*****
Martin Malone & Bryan Angus: Gardenstown • Colin Carberry: Ghost Homeland • Ezra Miles: The Signalman
*****
Gardenstown, by Martin Malone & Bryan Angus. UK: £12.99/ US: 15.99 / EUR: €14.99 Broken Sleep Books. ISBN: 9781916938106. Reviewed by Wendy Klein
Born in County Durham, Martin Malone has been living in the very place, Gardenstown, Aberdeenshire, in which this book is set. Guitarist and song writer, he is the author of four poetry collections and four chapbooks, former editor for five years of the print edition of The Interpreter’s House, and presently one of the editors of Poetry Salzburg Review. His writing is influenced by the natural world, the visual arts, and the historical/political landscape. In his collection The Unreturning (Shoestring Press 2015), he re-examines the popular mythology of WWI. I am no newcomer to Malone’s work; having reviewed his collection Cur (Shoestring Press, 2015 and his pamphlet Mr Willet’s Summertime’(Poetry Salzburg, 2018). I was privileged to read an earlier version of this book and was pleased to be asked to review it.
Malone’s inspiration from the visual arts is evident throughout his early works, but it comes into its own here in the partnership between himself and the artist, Bryan Angus, an Aberdonian who lives in Banff. Angus states in his introduction to the book that he has been ‘making images of Gardenstown since 2005’ when he was conducting retreats for painters there. Both poet and artist are struck by the unique structure of the place, built on 5 levels from the cliff top to the sea edge. The poet comments on: ‘…the sense of a certain Milk Wood magic in this wee town.’ Though not necessarily a poet of place, it is with palpable affection, even passion, that he writes about this place.
Just picking up this book the prospective reader has a sense of handling a piece of art. The cover is a certain blue that isn’t quite turquoise, but which has been given a matte finish that looks almost like velvet. The black and white highlights of emergent rooftops and stairs, of shadows, beckons throughout alongside Angus’s accompanying illustrations, a palette effectively sustained The structure is a simple one: essentially a long poem divided into 5 sections beginning with 1. Aubade, and continuing through the four seasons from Summer (2019), through to V. March/April 2020. Obviously, these dates are specific to the recent pandemic, but the author is clear that this is not a ‘pandemic poem’ while recognizing that the local lockdown created a space for a ‘prolonged act of looking.’ It is this ‘looking’, the particular use of language the poet employs to make it visible to the reader, that I want to focus on here.
There are several ways in which I see Martin Malone bringing forth the literary feat which is ‘Gardentown’. There is the way in which he evokes sound, his use of extraordinarily vivid and unusual imagery, and his choice of verbs which are, in my view, the very backbone of poetry excellence. He also weaves in, local vernacular, and a variety of less-used words that surprise and delight.
From the opening lines his imagery leaps out:
Where to begin but night
as high tide lush with kelp
licks at the harbour wall
and on the second page I am enchanted by the sound of: the bay’s gargled vowel’, and: the lone comma of a seal’s snout.’ Soon after, the poet’s son is seen: ‘hacking fiefdoms from the air / in the haze of an afternoon…’ and in another afternoon, a radio plays test cricket from someone’s kitchen while: ‘moments slip / the anchorage of fact, ‘and later: ‘while the town provokes / its own idea, drinking / hot blood in the snug.’ In IV Winter:
…Light as fox toes,
snow falls before dawn
prints absence onto the land,
draws the wren’s obscure
knack of self, conjuring
its haiku from the broom.
and even more, with a haunting visual image accompanying it: the old kirkyard’s / mouthful of smashed molars.’ Have gravestones ever looked so madly perfect?
Here some of my favourite verbs: ‘and the day’s new music is brogued into being’, ‘the winter sun’s candela / scorps the six hour day / from the hollow of my palm…’, which sent me to Google ‘scorp’, a tool used for gouging. In III Autumn, ‘Dawn fruits a fat white moon’ and the bay blooms its trawlers.’ If you wait you will see Ursa Major ‘snouting’ the dark. I could go on and on. As to the local vernacular, we’re given‘squalls of filsket sea’; the residents of the town in church: ‘witnessing The Word / and waiting upon the eschaton to the / doleful note of an electric organ…’ You knew that word, of course: the final note of the divine plan or even Armageddon. Wonderful.
