Mathew Mead, Walking Out of the World A. B. Jackson, Fire Station Julian Turner, Crossing the Outskirts Joe Winter, Guest and Host Donald Ward, Adonis Blue (all Anvil Press £7.95)
	Mathew Mead's Walking Out of the World is something of a curate's egg. It plays with a range of poetic forms (villanelle to triolet) but to very little effect except to demonstrate a quirky versatility of style ('An Unrhymed Villanelle', 'A double Villanelle', and 'A Badly Bloated Villanelle'). Most of the poems are derivative and slight (as far as poetic significance is concerned) and seem to exist merely to show off Mead's sense of the playful. The poems where this is most obvious are those comprising the sequence 'Eleven Little Poems'. Most of these are so frivolous they go beyond anything that could be thought of as 'nonsense verse'. For example: Teeth to which other teeth were fixed Teeth on which other teeth were hung Are drawn and gone and leave unmixed A total triumph to the tongue ('In the Mouth') And: A spectre is haunting Germany – The spectre of Germany. ('From the German') Neither can these lines be thought of as insightful or witty in a gnomic or epigrammatic sense; and they are insufficiently self-conscious to be considered postmodern. There is also an anachronism (which I doubt is ironic) in some of phrasing of the more serious poems that is redolent of Georgian poetry: Playing beyond that mortal shade ('Grown–ups') Men like beasts but born of woman, False to all but flesh and blood, We shall face the day with doom on – Beast like man like manlike god ('With a Styptic Pencil') For men with early deaths to die Crossing four hundred yards of mud. Exploding on a tracered sky A lot of God went west for good. ('At the Turn') Other poems have phrases reminiscent of Eliot ('I'll lie and hear the old refrain / Of empty buses going by' – 'Villanelle of the Unslept Night') and Coleridge/Blake ('Who in their man-made fibres dare' – from 'The First Cold Mornings'), but not all the poems are derivative or merely technical feats. Poems such as 'After the Break', although formally conservative and conventional in tone and register does facilitate hermeneutic possibilities: The time left hers and all again in order; we wait as we must wait – the unborn to be born, the undead still to die As does the following from 'You in Your Small Corner': noise and news from far and now sounds unheard and sounds uncanned breast-beat like a broken vow base-note like a lost command And poems such as 'The Drill', 'The Space Where I stood', and 'One: Set Up' each achieve something of this affect. But the overall content of this volume is uneven. The blurb on the back cover of Fire Station by A.B. Jackson reads: 'Without being obscure, these poems are harsh, inventive, compassionate, disturbing'. Yet to derive any satisfying pleasure from this collection one would have to be familiar with the philosophical and artistic references that litter this volume. There are references to the painters Henri Rousseau, Paul Gauguin, Petrus Christus and Rembrandt; the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and David Hume; the poets Roberto Juarroz and Charles Baudelaire; the scientists Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon; the entertainers Harry Lauder and Bela Lugosi; and those unclassifiable such as Phineas Gage (the most famous patient to have survived severe damage to the brain), the psychiatrist R.D. Lang and the twelfth century Northumberland monk St Aelred of Rievaulx. The poems are academic in the sense that they are knowing and nonchalant in tone. They leave nothing for the reader to respond to poetically. In 'David Hume Considers the Moon' the whole point of the poem (framed as the thoughts of Hume) is to reveal that Hume did not think miracles possible. The poem concludes: Clouds will burst with rain, not pairs or plums. Miracles make a mincemeat of reason. To get to this we have six stanzas of lines such as: Compare the two: a goose feather, a town. Breezes blow. Imagine the town airborne. The chance of such unearthly violation is next to nothing These may, or may not, be examples Hume used in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding but they have little poetic resonance in the way Jackson has utilized them in this stanza. This is further evidenced in the following lines from 'Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh': The night air carried nothing but the city; The sky, a slate grey-blue beyond routine bankruptcy, the government of loss. Blackbird, rattling its thicket, had no ear for trumpets. Spring intuited itself. This being said 'The Sleeping Gypsy', which refers to the painting of the same name by Henri Rousseau, is sufficiently connotative and therefore poetic: My best dream came And found me as I slept It came on four legs with a heavy head Its ribcage rose and fell it came so soft it broke my heart and held me small within its eye These lines, although mimetic when read in conjunction with a viewing of the painting, when read independently of such a viewing do have a connotative force that few of Jackson's other poems in this collection achieve.
