In the Coen Brothers’ movie Barton Fink, there’s a moment when a shotgun-wielding John Goodman charges down a burning hotel corridor screaming: “Look upon me! I will show you the life of the mind!”

Loosely styled as a choose your own adventure story, I will show you the life of the mind (on prescription drugs) offers an increasingly bleak – and bleakly funny – account of the journey of an individual through the mental healthcare system. It’s a grim safari taking in the skin-deep kindness of doctors, and group therapy sessions at which no-one is attractive because ‘this is England’.

And Fowler’s perspective is soaked with England.

The world outside looks like your wurld inside. Your mind is becoming pebble dashed. It is folded within a findus crispy pancake. You try to stay off the television, and replace it with the internet. Work colleagues have noticed you are working better, they invite you for a drink. Did you hear Janine’s brother has cancer? The weather has been terrible for August.

What hope for a pebble-dashed mind, lashed by a bad summer? The world curdles; the spelling of the word itself curdles. The mind is enclosed inside a savoury snack, popular in the ‘80s. Today, the Findus brand is dead like a parent; its child continues to work though, rebranded now under the Bird’s Eye banner. We are valued always in terms of our productivity. The conversation turns inevitably toward sickness.

This depressive, discomfiting Englishness pervades the book. One section, extolling the benefits of benzodiazepines, appears to lift like a balloon out of the fog. That is, until it emerges that we are reading a comment lifted from an online article. Its positivity is quickly dismissed when we – through his use of the second person, Fowler makes the reader his protagonist throughout – realise that it was written by an American.

In this as in many other examples, I will show you the life of the mind... uses its downbeats to reveal a shadowed comedy.

 There are fake five quid notes in your fridge.
And the person you thought you loved, who has never loved you,
has bought you a soda stream machine.
You have a blue slush puppy in your hand.
Happy birthday.
Do you A, clean up
or B, burn the house down.

 Again, this leavening of darkness by the surgical insertion of an item from childhood. Humour in this text comes when you least expect it. You feel as if someone knows you truly, then they go and buy you a soda stream machine. You feel the sudden chill on the hand of a gaudy drink you didn’t realise you were holding. Is everything over now? Should you run like a deranged John Goodman down the burning corridors of your life? (I should say here that my wife bought me a soda stream last year as a gift. It was very welcome and I am very happy with it.)

Fowler foists uncertainty on us, and some of the most memorable passages of the book evoke the inescapable, unaccountable peril of an anxiety dream. 

Here we find ourselves on a bus. In keeping with the conventions of anxiety dreams, we are exposed to others: we perceive the vehicle’s interior as a theatre, filled with observers.  

When you shift your chair just a few centimetres from the middle of the stage, to better see the driver, it falls out beneath you. This in front of a full audience and with a series of glasses below. You are not embarrassed, as its quite spectacular.

You stand up and say ‘my arse is wet’, then some elderly person points out to you your leg had been cut and blood is streaked across your clothes. The glass cuts into your knee joint, you were lucky to not have slashed your wrist. A different older human being asks you, are you alright love? Yes you say, they’re taking effect but they’re not working proper.

 What is it that falls out beneath us? Fowler wields a great power in that small word, ‘it’, which opens in its lack of specificity to offer an envelope for whatever nightmarish spectacle we care to fold inside. Then the humiliation of not knowing the thing about ourselves that is most plain for others to see. Though we hope to hide them, do we walk around every day with our own psychic peculiarities on display, betrayed by the tics of our unconscious, like blood spatter on our clothes that only we can’t see? Yes, probably.

Fowler’s writing zeroes in on these zones of discomfort in the same way it zeroes in on comedy. This is literature as trepanation, as a venting of bad pressures. He includes a seemingly cut-and-pasted passage on the practice.

 There is a good reason why obelion trepanation is uncommon: it is very dangerous.

Headaches can be unbearably intense (Credit: Science Photo Library/Alamy)
Headaches can be unbearably intense (Credit: Science Photo Library/Alamy)

It appeared as if all of these people were trepanned while they were completely healthy

The remnants of the text’s previous life online remain. The repetition in this example has the effect of diminishing the impact of the words. They appear dispassionate, rote. We can’t see the image to which they relate. A dangerous practice, performed on healthy patients, or victims, is reduced to the yammering of web-voice and ghost-code.

Perhaps there is another reason for the inclusion of this passage. Trepanation does violence to the brain, with the intention of healing the mind. Yet throughout this book, the brain is hailed as master to the mind. There is an antagonism in this, and it comes to define the book. Like someone in an anxious thought-spiral, it is a book in conflict with itself. As reader/protagonist, we seek medical help, but see medicine as a kind of invasive violence. We are accused of ‘evoking kindness and love while savaging your enemies.’

 The book leans towards violence often, and Fowler’s writing is strong when it is at its most visceral.

This unfortunate man with mental health challenges at the bustop says what’s wrong with your eyes? You answer him with a tight lipped what? and then his eyes glint, softly, crouching over. He’s trying to keep them in. In his head. His eyes could virtually spill, the cutaneous fluid emerging, naturally, like a pimple squeezing itself, through the jelly lid.

These touches of horror are typical of the book in that they threaten to overspill boundaries. What appears stable and ordinary is often disturbed, fractured, framed in flames. The hotel corridor is on fire. John Goodman is coming at us with a shotgun.  But there is an undoubted tenderness here, too. As I mentioned, the book is written in second person, in what seems a reaching out toward the reader, a choice towards empathy.

For a choose your own adventure story that asks a lot of questions, I will show you the life of the mind... offers little in the way of resolution. But nevertheless, Fowler balances the hardness of his words with a cautious optimism.

 I sit with my patient and hold hands,
and think there’s no word for this moment.
Balanced, I see rats lying in wait and I think, I like rats.

Ultimately, ‘even the common and consistent nope began with a yes.’ At the beginning, even for those of us caught in the snares of anxiety and depression, ‘one atom said yes to another.’

 Very Authentic Person
Kat Sinclair
The 87 Press

Kat Sinclair’s engrossing debut, Very Authentic Person, published by the87press last year, could be subtitled: a portrait of the artist’s mind trying to escape itself. The escapism is not a tragedy, though. It is fascinating. The contemporary traits of our distractedness are sketched by Sinclair with verve and fun is often a predominant flavor in the poems. The book also feels rousingly youthful, and I have Sinclair’s own words to back up my characterization: ‘… so what the fuck, and I’m so young, and where’d you go / poorly cut avocado’ (‘Home for Wayward Spiders’). These lines typify much of the collection, with their canny self-mockery, plus a rowdiness that is conformity-resistant, well-oiled-adult-resistant.

