See Saw: a Series of Poems about Art, Adrian Buckner, Leafe Press, 2023, ISBN 9781739721350, £8.00
Postcards to Ma, Martin Stannard, Leafe Press, 2023, ISBN: 9781739721343, £6.00
The Indescribable Thrill of the Half-Volley, Tim Allen, Leafe Press, 2023, ISBN: 9781739721367, £8.00
A Book of Odes, Alan Baker, The Red Ceiling Press, 2023, £8.00
The Ars, John Goodby, The Red Ceiling Press, 2020, £6.00
So, Rise, John Goodby, The Red Ceiling Press, 2023, £8.00
Woman on the Run, Carla Sarett, Alien Buddha Press, 2023, ISBN: 979-8374597981, £9.02
Noise, Jordan Davis, above/ground press, 2023, ISBN: 9781774602393, $5.00
The Swing of Things, Nada Gordon, Subpress, 2022, $10.00
Greedy Man: Selected Poems, Buck Downs, Subpress, 2023, $10.00
It’s time to celebrate once again the power of the pamphlet, those small windows into a body of work that might otherwise pass us by. Along with small mags, these are the life blood of poetry. The last few weeks have been a bumper time for these small gems dropping through my letterbox, so here’s an extended roundup of the best of the crop. I’m painfully aware of the gender imbalance on display; in my defence, I rarely buy books to review, I’m dependent on what poets and publishers send me, and that includes to many women poets. There may be a vicious circle going on, with women thinking I prefer to review men, which isn’t the case. So, if you’re a woman poet or a publisher with women on your list, and you think the work would appeal to me, please get in touch.
The subtitle of Adrian Buckner’s pamphlet is slightly misleading on two scores. Firstly, the 24 short poems collected here are on individual works of art, mostly paintings, rather than ‘art’ in the abstract, which is, I think, a good thing. Secondly, I see them as being more of a set than a series, although I suppose it could be argued that as the artworks are presented in chronological order, from Giotto’s The Entry into Jerusalem from around 1305 to Fiona Rae’s 2012 I need gentle conversation, there is some element of seriality.
Interestingly, many of the poems connect or locate the paintings in the poet’s presence, as when Vermeer’s young woman attends a party in New York or Duchamp/R Mutt morphs into Rachel Mutt, who cleans ‘lavatories in an Institute of Higher Education/In the English Midlands’, or again when Gwen John’s young woman finds herself ‘Arrested in my personal pandemic/Of loneliness’.
Behind the surface flatness of Buckner’s language there lies a belief in the power of art to evoke the unknown, as in Rembrandt’s drawing A child being taught to walk, where, in just a few strokes, the artist evokes
The entire expression of a girl
With her back to you
The exact sweet note
Of her father’s beckoning persuasion
Buckner is at his best when noting how the boundaries between ‘reality’ and ‘art’ are blurred, as in this complete poem:
Dufy
The Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, 1928
All the leaves in Raoul’s tree
Are all the birds
About to fly
A few have fallen
On the Avenue du Bois
Where Ladies and Gentlemen know
The delicacy of Raoul’s hand
And have the good manners
Not to sit in his chairs
This set of poems are an ekphrastic delight.
The title of Martin Stannard’s Postcards to Ma is also potentially misleading if the reader expects a set of postcard poems. What we get instead is a single continuous narrative over 12 pages of long-lined verse detailing 13 days holiday by the sea, each day beginning with the sending of a postcard to the narrator’s Ma. In fact, after the first day, each day begins in the same way:
Crack of dawn Swam in
ocean Frolicked on sand Sent postcard to Ma
After which each day turns in to a Walter Mitty style fantasy in which the narrator displays full mastery of a different area of human activity each day: photography, medicine, self-understanding, philosophy, dance, literature, history, music, sport, painting, and gardening. The final day is one of social upheaval making it a good time to leave.