	Julian Turner's Crossing the Outskirts is an intelligent collection covering a wide range of subjects ('from the interpenetrating identities of these islands to the fugitive colours of actual love' – Ian Duhig) and skilfully managing the fine balance between the general and the particular. 'Glider Pilot' begins in the standard British mainstream descriptive/defamilarization/empirical mode ('the tarmac licked / its long tongue out' to describe the runway) but then diverts to a more poetic register with: Love sometimes rooted, though, above the mess where thirsts were slaked and loneliness expressed in drunken blazes. The tortured will confess with lips apart beside a pale breast. And 'The Start of Something New' manages to produce some effective imagery 'her eyes like pike below / the lake-ice of morphine' and: And now over the hedges, their white floss of smiling blossoms, a figure with my mother's hair beginning her waiting game. However, 'The Magnificent History of English' is too mimetic and rather mundane in subject matter: Together, we have trawled through the photo albums and found Ida – the great aunt I remember fluttering in her chair beside the fire in Hitchin, frail, her hands afraid like birds. But 'White Herd' is more suggestive and poetic with its alliteration and rhyme unobtrusive yet essential so as to evoke an almost Blakean cadence: As Lilith walks the wilderness in storms, or flame-tongues wrap around a schooner's mast to tell the sailors that the worst has passed when fury rolls the sea to mammoth forms, they graze the city's rim, their souls revealed Overall, the collection is good despite, at times, blurring the line between poetry and short story vignette. Joe Winter's Guest and Host according to the back cover blurb 'records the experience of being welcomed into the household of a foreign country' and does so well. But again, we have a curate's egg of a collection. Many of the poems deal with the quotidian and leave one feeling exhausted by exposure to the mundane: Uncle Kanai is outside again. He's slung his shoes off – great wooden boats That sail the sea-road. When he visits Father He hails us, marching up the path … Then soon heaves to, a hero in a chair. And again in 'Highway 34': Sometimes when I walk where trees were tall I am in a prisoner-of-war camp debating poetry with Colonel-General Loblein. Hostilities were over and I was in charge of the German Officers' 'hostel' outside Jessore. As part of my duties I re-interpreted the Geneva Convention on canteen rights. The majority of the volume comprises two long poems. The first a sonnet-sequence ('Guest and Host') named after the collections title, and the other a poem on the 2001 earthquake in Kutch ('Earthquake at Kutch'). 'Guest and Host' is predominantly lyrical in register: India I have begun to know your stories as something closer than chaotic dream, a world more present. To pictured furies, glories, a little more is breathed in […] 'Earthquake at Kutch', however, is less so: Shadows of trees, branch-shadows, shadows of leaves stray in the dust. Only the trees are standing. Slight shapes chequer a quiet space of ground. All in all this is a good collection if somewhat limited in scope and subject matter. Donald Ward's collection Adonis Blue is firmly grounded in visual description. Nevertheless, the descriptions are so interestingly rendered that the resultant loss of poetic potential becomes irrelevant as you watch how cleverly Ward uses defamilarization on the 'objects of the real'. In 'East Side', the poet is at a railway station waiting for his train. The lights above him are 'Yolks of battery eggs'; and trains that pass 'suck' the rail like snails. Eventually his train arrives and he ponders on the monotony of the commuter's life: But the same journey for fifteen years is worse than illness This is essentially the poems theme. Yet it has taken nearly thirteen lines of visual comparison to convey it. Similarly in 'Cyclist on the Main Road' we see Ward's descriptive powers at work in the way he defamiliarizes cyclists and the sound their bicycle tyres make on the road: Each of these drivers is human yet they sound like the sea. Both defamilarization and inferred simile achieve the affect of comparing the noise of the tyres to the noise of the sea. Having established this, Ward then hones in on the metaphorical properties of the cycles' tyres: I lean on air, the heat of their tyres cremate as they pass. Both the heat produced by the tyres and their literal contents comprising 'air' are harnessed by Ward to create an even more precise visual description. When Ward is not describing things, he writes discursively in a philosophical tenor with few images: Suffering brings penetration to the mind Already able to explore distinctions And achieve fine grains of hope And even to more passive souls Suffering brings a presence ('Suffering') The best poem in this collection is 'Adonis Blue' which is very short but compensates by being evocative: More blue than the bluest sky You do not see the grass from which they rise— all, all, is blue hanging like heaven just above your head a swarm of angels in the morning sun brighter than day before the day begins Although seemingly grounded in a rendering of the objects ostensibly described (presumably trees) we have instead a subversion of this process. This results in a slight disassociation of meaning away from the 'described' referents and in favour of more plural meanings. This is the essence of poetic language yet it appears infrequently in Ward's collection. This is not to say that he is a bad writer. He definitely knows how to turn a phrase and his poems are sincere and well considered. © Jeffrey Side 2005