"Crowd Sensations" by Judy Brown (Seren, 2016)

I don't know whether it's me or the publishers, but increasingly I find that the first poem in a book acts as a prelude or even a tutorial. Here, the first poem, "After the Discovery of Linear Perspective", seems to use art as a visual aid to demonstrate poetry theory. It begins with "You gave us new places to hide". Theory has its disadvantages - " I miss their warmth: the maidens and saints twisted to press/ at the picture plane, all breathy frottage, and damp like flowers under glass". So what's the solution? "Come, technician, let us brush past the samey glamours of Joseph and Mary ... Let's inhale its new space, shout merely to gather echoes". The use of "brush" and "glamours" surely isn't accidental, and the use of theory to open up new possibilities for experience (rather than intellectualize feelings away) is a theme of the book.

She can make poetry out of material that most of us would pass by. Humidity and gaseous exchanges figure more than once (perhaps because she's lived in Hong Kong)

• "The Street of Dried Seafood Shops..." is in loosely rhymed couplets - a simile/metaphor-fest. At the end there's an attempt to make an overriding metaphor - "After a mile or so, I tell you, I was dry as a drill bit.// I dock at the Irish pub awash with happy hour,/ one more beery dog-fish in a bled-out harbour.". One can see how the poet might wish to turn a list into a narrative, but this ending begs questions. The "I tell you" is, I think, an attempt to make the poem sound conversational, the "you" different to the one earlier in the poem. Why dog-fish? Anything to do with the dog mentioned earlier? In the final line a wet fish in a dry harbour contrasts with the earlier dried fish, but to what purpose? "bled-out harbour" sounds womby, but I can't fit the poem around that idea.
• The poem after that, "The Dehumidifier", again makes the most out of uninspiring raw material. At the end the reservoir fills - "By Friday it's the usual story ... I ... pour away the absent week's wet harvest ... Once more I will myself to neither cry nor sweat: hereafter I may live as aridly as decency permits" - which makes me assume that the persona's female.

But "The Third Umpire" is more problematic. At the start I think there are allusions that I don't recognise - he "always was, his noonday elder brothers said,/ the piker in the pavilion, pale as milk./ Raspberry feathers ring his albino irises". Looking up online, I find that piker is "Australian/NZ - a person who withdraws from a plan, commitment". Cricket fan readers will know about "the master of instrument and replay ... where the stitched ball left a kiss on the glove shows as snow on Hotspot ... plays the delivery in dotted lines". Towards the end, I like how "Some nights he walks bare-chested onto the pitch and touches the square for some last warmth" but am more puzzled by "He can hardly believe it: that the crease belongs to the umpire and thus can be said to be partly his". The ending refers to the start "If his brothers had him thrown onto this grass furnace/ at noon, would his god really let him burn?". The ideas of judgement, body/mind, siblings, the contrast between being in the thick of it and being distant/technological are all there, but I feel I'm missing a key.

More generally, I like what she's trying to do, but sometimes I think she tries too hard, the imagery becoming ornamental. In "The Leaks: The Golf Hotel, Silloth" for example, there's "The next morning was a pulled pint full of light, and the sea flicked up the white undersides of its leaves" which I like, though it's already tending towards the Martian. But at the end there's "tip half a carton of Co-op milk into my borrowed rucksack, pour out half an hour scrubbing with shampoo and the hotel towel, only to mis-time the ebb tide of the first bus out" where the further pouring out (now of time) and the tide=bus comparison is over-cooked.

"Dove Cottage Ferns" reads like a list of comparisons and observations - "bulked to a galleon's massed rig of sail. Shrub-broad, they're bold as gunnera but feather-cut. From spring's straight-up vectors, they loosen and splay. I count out summer: arc, arabesque, parabola, catenary - a green apprenticeship of curve". I like that final phrase. Do the images knit into a poem? Does it help that I need to look up "gunnera"? The ending introduces another theme - "Flip to the frond's reverse: the future dried on like a code of dust ... I read a fern's microfiche, propagation an abacus clicking away at my ear". She has such a way with words that it's easy to be tempted forward by succulent images all the way through a poem without taking in the big picture. And anyway, what's wrong with imagery being at least in part ornamental?

My problem is that the strength or cryptic nature of an image can sometimes distract me from the poem as a whole. When I start having to engage my brain to decode a detailed image, it's hard to stop -

• "Prescription for a Middle-Aged Reader" speculates on having one contact lens for long-sightedness and another "for the fine print and the needle's slim traverse". The final 3 words cram a new idea in - local optimisation to the detriment of global effect.
• "Let the puddings boil dry in their baby clothes. Leave the tinsel coiled in snaky hibernation" (p.38) is far more striking than the rest of the poem
• "Water drains down the conifers' inner ladders" (p.49). Near the trunk, where there aren't many leaves, the horizontal branches look like rungs, the rain dripping from one to another?
• "Antidote" - "The fallen-forward mirror shows its brown-paper back/ and picture wire, a coffin to the alp shapes of its smash.// That hieroglyph is her next seven years lying there,/ spoiled to vinegar before they were even toasted in". Is "-forward" needed? It made me think too hard. The fragments are more cuniform than hieroglyph.

My favourites? Maybe "After the Discovery of Linear Perspective", "This is not a garden" and "The Imposters", though there's much else of interest too. I like her writing far more than that of some (currently) more famous poets.

Other reviews

• Jazmine Linklater
• David Green (At first I was concerned that some poems were trying too hard, striving too much for novelty and ingenuity)

"Loudness" by Judy Brown (Seren, 2011)

The book's been shortlisted for the Forward and Aldebugh prizes, and poems have been in the Guardian, etc. Nevertheless online reviews are hard to find, which is a shame, because there's a lot that's worth reading in this book.

