Identity Parade.

Identity Parade.
New British & Irish Poets ed. Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2010.
Here the editor has notionally gathered together the work of a 'new' generation of poets, showcasing each with his or her own potted biography and photograph ( a touch I had hoped would be helpful in understanding the work they had produced ) and linking each, in alphabetical order by their status as first-time authors, award-winners and academics in their own right across the contemporary literary landscape of Britain and Ireland in the Twenty First Century.
By way of introduction, Roddy Lumsden looks at those changes which have taken place in the world of poetry and literature since the 1990's. As he himself points out, the technological changes which gathered momentum in the Nineties and mushroomed in the last decade have mapped out the shape of the arts and media for the beginning of the Twenty First Century. Social forces have coalesced around the use of the internet, the World Wide Web, the personal computer, around the use of the mobile phone and the personal organiser.
However, I will argue that what is revealed in this collection is that the instruments that were notionally meant to serve as tools of communication, meant to bring people together have in fact driven them apart by enabling and inviting communication from afar. What is termed 'globalisation' has meant that a world community has been spawned via the internet. This community, whilst it enables someone on a social networking site in Malawi or California to blog, to 'talk' to, to do business with, to date the rest of the world has stretched out the lines of communication, which arch over long distances rather than spreading organically from the place of origin. This brings about a kind of social fragmentation, a disjunct which is mirrored by Lumsden's poetry collection,
Add to this the ease and frequency of travel, particularly that of air travel, and the result is the subsequent pulling away, dislocation of people (particularly of younger people) from their connections. Those connections are with the places we have grown up in, with which we are familiar, the places where, for example, we went to school. The dislocations are between families, friends, workplaces, individuals and communities, even nations. How often do we now find families far-flung from each other, a mother that hears from her son or daughter in Australia for example, once or twice a year?
I have argued that Roddy Lumsden's collection is not so much an identity parade, rather a parade of disembodiment, of alienation, of lives and persons fragmented, of 'frequent flyers' whose resultant work is fractured. For what is most striking about the many of the poets featured here is a lack of signature beyond the linguistic, a lack of identity. There's a nagging feeling that many of the poets represented here could have come from anywhere in the world, that they are no longer, at least not here 'British' or 'Irish' voices in the traditional sense but rather, the voices of poets who happen to be British or Irish, so that nationality is no longer something that the reader can identify by language, or by poetry itself.
Nonetheless the editor has gathered together poets whose work shows a characteristic elan, a vibrancy created with a brilliant palette of colours.
Those with creative backgrounds, whether in the fields of art, music, film or science seem to have provided the most memorable pieces, tending toward the narrative.
In this category, there's Chris Emery, Julia Bird, Mathew Caley, Patrick Brandon, Diana Pooley and Richard Price. There is Anna Freud and the well-known Paul Farley with his lovely, evocative stories.
About a game used by dinner ladies at his school to distract children, he writes 'Remember how they made us play Dead Fish?'...'you'll find an attitude that you were sure/ would last until the bell'...'some fell asleep...and this proved fatal. Sleep is seldom still'.
'An Interior' speaks of the power of the childhood image via, amongst other household objects, a Vermeer table mat. 'How many hours did I spend watching a woman pouring milk into a bowl that never fills? I never tired of it' .
'Newts' describes the power and loss of enchanted childhood places, of the natural world. In this, Farley is a wistful master. 'The golf course pond...on hot days more a Rococco mirror/ from the swing in the trees. The silvering had gone/ but we could fish fragile Kingeys and Queenies/out of its dark using newsagent nets.' In both these poems we see his Chelsea School of Art background.
Patrick Brandon, who has worked as an Art technician for the Tate Gallery, is a real find, as is Colette Bryce. Brandon's work is laid down with a painterly, mature eye and has, at times a sad, a sometimes tragi-comic cadence reminiscent of Carol Ann Duffy and of Seamus Heaney. Small wonder then, perhaps, that he studied painting at the Norwich School of Art and is a regular exhibitor in The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition.
His 'Grand Union', a depiction of a canal scene in the early hours of morning, after a night out is striking.'After a night of laser, and one/ outsized glitterball/ scattering its hoard of coins/what else to expect/ but this muffled aftershock/ and the canal lying like a pulled ribbon...we jockey its leaden pulse, the ground upholstered beneath/ our exhausted legs. The morning sets out its collection/of long, withdrawing shadows. The xylophonic echo of bicycle wheels over loose flags/ plays somewhere ahead.'
