Recent Reading April 2024: a Review

Wonder-rig, Lee Duggan, David Annwn, Nigel Bird, Knives Forks and Spoons Press (though I can’t find it on their website), 2024, ISBN: ‎978-1916590014, £14.40

Yeah, No, Jordan Davis, MadHat Press, 2023, ISBN-13: 978-1-952335-61-7, £17.00

Night Window, Ian Seed, Shearsman Books, 2024, ISBN: 9781848619135, £10.95

Cities Within Us, Peter Taylor, Guernica Editions, 2024, ISBN: 9781771838672, £12.00

Wonder-rig is an interesting collaboration, with texts by Lee Duggan and David Annwn (with no indication of who wrote what) and graphics by artist Nigel Bird. These take the form of concentric circles (with one instance of overlapping ones) surrounding a void, somewhat reminiscent of the Spirograph of childhood. A biographical note at the back tells the reader that many of these graphics are visual representations of the artist’s experience of the sound of a murmuration of starlings as heard from beneath. Having read the book before the note, my experience of them, in my graphic ignorance, was of the irises and pupils of enormous single eyes looking out at me, the book reading the reader.

This understanding of the visual element of the book sat comfortably beside the text as it hovered around ideas of perception, of how we see and understand the world through subjective filters in ‘snippets of attention’, and how the world views us equally subjectively.

cats read height
as dominance: crow stands
sycamore top

inner domestic transposed
to outer: planners see signs, seats
bus-stops as ‘street furniture’

Here, as throughout the book, flickering insight is sustained through patterns of sound; not just the sibilance that runs through the entire passage, but the threads of assonance ‘crow/transposed’, ‘sycamore/inner’ ‘cat/planner’ and so on.

The focus of concern fluctuates between the domestic ‘putting plate next to plate a zen occupation’, the political:

in doorway closed Mark w/crutches at his side & empty cup &shows his calf & foot
bruise mottling ‘you talk to me about
just
ice’

and the role of art in mediating the world, as in an extended passage on a public art installation in Welbeck on the site of a development on polluted land as a form of greenwashing:

how quick artists set off
on their ‘natural trip’ lyric
without the land –
or what they’re being used to conceal
or thought of
micro-lives already
killed in the building

Elsewhere, this sense of responsibility denied is exemplified by Tories on TV lying about the NHS and the ‘shadow education secretary/fluffing on-air/”plucking a finger” (figure) “out of the air”’ The full rhyme air/air underscoring the politician’s ineptitude.

And yet, this interesting book ends on a note of optimism:

    with precision place stone and shells

a clay bowl of green

         for new beginnings

    & what might be

And this sense of hope is buoyed by the patterns of sound, those long vowels (clay/green/be) bringing it all back home.

I started reading Jordan Davis’s Yeah, No for the first time at the end of what had been a long and busy day, thinking I’d dip my toes in and then leave it for the following evening. Some time later, I fell asleep having read the entire thing. When I reviewed his pamphlet Noise (ten of the poems from that pamphlet are reprinted here) last summer I wrote ‘he is a poet of hard surfaces … everything you need to read a Davis poem is in the poem you’re reading’. I find this to be even more true in this new book; that first read experience was of the mind skating over the surface of a world made of words, words that reflected what we call reality while transforming it.

Davis delights in language, in its incongruences and surprising congruences and takes a resultant pleasure in weaving puns, anagrams (and near anagrams) and other forms of visual and phonic echoing into his work. The easiest way to illustrate what I mean is by quoting one small poem in its entirety (it just happens to be the title poem for the collection):

Yeah, No

echolocate
the chocolate

Which is not to say that this poetry is hermetic; Davis attends to the world, to the world as surface, and reflects that attention in quicksilver language:

You

Yawn ink store four
o’clock
they say trick the sun
dogs
biting under the
picnic tables
one brown one white
and brown these
trash can lids you
see them on the needles
of gauges

There is a sense here, and across these poems, of language interrogating itself. How do we relate the process of sentence construction to the process of observing, and both of those to the process of understanding? In a sense, Davis’s answer is that we constantly revise and recover the how of the world as we speak it:

…and I’m these diagrams spoken
out about, the flowers of culture, and if
dignity means a lot to me so does linguistics.
So do? Let’s listen to the Finnish girls
as they correct our French. I like the way
you talk, omitting articles, like a Yiddish
girl.
(from ‘An Apparatus Through Which One Can View Any York’)

This passage pivots on that simple ‘So do?’, the language-using mind in constant search of accuracy, a precise use of the necessary apparatus in a world in which it is so frequently misused.

There’s an interesting balance here between the short poems if apparent instant gratification that soon turn out to be more complex than they seem, and the longer poems in which Davis gives himself more room to play seriously. One such is ‘A Little Gold, a Second Song’,  poem of 15 stanzas, 14 of which are seven lines long and on, the eleventh, 14 lines long. Here’s the sixth:

All that fever of being caught
That’s just the love of the world without you to listen
Music dreams of you
going so fast I have to go to the museum
Please write down the black spark glasses flying
breathing brick on brick with fires
complaining sunlight.

