Kristin Dimitrova

My Life in Squares

84 pp., Smokestack Books, £7.95.

Kristin Dimitrova is a 48-year-old Bulgarian poet, born in her country’s capital, Sofia. She is a career poet, publishing ten collections in Europe and winning the Bulgarian national poetry-of-the-year award five times. My Life in Squares is her second translation into English and the first published in England by Smokestack Books. She teaches Foreign Languages and has translated Donne into Bulgarian – this comes across in her style of writing, which has a definite metaphysical bent to it, along with an existential anxiety that is surely the most significant inheritance of any post-communist country, especially when we consider Bulgaria as the pre-eminent crossroad between Europe and Asia.

This is concisely and cunningly summarized in ‘After Babylon’, one of the best poems in this collection:

the small town sighs in the afternoon;

pears drop down through people’s dreams

and the town clock struck dumb at

ten to five like a calf gaping

at the men in bloodstained aprons.

The personification of the town along with the bright dreamy metaphors brings to mind the Vitebsk of Chagall. The line breaks here are restrained and unassuming, which contrasts brilliantly with the fantastical transformation of the town. The pears are a reference to the paramount status the fruit has in the Balkans, where it is used in cuisine and, most importantly in this context, in the production of strong hallucinogenic liquors. The ‘dumb’ clock evokes the long hegemony of the Turkish Ottomans, who proscribed clocks for many years, preferring the moons and suns of the Islamic holy calendar, and only began building them in their towns towards the end of the nineteenth century. The metaphor is developed seamlessly and with sound judgment into the ‘gaping’ calf, who can only stare innocently at the ‘men in bloodstained aprons’, who may represent the entire political spectrum of the twentieth century. Bulgaria has endured them all: feudal, liberal, fascist, communist.

It would be misleading to suggest that ‘After Babylon’ is representative of the tone and style of most of the poems My Life in Squares because it (unfortunately for some readers) isn’t. Dimitrova has a wonderful sense of humour and most existential or metaphysical posturings are heartily slapped down in favour of a sort of working-class common sense. A book premiere is interrupted by a gang of lady beggars who filch cheese rolls. The philosophical punt that a kitten may be the reincarnation of a ‘soldier / who died for me at the coliseum’ is roundly pooh-poohed by the kitten, who recommends that the poet ‘read better books’. The truth sets us free merely to ‘look for another job’. Dimitrova’s poems often end with bathetic punchlines which suggest a scepticism fostered by a region which has tragically embraced a kaleidoscopic range of idealisms and ideologies. Another excellent poem, which is easily as good as anything written by R.S Thomas or Yehuda Amichai, intellectualizes this post-Marxist scepticism into a wonderful metaphysical vignette:

We were playing cards with God

when he trumped my king with a two.

‘But God, according to the rules

you cannot do this’ …

‘Then think up of some

explanation’ he said.

And dealt again.

The syntax and rhythm of Dimitrova’s line is distinguished and refreshing due to the process of translation, which leaves her verse with a tangy pickled aftertaste: what Linda France has described as her ‘syncopated rhythms’, perhaps something which is in fact gained in translation. She is structurally experimental, often isolating clauses with line breaks and cutting her lines with bold enjambments. She is a politically and philosophically aware feminist who explores whatever interests her with good humour and a rare good faith. The style and content and humour of My Life in Squares, to quote the poem ‘Tibet’, ‘skins the fatigue, / frightens the habit’, it reminds us that we are ‘free people’ but ‘sometimes forget’.

Joe Dresner is 24 and lives and works in London. He is published in Ambit, The SHOP and Orbis. He won first prize in the South Bank Poetry Competition.

Mark Burnhope

The Snowboy

44 pp., Salt Publishing, £6.50

Mark Burnhope's pamphlet loudly and articulately challenges the silence that has built up around certain subjects, the chief of these being disability. Poems such as 'Wheelchair, Recast as a Site of Special Pastoral Interest', 'Milo Won't Go in the Water', and 'The Man Upstairs Drafts a Letter to the Councils' use a wealth of wit and originality to creatively expand the boundaries of how disability is viewed. This works against prejudice and the over-sensitivity often bred by a desire for political correctness.

Poems such as 'Emoliage', which opens the collection, describing the search for 'our blackest flower', provide haunting visual accompaniment to the moral and social questions raised.  This demonstrates  that imagery is a focus for Burnhope's poetry. There is a monochromatic feel to the collection: black foliage is contrasted with the snow of the title, and 'The Little White Poem' morally questions ideas of whiteness and English childhood with its depiction of chimney sweeps and corporal punishment.

