Rebecca Tamás – WITCH

Some disclosures: Have met the poet once briefly, spoken a few times on social media. Review copy provided by Penned in the Margins. I requested and received a text copy of the essay “The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult”, published by The White Review, from Tamás in the process of researching this piece. A heads up for those who need it: the book thoughtfully and carefully critiques violence against women, particularly in a political context – Tamás has discussed in an interview her wish to prevent such scenes from becoming ‘spectacles of women’s pain’. Deepest thanks, as ever, to Muireann Crowley for editing this review.

Review: It’s difficult to know where to start in discussing Rebecca Tamás’ first full-length collection, WITCH. The poems incorporate a huge amount of visual and aural information: in terms of discussing recurring themes (physical pleasure, solidarity between women, fluidity of identity, understanding the past to imagine the future, the sanctity of living, and some non-living, things) and images (dirt/silt/mulch, ash, trees, neon, honey, the colour blue), there is simply too much for any single review to cover. Arguably this is the ideal situation for such a many-minded, open-hearted book.

WITCH spends much of its time following its eponymous character, an immortal being witnessing, on a near-geological scale, the warp and weft of human history. The book playfully casts its ideal reader/listener in one of the few mortal characters in the book, the ‘petrol station boy’ who appears in ‘WITCH EUROPE’ and ‘WITCH AFTER’. He seems genuinely enthusiastic to hear what the witch has to say, and ‘shares a cigarette with her / under the no smoking sign which is his way of saying / I don’t know what to be sorry for but I am sorry’: the witch reserves her stories for those willing to do the work of careful listening. WITCH is precise and agile in its tonal and syntactical shifts: there are many occasions in which it feels like a poem is on the verge of hyperbole, of drifting away from its solid emotional core, but re-centres itself immediately with some casual turn of phrase that takes the breath away. For an example, here’s a short passage from ‘WITCH AND THE SUFFRAGETTES’, noting the gear-change into the last line:

‘the witch wonders what happiness could possibly look like
at some point it went wrong and even though she’s very old
she doesn’t know exactly when that point was
but she’s thinking that the most likely is probably Orpheus
when Orpheus was singing it was so marvellous and Eurydice sang too
obviously they were a great couple’

Earlier, the poem locates the forced feeding of the suffragettes in a history of punitive measures against women, like the scold’s bridle. Here, space is made for a moment that almost dismissively punctures the gravity and distance of both history and myth, one which allows that deflation to bring home the poem’s drama. It continues:

‘Orpheus went back to get Eurydice from death as we know
but he wouldn’t let her make her own way out of the rubble seek into the scratch of
each step that is not knowing always not knowing […]
her song is still down there somewhere’

One of the great strengths of WITCH is its instinct for when to be explicit (that is, make an uncomfortable truth unignorable) and when to trust the reader’s engagement. In the myth, Eurydice is a treasure to be won and lost by Orpheus, here she is a person. It’s a simple change, but one that reorients the entire scene: the poem draws out echoes between Orpheus and the prison guards, who both fatally considered their charges incapable of self-determination. The poem explores how political change rarely comes with ‘lots of clear light pouring in gold fantastic gold’, more often with undignified physical suffering, that ‘the smell of freedom is the smell of vomit’. The final image is one of visionary anger, the witch conjuring a scene that sustains her mind when her body is made abject:

‘all the fires coursing up the townhouses […]
were all already there cracking and flailing
and spitting
the pleasure of seeing everyone see it
their white eyes fat with flames
it is all burning it has all been burning us’

 

*             *             *

 

‘WITCH MARS’, ‘WITCH EARTH’ and ‘WITCH VOLCANO’, meanwhile, are characterised by weariness and a wish for escape. Often this manifests formally, as the propulsive lines seen elsewhere waver and halt, becoming structurally simpler than the rest of the collection:

‘mars is just lovely […]
witch says to herself that no one has ever been hurt here […]
no one has corrupted mystics still pure and flashing like neon signs’ (‘WITCH MARS’)

‘what the earth deserves
so much
so much more
than dead bodies […]

the earth likes wolves at least
you can give it wolves
you can give it
that’ (‘WITCH EARTH’)

‘Witch lies on the volcano
amongst creeping language […]

the witch has too many reasons to part from the earth but she won’t part […]
she cannot go home from the world’ (‘WITCH VOLCANO’)

In each of these instances – as in ‘WITCH AND THE SUFFRAGETTES’ – a moment of profound sadness is countered, however forlornly, by imaginative force. In ‘WITCH VOLCANO’, the witch seems to recover her strength, or at least starts moving again, after watching a congregation of ghosts in what feels like a communal ritual of healing:

