Poor Rude Lines: poetry reviews & recommendations by John Field

Claire Trévien’s and Gareth Prior’s Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History

In the anthology’s introduction, Trévien writes that ‘we wanted poems that would make us create new patterns of association in our brains where a historical period or event was concerned.’ The aim’s a lofty one, then. However, Prior and Trévien score some home runs and, given the anthology’s broad sweep – from Harry Man’s telescoping of time in his sestina, Earth, which runs at breakneck speed from the planet’s birth in 454 billion BC to our species’ search for alien life, to Martín Espada’s uplifting litany, Alabanza: In Praise of the Local 100, a psalm to the restaurant workers starting their shift in The World Trade Center’s Windows on the World on the morning of the 11th September, 2001 – there’s an excellent chance that something within its pages will knock you off your feet and leave you looking at the world in a different way.

Vandalized Rokeby Venus 1914 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For me, it was Rebecca Támas’ The Rokeby Venus. It was as a child that I first witnessed iconoclasm through the welts on Venus’ back care of the suffragette, Mary Richardson. My memory conveniently buried the inconvenient detail, the political intent behind the slashing of the painting, and Richardson’s act became my first encounter with a senseless vandalism that, to my mind, fitted into a continuum with the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the recent destruction of Nimrud by Isis. As I approached my first reading of Támas’ poem, I was convinced that it would support my liberal reading but she denied me my complacency. Her first line and stanza, ‘very quiet until the cut,’ like Richardson’s chopper, appears from nowhere but the definite article lends the cut a purpose, unsettling the reader. If this is senseless violence, an iconoclasm, then Richardson’s surgical precision is at odds with the indiscriminate brutality of hate. Indeed, if her cut is surgical, then surely her intent is to ‘do no harm.’ Only now does Támas direct our gaze to the victim, ‘her body held still / looking at itself / naked in a windowless room.’ Venus’ stillness is not the stillness of repose, it is held, like a stress position, and the ‘windowless room’ feels more like Orwell’s Ministry of Love than Titian’s boudoir of repose. Into this confinement, Richardson’s chopper is ‘a filament of rapturous electricity // her body // her bodies // are full of holes / and all the light is // all the light / is flooding in.’

My other extraordinary moment was John McCullough’s Polari Georgie, Belladonna, Sid, where the blitz, one of The Second World War’s most potent symbols of indiscriminate Nazi aggression (for British readers, at least), is deliciously, outrageously transformed: ‘Paper, scissors, stone. Grinning poster boys / for Winston’s bona* home front, the flashing sky / pink as a boudoir’ and the heroic servicemen are reimagined as ‘saintly omi-palones** who fall / when we stroke the Polish navy’s smooth serges.’ Reimagined is the word here because the dominant narrative, the narrative of heterosexual heroism, is writ so large and read so close that it is almost impossible to imagine anything else. However, with a few deft lines, McCullough has lifted the scales from my eyes, redrawing the Allied war effort with considerably more diversity and humanity. Even the Blitz now feels significantly different as Georgie, Belladonna and Sid ‘linger here, still paper / but folding, folding. The streets swarm with mammoth / skirts, decency, bedsits. I’ve used the last smudge // of American shampoo. Each dusk I vada*** / the ripped-open, scattered rose sky and pray / to God for the safe return of my blackout.’

* bona – lovely
** omi-palones – effeminate men
*** vada – look at

For even the blitz to have become a liberating space for those for whom ‘The horrors of peace are many’ serves to illustrate just how effective Trévien and Prior have been in their quest to rewire history and, if you haven’t encountered it yet, give their poets the chance to challenge a few of your assumptions about the world. You’ll be the richer for it.

Buy Other Countries: Contemporary Poets Rewiring History here

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Olivia Byard’s The Wilding Eye: New and Selected Poems

Angry Swans (Photo credit: Chris Frewin)

Seeing a swan holed below the waterline by a crossbow bolt on my stretch of river, I ran for the phone. The RSPCA were at the scene with the alacrity of an emergency service but I never found out what happened to the bird. In South Oxford, the river rubs shoulders with one of the city’s tougher areas and, every once in a while, someone would dump motor oil from the bridge, cut a boat from its mooring, or train a crossbow on a swan. Perhaps I started to feed swans from my boat’s kitchen window as a reaction to this barbarism. At first, they drifted nonchalantly, as if above my handouts, consuming them on sufferance but, soon enough, their necks reached for my sink.
Then the menaces started.
Hissing, beaks agape, ancient dinosaur DNA asserted itself. The creatures straining through were terrible lizards. No traces of beauty or serenity were left and I slid the window shut but they’d scope the river, awaiting my return from work, or the supermarket and, by the time I’d clambered down the mooring and aboard, I was a schoolboy fearing the circling bullies.

