"The Shared Surface" by Jane Monson (Cinnamon, 2013)

This is a book of texts that are promoted as poems. One of them came 2nd in the Cafe Writers Competition 2012. George Szirtes writes of the book that "The prose poem offers the expectation of prose (linear syntax, an interest in narrative sequence and doing, and a by-no-means universal preference for metonym over metaphor) while looking to evoke the experience of poetry (looser syntax, less interest in narrative and more in being, and a preference for metaphor). ... There is a cumulative power in the poems, the sense of a story that seems to be unfolding although it is mostly folding back on itself".

The "shared surface" of the title is primarily a table which appears in many pieces, though I guess it also could be the page. The texts have no line-breaks. The first piece, "The Photograph", like most of the other pieces in the book, doesn't even have paragraph breaks. Here's its beginning and ending

• "Only parts of her face are lit, but she knows that's her mother. She is at the far end of the table, where the shadows collect; her gaze is comforted there"
• "And so the rest of us are left, still not speaking, but wondering: who is trying to kill who and is that our cue to speak, or be excused?"

The situation is described at the start, and there's a conclusion at the end - a shape that many of the pieces follow. Here's the beginning and ending of "In Difference"

• "His fist pounds the table and makes the plates jump above the cloth. Water hiccups to the top of the glasses"
• "He doesn't believe in gluing things together. This is not a symbolic statement - he just believes in replacing. Based in this alone, their marriage has never been whole, fixable."

I like "Journey towards Dinner", "The Cool Hands of Luke", "The White Ribbon", "Beam of Light", and "The Artist is Present II". That I like more pieces towards the end suggests that I was gradually getting to grips with the genre, though even then I found "At R.S. Thomas's Table" puzzling in a so-what way.

I couldn't find any reviews online.

"Speaking Without Tongues" by Jane Monson (Cinnamon, 2010)

The blurbs are interestingly chosen. Here are 2 extracts

• "Reading a Jane Monson poem is like walking into the world of a brightly lit photograph" - Helen Ivory
• "These enigmatic prose poems ... must be negotiated like unfamiliar rooms in darkness" - John Freeman

Are these poems "enigmatic" or do they exhibit "a generous, honest voice, a poetics of openness" (Luke Kennard)? I can imagine these poems provoking a range of reactions even from a single reader. On my initial reading I read the first 4 pieces and skimmed the rest. I was looking for foot-holds - phrases or whole poems. There's more variety than might at first appear. For the moment I think I'll show, not tell ...

• "Babysitting" begins "Anna holds her arms up high while I undress her. In the bathroom she crashes the toothbrush around her teeth, foams at the mouth while I stand in the doorway looking past her head to the form that towers in the mirror. At her bedside, she introduces me to her doll". It ends by repeating some of the prose with line-breaks.
• "The Prose Poem" begins - "That night, she got down on her hands and knees and placed a wolf in the middle of the floor". Then "She took away the walls and put oaks in their place." Then "Finally, she did away with herself - lost the feeling of being watched". Again, it's a recognisable trajectory, an alternative to "The Thought Fox" perhaps.
• "Speaking Without Tongues" is "about" conversation on a train. "Shadows animate the train windows; they puppet the textures of silence, flight-ways of hands catch and knit words mid-air ... By night, their conversation twins in the glass".
• "Visible Speech" is "about" peat-burning - "Once lit, these packed cuts of land, ease themselves away in smoke; return themselves to the earth as powder ... they become the fire's thrive; its thundering swallow, the aching bass line of the cottage's warmth. Outside, the tongue of the chimney conducts them back into the world again: escapees, cast-outs, ex-objects, re-named and unheld, they disappear mid-sentence, the sky their paper now."
• Object Poem is more an essay - "We do not write about the object - we write about the shadow it casts or the reflection it throws back at us."
• "Weather Quartet" is a poem

  Winter is [...] Spring turns [...] Summer is [...] Autumn [...] Each year, they speak over one another

I'll be reading this book again.

Other reviews

• Caroline Clark (gwales)