Litrefs Reviews

"Alice Munro" by Coral Ann Howells (Manchester Universtity Press, 1998)

2012-03-08T06:08:00.001Z

There's little comparative analysis (brief mentions of Atwood) nor any adverse criticism. There's a lot about "mappings" and a few quotes are repeated - e.g. "Mostly in my stories I like to look at what people don't understand. What we don't understand. What we think is happening and what we understand later on, and so on'" and "shifts of emphasis that throw the storyline open to question". That said, I found many comments useful - in the "Critical overview and conclusion" section especially. Below I've tried to group the remarks

This isn't the first place where I've seen her compared to V.S.Pritchett. I have trouble with him too. Part of my problem may be to do with what's supposed to be hidden. I've been working my way in my own writing from explicit symbols and juxtaposed scenes (happy to read Means, de Lillo, Ali Smith, etc) to using embedded symbols within a fluid narrative, so perhaps I see the symbols that are supposed to be hidden. She seems to be going the opposite way to me.

Women

"I suggest that the dominance of secrecy and alternate texts in her stories implies an underground that is characteristic of texts by women" (Lorna Irvine).
"Her female narrators all have a fine double awareness of community values and of what else goes on outside those limits. They are fascinated by dark holes and by unscripted spaces with their scandalous discreditable stories of transgression and desire", p.3
"It is this alternative mapping which codes in elements of experience not otherwise representable with realistic fiction which is the link with Munro's treatment of women's romantic fantasies, the other feature which I wish to highlight as insistently present in her fiction from the beginning", p.5
"her stories present endless celebrations and revisions of female romantic fantasies with all their urgent eroticism, their bewildering contradictions and disappointments, and their defiance of age and experience", p.6
"their analyses of women's disposition towards shaping their lives as romantic fantasy plots - entertaining the same desires, suffering the same humiliations", p.78
"Munro is fascinated by the extent to which women are willing to make spectacles of themselves in their attempts to create exciting scripts for their lives", p.80
"Focusing on Munro's strategies of 'proliferating alternatives' which serve to blur binary distinctions, Godard discusses intertextual encounters with a dominantly masculine literary tradition and Munro's parodic revisions of Milton, Keats, Tennyson and Joyce, in contrast to her use of the maternal tradition", p.139

Layers and hiding

"surfaces which always hide something else, tracing shifts from the local and the physical to the psychological layering of experience over time or the multiple versions of a story mediated by different narrators" (Forceville, 1993)
"it seems as if I want to get a lot of layers going. I want the story to have a lot of levels, so that the reader can draw back and perhaps instead of thinking about what happens in this story as far as development of plot goes, to think of something else about life", p.10
"I hope I have managed to imitate to some degree Munro's fictional maps with their surfaces and hidden depth and interconnections which never fail to surprize us by opening out into moments of radiance", p.12
"The older I get, the more I see details as having more than one explanation. I see the content of life as being many layered. And in a way, nothing that happens really takes precedence over anything else that happens" - Munro

Realism and multiple meanings

"Munro's fiction with its constant deferrals and surprises subverts conventions of realism" (Heble, 1994)
"My main interest in Munro's experiments with the short story form and her shifts of emphasis toward increasing indeterminacy and multiple meanings, always contained within a realistic and domestic framework", p.146
"The story is not digressive although it gives that impression with its multiple narrative perspectives, its memory flashbacks and its sharp turning points, so that the mystery of the drowning is continually presented in new ways, each of which radically disrupts previous. In this clash of alternative versions distinctions between what is real and what is imagined tend to collapse", p.150
"In the early collections ... Munro works within the tradition of documentary realism, registering surface details of daily life and then disrupting those realistic conventions by shifts into fantasy. ... Endings are a significant feature in many of these stories, where something extra is added - some insight or additional detail of information - which unsettles the carefully constructed narrative ... [I]n the 1980s [i]nstead of placing the supplement at the end, supplementarity pervades the whole narrative through time shifts and shifts in narrative perspective", p.10
"Though Munro is not a fantasy writer her stories expose the limits of realism by working within a referential framework and then collapsing it by shifting into different fictional mode....As Munro shows, fantasy works with the same materials as realism, but it arranges them according to different imperatives, not of rationality or social convention, but of fear and desire ... each leaving out a dimension which the other includes and each disrupting the other's design", p.31-32
"It is also Munro's triumph to make her readers see that other world alongside the everyday, offering a glimpse into some of the multiple worlds hidden inside conventional maps of place", p.38
"Munro writes very well about the banality and the power of fantasy, which remains a central fact not affected by age or gender but which provides an inner space in which to invent new images of the self.", p.60
"Her multiple interpretations serve as a metafictional comment on the way that an artist might use the raw materials of history, suggesting the many reconstructions that could be made from the same incomplete evidence. This is a narrative strategy which Munro prefects in this collection and which she uses again in many later stories", p.74
"There is no clear distinction between what is real and what is fictional, just as there is no clear boundary between knowledge and belief. The meaning of these stories is never independent of the teller's interpretation", p.92

Language

"She has continued to investigate parallels between the instability of language and the incompleteness of any fictional structure on the one hand, and the indeterminacy of human relations and the excess of the fiction-making imagination on the other", p.153
"Munro's stories encode a postmodern awareness of the strategies of fiction while at the same time deflecting the reader's attention away from such artifice through the domesticity of her language", p.87

Gothic - the ordinary and the epiphany

"Where but in Munro would we find a sentence like this ... This description by a young girl of the imaginative process of transformation from 'touchable' into 'mysterious' might also be taken as Munro's description of her quality of vision and of her fictional method of mapping alternative worlds", p.1
"Typically for Munro, realistic detail and ordinariness are highlighted and the extraordinary event is introduced obliquely in amongst neighbourly gestures"
"If Munro takes risks to unsettle readers' expectations by showing us the limits of conventional plots of mystery and romance, she also takes the risk of showing unaccommodated moments of grace and insight which far exceed anything her characters or her readers might anticipate", p.135

Misc

"these stories perform similar functions to gossip for not only do they give their narrators a kind of power to cope with circumstances which they probably cannot change but they also strive to make sense out of randomness and confusion in everyday life", p.15
"The Moons of Jupiter is arguably the most significant turning point in Munro's fiction-writing career, for it signals a radical change in her storytelling methods as she develops new ways of writing the passage of time", p.67
"It is this emergence of story via digressions which generate new meanings and resonances that is the distinguishing mark of The Progress of Love. The possible meanings of a story are unsettled at every stage in the process of its telling", p.85
"Everybody knows what a house does, how it encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way. This is the nearest I can come to explaining what a story does for me, and what I want my stories to do for other people" - Munro

"Metaphor: A Practical Introduction" by Zoltan Kovecses (OUP, 2002)

2012-03-04T06:47:00.001Z

It begins by contrasting old and new ideas about metaphor

Traditional	Cognitive linguistic
Uses words	Uses concepts
Literary	Aids understanding
Based on resemblance	Often not based on resemblance
An art	Everyone does it
Ornamental	Inevitable

In most cases the source domains are more concrete than the target domains. Target and source domains aren't usually reversible.

There are many attempts at classifications. For example, conceptual metaphors can be classed by conventionality, function, nature, and level of generality. Cognitive function types include

structural - where source and target are similarly complex
ontological - there the comparison is describing the type of the target (that it's an object or a process, for example)
orientational - involving "up", "out", etc - "he fell ill"

Metaphors can be based on a general background image - in-out, up-down, contact (e.g. saying "Hold on" to someone on the phone), or a more specific image - "life is a journey", "ideas are food" etc.

Lakoff (from whom many of the book's idea come from), Turner and Ray Gibbs have looked at how poets' metaphors are different from everyday ones. In many cases they're no different. Sometimes they extend, elaborate, question (take literally) and combine.

When a comparison is made between 2 domains, not all the features of those domains are compared. Does "it dawned on him" always imply that there'll be a sunset? The book discusses what might determine the choice. The poetic context might encourage "illegitimate transfer".

Metaphors help us understand by letting us transfer our knowledge and skills from one domain to another.

Metaphors can interact or form hierarchies - "heat = intensity", "love = fire". Events have Purpose (leading to destinations); Means (implying paths); Difficulties (hence impediments). Such underlying schemas can influence our thinking. Many of these schemas are cross-cultural.

Metonymy is when one aspect of a domain related to another aspect (part-whole, for example). Examples given include "Does he own any Hemingway?", "America doesn't want another Pearl Harbor", "The sax has the flu today"

Finally Turner and Fauconnier's ideas of mental spaces, conceptual projection and blending are mentioned.

There are many exercises, with solutions at the back

"What ever happened to modernism" by Gabriel Josipovici (Yale, 2010)

2012-02-28T22:20:00.003Z

He charts the history of Modernism, writing "Wordsworth and Friedrich ... seem early on to jettison the notion of genre" (p.48) and "the novel is precisely the form that emerges when genres no longer seem viable" (p.65). He goes as far back as the Greeks (as did many of the Modernists).

He thinks that some people have missed the point about Modernism. He doesn't like Peter Gay's "Modernism: The Lure of Heresy" ("This dreadful book ... Though Gay's book is especially bad, ..."). He writes

"the effort, through art, to recognise that which will fit into no system, no story, that which resolutely refuses to be turned into art ... is at the heart of the Modernist enterprise", p.113
"Modernism is a response to simplifications of the self and of life which Protestantism and the Enlightenment brought with them", p.153

He points out (it's been on my mind too) that writers/artists may feel the need to make it difficult for readers/viewers to normalize their work. By "normalize" I mean try to see the work as having a single viewpoint, traditional perspective, single voice, non-contradictory parts, etc.

He considers how Cezanne, Cervantes, Picasso, etc changed things, and how different Modernists faced similar challenges. He suggests that Stevens' "The Comedian as the Letter C" is his version of 'Prufrock' (p.127), that Kafka's 'The New Advocate' is his 'Profrock' (p.131) and that Duchamp's "Large Glass" is his "Either/Or". It is also his 'Prufrock'. (p.133).

He thinks Golding and Spark are England's best post-war novelists.

Typo: "doublenesss" (p.156)

"Selected Stories" by Alice Munro (Random House, 1986)

2012-02-27T08:35:00.003Z

These stories pre-date previous books of hers that I've read. Some of them are only 10 pages long! In the first story, a father, on a car trip in the 1930s with his 2 young kids, drops in on an old girlfriend. On the way home "My father does not say anything to me about not mentioning things at home, but I know, just from the thoughtfulness, the pause when he passes the licorice, that there are things not to be mentioned". The daughter's PoV has to be broken out of in the penultimate paragraph

So my father drives and my brother watches the road or rabbits and I feel my father's life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back it turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine

(After posting this write-up I read "Alice Munro" by Coral Ann Howells which quotes this very paragraph on page 1, writing Where but in Munro would we find a sentence like this ... This description by a young girl of the imaginative process of transformation from 'touchable' into 'mysterious' might also be taken as Munro's description of her quality of vision and of her fictional method of mapping alternative worlds)

In "Images" a father and child go out.

Then we went along the river, the Wawanash River, which was high, running full, silver in the middle where the sun hit it, and where it arrowed in to its swiftest motion. That is the current, I thought, and I pictures the current as something separate from the water, just as the wind was separate from the air and had its own invading shape." (p.45).

They meet someone living rough. The father says "But don't say anything about it at home. Don't mention it to your momma or Mary, either one". At times in other stories the pace hastens -

Arthur got up in the evenings and sat in his dressing gown. Blaikie Noble came to visit. He said his room at the hotel above the kitchen, they were trying to steam-cook him. It made him appreciate the cool of the porch. They played the games that Arthur loved, school-teacher's games. They played a geography game, and they tried to see who could make the most words out of the name Beethoven. Arthur won. He got thirty-four. He was immensely delighted. (p.52)

"The Ottawa Valley" begins promisingly -

I think of my mother sometimes in department stores. I don't know why, I was never in one with her; their plenitude, their sober bustle, it seems to me, would have satisfied her. I think of her of course when I see somebody on the street who has Parkinson's disease, and more and more often lately when I look in the mirror. Also in Union Station, Toronto, because the first time I was there I was with her, and my little sister. It was one summer during the War, we waited between trains; we were going home with her, with my mother, to her old home in Ottawa Valley."

I like the mix of information and promise. The rest of the story's pretty good too. After that I struggled for a few stories, so I jumped to "The Moons of Jupiter". Here's the first paragraph.

I found my father in the heart wing, on the eighth floor of Toronto General Hospital. He was in a semi-private room. The other bed was empty. He said that his hospital insurance covered only a bed in the ward, and he was worried that he might be charged extra.

Distraction in times of crisis runs in the family

I was … irritated by an article I had been reading in a magazine in the waiting room. It was about another writer, a woman younger, better-looking, probably more talented than I am (p.206)

Later we find out about one of her daughters

"Where's Nicola?" I said, thinking an once of an accident or an overdose. Nichola is my older daughter. She used to be a student at the Conservatory, then she became a cocktail waitress, then she was out of work. If she had been at the airport, I would probably have said something wrong. I would have asked her what her plans were, and she would have gracefully brushed back her hair and said, "Plans?" - as if that was a word I had invented (p.208)

It's decided that her father needs a sudden operation. She leaves him, saying "I'll see you when you come out of the anaesthetic". The final paragraphs are a flashback to a few hours before when she was walking in the park, seeing someone who reminded her of Nichola. Themes and symbols are brought together.

If I did see her, I might just sit and watch, I decided. I felt like one of those people who have floated up to the ceiling, enjoying a brief death. A relief, while it lasts. My father had chosen and Nichola had chosen. Someday, probably soon, I would hear from her, but it came to the same thing.
I meant to get up and go over to the tomb, to look at the relief carvings, the stone pictures, that go all the way around it. I always mean to look at them and I never do. Not this time, either. It was getting cold out, so I went inside to have a coffee and something to eat before I went back to the hospital.

I liked the story. More generally I like Munro's stories when the characters are opinionated, not evasive. I don't like it when a significant detail is withheld by the narrator so that we can be surprised later. Having read about a third of the stories in this book I think it's time to take a break. I'm not very good at seeing behind facades.

Other reviews

Wendy Smith
John Updike (New York Times)

"The Wasp Factory" by Iain Banks (Abaqus, 1990)

2012-02-21T20:18:00.001Z

The novel hits the ground running, with "I had been making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already knew something was going to happen; the Factory told me.". What are the Sacrifice Poles? What had the brother done? What is the Factory? Some of these questions are soon answered, but others take their place. What is the narrator's disability? Which three people did he kill? Why does his father keep his room locked?

The narrator, Frank is nearly 17. He lives with his father Angus. His step-brother, Eric, is older. Frank is articulate, though when I read "I'm old enough to get married without my parent's permission, and have been for a year" I thought he might have been married for a year.

Identification matters. Frank say of Angus - "He doesn't attach the same importance to [names] as I do. I know they are important" (p.16). Angus however has stickers all over the house, giving "the approximate measurement for the part of the object they're stuck to. There are even ones in pencil stuck to the leaves of plants" (p.11). Frank's birth is not in the official records.

Frank's into scaled recreations: 1/72 scale model soldiers in a war; a model dam that burst to flood a town where shells represented people. He's engineered the death of 3 children - by adder, wartime bomb, and a giant kite. One of the victims was his younger brother, Paul, so named, thinks Frank, because the dog that bit Frank's genitals off was called Old Saul (as we discover on p.109).

Both Frank and Eric kill animals. Sometimes they strike back - "the rabbit was on me in a half-second, heading straight for my throat" (p.31). We learn that Eric started well at medical school until he saw maggots feeding on the brain of a child in a vegetative state. After that he had a mental breakdown, burning and eating dogs. Eric could be viewed as Frank's alter ego who takes revenge on dogs. At one point Frank thinks he's in psychic contact with Eric.

Rituals and relics dominate Frank's life. "The Tin Drum ... was .. one of the few real presents he has ever given me, and I had therefore assiduously avoided reading it" (p.51). Then on p.164 he listens to a Wagner opera.

On p.117 it gets heavy - "All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. ... The Wasp Factory is part of the pattern ... Like life it is complicated, so all the components are there". The Wasp Factory is a big clockface salvaged from a dump, a platform around which a dozen gadgety traps are prepared. A wasp is released into its centre. Which death it chooses is a sign.

Landscape is described lyrically - the sea, sheep and birds. There's some conventional observation too - "part of my brain thought about how in films, when people look through binoculars and you see what they are supposed to be seeing, it's always a sort of figure-of-eight on its side that you see, but whenever I look through them I see more or less a perfect circle" (p.152).

Frank's misogyny makes sense. The characters have scottish accents only when drunk. Little attempt is made to explain the father's behaviour. Fair enough. The last page or 2 of wrap-up isn't needed.

Typos - "someobdy" (p.133). "Almost I had succeeded" (p.127)

Other reviews

I'd guess that few books have more online reviews than this one has

"Ken's Poetry Book" by Ken Osborne (2012)

2012-02-17T14:28:00.007Z

Ken's Poetry Book is a Web alternative to a poetry book. It's beautifully presented with themed sections and a section of favorites, augmented by photos and audio files (I think there's a trace of a Welsh lilt there). Each page has a box for replies.

Though it doesn't say in the Acknowledgments, some of the poetry's already been published, and has won prizes (a few hundred pounds in total, I'd guess). Much of the poetry has to be read in the context of the supplied biographical notes.

For the purposes of this review I decided to focus in the favorites selection (currently 18 poems). My favorite's Mask, though I also like Hawk, Trumpeter's Kiss, and Abandonment (for the content, sound or both). Many of the other pieces have quotable parts too. Here's a selection

The moon has the sound of an empty sky
a balloon of a sound at the edge of the eye
immune to the crackle of stars floating by. (from "Moon Song")

Now, as rockets splash on sky
I long to touch whatever it was
I thought worth keeping, prise off
the lid that clamps my memory,
take back the childhood
burned out of my heart. (from "An Old Tea-Chest")

and I realized, among those old fishermen
smoking their clay pipes on the promenade
that I passed a thousand times as a boy,
was my grandfather .. who never said.

...
I met my father twice. It was enough
until I watched his coffin to the flame. (from "For The First Time (1993) ")

'Child Abuser’
I wrote beside his name,
as if the world would note,
people passing rage,
the sky fill with family ghosts
to storm around his grave:

but only the trees will see (from "St Mary’s Churchyard Walmer ")

Sometimes I feel that the middle-eight/bridge sections sag a little, maybe the odd line could go here and there. And the image in Gem of dull pebbles becoming gems when wet, though a variant of the common usage, might need a tweak. However, there's enough life experience and poetry to keep you busy for a long while - go and leave some comments.

"Glad not to be the corpse" by Lydia Harris (Smiths Knoll, 2012)

2012-02-10T14:11:00.002Z

This is less accessible than previous pamphlets in the series. One thing I sometimes do when reading poetry is look at how each sentence relates to the next. There may be a chronological narrative, perhaps with fillable gaps between sentences, or perhaps the gaps are big, the style more episodic. It may be a list poem. Alternatively, details of a scene might be presented according to the order that a darting eye or memory might determine. One needs to be light on one's feet and delay integration of the sentences to appreciate several of these poems. Here for example is the start of p.10

The rolls arrive at the Inchnadamph Hotel
She doesn't say 'I never should have married you',
instead tries I've cleaned our tennis shoes.
He spots the van through the binoculars,
the rattle on the cattle grid alerts the lad who helps.

The long title's not untypical - another piece is called "The library prefect rescues Tents in Mongolia from the discard pile". Like a number of the poems, "The library ... " is initially somewhat confusing, hitting the disorientated reader with the clearest image at the end, an image which helps contextualize the poem

Seven Stars keeps her company when the letter comes
about her mother's scan. On the bottom shelf
the 1920 OEDs, too far gone for girls to save.

In contrast, "Launderama, Albert Street, Kirkwall" ends with "I step down. Translated. It's 1861. I've been baptised/ in Burness Loch. Smoothed and folded." which is more challenging.

Though line-breaks don't play a major role, the discontinuities prevent the text being mistaken for prose ("Rosaries" being an exception). I liked "Cumbrian cottage interior" the most.

"Pulse" by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, 2011)

2012-02-06T11:13:00.004Z

In the first story, "East Wind", the characters behave in a way convenient for the plot. After that there are pages of clever banter

'You rode that hobby horse to death last time, darling.'
'Did I?'
'Riding a hobby horse to death is flogging a dead metaphor.'
'What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile, by the way?'
'Marmalade.'
'Which of you two is driving?'
'Have you made yours?' (p.49)

I like "Carcassonne" but isn't it an essay? Finally there's the title story, which makes the book worthwhile. A man reflects on his parents' marriage when his own fails.

About eighteen months into the marriage, Janice accused me of not being straightforward. Of course, being Janice, she didn't put it as straightforwardly as that. She asked why I always preferred discussing unimportant problems rather than important ones. I said I didn't think this was so, but in any case, big things are sometimes so big that there's little to say about them (p.214)

His father's quiet. There's friction between his wife Janice and his parents - Janice "used to complain to your mother about how difficult you were to live with - somehow implying that it was your mother's fault" (p.225). His father starts to suffer from anosmia (losing the sense of smell) just before his mother's diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

Her father tries acupuncture, which he doesn't believe in, but he goes along with it. "In Chinese medicine there are 6 [pulses], 3 on each side" (p.201); "Oh for Christ's sake, Dad. There's only one pulse" (p.206), says the narrator. And yet, the acupuncture seems to help. The narrator also has ideas about relationships

"If we're looking for someone who matches us, we only ever think of their good matching bits", p.215
"You would think, wouldn't you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself - either through some genetic inheritance or because you'd learnt from example?", p.217

Smells are a running theme - perhaps a shade too pervasive

When the narrator first met Janice he thought it was "a slightly off-centre tweak to her nose that I found instantly sexy", p.201
"Jake used to say I had a nose for trouble", p.206

Pheromones and compost feature too. When his mother's comatose on her deathbed his father rubs fresh herbs beneath her nose, believing that the sense of smell is the last to go.

Other reviews

Rachel Cusk (Guardian)
Tim Adams (Observer)
Tim Martin (Telegraph) - "many of these pieces are still masterclasses in the form, full of the sidelong wit and intelligence that make the writer one of our most consistently deft short-form stylists"
Leyla Sanai (Independent)
Michiko Kakutani (New York Times)
Kate Saunders (New Statesman)
DJ Taylor (Financial Times) - "Short stories nearly always suffer from being assembled in volume form. The reader starts to see the joins, work out how the tricks are played, looks on knowingly as the next artful metaphor begins to uncoil, and in this particular case to wonder whether the Trades Descriptions Act couldn’t usefully be invoked. The four pieces entitled "At Phil and Joanna’s" are simply exercises in the higher banter, smart-alecky conversations"

"Hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage" by Alice Munro (Vintage, 2002)

2012-02-02T08:36:00.009Z

Interviewed by Jeanne McCulloch in The Paris Review she said

"Well I think that "Jack Randa Hotel," which I quite like, works as an entertainment. I want it to, anyway. Although a story like "Friend of my Youth" does not work as an entertainment. It works in some other way. It works at my deepest level."
"I didn’t last at [my first creative writing] job at all. I hated it, and even though I had no money, I quit. ... It was terrible. This was 1973. York was one of the more radical Canadian universities, yet my class was all male except for one girl who hardly got to speak. They were doing what was fashionable at the time, which had to do with being both incomprehensible and trite; they seemed intolerant of anything else."

I don't like usually like long, entertaining stories, and I suspect I sometimes like supposedly "incomprehensible and trite" pieces. On e-notes they say

"In Munro's works the mundane is juxtaposed with the fantastic, and she often relies on paradox and irony to expose meanings that lie beneath the surface of commonplace occurrences."
"Many critics echo the sentiments of Catherine Sheldrick who states that the stories of Alice Munro present "ordinary experiences so that they appear extraordinary, invested with a kind of magic." It is this emphasis on the seemingly mundane progression of female lives that prompted Ted Solataroff to call Munro a 'great stylist of 1920's realism, a Katherine Anne Porter brought up to date.'"
"Occasionally faulted for limiting herself to a narrow thematic range, Munro is, nevertheless, widely regarded as a gifted short story writer whose strength lies in her ability to present the texture of everyday life with both compassion and unyielding precision."

I've now read 2 books of hers, and some stories in anthologies. I've seen little of the fantastic, quite a lot of irony. There's a high body-count (though death is an "ordinary experience" I suppose). Compassion? Yes. Precision? Not sure. Some effects are only possible if many words are used - I think Proust's work exhibits that type of effect, with precision. In places Munro's work requires a similar patience on behalf of the reader. I'm still coming to terms with the stamina required. On p.224 for example there's this paragraph (part of a 24 page story) - "She looked down at the table napkins, which were folded in quarters. They were not as big as dinner napkins or as small as cocktail napkins. They were set in overlapping rows so that a corner of each napkin (the corner embroidered with a tiny blue or pink or yellow flower) overlapped the folded corner of its neighbor. No two napkins embroidered with the same color of flower were touching each other. Nobody had disturbed them, or if they had - for she did see a few people around the room holding napkins - they had picked up napkins from the end of the row in a careful way and this order had been maintained". This is Meriel attending a post-funeral buffet at the parents of the dead boy. It says something about the guests and whoever set the table but we hear nothing more of them, and in any case it's rather verbose. It tells us something about Meriel's state of mind (later that day sleeps with a stranger). It slows the pace. Maybe that's the point.

The title story of this book is 50+ pages long. 6 characters have a voice, one of them a shopkeeper who could have been chopped were space at a premium.

In "Floating Bridge", Jinny, 42, is being told a rude joke by a stranger when we learn that she's been recently told that her cancer's in remission. A boy who may know about her illness drives her home, shows her some Nature on the way, then kisses her. I guess the title has a symbolic significance.

I think I've read "Family Furniture" before. The title story also features a pile of furniture. We see the narrator's changing attitude to Alfrida, a rather larger-than-life character. The narrator used details about Alfrida (who she didn't much like) in a story. The narrator has views about men

"[In] my aunts' houses ... too, you could come upon a shabby male hideaway with its furtive yet insistent odors, its shamefaced but stubborn look of contradicting the female domain", p.105
"All of my experience of a woman with men, of a woman listening to her man, hoping and hoping that he will establish himself as somebody she can reasonably be proud of, was in the future. The only observation I had made of couples was of my aunts and uncles and of my mother and father, and those husbands and wives seemed to have remote and formalized connections and no obvious dependence on each other", p.107
"in my experience ... Men looked away from frightful happenings as soon as they could and behaved as if there was no use, once things were over with, in mentioning them or thinking about them ever again. They didn't want to stir themselves up, or stir other people up.", p.110

Later the narrator says "I had ended my marriage for personal - this is, wanton - reasons". Much later we learn more about the men (the narrator's father included) who Alfrida befriended.

Powerplays/conventions between the sexes and highlighting of gendered social roles feature in several stories.

