Poems from Magma, PN Review, Poetry Review, TLS etc. 90+ pages.
Here's the first of 3 stanzas from "Next Door Moon" - "The boat man is throwing Claire de Lune/ in the bin. Tiny jackets of sound/ hang on the curl of his next door moon.". The other stanzas don't help me interpret this. I wonder whether "Claire" in the poem is an allusion to the author. Maybe he's throwing her book away - "jackets" could be book jackets? The title's not helpful either.
Here's the last stanza of "Wyvern" (23 lines) - "In the days of smocks, I'd have been drunk/ from scurvy grass ale like the boys/ around Wandsworth Plain, sobering up/ on saloop, made of cuckoo flowers"". The earlier part of the poem suggests that women are less constrained by gender-roles than hitherto. Here, (as in "Parent", which would be straightforward were "gravity" not used so strangely) it seems to me that a standard plot has been poemed-up.
”Lost child” has “Planes rise/ and fall as if ground were a shaking blanket” which I don’t get, and “The small original airport building stands apart, a mother at a school gate” which I do.
”Moods” begins with “Once I had a motorway of hair, long, black, stood up to stresses well. You trafficked it” then later “Ah, motorways. We protest because they seem to lace our towns with ladders” (in what sense?) and ends with “How together we watched the uncontrollable underneath of my hair” Eh?
"Foreigners in Lecce" has "An outburst of autumn birds, like rust or falling oranges in a courtyard" Eh?
In the "Untitled" section, more poems are traditionally mainstream in their aesthetics. I can follow "Boom". "Posts" is shaped. "Glide" has "A signer opens her gate of hands for the deaf" (shame about the in-line spaces). I can follow "Motorway Bridges" (maybe my favourite so far).
I think I get "Fail Safe" but so what? And it's prose except for the shape, which isn't worth it.
I like some of the "Forthcoming Titles" poem, though nowadays I think it would be classified as prose.
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