"Greenfields" by Richard Price (Carcanet, 2007)

Poems from PN Review, etc. 104 pages. For my tastes, it should have been much shorter. Minor memories are insufficiently enlivened by imagery, even when the imagery in itself is good, and there's much dilution. Prose sections are disguised by the use of wordplay, unexpected (puzzling) words, and line-breaks. Poems like "Facts about trout" could have been dropped. Others could have done with editing. Here are some samples -

• "Bungalows crating up the field" (p.8). Good.
• "The shock is the light/ sucked from the Tree/ (I think of me - as just teeth)" (p.9). I don't get this.
• "The stream runkles its sheet over the pebbles" (p.11). Good enough.
• "The inside was elastic/ twined tight/ like a statistic/ for nylon/ gripping the dwindling globe" (p.14). About a golf-ball, but so what? And in what sense like a statistic?
• "Inside, like church, when mum says garden/ she means an English one." (p.50). This is set in Scotland during a heat-wave, so the mother's perhaps confused. The phrasing suggests that "like church" refers to what follows it, in which case I'm confused too.
• "Skew across the road/ a tonne that's jumped the wingmirror,/car scrap in the sprung hawthorn." (p.26). What does "jumped the wingmirror" mean? Why "sprung"? Why the line-breaks?
• "Inside [the wedding rings], ions like mines five-jack up// in a wave's midrise,// froth themselves in charge -/ all so tense they just shine " (p.87). This looks like a merge of ideas - mines afloat on the sea, and gold's atomic-level behaviour - "charge" being a common term. Doesn't work for me.
• "and here's you, sleeping,/ irritable, sifting the air/ as if a hair/ at the back of your tongue/ knew something" (p.89). Maybe there are idioms I'm unaware of. A hair knowing something? At the back of a tongue??

His titles don't help -

• "With is" begins with "To ravel with you in ripening light./ To worry and adore the stacking cups of your spine" - cute enough first lines. The title is a contraction of "Being with you is ..." I guess.
• "Saying the swim" begins with "I am in the two of us at the breast stroke, ... and the pool is not now the municipool". Well, it's not prose.

The "Quilted Leather" section did nothing for me. The "Tube Shelter Perspective" section begins with a quote by Djuma Barnes - "An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties". The background's a trip on the underground, which helps to explain the day-dreaming. I liked fragments of it. Here are three sections, each given a page -

• "Stop, and in a tunnel of radio/ a probe is among moons" (p.57). I don't get it.
• "At the next station/ no detraining, too.// A bomb, or something civil?/ Fishermen in oilskins wave us through/ and we are a submarine:/ the nets have no snags" (p.63). Why invent "detraining" unless it's to allude to "training"? What nets?
• "On the tannoy I can hear/ the muezzin singing/ to Whitechapel's underground gallery.// Crosses have been crissed.// Upstairs the District Line's delays/ percolate in a golden minaret" (p.68). I like the idea, but "Crosses have been crissed" isn't needed to repeat the idea of mingling. Indeed, I think the sentence has minus points - the wordplay is distracting, as is the reference to Christian crosses.

Still in the underground section, p.70 is an aside about names and things. "Balham Station" to "banal" to "Balaam" to "bedlam". Then for some reason oilrigs' names arise - "Piper" and "Thistle" - which lead to "platform". On p.77 he sleeps on the train so he can end the section with "Even at the stops I don't start". Boom boom.

"Open the paper window is a hit'n'miss list poem - "Scaletrix. A red car. A green car -/ they're from my father to my father./ We were just intermediaries", "a tangerine,/ miraculous, the orange for learners", "Black bags of exhausted wrapping./ She definitely said batteries included."

A footnote on p.60 says that "[The Footnote's] rise, like that of free verse, can be traced to the marginalisation of poetry".

"Rays" by Richard Price (Carcanet, 2009)

133 pages of poetry! But on closer investigation that's not quite the bargain it might appear. "little but often" has sections (one per page) named after letters of the alphabet, averaging 4 lines but sometimes shorter (section t is "temptiness", section l is "lavish love", section h is "hesitations//share a life-/halve it?"). A skim through suggests that we're farming on marginal land here, labouring to extract poetry from unpromising raw material. Here and there something blossoms.

The first 2 poems give an indication of the breadth of styles in the book. The collection begins with "Freehold" that starts

A summer's day? - you're lovelier... You're ... more gentle.

and ends with "William Shakespeare (trans.)". The next poem ("The thought keeps counting") has

With primary insomnia the data suggests there's decreased regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) to the fronta lmedial, occipital and parietal cortices, and to the basal ganglia. I'll explain these things later.

Some pieces I don't get at all. "Melancholy plumber" spends 1.5 pages repeating a Blues verse and chorus, changing the underlining and line-breaking minimally between versions. For me it's a joke which drags on far too long. But then one comes across "Shells"

Shells mock the ear. Shallows? The swell? New / Just healed. Howls mock the air. Howls mock the scar.

He uses end-rhyme quite often, especially in refrains. Here's the start of "Trackside", a verse repeated twice (but with the final "and" replaced by a comma) later in the piece

Trackside fires when we met, foxes confused. Dust and drought, reservoir regret, underloved and overused.

There's so much that you can afford to pick out the bits you like and leave the rest. To end, here are more quotes to give an idea of the variety

You took drugs in the Listening Olympics

(from "Last train, full of couples")

We were wise to wash advice right down, with a drink to ideas. I don't offer youth or years for denial. We'd almost be lovers, near sisters, near brothers, if your conscience hadn't launched its show retrial.

(from "Rhyme nor Reason")

have passed by who by discontinue and area obviously we but not comment had off support

(from "Informer(1)")

In wardrobes, ties hang like curing fish, patterns like smoke. (in restaurants, avoid kippers and sauce.) 'She said she wasn't ready to be tied down. I was gutted.'

(from "Ties")

A person reading - truth and tree share the same root. A woman reading - singing - it's you, singing (under your breath).                 Golden key, golden key.                 Let yourself in,                 let yourself in,                 you can                 let yourself in                 with this golden key

(from "Golden Key")