Tim Cumming: The Rumour (108pp pb £8.50. Isbn 1-900152-95-9)
Dean Young: Ready-made Bouquet (119pp pb £8.50. Isbn 1-900152-99-1)
Joanne Merriam:The Glaze from Breaking (78pp pb £7.50. Isbn 1-905024-00-2)
Brian Louis Pearce: Growling (76pp pb £7.50. Isbn 1-900152-98-3);
Phil Bowen: Starfly (72pp pb £7.50. Isbn 1-900152-90-8)
Campbell McGrath: Heart of Anthracite (100pp pb £8.50. Isbn 1-905024-01-0)

Tim Cumming, in his latest collection The Rumour takes his reader through a whole spectrum of emotions, from a harrowing, painfully precise, dissection of all the nuances of personal break up, to the rather dazed, insomniac, agony and ecstasy of parenthood. At the same time, as the title implies, there is also some ambiguous, contemporary threat running through the collection. One is often stunned by the 'eureka' quality of many of the images and can enjoy the originality and versatility with which he takes them on a journey through the layers of their possible associations. In particular he seems to have a fondness for landscape and motorway images. In 'G spot' for example, the shocking exactness of a woman's lack of interest in sex, 'Sex was like a glass-bottomed boat/lined with men's flattened faces/that twisted when they came,' is then contrasted later with the highly unusual motorway image of her achieving orgasm, 'like a mile of traffic clearing from a junction'. There were a number of his parenthood poems that stuck with me for days, with one memorable line after the other. In 'Punctuation', for example, he describes how, 'You didn't ever stop getting nearer/you just kept going off the paper' and in 'Dreamland' contradictory emotions are cleverly described, and satisfyingly exact:

We handle her like an antique,
we raise her over our heads like a trophy,
she's there like the ticking of a clock,
it's as if she's loaded
and pointed straight at us.
She might go off at any minute.
We laugh at everything she does.
She's a brand new comedy icon.
Getting her to sleep is like picking a lock.
…… ..

She stares at us, wearing a frown
like a day-old crown or a ring of thorns.
The hours pass as quick
and strange as Aztec priests.

In general, this collection is filled with striking one(or two)-liners particularly evident in his poems on break up, 'The best bits of life were like the golden age/of cinema. There's nothing you'd want to cut'. 'The Long Spin' is striking as a poem about the time when you still live together after splitting up, 'Our last days were like amateur dramatics' and concludes, 'we'd travelled too far together/not to make that last incredible journey'. I thoroughly enjoyed `Rumour' and the only point I would make is that in places I think cutting some of the poems would have allowed the best of the imagery to stand out more.

If you enjoy poetry that walks a fine line with stand up, then Dean Young is the poet for you. Ready-made Bouquet is seriously funny in places, and has a 'motor mouth' quality to it, for as he says, there is, 'so much to say and shut up about'. With a sustained breathless air Young bombards us with facts and questions covering all human experience on a macro and micro-level, much of the humour stemming from the apparently random way he switches between these two extremes. Thus we get a whistle stop tour of science, mythology, art, poets' lives, the writing process, basically civilisation and just about everything, broken up with anecdotes, asides, trivia from his own life that, taken all together leave you with a rather wonderful carpe diem experience, as if to say, now really isn't everything in life so interesting. Take his account in 'Sky Dive' of why he jumped out of an aeroplane, 'to forget a beautiful woman who was sleeping / with some guy instead of me, who made guitars/from scratch'. You feel he is letting you in on his life, as he says in another poem, 'A guy I used to shoplift with'. Often humour develops from free association as he just lets his mind wander where it will such as in 'Lives of the Inventors' where he discusses Leonardo da Vinci's brain, 'In some cultures, eating the brains/of your ancestors is the polite thing to do'. Sometimes poems are just funny because he takes some single idea on an Eddie Izzard-like surreal journey, such as in the wonderful 'Myth Mix':

Which gets Zeus's attention so he throws
down lightening bolts which is pretty much
his response to everything, vaporising some
cheerleaders but mostly just blasting holes
in the ground which people use as basements
for buildings where they go and invent ways
to kill dandelions that also kill ants and….

Yet be in no doubt, in the midst of the madness this is poetry that has serious things to say about the human condition. With regards friendships, the poem 'He said turn here' is a particularly funny and touching account of his friend Tony, who while going through a bad patch is comforted by the relationship he has with his lake:

and some nights in New Mexico,
he can hear it howling,
searching for him in the desert
so we're glad Tony has this lake
and we promise to come back in August
and swim with him cross,
maybe even race.

Finally in 'Whale-Watch', we see the zany way Young half-conceals the serious message of the poem which opens, 'Sometimes you may feel alone and crushed/ by what you cannot accomplish' but concludes, 'You're not alone./You may see a whale.' The rest of the poem provides a whole pot pourri of practical and impractical advice for daily living, my favourite of which I shall leave you with:

Do not encourage small children
to play the trombone as the shortness
of their arms may prove quite frustrating,
imprinting a lifelong aversion to music
although in rare cases a sense of unreachability
may inspire operas of delicate auras.

