Rachael Boast
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again.
This week, John concludes that “Reading Boast’s Void Studies is a sensual, sensory joy. Like music, it has a simultaneity of effect and presents memory and desire with intoxicating immediacy and authenticity.”
Reading Rachael Boast’s Void Studies is an intense, rewarding experience. It’s best tackled in a few bursts – or even in a single reading – to best savour the restricted palette. To enjoy the connections between her archetypal images, it’s helpful to feel the musically rhythmic thrum of her images – doors, keys, moon and river – as they pulse from poem to poem.
Void Studies is divided into sections I and II, followed by ‘Poems of the Lost Poem’, a sonnet sequence coloured by the language of the previous sections. Boast’s notes point us to the late nineteenth century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who considered writing a collection entitled Études néantes, ‘written in the spirit of musical etudes and [which] would go beyond the temptation to convey any direct message’. Rimbaud’s name is a touchstone for the reader: in John Ashbery’s Preface to his translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, he writes of Rimbaud’s ‘crystalline jumble […] a disordered collection of magic lantern slides’ and this should help direct the reader down a relaxed, fruitful path. Sure, you’ll need to pay attention but you’re not missing something if you don’t ‘get’ it – you feel your way through poems like these. There’s nothing to ‘get’ as you watch sunlight playing across the surface of water – these poems are knocking on the door of the subconscious mind and the best thing to do is to relax.
Boast’s is a Protean, dreamlike, shape-shifting excess. Her form throughout these sections is the couplet – two parallel lines powering across the void of the white page – a fitting form for these meditations on the relationship between the physical and the transcendental.
‘Pleasant Thought for Morning’ opens with the sensual ‘Hiding your face in my neck’. Severed from the subject and main verb (‘I am’? or perhaps ‘You are’?) the poem feels disconnected and dreamlike. After the first two stanzas, as many of these poems do, Boast leaps into the abstract: ‘hiding in the space around / the space I have dressed you in // wings of hardened spirit.’ The perplexing double quality of space is present throughout the collection in the ‘parallel life’ of ‘The Glass-Hulled Boat’ and in the titles ‘Seeing Double’ and ‘Double Exposure’. Mirrors too reflect language through the collection. The wings of hardened spirit again evokes the French avant garde – this time Jean Cocteau’s ‘L’Ange Heurtebise’ (explicitly referenced in the section’s final poem, ‘Night of Echoes’). The poem resumes, ‘Angelot, a new day is here’. ‘Angelot’? A term of endearment, perhaps, – but again, a Protean image of instability as the Oxford English Dictionary lists it as, among other things, an instrument and a coin (both French and English, stamped with St Michael and the dragon). Boast’s is a sensual, transformational, transcendental poetry.
Section II opens with the ‘The Glass-Hulled Boat’, where the speaker is ‘Waking at lunchtime to a subdued sky / bemused by how the pivots of sleep // came loose’. The fulcrum is unstable – the dissolute hour of arousal and muted day points to a liminal world. The speaker thinks that she ‘saw you at the back / of the Tower Belle’, a physical enough instance of a pleasure cruiser operating in Bristol. However, the titular glass hull designates it a dream ship of drunkenness with its ‘splayed passengers’, where the poem’s ‘you’, its object, makes for the bar, towards ‘another vodka and tonic or any other /// see-through intoxicant’ – and again an image of transparency points to an altered reality.
The collection’s final section, ‘Poems of the Lost Poem’ reprise its themes and vocabulary, closing with the sonnet, ‘Coda: Lost Poem’. ‘Coda’ is another musical term in a decidedly musical collection. Reading Boast’s Void Studies is a sensual, sensory joy. Like music, it has a simultaneity of effect and presents memory and desire with intoxicating immediacy and authenticity.
Vahni Capildeo
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again and he concludes that: “Measures of Expatriation is a playful exploration of a wide gamut of ideas – home, ethnicity, identity, sexuality, history and literature jostle together and, where they rub, sparks fly.”
Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation opens with an Old English dedication, ‘Eadig bið se þe eaþmod leofaþ’ (Blessed is he who lives humbly), taken from the cold, salty exploration of isolation, ‘The Seafarer’, a poem which helps us to measure language and ideas against a thousand years of invasion, immigration and imperialism.
In some ways, Capildeo concludes that humanity is pretty much constant in nature. In ‘Inside the Gateway: 1970s Red Clogs With Side Buckle’, she describes the clog as ‘The forever shoe, which points homewards’. One might expect it to symbolise travel but this one is static, aligned like a compass needle. In the tenth section of ‘All Your Houses: Notebook Including a Return’, Capildeo offers another archetype of sea-bound exile as she quotes a line of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner:
“‘As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean’. A pleasure to be pressed between flat sea and flat sky into the two-dimensional glisten. A pleasure in the horizon as a lost line of pure waiting.”
Her speaker, musing on Coleridge and pressed flowers, transforms his image into something bigger than a becalmed ship – into a pressed preservation for posterity.
Yet, despite a formaldehyde timelessness, Measures of Expatriation also measures change. Another shoe poem, ‘Bad Marriage Shoes: Silver Ballet Slippers’, presents ‘The penitential mermaid shoes […] distressed silver ballet slippers with netted and criss-cross side details which would make the material seem to swish with the changes of light’. Here, marriage is an atonement, meted out in confessional and, à la Hans Christian Andersen, it is a painful, hobbling experience. The decorative aspects of the shoes adopt a sinister aspect as they tighten like an asphyxiating net. This motif recurs In ’The Poet Transformed into a Double Vodka’ from the nightmarish sequence ‘Inhuman Triumphs’ with ‘you, meantime, pouring out me / on the rocks. MAN DRINKS MERMAID / MISTAKING HER FOR LIQUOR!’ Yes, there’s a wicked dark humour in those icy rocks – but they’re also plain old stone, casting the poem’s subject as Andromeda – as objectified, fragile flesh for consumption.
Capildeo’s intertextuality extends beyond literary allusion. ‘Kassandra #memoryandtrauma #livingilionstyle’ references the Trojan prophetess, doomed never to be listened to in her own country but also points the reader to Twitter where a search on the hashtag, #livingilionstyle returns a single tweet by @PerdutaGente (Capildeo): ‘hold tight & think of delphi’ – a wry reworking of ‘Close your eyes and think of England’ – with all of the unpleasant baggage that this implies. Kassandra ends up very far from home as Agamemnon’s property. Twitter is no stranger to the trolling and degradation of women, as Mary Beard, among others, has experienced and Capildeo measures the fatal trajectory of such abuse:
Why listen? She’s privilege. Complication. Must be spoilt.
K.’s voice flares victim to her high-explosive hair; her thoughts
dismissable; cuntly, if you’re a man; peripheral.
Take sixty seconds to re-read each of the lines above.
That took ten minutes: half as long as my death
As the quote illustrates, the colour of Capildeo’s language pulls no punches but then again, nor can it. The collection maintains a dialogue with Shakespeare’s The Tempest (‘Handfast’ and ‘Sycorax Whoops’) and, as Caliban tells us, imprecations are the last refuge of the oppressed.
Measures of Expatriation is a playful exploration of a wide gamut of ideas – home, ethnicity, identity, sexuality, history and literature jostle together and, where they rub, sparks fly.
Ian Duhig
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again and he concludes on The Blind Road-Maker : “It’s a treat to read verse with this kind of agility, scale and sense of social purpose.”
Who does a society decide to memorialise and who does it shuffle to the margins of its history? Duhig’s titular blind road-maker, the remarkable Blind Jack Metcalf, was born blind but, nevertheless, worked as a successful musician, tour guide and, in later years, as a civil engineer. In The Blind Roadmaker, Duhig memorialises a range of figures: from Metcalf and the fifteenth century prophetess, Mother Shipton, both almost obliterated from history, to canonical figures like Laurence Sterne and William Langland.
