Lucy Burnett – Leaf Graffiti

Statement of Prejudice: None. “Leaf Graffiti” doesn’t strike me as a brilliant title, mind. A first collection.

Reality: Leaf Graffiti opens with a long, free verse series of connected pieces called “Variations on an urban monotone”, the prospect of which immediately gave me the howlers, but happily it takes a good two-thirds of its forty-odd sections before it starts to drag, which is no mean feat. The poem comprises 17-line sections, each concerning a image or theme from the previous section, in which LB does impressive work corralling the unpunctuated and often unsyntactic thoughts, and sounding pretty good doing it; this being a good (and rare) example of a discernible rhythmic pattern surviving free-verse formatting and of some slightly ostentatious page layout working in concert with the content. Otherwise, some of LB’s extended ruminations on summer afternoons and public transport are delicately painted, and show care and neat attention to detail that make the more clichéd passages worthwhile (see ‘vulpine ticks of thought’ or ‘girning drizzle skull clouds’ as examples of LB’s facility with the odd but logical turn of phrase).

The downside, however, is that the attractive statement of the poem is mostly surface level, and the few occasions on which LB approaches the topical (a political conference, tenement housing, her bank statement), the work noticeably flounders. There is little editorial statement, save for some rote decrying of ‘politicians’, while the ‘urban’ strain of the monotone is largely decorative, and slightly more troublesomely, there’s little emotional engagement with all its passing scenery.

As the book progresses, there’s scant deviation from the tone of the opening section: LB persists in a free-associating series of thoughts and visual descriptions, and very few poems carry a discernible thesis. Some of the individual pieces are pretty enough, particularly when the action switches to the natural world, but few bear re-reading, and the cutesiness (eg in “Pond life”: ‘On the mantelpiece a horse is asking me for words / but I keep on only making sounds of horses – / read this book I say. James Joyce, it’s good for you.’) grates. If you read the review of Emily Berry previously on this site, it’s a noticeably similar scenario. Few poems stand out, there is little for the reader to grab onto emotionally, there’s a creeping sense that we are not being addressed but rather overhearing a mind talking to itself.

As an aside – I’m finding it difficult to come up with fresh talking points regarding Leaf Graffiti – there is of course a rich tradition of the overheard conversation/monologue in poetry, it’s one of the form’s fundamental modes of address. But the importance of the fact that an audience is looking over your shoulder as you write your love letter/reverie/etc cannot be overestimated. With all the good will in the world the poet must work especially hard to cover the piece’s emotional heavy lifting, particularly intense in the particularly active medium of poetry (as opposed, say, to the relatively passive video games or television). That’s the assumed contract. You get your name on a slim volume and, provided I fully engage with what you’ve given me, my understanding of life is enriched, I am better equipped for its endurance. If that seems a bum deal consider an alternative: you get your name on a slim volume and I waste a few hours of my day listening to you describe sunsets and your noticeably sniffy distaste for the underclass. Being a poet is not glamorous, or at least it shouldn’t be. As a message to all poets, and as a decent touchstone to anyone consistently reading these reviews: remember: it’s not about you.

Tl;dr: back to the text at hand, if you don’t like haiku-style non-sequential thinking, there’s little to enjoy. Each poem feels much like the last, and a commendable sense that LB sees the natural world as something sacred and inherently valuable is shouted down by the book’s sheer volume and scattershot focus. Leaf Graffiti is worth picking up and skimming for neat turns of phrase and clever descriptors (“The chickens were with the gold at the furthest outer limits of the rainbow”; “i love a smoking glaswegian / strawberry in concrete”), but far too often these neat turns are rather incidental, and poems have an irritating habit of leaving their last line hanging in ostensibly significant white-space-come-silence. The goal suggested by its title –I assume an attempt to comingle the urban and the pastoral – is not achieved; the two remain largely segregated and there is a clear split between LB’s attitudes to the exalted trees and the repellent streets. At just under 90 pages, this is too long a read for too little reward.

Emily Berry – Dear Boy

Statement of Prejudice: None. This is Emily Berry’s first collection, and I don’t know her work. I do know Faber though, and will be proceeding with caution.

Reality: Oy vey. Turns out I had read her before, in Bloodaxe’s Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21^st Century back in aught nine. Forgettable in a sampler, aggressively dull over the 54 pages of Dear Boy.

There are a few major flaws in the book, principle among which is that this is barely poetry. By now this blog is half-full of complaints about a lack of aural composition, but dammit the world of professional publishing has yet to take the hint so crank up your Old Timey Whine-o-phone and let’s get this over with. Dear Boy falls victim to one of the most obvious flaws of un-composed poetry: it all sounds the same, a conversational drone. There is no rhythmic, sonic or even semantic patterning, and so no poem seems more significant than any other, no word seems to ignite the individual poem’s meaning machine. The register never strays from its cosy, drawing-room adroitisms, which in the opening poem “Our Love Could Spoil Dinner” is charming and jarring (in a good way), but it rapidly comes clear that that’s your lot. And Berry is not concise. The non sequiturs come hard and fast, and make it impossible for either poet or reader to build any shared emotional ground, and smacks of a book that needed a more ruthless editor.