‘ghosts are pink and blue and gold            agile birds
they are safe when they can change
safe when they can mourn and have voice to mourn
safe when they can hurt                                safe and entirely shattering
all of them crowding up into each other’s skinny arms
transparent clever yearning bodies and eyes […]

the witch watches the charged belonging air
rubs her foot in the salt lava
intimate and hot as god’

The ghosts manifest as an emblem of ideal community: their ghostliness allows them to present their ‘organs pulsing and held out like gifts’ to each other, a surreal enactment of one of the book’s key principles, the relative paucity of hard boundaries between one self and another. (This is grimly echoed in ‘WITCH FIRE’, as the deathless witch’s body disintegrates into many others at the stake.) As Tamás notes in an interview with Alice Hiller, the book celebrates ‘being amorphous, open’, and that ‘The witch doesn’t really believe in gender. […] Witch is male. Witch is female.’

While this mode of thought – disdainful toward taxonomy, faithful to mess – informs much of the book’s communitarianism, anti-facism and socialism, it might be worth hovering around gender a second longer. In her essay in The White Review, “The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult”, Tamás talks about Silvia Federici’s landmark study, Caliban and the Witch, which examines how the category ‘witch’ is delineated and propagated by early colonialist European states as a pretext for wiping out generations of women’s social power and shared knowledge in the witch hunts of 1580-1630. Prior to this, the ‘devil’ was a capable, if easily defeated, trickster in most European folklore; during the witch hunts he was co-opted as an inversion of social norms, playing strongly on stories of him offering sexual and social freedoms outwith the authority of husband and state. In WITCH the devil explicitly exhibits genderfluidity through his ability to shapeshift, an embodied freedom from binaries, in a way that harmonises with the book’s opposition to political strictures.

Tamás is an excellent storyteller, WITCH accommodates an impressive amount of emotional and scholarly information, and it is absolutely possible to relish the messy, intimate, glorious relationship the witch and the devil enjoy without considering any of the above. When placed in their literary-historical context, however, as representatives of those excluded and punished in the name of social cohesion, the layers of meaning and possibility that constitute ‘WITCH AND THE DEVIL’ begin to become apparent. There’s too much of it to quote satisfactorily, but here’s a taste:

‘when the witch first met the devil the devil was
a beautiful man and a beautiful woman
the devil had long eyelashes and a body that was hard and soft
at the same time so that you wanted to hold him
and also be held by her […]

the devil liked getting up early which is what the witch liked so they would go out
before anyone else was around and they would act out satanic rituals in the woods […]
and also the light had the green tint of rusted copper and took part in the celebrations […]
the witch didn’t just feel like she was getting what she wanted she felt like everyone
everywhere was getting what they wanted’

The specifics of their relationship are, like much of the witch’s life, marked by hyperreality: one could easily read blood sacrifices as a spooky proxy for long walks on the beach. The early parts of the poem run away with themselves rhythmically, absent of decelerative punctuation, and the descriptions of their sex life – ‘the devil had all the sexual organs you could / want’ – exhibit perhaps the richest blend of earnest joy, comedy by exaggeration, and thematic seriousness in the whole book. A real treasure is the poem’s treatment of the witch and devil’s breakup (if that’s what’s meant by goodbye), a mature and loving conversation:

‘when the witch said goodbye to the devil
they didn’t get overtly emotional but they held onto each other
for a long time until there was a flow of breath back and forth
that was entirely equal in the air passing through their mouths’

I can’t recall many poems that not only explore sexual/romantic relationships as loci of nuanced mutuality and regard the end of said relationship not as failure, but change, but also extrapolate that thread into its broader political thinking. As the devil notes in an intimate moment: ‘you had to make a decision are you prepared to destroy yourself / for freedom even though it will be really awful and maybe worse than not freedom’. The lovers’ sensitivity and, unlike Orpheus, willingness to let go at the right time, informs and is informed by their attitudes to the world at large.

 

*             *             *

 

Alongside the witch poems are twenty-one spells. In Tarot, the twenty-first Major Arcana is The World, associated with the completion of a cycle or fulfilment of what is willed, and often represented by a figure both male and female, heavenly and mundane. This feels like too much of a coincidence not to be intentional. It may be that the spells are intended to be read like tarot cards, a suggestive space for self-reflection that does not require or even encourage a conclusive answer. Though the witch poems often abide by obscure logic, they are identifiably in the process of forming a narrative or argument; the spell poems feel like momentary embodiments of the moods of those poems, their rational scaffolding forgone. ‘spell for joy’ begins:

‘THESUN THESUN THESUN

nothing can be trusted!
raise up your rinsed hands!
terrible fury and becoming!
take off your clothes!’

