Sadly, the lube applied to my intimate area was not recreational but medical.

Following numbness, blood, a phone call, I found myself sporting a knee-high backless number, cheeks sticking to a vinyl seat, and queuing along a corridor at the local hospital instead of registering my form before their morning lessons. Unexpected physical contact is stress enough (dinner at a friend’s house—shoes off, tablecloth to the floor and two playful kittens lurking beneath, intent on re-enacting the opening scene of Jaws—took me close to a coronary). So, physical contact was preying on my mind as I awaited the scan—and I’d yet to learn about the lube. Weeks earlier, cooing and ahhhing, I’d watched ghost images of my unborn daughter on the much same equipment. How times change.

A strength of Keith Chandler’s The Goldsmith’s Apprentice is its structure. In ‘Ultrasound (20 weeks)’ we’re in the maternity unit but, for Chandler’s speaker, the scan’s audio and visuals are troubling. The foetus has a ‘heart darkly pumping’, a ‘Mekon skull’ and shines ‘as if radioactive’. In the final stanza, Chandler is reminded of ‘bones I saw once / at the bottom of a pit / in Orkney, under a stone cist’. Perhaps Chandler is invoking Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: ‘Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries.’ But perhaps we can take heart from the human chain that connects us to our 5,000 year old brothers and sisters on Orkney. Towards the end collection, ‘Ultrasound (70 years)’ puts us back in the consulting room and the speaker sees ‘Three polyps (luckily benign) / cluster like molluscs on the rock of a kidney / while heaped in the distance / the mud banks of my upper intestine.’ Alluvial deposits are the nature of things. Rivers, once mighty arteries, silt-up and choke. To dredge them is to fight time.

These ideas play out across the collection. ‘Coalport Girls’ presents talent and tragedy: ‘Who like you / could magic up, plate after plate, / the fuzz of peach, the frosty glow of grapes? Or put a tear drop on the peony’s cheek  / fresh as your own / wet from the fields of Shropshire or East Wales?’ The repetition of ‘plate after plate’ reminds me of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice:

Never encourage the manufacture of anything not necessary, in the production of which invention has no share.

For instance. Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail. Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods or fuse the fragments, have the smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavouring to put down.

There’s an uncomfortable disconnection between Coalport’s idealised images and the manner of their production, the girls ‘seated at trestles, piecework piled high / behind, in front, like tower blocks’. Also, at first reading, I distanced myself from these pitiful conditions, presuming that Chandler presents a nineteenth century hell. However, the girls’ own ‘frosty glow’ was snatched from them as a landslip ‘spilled casually downhill toward the Severn’, leaving them ‘dull as the slipware before it is ghost fired. This happened in Jackfield, Shropshire, in 1952 and images of the exhumed houses, uncovered in 2014, make for uncomfortable viewing.

The title poem, ‘The Goldsmith’s Apprentice’, treads similar ground as the young apprentice, listening to the rules on day one, hears his death sentence: ‘You will breathe this atmosphere of dust / and soft percussion, dying at last / stoop backed, purblind, / your lungs lit up like a golden branch.’ ‘At last’ perhaps implies that the goldsmith will be waiting to extract the apprentice’s lungs to reclaim his gold in the same way that he has been periodically burning his ‘shoes, clothes, snot, sawdust’ to recycle every spec of gold expectorated. Or perhaps the apprentice, once he is the a husk of a man, will long for a merciful release.

Chandler’s portraits of working men and women transcend oppression and celebrate the workers’ skill and spirit. ‘Chemo Nurse’ sings with authenticity, recreating the banter of a brilliant bedside manner. The first five stanzas comprise a single breathless sentence. It’s only as the speaker pauses to reflect that we are permitted to draw breath. The poem reprises the nurse’s magic trick, plated up again and again.

There’s a tremendous amount going on within the collection’s 67 pages. ‘The Executioner’s Tale’, based on the account of a Filipino policeman, reads like the unflinching reportage of Dan O’Brien and lends a haunting, troubling humanity to the hardest of jobs while poems like ‘Skipping’ recollect the simplest pleasures with exquisite, painful nostalgia.

>> Buy The Goldsmith’s Apprentice from hive.co.uk >>

RELATED LINKS

• Keith Chandler’s website

 

 

 

 

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery was just a refuge from the pipers and Fringe flyers on Princes Street, so I was unprepared for this whopping triple portrait, executed at dramatic scale and measuring 2½ metres by 2 metres. The floor dropped away and the gallery vanished. I had disturbed Professor Sir Alfred Cushieri and felt foolish in T-shirt and jeans. These oncologists had pierced the veil and were mapping the uncharted reaches of space. They laboured on the edge of a precipice and the view was both sublime and terrifying.

