In these Selected Poems, the beautiful and the brutal are dangerous bedfellows. Political landscapes are often described through tender evocations of weather: coming rain or “the indomitable wind / over this absurd, wide world”, the place where “an icy wind / chills the bright surface of a well.” In an extract from ‘Seaboard’ (1956-1966), the poet describes facing death with equanimity:

I lay my head on the scrubbed block
As on a lover’s shoulder.

It seems glib to talk about the elegance within these bleak poems, because that suggests their starkness needs to be dressed up. Not so. Gorbanevskaya often spares us nothing. Take the short poem ‘Autobiographical’:

They gave the fool free rein, gave the rascal freedom
And he beats his free head on a wall.

The reader can’t help shuddering with recognition. Often, in fact, the beauty in Gorbanevskaya’s work seems to make it all the more devastating. Even her less overtly political poems shiver with quiet menace, like the intriguing ‘Unfinished poem’, written in 1965 (and arranged in translation as a sonnet). We find an unnamed person wandering a town in which

Night has erased the year,
The age from the building’s facades,
The town, bleak as an allotment,
But also like the Ark…

In the chill of dawn, things begin to return to their familiar shapes until finally:

You come to yourself, weeping,
On the bridge, over the Yauza river.

There’s a clarity in the work that reminded me of Japanese Death Poetry, written from the urge to distil the world just one last time. It’s this that gives the poems what Daniel Weissbort describes in his introduction as a ‘strange depth’.

I won’t say too much about the political context and content of these poems, because others far better qualified to discuss Soviet history have done so elsewhere (the book includes a fascinating interview with the poet by Valentina Polukhina, rightly placed at the end of the volume, after the poems themselves). Instead, what fascinated me most about Gorbanevskaya’s work was its relationship to the way our brains work. In these poems, there’s a preoccupation with the relationship between truth and fabrication. In an extract from ‘Alien Stones’ (1979-82) we’re told ‘this truth is a lie’:

This truth, I insist on,
Don’t, don’t believe it,
Don’t test it, with a knife pinning
Its tender throat to the wall.

Elsewhere “singing is like lying”, art is both sincere and insincere.

Neuroscientists like Benjamin Libet have suggested that our experience of time is something of an illusion: in short, memory is not a process of retrieval, but of reconstruction. When we try to ‘recall’ a memory, we also rewrite it, so that the time next we go to remember it, we don’t call up the original memory but the last one we recollected. So, each time we tell a story, we alter it (all the time remaining genuinely convinced of the ‘truth’ of our memories).

Gorbanevskaya’s work is full of re-written memories, implied stories, developed until we’re not quite sure where they started from. Her work isn’t indecisive, it’s a recognition of the true nature of memory, as in this extract from ‘Last Poems of the Last Century’, where the narrator occupies a strange hinterland:

My hands not holding the pen
My evenings not well-illuminated,
My midnights neither bright nor warm…

This no-man’s land, Gorbanevskaya recognises, is the real territory of human experience. Her poems draw the reader into that experience and invite us to be lost there, for as long as we want.

Helen Mort
Helen Mort won a Foyle’s Young Poet Award on five occasions and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. After two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, a third pamphlet, ‘Lie of the Land’, was published by the Wordsworth Trust last year. Her first full collection, ‘Division Street’, will be published in 2013 by Chatto & Windus.

Selected Poems by Natalya Gorbanevskaya is published by Carcanet Press, 2011, £12.95

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

God repeats himself in the flat-pack doll’s house,
The rubber furniture and plastic piano
Hushed of all arpeggios

These are the toys of the nineteen fifties, echoed by the model railways in the opening few lines. This could be a nostalgia trip, and it could be something altogether darker as well.
Williams juxtaposes the modern world’s foolish business obsessions with the more innocent world of the recent past. He doesn’t romanticise, thankfully. Take ‘Depression furniture’ for instance:

They made you cold no matter how you sat
Those no-designer chairs bought before the war
For front rooms and special company.
A touch on the heavy side,
Made of planks and bed springs,
And nailed in the warehouse with joiners’cloth.
You saw the world sitting in a suitcase.

