The theatre of life, Barry Smith's Performance Rites

As its title, Performance Rites (Waterloo Press, 2021), indicates from the off, Barry Smith’s first full collection is very much concerned with the roles we play and the characters we act out in our lives.

In many poems throughout his wide-ranging collection, Smith’s exploration of this theme remains in the background, filtered through a narrative or a scene, offering a latent invitation for the reader to wonder whether things and people are quite as they seem. However, in the book’s title poem, he meets it head-on, as he also does in ‘The Roles We Play’. The opening lines of the latter read as follows:

What drives us time and time again
to place ourselves onstage in the line of fire
in front of the adjudicating panel?

Is it our search for a new identity,
a different self with licence to act
in ways we would never dare or dream?

Or do we lack essential definition,
just a hazy blur of expressions
an empty vessel waiting to be filled...?

This poem’s scenario is an audition for a play. As such, its concerns might appear specific to theatre at first glance, but they expand. In other words, the two questions from the above extract echo and reverberate through the collection.

Nevertheless, as the poem progresses, it also takes on further ramifications, moving on from its initial, more generic doubts, homing in on a social context, as in its closing stanzas…

…you’re howling into the night…
OK, thank you very much,
we’ll let you know if you’re needed for the call back.

And so in a giggle and gaggle you withdraw to the café
sharing your experience over a latte or expresso
- it went really well, I think they liked me –

you’re ready to take on the world in King Lear
or Maria Marten and the Murder at the Red Barn,
inhabiting an unhinged king or scheming villain,

or maybe just back to the yoga and Pilates
waiting for the next audition to strut your stuff
seeking the ministrations of our transient art.

The ending gives us the bathos of exaggerated drama being undercut by everyday language, followed up by the counterpoint of cosy middle-class conversation about the audition (which feels like a pose in itself), all before the mention of pastimes that are implicitly both compared and contrasted with theatre. This leads to an intentionally over-the-top final line shot through with irony.

In summary, the poem works so well due to initially incongruous juxtapositions that apply gradual layers of nuance to the poet’s probing doubts. As a consequence, it provides us with a perfect calling card for the collection as a whole. Barry Smith’s Performance Rites leaves us pondering just who we are and why we act as we do. And in my book, that’s never a bad thing!

Grappling with love, Clare Best's Each Other

Titles sometimes fall flat or don’t quite represent the book that follows. However, the title of Clare Best second full collection, Each Other (Waterloo Press, 2019), certainly does so, as the poems are riven with duality.

First of all, the book is divided into two sections. Moon House evokes the dynamics in relationships between two people: wife and husband, daughter and mother, mother and son, son and father, grandson and grandfather, and in doing so it seems explicitly autobiographical. Each Other, however, appears far more fictionalised, portraying the evolution of an imagined couple.

Secondly, while the two sections might initially give the impression of being separate entities, the crux of this collection lies in their implicit dialogue. In order to get to grips with the terms of that conversation, it’s worth comparing their technical qualities.

Let’s start with Moon House. In this section, Clare Best captures and treasures moments. She’s explicitly personal, as in the ending to My father-in-law embraces my son:

…The love between you overwhelms the dream.

You both bristle with light,

I’ve never seen love as bright as this.

I must wake up and find my son, tell him

how much his grandfather loves him.

The love, the love. I will hurry now.

Love isn’t just invoked in these lines. Instead, it becomes a chant, being defined and redefined.

There are many instances throughout Moon House where Best, far from fearing this abstract noun, meets it head-on and wrestles with its potential connotations. As a consequence, Each Other (the collection’s second section) then comes as a shock.

In Each Other, most of the poems are driven by anecdote and observation. One excellent example can be found in the opening lines of What they depend on…

She believes in miracles, education, cotton sheets.

            He prefers wool socks, a tidy desk, blue cheese.

She swears by scent, candles, unexpected sex.

