"The More Things Change" by Jim Murdoch (fandango virtual, 2017)

Spoiler Alert!

James Henry Valentine "had never happened upon anything of any real value in this life, least of all the secret to true happiness" (p.5). "James had never found himself either ... The trouble was Jim was never exactly sure what he was meant to be on the lookout for or beating himself up over" (p.6). Later he says "I think I figured out fairly early on that there was no me to find, that if I wanted to "find myself" I would need to invent myself" (p.178).

He's an English teacher, a loner, a budding writer. When 40 he talks to a strange man in the park then returns home to find he has a wife who he's known for over 20 years. He has grown children too. He has to reconstruct his new past from the evidence available. He takes 5 years to do so. The book he writes about it ("Memoirs of a Made-up Man") is a success but his wife leaves him 5 years later. He never really connects with his children. The follow-up short-story collection "The Man Who Wrestled Angels" fails, though the individual stories did ok in magazines. Finally, after a gap of years he meets the man (God) again. God points out that "Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. With himself. Such is the guiding principle of existentialism" (p.295). There's a final, satisfying twist at the end involving a rake.

That's the plot. I'll now look at a few of the devices.

Extended analogies

There are several of them. For example there's "A sphere passing through a three-dimensional space appears in the distance as a speck ... Similarly a man moving through life may be perceived as an embryo, an infant ... It was the world that had changed about him" (p.9). The analogy sometime follows the statement it's illustrating - i.e. It's show and tell. There are also mixed metaphors. Take for example "Pleasure was an aside and rather surprised each of them when it did catch them unawares. It was like an attractive hitchhiker who might catch their eye but, while they were wrestling with their consciences, the moment would slip from grasp and there would be no turning back" (p.12). Note that we're given a fairly literal description, then we're given an analogy. The "no turning back" ending is apt, but not the "slip from grasp". An alternative style would be "Pleasure was like an attractive hitchhiker who might catch their eye but, while they were wrestling with their consciences, the moment would pass and there would be no turning back".

Sometimes figures of speech rather than clustering around a single analogy arrive like London buses - "the son proved a harder nut to crack. His poker face was no mere affectation either. The man seemed incapable of a knee-jerk reaction" (p.13)

Aphorisms

There are several of these too, including

• "Jim was forty and had been since he was thirty" (p.14)
• "Meaning is a symptom of action" (p.36)
• "Feelings are like spots - you shouldn't pick at them or they get all infected and scabby" (p.49)
• "The past is like yeast" (p.127)
• "Pity is like guilt: both are binding agents, tying things together that would really rather be apart" (p.168)

They work well. Some of them are extended towards being analogies.

Writers

The role of writer acquires a cosmic significance eventually, but even early on it attracts attention.

• "There is a special circle of hell earmarked for writers when they sit around all day long having great ideas but with no practical means of recording them" (p.24)
• "the real him was a writer" (p.47)
• "What aggravated Jim was that he had no feeling of empathy for his character" (p.90)
• "Someone should invent a new word, wroter, past tense of writer, one who who once wrote but no longer writes" (p.167)
• "I am a writer - we are always alone" (p.225).
• "Writers don't have real lives, they have ongoing research" (p.226)

The Craft of writing

We're given little lessons in writing

• "you decide, purely for the benefit of the plot you understand, your protagonist needs something, fleshing out, an idiosyncrasy" (p.83)
• "Plot Point No 1: Start the ball rolling with an event outside of the protagonist's control that initiatives a chain of events" (p.171)
• "Now would be a good time to take stock so far. A plot needs a number of elements for it to do its job: a believable and sympathetic central character - I nominate myself for that position ... " (p.183)
• "It's always tempting late in a book to graft in a bit of backstory to kick the feet from under your audience" (p.241)

Narratology

At first the writing's in the 3rd person. On p.25 we're asked "Have you given any thought to who I am yet? You've probably taken it for granted I'm the omniscient narrator". The main narrational elements are