"Well, of course he was wrong. Men are not normal, Chrissy. That's one thing you'll learn if you ever get married.", p.263
"It was the women who kept the conversation afloat. Men seemed cowed by the situation.", p.297

In "Comfort", Nina returns home to find that her terminally ill husband, Lewis, had killed himself as she knew he'd intended. She looks for a suicide note, has trouble making the appropriate arrangements. In a flashback we hear of Lewis's problems with Creationists in his classroom.

In "Nettle" a woman leaves her family to write (and have a non-committal affair). She meets by chance a childhood heart-throb.

I didn't get much from "Post and Beam". "What Is Remembered" interested me more. Muriel sleeps with a stranger - unplanned, just once. In the thirty years that her marriage continued, she thinks back to that episode, the ferry how nuances of phrasing changed the atmosphere, how "Take me somewhere else" meant more than "Let's go somewhere else", new memories and realisations strike her.

"Queenie" is in unnumbered sections sometimes as short as half a page. A women stays with her step-sister (who left at 18 to live with a music teacher) and sees that the relationship's unpleasant. Later the step-sister leaves again and the sisters lose contact.

"The Bear Came Over the Mountain" is another story where the first paragraph gives the reader lots of detail. We follow the course of Fiona's dementia. In a care home she forms an attachment with the wheelchaired Aubrey. Fiona goes downhill when Aubrey goes back home. Grant, Fiona's husband, visits Aubrey's home to ask his wife if Aubrey could visit Fiona - ironic because over the years Grant's had many affairs. The wife refuses, but later phones Grant asking about a date. Grant doesn't reply immediately. He visits Fiona, asking if she recalls Aubrey. She doesn't. Her health's improved.

Repeated details include flat-chested women, tall women, "house, not an apartment", and suicides. She leaves gaps of decades, begins with a fragment.

Some details from the stories are repeated in the Paris Review interview

On p.101 it says "At the end of my second year I was leaving college - my scholarship had covered only two years there. It didn't matter - I was planning to be a writer anyway. And I was getting married.. In the Paris Review interview she says "[I was a serious writer by the time [I] went to college ... I knew I would only be at university two years because the scholarships available at that time lasted only two years. ...I got married right after the second year. I was twenty."
On p.158 it says "my father shot and butchered the horses that were fed to the foxes and mink. In the Paris Review interview she says "When my father died, he was still living in that house on the farm, which was a fox and mink farm"

Other reviews

"The love of a good woman" by Alice Munro (Vintage, 1998)

2012-01-29T06:58:00.000Z

I've never read an Alice Munro book before, though I've liked "The Barton Bus" for a while. This book starts with the title story, a novella (77 pages). 3 boys find a dead body in the river. When they go home for a meal they don't mention it at first. We're told how their behaviour in the country differs from how they behave in the town, and it's different again from what they're like at home. We learn about their families in a domestic context

His five-year-old brother was sitting in place at the table, banging his knife and fork up and down and yelling, "Want some service. Want some service."
He got that from their father, who did it for a joke.
Bud passed by his brother's chair and said quietly, "Look. She's putting lumps in the mashed potatoes again."
He had his brother convinced that lumps were something you added, like raisins to rice pudding, from a supply in the cupboard (p.18)

We meet Bud's image-conscious sisters, Cece's violent father, and Jimmy's crippled father, seeing how some of them are different when they're out of the house.

Years pass. We're at the deathbed of an angrily-dying woman 27 years old. We discover that appearances are more deceptive than they initially appeared.

Image creation is something that's on the mind of several characters in this book. In a later story, "Save the Reaper" a 7 year-old "looked at Eve. A flat look, a moment of conspiratorial blankness, a buried smile, that passed before there could be any need for recognition of it.
What did it mean? Only that he had begun the private work of storing and secreting, deciding on his own what should be preserved and how, and what these things were going to mean to him, in his unknown future" (p.180)

In "Cortes Island" the main character thinks about becoming a writer - " I brought a school notebook and tried to write - did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can I did this over and over again until I had only the notebook cover left ... I was like having a secret pregnancy and miscarriage every week"

I like "Save the Reaper". The persona uses "temporarily in abeyance" on p.148, which doesn't sound right though. We don't learn for a while the relationship between Eve and Sophie, whereas the next story tells all right from the start "Thirty years ago, a family was spending a holiday together on the east coast of Vancouver Island. A young father and mother, their two small daughters, and an older couple, the husband's parents." I like "The Children Stay" too.

In "Before the Change" Madeleine goes back to her father's house having split with her fiancé, who teaches at a Theological College. She split because her fiancé wanted her to have an abortion rather than a too-early child. She's given it away for adoption. The style's epistlatory, though the letters are never sent. She realises that her father (a doctor) performs abortions - illegal in those days. He suddenly dies. In the will there's surprisingly little money left. She thinks maybe he did the abortions for free. Then, when the housekeeper comes to collect her stuff in a big car, she assumes blackmail. Although, she finally thinks What I've been shying away from is that it could have been done for love./ For love, then. Never rule that out."

"My Mother's Dream" is from the viewpoint of someone that's unborn, then a foetus, then a baby for most of the story. One night she might have died - "I think that the outcome was not certain and that will was involved. It was up to me, I mean, to go out way or another" (p.336). At the end, an adolescent watching silly kids play in a pool she says "I would have liked for one of them to see my pale pajamas moving in the dark, and to scream out in earnest, thinking that I was a ghost." (p.340)

Stories can share details

"little laughs or barks, not to indicate that anything is funny but as a kind of punctuation", p.260
"Her giggling was a kind of punctuation of speech", p.312

She uses interjected flashbacks, one-line memories, and often has more than 3 active characters. Families figure strongly. Years pass. There's a dislocation between events and the understanding of them. Epiphanies are delayed, muted, half-expected by the characters. Readers are sometimes kept in the dark about details that all (or most) of the characters know.

On his blog, Charles E. May says "As usual in a Munro work, the story covers a long period of time and focuses on several characters - the kind of time span and character configuration that makes many reviewers call her stories 'novelistic.' However, if we read ... as a short story rather than as a novel - that is, if we read it more than once - as a language-based thematic structure rather than for plot and character configuration - we may find that it is more complex than we first assume."

I'm not used to reading long stories. There were times when I wondered whether all the twists and turns were worth it -

She had thought he was older than she was, at least as old as Brian (who was thirty, though people were apt to say he didn't act it). but as soon as he started talking to her, in this offhand, dismissive way, never quite meeting her eyes, she suspected that he was younger than he'd like to appear. Now with that flush she was sure of it.
As it turned out, he was a year younger than she was. Twenty-five.

In other places I wonder whether diminishing returns set in. On p.238 it takes 9 lines to get a suitcase from the top of a wardrobe. I noticed that one blogger on reading the title story wrote "By the end, that whole first thirty pages felt highly unnecessary", a feeling I had too.

Other reviews

Sandy English
Michael Gorra (New York Times)
Reading Group Guide
the random book review
The Canadian Book Review ("The stories themselves are filled with Munro’s classic reserved style")

"Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri (Flamingo 2000)

2012-01-24T11:09:00.004Z

The stories have various settings - sometimes the setting's India, sometimes the focus is on Indians living in the USA, and sometimes a WASPy American in the States comes across Indians. Stories are well-crafted and plots are clearly delineated with contrasting characters and signposted resolutions.

In "A Temporary Matter" a couple begin to share secrets in the dark during some scheduled power-cuts. When the power-cuts are over, the woman announces that she's leaving. Here's the final paragraph - Shukumar stood up and stacked his plate on top of hers. He carried the plates to the sink, but instead of running the tap he looked out the window. Outside the evening was still warm, and the Bradfords were walking arm in arm. As he watched the couple the room went dark, and he spun around. Shoba had turned the lights off. She came back to the table and sat down, and after a moment Shukumar joined her. They wept together, for the things they now knew. - the contrast of the couples, the symbolism of the dark.

In "When Mr. Pirzada came to dine" the narrator is 10 year old Lilia, living in the States. Her parents are Indian. Mr. Pirzada often visits. His wife and 7 daughters are in war-torn Pakistan. It's Halloween, and he's helping Lilia to carve a pumpkin. Hearing bad news from Pakistan on the TV his knife slips. He's mortified. Lilia's father cuts an open astonished mouth to hide the mistake. Lilia gets ready to knock on doors. It's her first time. Mr. Pirzada fears for her safety but Lilia's ready

"Don't worry," I said. It was the first time I had uttered those words to Mr. Pirzada, two simple words I had tried but failed to tell him for weeks, had said only in my prayers. It shamed me now that I had said them for my own sake" (p.38)

In January, the war over, he returns to Pakistan. They hear nothing for a while, then discover that all's ok. The story ends with

Since January, each night before bed, I had continued to eat, for the sake of Mr. Pirzada's family, a piece of candy I had saved from Halloween. That night there was no need to. Eventually, I threw them away. (p.42)

In "Interpreter of Maladies" a wife reveals a secret to Mr Kapasi who she's never met before. On p.63 there's

" ... I could tell you stories, Mr. Kapasi"
As a result of spending all her time in college with Raj, she continued, she did not make many close friends

This passage of reported speech lasts a page. Until this point Mr. Kapasi has been the PoV focus. In this passage though, we get more than a summary of conversation; the PoV changes.

In "Sexy" Miranda, a WASPy woman, is having an affair with a married Indian man. In a whispering gallery he whispers "You're sexy" to her. She hears, though they're 30 feet apart. Later she spends an afternoon with a boy whose Indian father left his mother for a younger, white woman. The boy sketches her with wax crayons, says "You're sexy", explaining that "It means loving someone you don't know ... That's what my father did". He talks about his mother. Miranda decides to end the affair.

I got the book second-hand. "Sexy" has highlighting in 2 colours. I tried to work out the colour-coding - "Nothing you'll ever need to worry about," and he tapped her playfully on the head had never bought anything other than a lipstick tanned ... black hair ... knuckles ... flamingo pink shirt ... navy blue suit ... camel overcoat ... gleaming leather buttons ... pigskin gloves ... burgundy wallet ... tortoiseshell glasses wrinkles are going to form by twenty-five. After that they just start showing silver eyes ... skin as pale as paper ... dark and glossy ... features, too, were narrow red tissue grinning pig's head presiding over their conversation buy herself things she thought a mistress should have to an Indian restaurant her hand moving in unfamiliar directions, stopping and turning and picking up "You're sexy"

She's a good, reliable writer of Realism.

Other reviews

"William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure" by Stephen Cushman (Yale, 1985)

2012-01-20T08:55:00.001Z

In 1935, Frost wrote "Science put it into our heads that there must be new ways to be new. Those tried were largely by subtraction—elimination. Poetry, for example, was tried without punctuation. It was tried without capital letters. It was tried without metric frame on which to measure the rhythm. It was tried without any images but those to the eye". He had trouble accepting free verse, as in different ways did Eliot. WC Williams too thought that poetry couldn't be free of all constraints. He's a tempting subject when studying the conflicts at the birth of free verse because not only can one investigate his poetry, one can also try to understand his theorising which he conducted with "a persistance that sometimes borders on the monomaniacal"

"Williams crusaded on behalf of his theory of measure for nearly fifty years ... The larger measure grew, the harder it became to define ... many of Williams's readers and critics have had to lead double lives, admiring his poems while apologizing for his theory", p.1
"Why have I divided my lines as I have. I don't know", WCW, "Dartmouth College Talk", 1945
"How can lineation alone do the work of measuring verse? His many theoretical statements suggest that he never fully believed that it could", p.14
"Searching for the variable foot, Williams discovered instead the straggled leg [enjambment]", p.15

Antecedents are sought - Hopkins, Whitman, Wordsworth and Milton

"The radical indentations [in "Tintern Abbey"] let space into the verse column at irregular interval, signaling the abrupt discontinuities and shifts associated with the Romantic ode", p.57
"Milton's blank verse anticipates the 'effects' of free verse by abandoning rhyme and using the line ending to wreak havoc on the sentence", p.18

He considers the visual impact of line-breaks and ee cummings' influence. Enjambment becomes a key concept in the book - "The straddling of lines by sentences dramatizes 'the larger processes of the imagination' (I, p.123) as the poem disguises and reveals connections between words and objects", p.17. When WCW's lines (or stepped lines) shortened, the effect begins to dominate - "The short-line poem is in a state of constant enjambment", p.22. In sections like

But the stars
are round
cardboard

(from "Composition") each line-break can unveil a surprise. And yet, "the word 'enjambment' appears nowhere in Williams's published writing", p.18

He studies stanza 2 of "To a poor old woman"

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

"Without an accentual-syllabic norm, it is impossible to convert any of these redistributions into stress values. Does the first line of the second stanza ("They taste good to her") mean they taste good as opposed to bad? If so, we might say the second sentence ("They taste good/ to her") means they taste good to her", p.23. He also quotes the more successful "I saw a girl with one leg/ over the rail of a balcony" ("The Right of Way"), suggesting that "She is the emblem of enjambment, the straddler", p.50

The author looks at enjambments that are weak (break between clauses) or strong (break within word), and mimetic enjambments (e.g. "strain/ forward"), pointing out that "The problem with mimetic meaning is that we can easily make too much of it. Depending on the ingenuity of an individual reader, every enjambment can be interpreted mimetically", p.36. Then on p.42-45 he considers the scope of an enjambment's impact

"When we interpret a given instance of enjambment mimetically, tying it to a particular feature of thematic content, we justify it locally"
"When we interpret the pattern of enjambments throughout a poem prosodically, analysing the tendencies toward line-sentence alignment or nonalignment, we justify it generally. If we can tie this general pattern to the thematic content, so much the better; yet, like an accentual-syllabic design, the same pattern may appear in two poems which say different things."
"The third level of interpretation involves a[n] ... attempt to justify enjambment universally ... According to Lawler, enjambment is a gesture of freedom, the breaking of limits, transcendence, transformation and union (often sexual) ... . In poems such as 'to a poor old woman' or 'Seafarer' a sense of freedom and transcendence comes not with the fragmentation of enjambment, but with the release from these into the integration of line and sentence."

The importance of context (in the poem, in society) to the impact of a line-break is repeatedly highlighted. In the end it's still not clear what "measure" meant to Williams, important to him though it was.

"Deep Field" by Philip Gross (Bloodaxe, 2011)

2012-01-16T06:20:00.006Z

I have a folder where I keep poems I like. I have quite a few poems by Gross there - his stood out against other poems in magazines. I've not read a book of his before. "Deep Field" is less to do with "Composition by field" or "Deep Image" than astronomy (see Wikipedia's Hubble Deep Field page).

Loss of language is a tempting topic for poets to tackle, looking at the power of words, but also at situations when words aren't needed; dealing with the relationship between words, their meanings and the world - what happens when those bonds loosen.

Mimetic tools are available - confusion represented by jagged layout and loss of narrative; silence by encroaching white space. In this book some stanzas are right-aligned and some are shaped (into circles?). In "Mule", a line of each triplet is indented: line 1 of stanza 1, line 2 of stanza 2, line 3 of stanza 3, line 1 of stanza 4 and so on. There are many step-down lines. On p.24 the layout's almost like a chessboard where only the black squares are written on. On p.48 the text is a thick diagonal band running from top-left to mid-right. A few pieces are more random than that. Many have fairly regular left-aligned stanzas though, mostly couplets. On p.24 there might be prose. Line-breaks sometimes fracture negative words - "dis-/cohering", "a-/gainst", "dis-/embodiments", "mis-/placed".

When it's the poet's father who's losing language, these technical devices can be imbued with emotional content. It's a combination that should result in interesting poetry, though there's a risk of playing too many obvious tricks. As Peter Cushman's pointed out "The problem with mimetic [line-break] meaning is that we can easily make too much of it. Depending on the ingenuity of an individual reader, every enjambment can be interpreted mimetically". I found many of the line-breaks in this book hopeful, the indentation bizarre. Sometimes, as on p.11, the splattered layout seems to help a few ideas go a long way. This style of poetry doesn't break when it's off-form, it becomes diluted. Most of the time though, the content won through.

"Scry" is the first poem. It has a pattern - the stanza lengths are 2 1 3 1 2 1 3 1 3 1 2 1 3 1 2 1. The single-line stanzas are alternately indented by one tab or two. Phrases like "crosswords .... (the kind with no black squares,/ whose syntax I could scarcely guess at)" baffle me at a more mundane level - is the syntax really so hard? Syntax of the clues? Of the black squares? The thinginess of language is mimetically displayed in one-liners like "here's a word to peer into - scry" and "this crystal ball, this cryptic syllable". The persona's interest with etymology is contrasted with the polyglot father's aphasia, the father who's trying to go "from blankness into words" while the son, like a fortune teller, "reads the pauses/ in their questions". This focussing on the spaces recurs later -"The space between the words" (p.24) is where the father's sought, "'soul',/ that thing not in but in the space between" (p.29). In the Deep Field between the stars are more stars, whole galaxies.

"Scry" is one of 7 individual shorter poems. There's a longer poem "Vocable" and the rest of the book is a 3 part sequence called "Something Like The Sea". Some section could stand alone. Others prop each other up, sharing material that could have been more concentrated. In part II at least, there's enough to go round and the balance of human and linguistic interest is more even. The journey isn't easy - part III ends with "never more sure// of the way than in the losing it" - in the Atlantic undertow near Polzeath, perhaps. The sea as a source of imagery and memories is an insistent presence in the book - "John, you are the sea/ I stare into"

In Part I on p.12 the father's sudden linguistic clarity shocks the son - "Me,/ I'm the boy who turns/at the call of a bird, that seemed to speak/a syllable,/ his name, in the darkening wood.". Later on the same page there's the usual comparison of communication problems being like hitting a window (often a bird doing so, but not here) - "beat/ against the glass which, being nothing,/ cannot (though it longs to) break". On p.13 we find the identity of the glass - the father says You are my window.

Sign and referent blur - "One day you woke to find that you'd lost barley". After the confusion, silence becomes a recurring theme, one that helps re-assess the past - "[TAB] and so I grew//bilingual in English and silence,/[TAB] grew a stammer/ [TAB] [TAB] that said something, too" (p.15).

I especially like "Mule", another individual poem.

Part II's "The small phrases are easy" succeeds for the same reasons that Oliver Sacks articles do. It's interesting to know that "you-know" survives after "The substantives, most of all the proper nouns, have gone" and that if you "ask a stammerer his name, he'll tense" because they're "pinned to one, one only, meaning". At about p.30 there are small poetry fragments, extended metaphors - the idea of tinnitus being like an "engine-room thrum" is extended to boats, and then the sound of one plane/ out scouring the sea lanes at first light, for survivors"; in another section the idea of conversation is compared to a chess game "branching from each single/ hard-deliberated syllable". I like these - the words have calmed down, left-aligned so that line-breaks are assumed ignorable rather than meaning-laden.

"Vocable" is in a baggy, forgiving format of 20 numbered sections. As usual, it's best to concentrate on content. Sections involve choking, "finding one's voice", leaving meanings out, controlling sheep dogs, the physics of breath, the breath of Him, the inexpressible. Section 17's the least necessary.

I can't find any reviews online.

"I Sing the Sonnet" by Duncan Gillies MacLaurin (Snakeskin, 2011)

2012-01-12T06:14:00.004Z

My feelings about sonnets are ambivalent. I like poems of that length which elegantly pursue an argument. I like the image compression that the constraints encourage. I like sonnets by Geoffrey Hill ("Two Formal Elegies") as well as Carol Ann Duffy ("Prayer"). I'm less keen on the "punchline" structure of some Shakespearean sonnets, and the traditionally poetic imagery/trajectory that some sonnets gladly inherit. Also I'm wary of the effect that rhyme and rhythm can have on the assessment of content - it doesn't have a nice ring to it for me at the moment; I'd often rather have a prosed version with less padding, predictability and more flexible rhythms.

These 36 sonnets (in a free e-chapbook format that compares well with any paper competition) all have 14 lines and are tightly rhymed. Just occasionally (e.g. in "Presence") a line's initial unstressed syllable is missing, otherwise the rhythm closely follows the metre. It's the syllable count that varies from poem to poem. "Busker" alternates 6-syllabled lines with 8-syllabled ones. "Misfits" begins by alternating 8-syllable and 9-syllable lines. "Still Life" has quatrains whose lines follow a 9,8,9,7 syllable pattern, ending with a final 8,7 couplet. "Lucky Charms" has 14-syllable lines, "Remorse" and "Hope" have 8-syllable lines. Some poems are Shakespearean, though many are not. There are other patterns too - the lines of "Lucky Charms" begin alternately with "The" and "I", the line-beginnings of "Vagabond" and "Who Needs an Easy Love?" nearly follow a pattern, and there are acrostics.

I often read quickly straight through a book the first time to get a feel for the work as a whole. On my first reading what struck me was the certainty of the poet, the trust in language, compared to the uncertainty of so many poets I was reading concurrently. Here's the first stanza of "Mama's Little Boy"

A tearaway with golden curls,
he'll always be a darling boy,
your little pet, your pride and joy,
the odd one out amongst the girls.

I assumed that we'd get more about how wonderful the mother thought her boy was, only for the final stanza to surprise us. And so it came to pass. Yes, there are only so many plots available, but here the details are too generic. The persona tells us what s/he knows or has recently realised - there's no process, no enactment of discovery. I'd prefer "Mum's the Word" in prose, with more anecdote or observational detail, more irony or imagery.

I like "Horror Vacui", about Venice's dark side. "Hope" ends with

that wild old whisper still wakes spring,
still ushers rivers into flood,
and we still feel the rush of blood
each time we hear the blackbird sing.
You walk beside me in a blend
of soul mate, sweetheart, muse and friend

The "wild .. whisper ... wakes ... usher ... rivers ... rush" stream of sound impresses, but arrgh, those last two lines! "Presence" probably has more allusions than I've noticed. However, that too ends flatly with

Essential beauty is divine;
truth is, I'm yours, and you are mine.

I like "I Sing the Sonnet". Like "Hope" it has a passage of sustained imagery

Later on you knew
you'd heard the oystercatchers long before
you saw them round the river's corridor
at lightning speed, their destination you,
the listener whose needs must be addressed,
my silent partner whose assent has willed
this elevated song, who's just been thrilled
by carpe diem at its all-time best.

The final two sonnet series contain some of the best material. The sonnets are acrostics where the 1st words (rather than 1st letters) of each line form a sequence.

"The Acrosticist" and "The Lessons Learned from Vietnam" are 2 versions developed from the same material. Such dual poems are an interesting idea. The poems share many lines as well as an epithet ("The singer, under all circumstances, must be more interesting than the songs he sings" - David Craig) that lists the 1st words of the lines. The epithet is a counter to the collection's title, which in turn alludes to Whitman's "I sing the body electric"

"Notes for lighting a fire" by Gerry Cambridge (HappenStance 2012)

2012-01-07T21:52:00.009Z

At the pre-launch that I attended on 10/12/2011 the poet mentioned his interest in nature and detail, about how many types of birds he knew the Latin names for when he was young. In a Guardian article Ruth Padel writes "But deeper even than metaphor is the way poetry and science both get at a universal insight or law through the particular ... both arrive at the grand and abstract (when they have to) through precision. Scientists and poets focus on details. Poetry is the opposite of woolly or vague. Vague poetry is bad poetry - which, as Coleridge said, is not poetry at all. Woolly science is not science". This book certainly isn't vague.

The poet pointed out that bird-egg enthusiasts are nearly always male. Model-train fans are too. Neither of these interests seem concerned with how things work - what you see is what you get. Precision with words (from typesetting to poetry) seems a less gender-biased trait, and is concerned with effect, not merely looks. Throughout this book care's been taken at the lower levels (type-setting; word choice and economy) to help the content shine.

A wintery leit-motif runs through the early poems. In the title poem the persona prepares to write against the backdrop of a universe that "feels like a vast deep freeze"

Now you can settle
to the scratch of a pen in praise of primordial fire
with its lapping sound, as earth in its tilt turning round
swings Orion up sparking like a spaceship
of light from behind the black burial mound of that hill.

At the start of the next poem, "Processional at the Winter Solstice", darkness still dominates - "He has gone down into darkness at the wrecked end of the year". This time "Shop windows glint" heralding light's recovery

He lies as plain as frost-dust where those starving thrushes call,
And his lime and ray-struck armoury could hardly be less small
On the anvil of beginnings in the sun's gate on the wall.

"Young Snow" captures a morning. Then there are some egg-collecting poems. I like "Sacrifice", the guilt of egg stealing tied up with other emotions

Opening the cardboard box that had held
a long winter coat for my mother out of the catalogue

He looks at his egg collection, "arranged in sawdust" - "In those days, robbery was my form of love". In "The Whitethroat at Hamilton Bus Station" the relation to nature becomes one of identification - seeing a bird "fresh from Africa" that others seem not to notice, the persona says "I feel I possess some secret code" then thinks "he sings to me". In a later poem "My father's toy trains were his birds". A block of poems is about creatures (snails, frogs and wasps) - all good. I like "Take off" too - a Martian poem.

Part II is mostly taken up by two long poems. I like the coal section of "Light Up Lanarkshire" "Where it slept for millions of years/ Like some perversion of the fairytale princess/ Awaiting the kiss of her lover./ While over its sleeping abundance, out in the upper air, everything happened,/ Men were inventing, inventing, inventing./ The age of steam required to be fed". I like the anecdotes at the end of section II of the poem. Here, and earlier I wondered whether there were short stories to be made from this material. Jon Burnside might use these revealing anecdotes and zoomed-in detail to lay a trail of character development. I liked "Exposure"

Part III has poems about a father and other miscellanea often to do with middle age or looking back. "Christmas Oranges" features clementines - "fragrance of orange on the tips of the fingers -/ peeling away/ like a plaster from skin/ segment by segment/ held up to this morning light/ ... to check for the shades of pips". "Goose in Middle Age" is perhaps my favourite poem.

Other reviews

"Taking Account" by Peter Gilmour (HappenStance, 2011)

2012-01-03T11:10:00.004Z

At the launch on 10/12/2011 in Edinburgh the publisher praised the lovely syntax of these poems, some of which have appeared in PN Review, Smiths Knoll and The Rialto. The poet said that by writing poems about past events you remember in new ways, discover new things. He was careful about the I/persona overlap, but in these poems where the voice is the same throughout, the poet and persona can easily fuse. The subject matter's sorted into four broad sections: I) a wife's suicide; II) the husband's recovery; III) a father's death followed by the son's self-assessment; IV) More recovery, a mother's death, more self-assessment.

Section I begins with "Rupture", a somewhat deceptive piece in that it's unclear when or whether we leave Realism. I think it's best read as metaphor. A husband drives off the road, waking his wife. He keeps driving, "Skidded, round and round/ near a hundred times, dizzied out of our minds/ and when we stopped, facing back the way we'd come". Then we get "Overkill"

I thought of food parcels
to begin with, not any kind of poison.
All I can think of these days
is the degree of desperation:
six suicide packs. You only needed one.

"Solicitude" recounts events with equal directness

I married a woman who killed herself
...
My younger son looked for her in the stars
...
I wondered how on earth she would find us
if she ever came back. Leave message,
my sons said, in bottles and under stones
and in the earth where once she planted flowers.

And so they did. Message after message.

