"Jackself" by Jacob Polley (Picador, 2016)

Formats

The first poem, "The House the Jack Built" in Poetry (Chicago), charts the history of trees. It's time-sweeping and mythic. Here's an extract -

their ashes were buried in with a scattering of grain like stars              each small clay heaven still hangs in the earth    were overgrown, steered clear of    called dragon's ribs       devil's cot          were nested among, rotted down beside    harboured foxglove

Gaps (they turn up throughout the book) seem to replace commas (though the comma after "overgrown" seems to perform the same function as the gap after "clear of"). The indents and stanza/line-breaks don't look worth the effort to me. There's variation in the collection though - after this plant-based first poem, the second poem "Every Creeping Thing" concerns animals and has AABBA stanzas, the B lines indented. The giant words DON'T//WAKE//HIM fill a 2-page spread (p.8-9). On p.38 that spread's alluded to - "WAKE UP/ Wren yells". Later,"Tithe" has very spaced out, normally sized words - 39 spread over 2 pages.

Self

The book begins with a quote from G.M. Hopkins - "Soul, self; come, poor Jackself". Then "instead of a soul/ Jackself has a coal" (p.5). The coal imagery is continued later - "Jackself, if only you'd found that meteorite/ at the bottom of the coal hod" (p.14); "he needs a quest, thinks Jeremy Wren,/ who's been watching Jackself from the coals/ of the stove" (p.46), the latter quote suggesting that Jeremy might have been the spark to ignite Jack's too dark soul. In "The Lofts", there are further clues - "skeletons of past Selves ... Edwardself, Billself Wulfself". Then "back they go, the Selves/ Aself, Oxself and coracle-ribbed, ape-armed Selfself" and "Annself". Later, on p.30, "the locks of his head are picked/ and the distance he's kept from his different selves/ is all undone". When Jackself wants "to try to just be" he returns to the lofts. He licks his reflection in the way that "snakes eat their old skins,/ dogs their own sick" (p.37)

The book seems to be broadly chronological, Jack being school-age throughout. We see various aspects of Jack channeled through folkloric and idiomatic usages of "Jack". Jack and the Beanstalk is alluded to - "fie, foh and fum/ I smell your backwash in the coconut rum" (p.31) and perhaps again in "The Misery" when he goes to slay a monster (actually a rabbit). Perhaps Jackself is the less legendary component of Jack's character. The book doesn't end well for the self - it seems to disappear.

More poems

"Lessons" is the most prosaic of the poems so far until the end where it becomes a staircase of lines - "his mind a corner/ of beehives/ his fingers a box of matches/ his nose the afternoon rain/ his ears yesterday/ his eyes green eyes/ his tongue an earwig/ before it hatches". I don't know if the poem title "Applejack" is supposed to be anything to do with the US drink that's like Calvados. Towards the end the persona has a moment - "he returns/ nowhere to somewhere by/ standing there/ in sunlight, its flickering/ over him like     likelike/    he's been this way before". In "Peewit" he has a fit - "a breeze/ starts to ratch in the dust         the foxglove/ jangles             his legs/ break and he goes down, his eyes a white/ flutter in his head//    the boys circle him/ where he fits,/ grinding his teeth so hard they sing".

In "The Goose Shed" (which has dialogue and but for the line-breaks is Flash - good Flash) he meets Jeremy Wren. He's more explicitly poetic than Jack. I presume he's not a figment. Already there's mention of ghosts. They become friends, go fishing together, go out into the surrounding countryside to smoke and get drunk. We learn little about their parents, but we know that Jeremy's doesn't like him returning home smelling of smoke.

"Nightlines" goes mythic again - "all the streams of England run into/ Jackself's fretting ... their hooked lips/ mouthing into the waterworks and bloodstreams/ for all England". "It" uses end-rhyme with sporadic regularity. Later, "Jack O'Lantern" (one of my favourites) is in xAxA stanzas, the rhyming lines indented.

"Cheapjack" begins with "as an elephant has memory/ so Jeremy Wren has merchandise". The imagery's borrowed from marketing - "he offers Jackself the patter ... sell a man a second shadow ... Jackself lies awake,/ his commercial inhibitions coming undone"

In "Jack Frost" (it's cold) Jack is "wearing his homemade thousand-milk-bottle-top winter suit ... and the lametta wig he's kept all year in the Auto-Arctic Unit" ("lametta" is tinsel), slumped on a playground roundabout at 3am having imagined putting frost onto things. Then Jeremy Wren appears wearing "a mantel of tinsel and gauntlets and greaves of kitchen foil", also playing at being Jack Frost.

At the start of "Blackjack" (he's sad) "it's been raining for days". Jack imagines his bathwater carrying his mucky portrait away ("a skin on the water's surface, like engine oil"), the image being in the sewer "from the current on an old bedsheet". He recalls when he started to drink bathwater. He "squats/ to give his reflection in the first puddle/ on the gravel path/ a lick"

In "Pact", Jeremy Wren (who's previously shown signs of being troubled) commits suicide. Jeremy Wren haunts Jack, who sleeps rough for a few days in "The Misery". Even here, the poems aren't without humour - in "A Haunting" there's "don't talk to me about issues, Wren says, look at this old sheet I have to wear". Jack slips closer to madness. The final poem, "Jack O'Bedlam", is 15 AABBA stanzas.

