John Clegg - ‘Identity Parade’, edited by Roddy Lumsden
by and published in Edition Twelve of Pomegranate
Identity Parade, edited by Roddy Lumsden.
Bloodaxe, 2010. £12.
I’m writing this on Election Day. The BNP are canvassing in Stockton-on-Tees, it’s pouring with rain, and the rain is somehow muddy; this t-shirt was clean when I put it on. Although this is clearly a wicked world, whatever angle you cut the apple at, I am reassured now and forever by the fact that there is so much good poetry I haven’t read. Out of the 85 poets in Identity Parade, I’ve got 25 individual volumes stashed around here somewhere, and your total may be better or worse but I am prepared to make a wager with you that unless your name is Roddy Lumsden there is at least something in here which is new to you.
Judy Brown, for instance. I enjoyed her poems as much as anything else in the book. She hasn’t yet published a first collection (it’s due next year from Seren) but is already confident and assured, with a Bishop-like knack for description:
Three empty buses cook to scarlet
in the stands. I split a sandwich for my son.
Its cut hypotenuse leaks mayonnaise…
I’m desperate to reproduce all of this (‘Peckham Poem(s)’) but it’s too long, so you’ll have to take my word it is as good as that all the way through. The precision of ‘hypotenuse’ (a mathematical precision, a word gently enacting itself) is so much richer when it gets to chime with ‘mayonnaise’; Muldoon-worthy, but in context almost inevitable and certainly not daft. It’s just as impressive that Brown is able to do this without obviously showing off. Bookshelves accumulating dust ‘grow this familiar pelt, werewolfing slowly’. From the same poem, ‘The New Neighbours’: ‘I hear them rev and swing the roaring sander’. Brown’s gift for observation and description is sharp enough to create great poems out of almost nothing, cat’s piss and mayonnaise and the dust from electric razors. I may actually pre-order the book. (I don’t think I’ve ever pre-ordered anything in my life apart from the third season of Buffy on DVD.)
Julia Copus is great as well. (Don’t expect these paragraphs to really link together, by the way.) ‘In Defence of Adultery’, the title poem of her 2003 book, was new to me and another high point of the anthology: ‘We don’t fall in love: it rises through us / the way that certain music does’ seems such an obvious truth, and the way the poem’s final couplet subverts it – ‘‘Sometimes we manage / to convince ourselves of that’ – is quiet and shocking and sends you back to read the whole thing again. And I must have a fetish for close description, because this sort of thing makes me shudder:
…like spilt tea that inches up
the tiny tube-like gaps inside
a cube of sugar lying by a cup.
I think Copus has a scientific background; in any case she has a scientist’s eye.
But probably you know about her already. Almost certainly you know about Annie Freud, and if you don’t you should, she’s phenomenal. I’m desperate to quote some but she doesn’t work all that well in quotation; her poems aggregate into something much more substantial than the sum of their parts. Whether ‘A Scotch Egg’ is her best poem is up for debate, but it’s certainly one of her most characteristic, and the personality which emerges from the catalogue of ephemera is scarily realistic: she has Salinger’s trick of knowing far too much about what goes on inside people’s heads. Really, buy her whole book, but buy Identity Parade as well for the previously unpublished ‘Daube’, which doesn’t suggest any great shift of direction but is as good as anything she’s already done.
Actually there’s a lot of previously unpublished stuff here: the anthology takes a music nerd’s joy in b-sides and rarities. Frances Leviston’s previously unpublished ‘The Zombie Library’ is a case in point (though the poem itself I need to live with a little longer; I’m still not sure what she means by ‘the desert’s / durational sifting from and towards ’). Tracey Herd’s unpublished ‘Spring in the Valley of the Racehorse’ is the best out of the four she’s represented by. Chris McCabe’s ‘Lemon Blue’ is wonderful and not in either of his two books: a line like ‘my sloped brother of history – why hadn’t he copyrighted fire?’ seems to suggest his most recent work is taking a Kennard-like direction, but ‘Give me something cloned to sell, to profit the sons of my only son’ is unquestionably McCabe’s own voice.
In fact, the anthologist’s work is generally impeccable. Colette Bryce’s selection represents her full range very well (and includes ‘ Nevers ’ out of her first collection, which made me incredibly happy; it was one of the first poems I really fell in love with). Luke Kennard is similarly well-chosen: obviously it’s not an easy task to select from a poet who makes so much use of prose poem sequences. The Wolf doesn’t make an appearance, and while he is obviously much missed the selection demonstrates conclusively that Kennard’s work can stand up without him. (I’m sure the Wolf wouldn’t be happy to hear that, but there it is.) Daljit Nagra’s selection is perhaps weaker. I’m underwhelmed by the two unpublished pieces, and I’m sorry space couldn’t be found for ‘Singh Song’ (which I suppose is too long) or ‘Booking Khan Singh Kumar’, one of the funniest political poems I can think of.
