Archive for July, 2012

Holiday

Jul 31st, 12 / 0 Comments

Hello Dear Reader!

 

Thank you very much indeed for visiting The Cadaverine throughout the past year. We've had a great one and will be back in on September 1st!

 

If you have submitted work to us recently please be aware that this will be considered when we return. Submissions are open as ever and can be sent to thecadaverine@hotmail.com. We look forward to reading your work.

 

If you submitted over 6 weeks ago, we're taking this opportunity to bring ourselves up to date and you should hear soon.

 

Many thanks,

 

The Cadaverine Editors

News, News & Events

Not Finding Wittgenstein: Peter Lepus Poems – Review By Richie McCaffery

Jul 29th, 12 / 0 Comments

J. S. Harry

Not Finding Wittgenstein: Peter Lepus Poems

244pp., Bloodaxe, £10.95

Wittgenstein once wrote that ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’. In Not Finding Wittgenstein, J. S. Harry gives a probing, intellectual and sometimes arch voice to a rabbit who bears more than a passing resemblance to those of Beatrix Potter lore. This unlikely hero, Peter Henry Lepus, is also well-read in Cambridge philosophy, counting himself an acolyte of Russell and Wittgenstein; in his quest to research the pre-Socratic philosophers whom he believes to have been rabbits, he gets drawn into modern-day warfare in Iraq. The book-length sequence is laid out as a picaresque narrative, in which the title character, joined by other dispossessed animals, insects and humans, goes through great danger in the search for answers – often sparked by the simplest of wants, a need for food. Recalling the plight of Wittgenstein’s lion, the poems sometimes get lost in their philosophical convolutions about the pitfalls of language and communication. A spectral Wittgenstein is to be found in Peter’s dreams – but much like Clifta, the Huntsman spider, whose quest is to find out about the great Huntsman of the Rubaiyat, the wanderers’ searches are all in vain, and it is what is revealed by chance during the process of wandering that really powers the poems.

Peter is the innocent abroad, straying from Russia to Iraq and often finding himself wrapped up in events and issues far beyond his control or comprehension. He is a figure of witnessing and rumination, not action. For instance, when Peter and Clifta are traversing the Tigris-Euphrates Delta, they stumble upon a discarded backpack containing documents, the contents of which are revealed in later poems. They prove to be the papers of a murdered Iraqi scientist who was involved in the ‘Iraqi Government’s WATER CONTROL PROJECTS’. Behind the technical language – a jargon of ‘desertification’ and ‘salination’ – Peter finds out that all these plans were designed to:

Punish the Ma’dan

Who’d risen against Saddam

During the Gulf War, in anticipation

Of a Saddam-free Iraq.

Although humans are often portrayed in a negative light in this sequence and seen as antipathetic to animals, often it is the collaboration or sharing of ideas between species that yields the most convincing answers. Underlying such dialogues is the idea that philosophy, morality – and even thinking itself – are human constructs which interfere with the natural order, and which make spiders, camels and rabbits aware of (and doubtful about) their own instincts. Peter, an educated and humanised rabbit, is repelled by the idea that Clifta’s ‘kind’ of spider might be cannibalistic. While he is something of an ingénue, Peter has an endless capacity to learn which allows J. S. Harry to pace the horrific discoveries of the poems effectively. They are presented as slowly unfolding realisations – but Peter’s emotions and language are inescapably human, linking him to the same species that has ravaged Iraq and Baghdad (and killed their own ‘kind’). While these poems oscillate between the humorous and the cerebral, making them accessible, they are in the end a series of firm moral statements hidden behind Peter’s innocent and often uncertain perspective. Humour, satire and irony all help to move the work away from being simply a long jeremiad against human wickedness and war, but there is still something too didactic to these poems, from the indirect display of erudition to undisguised moralising:

Peter’s Rue:

 

it takes

fifteen rabbits

skint

of

THEIR LIVES

to make

one

never-alive

Akubra

hat

It is difficult to imagine any potential reader who would not agree with Peter, but the anti-fur point  is one of the more unsubtle in the collection. While the grim legacy of Saddam Hussein’s regime is approached in a fresh way, through the eyes of a bright rabbit, it nonetheless confirms what we already know: that he was a murderous tyrant. Yet the detail of the lives of people and animals existing in the regime’s fall-out elevates the collection beyond mere denunciation.

In ‘Two Days After They Arrive In Baghdad’, Peter and his retinue, who have found a body on their travels, are seeking to ensure that the dead man is afforded his exequies. Peter notices that the visceral shock on the face of his friend Max, confronted with body-parts in the morgue, is one he has seen before – ‘on a philosopher’s face’. Philosophy is not the preserve of abstracted academics, but something that connected with the capacity to feel acutely. The poems centred around the mysterious dead man are some of the most important in the sequence, as they use one death to represent the drive for truth and reconciliation in war-torn areas. In ‘Dilemma?’, a character called Hamid insists that the dead man’s family should be found and told:

So they & those who know him

can come to the mosque & watch him washed,

in the washing room; there are customs

to be observed. We have special rites & prayers.   

Although this final token act of reconciliation proves futile when the dead man is too decomposed to be washed, it reveals Peter’s philosophy as a deeply humane and practical one, attuned to all of the difficulties and suffering of his surroundings. While there are some poems in this collection that stand alone, such as the linguistically clever and dextrous ‘They’, this sequence is best read in its entirety, as many poems segue into each other or carry on threads and recurring themes. Not Finding Wittgenstein is a vast and adventurous sequence which deals with the ‘philosophy gone astray’ which, for Theodore Adorno, constitutes ‘the sole reason why it can go forward’. Peter and his entourage of knowledge-hungry drifters never find the answers they initially sought, but they discover something else by getting lost.   

