Caleb Femi gives voice to the unheard in “Poor”
Poet and film-maker Caleb Femi, Young People’s Laureate for London from 2016 to 2018, grew up in Peckham, moved away then back. His debut collection, “Poor”, published by Penguin in 2020, has won deserved accolades.
I am keenly aware that in commenting on this book I am entering a world with which I am totally unfamiliar. With the best of intentions, the liberal-minded white middle class to which I belong brings an inherent and unconscious mindset that can lead to an unconscious racism. We all need educating. But let me say at the outset that I am conscious of, and unhappy about, the lack of diversity in many of the poetry events I have attended, where a person of colour is rarely to be seen. I am conscious too of the fact that the fault lies as much with myself as with the organisers, in that I have not hunted out readings by poets from minority ethnic groups. Considering my admiration for Kei Miller and Roger Robinson in particular, I freely confess that the solution lies partly in my own hands.
Meanwhile the divide continues, making large areas of the poetry world, in spite of its well-meaning liberalism, a microcosm of our divided society.
The dispossessed black youth in that divided society are keenly portrayed in “Poor”, where Caleb Femi becomes their mouthpiece: “You will be four minutes from home / when you are cornered by an officer / who will tell you of a robbery, / forty minutes ago in the area. You fit / the description of a man? —You’ll laugh. / Thirteen,you’ll tell him: you’re thirteen”.
In the title poem, ingrained deprivation is vividly portrayed in youths joyriding at 14, driving through streets to “blazing music” at 16, and then:
"18, we figured it out; in our marrow knew no bowl would be passed our way. We eat only by the suppleness of iron whatever held us before now oxidised cruising, we mouthed a frenzy to pedestrians…"
The voice and language of the poems vary – even when the subject is a boy, victim of a crime incident that “had nearly destroyed” him, the language can be beautifully poetic:
"that time I was in a hospital bed & death drifted through the ward like a gardener checking on the ripeness of his plants inspecting each body attached to vines & two detectives stood like cherubs on either side of me".
At other times the demotic takes over with full force:
“fuckinnnn who’s chatting shit? / I’ll bang you in the throat if you’re chatting shit / fucking bounce your head off the concrete / you know what? what endz you from? / this is my block /my fucking endz…”
Death is never far away, usually the result of violent conflict:
"Just ask the boy who carries anger on his shoulders like two canons; blastoise bold, hardened like old eyes that know how wasteful it is to cry in a drought. Who took another boy's life at a funeral."
The closeness of death can result in survivor’s guilt : “Each dawn I wake/& scroll myself for new scars, / confess that I want to live for good times: / picnic with a peng ting, lips her on the grass. / But every day, on the endz, there is a procession/my breathing body mocks.”
The background to this life is the North Peckham Estate, consisting of 65 multi-storey blocks on a 40-acre site, comprising 1444 homes, with raised walkways linking the accommodation to shops and other facilities. In “A Designer Talks of a Home/ A Resident Talks of Home”, the poet alternates the words of an architect explaining the theory of design (“a tool to enhance our humanity…a frame for life”) with the words of a person who has lived on the Estate all their life (“on the 19th floor you can see everything but the future”). The contrast between intention and reality is tackled again in “Because of the Times”, where the poet asks whether the architect had in mind “A paradise of affordable bricks, tucked under / a blanket, shielded from the world”:
"It is true on paper there were no designs for a tomb yet the East wing stairs were where Damilola was found: blue dawn, blue body, blue lights, blue tapes."
It is not all doom and gloom. In “The Story of Fullness”, Dominic’s mother feeds the boys on Sunday afternoons, serving out jollof, curry goat, plantain and all “& we would leave full in body and in spirit”. But the impression given is that this is rare: conflict and violence appear to be the norm, against a background of drug-dealing and gang warfare. The situation is encapsulated in a prose poem entitled “16 October 2017”, which refers to the Grenfell Tower fire:
“My people, my poor people, my browner people, my other people who are not seen as people, they do not inspire moral shame in those who govern this place…If those in the higher seats of the high places don’t note Grenfell as a mass murder, as gross incompetence, as a final warning…then they should at the very least take note…of the nature of a spreading fire: if the bottom burns then surely with time the top will, too. Surely it will succumb to the flames.”
This is a rare instance of Caleb Femi making an explicit political point, and I found it both deeply moving and totally convincing.
As you might expect in a debut collection, there is a wide variety of poetic forms and techniques, as if the poet is in the process of finding his voice. Some worked better than others, and if I have a criticism it is that old one: that less may have been more. The book is some 130 pages long, and some of the themes are weakened, rather than strengthened, by repetition. There are some stunning photographs, also by the poet, of some of those appearing in the poems, which make for a powerful accompaniment. But it is impossible to come away from this book without the desire to make life better for those whose voices are rarely heard.
Caleb Femi, I salute you. Give us more, and help us to listen more closely to those you rightly champion.
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“Poor” by Caleb Femi is published by Penguin
Languishing with “The Kids”
Responses to my last blog piece surprised me. As so often, it’s encouraging to find that others are sharing the same experience when you think you’re the only one going through a painful ordeal. In that serendipitous way that often occurs, a day or two after publishing it I came across the term “languishing”, which was apparently first coined by an American sociologist to describe the state of mind that has afflicted many of us during and/or after lockdown. Languishing is a state between full mental health (described by professionals as “flourishing”) and depression. It is characterised by lack of interest and energy, a general listlessness, a feeling of “What’s the point?”
As a result of time, better weather, the books mentioned in my last post and others, I feel I have moved up the curve towards a “flourishing” state of mind. Going to a live concert helped, as well as seeing other people. But I can throw Hannah Lowe’s book “The Kids” into the mix as well. It has received numerous accolades – shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize, and now announced as the winner of the much-coveted Costa overall prize, having already come out as top in the poetry section.
The book is divided into three sections: the first is devoted to the young people encountered by Hannah Lowe while teaching in a London secondary school in the early noughties; there is then a section about teachers she met (including her own mother) when she was at school herself; and a final section starting with a group of poems about her son Rory, before branching off into miscellaneous poems about marriage breakdown and other encounters.
The poems are sonnets, though Hannah Lowe experiments with the form – and in one case (“Ricochet”) shortens it to thirteen lines. Elsewhere she shortens the line length or lengthens it, usually keeping to the overall rhyme scheme – although one, “Technology”, is the merest shadow of a sonnet, with short lines and rhymes abandoned – the only clue to the sonnet heritage being a break after the first eight lines:
"Suddenly, computers, screens, an electronic pen so off the cuff, I'd ping a poem up – 'To Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love' or a drawing of the Pardoner, an image of an ivory tusk or a map – one that showed the 'heyday' of the British Empire, the pale blue sea around the places half those kids had sort of come from once, shaded rich and bloody red."
Elsewhere, the purist/traditionalist in me twitched a little at the liberties taken with the form, as in “The Art of Teaching III”:
"How to shake a kid from boredom? Squeeze their names out like a flannel. Swap their chairs and split the windows for a freezing breeze, or zap them with a burning teacher-stare or fling out questions – the whens and wheres and whys – or make them role-play, or make them make a poster and give out coveted supplies (the high- lighters, the guillotine, the laminator) or study them – what’s in their bag, their walk to school, their grandmother in Tower Hamlets or Istanbul. Or map the way they talk, their slang. Write a glossary and call it Multicultural London English – mandem, wha-gwan, bare good, a'ight, yo whassup fam?"