The strongest poems of the collection are those in which Burnhope identifies with fictional characters, including Pinocchio, Quasimodo and in particular Moby Dick's Queequeg. The poet describes him as his 'Familiar' and the poem imagines a shared friendship with the character, listing their common traits: 'I too am tattooed / I too tap away / nightly at an idol'. The lives of the narrator and Queequeg are written on their bodies, and as the narrator escapes his own life through literary characters, so Queequeg can escape literature through their connection 'For a while, Quee, we’d find // a world where the whale /is not white or dreadful. It’s / a pale vessel, drifting, singing.'

The Snowboy is a well-crafted pamphlet, dealing with social and moral ideas and with a focus that challenges modern perceptions, including those of religion and disability. Burnhope's writing demonstrates strong images, moral questioning and a playful wit.

Suzannah Evans lives in Leeds and likes to travel on foot. She is studying for an MA in Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. She has had poems published in magazines includingThe Rialto, Iota and Brittle Star. She has been poetry editor for Cadaverine since 2009 and runs writing workshops at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery in Leeds. She has performed her work at Ilkley and Morley literature festivals. Her website is www.suzannahevans.wordpress.com.

Ben Masters

Noughties

288 pp., Hamish Hamilton, £12.99.

As a novel shot through with intertextual references, Ben Masters’ first novel Noughties reminded me of two other literary debuts: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Gavin James Bower’s Dazed & Aroused. Like The Secret History, Noughties tells the story of a group of close-knit friends at university whose relationships are threatened by unresolved conflicts and mysteries. However, since the stakes for everyone involved in Noughties are clearly lower than the murder at the heart of The Secret History, Masters rightfully eschews the highly wrought narration of Tartt’s novel for a narrator whose conversational delivery mirrors that of the cynically self-aware male model in Bower’s. What all three novels also have in common is their transformation of biographical elements into fiction – Tartt’s time at Bennington College, Bower’s time as a male model, and Masters’ time reading English at Oxford.

On one level, Noughties functions as a love letter to the study of literature. To begin with, the name of its central protagonist, Eliot Lamb, is a not-so-disguised pun on T. S. Eliot and Charles Lamb, both of whom are listed in the 'Author’s Note' as being part of the ‘numerous literary resonances, allusions, and quotations (mostly adapted and distorted)’ threaded through the narrative. Thus the first-person narrator of this novel quite literally speaks through the voices of the dead. Masters appears particularly conscious of what Eliot wrote in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.’ As Masters remarks in an interview with Untitled Books, 'The writers I admire have a certain amount of literary swagger, they write with literary inheritance.'

Yet literary homage aside, Noughties actually tells a very straightforward coming-of-age story. It makes for enjoyable reading, even without needing to decode Masters’s literary references. Eliot is torn between Lucy, who represents the pull of Wellingborough and his pre-Oxford life, and Ella, whom he connects with at Oxford over their shared literary and musical tastes. This is complicated by Jack, his best mate at university, also being in love with Ella, which sets the stage for the best reveal of the novel about two-thirds of the way in, as Eliot, Ella and Jack are forced to confront the consequences of their romantic entanglements.

What makes this main strand of the novel’s plot compelling is the unorthodox method by which it is told. Even as the characters move through the three-act structure of a student night out—pub, bar, club—Eliot’s past unfolds in flashback and steadily catches up with him in the present. The fragmentary nature of this recollection, interrupted as it is by bouts of drinking, dancing and fighting in the present, bears out Eliot’s self-indictment of his generation near the end of the novel: ‘We are not an age kitted out for the telling of true love, hardwired for fripperies and drivel instead.’ Masters is also not afraid to break from the conventions of realism, as shown in the novel's more experimental moments where Eliot speaks with his psychic double, each half of the conversation flush to one side of the page.

The only criticism I have about Noughties is that, for a coming-of-age novel, its cast of characters is too sprawling. Partly because of the first-person narration that restricts access to the interiority of other characters, most of Eliot’s friends apart from Ella and Jack remain quite flat, seemingly there to round out the friendship group rather than contribute to the plot in any significant way. The Eliot/Ella/Jack triangle is possibly also overcomplicated by the end of the novel, with a faculty-student affair being hinted at that comes almost out of nowhere and seems a bit forced. Otherwise though, Masters’ debut novel proves itself to be a self-assured, entertaining read, Eliot’s experiences being the sort that a whole generation of current university students and recent graduates are likely to identify with.

Ian Chung is Fiction Editor at The Cadaverine. He is an MA in English student at the University of Warwick. His work has appeared in Angelic Dynamo, Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure, Foundling Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and The Cadaverine, among others. He was nominated by Camroc Press Review for Sundress Publications' 2010 Best of the Net anthology. Currently, he reviews for The Cadaverine, Sabotage Reviews and Rum & Reviews Magazine. He also edits Eunoia Review, and has recently joined Epicentre Magazine as Assistant Poetry Editor.