David Wheatley reviews The Best Man That Ever Was by Annie Freud

‘I’m thinking of writing a film script about it’, Annie Freud writes in ‘The Villa’. Many contemporary poets, from Muldoon and Armitage to Joshua Clover and John Stammers, have embraced cinema as a narrative model, and Freud is happy to join in. Sassy poem titles, often bearing no relation to what follows, serve as the opening sequence. ‘We went to the cinema twice a day’ we read in the first poem, and she’s still there in the second, where it becomes the alibi for all ‘the many things’ the speaker ‘ought to do’ but doesn’t. A ‘she’ who can’t decide what to do with her ‘life lived in a lunch break’ will end up making a film ‘about an early time /before thought or cloth or pity or desire.’ Her many leading men might have wandered in from the nearest British rom-com, if that particular genre was remotely funny or literate, which, unlike Annie Freud, as a rule it’s not.

First books are a place to have fun, and as party invitations go The Best Man That Ever Was sounds like more fun than most. This is a book with oomph, the oomph of a speaker disdaining her ‘cucumber green’ vibrator for the robot she feels she should have bought instead, or of calling a poem ‘I Was the Manager of the Nipple Erectors.’ It doesn’t take large amounts of sleuthing to find trace-elements of Michael Donaghy and John Stammers behind Freud’s vein of picaresque urbanity, while another kindred spirit puts in an appearance in ‘Le Twelve o’Clock de Hugo Williams’ (though its car-keys can hardly belong to the famously motorbike-riding old dandy). ‘I Was the Manager of the Nipple Erectors’ is the kind of title no one will have used before, but since I’m in the business of sniffing out influences, the touch of quibbling precision in its last line, even down to the comma, is pure Armitage via Muldoon: ‘Alcohol was my drug of choice /but I never got impotent, /I talked better, I danced better. /I pissed the bed, twice.’

That ‘twice’ is a good example of Freud shifting the party mood towards something more poignant or fragile, a manoeuvre we see again in the insufficient consolations of a lover who has ‘nothing /to do with my depression’ or the ‘tears /that pool my eyes’ at the end of ‘The Green Vibrator’. The more hectic side of Freud’s work reminded me of James Wood on ‘hysterical realism’, a realism that ‘is not exactly magical realism, but magical realism’s next stop. It is characterised by a fear of silence (…) a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity.’ Freud’s dramatic tension comes from making us enjoy the party and see through it at the same time, while knowing that something dark awaits when everyone goes home and the lights go off. The bottom given a good thrashing in the title poem combines well-roundedness with slappability, and Freud too discovers that emotional roundedness may come at the price of a painful emotional slap.

Some poems don’t quite fit into this template, such as the delightful prose poem ‘To a Coat-Stand’, while in ‘The Small Mammal House’ the usual elements come off in a way that makes it seem an altogether more moving piece of work. The less successful poems are those that expire in weak jokes or lazy film references. If ‘show, don’t tell’ is a hackneyed old workshop rule by now, the closing poem ‘White’ breaks the related rule of ‘tell, don’t tell tell tell’ by frittering away its striking image (of Bob Peck in Edge of Darkness kissing his murdered daughter’s vibrator) by rewriting essentially the same first verse twice over.

Freud is a likable writer with a knack for happy-go-lucky narrative momentum. She writes with real gusto. The Best Man That Ever Was doesn’t always succeed in steering these narratives to a satisfactory conclusion, in a way that reminds me of the spin doctor’s joke about Gordon Brown: ‘The problem with Gordon is he’s all substance.’ If Freud trusted the substance to leak more into her style, her work could only benefit, in any number of unexpected ways.

On a wretchedly pedantic note, I feel obliged to point out that the plural of ‘vol au vent’ takes an s after the first, not the third word.

The Best Man That Ever Was, Picador, £8.99

David Wheatley is the author of Mocker (Gallery Press).

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.