• God/Joe
• Jim Valentine (wannabee writer. Manipulated by Joe and narrator)
• Narrator
• Jim Murdoch (I've never met him, but I presume he's real)

It's subsequently pointed out that "There is another thing with regards to storytelling that comes into play here and it has to do with who exactly is narrating. In some books the voice-over is never identified ... It is omniscient ... Omniscient narrators have zero invested in the outcome ... My narrators tended to be of the imperfect variety - unreliable witnesses" (p.174). Later, new elements emerge

• On p.165 the text becomes Jim's 1st-person narrative
• On p.222 the addressee issue is discussed. On p.240 there is "Why do we writers write? What do we get out of it and why do we need readers so? To validate who we are"
• On p.229 Jim asks "if my life has been nothing but a work of fiction, who're the readers?". Joe answers "The angels", pointing out later that Jim isn't real, and that "Life does not imitate art ... Like is art" (p.303)

The most common mode is the monologue - raconteuring - even if two people are in discussion. Either God is lecturing Jim or the narrator is talking to the reader who can't interrupt.

Misc

• I've never heard the phrase "loaded for bear" (p.30) before.
• On p.181 "streaks ahead" (rather than "streets ahead") appears. I've not heard it before, though apparently it's fairly common.
• The description of multi-dimensional time on p.85 will keep SF writers happy.
• There are Beckettian flourishes: when the none-too-young home-help gives Jim occasional relief; on p.254 there's a passage about sharing ashes fairly amongst a family tree of offspring.
• There are many allusions, of which I probably only picked up a few.

Summary

Character-development is a major theme, an analogy that works on 3 levels.

• God made us
• Authors create their characters
• We create others and ourselves

These level can be nested and twisted. Occasionally, sometimes for comic effect, the layers are confused (metalepsis) - God creates authors who create God. At each level the creator needs readers. Because of Jim Valentine's amnesia, he has to re-create himself, but perhaps that's life's norm - "Nietzsche ... proposed the unimaginable: the God was dead (or had at least forsaken us), which would mean we are all writing ourselves" (p.261). Jim thinks his home help (who loves soap operas) is the sort of viewer who'd post cards to the characters, but he doesn't consider it that strange - aren't other people always creations of some sort? I'm sympathetic to the theme and empathize with the hero. I've recently read Maria Taylor's Instructions for making me poetry pamphlet which tackles similar issues.

When God appeared I was at first worried, for the same reason that I don't like "Q" episodes in StarTrek TNG - anything can happen. But there are few (albeit major) interventions. The novel could have excluded the God character entirely, beginning with an amnesia attack. It would have lost a level of analogy that way, but might have gained more readers.

There were passages when the conjecturing went on too long for me. On p.206-233 for example, nothing much happens and I struggled. But perhaps I'm supposed to. A character admits - "Granted, I am prone to rambling and beating around bushes" (p.245). What kept me reading through these passages were the aphorisms, analogies, references, and writing tips, and I was keen to see how the story would end.

Other reviews

• Brent Robison

"Reader Please Supply Meaning" by Jim Murdoch (fandango virtual, 2015)

The book has a 4 page introduction in which it says "All poems are icebergs ... A lot of readers treat poems as if they were puzzles, things to be solved. Up to a point they're right ... the wrong question to ask when reading a poem is: What did the poet mean? The right one is: What can I make out of this? ... A poem is also like a piece of abstract art ... Some poets frown on poems written about poems. I've never understood this".

I'm broadly in sympathy with these views. I imagine most poets would agree too (except for the "poetry about poetry" tendency). Where people differ is their opinion of how much meaning (or how many meanings) the reader might be expected to supply. Don Paterson wrote "We read according to an undeclared handicap system, to the specific needs of the author. We meet the novelists a little way, the poets at least halfway, the translated poets three-quarters of the way; the Postmoderns we pick up at the station in their wheelchairs" ("The Book of Shadows"). So what demands does Jim Murdoch make on us, and are readers of one of his poems likely to come to a consensus?

