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A London School Carol Rumens finds ensoulment and ekphrasis in two show-case anthologies |
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Mimi Khalvati & Stephen Knight,
Editors John Lucas, Editor
I am twenty people! has a clear brief and a discernible set of criteria. Gathering new work from the excellent Poetry School (aged ten this year), it’s the third of a biennial series, always edited by the School’s Founder, Mimi Khalvati, and one other poet-tutor (this time Stephen Knight). All poets included are, or were at the time of acceptance, at a pre-first collection stage – a stage at which appearance in an anthology is helpful for them formatively as writers, and interesting for readers in that it signals new names to watch. In a brief but useful introduction, the editors make a point of their desire to reward commitment over time, and in recognition of this, three previously anthologised poets are again represented. The limit of twenty poets (with 3 to 7 poems apiece) produces a substantial but not overwhelming book. It testifies to good teaching (and, of course, to wise selfteaching) that there is so little amateurishness, such alertness and precision among these poets. The book is elegantly produced, and this is also of a piece with the strong aesthetic values it transmits. You could send such a book into the future, and it would tell a story of sophistication and culture, of a woman-dominated (only three of the poets here are men) democracy of poetry-writing which negotiated imaginatively with the past and was intensely alive to the nuances of contemporary language. It would demonstrate that, in an online age, on a small, muddled, poorly educated and unhappy off-European island, where poetry books were so often massproduced, ugly and typo-ridden as if their publishers no longer believed in them, there was still such a thing as a beautiful book – even in paperback. Virginia Woolf’s Diaries provide the title, and it feels very much as if Woolf and the Bloomsbury genius loci preside over the whole enterprise. Woolf’s jottings are assembled skilfully by Linda Black in her poem ‘At the Little Deal Table under the Glare of the Lamp’. A slightly dizzy and trembly ars poetica emerges: ‘Here’s my interesting thing, and no quiet/ solid table on which to put it’. This might have been written purposely to express the dilemma of the 21st century poet, the problem that all poets are required individually to solve. It’s a problem of form – perhaps a problem created by its own apparent division of content and form: the ‘interesting thing’ versus ‘the solid table’. By truly concentrating on the ‘interesting thing’, according to current convention, poetry can conjure the table; but, in fact, all poets know that a little, and sometimes much, judicious carpentry is required if the table is to be solid as well as surprising. The poets in I am twenty people! carve shapes that are standard in contemporary, so-called mainstream, English poetry: poems in lines and stanzas, often symmetrical stanzas, and, now and then, traditional forms. They have an understated melody and stress and, occasionally, rhyme. They are not torn raw and bleeding from life, or designed to give that impression; they are intimate in tone yet not quite conversational – certainly not full of the ragbag chatter and sense of urban flux of the New York school, for instance. I make this point not as criticism but descriptively, having had a passing notion to ask if there is such a thing as a London school. If there is, and it is represented here, it dreams of nature, art and travel. Many of the poets work extremely interestingly within these boundaries, though, and find their edges. Linda Black, mentioned above, is one of the inventive table-makers. She uses her source material with immense skill, both in the Woolf variations quoted, and in the John Ruskin homage, ‘Seven Lamps’. This work is a kind of translation, and Black finds enrichment for her own rhythms and vocabulary by re-grouping and personalising borrowings from the original texts. Of the architectural details observed in the second Ruskin stanza, the speaker observes that they ‘have grace/ about them, a sensation in every inch’ – which is a good description of Black’s own ekphrastic skills. Quite differently in her prose-poems, she hammers together flat, childlike, subject-predicate sentences to create unsettling, sometimes surreal, sometimes tragic and yet wildly funny family portraits: My grandfather was a Maurice but called Mon. My brother-in-law is a Morris. Morris’s mother was a Doris like my mother. Morris and my sister (known by her second name) were given an old framed ad of a Morris Minor inscribed ‘You’ll be glad you married a Morris’. Kay Syrad is another visual artist sensitive to the textures of language. ‘Carnival of the Lazy Kings’ embroiders the most wittily sensuous of sestinas. The envoi gives you the mischievous picture: I mourn him, long and slow in orange light, There are a few slips: ‘his long black hair, sleek and black’ in