*****
Jacob Polley: Material Properties • Helen Ivory: Wunderkammer • Kate Noakes : Goldhawk Road • Josephine Balmer: Ghost Passage • Paul Eric Howlett: The Bedfordshire Boy • Tim Murphy: Mouth of Shadows
*****
Material Properties by Jacob Polley. Picador. ISBN: 978-1-0350-0008-1. Reviewed by Jonathan Timbers
The blurb on the back of this rich and engaging new collection by Jacob Polley describes it as ‘undeniably his finest work to date’. Whether this is true or not, the collection is best enjoyed for its abundant creativity and best understood as a book about translation.
The golden thread of the book consists of translations of the Anglo Saxon Exeter riddles. You can compare Polley’s versions with the originals, commentaries and more literal contemporary English translations thanks to an extremely useful website edited by Megan Cavell, with Matthias Ammon, Neville Mogford, Jennifer Neville, Alexandra Reider and Victoria Symons. Polley’s hold up well against this standard because of their energy and skill. Sometimes they are close to the originals, sometimes, as in Emergency, which translates the first three riddles, the lines resonate with the original without being point for point translations. In Emergency, Polley opens with the power of wind on the sea: “so what collapses/ collapses back on what follows”. This is much more like riddle two than riddle one, which concentrates on the wind’s power over the land. He adds his own observations from our urbanised world:
..water way back from in the world’s
first darkness blazing down on the streets
and roaring up from the drains, flickering
with yellow filth.
Yet this seems to capture the spirit of the original with verve and originality. This form of urban pastoral features in other poems too, including ‘Mr Blackbird Gone’, which ingeniously interrogates sympathetic association:
I’ll say it plainly: we care
so much for the often-seen and don’t want to stop
sending our love across the car-park
where the dealers deal;
across any doubt as to what birds feel
to sing so hard against the falling dark.
You will have noted Polley’s clever use of poetic form including rhyme and how natural that sounds, even though it is highly wrought. This is one of the paradoxes of language and its relationship to truth and reality that the collection explores.
This small poem demonstrates that the key to the collection is not adept translations from the Old English but the concept that language itself is a form of translation, changing material properties into linguistic ones. Viewed like this, the riddles show how the alchemy of language gives rise to a form of being in a constant state of flux, a transmutation. It is entirely apposite therefore that the last poem – another one of the Exeter riddles – ‘The Creature’ is actually about creation itself:
……….. Thick and thin
and the likenesses of all things
wait in me and only when I let them
will they happen.
The scope of this collection is wide. It develops through different phases or mini-themes, including foxes, Tudor England, fish and the sea, air, wind and blackbirds and so on. Each of these sub-sections is a sort of fantasia, winging its way through language. For example, in the mini section on the sea, in the short poem ‘Down’, Polley connects sea spray with the down of birds, a feather from his son’s pillow and then returns to the sea again. There’s a sort of delirious collapsing of boundaries here, but ultimately the poem turns out to be tightly controlled. He is consciously essaying through subjects, as in ‘Moon Quilt Essay’, which touches on the moon as a trope, as “phases of myself”, encompasses a famous Philip Sidney line and ends up with the moon as ‘a needle pushed through/ night and day this page sewn inside’”. It’s dazzling and clever, but also rich in perception and experience. It is also essentially musical – the energy of language, with its capacity to interlink so many things ultimately bounded by form.
His approach isn’t flawless. Some poems get too caught up with their own brilliant devices such as ‘Dream of a Blackboard Left a Lifetime with Mrs Harvey’s writing on’. In some ways, it’s a Tom Waits-ey tour-de-force about Elizabethan London – I don’t want to snipe about a hugely enjoyable and linguistically brilliant piece of writing like this – it would surely be a wonderful piece to read aloud or perform – but it does feel a little bit self-conscious to me. The poem Pelt, about foxes being hunted by dogs is easily surpassed by Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World.