Richie McCaffery, born in Newcastle in 1986, is a Carnegie scholar at the University of Glasgow researching the Scottish poets of World War Two towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first collection of poetry was recently published by HappenStance Press, entitled Spinning Plates. He has been both a recipient of an Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary and a Hawthornden Fellowship, and in August 2012 will take up a writer's retreat at Brownsbank Cottage in Biggar. His poems have appeared in magazines such as The Rialto, Stand and The Reader as well as the anthologies Lung Jazz and The Best British Poetry 2012. He has reviewed for The Edinburgh Review.

Non-Fiction, Reviews

The Gestaltbunker: Selected Poems, 1965-2010 – Review By Seán Hewitt

Jul 29th, 12 / 0 Comments

Paul Green

 

The Gestaltbunker: Selected Poems, 1965-2010

 

174pp., Shearsman Books, £10.95

 

The eponymous poem to this varied and stylistically-meaty retrospective, ‘The Gestaltbunker’, contains a startling line which encapsulates many of the effects and fruitful frustrations of Green’s Selected Poems. We are told that

 

 each word jerks off     into the void

 

Not only does the form here echo the sense, with the gap between the ‘word’ and the ‘void’ (i.e. the disjunction between sign and signified) represented by line’s blank, but the sense is self-reflexively difficult to glean. The brilliant and disorientating circularity of this line is not unique in Green’s work. There are many such instances (‘the world is eating the sum of its parts’), and they are deployed with an impressive intelligence which is not meant to confuse but to demonstrate the surreal logic of Green’s worlds. In short, this rewarding difficulty is typical of a poet whose work is muscular and challenging through and through.

 

Green is a natural experimenter, and this trait is demonstrated effectively over the course of his book, which charts a career spanning 45 years. There are large, sprawling poems such as ‘Basement Mix’ and ‘The Slow Ceremony’; prose poems; poems propelled by a rapper’s attitude (‘SIT DOWN SHADDUP YA KNOW WHAT I MEAN / ONE WORD IN MY HAND GONNA CLEAN YOUR SCREEN’); and a poem conceived as a video poem for television (‘The Slow Learning’). What remains consistent throughout the selection, however, is Green’s experimental faculty, which inhabits new voices and styles with confidence and ease. We get the sense that Green has always been a poet pushing for new experimentation as his interests shift and mutate over time. All this linguistic and stylistic play can occasionally lead to an awkwardness of delivery (such as in the collection’s opener, ‘Aquarius’, where the direct address becomes grating as the poem progresses), but there is a great quotation from Gertrude Stein which might give us (and Green) some leverage. In her Picasso, Stein observes:

 

Picasso once said that he who created a thing is forced to make it ugly. In the effort to create the intensity and the struggle creates this intensity, the result always produces a certain ugliness, those who follow can make of this thing a beautiful thing because they know what they are doing, the thing having already been invented, but the inventor because he does not know what he is going to invent inevitably the thing he makes must have its ugliness.          

 

Green has affinities with the warping imaginative approach of the modernist experimenters. Lines like ‘your future could be sharp, bloody and glittering as a looted shop front. Or as lumpy as your first baby-food’ seem imagistically confused and impenetrable, but occasionally Green hits on a Beckettian mix of the lyric (or even the Romantic) and the experimental. It is on these occasions that his work becomes most captivating and memorable: ‘Noah’s houseboat wallows through the wine-dark sea’. Its compromise is effective and deeply-felt.

 

Green describes to us disturbing worlds, riddling with the difficulties of logic and sense, and yet often these worlds seem to be as difficult to him as they appear to be to the reader. His nature is uninterested in man: where Wordsworth’s nature may be described as the vehicle for his thoughts, Green’s doesn’t take much notice of the poet at all. In ‘The Slow Ceremony’, for example, the flowers are simply ‘existing’, and in ‘Basement Mix’ Green acknowledges the speaker’s own sense of his separateness:

 

outside the speckled window

church gongs time tremors

through a whole pearly sky

that won’t need me to milk it

 

and pink wet hydrangeas

carrying on

 

It is man, not nature, who bears the weight of Green’s force. In one of his most impressive cityscapes, ‘Metropolis’, nature’s haunting absence pervades the poem. The opening image, reminiscent of the empty chair or rocking swing so often used to depict loss, shows the deliberate and shocking self-destruction of humankind:

 

another diplomat hangs himself to swing slowly

like a briefcase bulging with small burnt sins

 

Just as we might hang up pictures, decorations, even coats, Green’s diplomat hangs up his own life, becoming the very briefcase he has worked so hard to stuff with corporate achievements. This ironic futility brings us back to Green’s subtle circularities, which distort logic just as they offer to deconstruct it.

 

The result of this is that we are never allowed any certainty of belief or understanding, with Green constantly pulling the solid ground from under our feet. He gives us precise, exacting detail only to undercut his own sureness with a qualifier, a technique which frustrates as much as it illustrates our need for sense. In these lines from ‘The Throne Room’, the firm and decisive ‘are’ and ‘is’ are harried by immediate uncertainties:

 

The sources of light are outside the room, somewhere in the tubular tunnels diffused, diffracted, perhaps.

 

In the mouth of the north-west tunnel, a throne is stationary. It is probably no longer in use…

 

Uncertainty is coupled with exactitude, lines offer sense just as they deny it, ‘words jerk off            into the void’.

 

This dystopian, experimental poetry skirts the fringes of a variety of forms and styles, but ultimately undercuts each to form its own unique idiom, situated somewhere at the very edge of logic. It is drenched in science, astronomy, and pop-culture, yet it also borrows from Romanticism, post-modernism, and spoken word. It is purposefully and excitingly frustrating, and it is a credit to Green’s dynamism that he has pursued different forms of experimentation throughout his career. This book is one for lovers of the surreal, for those who prefer the uncategoriseable to the mainstream. It won’t be a bestseller – and is definitely an opinion-splitter – but it makes you think, makes you argue with the words on the page, makes you defend yourself, and makes you aware, in an unsettling but addictive way, of your own position as a reader. The Gestaltbunker is a challenge, calling for courage and tenacity in its audience, but if worked at, a book that confidently repays the debts it demands.

 

Seán Hewitt, 21, recently graduated from Girton College, Cambridge, with a degree in English. His poetry has been published in magazines including Agenda, The SHOp, Northwords Now, Crannóg, The Cadaverine and The Mays XIX, amongst others. In 2011, he won the Rima Alamuddin Prize, and he has recently been nominated for a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He will be Apprentice Poet-in-Residence at this year’s Ilkley Literature Festival. He keeps a blog at seanhewitt.blogspot.co.uk, and tweets @seanehewitt.

Non-Fiction, Reviews

Revenge – Emily Paskevics

Jul 25th, 12 / 0 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Revenge

 

When he tells me he loves me,

he has Kleenex sticking from one nostril

for the nosebleed, and I’m pushing raw meat

to his blackened eye. He gasps the words

from between bruised ribs, whimpering

with a split lip, chipped tooth. I’m wondering

why he waited, and why he thinks it matters now,

now that it’s been a year at least

since we both fell in love

with that bright-eyed bohemian girl

in Spain, who took a photo for us

when we asked, then stayed the night

and ran off with him in the morning.

I don’t even remember her name.

And I’m not about to ask what happened

to her, won’t ask who busted him up like this,

whose honour he was defending, or where

he’s been for all this time. Instead I say

come in and of course you can stay, I’ll bring

Band-Aids and beer and we’ll catch up,

talk about Spain and those good old days

as though nothing strange ever happened.

And he tells me I’m so good to him, too kind,

and he doesn’t deserve a friend like me. But

I’m not being kind, after all. Just patient. This

pity is a quiet revenge, the perfect payback,

and we both know it. For once we have something

urgent to share, something about heartbreak,

half-truths, and the sick vitality of obsession.

And when silence presses sharp angles into us

again, we’ll know how to push right back

with both hands.

 

 

 

Sometimes I Find Myself

 

ravenous. Thin

as an edge, with

the teeth of a wolf.

 

And sometimes

I find myself

as a Victorian portrait

or in a map ripped

from an ancient book –

 

sometimes I find myself

singing along a crowded street

or muttering here

into an empty room.

Sometimes

 

I find myself naked

at a tall window

sentimentalizing

the moon –

 

otherwise I find myself

in the curve of the kettle

or as a greasy spoon,

or in tealeaves

at the bottom of the cup

 

full of holes. I find

myself empty

as an overturned bowl,

while sometimes

 

I find myself drunk

and walking home alone.

Or sometimes

I’m holding a jar of beach glass,

a rare feather

and a pocketful of stones.

 

These moments I find myself

are carved

into a fragment of bone

torn from the body

of a wild creature –

sometimes the wolf’s,

 

 

 

Emily is a graduate student at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. Recent or forthcoming poetry publications include The Claremont Review, Shorthand (via Toronto’s Diaspora Dialogues), Carte Blanche (via the Québec Writers’ Federation), Voices (through the University of Toronto), Black Heart Magazine, FringeLIT, StepAway Magazine, and ditch,. She has also collaborated with McGill’s “Poetry in Performance” project, and is a recent fellowship recipient for the Summer Literary Seminars International 2012.

Poetry

Selected Poems By Gig Ryan – Review By Daniel Barrow

Jul 22nd, 12 / 1 Comment

Gig Ryan

Selected Poems

176pp., Bloodaxe, £9.95

This selection may be an introduction to Gig Ryan's work for British readers, but it won't make it any less tough for them. Although her poetry has appeared in British magazines, and in overseas journals more familiar to the poetry-reading public (particularly Australia's excellent Jacket), the six volumes of poetry she's published in Australia since 1981 have been absent here. I suspect that the journal format is the best place for her work: the imagistic intensity, the wayward logic, the heavily referential and frequently dark tone of poems are best experienced in short bursts, among other material; she rarely writes in the sequence form, so there is little to disrupt. That isn't to fault the publisher's efforts in putting this volume out: considering the present image and coverage of Australian poetry in Britain, it's a useful and valuable addition. It's just that the book may be experienced best when opened at a random point – or, better, snipped into its constituent pages.