Each day contains a parenthetical sentence beginning ‘I have often wondered…’ and these are reflections on self-image and the perception of others: ‘I have often wondered if people see me the same way I see myself’; ‘I have often wondered if how people see me is how I really am.’; ‘I have often wondered where I belong.’ This anxiety about the nature of the self, embedded in fantasy narratives of over-achievement are the core of what Stannard is about. In a culture that seems obsessed with mundane notions of the extraordinary, the poem addresses the disconnect between expectation, perception, and self-knowledge. Inevitably, the outcome is frustrated disappointment, as in these lines from the end of the ‘dance’ day:
Fancied taking Mabel back to the hotel
Husband was waiting for her outside
Back to room alone
Slept like the only pencil in a pencil case
Which, of course, doesn’t dampen the narrator’s enthusiastic start to the next day. The final twist is the discovery that he lives with the ubiquitous Ma. Stannard’s engagement with popular culture is both funny and challenging, leaving the reader reflecting on the possibility that delusion is now a social and cultural norm.
The title of Tim Allen’s The Indescribable Thrill of the Half-Volley is both gloriously on and off topic. It’s not a book about football, indeed not a single ball is kicked, although one or two are thrown, but it does hover around the indescribable. The book consists of 97 four-line poems, in couplets, each numbered ant titles. The titles all consist of the word ‘invisible’ followed by a noun. Here’s number 25:
invisible politics
A simply dressed man clowning around
For no one in particular in a general street
The man goes home to paint his face
In the mirror the stillness of his world suspends all fear
How do you render the invisible visible in words? Obliquely and through suggestion, perhaps. The contrast between the man’s dress and behaviours evokes an image of politics as farce played out under a surface veneer of conventional blandness.
In many of the poems, the influence of Surrealism is evident, and some of the pieces almost read like automatic writing. In fact, the question, or problem, of language and meaning is addressed more-or-less directly in number 65:
invisible problem
If you insist on putting one work in front of another
At least try to resist their significance
Folded up dummy in chestnut brown suitcase
One word behind another enough to put you in your place
Of course, as a writer, putting one word in front of (or behind) another is precisely what Allen insists on doing, and a number of the poems here address the invisibility of poetry with wit and precision. There’s also a carefully constructed music at play here, as evident in the final poem of the set:
invisible image
Regaled by beggars in time-lapse profile
Badminton pigeons alarmed by the size of the knots
Pigeons play underarm beach-volleyball in the street
No particular street and no particular pigeon
The word ‘image’ in the title brings us back to poetry, but also invokes the world of marketing and promotion. The draining away of the particular in the second couplet tends to move us away from the former and towards the latter. The effect is reinforced by patterns of assonance and the alternation of two- and three-syllable feet that creates a halting rhythm, a hesitant movement across overlapping ideas. It’s a reminder that Allen is a poet in command of his craft whose experiments are never random, despite appearances, invisible or otherwise.
Alan Baker, who runs Leafe Press, is a poet in his own right, and his A Book of Odes from The Red Ceiling Press is not the first publication of his that I’ve reviewed. Before turning to the pamphlet, I want to take a moment to mention how attractive these Red Ceiling publications are. A6, with attractive and interesting covers, they make the best use of the space available through simple but effective design, and you can slip them into a pocket, which is admirable.
Baker’s pamphlet contains six named odes in which the human and natural worlds are set beside each other not as metaphor but as analogies that illuminate both spaces equally. This is evident from the very first page:
the birds on the wire
have nothing to tell us
yet migration routes
& wintering grounds
are both genetically
& traditionally determined
& dependent on social systems
[from ‘Ode to the Birds on the Wire’]
Migration, that staple of hysterical headlines and politicians on the make, saturates these odes, with Baker not afraid to draw on the public discourse to undermine it:
long queues
leading to the port
policy-restrictiveness
& “unwanted” immigration
bountiful seas
& shorelines
giving onto orchards
& wheat fields
illegal does not simply
mean illegal
[from ‘Ode to Every Blade of Grass’]
These lines may resonate with the reader who follows the news; the bountiful seas are as likely to yield up the corpses of dead migrants as they are to produce fish suppers, and the fruit remains unpicked and the wheat unharvested for lack of migrant workers. Meanwhile, people are declared ‘illegal’ for simply existing, with no regard for actual law. This is political poetry not just because it highlights political themes but because it interrogates the language that politics uses to create diversions form the real issues.
