Evolution of the Bridge by Maxine Chernoff (Salt Publishing, Cambridge 2004. Paperback, 144pp, £9.95. ISBN 1844710386)
Nine Lessons from the Dark by Adam Thorpe (Jonathan Cape, London, 2003. Paperback, 64pp, £9.00. ISBN 0224063855)
The Solo Leopard by Ruth Padel (Chatto & Windus, London 2004. 79pp, £8.99. Paperback, ISBN 0-701-17621-0)
Corpus by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape, London, 2004. 84pp, £8.00. Paperback, ISBN 0224073427)

Maxine Chernoff's collection of selected prose poems, Evolution of the Bridge, covers thirty years of her work. The following quotes are from two recent reviews:

Maxine Chernoff's prose poems have the metapoetic extravagance of the likes of Henri Michaux, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. Evolution of the Bridge should establish her as one of America's great fabulists. (Michel Delville)

Chernoff is a funny, invincible poet. Reading her is like watching the triumphant survival of wit and intelligence. (Jayne Anne Phillips)

Unfortunately, I could find no examples of her 'metapoetic extravagance' or 'wit'. The stories in this volume (I cannot really describe them as prose poems) are written in a matter-of-fact, girly-magazine style and overlaid with surrealist-like flourishes that are adolescent. Here are some examples:

The French beret was invented in Paris in 1828 during an epidemic of ringworm.
("Hats Around the World")

Suppose your parents had called you Dirk. Wouldn't that be motive enough to commit a heinous crime, just as Judies always become nurses and Brads, florists?
("A Name")

Since I've left Chicago, I always worry about my mother's plans for Thanksgiving. It's not that she can't join me out there — she can if she'd like — but she rarely feels up to travelling.
("Nomads")

I compare my situation to a piece of luncheon meat destined for a sandwich.
("The Moat")

Two soldiers, masquerading as trees, pass me casually on the street. [. . .] I walk on only to come upon two trees dressed as soldiers.
("The Moat")

I couldn't play it. No. I couldn't play it. All those years the majestic instrument stood by my bedside. Like an arthritic butler, it was the first thing that saluted me in the morning.
("The Edible Harp")

I should point out that naming this last story "The Edible Harp" as a reference (presumably) to Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" does not make it metapoetic. Chernoff's language does not draw attention to itself semantically, is lacking in lexical invention and does not acknowledge the plasticity of language. I wish I could be more generous in this review because from the photo of her on the back cover of the collection she seems a nice woman.

Adam Thorpe's Nine Lessons from the Dark is finely crafted collection of poems. Thorpe has a slight solemnity of expression that is reminiscent of Geoffrey Hill — although not as laboured. In the poem "Sacrifice" Thorpe extends a nod in the direction of Seamus Heaney in an attempt to fuse a sort of Wordsworthian confessional with clinical description of a mummified corpse found in a peat bog. Far from attempting to make the corpse a laboured metaphor as Heaney does, Thorpe explores his own subjectivity whilst in the midst of the natural world:

A walk alone over the fen
as dusk fell had already
throttled me with fear: all

at sea, divining my own death
in heartbeat twitches, lost
among brier and heather
where the sandy paths gave out

He soon senses something else inhabiting the scene with him:

I sensed as a medium might
in some Islington cabal

a second presence, no more than a hint,
watchful of me.

It transpires that the watcher is his son . . . or perhaps the mummified corpse — there is an ambiguity placed here. The description of the corpse itself is Heanyesque:

the body shrivelled to the leather
of its stitched hood, stubble

that gave that vexed, late-
night look under the calm

of someone who did not scream

"Cairn" is, again, Wordsworthian in the sense that it records the experience of an individual's subjectivity against the backdrop of nature. But this approach to poetry is, in my view, extremely limiting. In and of itself there is nothing wrong with this approach to the writing of verse. It has much to recommend it, and it is easily understood by the general reader. Yet its assertion of a recognisable, stable and constant "self" can lead to a poetry that is heavily dependent on a prose-like narrative structure, and a syntax that leaves little room for nuance or connotation. Having said this, however, "Cairn" does have some very interesting lines:

over the whispering of marram on the brae

it stretched up out of a slew of scree

the peak's thank offering to the sky

Almost half of the poems in this collection are cast in the same mould (in varying degrees) as "Cairn" including "Message in a Bottle", "The Proposal", "Troubles" and "The Blitz in Ealing". But poems such as "Nine Lessons from the Dark", "Aux Jardins", "Recent Summers" among others have more poetic foundations. All in all, this collection presents poems that are skilfully executed, thoughtful, and well phrased.

Ruth Padel's The Soho Leopard is a kaleidoscope of linguistic invention. Yet one review on the back cover fails to do it full justice with comments such as:

Colloquial, beautifully cadenced, popular and vibrant [. . .] The glamour recalls Sex and the City: this alone would make her voice an original one.

