Alison Gibb reviews
Shooting the Breeze
By Linda Chase and Len Grant
Shooting the Breeze is a collection of poetry about the people,
for the people. A collaborative project between American poet Linda Chase and
British photographer Len Grant that started out as a bit of an experiment,
became a slide show/reading for the Didsbury Arts Festival 2010 and finally
this book. A collection of compelling documentary portrait photographs and
simple poems, it celebrates the lives of the residents and passers-by in four
diverse communities in Manchester, which they met over the course of a day.
Chase and Grant’s mobile Show‘N
Tell photographic studio creates a contagious energy of curiosity and optimism
that is present in both the portraits and the poems. Babies, couples, elderly ladies,
teenagers, unemployed young men and workers all beam out of the pages of the
book. Grant’s excellent photographs make VIPs of all his subjects. His images capture
the self-respect, dignity, pride and humour of these people. They are a show of
humanity at its best, further demonstrated in the generosity of the subjects to
participating in this project. Each double page is made up of images and a
poem. The photographs are inviting and a pleasure to look at. The poems, short
and sweet, complement the images. Chase’s simple, naïve writing style, creates confident,
unpretentious poems. Here, she writes in response to her experiences on the
day. The content and form of her poems incorporate what she sees, hears, feels
and exchanges with the people she encounters. In ‘Esprit’, Chase refers to the
logo on Rebecca’s, Spirit of Cherokee, T-shirt, to set the tone and title of her
poem.
At other times she take risks
and she goes off on a whim. ‘White Cello Case’, a poem accompanied by a
photograph of man standing with a white cello case, is little more than a play
on the White Rabbit’s familiar lines in Alice of Wonderland ‘…I’m late, I’m
late, how can we still debate / Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev? / I’m late, I’m late,
I’m late!’ Here, collaboration has freed the poet, allowing her to write
impulsively, associating what she sees with a known lyric. The factual strength
of the image, allows the poet to be more fanciful with her text. The poem’s
lack of originality, is easily forgiven when read in relation to the image of the
man with the white cello case, presumably late for his next appointment.
Occasionally, Chase seems to gets
a bit carried away with herself, projecting through the poems what she imagines
or hopes these peoples lives to be: ‘Let’s Say’ a poem and image of two young
men sitting on one push bike, seem to be entire make-believe: ‘..Let’s say
they’ve had a hearty breakfast of bread, / cheese, olives and tomatoes with
Arturus’s aunt.’ At other times, her
playfulness is put to better use, adding to the spontaneous energy of the
photographic moment: In ‘Couple’, a poem
and image of a young couple in their early twenties, Chase uses the language of
their professions as metaphors to gently spin a fitting love poem: ‘…His labourer’s
hands pile, / one on top of the other ….Her hairdresser’s hands stack… …plaiting
and intertwining.’
It is hard to imagine Chase
editing these poems much. Here less is more.
In keeping the poem simple and not overly worked on, she is able to stay
closer to her initial experience and to produce more genuine impressions. ‘Standing’, a poem and close-up photograph of
young boy, demonstrates Chase’s talent to create complex impressions in a few
simple words:
Declan has waited patiently
for his turn to come.
Natkita, his sister who’s
four
wants to stay beside her
nana.
Gail, their nana, says it’s
fine
for Declan to stand for them
all.
And he does. Declan the
artist,
the drummer, the Man U fan.
What does Declan the artist
draw?
Fiction, he says. Pure
Fiction.
Grant’s photographs are
extremely compelling and easy to imagine as an exhibition of large-scale
prints. Few of the Chase’s poems, however, seem strong enough to stand alone
without the appropriate image. Together, image and poem present a sunny,
optimistic commentary on the day’s events, the people that they met and the inspirational
effect of these encounters. As Chase explains at the end of the collections, the
point of the project was to be collaborative, as artists and also as fellow
human beings: “… I feel that these short
pieces are more like captions than like free standing poems, which had been our
goal all along – to create an integrated, collaborative work – poet and
photographer, poems and images, people and their communitites.”
Shooting the Breeze is a great collection of photographs with
accompanying poems that celebrates an optimistic view of ordinary life.
Alison Gibb has an MA in Writing Poetry from
Kingston University. She is a poet and lives in Cambridge.
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