April Warman reviews Demolition by Neil Rollinson

With his first two collections, A Spillage of Mercury (1996) and Spanish Fly (2001), Neil Rollinson began creating a niche for himself as a poet of unashamed masculinity. Demolition continues the project: there are poems here on many conventionally ‘male’ topics: football (of course), a fighter plane, betting (dignified by association with chaos theory – Rollinson has a penchant for slipping in a smidgeon of science), cricket, computers, the death of his father (so often a fertile topic for male poets), and above all, sex.

The sexual poems provide some of the collection’s best points, where the masculinity seems most truly ‘unashamed’: that is, unself-conscious, a product of the speaker’s individual nature, rather than of a stagy engagement with social norms. ‘Wildlife’, for example, is a poem of the male gaze, as a tattooist meditates on a regular client, imagining the experience of her lover: ‘The journeys he takes. / The stories he finds in her skin.’ This could easily have been unpleasant: to position a woman as the link between two appreciative men is a risky undertaking, but Rollinson’s poem is inoffensive largely because it doesn’t pretend to be doing anything else or more. A couple of poems, ‘Belt’ and ‘Kiss’, are refreshing in their reversal of conventional gender relations: their speakers are subject to women’s caprice and control, that of ‘Belt’ abruptly finding himself with ‘the loop of her belt / around my neck, the cold brass buckle / tight against my throat’.

These poems, in their lack of pretension, do seem to find their own way through the mass of convention and mystification that surrounds the representation of sex: others, sadly, do not. ‘Gift’ has the makings of an edgy, discomfiting poem: the speaker ‘stand[s] in the dark garden and watch[es] / as the neighbour’s daughter, unclothed / and just sixteen, combs her long red hair.’ The careful self-exculpation that works to excuse frank enjoyment of this ‘sudden gift’ (‘I daren’t move / or even look away in case she sees me’) sounds pat: this is apparently acknowledged in the poem’s succeeding admission of the traditional price for acts of voyeurism: ‘A chill / runs through me, like Actaeon must have felt / in the woods. I hear the dogs bark in the suburbs’.

Disappointingly, the following and final lines squander the tension this admission achieves, in a feeble medley of imprecision and cliché: ‘the way they bark when something dies, / or is lost, like youth, or love, or innocence.’ Whose youth, love or innocence is at stake here? The middle-aged voyeur has presumably lost his long ago; the girl is happily unaware of what has occurred. The poem resorts to the big, wistful, abstract nouns in an unwise attempt to promote sympathy for the speaker, in a poem which could only have remained acceptable through a scrupulous acknowledgement of how little sympathetic he is.

The self-indulgence shown in this ending is the primary fault of Demolition as a whole. Among its food poems (Rollinson’s isn’t your unreconstructed masculinity: this man can cook a cauliflower – ‘seasoned / with sesame seed and a splash of soy’) is ‘Pâté’, which shows a desire to have its foie gras and feel sorry for it. It displays a brazen, brutal epicurism: ‘geese have been tortured for this – / note how it melts in the mouth’, but also demands indulgence from the reader. After the macho, ‘Fuck / the duck, is what I think,’ the speaker adds, piteously, ‘though in my heart I say a small prayer / for both of us.’ How can this ‘prayer’ be sincere? It is clearly of no benefit to the goose: it functions simply as an insistence that we note, and make allowances on the basis of, a vulnerability beneath the speaker’s boorishness.

On a simpler level, Demolition appears self-indulgent simply because many of its poems seem so little justified, either by technical or intellectual complexity. Lack of pretension, their occasional saving grace, is, after all, a negative virtue: positive ones do not abound. It will be clear from the quotations above that Rollinson does little with the formal resources of verse: lineation, for the most part, seems to occur once a line has reached a respectable length; rhyme, assonance and consonance occasionally appear, but to little specific effect. His poems thus seem occasioned more by the desire to express thoughts than by the desire to use language; unfortunately, these thoughts are rarely complex or surprising enough to carry their poems. The banality of many of them (computers are a nuisance, but we can’t live without them; if you bet on a horse then it’s bound to lose; isn’t it funny when a balloon shaped like a penis deflates?), can make the poems seem motivated less by the desire to express a particular thought, than by the desire to exploit any thought, however slight, that will do to hang a poem on.

‘Demolition’ voices the pride of an expert who can make a building ‘walk down the road, like a zombie’; its status as title poem invites us to read its celebration of craftsmanship and control as indicative of the volume’s aims. Narrative pace is a technical resource that Rollinson can use to advantage: his poems are generally shapely, even if what is shaped doesn’t always bear much examination. However, ‘Demolition’ affirms the ability specifically to ‘control the velocity of failure’: to ‘let each part of the structure disintegrate / at a different speed’: Rollinson’s failures, particularly his uncertainties of tone, would need to be under far more control, to show far greater awareness of themselves as failures, before he could claim them as the paradoxical achievement that these lines would suggest.

Demolition, Cape, £9.00, 022408171

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.