Review by Maria Taylor of "Ambush at Still Lake" by Caroline Bird

It’s been said that humour often comes from a serious place. That concept can be easily applied to Caroline Bird’s Ambush at Still Lake. Themes such as parenthood, marriage, addiction and recovery are turned on their head in Bird’s surreal and animated collection of poems. In Bird’s prose poem ‘The Addict Impersonator Contest,’ addiction itself is quite literally turned on its head: 

                                                                                               True self-hate
          Takes years to master like the Handstand Scorpion Pose in yoga, or
          Jazz drumming…

The humour here is wry, perhaps even uncomfortable, but  it also dances with the truth. The poem ends with a distortion of the speaker’s mimicked addiction with real-life hurt. I felt the irony of the judges’ description of it being ‘the realest routine they’d ever seen’ and felt the punch of ‘Mum and Dad crying with pride.’ Bird understands how humour and tragedy cause friction when woven together. There’s an intuitive awareness of this that often has startling results. 

Throughout the collection, rich images and strange confessions jump out at you. Experiencing a Bird poem requires a suspension of disbelief which I was more than happy to go along with. We live in a strange and complex world and Bird’s poems allow us to navigate the strangeness in an engrossing, vivid way. In ‘Starter Marriage,’ for instance, the speaker in the poem invites everyone to their wedding, including a BT Operator who kept them on hold for ‘forty minutes in 2007.’ Is Bird perchance saying that we live in a society in which most individual relationships are based on shallow connections – or is it just straight-up funny? Or both? What I especially like about Bird’s poems is the reluctance to come up with answers. Instead the speaker and the phone operator dance together, ‘reminiscing / under a marquee of stars,’ to what else but the ‘synthesised’ tune of Greensleeves that brought them together. 

In ‘The Baby Monitor,’ a sinister scenario occurs when a baby monitor becomes a living being, long after the actual baby has grown into a child at ‘preschool.’ There is something universal about the monitor itself being an object parents fixate on – and perhaps that stress never goes away:

                I sat through parents’ evening
          Like a killer in the dock, Knowing
          The monitor was home alone 
          Crying to an empty room.

For all the humour here, it’s also surprisingly chilling! 

Bird’s poems have a spontaneous feel, as if they’ve sprung from a place where humour and pain co-exist. Perhaps when someone has been through a great deal, they appreciate that the so called ‘happy ever after’ of marriage is not a wholly trustworthy thing. In the collection’s title poem, ‘Ambush at Still Lake,’ it’s the placid lake itself which offers an answer of sorts to the manic nature of life: ‘We carry on / dying forever, always almost home.’ 

About the reviewer
Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet and reviewer. Her latest collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press). Her debut collection of poetry, Melanchrini, was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. She has been published widely, including poems and reviews in The Guardian, Magma and The Times Literary Supplement. She has been highly commended in the UK Forward Prizes for poetry. She also works as Reviews Editor for Under the Radar. 

Review by Maria Taylor of "Grief's Alphabet" by Carrie Etter

At its heart, Carrie Etter’s fifth collection Grief’s Alphabet poignantly explores the loss of the poet’s mother and describes the impact of bereavement. Yet Etter’s collection is also as much about death’s antithesis – it is a celebration of life and the love which binds parents and children. 

This is not a collection which shies away from the painful aspects of grief. Etter’s poems have a piercing clarity about the rawness and truth of grieving that I admired very much. In terms of form, there are a great many prose poems and pieces which work with the white space of the page. In "The Last Photograph," Etter works with the "golden shovel" form to recreate a poignant moment between mother and daughter:

"Smile" I said, positioning the camera for
the last time. You turned slowly; you
struggled to smile, the lamplight a halo, cultivation
of a minor saint. 

The poem is accompanied by a photo of "Modie," Etter’s affectionate name for her mother. I found myself going between reading the poem and looking at the photo and thinking about how "the strength" Etter’s mother took to "lift her face" is a key image in terms of describing the final shot. Etter is unafraid at exploring the more difficult aspects of grief, those in which the grievers somehow blame themselves for the pain of the final days: "Blame this photo on the love or the / selfishness of daughters before they meet the dark."

