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Norman Jope's new collection is, in his own words, 'as
much influenced by contemporary developments in 'literary' travel writing as
by the poetry scenes in which I have participated'. These prose poems include
imaginative explorations of his home territory, Devon and Cornwall (Jope,
alongside Kenny Knight, perhaps, will be seen in retrospect as the early 21st
century literary recorder of the place known as Plymouth) as well as an
engagement with Hungary and its culture - based on actual geographical
experience - and imagined explorations of both the Arctic and the Sahara
related to a more speculative and 'dreamlike' journey, charting a meeting
between the map and the subconscious mind. The book's cover art, a sort of
'abstract Richard Dadd in glorious blue' is once again by Lynda Stevens.
Like much of Jope's writing the work in this collection combines a
well-researched, almost journalistic, level of reasoned argument and
thinking, with an often speculative and dreamlike reverie which features some
beautifully constructed writing which soars away into the stratosphere while
remaining perfectly engaged at an internal, thought-provoking level. There's
also a wide range of cultural reference, particularly to do with music, which
includes an inspired piece on Gyorgy Ligeti and the appropriateness of his
work in the out-of-this-world psychedelic moments in Kubrick's 2001. A further musing on the (incongruous?) relation
between Bartok and The Groundhogs, relates to his strange recollection of the
latter's 1970's 'Split' while travelling by train in rural Hungary:
Much of rural Hungary, particularly east of the Danube,
is redolent
of what, for me, is the far side of Britain, a terrain I now
know even
less well than that of the puszta É so the connection
is clear, if
only in my mind, and the Groundhogs succeed, this
April morning, in
blowing Bartok off-stage.
(from
'Superimpositions')
Whereas in his last collection - The Book of Bells and Candles - I felt there was a strong tendency towards a
'medieval worldview' here Jope juxtaposes the modern with the historical to
great effect, placing himself as an observer who projects his consciousness
into unfamiliar geographies and histories. If this is more Bruce Chatwin than
postmodernism, then all to the good, as Jope's always careful descriptive
facility, aided by an almost-painterly sense of evocation creates some
beautiful, breathtaking moments:
Jewels thick in mud, crowns in troughs,
the winnowing
of dust from dust and the scrape of a scythe with
the smile of
a god.
(from 'The Accoutrements of Silence')
There's a sense of, if not exactly empathy with the natural world and the
'other' inhabitants of our planet, then an appreciation, which avoids
sentimentality and is curiously moving in its starkness. In 'Ursus
Maritimus', for example we get this description of the polar bear, a creature
living and surviving in an extreme climate at the edge of possibility:
Our enemy, in
so far as it is curious, can run at thirty kilometres an hour,
and can kill
a seal with a blow of its claw.
Our enemy,
because it lives on meat like almost everything of any size in
these parts.
Like us.
Our enemy, a
soldier blessed with a built-in body arsenal, who will not
apologise or
atone but move on to the next feast. Intelligent, yes, but
beyond
anthropomorphism.
Our enemy,
sharing the same blue planet.
Our enemy -
marooned, starving, on an ice-floe drifting out into the
mildness of
an Arctic summer noon, too exhausted to swim to safety.
Lost from
sight - like so many of our enemies, our neighbours and our
friends.
(from 'Ursus
Maritimus')
There's plenty of humour here as well, occasionally of the belly-laugh
variety but more often self-deprecating, as in 'Crawl', where 'The city
dreams of itself, like any city, in a number of ways'. The 'Crawl' in
question, is of the pub variety, where the author imagines/recollects an
occasion where - 'As I crawl to the Dolphin, the salt begins to gather in the
tide-pools under the street lamps'. It's a novel way of defamiliarising the
familiar, something which Jope often does when writing about his location in
the landscape, particularly when the reverie is for somewhere he knows very
well. The closing sentence of this paragraph has both pathos and bathos, an
encapsulation which may be too neat but in a way it sums up the sense of
movement and stillness, the commonplace and the exotic, the intelligence
which has at its centre a melancholy awareness of mortality and the redeeming
nature of the absurd!:
Later,
there's a laurel wreath of seaweed, caught in my hair, that no-one
appears to
notice and which lands on the empty seat of the bus beside
me - at which
point I return to myself, the city's salt-encrusted Tarot
intact.
(from 'Crawl')
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Andy Croft is an unreconstructed leftie of the old school,
a fine poet who writes very skilfully in carefully formulated metrical
stanzas and whose knack for resigned satire is possibly about to enjoy
something of a resurgence. Although the last poem in the collection, 'Letter
to Randall Swingler Part 3', is its centrepiece, in terms of its epic quality
and its outlining of Croft's philosophy. His ongoing engagement with the
political poetry of the thirties is brought bang up to date by his continued
railing against the excesses of a Capitalism now in deep trouble, and one
doesn't have to be a paid-up member of the Communist Party (somewhat of an
anachronism in any case) to see that he has a point:
In such an
age of salivating snobbery,
Democracy now wears an Eton boater
And Freedom's
code for economic robbery.