If Young's poetry forces us to race at breakneck speed then Joanne Merriam's inaugural collection The Glaze from breaking invites us to relax in a bath of aromatic oils surrounded by wax candles. Her deliciously sensuous prose poems, though frequently dealing with traumatic subject matter (like Cumming, the aftermath of personal break up), draw on imagery from the natural world where every sensation seems magnified or intensified. She reminded me a lot of the early work of Boris Pasternak where the poet does not so much observe the natural world as fuse with it breaking down the boundaries between speaker and landscape. By way of example consider the following poem:

As she talks, their foreheads touch. The garden is all around them. The rasp of water in the fountain makes the night more impenetrable. he reaches out

to move strands of her hair back behind her ear. the water caresses the emerald crazy spring, in love with the new velvet whorl of her petal lips, and they fall into each other, and the sky opens and a mantle of tempests comes, ending the silence in the groves. Overcome by water, their petals fall on their knees,

their innocent movements, the frisky roses all nude and dizzy.

('The Kiss')

This poem gives us something more than metaphor: the poem's subject is both the flowers and the lovers. There is a wonderful dynamism in the natural world and the sense of some intense (the unusual choice of 'rasp' to describe water) encounter with nature, 'the emerald crazy spring'. Repeatedly in the collection there are one-liners that show this sheer pleasure—'a smell of sand', so simple yet so rich in association. She also does clever things with sound, a sense that things are happening where we think there is nothing, 'bark conceals a living silence' and ' a word for the sounds plants must make at the moment they break the soil'. At other times, like Cumming, she has the odd image that manages to be both unusual and just right, 'See how your fingers curl tight as fiddleheads', 'ice smooth as half-sucked lozenges' and, 'this mackerel sky'. By way of variety there are also poems with a more sinister tone such as 'Guest Room' where the dubious male character's 'fingerprints seep oil shiny as eyes in a bottle' while 'naked women scrabble for open windows. The bedside clock's measured ticks are their toenails on his gleaming tiles.' A final poem I found poignant, humorous and unusual was 'Traveller's anecdote'. It describes the speaker falling for 'the Trickster', 'his necromantic eyes doing unprintable things to what many have called my heart' only to find in twenty four hours 'the symbols of his cloak grew meaningless'. I enjoyed the trueness of this poem—how we all encounter posers when young, but aren't always immediately able to see through them.

Brian Louis Pearce's Growling neatly counterbalances the youthfulness of Merriam's poetry in its attempt to 'rage against the dying of the light'. He wishes, 'at seventy, arguably, to have some idea./Time to address myself.' Pearce's poetry is reflective and intelligent, providing subtle philosophical meditations on the temporal and transcendental world and the role that art plays in capturing such experience. In 'Studies at Sixty-Six' he is disgruntled at his own aging, 'What am I? A paunch, a/snatcher of breath,' but then proceeds to provide a living testament to his statement, in 'Studies at Sixty-Eight', 'It is never too late to live, provided that/each touch and breath is art'. His sonnet sequence to the artist Giacometti (1901-1966) provides deceptively simple statements on the sculpter's art:

Bend to it, where you are, though problems heap
in freeing the idea from stubborn grit.
the practised approximation is exact.

In this sequence in his dialogue with Giacometti he presents a complex three way communication between the artifact, Giacometti and himself, which make the sonnets rewarding to repeatedly re-read. In 'White Water' he contemplates life lived on the edge by someone who feels they are already on the edge, as you 'plunge into a pool/profound enough to swallow you yet give/you back to the world you left'. Pearce moves comfortably between the physical and the metaphysical:

They also serve who know
the bottom of their own pool; who dive, time and
again for God, by knowing how to stay still;

Ultimately, what is most startling about this collection is the language. One is struck by the versatility with which it switches between plain, abstract statement and a rich musicality driven by alliteration and assonance. The long poem 'Dry Mass' sustains over the space of thirty two verses a rich interweaving of sound, rhythm and imagery. It shifts from drought to rainfall in order to consider both physical and spiritual aridity. In the process there is a parallel shift from harsh to soft sounds and rhythms in the poem. Compare the consonantal, monosyllabic harshness of the opening, '…Rod stiff, gut racked,/bones creak, strain like a gut/ted willow' with the lush, long vowels and soft consonants of the later lines:

The air is moist-massed again.
the reapers or hope long
deferred leap with the showers,
clap, cup their hands. Clouds tower,
surprise us with prayed rain,
sculpt loveliness, pour song
in clay ears. Grief-burnt hours
green in an instant,…

And for Pearce, a rejuvenated natural world is inevitably linked to art:

Rain now for hours. the butt
is full flumes gurgle, the
gutters gulp, overspew.
the Word's wet quills fill fresh
veined scripts with leaf text,

Thus there is a satisfying cohesion to Pearce's work. His is a poetry that will give something new on each re-encounter.