Etter’s poems have a pinpointed quality at placing the reader in the immediacy of the moment. In "Homing," Etter writes about a trip to see her mother, where the pair are reunited and their close relationship is instantly rekindled: "If rain fell, we lingered, enchanted in the rooms where it could best be heard." The "rain" here works as a cocoon, a natural shield in which mother and daughter enjoy a comfortable companionship: "… we talked like this for days. I was that red cardinal on the white lawn, easy in brightness, except I was two: we."

Grief is often bittersweet; interspersed in this collection are poems of deep love. "An Adoption in 360°" takes us back to the beginning of the "two" as mentioned above, becoming "we." There is something incredibly tender in how the poet describes the day of adoption:

From the front, she carries a swaddled infant,
And both the man and woman’s bodies curve to shield it,
Though it is April in Illinois and the day mild.

From either side the three are one. 

I loved this collection. I found it compelling and have already read many of the poems several times. The inclusion of photographs also heightened my relationship with the poems. Etter has succeeded in writing a deeply personal collection, which at the same time is notable for its lyrical precision and variety of poetic styles when thinking about grief in all its different guises.  Grief’s Alphabet is a deeply memorable and evocative poetic tribute. 

About the reviewer
Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet and reviewer. Her latest collection is Dressing for the Afterlife (Nine Arches Press). She has been highly commended in the UK Forward Prizes for poetry. She also works as Reviews Editor for Under the Radar.

You can read more about Grief's Alphabet on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Review by Sarah James of "Dressing for the Afterlife" by Maria Taylor

Even just a few poems into Maria Taylor’s Dressing for the Afterlife, I realise there are many options for how to approach this collection, many themes and threads that I can trace through it.

The opening ‘Prologue’ gives us dressing for the afterlife as learning to 'breathe again,' having stepped into the moment where 'you ended a former existence / and zipped yourself into the unknown.'

The examples of possible outfits to wear hint at the poems to come, as does the opening poem ‘She Ran’ with its list of things run past, the poet having taken up running at the age of forty. This culminates, as summer turns to autumn, with:

          I couldn’t get as far as I wanted.
          The lights changed. My ribs, my flaming heart
          and my tired, tired body burned.

In many ways, the following similarly beautifully pared, moving (and also at times humorous) poems enact and extend this opening, taking the reader through personal past experiences. Some read like the poet’s own; others feature advice, adopted voices and celebrity lives. The book closes with a counterpart to the opening poem ‘Woman Running Alone.’

Afterlife here is not what happens after death but the afterlives within this life, especially women as they age. 

          In summer I was a night-blooming flower.
          By autumn I was a hangover. Winter made me
          a Wall-Street Crash.

I used the word ‘personal’ earlier but this collection is personal in a universal sense, borrowing others’ clothes (experiences) and drawing out wider similarities and significances. This poem, 'I Began the Twenty-Twenties as a Silent Film Goddess,' is a film star talking (in industry terms), but it’s the continuing experience too of many other women now.

For me, Dressing for the Afterlife is also about finding, or reinventing, an individual’s sense of ‘self’ against this and many other backgrounds.

          I trespassed.
          At night I found myself ice-skating
          into someone else’s life.

I can read this poem ('Awake in His Castle') in a Bluebeard sense, but I feel it also chimes at a real life level – in trying to establish and make sense of individual identity, power dynamics and dangers at play all around us.

Another reading of the collection, not unconnected to that above and completely fitting with running, is the sense of everything in continuous flow. Water is a recurring image. 

‘The Floating Woman’ is a memorial to Lauren Stephen, half-sister of Virginia Woolf. The poignant Ophelia-like imagery has death / suicide as a sense of ‘returning’ to water, and life as rivers poured over the narrator. Everything feels fluid, form-changing, transient. This also applies to language: 'how every word / turned into water.'

