"The Golden Mean" by John Glenday (Picador, 2015)

Poems from Ploughshares, Atlantic Review, etc. 8 are "after" a poem/poet.

The poems on pages 3-6 might serve as a sample of the book. They brought out a range of reactions in me. I didn't like "A Pint of Light" - a little idea, and little development of it. I preferred "Self Portrait in a Dirty Window", where there's more play of conflicting concepts - reflection vs transparency, mimesis vs imagination, etc. "Primroses" seems to be getting over-excited about not much - pumped-up poetisms. "Algonquin" made me suspicious too because it uses some tricks of the trade: things forgetting themselves, an unseen lone bird - "Late mists/ forget themselves"; "Somewhere not here, a loon calls/ out the word for darkness twice,/ then turns into the silence and its song". One of these poem's in triplets, two are in couplets, and one has 7-lined stanzas, which seems pretty much random to me.

At times reading the book I feel manipulated. "The Lost Boy" ends with "silence is their only song", which sounds familiar. It takes more than a mention or two of "song", "night", "moon", "angel" or "soul" to make me feel the mystery of everyday objects. A phrase like "one song to hang like nothing over everything" might be viewed as a paradox pointing towards a deep truth. Alternatively it could be formulaic humbug. The wild indents and line-breaks of "Only a leaf for a sail" don't help.

And yet ... I like the idea of "The Walkers", much of "The Constellations", "The White Stone" reminds me of Eluard (but what do the line-breaks do?) I like "Fireweed" and "Rubble". "Our Dad" has a sonnet's layout, though it's prose.

Other reviews

• Gail Wylie
• Edmund Prestwich (Writing like that embodies a process of careful advance and withdrawal in which every step takes its meaning by being a development or qualification of the steps taken before it. ... Ultimately, no doubt, it’s true of all short poems that the meaning of the parts depends on their relationship to the other parts and the whole, but it’s particularly true of Glenday’s, because of their extreme economy and the way their meanings are found in their step by step self-adjustment. As a result they’re often peculiarly resistant to paraphrase or even understanding ... For me, the absolute triumph of the book is the final piece, “The Walkers”)