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Rainer Maria Rilke: New Poems, translated by John Greening • Polly Clark: Afterlife -New and Selected Poems • Paul Eric Howlett: Random Self and Other Poems • Oliver Dixon: Incompletion • Pam Thompson: Sub/Urban Legends
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New Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by John Greening. £21.99. Baylor Press. ISBN: 9781481323543. Reviewed by Oliver Dixon
More wilfully elusive than any other great writer, Rilke comes down to us in several versions, often at odds with each other. A succession of Yeatsian masks, sometimes slipping to reveal a naïve, child-like gaze. There is the Symbolist poet, the dandified aesthete strolling the streets of Prague in “a broad-brimmed black hat, clasping a long-stemmed iris and smiling…into ineffable horizons”. There is the self-humbling, Tolstoyan ascetic, travelling across Russia and staying at the rural artists’ colony Worpswede, where he extolled the health benefits of Quaker Oats. There is the introspective spiritual guru of Letters to a Young Poet, a facile guise American readers in particular have been keen to embrace. Then there is the dauntingly elevated, visionary über-poet so attuned to his instrument that the dazzling lyricism of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus pours out as though (he felt) the god was singing through him.
Like Keats’ “chameleon poet” who has “no identity”, Rilke seemed not only to hive off different selves and the world-views they encompassed with each book, each project also involved a new poetic, a fresh engagement with language and form that signalled a step-change in artistic vision and ambition. Invariably this also involved a shift in location, one more rented room or (as he grew older and more famous) borrowed chateau or castle in a life-long restless periplus, in part a reaction against a stifling familial heritage of Catholic middle classness, wishfully reconstructed as aristocratic by Rilke. One thinks of Roland Barthes’ definition of l’ecrivain: “one for whom the why of the world is always embodied in the question how to write”.
There are several connotations of the title Neue Gedichte (New Poems): a collection of recently-written poems, firstly, but also this sense of a new poetic approach for Rilke and a proto-modernist “making it new” years before Pound had published anything noteworthy. This substantial, two-volume work stands at the midpoint of Rilke’s writing career, both chronologically and stylistically, with one foot in the 19th century and one in the 20th. However, apart from a few star turns such as ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ and ‘The Panther’, it’s far less known than the later, more showy masterpieces (or even Letters to a Young Poet) and has been far less translated, particularly in the UK. John Greening, taking up the challenge of rendering all 172 poems into contemporary English, is in agreement with Michael Hofmann that Neue Gedichte contains Rilke’s greatest poetry and read as a whole represents what Hofmann calls “one of the most beautiful poetic sequences ever made”. The fact that Greening (an accomplished poet as well as a translator) opts to follow Rilke’s use of rhyme and metre – a significant aspect of the poems’ formal energy – makes his achievement all the more praise-worthy, considering many other Rilke translators have preferred to adopt looser, unrhymed verse-forms.
If we accept that a translation involves an “interpretive project” (as Don Paterson suggests in the notes to his Rilke versions, Orpheus), Greening has made a reading that shifts effectively away from the high-flown, aureate Rilke of the later work (whose complex German sometimes founders into clunky neo-Romantic rhetoric in English) to present a more grounded, observant, craftsmanly poet, acutely alert to sensory dynamics and the natural world. Most importantly, Greening’s translations read like arresting English poems in their own right, fluent and assured, with a subtle command of Rilke’s rhyming stanzas across a range of different forms, lengths and rhythms which never feels artificial or forced.
Here’s an example, from the opening to the sonnet ‘Blue Hydrangea’:
How like the last green in a set of paints
these leaves so dried out, rough and dreary
behind their petal stalks which seem to carry
a blue not theirs but mirrored from a distance.
(p.54)
The syntactic movement across the quatrain is supple enough for the rhymes to hardly impose themselves on our reading, although we know they’re there – the fact that they’re not quite full rhymes aids this effect. The trochaic cadence which Greening mentions in his introduction as being more characteristic of German verse is appropriate to the rueful tone of the passage, even with a very faint Shakespearean echo “How like the winter…”. There is also a spondaic thud repeated through the lines which slows down and complicates the rhythm, adding to the doleful tone: “last green”, “these leaves”, “dried out”, “not theirs”.