Much of the attraction of Hannah Lowe’s writing is in the combination of traditional form with up-to-date idioms – here “zap” in the fourth line and the list of urban slang words in the last two. But what interests me here is the rhyme scheme and the line-endings.
In spite of the stanza break after the eighth line (a device used almost invariably, unless the poet splits the sonnet into seven couplets), the sonnet structure here is Shakespearean rather than Petrarchan. The odd-numbered lines in the four quatrains have full rhymes, although the poet allows herself a little latitude with “whys” and “high”. The even-numbered have full rhymes in the first quatrain and half-rhymes in the second and third and the final couplet. There is even more latitude with the half-rhymes: “poster” and “laminator”; “Hamlets” and “call it”.
The problem with this flexible use of rhyme is one of reader expectation. We start reading the sonnet and see full rhymes in all four lines of the first quatrain. Then things loosen up. But the reader doesn’t know whether there’s a pattern or not, and has to check it out, which is a distraction. It may be that the gradual disintegration of the rhyme scheme is itself a device backing up the poem’s theme – the recourse to anything in order to lift the boredom is mirrored by the increasing structural strain on the rhymes. If that is the case, I’m not sure why we have the full rhymes in lines 9 and 11.
What I am saying is that I’m not sure this use of rhyme works.
But in this poem there is an added complication with the line-endings. Normally a line ending would indicate a pause when the poem is read aloud, which gives an emphasis on the first word in the following line, particularly when there is a break in the syntax. I was unsure about the line-break after “Squeeze” in the first line, though it could be the equivalent of stressing and prolonging the sound to echo the sqee-eeze action of wringing out a flannel (having got this far, I found myself wondering about the image itself, which I don’t think is one of her most successful). But breaking “high-lighters” into two in order to have the rhyme of “high” with “whys” struck me as gimmicky.
This is not intended to be a sabotage of Hannah Lowe’s writing, which I enjoyed immensely. But the use of the sonnet form raised questions in my mind about the interplay between rhyme and structure and theme. It was a daring way to go, given the subject matter. It may well be that the decision both to adopt it and to loosen it was intended by Hannah Lowe to show how poetic structures can adapt to modern demands in exactly the same way that she shows the development and adaptation of society in modern Britain.
And most of the time it works well. I loved “The Only English Kid” in the first section:
"When the debate got going on 'Englishness', I'd pity the only English kid – poor Johnny in his spotless Reeboks and blue Fred Perry. He had a voice from history: Dunno-miss Yes-miss, No-miss— all treacly-cockney, rag-and-bone — and while the others claimed Poland, Ghana, Bulgaria, and shook off England like the wrong team's shirt, John brewed his tea exclusively on Holloway Road. So when Aasif mourned the George Cross banner swinging freely like a warning from his neighbour's roof, the subway tunnel sprayed with MUSLIM SCUM, poor John would sit there quietly, looking guilty for all the awful things he hadn't done."
Here the rhyme-scheme is sufficiently gentle to work without being obtrusive. The poem addresses the problems of multiculturalism with great sensitivity.
Not the least of the attractions of this book is the way in which it addresses both the diversity of the children taught – from the stroppy Janine who is only tamed when she discovers that her teacher is mixed-race like herself to the “posh girls…all lip gloss and ribbony hair” who correct the teacher’s pronunciation of “Pepys” – and the intimate family life seen sometimes from the child’s viewpoint, sometimes from the adult’s. There are endless poems I could quote to illustrate this, but for the sake of space I shall limit myself to “The River”:
"Not another poem about my father, as though he's been forever running through me, rising, churning like the Yallahs River where he was born. That river flooded yearly so no one could cross. What have I learnt after all these years of loss? At poetry readings I perform him, hope for sighs or laughter. I paint him at casino tables, cooking Chinese suppers, lying in the spare room, dying. I want applause, but see the real man standing at the door. There's something he wants to say. And nothing's been forgiven. Then I hear the water rushing down the corridor. He's swimming hard — but it carries him away."
How could poetry such as this not touch the heart and help one out of a languishing state?
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Hannah Lowe’s “The Kids” is published by Bloodaxe.
From desolation to hope
Casual browsers happening on this site will notice a distinct time lag since my last post. Yes, gentle reader, like so many others in this benighted country I have been in a not very good place. The obvious explanation is the after-effect of lockdown, which proved to be more traumatic than many of us realised at the time. I have been intrigued by the number of people who have emerged damaged in one way or another.
Oblivious to what was happening on a subconscious level, my husband and I unwittingly added to the stress by moving house at the end of June 2021. Moving house, it is said, is more stressful as you get older. In our case we compounded the problem by buying a house that needs total renovation, so that we are in temporary accommodation in the interim.
I shall spare you the details of these woes, since the purpose of the present piece is to speak of a curious side-effect, in the form of a total loss of interest and inspiration regarding things poetic. This had never happened to me before, so I persisted in attempts to write, but what emerged was lifeless, still-born.
What was almost more disturbing was a feeling of disillusionment with poetry in general. I read the poems in magazines to which I subscribe with an increasing feeling of boredom and weariness. Unfortunately the vast majority of my books are sitting in boxes in a warehouse so I had no recourse to my usual go-to sources of comfort, such as Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.
Perhaps, I thought, this is how it will now be. I have run out of ideas, exhausted my experience.
But there was another internal voice that objected to this conclusion. I found it difficult to believe that, overnight, I had lost what I felt was part of my identity. I recalled Sharon Olds saying, in an interview, that she could go through months of not writing and then would pour out a spate of poems, as if they had quietly been accumulating in the interim.
So I waited.
It may seem to you that the word “desolation” in the title above is overdramatic. I use it in the way a landscape is sometimes described as “desolate” – gloomy, empty. That was certainly how I felt.
Happily, after a few months there was a shift in mood. It is easy for me to think of reasons for this: settlement in our new accommodation, the establishment of new routines. It is difficult, with matters psychological, to identify causes. But there were two books that helped return me to a more normal frame of mind.
First came Vanessa Lampert’s pamphlet “On Long Loan”, published by Live Canon. Being a Live Canon groupie as well as a poet in their stable, I knew Vanessa’s name and was delighted when her poem “Sand” was commended in the 2020 National Poetry Competition. But I was late coming to her pamphlet, which contains 24 poems that are individually and collectively a total delight. She is capable of humour (“Candyfloss” describes a mother getting carried away with a candyfloss machine at the primary school summer fair, and indulging her children after years of heeding a dentist’s advice to the contrary), a gentle dig at the poetry world (“Woodland” describes a poetry festival where “gorgeous boy poets” read poems about gay sex in the woods to girl poets who would prefer something with them in), and a moving description of a session with a marriage guidance counsellor (“Therapy”, in which “the bruised animal of our couple” has its potential considered by the three parties present). There are a number of poems about her children which are achingly beautiful. But overall the impression is one of intense humanity and a poet assured of her craft. I can safely say this was exactly what the doctor should have/would have ordered for me in my desolate mood.
