Literary reviews by Tim Love.
Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Wednesday 15 October 2014

"Incense" by Claire Crowther (Flarestack, 2010)

A blindspot. Much of the time I don't get the point. When I think I do understand something, I don't much like it. These short poems often contain long info-dumps, and the short lines serve only to highlight weak phrases. My least favourites are "Ask the Heart", "Untitled" ("Ask a woman who's lost four stone/ of (mostly) fat: what's the difference?/ Capacity to jump and run?"), "The Losing Side" ("I cut, cut and forget that liposuction/ could result in a reaccumulation/ of fat that can never be as symmetrical/ as the body was pre-operatively"), "Exemplary Practice", "Recycling Guerillas" (good plot, but no poetry despite the line-breaks). "Over is Almost All of Lover" could have worked ("I've avoided naming a bomb Fat Man. I've considered variants such as Lo") but it's spoilt by the attempt to be poetic. "This Poem Must Take Clothes Off" nearly works. I liked "Rhetoric".

Other reviews

  • Gill Andrews, Matt Merritt and Hilary Menos (Sphinx) (I have two fears. My first is that Claire Crowther calls these poems ‘fatras’ because the theme of the pamphlet is fat. Nice little pun, but that's about it. My second fear is that she’s actually being much cleverer than this and I’m missing something - Hilary Menos
  • ‘The entire sequence is a minor revelation … she is able to locate poetry asleep in the language of science.’ David Morley (Poetry Review)

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