Sometimes the defiant mode means honest (and, again, usually fun) disclosure about the speaker’s lack of a stable personality. To be a Very Authentic Person is a struggle. Maybe that Person is chimerical. In ‘Heirlooms’ this comes to the fore in a comic and deeply relatable way:

Walking down to the train station,

six ay em, sea in the distance,

see in the distance a boat

pretend to feel what I assume it is you’re supposed to feel

when you see a boat in the distance

on the distant sea

trip on the crub,

stumble for a couple of feet and the sea slips

from view and now I’m not sure of which

emotion to adopt, I tend to go with what’s most cinematic––

The ‘I’ here is like a costumer at a sentiment supermarket, choosing from pre-cooked reactions to the world. However, authenticity is present in the self-monitoring. Endearingly, the speaker confesses to copying and this, to a certain degree, authenticates what is taking place.

Other ephebic attributes crop up in Sinclair’s longer poems, including the four-part ‘Really Listening’. Below is an excerpt, with my commentary on each line in square brackets:

my thumb perpetually over the lens and

[‘perpetually’ suggests exaggeration and the tone is a gentle, self-mocking one––of the ‘oh, you know what I’m like’ kind. The enjambment––a technique which is used quite a bit throughout the collection––boosts the sense of fast-past chatter]

I am murky and loving

[this line is a jolt after the preceding one; the speaker jumps from describing how she messes up photos to her character. The link is possibly that she makes her photos murky because she is murky]

I am a request stop the slowing down excites me

[the paratactic grammar keeps the breathy style going. Thoughts run up against each other. Also, the speaker’s being playful]

so I’ll tweet about it later but for now

[this beautifully captures that bustling, planning portion of consciousness, which often crushes the poor, present-ness part]

it will be enough to sit on a bench wrong with you

[another lovely, wry, slightly saddening line, implying that much is wrong and that one must accept the fact by continuing to sit on public furniture with nameless, wrongly-loved others]

draw up plans in old lipstick

[the gist here is: we are making do with a situation which is a little mad and broken, using tools which are a little mad and broken. The protagonist is quixotic and therefore liberated––liberated, that is, from the strictures and curbs of workaday, grown-up society by reason of incompetence and kookiness]

make homogeneity history or

[this happens quite frequently throughout Sinclair’s book: a grand, revolutionary idea flashes for us momentarily, but only momentarily. Now you see a utopian impulse, now you see something superficial take its place]

make a playlist for a day not like this one

[the abolition of homogeneity and the plan to make a playlist––rubbing these two ideas together creates irreverent sparks. A ‘day not like this one’ is also masterly. The present moment is glanced at, but only as problem in need of a solution. In this case, the solution is a nonexistent occasion’s soundtrack]

These then are the principal forces of Very Authentic Person: rapidity, rebelliousness, quixotism, mindful un-mindfulness, a sensitivity to error. At times, however, the collection presents us with emotions which slow things down. For instance, in ‘Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper’, we come across this plaintive computer/gaming metaphor:

I want to drag the corners of my own life

Into the right hand half of the screen

So I can busy myself with the Pacman ghosts on the left

And never have to know you again

Sinclair can also get very political––in fresh, far-reaching ways. The narrator of ‘Home for Wayward Spiders’, imagining themself at a party in 2023, tells us they suppose what is going on around them

                         doesn’t quite matter

            Because I am no patron to linear progression

            or colonial timekeeping,

            heteropatriarchal lineage

            or my own pathologized medical potentiality […]

The area covered by these highfalutin, academic terms is large. And the speaker, branded a ‘Dyke’ earlier in the poem, hints that she/they are ready to junk everything denoted by such terms. This is thrilling. It’s the kind of skepticism that can lead to fabulously dark questions, like: what if everything I think I know is wrong? In Sinclair’s final poem, ‘Ode to Osmosis’, politics is again at the center, negotiated via symbols the virtual realm (as with ‘Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper’):

the Duolingo owl, who is capitalism

perfectly distilled and stupid

counting globules of care into tiny jewellery bags and

pulling the strings tight

to be opened when most needed,

which is always, which is never

so the globules grow stale.’

Our current economic setup depicted as an unwise, digital ‘owl’ trafficking in gemmy trick-promises sticks in the mind. Sinclair isn’t aggressively condemnatory and the lament about ‘globules of care’ growing stale feels real. The last stanza of the collection is climactically melancholic: a loved one may be dying of cancer. The poet handles this in a manner both haunting and uplifting, while the whole ragged celerity of the collection comes to rest with a pause that is insurgent:

            I just never thought you’d be another ghost on the Internet

            like ‘Glioman’[1], pun thief, with one introductory post and

we don’t know if he’s lazy, or tired, or dead

like here it is, collapsing at the end of a trial:

caesura the means of production.

[1] A glioma is a type of brain tumour.

Sharon Olds, Arias, Jonathan Cape. Nov 2019
Sharing Image ©2020 JR Korpa

In Late in the Day, Tessa Hadley writes that the main character Christine, whose friend has recently died, ‘understood how sex and death were both part of the mystery of entrances and exits, both opening onto this same strange place where they all belonged now’. The only way I can sum up Sharon Olds’ subject matter is that she tries to talk about almost everything that can be glimpsed from this ‘strange place’ everyone lives in. As her collections pile up over the years it begins to seem like she must remember every day of her life, as well as those of her parents and her children.

‘Where I Die’ opens with Olds watching or reading a ‘mystery’ when a dead man’s home being emptied out prompts her to see her own death. She imagines having designed her own life as an interlude when she was a ‘soul raptor, hovering in the / vestibule above existence’. At the poem’s close Olds develops this notion of agency, stating that she wants to have fun in death, ‘as if this whole thing were my / idea, a little comedy / between nothing and nothing’. The poem’s floating ‘raptor’ sees ‘the Pacific, and the Golden Gate, / and my parents’ roof’, as if each were intrinsic parts of a conception myth.

The notion of the speaker as formless observer allows for several moments where the walls fall away from concrete settings, revealing grander imagined landscapes. ‘Morning Aria, 6,000 Feet’ takes place in a dreamlike state where objects float into the frame and false impressions are formed. Here, the speaker transcends the domesticity of the hotel room setting by envisioning the ‘mountain’ source of the water before her:

The coffee filling the pot looks beautiful this morning,
made from mountain water,
then I realize I had forgotten to put any ground beans in,
and I start over. I am starting over.

In this case, though, the speaker comes up against hard reality; the flow of the extended sentence is stopped by a brief declarative.

