The Zoo Father

Pascale Petit

Published by Seren September 2001

ISBN 1-85411-305-4 £6.95

Like Pascale Petit's first collection, Heart of a Deer, her second, The Zoo Father, is closely focused on family relationships, which are viewed through the lens of Amerindian myth. Since she is trained as a sculptor, the tactile, visual quality of these poems should, perhaps, be no surprise. The core of the collection is a sequence of poems in which the speaker's relationship with her father is explored as she transforms him, and sometimes herself as well, into one creature or object after another. The opening of 'My Father's Body' reveals part of the motivation:

As I sit her holding your hand

knowing that you were once a rapist,

I think how it isn't enough

just to shrink your head.

I could shrink your body

with the skills I learnt as a sculptor.

The work has a cumulative force and the hold on the subject is unrelenting. There is a sense of the poem as object, a vessel which must be skilfully crafted to contain safely a range of intense and sometimes conflicting feelings. Sometimes these poems sound like translations, perhaps because of the way they draw on mythological frameworks more familiar from other cultures; the language has its own strangeness, too, especially in its clinical naivety:

I know just what I've to do:

shrink myself to a tiny candiru,

the most feared fish in the river,

swim up your stream of urine

into your urethra, Father,

and wedge my backward-pointing barbs

deep inside your penis.

(The Fish Daughter)

This childlike perspective creates genuine surprise, and while the subject matter may seem at first to be claustrophobically personal, the imagery opens in so many directions that the collection feels engaged with a wider world than most.

Target: Wales

ed. Brian Fortey

Published by Forty Winks Press, 212 Caerleon Road, Newport, South Wales NP19 7GQ ,

Price £1.50, ISBN 0 9533575 9 7

This booklet features a selection of poems by Welsh contributors to the Newport-based magazine, Target. The editor says that they offer 'a finely balanced and complimentary cross-section of what it means to write poetry, and to be Welsh'. Accordingly, there is gentle melancholy from Idris Caffrey, lightened by 'Wales dancing again/in a swathe of yellow flowers'; there is a long, Under Milk Woodish poem by Jon Summers; Tom Lewis contibutes poems about a dead farmer, preaching in Welsh and, curiously, poetic cliché. Jacqueline Jones's science fiction poems are more interesting in their use of language, but are unfortunately marred by typographical errors. At least she was lucky enough not to be included in the last of these anthologies, 'Target Babes'.

Food

Peter Finch

Published by  seren  June 2001

1-85411-296-1 pbk original £6.95 pp. 72

R. S. Thomas's 'Welsh Landscape' is one of the many deserving victims of Peter Finch's wit in this extremely entertaining collection. The Thomas poem has, we are told, simply been put through French translation software several times, though I would love to find the programme that could come up with a finale like 'To widdle on the dictionaries of a polyurethane song.' Here, as in other poems, Finch focuses on the resistance and complexity of language in a way which neatly sidesteps the dangers for the poet writing about Wales. His 'Walking Poems' are Welsh (and Scottish) landscapes without a trace of sentimentality, the rushes of unpunctuated energy inhabiting a linguistic territory somewhere between Jack Kerouac and Nigel Molesworth. Wales in this collection is just as often an urban experience. In 'St David's Hall' the 'enormous cymrectitude' of the Welsh establishment emerging from a concert is set against another vision of an unselfconscious identity defined by alcohol, Catatonia and the Super Furry Animals: 'it's like breathing / you don't think, you do it...' This sense of culture as something to be endlessly created, something which is never static, informs the whole of Food, which includes elements as diverse as visual poems, in which type is blurred and distorted, poems about management training and a multiple-choice version of William Carlos Williams's fridge door note. In 'Going on TV' the taxi driver asks what the speaker will be appearing for: 'Poetry, I say / I pronounce it poultry so as not to sound too arty.' Although it is unquestionably art pursued to its limits, this book is full of delicious poultry and game.

Folding the Real

Fiona Sampson

Published by   seren  June 2001

1-85411-297-X pbk original £6.95 pp. 64

Seren's press release suggests that this collection is influenced by Jorie Graham and Emily Dickinson, though in many ways it seems to have a distinctively European rather than American flavour. Versions of Verlaine and Lorca make appearances, if in a somehow cooler form than one might expect:

Nobody eats oranges

in the flood of moonlight.

