TODD SWIFT
Winter Tennis
DC Books £7.99

NICK LAIRD
On Purpose
Faber £8.99

MARIO PETRUCCI
Flowers of Sulphur
Enitharmon £8.95

There are at least two Todd Swifts in Winter Tennis. The first, the one I like, is spiky and enigmatic, an anthropologist of contemporary culture, and a real craftsman. The second slips into grand gestures and an overwrought high lyricism. Swift is a proponent of ‘fusion poetry’ so this diversity of form, whilst confusing, is hardly surprising. Ambitious writing that breaks the mould like this is needed more than ever, and in this new collection there’s plenty of the first Swift to satisfy my tastes.

Winter Tennis is dedicated to the poet’s father, whose recent death is the subject of a number of moving poems and, moreover, acts as a counterweight to Swift’s natural verve. ‘When will poets get over words?’ he asks:

There’s been a lot of jocularity slash lightness lately –
Many mentions of popular figures, movies, and TV –
[…]
How much hipness can any master muster, then use?
I was savvy before I saw those I love die and cease.
Now I leave my slip, suck, swoon outside for prose.

                                                                (‘Vocal Range’)

But like or it not, what Swift dismisses as ‘jocularity slash lightness’ is actually what he does best. Take for instance ‘The Expedition’: an imagined account of a polar voyage gone wrong. There are no out-and-out jokes here – no punchlines – but lightness of touch and a dry wit:

Day six the dogs died; Cedric “neglected”
to put out feed for them.
We ate the huskies, threw their bones aside.
Day seven polar bears, attracted by the remains,

began to stalk us. Day eight: Cedric mauled.

This poem also showcases Swift’s linguistic nimbleness – that ‘spiky’ quality I mentioned. In the following passage, see how the alliteration on ‘p’, ‘m’ and ‘s’, and the assonance on ‘o’ and ‘i’ work to create a texture of interwoven sounds:

The radio transmitter was glazed

like a pea in aspic,
could no longer ping
our Morse or morose
SOS past the outer rim of things.

Elsewhere this technique becomes a kind of Muldoonian riddle-poetry, most notably in ‘The Mosquito and the Map’ and ‘Marcus Makepeace’, the latter a hyper-animated text with a whiff of the burlesque. Both fall on the right side of smart Alec, and are impeccably crafted. And then there are Swift’s more formal experiments, such as ‘The Oil and Gas University’ – a love poem in the guise of industrial hard-sell in the arctic tundra.

A Canadian who has lived in Budapest, Paris and London, Swift’s world is a sprawling but strangely placeless mesh of cross-cultural reference points. We encounter ‘Tokyo Elevator Girl’, Croatian highways, the sunflower fields of Rostov, the ruminations of an ageing Emperor Hirohito and plenty of icy wastelands. Swift is also a card-carrying film buff, employing cinematic techniques when setting a scene or drawing an image:

We stopped to watch
a white deer standing
in a white field, not moving.

                                                                (‘The Last Blizzard’)

There are numerous explicit references to film actors, characters and scenes. These are knowing winks and, yes, badges of ‘hipness’, but there’s something more profound going on too. Because the more we look out, the more we feel watched. On his popular blog, Eyewear, Swift describes poetry as ‘a total immersion in something other than the self’. But here, cultural voyeurism becomes the vehicle for a persistent interrogation of self. ‘I have looked at photographs of film stars also, / and felt great sadness for all living things’ says Swift’s Hirohito. And in ‘Brando’, Swift’s teenage lover falls short of the film star’s sexual paradigm:

You weren’t Stella, I wasn’t Stanley …

Had he aimed for my teen dream-girl, would’ve
conquered her in drama class on day one
when we had to pair off, to read the parts
that broke us.

