Fiona Benson – Vertigo & Ghost

Some disclosures: Haven’t met the poet; saw her read at StAnza Poetry Festival a few years ago, she is an incredible performer. A general heads-up that the book depicts and strongly critiques abuses of power, particularly sexual violence, in very direct ways. I wouldn’t recommend reading it all in one sitting, at least not without planning some downtime afterwards. I’m grateful, as ever, to Muireann Crowley for editing this piece.

Review: Vertigo & Ghost (2014) is Fiona Benson’s second collection, after the highly acclaimed Bright Travellers in 2014. Vertigo & Ghost builds on a lot from that first collection, particularly its explorations of the physical and emotional tolls exacted by motherhood, and speakers in both books are saturated by a pervasive feeling of embattled psychological isolation, a lyric self pitted against the world. What was ever-present but manageable in Bright Travellers has intensified here, becoming something remorseless, all-devouring, a corrupted force of nature.

What the few reviews of Vertigo & Ghost to date have focused on and most enthusiastically praised, with good reason, is the book’s opening sequence, ‘Zeus’, with a strong focus on the title character’s charisma, self-involvement and infantile, murderous sociopathy. Positioning Zeus as main character and focal point, however, might run counter to the sequence’s intentions. The sequence feels like a struggle for expression between the halting, affectively flat, painstaking speech of the unnamed narrator (and often what feels like a distinct omniscient narrator who shares similar intonations) and the blithe, trumpeting self-congratulation of the title character; it feels like a true depiction of the unfair power structures within the narrative that Zeus’ name overwrites everything.

It’s worth looking closely at the poem that precedes all of this, ‘Ace of Bass’ (the poem is spelled differently to the 90s pop group), which stands alone both formally and tonally. The poem inhabits in earthy detail a summer in the speaker’s adolescence at boarding school, the retrospective cheesiness and gaudiness that characterised the cultural moment, perhaps epitomised by Ace of Base’s Swede-reggae single ‘The Sign’, which spent the entire summer of 1994 on UK radio. The speaker’s self-image uses the same palette, her ‘teenage heart / [like] a glossy, maraschino cherry’, as ‘hormones poured into me / like an incredible chemical cocktail / into a tall iced glass’. The poem itself is a single, unstoppable sentence, its grammatical and substantial meanings meeting at its conclusion:

‘and we talked about who’d done what with whom
and how it felt, all of us quickening,
and sex wasn’t here yet, but it was coming,
and we were running towards it,
its gorgeous euphoric mist;
pushing into our own starved bodies at night
for relief, like the after-calm might last,
like there was a deep well of love on the other side.’

This friction between past naivety and present wisdom make a heartbreaking conditional in the final line, the tension between the imagined continuity of love, pop music and playground solidarity and reality. The double meaning of ‘deep well’, as a plentiful resource when full and a dangerous hazard when empty, encapsulates this turn with terrible precision.

After the fireworks of ‘Ace of Bass’, the first poem in ‘Zeus’ is painfully stark. Its speaker is vulnerable, chastened, and smaller, and the two narrators could be considered as the same character in different moments. Where in ‘Ace of Bass’ there was ‘colour streaming from my iridescent body’, ‘Zeus’ begins:

‘days I talked with Zeus
I ate only ice
felt the blood trouble and burn
under my skin […]

bullet-proof glass
and a speaker-phone between us
and still I wasn’t safe’

The sequence begins with Zeus in custody, and apparently convicted. The poem seems to question how, even from this statistically unlikely starting point, Zeus might be held accountable, or what would constitute justice or even closure under the circumstances. The sequence plays as a gruelling, episodic series of witness statements and evidence records. With their incorporation of supernatural elements, however, the poems are far more unconventional and generically fraught than their popular forerunners. There is no struggle between equally brilliant representatives of good and evil: the sequence’s foundation is the understanding not only the vast differences in power between perpetrator and survivor, but the narrative frames naturally predisposed to his version of events. Among the evidence presented are versions of the Metamorphoses, which locate their depictions of trauma within broader contexts of the women’s families. ‘[transformation: Io]’ and ‘[transformation: Callisto]’ both include the attempts of Io and Callisto’s parents to heal their children, and, as poems, feel like pointed rebuttals to the tradition of Ovidian versions that treat violence and suffering primarily as spectacle, and have no interest in real-world implications for protagonist or reader. ‘[transformation: Callisto]’ concludes, ‘Go ahead, Zeus. Constellate this’, perhaps implicating the tellers of Ovidian stories into the systems of violence as Zeus himself.

