Poor Rude Lines: poetry reviews & recommendations by John Field

Claire Booker’s ‘Pedestrian in the Multiverse’

On one of the benches punctuating the avenue of limes leading from Christ Church College’s Meadow Building to the Thames, a lady sat drawing. The wheeled shopping cart at her side evoked another era and, dressed head to foot in a light green cagoule, she was ready for anything the heavens might choose to throw her way. On her knees was a gigantic but expertly shepherded page. It was taped together from smaller sections, like a canvas stitched from animal skins. Walking past, I glimpsed the visible section of the image upon which she worked: a seemingly life-sized drawing of the tree opposite her bench. The time of day, the weather and the season would change but, for a number of years, I found that whenever I walked that avenue, the artist would be seated at one of its many benches, radiating a contemplative intensity. As an awkward youth, I walked on by but, as time smoothed off some of my rough edges, my wife and I joined Zoe one afternoon and talked. She passed away in 2011 but, for those of us who remember her, she has gifted her gentle stillness to that place.

Claire Booker’s latest, Pedestrian in the Multiverse, is published by the Waterloo Press. Thanks to the Marvel franchise’s dodgy 2022 effort, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, ‘multiverse’ conjures inter-dimensional adventure but, in Booker’s hands, the multiverse is considerably more affecting.

David Hockney, Winter Tunnel with Snow, March, 2006 (photo credit: thedavidhockneyfoundation.org)

‘Winter Tunnel with Snow, March 2006,’ is written in response to David Hockney’s painting of the same name. Coincidentally, Hockney passed away a month ago, adding a poignant interdimensional aspect to both painting and poem – as we time-travel back to 2006, Booker’s speaker addresses a dead man. The poem echoes Hockney’s winter tunnel as each line’s caesura widens to form an avenue of words. It opens with the statement that ‘every day is a season,’ a nod to the maddening, joyfully dramatic, sublime unpredictability of British weather and, in turn, to the unpredictability of life itself. Across the caesura’s rutted lane, the sentence runs-on with the single word, ‘turning,’ as we swap the one-point perspective of the East Riding of Yorkshire for an astronaut’s-eye view of our blue plant spinning on its axis. But Booker’s not done with us yet… The line is enjambed too, so, crossing the lane once again, it is Hockney doing the turning: ‘turning / at your easel again for the exact pigment of time.’ We’re two lines in, but neck deep in Booker’s vertiginous multiverse. Looking at the painting again, its left / right line of reflection is balanced by the up / down bisecting line of the horizon. Likewise, Booker’s poem is reversed on its horizontal axis (its second stanza is its first stanza in reverse), allowing it to end as it began with every day seen as a season, the artist turning at his easel for the exact pigment of time – its circularity gesturing towards infinity.

A later poem, ‘Kimono Recycled’, sets the present at odds with the past:

It was too tight even then, as if he wished
me slimmer or to spill out erotically

at every move. Now, as I rip strips for shoe
buffing, the cockerel-red cloth pulls

hard against me, held by its gristle of seams.

The man’s wishes present a tragic multiverse of impossible fantasies, with neither the thin nor the Reubensesque versions of his lover’s body realizable in reality’s middle ground / no man’s land. The kimono is ‘too tight’, awkward and uncomfortable to wear so, as she rips it to strips and it pulls ‘hard against me,’ we feel the echo of his arousal, an arousal which is troublingly adversarial as it is set ‘against’ the lover. Domestic entropy dictates that, in time, every garment becomes a cloth but, facing its final indignity, the kimono remembers ‘as it releases lost passion, the rapture of silk / between his palms and my thighs’, Booker’s couplets create an ironic tension as the mutual scent is ‘blended as we could never be’.

Although we might take some comfort from the familiar emotional intensity and often uplifting qualities of Booker’s multiverse, her consideration of Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine is more unsettling. The collection’s second section opens with ‘Rock Poolers.’ Perhaps the title evokes beach holidays but its opening lines are perilously unstable: ‘The women move across slippery channels, / ankle deep in a strange familiarity’ and, as we reach the final line of this first tercet, the women view this scene as as ‘khaki green as the Dnipro river.’ They search for whelks to recreate the cuisine, the domestic heart of Ukraine in The United Kingdom but ‘Shells rattle in the children’s buckets, / little universes waiting to explode.’

Versions of ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, Pieter Bruegel the Younger (after Pieter Brueghel the Elder), Musée Old Masters Museum, Brussels, and Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s version (1565 – 1567), probably overpainted at the request of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II.

This poem conditions our response to the later ‘Redacted,’ written in response to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘The Massacre of the Innocents,’ on display in Windsor Castle. The Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II, sanitised the massacre as the mere plundering of a village. Thankfully, the version painted by Brueghel’s son, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, gives the viewer a sense of the original’s horrific impact before overpainting. Responding to the overpainting, Booker’s speaker observes:

How well those despots understood the shocking power
in a small body. The need to blot it out.

It becomes a compulsion to find them: the babies who float
on the edge of invisibility. They begin to surface

from under the varnish.

Piles of munitions exhumed from the Somme (photo credit: P Allen)

Contemporary forensic pathology hangs like a miasma over the poem: Srebrenica yesterday, Bucha today. The title, ‘Redacted,’ does much of the heavy lifting – a massacre, although horrific in itself, becomes more repugnant as it hides beneath the bureaucratic sharpie. We’ve always known that a disturbance in the earth portends no good. Like the récolte de fer still gathered annually by the farmers of northern France and Belgium, there is no burying the truth – not in the long run. In the past at least, the lies required to hide it were often ridiculous. Booker’s use of the absurd illustrates this as the viewer asks ‘why is this woman weeping over a mound of ham flitches?’ The dawn of images manipulated with the assistance of A.I. – images far harder to unmask as crude overpainting – will add their own chaotic evil to the multiverse.

Claire Booker’s Pedestrian in the Multiverse is a multiverse of its own. In the fissures between – and within – its poems, it is possible to catch glimpses of infinity, and to see ‘eternity in an hour.’