In part, Moore’s debut collection reprises her two stunning pamphlets: the existentially inquiring, honest and dignified The Only Reason for Time, and Night Letter, short-listed for the Michael Marks Award for Poetry Pamphlets, 2016, and torn between poles of hope and despair. Both pamphlets sold out, so their availability in book form is a blessing.

Some of the collection’s new poems also explore the loss of a loved one and ‘The Oncologist’ took me back to Ken Currie’s extraordinary portrait. The poem opens:

Poets are meant to suffer. Use it, he said,
sprawled across your bed writing his notes.
You’d gone out for a pee, the ward was quiet.
I told him how frightening it was, and his look
told me he understood – he’d nursed his wife
and watched death take many of the pale figures
queuing at his clinic.

Moore’s oncologist towers with Cushieri and his colleagues. His bold opening statement (he even starts the poem) suggests his considered thought – and of course he appreciates that no-one is better placed to document the human experience than a poet. He’s powerful too as he commands the narrator to ‘use’ her experience for her good – for the general good. Moore implies the intimacy of his ongoing care with economy as the oncologist is ‘sprawled’ across the bed. And suddenly he’s a priest of sorts, as the poem’s ‘you’ leaves for a pee, creating a moment of intimacy – and showing how disease and dying drops its pockets of secrecy within our relationships. This poem is subtle, unflinching stuff. Although initially perceived as powerful and relaxed, we learn that the oncologist ‘nursed his wife’ – traditionally a female role – and reminding us that death knocks every door.

Some of the collection’s new poems negotiate our responses to places with perception and precision. ‘Taking Visitors to Auschwitz’ opens:

It’s here
except it’s not.
This could be anywhere or on the edges of.
That car’s parked askew
and sparrows forage on the tarmac
while people pose each other at the entrance.

Even the poem’s indefinite articles refuse to name the place as, sickeningly, Auschwitz becomes another destination – except that it can never be another destination. The poem develops, Auschwitz remains unnamed and, increasingly, this feels like an evasion. Repetitions pile up: ‘Better to wait, / better to wait’, ‘Coaches drop off groups […] Coaches drop off groups’ and whether we believe in ghosts, or not, Moore’s extermination camp maintains a whiff of itself as it processes people on an industrial scale. She pulls off a similar effect with another Second World War poem, ‘The Cell at Plötzensee’. The poem’s speaker rejects the idea of the supernatural, having worked in a Warsaw building, once used [‘they say’] as a Gestapo prison ‘but never truly sensed a ghost’. However, at Plötzensee, Hitler’s would be assassins were:

[…] to be hanged like cattle.
Hanging from hooks was meant to last longer. Their deaths
may have been filmed, though no film survives unless in some

hidden cabinet of secrets or dark net. The meat-hooks
could be slid along the flange of the high iron beam
where five still dangled in a line, narrow and bare.

There, in the space between ‘five’ and ‘still’ the cell is haunted by Hitler’s would be assassins – except they’re only there because the speaker has added them for us, as they were, in turn, added for her: ‘Unless only the hooks are shown // and I’ve drawn the bodies from a slaughterhouse image’.

Moore’s is a rare gift. We occasionally encounter artists, gatekeepers, who work at the limits of the known, of the utterable. Their work is shamanistic – rooted to experience, woven from the fabric of the universe. Moore would, doubtless contend this quasi-spiritual claptrap but her work achieves this. Like Currie’s oncologists, her poems shimmer with unworldliness, despite their grounding.

Buy The Distal Point from HappenStance

RELATED LINKS

• >>Check out Fiona Moore’s blog, Displacement, here>>
• >>Poor Rude Lines reviews Fiona Moore’s pamphlet, The Only Reason for Time, here>>
• >>Poor Rude Lines reviews Fiona Moore’s pamphlet, Night Letter, here>>

 

 

 

 

Its high pitch and speed makes birdsong feel utterly alien. However, Marcus Coates’s stunning installation, ‘Dawn Chorus‘, closes that distance. Individual birdsongs were captured in a woodland at dawn and then slowed to the point that they became reproducible by the human voice. They were sung, recorded and located in positions in a gallery space to create a virtual version of the woodland. The videos are disconcerting. They are sped up to reproduce the pitch of birdsong but, in doing so, human movement also becomes birdlike, blurring the spurious boundary we have placed between ourselves and the natural world.

