Ultimately, our obsession with light is due to our fear of our own mortality, of the death which faces us all when ‘dark wings fold us into the earth'. But we have to learn to listen to what is dark in order to avoid our ultimate destruction and to ‘create a turning point', an ‘unconditional welcome' where ‘green leaves are scattered on the threshold'. There is also a message of ‘hope': ‘If you want, the war can stop. If you want enough. All you have to do is want and it will, all of it. But only that, only all of it, not some favour, not some dream.'

I was quite often reminded throughout this collection of Kenneth Patchen, a poet not usually associated with Peter Riley: there is something about the combination of lyricism and political statement that brings Patchen to mind. In the hands of a lesser writer, the poems would degenerate into a rant. Riley, however, overcomes this danger through a carefully crafted balance of imagery with concept. The whole is anchored in the personal picture Riley creates of the narrator sitting by the window, or by different windows, in the evening, ‘reading, writing, and listening to music, with a bottle of the local wine to hand.' The tapestry he weaves is threaded together with recurring motifs, such as children - in a representation of what we have lost - who ‘run away down the street / laughing, hand in hand' or who hide in fields, or who ‘sport on the boundaries of the killing fields'. Insects also make their appearance in different places, as if to remind us that our position on the planet is not as important as we might think it is. From them, too, we must learn, as well as from the wisdom of the bushmen or the innocence of children. For in spite of our ‘vast military vocabulary' and ‘evangelical empire', what ‘on earth' do we do when we've ‘won? What silence do we speak?'

*

Carrie Etter's The Son, albeit in a very different way, also combines the personal with the political. Here the emphasis is on personal loss, but this is linked by implication with wider events taking place in the world. Etter begins her collection with a poem called ‘A Birthmother's Catechism (September 11, 1986)', which consists of the same question repeated seven times, and with seven different answers, as if to imply that we will never arrive at a satisfactory or complete truth however may times we try. The effect created by the different answers is one of psychological trauma as a result of loss (I was reminded here a little of Mark Strand's questions and answers in his ‘Elegy to My Father'):  

‘What is the anniversary of loss?

A national day of mourning.

Really now, what is the anniversary of loss?

My mother and I watch TV well past her usual bedtime.

What is the anniversary of loss?

Where the swan's nest had been, widely scattered branches and some crumpled beer cans.'

The question-and-answer form as a ‘Birthmother's Catechism' recurs in other places in the book, the last one dated September 11, 2006, with its implication that the questioner simply cannot accept her loss and will always go on searching for an answer.

Between these Catechisms, there is a series of portraits of ‘imagined sons', expressed often in prose poems which employ a range of language - from the highly lyrical to the banal and conversational - to capture a reality somewhere between dream and waking. To give you a flavour of these, here are two quotations:

‘My son leans from the tower; his red pompadour, stiff with Aqua Net, resists the quick wind. When he sings, the notes hasten to the forest a mile south before they descend. I clamber onto my restless horse' (from ‘Imagined Sons 1: First Son').

‘All right y'all driving home from work tonight, you've had a hard day and now we've got some songs to help you forget, but first, you'll forgive a man on his birthday one song for remembering. This goes out to, well, I don't know her name' (from ‘Imagined Sons 12: DJ').

Although this collection is less than twenty pages long, it reads like a kind of novel where you must continually fill out all the spaces with your own imagination. The writing is haunting and powerful enough to make you want to return many times to do just that.

*

Lisa Samuels' Throe, by contrast, is a pamphlet which is humorous, delightfully silly, and subverts our expectations of language and narrative. It seems to rely mainly on cutup and collage, and, although there is an awful lot of this around at the moment, Samuels does it well and in a voice that is instantly recognizable. This is one to read when you want to shake off the blues.  Even the title of the first poem was enough to cheer me up: ‘This bus kneels on request'.

Although the narrating ‘I' is not a consistent one, there is a consistency of tone: a wondering that the world can be as it is, that relationships can be what they are, and an ironic, self-effacing mockery:

‘Everyone is breathing at the same time it's exhausting.
The wind too heaves and pelts. Nagging, telling us off
with salt, the buildings lean dunce-wise under titled
clouds the harbour baulked for asks' (from ‘Exchange your ideas for happiness').

Or again:

‘it isn't the clothes, my dear, not even in France

where they mistook the spring that is here

so it must be true, the hands mapped with freakish

assertions of warmth concretely felt

and heavy on the envelopes I glue & send

to a terribly nice version of you' (from ‘Radical Empiricist Blues')

*

These three pamphlets are all beautifully designed by Oystercatcher's founding editor, Peter Hughes.

Oystercatcher Press has over a short time built up an impressive list of poets. As well as the above, I have recently enjoyed very much Allen Fisher's Birds, Rufo Quintavalle's Make Nothing Happen, and Peter Hughes' own Behoven. These will be collectors' items in a few years. Get them while you can.

Copyright © Ian Seed, 2010