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Bodies   Gareth Writer-Davies

6/29/2015

1 Comment

 
Picture
Exactly what it says on the tin! Or are they? These poems are about bodies or body parts: ears, heart, elbow, hips and nose amongst others. It's like a poetic version of a post-mortem except that the body in question here is still alive. Look away now those of you of a squeamish disposition or those of you who prefer your poetry to come in a more pastoral package. However, those of you who do look away will be missing out.


Gareth Writer-Davis says,


"songs plucked from the lute are complex miscalculations"


and therefore romantic, with either upper or lower case r, notions are disregarded,


"my heart has a job to do
and fit to the task
pumps blood around my body"


and the reader knows where he or she stands, the body is not to be worshipped but to be appreciated objectively for utilitarian purposes,


"my ears...


...are cartilage hooks for pencils and cigarettes
they are something I would like to pass on."


and the language is nearly always straightforward, plain nay blunt, so the occasional metaphor in the midst of this visceral dissection of the body comes as a big surprise.


"my ears are bats
they blink
open
and shut."


and this is a clue that Writer-Davis is not just a one-trick pony, as is demonstrated by a series of poems about his mother. The Slim Shape is as far away from sentimental as it is possible to get, readers may feel as though they have stumbled across something which they shouldn't be witnessing,


"my mother was 36 24 36"


Feeling awkward? Wait until you read the next stanza,


"I did not know what that meant
when I pushed in
the pointy tip of her bra
and watched it pop out again."


But decontextualising does the poem no favours as the poet concludes with a frank appraisal of his mother and captures in three short lines a mistake made and indicates maybe a bleak life,


"mother was a flirt
who married young
then thought better of it."


The fate of his "first and only love" was to "fade away at the edges" as she fell adrift of fashionable mores. But what does the poet care as he completes the poem with the unabashed statement,


"my mother was 36 24 36


but she
was without measure."


The depth of this love is demonstrated in the following two poems, Breathe and String, intense pieces of work where the poet deals with the illness and old-age decay of his mother and in both poems he gives lie to his concentration upon the physical. We are all more than just a collection of body parts as the author well knows, and despite an attempt to cover his tracks, we realise that we are reading the work of an artist who understands both the physical and the emotional.


Consequently, this is an engaging collection repaying a number of revisits but be warned, readers may well begin to reconsider their own body parts during their next bath. 


Credit to Indigo Dreams who have turned out a handsome pamphlet which in terms of appearance and content  will sit well on any poetry bookshelf. 


Bodies
Gareth Writer-Davies
Indigo Dreams Publishing
£6.00
9 781909 357716
1 Comment

Jo Bell, Kith

6/1/2015

1 Comment

 
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Don't you love it when you pick up a poetry book, read the first poem and think I'm going to enjoy this? With Jo Bell's Kith, the signs are there even before reading begins because this is a beautifully presented book, credit here to Heather Duncan the cover artist and publishers Nine Arches Press. Against the likes of this, ebooks have no chance.


But to the poems. That first poem Crates takes us on the mental journey of thinking about a crate. Three are supplied for us: a fruiterer's crate, a sturdy plastic tub and a pub crate, each of them very deftly described through careful observation. These are real crates, concrete in the mind and ready for service. Only they are not required for in the final three lined stanza the poem is flipped on its head and the reader has been wrong-footed, tangled in a web with some sixty-nine pages to go.


But it is an enchanted trap where poetry does what poetry does best, enabling the reader to see the world in a new light. Snow for instance in Like Love, "betrays the fox and starves the wren." The woman in Union Street in the poem Shame, pokes at a man "as if he were/a kidney on a butcher's slab."


This is a joy. Earthy, witty and magical, Kith is full of poems which cause you to sit up frequently and gaze out of the window for a while to marvel over what you have just read before you feel able to resume. Read the terror of crossing the hundred feet of water of the Severn in A Crossing  before reaching the sanctuary of the Gloucester and Sharpness canal which lays "a sixteen-foot glass slipper at our feet." Or the historical re-imaginings in Infallible and Gloriana where Giotta and Elizabeth 1 speak and authenticity booms from the page.


"Love, sex, boats and friendship" boasts the blurb, and yes, they are all here, but there is also a closeness to nature emanating, I suspect, from living in a narrow boat. How about this for a description of Spring? "The garden's lean, but buds and shadows fatten." and April falling "across the parish like stained glass." in a Nightingale for Gilbert White.


And I haven't yet mentioned the poems of excavation. But let that be because I will be back to this book and I will dig for myself into the layers of meaning, I will be nourished by the humour, prodded by the pertinent phrase and finally, I will take comfort from it like the day's last blackbird,


"holding up its song, a candle flame
as the street lights flicker on."


A delight.


Jo Bell, Kith. Nine Arches Press 9780993120107

1 Comment

    Author

    A visit to the Media Museum in Bradford and a damn good curry at the Kashmir. What greater pleasure can life afford? Writing a film review afterwards seems only fair. The routine began many years ago and the first review: Sam Taylor Wood's, Nowhere Boy is included here. But there will also be space for books and anything else that takes John Irving Clarke's fancy.

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