Shearsman 55

Tony Frazer

 

Books received, recommended & otherwise noteworthy

Dennis Barone: Walking Backwards
(Quale Press. Florence, Mass., 2002. ISBN 0-9700663-6-8, 31pp, chapbook, $5).

Splendid short collection of very short prose pieces, the second of its kind within a short period by Barone from this press. Good, clean, minimalist production at the service of the texts. Recommended.

Anne Blonstein: the blue pearl (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. 110pp, pb, £8.95.)

For those who don't know Ms Blonstein's work – as I did not before seeing this book – she is a freelance translator and editor based in Basel. No blurbs here, and a singularly vague cover note. Inside there are three long texts: the rock-that-gave-birth-to-the-sky, hathor in egypt and antilineated dreams. Each of these is a series of poems, mostly less than a page in length, some very much less than that. The texts are laid out in a kind of field-composition, and many use speech-excerpts as a motor.

Each section (stanza?) of the first poem (rock), is in quotation marks, and sounds like a gnomic utterance, quoted for effect. The accumulation of these – and the registers and discourses represented by these voices are very different – makes for an odd, but fascinating surface. Some parts do however run the risk of apparent inconsequentiality – always a risk when the words are pared down to an absolute minimum: there's nowhere left to hide. Thus poem IV has: "if spoken four times", "if summoned four times" & "if sung / the fourth time", and nothing more; XXIX by contrast has the far more diverting fragments: "there were times she was inspired / by the shape of the tools alone", "filling cracks / like blue fills losses" & "you can't really climb / into someone else's dream". I find the latter section oddly satisfying, but I'm unconvinced by the poem as a whole, even if I do recognise, and value, the interesting experiment that it represents.

hathor reeks of ancient Egypt, uses found texts, and the snakes of the opening part slither through the entire text. I love lines like "a sparrow is / passion, migrant / of rusted tracts", even if I am uncertain as the role of those words in the entire structure. It may well be that, in true modernist style, the fragment is the ruling force here, shards of broken discourses being all that is left as the poet grabs on to a confused and broken reality.

The last poem (antilineated dreams) is an altogether different animal, though the method is similar. Here communication is less broken, the voice more confident of having something communicable to say, images of war and horror, interspersed with the most affecting phrases ("emerging / like a strand of hennaed hair, (oboe / or clarinet?), from orchestral dusk, a note / spared", for instance, or " I built this temporary altar / for the 12th anniversary / of a mother's death. / three damask roses. / photograph / and one red candle. / then I drank / two blue moons"). For all its beauties and fascination antilineated dreams strikes me as having no final form; whole sections of it could have been removed without any apparent detriment to the whole, and the form as presented here seems fluid, unfixed. In some ways that is its attraction. And it is interesting to see a poet handling words as confidently as Ms Blonstein does here, notwithstanding the usual post-modern doubts as to the possibility of communication. A most unusual book, and one that I'm going to read again. Anne Blonstein seems an interesting discovery.

Christoph Buchwald & Michael Krüger: Jahrbuch der Lyrik 2004.
(Verlag C.H. Beck, Munich, 2003. ISBN 3-406-50273-3. 159pp, pb, €12.90).

The latest in the annual series from the Beck publishing house, with Krüger as this year's invited co-editor. Much the same as before, quite frankly: there are a lot of good poems in here, a broad spectrum of styles (perhaps too broad), and the usual absurd thematic divisions. The book is not a guide to what's good in contemporary German poetry, but it does show the range of what's being done: there are a lot of big names present, most of whom are likely to be invitees, plus the equivalent of our little-press poets, gathered from the vast annual mailbag. My one slight criticism is that the series is a little too well-behaved: we could do with some more contrarian figures to shake it up a little.

Alison Bundy, Keith Waldrop & Rosmarie Waldrop (eds): One Score More. The Second Twenty Years of Burning Deck (Burning Deck Press, Providence, RI, 2002. 240pp, pb, $15)

Time passes quickly, I can remember getting the last such celebratory volume from Burning Deck for review. Yes, it was 20 years ago, and I'm not sure I want to be reminded of the passage of so much time. This is a wonderful reminder, for those who needed it, of the superb track record of the Waldrops' press in Providence, Rhode Island. THis is not really an anthology: it's more of a calling card and, as such, it's really impressive. There are snippets from the press' German series Dichten= and from the série d'écriture French series, that Burning Deck took over from Spectacular Diseases. There are excerpts from books and chapbooks. Names include Paul Auster, Lisa Jarnot, Elizabeth Robinson, Paol Keineg, Pascal Quignard, Emmanuel Hocquard, Christopher Middleton, Anthony Barnett, John Yau, Walter Abish, Harry Mathews, Forrest Gander &c…. You get the picture.

