Dorothea Rosa Herliany, Kill the Radio

When I read Charismatic Megafauna and could only write cascades of exclamation marks in my notebooks until they looked like Woodstock chattering away in Peanuts, I wasn't sure how to approach making my thoughts public -- until I read Linda Hutcheon's latest thoughts on reviewing and it kicked my ass into realising that reviewing is about honesty, not making people like you. Reviewers are *not* charismatic megafauna (all those large mammals that people feel kindly towards while they eat their pig sandwiches). Or if they are, they're tigers.

Here's the thing: I think that Tamsin Kendrick has a compelling voice and has parlayed her striking performance poetry into poems that work on the page: no easy thing.

And yet.

And yet, with such a compelling voice at her service, she uses it to hymn female passivity and romanticise male violence. At first I thought that this pissed me off because it's within the framework of her Christian faith and I am not a fan of organised religion. But then I was reading Lorna Goodison's Guinea Woman today and her Rastafari poems filled me with their spirited joy. Also, I stand in awe of John Donne's metaphysical turn from human to divine erotic, and especially the poem "Batter my heart, three person'd God." Kendrick has her sights on a similar metaphysical shock and awe, but there's shock value in the violence of some of her images, there's also the yawn factor in reading yet _another_ cultural text that praises the passive, waiting female who gets turned on by a beating. I wonder if she could apply her talents to examining the conjunction of sex, violence and the Church in, for example, a residential school in Canada? Or the Inquisition? She has the verbal fireworks to make it happen: but the ethical imagination? Another question.

Of course, not all poetry has to engage in critical analysis or political history. But accepting, and even lavishing seductive descriptions upon, the metaphysical and masochistic knots of violence and desire in the Christian faith (and in patriarchy) seems, to me, a dangerous thing. And that's why I was so excited to discover Dorothea Rosa Hearliany's Kill the Radio on my reading pile -- reminded that it was there by the fact that she didn't come to Ledbury this week, courtesy of the fools at the Home Office. Instead of playing broken Barbies for teenage kicks, Herliany comes out swinging with love poems that end with images of castration and devouring. She brings an askance wit to the conjunction of violence and desire, exploring the hunger of it, its oscillation between the parties in a relationship, its flow _against_ power.

And that's where her book really stands out: this is writing with no time for the status quo, including the status quo that demands a polemic poetry of resistance. There's no spelling out a political stance here. Instead, her poems re-route communication: they send "secret sex telegrams" so intimate they burn the eye, "kill the radio," write "one letter after another, not knowing your address, / and never sent them to you" ("There Are Many Paths...").In the silence and the confusion of address, they speak with an amazingly direct language, a fierce assault on political and personal hypocrisy where the suppression of (female) sexuality in the public (and private) sphere is paralleled with political suppression. Like W.S. Graham, she is as fierce with the reader as she is with her lovers, paralleled in the "you" the poem calls out. Writing about the day of Suharto's resignation, she tells the reader:

you were aware of almost nothing
in the world where you lived
your life was a brief tale
which interested no-one. ("One Day in Indonesia").

Yet this strident poet striding the streets of Yogyakarta frequently compares herself to a snail "carrying [her] restless shell from one swamp to another" ("Uncoloured Symphony"). The snail's first appearance provides a beautiful metaphor for the work of poetry. Struggling to write in "Talking Trash," the poet says:

i am like a snail with no trail to follow.
searching for the home
it carries on its back.

Yes: this is the work of poetry, looking backwards and forwards at once, quixotic and never resigned, never comfortable, seeking the perfect, unseeable grammar of the snail shell's spirals. And there are many poems in the collection that offer a snail's-eye view of the shell, its immensity seen in fragments. I love the series of letters for Nadia, Jennifer, Julia and Lorena which articulate a rare poetry of female friendship, of the erotics of the letter, "the breath of your foreign love" ("A Letter For Nadia"). I rage with the furious poem "Cardboard Houses," which ends, in the voice of the houses' dwellers, " 'we are commercial objects / turned into victims / by your conscience!' " (The poem's subtitle, "—for a third-rate movie" makes me think, irresistibly of Slumdog Millionaire).