Like section I, section II starts obliquely. "Different kind of beast" is about a dog being found in clearing - the black dog "a stranger to me as I watched her". Depression is beginning to recede.

In "Stones and pebbles" he finds the stones that his wife had assembled in the hearth. In "Convalescence" he finds consolation in arranging stones. In "Husbandry", the raking of leaves is calming.

"Finally" ends section III. It is one of the poems about assessment

Those are the masts of ships moving above the corn.
I seem to have reached my destination, the end
of a pilgrimage whose beginnings are obscure

"Reckoning" in section IV is again about looking back, self-estimating a life - one of the few poems that consider choice. Should the persona stick or twist? And how long will this reckoning go on?

In earlier sections, poems like "Genealogies" and "Out of Step" parents don't come out of it well. Towards the end, parents make amends. The book ends with "Dying", about a mother's death, light becoming solid beyond the window.

We seemed to see these things together: she from her bed,
I standing by her, one hand with spread fingers on her back

(wasted now like the rest of her), the other pointing,
with amazement, I imagine, at these hints of glory.

The last line of the poem and book is

Will there be hints again when I go, or are these enough?

The previous poem, "Last Place", mentions that "a bright self would rise behind the dying one". The poem before that ,"Reckoning", wonders whether the poet's gone far enough, whether it's worth striving higher, further. Such pre-occupations are a timely end to a pamphlet that unsentimentally records the premonitions and aftermaths of life-changing events, youthful exuberance eclipsed by the responsibilities of parenthood and adult love.

Other reviews

Emma Lee

"Close Calls with Nonsense" by Stephen Burt (Graywolf Press, 2009)

2011-12-30T10:45:00.002Z

The book comprises reprints of articles and extended reviews (often of Collected works) about young US poets, non-US poets, famous US poets and the Ellipticals. They show people like me new routes into poems without sounding too preachy, pointing out the flaws I might see - e.g.

"When Revell's 1990s poems failed, they didn't make sense; when his new poems fail, they make too much sense, or rather avoid sense in overfamiliar ways", p.65
"Herrera's worst poems seem disorganised, excessive, frantic; his best seem disheveled, excited, uncommonly free", p.94
"all [Les Murray's] books include clumsiness and redundancy, masses of lines it's hard to take seriously", p.166; "over and over (it seems to me) [Les Murray's] Collected Poems places clumsy or merely doctrinaire work right next to some of the best descriptive poetry in the language", p.174

while also showing some strengths I'm not very responsive to. The book is written "especially, for people who read the half-column poems in glossy magazines and ask, "Is that all there is?"" (p.5). It has sections trying to explain the work of some supposedly difficult poets - contemporary US (e.g. Armantrout) but also WC Williams and GB poets (Denise Riley and Muldoon). Burt's associated with the term "Elliptical poets", those who "broke up syntax, but reassembled it; they tried (as had [Jory] Graham) to adapt Language poets' disruptions to traditional lyric goals (expressing a self and its feelings), and tried (as Graham did not) to keep their poems short, song-like or visually vivid". He points out that the younger poets belong "to the first generation of American poets who may have grown up without even a vestigial connection to the accentual-syllabic, rhyming English tradition - his inventive lines have this absence at their back" (p.122). In his introduction he points out that one needs to keep an open mind

"Some of the most celebrated "difficult" poetry of the past ten years seems to me derivative, mechanical, shallow, soulless, and too clever by half"
"In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others. I miss, in most contemporary poetry, the arguments, the extended rhetorical passages and essayistic digressions I enjoy in the poems of the 17th and 18th centuries (and in WH Auden and Marianne Moore)",

He writes that "Most of the new North American poets I've liked lately share a surface difficulty: they tease or demand or frustrate; they're hard or impossible to paraphrase; and they try not to tell stories", p.6. The explanations he gives are helpful, as are his tips on p.11-13 for reading such poetry -

"look for a persona and a world, not for an argument or a plot"
"Enjoy double meanings: don't feel you have to choose between them" - are they related?
"Look for self-analyses or for frame-breaking moments"
"Ask what kind of nonpoetic speech or text a given line evokes"
"Look for patterns you might seek in visual arts .. what sort of person would juxtapose [these phrases] and why?"
"gamelike poems focus on artifice (and personality) at the expense of 'sincere' or 'natural' speech. That artifice can carry meaning in itself: often it tries to demonstrate that selves, personalities, egos, are themselves artificial, effects of a social matrix"

His writing style's approachable and reader-friendly (e.g. "if capsule bios irk you, skip six paragraphs down", p.148). He deals with several poetry styles - a chapter about Wilbur follows one on Ashbery. The book ends with some fragments (e.g. "To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical", p.357). There's no theory, though notions of self and identity construction are mentioned several times. I think more could have been said about this from a psychological perspective because he thinks this influences or explains some of the poetry (e.g. "for Tranter ... we make, from the prop closet and the wardrobe of language and habit, ourselves, whether or not we know that is what we are doing" (p.197)). As usual, Minimalism seems hard to explain, and I sometimes had trouble seeing why less ambiguous/challenging alternative methods weren't used by the poets. For example, on p.331 he quotes from "To a Poor Old Woman" to show "how Williams's line breaks work"

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her.

They taste good to her (you might not like them); They taste good (not merely adequate); she tastes them, taking them into her body, rather than merely contemplating them.

To me, italics would have made the points better (if indeed these were the points). Breaking the line after "good" is rather like putting a dash there - it emphasises "to her", thus making the statement more subjective. He reads it as if "good" is emphasised (because it's at the end of the line, I suppose). About the following

the fields flooded with milk
the herbs shining on the mountain

the strong salt soil my dear

you stoop to pinch off eatings

he says it "begins by depicting a place to relax" but to me the first line's an agro-industrial disaster, and the second's strange. Why "strong". Why the white space? What are "eatings"?

But at least Burt has expressed himself clearly; it's possible to agree/disagree rather than merely feel baffled. I'd recommend the book to anyone who feels that the current crop of young poets are unreadable.

"Egg Printing Explained" by Katy Evans-Bush (Salt, 2011)

2011-12-26T10:00:00.007Z

The poems (few of which have previously appeared in magazines) aren't easy to summarise though there are family-resemblances. On the back cover David Morley writes about "the cavalcade of forms and registers. The poems shift in mood and music". It's true. Several poems seems inspired by other texts, or events in other lives.

Several are "After" something, "for" someone, or begin with an epithet.
Several are triggered by paintings or songs
Three poems start by mentioning a story - "I know that anecdote of your father's: it begins/ as always with" ("My Hero"); "The mise-en-scène's well-known enough" ("A Christmas Play"); "The little goat had heard this story often" ("The Mountain Goat and the Mermaid"). By chance I've just read Rae Armantrout's "Generation" that begins "We know the story"
The lines of "Intelligent Album Rock" end with the same words as the lines of Pink Floyd's "Wish you Were Here".
"The Love Ditty of an 'eartsick Pirate" is a translation into piratese that's over 5 pages long. It begins
It's time we be goin', me hearty, avast!
When the night's nailed up its colours to its mast
Like some swab loaded to the gun'les 'n' lashed to the plank

I was reading Stephen Burt while reading this book. Some of what he says of "Elliptical poets" applies here ("Elliptical poets treat literary history with irreverent involvement. They create inversions, homages, takeoffs on old or "classic" poems"; "Ellipticals caress the technical"; "jangling leaps from low to high diction; [they] like … to interrupt [themselves]"). Evans-Bush is well-embedded in the same zeitgeist, applying their ideas, trying on their tropes though without the rough edges and with fewer of the sharp ones. Transitions can be sudden, though she usually waits until a sentence ends, and she can just as easily produce person-centred, closured pieces.

She reminds me a little of John Tranter, who also writes in many forms, including "terminals" (the form of "Intelligent Album Rock"). Both Tranter and Armantrout are distrusters of language and grand narratives, employing intertextuality to such an extent that their works can be collages. Evans-Bush however is mobile along the language-trusting spectrum with uncooked narratives alongside the in-crowded, poetry-for-poets material. At times there's a whiff of workshop exercise, or at least of a restless resourcefulness that can squeeze and stretch an unpromising idea until it becomes publishable. Not all the poems are accessible. The mysteries begin even before the contents - there's a frontispiece saying only Secombesque which may have something to do with the David Secombe of the notes. Some of the poems are dedicated to "DS".

The sonnets that commence the book (and are scattered throughout) exhibit several relaxations - "What's Time" is metrically tight, especially initially

A year ago a day was like a year.
A minute and a minute were an hour;
an hour was what it took for us to hear
the tinkling of the crashing of a star

The abab rhyme pattern soon lapses into cxcx/ xxbx/ dd. I don't think this is enacting the rejection of schemas. "Radio Silence" has 12-syllabled lines and another unrigorous rhyme structure - line 1 rhyming with line 14, line 2 with line 13 (ah, a pattern!), but line 2 also rhymes with line 6, line 5 rhymes with lines 9 and 10 and the pattern's gone.

I'll jump to the middle of the book to sample a 10 page section which I hope isn't too unrepresentative

"The Night is Dark" begins

You started with an image of yourself,
reversed, as in a mirror. It was 3
a.m. The night was dark, the streets were full
of thieves: thieves of your heart, put there by you.

"reversed" or "re-versed"? Why the line-break after 3? To make us think that "It" referred back to the image? Well, the first line's iambic pentameter and the other lines are nearly iambic. They're 10-syllabled, hence the line-break I guess. And what's been "put there" - the heart or the thieves? Or both? Later

The falcon lives without love. And therefore
you love the falcon. You pity his misfortune,
unable to see him, since you are also hooded,
and this unsilvering of the mirror's yours.

Gone are the syllabics. Then the persona walks the streets. Finally

... It's too late
It's 3 a.m. You've made what you're afraid of.

It's too late though it's still 3 a.m. What's been made - the heart or the thieves? Mainstream, yes, but I liked it.
"You're in Bedlam" is a 4-stanza abab poem. The Notes give some background, how someone suggested that the material in the walls may have been able to record noises. The poem says "The noise is in the walls. We hear it daily" and ends with "You'll screech for ages when your song is sung". I like the final line, though I don't feel that the poem as a whole achieves its potential.
"Meditations on a Freudian's Lip" is a page-long near-anaphora. I don't get it ("Elliptical poets like insistent, bravura forms, forms that can shatter and recoalesce, forms with repetends" - Burt)
The notes for "After the Gasometer" are better than the poem
I don't get "The Starvefish". It's almost as if the poet got the starfish/starvefish idea and tried to make a poem from it. It's syllabic, with a 2/6 pattern (maintained by chopping words up - e.g. mys/tery) except for first line which has a syllable too many, and the last line which is a syllable short.
"Billy and the Days" is too long. One's tempted to construct a missing back- (or framed-, or fantasy-) story from the "mobile phone in a drawer in the hall,/ proof that he's dead". Is it a particular Billy?
I liked the fast-cutting "Intelligent Album Rock" ("Ellipticals almost always delete transitions" - Burt)
"Forth in July" is a straightforward enough narrative. I thought the poem ended at the bottom of the page, but there was 50% more. It ends prosaically with "My parents shower her/ with thanks and praise, and get up to shut off the water/ and go inside and change; it's been an adventure, but now we have to get ready for the parade".
"The desiring of practically everything" seems too long.
"Overland Homesick Blues (after Bob Dylan" is 2.5 pages of short, rhymed lines.

In summary there's something for everyone - she's a Jack of all trades, without being a master of none. I could easily believe that some pieces I don't get might be others' favourites.

Other Reviews

Magma (Mark Burnhope)
David Green

"The Best American Short Stories 2010" ed Richard Russo (Mariner, 2010)

2011-12-23T14:48:00.003Z

A very naturalistic selection (except for the odd seagull), with straightforward narrative voices and common situations, though reviewers seem to like it. A couple of stories are set a few decades ago (e.g. fleeing Paris in WW2), and there's a near-future story. Of the 19 stories, 8 stories feature a death, though not always as the central event. 5 stories feature couples separating. The shortest story is about 3000 words. The most-represented magazines are Tin House (4), The New Yorker (2), The Atlantic (3), and McSweeney's (3). The foreword talks about the challenge of online publications.

I liked Kevin Moffett's "Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events" most - a young writer's challenged by his father becoming a writer. It included the sentence "You'll never earn a living writing stories, not if you're any good at it". I'd already read Egan's "Safari" in her novel. "The Seagull Army Descends on Strong Beach" lingers with me.

"The Netherlands Lives with Water" is perhaps the most complex, using the setting of global warming in 2015 as a source of symbolism - "schoolchildren have learned as one of their first geography sentences Between Camperduin and Petten lie three dikes: the Watcher, the Sleeper, and the Dreamer" (p.332). A relationship is floundering, but only in the penultimate paragraph do matters became lyrically explicit - "We went on vacations and fielded each other's calls and took turns reading Henk to sleep and let slip away that miracle that was there between us when we first came together. We hunkered down before the wind picked up. We modeled for our son risk management when we could have been embracing the free fall of that astonishing Here. This is yours to hold. We said to each other I think I know when we should have said Lead me farther through your amazing, amazing interior" (p.336)

In "The Cowboy Tango" a paragraph begins "Ten years passed this way" then a few pages later "More years went by". A long-standing work relationship at a ranch between the male boss and female ranch-hand is upset by a visitor - a relative of the man who has an affair with the woman then goes away, leaving his horse, Digger, and some paintings of the woman. "She reached down and touched her own closed eyes. She could feel the texture of the canvas through the paint" (p.357). The boss takes Digger to an auction without telling her. She finds out, tries to use all her saving to buy it back, but is out-bidded - by the boss who's changed his mind.

Other reviews

Arja Salafranca (The Short Review)
Charles May
Bonnie Brody (Mostly fiction)

"The Imperfectionists" by Tom Rachman (Quercus, 2010)

2011-12-15T12:25:00.000Z

The book's been much reviewed. It's unclear to me why. It's described as a novel. Alternate chapters that are in italics (short; 2 or 3 pages) describe the history of an English-language, Rome-based newspaper from 1953 to 2007. The other chapters (almost short stories) usually feature a journalist. Characters appear in each other's chapters. The final main chapter is from the last owner's viewpoint. The final short chapter gives a concluding paragraph to each of the main individuals. With such books it's tempting to assess each chapter in isolation. They vary in tone from sad almost to farce. In Arthur Gopal's chapter a reporter gets phone calls while interviewing a dying writer for her obituary. Later we surmise that the phone calls told him that his young daughter had suddenly died. In Herman Cohen's chapter an old friend visits and lives are compared. Events shift to Cairo for the broader comedy of Winston Cheung's chapter.

Snyder points at the bustling crowd. "Get that chick."
"What chick?"
"The one in that coat thing."
"The burka, you mean?"
"Get her, big guy. We need man-on-the-street quotes."
"But a woman in a burka? Couldn't I do man-on-the-street with a man on the street?"
"That is so racist."

(p.141)

"Did you meet any terrorists?"
"The real deal, bro." He pauses. "Not full-on Qaeda. But they're way up the waiting list."
"There's an application process?"
"Totally. OBL is whacked that way."
"Who's OBL?"
"Osama," he replies. "I don't know him that good. We only met, like, twice. Back in Tora Bora. Good times."
"What's he like?"
"Tall. That's what hits home most. If he hadn't taken a wrong turn, maybe a career in professional sports. That's the tragedy of this conflict - so much talent wasted. Whatever..."

(p.150)

"Kooks with Nukes" succeeds best as a short story - a clear story-line, lots of local color, and newsroom atmosphere.

The senior editors call Kathleen on her mobile to discuss page one. They put her on speakerphone so everyone can go on record endorsing her, then hang up and mock her, as if to cleanse the air of their sycophancy

Infidelity, repeated phone-calls and sudden scene changes appear in several stories; between one paragraph and the next we might switch from the middle of a meal to the next morning.

Maybe there's a typo on p.272 - "Finally, this book would be incomplete without the inclusion of my favorite short story, Alessandra Rizzo, whose patience ..."

Other reviews

The Guardian (DJ Taylor)
New York Times (Christopher Buckley)
Booklover Book Reviews
Washington Post (Louis Bayard)
A.V. Club (Gregg LaGambina)
The Independent (Jonathan Sale)
About.com (Mark Flanagan)
Blogging for a good book (Mandy Malone)
New Yorker bookclub

"Of Mutability" by Jo Shapcott (Faber, 2010)

2011-12-11T09:45:00.003Z

Like many writers, Shapcott got the bug early and had an emotional upset. In a Guardian interview she says that "She was always a great reader, "pathologically so", and an early, faintly obsessive interest in synchronised swimming was diverted by teachers ... It was a happy childhood, which ended abruptly when she was 18, with the sudden, unexpected death of her parents, within a month of one another". In 2003 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She said "It is like stepping into a different world, where there are different rules, ways of behaving, ways of seeing". More recently she's widened her interests - "Over the last few years, she has taken science course after science course with the Open University, and she also has a deep passion for videogames - which she shares with her friend and fellow poet, Don Paterson".

It's difficult to read this book without some of the above information having an influence. Because Shapcott's not an overtly autobiographical poet, readers might see extra significance in what might otherwise be a simple enjoyment of the outdoors, or the comforts of a cup of tea. It's her first book of original poems for a decade. That too might affect what reviewers feel they can say.

"Mutability" is the ability to change - to recover. Cells can change in bad ways, but we depend on their ability to change, their replacement. As it says in "Viral Landscape", "gut epithelium is five days old at most ... my cerebral and visual cortex is as old as me". The title poem addresses this ambivalence, mixing different domains of interest: the physical and spiritual, the symbolic and social - "Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets,/angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye,/join them if you like, learn astrophysics, or/learn folksong, human sacrifice, mortality,/flying, fishing, sex without touching much". "join them" could mean "join them up", connect them together as poets do. Travel doesn't seem an escape, and besides there's no escaping destiny; the poem ends with - "Don't trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky.".

There are many rooms ("The Bet" is about trying to stay awake in a room for a long time). Even when a narrator's outside there's a tendency to look for details or probe within something to make the unseen visible (most explicitly with "I Go Inside the Tree"). Inside/Outside is an abiding theme, hence the mentions of bubbles, membranes, and surface tension. There's sometimes a desire to integrate inside and outside, absorb - "I breathe in and become everything I see" ("Deft"); "the first snowflake, mouth open to taste it, primed to ingest all the weathers" ("For Summer"). Sometimes the world takes the initiative - "I went outside and found the landscape/which had eaten my heart" ("Viral Landscape").

"Myself Photographed" is one of the few poems that look back, the details in the old image provoking several types of "new ways of seeing" - oak ("leaf, leaf"), high grass ("hay tickle"); dodgy ankle ("friendly old pain"); mouth ("charged tongue"); body cells ("Hope").

There are at least 7 mentions of "dust", and several of "tea". Music and trees feature too. "Border Cartography" is a sequence of themed poems (my favorite being "Montgomery"). I wondered if the tree poems could have been shortened into a sequence too.

Several of the images are beyond me - "Razor small" in "Of Mutability", for example or "the fields were full of water, the ground an unlicked sponge" (from "Forecast" - but why would one lick a sponge even if it's a cake? To get the icing off? No, too complicated. Maybe "unsqueezed" rather than "unlicked"?). Some poems (not just the one called "Riddle") are beyond me - "Religion for Girls", "Religion for Boys", "Sinfonietta for London" and "The Gypsies' Tales of Ovid" for example. "The Oval Pool" refers directly or indirectly to work by Helen Chadwick according to the Acknowledgements, which is nice to know, because otherwise the poem puzzles me. There are a few poems that I think I understand but I don't see the point of - "The Bet" and "Piss Flower" for instance. I liked "La Serenissima", "Scorpion", "Night Flight from Muncaster", "Border Cartography", "Uncertainty is Not a Good dog", and was interested by "Somewhat Unravelled".

Some poems are sonnet-shaped. There are 2-line-stanza poems and prose poems ("Scorpion"'s sentences all start with "I kill it"). There's always been a prose-poem element in her work. This is the first 20 lines of "La Canterina", a 1.5 page poem - "I can spring as high and nimbly as a flea; and I can execute twenty entrechats in sequence without pausing for breath, at each leap clicking my heels eight times: I can do the same for all the entrepas and I swear I make even the best of all the rest a block of stone. I like to add a detail or two to any complex dancing". Doing the ruthless sums (taking into account the time since her last book) this is 2 months work. Would a prose writer be happy with this as a morning's work? The 2nd half of the poem is better, but the set-up's too long. I felt that with some of the other poems too.

Other reviews

The Guardian (Frances Leviston)
The Observer (Kate Kellaway)
Jonathan Timbers
Amanda Claire Eades
The Independent (Stephen Knight)
Anthony Wilson
Hand+Star (Sophie Mayer)
The Manchester Review (Edmund Prestwich)
bookgeeks (Ben Parker)
The Independent (Carol Rumens)

"Jerusalem the Golden" by Margaret Drabble (Penguin, 1969)

2011-12-06T17:21:00.006Z

I'm struggling again. The heroine, Clara, is affected by words that are "phrased with some beauty" (p.31). I wonder what she'd feel about the start of this book. Early on she uses big words in conversation - "And now you can see that I can substantiate my disadvantage" (p.24) The following extracts of narration (3rd person privileged though they are, and interpretable as expressions of Clara's personality) are too wordy to me.

Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she had missed them, and whether a conjunction so fateful and fruitful could have been, by some accidental obtuseness on her part, avoided: she did not like to think so, she liked to think that inevitability had had her in its grip, but at the same time she uneasily knew that it had in some ways, been a near thing (p.9)
In the following, the repetition of "although" and "quite" seem accidental - Although she was quite ignorant of the etiquette of such occasions, she rightly took this to be her duty; she could tell that she was right by the way that Peter, after introducing her, politely echoed her sentiments, although he had expressed quite other sentiments whilst sitting beside her in the auditorium (p.10). How about this rewrite? - Though ignorant of the appropriate etiquette, she took this to be her duty; she could tell she was right by how Peter, after introducing her, politely echoed her sentiments, contradicting what he'd said during the performance
Clelia was a name with which she had no acquaintance. She did not think it likely that she would ever need to use it, so she was not unduly uneasy about her ignorance. How about this instead? Again, it reduces the word-count by at least a third - She hadn't heard the name Clelia before, which didn't worry her because she didn't think she'd use it

The paragraph starting near the bottom of p.10 begins with a sentence containing "but". Subsequent sentences hinge about "but", "but", "but", "but", "but" and "nevertheless", "however, though", "though", "and yet" until the pattern's broken by the none too elegant "She liked to like things, if at all, for the right reasons. And all in all, she was glad".

Once the text has something to narrate and more dialogue interjects, the style loosens up. Naive, Clara emerges into a mileau she's longed for - the "Jerusalem the Golden" hymn elevated the heroine, Clara, "to a state of rapt and ferocious ambition and desire ... where beautiful people in beautiful houses spoke of beautiful things" (p.32). She trusts the first interesting family she meets - "Clara was impressed by the way they all managed to talk intelligently, yet without strain, without intensity, without affection" (p.136); "She took them on trust so completely, the Denhams, for as far as she could see they were never wrong" (p.156). She identifies with Clelia - when Clelia was 8 or 9 she once "confessed that she was weeping because she feared she would never be an artist" (p.137). Later, finding some of her own dying mother's letters, Clara identifies with her as she was in her 20s. In chapter 7 we have Gabriel's point-of-view. Later, Clara's and Gabriel's points-of-view alternate. At the end, events happen rapidly, and Clara, without experience, perhaps oversteps the mark. Coincidences play in her favour. I like the last hundred or so pages.

I probably used to identify with her characters - heroines from a sheltered upbringing who have the basic brain power but lack cultural conversation and challenges to their beliefs. They meet someone who opens the door onto a new life, shows them London. They're not ready for it, they idealize their new friend, they run before they can walk, feeling there's so much time to make up.

In a Paris Review interview by Barbara Milton, Drabble says "Most people have a rival figure or model figure while some of us have lots of both. I suppose in my case this was either my older sister, or my best woman friend whom I've used again and again in my novels. The friend was very much a Celia figure to me in that she came from a more sophisticated background." and "The problem in my early novels was that I simply hadn't the ability to express the range of my feeling. I couldn't technically do it. When I wrote my first novel I didn't know how to write a novel at all. ... In the fourth [Jerusalem the Golden], I tried to write (not very successfully) in the third person". On enotes it says that "The Millstone, and Jerusalem the Golden are semi-autobiographical". So maybe my doubts about this book match her own doubts, and the reasons I liked the books were to do with the reasons she wrote them.

In the Paris Review she says she finds it difficult writing "about very stupid people. I'm aware that my characters tend to be not only intelligent, but intelligent about themselves." The characters do all seem equally self-literate, plot turns tending to happen when a character becomes suddenly more or less self-aware than usual. Jon Self on his The Asylum blog says "Drabble’s style remains similar through many of the stories: a subjective third person narrative which comes close to stream of consciousness in its detail and absorption of the characters’ thoughts (at times I was reminded of Mrs Dalloway). This enables her to impart her characters’ histories and impressions together, in a way which can tip from showing to telling". Maybe, but the initial style in this book still seems too stilted.

"True North" by Andre Mangeot (Salt, 2010)

2011-12-02T12:58:00.002Z

7 stories of 9 to 30 pages.

The first story, "Rain", has symbolic counterpointing - snow, water, steam. The prose is largely transparent, in the service of character and scene depiction. It begins with

He'd spent the morning deep in the Capathian forests, feeling like a god. The air was pure, so clear it felt eternal; and this was his kingdom.

and ends with

Blood thudding in his temple and chest he lay and listened to the rain, hard as hail against the glass. It was all he could do. Wait for daybreak to come, the first sounds from the corridors, other rooms. The eventual knock of the housemaid, click of her pass-key.
All that would follow.

At the start he's in control, in the open, with thoughts of eternity. At the end he's tied to his bed, waiting for things to happen. The story begins in Hungary. He's on a business visit, hoping to impress enough to take over the family business though as a youth he'd been rebellious. He phones his fiancee after a good day, saves a women from attack in a bar, goes to a nightclub, escapes a police raid. Earlier there were strategically-timed lightning flashes. Now the rain's pouring, the streets are flooded calf-high. He invites her to his hotel room to dry off. His fidelity weakens - "There was a pause in which new sheets of rain hit the glass, peppered it like grapeshot. Steam drifted in from the bathroom" (p.27). When he wakes he discovers he's been robbed and is likely to miss an important business meeting.

It's strong story-telling with a clear central character and moral trajectory. Scene evocation is especially strong. "Monkey Knife fight" shares some features (attention to atmosphere, flashback, love interest) but the storyline's less clear, suiting the characters. "Tajine with Madonna" is more like "Rain". It works well. I'm not so sure about "Borderline" though.

