Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 29

Review of Silents by Claire Crowther, pub. Hercules Editions 2015-07-08

This little pamphlet is an assemblage of 15 short poems, plus essays and images from and about silent film. Crowther was intrigued by an art form deprived of speech, that had to rely on other means of expression like body language and captions, and also in exploring parallels and connections between this form and her own.

The poems are, then, meant to be read in conjunction with the images, essays and notes at the back rather than to stand alone. Actually some of them do work perfectly well on their own, notably "Jehanne d'Arc and the Angels of Battle" and "The Inflammatory Properties of Celluloid", which doesn't really need its explanatory note at the back of the book. It's also a good example of Crowther's tight, economical way of making words work hard:

Yes, film's made of light

and the director uses stars to silence race slurs
in intertitles.

If you should come across old film, a star on the edge
warns you that it burns.

The relationship between this poem and the image on the facing page has to do with the polarity of light and dark, positive and negative. But I'm not entirely sure it is a relationship, in that they both, in their own way, illustrate that theme but don't, as far as I can see, illustrate anything about each other; I don't feel I understand the poem better for seeing the image or vice versa. Sometimes that does happen, as when the shadow-show in "Shamakky Joe", innocuous in itself, is lent added menace by the image of a still from "The Cat and the Canary" next to it. But not every poem has an accompanying image, nor needs one, and I'm not entirely happy about the few times where the relationship between poem and image is spelled out in the explanatory notes. In "Song of the Stretching Tree" it simply doesn't need to be; it's clear enough from the poem what is going on.

I did sometimes feel the images, in particular, would have meant more to me if I knew even half as much about silent film as Crowther clearly does (rather than never, as far as I recall, having seen one). The images are interesting (and in the case of the stills often memorably sinister), but I found myself reacting more to the poems. One or two do feel slight (the one about Germaine Dulac didn't really work for me, though the Buster Keaton "silent sonnet" is best seen as a light-hearted quip), but in most, the odd power and menace of silence as a medium comes over memorably:

While I don't know what device will trigger
me, or why,

while I don't know
why one device rather than another will make me

yet while I know, words are triggered by shades
and why not gods

wanting to be triggered into worlds by these
devices of word and human.

("Homage to Carl Theodor Dreyer")

The two essays at the start of the pamphlet, one by Crowther, one by Kevin Jackson, have some fascinating things to say, particularly about the relationships between film and poetry. But it's only fair to warn the reader of a practical difficulty here. I can see why, in a work about an art form that was not only silent but monochrome, this pamphlet is also black and white, sometimes black text on white and sometimes white on black. It looks very well, as a piece of design. But white text on black is actually a swine to read, especially in a small font, for anyone without 20/20 eyesight – it blurs and swims on the page. I could not read the first essay (white on black) without a strong lamp and a magnifying glass, and even then not all in one go, and I had the same problem with the notes at the back.

That is a pity, because in every other way this unusual project is accessible and readable. In fairness it may not matter to the large number of people with better eyesight than mine. And it's beautifully produced, as have been all the Hercules books I have seen.

The poetry of inarticulacy

Here's a thing. Poetry expresses ideas and feelings through words; that's how it works. It tries to do so as memorably, as unexpectedly, as possible. So how do you write a poem about being unable to do that – how do you assume the voice of someone who is so overcome with emotion as to be, almost, "struck dumb", while still managing to express in the poem what the voice you are using cannot do?

Well, it's possible and I have linked to the proof of it below, but it means making words work very hard indeed. The voice needs to say as little as possible, and for the most part as simply as possible, if it is to convince, because its owner isn't in a state to construct fancy phrases. But what it says must somehow be loaded with what it does not say; both words and the spaces between them must resonate.

Shetland Arts has a noble project called Bards in the Bog, whereby poems are put up in public toilets to attract the world's most truly captive audience. In 2010 a rather special batch went up. This was the year of "hamefarin", during which emigrants and the descendants of emigrants were encouraged to return and visit the islands they or their ancestors came from. Like Ireland and mainland Scotland, Shetland saw a great deal of emigration in the 19th century especially, and many emigrants, with the aid of assisted passages, went a very long way, to Australia, Canada and New Zealand among other destinations. And of course, since assisted passages only went one way, very few ever managed to return to see again the friends and relatives they had left behind.

