Non Fiction
Issue #2
Jane Yeh’s Marabou (Carcanet £6.95)
The exploration of personal identity through dramatic monologue makes Marabou, if nothing else, a refreshingly interesting first book. The collection is brimming with a variety of enigmatic characters: the opening poem figures a vengeful lover awaiting the delivery of love letters, the next poem the marriage of two Renaissance princesses. Further on, models pose before Pre-Raphaelite artists, seventeenth-century Dutch nuns lay out white linen, and a Roman priest speaks about death in the eruption of Vesuvius. And that’s without even mentioning listless teenagers forming secret spy groups, sheep philosophising on a hillside in Cumbria, and Ook the Owl reflecting on his success after being tipped as the first cast member for the Harry Potter films.
But it is Yeh’s turns of phrase and use of metaphor that makes Marabou a truly worthwhile read. In the ‘Pre-Raphaelites’, for example, a model states: ‘What it is that is wrong in me – / When one glove in a pair is turned inside-out / It becomes the same as the other one, but with the seams exposed. / Nobody wants to see that.’ In some ways then, Yeh’s book gives voices to trapped persons, wherever in history they may be: to those without a voice. Even inanimate objects are given intriguing and often amusing voices: ‘Bad Quarto’ is ‘Off-spindle, missish, lo-fi and hissy’ for example, whereas ‘Blue China’ simply states ‘how shatteringly unpleasant / It is to be born under Sevres’. But for me the strongest poem is ‘Portrait at Windsor’, giving voice to an oil canvas caught in a fire at the famous castle. Here the painting describes how ‘the great heat sets [its] face cracking’, ‘each brushstroke crumbling’, triumphantly stating at the close of the poem, ‘I have been a queen. / For four hundred and sixty-one years, I kept / This place. There will not be another.’
In most first collections, much rests on whether or not the poet has truly found their own ‘voice’. Yeh then, is that perfect exception: a poet who has produced an accomplished first volume that somehow manages to jump from voice to voice, without ever boring the reader or falling off of such a potentially lethal tightrope. Past and present, from the objective to the subjective, Yeh considers it all. What’s more, she manages to utilise the sonnet in two poems, marrying the form to her subject matter perfectly. It’s love, predictably, but not as you’d expect it, and it’s precisely those kinds of surprises that make Marabou stand out. Impressive stuff.
Simon Armitage Tyrannosaurus Rex vs. the Corduroy Kid
It is perhaps too obvious a statement to say that Simon Armitage writes well. His has been one of the most dominant and intensely original voices within British poetry since the early 90s onwards, spawning a whole school of imitators attempting to recapture his mixture of colloquialism, comedic timing, and stubbornly erudite common sense. But in this, Armitage’s eleventh collection, one senses a definite departure from the public, ‘man speaking to men’ style so prominent in earlier works (see Zoom! or Kid, for example). Gone is the explorative ambivalence of earlier volumes (‘And I guess that the tightness in the throat [… is] part of that sense of something else’, from Zoom!, say), replaced by what the book’s blurb describes as ‘the matter of here and now’; an open two-mindedness that hones in on the uncomfortable and ever-shifting facts of our lives today.
None of this is to say, however, that Armitage has abandoned his unique wielding of well-expressed anecdote. His poem ‘Horses, M62’ exemplifies this, in which the narrator recounts a ‘team / of a dozen or so / [being] suddenly here and amongst, / silhouettes / in the butterscotch dusk.’ Here the ‘flank[s] / of actual horse[s]’ invade the poem’s regimented order (the slow pile-up of cars on the motorway), to inject it with excitement, poignancy, and perhaps most crucially, Armitage’s trademark control of form and rhyme, the internal rhythms of the poem mimicking the galloping of commanding, but similarly terrified, horses.
But where the younger Armitage might have left such images and incidents to brood of their own accord, here we see ‘Standstill. / Motor oil puls[ing]. / Black blood.’ The poem, then, as well as harbouring its basic contemporary relevance (nature and man colliding in a confusion of creature and machine; fear and supremacy fluctuating repeatedly), is also ripe with global relevance, the hint of foreign crisis and the spoils of war becoming suddenly apparent. The middle-aged Armitage, then, is a darker and much sharper poet in his craftsmanship: the opening poem of the collection is a guide to ‘Hand-Washing Techniques’: its short, matter-of-fact lines injected with precise and stark relevance (as the washing technique becomes increasingly complex, for example, the dedicatory message ‘i.m. Dr David Kelly’ gains added weight and meaning, whilst steering clear of being overtly political). Other poems carry a similarly concealed frankness and complexity: ‘You’re Beautiful’ sees the narrator deconstruct the male/female dichotomy to brilliant effect (in spite of the perhaps clichéd play on Mars and Venus), whilst ‘The Perverts’ carefully considers current concerns over perversion and paedophilia through the playful playground test of the buttercup under the chin.
