#LoveLikeBlood, Sascha A. Akhtar, Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019, ISBN: 9781912211524, £12.00
The Quick, Jessica Traynor, Dedalus Press, 2018, ISBN 9781910251454, €12.50 – €20.00
Siren, Kateri Lanthier, Véhicule Press, 2017, ISBN13: 9781550654660, CDN $17.95
Reference Points, Lee Duggan, Aquifer Books, 2017, ISBN 978-1-9998367-0-2, £9.00
Deep Inside that Rounded World, Shannon Carriger, Finishing Line Press, 2020, $14.99
Poems can be written about anything and everything; it’s not the subject matter, the ‘what’, that makes a test a poem, it’s the ‘how’. That I to say that poetry is an art, and that the making of art is, to a large extent, a matter of technique. Defining poetry is a thankless task, it’s probably enough to say that you know a poem when you see one, and that you know it by the effect it has on you. That effect is created by the way the poet uses the resources of language. The poems in Sascha Akhtar’s #LoveLikeBlood deploy a range of technical devices and approaches, from found text cut-up collages to post-internet language (as in the title, for example) to chant-like rhythms, to explore themes of love, alienation and politics. Her aesthetic is essentially punk with an overlay of the shamanistic, both tempered, to some degree at least, by her academic training.
Akhtar’s exploration of the boundaries of language often circles around repetition and variation in a narrow field that serves to expose the limitations of the medium:
Here are the combined memories
of two people. Here are the combined
memories. Here are the combined. Here
are the memories. Here is the memory.
Here is my memory of you, your memories
of me are different. I have no memory of your memories.
[from ‘Poems for Eliot’]
In a number of poems Akhtar directly addresses the ways in which the society in which she lives views her through a distorting lens of ethnicity, a distortion that leaves her alienated from both the mainstream of that society and the ‘Freedom Murderers’ that she is wrongly mistaken for.
Nor do I give a fuck – I am
Sick, so sick of your compromising
Ballistics, your pageantry of
Generalisations –
Squatting on street corners
Willing the rain to come
We punk atavistic going
widdershins
These are my people
Not you fuckers
[from ‘Freak Beach’]
This insistence on a self-created identity runs through the book.
Probably the most overtly ‘Punk’ poem here is ‘Texted Plein-Air Poem On Bond Street Spliced W/Communist Manifesto’ which visually replicates the texture of a 1970s zine by collaging text from the manifesto, shop signs, branded logos and fragments from sales materials. It’s arresting on first sight, but for me at least not entirely successful, largely because its target is a bit too much a fish in a barrel.
In contrast, a poem like ‘Saturday July 05’, with its meditation on the relationship between art and reality, language and the world, seem more achieved precisely because they are more open-ended, more interested in questions than answers:
I am writing about
clouds of the day before the
day before.
Memory clouds.
Clouds in retrospect.
I took photographs imagining
I would write about them
But a cloud in retrospect
Is not a cloud at all
Jessica Traynor’s work is more linguistically restrained than Akhtar’s and most of the shorter poems in The Quick fit snugly into what has become the dominant mode of contemporary Irish poetry, first person anecdotes in either the voice of the poet or a borrowed persona that cover a repeating range of topics: family and local history; the relationship between church and state in 20th century Ireland, especially in connection with the treatment of women and children; the numerous, murmurous voices of the dead (as opposed to the quick); moments of illumination based on Joycean epiphany; the politics of migration and displacement.
Traynor, who has a Masters in Creative Writing, is a literate and competent practitioner in these modes, and writes sharp imagistic observational poems of nature, too:
Search for them in the canopy,
among meadow grasses,you won’t spot them;
the thousands of beesthat unzip the air,
follow the day’s weft,that rip the silence like cloth,
tug the tiny hairs on skinwith their ghost music—
bees long dead, bees soon to die[from ‘Swarm’]
It is, however, in the two longer sequences ‘Witches’ and ‘A Modest Proposal’ that Traynor stretches her poetic muscles most. The latter is a kind of catalogue of subjects that Swift might turn his satirical eye to if he were alive now. The challenge the poet sets for herself here seems to encourage a broadening of approach, a willingness to experiment with language and register that is less apparent in the shorter poems. These lines from the section called ‘A Proposed Housing Algorithm’ serve as an example of Traynor’s satirising of voice:
For our purposes,
let us think of the country
as a small white box, and within it,millions of smaller boxes,
each with a dot of red
like the blood spot in an egg.
The ‘Witches’ sequence revisits much of the same ground as the shorter poems, with memories of childhood woven through statements around family and sexual politics. However, the larger canvas pushes the poet to take greater technical risks, and the result is the strongest writing in the book, particularly in the section ‘The Witches Demonstrate How Best to Catch a Rabbit’:
Wait until the poachers have it gutted, spitted, sizzling,
until they’re lulled by the patter of fat on the fire,
then creep out of the trees, careful that the moonlight
doesn’t catch the bowie blade you’ve greased and whetted.
Here the alliteration, assonance and balancing of long and short vowels build a pattern of language that sings what it says. I’d like to see Traynor pursue this mode and the longer, baggier forms that seem to encourage her to write like this.
Formally, Kateri Lanthier’s Siren is dominated by the ghazal. The book is divided into three sections, with the first and last consisting entirely of poems in that form, while several of the poems in the second section are also ghazals. More often than not, the strict rhyming rules of the Arabic and South Asian ghazal are ignored, but Lanthier takes to heart the idea that the couplets should be independent of each other but linked thematically. Indeed, mostly she builds the couplets from fragments of language that are independent of, but illuminate, each other:
You won’t end up on Easy Street if you wear that hair-of-the-dog shirt.