The wit and precision of this description captures exactly how ugly and uncomfortable those chairs were. His nostalgic approach towards the “old Dansettes” is offset by the fact they “skipped” and were “suitcase size”, making them sound clumsy and ineffective in contrast with the “phone and screen/ That smoothes out wrinkles with the glow/ Of steady purpose” (‘Busy Time on Brash Street’). Yet “A dozen records such a luxury” shows the value music had then, because it was hard to come by, expensive and fragile. Teens had to save up pocket money to buy vinyl records and each one was treasured. Woolworths was a national institution then, not only a purchasing palace but a place to meet and hang out. Williams’s ‘Woolworths’ poem gets it exactly right:

As if we’ve followed the wrong god out of church
With hankies, gift mugs and paper flags,
To find we’re on the other side of sacrifice

And everything’s to celebrate:
The music of doo-wop coaxing time back
And the smell of peppermint and leather.

He structures the poem using the seasons, deploying some wonderful imagery, such as a “boat like a long golden answer”. The marvellous mixture of Woolies, as it was fondly known, is captured here as he selects seasonal merchandise; the aromas of the shop and the sense of bustle are somehow conveyed between the lines. There are lots more memories in this first section, some general, some personal, but all interesting and pleasurable. In amongst the particularities of things, there are some tucked away wisdoms like: “Memories don’t care where they live” in ‘From the Gallery’.

Every Liverpool poet has to write their own Mersey poem and Williams has written ‘An ounce of Mersey beach glass’. That great river which dominated all our childhoods is an endearing subject, as it shifts and changes constantly, yet remains a constant pull. Williams’s way is original. Instead of choosing the vast river, he focuses on a piece of glass picked up from the beach. He uses these washed-up sea-worn fragments as symbols for people:

as if we like to see ourselves as less,
in a maker’s mark, in a bristle of glass…

The sea glass is taken home where it “brings whole rooms to light”. Williams’s language is tactile and full of assonance and consonance which provide inner music. ‘Lost corners’ is another fine poem made of scraps but so much more than its parts, as he remembers some of the things that languish there “as if grief and failure came clear at last” on their rediscovery.

The second section, ‘The Rain Gauge’, is also packed with lovely, real things. I wasn’t fully convinced that the book needed to be divided into two unequal parts, as I couldn’t see much difference between the poems in the sections, either thematically or stylistically. Overall, it is an enjoyable collection, particularly for those who enjoy clarity and directness.

Angela Topping
Angela Topping is a widely published poet with eight solo publications, including two collections from Stride, one from bluechrome, two children’s collections, a Salt Modern Voices chapbook and a Rack Press pamphlet. She has reviewed for Stride, Ore, Other Poetry, Honest Ulsterman and Iron. She also writes for Greenwich Exchange and OUP.

The Model Shop is published by Waterloo Press, 2011, £10

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

the woven shawl, the grey hair
Gathered in a careful bun …

The next I was seeing Psycho through Simon Barraclough’s eyes in ‘Being a Woman You Will.’ He opts for a wide angle lens, taking a more detached view of Lila’s sister, Marion as she hires a car, driving through the rain in the direction of the Motel where she will meet Norman Bates. Using the second person, often a feature of Barraclough’s verse, we are informed that “Tiredness kills”. She waits, honking her horn for the arrival of the man who will eventually be responsible for her murder.

Though the two poets have much in common, especially a splendidly surreal sense of humour, it seems to me that it is this which distinguishes them: Simon Barraclough habitually takes a wider view of the worlds he occupies as a citizen of Plant Earth, owing a great debt, in particular, to Edwin Morgan. This can be seen especially when he whirls around the solar system, his destinations ranging from Mercury to his very short poem on that now officially non-planet, ‘Pluto’. (To recount it here would rob of its punch-line, if one could be said to exist!) On one occasion, he even directly references him in his poem to ‘Neptune’, declaring that this particular planet is the source of

Edwin Morgan’s ‘Little Blue Blue’
Inexhaustiblue.

On his travels, he makes some exceedingly good jokes. Mercury’s “unevolved ankles” are “tickled by feathers that never grew”. Uranus is knocked into a “cocked hat”. Earth is “God’s gobstopper”. He even continues this theme when he adopts the heart as a motif in his work. As well as a ‘Magpie heart’, a ‘Havisham heart’ and a ‘Pizza Heart’, he summons up school-days in the shape of ‘Wrigley’s Heart’, where the sheer adaptability of chewing gum is seen in the endless items to which it can be stuck – from desks to walls to hair.