One of these being the ecological catastrophe that affects al the planet and drives the migratory disruption experienced by both birds and humans. In ‘Ode to Adaptive Capacity’, Baker takes a wry tour of what’s happening:
foreknowledge of fog
in which fish consider
the human legacy
& find it wanting
What Baker is doing in these poems is thinking through the idea that how we treat he planet and how we treat each other are not different things, that what we lack is ‘houses built/for sustenance & not for profit’, much like these odes are.
The afterword to John Goodby’s So, Rise tells us that the two pamphlets reviewed here along with his 2017 The No Breath (reviewed here) form a kind of trilogy, in retrospective. It also tells the reader that the three pamphlets consist of OuLiPo-style repurposing of existing poems by other poets. The acknowledgements reveal that the source for So, Rise is Solar Cruise by Claire Crowther. Sources for the other two pamphlets are not named; on balance I think this lack of information is preferable, less of a distraction.
The resulting poems have the texture of mosaics, not of words but of phrases. The result is a poetry that doesn’t engage with the reader so much as it challenges them while asking what are language, thought, poetry ‘without expression’:
Workers
We talk thoughts, we charge
across skies in this swaying ship of time
away from the carbon branch.
Whose thought rocks us home? We think
we think, and talk of a saver
water-earthed within hours, days, means, ends;
what skyscraper workers we are, leaves
blowing this walnut yard! We think thought
with a shell, arm power with energy,
but our work is no tree; travel is not
what crosses with the two planes on a mast.
This, from So, Rise is in a sense the quintessential Goodby poem. The language flirts with prose sense, and there is an underlying political tone, but any idea of simple cohesion is undermined at every turn. What does cohere is the sound. Despite the collage-like nature of the work, there is a very specific music that, I think, owes much to his immersion in Welsh poetry. The knotter weaving of alliteration and assonance binds ideas and images into a coherence beyond simple sense, creating meaning through sound. There is a flow of sound and syntax across line and stanza breaks that make sit almost impossible to quote anything shorter than an entire poem. Even the two words ‘without expression’ lifted above from the title poem of The Ars lost considerable weight out of context, so so here’s the poem in its entirety:
The Ars
The raw snow thawing dawns
could be his observatory
but he cannot imagine yet
tipped space, the red thirst
swaddled in dried-out hankering
for the improbable moccasin
dust or camp canals; without
expression his no-features,
his dream inscrutably feeds
on itself wrings pain bodies dry.
The afterword also mentions the circumstances surrounding the composition of the pamphlets, with The Ars coming in the aftermath of ‘seeing off a managerial lynch-mob’ and So, Rise after ‘getting a fairly serious illness fixed’. This is an interesting acknowledgement that the personal might influence the procedural, and this certainly seems to be the case. For instance, the final brief poem in the former celebrates a moment of release, the title being the Welsh for power:
Llu
Topical and loose, in the tilt.
The unthing possible is, has, topped.
To happen is finished and about to.
The syntax here mirrors, as I read it, a sense of struggle, of power encountering resistance, returning, and recovering, both finished and about to finish or restart; it reads like a fractured version of a lost Objectivist fragment.
So, Rise is permeated with images of illness and recovery, from the title onwards. Take, for example, this short poem:
Waste
I am sure I might not get over
our future, whispering bluely in
my middle head. Between one
hair and sickening stability, shoe-
footed though that is, the wrong floor’s
built right; but I am not would not.
The certain uncertainty of the opening line will be familiar to anyone who has experienced serious medical conditions, as is the closing sense of not being ‘built right’. Between these brackets, the poem unfolds a sense of stasis that can often be the ill person’s world. Here, clearly, the OuLiPoan meets the personal, and the result is a poetry that is both controlled and moving. This little trilogy is essential reading.