These poems are simple, restrained distillations, but this isn’t always the case in Winter Tennis. Several poems are overwritten; some, like ‘Onset’, employ clichéd, archaic language; and a good handful are spoilt by Swift’s rather flamboyant attempts to tackle the ‘big ideas’ (Beauty, Truth, Time, Writing). A favourite verbal tic is the aphorism, but I’m afraid it just ticked me off:

                Time is a popular
song I won’t remove from my mind.

                                                                (‘Opium and the Romantic Imagination’)

The person you’re kindest to
is the one you want to save.

                                                                (‘Winter Winter Tennis’)

These moments are disappointing in a collection that is, overall, acute in its expression and impressive in its range. Several poems, particularly ‘The Expedition’ and ‘I’m in Love with a German Film Star’, will stay with me for some time.

Like Swift, young Ulster poet Nick Laird participates in a rewarding, if somewhat risky, dialogue between multiple writing traditions. On Purpose extends the aesthetic and thematic concerns of his much-praised debut collection, but is tighter, leaner. Laird’s work owes some debt to the rich word-hoard of twentieth-century Northern Irish poetry. On the one hand, verbal trickery, experimentation and a dynamic, disjointed voice all point to the influence of Muldoon and the transatlantic postmodernist tradition. (One poem uses cut-up text from internet search engines in what is, sadly, fast becoming a formal cliché.) But there’s also something of Heaney’s rich, measured descriptiveness, not to mention his sonorous vowel-play, in poems such as ‘Hunting is a Holy Occupation’:

In the strict fulfilment of my vows,
I learned to couch alone, un-housed,
on river-grit or thorns or flints
and ten unblinking moons I squatted,
moving only a-squat like a toad.

Perhaps such doubleness is a blessing. Perhaps it is a freedom enjoyed more by those West of the Irish Sea, whereas in England camps have been well-manned and boundaries guarded for decades. That metaphor is apt, and hunting is a good place to start too, because Laird’s main thematic concern is conflict. The hunt, as medieval writers knew well, is a kind of ritualised violence that absorbs, reflects and refracts the natural aggression of human society. Laird was born in 1975, at the height of The Troubles, and the sectarian ethic is brilliantly cut down in the opening poem, ‘Conversation’, where the protagonists ‘speak in code of what we love. / Here’:

How someone else was nailed to a fence.
How they gutted a man like a suckling pig
and beat him to death with sewer rods.

That ‘here’ is important; it’s the territorial caveat that undermines the promise of love. One of the highlights of this collection is ‘The Art of War’, a bold and off-beat series of love poems that charts a relationship in the terms of military combat. This is Laird at his most conversational:

You swear that it’s me who’s obsessed with war,
the sting of a nettle, a national recession,
monsoons and ice avalanches,

and any particular
type of fucking depression
that I might, even now, dare to mention.

                   (‘Waging War’)

Even in one of his funniest poems, ‘Pug’, Laird’s ‘batface, baby bear’ whose ‘weapon of choice is the sneeze’ becomes a symbol of the empty articulation of rage, barking relentlessly at ‘shadows and the fence, / at everything behind the fence’. This fence (boundary, border) is both a real, felt presence and a metaphor for a psychological crux. Laird’s trope is the knife-edge, the fault-line. ‘Leaving the Scene of an Accident’ imagines a post-apocalyptic city repopulating with animal life. His template is Chernobyl but this could easily be London after the Thames Barrier fails:

In the eastern suburbs deer appear.
Brushed by waist-high silver steppe grass
and the lighter strokes of barley stalks,

elegant as one might half-expect
the grazing self to be, except her grace
is one complicit in departure.

The crux here lies between the elegance of the deer and the threat of wolves ‘basking, snarling’ – a knife-edge between the self and its ruin. When ‘Knowledge, Beauty, Good Deeds’ left the stage of the Medieval Mystery, ‘from the right, wordlessly, came Death’ (‘Everyman’). This same pattern emerges in the poem ‘Lipstick’, which documents the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 using reconfigured diary entries. Amongst meagre aid supplies ‘there appeared, from somewhere, boxes of it: lipstick’.