In all this, Barraclough’s verse fizzes with the madcap energy of that world of gobstoppers and chewing gum. He is enormously inventive with an endless zeal for puns and in-jokes. Referring to the movie world that frequently inspires his verse, his narrator declares in ‘Flashbacks Of A Fool’;

I am but mad North by Northwest.

Describing certain planets, he draws upon the songs and lyrics of Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. Accusing Neptune of vanity, he echoes Carly Simon in declaring its world is so blue,

you probably think that Jarman’s Blue
is about you.

There did, however, come a point in my reading when I was unable to suppress an involuntary groan. This occurred when I came across the line, “I am the Lord of the Dance Settee”, words that, as a young boy in a school hostel, we used to shout out a number of decades ago. (The Corries version was constantly on the record turntable.) It seemed to me, too, that for all Barraclough’s verse is largely inventive and exuberant, it can often be too much rooted in a world where people watch similar movies and listen to the same song and tell familiar corny jokes. I feel, if he is to grow and develop, he needs to step away from this. There is little doubt that he has the creativity and talent to undertake the nifty footwork required.

I have fewer reservations about Isobel Dixon’s work. It possesses great range and inventiveness, dipping into several distinct and different worlds. It is true that, like Simon Barraclough, some of these involve both cinema and modern rock. Like him, she writes about Hitchcock; on another occasion, she draws inspiration from the film, ‘Into The Wild’ and Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ when she writes – ironically – of ‘Days Of Miracles And Wonders’ when visiting a city Common.

She draws us, however, ‘Into the Wild’ in other ways too. No one who lived my existence could fail to recognise the truth of ‘The Parliament Of Gulls’ where seagulls gather around marooned baby sharks on the shoreline. The delicacy of ‘Vision’ is also appealing, where she describes how bats invade the garden during a summer evening. In ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, it is the media who stand “gawping” at the intrusion of a whale into the modern world, noting how, a few years ago, one swam up the Thames,

searching for his Jonah, righteous bellyful.

It is mythic, too, in the way its presence recalls how there was at one time a whale “beached in Dagenham”, said by some to be predicting the death of Cromwell. In Isobel Dixon’s view, perhaps this arrival on the scene

spouted out his warning of the melting ice.

In particular, she writes well of her childhood world in South Africa. In writing that recalls the verse of D.H. Lawrence, she tells us of the ‘Toktokkie’, that country’s large black beetle. Dramatically, it conveys the insect’s

Ridiculous performance, till you realise –
Tap-tap, tap-tap – this suitor’s soundings out
Are spot on, as he homes in on his date.

She deals with that nation’s political legacy too in ‘The Only Brunette On The Beach’. She finds herself on Bloubergstrand, a place of great significance in the country’s history where the invading British forces defeated the Dutch before going onto colonise much of southern Africa. In the final verse, she recalls other tensions that exist in the landscape, referring to Nonqawuse, a Xhosa girl whose prophecies led many of her people to kill their cattle in a forlorn attempt to drive the British from their land.

Her political insights are not just confined to either that nation or the distant past. In ‘Mountain War Time’, she connects volcanic Mount St Helens with its nearby atomic energy plant which helped to develop the Fat Man Bomb that fell on Nagasaki, recalling how

molten kimono flowers singed to skin,
a city threshed and sewn with flowers, fissioning.

It seems to me that this is what makes Isobel Dixon an extraordinary talent. She may not veer and buzz around the solar system with quite the same gusto as Barraclough, but the entirety of this planet – from its animal life to politics, past to present – is found in close-up in her verse.

Donald S. Murray
Donald S. Murray is the author of the non-fiction books, ‘The Guga Hunters’ and ‘And On This Rock’ (Birlinn). His poetry and short-fiction works include ‘Small Expectations’ (Two Ravens Press) and ‘Weaving Songs’ (Acair). The latter, a collaboration with photographer Carol Ann Peacock, has been published to commemorate the centenary of the Harris Tweed trademark, the Orb, and celebrates the life of his father, employed as a weaver for many years.

Neptune Blue and The Tempest Prognosticator are both published by Salt, 2011, £9.95.

for blog review 6, see Karen McCarthy Woolf on Susan Wicks’s ‘House of Tongues’
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’

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’

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.