In ‘The Ballad of Blind Jack Metcalf’, Duhig writes in that most proletarian of poetic forms: ballad – the form of the road as it brought news from place-to-place, to the ordinary and perhaps illiterate. Duhig describes Metcalf as ‘a soldier, smuggler, fiddler, guide’. That middle ‘fiddler’ disrupts the alliterative neatness of the list with a little jolt – another of Jack’s forays on the wrong side of the law, perhaps, but also a nod to an early position as a musician at the Queen’s Head, Harrogate. Without knowing his history, he can be misconstrued and Duhig helps us to enjoy this as we catch up on Wikipedia.
Here, as elsewhere in the collection, Duhig validates his subjects with cross-cultural comparisons, describing Metcalf as ‘our Daedalus of roads’. (In ‘Mother Shipton’ the prophetess is ‘our Yorkshire Sibyl’, and the first person plural pronoun adds a sense of proud collective ownership.) The ballad leaves the reader at the sit-by-me statue of Metcalf in Knaresborough where Jack’s ‘secret tale’s picked out in Braille / and what it says is that…’ It’s a great ending – the waywiser wheel (pedometer) beside him points to the homing circularity of our journeys and the poem’s circular structure too completes its own revolution but, rather beautifully, the ellipsis transforms into Braille, bringing the reader physically close to the statue.
The collection also engages with questions of aesthetics. ‘The Marbled Page’ considers a page from Sterne’s experimental novel, Tristram Shandy, unique to each copy, hand-marbled and which the eponymous hero describes as ‘the motly emblem of my work’. Duhig’s poem opens: ‘For Aristotle, marble’s motley / trapped gobs of first matter / from the moment of Creation / when Fortune mothered God’. Aristotle and marble locate the poem within a Classical context, pushing us, therefore, to read ‘gobs’ as a dialect word for mass, or lump. Marble, the building material of choice for the Classical world, is placed at the centre of creation and, for a moment, Duhig permits his reader to imagine Sterne located there too as the marbling begins to ‘multiply like spiral galaxies’ as ‘the author priest watches over / the reproduction of his design’. Again, Duhig’s economical writing is playful as, at one level, the author becomes the celebrant of a sacred rite and, of course, Sterne was a vicar. When he ‘looks away. / The book-maker clears his throat / and gobs into the marbling trough’ and why, we wonder, do we enjoy the whirls and whorls of marble, but not those of a well-cleared throat? High culture is taken down a peg or two as a nameless bystander weaves his DNA into literary history.
If you enjoy this collection, check out the Leeds poet and classicist, Tony Harrison. In his work, pop and high culture, rich and poor, the proletariat and their oppressors collide. These poems doff their cap. In ‘Blockbusters’ the ‘locals speak blank verse (says Harrison)’ and Duhig’s remarkable poem reminds us of Harrison’s ‘Durham’. It’s a treat to read verse with this kind of agility, scale and sense of social purpose.
J O Morgan
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again and he concludes on Interference Pattern: “J. O. Morgan’s Interference Pattern is an exquisite read and, although it is greater than the sum of its parts, its parts are, nevertheless, quite something.”
Interference Pattern offers vivid, physical experience, offset by oblique, figurative responses. Although the book comprises a collection of individual poems, many of which stand alone sensationally well, this is no collection. Morgan’s poems work together to create a powerful, provoking metaphysical experience.
‘The first duty…’ voiced by someone responsible for unlocking a public swimming pool, presents the memory of – or perhaps the myth of – the tragedy of two girls drowned during an illicit midnight swim. One of the speaker’s duties is to ‘uncover the pool where, I’m told, / two girls were drowned, though long before my time’. The qualifying phrase, ‘I’m told’, suggests even the speaker’s dubiousness but, regardless, the event casts its blood shadow. Yet, despite the continuing uncertainty of the speaker’s ‘This we may presume’, s/he is powerless to do anything other than to conjure the two drowned girls: ‘and I can’t help but wonder what may bob into existence / as I slowly turn the wheel to roll the dripping plastic back’. ‘Turning the wheel’ re-casts the humble pool attendant as a minister of fate and humanity dwarfs into flotsam bouncing either upon a divinely ordained tide, or upon one of nihilistic chance.
