First, a review I wrote for a local group -
Looking for meaning
First love is magical. You can't wait to tell the world about it - how wonderful it is, how unique. You write poems about it. You think it amazing how the songs in West-Side story capture so precisely that feeling. Later it dawns on you that it's the most common feeling in the world. It's all been done - only the details change. Sometimes though, the details matter - Social Media and changing attitudes to flexible sexuality offer new opportunities.
Grief too has been done. That doesn't stop the bereaved putting pen to paper just when the objectivity of their judgement is at its weakest. Self pity and self-therapy are delivered in beautifully understated verse that nobody dares criticize.
Paul Stephenson (a local lad) waited 6 years. Even then he was unsure about his judgement. He sent 2 collections to Carcanet - a general one, and one on bereavement. The latter was selected. He's served his apprenticeship in magazines and workshops. He's seen it all. What is there left to say? In "Hard Drive" he's studiously avoided the usual spreading of ashes, clearing of lofts, etc, exploring instead marginal land to see if any meaning can grow there. Not all of the poems will work for everybody, but at least it's different, and there's a generous 116 pages of poetry so readers and pick and choose. It's unsentimental - there's wordplay, humour at the most inappropriate moments, and an interest in the standardized language of bereavement. In the early sections the narrator seems at times detached, unable to accept reality, unable to find meaning.
He uses borrowed forms. E.g. "A prayer for death admin" begins with
For the message received to establish contact
and being the designated representative;
For the formal letter of authorization
and acting on behalf in matters regarding.
Relatives and friends are largely absent. Instead he's suddenly on first name terms with Jean the neighbour, Sarah, who’d “like us to consider the options together and ensure I’m fully informed re decisions to be made”, Michael the celebrant who tells him about the crematorium button, and Jade from Self Storage.
In "Putting it out there" he worries how these poems will be received - "worrying myself to death/ about commodifying your death ... check your death for typos ... wait for a box with hard copies of your death ... told how well your death has sold".
Published last year, it's already been reprinted. If nothing else you can use it as an anthology of modern formal devices.
“Hard Drive”, Paul Stephenson (Carcanet, 2023)
Now my standard write-up
Poems from dozens of magazines, include Magma, Oxford Poetry, The Rialto, etc.
He excellently introduces the book on a blog entry and video, pointing out the risks of self-indulgence. He mentions something I didn't register - that many named people appear in the book - leading him to describe it as a "soap opera of bereavement". He contrasts the practical with the emotional, ritual with performance. "Voicemail" and "A prayer for death admin" show the poet's ear for phrases.
Death's been done to death. There are extras risks when writing about one's own grief -
- Like falling in love it's an experience that distorts objectivity, that tempts people to write about events that are common, though they may seem special to the poet. Using a restrained style won't help to distinguish the work - it's the default that many others use.
- Other people are wary of being critical of the writing. They may avoid evaluating the craft, instead calling the writing "brave", etc.
- The poet is likely to find evaluation of their own poetry difficult because of all the other issues - a text valuable to the poet as therapy may flop as poetry. Even more than other poets they might justify a detail by saying that "it really happened" rather than assessing its effectiveness on readers.
Technique can be used as a distancing device. Crossing out and redaction are used several times in this book. The most common devices is repetition of words/phrases. I'll try to classify -
- Psychological realism
- The Thesis - Each of the 5 lined stanzas has "I knew something was wrong." as one of its lines - an insistent thought returning irregularly.
Successful
- List
- Cause (2016) - about 50 short phrases all ending in "heart failure - "Green heart failure", "Norway plus heart failure", "Have your cake and eat it heart failure", "Over-ready heart failure", etc
- Better verbs for scattering - All 24 lines have the template "To [] the ashes" - e.g. "To breezegive the ashes", "To toriamos the ashes"
Riffs on a phrase. These lists are far too long for my liking though some of the items are worthwhile. As elsewhere in the book, humour isn't avoided.
