Alan Brownjohn

The Saner Places: Selected Poems

192 pp., Enitharmon, £15.00

Typically, one expects a poet’s Selected Poems to precede his Collected Poems, the latter acting as a sort of capstone for the literary career. Alan Brownjohn, however, has gone in the opposite direction. Following three editions of his Collected Poems (1983, 1988, and most recently, 2006, also from Enitharmon), The Saner Places: Selected Poems has been published, gathering together Brownjohn’s ‘personal choice of poems’ from twelve books, these presumably being the ones by which he would like to be remembered. Issued half a century after his first book (The Railings, 1961), The Saner Places provides those already familiar with Brownjohn’s poetry with, to quote Enitharmon’s description of the book, ‘an excellent opportunity to renew acquaintance with the most notable work of a writer whose achievement has been central to modern English poetry and its major concerns’ – while also serving as a handy introduction for newcomers.

Reviewing Brownjohn’s 2006 Collected Poems for The Guardian, Anthony Thwaite quotes Brownjohn’s remarks from a 1983 interview: ‘I should like people to read my work and think it was like drinking lemonade, only to find a little later that it was strongly laced. I’d want it to go down like lemonade but to hit them like vodka.’ In the poems, this desire manifests itself as plainness of diction masking wryness, the poems’ sting often revealed only in their closing lines. Consider a poem like ‘Before the Game’, where the stanzas in the first half slowly accumulate a stream of detail that weighs on the repeated ‘to decide who wins the toss’. The poem then pivots on the fifth stanza’s ‘And this, over here, is the twelfth man, / who lent the coin / as a method of being noticed for something’, allowing a series of ironic revelations to unfold in its second half:

            It is the custom here that the loser of the toss

            keeps the coin as a consolation

            for the brutality of Fate.

            The owner of this coin did not know of the custom,

            or he would not have lent for the purpose

            a rare doubloon

            of the Emperor Paronomasia IV.

            As it spins, he watches it, trying to seem unaffected,

            thinking, Will I ever get it back?

            The situation is complicated by the fact

            that the doubloons of the Emperor Paronomasia IV

            have two heads.

The irony in Brownjohn’s poetry is also directed along the lines of social commentary, as in a poem like ‘Bastard’. This poem begins with the insectile image of ‘A bastard creep[ing] out through a crack in some / Until-then immaculate-looking woodwork’, a figure who ‘plans to walk into an Organisation, / To stir things up inside an Organisation. / He is going to Go For It and get others Going’. The rest of the poem chronicles the titular Bastard’s steep ascent to the highest echelons of corporate power (‘up / In an express lift to a penthouse suite already, / And they have an office waiting for him already’) and his equally precipitous fall from grace, presaged by the ‘knowing looks, and ever-widening smiles’ of ‘Assistant Bastards’, just waiting to ‘[move] into the Bastard’s chair’.

Nonetheless, it is the whole ‘Organisation’, from bottom to top, which is indicted as rotten to its very core: ‘all the smallest bastards, / The shareholder’s democracy, have been stirred / To demand a different bastard at the top.’ Fundamentally, everyone is interchangeable in this fickle, corporatised universe (‘This year they’re eager for a different scene, / This year they’re after a man with a different style, This year they’d like a bastard with a haircut’), and as one by one, the ‘dirty, crooked, scheming bastards’ ‘shake their heads with humane and pitying smiles’, the whole edifice of a society built on petty squabbles and tussles for power begins to look worryingly hollow, in spite of its appearances: ‘the sun sets golden, and the immaculate walls / Begin to look like very porous woodwork.’ The overall effect of the poem is thus to render disquieting social implications in a drily humorous tone.

Brownjohn is also not above poking fun at poetry itself. He displays a keen mastery of form and a deft ear for rhyme, alternating between full and slant rhyme to great effect. However, in a poem like ‘Ballad Form Again’, Brownjohn treats the experience of walking in inclement weather as a comic metaphor for writing, declaring at the end of this ballad:

            Thought, Shoes which let in water

                 Should be junked for sterner stuff;

            And the same goes for the ballad form:

                 Enough is enough.

