Books You Should Have Bought Already

Do you ever get the feeling there’s too much published poetry, too many poets? Well, you’re wrong. And you’re a dickhead. It’s like saying there’s too many athletes or musicians or too much water. Why don’t you go away and do something really obscure like synchronised swimming? You can lament that the nose-plugs aren’t as good as they used to be.

Nevertheless, you have the beginnings of a point: there is an awful lot of poetry and it’s difficult to know, if you are wont to know, which you should buy. The problem is not that there is too much, but that a lot of ennard, it is achingly mediocre. Many’s the time you’re landed with a real page-creeper. You start finding things to do around the house rather than read it. I once filled in my tax return form over finishing the book I was reviewing. And that’s sad. And it hurts to be lied to – it hurts when you read a ringing endorsement of something which turns out to be a poet finding parallels between ancient history and their train being delayed. Or a poet on an ego-trip writing about what it is to be a poet.

I’m not talking about any specific aesthetic here, but can we at least agree that poetry ought to be just a teensy bit compelling? Or if it’s supposed to be boring, can we agree that it ought to be so boring it’s funny? (Like Beckett, but without just ripping Beckett’s ideas off.) Right? I thought we could. I like you. I probably don’t tell you that often enough.

The fact is there’s tons of great poetry, too. Does it get reviewed anywhere? Hell no! The LRB and the TLS barely even review novels anymore! Poetry? Ha! So let’s also agree that you and I probably miss out on a lot of great stuff while we’re debating Israeli foreign policy and wishing that, just once, the literary press would stop fulfilling the role of an especially erudite daily newspaper and review some gosh-darned literature. Oh, sure, there are magazines specifically dedicated to poetry, but most of them are so dull you fall asleep halfway down the front cover. A new translation of Robert Lowell’s unpublished haiku into Scottish-zzz-zzz-zzzzz-zzzzzzzz.

So I submit for your approval an occasional column dedicated to books which may have slipped off your radar – along with your coffee and your pastry, you bad radar-attendant, you! Let’s crowbar a little trust back into the reader/critic relationship, no? Think of me as Super Grover from the golden age of Sesame Street.

Oh, and also, if you have any suggestions for poetry books of the last decade I should already have bought – and if I haven’t already bought them and if when I do they’re actually good, I’ll feature your suggestion in the column, credit you as the source and give you a pound for the bus fare home. Email me by clicking here. Or, if you just want to bash me for my posh accent, same address, darling.

BOOKS YOU SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT ALREADY - Number 1

Person Animal Figure (Landfill Books, 2005) by Vahni Capildeo

Vahni Capildeo is one of this country’s finest prose poets – and "Person Animal Figure", a pamphlet available from the Salt website for the price of a coffee, is a great introduction to her work – and the perfect accompaniment to her full collection "No Traveller Returns" which I haven’t finished yet. What’s great about her is that she puts the fun back into Modernism, riding roughshod over form, syntax and image whilst never losing her sense of humour and, most importantly, coherence. By which I mean Capildeo has the desire to provoke thought and talk about ideas and events other than the boring old ‘atomisation of language’ we’re always getting told about by the new Modernist elders – as if any of us didn’t know that junk mail is a bit annoying and the rhetoric of the economist is a blight on the language. Capildeo provides an alternative to this trash-thought as opposed to just bluntly subverting it over and over again.

The bestiary – which forms the backbone of "Person Animal Figure" – is as baroque and surprising as a bestiary should be:

The animal who kisses persistently is much to be avoided. The more it is avoided, the more is comes back. It will seek out its prey in the middle of dreams about castles in nowhere, and make its catch before the staircase in the upper servant’s hall.

And:

The animal who has a leaf in its mouth is not to be comforted. It chews on the leaf to keep bitterness fuzzing its geranium tongue. […] If told its faults, it stiffens its back and walks on, chewing.

The pleasure is in the effortless combination of surreal detail and acute observation:

The animal who feeds is ashamed of itself, for it keeps on feeding. The way to make it less ashamed is to offer it more food. Even then its dumb look will signal not gratitude, but shame.

These are interspersed with bursts of breathless reflection on living in an adoptive country:

I have been talking to the wrong people they make me guilty about everything! What can I do!

On English supermarkets:

…big spills of sunshine on bare feet and funny hats isn’t it wonderful it’s like the whole world ends up in here…

On how one takes conspiracy theories about supermarkets:

…they feed salmon pellets now isn’t that clever some people say the pellets have stuff in that attacks people’s brains I’m sure that can’t be true they just don’t like commercial success well tough titties fish is for everyone at last…

On everyday paranoia:

young men by the new flats not very nice flats cut across and across me for fun when I’m walking my mouths quiver because they know they’ve been seen through my clothes what nonsense they’d do that to anyone wouldn’t they this story surprised my husband because he’s six feet tall not because he’s a man he walks straight forward eyes front and mouthless…

All done in pitch-perfect stream-of-consciousness which never (however personal and minutely detailed) runs to self-indulgence. The lack of punctuation feels justified – this is a true interior-monologue and the language itself provides the rhythm. (“I wake up with such a craving for a semi-colon” – p. 17) What’s more, the quotidian details build into a convincing sketch of life in this country – our Argos fleeces, The Bill, hot chocolate…

Juxtaposed with the arcane voice of the monsterologist, the autobiography becomes a kind of reverse-anthropomorphism, making both the reader and the poet a species in themselves, each of us unique and vaguely monstrous. Really it’s just a delight. Capildeo is a contemporary master of the prose poem and she should be read. And that’s all I have to say on the matter.

© Luke Kennard, 2006

Comments

[TheBlackburn]

From the last decade? Oh bollocks, let me ignore that. My tuppenceworth is IMPLEMENTS IN THEIR PLACES by W S Graham. This is the only book of poetry that I had by my bedside and read from every night for over a year. I've never done that with any poet. Not even myself. And certainly not with Andrew.

[Rob Mackenzie]

Thanks for the Capildeo, which sounds interesting. I hadn’t heard of her before. I’ll try to investigate further.

I suspect that virtually everyone who says there is too much poetry out there means there is too much mediocre poetry. But people will disagree on what constitutes mediocrity. In fifty years time, most poetry written today will seem mediocre but that’s probably been the case every fifty years.

[LK]

Blackburn -

You are quite right - 'Implements in their Places' is stunning, and W. S. Graham, despite being published by Faber and all that, seems to get bafflingly scant attention.