And if we turn to the original text of the same stanza, it’s clear to see (even if you don’t understand German) how well Greening has managed to reproduce the flow of Rilke’s syntax, rhythm and abba rhyme-scheme, attaining that balance between faithfulness to the original poem and natural readability in the target language which is one of the hallmarks of good translation:
So wie das letzte Grün in Farbentiegeln
sind diese Blätter, trocken, stumpf und rauh,
hinter den Blütendolden, die ein Blau
nicht auf sich tragen, nur von ferne spiegeln.
The received narrative around Neue Gedichte is that they emerged out of Rilke’s time in Paris during 1902-8 and his important association with Rodin, briefly working as the sculptor’s secretary and absorbing the lessons of “toujours travailler”; of close, objective study, both of paintings (the landscapes of Cezanne were key) and of places, buildings, animals. Much is often made of Rilke’s move towards “Dinggedichte” or thing-poems, a concretisation of the perception of outward, physical phenomena, a conscious reaction against his earlier, Symbolist “lyric of mood”, where subjective responses shaped plaintive, often beautifully-written short poems, full of wanderlust and longing – whether for an absent God or a lost beloved is often blurred. Hofmann reminds us that “Dinggedichte” can also denote the idea of the poem as a thing, as a well-made, solid artefact in itself, more like a sculpture, perhaps, than a piece of music.
However, if we read the two-volume Neue Gedichte in what Greening calls its “difficult entirety” we realise that “thing-poems” are not as dominant as we might have supposed. In fact there’s a considerable diversity of subjects and themes, arranged in a careful order that traces connections and oppositions not only between poem-cycles but also between the two books of the collection, which at one point Rilke wanted to name The Blue Hydrangea and The Pink Hydrangea, suggesting their off-setting complementarity. In reality, single-subject “thing-poems” are out-numbered by poems centred on human situations, difficult encounters, fraught moments of transition or transformation. Many of these tableaux derive from previous sources such as Classical literature and mythology but the major surprise for this reviewer in reading the whole New Poems was just how many Biblical references and scenes they contain, which are (as Greening acknowledges in his introduction) “seemingly endless”.
For a Nietzschean poet who elsewhere ascribes to himself an “almost rabid anti-Christianity”, this obsessive return to the Bible seems to speak of Rilke attempting to come to terms with the religious inheritance of his youth, previously so strongly rejected, reinterpreting these narratives as emotionally-charged human dramas rather than merely allegorical, homiletic materials. In this way, he is able to wrest the stories from their Christian contexts and – as he does in his “thing-poems” – see beyond the surface action to their inner dynamics, often linking it to familiar Rilkean themes (personal renewal, art and poetry, broken relationships, journeys). For example, in ‘The Prodigal Son Departs’, the mode of second-person address sounds almost like the poet questioning himself (“To run away? What for?”) about his own non-committal wandering. This recontextualising of Christian iconography is an important step towards the angels of the Duino Elegies, which seem a rechannelling of spiritual energies artfully disconnected from their Christian origin but which answer a reaching towards the numinous and sacred, always a strong component of Rilke’s poetic inspiration despite his avowed atheism.
Greening’s New Poems is a beautifully-presented, compellingly readable collection, restoring to us a Rilke who is approachable and readily understandable in English translation (not that he is ever simplistic), as well as introducing us to a whole new side to this beguiling poet by giving us the complete, multi-faceted sequence as it was intended to be read. Greening even attempts to contemporise Rilke slightly by adding in a few playful anachronisms – “apps” works within its context although “pecs” and “smoochily” sound to my ears a little less felicitous. One final gripe: a dual-text edition with the German poems would have been helpful, although I appreciate this would have left us with a rather hefty tome.
Oliver Dixon‘s first book of poems, Human Form, was published by Penned in the Margins in 2013. His philosophy guide, Who the Hell is Friedrich Netzsche? (Bowden & Brazil) was published in 2019 and a second collection of poems, Incompletion, was published by Vole Books in 2025. Other poems and reviews have appeared in The Sunday Times, PN Review, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Tears in the Fence, The Interpreter’s House, World Literature Today and New Welsh Review.
