Contact Print Tim Cumming
Collected Poems 1983 - 2000 Dan Fante
Stranger in the House Brendan Cleary
Harmonica Geoff Hattersley
Caminante Milner Place

Wrecking Ball Press, 9 Westgate, North Cave, Brough, East Yorkshire HU15 2NG, England

Dan Fante's poems are spontaneous, rage-fuelled soliloquies not concerned with the world so much as his own frame of mind. No observation, even the scientific kind, can ever be truly objective and Fante never pretends that they are. The things he sees are entirely coloured by his experience of life. The ...'meanest/bastard starving cat' he sees, 'white/ filthy/ with one green eye/ and one yellow eye/ and a fresh slash on his scarred ear' represents his own torment; 'and what emptiness and alones and rage can do to you when you've got nothing but your own pain in your pockets and your home is a busted-out 1978 Pontiac stalled in an alley in West L.A. and the voice in your mind is carving you up and killing more of you off each day and you wake up and drink more rat-piss wine to keep you from instant madness and god becomes a guy coming out of the 7-11 handing you chump change towards another fucking jug and fear is your finest feeling and love is dead and all time is dead and even your teeth stink and your gut is bloated with/ the screaming voices of those you hate and the only real sanity there is can be found in the small miracle of sucking back one more drink'.
I like the way this poem collapses. The first few stanzas are tight and small and give the impression that he is really trying to keep it together. But the moment which seeing the cat has inspired, the epiphany, cannot be contained. The poem expresses not what the poet has seen but the effect on him of seeing. All of the poems work in this way, building from a single moment to create an entirely subjective landscape. Thinking of a girl who's tits he copped a look of at the age of ten:

I was immediately lost
mesmerised
carried to a place hidden in my head that has crippled and delighted me
these last forty years

It is the looseness of the structure, I think, which makes up for a lack any particularly penetrating lines here. Words are used not to carry you inside his head but to make the form of the poem a metaphor in itself, for the poet's frame of mind.
This only works if the poet has enough courage to be completely honest, to lay his soul out on the draining board. You get the impression that Fante's poems are a genuine attempt to do this, if only because the personality that comes out is such a negative force. He is not trying to get us to like him by any stretch of the imagination and I sometimes got the feeling that his very hideousness is exagerated. What is expressed here is the psyche of a man who hates himself almost as much as he hates the people around him. This comes out most in his relationship poems:

I realized deeply - I truly mean this baby - I want you dead
I want to see you slashed open with a dull pocket knife
and watch a family of hyenas greedily gnawing out your colon
because see - thanks to you I'm now a fucking registered voter
my parking tickets are all paid
my drug dealers are all dead or in jail
and I've acepted the imperative of ending world hunger
and comprehensive health care

Okay, we could call it ironic and let him get away with it. Also, it expresses his half of a row so again it is not the attitude he is describing, it is the frame of mind he has found himself in, the frame of mind which has inspired him to write this poem. So what about this then:

And me/ the dufus/ laying here/ in bed/ a book on my lap/ chanting for salvation/ willing to pay any price/ tell any lie/ squinting at the shadows on your Sanskrit-motif-beige-wall/ hoping for you to/ please shut up/ so I can/ just once before I die or completely lose my sanity/ slam my dick inside the best/ piece of ass I've ever had

Again, it's another row. There are a lot of rows. But there's no disguising the fact he's just a plain old fashioned misogynist. In most of the relationship poems he's blaming women for
some thing or other - usually his own inhumanity. In the first example here the woman seems to be to blame for capitalism itself, or at least the fact that middle-class consumerism doesn't satisfy him. When it comes to real politics, however, Fante doesn't care, he says very little except in a kind of general, self-centred way. Politics involves the feelings of others too much for it to be of interest to him. Even if you were to cop out and insist that the personal is the political these poems are so far right you'll fall off the edge. Maybe this doesn't determine whether or not the poems are good but it certainly determines how much you can enjoy them.
But worse than any of this is the number of poems devoted to himself as a writer. How can you possibly hope to get away with an opening pair of lines like this:

After my first novel/ I took a break

Need I say more? And there are so many of them. Poem after poem after poem. This is where his poetic style, the emotional honesty reaches a real paradox. Of course he will talk about writing, he's a writer and he spends a lot of time thinking about writing. The poems in this book constitute his life and there's no shying away from this principle in the work. The problem is it's just not very interesting. The plain talk, for once, lets him down. His anti-lyrical, even anti-art standpoint means he just can't access that transcendental moment, though he talks about it a lot:

The only real peace there is for a writer is at the typewriter/ facing it/ as he must/ head first/ without artifice/ waiting for the fingers to move/ until/ once more/ with only the heart as a shield// he listens for the sound of the music

But is it there? Is it inside this poem, that transcendental moment? He's telling us that he feels it but do we as readers get to join him?
Overall we get the sense that the poems themselves are a side-issue in the man's struggle to come to terms with himself, and that they have some kind of therapeutic function for him. That's not to say they don't work as poems but such self-absorption can be a little wearing at times and, I felt, politically dubious. But they belong to a tradition of self-analytical American poetry - Bukowski springs to mind, as does Kerouac - which express something of the condition of America on a broader level and this should also be borne in mind. Also there is something kind of invigorating about being dragged through another man's ruin.

