reviewed by Rebecca Pohancenik
Saskia
Hamilton Canal
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancs OL14
6DA
ISBN
1 904614 15 9 pp94 published 2005
Despite the terse language and ample white space, Hamilton’s collection Canal is a weighty piece of work. The first poem brings the reader’s attention directly to the book itself:
The song was of two wholes joined by hinges,
and I was worried about the joining, the spaces in between
the
joints, the weight of each side straining them.
This song is a book, and the book is unsteady. Reading the poem that resides just behind the cover reminds us of the fragility of the book in our hands; we feel for its joints weighed down by heavy words, the blank spaces that suddenly seem more sinister, and we worry for it too.
With the fluid, unsettling exploration of grief, unmistakably personal, that saturates this collection, Hamilton elicits empathy like a gardener does new growth. Fluid, indeed, has a major role throughout. Hamilton presents us with a wet world of ‘black liquid,’ flooded fields, tubular oils and creepy seepings from sources unknown. The effect is to give the sense of something pulled up unwillingly from a dank underworld, grubby roots still clinging. Even dreams in this dark world are just so much lifeless matter, detached from the source and action of dreaming:
I have the ingredients of my dream in my hands in the morning.
In exploring grief, Hamilton chooses to explore the breakdown of the human body in all its wet gruesomeness. The canal of the title, a reoccurring theme in the work, is the body at death, a fast-eroding channel through which life, or the soul, runs quickly.
The visitors chatted on about old cooks and dogs.
The figure on the bed in the front room:
the mouth ajar: the window ajar:
the drawbridge raised for the barge.
Just what this barge is, life or the soul or something more sinister, isn’t quite clear, though defining it seems to be one of Hamilton’s preoccupations. This is a crawling, scuttling book as well as a watery one, full of shadowy dark things that hide in our bodies when we least expect it, and flee just when we have gotten used to their presence. It is this other presence that gives the collection its rare moments of humour, admittedly dark. As the poem entitled It Fled demonstrates, simple words can be the most chilling:
It
fled
from the one who was dead
and hid in you.
Hamilton’s use of spacing can be effectively jolting, as it is here, or simply distracting. The same holds for the titles of these poems, which repeat themselves as often as the main theme. There are 4 poems called Listen, 3 called Canal and as many called Entrance. The effect of reading these titles again and again is at first disruptive (I found myself checking the table of contents), then seemingly profound, then finally irritating. Given the unrelentingly funereal tone and the repetitive titles, a poem titled One Wiser Says to the Other Unwiser comes as a welcome relief. Other poems reveal Hamilton’s facility with language, a playful twisting of words and meaning:
You were hired by the tools in the box and set to work.
The poem Work has a rhythm and thematic complexity that sets it apart. The usual images are explored here – damp earth and flooded fields, heaviness and innards – but with a depth and a sorrow that feels more universal than personal.
How will you render it, how will you hold it,
how will you bury it and carry it on?
There
is everything still to do.
…
He calls work the throat. I call work the chest.
But it is lower than that,
The drawer in the belly,
Where the remnants are.
And when you open it, what will you find?
That it was neither the throat nor the chest.
It was the ear that led you this far.
Behind the obvious message of urgency and grief at life’s shortness, Hamilton is telling us to listen, to look at the fragility of life in the path of sinister, scurrying forces, and feel the weight of the book in our hands.
Jesse
Glass The Passion of Phineas Gage
& Selected Poems
West House Books, 40 Crescent Road, Sheffield, S7 1HN
ISBN 1 904052 18 5 pp173 published 2005
In a sense, Jesse Glass had some of his work done for him by the subject of the experimental poem that gives this collection its title. Phineas Gage is an easy figure to dramatise: in 1848 the stable, well-liked construction foreman was the victim of a bizarre accident that sent a 1m iron rod through his skull. He survived, but the brain damage wholly altered his personality. Taking historical accounts as a starting point, Glass creates a moving poetic journey through Gage’s life in the aftermath of the incident, charting his initial alienation through his mental decline and lonely death. While this course is partly mapped out by the texts he employs, Glass’s exquisite language and control over the multiple perspectives he introduces to plumb questions of identity and biography make The Passion of Phineas Gage an original, disturbing human exploration.
