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Me
and poetry haven’t been hitting it off for a while… Apart from the new
John Burnside [The Light Trap,
£8.00, Jonathan Cape] there’s been little to engage with in the Stride/Orbis review box;
and the local bookshops’ poetry shelves continue to shrink and I’m sure
will soon disappear completely. Even the Charing Cross Road bookshops, the London ‘flagships’ of the major bookshop
chains, have little to offer. So, apart from the odd secondhand delight
from Peter Riley’s splendid sales list, I’ve been sticking to fiction.
[Tim Winton, Huraki Murakami and Jonathan Coe, since you ask.] But it
was beginning to feel like make-or-break time: was I going to find new
poetry, was in fact there new poetry out there to
find, or should I just call it a day and forget about the wretched stuff?
An
hour later, Amazon.com had my money and I had gambled – relying on a
mix of strangers’ recommendations, review quotes, sample pages and minute
reproductions of book jackets – on a number of poets mostly unheard
of to me. And you know, having now read them, I didn’t do badly.
What’s
interesting to me is how the younger American poets [or some of them,
anyway] are able to produce a hybrid of Language [& other postmodern]
poetries and the kinds of domestic narratives that swamp the market
here. The way they write, however, isn’t the focus of the work – they
don’t wear their ‘avant-garde-ness’ or ‘experimental processes’ on their
sleeves, they simple get on with using it, producing witty, accomplished
poetry that has taken many things on board, in a way that is rare to
those accustomed to the unambitious [if sometimes accomplished and well-written]
poetry offered to us by the major UK lists.
Larissa
Szporluk apparently has a new book out, which I have every intention
of buying soon. In the meantime, her Dark
Sky Question [Beacon Press, Boston] is simply astonishing. Small, complex
poems startle with their unexpected vocabulary and heartfelt sensuality.
These poems move strangely along, making synaptic and syntactical jumps;
new ideas and images come at you page after page, impossibilities made
possible, language and feeling laid bare for the reader to understand
and process.
Dean
Young’s Skid [University of Pittsburgh Press] and Joshua Clover’s madonna anno domini [Louisiana State University
Press] seem to me to share their way of working and the resulting poems
of dislocation and surprise. Based on juxtaposition and collage, with
a hint of John Ashbery’s sly humour, these poems ask more questions
than they answer and always end up somewhere other than expected. Clover
is more obviously quirky, perhaps, with titles like ‘Romeoville &
Joliet’ and poems such as ‘Zealous’ clearly showing their construction
[an A-Z acrostic]. Young is slicker and stranger, more surreal, the
poems slither all over the place, appropriating, juxtaposing and simply
abandoning, yet also building upon, ideas gone before. Skid
is also one of the nicest designed books I’ve seen for a while.
Maurice
Manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book
of Visions [Yale University Press, New Haven] is more troubling. Well, it isn’t
troubling, it’s brilliant, a fragmented saga of a child growing up in
the South – we’re talking Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner territory
here – narrated by not only the boy himself, but his black friend with
learning difficulties, the narrator and other characters. Imaginary
and real friends, events, toys and stories, all manner of dialects and
voices, combine to present a technicolour widescreen version of Lawrence
Booth and where and how he lives. Troubling? Well, I can’t see much
‘poetry’ in the book, I simply read it as broken prose, it’s the story
that intrigues. Well, the language, too, but there’s no music or shape
for me that makes it a poem; it’s not really even prose-poetry. That
aside, I still rate and recommend the book.
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Jane
Mead, judging by her books The
Lord and the General Din of the World [Sarabande Books, Louisville]
and House of Poured-Out Water [University of
Illinois Press, Urbana] is a more traditional poet, seemingly writing
[sometimes auto-] biographical narratives, particularly in the earlier
The Lord… where her father’s and her own
drug/drink problems and their violent relationship is a backbone visible
throughout the entire book. For my taste there is too much declaration
and assertion in this earlier volume, the reader gets told and shouted
at far too much, something that has been put to rights in House
of Poured-Out Water. Here, the poems are less verbose, quieter
and more thoughtful, often gathered in sequences that hover and buzz
around a central theme. The language is more compact, fresher and
more original, although there is in the end perhaps still too much
pondering and thinking aloud, too much focus on declamation and ‘saying
something important’ rather than on letting the language move the
poem [and reader] along. But I like her quirky take on things – ‘That
music in the background, trying to be / of use …’ – and her gentle
clear lyricism when she gets it right.
I
struggle with Sam Witt’s Everlasting
Quail [Middlebury College Press, University Press of New England,
Hanover] because it looks and feels so horrid: it has a slimy gloss
laminate cover, and the typeface, particularly the italic, is too
ornate and difficult to read. The poetry echoes this in some ways:
I can’t get a grip on it, and it seems to be trying too hard to be
experimental and profound, where mostly it reads as drawn-out comment,
observation and new-age [non-]profundity. Disappointing, as is Matthea
Harvey’s Pity the Bathtub its
Forced Embrace of the Human Form [Alice James Books, University
of Maine, Farmington], despite it’s great title and high praise from
Dean Young, August Kleinzahler and Jorie Graham. These poems sit wide
on the page: long, long sentences moving left to right and down, along,
towards their small conclusions through the mechanisms of thought
and action. They lack the vocabulary, the words, to make this kind
of thing work as, say, C.K. Williams does [or Robert Creeley in a
much-abbreviated version of transcribed thought]; there’s simply nothing
here for me to get a grip on, no way in to these convoluted and self-obsessed
poems.
And
finally, two bigger names. Jorie Graham’s Never
[ecco, New York] continues the poet’s journey in to fragmentation,
long poems & sequences of poems, and religiosity. I like the accumulative
power of her short poetic sections, the internal dialogue of these
poems, although at times she, like Matthea Harvey, is also prone to
poems so tightly bound up the reader cannot enter. The ‘prayers’ throughout
the book are a highlight for me, moving lyrics as concerned with doubt,
despair and absence as deity. I don’t like this volume as much as
Swarm, her previous book,
and I miss the scientific metaphors and concepts she used in earlier
works, but it’s intelligent, intriguing stuff.
Charles
Wright’s A Short History of
the Shadow [Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York] shows how
literary and artistic allusions, thought processes, and conversational
tones can inform, indeed
be the very substance of, good poetry. This is sprightly, entertaining
and moving work that references many authors, painters and philosophers,
yet never wears ‘learning’ or ‘knowledge’ like a badge. This is simply
the world Wright inhabits, as real as the landscape around him, the
light and shadow, the stars and sun, and the possibilities of belief
which concern him. These tightly-sprung poems, full of hard-worked
and hard-won lines that stretch to fill the page, ponder the known
and unknown, look forward and back in time, see anew the human condition.
For me, Wright is one of the best poets writing today; this, one of
his finest volumes to date.
© Rupert Loydell
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