More welcome than another immediate bus, and hot on the heels of my Luke Kennard book reference from yesterday’s posting, this is my second [and only second] ‘treat’ of this year in terms of a special edition poetry booklet, this a single poem by Ted Hughes.

What makes it particularly welcome is I was unaware of its existence until doing some research yesterday. It is a lovely pamphlet, and has an unusual concertina method of opening, not that this has to be used and I won’t, again, because it isn’t straightforward to put back easily!

Another to add to my TedShelf,

I am not a significant collector of limited-edition, hand-crafted poetry pamphlets, but I have a few from across many years. My most cherished is Peter Reading’s Shitheads – designed, made and published by Michael Caine [read more here]. I am not going to account for the others – not even a ‘best of’ – but would stress that they range from the simple/straightforward to more complex, and all are equally pleasing for being tactile, carefully produced/presented and a special focus from and for each writer.

I was therefore pleased to receive yesterday my latest, Luke Kennard’s MISE EN ABYME, via Jett. W. Whitehead, Bay City, Michigan, and designed by C.W. Swets at Tungsten Press, The Netherlands [there’s the geography]. Typefaces and papers and cover material and stitching are of further interest if you wish to search out details online. For me, I enjoy the simplicity of seeing and touching this, but first it is the unwrapping from the careful packaging and that initial seeing.

Sounds a bit fetishist, I know. But I have just recalled and typed quite calmly. Really.

Contents are as critical, clearly, and I haven’t ordered any such pamphlets/presentations without knowing the poets’ work. I’ve reviewed Luke Kennard once before [here] and have other of his poetry collections so I knew what kind of innovative and enjoyable writing I would be getting: this linked to a personal liking for prose poems so I was especially looking forward to reading the 19 in this collection.

They are teasing, funny and sometimes provoking.

As with other reviews of late from me, what follows is a flavour of this particular book’s delightful contents, prose poems that occupy mystery and the oblique with humour and introspection as well as conversational to lyrical storytellings of this, and more:

In GREY ROCK, the grey rock methodology gets a fond delineation that traces effect and impact through domesticity referencing and the beauty of an idea; in CRISIS MEANS DECISION MEANS JUDGMENT we read how a head injury leads to confusion over whether a head injury ever existed – and that goes for the ducks as well, and in NEW INSIGHT INTO HOW ENDANGERED SPECIES ARE MAKING DRASTIC CHANGES TO THEIR LIFESTYLES there is a knowing mix of factual detail, tender urgings to a grey whale and occasions of that lyrical wrapping already mentioned to push us as readers through its questioning to a concluding [possibly concluding] exasperation.

I think I have mentioned before on this blog because it annoys the hell out of me, but in a world where anyone who is being interviewed on TV and asked a question about an unusual/special experience they have actually experienced – I mean in real life and literally, factually not figuratively – and the reply is always the awe-eyed expression ‘it was/is surreal’, we get within the many prose poem narratives collected here a genuine and so much more delightful encapsulation of this otherwise descriptive all-embrace, like,

‘I blew away the catkins which had collected in the dent of my fedora and told them I could tell the difference between one piano showroom and another – what did they take me for? I had to memorise a sad piano line to play to my contact.’

[IT IS IMPORTANT YOU SELECT A CODE FITTING FOR THE SITUATION]

There are similar and different treats throughout the rest of this collection, for example, the questioning insights from ‘The Oracle of The High Fantasy Landscape In The Heart’ [A DEFECT OF THE LANDSCAPE], and there is extrapolation on a hymn’s post-pause in TO SEE THE TASK, TO SET ABOUT IT where loneliness, lunching/dining on oxtail soup, and making an observation on the amount of support bars in a home provide a palpable pathos to the mystery of its storytelling. In TRUE STORY OF MY OWN DEATH #4, what is ‘spread on the beach’ is just like what is spread throughout these unravelling tales – the poetic dissection and disembowelling and playing with the entrails of reality to present another kind, though that is a generalising exaggeration to bounce off this poem’s moribund-made-michievous metaphor.

Anyway, I’m just off to wash my hands for another read, all part of the careful procedure [no, not fetish] when reading such an engaging hand-crafted poetry pamphlet like this.

I’ve championed on this blog before, and I’ll mention again that looking out for the inexpensive deals on hardback, glossy photobook offers is well worth it for getting individual copies of writing produced.

They’re simply keepsakes, but they genuinely do make work/writing done – as here with erasures, not artistic but colourful – much more presentable than lurking in the hard-drive!

With some revisions/updates to familiar Christmas poems of mine for that special day of this special year.

Read and/or download here: Christmas Caveat

Came across this last night, unaware it had been posted. Interesting reference to Brion Gysin who I didn’t know [but do so now having researched a bit this morning, and great to discover via this mention]. My poem – along with two by Gysin –  can be seen on the Straight Up site here. Thanks to Jan Herman for posting.

I asked him what spiel-song
plucked from the hymn sheet

would explain away how the
drunken driver was allowed

to crash out the corner walls
of his church at that bend in

the road, but he wasn’t playing
even though I waited for a reply.

He did say the man apologised
publicly through the newspaper,

asking to be forgiven,
and I said I thought the guy

was just getting ahead of
his inevitable sentencing.

‘The immoveableness of all things through which so many men were moving—a harsh contrast compared with the universal motion, the harmonious system of motions in the country, and everywhere in Nature. In the dim light London appeared to be a huge place of sepulchres through which hosts of spirits were gliding.’

from Coleridge’s ANIMA POETÆ, 1799

This would seem to be a direct echo of my favourite Coleridge lines from my favourite Coleridge poem The Eolian Harp,

‘O the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul,
A light in sound, a sound-like power in light,
Rhythm in all thought, and joyance every where—’

TEH was written in 1795, published the following year, and the pantheism expressed within this – beautifully so in the poise and balance of its language/rhythms, as well as nearly radical if it wasn’t for the orthodox reversion at the poem’s end – is presented more directly as a celebration of and yearning for the country/pastoral life in the quote from three years later when Coleridge was in London.

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[Images by artist and photographer Nick Dormand]