But these are minor blemishes in an outstanding collection, which is a joy to read and an intricate form of mimesis, where the poems themselves are stitched into the material and abstract properties of the subject matter. In Material Properties language itself is a form of epistemology which begins in observation and description and moves through the existential towards the conceptual, but remains in flux between the two. This is why Polley’s version of the Exeter riddles are not just translations in the literal sense but recreations of the original, just as all the ‘original’ poems are translations of material and experiential properties. Recreating them is a form of alchemy. And, assuming every poem is a spell, he casts their magic again and again in this brave and highly entertaining collection.
Jonathan Timbers has been a teacher and lawyer; he’s worked in a tank factory, a prosthetic limb factory and the last cloth cap making workshop in Leeds (at the time). He helped organise and gave evidence. to the UN inquiry on the impact of austerity on disabled peoples’s rights in the UK. He was once the mayor of Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd and thinks that Ted Hughes is England”s greatest war poet. He occasionally publishes poetry and reviews; otherwise he lives a life of complete self indulgence, with his cat, Polly.
*****
Wunderkammer by Helen Ivory. $22.95. MadHat Press. ISBN 978-1-952335-57-0. Reviewed by Pat Edwards
To read this collection is to be the newbie at a séance, to watch the ouija move inexplicably, to seek answers and to thrill at the strangeness of things only half understood. It is an immersion in imagery rich in Animalia, an exploration of darkness, a means of considering the treatment of women through the years. From the earliest work included in the book, poems that are over twenty years old, to the very latest writing, Ivory holds fast to her questioning about the female role in domestic and every other aspect of life.
Ivory is playful yet menacing in ‘Spin Cycle’, where the washing machine becomes a sort of beast occupying the landing, the very appliance designed to make mainly women’s lives easier, become controlling. In ‘Alchemy’, Ivory is already recognising the insignificance of being female:
But don’t worry -I am only a woman;
commonplace; like the moon, like breathing.
The reference to Lot’s wife who according to the Biblical story looked back when commanded not to, is clear in ‘Salt’. Again, this early writing shows Ivory concerning herself with how women are seen as ‘foolish’ and how man-made laws seek to subdue them.
Childhood plays an important part in the next section of the collection. In ‘The Doll’s House’ all is not as it should be and the doll’s blonde hair ends up cut off and used to line ‘a mouse nest in spring.’ The very next poem sees that same mouse collecting teeth, but the teeth ‘are gnashing/ and grinding…chewing at the cold/ metal door to get out.’ Fear begins to build, carried on surrealism, and the poet accuses ‘Magicians’ of thinking ‘they know/what you’re thinking’. The mounting disillusionment with the balance of power becomes more desperate, the sense of needing to escape more urgent. In ‘A Little Spell in Six Lessons’, Ivory promotes the idea that maybe we cannot safely afford to be our true selves, but must be disguised as birds, but even this has inherent danger:
If you want ever to be found
scatter breadcrumbs,
pray the birds are not hungry.
The next poems in the collection come from Ivory’s seminal work featuring Bluebeard, a figure whose many wives all mysteriously vanish, as if at his own hand. The first part of this begins at the time of the moon landing. Ivory thinks of her own mother:
Behind the bouquet,
a baby moved in a bell jar
like a cosmonaut testing space.
Childhood again features, and it feels haunted and tormented. In ‘Things my Mother Told Me’:
even a simple cotton reel
can hold every thread of your being
wound up so neat,
you may never see you again.
The early influence of a father figure dominates much of the writing, not an easy man but maybe a typical one of that time, remote, fixing cars. The mother figure too is strange, conducting seances, interested in death. Ivory’s writing is littered with the imagery of birds, mice, wolves, snakes, skin, thorns, all no doubt born of these dark obsessions.
We meet Bluebeard in the second part of this section, where the writing becomes incredibly disturbing:
The winter morning brought so little light
it was hard to understand
the hank of hair like a noose at rest
severed on the wooden floor.
