Review by Shanta Acharya of "Between A Drowning Man" by Martyn Crucefix

The ‘Invitation’ ‘to talk / about difference/ with its ambiguous / double birth’ at the beginning of two thought provoking sequences of poems, Works and Days (forty-nine poems) and O, at the Edge of the Gorge (fourteen poems) reflecting on ‘the world’s complexity,’ that makes us ‘other’ everything,’ is not the only reason that invited me to read these poems that resist definition. ‘Why make it a god,’ Crucefix asks. ‘Instead say something / something of difference / with its sudden / sometimes shocking riches / an othering/  to hone attention / not dull it.’ We have the experience, but miss the meaning. Like gods, the poems do not easily yield their meaning. 

The title of the book, Between A Drowning Man, its incompleteness, was a hook, inviting me to read the title poem first. However, ‘between a drowning man’ does not provide any simple answers even when the line is completed. On the contrary, it serves as a warning that navigating one’s path is not going to be straightforward, not unlike life. We face the unsettling juxtaposition of an unknown stranger’s mortal struggle and the intimacy of the writer’s ‘child’s skinny dipping.’ The rest of the poem does not offer any definite answers, not about the fate of the ‘drowning man’ or the child. Instead, we are reminded of the ways in which things fall apart: ‘between brother / and estranged younger brother / between mother and one of her six children / between the kissing gate / and the coffin route between cup and lip,’ and so it goes on to conclude ‘with its improbable cost / with its “always and forever” critical burden / words scrawled on a scrap of paper by someone / by the old gods of rumour / all the bridges are falling down.’ 

The image of a world in discord, with echoes of Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming,’ reaffirms itself as you begin at the beginning ‘like crimes woven into the weft of a tee-shirt / waiting on the reduced rail // … like envy buried long years in the black heart / of expressed admiration’. That ‘othering’ prompts the poet to see difference in a way that makes it open to interpretations. And ‘so it is—in and around and over and above –’ because ‘all the bridges are down.’ Broken bridges offer a metaphor for alienation, if not collision and confrontation, as a default landscape of our increasingly broken and fractured times. The reference to Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal on the front cover, the deep sense of loss, ‘the pathos of old things passing away and no things coming’ the great past crumbling down, breaking down, is palpable in the refrain: all the bridges are falling down.  

The poems in Works and Days, ‘written over a period of years, are responses to a series of historical moments in a progressively more disunited kingdom.’ They draw on two other texts: Hesiod’s Works and Days, probably the oldest poem in the Western canon, driven in part by a dispute between brothers, and vacanna poems that originated in the bhakti religious protest movements in 10th-12th century India that also ‘expressed a great deal of personal anger, puzzlement, even despair about the human condition.’ This forensic unfolding of two landscapes – contemporary Britain post-2016 and the countryside of the Marche in central, eastern Italy’ - represents complex parallel journeys. The leitmotif which runs through the first section of ‘all the bridges falling down’ and the epigraph to section two, a quotation from Canto 16 of Dante’s Paradiso in which cities pass out of existence through warfare or disease etc., offer hope. One must destroy in order to recreate, and even Time is not exempt from this process of regeneration.  

In a poem titled ‘can you imagine’ (for my children),’ the reader is invited to imagine a world in which ‘you carry me safely because the truth is / I’m no burden in your rucksack,’ no longer sharing the companionship of others, because ‘you find the bridges between us fallen down / and you mourn but you can imagine.’ The recurring metaphor of the fallen bridges, the disconnection and isolation in our lives portrayed less than a decade after Brexit are meant to disturb, hurt, confuse. We are no longer children and cannot create a world of our own. In our adult, increasingly global world, with technology that is meant to connect us, the world no longer makes sense. 

A poet, translator, reviewer and poetry blogger, Martyn Crucefix has won prizes for his poetry and translation. As a translator of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Laozi’s Daodejing, Huchel’s These Numbered Days, among others, Crucefix has been building bridges for those who want to cross the divide between cultures, countries, ways of seeing the world and each other. Words are bridges, language itself a bridge – yet we inhabit an increasingly complex world where loneliness and isolation are on the rise. In ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ an acceptance of this isolation is disconcerting: ‘you make a choice you go your own way … / because all the bridges are down.’ His understanding of the central role language plays in our lives, that creation of bridges between humans, is a fundamental aspect of his work.

The poems are packed with layers of meaning and references. If you get one reference, you many miss another. I had to look up ‘you make a choice you go your own way – / this has been better said before of course— / you cannot take the other way.’ To encounter references to Fleetwood Mac and Robert Frost in the space of three lines is not something familiar to me. Perhaps the unexpectedness of the juxtaposition is the key to our lives. Having grown up with English and American literature, I got the reference to Frost. Not that it matters if you get all the references as we are constantly reminded ‘all the bridges are down.’ The important thing is to enjoy the poems. Thankfully, not all the bridges are down all the time. ‘fifteen miles of traffic’ is also a brief meditation on the art of decision making in a world of AI and technology, where satnavs offer shortcuts which are nothing till they can be proven. 

