Reviews and Features

Julia Bird Sleep and Weather

ABI CURTIS
Unexpected Weather
Salt £12.00

RICHARD PRICE
Rays
Carcanet £9.95

TODD SWIFT
mainstream love hotel
tall lighthouse £8

HUGO WILLIAMS
West End Final
Faber £9.99

 

‘Unexpected Weather’: it’s the first thing you read when you pick up Abi Curtis’s book and the last before you put it down; the book’s title comes from the final line of its concluding poem ‘Bean’. So what does the poet expect us to do with this phrase once our attention has been so firmly brought to it? In ‘Bean’, a veggie garden is the setting of an epiphanic moment recalled from childhood. This is intensively farmed subject matter for today’s debut poet, but the fact that Curtis’s prominently placed example is the only such poem in her first full collection marks a satisfying revivification of the approach. The two-year old protagonist of ‘Bean’ is shocked when her mother shows her the ‘organ-shaped’ beans inside a gone-to-seed pod. After that summer, nothing was the same again. From now on she starts to:

expect a fine fuzz along the wallpaper,
a leguminous smell from green Lego.

Even now, the sky’s segmented hull
is podded with rooftops
and unexpected weather.

Life might catch you with a cloudburst or a washout and, throughout her book, Curtis is concerned with how you might button up or batten down in the face of such eventualities. Couples and lovers who people the collection are, more often than not, facing stormy times ahead. In ‘Lady Jane Grey’, a couple have independent encounters with Paul Delaroche’s ‘The Execution of Lady Jane Grey’, which hangs in the National Gallery. Its ‘many shades of grey in the stone background / suggest a staircase, a door, elsewhere’, the joint experience of the painting colouring the future of the relationship in sun-starved tones.

If there’s no forecasting the future, neither can the present be interpreted with any degree of confidence. The book’s two sections are named for the atmospheric conditions Fata Morgana and Ignis Fatuus, which produce mirages and hovering lightning respectively. Fata Morgana looks real but is an illusion; Ignis Fatuus looks supernatural but is real. How do we ever know what to believe in? ‘This is where you’ll learn,’ asserts ‘The Allotment’, a poem which tells us that answers to your questions are not to be found in the low-hanging fruit of ‘the blackberried track’, the ‘shallots and violets’ and the ‘boots, forever moulded to your toes’, but the back-breaking digging which reveals ‘walk-less husks of millipedes / and unforgiving knots of weed’. There’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. This book sports raincoats and wellies more often than flip-flops and Factor 50. It worries away like a compulsive at questions of hesitation, definition and miscommunication, and is light on relief and playfulness. Because it’s not immediately anxious to please, its pleasures reveal themselves through a longer engagement, and they are serious, unsettled and unsettling pleasures. Read on, but wrap up warm.

Drowsy. What a hardworking word that is. Its slow-vowelled syllables are the in and out breaths of a dead-to-the-world snorer; it’s a word full of the zeds which float over the head of the cartoon sleeper. Drowsy is a word which recurs in the opening section of Richard Price’s third collection Rays. In it, poems wander restlessly through the lonely landscape of the sleepless, the poet is:

Drowsy in charge of

Drowsy in charge of

Drowsy in charge of

a king-sized kingdom of good nights.

(‘The thought keeps counting’)

These poems mimic the thought processes of the insomniac: they replay phrases till meaning is skewed and lost; they make hurdling leaps of word association; they mix lucid periods of analysis with muddled memories; and their subject is itself the lot of the sleepless. Their project is to embody the experience of insomnia, and like anyone’s four-in-the-morning thoughts, logical argument is not what gives them hold over us. We are alongside the poet as he paces the kitchen in the middle of the night, and then we are taken deeper into a state of uneasy enquiry with him. Are the poems a record of the insomnia? ‘Continuous Positive Air Pressure’ is an engaged and wide-eyed poem, with a tone of scientific authority, about obstructive apnoea – a major cause of sleep disorder. Or is it the chatter of a busy mind full of as yet unwritten poems that is keeping him awake? ‘The thought keeps counting’ has him ‘a victim of inspiration’. If you find yourselves up in the small hours reading these poems, Price’s stoical, beautiful, illogical meditations on the condition will keep you company.

The hundred-and-twenty-page book progresses through its sections, a near dozen of them: some containing a single poem, some a pamphlet’s worth. Such organisation by theme and form brings order to the output of an extremely wide-ranging attentiveness. He translates the French Renaissance poet Louise Labé, and makes boiled-down versions of those translations; he lays out a love poem abecedary, and remixes the seeming interceptions of a phone-tap. He moves from the most fruit-packed prose poems to poetry of such truncated vocabulary that it reads as if it’s composed of mere phonemes:

Love was –
a shape, the past,
a… structure.