Afterlife -New and Selected Poems by Polly Clark. £14.99. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 978178037 3720. Reviewed by Kathleen McPhilemy
I was pleased that Polly Clark had chosen to put her most recent poems at the front of this collection, thus allowing the reader to see where she is now, before exploring her back catalogue. Some of the themes are what we might expect from a contemporary woman writer: love, marriage, men, motherhood and identity in the face of all of these. The matter might be predictable but the poet’s take on them is not. Many of these poems go off in directions which for me were initially baffling, although I have seen described elsewhere as ‘mysterious’. Several factors helped me to a more successful reading: the first was a You Tube recording of the poet where she mentioned that she had at one time been a zookeeper. This gave me more trust in the animal poems, as I recognised that metaphor was founded on actual experience. ‘Pelican’, for example, whatever subtext it may have, is first an accurate observation of a pelican in St James Park: ‘oh my love’s great beak / bends my neck upon my back’. The anthropomorphism in the exultant ‘Oh’ and in the last lines ‘slap! slap! Go my love’s pink feet, / right up to you, the one I’ve chosen’ may indicate human empathy or identification while the opening, ‘My love for you / gulps’ indicates that this is actually a love poem even though the pelican remains a pelican all the way through. Similarly, in ‘Tiger, Tiger’, the final poem in Afterlife, and ‘Zoo’, an earlier poem from her collection Kiss, the zoo and the animals are real though the distinctions between animal and human blur.
My discovery of the poet’s excellent novel, Larchfield, also helped me into the poems. Of course, it would be wrong to read the novel as autobiography, even though it is set in Helensburgh where Clark has herself spent a lot of time, and even though one of the protagonists is researching WH Auden, the other protagonist, just as Clark had to research him for the novel. More significant than these overlaps in story are the overlaps in imagery; for example, the representation of the boat journey in ‘Crossing’, clearly an afterlife poem with allusions to the Styx and Charon, is also reminiscent of the hallucinatory ferry journey that the novel’s protagonist, Dora, is about to embark on with Auden at the end of Larchfield. Helpful though Larchfield was, I also recognised that it was wrong to regard the poems as autobiographical, despite the occurrence of the poet’s married name in two poems, or at least mistaken to search for some sort of autobiographical line to interpret the poetry. The poetic persona is not always the author and the material is not always drawn from the author’s life, although, or at least not directly. One poem features Elvis the octopus who dies when he can no longer have an audience:
always ends like this –
fabulous in an empty room,
unravelled by the tender men in white,
laid out softly in the morning.
Another imagines being beheaded: ‘Fingers grab my hair / and I soar above my sad / old body, slumped and tiny.’ Clearly, neither poem is directly autobiographical, although the poet is certainly invested in both. Elsewhere, the poet takes on a male persona, sometimes that of a husband. ‘Dear Virginia Ironside’, or ‘Dumbarton’. The latter poem, in the voice of a husband faces ‘My Husband’, in the voice of a wife. The first poem ends when the wife says
I keep the phone close
in case he should decide
to come and save his wife.
The second poem seems to show the husband desperately trying to meet the wife’s demands, perhaps giving up on her:
I rang her. I hated my voice.
I’m so tired, darling, tired. Forgive me.
Another factor to bear in mind is that not all these poems are equally serious or multi-layered. Clark can be funny; she can be funny and serious. ‘Drain’ can be read quite straightforwardly as what happens when the plumber comes to unblock a drain. It is novelistic in its characterisation of the plumber, ‘a cowboy’ and the middleclass homeowner who is at his mercy. ‘We welcome him with tea and Marigolds / but he shakes his head. My uncle said all gloves / are for poofters.’ Some poems are much more public. ‘Her Kind’ is an odd anti-Thatcher poem which takes on the voice of the disaffected, while ‘I thought it was in Scotland – A Falklands War Story seems like a piece for radio, written in the voice of a very young, very raw paratrooper. The inclusion of these poems shows the range and heterogeneity of Clark’s work.
Nevertheless, this work is predominantly subjective, expressions of the poet’s own experience shaped into poetry. After the first section of more recent poems, the ordering is chronological, and it is possible to trace a biographical path through the different sections, although there is much revisiting and overlap. Afterlife is a strangely valedictory title for a poet who is presumably mid-career and a sense of death in waiting infuses the serenity or even settling of accounts in these recent poems. I suppose afterlife regarded positively could refer to the way the writer’s work lives on after them, but the poem ‘Heaven’, makes it clear that the possibility of a life in heaven after this one is a fiction: ‘My child’s happiness will not be sacrificed / to the rational ideology of dust. In short – / we have brought it back. We talk into the night / you and I, planning the detail of the place / we’ll all go to be together.’
