ZOË SKOULDING
Remains of a Future City
Seren £7.99

MEDBH McGUCKIAN
My Love Has Fared Inland
The Gallery Press €11.95

Here are three collections, by an English, Welsh, and Irish poet, with far-reaching international roots, each edging beyond what might be called the traditional lyric form, into a more abstract, sometimes conceptual, employment (and enjoyment) of language and style. Each work has a definite presiding spirit or two: for McCabe, it’s Donald M Allen and Ed Dorn; for McGuckian, Santayana by way of Mallarmé’s poésie pure; and for Skoulding, Walter Benjamin and Ivan Chtcheglov. Then again, let’s complicate things and observe influences closer to home. Chris McCabe – from Liverpool originally – often sounds a bit like Paul Farley; McGuckian bears the full weight of Irish poetry from Yeats back, in her weave of folk lyricism and strange storytelling; and Skoulding, with a reconsideration of the urban within a British poetic tradition, cannot help but work in the brickmade shadows of Roy Fisher. In such a way, each of these collections reminds the reader of how richly implicated ‘English’ poetry is in different nations and even different tongues. It may be that the twenty-first century disadvantage – being after everything, even theory – has become an answer to how writers navigate the troubled waters of the last century’s manifesto wars. These poets drift on, taking what they can, with less rancour and are the less aggrieved, the more rewarded for their daring, their ability to receive signals from any lightship.

Zeppelins, McCabe’s second full collection, operates as something of an extended freewheeling ars poetica– or a sort of one-man-anthology of various forms and tones. Moving from prose poem to list poem to a sonnet sequence to poems about poems, one called ‘Poem’, it induces a pleasurable vertigo. McCabe here side-steps ‘voice’, offering instead different and competing ways of speaking in poems. The whole project seems underwritten by the defining text of the British Poetry Revival, Donald M Allen’s 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry. This book became a dividing line in Britain between those more and those less interested in an American avant-garde that emphasized a renewed commitment to the free verse of William Carlos Williams, composition by open field, the abstract lyricism of an Ashbery or the sociopolitical engagement of a Ginsberg. McCabe’s Zeppelinslifts off from all these options, empowered to zip across the Atlantic and be back in time for tea.

McCabe’s collection has poetic homage and history hardwired into its system. Poem after poem calls out to key non-mainstream poets from the UK and America (and France). ‘A Diary Entry’ offers these lines:

On the bus towards the Strand I am reading Dorn
– how he retwines what Twain left behind –
and think there must be some quick route through English
to American poetry, a terminus that ends with rap.

McCabe’s poetry is quick to engage with the intersection between rap (in the sense that Kerouac used it too) and other forms of popular music. He operates, in ‘Good Friday’, with the swagger and energy of a young O’Hara, his credo ‘Go eachway in ink on the next good thing you say’. While politically he may share Adorno’s suspicion of the culture industry, McCabe, born in the shadow of The Beatles, knows that music writes in black ink. In the collection’s funniest poem, ‘101 Differences Between Poetry And Popular Music’, he writes:

If you want to read something that justifies the speed, energy, violence, contradictions and innovations of popular music then you read the prose of Paul Morley. If you want to read something that justifies the speed, energy, violence, contradictions and innovations of contemporary poetry then you read the prose of Andrew Duncan. Paul Morley appears on Newsnight Review, Andrew Duncan doesn’t.

Not everything that is violent is justified in McCabe’s world. For, if two of the main themes of Zeppelinsare pop culture and innovative poetics, the third is how both of these cope with the age’s political entanglements. McCabe offers the poem as – at least potentially –political. In ‘Axis Is’, the aftermath of the 7 July London bombings is put into shocking context with the last three lines:

at the hub of news & content
page 110 said
Blasts Won’t Shake UK Economy.

In ‘Abu Ghraib’, on a facing page, we are given an unnerving list – including the ‘body as party game’ and ‘the body as business’. Within the body of many of McCabe’s poems, including the title poem and several that dare to be ‘sentimental’, the pleasures of the text and of the world seem to defy the powers that be, exuberantly. Reading ‘Seven Perspectives’, one thinks of Auden’s ‘We must love one another or die’:

6.
we put our face up close
to the viewer-scope
of each other’s lives
and look in detail,
put a pound of flesh
or risk a limb in the slot,
not wanting anyone else
to look
is what is exclusive
to love

It is not surprising then, to find that the last poem is ‘The Great Sprawling Love Poem’. For McCabe – as for The Clash – love songs can be political and political songs can be about love. The thing is to fight the law. In this significant, feisty and verbally adept book, McCabe is both a lover and a fighter.

Skoulding’s collection Remains of a Future City(a project to imagine various cities within poetic texts, often supported by theoretically resonant diction: body, tongue, language, history) reads like a ‘concept album’. Beyond the initial appearance of austerity of design lies a city of the mind that, in its openness to play and exploration, is moving, even beautiful. Remains of a Future City offers each poem as a new location, a ‘textual city’ of Borgesian possibility. It feels very European in the way the words pick through the layers, the rubble, of wars, of time, of a past in collision with desire for the new. One thinks of Heidegger’s exploration of how ‘poetically, man dwells’ or even Wallace Stevens attempting to furnish a world out of fiction. This is deep excavation and high building.