- Borrowed form
- A prayer for death admin - 16 of the 32 lines start with "For the" - e.g. "For the confirmation of cancelled subscription/ and the 40 pounds refunded to a credit card"
- Grief as the preamble of the Maastricht treaty - uses the nomenclature of treaties - e.g. "RESOLVED to establish a day-to-day routine as part of coping// RESOLVED to implement a policy of continuation in order to promote peace of mind, anxiety reduction and sleep"
These work for me. I might classify them as prose (hermit crab form)
- An expansion of a borrowed form
- Grief as two sides of the Atlantic ocean - Each of the 22 lines has the template "This side []. That side [].". The first line is "This side me. That side them". Then there's "mobile" vs "cell", etc. The final couplet is "This side getting on with it. That side too./ This side telling everyone. That side no one".
It could have been presented more compactly (for the page rather than the stage) as a two-column table, the repetitions removed. I'd rather have had that.
- Fixation
- The hymn of him - an iambic pentametered sonnet with rhyme, where each line has the template "The [] of him, the [] of him, the []" - e.g. "The lip of him, the map of him, the mop"
- Namesake - "Tod not Todorov" appears 11 times
- On mailing a lock of his hair to America, belatedly - 10 lines having the template "Would his hair []?" - e.g. "Would his hair have to declare itself?"
- We weren't married, he was my civil partner - 30 lines each starting with "By which I mean" - e.g. "By which I mean bothering to iron a shirt"
- St. Pancras - 6 stanzas having the template "[] my time with you/ [] coffee[s] in St. Pancras" - e.g. "Fast was my time with you/ quick coffees in St. Pancras"
- Putting it out there - 22 lines, 21 uses of "death" - "worrying myself to death/ about commodifying your death ... check your death for typos ... wait for a box with hard copies of your death ... told how well your death has sold" - death ending up as the book. On one line that lacks the word "death", "it" replaces the word. I don't see why, if "it" is used in one line, it can't be used in more.
I like the idea of the sonnet. Some lines are as contrived as love/dove forced rhymes. Maybe the idea is that the form overwhelms the content.
I would remove all the "By which I mean" phrases from "We weren't married ..."
- Misc
- Relationship as covered reservoir - each of the 22 page-width lines except for the last ends in "water". Each uses the word "water" 4 or 5 times.
I don't get it.
At the launch he said that he knew "Wedding in Limousin" would be the final poem as soon as he wrote it. In it, the narrator's alone in a swimming pool "cooling off, the robot/ cleaning underwater, almost company". He's soon to attend a wedding - "I have come to represent you// but I'm also here for me". At the end of the poem/book the narrator sees 6 swallows, one "for each year/ you've been gone. It's time to swim" (reminding me of the phrase "sink or swim"). Clearly the poet hasn't rushed into print. The book's carefully organised, the final section addressing the ethics of writing such a book.
As the poet pointed out at the launch, there are aspects of camp in this book - bad taste, irony, audacity. Queneau wrote that "An oulipian writer is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape", and some of the poems have that feel. I think elegy collections benefit from a range of styles. I've read elegy books where my reaction after a few pages is to wish that the poet would snap out of it, stop wallowing in self-pity, etc.
Brutally, my initial reactions were
- No - 35, 36, 37, 38, 54, 59, 73, 76, 81, 83, 94, 100, 114 (too "experimental" or falling into the bereavement traps)
- Yes - 44, 82, 92, 98, 105, 123, 126
- Puzzled - "Climbing Tbilisi" is in landscape, with 3 stanzas of 3 full lines. I don't get the format. I didn't know until the launch event that "Starchitect (2016)" contained the words added to a dictionary that year.
Other reviews/links
- Stephen Claughton ( It was only in the final section where I felt that the redactions and cancellations ... ran the risk of being simply modish. And “Grief as the Preamble of the Maastricht Treaty”, with which the section ends, although an intriguing idea, remains just that.)
- Richie McCaffery (He circumvents the self-pity trap in inventive ways that show his visceral hurt while simultaneously walking the line between revealing and concealing too much.)
- Matthew Stewart (It’s often stated that elegies are ideal for poets to stretch themselves and push their boundaries, due to the inherent attempts to capture something that lies beyond the capacity for expression of human language. As a consequence, they lend themselves perfectly to Paul Stephenson’s approach to poetry)
- Jennifer Wong