Cueva de las Manos, Argentina (Photo credit: Xipe Totec39)

Olivia Byard’s The Wilding Eye: New and Selected Poems opens in trademark style with Homo Erectus, a vision of our progenitors gathered around the hearth 1 million years ago. ‘I see you crowd around, mouths full, / upright rumps near leaping flame – / and wonder who is jostled first / outwards towards the cave mouth, / where freezing draughts roar in / to sting and ancient predators / pace.’ The scientific classification of the Latin title invites us to view ourselves as enlightened. Furthermore, seen as a metaphor, Erectus implies moral stature. However, this is a crowd already enjoying ‘mouths full,’ suggesting their behaviour is darker than necessity demands and, despite the poem’s Latin title, ‘rumps’ also invites us to view these humans as animals… as cuts of meat. And so, as one mouth is filled, another is emptied, as the superfluous are ejected from the cave and repurposed as an offering to the ‘ancient predators.’ Byard’s Morlockian dystopia reaches its nadir as the group finally turn on ‘one / who slowed this morning almost / to a dawdle – watched a bird / an early linnet, say, weave and dive / through pitching branches’ and, as a teacher, I’m reminded of the intrinsic evil which Golding suggests resides at mankind’s heart in Lord of the Flies, and of the government’s blinkered STEM agenda, which chooses to forget the boundless, playful creativity of the great scientists as it denigrates the arts – for what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?

Mouse tracks in snow (Photo credit - Wikipedia) — Mouse tracks in snow (Photo credit – Wikipedia)

Over the page, Lone revels in uncanny effects: ‘On a festively-cold afternoon, you / skim an ice-rink square alone – swish / across its unpocked skin, attuned / to silence and criss-crossing tracks // You’re fleeing the clink of bottle / and glass – the alien brittle all-season din.’ The speaker addresses the second person, yet the instinctive, untamed fear of humanity suggests an animal. This uncertainty allows the poem the no man’s land between nature and humanity, pointing again, perhaps, to the beast within us, a beast keen to demonize a fearful and shy nature as rapacious in Homo Erectus.

Sisyphus schaefferi dung beetle (Photo credit: Wikipedia) — Sisyphus Schaefferi dung beetle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Byard takes an ambivalent view of stoicism. Sisyphus, like Lone, is presented without punctuation, suggesting the timeless, cyclical quality of his punishment. The burden is carried ‘Over and over, the falling / the disgrace – the never-learned / the same mistakes.’ Perhaps we’re inclined to view the repetition optimistically, choosing to see Sisyphus returning to his feet to carry the burden once more. However, Byard’s present continuous ‘the falling’ does not, I feel, afford us the luxury of a return to our feet – Erectus once more – and her present continuous fall enacts in grammar the ‘simple torture’ of ‘those ancient gods.’ (The uncanny effects of Lone, the ‘ancient predators’ of Homo Erectus and the ‘ancient gods’ of Sisyphus present Nature – and perhaps our natures – as disturbed, disturbing and untamed).

Daffodils at East Cowes Well Road (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At the same time, there’s balance. In Jam Jar, the first in the sequence Roadside Shrines, the fragile memorial is soon reclaimed, ‘except this jam jar, shattered / on its side – shards dimmed among / the nettles’ spider-eyes’ yet, in Jonquils, ‘Some kind heart / in a planting crew last spring / must have thought to help / – plastic tributes too feeble / by themselves – / so dug in tiny bulbs.’ In The Corset, we’re offered a Granny, ‘beached / in her whale-boned corset / high above the shimmering shoreline’ as ‘the thermometer nudged ninety’ and, in turn, nudging the woman out of her stays as ‘she trimmed herself up / to full four feet nine inches, / and breeze belling her loose blouse / sailed,’ as the air blows freely through Byard’s diphthongs.

These poems are often unsettling and uncanny and occupy those contested spaces beyond our domestic thresholds. Remember the last time the animal in you stirred in fear or anger and you will feel the power of Byard’s Wilding Eye.

In addition to the Wilding Eye, Byard’s new book contains selections from 2011’s Strange Horses and 1997’s From a Benediction – shortlisted for the 1997 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Buy The Wilding Eye: New and Selected Poems from Worple Press

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Olivia Byard’s website

Devil’s Haircut: Carmina Masoliver’s Nasty Little Intro #8

Sainsbury’s can sell your daughter a beautician’s outfit but not a lab coat and stethoscope. Although I’d always known that the girls’ toy aisle is a lurid pink, it never bothered me until my own daughter walked through its patriarchal nightmare of submission and subserviance. She loves Disney, dresses and all things pink, and, yes, I’m sure that this is just because she’s a little girl but, even though she’s only five, I can feel the weight of our culture pressing against the doors and windows – and it’s flooding through the cracks. As a gesture, we binned our stash of glossies and Sunday supplements but we’d be better off leaving the house in blinkers, for all the good it’ll do us.