I first encountered this poem as a Guardian Saturday poem back in March and, make no mistake, Morgan’s work is arresting, haunting and utterly memorable but, in book form, he achieves much more. ‘The first duty…’ segues into ‘it’s like the lights…’ a timeless, quasi-Homeric simile, the type of thing which one might expect to memorialize a fallen hero in the Iliad, an interference pattern running across the grain of ‘The first duty[‘s]…’ sense of time and place. The collection regiments its poems along these lines, as opposing sets of waves of interference, as the collision between the physical and the transcendental. Morgan also alternates between Roman and Italic typefaces to help to stage this opposition visually. It’s an incredible achievement – each poem gains mass and gravitas from the others. Furthermore, the Roman poems are aligned left but the similes often comprise two stanzas: one aligned left, and one aligned right – perhaps a signal of their equilibrium: ‘it’s like the lights that flash across the face / of a fruit-machine so many colours that flare up / and go out so fast it’s as if they are all lit at once’ – and we’re back at that wheel, rolling back the dripping plastic, chance and fate playing the brutal odds of the house – the flame of our brief candle has rarely felt so fleeting.
There’s a shocking calmness in the way in which some of Morgan’s characters deal with the universe’s chaotic cause and effect. One of the later poems, ‘I used to be…’ is voiced by ‘the teacher known / for dishing corporal punishment’. The line break here stages its own little drama as we mentally rehearse what teachers might be known for. ‘Dishing’, in this case pejorative, a meting out, ought really to be the provision of nutrition and represents the perversion of a vocation. Then there’s the chilly darkness in the teacher’s musing upon his cane and ‘those many lives it touched’. Ordinarily, one might hope that teachers touch lives to positive effect but then Morgan offers a maritime simile: ‘it’s like two boats whose courses bump and / after for a time run parallel and when / the vessels connect their timbers mesh / in part and are joined’.
J. O. Morgan’s Interference Pattern is an exquisite read and, although it is greater than the sum of its parts, its parts are, nevertheless, quite something.
Bernard O’Donoghue
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again and his conclusion on The Seasons of Cullen Church is: “If you enjoyed Heaney’s final collection, Human Chain, then you are likely to enjoy The Seasons of Cullen Church (the final poem, ‘The Boat’ is dedicated to Heaney’s memory). Translations of Dante, The Gawain Poet and William Langland allow these poems to resonate with the whole authority of the language – pure, beautiful and true.”
Open Google maps and fling your well-travelled orange ragdoll down to street level in Cullen, County Cork. Blink and you’d miss the place as, although Google feels the need to write ‘village’ on the map, all you’ll see is a ribbon of lane, peppered with houses and leading to the N72 link between Mallow and Killarney. Cullen’s church looks like any other small, parochial Irish church, yet it becomes a point of reference for the collection.
The title poem, ‘The Seasons of Cullen Church’ opens with an epigraph from Wuthering Heights: ‘ I wonder how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’ and, given the novel’s haunted wildness, we cannot take its narrator, Lockwood, at face value. And so, as we step inside the church, O‘Donoghue offers us an awkward prism of observation: the angels, the speaker and the unnamed ‘you’. The angels have their ‘eyes down / so as not to embarrass you as you dipped / a reverent finger, catching no one’s eye’. The seasons offered here might not be immediately apparent as the second stanza’s ‘Drop down dew, ye Heavens‘ brings with it the Rorate Coeli, a celebration of Advent and the next stanza’s ‘Was ever grief like mine?’ a reference to George Herbert’s ‘The Sacrifice’, brings with it Lenten austerity, ‘when the bell had lost its tongue and they struck / together flat wooden clappers, not to betray / the least trace of jubilation’.
And so, in an insignificant little church, the drama and mystery of the church unfolds. It’s beautiful. Every night, millions of Catholics recite the Nunc Dimittis, the Canticle of Simeon, the prayer of an old man who, having waited a lifetime to see the Messiah, knows that he can finally die in peace. O‘Donoghue‘s speaker asks ‘Had we, like Simeon, / lived long enough? But that night / the sky over the graveyard frosted with stars’.
