{"id":7687,"date":"2017-07-04T20:32:30","date_gmt":"2017-07-04T19:32:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7687"},"modified":"2017-07-04T22:15:25","modified_gmt":"2017-07-04T21:15:25","slug":"seahouses-by-richard-barnett-valley-press-reviewed-by-ken-evans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=7687","title":{"rendered":"Richard Barnett, Seahouses<\/em>, reviewed by Ken Evans"},"content":{"rendered":"
Richard Barnett, Seahouses<\/em>, (Valley Press, \u00a37.99).<\/h5>\n

Is it too fanciful to hope, that a cultural archaeologist, in six hundred years, might turn over in their hands, the delicate, beautiful rectangle of processed wood, print technology, and creative design, that is the small press poetry volume of today, and marvel?<\/p>\n

They would be right to marvel if it was this small volume from Scarborough\u2019s Valley Press, Seahouses<\/em>\u00a0by Richard Barnett. The black and white tree burr (or is it bird featherings?) of the front cover (from the poet\u2019s own photograph) is beautiful, yet sets the dark and somber tone of this collection, with its preoccupation with time and travel and their displacements, and what remains.<\/p>\n

Though reaching an apogee in the extended poem sequence that gives the collection its name, its themes (often in a nautical context) are prefigured in \u2018Longshore Drift\u2019, where the narrator \u2018summons whispers, echoes to pursue\/down to the shore – another refugee.\u2019 Or in \u2018Poem on Selling a Guitar\u2019, where, \u2018My fingertips\/will forget the strings, but for a time\/my shoulders will recall the heft.\u2019 And then asks: \u2018What remains of a song,\/when you find you cannot sing it?\u2019 Or the isolation and loneliness in \u2018Pitcairn\u2019, where \u2018breadfruit\u2019 is only \u2018our windfallen consolation\u2019, without which, \u2018we would have nothing \u2013\u2018 and only in sleep do \u2018we slip\/the moorings of our separateness\u2019. Marooned, geographically on Pitcairn Island, as well as emotionally and psychologically.<\/p>\n

In \u2018Cloud Study, Hampstead Heath\u2019, that most ephemeral of natural phenomena, cloud, makes up a \u2018Today\u2026made of light and air\/and water underfoot.\u2019 A moment where a boy – the woman\u2019s son? \u2013 is \u2018a sycamore key,\/dancing on air, so small, so slight\/that the wind must surely carry him away.\u2019 This world is constantly shifting, transient, inherently \u2018unsafe.\u2019 \u2018Paths are ghosts.\/To walk is to be haunted, to haunt,\u2019 from \u2018A Line Made By Walking\u2019, the opening poem, establishes the book\u2019s mood.<\/p>\n

However, should this sense of broken-offness, departedness, threaten to sound a little whimsical and even souffl\u00e9-fey, at times, the epigraphs remind us of the high seriousness of intent. No poems that quote Chomsky and De Lillo in their epigraphs are aspiring to otherworldly romanticism. The tone is more like the dystopia of \u2018Tomorrow\u2019, where \u2018tomorrow we will\/not need to live for one another\u2026tomorrow our smiles will be fixed\u2026tomorrow we will all be\/collaborators.\u2019 Or the Plathian, in the title-echo of \u2018You Do Not Do\u2019, and the short-line and dark suggestion, where \u2018I light a black candle for you.\u2019<\/p>\n

All these concerns meld in the \u2018Seahouses\u2019 sequence which concludes the collection. Barnett exploits the sea theme to the hilt, with some stanzas almost concrete poems in the shape of boats\u2019 hulls, and the Siren-like refrain of \u2018Will you come with me? Everybody\/Comes with me, eventually.\u2019 And the counterpoint indecision of reply, which almost wants to be made by mermaids – \u2018Perhaps, yes, perhaps\/yes, yes, perhaps.\u2019<\/p>\n

The sardonic trope in this ostensible sea-saga, is that the boat described in the poem is not just in harbour, but dry-docked, beached, needing attention on the shingle (\u2018dry-docks\u2019 feature also in \u2018Longshore Drift.\u2019) The sea itself is a life-taker, \u2018the broken mirror of the world\u2019 as well as the bringer of cargoes of new ideas (Cuthbert, the missionary, is described.) But nothing seems to be working much, the work of repair giving in to decay and atrophy (including the ideas) in \u2018This year was slow, wood\/ and pitch weren\u2019t getting on.\u2019 The water is indifferent to the human plight, \u2018Self-sufficient, distant sea\/Withdraw and overwhelm, itself it solves.\u2019 Itself, but nothing else. Even its capacity to feed us is in doubt, the Norwegian lobster-pots empty of catch and its crew, a \u2018cup of coffee was on the dashboard\/half full and steaming.\u2019 Where are they? Even the will or quest to repair, make reparations, seems fatigued, given-up. Instead of weatherproofing the boat, \u2018I kept finding myself with a\/rollup and mug of tea, staring out at the gorse and\/marram running down to the beach.\u2019<\/p>\n

In the quotations above, you may see some the strengths of a poem well-grounded in the everyday of \u2018mugs of coffee\u2019 and \u2018roll-ups\u2019, and the detritus under the waves and left on the shoreline, but also the slightly uncomfortable line-endings which are created in those sections where the narrators\u2019 voice enters, in those forms that seems to echo the bow or sterns of ships and boats in shape. I like this discursive, observational, philosophical narrator-voice, but wonder if the determination to press home the nautical referencing with \u2018ship-shape\u2019 stanzas (perhaps in itself, a slightly overly-self-referential \u2018tic\u2019) doesn\u2019t undermine the voice itself, as like the boat-shapes, it is an artful design too intrusive. I enjoyed the varied tone and \u2018voice\u2019 in this counter-pointing, and this and the refrain-and-answer sections help \u2018caulk\u2019 the timbers of the verse together, but my preference lies where the poet allows the sea, and the happenings on, above and below it, to \u2018speak for itself\u2019, without the authorial commentary, which, if you\u2019ll forgive me, make the sequence just slightly less immersive.<\/p>\n

Ken Evans<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Barnett, Seahouses, (Valley Press, \u00a37.99). Is it too fanciful to hope, that a cultural archaeologist, in six hundred years, might turn over in their hands, the delicate, beautiful rectangle of processed wood, print technology, and creative design, that is the small press poetry volume of today, and marvel? They would be right to marvel […]<\/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":"\nRichard Barnett, Seahouses, 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=7687\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Richard Barnett, Seahouses, reviewed by Ken Evans - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Richard Barnett, Seahouses, (Valley Press, \u00a37.99). 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