Book of the Month

October 2003

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This book should need no introduction to readers of Shearsman: several of the poems have appeared in issues of this magazine (issues 53 and 54), and there is also a large special feature on Ayres' work on this website, which gives you a chance to sample other poems from the book, plus earlier and subsequent work that is otherwise uncollected. I was fortunate enough to see a manuscript of this book last year and have thus lived with the poems for some time. It doesn't make the book any easier to review, however.

It is a huge collection as can be seen from the page-count, and the first section of the book is dominated by the 75-page poem Transporter, about which I remain somewhat ambivalent. The rest of the volume however, is a cornucopia of pleasures. Ayres' discursive style, positively luxurious in the way the poems unfold, is something rather distinct in modern British poetry, though it's perhaps tempting to see parallels with Andrew Duncan's discursive mode; both poets use long lines, are unafraid of long poems, and are quite prepared to adopt narrative forms in a way that seems utterly foreign in this country — a country in which the ruling mainstream seems to be in love with the inconsequential anecdote, but is afraid of grand themes and long arching narrative. It's the kind of work you can wallow in, but it doesn't lapse into prose despite the long sentence-based cadences; it offers instead a powerful alternative to other orthodoxies, mainstream as well as experimental. It is in fact a truly radical poetry, in that it stands outside all current norms of writing in the UK. This could mean that it will be mauled by all comers, but I hope the reverse will be the case, because this is an art that should be celebrated.

The beautiful love poem Pacific Union begins:

You turn away, and death has the south.
I'm folded in books. Knowledge like this
is simple, pure, you can't do anything with it
except to keep on knowing. I hold a smalls tone
in my hand – a small book, a small death, a small stone.

and ends

It's over. I'm at peace.
I'm moving through the poem, disturbing
small pebbles with my feet. Andromeda
moves through the night, waking no one.
There are no riders. There are no words.
Seahorses, they say, mate for life.

There's a sense of rightness about these lines, as well as what happens in between, that curious sense of recognition that occurs when the poet's said something you've never quite been able to put into words. Ayres manages that so often, that it's almost uncomfortable. In Galicia, he can even get away with skirting the edges of cliché, get away with it, and still send you home with your heart beating faster, stunned at the fact that he's managed it. a.m. is a masterly book, one that demands to be read.

See some of Michael Ayres' work in Shearsman 52, in Shearsman 53, and in the special Gallery feature on his work.

The Book of the Month series was founded on the Shearsman website at the end of April 2003, with the aim of highlighting certain significant publications that the editor has found particularly exciting. Books of the Month have been selected for earlier months of the year, retrospectively, and one of the 12 chosen volumes will be Book of the Year in December 2003. Click on the months below for other Book of the Month selections in 2003.