The poem seems more interested in the visceral effect of reading these words than in their logical force as conjoined thoughts, in this case the idea that ‘joy’ as an experience is also a kind of recklessness, a conscious rejection of security and stability. These could be read as speech acts by the witch herself, a shift from third to first person and an outlet from the boundaries of being narrativized. Although a very different experience to the acts of readerly empathy required in the witch poems, the experience of digesting:

‘I see a shaking which is total and absolute fear

one day yr gonna die!

the hot impossible apple of
your perfection’

is a little unsettling, but has a weird carefulness to it, a camaraderie, and there is unmistakable love in those last lines. I keep hearing ‘one day yr gonna die!’ while going about my business over the past few days, a chipper, ominous earworm.

This positive estrangement is perhaps most powerfully articulated in ‘spell for reality’, a poem that stands out among the spells for its calm and thoughtful pacing, the relatively clear provocation in the first lines, ‘what do you do when the answer to / too much is absolutely nothing?’ The poem carries echoes of MacNeice’s ‘Snow’, which Tamás studies in her White Review essay, in its worrying around the edges of perception, of accepting that the ‘more’ between MacNeice’s ‘snow and huge roses’ might be ultimately unsayable, but no less real for it. ‘spell for reality’ continues:

‘sometimes the ashy body in the ground seems
to have all the answers
ultimate realness             nasty truth as the final only truth
why then             this stupid relentless yearning for snow
why the                honey   and talking’

What Tamás and MacNeice seem to agree upon is that human beings are, finally, as subject to the whims of nature as any other creature. By exploring these fundamental questions about the nature and sanctity of living things, their inscrutable yearnings, the fire and the honey, they also recognise that there is something more to it than meets the eye, and that wondering about what that more might be is a fine way to spend what life we have.

 

*             *             *

 

WITCH feels like the right book at the right time. It’s a book that valorises political literacy, and figures its own feminist and socialist beliefs as inextricable from its aesthetics. What comes across most clearly is that this collection is, at heart, a gift. The witch is constantly mindful of who might need her strength, who might need her understanding, who deserves either or both. Tamás and Sarah Shin’s anthology, Spells: 21^st-Century Occult Poetry, demonstrated the appetite for an approach to ritual, spirituality, and philosophical inquiry. It is clear that ‘witch’ means a great many different things to a great many different people, and WITCH opens those possibilities ever further.

 

Further reading: Rebecca Tamás – “The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and Occult Language”, The White Review

Alice Hiller – “I Wanted to Think About the Possibility of a Revolution Based on Female Principles: Interview with Rebecca Tamás”

Rebecca Tamás – “The Enchantment of Disenchantment: Wallace Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning’ & Ecopoetic Potential”, Wild Court

Patricia Ferguson – “Filth and Glory: Review of WITCH by Rebecca Tamás”, EcoTheo Review

Silvia Federici – Caliban and the Witch: The Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia)

Sarah Shin & Rebecca Tamás, eds. – Spells: 21^st-Century Occult Poetry (Ignota Press)

Katie West & Jasmine Elliott, eds. – Becoming Dangerous: Witchy Femmes, Queer Conjurers, and Magical Rebels (Fiction & Feeling)

Amaan Hyder – At Hajj

Disclosure: Have not met Hyder. The book discusses several aspects of Islam including the eponymous pilgrimage, and the experiences of moving to a hostile new country, of which I have no experience, and many nuances of which I’ve probably missed. Review copy provided by Penned in the Margins. Huge thanks, as ever, to Muireann Crowley for editing this review.

‘The old man has fallen over. He runs over to him and lifts him and the old man holds onto his arm and takes hold of his stick and he tries to sit the old man down but in his position it is more comfortable for him to lean on the cane. It is easier standing up. Sitting down, the man would be dependent on him completely.’ (‘At Hajj’)

Review: At Hajj is Amaan Hyder’s first collection. It’s comprised of a series of narrative scenes from the eponymous pilgrimage to Mecca woven among more traditionally lyric pieces, most, if not all, of which are set in an unspecified British space. The book’s twin threads are not connected explicitly (bar one poem which discusses trans-generational attitudes to religious traditions), and it’s reasonable to believe they may be enacted by different characters, the various scenes at Mecca told from the point of view of at least one man and at least one woman, and all in third person. Certainly the self at the heart of the book’s lyric poems is notable by their relative absence, performing fascinating acts of narrative positioning to keep the poem’s focus on the lives of others; the speaker’s parents, brother, friends, neighbours and neighbourhood:

‘You’re going to look back and

I’m going to look back and
there’s been this van up and down
past the shop really slow.’