This playfulness also shines through in ‘Seven Old Men on an Inter-city Train: A Yeatsian Poem’. Brownjohn riffs on the imagery of Yeats’s sonnet, ‘Leda and the Swan’, with the titular old men imagining that the factory effluent discharged into the lake has taken on the appearance of swans and debating the image’s symbolism. At one point, the sixth man explicitly states, ‘The poet Yeats loved real swans on real lakes, / And had a penchant for using them as symbols’. The discussion then turns towards what Yeats would have thought of their ‘effluent-swans’ – only for the seventh man, hitherto silent, to interrupt with ‘I think that Crewe is the / next stop’, deflating the moment entirely. Perhaps these seven men reappear decades later in another collection as ‘Seven Sherlocks’, a poem that gently parodies the fictional detective’s exploits in anecdotal fashion.

Ultimately, what is most fascinating about Brownjohn’s poetry is its specificity of everyday detail. Commenting on his Collected Poems, Margaret Drabble writes, ‘Alan Brownjohn is one of the most reliably enjoyable of writers. His poems – some sad, some very, very funny – are the true record of an age.’ The selection from his most recent collection, Ludbrooke and Others, bears out her assessment. The character of Ludbrooke is ‘pedantic’ (‘His 1471’), given to boasting about his sexual prowess (‘His Classic Modesty’) and blithely oblivious to the ways in which his behaviour turns him into a figure of ridicule. Yet Brownjohn also makes Ludbrooke into an oddly sympathetic man. Perhaps all someone like Ludbrooke is looking for is the chance ‘to die in saner places’ (‘My Cricket’), and in the meantime, it is words like Brownjohn’s that will accompany him (and us) along the way:

            I am sorry to fear, now it’s dark,

            That only the worst lies ahead;

            Though the least we could show from now on

            Is an odd affirmative spark.

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 Editor.

Bad Language Writing Collective and Contributors

Bad Language: The Birthday Issue

£5.00

This anthology is the fourth collection of new work by the writers of the Manchester-based collective, ‘Bad Language’. The name of this literary coterie is well chosen, suggesting both swearing and ‘bad language’ in a wider sense – words that are spiky, street-wise and demotic, challenging the reader’s assumption that the language used for literature will be swooning or romantic. I’m pleased to report that there isn’t a hint of bad or sloppy writing here, but this medley is a heady mix of different voices from the lyrical to the minatory. The collection acts as a litmus paper for new writing in the Manchester area, showcasing both emergent and established writers while leaving room for the reader to make really exciting discoveries – from the confident poetic style of Elinor Taylor, to familiar names such David Tait, who is represented by his sparse but striking poem ‘How to Catch a Thief’:

Unplug the fridge and extractor fan,

loosen the TV from its stand

then wait in the dark, utterly silent

for the shimmy up the drainpipe,

the slipping of the slates, the rough

gloved hand reaching towards you.

There is a very even-handed ratio of poetry to prose, often lacking in anthologies of this sort. The prose ranges from an outré micro-fiction piece, JP Daly’s ‘That Was Enough’, to a bitter and twisted dramatic monologue, ‘MAM’, by John Roache. The Birthday Issue opens with Sian Rathore’s eerie gothic piece, ‘The Dead Clown Down Cherwell’, centred around a wooden clown that a couple must carry with them – until they decide to jettison its creepiness and awkwardness from their lives so that they can move on:

“I don’t like that clown,” he said, “I don’t like it at all.”

“Finally!” I said, “I’ve been dying to throw the thing overboard and now I have your blessing.”

‘It’s not that easy, is it? Aren’t you going to feel terrible? I might feel terrible.”

Even more disturbing is the next story in the sequence, Nici West’s ‘Wasp’, where a boozy night out leads to confusion and horror, as two friends are torn apart by a mystery man:

“Oh don’t look sad. We’ve freed her. She was an…unhappy girl, much like yourself. She wanted this. She asked for it.”

