KATE BINGHAM
Quicksand Beach
Seren £7.99

RUTH FAINLIGHT
Moon Wheels
Bloodaxe £8.95

PAUL FARLEY
Tramp in Flames
Picador £8.99

It’s a risky start. Kate Bingham’s opening gambit in Quicksand Beach is a baby poem, ‘Mediterraneo’ – an account of lunch ‘at the Italian with Mum / so proud of my belly / she’s catching eyes with everyone / and ordering too much food’. Seven lines of waiters and maitre d’s and mothers being expectant and predicting dates, and then ‘as I re-read the menu your left heel / kicks twice for chocolate mousse’ and it’s all over. It’s a question of taste, sure enough, but it seems that a sweet tooth may be required from the start for this collection inspired by, as the backcover blurb would have it, ‘childhood memories, marriage, children, road trips, ice storms and dreams’.

It’s not long before Bingham returns to children in a poem that feels genuinely autobiographical, ‘6th December 1998’, and which seems to be dishing up some more over-sweet dessert with its ‘In the delivery room I cry because you are so rare, / so sure, / I hardly dare to touch or kiss you’. Yet the other side of this preciousness is something of the fear and foresight of parenthood, which suddenly salt the poem:

I hardly dare to touch or kiss you,

even to let you live, slithering
towards ill-health and accident with every second,
every breath.

And it’s this ‘slithering’ that seems so dangerous, so important to Bingham’s idea of love in many poems throughout this collection. Early in the book is a five-part sonnet sequence called ‘Roads’ which plays with ideas of memory and prediction from childhood to marriage to parenthood, and which ends with the remarkable lines addressed, apparently, to a husband:

Scare me again,
I never loved you more than when our car
span quietly across fresh snow in the fast lane.

Much later in the book is the poem ‘Highbury Pool’, another of the more apparently autobiographical pieces in which mother and daughter have gone swimming:

She climbs to the top of the elephant slide
and bends one knee, looks down, then catches my eye
and smiles as pee spatters her ankles...

One day, I suppose,
I’ll have to choose which clothes recall the best
of these years, folded forgotten things I’d rather lose
than give away. She waves, then sits, lets go.

If the pun of ‘lets go’ smacks somewhat of Carol Ann Duffy or Wendy Cope, then so does its emotional sting. The bladder-loosening terror of growing up is shared here – but it’s the exhilaration of that terror that makes the lives worth living, it seems. ‘Highnam Court Violin Camp, 1981’ is a good example of the suddennesses of our comingof- age, recalling that ‘In a single week I learned “erection”, / page one of the score of Rite of Spring / and how to pop corn’. The best of these poems are the ones inhabiting the most unsure territory. The words used for the collection’s title, Quicksand Beach, are taken from ‘The Island-designing Competition’, an account of two children (and again, it’s told in that autobiographical tone) drawing headlands, inlets and estuaries of imagined islands. It all seems rather jolly at first, but soon ‘every bus-stop / harbours a scarlet dhow – for when there are floods’ and humans are introduced to the drawings first as red stick men, each representing ‘one hundred votes’. Soon the pictures are featuring fleets of battleships in battle formation, and Quicksand Beach is posited as the likely landing ground for an invasion. The idea of treacherous ground – the beauty spot that could open up any moment and swallow us – is right at the heart of this collection.

Reviews of Bingham’s previous collection of poems, Cohabitation, noted her ‘direct conversation style’, her ‘simple, natural tone’, her ‘apparent simplicity’. All of this remains true of Quicksand Beach, particularly in the more conspicuously formed moments, the sestinas of ‘Diamonds’, say, or ‘Wishes’ or ‘Monogamy’. If these are an obvious triumph of Bingham’s apparent simplicity, then there’s also a risk here in poems like ‘Gale Force Ten’, whose tale of woman-asrubbish- gathering-speedbump is neatly executed but, in the end, prompts little more than a ‘Yes, and…?’ sort of response. There’s nothing wrong with it, as such, but you can’t help wishing it looked a little more likely to blow up in your face. And there are one or two more of these – ‘Year Off’, or ‘Nice’.