Though written over a period of 36 years the poems (which have appeared in over a dozen magazines) are quite uniform in their demands - they're more aphoristic than Rorschach; more tell than show. And I don't think there'll be much arguing amongst readers - initially at least. Language isn't disrupted, nor is there puzzling imagery. Nothing approaches abstract art.

Of course, clarity of presentation needn't destroy mystery. For example, Magritte's painting of a steam train coming out of a fireplace hides nothing. Magritte claimed that he'd have liked to make the painting simpler still, with just a locomotive, but "In order for its mystery to be evoked, another immediately familiar image without mystery — the image of a dining room fireplace — was joined". With such works the title often matters. Magritte called the piece "La Durée poignardée" (meaning something like "duration stabbed") though the usual translation is "Time Transfixed". Murdoch's titles are sometimes the poem's missing key, though as frequently they tell it straight ("The Nature of Poetry", "Advice to a Young Poet", "Everyone's a Critic", "A Poem is not an empty room"), as does the content. There are few allusions - the only one I registered was "Unmoving/ he is moved/ and moves on" (p.87).

Word	Freq
poem	51
truth	14
meaning	11
understanding	9

I did a quick keyword count. Along with the words in the table, "answer", "mirror", "language" and "words" crop up often. "beauty" is scarce. Soundbites abound. Here are just a few -

• Writers are all liars. We all are./ But at least they are honest liars. (p.32)
• insight: the power to look within and// not be afraid of the dark (p.37)
• No one gets poetry/ anymore,/ not even the poor sods/ who write it (p.51)
• Poems turn up out of the blue these days/ like family/ and usually when things are going badly (p.57)
• Life is meaningless./ That said it is not devoid of meanings ... You can draw around them but that doesn't make them more real (p.69)
• I am sorry/ but your moment/ of meaningful/ silence has not been/ inserted properly./ Please try again. (p.74)
• there is always something to/ block our view/ of the nothingness this is // coming (p.88)
• You can't possibly know/ what truth/ is till you've made one up/ yourself (p.93)
• "Stones aren't packed with sparks are they?" "No, Dad." "So why would words be filled with meaning?" (p.101)
• Sometimes not enough/ has to be enough (p.105)

The reader is often directly addressed as "You". I often read books more as a fellow poet than a passive reader, wondering what I can learn from the poems, and how I'd do things differently. In this case, the urge to supply more than just meanings was especially strong. I've written poems entitled "Language is a shroud", "Balloons are poems too", "He understands but doesn’t love", "How to write a poem", etc., and I've written aphorisms (a recent one - "Poets are the first to tell the truth in an age of lies. Else when they're the first to lie" - suits the theme of this book). I wondered whether some of the poems could have been replaced by aphorisms - Don Paterson's written a book of them so it's a viable option.

In a magazine, amongst poems on other subjects, these poems would make a welcome change, but I found I had to take a break every so often to finish the c.100 poems. That said, there's variety within the constraint, sub-themes including "language in general"; "poem as mediator between poet and reader"; "the poet-reader relationship"; "analogies" (poem = map, poem = offspring, etc); "failure to communicate"; "the relationship between meaning and language" (in "Body of work" "There are no meanings/ for the words to hide behind"; in "If only pigs could fly" there's also conflict); "can poetry can express what's really important?"; "thought vs poetry" (in "Something to Think About" there are "so many thoughts ... there was no room left for the poetry"); "the nature of truth".

My favourites were "The Drowning Man", "The Primal Scrawl", "Exhuming Truth", "The Laws of Physics", "The Reason", "Give and Take"; "Making Sense", "The poetry of regrets", "Marks", "Maps", "Petrified Poem". I'd have listed more were I allowed to edit them ("Not Now" for example could be concertina'd). You can buy the book from the fandango virtual website.