            He likes promises, weekends, knowing what’s next…

The casual reader might well be disconcerted by the juxtaposition of these two approaches in a single volume. Nevertheless, further inspection of the collection gradually reveals its cohesive nature. In fact, the poet’s skill is such that she is convincingly able to employ contrasting techniques and then let them play off each other (sic).

To explain this concluding statement, let’s go back to that afore-mentioned implicit dialogue between the two sections. Similarity and difference, definition and description, the abstract and the concrete, are all harnessed, inviting us to join Clare Best in her grappling with one specific term that also just happens to be this excellent book’s final word: love.

Review: Waiting for the Sky to Fall, by Dan Wyke

You might recall my review last year of Dan Wyke’s excellent pamphlet, Scattering Ashes (2004). Well, Wyke finally has a full collection out from Waterloo Press, titled Waiting for the Sky to Fall, and it doesn’t disappoint.

All of his assets from the chapbook remain, while many of the most outstanding poems (see that afore-mentioned pamphlet review) are also carried over. However, these qualities are now even further concentrated, distilled and expanded.

Wyke has fully harnessed his gorgeous lyrical gifts - there are no fireworks for their own sake in Waiting for the Sky to Fall – as the poet approaches life so as to understand it rather than filtering it through some esoteric code. Whether dealing with Gazza, a dirty weekend or potatoes, accessibility is married to an ambitiously humanistic vision.

What’s more, Wyke’s risk-taking individuality enables him to stand out in the present-day morass of Creative Writing courses and renowned mentors. One key example of this is his treatment of abstract nouns. While most of his contemporaries run scared of their ramifications, Wyke grabs them, relishes their latent potential and wreaks according havoc with our expectations, as in this example from the collection’s title poem:

When the phone rings with the news, it is raining
or not; the heart stops,

the heart goes on; the same language
is no longer enough, though words come,

performing acrobatics on the tongue…

“Heart” is a pivotal word here, its repetition highlighting an inherent duality of meaning: physical and abstract. Interplay and tension are thus developed between the two, enabling us to reassess our own interpretations.

Furthermore, the above point is reinforced by the remark on the nature of language that follows. Rooted in the specifics of this situation, Wyke’s statement that “the same language/is no longer enough” broadens his perspective while also implicitly homing back in on that word again, “heart”.

In fact, I’d actually go as far as to highlight this extract as something approaching a statement of poetic progression. Specific experiences have led to Wyke’s recognition that he has to reach beyond lyricism. Those “acrobatics” are no longer enough: events have their consequences in verse, where they also earn transforming qualities.

There’s an enormous variety of tone, subject matter and versification in this book, yet it’s held together by a glue that many first collections lack - no matter which poem we choose to read, it could only have been written by Dan Wyke. In the current context of U.K. poetry, that’s a huge achievement.

In a just world, Waiting for the Sky to Fall would make all this year’s shortlists and carry off a gong or two from under major publishers’ noses. For the moment, I hope my review contributes in some small way to its finding the wide readership it deserves. This is the rare class of collection that can create an addiction to contemporary verse.

Dan Wyke

Some poets explode onto the scene, others just disappear.

Dan Wyke was a poet whose work I encountered in many small mags back in the mid-1990s. I identified with much of what he was trying to do and was thus delighted when he won a Gregory in 1999. Wyke's work might have been uneven, but it displayed a real spark. He was the featured poet for Staple 59 and brought out a pamphlet with Waterloo in 2004. Extracts from it can be found here. Further poems, meanwhile, are up at the Poetry Library site.

I've tried to get hold of a copy of his pamphlet from Waterloo, but they haven't yet replied to my repeated e-mails (sigh!). In his intro to the Staple selection Wyke mentioned that Waterloo also hoped to publish his first full collection, but nothing seems to have appeared.

What's happened since? All I know is that I've ceased to find Dan Wyke's poetry in the magazines I read. Has he given up on poetry? Has poetry given up on him? Is a terrific first full collection on its way? I'd love to find out!