Shearsman 61: Short Reviews (2)

Shearsman 61

Tony Frazer

Short Reviews (2)

R.F. Langley: Twine (Landfill Press, Norwich, 2004. 148x105mm, chapbook, 24pp, £2. No ISBN. Available from Landfill Press. 17 Waldeck Road, Norwich NR4 7PG, plus p&p charge of 50p. When bought with the other two chapbooks (see below), £5 plus £1 p&p.)
A new publication by R F Langley is always an event to be welcomed. He's not the most prolific of poets, so each shaving from this particular block is regarded in this house as something special. This little pocket-chapbook, poems printed on the recto pages only, is a fine little creation. The two poems it contains, 'Depending on the Weather' and 'Blues for Titania' have previously appeared in Stand and the LRB, where I have managed to miss both, so the chapbook is doubly welcome. If memory serves me right, I heard the author read the second of these two poems a few months ago in St. Ives. Oddly, both poems are 76 lines long (each taking 4 pages of this little booklet), but I won't hazard a guess as to why. Both are in line with Langley's more recent manner, which has seen the poems becoming denser, more compacted than before. 'Titania' is 'about' an insect, that is to say, it begins with an insect which becomes an object of contemplation as it wanders. Another beetle kicks off its companion poem, another reverie. Both are quite delightful pieces which need to be read carefully, although I suspect I'll be missing a number of the allusions, no matter what. Like many a fine modernist work, however, the allusions are interesting, but not essential to the enjoyment of the poems, and enjoy them I have, greatly. Since this costs all of £2, there's absolutely no reason not to buy it and put it alongside the author's wonderful Carcanet Collected. It will no doubt be a while before we get a new collection of book size, so little chapbooks such as these are essential to keep us enthusiasts going. More, please.

Thomas Wohlfahrt & Tobias Lehmkuhl (eds): Mouth to Mouth: Contemporary German Poetry in Translation (Giramondo Publishing, Newcastle, Australia. 271pp, paperback, A$24.95).

This anthology has its origins in a translation workshop at the Berlin Poesiefestival, 2003, involving ten German-language poets and 10 Australians, who translated each others' work. For the benefit of the final volume 5 more poets were added. The poets are: Thomas Kling, Kathrin Schmidt, Peter Waterhouse, Kerstin Hensel, Ulf Stolterfoht, Joachim Sartorius, Ursula Krechel, Marcel Beyer, Ulrike Draesner, Nico Bleutge, Sabine Scho, Raphael Urweider, Sabine Naef, Uwe Kolbe and Anja Utler. The translators are Australian poets Luke Davies, Dorothy Porter, Robert Gray, Judith Beveridge, Anthony Lawrence, Gig Ryan, Antigone Kefala, Samuel Wagan Watson, Joanne Burns and Peter Skrzynecki plus, from Europe, Michael Hofmann, Andrew Duncan, Richard Dove, Andrew Shields and myself.

Now, this is in fact a very good selection of writers and a number of these writers are particular favourites of mine. Some were new to me, and one or two were real discoveries, which means the anthologists have done their job well. The translators make up a list of fine Aussie poets and I can vouch for the powers of the other four European translators — though Michael Hofmann has made some odd comments about how difficult it was translating Durs Grünbein in the introduction to his recent edition of the Selected Poems from Farrar. I only know this second-hand, following some comments in the press from James Fenton. Here he's translating the excellent Thomas Kling, another poet whose work I would have thought was alien to him, if one could judge from his own poetry. (A dangerous assumption, though: Michael Hamburger did an excellent job translating poets whose work was radically different from his own; there's no intrinsic reason why Hofmann should not be able to do the same, and he has already proved himself a superb translator of German prose.) If I have a minor criticism of his versions of Kling, it's that he's refused to ape some of the strangenesses of Kling's diction, and I think this is needed. Many of the other translations are fascinating re-creations by confident poets, and that's always entertaining, regardless of lexical accuracy (which is not, of course, always the point). He's also done Marcel Beyer here, and with better results. I realise that slight carping such as this leaves me open to criticism for my own translation of Anja Utler, and I can in fact think of some valid criticisms that could be made of it. Translation is a tissue of choices, always trying to achieve the impossible. We know it's impossible, but if we can give even a shadow of the original and some sense of its sound and/or movement, that's about the best we can hope for. The more extreme the form of the original, the tougher those choices become. This is a good anthology, even if you have no German at all, though it obviously helps if you know what sounds the words on the opposite page make.

There was a similar project elsewhere in Germany last year, involving 5 English poets and 5 German-speaking poets, and an anthology resulting from that is due by mid-2005. It will make an interesting companion for this one.

Introducing the Hobo Poets: John Adair, Helen Hail, Oz Hardwick, RC Edrington, Peter Tomlinson, Brendan Hawthorne. (Bluechrome Publishing, Bristol, 2004. 97pp, paperback, £4.99)
Oz Hardwick: The Kind Ghosts (Bluechrome Publishing, Bristol, 2004. 53pp, paperback, £5.99)

Bluechrome is a new publisher from the Bristol area, from Portishead in fact, with a clear idea of what it's about. The books are attractive — or at least they are now, after a phase where they ran with truly awful covers and some odd typography inside. I have to say that the poetry here is not really the kind that I want to read very often — mainstream lightweight sub-Bloodaxe, or cod-Liverpudlian circa 1970 — but it's good that poets of all stripes have their outlets. Oz Hardwick is the most assured of the crop.

Daniel Kane: Seven
Leo Mellor: Things Settle (Landfill Press, Norwich, 2004. 148x105mm, chapbook, 24pp, £2 each. No ISBNs. Available from Landfill Press. 17 Waldeck Road, Norwich NR4 7PG, plus p&p charge of 50p. When bought with the R F Langley chapbook (see above), £5 plus £1 p&p.)