The ‘journey’ unfolds with a quote from Malcolm Macmillan’s An Odd Kind of Fame, a text Glass acknowledges in the preface as a source of information, before telling us that ‘it is not known if Gage had a wife and family; poetically we say he did.’ Already Glass is blurring the distinction between biography and art, and he goes on to assure us (as if we had any doubts) that what follows ‘is the only long poem to treat of the subject.’ The latter is not just a bit of posturing on Glass’s part – by asking us to consider poetry on a par with biography he wants us to forget the distinction, too, before beginning to read Gage’s story ‘in his own words.’
Glass uses punctuation and spacing to great effect in expressing Gage’s fragmented mind. He recounts the fateful accident movingly:
their, shouts, their, familiar, names,
their, chill, dipper, held, to, my, twitch,
as, it, all, went, up, like, a, 4th, of, July, rocket,
dressed, in, fire, &, blood,
up, up, to, the, Alamo, sun,
God, O,
O, GOOOOOOOO
D Think, I, said
&, someone’s, crying, holding,
a, rag, to, my, head, saying,
keep, still/ he’s, alive.
The pathetic, injured Gage is quickly replaced by a bragging, demented Gage. The personality change is nearly instantaneous, and Glass employs a dark humour to contrast his subject’s newfound aggression with his physical vulnerability:
&, it, didn’t, hurt, boyz,
JUST, KEEP, AWAY, THE, FLIES,
The impartial reports of the doctor on the progress of Gage’s ‘recovery’ provide another contrast, as does his wife’s reaction to her altered husband and his shattered head. Glass moves between narratives with an authenticity comparable to David Mitchell’s shifts in Cloud Atlas, but then abruptly inflates his characters’ language with unnaturally literary speech. This intriguing technique destroys our illusion of reading a biography whilst creating a poetic continuity between all the voices.
Occasionally Glass’s careful strategy rings false. We follow Gage’s wife recounting, with heart-rending simplicity, her fear as her husband asks for ale (‘My Phineas was no drinker in his home’), the disgust she experiences when he kisses her with brutish passion (‘the taste was of no living man, but I showed my fortitude for I loved him well’), and her horror of finding herself trying not to stare at ‘the visible pulse of his brain’. But the passage loses credibility when she lapses into a kind of literary hyperbole:
The hateful rod that changed him would not come clean no matter how I scrubbed it with brush and lye-salts.
This excess is an exception, though, and most of the characters Glass invents speak with such sharp eloquence that we forgive them for not being real. There’s a delightful scene with a pair of gravediggers charged with the task of retrieving Gage’s skull after his death:
We claim our fee & the doctor
tells us---‘We’ll render him down
light, pure & cleansed
of all ideas,
then matriculate him at Harvard…
And Gage’s mother remembers her last vision of her son, a ‘baby bird’
…crying,
sucking the hem of my dress
doubled over on the floor
by the weight of the distances
he’s crossed to find me.
The other poems in the collection could serve as a background to Phineas – we can trace the stylistic experiments and typographic innovations that find their fulfilment there. Some seem almost juvenile, addressed to famous literary figures or ‘To a Bird Killed on a Power Line,’ or built on such clichéd moments as being interrupted by a school bell in the middle of lecturing on Whitman and Dickenson. But each contains a little gem, a gut-wrenching twist to offset the occasional trite theme; the bird on the power line falls down dead ‘cleaner than you were…A song still boils / in your throat.’
Chris
Beckett The Dog Who Thinks He’s
a Fish
ISBN 1 902382 59 5 pp64 published 2004
This odd but endearing collection of poems takes us on a haphazard journey from boardrooms to boarding schools, garden squares to Ethiopian villages. The author info on the back tells us that London-born Chris Beckett grew up in Ethiopia, was sent to school in Yorkshire and now trades sugar on the international market. We don’t need to be told, because it’s all here in the poems, which read like an unabashed autobiography. And like the course of a life, The Dog Who Thinks He’s a Fish has its ups and downs, occasional awkward moments and frequent glimpses of beauty.
Each poem in this light collection feels fresh and distinctive. There is sometimes a sense of loneliness and of being at odds with the world, as the dog of the title poem suggests; we are treated to a humorous image of the extraordinary swimming dog
…coming up to Harry underwater
and shoving his nose up close, letting out a bark
that sounds like a small thud and sends ropes
of
excited bubbles floating to the surface.
