A pamphlet.
Themes
- Modern idioms, how times have changed (no more doodles by the phone), sign/symbol issues.
- About his father, then being a father, how have children affects self-image, how that image changes when parents die and children leave - no clearing of lofts but we have an emptying of the shed, memories of angling, and memories of a summer job working with a bunch of men, including his father, learning the father's undomestic "boss" habits. Then building extensions, and growing veg.
Flash/Poetry
Calling pieces like "'Ever Given'" poems gives the author licence to have a more flowery punchline than if it's called Flash. Currently I think several of these pieces could be classified as Flash (which isn't downgrading them, just suggesting that the boundaries are shifting). Of course then they'd be compared with other Flash pieces, which often have stricter word-length constraints than poetry. I think I've had Flash published which is more poetic than some of these pieces. That said, Red Squirrel press publishes prose of various types, so they know what they're doing.
"I'll never forget you attempting to say the phrase, teasing it out between new teeth. You sounded so proud of yourself, so very grown up, that we had to adopt your version instead" is a 6-lined stanza in "Slipping Away" - I don't see how line-breaks improve it. "The Tea Hut", without the line/stanza breaks, could have started a good short story.
"Half Term at Longleat Safari Park" is an anecdote with a punch line - "I can recognise myself in that". I think this is the most common structure, as much a Flash one as a poetry one nowadays. The next 2 pieces share the structure, the punchlines being "It's now I notice I'm out of my depth" (he's in water but there's another meaning) and "I can't say I know myself" (meaning "I don't know my self" and "I, myself, don't know the answer")
"A City Break" has couplets (e.g. "It's embarrassing how fast we'd stopped noticing/ the goings-on behind the scenes of each other") until the final, single line, "then asked where we might be going after this", a phrase than can be understood on 2 timescales.
My favourite of the punchlines might be from "Captain's Pond". The narrator, recalling his father angling, leaping in, then "swearing at bubbles" thinks "Someone's caught something and it's time to leave". I also liked the end of "Riches" (a punny title) - "when you let me sit in your lap and we reverse-parked it, my feet pressing on your feet in the dark" - that final "in the dark" makes all the difference.
Of the 27 last lines, 7 have "I", 5 have "me" and 4 have "we".
Imagery
"What the Photo Album Didn't Capture" begins with "I've sent a postcard home", which reminds me of Raine's "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home". Some of the poems in this pamphlet have a Martian tinge, most notably "Waking Up" with "Our peculiar mercuries are dragging themselves back together", "My leg's poised midway between Forsyth and Thinker" (Bruce Forsyth's start-of-program pose, and Rodin's statue), "We race forwards to sleep's photo-finish. Your hair offers its own tribute to Van Der Graaf.". The imagery ranges from colourful to poetic. E.g.
- "A hatchet is Excalibured/ in a chopping block by the door" (p.18)
- "The light looks like it's pulled over from travelling to catch a breath" (p.33)
The sign/symbol interest is most evident in "A Foley Artist Works from Home" where a sound FX worker tells us that "The sound of rain falling in films/ is bacon being fried up close./ I made lunch today, it poured down" ... "But birdsong's only ever birds being themselves".
The final poem is "Goliath". The character walks to the shore, with a pocket full of stones. They throw the stones in the water, the poem ending by the person stepping back from the incoming tide. So who's Goliath? Maybe the enemy that Virginia Woolf succumbed to. Maybe the infinity of the horizon.
Other reviews
- DA Prince
- Christopher Horton (it is mostly his own individual unknowingness that becomes the main point and this creates a powerful sense of pathos that is frequently disarming. ... he is at his most impressive when writing about family, both the one that brought him up and the one in which he is now a parent)
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