Tag: Review

‘Not All Together At Peace’

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Cover of 'Absence' by Ali Lewis

Ali Lewis, Absence (CHEERIO, 2024)

Absence by Ali Lewis is ‘a book about nothing’. So, what is a book about nothing really about?

From the opening pages, nothing expands and explodes. Absence is about ‘nothings’, resolutely plural in all the contradictions of that word. Its main characters are ‘losses, vacua, gaps’.

Anchored (loosely) around the poem’s central rod – ‘Rules for Comedy’ – the collection dips and dives into these holes. It offers non-whole glimpses of something both bigger and smaller than itself; it teases and riddles and returns again and again to absence. Some of the poem’s rules are questions. ‘Did I tell you I found a body once?’ he asks. ‘Did I make that up, or is it true, or both?’

Comedy is certainly both. Something that is funny is humorous and strange, deceitful and somehow truer than any sermon or lecture. ‘In comedy, you’re judged if what you say didn’t happen,’ says the poet near the end of ‘Rules for Comedy’. How about in poetry?

In ‘The Body Politic’, upon seeing the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan in the British Library – ‘an etching of a king, | artfully restored’ – the poet remarks:

I’m reminded of what I know
but don’t often think about: that I am a host
as well as a host, that even within
me, there is no necessary unity between
the parasites, the fungi, the cells splitting
like sects, the bacteria on my finger that touches
the glass above the book, which tells me,
now I am not all together at peace with myself

Knowing and not knowing, thinking and forgetting, the poet is a contradictory bundle of mind, body and book. Like the king’s restored form, the poet is constantly re-creating and refining. He has the tools for scrubbing: ‘the diamond grit | of mud and metal sludge you need to hone | fine work’ (‘The Knife Sharpener’).

In the section above, the poet is reminded, in a roundabout way, that the body is not finished. Indeed, the body, with its invisible cells, fungi and parasites is never “one piece” but a profusion of absences: how could anyone be at peace in such a diverse vector, one that contains so many multitudes, one that tries to stitch such different pieces together?

As well as a lack of personal peace, the book (and body) opens out to greater suffering. This is where Absence excels. In a ‘book about nothing’, the poet does not retreat into himself and dwell on existential dread. Nor does the collection exist only in abstraction. Instead, it confronts (and challenges) some of the world’s many cruelties.

For example, in ‘The Chick Sexer’, he remarks upon the commercial egg industry’s appalling practice of killing male chicks within days of being born. Billions of day-old chicks are fed through a macerator because, by virtue of their sex, they have no worth to the humans who have bred them into existence. How could any body be at peace seeing the millions of tiny pieces these bodies are torn into?

As Absence attests, things that aren’t there can be the most haunting. The missing piece is compassion. In Lewis’ hands, absence is not a refuge from the world but a means of seeing the world more clearly.

Ali Lewis, Absence (CHEERIO, 2024)

Available here

The poem’s the puzzle, or ‘I couldn’t not keep looking’

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In ‘Street Sailing’, Matt Gilbert looks anew upon familiar streetscapes. His reader can’t not keep looking

Cover of 'Street Sailing' by Matt Gilbert

In a blog post announcing the release of his debut collection, Matt Gilbert wrote:

‘Unlike maths, or wordle, there’s no ‘answer’ to a poem – only readings’

Poetry certainly resists the neatness of a single irrefutable solution. Instead, it invites readers to think beyond the obvious and acknowledge the plurality of possibilities that could exist.

That’s not to say though that a poem can’t be a puzzle. A puzzle in the sense of a brainteaser, a head-scratcher; a foot-tapping, eye-rolling, knee-jerking conundrum; a challenge, a problem. The world of poetry has many problems.

Even if a poem can’t be solved, it can have answers. These answers are less likely to be 43 or TOAST than another poem sparked into life by the original or a feeling too complex to put into words. A poem’s solution, however splintered and plural, is there in the text. Where else could it be? To find it: don’t not keep looking.

‘Street Sailing’ abounds with linguistic games, which pop onto the page like ‘terse notes sent rattling up through buried pipes’. The title already makes the reader do a double take: how can we sail through the street? Is the alliteration so alluring as to prevail over sense?