Whether as small as this or as large as a birth, a death, or a break-up, Olds deals in moments of rupture. In ‘Where It Is Now’ Olds ponders as she sits on a train where, six years after divorce, ‘all that sex’ has gone. She searches for memories of it in the rushing landscape: it is not in ‘these wild grasses’ or ‘stored in tide pools’ / gardens’, but is, she decides, ‘nearby’. Olds is a rare writer who can provide satisfying conclusions to impossible problems: she decides that ‘the made love of a / life is the inner logic of a life, / the home fragrance’. Forgotten things are not gone but pressed under the weight of time, like sand into cliffs, forming landscapes we hardly notice. 

Her last collection was called Odes; this one suggests a series of pieces for a solo voice, though that doesn’t mean the perspective is singular. Arias opens with a series of poems addressing some of the darkest problems that haunt the American psyche: the president, police violence, the climate. The first poem is addressed to Trayvon Martin; others consider the atom bomb, her father’s whiteness, impending apocalypse. It’s almost as if Olds is purging all these topics – the kinds of things that can make it seem pointless, even insensitive, to be writing poetry – before diving into the rest of the collection. The crises that beset the world at large show up in the poems in small ways. In ‘Nevada City, California Aria’ the red light of a television’s power button is ‘the light which means: because we hate ourselves / we are igniting the earth’.

The arias are ordered alphabetically, an editorial construction with an appealing arbitrariness. This contrasts with the ordering of the three subsequent sections, in which poems dealing with the same events or ideas are loosely clustered together. The first set of elegies, all to her mother, is one of the most striking examples of this. Across successive poems – including one named ‘Where Is My Lady?’, and the next one ‘Where She Is Now’ – Olds revisits the same scenes, events, and thoughts. She associates her mother most vividly with the ocean, seeing her in various poems ‘inside / the sea, in pieces’, ‘pulled to the top / of many small waves’, and as ‘the sliding body of liquid / around me’. These pockets of sameness have surfaced in previous collections when Olds has looked back on giving birth, losing her virginity, or divorce. Her revisitations and rethinkings overlap over the course of this book, and over the course of multiple collections. As these clusters work gradually through traumatic or formative events, they seem less like repetitions and more like renewals. 

In ‘I Cannot Say I Did Not’ Olds delivers some of the broadest abstractions of the collection. Of life, she writes ‘nowhere in any / of it was there meaning’. She reflects on the reasons for her being born (‘beauty’, ‘money’, ‘desire’) and concludes: ‘I want to say that love / is the meaning, but I think that love may be / the means, what we ask with’. These broad musings on the uses and purposes of love recall the disjunctive questions of Alice Notley’s ‘This Fire’. Notley’s poem tries to locate and define an ‘it’ at the centre of living that would propel and justify everything: ‘This fire all there is . . . to find . . . I find it / You have to find it. It isn’t love, it’s what?’ 

Notley’s political verse and her writings on grief and family are an important contemporary correlate for Olds. Notley has been publishing poetry since the 70s; Olds since the 80s. But where Notley has veered increasingly into formal experiment, Olds’ poems over forty years have maintained the same format: a series of full sentences, lineated to stretch across ⅔ of the page, in one long stanza, usually an A5 page in length. Olds addresses this pattern in a wry, self-conscious moment: 

suddenly I see I do 
write poems in sentences – not broken into
lines, but wound around the caesura,
making a caduceus.

The line breaks, then, are not actually breaks, but functions of the poems’ shape. Being wound around the midpoint of the line, and forming a singular block of text, her long sentences don’t rely on silences or gaps to add gravity. 

In ‘Summer Night’, Louise Glück writes about her own poetry, and similarly explains its consistency over the years. Looking over her writing of lost love, unfulfilled desire, and missed opportunities – all ostensibly traditional, sentimental poetic subjects – she asks ‘Why should my poems not imitate my life?’ Glück makes a solid defence of the time-worn: ‘Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— / surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects [...] I hear them echo in my heart, disguised as convention’. Olds’ poems also prove certain ‘inexhaustible subjects’ to be endlessly generative. Neither of these poets are uninventive or traditional, but the restraint they show in some areas makes space for insights of novelistic scope. 

The poems in Arias are most compelling when they are both deeply specific and deeply general. In ‘Tory Dent Elegy, Big Sur’ comes one of the most arresting moments of the collection:

[...] When I was a 
child they would ask us sinners what the
fuck we would say when brought before God
on the last day – and now I know, by the
green chainmail needle, by the thread
of sexual fire, by the gray lion’s spots; by the
boulder’s head and the foam’s silk, I would
say that I knew you, and then I would sit Him
down and feed Him, forever, Black Milk. 

Olds has built a poetic lexicon in which the human body is an element of the natural world, and monuments and relics from history feel as present as our own houses. The materials she cites here are intangible and resolutely textured: the words seem familiar but are ultimately strange. ‘Black Milk’ sounds like a mythical substance, but also like a godlike object of address, or a name being signed off. Olds’ great skill is to do two opposite things at once, to zoom out as she zooms in, so a ‘blue-green’ vein on her mother’s leg is ‘her own / Nile, privately        owned’. Blazing through an almost terrifying string of big questions, these poems offer paths through certain ends and uncertain futures. 

Julieta Caldas is a freelance writer based in London. Her poems appear in Tentacular and in the anthology Make Me Money & Don’t Piss Me Off (SPAM Press, 2020). 

What does it mean to be ‘making worlds rather than finding them’ (Rorty), for a poem to go beyond acknowledgements of one’s own and instead to interrogate recurring / fractured / non-linear present(s) and small narratives, and how they feature in the world. What happens when a poem or poet concerned with world-building (or teardown) meets a reader concerned with the same.  Why might constraint in poetry further and where might it hinder possibilities for / of meaning, self-criticism? I worry here about univocality and then about dismissing univocality out of hand. I worry about not finding enough meaning and I worry about accumulating meaning(s) that are not my own. I think having poetry as a part of one’s own narrative / (reading of this (not the)) world is a possible solution. I address this un-thought-through position and take a look at Stet by Dora Malech.

We begin with the most bourgeois sounding title: ‘THEN READING    IN THE GARDEN’. In selecting this, I mislead you. An underlying and flawed assumption is that ‘the garden’ is ‘my garden’. Is this a projection of the critic’s own privilege, or a presumption of “confessionalism”, or both? So much so, I read the title dishonestly, before even reaching the first line. Then, the opening takes ownership of the iris, which? And given the initial presumptiveness is whichever no bad thing?

my iris, know                           I risk my now

for you.                                              for you,                                         (L1-2)

I quote these opening anagrams to demonstrate the subtlety of Malech’s repositioning. As, respectively, frontal and terminal clauses, each dedication (‘for you’) encounters a new potential direction. Malech prioritises coherence and affectation here, and yet it is a flick of the wrist – of magic and artifice – that subverts an expectation of flowers concretely listed as commodities (most poems churn flowers out) to introduce an abstract. I am left to think, already, what does reading, in a 24/7 economy (obsessed with GDP, accounting little for happiness) risk? Indeed, it can be observed that the thinking here is already under the terms of risks and dividends and the impositions of productive ends. I am beginning to see Stet is indeed expressive of the constraints imposed upon our lives and languages by large corporations. Malech’s poem is an entanglement in and with these structures in which we are always already entangled, but which become all the more pernicious when left unconscious.

