New British Poetry: 8 Three Firsts and One Sixth
pang foo, in a suburb in Japan,/ I listened to C.M. Grieve cry MacDairmid's Penny Wheep-/ Wheesht, wheesht ye fule! / A Welsh ragworm/ dangling a rusty stylus,/ fishing for nibbles/ from the Langholm whale.
It is this defiance of simple relativity-the hi-fi is never more nor less for Greenslade's experience of it-while simultaneously acknowledging that it is after all one of the links in his perception of being, that defines these poems as superior. It effects a harmony between awe and un-sentimentality in the understanding of material facts that is always admirable and frequently resonate.
At the opposite end of the sensual spectrum is PEOPLE FROM BONES (Snitterfield: Ragged Raven Press, 2002), a first collection by Australians Bron Bateman and Kelly Pilgrim. With Bateman's work in the first half of the volume, and Pilgrim's in the second, there is almost an invitation to assume some sort of teleological role in the book's construction. There is, I suppose, an urgency about Bateman's writing, a voluptuousness in her inquiries about bodies, especially her own, that is less apparent in Pilgrim's verse, and yet the latter's is, in some senses more mature, more outward-looking. Take, for example, the gorgeous sounds of Bateman's 'Epicanthus':
Bruises are the truer skin;/ more porous,/ more permeable,/ pinpoints of our bodies unraveling;/ their radical blossoms/ the manifest hunger of flesh.
And compare it to the jaw-breaking, yet striking, closing sentence of Pilgrim's 'Toulouse-Lautrec is Dead':
Out of any calm he cultured chaotic freedom,/ sipping the cocktail of art and fantasy from a rusted cup.
But this difference of verbal control is only part of the story. Measured as it is, Bronfen's closing lines to 'The Songbird Dreams of Singing'
I know that pearls/ are the layers of/
separate/ pleasures/
each one spun/ bubble thin/ to enfold an itch/ that only ignorance/ calls irritation
Are not a match for the sincerity and surprise of Pilgrim's 'Domestic Archaeology':
The art of collecting antiques/ She said/ Is to bruise your hands / With the past.
PEOPLE FROM BONES is not without a few scratches from the workshop, but its vigor and its music make it worth a look.
Another small first collection is WATCHING THE SEA FOUR WAYS by Jenny Hamlett (Folkestone: The Frogmore Press, 2003). Like many of the books published by Frogmore, this is an inexpensive and unassuming chapbook, yet there some real treasures inside. Frogmore's editor Jeremy Page has an eye for talent, and over the past ten years or more new work by a number of estimable writers have appeared under their imprint (among them
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