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sheenaghpughI don't copy all the reviews I write to this blog, but am doing so with this one, partly because it's a new press which should therefore be encouraged, and partly because one way or another, I know several people in Manchester, who might be interested. There's a shorter version of this on amazon.co.uk.
The more I read this book, the more I find myself wishing it came with a CD attached. It is an anthology of currently practising Manchester poets, but many are performance poets, and a lot of performance poetry doesn't work on the page for the good reason that it isn't meant to: it is a performance art which needs to be heard, and sometimes seen in action, for maximum effect. In-your-face exaggeration and insistent repetition that can fall flat on the page could work well with a hyped-up audience chanting along; Dominic Berry and Rosie Lugosi are two of several poets in here who don't really do much for me in this format but whom I can see working well in performance. A CD of a live performance wouldn't replicate that format exactly but it would come close. How much would it add to production costs, I wonder, and might extra sales compensate?
Among those whose true medium is the page, there's quite a wide range of technique and degree of craft. Some are too concerned with what they want to say, at the expense of how it's said; there are some preachy, finger-wagging sermons, statements of the bleedin' obvious and, above all, poets whose desperation to get their message across drives them to spell out in big letters at the end of the poem what they have already said perfectly well in the previous verses. A lot of new writers, in any poetry scene, would do well to adopt the practice of automatically crossing out the last few lines of every poem and seeing whether anything is actually lost thereby.
There is lots of energy and humour in here. I shall long treasure Copland Smith's "Arabella", a wry, polished tale of unrequited love:
We seem to talk for hours
of Plath and Robert Lowell,
and when we're caught in showers,
I dry her with a towel
and very nearly do it
with Arabella Hewitt.
And there are enough poets who have got beyond the stage of wanting to say something to where they have the confidence and skill to say it effectively. Helen Thomas, Angela Topping, Andrew Oldham all repay reading, as do several more. I would single out three. Matthew Curry uses rhyme and refrain to great effect in the edgy "And The Palm Trees Whose Leaves Are Fraying":
Mantz Yorke's "The Boat" is packed with observation and detail without being merely anecdotal:
And Michelle Paramanantham ("Thoughts Such As These") is a really interesting voice, her use of line breaks and lineation especially subtle and thought-provoking:
I could have done with more than one poem from these three especially, and I'd also have liked notes on contributors so that I could find out more about them. I'm guessing the lack of these is so that more poets could be included, but there are actually three blank pages at the end...
This is billed as Volume 1. It's interesting, but more a portrait of a whole scene than of the "best of" that scene. I hope vol 2 will be a bit less wide-ranging and perhaps concentrate more on building up a fuller picture of fewer poets. They could call it "Really the best of..."
The more I read this book, the more I find myself wishing it came with a CD attached. It is an anthology of currently practising Manchester poets, but many are performance poets, and a lot of performance poetry doesn't work on the page for the good reason that it isn't meant to: it is a performance art which needs to be heard, and sometimes seen in action, for maximum effect. In-your-face exaggeration and insistent repetition that can fall flat on the page could work well with a hyped-up audience chanting along; Dominic Berry and Rosie Lugosi are two of several poets in here who don't really do much for me in this format but whom I can see working well in performance. A CD of a live performance wouldn't replicate that format exactly but it would come close. How much would it add to production costs, I wonder, and might extra sales compensate?
Among those whose true medium is the page, there's quite a wide range of technique and degree of craft. Some are too concerned with what they want to say, at the expense of how it's said; there are some preachy, finger-wagging sermons, statements of the bleedin' obvious and, above all, poets whose desperation to get their message across drives them to spell out in big letters at the end of the poem what they have already said perfectly well in the previous verses. A lot of new writers, in any poetry scene, would do well to adopt the practice of automatically crossing out the last few lines of every poem and seeing whether anything is actually lost thereby.
There is lots of energy and humour in here. I shall long treasure Copland Smith's "Arabella", a wry, polished tale of unrequited love:
We seem to talk for hours
of Plath and Robert Lowell,
and when we're caught in showers,
I dry her with a towel
and very nearly do it
with Arabella Hewitt.
And there are enough poets who have got beyond the stage of wanting to say something to where they have the confidence and skill to say it effectively. Helen Thomas, Angela Topping, Andrew Oldham all repay reading, as do several more. I would single out three. Matthew Curry uses rhyme and refrain to great effect in the edgy "And The Palm Trees Whose Leaves Are Fraying":
And the palm trees whose leaves are fraying,
and whose trunks are trussed up with string, seem to be saying:
nothing, nothing at all's decaying
Mantz Yorke's "The Boat" is packed with observation and detail without being merely anecdotal:
Stretched overthin,
the tide - mere puddles on the shaly flat -
lets me crunch a track across mussel-beds
and snails towards the silhouettes collecting,
insect-like, around its hull
And Michelle Paramanantham ("Thoughts Such As These") is a really interesting voice, her use of line breaks and lineation especially subtle and thought-provoking:
She says she sometimes gets a sense of eggs and a certain kind
of green but she ignores it
and wishes she never really had. These moments are too
plump, too quick, too past.
She knows the miniature things she could have held in both
hands, like a type of small
bird, but it's thoughts like these that she forgets to mention.
Two halves of nothing is almost better than a fuller something
else, he starts to say,
but nobody will listen
I could have done with more than one poem from these three especially, and I'd also have liked notes on contributors so that I could find out more about them. I'm guessing the lack of these is so that more poets could be included, but there are actually three blank pages at the end...
This is billed as Volume 1. It's interesting, but more a portrait of a whole scene than of the "best of" that scene. I hope vol 2 will be a bit less wide-ranging and perhaps concentrate more on building up a fuller picture of fewer poets. They could call it "Really the best of..."