This kind of talky writing works extraordinarily well, of course, when it has something really surprising to say. ‘I had always wanted to shoot myself’ is the kind of opening line that’s inevitably going to shove you into line two, whether you like it or not, and the posthumous calm of the poem as a whole is genuinely chilling and beguiling. Quicksand Beach is at its very best in its surreal, truncated fables, the supershort short stories which smack of Matthew Sweeney or Jane Draycott. This is from ‘Snow in May’, which feels like a warning note from a very imminent future:

I knew, but kept on having children
all the same, chose to prefer protracted
environmental degradation
to the world war mother expected...

                  Each generation fancies
it might produce a saviour for the next,
but of my sons and daughters none can see
what’s wrong with snow in May or the sex
of aphids, and the end of the world
drags on.

And the fables in the book are memorably striking, especially when they bounce off each other at a distance: ‘Rooftop Car-park’, for example, and ‘The Lion’. In the former, the lion is a metaphor for a mother in ‘the days / of her worst life…leaping effortlessly / onto the bonnet and spitting at me’. In the latter, the lion may be the urhusband, who ‘wasn’t my lion, you understand, / he just arrived, a stink in the kitchen’:

but when I pulled the thorn
from his torn paw still he refused to eat
and stood there needing someone to hurt,
my human cries to soothe his lion heart.

Quicksand Beach, despite one or two squibs among the chronicles of all our relationships – with our parents, our spouses, our neighbours, our children – is elegant and moving. And if it lacks a little explosive, it more than compensates with its knowing, unsettling quiet.

There’s more quiet in Ruth Fainlight’s Moon Wheels – a pretty hefty collection of 33 new poems, a selection from 1991’s Twelve Sybils and the out-ofprint 1993 collection, This Time of Year, and a good wedge of translations. And again, it’s a collection that gets off to a bad start. By the second poem it seems we’re going to have to read one hundred and eleven pages of poems about the moon. As if there weren’t already enough poems about the moon on this earth.

That second poem, though – the book’s title poem – sets out a kind of manifesto for the moon obsession. Describing a sleepless night with ‘Too much on my mind’, the poem renders the moon and the earth as:

two wheels which cannot stop grinding
between them the coarse stuff
of existence, images and words,
into a substance called poetry. The process
is indescribable. And its purpose.

An outstanding songwriter and rock musician once said that he simply couldn’t bring himself to sing the word ‘guitar’ in a rock song for sheer toe-curling embarrassment, and the use of the word ‘poetry’ in this poem seems to be in the same sort of territory. Yes, it’s obviously an issue of taste, but it does clang with its own contrivance, and it doesn’t ring with truth – does it really sound like the process by which poetry gets made?

The nature of poetry gets a good looking-at in the following pages, too. ‘Sit down among the boxes and write a poem’, Fainlight is told in ‘Moving’. ‘Writing a poem, shifting / words from there to here / is like choosing between / hexagons of tile / for a mosaic’ according to ‘Mosaic’. ‘Impossible / to write a poem impersonal / as a still-life, or to articulate / the essence of apples’, she opines in ‘A Bowl of Apples’. Perhaps it’s an impulse towards the ‘impersonal’ that makes the early pages of the book so humdrum, so bloodless.

So it’s a delight when this atmosphere is turned on its head by the terrific surprise of ‘Never Again’ whose six lines, a dozen pages into the book, are an exhilarating mix of regret and passion:

Old age means not being able
to bite into an apple
walk the length of a valley
see every detail in a pattern
hear the highest alto deepest bass
or wrap my legs around your waist.