By now, some trends are emerging - stories begin with an arrival at a new (or rarely visited) location, with teasing hints about the plot, then there's some flashback (sometimes a page, sometimes several). There's usually a love interest and parents are involved one way or another. Relationships come to an end or are re-evaluated in the light of new evidence leading to feelings of betrayal, guilt or revenge. A flash of violence (usually involving knives) is common. The proportions of these ingredients vary. "The Wood Yard" has little flashback but involves a murder. I didn't find the murder well-motivated. Once the murderer's intention was announced, the last 3 paragraphs had little point. Even then the scenes and characters are convincingly depicted. "The Never-Still and the Stars" is the story that's closest to sacrificing narrative for atmosphere, entering the life of a child selling matches and gum on a multi-lane road, ending with the boy looking at the stars, thinking about death and myths. I presume the final story, "True North", is based on Glenn Gould, though I don't know how closely. Well written of course, but less gripping (more formulaic) than the other pieces.

There are typos - "burst from it's one straining button" (p.15); the header on p.51 is "ANDRE MANGEOT" rather than the story title; "That accent of your's" (p.96); "dissapate" (p.132).

"Profit and Loss" by Leontia Flynn (Cape, 2011)

2011-11-28T07:25:00.002Z

A busy, fidgety poet. Motherhood and aged parents feature in several pieces - nothing original (it's hard to think how a poem about an antenatal ultrasound scan could be original) but at least there aren't many of them.

Part I is about rooms and houses. Most stanza have 5 lines, most poems have 3 stanzas. They have flat sections - e.g. in "The Dream House" "The watermarks and coffee-rings on worktops;/ the wine spilled by the sofa; the low beam/ where someone thought to fix a rope once; notches/ on bedposts then on doorposts; errant Post-its/ under old doormats, knick-knacks left in drawers". Some average pieces are saved by an image: "I once lived in a railway carriage flat" ends with "I hummed like a fridge, delighted, in the dark"; in "The Examination Room" "the girls sit on/ at their neat, square desks, like rows of cooling loaves"

A trick she uses is to let the reader discover that someone spoken of in the 3rd person is the persona - "this sardonic idiot (me, if you're asking)" p.38; "The Girl upstairs".

In Part II the stanzas have an ababcdecde rhyme-scheme. I didn't discern metre. Some of the material's quite chatty

"But here, though, poetry - the Holy Grail / so long - the language at its highest power,/ has got its marks back from the public: fail/ and fail again. The reasons for this are /a) that it's quaint and b) that it's obscure" (p.40)
"Are we depressed that faith is in decline?/ I mean the Christian faith. Except it's not/ (google 'US' and 'fundamentalism' and 'profit')" (p.42)
"And offering stiff competition to this strife/ in fiscal matters, to the banks' collapse,/ are daily threats bought to our Way of Life/ by man-made imminent apocalypse/ though neither really outweighs private grief or private fears" (p.44)

"There's birds in my story" is a lively piece with allusions to Carroll's Alice, and 8 consecutive instances of "whee-whee".

Part III begins with "Five Obvious Catullus Versions" - the weakest section. I liked "A Plane". "Magpies" adds to the long list of recent poems about the bird, though this one was rather long.

Other reviews

The Guardian (Fran Brearton)
The Independent

"The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" by John Le Carre (Penguin 2011)

2011-11-24T13:44:00.000Z

It was first published in 1963. With a puff like "'The best spy story I have ever read' - Graham Greene" you don't really need any further blurb. In the Afterword to this edition the author says it took him about 6 weeks to write the novel. He adds "What prompted me to write it? ... I know that I was deeply unhappy in my professional and personal life, and that I was enduring the extremes of loneliness and personal confusion ... The familiar process of embracing an institution, then fighting my way clear of it, was taking over my relationship to my marriage and my work" (p.257)

The plot and the author employ double-crossing. When characters exhibit emotion it pays to be circumspect - "Leamas was sweating. Peters watched him coolly, appraising him like a professional gambler across the table. What was Leamas worth? What would break him, what attract or frighten him? What did he hate, above all, what did he know? Would he keep his best card to the end and sell it dear?"

PoV switches when it suits the plot. We dip occasionally into other minds: fair enough I suppose, but it seems to me that in the final chapter Liz become too articulate, too wise.

"next word, better word" by Stephen Dobyns (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

2011-11-20T07:03:00.005Z

The title's a reaction to Ginsberg's “first thought, best thought”. Dobyns doesn't mind stating his beliefs, many of which are commonly held though perhaps unfashionable with some academics -

"One of the demands of poetry, especially of Romantic poetry and its offshoots, is that it must have an appearance of spontaneity which creates the impression that the poem was flung off fully formed in a moment of inspiration ... In addition, romantic poetry demands a high degree of verisimilitude", p.11
"a poem must give the impression that it is larger than its actual size would suggest", p.117
"A poem is a form of communication and must be capable of communicating. For me this is an axiom", p.203
"A lyric poem is a symbol of life, the realm of feelings. It was written because the poet has experienced an emotion about which he or she was unable to remain silent", p.147
"An enjambed line creates tension; an end-stopped line creates rest. A long sentence will create tension; a shorter sentence creates rest. Obscurity creates tension; clarity creates rest. ... If fact, any sound or rhythm within the poem can be repeated to create the expectation of a reappearance. .. Patterns of tension and release are often easier in metered poems", p.181
"Everything within a poem heightens the poem's symbol and participates within it", p.205
"One writes a poem because one is unable to remain silent and from a desire to create something beautiful, but also writes out of a sense of play, which is a force behind all art", p.16
"Every line, every sentence has to have within it a reason to read the next", p.30
"we go to poetry and the other arts for knowledge, to expand our moral experience of the world, for sustenance, survival, and connection", p.33
"I look for many things within a poem, but one thing I look for is corroboration of human experience", p.213
"The reader usually assumes that all aspects of sound and content exist for a specific reason. That reason, as far as the reader is concerned, must fit within a range of acceptable reasons based in part on reading experience and in part on the reader's experience of the world", p.91

He takes some fairly modern examples of poetry (Bill Knott, Merwin, Kenneth Rozen, etc) and attempts to show how these traditional values still apply. He tackles form and line breaks head-on -

"Wallace Stevens, when he read his poetry, never audibly broke the line", p.94
"An effect of nonmetered poetry is that it makes it more difficult to control nuance", p.101
"because nonmetered poetry can lack the range of emotional effects found in metered poetry, it makes the enjambed line with its artificial pause even more important, and, aside from rhythm, it functions much like an artificial pause in conversation", p.101
"many poets of the following generation - the fourth after Lowell - who write nonmetered poetry no longer seem to have the example of metered verse within the ear, with the result that many of their lines appear flaccid and lack any apparent reason why a line is broken this way rather than that. Their lines often read like prose", p.102

But he gives line breaks their due. Of a James Wright poem he says "If one rewrote the poem as a prose paragraph, the language would be flat and uninteresting. The line breaks with their enjambment, and the rhythm they help to create, keep that from happening", p.104. Later (p.110) he says "Rewrite Gluck's poem with end-stopped lines and it would read as prose, while if the same were done to Lux's poem, it would still read as a poem, though a much weaker one".

He takes a few pages to analyse the first paragraph of Henry James' "The Middle Years" - 3 pages alone on this first sentence - "The April day was soft and bright, and poor Dencombe, happy in the conceit of reasserted strength, stood in the garden of the hotel, comparing, with a deliberation in which, however, there was still something of langour, the attractions of easy strolls". He writes

"James used these commas to call attention to important words, used them in fact as line breaks are often used in poetry", p.129
"begins with an independent clause; the tone is straightforward and somewhat optimistic ... Rhythmically, we notice the clause is four iambs, which contributes to its lightness.", p.129
"The second independent clause has seven commas, which ensures no consistent rhythm can be established. This rhythmic disruption, as it were, arises, arises directly from the word "poor" ... Dencombe is "poor" because of his health, but also because he is deceived.", p.129
"The modifying phrase between the subject, Dencombe, and the verb, "stood," the following dependent clause and string of prepositional phrases create tension by delaying verbs and direct objects, but they also in their progression and rhythm imitate the languor of Dencombe's thought [which] leads to a slightly humorous direct object", p.129
"As with a classic Latinate sentence, James's second independent clause accumulates meaning until it reaches its most important words.", p.130
"James's sentence keeps us from being able to anticipate its direction and controls the speed at which we read it, while the word "poor" provides us with suspense enough to care about that direction", p.130
"James's sentence could be rewritten as "It was a nice day and Dencombe decided to go for a walk" ... by seeing just how the writer has expanded upon the simple version ... we develop a better idea of the writer's intentions", p.131-2

He spends several pages explaining closure, revision, metre, context, etc. He ends with a rather too long description of how languages spread but before then makes many worthwhile points

"every lyric poem has four types of closure: visual, syntactic, narrative, and contextual", p.168
"At times I read a poem by an inexperienced poet, and the poem stops right where it should begin. The poet has hit upon an evocative something (an image, perhaps), hopes that it is relevant, and decides this is enough of an ending ... One might be "And the geese fly north into memory." A line like that can be slapped onto the bottom of many poems ... some writers keep notebooks of such lines. They have a certain poetic tone and the appearance of meaning, but nothing is resolved. The poems are muddy. A common revision tool is to rewrite the poem using that last line as the first line to see what might happen", p.173-4
"The reason why polysyllabic words are less common in poetry is because most have one stressed and three or four unstressed syllables. A number of theses together may make the line flaccid and turn to prose", p.182
"[Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos] was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry", p.198
"When a philosopher, scientist, or psychologist discusses the discrepancy between the actual and the ideal, he or she attempts to convince us with the tools of discursive thought ... An artist does it differently ... their primary approach is different, even though both groups, if you will, are investigating the actual, the ideal, and the discrepancy in between", p.222

I've many lines like "And the geese fly north into memory" in my notebook.

"Electric Shadow" by Heidi Williamson (Bloodaxe, 2011)

2011-11-15T09:40:00.003Z

"Fuelled by a residency at the London Science Museum's Dana centre, Williamson's fascination with science leads her to explore less usual territories for poetry, including mathematics, chemistry, and computer programming, as well as space travel, electricity, and evolution" (back cover). I suppose they are less usual. The science poems here are by no means the weakest in the book. The first poem for example, "Slide rule", starts and ends with

The universe is running away with itself
like a child on a red bike on Christmas day.

Somewhere the wrapping is still being opened.
The present gives itself again and again.

...

Meanwhile,
the child on a red bike

is running away with herself
like the universe on Christmas Day

I liked "Schrodinger's pregnancy test". I wonder how many people who've heard about Schrodinger's cat understand the point of it? After all if you toss a coin and cover it, no-one will know what it is until it's uncovered. If you lock a very ill cat in a cupboard it might die at any moment and nobody will know. So what's special about Schrodinger's cat? "The Travelling Salesman Problem" runs out of ideas too early. "Mobius Strip" is a sestina that spends its first stanza info-dumping before becoming a decent poem. The footnote to "If Then Else" says "If Then Else: A logic statement in high-level programming that defines the data to be compared and the actions to be taken as a result. There can only be one of two outcomes. There is no scope for ambiguity". Here's a sample stanza from the poem that's far too long

If
you age, Then
live
Else you age lifelessly

About 20 of the 53 poems are in couplets. 10 are in triplets. It could just as well have been the other way around - line and stanza endings don't seem to matter. "Static" and "No such thing" would be ok but for the heavy-handed portentious white space. I preferred "White". "Emily Cohen knits summer" was too minor. "Brodsky at the milling machine" sounded unfinished. "James Dean ..." starts with a good idea but lack stamina. I didn't like "Old tricks". In "The wind turbines" should "live" be "life"? That poem starts a weaker group of poems.

Not all the poems are as easy to understand as the headlining pieces might suggest. "Smoke and Apples" begins "He holds fire, wasting in his hand./ The crumbling tip of ash// reaches for his tensed fist.". Who is "holding fire" (i.e. not firing)? Actually , it's just a kids + cigarettes poem, though some deception's going on. "Flight" would be ok but for the over-used title and setting. The final poem, "Aurora", ends promisingly - "While every poem every written/ about the moon rises before me,/ I wait here, in the dark,// with my eyes wide open."

"We need to talk about Kevin" by Lionel Shriver (Serpent's Tail, 2005)

2011-11-11T16:00:00.002Z

The language is elevated though the narrator works in "Travel R Us". The letter form belies the content. These are literary artifices that one gets used to I suppose. Perhaps later on in the book this wordiness will be justified.

"This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me go mad; ergo, you make me mad. If I'd had the presence back then to seize on the first part of the proof, I might have glimpsed in Kevin's spontaneous dudgeon a glimmer of hope". (p.47)
"But if I had arrogated to myself the whole planet as my personal backyard, this very effrontery marked me as hopelessly American, as did the fanciful notion that I could remake myself into a tropical internationalist hybrid from the horribly specific origins of Racine, Winconsin" (p.52)
"Though I expected that my ambivalence would evanesce, this conflected sensation grew only sharper, and therefore more secret" (p.66)
"Kevin looked victorious. For years he has tempted me to be nasty. I remained factual. Presenting emotions as facts - which they are - affords a fragile defense" (p.68)
"Then, while I do hope this correspondence hasn't degenerated into shrill self-justification, I worry equally that I may seem to be laying the groundwork for claiming that Kevin is all my fault." (p.78)
"Besides, I might be more kindly disposed to this ultra-secular notion that whenever bad things happen someone must be held accountable if a curious little halo of blamelessness did not seem to surround those very people who perceive themselves as bordered on every side by agents of wickedness" (p.80)
"I might have achieved a renewed appreciation for my own normative propensities, including a not unreasonable expectation ..." (p.101)
"If fear of abandonment contributed to a decibel level that rivaled an industrial buzz saw, his loneliness displayed an awesome existential purity" (p.106)

There are half-pages I'd chop, chapters (e.g. "December 21, 2000") I'd shrink. It took me 6 weeks to reach page 100 - I'd given up twice. No doubt it's all explained at the end, but that's still hundreds of pages away. I think I'll stop now.

Other reviews

"He said/She said" by Michael Loveday (HappenStance, 2011)

2011-11-08T06:26:00.003Z

I liked the initial poems. Several of them involve an apparent relationship between an English speaker and a Polish speaker, though the misunderstandings could be between any 2 people. The language is lively and can cope with short lines. I wasn't keen on "When". The title poem has some good stanzas - "Pregnancy ..." - but also some weaker ones - "Floatation tank ...". "The ear" is unashamedly, entertainingly Freudian. "747" is excellent. By this time we're half way through the pamphlet and looking forward to the rest, but I didn't think the second half was as strong. "Agent" has 45 lines of 1-5 words, but this time the shortness of the lines has a negative effect. "Desert island" has its moments. "Other" is the best poem of the second half.

Other reviews

Richie McCaffery, Emma Lee and Marcia Menter (Sphinx)

"Lip" by Catherine Smith (Smith/Doorstep, 2007)

2011-11-03T06:26:00.001Z

"Losing It To David Cassidy", "The Fathers" and "Brother" are alright, but many of the other poems, especially at the start, are plain. "Request", "Twin", "The World Is Ending Pass The Vodka" etc go on too long about topics I think I've heard about before. I still don't get her theory of line/stanza-breaks. She was a New Gen poet. Perhaps she's targetted at a different type of audience than I'm used to. Perhaps I'm ab-reacting to the blurb - "remarkable", "disturbing", "unique".

Other reviews

Hope Estella Whitmore (The Glasgow Review) - "My mind was absolutely blown by this illicit, explicit, compelling collection of poetry"
Emma Lee
Rowena Knight (The Bubble) - "It is the range of her work which I most admire"
Kay Green - "I’m a story lover who sometimes reads poetry so perhaps subject matter and ideas impress me more than fancy words do"

"Furniture" by Lorraine Mariner (Picador, 2009)

2011-10-29T07:06:00.004+01:00

44 pages, but many of those are more than half empty. You end up with about 30 pages (a pamphlet) for 9 pounds.

How intense is the text that remains? Consider the following examples

After you told my sister that there was no one else but you no longer wanted her, she went to bed and tried to work out what she had done and what was wrong with her and spent the night awake
In childhood memories I am never still. Being bathed, running towards the camera with fists clenched, or crashing my tricycle into kitchen chairs, I'm always slightly blurred

One starts a 2000-word story of mine. The other is the first half(!) of a Mariner poem. I think that by midway the poem's irretrievable, though it ends pretty well. I think Lorrie Moore would have scrubbed such a start from a first draft (mine's the second example). Several of the poems sound like beginnings of stories, with potentially promising ideas left undeveloped. I think all the Jessica Elton anecdotes could have been packed into a decent short story. Even when there's a final pay-off, the set-up (which can be more than 50% of the poem) is merely that - existing only so that the ending works.

None of the poems do nothing (though "Adam", "The Bank of England", "From now on" and "Dans le Cabinet de Toilette, 1907" and "Poetry dreams" hang by a thread) , but many of them do little, and most of them have generous doses of inert material. "Bye for now", "Feathers" "Injured", "Many happy returns" are pleasant. My favorite is perhaps "Say I forgot". "Thursday" attracted attention from the Forward judges. It doesn't take off until "ask her which is the best bus". By then it's too late. "Heart" reminds me of Kirsty Logan's "The Rental Heart" in "Best British Stories 2011".

I think this book must have come out far too early in the writer's career.

Other reviews

John Clegg (the Bubble)
Ben Wilkinson

"Coin Opera" edited by Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone (Sidekick Books, 2009)

2011-10-25T06:19:00.001+01:00

A pamphlet on the theme of computer games. I'm not usually keen on themed anthologies especially if there's commissioned work. In this case the pamphlet's style matches the theme, which is fun. There are many allusions to games I've never seen, so I find the poems hard to assess. I didn't get Amy Key's pieces at all. I liked Chrissy Williams' "Goldeneye 007" best. There's VisPo too.

"The Best British Poetry 2011" by Roddy Lumsden (ed) (Salt, 2011)

2011-10-19T06:09:00.016+01:00

When reviewing an anthology it's traditional to react to the introduction and list strange inclusions/exclusions. In the introduction to this book the editor points out that the Forward anthologies publish few poems from magazines nowadays. I've noticed that too. This anthology picks solely from magazines (both paper and online), an idea I welcome - I subscribe to 7 of the magazines listed, and read several more. The editor read many of the magazines in the Southbank's Poetry Library taking 8 poems from Poetry London and 5 each from Iota, Magma and Rialto. Agenda and Smiths Knoll did ok too. No poems from the TLS though. Or Acumen. This policy perhaps explains why fewer big names feature (though there's D'Aguiar, Gross, Hadfield, WH Herbert, Padel, Shuttle, Sweeney and Szirtes).

It's modeled on the US version, conceptually and visually, with nearly 40 pages of notes. The American Best Poetry series has its provocative years (Lyn Hejinian's 2004 offering, for example). Lumsden's choices are far less extreme, but nevertheless they don't attempt to be representative - they're centred around nascent elliptical work. Even mainstream poets are represented by their more artistically engaged pieces, free from the distractions of unemployment fears, computer games, car accidents, mobile contracts, sleeze, comedy, and aging parents. Love and death feature less than stylistic bursts of short sentences and machine-gun imperatives.

It's tempting to keep flicking to the notes at the back, as if it were a book of crossword puzzles. Except for books like this, poets don't often help readers - a noble exception being Kona MacPhee with her Perfect Blue companion. In "The Best British Poetry" the notes vary from auto-biographical to technical. In general, the more reader-friendly the poem, the more reader-friendly the notes.

It wouldn't help me to know the name of the brides in Larkin's Whitsun Weddings, or the particular "sad height" that inspired Dylan Thomas. I don't care whether the poet got the idea on holiday or from a kids' TV program. I want notes that are more reader-centric than historical. I would like to know why the poem's the way it is. I've doubts about whether some of the poets appreciate what aspects of their poetry readers might find difficult. Some poets make an effort -

Christopher James' notes describe what he aimed to show, why he chose certain sounds, and what the framing device was meant to do.
John McCullough's notes help explain why the poem's the way it is. They attempt to appreciate the difficulties some readers might have, thus widening/deepening the readership.
I found Warner's notes useful (though I liked the poem before I read them).
The notes for "Lanterns" matched my impressions, but weren't obvious. So I liked them

Others try, but miss the point

McCabe's "Kingfisher" begins

How do you describe the blue you've never seen?

I was fixing the biting muzzles of mitts to the Boy's fingers

you saw

- the tail-less hologram shoot its bib of ore -

Why the double-spacing? The dashes? The indentation? The variously-indented dashed lines are the attempts to describe the blueness (a common theme of kingfisher poems), and they're pretty good lines. The notes (nearly a page of them) add little except the information that "the Boy" was based on his son. So why "the Boy" rather than "my son"?

Lizzi Thistlewaythe doesn't even bother explaining the title "Scart Gap".

Others state the obvious -

Colette Sensier explains that "The first part is in third person, second in first person, and third in second person, and they're different visually, as the first part has long thin lines, the second is brief, and the third in the middle" (p.149)
Lorraine Mariner's notes added little to the poem.
"Young Pterodactyl" (which I liked) had explanations that to me added little.

A number of poems fail to convey what (according to the notes) the poet seems to intend

Giles Goodland's "Waves" has
- "Look through your impression of water,/ the evolution you drag inside you" (the notes say "humours in the eyeball have a similar composition to seawater, and I read somewhere that this is a relic from our very distant evolution")
- "See/ such children it sucks like a sweet//The pebbles are frantic under them (the notes say "that feeling of having the ground pulled under you when a wave rolls back into the surf")
The poet writes "So I let the words play around, as the children were doing, in my notebook". A different sort of playing, I bet. In this case, interesting information's been obscured.
Kate Potts tells us on p.147 that "the poem became a sort of cautionary tale about the idea of progress and the complex and unpredictable reality involved in getting what we wish for." It didn't to me.
I liked Andrew Philip's "10 x 10" - 10 ten-lined poems - but until I read the notes I didn't realise that the titles alluded to wedding anniversary gifts - paper, cotton, leather, etc. I noticed some repeated words but didn't notice that the 1st poem's lines each included an allusion to the gifts, that lines 1-10 of the 2nd piece included allusions to the 2nd, 3rd, ... 10th, and 1st gift, the order cycling around with each verse - a bigger hint in the poem's epigram would have helped.
Nii Ayikwei Parkes wrote "I chose to use three-line stanzas to reflect the measured manner in which realisation hit me, and I tried to end the lines to both emphasise words and add nuance" (p.144). The result however is no different from loads of the other box-stanza poems in this book. Why didn't he use good old-fashioned measure?
"The Year Strikes the Rock" anthropomorphises "year" - "The year is sleepless" ... "The year makes many an arduous journey" - for a page or so in couplets and an odd-man-out triplet, then ends on a different tack
she's a realist,

tucks all her weathers
under her humble hairy marvellous armpit,

just watch her making sunshine
from the gold of Frau Luther's wedding ring
The notes explain these lines, but don't convince me that these lines belong to this poem. Perhaps poets writing list poems still feel the need to indicate closure with (if not a big finish) a change of theme.

Some of the notes might be tongue-in-cheek. I'm unsure how worried I should be about the following

Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch writes "Lining objects up on tables has always fascinated me, whether pens, pencils, paper, cutlery or tools ... Transferring this fascination from the table to the page, to write a poem in which I could connect cutlery and communication took some time. It was only when I attended a table etiquette course in Somerset three years ago that I was able to begin writing the poem" (p.154)

And some don't try at all. Of course, there's no reason why they should.

I didn't get "White Lace Nightgown" - to me it's just unconnected poetic images strung together. Here's the middle stanza.

The coffee mug in your palm
is a baby's crown,
voiletwhite soap noses
suck the porcelain washbowl
Heather Phillipson wrote "I could tell you that the poem is made in the way department stores sell off their winter jumpers. I could tell you that I liquidated my current work of unverifiable postulations and what you see is a car boot sale." (p.146)
Kate Kilalea's "Hennecker’s Ditch" is given a treatment by Don Share that's interesting. He's given more space, but I think the poet could have helped more.

Some poets clearly don't like making things too obvious. Why worry that you might be understood, that a reader can see everything there is to see, that the poem's finite? If you mutilate it to make it unfathomable, the reader might think it deep. You risk being thought a charlatan but nowadays it's a small risk, so you might as well chance it. There are few Mark Hallidays around.

Abigail Perry rather gives the game away when she writes "It grew out of my revisions for another poem, one cluttered with clumsy polysyllables that were, nonetheless, semantically economical: they nailed the point I'd been trying to make. It was this that sounded the warning bell. A poem, I realised, should never 'get to the point'." (p.145)
Katharine Kilalea writes "On the surface, it seems a difficult poem, but it's only hard work when you try to make it meaningful" (p.134). It depends of course on what is meant by "meaningful".
Eoghan Walls wrote "I stuck to half-rhymes, and hid them from the eye by splitting the rhymes with a verse-break" (p.152). Why? What would have been wrong with rhyming couplets (though "rising/sink", and "cities/sky" are barely half-rhymes)?

At least I improved at appreciation as I progressed through the book. By the time I reached Richard Osmond's "Logo" I was ready to commentate as I comprehended. How do I convert a pile of words into an experience? One temptation I had was to extract the details and reconstitute it into something I could appreciate.

The title? Pass
Jack who? Ah, bells have names. Some of them have figures hitting them with mallets or axes on the hour
There's "rolled-iron", "woolgold", "silver plate", "smelted to ingots" - ah, a sub-theme to follow
"speak with raised right arm" - a salute?
I can't make sense of the line/stanza breaks
It mentions Dunwich - a flooded town that I've read other poems about (the graves are aligned east-west, so the sea reveals the feet first). It mentions Southwold - a resort that time's forgotten.
It ends with "this town, my untimed first person/ smelted to ingots". Maybe "untimed" means "timeless". Maybe the historically-generated self-image is glowing with golden nostalgia.

From these fragments I could construct a poem about history, time, sunken bells, and the East Coast. I'd jettison the line-breaks and the poetic "playing". When I read the accompanying notes I found little there that I'd not already worked out, though mysteries remained. The only confusion that the notes resolved with was the title - a local brewery use as a logo a man with an ax. The poet writes "I never researched or expanded upon the themes in 'Logo', so this slight, impressionistic flurry of images is all that remains. Far from serving as heroic blazon for a grand pub crawl through history, my Jack is alone, and rings his bell forlornly out to sea, an orphaned signifier" (p.143). So 'Logo' is an abandoned signifier, a stray that the poet no longer feels responsible for. Anyone - me for example - could pick it up, and take it home. These emblems are a logo of a time gone by, Englishness a brand?

I think there are few experimental pieces (no LangPo, no minimalism, though the final poem's a mash-up). There's little narrative. Several pieces follow a form that can be demanding - e.g. Jon Stone's "Mustard" has lines that end in anagrams of the title - "cry out drams", "heart's mud", etc. Some of the pieces might as well be in a foreign language as far as I'm concerned. Lines could be removed or reversed and I'd be none the wiser. And yet, I'm sure many people would see little difference between these "difficult" poems and my stuff. The most recent rejection slip I received said "I found these poems difficult to read. ... Try writing more simply and directly. Complex things _can_ be said in a simple, clear way". In what way do I find the poems in this book harder than mine?

