{"id":7418,"date":"2017-03-20T20:38:38","date_gmt":"2017-03-20T19:38:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7418"},"modified":"2017-03-20T20:38:49","modified_gmt":"2017-03-20T19:38:49","slug":"four-pamphlets-from-rack-press-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7418","title":{"rendered":"Four pamphlets from Rack Press, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5>Kathryn Gray, <em>Flowers<\/em>; Chris Kinsey, <em>Muddy Fox<\/em>; Martha Sprackland, <em>Glass as Broken Glass<\/em>; Rory Waterman, <em>Brexit Day on the Balmoral Estate<\/em>, (Rack Press, \u00a35.00).<\/h5>\n<p>Kathryn Gray\u2019s pamphlet <em>Flowers<\/em> references films from <em>Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off<\/em>, to Roger Donaldson\u2019s <em>Cocktail<\/em>. It also has poems about Bill Hicks and The Killers\u2019 Brandon Flowers, who gives the pamphlet its title. This is poetry as a kind of fandom. But Gray is too cute a writer for that fandom to be simply starry-eyed. Or maybe she\u2019s too British not to ironize these figures at most turns. Part of that irony is Gray\u2019s direct address to the figures she writes about, so \u2018O Brandon, my brown-eyed boy, I will not answer\/ critics who say you\u2019re a triumph of style over substance\u2019 (\u2018Testament\u2019). And it is possible that this subject matter demands that kind of address, that Gray\u2019s mode of writing is slightly conditioned by focusing on celebrity. But that focus enables the construction of a most enjoyable group of poems; as in \u2018A Bandana\u2019 which references <em>The Deer Hunter<\/em> and begins, \u2018I\u2019ll say, like some, you wore it for the wound\/ &#8211; Sweet tourniquet of youth!\u2019 <\/p>\n<p>Chris Kinsey\u2019s <em>Muddy Fox<\/em> is a more descriptive kind of writing. That descriptive nature is indicated in the title, and Kinsey\u2019s impulse is to observe and meditate on those observations. In \u2018Rough Sleeper\u2019, for example, the sleeper \u2018curls into the darkness of summer trees.\u2019 This hints at the sumptuousness of some of Kinsey\u2019s writing. And also the romanticism of Kinsey\u2019s approach. Later in that same poem, the sleeper \u2018sleeps through bees droning\/ ten thousand moon-pale bell flowers.\u2019 Kinsey\u2019s romanticism moves easily between the rough sleeper, injured angels and a day off. There is a danger with this ease of movement that the surface of the poems becomes too similar, and the subject matter is subsumed beneath that surface. However, Kinsey\u2019s technique and her confidence with words means that the poems have a warmth and generosity towards their various subjects, which particularises them and makes them individual.<\/p>\n<p>Martha Sprackland is already a formidable technician. The sonnet is moved through quatrains and and a kind of terza rima, and there is deft and adept free verse. The result is a calm, taut surface to the poems which belies the heightened, sometimes gothic nature of the subject matter. In \u2018Fever\u2019, the narrator of the poem lies next to a lover of whom the narrator comments, \u2018I have seen the extreme weather; \/ the powerful forces under your control,\/ all that terrible dynamism you keep in hold until you sleep.\u2019 And this sense of witnessing the controlled, but powerful forces in the world permeates a lot of Sprackland\u2019s writing. In the short sonnet sequence, \u2018Hunterian Triptych\u2019, the poem unveils\u2019 the piano lids left off to show the working underneath\/ [&#8230;]\/ the marinated palm\/\/ flat neatly, peeled to show the bone in brine \u2013\u2019 and then we get a literal sleight of hand, as the next line reveals, \u2018the strange compared assembly of your hand in mine.\u2019 Sprackland is particularly skilled at showing this disquiet in the midst of precise description. <\/p>\n<p>Rory Waterman\u2019s first complete collection, <em>Tonight the Summer\u2019s Over<\/em> was much lauded, seen as \u2018the best first collection for the past couple of years\u2019 and was a PBS recommendation. The splendidly titled <em>Brexit Day on the Balmoral Estate<\/em> is a fine widening out of subject matter for Waterman. These are loosely \u2018travel\u2019 poems and travel around Europe from Sarajevo, to Albania, to the aforementioned Balmoral. Like a lot of travel writing \u2013 and travel poetry, in particular \u2013 the poems are journeys around the self as much as they are around the landscape. Thus, the first part of \u2018Sarajevo Roses\u2019 recounts a failed love affair around the narrator\u2019s thirteen birthday, ending as the narrator watches the girl he lost with another boy, \u2018and Bosnia took up the television,\/ as though to mock my suffering as well.\u2019 That linking of the personal and the other is taken up in the second part \u2018when souvenir casings for sale\/ to people like us&#8230; that we catch ourselves thinking\/ crass, or (un)necessary \u2013 found a quoin,\/ a cupola, a father shivering at a standpipe,\/ a door-jamb, an old woman buying cigarettes.\u2019 There\u2019s a fine balance here between the slightly superficial reactions of \u2018crass and (un)necessary\u2019 and that fine description of the real suffering. Waterman is a poet with deep empathies and, like Sprackland, an achieved technique.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Kathryn Gray, Flowers; Chris Kinsey, Muddy Fox; Martha Sprackland, Glass as Broken Glass; Rory Waterman, Brexit Day on the Balmoral Estate, (Rack Press, \u00a35.00). Kathryn Gray\u2019s pamphlet Flowers references films from Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off, to Roger Donaldson\u2019s Cocktail. It also has poems about Bill Hicks and The Killers\u2019 Brandon Flowers, who gives the pamphlet [&hellip;]<\/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":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.2.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Four pamphlets from Rack Press, 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=7418\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Four pamphlets from Rack Press, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Kathryn Gray, Flowers; Chris Kinsey, Muddy Fox; Martha Sprackland, Glass as Broken Glass; Rory Waterman, Brexit Day on the Balmoral Estate, (Rack Press, \u00a35.00). Kathryn Gray\u2019s pamphlet Flowers references films from Ferris Bueller\u2019s Day Off, to Roger Donaldson\u2019s Cocktail. 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