A Reasonable Thing To Ask

It's not often that one poem can provide a straightforward answer to another poem's question. After all, if poetry always worked in such ways, it would cease to be the questioning, affecting and constantly challenging art form that it is. But in the latest edition of Poetry Review (Vol. 98:1, Spring 2008), the poet Christopher Reid has 'A Reasonable Thing To Ask', a poem alongside two others, 'Conundrum' and 'Afterlife'.

The poem's reasonable query is that the reader, or at least someone out there, 'please explain tears'. 'What', asks Reid's narrator, 'do we gain by it' ... 'a faculty that interferes / with seeing and speaking / and leaves [us] feeling weaker'? The question is a good one, as the poem's allusion to Darwin, and by extension, evolutionary theory and survival of the fittest, throws into question the evolutionary benefit (if any) of such a disabling, emotionally-triggered reflex.

Almost incredible, then, that Nick Laird's second collection, On Purpose, published last summer, provides a near perfect answer to Reid's poem in a short little piece titled 'The Perfect Host'. For it turns out that recent scientific research has uncovered the benefits of emotional tears by comparing them with basal tears (constant, moisturising 'tears' that lubricate the eye) and reflex tears (as in 'those that flow / because an onion is reduced to pieces / or smoke strays from the barbecue', as Laird puts it). And the results have shown that emotional tears contain a greater number of toxins and in particular, higher rates of manganese, which is 'thought responsible', as Laird's poem notes, 'for sadness'. In spite of crying and its physically and socially debilitating effects, then, emotional tears help to rid our body of certain toxins, and also explain why, after a good cry, people often feel much better...

because you must know by now
that it loves you, your body,
and wants you to stay.

Quite a cheery sort of conclusion, don'tcha think?

Review: Paul Henry's The Brittle Sea: New and Selected Poems

As the poet-critic Nick Laird recently pointed out in a review of the poet’s letters, the influence of Louis MacNeice is everywhere in contemporary poetry. His sprightly, masterly way with form and his sprawling themes – the blurring of past and present, personal and public, darkness and light – have made an impact on some of the best-known British and Irish poets currently writing. Paul Henry may be an unfamiliar name to some, but like the work of many of his better-known contemporaries, The Brittle Sea, his new and selected poems, owes much to the Belfast-born “laureate of in-between-ness”. This hefty volume takes in twenty-odd years’ worth of work, selections from five collections and a batch of new poems, yet like an intricate Venn diagram, all are linked by their abiding themes: how the past haunts the present, and how people and places change, as do our relationships with them.

Despite their MacNeice-ish content and formal bent, however, stylistically Henry’s poems are often expressionistic, even symbolist. Early pieces such as “Double Act” and “Love Birds” – both about couples making the most of the hand that life has dealt them – combine suggestive images and wordplay with short lines, oblique clauses and a subtle music. In the more reflective, avowedly lyrical poems, this restraint and exactitude remain, serving to reign in sentiment and keep self-indulgence in check. “The Visitors”, a sequence from Henry’s third collection, The Milk Thief, conjures female relatives from the poet’s childhood with eerie concision, while “Between Two Bridges”, in which the poet stalks his younger self around a changing city, employs a similar matter-of-factness:

Wind scales the river in its mud.
It squirms and pirouettes to the tide’s score –
dance of a reptile, forging its cast in silt.

Here comes a friendly stray, with marble eyes.
And here, someone’s ditched a fridge. Boats
ghost-boats, Anon’s boarded up work …

The effect can be gripping, but Henry can go too far in his attempt to avoid solipsism: cloaking personal intimations in a wilful mysteriousness that leaves the reader behind. It is the new, previously uncollected poems that best strike a balance between the emotive and the clinical, often with formal skill and time and space-bending panache to boot. Here, a “gap between the railings” becomes “thirty-five years” and a meeting room sprouts wheels, sending us “through tunnel after tunnel”: the imaginative leaps justified, the emotional reach profound. They represent the best work of a lyric poet who deserves a wider readership.

first published in the Times Literary Supplement

Nick Laird wins Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize

Good to see that Northern Irish poet and novelist Nick Laird has won the 2008 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his second collection of poems, On Purpose, published by Faber in 2007.

