Fiona Benson
‘If Vertigo & Ghost explored male violence, then Ephemeron sees Fiona Benson turning her gaze towards the monstrous pain of motherly love’. John Field reviews Fiona Benson’s T. S. Eliot shortlisted collection Ephemeron
Ephemeron is Benson’s third collection; both of her previous collections, Bright Travellers (Cape Poetry, 2014) and Vertigo & Ghost (Cape Poetry, 2019), were also nominated for the T. S. Eliot Prize. While Vertigo & Ghost opens with an exploration of Zeus, patriarch of the Greek pantheon and the original toxic male, at the centre of Ephemeronsits a sequence exploring the myths surrounding Pasiphaë, mother of the ill-fated Asterios, better known as the Minotaur. If Vertigo & Ghost explored male violence, then Ephemeron sees Benson turning her gaze towards the monstrous pain of motherly love. Through the focal point of Pasiphaë, love, pain and desire refract. The mayfly (or Ephemera danica – one of the allusions in the collection’s title) in its winged state lives for a day; it is this pervading fragility that gives the collection’s rendering of love its almost unbearably painful bite.
Benson opens obliquely with the section Insect Love Songs, and her observations are a riot of the domestic and the forensic. In ‘Mosquitoes, Mozambique’, the value of human life is just a matter of perspective. To us, it’s sacrosanct but, to the humble mosquito, ’your body is a WELCOME mat’. It’s both shocking and comic and, as we blink, the poem changes tone as the mosquito uses ‘two serrated needles / to cut through your tissues, two needles to hold the flesh apart, / one to insert a chemical spit’. The Latin root ‘serra’ of serrated endows the mosquito with a surgical precision as its saws away at the body, using retractors to hold the incision open. It’s clinical, dispassionate. An echo of this is heard in ‘Little Basket,’ the final poem in Daughter Mother, the collection’s final section. A child finds a packet of razor blades with obvious consequences, and all the speaker can think of is her ‘darling desperately trying / to put the razors back with her tiny, soft fingers’. How can we bear to love such fragility with this intensity, living, as we do, so fleetingly?
The second section, Boarding School Tales, is a stunning sequence of poems exploring life’s cruelties and oozes with pheromones. The poem ‘Like a Prayer’ opens with a liturgical image, the speaker and friends ‘Dressed in dazzling, Byzantine white’, perhaps evoking the May-Day dance in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In a trice, the schoolgirls ‘ripped off Velcroed skirts’ and their burlesque moves us from the sacred to the sexual, where virginity’s ‘a new pair of Converse / demanding to be scuffed’. Benson’s girls recognise their power. It is they who will teach the boys ‘shudderingly – to pray.’
At the heart of this collection is the section Translations from the Pasiphaë. These monologues have an immediacy and a visceral power that bridge gaps of time, place and culture, and amplify the ideas explored in the book as a whole. In her end notes, Benson observes that Pasiphaë’s alleged copulation with a bull reveals that, ‘Like other powerful women (think Catherine the Great) she is remembered almost solely through the lens of an unlikely sexual deviance’. In ‘Pasiphaë on Wanting’, we see a character who ‘moved in desire, its shining atmosphere, / dilated, ripe, under its enchantment’. The poem places her alleged sexual deviance within the context of an indifferent husband, and so ‘Desire makes beasts to be ridden of us all.’ Pasiphaë is little different from the schoolgirls in ‘Like a Prayer’. The similarities shine a light on the misogyny of myth-making, shaking the prejudices on which societies are built. Motherly love, so painfully rendered in the Daughter Mother section, is powerfully evoked here. Pasiphaë’s son, Asterios, is immortalised in culture as the very definition of monstrosity yet, in ‘Pasiphaë on her Last Newborn’, we see him as Pasiphaë does: ‘He was beautiful, my son. / In his sleep he shone.’ Benson’s short lines and simple statements testify movingly to the truth of this.
The poems in Ephemeron acknowledge life’s cruelty, its brevity and its suffering. However, woven through Benson’s universe is the immortal power of love – and this, she shows us, is enough to redeem us.
Fiona Benson’s Ephemeron (Cape Poetry, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.