Stranger in the House Brendan Cleary
ISBN 1 903110 06 8
Published 2001      60pp     £5.95

These poems are like ghosts, not in the sense that they haunt you but in the sense that they're impossible to grab hold of. The narrator seems to be a fictional persona but then again might not be. The details of his life are continually being skimmed over so you never get a proper sense of a life being lived. It's like those photograph stories you get in magazines for teenage girls, with speech bubbles inserted into awkward-looking images.
Or else it's like porn with the sex taken out. Some of the poems are about his relationship with a kind of swinger dominatrix type. This is a genuinely interesting world but the reader is left to do most of the work. In the poem 'Encounter' we are introduced to this femme-fatale:

you wore a studded leather collar;
I'd drunk 13 bottles of Kronenburg.

and that's it, followed by:

you wanted to eat my tongue red raw;
I wanted to dissolve us both in acid.

Which is as close as we get to sex, or the psychology behind it. This is a problem because it is one of the central themes of the book. There is an argument to say that poetry's responsibilities are different from those of fiction. A poem answers, surely, to language, to the base metal and not to broader narrative structures. But is it enough to conjour up a world only through the use of implication and metaphor and leave it at that? The red raw couplet above certainly does this, they are nice lines with a clear tone, an element of humour and in terms of meaning they can be read in different ways. If the book was full of couplets like this I would be much happier but even then could we say it gets us to the heart of the matter? My own feeling is that implication and metaphor are enough in themselves, but the implications need to resonate and the metaphors need to take us from the surface to the underneath, not simply to another part of the surface.
'Encounter' is three stanzas long, each stanza three lines long. Most of the poems in the book are this length. The overall effect is that the reader is continually left dangling. Even the best lines don't transport us right into the emotional centre and I think that is my main complaint. The subject matter isn't an intellectual one - these aren't poems about poetry or the workings of the brain or the class struggle or the sustainablity of capitalism. They are poems which pertain to life and they have an emotional heart. This being said, the responsibilities of the poems are not simply to the language from which they are made; they are answerable to our emotions and they are answerable to the world they portray.
I don't belong to the culture these poems express, which is exactly why I would be interested in reading them. Unfortunately I didn't feel any closer to this world by the end of the book. I wanted more detail, more and graphic descriptions of the sex would have brought me into the heads of the characters. More and graphic images of drug-taking, more and graphic scenes of betrayal. The perspective we do get is a distant, external one, blurred and fragmentary. You could argue that this is the very point. These lives are blurred and fragmentary. But this doesn't work because within the poems there is also the implication that the narrator at least knows exactly what's going on:

Flowers strewn all around me,
I could tell you of blossoms
my secrets as rooms perspire,

Do then! Stop skirting around it all the time and tell me. I'm interested, honest. I would perhaps even care. Everybody has a story and I don't think Brendan gives enough emphasis to that. Everything is miniaturised, rather than being condensed or minimalised, leaving you with a sense that the telescope is the wrong way round and isn't pointing at the really interesting thing which is going on just over there.

Harmonica Geoff Hattersley
ISBN 1 903110 11 4
Published 2003      82pp     £7.99

At first I thought I would have a problem with these poems and at first I did. Geoff sets his stall out early on:

I'm sure someone once said
a poem should be like an
onion, peeling it, layer after layer
bringing tears to the eyes,
but who'd want to wake up
in bed with that person?

My instinctive response to this is, why bother to have sex if you never plan on coming? There isn't enough subtlety in the work to give it emotional depth, not enough power to give it impact. Some of the poems seem nothing more than an enervated celebration of impotence:

I go to fetch some bread and milk,
the pavement's full of holes...
I'm wondering what there is
to look forward to.

This can get irritating after a while. All he desires is a boiled egg sandwich. Even the irony is tired.
There is, however, a cumulative effect in the early poems and also a kind of narrative starts to appear. The narrator of the first section mopes around ruminating, it weighs you down, something has to change. The second section begins with a poem that seems much tighter, more liberal with its images. Where before a poem would meander through on a single image, here there is more life, more to go on. The middle section of the book doesn't dramatically change in style but it becomes clear that the poems here aren't meant to be read in isolation. The minimalism starts to have a real effect. The grumpy middle-aged man of the first section is thrown into a mind-numbing world, full of people who genuinely don't like him.
In 'Small Chocolate Heart', the language is sparse and without humour or ornament:

The press opens
I open the gate
remove the mould
I spray the tool
shut the gate
I push the green button
the press closes
I trim the mould
I pack the mould

This stanza is repeated four times. It was the point at which I began to wake up. Each poem in this section is a simple, bleak description of factory life. Any poetic touch, any movement in the language would ruin it. It reminded me of Clint Eastwood. The book as a whole could be Geoff's version of 'High Plains Drifter'. Work itself is the corrupting influence, the shady characters who crop up are formed by work and damned to it. The poet himself is damned to it.
Again, the poems only really become powerful as they accumulate. There isn't any particular poem which stands out, or any memorable lines. If you were the kind of person to quote lines of poems, you wouldn't quote any of these but slowly they get on top of you. The final section remains at the factory but also drifts into other areas of life. The effect of this is to provide some kind of a release, some kind of confirmation of life, that the factory hasn't entirely won. You get the sense it hasn't lost either. To go back to my original question, you might want sex just for the feel of someone else's skin, or for a moment of intimacy in a world which despises intimate moments. Geoff's poems offer you small, intimate moments, brief contact with someone else's skin. Or is it just a Western set in Barnsley?

