{"id":8811,"date":"2017-11-29T11:47:17","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T10:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8811"},"modified":"2017-11-29T11:50:11","modified_gmt":"2017-11-29T10:50:11","slug":"ian-marriott-the-hollow-bone-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8811","title":{"rendered":"Ian Marriott, <em>The Hollow Bone<\/em>, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"<h5>Ian Marriott, <em>The Hollow Bone<\/em> (Cinnamon Press, \u00a38.99).<\/h5>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i66.tinypic.com\/2iu5d91.jpg\" width=\"200\" align=\"left\" style=\"margin: 10px\">The blurb on Ian Marriott\u2019s first book does a good job of summing up the contents, \u2018Meditative, spare and precise&#8230;suffused with a vital, shamanic sensibility.\u2019  Marriott\u2019s poems are often very short, with short lines in the kind of free verse which is happy to have different line and verse lengths, \u2018Night flaps its broken tent.\/ A porthole moon\/ peers down\/ over small inland lakes.\/\/ Under the skin it tugs \u2013 slight parted the harbour mouth.\u2019 This latter from the sequence \u2018Terra Infirma\u2019 is not untypical of the book as a whole. The verbs \u2018flaps\u2019, \u2018peers\u2019, \u2018tugs\u2019 are present tense monosyllables in short sentences in which they are prominent and declarative, presenting facts to the reader with some definiteness. There\u2019s no arguing with a Marriott poem; they stand as rock solid miniatures. The lines and verses are made from breath units which have a kind of inevitability in their exhalations.<\/p>\n<p>The landscapes these poems explore are often of this windswept, frozen kind.  And are inhabited with a range of appropriate fauna and flora, from arctic hares to polar bears, wolves and caribou. There are odd \u2018warm\u2019 moments in this world, but even \u2018The armadillo sleeps\/ in its armour of frost\u2019. But when humans occur, and that isn\u2019t very often, then they might be heading \u2018out early\/ onto the high moor,\/ the whole day through thick mist\/ and deep, untrodden snow.\/\/ The whole day without words&#8230;\u2019 \u2018Christmas\u2019. So there\u2019s a distinct absence of companionship in these poems. In the two poems, \u2018Antarctic Winter I\u2019 and \u2018Antarctic Winter 2\u2019, Marriott paints a detailed and sympathetic portrait of what it must be like to live through an Antarctic Winter, beginning with \u2018Each morning\u2019s bruised rim is painful to touch.\u2019 And ending with \u2018I am a Gordian bundle of bone and muscle\u2019, the narrator having been forced by the environment to place his relationship with his parents in the new light of his situation.<\/p>\n<p>The sensibility that drives these poems is deeply empathetic towards the natural world. And Marriott is good enough a poet to avoid both a sub Hughesian projection of animal existence, and also an eco-poetics; although it\u2019s clear where he stands on conservation and eco-politics. In the poem \u2018Wasps\u2019, Marriott writes about the wasps at the end of the summer when they are \u2018coming in\/ to die\u2019. In the second half of the poem, he captures something of the notion of this event impinging on his own world, \u2018Each waist a drawn snare &#8211; \/ for I know I will find you\/\/ curled in some corner,\/ pit burial of the sink -\/\/ perfect comma\/ to punctuate my morning.\u2019 If this poem has echoes of Edwin Muir\u2019s \u2018The Late Wasp\u2019, Marriott updates Muir to bring the wasp into a contemporary milieu, not only with the comparison of \u2018wasp-waisted\u2019 with a snare, and with the sink which contrasts to the \u2018sweet pit\u2019 of Muir\u2019s wasp\u2019s death in the marmalade jar.<\/p>\n<p>Coupled with the quality of \u2018rock solid miniatures\u2019, in these poems, is Marriott\u2019s ability with an ending. And possibly that rock solid feel is accentuated by Marriott\u2019s endings. One such concludes \u2018Aurora Landscape\u2019 a typically brief and pregnant Marriott poem, \u2018the dumb glass blower\/ empties his long lungs\/ of light.\u2019 Or this from \u2018Strange\u2019, which describes the narrator\u2019s encounter with an octopus who escapes the narrator\u2019s eye through \u2018that rusted port-hole\/ so impossibly\/ smaller than yourself.\u2019; the poem ending, \u2018you\u2019re through -\/ gathering together on the other side,\/ this place too strange to fathom.\u2019 So there\u2019s a rounded quality to these poems which, with Marriott\u2019s other skills, helps them skirt the vatic, whilst showing the natural world as having a natural mystery to which we need to pay attention. <\/p>\n<h5>Ian Pople<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone (Cinnamon Press, \u00a38.99). The blurb on Ian Marriott\u2019s first book does a good job of summing up the contents, \u2018Meditative, spare and precise&#8230;suffused with a vital, shamanic sensibility.\u2019 Marriott\u2019s poems are often very short, with short lines in the kind of free verse which is happy to have different line [&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>Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone, 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=8811\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone (Cinnamon Press, \u00a38.99). The blurb on Ian Marriott\u2019s first book does a good job of summing up the contents, \u2018Meditative, spare and precise&#8230;suffused with a vital, shamanic sensibility.\u2019 Marriott\u2019s poems are often very short, with short lines in the kind of free verse which is happy to have different line [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8811\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-11-29T10:47:17+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-11-29T10:50:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/i66.tinypic.com\/2iu5d91.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"The Manchester Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"3 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8811\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8811\",\"name\":\"Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2017-11-29T10:47:17+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-11-29T10:50:11+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/e6deb0374609919f6e86f6ee1defe8cc\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8811#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8811\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=8811#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Ian Marriott, The Hollow Bone, reviewed by Ian Pople\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#website\",\"url\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"description\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/e6deb0374609919f6e86f6ee1defe8cc\",\"name\":\"The Manchester Review\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/wp-includes\/images\/blank.gif\",\"caption\":\"The Manchester Review\"},\"description\":\"The Manchester Review was founded in 2008 and is published by the Centre for New Writing at The University of Manchester. 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