‘A Week with Bluebeard’ is a terrifying account of seven days, seen as a kind of farmer’s diary that hints at the slaughterhouse, fake regret and cover up. Ivory calls nine poems ‘The Disappearing’, as if to emphasise the end of childhood and the slowly vanishing woman in a toxic relationship. We know this to be a mix of myth and autobiography, though the whole truth is never fully revealed.
The next section evokes tarot cards. Many poems are short, compact depictions of figures such as the Fool, the Empress, the Hermit and the Devil. Ivory draws on the practice of reading the future from summoning meaning from the random revelation of each card.
We then encounter Ivory’s extensive research into the history of women depicted as witches, whores, crones, deceivers, psychotics, strippers, you name it. The title, ‘The Anatomical Venus’ is a reference to the wax cadaver used to teach about the female form. This was a fantasy, a curiosity, an eighteenth century phenomenon, and Ivory’s writing is more than up to the task, masterfully dissecting the layers of shameful misconception and curiosity assigned to women down the ages. This is surely some of Ivory’s finest work.
The penultimate section is ‘Maps of the Abandoned City’ from 2019. Here Ivory uses her rich language to create imaginary places and landscapes, some dystopian, all redolent with her mystic, other-worldly creatures and happenings. In one poem Ivory thinks of the city at night:
In the shadowplay, the dark is a plague doctor’s mask,
a bone-saw, a gathering of spat-out teeth.
Soon, fire will describe a still life of eyeglasses:
their tiny infinities – all their dashed lenses.
It is exciting to know that Ivory has new work to be published in 2024. We are given a preview here in ‘How to Construct a Witch’, where the poet is on familiar territory writing about the depiction of women as the Devil’s servant peddling in the occult. Many of the poems are about named women such as Margaret Johnson who featured in the Pendleton Witch Trials. Ivory treats these women with respect whilst giving us a glimpse into who they were perceived to be. In ‘The Change’, Ivory makes the menopause into a kind of witch. In other poems she looks at Glinda from the Wizard of Oz, at spells, and at the ever-present crimes of violence against women.
This collection represents a remarkable body of work, a lifetime of writing about women using a range of tropes and devices so recognisably Ivory. She has mastered her craft and cornered a special niche for herself, powerfully framing so much of her work in the language of mysticism, of both the natural and unnatural, of prejudice and unfounded accusation, but always rooted in what makes us human and vulnerable.
Pat Edwards is a writer, reviewer and workshop leader from mid Wales. Her work has appeared in Magma, Prole, Atrium, IS&T, and others as well as in a number of anthologies. Pat hosts Verbatim open mic nights and curates Welshpool Poetry Festival. Her three pamphlets are: Only Blood (Yaffle); Kissing in the Dark (Indigo Dreams); Hail Marys (Infinity Books UK).
*****
Goldhawk Road by Kate Noakes. £10.99. Two Rivers Press. ISBN:978-1-915048-04-2
Kate Noakes is a much published and very competent poet. This is her eighth collection and it is substantial. Noakes takes us around the world, organising her poems into three sections: ‘Home’, ‘Away’ (a nod to Australian soap opera?) and a final group set back in London but focusing on trees. Throughout the book, we appreciate the poet’s keen powers of observation but sense, underlying and unifying her writing, her fear and foreboding for the planet. Her second poem ends:
I know we are living in the end
of days. Still, there is art.
This is one of the rewarding features of her work: the courage to go on, to create, even to laugh, despite all the signs that the environment is in almost irretrievable decline. This tension between a sense of beauty with a will towards positive action and global intimations of disaster is very productive. She describes collecting what I take to be storm-wrecked starfish from the beach and returning them to the ocean. She and her companions save this ‘living galaxy’ but she ends the poem with the wry comment: ‘Our good deed. / Yet far off the last Sumatran rhino / dies on the very same day.’ Her sharp eye for the absurd serves her well in her attack on the Damien Hirst artwork, ‘Cock and Bull’, a dead bantam hen riding a dead Hereford bull calf, preserved in formaldehyde in a restaurant specialising in beef and chicken, although even the catalogue description of this piece is enough to arouse feelings of revulsion. She concludes:
And it’s not even art, just a cold slab
of inedible money, but in your heart
you know this, Damien, don’t you?
