17 January 2018
31 May 2017
Review: Andy Brown's 'Watersong'
The title of Andy Brown’s new
chapbook from Shearsman might suggest a lyric rurality, but this collection
takes as its subject matter something rarely treated in either poetry or song and
sets it firmly in the urban. Brown’s
topic is disease: disease caused by
water contaminated by human faeces – not quite what the reader might have
expected from the title.
The collection falls into two parts. The longer, first section, is a sequence of
untitled poems grouped together as ‘Watersong’, and deals with the Exeter cholera epidemic of 1832, which killed over 400 people.
This is followed by a short set of poems which address the issues of water and
disease in the twenty-first century.
The ‘Watersong’ sequence is full of
the grisly detail of the realities of cholera, much of it employing a lexis and
register which gives an impression that some of the words might be
incorporations from original texts. We
are given lists of fines for keeping insanitary conditions:
The Widow
Barrier, for a nucence by keeping a mound
of filth and
nastiness beneath her court, amerced 5l.8s…
lists of deaths
On July 24th,
at Bury Lane –
the wife of a journeyman
cordwainer.
Cholera 3 days…
and lists of symptoms
Skin cold and
clammy. Cramps, emaciation.
Abnormal smell.
Intelligence entire.
Vomiting and
purging now profuse.
Jactition.
Diarrhoea.
and we are given stories. The
subject of these poems is not just cholera – it is people. So we hear of the
grave digger who was attacked for carrying a coffin ‘underhand’, and the
surgeon who before sewing up a dissected body ‘strokes the black heart’.
The poems in the sequence have no
titles – they flow into each other in a way that creates a sense of fever and
unreality in the reader – yet even as
they do this, the poems are also
formally distinct. These are poems that fall (sometimes uneasily) into the varied
form of song. They use songlike features such as refrain (‘Sing: Water from the wealthy, private well…’) and chant (‘’Plague. Plague. Plague. Plague…’).
Other poems utilise poetic forms
which have their roots in song. ‘In Bury Fields’, for example, is a rondeau which closely follows and interacts with the
form and structure of John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’. Most noticeably, six of
the thirteen poems in the main sequence,
including many of the list-poems, are fourteen-liners, each structured in such a way as to invite the
reader to see them through the lens of ‘sonnet’ (a term which, of course, has
its derivation in the Italian ‘little song’).
The subject matter of these sonnets
is, however, far removed from the form’s traditional themes. This tension
between form and subject is both witty
and disturbing, as is the uncertainty engendered in the reader as to whether
these texts are ‘found’ or imagined. One
sonnet is a list of public orders, while several are a series of medical notes:
20th.
10. A.M. fiat pilula
quarta quaque hora sumenda:
Cupri Sulphatis,
gr. ¼
Pulveris Opii, gr. ¼
The final four poems of the
collection, the poems that deal with contemporary cholera deaths and the
present-day attempts to address the problem of contaminated water, have titles.
But they are titles which reflect the continuing problem of naming, and the way
in which this results in an inability to address the central issue. In ‘The
Unnameable Taxonomy’, we are given another list – this time, two pages of jauntily
rhyming euphemisms:
...Room 101, or
Number Two.
Auditing Assets,
Doing the Do,
Taking Some
Weight Off Your Troubled Mind,
Seeing How
Things Turn out Behind…
In the final, unrhymed sonnet of
the pamphlet, ‘The Flying Toilets of Kibera’, Brown moves the form forward into
something more lyrical, and something that more closely relates to the sonnet
as an image-led structured argument: ‘Because the politicians can’t discuss/ toilets
for fear of breaking taboo…’ children such as ‘Kanja (Sanskrit, ‘water born’)’
and ‘Nafula (African, ‘born in the rain’) have to get rid of their faeces into
the reservoir from which they drink. Their names are of the beauty of water,
but their deaths are waiting in its contamination.
The underlying message, made
explicit in these final poems of the collection, is that because society still
shies away from talking about ‘answer[ing] nature’s call’, people are still, nearly
two hundred years after the Exeter epidemic, dying of cholera. Andy Brown, however, is not shying away, he’s ‘singing’ about it. This
is an intelligent and witty collection, which throws the reader into the
gruesome details of an historic tragedy, while at the same time addressing an
important contemporary issue.
Watersong, Andy Brown
Shearsman, 2015
30pp
Review first published at Canto Poetry
22 April 2017
The Torrey Canyon and Jos Smith's A Plume of Smoke
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| Photo: www.shipwrecklog.com |
Radio 4's excellent poetry programme The Echo Chamber, hosted by Paul Farley, recently examined poetry's responses to the Torrey Canyon disaster. One of the poets featured was Jos Smith. A while back, I reviewed his pamphlet A Plume a Smoke and though I'd share it again here.
In 1967, when the Torrey Canyon ran into rocks between the
Isles of Scilly and Lands End and spilled over 100,000 tonnes of oil into the
sea, I was four years old, a small child
living in Cornwall. I don’t remember the disaster itself, but I do remember
people talking about it. And I remember how even years later, clumps of oil,
looking like black rubbery pebbles, could be found washed up on our favourite
beaches. So I was very interested to read Jos Smith’s pamphlet, ‘A Plume of
Smoke’, which draws on oral history accounts of the disaster.
The collection starts with poems rooted in the character of
the Cornish coast and waters. ‘Remembrance
I’ uses the patterns of Biblical
language to depict the power of the sea and its relationship to the
people of ‘this place of saints and
graves and mines,/ of harbour bells and broken-winged gulls’ who work on it:
The water giveth and the water
taketh away.
Of the thirty-one lost out of
Fowey last year,
wheeled into silence by the clock
of the tides,
none survived.