'A sloping pitch' is another delightful narrative; 'Was it butane or propane, gaz/or Triangia? I can never remember/that kind of detail. I do recall/ the air heat-wavering like water/ above the stove, the ring/ of neat blue petals splaying so/compliantly beneath the kettle/ and how it had been an uphill struggle/ to sleep. Someone tearing strips/ from the dark with their snoring,/ cars returning late, and the sloping pitch,/ the yaw of the ground rolling us together/ as if all night rounding a corner at speed.'
Matthew Caley, also an artist, picks up in 'The Argument' the concept that Seamus Heaney suggested in one of his poems, that it is the land that makes inroads into the sea, then retreats, and not the other way round.
　
The Scottish poet, Frances Leviston uses her scientific background and her work, like that of many in this collection takes on an abstract, metaphysical quality which often supersedes the meaning in the immediate sense. There are flashes of genius and descriptive power here. 'Zombie Library' for example, begins 'In gallon jars, years of damsons rest/ against the glass/ contingent organs/ sunk in blue formaldehyde/ of supermarket gin, breathing one life out, another in.'
In 'Sight', she talks about 'the endless tether the mind ranges upon'. Then there is her grasp of the enigma of solidity (in scientific terms a misnomer) which she discusses playfully, masterfully in 'The Gaps.'
'And then they revealed that solids were not solid/ That a wall was not solid/ That it consisted of molecules fixed and vibrating/ Some distance apart, as did the flesh.'
Another Scottish poet (with a background in Psychiatric Nursing) Kate Clanchy, writes tidy, modern, lucid prose. In 'Scan' she describes her own pregnancy.
'They showed me on the screen/ some star-lit hills, a lucky sky/ then, resting among haar-filled fields/ a settlement round the outlet/ of a phosphorescent river'... 'And they pointed out with a line of light/ a hub like the start of a knotting city/ like a storm in a weather front, coalescing.'
Further into the collection, Katherine Pierpoint's 'Burning the Door' is another loose narative bearing an uncanny resemblance to Simon Armitage's 'Five Eleven Ninety Nine' from his 'Selected poems'. In it she describes, as he has done, the progress of a fire(as it is) burning an old door she has decided to do away with. 'First match...makes the smoke roll like wood-shavings./ A single, black-footed flame climbs limber round the twig joints./ It tumbles upwards, birdlike, through the bush/ to dither at the open top.' Her observational poem 'Cats are Otherwise' can comfortably join the ranks of 'cat poetry.'
The single image in Simon Barraclough's poem 'Frigidaire' about playing with a discarded fridge is similarly satisfying to the urban ear; 'grab the chrome handle and whump it shut.'
Julia Bird's closely observed work has comedic power. Its fine description and metaphor are sublime. Talking about the quality of time, what it is like to lie awake, or half-awake in anticipation of a dawn which never seems to arrive, she writes;
'That window has shifted in the night./And dark blue daylight borders the blind...
but dawn must be on hold;/ it took the clock an hour to flick from four to four oh nine/ its winking figures/ marking time where no time passes./
Who moved the window?' And later 'The homespun logic of the half-asleep/ has tomorrow holding to this new-found shape/ if drifting off, I make my breathing pattern fit/ the zip/slow unzipping of his breathing pattern.'
There's a tautness and dark urbanity too about Jonothan Asser's work. In 'The Birdbath's Saying Dive' he surveys the scene from a London rooftop.'Textured bitumen dimples my butt./ Ants patrol a Russian vine's tips. Ambulances wang in counterpoint/ to traffic-light beepers. Bach drifts up'. Then later, 'A person opposite strips off, does tai-chi./ Garlic wafts from someone's veg' stir-fry./ Moths buffet sensor lights bursting/ onto prickles of in-house cacti.'
There is this from 'Something to do.' 'As if for practice, signals flit/ from green to red and back again, observed/ by flaking bark from plane trees, blackbirds thinking/ through the small hours.'
To what should we compare a Twenty-First century collection of poetry? We could, as Lumsden does in his introduction, compare it with Hulse, Kennedy and Morley's 'The New Poetry', also published by Bloodaxe in 1993. Previously, there had been a gap of a decade or so, going back to the Penguin anthologies from Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion in the early 1980's and Edward Lucie-Smith in 1970, then to A.Alvarez's 1962 'The New Poetry' and back further still to 'various anthologies such as 'New Lines,' 'New Signatures' and The New Apocalypse'. My own school studies were of 'This Day and Age' in the 60's. This was a self-consciously 'modern' collection.
