{"id":11911,"date":"2020-12-19T00:29:02","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T23:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11911"},"modified":"2020-12-17T20:33:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-17T19:33:12","slug":"carrie-etter-the-shooting-gallery-verve-reviewed-by-ken-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11911","title":{"rendered":"Carrie Etter, The Shooting Gallery (Verve), reviewed by Ken Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <em>The Shooting Gallery<\/em>, Carrie Etter uses a favourite form, the prose poem, to interrogate and illuminate the fatal attraction in a country with more guns than people. However, her way in is not outrage or despair, but to look through an artist\u2019s eye, in a sequence of twelve ekphrastic poems, featuring images suggested by the ambiguous \u2018Gallery\u2019 in the pamphlet title. Czech artist Toyen captures, for Etter, a savage meshing of images of childhood as in: \u2018think: <em>Anne of Green Gables<\/em>. Oh I \/ remember child-size desires, glee come easy,\u2019 (\u2018Shooting Gallery II\u2019) and images of \u2018adult\u2019 war, most luminously in the \u2018torsos of two young soldiers, arms roughly hacked off\u2026their thoughts: school and \/ its handwriting lessons.\u2019 (\u2018Shooting Gallery VIII\u2019) Barely more than child-soldiers then, killing and killed in a landscape of severed fish, fox and stag\u2019s heads, an eco-genocide.<\/p>\n<p>The second half is a dozen more prose poems, based on now infamous US school shootings, Columbine being the most well-known. The focus is the aftermaths. The iconography of violent, shocking child massacres, is evoked by tableaux, both incongruous and by now horribly familiar to us, of a \u2018teenage boy\u2019s brown pick-up truck\u2019 sprouting \u2018lilies, roses, carnations\u2026balloons \/ tied to the fender\u2026cellophane-wrapped bouquets rise amid cards, handwritten notes.\u2019 The totality becomes \u2018a poem until all the empty space \/ fills, until absence becomes presence, for a while.\u2019 By these pathetic, rote and screened observances, do we try and retain, even resurrect, the lost ones.<\/p>\n<p>This is not merely poetic observation of terrible events at distance, through the by now commonplace reiterations of on-screen, societal comment, laboured analyses and swift conclusions of non-conclusion, often followed by celebrity support, and the squalid, inevitable political side-stepping. For in the poem, \u2018Normal Community High School, Illinois, 2012\u2019, the \u2018war\u2019 comes to the poet\u2019s hometown. \u2018At first, what rattled \/ was the proximity, the intimacy \u2013 \/ gunfire \/ only a mile from \/ my family home.\u2019 The poet wears \u2018the \/ knowledge \/ like chain mail, my torso \/ heavier, my shoulders \/ newly weighted.\u2019 The chain-mail image shines in its ambivalences, suggesting the need to feel \u2018armoured\u2019, yet also inured, against the event, but also the ineffectual nature of the armour (which won\u2019t stop high velocity bullets). It echoes\u00a0an older, more \u2018chivalric\u2019 way of death, associated with knights in armour, where there appears, however spurious, some \u2018cause\u2019 or \u2018motivation\u2019. \u00a0Perhaps we are, suggests the image, from an older era of more \u2018established values\u2019, incapable of properly processing what seems random, savage, purposeless and incomprehensible. Until the next round of handwringing and pop-psychology <em>faux <\/em>explication.<\/p>\n<p>Ken Evans<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In The Shooting Gallery, Carrie Etter uses a favourite form, the prose poem, to interrogate and illuminate the fatal attraction in a country with more guns than people. However, her way in is not outrage or despair, but to look through an artist\u2019s eye, in a sequence of twelve ekphrastic poems, featuring images suggested by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"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":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Carrie Etter, The Shooting Gallery (Verve), reviewed by Ken Evans - 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=11911\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Carrie Etter, The Shooting Gallery (Verve), reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In The Shooting Gallery, Carrie Etter uses a favourite form, the prose poem, to interrogate and illuminate the fatal attraction in a country with more guns than people. 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