The first instalment of the ‘At Hajj’ sequence, meanwhile, introduces a book-long quiet attentiveness to the thoughts and actions of others:

‘He sees people standing to pray, putting their hands on their knees and drawing up and going down to touch their foreheads to the ground. These are the movements his thoughts make. […] They sit long after the prayers are over and ask what they have to ask for.’

The ‘At Hajj’ poems are all printed in italics, a typographic convention that usually indicates quotation, emphasis, or voices-off. Here, it seems to act as the introduction to a special world, or an alternate form of address, a different frame of mind. The language is plain and spare and methodical. Its painstaking, precise description of the body and its motions feel strange on a first read; it is unusual to be asked to spend so much thought on so ordinary a motion. The passage of time in this scene is key: the ‘he’ doing the watching has clearly been doing so for a substantial span of time, watching the prayers without praying himself. There’s a kind of mirroring between how carefully Hyder has crafted the passage, in its precise ambiguity, and the attention the figure in the poem gives to the worshippers; there is more than one level in ‘the movements his thoughts make’. The last line pushed me gently off-balance too: are they asking for advice on what to ask for, or is this an elegant way of describing the manifold things people request in prayer? Perhaps this careful observation of the everyday, this dedicated, time-consuming attentiveness to the bodies and thoughts of others is the poet’s own act of worship.

The spiritual and the profane are blended and combined throughout the book. In two poems, ‘Mohammed’s Mobile’ and ‘Calling Mohammed’ Hyder imagines the prophet as a contemporary, partly filtered through the speaker’s brother of the same name. The former begins:

‘I think Mohammed peace be upon him would have had one of those phones that aren’t big or black like you sometimes get in old TV programmes. […] I feel that he would have written his name on the back of his phone because he was a good man. […] I am certain that he would have kept his phone switched off so that he would not disturb other people.’

As in ‘At Hajj’, the most prominent note in both the poems’ atmosphere and its subject matter is this openness, this willingness to speak simply and invite understanding. The opening lines of ‘Mohammed’s Mobile’ enthusiastically inhabit this sincere subjectivity (‘I think…’, ‘I feel…’), lending the speaker a kind of moral certitude  which compliments the casual confidence of their imaginative leaps. The whole poem might well be in a child’s voice, the way children, faced with difficult and alien ideas, attempt to draw them nearer to their own experiences, like asking why there are no dinosaurs in the Bible. The second half of the poem expresses this tone formally, as the prose gives way to ballad meter, with its rumbling, uncomplicated rhythms:

‘My brother’s called Mohammed.
He’s always in our room.
He’s stopped watching TV
and he hates middle school. […]

‘To make my brother happy
we go out on our bikes.
We stay away from others,
eat Bountys in the night.’

The poem’s objects are beautiful in their specificity, ‘The [phone] I mean is the one Faraan my cousin has’, the Bounty bars, their very singularity giving them radiance. The final stanza becomes its own sacred space for the two brothers, safe with the explicit treasure of sweets and the unspoken one of familial solidarity. Where, exactly, the historical-religious figure of Mohammed fits in this scene is hazy, as the poem is definitively rooted in earthly concerns, contemporary consumer society and family politics. The speaker’s imaginative lens provides space for what might be a deeply personal, immediately present interpretation of the prophet, somewhat at odds with the book’s frank, straightforwardly realist presentation of religious acts in its central sequence.

Few of the collection’s lyrics are so readily unpacked, however, and Hyder’s ability to convey meaning tonally and atmospherically is truly remarkable (presuming that I’m picking it up as intended). Many of these short poems create a sensory space for the reader to inhabit, by way of brief snatches of conventional syntax among ostensibly disconnected ideas or images. Here’s the opening section, Alif, from ‘The Clot’:

‘What is a fit?
A holy thing is a fit.
A life is a fit.

I hear fifty machines stitching,
inking a grip.
Someone came to the door.

Someone was listening to us.
When I wake I am told what happened.
I pressed eject, mouths my father.

I pressed enough, mouths my mother.
She leaves in a car that shoots light.’

The drama conveyed in a few dozen words is incredible. The haiku-like opening stanza is a formula one could spend hours exploring, the vital qualities of ‘holy’ and ‘life’ left tantalisingly undefined. The following stanzas’ combination of autonomous machines with human listeners creates a kind of dread that could not have been rationally expressed; the fact that the father and mother cannot physically speak, and communicate only in the low-tech language of magnetic tape, is deeply unsettling. That last line makes my hair stand on end, the passive verb, the supernatural vehicle.

Using similar techniques for near-opposite purposes, the opening lines from ‘Wet Collected’:

‘Dancers stamp
Earth! Earth!

Coy Beau, not gym,
don’t bury him in muscle.