Death and burial is writ large. ‘The Din Beags’, an earlier poem, presents an impoverished family losing their beloved horse: ‘But, even having so little, there was room / to have less’ and their suffering takes on a Biblical dimension, like the trials of Job. O‘Donoghue allows the poor to take their place in society and death levels us. In ‘At the Funeral in Oxford of Darky Finn’, ‘The rain battered on the corrugated roof / of the Simon Community’ – the pathetic fallacy here suggesting that the heavens have taken note.
If you enjoyed Heaney’s final collection, Human Chain, then you are likely to enjoy The Seasons of Cullen Church (the final poem, ‘The Boat’ is dedicated to Heaney’s memory). Translations of Dante, The Gawain Poet and William Langland allow these poems to resonate with the whole authority of the language – pure, beautiful and true.
Alice Oswald
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again and his conclusion on this new collection is: “In Falling Awake, Oswald offers us no ordinary experience of mutability – her ambition is cosmic and repurposes those little buzzing windowsill deaths.”
Sometimes we think that the cycle of the seasons offers an immortality of sorts. There’s the pallid Keats, imagining, in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, that the song he hears is the self-same song as was heard “In ancient days by emperor and clown” and, as Alice Oswald opens Falling Awake with ‘A Short Story of Falling’, we’re left expecting the collection to deliver more of the same.
She presents a series of euphoric rhyming couplets, revelations of eternity which evoke William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ – “To see the World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”. Oswald writes of the story of falling that “It is the story of falling rain / to turn into leaf and fall again // it is the secret of a summer shower / to steal the light and hide it in a flower”. Although there’s repetition in these natural cycles, there’s a freshness as nature metamorphoses and, as the poem reaches its final stanza – which closely resembles the first, the poem’s circular structure presents us with infinity.
However, this joyful seasonal eternity is problematized as the collection unfolds. Oswald first presents a series of vignettes, focusing on a dead swan, flies on a windowsill, a badger and these poems darken the mood. In ‘Flies’, Oswald presents life as an abrupt interruption. Life: it’s a hot, dirty, insignificant business – little more than dropping litter as the flies “drop from their winter quarters in the curtains / and sizzle as they fall / feeling like old cigarette butts called back to life / blown from the surface of some charred world.” And then Oswald’s focus turns to us, finishing the poem with the collection’s characteristic unfinished, searching repetition: “what should we / what dirt should we”.
The collection inverts and destabilises our regular perspectives. ‘Looking Down’ opens with “Clouds: I can watch their films in puddles / passionate and slow without obligations of shape or stillness // I can stand with wilted neck and look / directly into the drowned corpse of a cloud”. The puddle feels like the veil separating the world from the underworld. We are “wilted”, weak and closer to death than to life and, viewing the world through death’s lens, all we can see is its “drowned corpse”: the mutability of all things, despite the seemingly eternal repetition of processes like the water cycle.
At the collection’s centre lies ‘Tithonus’, Oswald’s aubade, her hymn to the dawn. Zeus made Tithonus immortal but without arresting the ageing process. The visual quality of the poem is difficult to convey – a graduated line runs through the poem and musical cues are added on the left, with the rest of the material appearing on the right. This device threads a backbone of time through the poem. Some pages present silence, as the graduations are unaccompanied by text. And so we return to ‘A Short Story of Falling’s’ cyclic optimism, except here: “a voice goes on arguing / in its sleep like a file going to and / corrosively fro”. When replicated often enough, computer files collect digital artefacts. Whispered often enough, the message corrupts. In time, the storage media will fail.
We like to imagine that mutability is limited to the self but, inevitable errors in coding will ensure that, in time, whole species will feel the pinch of old age.
In Falling Awake, Oswald offers us no ordinary experience of mutability – her ambition is cosmic and repurposes those little buzzing windowsill deaths.