And then there are two poems that operate in some sphere beyond for me, because they are about music: something that I don't understand at all, but something that moves me, especially when turned into language. I should add here that the translator Harry Aveling, who worked with Herliany on the poems, does a fantastic job, preserving the immediacy of the poems. His introduction also papered over my shameful ignorance of Indonesian recent history. Maybe that's one reason these two poems catch at me, because the references to Western classical music make me feel that I'm on safe(r) ground.

And yet.

Part 4 of "There Are Many Paths in the Old City of Melancholy" begins with the poet imagining "Joan Sutherland singing Mozart's Die Zauberflote / but it is a tiny woman begging for coins," an image that reminded me hallucinatorily of Tsai Ming-Liang's film I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (set on the Malaysian/Indonesian border), which was part of Peter Sellars' New Crowned Hope festival of work inspired by Mozart's late operas. An act of prescience, yes, but its uncanny force is met -- and perhaps exceeded -- by the haunting fragment 9 of "Kill the Radio":

i thought it was beethoven, reaching out:
silence had frozen around the door. the embrace
was perfect.

i was not yet asleep, but very tired.
i heard steps approaching,
they were too soft to be loneliness

the room was distant, sad: kilometers away
a car roared, half-way home.
then the silence returned - the old silence,
dancing alone.

but it was not beethoven.

That's my feeling reading Herliany: I thought it was [x] / but it was not. She leads you in, persuades you to listen, allows you to feel nuances of nuances, and then turns -- like Graham's "beast in the cage" -- and brings you into the "old silence", the chaos of making criss-crossed by silvery snail-trails of her lines. Their effect is gradual but utter. "One Day in Indonesia" is not enough for me: I want more "secret sex telegrams" and lost letters from this major poet. And I want to hear her read. Home Office, take note: this is not a woman to mess with.

Sarah Hesketh, Napoleon's Travelling Library

I've been engaged in my favourite form of work-avoidance, browsing poetry publishers' back catalogues -- in this case, Carcanet's, in order to take advantage of their 20% summer discount. Lots of titles caught my eye, but one -- Daniel Weissbort's Nietzsche's Attaché Case -- made me wonder if a new genre is emerging: poems and/or collections concerning the minutiae of the lives of famous men, the way in which these noted individuals accompanied and catalogued themselves.

Sarah Hesketh's Napoleon's Travelling Bookshelf -- published this month by the wonderful Penned in the Margins -- is not only concerned with the eminent, but it's full of curiosity as to how we catalogue, carry and discard our lives. The title poem finds Napoleon reading amidst Russian wastes, and others draw out similar moments of intense introspection and awareness against dramatic backgrounds: a mentally-ill woman struck by the "new necessity / of forever remembering the waltz" in "The Ballroom at West Riding Asylum" or friends "expecting the mutter of wings" in "Waiting for the Indiana Night Moth." Hesketh's poems often touch on moments of heightened expectation, rather than of loss or satisfaction, the moments in which we catch ourselves thinking, observe ourselves and commit the observation to memory. "Saturday Night Fly" and "Faking" both make this moment of awareness -- in the context of dressing up to go dancing, and negotiating with a lover -- glitter with specificity.

The poems themselves generate heightened expectations because of their precise and inventive titling, frequently conjuring images or whole narratives, from opener "Wild Boar of New York" to the final poem (and one of my favourites) "Suzanna Ibsen is cold." Wildness -- particularly of the snowy kind -- and femininity run quietly as themes through the book, culminating in a moving elegy for the playwright's wife that extends the genre (?) of wife poem pioneered by Carol Ann Duffy in The World's Wife.Suzanna echoes the characteristics of Ibsen's heroines -- "Ghosts / live in her bones" -- becoming an embodiment of his "large theatre-throat" in a subtle meditation on the relationship of literature to life. There's no bookshelf here where Ibsen catalogues his life -- except Suzanna herself (and her "rack of disappointment").