In his previous pamphlets, ‘Body Voices‘ and ‘Wordless‘, Kevin Reid showcased an eye for the absurd. In ‘Wordless’, George Szirtes’ words and Reid’s images riffed on silent cinema’s intertitles and in his latest micro-pamphlet, ‘Burdlife’, Scots dialect is grafted onto birdsong, rendering the witterings of our daily lives as gloriously absurd.

The understated dialogue, ‘Juicy Wurm’, is perfectly formed. The interlocutors preface their speech with ‘nawnawnaw’. Perhaps this is because they’re expressing their disagreement as they argue over a worm. The poem starts in medias res: the birds’ tug o’ war has already started. This being the case, the poem has a mock heroic quality. We might as well be looking at Achilles and Agamemnon tugging at the hapless Briseis. The  poem darkens as we’re reminded of our place in the natural word. We like to credit ourselves with rationality and superiority but Reid’s poem takes us down a peg or two.

‘Scunnert’, another dialogue, presents the emptiness, boredom and repetition of economic deprivation as the pair are up to the ‘sameolshite / sameolshite’. Imprecations lose their power and meaning as they become verbal ticks. Similarly, ‘Bird Scale’ ends with the line ‘Effoff effoff effoff’.

‘Burdlife’ is a small but perfectly formed micro-pamphlet of nine poems. It is rich, distinctive and repays re-reading. It sizzles with the sheer joy of sound and language. I read some of these poems to my five and eight year old children over the dinner table: they howled with laughter. To me, this is another sign that Kevin Reid is getting a lot right.

Buy Burdlife from Tapsalteerie

RELATED LINKS

• Check out Kevin’s website, eyeosphere.com, here
• Poor Rude Lines reviews Kevin Reid’s & George Szirtes’ Wordless
• Poor Rude Lines reviews Kevin Reid’s Body Voices

Suede’s debut single, ‘The Drowners’, enacts a war between Butler’s masculine, strident rhythm guitar and the androgyny of Anderson’s lyrics and vocal delivery: ‘We kiss in his room to a popular tune / Oh real drowners // Slow down slow down you’re taking me over’. There are undertones of violence in the song and the desires of the dominant lover threaten to overwhelm.

Jennifer Copley’s pamphlet, ‘Some Couples’, opens with ‘The Drowners’. The river serves as an aggressive, abusive metaphor for love as it ‘pushed you’, ‘punched her’ and ‘dragged her’. The first stanza addresses the reader in the second person, acknowledging that, whether we want to, or not, this is one river that we all dive into. The second stanza switches to the third person, confirming that the abuse it metes out to us it metes out to everyone.

The pamphlet’s title sequence, ‘Some Couples’, comprises four dreamlike poems. ‘Emma and Albert’ opens: ‘To keep her tall / he hung her on the washing line.’ The active verbs are performed by the man and revolve around his maintenance of his partner’s appearance. The poem closes in bed, where she lets him ‘kiss away the peg marks’. The remorse of the domestic abuser? The next poem, ‘Tracy and Shayne’ stays in the bedroom, where the same pattern of active verbs point to the universality of male dominance: ‘He made her grow her hair / so it would spread across his pillow. / She couldn’t move; the weight / of his head pinned her down’. At least in the final poem, ‘Jeff and Carmelita’, it’s Carmelita who rules the roost: ‘His bruises couldn’t be seen / by the naked eye. // At night, in dreams, / he sawed her in two. / Then she sawed him in three.’ Copley suggests that equilibrium is impossible, that all relationships have their masters, or their master-mistresses.

There’s a disarming levity to the pamphlet despite this. In ‘The Nightingales’, ‘Last night the nightingales brought gin instead of song’ and ‘The noise was too much for Alison and Frank, the fallow deer’. The river referred to in ‘The Drowners’ feels less like love and more like animal instinct. Copley’s ridiculous anthropomorphization of the deer with first names invites us to reappraise the titular couples from the sequence, ‘Some Couples’ as biological reproductive units, and as nothing more. Copley’s final lines, ‘The lovers speared themselves on thorns / and didn’t feel a thing’ reference Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, where the Nightingale’s Christ-like loving self-sacrifice is all for nought as the student concludes ‘What a silly thing love is’.

‘Some Couples’ takes simpler pleasures. ‘The Best Places’ ranks ten places for sexual intercourse, eschewing the locales thrust upon us by romantic ideology, preferring instead ‘the park, / the struggle with my top’ and ‘the sofa in Chepstow Road, / slugs in the kitchen, mice on the stairs’. Unadorned with metaphor, the poem encourages us to recognize the pleasures already present in our own lives and to reject the capitalism of dissatisfaction that would have us grafting for white sands and turquoise waters as a suitable mise-en-scène for our sex – the marram grass at Seascale will serve us just as well.