Jacob Polley
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again and his conclusion on this new collection is that: “The persistence of character presents a narrative of sorts: a childhood, an education, friendship and loss. However, the quasi-mythic character of ‘Jackself’ presents this as a darkly magical experience. The intoxicating rhyming couplets which run through the collection make it feel a little like Shakeapeare’s Puck – or witches – and Polley mythologises place like Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Jackself offers the reader an intense experience of a childhood lived outdoors, dancing in Bedlam wildness.”
Jackself opens with 2 epigraphs – one from the anonymous ‘Tom o’Bedlam’ and the other from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘My Own Heart’, one of his ‘terrible sonnets’. The despairing Hopkins seeks joy and tries to pull himself – to pull body and soul – together and, in the word ‘Jackself’, presents himself as an everyday, hard-working fellow: “Soul, self; come, poor Jackself”. ‘Tom o’Bedlam’ gives voice to a mad vagrant, dependent upon the charity of the Bethlehem (Bedlam) psychiatric hospital. Its speaker is a deluded wanderer and “By a knight of ghosts and shadows / I summoned am to tourney”. These epigraphs set the tone: Jackself promises a deep engagement with nursery rhyme and folktale and wanders in a midnight world.
The collection presents a dreamlike, shifting vision. Sometimes folklore and the modern world collide in surprising and beautiful ways. In ‘Jack Frost’, “Jackself is tapping / fractals of ice, ice / ferns and berries of ice, onto windowpanes”. Polley’s natural imagery is reassuringly familiar, but ‘fractals’ presents something mathematical: a kaleidoscopic iterating algorithm of the infinite. This collision helps to underscore the persistence of folklore and its difference from the modern world.
However, Jack Frost’s work is as dispiriting as production line drudgery and as infinite as the fractal “and 3 am finds Jackself / with his silvery head / in his hands, slumped on the unspun roundabout / among the gallows-poles of the moonlit playground, / the stars grinding on above him”. The loaded “unspun” suggests his total exhaustion, unable to work, unable to play, as the location metamorphoses into one of desolation and despair. The terrestrial roundabout may remain unspun but the grinding revolution of the heavens perhaps carries echoes of another Jack – Jack in the Beanstalk – and the grinding of bones. The collection presents other arresting images of the passing of time. Take ‘The Misery’, where “the year wheels / round and the days pass like light between the spokes”. Like Hopkins’ terrible sonnets, many of these poems convey an existential despair.
The collection is also rooted to a place and its poems wheel around a farm, Lamanby, whose name ties it to Polley’s native Cumbria. ‘An Age’ presents a different kind of time as “Jackself is staying in / today, like a tool in a toolbox, to try to just be / high in the lovely lofts / of Lamanby”. Assonance, alliteration and rhyme let this poem luxuriate in language and, in contrast with the nihilistic chill of ‘Jack Frost’, we are presented with warmth, heartwood floors and a time when “bees / browsed the workshops / of wildflowers for powder of light”. It’s intoxicating stuff and Polley’s heady assonance channels Keatsian excess.
The persistence of character presents a narrative of sorts: a childhood, an education, friendship and loss. However, the quasi-mythic character of ‘Jackself’ presents this as a darkly magical experience. The intoxicating rhyming couplets which run through the collection make it feel a little like Shakeapeare’s Puck – or witches – and Polley mythologises place like Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Jackself offers the reader an intense experience of a childhood lived outdoors, dancing in Bedlam wildness.
Denise Riley
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again and his conclusion on this new collection is: ‘This is a powerful collection and uses the poetry of the past to ventriloquize a history of mourning, adding sedimentary layers to its articulation of grief.’
Though you are sitting in the warmth of home, curtains closed to the winter darkness, you can feel the hardness of the frost fingering the corners of the room. Denise Riley‘s Say Something Back has this quality – the void of the white page feels less like the canvas of possibility and more like the oppressive silence of oblivion as the collection explores grief and loss.