Meanwhile, in 'The Fields,' 'rain dissolves / a  landscape you thought familiar' and the poem observes 'your place in this world an ever-shifting thing.'

Flow is present too in life’s dance and our steps of learning: 'We dance to learn about a part of ourselves / books can’t teach; it’s what our parents expect' (‘Learning the Steps’). In this case, that includes the moves of old island lives and leaping like salmon (water and flow), 'trying to catch scent of home, / as music pours through speakers like flood.'

It’s also in the passing and nature of time:

         People vanish into thin air every single day,
         even ghosts fade in time ….
         You’re no different. Look, here’s your own reflection.

More than this though, it’s in the pace of the lines, the use of recurring motifs, choices of line-breaks and punctuation, including the end of ‘Mr. Alessi Cuts the Grass.’ Here, a noise like a neighbour pushing 'something larger than dreams / over concrete' expands into a whole poem that ends on the full-flow leaving open of all possibilities of 'but for a moment –'

That the final poem of the collection ends with a similar dash is even more significant in these terms, as well as inviting the reader to re-submerge themselves in the collection, re-reading for more possibilities.  

Other strong elements for me in Dressing for the Afterlife include romantic hopes and family love, and with them the sense of belonging, or not belonging (as present in some of the poems already quoted).

In ‘The Distance,’ the narrator’s family can’t get the hang of England, as lives are scattered into flats, people calling to each other from balconies instead of olive groves:

         Years later I throw open my windows to rain
         knowing my aunt’s echoes won’t travel the distance,
         I’m here, I say to water, can’t you shout any louder?

Meanwhile, in ‘Role Model,’ famous and seemingly glamorous potential role models are rejected for the woman next-door with 'a walk that says I know where I’m going.' 

And yes, all these loop back and together with the elements of water, dance steps, the essence of ‘self,’ the nature of life, society and time: 'Maybe time moves like a figure of eight, / surging forwards then back on itself' (‘Loop’).

That poetry can, maybe even has to, exist outside of time is evident hopefully in the scope of what I’ve already quoted. Imagination does too and this is inherent in many of Taylor’s poems here, including those that place deft light-hearted observations side by side with sharper emotional insights and lines.

In ‘Hypothetical,’ the 'conversational frolic' of a friend asking the narrator if they’d sleep with Daniel Craig is a wonderfully humorous poem. But it also speaks to the nature of the world we live in with its sometimes obsession with celebrity-status and lives turned into public drama.  ‘How to Survive a Disaster Movie’ is similarly deliciously light-toned yet profoundly chilling. 

These are some of the ways I have read this collection. The beauty of strong poems is that they leave space for the reader to find their own truths in them, having given the images, ideas and narratives to do this with. This sense of multiplicity of paths and routes – in life, identity and reading – is most explicit in ‘Choose Your Own Adventure,’ another poem that is simultaneously funny and heart / dream-breaking.

Reading and re-reading Dressing for the Afterlife, I’m struck by new and different striking images, lines and resonances. Each time, now matter how deep these may cut, I come away with a sense too of exhilaration, much like the woman of the closing poem:

          The rhythm fills her with flight – 
                                            and her wings,
                                                   what wings she has –                             

About the reviewer
Sarah James/Leavesley is a poet, fiction writer, journalist, photographer and editor, who also runs V. Press poetry and flash fiction imprint. Her latest project is an Arts Council England funded multimedia hypertext poetry narrative > Room. Website: www.sarah-james.co.uk.

Favourite Reads of 2017

At the end of 2017, we asked readers to nominate a favourite read of the year, and write a one-sentence review of their chosen book. The book could be from any time or genre - the only qualification was that it had to be a book the reader found particularly memorable, striking or enjoyable during the last twelve months. Here are the responses we received. Wishing everyone a happy new year of reading and books!


Barbara Cooke 

The Bees by Laline Paull: "1984 in a hive, with more eco-criticism, and a happier ending."