The problem with monotony is that Dear Boy makes no clear, consistent statement about the culture from which it came; the surrealism and consequence-less play allows the poet to pretend there is no world outside the page, no problem a writer might rail against and no audience to enlighten or entertain. The problem with this is that when EB does stray into more risqué subject matter

(and my god Faber have gone to town in painting the poet as 21^st century literary totty. Listen to the flyleaf: ‘In a collection with a taste for ventriloquy and wickedness [!], and a flair for vocal cross-dressing [?], the balance of power is always shifting in an unexpected direction [it doesn't] – an ingénue masquerades as a femme fatale […] carried along by the undercurrent on which the collection ebbs and rides.’ Someone in the F&F copy department needs a cold shower. Trouble is the book’s about as sexy as Larkin.)

the register remains the same: a skittish, unfocused, descriptive voice who relies on editorial passivity to give the action an edge; that is, relies on the reader to make the jump between subject and tone. But a reader can only jump so often before one resents the exercise, and in the poems “A Short Guide to Corseting” and “The Incredible History of Patient M.”, where a dominant male figure (‘I love / his arms, thick as pythons’, ‘His wrists are great hairy chunks’) chokes the breath out of the speaker and ‘slapped my face with his penis. // ‘To get you going,’ he said’ respectively, we have no strong editorial voice elsewhere in the collection to contextualise the scene. Nowhere else in the book is there a clear message that a bad thing has happened, and if the poet is taking for granted that male violence towards women isn’t automatically glamorised and should obviously be condemned, the poet hasn’t read many of her contemporaries, not to mention popular culture at large.

The s&m thing drags wearily on in “The Value of Submission” and “Thirty-two Fouettés”, and gosh the world of kink seems a dull one. For illumination, read Mark Doty on the same subject; where EB assumes the appearance of whips and corsets is enough to make our monocles fall in our beaujolais, Doty takes the time to interrogate the participants’ motivations, and in giving us a human face in which to examine our own makes far richer reading. His proposition that s&m is no weirder than going to a poetry reading asks questions of the reader in a way that’s playful and engaging, and assumes a degree of maturity.

Not to say that this is the only thing Dear Boy is about. It also has poems about child/parent relationships, cutesy/quirky poems about cats and tea, budgies, the language of salad etc. Poems to be printed on Cath Kidston merchandise. And none of this would be so terrible but this is a debut with the nation’s biggest publisher, and the choice to be apolitical is still a political choice, just the least responsible one. In the title poem, the key line is ‘You know perfectly well I believe / nothing worthwhile is explainable. Dear boy, / don’t be so literal.’ Fine, some things are difficult to explain. But that doesn’t mean you stop trying.

Tl;dr: Dear Boy is a missed opportunity, a book that does everything in its power to distract you from the fact that there’s not much below the surface, and it’s not nearly as ‘dark’ as it thinks it is. Much like The Dark Knight Rises, and it shares that film’s position on gender binaries, too. There’s little to be gained, no great thought about society, no establishment challenged or accepted wisdom debunked, and I suspect that suits Faber just fine. [Edit: Fiona Moore has an interesting bit of data on the big poetry houses.]

Nick Laird – Go Giants

Statement of Prejudice: As a fellow Nordy I had real hopes for Laird, particularly with so many touting him as a follower of MacNeice. In practice, his first two books, To a Fault and On Purpose were too self-consciously eager to dip into the NI canon to break any new ground of their own, and often failed to make an emotional dent. The fact that he seems to have been championed by the Guardian Books review team doesn’t much endear him to me, though that’s a less reasonable prejudice. The title ‘Go Giants’ appeals to me as a US Football fan.

Reality: For such a short book, Go Giants is a slog. Laird wears plainly his loyalties to Ted Hughes, Paul Muldoon and Don Paterson (to whom thanks is given in the Acknowledgements), but rarely peeks out from beneath the shadow of these – yup – giants to say much that’s unique or challenging. The verse is generally well-crafted, the vocabulary expansive, but there is a great big hole where the book’s heart should be. Why this has happened is purely speculative, how it has happened is more interesting.