Arthur Rackham Rapunzel, 1909 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For me, the highlight of Carmina Masoliver’s 8 poem chap-book is her reimagining of Rapunzel. The poem is immured between a repeated, blunt, single sentence stanza: ‘My hair feels heavy today.’ The speaker says ‘I remember the chop, / when the taste of freedom / was a gulp of fresh air. I could run / in the wind without its whip.’ The colloquial ‘chop’ equates the hair-cut with castration, implying that luxuriant hair is the source feminine sexuality and that deliverance from this is an unbridling (although Rapunzel’s hair only grew so long because of her kidnap and imprisonment, and was shorn as an act of revenge by the witch. Either way, she’s a victim). Across the stanza break, the poem jumps through time and into a contemporary urban space, where ‘The length of each new strand / contains a new kind of pain, / from the muttered insults / and ignorant opinions / from train commuters // and internet commentators.’ We realise that the Grimms’ solitary confinement is easy when compared with the comments and judgements our children risk being subjected to online, even within the ‘privacy’ of their bedrooms. I don’t feel that I can spoil the poem’s coup de grâce here, so I’ll leave you to fork out the £2 required to experience it.

Young Saudi Arabian woman wearing a niqab in Abha (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In ‘Bethnal Green,’ Masoliver further enriches her theme as ‘The girls are quiet here, but they call out poetry on rooftops / where their hijabs are not a symbol of oppression. They speak / of their identity in an English mixed with Bengali.’ Read against Rapunzel, the rooftops are just a substitution for the phallic tower, a shorthand for oppression. However, the calling out of poetry amongst themselves characterises these girls as culturally engaged, a community and loud – all of of which runs counter to Western stereotypes of Islam.

Masoliver reminds us that symbols are slippery things and that we’d do well to proceed with caution when ascribing them with meaning. Take Rapunzel – the earliest version that Marina Warner can find is the Neapolitan Petrosinella (parsley), 1634 – 1636, and asks why the girl’s mother is desperate for parsley, a popular abortifacient, and wonders whether the witch’s attempt to keep the baby from men is simply her best effort to prevent a genetic inheritance from repeating itself.

Carmina Masoliver shows me where I’m standing and reminds me of the limitations of my perspective – I’m still not sure about that beautician’s outfit though.

Buy Nasty Little Intro #8 from Nasty Little Press

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Over the past two years, Nasty Little Press have published 10 Intros. Intro authors have been mentored through the editing process with a view to publishing a longer collection of poems in the future.

Nasty Little Intros are kindly supported by Arts Council England.

Nasty Little press makes no profit from Intros. 100% of the cover price goes to the author.

Theatre of Blood – Chris McCabe’s Speculatrix

Red Bull Theatre, Clerkenwell (Photo credit: The GeoInformation Group, Map Data, 2015 ©Google)

Oxford’s Golden Cross is a Pizza Express now but the interior decor points to its Tudor pedigree. Outside, the square has a palpable theatricality, despite the Vision Express and coffee shop adding two more of its sides. In that Pizza Express, it’s believed that Thomas Cranmer was temporarily imprisoned before meeting his fiery fate by Boswell’s department store, Broad Street. Outside, in that square of shops, locals like to think that Shakespeare performed Hamlet. The inn’s yard is a reminder of how theatre once lived cheek by jowl with the pulsing life of the city. Take Clerkenwell’s Red Bull, once partly open to the air and perhaps, like Golden Cross, an inn prior to its conversion and, like its Oxford cousin, this ghost theatre’s auditorium improbably maintains itself in the twenty-first century – an echo of the past.