Laurie Cusack

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack: "It made me shiver with joy; should’ve won the Booker by a country mile!"

Sharon Eckman

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman: "long-awaited, every bit as wonderful as hoped for ... Glorious."

Peter Flack 

This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell: "Life and love on a one track train line that eventually passes everywhere."

Simon King

The Little Demon by Fyodor Sologub: "Early twentieth-century Russian writing of the cruel and satirical kind, this tale of a sadistic and insecure provincial schoolmaster is as black as a diseased lung."

Kevan Manwaring 

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead: "Boldly genre-bending, defiantly imaginative, and beautifully-crafted, it seems eerily resonant - a novel about an alternative past that is really about now." 

Alexandros Plasatis

The Complete Short Stories by James Purdy: "A sensitive observer, his prose is gentle and, when needed, fierce."

Robert Richardson

The Road by Cormac McCarthy: "The magnificent 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner has a setting of the terrifying aftermath of environmental disaster while still affirming humanity."

Jonathan Taylor

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway: "a masterpiece of storytelling. You feel like you're there, on the boat, with the old man."

Maria Taylor 

Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: "I have nothing more to say than I loved reading this book." 

Miranda Taylor (aged 9)

Toto the Ninja Cat by Dermot O'Leary: "because it's fun and silly. It was fun to read and it took me only two days."

Rosalind Taylor (aged 9)

Rabbityness by Jo Empson "because it's my favourite book of all time."

Paul Taylor-McCartney 

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: "A heart-rending and life-affirming journey into that purgatorial space between knowable historical fact and extreme creative invention."  

Harry Whitehead

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: "for making me see that industrial farming is the 'greatest crime in history' - now what the hell am I to do?"

Review by Karen Powell of "Instructions for Making Me" by Maria Taylor

Instructions for Making Me is the intriguing title of Maria Taylor’s pamphlet which has been beautifully published by HappenStance. Her poems skip across times, places, emotions, and the reader is quickly immersed in each one. A few of her poems have a dreamlike quality and give rise to a sense of uncertainty, whilst others have more familiar themes. My particular favourites are ‘Not about Hollywood’, ‘The Pavilion’ and ‘The Vale’.


In ‘Not about Hollywood’ the tension in the waiting room is almost tangible as the focus moves between illness, life savings, and film premieres. There is also a sense of acceptance: ‘ My mother’s seen it all. I was born / into melodrama.’ The reality of the situation reappears as ‘His step falters. We tell him not to worry / as his name flashes in blood-red lights.’


Maria Taylor’s skill in creating an atmosphere in each poem continues in ‘The Pavilion’ where we can watch the bowls ‘bumping politely into another’, and hear ‘the soft ceramic chink’. The poem ends with the poignant image of her widowed grandmother (yiayia) who ‘rounded up chaos like a sheepdog / and raised six children.’


‘The Vale’ evokes teenage memories of feeling invincible with that it’ll-never-happen-to-me naivety until the sudden realisation of vulnerability: ‘It’s always like this, till one day’ even though ‘You’ve done nothing wrong.’ The simplicity of the final lines perfectly captures that breathless blend of fear and relief: ‘and you’re walking / you just keep walking’.


Maria Taylor blogs at http://miskinataylor.blogspot.co.uk/


About the reviewer
Karen Powell lives and works in Leicester. Her poetry has been published in Welcome to Leicester, soundswrite 2015, and various magazines including The Interpreter’s House, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Lake. http://karenpowellnotebook.wordpress.com/

Maria and The Mullet, Upstairs at the Western: Reviewed by Charles Wheeler

This review is late. Even later than I was to the event itself. But while my lateness on 3rd October gained me nothing but a few disapproving glances as my awkward search for a seat undermined the enchanting atmosphere of the Western's hidden-gem attic venue, the lateness of this piece has proven useful, providing me with glorious, enriching, relevance-granting context. How fortunate for me.