It's in this context of gathering that poems like "Green Song", "23 Kinds of Solitaire" and "Chaconne for Ice" fall into place. On their own, each seems like a workshop exercise working through shades, names and images. Offset by the wittily-named "The Year is 2095 and Bjorn is Planting Seeds from the Norwegian Ark," these poems of change-ringing become an enquiry into the human desire to collect, collate and preserve against an imagined future. Often, the poems appear to emerge from such acts of collecting that turn the poet's awareness to news stories, and their details, that the general reader might pass by as unimportant to the scope of history. "The Ladies of France Buy New Shoes" and "Warsaw Uprising" surface the small (and seemingly inconsequential) details of lived experience from overwhelming narrative of WWII. Poignancy is saved from mawkishness by Hesketh's ability to inhabit a real, defiant voice in each situation. Although the ladies of France walk with "the whole foot leaving the ground at once," they are grounded, earthy, worldly, and the Uprising comes to the reader in "the brack and the flail / of mudsuck and sewer-snipe."

These are ambitious -- in the sense of a large-minded writer with a strong sense of historical responsibility -- without being arrogant: it's their precision, but also their stance aslant. Hesketh gives a hint of her poetic manifesto in "Casting", which advocates not being the queen, but

the messenger
who will take the letter
that is always delivered too late.
Slipping scenes somewhere on the ship
to Norway. Lost from sight
behind the ice-mapped waves.

There's a glancing reference to Hamlet in that messenger on the ship, and therein to Eliot's Prufrock who pronounces himself "not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do." So in the apparent stance askance is also declaration of intent. No walk on the beach here, but ice-mapped waves: a colder landscape, etched as copperplate. Hesketh is a fine poet, in the calligraphic sense, a poet of blade-like enjambment and almost aphoristic lines. This, from the end of "Lillith's Lament":

I taught my children several things:
never to roost where the apples grow;
never consent to lying below.

Sascha Aurora Akhtar, The Grimoire of Grimalkin

"She calls severance, fatal
altruism won't help now" (Urban Sojourn)

What's a reviewer to do in the face of such predictions? Severance is fatal -- so I'm doomed from the quote-and-paste start. And altruism won't help: this book gives no quarter and asks no charity. It echoes the casual grotesque of contemporary cinema, from Haneke to Hostel, in what could be called a Tarantino poetics. But, as the speaker in Urban Sojourn says "My restraint comes like a constipate / trying to pass a bowel movement": this is poetry that gets off on shitting in the pot.

And potty-mouthed isn't its only register -- with a vocabulary this dynamic to conjure with, the poet can be forgiven some verbal diarrhea. Running off at the mouth counters the "constipate" expectations encountered by the [fill in the blank: female; postcolonial; workshop; publishable] poet. Gossiping, babbling, scatting, blabbering: these are considered the actions of those who don't conform to Audre Lorde's "mythical norm," those regarded as incapable of forming conscious meaning, of using language with agency. More Dada than bar-bar ("barbarian" coming from the Ancient Greek barbaroi, meaning "those who go 'bar, bar' [ie: talk nonsense] when they speak"), Akhtar works her mouth like a dictionary-chomping version of Beckett's Not I.

And in the incomprehension, magic emerges. Grimoire relates etymologically to grammar (and glamour, pace the cover image of Theda Bara vamping it up in Salome), the magic of words. "Cathexis 1:1" samples the cod-Latin used in medieval witchcraft (not looking that different from the "Lorem ipsum" cod-Latin used by printers as a placeholder for text). Mis-constructed from classical Latin, and often featuring words from multiple vernaculars -- and nonsense words as protection or summoning -- grimoire-Latin casts a long spell over Akhtar's work with language, which also scatters echoes of Polari, A Clockwork Orange and backslang: these invented language systems are marked by their production as codes for marginalised groups. There's also an investigation of the Orientalisation of magic in the citation of terms like "chibouk" and "effendi": the dark, seductive (feminised) East of Valentino's The Sheikh is being taken apart in the maelstrom of inventive invective.