As the sequence progresses, the narrative fact of Zeus’ omnipotence becomes an irreconcilable obstacle: he is imprisoned, drugged, thrown in an oubliette (the bleak inverse of the ‘deep well’ in ‘Ace of Bass’), and electrocuted, to no avail. The final poem is removed from the narrative proper, as signalled by its title: ‘[translation from the annals: Ganymede]’, a category which has not appeared to this point, and is the weirdest poem in the book. The sequence has previously depicted the casual presence of the mythical in the mundane; this poem is from another world entirely, in which the speaker (implicitly not the one we have travelled with thus far) is on an interstellar spacecraft with quasi-angelic beings known as the Powers:

‘I had not been in proximity with the Powers before,
and was afraid of their full-skin tattoos and body-jewels
and their ease with weapons. I did not fully understand
their dialect, and between themselves they talked
in an ancient language of the seraphim. […]

Sometimes I’d wake
soaked in sweat and hear the Powers singing
on a scale other than our own, high and screeching,
vibrating in a way that made me heave up yellow bile.’

Nothing in the book prepared me for this blend of biblical, science-fictional and Lovecraftian notes. Perhaps this poem is a grim reflection of the book’s first, the rhetorical energy of ‘Ace of Bass’ converted into this poem’s startling imagination; both feel breathless, high-speed and doomed. The Powers have been tending to Zeus’ dismembered corpse, scattered across the cosmos – a gruesome mirror of Zeus’ own murder of the eponymous prince – its various organs still alive and ‘whistl[ing] to each other’. The mission to extract information from Zeus about the location of Ganymede’s body is a failure, and worse:

‘The pieces would not yield
the boy’s location, though the synapses of the brain
lit up like a firework display when questioned.
The parts whistled to one another
like abusive masters to their kicked-in, wary dogs,
some ‘come-to-heel’, some barely stifled threat
and the cages themselves began to agitate and sing
and I became something beyond afraid.’

Benson’s carefully crafted Zeus is obsessed by the minutiae of his own interests – see his childishly repeated list of things he ‘likes’, their cruel tedium – and interested in nothing but his ability to exercise power. No punishment will change the fact of his godhood, which has corrupted him absolutely: the events of ‘[Ganymede]’, for all their hopelessness, seem to represent a best-case scenario. The haunting closing lines, ‘And still the cables rattled and shook, and still I am afraid’, are a reminder that this poem is not a conclusion to the narrative proper, which ended with ‘[votive]’, a forlorn prayer to Hera to ‘Keep him in the prison of your vigilance’; the sequence’s action comes after ‘[Ganymede]’, the terrible implication that not even this prison will hold forever. ‘Zeus’ is a remarkable work, walking a difficult line between its harsh critique of aestheticized violence and reproducing its effects, a fully realised portrait of abuse and manipulation.

 

*             *             *

 

Vertigo & Ghost’s second half is a very different proposition, more in keeping with the short lyrics that constitute Bright Travellers. A comparative study could be made between the long sequence in Benson’s debut, ‘Love Letter to Vincent’ and ‘Zeus’ here, in particular the depiction of Van Gogh as self-interested, petty and careless, and the intensification embodied by Zeus. In ‘Sunflowers’, the speaker describes how: ‘I listen to you move in the other room / and I burn’; this is echoed in how the speaker feels her blood ‘trouble and burn’ in the opening poem of ‘Zeus’. If there are shared roots between the two sequences, a major point of divergence is in the narrator’s affective response, the turn from desire to fury. Though the poems in the second half of Vertigo & Ghost are drawn together thematically rather than dramatically, questions of isolation, escape, familial care and physical autonomy still feel prime in Benson’s thinking. The most obvious connective tissue between the book’s two parts is in the repeated presence of stars and the night sky, everything that seems to represent an otherworld to the poems’ immediate settings. ‘Two Sparrows’, the second poem in the book’s second half, talks about its subjects in spiritual terms – ‘already elect, condemned’, ‘a spirit at play’, ‘his heart’s […] true empyrean’ – and ‘Marcela Sonnets 3 & 4’ set more soul-swallows ‘moving their tents between the constellations’; in ‘Fly’, the speaker draws these ideas into a more human meditation on spiritual escape and self-destruction:

‘I wanted to take myself off like a misshapen jumper,
a badly fitting frock. I wanted
to peel it off and burn it in the garden
with the rubbish […] And what sliver
of my stripped and pelted soul there still remained,
I’d have it gone, smoked out, shunned,
fled not into the Milky Way,
that shining path of souls, but the in-between,
the nothing.’