That latest point of mine, is clearly indebted to OuLiPo, and OuLiPo, who so freely appropriate among themselves (and so disdain the appropriation of them by others), would have you consider Malech to be indebted also. I do not think this is the case, because what is pernicious in the OuLiPo movement is their imposition of nothing besides total obedience. Malech’s work rebels against obedience to a system but instead acknowledges these pernicious structures to recalibrate, even recover, language following their imposition on life and circumstance. An imposition that is breaking our planet, denoted by the rupture of Malech’s lacunae (the lacunae also connotes, I think, ever widening divisions in class and income caused by these same structures (read, big tech) underpinning daily life), which demarcate the original clause from the anagrammatic clause:

pure monster, no petal                      nor stem. rope   un-leapt

dares     show,                                                         re-shadows.                  (L12-13)

Here is an acute awareness that when light reveals the monster the petal is hidden and vice versa. Constraint in poetry draws focus (Harvey), and in looking in one direction another direction is failed, the writer fails it. Malech knots both (im)possibilities here. To show is to shadow, to shadow to show. Moreover, if read linearly, the poem is moved continually away from the natural world. Is monolithic architecture responsible for the re-shadowing depicted? Let us appreciate the extent to which this poem is concerned with its consequence:

sea, a word is my bond, but                    my bonds are outbid. was                 (L36)

This frontal caesura proliferates the meaning of ‘sea’ to mean ‘see’ and the word shows two sides of a coin, that a word can be meaningful to the speaker yet squashed by capitalist overtones and appropriation. The bluntness of ‘my bonds are outbid’ moves to despair. That as much as we are bonded to one another and to language, our promises are inf(l)ected by monetary bonds that of course matter most. As automation thunders on, and the stock of writers, teachers, publishers decreases, Malech evokes a wavering defiance, what inspires this strictly mathematical form, presumably as easy to automate as any?

                                                                      tunes for nothing

spent                                                                                                            (L28-29)

The answer, I think, is the expression of a wish to defeat and to exit a system hell-bent on destroying what is human, and, more than that, on destroying consequence itself. Inevitability, and the impossibility of escape, are to be resisted through awe, love, care :

i want whatever awe

can find me sore,                end from in case                 if rose can mend                 (L31-32)

 ‘If rose can mend’, an anagrammatic solution out of Malech’s limited resources, echoes the limited resources of the natural world and our limited capacity to affect change in light of the scale on which big oil is destroying the climate. Malech looks beyond middle class notions of personal ownership ‘not my more’ (L30) and anthropocentric claim to the planet. She looks beyond any one garden in THEN READING    IN THE GARDEN to acknowledge and dispel ‘all this stupid cold’ (L41) to remind us of where, urgently, we are and what is withered by fatalism and apathy.

*

I re-read and the divide between the anagrams suggests to me that the meaning is not as singularly tied to the eco-crisis as I might have thought. ‘If rose can mend’; ‘a word is my bond’; ‘my bonds are outbid’, imply an interpersonal turbulence too. This might not be unconnected to the eco-crisis, carbon costs and guilt (as well as monetary and time costs) can make relationships challenging, and so this new information, this re-reading amid an updated narrative casts doubt over my interpretation, or has the meanings proliferate, and alerts me to different meanings others hold and may in the future hold for the poem, meanings not discovered but assembled, torn-down, reassembled. Maybe a wrong reading can still be a good reading. The poem reminds me of my fallibility, whilst giving permission for re-reading and reconsidering poems and moments (political, personal, both or neither) that come to pass. Perhaps more broadly, permission to reassess priorities and methods of determining a people’s well-being, in times of world – not national ­– crisis.

 ‘THEN READING   IN THE GARDEN’ is published in Stet, available from Princeton University Press.

In recent years Sarah Crewe has built up an impressive back-catalogue of pamphlets including Aqua Rosa (Erbacce, 2012), flick invicta (Oystercatcher, 2013), sea witch (Leafe Press, 2013), flick/shift (Dock Road Press, 2016) urchin (Dancing Girl Press, 2016) and echolalia (Litmus, 2016). She also co-wrote, with Sophie Mayer, the excellent Signs of the Sistership (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2014) which is where I first encountered her work. I was therefore excited when floss, Crewe’s first full collection, was published by Aquifer in November 2018.

In floss the reader is invited to explore Liverpool, Crewe’s home city, and other places in the company of floss and flick. Who are floss and flick? The prose poem ‘anfield fleet maintenance’ includes an outline of both these characters and the major themes of the collection:

floss is a dog. imagined as rather like the black rabbit of inlé from watership down. another incarnation of my psychogeographical self is flick, a girl version of spring heeled jack. legendary menace. flick/slick, sleek and all aerial like. dogs in a maelstrom more visible than women. even dead dogs. both of these more palpable than dead women. most of all, dead poor women.

dead in my language as alternative to very. dead good. dead bad. dead old.

floss as flick/loss/fleeting. working class women: we learn early [dead right] that we come and go on pay rolls, registers, phone books, electoral rolls, archives. nobody is indispensable.

Crewe uses these ludic incarnations to break away from ordinary ways of perceiving and experiencing the modern city and reveal what has been neglected and oppressed. Psychogeography, the playful exploration and critique of urban environments, is key to this. Mainstream psychogeography has been dominated by the likes of Will Self and Iain Sinclair, but Crewe is more in the tradition of the psychogeographer Laura Oldfield Smith, author of Savage Messiah, who has written:

I think a lot of what is called psychogeography now is just middle-class men acting like colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and guarding their plot. I have spent the last twenty years walking around London and living here in a precarious fashion, I’ve had about fifty addresses. I think my understanding and negotiation of the city is very different to theirs.

Living in a ‘precarious fashion’ and its influence on how people understand and negotiate a city is a theme which runs through floss. Crewe, herself working class, explores what life in the city is like for those on the economic margins. This is a world where there are loans sharks ‘in low grade social waters   circling light bites&snacks’ (‘flick/pound café). There are three poems set at Ann Fowler’s, a women’s refuge in Liverpool, a place that is used locally as a threat: ‘women like you end up at Ann Fowler’s.’