Jemma Borg
Wilder, Borg’s second collection, recoils from the sterility of a changing climate and embraces the resilience and fertility of the natural world – and the trials of motherhood, writes John Field
Instinctively, we fear the wild. Ours is a disposition to fence, to enclose, to map and to sign. Borg’s epigraphs remind us that, like a hardy, deep-rooted plant, the word ‘wild’ stems from the Old English ‘uelt’ – ‘open field or woodlands’ – and that ‘wilder’ is ‘to lose one’s way’. The collection opens with ‘Marsh thistle’, one of the poems selected to celebrate 2022’s environment-themed National Poetry Day. In Borg’s poem, ‘A gong sounds in the dark temple of the earth’, to mark the coming of the thistle. There’s a numinous, Wordsworthian quality to the sounding note that reminds us of the preciousness of all life. In William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, the speaker’s succession of questions point to his feelings of awe when contemplating one of the biggest and most powerful of nature’s beasts. ‘What immortal hand’, he asks, ‘In what distant deeps’, and so on. We catch an echo of Blake in Borg as her speaker asks ‘And what soul is it that embellishes the sky / with battlements and bristling lances? / What part of a human soul is this thistle?’ Blake’s speaker is seduced by the big cat, but Borg finds majesty in the small and humble. Her ‘battlements and bristling lances’ embellish the sky with heraldic flourishes and recast ‘our unpalatable, / fen-meadow’ as regal, where thistles are ‘nectar-rich candelabra rampant with bees’. ‘Rampant’ borrows from the language of heraldry. The thistle flutters in the breeze like a lion on a royal standard; it rears in a threatening manner and, across the fen, it also grows rampant: abundant and unchecked.
Moving to the domestic sphere, ‘Nulliparous’ offers a stark contrast. The word ‘nulliparous’ designates a female animal who has never given birth, and so we move from unchecked fertility to an unsettling contemplation of sterility and absence. Borg opens with two terse simple sentences: ‘Here lies no-one. Let the angels pass.’ The caesura is emphasised by that full stop and the line is riven, suggesting absolute brokenness. The first sentence echoes the epitaph on a gravestone. The poem comprises a series of couplets but, by the end, we’re left with a stark single line floating alone in the void of the page: ‘barrows sleeping in a green field.’ It’s an image of beauty and depicts a healed landscape, the momentous earthwork smoothed and covered by grasses but at its heart there remains an aching emptiness.
In ‘Ultrasound’, the smooth undulation of the barrow resurfaces as a pregnant belly and the void at its centre has been filled. ‘We have peeked – forgive us – to find you / are barely more than a sound: a rally drum, / a two-valved butterfly-engine, piston-rapid, / among bright haloes of finger-buds, a secret / miner working in the sonorous mountain.’ The listing of those metaphors makes this a love poem, and those haloes are a delightful expression of unrestrained love. Look at any sacred painting and you’ll see that even the heaviest-hitting saints, the Peters and the Pauls, are granted but a single halo each… but the peeking mother can find ten – and that’s just on the fingers!
Given the war in Ukraine, one poem in particular resonates. ‘The engineer’ is a dramatic monologue, subtitled ‘Chernobyl, 1986’ and it’s currently difficult to think of Chernobyl, without also thinking of Zaporizhzhia. The irrepressible fecundity of ‘Wilder’ has a flip side of ‘cankers, sores, bitter rashes weeping milk’. The engineer tells us that he has ‘seen the trilling heart of the reactor’ inside this modern, deadly barrow – a musical pulse that can be read as the dark dance partner of ‘Ultrasound’s’ ‘urgent heart’ – where ‘At last, we could know / the object of our faith.’
Thankfully, Borg’s vision of the natural world crackles with life and beauty and, rather than bewildering us, reminds us that the open landscape offers freedom and possibility.
Jemma Borg’s Wilder (Pavilion / Liverpool University Press, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley
In Quiet, Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s debut collection, the poems subvert and problematise the language of the establishment by forcing open old ideas and creating new spaces for thought and dialogue, writes John Field
In 2018, Adukwei Bulley was poet, writer and artist-in-residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and if you’ve only seen her work on the page, take a look at the beautiful films she made, such as ‘Men Like You Say Mankind’. ‘Men like / you go on grand tours & gap years, dig up other / men’s bones & call it science,’ she says, in a low, hushed tone that adds ironic heft and power. In combining grand tours and gap years, Adukwei Bulley signals a problem not yet consigned to history.
An early poem in Quiet, ‘revision’, is knock-out stuff. Its four sections, ‘i. consider’, ‘ii. compare’, ‘iii. consolidate’ and ‘iv. conclude’, co-opt the language of examination questions and evoke the oppressive silence of the examination room, a silence in which some candidates will simplify problems in an attempt to control their material. That first word, ‘consider’, appears to invite thoughtful, holistic responses, but the text which follows constructs statements from multiple-choice options: ‘from the 1400s, the area later known as the gold coast would be […]’. We’re familiar with this voice. It’s the authoritative, ostensibly objective voice of ‘History’, here offering up the idea that there was nothing there before the British gave the Gold Coast a name – it was simply ‘an area’. As the line ends, the reductive rules of the game are revealed through the examination’s rubric: ‘(choose one)’. Despite appearances, there’s little to ‘consider’ in this examination; all that is required is to distil history until all nuance is removed. And once again the annexation is not over; ‘sabbatical’ (in the list ‘visit / residency / occupation / sabbatical / stay’) echoes those ‘gap years’ in ‘ Men Like You Say Mankind’.