Go Giants’ title poem is one of those set pieces where a refrain is picked up and used ad exhaustum until we can tell the rest of the class how clever the poet is. The poem uses terminology of American sports, militarism and old timey religion, but to what end is anyone’s guess, and “Go Giants” reads very similarly to the verses of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. It’s one of many nods to Muldoon’s work, in which ostensible nonsense is employed to work out some aural/irrational meaning, a tactic which Laird fails to execute. In Muldoon, this strategy works best when used to debunk certain historical/political tropes and prejudices; if this is NL’s plan, it remains unexplored in the rest of the book, or too deeply buried/encoded to be of much use.

In the ultra-Muldoony long-form closing poem “Progress” (which uses the chapter titles from Pilgrim’s Progress, lest you forget this is Literature), to discuss Laird’s childhood, the birth of astronomy, the ‘big men’ of Irish myth, including the auspiciously-named rugby player Willie John MacBride, and the death of someone who appears to have been the poet’s teenage employer at a pub (lest you forget he likes Muldoon’s book-ending elegies). Where the poem fails is that its priorities seem all wrong: reading it, the most clear impressions that remain (and in a long poem we generally rely on broad impressions, the close-reading part of the brain being better suited to sprints than marathons) are of the poet’s scuffle with a boy from another school and Laird’s discontent with the church as a locus of political power. The chapter headings serve as little more than providers of white space between stanzas, and my attempts to connect them to the text were unrewarding. Ultimately, though we’re encouraged to see this ongoing battle from childhood as emblematic of other historical disputes (NL says ‘that the history of history is ridiculous, / that these specifics were sufficient’), the parts don’t connect to a satisfying whole. The lines ‘I was tall for the fourth form and thin // and wore the wrong uniform for him. / As did he for me. Like MacBride. / Both of them! This is becoming a theme!’ should be a witty metafictional aside but comes aggravatingly between one dull detail and another. The feeling that the poet should get to the point is overwhelming.

Worse, the poem finishes in something transcribed from the Black Eyed Peas facebook page. ‘the plenitude / of faces meant an openness and soft regard / for all the local gods, some dulling into love // by constant movement, children, music, dogs, / by the caramel or black or light pink / skin the people move and keep on moving // the miraculous flesh of their bodies in.’ Given the Boys Own, self-celebratory masculinity NL is content to expound elsewhere in the book (more later), it’s tempting to read this as sarcastic, though even then I’m not convinced NL would intend something so overtly nihilist. If we are to take it sincerely, please overlook that penultimate line’s sub-Heaney platitude that forgoes the effort Heaney makes to earn his trademark stoic philosophy.

This spiceless ending is characteristic of Go Giants. The book’s opener is another poetic staple, the ‘You are x, I am y’ formula, which generally allows the poet massive freedom to make connections between ostensibly unrelated things before mapping them onto a (usually romantic) human relationship. In “Epithalamium” there is no consistent mapping for the reader to play with, and in the last stanza he explodes his own game with ‘and frequently it seems to me that I am you, / and you are me. If I’m the rising incantation / you’re the charm, or I am, or you are.’ Christ. It’s hard to tell if this is NL challenging our expectations, or suddenly getting bored as the bottom of the page rises to meet him. In any case it’s unenlightening as to what he thinks of either of the concerned parties, and is the first of many clues that the audience’s experience is not at the forefront of his thinking.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the more effective pieces is “The Mark”, subtitled In the Capitoline Museum, a series which concerns an artist persecuted by both religion and state. There are some neat thoughts, like ‘since it predicts redress, is dilute with / the largess of the much better informed, / the grief of Christ is inauthentic. // This is not,’ but the ultimately the tone is defensive of the artist, snottily dismissive of the ‘vengeful and drunk’ members of the hoi polloi, and lacking the sympathy you might expect given a genuinely moving piece of sculpture. Note the loss of rhythmic patterning in those lines as NL gives full priority to his political statement.

And just while we’re on the topic of privileged views, NL’s views on love/women etc are pretty dull/vague/perhaps better unexamined. One poem named “Women in Antiquity” either has an extremely complex thesis regarding ‘the checkout Cleopatra’, ‘The Queen of Sheba leaving Tie Rack’, ‘Boadicea clipping tickets’, or none at all; ‘You express / surprise at such a wide variety, / and I stay absolutely silent.’ Which is all well and good, but you can be damned sure he doesn’t. The very next line: ‘Each wood or stone statue stands / and holds her breasts or clasps / her hands above her solar plexus’, before dismissing ‘nakedness; social; shame; the cold; aesthetic’ as reasons for this pose, before ending on the predatorial ‘but the eye is mine’. Were this a book with a coherent and consistent message about the presentation of women in western (or even ancient) culture, this could be a strong poem connecting (say) the woman-as-mythical-figure-and-thus-not-quite-human trope, but most other women in the text don’t really do very much. They appear in states of undress (eg, exiting the shower or as participant in ‘adolescent sexuality’ in “Progress”, with pierced nipple in “The Package from Latvia”) or as mothers/sisters/Gaia. Snooze. While it would be naïve to express surprise that a male Faber poet should offer such conventional presentation of women, damned if I’m going to let it slide. I expect better from someone as obviously well-read, and if this review is harsh it’s largely from disappointment in someone capable of much more. This crap is lazy, inaccurate and harmful, and I cannot for a second believe that he has examined the literary canon and decided such nonsense worthy of regurgitation.

