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Should young poets heed Virginia Woolf's advice not to
publish before they reach thirty? Perhaps. Among other things - like the fact
that there'll always be more pleasure in writing than seeing your name on the
spine of some book - it comes down to whether a poet reckons their work's
ready for publication, whether they think their poems have something to offer
to readers, and a self-interrogation of their motives for doing so. Some
think too much poetry's published, others say publish and be damned. Whatever
the case, the rise of the poetry pamphlet in recent years has afforded
fledgling poets the opportunity to, at least in part, side-step these
questions. If committing to a full debut collection seems a step too far, the
pamphlet offers an opportunity to test the waters; publishing a sampler with
the hope of interesting readers.
Tall-lighthouse press's Pilot series, a venture which publishes pamphlets by
British and Irish poets under thirty, set out from the beginning to offer
young poets the opportunity to do just that. The four slickly produced
volumes sat on my desk are the last in this series, and in their crisp,
black, white and red binding, they at least look impressive. But their collectable feel and
enticing cover images aside, are the poems inside actually any good?
Charlotte Runcie's Seventeen Horse Skeletons is certainly a lively read. In the broadest sense,
her theme is journeys, coupled with a fascination with the future's
uncertainties; unsurprising for a poet just out of her teens. But Runcie's
succinct lines steer her poems clear of daydreaming: the tone here, though
not without feeling, is typically sharp and to-the-point, lending her poems a
seeming purposefulness: 'Yes', begins opener 'The Seventh Winter', 'we've lost
that many men to avalanche'. What follows is a study of insecurity: at the
hands of the elements as it goes, but this snow, figured as a 'murderer' who
has 'pushed his one white foot / into our house', could be any untameable
force that impinges on, or even threatens, our lives. 'This is how it is with
us', states the wearied narrator, 'We hold back snow with bones'.
If this is too grim or portentous or even faux-Plathean for some, the range
of poems in Seventeen Horse Skeletons - at least thematically speaking - is happily broad. Runcie has two
main tricks up her sleeve. The first is a knack for vivid, sometimes original
description, which keeps the reader interested even when the driving force
behind her less persuasive poems seems to be description for description's
sake. 'Glassblower' sees the eponymous speaker 'create and shape cages for
tiny suns', while in 'Grotesque', the abnormality of two joined toes become
painted 'Siamese showgirls, / bald heads inclined // in opposite directions,
as if split / and mirrored, blinded / by a cherry sheen'. The second, more
beguiling skill is Runcie's ability to take a predictable enough theme - the
highs and lows of young love, say - and enliven it with an off-kilter
perspective or, in some cases, by imaginative dislocation, historical or
otherwise. Take 'Crossed', which replaces the archetypal thwarted lovers with
'marine biologists and astronauts', or 'Dating the Anglo-Saxon', a sonnet
which shifts from humour to serious contemplation:
A clich, but I took him to the fair,
and in between the whistling circus notes
he skimmed my shoulder, dusted off my coat
and murmured harp songs, shivering, to the air
that rippled back, reflected by the moon.
His breathing was off-beat, and harsh, and wet;
his hair was black and wild, his nose re-set.
He didn't call, but wrote to me in runes: [...]
Seventeen Horse Skeletons is a
rich pamphlet, mixing the past and mythology with the present and the
fantastical in poems which combine a familiar idiom with colourful imagery.
Charon, Samson, even the mythical Selkie, a seal able to shed its skin and
become human - it's a feat to fit this much into a short book, but in also
recasting these characters, Runcie's lush imagination bodes well for her
future writing.
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The poems in Richard O'Brien's first pamphlet, Your Own
Devices, are less observational and more
reflective than Runcie's work. His interests aren't the palpably strange and
otherworldly, but the complexities of everyday relationships. This poet's
style may be loosely formal, but it is also baggy and freewheeling: the
chatty and straight-talking voice of a smart and cynical twenty-something
dominates which, when combined with the poems' rhythmical qualities, places
him within the English male lyric tradition. Here are the opening stanzas of
'Hymn for the Cigarettes':
The girl I started smoking for
could polish off Coronas like Sambuca shots,
learnt how to drink from wild boys
gone feral after boarding school
who filled her head with drum'n'bass
and herbal cigarettes. (And what she gets
she wants, and what she wants she gets).
The girl I started smoking for
took off her clothes like someone
running for a train, and afterwards
lay down as if I'd tied her to the tracks -
and what she lacks in grace she papers up
with pace, unsubtle sudden storms.
The anecdotal style here owes a debt to Simon Armitage; the insouciant
dealings with the subject matter of male-female relationships are perhaps
closest to Roddy Lumsden; the autobiographical, quasi-confessional tone
suggests the influence of Frank O'Hara. But while some readers will baulk at
this kind of stuff - particularly those inclined to rubbish poetry which
draws extensively on the poet's own life - everything boils down to how you
put your subject matter to use, and O'Brien's combination of neat
observation, attentive insight and occasional humour ('Feeling weak I slept
in libraries. I drank - / sometimes I drank in libraries') tends to work
well. 'Infinite Regress' is a formally-assured take on the personal corridors
of memory, concealing its rhyme-scheme impressively; 'Alone with the Fish'
draws a thought-provoking comparison between the displaced isolation of
creatures in an aquarium and a young girl, missing out on life, who works
there. There are also poems which reveal an interest in the slippery
semantics of language ('Moses in Medieval Glass'; 'Session Voices') and some
fairly imaginative pieces (in 'Chlorosis', a boy literally witnesses his
'hands turning into leaves'); evidence of a curious mind at work. At its
best, Your Own Devices is the
pamphlet of a young man with a lot to say and a knack for saying it with wit
and (aside occasions when certain poems lose their direction) economy. I look
forward to a first full collection - on the proviso that, in a new phase of
development, O'Brien outgrows the adolescent thoughts and themes that can
sully his writing.
