Reviews
The Ice Age — Paul Farley
Published by Picador
Price £8.99
What does milk have to do with the 11th February 1963? It was "the worst winter for decades. In the freeze some things get lost and I'm not even born" , and a strange unification of events takes place. At the time when John Lennon was recording Twist and Shout at Abbey Road studios, he asked for a bottle of milk to soothe his throat for one last take . And at that moment, in a flat in Primrose Hill, Sylvia Plath took out the milk from the fridge for her children when they wake up, before gassing herself. And "This milk bottle might hold what John'll drink for one last take / that she'll leave out for when the children wake. "
The whole chilling image of Farley's 11th February 1963 poem is
the chill felt by the reader throughout his new collection
The Ice Age. Farley's first The Boy
From The Chemist Is Here To See You has won him the
Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Since then, Farley's
work and recognition in poetry circles has been in constant and
steady growth.
With his first collection, Farley had already emerged as a poet
with a remarkable ability to change and revitalise the way in which
we see the minor oddities of daily life. Poems like The
Reading Hour, Dead Fish, Winter
Hill capture the unavoidable detail hidden in thoughts and
objects around us, they further the imagination and reminisce of
childhood, through teenage years to maturity of existence. He can
move with bewildering speed from image to image, allusion to
allusion, simile to simile with distinct clarity of thought. This
though can be seen as his genius and the fatal flaw. Perhaps a
slight influence of Philip Larkin can be detected in his allusions
of trains and travel, but the reader is still left with an
intriguing taste in mouth.
The Ice Age has been short listed for this years
Forward Prize. Although there have been many shadowing inner
political debates at this years Forward Prize panel, especially
with Farley being one of the Picador Poets, this is piece of work
that represents modern trend in British poetry now. If in October
this collection wins Forward, it will be deservedly. Still, Farley
is far, far from reaching his poetical peek yet.
The Light Trap — John Burnside
Published by Cape
Price £8.00
John Burnside's eighth collection of poetry takes its epigraph
from Wallace Steven's poem Thirteen ways of looking at
a Blackbird, images from which are woven throughout the
collection as a way of structuring and working through complex
ideas about the way in which we think about the natural world.
As in previous collections, Burnside continues to explore the
numinous, presenting the poet's role as that of someone who
works at catching the elusiveness of experience as it hovers
between the unspoken, the remembered or imagined.
Each poem asks us
to reinvent a way of seeing, rehearsing words / to make the
world seem permanent : a philosophy of the world that depends
upon a simultaneous bewilderment and a desire to make sense of the
physical laws that govern nature. For Burnside, 'seeing'
and 'not seeing' are important concepts, with poetry
offered as a way of both thinking and of knowing in a universe
where looking always worked towards a word / trading the limits
of speech / for the unsaid presence . It is the magic that
speech performs which allows us the revelation of the
known .
Burnside makes reference to various philosophies of being and
science: Lucretius, Heidegger, Einstein, but his own philosophy
appears to reside within the mysteriousnesss of the power of
language as he looks for the pull of the extraordinary within the
ordinary. Resisting as he does the sometimes easy haven of either
the religious or the secular aesthetic, Burnside appears to be
offering us a kind of holy science. The Light Trap
is a hugely ambitious collection which leads the reader through
difficult ideas in a lyrical and seemingly effortless celebration
of what it is to be human.
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