Here, the people are vulnerable, and the sea is powerful. The
environment Jos Smith is writing about is an entity in its own right, something
huge and awesome. In ‘Trawler’, we hear that
Some nights there’s the feeling
of stalking a god,
diesel rattling over the waves
towards a presence…
… it hangs like a thought in the
gulf stream,
blowing in and out of the dark:
animal,
theological, cold.
One of the strengths of this collection is the way it
realises landscape as a living thing. ‘Herbivore’, a fabulous poem, rich with
sounds and images, describes Cornwall’s coast as ‘one long animal/ laid down in
the slopes of cove and cliff,/ bristling with sea life like nerves in the
skin…’. Everything that the coastline consists of is part of the one entity:
An animal drifting in and out of
view,
breathing and sleeping, sniffing
and eating,
grazing the outer edge of a
volatile world.
The environment is overwhelmed by a dark, unnatural force,
which is in turn, given the characteristics of a living entity. In ‘The Smell
was the First Thing’,
The weight leaned in and
belittled you.
Every part of it found you out…
[…]
intimate long before
any kind of explanation
This, and many other images will stay with me a very long
time: the slick as a ‘black rind on the water still as leather’; children
trying to stop seabirds landing from in the oil, shouting from the beach
‘“Don’t land! Don’t land! Don’t land!”’; the flaming slick ‘Primal,/ like land
forming where there was no land.’
These are poems filled, as one might expect, with voices : the voices of sailors, of the
Cornish people, of the workers brought in to try and contain the disaster. But
this is a collection which also deals with memory. The 30,000 tonnes of oil
that were pumped into a quarry in Guernsey in an attempt to save the coastline keeps
bubbling up, despite efforts to process it, like memory itself:
A memory that we have been
ill-equipped to meet
with anything but indefatigable
helplessness
[…]
sleeping digester of unliftable
wings,
you have been on the coastal edge
of all our thoughts.
The two poems entitled ‘Remembrance’ use the language of
ritual to suggest a way of dealing with these memories. The dead are remembered and in the living,
some kind of healing begins to take place. In the last poem, ‘Afterwards’, there
is a quiet hope, but it acknowledges that a price will be paid:
All
that repairs, repairs quietly.
All that heals, heals in silence.
The wet head of something will
rise from the pools,
dripping and lonely and not what
it was.
‘A Plume of Smoke’ is
itself a vehicle for remembering.
The Echo Chamber's programme about the Torrey Canyon is available to listen online until 14 May 2017.
A Plume of Smoke is available to purchase from Maquette Press.
21 April 2017
On a Roll and On the Buses!
At the beginning of the year I decided that, instead of submitting to magazines, I'd enter a few poetry competitions. I've never really got into the competition thing, but I have some friends whose names seem to pop up on every shortlist and winners' list, and I thought I'd have a go.
I spent several weeks agonising over which poems to send where, reordering words, fiddling with commas, changing titles and changing them back again, and eventually sent off entries to five competitions. And it seems it was worth it, as I'm really chuffed to discover I have won or been placed in three!
My poem 'Dead Things I Have Seen While Walking' was placed joint fourth in the Kent and Sussex Open Poetry Competition, judged by Catherine Smith. The winner was Janet Sutherland, with her amazing poem 'Braided Wire'. You can read all the winning entries, and the adjudication report, on the Kent and Sussex website, and I am very proud to be placed among such a fabulous group of poems.
'My Glass Father' was placed third in The Plough Prize, judged by Philip Gross. First prize was won by Vicki Morley, and second prize by Millie Guille - two fantastic poems. Once again, I am honoured to be placed in the company of such great work!
And in the Guernsey Literary Festival's Open Poetry Competition, judged by Gwyneth Lewis, my poem 'Demeter's Lament' won first prize, with 'Monsoon' coming joint third, and 'The Cliff' coming fourth. Second prize was won by Gabriel Griffin, and the other third prize by Fiona Ritchie Walker. All the winning poems in this competition will be featured on Guernsey's buses and at the airport, so I am absolutely delighted!
Many thanks to the judges Catherine Smith, Philip Gross and Gwyneth Lewis, and to the competition organisers.
I guess after this flurry of excitement I'd better get back to working on the new collection and the MA!
7 March 2017
29 September 2016
Poem: The Cliff
The
Cliff
(after Anselm Kiefer)
I make a lexicon of things that can be white
linen
lace sea foam face
but these small
dresses nightshirts
doll-sized robes
are spattered grey and maculate
stone ghosts of birds snagged on a
wall of ash
I wonder how they were stitched
smock
shirr pick cross feather
but it’s impossible to tell
their seams have rotted in the spray
I think how
they once were cut from patterns
facing yoke placket pocket welt
but the waves have flung this flock of empty children
against a squalling bluff
all memory of making has been lost
Above the cliff
the sky is cracked like mud
I make a lexicon of things that are unravelled
Sally Douglas
'The Cliff' was a prizewinner in the 2015 Exeter Poetry Festival Competition, and was originally published in the Festival pamphlet, Threads.
9 June 2016
Nana on a Dolphin and other poems...
I'm delighted to have three poems featured at Exeter University's poetry journal, Canto. One is a response to Niki de St Phalle's wonderful 'Nana on a Dolphin'; one has its roots in Russia, and another was described on Twitter by WN Herbert as 'a fine elegiac poem about eyebrows'. (Thank you!) You can now read the poems here.
To whet the appetite, here are a couple of related images:
To whet the appetite, here are a couple of related images:
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| A carving by Grinling Gibbons |
By Camster2 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6521009
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| Nana on a Dolphin, by Niki de St Phalle |
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