All the Bards in the Bog poems for that period had to do with emigration or return. In "Come Ben Trow" by Mary Blance, we hear the voice of a person who has just opened the door and seen someone totally unexpected; someone they may never have thought to see again. In fact their first words are a stunned exclamation – "Na, my mercy".

We know this person is either a relative or a very close friend, because the householder uses the form of address "dee", which is the equivalent of French tu or German du; it is a familiar form only used to someone close. But the query "Dis is no dee, is it?" suggests uncertainty, either because the visit was so unlikely or because the visitor has been gone long enough for their features to have become unfamiliar – perhaps both. If you're only going to be able to use few words, the more meanings they can hold the better. All the host can manage at that moment is a conventional phrase of welcome: "We ir da blyde du’s come." – "we're happy to see you" – which resonates because we know that for once, it is not being used as a polite cliché; every word is meant.

From now on, the host sets in motion a strategy, which may or may not be conscious: this visit which may never be repeated must be prolonged by all possible means and to that end the visitor must be lured with every comfort, discouraged from rejoining the world outside. The title means, more or less, "come right in", not just through the door but into the inner room, where the fire is. The coat must be removed (one wonders how easily it will be found again); the visitor must come to the fire, be protected from the cold, ensconced in the best chair. The phrase "Dis is da comfy chair" is another that says an awful lot more than appears on the surface. In the first place, this person, who was once either a member of the household or very close to it, is now an honoured guest, rare enough to get offered the best seat, rather than someone who drops in and sits where they can find space. Secondly, if he/she has to be told which is the comfy chair, it is a long time since they have been there, maybe even long enough for furniture to have been replaced. Indeed the host's first demand is for "news" (and if we hadn't guessed already, we know now that this is all happening long before Skype was invented). These people have lost touch with each other and have to get back up to date. The strategy, however, continues: now the visitor must be offered the hospitality of food and drink. Then with the guest temporarily secured as far as may be, the feelings of the host finally find voice, albeit in a very limited way, still semi-stunned by what he/she had thought would never happen again:

Ta see dee –
Ta hae dee here aside wis.

The tone makes it clear that for the host, this is little short of a miracle. Throughout this one-sided conversation, in fact, the tone is a mixture of affection and anxious deference; this person who was once so close has been gone long enough to have become something of a stranger, hence the bustling hospitality. The voice of the poem actually says very little, and all in short, conventional phrases. Yet these convey the anxiety to please, the hunger to keep the guest there, the uncertainty as to what footing they are now on, above all the stunned surprise at the visit ever having been achieved. There is power behind the words, precisely because nobody is trying to explain the enormous back-story; the reader must, and can, deduce that from the little that is actually said.

Bards in the Bog lives here.

Review of At the World's End by Catherine Fisher, pub. Barrington Stoke 2015

This is a YA book (Barrington Stoke Teen) with a difference: this series, which has attracted some fine writers, including Michael Morpurgo and Fisher herself in the past, was designed specifically for teenage readers who have difficulties like dyslexia but who want to be reading something suited to their age, not pitched way below it. There are some physical differences, like specially chosen fonts and thick paper to stop text or illustration showing through and confusing the eye. The editing process has been developed with speech and language experts, but if it involves much interference with the writer's normal process, this is not obvious in the product. It is very pacy, but then Fisher's dystopian fantasies, of which this is one, seldom hang about doing nothing. Its characters develop through action rather than being explained to us; that too is normal for her, as is the fact that she does not go in for lengthy exposition but plunges straight into the story at the point where something exciting is about to happen. Fisher's keen sense of place is there as usual in the icebound city and the deserted tunnels of the Underground:

She looked around at walls that had once been white. Huge adverts hung in ragged strips. They showed a woman's smiling face, a sleek black car, scraps of what looked like a beach in the sun. Things people had worked and longed for. Things that didn't exist any more. Caz looked along to where the tunnel curved out of sight, and thought of all that world, all those people, gone and forgotten. A world that could never be rebuilt.

The one point where I did wonder if she would normally have written otherwise was when the story moves beyond the frozen city and there is a change in the natural world which must have become obvious to the young protagonists more gradually than it does here. I did think that in a series like Chronoptika, for instance, she would have spent more time and physical description on this, and probably to great effect – even as it is, the moment of the swans is stunning. In fact the ending comes quite quickly and feels provisional, not in a bad sense but in the sense that it feels like a natural place to stop for a while, rather than a permanent ending – like the first instalment of something longer. We leave Will and Caz "staring out at their future", and though for the moment they do seem to have found refuge, the more we think about it, the more we can see that there may be quite other problems ahead. I am sure this is deliberate, and that the story will be continued by its author, but it may also have the beneficial effect of leaving the young readers in a mood to do that for themselves, because we now know enough about Will and Caz to mind what happens to them, yet there are still questions we'd very much like the answers to.

