{"id":11354,"date":"2020-06-22T13:52:11","date_gmt":"2020-06-22T12:52:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11354"},"modified":"2020-06-22T16:51:23","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T15:51:23","slug":"8-pamphlets-from-rack-and-melos-presses-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11354","title":{"rendered":"8 Pamphlets<\/strong> from Rack and Melos Presses reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mich\u00e8le Roberts, Swimming Through A Painting By Bonnard, <\/i>R\u00f3is\u00edn Tierney, Mock-Orange, <\/i>Kate Quigley, If You Love Something, <\/i>Christopher Reid, Not Funny Any More, <\/i>A.C.Bevan, Field Trips In The Anthropocene <\/i>Rack Press, \u00a35.00, Mich\u00e8le Roberts, Fifteen Beads, <\/i>Andrew McCulloch, The Lincolnshire Rising,<\/i> The Melos Press, \u00a35.00, Nicholas Murray, The Yellow Wheelbarrow, <\/i>The Melos Press, \u00a310.00<\/p>\n

As always, there are interesting contrasts running through this latest batch of pamphlets from the closely interwoven stables of the Rack and Melos presses. And at this \u2018interesting\u2019 time, those contrasts seem move vivid. On the one hand, you have the hard-hitting and always very well-constructed satires of Christopher Reid and Rack\u2019s editor, Nicholas Murray. On the other hand, you have the painterly, and that sometimes literally, work of Mich\u00e8le Roberts, R\u00f3is\u00edn Tierney and Kate Quigley. In the middle, you have writing which situates itself in time, either the contemporary world of A.C. Bevan\u2019s Field Trips in the Anthropocene<\/i>, or the historical as in Andrew McCulloch\u2019s The Lincolnshire Rising. <\/i><\/p>\n

The paintings of Pierre Bonnard have not been uncontroversial either in his own time or in ours. His attitude to figure and figuration was sometimes woozily subordinated to his extraordinary ability as a colourist. There is no such ambivalence in Mich\u00e8le Roberts\u2019 \u2018The solitary swimmer\u2019, in which the narrator swims through \u2018the radiance\u2019 of Bonnard\u2019s compositions. However, Roberts is ready to concede that Bonnard\u2019s depiction of his wife, Marthe, nude, is \u2018flat & still.\u2019, even if she is \u2018pearl-fleshed \/ in her opened oyster shell.\u2019 There is a nice ambivalence in the location of the poem, here, which starts in \u2018the hushed basement spa,\u2019 in which the narrator swims through the Bonnard. Roberts\u2019 attraction to Bonnard fits with the painterly nature of Roberts\u2019 poems, and she, too, is an unabashed colourist. In \u2018Fifteen Beads\u2019, the sequence which makes up the whole of the eponymous pamphlet from Melos, Roberts gives us often warmly exact depictions of the flowers,<\/p>\n

Blossoms flare then fall.
\nSeedpods explode
\nin the evening sun trumpeting
\nyellow as courgette flowers
\nbold and brassy as nasturtiums.<\/p>\n

In this context, and with this precision, Fifteen Beads<\/i> evokes and memorializes a set of always involving epiphanies.<\/p>\n

In R\u00f3is\u00edn Tierney\u2019s Mock-Orange <\/i>shows that the natural world can impinge to deceive and betray. In the title poem, a crab-spider lies among the fallen blossom of the mock-orange, perfectly imitating it. So, when the narrator picks it up \u2018among the other petals,\u2019 she is \u2018made aware by its tiny bite, its fulsome needling venom.\u2019 This venom, in turn, makes the narrator, \u2018think of you then, in hospital, in Dublin, \/ drinking your necessary poison.\u2019 Who this other might be, may or may not be important. But Tierney\u2019s procedure in this collection is reflect on how the presence of others may deepen our own response. In \u2018Winter Dybbuk\u2019, a bat which falls from the eave of a roof, is warmed and then released. The bat reminds the poet of other winged creatures which have fallen from grace; but also \u2018of our impossible mythologies: \/ blood-thirsty lover, ghost eater, \/ fallen angel, demon, god-in-exile.\u2019<\/p>\n