The answer is yes – and no. The wind that propels Gilbert’s vessel is rhythm and melody, ‘floating for no reason | until the cuff began to form, | sprouting from that plastic seed…’. But sailing the streets is not merely wordplay; it is an ideal metaphor for how the collection asks its reader to look again at familiar sights. Discovery comes in stages that slowly reveal themselves: first, ‘a sleeve, arms empty | followed by pocket, collar, yoke’.

The poetic game does not have winners or losers; the joy is in the taking part. In ‘Street Sailing’, everyday scenes are taken apart and it is the reader’s job to reassemble them.

In ‘How to flatten the moon’, the poet combines a critique of modern life and its abundance of technologies with an anecdotal plea for the importance of poetry. The title could be taken from a clickbait blog post and, like this dubious genre, you have to read (or scroll) all the way to the end of the poem to get the answer:

… now ease the phone
from your pocket, point it up
towards our ancient friend,
then click.

Now you’ve done it.

The answer is simple: a photo can flatten the moon. But what does that mean?

Given that poets have obsessed over the moon for millennia, there is a certain self-deprecating nod when Gilbert romanticises ‘the rounded milky glint | of our almost full fat | satellite’. Is the point then that, where photography flattens and dulls, poetry adds depth and revivifies? The poet’s repeated focus on the present moment emphasises the disconnect between living through screens and LIVING with eyes wide open and capital everything. Poetry is firmly in the latter camp: to write poetry is to observe, really observe; to read poetry is to read and re-read and re-examine everything through someone else’s eyes. Technology has made our lives easier but it has also overcomplicated something as simple as looking at the night sky: as the poet exclaims, ‘there it is, there it is’. Look at it!

Other readings are available. Flat does not have to mean bad. The final line is deliciously ambiguous: ‘Now you’ve done it’ could just as easily be jubilant as derisive, depending on where the stress lands. Capturing a complex astrological body in an accessible 2D-frame could be considered a modern miracle. In the ‘Editor’s introduction’, Matthew M. C. Smith extols the photographic qualities of Gilbert’s collection, exclaiming that ‘his poetry wanders, camera-like […] then zooms in, on the minutiae that most of us ignore’. Flattening boxes before recycling them helps more boxes be recycled.

It’s not just the moon that people fail to notice. Drivers are an easy, and justifiable, target: ‘Rush hour cars kept coming, | oblivious to all but road’, while ‘rasping corvids’ and a ‘lone indignant… sparrowhawk’ perform to an empty audience high above (‘Take the second exit’).

The image could easily be a metaphor for governments’ narrow focus on short-term economic growth, while climate catastrophe creeps ever closer. It could also be a critique of humanity’s treatment of non-human animals, whose suffering on farms and in slaughterhouses is kept well out of sight. Either way, there is hope: although the ‘petrol-powered | roulette balls’ keep spinning, the drivers are ‘desperate for their exit’. If systems can be adapted to redefine priorities, the drivers can adapt with them.

‘Rush hour cars kept coming, | oblivious to all but road’

Although some animals are ignored and others are deliberately obscured, a fox hit by a train is grimly compulsive viewing for the poet: ‘I couldn’t not keep looking’ (‘Foxed’). The double negative is symptomatic of humanity’s confused relationship with other species: most people don’t want to harm animals but neither do they want to stop using (and abusing) them. The presence of violence and death uncomfortably close to a shielded human space (‘the platform’s end’) is a reminder of the interconnectedness of nature and mortality – however hard we try to place ourselves above other life forms. Twinged by this sorry sight, the poet feels duty bound to convert his feelings into words: ‘In the absence of a ritual | I shall mark your empty legend’.

Putting into words the illogical act of staring at something repulsive seems a fitting way to describe why poetry exists. ‘Street Sailing’ is a puzzle with many readings and many answers. Matt Gilbert is a skilful setter, spraying clues, hints and red herrings all around his poetic landscape. Getting lost in this impressive debut is no bad thing.

