Jenny Wong reviews
The Good News
By
Rob Mackenzie
Deft,
purposeful and precise, Rob Mackenzie’s latest collection The Good News examines from different perspectives the human need
for faith, love and truth. His poetry fuses imaginative scenarios with
prophetic voices, whilst it conjures a somewhat surreal yet familiar
contemporary reality.
It
is a delight to see the poet’s risk-taking experiments with form result in
highly original satires such as ‘Tippexed Speeches on Scottish Independence'.
In measured pace, Mackenzie taps into the latent meanings of a politician’s
language, reworking the news-speak by David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Alex
Salmond. By highlighting the different interpretations of ownership through the
different use and repetition of ‘I/we/us’, and by leaving out parts of their
speeches, the poet exposes the politicians' craft in swaying the crowd with
deliberate, emotive language, such as the following imagined speech from David
Cameron:
I also understand why
people
want a Scotland where more people own
where more people keep more
where business can (p.17)
In
looking at the question of Scottish independence, Mackenzie adopts a language
of his own and presents both sides of the argument with artless humour. In his
poem ‘The Point’, he explores the inclusivity and exclusivity of the pronoun
‘we’, as the people are confronted with an uncertain future:
…We cannot trust
ourselves
to talk about how we
think the things we've thought.
Our independence, our
politics, our fitting demise
are not worth
retweeting. (p.16)
Inspired
by Ian Pindar’s ‘Chain Letter’, ‘A Scottish Cent(o)ury’ is a powerful poem that
projects a present reality illuminated by the past. With lines chosen from 100
Scottish poems, this is a piece of refashioned vernacular kindled with hope, in
the context of changing social and political expectations.
In
his previous interview with Robert Peake for
Huffington Post, Mackenzie talks about the difficulty to trust in a world full
of subterfuge, and sees poetry as a way of countering fakery:
‘Poems can capture moments like undoctored photographs
- as evidence against fakery and unreliability - but they can also enact fakery
and unreliability by (in effect) photoshopping the past. Good poems don't try
to fit in. Good poems don't pander to expectations. They know the official
versions of events and subvert them.’
Divided
into three sections – ‘The Lingua Franca Happy Hour’, ‘Autistic Variations’ and
‘Human Manoeuvre’, the book explores the needs and expectations of an
individual, and reflects a constant adjustment process of perception and
interpretation, of self-acceptance and self-renewal. Using the metaphor of an autistic
child, the second section offers a moving account of self-exploration and
understanding. For example, in ‘Torino in Furs’, a child grows up within and
apart from the Torinese community, as an outsider, and his un-belongingness
escapes the ‘untrained eyes’, and the place itself feels unlike home, as if it
were ‘a whole city with Asperger Syndrome’.
Carefully
poised and sometimes unsettling, Mackenzie’s poems tackle the gap between what
seems and what really is, being arriving at what truly matters, such as the
moment of clarity in ‘The Boxer’:
…I have been working
on
a lyric called The
Boxer, a sort of Kate Moss
vs. Simon &
Garfunkel growl mix, but it’s really
about longings and
other howlers I have made. (p.72)
Moving
between political satires and introspective poems, Mackenzie’s book is full of
optimism, vision and acerbic wit. Borrowing from a vast range of materials and
voices, his poems puts forward questions or hypotheses of our existence, which
are at once profound, unsettling and yet uplifting.
Jennifer Wong is a British-based poet born and raised in Hong Kong. Eyewear reviewed her recent poetry collection a few posts back.
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