“She would never ask for this, how can you say that?”

“We all want this eventually.”

Fatima Al Matar’s poem, ‘After I Hate You’, deals with the breakdown of a relationship and carries with it the freight of everyday possessions, containing the finely turned stanza:

Mutual dreams that have expired,

dreams that survive him,

dreams that are hers.

Fat Roland’s short piece, ‘If You Were the Only Boy in the World’, looks at an obsessive lover and includes a line redolent of Patrick Hamilton’s ‘Hangover Square’:

On this wet August evening, I decide that he has to die.

‘He’ is the limerent object of narrator’s infatuation, whom he wants to ‘kiss so hard, I chafe you to your bones’.

In a much more cerebral and evocative vein is Anna Percy’s ‘Lost Lexicon’, which deals with memory, landscape, dying languages and shibboleths. From the window of a Pendolino train, the speaker imagines the quality of vision in first class, and visualises the windows as being pixelated by the mind and by an unreliable gaze:

The window stops being opaque, startling the men in pinstripe suits clutching the pink paper. The Financial Times and pin stripe surviving anything like she was once told cockroaches did, but later found that only the eggs survive which hatch and die motherless.

Here, the bucolic life of the speaker’s mother’s childhood collides with the life of the city – this introspective vignette is one of the real highlights of the anthology overall. From the richly descriptive quality of Percy’s prose, we turn the page to Tom Mason’s cold and clinical short, set in a dystopian future where the church imposes silence upon everyone save the ‘preacher’. At night however, these laconic people silently ‘meet in a crumbling library’ to devour books and:

One by one, delicately cut the stitches from their mouths with rusty knives. They are all aware of the consequences should they be caught. The Golden Silence do not take bad language lightly.

Next are two poems by Michael D. Conley, the first dealing with the world-conquering hubris and imagination of the poet. To test its depth, the speaker dumps into the Mariana Trench all of the most iconic monuments from across the globe, and by doing so makes his old friends seem like ‘underachievers’ – ‘because I can’. ‘Your Husband is Missing’ is a more affecting depiction of a woman whose ‘husband is missing’ because they ‘got into your head and stole him’. Although no condition or disease is mentioned, the poem seems to deal with amnesia induced by degenerative illness:

You stare through him,

through the wall behind him

and start the search yourself.

It could take years.

Nija Dalal’s ‘Young City’ is an unlikely but convincing paean to the city of Atlanta, a place that ‘never intended to be a city’, and where we are given a glimpse into the life of ‘a young brown girl’ living in suburbia and grappling with a difficult history:

We find the unmarked parts of the cemetery, the places that hold the bodies and grief of slaves. It looks like it might rain, and we walk back to the car. A giant, new, black Hummer SUV slows down around the curve.

Justin Dooley’s ‘Fuck Me I’m Lonely’ brings us back to the one-night stand that opened the anthology, but here a lonely figure uses casual sex to try and fill a spiritual void – but he isn’t fooling anyone, especially not himself:

So I pull your pants down, but I don’t really mean it,

and you feign your pleasure and I pretend to believe it. 

Nick Garrard’s ‘Gilda’ is a deftly written, strongly visual piece of creepy backwater Americana where a girl, who has either escaped or is on day release from ‘the containment ward’, finds that chocolate bars and bacon-rashers are not enough to sate her appetite:

Her face was smeared with blood. She smiled, her teeth impossibly white through the stain. The man lay on his back and kept shuddering.

‘The Ghost’, by Daniel Carpenter, is one of the most topical stories in the anthology, relevant to the struggle of the tabloid-named ‘lost generation’, whose members are stuck in a pattern of joblessness through no fault of their own. Here the protagonist loses his job and moves back in with his parents, only to be haunted by the ghost of his carefree adolescence and by the zeitgeist of his times:

It finds old photographs of my friends and leaves them lying on the bed. It plays my old CDs from back when I thought I was a punk.