Buy Pedestrian in the Multiverse from Claire direct

RELATED LINKS

Claire Booker’s website

Poor Rude Lines on Claire Booker’s A Pocketful of Chalk

Lust for Life – Charles Lang’s The Oasis

Running heatmap of central Norwich (photo credit: johnfield1)

My three-year-old daughter accompanied me to John Lewis (though it would be more accurate to say that I accompanied her.) We’d bought the new shoes / whatever it was we needed, and wandered the aisles for a while before she asked whether I was lost. She told me not to worry, took me by the hand and led me to the exit. So, you’ll understand that when I relocated for work a few years ago, I wondered how my new city would ever feel like home. My superpower turned out to be running. Pounding the pavements by day and by night has helped me to internalise the city in a way that I would never have managed with a satnav and a handful of routes to supermarkets.

A scene from ‘In the Clutches of the Gang’, a Keystone Cops silent comedy directed by George Nichols and Mack Sennett. Left to right : Ford Sterling (on phone), Edgar Kennedy, George Jeskey, Al St John, Hank Mann, Rube Miller, and Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle (1887 – 1933). (Photo credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Charles Lang’s first collection, The Oasis, opens with a bang with ‘The Chase’: ‘Aw it takes is a wee ‘fuck the polis’ n a night ae excitement is on: / the chase, navigatin side streets n gable ends, hidin in bushes’. On a first reading, I imagined Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh as seen through Danny Boyle’s eyes, Ewan McGregor running from the police to Iggy Pop’s punk rock ‘Lust for Life’, but Lang’s speaker’s bursting with joie de vivre. This isn’t a functional chase to fund a skag habit but ‘a night ae excitement’ – a full evening’s entertainment, and planned as such. Its impetus ‘is a wee ‘fuck the polis” – with the diminutive ‘wee’ adding a childlike (childish?), impish and endearing quality to the taunt. It’s not a crime at all. If the taunt is ‘wee’, then either the police are on a hair-trigger, their reaction grossly disproportionate or (and I like to imagine this as more likely) they are just as bored as the children and accept the opportunity for some excitement gratefully. Thrilling as it is, this is a calculated chase. The speaker and his pals are ‘navigatin’. They ‘map it was ease – the school, the wee shop, the tree swing, / the bought hooses, ma granny’s hoose, ma pal’s aunty’s hoose, the lane’. The definite articles point to the microscopic size of this world, a world with a single lane. The poem is structured in couplets, pointing to the weird intimacy between perp and polis but, instead of a final couplet, Lang leaves us with a half line: ”awright officers // wit yees been up tae the night?” It demonstrates the speaker’s power to pick up the polis and to put them down at will. As an opening shot, ‘The Chase’ pulses with life.

A couple of pages on, and ‘New Shoes’ illustrates that the apparent freedom of ‘The Chase’ is strictly limited. The speaker’s mother presents him with a new pair of white Lacoste trainers: ‘The rules ur as follows— // nae wearin them tae school, / nae climbin fences, nae games a hidey’. It’s exquisitely observed: that the trainers cannot be be worn to school suggests that the omniscient ma knows only too well that, for the sake of fashion and status, her son would swap his trainers for his school shoes at the gate and, whereas climbing trees evokes Boy’s Own adventures, the climbing of fences, their urban equivalent, has a different feel. Ma reels off her commandments, nae, nae, nae with rhetorical polish, omniscience and omnipotence. In ‘The Chase’, the children enjoy the last word… but here? The son knows better than to open his mouth.

The M8 in Glasgow looking towards the south (photo credit: Craig Duncan Photography)

The final section, ‘Glasgow Sonnets’, rings a more sonorous, melancholy note as it muses on Glasgow past and present and brings me back to my heatmap of Norwich. Navigating the M8 in central Glasgow makes my palms sweat and raises my pulse. On and off ramps are truncated. Vehicles enter and exit from both the left and the right. Congestion hides lane markings. The lines on my heat map represent points of contact between feet and street. They represent a deepening connection between person and place, whereas Lang visualises the M8 as a botched operation, a false hope: ‘Flyovers, wance the future, / dissect the city / n send it tae an early grave’. ‘The air is thick’ with the modern embodiment of a pea-souper, ‘n awready everybody / hus forgotten aboot Rosebank‘ and our attention spans struggle to extend much beyond the current news cycle. Like lab rats, we’re ‘going to root the inner/outer / circle in the dark’, like the denizens of Dante’s Inferno.

Lang’s powers of observation are forensic and, as a result, his poems ring with truth and radiate warmth. The Oasis is an affectionate portrait of a city and its people but tackles division and confrontation head-on.

Buy The Oasis from skein press

Richard Scott – That Broke into Shining Crystals

Sometimes books rewire the brain. Even as you read, you know already that, by the time you’re done, you’ll be looking at the world a little differently from now on.

Richard Scott’s second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, has this quality. I’ve been reading it for a couple of weeks, on and off, and it’s made a mark. It reframes the way in which you read the world as it explores sexual abuse and its legacies. One of Scott’s epigraphs is taken from Emily Dickinson’s ‘The first Day’s Night had come –’: ‘And grateful that a thing / So terrible – had been endured – / I told my Soul to sing –’. Helen Vendler comments that this poem is, to her mind, ‘Dickinson’s most harrowing depiction of active mental suffering’ but, the way Scott cuts it, we’re left with the singing and not with Dickinson’s more awful second day, ‘a Day as huge / As Yesterday’s in pairs’.