The three Ann Fowler poems are dated 1922, 1968, and ‘2013&counting.’ Memory, place, and identity shape each other through the generations and the poems mix past and present to show this process at work. Throughout the book Crewe reveals a palimpsestic city where new buildings overlay old ones, the lives of new family members overlap with the lives of past family members, and ‘maps&faces’ are ‘blended’ (‘preface (portmanteau)’). Crewe’s working class ancestors are important characters in floss and are often summoned by name. Even the persona of floss the dog is part of the family, described as flick’s dad’s dad’s dead dog (‘preface (portmanteau)’). As ‘reflection (berwick street)’ puts it:

            a gene pool is not the universe

            it is: a split surface      glass cobwebs      a substructure

            beating a path    invisible

This is a path that Crewe follows in her psychogeographic explorations and makes visible. These ancestors lived lives that were insecure, vulnerable, and politically neglected.  floss acknowledges this suffering and hardship, but it is far from a mournful collection. The bad is tempered by fun and companionship. ‘flick/towbridge street’ celebrates the Bronte Youth and Community Centre in Liverpool as an ‘inner city safehouse’ where ‘secret handshakes,’ ‘daydreams’ and ‘collective aspiration’ are “made in L3”.

floss reminds me of the poetry of Geraldine Monk. This influence can be seen in the way Crewe’s poems play with sound associations, as ’floss’ slides into ‘flick’ into ‘loss’ into ‘fleeting’ (‘anfield fleet maintenance’), and in the use of puns, such as ‘housing (dis) association’ in ‘concentric’. Crewe and Monk share an interest in understanding places through the history of those who lived there. However, whereas Monk tends to explore a place and its history via well-known historical figures, such as the victims of the Pendle witch-trials in Interregnum and Mary, Queen of Scots in Escafeld Hangings, Crewe’s inclusion of her own ancestors and family history is more intimate. Here, the personal is political.

The title of ‘west curve (june 2017)’ refers to the month when at least 72 people died in Grenfell Tower. That avoidable tragedy shows that class oppression continues to be a deadly force. The poem demands an inclusive working class response: ‘we need an armada                     white working class  diminishes       all of us.’ The explicit inclusivity of this ‘we’ is important at a time when narratives about the neglect of the working class are exploited by the far right.

In ‘rat in the kitchen’ Crewe tenderly mocks her own project as she describes a series of encounters when out walking. This self-deprecation adds to the poignancy of her collection:

to the car park attendant: i have no car but this is my land. to the barmaid: this used to be slum housing…..my grandfather….her eyes glaze. to the gull at my feet: i see you

always do

Such acts of seeing are central to floss. Crewe’s psychogeographic poetry is an excellent exploration of the working class city that combines play with a serious political purpose, acknowledging the marginal, forgotten, and neglected in Liverpool and elsewhere.

Floss is available from Aquifer Press

Alison Graham reviews J.R. Carptenter

The cover of An Ocean of Static makes reference to the text’s “splinter and pulse”, it’s transcription “of strange noises and of phantom islands.” Certainly the collection’s reputation  precedes it – it secured Carpenter a place on the Forward Prize’s Highly Commended list this year. For a deeply experimental collection that not only transcribes past and present experiences of the North Atlantic, but also envisions the experiences of these experiences and jettisons text and voices across every page, it has achieved a welcome level of mainstream recognition.  

Carpenter is a digital writer and artist and from the very beginning of the text, aspects of programming are integrated; the book’s ‘Legend’ is written partly in code. It is startling – jarring, even – to see JavaScript transcribed onto paper and turned to poetry. Initially, I was wary of it making for a reading so juddering as to impede any cumulative effect of the sequence. I was glad to be proven wrong.

These poems offer a passage that is engaging in its uncomfortableness, flowing and thundering by turn, its beauty challenging as the North Atlantic itself. Carpenter has said she “hope[s] readers will feel the surge of all that strange language coursing under the pages”. Her ear is closely tuned to differentiations in sound, and to proceeding, as in

            “how far the land you first saw

            was then from you”

The letter “a” diffuses through these lines without repetition of sound. As the distance between speaker and land closes, the vowels tighten. This movement from long to short, from stretch to immediacy is achieved through dislocation of syntax. Ordinary grammar is secondary to a grammar founded in movement. At the core of An Ocean of Static is a concern with relational movements. Indeed, none of these poems happen univocally; all have at least two voices. The poet’s use of prepositions consolidates this. The closing lines of ‘Etheric Ocean’ are thick with grammatical manoeuvre, the speaker issuing

            “about wonder I what know you

            in between shores”

Granted, I felt that this use of hyperbaton needed something in addition to make it convincing, that I might follow the meaning. The text isolates and diminishes the reader, just as a body of saltwater with an area exceeding one hundred kilometres might. But Carpenter provides; these lines are held together by their music, by the blips of between and the whalesong of about wonder. In the hands of her speaker(s), the vowels become points of orientation in a text that has no solid ground.

So this ocean has not been completely drained of familiarity; more mainstream poeticisms also emerge. The music may be strange, but it is music; the beauty of

“pack of hump-backed slick black rocks”

undeniable. It is a demonstrative aesthetic – as the smooth rocks clack, so too does the language in its abrupt vowels and stoppering digraphs.

Just as technique might be recognisable, so too are the intertextual references. It was these that offered me a way through the text; without them, I might have gotten lost in the dialects of coding and oceanography of which I have little knowledge. Literary precedents for singing the sea in many voices thread through An Ocean of Static. ‘Once Upon a Tide’ incorporates Shakespeare’s The Tempest by way of quotations, the poem’s speaker (re)telling “Solemn music” and “a noise of hunters heard.” The speaker’s wry insistence that “by islands, I really mean paragraphs” (‘Ten Short Talks About Islands…’) shares in the trickiness of

“divers Spirits in shape of dogs

and hounds…”

And it was always noises, even a thousand twangling instruments on the isle; in this sea, the poet has assembled a chorus vying and harmonising in equal measure. It is executed with the most affect in ‘Notes on the Voyage of the Owl and the Girl’, for instance:

            “in this place we continued

            beware

            be where

            be here

            here be dragons”

This is a rupture that generates as much as it implodes. Letters are lost and in return, a dragon. In these glitches, the energy, the enormous energy, of these poems is at its clearest. In

“The shape of the same land

as it appears unto you”

language is experience. The line break creates a moment for me to fix the image of the land into my mind before I am informed what I thought was the land is one of many. I have a moment to fix the image of the land into my mind before I am shaken, my gaze moved downwards and I am informed that what I thought was the land is one of many possible lands. With emphasis on “land” and “you” I am made aware that land is particular, not universal. It is because I hold the land in my gaze that I cannot definitively hold it.