Though the following lines self-deprecate this passage as ‘so Wagnerian’, it’s hard to miss its dramatic flourishes moving from the everyday of jumpers and frocks into an ecstatic void: the poem feels sad, worn down, but unafraid. This draw toward oblivion, or something like it, animates two more poems in this section:

‘And here is that storm again,

wrenching at your roots,
insisting that you fly now
little horse, little flower,

into the dark,
its million
whistling stars’ (‘Ectopic / Yellow Seahorse’)

‘should the blue heron lift
from the tightening shallows
there will be love, release;
look now at the white stars falling,
the night-sky-blue of heron, rising.’ (‘Blue Heron’)

However compromised a resolution the final poem in ‘Zeus’ offered, it feels significant that it happened among the stars, and that the Powers are one among many flighted creatures in the book, from termites to bats to swans: the book’s thoughts about stargazing and flight, both avian and metaphysical, seem bound up with its meditations on freedom and death. It feels like the poems cannot quite put their faith a place of peace and safety (or freedom from earthly commitments) without rendering it as a no-place where life is untenable, nor do they shy from imagining the voyage there in consistently gentle and wistful terms. Perhaps the Powers are the amalgamation of all these imaginative processes: they viscerally terrify the speaker, their bodies ‘infected / and larval’, but, as wardens of Zeus, they are clearly a force of justice, speakers of angelic tongues, though the book has little time for religious convention, and little surety of ‘benevolence, or God’.

Though not explicitly a sequence, the poems in the second section feel very much in conversation, a long subtextual narrative in which preoccupations flow into and through one another. In ‘Wildebeest’, the metaphysical takes a back seat to the immediately embodied, and the proceeding poems on motherhood are intensely graphic achievements. ‘Wildebeest’ is set during childbirth, and Benson again uses a single, long, syntactically complex sentence to propel a poem in which the body becomes part-object, part-instinctual creature. ‘Wildebeest’ feels eager to immerse itself in its linguistic work:

‘and I was both the flood
and the furious corral
from which you were expelled –
trampled and pressed
and hammered like metal, […]

as if I were giving birth
to some fierce, Taurean star
spoked at the rim,
thorned like the sun’

The poem confronts and foregrounds the physical toll of childbirth and ends with the briefest moment of calm, as the baby is ‘brought from water / now ruddled with blood […] dark-haired like your sister, / incarnate, loved.’, as the astrological once again sneaks into the poem’s thinking. A page later, however, ‘Afterbirth’ takes pains to complicate the relationship between speaker and newborn, again using the blunt reality of the speaker’s body as a focal point, again in a single, multifaceted sentence. The pyrotechnics of ‘Wildebeest’, however, are curtailed and leaden:

‘sweet stink
of torn labia
under warm water […]

its acid sting.
Ragged animal
I stagger back

to my bed –
smell of blood
all over the ward’

Benson’s skill with conveying sense with sound alone is a true wonder. The poems in this section are compelling in how they dramatize the nervous, frantic energy they describe – a fall into a swimming pool, the threat of illness, the joy and exhaustion of chasing after ‘our glorious, stampeding daughters’ –  alongside a deep cognizance of pervasive gendered violence so vividly rendered in ‘Zeus’, which hovers around the margins of these poems every bit as much as the stars and their deathly quietude. A few poems in this passage, as Alexa Winik noted in the most recent Poetry Review, fall short in leaving too little room to explore the details of violence worldwide: the image of ‘the tribesman carrying your husband’s genitals / and a bloody machete’ in ‘Hide and Seek’ may be a stylised nightmare, but it appears beside more plainspoken references to the Holocaust and contemporary human trafficking, and its colonialist overtones are uncomfortable. As Winik argues, ‘That Benson attempts a self-critique here only seems to strengthen the impression of a missed opportunity, namely for a robust acknowledgement of the speaker’s own positionality […] in relation to the pain of others’. Vertigo & Ghost is immensely rich in its capacity to convey difficult interpersonal relationships without judgement, particularly between the speaker and her family, and the relative paucity of nuance in a few poems set far from home is all the more noticeable for it.