Subtly, the poem questions if Damien even has a heart.
The ‘Home’ section also includes work which reflects the tug of her Welsh side. The opening poem portrays a conflict of identity, ‘Too English for the Welsh / Too Welsh for the English’ which she resolves by aligning herself with the wildlife of the Severn estuary, …’I am all oystercatcher / and sand eel, stunted grass and thrift’. In other poems, the futuristic ‘Spring 2042, or Curlew at Laugharne’ and ‘Gulls, perhaps’ she gives her concern for the environment a Welsh setting. Some poems, however, look inwards or are more metaphorical than observational. There are poems about death, sex and passion which express powerful feelings although the context is less explicit. One such is ‘High Bright Ride’, -‘I need a more rapacious lover / an eagle man’; another ‘Woman clothed’, -‘This wardrobe’s not hell’s mouth’. There is a very tender poem about her mother in hospital, ‘When the best vase was an egg cup’ and some sardonic comments on human (husband/partner) nature:
Supermarket blooms were a gesture, but
when you chose two stems of half-price ones
forgot to peel off the tags and red spots
what were you saying?
(‘Bird’s Instant Custard’)
Perhaps the most interesting poem here is the one from whose first line the book takes its title: ‘She dreams of Goldhawk Road’. In ‘Each Night in Jasmine Sleep’, the framework of dream allows the poet to explore the imagination and the surreal so that the reality of life in London is refracted, splintered and time-shifted. Thus, she flits between an encounter with Christina Rosetti at the opera and an evening in a pub in 1940 in the blackout, ‘Twenty men sup and listen. Sup and listen. Sup and’. If, as is sometimes suggested, dream is the way in which the unconscious sorts out our daily experience, this poem returns to waking reality with a bump.
And she dreams she’s a young woman on the Tube
reading, and eating a Golden Delicious, who
twice a day between Portobello Road and Ladbroke Grove
unburies herself and looks up from her phone,
eyes fixed wide on the ruin of Grenfell, the tower
that can’t be, won’t be covered up.
In the ‘Away’ section, there are poems set in Japan, America and France. Noake’s talent for observation and her political engagement, particularly in relation to ecopolitics, redeem these poems from any charge of tourism. I enjoyed her debunk of Kintsugi which has become perhaps an overused metaphor in recent poetry. In ‘Acquiring a taste, Kyoto’ she describes a mass-produced ‘tea bowl’ she has been given for some sort of tea ceremony,, ‘The glaze is rough and black, classic in that way, / and shows no sign of cracking. No need for gold.’ In ‘Autoportrait as France’ she gives what feels like an embedded presentation of contemporary France, from Paris to the horrors of the Calais Jungle. The landscape of childhood is often the landscape of poetic imagination, and this is born out in the pieces set in Australia. ‘The Wendy House, Adelaide’ has a touching description of childhood which succeeds in being simultaneously realistic, funny and Gothic: ‘You can play hide-‘n’-seek // if you want to be in there alone, / can trust yourself not to peek // through the back window on chicken days, / not to see the axe off the block’. The strength of this conclusion is reinforced by a rare use of rhyme and the final half-rhyming harsh consonantal ‘ck’, mimicking the imagined sound of the axe.
One of the poems, in the last part of the book, ‘London Tree’ has the title ‘Marble and dendrophilia’ and indeed this section is an outburst of dendrophilia or the love of trees. Even the destructive ‘strangler fig’ wins admiration, ‘Visitors marvel at his strength / and pose before the rippling body / he’s built. This is a celebration but at the same time a recognition of fragility; the sense of living in end time, introduced at the beginning of the book and always implicit, re-emerges in ‘Not having a spare century’:
Only the wind brings this sad uprooting,
and not having a spare century,
we need it soft and on our side.