Buy Some Couples from HappenStance here

RELATED LINKS

Visit Jennifer Copley’s website here

Kim Moore describes Copley’s pamphlet, ‘Vinegar and Brown Paper’ as ‘completely bonkers in a good way’. Kim featured Copley as the Sunday Poem here

My father’s watch clasps my wrist now. Big shoes to fill, his shoes. The removal of three links slimmed it for my scrawny wrist yet, standing by my chair, my five year old son, puzzling its butterfly catch, lets it slip down his arm to nestle in the crook of his elbow. A single golden dot punctuates its face. The absence of a second hand means that, when watched, time stands still but the bronze company logo mounted on the strap marks the jolt of retirement. Telling the time is an act of remembrance – every time.

The filth and the fury of Luke Wright’s The Toll may catch the eye but the collection’s intimate observations steal the heart. ‘Watch’ brings three generations together at Christmas. The speaker, now a father, finds his fraternal role supplanted and gravitates towards his father: ‘Like my dad, my Christmas job, it seems, / is balling wrapping paper into bags’. The speaker’s aside, ‘it seems’, points to paternal redundancy and Wright’s observation has a Larkinesque quality. In Afternoons, Larkin observes the young mothers ‘pushed to the side of their own lives’. Wright’s final couplet is poignant, restrained and true: ‘We sit together, watching seconds tick. / Wow, Dad, you say. It’s going really fast.’

The Shakespearian sonnet ‘Dad Reins’ also feels the beat of time’s wingèd chariot as Wright explores fatherhood with honesty as the speaker’s ‘nightly monologue / of measured, risqué quips’ is ‘switched for a set / of weary nags and faux amazement’. Identity is not a performance as amazement is ‘faux’ and the public persona: gigging ‘back-combed jobbing fop’ is also a confection. The sonnet concludes that fatherhood is a place, not a surface. It’s the core, not the crust: ‘Roam now, my boy, don’t worry, you’ll be fine. / I’ll be you tether, Sam, because you’re mine’. Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning‘, presents husband and wife as a pair of compasses – the central point supports the free roaming of the outer arm and Wright’s baby reins are a moving reimagining of this conceit. Wright’s couplet is a pair of statements, a pair of sentences and his end-stopping drives home his fatherly confidence.

Yet The Toll is a game of two halves and ballads like ‘Lullaby’ remind us that depressingly little has changed since Charles Causley’s ‘Timothy Winters‘: ‘Then here again: the half-bought couch, / the supermarket wine, / the drip-drip of these Netflix nights, / the whittling of our brittle time.’ Wright’s Britain is a divided nation and, in ‘The Toll’, ‘Dartford’s distant toll’ serves as a metaphor for a divided society in which a good day is ‘a trip to KFC for tea, / a DVD, some sweets’. Wright’s a balladeer for our time and this collection is loaded with social comment and observation. He doffs his cap to John Betjeman in ‘Sick Children’ and the collection reads like a tour of England as Wright visits Saffron Walden, Much Harpington and even Bungay as his thermometer measures the sickness of the nation. However, at his angriest, Wright’s an f-bombing William Blake but mitigating this with moments of pure tenderness gives this collection breath-taking range and power.

Buy The Toll from Penned in the Margins

Luke Wright’s website is here

Setting the tropes of film noir aside for a moment, Raymond Chandler’s iconic sleuth, Philip Marlowe, feels more like Eliot’s Tiresias: knowing and foresuffering all, peeling back the cheap tin lid on the eternal drama of exploitation playing itself behind the inscrutable facades of suburbia. In The Big Sleep, the clean lines of LA interior design comment on a shady underworld as Carmen Geiger lolls drugged and compromised. Nothing escapes the world-weary Marlowe as he enters that room: ‘The ivory furniture had chromium on it, and the enormous ivory drapes lay tumbled on the white carpet a yard from the windows. The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out.’

Drenched in Chandler’s LA sun it isn’t, but Charlotte Gann’s Noir views suburbia through the eyes of a forensics team. The collection’s first section, ‘Surveillance’, opens with ‘Puzzle’: ‘If I look closely I can just see how these / red-roofed houses slot together – where / to unclip the lid on each, lift it gently / and peep inside. In this one, a lad with his back / to a box-room door plays Space Invaders’. Gann’s first person narrator remains a mystery,  enjoying the anonymous omniscience of the surveillance age and the modular construction of her vision of suburbia presents private lives as fragile and doll-like. The section remains focused: in ‘Private Eye’, ‘everyone here watches their neighbours / through binoculars’ and, in ‘Prisoner’, a woman is loaded into the van at the county court, locked ‘into the tiny box-like cubicle inside’.