line two, for example, suggesting tautology rather than deliberate repetition. Syrad is something of a formalist and shows her mettle in a series of Petrarchan sonnets, which prove a fine, smooth-running vehicle for a photographic voyage dedicated to Thomas Joshua Cooper. Patrick Early’s group begin with ekphrasis (a dramatic monologue in the form of a letter from Barbara Hepworth to Ben Nicholson about her sculpture, ‘Spring’) and moves on to material with a more political dimension, drawing on his experiences working with the British Council in the Balkans and elsewhere. The ‘distant memory’ genre is difficult, the recollection of emotion in tranquillity, whatever Wordsworth thought, often ill-advised. Write about the memories that bring you out in a sweat! Early has produced two strong poems from (it seems) difficult memories. In ‘The Burning of the Maps’ a young arsonist has set fire to his school, beginning with maps ‘of old Serbia, our lovely Kosovo’. The boy and speaker seem to merge rather interestingly at the end of the poem, as if the child had grown wise and old from his experience: Since we cannot live in one another’s sight, Let our villages be nameless. Let our people grow The image is simple, not immediately shocking – yet as we think about it we realise what it might mean to have ‘blank minds’ and to have eradicated all knowledge of our own and our neighbours’ history. In short, further disaster and bloodshed – but Early doesn’t mention this. It’s another skill that these poets consistently demonstrate; they know when to stop and let the reader do the work. In fact, occasionally poems employ powerful description but don’t quite manage the elusive art of making all that’s shown add up to more than itself – or find resonant closure. This reflects a contemporary orthodoxy, generally a sound one, but an opinion or conclusion, now and again, can be the seal of authenticity. Jemma Borg’s ‘The Pieces we Need’, a poem about jetsam, ‘its necessary puzzle’, is full of intriguing images with a philosophical framework, but ends rather lamely with ‘the long drive to the beach’. Borg, however, is a writer to watch. Her poems take us into genuinely new places, with great care and precision, step by step. In ‘As Flamingoes at the Water’s Edge’ the places we visit, the net of allusions and symbols, are spun with metaphysical panache: It’s as though glass has been falling Tears have rarely been less idle. Eye-on-the-ball descriptive writing is effective in poems by Claire Crowther, Louisa Hooper, David Penn, Kathryn Simmonds and Jenny Lewis. Lewis’s ‘Sur les Pont des Arts’ is a nice variation on the ekphrastic, with its wry psychological portrait of a man ‘looking at a painting of a river and trees’ and thinking of more worldly things, like money, his mistress and his smart new Homburg hat. The poem is finely constructed, its refrain-line returning at well-judged moments to create a balance of fixity and digression. Gradually, the visually bedazzled reader picks up the tones of distinctive voices. Saradha Soobrayen’s series of clichéredeeming, sinuous love letters (‘Now that the sparkle is gone, this poem remains/ in the spirit of a truant’) culminates in a super monologue, ‘My Conqueror’, in which Mauritius, the island, describes her multi-national history as a colony. The conqueror is a shape-changing, sexy if dangerous woman – especially sexy when she is in her French guise: She unbuttons The poem rings a pleasant change on the familiar trope of mother or maiden earth fucked (up) by male imperialism. There’s a strong colloquial tone in all the poems by Lorraine Mariner, a young writer who looks into ordinary childhood and teenage memories and finds their essential oddity. ‘Mac’ (as in ‘complicated outdoor pursuits macs’) has a particularly enjoyable, deadpan humour. Lucy Hamilton, boldy translating the legend of the Muslim warrior-saint Lallah Maghnia into a series of sonnets, attains at times a grandly epic tone and retains the incantatory quality of her original prose text. (What a wonderfully flexible instrument, the sonnet!) There is scope for some fuller story-telling here, I felt. ‘If the body is to adorn the soul / how should it dress her?’ is the first sentence in the anthology, an arresting question, asked (and beautifully answered) by Alice Allen. Jemma Borg has a poem entitled ‘Soul Sends a Letter at Last’. Mary MacRae’s work too seems to have a religious sensibility. Is poetry in the West entering a new spiritual age – and what does ‘spiritual’ mean? Writers whose influence I thought discernible in the anthology are Pascal Petit and Alice Oswald, who, in their different ways, bring a special ‘ensoulment’ to the worlds they observe. There are echoes of magical realism, a sense that nature is alive in more ways than the obvious, a feeling for the mystery of science in many of the poems here; however non-prescriptive they are, they forge deeper networks of connectiveness – and perhaps this is what the modern, non-theological mind understands by soul: intensified, inter-related matter, the stuff of poetry.
