Book of the Month

January 2004

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Ken Edwards is something of a polymath – journalist, poet, novelist, composer, publisher. It's been a while since he had a new collection of poems and now this little gem arrives. The book comes enblurbed by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein, which is an impressive strike-rate, and Ms Perloff's is the kind of blurb that is actually helpful and encouraging to a potential buyer. Useful, that.

Eight+six is fourteen, of course, and all these poems are sonnets. Well, many of them are identifiably so; others need a closer reading to see how they fit the form. They do, though, even if not always 8+6; sometimes 4+4+3+3, sometimes a straight 14. Unusually for an experimental writer, many of these poems are amusing; and they're particularly amusing in the way that the author raids the grab-bag of contemporary culture for his linguistic material. Take Puissant Car, for example:

Like a dickhead in a BMW
he presumes too much — and this presumption
is his puissant car — with copious clocks
and microprocessors, extreme of function.
A male cadence says “just do it” and unkeen
to seem too couth he stupefiedly
obeys and makes the death hex sign to gain
consumer satisfaction, sucked & seen.

My friend! that self-same powerhead within
the chrome & polished steel his glorious armour
was I — gearstick in hand — no, but you can
imagine — liquid years and laddish glamour
faded, carless in Peckham, on your pins
hearing the engine of grace slowly turn over

Now, I didn't even see those rhymes and half-rhymes until I'd read it three times. They sneak up on you. And I do like the way the resolutely non-literary language is interrupted by phrases like extreme of function (extreme unction, anyone?) and engine of grace, and the whole thing bedded in a beautifully accurate rhythmic structure. Bravo.

Unusually, too, the poet's own life sneaks in view – unusual for non-mainstream poets, that is, who tend to eschew the autobiographical, distrusting its value:

The Coral Necklace

Then we take the path on down the valley
accompanied perhaps by a hopeful dog
through all that tumbling fecundity of oak & alder
fir & pine, & eucalyptus, vetch, wild lilies
lemons ripening in their picture cage of netting
& in the bend before us the sea glistening hazy still the
Siren rocks amid it pink & purple white
so there we drink our water

Now I've opened the curtains this a.m.
& it's frozen upon the garden
a shade encroaching hard on fugitive glitter
How a year can go by, then another
it's in the earth, somewhere, ochre & silver
sometimes your tongue can taste the coast

 

Or there's the very different After Berlioz (a composer whose work I'll admit to adoring…):

Silence … rustle of young wheat
cry of quail
a bunting pouring forth
profound peace … a dead leaf.

Life seemed so very far away
a thing apart
flashed & glinted in the mountings
over there.

And the fit
tearing up handfuls of grass
the crushing sense
of absence
takes possession
as if a vacuum had formed.

The three examples I've given are indicative of the range of styles encompassed by these fourteen-liners, and I've found it fascinating to go through the book, constantly being surprised by what's around the corner. Work like this confounds easy assumptions about what an experimental poetry might be, which, when you think about it, is exactly what an experimental poetry should do. Eight+six is quite simply one of the most entertaining and impressive new collections to have crossed my desk in some time.

Click on the months below for other Book of the Month selections in 2004:

...and 2003: