Archive for July 22nd, 2012

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