Y'see, in the weeks since this event (during which I moved house, started a new job, and tripled the amount of pets I own - legitimate excuses to go alongside my myriad apologies to the unreasonably patient Jonathan Taylor), Leicester, host city of Everybody's Reading, City of Culture contender, and my dear, dear hometown, found itself the centre of what I'm told is "controversy", which we know by now to be a synonym for "a ham-fisted Channel 4 documentary". Make Leicester British raised plenty of ire for plenty of valid reasons, and one of the most common seemed to be that people from Leicester simply didn't recognise the city being shown to them. I was one of those people, and as I watched the hopelessly contrived 90-minute bigot-baiting session unfold, I couldn't help musing on the stark contrast between what some TV producers had decided to make some people from Leicester do in a room, and what some other people in a room in Leicester a few weeks earlier had done for themselves.

I found my seat. Shruti Chauhan was on stage already, launching into a heartstring-pulling account of social media-age romance, posing huge, world-shaking questions of self-worth and self-care in a new, commodified dating scene, hitting cultural touchstones that resonated with the world I know from friends, from life, from Twitter. Other pieces spoke of a life I hadn't lived but that I knew from friends and colleagues. Here was a poet speaking truths I recognised, illuminating experiences I've seen transpire around me. Here was artistic and cultural kinship, happening starkly and obviously for one of the first times I can remember. Channel 4 would presumably prefer Shruti and I to be having a challenging discussion about whether we should even be from the same city.

Mere minutes later, we arrived at our first headline act (oops, I was late). Maria Taylor's work, whether on page or in person, is near impossible to summarise, and that's a case of quality as much as quantity. While her observational scope is undeniably massive, it's the detail with which she attends her subject matter that truly impresses. Jumping effortlessly between diverse ideas, Taylor led us by the hand through ever-changing worlds, never once letting us feel alienated, always hitting home. She is a singular poet and a natural, organic performer.

Post-interval (feat. free cakes! Who could possibly object?), James Mcatear and Jitendra Bhatt presented a set of music-verse collaborations that were both delightfully indulgent and grounded in salt-of-the-Earth charm. I'll stop short of saying "only in Leicester", but if multiculturalism is apparently failing, it's doing so with style, heart and a deceptive amount of success round these parts.

Between all this, compère Lydia Towsey held the evening together in her inimitable style, a whirlwind of personality that can be described as "quirky" if one doesn't mind things being described in woefully inadequate terms. Her offbeat humour made for a perfect backdrop to the acts, but was revealed to be little more than sly disarmament towards the end of the night, as she blew the entire room away with a stunning ukelele-led epic poem about her grandfather's experiences in the war.

And so it was on to the veteran, Andrew 'Mulletproof' Graves, to close proceedings. Moving quickly from wry self-deprecation to wry deprecation of pretty much everything else, Graves is nothing short of a spectacle when mid-performance. With a slickness, easy charisma and hyper-assured delivery of culturally cutting pieces, he is nothing short of a consummate professional who somehow manages to remain a hundred times more relevant and believable than any consummate professional should ever be able to.

But while Graves is sharp, and cuts deep, his touch is every bit as deft as the acts around him on this night - and crucially, it leaves them unmarked. Every act who took the stage at Maria and the Mullet managed strikes to the hearts of their various and just issues with the world, but none ever came close to treading on the others' toes. These commentaries, these experiences, sat alongside each other - not in harmony, but in glorious intersecting solidarity.

If it seems trite to suggest that art will bring us together, it's still better than the implicit insistence that diversity will tear us apart. Whether expressed through creativity, commentary or simply conversation, whether integrated with each other or presented in worthy, safe single-issue spaces, it is the voicing of people's lived realities wherein deeper, more engaged understanding is fostered. Maria and the Mullet was a microcosm of Leicester, and was more representative than any unwieldy attempt to "make" Leicester anything.

And that, surely, is as good an argument as any to get everybody both reading and reviewing.