I want to avoid spoilers, with such a book as this above all, so will only say that it strikes me as admirably suited to its intended purpose. Its format is a journey, and one with such attendant dangers and surprises that I can't imagine it being easily put down, especially since there is, as usual with Fisher, not only a male protagonist but a particularly stroppy, resourceful female one as well, who is actually the POV chracter. Its concerns, too, are essentially adult: there is grief, injustice, the sudden assumption of responsibility, the facing down of old fears, some completely non-gratuitous violence, and if there's very little hint of sex, that is because everyone is far too busy staying alive. If you have a young relative or friend who is a reluctant or easily discouraged reader, this book, and indeed this whole Barrington Stoke series, might be just what they need.

Review of Englaland by Steve Ely, pub, Smokestack 2015

Steve Ely's previous collection, Oswald's Book of Hours, which I reviewed here, was by some way the most memorable and unusual collection I read in 2013. It felt like quite a short, tight collection, not in the sense of inhibited but economical, every word working like mad. Englaland is much longer, looser and baggier, more sprawling, but there is a good reason for that; it is trying to portray a whole culture, and over a period of a millennium and more. The back cover suggests this culture is that of "the English" but that doesn't seem to me to be quite so: it is pretty specifically Northern. And as in Oswald's Book of Hours, the past continually collides with the present, is in the present – the epigraph to the collection's first section is William Faulkner's "The past is never dead. It is not even past."

There are seven sections, and in the first, he cuts cinematically between stragglers from the 10th-century battle of Brunanburh, fleeing and pursuing each other, and twentieth-century lads in the same landscape, trespassing, bird-nesting, looking for a fight. Those seeking refuge in the stream, aware of "waterline, rat tunnels, hand-holds for drowners" could be from either time, and the victors of Brunanburh who "ride garlanded in ears" are reminiscent, purposely no doubt, of the Falklands War soldier from Oswald's Book of Hours who did the same.

Indeed, though I said the book was looser and more expansive than its predecessor, it is full of linking chains of images, words, places – the landscapes of the Ryknild ridge and Frickley Park, which first appear here, will crop up in other sections, and the question in the first section "Whose is this land?" is the theme of the third section, "Common", which is all about ownership, particularly of land (trespass and poaching figure throughout the book, but most here). In the fifth section, "The Harrowing of the North", past and present are again linked indissolubly by one of these chains. Here, the effect on the north (and elsewhere, but the "elsewhere" isn't exactly stressed) of the miners' strikes and pit closures of the 1980s is compared with the punitive action waged in the north of England in 1069 by William of Normandy (generally known in this book as William the Bastard, which is pleasantly familiar to one used to his Welsh name of Gwilym Bastert). The narrator of "Ballad of the Scabs" mocks the UDM for their optimistic belief that co-operating with the government would save their pits:

And Foulstone, Butcher, Taylor,
how's your job for life?

The next poem, "1069", shows William conquering by dividing his enemies: "he bought off Osbjorn and bribed Malcolm of Scots". This poem ends with the words of the Domesday Book recording the names of villages laid waste in this conflict: "Warter, wasta, Wetwang, wasta, Wichum, wasta…" And the next poem, which returns to the present to show a dying, demoralised ex-pit village, is titled "Wasta"... There could scarcely be a simpler or more effective way to link past and present, to assert, as the earl of Newcastle once said without result to his unsatisfactory pupil the young Charles I, "what you read, I would have it history that so you might compare the dead with the living; for the same humours is now as was then, there is no alteration but in names." Nor does it end here: poem titles like "Search and Destroy", a litany of the names of dead pits, and the image, (when a disused pit is demolished in "A sin and a shame") of a crew dynamiting "the twin towers/of the winding gear" leave no way to see the proceedings except in terms of war.