No amount of rehearsed apology will get you to Carnegie Hall.
We’re bittersweet? Then let me count the ways, I mean, the petals.
O let me plant my kisses all along your neck of the woods.
You say you’ll be my mirror…You’re more like my indoor plunge pool.
When I finally looked you in the eye, sorrow skipped a beat.
[from ‘Easy Street’]
This bringing together commonplace cliché and literary references that are so well known as to be clichés in themselves is characteristic of Lanthier’s approach, and the result is a mosaic poetry of shining surface reminiscent of, say, John Ashbery. She uses alliteration, assonance and a kind of hesitant rhythm with variation between long and short feet, stresses close together at one moment, further apart at the next, to considerable effect:
Our sugar-cookie house in crumbs,
gingerbread mattresses mouldering.
The bubble reputation bursts in our South Sea tank
where iridescent fish goggle, glum
at their view of grey bark, grisaille sky.
[from ‘Keeping Up’]
Traditionally, ghazals are love poems, and Lanthier writes perceptively of love in the modern world:
I’m not too cool to care, though. Nature and I have a lover’s quarrel.
I adopted the strut of the peacock and the nightingale’s nightgown.
After 15,000 texts, can we say we have a past?
My love for you is e-phemeral, elliptical, ekphrastic…
Love to me was cotton candy: spangle, collapse, tongue grit.
With you, it’s sadness scissored out. Lights on a suspension bridge.
Sport with me. I am the coin under the leftmost sliding cup.
Right, left, double-crossing…There. Now you’re in my pocket.
[from ‘The Coin Under the Leftmost Sliding Cup’]
The spaces between phrases enact the spaces between lovers and perceptions of love, spaces accentuated by the new technologies of language.
At the very centre of the book there’s a sequence of 27 haiku that provide a refreshing contrast to the richer fare of the longer poems. Here the sharp linguistic juxtapositions open out more immediately than they can in the larger structure of the ghazal:
Flawed Thaw
Magnolia buds
and I snowed over: my fave
annihilation
Siren is a tour-de-force, and as can happen with such bravura performances. the reader, this reader at least, reaches the end with a sense of something over, a vein of language exhausted. I may be wrong, but it will certainly be interesting to see where Lanthier goes next.
In Reference Points, Lee Duggan also plays with syntactical structures and writes about love, but technically her free verse style is a world removed from Lanthier’s tight structures, especially in the longer, open field, sequences that punctuate the book. Interestingly, Duggan has written about Olson’s Projective Verse and women poets. Hers is a poetry of place and body, of body in place.
It is also a poetry admirably short on metaphor, with a floating ‘I’ woven through it:
found alternative
to talk around
not my idea
took a phrase
and squeezed
hoped you’d notice
promise slick as
breaths that made it
bounce enunciation
edit your memory
to make mine
[from ‘flickers’]
The lines ‘took a phrase/and squeezed’ are a pretty good description of Duggan’s approach to writing, as exemplified in ‘roads home’, one of the best of the shorter poems here. A handful of words squeezed through a process of variation, the spaces as important as the marks on the page.
This is language almost drained of reference, a procedure that she also applies to the emptied precision of numbers:
8 is my central metaphor
controlling the wasteland
gold ink on a broken spine
break time to hold my head
wash dishes in a cave 5 7 9
flashes in consequence of 34
[from ‘axes’]
The effect is to make the reader stop and ponder, to construct meaning from the clues the poetry provides. Elsewhere, the movement of language is apparently more direct, as in this section from the poem/sequence ‘waiting’:
love is where you sometimes hold me
fuck is how you often love me
now is when you ought to fuck me
I am who you ought to hold
However, even here the adverbs and modals create a sense of the provisional, of meaning evading the grasp of the intellect. The sequence closes with a short section that might stand for Duggan’s approach:
lay warmth along the crisp sheeted sunsets
an intelligent composition of wordless sense
think twice and it’s spoken
Shannon Carriger’s work is at the other end of the formal spectrum to Duggan’s; the poems in Deep Inside that Rounded World are tight narrative structures build from coherent sentences. It’s the smallest publication under review here, a chapbook not a collection, and is fairly thematically coherent, too. The title poem points to the Genesis story of Sarah and, by extension, to a world of birth and death, beginnings and endings:
Sarah knew the value of waiting for ripeness,
the promise of texture and consistency buried
beneath the skin of a well-timed peach.
Not hers to bear, she watched Hagar’s belly,
heavy with fruit, the secret sweetness hidden
deep inside that rounded world.
This finds an echo in ‘Dissection’, a poem set in biology class that links birth and death overtly while stating the poet’s position as favouring life:
I have no interest in taking things apart,
no interest in where my green eyes came from
or why my father lost his hair so young.
Hands inside the dead shark, holding babies
that don’t belong, I see this is no lesson of
beginning. It feels too much like the end.
Poems about Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese ‘holdout’ soldier whose war only ended in 1972, the Biblical Delilah and Christine Keeler circle around similar thematic material. There’s sense of an individual voice emerging and influences being absorbed (Frost among others). At her best, Carragher writes with a vivid simplicity of diction that promises much, if she comes to take more risks in her writing, as in these lines from ‘A Dream For Seamus Heaney’:
In the dark, I walked
through briar and brickyard,
long hair down my back
in a thick red plait, my
fingers stained with
the juice of blackberries.
There’s a limpid musicality in these lines that pleases the ear.
Elliptical Movements 
Comments are good, please leave one.