The poem ‘How Not to Disappear’, which explores the 2021 disappearance and death of Richard Okorogheye, works with a different kind of silence. Its epigraph, words spoken by Okorogheye’s mother, reveal police indifference to his disappearance. Here, silencing the inner self becomes a possible survival strategy, as we, addressed in the second person, hope that we ‘have spoken to no one lately / about bad days, hard times, or worse have written / a poem or two about them’. At 19 (Okorogheye’s age when he disappeared), surely everyone has the right to voice their angst on a silent page without fearing that, in doing so, they may compromise their safety? How can we tolerate a society in which access to this inner silence – the sort of silence cited in the collection’s epigraph, from Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet – might be deemed unwise?
The poem ‘[ ] noise’ approaches silence from another angle. In the notes, Adukwei Bulley reminds us that, because it cuts through environmental sound, white noise is used by the emergency services. It is also weaponised in the hands of interrogators and torturers. Just looking at ‘[ ] noise’ on the page, you see its whiteness strobing through the text, disrupting the language. This poem contrasts with the blackout poem, ‘black noise’, where the speaker’s voice has been almost entirely occluded by redactions. Despite this or through this, we are reminded again of the collection’s epigraph, its description of how an inner life of dreams and ambitions enriches people all too often forced into a loud language of protest. Kevin Quashie writes that, ‘It is this exploration, this reach toward the inner life, that an aesthetic of quiet makes possible.’ And so, in ‘black noise’, through the silence, stripped to its essence, the self emerges all the clearer from the page and the speaker asks ‘can you // see me // now?’ Yes! Clearly!
Through the pages of Quiet we see Victoria Adukwei Bulley emerge. We hear her voice, and hear its authority, eloquence and nuance aplenty… without recourse to shouting.
Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet (Faber, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.
Philip Gross
Philip Gross, winner of the 2009 T. S. Eliot Prize with The Water Table, has been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022 for his twenty-seventh collection, The Thirteenth Angel. It offers an airy flight above the city and a meditation on angels
Towering above Rome’s Castel Sant’Angelo, the archangel Michael stands guard over the city. He’s sheathing his sword as a sign that the terrible pandemic of 590 CE has ended and promises the city future protection from plague. The Thirteenth Angel views our humdrum urban spaces through a similarly angelic lens: like Michael, high above the city, Gross’s speaker sees the geometry – the angles – of the city from a fresh perspective. It’s not so long ago that all of us were required to watch the world from our windows, so it’s difficult to view the urban world from this angle without the COVID-19 pandemic springing to mind, but The Thirteenth Angel is a wider, richer meditation on modernity and the crises facing humanity.
Gross opens with ‘Nocturne: The Information’ but, where the nocturne once celebrated the night, Gross explores the expulsion of darkness from the city. He opens with the terse, ominous fragmented half-line ‘Night, wired and ticking’, as if the night were an IED, awaiting a bright, violent destruction. ‘[T]he park’s null, an amnesia amongst us’ suggests that there’s nothing positive about the absence of light. In the poem’s first movement, we are empowered as the bearers of this light. The speaker observes a woman using a smartphone, ‘the cold blush of blue / on a cheek: stranger, her mobile tingling / with presence’. Light brings a frisson of excitement, of connection or connectivity, albeit a cold one. However, viewed from the perspective of the speaker’s third floor window, buses appear as ‘dim stacked / blocks of pixels,’ as if the city’s grid were a printed circuit board and its inhabitants were merely electrons, travelling pre-ordained routes, their free will revoked in a fatalistic world-as-machine. As the speaker comments, ‘We are the information.’ Gross reimagines the city as a newly inscribed circle of Dante’s Inferno but, even here, the speaker wryly observes that the town planners have been at work: ‘The underworld’s arranged / not in circles but parallel.’
