Bruce Andrews: Designated Heartbeat
(Salt, Cambridge, 2006; paperback, 132pp, £10.99 / US$16.95; isbn 9781844710683)

Ian Gregson: Call Centre Lovesong
(Salt, Cambridge, 2006; paperback, 117pp, £9.99 / US$15.95; isbn 9781844712564)

Tobias Hill: Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow
(Salt, Cambridge, 2006; paperback, 67pp, £8.99 / US$14.95; isbn 9781844712625)

Muriel Spark: All the Poems
(Carcanet, Manchester, 2006; paperback 130pp, £9.95; isbn 9781857548907)

Deborah Meadows: involutia
(Shearsman Books, Exeter, 2007 (sic); paperback, 83pp, £8.95 / US$15; isbn 0974690279)

Sam Ladkin & Robin Purves (eds): the darkness surrounds us (Edinburgh Review #114)
(Edinburgh Review, Edinburgh, 2004; paperback, 240pp, £5.99)

Is Bruce Andrews a caring person? Maybe, if you accept his definition of 'negation' as 'care' (in Definition, the coruscating Devil's Dictionary that closes his new collection, Designated Heartbeat). It's possibly true that one has to care about something in order to negate it, and perhaps Andrews arrives at a sort of negation of the negation, and is performing a social responsibility, by holding up (like Charles Foster Kane) a big empty sleeve to everything people believe in: 'Lesson – killed by', 'Lack of quality – lack of courage', Career – autism', Applaud – command, 'Enabling – surrender', Emotions – purely dyslexic social constructions'. He's certainly bracing, funny - but more Nietzschean than Ambrose Biercean, No mere cynical humourist, his negations attempt a thoroughgoing critique of received ideas and morality that threatens to topple over into syphilitic madness or a fascistic exultation of power. Oh well, maybe disentanglement isn't as easy as it looks. He defines 'pleasure' as 'measure' and 'pleasures' as 'all sequels', and the poems that precede Definition show that linguistic pleasure is indeed his measure - a vertiginous, ceaseless pile up of witty apothegms that obviously delight their author, even delight me in small doses; but I wouldn't want to survive a plane-crash with him. If that happened (on a remote hillside, heaven forbid) I suspect the other passengers would decide to eat him first.

That's almost the kind of scenario Ian Gregson would choose to write a persona poem about, but thankfully sticks to monologues by people who work in a call centre, whose husbands are aliens, who suspect their wives of 'playing away' (Bruce Andrews has heartening reassurance here: 'a slice off a cut loaf is never missed'), and a sequence about Superman and Lois Lane. Gregson's poems are traditionally formal (they all rhyme intricately) and might have been dismissibly glib if it weren't for an intellectual knottiness, a skilfully managed complexity that helps them transcend being generic 'trad-post-modern' poetry. He is particularly interested in the travails of modern masculinity, but here he picks some soft targets (poor old Hughes and Heaney come in for a predictable pasting). Like Andrews he's a very witty writer, but seems to care to dig deeper in poems (which sound autobiographical) about modern middle-class family life: a father in advertising, a childhood recognition that most of the daily world we inhabit is disturbingly made-up. These are moving, haunting. Then it's back to the aliens, 'Carriers of the End':

They saucered here because their planet died.
They hate our values but they hide
In human form, except they're laser-eyed.
Their feet are webbed. They're plants inside.

Post-modern poets perhaps?

Tobias Hill was a 'New Generation' poet of the nineties who has mutated into an acclaimed novelist. Nocturne in Chrome and Sunset Yellow is his first poetry publication for some years, and shows that the novel's gain was a considerable loss to poetry: he really is good. A reassuringly personal poet (Bruce Andrews: 'Personal experience — obediently derivative') with a voice cool, precise, echoic, eloquent, forms traditional but largely unrhymed, dozens of martianist similes ('yellow as eggs cracked clean into a glass'), a few dud clichés ('though sequels are never quite as good') but a quite lovely unassuming sympathy for the lives it observes in a passing London scene, and a sense of true storytelling that lifts the whole collection. Repossession is particularly fine. As is 'The Nightworkers':

The clocks stop for them.
Nothing comes
while they mend their ways.
Nothing goes. The night trains
rest in their stables.
The mainline lies
bright as cobweb

and the voice of the first man to speak
becomes a grand thing in the darkness
and the workers who follow
lope like so many bogeymen
through the lights of the gantry towers

The book's centrepiece is a sequence called 'A Year in London': twelve monthly poems, a menstrual cycle encapsulating more social and emotional territory than the entire output of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd combined. One of these poems was even issued as a stamp, or something. Every woman he ever met loved him, and he loved them in return, for a while, even the one 'who never much liked music'. Give it up, John. Tobias Hill is an unbeatably clever little bastard. I'm green as a Martian's armpit. Almost as green as the rest of it.

Another poet-novelist is Edinburgh-born Muriel Spark, best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Spark began as a poet. All the Poems isn't a fat book, but it is an interesting one, arranged in an ingenious non-chronological order whose principle escapes me. Spark is a highly traditional poet and a very skilled one — bracing and somewhat acerbic in tone, like her fiction. Often no more than jeux d'esprit, her best poems are, I think, comments on the literary life (one I don't myself live) viewed from her Kensington Erie. In 'While Flicking Over the Pages' she asks of a once-promising writer (b.1912):

Now why, bewildered, does he hop around,
an office-boy of literature, snatching
the opportunity to write a paragraph
of wasp-like criticism, here and there,
and tittle-tattle over the garden fence?

