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Simon's Smith's poetry has a surface dazzle which is
attractive and immediate, concerned with capturing the moment and
incorporating as much information as possible without resorting to 'overload
tactics'. In this sense his work is more artful than it may at first appear
and furthermore, on re-reading, you start to pick up patterns, of vocabulary,
repeated phrases with different resonance, and a sense that beneath the
surface shine there is more going on. You wouldn't necessarily call this
poetry as critique, but there's certainly an historical suggestiveness that
is rich with detail, even though this is conveyed via the immediacy of an
individual's autobiographical snapshotting.
The collection is split into two parts, the first concerning California and
the second, entitled 'Gravesend', which may be the author's hometown. There's
a sense of 'flattening' here which combines an intoxication with the
landscape (we are introduced to L.A. via a bird's eye view) and the idea of
AMERICA with all the complexity that entails and a more European viewpoint,
also hinting at classical allusion in a manner which feels refreshingly 'of
the now':
Sunset Blvd.
The Pacific coast Highway, then north north-west
along the
coast
canyons
inland lined-up-Topanga, Corral,
Latigo,
Ramirez,
where the
miniature black Pomeranian goes surfing,
where the
porno threesomes cruise-oh, cup
cake this
ain't Proust's madeleine to bite into-
not even if
you listen hard enough
(from 'Paradise Cove')
References to popular tv culture ('Jim Rockford's Pontiac') and Jazz ('chill
to Chet Baker's / 'The Thrill / is Gone') jostle with echoes of the
'homeland' ('the hundred Croydons of the west / & time before') via a
transposed poet who owes as much to Jim Morrison and Steely Dan as to any
classical tradition:
Rilke
searching streets & corners, passing
cars like the
grind of sharpening knives.
(from
'Hummingbird')
There's an
implied relationship here between the 'Brit', imbued with American culture
and American glamour, which is both celebratory and yet not entirely
overawed, a sort of relaxed comfortableness which retains its critical
faculty, not something so easy for an early generation of 'leftfield' English
writers, I would have thought.
There are poems in 'Gravesend' which have a more explicitly political
content, though these are often viewed through the dual binocular of the
recent past and a more classical sense of colonialism and the way in which
these aspects impact upon the present. Thus we get:
'Is anyone going shopping? The ascendant
Activity over
and above questions of heritage
Or the role
of collieries in the early 21st Century.
Question 1:
'1984'
Where a
half-brick to hand is worth
A throw
through an open window comes in handy.
Police lined
up aboard vans connive
Two knaves
and three of a kind
Behind
reinforced glass and grilles
Juvenal,
Claudius, Caesar, heading west then north.
Maybe even
Vespasian.
(from 'History GCSE [Kent and Essex Board, June 2008'])
These two sections work on each other on re-reading and there's clearly a
sense of an uneasy relationship between the two cultures, both in terms of
politics and in lifestyle - 'How much do they give in the pawnshop for the
lyre?' (from 'Those Were the Days') yet despite the mix of high culture and
'down-at heel' austerity, more evident in Section 2, there's an irrepressible
sense of 'take-it-all-in' observation which is both sharp and immediate,
offering pleasurable aesthetic moments within an increasing sense of a
critical voice:
Deposits
Refrigeration
and containment
Not that far
to the jail at Sheppey
Nationalise
the debt for helicopter money
No time to
think - extruded plexiglass,
Or a few
details from my own personal experience
Is History in
real time not sampled
The exchange
of containers from ro-ros to lorries,
The male
located in the female.
This is certainly a collection which you need to re-read as there's so much
going on that it's easy to miss things first time around. There's also a
pleasure-rush to be had by engaging with these poems, a fact which deepens on
subsequent gistings, not something you could say about all contemporary
poetry.
Somebody ought to do a comparison between contemporary 'political poetry'
produced from within the academy - say Drew Milne, Tony Lopez, Keston
Sutherland and Simon Smith, with those poets working outside this framework,
say Sophie Mayer, Niall McDevitt, Alan Morrison and Andy Croft - I think it
might throw up some interesting possibilities.
© Steve
Spence 2014
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