Matt Gilbert, Street Sailing (Black Bough Poetry, 2023). Available here: Street Sailing – Black Bough Poetry

Cover of 'Street Sailing' by Matt Gilbert

Whispered Screams

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Keely O’Shaugnessy, Baby is a Thing Best Whispered (Alien Buddha Press, 2022)

Keely O’Shaugnessy’s collection of short stories is a hard-hitting spin through scenes of horror and glimpses of hope. Screams are heard as whispers and whispers are screamed…

The collection is strewn with violence and fear. Domestic abuse, in particular, is a recurring theme. ‘Hidden in the Margins of a Gideon’s Bible’ is a grimly vivid snapshot of three characters’ responses to such horror: the mother, bloodied and beaten; the ‘kid sister’, inquisitive and fearful; and the older sister holding her family (and the narrative) together. All three lay in a single motel bed, aware to varying degrees of the perils of their situation, a disturbingly evocative metaphor for the widespread impacts of abuse.

For all the horror, however, O’Shaughnessy offers plentiful moments of redemption. Dreams spiral up, emerging from the darkness. In ‘Practising Tricks, Spells and Other Incantations’, the narrator opens with a wonderfully unstable first line:

You’re seven when I fracture my wrists, still young enough to believe in magic

The contrasting personalities housed within this line encapsulate the delicate balance between believing and disbelieving that runs throughout the collection. Magical possibilities interact with harsh realities, often losing but always putting up a fight.

Transformation is a tantalising prospect in a world where escape is often a character’s greatest hope. In ‘What If We Breathed Through Our Skin?’, a boy turns into a frog. Less literally, motherhood transforms characters. The narrator in the collection’s opening story, ‘Baby is a Thing Best Whispered’, is undergoing perhaps the greatest change of her life but ‘the ’90s playlist we devised nights before’ is drowning out moment. The start of a new life blurs into ‘long and winding’ speeches in which the bride and mother-to-be barely features. Starting with a character who feels absent from her own story is a superbly disorienting technique, which sets the scene for the collection’s distinctive instability.

Meanwhile, the convincing co-existence of life-changing and trivial is one of the collection’s greatest achievements. Small details that seem scarcely to warrant a mention are in fact pivotal, like the shade of red on a car used for an extra-marital affair or the different sizes of balloon thrown in water fights as a pregnant narrator’s baby kicks. The ripped chinos the narrator imagines her father might have worn as he threatened her mother with a knife seem vanishingly insignificant yet somehow essential to the made-up memory.

In a collection with such carefully scrutinised memories, vagueness stands out. In ‘The Manicure’, the narrator’s throwaway reference to ‘a long dead actress whose name I can’t remember’ feels like a fitting epithet for many of the collection’s absent and self-absent characters. Loss accompanies transformation like night follows day. ‘How to Bake Cookies When Your Child is Dying’ is not, as the title suggests, a self-help guide for coping with grief; rather, it is an eight-step recipe that advances with unnerving inevitability. Baking, for the narrator, is a gesture. It is ambiguous whether this gesture is meaningful or meaningless. Simply, when going through the motions is all one can do, one must go through the motions.

O’Shaughnessy’s writing certainly does not go through the motions. Her rhythmic prose showcases masterful narrative control and her stories have the ability to surprise with devastating simplicity. Nowhere is this better seen than in ‘Teaching a Clean Front Kick’, where words spoken and unspoken are reflected in actions done and undone. The child narrator sits on her infant sister but is dragged off before she can cause too much harm. The ominous presence of Uncle Jerry, however, lurks over the story – and provokes its chilling final line.

Keely O’Shaughnessy, Baby is a Thing Best Whispered (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). Available here.

Words + Shapes = Poetry

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Elisabeth Kelly, Mind Mathematics (HybridDreich, 2021)

Mind Mathematics is a poetic experiment and eye-opening experience. While we tend to associate poets with descriptions of shores and trees, Kelly’s poetic persona shifts the focus to shapes and degrees.

Intangible, internalised feelings are mapped onto a geometric landscape. In ‘Lines’, ‘hope [is] paralleled, across the field’; in ‘Rhombus’, yearning is grounded in concrete measurements: ‘One hundred and eighty degrees away,/ you walk,/ leaving patterns of solitude/ on a shifting beach’. Kelly constructs her poetic environment with deft skill, stripping nature to its core mathematical elements before ‘silently building us a new picture, a new whole’ (‘Patterns of You’).