Close on the heels of Vanessa’s pamphlet came my second quiet saviour, in the form of Eavan Boland’s final collection “The Historians”, published posthumously by Carcanet. Eavan Boland is an old favourite of mine, with her superb evocations of Ireland past and present. Plentiful white space gives her quiet verses the room in which they breathe and resonate.
“Repeat the word sainthood and we are
in an old Ireland,
in a time warp of tallow—
candle smoke rising towardsthe porcelain
yellow faces of the sanctified.”
(from “The Light We Lost”.)
Boland has a delicacy and precision that results in very moving verse, and I found myself thinking “Yes, this is what I have been missing”.
“For a Poet who Died Young” contains lines that sum up my own feelings for her:
“Your words disturbed my earth. They changed my mind.
Whatever a dead poet could have I wish for you.
But a living woman
is what you should have been. So many years later
forgive the fact my words unlike yours
offer little comfort and less peace”.
So it was that recovery began, and with the help of these two poets I have found my way back, out of the desolate landscape and into a more hopeful place.
Over the Christmas period I met an artist friend who was going through a similar experience of aridity. By this stage I was emerging, and told him that it struck me that creativity is like a bucket that was sometimes empty, and you simply had to wait for it to refill. If you are creative, you don’t suddenly stop being creative – but you may have exhausted your creative energy for reasons that are not clear to you. In those circumstances, I have learnt that you have to be patient, and wait for the bucket to fill.
A rich dystopia: J.O. Morgan’s Martians
Let me put my cards on the table at the outset: I have never been a science fiction fan, my last sampling of the genre having been about sixty years ago with John Wyndham’s Triffids. However, J.O. Morgan has come close to converting me. His book “The Martian’s Regress” manages to combine humour and invention with a sense of rhythm in verse that is truly poetic:
"Waking from his nightmare in the rocket Was like waking from a nightmare anywhere else The pressing blackness of the air Failed to hide the martian from himself. The nightmare too had woken."
After the humdrum prosiness of so much contemporary poetry, it comes as a relief to find this underlying iambic meter. J.O. Morgan seems pleasantly immune to fashion, with a variety of formal structures as well as free verse. And capital letters at the beginning of lines? It’s as if Tennyson is meeting Ted Hughes. Indeed, this sense of the continuity of the canon, combined with the fearless inventiveness of a dystopian future, accounts for much of the attraction of the book.
“The Martian’s Regress” appears at first sight to be a collection of poems in the conventional sense, but the reader soon discovers that there is an underlying narrative. The central character, the martian, has been sent to earth on what seems to be a surveying mission – the first line of Kindred is “He wanted to begin his survey work”. But he becomes diverted: “When they said he should be at the first test location/He was lounging in the bows of a rowing boat…” He is meant to be returning home with samples – The Martian Goes Hunting describes his search for appropriate items. He discards a tin-opener, a telephone and discarded umbrellas and chooses a wrought-iron poker: “A worthy trophy for the long trip home”. But he finds a deserted building “By far its best feature, the real selling point/Was its walled garden/Vast and vaulted – /An ample enclosure”:
"One could surely make a go of it Somewhere to settle, somewhere to grow old And with such a head start With patience One might even be happy there."
In the penultimate poem, The Martian Stands Back, the return rocket is wrecked – whether by accident or design is unclear: “He didn’t much care/It wasn’t his problem any more”.
The martian has a robotic companion:
"A womanly shell with the woman removed Refilled with simple logic gates Bloodless thoughtless yet obedient."
Operational Guidance describes how he recharges her, in stanzas that alternate with what appear to be extracts from an instruction manual:
"(And if you raise your voice against her She'll only work harder She'll burn out her coils Straining in her utmost efforts to please)"
Feminist readers may be uncomfortable with this reduction of the female sex to a mindless robot. I found myself wondering whether it would have been more interesting if the martian had been portrayed as a female and the robot as a male. It is probably immaterial. For the martian, sex is not a lot of fun: Of Martian Lovemaking is a hilarious description of the sex act:
"He jiggled until he felt a small part Of what he presumed was still him Inflating somewhere deep inside her. She winced and reached forward for a magazine. He counted dark spots on the ceiling to stop himself Reading over her shoulder."
However, the companion is not entirely devoid of personality. She ministers to him when he is in pain; she waits for him when he goes out; in an empty department store she picks up a gingham shirt, washed-out dungarees and an auburn wig.
All of this occurs in a deserted wasteland. The earth’s last inhabitants flew out to Mars, “seeking solace, a refuge, a future” and were allowed “measured, mixless integration”. The martians sent robotics to the earth, which brought back “small sterile packets of gas and grit”, enabling the martians to engineer “new strains of plant life” which escape, turning their world toxic. Whereupon:
"Those responsible turned their attention Back to the desolate planet And took great comfort in knowing They had alternative measures already in place."
The martians do not operate in the same way as earth-dwellers. Interspersed with the poems weaving the central narrative are others which J.O.Morgan describes as creation myths and folk tales, which delve into the martian past. Thus Ancestral Tales describes the original martians, and how their
"...numerous progeny, greasy, small And black inside and out Roamed the land through the silent night Seizing those to whom they took a fancy Men and women and children alike, Spreading further their blackness Infusing the whole populace..."
In other poems a more sinister picture is conjured, where the faceless beings in charge prepare for different eventualities. Thus in The Natural Course of Things the deterioration of the natural world is countered with deliberate actions. Dying birds are replaced with “superior flying machines”. When fish slowly rot, alive in their ponds, detergent is added to clean up the water. “The planet may have been going downhill/But we were forging ahead, we were leading the way”. Frequently Asked Questions satirises the opaque responses given by authorities to a questioning population:
"Now death can be postponed and birth prescribed to them that ask, what proportion of funding has been set aside for the hungry? We've deconstructed matter to its darkest particles. The loops of our magnetic tunnels now run beneath five continents."
There is an inflexibility in the martians’ approach. An attempt to create food results in a fungal mould that has to be destroyed. Undeterred, they start the same process over again. Similarly, when assessing their own way of life and finding that “the likelihood of their own complication of living/Was just too dubious to be conceivable…/They chose to mark this revelation down/ As anomalous/Such results were to be expected once in a while/And could be disregarded…”
This inflexibility is mirrored in the microcosm of the central character’s own consciousness. He is casually destructive from the start. In the spaceship he breaks a mirror and tears up wallpaper. Once on earth he batters mannequins in a deserted department store; creates hideous works from combined exhibits in a natural history museum; systematically wrecks elements of a cathedral – all out of what appears to be a bored vandalism.
The “Regress” of the title can be interpreted in two ways. Literally, it refers to the return from Mars to the earth. But on another level, in the martian’s discovery of a place where he can possibly find happiness, it is a regression of the species to an age of innocence. This is the only moment in the book featuring a positive emotional response. For the rest it is a depiction of a world in which nature is ruthlessly depleted by a skilled and authoritarian master-race who find it difficult to accept that they may be making mistakes. The reader may find this disturbingly familiar.
