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The title poem of Bride of the Wind is inspired by the painting by Oskar Kokoshka and
says much about the way in which Barry Tebb marries an irrepressible
enthusiasm and curiosity about art with an emotional intensity and richness
of experience. I've read many of these poems before but revisiting them is
a pleasure, from the elegy to James Simmons - 'You bared your soul in a
most unfashionable way' - to his hilarious
commentary on the poetry scene, 'A Call to Arms', which combines a
wonderfully knockabout robustness which hints at Monty Python with some very
funny rhymes and an almost Spike Milligan celerity of thought which surprises
at every turn:
Andrew
Crozier was leading a counter-attack
With Caddy
and Hinton neck and neck
And Silkin
was quietly garrotting
While he kept
on smiling.
Price Turner
was so happy at the slaughter
He hanged
himself in a corner
And Hughes
brought the Great White Boar
To wallow in
all the gore
While I rode
a centaur
Charles
Tomlinson had sent for.
Tebb combines an approach which you could call sentimental with a tough,
working-class self-confidence that comes from a genuine desire for knowledge
and delight, allied to a scatological wit and fearless response to the
absurdities of power and pretension. He isn't afraid to 'speak his mind' as
they say. He gives nostalgia a new and attractive twist with 'Give Me
Yesterday', where there are 'Gas lamps and rainbow sherbet, / Ink in bottles,
fountain pens / Soot and steam engines, Meccano / And Beano, prefabs and
larders,' ... assertive and unapologetic.
The final section 'Uncollected Poems' provides a rich mix of erudition,
high-intensity recollection and more irrepressible moments than would grace
whole volumes by poets of a more sedate temperament. Tebb is volatile and
fun, but always authentic and wide-ranging in his interests and enthusiasms.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this collection, especially encountering his
more recent material for the first time and I got through it quickly and
greedily. Take this extract from 'Delius', the last poem, which mixes
celebration with yearning and an unrepentant openness to experience, which is
refreshing and splendid:
Do you still
swirl like a top
Or have you,
too, passed into the beyond of the earth
Where the
heard songs are
Only the mad
dead's mirth and not the libidinous lyre
Of uplift to
the summer zeniths?
Terrific stuff.
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Tim Allen's new collection, beautifully presented in this
pocket-size edition, continues his exploration of the here and now and the
then and there with linguistically puzzling jests which fizz and fizzle in
your mouth and explode in your brain. Take this line, for example, from page
26. - 'Liberate the future with rootless spontaneity - please'. There are forty-nine
untitled poems in this mini-explosion, each comprising a set of three
quatrains and each line being discrete, as far as I can tell, though every so
often there appears to be the hint of a 'follow-through'. Which isn't to say
that the 'disconnections' are unconnected as I'm sure that on another re-read
I'll find that resonance abounds. The cover art, a collaboration between Tim
and long-time 'visual partner' Terry Hackman, presents the Jack of Hearts
with what looks like a photo-fit image of Adam Ant (and other) and either a
Byron look-alike (with other) or what could be a Renaissance painter with
very curly locks, I'm not at all sure. In any case the image/title is
predictably surreal and I do mean that in a complimentary way.
29.
City centre
is one immense pavement cafˇ
Bus on a
bridge breaks down the neutral distance
Night nurse
prejudice and hibernation
Writer
returns later to check the fermentation
It's true the
apples smelt of fish
Blame was
flying around with a life of its own
No one was
left though no one was seen leave
Nibbling
nimble feathered equilibrium
I prefer my
waiters to my waitresses
The day lends
you test papers and crisp perspectives
Gentle lumps
can drive you to distraction
Teachers
locked up in the school with the children
The tendency, as with a lot of 'this kind' of writing, is to read the
material through quickly - my preferred tactic, anyway - to get a feel for
the rhythms and the textures though the abruptness of the short sentences can
make this a risky business as you keep having to stop and think. You are
forced here to view the writing 'as writing' in the sense that any attempt at
reading a narrative - as appears possible, for example, in the first two lines
of the first stanza above - is frustrated by a complete shift, such as line
three in stanza one above, where your mind is initially blocked by the
abstract impossibility of the premise and then shoots off in a series of
directions implied within the text. Wordplay is an important aspect of Tim's
modus operandi and I think the celerity of his apparent thought processes -
though probably deeply worked on! - owes something to Tom Raworth's
methodology, which in turn owes a lot to Spike Milligan!
There's loads of stuff about politics and philosophy and art and literature
and zombies and bingo halls and animals here - you just have to dip in and go
with the flow, admire the intense bursts of concentration, give up and carry
on when you get stuck, as you invariably will, and keep going until you reach
the end. Quite frequently you will be 'stopped in your tracks' by a wonderful
line, which is one of the real pleasures of reading Tim Allen's poetry - 'And
today, bike, you will drip with sincerity'.
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James' Turner's second poetry collection - A Chance of
Love - is composed of sonnets written
during the past two decades. Although it's clear that Turner is very aware of
the possibilities of the form these poems all feel and look very modern
without being particularly experimental, though he does occasionally tip his
cap in this direction both in terms of 'form' and 'content'. The poems are
split into three sections: Part 1: Work; Part 2: To be Vulnerable, and Part
3: To be Nothing.