Richard Burns: Book With No Back Cover
(David Paul Books, London, 2003. 105pp, pb, ISBN 0-9540542-3-7. £7.99.

This is Shearsman Book of the Month for July 2003. Go here for the full review.

M.T.C. Cronin: beautiful, unfinished ~ PARABLE/SONG/CANTO/POEM
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2003. Isbn 1-876857-29-3. 103pp, pb, £8.95 / $12.95).

This is Shearsman Book of the Month for August 2003. Go here for the review.

 

Ian Davidson: Human Remains & Sudden Movement
(West House Books, Sheffield, 2003. 24pp, chapbook, £3.50).

The first five of these poems appeared in Shearsman a while ago, so it was a fair bet that I'd like the whole book, and I do. Davidson's work should in fact be more widely available, and this sequence of 17 poems will do until someone brings out a large collection, which I think is long overdue. As with a number of the writers that I like, no review can pretend to tell what these poems are 'about'; written in a style that is informed by both British and American predecessors of varying avant-garde stripes, this is not a 'popular' poetry and probably never will be, given that they are probably too abstracted from reality for mainstream contemporary taste.

But, observable reality is there, even if it is not explained; it comes in flashbacks, glimpses. Sometimes it even erupts into the foreground as in the first two stanzas of the seventh poem:

at the bottom of the steps a lighthouse
before coming into daylight the
kittiwakes close enough to

touch the puffins like helicopters inside
a virtual world speed indicates
flying out of the shelter of the cliff then
turning in the wind at some angles

This is a poetry grounded in the person of the poet. There is no 'I' in the poems, but the poet's presence is felt throughout, filtering experiences and landscapes, shuffling and blending them, draining them through a colander of tightly-wrought language. Excellent stuff: more please.

Nate Dorward (ed): Removed for Further Study. The Poetry of Tom Raworth
(The Gig, Toronto, 2003. ISBN 0-9685294-3-7. 288pp, pb, C$25, US$19, £15, €22.)

There are 4 uncollected texts by Raworth here, something which is always welcome, but the book is really about the 23 essays / studies from a wide range of contributors. They vary in tone from the festschrift celebration to serious academic study and back to illuminating personal memoir. There are a couple of studies of Ace – one of them by John Wilkinson –, which surprises me a little, notwithstanding that book’s interest as a new departure in the author's work in the early-mid 1970s.

Writing is also covered once, but Eternal Sections – to my mind the magnum opus of Raworth's work so far – is not covered. Notwithstanding that minor blemish, this is a book of many pleasures, a good deal of useful information, and one that actually enlightens and opens up some difficult texts for the reader. Which is what good critical writing is supposed to be all about, but usually isn't. Congratulations to Nate Dorward on a fine job – this is just the book to have alongside this years's huge Raworth Collected.

Ian Duhig: The Lammas Hireling (Picador, London, 2003. 69pp, pb, £7.99)
This is my third acquisition since I became a member of the UK's Poetry Book Society. The first two (Muldoon* and Collins) were abysmal; so is this. Actually that's not fair. The title poem here is really very good indeed: tightly written, not a word out of place, a nice air of mystery, quite the pièce de résistance. On the previous page, alas, we get the poem Blood, this book's opening poem, which is a formula piece, a list-poem, with the list this time being period teenage hip clothing, observed with a light self-deprecation before the poem hits its final punch-line. They'll love it at public readings, but the truth is this is the kind of meretricious poem that is sent out there to perform, so that we can all have a little giggle together afterwards. Its light sneer is unworthy, and it does not belong alongside the beautifully-crafted title poem.

Duhig has a good reputation, enough of one that even I looked forward to opening these covers. Carol Ann Duffy says he's "the most original poet of his generation". Needless to say there's little evidence of such originality in this book. What we do get is yards of anecdote ('storyteller and balladeer' he is, according to the rear cover… hm). We get this:

I was a Soho nightclub doorman,
Which doesn't make me Martin Bormann:
You don't stop fights by tuneful humming
And most I brittled had it coming.