The same plangent feeling of loss and stagnation is captured in Mercedes Fonseca’s poem ‘Trespassed Perimeter’ where:

Each time, a new piece of news

tugs at my sleeve,

urges to go, run along:

there’s nothing to see here,

not anymore,

nothing to see here.

The sinister undertones of this anthology continue to the end with Ben Judge’s vision of life controlled by an art gallery’s audio guide. Everything, from fine art to a first encounter with a future wife, carries with it a bar-code and an accompanying explanation:

James stopped fifty yards from the Riviera. A girl stood in front of it wearing a t-shirt the colour of summer. On the back was a drawing of a pair of headphones with the number 36715728 where a head would be. James typed the number into his audio guide.

While there are recurring themes of loneliness and ennui laced with genuine moments of horror here, this is from cover to cover a winning anthology, written in fresh and varied styles. Poetry mingles with short prose, certain pieces particularly lingering in the mind long after a first reading. Here’s to the fifth anthology.

Neil Powell

Proof of Identity

68 pp., Carcanet Press, £9.95

Proof of Identity is the seventh poetry collection by Neil Powell. Elegiac and introspective, the nineteen poems in this volume consider both those aspects of existence thrust upon us – family histories, childhood and inheritance – and the adult life choices that sometimes misfire.

 The collection’s most memorable poem, “The Break”, focuses on childhood, exploring the disastrous emotional consequences of the titular “break” between Powell and his parents. The young boy’s failure to speak up on the threshold of his new boarding school becomes “the break that left me forever disconnected”, subsequent festive homecomings failing to heal the breach with either “presents or prayer”. “The Break” is memorable for its emotional honesty – “One wrong turning can mess up all your life / It’s taken me fifty years to see that it was it” – rather than its versification, an imbalance which typifies the collection. Perhaps unsurprisingly – Powell is also a biographer – some of the strengths of Proof of Identity lie in its life-writing. Typically, the collection offers the reader an excitement more historical than formal.

In this context, the volume’s most ambitious poem should be its greatest success. The Journal of Lily Lloyd transposes the diaries of Powell’s grandmother, chronicles of the dispiriting deprivation of her life in South Africa. On landing at Cape Town, she writes of her husband: “I understood the lies he’d been telling me: / he had deceived us all,” and she subsequently endured successive terrible treks across the inhospitable continent. Overall, Journal reads as a social history of small disasters, made expansive by a geography of “Kaffir kraals, / Then a lot of Boer graves near Ladysmith”, where the only possibility is to “get away from that desert / but not out of that wind”. A fascinating biography, but an unsatisfactory poem. The journal’s formal transition from prose to poetry is visually successful, with Powell’s imposition of short verse lines creating a linear, narrow text reminiscent of Lloyd’s restrictive marriage. Affectively, however, Powell’s adaptation is less convincing: rendering Lloyd’s prose account as verse feels arbitrary, creating an emotional disjunction between Lloyd’s voice and the doubting reader.

Proof of Identity is poetry for the curious, balancing psychoanalytical, reflective subject matter with apparently accessible forms.  If re-reading reveals few new metrical subtleties, further consideration raises the question of whose “identity” Powell’s poems seek to prove. Ostensibly, the title poem’s focus is paternal, as the narrator collates photographs that memorialise his father: “Looking for once the statesman he should have been”.  But the most intriguing element is Powell’s consideration of his mother, also present in one image: “It strikes me now that she’s in love: with whom?”. This ambiguous maternal presence haunts much of the collection. “The Gardener”, a sonnet sequence reflecting Powell’s longstanding interest in landscape poems, spans almost forty years of horticultural death and rebirth, ending with the protagonist’s “green burial; she knows / That what we plant outlives us, and outgrows”. Powell (or his cipher) appears in the poems as a “lanky boy”, implicitly identified with the poetic voice of the next piece, “Shutting Down”, in which the narrator – hurrying to his mother’s bedside – prays, “let it be one thing or another”. Recovery, or a quick end: bereavement is a key theme across the collection, which closes with two lively elegies, but this desire for “one thing or another” is about more than death As the final elegy, “Point-to-Point”, makes clear, Powell is ultimately a son “baffled […] all my life” by his mother, and “her lack / Of interest in what went on in other’s heads / Including (I need hardly add) my own”. In Proof of Identity’s final poem, as in its first, Powell’s mother remains “Unanswerable, still”, but the questioning persists. It is when Powell attempts this empathetic projection that Proof of Identity delights and astonishes: a poem like “The Boy on the Bus”, narrating the final thoughts of a 7/7 bomber, is the antithesis of Powell’s more navel-gazing works. The least engaging poems in the collection veer towards a predictable poetry of privilege – all littered architectural cues and monied music – that disappoints in comparison with the impact of “The Boy on the Bus” and “The Break”.