Vertigo & Ghost ends strongly with ‘Eurofighter Typhoon’, named after a military jet designed for air-to-ground strikes, of which the Royal Air Force owns 160. The poem does excellent work in figuring many of the book’s recurring thoughts in a deceptively straightforward scene, told with Benson’s characteristic flair for rendering raw, nervous energy through sound and syntax alone. Thinking back to the ‘Zeus’ sequence, the Eurofighter is presented as an unholy, apocalyptic beast, as one of the speaker’s children runs for safety, leaving the baby outside:

‘all this in the odd, dead pause of the lag –
then sound catches up with the plane
and now its grey belly’s right over our house
with a metallic, grinding scream
like the sky’s being chainsawed open
and the baby’s face drops to a square of pure fear’

The poem’s conclusion, in which the poet imaginatively connects the jet overhead to the people killed by it, is more affecting than the example above for remaining grounded in its emotional moment:

‘and it’s all right now I tell her again and again,
but it’s never all right now […]
my daughter in my arms can’t steady me –
always some woman is running to catch up her children,
we dig them out of the rubble in parts like plaster dolls –
Mary Mother of God have mercy, mercy on us all.’

The poem seems to have ‘Zeus’ in mind: the invocation of Mary recalling of Hera in ‘[votive]’, Ganymede’s mother’s search for her son, the image of women running from danger. ‘Eurofighter Typhoon’ might be a coda to the sequence, a reminder that the god’s violence is not merely interpersonal, but part of a system of national and international power whose origins lie uncomfortably close to home. Vertigo & Ghost is a powerfully discomforting book, its poems knotted and uncompromising, all harsh self-critique and virtuosic fury. This review could’ve been twice as long to give space for exceptional poems like ‘Haruspex’ (‘It is true, / I hear voices / and talk to myself. / I am done with shame.’) and ‘Village’ (‘And I felt love for my small and human life down there, / its tenderness’), every bit as impressive as the work of the spectacular first half.

Further Reading: Alexa Winik’s review in Poetry Review 109:1 (Spring 2019, contents page here)

Benson in conversation with Daisy Johnson on the London Review Bookshop podcast

Benson in conversation with Emily Berry on the Poetry Review podcast

Declan Ryan’s review in The White Review

Tristram Fane Saunders’ review in The Telegraph

Kate Kellaway’s review in The Observer

Stanza 2016 Diary – Saturday 5 March

Full Disclosure: Part two of a two-part series on being at StAnza poetry festival. Still a paid gig, all of yesterday’s caveats apply.

10am: Aase Berg, Clare Best, SJ Fowler, Andrew McMillan, Justin Stephenson: Poetry Breakfast

As I sit down to write this on the mezzanine in the Byre, a poem translated by my pal Jessica Johannesson Gaitán has appeared projected on the far wall. Sometimes wee particles of unexpected joy hurl themselves at you and your heart is glad. Hey Jess! Your poem is wonderful. It’s called ‘Cathedral 2.0’, about a computer recreation of St Andrews cathedral, and has lines like ‘a tissue sustained by professionalised gaming-aesthetics’; ‘There are no stars upon my linen / or on the inside of my eyelids’.

After a morning’s formalities of tea and introductions, the Saturday morning panel was themed around the body in poetry. McMillan, whose book physical won the Guardian First Book Award (AND MY HEART), opened proceedings by introducing a few of the book’s guiding lights: Thom Gunn, whose candidness inspired him as a young reader, his free discussion of love, baths, and the AIDS crisis; Sharon Olds, who seemed to give permission to a confessional openness; and the Yorkshire poet Geoff Hattersley, bringing his daily factory shiftwork to the realm of poetry. Later, McMillan would speak about the politics of telling other people’s stories – an electrician whose granddaughter had died, and four days later was back at work – arguing that his duty as a poet was to bear witness: ‘the only way to go is to be totally sincere’. It’s this sincerity that marks McMillan’s work, and his questions about whether a straight male poet could have ‘gotten away’ with his poems about women’s lives and sexuality (‘Leda to her daughters’, ‘the things men take’) does raise important questions about who the reader ‘permits’ to speak for whom, and why.

