Poems from Agenda, Magma, Manchester Review, Rialto, Shearsman, etc. There are sample poems and video poems
Here's the start of "Girl Lunar" - "You run across the garden - a pair of lungs. Blue fruit and attic-faced. Your eyes parachutes. The sky is black and I can't make our your toes as they Morse code the grass. This is the night, you say. You say: we are the night. The night is humming and it is cold. A giant, outdoor freezer and I wait for our kiss to become kitchens". This as an early poem so I'm not prepared to give the poet the benefit of the doubt yet. Trust needs to be earned. "attic-faced"? "parachutes"? "kiss to become kitchens"?
I don't know how to read lines like these, from "Appendix" - "The pages curl under my doormat, coated like a football of straining bladders". Yes, a football can have a bladder inside it, but what is "a football of straining bladders"? And how can pages be coated like them? The title poem is excellent in parts. It's followed by "Half-full", which I can see no value in. Ditto for "I wish to tell you body parts"
"Etymology" ends with "Some days I feel she is a hotel. She needs cleaning/ from all the ghosts that continue to sleep inside of her./ She has a grass stain on her upper lip. Pickling./These spiders are whales on stilts, she laughs.". I like the first 2 lines but the final two baffle me.
Lines like "The world is not a foetus, she would say. We do not need to be children" (p.28) are good but aren't helped by their context. "Bear" needs work. Some poems are in Geordie - "Yer black hair, canny like steam. Yer bird eyes, coal./ Yer body a house for us. Its sea rooms like yem". But what are those extra spaces for? I like "Netted". "Small Infinities" has short (max 4 syllable?) lines for no reason I can discern.
The start of "A song of herself" (a prose layout - a single paragraph) is "Before gifts and weekends bus rides, all was forest: the hair and the house. She hung her voice from the height of firs, and the castle was condensation." which has promise. "Angel metal" isn't bad. In "On Crucifixion" is "They say that if the horse's head was titled we could be violins", which is where I was tempted to turn the page.
"The art of saving other people" works for me. As does "Hello, dark". But then there's "The glow-worm chasers" which begins with "We ride to school in green barrows/ our balloon heads forever growing". I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that. Why the extra white space? I don't mind "Kitchen", and "how to weigh nothing" isn't bad. I don't get "The woman's private looking-glass" or "The day we ran away from the circus". I suspect they're both not very good.
In hit-and-miss poetry that uses juxtapositions and surprises, perhaps editing has to be hit-and-miss too. Maybe others will like the parts that I didn't. The question is, do the same poems and lines fail for most readers? My hunch is that they do. There's a whiff of emporor's new clothes about too many of the poems.
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