Reviews and Features

Julia Bird Between Light Card Covers

PETER ARMSTRONG
Madame Noire
Shoestring £5

ELIZABETH BURNS
The Shortest Days
Galdragon £3.99

MIKE BARLOW
Amicable Numbers
Templar £4

RETTA BOWEN
The Ornamental World
Tall lighthouse £4

AMY KEY
Instead of Stars
Tall lighthouse £4

SIMON KIRWIN
Joe Mendoza is a Tout
Little silver trumpet £4.99

MICHAEL MURPHY
The Allotments
Shoestring £5

KATRINA NAOMI
Lunch at the Elephant & Castle
Templar £4

LIANE STRAUSS
Frankie, Alfredo,
Donut £5

The rules of poetry publishing relax between the light card covers of the pamphlet. Debut poets are very welcome here; established writers are licensed to experiment with poetic projects which might not suit more mainstream publishers, and typographers, designers and book artists are not tied to the format of the sixty-four page, perfect bound paperback. The nine pamphlets here are some of my favourites from a year when the pamphlet form itself was honoured with its own new award, the Michael Marks Prize, granted by the PBS and the British Library.

Regular Picador poet Peter Armstrong’s Madame Noire is one of those pamphlets created as a discrete poetic project. Its subtitle ‘(and other figures at the edge of an imagined war)’ together with the ambiguous nature of its afterword notes – ‘The fragmentary documentation remaining from production records has left critics divided on whether R is played by, or based on the Bogart-lookalike N’ – hints at the unsecured territories in which its poems operate. The poems’ subjects and objects are the characters R, H, The Uninformer, the Admirer and Madame Noire herself; they are cast in situations of war, counter-war and liberation. This book is no dam-busting war movie though, no straightforward narrative about Heroes of the Resistance. It deals rather in propaganda, rumours and uncertainties:

So, having still declined to speak
the subject was advised
(here details unavailable).

Elizabeth Burns’s The Shortest Days is the winner of the Michael Marks prize. Of a granddaughter’s handicrafted ‘collage of autumn’ in ‘Beautiful Mind’ Burns writes that the leaves glued to paper are ‘so exactly placed / the white space clear between them, [is] perfect as snow’. Throughout the collection, it’s the skilful control of this white space, the visual version of silence, which is particularly rewarding. There are just eleven poems set down in this slender hand-stitched pamphlet, two sequences of elegies. Michael Marks judge Ian McMillan praised the ‘completeness’ of Burns’s work, and there is truly nothing distracting or extraneous in the selection or in the poems themselves; they’re a series of reflections on grief and the stages it passes through. The noticing is methodical, almost forensic. Though their colours are ‘steel grey’, ‘light blue’, ‘pale mauve’, the emotional effect of the work is more powerful than these watercolour shades might suggest. Consider the quiet devastation in lines like ‘A shimmer of memory ... telling us ... that you would be waiting on the platform / of the station where this train no longer stops’. Readers, however, will want to stop to pay these poems the sustained attention they deserve.

The title poem of Mike Barlow’s Templar Competition winning pamphlet, Amicable Numbers uses a mathematical rule about paired numbers to explore the connection between a couple, Esther and Jack. Scant evidence of their relationship is discovered in a letter, tucked in a book, found in a second-hand bookshop twenty years ago; the layers of distance between the reader and the couple act like pass-the-parcel paper hiding a prize. Two is the dominant number here. Each poem examines a different plane of connection between two people: new lovers, ex-spouses, a father and son, the living and the dead. Barlow’s voice is clear and direct, the space between his lines easily read. This clarity provides the perfect minimalist setting for his stand-out images and fresh perspectives – a photo on fire with a ‘green-edged grin of flame’, ‘the song of a whale / speeded up ... turned into Bacharach hits’, the delicate relationship, not one frequently examined in literature, between a woman and her daughter-in-law. He’s pleasingly aware of the subject that’s picked him. The book’s last poem tries to assert ‘Sex and death: I’ve done with those’, but its last line reminds us that the pairing ‘fear’ and ‘desire’ is a recurring number for all of us, forever.

The Ornamental World may be the title of Retta Bowen’s pamphlet but her poems are fully functional. However much she stares, she sees that ‘Only in glimpses can we know what we are born for’, and it’s at the periphery of this vision where her truths and motivations are discovered. ‘On Being a Million Miles Away from Christmas’ makes direct reference to the festival only in its title. She comes at her feelings sideways, examining ideas about a midwinter double-charged with Christianity and consumerism through consideration of hot panting dogs and long iced drinks next to a swimming pool in the high summer’s ‘long reign of light’. She measures out her skills like a scientist. The tenses and timings are so precisely mixed in ‘I think of arachnids under glass’, a silvery what-if love poem, that it’s as if we see all past, present and future episodes of a love story at the same time. Bowen has a microscope at one eye and a telescope at another.