Here the sense unfolds through patterns of sound, like the assonances in dream/museum/please/breathing, or the multiple different phonemes represented by the grapheme ‘o’, ‘the love of the world without you to listen’ that finds resolution in the long-vowelled ‘go’. Here we have that most difficult to define beast, the poet’s ear, in harmonious action.

Turning to the final stanza, we see the complex simplicity evident in the shorter poems being deployed to discover a resolution to this larger canvas:

The water alone is comforting
My face on my hand
Fragile sky in the ugly city you see on tv
place on the knob a set of keys
that day begin
to sing a shaped poem
of the fall of the water and the light from the sky

There is a satisfaction to be found in these gestures that can only be experienced, never described, and this, I think, is one of the true ends of poetry. I ended my review of Noise like this: ‘But enough. He’s a poet. Go read him.’ I can’t think of a better way to end this one.

Ian Seed is also a poet of surfaces, but where Davis’s are adamantine, Seed’s are quietly shimmering maps of a world that moves to the inexorable logic of the dream while being apparently awake. Nevertheless, everything you need to know about each poem is right there on the page in front of you

FIRE

The only way to get the small child
to the street below was to carry him
in one arm and use my other
to let us both down
two curtains tied together

but by the time I got to the ground, the child
was no longer with me. Had I dropped him
or in my panic had I left him behind at the top?
Or had he made his own way, faster
and more agile than me?

Seed creates entirely convincing fictions first-person that turn out to be absurdly impossible (indeed, sometimes they start out that way), as in these opening sentences of ‘Senility’:

It was a clown’s unicycle without handlebars which I found myself riding down the country lane one summer morning. I couldn’t remember having ever ridden on before. A sheep on the lane let out a protesting baa.

Though all the poems in verse and prose here are stand-alone texts, there are threads and themes that run through them. The multivarious ‘I’ of the book finds itself in Paris and Italy frequently, he (it’s definitely male) teaches classes, or fails to, has sex, reads and writes, is the subject of theft, or thinks he is, and moves around a lot, by taxi, bus or train, to destinations that are unclear, or suddenly disconcertingly familiar:

Coda

I took the train all the way to the last station. The sailors in the same compartment were speaking a strange language and laughing. Further away, there was one who waved to me from a hill. I told myself I would come to know him in due course. A lifetime went by. I split into separate selves until I no longer knew who I was, or what I could say to make myself heard above the noise of weeping.

Here, as in so many other pieces in Night Window, we sense the ultimate thread that binds the book together, a sense of frustrated ambition, of never quite achieving. Seed’s great gift is in expressing self-doubt obliquely by charting a kind of existential self-doubt in worlds that are meaningfully meaningless. It’s a quietly impressive achievement.

Peter Taylor is another Canadian poet whose work is new to me.  Cities Within Us is a book in three parts, with distinct thematic concerns. The first, ‘Glyphs and Biographies’ has to do with lives, human and other, and the disintegrating world in which they are lived, as in these lines from ‘Abandonment of the Bees’:

Fearing experiments and autopsies
the workers—all women—revolted,
forcing drones with stingers or expulsion.
Remembering the ancient dances
and weary of choosing between
children and the golden sacrifice,
they convinced the Queen.

There’s a quality of active stillness in the writing in this section, especially in poems depicting the relationships between horses and riders:

the horse is restrained by the shy
syllables of a girl
mounting in slow motion
(from ‘Equus & Anima’)

The second section, which shares a title with he book as a whole, is concerned with urban realities and artifice, be it a celebration of the Chicago Picasso or a collection of glass flowers at Harvard. This contrast between the natural and urban worlds finds its clearest expression in ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Subway’, with its explicit reference to Wallace Stevens’ poem on human/nature interactions. Taylor’s poem, as the title indicates, focuses on people in as unnatural an environment as you might imagine, seeing the beneficial in our enforced anonymous intimacy:

Waves of us underground, rocking
in a mechanical lap, gliding under our lives,
resting, sliding, leaning into curves,
shuddering and returning
to the same graceful unison
of bodies.

After that opening laying out of terms, the poem moves through a series of observations until the closing lines, an image of proximate disassociation that is all too familiar:

While the lady beside me
sits and reads her cell phone,
as do I.

The third and final section, ‘Birth Craquelure’, deals with matters of birth and death; the birth of a daughter and the deaths of various family members. Taylor captures that sense pf nervous anticipation and frantic planning that constitutes the life of an expectant parent in a poem called ‘Like Babies’:

The gas in the car never falls
below half a tank. I rehearse
three routes to the hospital
and lie awake at night
thinking of traffic jams.

Each day the suitcase
gets heavier.

The limpid clarity of the writing here represents Taylor at his best, as do these lines from ‘This is Stephen’, a poem marking the passing of a brother which capture the sad incongruities that can surround death:

Coroner in evening dress,
a piece of confetti on his collar,
instructs the police
to drive my sister and me
over to tell
your wife and children.

And so, my education in contemporary Canadian poetry continues. I’m struck by the fact that all the poets from there that have sent me work to review are men. If any Canadian women poets happen on this review, I’d love to set the balance straight.