Glyn Maxwell’s comment on the blurb of Carrie Etter’s The Tethers announces that this debut collection is “sorrowing, glad, graceful”.  I did not feel sorrow being induced by these poems;  there was a sorrow in the content of some of them, as in the poems about the ending of  a love affair, such as ‘Divorce’,  though they were not so much tinged with sorrow as overwrought with acrimony.  There is certainly a sense of gladness, or perhaps relief:  more so to be alive, to be ‘the flesh and blood figure of a witness wholly alive’, to quote Maxwell’s blurb again.  If there is an inherent poetic grace in accomplishment of verse composition, then Etter’s poems are graceful; but I am concerned that many of the poems, especially the poems that interpret, re-interpret, or make reference to myth, classical history, works of art or workers of art, are graceful by virtue of the archaic impetus of material for the poem.  One result is that the contemporary is refracted by essentially arcane context and form.  Mentions of Horace or Polonius, allusions to Cyclops, references to Millais, Ophelia, Fanny Brawne, Keats, Bob Dylan, and Virgil serve no obvious purpose.  To quote Maxwell’s blurb yet again, are these the ‘strong roots to cling to’ Carrie Etter has found?

Rosanna Warren describes these poems as ‘discreetly metaphysical’.  For some of the poems in this collection, her critique translates as ‘slightly interesting’, though through a positively individual linguistic virtuosity the poems are accomplished, and therefore we assume graceful, pieces that work effectively to a  ‘metaphysical’ effect.   Yet for some poems it is a statement that does not do justice to the poetic pertinence of how they can be abruptly metaphysically bound, textually and contextually, energised in and by the absurd.

Poems like ‘Biopsy’, ‘Pleurisy’, ‘San Fernando Valley Love Song’, ‘Horace’s Wet Clothes’, ‘Siren’, ‘Almadine’, ‘Aracdia, or Something Like it’, ‘Arizona 2002’, ‘Soporific Red’, ‘The Lengthening Winter’, ‘Early Days’, ‘The Violet Hour’, ‘Postmarked (Ars Poetica)’, ‘The Honeymoon of Our Attraction’, ‘Over the Thames’, and ‘Crowd of One’ are all good poems by a good practitioner; but they lack the intensity that gives longevity, as well as the density of feeling by which a reader may be confounded, but which he will also want to re-read.  Some of the good poems made me at their aplombic close want to ask, ‘And what then?’  There is a great deal of difference between accomplishing a poem and achieving a poem.

Among the number of achieved poems in this collection are the two opening poems, ‘Citizenship’ and ‘Ode to Raggedy Anne’.  The achieved poems in this collection represent the stoic, witty, Carrie Etter, a poetically inspired personality, a mind with an acute sense of what constitutes poetry, and what it means to be a poet.  From ‘Citizenship’ and ‘The Review’, she explores possibly her personal sentiments on poetry, its function and its publication:

everyone's favourite mayor, whose bad poetry
has become a feature of our weekly newsletter
a column of O’Hara-derived frivolity

I have seen the man at his desk, giving up on Dostoevsky

(‘Citizenship’)

Some neglected authors cannot stop thinking of The Review

(‘The Review’)

The absurd that Carrie Etter contends is the Camusian ‘irregular announcement of birth and death’, where the absurdities of humdrum pastimes and quotidian trivialities (like the smell of McDonald’s fries, ordering coffee at Starbucks, attending May Day Dances, cracking eggs, sorting post, posting letters, or playing scrabble, life’s happenings ‘too common for metaphor’) are contrasted with the design of the Panopticon, Pleurisy, endangered species, displaced peoples, the Bermuda Triangle, and the concept of regret.  In these achieved poems Etter appropriates strangeness in metaphor:

it is enough to see Gertrude’s change of feeling
as ordinary and therefore the more monstrous

to know I am the one who drowns in a temperate sea
blind to the outstretched rope in the dread of it’s absence.

(‘Seaborne’)

The motels whose neon vacancy signs
blink drowsily at the oncoming cars,

whose olive sinks sputter rusty water,
whose suspicious vending machines carry

a childhood candy believed obsolete

(‘Four Hours from the Coast’)

The Camusian allegory of Sisyphus is common in these poems where ‘a body in the world is a body/on an errand’.  People in Carrie Etter’s poems are themselves like an endangered species, vulnerable yet conscientious, ‘brighter than fire’.  Poems brighter than fire in this collection are ‘Americana, Station by Station’, and ‘Lecture’, in which the image of the student ‘breaking pencils in her lap one by one/through a once inexhaustible supply’,  along with another student in ‘the recurring grip of déja vu’,  might encompass the reader in the existential, unnerving qualities of life, where we search places for a sense of place that cannot be obtained.  Carrie Etter’s experiences of this are in her poems of expatriation, such as, ‘Days in Mildá Boleslav’, ‘The Wake’,  and ‘Over the Thames’.

I admire the prose-poems ‘Fin de Siecle’ and ‘Vermillion’, also the title poem and the Magritte-like ‘The Cult of the Eye’.  Successful too are ‘The Assenting Castaway’, ‘The Sty’, and ‘The Bonds’.  This is a good collection, then, with some poems better than good;  Carrie Etter’s debut contains memorable poetry, and I would urge poetry-readers to buy it.  I am sure that the better than good poems she has still to write will in time balance, and perhaps outbalance, the good work here.

Carrie Etter, The Tethers, Seren, 2009. £7.99. 978-1-854114-92-1

© Robert Herbert, 2009

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.