"Making Sense" by Jim Murdoch (fandango virtual, 2013)

19 stories, an introduction, an afterword and a glossary of Scottish words (because 2 stories are in Glaswegian). In his introduction he writes "People write for lots of different reasons. Top of my list is the need to make sense of things". The collection's a mixture of first and third person narratives, male and female - mostly internal narrators who think that words will help, albeit retrospectively. Several of these personae are trying to talk themselves into understanding something. In the course of their story, some make progress. In searching for sense, different strategies are adopted

• Some parents are investigated by their children - partly to learn strategies, partly to learn about the self. In "Coping" for example the narrator's mother says "If he'd to go in on a Sunday then I made him sandwiches. I hadn't a clue if he ate them, shared them with his fancy woman or fed them to the swans down the park. I didn't make them for him. They were for me."
• In "Islands" the narrator's not convinced that reasons explain things.
• In "Scent" the narrator says "By making sense, I mean translate well into words. What I was just talking about. Smells work but it's harder to make sense of them.". At the end of that story "It's not until someone pops the right question that the answer makes sense. We spend our entire lives looking for questions to make sense of them. Well, some of us do."
• Some personae have more immediate concerns. In "Disintegration" (which has shades of Godot) there's "Ah jist need tae get through this mornin', that's aw.
  Goad? Are ye thur Goad?"

Throughout, there are quotable phrases and paragraphs, though I'm not always sure they're in character

• an excuse which is a lie without balls (p.90)

• I come from a broken home. When a china plate hits, say, a kitchen wall, it breaks, it shatters into fragments, but when a watch breaks it just dies; you have to look closely to tell. That's what must've happened to my parents' marriage. And just the same as a stopped watch tells the right time twice a day, every now and then things passed for fine at home (p.29)

• I left home, as most people do, brimming with ideals, ambitions and with the wrong-end-of-the-stick-completely stuck up my arse. I gazed in awe at the world through eyes that'd seen so little and I described my universe by reference to the tiny island that was moi (p.29)

• I don't know about you but I can't make head nor tail of the theory of relativity. What I want to know is what's anyone doing in a train travelling at the speed of light anyway? (p.79)

Though you may feel sorry for some of the characters there are few attempts to tug at your heart-strings. This is due in no small measure to the non-judgemental over-arching viewpoint. Sweet dreams are made of this.

Individual stories

• In the first piece, "√ -1 ", a character's obsessed by numbers - "Thirteen is the sixth prime number and the smallest emirp". I found this interesting because I've written a similar piece about a word-fixated person.
• "Stray" is typical of one type of story here - as much essay as narrative, with an identifiable theme and an ending that neatly meshes into the beginning.
• In "Zeitgeist" the author says that "we have a man whose world's collapsing around him"
• "Katherine and Juliet" is about identity, being classified - "It dawned on me the only thing I had in common with the guy next to me and the guy next to him was my sexuality and that was it" (p.111). It ends with "Jeremy..." "Yes, love...?" "You're drunk." "Quite possibly." - "drunk" being as limited an adjective as "gay" was earlier. But Jeremy killed himself.
• "Objects of Affections and Intention" uses Art to explore identity - people can become objects

My favourites are "Katherine and Juliet" (I like how twins, The Twilight Zone and Kafka are used) and "Objects of Affections and Intention".

PoV

The male/female split's about 50/50. The pieces are mostly first-person, though in some of these the main character isn't the narrator - in "Poise", the attention is mostly on "You" (the object of adoration); "Sub Rosa" is more a portrait of Mr Hutchinson, and "Coping" is a portrait of the character's mother.

The third-person pieces adopt different perspectives - "Monsters" has an in-your-face external narrator, the "Tomorrowscape" narrator is in the story as an anonymous observer, and in "Life" there's an external narrator too

These narrators are sometimes aware of their role -

• On p.39 the narrator says "and I think that's where the point to this story lies".
• "The plot of this story should be straightforward" (p.45)
• "I should point out I found out about all of this at a much later date. I'm not part of the story yet" (p.118)
• "Now befaw we go too fah down dis road let's you and me get a few tings straight: I'm yer narratah ... whad I say goes" (p.125)

In "Monsters" especially but also in "Scent" the reader's directly addressed.

