The sort of review that dreams are made of...

I feel very fortunate to have received some excellent reviews for The Knives of Villalejo, my first full collection, over the past two years, but Christopher James' recent piece takes the biscuit: it's the sort of review that dreams are made of.

Not only does he display a profound understanding of how my poems go about their business, but he also enables me to learn more about my own work, which is always a sign of an excellent reviewer. However, perhaps the most important point from a personal point of view is his highlighting of the layers and depths that can be found in my poems.

I can't quite bring myself to extract quotes from his extremely generous post, though you can read it for yourself by following this link to his blog...

Special offers from a special press

HappenStance Press are one of my favourite poetry publishers. In fact, my shelves are full of their brilliant books, which is why I'd like to draw your attention to their current set of special offers.

As mentioned previously on this blog, I'm a firm believer that Tom Duddy deserves to be recognised as one of the best poets to have emerged since the turn of the century. If you haven't yet discovered his incredibly moving poetry, an excellent point of departure would be The Years, the posthumous collection that HappenStance brought out in 2014 and I reviewed on Rogue Strands at the time (see here). The Years is now on promotion at the HappenStance website, down from 12 to 9 pounds. Get your copy by following this link.

And then there's J.O. Morgan's In Casting Off. Morgan is a unique figure in contemporary verse in many respects, but perhaps most of all due to his breadth of ambition and his control of book-length narratives. In Casting Off is a rare achievement and is also available at 9 pounds instead of 12 at the HappenStance shop (click here!).

These are collections to savour, to go back to again and again, as my well-thumbed copies can testify. But there's an extra bonus to purchasing them now: by doing so, you'll be helping to fund HappenStance's next publications, ensuring we'll enjoy their new books for years to come!

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.

A mouthwatering week for new collections

Looking back over my Twitter feed for this week, I'm struck by how much good news I've been able to share from poets that I admire, all revolving around their new collections. Just like buses, three of them are heading our way in near unison now that we've got the festive period out of the way.

The books in question are Robert Selby's first full collection, The Coming-Down Time, which is due this spring from Shoestring, Rory Waterman's third collection, Sweet Nothings, on its way soon from Carcanet, and Samuel Tongue's first full collection, Sacrifice Zones, launching in February from Red Squirrel. I very much look forward to featuring them on Rogue Strands in due course...!

Making it big in poetry

Countless poets imagine on a daily or nightly basis (or both!) just what it would be like to make it big in poetry. They're convinced that they only need one major win or acceptance for their path to be cleared to stardom, for their arrival at some hidden inner sanctum to be declared.

In this context, let's imagine winning the Bridport, followed by the National Poetry Competition. How would it feel? How would life change? Would things be utterly transformed forever?

These aren't just questions to be thrown into a vacuum. They're issues that were faced head-on by Christopher James in an excellent post on his blog a couple of years ago (thanks to Mat Riches via Neil Elder for pointing me in its direction). You can read it here.

James has gone through the process of winning and has come out the other side. He tells his story beautifully, with self-awareness in spades and zero narcissism. Making it big in poetry is a fantasy that blurs our focus on the most important things: the reading and writing process itself, followed by a search for readers. Even if we just find one, we've discovered real success.

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…?!

Don't live to write, write to live

Every now and then, when overdosing on momentary angst about a poem that I'm gestating, I find it's worth reminding myself of my own version of an old Spanish saying that we often repeat while at the office: no vivas para trabajar, trabaja para vivir...don't live to work, work to live.

From my perspective, a similar attitude to the blank page is extremely useful. Writing poetry makes me feel more alive and awake to experiences and feelings. In other words, as the title of this post indicates, my attitude is clear: don't live to write, write to live.