"Living by troubled waters" by Roy McFarlane (Nine Arches Press, 2022)

Poems from The Dark Horse, Rialto, Magma, etc.

It's a good-looking book. 108 pages. It begins with an "Author's Note" explaining the rationale for some of the techniques, and for the inclusion of 1800s docs. It ends with "Notes" and "Further Reading". Some pages are in colour - collages/erasures based on old documents. Epiphets come from Rankine, Barthes, the Bible, Nina Simone, etc. Not quite mixed-genre, but solidly rooted in facts.

Non-mainstream literary techniques and committed writing don't always go well together. For example, there was a split between US and UK 1st or 2nd wave poet-feminists - very roughly, the US ones used the latest techniques (poems who wrote about feminism) whereas the UK ones were more populist (feminists who had a go at writing poems). The techniques can prevent the works being of any use as publicity/propaganda, attracting elitist literary readers rather than the general public. On the other hand the ballast of the facts or the need to deliver a moral/message can weigh down the poetry and snifle out dilemmas.

I don't think I understand all the poems - I don't think I understand what the intended purpose is. There are several styles of attempting to poetise facts, telling them slant. The slanting often doesn't help me, especially when the facts are well known. There's rhetorical repetition - this for example, from p.19

You are Windrush, the wanted in times of trouble, the visible that becomes invisible, to be discarded by a nation. You are the unwanted. You are the hunted down in the middle of the night. You are the imprisoned. You are the boarded flight to a place you have never known.

I don't know much about Windrush, but I know this much. The "You are" intrusions didn't help me. Maybe the poem's better performed, but I distrust this style of rhetoric, associating it with soapbox persuasion. With villanelle repetition, there's a chance that the meaning will change even if the words don't. Not so here. Your mileage may vary. Part 2 of this poem, about 40 pages later in the book begins less factually with

You are impossible to love, stolen across lands and seas, you carry knowledge in the universe of broken bodies, a lost language in the caves of your mouth, memories in the constellations on your back. Your bodies, temples of trauma.

"If only we could walk on air" begins with

14 years old and 6ft shoulders of Atlas carrying the world He carried the absence of his father in jail and out of jail carried the reputation of a family carried a mother who was carrying her own problems; a baby on the way, whilst another child aged nine excluded for carrying a knife So he squeezed his size on a sofa at night and spread his length all day on the streets

There are puzzling irregularities here - why "14" and "nine"? Why no comma at the end of the line about jail? The repeated use of the verb "carry" works for me. I'm less sure about the objectification of "size" and "length" though - spreading his length on the street?

The poems on p.24-30 take an historical event (1951 hurricane, 1907 earthquake, 1962 smog). I like p.29 best - a mother coming home, new to the country, is stuck on a London bus that's been abandoned by its crew because of smog. Her husband checks each bus along the route until he finds her.

"We the Brothers of the Salute" is an interesting enough observation to merit a paragraph in a story, but a whole poem/page? p.96 repeats "In praise of" about 24 times, then p.101 repeats "to the Heron" 7 times, which is a bit much, though I like "to the Heron with the slow wing beats/ of a double-bass on a Jazz June evening".

Layouts are (somewhat randomly) varied - e.g. p.34-35 has short-lined couplets, p.36-37 has slashes instead of line-breaks, p.38 is 3 octets, p.39 is 4 4-lined stanzas, p.40 is 5 stepped stanzas, each beginning with "To all women of all colour who".

I like "Living by Troubled Waters #3" most - it repeats phrases, bringing something new to them each time. I didn't like many of the pages involving graphics. See Praise for my father online, with comments by the poet.

The title on p.40 includes a typo I think - "Malcom X".

Other reviews

• Stella Backhouse (With so much going on, there’s always a danger of tipping over into mere unnavigable morass. It’s a pitfall McFarlane avoids; by deploying his unifying thread of past-in-present, he succeeds in stitching together from disparate elements an ensemble that seems almost seamless. ... what I felt most on reading ‘Pantoum for the 27’ was that this is Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, updated for our time. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, itself a nightmare parody of Thomas Gray’s quintessentially English ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, is a poem of ugly truths about Englishness. By linking McFarlane to Owen, we plug him into a poetic tradition of using Englishness to re-interpret Englishness by exposing truths the English don’t want to hear. )