On duality, Carpenter notes that the poems “are intended to be read on the page and to serve as scripts for the live performance of a body of web-based works.” They move towards a duality of bodies – the flesh of them – and technology’s scope of (re)making. These are poetries of glitches, an experience exact to each occasion of reading. Truly it is an

“instrument

for trying of distances”

– a test of what and how we may know.

In the final poem, hierarchies of knowledge are ruptured.  The poet intersperses gathered and invoked knowledge; two voices speak in terms that are alternately melodic and eerie –  

“The time has come to talk of many things:…

…why the sea is boiling hot,

and whether pigs have wings.”

– and prosodic and empiric - “Numerous gigantic extinct quadrupeds.” Carpenter attends thoroughly to shifting voices like wind in their variability and consequence. One tributary of language is not inherently prioritised over the other; speculating language has as much to tell as describing language. These are permeable, clamouring voices, allowing the inflow and departure of ways of knowing. An Ocean of Static is a (re)vitalising permeability between physical – human – virtual phenomena. All of these are present, agitating and ebbing, on the page, directed exactingly over boundaries.

Hex £9.99
Jennie Farley
Indigo Dreams Publishing
66pp.
ISBN 978-1-910834-87-9

For the Macbeth witches, Harry Potter and every wielder of spells in between, the act of casting a hex on someone is ultimately about control. And control is a word that comes to mind repeatedly in this, Jennie Farley’s second collection with Indigo Dreams, not simply in connection with its subject matter, but, and more specifically, with how a poet controls their material, and our response to it.

To begin towards the end of the book – where, to my mind, some of Farley’s strongest poems lie – Grandma Jenkins is specifically about spells, and opens intriguingly, inviting the reader in – ‘Grandma Jenkins stirs her porridge the wrong way’. What follows is a beguiling short story in couplet disguise; the details are well observed: a little girl, passing an old lady on her way to school, notes that Grandma Jenkins’ ‘eyes / are sharp as tin’, has ‘baccy breath’ and cackles – and wonders ‘Would she put a spell on me?’ But the poem ends mystifyingly weakly: ‘I haven’t yet turned into a rat / or an owl, but I go to school another way.’ I had rather hoped that my imagination would be corralled somewhere more intriguing.

Knives follows a similar pattern, snaring the reader’s attention with its arresting opening line ‘You feel in control throwing knives at your Mum’, and keeping it with vivid detail – ‘The sharp blades / send chips of red paint flying around her’ as the speaker practises her circus act, disquietingly unobserved by the rest of the troupe. Farley still has you in her grip as we reach the penultimate couplet ‘An inch to the right, and I’d slice off / an earring’, but the final three lines: ‘Or I could aim for the bull’s eye - / the exact spot on her forehead / between the eyes’ didn’t quite nail it as I’d hoped. Control of the reader is such a subtle, fragile thing – the repetition of ‘eye(s)’ is unfortunate (‘aim for the bull’ might have worked better) and losing the unnecessary ‘on her forehead’ would have kept a tighter grip on my response.

A poet’s control over the reader can, of course, be achieved without overt drama, and elsewhere, Farley uses subtlety with deft grace. Tea Candles – another short story masquerading as a poem – describes ‘Maud’, ‘the kind / of person should keep a cat’, ‘who went about helping herself / to things in shops’, stacked them in a ‘tottering tower’ in her front room, and kept ‘sherry in tiny glasses / to welcome visitors who never came’. It’s a keenly observed portrait of an oddball stereotype that turns, in the final stanza, to movingly hint at what might have caused the unravelling:

… no one would ever see inside
the airing cupboard on the landing,
each shelf heaped with bootees,
knitted baby bonnets, plastic
rattles of pink and blue.

Farley writes well about the elderly, particularly so in Pearls – a sonnet, loosely speaking, about her parents, memory, and grief. ‘They met at a tea dance, perfectly matched’ she begins, and delicately captures the couple’s mutual devotion: ‘In snapshots / they are always turned to each other’, preparing us for what are some of the book’s most hauntingly memorable lines: ‘The day he died, she wept, Who will / be here now to fasten my pearls?’ It’s another accomplished narrative piece, ending, satisfyingly this time, on the anniversary of his death, with the mother, ‘a frail form in her old winter coat’ waltzing with her daughter among willows ‘to some ballroom music / only she can hear’.

So far, we have been in familiar, yet somehow ‘other’ worlds – more or less contemporary stories where magic hovers on the edge of the everyday. But a significant portion of Hex is taken up with the re-telling of old stories familiar because their protagonists – the likes of Salome, Jocasta, Penelope, Circe and Odysseus, Hera, Hyppolyta – are safety tucked away in our cultural store cupboard. The retellings are from the women’s point of view and, while it’s perhaps unfair, it’s also impossible not to compare them with Carol Ann Duffy’s witty, satirical and complex versions of some of the same women in The World’s Wife. In fact, Farley does a reasonable job of it – I particularly like Hera, and the nice ring of authenticity in the details of her narrative about husband Zeus. She tells us ‘For eighteen years I polished his helmet, / sewed on gold braid, served him oysters / cooked in cream, artichokes, figs…’, and I enjoyed the unexpected swipe of the contemporary in her fantasising about seducing Zeus’s son, a ‘tender boy’, who would be ‘leaning on the bridge where / oleanders sweep down to the bank, / pulling on a roll-up’. But I did wonder why Farley chose to write about these characters, and with this particular angle, especially when she has such a rich stock of her own stories to tell. Is it simply (and, if so, depressingly) that poetry fashion dictates that we should? It certainly came as no surprise to also find the recently much-mused-upon Mary Anning here too, making me wonder what the palaeontologist would have made of repeated re-excavation of the same site. Farley’s poem, Stone Child, Bone Child, sees her narrating the facts without adding much that is new, before seemingly running out of steam in tandem with her subject, ending flatly with ‘But I am old now, / and too tired to deal with miracles.’ It’s a pity, because a pair of witty lines mid-poem made me laugh out loud: In the beginning was the Word, / and the word was ichthyosaurus’. It would have been a different poem, for sure – and a more boldly idiosyncratic one – if this couplet had been the poem’s opening gambit.

A whimsical humour is one of Farley’s chief strengths. She has a great line in titles – I Knitted You a Halo, The Day I Rescued a Merman, Meeting Jesus on the Beach – and an eye for the quirky serves her well. Cannibal Stew, for example, opens humorously:

My missionary great-uncle found
a severed toe in his hot-pot, and
not wishing to offend the tribal chief,
or displease God, he swallowed it.