Beginnings and endings

In several of the stories the theme hinted at in the title is picked up in the first sentence and returned to at the end, as this crude table illustrates -

Title	Start	Finish
√ -1	It was not a nervous breakdown	It is not so until you believe it to be so
Poise	You could never be a model	It might've been but there's always tomorrow
Funny Strange	Oi, I've got a new joke fer you	I could do wiv a good laugh
Coping	If there's one thing that annoys me about my mother it's this: she watches life with the sound off	My mother's happy and I should be happy for her. I should and I do try. I really do
Stray	Home	that can't see itself as anything more than a stray. I expect that's been me all along
Objects of Affection and Intention	I'd always suspected David hadn't asked me to move in with him simply due to my wry sense of humour and decadent personality	"Only if there's raffia involved"
Life	The plot of this story should be straightforward - boy meets girl, they fall in love, get married and settle down to start a family - but that's never it, is it?	"I couldn't get you out of my mind" "Really? I'd much the same problem."
Failing	I'd always expected one day I'd feel this click inside, from OFF to ON, and I'd go, yes now's the right time to start thinking about having kids	Maybe he quit too soon
Zeitgeist	Ma wife sez Ah'm too serious	Ye'er aw right
Islands	Nowadays people make too much of a thing out of being touched	Sometimes I wish I was a poet. I think that might be easier to live with
Scent	My mam once said, "There's a bad bit in you"	You should thank me. You really should
Sub Rosa	Mr Hutchinson was a peculiarly private person, not that I'm suggesting for one minute there's anything wrong with valuing one's privacy, but it does set tongues wagging	The rest is private
Silence	All men're the same - a few bubbles short of a bath, so some women say - but it's not true	Jenny? If you can hear me: night, night, pet. I love you
Disintegration	He'll be here by half seven	Goad? Are ye thur Goad?
Tomorrowscape	The future, if you think about it as simply another place to go you've never gone before, is bound to have its ups and downs	Maybe it was funny once but not anymore - not in the slightest
Katherine and Juliet	I first met Katie when I was sixteen	"You're drunk" "Quite possibly"
First Time	They say you never forget your first	Now, let me tell you about my second time
Jewelweed	One would've thought that a prerequisite for being a schoolteacher, even before one starts to consider academic qualifications and relevant experience, might be a fondness for, or at least not a total loathing of, children	I'll take her a wee sherry in a bit, when the time's right
Monsters	Now befaw we go too fah down dis road let's you and me get a few tings straight: I'm yer narratah	It's all yer gettin' outta me in any case so ya can shovawf now. Gowan. Beat it

See Also

The book's on sale online. In an article, Homogenised tongues, the author discussed the purpose and difficulties of writing in dialect.

Other reviews

• Jessica Bell
• Jessa Larsen
• Brent Robinson
• Andrew McCallum Crawford
• John Baker
• Fran Lewis

"Living with the Truth" by Jim Murdoch (fandango virtual, 2008)

A bitterly comic novel. The main character, Jonathan, is a 53 year-old bachelor who owns a bookshop. He's not interested in others except physically, sometimes. He says "Bit by bit I've somehow rid myself of people and the problems that come with them. I'm safe. Sometimes a little lonely but it's a price I've been willing to pay for a bit of peace and quiet". Early on however, we read that "he moved inevitably toward the edge of himself - and quietly slipped over", p.5

His life's capsized by the visit of the embodiment of Truth, a young man. His capricious omniscience takes over from the novel's earlier solipsistic viewpoint. Truth reveals the secrets and past of other characters to Jonathan. Truth makes Jonathan curious, tempts him to ask questions, and also to reveal himself. Truth is entertaining too, coming out with monologues like "It's like Everest, the laziest mountain in the world (you read that joke in your Fantastic Four Annual), Tenzing got there first but everyone thinks it was Hillary. Actually the Goons got there a month and a day earlier. Who gives a bunch of dried figs about the truth nowadays? No one realises that Tenzing was his first name either. It's like Jesus never being born on Christmas Day but back in the early hours of October the Second. And 2 BC at that", p.40.

