Carl Phillips’s latest collection, Scattered Snows, To The North (Carcanet), is rich in his by-now familiar long, clause-heavy sentences and his ability to reproduce the feeling of a mind thinking out loud, but he’s added to the mix a sedately apocalyptic charge.
These are often exquisitely sculpted poems, internal weather unravelling at the borderlines of mythology and memory, always refusing to settle for the obvious thing, or the received idea. They are poems of “knowledge conquering/superstition”, taking place on the edges of days – early mornings, late nights, dreams which are always private, but into which we feel ourselves step, as through a fog.
Phillips manages to at once recreate “the renegade glamour of late fall” and to underpin his often intimate, internal landscapes with something immortal – we feel the barbarians rattling the gates, and in the background there is imperial decline, an end-of-days undercurrent, whether touching on the Roman Empire and its “slow/unwinding into never again” or painting with “the beautiful colors/of extinction”.
He’s interested in category, and category error – in the splinters between what is outwardly named, and what is innate – “The trumpet vine that grows/up the ginkgo’s trunk and has even reached its branches is an example of/instinct, not affection”. Often, for all their carnality, their bloody sensuousness, these are hard-edged poems of love as utility, or obligation, of life as habit, obsession or ordeal.
‘She won’t read again’: I can’t conceive of my whip-smart mother not being able to fathom words on a page
The Velveteen Rabbit, reimagined: ‘I had to think what would persuade me to go to a children’s play and enjoy it’
New poetry by Carl Phillips; Rebecca Watts; Charles Lang; and Nuala O’Connor
Author Clara Kumagai: ‘I’m drawn to writing for young adults because it’s a time of turbulence and change’
Throughout, Phillips makes striking, and regularly confronting, use of a declarative, undeceived tone – “I prefer a clean view”, he writes, and offers the reader the same. “From attention to adoration/is a smallish distance”, he notes in Like So, yet here it feels a great chasm, being scrupulously negotiated. This is a book rich in memory, the telling gesture and an almost Augustan refusal of the histrionic, despite also being a book of at-times anonymous (or anonymising) sex, regret, and passion.
“I am still among the landscapes of my childhood” Rebecca Watts writes in her third collection, The Face in the Well (Carcanet), and one can read that “still” both ways. There’s a sense of stasis, of being caught – entangled even – by legacy, and the past, here but also an ongoingness, an ever-dawning recognition of the battle to retain some degree of innocence in the face of oppressive and pollutive forces.
Watts’s narrators feel most at home when lost among nature, the “animal in me” often conjured up, or let loose, to roam around the familiar landscapes or take her chances among the spiders “in a crevice in the old park wall”: “I wonder/if I stay here long enough/might they take me in –/reduce me//to a crescent of fingernail,/a snatch of hair”.
Throughout, there is a sense of abandonment, of having been lied to or let down, which acts as a generative and winning contrast with the clarity and seeming straightforwardness of Watts’s diction. Childhood isn’t just landscape, it’s also – at times literally – a museum of sorts, in her mother’s somewhat grisly collection of pieces of her childhood self, “My mother keeps parts of me under her bed” and in a series of compact snapshots where Watts also presents quietly horrified memories of “my act, which isn’t an act at all”.
There are sharp, sardonic portraits of women poets, “types her poems winter evenings/with a beaker of tonic for company./Some of them are even funny” and other moments of leavening wit, but for all its surface levity these are subtly existential friezes, at times reminiscent – in that sense - of some of Hugo Williams’s plangent mock-comedies, refocusing the reader’s attention on what had seemed known and mining it for absurdity, and tenderness: “how close and familiar it all is/Uncountable/sweetnesses, tragedies”.
Charles Lang’s debut The Oasis (Skein Press) is rich in Glaswegian vernacular and full of an ebullient brand of urbanity. These are poems of youth, rich in youth’s grandeur and urge towards the casually ceremonial.
The book opens on a chase, the collective police-evading narrators “athletes fur the buzz” and it’s this buzz, and this fleet-footedness, which comes to mark out the collection as a whole. There’s a fear of being caught – in this case by the law, or in a wider sense of being trapped, cosseted or forced to come down on one side or the other, when a far more appealing kind of life is one in which – as in Helen’s Bay – a narrator taking in the atmosphere on a ferry decides he’d “rather be here/than reach the other side”.
Lang is keen to celebrate, noting that “There’s glory in this day”, of an ordinary-seeming July evening on the Ormeau Road, or managing to ennoble other aspects of childhood, whether it’s the flash of hope which is the real drive behind collecting football stickers: “It wis the packet that set/the pulse racin” or a lesson in perfectionism during a darts session, “even the tea between games/is a lesson: like everythin in this world/ye’ve got tae get it just right”.
There’s something New York School about Lang’s city rambles, seen in an easeful poem capturing a trip to the park, or the often wordless joys of post-adolescent friendship, but pleasingly he’s also gimlet-eyed when he pauses for breath, too, as Birds amply demonstrates, its light touch adding meditative depth to his velocities. There’s something joy-making about a book like this, its enthusiasm and willingness to “write through fear”, as well as its suggestions of what else is to come from a poet who, like the white Lacostes of New Shoes still has “Plenty room fur development”.
Nuala O’Connor’s new book Menagerie (Arlen House) operates in the tidal pull of the past, and of ancestry. Nothing is ever really gone here, and while she leans on a number of artists and other touchstones, the core of the book is a reckoning of the personal – the ghosts of the past and the marks left by them, in some cases literal ones – “‘Your brother,’/she says, ‘shot a perfect bullseye.’”
O’Connor is also interested in inheritance, and inheritances – genetic, physical and linguistic – and she takes great care to demonstrate an urgency towards living in the immediate present to counteract the undertow of entropy, the gathering storms of history.
“I am wedged between drifting languages” she writes, but it isn’t only within languages that O’Connor’s narrators must try to find a place – like her teenage daughter, the subject of a number of poems here, “she shifts shape daily, trying/for the mould she can settle into”. The fight against being too easily placed into a pre-existing shape is common ground for all O’Connor’s varied, and various, figures, another is the sense that life and its continuance is always at risk, never a given: “we are all teetering, we will all fall”.
O’Connor’s is a lyric voice, and her impulse is towards singing – at times she slightly misses the mark, clouding her language a touch when reaching for something a touch ornamental: “halo lies the true, hidden one:/a girl of horns, matterated heart,/and scarlet, forked tongue” or risking slippage into the portentously epigrammatic lurch, for emphasis: “we are built of everything but hope”.
Mostly, however, she gets the balance right, between a warm, feelingful generosity of vision and a distanced, diagnostic eye, managing to weave in found material, literary biography and family history to create a collection which is at once involving and clear-sighted.