There is considerable variety of form in this collection. Quite apart from the fact that one section is a short play and another an extended narrative in alliterative verse, there are ballads, prose-poems and the same creative use of white space and shaping familiar from his earlier collection. The alliterative piece, "Big Billy", in fact puzzles me slightly, because I'm not sure what role it plays in the pattern. Everywhere else in the book, the battles are about something: access to land, identity, holding on to what one has. Billy, a prizefighter, seems to fight for no better cause than to prove who's the best at punching and gouging (there is money involved but that clearly is not why it is happening). My best guess is that Billy represents fighting spirit in its purest form, but if he is being seen as a hero, which I think he is, then his name is a conundrum, because Norman William is no hero in the rest of this book. I suppose it could be mere coincidence, but it is a measure of the craft of this collection that I find it hard to credit that anything here is done for no reason. Though I'm unsure what this section is trying to do, what works brilliantly in it is the exuberance of the language, particularly for flyting purposes. I hadn't realised what a great medium alliterative verse can be for insulting people: "valourless-vagrant, vile vardo-vagabond".

The least poetically successful section seemed to me to be the sixth, "Mongrel Blood Imperium" which considers the various cultures and ethnicities that inhabit the landscape. I don't know if it's an overwhelming desire to convince, but at times in this section (eg "Acts of Union") the verbal music seemed to go missing, to be replaced by flatter, prosier statements than he normally deals in. I think something similar happens when he assumes Peter Mandelson's voice in "Scum of the Earth", the playlet. Not to be ungrateful, because any play in which Mandelson and Wellington fight each other and both get killed is an enchanting thought, but Mandelson's voice would be funnier and more biting satire if he were saying things he might actually say, as Burns makes "Holy Willie" do, rather than things an opponent might put unconvincingly into his mouth.

The last section, "The Song of the Yellowhammer", harks back to Brunanburh and its victor Athelstan, described by his contemporary the poet Egil as a "golden-haired Aetheling". This long, mesmerising poem is literally flooded with the colour yellow – corn, cheese, gold, ragwort, dandelions, gorse, sand, pears, a yellow moon:

The white-tailed eagle's
sunlit eye
tracks Humber's gullet
along Ouse, Don and Ea
to the slow blonde stones
and saffron clays of Hampole.
An orchard
of yellow pears.
Aureate moon, soft light of xanthic tallow.

It's a landscape with a golden haze on it. There seems to be a tentative hope such as George Mackay Brown sometimes expressed, that landscape will survive what people do to it and that they may eventually return to the land with a keener appreciation of it.

For most of this collection, and there's a lot of it, 200 pages no less, one is in the presence of the same linguistic exuberance, intellectual vigour and keen sense of living history as in Oswald's Book of Hours, and that's reason enough to buy any book. It's also very ambitious, far more so than most of the neat, controlled 64 or 72-pagers you'll read this year. Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the title: what's that about, then? On one level, "Englaland" obviously carries an echo of "la la land". But modern words, place-names especially, tend to be worn-down versions of older ones, and just as Bolton, in this book, is occasionally Bodelton, depending on who is speaking and when, so this was, and still is, Angle-land, and there's your third syllable. The past is not past: it is in the present and intrinsic to it; it is how the present came to be.

Review of The Art of Falling by Kim Moore (Seren 2015)

This is a debut collection, uneven but with plenty of vim and interest in its language and concerns. The mid-section is the one most obviously themed, concerning a violent and abusive relationship; the other two sections are more disparate, though the third contains several poems either "after" named people or titled for them.

In her best poems, she assembles objects and events with a sure sense of their significance – in "I'm Thinking of my Father" a man haunted by his brother's impending death feeds a fire obsessively:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp and he doesn't care about splinters
or safety, as long as the fire gets higher.

All the stone lions and grave little gnomes
in their cheerful red breeches are waiting
and the lamp that's addicted to heat
flickers on, flickers off, and the lawn sits

in its shadows and dark and its falsehood
and the ending begins with its terrible face

Another impressive poem is "Red Man's Way", its language apparently uncomplicated but working, with its rhythms, perfectly:

&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I feel full,
as if one person can't carry this with them

and be unchanged, as if I could speak seagull
and they would come cursing, articulate,

their wings the colour of sky.

The whole of the second section is powerful, finding some telling images for the relationship - "The World's Smallest Man", in which the speaker imagines the "you" figure smaller and smaller, until the poem ends in a finely achieved ambiguity:

till you are less than a grain of salt
so small, you are living on my skin.
And once I breathe, I breathe you in.

