The title alludes to The Fens. Maybe also to mood. There are poems from Stand, The Rialto, Magma, and some competition anthologies.
Two of my allergies are to higgledy-piggledy indents and contractual poetry. This book has a fair amount of each. The first poem, "Juno's Augury" is laid out as prose with some passages in bold. The bold text can be read alone as a poem - the passages end with "woke", "night", "moonlight", "bones", "stain", "flakes", "breaks", "pane", "smudge", "watermark", "lawn", "budge", "skylark", "dawn" - an abbacddcefgefg pattern. There's a storm with thousand-mile an-hour winds, a father, and many birds. A little research uncovered Aesop's Juno and the Peacock, and a Juno/Moneta soothsayer. And the planet Jupiter has violent winds. OK, so what's to be made of this passage - "Her voice is low, measured as she speaks: soaring birds have hollow bones. The marrow in my hips settle like evidence. They rotated him to remove the needle: they took what they wanted and left a stain on the paper sheet."? I don't know. The poem's tantalising though ultimately frustrating. "Creed" and "Gravid" use the same poem-in-a-poem form.
"Hum" riffs off the title - "Human ... Humbert ... humouresque ... humerous ... humdinger", etc. "The butterfly and the stone" has fluid symbolism - she=butterfly and he=stone? At first, yes - "she rests on the large grey boulder of him ... he wakes to something brushing the back of his neck ... the boulder is not capable of thought" - then "she" becomes "I" - "while he sleeps my wings open to night ... his mouth twitches as if in prayer when he closes me with his tongue ... I have a jar he says to preserve each piece of you"
I didn't like "Anonymous" - even if it's worth printing, it should be printed as prose. I didn't get "The Homemaker". I can see it's in 4/5/3 syllabics, but why the 1-tab/0-tabs/2-tabs line indent pattern? So each line has 5 "units"? I've problems with the content too. "Footnotes to a marriage" uses a cute idea and has some nice lines. I like "The Actress". But "Volta" has "last night's chip papers/ flap emptiness at our shoes/ grease our wayward steps", and an indent pattern of 1/2/0 0/2/1 1/2/0 0/2/1 1/0/2. I don't get "Jagged Lullaby". "Soham" presumably alludes to the 2002 murders. It's in 2 columns. Maybe it's supposed to be read either column-wise or row-wise, but the syntax is loose enough to make that a technically easy thing to do, and the content doesn't do much - is it about regeneration? I like "The Missing Moth Cabinet ...".
The book has many lines that sound good in isolation - "You no longer keep your threads taut/ in your dull patchwork of fields" ("Fen"); "Here futures are set in creosote" ("Fen Elegy"); "How the yellow bathwater made islands of me" ("Footnotes to a marriage"), etc. In the end however there were too many poems that I found difficult, and too many features that I look upon as warning signs - it's too advanced for me.
Interviews
- Paul Stephenson (I’ve heard that living at or below sea level can have an effect on a person’s physical/mental state. I don’t know how true that statement is, but it interests me .... I have travelled a lot, since my late teens with my own work and later with my husband’s job ... As a child, I didn’t want to be female because I’d been conditioned into thinking girls and women were weak/lesser beings by my stepfather (who beat and humiliated my mother). )
- Chris Edgoose (She took it further and replied that the Fens are an ‘abused’ landscape, almost literally beaten into submission over hundreds of years of drainage ... But Liz has spent years away from the local dialect, living in Cambridge, the Netherlands and the US, and so she does not feel linked to the local language in a way that has allowed its use to feel natural in her poems so far.)
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