Kathleen McPhilemy grew up in Belfast but now lives in Oxford. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being Back Country, Littoral Press, 2022. She also hosts a poetry podcast magazine, Poetry Worth Hearing.
*****
Ghost Passage by Josephine Balmer. £10.95. Shearsman Books. ISBN: 978-1848617940
‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Quoted to near-death, Faulkner’s quip usefully reminds us that the past has to come into the present to even be the past. A case in point are the wooden Roman writing tablets which prompted many of the poems in Josephine Balmer’s Ghost Passage. Bearing marks left by scribes under long-vanished black wax, the tablets were discovered only a decade ago, as the City of London was getting another much-needed office block (bureaucracy has a long history). You can see them at the London Mithraeum.
Ghost Passage consists of three inter-related multi-voice cycles. They span two thousand years, but each cycle clusters around a particular period or setting: the first century CE as Roman power was making its stylus-marks across Britain, then late Roman Britain as the future of that power starts getting smudgey, and finally a place where the wooden tablets are replaced altogether by upright stones, namely a church graveyard.
Recurrent themes and resonances include forced or unforced migration, religious proselytization, parenthood embraced or renounced, the missing partner and absent father, war, revolution, veteran issues, sexwork, and near-term societal collapse after economic crisis and pandemic: ‘Markets crashed so we buried our money. / Sickness shadowed us on the streets. We stayed / at home.’ That poem’s datelined 420 CE, rather than 2008 or 2020.
If much of this sounds grim, the collection sets it out with great skill. One of its formal strategies is the use of sporadic rhyme, assonance, or other phonic echos at the ends of lines. Fill in your own comparison, but mine would be WS Graham’s ‘The Night City’ (another great London poem) or Hart Crane’s ‘My Grandmother’s Love Letters’, implicit rebukes to the oft-assumed dichotomy between “formal” and “free verse”. Balmer begins:
It seems a slip, a novice error,
marked as if crossed through.
A name no one can read. Or knew.
But I am the first. It holds my fear
and my life, the heart-knot terror
of a letter misplaced, misconstrued.
I breathe through its blocked lungs –
my blood, my bone, my sinew.
These lines are the opposite of a slip or novice error, of course. The irregular but tangible patterning, using intermittent full, near or off-rhymes, is a pleasure in itself. But this patterning also embodies something substantive in the book and our relationship to history: there are things in the past we can rationalize or even recognize, and things that will remain irretrievable (for example the gaps in what’s left of Sappho’s poems, Balmer’s translations of which have been widely published and praised).
For want of written sources and webcam footage, it’s hard to reliably visualize a social life of two thousand years ago, and imagination is a necessarily large part of what we have, if prone to projection. Mitigating the risk of the latter, the collection diversifies its voices and physical details, the voices shifting from one poem to the next and ignoring another putative dichotomy, that of lyric and epic. How far does this reaching back to the past inform us about that past, and how much about the present? And should we mind? Put another way: what is the validity of anachronism?
The voices are not wholly from “back then”, or ex tunc as lawyers would say: ‘Every Sunday for fifteen hundred years / they have passed by us in this place’, says a stone in a church porch (‘For Evalus, Son Of’). But neither are these voices wholly ex hunc, from now. They’re ghosts, the past in the present. Which is ultimately the case outside the poem of course: however usefully historians read and archaeologists dig and museums charge for talking waxworks or holograms, we only ever have extrapolations, imaginations, approximations of the past. The poems hover between those ex tunc and ex hunc perspectives, sometimes building a character directly from the archaeological record, sometimes looking back from now, from history in all its contemporeity.
