Vicky MacKenzie reviews
God Loves You
by Kathryn Maris
and The Last Temptation of Bond
by Kimmy Beach
Kathryn Maris’s poetry is of the slippery, unstable variety: it is witty, self-conscious and often flippant, but sometimes leaves the reader uncertain as to what’s really being said and even less sure what’s meant.
In
the second section of the book, Maris parodies the language and rhythms of the bible,
using numbered verses, anaphora, and her own version of the Lord’s Prayer. A
desperate need to be loved by God recurs throughout but it’s echoed by a need
to be loved by men, bringing these masculine figures to the same level: that of
the desired but neglectful lover. However it doesn’t feel like religious faith
is Maris’s target, so much as the godless state of contemporary society, which
substitutes religious worship with celebrity worship.
In
the wonderfully-titled ‘Will You Be My Friend, Kate Moss?’ the narrator
observes:
‘[...]
We have so many things
in
common, like you’re pretty much my age;
we
share initials; the circumference of
our
thighs is basically the same. (I checked.)’
The use of shaky qualifiers such as ‘pretty
much’ and ‘basically’ suggests wishful thinking on the speaker’s part, but then
those initials (KM! It’s true!) brought me up short and had me wondering (fooled?):
are the other things true too? Not that it matters, it’s all part of the fun.
Maris’s
collection is extremely wry and knowing, and her take on the confessional is more
in the tradition of dramatic monologue than autobiography. She even has a poem
called ‘This is a Confessional Poem’ in which the narrator confesses to various
minor social misdeeds and mentions her attendance at a ‘class called “Poetry
Therapy”’. Slippery as a slope, this poet! However, I find the punning ending as
awkward as it is amusing:
‘“Don’t
be Jesus,” she said. “There are enough around here.”
I
know I should thank her if she’s alive,
but
I also know it’s unlikely I’ll rise to the task.’
Maris
is technically accomplished and this collection includes sonnets, a sestina and
prose poems, as well as the direct parodies of biblical verse. Rhythmically,
she rarely puts a foot wrong, but for all the cleverness and anguish in this
collection, too often the poems feel rather slight. She eschews description and
imagery, preferring a conversational tone, and she is very funny on occasions. ‘Darling,
Would You Please Pick Up Those Books’ is written in the voice of a wife fed up
with tripping over books written by her husband but dedicated to other women. A
few lines convey the sardonic wit at work:
‘ [...] do I have to be dead for a man
to
write me a poem how do you think it feels
to
be non-muse material [...]’
This poem is in fact the sestina, the
showpiece of the collection, and the lexical repetition at the end of each line
builds the mood to a frenzy of hurt, jealousy and rage, the absence of
punctuation contributing to the sense of a single exhalation of fury.
‘Angel with Book’ is among the strongest poems
in the collection, and one of the few occasions where Maris lets her lyric gift
shine through unfettered by the urge to parody and double-speak:
‘The
angel’s book is blue and dense and God knows the book,
which
is nailed to the sky.’
Parodies
come in many shapes and sizes and Canadian poet Kimmy Beach’s latest book could
hardly be more different from the biting humour of Maris’s volume. Maris critiques various specific targets, but it
would be a strange and thankless task to write an entire collection parodying
James Bond if one couldn’t stand the guy. Beach’s The Last Temptation of Bond, dedicated to the Bond franchise, is
more affectionate than satirising or critical, and it’s crammed with sex,
violence, champagne, Martinis (of course), Bond girls and glamour: so far, so
Bond.
It’s
a very playful and inventive book, where multiple layers of ‘reality’ are enacted
- there’s the Bond we know and love (or loathe), but also a Bond who has opted
for the so-called quiet life complete with office job, house in the ’burbs, and
wife and kids. And there’s a third Bond, one who enjoys regular Saturday night
movie dates on the sofa with two Bond fans, known only as ONE and THE OTHER.
They hang out, drink wine, sleep together and discuss the portrayal of Bond’s
character via Walter Benjamin’s theory that each unique object has its own aura
which cannot be duplicated when the object is reproduced. It’s not going too
far to say that this collection easily outweighs the Bond franchise in terms of
intellectual ballast.
Beach
plays fast and loose with the parameters of poetry, incorporating narrative
verse, long sections of prose, and scripted dialogue complete with stage
directions. Switching between first, second and third person, the narrative grabs
the reader by their dinner jacket lapels and hurtles them towards the
unthinkable - a grizzly end for Bond. Beach imagines a scenario whereby the
Bond girls get together with ONE (thereby colliding two levels of the book’s ‘realities’)
to exact their murderous revenge, by reprising Goldfinger’s lethal laser.
Whilst
aware of the stereotypes in Bond books/films, Beach pokes gentle fun at them
without overtly critiquing them. The closest we get to an analysis of Bond’s
shortfalls is when ONE tells him, ‘All you want to do is screw us and pretend
to be smarter than we are.’ Well, duh. Succinct, but hardly telling Bond, or us,
anything new. If you’re not a Bond fan, this book won’t convert you: it’s definitely
one for Bond fans’ eyes only.
Vicky MacKenzie writes poetry and fiction and
lives on the east coast of Scotland.
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