{"id":10530,"date":"2019-08-23T11:32:46","date_gmt":"2019-08-23T10:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10530"},"modified":"2019-08-23T11:34:21","modified_gmt":"2019-08-23T10:34:21","slug":"three-pamphlets-reviewed-by-ian-pople-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10530","title":{"rendered":"Three Pamphlets<\/strong><\/em> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martina Evans, Mich\u00e8le Roberts, Denise Saul, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch | Speaking Again: Poems for International Women\u2019s Day<\/em> | Rack Press: \u00a35<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Even though each poet in Speaking Again: Poems for International Women\u2019s Day<\/em> has a slim selection, four quite individual voices are present in this Rack Press pamphlet for International Women\u2019s day. The importance of those voices is emphasised in the epigraph that fronts the volume: \u2018The few who dare, must speak and speak again \/ To right the wrongs of many.\u2019 Mich\u00e8le Roberts begins the pamphlet with the suitably titled \u2018The Struggle Continues!\u2019. This is a short sequence of four sections; the first of which, \u2018A Grammar of Streets\u2019 describes a walk through the East End of London, and the heightened variousness of that world, from \u2018crazy- \/ pavement prophets \/(women on pedestals, women as diamonds)\u2019 to \u2018a field of Spanish-Jewish bones.\u2019 The result of the conversation over these worlds means that \u2018We twist our threads \/ of history together, knot in \/ our looping, different, heretical selves.\u2019 This is the celebration of difference, which is carried on through the other three parts with their different locations. In each, Roberts uses her novelist\u2019s eye and her poet\u2019s sense of close organisation, to offer tangy evocations of place that open out into deft evocations of the people that inhabit them. Denise Saul presents four, short prose poems that describe a stay in what might be a mental hospital. The poems narrate with piercing fluency the dissociations that the narrator perceives in her surroundings, \u2018I never thought that I would make peace with noise: chimes of the midnight bell, traffic and low-flying planes remind me that God is a never-ending-white ceiling.\u2019 The narrator\u2019s situation does not improve over these four, short pieces, and Saul\u2019s gift is to create, over a tiny canvas, a scenario which is poignant but completely lacking in self-pity. <\/p>\n

Samatha Wynne-Rhydderch\u2019s contribution is four dramatic monologues; the first of which is a woman commenting on stays and what women will do to get an hourglass shape, \u2018As if sand might run through us, \/ weight our feet until we\u2019re turned upside \/ down again.\u2019 What such society might have viewed as \u2018weighting\u2019 is clearly a misjudgement, as Wynne-Rhydderch describes the deaths of three women involved in accidents in the stays. Her final poem, \u2018What Can Happen if You Never Move House\u2019 describes what does<\/u> happen when you finally excavate the drains!! Martina Evans completes the pamphlet with four first-person poems in which Evans, herself, appears to be the \u2018I\u2019. The first two poems are depictions of the domestic absurdities that accrue in the relationships between teenagers and daughters and mothers. The final poem again concentrates on the bathos of the A&E nurse who is having problems with her shoes. Evans, like Saul, pulls poignancy out of the most bathetic situation, and in doing so frames the emotional range of women\u2019s lives in profound and involving ways. <\/p>\n

Nicholas Murray | Of Earth, water, air and fire<\/em> | Melos Press: \u00a35<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Rack\u2019s publisher, Nick Murray has produced a pamphlet of animal poems which are, in many ways, quite the same work of the deft producer of satires on contemporary politics, Murray has published recently. That similarity is due to his acute sense of the responsibility humanity has to the animal world. The animals range from the \u2018Aardvark\u2019, with Murray playing on that animal\u2019s position at the start of the alphabet; to the Salamander, \u2018the godly [need] as proof \/ that righteous souls survive the holocaust.\u2019 \u2018Kangaroo\u2019 evokes the poet\u2019s guilt at his being on a bus in Australia which hit one. A badger, too, is likely to be victim of humanity\u2019s attachment to the motor vehicle. And the bear, viewed, chained to its owner in Eastern Europe, is also seen with undisguised compassion. Thus, Murray the political poet who calls upon our political leaders to account for their responsibility for the current \u2018Dog\u2019s Brexit\u2019 we find ourselves in, is demonstrably the same poet who feels our responsibility towards the natural world just as deeply. <\/p>\n

In the midst of this poignant and never self-pitying disposition of guilt, there are lovely and piercing evocations of the natural world. In the rowdy world of lambs, the ewes are \u2018their stoic parents, like the aged without teeth, \/ munch with loose jaws, and lazy eyes \/ take all this in; the cries, the frisky jumps.\u2019 The wagtail, \u2018freezes \/ as if, just then, it has \/ retrieved a lost idea \/ then, having thought, moves on,\u2019; the punctuation and lineation mimicking the motion of the bird. The Pelican, too, brings out the technician in Murray, with the poem\u2019s warm, short lines and full rhymes, \u2018and that sexy tuft\u2019s \/ the sort of thing that Cruft\u2019s \/ would reward in a poodle. \/ You\u2019re a child\u2019s doodle.\u2019 This is a strong, adroit addition to Murray\u2019s poetic oeuvre; its poems memorable and good.<\/p>\n

Ian Harrow | The Quiet Life<\/em> | Melos Press: \u00a35<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The final pamphlet under review here is Ian Harrow\u2019s The Quiet Life<\/em>. The \u2018Quiet<\/em>\u2019 here might actually be the quiet authority of Harrow\u2019s writing, which gives each of the poems in this pamphlet, a warm inevitability. And although the prevailing note of this collection is the ruminative life of the older man moving in and out of health, there isn\u2019t a moment when the poems are remotely self-pitying or self-absorbed. Harrow is, essentially, a contemporary metaphysical, reflecting, mostly, on the process of aging. In addition to the calm reflection which drives these poems, Harrow is an adept and adroit observer, so the poems are threaded with a grounding sense of things: as in this Mahon-esque section from the poem entitled, \u2018The Unadvertised Life is not Worth Living\u2019:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that, or some huge half-empty pile,
\nInvisible from the road,
\nHistory held up at the gate
\nAnd where the only visitors
\nAre the delivery men and the post
\nAnd the conversations wander
\nUnspoken, through the years of rooms. <\/p>\n

That quiet authority imbues each of these poems with a completeness which makes the pamphlet substantial and satisfying. <\/p>\n

Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martina Evans, Mich\u00e8le Roberts, Denise Saul, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch | Speaking Again: Poems for International Women\u2019s Day | Rack Press: \u00a35 Even though each poet in Speaking Again: Poems for International Women\u2019s Day has a slim selection, four quite individual voices are present in this Rack Press pamphlet for International Women\u2019s day. The importance of those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nThree Pamphlets | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=10530\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Three Pamphlets | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Martina Evans, Mich\u00e8le Roberts, Denise Saul, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch | Speaking Again: Poems for International Women\u2019s Day | Rack Press: \u00a35 Even though each poet in Speaking Again: Poems for International Women\u2019s Day has a slim selection, four quite individual voices are present in this Rack Press pamphlet for International Women\u2019s day. 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