Part of the difficulty in orienting oneself in Ryan's work is the lack of the generic lodestars by which we (unfortunately) often navigate through new poetry. She doesn't bear much of a resemblance to what most readers will know of Australian poetry – her overtly satirical poems can occasionally bear a distant likeness to Peter Porter at his most cryptic and grim, or a closer one to a more fragmented version of the Robert Adamson of 'Sonnets To Be Written From Prison' – nor to much of the usual contents of Bloodaxe's list. A better territory for thinking about these poems when meeting them head-on may be that of American poetry of the postmodern period: perhaps Bill Berkson, Clark Coolidge's later work, Ted Berrigan (though less happy-go-lucky than the latter). More obviously, there is Surrealism: at times she resembles Vallejo, the early Neruda and Paz robbed of their vitalism, the perturbing but hot animation of the world in their poems turned to the uncanny life of objects.  The shades of experience don't so much parade through her work as hammer past, sometimes stinging the reader in their wake.

Fractures run through Ryan's voice at every level. The muted strangeness that inhabits her work at the level of the sentence – take this, from 'Eliminations': “My silly soul drives badly round the concourse, / back home, proving everybody wrong, why don't you /crawl out of that damned statue?” – extends to the relation between sentences, her work's logic. Particularly in the work after Pure and Applied (1998), one of her major tics is to swap line-breaks for sentence-ending periods (though the new lines are capitalised at the start), which can be disconcerting at first, not least because the sentences they cut off are often fragments that sit on the threshold of conventionally sensical speech. (One of her lovely tendencies is throw out whispers, leaning-in confidences, deadpan statements, complaints, only to take the sentence somewhere else in the next clause or follow it with a non-sequitur.) The strangeness of her work cuts in both directions: it suggests, as much of the best contemporary poetry does, other logics by which to engage with the object of the poem, and, simultaneously a certain corrupted fealty to the quality of 'comprehensibility'. Consequently, on second glance, bewildering images – “What helicopter must have sunk into the roof / to be used so precariously by the management” – fall into odd but understandable relations to their context; apparently cold, menacing, thoroughly ironised poems take on new facets of intimacy. A switch of register, addressee, affective inflection, type of verbal gesture (questions, bitching, reminiscence, pointing), from clause to clause (or even severed by a line-break) can throw one off until a re-reading seems to realign things, at least for the moment.

The early work, which see-saws, poem to poem, between surrealist dissonance and unsettling but genre-conventional anecdote, comes off as somewhat gauche, unsure of how to handle itself, hitting on effect for its own sake (and sometimes falling flat in the struggle). The latter sort of poem tends to work better: 'The Tenant', from her first collection The Division of Anger (1981), does very well at its parlour-game purpose. Its conversational fait divers opening – “The old bloke down the corridor was found today / in his neat and powerless room / with the empty jar of pills” – turns into an odd but welcome admission of inarticulacy, of not knowing what sort of thoughts are to be prompted by such an event –

            in the afternoon. I suppose it's the suburb

            or the age. I never knew what to say to him

            much. His daughters never came. […]

            The window looked back at the tiny room

            like a Health inspector.

 By contrast, the poems from Pure and Applied onwards, which make up more than half of the book, are much more consistent. The two poles are brought together, startling imagery and logic allied to a clear overall sense of a poem's effect and shape, the energies of misery, eroticism, domestic tragedy (or non-domestic – I'm thinking particularly of her mining of classical imagery) focused through more precise outbreaks of oddity. Take something like 'Autumn':

            You go to bed a failure and rise a saint

            The casino's trays of lights wobble in the river

            Unpack the origami news in prison flats

            and books advertised like cars

The linebreak takes on, as so often in postmodern poetry, the function of a film-edit, prompting the question of what meaning can emerge from the cumulative constellation or pile-up (the latter more often in Ryan's work) of its glimpsed object-images. At the sixth line, the lyric 'I' enters, and the latent melancholy of the preceding lines emerges; the narrator seems to have no especial relationship to the preceding images, nor to anything much else in the way of self-possession: “I forget who I am, and drive / or hover at a desk, a blank mosaic / while their shocks comfort or defer” (difficult to tell who the implicit 'they' is, but the objects named in the preceding lines – the world itself, picked out in close-ups – seem like good candidates). With a focus thus provided, the sadness of the poem's second half comes to the fore: “A beautiful object covers his book / Concrete rain falls down”. Although the way it describes “her devices and rueful catharsis” – again, who is the 'she'? The narrator suddenly switching into the third-person? – lends it a lightening archness.

We can see, then, how intricate the effect of her work ultimately is, even if its method, at the level of the line, can sometimes seem crude (those successions of sighs and snapshots). A few of the more formal poems – the Petrarchan sonnet 'When I consider', 'Actaeon' – calm the energies of the work down further, but it bubbles angrily under the surface, never wholly subordinated to any formal logic (rhyme never plays a big part even in those poems that use it). The section of 'New Poems' that closes the volume contains a few duds (the ekphrastic take on Jan van Eyck's The Marriage of Arnolfini is pretty throwaway; 'The Swimmer Retires', perfunctory), but also plenty of evidence that Ryan continues to do good work, not least a scathing attack on John Howard, 'Kangaroo and Emu': “'We have signed niiine memoranda' the minister umpteenths out / ramping up his slush fund's rumpled horn”. We look forward to more – though not too much at once.

Daniel Barrow is a poet and critic. His poetry has appeared in Iota and Horizon Review, and was included in The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011). He has written on music, literature, film and visual art for The Wire, Plan B, The Quietus, New Statesman and others; he was runner-up in the Critic of the Year category at the Guardian Student Media Awards 2011. He lives in south-east London.

