Sylvia
is Missing
Flarestack Poets, 2012
Reviewed by Christian Ward
Sylvia
is Missing is an anthology featuring poems from
Flarestack Poets’ 2012 pamphlet competition. The slender volume looks and feels
like one of Flarestack Poets’ pamphlets, boasting a bright pink cover and a
large, simple font. If you passed it in a bookstore, you would notice it
immediately. There are no quotes from poets on the back cover, just a blurb that
boldly says it contains “Poetry that dares outside current trends, even against
the grain...collections that aren’t bus queues, from poets forging their own
linguistic connections with the root-ball of experience.”
I’m always wary when presented with
statements like these, particularly if the poetry doesn’t always fall in line
with their description. If you’re going to use such hyperbolic language to try
and win me over as a reader, then it has to deliver - even more so when the
pseudo-academic babble of ‘forging their own linguistic connections with the
root-ball of experience.’ is included. Add to this a questionable choice of
anthology title (referring to Plath, obviously, but does anyone really write like her nowadays?) and the
lack of information concerning selection (why was one favoured over the
other? what were the editors looking for?), and you create even more weariness.
Luckily, Sylvia is Missing is an anthology worth reading. It opens with my
first pick, Siofra McSherry’s intriguing ‘No Nemo’ – a poem concerned with
investigating how the process of questioning (in this case, whether something
will continue or not) works. A mysterious fish “observes, moves through water,
/ shines light, remains strange.” This is contrasted against a polar landscape
filled with machines, representing logic and processes that have the “smell of
hot machines”and“cables wrapped in rubber thick / as thumbs.”
Claire Dyer’s ‘Strawberries’ is my next
choice. Dyer has an eye for memorable images and the poem opens with the simple
yet wonderful “It’s March: a caramel-soft day and there’s/ a man on the bus
eating strawberries.” What follows is an exploration between two worlds that
almost seem to be superimposed on each other – the bus observation with the odd
man who turns out to be the speaker’s friend and another version of himself;
darkness outside, summer inside. Each strawberry is symbolic of an experience
by the speaker and the piece ends with the man on the bus/friend choosing
another and putting “the stalks in the pocket of his coat” where they will both
literally and figuratively decompose.
I liked the oddness of Michael Conley’s
‘Auction’ which opens with the funny “I have a green meteor next to my name: /
nobody has complained about me.” The tender acts of buying a Bart Simpson watch
for someone (one assumes a young relative) is contrasted with the speaker
smashing it “three times with a hammer”. It lands at the bottom of the
recipients postbox with the “hushed jangle/ of settling stardust.” Conley makes
the reader wonder why he did the act – was it because no-one complained about
him? Some ulterior motive? I like poems that make the reader ass questions,
especially when the answers aren’t immediately obvious, so kudos to Conley.
My other choices are Peter Daniels’ ‘Being
Cute’, which is a nice little riff on how being “cute” can have a downside and
Gina Wilson’s ‘For the she-ass, Lise’. The opening image of “the donkey’s
two-foot pizzle/ dangles like liquorice” had me hooked. The poem has a charming
kind of bitchiness that is also suprisingly tender.
Sylvia
is Missing is an intriguing anthology with more
than a few poems that are worth reading. Poetry competition anthologies can be
a little hit and miss – a bit like those action films I remember watching
growing up in the 80s. You get some big explosions, bad guys go flying and the
rest is just filler. This one is a bit better. Go read.
Christian Ward has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, and was a runner up for the 2011 Bridpoet Prize. His poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry Review and Poetry Wales, among others.
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