Like wholeness, balance is a recurring theme. To a logical mind, the practice of mathematics possesses a reassuring quality, an unequivocal certainty amidst the chaos of the outside world. In ‘Subtrahend’, the poet strives for stability. She laments efforts ‘to subtract,/ to lose parts of me’ that she has spent a lifetime trading with ‘desperately attempting to add’. This ‘sum/ I hoped would balance’ represents the elusive ideal towards which we all struggle; perfect equilibrium is harder to find in real life than on paper.

You set the constant,
the old beech glinting,
the balance in my equation.

‘My Equation’

The pamphlet’s success comes from its portrayal in poetic form of an experience of the world through a purely mathematical perspective. The poet uses this contradiction to unite two seemingly irreconcilable worldviews and in so doing enriches our overall outlook. Kelly reconciles mathematics and poetry, science and art, logic and creativity, and demonstrates that what falls under these labels should not so hastily be kept apart. In the end, ‘Mind Mathematics’ is a beautiful expression of unity.

Elisabeth Kelly, Mind Mathematics (HybridDreich, 2021). Available here.

A (blue) light at the end of the tunnel

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Michelle Marie Jacquot, Deteriorate (Michelle Marie Jacquot, 2021)

I hope you enjoy this e-book
about hating anything “e”

Michelle Marie Jacquot’s second book of poems (her first pamphlet) is rooted in contradiction. In Deteriorate, the poet is nostalgic for a pre-internet age, for the simplicity of skipping rope and playing ping pong. She laments the ever-falling modern attention span and the pressures of social media. Yet, ultimately, she accepts that technology has come to dominate our everyday lives, and that it’s now up to us to learn to live with it.

Jacquot’s style is intuitive and unpretentious. The verse is sparse and free of decorative adornment, which allows her words to cut through the noise of modern living. An actress and songwriter, Jacquot has a knack for rhythm and musicality; she writes lines that will stay with the reader like a catchy song lyric stuck on repeat.

I wonder what they teach in schools these days
and what kinds of robots
these robots
will breed

‘Future Libraries’

Jacquot writes with wit and humour, which gives the pamphlet its characteristic balance of exasperation and acceptance. She is attentive to the arbitrariness of life, its injustices and shortcomings. Her poetry focuses on many pressing themes: body image, addiction, the effects of celebrity culture, fake appearances. One such consequence of technology that interests Jacquot is the impermanence of creation. This can have a sad but liberating impact, a contradiction the poet picks up in ‘Sing Along’. In this poem, she wryly acknowledges the rapid changes we have lived through, whilst warning of the dangers this can pose: ‘If you get enough numb people mumbling/ they will repeat anything you want’.

In ‘The Blue Light’ Jacquot raises an interesting paradox about the measures we take to protect ourselves from technology. Bemused by adverts for blue light glasses, she asks ‘Would you poison yourself on purpose/ in any other circumstance?’ Reading this poem onscreen reinforces the doubly ironic message. Our agency in the digital age is subtly questioned in the phrase ‘on purpose’: technology addiction robs many of this control.

Do we think the kids will be alright
If we leave them nothing to lose?

‘Sparknotes’

At times, the poet’s frustration bursts forth in an uncontrollable wave: ‘I’d like to rip my hair out/ one by one and count them all’ (‘Spears’). The self-destruction of the body is a painful consequence of an age where virtual connections replace physical contact and body image is determined by airbrushed appearances. The tenderness with which we treat our devices (‘Your cell phone is dying’) is too often absent from our own self-care. The solution lies in moderation and a healthy attitude that neither immortalises nor vilifies the body. Jacquot sums it up neatly in ‘Personal Best’: ‘My body may not be a temple/ but of it I’ve grown quietly fond’.

In the end, these seedlings of hope push through the negativity. The balance between self-representation and spectatorship is a recurring theme throughout the collection. The poet offers a liberating take on a classic mantra: ‘dance/ as if they’re not watching/ because, simply, they aren’t’ (‘Your Advantage’). This poem embodies the two-step positivity needed in the modern age: it is from deterioration that the capacity for celebration grows.

Michelle Marie Jacquot, Deteriorate (Michelle Marie Jacquot, 2021). Out July 7th. Available to pre-order here.

