My review of Glut at Wild Court

My review of Glut, Ramona Herdman's new collection from Nine Arches Press, is now up at Wild Court. You can read it in full via this link, but here's a snippet to whet your appetite...

‘Many poets in the past have identified the hyphen as a useful device, but few have delved so deeply into its powers, the hyphen as hinge to a door between two previously separate words that leads into a highly personal aesthetic...’

Turning tactile, Ramona Herdman's A warm and snouting thing

For my money, Ramona Herdman is one of the best poets on the U.K. scene at reading her own work. I was lucky enough to see her read from her most recent pamphlet, A Warm and Snouting Thing (Emma Press, 2019) in London recently, and I was most struck by how she paced each line, each word to perfection, accelerating and then slowing down, as in the ending to No Better Than She Should Be Red…

…the garden tapestried

with shock-sweet little nippled sherbet candies

slug-beloved

vigorous  sprawling  decadent  shameless.

When seeing these lines on the page, I can physically feel Herdman lingering over those last four words, relishing the physical shape of their consonants and vowels, turning her poetry tactile.

Moreover, the above-mentioned poem is representative of much of the pamphlet in thematic terms. A Warm and Snouting Thing confronts and subverts traditional roles, especially when dealing with gender and sex, sometimes explicitly, as in Comeuppance…

…And I remember the sudden novelty

of making adult men feel something.

Of stealing some of their power. Making a ripple

in the world…

Moreover, this extract provides an excellent example of Herdman’s harnessing of sentence structure so as to play further with pace, with surprise and expectation. In this example, she allows a sentence to flow according to convention before slamming the brakes on, challenging both linguistic and social conventions.

At other times, meanwhile, Herdman’s technique is more implicit. She is adept at layering descriptions. In the following extract from Nudes, she juxtaposes them, allowing them to play off each other, inviting comparison and contrast:

…Summer-comfortable just in skin,

butter baby, unselfconscious, playing

in the stained glass shadows on the parquet…

Taken in the context of her previous (also excellent) pamphlet, Bottle (HappenStance Press, 2018) it’s clear that Ramona Herdman is building an outstanding body of work. Her challenge now would seem to be the development and publication of a new full collection that would enable her to reach a wider readership and surely gain the extra recognition that her poetry so richly deserves.

However, for the moment, let’s relish her most recent offering: A Warm and Snouting Thing invites you in, challenges your pre-conceptions and takes you on a sensorial journey in the space of thirty pages. What more do you want…?!

A poem by Ramona Herdman

I've been a fan of Ramona Herdman's excellent poetry for several years, but I wasn't aware of just how good she is at reading it until I attended the HappenStance event at StAnza last March, where she was exceptional. As a consequence, she went straight on our hit list when Mat Riches and myself started discussing the line-up for the forthcoming Rogue Strands reading in London on 28th November (see Facebook page here, plug, plug, plug...!), and we were delighted when she agreed to feature.

Moreover, the poem she's sent as a taster of her work is also top-notch. It represents so much of what makes her work special. Her control of line-endings and stanzas is delicate, working in perfect tandem with the build-up of semantic tension. And then there's her treatment of the contents themselves: this is highly personal poetry but never confessional in tone, and its emotional impact is consequently greater...

‘Wake up: time to die’

(Blade Runner)

It’s supposed to be digitally remastered

but it’s pixellated to shit still, luscious

city smog, rain, light blare like morning mist.

The year my father knew he was dying,

every film turned out to be about death.

Blade Runner the worst: built-in

obsolescence and a four year life-span

in the near-distant future of 2019.

I must have watched it yearly since

and every time Harrison Ford gets younger.

I don’t remember whether dad liked it

but every time Rutger Hauer dies for our sins,

too perfect to imagine, I think of watching it

with him: the oxygen tank, the tipping

chair the NHS lent him and how that year

he was too ill for his lifetime trip to India

so watched TV all day. I don’t care

if Deckard is a replicant or not.

I just hope he makes it to the mountains.

This evening, I am grateful to watch

yet another Director’s Cut, to wonder

at Pris (your standard pleasure model),

Daryl Hannah‘s tender immortal quarter-

century inner thighs – self-sustaining miracles.

I am grateful that you are here

again to snicker with me when Deckard fails again

to persuade anyone that he’s still quit,

to toast life as it is and still being part of it.

(First published in Under the Radar)

Rogue Strands Poetry Reading

With featured readings from Rory Waterman, Katy Evans-Bush, Ramona Herdman, Rishi Dastidar, Mat Riches and myself, plus support from Robin Houghton, Neil Elder and Clarissa Aykroyd, the second Rogue Strands Poetry Reading is up and running!

It would be a huge understatement to mention I'm chuffed that my co-organiser (Mat Riches) and I should have managed to bring the above-mentioned line-up together. In fact, I'd go as far as claiming we'll provide an excellent snapshot of some of the best poetry around on the U.K. scene when they read at the King and Queen pub in Foley Street, London W1W 6DL on 28th November, where events will kick off at 7.30 p.m..

There's a Facebook page for the reading (see here) where you can keep up with our news, while I'll also be posting a top-notch poem from each of our poets on Rogue Strands as we get nearer the time.

Oh, and Mat Riches has produced this excellent poster. Please feel more than free to share it on social media and help us generate the audience on 28th November that our poets so richly deserve...

Beyond the booze, Ramona Herdman's Bottle

Having worked in the wine trade for nearly twenty years, I’ve witnessed both the short-term and long-term consequences of alcohol on people’s lives. Moreover, I’ve read and heard a whole litany of opposing sayings and expressions as to whether or not we reflect our true selves when consuming booze.

My own conclusion is that alcohol doesn’t actually cause us to tell or find truths or lies. Instead, it warps our visions and interpretations like a concave mirror. As such, it distorts reality, which brings me to the subject of this review: Ramona Herdman’s Bottle (HappenStance Press, 2017).

A facile interpretation of Bottle would be to conclude that its theme is the demon drink. In fact, this pamphlet uses alcohol as a point of departure and reference, exploring the effects of that afore-mentioned concave mirror on Herdman's life and on the lives of those around her.

One initial problem when approaching a pamphlet with such thematic drive and unity is that the poet’s technique risks being left in the background. In Herdman’s case, that would be a great pity, as she has many strengths. For instance, there’s her terrific ear, as in the following line from “In Vino”:

“…snigger and whimper and spite…”

The repetition of “er” is obvious, but Herdman’s real skill emerges in the way she uses the “sp” of the third noun, “spite”, to bring together the “s” of “snigger” and the ”p” of whimper”, followed by the bite of the “t”.  

This musical strength combines terrifically with subject matter in one of the most representative poems from the pamphlet, “Drinking Partner”, which is addressed to a father figure and ends as follows:

“…You are the person I’d most like to drink with.

I leave a glass of Bells out at night – like kids,

I hope, still do for Father Christmas. It makes

the morning smell of you.”

The break between the second and third line of this quatrain provides us with a gorgeous undermining of the poem’s narrator – “…like kids/I hope…”, while “do” in the third line plays off against “you” in the fourth, encouraging us to stress that final word of the poem against potential assumptions, thus magnifying its significance. Of course, the last line is also foreshortened, as Herdman accelerates through to the core of her poem.

These brief snippets from Bottle are intended to serve as a taster of its rich layers, of the delicate craft and art that lie just beneath its surface, of the contradictions that are inherent in our relationship with alcohol. Like all top-notch poetry, it leads us back to a fresh reflection on our own experiences.