The way of flightless birds.
Emerging first,

a drip diving hairs in a beard.’

Who the dancers are, whether they are vocalising ‘earth’ or whether this is the message their dancing bodies convey, is less important than the atmosphere those lines suggest, their notes of physical action, communal movement, joy in the sensory. Whether ‘Beau’ moves like a flightless bird, is a flightless bird, or the moisture in his beard is redolent of flightless birds is less important than the sensation of thinking all these things (probably more) at once. It’s a unique poem in At Hajj, a dreamy interlude in a book in which sensual pleasures are rare.

Bodies, as noted already, are in focus throughout the collection. ‘Sleeves’ is a gorgeous, playful poem about gift-giving and emotional labour. The poem closes as the speaker and his friend share a secret, intimate moment: ‘I put my hands in the pockets with his and our fingers overlapping go in and press and circle and out like zigzags snug-tight hot and the heat is another layer around us too’. The precision, again, is part of the way the poem expresses love. Even ‘What Were Giraffes?’, with its weird, catastrophically suggestive opening line, ‘Remember horses? They were like horses’, keeps the animal’s body at the centre of its thinking: ‘a tough skin / patterned like baked earth’, ‘They had thick eyelashes, Mohawk mane hair’. ‘What Were Giraffes?’ is partly, I think, an attempt to reconcile an unusual body with the human observer’s impulse to impose on the body the category ‘comic / gold’. The poem defends giraffes’ innate worth in a world where they are gone for good, closing on a note both defiant and accusatory, ‘Those were giraffes.’ However ludic its terms, the poem asks the reader how one considers the living worthy or unworthy of respect and survival, what it is about giraffes’ outlandishness that makes their destruction acceptable.

To return to the book’s central sequence, ‘At Hajj’, it’s remarkable how ordinary it often feels. These passages, as noted above, are at times both highly specific – in terms of the physical movement of bodies, the interpersonal dynamics of the pilgrims, the behaviour of a dog – and notably unfixed – there are at most a handful of proper nouns, and although it is heavily suggested that a multitude of peoples and tongues are present, the text denotes them only as speaking ‘in his/her language’. There is no attempt, in other words, to provide ‘local colour’, the market-friendly mangoes demanded by Western publishers and editors, as critiqued in Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation. Perhaps, then, this is one meaning of the italics; a typographical note that readers such as myself have been provided only conditional access to these scenes by narrators who themselves may be working by interpretation. Body language, as in ‘The old man motions that he will wait and gives him stones and tells him to throw them for him’, seems to operate on an equal footing to the spoken.

The poems also seem reserved, if not somewhat sceptical, about one’s access to the spiritual plane. Among their accounts of pilgrims’ struggles to move safely through a crowd, journeying in the desert with only a dog for company, and campsite politics, there is only one short section that even mentions divine immanence, and that with heavy irony:

‘Some onlookers believed that such a spirit was in the mall now, guiding the insiders round, giving them the energy. Yes, and some had their servants carry them the whole Hajj. There was no ghost in the mall but corporate spectre.’

What’s more visible in these narratives than spiritual uplift are physical sacrifices made on the behalf of others. Two separate sections note that their protagonists have hurt their shoulders: a man holds back a crowd to let an elderly man safely use the public toilet; a woman guides an elderly woman get through a bottleneck in the crowd. The narrative voice remains neutral throughout, their suffering simply another fact in an accumulation of facts: ‘What she knows very keenly now is the pain in her shoulder.’, ‘He thinks on what he had done. He puts a hand to his shoulder which aches.’

Although these italicised passages in Mecca are more obviously disconnected to the lyrics set in the West, they are strongly connected by their characterisation of society as a great, unfeeling and irresistible threat punctuated by moments of kindness, ‘Save announcements / of change, it has made a mockery of / all of us’ (‘Inheritable Landscape’). The pilgrims risk their bodies to help those who need it, a man hides the flaws in his friend’s gift, or, in one of the most remarkable poems in the book, ‘Grain’, the weary repetitions of the pantoum form converts the opening stanza:

‘We will look back on our time
as ruined lives and think doing
good work will bear some reward,
but it gives only false impression.’

into a final, hopeful, if to some degree ironised, assertion:

‘Good work will bear some reward.’

It only takes the faintest gesture toward the great evils at work in the world to remember how important, and radical, a thought this is, how substantial change begins with kindness for the vulnerable and contempt for the powerful, how one’s body may be a tool for fighting oppression. At Hajj is intelligent, kind and resolute in its politics, curious, precise and inventive in its aesthetics. It’s a book worth spending time over, worth keeping in mind.

