"By all means" by Tim Love (Nine Arches Press, 2012)

Short stories from Staple, Under the Radar, etc

• Olga, December '76 - A man gets a call from a troubled ex. He dashes to meet her in London. She hasn't changed. He has. He sleeps with her before he has second thoughts about alternative lifestyles, and creeps away. Years later, he builds his kids a tree-house.
• The Big Climb - A father's on a caravan holiday with his little son. The mother disappeared a few months before. Today they're going on a long walk. Will she return? The father says they'll have to wait and see.
• Late - A pair of men, old mates, search in vain for the grave of an mutual friend as night falls. They're nearly locked in the graveyard. The married narrator is worried that he'll be late home.
• Prague '86 - A man visiting his friend in Prague meets his friend's aunt, who lived through some troubled times
• Doors and windows - London. Mark's male partner walks out on him. He recalls summer holidays in Wales when a boy, his parents breaking up, the people who'd helped him through life. Bill Thompson had introduced him to the gay scene. Mark goes to Bill's old London address. A young man lives there. He says he'll look for Bill's address and meet Mark later. Mark decides instead to get a train for Wales.
• Method of Loci - The narrator on a Moroccan train starts writing. He chats to a woman opposite. They're involved in the same conference. His paper is entitled "Transgendered Infiltration of Fractal Grammars"
• Dreams - The narrator had a mental crises while driving, deciding whether to accept a new job. Now he's going through the contents of his loft, watching old video clips and BBC retrospectives.
• Definitions - A person in transition goes swimming in a hotel pool. It gets tricky
• Fractals - A writer tries to write a story. He goes for a walk, hoping to gather material. Nowadays his story drafts shrink to Flash. Sometimes they expand out again.

Lots of details and self-conscious narrators. Many analogies. It's "Reality Effect" vs "Meta", "Purple prose" vs "sad, grey lives". Often a person journeys in an attempt to make sense of something, hoping there are lessons in the past. In several of the stories ("The Big Climb", "Late", etc) one of the significant characters is absent. All the stories (except "Olga, December '76" which fast-forwards years at the end) have narrational durations of at most a day (often just hours) punctuated by flashbacks.

More details are on litrefsbyallmeans.blogspot.com

"Moving Parts" by Tim Love (Happenstance, 2010)

I wrote the following review in 1997, about an unpublished collection I'd assembled then. I wrote it to encourage a change of direction in my writing. Several of the poems got into "Moving Parts" (whose poems, on average are 11 years old). Of course, so much has changed since then ...

A review of "Misreading the Signs" by Tim Love

To entitle a collection "Misreading the Signs" is to tempt fate. If the poet misreads, what chance has the critic? And what are critics to make of being told that they

wind up their gramophones for icing cakes, lift doors off their hinges to sleigh through slush, ("Re-evaluation")

There are many signs and images in these poems that could easily be misread. Perhaps because it's been put together over many years, the collection (as well as some individual poems) lacks coherence. There are sonnets and haiku, as well as free form pieces, but in the main traditional forms are used ironically. Poems range from the image-free "Trying Again" to poems like "Giraffe" that use imagery at the expense of sense, symptomatic of a more general conflict between feeling and intellect that is not always well resolved. There's a wide range of subject matter too - love poems, poems about family life, comedy, the statutory re-interpretation of greek myth, art, politics - all dominated by a pre-occupation with language (its history and development).

The poems start well, but often falter or become suddenly obscure soon after the start, as if he's trying to

mutilate language to see how it works, if it can still escape your maze. ("Romance")

Nevertheless, many of the poems pull themselves together and end strongly. "The Fall" begins with a comment on the development of languages, then we realise that an englishman's intellectualising the loss of his american lover. The conclusion tidily brings together differences between the two cultures and languages

And because it's autumn, London leaves fall yellow as cabs. As you fall asleep, a fire engine that used to hee-haw like a seaside donkey goes wow wow wow.

In "Estuary" a river's used to represent a life, the passage of time going upstream

The tide takes up the challenge of the sea's grief, narrows into fate.

ending at the source

then finally fear that lasts so long your sleep comes easily now, a trickle of wine's enough.

Yet even in the successful poems the endings are sometimes too neat, and though they draw together the poems' themes, they rarely draw a conclusion from what's gone before.

The author's a computer programmer and this shows up in his tendency to trust the artificial rather than the natural

At night there's no sun to lead you but satellite dishes all point in one direction.

and even to see giraffes as programmers "debugging the horizon".

With a little more faith in natural subjects and treatments, I think the poet could develop the talents sporadically displayed here. As it is, the book remains an interesting but bumpy ride.

Other Reviews

• The pamphlet's website
• Sue Butler, Charlotte Gann and Nick Asbury (Sphinx)
• Jim Murdoch