The consequence of technological 'sophistication', of rapidly spreading information, of the 'global community which I mentioned earlier has been the emergence of a more visible public platform for the arts. Media has both geared up to and enhanced the features of the modern creative process, showcasing it. The alienation that the internet world has partially created and the culture of distrust have resulted, paradoxically, in the need for real social gathering, around 'live' events, for the expression of what is silently felt. Furthermore, the technology itself has enhanced the marketing process and the distribution of the written word. Cultural programming on terrestrial TV channels has, in the last decade produced review shows such as The Culture Show and the arts features on The One Show. Newsnight Review has established itself as a pre-weekend TV arts digest.There are themed arts programmes and interviews with artists, writers, playwrights, actors. There is Carol Anne Duffy's delightful showcase, 'Poetry Corner' in The Daily Mirror, a feature which would not perhaps have been countenanced by a tabloid newspaper during the Nineties. The broadsheets, too have responded to this surge of interest by fleshing out the arts sections and review sections of their newspapers. The Guardian has featured, in this decade 'The Saturday Poem', for example. Poetry has been in the ascendency as never before with the arrival, in 2008, of Carole Ann Duffy as Poet Laureate. The public interest and presumably participation in poetry is gathering pace as never before since her nationwide and ongoing touring of schools, colleges, libraries, community and civic halls, theatres, other public places including, this year a cathedral.
Had a woman Poet Laureate, or any other Poet Lauteate appeared at my own school in the 1960's, I don't doubt that the profile of poetry and the creative arts there would have been dizzying.
We must wonder, then at the more public profile that poetry now occupies. The competition that flows from the public consumption of the arts is said to 'drive up' the standard of the work itself, in much the same way that the proliferation of products in a supermarket provides, it is said, 'more choice' and 'drives up' the expectation, the demand for 'greater choice'. The reverse is also claimed. Market presence and over-abundance can depress the standard and rigour of the creative process. Though a greater input into the arts world can and must give rise to earlier and larger overall participation which makes for a greater, more exciting profile.
The proliferation of poetry is, in some ways a counter-intuitive phenomenon. You might have thought that in an age of celebrity, of conspicuous consumption, of noise and high-definition, of the Internet, of car-crash-and-war film, available round the clock, that poetry, the home of subtlety, of contemplation, of wordplay as opposed to swordplay, of introspection would have been one of the first casualties. Not so.
Through links and networks, through the flowering of poetry performance arenas, through competitions, awards, performance venues, themselves shaped by the changes in licensing laws, the boom in social eating, even the restrictions on music licensing and the smoking ban, the art of poetry has flourished! We are about to witness the birth of the 'tweeting competition' at an arts festival, where the public is invited, via The Guardian newspaper, to submit their favourite, most comedic tweets (which must be no more than 140 characters long). Open mic readings, readings by established poets, slam events and arts festivals describe, some would argue, a healthy and a competitive social backdrop against which the art of poetry may be paraded.
In the case of 'Identity Parade', the result is a kind of collage effect, sometimes at the expense of meaning and intelligibility.
This is illustrated by the front cover, a planet made up of a what looks like an abstract jumble of faces and books and which hints powerfully at what lies inside.
The collection, faithfully garnered from every corner of the United Kingdom is a pageant or carnival. There is Tracey Herd, from East Kilbride, Vona Groarke, whose poetry illustrates social and cultural mixing, Kevin Higgins, from the West coast of Galway, A.B. Jackson from Glasgow. Sinead Morrisey, with her themes of travel, of other countries, is an archetype. There's Catriona O'Reilly, Frances Leviston and Nick Laird, also from Ireland and the Scottish Richard Price. From Wales, there is Gwyneth Lewis, John McAuliffe, David Wheatley and Samantha Wynn Rhyddert. There's also Deryn Rees Jones, whose work I found impenetrable. This was also true of Neil Rollinson, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Anthony Rowland, James Sheard and DS Marriott. Ian Gregson's comments on Zoe Skoulding's work are equally impenetrable. He writes that her poems suggest 'an equivalent in spatiality of intertextuality-that places can only be understood in relation to each other, and never in isolation'.
The poets feature in the second half of Identity Parade are, for me the hardest to decipher.
Mark Waldron, Ahren Warner, Luke Kennard, Sarah Law and Jen Hadfield are all writers whose work seems to have sacrificed meaning somewhat to style.
Three of the poets who seem to have been able to establish their own identies more successfully are Clare Pollard, Kevin Higgins and Daljit Nagra.
Higgin's 'The couple Upstairs' is a good example. This feels like an autobiographical piece, a small sketch.
'Your husband's last set of golf-clubs/in their vest of cobwebs; and the chair you've sat in since Jimmy Carter/often empty now, as you tumble away to a life/ of medecine, mash and Sunday night/ nephews.
