"Broken Cities" by Katy Evans-Bush (Smith Doorstop, 2017)

Poems from Ambit, PN Review, etc.

There's no "Here and Now".

• If it's Here, it's now and then - time stops, or "time has warped" (p.8), or there's a comparison of the present with the past ("Field of Fire, 1555", "Prior Bolton's Oriel Window") often concerning London, nostalgia and decay. In "Snowing" (the day after a cremation?) "What was black and grey the previous day has turned to grey and white. Already Dad's dust must be sinking down".
• If it's Now, it's here and there - abandonment or displacement (parties in ocean depths) though little movement. There's an immobile cat owner in "The Broken City" - "Who are those people? you ask, pointing a finger at the foot of your bed". In "The Great Illness" the character is wheelchair-bound. Train journeys are unpleasant.

"Prior Bolton's Oriel Window" describes an early 16th century scene of a Prior safely watching from on high his monks. He had a house built high in Harrow Hill to avoid dying in floods like the monks, fools and sinners below him. This is compared to us watching our own Prior Boltons on screens, "and they see us, with their data-gathering technology".

"Don't Look Down" is mostly in rhyming couplets with irregular line lengths. There's sing-song rhyme - "Oh, retro moon of London,/ How analogue you are!/ We lost all our signal,/ Down in the cellar bar" (p.21). We're told that

Bing sure could sing: it made him so rich he could afford to spend all his Christmases on isthmuses.

but we can't all be so lucky. Anyway "crooning is a form of nostalgia" and "Tony Soprano/ at the piano/ plays like there's no tomorrow./ There is no tomorrow."

I was distracted in "The Milk God" when the poem left its realist beginnings, wondering who/what the God was (a big plastic bottle? a dead person?) - "Next to the sink sits the granddaddy, the sun,/ of all milk bottles. This mighty being/ stands tall and kind of bearded, his translucent plastic/ body almost mystical. Visible inside him/ where it radiates heat, and the smell that forms their atmosphere,/ is the source of his power: a hardened orb/ of golden orange". I had more trouble with p.18, p.19, p.20-22, p.23 (I think a poem that compares the underworld with the London Underground, and Tube stations with Stations of the cross needs to do more), p.26, p.30, p.31 - perhaps an indication that she's taking more risks while I've become more conservative. Does "Gyb" on p.31 mean "Got Your Back"?

Other reviews

• Pam Thompson
• Angelina D’Roza
• Jennifer Wong

"Forgive the language" by Katy Evans-Bush (Penned in the margins, 2015)

Articles/essays from "Contemporary Poetry Review", "The Dark Horse", "The Los Angeles Review of Books", "Magma", "Poetry London", "The Poetry Review", etc - an impressive haul. Inevitably there's some repetition, with pages 45 and 50, 61 and 73, 130 and 215 sharing blocks of lines. She's a pro - professional in her approach, and in favour of what she writes about.

Comments on particular essays

I was aware of Ira Lightman's investigations into plagiarism, which she tackles in "Now I'm a real boy". I hadn't realised how many moral boundaries Sheree Mack had transgressed -

• She broke the trust that fellow workshoppers presume
• She exploited the Black/authenticity theme, bizarrely transplanting poems by Douglas Dunn, etc to Trinidad
• She taught creative writing at the OU.

KEB writes "It seems to me obvious that this is self-harming activity" (p.191), which seems quite possible.

"The Line" covers much material in a few pages, making several useful points -

• "Clearly the line plays a different role in sound, concrete, 'innovative,' 'post-avant,' language and other poetries" p.194
• "Many poetry tutors don't like to discuss [line endings] at all; there is such a taboo on discussing this most personal aspect of poetry" p.196

Uncharacteristically she quotes some lines she doesn't like. Then on p.204 she takes some lines from "Briggflats" and reformats them so that there are "Orphaned words ... Symmetries ruined ... like a refrain in a 60s pop song ... a line too clotted even to falter ... trivial ... the final line portentous and reminiscent of Peter Greenaway". I can't see quite as much of a difference between the 2 examples. She points out some risks with certain types of line break -

• "Done badly, it means the reader has to go back, reread the first line ... and then proceed, having gained nothing from the experience" (p.206)
• "so many poets adopt [the utterly atomised line break] merely to break up something they think would have looked predictable otherwise" (p.207)

I see many such line breaks even in famous poets' works. Of Sharon Olds' poems she writes "Putting the stress on the first word of the line below, it creates a sense of urgency as well as hesitancy, and disorientates the reader, who then grabs for the emotional content as for a lifeline" (p.207). I don't feel urgency, hesitancy or disorientation. After a line or so I adapt to the style and the trick loses its (in any case minor) effect.

For me there seems a lot of subjectivity in people's response to line breaks, opinions based as much on the poet's name as the layout. A wide range of alternative formats of a poem could be defended because there are so many grounds (not least of which is "breaking convention"). We need many more experiments, more psychology of reading. How, for example, do short lines affect reading speed (actual and felt)?