Clark’s poetry is often puzzling because so often she seems to juggle the need to communicate truths about lived experience with the desire to create the made thing, the work which is separate from the person and does not descend into the titillations of autobiography. One extraordinary poem in the first section is ‘Birdsong’. Even the title carries connotations of escaping into freedom and joy, inherited from Siegfried Sassoon and Sebastian Faulks. The poem opens with a description of physical hunger, so often a metaphor in feminist writing: ‘If I chomped and chomped would I get back / to a unified something that was me’. The idea of division mutates into the splitting of the atom, which in turn becomes the division between word and meaning:
We wiped meaning, like an insult from our lips.
Words were kind, meaning was treason.
I was afraid to describe my hunger.
I hoarded meanings like tins under the stairs,
licking and nibbling them when I was alone.
I longed to share them with someone,
but Protect and Survive said no.
It is possible to read this as a critique of poetry which abjures communication to focus on language; on the other hand, it may be an account of a familiar struggle to reach wholeness and independence from parental influence. The fifties/sixties nuclear shadow shifts into a description of a Plathian father figure, ‘He followed me / all my life, even when he was dead,’ … ‘until he’d eaten me up’. The final lines describe the achievement of poetry, but so ambivalently that we are unable to rejoice:
To thrive, I grew stiff, a Russian doll.
The tiniest one inside was so hungry
you could hear her crying to be free.
I opened my mouth and out flew birdsong,
meaningless , inedible, lovely.
Polly Clark’s poems are often lovely, not meaningless, not inedible but difficult to absorb in their pursuit and evasion of meaning.
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 https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kathleen-mcphilemy.
Everything You Always Wanted To Know by Mark Granier. £11. Salmon Poetry. ISBN: 9781915022813. Reviewed by Ross Thompson
In this often startling, deeply rewarding collection, experienced poet Mark Granier writes with his trademark humour and humanity about the little miracles of everyday life. These qualities are evident from one of the opening poems, ‘Anyway,’, which observes:
we are, impossibly in our sixties,
putting on our new
old-men clothes with only
marginally more difficulty;
Immediately, the reader feels at ease with the speaker. Granier has a knack for not only encapsulating those experiences to which anyone with a soul can relate but also relaying them with poetic precision. There is no obfuscation or arch tomfoolery here; poetry, as we all know, is at its very best when it is crystal clear in its communication. Yes, it should render old things new through deftly-selected metaphors and honed language but it should also still possess a beating heart, and an essential aspect of the human condition should be the act, intentional or otherwise, of noticing things. Take, for example, Granier’s lovely observations in ‘Listening To Bray’, which hones in exclusively on aural imagery:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe faint burr
of passing voices, racket of sparrows
in the moss-choked gutter, overstored
by a heavy engine
It takes confidence and courage to choose to focus on images so singular, in all senses of the word, the kind of things that some would overlook simply because they were not looking hard enough – or in this case listening hard enough. Granier’s poetry is affecting in part because of its languid pace: the willingness to slow down and savour the minutiae of the world around us such as the almost comical description of the “racket of sparrows”, a phrase amplified by its internal assonance. Sound, or the conscious act of listening, is one of several touchstones for this collection. In the almost sonnet ‘Sirens’, whose title can of course be read in multiple ways, Granier notes:
At intervals, in our edgy little town,
that shrill note rises and falls
and our collie answers it. He stands
in the back yard, lifts his wolfy muzzle
and adds something desolate and beautiful –
a lament, a full-throated dirge –
There are several remarkable elements in this series of couplets. Firstly, the clarity of the mise en scène, arguably shaped by the writer’s twin career as a photographer – and a celebrated one for that matter – is so vividly captured with so few words. It takes considerable skill and judgement to convey a visual snapshot so seemingly effortlessly. Secondly, the words themselves. The adjective “edgy” in the opening line is suggestive both of danger and of being on the “edge” of things, a remote dwelling somewhere on the hem of the fabric of civilisation. It channels the well-worn idea of the poet, like Wordsworth or Kerouac, being one step removed from the normals around him. Also, the juxtaposition of “desolate and beautiful” is fantastic and fascinating (how could the dog’s howl be both at once?) Yet it also prefigures the appearance of the “blue halo flashing” in the poem’s denouement, the subtle suggestion that an unfortunate event has befallen someone in this “little town”, and howling of a different kind is sure to follow.