The second section, ‘Witness Protection’, looks again – looks harder. A stand out poem, ‘Vice’ requires quoting in full:

He holds her in his vice
The place is soundproofed.
She’s screamed and screamed
and no one’s come.

When she stops the birds still sing.
Weather passes. Days
are days. The postman calls.
She hears the milkman whistle.

Initially, we are absolved. ‘The place is soundproofed’ and life continues with the cruel indifference of Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ where ‘the dogs go on with their doggy life’. However, Gann’s final line exposes the sham: ‘She hears the milkman whistle’ and, sickened, we understand that the screams rang loud and clear in the small hours – small wonder, as Gann’s is a prefabricated, paper-thin suburbia, an LA sound stage.

Gann’s suburbia is Gothic and a section in Noir, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, references Angela Carter’s reworking of Perrault’s ‘Bluebeard’. However, like Matthew Stewart’s The Knives of Villalejo, recently reviewed here, Gann’s not interested in reassuring her reader with the distance of a Transylvanian or Los Angeles mise-en-scène. We’re made instead to wander the half-deserted streets of our own towns. A couple of weeks ago, yards from my children’s primary school, a double murder was committed behind the closed doors of a terraced house. How long, I wonder, before a neighbour picked up a phone?

Buy Noir from HappenStance Press

RELATED LINKS

• Charlotte Gann blogs here
• Follow her @CharlotteGann

 

 

 

 

Our Gothic dopplegängers suppress our unease. Conveniently externalised, Mr Hyde and Victor’s creature stalk the margins. We reassure ourselves that the monsters are beyond our thresholds and insulate ourselves from the threat without by wrapping tight in the tissue of domesticity. Thomas Hardy, never one to flinch from the truth, saw things differently. In ‘The Going’, the first of his Poems of 1912 – 13 to mourn the death of Emma Hardy, his house, Max Gate, becomes its own mystery of Udolpho: ‘Why do you make me leave the house / And think for a breath it is you I see / At the end of the alley of bending boughs / Where so often at dusk you used to be’. Hardy’s uncanny experiences acknowledge that it’s our everyday locales that are truly haunted – and our ghosts don’t need a witching hour to haunt us.

The Knives of Villalejo is Matthew Stewart’s first book length collection and it starts with a bang: poem after poem worries away at the wound of grief. The collection opener, ‘Formica’, eases us in gently:

An ochre dusk through the window,
stewed apples sighing from the hob
and slippers squeaking back and forth
on the lino – Mum’s become Gran,
Son now Dad, but a boy still plays
at the same Formica table.

Stewart’s control of sentence structure offers its own suspense and compresses time into a simultaneity. ‘Lino’ and ‘Formica’ invoke the ’50s yet, despite their archaic irrelevance – perhaps even because of it, they offer a timeless stillness as the family unit reconfigures to the beat of the music of time. Perhaps the clays of the ‘ochre’ dusk hint at mortality but their warmth, coupled with the comforting domesticity of the ‘stewed apples’ and the ‘perfect shine’ of the table’s ‘ersatz knots’ would have us believe that time can be staved off. However, the poem’s second part opens quite differently: ‘The empty chair is staring hungrily’. This is a horrifying image. In ‘The Triumph of Death’, Bruegel presents Death riding a starving horse – a metaphor for death’s insatiability. This empty chair, instated within the heart of the domestic space, eyes its next victim. In poem after poem, disconnected numbers are dialled, a lost loved one is spotted through a crowd of shoppers and, in a series called ‘Debris’, small appliances are hurled into a skip and ‘your pencil / perfectly wigwammed by a Stanley knife // […] racing against the tip before it blunts / and a sharpener peels your work away’.

The collection then veers away to revel in food, wine, and to explore identity. However, Stewart’s poems all share a grounded honesty, a rootedness in the material world: a world of kitchens, tables and cooking. In ‘Making Paella with David’, ‘I watch his fingers learning how / to shell langoustines, exploring / their cartoon-alien faces / and train-track bellies. He giggles at calamari tentacles’. Where ‘Formica’ presents the generations as ranks of corn facing the scythe, this poem presents the generations as united. Food, sometimes a serious topic, is viewed from the son’s perspective but the word ‘alien’ is telling. The son considers the Langoustines’ faces to be ‘cartoon-alien’ but they’re not the aliens, the boy is. The collection explores belonging with tremendous sensitivity.