Dylan Thomas is looking over Malone’s shoulder everywhere in this exquisite book-length poem. Commenting on the poet’s earlier work, Michael Symmons Roberts has said that ‘Any attempt to forge a new nature poetry in the English lyric tradition is a bold undertaking, but Malone’s sensibility and assurance make this possible.’ True it was and is, and ‘Gardentown’ is clear evidence of this, vivid and satisfying in an ‘Under Milkwood’ way. On reaching the final page, the poet Matthew Caley notes on the back cover: ‘I believed I’d walked the whole route.’ As did, I, having actually walked part of it –just like the book, which is only 51 pages long and contains this bijou universe, a jewel in every sense of the word.
Wendy Klein is the author of three full collections, Cuba in the Blood (2009), Anything in Turquoise (2013) from Cinnamon Press, Mood Indigo (2016) from Oversteps books, and a Selected, Out of the Blue from The High Window Press (2019). Her pamphlet Let Battle Commence, from Dempsey & Windle (2020), is a US Civil War memoir based on letters home from her great grandfather, a Confederate soldier in that war. She is working towards a fifth collection.
*****
Ghost Homeland by Colin Carberry. 12.00 Euros. Scotus Press. 978-1-916753-1-3. Reviewed by Belinda Cooke
Colin Carberry, gives us entertainingly direct, skilfully constructed poems – mainly sonnets – that have that rare quality of being clearly about something. Don’t be put off by the few sentimental slips in the otherwise sharply observed opening lyrics:
We’d raise mounds of mossed stones in the half-light
standing under the dark green shawl of trees
privy to the song of the rain-voiced breeze
and the first owl peaceful in his second sight.
(‘Rathcline Woods’)
For once we get beyond his ‘fields glistened with dew’ and ‘holy, coin-filled, healing water’ (At Saint Faithleach’s Well’), he really gets stuck in with powerful, cohesive poems that journey through his childhood in Ireland, the seventies ‘Troubles’, and onto his bohemian life of travel. Born in Canada, after spending his childhood in Ireland, he returns to Canada for university and subsequently travels by Greyhound the length of America before permanently residing in Mexico where he currently lives and works with his family. This unusual life trajectory has led to a collection filled with colourful characters and experiences, of those, often living the single life in bars, all captured with an engaging demotic voice where his sympathies clearly lie with the common working, often marginalised ‘little man’. Indeed, happy as we may be for him when his wife agrees to marry him in the rather sentimental ‘Rain’, it is his nomadic life drinking in bars that makes for great poetry to celebrate the unique qualities of the ordinary common man – these colourful, story-telling outsiders.
All this clearly connects with his support for freedom fighters worldwide, seen in his hair-raising ‘terrorist tourism’ in Belfast:
‘You’re seein’ this but once, mind: lock that door,’
my suddenly exercised (ex?) Provo
guide spat (like it was some treat) as we tore
down the street where sane Fenians do not go –
(‘Down in Sandy Row’)
and his reaction in Mexico to the Zapatista slogan: ‘Resiste con todo el corazón! /Resist with all your heart!’:
And my heart soared
like flame in a furnace as I recalled
them: the guileless, battered faces of those
who spoke out, all heart, and were crucified.
The bold Romero caught in the cross-fires.
Biko. Sands. Saro Wiwa. All the boys.
(‘Blood Sports’)
This brotherly connecting clearly stems from his experience of The Troubles, both his memories of it as a child and his attempt to understand on visiting as an adult. This is all captured in the collection’s second section: ‘Guerilla’ on a friend famed for his rebel songs; ‘Hunger Striker’ on a memory of the funeral when he was a child: I was nine then but I knew something huge / and serious had happened…’and the superb terza rima narrative ‘Solicitor’ on the murder of human rights lawyer Pat Finucune who speaks to him beyond the grave.