Ruth O’Callaghan’s best work would also be at home in I am twenty people! Her sestina and ghazal suggest earnest toiling at the craft, but it is in the looser-structured ‘McCready’ poems that her language really comes to life; there are some great colloquial moments as she charts the passage of the ne’er-do-well who knows: with the wisdom of his Egyptian forebears, Another Scottish poet, John Manson, opens the collection with his engaging, old-left, somewhat score-settling takes on political and academic pretension. Manson has previously coedited collections by Hugh McDiarmid. His plain-spoken style is attractive, though linguistically nothing special, at least not until he starts sharpening up his act with dialect. ‘To an Unconceived Child’ reminded me a little of Patrick Kavanagh’s masterpiece, ‘The Great Hunger’: What language did I learn Nancy Mattson, a Canadian, contributes warm-hearted, if somewhat anecdotal poems that sometimes seem closer to journalism. ‘Getaway’, for example, is touristic in subject and tone: the painted figures in the church are carefully described but there is too much incidental detail about the observer’s feelings, as if the experience had not been wholly re-entered at the moment of writing. Rosemary Norman’s work conversely aims at directness and sharpness of tone. Her end-of-line punctuation and grammar (like Manson’s) can be erratic and result in fuzziness, but there are some strong, controlled poems here, such as ‘All you need to know’. I also liked the disciplined tenderness of the villanelle, ‘Kissing in Hats’. The unevenness of the selections in Take Five 06 could have been avoided if only the strongest poems by each author had been included and, that way, more poets might have been added. The five-poet idea seems to be governed by the series title – but is it a good title any way? Most people will not recognise its source (a Dave Brubeck jazz composition) and if they do, will wonder why it’s relevant. Perhaps I’ve been corrupted by reading too many anthologies of the niche-marketing variety: ‘Poems to heal/feed/change/ revive your heart/soul/granny/bank account’ – circle as preferred – but I couldn’t help wondering about the market to which this book was addressed, why there wasn’t any mission-statement and why the editor – John Lucas, I assume – chose to remain anonymous. The book jacket contributes to the feeling of indirection. An engraving by Thomas Bewick, ‘Passerine Warbler’, on a dark green background – it’s handsome but seems unconnected to this particular collection and its title. The impression of handsomeness fades rather quickly once the book is opened. The list of poem-titles crams itself amateurishly to the foot of the contents page, and, worse, there’s a horrible typo: ‘To and Unconceived Child’ (my italics). It adds to an impression that Take Five 06 wanted more of the kind of editorial care which informs every page of I am twenty people!
Carol Rumens is the author of fourteen collections of poems, the latest being Poems, 1968-2004 (Bloodaxe) as well as occasional fiction, drama and translation. Her lectures on poetry in the Newcastle University Lecture Series are also published by Bloodaxe as Self Into Song.
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Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
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