We are then entertained with details of how this experience changed him, made him ‘almost raunchy’, saw him watch the chieftain’s fifteen wives’ ‘swaying rumps’, count how many times each day he had an erection, and, back home, made him lace the Communion wine with rum. It’s another narrative, and a fabulous one, but ends with what seems to be such deliberate bathos – the final line is ‘He suffered / problems with his dentures’ – that we begin to wonder if all those other flat endings were somehow intentional, too. If that’s the case, I’m at a loss to know why.

Farley beguiles with her ability to transplant the surreal into the everyday, and the everyday into the unfamiliar, but ultimately, her control over her material, and of her readers, is inconsistent. She is a natural, empathetic and witty storyteller, and it would be interesting, perhaps, to see how some of the poems in this collection might hold up to the light if explored in greater length, as prose.

Dawn Gorman runs community arts events and collaborates widely, with work turned into art, films and a symphony. Her most recent pamphlet, This Meeting of Tracks, was published in the Pushcart Prize-nominated four-poet collection, Mend & Hone.

Soho, £10.99
Richard Scott
Faber Poetry, published 05/04/2018
88pp.
9780571338917

When approaching Soho, it was impossible not to have in mind Scott’s reputation. The collection has been shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, one of the Forward Prizes. Scott has gone from strength to strength in the world of contemporary British poetry – his poem ‘crocodile’ was selected for first prize in Poetry London’s 2017 competition, and in 2016 his pamphlet Wound won the Michael Marks Award. In light of all this, I approached the work with high expectations of craft and invention.

In Soho, the internet functions as a timeline along which many of these poems can be located. Indeed, the collection opens at a specified date (1983), when “queer subtext” is “nestled”. ‘Public Library 1983’ is impishly demonstrative, darting from innuendo (“rimming each delicate / stanza”) to the explicitness of “beards and thighs [in] fourgies”. It is a fitting opening, and there is triumph in the tension between a speaker who writes “COCK / in the margin” alone in public, and these same words appearing in a collection from a major publisher. Such is the difference made, in part, by the Internet.

What came before is the world expounded by ‘Public Toilets in Regent’s Park’, a primeval time marked by greasy diphthongs ‘sliming across the yellow groutings’, in which “information on venereal disease” is to be obtained by telephone. Elsewhere, the Internet marks the passing of time less joyously. The speaker in ‘cover-boys’ is breathless with shock and grief. Phrases run together and no pauses for breath are indicated in the lines detailing Raúl and José’s declines  – the fates of the titular men bombard the reader. The speaker, too, is positioned as passive observer; the archness in the poem’s close (“too much love or rather crystal”) suggest distance and futility. Indeed, the speaker makes himself known once, when asserting “the future” he wishes for the cover-boys.  

In ‘like to take long walks’, the speaker seeks out sex in “those pre-grindr days” – are these conditions preferable? Scott offers no easy answers. The poem deals in a very different sensuality, and at times appears devoid of it – the precise strategy of “X might mark the spot” informed by alliteration is miles apart from “jaw-locked / in a three-way french”, as is the geographical quality in “through industrial estates along the towpaths”. Instead, a devoted eroticism is offered by the speaker, a way of thinking in which both “yourself” and “a milk tooth” are suitable for giving away; in which “your stomach your semi” are a gold, precious “treasure map”. The poet inflects these minutiae with a shimmering beauty.

The online world also shapes aesthetic of Soho. The “♥”s of ‘four arias’, and the “:-(” referred to in ‘blue screen’ establish a permeability between the poems and cyberspace. The ♥ is an illustrative division of the poem’s four movements, ‘blue-screen’ takes :-( as a precise but unstable adjective. Inflection is to be inferred from context and the context is a poem bleating in its intonation – from “into the silent blue-screen blank and sad”, ringing with a music of little assonance, to the subtly lowing o in “programming and code run like teardrops”. In ‘Reportage’, it is the permeability within texts, and between texts and acts of violence that he discusses. First, in “poured petrol over that man”, the plosive emphasizing explosive violence, and the assonance which slows movement and reminds us of the considered nature of such a crime. It then surfaces variously as “tractor fuel”, “spit[]”, “saliva in my mouth”. The transfiguring of this image stands as a stunning representation of the insidiousness of bigotry; of how geographically distant brutalities are psychologically violent.

This is not the only appearance made by images of mob violence nesting in the body. The speaker in ‘you slug me and i’ is volatile, asking for the “unearth[ing] of my heart”, for the addressee to “beat the queer into me into me.” While performativity will likely be present in any collection oriented towards queerness, these recurring displays of violence and victim provoke reflection on public performances of vulnerability. What is achieved through the gory disclosure in ‘crocodile’? Certainly, a warning of the content to follow would not be unwarranted.  

Scott is aware of the problems in producing an exhibit of violence. This consideration is ongoing, and the forefront of the Admission sequence. ‘Permissions’ opens with the speaker “always writing my pamphlet of abuse poems”, akin to “a tramp pocketing bin-butts” for how he will “fuse’em together later”. The poem becomes a consideration of the lyric-I – “is the I you” a question especially pertinent in contemporary poetry and poetics. There is a bleak humour in the assertion in “please take your hand out of my trousers”, in that it issues from a speaker within the confines of a poem. It would seem that in Scott’s determination to unflinchingly poeticise the experiences of gay men, he has not only rejected respectability, but consideration for his readers at times.

‘museum’ is, for me, the standout poem of the collection. Setting out a history of queerness requires philology: a language of fragments to be mourned, gleaned, and loved in equal measure. Scattering is performed by the speaker through enjambment that cuts through the words themselves. “[D]is- / figurations” is itself disfigured. The interruption of the speaker’s “look- / ing” occurs not only through his “steps away” but also through the blinkering effect achieved by breaking a line mid-word. It is coinciding of emotions that drives the central metaphor, with the speaker lamenting to the statue that “your loneliness / which has been my / loneliness”. And a radical narrative at that, one that refuses to shy from its self-prescribed task of scribing the historical violence done to queer bodies and lives. Scott’s bluntness is invigorating. He sculpts a ferocious and proud resistance to those who would implore historical amnesia and shallow forgiveness. Envisaging a queer lineage in which artistic creation is birth, and “echo-/ing voices” are channelled medium-like; where (self-)love is idolatry, has a dazzling result.

Deborah Alma
Dirty Laundry
Nine Arches Press
£9.99  

If Deborah Alma’s name wasn’t on your radar before, then as editor of this year’s Saboteur Award-winning #MeToo anthology, highlighting the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault on women, it probably is now. A good time, then, for a debut collection – not only (pragmatically speaking) in terms of catching the wave, but also – and more importantly – for Alma to re-assert her own identity as a poet. But how do you follow such a landmark publication?