Clare Best’s poetry about her mastectomy – breast cancer has affected every woman in her family, and Best took the decision to have the operation voluntarily – was similarly frank and clear-eyed about making choices about one’s own body, about taking control before control is taken away. Aase Berg, who performed yesterday, complimented this idea in a book on her pregnancy, ‘Transfer Fat’; she talked about how women writing on pregnancy are expected to ‘be the warm mother’, even though in reality she did not feel in control of her own body: ‘nature is not a Disney film, it is a Werner Herzog film’. She extended a similar critique to readerly expectations of poetry, that there is a Disneyfied, narcissistic approach to reading, that ‘you go out into the woods and meet a totem animal, a nice deer who likes you’. Poetry has the power to resist a self-centred, comfortable culture, the power to be unlikeable.

Stephenson played his video interpretation of Canadian poet bpNichol’s work, a neat, twisty poem about the process of writing and interpretation, how the physical tools of writing become part of the writing’s meaning: ‘this is a pen moving on paper / metaphorically this is a pen moving on paper / metaphorically the page is a window. it is not.’ Fowler made the very fine point that poetry culture tends to lean altogether too heavily on the idea of the individual genius producing ‘golden nuggets’ from the void. A lot of Fowler’s work comes in facilitating collaboration, and his project today involved tearing up a copy of his own collection and distributing its pages among the audience, who, on cue, read all pages at once; the resulting wall of voices was a neat metaphor for breaking hierarchies. In practice, it was pretty apt, as the audible individuals were the ones who just kept talking long enough. Mulling this over, one notes that one routinely just keeps talking longer than one should. Hm.

The panel concluded with Berg and McMillan’s valuable thoughts about exploitation in poetry – a tendency to beautify or poeticise suffering or other people’s stories. Berg’s collection Hackers features on the cover a photo of a Dutch sex worker; Berg questioned her own motivation – the poet described the image as ‘a Trojan horse’ for the collection to do its work, and recognised the complicated politics of exploiting others’ bodies or acts of witness to one’s own artistic benefit.

1pm: Em Strang, Samuel Tongue, Briget Khursheed, Lindsay McGregor: New Writers Showcase

Anna Crowe’s remarkably effective patiently-smiling-while-audience-settles-down brought the Council Chamber to order for readings from four recent winners of the Scottish Book Trust’s New Writers Award. Em Strang, whose first full collection, Bird Woman, is coming out this year with Shearsman, read a long poem, a nightmarey folk tale full of fire and horses and cries in a language that might have been Scandanavian(?), entirely from memory. It left an Atmosphere in the room unlike anything I’ve seen at the festival thus far. ‘It isn’t our land but it’s all we need. It stood up to the night for a long time.’

Samuel Tongue is the poetry editor at the Glasgow Review of Books and read short lyric poems on language, the materiality of words (the poem ‘Alef-Bet’ analyses how the physical shape of letters affects what they do, ‘alef’ being ‘a stag head already tracking thought’), science and faith. One proposed the ‘extended phenotype’ (the theory that the environment a creature alters may be considered part of its DNA, cf beaver dams) for humans might be the ‘unplumbed lavatory’ left in the street. Tongue’s poems were thoughtful, generous and precise.

Briget Khursheed’s poems also paid close attention to scientific research and the natural world, with a poem for John Smith, the builder for a large part of Walter Scott’s Abottsford estate, admiring the craftwork of the windows into ‘The Little Gothic Orangery’ he had made, insisting ‘but I had nothing to do with the oranges’. Another observes otters and stoats in their natural habitats, ‘maybe dancing, maybe charming a rabbit’, ‘writhing rodent maps’. A poem about the exact moment Khursheed’s father died, with the line ‘heather so perfect it might hide Tunnocks wrappers’ is witty and heartbreaking.

Finally, Lindsay McGregor explored her new collection The Weepers, a historical group of paid mourners (‘rent-a-crowd’). The book concerns the scattering of her partner’s ashes, and ranges from medieval saints plucking out their eyes to escape unwanted courtship (‘she’ll cure the vision of anyone who asks / she is a lesson to us all’) to the life and times of the fairly monstrous Duke of Sutherland, one of the key perpetrators of the Highland Clearances and a firm believer in the efficacy of steam for just about any problem you could think of, but primarily lazy peasants. A poem on scattering ashes under a frozen lake to be eaten by fish is particulary powerful: ‘I let them / feed, then, fishing deep, I net them. / We must eat.’

2.15pm Martyn Crucefix on The Daodejing and Pascale Petit on Tomas Tranströmer Past and Present

Minidisclosure: I’ve met Petit a couple of times.