Granier is exceptionally gifted at employing accounts of the quotidian to provoke mediations that linger with you after finishing the poem. In ‘Westport, Late August’, a burst of innocuous small talk nudges both the writer and the reader towards a consideration of something more profound:
xxxxxxxxxxxxx You mention
the swallows you’ve seen, late
in October – ‘They must lie
in some archway near here… and then
one day you notice they’re gone’ –
Even the most trivial conversations can lead to a discourse on vulnerability and mortality, and this one seems to be no exception: a coffee date is interrupted by a funeral, and the tone and the timbre of the talk changes entirely. Similarly, the collection’s titular poem, with its hilarious opening line “At fifteen, I found Burt Reynolds in my mother’s bed”, moves gracefully from a recollection relatable to anybody who spent their teenage years searching their family home for secrets to a wider consideration of how our parents once had personal lives that were not governed by those of their children. Elsewhere, in ‘Post Op’, another visually rich piece captured with a photographer’s keen eye, an ectomy of an unspecified nature (“a small / enigmatic part removed”) is conflated with war, house prices in Dublin and a blissfully unaware stranger playing golf. Life comprises multitudes, all different timelines running in parallel at the same time, and this poem captures how jarring it can be if one takes the time to pause and consider their confluence. The villanelle ‘Crown Shyness’, another standout, depicts the phenomenon of how the tops of trees growing close together do not touch each other, creating light-leaking synaptic patterns in the canopies of forests and woods:
xxxxxxxxxx Ends of branches don’t abrade
each other, but leave ripples in their shade
as if they’ve grown wary of that war
that moves inside the pattern that they’ve made.
The poem calls for the need to, in the words of that great philosopher Ferris Bueller, stop and look around once in a while, to look up and take in the majesty of “a bright cascade” such as this one.
One final thing to note about this collection is the shapeshifting nature of the poems themselves. Granier is comfortable with rhyme and rhythm but he is not continuously shackled by it. He plays with tercets and quatrains, and he prunes lines to one or two in length while allowing others to extend conversationally, creating unpredictable forms such as the closing ‘Road’, a denouement that borders on Beat poetry in which further intuitively selected images such as “rain’s metronome”, “the poured tar of night” and the derelict farmhouse” are layered on top of one another to powerful effect. The anaphoric “as” at the beginning of each successive line becomes a mantra, a hypnotic paean that again pays tribute to the aforementioned little miracles of everyday life.
Ross Thompson is a writer from Bangor, Northern Ireland. His debut poetry collection Threading The Light is published by Dedalus Press. His work has appeared on television, radio, short films and in a wide range of publications. Most recently, he wrote and curated A Silent War, a collaborative audio response to the COVID-19 pandemic. His most recent collection is Threading the Light (2019. Dedalus Press.)
*****
Random Self and Other Poems by Paul Eric Howlett. £12. Waterloo Press. ISBN: 9781915241221. Reviewed by Tom Phillips
With the title of his first collection, published by Waterloo Press in 2022, Paul Eric Howlett proclaimed himself to be A Bedfordshire Boy – a child, that is, of an oft-overlooked county hovering between the Home Counties, the Midlands and East Anglia. Thanks to motorways and rail links, much of it falls within the northern arc of London’s commuter belt and has consequently undergone almost continual development since the end of the Second World War, the sprawling expanse of Luton being a prime example of that. At the same time, however, it retains much of what passes for ‘quintessential’ rural southern England (albeit without the picturesque tourist-magnet clichés of the Cotswolds): Saxon or Norman church towers, village greens, modestly winding middle-course rivers, Elizabethan manor houses, chalk downs, heathland. I can attest to Howlett’s attentive observations of these human and natural terrains, having been born into this same primal landscape myself, albeit on the Buckinghamshire side of the border just south of Leighton Buzzard.
Howlett’s poetry remains very much rooted in this liminal hinterland. After an autobiographical and self-admonitory ‘Prologue’ in ironic Poundian quatrains (‘Poetry? A habit at 17/Like masturbation and passion’), his third volume, Random Self – much like A Bedfordshire Boy and 2023’s Onebody – opens with poems occasioned by a church in the Bedfordshire village of Eaton Bray, the River Lovat (or Ouzel as it’s more commonly called) which flows along the border between Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire, and Manshead, one of the Bedfordshire ‘hundreds’ that includes Leighton Buzzard and Dunstable and within whose ancient bounds Howlett has lived for much of his life.