Further Reading: “Coats” by Amaan Hyder in The Guardian

Review of At Hajj by Jeremy Noel-Tod in The Times

Review of At Hajj by Richie McCaffery in The Poetry School

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Ryan Van Winkle – The Good Dark

Full Disclosure: Ryan is a close friend, one of the first poets I met in Edinburgh and a ceaseless source of care and encouragement. I also did a little editing work with him on this manuscript a couple years back, and I’m in the acknowledgements. So get ready for hella objectivity is what I’m saying.

Review: The Good Dark builds on the work done in Van Winkle’s first collection, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here, in its gestures of gift-giving, its intermingling of past trauma with present crisis, its blend of intimate address and a kind of Galway Kinnell-ish emotional proximity to nature. It’s probably useful to think of the book as a kind of stock-taking, an out-of-love letter, an attempt to triangulate the speaker’s life with those closest to him. Unlike a great many broets, however, the poetry of loss in The Good Dark, particularly loss of love, is not bitter or recriminatory, but a kind of analysis, a recognition of one’s own failure, even a manner of apology. The book’s opening poem, ‘The Duke in Pines’, inhabits a time significantly after the initial parting, in a kind of workaday breathing space between loss and closure, which finds its punctum in a dress left behind by the speaker’s partner:

‘sometimes I would open the door and look
at the lichen thing, wonder why it had to hang
like an unwatered fern, wonder if it ever wanted you
the way I sometimes wanted you. And, of course,
it was just a dress and it could not say. And I
was just a young man and I could not say,
even about a dress that did nothing but hang.’

A great many poems would take such an opportunity to embark on a Cavafy-style conflation of lover and lover’s signifier, but ‘The Duke in Pines’ is a quieter, more thoughtful creature, more concerned about telling the truth of its wordlessness than a more dramatic fiction. If there’s an abiding tone in The Good Dark, it’s this kind of stoic sadness, a recognition that other people’s lives are complex, that their interaction with our own more complicated still, that the ways we hurt each other are rarely intentional. And yet through all that Van Winkle’s poetry is primarily, I think, one of gift giving, a faith in the consolatory and conciliatory power of creative gestures, their ability to give us the strength to continue. Take ‘I Do Not Want Rain for Rain’, a poem that looks back from the wet summers in Edinburgh to his childhood in the states; the poem comes in little, five line stanzas shaped like, well, rain:

‘in good dreams
my grandfather takes
my hand, says I am forgiven
for getting to his hospital late,
for the way I speak

to my mother,
for living while he is dead.
And I say thank you and he says to enjoy the rain
while I can. And because he says it, I try.’

This is a silly idea. It would get ummed and ahhed out of most workshops. But Van Winkle makes it work, and it’s difficult to put a finger on why. There’s a sincerity to the poem, an earnestness and an openness about childhood, memory, being a dick to one’s siblings (and ultimately forgiving and being forgiven), and it’s all tied up in this dumb formal trick, its organising metaphors of ice-cream and rain, its little stay against mortality. I love it. Van Winkle specialises in brief, unatomisable lyrics, and in ‘Untitled (Lincoln)’, links Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, starfish, and an extended moment in which the speaker implores the beloved not to run so fast to catch a train. The setup is simple, the execution complex; it opens with a deft piece of deflating irony, maybe even self-parody:

‘Time is nothingness
and this should allow
me to take any transport

I want.’

But in just a few stanzas the poem becomes something caring, sincere, almost painfully vulnerable:

‘And my arms and time
are nothingness and that

should allow you to take
them in your own time,
deliberately, like boarding

a train you know you want’

Sure, it’s a set-piece, it’s a bit of poetic trickery, it gives the emotional investigations of other poems a breather, but it’s difficult not to get a little swept away by its everyday metaphysics, its emotional immediacy.

In ‘Gerontocracy’ (government by and for old men, useful word!), this attempt to understand or explain the speaker’s family is explicitly linked to collapsing relationship in the poem’s present:

‘Maybe you and I needed bills
like old boys on Capitol Hill; maybe
we needed debate, gavel-bangs, and lashings
of whips. But I couldn’t call that government
to order because all I’d ever learned
of government was from Father’s hard hand
and all I ever learned of talking
was from the TV; so loud
it spun out everything honest
so I could not tell what was puppet
and what was shadow.’