In matters of literary importance it seems pretty clear that nobody really has a clue. The great poets who know they’re great long before they’ve written anything good (Plath and Keats) just made a lucky guess. Who’s ‘important’ or ‘major’ is as impenetrable to us as it was to, say, Leigh Hunt, who supported Keats on the one hand and on the other a dozen writers so plainly bad to our eyes that it’s hard not to conclude he had a tin ear. But we all have a tin ear when it comes to listening to the future and deciding what it’s going to find valuable. With that as proviso, I’d like to wrap up this review with a mention of Frances Leviston’s ‘Scandinavia’, which is (at the minute) my favourite poem in the book.
A couple of Identity Parade ’s early reviewers have mentioned a lack of ‘show-stopping poems’. Taken kindly, this criticism could simply amount to reticence towards predicting the future (‘In the realm of art a man must be like a sailor on the sea, inextricably connected with it, but very restrained in his judgement and predictions’, as Ivo Andrić writes somewhere). But for me, ‘Scandinavia’ falls into the category of show-stopping: not just a faultless poem but one which grabs you by the lapels and shakes you into (what feels from where I’m sitting like) a deeper understanding. The ‘soft-heaped fields’ ‘forever / reforming at the wind’s caprice’ are straight-up Wordsworthian (if there are any other Wordsworth-influenced poets in Identity Parade I can’t find them), down to the anthropomorphising ‘caprice’, but then comes the astonishing
…I could try
to live as a glass of water, utterly clear and somehow
restrained, a sip that tells you nothing
but perpetuates the being-there;
The vision and vocabulary are Romantic, but the argument works towards a more subtle and complex position. The poem as a whole seems to me a tentative endorsement of the ‘pluralism’ that Lumsden identifies as a generational characteristic in his (admirably bullshit-free) Introduction, applied not just to literature but to life: a movement ‘north of fame’, to where ideas are lost ‘as rain is lost // in the shift of the sea’, not lost in the sense of vanished but subsumed. Leviston is too astute not to grasp the implications of what she’s talking about, and the final few lines present both sides of a terrible bargain:
…and the notion of loving
that one more critically than any other flake in a flurry
melts, flows back to folly’s pool, the lucid public dream.
I just noticed for the first time that what melts to form ‘folly’s pool’ is the metaphor itself (‘any other flake in a flurry’). And when I read it the time before I noticed how stunning the play of sounds was in the last three words, how unobtrusive all the ‘fl’s were in those two final lines (and how it wasn’t just a sound repeated for its own sake but a meaningful repetition linking back to those ‘rims forever / reforming’). And when I read it the time before that I noticed how much weight that word ‘critically’ carries, and the way it chimes very gently against ‘folly’. I don’t know how to spot a ‘great’ or ‘important’ poem, but one which consistently refines itself on each re-reading seems to me – to make the bare minimal case – worth your time.
Anyway, this is an excellent anthology. It introduced me to a few poets I hadn’t heard of (hello Tracey Herd, Peter Manson, Julian Turner) and loads more I had heard of but hadn’t read. The individual Introductions were mostly helpful. The photographs reassured me that poets are, in general, an attractive bunch, with a tendency towards male-pattern baldness and elaborate hats. I apologise for all the fantastic poems I haven’t mentioned, including ‘The fundament of wondrement’ by Matthew Welton, ‘De Beers’ by Kate Bingham, ‘Desert Orchid’ by Simon Barraclough, and ‘Carl’s Job’ by Chris Emery. I apologise for all the fantastic poems I still haven’t mentioned.
In the Introduction, Roddy Lumsden specifically warns reviewers against looking for ‘theories of literary zeitgeist’. So I’m not going to provide one, and instead close with this, from Raymond Chandler’s essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’. Discount the misogyny as much as possible, and the description is not unsuited to a majority of the poets in Identity Parade:
‘In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. (…) He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.’
John Clegg
John Clegg was born in 1986 and studies for a PhD in Durham. Some of his poems are featured in the upcoming Salt Book of Younger Poets, as well as Succour, The Rialto, Mercy and online at Pomegranate. His e-chapbook Advancer is published by Silkworms Ink, and a full collection is forthcoming from Salt.