These poems, however, eschew conventional lyrical responses to the landscape. Even in the railway station ‘epiphanies’ of ‘Platforms’, we are a long way from Edward Thomas’ Adlestrop, and while ‘Ploughing’ has a touch of the claggy loam and firmly earthed language of Heaney’s Northern Ireland or Hughes’ Yorkshire about it, Howlett’s poetry ploughs a ‘history field’ that is very much his own.
Reading further into the collection, it becomes increasingly apparent that Howlett belongs to that strand of British poetry which was once patronisingly described as ‘provincial’ by self-styled metropolitan tastemakers, but has often drawn its influences from outside mainstream British traditions and is not afraid to pursue its own routes through the essential problem of writing in a ‘salt/And spleen world’ where ‘latencies outpace/Our tethering’ and we must all ‘prepare for mute/Disappearance’ (‘Prologue’). Howlett’s poetry, in other words, shares characteristics with the work of those, like Basil Bunting, Geoffrey Hill, Roy Fisher, R.F. Langley and J.H. Prynne, who fret at the limits of established conventions, determinedly question surface assumptions and set out to explore the full range of possibilities offered by language’s resources.
To suggest that Howlett belongs in this essentially late modernist lineage, of course, also suggests that his work is ‘difficult’. And, yes, it is. But that’s only true if you consider reading poetry to be a passive or receptive activity – that it merely requires allowing a poem to speak to you – rather than one in which the reader engages in a process of fathoming ambiguities and ambivalences disrupting the surface tension of everyday communication strategies. And, of course, some ‘difficult’ poetry does stray into unrewarding incomprehensibility or appears to equate a radical approach with randomly scattering letters and punctuation across the page. Howlett’s ventures into so-say ‘difficulty’, however, are not of this kind. At times, perhaps, it’s as if the language gets the better of him – in lines such as ‘Railway cross padlock/Fallacy coat flack’ in ‘Pentecostal poetry’, for example – but such occasions are rare. His is a poetry of rigorously inventive precision.
In the short poem ‘Hybrid’ (quoted here in full), Howlett perhaps comes closest to outlining a tentative aesthetic:
Poems shift where words drift
From pulse’s brim from mind
Buds unclosed temper
Gambit blind
Poem bloom in love’s tomb
Sound temperate mind flows
Echo dies a brain-
Hybrid rose
You could analyse the possible meanings of these eight lines until the cows come home, but which one or other of them is ‘correct’ is not the point. Besides which, this is a review rather than literary analysis, and I suspect that what, to some, will seem rebarbative has much to offer to others by way of its invitation into the drift and flow of both language and thought process.
Further into the book, Howlett eases his grip on the complex minutiae of language and its curious dependencies. There are poems about the heart attack which brought him close to death – the section titled ‘Random Self’ – and others which skewer our current political sickness with sharp-bladed images of ‘Officials with increment/Pension and slow paper/[who] Slice England quietly’ and of ‘England in the city-centre/blood along its fur’.
Surprises, too, await. There are jokes – ‘take your places, please/for the Pilgrim conga’, Howlett deadpans in a poem relating to a white American obsession with hereditary status (a poem which rings with the irony of Ed Dorn’s later satires) – and a wholly unexpected monologue in the voice/style of George Herbert in which Howlett admits himself to be ‘Part blind with Adam’s clay, one moment in/The story of belief, but suffer me/A servant of your infinite parish,/To know what truth your powers protect and time/Cannot put down’.
In that much over-used phrase, Random Self is a book you’ll want to come back to, not only if you’re interested in what poetry might do, but also if you’re open to writing that takes a unique angle on the world. It hums and sings, dumbfounds and challenges. It is both brilliant – in the ‘glittering’ sense – and unnerving, precisely the sort of writing we might want more of, given how it deftly slips beyond the popular current to embrace our moments of common obscurity and encompass artistic complexity.
Tom Phillips is a UK-born writer, translator and lecturer living in Bulgaria where he teaches creative writing and translation at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski. His recent and imminent publications include Self-Portrait with Tobacco Moustache (DA Poeziya, Sofia, 2026), A Moment Short of Perfection – translations of the selected poems of Kristin Dimitrova (White Pine Press, USA, 2026) and Once There Was Spring – the translated poems and prose poems of Geo Milev (Worple Press, UK, 2025). His own poems have also been published in Nepozhati Prevodi/Unknown Translations (Scalino, Sofia, 2016), Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012) and Burning Omaha (Firewater, 2003).