Non-Fiction, Reviews

The Bees – Review By Dominic Hale

Jul 22nd, 12 / 0 Comments

Carol Ann Duffy

The Bees

96pp., Picador, £14.99.

Reviewing Carol Ann Duffy’s first collection as poet laureate is a surprisingly difficult experience, at odds with the bliss of reading it. The reason for this is perhaps the collection’s vast scope, its (typically Duffyesque) bravery, the way it does not shirk from confrontation. Duffy’s work has always epitomised what great lyric poetry can, and should do. It is accessible, but it is not simple. Indeed for a poet to become truly timeless, some degree of accessibility is always necessary, and Carol Ann Duffy possesses this quality. This collection, as with much of Duffy’s oeuvre, is filled with poems to sing into cradles, and to pore over in dusty, tome-brimming rooms.  She wields this paradox like a cutlass, a mask and an invitation all at once, switching voices, perspectives and views with the ease of a writer at the peak of her art. This is poetry for anyone and everyone. We take what we want from Duffy’s poems: we plunge as far into them as we deem fit. But we all take something.

I did not expect to greet Duffy’s collection with such enthusiasm, unconsciously expecting that her new office might blunt some of the edge in her work. But she inhabits the role of poet laureate perfectly – not overly erudite, nor too modest. She has the nerve for the job. She does not shy away from big themes, neither by ignoring them nor clouding them with pretentious language: the prestige of her office has not hampered her poetry.

Duffy’s distinctive manner of engaging with her laureateship is very evident in The Bees. Duffy seems to see her post as a means of celebrating Britain, but not necessarily the sovereignty that employs her. ‘The English Elms’, while of course an environmental poem concerning the effects of global warming, exudes Britishness – and specifically, Englishness. But as a Scottish poet living in England, Duffy has more licence than most to speak for Britain. ‘Drams’ is a wonderful sequence of haikus, at once personal and transcendent, amongst the standout poems in this collection. National identity is wrestled with in this poem, as it has been throughout Duffy’s work (in such poems as ‘Originally’); the ‘sad flit’ from ‘whiskey to beer’ brilliantly encapsulates transition and homesickness, while ultimately seeming to align herself with Scottish poetry, with ‘Imlah, Lochhead, Dunn’ and other peers.

Natural imagery, specifically the wildlife of Britain, pervades this collection. Duffy, always lauded for her so-called ‘ventriloquism’, seems in The Bees to embody the voice of an entire nation: of its people, yes, but even more, the voice of its rocks, roots and earth. The running motif of the bees in these poems serves as a symbol for the untainted world – for natural life, a kind of British Eden. As Duffy writes in ‘Virgil’s Bees’: ‘bees are the batteries of orchards … guard them’. Elsewhere, the natural world is championed through the voice of The Tempest’s Ariel, that quintessential spirit of nature within the English literary tradition, and simultaneously a symbol of nature’s subjugation by man. ‘Parliament’ is a stunning poem, with all the birds of the so-called ‘writer’s wood’ chorusing their two cents’ worth in protest of humanity’s disregard for the planet; here, again, Duffy speaks to the ancient traditions of literature in English, specifically to Chaucer’s ‘Parlement of Foules’, written in the 1380s.

Something that stands out in this collection is the power of its verbal music. The language in The Bees is exuberant and playful, unusually so for Duffy whose earlier poetry often relied on the potency of its phrasing as opposed to its phonological vibrancy. Duffy’s recent forays into poetry for children have certainly had an impact upon this collection: assonance and alliteration abound (‘garden from grave to garland her’ in ‘Winter’s Tale’). Occasionally the sheer enthusiasm of the music can become overbearing and distracting, in poems such as ‘Cockermouth and Workington’ (which recalls John Cooper Clarke’s poem ‘The Pest’), but usually the collection’s joyous language sweeps the reader away. These are poems that celebrate the English language, and Duffy’s ear for its cadence and melody has never been more acute.

One of my favourite poems in this collection, ‘Mrs. Schofield’s GCSE’, is a brilliantly wicked piece of rhetoric in response to the removal of one of Duffy’s most memorable poems (‘Education for Leisure’) from the GCSE syllabus, on the grounds that it might incite knife crime. Duffy appropriates the voice of the complaining examiner in one of her typical feats of ventriloquism, pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of banning one poem about violence while the literary canon is steeped in it. She argues powerfully that a ban on ‘Education for Leisure’ should equate to a ban on a huge number amount of other school texts, notably Shakespearean tragedies. This poem is a perfect example of the caustic wit that Duffy has always wielded bravely throughout her career.

Another of the finest poems in ‘The Bees’ is ‘Last Post’, a moving elegy for Henry Allingham, Harry Patch, and the dead of the Great War. The jarring rhythm and alliteration (‘bled bad blood’) apes ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, and the hypothetical reversal of time that the poem adumbrates is made dramatic and agonising by the poem’s subjunctive mood: ‘If poetry could truly tell it backwards / then it would’.

This is an excellent collection, among Duffy’s best. She has always been a political poet, and a poet concerned directly with modern as well as timeless concerns, a dual focus that certainly comes across in these poems. The Bees was a pleasure to read, and was a worthy winner of the Costa Poetry Award. Duffy is a marvellous laureate writing marvellous poetry, and we are very fortunate to have her.