J.O. Morgan achieves his effects with great variety of form and structure. He is skilled in a use of repetition to create form – for example, Ancient Trickery consists of four stanzas, of which the first three begin with the words “The trick with…” The Martian Ages is in three numbered sections of ten lines each – a tercet, a couplet, a quatrain and a final single line, where the final line describes remedial action taken by the martian’s “pale companion”. This is a book created by a poet who has fully mastered his art, with a control that mirrors the eerily controlled environment of his creations. It is a relief to find that the martian finally seems to rebel.
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J.O.Morgan’s “The Martian’s Regress” is published by Cape
“Deformations” – Sasha Dugdale
I am beginning to suffer from TS Eliot shortlist fatigue – do you know the signs? that heartsinking feeling when you open a much-heralded collection, hyped to the skies in a blurb on the back, and think to yourself on reading the first poems “WTF? I don’t understand a word of this”. At the same time as I admire the stamina of judges who have to wade through a mountain of books, and who then produce a shortlist of astonishing diversity, I find myself thinking of their role as gatekeepers…but that is for another time.
In common with the other shortlisted collections, the brain-fog that overcame me on starting Sasha Dugdale’s book gradually lifted on a second and third reading, although it remained, thick and heavy on occasions:
"Why do perpetual motion machines never work? Because history only travels in one direction."
Now I know that poetry needs to be elliptical to be interesting, and I know that these lines are quotes from something (it’s slightly unclear from the footnote what is a quote from what), but as elliptical non-sequiturs go this is a good example. It doesn’t help a poet when the reader is shouting “No!” at the page.
The collection consists of three parts. First is a sequence called Welfare Handbook which, the Notes tell us, uses material from the writings of letter cutter and artist Eric Gill, his diaries and notes, as well as reflections on his life, his sexual experimentation and the abuse of his daughters. Last is another sequence, called Pitysad, which consists of poems composed round themes and fragments from the Odyssey. Between them a group of poems on miscellaneous themes, incorporating different voices, ranging from a moneychanger’s female assistant in the Temple of Jerusalem to a present-day woman walking her dogs on the South Downs with a son or daughter who is on the verge of adulthood.
Of the three, I found Welfare Handbook the most uneven. The difficulty with any exercise of this kind is that the writer, deep in their subject after prolonged research, has to build a bridge to the reader with minimal knowledge. My own knowledge of Eric Gill stems, most recently, from reading Elizabeth Taylor’s The Wedding Group, which satirises the artist’s establishment. There, Gill is portrayed as a spoilt autocrat, head of a hide-away Arts and Crafts community – not a complete picture. In Welfare Handbook The first poem begins:
"A female peacock would be a monstrosity what shape would it assume? How hard it is to envisage a building that goes up and up."
This is one of those WTF moments. Call me tendentious, but my reaction to the first line was “It’s a peahen, dummy”. Then a transition from a female peacock to a building. Mmm.
More successful are the incursions into Gill’s sex life. “sex with children upsets us/more than it used to. As my friend’s mother/once pointed out: stay away from him/you know what he’s like.” The double standards become increasingly sinister: “If he entered you and it hurt then it was done/gently, with the best intentions”. And then:
"the mystery of the shift diaphanous and yet chaste, the plaits, oh the mystery of hair and the mystery (for some) of why two sisters might have begged the youngest to marry without delay, to do secretarial, to become a governess, or to drown herself perhaps, when they left home with their husbands."
I like the mix of registers in this passage – the poetic “diaphanous and yet chaste” followed by the down-to-earth “to do secretarial” echoes the contrast between the fantasy and the urgency of the reality. The horror is all the stronger for being so understated.
By contrast the later sequence, Pitysad, had me gripped from the start:
“Odysseus spent the day with the couple in their apartment, an unplastered room many floors up. There were no seats and no tables, but a smell of cooking hung in the air.”
Yes, I thought. I know where I am: this is the territory of Greek myth anachronism, started off by Cocteau. When Penelope bids her husband farewell:
"That day she climbed back into her car and slammed the door against the wind it was warm and drowsy at the wheel still smelt of his deodorant and beneath her in the bay the ships fanned out into a wedge of white-sailed cranes silently, as she sucked a mint imperial..."
I was captivated and convinced by these poems from the start. The central character, Pitysad (I remain baffled by the choice of name, finding it unhelpful), is pictured in a variety of places, all chronology confused. Scenarios vary from the sacking of Troy to a clinic for treatment of an undefined disease that could be PTSD. Shades of the Eric Gill poems continue with the seduction of a young girl in a municipal carpark in a warzone. In contrast with the cruelty of war we have glimpses of Penelope at home. In the Odyssey Penelope is pursued by suitors whom she resists. In the Dugdale version of events the suitors are lovers, who seek favours from her after the affair is ended. But she conducts the affair from a distance:
"...better not to be steeled, better to fool oneself that this is pleasure of mercy or the need to survive."
These poems have immense power. The varying forms adopted enhance the feeling of fragments, discovered snapshots that echo the damage caused to both parties – the wartorn veteran as much as the abandoned wife. The last piece in the sequence is a prose poem stretching over almost two pages without punctuation, which clarifies what Dugdale is doing. It is in Penelope’s voice.
“I feel his body next to mine behind me yes I feel it he is placing his human hands around me around the scalding heat of me he places them on my breasts and yes I’d brush away all the hero all the myth I’d chip and plane away at the lying outer form of him to expose the worthless soul inside yes worthless and if he could only hear it I would take that insignificant thing and I would love it with all my own insignificance I’m insignificant but I’ve kept going I’m insignificant but I am not a myth I am an existence and I am so full of love”
The poems in the central section are varied in form and content and – for this reader at any rate – also in success. Golden Age describes the idyllic childhood of a person of great potential whom the poet encounters in later life as his translator to find him querulous about his wife and his failure to win “that prize/he was promised all those years ago”. I mentioned above The Last Day of Your Childhood, which describes in masterful fashion the way in which the mind works, and the way in which – an English characteristic – emotions are kept below the surface. Odysseus Welcomed from the Sea by Nausicaa is in the voice of a teenage girl caught between repulsion and a magnetic attraction.
I hope you get the message – that this is not a collection for the fainthearted, but that it rewards persistence in spades. If there are quibbles, blame lockdown, TS Eliot prize fatigue, the weather or whatever you like. They are minor in the context of the whole.
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Sasha Dugdale’s “Deformations” is published by Carcanet.
In the clouds with Shane McCrae
Of the T.S. Eliot shortlisted collections I have read so far, Shane McCrae’s “Sometimes I Never Suffered” gets the Oddball Prize for the moment. It contrasts the views of two very different characters, in different sections of the book. First, a “hastily assembled angel”:
"the angels Had seen the creatures coming in the waves Then covering the Earth the angels had Seen them and hadn't wanted to be forced To live with them and so had voted to Build their own angel but they hadn't asked Permission first instead they all together Threw him together and as Gabriel Asked God if this new angel could be sent Instead to Earth fresh eyes for a fresh World The other angels shoved the thrown- together angel From the clouds and Heaven..."
This solitary figure, cast out from Heaven with a mission, watches the development of the human race:
"His job he knew it had to do with seeing And what he saw was everything would come Together at the same time everything Would fall apart..."