There are bright spots of hope: the “wow and flutter” of jazz when “Louis [Armstrong] takes a Break”, and the charming, speculative history of “Strand, 1923”. But Powell chiefly concentrates on the “old, unhappy, far-off things” and their painful intrusions upon the present. The result is a collection of much interest and some distinction.

Sophie Duncan is a lecturer and DPhil student from the University of Oxford. She likes Shakespeare, fin-de-siecle culture, and is currently working on a new project for Oxford University Press (USA). You can find her blog at Clamorous Voice.

Toni Morrison

Home

160 pp., Chatto & Windus, £12.99.

Home begins with a memory of horses. Frank Money, the novel’s protagonist, remembers watching horses fight when he was younger: ‘their raised hooves crashing and striking’. Frank and his sister Cee were awe-struck as the horses ‘reared up on their hind legs, their fore-legs around the withers of the other’. As children, this memory is indelibly marked on both of them. Not only for the visceral nature of the image, but because of the other memory that it is twinned with (but smothered by): one of racist violence. While hidden from the horses, the children also see a group of men dump a body ‘into a hole already waiting’. In particular they remember the body’s ‘black foot with its creamy pink and mud-streaked sole being whacked into the grave’. It is on this pairing of powerful memories that Morrison’s tenth novel begins. 

The book follows Frank Money as he travels to Georgia to rescue his sister. He receives an anonymous letter that tells him to come quickly, that Cee is in trouble and could die without his help. Frank is an army veteran, recently returned from fighting in the Korean War. After leaving his home to find Cee, an unknown event forces him into a psychiatric hospital; it quickly becomes clear that Frank is suffering from PTSD, or something similar. Frank escapes, however, and continues his journey across the American landscape, from the snowy wilderness of the North to the South of his childhood.

By way of third-person narratives focalised through Frank, Cee, Frank’s wife and grandmother, Morrison builds a portrait of the Money family. These narrations are interspersed with fragments of memory from Frank, such as the opening. Unlike Morrison’s previous work, often compared to Faulkner or Marquez, Home is far more straight and direct, the prose lean and simple. Indeed, with this and her last two novels – Love and A Mercy – Morrison is producing work that is taut and stripped back. The force and directness of this novel is one of its strengths – Morrison has written her most inclusive and simple book yet – but at times it can feel thin and brittle. There could have been much more character development and psychological insight. The brief portraits of the characters other than Frank are measly; however interesting, you can't help but feel that they need more time and space to become fully-fleshed. The brevity of these three novels matches that of Morrison’s contemporary, Philip Roth. In later years (he is in his seventies, Morrison her eighties) Roth has begun to perfect the elegant short novel and novella. It is as though Roth and Morrison are pulling back in later life, detonating tight, dense novels, exercising restraint. But this comes with its own drawbacks.

Frank rescues his sister from an evil employer (I won’t give anything away), and they hurtle back to Lotus, Georgia to keep her alive. It must be said, however, that this return to home is no idealistic and romantic move: Sweet Home Alabama, this is not. Lotus is stifling, full of traumatic memories and difficult familial relations. The town is punishing in every sense. Morrison describes the weather beautifully: the sun, ‘having sucked away the blue from the sky, loitered there in a white heaven, menacing Lotus, torturing its landscape’, but she then goes on to write that it is ‘failing, failing, constantly failing to silence it’. Home is, here, both constricting and yet liberating; there is something that cannot be quelled by the torturing sun.