In the ekphrastic ‘Paul Klee: the Later Angels’, the speaker deconstructs Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920). Instead of seeing Klee’s angel, he sees ‘the intersections of the things – // shapes, colour-bodies, masses – / that make up the world’ and so, perhaps, we are invited to equate the city’s ‘live flow diagram. The pulse of us’, that Gross sees in ‘Nocturne: The Information’, with an otherworldly power and beauty here. Klee’s Angelus Novus resurfaces in the literary-philosophical work of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Indeed, Benjamin purchased the print in 1921. Benjamin imagines it as the angel of history and, in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ he writes that ‘A storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’ Gross’s collection echoes Benjamin’s doubt in progress. In ‘The Follies’, the modern City of London still labours under the ‘grey-brown fug’ we glimpse in Eliot’s ‘The Burial of the Dead’, where London’s commuters walk to work under a pall of ‘brown fog’. The next poem, ‘Smatter’, debases the sacred with ‘The plainchant of speed. The monks, the truckers, / in their high cabs, or their satnavs, telling the names // of Europe over, till the words mean nothing; there is only / flow and eddy, mattins, evensong, the rise and fall.’ We’re back in The Waste Land, this time in ‘Death by Water’, where the bones of Phlebas the Phoenician are picked ‘As he rose and fell’ with a current mimicking the relentless cycles of the marketplace.
Gross presents us hurtling forwards, across the circuit board of the modern city, but making the same old mistakes. What we need is perspective, an opportunity to gain some objectivity, and The Thirteenth Angel offers us this divine intervention and the opportunity to step outside of ourselves and to view the world from a fresh angle.
Philip Gross’s The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.
Anthony Joseph
Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert explores how we cling to precious moments in time and, when necessary, construct absent loved ones from scant coordinates, writes John Field
When we’re reading sonnets we’re often reading a poetry of desire or a poetry of loss, but in Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert, his fifth collection, we’re reading a poetry of absence. The collection, punctuated by family photographs, explores how we cling to precious moments in time and, if necessary, construct loved ones from scant coordinates. In conversation with Gregory Porter about their fathers on BBC Radio 4, Anthony Joseph comments that, ‘because of that absence […] we create a mythology around the character[…] and he becomes more present in the absence.’
The collection opens with ‘Breath’, an account of Albert’s funeral. The speaker tells us that ‘When I hear my father dead, / I flew ten hours into the sun.’ Perhaps it’s fanciful, but this island setting invites a parallel with Odysseus’ wandering and return to Ithaca. Seven years spent with Calypso could not quench Odysseus’ desire to return home and, even in death, Albert exerts this gravitational pull on his son. The poem’s first line is a bump in the poem’s groove as the Caribbean grammar of ‘my father dead’, instead of the Standard English ‘my father was dead’, creates a ghost in the line. There’s a similar uncanny moment at the end of the poem where, ‘There was no wind, no breath in that hot time, / besides the warm air above may father’s mouth’; for a moment it seems as if Albert breathes still. In a way, he does: the dead father lives on through the sonnets, he lives on through his children too; as the speaker comments in ‘Rings’, ‘I only have to look at my hands to see my father.’
The circling structure of Sonnets for Albert, which begins with the father in his casket, ventures through incident and memory, and ends with an invocation beside his grave, nods to the cyclical nature of life, the rhythm of the dance. It’s an idea which is explored in ‘The Work of Generations’. Life, the poet’s dance partner aunt Agnes explains, is a ‘circular motion’, and the speaker and his brother ‘are of another generation and loop. / That soon it will be our turn too, to turn / towards our graves.’ As Joseph explains in the BBC programme, the calypso, the pulse of the Caribbean, animates Sonnets for Albert. Eschewing iambic pentameter, Joseph works with something akin to the rhythms of Albert’s speech, something closer to the calypso. For example, in ‘What Do I Know of My Father’s Body?’, we read ‘to thread a rose through the eye of your lapel. And I find’. That final three-beat stab give the poem a calypso quality.
The absence in these poems is an enigmatic ache. In ‘Flack and Hathaway’ (another musical reference, this time evoking Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s cover of ‘You’ve Got a Friend’), Joseph cuts his lines to half their regular length, Albert’s absence represented as the unguessable blankness of the page: ‘My father would be gone. / Months into mystery.’ It’s a broken poem and the halting end-stopped lines articulate that pain. If, like Odysseus, the speaker has left and then returned home, then the same is true for Albert: ‘And while we waited / the myth of him grew, / till the anticipation / of his return / would fill each room.’
So the father is built from myth or, if not myth exactly, then through the faults and failings of the memory. In ‘Jogie Road’, a violent confrontation between the speaker’s mother and father is recalled in vivid detail at ‘The red / sawmill on Jogie Road with cedar grain / in its fibrous air. Red.’ The restatement of the colour of the sawmill is a verbal tick we use when we are at our most uncertain. And myth is created from faulty memory: ‘The red sawmill / was not on Jogie Road but on Silvermill.’
