Poems from Poetry Review, Under the Radar, Poetry Birmingham, etc.
Layouts
Flicking through, their variety is evident. Here are the starts of most of the early poems
-
They say no / sound
is ever lost / that -
do you remember / love / that day at the student hostel
on Cross Street / the way light tilted in / at the window -
When one too many English women
crosses to the opposite pavement -
you bellow / the night
we stumble / into
your north / hackney flat -
Waking at night / My mother-to-be / approaches the window/ hesitates / in this foreign bed -
grey & blue nike t-shirt its confident tick dissecting the chest -
is at times a relief at other times intolerable You know intimately -
Majestic with silver curls
like a taller version of the queen,
She appears at my mother's flat -
Cerulean envelope falls through the letterbox - untethered kite sinking in a windless sky
The invention doesn't end there. Later there are framed stanzas, right-aligned poems, in-line gaps, etc. "how to talk about loss" uses tildes! ("~" symbols). Pages 49 and 72 use the same repeated pattern of indentation - 0, 1, 2, 1. p.69 is a numbered list of 12 phrases that comprise 3 sentences. The form/content combinations look mostly random to me. The effect is rather like that of a student who dyes their hair a different colour each week to make themselves interesting.
How many line-breaks and stanza-breaks would improve "There are times she closes her eyes with him beside her and opens to find him gone with no idea of how or when he left."? I'd say none, but in "Notes on dreaming" it's embellished with are 4 line-breaks and a stanza break.
How many slashes would improve "It makes you feel special the way they look at you the way you are adored by relatives who are unknown to you but who love your father They want to touch you Hands shoulders head cheeks"? I'd say none, but in "Photograph (II)" it has 9.
"Photograph (I)" seems to me a pretty standard poem about the narrator looking at an old photo of themselves, reassessing their father. Thanks to the layout it fills a whole page. It begins "There is a photograph of me/ perched on your shoulders// in a pastel pink duffel coat,/ aged twelve months" and carries on with short-lined couplets, including "how you'd grown into fatherhood/ the way an orbit grows, ever expanding", which seems unhelpfully redundant to me, and I'd challenge the aptness of the simile - how often do orbits grow?
"Mother-daughter conversations" is mostly short-lined triplets. There's one image - love as a cave system.
"Camera Lucida" is the most ambitious, experimental piece - 8 pages, including a blank page representing more. It might be excellent, but it's beyond me.
Content
Issues that are hinted at earlier become clearer later - "They said forget her and the other her or him that wasn't a her or him yet" ... "'And where is your husband from?' 'Jamaica'" A grandmother "will tell me forbidding my parent's marriage is the biggest regret of her life". Early days in the UK and a visit to India have a big impact. I feel that the poetification of the content doesn't add enough to the material - indeed in many cases it detracts and/or spatially dilutes.
Other reviews
- D.A. Prince (The collection is divided into four sections, with poems travelling through time, across continents, taking in different cultures and languages, and connecting generations and their emotional ties. ... Read in isolation this conversational exchange could almost be prose. ... ‘Starting from a Dream, 1983’ is a prose poem weaving two poems – one in italics, one in regular font – with a storm (actual as well as emotional) connecting them. It’s inventive and effective, the form integral to the story. ... ‘Freight’, a three-section poem in short triplets. I’m aware how subtly the space around poems is used: to show division and internal conflict)
- Alice Hiller (Like a tide flowing back, from the midpoint, the poems shift towards reclamation as the speaker understands what she has lived without, and becomes more able to heal. ... Her spilt blood is both historical fact, and a metaphor for the redemptive interpersonal transactions that occur through the reactions of art-making and art-sharing, and the energies that they confer on those who create and receive them. )
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