But look beneath the bubbles, and this isn’t a dog out of place in the water, trying to be something he can’t be; he is a perfectly happy dog who sees ‘no difference between / himself and the fish, enjoying the element of both.’ The loneliness only ripples through the surface of these poems, and we get a stronger impression of a man who enjoys his life and his travels, living comfortably both as poet and businessman.
There are still tensions. We follow a poet through his daily routine in The Weather at Work, discussing the effects of his reading on the tube with a slightly overwrought analogy:
Today, a nimbostratus has followed me
into the underground
where I’m strap-hanging with an anthology
including Pound and Frank O’Hara,
and everyone around me hunches their shoulders
as if my cloud might cause a storm.
On Hearing Joshua Bell Play Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major while my left leg is in a cramp describes the trade-off between reality and art in a rather obvious way. In Camel, a businessman waits for 5 o’clock so that he can ‘dip into the bookcase / and take a swig of Walcott.’
While Beckett obviously enjoys his words and often succeeds in sweeping us along with him, these indulgent poems lack the exotic exuberance or subtle glimpses of the best work in this collection. Turn the page, and you are plunged into another world where hyenas feed from a man’s mouth, mosquitoes and tsetse flies buzz and braying donkeys pervade the mind of a man feverish with malaria. It’s hard to reconcile the boarding-school boy fantasising about ‘glossy girls’ with the silvery voice in Lament for an Ostrich:
Mother, I am your two-toed son.
When I think of you, I am running bolt upright,
my neck is a rose stem swaying and my eyes float like eggs.
The most effective poems seem to incorporate the various voices, or at least sit next to them without contradiction. In Still Life with Niece and Skull, a decaying landscape of ‘geriatric grass’ and a loch that is ‘wrinkly, full of spots that may be otters or old age’ prompts a young girl to ask, ‘Uncle, do you miss your youth?’
Well, I may be guilty of warm mittens…
I’m savouring the prospect of unbottled
heaven in my glass of Oban whiskey, relishing
the deep-sea flavour of the fresh crab
your dad is promising to dress for us tonight,
and how your button nose will wrinkle in disgust
at it’s not being pasta and cheese,
how your eyes will sparkle in the firelight
as we sit around telling Japanese ghost stories.
But no, Katie, I don’t miss my youth. I have
yours.
Beckett’s poems travel far, and bridge the distance with a willingness to draw out the subtle moments of a full life. These shine out often, but each time feel as rare and unexpected as an aquatic Labrador.
Jane
Routh Teach Yourself Mapmaking
Smith/Doorstop Books, The Poetry Business, The Studio, Byram Arcade, Westgate,
Huddersfield, HD1 1ND
ISBN 1-902382-80-3 pp63 £7.95 published 2006
Routh’s prose exerts a hypnotic influence, a lulling undulation of image and word that probably has something to do with the subjects – sea and journey, flight, passage and home – to which she most often turns. As a whole, the collection presents a landscape through which we are invited to wander. We smell the wood smoke, touch the ‘tall, plumed reeds’ of calm boatyards and feel the roll of the Atlantic beneath besieged decks, note the way that geese tuck down in the sunset. This is a book I would like to return to every autumn; there’s something migratory about it, and reminiscent of campfires.
The first poems are sparse and chilly, concerned with survival and wayfaring on the destructive sea. Navigation with tools is measured against the navigation of sense and emotion: ‘what if the waypoint for home / were seasickness, were risk, or skill, or age; / what if the waypoint for happiness, pain?’ How do we apply the same wayfaring methods in life as on the sea?
The effect of cold seas and desolate shores on human beings is beautifully described. In Foresight, a young couple on holiday plan their next day’s activity -- a 20 mile crossing on foot – while eating their lunch.
Seaboots and a shirt are strewn on the rocks.
A dinghy makes quick surges, falls back and surges
at the end of its painter, as if anxious to be off.
A man and a woman are eating mackerel
cooked in wet newspapers on the embers
of kindling from the oakwoods –
they burn their fingers on the smoke-sweet flesh
and in their own ways they love each other.
We realise that the tossing boat is theirs, that they are already a long, long sail from their starting point, and ‘haven’t even glanced upwind / to check the weather.’ Is it the optimism of youth, or the despair of a stale relationship, or the desolation of the landscape that makes them reckless? In any case, the author warns that ‘Nothing / will ever taste as good as those mackerel,’ as the couple prepare to sail back upon the suddenly snapping waves.
Humans figure in this landscape much as the seals and seagulls do – they are figures and behaviours observed from a distance. Even in the poems that move closer to home, Routh keeps the standards of a scientist observing quietly from a corner, more witness than participant. There is a homecoming:
Clack of the yard door.
All comers known, to time,
listened for,
everyone coming up the passage
ducking the smalls and the sheets.
This seems to be a family reunion, but the people involved are sketched only by the effects of their presence – the bicycle by the door, the hanging raincoats and pulled out chairs, the ‘purple and green spills’ and steamed-up windows. Only one person is directly described:
…a daughter-in-law who makes
everything. Party dresses. Twigs
set with yellow jasmine flowers
of moulded wax. Silver balls on iced buns.
This kind of vivid description, which so aptly sketches the image of a person (and with a slight, intriguing sense of opprobrium -- a rare glimpse of emotion in this restrained collection), is largely missing from the poems about home and local histories in the latter half of the collection. Routh gives such glancing descriptions of the people that inhabit her islands and farms that they remain just names. A series of poems that made reference to a mysterious Skirrow, the local boogie man blamed for every chicken death who may or may not have died in the woods, failed to grab me in the way that her sketches of nature did. I was glad to return to the sea as subject, the longing for home rather than the awkward details of home itself, in the final poems. Routh is at her best with these stark but lovely sketches, in the solitary landscape that I suspect she herself prefers.
Jackie
Wills Fever Tree
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancs OL14
6DA
ISBN 1 900072 84 X pp65
Wills’
subjects range from the domestic to the exotic, her approach from the mundane
to experimental. Despite this variety she has found a consistent voice;
the collection works well as a whole and can be comfortably read in one
sitting. On putting the book down, though, I found that my desire to keep
reading had stemmed from a desire to get quickly past poems that struck
an awkward note and move on to poems that seemed more polished – usually
those with an interesting concept or exotic location.
Wills writes with a casual, conversational tone, whatever her subject. The results are mixed. In poems that chart domestic ruffles or a mother’s tribulations, Wills sketches a keenly authentic picture. A teenage daughter refuses to open the door to her mother’s pleas:
…Her territory’s
marked out in lists, of best friends, love
letters, apologies, “I hate mum” copied out
five times. I stand outside her door
with the other Jackies; know I shouldn’t disturb
her as she draws her maps, feathered
coastlines with bays named after cats.
Wills often seeks to explore the frustration of a mother watching her children grow up, the desire to protect their innocence warring with the knowledge that they will create their own paths, and the immediacy of her language communicates this understanding well. The approach also works well in some of her ‘concept’ poems. In Cheiron in Hollywood, this conversational tone gives a humorous touch to the centaur lost in the world of celebrity, looking ‘too much like Robin Williams’ and worrying about his shadow as it ‘roams Mount Pelion / ripping heads off hares,’ perhaps to drop them in swimming pools ‘shaped into hearts / and Fender Stratocasters.’
At other places, though, the language either feels awkward in context, or fails to hit the right image. In The Other Boy, a boy receives a second-hand jacket and can smell the scent of the boy who first wore it: ‘my son, like a spaniel at Heathrow pursuing / the scent of poppies, can detect another boy.’ Wills goes on to describe the class of10-year-olds ‘in the Royal Albert Hall, / reviving smell concertos, chanting / for their favourites – heavy chocolate, mixed / with vanilla and the beach on a hot day’.
Overuse of contractions and a carelessness with word choice made the last two lines of an otherwise lovely poem jarring:
Jump with me into the riverbed
like boys who search for pennies.
Then you can sing your song about rain.
It’ll thunder, we’ll stand there naked:
drenched, washed clean.