Silence begets silence and alcohol, the relationship fails, ‘and we are left with nothing / but noise and the cold majority / of silence below noise’. The extended metaphor picks up the poem’s feeling of entrapment in executive orders whose authority still resonates. It’s an angry poem, and the lines ‘when my mother / finally took to the lawn and threw her eyes / at her own home I think I understood / the single government of my father’ provide a defiant, comprehending gesture, perhaps one the speaker wishes to emulate. At its core, ‘Gerontocracy’ is the record of sabotaged relationships: the speaker’s parents by violence and the his own by an unwillingness to do likewise; even if that’s what the relationship ‘needs’, it is too high a price. When the speaker ‘wished / my own government wasn’t owned / by the same old ghosts of old men’ it’s a recognition of a flaw being managed; the ghosts may have harmed him, but they won’t harm anyone else.

In Tomorrow, We Will Live Here, one of my favourite poems was ‘And Table, You Are Made of Wood’, in which Van Winkle kinda goes, ‘welp, guess it’s just you and me, table’, I imagine in a bar or restaurant somewhere far from home. It has a spiritual successor in ‘One Year the Door Will Open’, in which the poet once again finds solidarity in a stalwart household fixture. Once again, the ostensible silliness of the setup is offset by, or perhaps permits, the seriousness of the poem’s substance; it moves from the blue of childhood and seasides to ‘argument red, family yellow, divorce brown’, ‘been locked and pushed / shut, hung on frames and forced to gaze / through creaking day and slamming night’. Ultimately, however, both door and poet survive, even look with some hope toward the future:

‘Door, I too have stared
at my own brass, have become wood
and squeaked with need. Weathered, pale,
but still here. So we can peer through gloam
and into each other, honest as hinge
and nail, can open and call this home.’

Home is at the heart Van Winkle’s work, a point his poems continually set out in search of and/or find their way back to. It is often a disturbed and unsettling place, as in ‘Untitled (Lynch)’ (‘It doesn’t matter what you know of other places if you’re still trapped in the building’), and the distinctly Lynchian long poem that concludes the collection, ‘Untitled (Snoopy)’. As an aside, the book’s title is partly drawn from Snoopy’s epigraph, ‘It was a dark and stormy night’; it’s a neat bit of ironic undercutting of a title that at first appearances felt portentous, a slightly heavy nod to the Robert Frost-ish New England backdrops of Van Winkle’s ‘nature’ poems. The poem itself is a kind of rangy, free-associative dream quest, alighting on some of the images and scenes from earlier in the book; in many places it expands on the book’s themes of loss of innocence or intimacy, the fear of being caged and the fear of the passage of time, the poem’s formal unrestrictiveness permitting some striking passages:

‘I counted letters
I should have written on the hill,
the butterfly I might have chased,
locked in a jar, carried home.
For, when the night turned stormy,
I could have said, “I have done
something. I have run
for beauty. I have begun.”’

‘But she
began to call me Moon as if
I was far away. Hey Moon, are you
hungry? C’mere Moon, give us a kiss.

Later, I became Mr. Moon. Mr. Moon,
this is serious. We must call a meeting.’

It also permits maybe a little too much, and the stronger passages get a little lost in the meandering. But maybe the concision and thoughtfulness elsewhere in the collection have earned a bit of relaxation, a little breathing space. The Good Dark takes a kind of emotional failure as its point of departure, as a key element of its understanding of the world, and makes from that first shortcoming something beautiful.

Tl;dr: Hey, guess what, I really liked Ryan’s book. Hopefully I have not been blinded by this strange human emotion called friendship.

Hannah Silva – Forms of Protest

Full disclosure: Have seen Silva perform live once. She was pretty great!

Review: Silva’s poems are unlike anything I’ve read. As the video above (and this podcast, absolutely required listening) demonstrate, Silva’s physical voice is central to her aesthetic, removing it a huge risk; the formal aspect of the work is an integral part of the complicated and angry messages that the poems present. Her background in music, theatre and sound poetry inform Forms of Protest from the foundations up, and that the poems’ technical intricacy and often dispassionate removes are transferable to the page at all is a remarkable achievement. That so many successfully convey their political anger and emotional precision is a large part of what makes Forms of Protest a valuable book.

The poems themselves are remarkable for the relative absence of the poetic ego. Only one poem, a startlingly frank snapshot of adolescent life at a boarding school in ‘School of Music’, has anything that could be reasonably identified as autobiographical, which seems like a forceful statement in itself. Here, Silva connects her first sexual experiences with an early understanding of how performance becomes reality, or constructs versions of the self:

Her sex didn’t speak to me, but it didn’t hurt;
it didn’t give or take but at least it was easy.
Afterwards, I remember thinking –
man or woman, it doesn’t matter, but there has to be love.