While the book has its own rhythms -- and in performance, the poems are surprisingly funny and ear-gaging, spit like rhymes at a battle -- they can become wearing as well as entrancing. Yes, the beats of the divine horsemen can be heard thrumming in your head as Akhtar's work pulses through its cathectic verbal transformations, but occasionally that cathexis feels like a literal throwing-out or -up, the verbal equivalent of Linda Blair's performance in The Exorcist. It's not that I want content, confessional or catalogical -- I'm fine with language as language, all micaceous surface and refraction -- nor that I want to "call severance" on a fascinating and agitating voice. But sometimes my attention is so shattered that as a reader I feel like the fluke worm in "Urban Sojourn":

An unwitting mouth bites it in half;
neither one knows what happens next.

Both mouth and worm can be aware -- are, in tighter poems such as "Subfusc" and "La Peinture" -- but a collage poem like "60 by 120 KM Ellipse" can't quite make a virtue of its addiction to distraction.

There's something of the franticness of a modern Salome dancing the Seven Veils to keep us from seeing what's underneath. Her vast vocabulary and brilliant ease with (and across) language(s) tempts her into the show-tricks of the "magi of make-believe" (Marasmus). I know that Akhtar has more in her than the easy laugh of:

Creatures doomed
to state the obvious
what a plight for
pillocks! (Valhalla)

Nothing up her sleeve. When she puts down the conjuror's wand, she rises to the possibility of seeing through the veils by exercising persistence of vision:

I have met the Demiurge
& he is a pretty sight
for eyes sore from photophobia
forced to see the sleight of hand (Sirvente Moi).

Awesome.

Keri Finlayson, Rooms

Keri Finlayson's Rooms opens with a poem titled "Cave Painting" that outlines (in charcoal) her project in the book: to explore a curious and productive tension, the relationship between language and image in human communication. The book will offer, promises the poem:

Pictures about words
Words about pictures
Stanza about camera
Rooms about rooms

through a delicate interplay of histories -- personal, aesthetic, technological -- that set in motion the shadows on the wall.

But like Plato's analogy of the prisoners in the cave, Finlayson's work betrays an anxiety about language as a means of representation. The book begins with the statement that "before the beginning there were pictures," rooting the visual spectacle of cinema in cave painting, while language is "the gloss … the la la la … The going barbarian." It ends with poems arranged in crystalline forms suggestive of the atomic structures of silver nitrate and celluloid, the principle components of early film. Brittle, combustible and unstable, the material elements of cinema are paralleled with the fleeting and dangerous images that they captured chemically. Recounting, in various combinations, a fragmented sequence of remembered events, as if editing a film sequence, Finlayson measures how far words can approach not only the images recorded on film (which itself may be lost or faded) but -- more importantly -- those that happened off-camera.

The world of the book is that of Cornwall just after the First World War, of the fishing village where Finlayson's grandmother was born -- and where she was discovered by a silent film-maker who got her pregnant and deserted her in the care of her violent priest father. That is the primal scene that plays again and again through the book: with each poem, we drop a penny in the pier machine and watch again as the black-and-white (textual) figures perform their herky-jerky (e)motions. Fixed as/by melodrama as much as by silver nitrate, this all-too-familiar Griffiths-esque narrative of the kohl-eyed innocent is given - literally - texture through the verbal materiality of village life, with Finlayson's particular emphasis on fishing and on knitting (in "Knitfrocks"), giving the title of the poem in which the film-maker first sees his star -- "Casting" -- a triple sense. Inferring that film's techniques and traps are as old as cave painting, hook-baiting and "slip[ping] the knot" strips away its smoke-and-mirrors mystery, its celebrity. The poet also casts a weather eye over the cinema of the natural world, rooting film's chemical sheen in "Gorse, ore fed, suck[ing] up smelted quartz flecks as sap, / Fruiting copper flakes" ("Cornish").