This is clearest in the final section, whose poems begin ex tunc and become ever more ex hunc. Here and in the earlier two sections, Balmer is great at metamorphosis: ‘As in the mess, they stretch out, ankles crossed’ (she’s talking about airmens’ graves) (‘A Few Feet’). A woman in Rome sends a writing stylus to a one-night-stand now in Britain, but that image transforms to her newborn child: ‘Ten days / old. Her father in replica. As sharp.’ (‘Keepsake’). A tallying up of legionnaries’ pre-campaign drinking ends: ‘Every drop they drained would soon be spilt.’ (‘Account’).
With or without the accompanying notes, these poems have impact read silently, but reading them aloud really brings out their resonance beyond the surface context. As these words, once Roman or Romano-British, then Balmer’s, become literally ours, the first person pronouns, singular and plural, facilitate identification or at least involvement. The read out-loud brings the various voices together, as we feel the arbitrariness of history, or:
… how, when these walls are levelled,
our names, our jokes, will be left
still scrawled across in crude relief.
What will survive of us are our one-liners. But it’s serious stuff, this messing about in the past (sometimes confused with messing about with the past). One poem grows from the XY chromosome in the bones of someone buried as a woman, confirming that non-binary gender identities are nothing new (‘Both/Neither’). Several poems show the meeting, mingling and merging of Britons, Romans and people who’d now count as Bulgarians and Romanians, given their geographical if not necessarily genetic origins, and people from still further afield. Nothing’s as new as archaeology, it seems. Ghost Passage is a book to travel with and be haunted by.
Alistair Noon‘s Paradise Takeaway, a long poem with Luton Airport in it, is forthcoming from Two Rivers Press in October 2023. His translations from the Russian of Osip Mandelstam have appeared as three volumes from Shearsman Books. He lives in Berlin.
*****
The Bedfordshire Boy by Paul Eric Howlett: £12. Waterloo Press. ISBN: 978-1-915241-09-2. Reviewed by David Hackbridge Johnson.
A few years ago the surprising name among posts newly published was Illiasa Sequin; a Greek writer living latterly in London and producing in almost total obscurity a body of work remarkable for its concentrated power and bold imagery. Waterloo Press have issued a handsome volume of the work of Paul Eric Howlett, another new name sprung from apparently nowhere; the poems within are described as having only previously available (or not) in manuscript. Biographical details are scant as there is no introduction to the poet except in vague terms; no birthdate, no life events, no literary profile to allow a placing of Howlett in context. We know only that he has worked variously as a civil servant, kitchen porter, clerk and warehouseman. The book’s title, The Bedfordshire Boy, provides a location from which these poems emanate; the ‘Foreword’ takes pains to emphasise that a ‘little-known corner’ of the county is meant and there is a desire that the poems be seen as part of an experiment – will poems in a ‘simple and straight-forward language’ have a role in the present age.
From such a modest and conservative standpoint might not a charming posy of verse served in rather an old hat be expected? This is not what happens. In a collection that takes in the spells cast by the poet’s immediate location and a wider European scope, Howlett has quietly laid out an ambitious project that hinges on poetry’s reach both near and far. If the jacket blurb hopes to trigger echoes of Hill, Stramm, Stadler, and Hölderlin in reading Howlett, the effort is at least in part worthwhile, in that amidst these competing influences a distinct voice is to be discerned. Take the poem ‘Resort’ (p. 48) which begins: ‘These, Sunday-week people, / Couple traffic, bulging / Beaches, distress themselves / If clouds come.’ That first ‘These’ followed by a killer comma that suggests both watching and disdain brings us close to a Larkinesque melancholia yet the language is so compressed as to suggest the tightly packed modus of Imagism. In the next poem, ‘sub rosa’ we are closer to Geoffrey Hill territory with its ‘Adam with shadows’, and its ‘Green man / as bone-lichen’. The poem manages in five short stanzas to suggest multiple strata as if the ‘sap’ of a poem is expressed by these layers of history and custom. The ending: ‘and then / loaded Moloch-earth heats, love dries / and people explode’ elides German Expressionismus with Blake at his darkest. In mentioning Ernst Stadler and August Stramm, the jacket blurb puts the reader on guard for compressed energy and grotesquerie – we can certainly hear the former in the sequence ‘Lake Lyrics’ (p. 60) where a garish sunrise – ‘rise / on earth Sun / the unlidded One fashion / a dream of eyes’ presents an alarming anthropomorphic image. The poem goes on to suggest a raw biological force – ‘Life a bud of blind passion / Soul the spasm flower’ – that hints at an alienated stance removed from mere nature painting and an acceptance of a starker view of creative or destructive elements.
