Matthew Sperling reviews three new collections from Stride

In the first of these three pocket-sized and luridly covered titles from Exeter’s Stride, Campbell McGrath is announced as ‘the most highly-honoured American poet of his generation’. The crucial word is ‘American’. The proper nouns given in these poems might make an American prose poem on their own: ‘Silt, Colorado… Mike… Denver… Utah… Las Vegas… Mojave, Baker, Barstow, Los Angeles’ – all of these in a single 15-line text which finds room along the way for ‘ski towns, mining towns… mountains… plateaus… cliff, gulch and guyot… five horses’ and four kinds of pie: ‘apple, cherry, coconut cream, lemon meringue’.

What becomes clear is that McGrath’s is a poetry of elaborately ordered or disordered stuff. The last sentence of this poem says ‘Silt is beyond me’, and might be an effective motto for a poetics continually trying to make a language which can do justice to the crude matter and sediment deposited by our phase of ‘late capitalism’, even where the insistence of such deposits might seem to fill out, obstruct or block potential channels. In a way the poems are most successful when the recalcitrance and resistance of these materials finds an appropriately strange and concrete language; the most attractive of the properties quoted above are surely ‘gulch’ and ‘guyot’, if only because the reader (this reader) doesn’t know what they are at first sight.

The hyper-banal might become the hyper-real through the back door of an old fashioned defamiliarization, these prose poems claim. But when a poem called ‘American Noise’ gives us ‘nighthawks of the twenty-four hour donut stores’ and other such gear from the junk-store of the American image-repository (long raided by British writers too: see Michael Hofmann’s ‘Nighthawks’, in Acrimony,for the same combination of Hopperish, Tom Waitsy snapshots), some heavy machinery of charm is needed for the poet to carry us with him. The unlikely thing is that McGrath often pulls it off: the eccentric taxonomies suggested by such BS-lyricism (that on-the-road air of shooting the breeze) often become genuinely sublime in their swaggering capaciousness:

protest rallies, rocket launches, traffic jams, swap meets; the Home Shopping Network hawking cubic zirconium; song of the chainsaw and the crack of the bat; wheels of progress and mastery;

[.]

with an eye for what blossoms, vetch and timothy, early forsythia, the fatted calf in the fallow field, the rabbit running for cover, the hawk’s descent in the lightning-struck tree.

That second quotation is from the book’s first poem, with the bold, bald title ‘The Prose Poem’, and a concern for types of boundedness and liminality which is analogous to the genre-investigations in the rest of the book.

Where McGrath airs his technical concern with the form explicitly, the poems in Joanne Merriam’s The Glaze from Breaking quietly call into question the boundary between prose poetry and lineated forms. The majority of the poems are written in what might either be, as one back-cover quote says, ‘long lines’ gathered into small groups, or else short prose paragraphs: the unjustified right-hand margin serves to leave this question open, so that the best of the poems can make use of the line-break as a technical resource, as in the third of Merriam’s ‘Eight Ways to Think About Happiness’:

To be insatiable. The only true way is to inhabit the skin of words, acne

scars and all; to erect temples to mouths and palaces to ears;

[...]

to behave as though you’ve contracted a virulent dis-

ease.

While ‘acne / scars’ introduces a time-delay in which ‘scars’ seems poised to become both noun and verb at once, ‘dis-//ease’, invoking the root-meaning ‘lack of ease’, unsettles the potential desire for an ‘easy’ passage of meaning with a wrench that makes light of its own uneasy eloquence. Looking back now, the word ‘virulent’ starts to seem more productively conflicted; the false-friendly root in virilis, manly, emerges to hint at a secondary level of suggestiveness on which the overall themes of this collection become clear. This is characteristic of the way in which the best of the poems and sequences in The Glaze from Breaking succeed: the implications of particular images shift and are clarified in time. The first sentence in the book tells us that ‘Theories of self can be demolished’, and the poems proceed to show subjective language rewriting itself, as where the word ‘breaking’ in the book’s title comes to inhabit many of its different senses at once (as in breaking up, breaking down, breaking away, breaking, and so on).

Keith Jafrate’s Songs for Eurydice is a long, nine-part poem of and for many voices. The blurb’s description of ‘a living myth… a way to connect to the deep roots of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice’ only partly corresponds to a text which seems not at all interested in story but in a modulated and musical progression of lyric measures. At times the indirections and repetitions of the verse can be frustrating, but it can also rise to passages of simplicity and power:

the sound of the broken spider imagined

as wholeness

not imperfection

or nostalgia for silk

the word of the broken weaver

thundering without term or deadline

forever in this poem

to sing it

If the first two titles reviewed were resolutely ‘talkies’, it is salutary to read Jafrate’s poems that insist so much – to the point of insisting too much – on ‘singing it’. Stride are to be congratulated on the range of their output.

Campbell McGrath, Heart of Anthracite (Stride, 2005), 99pp, £8.50.

Joanne Merriam, The Glaze from Breaking (Stride, 2005), 78pp, £7.50.

Keith Jafrate, Songs for Eurydice (Stride, 2004), 136pp, £9.50.

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.