Dominic Hale was born and grew up in Lancashire, and is currently living in Edinburgh studying for a degree in English Literature. He has been writing poetry for about three years, was twice winner of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award and has had poems published by Cadaverine, Pomegranate and the Inkwell. At present he is thoroughly enjoying the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Geoffrey Hill.

Non-Fiction, Reviews

Largo – Review By Richie McCaffery

Jul 22nd, 12 / 0 Comments

Paul Bentley

Largo

26pp., Smith/Doorstop, £5.

It is an old saw for reviewers to term a work inaccessible and then praise the benefits of careful rereading, but this is certainly the case with Paul Bentley’s ambitious psycho-geographical work, Largo. There are only three poems in this pamphlet, of which two are long and discursive, but presented in a pop-song manner, complete with solos (‘Morning, wankers!’ – Policeman greeting picketers), riffs, and emotive choruses conjuring up the adolescent malaise of Morrissey:

Scargill’s waiting… Then he’ll turn round to the members and say ‘Look, I warned you what was going to happen’. Then I think he’s going to go for another one.

Arthur Scargill haunts this pamphlet, which is rooted in the North – an exploration of coming of age under the iron presence of Thatcher. The language of the poems is a coadunation of high and low styles, from Latinate terms and allusions to classical music, to cries of ‘Scab!’ Within this verbal mix, Scargill’s presence brings to mind an epigraph from the finest collection (V) of another Northern poet, Tony Harrison:

My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.

– Arthur Scargill

Largo itself carries three epigraphs. One is from an interview with Thatcher in which she claims to be returning Britain to the Victorian values; one is from an account of the Native American tribal chief, Sitting Bull, always running from ‘white men’; the third is an alchemical adage, ‘visita interiora terrae rectificando invenies occultum lapidem’ – which in translation means: ‘visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying you will find the hidden stone which is the true medicine’. The true medicine Bentley is searching for in re-enacting his politically troubled teenage years turns out, much like alchemy itself, to provide neither riches nor remedy – but rather elegy and loss. For all of the pamphlet’s brio, linguistic and physical, the guiding tone is very mournful.

While the longer poems display real variety, dexterity, and detail, it is the twelve-line title-poem that stands out, acting as a vital lodestone for the collection. Bentley succeeds in mingling death and the emotive effect of classical music, developing the familiar connection between Dvorak’s ‘Largo’ (‘the Hovis music, to you and me’) and working-class Yorkshire into something more profound. He gives us a place of cobbled streets ‘sad and steep’:

and seemingly never-ending; or the massed bank

of Leeds supporters, intoning it

wherever they went, still adrift from Division 1.  

While it might seem too easy to compare this poem with Larkin’s ‘High Windows’, it nonetheless contains a strikingly similar vision of something inexpressible and transcendent being tethered by workaday reality.

The most difficult poem to approach is Bentley’s postcard riposte to Paul Muldoon, ‘Barnsley Abu’, which features a similar mix of basilect and acrolect – the agony and ecstasy of football, references to both highbrow and popular culture, and most of all, the haunting effects of place and home. This theme comes movingly into focus in the final stanza, as the closure of the pits, the demise of a football team, and the death of a father are all skilfully juxtaposed:

As the morphine stops working – for even as closure now seems imminent, you see

I’ll have no choice but to stand here, Paul, ‘forever’ as you say,

stand here among however many we may think we are – though I’m f-ing crazy

for wasting my money our kid says – stand here half-drunk again, swooning as this

Easter snow falls on my tongue on my eyes on my ears in the palms of my hands,

faintly.

While these feel like visceral, authentic experiences wrought into poetry, there is a telling point of divergence between Paul Bentley and Tony Harrison: Bentley’s poetry holds back from swearing, almost self-bowdlerised. This poem is also self-conscious in its Northern signifiers, as if each moribund mining town is the sole patch of a poet whose eloquence rose above the collective din of the football crowd. This also stretches to some of the pop-culture references Bentley uses to underline the period he is writing about:  poems in the sequence entitled ‘The Two Magicians’ abound with so many allusions to Smiths songs that it begins to feel like a desperate measure, an attempt to locate the poetry musically which, if specific, is also over-emphasised.

The poems blend memories of Thatcher’s illusory, neo-Victorian England with the difficult business of growing up in a dying place, with a resulting involvement in petty crime and drugs. The Latinate names of the fauna in each poem contrast with police brutality, picketing and acid houses in the countryside, where youngsters go into the countryside to take drugs under the pretence (as they archly explain to the police) of going ‘fishing’. There are moments of high rhetoric and convincingly working-class patter, while a strong sense of meter and rhyme underscores the idea that these poems are as much musical as they are linguistic. 

While Largo is a pamphlet, it has an undeniable feel of something more substantial and less ephemeral. The poems grapple with big themes in inventive and clever ways and the usual size of a Smith/Doorstop pamphlet has been enlarged. With a poetry of such scale and vision, it won’t be too long before Paul Bentley makes the leap into book form, and I for one look forward to that event. 

Richie McCaffery, born in Newcastle in 1986, is a Carnegie scholar at the University of Glasgow researching the Scottish poets of World War Two towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first collection of poetry was recently published by HappenStance Press, entitled Spinning Plates. He has been both a recipient of an Edwin Morgan Travel Bursary and a Hawthornden Fellowship, and in August 2012 will take up a writer's retreat at Brownsbank Cottage in Biggar. His poems have appeared in magazines such as The Rialto, Stand and The Reader as well as the anthologies Lung Jazz and The Best British Poetry 2012. He has reviewed for The Edinburgh Review.