Differences between us

• I tend to accentuate the negative, the darkness blinding me so that I miss some good features. A case in point might be Dorothy Molloy's poetry of which KEB writes "This sound is her own music, and it is the thing that makes these poems work despite their weakness of melodrama, sentimentality, and the sometimes lazy diction which leads to sloppy imagery ... She annoys me with a slight histrionic edge, almost adolescent, as if she were the only person who had ever had a hard time" (p.83, 84). When there's doubt, I have trouble interpreting positively whereas KEB sees the bright side - "Merwin's characteristic late style avoids punctuation and linear narrative ... This has the effect of thrusting the reader right into the words themselves, undiluted by all the hesitations and qualifications of the comma, semi-colon and full-stop" (p.114)
• She tries to be interesting - no statistics for example.
• She's good at summarizing large areas of knowledge - a poet's oeuvre; a movement, etc - the results sounding like hard-won conclusions rather than bland generalisations.

Things I couldn't bring myself to write

• "we have a solid core in us that makes us human, and that this core is expressed through poetry" (p.48)
• "These poems chip away at the nonessential in the words they are made of, become prisms of association and fractal intensity " (p.109)
• "shapes yield fragments of meaning, like a race memory. Spin the [Liliane Lijn] cone and even that disappears into the particular abstract Energy of the particle" (p.165)

Typos

• but now how to get to it (p.24. "now" should be "not"?)
• this is a poem is that is (p.135)
• was also reiewing (p.137)
• life issomething (p.153)
• compelling anf immediate (p.163)
• Bing too linear (p.164)
• alongisde (p.166)
• A quotemark's missing from the final paragraph on p.171, and some quotemarks on p.194 ('innovative,' 'post-avant,') look wrongly placed to me.

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

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

• John Field
• Magma (Mark Burnhope)
• David Green

"Me and the Dead" by Katy Evans-Bush (Salt 2008)

"Mid-Atlantic pearl" is a clichéd though accurate description of this London-based American. She's a metropolitan poet - cafés, fashions, streets, "sophistication" - exhibiting no overt intellectualism yet wary of appearing simplistic. Never "light", only knowingly "Lite"; when she writes short poems they're sonnet-tidy in a Donaghy way. I have to read her poems slowly - no easy rides, no sequences that one can settle into, none of the middle-eighting that one sees in established writers' collections.

I open with trepidation books written by people I know, but here "The Only Reader" on p.1 was enough to dispel anxieties. The poem sounds nice - never a bad thing - but has symbolic underpinning. Over-reductively you could say it compares the act of reading with watching the flight of a passing goose - a "book" is never "yours". A wide range of styles follows this one, but let me first pursue the use of symbols further, because several poem simplify down to juxtaposed symbols rather than a central theme. Given the acknowledged influence of Michael Donaghy it's no surprise that there are pieces like "Our Passion" that sound rather like philosophical arguments employing symbolic reasoning. The symbolism's perhaps more masked in poems like "As the Sun Sends the Sequins on my handbag Scattering". As a train goes over an old bridge a woman rests her head on someone (for sake of argument a man) who starts talking about the river and geology. Sunlight begins to reflect over him from her sequinned handbag. Looking out, she notices a movement in the water, a fin maybe, signifying hope, potential. Here the concepts of "inner" and "outer" are juggled, the 2 people internalising the external world in different ways, reacting differently to the other's attempts to shift attention and make connections between themselves and between inner/outer.

I described her as a metropolitan poet because whereas Nature is used as a source of Symbols, a sauvignon's just a sauvignon. Cole Swensen wrote that "a poem is the city of language just as prose is its countryside. Prose extends laterally filling the page's horizon unimpeded, while poetry is marked by dense verticality, by layerings of meaning and sound. Cities and poetry also share compression, heterogeneity, juxtaposition". In the city, the rough and the smooth rub shoulders as in "East Ten"

You can't get more than five feet in this gaff without running into some bleedin' tosser Trevor used to do the rounds with.

(but don't get the wrong idea; the balancing epigraph is after Catullus X). If you like juxtaposition, try "Moose: an Adventure in Real Time", with "mouse", "moose", "Morse" and "morose" guesting in the 4 stanzas. Fancy some rhyme? Visit "The Cathedral"

Bells, like voices, open round and clear. Like life they'll paralyse you with their din. Like steel cables they tense and draw you in. They ring what you don't think you want to hear.

(though most of this heterogeneous poem doesn't rhyme) or rattle the loosely rhymed couplets of "The Brass Doorknob".

The pages are packed - maybe 60 pages of text! It's almost unfair to single poems out, but I particularly admired "Across the Lake", "Imitating Life", "Me and the Dead", "This is Happening" and the playful "A Crack in the Feeling". I didn't so much like "I See the Hudson River, the Hudson River Sees Me", "Abney Park Cemetery", "Or Something" or "The Electrical Paradox". The latter two deal with jargon and knowledge domains that seem alien to the persona who either quotes verbatim or riffs without comprehension - fair enough, but not to my taste.

And the dead? In "The Cathedral" the link with history's impersonal. Elsewhere she communicates by teleporting back using photographs, swimming pools, or a voice on a phone. An exception is "Me and the Dead" where despite the "you" character looking at photos, reading letters and fingering houses, such contact's not enough - "Your past's a rag-bag of scraps". What is "you"? Ghosts haunting houses? The bereaved? A past self? In stanza 3, "I" appears, who "worried that you were unhappy" and who "saw only the future", finally realises that "you were an assemblage of fragments" - an allusion to an earlier mentioned Tate Modern piece, but also to the rag-bag. Like layers in a dig, each generation ends up as fragments for the next to build exhibits with - something to remember them by.

Other Reviews

• John Field
• Rob MacKenzie