Pass the Cheesecake: Simon Turner devours three new poetry publications from Shoestring Press

http://www.shoestring-press.com/

Hamish Whyte, A Bird in the Hand, Shoestring 2008. ISBN: 9781904886846. £8.95.

Angela Kirby, Dirty Work, Shoestring 2008. ISBN: 9781904886839. £8.95.

George Gömöri, Polishing October, Shoestring 2008. ISBN: 9781904886761. £9.50.

Small presses are the lifeblood of the UK poetry scene: they’re where the action happens. When I was living in Nottingham as a postgraduate, there was a wonderful sense of belonging attendant to the fact that the city plays host to a number of presses and magazines: Leafe and Shoestring (the presses) and Staple and Poetry Nottingham (the magazines) present a diverse aesthetic front, but what they all share is a commitment to poetry as an art-form, and a commitment to the values that make the small press scene what it is.

Frustratingly, I only became fully cognisant of the Nottingham poetry community towards the end of my time in the city, but of course, this was before I became the internet evangelist I’ve gradually mutated into — check out the USB port I just had grafted onto the back of my knee, you disconnected meat-space cadets — when my knowledge of the poetry scene was garnered solely from word-of-mouth Chinese whispers, crudely photocopied flyers for open mic nights at the Duck and Hammer, and cryptic messages hastily scrawled on the back of brown envelopes in green biro by some bearded bloke I met at a squat party in Sheffield. What mattered, of course, was not how early I became clued up to what was out there, but the fact that there was such an energetic publishing scene to begin with, so much going on within the confines of what cannot be considered a huge city by any standards. Moreover, a thriving and diverse local small press community fosters connections within the wider poetry scene — both national and global — in a manner with which the internet (much as I enjoy suckling at the cold fibre-optic teat of our heartless digital overlord) cannot hope to compete.

Since leaving Nottingham, I’ve kept abreast of developments amongst the city’s small presses, and I’m happy to report that the East Midlands poetry scene is in rude health. Leafe and Shoestring continue to publish high quality work, and the new kid on the block — Skysill — has already racked up a handful of beautifully produced pamphlets, with some exciting projects — including something by Shearsman mainstay Laurie Duggan (the ‘Outback Pound’ as he’s known, by me) — waiting in the poetry pipeline. The three Shoestring publications under review here are indicative of what I’ve come to expect of John Lucas’ press, and whilst they all fall under Shoestring’s editorial remit — which is broadly mainstream, with Leafe and Skysill covering the more left-field sector of the market — their various aesthetic approaches are extremely diverse, quite at odds with the reductive tendency towards hegemony we see in certain of the larger publishers.

Hamish Whyte is a poet who was unknown to me before, but A Bird in the Hand is a wonderful collection, and I’m glad I’ve now been initiated into his strange, beguiling world. Whyte is working within a tradition of approachable experimentalism, which is to say that his experimental tendencies do not seem to be the product of a joyless aesthetic dogmatism, but rather restlessness, as though he grew bored easily and felt that choosing one style or method over another was a waste of time since there are so many to choose from. Dream poems, found poems, list poems, epistolary poems: they’re all included here, but what holds them together is Whyte’s tone of voice. His style is seemingly offhand, avuncular and conversational, but there is a real lyric craft behind the apparent lack of artifice. I was particularly taken with ‘Cornwall to Glasgow’, dedicated to Edwin Morgan:

Dear Eddie
How are you
in your yellow room?
I am here in spring
in WSGrahamland
and it’s not yellow — it is ‘a jasper sea’
and a different water
from the Clyde
(though Graham never
forgot the Clyde) — it’s every shade of green
and pure white breakers
to hurt the eyes
and a blue blue blue
out to America.