A Joiner Shows Us the Clues: Review by Rebecca Bird of "Melanchrini" by Maria Taylor

Maria Taylor’s debut collection Melanchrini is the music of archaeology. She digs deep trenches in the right places, uncovers the right amount of dust and earth, knows the histories and peculiarities of her subjects, yet finds inevitably that these past peoples – embedded as memories in her poetry – have been living deficient: missing something from their lives. Maria Taylor has an assured and informed grasp on this nature of absence, of departure, of death and importantly, of not-quite-yet and such excavation, we get true lyrical glimpses at the underside of normal and how the impact of ‘not-having’ resonates throughout ordinary lives.

The entire first section illuminates ‘not-having’ with family and personal memory. ‘Outside’ offers a stunning lyric about pregnancy and the expectation of birth: ‘I stroke your head through my flesh/the moon curve of you.’

‘At Her Grandmother’s Table’, almost a cold opening, references morning coffee over the years and the participants now long gone: ‘your grandfather hushed and stormless’ is a typical Taylor usage, similar to ‘unhistoried’ ('99/2000') and ‘unfathered’ ('Folk Tale') in that it implies something that is lost that can perhaps never be retrieved, or righted.

‘Par Avion’, an ode to air mail, lingers on homesickness as ‘an open wound’ and she seemingly lampshades these 'lost' themes in her work with the stanza:

Faces, half-recalled, revived by pen:
sisters getting married, fathers always busy,
babies getting born, you missing.
 

Taylor has a very self-aware, authoritative voice and it is striking to see how complete this collection is to itself. Although I cannot work out why the three sections to the book have been ordered so, there isn’t a single poem that does not belong. Put that down to a decent editor and a hard-working author.

Taylor does have a tendency to revisit ideas: ‘I keep my knees shut’ ('Thea') and ‘That I should keep my knees together’ ('Three Things I Learnt In Church') for example, but in the context of the collection as a whole, this works. It creates a fullness: too many collections of poetry turn out to be collections of poems. Not this one. Taylor creates big, beefy images, which sustain and keep you full until dinnertime.

The hit of the collection, for me, is ‘I Woke Into Birth’. It serves as the pinnacle of Taylor’s mastery of line-control and structure:

as if surgeons were washing up in the bowl of my womb
as if I were a matryoshka, exposing lathed children
as if a hunter had slit the belly of a doe to reveal butterflies’

I returned to this poem considerably during my inhalation of this book. All poets are at some point taught to not use too many images within a poem, as it leads to a kind of metaphor saturation which makes the writing inaccessible. This poem, perhaps in itself, taught me that if you have control over your structure and control over relevance, you can arrive anywhere you want to in a poem and let the reader look out the windows. It is Taylor's control within the line that means that the poem doesn't dry out from the weight of metaphor: everything that needs to be examined in a particular line is examined.

And it is this line-control that makes it the book. Pound would have it that poetry begins to atrophy when it is too far from music. I think Taylor would agree because she blends keen rhythm and timbre with informed verse and it is so akin to when good rock bands start bothering with their lyrics. She has a bass player in the walls of her writing hand.
Her poem ‘The Language of Slamming Doors’ could represent the collection, in that that she herself is a ‘joiner pointing out the scars’ of an old, empty house. She knows every bad floorboard, every secret passage. And she wants to show you.

Melanchrini is available from Nine Arches Press.

About the reviewer
Rebecca Bird was born in 1991 and is the editor of Hinterland. She has been published in magazines including The Rialto, The Interpreter's House and Envoi. She currently lives and works in Guildford.

The Chemistry of Holding: Review by Maria Taylor of "Nitrate"

This review was first published in Under the Radar Magazine, published by Nine Arches Press.

 

 

 

 
 Nitrate by Simon Perril (Salt, 2010), reviewed by Maria Taylor

The history of cinema began with an antivivisectionist. The French physiologist E. J. Marey wanted to understand the rudiments of movement without physically tampering with the living creatures he was studying. He invented the chronophotographic gun, an instrument which didn’t hurt flesh but instead captured time and space. The gun itself was actually a camera, capable of taking twelve photos a second - a device which, rather than compromising skin, fur or feather, could only ‘graze the skin of space,’ as Simon Perril puts it in his new collection Nitrate.

