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.

Friday, 13 June 2025

“The apothecary of flight” by Jane Burn (Nine Arches Press, 2024)

  • "I am clearing the page of birds    Beneath the thoughts of feathers/ is a person who writes/ I will do this" (p.11) - the first lines of the book. I like them.
  • "Shift your unreadiness - you must rise, unassembled and scarecrow/ that mattress on broomstick bones" (p.14) - too compressed for me. Make broomsticks and a mattress into a scarecrow? To scare off what? Is there an allusion to the healing of the paralysed man in the Bible?
  • "Sperm and egg translate [sometimes] to flesh, wet womb to dry air, water's peace to screams. Need translates to milk - to a gum's burden of invading teeth / bone to longer bone" (p.16) - this list of poeticalising common events goes on too long
  • "You're a goddam phoenix    and now the milk is ashes - scatter/ each season away with one flick     of your great wings" (p.20) - puzzling
  • "There's a hive, somewhere     at the centre of the universe,/ and its bees are made from spectacular gas    the honey they weave/ is a sable welt of sky" (p.21) - don't get that
  • "Bear i Bear Bear Bear" has too few striking images to escape sounding like a persona's self-pity. Identifying as a hibernating bear, she is perhaps comforted by the penultimate sentence - "She'll find someone to hug" (no longer alone but still a bear?)
  • "I didn't realise how dull, how stale, how loose, how soft, how blunt I had become/ until I came to this place. I crouch in the ailse// of an old rut and sense the soil's song as it raises crowns of rush./ There's a faraway house, tucked in a fold - it windows must shrine/ with coins of evening sun ... I am not lonely here, though I am alone" (p.28) - "shrine" is awkwardly (cleverly?) close to "shine"
  • "I saw where a mast year acorn had taken root" (p.30). Should "mast" be "last"?
  • "At High Force" is perhaps the clearest example of an abiding theme - identifying with Nature, or using it as therapy (see p.28 etc). If "I" and "Nature" don't match, which will change? The poem begins with "I wait for a different way of being". The persona wonders about using the stars. Then (not for the first time in the book) s/he sees a high bird - "Ring ouzel or merlin, perhaps; a name with an inkling of magic". "Nothing is completely obsolete" could be read 2 ways - "nothingness is obsolete" or "everything has some purpose". Whatever, "The moon licks them luminous". Then "My reflection clots the pool ... not my real self". The persona punches the reflection, which says "I forgive you ... people sometimes hurt what they do not understand.". The persona ends by looking at the sky again.
  • "Taraxacum" has a common theme (dandelions) and a fairly standard treatment. It works well.
  • "rabbits have left behind the truth of their bones ... tooth and tongue have loosened their language to the soil" (p.39).
  • "drizzle clings to its roof/ like a coat of pearls that only moments ago belonged to the sky" (p.50) - too poetical
  • "and you made the child | who made the child/ who crossed the sea to Liverpool | who made the child/ who made the mother | who in the end | made me" (p.53) - this ends the poem. I'm not convinced that the verbosity works. And why use vertical bars?
  • "Strophe/Antistrophe/Epode to being all the parts of me inside a poem" (p.71) is way beyond me.
  • "I think therefore    therefore, therefore I am    alone. Come    go away    shut up. Please stay    Descartes proved his existence because    he doubted his existence    The moments I doubt myself are the moments that make me alive" (p.72) - for my taste, sections like this sound too close to being jotted notes.
  • "I told the Horse a long, long story of the dark" (p.82) - after a passage of poems I had trouble with, this poem I liked.
  • "Always make friends with a cloud" - "Because each one will only live for one minute to an hour, you might be ... the one to act as witness to its life ... There is a cloud, many light-years away from Earth ... Are you their evidence of an afterlife? Do they pity us our heavy skins;/ our doubts, our ground, our weakened faith,/ own own attempts to fly?/ Perhaps their deaths are rain.// We are both just so much water./ Small wonder then we cry" (p.89) - perhaps because it's straightforward, this is my favourite piece.

The pages are bigger than A5. Many are packed with words. Sometimes gaps are used between words. On p.51 there's a diagonal gap down the page, resulting in words being split.

Some of the poems have "ocular map" in their title. At the end of the book there's a note about Ocular Maps - Learn the dialects of space ... I investigated the grouping of areas of text into their own separate entities ... What if we read [words], but not in the traditional order? ... Removed from any typical structure, the words I used were revealed to me in new, fascinating arrangements, as if I had come to them as a stranger, and not their original author ... There is an undeniable inheritance connecting concrete poetry, abstract art and the function of white space in poetry."

I like "Always make friends with a cloud", "An imaginary residency inside an 18th century stoneware jar" and (less so) "Revelations 01/01/2022"

Other reviews

  • Rennie Parker (the poems are difficult to quote from, because the effect depends on a cumulative build and the poets’ extreme ability to become other states ... Sometimes, poems which are an expression of Language veer towards word-factory fallout and the kind of experimentation which other poets have to leave in their notebooks ... And I am not sure that the "Ocular Map" is different from other poets’ definitions of visual and concrete poems,)

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