You have to eat

frozen green fruit. ('The Moon's Up')

The sense of remoteness, the fascination with the play of light and subtleties of colour have a quiet, interior quality which is more Vermeer than Hopper. 'Travel Diary' begins like this, for example:

The sill is also a horizon. You lie down below it

on the blanket bed

to watch trees and grass screen

the pale shiftiness

which is a continent of distance.

Where these poems might seem most foreign is in their intellectual slant, which is not very British and all the more welcome for that. The mainly fourteen-syllable lines of the sonnets, for example, allow for revisions and explorations which follow the patterns of a thought beating itself against an idea, and her ideas are often interestingly abstract, her investigations including the relationship between the self and the voice, how furniture occupies space and what a line is. One feature which Fiona Sampson does share with Jorie Graham and Emily Dickinson is a fondness for the frequent use of dashes, deployed in 'The Bargain' and elsewhere to emphasise the shifting, provisional nature of perception like a flurry of pencil in a sketch, although the final result is calm and measured. She is not as open-ended as Graham, nor as passionate as Dickinson; however, one of the most direct poems, 'How It Was,' is a haunting description of the loss of a child, where feeling and intellect fuse to create memorable images:

You were a star

with a pumpkin head; a nursery rhyme;

you were our accidental shaving

a spiral cast-off from the bench;

you flickered like something to steer by.

Rockclimbing in Silk

Samantha Wynne Rhydderch

Published by   seren  June 2001

1-85411-298-8 pbk original £6.95 pp. 64

The core of this collection was published by Redbeck Press in 1998 as Stranded on Ithaca. 'The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter' has stayed in my mind since then for its surreal musicality. It begins by telling a story but by the end of the poem, the rhythm of the lighthouse signal fragments the language, light and darkness scattering ominous clues:

The whiteness throbbed round

and round, firm and eternal as

this glass tower, a prism

practising madness: light, limb, dark,

blade, light, clover, dark, lake, light,

dark, wound, dark, dark.

Samantha Wynne Rhydderch's voice is intense, at times neurotically so, but nearly always compelling. Her preoccupation with blood, embalming, electric chairs, drowning and burial may be the reason why the back cover says this collection is 'not for the faint-hearted,' but there is often a dark sense of humour at work too, for example, in 'Part of the Furniture,' in which a wife has her husband stuffed after his death, 'far better/ disembowelled than drivelling on.' In 'Lighting the Fire' or 'The Truth About Escalators' metaphors from everyday life are playfully extended to deal with less sinister relationships, but the world of many of these poems is a mythical, dreamlike past cut across by constantly unexpected language. In 'Deacon Brodie's Predecessors' a flirtatious but utterly unhinged speaker tells us:

He was a fair size stag, Invercauldie craver,

dragons slain at no extra cost:

an elaborate date. I was King Arthur's love-rat

in a rattan chair: simply add boiling water.

The handling of tone is careful enough to sustain interest through the repeated dislocations and it's poetry which often demands to be read aloud, something which Samantha Wynne Rhydderch does particularly well.

The Bed of Memory

Jean Earle

Published by   seren  June 2001

1-85411-295-3 pbk original £6.95 pp. 64

The fact that this author is in her nineties should not, perhaps, colour the way one looks at her collection, but it inevitably does. She is writing from a perspective from which very few people can produce such lucid poetry, so it deserves to be read if only for that. Her answer to the romantic ideal of the love poem is 'Going Home,' in which she sees 'a bronze man/ Flaring an aura in the haze. A prince....' and then, from her vantage point, the ending of this fairy tale: 'I thought, "It will never be like this again...."/ And it never was.' Loss is a recurrent theme in these poems but it is tempered with other moods, like curiosity about the afterlife, as in 'A Long Ago Death,' and 'The Ritual Meals' or satisfaction with a life fully lived in 'Having That'. In fact, the optimism is sometimes overwhelming, but it is a quality to be prized in the not-so-remote place from which Jean Earle is writing. If poems about a lifelong belief in angels might seem dubious to some, the idea of 'Consolation against/ What may happen and what has been/ And the tears from that' makes considerably more sense in the world created in this collection, in which memory is long and happiness fragile.