"Greenfields" by Richard Price (Carcanet, 2007)

Poems from PN Review, etc. 104 pages. For my tastes, it should have been much shorter. Minor memories are insufficiently enlivened by imagery, even when the imagery in itself is good, and there's much dilution. Prose sections are disguised by the use of wordplay, unexpected (puzzling) words, and line-breaks. Poems like "Facts about trout" could have been dropped. Others could have done with editing. Here are some samples -

• "Bungalows crating up the field" (p.8). Good.
• "The shock is the light/ sucked from the Tree/ (I think of me - as just teeth)" (p.9). I don't get this.
• "The stream runkles its sheet over the pebbles" (p.11). Good enough.
• "The inside was elastic/ twined tight/ like a statistic/ for nylon/ gripping the dwindling globe" (p.14). About a golf-ball, but so what? And in what sense like a statistic?
• "Inside, like church, when mum says garden/ she means an English one." (p.50). This is set in Scotland during a heat-wave, so the mother's perhaps confused. The phrasing suggests that "like church" refers to what follows it, in which case I'm confused too.
• "Skew across the road/ a tonne that's jumped the wingmirror,/car scrap in the sprung hawthorn." (p.26). What does "jumped the wingmirror" mean? Why "sprung"? Why the line-breaks?
• "Inside [the wedding rings], ions like mines five-jack up// in a wave's midrise,// froth themselves in charge -/ all so tense they just shine " (p.87). This looks like a merge of ideas - mines afloat on the sea, and gold's atomic-level behaviour - "charge" being a common term. Doesn't work for me.
• "and here's you, sleeping,/ irritable, sifting the air/ as if a hair/ at the back of your tongue/ knew something" (p.89). Maybe there are idioms I'm unaware of. A hair knowing something? At the back of a tongue??

His titles don't help -

• "With is" begins with "To ravel with you in ripening light./ To worry and adore the stacking cups of your spine" - cute enough first lines. The title is a contraction of "Being with you is ..." I guess.
• "Saying the swim" begins with "I am in the two of us at the breast stroke, ... and the pool is not now the municipool". Well, it's not prose.

The "Quilted Leather" section did nothing for me. The "Tube Shelter Perspective" section begins with a quote by Djuma Barnes - "An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties". The background's a trip on the underground, which helps to explain the day-dreaming. I liked fragments of it. Here are three sections, each given a page -

• "Stop, and in a tunnel of radio/ a probe is among moons" (p.57). I don't get it.
• "At the next station/ no detraining, too.// A bomb, or something civil?/ Fishermen in oilskins wave us through/ and we are a submarine:/ the nets have no snags" (p.63). Why invent "detraining" unless it's to allude to "training"? What nets?
• "On the tannoy I can hear/ the muezzin singing/ to Whitechapel's underground gallery.// Crosses have been crissed.// Upstairs the District Line's delays/ percolate in a golden minaret" (p.68). I like the idea, but "Crosses have been crissed" isn't needed to repeat the idea of mingling. Indeed, I think the sentence has minus points - the wordplay is distracting, as is the reference to Christian crosses.

Still in the underground section, p.70 is an aside about names and things. "Balham Station" to "banal" to "Balaam" to "bedlam". Then for some reason oilrigs' names arise - "Piper" and "Thistle" - which lead to "platform". On p.77 he sleeps on the train so he can end the section with "Even at the stops I don't start". Boom boom.

"Open the paper window is a hit'n'miss list poem - "Scaletrix. A red car. A green car -/ they're from my father to my father./ We were just intermediaries", "a tangerine,/ miraculous, the orange for learners", "Black bags of exhausted wrapping./ She definitely said batteries included."

A footnote on p.60 says that "[The Footnote's] rise, like that of free verse, can be traced to the marginalisation of poetry".