Each poem in this section takes a different episode in the perception of the hastily assembled angel, who appears to have no function other than to watch. There is no communication with God, and the angel feels increasingly isolated. Then, quite late in the section, a second being appears – the “disappointment angel” – who seems so dangerous that the hastily assembled angel is afraid to lift his arm to wave in case he loses it to the disappointment angel as it sweeps past.
"it coincid- ed the beginning of its flight with the Beginning of the hastily assem- bled angel's loneliness and fascination With human beings which itself began Centuries after they began to thrive..."
You will by now have noticed, from the passages I have quoted, some oddities of style: double spacing between lines and spaces in place of commas or other punctuation (although sometimes the spaces seem random), together with aggressive line-breaks that follow no apparent logic, combine with what now appears a slightly archaic practice of lines beginning with an upper case letter. This seemingly haphazard combination of conventions, with its abundance of white space, creates a disorienting no-man’s-land, a dreamworld that evokes the curiously floating feel of an angel hovering over vast expanses of territory, puzzled about what he sees.
At the end of the book, in a rather beautiful long poem consisting of five-line stanzas, the hastily assembled angel builds a ladder to return to Heaven:
"each rung was like A thousand rungs the first rung who could say How many feet from the ground it was how many Miles from the ground more than the higher rungs it looked Like most rungs on most ladders made by humans..."
The first rung is like a rusty rung on a fire escape, the second is made of glass, filled with water and tiny plastic animal figures. The third is a sky-blue thread, the fourth “a row of puffed white rice/Kernels implanted in a strip of moist/Chewed gum”, the fifth “locusts strung together/On a golden chain”, the sixth a wide-open black book. The seventh rung, however, expands into a landscape in which the angel rests, sleeps and dreams, echoing the seventh day of the Creation myth. After a surreal conflict with the sky, when the angel growls
"and his Growl echoed through the new valleys his body Had made and animals big cats and lizards Bipeds and quadrupeds invertebrates birds fish Appeared in the dream and in the waking world"
the angel wakes and steps from the rung to Heaven.
With me so far? The second character in the book, who is also in Heaven, is Jim Limber. Unlike the hastily-assembled angel, Jim Limber is a historical figure, who achieved fame as a child when he was removed from his black family in the Southern States of America and taken into the care of the Confederate president Jefferson Davis and his wife Varina. This only lasted for a year or so, since the Davis family were captured by Union forces and Limber removed into the custody of the Union general Rufus Saxton before being sent north to be educated. From this point on he disappears from history.
In the McCrae world, Jim Limber dies of old age and finds himself in Heaven, to his considerable surprise:
"I got to Heaven and I won't believe it 'Cause nobody in Heaven's gonna make A fool of me I told them Send me back If you're good angels like they got in Heaven I told them Send me back and I'll Believe you when I wake up in good boots Since I never had good boots I'm wait- ing on those good boots still..."
Jim is bewildered by Heaven, where he enjoys every comfort but appears to have no contact with other heavenly beings. Indeed, the angels themselves are scary, “Standing like white boys standing at the edge of/Town staring at you and they look like/Giants…” In part of this section McCrae inserts a brief playscript, a dialogue between Jim Limber in Heaven and Jefferson Davis, who, it transpires, is in Hell, accompanied by a demon disguised as Varina. Those in Heaven are able to watch those in Hell from an “observatory”, from which Jim watched Jefferson Davis:
"I found the observatory, saw your dreams. You pleading with that demon in that mask - I saw you and I felt ashamed. But I Saw you. That demon has you like you had Me - pleading with a mask I put on you - The year I lived with you. "
An added twist to the Jim Limber section is the idea of a “multiverse” – i.e. the idea that there is more than one universe, meaning that there is more than one Jim Limber. This gives rise to a section called “Variations on Jim Limber goes to Heaven”, where there is a sequence of fourteen-line poems giving alternative perceptions of Heaven from Jim’s point of view. The combination of bewilderment, memories of how hard life was and the surreal surroundings in which he finds himself is highly unusual:
"What if I had been born in Heaven do They do that here I've never seen a baby But I see full-grown people who I hear the angels whispering they say they Were babies when they died I always look Those people in the eye but I don't think They see me and I've never heard them speak They just walk around in sailor hats with blank Looks on their faces..."
In one of the recorded pieces I hunted out about Shane McCrae, he explains that “Sometimes I Never Suffered” is the third part of a trilogy covering Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, in the same way as Dante. At that point, I think, the resemblance ends. McCrae has created a confused and disorienting world with a remote godhead, insubordinate angels and rough justice, even if the language is often very beautiful. When I first read it I was totally baffled. After several readings I am a little less so, and have enjoyed much of the writing. But I remain a little unclear about what McCrae is trying, artistically, to achieve.
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Shane McCrae’s “Sometimes I Never Suffered” is published by Corsair.
The Alien World of Ella Frears
Ella Frears’ collection “Shine, Darling” was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. It is divided into three sections, the central one (titled Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity) reproducing a work that appeared as a “Goldsmiths Short” pamphlet.
Passivity, Electricity, Acclivity weaves a number of narratives together in a sequence of small pieces, beginning:
"For years after my near-abduction
I told my mother I could smell him, still
that was easier than explaining
that it wasn't so much him I could smell,
but something new in me."
The “something new” appears to be the magnetic power of sex appeal, where a woman discovers both that she may become a target and that this can confer power. It is only a “near” abduction because she realises she can escape:
"There was the way, as we walked up the hotel stairs, arm in arm, I shifted my hip so there was room to break free and ran off slowly, laughing, as if it were all a game. That I knew to laugh like that aged ten surprises me."
Older, she shares a flat, where she is stalked by a female flatmate. Then there is a reference to a man dressed as a wizard in a theme-park where she grew up, whose task was to promote the theme-park. His job collapsed when “One day, he picked up a toddler and began to wade into the sea. Who knows what he was trying to do; drown it, baptize it?”. Years later, she sees him again from a bus: “Except his face is made-up like a skull…He looks right into the bus and waves at me.”
Then there is “a handsome older man” she notices staring at her as she works in a bar. He tells her his wife has just left him, and that she looks very like her. She lands up going back to his house out of pity, where “he shares a joke with himself on my body”. She goes to the bathroom and sees a photo of beautiful woman who looks nothing like her.
The woman portrayed in these poems realises she has this power (electricity) but is often curiously passive. As a child, she does not identify the near-abductor when asked, only to find that, later, another girl has been abducted by the same man. When the father of a friend tells her that the friend has committed suicide, she pauses before saying, finally, “I’m sorry”. When she meets the twin sister of the suicide at a party two years later she says nothing about the sister’s death, even though the twin brings the subject up:
"You were the last person she texted
she says, hugging me tightly,
the first of her friends my dad called.
She is high and strokes my hair.
I'm so happy to see you, she says, laughing.
I miss her so much."
The character’s lack of empathy is consistent with her thoughts on hearing about the death:
"She had texted only a couple of days ago asking if I wanted to meet for a coffee and catch up. I reread the text. I ask myself how I feel, but can't reach anything sub- stantial."