(Cutler's Poetry, first 4 lines – I like the use of the word 'brittled', but nothing else;)


and


Chuck someone out for too much booze, he
Comes back blazing with an Uzi.

(op. cit.)

That last, again one which will cause belly-laughs at a reading, reminds me of a Two Ronnies sketch from early 70s British TV, where the line went (in cod Gilbert & Sullivan): "I love you Iolanthe / You're the only girl I fanthy".

There are several poems that are laboured exercises, with all the inspiration of someone who's set himself a task when faced with a the tyranny of the blank page. DXCVII is one such, and opens thus:

Romantic histories of England's Christian conversion
Begin with the future Pope Gregory at a slave market,
Stunned into punning by a vision of Angelic Angles
And instantly deciding to evangelize their people.
But you must know even then your distant archipelago
Boasted Saints, some still recognized in our Calendar.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. There is a rhythm in there somewhere, to be fair, but this is prose. I'm all for the reclaiming for poetry of the prosaic, or rather the possibilities that prose offers – to avoid the pejorative – but there's no point if all you do is divide the prose up into lines. It still has to justify why you've chosen that form, and journalistic prose divided into lines does not poetry make, I would suggest. And this is bad prose, at that.

Now there are a couple of good ballads here, if ballads are your thing, so don't assume the entire book is a loss. But if only Ian Duhig had decided to write more poems like The Lammas Hireling, and less poems like those excerpted above… I'd like to quote that poem, but it really needs quoting entire, and the copyright laws won't extend to my doing that here. So, go to the bookstore, look at the poem on pages 4 and 5, and you'll see him at his best. A couple of rollicking ballads aside, the rest of the book is a waste of bookshelf space. I'm sorry if this all sounds intemperate; it is, and I think if the title poem had been worse, I might have been less upset by the rest of this book… if anyone out there disagrees with me, I'd be glad to hear from them. The selectors at the PBS obviously do.

*Bear in mind that this dreadful volume has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize and is now shortlisted for the Forward Prize in the UK. This means that I'm wrong, according to the great and the good, and the arbiters of opinion.

Martin Harrison: Summer
(Paper Bark Press, Sydney, 2001. ISBN 1-877004-84-7, 81pp, pb, A$25).

I thought Harrison's previous volume, The Kangaroo Farm (also from Paper Bark) a complete knockout, its long-lined poems extraordinarily liberating in their engagement with the narrative impulse, something I see fluffed so badly, so often. Summer, which I bought on the strength of its predecessor, is less consistent and less impressive, though once again the longer-lined poems, such as Farm Diptych, Midday and A Breath of Wind on a Summer Night, are the most impressive. It's hard to dislike a poem that closes thus:

[…..] Just for a moment
it's possible—whether through a voice echoing
in a cobbled courtyard or through the quick unravelling
of a hand-held implement, a day, a zenith of overstrong light—
to make tracks under the sun's narrow defile: even
to think of the rich man, weeping in the needle's eye.

Brian Henry: American Incident (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2002. ISBN 0-876857-52-8. 157pp, pb, £9.95, $13.95)

This third collection (and first in the UK) by Brian Henry, editor of Verse, is an unsettling collection. Unsettling because it feels thrown together, unedited. In amongst the poems and the prose-poems, there is what the cover describes as a 'scattered novella', i.e. stray lines from a presumably longer prose work, called Patricide in C Minor. The quality of the prose there is frankly poor, although this could well be deliberate, along with the knowing, arch tone employed throughout. That tone leaks through into the poems as well, and is undoubtedly the reason I found this book grating on me as I read, rubbing me the wrong way.

There is much here that is clever, ironic, delivered with a coy wink and a light slap on the rear, but for all the demonstrable skill with words, the results tend to clunk, for the sound of these poems can grate like a door hinge in need of WD-40. There may well be a diverting 50-page collection in here somewhere, but I wouldn't want to try and find it. One to avoid, I'm afraid.

Jen Hofer (ed./trans.): Sin puertas visibles: An Anthology of Poetry by Mexican Women
(University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2003. ISBN 0-8229-5798-1, 241pp, pb, $22.50).

This is the latest in a rash of anthologies of Mexican poetry coming out of the US. This one is somewhat different, though. While it is a gendered anthology – probably a good idea given the poor representation of women in Mexican anthologies (the recent wonderful Reversible Monuments excepted) – it is not the usual selection driven by the editor's need to classify and rank.