Towards the end Truth monopolises with moralistic/philosophical monologues. Given the situation I guess that's fair enough. I liked the comparison of love to water that starts on p.159, but some of the rest goes on too long. On p.165 Truth says "I'm telling you you've never known real love". Later, just in time, he tells Jonathan how close he got.

Comedy

There's hardly a quiet moment. One keeps wanting to read on

• "She had been saving herself for the right man and the interest was accruing nicely", p.43
• "Why? What's wrong with the word? It's a perfectly valid euphemism." "But do you have to euphemise so loudly?", p.89
• "The doorbell did its stuff. Truth's eyes lit up and his mouth shifted into first gear, though the handbrake was still firmly on", p.99
• There's a fun scene about Jonathan's sister playing Winnie in an am-dram Christmas version of Beckett's "Happy Days", a couple of songs added for good measure.

If anything the comedy and the striving to enliven each sentence (as in the "doorbell" example above) is too relentless, but I guess that's the point. The prison episode seemed a wee bit of a detour though.

Spot the poem

Some of the ideas from poems in This is not about what you think have another outing here -

• We learn that sexual "coming" in the Orient is "going", p.4
• "Jonathan didn't believe in destiny but he did in inevitability", p.6
• On p.14 there's mention of Laing and Truth.
• "Memories? Well he could do without them", p.21
• "He could usually be found in the library making notes for tomorrow's tests. Or more often scouring the art books for naked women. Somehow their art never quite reached him", p.24

I do the same thing. Why waste a good line?

Outliers

Sometimes a sentence surprizes - going outside the story or "going meta"

• "Overseeing all the foregoing to-ing and fro-ing was a solitary magpie on the back wall who, not feeling all that symbolic that morning, contented himself by repeating an unimaginative mantra over and over again", p.26
• "He had all the personality of one of those minor characters writers insist on introducing to pad out their novels", p.109

Two typos (I think) -

• "if you headed due east, within a couple of hundred years, you were in the country", p.128. "yards" rather than "years"?
• "Now, strand straight", p.134. "stand"?

Other reviews

• Paul Sean Grieve
• goodreads
• Jim Murdoch's site

"This Is Not About What You Think" by Jim Murdoch (fandango virtual, 2010)

The book contains about 85 poems that according to the poet "chart a life from childhood through to old age but it is not my life nor the life of anyone I know". The title poem suggests that compared to reality, "Stories are simple ... smoothed out and edited" with some metaphors and sense/purpose added, and goes on to query why sense needs to be added. Such stories are what many of these poems are - individually they're tidier than life: they make a single point (sometimes employing a punchline) then end. One needn't spend a lot of time on each, though one should pause to consider their collective impact, so perhaps it's best to read the book twice rather briskly, rather than read it once more slowly. The poems are mostly free-form ("Made-up Truths" is an exception with 5 stanzas of 6/2/6/2 syllabled lines). I needed to look up just one thing - "mene tekel upharsin".

On a first pass through I made a note of the pieces I liked - p.24, 26, 28, 32, 38, 40, 47, 53, 55, 57, 60, 67, 74, 80, 81, 92. Subsequently readings didn't make me change my mind. An Appendix gives a date for each poem (28/4/1979 to 25/5/2010). I found out that the poems I like mostly cluster around 1988-89 and 1997-98, with nothing from the 1999-2006 period. Favourites include "Tears" (a wife is on a saline drip because of all her crying. The nurse says that she can "live without hope or/ a life or even the/ truth as long as she/ can cry about it"), "Making Sense" and "Tweezers".