Henry Fonda bites the dust
with a harmonica in his mouth.
You can't help thinking about it,
you can even take it seriously.

Caminante Milner Place
ISBN 1 903110 12 2
Published 2003      112pp     £7.99

It always helps a writer, I think, to have had an interesting life. Milner Place's poems ooze adventure - even when they are set in Huddersfield:

...Buses sail past the windows,
hearses sweep by and students rock to earphones. Gulls
scrap on refuse heaps like bishops, car horns make war
and gentles turn to bluebottles before your very eyes.

This amongst poems inspired by a life of travel, of 'ports so secret that their names are only / printed on the charts drawn by hydrographers disciplined / in necromancy.' It is a world reformed, set to a backdrop of stunning landscapes and slightly dodgy characters. In Milner's eyes everything becomes exotic, sometimes obstinately so:

St. George according to tradition
was born in Palestine and martyred
at Lydia circa AD 323 and there's no evidence
that he is related to Harvey Stubbs
who was born in Outlane circa AD 1948
is a brickie and his mother
was a martyr to arthritis

Although this seems perhaps a little self-conscious, it also shows us that there is a point to Milner's approach. Harvey Stubbs, in such a context, becomes a heroic figure - as we all are in our own minds. Time and again characters appear in the most banal situations (usually in a pub) with a kind of grace inside them so that they appear to us like angels:

Ben Solomon turns
the corner, steps by
the Jug and Bottle, Stolen
from Ivor, Capolito,
Wots in Store, the Merrie
England Coffee Shop
without a glance, but
in an empty window next
to Next, sees his reflection,
grey on a background of white.

There is an element of gentle irony in that those characters Milner tends to favour all talk a good game but invariably piss half their lives against a wall. They exist and, as described by Milner, they twinkle, but there is an underlying sense of catastrophe in their lives, sometimes self-induced, mostly not. This kind of gentleness has a sharp edge. The landscapes of many of the Huddersfield-based poems feel almost post apocalyptic. Life is harsh, survival the only motivating factor. Posh people don't get a look in and the economy lurks behind everything like a dragon in a cave.
The overriding principle, generally, in these poems is that of the folk-myth. This lends itself to a sometimes confining view of human relations. There is not much to be said on the nature of individual goodness or badness, for example, or personal responsibility, except in the broadest of brushstrokes. This leads to a kind of neutral moral tone but Milner gets away with it because of his enthusiasm for people in general. He has a great deal of compassion and this is expressed in his work. People might be tragic and they make mistakes but they are interesting and fundamentally good because they are humans. The series of poems, 'Bat Woman' goes some way to addressing this, as though there was a point in his writing where he felt the need to escape a prison of his own making. Mankind becomes a 'crippled thing', without compassion, living in

acrid back-to-backs, fouled semi-nests
and dungeons with herbaceous walls;

It is a serious attempt to define a specifically female experience and Milner has dropped the whole male-orientated folky-type style in order to do so, without compromising his lyricism or sense of narrative. In a way he has hedged his bets by inventing a mythological creature to get him inside a woman's head but the resulting allegory is incredibly beautiful and haunting. This creature is damaged by the world of men and all of her hope is focused on her new-born child:

Dream the gyrations
of your life.
Dream ice and knives
of mountains sabring the sky; dream
nectarines and moths
with emerald wings. Batten
your eyelids down to see how mist
on a morning's river cons time,
halts the train's whistle in mid note;
wraps up the heart in marble;
smiles light,
musics silence,
liquidizes stone.

In that conception you can fly
forever; hang from a branch
of a tree so old it knew a world
before the ape, before the crippled thing
turned the wheel into the barrel of a gun.

There are also quite a few poems about death. Coming from a poet with such a profound respect for life, these meditations have an elegaic quality. They express no fear or anger about it but a kind of resignation, even a sense of anticipation for this new journey to come:

he didn't shout
or say a prayer
just looked
in the mirror of a lake
smelled the moss
took a pinch of soil
to feel
its soft endurance
sat on a rock
listening
for the slap of waves...

Death's presence seeps into other poems, sustained by a faint, but pervading sense of nostalgia which inhabits the book as a whole. This is more like a trick of the light than any conscious poetic technique but I think it is also a facet of Milner's voice. It gives the overall impression that generally we ought to be spending our time celebrating what little we have. Caminante is one of those few books you can turn to when slowness is needed. It is for those times when you've forgotten what season it is, or can't think of the last time you noticed the rain, or the colour of the sky.

And where all water runs,
there shall be found
the past and future answers,
in a sea that closes
all the wounds of keels.