Margareta Haverman, ‘A Vase of Flowers’ (1716) (photo credit: wikipedia)

The collection opens with a series of ekphrastic poems – all responses to Dutch still life paintings. When visiting galleries, I’ve pootled past these in search of faces and flesh but ‘Still Life with Rose’, Scott’s response to Margareta Haverman’s ‘A Vase of Flowers’ (1716) and Rachel Ruysch’s ‘Tulips, honeysuckle, apple blossom, poppies and other flowers in a glass vase with a butterfly, on a marble ledge’ (c.1691), has put an end to all that. His sonnet opens with ‘Like a foreskin being pulled back’, translating those floral whorls into an arresting intimacy. Line 3’s ‘dense sweet-meat bloom, coral’d cave’ stuffs the mouth with assonance before we choke on its gutturals. Scott paints a dangerous scene: leaves are ‘serrated’ and thorns ‘prick’ (a double entendre which threatens both physical and sexual harm) but, despite this, the painting offers the possibility of escape. The second quatrain opens with ‘So let me in – where everything is new-born / and crystalline, paused, protected – not that other / world, that high-shine of safety, arranged / and sparkling up like a bower’. However, the volta, something we might expect at the beginning of line 9 intrudes into line 8: ‘Almost every day, / for some moments, I think about him’. Margareta Haverman’s ‘A Vase of Flowers’ might appear to be glossy and wholesome but look again and see the snail at bottom left, and at the discolouration of the leaves below it. There’s something rotten here.

Abraham van Beyeren, ‘Still Life with Lobster and Fruit’, (c. 1650) (photo credit: Wikipedia)

In ‘Still Life with Lobster, Fruit and Timepiece’ the speaker’s eye is drawn to the lobster, to its ‘muscle’, to its ‘exoskeleton’ – but the speaker is unable to complete his sentence before the lobster’s hard man image disintegrates. The second tercet opens with ‘terracotta warrior toy’ and, as we reach the third word, we realise that it’s just an image of toughness, a futile attempt to protect that tender centre. Its carapace belies its absolute fragility and ‘even he ended up on the // table – broken apart, belly / opened – men, / silver, flashing above him’. Perhaps we imagine the silverware as the mise-en-scène for some swanky dinner… perhaps. Or perhaps we see flashbulbs, light rebounding from studio umbrellas in another unspeakable act of exploitation. Who, we ask ourselves, is behind the easel, behind the lens? And who lurks beyond the frame, watching from the shadows?

The second section of Scott’s collection, ‘Coy’, a vocabularyclept, plays with Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Marvell’s poem is a classroom staple and anthologised for GCSE frequently. The tumescent innuendo of ‘vegetable love […] vaster than empires’ is always good for a giggle. However, Scott’s epigraph, taken from Gemma Carey’s No Matter Our Wreckage wiped the smirk from my face: ‘Many people still don’t know what grooming really is, beyond ‘something people do to children’. They don’t know what it looks like, so to speak’. And, at this moment, I disappeared down the rabbit hole of Marvell studies. Who is the coy mistress? Why had I never spared her a thought until this day? Why was I content to let her body function as a blank canvas for Marvell’s rhetorical emissions? She’s been hiding in plain sight for my whole adult life. I’ve smiled at her ‘coyness’ and my imagination fleshed out her ‘youthful hue’ pruriently.

But Scott asks us to look again. Her ‘youthful hue / Sits on [her] skin like morning dew’… How, I ask myself, can I have never seen this before? Or was it just that I was incapable of imagining it? I mean, if exam boards anthologize the poem, then she’s a women and not a child… Poking around JSTOR, it transpires that the disquiet surrounding ‘To His Coy Mistress’ predates #MeToo by more than a decade. In Michael John DiSanto’s article, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Ambivalence toward Adult Sexualities’ in Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900, he asks ‘whether our reading habits have made us blind to this problem, and whether a fascination with nymphets has become acceptable in our culture’. In The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography W.H. Kelliher writes:

“On Fairfax’s withdrawal to his native Yorkshire, Marvell was employed as tutor in languages to his twelve-year-old daughter Mary. It says much about his character and religious temper that her devoutly Presbyterian parents and formidable grandmother Lady Vere found him, in Milton’s phrase, ‘of an approved conversation’ (TNA: PRO, SP 18/33/75). By the winter he was praising his pupil in some English verses prefaced to the translation of James Primrose’s Popular Errors (1651) by the Hull physician Robert Witty.”

Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (1681), Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Eng. poet. d. 49: https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/0e1201a5-03c0-4e40-9a9d-8a8384c84675/

Okay. Deep intake of breath – and back to Scott’s ‘Coy’. He uses the modified spellings adopted by Helen Gardner in her The Metaphysical Poets. Scott’s speaker remarks on his ‘youthful hew / to ashes conversion’ where we might expect a ‘youthful hue’. While ‘hew’ is a variant of ‘hue’ – and this remains a possibility – we might also imagine a shout, an outcry, or perhaps even shaping with an axe. Meanwhile, in the Bodleian Library’s 1681 collection, the copyist doesn’t think ‘hew’ is right either, and alters it to ‘glew’ – mirth, rejoicing. Out with the dark and in with the light. Even the poem’s body is a battleground. Scott’s Coy Mistress continues, seeing herself as ‘his / prey, his found pleasures, skin-ball for his sport’. It’s all there on Marvell’s page but, once seen, Scott’s vocabularyclept cannot be unseen.

That Broke into Shining Crystals is ravishing. From page to page it delights with its riot of forms and witty, suggestive, intoxicating language. It’s confessional poetry at its finest and to read it is to receive a priceless gift.

Buy That Broke into Shining Crystals from uk.bookshop.org

RELATED LINKS

Richard Scott at Faber

Read my review of Richard Scott’s Soho, commissioned by the T.S. Eliot Prize

Richard Meier’s After the Miracle

Broad Street was in summer mode: conga lines of language students sporting identical backpacks following the sign of the brolly raised aloft, selfies at the gates of Trinity College and my wife and I, juggling a two-year-old and a five-month-old through the scrum and into Blackwell’s to scratch my poetry itch. Claire Scully’s cover illustration spoke to me, and so I pulled Richard Meier’s Misadventure from the shelf.

I started at random with ‘Blackberrying in a time of recession’: ‘You can’t eat those ones, darling, / I tell Matilda as she tries, / as she tried yesterday, to pick the last / blackberries at the bottom of the garden.’ Shiny new dad that I was, this was in my hit zone: ‘tries’ and ‘tried’ suggesting the Sisyphean challenges of parenthood so lightly. I was sold.