In Sonnets for Albert, Anthony Joseph weaves the messy warp and weft of family life with disarming ease. What emerges is truthful, at times painful, but always warmly human.
Anthony Joseph’s Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury Poetry, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.
Zaffar Kunial
With its fanciful etymology and cautious optimism, Zaffar Kunial’s England’s Green is a joyful exploration of how language and sound shape the self, writes John Field
The title of England’s Green, Kunial’s second collection of poetry, echoes William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’. Where Blake saw ‘dark Satanic Mills’, Kunial is cautiously optimistic; he manages to see the green even in our urban spaces. England’s Green is a journey down leafy lanes, along suburban streets and into the nation’s hallowed oval Os – its cricket grounds. Reading the collection is a joyful experience in which Kunial shows how language and sound shape the self.
The opening poem, ‘Foxglove Country’, strikes a playful note: ‘Sometimes I like to hide’, confides the speaker, evoking games of hide and seek, probably the last time when many of us were prepared to sit in a hedge. However, in Kunial’s poem, the speaker disappears down a rabbit hole of the absurd as he confesses that his hiding place is the middle of the word foxgloves, in the ‘Xgl / a place with a locked beginning / then a snag, a gl / like the little Englands of my grief, / a knotted dark that locks light / in glisten, glow, glint, gleam / and Oberon’s banks of eglantine’. Letters become magical, runic ideograms with the X literally barring the way. The ‘knotted dark that locks light’ has the characteristics of amber – the power to petrify and to preserve. Words are conduits to the past: ‘glisten’ takes us back to the year 1000 and its first use in runic poetry; it places us back in Anglo-Saxon England. The poem performs the miracle of splitting the atom: Kunial opens a chasm in something impossibly small, revealing a new beauty and fresh spaces in which to play, as ‘Gulliver whose shrunken gul’ evokes the Persian word for rose. Kunial’s fanciful etymology demonstrates how the refraction of personal experience through language creates an unexpected spectrum of colour.
‘The Hedge’ riffs on a similar theme as land becomes text, this time via a sleight of hand in which a folio is at once both a leaf and a page. Britain’s miles of privet transform themselves into ‘Thorned blank verse, strange runes, folioed text’ and ‘A bewitched curtain’. We seek the magical through impossible Narnian wardrobes though Kunial also reminds us of the secretiveness of those privet hedges, which render every house a revelation.
Language refracts through the collection too. That Persian rose resurfaces in ‘The Newly Bred Rose’, a response to a rose bred in 2018 to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Emily Brontë, and this echo reverberates over the page in ‘Little Books’, a sequence of sonnets celebrating the Brontës’ Little Books, the hand-drawn miniature books in which they created the mythic world of Gondal. (The Friends of the National Libraries saved the last of these books for the nation earlier in the year.) Indeed, if you look at Charlotte and Branwell’s Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine on the British Library website, you’ll find a Brontë rose drawn on the final page. Perhaps the speaker of the first poem in the sequence, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, is God. It’s a moving, personal address (‘Charlotte, I’m remembering when you were / eight’) and the sonnet itself has the qualities of a fractal as it zooms into the little book of nature’s whorl only to see fresh spirals: ‘In any seamed thing / or stone, lives, lands, stories, are crammed / like a wish for more world.’
This playful collection serves a banquet of language. In ‘The Newly Bred Rose’ the speaker displays a willingness to get down and close to his subject and to savour each exquisite sensory detail. In England’s Green language wafts like perfume, savoured for each note, and enjoyed as a whole.
Zaffar Kunial’s England’s Green (Faber & Faber, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.
Mark Pajak
There’s something disquieting about the forensic quality of Slide, but Mark Pajak knows that by focusing on the surface he can leave us to plumb our own depths, writes John Field
Slide, Pajak’s debut collection, directs our gaze towards the margins – to unlit urban areas and silent shorelines. These are liminal spaces where a game can become a disaster in a heartbeat. These poems are breathtaking: they feel like the kinds of news stories that, once read, gnaw away at the mind. Liminality unsettles our sense of perspective; are we looking down and into the tragedy, or up and out of it?
The collection opens with ‘Reset’, a term associated today with an act of last resort as our work is frozen on the computer monitor, when all that’s left to do is to kill the power and to start again. In his poem, about a girl who self-harms with a cigarette lighter, Pajak develops a disturbing parallel. A previous scar is ‘a small pink socket in her forearm’ and speaks of its intentional placement and utility. Self-harming is ‘how she deletes herself’, a negation, an undoing which we generally respond to positively because mistakes can be erased, the slate is wiped clean, and a broken operating system can start anew. Her mind becomes, once again, a ‘blank page’, a tabula rasa. There’s a thrilling freshness and clarity to the poem’s precision of observation too. Eyes screwed tight become ‘walnuts’ and the lighter flame is ‘raw egg-white heat’. Even this metaphor becomes a kind of portal as, beyond it, we see the edges of another egg browning and crisping in the mind’s eye.
