by Kate Noakes on June 7, 2010
A review of Smithereens by Jocelyn Page, tall-lighthouse, 2010, £5
Selected American icons sing from these debut pages: a woodsman fashions a bowl for his lover, a mall shopper provides the phone number of a long lost school friend, evangelical worshippers give praise in a sports hall, and a Salem witch is ducked and hanged as Page writes her way to the final poem in rainy London, her present home.
Her anti-love poems are rightly cynical, as her love poems are tender. A pufferfish is an exciting image for nagging jealousy in a poem about seeing an ex-lover. It is ‘small, ready & all about the poison’. Our love explains love as ‘solid as a rock/ yeah – like pumice’. The love-making in Three Times from Three Different Angles always ends in tears. Between Them uses the periodic table as an extended metaphor for a loving relationship: ‘We haven’t mentioned oxygen, he said, covering her mouth’.
Page’s style is relatively unadorned, but with interesting similes: ‘purled like a whippoorwill’, ‘purred like an orgy of bees’ (Overcomer’s Assembly) and is only spoiled when she lapses into the scatological: ‘smear-ass my way off the bed’ (Versuvio’s).
The title of the collection comes from the poem Magnum Opus on futility; the impossibility of a snowball exploding matter. There are many poems here to explode the imagination.
by Jon Andriessen on June 7, 2010
Review of mainstream love hotel by Todd Swift (tall-lighthouse) £8
Having been extensively published in his native Canada, mainstream love hotel is Todd Swift’s first British collection of poetry, but it certainly won’t be his last.
This is a generous set of poems in every way; from its multi-styled forms to its eclectic subject matter, Swift offers up a significant depth of artistry and material. Although this can sometimes feel like a study in poetic technique, the end result is a gratifying mix of voices and places, both real and somewhere spaced around the ether:
‘This morning the mist contained mountains.
I lay beside the window, penetrated
by a stillness, while she showered’.
Half rhyme, sight rhyme and full rhyme mingle together confidently throughout the collection with an often playful respect:
‘By visiting here I relive
each and every unsubstantial dive
into the water of my past
that old age drinks as if its last.’
Truisms sit side-by-side with dreamy flights of fancy in a charming mix of realism and romance, as with the opening poem, Mirror, where he reflects; ‘The sister of knowing is making.’
The language is characteristically economic and at times pleasantly free of overly figurative expressions, instead leaving the poems themselves to speak in extended metaphors.
The pop-culture of cinema – Spiderman 2 – sits comfortably alongside the more academic pursuits involving Al Alvarez and I.A. Richards, whilst never losing sight of the collection’s Freudian inspiration in poems like Dream Father.
In the end we are left to consider the dreamier aspects of our consciousness through the sometimes banal reality of our surroundings. For Swift, people and places become one tightly wrapped parcel, posted on a magical journey of the mind. And that is a nice thing to behold.
by Kate Noakes on May 25, 2010
A review of Mulfran Miniatures 1-4,
Mulfran, 2010, £3.95 each
An illustration from Work and Food by Moira Coupe
Mulfran Press, from Cardiff, in addition to publishing some fine individual volumes of verse (see the forthcoming review of Lesley Saunders’ No Doves in the first print edition of Ellipsis), has produced a series of miniatures. These are small groups of poems or sequences and each pocket-sized book is beautifully illustrated by different artists.
1 is The Sychbant by Roy Morgans (illustrated by Marion Kenning) and is a sequence of Italian sonnets charting a day’s meditative journey across the landscape of South Wales following the title river. There is some lovely use of language here: ‘the quiet company of stones’, a frog is ‘an obese green god’, the river is a snake, and spruce and larches are ‘squadrons’ and ‘columns’ to the walker’s march.
2 is Work & Food by Peter Daniels (illustrated by Moira Coupe) comprises seven poems on these topics, packed with arresting images. Commuting: ‘The trains are full of people who also choose wakefulness’. An employee has a ‘smile (that) can undermine office morale for days’. A restaurant’s menus are worn down to ‘something opaque, like melted onyx’.
3 is The Hard Man by Malcolm Lewis (illustrated by Ceri Richards). This sequence of tough but tender poems about his soldier-collier-communist father’s final illness and death starts with an unsettling poem about smoking (Fags), presumably the source of his cancer. There’s no shying away from reality such as ‘his bent back’s ribcage rippling/ the virgin cloth he’ll soon be buried in’ (Getting Ready) and ‘his flesh starved, his spine, taking no weight,/ stretched like a cosmonaut’s in space’ (Comrade).
4 is My Shinji Noon by Maureen Jivani (illustrated by Jill Schoemann) is a sequence set in Imperial China, written from the point of view of one of the Emperor’s concubines to her lover the imperial artist Shinji Noon, who dies from rabies. So a classic tale of love and loss and is presumably invented. Jivani uses a clipped register generally without definitive articles and pronouns, which is appropriate here, as is imagery of the oppressive court:‘Emperor’s tongue speaks in gold/ our silks are forbidden to fade’.
As collaboration between different art practises these little volumes have much to recommend them.