Many other poems stand out: the chilled and poignant eeriness of ‘Evening’, the quirky and interlaced sequential lines of ‘Poem on His Birthday’, and perhaps most of all, the illuminating brilliance of ‘The Patent’. Some show weaknesses: ‘Learning by Rote’, for example, takes a poor idea and runs with it. But as a collection from a writer who Sean O’Brien described as ‘the first poet of serious artistic intent since Philip Larkin to have achieved popularity’, Tyrannosaurus Rex… is ultimately a strong work that sees Armitage moving away from his comfort zone and into a more dangerous, darker, and all encompassing territory. As ‘The Six Comeuppances’ states, ‘For every learning curve, a plateau phase’, and Armitage’s curve, it would seem, is definitely going places.
Nick Laird To A Fault
‘It’s a bit like looking through the big window / on the top deck of the number 47’ says Nick Laird of writing, and comprehending, poetry: ‘I’m watching you, and her, and all of them, / but through my own reflection’. It is the simple, the everyday, the near-mundane that gives Laird, almost paradoxically, a voice of such affirming vitality and astounding awareness. That said, Laird’s poetry, despite its colloquialism, upbeat tone, and occasionally irritating New Labour slang (‘I remember poncing a fag off some guy at the bar, then downing the dregs of my last pint of stout’), is constantly dealing with – as the book’s blurb states – ‘the sharp side of relationships’, in a tone that is deliberately unsure, often detached, and full of wordplay (reminiscent of Paul Muldoon, a clear influence in Laird’s poetic stylings). Take ‘Done’ or ‘Aubade’: the latter is almost an inverted love letter directing the object of his affection to ‘Go home’, claiming that ‘If you knew enough you’d / know removed is how you’re loved’, while the former compares, through extended metaphor, the break-up of a couple and their moving out of a flat to ‘the scene of a murder. / Dustsheets and silence and blame’. Gritty, painful, and honest poetry. But then in the middle of all this comes refreshing and deftly placed comedy: ‘You wrote off the Volvo. I gave you verrucas’. Laird is a poet constantly shifting perspective, tone, and often focus, and yet his poems never sound disjointed or lacking in fluidity.
As a child of the Troubles, Laird predictably addresses the political and social issues facing past and modern day Ireland. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Laird’s scope is wide, and shockingly so, not least in ‘The Given’, a poem that is carried along by internal rhyme at such a pace that the reader is forced to contemplate how fragile our political freedoms are. Each of the poem’s five verses addresses the loss of a sense, and the apathy and despair of those losing them (‘To accept these losses, we cover our faces, / then scratch Be our guest with a fork on the table’), especially poignant given the fast-paced world we inhabit and increasing disinterest in politics today.
Perhaps though, Laird is most impressive when considering his childhood home of Northern Ireland, as ‘Cuttings’, arguably the best poem of his collection, demonstrates. The poem revolves around his father getting a haircut, and is a microcosmic symbol of masculinity and Irish culture in itself. Laird considers those who have, and will, sit in the same seat as his ‘angry and beautiful father’: the ‘eelmen, gunmen, the long dead, the police’, whilst alluding to the sparse, diminishing ‘glories of Ulster’ on a wall-calendar ‘sponsored by JB Crane Hire or some crowd flogging animal feed’. But it is the beauty of Laird’s metaphors that make the poem, and his book, shine out amongst most postmodern and contemporary poetry. The barber’s cape ‘comes off with a matador’s flourish’, the generic barber’s sign is transformed, with added political connotations, into ‘the bandaged pole’, while his father is ‘open as in a deckchair … / his head full of lather and unusual thoughts’. Further examples instantly spring to mind with their vividness: ‘A singular sprinkler shakes his head spits at the newsprint of birdshit’, and the radiance of the photocopier is ‘nothing but the dawn horizon / strapped into a plastic box’.
The mundane and ordinary become the beautiful and interesting. Love and relationships become uncertainty and dusting down, moving on. Despair becomes renewal and resoluteness. Nick Laird is a poet addressing difficult issues that poetry often shies away from, but he is clearly capable of rising to the task with a refreshing vitality and dynamism. As Laird forcefully proclaims of poetry in ‘Disclaimer’: ‘It’s not… the tremulous blow job you got in the Eurostar toilet… / Not just a smallholding. Not just moving parts. / And it’s not all the same. / It is joined up writing. / It’s not lifting the pen from this page.’ And you know, at times, I don’t doubt for a second that he didn’t.