And here I sit, with Richard’s third collection, After the Miracle, and, turning from the painting on the front cover to the image credit on the back cover, I read the name ‘Matilda Meier’ — the very same ‘toddling, student daughter’ from ‘Blackberrying in a time of recession’. To have one’s daughter illustrate the cover of one’s book – oh, be still, my heart!

In ‘Muscle Memory’, we’re on ‘A wide, blank beach in northeast Norfolk’. Given that there’s a poem called ‘Sea Palling’ in Misadventure, I cannot help but imagine Meier’s beach as this one. Glorious in summer, its ‘wide, blank’ qualities offer families the space and freedom to play, but there’s a brutality here too: spend the day outside, no matter how slathered you are in sunblock and, come the evening, lashed by sand and wind, your skin will smart. Meier’s poem, built from couplets, enjoys space on the page. The son’s final throw becomes ‘a template for all future beauty. / And on the boy’s face, as he gets it // and as the world falls open slightly / to show its workings, oh the joy’. Meier finishes with a trademark flourish – the absence of a full stop – pointing beyond the beach, and into the future. The ‘arc’ and the ‘template’ point the geometry, the physics at the heart of things. When the world falls open in a poet’s hand, we brace for another encounter with the numinous but, instead, we glimpse the Earth’s ‘workings’: its un-numinous numinousness!

At the heart of the collection sits ‘Sketch of a Pagoda’, an homage to Takuboku Ishikawa (1886 – 1912) – known for frank, personal, observational poetry. Here, every word is weighty. One reads:

Your using the word we
to mean not you
and me

[Devastating thing]

In the summer of 2020, and a couple of miles south east of Sea Palling, my children and I sat on a bench outside The Dunes Café above Winterton beach but, that winter, after severe coastal erosion, it was demolished. Visiting today, you would never know that it had been there. The pronouns we use to shore-up our lives lack the solidity we endow them with… and rhyming ‘we’ with ‘me’ ought to sound trite – but here it works. No, it doesn’t just work – the poem unleashes its body blow from this elemental simplicity.

My father still speaks in the first person plural, and it cuts when I hear it. I couldn’t tell you when I last had the sense that my mother knew who I was and, when I visit, I also visit the ghost of my great aunt who, late in her dementia, looked just as my mother does now. In the final section of the collection, ‘From Memory’, Meier trains his eye on his mother’s dementia, and on its impact on the family. He opens with ‘Spiral’: ‘It started with some dates she got mixed up — // her illness, yes, but also / our watching her / closely, as if through glass’. ‘Our’ again. We imagine the discussion dissecting the visit in the car and note the uncanny effect of viewing the mother as both part of the family and apart from it, divided by the unbridgeable barrier – we see one another, but the ferry’s been cancelled.

To look a thing in the face, to call it by its name and, through some alchemical miracle, to turn life in its joy, its mess, its pain, into gold – that’s the calling of the artist, the musician, and the poet. Richard Meier’s poems are of this class and, as I walk the next few miles of my journey, I’ll have After the Miracle tucked into my back pocket.

Buy After the Miracle from HappenStance

In Bloom – Bernard O’Donoghue’s The Anchorage

Happisburgh (Photo credit: @johnfield1.bsky.social)

Reading Bernard O’Donoghue’s Farmers Cross in 2012, it was the poem ‘Vocation’ that caught my eye. The speaker considers a farmer, sowing next year’s crops:

‘Each cold October morning he went out / into the Gate Field and walked up and down, / like the horse-drawn seed drill quartering every inch’. O’Donoghue captures fruitless effort in a bleak echo of Mark’s gospel’s parable of the sower. In Mark, something happens to the seed, even if it’s negative. O’Donoghue’s seed simply disappears – despite the methodical, back-breaking ‘quartering every inch’. The imagery is cold and bleak, and the poem ends with the subject ‘staring for inspiration / at the golden, unresponsive tabernacle’.

In contrast, the title of O’Donoghue’s latest collection, The Anchorage, offers us a firm base, a source of support, a refuge from the waves and the wind. Thinking back to ‘Vocation’, and O’Donoghue’s agricultural childhood, we might re-imagine the roots of crops, flowers and trees as anchors of sorts: dependable fixed points in the maelstrom.

The dependability of perennials brings pain as well as pleasure. Even the title of the sonnet ‘Pruning in August’ points to something amiss: roses are best pruned in February or March, not August. The speaker starts by showing us how things should be done: ‘In China, a cherished gardening skill / is to prune the shrubs in such a way that / it’s imperceptible that they’ve been pruned / at all. But here […]’ We’re only a couple of syllables into the final line of the first quatrain and we’ve hit the volta. Don Paterson writes about the octave and sestet forming (an approximate) golden ratio, and perhaps the beauty of these proportions is the reason why O’Donoghue’s speaker takes the poetic equivalent of a chainsaw to the roses: ‘But here, before departing / at summer’s end, I trim off all the shoots / that might have flowered later in the year / for those who come here after us’. It’s a grotesque display of small-mindedness. Okay, it’s not quite as moronic as the mission to fell the Sycamore Gap tree, but it might be in the same ballpark. However, as the sonnet closes, the speaker’s motive is revealed: ‘we can’t bear to think / of their display before the next comers / as if they’d never been the heart of things for us’. At a stroke, vandalism becomes an act of heart-breaking self-laceration.

A later poem, ‘Walking the Land’, explores the sale a farm. The speaker, presumably a version of the teenaged O’Donoghue, ‘led potential buyers through the fields, / showing them the bounds and listening / to their evaluation of the soil’. To evaluate: to reckon up, to work out the ‘value’ (when ‘value’ is understood in monetary terms). The buyers aren’t looking with their eyes; they’re assessing its physical, chemical and biological properties. O’Donoghue sets this against a litany of names: ‘Below the pink spreading hawthorn in Murt’s Field / was the Guttery Gap into the Quarry Field / that led to Dominic’s Inch where we used to gather / frail mushrooms in the dawn along the river’. Soft pinks and frail mushrooms are at odds with the blind assessment that sees only the underlying soil.

