April Warman reviews Little Gods by Jacob Polley

‘Votive’, a poem that appears towards the end of Jacob Polley’s second collection, Little Gods, is typical of the book in a number of ways:

Day breaks the dark in two again.
The coal’s cold, the log lies blackened.
The exiled owl sleeps, one eye wide.

The same sun that charges the stones,
the same light exposing the veins
    of the leaves, falls
on my head and heats up my brain:
the thoughts that grow I give to you –

Imprisoned in the rain
    the animals dig!
How we’re all arranged
         like toys on tender legs!

The skilled, unobtrusive consonance that knits together the verse (‘The coal’s cold, the log lies blackened’) is something that reappears throughout the book; as is the clever creation of a sense of the uncanny, achieved through the subtle wrongness suggested in cold coal, and in an open-eyed sleeper (and even, for that matter, in the idea of eyes working independently of one another). The slightly crazed voice of the last stanza, with the manic emphasis of italics and exclamation marks, and the weird detail of ‘tender legs’, adds to this nightmarish quality, the strength of which nearly manages to gloss over another of the characteristic features of this poem: the fact that the (suggestively violent) image of the first line doesn’t actually make sense. I cannot think of a way in which sunrise can realistically be said to bisect darkness. Polley is liable to push for effect to the detriment of meaning.

But this poem is especially representative in its untrammelled (though not, in this case, particularly well founded) confidence in the value of whatever ‘thoughts’ might ‘grow’ in the poet’s mind. One of the dominant features of the collection is that it seems driven not by a desire to say anything, but by its speaker’s deep conviction that he is worth listening to.

This can work to the poems’ advantage. Little Gods contains a number of love poems, and where they work it is through their quality of wilful urgency, creating an almost Donne-like persona, determined to display the strength of his passion by his ability to bend all occasions to the expression of it. In ‘Brew’, the unremitting insistence on the self gives dramatic thrust to the poem’s clever transfigurations of the mundanities of tea-making. In such lines as, ‘I’m stewing your tea. Can’t you see / my heart’s steeped in it, honey?’, or ‘You warm your hands on the cup: see / how it breathes, how you throttle me?’, what could be slightly irritating exercises in the redeployment of vocabulary are redeemed by their combination with the insistent rhyming to reinforce the hectic self-centredness already apparent in the speaker’s pestering address.

‘Telephone’ similarly uses an unrelenting rhyme-scheme (every line rhymes, more or less, with the title) to evoke the obsession of its stalker-ish speaker, leaving the poem touched with the darkness that colours ‘Votive’. It has some excellent lines: ‘I tell her my house is full of her gone’ is a deceptively simple evocation of the effects of loss; the closing couplet finds a surprising expression for the spirit in which unwanted conversations can be ended: ‘I ask Are you glad you left me at home / She’s glad, and shuts me back in the phone.’ 

The wilfulness that underlies the collection also benefits the volume’s tendency towards what, for want of a better name, might be called horror poetry. Polley, as shown above, has a penchant, and a knack, for the unsettling, the out-of-joint, which is served well by his propensity to present his thoughts without explanation or apology. The weird frisson of, for example, ‘English Damside’, would be lost if anything in the poem owned up to its own idiosyncrasy:

The sun rises, the sun falls.
Rats run up and down the walls.
Mushrooms grow in amber rings.
Graveyards spread their marble wings

‘Mandrake’ is a disturbing fantasy in which a man kills his dog in order (I think) to release the mythical properties of the eponymous plant. The last stanzas are unpleasantly effective (‘My teeth sang as he tore in two’) in a way which could not be achieved without the narrator’s sociopathic inhumanity. The macabre mode is hardly an ambitious one, but Polley handles it with assurance.

However, many poems in the book do not present sufficient matter in themselves to justify the writerly bravado. Too many have the feel of pieces whose only raison d’être is their author’s self-image as a poet. ‘History’ provokes nothing more in me than surprise that the obvious is here considered so worth stating:

Here’s what lasts:
the buckles and pins,

the arrowheads
but not the shafts,

piss-pots, urns and epitaphs,
false teeth; graffiti.

Even poems which contain some excellent moments (and Polley does display, in places, an acute ear for metre and sound-patterning, and a rare gift for the suggestive image) tend not to have much of an overall purpose. The five seven-line stanzas of ‘Rain’ include the wonderful lines, ‘Rain’s inconsequence to the sea’, and, ‘A few pins drop then rain’s loosened like hair’, in both of which there is an enviable economy of expression, as different levels of import can be appreciated, but are never over-burdened; but the poem as a whole, an unstructured collage of rain-related thoughts, usually rather less striking than those quoted, could lose whole stanzas without missing them. ‘Sally Somewhere’, another of Polley’s spooky whimsies, contains among its catalogue of neglected domestic spaces some boldly composed phrases: ‘Washing-line, sink-side, bedside; / clear-sided cyclonic Dyson’s insides she tries’. But its attempt to make more of itself with a sententious last line (‘I say: Don’t you know what you’ve got’) actually betrays the eccentric texture of the poem itself, which would have been better, if unmitigatedly shapeless, left alone.

The fundamental tiresomeness of poems whose reading must be governed by accommodation to the self-will of the narrator is exposed by the moments in Little Gods when such wilfulness disappears. ‘At Home’, for example, has a light comedy which stands refreshingly alone, not needing the special pleading – it’s irritating because its dramatised persona is irritating – that is required to make other poems work:

Old Death, in slippers and a crocheted shawl, peels
spuds at the sink or ties beans to beanpoles.

The black cloak hangs by its hood in the hall.
The famished scythe whines through the tool-shed wall.

Little Gods shows Polley as a poet of notable technical flair, and an often fertile imagination; he lacks only in discernment as to which among the ‘thoughts that grow’ are likely to repay the employment of such talents.

 

Little Gods, Picador, £8.99, ISBN 9780330444200

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.