War and Love - part 2/2 - When Life Looks Like Easy Street

2nd part of my review:

WAR

Psychomachia: 'frail, accidental, articulate' is a line which reaches out of its setting, perhaps because of the sequence of the vowels, or because it reminds me of the only line of the Qur'an I know, the first line. This is what I look for, diving boards to jump off without even knowing I was on one.

Triage took me to T S Elliot's 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'. It took a while, but eventually I realised that this was what I was enjoying about the refrain 'when the kids go into survival mode the knives come out at night.'

In spite of the subject matter I spent quite a while with friends on Ginsberg's ashcan rantings, taking it in turns to read out each stanza week after week in the summer, so I became fond of the endless phrases and images of violence, and simply enjoyed the words.

Is this how people used to take their Bible readings after a lifetime of beautiful phrases about the battles and evil deeds? They turn into music, like a compost heap receives rotten fruit and peelings and produces sweet black soil.

The Ballad of Jimmy Roach is the killer poem of this section, to me the worst aspect is the insult to his name. It pains me when someone's name is anglicised and twisted away from itself. Every word from another language, including names, gets changed, but how can a person be unmoored from their name and not become smaller and more hidden, unseen, unheard, unspoken? At the word 'disposable' I realise that the poem has turned rotten.

LOVE

I see many experiments with sonnets in the collection, in fact I have only just spotted the sonnetiness of An Infinite Universe.

There are three lines to each stanza, but their length means they run on, hiding the structure from my eyes.

Another love of mine is the use of repeated lines. The chorus arrives as the second line in each three line stanza. It then opens the final couplet.

Central Station Here I see simplicity and directness emerging from a louder flow of words. For example, see the shift as the poem moves from the terse compact actions and incomplete sentences of 'stack cordwood to burn' to the softer slower pace of the full sentence 'I gave you my broken soul'.

For me these two unmixable registers are the message of the collection. Neither one can include the other, they can only be extremely close to each other. Only children can contain both parents.

'from the Anglo-Saxon' thrilled me immediately. I keep on re-reading Wolf and Eadwacer because it seems impossible to work out who is speaking to whom, but not so impossible that I give up.

I keep on trying to work out how the poem comments on the rest of the collection, convinced that it is the key to it all somehow.

End

What is a collection? - Roger Robinson

Collections

Presence - Poems written back then, a year ago or more.
Absence - All the other poems are back in the folder. Without them, the chosen ones wouldn't have been written either.


Presence - A more recent set of decisions on how to order the chosen ones.
Absence - All the other arrangements of the poems are ignored. Also crucial to the whole process.


Presence - The writer and the editor. Writing all finished.
Absence - The reader, on the other side of the page. Marking with a biro now.
Absence - The other readers. Where are they?

A quick google and I have found George Roberts' blog. But I don't want to read it until I have done my review, that would be cheating. It's just me and the ink.

Roger Robinson

Direct, simple words on reading and writing: alskdjlaksd Where do all these amazing people keep coming from? What was I doing with my life until recently? Children, that's it. My big task.

Cliff Yates - War

Cliff Yates' collection 'Bike, Rain'

The title is the most fitting one I have yet come across. It is simple, spare, unpretentious. It conveys exactly what Cliff Yates is about. Every time I turned a page it would be sitting there at the top of the new right hand page.

I have made all my notes on the pamphlet itself as I was reading through. That is a first. I now see where Cliff is coming from.

I did mark one or two places where I felt some lines should have been cut, but that is because I am so used to spouting my own views on Facebook poetry workshop groups. Having these thoughts is not sacrilegious, but a demonstration of the faith I have in the power of the poems and poets to cope with contrary opinions. I need to bang up against what others say and write. It is like giving a bannister a good shake before holding onto it and going up the stairs.

Go off and read it for yourself.

War

I am now in the second and middle section of George Roberts' collection. I need to find a new approach. My first one isn't working any more. Once I have found it I will be able to post a sensible set of comments. Reading Cliff Yates might be setting me off towards what I need to find. Let's see.

George Roberts - When Life Looks Like Easy Street - part 1/3

I am writing some notes on this collection of poems. There are 3 parts to the book, so I have read the first section and am writing these notes without knowing what comes next. I like that uncertainty.

Part 1 - Nature

I know George is a performance poet. He recited a couple of his things to me in a loud cafe, but that isn't the same, I know, as speaking forth across into a filled room, standing up there in front of everyone. So reading poems by myself is a different proposition again.

Are these poems which he usually speaks forth, at the Oxford Hammer and Tongue nights or where ever it is something exciting happens every 2 weeks down the Cowley Road? Or are these poems from another side of his life, ones which couldn't be thrown across a room and need a quiet page to themselves and the special loose binding which Albion Press, ie Dennis Harrison, has given them, via Lucie Forejtova of Immaginacija?

It took me until 'Creation Myth' to find myself. Until then I was lost. At the end of 'When I Am' I wrote 'I feel lost still'.

Finding myself didn't mean I was happy. I pondered the as yet unsolved question of procreation. Why is it so full of prohibitions? Why does the rest of the living world just go to it while we humans are constantly told not to or tell ourselves not to for fear of poverty, educational disaster, moral disaster, physical exhaustion, physical disability...you name it, it all adds up to a no. I'd rather not see my children killed, starve, be bullied by a horrible father or educational system obviously, but the result of that is a loveless sterile life, which stinks. What is this all about?

I loved the phrase 'she purred them on' because it feels as if a powerful beast is protecting and permitting the couple to be together. She won't let anyone attack them or disturb them.

So who is Jay Griffiths and what is 'Wild' from which so many quotations are taken? Whose book is this? George's or Jay's. Am I a bad person for asking?

'The Day I Stopped Taking the Happy Pills' has a certainty about it I love. Here's the final stanza:

'The day I stopped taking the happy pills

my hunger ate me, my sorrow cried me,

my faith believed me, my light shone me,

my love loved me and I loved me back.'

'What I Learned in the Closing of The Year' is so hopeful, yet fragile. Glorious, delicate confusion in front of the wonder of local real kindness. Am I putting in too many words here?

'Teaching Observation' pleased me because it mixed the time consuming process of going through a mathematical equation with something else entirely.

'The Dark Companion' is my favourite at the moment because of the intimacy with the way things can be. Escaping it only means being able to see it and sense it rather than being under water with it. 'He is near me again.' That is such a plain sentence. I love that.

'A Blues for Nenna Nyama (d. 8th July 1986)' makes me realise how little I know of what it is to be from the different parts of America and its society. How big it is, how ungraspable compared to our little space, with small rocks and nearby coasts, Even our moors and wildernesses are small. Just 3 legal systems, not 52.

It suddenly opens up at the line 'This is too civilised', though the rhyming has emerged a bit before. If I were to let myself write all over the pages I could follow the structure much more closely. This is where the neatness of the book stops my thinking. I am not yet able to break into it with my biro. If I were to photocopy each page that would help. I do that with poems I have been given by other people to comment on prior to submission for publication.

That's not entirely true, I have given in and numbered the pages.

'Allotment Fox' - poetry itself, shouting in the night for a partner, the essential listeners/readers, but each one alone for a while to consider the writer's call. Look at this post: a-genuine-stink-of-poets-own-fox

I look forward to parts 2 and 3.