With the help of the women of the town, however, Cee recovers. Their female collective healing is, again, far from an idealistic refuge of black sisterhood (something visible in her novel Paradise), as the women are cruel and punitive. But Cee survives and the women teach her to quilt. This woven creation becomes a shroud, a tool for mourning and reclaiming the past at the novel’s end. In its closing sections, Frank faces up to a traumatic event in Korea that he had repressed, and they both unravel the darker incident concealed by the memory of the horses. It should be noted that this historical period has been explored with more precision and deftness in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Lark and Termite, but Morrison’s endgame is grander in historical reach.

What they eventually find is shocking and disturbing, but Cee makes sure that she acknowledges the trauma, ‘forcing herself not to look away, not to be the terrified child who could not bear to look directly at the slaughter that went on in the world’. The shock of racist violence that so framed the characters’ childhoods – without them knowing it – is finally confronted. I get the sense that Morrison is talking to the reader here; she is telling us not to shy away from the brute realities of the contemporary world, particularly those still-repressed parts of recent American history (often concerning race). In further excavating the body of black history in America, Morrison continues to assert her necessity as a writer in today’s fictional landscape.

Chris Lloyd is 24 and studying for his PhD at Goldsmiths in literature and film of the American South. His blog, rapturelondon.tumblr.com features his writing, reviews and thoughts on culture.

Wendy Klein

Cuba in the Blood

80 pp., Cinnamon Press, £7.99

Cuba in the Blood, Wendy Klein's first collection of poems, is a book of distinctively separate halves. Klein's core interests lie in the linked arenas of personal and familial history, and in the second half of the book, 'Stops Along the Fault-line', she plucks telling details – poetically or dramatically successful, sometimes both – from these seams. The poems are uneven, particularly when they move into more political territory ('Pennsylvania Prim' offers a discomfortingly textbook sketch of “white-capped, / compliant” victims murdered in the 2006 Amish school shooting), but Klein sometimes achieves a lyrical abruptness which can be striking. In 'Rough Draft – Easter', she conjures an image of “Leaves so tender // they've yet to learn green”, while the end of 'Going Without Saying' proves that even when writing politically (the poem addresses the meaty themes of Balkan conflicts and displaced persons), Klein deals best with a sensory and specific key:

               Walk right away from the rub of sack cloth

the sprinkle of ashes, creamy saucers of elderflower, edible mimosa.

Leave the wind to spread the news.

The poems dealing with confessional, memoir-like topics are also among the most interesting, and in general animated by a sense of drama and character which allows Klein to sustain her tensions more effectively than in the straight lyrics. The speaker of 'Bridging' recollects a car-journey in the company of her parents, during which “mother had learned of his latest / woman—tried to jump out on the freeway; how he // stopped in time, and me wondering what if he had not”. This moment evokes a sense of calamity's haphazard appetence, which in turn invests the poem as a whole with aching and pervasive uncertainty. Its conclusion, ambivalently suggesting the existence of “journeys that might end / in tears or might end somewhere else”, thus feels like a natural end-point at multiple levels of reading, its verbal balance capturing the poem's intellectual and affective preoccupations.

'What my Mother had in Common with Murillo' is a strangely delicate poem in which the writer's memorialising eye remains dispassionate, charting movement rather than excavating feeling:

I imagine her smoking a cigarette

in front of a mirror in the dark –

the movement to and from her lips

like the fireflies that Long Island

summer, catching them in jars,

their torpedo bodies: the smell of smoke –

antique mirrors –

more ghost than smile.