Non-Fiction, Reviews

Ancient Light – Review By Chris Lloyd

Jul 13th, 12 / 0 Comments

John Banville

Ancient Light

256 pp., Viking, £16.99

In Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, the protagonist asks ‘Who said it that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten?’ This quotation would serve as an adequate epigraph for John Banville’s new book, Ancient Light. The novel features Alexander Cleave, an ageing actor who has appeared in two previous books by Banville. This is no saga of the likes of Edward St Aubyn though, but a more episodic aggregation of Cleave’s various desires and memories. The novel charts Cleave’s recollections of an affair he had as a teenager with the mother of his best friend. This relationship is remembered in blurred fragments: scenes of voyeurism, heady adventure and intimate sexual experience. Cleave informs us early on that these memories are merely ‘items of flotsam’ that he chooses ‘to salvage from the general wreckage’ of his mind. ‘What is a life,’ he poignantly says, ‘but a gradual shipwreck?’ 

Stories from the illicit relationship are interspersed with scenes from the present where Cleave is asked to star in a new film about a literary scholar. This half of the book is less successful and remarkably unbelievable in many ways – a film about literary theory? I think not – but in some ways it provides a neat balance to the scenes from the past. However, the dual storylines are too forcefully combined. For instance, the film is called The Invention of the Past: a far-from-subtle nod to the subject of the novel we are reading. I find it strange that Banville felt the need to include such an explicit gesture to his theme; there are a number of points where Cleave admits the fragility of his memory, asking himself whether he has made the whole affair up. We do not need such hulking signposting. 

Books about the potency, or waning, of memory are nothing new, and sadly Banville has little to offer us that has not been charted before. He is always good at capturing small details and glimpses of human behaviour in the miniature, but in Ancient Light the whole effect is too rigid and artificial. In contrast, Barnes’ slender and delicate The Sense of an Ending effortlessly charts the machinations and complications of memory in a restrained and wholly convincing way. I longed to re-read Barnes’ book as I ploughed through this sludge of a novel. 

The Sea, which won Banville the Booker prize some years ago, masterfully tackled similar themes to Ancient Light, but did so with a clever and shocking structure, in poetically-charged language. Banville is known for this luxurious and finely-tuned prose, and there is no shortage of seductive sentences in this book, for example: ‘there is nothing like the loss of an only child to soften the wax of sealed convictions’. Such metaphoric beauty is typical of Banville, but in Ancient Light this wordiness often gets out of control. He is often critiqued for his pretentious literary styling, and for the first time, in the case of this book, I have to agree.  Consider this description of steam rising from a boiling kettle: the ‘column…was rising, dense with sunlight in it and lazily undulant, and curling on itself in an elegant scroll at its topmost reach’. While the steam in some ways stands in for Mrs Gray – the undulant and elegant one in Cleave’s eyes – this description is too overbearing. Banville has many of these moments where his prose spills over into ridiculousness. Take this awful simile: ‘A sob of anguish was forming inside me like a big soft warm unlayable egg’. With the clichéd ‘sob of anguish’ aside (more than clunky), the layering of four adjectives onto that egg is laughable (I put an exclamation mark in the margin next to this passage in my copy!).

Ancient Light is a thoroughly disappointing read. Banville is a skilled and often stimulating novelist, but this book is flawed in too many ways for it to convince. For the real force of a ‘shipwreck’ of memory, read The Sea. 

 

Chris Lloyd is 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.

Non-Fiction, Reviews

You – Rachel Grosvenor

Jul 12th, 12 / 0 Comments

 

You awake beside him. Watch him sleep. His closed eyelids flicker and you rest a hand on his cheek. He doesn’t wake. You know already that it is too late for the both of you. Get up, and put on your shoes. Put on the black ones with the thick soles, the ones that water wouldn’t dare penetrate. You’re already dressed. Take your bag, but don’t turn around to look at him as you leave. If you’re going to leave, you’ve got to do it with your whole heart. You mustn’t look to him anymore. He doesn’t stir. Close the door behind you quietly.

It’s cold outside. Autumn is growing frosty; you can see your breath hover before your face. Think back to him; remember the way that he used to use the winter air as a fake cigarette, and how you never laughed. Now try to forget it. Walk toward the station. Pull your collar about your face and wish that you’d brought a scarf out with you. Wish that you owned a scarf. You can always buy one. Maybe she could knit you one. Outside the darkness holds a glimmer of light, the way that it does when the moon is so big and bright that it acts as a street lamp. You look for the moon, but you can’t find it among the houses and trees. It’s silent. There is nobody around and you don’t need to feel frightened. You feel so anyway. You think of ghosts and of strange men that could follow you.

You’ve been walking for five minutes. You know that this means there are only another five minutes to go if you take the normal route, through the high street. You weigh up the pros and cons. You decide that you’d rather not deal with the drunken cries of youths as they get kicked out of nightclubs. You’ll take the shortcut instead, which you never normally do. It’s simply a path under a bridge; it’s nothing to worry about. This is what you tell yourself, and yet, as you walk, you can’t help but remember that story about the boy that fell in the canal whilst he was drunk. Try to push it out of your mind. As you pass under the bridge and focus on your steps upon the gravelly path, the light of the moon cuts out. You reach for your phone and try to use its glow as a torch, but you find that it makes the air around you all the darker. It seems to creep around your shoulders and pull at your shoes, trying to trip you, trying to trick you. You can see the end of the passage up ahead, the station lights flicker above the sign. Keep moving your feet along the path, make your strides long and purposeful, but don’t run. People get into trouble when they run, and anyway, you don’t have anything to run away from.

