Michael S. Begnal reviews
by Graham
Clifford
Graham Clifford’s pamphlet Welcome Back to the Country, published
by Seren Books, is the winner of the Poetry Wales Purple Moose Prize for
2010. It’s nice to see that a beer
brewery (Purple Moose) somewhere in the world sponsors poetry publications –
others ought to do so too; it would be a great help to poets everywhere. Clifford, the winner of this contest, has also
been successful in a number of other contests, and his poetry seems well-suited
for the contest milieu. It is
accessible, straightforward, with craftsmanship apparent so that it is capable
of appealing to both the general reader and the poet-judge. This could either be a good thing or a dissatisfying
thing, depending on the individual who chooses to engage with his work (if, for
example, he or she falls into something other than the “general reader”
category).
Zoë
Skoulding, one of the two judges, provides a blurb arguing
that “these poems locate the dark edges of ‘ordinary life’ so precisely as to
reveal that no such thing exists.” In
other words, we are meant to see via these poems that even the seemingly
mundane is in reality worth our closer attention and could be full of
unexpected surprises, depending on how attentive the poet is to the
details. This may be true, but I’m not
so certain that this is what Clifford’s project always consists of here. In fact, he seems to be fairly dismissive of ordinary
country life. He does render it
precisely, as Skoulding suggests, but there is little that is affirmative about
most of these poems, or even darkly so.
If anything, Clifford often seems to be venting his annoyance and
disgust and a desire to be elsewhere. In
“Holiday ,” for example, he writes,
I know it is
wrong to ask, but
could we,
perhaps,
be more like
somebody else
one day?
I’m bored of myself,
these arms and
legs and this past,
I’ve heard it
all before:
the small town
the moths the sewing machine
haunting the
spare room…
Such ordinary existence (running together
without commas) seems to be the last thing he wants any part of. Similarly, his poem “The year of rain” paints
an even bleaker portrait of village life, with suitably-observed particulars
(“Outside we will shelter in bus stops/ and pavilions, the 1940s ice cream
parlour/ with psoriasis of the paint job…”).
And then we come to “On a slope”:
Trapped for ever
in this town
a green, open prison with too much sky,
too much surface area cooling quickly down
where spinsters and wealthy men who wear
ironed jeans scowl along supermarket aisles.
You serve them, burning up, desperate for
your share. Perhaps you have been forgotten
or the very best you deserve is a carnival
by the canal locks, featuring the local librarian…
a green, open prison with too much sky,
too much surface area cooling quickly down
where spinsters and wealthy men who wear
ironed jeans scowl along supermarket aisles.
You serve them, burning up, desperate for
your share. Perhaps you have been forgotten
or the very best you deserve is a carnival
by the canal locks, featuring the local librarian…
At this point, the reader might be tempted
to say, “I want out of here too.”
An obvious precedent to Clifford is Philip Larkin, the master of bleak
irony coupled with English frustration. The
danger with the precise rendering of the bleak and the mundane in this case,
though, is that, rather than attaining the edginess that Skoulding’s phrase
“locate the dark edges” implies, rather than transmuting the ordinary into the
extraordinary, the poems themselves become mundane, and the reader is imbued
with the same bleak feelings that gave rise to the work to begin with, rather
than with any sense of wonderment. For
me, the ordinary in Welcome Back to the
Country often remains just that. I
acknowledge that it very well could be different for other readers. Zoë Skoulding is no slouch.
A desired sense of wonderment can only
occur through the poet’s use of language on the page, I would say, and often
there is enough going on in these pages that Clifford grabs one’s attention. He has a good eye. Other times, though, I was underwhelmed by
form as well as content (this being, again, merely a subjective response). Thus, the poems I liked the best in this
volume were the few that veered away from realistic description, away from the
portraits of the everyday. “No alternative
now” is another escape fantasy, but this time into a surreal forest existence
where “our clothes [drop] from us in leaf shapes/ in the dark crunchiness/
where we copulate quickly like foxes/ and crap standing, ready to run.” Not only are such images welcomely startling,
but Clifford’s language seems concomitantly stronger, both terse and
alliterative. “Being dead” is perhaps
the most humorous piece in the collection, positing an improvement in one’s
life through dying: “You die, and being dead/ are better. From night buses/ you
watch with dry always-open eyes…” What
might also change if Clifford were to similarly let die, through natural
evolution, some of the strategies that have seemingly won him this pamphlet
contest?
Michael S.
Begnal’s new collection Future Blues is
forthcoming this year from Salmon Poetry.
His previous collections include Ancestor Worship (Salmon, 2007)
and Mercury, the Dime (Six Gallery Press, 2005). He has appeared in
numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry Ireland Review, Notre
Dame Review, and Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde under “Post-” Conditions
(Litteraria Pragensia, 2006). Most recently, he composed the Afterword to James
Liddy’s posthumous collection Fest City
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