These short, sparse lines avoid many of the difficulties of elegy, a mode caught between the Scylla of overblown sentiment and the undoubted Charybdis of banality. 'What my Mother had in Common' is not difficult or virtuosic poetry, but its ending brings the repeated movement and the imagined woman neatly before the reader's eye, and that is all that is required. The poem that follows, 'Caught Between a Hurricane and What-Happens-Next; her Life in Miniature', also ends well: “If she bicycles into an afternoon foggy with mosquitoes, / mother-of-pearl for mourning, catch her, keep her and / keep her”. The near-stutter of repetition in that closing line lets in a splash of feeling which, held in check for most of the poem, vastly improves the sweet, elaborate images (some feel a trifle over-poised) that precede it. Klein's poems are at times surprisingly plodding at a rhythmic level – in 'Migration', for instance,  “she can see the glimmer / of hope through the viscosity of angst” – but elsewhere, she handles her chosen forms with much greater confidence. 'Fossils' achieves a crisp poetic clarity that accords well with its partly-Chekhovian subject:

Prussian Frederick orders amber in bulk

for his room, and you want to be

trapped there forever.

How afternoons are accordions and Chekhov

with air that's lingon blue, the taste

of tart green schnapps, and Olga

orders champagne which Anton hasn't drunk

for ages, and he says you don't put ice

on an empty heart and dies.

Here, Klein is poetically playful, adapting the facts of Chekhov's death, as Olga Knipper describes them, into a lighter and more jesting narrative spun from sense-impressions. It is unfortunate, then, that the first half of the collection, Cuba Notebook, should suffer from an excess of factual information, often conveyed through superfluous prose linkages between the poems. This sequence is not a successful introduction to Klein's work: interested readers would do well to browse the latter half of the book first, to gain a sense of the poet's strengths. Although there are some effective moments of poetry in Klein's description of the journey to Cuba, as when the sun “leaves / a wonderful starry-straight track / like a pheasant's footsteps jotted / across clouds” ('Flight'), the sequence disintegrates into something much too close to unvarnished travelogue.

The prose linkages are a remarkable problem. In addition to being syntactically unclear at times (a  fault which could have been resolved by more rigorous editing, as could various typographical errors), they often feel like dressed-up extracts from a guide book, giving the impression of a poet who does not wholly trust her own writing: “Viñales National Park was created as a biosphere in the 1960s, and in line with its ethos, the Hotel Moka shares its space with the tree that was there first and now spreads through the roof of the reception area, stretches to a cloud-scudded sky” ('Two Days in – Pinar del Rio'). Klein even makes a direct appeal to what is clearly her authority, in 'El Palenque', which is “one of the places, says the guide book, where runaway slaves could escape from their masters prior to the abolition of slavery in Cuba” (my italics). This limp prose in no way sharpens our appreciation of the poems in between, which would be better if left to stand alone.

Indeed, despite its ill-conceived structure, Cuba Notebook is not irredeemable. The poems' take on the scenes and people they seek to document is 'touristy' to a fault, but Klein does show an awareness of the traveller's ambiguous, tricksy – in some ways necessarily facile – position, from time to time undermining it quite deftly. 'Cigar Factory' confesses that it has proved “Impossible to pick out / the virgins” from a crowd of working women, an observation which throws comic doubt on the notion that cigars made by virgins should constitute a superior pleasure. There is also a great absurdism in travel, as fine travel-writers from Sterne to Gerald Durrell have appreciated, and Klein's use of animals irreverently entering human spaces offers some moments of robust and amusing poetry. Though Cuba in the Blood should not be read primarily for Cuba Notebook, those who persevere with the sequence may enjoy the localised comic felicities of poems such as 'A Parrot Comes To Breakfast', for it is here that Klein's writing feels most fresh and assured:

Sociable, calm, shrewd, he flaps up the stairwell,

leans over the banister, and with a single triumphant

squawk, takes charge.

Chloe Stopa-Hunt is poetry reviews editor of The Cadaverine and a senior editor at The Oxonian Review. She has contributed reviews and review-articles to Poetry Matters, Asymptote, Mslexia, and Poetry Review, and her poems have appeared in magazines, pamphlets and anthologies.