And in "Body, Remember" she takes the Cavafy poem where he urges his body to recall both the pleasures it has known and all those it hasn't, but she uses it inventively by having her speaker, instead, resolve to remember the feel of danger.

I said it was uneven and there are certainly individual poems that fall below par, notably "Tuesday at Wetherspoons", where apparently "all the men have comb-overs,/bellies like cakes just baked" – what, all? That's just lazy stereotyping. But what worries me a little more is a rhetorical technique, which thanks to contact with some recent A-level students, I now know is called anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase at the start of every sentence or new proposition. For instance, in "When I was A Thing With Feathers" the operative word, which defines all the syntax, is "when":

when feathers pierced my skin growing from within,
when I tried to let my head fall to my hands and found
only wings, when I was able to fly

In other poems, words like "and", "this", "by", or phrases like "some people", fulfil the same semantic function. Now there's nothing wrong with this in any individual instance, but by my count about a third of the poems use this device, and then it starts looking less like a rhetorical device and more like a method of composition. Again, we all have ways of coming by a poem, and this one can be as good as any, but when used too often it can start to look like an exercise. It's awfully easy for poets to develop tics, to get into habits of automatically using the same ways of working, and then they need to steer clear of the comfort zone for a while. I don't think any of the poems I most admired in the collection used this technique, but that might be partly because after the third or fourth time it cropped up, it was feeling predictable.

But the main impression the collection left with me was of language used with considerable skill and power, and often also surprise. Those who think the "myth-kitty" outmoded and unusable might care to reflect on how it is renewed in "Translation":

Don't we all have a little Echo in us, our voices stolen,
only able to repeat what has already been said:
you made me do it, he says, and we call back do it, do it.

Review of Solid Citizens by David Wishart, pub. Severn House 2013

Why am I reviewing a novel from 2013? Maybe because it's a "genre" novel (historical detective) and I'm tired of people pigeonholing genre novels and not expecting them to raise the sort of questions you'd expect in a litfic novel, when in fact they crop up just as regularly.

For those who aren't already fans, Wishart's detective hero is an upper-class Roman layabout called Marcus Corvinus with not much time for his own class, and a talent for furkling about finding out the truth of things others want to hide. He also happens to talk like the Roman equivalent of a Raymond Chandler hero. He and his slightly anarchic household are the source of a lot of incidental humour in the books.

This one is set in the small town of Bovillae, where the local senate has asked Corvinus to look into the recent murder of the censor-elect, Caesius, an upstanding citizen with a squeaky-clean reputation who was found with his head beaten in near the back door of the local brothel (where the madame cheerfully admits he was a regular customer). The town dignitaries are fearfully embarrassed about this, but as Corvinus soon discovers, they have worse things to be embarrassed about. The town lawyer (Novius, whom we've met in a previous book) has a long and shady past: civic dignitaries Manlius and Canidius are up to their ears in a financial scam, even the local antique dealer does a good line in fakes and almost nobody is telling the truth about where they were, or with whom, on a certain evening…. Solid citizens often have things to hide.

But what of the victim: was he as solid as he seemed? Opinion is divided. Those who knew him as a politician and businessman give him a good name for probity. But his closest relatives, his brother and nephew, do not hide their contempt for him (though they do hide the reason). Granted, the brother is the town drunk and the nephew a ne'er-do-well. But might they, for once, be telling more truth than the solid citizens? And why does Anthus, the loyal major-domo who is never done singing his late master's praises, utter the rather equivocal encomium "He was a decent man, at heart"?

This line is in fact key – as is one from another minor character: "He wasn't a bad man, he did his best for the town". Previous Corvinus books, notably Food for the Fishes, have stressed the difference between what was legal in Rome, and what was socially acceptable. Divorce, for instance, was quite legal, as was killing a slave for no good reason, but neither would do you much good either socially or professionally. The same disconnect comes up here, but this time in relation to a different activity. Another thing I get tired of is the assumption that historical novels are somehow turned away from our own time, indifferent to "contemporary" problems which are the preserve of litfic. The secret Caesius was keeping could hardly be more relevant or "contemporary".