As statements of intent go, her book’s title is pretty clear: this is no shrinking violet of a collection – it will defiantly air its ‘dirty laundry’ in public. There are, as we might expect, poems which say #MeToo. In the bleak, gritty I Don’t Know Why, Alma draws cleverly on metaphor from the children’s rhyme There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly to tackle ‘the way he wants to be loved’ – in which his ‘bird, a small one’ is ‘pushed down shoved / between teeth over tongue stuffed / swallowed’. The speaker clings to scraps of rhyme woven through the lines – ‘chest’, ‘breast’; ‘less’, ‘mess’; ‘stayed’, ‘paid’ – adding to our sense of the situation’s relentlessness. She says: ‘I gave up hope and gentleness, / the pain became hard to ignore’, ending with a chilling echo of the children’s poem: ‘Perhaps I’ll die’.

There’s further victim paralysis in Dissociation, in which the speaker tells us ‘Whenever he shouted at me / his spittle would fly out’, but, as a coping strategy, she focuses on that spittle’s ‘perfect parabola’ trajectories, not the words, man or intent. In Still Life, meanwhile, a man is forced to face his own ‘ugly words / the cunts, the bastards, the bitches’ because, in a wonderfully surreal turn (and there is much surrealism in the collection), he imagines them ‘wriggling around her’, and, even after he’s tried to clear them away, he feels they’re ‘still alive’ inside the vacuum cleaner.

Alma’s use of fairy tales, fables and nursery rhymes gives a one-step-removed quality to some of the heavyweight content of the book – and a sense of possible escape. In Troll, which draws on The Three Billy Goats Gruff, we move from reality, where graffiti declares ‘Anwen Price is a slut’ to a made-up place – and gorgeous made-up language – ‘past the peckled rocks’, where ‘the bus dreeps to the distance’. Here, lullabied by rhyme, we find ‘sheep-bitten grass’ and ‘sleep’. Meanwhile, in The Magic Spell – more short story than poem – Alma offers her own, deeply satisfying modern-day fairy tale in which she passes on the spell that makes every man fall in love with her to a ‘bespectacled, shy of any notice’ girl on a train.

Another route to escape is defiance, and we find both that and, at times, Alma’s personal possession of violence. In the three-stanza, nursery-rhyme-style Borderline, she refuses to ‘walk on eggshells’, crunching through them in her Dr. Martens boots, and saying ‘No!’ when a Humpty Dumpty-esque terrorist asks her if she’ll put him ‘together again and again’. In a neat handover, the next page offers Then in June, which switches the nursery rhyme egg for a cuckoo’s. Here, the speaker weighs empathy for the hungry chick – ‘The cuckoo does not know itself to be a cuckoo / and is to be pitied’ – against its suffocating of her own brood. ‘I cannot stand it’ she says as the scales tip, and pushes the cuckoo ‘over the edge’.

That balancing act between compassion for, and reaction against, resurfaces in My Mother Moves into Adolescence, where a conversation with a needy elderly mother culminates in the older woman shattering the speaker’s ‘green mug with the spots from Woolworths’ – another tipping point, and one of many instances in the book of Alma’s startling emotional honesty:

Suddenly,
terribly, unbearably sad
that there is no Woolworths,
I tell her to go and never come back.

There is more about her mother in three poems focusing on clothes, combining early memories with details of her half-Indian heritage, those ‘sequins sewn into my childhood’ (Roshan), her sense of self as ‘half-caste council-estate bastard’ (Pink Pyjama Suit), and as her mother’s ‘little blonde doll’ (Mustard Cardigan). With its splinters of light and darkness, this is complex, intriguing material, leaving us wanting more.

Mothering is seen from an instinctive angle in connection with Alma’s affinity with the countryside. In One Mother, ‘Cheryl’ would rather return to her ‘council estate concrete’ than face the uncomfortable reality of ‘ewes calling for the lambs’. The empathy is direct: ‘the milk twitching at teats. / She can feel it, needing the pull and pull’ – an idea revisited in Cattle Lorry Lover, where sex in a lay-by on the A49 means ‘calves from their mothers / are forced to wait’, but her ‘breasts’ milk drips’ as she leaves.

Often, Alma’s weapon of choice is wit – I like in particular The Angel in the House – one of a plethora of house-based poems – where we see domestic angel turn devil against the man who nods at her tea and says ‘Didn’t you make me one?’ (Alma has a fine ear for such fragments of dialogue). Another tipping point, then, at which ‘She hangs up her wings / in the under-stairs cupboard’ – ‘the white feathers, after all, / keep blocking the filter in the hoover’ – and ‘takes up the three-pronged fork’.

The humour is sometimes ribald. The unbeatably bluntly titled I put a pen in my cunt once, although certainly set to relieve the monotony of your day, feels more a statement about taboo than something to stand up to poetic scrutiny, but The Head of the Church in Rome, about pickling ‘the cocks of cardinals / the penises of the popes’, spills wit with glorious irreverence.

Elsewhere, the chime of half-familiar religious phrases is cleverly used. In Sex We Sing, with its echo of ‘in God we trust’ suggests sex is not perhaps what we thought – it’s not about being ‘strong as blackbirds’ after all, but about us being ‘feather-brained’. This connects with Morning Song, where there’s a sense of release from hormone-driven battling – on a ‘church-belled morning’ we find an ‘ageing’ but bewitchingly contented woman luxuriating in bringing ‘back to bed a blue enamel / pot of hot coffee’, where ‘lazy eyed / the women I have been no longer fight their corners’.

Alma, generous in her objectivity, refuses to wallow, and this, together with the book’s heartbeat of resilience, make it an uplifting read. In the lovely final poem, She describes herself like this, she admits: ‘I have had many lovers / and I have been many times loved’, and leaves us with a memorable metaphor capturing an intoxicating sense of joy about a life well lived:

I am each of the processes of laundry,
but most, the unfolding in winter
of sheets –         a sudden punch
of trapped summer on white linen – heat.

Clean laundry, dirty laundry – whichever way you look at it, this is a bold and unapologetic parade of the moving, unsettling, shocking and irreverent. Expect to be taken repeatedly by surprise, and into complex territory far beyond #MeToo, to places of taboo and uncomfortable truths, to see woman as wounded, flawed, tough, voluptuous and, finally, healed.

Bio:

Dawn Gorman runs community arts events and collaborates widely, with work turned into art, films and a symphony. Her pamphlet This Meeting of Tracks was published in the Pushcart Prize-nominated four-poet Mend & Hone.