Tl; dr: so young Laird has picked up some bad habits hanging around those bad Muldoon and Paterson kids. Oh well. It’s a shame, as he is by no means lacking in talent (although when he has a deliberate political point to make, NL is more than happy to say toodleoo to any semblance of aural composition, one of our medium’s few unique joys) or imaginative ambition, but suffers terribly from too close an adherence to the worst habits of poets who are variously past their best (Muldoon), past their relevance (Hughes) and convey some fairly ambivalent attitudes to at least half of their readership (Paterson, who is unique of the three in at least seeming aware of this shortcoming). NL has enjoyed more success (or at least more exposure) than many of his more accomplished Northern Irish contemporaries, and that’s a shame. That said, Go Giants is still worth a read, as our negative influences can be beneficial, and there are no shortage of half-baked ideas waiting for a better poet to finish them.

William Letford – Bevel

Statement of Prejudice: Extensive. I’ve met WL a couple of times and seen him perform another couple. He’s a tremendous performer, exerts more fruitful scrutiny on the vocal/aural composition of his work than almost any other poet I can think of, and has a rare talent for inspiring total unbroken attention from a live audience. I have great hopes for this book, particularly considering Michael Longley (my original poster-on-the-bedroom-wall poetry hero) said he regretted Bevel not making the TS Eliot cut (of which more later): “ Bevel was kind of word perfect – an extraordinary first book. I found it very refreshing and I think he’ll be a contender with his second book.” I choose to read between the lines and speculate that ML was thwarted by his fellow judges. Anyway.

It also makes sense to say now that the coverage of Bevel in some quarters – our own Gutter magazine being a particularly egregious offender – has been frustrating to say the least. In every one I’ve read, the opening paragraphs make a screaming deal of Letford’s work as a roofer. Which would be all well/good, but it almost always appears instead of the column inches that should be discussing his skill as a writer and performer of poems (or not, there’s no obligation to enjoy his work, we’re talking critical/emotional engagement here), and the condescending and reductive implications bubbling below the surface (“Gordon Bennett! A workman who can write! How splendid”) are insulting to the time and effort Letford has obviously invested in his work, and degrading to the publications who print them. Letford may have hammered some nails in his time, but we should no sooner privilege that work over his poetry than we should discuss the crop yields on the Heaney farm, or the inpatients at Carlos Williams’ clinic. We should be better than this.

Also also: I have seen some of the poems in this book performed live, and where appropriate will be discussing them both in terms of their publication and performance, as it would be daft not to.

Reality:

A poem

Is an object made from language

A poem
Should pass from fire to fire – from chest to chest

A poem
does not belong to the poet

Make no mistake, WL knows what his work’s about. And while Bevel has the rough edges and occasional so-so-ness of many first collections, there’s so much generosity, so much unselfconsciously given over to the reader, such loyalty to both the life of the senses and life in community, it’s difficult not to love.

Alright, let’s calm down for a second. WL seems heavily influenced by Tom Leonard and Edwin Morgan, and while their voices sometimes get in the way, WL has plenty to add to their vocabularies, not least the controlled panic of the avifauna in “Thurs hunnurs a burds oan the roofs”, wherein: ‘we’re no dodos we kin fly forget aboot the fields Frank look it the sky’. WL employs a very Morganian strategy of making an ostensibly silly and aurally pleasing surface to smuggle in a much deeper engagement with a discussion that animates the entire collection, of which more in the next para. On another day I’d posit that the closing line’s addressee ‘Frank’ is none other than New York gadabout O’Hara, but ochone today just isn’t that day. Here’s the poem in action though. You tell me.

“Wit is it” is another piece that confronts, less directly but no less powerfully than “A poem”, the book’s central concerns. [Also a piece to bait the less engaged reviewer into bloviating upon the nobility of manual labour, but we know better.] In it, a series of specialised workmen use their trades as a means of understanding the world: ‘The stonemason sade it’s aw in yur heed / Yur eyes ur like windeez an yur brain’s gon naywhere / build yourself a palace’. Each stanza is a witty piece by itself (‘A looked it the gaffer. Work hard, he sade / bit that wiz his answer fur ivrythin’), but the cumulative effect is nothing short of (though certainly not restricted to) a highly complex creative philosophy: that the art we make is, essentially, not our own; not only does it depend upon the successes and failures of countless others that went before us, but also the presence of our peers to read/hear it, and without a deep concern for both of these factors, we’re lost. At this point we should probably take a cold shower lest we forget that Bevel is, at heart, a sincere celebration of the sensory world, its struggles, complications, losses and small redemptions, the palaces we build behind our eyes.