And the odd thing is that at a couple of points, I nearly guessed it; there are clues left, if you listen to them. But I persuaded myself it couldn't be so, because I couldn't equate it with the facts and opinions I was hearing. Now the reason it doesn’t square with certain alleged facts is simple: people are lying through their teeth (as again I might have guessed if I'd been a bit more alert). But the opinions are another matter. In the end, the book asks you to compartmentalise to a degree, to accept that a man might do X and still be, in other respects – even "at heart" – a decent man, not a total fraud whose good side was entirely fake. This may be harder for us to do than even for the Romans – I can't see anyone nowadays daring to make the remark that Anthus made. But it makes for a fascinating, thought-provoking read.

A poem from the 80s

This is a VERY old poem; I wrote it in the 80s and it was in my then Selected, but old times come around and around and I just had a yen to post it here. I was a civil servant when I wrote it, and quite enjoyed the challenge of writing a poem in officialese.

OFFICIAL BRIEFING FOR MINISTERS ON THE VIOLENCE IN THE CAPITAL

As Ministers will be aware already,
the recent spring festival was marred
when a brief but violent incident occurred
in the church. The full facts are not easy
to establish, because accounts vary,

but it seems that on the day in question
hard-working persons with a licence to trade
on church premises, duly granted
by the civic authorities, were upon
their lawful business, when a young man

who had some objection to their presence
began vandalising their property
(mainly currency and pigeons), eventually
driving them out with some violence,
(a whip was rumoured to be in evidence).

The man is a disaffected itinerant
whose motives are not entirely clear;
he is said to have called his victims either
"thieves", or, by another account,
"businessmen". In either event,

for the Minister's interview our advice
is to focus on the clear contempt
for law and order, the arrogant attempt
to impose the whims of minorities
and the interference with private enterprise,

which might very likely have put
jobs at risk. A police investigation
should soon result in charges against the man,
who, though a minor youth cult, is not
in himself a serious threat, it is thought.

In Praise of Dull Lines

Just a personal thought. A poem, to my mind, is or should be an organic whole. That being so, it doesn't actually exist on the lyric heights for the whole of its length; it has peaks and troughs. Every line does not coruscate at you, jumping up and down shouting "notice me!" There are quiet, unremarkable lines, which swell up like waves under the surface of the sea until they foam over into something brilliant. These are lines which can easily be rubbished by a careless reviewer, who will point out the "boring" or "predictable" language, but in fact they are paving the way for what comes next. Try for yourself quoting brilliant, memorable single lines from a poem. Do they work outside their context? Would you not often feel impelled to quote the few lines before, to show where they emerged from, what they convey: why, in short, they are so brilliant and memorable?
Now there's a type of poem much written and admired, in fact often known informally as a "competition poem", which does try to make every line a peak. It isn't an organic whole; it is a series of flashy, notice-me lines which don't obviously grow from the poem. I don't care for these poems, finding them shouty and ultimately unmemorable because they are trying too hard to be unforgettable. But there's another thing, connected with the fact that these lines don't seem to grow naturally from the poem. They don't seem to come from anywhere, and paradoxically when a line doesn't come from anywhere, it COULD actually come from anywhere, including where it shouldn't. In fact, when marking student work, this kind of poem rings alarm bells. There might be all sorts of reasons for derivative work, but I'll put forward the notion that thinking in terms of fine phrases, knockout lines, moments rather than whole poems, might be one of them.

How not to write a review

Have just read a review of a collection by a new young poet, which encapsulates everything I think is wrong with reviewing at the moment. Humourless, pious, under the illusion that certain objects or subjects are "unpoetic" (can you tell me why a bottle of Fanta ought "rightly" not to be in a poem?). When it isn't being completely opaque - what does " The images and language do not smear together in a smooth arc at the steady pace of a walk" even mean? - it is castigating the author for writing the poem she wanted to write, rather than the one the reviewer thinks she should have wanted to write, a cardinal fault in any review:

"She is inconsistent in her sensitivity to the connotations of the objects she allows to feature in her poems; twice she makes mention of Pirates of the Caribbean in a collection which is thirsty for a considered comment on piracy, a pertinent and timely topic."

Considering that this review elsewhere criticises the poet for "confusing flippancy with humour" (well, I'd say flippancy was a type of humour, but there...) this is the most stuffy lack of ANY kind of humour that can well be imagined. It takes me back to when a magazine editor told me he didn't think snooker suitable subject-matter for a poem. But that was decades ago; I thought we'd got past that sort of stuffy snobbery. It's also ironic that the critic has been accusing the poet of being preachy (possibly with reason, possibly not; one can't tell because the assertion is not backed up with quotes, despite the fact that this is an online review that doesn't need a word limit) and then comes up with this insufferably preachy comment about the collection being "thirsty for a considered comment on piracy".

