"Certain to be one of the most read and talked-about poetry collections of the year", the blurb says. I'm struggling to find any reviews online. The back cover says the book contains some "musings" and has quotes by Anne Stevenson, Elaine Feinstein and Ruth Fainlight. The front cover's quote is by Brian Nellist who no doubt I should have heard of. Oh well.
The first section of the book was inspired by Montale, so don't expect anything simple and strong. Here's the start of an early poem, "Bibliomythos"
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To discover you, of the calm, precise mind, incarnate at the core of my obsession is to face a book that stirs, acquires a backbone, and crawls out of the water, mortal, moral, peppercorn eyes amassing strings of light-cells. |
Quite a lot's going on here - word-play (mor[t]al) beneath an over-arching analogy. The 1st line's "of the" disrupts rather gratuitously - "with your" would read more smoothly. The 2nd line could have been "incarnate at my obsession's core". "acquires a spine" would perhaps be too obvious. I presume that "light-cells" are "light-detecting cells".
"Sunflower Chorus" is in couplets, some more opaque than others. Here are a few
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Which one? We're inter-changeable. Fibonacci Sussed our spiral soul. Don't trust us ... We like the masks - but, in your caves, no surgeon Reports on a commedia dell'arte. ... In love at least you're curious, carbon but Polar, not much lower than the angels |
Part 1 is booklet-sized, but this is a "2 for the price of 1" offer because part 2, "Blind Spots", is 60 pages. Family, health, and a trace of politics feature. There's some good period imagery e.g. "the empire steams and streams/ Like cooks' pink custard (magic!) over school grub". The variety of forms and accessibility continues. Here's the start of "A Calepin for Dr. Brewer"
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Aretinian Syllables, sing To our Bevy of sky-sipping, 'timid, Gregarious' Candidates ('Lat. Candidatus, clothed In white'). Not for donkey's years have we dreamed Of Evans's Supper Rooms, where the air blushed blue, Refurbished, and our Familiar of Assisi, Home from Glubbdubdrib Hock-shop, Poorer than Irus, back in his Portiuncula. |
There's some looking-up to do, but here as elsewhere she nearly always writes in well-formed sentences. "Almost True: A Guided Walk through Larkin's Cottenham" edges more towards prose. Here's the final stanza
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What will survive? The work of course, we cried, The work, But every instinct understood How tenderly, to those with whom you'd shared Mere life, you would have turned, And vanished through the dusk of memory, leaving The experts to debate the barely heard. |
Sometimes lines begin with caps, sometimes they don't. There are prose poems (which I don't get), terza rima, a Pantoum, a Sestina, a Crown of Sonnets and villanelles too. "After a Deluge" is in a campanological pattern. "English Bridges" comprises 2 interspliced pieces (prose, actually). I'm not so sure about all the standard forms though; some seem to adversely affect the content. The following isn't hot, given that it's 25% of a poem
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Two dates that span The life, distilled From gazing child To faded man, |
Something for everyone, and a lot to choose from, though I'd be impressed by anyone with wide enough tastes to like it all.
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