Yeesh. Look what you’re doing to me, Bevel. This is a respectable establishment for godsakes. Throughout the book are a series of short prose pieces, in which the brusque, punchy tempo of the lyrics are replaced by something slower and more contemplative. A short prayer to the copyright gods that I may quote in full “In the mountains of northern Italy”:

‘The chapel on the hill has no roof. For five hundred years its four walls have framed the universe. The locals laugh at the Sistine Chapel and call it the coffin lid.’

Look at that! Just look at how much is packed into those three short sentences by way of the piece’s engagement with the book’s recurring themes: the spiritual primacy of the observable universe, the idea that art belongs to the world, the community that keeps it alive, and that’s before we examine the tight sonic architecture. These are simple but big ideas, and worth considering at length. See also “Winter in the world”:

‘The old lady struggles, footsteps careful, leaving shuffle marks in the snow. No shopping bag, so maybe it’s church, and maybe not. Perhaps she is out for walk, because she can, and the night is spare, and she is undiminished and harder than bone.’

That grabs me something fierce. I can’t remember the last time a book held so complex a tension between the desire (explicitly stated on several occasions, like the excellent “[T-shirt wrapped around my head]” or the cantankerous “Newsflash”) for death-defying immortality and the desire to observe and document the actual waking world. WL seems to understand implicitly that if art really is the key to surviving one’s body, it cannot be done alone.

Elsewhere, “The light and dark of Adeona” and “No distractions” deserve a shoutout, there are some beautiful little formal touches like the two one-sentence-per-page series that pop up unexpectedly and act as little haiku-y interludes, and a couple of charming set pieces like “It’s aboot the labour” and “Sex poem number 1”:

‘aye       right       okay      right right            okay’

On the neg side, a couple of the travelogue poems are a little meh, and while there’s the occasional feeling that the poems’ gender politics lean toward the conservative, WL still ends up safely on the positive side of a great many of his peers, who shall remain nameless. On the topic of those peers, how this book was left out of a list that included Sean Borodale’s self-obsessed debut is beyond me. Bevel is a challenging book with a more coherent socio-political philosophy than anything on the shortlist, and its omission is a black mark to both the Poetry Book Society and the TSE judges.

Tl;dr: Bevel is an important book as much as it is a great debut for an exciting writer. It provides an unusually frank point of entry to the world, a wit and charm about society at large, and a mind actively engaged in the question of what the heck it is we’re doing with this whole art thing in the first place. Read it slower than you think you should.

PS: I know I said I’d write about the performance, but there was too much to go on as it was. I hope the included videos speak for themselves.

Julia Copus – The World’s Two Smallest Humans

Statement of Prejudice: I am aware that Julia Copus is a poet.

Reality: The World’s Two Smallest Humans is a book of two halves. The first, a series of lyrics grouped under the title ‘Durable Features’ (significance unknown, but likely to have something to do with interior design, which is then hitched to the poems’ discussion of a failed/failing relationship, among other things), is pretty middling stuff. The poems are more often than not too long for their fairly straightforward approaches to some of poetry’s commonest themes – time passing, loneliness, lost love etc – and it suffers badly when pitched in the same arena as Sharon Olds. Copus just doesn’t find the sophisticated emotional configuration or the piercing lyrical moment to fully animate these opening lyrics, and the over-riding feeling is restrained, conversational, nice.

The one exception, however, is one of the best poems in the book, and one of the best single poems in the entire shortlist. “Heronkind” holds a remarkable balance between conceit and execution, simplicity of statement and intricacy of thought. It’s no accident this is one of the shortest poems in the sequence, establishing the necessary scientific data regarding the dietary life of juvenile herons, then hits the mark perfectly with the poem’s conclusion: ‘How much less complex / life would be / without this feverish / dance between / the wanter and the wanted, / though the truth of it is / that without fish / all heronkind would / be stunted.’ Neat. The poem says everything it needs too, and is also one of the few poems in this sequence to pay heed to its sonic architecture. The short lines hide the aural echoes, and elsewhere in the poem allow them freedom to shy away from line-endings and work their way more subtly into the ear. It’s a great piece of work, and makes the other poems more frustrating for the lack of close attention paid to their structural ungainliness.

Digression: some reviewers have praised Copus for the mirror-y form she came up with in two poems, “Raymond at 60” and “Miss Jenkins”, in which the last line of the first stanza is repeated as the first line of the second stanza and so on. It’s a complicated trick well performed, but it limits the poem’s freedom of expression, and is impossible to read without being distracted by all the clever-clever. And that’s besides the altogether over-Audening she gives poor old schoolmarmy Miss Jenkins. Let’s not be distracted by the shiny lights, fellow readers.