But it is when we get on to our critic's personal dislike of beetroot sandwiches that he/she (the name is ambiguous) goes completely OTT: "There are other graceless flashes. At points she fills your mental palate with claggy images of her quite revolting-sounding lunches; her ‘courgette pie’, the beetroot and ‘dense’ bread of her sandwiches. The delicate, interesting play of olfactory stimulation that is a strength of this collection elsewhere is clouded and blotted out by these dreadful evocations.".

Does our critic not see how completely subjective this is, and how little it belongs in a review of a poetry collection?

Just to make things clear, I have met neither poet nor critic, have no axe to grind and haven't read the collection. The review is not, incidentally, wholly hostile; at the end it offers praise, but in a way so patronising to the reader of the review as to be off-putting: "I must coolly but seriously insist that you read all three of these last mentioned poems during which the whole piece fuses together yet remains definitively divided and neatly, sensitively, wisely, craft-fully concluded. And in order to read them and understand their true pedigree and meaning I must insist that you also read the full collection beforehand." (Must you, indeed? I think I'll be the judge of that.) No lines are quoted in full; indeed hardly a phrase of the poet's is quoted at all, another cardinal fault, so we have no means of knowing whether the critic's taste is any guide for ours and are simply asked - no -ordered - to take it on trust in this sentence that sounds as if it came from a brash sixth-former new to the game. Ach y fi....

Review of Negativity's Kiss by Alice Notley, pub. Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre

I leave the hospital in full autumn – fog
and, when you can find it
a yellow blaze that remembers love for
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp you

It may sound odd, after quoting lines like those, to say; when you first read this, don't read it as if it were a poem. But though the language and cadences are clearly those of poetry, the narrative structure is that of a noir crime novel. The I in those lines is Ines, short for Inessential, a poet whose political and anti-religious views have attracted the attention both of a state secret agent and a bunch of religious fanatics, and who is recovering after having been shot. Whodunnit is a question that occupies both Ines and the policeman who becomes her friend/admirer, Cop (short for Copernicus) Smith. There are several possible suspects, including Charl (Charlatan), a media mogul, Orphée, an older poet/songwriter who resents her for being the anti-establishment figure he was once thought to be, and CS (Current Sweetheart), a younger, female poet who resents her for being alive and in the way of her own success:

She does
have to die first. 'Cause I'm
the younger poet.

There's also a murder which has already taken place and been recorded on a video: the victim being a young woman called Harvard Washington but known as Harry, and the murderer a man who is for a long time called Hooded, until he becomes Verball.

It should be clear by now, firstly, that there's a lot of grim, wry humour about this book (her coinage for the internet, The Garble, is priceless), secondly, that it has a lot to do with the place of poetry in contemporary society (bear in mind, as you read, that it was written at the time of Hurricane Katrina, which explains some of its apocalyptic mood) and thirdly, that it is very unlike most books of poetry. Indeed if you don't normally like or read poetry, it might be just the book to start with, though if you do already read poetry, it should come as a welcome (or at the very least, bracing) change from what you normally read.

I first came across it when Notley read some of these poems at the STAnza poetry festival. She gave far the most dramatic, energetic reading I'd ever heard. I haven't been able to find any example online of her reading from this book, and the readings I have found, like this one from Disobedience, though they convey some of her energy and humour, don't quite have the force I felt from her stage presence, which was electrifying. I wasn't sure afterwards how much of the effect was down to her and how much to the work itself. I can say now, having read it, that Negativity's Kiss is indeed a powerful piece of writing that works on the printed page, though if you ever get the chance to hear her read from it, I strongly urge you not to miss it. The exchange between "every religion" and Ines had, when she read it, a stunning effect on its audience, but is still memorable here:

you must sign up with an acknowledged

detailed dogmatic form of superstition
rites in a language ancient or
glossolalian, or one of our fanatics may
break free of our benign moral constraints
and shoot you. We are aware that you have
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp been shot once before
we would be sorry if you got shot again.

I Ines say: go to hell […]

may your temples of cosmic allegations collapse
may your myths be forgotten
may your prophets and saints and patriarchs
finally die into the unmemorized night