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Reed is probably the most prolific and consistently
excellent poet currently working in Britain. That his new volume has an
introduction by J.G. Ballard and back-cover 'blurbs' from writers as diverse
as David Lodge, the late David Gascoyne and Seamus Heaney would suggest the
kind of 'cross-cultural' endorsement that most poets would die for. He ranges
across a vast array of subject matter, from his quietly spectacular nature
poetry (By the Fisheries, for example), to an interest in dark, gothic
horror, S/F and the numerous engagements with the world of popular culture,
from novels through biographies of pop icons Reed and Almond. It's as a poet
that he's a force to be reckoned with though, a poet who has great technical
ability as well as a wide-range of reading and knowledge to draw on.
This collection deals head-on with the contemporary world and its mix of an
almost-jaunty 'easiness' belies the tautness of his verse structures and the
darkness of his vision: the vocabulary sizzles with energy and variety. Like
Ballard, the world he evokes in these very readable poems is one of dystopian
breakdown and apocalyptic expectation, but it's a dystopia which is not
without its glamorous attractions and where psychology, or the inner world,
is as much a part of the subject as 'what's going on out there'!
In Blake, he imagines a 21st century counterpart
of the visionary poet - a subject J.G. Ballard also explored in a novel, I
seem to recall - living in the post 9/11 world, where psychedelia jostles
with virtual reality to create a visual scenario which is part Blade-runner, part Performance.
So we experience:
Diagnosed
delusional
Blake brought
a decommissioned jet,
Lived in it
on Wandsworth flats
grew
gardenias in the cockpit,
manufactured
LSD
and watched
incoming airliners
morph into
jewel-finned jellyfish,
his
girlfriend atomize on touch
into 3D
molecules
and knew he'd
fly again, steal a Jumbo
and kill it
over Whitehall.
This is a very post-modern text in the sense that although the setting is
London, the mix of cultural references, whether they be architectural,
literary, filmic technological or musical, are international, stellar and
'glitzy' - there's a sense of surface sheen which predominates and hovers
over the writing. Fashion is celebrated as it's being 'deconstructed'
although deconstruction is not a word I would usually associate with Reed.
The writing is very pleasurable to read, it slips down easily for the most
part, even amid its tumult of multiple vocabularies, and every so often you
get stopped short by a striking metaphor or simile, as in: 'she thinks the
way small red fish swim' (The Cryo-trainee) which
beautifully captures that sense of neural transmission, that celerity of
thought which could probably be mapped mathematically if we had the means to
do so.
One minute Reed is speculating about space travel via the world of virtual
reality and the next switches attention to some fashion item - all is
available to his sense of wonderment and his imaginative leap. The poem Jeans
made me smile:
The detail
grabs me, it's the twisted seams,
rivets,
buttons, pre-damage patch,
Miss Sixty,
Levi's Red, Moto,
Lee Leola,
Sass & Bide,
in graduating
indigo
sprayed on as
accessory,
a peelable
banana skin
Jeans age
contemporaneous with cells,
look better
midlife, burnt by wear
to a white
thread exposure:
an epidermis
roughed like bark.
If this is writing which is 'cool' and it surely is so, it's also work which
is richly articulated yet where intelligence is the guiding principle. Reed
makes every word work for its living and is a prolific and focussed writer.
He may be some kind of guru for an aspect of what still exists as 'the
counter-culture' but his concentration is deep, and when it comes to poetry,
he has the work-ethic in abundance. It has been said that he learned his
craft over many years by writing at least one poem every day!
Brain Damage - a short History of the Pink Floyd opens
with these startling lines:
Barrett's the
rock astronomer
boating the
Cam's lime green spine
wristing
downriver like a water boatman
listening to
voices, his schizophrenia
big in the
mix
like invasive
radio.
It's an exquisite example of poetical skill, mixing laid-back pastoral
psychedelia with a suggestion of
something darker and more intrusive. Although Reed often writes as a 'neutral
observer', an alien from another world (Craig Raine could have learned a lot
from Jeremy Reed!), there's usually a downside to the ecstatic states he
describes, whether this is via drug-induced self-destruction, or the gradual
collapse of 'Western Civilization' through the threat of war, global warming
and paranoid delusion!
In The Last Tycoon, references to James Dean, Nicole Kidman and Marilyn
Monroe are interspersed with images of fighter pilots and WW2, a glorious,
dreamy anachronism which reminds me of the film Kelly's Heroes, where
the victorious American tanks liberate Europe while their crews are listening
to rock music! This method comes to a head in a lovely line which is
nostalgic in more ways than one - '(is it Morrissey,/his Beachy Head-vertical
quiff collapsed?)' - and still manages to raise a smile. In fact, Reed plays
with a whole range of genres, from gangster fiction and S/F to fashion parade
movie and rock band
elegy, to produce a 'mongrel' form which is both democratic and in the realm
of 'high-art'. His poetry gets closer than any other I know to successfully
competing with the visual media in terms of glamour and instant-hit
excitement - yet he remains in control of the writing which is polished and
literary, in the best sense of both terms:
The atrium's
Bauhaus. He takes the stairs,
a charcoal
pinstripe, Sisley suit,
Thomas Pink
shirt, a slicker's louche
post-rehab
cool in the figure
he cuts, as
corporate exec. ....
He's under
scrutiny for fraud,
offshore
deposits traced, 3 flats in Nice,
a link with
drug mules, blue-chip hoods,
his dodgy
subterranean
sweating out
poisons in his skin ...
('Born to
be Wild')
While Reed references avant-garde poets such as Jeremy Prynne, advocating a
new readership along the way, one hopes, his narrative talents are too
evident and focussed to be drawn into such enriching 'backwaters'. Reed is a
poet who is seeking a wider audience and whose work is only difficult because
of its subject matter.
© Steve
Spence 2009
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