Twin Peaks: The Black Lodge (Photo credit: Interstate Projects )

Chris McCabe’s Speculatrix is introduced by the disconcerting Black Lodge Recorder, a Rimbaudian text which references David Lynch’s Twin Peaks and which, like the cult drama, presents a series of disturbing transformations: ‘A black box is a device which has input & output / mechanisms. Its internal workings are unknown. It is of / the starling family & can often be heard saying “Leo, no!” Almost anything can be described as a black box, even the human mind.’ The black box resonates in contemporary culture as the last words from a crash site, voices from a violent past asserting their humanity from beyond the grave, a light shining on the truth of tragedy. However, as theatres like Blackfriars started moving indoors, the black box also serves as a metaphor for theatre itself, the black box from which tragedy will out and out, night after night. Today, perhaps the ubiquitous black box is the TV digibox, the box from which Twin Peaks’ Shelley Johnson, a victim of domestic violence within her marriage, might scream, ‘”Leo, no!”‘ again and again. The poem’s form nods to Rimbaud’s Illuminations and, in John Ashbery’s hands, his Sideshow reads: ‘Expert jugglers, they transform people and / places, and resort to magnetic comedy. The eyes flame, / the blood sings, the bones swell, tears and trickles of red / descend. Their raillery or their terror lasts a minute, or / entire months.’ Rimbaud too observes that drama transcends time.

French C16th - C17th Ivory Pendant with a Monk and Death Walters Art Museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia) — French C16th – C17th Ivory Pendant with a Monk and Death Walters Art Museum (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The collection proper commences with a series of free verse sonnets, each sharing a title with a Jacobean revenge tragedy and offering an additional speech by a main character. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, as the Duke kisses the poisoned skull of Gloriana and dies, Vindice speaks: ‘I’ve seen skulls with better teeth than this excessive / in death as an eunuch’s archived Playboys / After the extraction the black sock in the ditch of the / mouth a debit of bones cindered in corsets as / Southwark’s abscess drains green in the / Thames.’ Vindice sees a hedonistic eroticism in death and ‘excessive’ carries a sense of immoderate extravagance. As the poem closes, Vindice’s words are direct echoes of the play: ‘O Gloriana A bone-setter one / that sets bones together.‘ In the play, Vindice likens the bone-setter to the bawd, reminding the audience of the skull beneath the skin, as the eunuch’s Playboys make him ache for his lost flesh. Absences ache and channel filth, and the city’s ditches and drains allow McCabe to create a fleshy London. (In his Women Beware Women, ‘tubes / cascáde underground,’ evoking both the rats and the warmth of the tube network and the body’s pulsing blood). The reader is then thrown forward in time: ‘ Link me in the rain, where the coachroach of the cab / scratches its back with wipers Link me because what / are teeth but calcified tíme plugged in pulp & dentine / & gumline The Glóbe on Google Earth like a / shitbasin of rivets, a cistern of balconies.’ McCabe London cab, beetling through the water and filth is a truly arresting image and offers the poem a vertiginous, breath-taking scale. The city, the county and the continent spin away into digital miniaturization and the Globe’s once again a ‘noxious and infectious’ sewer, as William Prynne’s 1632 Histriomastix once had it.

Wonga.com screenshot 3rd February 2014 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

McCabe’s poems allow us to see the Shylockean quality of daily life. The light shone into the murky world of payday lending has given us all an insight into the depravity and misery of austerity. In A New Way to Pay Old Debts, Alworth rages against Overreach, and against anyone finding the going tough: ‘You brach You dog bolt You hellhound / beats & kicks him ThIS IS The ANNiversArY / of SELlINg YoUR SoUL TO H+t INsURAncE ApR 549% This credit card you don’t want has your / name on it it can be couriered by Three Creditors / You lean skull You privy creature You / sláve to meat.’ As you read on, there’s a claustrophobic quality to McCabe’s language, with the same words and phrases surfacing again and again: zombies, rose, eros. McCabe’s suburban commuters are ‘the zòmbies of / ambition’ and, in this cadaverous updating of The Waste Land, suppurating fiscal and physical corruption take centre stage.

McCabe’s London, his visionary telescoping of Jacobean corruption and mortality with the misery and avarice of our times suggests that what was once theatre has not only been persevered but those theatrical spaces now form the backdrop for the tragedy of the lowest ebb of our daily lives. 5853% APR would have been dismissed as an improbable fiction – even by those bloodthirsty Jacobeans.

Buy Speculatrix from Penned in the Margins

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The Scottish Poetry Library needs your money

San Lazzaro degli Armeni - Biblioteca dei manoscritti — San Lazzaro degli Armeni – Biblioteca dei manoscritti

Byron rowed his own gondola to the island of San Lazzaro to learn Armenian but, standing in the monastery’s climate-controlled manuscript library, it became clear that the importance of this diamond-shaped scrap of a leper colony in the Venetian lagoon was far greater than its casual association with the bad boy of English letters.

The Mekhitarist monk showing us around gestured to the library. “Here is our history and culture.”

Even if you don’t have a library card, even if you don’t understand why the government can’t just buy pensioners Kindles and tell them to download their Mills and Boons instead, the library is still the closest thing that we have to a cradle for our soul – and a cargo this precious must be carried gently.