             For me at least
it was the darkest ring of something, seeing

how those women lay with no nightdress or sheets
but still that redness on their lips.

The proximity here of overt sexuality, death and the absurd is reminiscent of the harrowing climax of Trevor Griffiths’ 1975 play Comedians. Both are uncomfortable reading, but strangely uplifting. The red smear of lipstick, like the collection itself, is a macabre affirmation of existence despite it all.

Mario Petrucci’s Flowers of Sulphur brings together recollections from childhood, unexpected love poems, and the fusion of ‘science with psyche’ that Petrucci has made his own. Where Laird employs the vocabulary of war, Petrucci draws from the language of science and technology to produce a love poetry that is tender but whimsical.

That ocean divides. Yet the yeasts on my toes
have stowed away on yours

                                         (‘In Touch’)

In ‘Bunshop’, the poet’s adolescent fumblings are recalled through details that are the more believable for their strangeness: the ‘sulphurous perfume’ of a teenage scalp, ‘perchlorate’ used to ‘singe her initials in benchwood’, the teacher’s ‘nicotined lard of finger / and thumb’. And if there are two lines that invoke the innocence of young love better than these, I’d like to read them:

End of term. Her hand in my pocket

my éclair in the other

Petrucci prefaces Flowers of Sulphur with a quote by Muriel Rukeyser: ‘Say it, say it, the universe / is made of stories, not of atoms’. Some of his strongest poems question how the notional self becomes mediated and contested by the body, the physical stuff of man:

You’re a perfect likeness of yourself. But that
clot knotted your brain, a dark fertilisation.

                                       (‘Stroke’)

Or, when recovering corpses, the physical stuff of man is transformed: ‘toy skull / made cupreous by the stewing of coins’ (‘Opening the Graves under Spitalfields Crypt’). Only when the schoolboy poet plays war with plastic soldiers can the perishable body be constructed, destroyed and repaired, all with a dab of glue.

Horses at full strain – stuck down
by one thermoplastic hoof, their riders
anally inserted by a stud at the saddle.

                                       (‘Airfix’)

Petrucci has a snappy metaphor for every body part. There is a brilliant strangeness to ‘the turbine throb of my brain’, ‘your huge mushroom of skull’ or ‘those tiny saddles of talus’. If I have one criticism, it’s his occasional tendency to overcook the metaphor, generating a kind of enforced neatness that closes down possibilities of meaning. The final line of ‘In Touch’ spoils a good poem with the rather obvious ‘our bodies’ soft continents’ (this metaphor repeated in a later poem as ‘continents of muscle’). Neatness like this is something Petrucci’s last book, Heavy Water, avoided.

The best poems in Flowers of Sulphur retain an ambiguity of purpose, such as the excellent ‘Z’. A schoolboy conspiracy to name everything ‘z’ (‘Armstrong making the moon, was z’, etc.) ends with the two conspirators, brothers, falling out:

             with those
few words z span away black as vinyl, became instead
that lingering the end-of-song guitar starts into
just before it fades to crackly nothing.

‘Crackly nothing’ is as much cinematic as it is phonic. One of the highlights of Flowers of Sulphur is a long poem, ‘Footage’, whose fifty-two three-line stanzas are like scraps of celluloid working against, as well as for, the narrative. For Petrucci, as Swift, film is the high art of the voyeur – the arena of the multiple, disintegrating self.

A man wrenches back
Falls to death in four frames
He does not fall

continuously, but as he falls
finds four selves for company

Petrucci writes with great tenderness and intelligence throughout this collection, particularly in his poems on family. There’s a depth to his poetry that belies the surface- level energy; that’s something all three of these writers share. Although of course, as Todd Swift points out, ‘sometimes the visible is the deeper world’ (‘Hotel Orient’).

Tom Chivers is a writer, editor and promoter of poetry. He runs Penned in the Margins, Generation Txt and London Word Festival. In Spring 2008 he was appointed the first ever Poet in Residence at The Bishopsgate Institute, London.

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