Magma Poetry

The title poem, ‘House of Tongues’, is after Paul Bowles’ 1947 short story A Distant Episode which recounts the capture and physical mutilation of a linguistics professor travelling through an unnamed country that is probably Morocco. The professor suffers an emblematic violence when his tongue is cut out by a band of Reguibat tribesmen. It’s a strange and compelling narrative that stays with you long after reading and House of Tongues has a similar effect: these are subtle yet invasive poems that creep into your psyche and occupy space.

In the poem, Wicks skilfully interweaves the original narrative with a more intimate domestic tableau, where

Next to the back door
the tongues of our battered trainers
strain under laces, swell
crusted and luminous.

Throughout the collection the body is often in a state of flux, whether from ageing, sickness or an inflicted violence. In ‘Under the Blue Umbrella’ Wicks juxtaposes a fragile and metaphorically encircled Mediterranean idyll with wider political concerns: “No one’s heart clenches here. No one is seen to bleed/from the anus, or stand naked at a wall to be shot.” Likewise, the ‘Untitled (Wheelchair)’ after the Lebanese/Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, which like many poems here, gives voice where voice is lost. Even the seemingly anecdotal sonnet, ‘Box’, about a topiary bush in the shape of a bird, which “daily becomes less bird, and more completely bush” provokes a contemplation of the ongoing human wrestle with nature, the manicured garden versus wilderness, bush against bird.

This sense of tension and fragility is elegantly expressed elsewhere. In a short sequence at the beginning of the central section, ‘What She Was’, deer wander into the house, and the narrator has to “wake/and feel their noses on my face,/my breasts, nudging between my thighs.” Here Wicks avoids the myriad ‘Bambi’ pitfalls and instead manages to capture the experience via a precise and visceral approach:

I sensed rather than saw them move
in the darkness, the dark fractionally displaced
at the edge of seeing…

The sea is also a recurrent motif and is often a conduit for the book’s emotional and thematic core. In the opening poem, ‘Pistachios’, physical ageing is pitched against a sensuous vivacity, yet these contradictions are empowered by simple expression. If sex, “as they say, is a kind of dying” then you “never know exactly when/or where or how fast/sex leaves” as it’s carried out on the tide. Later, in the lyrical ‘Inside the Movement’, the idea of death as process is expanded and it’s “as if the land itself had had a stroke”.

Against this quietly unsettled backdrop, there’s a deep sense of hope embedded in the heart of the work; if there are environmental imperatives humankind must attend to, then the fact that “we’re built for loss” (‘Inside the Movement’) is perhaps a more optimistic thought than it seems. A lesser poet might have rendered these ecological themes dull or clichéd; Wicks energises the subject through adroit and stylish handling that is confident but never showy.

The final section entitled ‘Nightwatchman’s Yard’ is set in Visby, a medieval city on the Swedish island of Gotland. Wicks builds a historical picture through a series of poems that give voice to the city’s saints, warriors, workers and villains. It opens with the monologue ‘Confession’; set in 1350 it’s the story of an embittered church organist who deliberately poisons the town’s wells with bubonic plague so that: “Now I can let my voice/howl in your pipework, echo to the town walls: how I spit on each upright soul/in this stinking city…” As in ‘House of Tongues’, sound – and specifically the voice – becomes a charged leitmotif through which both revenge and injustice are enacted.

At this point there is also a sense of release; as if the restraint of writing from the self is cast off, allowing the poet to run riot within the anarchy of embattled medieval society. Everything that was economically held back pours forth in these vigorous narratives, whether it’s the blithe sense of entitlement that infuses the utterances of the invading Dane Valdemar IV in ‘The Plundering of Visby’ or Little Ingeborg, “A woman alone/with her child and her child’s child” who is tried as a witch. What connects them to the other poems is emotional authenticity and the sense that the dystopia we experience now was ever thus.

Karen McCarthy Woolf
Karen McCarthy Woolf’s poetry chapbook The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2006. Her poetry also featured in the anthology, TEN New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010, ed. Bernardine Evaristo & Daljit Nagra).