I should admit here to having known Stewart since 2012. This aside, The Knives of Villalejo left me weeping, in Caffè Nero, Banbury, as I read it. I only hope some of the other customers saw that poetry pulls these sorts of punches.

Buy The Knives of Villalejo from Eyewear

Matthew Stewart blogs at Rogue Strands and tweets as @roguestrands

This review was commissioned for the T.S. Eliot Prize newsletter and is reprinted with kind permission.

This review was commissioned for the T.S. Eliot Prize newsletter and is reprinted with kind permission.

This review was commissioned for the T.S. Eliot Prize newsletter and is reprinted with kind permission.

Who does a society decide to memorialise and who does it shuffle to the margins of its history?

Duhig’s titular blind road-maker, the remarkable Blind Jack Metcalf, was born blind but, nevertheless, worked as a successful musician, tour guide and, in later years, as a civil engineer. In The Blind Road-Maker, Duhig memorialises a range of figures: from Metcalf and the fifteenth century prophetess, Mother Shipton, both almost obliterated from history, to canonical figures like Laurence Sterne and William Langland.

In ‘The Ballad of Blind Jack Metcalf’, Duhig writes in that most proletarian of poetic forms: ballad – the form of the road as it brought news from place-to-place, to the ordinary and perhaps illiterate. Duhig describes Metcalf as ‘a soldier, smuggler, fiddler, guide’. That middle ‘fiddler’ disrupts the alliterative neatness of the list with a little jolt – another of Jack’s forays on the wrong side of the law, perhaps, but also a nod to an early position as a musician at the Queen’s Head, Harrogate. Without knowing his history, he can be misconstrued and Duhig helps us to enjoy this as we catch up on Wikipedia. Here, as elsewhere in the collection, Duhig validates his subjects with cross-cultural comparisons, describing Metcalf as ‘our Daedalus of roads’. (In ‘Mother Shipton’ the prophetess is ‘our Yorkshire Sibyl’, and the first person plural pronoun adds a sense of proud collective ownership.) The ballad leaves the reader at the sit-by-me statue of Metcalf in Knaresborough where Jack’s ‘secret tale’s picked out in Braille / and what it says is that…’ It’s a great ending – the waywiser wheel (pedometer) beside him points to the homing circularity of our journeys and the poem’s circular structure too completes its own revolution but, rather beautifully, the ellipsis transforms into Braille, bringing the reader physically close to the statue.

The collection also engages with questions of aesthetics. ‘The Marbled Page’ considers a page from Sterne’s experimental novel, Tristram Shandy, unique to each copy, hand-marbled and which the eponymous hero describes as ‘the motly emblem of my work’. Duhig’s poem opens: ‘For Aristotle, marble’s motley / trapped gobs of first matter / from the moment of Creation / when Fortune mothered God’. Aristotle and marble locate the poem within a Classical context, pushing us, therefore, to read ‘gobs’ as a dialect word for mass, or lump. Marble, the building material of choice for the Classical world is placed at the centre of creation and, for a moment, Duhig permits his reader to imagine Sterne located there too as the marbling begins to ‘multiply like spiral galaxies’ as ‘the author priest watches over / the reproduction of his design’. Again, Duhig’s economical writing is playful as, at one level, the author becomes the celebrant of a sacred rite and, of course, Sterne was a vicar. When he ‘looks away. / The book-maker clears his throat / and gobs into the marbling trough’ and why, we wonder, do we enjoy the whirls and whorls of marble, but not those of a well-cleared throat? High culture is taken down a peg or two as a nameless bystander weaves his DNA into literary history.

If you enjoy this collection, check out the Leeds poet and classicist, Tony Harrison. In his work, pop and high culture, rich and poor, the proletariat and their oppressors collide. These poems doff their cap. In ‘Blockbusters’ the ‘locals speak blank verse (says Harrison)’ and Duhig’s remarkable poem reminds of Harrison’s ‘Durham’. It’s a treat to read verse with this kind of agility, scale and sense of social purpose.

Buy The Blind Roadmaker from Picador

This review was commissioned for the T.S. Eliot Prize newsletter and is reprinted with kind permission.

Vahni Capildeo’s Forward Prize winning Measures of Expatriation opens with an Old English dedication, ‘Eadig bið se þe eaþmod leofaþ’ (Blessed is he who lives humbly), taken from the cold, salty exploration of isolation, ‘The Seafarer’, a poem which helps us to measure language and ideas against a thousand years of invasion, immigration and imperialism.

