"Don Marcelino's Daughter" by Tim Cunningham (Peterloo, 2001)

Poems from Ambit, Poetry Ireland Review, TLS, etc.

I don't feel that they're over my head, but I think I'm missing something because too many of the poems seem so-so - a shame because the book's not lacking in quotable phrases, or original ideas for poems. One problem I have is that pieces like "Mrs Kirby" and "Errata (about days 8 to 13 of creation - a neat idea) are prose in all but format, and fairly ordinary prose at that, compared to Flash nowadays. I liked "Pebbles" and a few of the other shorter pieces. Longer pieces can sag - "The Living Room" shows things reverting to their origins, some more obvious examples (e.g. "Books and bookcases/ Revert to trees/ And the glass that I held/ In the palm of my hand/ Crumbles to grains/ Of timeless sand") filling more space than interesting ones like - "when/ Piano keys release again their music to the world/ I know that I will hear only the trumpeting/ Herds as they charge behind ivory spears". And there are longer poems like "Viking" (24 lines) that don't work at all for me.

Rhyme's used sparingly. "Quartet" has a sextet for each family member, then ends with a rhyming quatrain - "Sometimes the music stops/ But mostly they accept the score/ And play the harmonies/ That exorcise the demons at the door". Each sextet begins with "Sometimes the music stops". The final line of each sextet rhymes with an earlier line: in the first sextet line 4, then line 2, line 3 and line 4.

'Clintona' ends with "a boy/ Watched the magical designs// Of frost crystals on window/ Panes, intent/ As a geneticist detecting// The chromosome/ In cells that spell,/ At best, a life sentence". I'm not convinced that the analogy is apt but in any case the line-breaks are no help to me. The final line is a pun/double-meaning, something he does in several pieces. In "Flashback" children in Hiroshima play Samuria until "Bad light/ Stopped play". In "Piano Tuner" the blind man, a "keyboard Casanova", is finally envied for "The magical vibration of his wand". At the end of 'Corrections', "Magenta pencils lost their point".