‘Into the Mudflats’ exists in the subjunctive as it speculates about the disappearance of a student on the river Orwell in Suffolk. The local paper ‘gave no name’, as local paper sometimes do to shield a family, but this detail adds to the sense that, in disappearing, the student has slipped from the world’s consciousness too. Little Red Riding Hood springs to mind as ‘All that’s certain is, she left the path’, and perhaps this association implies something rapacious, something lupine, about the natural world. ‘[C]old swallowed her knees’ and, again, although it’s not stated, we know what this means: peristalsis, a series of wave-like muscle contractions, as food slides down the oesophagus. Drawing the veil between planes of existence has a numinous quality: ‘And there’d have been a moment, / at that low angle of daylight, when the mudflats lit up // like quicksilver. So bright she might have stopped / screaming. It really would have been beautiful then.’ The line break (‘stopped / screaming’) is horrendous, as is the terror juxtaposed against the quicksilver beauty of the mudflats.
Towards the end of the collection, we encounter ‘Open Water’, a clever title for a poem in which a boat is pictured as a trapdoor. Two crisp tercets lend it the power and quality of an aphorism: ‘The underside of a rowboat / is the shape of a church door / to the world below’. We’re already looking up at that gothic silhouette and are reminded that the world as we know it isn’t fixed. It’s just a perspective which, in an instant, is liable to change.
We see this to horrifying effect in ‘Slaughter-House Worker at the Public Pool’ where ‘The showers / stopped him dead’. The spectre of the Holocaust also haunts this image as the ‘sterile white’ tiles and ‘the sweetness’ of the disinfectant only serve to remind us of what lurks beneath them. In the ‘guttering / of the drains’ we hear something visceral and see the nightmarish hallucination of post-traumatic stress disorder.
One of the great strengths of this collection is its economy. With a word or phrase, Pajak reforges the world anew. Indeed, in ‘Embers’, he even writes in Haiku form. There’s something disquieting about this forensic quality, but Pajak knows that by focusing on the surface he can leave us to plumb our own depths.
Mark Pajak’s Slide (Cape Poetry, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.
James Conor Patterson
In bandit country, James Conor Patterson writes of Newry as a place of the future while acknowledging the power of the past and its ability to menace the present, writes John Field
Merlyn Rees, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, 1974-6, coined the term ‘bandit country’ to describe the area of South Armagh, South Down and North Louth. The task, he said in 1975, of enforcing a ceasefire was ‘made difficult by the terrain, the proximity of the border and the limited assistance given by local people’. James Conor Patterson’s debut collection, bandit country, explores the gravitational pull of Newry and the borderlands of Armagh and County Down. In doing so, he offers a response to Rees through a collection scintillating with local dialect. While Patterson’s ‘bandit country’ may be disturbed by dreams of the past, as a place it looks to the future.
The title of the opening poem, ‘bambooland’, invites the reader to imagine a jungle, then immediately undermines such an exotic idea as a drunken adolescent is hauled ‘intae the back of a parent’s car’. Yes, the world can at times be anarchic, but parental love and care demonstrate that society is functioning just fine. Jumping into the bamboo void, teenage boys may regard themselves as ‘like orpheus’ but the effect here is bathetic. Boys will be boys the wide world over.
Over the page in ‘may queens’ Patterson balances this laddish portrait with a group portrait of some girls dressed ‘like a cuppla vaudeville performers / in our ma’s old barbara stanwyck shurtwaists & revlon red lipsticks’. The girls’ vaudevillian look suggest they dream of somewhere more glamorous than Newry. Later in the collection, in a poem entitled ‘the depression’, we get to visit Hollywood. It’s 1932 and up close and personal the Hollywood sign, the epitome of star-studded dreams and glamour, is wild and sordid, surrounded by ‘hosiery & scrub’. We’re addressed in the second person as someone prepared to jump from the iconic sign. Newry comes off the best from this comparison and the girls mix cultures as they ‘morris dance freely’ until ‘called for tea’ in a charming mix of the folksy and the glamorous.