What we should be distracted by is how wonderful the book becomes from the middle onwards. Two long dramatic poems, “The Particella of Franz Xaver Sussmayr” and “Hero” have a fantastic sense of humour and pathos respectively, and JC is ablaze in the creative freedom the ventriloquism allows her, to the extent that one wonders why there isn’t more of it in TWTSH (aside from the fairly dull and drafty “The Constant Landlady”). In the former, we have the four-part account of Sussmayr, who transcribed Mozart’s The Magic Flute into its completed long-format, addressing a non-speaking friend delivering it to Vienna. Fair enough. But JC’s ability to make us care so quickly about this blowhardy fellow and to take his closing question, ‘what, in the end, is the world most altered by?’ both as a sincere inquiry and a naïve sally into what is clearly the unknown, a minor clerk faced with a work of great genius talking to a delivery boy. Moving stuff.

Inadequacy also haunts Hero in the latter, a version of Ovid’s Heroides, and y’all know I’m a sucker for classical reworkings, in which Hero grows weary of waiting for Leander’s nightly crossing of the Hellespont: ‘I can’t sit tight, as other girls do. / I cannot be a harbour for you.’ Again, JC’s adherence to a rhyme scheme enhances the poem’s forward momentum and Hero’s eventual resignation towards her appointed place in the myth. The poem’s conclusions are straightforward but affecting, it’s a deeply felt rumination on gender politics, and a worthwhile addition to the collection.

The final section, “Ghost”, is a series of poems telling the story of JC’s IVF treatment. I say story because it has a simple but bona fide narrative arc, and the poems connect with each other on a level deeper and more uncanny than the unity of topic. In JC’s telling, the machinery is invested with unsettlingly human qualities: the giant purple treatment chair’s ‘empty / purple arms reach out / for her’; the lamp, which inhabits its own tiny but brutal poem, “Constellation”:

A lamp the size and shape
of a flattened planet

traces a graceful arc
and comes to rest

in the constellation of her
parted thighs.

in “Inventory for a Treatment Room” is ‘on a long, extend- / able limb’; in “Phone” there is a ‘fragile clutch of embryos’; and finally MINOR SPOILERS HERE in the poem “Lapse”, the IVF has failed, ‘the womb / was an open palm: / glabrous, dumb, / it had not known / to close. Just that.’ Similarly, the few humans are distant, masked, ‘padding about like kindly, / soft-footed camels’, the speaker herself presented as another piece of the equipment, the sum of many parts.

The book’s final piece, typed in all-italics – as to suggest a slight otherworldliness or permit a flight of fancy – is addressed to future potential children, and to welcome them to a world of ‘changeful air / with its brood of noises – helicopter, dog-bark, / many song-filled, open-throated birds’. While the piece is understandable, leavening the book’s ending with a hopeful note, it isn’t well executed, and I don’t entirely believe JC’s stoic conviction. Obviously at this point I’m speculating about the inner life of real-world-historical JC and triangulating it with the JC-version presented here, a mendacious task at the best of times, but the poem simply doesn’t ring with the same intensity as the others in the section. The last stanza’s stoic exterior seems just that, and I suspect that it’s a deliberate callback to Hero’s situation, of one disappointed but persevering. Which doesn’t map perfectly – Hero is a victim of institutional behavioural restriction, the JC of “Ghost” is not – but it does inject some significance at the very last minute. Maybe it would have been a more straightforward (implicitly less nuanced) approach to the situation, but I was left wondering what JC might have expressed if that ellipsis before the resigned ‘But you did not come’ had given the poet license to speak.

Tl;dr: This is an odd little book, with a second half that totally belies the pedestrian first. When Copus takes emotional and dramatic risks they pay off; when she aims for the cosy and the well-trodden, it feels little more than that, but a handful of lyrics are worth the price of admission alone.

Gillian Clarke – Ice

Statement of Prejudice: Not much. Aware of her being around for a long time and being the National Poet of Wales, but haven’t read her work.

Reality: This is a good book of poetry. Unlike some of its TSE-contemporaries, Ice is clear-headed about its artistic goals and scores more than it misses. Clarke writes with the assurance and clarity of one deeply acquainted with her own writing voice, her account of the rural world both of her childhood and the present are invested with a sharp emotional edge you might expect from a collection named “Ice”, while some poems, like “Shearwaters on Enli”, “Polar” and “Nant Mill” brought to mind similar pieces from Heaney, Frost and Edward Thomas. Which is good.

