Skip to main content

Ian Pople On a Shoestring and a Flarestack Book



John Hartley Williams Assault on the Clouds

David Clarke Gaud
reviewed by Ian Pople



Much is made on the blurb of John Hartley Williams’ individuality.  He’s described as ‘one of the great originals of contemporary English poetry’, and ‘joyfully anarchic and surrealist’.  In fact, Williams and Clarke share a love of quirky narrative. Thus, a range of characters populate both poets work, sometimes with names that wouldn’t have shamed Douglas Adams.  In Assault on the Clouds:  Hartley Williams has produced a group of short stories in verse, in which a group of characters react in varying ways to wild and surreal events in their ‘lives’.  Eggwold Zunn, the auto-didact, meditates on Cleopatra’s nose, and is asked to comment on many things from the deposing of  the Emperor, to the nude Saint Ronda of Arboa.  The General rides his donkey around an imagined country, Arboa, which, I’m sure, we are meant to assume is a mythical China. And a ‘poet’ who also comments laconically on the action going on around ‘him’. 



I’m assuming that the poet in the texts is a him.  This is as much because the writing as a whole is muscular and direct.  I hesitate to call it ‘masculine’, but actually it does come across as rather masculine.  The humour seems of a piece with that slightly common-room satire which has provided a rich vein of English writing but can be a little exclusive and public school.



That is my reservation about this collection.  But there is no doubt that Hartley Williams is hugely inventive and has created a ‘world’ in these poems that is often fully realised and involving.  Hartley Williams also invents words which nicely fit in the worlds of the poems, ‘The travellers are spying with their vanderscopes/on the geisha and her poet./She retains a single comb in crowblack hair;/ he roams her apricot thighs with his tongue.’ ‘Through the Keyhole’.  This excerpt illustrates some of Hartley Williams’ method;  the clipped sentence structure containing a clipped portrayal of events;  the deft use of an unusual adjectives, i.e., ‘apricot’. 



David Clarke’s Gaud is a winner in the Flarestack pamphlet competition.  And there is a muscularity to Clarke’s writing too.  Where Hartley Williams has a clipped, snappy style, Clarke uses a more impacted, costive syntax.  That sentence structure is much more populated with adjectives than Hartley Williams’, ‘Haggard teenagers/in threadbare chinos riffle/Blu-Rays of gaudy murder,/as the in-store DJ spins a/ retro Osmonds cut.// And the result of this density is that the charge of over-writing might sometimes be laid at Clarke’s door.  That said, Clarke, like Hartley Williams, is entirely capable of creating an adroitly imagined world in his poems;  for example in ‘Notes Towards a Definition of the Revolution’ Clarke reports ‘an earnest// panel of intellectuals consuming/ meat-paste sandwiches in a Sheffield Labour/ Club in the mid 1970s;’  There’s a loving detail in that which is beguiling and strong.  And here too, is an example of Clarke’s way with line-endings where adjective may be sheared from their nouns.
 

Ian Pople's Saving Spaces is published by Arc. His first book of poetry, The Glass Enclosure (Arc, 1996), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. His second collection, An Occasional Lean-to, was published by Arc in 2004. He teaches at the University of Manchester.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

THAT HANDSOME MAN  A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought.  Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se.  What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".