Dreams and beyond

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Rachel Ka Yin Leung, chengyu: chinoiserie (Hedgehog Press, 2020)

The chengyu (“idiom” in Mandarin) condenses something meaningful into four characters. In her debut collection, Leung follows a similar pattern, translating Chinese sayings into English and using the resulting amalgamation to carve out her own stories. These stories gain power through their brevity; they are fleetingly endless and endlessly fleeting.

but stirring, i return to the
hum and cry of this brief world, and
bare, and cold

‘sea oath, mountain treaty: till the end of time (海誓山盟)’

The poet looks out over the immensity of the ocean and then looks at herself. Like the seemingly never-ending expanse of water, Leung’s language is a contradiction. Her descriptions are simultaneously incisive and open-ended, vivid and vague.

One highlight is ‘a long night is fraught with many a dream: before morning comes (夜長夢多)’ with its powerful focus on liminality and boundaries. Leung compels a sense of danger and transgression from the start: ‘i am crossing over / in the dark’. Through an array of transcendental images, Leung takes us “beyond”, wherever that may be. Once there, the language used to describe ‘these dream-infested waters’ is exquisite. Leung has a delicate and subtle touch for sound and its limitations. The dreamer is aware of ‘bendy silence’ and of her ‘eyes ticking, ticking like the / black time’.

i am confused.
i think
my blueness is a shade of red
like a baby bleeds

‘drunk on life, dreaming of death: living life as if befuddled (醉生夢死)’

Time and sound are inextricably linked. Both are flexible but suffocating. Similarly, the poems of chengyu: chinoiserie feel confined and freely formed, confused and lucid. Leung skilfully twists our expectations throughout the collection, showcasing the fluidity and stickiness of language. This is perfectly exemplified in Leung’s phrase, ‘syrupy noonlight’ (‘a trickle of water runs long: always (細水長流)’), one of the collection’s many beautiful and sharp observations that will stay with the reader.

Rachel Ka Yin Leung, chengyu: chinoiserie (Hedgehog Press, 2020). Available here.

Just a Kid from Cortonwood

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Mick Pettinger, Just a Kid from Cortonwood (Wild West Press, 2020)

Mick Pettinger’s debut pamphlet, Just a Kid from Cortonwood, is a raw portrayal of suffering and love. A punch-up between pain and healing, these personal poems are both confessional and vulnerable. Mick leaves nothing in the changing rooms, allowing his varied experiences to crash onto the page. From the death of his brother, to a childhood love of Ninja Turtles, to those people in the ‘photos in our minds and hard drives [which] slowly get wiped’ (‘Essence’), Mick pieces together all the ‘dates and times and dates and times’ (‘Chronology’) that make up a life.

We just wanna be normal
But what we really mean by normal
Is that we wanna cope

‘Finding Normal’

Mick’s authentic voice is heard in every line, swinging from angry to tender, at once bleak and life-affirming. These are poems that demand to be read aloud, narrated with Northern no-nonsense. Between conversation and monologue, the collection doesn’t hold back its punches. Mick knows he might get no reply (the opening poem, ‘Dear Steve’, is poignantly addressed to his dead brother) but this only makes him shout louder.

…without a care in the arse-backwards world!

Because today I am alive…

‘Cost Price’

Produced by Wild West Press, an independent South Yorkshire publisher, the pamphlet is beautifully made. The poems are also accompanied by a powerful and moving series of black and white photos by Mark Antony, featuring Mick and the South Yorkshire landscape.

Mick Pettinger, Just a Kid from Cortonwood (Wild West Press, 2020). Available here.

Fragments and forgetting

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LOST FUTURES, vol. 1: ‘in search of lost time’ (January 2021), eds. Kieran Cutting & Christian Kitson

‘Go on a journey with me’ urges Kieran Cutting in the introduction of LOST FUTURES, a compulsion that grabs the reader and pulls them into its strange temporal and spatial worlds. If the first volume is a journey, we embark unsure of our destination, unsure if we will arrive and, by the end, even less confident we will ever make it back safely. We travel through time, space, memory and dreams on a journey ‘from out of the chaos’. The result is both enriching and enjoyable, disorientating and disruptive.