The animals in Kate Quigley\u2019s debut pamphlet, If You Love Something, <\/i>offer striking lessons for their human \u2018interlocutors\u2019. The title of the text is taken from the poem, \u2018If or Some Lessons Learned from a Small Dog. The poem opens with the following verse, \u2018If you love something, \/ put it in your mouth \u2013 take it by the ear \/ between your needle teeth,\u2019 which is repeated through the poem. The small dog\u2019s physical engagement with the world, its need to understand, to \u2018love\u2019 takes a fully physical form. Thus, Quigley writes, \u2018whatever truth you have in you, \/ whatever rises from the hot knot of desire at the bas of your oesophagus – \u2026\/\/ This is all you have, \/ all that lies fermenting in your small cage of a body.\u2019 The use of \u2018you\u2019 deliberately opens out the implications to the small dog, the reader and the writer, too.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s something quietly triumphant about the way Quigley\u2019s pithy style works all this material. Quigley is simply very good at using the small dog as an exemplar, without either reducing the dog to some kind of anthropomorphised cypher, or being patronizing to the nature of the dog\u2019s animality. It\u2019s a dog, all right, and a beautifully realized dog, too, but the actuality of the dogginess is something that shows humans where they do actually fit into the moral order which they pretend to control.<\/p>\n

The moral lessons of Kate Quigley\u2019s small dog ought to be learned by the humans in A.C. Bevan\u2019s finely realized Field Trips in the Anthropocene<\/i>. That is not to say that Bevan doesn\u2019t show the need for those lessons; his pamphlet is a strident lament for those lessons not learned. In \u2018Beached\u2019, Bevan depicts bathing in the now shrinking Dead Sea, \u2018irrigation, \/ drought & saline evaporation have \/ left a tidemark \/\/ & a fat man floating on \/ his back in a puddle, \/ big toe in the \/ plughole.\u2019 And we shouldn\u2019t search for answers in technology either. \u2018The Algorithm\u2019 \u2018Beats you at chess or checkers \/ whilst finding you a mate.\u2019 Here, whatever constitutes a human is suborned to the machine, and whatever the needs and wants that make up that deeper human are ultimately crushed, \u2018Your safe-word is the wake-word \/ to your always-on smart hub, \/ Alexa, ask the Bible App \/ if now<\/i> there is a God\u2026?. If all this seems pessimistic, Bevan\u2019s whip-lash irony brings a leavening humour to it all.<\/p>\n

To say that, in this company, Andrew McCulloch is a much more traditionally lyric poet is not to remotely lessen the impact of his lovely lyrics. He is also poetry of more traditional forms: sonnets and rhymed quatrains. There is a quiet observational quality to much of McCulloch\u2019s poetry in this pamphlet. The natural world in McCulloch\u2019s poetry reminds the human of their mortality. In \u2018Late Spring\u2019, a long winter means \u2018the earth turns in its sleep but will not wake,\u2019 and at the end of the poem, the narrator wonders whether spring will come at all, \u2018How could it come again to lift me free \/ From dreams in which you say I didn\u2019t die?\u2019 <\/i>If there is a Georgian quality to much of McCulloch\u2019s writing, that quality does not deny that under a rather \u2018English\u2019 melancholy, McCulloch has a substantial attachment to the land and its people. McCulloch recounts \u2018The Lincolnshire Rising\u2019, the title poem, the sonnet form contains a narrative which deftly shows the deep disruption caused by that rising, against Cromwell\u2019s puritans. In McCulloch\u2019s account, this rising was an attempt at preserving an older way of living, much in the way that John Clare wished to preserve a deeper, more natural countryside.<\/p>\n