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Ailbhe Darcy is the sort of poet who will attract attention
for the same reasons that recent T.S. Eliot prize-winner Jen Hadfield has:
her poems reveal a beguiling, sometimes baffling, yet unique slant on the
world. Her debut pamphlet may go by the title A Fictional Dress, but these poems often seem an attempt to get at
some form of hard truth, albeit a typically personal one. Take the opening
lines of 'He tells me I have a strange relationship'
with my city. As though I were something divorced
from the skin I'm in, could scrap or elope with
my own tattooed scapula, pouting belly, saddle curve
of his palm's kiss.
But here's the vein on my left wrist
fat as Liffey; my right skinny
lost Dodder; slit,
they run murky and thick
with city. My left breast
thingmote, my right sugarloaf,
my throat a high and narrow pane, frogged
and pointed like a lancet.
This vivid transformation of body into city, veins as rivers and breasts as
hills, is richly complex: at once celebrating Dublin in the poem's joyous
list-making while hinting at the damaged history that city harbours ('slit, /
they run murky and thick'; 'pointed like a lancet') both in the poet's own
memory and in a wider social context. It is this kind of merging of the
specific with the general that appears to similar effect in 'Crossing', where
a bunch of kids' wide-eyed wonder at witnessing an Hungarian sword-swallowing
act is contrasted with the otherwise mundane: 'The border police came and
went [...] and we shared our compartment with a Romanian / coming home from a
student union meeting in Prague'. Or at least contrasted to begin with: a
little explanation, and the sword-swallowing act soon crosses the 'border'
from spectacular feat to well-rehearsed trick. Things, the poem suggests, are
never quite as they seem.
On such a showing, it is a shame that some of Darcy's other poems fail to
convince. While her best work is intent on getting at as honest a perspective
as possible ('Mrs Edgeway' is a powerful vignette on motherhood, marriage,
and the path not taken), other pieces are clearly pa¤dded out with
mystifying, albeit interesting, objects and images as if to lend them a sense
of direction or symbolic purposefulness ('Breakfast with Braden' is an
interesting sketch, by way of example, but the reader is left, as the poet
elsewhere, 'trying to find some thing of substance'). But then a few duds are
bound to be nestled in any pamphlet, and it must be said that Ailbhe Darcy is
a young poet with a fairly distinctive voice and a knack for sustaining
complex conceits. Read the darkly beautiful and restrained sequence 'Unheimlich', which views familial trauma through a
storytelling lens, and you get an idea as to what this writer can do.
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Last, but by no means least, Simon Pomery's The Stream is an accomplished first pamphlet of metaphysical
verve and lyrical concision. Which is to say that, admirably, these poems do
not strain after their effects, but in their unassuming music reveal a smart
mind at work: no small feat for a poet still in his twenties. Here in full is
'Animus Mundi', one of a number of poems that draw on the epistles of the
Roman philosopher Seneca:
The soul of the world abides.
It doesn't distinguish between
those born in town or country:
it makes its home in the wild sea,
the blur and seam of the horizon,
the cloud-racked firmament itself.
The space that separates the gods
from men unites them also, where stars,
like watchmen, sleep out in the open.
Like most of the best poetry, these lines display a hard-won clarity;
managing to blend the everyday and the spiritual in a closing image which,
for my money, is close to perfect. What's more, Pomery is just as good at
combining complex reflection with linguistic precision when a poem's focus is
less abstract and more observational. 'Eulalia' may open with a worldly visit
to the eponymous cathedral, but our attention is drawn to something else
entirely:
The petals fell
over a maze of lanes, my girlfriend, and the friend
I no longer wish to know,
over two women sharing a needle
as if at a picnic, on cloistered grass
by the Cathedral of Saint Eulalia,
as one of them dropped, flat on her back.
By the end of the poem, the woman has 'raised her arm skyward, like a maenad,
or a saint', and what seemed an incongruous, even violent, comparison, serves
to remind us of the tortures to which the Romans subjected Saint Eulalia
herself. Splendor and destruction are inextricably linked: the cathedral and
Eulalia's crucifixion; the woman 'smiling' and the shared needle; even the
petals falling and the suggestion of infidelity. That such a short poem is
capable not only of being both beautiful and disturbing in the same breath,
but of doing so on so many levels, is testament to Pomery's talents.
This short pamphlet is threaded through with gems like these. 'Butcher Boy',
for instance, balances a tender descriptiveness with intimations of mortality
in its survey of a trade where 'money begets more family', while 'North Wind'
demonstrates almost cinematic sweep in its flowing, atmospheric lines. Pomery
is also good with form, and not just in the sense that he can write sonnets
that at first glance succeed in disguising their neat rhyme schemes (although
he does that too). Rather, the looser pieces here show an ability to marry
form with content as much, say, as the complex rhymes of 'Steve Reich's
Variations' that take musical compositions as their model: in 'A Drop of
Snow', the thawing white stuff is sudden, fleeting: 'each dropped powder dot
[...] an infinity // of chance, choice, aloneness, / accident and cause'. Right
through to the moving close of 'To an Innocent Prisoner', The
Stream is a provocative, intelligent, and
astutely realised pamphlet, suggesting that a first full collection of Simon
Pomery's poems will be worth looking out for.
© Ben
Wilkinson 2010
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