Moments though/ when every sound upstairs is sex. Time when/ all he has to do is drop/ his Penguin Book of Poetry from/ Britain and Ireland since 1945/ and you shudder at the thought of them/ about to commit an unnatural act/ on a Tuesday afternoon.'
This has a 1960's feel, as though it wouldn't have looked out of place in 'This Day and Age.'
Kona McPhee's work shines too. Reading it, one is reminded of DH Lawrence, and there are Shakespearean touches. In 'Melbourne, evening, summertime' we hear of
'the flies settling, passing the torch/ of insect purpose to moths, mosquitoes...and we, alone on lawns, or jointly laid/ in the mitred corners of urban parks...we find our warmth in evenings cool/ stirred by twilight and the rightness of things.'
Her 'Shrew' is an elegiac study of a dead shrew. 'lips that don't meet over tiny scimitar teeth/ caviar eye-dots, sunk like the knots where buttons were/ a splut of puce intestine, looking glued-on, no blood/ the fine fuse of a tail that won't be re-lit.' While, in 'Pheasant and Astronomer' , she describes a cock pheasant strolling behind the astronomer's offices where she works 'Burnished, finicky, picking his headbob way/ we can't not watch his colours in sunlight.'...our measures and projections fall aside/ as coarsest calculus to his most perfect curve.'
　
What the poets in this collection do seem to be presenting in common is a love of language for its own sake, a love of the power of written word and phrase, a love of the colour of language over and above meaning, what language can and does convey. The poets assemble language in almost abstract ways, making collages of words and images. There are poems that are metaphysical, poems that meander, poems that are purely surreal, poems without a narrative, poems that seem to consist of streams or packets of images that make a confused whole or else convey nothing that can be salvaged by understanding. A few of them remind me of the work featured in a recent BBC4 two-part documentary, 'Goldsmiths: But is it Art?' which follows the lives of several final-year students at Goldsmith's College, a college which is credited with producing the stable of artists known as the 'Young British Artists', amongst whom the most well-known is Damien Hirst.
In the documentary, they are shown examining their own ideas, their lack of ideas and their desperation to 'come up with the goods', to present art which is creative, meaningful, to trawl for concept. In the process several of them go through crises of identity and purpose. Some strive at their task, whilst others seem to succumb to the imperatives of the Goldsmiths process of conceptualization, and ultimately to the market.
I will close this review by looking at three poets that seem to encapsulate, for me, a kind of plaintive urban mastery, a fractured view from the 21st century.
The Irish Leontia Flynn writes charmingly about the world within a world that is an airport.
'Their lucid hallways ring like swimming pools./
From each sealed lounge, a pale nostalgic sky/ burns up its gases over far-flung zones/ and the planes...hang at random.'
In 'Belfast' she takes a great swipe at the marketing of culture, the 'City of Culture' phenomenon. 'Belfast is finished and Belfast is under construction./
What was mixed grills and whiskey is now concerts and walking tours...
A match at Windsor Park has fallen in Gay Pride week./
at two A.M. the streets erupt in noise./ I listen as 'We are the Billy boys' gets mixed up/ four doors down, with 'Crazy' by Patsy Cline....
and gathering in the city's handful of bars/ men are talking of Walter Benjamin and about 'Grand Narratives'/ which they always seek to 'fracture' and 'interrogate.'
Next there is the sublime poetic voice of Nick Drake. In 'Eureka' he describes himself literally reflecting on his own body as it is submerged in the bath.
'Displacing only and exactly yourself/ You glissade into the bath;/ From one angle you look/ sunk in a paperweight of crystal and quicksilver,/ Your severed head humming and chatting;/ From another your submerged limbs are lensed,/ Refracted, swimming, shoaling.'
Finally, in a similar vein, there is Colette Bryce's 'Self-Portrait in a Broken Wing-mirror' which muses at the surreal image, fractured, disturbed, disturbing to the 'never-easy gaze of the portraitist.'
She finds a wing-mirror on the ground, in an isolated place, peers into it and finds it difficult to tear herself away.
'But no, that's me, a cubist depiction...The ear is parted neatly from the head, a wierd mosaic/ for the brain to fix....The eyebrow, stepped in sections, stops/ then starts again,/ recognisably mine...the eye/ is locked on itself/ the never-easy gaze of the portraitist...I'd swear the face looks younger than before.' Then later 'I have never been so still...presently, I will attempt to move/ but first I must finish this childish contest/ where one must stare the other out, not look/ away, like a painting in a gallery, where/ only the blink of an eye might restart time.'
A great deal of the poetry in Roddy Lumsden's Identity parade is, it seems, like the image in Bryce's broken wing-mirror; quirky, colourful, but fragmented.