{"id":5160,"date":"2015-12-22T22:24:38","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T21:24:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5160"},"modified":"2016-01-23T14:25:26","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T13:25:26","slug":"the-terrible-by-daniel-sluman-nine-arches-9-99-reviewed-by-ken-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=5160","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Sluman, the terrible<\/em> (Nine Arches) \u00a39.99), reviewed by Ken Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"

A blood-spatter or tainted x-ray? The vivid front cover of Daniel Sluman\u2019s second collection from Nine Arches, the terrible,<\/i> (even the title sounds cut from its meaning), alerts you that this volume deals with what Sluman describes as the \u2018dark underbelly of our relatively comfortable lives.\u2019 If the endlessly dividing cell that is contemporary poetry can be reduced to a single trope in recent years, it could be the Poetry of Bodily Trauma.<\/p>\n

Whether in the physiologically overwhelming, as in Karen McCarthy Woolf\u2019s Eliot-nominated An Aviary of Small Birds<\/i>, with its focus on stillbirth, also the subject of \u00a0Wendy Pratt\u2019s Flarestack pamphlet Lapstrake<\/i>; or Rebecca Goss\u2019s loss of a child to Severe Ebsteins\u2019 Anomaly in Her Birth<\/i>; or in the underminings of the body, as host to our \u2018enemies within,\u2019 such as Crohn\u2019s Disease (Matthew Siegel\u2019s Blood Work<\/i>); or auto-immune diseases in Hugo Williams\u2019 dialysis poems from the recent I Knew the Bride<\/i>, the failings and what Sharon Black calls in her review of Shulman\u2019s debut collection, the \u2018frangibility\u2019 of the body, seem part of the poetic zeitgeist.<\/p>\n

Sluman may be one of the youngest poets addressing life-changing trauma, but he has suffered disability since childhood, after a through-hip leg amputation due to bone cancer. The biography is important, as without context the poems alone only obliquely and occasionally, if beautifully, refer to \u2018this lightning trapped in my hip\/my strange weather\u2019 (\u2018Doppelganger\u2019).<\/p>\n

The first poem in the opening section \u2013 this new collection is divided into three roughly equal sections – \u2018Human\/beauty\u2019, lays out the stark territory like a mission statement, from \u2018the sweat & bleach\/of human delivery\u2019 to the \u2018fall into the cold\/black earth\u2019 of death. And no ameliorating god-head to ease the pain:<\/p>\n

he never came\u00a0\u00a0 never came for us
\nwhen we carved open our arms<\/p>\n

on bathroom floors \u00a0\u00a0how he took my leg
\n& left her shivering in a cupboard at sixteen<\/p>\n

we\u2019ll gut his son\u00a0\u00a0 scalp the holy spirit
\n& we\u2019ll never kneel for him again.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (\u2018angels\u2019)<\/p>\n

Reviews of Shulman\u2019s first book, Absence has a weight of its own<\/i>, use epithets such as \u2018bleak\u2019 and \u2018unflinching\u2019. The same can be said about the terrible. If there is a codocil to the anguish, it is in the love of and for his partner (also namechecked in a poem.) Even here, however, the sense that love is a contingent condition that can be swept away or lost at any time is ever-present, as in \u2018my love is sponsored by the warmth of opiates\u2019, where \u2018the pills\/spill through the blood to hush\/the nerves\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 a damp towel thrown over a pan-fire.\u2019<\/p>\n

This illustrates where Sluman saves the shocking and disturbing subject-matter from the risk of melodrama by counter-pointing its almost unfathomable severity (to the outsider), with grounded, down-to-earth images, precisely observed. Cigarettes become, \u2019twenty pale promises\/pinched side by side\u00a0\u00a0 bursting to be prized\/from this cardboard theatre.\u2019 This is minute and imaginative observation, locating the poetry of personal pain in the quotidian here and now. We see those cigarettes and feel their meager, but still essential, small comfort.<\/p>\n

However, what is really striking is the form. Sluman says he owes this to readings of American poets, specifically Brenda Shaughnessy, James Dickey, C.D. Wright, and Rosemarie Waldrop. He gives us almost no punctuation, not even full-stops. Capitalisation goes. It\u2019s as if the poet\u2019s confessional style is furthered by deleting intrusive punctuation as mere \u2018scaffolding\u2019, an obstacle to expression that only adds stylistic obfuscation. The paradox is, of course, that to get rid of artifice requires skilled invention, or in other words, technique of another sort.<\/p>\n

So we gain multiple space-gaps that stand in for breath-taking; for pauses; to emphasise; or make connections. The ampersand substitutes for \u2018and\u2019, as if the highly-worked poems are in fact \u2018sketches\u2019 prized from the quickly overwhelming pain of lived experience. Frequently, ampersands (as in the example from \u2018angels\u2019 above) come at the start of a line, often repeated three or four times within short poems. Even the title of a poem starts with one, as in \u2018& this is love.\u2019<\/p>\n

I thought I understood this better when I read Sluman\u2019s first interest was in music \u2013 the ampersand becomes like a treble clef in musical notation, at the start of a line, indicating changes in pitch or tone, just as an \u2018and\u2019 conjoins two phrases which relate to each other, with the second adding amplification, or clarification, or even under-cutting, of the first. In this light, the ampersand made more integral sense, rather than becoming a repeated, potentially irritating, \u2018attention-seeker\u2019 on the page.<\/p>\n

Artificial space between words is sometimes indicated by a forward slash, as in \u2018wonder\/ful\u2019 which like a paleographic minim in old texts, seems a means of identifying difference, of suggesting a \u2018tic\u2019 of the homogenized, twenty-first century writer in \u2018Word\u2019, where everyone\u2019s writing looks the same<\/span>.<\/p>\n

To have two collections behind you at 30 is a great achievement for an interesting writer: Sluman mines the depths of his own humanity to make it visible for us all, and suggests that what it is to be \u2018able-bodied\u2019 is both a literal and metaphorical conjecture.
\n 
\nKen Evans<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A blood-spatter or tainted x-ray? The vivid front cover of Daniel Sluman\u2019s second collection from Nine Arches, the terrible, (even the title sounds cut from its meaning), alerts you that this volume deals with what Sluman describes as the \u2018dark underbelly of our relatively comfortable lives.\u2019 If the endlessly dividing cell that is contemporary poetry […]<\/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":"\nDaniel Sluman, the terrible (Nine Arches) \u00a39.99), 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=5160\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Daniel Sluman, the terrible (Nine Arches) \u00a39.99), reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A blood-spatter or tainted x-ray? 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