Jane Holland reviews The Broken Word by Adam Foulds

Adam Foulds’ poetry debut, The Broken Word, is described by Cape as ‘a poetic sequence’, following a young British colonialist’s experience of the Mau Mau uprising in 1950s Kenya. It reads more like a poem-novel than a sequence, however, and is certainly novelistic in intent. A poetic sequence consists of a number of typically shortish poems linked by theme. The Broken Word is a long narrative piece presented in headed sections, with little effort being made to avoid the prosaic: ‘What Was Happening’; ‘Dinner (1)’; ‘Dinner (2)’; ‘Who Were These People?’

Not the stuff of great Homeric epic then, but clearly a nod to the anti-poetic, and while plenty of Foulds’ line-breaks are apposite, many appear curiously random: ‘Tom tucked his hot gun/into his waistband to be able/to shake their hands.’ There is an unfortunate dearth of imagery, a point to which I’ll return later, and plot too often takes precedence over poetry:

Talk was of Frank Grayson and Charles Hewitt,
the two old boys who dined together,
clobbered by their servants,
just absolutely butchered.

To begin a poetic career with a long poem demonstrates a pleasing ambition, and to take on such a difficult, emotive topic underlines that. Adam Foulds wants to be noticed, and for a certain kind of heavy-weight politicised writing, adopting a stance inspired perhaps by poetry veteran Craig Raine, whose advice Foulds publicly acknowledges and in whose combative arts magazine, Arete, this poem was first serialised.

The story itself is gripping, seen almost entirely through Tom’s eyes, an idealistic young Brit swept up in the Mau Mau uprising. It’s also deeply unpleasant, exploring the horrors of racism and colonial exploitation. This poem encompasses rape, murder, mental torment, and the most brutal physical tortures imaginable. But it’s a hard act to maintain. In particular, its intense eye-witness focus is diluted when the narrative swerves to accommodate two incidents outside the main thrust of the story: a rape during the uprising, and an apparent ‘murder’.

Presumably realising that the reader’s sympathy for Tom will be lost if he commits a rape, Foulds abruptly switches narrative viewpoints to Prior, one of the more hardened young colonialists, for this first problematic incident:

After one good slap that salted her mouth
she was compliant, only
repeating some phrase over
and over, like a bird’s stupid song.

The description by Prior feels unnecessarily lengthy and graphic - ‘her buttocks greasy, cold against his belly/ ... her dry hole burning him’ - and immediately after his casual post-coital cigarette, Foulds returns the viewpoint to Tom. Tom himself may not have even witnessed this rape but the seeds have been sown in the reader’s mind here. Later, when he attempts to have sex without his girlfriend’s consent, ‘getting as far as her underwear’ - this is the 1950s, remember - that earlier terrible rape is recalled in their undignified struggle: ‘He kept his hand there,/using his strength.’ 

The second distracting incident is a trompe-l’oeil piece of writing. It shifts from a description of Tom translating Homer in his university library with apparent satisfaction to suddenly beating his tutor to death with a coal shovel:

The tutor defended with vague, slender hands.
What on earth are you doing?
leaking dinges in his skull,
eyes clouding, Tom athletically
rendering him down until
the whole study was laquered red ...

Perhaps obvious out of context that this apparent murder turns out to be ‘just a dream’. But after the horrors of the uprising, anything feels possible. At the same time, it raises questions of authenticity and trust. 

To return to a lack of effective imagery, this is the one flaw most likely to leave The Broken Word open to accusations of not being a poem at all. When describing brutal acts of war, Foulds tends to shy away from anything but the most prosaic statements. Though his use of language is occasionally apposite and arresting; here, catching a Kenyan prisoner escaping from a PoW camp, Tom

... forgot his training
and beat him
not with the butt but the barrel of his gun.
He swung and swung
across the breaking stave
of the man’s forearms and collar bone

‘Stave’ used as a noun has several meanings, including the rung of a ladder, or a stanza or verse; it is also a verb, meaning to crush or knock out of shape. But such interesting metaphorical usage is not frequent enough.

In a similar incident later on, Tom kills another prisoner to save him from being tortured: ‘A Home Guard pulled him to his feet/and Tom quickly drew his pistol./Like slapping a toy from his hands, he shot him through the head.’ The over-use of ‘his’ and ‘him’ here confuses the sense, and the slapped toy simile must border on bathos in this context. The writing feels rushed, just when slow-motion might have been more effective. Yet when Foulds does attempt more detailed descriptions, the writing suffers: ‘He sipped tea, felt it rush/around his teeth, and recommenced/with a lawyerly, factual, frangible calm.’

In spite of its flaws, there is much that is memorable about The Broken Word. It asks those big tough questions we tend to avoid nowadays, such as ‘what is a proper subject for a poem?’ or ‘can poetry be political without losing out on craft?’ As for the answers in this particular case, Adam Foulds may be a committed young writer but I am not convinced that the best medium for this particular story was the long poem.

The Broken Word, Adam Foulds. Cape, £9.00. ISBN: 978-0-224-08444-4

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.