In some ways, Capildeo concludes that humanity is pretty much constant in nature. In ‘Inside the Gateway: 1970s Red Clogs With Side Buckle’, she describes the clog as ‘The forever shoe, which points homewards’. One might expect it to symbolise travel but this one is static, aligned like a compass needle. In the tenth section of ‘All Your Houses: Notebook Including a Return’, Capildeo offers another archetype of sea-bound exile as she quotes a line of  Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: ‘‘As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean’. A pleasure to be pressed between flat sea and flat sky into the two-dimensional glisten. A pleasure in the horizon as a lost line of pure waiting’. Her speaker, musing on Coleridge and pressed flowers, transforms his image into something bigger than a becalmed ship – into a pressed preservation for posterity.

Yet, despite a formaldehyde timelessness, ‘Measures of Expatriation’ also measures change. Another shoe poem, ‘Bad Marriage Shoes: Silver Ballet Slippers’, presents ‘The penitential mermaid shoes […] distressed silver ballet slippers with netted and criss-cross side details which would make the material seem to swish with the changes of light’. Here, marriage is an atonement, meted out in confessional and, à la Hans Christian Andersen, it is a painful, hobbling experience. The decorative aspects of the shoes adopt a sinister aspect as they tighten like an asphyxiating net. This motif recurs In ‘The Poet Transformed into a Double Vodka’ from the nightmarish sequence ‘Inhuman Triumphs’ with ‘you, meantime, pouring out me / on the rocks. MAN DRINKS MERMAID / MISTAKING HER FOR LIQUOR!’ Yes, there’s a wicked dark humour in those icy rocks – but they’re also plain old stone, casting the poem’s subject as Andromeda – as fragile, objectified,  flesh.

Capildeo’s intertextuality extends beyond literary allusion. ‘Kassandra #memoryandtrauma #livingilionstyle’ references the Trojan prophetess, doomed never to be listened to in her own country but also points the reader to Twitter where a search on the hashtag, #livingilionstyle returns a single tweet by @PerdutaGente (Capildeo): ‘hold tight & think of delphi’ – a wry reworking of ‘Close your eyes and think of England’ – with all of the unpleasant baggage that this implies. [Well, it did at the time of writing but appears not to now.] Kassandra ends up very far from home as Agamemnon’s property. Twitter is no stranger to the trolling and degradation of women, as Mary Beard, among others, has experienced and Capildeo measures the fatal trajectory of such abuse:

Why listen? She’s privilege. Complication. Must be spoilt.
K.’s voice flares victim to her high-explosive hair; her thoughts
dismissable; cuntly, if you’re a man; peripheral.
Take sixty seconds to re-read each of the lines above.
That took ten minutes: half as long as my death

Measures of Expatriation is a playful exploration of a wide gamut of ideas – home, ethnicity, identity, sexuality, history and literature jostle together and, where they rub, sparks fly.

For various reasons, 2016 was not much of a year for reading, or reviewing poetry. So, the experience of reviewing the collections shortlisted for the 2016 T.S. Eliot prize was an intense one: a book a week from October to December.

Rachael Boast’s Void Studies was the first up and this was a poetry collection on the edge. Its language reinscribes words with power in a fabulous dreamscape of memory and desire as it invokes – reincarnates – Arthur Rimbaud. The poems’ relationships with one another are like the facets of a precious stone – individually beautiful but, together, they reflect and refract ideas and sounds into a spectrum of pure colour. This collection was jaw-droppingly inspiring and a great start to my ten weeks of reading.

Next up was Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation. As I wrote for the T.S. Eliot Foundation newsletter, this collection opens with an epigraph from the Old English poem, ‘The Seafarer’, (‘Blessed is he who lives humbly’) and ‘helps us to measure language and ideas against a thousand years of invasion, immigration and imperialism’. With a resurgence of nationalism, protectionism, introversion and a general fear of the other, Capildeo’s poetry feels  important and timely.

Wit, wisdom and social engagement flow from Ian Duhig‘s Twitter account – @IanDuhig. Take this recent Tweet: ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.docx. A play on Word’. His nominated collection, The Blind Roadmaker, is filled with his trademark wit and his sheer joy in language. However, it also engages with social justice and historical revisionism through figures like Blind Jack Metcalf, a Renaissance Man of the late 1700s / early 1800s. As I wrote for the T.S. Eliot Foundation, ‘Duhig validates his subjects through cross-cultural comparisons, describing Metcalf as ‘our Daedalus of roads”. If culture is our collective memory, then Duhig’s collection is a political act: inviting society to remember a different set of figures and to spend a little less time revering the cold bronze imperialists typically memorialised by the nation. Duhig invites a humbler, more humane memory of ourselves.

