With a title that simultaneously evokes the seaside, industry and a condiment, Salt Pier isn’t a volume trying to launch fireworks on its title page; something which its beige and seemingly rusting cover doesn’t help to dispel. A quick search of the title on Google, however, almost solely returns a popular diving spot on the Caribbean Island of Bonaire, a far cry from the twee Americana I had anticipated. This experience, in part, works as a nice analogy for what reading Salt Pier is like: Something seemingly familiar starts to unravel upon investigation. In fact, this is even mimicked in that aforementioned cover: Far from being the weathered wall of a port warehouse, the image is, in fact, an aerial photograph of a salt pond, something which you need only look on the volume’s back page to discover.

Kiesselbach himself, in ‘Winter Reeds’, offers a fairly neat summary of his style: ‘Casual study grown/ intense, then forensic’. And how casual that initial study is: His poetry is presented in neat descending columns, has a keen focus on both nature and the domestic and even seems to have a nice little narrative running throughout it involving a difficult relationship between parents and children – so far, so standard. What makes Salt Pier fascinating is that Kiesselbach never quite breaks this sense of familiarity; instead, he either toys conceptually with it from the inside or, as is the case of the volume’s opening poem, he lets some strange image or observation momentarily bob up, only to let it sink back into the familiar again. In Salt Pier’s starting poem ‘a deer/ leaves a footprint… under the box elder’ which Kiesselbach studies. This investigation, however, then leads us to:

Speechless lips pressed
Into snow if man was not
Already the beast
That walks on its mouth.

The awkward syntax and imagery of this stanza is made all the more fascinating by its stemming from what initially sounded like an unremarkable nature poem. In contrast to drawing the strange out of the commonplace, you then have a poem like ‘Magnifying Glass’ in which the seemingly cruel act of burning ants is aestheticised to the point of seeming profound: Whilst being burnt, the ants ‘pause as if considering/ a huge question/ coming from within’, their bodies (though never referred to as such) moved by the wind ‘the way leaves blow/ across the surface/ of a frozen lake.’ Cruelty to insects is treated with the kind of delicacy with which one might’ve expected the deer’s hoof print to receive, the clichéd image of leaves in the wind helping to enforce Kiesselbach’s quiet reversal of the familiar.

Kiesselbach is also capable of bringing dark comedy into his investigations of the everyday, such as in ‘Apology’ where a mother tells her children that they were ‘more fun than/ a barrelful of monkeys’ to which the speaker replies ‘For whom is such/ a monkey fun?’ A barrel can, however, ‘hold/ emptiness… can hold dread.’ Here even common idioms, upon close examination, can hold a sense of dread.

Dore Kiesselbach is certainly not a poet of bombast, but this topsy-turvy treatment of well trodden subject matter exposes the potential strangeness lurking behind everyday occurrences. His knowingly clichéd treatment of otherwise neglected subjects, on the other hand, reinforces suspicions about the effect of presentation and the importance of engaging critically with the familiar. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Salt Pier, however, is that it manages to do all this whilst also seeming (mostly) fit for a church reading group; his own poetry operating much like his chosen subjects.
 
James Reith

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