The Anchorage sees little miracles of beauty everywhere. ‘At the Wimpy Bar on Cornmarket Street’ takes us to Oxford city centre and opens with: ‘He has nodded off, his big head drooping / towards his knees, the half-drunk half-bottle / of whiskey sloping from the pocket / of his withered sports coat.’ Presumably the subject is a homeless man, but the ‘drooping’ head and the ‘withered’ coat demand that we acknowledge the man’s beauty – or at least its memory. Thoughtlessness and self-interest operate here too as ‘a young man reached over with a wink’ to steal the whiskey, the wink presuming the speaker’s complicity. Half a half-bottle… a trifling theft, but the bottle’s humble size reframes it as the man’s worldly goods, as both nothing and everything. The poem’s leisurely multi-causal sentences span multiple lines, but the theft changes all that: ‘You stopped what you were saying, / sprang to your feet and shouted: / ‘Put it back. It’s his. Give it back to him.’’ We can stand up for beauty and dignity. The world does not have to be cruel and unfeeling.

A couple of poems along and we’re still in Oxford, watching a young woman on the bus, framed behind glass like a painting. The title ‘Madonna’ asks us to see something beatific. She is ‘illuminated / By the light from her mobile phone’ – a glow of sanctity. Like the homeless man’s, her face is ‘downturned’ – this connecting thread pointing to our shared humanity. Her chilled fingers exhibit a ‘bare bloom’. The farm of O’Donoghue’s childhood in Cullen, County Cork, may be a world away, but it has taught him to see that humanity occupies a position in nature and not one above it.

In The Anchorage, O’Donoghue views the world with a kindly, hopeful eye. Cruelty, selfishness, and stupidity are acknowledged, but these do little to dampen his joy and love for humanity. In a late poem, ‘Maker’ (i.m. Pat Joe Morley), O’Donoghue ends, ‘he worked / to leave the world better than he found it’ and the same is true of The Anchorage: it is honest, enriching work.

Buy The Anchorage from Faber

Review of Farmers Cross on Poor Rude Lines

A Fragile Thing – Camille Ralphs’ After You Were, I Am

‘Easter Wings’ (Photocredit: johnfield1)

After a chance remark about George Herbert, the librarian pulled a small volume from the shelf: leatherbound and plain, scruffy but serviceable. It opened to ‘Easter Wings’, Herbert’s iambs restaging sin and redemption where, after a process of subtraction, we become ‘Most thinne’ and ‘Most poore’ but, ‘With thee’, we grow, as ‘Then shall the fall further the flight in me’. I could feel the type pressing into the poem from overleaf and could imagine the printer tugging at the handle of the press. The result? A palpably handmade ink-splattered artifact, printed in 1633 – the year that saw Galileo guilty of heliocentric heresy. Visiting modern bookshops persuades us that certain texts are omnipresent: here’s your choice of editions of Hamlet. Here’s Dickens. There’s Woolf. Perfect. Mass produced. Ubiquitous. But, at that moment, I saw ‘Easter Wings’ – a little miracle of survival, carried by successive generations of love and attention into the present moment. This does not amount to a guarantee of future survival. For a book to exist it requires readers and, without them, entropy steals the words away.

Ralphs’ opening sequence, the playfully titled ‘Common Prayers’, recalls Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, a founding text of Anglicanism. The plural ‘Prayers’ undoes Cranmer’s uniform singularity and points to a celebration of the individual voice. The first poem, ‘after George Herbert’, is similarly tricksy, and works with Herbert’s 1633 ‘The Call’. ‘Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life’, Herbert’s speaker prays, in a trinitarian list which evokes John’s Gospel’s ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’ but here Herbert capitalizes ‘Way’, ‘Truth’ and ‘Life’, perhaps denoting them as aspects of God’s godliness. Ralphs opens her poem with ‘Come, my Motorway, my Equals Sign, my Higher Race, / such a Motorway as wheels with stars’. Where Herbert’s poem focuses tightly on God, measured in monosyllables, viewing complexity through the lens of simplicity, Ralphs’ poem achieves the opposite. Her ‘Motorway’, ‘Equals Sign’ and ‘Higher Race’ are jarring – and especially as her line is haunted by the simplicity and beauty of ‘Way, Truth’ and ‘Life’. Modern life feels and sounds rubbish. Her conceit is worthy of Donne. Perhaps we imagine the convergence of motorways, viewed from above – like the biological beauty of the M4’s junction with the M5, or laced together like the M6 and the M62, the pinpricks of headlights orbiting the junction’s axis like stars spinning around the Galactic Centre. The seventeenth century malaise was Galileo’s heliocentrism – it was the push that sent humanity spinning away from the warm lights of centre stage and into the shadows of the wings. Ralphs undoes this as the motorway ‘wheels with stars’. We each become a little sun, the solipsistic centres of our own universes in a sea of meaninglessness: ‘Come, my Bedside Light, my Takeaway, my Calloused Hand’ but, through the rubbish, ineffable communication still connects us. Gloriously old-school alternate rhymes chime harmoniously, and the poem closes with a resounding ‘yes’.

The next section, ‘Malkin’, revoices the people tried for witchcraft in Pendle at the Lancaster Assizes in 1612. As Ralphs notes, we’re left with the records of the court clerk, Thomas Potts, who would be aware of James I’s unsavoury interest in witchcraft. The documented voices of the victims have, more than likely, been tuned to the ear of the king. Even though these people are 400 years in the grave, Ralphs marks each one executed for witchcraft with a typographical obelisk: † and, in so doing, their demotic is elevated to the status of sacred – the murdered become martyred. ‘Anne Whittle †’ is punctuated by her stutter and speech impediment: ‘And after, well fed-up but famished, I knashed at th bare bakside / of an apl csh csh – – / nd an appl & / another apple – and felt non the better for it, only old.’ It’s touchingly human – and especially the real confession here – that she felt old. She ‘confessed’ to dining with a spirit, and perhaps this accounts for the ever lengthening of the poem’s lines – hardly a confession, but rather a tall story (think Monty Python’s ‘The Four Yorkshiremen’). A side effect of these long lines is the rotating of the poem 90° on the page – and this leads us back to George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’, itself perhaps an echo of ancient Greek technopaegnia – poems inscribed on objects like altar stones from which they took their shape. Like the obelisk by her name, even her poem becomes a memorial, lending Anne Whittle a new dignity.