Daniel Kane's seven prose poems are entertaining squibs, pleasingly surreal in their juxtapositions. Leo Mellor's prose poems in Things Settle have something in common with Kane's but have not really settled down in style terms. At their best, the fragmentary perceptions, or images, pile onto one another to build a pleasant heap. The desire to close out the pieces occasionally seems at odds with the openness of their internal workings, however.

David Miller: Spiritual Letters (I-II) and other writings (Reality Street Editions, Hastings, 2004. 200x120mm, paperback, 56pp, £6.50 ISBN 1-874400-27-X)
I'm not the most avid follower of the prose-poem, but Miller's strike me as being amongst the most successful being produced at the moment in the UK. If you add this to the recent Shearsman volume The Waters of Marah (also available in the USA from Singing Horse Press, Philadelphia), you'll have a good overview of his work in this genre. The pieces here defy short quotation, but some have appeared in Shearsman before, so regular customers will be aware of what's involved. An attractive little book and well worth acquiring.

Zoë Skoulding: The Mirror Trade (Seren, Bridgend, 2004. A5 paperback, 72pp, £7.99. ISBN 1-85411-366-6)
An enterprising first full-length collection from an English poet, and co-editor of Skald, based in north Wales. Zoë Skoulding's work is quite various, though one tends to expect this from a first collection covering the work of a number of years, and (presumably) different stages of development. There is formal work here, there is work that nods towards open-field composition and there are the splendid columnar poems called 'Through Trees', four of which appeared in this magazine a year or so ago. Ms Skoulding has a good eye for image:

Out of the river's tape hiss
the green drone of leaves, the wow
and flutter of wind

(from 'Birches')

or

This is an entirely different forest, where the beeches
dance blindly to the sun and only one dark trunk
leans forward, a stained word.

(from 'Klimt's Buchenwald')

Many of these poems show a good eye for landscape, and an inclination towards imagery that delivers rather than being mere decoration. I find a number of the anecdotal poems here less assured and that might well be because they are older — many of the poems concerning India, for instance. The poems I take to be more recent show a greater level of compression, unnecessary verbiage excised, and an impressive level of control. I especially liked the poems in the first section of the book, the trees, and this one below, 'Uruk', which says ten times more than the average moral strident political piece, thanks to its reticence, its delicacy, and the rightness of the words employed. Its final two stanzas read:

To deconflict an airspace
you have to think in four dimensions,
          three you know
then all the trajectories.

Scored lines in clay converge
          in twenty-four hour satellite
pictographs to tally sacks of corn
while Uruk crumbles;
a pattern of raised surfaces
          rewrites itself in dust.

A good one, then, and there are signs here that the next book could well be a book to be reckoned with.

Geoffrey Squires: Untitled and other poems 1975-2002 (Wild Honey Press, Bray, Co. Wicklow, 2004. 9x6ins paperback, 210pp, £10/€16/$16. ISBN 1-903090-45-8)
Another book to fall into the 'long-overdue and long-awaited' category. Geoffrey Squires, an Irish poet based in Hull, where he taught at the university until recently, has published several small collections and pamphlets with Irish presses, such as New Writers' Press, and English ones such as Menard. You had to be dedicated, however, to track all these down (which I did). Thanks to Wild Honey, which has also recently brought us Maurice Scully's Livelihood, we now have a large selection of his work. Part of me would have preferred a Collected, or a Collected Earlier Poems and then another volume concentrating on the more recent work, but I recognise the financial imperatives.

The reason for this is a pronounced shift in his work that has occurred in recent years, with the poems reaching more and more for a level of abstraction that I find extraordinary in English. And I mean abstraction — I do not use it as a euphemism for 'difficult'. Take these poems as an example of the kind of progression that has occurred in Squires' work (none of which, by the way, carries titles):

Finding my way back
through small fields

to where the house should be

clothes catch on briars
a stone dislodged from a wall

rolls to rest in the grass
local granite outcrops

gorse clinging to them
in wild yellow flower
all this

the mountains go unseen

(from Drowned Stones, 1975)

Water somewhere, water running, running away
through stones, down small steep gullies
miniature falls and pools, a stream running
through the heart of the wood
a sound so inner it might be in one's head
but for the occasional flash of sunlight
through green leaves, catching the eye

(from Poem in Three Sections, 1983)

In the quiet of      in the stillness of

the garden in the garden in the evening
who could believe it

absolute hold of world
nothing moves because nothing can

except for the mind which moves over things
passing over them like a light shadow
which darkens them for a moment only a moment

and hardly at all

(from Landscape and Silence, 1996)

Each time a little or a little more

all these movements gathered into one shadow
listen      wait      do not

and to find some history for them      something
that they lack      without which they seem
curiously superficial
merely what they are

(from Untitled III, 2002)

Now, I must also say that an astonishing change has occurred in the poem called Untitled II. I published several sections from what was then a 57-section work in issue 50 of this magazine (see here). Back then it was similar in form to Untitled III as well as the poem that I assume became Untitled I (not included here). U II is now a riot of lines scattered across the page like confetti, almost as if there's been a cut-up of the original, and it's six pages long now, probably equivalent to 18 pages of the original. I wonder what caused its dismemberment? In any event Untitled III returns to the spare structure of Landscape and Silence, a book I've admired very much for a good many years. Squires' poetry is meditative, spare, increasingly abstract, and a wonderful companion. Over the years they have opened up, resisting the closure so beloved of everyday poetry in our age, and encompassing the world just as it seems to be eliding it.