In the olden days, writing poetry was a 2 stage process for some people. Poets had ideas that they dumdeedumdeed into a poem, choosing a title to pre-empt "What's it about?" questions. Even famous poets would to-and-fro between poetry and prose to clarify plot or sound. The 2nd stage was sometimes clumsily done (the meaning mangled to fit the form, words inverted, strange words used to satisfy the rhyme scheme) but it was necessary to suit the expectations of the era, otherwise the poem wouldn't be read.

Times have changed. Poems needn't pander to the masses or even to the non-poet intelligensia. "What's it about?" is no longer a question to fear. Moreover, there's no point anyone shouting "He's wearing no clothes!" because the masses aren't listening, and fellow poets are faced with too many vested Creative Writing interests. Some poets, consciously or otherwise, still write in 2 stages, the 2nd stage rendering the ideas to suit the expectations of the era. The aim is no longer to be easily paraphrasable - au contraire, the 2nd stage brings in language effects to disrupt the standard prose routes from words to meaning. The fractures interfere with knowledge acquisition methods use to read a text-book, favouring more the skills of song lyric, music or art appreciation. The poem needs to be in some way unresolved, not only at the level of paraphrased meaning but also at a lower level - unresolved words, ruptured syntax, less transparency. The poet leaves loop-holes - flaws? or an admission that language is fickle, that poets (like Islamic temple decorators) have to be humble?

Some poets are lucky, living in an age whose style suits them. Other poets are able to write in several styles, comfortable in any era. Most people are adaptable enough to mould their talents into a shape that suits the prevailing fashions, provided they're exposed to those fashions early enough. At the age of 18 isn't too late.

But what is the equivalent of the beginner Formalist's clumsiness? Is all disruption and fast-cutting an unquestionable sign of the modern age, the new realism? In The Poetry Circus long ago, Stanton Coblenz suggested that inauthentic poets might consciously try to avoid triteness. Even something like "They are as far part as midnight from noon or April from Night" might be redrafted, using "fresh and original images" to get "They are as far apart as a yawn from vertigo, or an aspersion from a hypotenuse" (p.31). Some poets in this book seem more to be avoiding simplicity than confronting complexity. They rough up the surface of their poems (or "let the words play around") until their poem might be given the benefit of the doubt. My problem with many of these poems is that I didn't see what this 2nd stage added to the works; it obscured rather than augmented the effects.

Stephen Burt in his "Close Calls with Nonsense" writes "Some of the most celebrated 'difficult' poetry of the past ten years seems to me derivative, mechanical, shallow, soulless, and too clever by half" and that "In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others. I miss, in most contemporary poetry, the arguments, the extended rhetorical passages and essayistic digressions I enjoy in the poems of the 17th and 18th centuries". I rather miss those features too. If readers can touch the bottom of a poem (rather than feeling out of their depth) it's not a disaster. If the water's clear enough for them to see their own feet, all the better. I think it's a viable form of poetry (indeed, Lumsden's written many good poems of that type in the past), but it's almost entirely absent from this selection. That said, the poetry's representative of the magazines most represented here. I'm a little surprised that "Tears in the Fence" didn't feature more though.

I forgot to make a note of all the poems I liked. Amongst them were "Light Over Ratcliffe", "10x10", "Young Pterodactyl", "Collusion", "Of Other Spaces (Tate St. Ives)" and poems by Judy Brown and Emma Danes. I suggest that people browse before buying (the first few poems are online) because it's quite possible for even practising poets to like next to nothing. If they want an educational experience maybe they should first read "Close Calls with Nonsense" (Burt) or even "The Poem and the Journey" (Padel) . However, for those who want an update on "Identity Parade", or want to see the type of British poetry that becoming increasingly popular, this is just the job. It's a book that looks ahead, rather than back, and ambitious and/or career UK poets would do well to read it. It's useful for non-UK readers too - they'll get a feel for the type of UK poetry that doesn't always reach foreign shores on paper.

On p.118 there's an original typo - w131ere instead of were.

Other reviews

"The Ghost of Tradition" by Kevin Walzer (Story Line Press, 1998)

2011-10-15T06:50:00.001+01:00

He begins with

"My aim is also to show how Expansive poetry has helped to transform poetry's place in American culture - particularly in its challenge to the creative writing establishment based in universities", p.ix
"I use the term 'Expansive,' first used by Wade Newman in a 1988 essay. The term reflects these poets' interest in expanding both the formal possibilities available to poets, and the audience for poetry in American culture. The term also recognizes the broad affinities between the New Formalist and the New Narrative poets", p.xiii

I like Annie Finch's The Ghost of Meter and even more so Steele's "Missing Measures". They're both discussed in chapter 2 where the Expansive poetry movement's put into historical context. Dana Gioia is described as "already one of the most influential poets and critics of his generation", (p.53). I didn't think his poetry did much. Frederick Turner is mentioned too as a key theorist whose "major work has earned him a place among the significant poets of the twentieth century" (p.121), which judging by the material presented surprizes me too. Opinions on the poets aren't uniformly favorable though - weaker books are pointed out. Interestingly, some of the poets featured began as free-formers.

Walzer writes that High Modernism's experiments "share a common denominator: presentation of direct objects and experience, in free verse, without interpretation, in short units" (p.25). He presents various arguments that have been used to explain Modernism's effect on poetry: the increasing respectability of prose; the extrapolation of "poetry needn't be in a form" to a prohibition; the changing notion of Organic Form (the natural world no longer being considered orderly); the rise of science and experiment. He points out how older forms have become associated with other older things -

Easthope links "blank verse with the emergence of the borgeois, capitalistic society that is the hallmark of modernity. In Easthope's view, blank verse helped to create the very cultural conditions that bring on mass oppression ... Easthope argues that iambic pentameter furthers bourgeois culture by creating the illusion of a single poetic speaker, attempting to capture that individual's idiomatic voice by effacing the rhythm of the lines, rather than foregrounding the musical and communal quality of poetry that the older four-stress, oral poetic tradition emphasized", p.12-13
"For serious twentieth-century women poets, traditional poetic form has had a troubled legacy", Annie Finch, "A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women", p.1

He writes that "Like any successful revolutionaries, however, the Modernists and their successors changed more than the present system; they changed our senses of the past", (p.25), listing some of the victims - "In the twentieth century, dominated by the free verse revolution, poetry came increasingly to be identified with lyric - primarily because good free verse, lacking the rhythmic regularity of rhyme and meter, tended to make extensive use of other aspects of sound form to achieve intensity (assonance. consonance, alliteration) and, influenced by Modernism, concentrated on direct, unadorned presentation of images to portray its subjects" (p.122). Satire and narrative became harder to write.

As a summary of the historical arguments it's a useful book, but how good is the poetry? He offers some long examples, as he must if he's going to illustrate narrative tendencies. He shows that Formalists aren't bean-counters - he's happy with terza rima that ends with an "aba bba cdc" rhyme scheme, and sonnets with the "wrong" number of lines. But he doesn't convince me that there's much uptapped potential.

"The Millstone" by Margaret Drabble (Penguin 1968)

2011-10-12T06:11:00.001+01:00

Long ago I read a few Drabble books. I knew about students then, but I didn't know how graduates lived, or how the middle classes lived. In Drabble's books I encountered emotionally articulate women, London lifestyles, and people who were interested in literature. I saw dramatizations starring Sandy Dennis.

I know I read "The Millstone" but now I've re-read it I feel it couldn't have contributed to my abiding impression of Drabble books. I finished it, but only just. The quality of the writing didn't propel me along. Is the main character supposed to come over as snobby? Maybe. When she found out that her lodger has been writing a novel about her, she was more annoyed by the novel's attack on scholarship than the invasion of privacy. But maybe it's just that times have changed. No longer do mothers stay 9 days in a maternity ward, neither do unmarried mothers have a "U" at the foot of their bed.

The character has a Ph.D so we should expect some elevated, controlled writing - "Lydia, who had hitherto been accepting our devious comfort, suddenly turned on us with a wail of despondency", (p.9); "she wore her grief well: she spared herself and her associates the additional infliction of ugliness, which so often accompanies much pain", (p.135)

The baby's nameless more often than I'd have expected - "I remember, however, the night before it was born with some clarity", (p.87); "And so the summer wore away, and autumn set in, and the baby started to sit up", (p.112)

I think the plot is that she becomes more self-assured. At the start she thinks of the father that "He must be one of these bisexual people, I thought, or perhaps even he's no more queer than I am promiscuous, or whatever the word is for what I pretend to be. Perhaps we appeal to each other because we're rivals in hypocrisy", (p.27). When the child is born she has a funny feeling - "Love, I suppose one might call it, and the first of my life", (p.98). Later she's brave enough to talk to neighbours, she realises that "If I asked more favours of people, I would find people more kind", (p.156). At the end she invites home the unknowing father having not met him for 2 years. She likes him. He asks if she'd like to travel the world with him. She turns him down, sort of - "I asked him if he would have another drink. But I asked him in such as way that he would refuse, and he refused.
'I can't help worrying,' I said. 'It's my nature. There's nothing I can do about my nature, is there?'
'No,' said George" (p.167). We're left wondering whether motherhood has changed her much. Before, she loved no-one and had a career planned. After, she has someone to worry about and has a career planned.

"Pandorama" by Ian Duhig (Picador, 2010)

2011-10-08T07:00:00.002+01:00

I've never been sure about Duhig. I don't know if he does what he does so much better than others do. He's given more license I suspect. The High/Low mix could be considered PoMo or evasive. I like best his longer poems - "A Summer's Fancy", "A Gift of Boxes" (perhaps my favourite), and "Jericho Shandy" - shades of Larkin. Of the shorter pieces I think "Heredity" works best. "Jingwei Birds", "Beggar's Song", "Roisin Bain", "Darkness Visible", "A Room With a View", and "Alferi Stock" don't convince. "Via Negativa" is longer - a list of "Not ... but" phrases - Not church Latin but medical Latin./ Not Catechism but questionnaires./ Not Pentecost tongues but echolalia". Yes, I notice the Dante reference in the title and the more topical reference in the final stanza, but in the end it's just a list of phrases, a few of which are ok. "Whistling Or Just After" is in pieces too. I liked "the Welsh" section, but I don't think there needed to be 2.5 pages of fragments. "Braque's Drum" has its moments, but at 24 lines feels long. I don't see what "Death Panels" is trying to achieve so singsongingly.

"Border Ballad" alludes for 12 xaxa stanzas, but to what end? In Stanza 8 the Science/Maths allusions fall away - "This border ballad's walls first rose/ where Angle Land lacked order;/ its laws were theoretical,/debatable its border// The pele tower of its verse contains/ a fear it will not hold, that closed inside, none lived or died/ stayed young nor yet grew old". "Angle Land" alludes back to the Flatland book and to England - the land of the Angles. I had to look up "Pele Towers" - watch towers on the Scotland/England border (incidentally, Heisenberg was interned near Huntingdon, Cambs).

His poems often kick off with a factoid. A quick trawl came up with these references, some of which are mentioned a few times (I'm sure I've missed many).

Art - Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Giotto, Cornell, Jeff Wall, Magritte
Literature - GB Shaw, Keats, Ovid, Jonson, Wilde, Nabokov, Mandelstam, Celan, Stevens, Dante, Paz, Burton ("Anatomy of Melancholy"), Sterne, Koestler ("Darkness at Noon"), Coleridge (Porlock), Ashbery, Bruce Chatwin, Nerval, Alan Bennett, Auden, Eliot, Twain
Science/Maths - Einstein, Bohr, Edwin Abbott ("Flatlands"), Hilbert, Schrodinger
Misc - Tarkowsky, Debord, Marx

He has more contemporary references too - Turnitin software, Goths, the Stranglers, etc. The 2 pages of notes at the end of the book are worthwhile.

Other Reviews

David Wheatley (The Guardian) - "Duhig stays true to the combination of high seriousness and low clowning that has always marked his work ... Allusion in Duhig, for instance, typically entails affectionate mimicry ... The informational overload we might fear is deliberate: we are forever somewhere between revelation and madness, with no clear pointers as to which is which."
Katy Evans-Bush (Horizon Review). - "It is demanding, and it’s no use worrying about not getting allusions: Duhig makes free use of the knowledge he possesses, and doesn’t try to second-guess which bits of it his readers might or might not share. ... Duhig raids what Michael Donaghy called the ‘posh shop’ of Western civilisation, makes off with what he needs, and takes us on a rattling tour of his spoils. But while the shop may be posh, it was built by builders ... Wallace Stevens is a presiding spirit ... Everywhere in this book are boxes ... Drums are everywhere in this book"
Natalie Whittle (The Financial Times) - "But Duhig is also fond of a more cryptic, riddling style of verse, often applied to his most serious indictments of modern life ... There is an interest in pathways and a respect for the people who build them"
David Green

"Time Being" by Ruth Bidgood (Seren, 2009)

2011-10-05T13:07:00.000+01:00

Several poems are about leaving landscapes, returning to them when they, or the narrators, have changed, then pondering on the difference between then and now, between maps and reality, down country lanes in fading light.

With poems like those on p.37, p.38, p.40 the plot summary is essentially the poem; the idea's spread too thinly amongst too many words. The language goes flat when she wants to make sure we "get" something important, or when there's info-dumping

"When he ordered the carving/ of his graduate son's memorial -/ the young consumptive/ so loved, focus of so much pride -/the austerity of grief/ constrained him" (p.15)
"Scarcely anyone walks where the pavement ends/ by the busiest road, on rough grass alongside/ cars, tankers, stock-lorries, vans, four-by-fours,/ and once in a while an obstructive tractor/ chivvying a herd of cows. " (p.44)
"But then/ one by one, cluster by cluster, as though/ abandoned or overwhelmed,/ the little faraway lights went out./ There was only the pallid mist, thickening,/ a chill in the morbid air, and questions/ it might be better not to ask" (p.56)
"Knowing again, vicariously,/ the concentrated life of my/ irreplaceable solitudes, I felt/ it mattered little to be there/ or far away, young or old, even/ alive or dead, as long as that/ uncompromising beauty stayed" (p.61)

"checkng" (p.17) is a typo. "Elegy" is my favourite.

Other reviews

Charlotte Newman

"When I Forget" by Elina Hirvonen (Portobello, 2007)

2011-10-02T07:04:00.001+01:00

9/11, suicide, domestic violence, and mental problems are combined with restrained writing. Anna neglects his institutionalised brother and Ian neglects his institutionalised father, later finding out that his father's dead. Given the material, the novel has surprisingly little impact though when similes are used, they work well enough

" His grip was like what you'd use to grab a runaway horse or an underwater handful of hair", (p.44)
""We had talked to each other as you'd talk to a stranger you'd met while drunk after the barman calls for last orders, sure you wouldn't remember the other's face in the morning", (p.69)

"Reality Hunger" by David Shields (Penguin, 2010)

2011-09-28T08:18:00.002+01:00

A plea in 618 numbered paragraphs for fewer standard novels. He begins with "Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art" (p.3). He mentions that "extended aphorisms [Ecclesiastes, Confucius, Heraclitus] eventually crossed the border into essay" (p.8), that "essai" means "experiment", that "fiction" derives from "fingere" meaning "to shape", that according to Coetzee, the word "novel" "meant the form of writing that was formless, that had no rules, that made up its own rules as it went along". He likes a return to these original notions, where facts can be experimentally shaped. He likes mixed-form novels that combine essay, memoire, reportage, fable, hoax, etc (he mentions Sebold, Brian Fawcett, Bernard Cooper). He likes collage and sampling (in this book he doesn't separate quotes from his own words, and he sometimes adjusts the quotes. The last section of the book lists the sources)

He distrusts the supposedly factual, quoting Marshall - "Autobiographical memory is a recollection of events or episodes, which we remember with great detail. What's stored in that memory isn't the actual events, but how those events made sense to us and fit into our experience", adding that "As a work gets more autobiographical, more intimate, more confessional, more embarrassing, it breaks into fragments. Our lives aren't prepackaged along narrative lines and, therefore, by its very nature, reality-based art - underprocessed, underproduced - splinters and explodes" (p.27)

He dislikes chronological narrative as the principal structuring device - "The grandfather clock is the reflection of its historical period, when time was orderly and slow. .. By the 1930s and 1940s, wristwatches were neurotic and talked very fast. ... Next, we had liquid-crystal watches that didn't show any time at all until you pressed a button ... Now, no one wears a watch; your phone has the time" (p.123)

The lyric essay appeals to him. He likes Kundera. He likes Proust. He points out that Marcel plays a similar role to the "I" in poetry as regards the stance viz a viz the author. He writes "The poem and the essay are more intimately related than any two genres, because they're both ways of pursuing problems, or maybe trying to solve problems - The Dream Songs, the long prologue to Slaughterhouse-Five, pretty much all of Philip Larkin and Anne Carson, Annie Dillard's For the Time being" (p.202).

He likes short-shorts (Jayne Anne Phillip's "Sweethearts", Jerome Stern's "Morning News" etc) because they focus on the essentials. He likes novels that are more short story collections. He's not keen on books like "The Corrections", preferring "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", "Nadja", "Letters to Wendy's" etc.

He dislikes the hidden omniscient author, the "cooked" novel. I guess he feels it's more psychologically honest for the author to follow the twists and turns of thought across genres (using quotes, anecdotes and fables to illustrate points) rather than try to fake objectivity and watch the clock. He admits to "the lure and blur of the real", but doubts whether the veracity of the supposed real matters.

"Serious nonfiction removes fiction's masks, stripping away monuments to civilisation to arrive at truths that destroy the writer and thereby encompass the reader - the last shred of human expression before silence seizes all words", (p.149)
"The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art"", (p.166)
"It was exciting to see how part of something I had originally written as an exegesis of Joyce's "The Dead" could now be turned sideways and used as the final, bruising insight into someone's psyche. All literary possibilities opened up for me with this story. The way my mind thinks - everything is connected to everything else - suddenly seemed transportable into my writing", (p.173)

He'd like more prose writers to take advantage of the poetic voice - its inclusiveness, the freedom of its narrative trajectory. But I don't see why some anecdote or fable shouldn't bud off and create its own frame, the reader adding the context.

Other reviews

Sean O'Hagan(The Observer)
Blake Morrison (The Guardian)
Luc Sante (New York Times)
Ellen Wernecke (A.V. Club)
This Space
Sam Sacks (Wall Street Journal)
Curtis White (Electronic Book Review)
David Griffith (Bookslut)
Catherine Bush (The Globe and Mail)
Donald Brown (Quarterly Conversation)
Levi Asher (Literary Kicks)
Kirkus Review

"Death on the Nile" by Agatha Christie, (Harper Collins, 2006)

2011-09-23T06:46:00.013+01:00

It was first published in 1937. I read a facsimile edition. It's the only Christie I've read, but since I've more than once used the whodunit format I thought I'd better read something of hers, and on holiday we saw the hotel where she stayed in Egypt. A few of her phrases are like Waugh's comic satire - " ... if any misfortunes happen to my friends I always drop them at once! They always want to borrow money off you, or else they start a dress-making business and you have to get the most terrible clothes from them. Or they paint lampshades, or do Batik scarves" (p.13), but mostly it's plot mechanics. I could have done with fewer mentions of hearing splashes and noises like a cork popping from a bottle.

It starts with Part 1, which has one chapter - 30 pages where each of the 10 sections features a new character. It's a glorified cast-list, which I found useful. On p.133 there's another info-dump - a diagram of the cruise boat's cabin layout (we only saw 2 on the move: one nearly mowed down our companion felucca, the other ghosted by one night. The rest were moored). On p.182 there's a summary of suspects, motives and clues constructed by Colonel Race.

There's very little local colour, barely a page altogether - strange, since she could have slipped a lot in - what was happening on the river-banks? Was it hot? We went in a group of 5 families when, according to the tourist magazines, only the most intrepid tourists did Nile tours - rather like in her day, I guess. The following still rings true

" You want ride donkey, sir? This very good donkey. This donkey Whiskey and Soda, sir. ..."
"You want to go granite quarries, sir? This very good donkey. Other donkey very bad, sir, that donkey fall down. ..."
"You want postcard - very cheap - very nice. ..." (p.43) and so does this - "some one is always pestering for money, or offering you donkeys, or beads, or expeditions to native village, or duck shooting" (p.79) but the following is more surprising; I don't recall black rocks, though she went further south than I did - They looked down to the shining black rocks in the Nile. There was something fantastic about them in the moonlight" (p.53)

Luxor's mentioned (but not feluccas, though she went on one). Aswan (the view above) is mentioned (spelt "Assuan"). Some passages have contemporary echoes -

""These Italians are really insupportable"" (p.114). On the Red Sea coast there were a lot of Russians ...
"We've had a good deal of trouble out here - one way and another. It isn't the people who ostensibly lead the rioters that we're after. It's the men who very cleverly put the match to the gunpowder" (p.116)

The only head we see inside of, though only occasionally and slightly, is Poirot's

"Yet there was a kind of sharp cunning apparent in her face which did not prepossess the two men favourably towards her" (p.153)
"" Hercule Poirot slowly nodded his head. But his eyes were grave." (p.192; end of chapter 18)

except in Mrs. Otterbourne's last scene - Yes, she was very happy - no doubt of it! This was her moment - her triumph ... Not too good, this, but she could think of something that sounded better before it came to telling the story in court." (p.226)

I didn't guess the plot. I thought Colonel Race was involved.

"The Informers" by Bret Easton Ellis (Picador, 1994)

2011-09-19T10:02:00.001+01:00

I've categorised this as a short story collection because that's how the frontispiece describes it. I think few of the pieces (some as short as 4 pages) can stand alone. I prefer to think of it as a novel.

Early in most chapters there are clues to the year (if only in the mentions of current films and albums) and the identity of the characters, but a crib would help - people change partners and orientation quickly, and people might share the same name. You don't know which of the swirling characters will recur, so you may need to keep a list.

The characters

I may well have missed some clues and cross-references, but here's a start

Bruce, Robert, Lauren and Marshall are friends. Chapter 1's narrator is friends with Reynolds
Anne, Eve and Faith are friends.
Eve's daughter is Sheila.
Faith's son is Dirk
Ricky (Danny's friend) is murdered.
Edward has a son called Danny
Raymond, Graham, Dirk (Erikson?) and Tim are friends. Jamie died a year before Chapter 2
Bryan and Nina are together. They have a son called Kenny
Elena is married to Les Price. Their children are Tim + girls
Cheryl was married to William. William then met Linda. Cheryl met Danny
XXX is married to William and having an affair with Martin. Their children are Graham and Susan.

Chapter narrators

They're all first-person. I think that the action spans no more than a year or 2.

1982: Narrator is friend/lover of Bruce and Reynolds
Narrator is Tim
1983: Narrator is XXX - one of William's wives; Graham's mother. She has a thing about young men, poolboys. Her shrink is Dr. Nova.
Narrator is Les Price, on holiday with son Tim
Narrator is Susan, on the way to the re-marriage of her father, William, to Cheryl.
Narrator is Cheryl Laine, a news presenter separated from William. Current partner of Danny (19). Friends with Sheldon. She goes out, drugs up, misses the program she's supposed to anchor
1984: Narrator is Bryan Metro, a rockstar who abuses groupies. He's on tour in Japan with his agent Roger. They meet "The English Prices"
1983: Letters by Anne to Sean. Unrequited love. Anne meets Randy who ODs
Narrator is Graham who's with Christie, Randy and Martin. Martin's helping Leon to make a video of "The English Prices". Graham's father (William?) dies
Narrator is Jamie, a vampire. His shrink is Dr. Nova. Jamie's a friend of Dirk, a cannibal
Narrator knows Peter and Mary, who've kidnapped a boy. The narrator kills him.
Narrator, who's with a dying girl, knows Mona and Griffin. They're on a beach holiday together
Narrator is with Bruce who's married to Grace who he's promised to leave for the narrator. During a zoo visit he tells the narrator he's an alien.

There's lots of valium, tumbleweed, tanned blondes, shared lovers, Wayfarers sunglasses and crossing of legs. LA features heavily - "I didn't recognize the signs that accompany an affair with a married man since basically in L.A. there aren't any" (p.258)

Sometimes the dialog is snappy. More often it's expansive. I liked "The Up Escalator", "In the Islands" and "Another Gray Area", though I thought they were rather long.

Other reviews

"Wave" by Pat Borthwick (Templar, 2007)

2011-09-15T07:38:00.002+01:00

A pamphlet whose acknowledgements have to be in a small font to fit on a page. The first poem, "Visit", (ostensibly about a moth) has enough imagery to show why so many of the poems have been published. It ends

O mighty little thing I cannot name,
the Moon must have spooned you in
between the tides of my curtains

I'm not sure about all the pieces though. In "Until I Did" the curious persona finds brother's naughty mags and father's condoms, ending with There were many other things/ I didn't understand/ until one day, I did, which is a rather predictable ending. In "A son" is "quant" a typo? Is the son dead, alive only in memory? Or is he alive, his absence like death? It begins "You'd have been a young man now" then later says "Do you remember when you were six", "Our hands are still stained and clotted". It could have been his birth or death on "the day I had to use my overnight case".

I liked the start of "Snow" Snow began quietly, like we did,/ And then I heard you everywhere. "In The Consulting Room" didn't work for me - a shame, because it was a 2-pager. A number of the poems feel 25% too long to me, extended slightly beyond their natural span, but "The Collectors" and "Grass" are ok. "Beech House" is my favourite - a character portrait with poetic phrasing and movement. Its moth imagery harks back to "Visit". There's snow too, and confusion, and at the end talk of the moon and home concludes with Do you know our module only has one ascent engine?/ There is never a second chance?

Other reviews

Sphinx

"Notes on Sea and Land" by Lydia Fulleylove (HappenStance, 2011)

2011-09-10T07:10:00.001+01:00

A pamphlet where the existence of one "prose poem" made me wonder why there weren't several others - not so much because the content's prosy (though some Flash Fiction's there), but because the line-breaks and indentations aren't earning their keep (though "Gifts" is in couplets).

The Sea/Land themes in the title are emphasised by the knowledge that the writer lives on the Isle of Wight and that she's been a prison writer-in-residence. The dedication is "for my father". The 1st poem's about moving a chest to a house. The 2nd poem begins "Even when I'm not in the sea/ I am sensing her". So to sea/land we can speculatively add other pairings: containment/boundlessness, presence/absence, mother/father. There are walks and rivers, landslips and boats. All this provides a promising foundation layer, opportunities for cumulative symbolic development. But I don't think the collection makes the most of this - there are too many glancing blows, too much dilution.

"where there is no gravity" has some nice lines ("dust motes yearn to settle on pianos", "water can be wrapped around your hands") along with some weaker, more predictable ones ("the minister cannot keep a straight face"). I'd have liked more poems like "Echo Wing", "Boat-fish", "Ritual", "Estuary", and "The prison and the forest"; fewer like "Adder on Afton Down". A few poems end by repeating the 1st or 2nd line, a ploy that doesn't appeal to me. I think "Night drive" for example could have ended after line 7.