‘The Summer I Mapped the World’, with its one word of Irish, éaligh: escape, is a poem of childhood in which (unlike many of his contemporaries) Duffy’s experience is viewed without a nostalgic filter. Once he éalighs the classroom, his solo project is to make a map of his town using only a notebook and his counted strides as a meter. The lines “At last the roads locked into place, joined up/ as they should across the barren spaces” are a fully-achieved expression of the feeling when a poem clicks in the reader’s mind, one that still makes sense within the boundaries of the poem’s conceit.

When the cogs mesh, Duffy crafts some brilliant set-pieces. ‘The Beekeeper to his Assistant’ is another poem that gets the dynamic between tenor and vehicle spot-on, fluctuating seamlessly between experience and instinct, scientific fact and anecdote, the art of beekeeping and the tradition of poetry:

You must understand from the beginning
that the hive is a mind and one
you will not comprehend.

And then (with the Queen Bee as subject):

Unknowingly she gives birth to her own successor
incubated in the brood and hidden from her.

This is a fantastic poem, and one I hope gets its fair share of exposure.

‘The Beekeeper to his Assistant’ also mentions Albert Einstein, who as a less-than-stellar pupil himself is something of a patron spirit. The poem he gets to himself, ‘Einstein’s Compass’, is an anthem to absent-mindedness, as the boy Albert is derided by an unnamed voice for his unbroken attention to his father’s compass and its steady needle:

when will the boy learn,
that it will never do otherwise,
that he breaks his mother’s heart
with his silent vigils?

Einstein once said “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” It is the book’s similarly modest, unwritten epigram.

‘Baltic Amber’ does the kind of stitch-work that most books only dream of having. So many threads find a common ground here it’s almost worth quoting in full, but to summarise: an ant caught in amber “in the afternoon heat of the Paleolithic” (wow), is an “emblem and lifeline/ of all that perishes, all that survives.” These lines shed sudden light on five or six other poems and position the preserved ant as the ideal symbol of poetry’s work of consecration, restoration and survival.

The closing poem, ‘Swallows’, draws a circle around a series of poems about Duffy’s late father; the swallows that appear “the day after I wrote your poem” are heavy with emotional and metaphorical freight. It’s not quite possible to tell what has been imagined and what has fallen serendipitously into place, but ‘Swallows’ is convincing enough for that not to matter. Duffy’s work is rooted in a deep study of his medium and, although not without occasional shortcomings, the poems in In the Library of Lost Objects work in concert in a way very few books achieve.

Dave Coates
Dave Coates grew up in Belfast and lives in Edinburgh. He writes about poetry on his blog, http://davepoems.wordpress.com. His new year’s resolution is to write on it more often.

In the Library of Lost Objects is published by Ward Wood, 2011, £7.99.

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’.

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

‘Caw Poem’ contains everything we might justifiably look for in the début work of a poet of promise. Darcy’s ear is pitch-perfect, as displayed in her deft imitation of the magpie’s movements:

I cocked my head,
hopped a little, hopped a little closer,
love become a scrum, a scuffle,
a ruffle of feathers

The opening is arresting, and cuts straight to the chase:

Not atriums and ventricles that cup and pour

Finally, imagistic and linguistic innovation is at a premium, both effortless and bang on the money:

a solitary magpie
beats cricked wings

“Cricked” is the mark of her ability as a wordsmith. Yet the poem offers much, much more, and it’s this that sets Darcy apart from the ranks of capable word-turners and puts her in that special place reserved for the very few – for poets who matter, have something to say that’s worth the hearing. You can’t matter as a poet if you don’t have style, but neither can you if it’s all you’re equipped with. Darcy’s poems have style and substance; indeed, in her work, they are one and the same.

‘Caw Poem’ enacts a kind of bricolage which recurs throughout the collection and recalls both MacNeice’s plea for “an impure poetry” and Muldoon’s baffled and baffling sense of random interconnection and segue. Early in his career (and, one suspects, with more than the tip of his tongue in his cheek), Muldoon said something to the tune that he’d love to be able to write simple poems, pure poems, ‘lovely little lyrics’, but couldn’t do it. ‘Caw Poem’ closes with the conditional urge to “plunder some bright thing, / learn to sing true”, but Darcy, like Muldoon, is astute enough to recognise that “truth” doesn’t come in pebbles of quartz, and that conviction is frequently culpable. Many of her poems are (in a good way) about poetry, the working through and questioning of her own aesthetic – ‘Terminus’, for example, which both yearns for and dismisses the knack of “lay[ing] it on the table”, or ‘Socks’, which toys hilariously with Terry Eagleton’s pronouncement on “the inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language…[which is] in a broad sense political”:

I wear my socks odd, queer
bags a couple of feet from my

knees…

…I believe
that’s right – the way you can’t tell
what colour my knickers will be.