The next poem in the sequence uses repetition not so much to create the febrile intensity of August Stramm but to bring an incantatory voice to bear on nature colours- ‘blow in God / white mist on silent feathers / flow in God / strata claws a tarn vassal.’ The abstract word-play of Stramm is apparent in the poem called simply ‘a’, (p. 39) which word forms the apex of a triangle that plunges from the heights beginning with Adam and ending with ‘zen-man’. Word-play and a Geoffrey Hill-like wrestle with a recalcitrant faith are charted through a knotty meditation ‘On the Demolition of a Church (p. 33). This complex yet verbally dazzling poem would need more space than is available here to unpack – images like ‘death-watch’ (the expected beetle is absent but implied), ‘shut this / Saint up’ with its suggestion of holy gagging, ‘the delicate soul-trowel of centuries’ – a line that seems to mourn a spiritual era that is built into the very fabric of the church, and ‘immovable grief’ which I take to be a hidden pun on moveable feast – all these show a subtle mastery that guarantees a poetic afterlife in the resonance of their implied meanings.
Elsewhere in the volume apparently more mundane matters are enlivened by virtuosity in the way characters, pictures, events are elided or are elusive – ‘Henry Howard’s Cloak’ (p. 85) shows these modes in the manner of a madcap diary where we find at ‘4 o’clock Monday. Dark detective / Nosing the shop-soiled / CO coats in car- / Parks’. The poet seems to pass laconic judgement on these and other activities – ‘This ink-slum. Write it off.’ Howlett may be obscure but he isn’t isolated in terms of the poets I’ve suggested here as forming an off-stage chorus to his arias. We get a sense of the metaphysical as found in Hill and Ted Hughes. There are even a couple of mischievous poems to the shade of Larkin – the second, ‘Hullabaloo on a Commemoration in Westminster Abbey’ (p. 103) invites the ‘Laureate of Hull’ to leave his grave and take the pulse of the nation. Howlett manages to tease the dead poet and tread lightly on his poems at the same time. To have two unknown poets finally published in the space of a couple of years makes a rich harvest. Both Howlett and Sequin have inexhaustible image-banks to draw on and they do so to startle, shock, and move in innovative ways that whilst challenging the reader invite re-readings rather than defeat. I urge that Howlett’s marvellous book be sought out at once and I hope we shall learn more of this poet’s life and work before too long.
David Hackbridge Johnson began composing at the age of 11 and has written works in all genres. His works have been widely performed. and include 15 symphonies, 4 of which have been recorded on Toccata Classics. He is also a poet.
*****
Mouth of Shadows by Tim Murphy. £10.99. SurVision Books. ISBN 978-1-912963-29-4 reviewed by Mike Ferguson
At the time of my typing this, there has been some mildly obnoxious criticism of erasure poetry posted on Twitter by a writer claiming it is ‘pure philistinism’. Likely a stance just to prompt a response – the ‘Fight me’ was a signal – it drew a calm if confronting blood: the reddened face of counterarguments cogently and, by and large, politely posited.
I mention as there are cut-ups (found writing) in this first full-length collection from Tim Murphy that would no doubt fall under that tweet’s dismissal of creative worth and value. The point is Murphy’s found poetry is a perfect example of how re-working/using source material is such a rich platform for creativity. And more than this – it honours the ‘original’ writing. This struck me particularly when I initially read the poem ‘Barricades of Pain’ and then the prose poem ‘Tinkling Wound’.