It’s a difficult book to love, however, and I blame that as much on my urban-ironic-literary fashionable-oriented approach to reading as any flaw in the work. Clarke’s measured craftliness has more in common with Michael Longley than any of her shortlisted peers, and it’s unsurprising that one of her poems – the aforementioned “Shearwaters on Enli”, in which ‘I choose it as llatai, bird-messenger, sea-crier / for the poet of flight and song.’ – is dedicated to himself. And her poetry does find its feet, or more appropriately its wings, if you’ll permit, when the poem ventures into an imaginative register, capitalising on the hard work GC commits establishing the difficult facts of the physical environment.

The book progresses slowly, deliberately labouring its preoccupation with winter, death and the passage of time. The number of deaths from violence and neglect in the early passages are striking: the two murdered girls of “Freeze 1947” and “Freeze 2010” and ‘The tramp they found in a field / after the thaw. // When they lifted him, meltwater / streamed from his open mouth’ in “The Dead after the Thaw”, which I won’t forget in a hurry. Flowing water from a dead tongue seems to find its apical point in “Nant Mill”, which acknowledges the passing of traditional rural life and the neglect of the Welsh language in the same dignified, sacramental, but noticeably secular/pre-Christian tone employed in Heaney’s earlier books: GC refers liberally to the Mabinogi mythical cycle throughout Ice, but not at all to modern religion.

Also like famous Seamus, GC also economically employs fragments of her native tongue, most effectively in “Glas” and “Gleision”, the singular and plural forms of a word that means ‘blue or green’ and is the root of the word glass, which on its own is a pretty and evocative trivium, but in the book is set impressively to work. In “Glas”, the word becomes like Heaney’s omphalos, ‘an arterial stream to every tap, // like those rivers, reservoirs, aquifers underground, / invisible slivers silent as ultrasound’ (stick that in your syllabus and study it); while “Gleision” refers to a mining accident in 2011 that killed four men, noticeably also ‘in the hill’s dark hollowed heart’. The inner life of Wales and the Welsh language, figured literally in the second poem, is irrevocably tied to violent death, as much now as in 1947.

The drawback of this focus on the past is that it appears to have little to say to the present: one particularly failed poem, “Blue Sky Thinking”, is an exhortation for the business travel industry to ‘ground the planes for a while’, which ends with the total negation of ‘No mark, no plane-trail, jet-growl anywhere’. The line is almost touching, but comes across as curmudgeonly and naive where the more impressive imaginative project would be to reconcile the necessity of modern life with the equally valid necessity of preserving the only home we’ll ever have. The book is in awe of the natural world, but its rejection of modern life, though understandable in an author born in 1937, misses the chance to say something truly unique. Readers might find the repeated trope of wives waiting at home for their mining husbands, the ‘heroes’ of Gleision, difficult to swallow.

A number of poems towards the back of the collection seem to have been added in as a kind of published-elsewhere-miscellany of commissions and occasional pieces, and this might be an instance where dividing the book into sections could have benefitted the whole. And as you might have gathered, GC is at times as restricted by her influences as bolstered by them.

Tl;dr: This is a strong-minded, compassionate and well-composed book of poetry, but it breaks very little ground in either content or tone, and often lacks the engaging personality of her immediate contemporaries. That said, of the current batch of poets laureate, Clarke is ahead by a country mile, and Ice should be lauded for confronting some unpleasant realities in poems that are unlikely to be requisitioned by the Welsh Tourist Board.

Jacob Polley – The Havocs

Statement of Prejudice: Polley is a writer I’ve had a vague opinion about for a while, as being a fairly nondescript and slightly pretentious Poet (caps intended), and I’m aware of a fascination with Wordsworth which is totally fine and above board and legit but a bit like finding out someone’s favourite band is Led Zeppelin. I am totally aware of and have just now come to terms with the shallow nature of this opinion, however.

Reality: I am in two minds about this book. Heavens! The shock may kill you. But The Havocs is composed of some genuinely cracking little poems and an uncommon skill with the whole rhetorical/rhythmical craft thing and a capacity for evoking a Frost/Hughes-type dark-and-deeply wintery pastoral without invoking those poets’ nihilism/overweening lust-for-dominance respectively; it also clunks on occasion and has a bad habit of enjoying its own vocabulary at the expense of the lyric exploration.

It’s also a book that richly rewards a second run. If I’ve name-dropped out the wazoo already it’s because Polley is a writer deep in an English-language tradition, and to approach The Havocs without that in mind is to miss a lot of the book’s finest qualities. The opening poem, “Doll’s House”, is an intricate lyrical essay on the act of observation and the fear of writing poems in which nothing moves (as in both emotively and locomotively), as in ‘the shelves of depthless books / lining a room where nothing’s read’. It’s also delightfully creepy and should put the howling fantods up anyone looking for a comprehensively comprehensible arrangement of Polley/poet’s voice/reader. That the effect is somewhat undone by the unsatisfyingly lax “Hide and Seek” on the next page is kind of a shame: the second poem’s sort-of-a-riddle goes on for too long without quite coming to the boil.