The fun of this shouldn’t, however, (and doesn’t) obscure the underlying seriousness of poems which themselves invest in the concept of the “unfinished” and the “political” in language, but are justifiably sceptical as to its force. At the heart of Darcy’s writing is a desperate desire for poetry to measure up, have real value in a world of “parataxis” and “bodies degraded / in mixed media” (‘La rue est rentrée dans la chambre’); for it to function as a means by which, if not to make sense of such a world, at least to challenge it. One of the most likeable and convincing things about her, though, is her irrepressible tendency to self-question, revert to “doubting / [her] own innocence” (‘Terminus’) at every turn.

While ‘Stump’ gives a fair indication of what Darcy isn’t about – the organically whole poem that finishes with a resounding, self-satisfied “Whump” – ‘Panopticon’ and ‘Umheimlich’ explore the inevitable and ultimately necessary “anaesthetic” role of “an aesthetic”. Both are addressed to suicides – those who couldn’t or wouldn’t indulge in the lie of systems, “do the awful maths” – and who chose silence rather than the “the noise” which “circles us” “at the centre of a shrinking globe”. So vigilant is Darcy her vigilance extends to this painful understanding that the very means by which she hopes to rock the boat is the means by which ‘world’ is coped with – systematised – and thus made liveable to her. ‘Panopticon’, incidentally, performs a characteristically brilliant inversion on Bentham’s original application of the term – in Darcy’s hands it’s the watcher who’s imprisoned, not the watched. And from this dinning mélange are culled the poems.

The title of Imaginary Menagerie bespeaks diversity, the mixed bag of the first book in which the neophyte tries his or her hand at this and that without yet knowing where to go or why. In this sense it is impishly misleading, for Darcy has, as Kevin Higgins remarks, a clear sense of “purpose” and the book is utterly coherent. On the other hand, diversity’s the turf these poems tread, from metamorphoses to poly-linguistic stews. There are, in any case, few better collections to carry with you “at the eye of the panopticon”. The mix is daring, and never off the mark.

Miriam Gamble
Miriam Gamble’s first collection is ‘The Squirrels Are Dead’ (Bloodaxe 2010), which won a Somerset Maugham Award.

Imaginary Menagerie by Ailbhe Darcy is published by Bloodaxe, 2011, £8.95

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’.

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 don’t know what to do with my arms.
      They fall off the sides or end up numb
      under the pillow. Spiders build nests
      in my arm pits and my muscles won’t
      work in the morning. I don’t know what
      to do with my head.
           (‘When I Sleep’)

Wildlife is in many ways not very different from his previous Shearsman collections. There are the Animals Are Not Your Friends poems, interspersed throughout the collection, which meditate on various subjects but seem increasingly aware of mortality, and there are poems about family and art, poems which may or may not be collages. Rupert Loydell’s world is strangely beautiful, or beautifully strange, but it’s also strangely familiar. He writes about middle-class family life, holidays and children growing up, in ways that make them seem like the freshest of subjects, because there is always the sense of the intangible behind his words:

      Symbols and cymbals glitter
      in the mirrored distance,
      These moments do not reflect,
      do not compute; it’s a good job
      we have email or I’d never be able
      to write to myself.
           (‘Not Made to Last’)

I suspect he’s not as well-known in poetry circles as he perhaps should be because he’s never gone the poetry career route, and his Stride website can contain some very trenchant and sometimes unfair reviews (usually not written by him, though). He’s non-mainstream without being massively experimental, though he is prepared to experiment when he thinks it necessary.

What I like about Loydell’s work is his commitment to a kind of truth, not to experience so much as to language. He doesn’t fuss over his language, he’s never showing off his clever images, or making you gasp as he steps over rhetorical tall buildings with his wit. He can be witty, he shows his intelligence all the time, but he never shows off about it. To me, that’s a great virtue, and long may he produce more of it.

Steven Waling

[Steven Waling's last two collections are Captured Yes (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, 2009) and Travelator (Salt, 2007). He lives in Manchester. ]

Wildlife by Rupert Loydell is published by Shearsman Press, £8.95)

[for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Wood’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.]
[for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’.]