The second section of poems, O, at the Edge of the Gorge, is a revised text of a sequence of fourteen linked sonnets, originally published in 2017. The sequence begins and ends with ‘carpenter bees,’ whose significance is not clear. Carpenter bees are traditionally considered solitary bees, though some species have simple social nests in which mothers, sisters, daughters may cohabit. I am not sure if their solitary character ultimately matters as ‘each lone speck’ vanishes ‘into the gorge as if headed home.’ 

In the final sonnet, the hawk’s resting place in the ‘shivering of poplars’ where he sways so that he is neither falling nor at ease with ‘these whisperings that cradle him on a whim’ is a powerful image of the transitory, even precarious aspect of life, including that of nations and civilizations. In the middle of all this, one encounters moments of realisation ‘in sharpening gusts along the valley floor / the little twister birthed from a scrap of air / whirling inches above a littered drain / in a back street of some hilltop town // like Urbisaglia or some place that has seen / and has survived change of use / from sacred temple to church to slaughterhouse / and no gully nor hill can stop it.’ In this uncertain, shifting world ‘great swathes of air’ gather strength to flex ‘all things to a scurrying to keep up / and the truth is some will and some will fail.’ In this inexorable move towards extinction, ‘perhaps he can build something on that–.’ But ‘it occurs to him the terrible shortness of time / remaining unless its vision involves / the hawk how soon the creature dies.’ These poems, offering no resolution, are powerful, understated, affecting. What emerges is an intense realisation of the fragility of our human condition. 

About the reviewer
Shanta Acharya’s recent poetry collections are What Survives Is The Singing (2020), Imagine: New and Selected Poems (2017) and Dreams That Spell The Light (2010). Her doctoral study, The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published in 2001 and her novel, A World Elsewhere, in 2015. Her eighth collection of poems is forthcoming in 2025. The author of twelve books, her poems, articles, and reviews have featured in various publications. Her website is here. 

You can read more about Between A Drowning Man by Martyn Crucefix on Creative Writing at Leicester here.

Review by Omar Sabbagh of "My Hummingbird Father" by Pascale Petit

In the later 1930s Ford Madox Ford was asked by one of his writing students, Robert Lowell, what the one essential need was for an aspiring writer. Ford said: "Memory." Oscar Wilde is famed for averring that life copies art, not the other way round. Both these insights are lived-out and lived-up-to in acclaimed poet Pascale Petit’s first novel, My Hummingbird Father.  

This is the story of the main protagonist, Dominique, a painter, and a story about the value of the imagination and its glorious inheritance. A story about how art redresses and redeems the seemingly insuperable vulnerabilities of being human. Indeed, to start: Chapter 29 of this compelling, moving book is titled "Two Dominiques," and my discussion centres on this doubleness, what Dominique thinks of at one point in the novel as "double exposure." 

In the "Prologue" we start with the "forest of perpetual childhood," "painting animals none have seen." Indeed, Petit as a poet is very well-known as a writer giving life and signifying sentience to the lives of and in the natural world, the rich and feral world of her good, longstanding wilderness. In this book, though we travel, transformatively, between her heroine, Dominique’s self-professed "blank childhood," her thinking of herself as having "died at six," her "forest of sleeping birds," "memories never to be remembered," and her later reconciliation with that fraught past. For she was also the girl through these traumas with "a crayon always in her hand," with a body that as this story fleshes out, "remembers her childhood," bodily (aesthetically), a woman for whom life itself comes through her canvases, "hungry for the truth."  And "hunger" is deeply apposite, in so far as it’s used both literally and figuratively in this novel, a novel replete with a rich and kaleidoscopic array of flora and fauna that act as both vehicles and tenors for how the tale is told. In short, this story is an adventure and a homecoming. A bad wilderness (Dominique’s harsh childhood) is exchanged through the process of daring to love again with a good one: she is loved and loving again in the Amazonian wilderness of the book’s final part, its "Epilogue."    

Architectonic aside, the lifegiving doubleness of this tale is also apparent in its style, a style much like the (mythopoetic) "rites" of passage of the Pemón people she visits in Venezuela, in her visits to the Amazonian wilderness. For instance, "Juan," her Amazonian guide, future lover, and future replacement for her now-dead father, can speak of his people dubbing rain "saliva of the stars," and (one of innumerable examples) Dominique can see her dying, breathless father later in the Amazonian trees, "a forest holding in its breath." The sensibility of the heroine (and/or her narrator) of this tale is oceanic, meaning all the elements of felt life, wild and tame and in between, interpenetrate continuously in its telling. The literal riches of wildlife described and descried also stand for and inhabit different metaphorical levels in the novel. This gesture of (freely) translating at least two levels of world is enacted on nearly every page: the Pemón speak of the "sky-forest" and the plain one, the "spirit world" and the "visible" one (like left and right hands), and via flashbacks and instinctual moves of involuntary memory, Dominique and her guiding narrator shuttlecock between literal, contemporary worlds and mythic and spiritual or imaginative ones, rendering this book in toto a paean to the empowering freedom of the imagination, epiphanic, transformative.  