 

Nitrate is a collection born out of Perril’s interest in the birth of cinema and Marey’s work. Perril himself has described the collection as ‘idiosyncratic’; he does not write of actors or Hollywood glamour, but instead deals with the mechanics of early film and the constituents of which it was made: ‘bladders, putty, collodion.’ He is also interested in the scientific processes used to keep the image on the frame, what he calls ‘the chemistry of holding.’  In particular, Perril is intrigued by the notion of the still, as well as the moments in between these images that Marey couldn’t capture:

           

I reached The Intermission

fallen through a here-shaped hole.

The minutes pile up like snowflakes.

 

‘Here-shaped’ would be a good way of describing Nitrate; since many of his poems are concerned with the static rather than the mutable. In ‘Death by Snowflake,’ not only are there more snowflakes, but also inertia and the relentless nothingness of nothing:

           

The minutes cover a man

like snowflakes

                       

lost on impact, skin

thinks nothing

             

Marey’s experiments in the 1890s fortuitously collided with the arrival of the moving image; with his chronophotographic gun he’d inadvertently invented the ‘shot.’ Of course the term still exists and Perril pays homage to Marey in ‘The End of Portraiture.’ Here, Perril considers ‘photography’s slow thaw’ from static freeze to movement. He is concerned with the concept of that ‘thaw,’ when the still wings of a bird assume movement on the ‘lunar slither’ of photographic film. No accident perhaps then that the front cover of Nitrate features a collage by the poet himself of a camera being destroyed - or perhaps vivisected - to show the release of birds from within.

 

Which brings us to the title, Nitrate: Cellulose nitrate was the substance used as a film base in early cinema photography. It had one significant drawback in that it was highly flammable, so much so that the US Navy showed trainee film projectionists warning films of nitrate reels on fire even when they were fully submerged in water. Perril describes ‘the nitrate symphony / glinting incandescent / for an age / learning to dissolve. ‘And yet collodion was also used in early film, a substance which in liquid form was used for dressing wounds. The irony of early film having healing and destructive properties emerges as a significant theme, as evinced in ‘Succession’:

           

Each time we talk of the ‘shot’

a glass plate drops: pieces of photo, gun cotton collodion

continually dressing the wound

leaking frames.

 

There is an implicit appreciation here that the materials used to capture film have their own inherent life and purpose like the images they depict. The beauty of this poetry is its immediacy and its ability to crystallise language. The poet’s skill is in achieving directness and economy, there is nothing superfluous here: ‘flux-wrapped / wave-swept / pulse thwacked.’ Perril succeeds in balancing delicacy with punch.

 

The collection is divided into three parts: Nitrate, The Intermission and Forward. The second of these, The Intermission, is Perril’s attempt to capture ‘lost time,’ the moments in between Marey’s shots, ‘an enforced intermission in which we’re waiting for our lives to begin’. These poems are much more personal and have a ‘lived-in’ feel whilst still retaining the cinematic themes of the collection itself:

 

The idea of cinema

in the mind of a painting,

 

my daughter puts small objects to bed

they dream

 

the idea of audience

in the mind of a poem.

 

There is here a more domestic, dreamier outlook on the notion of the still, whereby inanimate objects somehow conjure themselves into life. In Perril’s hands, the poem similarly conjures itself into life:

           

The radioactive weaponry of the poem

comes to life; the fructification of nothing

 

Echoing Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen,’ Nitrate could be seen as a comment on the beauty, intricacy and nothingness of art.

 

 

About the reviewer

Maria Taylor is a Leicestershire-based poet. Her debut collection, Melanchrini, was published by Nine Arches Press in Summer 2012, and was subsequently shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. Her writing has been published in The North, The Guardian, The TLS, Staple and others. She blogs at http://miskinataylor.blogspot.co.uk/