In this case Jen Hofer advertised in all the places she could think of throughout Mexico – cultural supplements in the literate press, literary journals, notice boards in government-sponsored Arts Centres. She then selected the best of the work that came in, translated it, hey presto, one anthology. It could have bombed, of course, but it hasn't. The voltage level here is not up to that of the feminine stars of Reversible Monuments (Gervitz, Cross, Volkow, Hernández, Boullosa, Baranda), but there is nonetheless a lot of good work here. There are eleven poets in all, ranging in age from 32 to 44, all of them urban intellectuals. All bar three were born in or live in one of the big three cities (Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey); of those three, two are in northern border towns (Tijuana & Ciudad Juarez), and one is within a short distance of the border. It would have been good to see work from southern writers, perhaps, but you can only use what you're given, and the methods used to attract work were pretty fair. The translations, all by the editor, are excellent.

The one difficulty reviewing a book like this is that there is no real unifying theme on which to hang a review; the range of styles is broad and the quality is pretty high. Here's the opening of Three from Of Those We Used to Be and Those We Were (De los que estábamos y éramos) by Ofelia Pérez Sepúlveda:

Once upon a time there would be the bluest bitch of the pack.
Her history would begin where histories begin,
in a realm, on a day.
Dog of anonymous streets, the entire city would fit in her paws,
since her mother's name contains the four cardinal points and the
seventy orifices through which the weeping escapes,
through which a man enters.

 

Habría una vez la perra más azul de la manada.
Su historia empezaría donde empiezan las historias,
en un reino, un día.
Perra de anónimas calles, cabría en sus patas toda la ciudad,
pues el nombre de su madre tiene los cuatro puntos cardinales y los
setenta orificios por los que el llanto sale,
por donde entra un hombre.

 

Or the more gnomic utterances of Dolores Dorantes, youngest of the book's poets :

Blank sand
all that glitters not
on the wall of glass
in the depths of the wall
beside the tin-plate
(the sand aglow)
Mill-like hands
that cut
serve
sift
all that glitters not

 

Arena in blanco
no todo lo que billa
en el muro de vidrio
en el fondo del muro
junto a la hoja-lata
(la arena encendida)
De molino las manos
que cortan
sirven
ciernen
no todo lo que brilla

 

Or Laura Solórzano's Mute Poem / Poema mudo:

I spell out my house in newly dead tree. I spell out Sunday of clear omissions and then languor of a life doubled over and described. Using all the letters, I put a strangeness ion the coordinates of a suspended pain. I spell out this throbbing of eyes open where I would think they'd close. Where the bed imposes a palate of months. Letters tend to feel another pronunciation, another labial fissure through which they emerge savage and happy like unexpected panes of glass.

 

Deletreo mi casa en árbol de nueva muerte. Deletreo domingo de claras omisiones y después languidez de vida doblada y descrita. Con todas las letras, pongo una extrañeza en las coordenadas de un dolor suspendido. Deletreo este batir de ojos abiertos donde sospecho se cierran. Donde la cama impone un paladar de meses. Suelen las letras sentir otra pronunciación, otra labial fisura por donde emergen salvajes y alegres como cristales inesperados.

 

I can't really give more than a brief idea of this book, but it's one that is definitely worth acquiring. In common with most US university presses, the quality of production here is high, as is the cover-price. It's hard to judge how much filtering has gone on by the editor, and thus how much this work approximates her own preconceived interests. It seems safe to assume that writers of rhyming ballads would not have got very far in the selection process, though the invitation did not specifically exclude such work. Stylistically, most of the work is comfortably in the post-Paz Mexican tradition, with surrealism an argument that's long been won and absorbed into the bloodstream. The emergence of more new female poetic voices in Mexico is to be celebrated, just as one should stand in awe of the achievements of some of the older generation of women that first established names in this most patriarchal of societies.

David Kennedy & Rupert Loydell: Eight Excursions
(The Cherry on the Top Press, Sheffield, 2003. 400pp, chapbook, £5).

I like the work of both these poets, but I'm not at all sure about this volume of collaborations. Collaborative poems often seem to be less than the sum of their parts, and I'm afraid this is another one. I'll wait for the next solo venture from each of them.

Copyright © Shearsman Books, 2003.
The copyright in all quotations is held by the authors, or their estates. There are many additional reviews here, not included in the print version of this issue, which only had space for shortened versions of the reviews of Jennifer Moxley, Peter Robinson and George Stanley.