Proof, Peter Riley, Shearsman Books, 2023, ISBN 9781848618855, £6.50
Very Rare Poems Upon the Earth, Tim Allen, Aquifer, 2023, ISBN: 978-1-8383587-9-2, £11.00
Thin Slices, Caitlin Stobie, Verve Poetry Press, 2022, ISBN: 978 1 913917 20 3, £9.99
Accessioning, Charlotte Wetton, The Emma Press, 2023, ISBN: 9781915628138, £7.00
Small Increments, Aodán McCardle, Beir Bua Press, 2023, ISBN: 978-1914972737
Peter Riley’s sequence of 27 short poems opens with words “Proof that the world exists.” What is this proof? The irreducible figure of the refugee, that human in motion who surrounds us every day, invisible but insistent:
Proving
that the world is, but unstable: the Refugee’s story.
The second poem introduces a counterpoint; birdsong. The birds are also migrants, and their song tells “the tale of the Refugee’s journey across Europe,/a sonorous black hole day after day”.
The birds and the figure of the Refugee are intimately interwoven in the poems that follow. We are reminded gently that the figure in the steel container is a dweller on the earth whose existence requires proof:
did he remember before he left to visit
the old holm oak up in the fields , to hold
its spiked leaf in his hands and listen
to what it said?
It’s not without significance, I think, that while the native oak is a symbol of Britain, the holm is viewed as an invasive species. A little later, birds, tree and the Refugee are drawn against a background of ongoing ecological catastrophe framed by the central concern of proof:
There may well be a world
but there is probably no future. Earth’s
moisture sucked into the blue sky,
lost rhymes fallen into dry ditches.
The last line in this extract draws us towards another central question; what is the role of poetry in the face of loss of hope? The answer, tentative as it is, is to hold on, to persist:
Thursday, market-day and again a bird sang.
across the canal, not a wren.
By Sunday there were three or four. Is this a turn
of the tide, is there a hope of something more
than a stray pheromone riding the breeze?
And we r reminded in other sections that we are all refugees in a world that, despite all its provisional flux, fully is. And that we must, against all the odds, sing:
Robin, fill your little lungs,
and blow your meaning over the fields
fortissimo for the new year.
Peter Riley is one of our great singers, and here he is, full fortissimo. We’re lucky to have him.
The title of Tim Allen’s Very Rare Poems Upon the Earth, a picture that is a collage and not really a picture at all, which may or may not be relevant to Allen’s book. Certainly relevant is the subtitle ‘128 Improvisations’. In one of a number of notes, Allen outlines what this means for him, effectively the constraint of a form plus the aesthetic intent to make poems combined with writing at speed with minimal revisions. The formal aspect consists of two eight-line stanzas per poem, the lines double spaced, and with liberal use of internal spacing in the long lines. Most of the time the spacing is visually random, but in some cases a run of lines use tabbing to produce columns across the page, the visual repetitions often augmented by syntactic ones:
agnostic thermals you nique a gnostic
clique thermals you nique a dog club
footed thermals you knit a bulkhead
of thermals you delice the dog
Repetition and variation; the essence of music. This extract also gives some sense of the wordplay and use of splitting words that typify the work here. The speed of improvisation allows us to see the play of a mind through words, through associations of sound and/or sense that, along with the use of space, are the organising structures of these poems, “word play thurible no/bigger than a thimble that’s as big as a turbine egg box sound proofing pig”.
Phrases and ideas recur, there are frequent allusions to popular songs, TV and film, and poetry, politics and autobiographical material. Vivid images emerge from the flow of words, like moments of illumination “to the fleet footed butterfly”. However, in the end, the question of what these poems upon the earth are about is not important. Archibald MacLeish famously wrote that “A poem should not mean/But be” and the critics are still trying to work out what that means. Allen’s poems here do not mean, they happen, they recognise that “reality is at the/rear of life”. They are, to quote again, the work of a
poet in residence waiting for you when you get home
Most of all, they are enormously entertaining.
Turning to Caitlin Stobie’ Thin Slices after Allen’s book is a move to a very different poetic world. These are poems that are quite definitely ‘about’. Many of them deal with specifically female experiences, while others are concerned with matters ecological and/or political, with a deal of overlap. Stobie is an Irish South African poet who s based in the UK, and while here Irishness is absent, both other locations inform the work. She can be formally inventive, often using parallel columns of text that can be read multidirectionally or using vispo techniques. One poem, ‘Bilayer’ is a palindrome by word, not letter, centre aligned to create a two-part form that reflects the organic nature of the ‘thing made lone’ the poem reflects on.
More strikingly original is Stobie’ vivid use of language, as in this section from ‘Five Ways of Looking at a Period’:
II
Peach’s pit-flesh.
Cherryburst anemone.
Pomegranate plasma.
Beet-cloaked clover.
Hibiscus nimbus.
The surprising semantic juxtapositions and the sonic effects of alliteration, assonance and half rhyme combine to open up the precise experience of menstruation in ways that are illuminating, even to the male reader.