There's a style of poetry that begins with prose to set the scene (often using observation), then some backstory is provided, then the emotional payload's delivered followed sometimes by a hint about the future. A few of these poems have those ingredients but there the resemblance ends. These are through-composed pieces. The sentences aren't a simple sequence; at each decision point they twist rather than stick. The gaps between them are hidden hinges.

Some certainty is often provided early on - a precise location, or an ostensible topic. The titles are tempting - "The Ex-Angel", "The End of the Rainbow" (a visit to a Personal Stylist), "The Helicopter Visions" (flying over London), "Spontaneous Combustion", "The Blackmailer's Wife Reads History and Considers the Nature of Guilt", "Letter to my Optician". But there are puzzles.

• "The Cheese Room" seems to be about an all-you-can-eat cheese buffet costing 5 pounds. The persona "strips/ soaks a sari in buttermilk, wraps herself up/ and goes in" the room in the corner walled by glass. At the end of the page-long poem she "curls up on the floor. She's happy/ to wait, passive like milk, for the birth,/ for the journey from death into food". So this is how she sees her next stage of personal development?
• In "The Swap" the narrator (a woman, let's say) overhears a man curse the sunset. She knows how he feels because she used to talk into a silent phone, somehow hoping that someone on the other side of the world would be listening. Actually, she didn't talk, she "whispered out of pure shame". But what does the final "Now, let me pass" mean? That the overheard man blocked her way? That the memory was hindering her progress?

Neither sound or spelling feature strongly in these poems, and the line-breaks seem arbitrary. Instead, the language is image-rich. On the first 3 pages there's "the glassblowing slowness of its fall", "weeds starfished in the turf" and an optician's "ziggurat of dwindling capitals". In the 4th poem, "Marbles", "the grip of the glass held a twist// of iris, a fluke of coloured muscle/ in North Sea blue, as cold as holidays./ It looked like an eye gone bad, locked up/ in glass, like the dust that's left in reactors// at shutdown.". "P45" (paperwork you get on leaving a UK job) is nearly all imagery, inter-related by the theme of machines. In "The Guest" a dressing table "is glass over dark veneer". Imagery takes over when the persona sees her reflection - "I've thrown my pale mask/ into a pit of brown water./ She holds me under, a swollen/ low moon, lying at anchor". Sometimes I wondered whether the image-fecondity was helping a piece survive, whether the language had to be souped up to justify the content - "I labour open-mouthed through the siesta hours/ to earn a coated tongue" (p.40).

I liked "The Supertanker" - "Did I never launch my life at all?". I wasn't keen on "The Strop". "On Vacating a Flat ...", "In the Darkroom" and "Freefall" have a decent punchlines but not much else. "The Students" is too much of a list. "A Woman Assumes Invisibility Aboard HMS Belfast" is mostly travelogue.

At times I wondered whether the parts were more than the whole. Here are some extracts from "The Students"

We all yearned for goose-down, that vegan winter, while the wheeled gas fires spiked votives in yellow and turquoise from their blue cylinders, There's something about the mouthful of animal fat, we said, running the pulses' sea-swish back and forth in their tall jars. I loved nothing [...] We caught a rainbow in the washbasin [...] I'd have snogged anyone then, mouth as raw as broccoli [...] the travellers' caravans scattered in the carpark behind. On Saturday nights, we watch fires burning on the tarmac, [...] In the kitchen borlotti beans jig behind glass, each dried scrap a song to attract the attentions of water

The first line (as often in this collection) introduces a theme - desire for flesh, for simple comforts. Bonfires, goose-flesh and "anyone" are preferable to heaters and borlotti beans. There's a network of symbolism: water, colours, rainbows - freedom constrained (rainbows in sinks; travellers in car-parks; staying on on Saturday night). Carefully constructed, but perhaps overly schematic. "raw as broccoli"?!

Other reviews

• Carol Rumen's poem of the week (Guardian)
• Lesley Saunders
• David Green
• Poetry London
• Poetry Review

"Pillars of Salt" by Judy Brown (Templar Poetry, 2006)

Format	Frequency
2 line stanzas	5
3 line stanzas	1
4 line stanzas	1
5 line stanzas	2
8 line stanzas	1
9 line stanzas	1
1 box stanza	1
Misc	8

20 poems, none of them weak, in a pamphlet slightly bigger than A6, printed and bound in India! It doesn't seem to matter much how many lines there are per stanza, as long as each stanza of a poem has the same number of lines. Of the "Misc" poems, several have stanzas where all but one are the same shape - Guthrie's "little boxes, little boxes" but these are anything but tickytacky. Here's the start of "The Business Traveller", a 6 by 3 poem.

The grinding of the Gare St Lazare rubs at his room as day falls away from the hotel's long windows, and the things he knows draw tidally back to the tightening coil of a single thought.

Note the arbitrary stanza break (the poem would fit better into a 2-line stanza form than some of book's 2-line stanza poems), and how simple statements are avoided - each phrase strains for effect, "told slant" to keep the reader alert, but risking the accusation that it's straight mimesis with linguistic frills. When there are direct statements, they're short, almost as if apologetic. The technique (which varies less than the subject matter does) usually works well. In "Best Drink of the Day" for example, the stream of description sustains its heightened register for a while. "Silvano fences a knife to sharpness. There's the scrape of spread on flags of toast" begins to sound laboured, but then we get the direct "I order tea" followed by the expressive "The mug comes steaming, pulled from the gasping dishwasher in mid-monsoon, a thick white saucer like a worn-out moon, brittle from too much shining". Amongst these lines is a phrase that saves what would otherwise be merely sub-Martian description - "By now so much of life is already decided but there's always a shiver in this waiting moment".

Other Reviews

• HappenStance