The delicacies offered to the voter
Are either
bare-arsed sleaze or bare-faced jobbery.
Equality's a
dream that gets remoter.
When talking
of the have-nots and the haves
The
working-class is now known as the Chavs.
(from 'Letter to Randall
Swingler Part 3')
Croft has spent a lot of time teaching poetry in schools and prisons and
there's a complete section of this book - prefaced by an appropriate
quotation from Ken Smith's Inside Time, which relates to his prison experience. Although I occasionally
find the rhythms a bit clunky there are some very subtle rhymes in these
poems and the emotional appeal of the work is direct and, at times, very
moving:
There's poets
on the landings,
And there's lovers on remand,
There's lines
of poetry up for grabs
In smuggled contraband,
While those
who're good at free verse find
Themselves in much demand.
(from 'The Ballad of
Writing Gaol')
His prefacing aside to a McDonald's advertising jingle in the section devoted
to Brecht is apt and sardonic and his yolking together of references from
popular culture and football (you can tell I'm not a football fan) with
political ballads and modern allegories is refreshingly unfashionable and
definitely not post-modern! His second poem based around the pronunciation of
place names 'Either or Eyether' is hilariously slapstick and I'm sure sounds
great when read out loud. One of my favourites here though is 'Checkpoint
Charlie' where:
You can grow
a tache like Dali,
Clank your
chains like Jacob Marley,
You can learn
to speak Bengali,
Look for
polar bears on Bali,
Be a rebel
like Steve Harley;
You can wave
your arms like Kali,
Quench your
thirst with lemon-barley
In the desert
sands of Mali,
Sing The
Internationale
In Somali or Gurkhali;
You can
celebrate Diwali
In the
barrios of Cali,
Get a tattoo
in Kigali,
Try to act
like Joe Pasquale
In the slums
of Mexicali -
But no matter
how bizarrely
You act
It's a
fact
There's only
one proper Charlie.
('Checkpoint Charlie')
This was possibly generated during a teaching exercise - I'm not sure - but
it's the letting go of control, dictated by the minimal structure of the end
rhyme which appeals to me; there's a impish delight in silliness which comes
through in unrepressed abandon.
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Andrew Duncan's claim that Jeremy Reed's 'Junky Tango
Outside Boots Piccadilly' is his masterpiece is a bold one but I'm not so
sure. This poem from his recently published collection Black Russian, is of its time and represents work written between
1978-79 which has only just seen the light of day. Certainly Reed has a long
backlist of impressive material to his credit and his poetry has been
consistently of a very high standard, whether the formally impressive nature
poetry or the gothic excess or the celebrations of pop culture and dystopian
visions of contemporary London. The work in Black Russian seems unrelentingly dark and quite complex in its
experimental nature. Clearly there is a serious reflection on drug culture
here - the central poem involves the suicide of an addict - and there's a
constant environment in which lives are being explored at the edge, of
poverty, of addiction, of extreme cases of 'outsiderness' where suffering and
physical degradation are explored in depth. Feeling filters through the
language yet there's an almost abstract element to the poetry itself, which
makes clarity indistinct and leaves you helplessly admiring the quality of
the writing (Reed is always fluent and exacting) while wondering about the
content. Certainly there are hints towards Scott Walker and David Bowie and
the strange references to aeroplanes (an overwhelming metaphor?) somehow
brings to mind that disturbingly skewed and mad psychedelic/suburban
environment of Donald Cammell's film Performance. Take this extract:
It begins
like this. A simulated
jarring of a
cat's saucer on concrete
and grows in
sound until it's amplified
to no
contingent source but that inside
the head,
then it's so loud it has to blow
windows three
feet inside without fracture,
and shiver
contact lenses in mid-brain,
and strip the
high-rise exterior of
its veneer,
until its orange antirust
primer shows
through on a steel structure
bare as
scaffolding.
You wonder
if it ends or
takes up on another
plane, and
this time the cat's saucer is real,
and it's your
mind gone, pretending to feed
something,
anything which will crawl
from the
sidewalk to make contact, human
is
irrelevant, things aren't as easy
now as to
make for differentiation
between
species, anything with warm blood
even if a muzzle or a helmet dulls
true contact,
everything's so near extinction.
('Take it Up')
I'd hazard a guess that this is an attempt to explore or recapture the
thoughts, sensations, feelings of a person experiencing a drug-induced trip.
The heightened sound, the apparent loss of a sense of 'self', followed by the
slightly more anxious 'episode' of the second, connected stanza, which
possibly describes a state of coming down. Perhaps the subject doesn't
matter, the quality of the description is what counts and this is cool
writing, slightly disconnected yet also disturbing, not, I think the
'melodramatic realism' suggested by Duncan in his introduction. I'm intrigued
by this writing though, slightly outside my comfort zone (not in itself a bad
thing) and I'm sure I'll return to this book at some point though I'm not
sure it's my favourite variety of Jeremy Reed.
© Steve Spence
2011
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