The award - given alternately each year to a work of prose or verse - was judged by poets Jo Shapcott and Michael Longley, and Sam Leith, literary editor of the Daily Telegraph.

It puts Laird on a distinguished list of previous winners, including Seamus Heaney, Hugo Williams, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Don Paterson and Michael Hofmann.

Having enjoyed and reviewed the collection for the Winter 2007/08 edition of Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly, I recommend it to readers unfamiliar with Laird's work, as well as his first collection, To a Fault. Here's an excerpt from my review of On Purpose:

What is most impressive about On Purpose, however, is Laird’s charting of the loose and difficult territory of the existential crisis between our desire to control our lives and act with certainty and conviction, as set against the possibilities and inherent unpredictability of the world we actually encounter. As Don Paterson rightly urged in his T.S. Eliot lecture in 2003: ‘It’s important that poets remember that our first perception of the world is already a misinterpretation’ (though one, it must be noted, that is no less valuable than every other). Laird often succeeds within these poems, then, in exploring that which is – both personally and universally – so often beyond our grasp and understanding, be it in the narrator’s failure to describe a beautiful vista in ‘Use of Spies’, the attempt to break habits of a lifetime and escape blinkered perspectives in ‘Variation in Tactics’, or the dedicated hunter’s speculation and failing faith in some higher power in the sombre tones of ‘Hunting is a Holy Occupation’. Laird’s poetic voice has gained an added maturity and distinctiveness since his first collection, too; gone is the unconvincing ‘newladspeak’ that knocked the shine off some of his earlier work, honed into a style that allows for poems of greater brevity, rhythmical execution, and despite a deliberate variance in seriousness of tone, real feeling. Like Armitage, he is an impressive and distinctly male writer of love poems: the expression of masculine emotion and its awkwardness measured and balanced with an economy of sentiment, as in the narrator’s stating ‘Love, I’d turn for you clean-living, / relinquish drinking, fighting, singing’ in ‘The Present Writer’. And the more I read those poems of Laird’s that explore the rural and urban landscapes of Ireland, Britain, and beyond, the more I think it not an overstatement to compare his rich descriptive powers, during their finer moments, to Heaney’s. Take the following glittering stanzas from ‘On Leaving the Scene of an Accident’:

In the eastern suburbs deer appear.
Brushed by waist-high silver steppe grass
and the lighter strokes of barley stalks,

elegant as one might half-expect
the grazing self to be, except her grace
is one complicit in departure.

For those interested, the Guardian coverage is here.

The Manchester Review

In certain quarters of the poetry world, there can be a certain snobbery surrounding publication online - one that maintains that print literary magazines are usually better than online journals. This argument is usually based on the idea that many (though certainly not all) established poets only send their work to print publications, and so the best quality work ends up being published in them, especially given the added incentive that the bigger players pay for poems: Poetry Review, The London Review of Books, the TLS and so on.

Though not entirely untrue, fortunately this is only part of the bigger picture, as a number of online poetry and literary magazines in the UK and further afield are growing in considerable authority. These include the likes of Salt Publishing's Horizon, edited by Jane Holland; Blackbox Manifold, edited by Adam Piette and Alex Houen at the University of Sheffield; the longstanding Jacket magazine, and those print journals which also publish much of the material from their issues online, most notably the American magazines AGNI and Poetry. A few UK print journals could learn a thing or two from the latter, and of the former UK online publications, work by Paul Muldoon, Michael Schmidt, George Szirtes, Fiona Sampson and Vona Groarke have featured in Horizon's and Blackbox Manifold's pages - some of the better poets writing in English today.

Another online magazine that's recently emerged in the UK is The Manchester Review, edited by the staff of Manchester University's creative writing course. The magazine published its second issue earlier this year, and has already featured new work from Sean O'Brien, Nick Laird and Conor O'Callaghan, among others. It looks like another strong addition to the best online publications around, and one which poets and novelists alike can publish their work in. Of particular interest to me were Nick Laird's poem 'Adeline' and Peter Armstrong's 'Breakfast at The Fisherman's Mission'. Check it out if you get chance.