Finlayson has a kenning way with her word-hoard, a love of alliterative play and of specific vocabularies, often layered over each other. This works to great effect in "Fine Cut" (The Sex Scene), where a deep knowledge of Cornish fauna is made strange through a Latinate vocabulary that transposes Church language into the Latin used for biology and geometry -- and sex, too, becomes a geometry. When she moves away from these specifics, from the tight patterning of words within a register and a line, Finlayson is prey to slightly clumsy generalisations like the line that ends the book: "We have the ability to burn." Given her delicate tracing of family history through the knotted shadows cast by village crafts and film's chemicals, Finlayson clearly has ability to burn when, like a film-maker, she keeps her (kino-)eye on the details.

Jorie Graham, Sea Change

Ariel: Full fadom fiue thy Father lies,
Of his bones are Corrall made:
Those are pearles that were his eies,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a Sea-change
Into something rich, & strange:
Sea-Nimphs hourly ring his knell.

William Shakespeare, The Tempest (First Folio, from Project Gutenberg)

Pulitzer Prize-winner. Successor to Seamus Heaney at Harvard. Regarded as hermetic, even mantic, Jorie Graham is a difficult poet to review. Investigating the "sea-change" of global ecological devastation (resulting, in turn, from "sea-changed" carbon) and the political sea-change after 9/11 in the US, Graham speaks with a voice of quiet assurance and devastating (literally, laying waste to vistas in her incredible feel for detail) observation that - echoing Shakespeare and the Psalms (and, in its cadences, the New York Times) - has an almost devotional quality. It's a difficult poetry to answer back. It's a poetry that pushes itself further through the repeated gesture of "& how," an exploratory -- even axcavatory -- development that draws the reader deeper into the mysteries.

Graham creates chinks in the poems with her frequent tactic of an assertion followed by "no", yet these confound the reader into further dumb awe y enhancing -- even staging -- her control of specificity. I found myself writing out phrases and stanzas in a rapture (not easy considering the intense length of her lines -- so long that Carcanet had to produce an unusually square book to accommodate them), reading poems three or four times, sometimes backwards. Some -- particularly in the middle section -- are legible and lovely lyrics about ageing, seasons, and intimacy. But the breadth and density of her poetry is like that of the oceans. Rather than leading me to coherence, to an essay, her poetry makes me want to revel in it, to swim and dive and splash.

So here are some watermarks from my reading -- partial and scattered. I imagine reading this book again and again -- and feel almost shy of asserting to cohesive a reading. I want to hold onto the white space that striates the pages.

How does Graham's book concern itself with The Tempest? It's poetry as oceanography. It pairs the sea and death, counterpointing the constancy of death with the sea's mutability. It's concerned with the magic of making -- especially the late magic of Prospero's final speech -- and "this inch of finishing." But Prospero is also "the torturer" (and the poet Ariel) in "This," which speaks of "the sound of / servants not being / set free". And the torturer is Bush -- especially in the extraordinarily angry "Guantánamo" and in the spine-tingling "Full Fathom":

those were houses that are his eyes— those were lives that

are his

eyes—those are families those are privacies, those are details—those are reparation

agreements, summary

judgements, those are multiplications

on the face of the earth that are—those are the forests, the coal seams, the

carbon sinks that are his—

as they turn into carbon sources—his—

. Those "eyes" are also Graham's interrogation of the lyric I (and the personal I that is attacked, and dismantled, by torture), equalled by her savage and direct invocation of Bush, the torturer, as "you" in "Guantánamo."