The zine’s vision is set in ‘two ghosts’ with the division (and disruption) of “real v imaginary” and “concrete v abstract”. The present-day “real” woman to whom the poem is addressed is absent for the poet; she is ‘a you’, one of an infinite number of possibilities for who she might now be. In contrast, ‘the you’ is a presence fixed in the past, but also a ghost, a non-existent entity who has ceased to be, and who is therefore painfully real. This rich poem hints at many of the tensions that resurface throughout LOST FUTURES: the rupture of past, present and future into an amorphous mess; the intricate balance between relationships held too long or relinquished too soon, and the search for ‘some shred, some tatter’ which is played out in the volume’s fragmentary multimedia work.

Daniel Bristow-Bailey’s wonderful title, ‘an excerpt from “the wholeness” (a work in progress)’ reflects on the impossibility of completeness. The seemingly autobiographical opening immediately complicates temporal linearity by starting before the author’s birth. The author narrates how his father escaped from a bubbling bar brawl in order to attend his birth, which he admits ‘may or may not be entirely true’. Of course, such a disclaimer could be applied to the past in general — history, myth, legend and fantasy are flexible categories that overlap more often than not. Regardless of how much truth is behind the story, the nascent brawl is a powerful example of a “lost future”: an event that may or may not have taken place, a mystery that doesn’t need solving. What matters for the author is that it became “a brawl” rather than “the brawl” when his father walked away to attend another beginning.

The rest of the story poses the question of parallel universes through the urban myth of Bob Holness’ sax solo on Baker Street. As well as the unreliability of the past — which is brilliantly expressed in the “imperfect perfect” construction ‘he used to have done’ — the introduction of ‘another universe’ raises the question of opposing spatial realities. This idea also forms a key part of Christian Kitson’s ‘parasite’, which contrasts ‘the reality of the moment’ of the reunion of lovers with ‘the simulated world I’d painstakingly built’ during their time apart. When these two ghosts collide, their incompatibility is destructive: ‘you, the stranger, collapsed my dream world’.

It is significant that imagery of orbits recurs throughout the volume. This reminds us that the basis of our existence is mere chance, that our environment (like time) never stands still, and that small bumps in the (orbital) path can set us off in a completely different direction. The collage built around the concept of ‘IF’ — a tiny word with enormous significance — is perhaps the best embodiment of our fractured and changeable existence. The dream of utopia is in fact a partial and messy reality, constantly reimagined and reframed to adapt to present experience. Meanwhile, in ‘new worlds’, language has the power to reinvent and reform our experiences. Do we taste and smell differently if we ‘hear waves of mint’? Can new wor(l)ds — or new combinations of existing ones — create ‘a future/ where we hold each other’s houses’? IF is both a powerful and crushing word: it communicates hope for something better and acceptance that reality is not how we would like it to be.

The collage’s screenshots of tweets and WhatsApp messages add a sense of fragmentation and ephemerality that characterise much of the modern age. This is, however, countered by the seriousness of the messages: imagine ‘if we reinvested in networks of care instead of surveillance’. Technology’s “lost future” had earlier been foreshadowed in references to MSN Messenger and CDs, examples of technologies that shaped (and, perhaps, continue to shape) our lives despite now being largely redundant. Likewise, Duunya’s powerful artwork ‘another day’ satirises both technology and modern jobs in its portrayal of a worker slumped at their desk. The figure has one hand on a keyboard and the other on a mouse, while the computer screen bears down on them from out of shot. As occurs throughout LOST FUTURES, absence makes the computer’s presence even more overpowering. In the background, frames of happier, more human moments dance out of sight, a potent contrast for an age in which many lives have been altered and many futures lost staring into cyber space.

This debut volume is a varied and skilful collection of work by Kieran Cutting, ‘some fantastic friends and some well-timed strangers’. Serendipitous connections are certainly appropriate for LOST FUTURES with its array of moments, missed moments, nearly moments, imagined moments and forgotten moments. The search for lost time — time lost to abusive relationships, believing something that was never true, or ‘holed up in a crumbling castle’ — is as paradoxical as it is imperative. These “lost futures” (‘the world-where-you-never-held-her-hand’, the space between IF and THEN, ‘missed connections, grey days,/ unescapable nights’) are neither real nor imagined, utopic nor dystopic, remembered nor forgotten. They are ‘possibility, nostalgia, regret’ all rolled into one.