The Daodejing is a fifth or sixth century BCE document from China, reportly containing all the wisdom of a single librarian from the royal court, who wrote it all down at the behest of a gatekeeper on his way out into the wilderness; as Crucefix notes, that’s probably just a nice story. What’s certain is its concern with effective statecraft, with wisdom extremely tempting to transfer to the present day, as Harry Giles did with his minimalist Orcadian versions in Tonguit. Crucefix’s own versions turn the ‘sage’ or ‘wise teacher’ character into a woman, on the grounds that the text recurrently insists that good government uses ‘female’ power, ‘rising up from below’; this seems an odd and slightly distracting decision, not least given the text’s own advice to refrain from interference while exercising power. But Crucefix’s general interpretation is extremely valuable, insisting on the theory that those who desire power are worst equipped to wield it, ‘those who delight in the sword delight in its function’; he has clearly made an extensive study of the Daodejing and he seemed completely in his element guiding a tour through its ideas.

Petit’s talk on Tomas Tranströmer was a real pleasure, a thoughtful, incisive and evidently delighted close read of some of her favourite poems. Starting with his name, which in Swedish (I’m guessing with some creative license?) goes something like ‘tran (crane, as in the bird)’ ‘stromer (fast-flowing river)’; Petit took this as an aspect of the poet’s habitual birds-eye views and rapid changes of direction. Starting with his first published poem, ‘Prelude’, ‘waking up is a parachute jump from dreams’, Petit follows his ‘filmic’ zoom in/pan out techniques, the way Tranströmer renders abstract ideas in the comprehensibly immediate physical and sensory world.

Also key to Tranströmer’s work is his love of music, particularly Schubert – his poem ‘Schubertiana’ Petit named as a masterwork. Here, he explores the idea that from a particular point in New York one can look at the homes of eight million people; the city is framed as galaxy, and ‘within this galaxy coffee cups are pushed across the counter’; ‘plants have thoughts’, ‘I know that somewhere in those rooms Schubert is being played, and it is more important than anything else’. In ‘Allegro’, ‘I raise my Hayden flag… we do not surrender but want peace’. Among the technical artistry is an engaged and grounded political mind, a value system that considers coffee cups and music, the small pieces of ‘the vast machinery of a vital organism’ as important as the organism itself.

5pm: Fiona Benson and Andrew McMillan: Five O’Clock Verses

Minidisclosure: I’ve previously reviewed both poets, and have had brief twitter chats with McMillan.

It’s been a couple of years since I first read Bright Travellers, Benson’s first collection. I hardly recognised those same poems, and hearing them read so passionately, and at such an intense emotional frequency, did that thing that I pretty much considered an industry cliché – it made them sound like new poems. The honesty and openness of ‘Love Letters to Vincent’ [Van Gogh], which could easily seem silly, workshoppy – imagine you are in a frustrating and emotionally unviable relationship with a historical figure – are in Benson’s hands totally convincing, viscerally affecting. There is powerful, wrenching emotional reality to these scenes, the Great Artist’s simultaneous dependency and disgust on the narrator, the narrator’s pity and desire, the nostalgia for the better person subject to ‘a vertiginous dark which is never done with you, old pal’ and the self-hatred for their own weakness, ‘and I let you in, and I let you in, and I let you in’. It was something special.

McMillan’s work carries a similar emotional maturity, often hidden behind the absurdity of the poems’ surface action; ‘the men are weeping in the gym’ (introduced as ‘If you’ve ever wondered what has happened to 21^st century masculinity, watch men try to talk to each other in the gym. It’s like awkward ballet’) in particular benefitted from a live reading, the little ridiculous twists in each line getting properly drawn out: ‘they have turned water … into protein shakes’. The couple of new poems on show were also beautiful: ‘Fraternal’ has the poet watching his nephew looking after his new baby sister: ‘he is pretending to parent her… this is how we learn the basic wants of people… the body is needful, it must be undressed’. ‘Curtain’ is a brief and disarmingly candid account of a failed sexual encounter backstage, which ends with the speaker with his cock out, bowing deeply. It’s probably coincidental, but this poem came shortly after McMillan shared some of his less appreciative reviews; a recurring idea was keeping one’s feet on the ground. In any case, the reading was one of the best I’ve ever seen at StAnza, two hugely talented and confident poets giving everything for the audience. More of this sort of thing.

