Mab Jones kicks this October’s instalment off by recommending a multimedia poetry installation, before reverting to the paper and ink combo we know and love. Rest assured there’s plenty of great poetic invention therein…
In So Many Words, National Museum Cardiff
This interactive poetry display comes courtesy of a PhD undertaken by poet Rachel Carney. Here, you can write a poem in response to the artworks in the gallery, read poems by others written in Carney’s preceding workshops, and play with the power and potency of language via the scattered words on two low tables, a bit like those magnetic word sets you get for the fridge. It’s incredible fun, and one of the loveliest and best set-up poetry installations I’ve ever come across.
The poetry installation is only open until Sun 6 Nov, so this is your last chance to engage with it. Thurs 3 Nov is one of the museum’s late night openings – until 9pm – and the exhibition and installation are free, so, I strongly encourage you to attend! You can also read some of Carney’s excellent poems on the museum website (linked above) so do make sure to enjoy these, too, whilst you can.
& There 4, Mike Ferguson (Beir Bua Press, price: £7.99)
And, onto the new poetry books for October – beginning with a press that I love so much I pressganged/begged them for several review copies! Here’s just one of them, & There 4, which is an absolute beaut. I love the crayzee glitch art style of the cover, and the super-imaginative, experimental, unpredictable poems inside, where a surrealist image of a lobster – extracted from a mighty, meaty book on pragmatism – sits just pages away from another piece expounding ideas of theology, reason, and the self, albeit with a cut-up, absurdist spin.
& There 4 is glitch art poetry, in a way, and what you find beyond the image on the cover is the same: a sideways view of the world that’s part magic, part mayhem. Found poems, erasure poems, and shape poems cajole and caress, exciting and enlivening the reader. Many are drawn from very hefty tomes, showing the marvel of language and giving a sense of that original text, albeit with sparkle, wry humour, and an intelligent re-rendering that both rebels and appeals.
Scattered poems are included here, too, with words, numbers, and even diagrams making up some of the pieces, making this one of the most exciting, enlivening books I’ve read in a long while. Just in the same way that a glitch art image takes a familiar picture and changes it so that the original is both there but as distant as an unfamiliar star in another solar system, so too do these poems startle, shift meaning, and turn the known into the fantastically new and unfamiliar. It’s remarkable, wonderful, and dizzyingly inventive. I love & There 4.
The Little Hours: New And Selected Poems, Hilary Llewellyn-Williams (Seren, price: £12.99)
Lucid, luminous, languid, the measured, evenly paced poetry of Hilary Llewellyn-Williams takes inspiration and meaning from the year itself, beginning early on with a ‘tree calendar’ sequence that draws upon a pagan view of the world. As a ‘selected’, there are poems from various previously published volumes in The Little Hours, meaning that there’s a multiplicity of moods, a wide range of subjects and themes; but always, throughout, there’s nature, and magic, too, in subjects that consider monks, myth, and meaning, leaning, here and there, towards the mystical.
The poems are liquid and flowing, yet confident and concise. Here’s a poet who’s made friends with their own pen, and it’s an instrument they wield with skill – sometimes, in collections, there is a bit of mess; an experiment that doesn’t quite work; a word you feel is out of place. There’s no such feeling here. It’s as if the works within this weighty volume have been, like sculpture, ‘seen’ and hewed into perfect shape.
Reading The Little Hours felt to me, therefore, like reading something inspired, yet well-earthed – a prayer, a meditation, an invocation. There’s physical vibrancy and astute observation but this rare sense, too. A selected that’s worth picking up and perusing, then, but particularly if you want to immerse into a wondrous world which considers “early saints” alongside wells in woods, herbals and hares, broomsticks and blessings. It’s pretty bewitching stuff all round.
A History, Dan Burt (Prototype, price: £9.99)
A History is an unusually thin volume from master publishers Prototype, although the poems are hugely meaningful and profound, and make a huge and lasting impression. They sit inside a cover which shows a painting of a scene intimating death, grief, and memorial; the poems themselves detail love, illness, and loss. The poet uses rhyme, here and there, to create a lilting sense, which is starkly at odds with the subject matter, and there are some truly remarkable and greatly affecting lines, such as “Surgeons probe the ruin / that six weeks before had been a woman”. The poems are, for the most part, pared back, sparse, as if they’ve been sculpted with a surgeon’s knife.
The end result of A History is a compelling and highly effective gathering of works which do indeed give ‘a history’. We rage, too, at “the egg-sized ruby mass / that damns her bowels”; we mourn the “wasted high school heartthrob” transmuted to “nothingness”. It’s powerfully devastating work, set within very fine writing, that cannot fail to affect the reader. Set within matte, black inner pages, it’s another great output from this very varied small press publisher.
Peach Pig, Cecilia Knapp (Corsair Poetry, price: £10.99)
One thing I really love about Peach Pig are the lists of everyday items – stuff – that seem so random yet say so much. The opening poem I Used To Eat KFC Zingers Without Hating Myself (love the capitals in the title, too, as if KFC Zingers are so very Keatsian) is a great example of this, listing actions and objects – “Order cat litter off Amazon. Light / a fig candle” – intertwining the mundane, and meaningless, with the confessional, the revelatory: “Before you died, I cut your hair”. A following poem also uses objects to ‘say’ far more – “I had a hamster / and a CD player” – items which give us the I of the poem’s age and make what seems like a sexual assault in the piece even more gruesome.
But there are so many other things to love: voices (“Come in from the cold, babe”); exacting images of ex-boyfriends; daydreams, revealing issues with food and the body, images of the self as “a glutinous daughter”. The language extends to the everyday, but goes deep into the details of these – “Two peaches rot in the bowl, the yielding / fuzz of them like unfused skulls” – and is varied, inventive, vivid, even as it draws from the domestic and everyday.
The poet’s job is to transmute and transform the familiar, even whilst connecting to the reader through what is known: Peach Pig is a book which does that so, so well. It’s pretty brilliant stuff. A highly recommended read, and proof positive that here’s another Young People’s Laureate for London who, despite their age, is already a remarkable poet full stop.
If you would like to submit some new, published poetry for potential review in this column, contact Mab via her website (you can find social media links there) or get in touch via Buzz.
words MAB JONES