House of Tongues is published by Bloodaxe, 2011, £8.95.

for blog review 5, see Dave Coates on Noel Duffy’s ‘In the Library of Lost Objects’
for blog review 4, see Miriam Gamble on Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’

Noel Duffy’s choice of title for his debut collection is a good early omen. It neatly and precisely draws together the book’s deepest concerns. In the Library of Lost Objects is primarily concerned with preservation and restoration: the poems that play with this theme are uniformly more satisfying than the ones that don’t. To be more specific, when Duffy employs his knowledge and intimate familiarity with the natural and geological world, the poems flow with quiet assurance.

This refreshing curiosity about the inner workings of the stellar bodies, magnetic fields, beehives and fossils is the fuel for his poems; richness, even in such mundane things, comes from being in a world in which life is precious and survival always possible. A few key poems lend the book a sense of cohesion and, with ideas so thoroughly connected, even a few lesser pieces gain in vitality.

In one of many gems in this extraordinary first collection, Ailbhe Darcy compares her emotional (and, implicitly, artistic) self to “a solitary magpie”:

reflecting every colour and none, playing I-Spy with the gleams of a mind

Rupert Loydell is not one of those poets who will publish a mere 100 or so gems of perfect poetry over a whole lifetime. He’s not Larkin, or Bishop, or Bunting. He’s more like Emily Dickinson, or John Ashbery: he writes a lot of poems and sends them out into the world, and isn’t afraid of over-production. I find this refreshing myself: but inevitably, it means that among the books, pamphlets and collaborations he’s sent forth over the years, there will be some poems that work for me and others that don’t.

Like Ashbery, his poems are basically about his life and times; unlike Ashbery, though they sometimes use cut-n-paste techniques and are sometimes humorous, there’s none of the odd angles and non-sequiturs of the New York poet. These poems are often in plain, simple language, often conversational and personal, with a kind of resigned grace to them that is very appealing to me:

I’m a sucker for dogs. Dogs are not taboo in poetry as cats are. I cite Suzanne Batty’s ‘The Barking Dog’ and Chase Twitchell’s ‘The Language of Dogs’. Mark Doty, too, writes dogs into poems and his memoir Dog Days. However, the dogs of the aforementioned poets appear as energetic Buddhas; cheerful, deep, embracing the ‘now’ that contemporary writer-owners find elusive: “This shining bark// a Zen master’s gong, calls you here,/ entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow” (‘Golden Retrievals’ in Doty’s Sweet Machine). Gregory Woods does not present dogs in this way.

The title poem is, after all, ‘after Kakfa’. This dog chases an ambulance and then turns off: “the bystanders reconcile themselves/ to knowing / it was just an ordinary dog.” This disappoints: don’t we want the dog to follow its injured owner all the way to hospital? We already know that life is bleak, don’t we want the poet to transfigure the ordinary dog? But Woods might be right to deliver such a poem and he avoids (even comments upon?) the sentimentality of other poets who rely on emotionally manipulative story-telling. Yet Woods does not restrict himself to a purely plain-speaking or realistic stance.

[Introductory note from Magma Reviews Editor, Rob A. Mackenzie: This is the first in a new series of monthly blog reviews. We've lined up a great team of reviewers to write these, which will (I hope) be up to the same standard as the print magazine, and will enable us to review an extra twelve or so books a year. For this feature, I send reviewers a list of five recent collections and ask them to choose one to review. Mark Burnhope chose Egg Printing Explained, Katy Evans-Bush's second full collection.]

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American writer, Kent Johnson, sounds off on the thorny subject of poetry reviewing. He suggests that reviews and blurbs have ‘begun to blur in purpose and effect’:

Fawning, toadyish criticism, then, is likely to remain the default setting so long as “negative” reviewing constitutes a potential hazard to the position and advancement of the poet-reviewer. (Interestingly, by the way, it’s in top-tier journals like Poetry where negative reviews are most likely to appear, since the capital accruing to the poet-reviewer compensates for the risk.) Given this, maybe it’s time that magazines, of all aesthetic shapes and circulation sizes, resurrect the venerable practice of “unsigned” reviews. There’s no question readers, in the main, would be tickled and intrigued.