Placed alongside the more dynamic analyses of public language, ‘School of Music’ is far more conventional a poem, lyrical-minded and intimately anecdotal. But the poem has a major role to play in the collection’s drama, asserting the poet’s basic faith in the sanctity our most personal relationships. Though this poem’s long lines might feel baggy and a little insubstantial, their casual directness is a concerted departure from the book’s norms; without it, there would be little to suggest that the book’s attacks on political mealy-mouthing or the commodification of women’s bodies was built on an essential hopefulness that it might change for the better. We might fruitfully compare Silva’s approach to teenage sexual awakening to Keston Sutherland’s, another political-minded avant garde poet; Silva’s story is no less about disappointing and unglamorous first encounters, but is far more generous to its actors, less willing to play the scene for shock value. In depicting a young woman taking control of her sexuality, Silva undermines the narratives of domination and exploitation presented in Odes to TL61P.

The book’s most powerful pieces often come from repurposing oppressive language, illuminating its most harmful aspects without manipulating much of the source matter. In ‘@Prosthetics’ (a powerful sound poem you can hear at around 3.30 on the linked podcast) the line ‘twenty percent of those with prosthetic / limbs will go back into war’ is placed alongside other quotes from a documentary on the subject, like ‘amputation is the first step / in rehabilitation’. The difference between the fragmented and traumatised audio version to the straight-talking text is noticeable, but that the finished product was allowed to go through such a dramatic change and retain its conviction is impressive. Similarly, the following poem, ‘Mannequin’, draws unsettling connections between the ‘breezy’, ‘Oh so perfect!’ register of fashion marketing and the poem’s violent dramatization of achieving its demands, ‘smile s s s split spill slip lip tears tears ears chic cheek’. In the poem’s closing line Silva shows her flair for the blunt force conclusion, for pushing the poem’s subtext back into the source text, ‘Headless mannequins are the ultimate choice for flexibility!’

Similar strategies are in play in ‘Tory Party Sonnet’: ‘There are some women, it is true, small numbers, / bright colours’, and the long sequence ‘Opposition’, which forms a kind of centrepiece in the collection. In it the rhetoric of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ speech in 2010 is performed in all its echolalic glory:

It’s great to be here in Liverpool
we’re happy about that.
I’ve been in Downing Street
it’s great to be here in Liverpool.
We’re happy about Downing Street
it’s great to be here in Liverpool.

The poem is high pastiche and sometimes leans towards the straightforwardly comic (‘My Big Passion / The Biggest Budget Deficit / My Big Idea / The Biggest Past Decade / Big Britains / Big Uglies’), but what keeps its edges sharp is the timely deployment of real, horse’s-mouth rhetoric, not least the iconic and devastating ‘Calm down dear’, which Silva gives its own section and might be the crux of the poem. The patronising remarks the Prime Minister made to MP Angela Eagle, then Shadow Secretary to the Treasury, are condescended to the Big Society at large, while the poem’s conclusion is a stark reminder that objections to this attitude might have no impact at all: ‘Yes, there will be objections / but you know what? / We’re happy about that.’ The smiling face of neoliberalism remains unmoved, an avuncular hair-ruffle to the wholesale hollowing out of democratic accountability.

Among these are some beautiful elegies to Silva’s literary forebears, which could easily be overshadowed by the bolder-coloured pieces. ‘Le Momo’, for Surrealist Antonin Artaud, a rather beautifully expressed hope for the perfect, inclusive artistic experience tied to the perfect, inclusive death: ‘I wish to die holding my boots / following a session on a block of wood […] my daughters are watching, my friends / join in with an axe’. Please note, if you want to take a shortcut to the soft and squidgy part of my imagination, just write about wanting to hang out and make art with your friends. I’m a sucker for it. And ‘Le Momo’ hits that spot right between the eyes: ‘Over night we make a new language / then at the crossroads we are abandoned / by all possible human feeling.’ In a similar vein is ‘The Riverbank’, written for the feminist experimental poet/playwright Kathy Acker, who might well be one of the book’s patron spirits: ‘She didn’t know what it meant / when she walked through the city of the rich / and no one touched her, except physically.’ Again, the lyric elegy is the governing register, its closing line ‘You will leave behind an immensely human smell’ linking the book’s empathetic spine to its various political nerve clusters; how do you remain positive, particularly sex-positive, in a world that asks ‘What do you do with a slut?’ Much more quietly, but no less clear-sightedly, than other poems in the collection, ‘The Riverbank’ dramatises the narrowing of options for one who refuses to abide by social norms.

Tl; dr: And this is, I think, why I like Forms of Protest so much. It manages to explore its radical core, its steeping in radical theory and sense of technical adventure (though in a few pieces, like ‘Arvo crash’ and ‘Translations’, I struggled to rationalise the effort taken to understand with the relative simplicity of that understanding) while maintaining its lyric sensibility, its emotional receptivity, without which the book’s political anger might lose its force. These poems, too, are immensely human.