Many of the poems conjure houses or quarters, with their astonishing titles such as ‘The House That Is Irresistible to the Benighted Traveller’, ‘The House Through Which The Weather Passes’, ‘The Noble and Tragic Quarter’ and perhaps the book’s best short poem, ‘The House Where It Is Impossible Not To Fall In Love’.

These and other of the poems establish their design on the page by dynamic shape as much as sound. I was struck by resonant, sometimes surreal, moments in these poems: ‘The Sinister Quarter’ with its ‘street signs all pointing at each other’ or ‘Airport’, in which ‘money dissolves / in the exchange / I fly out of’ establish worlds that many contemporary poems would never conceive of.

The finest work in Skoulding’s collection is the poetic sequence ‘Columns’, consisting of five tall thin prose poem columns that play on their resemblance to both office towers and blocks of text in a newspaper. Here, the disrupted syntax moves across the line breaks, building a series of verbal ironies generated from the title, the form, and the content. The key lines may be ‘grammar turns in this silence’ or perhaps ‘no end and the dead only stop / shopping when they are dead’. I offer a few lines from the top of the fourth ‘column’:

daily on street corners this is
still the news shouting from
column inches in whatever
might be left of public space as
statues missing an arm here or
there a leg in such glorious
causes sing across the square he
maps the idle thoughts of her
journey she is a gateway to
marketing opportunities sun

In work like this, Skoulding is bringing fresh ways of thinking, and of making poems, to Britain.

My Love Has Fared Inlandis a horn of plenty. Even poems about loss, in McGuckian’s poetry of ravishing excess, are plentifully stocked. And this collection – supposedly autumnal – allows the reader to harvest the expected and unexpected symbols, images, things and words that have filled her work from the start: flowers, rain, angels, and lavender. I don’t for a moment pretend to ‘understand’ these poems – indeed, for me, their power emanates from their sheer willingness to drift away from the platform where most poems begin and end: intelligibility.

Curiously, since her work has been more or less non- mimetic, and borderline opaque, for decades, this collection begins with a quote from Santayana, as if she needed such a back-up now: ‘It is when sound abandons the servile function of signification, and develops itself freely as music, that it becomes thoroughly vital and its own excuse for being’. Donald Davie, in Articulate Energy, observed that ‘poetic syntax is like music when its function is to please us by the fidelity with which it follows a ‘form of thought’ through the poet’s mind, but without defining that thought’. All this is to say, it is likely that, whereas McGuckian’s poems very often resist the ‘what is this saying?’ test, her broader aesthetic is very much embedded within a major tradition, one which many poets writing in English have dipped into, since Swinburne. At times, in this lush and moving collection, I was reminded of the grandeur of Dylan Thomas and, at times, the strange and utterly original diction of Lynette Roberts. There is intelligence at work in this emotive, complex verbal layering.

I confess to having been initially entirely overwhelmed by a flood of luxuriant language, all so seamlessly deployed, whether private or public, that there is little diminishment in quality from poem to poem. Resisting this easy acquiescence to the unbroken delights of her words, however, I did note the poems that within their own marvellous constraints seem firmer and more wholly accomplished, equal to her best work in any earlier collection. A few are simply ravishing: ‘The Gold that is Worn by God’, ‘The Realm of Nothing Whatever’, ‘Starrinarosa’, ‘Broca’s Area’, ‘Birds, Women, Writing’, ‘The Good Housewife’, ‘South of Mars’ and ‘Tertulia’. Of these, ‘The Realm of Nothing Whatever’ is about as ‘good’ as a contemporary poem can become, within the frame of a lyrically abstract style that skirts the coasts of self-reference and overt stylishness, the realm sometimes called Ashberyan but which really needs to be opened to include McGuckian as her own master of such sailing; it opens this way:

The difference between things
that are really the same is called
Three in the Morning.

And, yes, this is poetry that works because like a newly dead ghost, it borders the pale between the empirical and the artificial (or unreal as it was once called), as in the exquisite ‘Starrinarosa’, which explores ‘an oddly courtly moment’ this way:

talking while dancing,
taking movement risks,
her face churned in the travel time
of his hand and arm: her shoulder
turned every colour of the rainbow.

The beauty here is that, while the dancing couple is only a metaphor, it is so vividly and accurately rendered as to become actualized separate from its other function in the poem; and this occurs throughout the collection, when images, similes, tropes and so on, succeed each other, marvellously, as in ‘Unsound Ship’ where:

without a beyond – as if in hospital
at the height of summer the bits
and pieces of evening have fallen.

It made me think of poor Rimbaud at the end and, while the poem moves on, my mind stays in the hospital, so perfectly is that moment achieved.

Then again, in her sonnet to commemorate Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Broca’s Area’, she ends the poem with a complete sentence that occupies its own line and, seemingly unlike almost any other line in this collection, stings with the grit of direct statement that once it is mulled over, begins to lead back to lines and phrases throughout, showing that there is iron within the velvet glove. Here is that vital line: ‘But he also went out by the slaughterhouses’.

Todd Swift’s Seaway: New and Selected Poems was recently published by Salmon Press. He has edited a selection of work by young British poets for the Manhattan Review.

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