Many such characters surface in his opening poems on his time in Ireland. Take this great encounter with the subject of one of his poems:
…’That poem…the one you wrote for me,’
tapping my slim debut, ‘Now I’m no judge
of these things, but I thought the first version
was more honest…’
…
…he took his parting shot: ‘Son,
a little madness every now and then’,
he grinned, ‘is relished by the wisest men’.
(‘The Critic’)
While celebrating such individuals, when we come to his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Lanesboro Co Longford there are also expressions of regret at his permanent departure, noting how such nostalgic poems on loved family and neighbours, were written as a kind of release: ‘taking our ease; / the storm clouds of those exiled years apart / dissolving…’ (‘Natural Harbour’). This loss is particularly movingly recalled when he breaks in a horse, only to be left with a feeling of defeat: ‘It was only then / I saw, in his bloodshot eye, I had killed / the very thing about him most loved.’ (‘Connemara’)
From this point onwards alcohol starts to dominate as he moves onto his travel poems: ‘I will sit, a half comatose Winston, / until all hours, sinking in glorious gin.’ (‘One Dark Night’), and his own attitude to the solitary drinking life is by no means clear cut. The poem ‘Shanty’ points to such ambiguities in this superb tribute to those individuals who, whether through choice or circumstance, never transitioned out of it; one cannot fail to connect it with the plight of many aging Irish navvies – this poem a monument to the universal lone drinker:
As knowledge deepens, so sorrows increase.
Tired of islands, women, psalms and poets,
I lounge with sailors, drinking seven seas,
those mad ones howling in their shacks of bone,
lit always by the glitter of the wave
that breaks the blue depths of their solitudes;
not for them the quiet agony
of years spent in dregs, attempting to atone
for black self-loathing, but surfeit of love
for all things that labour under the sun;
whose lips are full of music, mirth and wine.
Those are the ones I wish to lay me down
in an old skiff at lovely dusk to burn
at the end of days, unknowing and alone.
(‘Shanty’)
And no one is presented as more of an outsider his imagined dead father in ‘Revenant’ who he did not know and who he suggests committed suicide. Once more he veers away from his favoured sonnet form with echoes of both Dantean terza rima and Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’. Hard to know how much is fiction but the blunt voice is powerful as the father tells his tale:
No, I was tired of playing the outlaw,
on the run from no one but my own spooked
self.’ And that look again: ‘But you: why
should you be mitherin’ your silly head
with this old shite now. It’s yesterday’s news,
why scratch old scabs…Besides, I was bombed
out of my skull on sleeping pills and booze.’
And as the collection winds to a close, although the poet comes across as the more settled married man, he is no less politically engaged as he continues to write movingly of the predicament of those caught up in internecine conflict.
By the end of the collection one is left not hopeful about the conflict about us, but nevertheless still holding some belief that even if they are pouring forth is some backroom pub or late night dive, there will always be people will still be prepared to stand up and be counted.
Belinda Cooke is a widely published poet, translator and reviewer. This consists of seven collections, including translations from both Russian and Kazakh. Best known for her translations of Marina Tsvetaeva, she has recently written a prose memoir of her mother’s life: From the Back of Beyond to Westland Row: a Mayo Woman’s Story (The High Window Press, 2022). Her latest collection, The Days of the Shorthanded Shovelists, is due out from Salmon Poetry in 2025.
*****
The Signalman by Ezra Miles. £11.99. Black Spring Press. ISBN 978 1 91506 38 5. Reviewed by Tom Phillips
It is probably fair to say that, on opening any book of poetry, especially a debut collection, readers expect two somewhat contradictory things: to feel they’re in a safe pair of hands, but that ultimately they’re going to be surprised or, best of all, enlightened. Ezra Miles’ debut – originating in his own experiences as a signalman posted to a remote corner of the British railways network in Lincolnshire, rather than in response to Dickens’ well-known short story of the same name – fulfils both those expectations. A combination of diary-like short poems in italics and titled pieces that address concerns, beliefs and emotions arising from his experiences, it combines a visceral immediacy with an openness to what might be called the spiritual other as well as finely tuned language that, even on the first page, gives us ‘a smoke-strafed, ground-floor flat, snarls cut sharply/across the stained walls, front door off its jamb where/a broken man, the former tenant, kicked it in’ – a seemingly simple observation that’s heavy with assonance and alliteration and brings into view a first suggestion of a motif – fire – that courses through the book and ultimately transforms into light and, indeed, enlightenment. The way these few words are deployed tells us already that we’re in safe hands and that we’re entering terrain that may frequently jolt our expectations.
