My review of The Kentish Rebellion at The Friday Poem

Does this sound familiar in the current political climate...?

‘Selby hints at the presence of decline, at the role of that decline in generating rebellion and confrontation, at how leaders attempt to manipulate the masses, and how this issue pervades both the past and the present.’

My review of Robert Selby's The Kentish Rebellion is now up at The Friday Poem and you can read it in full via this link.

Summer / Break by Richie McCaffery

Due to having a generous mention in the acknowledgements section of Richie McCaffery’s third full collection, Summer / Break (Shoestring Press, 2022) and  having kept up a long-distance, email-based friendship with him over several years, I don’t feel I can review his new book with any degree of independence or objectivity.

However, suffice to say, Summer / Break is an excellent example of the poetry I enjoy reading. Apparent simplicity, delicious poetic leaps and achingly resonant object-led poems have long been McCaffery’s trademarks, but his recent personal upheaval seems only to have driven him further and deeper in a quest to find the means of expressing and transforming extreme emotions. Completely and utterly recommended!

The looming shadow of the present, Robert Selby's The Coming-Down Time

When describing Robert Selby’s first full collection, The Coming-Down Time (Shoestring Press, 2020), there’s a danger that critics might reach for terms such as “traditional” or “nostalgic”, particularly as the poet evokes and invokes an England that’s about to undergo a seismic shift.

However, those afore-mentioned terms would do Selby’s work a disservice, as they would misinterpret his implicit contextualising of the past and the delicacy of his touch. Selby’s work rewards patient rereading: poems that might seem a pastiche or anachronism are in fact inviting the reader to engage in a dialogue with the present. In The Coming-Down Time, what’s left unsaid is often even more important that’s what actually stated, and the impatient reviewer can easily miss these nuances.

One such example is The Sycamore. A pertinent comparison would be between the opening lines to the first and final stanzas, which read as follows…

The black-faced smithy’s boy of Brig o’ Turk
propped his bicycle against the sycamore
before his final shift at the clanging hearth,
soon to head to war to escape the bore
of pouring coal into the firepot’s girth…

…Long since the blacksmith sold off the yard,
since war ended, resprouted, withered again,
and the Trossachs became a National Park,
the bicycle protrudes still, a man-made limb
mimicking new growth…

These two extracts clearly mark the passing of time, as individual and social histories are portrayed in parallel, while the natural and human world are also juxtaposed to fine effect. Nevertheless, the poem’s significance pivots around the moment at which its narrative stops. The Trossachs became a National Park in 2002, and Robert Selby is leaving unspoken all the changes that have taken place since then, inviting us to continue with his temporal journey, making it our own, implicitly encouraging us to carry on to the here and now.

In other words, contemporary England might be termed “the elephant in the room” in The Coming-Down Time. Selby is entirely aware of the looming shadow of the present throughout his collection and plays on the knowledge that readers will approach these poems via the lens of 2020 with its new conflicts, tensions and changes. 

It might be something of a cliché to state that we must understand the past in order to get to grips with the present and future, but that doesn’t make such an affirmation any less true. As a consequence, The Coming-Down Time is far from being behind the times. In fact, it could barely be more relevant.

A poem by Robert Selby to mark the launch of his first full collection

I'm delighted to be featuring a poem by Robert Selby today to mark the launch of his first full collection, The Coming-Down Time (Shoestring Press, 2020). I'll be reviewing Selby's book on Rogue Strands in due course, but for the moment a delicious sample is in order.

The power of this poem resides in its use of pronouns. I'm convinced deft manipulation of the blighters is a sign of a good poet, but this piece reaches beyond normal expectations to create an emotional charge that gradually creeps up on the reader. The third person undermines the second, before both of them overwhelm the first, though I'm not going to reveal any more details at this stage. I simply suggest you read it for yourself to discover what I mean about its subtle impact.

N.B. I'm inserting the poem below as a jpeg image because its line lengths don't lend themselves to the format of a blog and I don't want them to be mangled by the limited boundaries of a screen...

Pivotal details, Roy Marshall's The Great Animator

I’ve been a fan of Roy Marshall’s poetry ever since I read and reviewed (see here) his first pamphlet, Gopagilla, which Crystal Clear Creators published back in 2012. He’s now on his second full collection, The Great Animator (Shoestring Press, 2017), and his development has been startling.

The Great Animator brings us a poet in full maturity. First off, there’s Marshall’s talent for producing endings that provide satisfaction but then unsettle and open out beyond the text. One such instance can be found in the final lines of “Expresso”:

“…His heart, once as easily excited by this dark syrup

as by a lover’s touch, has grown steady, accustomed.”

This extract also provides us with a fine example of Marshall’s mastery of cadence. He has a keen sense of the weight of every syllable, together with a delicate control over the ebb and flow of language.

The collection is packed with terrific narratives. Moreover, Marshall has learnt to home in on the pivotal details that make a story come alive, as in “Thaw”, in which the first stanza sees a grandson waiting outside “by a patch of snow/that’s losing its grip on gravel. The final stanza, meanwhile, invokes a mother’s offer of “a little ice-cream” to an ill grandmother, leading through to another excellent ending:

“…She nods, though both of you know

it’ll melt untouched while she sleeps.”

In this poem, Marshall is inviting the reader to compare and contrast two different thaws, all tied with the drip-drip of three generations. The invitation, of course, is implicit.

Perhaps the most striking poems in The Great Animator are those that portray Marshall’s work as a Coronary Care Nurse. Their strongest quality is their invocation of empathy, as they enable us to connect with the person that lies behind the health professional, casting new light on the patient-doctor/nurse relationship. One such poem is “Carrying the Arrest Bleep”. Again, its final lines are terrific:

“…and when the registrar asks

if we agree to stop, I meet

his eye, and nod.”

The above extract offers us yet another of Marshall’s “pivotal details”: the human meeting of eyes, as the people behind the jobs are revealed.

In The Great Animator, Roy Marshall demonstrates the technical and thematic skills of a mature poet. He’s come to trust not just himself but his readers. The least we can do is get hold of a copy and be thankful for the generosity of his poems.