Saison Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre

Not living that close to London, I’ve only visited the Saison Poetry Library once, but it was easy to feel at home among the shelves. We all know that you don’t find much poetry in the local bookshop or library so, even as a stranger in a strange land, the Poetry Library felt like a sort of home – keeper of the flame – years before we know what we’ll need – years before we are born.

Nell Nelson’s piece on the Scottish Poetry Library explains why it needs our money and, in the age of blogs and podcasts, all global citizens stand to benefit from the existence of a valuable cultural beacon like this and, when we give, we know that it’ll be about something bigger than books and buildings. We’re investing in the best of ourselves and we’re doing it so our children, our children’s children, can live in a world with a healthy beating heart, with soul – with poetry.

Visit the Scottish Poetry Library’s Just Giving page

Jo Field’s The Anglesey Leg

George Jones, The Village of Waterloo, 1821 (Photo credit: Waterloo 200 - all rights reserved) — George Jones, The Village of Waterloo, 1821 (Photo credit: Waterloo 200 – all rights reserved)

Watching the Sky journalist, Colin Brazier, picking through a suitcase at the crime scene / crash site of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine was the grimmest reminder of our fascination with the relics. Sadly, nothing changes much – back in 1815, Lady Caroline Lamb was in the first wave of tourists to descend, vulture-like, upon Waterloo. She wrote to Lady Melbourne that ‘The great amusement at Brussels, indeed the only one except visiting the sick, is to make up large parties & go to the field of battle – & pick up a skull or a gunshot or an old shoe or a letter, and bring it home.’

Antoine Fauveau Cuirass (photo credit: Waterloo 200 - all rights reserved) — Antoine Fauveau Cuirass (photo credit: Waterloo 200 – all rights reserved)

As the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo approaches, Jo Field’s (no relation) The Anglesey Leg finds an engaging way to present the battle and its aftermath – through the story of the 2nd Earl of Uxbridge’s prosthetic leg. In modern warfare, the high-tech carbon fibre prosthesis is an icon of rehabilitation, which resonates with the Anglesey Leg. Its movements were controlled by kangaroo tendon strips and it was advertised commercially until 1914.

Artifical leg of Earl of Uxbridge (photo credit: Waterloo 200 - all rights reserved) — Artifical leg of Earl of Uxbridge (photo credit: Waterloo 200 – all rights reserved)

The breathless first poem, Waterloo, balances order and chaos. Enjambement pushes the poem forwards and Uxbridge, like Chronos, is the master of time: ‘Saddle-leather clamped between his thighs / he spurs the hours forward.’ Although not strictly an equivocal word, ‘hours’ can be pronounced as ‘horse,’ making Uxbridge, the man in the saddle, absolute master of his destiny. Even the horses’ fear is concealed and controlled as ‘Again and again / they come, led skittering on their toes / or planting their heels / to brace themselves in elegant levades.’ The levade, a speciality of Vienna’s ‘Spanish’ Riding School, suggests that training, which allows soldiers function on the battlefield, masks fear and brutality with ritual. Like Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Field strips this mechanism away as Uxbridge loses his leg with an arresting, domestic and practically Homeric simile: ‘As a new mother might watch that part / of her which is her dead child / borne away.’ In Second Opinion, the black humour of Field’s title delicately suggests Uxbridge’s shock at the loss of his leg, as if the amputation were a matter for debate. The poem’s lines taper to a brutal point: ‘Sir Hussey’s examination of the thing / is brief, but thorough enough. / He is able to confirm / that it is better / off.’ The sequence’s ninth and final poem, The Last Leg, swings from right to left: ‘ So what / is left?’ perhaps because Uxbridge lost his right leg and would have to lead with his right, swinging out from his good left, permenantly out of step with the British Army’s ‘eft, ‘ight. Field’s line, seeming to answer its own rhetorical question, comes to rest on the left, on Uxbridge’s good leg. However, after the stanza break, the poem leads again from the right with the surprising ‘ Nothing / of flesh and blood’ as ‘back home in Plas Newydd / there is one empty half // of Hussar trouser // and a Potts limb, made of wood // maintained behind glass / in battle-ready order.’

At 16 pages, The Anglesey Leg is short but Jo Field packs so much in. These are purposeful poems and remind us that celebrity culture, ghoulish relic collecting and the nature of war have remained unchanged for 200 years. Waterloo feels a little closer in 2015, not further away.