Sea Change recognises very directly, in the stretch and elasticity of its long-line poetics, that Guantánamo, climate change and the credit crunch come from the same monolithic (and monotheistic) neo-conservative mindset. "Futures" and "Loan" use the poetic economy of repetition to essay/assay the way in which the "this / message 'I'", money and water all depend on circulation (and are eroded by exploitation). The book is predicated on a moment of crisis that is personal (ageing), political (the US' loss of credibility under Bush), ecological -- and linguistic, concerned with the redaction and devaluation of language under the Bush government and in the era of texting. Sample from "Futures":

I your speck tremble remembering money

where "speck" suggests "speculation" -- the act of imagination itself reduced to mean monetary mind-games -- and further to a mote in the eye/I that produces the tears that flow through the poem:

wind which the eye loves so deeply it
would spill itself out and liquefy
to pay for it

"Just Before" torques speculation further (or in reverse) to present a speculative poetry: "a pool. Of / stillness" opens out into a science-fiction in which

... there was no standing army anywhere,
& the sleeping bodies in the doorways in all
the cities of
what was then
just planet earth
were lifted up out of their sleeping
bags, & they walked
away, & the sensation of empire blew off the link
like pollen—just like that

The words are short, simple, plangent but the vision they offer is expansive, utterly original. This is science fiction that is "far from un- / earthly, it was full of earth." Immanence is one of the big themes of the book, delinking the maker from any grand Maker. And on the subject of making, Graham is constantly pressing and examining the act of writing and the status of poetic language.

In "Loan," thinking about how poetry uses the world, she writes: "all this taking is not our taking", asserting that poetry is exactly the work of circulation, of giving and returning, rather than keeping (or more, accruing) meaning. Similarly, "Loan" reminds us that

irrigation returns only as history, a thing made of text,
& yet, listen,
there was
rain, then the swift interval before evaporation, & the stillness
of brimming,

Despite the long lines and the many vocabularies, this is a poetry that seems to aspire towards something beyond words, or at least beyond their accumulative nature and economics of meaning. In "Day Off", Graham foresees

the day of
days, where all you have named is finally shunted aside, the whole material man-
ifestation of so-called definitions, imagine
that, the path of least resistance wherein I grab onto the immaterial and christen it
thus and thus &
something over our shoulders says it is good, yes, go on, go on, and we did.

There's the echo of Molly Bloom's soliloquy and of Beckett in that final line that takes up the play on "day of/f judgement" to suggest an ending as release from meaning rather than entry into it.

That turn is encoded from the first poem of the book "Sea Change," which exhibits two of the recurring tropes in the book: Graham's hyphenation of and caesura on "in-" and her exact use of the ampersand. The former allows her to invent words such as "in-clingings" and query words such as "in- / dispensable," asking what the inwardness -- or inversion -- of each might be, and how internality and refusal/reversal might be related. The ampersand is curioser, littering the page like a Celtic loveknot, at once less and more than the word "and": it opens up the word that links "rich and strange" to suggest we might, culturally, delink them. It asks us to sea-change its knotted notation into and out of language.

Abi Curtis, Unexpected Weather

Abi Curtis' debut collection, Unexpected Weather, sounds like a quintessentially British divertissement, opening as it does with "Lady Jane Grey" and closing with a "Bean." But Curtis gets wryly and slyly to the Gothic heart of the English country house/garden, revealing its passionate heart and eccentric imagination, particularly in several poems about English inventors such as George Gabriel Stokes.

Stokes is one of several figures who stand at the edge of cliffs (see also "Poem at the Edge of a Cliff") both literally and metaphorically looking across the chasm that separates Britain from the rest of the world. Curtis' poems are often avowedly archipelagic, looking with a loving eye at the flora and fauna (especially the lovely "Mole") of the British Isles, but they also explore -- and expand beyond -- the seductions of our island mentality. "I was a gwailo," begins "Hong Kong", a prose poem dense with the shock of encountering the textures of another island ("the rot of blue eggs boiled behind doorways" gives you a sense of her command of alliteration and rhythmic patterning) that Curtis weaves into a history of empire -- or rather empires, with the island as a fault-line between the tectonic shifts of British and Chinese history.

"Hong Kong" is also a love poem, an account of an intimate meeting (encoded in its dedication, "For Simon") and love is the book's most consistent unexpected weather. While only the first few poems are explicitly I/you lyrics that intimate a confessional voice, they create a prevailing atmosphere skying over a terrain created by the meeting of two people, the shifting and uncertain borderland of love somewhere between one and two. This unexpected weather leaks into the love poems, shifting easy presumptions about the confessional voice, especially as the reader encounters skillful dramatic monologues that expand the whether of the confessional first person.