The first and third sections of the collection contain a varied group of poems, many of which were written in the course of residencies. Ella Frears is unusual in that she earned a living over some five years from a sequence of residencies with a variety of organisations, including Tate St Ives, the conservation organisation Back from the Brink, Southampton’s No. 17 Bus and the National Trust. She has said, in the course of an interview with Andrew McMillan, that her technique in these residencies involves the taking of endless notes which she then goes through and, by a lengthy process of editing and eliminating, works into a poem. What interested me in this account was the apparent dissociation of the poem with personal experience. Many poets will take a personal experience as a starting point, a springboard. It is probably impossible to sever the genesis of a poem from the individual psyche of the poet, with all its layers of baggage, but I found myself wondering whether the technique involved here can explain in any part the apparent lack of emotion, or of emotional involvement with other people, that comes across in much of this collection.
Fucking in Cornwall was commended in the National Poetry Competition. It appears on the Poetry Society website as a single block, but in “Shine, Darling” the text is broken into smaller sections of one, two or three lines. This serves to bring out better the alternation between seaside holiday activities of the bucket and spade kind and the speaker’s description of sex – in which, again, the woman is telling the man what to do and the experience she wants to have: “just put your hand up my top”; “Kiss me in a pasty shop with all the ovens on”; “Unlace my shoes in that alley and lift me gently onto the bins”; “I want it like that – like water feeling its way over/an edge”. There is no mention of the man involved.
NPC judge Mark Waldron is quoted on the Poetry Society site as saying: “The seaside has always been a liminal space, clothes are taken off in public, holiday romances are had. This poem effectively captures that sense of occupying both sides of a boundary.” What he does not draw attention to is the attention-seeking title and the absence of emotion. The speaker in the poem is seeking sensation only – because, it appears, she is bored with the seaside environment:
"I've walked around that local museum a hundred times and I've decided that the tiny, stuffed dog, labelled the smallest dog in the world, is a fake."
Feminism combines with iconoclasm in the two poems called Magical Thinking, both of which are about menstruation. In The (Little) Death of the Author the speaker talks about texting to a boy as a thirteen-year-old, saying she’s in the bath, and the sexual frisson of the ensuing exchange. But in The Overwhelming Urge the speaker appears to be concerned both with self-harm as well as seduction. On a country walk:
"He wants to show her something
by the metal farm gate.
She, nodding, surveys it from a distance,
files it under:
penis, moonlit."
In the sex that follows the man is a cipher: “For now there’s nothing to do/but finger one another/uncomfortably at the shoreline”.
The final poem in the collection, I Asked Him to Check the Roof, Then Took the Ladder Away, is based on a true incident, following a quarrel Ella Frears had with her boyfriend. After the action described in the title, the speaker entertains friends to dinner, saying that the boyfriend is unwell.
"As the guests left I looked up and realised that there was no moon. Shine, darling. I whispered. And from behind the chimney rose his little head."
It is surprising that they are still living together. The men who appear in the book are either peripheral or menacing. Love is entirely absent.
Of the residency poems, my personal favourites were those dealing with the St Ives Modernist artists Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron, Naum Gabo and – last but not least – Alfred Wallis:
"I've left St Ives. But all day I will be thinking of perspective, of lighthouses as jaunty as sailors, of what a sweet, raw talent he was."
If there is tenderness in this collection, this was where I found it.
As you would expect from someone whose website reveals that she has guest lectured at Falmouth University and University East London in Fine Art, and Creative Writing, is a tutor in poetry and creative writing at City Lit and runs workshops for the Poetry School and Spread the Word among others, the techniques and forms used cover the gamut of possibilities: landscape format as well as portrait, quatrains, tercets, couplets, prose poems, blocks of prose divided by slashes, short lines, long lines – not to mention a couple of sestinas. Sometimes I confess to wondering whether there is a degree of fashion involved in some of this, a wish to push the new, rather than focussing on the content.
In a review of “Shine, Darling”, which appeared in the Winter 2020 edition of Poetry Review, Kate Simpson writes: “Ella Frears’ luminous collection, Shine, Darling, is…preoccupied with altered states of being, duplicity and hybridity. Here bodies sizzle and transform as they explore the depths of physical sensation and personal identity in both private and public spaces…Frears’ poems test the limits of power and potential, presenting a slick depiction of female desire tied to a tangible, lived experience”.
Having read and reread Ella Frears’ collection, listened to her interviews with Andrew McMillan as well as with Forward judge Leaf Arbuthnot, and read a number of reviews, I found myself thinking of an occasion many years ago, when I was at an international legal conference. The French chairman of one particular morning session struck me as being particularly brilliant – able to draw connections between apparently unrelated legal principles or cases, and to summarise a complex argument with admirable concision. When I commented on this to one of the other French lawyers present, his response was “Oui, mais c’est creux” – “Yes, but it’s hollow”. Reactions to poetry can never have universal validity, but this reader needs an emotional involvement, an emotional response, that this collection, however brilliant in concept and execution, rarely provides. I have sufficient respect for Ella Frears’ intellect and integrity to understand that this is a deliberate ploy. But I am afraid that the resulting world depicted is, for me, too cold and alien, too remote from my own, to be sympathetic – or, indeed, to encourage me to return.
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Ella Frears’ “Shine, Darling” is published by Offord Road Books.
A rich feast from Natalie Diaz
I remember celebrating my fiftieth birthday in the Dordogne, and ordering all my favourite things at dinner: a starter of foie gras, a main course of magret de canard with pommes dauphinoises, cheese of course and then some suitable dessert concoction that would have involved sugar, eggs and cream. Washed down, of course, with some Saint-Emilion from down the road, and doubtless a glass of Sauternes at the end.
I also remember feeling a little bloated afterwards…
This memory came back to me on reading Natalie Diaz’ Postcolonial Love Poem, the richness of its language made all the more extravagant after the recent experience of Bhanu Khapil’s much sparer How to Wash a Heart.
"There are wildflowers in my desert which take up to twenty years to bloom. The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand until a flash flood holds the arroyo, lifting them in its copper current, opens them with memory - they remember what their god whispered into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life."
These lines from the title poem, which opens the collection, introduce a number of the recurring themes. The “desert” is both literal and metaphorical in a world where nature and human beings form part of an indivisible whole, where an emotional landscape merges with a real one:
"...So I wage love and worse - always another campaign to march across a desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skin settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast."
Natalie Diaz is a Native American, a member of the Mojave people, who traditionally resided along the lower Colorado River in what are now the U.S. states of Arizona and California, as well as Mexico. But the river is not just a location representing home. In The First Water is the Body, Natalie Diaz writes:
"The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States - also, it is a part of my body. I carry a river. It is who I am: 'Aha Makav. This is not metaphor. When a Mojave says, Inyech 'Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name. We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body."
This melding of the natural and the human necessarily leads to environmental concerns, since damage to nature is damage to humans:
"We cannot live good, we cannot live at all, without water. If we poison and use up our water, how will we clean our wounds and our wrongs? How will we wash away what we must leave behind us? How will we make ourselves new?"
And in How the Milky Way Was Made:
"My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-
fast flood. Able to take
anything it could wet - in a wild rush -
all the way to Mexico.