Carla Sarett is a poet whose work is new to me, and I’m very happy to have encountered it. This is where the pamphlet comes into its own, opening a window into a body of work that you aren’t previously aware of. At the heart of Woman on the Run are a number of poems that focus on the world of cine noir, especially a reimagining of the femme fatale role in the genre. In a poem that is at a tangent to this central concern, we find these lines that might act as a touchstone for the pamphlet,
women never learn, all of us say.
Women should know better.
…
We have heard about the ring in Florida.
That doesn’t mean it’s the only game.
We should check Washington, Oregon, California,
anywhere women are lonely and
everyone should know better.
[from ‘in a lonely place’]
This poem is putatively about gigolos who scam women, but the twist in the final line brings into focus Sarett’s view that exploitation is not down to the victim alone. This is brought into sharp relief in ‘post abortion interview’:
no there wasn’t much
pain
or it didn’t last.
no there wasn’t
shame
except I had
to ask a man for
money
& I counted it.
The reduction of relationships between women and men to the transactional, to the exchange of money and sex, is one strand running through Woman on the Run; it might even be what the woman is on the run from. This is somewhat confirmed by the title poem, which concerns a relationship’s ‘progress’ from seeking to finding to marriage to parenthood to the unstated, unexpected fleeing.
However, I don’t want to let this emphasis on the ‘about’ of these poems to distract from their other qualities. Sarett writes a quiet, undemonstrative verbal music.
Cigarettes and coffee
your lipstick-stained butt,
burning in his ashtray
a quarter to three
they lit up the dark.
What you used to call risk.
The alliterations are the most obvious elements of sound at play here, but there are assonances (cigarettes/lipstick/lit, coffee/three) that bind the lines together. These patterns of sound are as much part of the control Sarett exercises as are the semantic elements of the words she uses. There’ a real poet’s ear at work here.
A packet in the post from Jordan Davis brought three satisfyingly old-school pamphlets a while back. Some sheets of paper and a card cover folded in half and saddle-stitched, bringing me back to the early days of desktop publishing, with only the attractive full-colour covers and fonts that are neither Garamond nor Times New Roman indicating their recency. Interestingly, they are produced by two different publishers. And one of the beauties of saddle stitching is you can open the booklet out flat to type from it without damaging the spine. A small reviewer’s benefit.
Davis’ own Noise is published in Ottawa by Rob McLennan’s above/ground press. Davis is a New York poet, which is to say that he is a poet of hard surfaces, with the shades of Ashbery and O’Hara floating around somewhere beneath them, which is intended as praise; we all have our forebears. Where the comparison is most true is that everything you need to read a Davis poem is in the poem you’re reading.
In many of the poems here, Davis’ language reflects the somewhat random nature of reality as a source of delight:
The Ultimate Team Chart
Given how much of time pearls.
Now, take a walk from the subway
to your last place of residence.
The changes to the roster of local retail.
A couple you always noticed
with a new dog, facial scars.
The thick light of a humid day,
swelling of the river. Love the car
comparing subwoofers. I love
the givens of a neighborhood,
the opportunities (declined) to become jaded.
My art is what’s eating your shoes.
This is a kind of quantum Heraclitus; you both can and cannot enter the same neighbourhood twice, but what marks Davis out as a poet is that refusal to become jaded, an ability both to see and to articulate the extraordinary in the everyday, the aliveness of things. Which is not to deny an innate scepticism that also informs his work:
What separates us from the animals?
I’ll answer with the animals: a fence.
[from ‘Think Tank Girl’]
But then again you cannot celebrate the messy totality of the world without including the warts. It is this acceptance of complexity that drives these poems:
I keep thinking I have something
to show you, like noticing
what I was thinking when I wasn’t thinking
which was partly what you were saying,
something about happiness and sex and something
you wouldn’t think I would think, noticing
how quickly once around the park was becoming
sunrise flickering on the edge of your collar.