The address to Edwin Morgan is appropriate, as Whyte shares with Morgan a combination of an outward looking investigative intelligence and a deep-rooted attachment to Scotland. (The reference to the Clyde is wonderfully telling, as is the way in which Whyte draws Graham into the fold of a putative diasporic Scottish community.) Morgan is also an apposite point of comparison, for if any poet represents the approachable experimental tradition I noted above, then it’s Morgan. Indeed, we might even go so far as to say that Scottish poetry in the 20th century has been central to keeping the experimental tradition alive and kicking, with the internationalism of Morgan, and the efforts of poet-editors such as Gael Turnbull (another dedicatee in this collection), playing a vital role in the introduction of American and European avant garde currents to a general British readership.

The variety of this collection means that picking favourites is rather tough — I enjoyed nearly everything here and for different reasons in each instance — but highlights include ‘Dreamsters’, a series of prose sketches of poets and famous historical personages (‘Mr Bach’, ‘Mr [General] Lee’, ‘Miss Plath’ and ‘Mr Frost’) who have invaded Whyte’s dreams. This is a lovely conceit, but one tinged with a certain degree of envy on my part, as I’ve been working on a similar sequence for some time now, and Whyte has pipped me at the post. (For the record, my list is far less prestigious, and includes the following: John Cleese, Michael Palin, Bill Oddie, George Bush, James Joyce — actually fairly prestigious, I know, but in my dream he was a terrible drunkard and letch — Bart Simpson, Spiderman.) Though relatively slight, I was also fond of ‘Dogsitting in Stockbridge’, for its use of the word ‘hirples’, and for its description of the dog in question as Òan early / Greek philosopher transmogrified / into a woolly liquorice allsort.Ó Other readers will no doubt find their own favourites: there is no shortage of candidates here. If I have one complaint, it is that the collection feels far too short: it will be a long while before I tire of Hamish Whyte, and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.

J G Ballard, in an interview he gave a few years back, expostulated on why Catholic countries seem to have a much better relationship with pleasure than Protestant states. The reason, he argued, was due to the differing attitudes to sin. The Catholic notion of sin suggests that we’re doomed from the outset, and that nothing will change this except constant confession and atonement — and even then, we’re extremely lucky to get into paradise; whilst the Protestant conception of sin, by way of contrast, refuses to countenance the possibility that it cannot be overcome through effort and self-improvement. According to Ballard, Catholicism is the more humanistic branch of Christianity, because it allows us to fail, again and again and again. In such a philosophical context, it’s little wonder that the pleasures of the flesh — food, drink, ‘adult situations’ — are more readily tolerated: we’re only human, and sin’s just what we’re programmed to do. Pass the cheesecake.

Angela Kirby’s Dirty Work, her follow-up to Mr Irresistible (which was also published by Shoestring in 2005) is a highly Catholic collection (and a highly small-c catholic collection, too), in its unabashed focus on the pleasures of the here and now. Food, drink and sex are the mainstays of these poems, and these subjects are dealt with in a refreshingly vigorous manner:

You say the moon too is horned
but, as I see it from this angle, she is a raised eyebrow
and perhaps we have surprised her

for the cows too seem mildly astonished,
wide-eyed at our intricacies, chewing things over,
puzzled by such ineptitude —

they circle nearer, their broad flanks
hung with castanets of dung that click, click, click
to our quickening rhythm —

there is a lot of head-tossing and heavy breathing,
something sweet and foxy in the air,
our sweat mashing with the scent of the hawthorn.

                                     (‘The Sweet Scent of Hawthorn’)

This poem exemplifies Kirby’s greatest strengths: a brisk and sure-footed grasp of narrative; a brawny colloquial diction capable of hitting some surprising lyrical notes (Òsomething sweet and foxy in the airÓ); and a capacity for making arresting phrases and images from the everyday (Òcastanets of dungÓ is extremely eye— and ear-catching).

