Review: Don Paterson's Selected Poems

Review of Don Paterson's Selected Poems in The Guardian.

Review: Eoghan Walls' The Salt Harvest

Eoghan Walls’s piquant debut crams more than most into its 60-odd pages. Faithful to the gritty physicality of nature, what separates The Salt Harvest from many first collections is a willingness to look for the poetic in pretty much anything, an almost aureate diction, and a darkly exuberant style that at times borders on excess. The book moves from secular hymns to the sea’s unforgiving cycles – the poet praising “lumpfish snapping medusae through stalks in the biomass” – through sketches of home life’s little details (the yard “a damp offstage to the house” in “Thirteen Foot by Six”) to the sprawling otherness of airport terminals and visits from extraterrestrials. For the most part, it comes off. Favouring a loose, typically anapaestic meter shaped into couplets and tercets, Walls can serve up a plate of cockles and gesture towards its human cost just as he more openly handles human frailties: illness, environmental damage, a flood that finds “sandbags are useless”. “An Ethical Taxonomy of Cordyceps” is a bridge too far, but the vigour and reach of The Salt Harvest makes him a poet worth watching.

 

first published in The Guardian, Saturday 21 April 2012

The Dark Film

Review of Paul Farley's The Dark Film in The Guardian.

The Leash

photo artwork by Rich Jacques

The Leash


Snow ploughed high up on the pavements
and snow still drifting down,
us, wandering back from the valley at dusk
tired, slipping in bad shoes
and wrapped up in long winter coats,

remember bumping into that drunk
and his rabid, loose little dog?
I felt for that Staffie, all bloodshot eyes
and bark worse than its bite,
even as it sniffed out my petty fear

to start snapping and jumping at my side.
We laughed about it afterwards –
my skittering on ice as it leapt around –
but I swear its look of anger was
sadness, leashed tight to the here and now.



poem by Ben Wilkinson

Days and Nights in W12

Jack Robinson
DAYS AND NIGHTS IN W12
112pp. CB Editions. Paperback, £7.99
(with free p&p from the publisher's website)
978 0 95610 737 4

Jack Robinson's "ramble through the streets of London W12" (that postcode area otherwise known as Shepherd's Bush) is the sort of book which gets you writing a little review about the thing even though you've probably more urgent - I hesitate to say important - things to be doing. Mainly because it makes a real virtue of watching and waiting; it's the importance of being idle, but equally attentive to the weird, wonderful, mixed-up everyday metropolis that tends to pass us by as we hurry here, there and wherever. Each of Days and Nights hundred-odd pages features a black-and-white photo taken by Robinson, followed by a concise, thoughtful, often spot-on paragraph riffing on a chance scene, a snatch of conversation, an object, a character... anything that might grab the attention of our (almost) anonymous, alternative tour guide. Though as a critic quoted on the backcover says, you needn't really know W12, or even London, to enjoy the read; "it's about every urban space, including the one in your head." This isn't dry or wearyingly melancholic stuff, either. For every gentle lament or grim snap of wasteland/empty construction site, there's a reflection on lucky happenstance, moments of happiness (however fleeting) and people's resilience, and a fair few genuinely funny moments. Take a reflection on daydreaming and being "anywhere but here", in which the narrator makes his little confession: "I once sat for ten minutes in a car staying resolutely calm in front of a sign I read as DO NOT PANIC HERE, until I glanced in the wing mirror and saw the traffic warden approaching". Or modern life's frustrations condensed into the sort of moment surely anyone can relate to, accompanied by a snap of garden gnomes on "3 for 2" offer:

"It's raining, I'm hungover, I've just got a parking ticket and I live in a world that produces a surplus of garden gnomes but cannot manage to house and feed its most vulnerable inhabitants. Their ruddy cheeks, their dopey assumption of bogus folkloric wisdom ... Fortunately there are shovels available in the next aisle, for smashing them to bits."

Days and Nights in W12 swings pretty much effortlessly between the commonplace and the lesser-known telling fact; quietly offering its stories from the lives of others alongside imaginative, more idle speculations. I'd call it a collection of prose-poems but that'd be truly lazy: sure they're precise and atmospheric pieces, even lightly musical at times, but they have a disarming casualness, shifting tone, and beautiful throwaway quality that I reckon any kind of poem, prose or otherwise, would find quite difficult to match. It's a book that you can easily devour (as I did) in one sitting - perhaps with a packed lunch in a park on a warm, less-than-overcast day - but one you can come back to too, I'd wager. And of course, it gives the gift of leaving you that bit more attentive to your own patch - wandering past and thinking on that throwback of a phonebox, some graffitied bus-shelter advert, or the dapper old guy always walking his lively Jack Russell, same time each day - which is no bad thing at all.

Everything Changes But the Avant-Garde

from an interview with Michael Donaghy by Conor O'Callaghan, 1997

CO'C: On a topical point, Allen Ginsberg died recently. He was somebody who made a career out of opposition to mainstream poetry as embodied by Hecht and Wilbur. How do you value his work?

MD: It's possible now, in American schools, to take an exam on Allen Ginsberg and fail it. There's a market for being opposed to mainstream culture. I don't want to say anything about poor Ginsberg now that he's dead, but there was a time when he'd shock everybody at poetry readings by taking off his clothes and running around the stage. Towards the end of his life, he would sit there quietly in his tweed suit, while people would give lectures on his work. Early on he liked to give the impression that poems like Howl were written rapidly in a fever of Beat improv, when in fact they were carefully worked out in successive drafts. And I have no problem with any of this, my only problem is with the self-delusion involved when artists/writers/poets believe they are opposed to mainstream culture and they are just playing their part. That romantic idea, as it stands, began with advertising. 'Throw that away, and buy this. That is the old style, this is the new style.' That's consumerism. You can't be an oppositional poet unless you abandon the concept of the avant-garde.

interview excerpt from The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions,
a collection of prose by the late Michael Donaghy.

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