The interweaving of the personal and what, for want of a better word, we might call the philosophical, is made possible by the syntax and rhythm of the lines. In particular, the stop/start stress patterns frame the process of thinking through:
I keep thinking I have something
to show you, like noticing
what I was thinking when I wasn’t thinking
which was partly what you were saying
Of course, others may read differently, but however you parse it, the language of prosody, of metrical feet and regular patterns, is inadequate to the movement of these lines, with long runs of unstressed syllable bumping up against paired stresses. And his musical range is wide, as evident in these taut lines from ‘The Moon Outshined by Cigars’:
Two arcs joined at the ends
a thin scree. The sink
gills up Bromeliad
unabridged
Or these more relaxed, but no less intricately patterned, ones from ‘Periphrase’, one of the longer poems here:
People are like plants; I’m trying to get you to propagate,
But I can’t do it with just poetry –
And by the way unless you have a child nobody’s going to believe how beautiful I say you are.
But enough. He’s a poet. Go read him
The other two chapbooks in the packet are both from Subpress, which Davis runs, and feature two poets whose names, never mind works, are entirely new to me. Nada Gordon’s The Swing of Things is a single long poem effectively in two parts, 32 pages, or rather half pages, in stanzas, relatively short lines, mostly but by no means always tercets, and two pages of long lined text in which words, phrases and images from the preceding text are repurposed. In the half pages, the bottom half of the page sometimes blank, sometimes containing black and white illustrations by Gordon, the latter being more than a little reminiscent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.
The poem opens in the midst of the new normal chaos of 2020 America:
A normal pandemic day,
with normal mushrooms
and a brain coral tomb ornament.
Much of what follows seems to me to be concerned with the loss a secure sense of self that afflicted so many during the Trump/Covid years (there are references to ‘the little blond strongman and impeachment), a feeling of divorce from our own lives:
What might it actually mean
to live my life
as I want to live it?*
The asterisk refers to a footnote requestion ideas from the reader, a simple device that moves us from spectator to participant in the poem’s unfolding. A different sense of complicity emerges in these lines, with their echo of Eliot:
Daring to impeach the incunabula
of my built-in dream hamper
with their implication that the impeachable one is the product of the bystander poet’s imagination, that we somehow make our own nightmares real. On the facing page, the narrator once again appeals to the reader for engagement, help, to navigate those imaginings:
If I fall into the hole of this poem
will you pull me out?
Fortunately, Gordon is too adept a poet to fall into that hole, but she does draw the reader in to her world through the sheer exuberance of her words:
The damp blue nose of horror settles onto my bare shoulder like a
snail as I realise, while the shawm pipes so piquantly, that this
is exactly what it is to be…in the SWING of THINGS.
There is, I think, a certain bravado involved in publishing your Selected Poems as a pamphlet containing just 32 pages of poetry, but this is exactly what Buck Downs has done in Greedy Man. These are poems of serious humour, sometimes engaging with the literary tradition, as in ‘The Red Toyota’, which opens ‘so much/depends’, or this short poem:
Myself Contains Multitudes
and some
of these fuckers
have got to go
This has the effect of both deflating Whitman and Downs (and, if it comes to it, the reader). The same pointed fun is poked at society at large in other poems:
Petty Cash
when money
is missing
from the till
the #1 place
it is bound to be found
is in the boss’s pocket
At the back of all this is a sense of the limitations of language that is made explicit in ‘A Theory of Language with no Educational Value’, which opens ‘everything/ever said/doesn’t exist’, and like any poet who questions their medium, the question of the value of poetry and of the role of the poet is never far away:
I found a magic
vessel on the stone
beach and the liquor
there inside it I knew
could restore me
to what I had once
been and so I took
off the plastic lid
and poured it in
the water
Of course, this scepticism is expressed in carefully crafted verse, with the enjambments paving the way towards that final twist. This is typical of the pleasures of reading the poems selected here.
Elliptical Movements 
Comments are good, please leave one.