Other poems are more successful at maintaining the dreamy rhythms and crystal clear imagery. There’s an exquisite description of a world between ancient and new in Crossing the Tropic of Capricorn: ‘In dried up rivers, wide as cities / frogs are buried, waiting for rain. / Listen to the children bang tin cans / into cars…’
Another investigates the fate of balloon-sellers, now missing from the beach – ‘they’ve been carried away on thermals / rising from the beach and are orbiting the earth.’ From this strange vantage point they spy on girls from Croydon and ‘pick today up like a postcard and beam / it back to you -- the sun on your neck in a queue / for chips.’
These imaginative, evocative poems are the ones I rushed through the others to get to, and I wish there were more like them.
Patrick
Lane Syllable of Stone
Arc Publications, Nanholme Mill, Shaw Wood Road, Todmorden, Lancs OL14
6DA
ISBN 1 904614 29 9 pp 121 published 2005
Patrick Lane is not an easy poet to read, and this collection, which brings together poems from nine of his books, contains plenty to challenge and shock. Sometimes, this shock takes the form of that little twist of the heart that we feel at the end of a perfectly written poem. At other times, the shock is simply a reaction to the events described, events that, to judge from the poet’s brief, imperturbable prose, are commonplace in the brutal Canadian wilderness.
Lane oscillates between depictions of tenderness and cruelty, often within the same poem. In Because I Never Learned, a boy steps on the head of a kitten at his father’s command. He remembers the ‘silence of the dying / when the fragile skull collapsed / under my hard bare heel’ and ‘the small of my father’s back / as he walked tall away.’ But the act is not one of meaningless cruelty; we learn that the kitten had been injured by a bus. A poem that appears to explore the morality of a child’s cruel action becomes an exploration of our inability to know or understand another human being. The boy watches as his father walks away, standing tall – does he feel pride, compassion, or simply nothing? What lesson had been taught that day?
The ambiguity of the parent-child relationship returns often, sometimes with more disturbing overtones. The boy observes his drunken mother flirting indecently. His voice is not one of censure or confusion, but a frighteningly mature sympathy. In this bleak landscape the luxury of an innocent childhood is denied. In Dance of the Wings, he watches as his father, in a bizarre ritual, chops off the wings of a dead hawk and circles, holding them aloft:
I knew in my father’s dance of the wings
he was back inside a century where birds
like hawks were things that had to die…
for him there was only the human.
Lane frequently challenges conventional notions of love. The Far Field suggests that beating can be a form of love, at least in the mind of a boy who has seemingly experienced little physical affection: ‘as if the beating was a kind of holding, a man / lifting a child in his huge hands and throwing him / high in the air, the child’s wild laughter…a question spoken into both their lives.’
Other kinds of love, such as friendship and physical love, are not explored so often, which makes the moments of tenderness between strange and brutal events even more compelling. One such odd moment occurs in The Calf, where a boy comforts a calf who has just been the victim of apparently common bestiality by the boys of the village.
Sometimes these moments verge on the darkly comic. In Just Living, a man contemplates his friend’s severed hand as he drives him to the hospital. The hand cannot be reattached, and he is left alone with it ‘curled like an empty cup / a dark blue spider sleeping,’ partly disgusted and partly amused by the lifeless thing, wondering whether to keep it as a souvenir or pitch it into the river. The humour is negated with his pity toward the plight of his friend, who comes back healed only to find his wife and his livelihood gone with the useless hand.
Lane has a knack for saying a great deal in a few words – when he chooses to. Perhaps because this is a selection of poems from various books, I felt a lack of continuity between the first half and the prose pieces that finished the collection. The initial poems, the best poems, are sparse, original, and cut to the quick. The scrolling lines of wordy text seemed a letdown after the brief brilliance of poems like The First Time:
The first time
I saw a chicken
run headless
across the yard
I wanted
to do it too
I wanted
to kill something
so perfectly
it would live
Descriptions are also finely sketched in these poems. A weasel tests for broken wood in an attempt to enter a chicken house: ‘His needles worry wood. / The night is long. / Above him bird blood beats.’ In the excellent series Winter, a sliver of ice is compared to a 15th-century Spanish knife -- just the right curve and width to slip under the ribs of an unfaithful lover -- until it melts in the poet’s hands. The long pieces, while evocative, don’t have the same chilling impact. It is on this ability to shock or surprise with a few choice words that Lane’s reputation is rightfully founded.