Phil Bowen, like Dean Young, makes use of a good deal of humour but beneath the lighthearted veneer of his regular metres there is something of a murderous song. In Starfly, Auden-like public statement mixes with the bleakness of Larkin. In poems like such as 'A Place Called Ask' and 'No Question' individuals have to deal with constantly shifting goalposts in some kind of Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare or are seen as powerless against a faceless police state. This is all heightened by a sinister sense of surveillance such as in 'A Little Chat, 'We've got all the dirt there is/to dish against you: photocopies, carbon,…a certain signature signed/by a certain someone'. Many of the poem's speakers are those on those on the sidelines, the wannabes rather than starlets, yet even those who gain entrance to exclusivity are pursing some kind of futile dream where 'neither know/What part or scene/They'll get or miss'. There is also a general interest in the seamier side of life, such as 'The Cameo killer 1950', and 'No more Mr Nice Guy', which debunks the myth of Buddy Holly's squeaky clean image.

Frequently Bowen plays around with an idea, cleverly juxtaposing ideas to come up with something unusual. 'Behind the Lines' makes clever use of wordplay as well as drawing attention to the depressing fact war poets are needed now as much as they were in the past:

That language now
Won't say a word
Like right or wrong
Just talks the talk
And walks along
A page of coffins…

In 'Dying's Hard' he plays around with Billy Wilder's statement, 'Dying's easy—Comedy's hard' to juxtapose death and standup in a poem which encapsulates for me the nature of Bowen's sense of dark comedy:

The day we war broke out we all joined in song
Around the end of the pier where the penny drops—
…'ere!—Timing's when the last laugh stops
at the hands of Hitler around the neck of Stalin
which is why I'll settle for Woody Allen:
so when my number's pulled out of that shaken bag,
play it to me straight—your final gag.

Yet Bowen is not always dark. He includes poems on his interest in theatre and past heroes, and the humour in 'The Prince's Love Song' is irresistible, 'Camilla Parker Bowles, Camilla Parker Bowles,/Horsey and saucy with ponies and foals'. Finally, towards the end of the collection, there are poems that reflect Bowen's versatility with a shift in tone and subject matter providing some beautiful, questioning poems, such as 'Moonlight on the River, 'I can seem to catch this hour/now our thoughts are cold' or the lovely, melancholic sensuousness of 'Fresh':

A separate bloom
Splashing itself on a high scale
On the widest stretch of the breeze:
A midnight spirit, a lyric—whatever
The meaning is of these trees.

Campbell Mcgrath's Heart of Anthracite is a gathering together of his prose poems from various collections over the past twenty five years. These poems are addictive and should be read in tandem with a journey across America's Mid-West. Expressed with the expansiveness of Walt Whitman the poems begin with a straightforward physical journey through the landscape but gradually evolve to something much broader, as the momentum of the poems absorb history, migration, urban and rural settings, colours, sound, sense etc ultimately present, with no sanitising of the worst features of American culture, an America to be wondered at. Consider 'Landon, North Dakota', for example:

The Arctic wind massing a thousand miles to the north and barrelling down the continent, along the width and breadth of grass, the Dakotas, Nebraska, sod and wild flax in the spring, limitless land, a place to plant and sow that neither Indians nor winters fierce as Stockholm's nor the virulent range wars could take away from the Vorlegs and Johannsens and Lindstroms…

America's awe-inspiring qualities are conveyed through a sense of variety, immensity and vastness, 'There is a terrible loneliness in America, in its vast empty spaces, its distances, and recesses, its prairies and its endlessly retreating mountain ranges'. Through very differently from Young, Mcgrath bombards us with all that America encompasses—its popular culture conveyed with much affection, 'I could tell you things about "Lost in space" you wouldn't believe. The carrot creatures crying "Moisture! Moisture!" His frequent use of lists allows the reader to join him on the journey with a feeling of immediacy, such as in 'American Noise, 'Box cars and electric guitars; ospreys, oceans, glaciers, coins; the whisper of the green corn kachina; the hard sell, the fast buck'. Such all inclusiveness also entails the telling of stories. Mcgrath creates a certain intimacy in the naming or friends and family in his stories and travels and also a Jack Keroac 'On the Road' feel in the random encounters when travelling, such as the woman in 'Amsterdam' who invites his back to her houseboat, 'This she indicated with her knitting needles, sitting up in bed at dawn, flaxen haired, measuring me for a sweater'. The collection leaves you with a feeling that everything is there to be experienced, caught in the title of the concluding poem, 'The World has Flooded over Me'.

These collections from Stride are diverse in style and subject matter but share sharpness, originality, technical virtuosity, and poignancy.

copyright © Belinda Cooke, 2005. All quotations are copyright by the authors.