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.

An Ordinary Dog is 134 pages long and divided into four sections, so it might be read as four shorter collections. Section three, for example, contains shaggy dog and philosophical poems (including one called ‘Narrative Poem’). The highlight for me of the fourth section is not the title poem but ‘Theorem’ a poem that unites ideas about writing, separation and sexuality through the satisfying image of a man sat in a room full of people but with his chair turned to the window: seeing others seeing him, framed within a frame within a frame, etc. This image is repeated and altered slightly, alongside a recurring conversation that crucially moves between genders (“he replied, to/ a man that his eloquence was its own/ defence, or to a woman,/ that her beauty was its own defence” but by the end of the poem he is saying to a young man “Your/ beauty is its own defence”). The cumulative effect of the layers of language building up is like being in a barber-shop or hairdresser’s and watching the mirrors reflect yet more mirrors into infinity.

The poems the reader initially encounters though, are less philosophical and more explicit, the gods of school-boy crushes. On encountering one such manly specimen: “we each put into practice plots to mine the seam/ and plumb the arse, a speciologist’s wet dream” (‘Wing Three-quarter’). These lustful poems are not my favourites, although the skinhead in ‘Strokes’ has a brooding passive charm contained in short-lined yet expansive tercets. When I reached ‘Trees or Fly-fishing’, its epigraph made me realise I was arguably guilty of some impatience for Woods’ other (‘straighter’?) poetry. Here’s the epigraph:

      I suppose a Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies has a professional
           obligation to write about these areas, but I’d have welcomed
                a few poems about trees or fly-fishing
                          John Greening, London Magazine

Hilarious. In response Woods writes a pair of formally genteel yet slapstick sonnets. The tree becomes a place from which a cherubic boy falls “exposing genitals and peachy bum”, and the fly-fisherman inadvertently catches his hook on “Laszlo’s flies” revealing an “enormous chopper” and a tale that becomes an unlikely “whopper”.

If Carry On humour isn’t your thing don’t give up. Woods’ serious poetry matches the best of Gunn or Doty with his conjurations of gay experience. I was moved by ‘The Sweet Life’: his recollection (true or fictional) of first love – illicit, intense, on holiday. There’s sadness later when the narrator recalls his older self:

                                                     cruising
                    any shadow and confusing

               trees for men, but somehow drunkenly finding
               enough of what I was seeking to make it
                    worth coming back, night after night,
                    following dark outlines, despite

               the risk, through darker spaces, almost blind, week
               after week, man after man.

Note the particularly well-judged line-breaks that allow for rhyme but compel the reader forward via a long sustained sentence. Imagine the poem read out loud and where your thoughts might go at the ends of certain lines: “to make it” and “week”/ weak. The poem concludes by bringing us back to the present, “I’d forgotten how/ much that one boy meant. Until now.”

[Cath Nichols has a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University. Her publications are 'My Glamorous Assistant' (Headland Press, 2007) and pamphlet 'Tales of Boy Nancy' (2005). 'Tales...' is due for re-issue with new poems soon.]

An Ordinary Dog by Gregory Woods is published by Carcanet Press, 2011, £9.95.

*

[for Blog Review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush's 'Egg Printing Explained']

*

Some say that ‘satire’ is dead. Perhaps ‘light verse’ has gone the same way; after all, much recent poetry has increasingly eluded strict classifications like ‘serious’ or ‘light’, preferring to throw everything in for a kaleidoscopic look at life. If Evans-Bush’s wide-ranging, coherent second collection is anything to go by, I’m glad. In it, readers are transported into tradition and back again; into an American childhood then a present London. We encounter forms, registers and dictions both baroque and contemporary. We explore art, music, love, religion (‘Meditation on a Freudian’s Lip’ bends and warps the line “Jesus’ blood never failed me yet”, demonstrating how religious rhetoric gets run through the mill of authentic life and experience). We reconsider famous faces including Jesus, Freud and Bob Dylan (‘Overland Homesick Blues’ also evokes the rhythm and rhyme patterns of neo-folk legend Tom Waits).