Incompletion by Oliver Dixon. £10.99. Vole Books. ISBN: 9781917101097. Reviewed by J.S. Watts
Incompletion by Oliver Dixon is a 2025 publication from Vole Books. To quote from its back cover blurb, it is: ‘A vivid foray through the fractured and incomplete things of our society’. The background theme to all three sections of this poetry collection, Dixon’s second, is most definitely the damaged and the unresolved, whether relating to people, relationships and the personal, broader social, national and international settings, or literature itself.
This is poetry that is especially conscious of the power and the weakness of the written word and the work of writers who have gone before. Sometimes it is implied. Sometimes it is clearly stated, as in the linguistically playful but ultimately bleak quasi-villanelle A Villa in Hell, where the first key verse states:
Soon as you write it down the thing is gone,
a trap sprung as the kingfisher takes wing.
The words decay, the words decay and strain.
Elsewhere, poems begin with quotations from Lorca, Patricia Highsmith, Ali Smith and Rimbaud, to name a few, or reference Dante and Brian Eno. This is intellectual and erudite poetry that knows it literary roots.
The Eno reference relates to the poem The Devil’s Interval:
I collaged my monitor
with multicolour Post-Its
like a purblind Matisse
assembling his Snail, each
with a random memo biro’d across it
- REPETITION IS A FORM
OF CHANGE. The droning fan
trawling through its rota
sent a simoom over the notelets,
The section in capitals (the poet’s styling, not mine) is the Brian Eno quotation (with apologies if you already knew that).
Compared to many other poems in the collection, The Devil’s Interval is light on words and moderately heavy on white space. Most poems struck me as word heavy and linguistically intense, despite Dixon’s use of white space and a knowledgeable variety of poetic forms. Incompletion is not a quick or a light read. It is poetry that benefits from multiple slow readings.
Whilst it could be called intellectual poetry, it is also poetry that is grounded in the day to day. One example of this is the opening poem, Fallout, which explores in domestic detail the: ‘Morning after the row’:
blocking the drain,
his last plunge re-enacted, my Complete Hart Crane
has bloated, wavy; come unstuck,
with fractured spines,
Mina Loy and Kierkegaard lie splayed
beside the bins.
Even in the day to day detritus of domestic rage, literature and high culture are present.
From the soggy, bedraggled remains of Fallout, via repeated visits to bookshops in Slow Fire and The Metre, the reference to a ‘bookless library’ in Once in a Lifetime and multiple allusions to other writers, books feature significantly in this collection, even if the words they contain ‘decay and strain’. It is probably worth highlighting, with thanks to the notes at the back of the book, that Slow Fire: ‘is a term…to describe paper embrittlement resulting from acid decay’. Even published words have a finite lifespan and are therefore existentially incomplete.
It is not just books that appear to fascinate Dixon. Words and sounds unframed by the page also appear significant. In Echolalia, a poem that begins with a quotation from James Joyce, it is the sound of words and the sound of sounds that come to mean nothing and everything:
His tongue, nightly strained
with probing
her openings,
tore subtly
at its root
until words
were a strange
minor pain
to articulate,
In the second half of this two-sectioned poem, a phrase repeated over and over again: ‘until the words/ abrade’ becomes: ‘pure/sound’, while the meaningless babbling of a toddler begins: ‘to sound/ like words’. The sounds of words are presented as both complete and incomplete in themselves.
Back in the second-hand bookshop of The Metre, it is the sound of: ‘a slow bluesy version/ of ‘All of Me’ ‘ played on a crackly record that brings back memories of busking in Paris and:
what seemed the preparation for something
was (I suddenly saw then) the thing itself,
If the incomplete was actually complete, where does that leave what follows? In this case, most certainly incomplete because the speaker remembers that his time on the parking metre ‘was nearly up’ and leaves. In these poems, the small precise details of the mundane and domestic are never far away from the erudite.
By the time the collection has reached its second section, it’s not just the sound of Languages Never Learnt, but also the symbols that represent them, that assume significance:
Squiggles in a crumpled jotter, paraphs and umlauts
like testings of a pen. This wobbly
algebra, I slowly grow
to realise,
is crude stabs at Arabic,
and that come to represent an incompletely learned language or languages, as well as uncompleted or historically fractured personal relationships.