 

8pm Nora Gomringer: Poetry Centre Stage

Every time I’ve been at StAnza there’s been some cool sound or noise poetry event, but this was the first time I’ve seen it in pride of place in one of the main event slots. Gomringer is considered a leading German-language poet (acc to Annie Rutherford, who provided a bilingual introduction), and alongside jazz drummer Philip Schultz did a little bit to expand some ideas about what poetry can do, what it looks like, and how many squeaky dog toys may be employed in its creation. Gomringer and Schultz introduced their double act as taking the words of others (including the poet’s father, Eugen Gomringer), and reproducing them in new formats. The pair had a huge amount of energy and bounced off each other beautifully; Gomringer has a huge amount of stage presence and charisma, Schultz’s creative use of unusual percussion props its own kind of physical comedy.

Gomringer’s opening piece was a sound poem that involved play with the component sounds of the word ‘perfection’ (and kind of broke the ice by permitting some weird noises and silly faces). Other highlights included Dorothy Parker’s ‘Frustration’ (‘If I had a shiny gun…’) as performed by a nightclub singer; a performance based around the I Ching, one of the oldest written Chinese texts, including a really sharp bit of silent sound poetry (I guess you’d have to have been there); an autobiographical piece called ‘Family Thing’ in which the poet imagines herself a sister, instead of her seven brothers: ‘if my mother is the mother of invention then invention is my sister, my sister is… invention’. The set closed with a cute piece on being asked to babysit a dog that only speaks English and being given a book’s worth of instructions called ‘How to Love Dog’.

At this point the Fife transport system dictated I must head for the hills, having consumed far in excess of one’s poetry RDA. I know this is a paid gig and superlatives are expected, but it’s a true fact that I’ve never seen crowds like it at StAnza, and paid or not I’ll be coming back next year.

[PS: apologies to everyone I didn’t get a proper chat with on account of running around headless.]

Fiona Benson – Bright Travellers

Full Disclosure: Haven’t read Benson before, though a well-read pal had bigged her up on Twitter, so expecting something good.

Review: It took a long time to come round to Bright Travellers, but it was worth it. It is by some distance the angriest and saddest collection of poems I’ve read in a long time, maybe since Sharon Olds’ Stag’s Leap, and its display of a sharp intelligence pushing itself to some uncomfortable and upsetting emotional places is like no other book on the shortlist.

The fact that the poet’s inner life is so openly dissected in all its messiness, so recklessly explored without (apparent) embellishment, means it isn’t uncomplicatedly recommendable, i.e. the natural first response is to be a little taken aback. To return to Stag’s Leap, where Olds’ anger is calm, directed and wryly at ease with itself, the most common mood of Bright Travellers seems to be a tension between its justified fear of the world it depicts and its anger that the world it depicts should provoke such justified fear. To this end, it’s almost disappointing that the collection should kick off with an apologia, ‘Caveat’, a perfectly fine lyric in its own right but one that begs forgiveness where none is due:

But consider the cactus:
its thick hide
and parched aspect

still harbour a moist heart […]

And, once a lifetime,
when the slant rains fall
there is this halo of flowers.

By the poem’s conceit, ‘this halo’ may be the book in hand. The immediate response is that a prickly and uncompromising cactus isn’t necessarily less interesting than a bed of daffodils. The collection proper kicks off with ‘Dumnonia’, a series of poems commissioned by two Devon-based arts groups. It’s an odd way to kick off a first collection, and while the poems are strong and do a decent job of establishing the collection’s direction, they have the feeling of being tacked on at the front. With each of Bright Traveller’s sections prefaced by a single poem, this group of occasional-feeling pieces feel a little extraneous and perhaps better deployed elsewhere. That said, ‘Rougemont for Temperance Lloyd’ is a powerful piece of historical recovery; Temperance Lloyd was one of the last three people executed for witchcraft in England, a witty and apparently fearless woman of around eighty, who the poem renders:

You are a thin thought turning over the walls
in a grey wind, transparent, spider-weight.
I’d have you angry and impenitent and brave.
I’d have you fly from the drop in the shape of a rook,
its rag-and-bone, its bloodshot eye.

before concluding that Lloyd is ‘pleased overall / to be looked at, riding in this cart, when all / your life you’ve been invisible and walked.’ Benson’s ability – with as little manipulation of the facts as necessary – to turn a moment of injustice on its head is breathtaking, performed as well as anything in Heaney. It’s a poem to savour.