As you step out of the darkness, take a deep breath in and realise that the air no longer smells like dank and stale water. The moon welcomes you to your destination, the bulb above the station sign stops faltering as if to comfort you. Stand below it and wait. You only have to wait for a minute. There she is, climbing out of a taxi before you. She smiles a big smile and rushes over to hold you. You bury your face into her scarf and smell the mixture of perfume and something else, something that belongs to her only. She squeezes your hand and kisses you gently on the lips.

“Are you ready?” she asks. Nod to her. You’re ready. 

 

 

Rachel Grosvenor is a writer from Birmingham, currently finishing an MA in Creative Writing. She spends her days drinking good coffee, hanging around Oxfam, and trying to squeeze witticisms into 140 characters.

Prose

Shark – Review By Lucy Williamson

Jul 6th, 12 / 2 Comments

Wes Brown

Shark

176 pp., Dog Horn Publishing, £9.99.

In a recent interview, Wes Brown spoke of his commitment to “writing completely uncensored.” His debut novel, Shark, certainly seems to have been written in this way. Its pages are full of sentences that barge their way in to your head, smash the place up a bit and break the door on their way out. Sentences, in other words, that tell it like it is, however that might be. For this reason, Shark will not appeal to everyone. If you are easily offended by swearing, or recoil at the idea of frank sexual discussion, I would advise you to seek alternative literary pursuits; everyone else is invited join John Usher in the run-down boozers and worn out snooker halls of Leeds. 

A Yorkshire lad and Iraq war veteran, Usher has returned to his home city following his departure from the army. He struggles to adapt to civilian life and battles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Uninspired by the limited employment opportunities available to him, Usher decides to earn his money as a pool shark. Brown’s novel is the story of the ups and downs of Usher’s life both at and away from the table, including his complex relationship with two women: ex-girlfriend Evelyn, now married to English Defence League member Carl, and attractive barmaid Francesca, whom he has instantly taken a liking to.  

The way that Brown writes about Burley, the district of Leeds in which the novel is set, is vivid and engaging. He states that his depiction of Leeds has “elements of the real” but is “located somewhere deep in the subconscious”. Understandably perhaps, he wishes to distance the dystopic elements of his writing from his home city, which, he says, is already at risk of being negatively stereotyped in a way that is “not truly representative”. Nevertheless, he does admit that the novel portrays some of the grittier elements of life that can be found in big cities like Leeds. His writing is undoubtedly at its best when it deals with recognisable aspects of urban Yorkshire: the long roads with “the houses all the same: chunky terraces” and the guttural Leeds accent “doht” for don’t and “yer” for you. 

Shark has some weighty themes: the after-effects of war, adultery, misogyny, racism, drug abuse, alcoholism and unemployment all feature at some point during the narrative. Brown, however, manages to keep Shark from become an ‘issues’ book. His focus is on his main character, John Usher, rather than on any particular theme. The novel is Usher, his thoughts, his feelings, his actions and his words, none of which are without their controversies. 

Usher is a deeply flawed protagonist, who is all the more interesting to read about for this reason. On the one hand we feel sympathetic towards him because of his experience of war, which haunts him like a “quiet scream that doesn’t let slip”. On the other hand, throughout the course of the novel, he is shown to have plenty of personality traits that are difficult to sympathise with, particularly his tendencies towards misogyny and racism. 

Although Carl, Usher’s friend, is clearly more vocal and holds the more extreme right-wing views, both men become involved with EDL marches. Futhermore, despite his assertions that the demonstrations are not about race but “abaht country”, Usher often talks about Black and Asian people in offensive terms. The same can be said of the way in which he refers to women, who, in summary, are bad drivers that create too much drama but have bodies that are too appealing to allow one to ignore them completely.  

Brown’s choice of protagonist is brave and could easily have backfired. He makes his choice work by giving us a precisely constructed view of Usher’s psyche. Whether we like Usher or not, we do at least understand him and appreciate his complexities. Brown is also careful not to allow us to judge his character too quickly. Usher’s use of racist language is somewhat countered by one particular passage towards the end of the novel, in which he acknowledges that all races are equal in the sense that “we’re all drifters finding our way”. In a similar way, Brown manages to balance Usher’s misogyny with moments of affection and respect towards Francesca and Evelyn. 

There is no doubt that Shark is a strong debut novel. It showcases Brown’s distinctive and beautifully economic writing style. Through his exploration of subjects such as the English Defence League, Brown establishes him as a novelist who is unafraid to write about both extremely contemporary and highly controversial topics. Kate Wilson’s comment that "[r]eading Shark is a little like getting punched in the stomach (in a good way)” is very fitting. This is a novel that pins you down and won’t let you go until you’ve reached the back cover. Nevertheless, you won’t want the experience to end. 

 

Lucy Williamson is a recent graduate of the School of English at the University of Leeds. She has had poetry published in the likes of Poetry and Audience and The Scribe and as well as writing reviews for The Cadaverine she also writes book reviews for an online blog Rum and Reviews: http://rumandreviews.com/. 

Non-Fiction, Reviews