Themes

• Truth - The term's distrusted. "Truth is overrated if you ask me" (p.35), "Truth is the pornography of the self-righteous" (p.56), "Exhuming Truth ... Nothing smells very sweet/ this far down" (p.63), "You can't possibly know/ what truth / is till you've made one up/ yourself" (p.64), "as if truths came bottled./ and too many made you puke" ("Sedatives and Emptiness")
• Emptiness - "Nothing" features heavily in these poems - "and on the inside/ the nothing" (p.46); "there is always something to/ block our view/ of the nothingness that is// coming" (p.86). I'm reminded of
  • "God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through" - Paul Valery.
  • "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum description" - Bohr.
  In "Hands" that emptiness becomes internalised - "we turned those selfsame hands/ on ourselves in the end.// It might surprise you just/ how much emptiness/ a pair of hands can hold."
• Gloom - In "Specks of Dust" grief first "fills up holes/ in sentences", then the "whole damn universe". "And we are so/ very, very/ small". Gloom spreads through this book. Of course, it's a common enough sentiment amongst writers
  • "He is this afternoon writing a poem with great spirit: always a sign of well being with him. Needless to say, it is an intensely dismal poem", Florence Hardy, letter to Sidney Cockerell
  • "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth", Larkin

  One poem's called "4am, Reading Larkin" which is asking for trouble (in "Aubade", Larkin is "Waking at four to soundless dark"). It was Larkin who wrote "Wants" ("Beyond all this, the wish to be alone ... Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs", etc). Detachment can be a valuable artistic aid but in the form of depression and depersonalisation I think it tends to suppress writing.

• Love - It's here in various forms. In "True Love II" we learn how a son used sadness as a way to relate to his father. Elsewhere love is seen as as completion. But we're warned about the risks of attachment - to people and things.

The Poet and I

This poet's not invisible. He gives us an introduction, and says that some of the material is autobiographical. Moreover he and I have exchanged many online messages, so this write-up isn't impersonal. The author tells us that

• "My poetry is actually written primarily to exorcise, to get a specific thought or feeling out of my head so I can examine it"
• "The writing process is more important to me than the finished product"
• "If my poems are throwaways why publish them?"

We see only the product, the words, but the production of these throwaway words presumably affected the poet whose work we see. His interests and mine intersect, and we're part of the same generation. We both know about computers. Our analytic approach is in some ways similar. Perhaps we also share a tolerance for gloominess, at least in our writing. He suggests that my story book dealt with many aspects of sadness. Sadness doesn't inspire me to write, but I find it interesting.

Yet our creative output is different. In this book at least, he wants to be understood, to entertain even. I'm more conspicuously literary, with all the derogatory connotations that implies. I can be inexplicable, pretentious, and ludic, with a weakness for word-play.

Perhaps in consequence I'd like some of these pieces to be crisper, starker (no Maybes), with more word-play, and more poems overtaken by word-play. The poet's written about R.D.Laing (who I've read with interest), and I expected more poems in this book to be like those in Laing's "Knots". I expected more period detail. Music (no REM?) and place hardly feature, nor does memory. On p.94 the poem is called "The Past Must Die". The next poem is "Stale Truth", which begins "I couldn't warm to him" then later says "I tried to avoid him, turned// mirrors to face the wall". The past is by-passed.

Soundbites

Many of the poems have quotable lines. Here are just a few -

• "You can't miss what you've never had, son"// Is that so? I think you've missed the point (p.5)
• "My dad used to give me marks out of ten ... Marks is merely another word for scars" (p.7)
• "It's hard not to look for cracks/ and harder still not to step/ on them" (p.53)
• "You can drown inside yourself you know/ but only a dripping tap can drive you/ insane" (p.81)
• "I've heard say parallel lines never meet./ Sometimes they seem to - in the distance - / they disappear over the horizon/ so no one knows for sure" (p.98)
• "Poems turn up out of the blue these days/ like family/ and usually when things are going badly. .... but you don't turn family away. Not ever" (p.104).

Other reviews

Reviews have been collected on the author's website