"Perdido" by Chase Twichell (Faber and Faber, 1992)

Poems (nearly all of them longer than a page) from many good American magazines. I highlighted several passages. Some sound like poetry to me, some are too puzzling.

• Gravity draws down to me a halo whipped up of holy dust or dust from outer space: dim chalk of moonlight, phospher, youth in the eyes of my former selves. (p.6)

  I like the sound of this. Having "down" and "up" so close together confuses my mental image.

• The hotel’s heating system blurts sporadic clouds into the faint geometry of unlit monoliths beyond a flimsy Spanish balcony (p.9)

  Here (and elsewhere) is a passage where each noun has an adjective.

• The flip side of a wish is a fear, and that was why we crushed the heaven from those darkened rooms. How easily the stubborn pearl hoarded up and gave away its infinite concentric mysteries (p.10-11)

  Recognisable poetry.

• Minnows glittered in the shallows, a school of compass needles fixed on a single dream (p.18)

  She can come up with quotable images. I struggle with some of the passages between. Her poems are longer than I'm used to.

• Beloved is a word concealing four sharp points, four kinds of innocence, four winds of change (p.20)

  I don't get that.

• The palms go on sharpening their long, invisible blades, and the sea erasing its infinity of names (p.22)

  Palms (trees) and the sea feature in several of these poems.

• I dreamed the structure of the self. It had a queer, disorderly geometry something like the atom’s, designed to be interactive (p.26)

  Something like the atom's? In what sense?

• We lie in a flood of white sand under the broken prism of the sky, watching its fragile rays disappear down the secretive avenues of palms (p.31)

  That adjective-noun fixation again. Would a "broken prism" produce the light effects she experienced?

• I can see that I’ve kept this story caged in the past tense as though the present were a spectator come to gaze at the wild thing up close, but it’s easy to lie with metaphor (p.40-41)

  Not a new concept, but I've not seen it rendered this way before.

• Sex had become a well into which I could throw the trash of all my sorrows (p.41)

  Again, a neat image.

• Sleep itself is a shadow, a heavy, invisible wave that swells and breaks over us where we lie in the moonlight dried white on our sheets (p.42-43)

  Sleep, sea, moon - elemental ideas. Earlier I quoted "dim chalk of moonlight". I like this dried white image more.

• all the while watching the pleasure boats glide past us trailing bits of broken mirror, their engines pulsing steadily, fueled by what's left of the future. (p.55-56)

  Earlier we had "broken prism". I prefer this image of a wake. I don't think final image survives much analysis, though I like the sound of it.

• Like pain, such joy is locked in forgetfulness, and the prisoner must shout for freedom again and again (p.57)

  Another image I like.

• Atoms! Each one a window through which the wilderness of the future leaks, poor water blank as infancy. (p.67)

  I've quoted "atoms" and "future" before. I think the words have different associations for her than for me. I don't get that final line.

My favourite is “The Condom Tree”

"Dog Language" by Chase Twichell (Bloodaxe, 2006)

The rule seems to be that lines should be more than 5cm long but less than 8cm, keeping clauses intact if possible. So in "The Wheelchair in the Attic" "Lunch was a formal sit-down, linens and finger bowls, cousins and siblings conversing under the radar of adults, me at Gran's left as usual" demands 4 line-breaks. The poem ends with a conventional twist - "What Sam doesn't know is that when I was sent from the table for my mimicry, my father followed me upstairs and I said it was because he no longer loved my mother, and he said, You're wrong. It's your mother who does not love me." - but at the expense of 7 more line-breaks.

Story-writers - and even Flash writers - would do more with these observations. The pieces are studded with the odd piece of imagery but not enough to relieve the uniformity. The standard pattern is to start with prose, throw in a passage of imagery three-quarters of the way through, then end with a punchline. Typical is "Neurotransmission". It starts with "My history of drug-taking is long, starting with One-a-Day Vitamens and St Joseph's aspirin ...", mentions "Solaces" (Buddhism?) then ends with these 5 lines - "Now a psychopharmacologist oversees the weather of my brain, and I live in its atmospheres, its tides, its own distinctive forms of sentience". The imagery is standard. I don't get the final clause though.

I gave up reading the book half way through - too much padding (a lot of it white), too little variety and too many cop-outs. The rest of the book no doubt contains worthy material but I'm pressed for time and don't quite trust the writer.

"Watertown" is the favorite of the pieces I read. It lives up to the blurb. It's perhaps too obviously fodder for superficial analysis. 1.5 pages long, it begins more cryptically than other poems do -

   Watch out for easily-broken
   crocus and tulip -
   lift the spoils from them
   carefully, hit the brakes
   for chocolates in colored foils,
   caramels

Who has to watch out? "The spoils" suggests to me the spent tea-leaves that people tip on their flowers, but why would one lift these spoils off? Do the last 3 lines merely say that they stopped the car to visit their grandma who gave them sweets? The imagery of these lines is soon continued

• A few lines later we have "You'd have to break the room to break the door" - 4 uses of the idea of "breaking" in 18 lines.
• Later there are "spring flowers" and in contrast "a hundred-year-old jade tree on the piano"
• Later there are no sweets, only "a hard sugar egg" and many colours - mid-winter blue, green, red, gold, red, black, white, orange, lemon, lime, green

Each of these associations ramifies - eggs are held up to a candle to see "the chicken embryos hunched up in there like little monks". The theme holding the imagery together is perhaps the contrast of the fragility of life (as shown in the initial lines) with the wish for permanence - "sugar egg", "paper duck", "Artichoke" and "Ember" made into colours, a recipe for a cocktail called "Sunday Noon" and the "jade tree". At the end the narrator first wants the jade tree, then something more permanent representing something more alive - grandma's stone turtle.

See Rattle's review for a more comprehensive treatment.