Equally interesting, but in quite a different way, is ‘Christmas Quartet’, a sequence of four poems that navigate the fraught territory of the family Yule, especially when one guest is vegan and concerned with ethical consumption (‘jesus is brandy cruelty-free). Beneath the humour, there is a serious poetic intent, and this is underscored by the visual form used. Each section is centre-aligned, culminating in a final section that becomes a Christmas tree in shape while the words reflect on the environmental impact of all that packaging and consumption. It’s a small tour de force.
There are moments when the writing is perhaps not so assured, as in the overtly political ‘W’, a response to Tony Harrison’s ‘V’:
Worse still are the racists, the EDL
with their own slogans of ‘nothing’ and ‘not’.
All lives matter, they say, but they fear hell
is other people talking, taking their lot.
There’s no doubt that the politics are sincere and admirable, but admirable sincerity doesn’t make poetry. The handling feels naïve and the versification a bit clumsy. However, the poem is a hiccup in an otherwise interesting and engaging first book. I’d like to close this short review with a really excellent short poem:
Birth Control Blues
Every time I take
The pill, I feel closer to
The day I’ll expire
At least they don’t say
‘Mother Time’; that too would be
A bad reminder.
The poems in Charlotte Wetton’s pamphlet Accessioning revolve around the activities of cataloguing, mapping, listing and recording with more than a passing recognition of why these ways of looking at the world ultimately fail to help us understand the world. In some instances, this can be because our collections can only tell us so much about the past:
colour decoration deduced
from patterns of erosion
renders
eyes, eyebrows,
bracelets, diadems.
It is unclear if they are hunters or warriors.
[from ‘What’s Left? Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens’]
Everything hinges on that “unclear”; despite our best intentions. the cataloguer’s science yields only provisional results. In which it resembles all science.
On other occasions, the proves of archiving misses the point entirely, as in the drawers of wedding cake slices on display in Ilfracombe Museum:
Cake should not be an epitaph. It is made to crumble on the tongue, dispersed to cousins and aunts in white napkins, shuck out of tins and off sideboards by the large hands of greedy husbands. Eggs and flour. You cannot carve monuments in cake. You cannot engrave details of contracts. It should not last.
[from Specimen Drawers’]
Wetton’s carefully modulated language recovers the dead cake and restores it to where it belongs, in the middle of lives lived, recovered from the archivist’s dead hands.
She is also aware of the tendency, facilitated by modern tech, to treat those lives as artifacts to be preserved:
I post photos up, curate
myself to myself.
Graffiti on a cactus.
The horses of the Madonna
all yelling in stereo.
[from ‘I Spit Cherry Stones into the Sea’]
The juxtapositions serve to situate the self-curation in a wider context of cultural and natural artifacts as a focus of self-awareness, a recognition that we risk treating ourselves as inappropriately preserved slices of cake.
The most affecting poem in the pamphlet is ‘Slave Lodge: Cape Town’, which opens:
they have made a column of names
perspex eight feet tall
The names are those of women slaves, the ultimate irony being that they are Afrikaners names, names given by their ‘owners’, apart from two ‘unnamed of Madagascar’ and ‘no name of Angola’. This attempt to memorialise them just perpetuates the burial of their identities as they really were, the irony being that he two unnamed women are closest to having their own identities. It’s the ultimate critique of the tendency to see lists as ends in themselves, a reminder that we need to look beyond out drive to categorise, to see the individual behind the specimen.
Aodán McCardle’s Small Increments is a collection of mostly untitled scores for performance, using visual and concrete poetry techniques that can, I think, be traced back to the work of Bob Cobbing and other Writers Forum poets. McCardle also shares many of the political concerns of those earlier writers, albeit in a different context, both temporal and geographical.
At the centre of these concerns is the question of language, and who owns and controls it:
Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice is no longer Your voice
The modulations here as you read aloud are such that the repetition of this single phrase becomes a kind of meditation on what it is both to have a voice and to lose it. This kind of repetition is used regularly throughout the book to bring ideas in and out of focus.
McArdle also uses a range of visual techniques, including overlapping blocks of text, often in different fonts or font weights, to interrupt the conventional reading process. In several of the texts, black blocks obscure parts of the text just as they would in redacted official documents. Again, the political undertow is clear. Unfortunately for the reviewer, it’s impossible to reproduce these effects here.
The longest singe text in the book opens:
words account for
approximately 7%
8% of human bodyweight
and goes on to treat language as a biological function as important as blood, both overlapping with the condition of modern capitalism:
the language of blood
what rhymes with blood
repeat
bloodmemes
repeat until the ears are filled with blood
repeat
repeat until everything is made of blood
citizens become hard working blood payers
wander around speaking without notes
vote for blood
This incantatory passage follows on from and expands on a more distanced exposition on the previous page:
Blood is the practice and theory of influencing other people, it is the study and practice of the distribution of power and resources within a given community.
This sense of language as both organic and exploitative is integral to the process of defamiliarisation that McArdle finds necessary so as to render language usable for the creation of song, however we define that word:
sing song sing song
today the howls are human and
the wind outside is ashamed
sing
Small Increments is unlike almost any other poetry being produced in Ireland today. Sadly, Beir Bua Press no longer exists and it’s not possible to buy there books online, unless you hit lucky. But this book needs to be read. If you click the link on its title at the head of this review, you can email McArdle to see if he still has any copies for sale. I urge you to do so.
Elliptical Movements 
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