Reading · Some Flowers Soon

It’s been a while since I did a selection of seven poems from recent books I’ve been reading — the last was back in March:

And it’s been even longer since I did a post about the contemporary prose poem:

So this week’s Pinks combines the two.

Billy Ramsell’s third collection Render (Banshee Press) presents the selected works of a fictional Catalan author called Alberto Cenas, who — like any self-respecting European poet — does an elegant line in the self-reflexive prose poem. Here are the opening sentences of “Float”, from a collection called The Practicalities of Springtime (1984):

Float Pollina, I see, has been writing - emphatically, asthmatically - about Cardona-Blanxart again. He's made it into El Riu Negre, that fiercely adequate periodical. In Documenta, on Cardinal Casañas Street, I pick up the April number. I get the metro to Princessa Street. I find myself in La Ribera Sa, considering the truffle salts. I find myself in the old Subirà Candle Shop. Poor Pollina: his obsession with Cardona-Blanxart so jejune, so unbecoming, his prose so disagreeably grasping. Prose should hover and oscillate, should flit about and coax its subject, should be a hook tied to a filament. My father took me fishing once, on a secret swerve of the Francolí. I remember his rust-flecked tackle box, the lures that were cerise or robin egg, the serious glinting hooks.

In the Nineties, when I first started to read poetry, the contemporary prose poem was mainly something British readers might glimpse in translations of the kind of riddling Eastern European poetry that the Cold War had made popular in the West. In 1996, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize, and Faber published her poems in the UK. This new selection, The Acrobat (Faber), translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, includes her Nobel acceptance speech, which argues that “Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating ‘I don’t know’”:

Some fishermen pulled a bottle from the deep. It held a piece of paper, with these words: 'Somebody save me! I'm here. The ocean cast me on this desert island. I am standing on the shore waiting for help. Hurry! I'm here!' There's no date. I bet it's already too late anyway. It could have been floating for years,' the first fisherman said. 'And he doesn't say where. It's not even clear which ocean,' the second fisherman said. 'It's not too late, or too far. The island Here is everywhere,' the third fisherman said. Parable They all felt awkward. No one spoke. That's how it goes with universal truths.

I first read Anthony Joseph while researching my anthology, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018), when I became intrigued by his dream-like prose poem “Folkways”, which featured the memorable refrain, “Well, death groove my brush room”. It’s good to see him returning to the mode for a series of poems about connection and memory, called “Rigour of Wires”, in his new book, Haunting the Black Air (Bloomsbury):

THE NEAR EAST We emerged from an overcrowded taxi, from a journey in which I'd sat on a rag rolled to catch bad water which had pooled in the crease of the leatherette seat. We were crossing to another station to catch an onward train to the Near East, when I saw, walking past along that hard and dusty road, a group of boys I went to school with. I called and the boy paused, like a black and wise poet, contemplating my face like a new word, or the use of a semi colon. Then he moved on. It was as if he had not recognised me, even though he held his duffle bag across a shoulder in the same way as in a photograph I took of him, when we once went hiking over the Northern Range to Maracas, and dated: 1982. Then Dex and Lex and Cordner and Curtis, older but as handsome as they always were, then Sherwynand Colin. But theytooseemedtoseethrough me. Where were they going, and had we known then, as boys in that school on the hill, that we were bound together in a generation, that even our youth had its limits, and was not a loop, but a finite time, would we have loved each other more?

I’ve admired Andrew McDonnell’s use of the prose poem for a long time, not least because he uses it to evoke the landscape of Norwich and Norfolk, where we both live. But I’ve chosen a non-landscape piece as a taster of his new book, 55 Devotionals (Against Erasure) (Broken Sleep Books), because it encapsulates the collection’s sweet-sour nostalgia for a world of working-class life that was not so sweet in the first place:

DEVOTIONAL FOR A MILK FLOAT Every day the milk float passed the same spot at the same time. Is that devotion? And when the Carter boy was run over, outside the little shop, pockets full of pink fondant shrimps in a pink and white paper bag, he lay on the road utterly devoted to the absurdity of milk floats which were silenced by the edgeland supermarkets draining the pink tits of cows at a faster demand, so that one day he could lie in bed devoted and tell his love that he was one of the last men to be run over by a milk float; his tiny stab at immortality, and the glass bottles still clinking like a dog awaiting its beating.

Mantra Mukim’s remarkable Glitchwork (The 87Press) is a shapeshifting debut which uses prose as one of its modes to explore “the uneven lineages of Central India”. You can read its meditation on the crash-landing that ended the Chandrayan-2 lunar exploration mission here. The following prose poem is one of several meditating on the abstract meanings and potential of “the line”:

Each line is born with three hands that it uses to wage a war against sensory reductionism. Some lines are born with a non-terrestrial vision. Few lines I have known personally were born either as too much or as too little. There are still lines out there waiting to be added to the endless mesh. Plainer surfaces with concentrated depths - 'each line is born of effort, history and pain'. The book is full of lines that do not intersect nor give us a mesh. The book reeks of the hand. One line alone can birth a swarm; it can bring voice to the world. A line born out of wedlock is generally rewarded with depth. Lines born in raipur have severe back pain. They do not know their source, they often let the calamity shape them

One of my favourite prose poem sequences of the last decade is Holly Pester’s Eclogues for Idle Workers (2019), originally written as a radio drama of tender dialogues spoken in the intervals of the working day. The dazzling Cafés (Fitzcarraldo) continues her fascination with the fantasy life of such spaces in a book of linked pieces:

What part of our entrepreneur is her beart? She puts the know-how of the café into a train station or hospital, then observes. Goads her veins. The oldest café in the city lives on in spirit, bringing glow to the slow surrealism of the franchise. This is where and how we will meet, create types - a plum tart - the glow and the show, but how do we endorse it and now what? The taste of nothing! Fold cloths. Dust the mirrors. Time runs out. Time ran out. I opened a café instead of mustering will or pursuing a sex life. This is my story.

Finally, it’s a pleasure to be able to say that there is a new book of poems, mostly in prose, by Lila Matsumoto. Talk a Blue Streak (Monitor) evokes youth in a remembered/imagined Nineties-Noughties America, and the intermingling cultures encountered there. A very short one called “U.S.A.” reads in full: “Country Creek Acres Crunchy Texture Imitation Bacon Bits Shaker Jar”. Here is a slightly longer one:

Your dangerous shoe When I woke up I discovered that Dorothy’s flatmate had taped up my broken shoe so tightly with electrical tape that I couldn’t get my foot in it to go to work. The flatmate had been very kind. He showed me pictures of a pet falcon he had when he was a boy. He was from Serbia. The only other Serbian person I’d heard a memory from was a famous poet who read his work at an event at the university. In between the poems he told us stories about his childhood and drank out of his water bottle. I had never seen anyone drink water like him: instead of sips, he put the entire opening of the bottle fully in his mouth and took a shot. Then he resumed his short dark poems about angels and bandages.

NOTES

One of my first posts here was about Lila Matsumoto’s previous book of prose poems:

Pinks #45: Angels and Bandages

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