Buy The Anglesey Leg from HappenStance

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Among Angels – Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients

Bedouin camp (Photo credit: Susanne Koch)

In the Old Testament, it was important to treat guests right – you could never be sure who they really were. Besides, if you were living a tough life in a harsh environment, hospitality made sense – one day, it might be you seeking food and shelter. In Genesis 18, Abraham opens his doors to three mysterious travellers but their prophecy that his 90 year old wife, Sarah, will bear a son, causes the reader to question their identities – angels in our midst?

Jupiter and Mercurius in the house of Philemon and Baucis (photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Ancient Greeks felt much the same way and their code of hospitality, xenía, safeguarded against those dangerous visits by gods in disguise. Today, our angels are sanitized, infantile and unthreatening but, by contrast, there’s something subversive about the physicality and sweatiness of those ancient angels and gods. They kept people in their place and on their toes – when even the lowliest beggar might be a god in disguise, there were good incentives for treating people properly.

Kate Tempest’s dramatic poem, Brand New Ancients, reminds us again of the blurred lines between ancient and modern. All 47 pages are peppered with rhyme, an aide-mémoire for both the oral poet and the rapper and, in a world in which we can no longer even remember our own phone numbers, performances by the likes of Tempest, Oswald and Silva seem even more remarkable, as they return us to an oral tradition which many of us had forgotten. Despite our intellectual enfeeblement, Tempest’s speaker continues to have faith in us and her inclusive first person plural ‘we’ identifies with us as one of the people:

But we are still mythical.
We are still permanently trapped somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful.
We are still godly;

For the Greeks, mythos was also speech and narrative, so we are still mythical when poets like Tempest elevate the ‘everyday odysseys’ of lives lived in betting shops and caffs to the status of epic.

Henry Fuseli – Hephaestus, Bia and Crato Securing Prometheus on Mount Caucasus (photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tempest’s poetry is one of extremes. Clive and Spider, the poem’s sadistic antagonists, inhabit a two-man nation where:

All men are weaklings, all women are whores.
And they will have their power,
two starving mouths desperate to devour,
to digest the flesh of the city
that raised them so sour,
a hunger for vengeance that never sleeps
but endures.
A hunger satisfied every night
but every morning restored.

By fleshing out their narratives and beginning at the cradle, the audience understand that Clive and Spider are simply products of society. It’s easy to see fate as just another story-telling tool but Tempest’s uncomfortable conclusion is that fate’s alive and kicking today, robbing the disadvantaged of any possibility of escape. Clive and Spider are analogous with Tantalus, punished by Zeus with tantalising hunger in the deepest reaches of the underworld and this overpowering, monstrous insatiability presents the pair as victims of a primal force older and greater than themselves. However, the myth presents Tantalus as the murderer of his own son who would present his cooked flesh to his father, Zeus. Viewed in this light, his punishment can be seen to fit the crime. Tempest allows her audience no easy answers: Clive’s behaviour is abhorrent but we can see the forces which shaped it.

Riace bronzes – Statue A (detail): (photo credit: Wikipedia)

The poem’s funnier moments are bitingly satirical, as the readily identifiable king of light entertainment is re-cast:

the new Dionysus is in his dressing room preening,
the make-up girls hold their breath as they dream him
into a perfect bronze and then leave him
to his pre-show routine of stretching and breathing.
He winks in the mirror as he flosses his teeth,
pulls his trousers up to his nipples and strides out to the stage.

Tempest’s ‘perfect bronze’ is worth savouring, as the brand new and the ancient collide again. The TV perma-tan suggests narcissism and the nod to the bronzes of classical sculpture shows how far short of the ideal our celebrity culture falls. Perhaps we don’t even aspire to look beautiful anymore – we aspire to ‘airbrushed bodies that shine golden.’ Does the line imply that we all aspire to stand naked as we’re spray-painted, or does it suggest that we’d rather be retouched on Photoshop – after all, if we look good in the pictures, who gives a damn how we look in the flesh?

Brand New Ancients is an invigorating experience. Tempest handles her cast with kindness and generosity and, as with much satire, there’s a deep vein of conservatism here too. In The Battle of the Books (1704), Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope side with the timeless Classical Ancients, launching a scathing attack on the Moderns, on the writing and values of their own time. Tempest’s poem fits within this tradition, presenting modern culture as vacuous. She prefers to look back, celebrating the values which make the Ancients our brothers and sisters, celebrating the heroism seen everyday in the districts of her beloved south-east London and, thankfully, everywhere.