"Engineering Infinity" by Jonathan Strahan (ed) (Solaris, 2010)

2011-09-06T06:40:00.006+01:00

Hard-ish SF, a sub-genre I'm less keen on nowadays. Benford continues to show he can write. The stories by Stephen Baxter and Robert Reed had their moments. Reed's was perhaps my favorite. Discussing solipsism, a character says "Every time you feel bored and ordinary, be grateful. Because that's the best evidence that you are genuinely, joyously real". I'm going to focus on "Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone" by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar because of its wealth of allusions. The allusions are in character and contribute to the plot, but there's a lot of them. Here's a selection

A Max Born quote about the reality of the wave function, p.159
A dissertation title - Ob(Stet)Rick's:A/OB[GYN]jection, Blood and Blocked de(Sire) in CASA[BLANK]A., p.160
Mention of Jacques Lacan, p.166
Mention of Tea Party (political), p.167
Mention of Julia Kristeva, p.168
Mention of Mapplethorpe and de Kooning (Elaine, naturally, not Willem), p.170
He pronounced himself a cubist ... A QBist. A Quantum Bayesian, p.172
Bohr thought that nothing was until it was observed, which might not have appealed to Freud, p.174
Bohr wrong, of course. Bohm, wrong. Heisenberg not even wrong. QBists, half right, p.177
The ghost of Christmas Future, p.177
"It's an entanglement excursion," Amanda told me. "Probability waves bouncing around an attractor, making the droplets walk, you know? We're just walls of flesh, daddy, wrapped around bars of bone. And tangled."
A fragment of an old Bob Dylan song twanged in the back of my defeated skull. "Tangled up in blue", p.177
wore a tee-shirt urging me to Please readjust your priors before leaving the QBicle, p.178
we are told inside a text by Derrida: Il n'y a pas de hors-texte, p.180
Picasso's wonderful African contortions, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his cubism, his late hideous, marvellous Nude Woman with a Necklace, and of course the once-fashionable distortions and visual paradoxa of Dali, Escher, Magritte, the decompressions into art that denied itself as art, Rauschenberg, Johns, p.180
My experiment with single particle self-interference proved that a macroscopic extended object can be made to deviate through an instability threshold and surf its own pilot wave. But it can only do that because we chose to place it in that apparatus. We observe it from our own Bayesian priors, p.182

"Singer" by Sally Goldsmith (Smith/Doorstep, 2009)

2011-09-03T06:50:00.000+01:00

A pamphlet by an ex-songwriter - information which initially and unnecessarily made me wary. In fact, even the title's unmusical - it refers to a make of sewing machine. There's a refreshing agility of approach in these poems - from seemingly biographical sestinas to playful ghazals. I wasn't so taken by the more purely character-based poems like "Down There", and "Out of Joint", preferring the more lingo-savvy "Janice" and "Hare Ghazal". Some of the more promising poems ("Bike", Lil") rather outlast their welcome.

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Sphinx

"Confer" by Ahren Warner (Bloodaxe, 2011)

2011-08-31T09:43:00.013+01:00

I've seen this 25 year-old's name around in ones-to-watch anthologies. This book's shortlisted for the Forward's Best First Collection prize. To me, "confer" means to endow something with an honour or meaning, or to discuss without revealing details. In the title poem 2 misfiled paint catalogues are found on a bookcase - "Crown" between Catullus and Celan; "Dulux" between Donaghy and Donne. "Glosses, Mattes and Silks spill over, fill the book I find" (the book might have been the misfiled "Confer") "the just-off alphabetical ... prop with which to strut the bonds of personality. Contradiction in coherence expresses the force of desire"

I don't sense contradictions in this book. There's little that forces a transcending synthesis, only amalgams of allusions and languages, a consistency of register, and avoidance of scientific/technical references. Let's start at the beginning

"Jardin du Luxembourg" begins "Here, all parks are masculine, grammatically so". Stanza 2 begins "Even the flowers, here, are masculine". Then there are observations about men and women's fashions, ending with "sérénité, the gender of which/ I've had neither the time, nor desire, to look up." The conceptual structure's traditional as is the visual arrangement (4 rectangular stanzas). Centering the poem on a linguistic feature (rather than "nostalgia", say) is less common but far from unusual.
"La brisure" - philosophical musing about a tolling bell and repetition: whether each instant replaces or accumulates the past; whether we exist in a state of endless becoming. The couplets follow an aBaB rhyme-scheme that corresponds to the argument - a whole that contains gaps, or loosely related bits? Lines have internal gaps to make them all the same length. Neat.
"Hasard" is more freewheeling than the previous poems, though the play of concepts could easily be re-cast into a sonnet-like piece with more navigational aids. It starts with an allusion to a TV ad (I think. About toilet paper, I seem to recall) that features a dandelion. We're told not to fall for it. Then we're told about an individual seed in a fissure of concrete, and "those beds of chance -/in which/ we have landed, taken root". Except for the final couplet the stanzas are 4-lined, with a long/short/short/long shape.
"About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters" suggests that the old masters weren't so good with breasts.

This is the acceptable face of innovation, maybe, though only later do the subject matter and combinations of concepts approach novelty. There's method in the madness, freedom of association wedded to form. There's lots of language-dropping: 9 French titles, 6 Italian, and 5 Greek. Even the English titles aren't easy - "Dactylogram ...", "Pictogramme", "Engram", etc. In "Re:", Greek and English words rhyme, as do English and French ones (there are several sonnets). And when you think you've identified the language (e.g. Italian) and have looked up the word (e.g. "legare", the title of 2 poems) you still might be none the wiser as to the purpose. "legare" means "to join up", contrasting with "La brisure" which means "The fragment" but it also might be a place and a film.

I think the playfulness goes too far sometimes. Here's the start of a poem

Διόνυσοζ
Girl with ridiculous earrings     why do you bother
to slap the boy    we all assume is your boyfriend
and is lolling over       that bus seat       shouting

Is the title "Dionysus"? And why the funny gaps in what is an otherwise straightforward stanza? Sometimes they replace commas, sometimes not. Here's the start of another poem

Whoso list to hunt...
In "poetical" discourse, the communication
of the existential possibilities of one's state
-of-mind can become an aim in itself...
this amounts to a disclosing of existence,
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

As the hoplites sobbed Thalatta! to the sea,
we read of them in Xenophon, or Ulysses

Here a difficult title (see the book's "Notes" for details) and a quote by Heidegger is followed by more allusions. Needless difficulty or youthful exuberance? I suppose if you have a Ph.D in philosophy, and live some of the year in Paris this kind of stuff comes easily.

Over a dozen poems are rectangular with internal gaps. Of prose poems, Rosmarie Waldrop wrote "I try to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text. I cultivate cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference, etc. 'Gap gardening,' I have called it". I guess this is Warner's game. I got used to it, but don't share his amour of the rectangle.

"Cuneiform" shows a different typographic quirk. It's in paragraphs. The first isn't indented (fine), but the last is indented half as much as the other indented ones.

As for allusions, my guess is that "Carolina" is the most dense - it begins by thanking a dozen or so bands/song-writers. The book's "Notes" (over a page of them, nevertheless incomplete) suggest that the poem's a collage of quotes (the Moody Blues did the same with Beatles lyrics). I liked it. "Elysium"'s allusion-heavy too. Sporadically witty, it'll keep scholar busy for a while.

He can be straightforward though - here's 2/3s of "Grimsby" - "An old dock town/ where the last sailor is long drowned/ and the boats rot, creaking// like gravel-throated cancer patients" whose only obscurity is the layout. "Engram"'s straightforward enough (though more contorted than it needs to be) and "November" is if anything too flat. If "Metro" (with its Pound allusion) isn't ordinary, then only the last 2 lines save it.

With "Homage to E3" I felt I was beginning to tune in, to become acclimatised to the gimmicks and occasional excesses - the technique performed a modernist cleansing of the tongue, a reformulation of diction.

... a retinal twitch. And the day still black ink bled grey
the excess running to clot in the gutter with socks render

There's much to like in the book, though there's some suspicious-looking glister too.

Other reviews

Phil Brown (Hand + Star)

"Lantern Slides" by Edna O'Brien (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990)

2011-08-28T08:24:00.003+01:00

I was impressed by her "Paradise" story in an anthology, so I got this collection from the library.

"oft in the stilly night" is addressed to a passive "you", the putative reader.

"You are passing through, on your way to somewhere livelier. You would never dream that so many restless souls reside here, dreaming of a different destiny. As you enter you see a stone, Roman-type church … You would not suspect that in the big house with the wrought-iron gateway and a winding overgrown avenue a wife went a bit peculiar", p.3
"You would not known, either, that in the main street, in the row of imitation Georgian houses, many fracas lurk", p.7
"Yes, you would pass houses where there are drunks", p.8

It ends on p.23 with a final paragraph starting "Now I ask you, what would you do? Would you comfort Ita … Perhaps your own village is much the same, perhaps everywhere is, perhaps pity is a luxury and deliverance a thing of the past"

"Epitaph" begins "When first I met you". In this case the 'you' is a character in the plot.

Other stories deal with visiting old parents, brother/sister incest, a mother going on holiday with her son and his fiance. Then more holidays, more visits to relatives, Irish village gossip and continental beaches. There's none of the spareness and power of "Paradise".

"The Best British Short Stories 2011", Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2011)

2011-08-25T07:16:00.005+01:00

The breakdown of sources is: books (5), non-UK mags (3), newspapers (3), Warwick Review (3), London Magazine (1), Ambit (1), Wasafiri (1), Riptide (1), New Welsh Review (1), online competition anthology (1)

There's nothing under 5 pages long. The selection begins rather tamely but soon develops width and depth with some soft-SF, meta-fiction (In Heather Leach's "So much time in a life" the number of characters is in flux until at the end there are none), a ghost story, a story with pages of foot-notes, tales of broken families, etc. Michèle Roberts' piece is the most consciously poetic. Alas, I've never taken to her style. I'll briefly focus on 2 pieces that use animals as a kind of Symbol or alter-ego

SJ Butler's "The Swimmer" uses a swan as Symbol. The narrator's "quite unready for the swan" when she first sees it - her gasp of pleasure at its beauty alerts it to the strange sight of a swimmer in its river". But it's dangerous too. In her "sweltering tiny office ... she cannot stop thinking about the swan". Then one evening she can swim close enough to it to touch it. She realises it's trapped in fishing lines. She releases it. It drifts away. "And at the next bend she cannot tell it from the mist rising from the water."
In John Burnside's "Slut's Hair" a woman's trapped in an unhappy marriage with a drinker. They're short of money. Her husband gets his toolbox out to extract her bad tooth, encouraging her to gulp some spirits down first to dull the pain. After, she sees something in the kitchen, "something vague and unfinished, like a scribble in blue ink amongst the wet shadows - something impossible". A cat maybe, or a fox. No, it's a mouse. "She needed to save it - she didn't know why but she had to". She tries to pick it up near the tumble-dryer, but she came up "with nothing more than a fistful of dust and - what was that stuff you found in dark corners where nobody had cleaned? What was it called? Slut's hair. Yes; that was it. That was what her mother had always called it". Then her husband returns.

Other reviews

Mario Guslandi (The Short Review)
bookmunch
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"Decline and Fall" by Evelyn Waugh (David Campbell Publishers, 1993)

2011-08-21T07:10:00.001+01:00

I have trouble with novels that are supposed to be funny. This one, first published in 1928, edges well into farce and is funnier than most. Lord Tangent and Lady Circumference get together with Dingy, Pennyfeather and co in a tale of unremitting bathos and bad behaviour.

Captain Grimes continued his lament for some time in deep bitterness of heart. Presently he became silent and stared at his glass.
'I wonder,' said Mr Prendergast, 'I wonder whether I could have just a little more of this very excellent pheasant?', p.86
'I don't believe,' said Mr Prendergast, 'that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed. Don't you agree?'
'I don't think you can be quite right,' said Paul; 'you see, animals fall in love quite a lot, don't they?'
'Do they?' said Mr Prendergast. 'I didn't know that. What an extraordinary thing! But then I had an aunt whose cat used to put its paw up to its mouth when it yawned. It's wonderful what animals can be taught', p.87
'... Married life is not all beer and skittles, I don't mind telling you. It's not Flossie, mind; she's been hardly any trouble at all. In a way I've got quite to like her', p.91
'Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.'
'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.
The Doctor looked up for the first time. 'Don't you dare to make jokes here, my man,' he said, 'or I'll soon have you in a strait-jacket in less than no time', p.138

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Sheila O'Malley
John Murphy (Catholic Fiction)

"even the dogs" by Jon McGregor (Bloomsbury, 2010)

2011-08-16T13:25:00.000+01:00

In chapter 1 the narrative impetus is triggered by the finding of a dead body. In chapter 2 the body's driven away while Danny's in flight. In both chapters there's a "we" that often seems to represent a 3rd-person narrative viewpoint, or the spirits of his friends following him to the morgue, the fire.

It gets dark, and light, and dark again, and we wonder whether anyone else will come, p.3
They don't see us, as we crowd and push around them. Of course they don't. How could they. But they're used to that. We've been used to that for a long time, even before. Before this., p.4
Waiting here now for all our names to be called.
Mike. Heather. Danny. Ben, Steve. Ant. Here we all are now., p.105

Time is fluid - We look at Robert. We listen to the coroner and we look at the policeman and we stand outside the flat waiting for someone to come and kick down the door. (p.170). Voice is fluid - filling their pockets with shrapnel until they could change it for gear. Having a dig and a nod and then getting up and starting all over again (p.38).

In chapter 2 paragraphs end in mid-sentence, though not on a way that introduces ambiguity. Chapter 3's more discursive, giving some history. Chapter 4 deals with the post-mortem. Chapter 5's in the coroner's court. But it's not as simple as that. Narratives are interleaved.

The title? Einstein's a dog, but also on p.113 a Bosnian policeman says No. You do not go. There is nothing for you there. There, even the dogs are dead.

It's good, but I wanted to like it more. I prefer So many ways to begin though "even the dogs" has interesting stylistic features to complement the description of a different milieu, one that's more like that of if nobody speaks of remarkable things which also has multiple narratives.

Other reviews

Christopher Tayler (Guardian)
Edmund Gordon (Observer)
David Robson(Telegraph)
Floyd Skloot (New York Times)
James Scudamore (Spectator)
Toby Clements (Telegraph)

"Party Piece" by Anna Woodford (Smith/Doorstep, 2009)

2011-08-03T14:05:00.003+01:00

A pamphlet of 23 poems. "Party Piece" starts the collection, displaying a control of imagery evident throughout the booklet

My mother is taking a turn
  in my killer heels
- they could topple her -
      the old idol of her body
sways like a Madonna
     shouldered out of a Spanish cathedral

....
...... Now I can't hold her
back or follow her

Note the "killer" heels that could topple her; her body as idol (the swaying image apt); the line-break after "hold her"; and the final line, where "follow that!" is only one of the interpretations. I hope I've duplicated the indentation correctly - quirky indentation is a feature. "Journey 14/34" (I don't get the title) is 5 4-lined stanzas. The first stanza reads "Her father was driving/not to the doctor's/for all her screaming/but to school". Lines 1 and 3 aren't indented. Lines 2 and 4 are indented by 4 spaces - I'll denote that pattern by 0404. The pattern for the poem is 0404 0704 0007 0405 7071 which isn't entirely random. In fact, the indentation seems painstaking - why a one-character indent? Why mix 4-space and 5-space indenting in one poem? Does each space matter so much? Tab-related printing problems? I doubt it, because a few other poems have irregular indentation too.

In 3 poems the persona has school problems. Old parents feature (sometimes unexpectedly as when "Gran is/ dollypegging dad's nappies"), as does love and writing. There are relationship poems as well -"Engaged" didn't grab me but "Birdhouse" (perhaps the pamphlet's best poem) did. "Big Bed Scene" ends

but we were great
together, the way
I remember it.
Every time I look back
we're getting better with age

I don't know how to interpret those 2 final lines - that the past looks worse each time it's recalled? I don't think the short lines help. "The Tree" is a short-lined single-stanza poem. It begins "When I raise my foot/ off the ground, in line/ with all the other women/ and the couple of men,/ I am expressing myself/simply as a woman with a raised foot" which is a lot of line-breaks.

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Sphinx

"Changeling" by Clare Pollard (Bloodaxe, 2011)

2011-07-30T21:50:00.003+01:00

Poems in many shapes and sizes - some ballads, e.g. "Reynardine" which starts with

A basketful of dappled eggs
was swaying on my arm,
the sky had darkened to a bog.
Faint lights picked out our farm.

some prose layouts, a shape poem, and a few sonnets. "First Sunflowers" is a loosely rhymed sonnet beginning

I watch them as they lean against the wall,
like lads behind a bike-shed for a smoke.
They nod, all skinny legs and awkward-tall;
the leaves shrug in the breeze. The faces glow

"Lines Written on the Norfolk Broads" is traditional both in form and content - a kingfisher appears, "Illumination in the margin inked/ with lapis lazuli". Her use of imagery is clearest in "Lovely Trees" - "On one branch, a plastic bag breathed./ On another, pigeons, still trying to nap,/ kept themselves tucked in - plump grey jugs.// And below, of course, roots were gagging the drains,/ graffiti-ing lightning on walls".

I liked "Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe", "The Oil", "Introducing .... the Bearded Lady Miss Lupin" and particularly "Whitby", which begins with a quote from "Dracula", then "Whirlpools of gulls whip over harbour" and "The roses on the fortune teller's/ tatty hut are leeched,/ and I've never bought a reading/ for fear she'd shrug ... Yet something dark veins me, as jet veins these cliffs ... I'm the lighthouse lamp,/ guiding something in -/ the bay's sand fingers strain". Finally the persona says "Feed on me that I can feed,/ for I am sick of being tame. Evil and freedom/ are the same"

In contrast, "The Market", "Adventures in Capitalism" (loosely rhyming couplets) and "The City-dweller Laments" seem tame. In "Empathy" a dog bites a narrator, a young girl. The old owner sobs, tells the girl not to complain because the dogs will be put down. The girl stays silent. Later, reading in the papers about a tot being mauled, the girl wonders her silence was irresponsible or arrogant. Not worth 40 lines.

I think "As a girl, I pored over theories" (p.10) is a typo, but I'm less sure about "melons, mint and leak filled gardens" (p.49).

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Rina
Guardian (Ben Wilkinson)

"Do not pass go" by Joel Lane (Nine Arches Press, 2011)

2011-07-25T08:42:00.012+01:00

A fiction pamphlet, about the first I've seen. The pieces are described as crime stories, though the focus is psychological. Ben Wilkinson in the TLS recently reviewed The Autumn Myth, Lane's latest poetry collection, writing that it's "sometimes bleak for bleakness' sake". I don't feel that with this book, though Blues and blackness are never far away, and punishment is often self-inflicted, albeit indirectly. The text is fast-moving, atmospheric and strong-voiced with lots about music, pubs and clubs. There's view-point variety in the 5 stories - 1st person (potential victim); 1st person (criminal); 1st person (detective?); 3rd person (victim); 3rd person (criminal/victim). They have strong first paragraphs. Here's the start of "Blue Mirror"

The bedroom was cold when John woke up. It was nearly ten o'clock. Dave was lying wrapped in the stained blanket of his own dreams. A small trickle of saliva had escaped from one corner of his mouth. John could hear the faint wheezing sound of Dave's cigarette-laden breath. Even in sleep, he couldn't shut the fuck up.

As a poem might be held together by a sonic texture, so a story might be unified by interlocking symbolism. In "This Night Last Woman", the karaoke, the songs, and the middle-aged people's preoccupations help sustain the sense of nostalgia, of lost opportunity. The persona escapes being murdered because the mass murderer thought he was already dying. An opportunity or something to regret?

In "The Black Dog" there's a symbolic leitmotif too. A pile of tarmac "looked like a huge sleeping dog". Later, the murderer confesses that "The black dog won't leave me alone". It's not just depression; there's a body under the tarmac. At the end the tarmac dominates as the detective walks - "The road was covered with fresh tarmac ... I felt sick and cold, unable to move. I looked for some kind of mark in the fresh tarmac. What did I expect: feet running away, paws following? The surface was unblemished.".

"Rituals" is my favorite - it's about what to do with guilt, the risks one takes when trying to belong. 4 men (one of them Finlay, who's armed) are taking Dalton to a disused factory to teach him a lesson, but the place is double-booked - a gay porn film's being made. In the chaos Finlay kills an actor. Dalton escapes, beaten to death days later. Finlay, lying low, has trouble sleeping. He recalls as a child thinking that the city turns into a forest in the night. He remembers a folk-tale called 'Finlay the Hunter' where the lost hunter is eaten by man-wolves. Suddenly Finlay's in a gay bar where he finds his forest. In the final paragraph 4 young men who'd been waiting for him drive him away. "Probably they weren't even aware why they were going to do it. They were just beginners, keen to belong, to uphold the rituals".

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"Watering Can" by Caroline Bird (Carcanet, 2009)

2011-07-21T17:30:00.002+01:00

I don't remember her like this. Compared to her earlier Looking through Letterboxes these poems often sprawl, with lists replacing narrative, conceptual development and closure.

Here are 5 sample starts

The Doom
I've been breaking clocks in case they use clocks
in their bombs.

I've been carrying a camouflaged tent
and a brightly coloured tent.

I put salt in my coffee to confuse them

Hit'n'miss fragments that mostly miss.

Blame the Poodle
Like the girl who dropped her ice cream
down a volcano and leaped in after it,
too warm for comfort, I realised mid-air

that my changes were gone, the second
I entangled in the lead of a passing poodle

More promising, though the rest of the poem's disappointing.

Short Story
If I was a person, like my granddad, who picked one partner
and boiled them tea for the rest of my days, smiling supportively,
I wouldn't have cheated. At least, I wouldn't have cheated
with such a downright skank.

The first paragraph of a story?

I Married Green-Eyes
I married Green-Eyes early last July.
The neighbours all advised me to go green.
Grass smells sweeter when the gooseberries cry.
The butcher-boy went green when he got clean.

More towards the nonsense or surreal genre. There's end-rhyme, and elsewhere there are variants of villanelles.

Closet Affair
When the shivers of shame have stopped, she said,
I'll just hop on a bus and go back to my husband
but first - this might sound odd - I want to sit
in your airing cupboard for a couple of days

Could be a promising start.

There are 3-line poems and 3-page poems. Several poems take up 2 pages. I'd chop lines and sections from lots of them, but maybe other people will like the parts that I don't. To me they sound like caricature performance pieces, or attempts to be "modern". "Penelope's Chair" is interesting. It has 5 stanzas each with 4 long lines. Each final line contains the word "scruples". Here's stanza 2

I went to the adult bookshop for a book on adulthood
but all they had was Threesome in Reno and Cream-gartered Sue.
What's a novice monogamist to do? My love was at sea.
Scruples splattered the sand like broken shells. My spyglass got bust.

The 1st line isn't funny (is it supposed to be?) and the last line doesn't do much. Here's the final stanza

A decade passed. I turned around. He was living with his mum.
We hunched over a plate of chocolate biscuits, like old junkies.
Our elbows went weak at the knees, a tear curled up in my ear
Partied out, we grow scruples and watercress in the window.

I like line 2 but not "Our elbows ...", and the final line doesn't really cut it.

Other reviews

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Caroline Woodward (Osprey Journal)
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"Life Under Water" by Maura Dooley (Bloodaxe, 2008)

2011-07-16T17:00:00.009+01:00

Symbols and internal references abound. It's the interconnection of these symbols that I'll focus on. It happens at the section level - the "four chambers" section begins with pieces explicitly then more generally about the heart. "Stent" for example ends with "Let's edit./Let's make one tidy, precise/amendment and leave the work/as it always was, perfect". It's about a heart (a stent is used to widen an artery) and thus could be about a relationship. The term 'stent' is also used in typesetting, hence the editing analogy.

More commonly, poems have an internal network of images -

"Moth trap" is 12 short lines. In the first stanza "We look to learn", enticing a moth "by a shaft of light". In the second stanza, a girl's "observing her own shadow", her past "a thread leading home,/ a rope to be cast off". The juxtaposed imagery works well.
"The Old Masters" is a page long poem about towers and languages - the New York skyscrapers built by a mix of immigrants; the Two Towers filled with people from many countries; Babel (as painted by Brueghel). At the end Brueghel's Icarus and the Two Towers come together with "a boy falling out of the sky". One can sometimes see methods more clearly when they don't quite work. The Icarus story, like the Babel one, is about pride, but it's not about multilingualism, though multilingualism/communication may help prevent future crises.
"Familiar Object Seen from an Unusual Angle" is 6 long lines. In the first stanza something looks like moon craters or rain on sand - a childhood memory. In the second stanza it's "cross-hatched stars on your hand growing older/ or the real things, sparkling still, as they cool,/ it's how they twinkle, how we wonder what they are" - back to childhood again. The space and age themes sustain this short piece well. It could perhaps be read as a credo.

Her forms aren't complex. She uses drop-down lines quite a lot. In "Remark" for example there's

and you laughed
                in a way
that made me
              stop and stare

these 2 lines formed part of an xaxa rhyme pattern (she rarely uses rhyme).

Her range runs from "May 2007" (a haiku) through many sonnet-length pieces, through "Strange Meeting" and "In which Paula loses an earring ..." (which both seem long for what they do) to the final poem, "The Source", which is over 7 pages long. I'm interested in how a poet who's good at short, tightly orchestrated pieces approaches long poems. The first line is "It is the breaking of the waters that begins it all", which is repeated 6 times. "What does it mean when a well runs dry?" appears 3 times. There are references to Moses, Genesis, Venice, limestone, London's underground streams, Narcissus, and Alice being drowned in her own tears. There are many water and mirror images:

"those are the depths/that the bucket cannot reach,/ the stone thrown down/ to no answering splash"
"the body, like the planet, being two-thirds liquid"
"So is the breaking of the waters/ like the breaking of that tiny flask,/ with its sacred essence,/ the four tears of the Blessed Virgin?"
"a healing holy well ... guiding first pilgrims then tourists to the famous spa of Hampstead"
"here at my door a window cleaner/ wants to refill his bucket of water"

ending with

"whose faith was as knowledge,/ an awakening, a promise,// a splash of cold water to the face"

I think there's too much about London's buried rivers - they've been used too often by others. As has much of the other imagery. I guess that's unavoidable, but the images feel as if they're the result of research/brainstorming to fill gaps in a pre-existing scheme.