A question she doesn't try to answer. Perhaps it's frustration at his own failure that's led him to take such pleasure in popping other people's balloons — what's her excuse? Spark revels in deflation, a downright nasty piece of work much of the time, and quite as snobbish as Miss Jean Brodie. 'Going Up to Sotheby's' is one of her best poems. A long dead writer, whose dates fit George Orwell, has his 'most important manuscript' sold at auction by his grandchildren. His effort in writing it, his family's poverty, his whole life, is succinctly, mock-sympathetically described. But Spark reserves a sting in the tail for the eventual prestige of his valued manuscript. As what might be the grubby sheets of Down and Out in Paris and London are taken to be sold off, the papers

are going up
to make their fortune at last,
which were once so humble, tattered,
and so truly working-class.

Perhaps I am doing her a disservice in thinking this a patronising sneer. One quality she shares with her fellow fictioneer Tobias Hill is a brilliant sense of narrative timing in poetry, and the ability to conjure atmosphere so deftly that you don't quite know how she managed to do it.

Deborah Meadows' involutia consists of several sequences of philosophical poetry in a spare American modernist manner that owes something to the Objectivists. She is much interested in logic, asking if W.V. Quine's The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays 'will help me understand serial poems, their compositional principles better than I do now'. As someone whose grasp of iterative sets began and ended with an attempt to read a book called Beginning Logic, I have no real way of knowing, but Meadows' poetry is fairly readable on its own. I do think I know what a synthetic apriori truth is, enough to make sense of

4

When more sure than sure
no need for "surely."

If about to be shown a leopard,
"surely it has spots"
is predicted, so
out it comes
at leash-end
       governing the conditional sentence.

Which is to say that we don't need to examine every leopard to see if it has spots — to arrive at your perception of leopard-spottiness by analytical apostiori reasoning. Can a leopard change its spots? Can an analytical philosopher stop herself from hair-splitting? Her book opens with a pair of sequences in which philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray send one another rather astringent love letters, reminding me of Superman and Lois Lane in Ian Gregson's poems. Luce and Gilles have a more complicated relationship though. Both are studying a Zen text, The Blue Cliff Record. I particularly liked the moment when she exclaims:

If you have eyes, look!
If you have hands, touch!
This is no more mystic …
than words straight to the point,
clear as pond water.

Meadows has an admirably clear, very refined poetic style. Her work is interesting, beautifully formed, but you'd need to be thinking with the same things to get the most out of these reflections on truth and language.

the darkness surrounds us (edited by Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves) is an issue of Edinburgh Review devoted to essays on American poetry, with some recent examples of same at the back. They are for the most part fine essays (with the exception of Allen Fisher's, which is characteristically pretentious and opaque) on Edward Dorn, John Wieners, Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, William Burroughs, Andrea Brady, Mark Doty and Carol Mirakove. If I have to single out one for excellence it will have to be John Wilkinson's long meditated essay on John Wieners, which is an obvious labour of love. A model of clear exposition, sensitive close-reading and scrupulous sympathy, Wilkinson's essay makes a good case for one of his (and my) favourite post-war American poets. Wieners' poetry is romantic, desperate, tender and funny — a Black Mountain poet neglected in favour of system builders, a Beat overshadowed by histrionic publicity hounds, a Boston poet of mental breakdown and distress whose self-pity is sometimes (unlike the others) resolved by the release of self-mocking laughter. This might make him appear saner than Lowell, Plath, Sexton and co., but nay, he is madder than the rest.

Wilkinson follows his subject in defining Wieners as the inheritor of a female line in poetry — Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie and H.D., responsive "to their observations of nature, to their love feeling and to an abbreviation of expression." Wilkinson himself sounds like Christopher Ricks at times — it's that kind of criticism — finding notions of courtly civility in poetry that is most often about brief, unhappy sexual relationships. This can seem inappropriate, but has the virtue (like Wieners) of lending dignity to the quicksilver and confusion of ordinary human emotions. He says that scorn is outside Wieners' emotional range, but there I must disagree: 'what matter if the boy's a lout' sounds mildly scornful to me, and his most powerful poem, 'Children of the Working Class', is vituperatively scornful of God for abandoning these his children in the public wards of state asylums. Wilkinson, a former health-care professional, suggests that Wieners tends to find a universal predicament in human suffering rather than a social cause. That is true of this great poem, where suffering humanity is the victim of a cosmic injustice for which the almighty must squarely take the blame. An excellent essay in a fine collection that should be sought out by lovers of American poetry. Here's John Wieners, personal but not obediently derivative:

In Public

Promise you wont forget
each time we met
we kept our clothes on
despite obvious intentions
to take them off,
seldom kissed or even slept,
talked to spend desire,
worn exhausted from regret.

Continue our relationship apart
under surveillance, torture, persecuted
confinement's theft; no must or sudden blows
when embodied spirits mingled
despite fall's knock
we rode the great divide
of falsehood, hunger and last year.

 

Copyright © John Muckle, 2006. All quotations are copyright © the authors.