LOST FUTURES, vol. 1: ‘in search of lost time’ (January 2021). Available here.

Absence, nostalgia and memory

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Nigel Kent, Saudade (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2019)

In Saudade, Nigel Kent traces lives and their losses, carefully threading themes of love, death and legacy to reflect on how we record and remember our existence. Art, poetry and the body’s demise all serve as frameworks, yet it is absence and nostalgia that dominate Kent’s debut collection.

Five poems are written after well-known artists, including ‘The Maids’, inspired by a 1987 painting by Portuguese-born Paula Rego. In this poem, hands are a powerful and ambivalent force, creating and destroying in equal measure. In ‘Lipstick Smile’, art itself is ambivalent: a father cruelly uses an artistic metaphor (‘like painting/ over flakes of rust;/ the past carries on/ corroding unseen beneath’) to warn his son about his choice of wife. The harshness of this message, as well as the father’s ability (or curse) to look beyond beauty to see what lies beneath, characterises the stark and poignant tone of Saudade.

In ‘Clearing Out’, a woman agonises over the objects that have shaped her life, unable to throw away such distinctive memories. Her insistent refusal, ‘Not yet! Not yet! Not yet!’, will later find an echo in the collection’s powerful non-ending (‘linger, linger, linger’). It is not possessions, however, but poetry that serves as the most pertinent evidence of having lived. The collection opens and closes with performances, which frame the sequence as a poetic memory. The speaker in ‘7.30 p.m. at the Art’s Workshop’ is inextricably bound to her creation: she has ‘iambs/ beating loudly/ in her chest’. Poetry is not the words she voices, but the marks they make on her body.

If poetry is necessary, it is also corruptible. Indeed, the innocence of ‘those naked words/ [that] shivered/ on the page’ will later be twisted into ‘oily opalescence’ by the smooth-talking speaker in ‘The Urban Shaman’. Here, the body (and our abuse of it) reveals the truth: ‘a city of a thousand/ cuts laid bare/ her sleeves ripped back/ to show the weeping wounds/ that she conceals’.

Diverse bodies populate Kent’s poetic landscape, many of which are in decline. In ‘Dignitas’, the subject is naked again, requiring assistance to carry out one of the most basic human necessities, his dignity washed away ‘like the dirt swirling and gurgling/ down the drain beneath his feet’. Another potent symbol for this degeneration comes in ‘Sweet and Sour’, where ‘frayed bags for life/ filled with Kilner jars/ of pickled strawberries’ reveal the layers of our existence. The poet contemplates how long this drawn-out life can last, the heart still beating while the body decays.

iambs
beating loudly
in her chest

‘7.30 p.m. at the Art’s Workshop’

Kent is arguably at his most poignant in the prose poem, ‘Bleak, dark, and piercing cold…’, which takes its title from Oliver Twist. Through a deceptively profound analogy between a homeless man and discarded piece of chewing gum, he shows how bodies can be turned into unwanted stains on a landscape: ‘They spit you out like gum that’s lost its taste, yet they complain it’s you who litters the city’s streets’. The problem won’t go away however much we try to ignore it: the politician ends up ‘irked by the sticky glob embedded in the tread of handmade shoes’.

A tension also exists with technology, which is brought out prominently in ‘Faraway’. In this poem, a worried father checks his phone in the hope that his daughter will have texted. The wait for this elusive message tests his patience, a virtue that continues to dwindle in the modern world. Although technology seems to offer an immediate solution to saudade, in the end it merely reaffirms the absence. This is reflected in ‘Saudade II’ where technology cannot resolve the poet’s longing: ‘I try once more/ to cut and paste you/ by my side’.

Ultimately, reading Saudade is an enriching experience. The reader will share characters’ frustration at an inaccessible past or evasive present/presence, as well as sadness at the body’s inevitable decline. But, more importantly, she will feel quietly invigorated. For Saudade is full of small moments of pleasure and beauty which give us something for which to yearn.

Nigel Kent, Saudade (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2019). Available here.