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.

Sunday 2 February 2020

"Fleche" by Mary Jean Chan (Faber and Faber, 2019)

Poems from Poetry Review, Poetry London, PN Review, London Magazine, Rialto, Magma, etc. The book also won the Costa Book Award for Poetry in 2019. I had trouble liking it. "Practice" was the first poem that I thought ok. The "Riposte" section contains my favourite pieces - "At the Castro", "They Would Have All That". Less so "Names (1)", "Safe Space (II), "11". Later I liked "an eternal &".

At first some of the paraphrasable matter (e.g. in "Vigilance") interested me, but too many poems go on about the same subjects (mother dealing with lesbian daughter; a women wanting to be accepted though she's mistaken for a man and likes woman; multilingualism; assimilation), arbitrary variation being introduced by way of typography - slashes instead of line-breaks; wide-margined double-aligned; stepped lines.

Analogies aren't striking - "as when a great wind / pushes a small boat out to sea / before it is ready" ("Vigilance"); my arms are weak as hand-pulled noodles"" ("song"); "all the sounds a body makes when it becomes its own instrument, rehearsing the songs it has learnt across the centuries" ("One Breath")

"Wish" uses extended analogy - "my lover often says look up!/ as she admires a canopy of green ... my languages are like roots/ gnarled in soil, one and indivisible/ except the world divides me endlessly ... lately I've been trying to write/ a poem that might birth a tree/ a genuine acceptance of the self/ continues to elude me"

The title poem and The window (Shortlisted for the Forward prize for best single poem) are online.

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