Though hated by her (now-dead) mother, having a fractious relationship with her sister, Vero, bullied at school, near-suicidal later, Dominique’s primary antagonist is her father, whom she visits in the last few, dying years of his life, a man who had absconded from her childhood.  The "grey" Paris (of her childhood) Dominique visits is soon to be animated with colour, though, as much as the Notre-Dame she visits (which becomes "a new zoo") repeatedly, becomes a parallel of her Venezuelan wilderness. Two poles, again, but two welded in the end as one.

Her father is her hummingbird father. Another doubleness symbolizes here, too: the hummingbirds, we read, "pierce time itself." There are the cared-for hummingbirds (37 of them, Dominique’s age) of the ornithologist Augusto Ruschi and the deadened, heartless ones she finds among her father’s remains. Her father (abused in childhood, as Dominique was herself) represents the dead-end of temporality, a vicious cycle and re-cycling of immanent abuse – Dominique’s father averring at one point (ashamed) that one cannot change the past. The better hummingbirds represent the way that art and imagination can use the past as an opportunity for the future, redressing the beeline of mortality.

The overall imaginative vision behind this rich and compelling tale is both a concrete journey of transformation and, through the riches of its lucid, dramatic, highly evocative telling, an allegory about what art is for. The wilderness of our wounds and suffering can be transcended by the loving care of the imagination – not as escape, but as the distiller and giver of the essence of flourishing human well-being.

About the reviewer
Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer and critic.  His latest books are Y Knots: Short Fictions and For Echo (Cinnamon Press 2023 & 2024). Currently he teaches at the Lebanese American University (LAU).

You can read more about My Hummingbird Father by Pascale Petit on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Rennie Parker of "The Apothecary of Flight" by Jane Burn

I was glad to receive this collection for review, and it more than lives up to the promise of Burn's first collection, Be Feared, her magnificent debut in 2021. While the first gave the impression of a poet fiercely fighting her corner and stating her poetic vision, the second shows her heading into a richly pastured garden of Eden where the fruits of practice and observation are hers to gather and enjoy. Best of all, do it loud: "You must not whisper   or mutter   or skein  but stand / With your poem loud and like a beacon   in your hand." "Say it strong …"

These lines from the title poem pretty much outline the poet’s position and set up what the reader should expect over the next eighty pages or so, because Jane Burn does not exactly hold back with the talent and the fireworks. When you want language to be glorious, this is how it is -  although the poems are difficult to quote from, because the effect depends on a cumulative build and the poets’ extreme ability to become other states. She climbs inside an eighteenth-century jar, observes her horse, identifies with a bear, sees everyday miracles, wonders about clouds: she goes to the Laing Art Gallery and concludes "the sun goes down alone / and doesn’t seem to mind," with the visit becoming a reflection on loneliness and belonging. In many ways, it is the act of poetry which brings her into belonging: time and again comes the reminder that poetry has "saved" her, including a personal account of the time when "that" teacher (the Miss Moss we all needed) opened the door into verse.

Sometimes, poems which are an expression of Language veer towards word-factory fallout and the kind of experimentation which other poets have to leave in their notebooks -  for example, "metapoem / iteration (Dickinson, 568)," where a few more clues would have been helpful for the reader. But JB is a daring writer, and this is what we need in the poetry universe, even though the reader has to catch up fast. And I am not sure that the "Ocular Map" is different from other poets’ definitions of visual and concrete poems, although the Note on pp.94-96 would suggest it is so. Plenty of us out here are used to reading poems in alternative ways, Jane!

My main concern would be for the person who stands behind the poetry. I would hope that people are mindful of her development as she pours herself into the work. Why? Because the arts world is profligate in its disposal of artists who are genuinely different and/or original in some way, and she has already foregrounded her neurodiversity / class-based position from the word go. At what point does the appearance of neurodiversity in poetry travel beyond the reader and into the hall of mirrors where only the poet can find her way out? When will we concentrate on poets and poetry instead of the "class" they come from? Does it matter, as a way of pinning "work" onto a "person"? Burn writes the kind of poetry which excites critical debate, and I would hope it is for the right reasons.

I am sure The Apothecary will be on many peoples’ Books of the Year list already, and the titles alone are enough to sell it to readers -  "Pantoum to Maud’s Absolutely Brilliant Door" being just one of the titles which make me want to read it; meanwhile the lines sometimes have the shock of cold water as the poet exhorts us to "Raise your voice  Speak the clarity of ice." If your book budget is limited and you can’t buy many collections per year, make room for a Jane Burn.

           

About the reviewer
Rennie Parker's latest collection is Balloons and Stripey Trousers (Shoestring, 2023). She was born in Leeds but lives in south Lincolnshire, and currently works for an FE college. Blogs here, daily nonsense on Twitter @rennieparker.

You can read a review of Balloons and Stripey Trousers on Everybody's Reviewing here.