Buy Brand New Ancients from Picador

Sympathy for the Devil – Mark Waldron’s The Brand New Dark

Mephistopheles Over Wittenberg, Eugène Delecroix, 1839 (photo credit: Wikipedia)

The slings and arrows of Hamlet’s existential crisis would have it that conscience makes cowards of us all and that certain suffering on Earth is preferable to damnation. However, the values that Waldron presents in The Brand New Dark share little with those of the 1600s. Holding Yorick’s skull in V.i., Hamlet asks, ‘Where be your gibes now? your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?’ celebrating our wit and intellect, the best of us. Waldron’s Shakespearian sonnet, Poor Derek, perverts this and, holding Derek’s brain, Waldron’s speaker wonders, ‘What filth, what porn was conjured here, / was collaged from cut pieces of the world, / from stolen ghosts of girls made to appear in skin-flicks played on silver screens unfurled / like strips of cartilage within this nut / of thinking meat?’ The anaphora, the repeated ‘what,’ punctuates the whole sonnet and evokes Blake’s The Tyger. So, by association, it possesses the same sinewy physicality and hellish heat as Blake’s beast. Magic evokes dodgy card tricks, whereas conjuring calls to mind Faust’s pact with the devil. Similarly, the cut and paste of collage is a destructive, violent act and, lined up against ‘stolen ghosts,’ is disturbingly dark. In the modern sense, perhaps ghosts has a murderous quality but, in Old English, gást is the soul, the life spirit and, read like this, Derek’s Faustian pact carries a terrible price. The ordinariness of the name, Derek, gives it an Everyman quality and, at the volta, the speaker’s command implicates us all: ‘See it, as though he dreams again for us.’

Pieter Bruegel the Elder – The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562 (photo credit: Wikipedia)

On the facing page, in The Run, brevity, simplicity and whiteness contrast with Poor Derek’s baroque. ‘They’re in the bath together. / Like tobogganists heading down and down a hill, / snow covering the land like a sleep.’ Perhaps the bath’s intimacy turns the toboggan into a simile of mutual trust and togetherness – us versus the world. Waldron reveals the poem’s spare details with the instincts of a dramatist and, in stanza one, it’s difficult not to imagine the woman sitting behind her husband, arms around his waist. However, in the second stanza, ‘He has his arms on the bath’s enamel sides, / she, in her soft, transparent cap / is tweaking the cold control’ and, in the third stanza, we discover that they are not even looking at one another as ‘One day she may turn and find him gone. Fallen off somewhere, / tumbling back towards the world.’ It’s difficult to hear the word ‘fallen’ without calling to mind the rebel angels and the fall of mankind and it seems pretty clear that there’s a rival gravitational force in this poem. The couple should be attracted to one another, but the man is being pulled off somewhere else – Waldron’s decision to set a poem about a couple in tercets nods offstage with a restrained eloquence.

Devil Hand Puppet (Photo credit: amy_buthod)

In His Hand is in My Head, the speaker questions the idea of freewill, seeing the brain as a joint occupancy – possessed. ‘His fingers roll the dark sides of my moon eyes, / or they make my mouth move as my mouth moves now. / Sometimes he sticks out his thumb / pressed into my tongue and makes me kiss you.’ ‘Make’ is repeated four times in the poem’s eight lines, giving power to the hand in the head and reducing us to husks, puppets with the ability to spectate but to do little else. Waldron achieves his creepily surreal conceit with a horrific physical credibility: ‘On occasion I have felt his bumping knuckles nudge / my quite stiff brain in its bowl, tipping it a little, / making it pull against my stretching spine, making my toes curl.’

The poems in The Brand New Dark feel like Billy Collins recast as a soiled, squatting smack addict. Take a poem like I was Writing Recently on the Subject of Mice. It immediately calls to mind Collins’ I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice.’ Collins creates sympathy for the ‘poor mother / brooding over her sightless young triplets,’ whereas Waldron’s mice are ‘pale pink / and sudden morsels rolled in fur.’ Waldron smiles and it’s a thrill to be rolled high into the air but make no mistake – we’re dancing with the devil and there are teeth in that smile.

Buy The Brand New Dark from Salt Publishing

RELATED LINKS

Mark Waldron at Next Generation Poets, 2014

Instagram for the soul – Sam Willetts’ New Light for the Old Dark

Sam Willetts is one of the Next Generation poets, 2014, and I’m currently writing on his collection, New Light for the Old Dark, for the nextgenerationpoets.com blog.

Next Generation Poets 2014

The Poetry Book Society

Poor Rude Lines: poetry reviews & recommendations by John Field

Robin Redbreast

There was always something cringeworthy about family snaps. As Philip Larkin says in Lines On A Young Lady’s Photograph Album ‘But o, photography! as no art is, / Faithful and disappointing! that records / Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds’. Larkin’s not quite got it. Yes, the camera recorded the dull day as dull but, unaccustomed as we were to that camera, the rictus of the smiles and the awkwardnesses of our bodies were created, and not simply recorded, by it. I’ve never actually seen the photo but my brother has described a piece of war zone photojournalism in which a mother carries the body of her child across a bullet-pinged street. She spots the camera and, instinctively, flashes Larkin’s hold-it smile.