Riley opens with ‘Maybe; maybe not’, the title of which feels like a shoulder-shrugging skit on Hamlet’s existential crisis. Its irreverence continues as the opening line invokes Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians – the wedding favourite – the Bible’s great paean to love. “When I was a child I spoke as a thrush, I / thought as a clod, I understood as a stone”. In Paul’s version, the child thinks like a child but perhaps Riley‘s thrush calls Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to mind – the nightingale (thrush) “wast not born for death”. Riley then references William Blake’s ‘The Clod and the Pebble’, where the clod aligns with Paul’s selfless vision of love while the pebble would bind another to its delight. Again, Riley offers us a maybe / maybe not as the poem effortlessly takes in a broad sweep of literary history in its brisk allusion. The speaker aligns with the clod’s selflessness but can “never / get it clear, down in the soily waters” and within seven lines, the reader is left abandoned on the void of the white page with an image of confusion, blindness and drowning.
Having sounded this knell, the collection gets going in earnest with ‘A Part Song’, a sequence meditating upon love and loss. Part iv, another terse elegy employing the structure of ‘Maybe; maybe not’, opens “Each child gets cannibalised by its years”. Growing to maturity might be seen as a benign process but here it is presented as one of self-consuming violence. In this context, it suggests suicide – an act which not only removes a loved one, but demands a re-appraisal of every previous moment and memory: “But all at once / Those natural overlaps got cut, then shuffled / Tight in a block, their layers patted square”. The sequence stares, unflinching, into the abyss and refuses – mocks – conventional optimistic comfort, citing and rejecting lines from Mary Elizabeth Frye’s ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep’: “I can’t get sold on reincarnating you / As those bloody ‘gentle showers of rain’ / Or in ‘fields of ripening grain’ – oooh / Anodyne”.
The collection closes with ‘A gramophone on the subject’ – another exploration of loss, this time in the Great War. In ‘7 ‘He lies somewhere in France’. Somewhere’ the speaker asks “What can it mean, that someone walks / out of your house then they won’t come back ever”. The collection’s bookends universalise parental grief and the oozing mud of oblivion presented in the earlier poems is darkened with blood and violence here by association.
This is a powerful collection and uses the poetry of the past to ventriloquize a history of mourning, adding sedimentary layers to its articulation of grief.
Ruby Robinson
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again and his final thought on this amazing debut collection is: “in Every Little Sound, the imperceptibly fragile achieves audibility and presence, and casts some hope into an unravelling universe.”
The teenage electric guitarist in me would have started the journey into effects pedals with something flashy – with a slice of heavy metal distortion, perhaps. However, the 40-something with the disposable income for this hobby started with something quite different: compression. Loud sounds are quietened and quiet sounds are amplified. The instrument feels more present, louder, in an odd sort of way and the essential details – the rhythmic click of funk, or the hammered notes of country – become possible. Robinson’s Every Little Sound opens with a summary of the concept of “internal gain”: “an internal volume control which helps us amplify and focus upon quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense concentration”. The result is a set of hyperreal observations which transcend the everyday, unlocking its latent Gothic menace.
The collection opens with ‘Reader, listener’, a staged invitation to enter a home, a home with all the authenticity of a MTV crib: “come in. I’m opening my door to you – the trap / door of a modern barn conversion with lots of little rooms, vast paintings on the bare brick walls, a daring colour scheme, / sofas and awkward plastic chairs for interrogating guests”. The first delicious line break acknowledges the calculation behind the home visit – the barn’s humble rusticity repurposed behind seemingly honest, seemingly transparent “bare brick”, which may amount to a double bluff, to another posture. The sofas too, are to interrogate guests and the poem’s incessant imperatives: “come in”, “take off”, “take some” start to sound less avuncular: “I know your deepest thread, like a baked-in hair”. The quality of Robinson’s figurative writing is sensational. Everyday similes pulse with insight: ‘thread’ suggests life’s precious fragility but that hair in the food transforms it into something intolerably revolting.
With its “porthole in your bedroom door”, ‘Locked Doors’ reimagines the care home as prison-cum-boat, voyaging we can but wonder where, “cigarettes in a locked drawer”, evoking the torture of Tantalus: food and drink eternally just beyond reach while, with sickening irony, beyond the locked doors, someone’s “noticing the warmth of a star, 93 million miles away”. Robinson’s use of the second person makes it clear where we’re all heading.