Elsewhere, in ‘Final Reductions at the Sofa Workshop’, these same attributes are put to poignant effect in a poem which is almost Carveresque in its efficient handling of oblique narrative fragments. ‘Final Reductions …’ concerns a (most likely recent) widower who’s bullied into attending a furniture sale by a no doubt well-meaning but overbearing niece. This precis may sound inconsequential, but the power of the poem lies in its accumulation of telling details:

He changes things slowly, one by one,
a feeling of disloyalty each time —

a new kettle when the old one blows,
a blue enamel egg-pan to replace

the one she burned dry, time and again,
a single bed, room now for a desk

where he can lay out his stamps — she would never have allowed that —

There are certain shortcomings in the collection, however. A number of poems — ‘Graffiti’, for example, and ‘Sardines’ — fail to develop much beyond the anecdotal, whilst Kirby is occasionally undone by a tendency towards whimsy. The collection’s opening poem, ‘Trizonia’, is perhaps the most egregious example of this. A sprightly evocation of life on a Greek island is framed, unnecessarily to my mind, by an address to a ‘most excellent donkey’, which suggested a film treatment for Bill and Ted’s Aegean Adventure. However, the pure unadorned diction of Kirby’s elegies — ‘we reach the long-planned / rendezvous and find you gone’ (‘Julia’s Doves’) — more than atones for these minor failings. ‘Letter from Rathcoursey’, too, is a poem to treasure:

Sweetheart, I write to tell you how the sun
has glazed the distant stubble fields with light
and that the old zinc bucket which you filled
with weeds still squats upon the grey stone steps
before the painted door. What would you call
that colour? Dusty, or slate, or maybe
breast-of-dove? Rathcoursey blue will have
to serve for now

George Gömöri is a Hungarian emigre, forced to leave his country after his involvement with the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and Polishing October is the second of his collections to be translated into English. Whilst recognising the seriousness of Gömöri’s project — he engages with History with a capital H throughout the collection — I must admit that much of Polishing October left me cold. Many of these poems are written in a uniformly humourless vatic tone, deploying a heightened, self-consciously poetic language that bears no relation to how language is used in the world, and which stands in stark contract to the unforced colloquial music of both Whyte and Kirby. ‘Miracle in Manhattan’ is symptomatic of the collection’s problems as a whole. The poem centres on the image of a tree growing in New York, which Gömöri contrasts clumsily with the ‘jungle of bricks [which] entangled everything’. Gömöri’s description of the tree as ‘green and abandoned as the everyday miracle / that is the created world’ is arresting, but the poem’s Manichean symbolic schema — with the tree set in opposition to the ‘muddled age’ of urban modernity — felt both clunky and patronising. The poem’s moralising conclusion, meanwhile, was reminiscent of an unacknowledged quotation from a Deepak Chopra bestseller:

You should live this way too, for the future’s sake,
with all the beauty and courage of that tree,
shaping the light that falls on you into colours,
that the melody of life might blossom skyward.

Even when Gömöri attempts whimsy or humour, as in ‘Letter from a Declining Empire’, the same heaviness and unmitigated seriousness seem to hold sway over proceedings:

galloping on, the northerly wind
screeches through cloud-crevices, shears off
leafy crowns, tears down
beech-tree robes the colour of sealing-wax,
shedding their heavy blood,
cracking its whip at defencelessly shuddering maples —
and how the gold coins keep falling!

This is a diverting enough conceit, but the reader is given little or no breathing space: the images and phrases are relentless, and absolutely groaning with symbolism which the central metaphor of the poem — autumn portrayed as an invading barbarian army — is too fragile to be able to sustain.

However, when Gömöri takes his foot off the pedal, and lets the poem speak for itself, a very different poet emerges: quiet, human, with a vein of dark humour coming to the fore. ‘Yes, No’, with its stripped-down rhetoric and bare enunciation of the facts of Nazi genocide, is a far more effective response to the horrors of the twentieth century than Gömöri’s more prophetic pieces. ‘Poems for Mari’, meanwhile, a sequence for Gömöri’s wife, show his human side to full effect, and these poems are Polishing October’s chief saving grace, a calm and unforced centre in a storm of hyperbolic rhetoric. In fact, the final lines to one of Gömöri’s gentler poems express this extremely eloquently, and feel like a strangely appropriate way of concluding this review:

when the sky (as it often does) turns dark and when the gale
makes doors and windows rattle in its black fury
and the when the hail pours down

remember that blessed summer day
and with it the lightness of the hot-air balloon

                                               (‘Present for Anna’)