Between “Doll’s House” and the next truly stand-out poem, “Keepers”, The Havocs maintains a tone of the implied menace of recently-departed things through recurring instances of silence, absence, and negation, JP’s constant resort to childhood giving the speaker a child’s lack of agency, an inability to counter the darkness with light, the meaninglessness with meaning. “Keepers” does introduce the possibility for upsetting the status quo, as the child speaker spies on the pure white space-suited beekeepers through the hexagon-shaped wire fence (nice), and the poem recalls Saint Ambrose lying ‘in his crib while the bees dances / over his lips, conferring eloquence. Slipping / from book to dusty book, I’d wondered when he spoke / if goodness had lit like honey his every cell.’ That is one neat, tight, evocative bit of metaphor-making, and it even sounds good. ‘But we were who we were’, is an ambiguous conclusion to such a busy and almost hopeful poem, suggesting waking from a dream, returning from Narnia, a voice still searching for Ambrose’s gift.

The title poem and “Virus” both share an explicit strategy of employing words outwith their common usage, and both take this opportunity to make the book’s key political-social-type statements. Naturally, nothing is quite clear cut, and I’m still rather unsure of how to deal with them. Initially, both were in the column marked ‘bad poem’ in my notes, and on first reading, “The Havocs” is frustrating and dull, a succession of clever-clever subbings of the word ‘havoc’ into stock phrases, as if Muldoon had never been, and some fairly standard liberal-y assertions about social justice, human rights, Batman and ‘narrowing the gap between the rich and fabulously rich.’ It’s not a whole lot better on closer examination, barring a slight self-aware self-deflation as it emerges that the caped crusader is the poet and his havoc is the one that I the reader am not taking seriously, just as the poem predicts. But it still comes in a little underweight politically; these are fine statements, but it feels like half the argument, and its broken syntax leaves a string of half-finished ideas that do little to serve the interests of political engagement. This is one occasion where a little declarative speech would go a long way. But then I find myself trapped in the vortex of ‘aha, maybe the speechlessness is what he meant all along’ and ‘aha, that still sucks’ and ‘aha, maybe the problem is you being a crappy reader’ and then my head hurts and I regret giving up drinking even temporarily.

“Virus” expresses itself with a little more clarity, being a nice little Foster Wallacian game of imagine-what’ll-be-slang in the future around an odd little tale of fractured meaning, poverty, art chic and brain damage. Underlying both poems is a protest against the devaluing of language in art, commerce and governance, against neglectful reading of ‘big books we felt too heinously / short-lived to waste our eyes upon.’ Respect is due for even attempting to address a social issue (an inclination notably absent from the majority of the TSE shortlist), and if the message is a little incomplete the execution is at least playful and in keeping with the book’s discomfiting tone.

A quick note should be given to the neat, sparse short poems interspersed throughout the book,in particular “Spike”, which I hope you’ll forgive my quoting in full:

From the wood, a winter fruit
with pips of air inside,
its core like light, like light slowed down;
like nothing, crystallised;

fetched from the dark like light itself,
like light itself grown old:
we touch what can’t survive our touch
but scalds our hands to hold.

Good stuff. Though I can’t budge a feeling that more could have been done with that second doubling of light. Heigh ho. Similarly, “Potsherds” shows a keen observant eye, skill with complicated syntax, and a flair for the rich conclusion: ‘only those parts / of the world whose keeping / required of us an art.’ The poem has a message to convey and does so unassumingly and directly, and is extremely pleasing for it. Shout-outs also to “The Ruin”, an impressively authentic-sounding rendering of an Anglo-Saxon poem and “The Weasel”, a poem about a drunken break-up and breakdown to the rhythm (or tune if you’re feeling frisky) of Pop Goes The Weasel that finds five rhymes for its refrain ‘white winter flowers’.

There are some mis-fires, like the weird ballad about a stabbing, “Langley Lane”, which upon googling doesn’t appear to refer to any particular real-world event and seems to have entered the book without any emotional teeth (it might be telling that the one poem that intends to provoke an emotional response, “Gloves”, is more sentimental than moving, and reveals little about the father-son relationship at hand), while the book en mass could be accused of leaving too much to the reader or hiding an individual poem’s paucity of meaning behind an extensive vocabulary and attractive surface sheen. Though, again, a sheeny surface is by no means a given.

Tl;dr: This is an occasionally frustrating, occasionally dry, but ultimately unsettling and memorable book, with a coherent and befitting aesthetic, impressive formal wit and productive engagement with its predecessors. Plus a fine example of my prejudices being precisely wrong. Totes worth a peek.