The collection’s title, After you Were, I Am, reads like a prayer but perhaps it’s supposed to be taken literally and makes us mindful of the fragile links in our human chain. It’s exquisitely wrought and breathtakingly beautiful but, like George Herbert’s The Temple, there are no cheap sideshow stunts here. Form and function reanimate the dead and in their fragility and mortality we see ourselves.

RELATED LINKS

Camille Ralphs at faber.co.uk

Penny Boxall’s The Curiosities

Wheeldon Care Centre (Photocredit: Brian Bullock Building Construction)

I’ve been never one for zoos, but daily life offers the same anxieties. Visiting my mother in her gated compound, my first sight is the woman who paces behind and hangs from the railings like Odysseus, lashed to the mast. Inside, in the heat, residents doze in chairs, chins on chests, and others wail. Roy’s the only resident I’ve met with whom I can converse. This week, as I made to leave, a lady approached, asking for help. There had been some mistake. She shouldn’t be here. Please, would I help her to get home? I’m no different to the rest of us, I know. Shuffling off this mortal coil isn’t the problem, it’s death’s interminable antechamber that’s the worry.

Lions’ Den Hatch, Rhodes Zoo (Abandoned) (Photocredit: mallix)

The title of ‘The Curiosities’, Penny Boxall’s latest pamphlet, brings museums to mind. Oxford’s Ashmolean, Britain’s first public museum, started life as the Tradescant family’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’. Boxall will be well aware of this – her most recent work at the museum was 2022’s ‘In Praise of Hands’, a collaboration with the artist Naoko Matsubara. Museums contain objects which belong in the wider world: teapots condemned to a desiccated existence are least enjoyed by a viewing public, but those items are the iceberg’s tip – what of the objects packed away in storerooms? ‘First Date at the Zoo’, opens with an image of shocking violence: ‘It started when the big baboon / lugged another towards himself / and eyed us as he juddered’. The poem’s tercets feel neat, and transfer the baboon to a new kind of zoo – the poem itself. Line one ticks along with iambic elegance, caging the baboon between the bars of its metrical regularity. But then the force of ‘lugged’ banishes these pretensions. At least the objects in a museum don’t look back, but the big baboon ‘eyed us as he juddered’. It’s a moment of awkwardness. What should we feel? Shame? Pity? Revulsion? … Violation? – And where might the first date eventually lead? Standing together, watching the baboon juddering, rape in mind, what a pall is cast over the nascent relationship. Boxall’s first person plural reminds us that this was a shared experience but, by the poem’s end, “we lay untouched in parallel beds”. The bars prevented the baboon from touching either of them physically, although the speaker’s “stricken eyes” carry the encounter, and any ardour is quenched. Those parallel beds describe a hotel room with perfect economy, but there’s no amorous intersection ahead either.

Behind the banana bread (Photocredit: Brandon)

“Equity” offers a counterpoint to the juddering baboon. We’re shown a woman in “the new retirement flats / near my mother’s house”. All the speaker gives her is the preposition “in”. Like the baboon, or an artefact, she’s been contained while the speaker’s mother owns her house. “Neat” is repeated as we’re shown the “neat sofa” and the “neat letters” she has written. Is she happy? Is she bored? The speaker concludes “Easier to think she’s on the payroll, Equity Card / tucked inside her model’s-own purse”. Boxall borrows from the credits for fashion magazine photoshoots and, at best, it’s a vignette of vapid vanity, or perhaps the view through the window has been styled within an inch of its life to sell real estate but, at worst, there’s something macabre and unsettling here. If you know Roald Dahl’s short story, “The Landlady”, then you’ll know that, when the view through the window looks too perfect, then you’re stepping into a honey trap. In stanza one, there’s “no mystery” and, in the final stanza, there’s “nothing to hide” – unless there’s everything to hide and its hidden in plain sight.

Life coaches send me into an existential spin, so I’ll leave you with “Life Coach” – a trademark piece of Boxallian subversion. Her speaker opens: “How hard I try to emulate / the tufted dandy dinmont”. Line one’s self-help books, gurus, effort and examples are undercut by the drooling joy of a dog, “snuffling up cherries where they’ve fallen / in dark circles under the leaves”. These cherries aren’t Instagramable – those dark circles lead me to imagine that they’ve gone a bit squishy, a bit frowsy – but no matter. I’d sell my soul to be able to follow the advice of a life coach like a dandy dinmont.

Buy ‘The Curiosities’ from New Walk Editions

Related links:

pennyboxall.com

My review of The Ship of the Line, winner of the 2016 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award

Fiona Moore’s Okapi

Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks is on my mind – again. On first reading, I paid it scant attention, but it’s nagged away at me. He writes about the publication of a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary in which “there had been a culling of words concerning nature.” If the dictionary’s duty is solely to reflect how and what language is used, then it has no environmental, political, or social duty. However, Martin Robbins’s 2015 Guardian article was a call to arms for parents, politicians and teachers.

Macfarlane reminds us of Amec’s and British Energy’s proposal for 234 wind turbines on the Isle of Lewis’s Brindled Moor – Europe’s largest wind farm at the time, saying that “It was in the interests of Amec to characterise the moor as a wasteland, a terra nullis […] One pro-farm local councillor dismissed the island’s interior as “a wilderness”, suggesting a space both empty of life and hostile in its asperities.” The protesters’ use of language remapped and reimagined Brindled Moor with its bog-cotton, damselflies and greenshanks, refuting the convenient idea of the space as empty. “In their wish to record the particularities of the moor, they shared an ethic if not a tone with Hugh MacDiarmid’s angry poem rebuking a “fool” who has dismissed Scotland as “small”. MacDiarmid “finds in moorland ‘not only heather’ but also blueberries (green, scarlet and blue), bog myrtle (sage green), tormentil (golden), milkworts (‘blue as summer skies’)” and so his list goes on.