‘I rustle like roast potatoes / shaken; tell me it’s the sound you’re listening for’. If you want to listen to any poet this year, try Amy Key, whose Instead of Stars is as much about listening as it is delightful to listen to. ‘We start out with our ears / cocked to bird song’ she begins, and ends ‘At Lancaster Gate / I almost hear someone / call for me, darling!’. In between are poems that might be called unashamedly beautiful, if it made sense to think that beauty was something to be ashamed of. Here, even dead flowers ‘shiver cracker-dry / their throats ceramic and petals pearl’, while, outdoors, ‘The garden is flung with a camouflage of twilights’. These are poems for the mouth’s musical instrument, their chiming vowels and consonants scored like sharps and flats. Her ‘narratives of conjured liaisons and romantic adventures’ are shaped formally, the lines usually arriving in their twos, threes and fours; but the forms and her concerns sometimes flirt with the experimental. In the bullet-pointed poem, ‘Super Extra Gravity’ you’ll ponder what it is to ‘surrender to ultra texts’ even if you already know the feeling concluding the poem, ‘I’m a pebble beach you just walked across’.

The white space in Simon Kirwin’s Joe Mendoza is a Tout is all at the top of the book as, mischievously, the poems are aligned with their last lines at the bottom of the pages. Kirwin bills his South American traveller’s tales as ‘Stories’ rather than poems. It may be that he has issues with trusting the work, when defined as poetry. If the writing lacks the absolute degree of craft and compression that a truly successful poem needs, the book taken as a whole is an enjoyable collection of souvenirs and Kirwan knows well that the deepest thoughts about home are often formulated when you’re away. A boy in Bolivia is ‘a cardboard toy prince in a Pollock’s theatre’. The atmosphere in a café in Buenos Aires can be understood by equating it with that of a ‘burlesque bar in Bethnal Green’. Reading the book is like receiving a postcard with a beer-bottle ring stain, a wonky stamp and lots of biro kisses. It offers a generous, genuine flavour of the poet’s experiences abroad. According to the book’s afterword, ‘SK leaves London for good about once a fortnight’. So maybe this traveller’s journal will have more chapters to follow.  

The late Michael Murphy had a residency at the National Wildflower Centre in 2005, coinciding with the warmest spring on record and the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Poems named for native flowers are rooted throughout his collection, Allotments, a variegated and subtle mix of meditations on nature, chaos, flower lore, and war stories. The book’s non-floral poems range over a wider territory: from China to America, Rembrandt to Gay Byrne. The voice common to them tells us it can’t get comfortable anywhere. There are smiles like ‘a bare bulb in an empty room’; there is rubbish ‘Heaped in corners, waiting to be of use’. Domestic disturbance runs through the collection, from the loose translations of the instructions Proust left to his staff – ‘I cannot speak ... I will undress / Alone. How many times must I say it?’ – to a childhood Bank Holiday tea in front of the telly interrupted by a cold-calling evangelist:

Dad turns the TV low, bites
in half a radish. Succulent
isn’t the word. Nor was it sweet.

Katrina Naomi, another Templar Competition winner with Lunch at the Elephant & Castle, has the chatty, confiding tone of a friend taking you aside for a natter or an entre nous revelation – ‘I can’t think why’, ‘I say “my”, he was anyone’s’. There’s a great deal of the gossip’s guilty pleasure to be had picking over the matter of the poems – the dodgem-driving bit of rough on his ‘shag break’, the ‘afternoon sex / on a Spanish bed’, the matching pair of fathers who let down their child in contrasting ways – but the poems go deeper than confessional anecdote. By assuming alternate identities, Naomi opens up a wider and more objective world through the voices of an Ethiopian chanteuse, a Reggie Perrinesque bolter and – most unsettlingly – a balaclava-clad breaker and enterer who seems to be solving the problem of the housing shortage by ‘disappearing’ sitting tenants on commission with a lock-pick and a pillow. If a debut poet’s pamphlet is a showcase of her technique, the range of formal, imaginative and rhetorical skills on display here suggest that the wait for this author’s first full collection will be a short one.

Liane Strauss’s Frankie, Alfredo, reads like an invitation list for a fantasy dinner party. Salome, Byron, Catullus, Archimedes and Lady Macbeth are among the VIPs present in the poems; but their lives or work are serious subjects for the host’s inquisitive and original table-talk. None of these guests are here just to make up the numbers. Reasons to read Strauss are also to be found in her chin-up tone, her fantastic syntactical control and her de luxe subject matter. The next move or the next act of love may be difficult to make, but there’s always something to aim for: ‘the sky is turning / and dark descending dawn dawns and it’s morning’. In ‘Boy’, her images – cliffs, birds, pomegranates, lava – progress though an accretion of phrases and parentheses, which defer their import to a resolution as satisfying as a thunderous major chord. And when better to consider than in these cash-strapped times her spree of gold couches, champagne, beautiful babies and ‘a fox / dangling from a chair-back / like a provocative suggestion’? Donut Press’s design values are as high-end as ever. This covetable little pocket book with its stitched, linen-thick pages and gorgeous full-colour cover is a perfect vessel for its rich contents.

The pamphlets reviewed are available from the following addresses:

Donut Press, PO Box 45093, London N4 1UZ

Galdragon Press, Stromness, Orkney Islands KW16 3EJ

Little Silver Trumpet (littlesilvertrumpet@gmail.com)

Shoestring Press, 19 Devonshire Avenue, Beeston, Nottingham NG9 1BS

Tall-lighthouse, Stark Gallery, 384 Lee High Road, London SE12 8RW

Templar Poetry, Fenelon House, Kingsbridge Terrace, 58 Dale Road, Matlock, Derbyshire DE4 3NB