A poetry collection that focuses on the damaged, dislocated and incomplete is bound to feel a little downbeat, but Dixon also looks for brief moments of redemption, wherever they might be found. I am sure it is not by accident that the final poem in the book, Morpheus Unbound, has the sleeper and sometime insomniac falling asleep and waking up to disjointed sounds: ‘like a bassline left/ rumbling, nonsense-/ travelogues full of old sibyls’, but ends positively on a note of new beginning:
I want to tell of bodies
taking other forms, how we live half-in
half-out of dreams, the broken circle
uprising once again, the ceaseless rhythm
stirring and murmuring
and stuttering, the rumbling bassline, rain at the window, birdsong,
the tiny life inside you
about
to begin
It would seem that even within the midst of a life that is full of incompletions, there is hope and fresh starts.
J.S. Watts is a poet and novelist. Her poetry, short stories and non-fiction appear in diverse publications in Britain and abroad and have been broadcast on BBC and independent radio. Her published books include: Cats and Other Myths, Songs of Steelyard Sue, Years Ago You Coloured Me, The Submerged Sea, Underword (poetry) and A Darker Moon, Witchlight, Old Light and Elderlight (novels). For more information, see her website https://www.jswatts.co.uk/
*****
Sub/Urban Legends by Pam Thompson. £5. Paper Swans Press. ISBN 9781916052956. Reviewed by Emma Lee
In Sub/urban Legends Pam Thompson brings a stylistic flair to compassionate poems that look at parenthood and altering relationships as adult children leave home, e.g. ‘The Museum of Water’ ends:
paired with water, my hands
are wet, dipping into water,
I can’t work out how it’s done,
clipped silver water, drilled
molecules, water is singing
in green gold, water from
spattering showers, her son’s
breaths and sighs, containers
of voices, tipped and spilt.
There’s a sensual connection; the poem’s speaker is taking an active part in this exhibit. The water the speaker touches reminds her showers, perhaps bathing the son whose breathing is brought to mind. ‘Tipped and split’ suggests children now leaving the original home they grew up in. Parenthood as an everyday miracle, yet unique to each family.
“The Glass Strawberry” looks at gifts. A boyfriend sends his lover three cacti which reminds the speaker of the cacti her daughter sent as a Christmas gift which makes her think of self-care packages and someone who calls “endorphins”, “dolphins”:
My friend sent me a glass strawberry that’s cool
and slightly spiky. I like to hold it but the glass heart
with severed arteries stays in its red satin box.
We have both been in the desert for ages
but our cacti have pink flowers, are taller than us
and hold out their arms. And the dolphins leap and leap.
The glass strawberry doesn’t feel like a treat, like the cacti, it’s something looked at rather than handled. It stays disconnected from touch, severed arteries cannot feed blood to or from the heart-shaped ornament which remains boxed. Although the friends have not been in touch, the cacti are still blooming and still capable of boosting endorphins. Like thinking about getting in touch with someone close can be as good as picking up the phone and speaking to them.
In ‘Self-Portrait as Fulang Chang’, after Frida Kahlo’s painting with her pet monkey named Fulang Chang and referencing the Frida Kahlo Museum, the Blue House:
I am the brush passer, ear
for her secrets, but I am all chat,
you know, teller of her tales
though she isn’t one to keep schtum.
The bloody hearts we paint
will drip onto the Blue House floor.
The monkey becomes guardian and keeper of her secrets. The monkey chatters, but no one can understand what’s being said. Speaking is pointless if you’re not being heard. The monkey sees itself as a co-creator with Kahlo. Their stories merge in the museum. The suggestion of violence seems to underline that they will remain misunderstood.
More misunderstanding ensues in “Go/diva”, a play on Lady Godiva who famously rode through Coventry wearing nothing so her husband would cancel taxes for the poor. An act that suggests protector. Yet, as the speaker grows from childhood towards adulthood, she speaks to Godiva:
You must have been asleep when I held the baby rabbit,
poor charcoal smudge, on my palm, to show our ginger tom
who bit its neck and killed it. Occasional protector,
my lesson learnt, I dumped you when I went to uni.
A prey animal saw food, not a vulnerable kit who needed protection. Is Godiva a protector of the poor or a diva drawing attention to herself?
Sub/urban Legends is a deserved winner of the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2023. Thompson has created a poignant curation of sensual poems that appeal to visual and tactile senses as well as asking probing, cerebral questions that keep a reader engaged. Images and phrases linger long after the book is closed.
Emma Lee’s publications include The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020) and Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea, (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs at https://emmalee1.wordpress.com.
*****
The High Window 