This unfussy, unadorned writing is Fainlight’s own poetry at its best, but Moon Wheels really catches fire with her translations. She begins with the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, and her language immediately starts throwing some muscular weight around. Her choices demonstrate a strangeness at odds with her own writing – darker, more disturbing, more surreal – as in Vallejo’s ‘The Spider’: ‘It is an enormous motionless spider / colourless, but whose body, / head and a belly, are bloody’; or the Mexican Victor Manuel Mendiola’s long and deliciously disturbing ‘Your Hand, My Mouth’. Here Fainlight comes over all Nigella- Lawson-on-bad-Mexican-drugs. A few of its numbered parts, here, won’t demonstrate the compelling movement of the whole piece, but are worth serving up as a taster:

1. A plate is a hand hollowing with thirst or hunger.

17. When a plate breaks something essential collapses. Love or the
family. Whatever promise or pact. Whatever embrace. Even the kiss
withers. It knows the worst.

48. Under my nose, in front of my eyes, I watched two snails
become two mouths on my plate. It was the most passionate kiss
in the history of cinema.

59. Your plate is a delicious grave. Bury me.

This collection of translations also includes the Mexican Elsa Cross, the Portuguese Sophia de Mello Breyner, the Argentine Maria Negroni and ends with Sophocles, and a small section from Oedipus Rex, here entitled ‘Jocasta’s Death’: ‘I’ll tell you, though, what I can drag from my mind – / where it’s already buried – / of her pitiful end’. Its combination of high-style and plain speaking quickly creates a perfect atmosphere for a story about the damage of a collision between deity and the domestic.

Then it’s on to Fainlight’s 1993 poems from This Time of Year, and its disappointments, like the very tired cod-postmodern philosophizing of ‘Until You Read It’ which even gives away its own feeble punchline in the title. This is it in its entirety:

Like music on the page
which has to be played
and heard, even if
only by one person,
this word, this phrase,
this poem, does not exist
until you read it.

The question of whether a tree falling unheard in a forest does or does not make a sound is such an over-worked, chinstroking cliché that it’s hard to muster anything approaching surprise at this poem, apart from noting how simple is its language. So much of this collection is over ornamented with flowery adjectives and adverbs that it’s hard to get to the plain woodwork of the poems. Set these poems against Ezra Pound’s dictum that literature is ‘news that stays news’ and – although heaven knows that fashion must never be the arbiter ofwhat’s great and what’s not in our literature – aside from its tremendous translations, Moon Wheels feels oddly oldfashioned, even somehow out-of-date.

Hearkening back to the old days has been something of a feature in Paul Farley’s work since he took the poetry world by the throat with 1998’s The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You. His first two collections are strewn with nostalgic totems – his father, his native Liverpool, his schooldays’ games of ‘Dead Fish’, his iconizing of a treacle tin – and there are more of them in Tramp in Flames, giving this third collection a real flavour of things lost. Echoing the Tate & Lyle reference from his first book’s ‘Treacle’ is the litany of brand names in ‘An Ovaltine Tin in the Egg Collections at Tring’:

Craven A, Huntley & Palmers, Oxo
Crawford’s, Jacob’s, Peak Freans, Assorted Creams,
Selesta Fondants, Ogden’s, Ovaltine…
Some sing on while others ring hollow

This is one of many castings-back to his own childhood and beyond. There’s a conspicuously Larkinesque start to ‘Automatic Doors’, reminiscent of ‘High Windows’: ‘When I see some kids springing the gallery doors’, a poem which recalls how Farley and friends would play for hours in revolving doors as children:

we were time travellers
fast-forwarding ourselves into the future
before we were thrown out, into an era
of never even having to lift a finger.

While the poem (which comes only a few pages after one which declares ‘now I’m old’) brandishes some fine lines – the revolving door as a ‘glass and darkwood turbine’ – there is a slight sense of nostalgia turning into grumpy-oldmandom here, of Farley as ‘they-don’t make-’em-likethey- used-to’ merchant. Perhaps ‘Automatic Doors’ only suffers by dint of its own nod towards Larkin’s much more philosophically complex and unsettling ‘High Windows’, but it does seem to lament, simply, rather than explore.

Tramp in Flames concludes with a long sort-of prose poem, ‘I Ran All the Way Home’, comprising 60 sort-of stanzas, each beginning with the words ‘I remember’ – from ‘I remember waking up around the time of the moon landing and flicking a single Sugar Puff from my pillow, and then turning over to find hundreds more where I’d been sick in the night’ to ‘I remember my first night in London. It was a shared room in a hostel in Knightsbridge, and somebody had carved I stumbled into town into the headboard’. Again, despite its charming chronicling of quirky details (‘I remember a girl called Denise Custard who could tap dance’), it’s not got a challenge for the reader at its heart, and seems to end the book sighing, Ah, those were the days… and then going home.