The “burnt eyeballs” and “the collapse // of the food-chain” in ‘Watching TV’ present other inevitabilities. ‘Collapse’, teeters on the edge of the stanza and it’s all too easy for the reader to fill in the blank with any number of catastrophes in the time it takes to flick an eye to the next line. The sofa, usually sat on, becomes something sat “inside”, as we insulate ourselves from the pain of digital images, self-medicating with whiskey and chocs – and then Robinson returns to the image of threads, as “The threads at the edge // of your rug were falling apart”. This quietest of unravellings is amplified to destruction on a massive scale.
The couplets comprising ‘Tuning Fork’, one of the collection’s final poems, evoke the fork’s twin poles. Although its vibrations are virtually imperceptible to the ear, the speaker remembers that “our voices, raised // against each other, amplified // by the walls of this house, recall // the function of a resonator, // as simple as a table top, to which // the handle of the fork is pressed, // or a hollow wooden box” and, in Every Little Sound, the imperceptibly fragile achieves audibility and presence, and casts some hope into an unravelling universe.
Katharine Towers
For the 2016 Prize, we’ve asked poetry blogger John Field to review the shortlisted titles again and his conclusion is that “The Remedies possess the purity, the intensity of an essential oil and, in the darkness, Towers offers us light.”
These poems are as simple as simples (medicines made from a single herb or plant), as simple as the attack and decay of a musical note struck beautifully. Here, Katharine Towers showcases an exquisite lightness of touch and, using the simplest, purest of materials, her poems sing from the page.
Take ‘Daisies’, which opens: “We don’t wish to shout / or be brilliant or climb up walls / or hang from walls”. The daisies are voiced with a simple demotic and the perfect rhyme of walls / walls lends the poem further simplicity and innocence, as does the childlike character of the daisies. At this point, at the word ‘but’, we reach the poem’s single stanza break – and suddenly that guileless tercet begins to feel like a miniaturised octave and those innocent daisies, the flower of many a childhood, achieve a sagacity, “shyly shaking our heads / because we understand, yes truly we do”. Humble and unassuming the daisy might be, but this poem’s sonnet-like volta finds the classic beauty in the commonplace.
The collection’s second section, Flower Remedies, gives voice to plants used by Dr Edward Bach in his homeopathic remedies for states of mind. Towers suggests the homeopathic principles underlying Bach’s remedies by voicing each plant as the state of mind it supposedly works upon. This ‘physician heal thyself’ dimension also adds irony to the poems. ‘Willow’, we read, is a remedy for self-pity and the tree says “Don’t think that I weep. / I’m practising drowning.” The willow’s weighty statements, the finality of those end-stopped full stops conveys the character of the willow with the same confidence and deftness with which the daisies were invoked. In ‘Common Centaury’, a remedy for those who are too selfless, Towers writes in a rough iambic dimeter: “All summer long / I acquiesce – / a drudgery / of red and pink” and the brevity of these lines suggests that the plant can hardly bear to leave a mark on the page.
In its gentle way, the collection considers beauty, time, love and loss and the note sounded by one poem is as likely to bounce off the next one as it is to resonate and the editing of the collection brings these oppositions to the fore. ‘So Beautiful it Must be True’ opens with an epigraph from the Minimalist composer, Arvo Pärt: “It’s enough if a single note is played perfectly”. The note, one of the smallest divisions of the ephemeral is incarnated as it “flew up and landed in your heart […] singing to itself and wanting only / to be left alone”. A note, internalised, becomes the essence of beauty but, on the facing page, in ‘Tinnitus’, the internal noise becomes “round-the-clock / back-chat of an irritated nerve”.
The lyrics in the final section put this simplicity to work on more personal subjects with touching effect and often with exceptional brevity. In ‘Midnight’ (for AE), Towers presents a couplet of couplets: “This darkness lit by one bird’s / threadbare song. // Let’s stand and listen, love. / No-one knows we’re gone”.
The Remedies possess the purity, the intensity of an essential oil and, in the darkness, Towers offers us light.