"The Source" has a religious slant. "The Director's Cut" has a religious angle too - "Your art is the scent of woodsmoke at bitter dusk ... Your eye is the needle through which we all must slip ... and we do this again and again. We do this for you./ Then watch you make the untrue true/the true more true"

Other reviews

Sarah Crown (Guardian)

"Brought to Light" by Jem Poster (Bloodaxe, 2001)

2011-07-12T10:15:00.004+01:00

Some initial observations -

He likes step-down lines - he uses them to start a new paragraph without leaving a short line. And yet, many of these otherwise rectangular poems have a single short line - e.g. "Sparrowhawk", "Plenty", "Familiar", "The Given"
Birds get many mentions, and are central to several poems - blackbird, vulture, choughs, gulls, plovers, quail, redwings, geese, osprey, buzzard, chaffinch, kingfisher, goldfinches
He likes to end poems with sentences that have lists of clauses - "Plenty", "Offerings", etc.
There's lots of light, dreams, leafmould and bedsheets. There are at least 5 mentions of meadows. Crops and grasses are common - "sigh of grasses", "dry whisper of uncropped maize", "the hush as the shaken grasses settled", "dry grasses stir".
Several poems (e.g "Now") try to expand a moment, sometimes using birds to support the image. In "Sparrowhawk" "it's on that instant of suspension the whole thing centres". "Kingfisher" comprises "I might have spoken ( ... ) but I let it pass", the lines in the parentheses (the bulk of the poem) describing a passing bird. In "The Given" a memory is rummaged through until something's found, a memento if nothing else - "Yes,/ goldfinches. This/ is the given".
A few poems describe attempts to accurately recover a memory, or a person from the past suddenly appears: "Thirty years on, the scene's as clear as any/ from that phase" (p.31); "What was there to remember?" (p.35);"I hadn't thought of you for months; but there you were" (p.56); "I thought it was you, but it doesn't matter. Whoever/ was with me then will remember" (p.58); "So little to help me place it. I feel the garden/ can't have been ours, though my father's there beside me" (p.61). Some poems record multiple attempts - a third of the way through "Again" we read that "there's something/ I've not accounted for, a faint vibration/ subtle but too insistent to ignore./ I'll/ start again ", and at the end "He'll have to start again". "Offerings" ends with "the words/ tried and found wanting and tried again; again".

Several of the pieces have plots that could work in prose. "The Collectors" and "Incident" are face-to-face in the book. Both won "Cardiff International" prizes. The first has lively language, but the second's a thoughtful anecdote (perhaps an allegory - people maybe praying on a boat as it drifts hopelessly away), as is "Conjurors". Here, as in most places, line-breaks aren't often significant, and the language is patchily prosaic, making the line-breaks disruptive -

"I step inside, breathing again the tainted/ heat of the corridor, the subtle/ ammoniac presence gathering in my throat" (p.17)
"The engine overheats. I ignore the warning/ flickering on the dashboard as we climb/ clear of the valley. Less easy to ignore/ the bickering kids, your stifled/ anger as you guide us through the web/ of dusty lanes, one finger tracing/ our progress on the map" (p.20)
"The organisation was superb. The delegates/ were - to a man - my type, and from the outset/ I wanted to be part of things. The firm/ was paying, and though the schedule seemed/ perhaps a little light, I soon/ stopped fretting about such details" (p.24)
"I struggled upward/ breathless, bewildered, to find myself at last/ on an outcrop high above the valley./ Nothing/ had prepared me for that giddy confrontation/ with sunlit space" (p.28).

Interiors - even lives - are explored using a similar method. In "Vacant Possession", the persona enters "the lounge. Or bedroom ... a sofa draped with sheets", sees the "debris of a concluded journey" - old photographs, a butterfly collection. Beyond the room where perhaps the previous occupant (a relative? the past?) died there are "grasses seething with undiscovered life".

This isn't a woodland dreamscape of clearings and revelation. There's no hacking through - the undergrowth's trampled down in the course of walking, thus bringing some old detail to light, something worth taking home and adding to a collection even if it's not what you came for. In "The Collectors" there are "the Victorian collectors/ out at the margins of the recorded world, equipped/ with rifles, nets and notebooks, taking the measure/ of their own astonishment" who reach "Beyond the threshold/ the intolerable light" (of the here and now?). The final "Crop Circles" could also be read as a credo - though we know crop circles are hoaxes,

still the people gather
in fields at dawn, breathing the irreducible
fragrance of broken wheatstalks, lost for words

"What to do" by Kirsten Irving (Happenstance, 2011)

2011-07-08T14:15:00.004+01:00

Many structural devices are used, though few are received forms.

p.10 - xxaxa
p.14 - end-rhyme
p.15 - all end-words contain an "l"
p.20 - terza rima
p.21 - 3 8-lined stanzas. All stanza 1 lines end with "dreams". Stanza 2 and 3 lines end with "body" and "nothing" respectively
p.22 - end-rhyme
p.32 - rhyme and assonance

First the difficulties. I had trouble with some of the titles - "Ittan-Momen" (web-searches only partly help, but the pamphlet has Notes), "Nancy Archer steps out" (Character from "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" - see Notes), "Pathogenesis" (The development of a disease) and "The orniphobe" (Ornithophobia is fear of birds). I had to look up some other words too: "shuriken" (p.12) is a traditional Japanese concealed weapon that was generally used for throwing, and "tengu" (p.20) are a class of supernatural creatures found in Japanese folklore.

I didn't really get "Honey badger" (according to Wikipedia it's an animal with "few natural predators due to its thick skin and ferocious defensive abilities"). The poem begins "To forget me, you square up to a leopard/ He a flecked bullet, you a cluster of iron filings". "flecked bullet" because he's as fast as a bullet and spotted? So? Honey's popular - it appears on pages 9, 14, and 20.

I didn't get the end of "Explaining it". In "Ants" there's a line or 2 I don't get - e.g. "aiming that barrel at the barrel", like shooting fish in a barrel? It's about a social situation where peer pressure or a challenge raises the stakes. The "Restorative justice" poem sets a similar problem in a different context.

Now the main course. I liked "No matter". It begins

There's Cat singing, Here she comes now,
flanking you like Benvolio
and there's an elbow in your side.
You want a banner three feet wide
saying THE END and WOE.

The syllable pattern's 88886; the rhyme scheme's aabba (the 2nd stanza has a gap where a significant 4th line would be). "Cat" is presumably Cat Stevens, singing "Here Comes My Baby ... with another guy". Benvolio is Romeo's cousin and friend. The poem moves fast without leaving the reader behind, ending with

I should hide
from her wrists and her street-thief stride
but I stand like a corpse for a crow

It's a poem where I'm unsure how peripheral the mysteries are. Once the surface turbulence is negotiated, there's a rather simple poem underneath. I prefer things the other way around, and there are poems like that too. I liked "Full-length mirror" (perhaps my favourite), and "Comparative tranquillity". "Three betrayed lieutenants" is growing on me. "Nancy Archer steps out" makes good sense when you understand the title. In any case, the ending works

The moon's a thumbnail. Guess
I'll sit on the bar stool of the cooling tower
until I work out
what to do with myself

Other reviews

Chris Emslie (Sabotage)
Sphinx

"Never let me go" by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, 2005)

2011-07-04T10:30:00.002+01:00

His style isn't what I prefer. When his characters monologue, they all sound the same to me. It's a novel of anticipation and regret

"Tommy thought it possible the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we'd take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly", p.81.
"Maybe, looking back, there was an atmosphere of something being held back, but it's possible I'm only thinking that now because of what happened next", p.224
"In the few seconds after he said this, I realised I wasn't surprised by it at all; that in some funny way I'd been waiting for it. but I was angry all the same and didn't say anything", p.275

Tommy's theory of disclosure is rather Ishiguro's too, leading to muted epiphanies like the trip to a beached boat they'd heard of, surrounded by untraversable bog - "I could now see how its paint was cracking, and how the timber frames of the little cabin were crumbling away. It had once been painted a sky blue, but now looked almost white under the sky". I like this image. In fact I think most of what I liked could have fitted into a shortish story.

Will Art save you? No, but it might make someone think you're more human.

Other reviews

The Guardian (M. John Harrison)
Cavalier House
The Times (Peter Kemp)
The Independent (Andrew Barrow)
The Telegraph (Caroline Moore)
Salon.com (Andrew O'Hehir)
New Yorker (Louis Menand)
Village Voice (James Browning)
New York Times (Michiko Kakutani)
San Francisco Chronicle (David Kipen)
Washington Post (Jonathan Yardley)
The Spectator (Philip Hensher)
New Statesman (Siddhartha Deb)
Sydney Morning Herald (Andrew Riemer)

"hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica" by Matt Merritt (Nine Arches Press, 2010)

2011-06-29T08:40:00.005+01:00

It's a fat book - p.112 pages, c.90 of them with poetry on them. It's sensibly organised into 3 sections: Uchronie (Misc?), Maps & Legends (places and history?) and Goose Summer (nature poems?). In the gaps are poems on the glass harmonica theme. The book begins with a quote - "The harmonica excessively stimulates the nerves ... if you are feeling melancholy, you should not play it". The related poems deal with its otherworldly sound, glass, light, and empty vessels - themes whose imagery pervades other poems too.

As I read through the poems, scribbling on my bookmark, I found that I was making a lot of notes - the average level is good and there are enough ideas to go round: few "so what" poems.

"English Literature" begins

Pens pause one last time,
above the gaping permafrost
of the page

while outside
swifts are scribbling furiously
upon the thinning haze

ending with "One chance" -in exams and life. That's one type of poem - juxtapositions united by a punchline. There are also list poems - "1984" is a list of bathetic observations, but good observations, the fears predicted by the novel have become "what/ Malcolm Marshall could do to an unprotected skull/ on a late-season flyer". There's rhyme - "Dreams From The Anchor Church" is all end-rhyme, "Halcyon", in couplets, has something like a "xa xa xa bb cb cx cx" end-rhyme scheme. "Troglodyte" nearly has a regular rhyme scheme. The stanzas of "Request Hour .. " all begin with "For [those/all]". "Leland's New Year Gift ..." mostly has stanzas beginning "The past". "Farewell, fantastic Venus" (stanzas beginning with "Farewell") isn't for me though, nor is "Treaty House" or "Stanislav Petrov".

The formalism trend is less strong than the prose one - "The American version" is prose laid out as tercets, but that's maybe the point. "Dio Boia" would more naturally be presented as 2 prose paragraphs I think. "Worst Case Scenario" uses indenting and in-line space. For the most part, the less the line-breaks matter, the more ruthlessly regular the line-breaks - most poems are same-size-boxes style. In poems like "Zugunruhe" where lines are short this leads to over-preciousness, phrases like "before we notice anything" not deserving to be a couplet.

Longer poems are usually collections of smaller ones. "from Tesserae" fuses past and present, years concertina'd - "For years, The Charlotte,/ sweat forming stalactites from the ceiling, ears bunged/ with the sound of the suburbs. Five years at a desk,/ an autumn at the Infirmary, and a bar on Braunstone Gate,/ its name changing every eighteen months." Were it Iain Sinclair writing about London, all those line-breaks would disappear.

Content-wise, most poems have something going for them.

Ending - I guessed that "Zugunruhe" was something to do with migration before I found out that it was the restlessness that caged birds show at the same time as their free compatriots start to migrate. It ends (anthropomorphically, I guess) "Hopeless// creatures of habit/ bound to the same great circuit,// tracing memories they didn't know/ they had until the moment// they started to relive them."
Imagery - "Dotterel" begins "Morning found me out. An alloy sun picked out flints/ spackling the heavy clay. Braille of worm-casts/ and rune text of the first birds' wanderings." "Fantasia for Glass Harmonica" begins "In the warm, loose embrace of a slow summer/ twilight, the wine-puddled drowse/ through some winter afternoon, the crystal flutes// of the city's skyline fill to brimming/ with pale, living gold" - It's "poetic" in a way that I can imagine some people being suspicious of. More generally there's lots of sky imagery, many metaphors about light, and many birds - which given his bio is no surprize.
Idea - "Drinking With Godberd" and "Warning Against Using these Poems As A Map" are based on good ideas, but don't have a prize-winning panache. "Winterbourne", (about a stream that appears after years, thus explaining the layout of the path and fields) could have done more.
Shape - "Yellowhammers" begins "Snow brings them in off the fields". Then we told that one was last seen crashing into a window, recovering in time to evade the cat. But no, actually the last time was when a swarm appeared on the "day you died". Finally we're told that "Snow brings them in off the fields. That's all".

The strengths are of various types. However, there were no poems where everything quite came together for me - no knock-outs. It's an even (consistently interesting) collection. "Truth Or Consequences" perhaps stands out the most. It's the poem that was initially hardest for me. I can't see how the title fits in. It begins with "Down from the high ground at last" and ends with "Good to be back on the level again." So far so good. The rest is a struggle. The guiding context, I think, is driving through a one-street USA city in a desert. Film crews misread "Motel" as "Metaphor"? Alien abduction? I like the imagery, though the poem's construction seems differently motivated to the rest of the collection: "Leave the desert// as a tidemark in the hot tub, and ask yourself this -/ Exactly how long was I in there? / Meanwhile, out on the abstract plain,/no mothership over the mesa// but an answer with your name on it/heading for the hole in your head."

Other reviews

Matthew Stewart
James McLaughlin (Stride)

"The Unread Squirrel" by Helena Nelson (Happenstance, 2009)

2011-06-26T12:21:00.004+01:00

The acknowledgements include "Pap Issue 3" (i.e. my Poetry about Poetry magazine, with its logo that I created with Postscript). Also mentioned is Lighten-Up Online, another magazine I've been in (and P.N. Review, which I haven't). Light verse? Well, some of it I suppose, but it could just as easily be described as witty, formally playful, etc. I don't think one needs to labour over them, though you may well go back and read some again.

"Plodding" is far from mainstream. "Break in the Line" though it's about line-breaks is the most prosaic piece - a strong Flash contender. "The Red Squirrel" is witty (I thought the squirrel was going to be the author). "Submission Guidelines" offers good advice

Do not go gentle into that villanelle.
Allow yourself a period of remission.
Rage, rage against a rhyming hell.

"xaxa" is the most common rhyme scheme, but there are many other forms. There are rhyming couplets ("The Amazing Adventures of Alphabetsy" is a sort of Abcedarian in couplets). "Rain" (7 lines) and "Half Light" (14 lines) have the same end-rhyme throughout.

Other reviews

Trevor (goodreads)

"A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan (Constable and Robinson, 2011)

2011-06-21T12:56:00.006+01:00

In the other reviews (there's no shortage of them) you'll find summaries of the chapters. As a reviewer pointed out, it's hard to say anything new about a book that's already received so much attention. Here are few thematic signposts from those reviews

Egan deftly manages to weave strands of time and music together, using bands to evoke time periods we’re all familiar with. Egan particularly stresses the pauses within the musical scores. The pauses represent life’s pauses - our stops and our starts - what she terms our 'not yets'. - Elissa Elliott
[Goon] is one character's name for time: "Time's a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?" Everyone in the book is pushed around by time, circumstance and, occasionally, the ones they love - Sarah Churchwell
"A Visit From The Goon Squad" is a novel about time, and music, and how the two of them work to make connections across people's lives. ... it is divided into two "sides" (A and B) and it's instructive to think of the chapters as tracks on an album - Jonathan Gibbs

Tracks of an album? Maybe. Several work as self-contained stories (I'd heard "Safari" presented as such before, and liked it). Certainly time's a theme: the stories are often interrupted by memories or flashbacks, and there are some flash-forwards. Since the stories involve the same bunch of people, and the stories (spread over 40 years into the 2020s) aren't presented chronologically, one story can foretell or introduce another. The author admits to being influenced by Proust and The Sopranos. Others see some Pulp Fiction in there too.

In the first chapter, "Found Objects" (a good story), the initial narrative turns out to be a recollection. The "present" is where Sasha is with Coz her therapist. The style of the stories rewards readers looking for meanings in the details. Why "Coz"? Maybe because "Coz = Because", a keyword for therapists. The initial narrative is revisited, and other memories are interjected. Attention flicks between narrative frames, often triggered by an emotion the 2 frames share. Sasha remembers stealing an old piece of paper from a one-night-stand's wallet. Written on it was "I believe in you". While she's thinking about whether she should have returned it, we're jolted back to the present with "And did you? Put it back?" Coz asked. We meet the victim again in the final chapter. The story makes the point that the therapist and patient together construct a narrative, play the game expected of their roles. "Therapist/patient = Author/reader?"

The writing can be fast and dense. Take this paragraph for example (p.87)

Kids I remember from high school are making movies, making computers. Making movies on computers. A revolution, I keep hearing people say. I'm trying to learn Spanish. At night, my mother tests me with flash cards.

or this (p.100)

As I looked up at him, I experienced several realizations, all in a sort of cascade: (1) Bennie and I weren't friends anymore, and we never would be; (2) He was looking to get rid of me as quickly as possible with the least amount of hassle; (3) I already knew that would happen. I'd known it before I arrived; (4) It was the reason I had come to see him

Several of the characters have obsessions - stealing, gold flakes, etc. In "X's and O's" Scotty has trouble seeing spectra: things are either White/Black or all grey. He meets someone he's not seen for years, says 'I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B'. If he's looking for cause and effect I think he might be disappointed: things happen in the pauses, fall into the cracks. One thing I like about Egan is that she's more digital than analogue - no impressionistic mood music. Details form the foundation of her work.

Sections 7 and 13 have a function in the novel but in themselves are the least strong. One section's in the 2nd person, another's a Powerpoint-like presentation. Section 9 has long footnotes and a style that reminds people of David Foster Wallace. I didn't find the book strikingly original (even the Powerpoint chapter has forbears), though I agree it's bold and successful, introducing some non-mainstream ideas to a wider audience. The book could maybe do with an index. I wonder if the chapters could have been chronologically ordered. It would have helped a few readers. There's perhaps enough to-ing and fro-ing in the chapters as they are - in "Safari" for example we're told what will become of the main characters in the decades to come.

The book ends with "But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys". With so much music in the book, the use of "fiddling" and "keys" comes as no surprize.

Other reviews

Elissa Elliott (Paste Magazine)
Sarah Churchwell (Observer)
Will Blythe (New York Times)
Donovan Richards
Jenners
mrstreme
Jonathan Gibbs (Independent)
Justine Gordon (Guardian)
Jenny Shank (Dallas News)
Dork
Christian House (Independent)
Writers Salon
Marco Fong (The Short Review)
Adrian Slatcher

"An Irresponsible Age" by Lavinia Greenlaw (Harper Perrennial, 2006)

2011-06-19T07:27:00.000+01:00

I gave up at about page 30 - wasn't interested enough in the characters or language. The reviews suggest I'm in the minority, so I might go back to it. Here are some of the livelier parts so far

"As far as Lambeth Bridge there were white walls, swagged chains and cast-iron railings. Then the path gave way to four lanes of traffic edged by an intermittent yellow line which was supposed to designate a cycle path. Half a mile ahead, this line ended as the road crossed from a borough which supported cycle paths into one that did not" (p.7)
"Fred has been a child who acted the part of a grown-up. Now he was a grown-up acting the part of a grown-up. He was the same height as Juliet, but did not have her coherence. With his red-and-white looks, fizziness and wild hair, he might strike you as badly wired whereas Juliet was wire" (p.8)

Other reviews

Jem Potter (Guardian)
Ruth Scurr (Observer)
Anita Sethi (Telegraph)
Catherine Humble (Telegraph)
Katie Gould(Living Scotsman)

"The city and the city" by China Mieville (Pan, 2010)

2011-06-13T06:25:00.004+01:00

This was in the library's SF section. At the start I thought the 2 cities in the title were co-spatial, one East-european, the other ghostly. Then we discover that the 2 cities are interspliced, the citizens of each city trained to unsee the other. Tourists have to go on courses so as not to breach the rules. Infringements are dealt with harshly. This, a world of iPods and skateboard parks, is the setting for a whodunnit. The setting isn't feasible but I didn't mind - the consequences of it are fruitfully exploited. The motivations aren't convincing either (Dhatt defects far too easily). The pace and tone carried me through.

The Breach live in both cities, safeguarding their integrity. One city's not the subconscious of the other, more a doppelganger. The metaphor of (psychological) integration isn't exploited.

Other reviews

Adrian Slatcher
Michael Moorcock (Guardian)
Robert Hanks (Telegraph)
Denise Hamilton (LA Times)
Jane Jakeman (Independent)
Blastr
David Hebblethwaite
mostlyfiction (Kirstin Merrihew)

"Planet-struck" by Julian Turner (Anvil, 2011)

2011-06-08T08:29:00.000+01:00

The first poem "At the Pagan Sites" (published in Stand) begins

My father showed me how to haunt such sites;
he disappeared as I walked after him,
returned to me as one small speck within

the larger field, wearing the clothes of sky,
his wet shirt flapping scarecrow-like, a kind
of corposant appearing to illume

The unpressurised style, sporadic unusual word, and the format typify this collection. I think the only poem that's not a sequence of same-sized boxes is "Pastoral" , which ends in a rhymed couplet. Several of the poems rhyme, though the number of half-rhymes makes the pattern hard to detect sometimes, and in poems like "Les Hirondelles" some lines don't try to follow the rules.

"At the Pagan Sites" ends with a return "to the thoughtless world of ordinary things" and the persona saying that s/he tries to "get away as much as possible". In subsequent poems there are ghosts, henges, Easter Island, the dead, and cargo cults, and a hint that once violated, the security of home/family/self is hard to recover.

In the final poem "In the Attic at Work" (published in Poetry London) the persona, switching off the lights at work to go home, senses "the revenants from the day's work" and feels that his/her duty is "putting to bed/ these echoes, letting them exhale". For me, these mysteries are too easily plucked from thin air. Ending the poem and the book there's

As I patrol the corridors
a meteor's descending flight
across a screensaver mirrors
the Leonids through an angled skylight

a correspondence of the mundane and heavenly that doesn't give me a sense of satisfying closure.

The poems contain some conventional imagery - "trees hiss together", "the auburn candle flames glow mutedly/ like love-shot eyes" - and descriptions that might transport you - "Everywhere the water's height/ surprises, a great smooth swelling/ over weirs, a sheer glass welling/ above the banks as skeins of light/ wind around themselves in mauves". Once in a while, society's ills are portrayed - e.g. child prostitution

Under the sodium in negligées
the children stand by cars, their mouths blasé
like pomegranates from the work of Poe,
and close them on the fountains of decay.

"Inventing truth" by Matthew Stewart (HappenStance, 2011)

2011-06-02T06:15:00.004+01:00

Poems from "London Magazine", "The Rialto", etc. The number of lines per poem ranges from 5 to 15 (in fact, all values except 11!), most commonly 10, 6 and 8. Stanza lengths vary too - most commonly poems have 2 equally-sized stanzas. The lines aren't long, though it had to be pointed out to me that the poems are syllabics with lines having the same number of syllables - 1 2-syllabled; 3 6-syllabled; 18 8 syllabled and 6 10-syllabled. Iambic lines come and go. The formalism's unobtrusive though - it's a person-centred pamphlet.

All in all it feels like a collection of shorts. Some people aren't keen on such collections. Others look upon them as hit'n'miss like a sketch show - if one doesn't work there's always another coming along. I wouldn't like to read a book of haiku, but none of these have a haiku feel. Some are sketches that say all they need to. Others sound like first or last stanzas of a longer work, or a paragraph from a short story. I'd love to end a story with "Learning the language" or "In exile" - they have the Larkinesque lift that gives the reader the escape velocity to be launched beyond the text.

I'd guess that readers' reaction to these pieces might depend rather on their stance re micro-fiction, syllabics and short poems. Is the need for the same number of syllables per line sufficient excuse for all the line-breaks? Should one pause briefly at the end of each line? When is enough enough? Impressionism gave respectability to what until then would have been considered an un-exhibitable sketch. More recently, Flash fiction has widened the definition of a "finished piece". I wavered in my levels of satisfaction. I liked "Chicken" whereas "Formica" seemed unfinished. I liked "Milko" whereas "La despedida" seemed too slight. "Kleptomaniac" and "Epilogue" didn't work. "You've reached 020 ..." sounded too long for me, yet "01252 .." was fine. I first read - and enjoyed - "Tennis" in "New Walk 2". To me it's Flash (or at least the sort of Flash I'd like to be able to write) because it exhibits the stylistic features that a reduced word-count can commonly cause without taking advantage of line-breaks. I've been known to string a few shorts together into episodic poetry or prose sequence. Maybe that could sometimes have been done here.

That many poems have one or two stanzas is a hint that there aren't many thesis-antithesis-synthesis structures. Endings are usually open, sometimes in a tell-not-show way ("Everything else" ends with "everything else has changed", for example).

A few things puzzled me at first. Was the "San fairy ann" title a sonic rendering of something more meaningful? [ah, Google tells me it's soldier slang - something like Sweet Fanny Adam]. 4 titles are in Spanish. To save you looking them all up -

extranjero - foreigner
La despedida - farewell
callémonos - ???
Guisantes al vino tinto - peas in red wine

Nostalgia (which is also a physical distancing, because the author's based in Spain though writes about England) comes through in many pieces and is often demonstrated using food and language.

My conclusion? A few at a time they're a breath of fresh air, making many a short story seem verbose. In a few words they can introduce characters at turning points, the kind which initially seem undramatic but in retrospect either summarise or fore-shadow significant changes in a relationship or person. At the moment I'm unconvinced by the format (I've never really understood syllabics) and in bulk they might dilute each other.

Other reviews

Sphinx

The brevity of the poems was welcomed in these reviews - "economy ... restraint ... refreshingly short ... consistently stripped-down frankness ... laconic pulling-back and concealment ... crystalline domestic vignettes and distillations of loves ... pithy"

The nostalgia is praised too - "personal and yet so universal ... sifting the most basic of memories, to tease meaning – invent truth – from his own very personal history ... elegiac pangs ... poems that open up to panoramas of love, family, regret and longing"

He seems to have avoided the potential downsides to these tendencies - reviewers don't feel they want more exploration, nor do they think the work over-sentimentalised.

"The Tethers" by Carrie Etter (Seren 2009)

2011-05-28T06:50:00.007+01:00

She's widely published. Her (out of date and selective) list of published poems shows that she's had 20 poems in "PN Review", 6 in "Poetry Review", 3 in "The Rialto", 29 in "Shearsman", 5 in "Stand" and 18 in "The Times Literary Supplement" as well as many in smaller or online magazines in the UK and elsewhere. A first full collection was overdue.

I reviewed her pamphlet Yet for Poetry Nottingham and found it a struggle. She did a local reading on 23rd May, 2011 so I went along. There she described the fragmentation of "Yet" as an experiment, hoping to be able to capture experiences (in particular the erotic) in a new way. I recall her saying earlier that she doesn't think she's a difficult poet. Much of the time in "The Tethers" she isn't. It was interesting to see how her pre-poem introductions helped. She pointed out when there were multiple narratives, and the extent of these narratives' entanglement. In "The Separation" and "Americana, Station by Station" for example, the narratives (3 and 4 respectively) barely merge, whereas in some other poems they do. It was also a help to have the titles explained. Sometimes it's hard to see how they relate to the poem. The main theme only kicks in after a few stanzas, but by then listeners like me might be down quite another garden path.

I liked many of the poems on a first reading: "Seaborne", "Cult of the Eye", "Collecting the Ridges", "The Review", "The Tethers", "Siren", etc. "Four Hours from the Coast" if anything doesn't contain enough about the squalid motels, and a café

where we sip weak coffee from mismatched mugs,
name-drop our destination to assure

any listeners we're going somewhere.

