Books of 2010 (Part 2)

Five More 'Not-Reviews'

Some books I like a lot. Some I know I won't like, so I don't read them. Some I like more than others. If I enjoy something I like to share it. So this is just a little pre-blogpost (and post-the last blogpost) warning. These bloglets about books I have enjoyed are simply that. I'm not going to analyse the books (well not much), I'm not going to pick them to pieces, I'm not going to rank them, or place any relative values on them: I'm just going to let you know why I enjoyed them. And hope you might enjoy them too.



Josephine Dickinson: Silence Fell (Mariner, 2008)

Josephine Dickinson's poetry is poetry of the moors and mountains, of the farm, of the rain and the mist, of the seasons. It's poetry deeply rooted in place, in the often harsh reality of rural life, and it's poetry deeply rooted in sound. Sound patterning is woven through each poem like coloured silk. A poem called  'How Can I Explain to You That He Was Real?' starts

In a lump which banged as it humped,
the last of the lamb came out of the freezer,
deliquesced in the summer heat
in a bowl overnight. Next morning
it slid from its bag, unwrapped
from its thick aroma...

You could be hearing this through a wall, only picking up part of the sense, but you'd still be getting the thuds and the awful slick oozing. Your guts would know something about what was happening even if your intellect couldn't quite put a finger on it. The reason I find this sound patterning particularly interesting is that, from the age of six, Josephine Dickinson has been profoundly deaf. In the Foreword to the collection she explains to Galway Kinnell that '...when I see and write words, I experience their sound, rhythm and meaning with my whole body...' and 'the possible range of human experience is so vast that in losing one sense, one gains a new dimension in the others.'

I'm particularly interested in Josephine's deafness because I have worked with deaf children in poetry workshops, but her deafness is not why one should read the book. One should read it because of the poems: poems that tell the story of a place, a way of life, and a relationship, and that invite the reader to come along and experience these things too.



Fiona Benson: Faber New Poets 1 (Faber, 2009)

Fiona Benson's slim pamphlet is a gem. Her poems are beautifully crafted, every word exquisitely chosen, poised, and placed. Water, blood, fish, animals, religious allusion, all thread through this elegiac collection in its attempt to address and come to terms with loss. In 'Prayer', she describes how

I saw you like a hare, stripped and jugged
in the wine of your own blood, your tail a rudder

and in 'Corpo Santo'

I could dedicate myself to this:
the pursuit of cadences in salt and warmth
and the sinuous will of this many-ribboned shoal 

I've met Fiona several times, and had the privilege of her feedback on some of my own poems. She's lovely, and quietly brilliant. I'm looking forward to her first full-length collection - if this is anything to go by, it'll be fabulous.



Abegail Morley: How to Pour Madness into a Teacup (Cinnamon, 2009)

Abegail Morley's poems inhabit the realm of metaphor in the same way that people inhabit the realm of their own skin. And the people in her poems inhabit their own skins in the way that fish inhabit knives. Her collection is not a comfortable read. It addresses breakdown and mental illness with the delicacy, the beauty, and the ruthlessness of a scalpel.

She snatches a letter, a word,
and harvests her head,
finding the middle of a sentence.

           (from 'Misplaced')

It was very deservedly nominated for the Forward First Collection prize last year. Beautiful cover too.

Brian Turner: Phantom Noise (Bloodaxe, 2010)

In an article in the Independent, Fiona Sampson posed the question 'Where are the war poets now?' Reading that article led me to the work of Brian Turner, an American soldier-poet who served in Bosnia and Iraq. I found this collection, which deals with war from the perspective of 'afterwards', completely gripping.

No moral judgments are made, but unflinching observation brings the reality of the war right into the reader's head. War experiences and post-war life bleed into each other with horrifying and surreal clarity. In a poem called 'Helping her Breathe' the speaker focuses in and in to a single experience in an arena of noise and fear:

Subtract each sound. Subtract it all.
Lower the contrailed decibels of fighter jets
below the threshold of human hearing.
Lower the skylining helicopters down
to the subconscious and let them hover
like spiders over a film of water...

This is the war poetry for today.



The Faber Book of 20th Century German Poems , edited by Michael Hofmann (Faber, 2005)

It took me a long time to be keen on translated poetry. I think I had been too exposed to the kind of 'parallel text' text that gives you literal translations without actually producing any poetry. I did a substantial amount of Latin literature for my degree in English and European literature, and as I wasn't particularly confident in Latin, I have to confess I did an inordinant amount of checking my own work by way of other people's translations. But literal translations just don't get what poetry's about. Who was it who said that 'Poetry is what gets lost in translation'? (Robert Frost, apparently, according to a quick Google). This anthology does get what poetry's about: poems are translated by poets, and thus the poetic possibilities of English are explored and exploited as well as the literal meanings. There are some great translations. For instance, Robin Robertson translates Rilke's 'Spanish Dancer':

she is a struck match: sparks,
darting tongues, and then the white flare
of phosphorous...

There are translations from Derek Mahon, Michael Hamburger, Michael Hofmann, Christopher Middleton, Robert Lowell and other practising poets, as well as such poetically sensitive translators as Margitt Lehbert and Susan Bernofsky. The book ranges from Morgenstern and Rilke, through Brecht and Gottfried Benn, to contemporary poets such as Matthias Goritz and Ian Wagner. There's also a parallel text version available, which is interesting even if you don't read German (which I don't, apart from menus and road signs) because it's fascinating to see the original poem on the page and see non-lexical parallels and differences. After all, the shape of the poem, and the white space around it, are such a large part of the experience of poetry.

I'm still dipping into this one, and enjoying meeting new poets. I see there's a Faber book of C20th Italian Poetry too, (edited by Jamie McKendrick). That's next on my wish list.

A belated happy new year to you all. And if you have any recommendations from your own reading last year, please feel free to add them here in a comment. I'd love to hear from you.