School curricula aim to equip the young with required knowledge and skills, and we hear plenty about STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) but where is the time and space to help pupils actually see – and I mean really see – the world they will later serve as its stewards? When do pupils interact with their local environments to the degree that they can name its parts – surely the first step towards seeing and a gateway to the possibility of respect and appreciation? And don’t talk to me about tiny tots running around in forest school, loppers in hand. Yes, it’s a great start but shouldn’t school leavers have a deep knowledge of their environment? If they never feel connected to it, then how are they supposed to care for it?

Fiona Moore’s latest is the book length poem, Okapi. (Combine a giraffe with a zebra and you have an okapi.) The first okapi Moore shows us isn’t a Congolese forest giraffe at all. Instead, we see the speaker as a child, “playing with my plastic zoo putting her / alongside leopard zebra lion giraffe / whose bright patterns on the carpet’s worn savannah / make the world that began to age at my birth”. The plastic okapi may turn the child’s mind to nature, but it also turns them into a consumer as they amass their first hoard of worldly goods. Its “bright patterns” delight the eye and train the palette to prefer chemical overstimulation, but that brash paint fades and chips – and that plastic zoo, chewed and chipped, will be discarded in the blink of an eye.

The tension between the interests of capital and the needs of nature energizes the poem. The speaker wonders, “will my okapi still have a forest / will the forests still have okapi / solitary treading hidden paths / or will her image survive on banknotes / rotting in an unretrieved hoard”. Blink and you’ll miss the chiasmus – okapi forests | forests okapi – perhaps a nod to the fragile codependence of planet and species. The okapi features on local banknotes in the Democratic Republic of Congo – it’s telling how the natural world is simplified to a set of symbols, stylised and merchandised. We can turn anything into a travesty.

In part at least, Moore’s poem reads as confessional. She worked in the Foreign Office until 2004 and ended up working for the NGO Excellent Development (now Sand Dams Worldwide). She campaigns on environmental issues and this authenticity, this correlation between life lived and words written, lends heft to this poem. She characterizes her speaker as once a “daily reader of the financial times” but “taken aback by the unswimmable / opaque turquoise of a bauxite tailings lake / I began to question GDP”. This isn’t just poetry, it’s a damascene moment, and not one that we can (or should) read through blithely.

Moore alternates between longer-lined, introspective sections and crisp, imagistic observations of the natural world. Following those highly alkaline bauxite tailings, we’re shown “five slavonian grebes”, “an ancient mural of / precious assets / a keeping account” – a counter-narrative to our rapacious perspective on the planet. Those grebes, “the next day three / four two gone” – spaced out on the page, they become an erratic countdown…

Moore’s speaker, musing on our stewardship of Earth remarks: “easy to have a bad conscience the question is / what to do with it how absurd it felt / to have put our bodies on the airport road / hundreds of Cassandras getting arrested / there must be a better way”. A few weeks ago, I reviewed Hannah Copley’s T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Lapwing for the T.S. Eliot Foundation – another Cassandra lending her voice to the planet. Moore’s language is deliberate, reminding us that without words, we cannot see the world and that, with them, we can change our relationship with the planet for the better. Okapi’s litany of plants hums with life, shimmers with colour. In the end, Cassandra will be heard, and we will be thankful for her voice crying in the wilderness.

Buy Okapi from Blue Diode Publishing

The Vortex: Hugo Williams’s ‘Fast Music’

Although listening to music remains one of life’s pleasures it does, over time, become complex territory to navigate. It conjures ghosts of palpable intensity. Music is not only music anymore. A random encounter with the perfect track at the perfect moment may surprise you with joy, but you are just as likely to be surprised by an ache of nostalgia – or intense pain. Perhaps that is why I have made the switch to the uncontested ground of classical music. It too promises sublime peaks and troughs of emotion, but there are no corpses buried in the landscape.

Fast Music, Hugo Williams’s latest, charts our changing relationship with music: careering around the furniture as a kid, high on the vibe, heart racing with the bullet-proof eternal pulse of childhood to that aching nostalgia. Plenty of people write about old age and the dreadful beat of time’s wingèd chariot, but the poignancy of Fast Music is felt in the way music short-circuits the gap between youth and age. Sparks fly. The air crackles.

Williams opens with ‘Undiscovered Islands’, whose conceit casts the poet as mariner, seeking the shores of Utopia. The poem’s epigraph is taken from Legend’s 1968 track, ‘Typewriter’ where, on a ‘dusty desk’, the typewriter ‘sits’ and ‘never says a word’. Moving into the poem, and the silence and potential of Legend’s typewriter becomes action: ‘Days going down with a splash and a hiss / into a restless sea, / words returning with a bang and a bell / to the left-hand margin,/ pausing for a moment to reflect on the scene.’ The poet is diving for pearls, investing a life, risking a life, for scant return – returning with ‘words’, not poems – sinking a life into the time-consuming labour of construction. This labour is a sun-kissed, sword and sandals form of heroism, ‘Words in mortal combat / with arm-wrestling octopi and squid’ but, by its end, becomes more muted, with ‘words bearing news of undiscovered islands, / sometimes taking us there’ – but the thrill of the Odyssey is in the journey, not the destination, and Hugo Williams is a skilful helmsman.