Photographers like Nan Goldin changed the way that the establishment thought about photography. She obsessively documents her friends using available light and basic…

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Jane Yeh’s The Ninjas

Wandering Stirling Castle this summer, I kept my camera(phone) holstered. In a baronial hall, holidaymakers queued to pose in a high-backed-chair-cum throne. What turned the stomach was that it’d been sited there to add yet another photo-opportunity to the itinerary of digitally uploaded moments. Any self-respecting 21st century tourist needs these to prove that s/he’s oh such a wacky photographer, and that a rare ol’ time was had by all. In teaching today, a key focus for e-safety is helping young people to appreciate how their friends’ avatars, timelines and photos are pure wish-fulfillment. The sunshine and laughter of the timeline makes those without it feel miserable and excluded. Kids are digital adepts and inconveniently bored-looking mates are cropped from the margins of parties. Even the dullest of days can be saturated with colour thanks to digital sliders – never has a generation looked like it’s having so much fun.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, John Singer Sargent, 1882 (photo credit- Wikipedia)

In The Ninjas, Jane Yeh reminds us that it was ever thus. In Four Sisters, the first in a sequence of poems addressing John Singer Sargent’s group portrait, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, ‘each girl has got her best dress on. / At dawn, they were washed and brushed and tied / Into pinnies.’ The girls are waiting to be shot at dawn – who cares how they felt, as long as the picture looks sensational? Yeh’s line break at ‘tied’ evokes the bondage of childhood and the pinnies are the final irony: the pinafore symbolised girlishness, as, like a modern apron, it offered some opportunity to the child to play, despite her otherwise limiting clothing. Not so on this occasion. These pinafores are costumes to conjure the look of childhood. In the final poem in the sequence, Playing Dead, the children are feral: ‘The girls crowd round his easel like frilly pigeons, / Chattering. The allure of children / Escapes him – they seem // To be everywhere. He waits / For them to stretch, scratch, yawn, pull on / Each other’s hems, then puts them back in their places // Again.’ The limpid tranquility of the girls, as characterised by the portrait, contrasts with the frenetic weight of the girls’ verbs: crowd, chattering, stretch, scratch, yawn and pull. Their childishness is exhausting and tedious, as the resigned stanza break before ‘Again’ suggests. The imagery is bestial and misogynistic, with ‘frilly pigeons’ suggesting that Sargent views the girls as decorative, lobotomized and trivial. The poem darkens further, as ‘The painting ends with the girls released – // They vanish, leaving their faces behind like masks / On the empty canvas.’ ‘Masks’ suggests that identity is a performance and that people have the freedom to swap them as the occasion demands, but the girls have not left masks behind, they have left their faces. They are reduced to husks, and the blocks of colour on the canvas morph into something more existentially troubling.

Lists are a viral online phenomenon – and BuzzFeed’s crack cocaine is surely a brake applied to the nation’s GDP. Yeh revels in these lists and they punctuate her collection with their surreal bricolage. Scenes from My Life as Sherlock Holmes opens with: ‘1. Feeling around for ideas in the dungeonette / 2. Scattershot remnants of tulle and fur / 3. To quell an especially decorative urge / 4. The taxidermy machine in the hall.’ The delight Yeh takes in language is a joy, as the diminutive suffix -ette performs a minor miracle, as the reader’s mental picture of the dungeon becomes domestic, bijou.

Rolling news culture is referenced in the title, Breaking News, and it’s exploited to comic and dramatic effect: ‘Yesterday, the black cat that sits on the bin next door wasn’t sitting on the bin. / • The price of porcine commodities rose slightly, while that of the English breakfast at my local café remained the same / • Nobody attempted to assassinate the French librarian at my old university, despite his insistence on labelling paperback books ‘INFÉRIEUR’. / • The last of the flannelette pyjama tops I had acquired in America finally gave up the ghost.’ At one level, this feels like an assault on microblogging sites like Facebook and Twitter. However, perhaps it should be taken at face value. The ephemera of our lives is priceless.

The Ninjas is democratic, pluralistic and celebrates the best of us. It feels smart and modern, yet, through a number of superb poems on portraits by Sargent, Manet and Van Dyck, Yeh sees a reassuring continuity of human behaviour – warts and all. Our world might be changing but, for better or for worse, we’re not.

Buy The Ninjas from Carcanet.

RELATED LINKS

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