Though the content's clear enough, the line/stanza breaks baffle me. The same baffling breaks are in "Pleurisy" (which appeared in the TLS and is reprinted near the end of a blog page) - 6 couplets and a final isolated line, each line between 4 and 7 syllables. In this case though, the narrative's unclear too. The first sentence is "At the question of lung capacity, the radiator pops and hisses, a fox can only be metaphor" which mysteriously spans 2.5 stanzas, but for me the mysteries don't stop there. Why "At the question"? I've heard radiators rattle and gurgle, but never pop. Which fox? Hughes' thought-fox? It's "six a.m. winter dark" so maybe an urban fox has been seen. Later "You and that hunk of metal wheeze" - the "you" (who?) is suspected of having pleurisy whose symptoms sound like the radiator's noises? The final line "I almost miss it" might refer to the previous line ("The fox is stealth" - death creeping up?) and/or to the noise of the patient, or the radiator. Or the initial question. Pass

The title poem is 35 long lines. It begins with

Hyacinth by orangutan by protozoa, you build our new earth

It's unclear what kind of building this is. The order of the life-forms is unusual too, and "protozoa" unexpectedly general. I seem to recall that hyacinth DNA was analysed early to see how it compares with human DNA, so maybe a geneticist is building a new tree of life. Or maybe it's a SimLife computer game.

...
the gazelle
in the British Library plaza may find the vegetation limited.
...
We don't know who we are without sex, and you'll compound
or mitigate the gazelle's displacement by adding a mate.

We're thinking human population: two, but others will emerge
to lead the gazelles to water, to unlock the library's doors,
to pull pints of Timothy Taylor and take down a packet of peanuts.

I don't know of any gazelle sculpture in the British Library plaza (Blake's Newton is there), so why gazelle? I can see that the theme of sex and definition is emerging. The "others" are, I suppose, those who'll break up the couple, make them drink.

As your first draft nears completion, as my hand falls on your thigh,

Another attempt to unlock the doors between the world and word

to our own naked bodies, self as both tenor and vehicle,
never wholly unmade but in constant flux with the expiring
and transpiring of cells

Though species differentiation matters, and gender (or at least sex) aids identification, the Self is hard to define. And later "The world is ever on the move" too

If I stayed this new earth you did and did not make -
but I would not, not even to allow your sigh's passage, your heart's pause.

I want to paraphrase this because it seems to me that the argument is reaching a crux. Why might the persona want the new earth delayed or halted? For the sake of the relationship I guess - the other's work of "building worlds" is getting in the way of building a relationship. Earlier in the poem the other person is told not to dread delays -

remember that we live by lacing between past and present
stronger, straighter tethers than can possibly hold.

What does this mean? Perhaps "Though we have to try to establish links (both scientific and emotional?) with the past, they won't last"? Tethers are straight when they're taut, strained, being tested. The poem ends with

The heart cannot pause. If we're not sexless children, neither are we
so innocent as we make and break, make and break each other.

The heart joins the world and self in flux. The earth that was-and-wasn't made is matched by people made and broken. We learn by structuring, breaking down those structures, structuring again. Sex isn't innocent. It can be used to manipulate make-or-break situations.

In the Q+A session afterwards she said that being in the UK gave her room - in the US whatever you do you're bound to be compared to several other writers doing the same thing. She's been in England for a decade or so. At least 5 poems mention London, the Thames in particular. "Postmarked (Ars Poetica)" seems as much about the Old Operating Theatre and London Dungeon as Mount Pleasant Sorting Office.

There were still poems I struggled with - "Soporific Red", "Hardscrabble", "The Sty", "Crowd of One" for example, whereas I'm happy with "Lecture". Parts of other poems puzzled me too - the 2nd stanza of "Over the Thames" seemed out of place, too cryptic, and "The Trapeze Artist's Dear John Letter" ends with "I love you. I'm quitting you. I live my life between/ the two meanings of cleave" which is ok in itself, but its hint of unhappy marriage makes me wonder how to interpret the trapeze artist's earlier "[I] trust hamstring and calf's steady marriage// when I hang from my knees."

She said that she doesn't use much humour in her poetry. Forms are scarce too, though "San Fernando Valley Long Song" has an AAbb/AAbb/AAbb rhyme scheme, each stanza beginning with "Man of wax, my butterfly days". Her poems, according to Rosanna Warren, are "discreetly metaphysical". I'd say go easy on the "discreetly".

With "The Bonds" we're back to restriction; it seems to be about the lightness of memories that once had a heavy physical, restraining origin (though stanza 2 sounds wordy). In the next poem, "The Honeymoon of Our Attraction", memories (again linked to water) return with renewed vigour months later. Tethers don't prevent movement entirely, they limit it, and within those limits is "the rise and fall of what we cannot moor" ('The Violet Hour').

Maybe my favourite poetry book so far this year.

Other Reviews

Robert Herbert (Tower Poetry)
Claire Crowther (Horizon Review)

"Perfect Blue" by Kona MacPhee (Bloodaxe, 2010)

2011-05-23T10:00:00.005+01:00

About a third of the poems are end-rhymed, and several others are metred in some way, with the elevated diction traditionally associated with sonnets. Patterns abound. "The short answer" has all the conceptual form of a sonnet though it's a 5x3. "Newsbites" is a villanelle. "Smallpox" is 5 5-lined stanzas, in a abcde pattern. "The problem of bees" is loosely xaxa, with "west" ending a line in stanza 1, "north" ending a line in stanza 2, and so on for "east" and "south". 'the timid heart' plays a similar trick with the seasons.

The first poem, "Iubilate" is syllabic and iambic. High above the shoppers in a mall, with shop displays "like sideshow mirrors/ to proffer different selves", somebody's cleaned one perspex tile to reveal "the endless perfect blue" that no shopper notices. As an introductory poem it works well. We're led from plastic bags in line 1 to the book's title in the final 2 words.

The next poem, "The invention of the electric chair", again brackets an iambic journey from the initial line's mundanity - "All the slow purposes that make a tree/were in you once" - to the final lines' spiritual "those drooping limbs surrended to your arms;/ that smoking moment held: a Pietà."

"Addiction" is adjective-heavy, ending with

Across the clear-skied coldness of the town,
a starched cathedral cancels its assurances;
the pinned moon suffers on its pointed spire

"A year in the back country" was the first poem I was unsure about. The next poem, "Self-portrait ..." seemed light. Starting with "Autumn evening blues" there's a block of poems that I didn't like so much, though there's variety enough. In "The malfunction" I wondered if there was some form-induced padding

My watch had gained the knack of losing time,
not every day, or even every week,
but now and then a gout of minutes gone,
a sudden gush, a splash, a spill, a leak.

and I couldn't get into the list poems where there was repetition: 'the timid heart' and "View from a window". "The detour", "Dysentery", "Fen train" and "Paranoia" seemed overlong to me. For a tight-writer, gaining volume can be a problem.

The final poem, "Marchmont Road", ends with

Stop it. No moment must encore
itself in some pert metaphor

Suspend that distanced commentary.
Take a deep breath. Now be here. Be.

Metaphors are circumspectly used elsewhere too, questioned and replaced

"Wild night's morning" describes a crow with a damaged wing, down but not out - "the metaphor/ in his ruined grace/ not a sundered abbey/ but a boxer's face"
"To a young daughter" starts with the ugly-duckling metaphor, then wonders if the mountain hare, rather than swan, is a more apt metaphor - an identity that "preserves/ her only self, that soon the world/ must answer her with with snow" (perhaps my favourite ending)

Foes of formalism point out how the constraints limit choice and increase padding, how speech rhythms are smothered, how the diction becomes constrained (heightened) too, how the reader becomes seduced by the dumdeedum rhythm and certainty of the rhyming couplet, how closure becomes ruthless. Of course, there's an obverse to each of these points. I think her sonnet-length, formalist-influenced pieces are fine examples of fused form and content, of content elegantly supported by sound. The more she strays from such pieces, the less sure I become, though there are several exceptions - Typhoid" for example is an interesting departure, made more interesting still by the notes. And I can see that others might like the pieces that don't excite me - nothing's bland. I might not be shifting aesthetic frames fast enough.

As usual, I have unanswered questions on finishing a book. This time my luck's in. In the Introduction to her free Perfect Blue Companion she writes that "an engaging and informative preamble, delivered in an honest and open way, gives new readers a reason to trust" - which I agree with. For similar reasons I think the early poems in a book are important, and the early poems here are especially good. She writes that she's not "trying to 'explain' [her poems] in some tedious line-by-line dissection" and that the commentary (the aforementioned "distanced commentary"?) is "explicitly intended to provide a handhold, a stepping stone, a small reason-to-trust for readers new to poetry."

I think it's a fine idea. Some of the commentaries are more peripheral than others, but part of the trust-making involves getting to know the poet as well as the words. Here are some notes about the notes

"Addiction" - there's not much about drug addiction in the poem, though there's a lot of grime. The notes talk more widely about squalour and offer a setting - which was useful. I think it was worth pointing out that "manumitted" (p.12) means "released from slavery".
"Wild night's morning" - worth noting that rood" (p.14) isn't a typo for "rook"
"A year in the back country" - Not "Black country"? (around Birmingham?). I'd have liked to know more about the relationship between the characters. How many people are away? Was the cabin ever on a ship? What's a "stoop"? For me, the poem doesn't delve as deeply as the notes suggest
For "Justice", "Wildwar" and "Exit hymn", I was hoping for more than a confirmation that they were list poems.
"The problem of the bees" - I hadn't been sure whether bees were causing a problem, or whether the "bumblebee's enigma" was that it could fly at all. It was useful to know that "This poem makes playful reference to the fiddling we're doing while Rome might be burning: self-importance (the writers), grandiosity (the scientists) and creative stagnation (the artist)"
"The Book of Diseases" - "In the nearly 4 years since 'Tails' had come out in 2004, I'd written almost nothing, and I'd long resigned myself to the fact that I'd never write another book". Ah. Illogical I know, but I rather distrust commissioned work and themed series - they cause things to be written that wouldn't normally be written - anti-writers-block devices.
"Pleurisy" - the comments are interesting, but don't deal with the poem, which goes on a bit.
"Depression" doesn't match the description for me
"Influenza" - I was hoping that I'd missed something in this poem that would explain its length. The commentary is a defence of SF
"Plague" - this commentary (perhaps the most interesting of them all) homes in usefully on several phrases.

Other reviews

The Guardian (Charles Bainbridge)
Emma Lee
Good reads (Juliet Wilson)

"Politicamente Scorreto" per Daniele Vetta (Robin Edizioni, 2004)

2011-05-18T08:00:00.002+01:00

20 stories, about 800 words/story. It's Flash! The stories depict a rather bleak world of sex without love. Men's desire for sex with unwilling partners leads to tension and conflict. Men's private views of women (e.g. a perfect composite fantasy woman) are spoilt by a real woman turning up. "Primo Giorno" and "Pausa" end with the sudden arrival of a women and consolation sex. Other stories (e.g. "Sonno, Doccia a Altro") have a woman's arrival, sex and the woman's departure dealt with in 6 lines or so. In "Io e mia moglie" the narrator considers humiliating episodes from his childhood with his mother while in bed with his wife.

Without sex, life's still humdrum. "Soltanto un gioco" compares life to a card game - " 52 cards. The weeks in a year. Four suits. The seasons. Two colours. Red and black. Life and Death. The sum of the value of the cards. 365. The days of the year. The joker. The day extra in a leap year". Loners have moments of well-being, of suddenly feeling that they're masters of the universe or that they are the universe. When a surfer strives to lose himself in the moment, it's the best he can hope for.

The page-numbers in the index are up the creek.

"Permutation City" by Greg Egan (Millennium, 1994)

2011-05-11T10:32:00.002+01:00

An SF novel set initially around 2050 prefaced by a 20-line poem that begins

Into a mute crypt, I
Can't pity our time
Turn amity poetic

Each line's an anagram of "permutation city". The Prologue's title is "(Rip, tie, cut toy man)", which also appears in chapter headings 3, 6, 9, and 12. Chapter 1 is headed "(Remit not paucity)", which also appears in chapter headings 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, and the Epilogue. Chapter 16 is headed "Toy man picture it". Chapter 20 is headed "Can't you time trip". Chapters 24 and 27 are headed "Rut city" (a subset of the 15 letters). The other chapters have blank headings.

People are scanned and converted into programs called "Copies". Do they feel continuity with their biological originals? Do they feel their original's guilt? What is identity? What sort of madness is it when people think they're Copies? The status of Copies is a hot topic in the media

"There's discreet sponsorship of a sitcom about working-class Copies, which makes the whole idea less threatening" (p.33)
"Supporters of the Strong AI Hypothesis insisted that consciousness was a property of certain algorithms ... regardless of what mechanism, or organ, was used to perform the task. ... Opponents replied that when you modelled a hurricane, nobody got wet." (p.40)

The novel's a concept-guzzler with enough ideas for a few short stories. Info-dumping's inevitable, though I think the dialogue where characters explain their motivations needs more variety. Much of the action takes place in a VR world where for fancy dress people appear as Babbage engines or "Searle's Chinese Rooms". The world's based on the dust theory. Politics is different there - "Any one of the founders who disagreed with the way Planet Lambert was managed would be perfectly free to copy the whole Autoverse into their own territory, and to do as they wished with their own private version" (p.239) The VR world hosts another experimental world where Lambertians evolve. The Copies build a spaceship to enter this inner VR world when they think the Lambertians are ready to meet "aliens", but the worlds collide.

I think the Wow-factor of the dust theory could have been exploited more, and some of the info-dumping could have been shortened. Moral responsibility in this context has been dealt with by Chris Beckett (amongst others) who, freed from the need to explain the technology, wrote a more engaging story.

Other reviews

"from there to here" by Michael Mackmin (HappenStance 2011)

2011-05-04T13:00:00.004+01:00

A 28 page pamphlet. I liked "January 20th, 1986". I didn't like "This poem explains" or "The watchers". The rest were somewhere between those extremes. He's quite partial to interruptions - of register (p.16) or a new voice or a "THWACK!" (p.31), or parentheses. I like how these shape the poems. I'm less sure about some of the language. In "Susannah" the persona wonders why a girl's face is so pale, and thinks "maybe the white is because/ her black of hair, black of eyes, invents/ white skin?". Well maybe, but it's a needlessly contorted way of saying so.

Other reviews

Sphinx
Donald Gardner (Horizon Review)
Noel Williams (Antiphon)

"The Way I Dressed During the Revolution" by Jane Weir (Templar, 2005)

2011-04-28T17:56:00.001+01:00

Few poems are shorter than sonnet-length, and those that are ("The First Time", "South Cemetary Visitor's Map") aren't always the best. She's not a crisp writer, and can need more than one try before things become clear. Several poems are longer than a page. The 1st of "Recovery"'s 15-lined stanzas starts with "When I cough no matter whether/it's short and raspy or endless/ like a marching army on slush and ice,/ you're attentive. You always get up,/ answer with a look, always follow/ up with deft touches.". I suspect the line-breaks are there only because later there's "their petals tigering/ through an alchemy of winter light" which in prose would be too purple. "The Match Breaker" begins "She handled me with skill,/ setting me down on a chair,// as if I were a dare at a country fair,/ to poke fun at.. 2-lined stanzas this time. Well, it adds visual variety I suppose.

There were several mixed metaphors and analogies that I struggled with, e.g. -

"Like rhyming couplets let me savour/ all of you and all the work you continue to do." (p.21) - The rhyming couplets are being equated to "you" rather than to"me", or "me savouring". Even so, it's a rather stretched analogy.
"Swathes of sweat/ made great strides across/your face, neck/ as you bent double" (p.28) - "made great strides" seems inappropriate here. Also the swathes of sweat probably aren't necking.
"The pond went platinum under an ice sun" (p.32). "went platinum" is a term from the record industry that seems misplaced here.

There were also places where things have been said in a flashy (rather than poetic) way, the similes ornamental rather than structural, bringing to mind ideas that don't fit the poem. E.g.

"I leave the table unsided, cooker half cleaned,/ though I insist on putting out the windows eyes/ by drawing the blinds" (p.41; "putting out eyes" sounds violent)
"Then our conversations take on the colour/ of elastic released from a swollen wrist" (p.41)

"Lace Swans" has a more carefully judged balance between tenor and vehicle. It's immediately followed though by "Aria", which starts "We take her up to the cottage./ She wants to try it before/ she makes a final decision,/ in the same way you tentatively/ taste, sniff at something/ foreign like a soft cheese.". It uses some of the shortest lines and disruptive line-breaks in the book when the content's prosaic. Again I have trouble with a simile - is it "taste or sniff", "taste then sniff", or (despite the line-break) is the sniffing clause separate from the tasting one? The introduction of foreignness becomes apt.

Parenthood's a recurrent theme, in particular coping with the growing distance between parent and adolescent, and meeting friends from pre-parenthood days. "Florentines" begins "Like Venetian merchants/ pulling the cords of their/ purse strings we grab chairs/ draw ourselves/ round the kitchen table". I don't know why Florentines and Venetian are mixed up (maybe Florentines are being eaten) but I like the idea of 2 friends meeting after years to flaunt their produce (and to draw themselves). The "purse strings" analogy works as far as the seating arrangement's concerned, but are they going to buy or not? A line or 2 later "my pitchfork eyes/ toss a florin for you to go first". Ah, so the purse isn't closed. How can you toss a florin with a pitchfork? And isn't a florin a lot of money? Later "you open two buttons on your shirt,/ steep sloping terraces of chest hair./ I run my fingers through vintages/ of my hair, both of us knowing/ a knee length boot has trampled there" Where is "there"? If a terrace is steep need we be told it's sloping? But "vintages of my hair" is nice.

"Cigar" works for me. Though other things are hinted it, perhaps in the end it's only a cigar. By the end of the book I think I was getting the hang of the reading style I'd need to adopt to get the most out of it.

"Moving Parts" by Tim Love (Happenstance, 2010)

2011-04-21T12:00:00.002+01:00

I wrote the following review in 1997, about an unpublished collection I'd assembled then. I wrote it to encourage a change of direction in my writing. Several of the poems got into "Moving Parts" (whose poems, on average are 11 years old). Of course, so much has changed since then ...

A review of "Misreading the Signs" by Tim Love

To entitle a collection "Misreading the Signs" is to tempt fate. If the poet misreads, what chance has the critic? And what are critics to make of being told that they

wind up their gramophones for icing cakes,
lift doors off their hinges to sleigh through slush, ("Re-evaluation")

There are many signs and images in these poems that could easily be misread. Perhaps because it's been put together over many years, the collection (as well as some individual poems) lacks coherence. There are sonnets and haiku, as well as free form pieces, but in the main traditional forms are used ironically. Poems range from the image-free "Trying Again" to poems like "Giraffe" that use imagery at the expense of sense, symptomatic of a more general conflict between feeling and intellect that is not always well resolved. There's a wide range of subject matter too - love poems, poems about family life, comedy, the statutory re-interpretation of greek myth, art, politics - all dominated by a pre-occupation with language (its history and development).

The poems start well, but often falter or become suddenly obscure soon after the start, as if he's trying to

mutilate language to see how it works,
if it can still escape your maze. ("Romance")

Nevertheless, many of the poems pull themselves together and end strongly. "The Fall" begins with a comment on the development of languages, then we realise that an englishman's intellectualising the loss of his american lover. The conclusion tidily brings together differences between the two cultures and languages

And because it's autumn, London leaves fall
yellow as cabs. As you fall asleep,
a fire engine that used to hee-haw
like a seaside donkey goes wow wow wow.

In "Estuary" a river's used to represent a life, the passage of time going upstream

The tide takes up the challenge
of the sea's grief, narrows into fate.

ending at the source

then finally fear
that lasts so long your sleep comes easily now,
a trickle of wine's enough.

Yet even in the successful poems the endings are sometimes too neat, and though they draw together the poems' themes, they rarely draw a conclusion from what's gone before.

The author's a computer programmer and this shows up in his tendency to trust the artificial rather than the natural

At night there's no sun to lead you
but satellite dishes all point in one direction.

and even to see giraffes as programmers "debugging the horizon".

With a little more faith in natural subjects and treatments, I think the poet could develop the talents sporadically displayed here. As it is, the book remains an interesting but bumpy ride.

Other Reviews

Sphinx

"Heavy Water and other stories" by Martin Amis (QPD, 1998)

2011-04-18T06:35:00.004+01:00

The contents page mentions 6 stories though there are 9 in the book. There's no acknowledgments page - by looking at the ends of the stories one can see they come from The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, etc. Looks promising

"State of England" is long and has some of the best passages (p.58-60). It also has some typical Amis characters

Mo said, 'My son's three. And he calls me an asshole all the time.'
Everybody looked suitably impressed. (p.16)

"Career Move" is set in a topsy-turvy world where business executives are involved with poetry launches

Joe looked doubtful. '"'Tis" has made the suits kind of antsy about sonnets. They figure lightning can't strike twice."
'ABBA ABBA,' said Bo with distaste.
'Or,' said Joe, 'Or ... or we go unrhymed.'
'Unrhymed?' said Phil.
'We go blank,' said Joe.
There was a silence. Bill look at Gil, who looked at Will.
'What do you think, Luke?' said Jim. 'You're the poet.' (p.19)

"Straight Fiction" is set in another topsy-turvy world. This time gays are in the majority.

"Heavy Water" is about a mother taking her 42 year-old mentally handicapped son on a cruise. About half way through we're told that he was fine at fourteen, before his father left. On the next page we suddenly, momentarily enter John's head "John gave the food a look. The food gave John a look. John didn't like the look of the food. The food didn't like the look of John. To him, food never looked convincingly dead."

There's a talent show on board. I expected the all-but-mute son to suddenly burst into song. But no, the twists are that near the end he tries to jump off the boat and that his evening bottle contained not milk, but gin.

"The Janitor on Mars" is SF, with a monologued history of the universe delivered by an advanced robot. Standard - no undermining of the cliché. I was expecting the Earth to be destroyed at the end.

I think his novels are better.

"Lying in Bed" by Polly Samson (Virago, 1999)

2011-04-13T13:33:00.003+01:00

In the first story, "Wasted Time", the narrator's a daughter of parents who sometimes argue. Her mother tells her about the facts of life. The lonely daughter often visits the graves of 3 children. She also counts the condoms in a tin in her parents' room, and is worried when they've not been used for a while. One day she finds a Jackdaw with a broken wing and brings it home. Her mother, in one of her rages, causes the bird's death. The daughter pierces 3 condoms, one for each child. I liked the punchline, the relative brevity of the story and the spare characterisation. It's my favorite perhaps because it's the first I read.

The second story's longer, and if you're the type of reader who tries to anticipate punchlines, you won't be surprised. The next story "The Right Girl for the Job" is longer still. By now I'd begun to seek clues in the titles. A single mother's interviewing for nannies. I soon realised that the mother's picking a pretty one as part of a plan to make life difficult for her ex-husband and his young mistress. The punchline is a twist on this - if it was foreshadowed it's too subtle for me.

"Blood Roses in the Snow" begins with a policeman and social worker at the narrator's door. He's come to take the baby away. Was the baby being mistreated? Handicapped? Is it in fact a doll? Has it replaced a still-born that's rotting somewhere? Who is the "other child" on p.139? We soon discover that the baby had simply been snatched and the husband had left rather than spill the beans. There's not much to the story after that.

But the endings aren't always predictable. I thought at the end of "Turkish Carpets" that Robert would be revealed as a father. In "Subterfuge" I thought the brother was gay. I was wrong both times.

There's a lot of detail. Flashbacks are often long and uninterrupted. "Mermaid's Purse" is in the present tense with time-gaps between some paragraphs. It works well, though in a restaurant we're suddenly dropped into a waiter's head for a paragraph (p.107). Language can become a little wayward too - little girls think things like "warming my cold heart against the heat of their impatience" (p.63) or "that was as ice compared to the hot spurts of hatred that followed" (p.78). Words aren't at a premium - e.g the last word's not needed in "'Good heavens, why do you ask that?' said Emily, surprised" (p.122).

Susan Hill said "Stunning, wholly original". I don't think so. They're neatly written stories and often a pleasant, undemanding read.

"Mr Luczinski Makes a Move" by Peter Daniels (HappenStance, 2011)

2011-04-07T08:00:00.006+01:00

A 24-page pamphlet with winning poems from TLS, Ledbury and Ver Poets competitions as well as poems from "The Rialto", "Thumbscrew", etc - another pamphlet whose density and variety of goodies puts some bloated books to shame. "The Pump" is only the second poem but reading it I already felt in safe hands. It begins

After the piped water, the pump becomes redundant,
the handle chained down at the side - at rest, if you like.
The pump turns into 'what we used to have'

The pump may be at rest, but it doesn't die - from being functional, it becomes a back-up, then historical, ornamental, then a garden feature painted green, then white with black text. "Pump"="Art"? At the end though, "the pump can stand for ... the kitchen girl" who cranked until the water appeared

and at last
she could find time to become somebody's grandmother.
Somebody look at the pump and think of her.

The next 2 poems, "Windfalls" and "At the forest pool" (deep image?!), are in different styles, and similarly successful. This is the kind of non-trivial variety I welcome - short or long sentences; deep image or social observation; traditional or invented symbols. There's always a persona or 2 though (the power of witness), few artifices, and a tendency towards the urban. There's lots of rust, buses and streets, candles, forests, dust and water, wind and thunder, spiders and anger - one can nearly daisy-chain the poems using these symbols as links.

"Policeman, Stoke Newington", "River", "All you need" and "Hat and Pan" are amongst the poems involving 2 personae interacting, sometimes mediated by a third object. "The naked city" and "The retreat" involve a persona trying to engage with a wider context (retreating into the open) but never a life-less one. "Out there" combines these themes - a persona on the retreat meets another (itself?) on the way back. Seems like they both feel they're on the same journey.

There's a "tell it slant" approach to some of the central images, with riddling, "What am I?" titles.

"River" begins
My nerves have decided it was
your fault. It's dark, and I resent that,
but I'll be the moon,
you be the pull of the current.
With the title in mind, a reader might think that the early "your" refers to the river, or that it's the river that's dark. Soon though "The river looks cold but alive", making "you" into an Other. At the end the persona's on the bank at night - "I'm alone with this mess in the mud ... The water is always moving downwards and now/ I have as long as I want to settle my fear of the river". The river seems to have taken on its traditional time/fate role, the earlier "current" becomes more temporal as does the persona's need to "settle". The "The houses/are darkened for their generous wet dreams" phrase puzzles me though. And why is the "dark" resented? Another symbol of passing time?
"The naked city" begins "Open your heart and harden your ego to disillusion". Again, if one pre-emptively tries to decode the title, "your" might refer to the city, but the poem continues "pose in the nude on the height of the doric frontage" - it's "the city of naked souls", an attempt to influence the city/society.
"The monkey of forgetting" is about a monkey rummaging though the past. What does the monkey represent? Another person? An aspect of the persona? A mischevious minor god? Or maybe reviewers. The final stanza is
Hard to tell how much he means to it to hurt.
Blame it on the monkey's own sense of loss,
the babyhood of clinging to the hard wire breast
I presume the allusion's to the behavioural experiments on baby chimps where their mother was replaced by a bottle strapped in a flannel, but what/who is forgetting? Or is all the forgetting in the past?

Other reviews

Sphinx
Donald Gardner (Horizon Review)