After this splash of colour, Williams cuts away to the black and white past of the Phoney War with ‘Pennies from Heaven’. The song, written in 1936, and was the title track in the Bing Crosby star vehicle released the same year. The poem opens with the speaker’s am dram father applying stage make-up ‘like warpaint’, in a foreshadowing of the conflict to come, acknowledging both its costumed theatricality and its tribal physicality. Back at work, he’s ‘dressed to kill / in government-issue busman’s overcoat’. It’s another delicious duality as the humble uniform speaks of a lowly social position, but ‘dressed to kill’ casts him as a ladykiller. However, as the stanza unfolds, we see his ‘white armband for ‘Officer Material’ and ‘dressed to kill’ assumes a darker significance. Stop and look again: the 1930s… a busman’s overcoat… officer material?? Stanza two solves the mystery as we learn that his ‘debts to the Inland Revenue / amount to four figures’. He has been reduced socially by a change in fortunes – but not fully as, in this society, his class is also innate, and his playful attitude towards money is both destructive and transformative as he places the coins which comprise his wage packet onto the railway tracks to create ‘playthings for his son’.

‘Fast Music’, the collection’s title track, follows next. For the father, ‘dressed to kill’, fast music might have evoked the fleshly press of the dance hall but the son ‘ran round the room on the furniture, / […] took off in a Spitfire’, when he trips, electrocutes himself and ‘soldered [his] fingers together’. On his return from hospital, a ‘wind-up gramophone’ awaits him in his room, ‘playing ”Tico Tico’ by Ethel Smith.’ We feel the dumb, irrepressible energy of youth as the speaker is scarcely through the door from his last scrape when ‘my grandmother wound me up / and bounced me over the moon / on a lap of honour. / Black bakelite planets spun me to heaven’. ‘Wound me up’ – whether the speaker knows it, or not, the clock is ticking. Whether he feels it or not, his existence is fragile and finite. The poem’s final cosmological image is joyful, yes, but, at the same time, it shrinks the child to a mote of dust, a single electrostatic crackle in the grooves of a bakelite planet.

The collection’s second part is a sequence of sonnets: a pean to love, but also an elegy. It’s full of bravado and pathos. ‘Sell-by Date’ is intimately conversational: ‘Remember johnnies? Slippery fuckers / that seemed like a good idea at the time, / but always spoiled things later?’ Even in the octave, entropy asserts itself as ‘You kept one in your wallet for years, / until it disintegrated from neglect’ and, as we move into the sestet, the double entendre of ‘its longed-for / lubricity reached its sell-by date’ keeps things playful, regardless of the cold finality of ‘sell-by date’.

A fast life has been lived to the beat of fast music but, despite the grim medical realities of poems like ‘Enter Mr White’ and ‘Hospital Pet’, Williams ends his collection with ‘The Story So Far’, and not with a ‘sell-by date’. We return to the topological conceit of ‘Undiscovered Islands’ and continue ‘to explore the difficult terrain / where everything remains to be seen’. However, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as an old man, but with the power to restring his bow. Williams leaves us somewhere less comfortable than home, and a good deal older: We climb up into the fork / of the tallest tree / and kick the ladder away’. The wilful risk-taking boy of ‘Fast Music’ holds sway in the body of the ageing poet. When we reach our destination, it’s all over, and who would want a journey as good as this to end?

Buy Fast Music from Faber direct

Woven Song—Liane Strauss’s ‘The Flaws in the Story’

In a world of spoilers, ignorance can be a superpower. And so it was when I visited Sir John Soane’s Museum at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. I had expected a genteel drawing room, the tick of a clock, a clutch of louring canvases… In retrospect, the first clue that something was amiss about this place ought have been its name: Sir John Soane’s Museum. It isn’t named in memorium like The Ashmolean, or the Fitzwilliam. That possessive ‘s implies Soane’s continuing ownership of his collection. It’s located on an ordinary London square: a modest park boxed-in by terraced brick, but the muesum’s facade, faced in Portland Stone, sets it apart. Inside, there’s a Colonnade like a vertical shaft at its core. A Dome casts light down towards the basement’s sarcophagus of Seti I. It feels absurd to speak of yin and yang, of heaven and hell—but that’s how this space feels. With every dart of the eye, more is revealed and, in this little model of infinity, its Picture Room is a memorable flourish.

The Flaws in the Story is the latest collection from Liane Strauss, and winner of the 2023 Marsh Hawk Press First Prize in Poetry. The epigraph is taken from Odyssey, Book II, and shows us Penelope stalling her suitors. ‘Day by day she would weave at the great web, but at night would unravel it. …’ Strauss’s ellipsis reminds us, perhaps, that life is a breaking-off, a lapse in attention. Every day anew, we strap in, hoping to be seduced by the story, and that we are willing to recommit to this hope, day after day, is an article of faith.

Like Penelope’s tapestry, the collection is built from epic running stitches. Each stanza looks like a couplet but the indentation as we draw our breath for the second part of the line serves as a visual cue to treat both as a whole. The reader soon finds themselves in a web, in a neural network in which we can longer be certain of the entrance or exit. In another destabilising nod to the Epic, the poems open in medias res with the tangible and the domestic. For example, ‘Alive Again’ opens:

It’s a tangible, relatable moment but, as the speaker continues, we bounce off the story and into soliloquy:

There’s something faintly disturbing about all of this: to look at a park, to know the park, but to fail to read the space will set you on edge. If disorientation is to be unable to see the East, then our high-rise cities are, by their nature, disorienting, unsettling spaces. This moment takes us back to Sir John Soane’s Museum and, in that mullet, we catch a glimpse of the ‘terrible fish’ lurking in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mirror’.

‘Sanctuary’ takes the reader inside the ‘subterranean levels’ of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Here we encounter the shortest line in the collection. It’s stark and dramatic. The Germanic root of ‘wend’ (to turn), sends us down a staircase and towards the ‘sepulchral chamber’. Perhaps we’re conscious of something ancient at the foot of the stairs but Strauss’s ‘abyss’ resists anything too specific as her speaker, visiting the Archaeological Museum in Mexico City, stares at a jade death mask:

There’s no gentle ‘wending’ here as we’re shown a primal, formless chaos inside ourselves. There’s a black humour too as, at this moment, the speaker asks:

The Flaws in the Story is a dizzying encounter with a mind. It is humane and earthed but, from the safety and familiarity of this platform, somehow, Strauss switches gravity off.

With thanks to Liane and Marsh Hawk Press for a review copy of the collection.

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