Rather unpredictable both at the level of poems and lines. You never know what well be on the next page. I admire how she's gone back to basics. For the journey from the world to words, what needs to be packed? Apparently NHS forms rather than renaissance ones, tech rather than formalist techniques. Formats abound.
All the same, "<h>Cutting Back on Work Shifts</h1>" puzzles me. It might look like HTML to the uninitiated but the bugs are serious and various enough to require explanation. That "<body>" is ended by "<body>" rather than "</body>" might be explained psychologically (preferring to re-start the body rather than end it) but that doesn't apply to "<h>". The value of "src" in the "img" tags lack an opening quote-mark. Why? The grandfather (the poem's in his voice) worked for years as a computer engineer. Now he has dementia. I guess that explains it. His decline, death, and the narrator's attempts to cope with the subsequent grief, is the main thread of the book.
It's easy to pick out quotable phrases -
- My grandmother holds the rosary beads like a line of pills she wants to overdose on (p.9)
- Research shows our memory of music remains intact,/ like the clothes of a missing child kelpt by a mother;/ the brain stores music in a different place,/ - a subtle precaution (p.14)
- it must hurt for someone you love/ to remember a song in clearer detail than your face (p.14)
- When you are running from the dark even a light bulb will feel like God's eye socket (p.25)
- I am so beautiful death can’t take its eyes off me. (p.27)
- Grief is the most expensive thing I own. I hide it in a safe box, I admit I only wear it for special occasions where men will bid to buy it off me (p.28)
- A rope was found clinging to his neck. We think it was a halo failed by gravity (p.49)
- Somewhere a doctor is being trained to prevent the word dead wobbling on his tongue like a fallen star (p.51)
- we debate which song transports our body to the womb of another world (p.52)
- Jesus wept/ for at the time of the painting/ blue was a more expensive colour than gold/ but times change/ and we invent new ways to cheapen God (p.55)
There's a "golden shovel" (this time a poem's lines begin with the same 2 words as a Plath poem does) - an increasingly popular form.
My favourites were "WikiHow To Find Things You Have Lost" and "Black Marilyn". "Tayloring grief" is online.
Other reviews
- Niroshini Somasundaram (The unnamed grandfather’s death after years of enduring Alzheimer’s disease propels the poet to explore the meanings of existence, identity, faith, and suffering. Biblical imagery and wordplay are central to this collection ... Poems are variously presented as computer coding, live reportage, prayers, algorithms, Wikipedia entries and hip-hop lyrics ... The face, as in ‘shadow be thy face’, is a recurrent theme throughout the collection, as is the language of leakage and spillage of urine and body parts.)
- Carmina Masoliver (Insomnia is a Cheap Drug uses the form of drug prescription notes where each stanza is placed inside a table. Closer is divided into seven small sections with subheadings, including a questionnaire and a series of prose poems.)
- Hannah Williams (‘Rebuke The Bad Death’ highlights how indeed most ‘language has no translation for suicide’. To me, if a word doesn’t have a translation, it means people do not have the tools to talk about it. ... This piece subtlety highlights the stigma of suicide in the Nigerian culture and perhaps subtlety paints a poor picture on how it is dealt with. ... My favourite piece in this collection is ‘Blessed are the mothers of a dead child’.)
- Kitty Horsfall (The intensity of the poems could easily lead to their integral message being lost, and the collection does teeter on the brink of saturation with despondency. )
- Charlie Hill (‘sweeping me off my bones’ is just one of a number of lines in the collection that stop you dead. Lola is also excellent at a more prosaic accretion of sentiment ... Perhaps writing poetry is the source of this sanity. Perhaps it counterbalances grief. Maybe this is where the equilibrium lies.)
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