Immediately afterwards is ‘Love-Letter to Vincent’, a series she describes in an insightful interview with Granta as coming from a period of writer’s block. The sequence’s narrative (though narrative is not at all its main concern) is of the speaker’s uneven and often emotionally abusive relationship with Van Gogh, here depicted – as realistically as can be discerned by historical documents such as his own letters to his brother, one of which is quoted in the epigraph – as a sort of unstable genius. On first reading I was hugely put off by the sequence’s power dynamics: in the opening poem, the speaker describes herself as ‘your wounded girl, your damned and lovely prostitute’; in ‘Pear Tree in Blossom’ are the lines ‘your mouth sweet to kiss, / your sticky beard … Christ. I never thought I’d beg’; ‘Sunflowers’: ‘I listen to you move in the other room / and I burn; your meanest tread outside my door / and I almost come, but you never enter in.’ Ostensibly the sort of writing that I tend to chew out men poets for. And while it might be true that the early poems in the sequence partly perpetuate the powerful artist/silent, suffering muse dynamic, their aim (I think) is in foregrounding the woman’s perspective, and so undermining a very familiar setup. Benson presents this relationship entirely without frills or excuses, in all its taboo-exploring, self-destructive, Stockholm syndromey recklessness. We might hope that the poems’ speaker fare better in future, but ‘Love-Letter to Vincent’ is an important account in its own right, depicting in no uncertain terms the damage done to both parties by the relationship’s uneven distribution of power.

The turning point seems to come in ‘Portrait with a Bandaged Ear’, in which the painter repeatedly shows up at the speaker’s door, ‘and I let you in and I let you in and I let you in – / remember the long afternoons of our youth / spent wrapped in the covers as if night would never come, / how fierce you were and clear, back then. […] we’re running / out of grace. Men will come and ask me to confirm / your name. I want you strong and well. Please stay.’ The speaker’s acquiescence is reframed as an active defence of the better part of a disintegrating mind, and the sequence’s focus changes accordingly. Van Gogh slips into the background, and the next piece, ‘Irises’ seems increasingly to speak to the poet over the painter: ‘Art’s not all you’d hoped […] There’s remedy yet. / Today you may not make a master-mistress piece: / so what? […] Get back to work.’ Intriguingly, the sequence’s conceit fades as the poet regains her own power of composition, as ‘Place du Forum’ puts it, gets ‘in it for the long haul’. It’s this capacity for layered reading that makes Bright Travellers such a fascinating, compulsive re-read, and makes its exuberant presentation of its own instability lodge in the imagination. As Benson notes in the Granta interview, Olds and Matthew Dickman are presiding influences, and while Dickman’s poems might err on the preening or the self-conscious pose, Benson is able to pack more of a punch without even a whiff of emotional grandstanding. This sequence is an exciting one, and it’s a real treat to be trusted enough as a reader to make mistakes on the first read.

The book’s final section features poems on pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, some of which are marvellously powerful and written in a kind of weary-but-undefeated tone established elsewhere in the collection. ‘Sheep’ in particular is noteworthy in its stoical assertiveness, conflating a horrific scene of a dead ewe being picked apart by crows and chickens with the poet’s own miscarriage, but ending with ‘Yet once it was done I got up, / gathered my bedding / and walked.’ Similar is the exceptionally dark-humoured ‘Repairs’, which sees the midwife ‘holding pins / between her tightened lips // as she works / with both hands / round the wound / to stitch me back in.’ These last poems are again impressive in their willingness, if not eagerness, to self-portray as frightened or discontent or simply absurd, and all in a form that never loses sight of its purpose, giving the poem the formal control that permits/compliments its imaginative unmannerliness. The lines toward the end of ‘Small Mercies’ are beautifully weighted and perfectly unresolved: ‘partly longing to be free / and partly unable to wish myself / anywhere but here’.

At the end of the second or third readings, the only sincere criticism I could think of is the book’s slightly incongruous title. The unit ‘bright travellers’ comes in a poem called ‘Visitations’, and refers not to the foetal outline on the book’s cover but the invisible beings the poet’s child stares at in ‘blank corners’ of the room. It’s a wispy phrase that does little to highlight the best parts of the collection, its controlled rage, its emotional frankness. I suspect shenanigans.

Tl;dr: It’s a great book, and if it took me a few reads to really get what it was trying to achieve then more fool me. Despite the very weird and not necessarily beneficial editorial decisions I’d happily recommend it to anyone, and I suspect it’ll be deep in the running when the prize winners are announced.