"Reckless Paper Birds" by John McCullough (Penned in the margins, 2019)

Poems from Rialto, Stand, White Review, etc. Here's how "Tender Bodies" starts -

I keep trying to slip away through the crowd but history won't take its mouth off my body

He does a lot of this - the second clause's meaning is clued by the first clause, though the metaphor complicates. His past (or society's past - the masses) hampers his independence? Perhaps later there's clarification? In the final stanza there's

because I'm not the only one falling, I'm in a crowd, a loose democracy of descent, velocity with its hands all over our bodies

which is metaphor-rich. "I" and the crowd return, there's a sense of collective fate. Elsewhere in the book mouths are prone to taste bodies. In "Flamingo" he again takes 2 or 3 image streams and conflates them - "We prefer shallow water,/ gathering in hundreds at night clubs/ by the shore. The powder cakes/ we bring say EAT ME and we do, gobbling up beakfuls till our heads turn/ upside-down". I guess this is what Helen Mort's "synaesthetic" comment on the front cover alludes to - the mixed metaphors, intermixing of tenor and vehicle.

From the start of the book the formats of the poems are

• couplets
• couplets, each second line indented
• sextets
• triplets, staggered lines
• 2-column, the 2nd column empty on odd lines, the 1st column empty on even lines. It's read left-to-right, not column by column.
• alternate lines indented
• triplets
• couplets, using gaps instead of commas

Needless to say, despite the variety of formats, the style of the content barely changes. At times, the combinations of imagery seem similarly random, as if he splats images against the page, hoping enough will stick. They often do. Even in a poem that struggles, there are often worthwhile (or at least surprising) parts -

• "I've pictured the least offensive escapes: being carried off by two thousand rogue butterflies or quietly evaporating through his keyhole" (p.18)
• "The sea is always sorry. It is talking in its sleep" (p.37)
• "each fingernail is a screensaver of somewhere I've never been, a white hill beneath a giant sky of pink ghosted with cloud" (p.40)
• "you fix small wheels to my foolishness so it turns into a vehicle we drive about in" (p.49)
• "On this window, the Boeing 767 overhead appears in each raindrop as though it's laid planespawn and is leaving its young behind" (p.51)
• "By the kerb, there are scattered aquarium stones, green and orange, like someone from My Little Pony took a dump." (p.52)
• "I am the dead pigeon beneath a Volvo, the sweat that gathers in the creases of a sofa sleeper's brow and this hoverfly that tugs itself in angled lines, a cursor that clicks on each part of my garden to see if it will open " (p.83)

The Falling/diving and paper themes appears intermittently - "Birds plummet from shelves without bothering to flap, remember nothing" (p.12), "we speed through the air together, reckless paper birds. They will find us with our beaks wide open" (p.15), "Your skilful face punches a giant hole in the day and I jump through it" (p.17), "I will learn to fall with my eyes fixed on the ground" (p.19), "I'm not a bird at all but a man drawn on folded wrapping paper, cut out and pulled into fifteen of myself" (p.64).

I like "Flock of Paper Birds" most. I found much of the book interesting.

Other reviews

• Maria Taylor (There is a powerful sense of tension between body and soul ... While Andrew McMillian wrote Physical, McCullogh’s Reckless Paper Birds is perhaps its Metaphysical counterpart.)
• Diane Mulholland (McCullough moves effortlessly from one seemingly random subject to the next, from Lady Gaga, to silkworms, to My Little Pony, but this collection is far from incohesive. These poems are proof that anything can be a conduit for delight if we pay attention, and that while life may be unpredictable and difficult, the desire to continue living is strong)