The Troubles appear in ‘about suffering’, a poem that both nods to Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ and offers a reflection on the Brexit vote in which, according to the LSE’s Roch Dunin-Wasowicz, ‘85% of Catholics voted Remain compared to only 40% of Protestants’. We see Newry from ‘the moutha the crimean war cannon’, a projection both of British military power and the city’s tourist itinerary. We observe ‘memorial arcs of of strongbow down the arts centre steps’ as a drunken parody of a civic water feature and perhaps another slant nod to English invasion (Strongbow was also the moniker of Richard de Clare, a leading actor in the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland). Suddenly, from ‘outta nowhere, a saracen comes squealin / through the barricades’, a hated symbol of the British military oppression. However, across the stanza break, the speaker reveals that this is ‘the sorta thing i imagine there mighta bin / had i lived through the eighties’. The Troubles have receded into the imagination and instead we’re shown people committed to the democratic process, booking their flights and returning home to vote on Brexit in an image of optimism that flies in the face of the past. We see much the same thing in ‘INTERNMENT’. The poem’s title evokes dark memories of places like the Maze prison. Delivered in terse stabs across the page, it recreates intense memories of brokenness and division, but the recall of these days is dying with their generation.
Nevertheless, bandit country acknowledges the power of the past and its ability to menace the present. The poem ‘currents’ shows us ‘two young rapscyallions launchin their newspaper boat—as / fragile as a may butterfly—down a flagstone culvert with a rusted / grille…’ Patterson’s pop-culture reference to Stephen King’s It perhaps reminds us that Pennywise lies dormant for 27 years. The ellipsis readies us for a jump scare but instead of darkness, there’s light reflected from ‘the glare from a starbucks / takeaway cup’. A gulf of time separates the Troubles from these more affluent times. Still we’re unsettled, alternative histories lurking like King’s killer in the culvert of the reader’s imagination, whether they manifest or not.
bandit country is a rollicking read. Its pages sing as it celebrates the borderlands and puts Newry on the personal, cultural and psycho-geographical map.
James Conor Patterson’s bandit country (Picador Poetry, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.
Denise Saul
In The Room Between Us, ‘the Rubicon has been crossed and that which has happened cannot unhappen’. John Field reviews Denise Saul’s unflinching exploration of loving care
Saul’s first collection, The Room Between Us, lifts the veil on those caring for elderly relatives. It is a deeply moving collection in which we see loved ones through the distorting prism of new spaces, distanced from them by doors and glass.
This sense of people misplaced is suggested by Saul’s epigraph, taken from Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’: ‘Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.’ In her title poem, which opens the collection, Saul’s quatrains are superficially similar to Gray’s but his neat iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme are absent, indicating, perhaps, that something is wrong. Doors should provide privacy and security but here they have become the spring of a trap. The speaker recollects that ‘You point again to the Bible, door, wall / before I whisper, It’s alright, alright, / now tell me what happened before the fall.’ At this moment, Saul deploys a rhyme with a terrible sense of finality. In Christian terms, ‘before the fall’ reminds us of life in Eden before the apple, sin and death. The Rubicon has been crossed and that which has happened cannot unhappen.
The title of ‘The Viewing’ suggests that the speaker’s mother has become an object we might expect to see behind glass in a gallery or museum. It begins ‘Behind another brown door’, inevitably reminding us of the door in ‘The Room Between Us’; in both cases, the word ‘behind’ intensifies the idea of muffled confinement. The door in ‘The Viewing’ also announces its labyrinthine motif, further emphasising how trapped is its subject. There is an awkward, uncanny quality to the poem. In many ways, it invites us to imagine an undertaker’s parlour, a loved one laid-out. The title, ‘The Viewing’ encourages this idea. However, the chronological structure of the collection belies this. She lives, but this isn’t how we see her.
This powerful sense of awkwardness and uncertainty carries through the collection. In ‘Observation’, it’s unclear who is being observed, the speaker or her mother. The precision of the daughter’s gaze, noting that her mother sits on the ‘left side’ of the chair but needs her ‘right leg’ repositioned shows the level of care someone in this situation requires, while also conveying an unwelcome suggestion of the mother viewed as object. However, the poem ends with ‘She waved to me and I waved back’. When it comes down to it, it is the mother who initiates this sociable moment, not the daughter.
There’s an intensity to the unflinching truth-telling of these poems. At times, Saul changes step and a memorable moment is the visionary, ekphrastic ‘The Eternal’, a meditation on G.F. Watts’ ‘The All-Pervading’ (1887–90). Watts’ painting presents a winged deity holding the world in his hands, but Saul gives us ‘the scryer’ who ‘holds a sphere’. A scryer ‘scries’ (sees into) the future or the secrets of the past or present by looking into pieces of crystal or water. Once again, we’re reading a poem exploring observations and, once again, the speaker’s isolation from that which is observed is painful. Faces are ‘brought’ to the sphere’s ‘cold surface’, suggesting that they have not appeared voluntarily. Reflections become ‘galaxies and stars’, evoking the infinite and eternal. Likewise, we finally see ‘a wooden door that cannot shut’. However, we are snapped back to reality as the speaker acknowledges Watts’ own account of his impetus for the painting: ‘Perhaps this is what Watts meant when, / seeing the glass drop of a chandelier in / a rented house, he drew the hooded figure’. The speaker’s imagined words recede and become, once more, trapped in glass and ‘the seer gazes only / at the reflection of a woman held within the sphere’.