J.O. Morgan’s Interference Pattern was a revelation. As I explained in my T.S. Eliot Foundation piece, the collection ‘offers vivid physical experience, offset by oblique, figurative responses’. The collection sets quasi-Homeric similes against a set of dramatic monologues – it sets the physical against the transcendental and watches as the sparks fly. Like Boast’s, Morgan’s poems gain mass and gravitas from the others around them and this book adds up to more than a poetry collection – it’s a single entity… a work of art.

I’ve been reading Bernard O’Donoghue my entire adult life. At uni, the rest of my year group wisely decided to take a course with him… and fell in love in an afternoon. He’s a generous optimist, once putting his hand in his pocket to help a friend of mine to launch a literary magazine that lasted 2 issues. Like Duhig, O’Donoghue tends the flame of a more humane humanity. In The Seasons of Cullen Church there’s no ‘project’ like Morgan’s or Boast’s, but there’s a mastery of craft like no other.

Alice Oswald’s Dart reinvigorated my faith and excitement in contemporary poetry and Falling Awake, winner of the Costa Poetry Award, is yet another superb collection from an exciting poet. The stand out poem is ‘Tithonius’. A graduated line – time? – threads through its backbone and it retains Dart’s distinctive sense of journey through landscape and time. Oswald’s deep engagement with Classical literature helps her to convey timelessness through the perpetual repetition of actions as the planet spins through space.

In Jackself, Jacob Polley creates an eponymous, quasi-mythic character and mythologises his native Cumbria. His title is wrested from one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s terrible sonnets of spiritual and existential crisis (‘My Own Heart’) and, combined with an epigram from the anonymous ‘Tom o’Bedlam’, promises a deep engagement with folktales as it wanders through a midnight world.

If Polley’s intimate engagement with landscape reminded me of Thomas Hardy, Denise Riley’s haunted Say Something Back reminded me of Hardy’s Poems 1912 – 13, his haunted, passionate response to the death of his first wife, Emma Gifford. Riley’s speaker seeks consolation in poetry: ‘I can’t get sold on reincarnating you / As those bloody ‘gentle showers of rain” – mocking the poeticisms of the past like a twenty-first century Ezra Pound – ‘oooh / Anodyne’. The collection’s engagement with grief in a godless world is stark, uncomfortable and authentic. Wordsworth, eat your heart out as ‘Peanuts in caramelised burnt chocolate bake / Through syrupy air’ underneath Riley’s Westminster Bridge.

Ruby Robinson‘s Every Little Sound opens with a summary of the concept of ‘internal gain’: ‘an internal volume control which helps to amplify and focus upon quiet sounds in times of threat, danger, or intense concentration’. The result is a set of hyperreal observations, transcending the everyday and unlocking its latent Gothic menace.

Finally, Katharine Towers‘ The Remedies is unlike the other shortlisted collections: there’s a purity, a gentleness, a stillness which serves as a foil for the political and social engagement in some of the others. However, perhaps there is a form of social engagement here – stillness and silence are premium products,  luxuries, in a world overloaded with the white noise of information and demands for action. Towers offers us a salve. Simplicity and beauty are endowed with the power of an essential oil in this collection.

And who will win? The teacher in me would ask to see the assessment criteria before venturing an opinion. Ben Wilkinson makes an impassioned case for Ian Duhig. Boast, Morgan and Oswald create sublime edifices of language and this quality, I feel, chimes with the ambition in form exemplified by Eliot in The Waste Land. At an emotional level, J.O. Morgan’s Interference Pattern actually had me gasping as I read it, so, I suppose I’ll be rooting for him tomorrow as this embarrassment of riches is arbitrarily judged.

Now bag some book goodies:

• Rachael Boast, Void Studies, Picador
• Vahni Capildeo, Measures of Expatriation, Carcanet
• Ian Duhig, The Blind Roadmaker, Picador
• J.O. Morgan, Interference Pattern, Cape Poetry
• Bernard O’Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church, Faber
• Alice Oswald, Falling Awake, Cape Poetry
• Jacob Polley, Jackself, Picador
• Denise Riley, Say Something Back, Picador
• Ruby Robinson, Every Little Sound, Liverpool University Press
• Katharine Towers, The Remedies, Picador