Now it is shattered by fifteen dams
over one thousand four hundred and fifty miles,
pipes and pumps filling
swimming pools and sprinklers
in Los Angeles and Las Vegas."
This is more than mere pollution of the environment. It is an attack on the essence of life itself. In the superbly original “exhibits from The American Water Museum” the poet imagines a museum dedicated to water and lists a series of notes to the imagined exhibits, referencing all the gimmicks of modern exhibition techniques: a recording of a voice played from “somewhere high,/or low, floating up or down through the falling/dust-light”; a rock painting digitized on a wall-mounted monitor; a urinal inside a curtained booth. The notes are numbered seemingly at random. The sequence ends with the devastating exhibit 11, mysteriously titled “Art of Fact”:
"Let me tell you a story about water: Once upon a time there was us. America's thirst tried to drink us away. And here we still are."
In That Which Cannot Be Stilled, the poet writes “Back home, we believe in dreams”, and much of the writing has a surreal, dream-like quality that is most evident in the eroticism of the love poems. If I Should Come Upon Your House Lonely in the West Texas Desert begins:
"I will swing my lasso of headlights across your front porch, let it drop like a rope of knotted light at your feet. While I put the car in park, you will tie and tighten the loop of light around your waist - and I will be there with the other end wrapped three times around my hips horned with loneliness."
It is in the love poems that the language becomes ornate, encrusted with imagery. In Ode to the Beloved’s Hips the poet writes:
"O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped the amber—fast honey—from their openness, Ah Muzen Cab's hidden Temple of Tulum—licked smooth the sticky of her hip, heat-thrummed ossa coxae. Lambent slave to ilium and ischium—I never tire to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet- dropped comb—hot hexagonal hole, dark diamond— to its nectar-dervished queen. Maenad tongue— come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips, I am—strummed-song and succubus."
Another series of moving poems in the collection relate to the poet’s brother. Already with the second poem in the book, Blood Light, we realise that all is not well:
"My brother has a knife in his hand. He has decided to stab my father."
But in The Mustangs, which describes the local basketball team, “my brother and his teammates— some of whom were from our reservation—were all glide and finesse”. The brother’s degeneration is movingly described in It Was the Animals, where the brother brings his sister a jagged piece of wood which he refers to as Noah’s ark. Whether his state is caused by drugs or mental illness or both is unclear. The sister sits down and goes with his delusion:
"So I sat down, with my brother ruined open like that, and two by two the fantastical beasts parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles, built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup before floating it away from the table. My brother—teeming with shadows— a hull of bones, lit by tooth and tusk, lifting his ark high in the air."
By the time we come to the penultimate poem in the book, My Brother, My Wound, the degeneration is complete:
"He said, Lift up your shirt. And I did. He slid his fork between my ribs. Yes, he sang. A Jesus side wound. It wouldn't stop bleeding. He reached inside and turned on the lamp. I never knew I was also a lamp, until the light fell out of me, dripped down my thigh, flew up in me, caught in my throat like a canary."
This is not a book to be read at one sitting. Like my birthday dinner, that will bring indigestion. The writing is too dense, too emotional, too laden with trauma, for that. It needs to be savoured. Read one or two of the poems, then put the book down and come back to it. The themes are universal. Nothing in it is trivial. Let it seep into you. Enjoy.
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Note: apologies are owed to Natalie Diaz for the fact that some of the quotes from prose poems have been formatted above as if new linebreaks have been introduced. I have not been able to find an adequate solution to this.
“Postcolonial Love Poem” is published by Faber & Faber and was shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize.
Washing a Heart with Bhanu Kapil
I came to Bhanu Kapil’s collection How to Wash a Heart after it had won the T.S. Eliot Prize. I had not seen her reading it, but have now done my homework. I have watched her talk about her work in the brief video done prior to the night of the award. I have watched the longer video with Andrew McMillan’s enthusiastic briefing following the book’s choice by the Poetry Book Society, in which she joins from Cambridge via Zoom, talks about the work and reads an extract from it. These were both helpful in their different ways, but neither helped me with the title.
At the end of the book Bhanu Kapil adds “A Note on the Title”, in which she explains that it goes back to “an installation, performance, poetry reading or ritual” that she created with her sister, Rohini Kapil, as part of the Kathy Acker exhibit at the ICA in London in 2019. So I extended my homework by hunting out the ICA website blurb about the event and read a passage by Bhanu Kapil explaining her intention:
“ If Acker wrote the ‘wild heart’, then that’s what I want to do. I want to wash a heart. I want to make visible what is never visible: the insides of the body without end. Or perhaps my performance can happen at lunch-time, and perhaps we can exit the curation through its anus. I don’t know what that means. One thing I can say is that, this June, in the ICA, I will be (almost precisely) the age that Kathy Acker was when she died. I want to write a sentence that shakes. I want there to be blood in the line, and on the floor beneath it. “
Call me over-literal, but my problem with the title was what it meant – I had even gone back to my recent reading of Maylis de Kerangal’s wonderful novel about a heart transplant in order to see whether a heart was “washed” in the process. (It isn’t – I’ll spare you the details.) I learnt from the ICA’s website too that “the performance of identity” remained integral to Kathy Acker’s work. But the meaning of the phrase in the ICA blurb remained as elusive as in the book’s title. How can you “wash a heart”, I thought, with increasing obsessiveness. But wanting to make visible what is never visible – yes, that resonates.
In the same note, Bhanu Kapil goes on to say:
“In writing these new poems, I diverged – almost instantly – from the memory of the performance. Instead, as soon as I sat down to write, I heard an unexpected voice.
“This is the voice of this book: an immigrant guest in the home of their citizen-host.”
The book comprises forty pages of untitled poems of about twenty lines apiece. Four blank pages divide the ensemble into sections – again untitled. The shape of the poems is distinctive and uniform – narrow columns aligned against the lefthand margin, a capital letter at the start of each line. Here is a sample, taken from the last (and arguably most coherent) section:
"The host's gleaming hair Responds beautifully to the shampoo She has set out for me To share. What's mine is yours, She says with a sweet Smile. I don't want you taking her out Without asking me First, she continues, Holding her daughter tight Against her side."
Talking about this book, Bhanu Kapil says that she is exploring the themes of migration, host and guest. She wanted to create something “linear and brutal” and see what happens when all the lushness one associates with poetry is discarded.
This may explain the absence of rhyme and metaphor, but is a deceptive statement in that there is lushness in the juxtaposition of images and statements: the gleaming hair, the sweet smile, the daughter clutched to her side, and the statements “What’s mine is yours” and “I don’t want you taking her out without asking me first”. Already limits are being placed on what is “mine” and what is “yours”. There is considerable art, too, in the strange line-breaks, that often have little rational purpose, but which seem to be reinforced by the capital letter that follows: “a sweet/Smile” and “Without asking me/First”. In practice, these fulfil a largely visual function, since when Bhanu Kapil is reading herself, she frequently ignores them. Arguably, the disruption of the syntax mirrors the disruption of the immigrant’s life, and the fragmentation of perception. Andrew McMillan argues that the use of a capital at the beginning of each line encourages us to look at each line as a separate unit as well as part of a sentence. I buy this in some instances, but there are too many instances of the fragmented line having so little weight it doesn’t bear lengthy consideration on its own:
"I want to be split Into two parts Or a thousand pieces. I want you to touch My cervix. I want my dress Shredded And my life Too."