There are excellent Notes at the back of this book, but I didn’t look at these on a first perusal. Reading ‘Barricades of Pain’, it seemed unlikely Murphy experienced the drama of its narrative, and this was confirmed by many telling references throughout the poem. In that respect, the action/angst expressed was for me entirely via the imagination, though perhaps linked to actual feelings. Reading later that it was a cut-up of two poems by Oscar Wilde was reassuring (considering the intensity of emotion) as well as informative, but never detail as a worrying sense of appropriation. Those better-read than me might well pick up on references like ‘Genoa’, yet that is another engaging possibility from working with a source steeped in its own contexts.
With ‘Tinkling Wound’, I was immediately struck by its Heaney-esque infusions. The echoes were steeped in an influence, both of style and time (an alternative to what is coming…), and again I was reassured to read in the Notes, references to the two Heaney poems Blackberry-Picking and The Grauballe Man which were used. That these span quite a gap/change of a difference in time and style for Heaney as a writer is a part of the creative cut-up significance that exudes a fulsome sense of Heaney. Here is just one great line:
‘A fermented purse makes a sign of lust, the twisted tongue flesh perfected.’
There are other cut-ups whose source material are unknown to me, like Hidden Bow, found in an English translation of ‘El silencio’ by Vincente Aleixandre. Here are the opening lines:
‘While I rise from the chest of uncertainty
that teases my eyes,
I am as quiet as a naked arm.’
and I quote because the surreal description/evocation is mirrored in much of Murphy’s other writing where cut-up isn’t a feature, and this can be seen as a familiar stylistic approach of all his work.
This is revealed in the book’s opening poem Instrumental which I present in full:
‘Sunday again.
A sombre sculpture moves
through a highway underpass.
An empty studio is fractured
by a pious sunbeam.
A transit landscape shifts itself
to reveal a new absence,
a new marginalization.
The city prints
another symbolic engine.
Sunday again!’
I would have preferred an omission of the last exclaimed, repeated line, but that dreamy evocation of place is effective and enhanced, perhaps provocatively, by the image ‘a pious sunbeam’.
There are similar staccato visuals in the opening lines of the poem ‘Burning Luggage’ which have the impact of a list poem though moving through varied captures of intriguing detail:
‘Summer flicks her hair
like a switch on the back
of an evil flower.
The carousel speaks in a language
of basslines and falling rocks.
An onscreen car crash collides
with real roadkill.’
Other descriptions come from poetic amalgamations, for example this from ‘Backing Vocal’:
‘He was your common or garden convent wizard,
always in a patchouli-coloured dance coat.’
and the amalgam within the poem is the inclusion of lyrics from Roger Miller’s classic 60s’ song King of the Road which has travelled well to arrive here!
There are other unexpected journeys to be found in the inevitability of surrealist writing, for example this from the cut-up ‘Apple Graves’, beginning:
‘There is no cure for craving
the open mouths of dying canyons.’
that moves on to:
‘Landscapes full of graves
yield tiny apples
because of a silence
that has no roots.’
This is the enjoyable flavour of the surprising in reading these poems – lines/expressions that slant and taunt, delighting in being sustained as nuance or the unusual, as in this final example from (as it happens, another cut-up but not confined to these) ‘The Here and Now’:
‘You kicked curiosity
into touch,
calculating a response
and dividing it
by an archway of lesser decisions.’
A final observation – and returning to that opening twitter-tattle about erasure (and therefore any notional ‘experimental’ poetry) – it is clear how Murphy’s vision/visuals throughout are derived from a skilful and practised talent, evident in the fine writing here but especially in the cut-ups where the writer is creating all the time, using ‘source material’ as further observations for shaping and revealing.
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The High Window 
Reblogged this on The Wombwell Rainbow.
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