David Troupes, The Simple Men (Two Ravens Press) \u00a37.99
\nAnne Fitzgerald, Beyond the Sea (Salmon Poetry) \u00a310.00<\/p>\n
The Simple Men. \u2018The Simple Man [\u2026]\u2019, a sequence interspersed throughout, forms a backbone. One does not feel it to be heaved up from the Everyman, or Wordsworth\u2019s ballads. Do we still \u2018choose incidents and situations from common life, and [\u2026] relate or describe them, throughout, as far as [is] possible in a selection of language really used by men\u2019? (Wordsworth, \u2018Preface to Lyrical Ballads\u2019 (1800)) What are we doing now?<\/p>\n
The first \u2018Simple Man\u2019, the second poem of the collection after the aptly-titled \u2018The Quarry Jumpers\u2019, is \u2018The Simple Man in Love with the Sound of Things\u2019:<\/p>\n
[\u2026]
\nthis slow
\nharmony of beats
\nwhich is the sound of everything loving
\nand warring in unison.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Simple Man\u2019 is not simple. Alone, but written (\u2018We splash ourselves through pools of evening whey, | pour ourselves | to the platterbearing yarrow and loose | our hymns up the maple flue [\u2026]. | Long rivers of medicine | where a drop would be too much.\u2019 (\u2018The Simple Man Dressed as Though Death\u2019)) A conversation between worlds. I was talking to my mate, who, like Troupes, also went to UMass, on Facebook whilst reading. Massachusetts and the North of England! I sat and read it again in the pub (where I am now writing). \u2018The Quarry Jumpers\u2019 \u2013 there\u2019s a quarry not far away. \u2018Rain scrim under eastbound clouds\u2019. (\u2018Morning at the Day and Night Diner\u2019). Life and the poem \u2013 they can live and work together. But, again, what are we doing?<\/p>\n
It is a beautiful collection. I\u2019m watching Man Utd \u2013 Liverpool, reading \u2018Guinea Fowl\u2019, thinking of Cantona and the seagulls, wondering whether I might have become one of the \u2018Men in gray coats [\u2026] wandering my old backyard, men | who never search for what I\u2019ve hidden, | who follow their own nonsense [\u2026]\u2019. What is the man, what is the poem, \u2018the willow | our neighbor felled\u2019, and \u2018time felled our neighbor and the fowl returned | with their helmets and head-wounds\u2019, \u2018[\u2026] taller into the ripeness | of an ending of an end\u2013 | O willow return!\u2013and tie strings to my wrists.\u2019 What do they make of each other?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a fine sequence of five two-line poems, called \u2018Pennies\u2019:<\/p>\n
I<\/p>\n
The bait shop man, a heap of gristle.
\nWhat pinks the refinery of his eyes?<\/p>\n
Sound and image. And \u2018The Bull Moose\u2019:<\/p>\n
Earliest faint of dawn, lip-slip
\nsilence of river
\nand like a fish opened
\nthe sky bleeds and feathers
\nas three moose feed
\nin the slackwater by the islands,
\ndark silhouettes
\namong the bales of mist.
\n[\u2026]<\/p>\n
What a poem describes, what it is, \u2018[\u2026] up | the rain-belittled, rain-berunnelled hills, | searching through my searching for what it is | to be moose [\u2026] | each tree in the rain shaking | grandly | like a tree in the rain.\u2019 (\u2018The Bastard\u2019) Again, it\u2019s a beautiful collection.<\/p>\n
Tomorrow morning<\/p>\n
early, when the sun is a tray of crumbs
\nI\u2019ll rise
\nin the spin and wander,
\ntill I throw myself down and there\u2019s my urn.
\n(\u2018The Simple Man Arriving Through the Fields\u2019)<\/p>\n
*<\/p>\n
Anne Fitzgerald\u2019s Beyond the Sea. Here are the mind-blowing first few lines of \u2018D\u00e9votion\u2019:<\/p>\n
It makes sense all the same when you think of it. Born
\non the feast of finding the true cross, he\u2019d always felt
\na direct line, so to speak. Since Johnny gave up the drink
\nhe\u2019s killed worrying them blasted rosary beads to death [\u2026]<\/p>\n
Religion, history, the Young Man. There\u2019s a huge amount here. In terms of subject, in terms of style. In the last few lines of this poem there is something akin to Tara Bergin\u2019s \u2018Looking at Lucy\u2019s Painting of the Thames at Low Tide Without Lucy Present\u2019, which I also reviewed recently for The Manchester Review; that stunning line of hers \u2018they say the marine world is notoriously \u2018close-knit\u2019:<\/p>\n
[\u2026] Nelly Ryan\u2019s pink
\npaddling pool might well be the lake in Central Park.
\nFor miles they does come to re-enact crusades, to seek
\nindulgences for battles lost, [\u2026]
\n[\u2026] tall flags wave colour askew as if a tapestry
\nlost in a watered-down detail of its own threaded myth.<\/p>\n
Well woven, fine poems. From \u2018Longing\u2019\u2019s \u2018From the sound of things you say | he\u2019s as hard as that stick of rock\u2019; \u2018her lip-hush kisses sail his vertebrae | like her index over the spine of an upturned | hull beached in the scent of bladderwrack\u2019; to \u2018Little Death\u2019\u2019s \u2018The tip of your tongue teases | unknown pleasures, | releases a kind of jazz | oozing with the after taste | of movement, like little fish | licking the wild Sargasso.\u2019<\/p>\n
She is \u2018Signalling Through Space Without Wires\u2019 with these poems.<\/p>\n
Though folded away in the lining of a pocket
\nyou arrive unannounced as if a change<\/p>\n
in weather, alter the climate of my thoughts
\nlike a gulf stream\u2019s warm air [\u2026].<\/p>\n
[\u2026]<\/p>\n
From deep inside it comes, like a longing
\nto drive across the Golden Gate<\/p>\n
uninterrupted by the thought of you unravelling
\nthe storm we gather and weather
\nin the face of what we have disfigured of ourselves.
\n(\u2018Gone are the Lightships\u2019)<\/p>\n
Bridges between things. People, places. Poems. Perhaps that is what we are doing, what we are making.
\n
\nJohn North<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
David Troupes, The Simple Men (Two Ravens Press) \u00a37.99 Anne Fitzgerald, Beyond the Sea (Salmon Poetry) \u00a310.00 The Simple Men. \u2018The Simple Man [\u2026]\u2019, a sequence interspersed throughout, forms a backbone. One does not feel it to be heaved up from the Everyman, or Wordsworth\u2019s ballads. Do we still \u2018choose incidents and situations from common […]<\/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":"\n