Here's some of the imagery that's scattered through the collection -

• "eight-legged/ and shrivelled like a dead/ star ... an old spider" (p.25)
• "listen to those hollyhocks/ those lupins,/ Wren says I've watched the bees/ stealing in and out/ with their furry microphones/ to record the voices inside" (p.27)
• "the gulls/ flash and snap, like washing on a line" (p.32)
• "his black shoes are Frankenstein to walk in" (p.42)

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway (The poems need to be read in sequence and benefit from being read aloud. ... it is to Coleridge rather than to Hopkins or any nursery rhyme that Polley is most indebted.)
• Martha Sprackland (she's one of the two "early readers" acknowledged in the book)
• Joe Carrick-Varty (a collection of story poems, snippets of conversation, thinking and remembering ... On the page many of the poems look sprawled, lopsided, indented, with words set alone and not a full stop to be found. ... The poems take images in nature, or moments of a day, or the cycle of a wing beat and make us experience them like we are right there inside each one.)
• Martyn Crucefix (Polley’s language is charged, improvisatory and colloquial. It is fluid and rhythmic (more modern, less ballad-like than some reviews have suggested). It has a crusted, superfluous quality to it that reminds me of Shakespeare, or what Hughes has described of Shakespeare’s excess, and Jackself is not thinned out by constant ironising, rather it’s thickened by a weight of language, history and imaginative hard work. It’s very impressive – but needs a few reads before it gives itself up. ... The book lights up differently with the appearance of Jeremy Wren, a more wise-cracking, cynical, entrepreneurial and ultimately more troubled young man than Jackself. ... Hard to end such a book and I confess I didn’t find the ballad-like ‘Jack O’Bedlam’ very satisfying, but perhaps I’m falling foul of the novel reader’s desire for narrative closure)

"The Havocs" by Jacob Polley (Picador, 2012)

I like Polley when he's being metaphorically lyrical. When he's writing long pieces, or is being modern/clever, or writing about the moon, I'm less convinced. I like "Doll's House". It has 4 6-lined stanzas, iambic, with irregular but frequent end-rhymes.

diminishment has simplified the aims and objects of desire, while blinder faith must still provide the mincemeat in the wooden cakes, the creaking stair and wind outside. For you have held your breath to peer along the shelves of depthless books ... What happens if you turn away? Every god has asked the same ...

"Hide and Seek" had no stanza-breaks. Like "Doll's House" it doesn't quite stick to the form. It has an abab rhyme scheme for 20 lines, an odd-man-out line ("I wasn't under my parents' bed"), then 24 more lines of abab

I like "Gloves" and the 4-line "Marsh". "Langley Lane" is a 64-line ballad in 2 voices - seems rather long to me. In "Keepers", "the river seemed to clarify/ and wobbled like a light-filled jelly as we walked;/ and those six squat humdrum boxes stood". Later "we watched a moon couple move/ from box to box, raising the combs like golden books/ while the smoke-enfeebled fighters droned". Ah - bee-keepers, who "could have been us, attending at last to something/ of substance, with a taste and use, obvious to anyone./ But we were who we were and turned from the hexagons/ of fence wire we'd been peering through.". Maybe the river's being compared to honey or royal jelly. Later the fence (I bet it wasn't really hexagonal) is like honeycomb. But that's as close as the couple get to the eloquence-conferring bees on their walk to the city.

Over half of the 45 poems use end-rhyme. Of those, about 7 are sonnets. There are other forms too, based on anglo-saxon patterns and word repetition. The sentences of "Hide and Seek" mostly begin with "I wasn't". The 9 lines of "An Empty House" repeat the same words, not always in a different order (I prefer Wendy Cope's "The Uncertainty of the Poet"). "The Havocs" (3-pages or so) uses the word "havoc" on every (perhaps continued) line. "Virus" mentions "heinous" 8 times, "vulpine" 5 times and "caress" 6 times in its c.40 lines. "It Will Snow Before Long" has 5 5-lined stanzas where the 2nd and 4th lines end on the same word (and the 3rd and 5th lines rhyme). The 5 stanzas of "The Weasel" each end with "White winter flowers".

After the final poem that's mentioned on the table of contents there are 3 blank pages then a poem ("Outer Banks, N.C.") on an unnumbered page. Strange.

Other reviews

• Ben Wilkinson (The Guardian) - The Havocs may be an uneven collection that sometimes finds Polley treading water, but a handful of its poems are so moving and memorable you might just forgive him
• Mariam Gamble (Tower Poetry) - Polley is a doyen of forms ... Polley has always been a loving delineator of childhood ... the range and ambition of the collection is to be applauded, and many of the poems are superb
• David Birkett - a wonderfully inventive, beautiful, and intelligent collection
• Dave - some genuinely cracking little poems and an uncommon skill with the whole rhetorical/rhythmical craft thing and a capacity for evoking a Frost/Hughes-type dark-and-deeply wintery pastoral without invoking those poets’ nihilism/overweening lust-for-dominance respectively; it also clunks on occasion and has a bad habit of enjoying its own vocabulary at the expense of the lyric exploration.
• Lee Redman (Dundee University Review of the Arts) - The poet’s fusion of styles and the diversity of his inspirations allow the collection to remain refreshing until the end

"The Brink" by Jacob Polley (Picador, 2003)

Reminded me of "Painted Field" or (with "The Distance" for example) early Muldoon. I liked "the Crow", "Snow" and a few others. I liked some of the initial imagery even if the poem ran out of steam - gulls "fall about laughing" or are "trying to shake themselves out of their sleeves". I'm puzzled by the start of "Allhallows" though - "morning breaks like an egg/or a promise".

"The Kingdom of Sediment" was belatedly ambitious. At times narrative decays into chronological lists, and sometimes lines seem to grow shorter when he runs out of things to say. Like a high-performance gas-guzzler he freewheels when the metaphors dry up.