The near-solitude of his working existence brings Miles hard up against what he refers to as the ‘penumbra’ and his encounters with what’s beyond the apparent mundanity of signal-box life. The thematic armature of the collection is an often intense negotiation with belief and faith, their manifestations and challenges, but this is a negotiation which is conducted through close observation of the actually existing and often cruel, visceral or quite simply baffling physical and material world. This is, as Miles puts it himself, poetry written by ‘A strange man in dialogue/with (something greater than) himself.’ It is also poetry that sees, in a fleeting glimpse of a Muntjac deer, an ‘extant shadow, floating/up against the hillside, perhaps//the finest of all the poems I’ve read’ and unflinchingly recounts what must be done with a misshapen calf in ‘True Night’, a poem that recalls the visceral immediacy of Ted Hughes’ Moortown Diaries.
Geoffrey Hill’s urgent attention to the questions of faith in and, to a lesser extent, those of Donald Davie in his later work come to mind, but Miles’ voice is very much his own and his anxieties extend back to the febrile explorations of what lies outside and beyond that characterise early 20th-century European symbolists. ’14 Lines’, for example, examines complex spiritual and emotional knots teased at by the likes of the Belgian poet Émile Verhaeren and Bulgaria’s Geo Milev in his fiery Baudelairean phase. Opening with the bold statement ‘Death would be a mercy. You don’t deserve it.’, the neo-sonnet (as it were) continues with self-reflexively harsh criticism of itself:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxI look to God and my
sordid, defiant demon hates him. My one
orthwhile fragment of soul, His domain, feels
farther, starker. I am angry at my poverty,
I take it out on the poem: little music in this
verse.
There is, of course, quite a lot of music buried within these lines as well as across the rest of a collection which resonates with an authenticity that is able to traverse the ranges of human experience without sounding trite, simplistic or indeed over-complicated and histrionic in its confessions. The poems in The Signalman are worked for and worked at. The best of them have an atmosphere that is simultaneously, paradoxically, provocative and reassuring, as if we’re being invited into a landscape where visionaries and hermits lurk, but without being entirely sure of what they or we might be about to encounter in the ‘penumbra’ that remains tantalisingly somewhere out there.
It is the energy contained within the collection, however, that stands out, deriving, as it does, from both the seriousness of its enquiry and the strongly rhythmic music of its linguistic surfaces. This emerges in both relatively loose, free-form poems like ‘Diagrams of the Heart”, with its stream of consciousness-like flow of images (‘Oh the skin skin but what of the maze of love/the high-pillar hedgerows mansions of love/heart in more code atonal tune chirps/through a dee-sea cable laid across bedrock’), and the taut little ekphrastic poem ‘A New Church’ in response to Pieter Breugel’s ‘The Harvesters’ in which ‘The woman replace their/tall white hats and bob/into the burning gold’.
Towards the end of the collection, the poem ‘Avocet’ directly addresses the connection between the isolation of the signalman’s life, depression (‘the dark-faced avocet of your own life’) and finding solace in the ongoing existence of the ‘hallowed earth’ embodied in the existence of the bird with its ‘long stiletto bill furrowing’. The poems ends with couplets which, in many ways, characterise the tilt of the music sounding throughout the collection as a whole:
In the harsh timbre of its song, unthinking and
strangled, I know I mustn’t leave this hallowed earth,
no, not until night arrives of its own volition,
to pierce life’s strange and swooping tune.
Tom Phillips is a writer and translator now living in Sofia, Bulgaria. His poetry has been widely published in journals, anthologies, pamphlets and the collections Unknown Translations (Scalino, 2016), Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012) and Burning Omaha (2003). He has translated many of Bulgaria’s leading contemporary poets and his translations of Bulgarian modernist Geo Milev are due to appear from Worple Press in 2023. He is editor of the book of essays Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work (Shearsman, 2021) and teaches creative writing and translation at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski.
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