This was written by Stephen Knight in The Independent on Sunday — presumably so as to keep in harmony with the marketing strategies employed by the bigger poetry publishers to sell their poets as non-intellectual, "chatty" and fashionable. Padel, to her credit, is none of these things. Her poetry is, as a another reviewer says,

Highly seductive, as if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in.
(Times Literary Supplement)

The collection is full of references and allusions to such things as the Socratic dialogues, Greek mythology, Mayan myth, Burmese history, anthropology, zoology, Tudor England, Buddhism, and Siberian archaeology. This may seem off-putting to those who like their poetry written by short story writers such as Jackie Kay and Carol Ann Duffy but Padel's poems also allude to the more demotic. The post-modern hallmarks of intertextuality, odd juxtapositions, shifting of registers, references to popular culture etc. are all represented here. This is all packaged in a language and style that is sometimes colloquial and sometimes lyrical — with the joins hardly visible. For example, consider the mixing of registers represented by the following lines from the poem "Yellow Gourds with Jaguar in Dulwich Pizza Hut":

Hang on a minute, soldier. No more of your party talk
or flashing the glitter lining to your fake Armani suit.
You're not the guy you were.

and

                              I found your stallion
thudding from the Forest-of-No-Horizon

The rest of the poem has similar instances. I particularly liked her 'with blood / on his empty saddle' which is clearly alluding to Bob Dylan's 'with blood on your saddle' from his song "Idiot Wind". Other Dylanesque touches in this poem are: 'Sky-Shutting-In-Time', 'Forest-of-No-Horizon', and 'Seventeen deep-frozen Xeroxes'. There is also another one in the poem "The Soho Leopard" — 'The avenue of the dead'.
Every poem in this volume is jam-packed with so much linguistic inventiveness that it is impossible for me to itemise them here, so you will have to suffice with just a few:

From "The Red-Gold Border":

Closed-bracket lovers,
watching their own flame flicker

From "Jaguar Quartet":

                    Twelve hours he burns,
tattooing the blue with peyote rosettes
from his ormolu skin

The shadow-clot Underworld

Weave him a spirit house from chalice vine.
Hang it from adobe cactus

The secret of apotropic

From "The Burmese Nat of Shape-Changing and Betel-Nut Sends a Dream to the Corrupt Official Who Ordered the Beheading of his Secret Beloved":

                    Anahuath jewel
   paraded by the Demoiselles of Xipe
who created the sun

one of the wild ungulates of Yakutia,
   the night-tide of Gaviscon

She also shifts back and forth in chronological time, making temporal connections that are bizarre. In "Yellow Gourds with Jaguar in Dulwich Pizza Hut" the first stanza is "set" in the present with the poet addressing a contemporary man in a 'fake Armani suit", then the enjambment which connects this stanza to the next acts as a transition to the distant mythological past. A place where the contemporary man has become a horse-backed hunter with crossbow on the Rio Negro dunes. But he got this crossbow as a gift from the poet when they were in her kitchen — which means we are back in the present again. This sort of temporal relocation is present in most of the poems. There is much more I could say about this collection: such as her use of ambiguity and the oblique phrase (sadly missing in most contemporary British poetry). But it would take too long. All I can say is that this is the best collection by a British poet that I have read in quite some time.

Michael Symmons Roberts' collection, Corpus, is comprised of poems that are formally and thematically conventional. The use of language and syntax is pleasing but not exceptional. There is a tendency to slip into prose description, which mars the effect of some of the better poems. For example the first three stanzas of "Ascension Day" are:

In the Blue Lobster Café backyard,
the head chef — arms outstretched —
bears what looks like a body,

but conjures six cook's shirts,
hot-laundered, pegged out,
dripping in a drench of sun.

As they dry, their half-hearted
semaphore becomes
more urgent, untranslatable.

These opening stanzas (despite the presence of 'half-hearted semaphore') are not poetry — merely prose. This can be seen once they are displayed in the following manner:

In the Blue Lobster Café backyard, the head chef — arms outstretched — bears what looks like a body, but conjures six cook's shirts, hot-laundered, pegged out, dripping in a drench of sun. As they dry, their half-hearted semaphore becomes more urgent, untranslatable.

This is not to say that it is not exceptionally good prose. It is very good — but it is not poetry. However, the poem "Food For Risen Bodies – 1" is. It has a dream-like quality that is difficult to trace to any single stylistic cause. It has a certain disorientating effect similar (although not as extreme) to John Ashbery's work: in that it leads you to expect "meaning" but subverts this expectation. The difference between this poem and one by Ashbery (there are many differences, but I am just highlighting two) is that this poem has a stable register and is slightly more lyrical. The poem opens with:

A rare dish is right for those who
have lain bandaged in a tomb for weeks:

This proverb-like utterance is syntactically logical and meaningful — at least semantically. A 'rare dish' would, indeed, be welcome to someone entrapped anywhere for weeks. But in this instance the location is a tomb, and the occupant is bandaged. We can, therefore, conclude that a mummified body is being referred to.

To further ratify meaning we then have presented to us a list of items that have been left in this tomb:

quince and quail to demonstrate
that fruit and birds still grow on trees,

eels to show that fish still needle streams.
Rarer still, some blind white crabs,

not bleached but blank, from such
a depth of ocean that the sun would drown

if it approached them. [. . .]

The opposition between life and death is clearly forgrounded by the use of the word "still" in the first two of these stanzas. That 'fruit and birds still grow on trees' must be some small comfort to the corpse, yet it signals to us a connection to life, growth and the cycle of nature, that the corpse clearly does not represent. Note, also, that 'birds still grow on trees' — in what way this is possible, or in what sense is left unclear. It seems to function as a surrealistic flourish to enhance a poetic line. As does the phrase in the next stanza: "some blind white crabs". Presumably the crabs would not be alive (or remain living long) when left in the tomb, therefore, in what sense are they blind?

I particularly like the line: 'a depth of ocean that the sun would drown' because the syntax makes its statement ambiguous. Does it mean that the sun would drown in the ocean because it is so deep, or that the sun would drown the ocean? The answer does not matter because this is a poem and not a short story. The poem concludes with:

          [ . . .] Two-thirds
of the earth is sea; and two-thirds of that sea

— away from currents, coasts and reefs —
is lifeless, colourless, pure weight.

This unexpectedly takes us away from the tomb and into a dream-like open-ended pseudo-factual statement that, for me, is great poetry — but difficult to describe why.

Copyright © Jeffrey Side, 2004. All quotes above are copyright © by the authors concerned.