In love – ‘in’
‘is’.
I, I… I? (‘A Shape, the Past’)

A generous and playful writer, Price takes a turn with all the toys in the box. Like Simon Armitage with his band The Scaremongers and Paul Muldoon with Rackett, Price is a poet with a rhythm section and a tour bus. The ‘Songs for the Loss Adjusters’ section contains an EP’s worth of lyrics for an imaginary band. A feedback squall blurs the distinction between imagination and reality as a couple of these Sean O’Brien / Lloyd Cole-ish lyrics (‘Parkway and ‘Last train, full of couples’) have been recorded by Price’s actual band, Mirabeau, and can be tracked down at www.myspace.com/mirabeauproject. Reading lyrics can sometimes be an unrewarding affair as, stripped of their killer key changes or uplifting doo-wahs, the clichés and wrangled inversions of the less literate lyricist are left unkindly exposed. This is far from the case for Price. His minimalist’s skills imbue the sketchiest of unaccompanied phrases and fragments with ’laughter, ideas, the real work we do’. As ‘I’m writing to write again’ declares, his memories and melodies ‘charm the pulse / to a residue’.

Reading Todd Swift’s mainstream love hotel, moving from poems of love and emotion to more radical, experimental poems, is like having your eyes tested. The book asks us first to focus on formally constructed lyrics detailing identifiable episodes of an individual’s history, then on poems free enough to encompass the whole world in their field of vision. At such extremes of focal length, perception can get a little hazy. ‘Spider-Man 2’ is a Facebook-status-update of a poem which begins cheerily, ‘Sitting in the cinema with Sara, best date ever’. Meanwhile ‘Ice-shelf loss’ instructs:

Kill a beer. Hunt a bear.
Wear a pelt, pellet an appellate
court; court an Inuit; cut a house of ice from a sneer.

Depending on the depth of your engagement with the experimentalist undertaking, these verbal refractions either illuminate or merely dazzle. However, at the point when the boundaries between the mainstream and the experimental blur, Swift’s poems become truly spirited and involving. ‘Green Girl in Vermont’ is a sonorous and spare elegy infused with the rose-tinted romance of his more immediately accessible work, its impressions endlessly re-readable:

more like a song

than a singing,
hardly a word spoken
no vessels broken,
no offerings or tokens
slipped past the toll
out on the road
green as the knoll
grass grown over her.

‘Lighthouse’ speaks directly enough about the need to ‘weather’ and ‘winter’ ‘the vertical storm’ like the lighthouse-keeper, but the lines ‘You shelve the green collection / as the parakeet screeches again’ drop in just the right degree of compelling yet fathomable wildness.

Subjects and settings reappear throughout. There is much summer swimming, singing and dancing in the book, many cinemas and bands. There are enough variations in his repetitions to assure us that this approach is skilled and deliberate – the first poem in the book, knowingly placed, is called ‘Mirror’. We’re shown something clearly: ‘My brother and his wife come down to the lake / late, vegetarians with their barbecue’ (‘Laurentian Lakes’) and at the same time through a looking glass, as in ’BBQ’: ‘Sparks , wild hair / have done something to air / that wasn’t there before’, and the effect is to underscore and deepen our assimilation of the collection. Look for its inclusion in the Good Hotel Guide.

At the exact half-way point of Hugo Williams’ West End Final, his tenth collection, the poem ‘Religion’ begins, Larkinesquely:

If it were up to me
I would make use of sleep.
Going to church
would involve a flight of stairs
to a familiar bedroom

It’s a pivotal point in the book. Up until this point, there has been no ‘would’, no reference to any event, dream or idea that might occur in the future. The book’s first act is told in flashback – scenes from the life of the schoolboy self ’If I turn round now / I’ll be back at school, / arranging the chairs in the Library / with Briggs and Napier’ (’The Reading’) and from those of his parents:

When your father saw me sitting there
in the dining room of the S S Washington,
drinking my glass of milk, he thought he’d just
discovered me. (‘Someone’s Girlfriend’)

Even the occasional Williams reader knows that these subjects have been tested thoroughly in his previous collections. If Cézanne has his mountain, Williams has his early autobiography to revisit, discovering something new on each artistic expedition. At this point, at the closing of the decade and the approach of Williams’s seventieth year, the assumed characters of the poet son and the actor father are beginning to merge.

How he achieved the transformation
from juvenile lead to Heavy Father
without the use of wigs and make-up
is the great mystery
that is currently being revealed to me. (‘Heavy Father’).

The schoolboy’s life story allows investigation of the key subjects we all study – how to be someone’s child, how to be someone’s parent, how to be apart from those we love and how to be together with them – but it is not endlessly elastic. A commission to mark the anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery delivers ’A Suitable Cane’ in which the young H Williams is sent out by his school superiors with a ten bob note to purchase, yes, ‘a suitable cane with which to be beaten’ for being seen dancing the Charleston in O’Sullivan’s Record Shop. The poem itself is perfectly judged; the drawing-room-dry tone it takes with its occasion less so.

Once we’re past the interval of ’Religion’, the second act of the book begins. We’re back to the present where two moods pull in opposing directions and the tension between them sings. ‘Well done for getting up!’ congratulates ‘You Have to Laugh’, bitterly:

Well done for getting dressed!
You can‘t work out what day of the week it is,
but the Radio Times will know. What’s wrong
with buying two copies if you want to?

Williams alternates between rage and resignation to the conditions of age, but ageing’s inevitable conclusion is kept at bay by the remarkable ‘Pillow Book’ sequence in which the bed-time rituals of a woman and her lover are told and retold, like Scheherazade holding off death with her stories.

West End Final is a title that sounds a more than valedictory note. Whether there’s a curtain call or not depends surely on how loudly the audience joins in the applause.