It can sound glib to describe poems as ‘necessary’, especially in a review, but I’m going to do it anyway. These are necessary poems and through them we understand something of the complexity and pain of the windows and doors through which we view our ageing parents.
Denise Saul’s The Room Between Us (Pavilion / Liverpool University Press, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.
Yomi Ṣode
Yomi Ṣode’s Manorism is an urgent interrogation of double standards and lays bare the doublethink Black men and boys are required to negotiate, writes John Field
On The National Gallery’s YouTube channel, Yomi Ṣode responds to Caravaggio’s life and work. He says, ‘I’m watching an art historian being interviewed. The news anchor asks the expert about Caravaggio, the painter and the murderer. His chapters of violence, and troubled upbringing. The historian, like witchcraft, mouths an enchanting response: “He was a man of his time”. A denial of Caravaggio’s foul behaviour. An erasure spell passed on through generations; one that’s excused the crimes, privilege and power of white people.’ In Manorism, Ṣode works with black and white, light and dark, creating a kind of chiaroscuro as he considers the lives of Black British men and boys and the challenges they face.
Ṣode opens in Yoruba with ‘Àdúrà Màmá Mi’ (which translates as ‘My Mother’s Prayer’) reminding us that, from the cradle, negotiating blackness and whiteness is a complex business. Ṣode’s speaker, praying for her son, asks ‘Ọlọrun á là’nà fún ẹ ní ilẹ́ aláwọ́ funfun: / Bí ó ti lẹ̀ jẹ́ pé èniyàn dúdú ni ẹ́’ [‘May God bless him with a white house / Because he is a black man’]. The prayer reminds us that, in the Western imagination, God and Christ are depicted as white – even the contemplation of the eternal may be problematic.
In ‘Manorism I: On the Cultural Representation of ‘Black Britain’’, Ṣode explores a concept he dubs manorism. In an interview with The Guardian, Ṣode describes this as the ‘innate manorism that comes from where you grew up – your manor – and goes with you wherever you travel’. One of the poem’s epigraphs is taken from Piers Morgan’s Good Morning Britain interview with the then fifteen-year-old Alex Mann, pulled from the Glastonbury crowd in 2019 to perform ‘Thiago Silver’ with Dave. On the sofa, Morgan told Mann that ‘That’s what the youth of today should be doing more of. Taking their chance & slaying it.’ To hear a paunched quinquagenarian bandying idioms like ‘slaying’ is sufficient to make anyone queasy. However, Mann’s performance on the Other Stage was described by the BBC as ‘Glastonbury Magic’ and, to date, has been viewed 33 million times on YouTube. Having mouthed the words of AJ Tracey, Mann was feted – even by the likes of Morgan – but, with a diagonal slash across the page, Ṣode juxtaposes this with Tracey’s interview as ‘Both are being interviewed on separate channels at the same time. / I watch […] AJ, some of your other / videos. It’s almost like / a bit of a shout out / to gangs in London. // AJ’s body shifts in discomfort. A manorism not shared by Alex from Glasto’.
Ṣode’s use of juxtaposition works to biting effect across the collection and his sustained engagement with Caravaggio informs our response to racism. In ‘A Plate of Artichokes’ Ṣode works with the story of Caravaggio’s 1604 dispute with a waiter at the Osteria del Moro, one of his favourite inns. It ended with Caravaggio attacking the waiter with the plate and wounding him. In all probability, it was his patron, Cardinal del Monte, who stepped in to smooth things over with the authorities. In Ṣode’s poem, ‘Caravaggio felt like he had been treated like a commoner – some barone. The same way I felt when a waiter asked me to pay as soon as I ordered my food. My man did not ask the couple sat beside my lady and me. Why? He took their orders first. Yet there I was, thumbing the first of my digits into the card reader.’
Manorism is an urgent interrogation of double standards and lays bare the doublethink Black men and boys are required to negotiate. Ṣode shines the torch of truth towards the centre of the canvas, disclosing an evil that has always hidden in plain sight, shielded by the light.
Yomi Ṣode’s Manorism (Penguin Poetry, 2022) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2022. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.