This intermingling is evident from the very first line-break, which bumps comedy against perhaps more typical ‘poetic’ expectations: “So I said to Mark, this is no time for more / whimsical gravitas!” (‘Talk’). The poem crams its lines with the breathless banter of the cosmopolitan everyplace. Dashes are scattered throughout to introduce interrupting speakers. I’m reminded of Emily Dickinson’s use of dashes to blend units of meaning, image and sound for brevity, discomfort and a mischievous ambiguity:

…But then Gavin interrupt – And what’s
the point of talking about this stuff anyway. I hate
talking about this stuff. You think anybody even – We had
Patti here last month and interestingly enough she
agree – Well swivel your chair, you’re not the one
listening are you?

‘The Love Ditty of an ‘eartsick Pirate’ is one of the collection’s strongest mission statements, being both a parody of, and homage to, Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’: “It’s time we be goin’, me hearty, avast! / When the night’s nailed up its colours to its mast / Like some swab loaded to the gunn’les ‘n’ lashed to the plank”. Its vibrant revelling in language makes it both farcical and highly respectful to its sources. Even formal details of Eliot’s original are kept, like repetition: “Arrr, th’mist what do rub itself upon yon portholes, / The ghoulish-coloured mist that be rubbin’ its muzzle on yon portholes.” The questioning of received tradition is a major theme in the collection, and the poem which most plainly demonstrates the postmodern voice challenging things as they say they are is also, possibly, the shortest: “it says it isn’t / a pipe / but it is” (‘dear m magritte’).

Humour is never far away from poignant lyricism, however. In ‘The Best Scarf in London: a Picaresque’: “I always love the moment you appear, / sudden and entire, where just a second / ago was air.” Later, our egg gets printed, when the scarf “spreads like the egg that promises everything, / new life and fragile shell, the broken secret, / delicate murmur light as your breath by my ear”.

‘Hammershoi’ is a moving sequence of five ekphrastic vignettes around the Danish artist. In ‘Interior, With Coffeepot’:

‘Not only is the artist’, he says, ‘a child.’
‘He is an only child.’ His wife sits by herself.
He sits by himself. They are joined together
by the two ends of the brush.’

These poems enact this whole collection’s achievement: to ‘join together’ elements oft-considered mutually exclusive for a funny, serious, intelligent whole. When printed, Evans-Bush reminds us, “an egg is never just an egg”: it’s a never-changing image of things always changing; a container showing us life as it was, is, and will be. Egg Printing Explained is more than a collection: it’s a record.

Mark Burnhope

Egg Printing Explained by Katy Evans-Bush is published by Salt, 2011, £7.99.

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.

On the other hand, anonymous reviewing presents another problem. Reviewers might use the cloak of anonymity as a means to trash a poet who had previously commented negatively on their own books or, alternatively, to praise a book written by best friends or family members without the connection being obvious. Kent Johnson says that editors have a key role in ensuring this doesn’t happen.

Mayday contains 32 responses to the issues raised in Johnson’s article, nearly all of which are worth reading. Daisy Fried’s comments are particularly well thought out.

I was taken aback by this part of Stephen Burt’s response:

And here’s one more reason so little poetry attracts negative reviews: it’s not worth writing a negative review of a book that will sink without a trace, which most poetry books do. Negative reviews in poetry these days only seem worth while when they attack (a) examples of bad trends or (b) people who are very famous and don’t deserve it . In both of these cases, a bad poet (a poet I consider bad) is worth “taking down” (seems to me worth a negative review) because bad poetry, praised in high places, really distorts the sense of the art the younger generation gets; such praise, uncountered, makes it harder for new readers to like the good stuff. Under the right circumstances I would write a blistering attack on any of about eight very famous or widely respected poets, with my name attached (you get a cookie if you can guess which poets). I write negative reviews when editors ask me to review poetry I don’t like and when it falls into one of the categories above. But I almost never solicit work for review that I know I won’t like, and I certainly won’t write really negative reviews of poets who aren’t already well-known. It doesn’t seem worth my time, or theirs.

What kind of reviews do readers want in a magazine like Magma? Have reviews in the UK become akin to blurbs? Are anonymous reviews a good or bad idea? Do you agree with Stephen Burt that it’s OK to write negatively of well known poets, but not of books ‘that will sink without a trace, which most poetry books do?’

A few other recent contributions to the debate which may be of interest:

Nic Sebastian

Aditi Machado

Lytton Smith

If you enjoyed this article you can have every new article from the Magma Blog delivered to you for free.