I like the way that Turner manages to combine the conceptual with the world
of feeling in his work, not something that everyone succeeds in doing, and
also the way in which his formal devices - he's very good with rhyme and the
use of repetition, for example - are integrated into the flow of the poems so
they appear natural and unstructured. There is a great deal of artifice in
these wise and canny poems but you certainly don't pick that up on an initial
reading:
This Fog
It's like
there was this fog, you see, or rather,
don't see, don't even see the fog, and yet
out of it
words come. Feed some back and if
you're lucky
it responds with further words.
Fog? It's too
thick for fog! It's porridge rather,
familiar
sludge. It's everywhere and yet
nowhere. It
soothes and hurts. It flows, but if
pushed it
will tense, which deafens it to words.
When you're
morose it's all there is, no hint
of light,
just liquid mud, the viscous pull of it,
and no way in
and no way out. But when
a distant
source transmits, it picks up int-
ermittent
signals. Fizz! You're happy then.
A radio full
of mud, your head's full of it.
This could be a poem about the
processes of composition or it could be about the experience of depression or
even the 'therapeutic' nature of creativity as a way of dealing with bad
feelings, yet it works in its own terms - as a poem - and Turner achieves
this without highlighting the artifice of the poem, despite its being a
sonnet. This is aided by the colloquial yet 'inner-dialogue' element of the
writing which is accomplished. Very clever.
In 'Pavlov Sonnet 4', we
get these opening lines - 'In
days gone by they told us everlasting hell / would punish those who died as
unrepentant sinners - ' and the poem concludes with 'I.P. Pavlov didn't
invent conditioning'. Science is a subject which appears quite often in
Turner's work, both in terms of an appreciation of its discoveries and
methodologies (and discoverers) but more consistently perhaps in a dystopian
thematic whereby Science (and
Western rational thought in general?) is seen to be found wanting.
That clever German
Marx was a
prime example. Nietzsche,
though, was a
rarer kind of teacher
who could acknowledge,
even respect it,
the hectored
half, that hard-whipped horse -
could hear
its shrieks and weep. (Of course
he went on
whipping till he'd wrecked it).
(from
'Split')
The argument here is that we need 'dreamers' as well as 'schemers',
scientists as well as artists and Turner's prefacing of each of the sections
of this collection with a saying from J. Krishnamurti gives some indication
of his 'philosophical' position.
His musings on the nature of consciousness and perhaps also on the
mixed-blessing of 'consciousness-of-consciousness', come to the fore in
'Consider this Cat', where the agonised protagonist, lost in turbulence amid
a welter of comparisons and a desire to be 'other' than that which he is, is
presented with a somewhat bald yet comforting and humorous final statement:
This
unambitious cat is just a cat
yet lives in
undivided consciousness.
He's got the
thing we're after, there's no doubt,
yet we who
have the brains can't work it out.
(from 'Consider this
Cat')
Yet his somewhat 'tongue in cheek' blast against 'the postmodernists' -
'Refuse to be entranced / by the rough granite of the deeply felt.' (from
'Blessed be the Postmodernists') is slightly at odds with his own thoughts
about 'the creative process' in 'Birth of A Poet', where we get this - 'Cut
up the page. Shuffle the pieces. Stick / them back together. Like this, see?
I saw'. Which suggests that all writing is primarily a game with language and
deep feeling isn't exclusive to 'the traditionalists'. This is a big subject
and there isn't space or time to explore it properly here. Suffice to say,
I'm sure that James Turner is aware of the paradox and his writing often
explores difficult areas of the human psyche while utilising many of the
playful elements available through language. Incidentally, I love the play on
seesaw ('see? I saw') in the above and there are many such examples in this
excellent collection from this serious yet entertaining poet. James is a
great live reader of his work as well, so don't miss him if you get the
opportunity.
With regard to the cover design, I like dandelions and the image is perfect,
though I still remain unsure about the use of italics for the text as part of
the house style - it all looks a bit 'Patience Strong' to me.
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Peter Finch is still a key contemporary figure in terms of
the re-working of existing materials in a manner which combines critique with
a ludic energy, and his influence remains important, I think. There have been
a number of recent works where iconic writers/artists from the past have been
reinterpreted in a modern context - Phil Terry on Dante and Peter Hughes on
Petrarch, for example. Tom Jenks is a younger writer whose mix of plunder and
quick-witted celerity of movement is establishing what could almost be
described as a 'genre' - his work is so prolific and constantly 'on the
move'. In his latest collection from Knives, Forks and Spoons, he adopts a minimalist approach to the 'classic
critical work', On Liberty, by
John Stuart Mill. By utilising a series of Oulipian procedures and with the
aid of a computer programme, Jenks provides a 'commentary' on both Mill and
on current notions of austerity with a much-condensed 'version' of Mill,
which is playful, challenging, oblique and anarchic.
His mixed methods, which combine chance with organisation, throw up a whole
raft of possibilities and provide an entertaining read which you can then go
back and think about if you so wish. It's some time since I've looked at Mill
and I'm not sure I'm over-tempted to go back to the original but this chunky
yet minimalist tome was a pleasure to skip through. There are 268 pieces in
this collection, one poem per page, and the cumulative effect of reading them
through at speed creates a host of impressions which are both comic and
forming the basis of a critique of Mill's strictures. There is plenty of
contemporary resonance here and although it's impossible to give any real
idea of the strength of this work by individual quotations, I do like the
epigrammatic nature of some of these texts:
beliefs
in
beliefs
escape
responsibility
( page 69)
If you've not come across Jenks before this is as good a place to start as
any - he's rapidly become a firm favourite of mine.
©
Steve Spence 2015
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