Poems from Under the Radar, Ambit, And Other Poems, The Rialto, Magma, Antiphon, PN Review, Finished Creatures, Tears in the Fence, etc.
I struggled in different ways with each of the first 5 poems. I wouldn't normally have read any further.
- Whitewash - 7 3-lined stanzas. A faded swastika is showing through on the side of a barn. A farmer's daughter submitted to a Nazi officer. "Your great uncle ... swore an oath to Pétain". After the war his possessions and farm were returned. So he was the farmer mentioned earlier? "I boast of my Danish uncle who fought in the resistance". Fair enough. It's all been prose reportage so far. At the end "we .., are .. stripping off layers to expose raw nerves ... what of us that shows through, what is proves"
- Bureau Mazarin begins with
It stands like a tragedy And the locks were forced Strikingly teased data Weathercocks end or fled Apart from its creator Left in the attic A rip at comforter's art Theft intact lie - Aubade for an Artist - 5 aabb stanzas, the first the same as the last. The beginning is "Of course, the morning came; it always does"
- Life Model - 2.5 pages. The narrator (female?) poses nude back to back with a male. After, she meets her boyfriend, an artist. Later still she meets a critic who says she's little better than a whore. She replies that he's the emperor with no clothes. Her boyfriend doesn't intercede. Again, I see little in the text beyond the plot. The repetition makes things worse.
- Slant of Summer - a loosely rhymed sonnet.
And so on ...
- "This is not a road trip" is 6 5-lined stanzas with indent pattern 01210. A boy throws a stone in the sea. There's an old fisherman in a boat. A horse is being ridden on the sand. Stanza 5 tells us "And there will always be an old man rowing for shore/ with pregnant nets, waiting to spill silver./ And a horse and rider will always be in the middle of the bay,/ almost able to walk on water./ And a boy will always be hurling a stone into the sea.".
- "A Desultory Day" uses "the sort of day" 8 times in 16 lines. It would work for me outside the context of this book but by now repetition has long lost its power.
- "Wavering" is prose with line-breaks, alternate lines indented by a single space!
- I like "Philip Levine's Good Ear" except that it uses line-breaks. The lines are so long that the poem's presented in landscape. Bling.
- "Herring Loss" is a fun anecdote, not a 14 line poem.
- I like parts i. and ii. of “A map towards fluency” but I don’t see what the subtitles are for.
- “÷” is another of the poems which use the “if in doubt, repeat” tactic. It uses “This is our event horizon” 4 times, and the last couplet is a duplicate of the first. I think there are various interpretations of the symbol, but a black hole’s event horizon can’t be seen from both sides, which casts doubt on some of the attempts. I don’t understand “the head in the golden round, divided,/ each must have an eye, each a tooth”
- ”Polar Observations with Anagram Shadows” has footnotes (I expected them sooner or later. No redaction yet). Each of the first 3 lines has a footnote. Lines 4 to 6 are nonsense anagrams of lines 1 to 3, and there are nonsense anagrams of each of the footnotes. No!
- I like the loosely rhyming "Colchester Native"
Other reviews
- Maria Sjöstrand (While many poems in her collection are divided up into more conventionally symmetrical stanzas, Kelly does not shy away from more unusual structures. She generously utilizes footnotes, symbols, and columns to create a unique poetic structure, and one poem ‘Philip Levine´s Good Ear’ has quite literally been turned 90 degrees in her quest for the desired visual effect. Kelly’s use of shape to make socio-political points is reminiscent of the prose-poetry in Microbursts by Elizabeth Reeder, in which she makes use of compacted typescript to simulate a torrent of emotion.)
- Emma Deshpande (some of the most compelling pieces are in “Orientation”, the third section of her book ... Kelly’s “Corona/Cuts” has repetitive lines stylistically inspired by John Donne: [...] These lines promise unity, and the healing that comes from awareness of others. The next stanza undoes this with quotes from a Guardian article in which teens give their reasons for carrying knives:)
- Richard Skinner (The book is divided into seven sections, with titles such as ‘Scale and Accuracy’, ‘Coordinates’, ‘Navigation’, all of which build up and add to the sense that the book is a map of Kelly’s own life and life experiences thus far. A poem in the first of these sections, entitled ‘ø’, perhaps best sums up Kelly’s intentions for her project ... Another formal tour de force is ‘This Is Not a Road Trip’. [...] The form of the poem, with elements repeating, and lines gradually indented and then pulled back to the margin, create a wave-like motion which reflects its setting. This poem is remarkable for its symmetry, its inward tension and its balance. ... the extraordinary ‘Apple Quartet’ - is there anything more gorgeous in the English language than a list of the names of the different kinds of apple? Another sequence of poems is “Coronas/Cuts”, actually a crown of sonnets that deftly weaves lines and images from John Donne’s work into Kelly’s own moving meditation on the inevitability of sons leaving home and, startlingly, on knife crime. Other poems that deserve a special mention are the moving ‘Let Them Leave Language to Their Lonely Betters’, the deeply mysterious ‘Saltatorium’ and the melancholy of ‘Aubade for an Artist’ ... it will be an absolute travesty if A Map Towards Fluency doesn’t win a major prize in the coming year)
- Leah Fritz (What I like especially is Lisa Kelly’s poem about sitting naked for artists, as an artist’s model. ‘Life Model’ ... And I much like ‘Aubade for an Artist’ ... Kelly’s poetry can be brilliant, but there’s a bit too much of it here – as there would be in a first collection assembled too late in a poet’s career which comprises both the brilliant and the self-consciously artistic.)
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