{"id":11151,"date":"2020-01-06T10:19:50","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T09:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11151"},"modified":"2020-01-07T10:53:47","modified_gmt":"2020-01-07T09:53:47","slug":"ken-evans-reviews-new-pamphlets-by-emma-simon-alice-allen-marie-naughton-and-martin-zarrop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11151","title":{"rendered":"Ken Evans reviews new work by Emma Simon, Alice Allen, Marie Naughton and Martin Zarrop"},"content":{"rendered":"

The much-missed Les Murray, writing about David Morley, highlighted his capacity to achieve a \u2018refraction of the familiar.\u2019\u00a0 Emma Simon\u2019s Smith\/Doorstop pamphlet competition winner The Odds<\/em> (2019) shares this ability to imbue the everyday with a shining radiance. \u00a0Mundane details are given a twist of the Gothic as in a pub\u2019s Hades-like cellar (\u2018The World\u2019s End Pub\u2019); or a turn of the surreal among the sun-loungers by the pool in the intriguingly titled, \u2018Where I compare myself to the goddess Thetis, but not in a good way\u2019, or how in \u2018Quantum Sheep\u2019, the animals are \u2018grazing\/ever expanding fields of dark matter\u2019, or how \u2018The Bookies\u2019 suggests a sexual current of lubricious, transactional unease:<\/p>\n

\u2018We\u2019re taught to count all winnings slowly, licked thumbs<\/p>\n

peeling back the 50s. Turf accountants performing<\/p>\n

our financial striptease, all eyes in the room on you, panting.\u2019<\/p>\n

The juxtaposition of the quotidian and the fabular recurs throughout this impressive collection, whether in a lexically-dissolving library, an astral fun-fair, or the liminal world of a car break-down on a motorway hard-shoulder. Simon creates a familiar-exotic sort of \u2018Milton Keynes of the Mind\u2019, where people, under a \u2018canopy of roof-tops,\u2019 put out recycling from gardens without ponds, in a ritualistic way that is both unsettled, and unsettling.<\/p>\n

There is a grace of restrained emotion in these poems, though heightened emotions break through the conventions of this suburban milieu where the work deals with the loss of a close one. \u2018Bears\u2019 is both an ode to the delightful, multifarious oddity of words, and a recognition of their limitations when dealing with loss. Words are, \u2018difficult to hold \u2013 like knives and keys\u2026 Nothing will make this better. So we stick\/to this week and the next\u2026 enjoy the unreasonable sun.\u2019 \u2018Unreasonable\u2019 does the heavy-lifting here, zooming the poem out, in a single word, from an awkward, \u2018difficult-to-have\u2019 chat in a back-garden, to something heart-rending and universal.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Lady Macbeth\u2019, a brilliant, dark sonnet riffing on one of the greatest of anti-heroines, placing her in a modern-day asylum, the Lady M. persona mocks the staff for \u2018their limited ideas of madness,\u2019 a fabulous re-invention of a character we think we know (even though never \u2018real\u2019), grounded in Shakespearean motifs of \u2018a stage\u2019, a wood that moves, and \u2018players\u2019, but lent here a modern, first-person twist. These are knowing poems, name-checking the canon at times, while adding something fresh and vital.<\/p>\n

Alice Allen\u2019s Daylight of Seagulls (The High Window Press)<\/em> has a similarly detailed rendition of place, but one more squarely realistic \u2013 in this case, war-time occupied Jersey. This could suffer, if merely a documentary, by suggesting the clich\u00e9 of an \u2018Unknown War\u2019 or \u2019Forgotten History\u2019. There is inevitably, given this context, much explanation, which I found a fascinating backdrop to the poems, but may hinder the reader less interested in the period. But Allen writes out of a recognition of an unacknowledged Allied defeat, a hidden loss the British Government, for all its Churchillian grandiloquence, chose to hide in a dark corner. Allen lends this period new resonance by invoking her own families\u2019 experience of that loss, as a Jersey-born child of islanders.<\/p>\n

The poetic discovery of the hybrid-language spoken in Jersey in the 1940s, \u2018Jerriais\u2019, an old form of Norman French, Norse, Breton and Medieval Latin, is an irresistible gift to the poet, and in this collection, the musicality and almost-but-not-quite familiar sounds and diction are a joy. Take this, for example, with all the words for rocks, glossed for the first poem, \u2018Gers Ey\u2019, including \u2018etchierviethe,\u2019 for rock frequented by cormorants; \u2018marmotchiethe\u2019 for murmuring rocks; \u2018sablionniethe\u2019 for sandy rock, and \u2018scoucherel\u2019 for a skulking place. They are lovely in the ear and I defy the reader to be able to resist rolling them around the mouth.<\/p>\n

Nature and our rituals in dealing with, and using, Nature have an almost Heaneyesque sense of their texture and feel and an attentiveness to the detail. In \u2018La Soupe D\u2019Andgulle\u2019 (a specialty dish of eels), her mother is:<\/p>\n

\u2018\u2026swift to make the eel listen,<\/p>\n

working the flesh into clean stalks,<\/p>\n

her swollen wash day hands<\/p>\n

turn agile and particular<\/p>\n

in the presence of this fish<\/p>\n

placing pieces into the pot, basting, no,<\/p>\n

anointing the eel in its juices,<\/p>\n

the milk-sweet fragrance of the stock,<\/p>\n

a scattering of parsley and marigolds.\u2019<\/p>\n

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The threat of the war is rendered through bees, for \u2018They may die from gun-fire shock\/as it clatters through the valley\/or soldiers on creeping knees\/might come at night\/and steal the hives away.\u2019 The bees, like planes, \u2018pin flight paths\/through the valley sleeves\/of chestnut, oak and sycamore\u2026\u2019 (Beehive Stories)<\/p>\n