The relationship between guest and host is explored with great subtlety – both sides are performing a part, where there are hidden strains and conflicts:
"When what you perform At the threshold Is at odds With what happens When the front door is closed, Then you are burning The toast And you are letting the butter Fester."
The passages I have quoted are all taken from the last section. The earlier sections are less accesssible. On the second page the poem begins:
"I don't want to beautify our collective trauma. Your sexual brilliance resided, I sometimes thought, In your ability to say, No matter the external circumstances: 'I am here.' From this place you gave only this many Desiccated fucks About the future."
This leaves a reader guessing on several counts: does the “our” in the first line include the “you” of “your” in the second? is the “collective trauma” what the immigrant has been through or what the guest and host are both going through now? what is “sexual brilliance” and how is this illustrated by saying “I am here”? Is the “you” the person who appears as a host elsewhere?
The obscurity of these passages does not detract from the overall power of the theme that Bhanu Kapil tackles: how, at a micro level, a guest in the house of a foreign host has to co-operate in order to achieve a modus vivendi, thus abandoning – or repressing – their own personality and culture; and, on a national level, how an immigrant has to compromise in order to fit in with the society of the country they find themselves thrown into by force of circumstance. As people become displaced with increasing frequency as a result of war, climate change, repression or the other reasons that drive people to flee from their homes, these questions are crucial. Bhanu Kapil makes it clear that in the final analysis power resides with the host:
"I clock the look That passes between you. You and the officer From the Department Of Repatriation. And understand This is your revenge."
Bhanu Kapil has said that she wanted to write a short book, which could be read at a sitting. Its slightness in terms of length does not detract from the importance of the theme.
Where does this leave the question of the title? I came to the conclusion that the situation is very similar to that which arises when you begin a poem that then, in the course of writing, diverges into a path that is not what you foresaw but in which the true identity of the poem is discovered. It is common experience among poets that, in these circumstances, the opening lines have to be deleted, since they are at odds with the poem as it has developed. The ICA performance that bequeathed its title to the book derived from Kathy Acker’s preoccupations and Bhanu Kapil’s interaction with them. As she herself admits, this book diverged almost instantly from the memory of the performance. The title needs to go. Phew. That feels better.
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Bhanu Kapil’s “How to Wash a Heart” is published by Liverpool University Press. The novel referred to by Maylis de Kerangal is titled “Réparer les Vivants” in the French original. A translation into English titled “Mend the Living” is published by MacLehose Press.
Glyn Maxwell – “How the hell are you”
When I embarked on the idea of doing brief reviews of the collections shortlisted for this year’s T.S.Eliot prize, I was not prepared for either the variety I would encounter or the pleasure it has given me. Coming to Glyn Maxwell after Will Harris and Wayne Holloway-Smith is a little like moving from a student degree show to the studio of a master craftsman. And I don’t mean by this to disparage either of the younger poets, both of whom I admire in their different ways. But years of practice at the art leave their mark.
What is immediately distinctive about Maxwell’s work is his attention to form. Take the first two stanzas of The Forecast:
"A day of rain they forecast came and thrown along the window pane was every drop that couldn't stop but dabbed across the light in step"
In the short Youtube interview that preceded the T.S.Eliot Prize readings, Maxwell says that his poems incorporate centuries of formal tradition, and that he doesn’t feel trapped by this – “it allows me to say exactly what I mean because I’ve practised it for long enough”. The two stanzas I’ve quoted contain the recurring elements of regular stanzas, rhyme or assonance, rhythm (here two stresses in each line) and a syllabic pattern (here four syllables per line).
In the same interview he says that a number of poems in the book are a lament on the way things are going in the Anglophone world. The title poem How the hell are you is a case in point. I particularly recommend the Youtube clip of Maxwell reading it. Although it’s written as a monologue it describes the encounter of two old friends who haven’t seen each other for some time. It is deeply moving:
"How the hell are you. Christ you haven't crossed my mind since all the shit we knew turned into shit we hoped was true forget it take my arm and tell me how the hell are you."
The conversational tone is deceptive, as the mood darkens:
"...Plaque there where the thing kicked off here come the same young men in the same lines remember when we never mind Huzzah Forever Glory Be Amen etc. Off they go sunlight glancing off their gear new world of years ago you didn't hear me say that though because I never did how does your bastard garden grow."
The Other Side is about deeprooted social divisions, as were revealed in the course of Brexit:
"The other side took everything we know is true and twisted it and why they pull they shit they do we cannot fathom friend it's why we're asking you."
You will see from both these poems that they have an onward conversational flow helped by the total absence of any punctuation except full stops. Added to these devices, often, is a form of repetition that involves a slight change of context or position, and an adjustment of effect. In the syllabic poem Plainsong of the Undiscovered the words “the dark that you consider/to be dark” occur in the centre of each of the first four stanzas. Similarly, in another syllabic poem, Death Comes to Everyman, the first line in each of the five stanzas ends with the words “the last-night party”. In each case the repetition gives a shape to the poem, underscored by a regular metre – both of these countering the apparently arbitrary line-breaks that are a feature of syllabic verse:
"I hie me to the last-night party
show I'd not played any part in
hadn't even got around to
catching don't to this day know what
play it was."
Maxwell’s day job as a teacher of creative writing has left its mark in a number of witty poems dealing with the creative process. Readers of his brief treatise On Poetry will remember the first section, “White” in which he writes “Poets work with two materials, one’s black and one’s white. Call them sound and silence, life and death, hot and cold, love and loss: any can be the case but none of those yins and yangs tell the whole story”. The blank page is the “white” element, on which the poet will be placing his black marks. In this collection the blank page is given a voice in a number of poems – although, of the “page” poems my favourite is Page as Seating Plan at a Wedding, in which the point of view is that of a seating plan pinned up outside the dining-room:
"I heard recited names of the nine tables as if they meant the world, or meant a thing, and I sniffed the eau de this or that, the rain, the mint and smoke, till the long hall was clear but for a booming sound, life all a dream, far sprinkle of applause that seemed to greet a silence, many rooms away from here..."
Great art, then, a sometimes gloomy perspective, and fun for the creative writing crowd. But there is more: two long elegies, one for Maxwell’s father and one for the poet Derek Walcott, under whom Maxwell studied at Boston University. Both of them are moving, but I found the latter particularly so:
"Your empty page was ocean, is still ocean,
lapping the ribs of this. If it's a blank page
anything like mine it sees no reason
to think you won't be back, mistakes the hush
for inhalation, waits
ecstatically for more.
But it isn't coming in, the light, the heat.
The handle's not about to turn this scene
to us lot sitting where we used to sit,
our ballpoints circling what we think you mean,
our notebooks gaping wide
on a cold and frosty morning."
Maxwell did not win the T.S.Eliot Prize, but he is probably old enough to take this setback in his stride. This collection demonstrates his skill at reinventing the formal poem and imbuing it with meaning and emotion.
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How the Hell are You is published by Picador. Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry is published by Oberon Books.