Christopher Reid\u2019s Not Funny Any More<\/i> features \u2018The Great Turnip\u2019 and no prizes for guessing who that turnip might be. The current world climate has drawn out the satirist in Christopher Reid, rather better know as a \u2018Martian\u2019; an appellation that I\u2019m sure he would rather discard. The satirist in Reid manifests itself in this pamphlet as one possessed of considerable formal variety. There are neatly rhymed quatrains, of varying forms, as well as closely cropped rhyming couplets. This formal adroitness is allied with a pitch-perfect irony that nails The Great Turnip in all of his vices, and also in all of his voices.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to quote from Reid\u2019s pamphlet as almost every line is eminently quotable. This is from the final section:<\/p>\n

The Great Turnip is planning to punish the press,
\nwho have caused him such distress.<\/p>\n

They are all wicked, all liars,
\nall godless and unpatriotic Turnip-deniers.<\/p>\n

Bad people. Sad people. Both.
\nThey need to be cut out like a malignant growth.<\/p>\n

It must be done for the nation\u2019s health,
\nand by stealth.<\/p>\n

Nicholas Murray has also shown himself to be a fine satirist, as his poem A Dog\u2019s Brexit, <\/i>showed so well. The Yellow Wheelbarrow<\/i> is a full-length collection of work and includes work from previous pamphlets as well as new work. Murray the satirist is represented here with such poems as \u2018We Must Avoid Clich\u00e9\u2019, which, as you might imagine, does not<\/u> avoid clich\u00e9, particularly where the \u2018poe-biz\u2019 is concerned.<\/p>\n

This long-awaited first collection.
\n<\/i>Long-touted on Twitter by its friends,
\nits enemies not yet found, still to stir
\nfrom their long sleep of indifference.<\/p>\n

What is present even in these lines whose purpose is, perhaps, \u2018political\u2019 with a small \u2018p\u2019, is the quiet rhythmic pulse with underpins all Murray\u2019s poems.<\/p>\n

That assured rhythmic control is often allied with a closely observational sense in Murray\u2019s writing. And the final effect of this combination is a warm lyrical quality to these texts. The poem, \u2018Venus\u2019 depicts the painting of a nude by Cranach the Elder in the painter\u2019s studio, in the dead of winter, \u2018where ice made dragons \/\/ on the window-pane \/ and lust froze up before the twist \/ of water left the opened tap.\u2019 Murray\u2019s deft imagination creates the strikingly visual image of the ice making \u2018dragons\u2019 on the window. Then he yokes the freezing of lust with the unfrozen water in the tap; and does so, in part, with that nice half-rhyme of \u2018lust\u2019 and \u2018twist\u2019.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Murray\u2019s satire is a natural development of that other ability his poetry has, an ability to look at a scene and depict it with real emotional precision. In that way, Murray\u2019s lyrics share the laser like focus of his satire. The emotional precision of Murray\u2019s poems drive the quiet narrative that leads the poems. And in that precision there is a feeling of what might be right entwined with what might be possible, as in the poem \u2018Island\u2019, which is here quoted in full:<\/p>\n

Brendan\u2019s monks have lit a fire
\nwhere gutted fish brown on whittled sticks,
\nand God is thanked for the air of a small island.<\/p>\n

There is no hint of what\u2019s to come:
\nthe slide of embers, the tilt and scatter
\nwhen the whale lifts itself from seeming sleep.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Mich\u00e8le Roberts, Swimming Through A Painting By Bonnard, R\u00f3is\u00edn Tierney, Mock-Orange, Kate Quigley, If You Love Something, Christopher Reid, Not Funny Any More, A.C.Bevan, Field Trips In The Anthropocene Rack Press, \u00a35.00, Mich\u00e8le Roberts, Fifteen Beads, Andrew McCulloch, The Lincolnshire Rising, The Melos Press, \u00a35.00, Nicholas Murray, The Yellow Wheelbarrow, The Melos Press, \u00a310.00 As […]<\/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":"\n8 Pamphlets from Rack and Melos Presses 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=11354\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"8 Pamphlets from Rack and Melos Presses reviewed by Ian Pople - 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