In \u2018Trench\u2019, a prose poem in which children witness, from a window, the punishment meted out with a \u2018chouque\u2019 (a heavy wooden club) to a slave labourer digging a trench under a German soldier\u2019s supervision, \u2018The five children do not know what to do with what they see.\u2019 Now adults, they are \u2018surprised\u2019 they still do not know. The war is both history and still present in memory, a post-traumatic fissuring in the mind.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Pouquelaye\u2019 (a prehistoric burial site) children are comforted by their elders. \u2018They held our hands\/in the granite chambers,\/scented with the sea.\/Other children were not so lucky.\u2019 The war-time tragedies and local heroisms of the islanders are utilised to powerful effect in poems of memory, storytelling and forgetting.<\/p>\n

The insistent \u2018Is\u2019 at the start of six of the lines of the sonnet, \u20187 West Park Avenue\u2019 draw our attention to the act and sheer will of survival. An Anne Frank-like attic-room hiding a refugee, \u2018is a hole, a cellar, a bookcase on a hinge\/is the view from an attic\/ – daylight of seagulls -\/is salt in the wind.\u2019 The image of the escapee only able to see seagulls, free in their flight, from their hide-out, is a wonderful image and a fitting title for this meticulously well researched, yet personal, book of poems.<\/p>\n

Marie Naughton\u2019s A Life, Elsewhere <\/em>(Pindrop Press) also deals in memory and nostalgia, rendered in visual details. The talcum-powder in \u2018A Tin of Powder\u2019 dropping from a school-bag, \u2018shaking white arcs through the air.\/Johnson\u2019s. \u2018The top twists open with a biting click. Upended,\/seven holes print my hand with a circle of dots.\u2019 This precision of detail typifies many of the poems. Nature is observed closely in \u2018Diva\u2019, where a silver-birch in a garden \u2018holds court\u2019\u2026..\u2019a lightning-bolt\/upended: earthed in the flowerbed.\u2019 The tree\u2019s bark will \u2018peel off and litter the garden. Look -\/here\u2019s a scroll under two frogs clasped together\/in the pond.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u2018Brain\u2019, the organ \u2018Glistens in a pool of saline\u2026Colour\/of river clay, oyster mushrooms, yeast. Runnelled\/as a walnut.\u2019 There is tenderness in \u2018Hearing Aids\u2019, with the \u2018hard to watch\u2019 struggle to \u2018loop the slender wire behind\/his ear,\u2019 in a father\u2019s slow reluctance to admit infirmity. In \u2018Still\u2019, the loss of a child \u00a0is registered \u2013 \u2018We\u2019ve fallen\/through a gap in the language\u2019 \u2013 against the institutional insensitivity of the 60s, when the narrator\u2019s mother-in-law tells us still-born babies were slipped inside a stranger\u2019s coffin. There is a versatility and range to these poems that, while always grounded, demonstrate a soaring, painterly eye for imaginative detail.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The rich nexus between science and poetry has been well-explored. Keats was originally, after all, a failed surgeon and pharmacist. Michael Symmons Roberts wrote on the genome; Ruth Padel on her forebear, Charles Darwin; Sarah Watkinson is an eminent emeritus research fellow in Plant Sciences at Oxford, with a particular interest in mycology; and David Morley is an ecologist, to name only a few poets who have sought to marry poetry and science .<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Martin Zarrop\u2019s Making Waves <\/em>(V. Press) is subtitled, \u2018Albert Einstein: Science & Life\u2019, and many of the poems\u2019 in this pamphlet have epigraphs attributed to the great man. As a retired mathematician, there can be few poets so well-equipped to tackle this somewhat arcane area of scientific enquiry. But like all good teachers, Zarrop imparts his knowledge with a lightness of touch, with an ear for the anecdote and keen sense for picking propitious moments in time. Arguments from 1905 between Max Planck and Einstein over quantum theory may seem an unlikely subject, but Zarrop renders the debate simply in \u2018Quantum Leap,\u2019 as we become familiar with, even as Albert himself resists, the idea of \u2018waves of matter, lumps of light.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u2018An Amusing Thought\u2019, Zarrop uses the concrete poem form to render a mushroom cloud, as, in awe of his subject as he is, he is also aware of the sciences\u2019 terrible capacity for misuse in wartime. The font enlarges and expands as he explains at the start of the poem, \u2018relativity implies\/mass is energy\/energy equals\/mass times the speed of light squared.\u2019 Are we, the reader, still with him on this? We need to be, as a thought can\u2019t be \u2018unthought\u2019 and ends with the devastating realisation: \u2018nineteen forty-five\/matter lights up a city.\u2019 Einstein\u2019s responsibility is explored in \u2018Dilemma,\u2019 where the scientist is quoted: \u2018I made one great mistake in my life\u2019 and where \u2018His letter to Roosevelt burns\/brighter than the sun,\/casts everlasting shadows\/on witnesses of stone.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The science really comes to life where the poet-narrator-teacher employs metaphoric image or storytelling to great effect, as in \u2018Equivalence.\u2019 The image is of a man in a lift with the cable severed. Is he an astronaut, floating, or is he falling, in that precise moment? \u2018as reaction\/follows action,\/performs a slow rotation\/before terrestrial matter,\/without a single thought,\/gets in the way.\u2019 The verbal shift from the scientific to the colloquial finale of \u2018gets in the way,\u2019 illustrates best the poet\u2019s ability to bridge these two worlds in a way that is fascinating, and illuminates for once, (to me, at least, as one all too decidedly \u2018non-scientific\u2019), the poetry of, and in, equations, equivalencies and scientific paradox.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ken Evans<\/p>\n

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

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