The most striking group of monologues, spread across the book, concerns circus performance ("Trapeze Artist", "Lion-Tamer", "Bareback Rider"), tales of daring feats, of balance and violence, that curiously echo the circusification of pop music on the one hand, and the Gothicisation of circus (I'm thinking Cirque du Soleil and post) on the other. Family entertainment turns bloody in the lion-tamer's "ache to be reopened" by the lion and the bareback rider "picturing how a simple slip / might be enough to free us." The poem subtly invokes not only the sexual connotations of barebacking, but the reasons for its transition to sexual slang.

Horses, like moles and beans, become desiring strangers rather than comforting signifiers of Englishness: like the lover -- or the Wizard behind the curtain in "Oz" -- these are figures that become stranger to read the closer we get to them, "ignis fatuus" (to take one of Curtis' section titles) that misleads us through familiarity and -- like the unexpected weather that scuppers Antonio's ship at the start of The Tempest -- brings us out somewhere rich and strange.

Claire Crowther, The Clockwork Gift

Maybe it's something about getting sucked into watching Wimbledon -- the way the regular thwack-and-forth of the ball somehow eats up the minutes and hours, the way that Centre Court acts like a giant sundial with that L-shaped shadow eating up the late afternoon -- but I want to write tonight about time as (a) present in Claire Crowther's The Clockwork Gift.

Not one to maunder about wearing a purple hat, Crowther turns a weather eye on women and ageing in her second collection. In poems that are at once metronomic in their deft rhythms and syncopated in their tripwire vocabulary and image-making, Crowther presents a paradoxical vision of the clockwork gift: that the passage of time brings with it both repetition and entropy, with seasonal cyclicity as the balance between.

The poems bloom not with polite garden flowers, but ruins, rust and inflorescence -- all treated lovingly, disinterestedly, rather than as an Iain Sinclair-esque baroque of disintegration. The book's various careful, and often witty, approaches to age remind me of Agnès Varda's wonderful documentary about what's thrown away and the people who retrieve it, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse. The lucite clock without hands that Varda keeps on her mantelpiece, and which she cuts to after a shot of her ageing hands, might stand as talisman for Crowther's recovery of the discarded, the way that she sets decay back into the natural cycle.



That's a radical move against our current cultural fear and exclusion of that which ages. She finds in age exactly the glow produced by late blooming, the fire of energies that have been banked and are flaring up. Of her grandmother she writes:

She would have been in her element, arc-lit

in gold water, being filmed on stage
reading poems about sun, flanked by flowers,
her face a gleam of all her profiles projected
at once...

No skull but a newly-coined queen.

That which is devalued is "newly-coined" in a luminous account of memory and inheritance. It's a triumphant conclusion to the poem "The Herebefore," a title that suggests some of Crowther's subtle play with time, memory and age as cultural -- and specifically narrative -- constructions. This is most acute in a startling central sequence, "St. Anne's Apocrypha" that brings St. Anne and St. Joachim into the twenty-first century, with Joachim coaching a team of elementary particles and Mary having acupuncture, hinting at contemporary tales of older mothers conceiving by IVF and (in Joachim's Kaons and Pions) the scientific redefinition of the miraculous.

More playfully but equally astute, "Unexpected Goal" finds "St George / overlooking a grey-haired woman striker playing / with a boy among bikes left where they fell, mid-roar." The overlooked (in its dual sense) among the abandoned, the striker and the roaring -- it's a juxtaposition that gets at the uncanny fear and fascination of another game invoked in "Street Football," that of Grandmother Wolf. Crowther is and isn't the wolf in grandmother's clothing: hungry for language and its scenes, she essays an appetitive poetry that is inspiring in its openness, its generosity in giving time -- and its effects -- to the reader.