Even more explicitly lamenting is ‘The Lapse’ which is Farley’s precision-tooled writing at its very best, recalling the work of legendary animator Ray Harryhausen, and how

we blinked our way through Jason and the Argonauts,
thrilled by the stop-motion universe...

by Harryhausen, who got between the frames
like a man who comes in bone dry from a downpour
by stopping the world and snapping out a path
through glassy rods right up to his front door.

The poem goes on to talk about the wonder of ultra-slowmotion and time-lapse photography: ‘And I’d have to say that something was taken from us’ and ends with the plea, ‘Give us back the giant day. Give us back what’s ours’.

But if the precise nature of what’s been taken from us is unclear, other moments in Tramp in Flames leave us in little doubt. In a collection dedicated ‘i.m. M.D.’ it doesn’t feel like an accident that the long ‘Requiem for a Friend’ straddles the middle, the very heart of this collection, and contains the words ‘Time to lament’.

Bleakly hypothesizing that every bump in the night, every rattle from the water pipes, every distant banging door is the sound of the dead friend knocking to be allowed back among the living, this is a truly unsettling elegy. It ranges, though, beyond elegy itself to explore what it is to lament, and to grieve, and to let go. If we can admit the assumption that this poem memorializes the poet Michael Donaghy, who died from an aneurysm in 2004, then we can make sense of the lines following that ‘Time to lament’:

Your cometary blood
lost track; the circuit broke; how could it know
its point-of-no-return was being crossed?
A stanza-break can stand between two seasons
but blood is curious and your blood rushed
amazed into a room it never knew,
escaping from its greater circulation.
This party was worth crashing.

There’s a slightly queasy sense that the poem eschews mawkishness by brutalizing itself. It’s uncompromisingly not an easy read, probably particularly so for readers who knew Donaghy personally, and yet it is tender and moving, honest and distracted and wandering as loss is.

The ghost of Larkin turns up again to preside over the marvellous ‘Philistines’, in which ‘angry razor- / burn blooms in call centres without windows / where Post-Its stick like shit to shoes’. It’s a poem riddled with ambivalence about the position of the working-class-by-blood professional poet – accusatory, self-accusatory, ludic, knowing – and curiously uncomfortable for the reader as it conjures our complicity in its trajectory from sneering to patronizing wonder to pity, and doesn’t seem to let us off the hook.

And there’s some pleasing Farleyan mischief here and there to leaven the tone. ‘Civic’ is another long one, which waits 112 lines to own up that,

In this poem disguised as a meditation on water...

I plan to break
the great stillness and surface of this lakecum-
reservoir by peeing quietly into the supply.

A lot’s made, in the world of rock music, of the ‘difficult third album’ syndrome, and even the back-cover blurb caveats that Farley may have experienced the poetic equivalent. But there are still far more top-drawer poems in Tramp in Flames than in your average 64-page collection: see ‘Night Swim’, ‘Liverpool Disappears for a Billionth of a Second’, ‘The Heron’, ‘The Big Hum’, ‘Paperboy and Air Rifle’.

The back cover also has it that Tramp in Flames finds Farley ‘driving his formal ambition and remarkable imagination harder than ever’, and it’s in the poems like ‘Requiem for a Friend’ where this is most conspicuously so. Perhaps, if there is a difficulty with this third collection, it’s a slight case of overshadowing. With the unmissable heart of the book being the most challenging, uncomfortable and, yes, emotionally daring poem of the set, this is certainly not his easiest read. But give it a few spins. It’s a grower.

Antony Dunn has published two collections of poetry, Pilots and Navigators (Oxford Poets, 1998) and Flying Fish (Carcanet Oxford Poets, 2002). He is working towards completion of a third, Bugs. www.antonydunn.org

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