Nathan Thompson - One Poem

Possible Pieces for the New World Orchestra


Recently I have been making sketches – calculations in balance with the things we can choose to believe, red and plain as a crisp packet. I know that you appreciate company and trust, so please share this with me. Something must change. Transfers and postal orders can help us create it. I love you, more nakedly exposed than ever before.

everything in our power is
to choose to create it
this little room
filled with the scent of forgotten roses
ash tottering in a horizontal pile
and gone
                      can you tell the television is broken

30 August: I’m still waiting for your letter to tell me that what I’m doing is as freakishly beautiful as Frankenstein. Play your horn with a flute stuffed down it – a performance direction the equivalent of aural torture sex.

do you think they know you left me
as one ship crosses another in broad daylight
the furniture of our indifference

to hurt is to be a plant growing
                                                           evenings with Mahmood
for company      a sitar      that’s what I missed out

31 August: This should be cosmopolitan if it is to be truly all-encompassing and primeval. But the tax man has taken away the solitude of high piccolos and I shall have to rethink your cowbells in punk-style skiffle: washboards with an Irish accent, the hiss of missing teeth.

to continue      leaves are falling
whisky pains      suck this and
see if it blows      ideas birthing
later      spot the difference

how to incorporate everything
expression      criticism by all known
contemporary dead composers
into something coherent

I’ll need words      sonic
graphs in imaginary idioms
your language and mime
whatever’s in between
cheques and money orders payable

32 August: We’re in the future now. I imagine you dressed in a pink robot suit covering the essentials Zulu-style and I’m Michael Caine barking orders. It’s reasonable to feel you’re right when you’re dressed in red and your opponents have ‘incorrect weapons’. That’s how the hammer and sickle went wrong: ‘if you know where to shoot to find a heart and don’t mind...’

But something more visual is required to give this meaning. Here’s a picture I drew yesterday:

[small pig on a high-wire eating an Iraqi communist]

it isn’t easy      these lines
become the unstable nature of autopsy
Slinger: the horse is bolted
Hemingway: the hell it is

this is America for beginners
wild and cold as Alaska (is that really... I’m just not sure)
burning borealis separated
by an entire country or ocean

‘more tea?      the global economy may collapse but...’
what ‘s left      China aspires
and we’re living the dream      ISBN tenderness
to ease the joints      patterns we construct

In our musical instruments the world is richer, subtler, more complex than we imagine. White noise can’t be found. We hear portions, weights, textures and colours but ultimately we construct beyond our control. After all this, I hope you enjoy the string duet. We can surrender but what choice do we have.




===
Nathan Thompson is published by Shearsman, with pamphlets forthcoming from Oystercatcher and Skald.

AND HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

Nathan Thompson - the day maybe died

the day maybe died

running out on the new book half way through      you deal
faces      these are blue days      blues      ‘I wish we was (I were) in St Malo’
or wherever      I’m not sure      this is not
so illogical as it sounds today      land’s never mind
considering the where you are where I am factor of the situation

at first I too had intended harmony      like a huge ‘O’      but I seem to have
finished early      ‘the bad break is hardest to mend’
no shit
                  and the criminal loops his smooth fingers
about a tree      it is all too tall and obvious
how about a short tomato      what’s the difference?

the difference is my face is empty as a rotten microscope
waiting for something really big to get my teeth into
‘is it your bank or another one?’      I don’t have the heart

                                                                too many questions

I’m not really interested in the intricate yesterdays of a talking horse
give me the down to turf derby every time      laugh to win
bubbles (10-1) at Ascot      ‘is it really possible to go anywhere with ladybirds?’

                                                                you may well ask

we rose too early this morning to do things the way we intended
work was out      the exercise bike of broken images had flown away with itself
making a mockery of my lit cigarette      the moon in which
future rooks are roosting      their eyes quail like eggs in the walked crooks
        of their hands
‘is nothing sacred?’      ‘dear teddy-bear Joe: no’      it’s not as if
it’s only you who is tasteless      energy sleeps south of your thrilling paws
clubbed together for a glass of sangria      I offered      but a bottle of Raymond
was what was needed    not quite celebratory coverage but celebrity ladies wear
in a shop window Jacques Brel style

                                                                    the effortlessness of your impossible health
is frustrating      sure you can sing      but can you dance
the king of Pepsi duffed up outside court opens his white arms
like an uncharitable disease with soft spots for everyone
soon we’ll be talking notes      too many questions
are out of the question      hair trigger reactions      blue looks
                                                                                          ‘dear Frank (you’re fired)
what do you make of all this’    but you’re having a coke with the wrong sponsor
the burgers are on bald Elvis green eyed in Hawaii

                                                                                                      25-26 June 2009

"a very remarkable collection of trees"

The Editors discuss Nathan Thompson's the arboretum towards the beginning (Shearsman, 2008, £8.95)

GT: Dude,

Seeing how we haven't yet started that review and Nathan sent us that collaborative piece he did with Rupert a few weeks ago, do you think we can get the ball rolling?

How about this for kicks - cos I know you said you had a lot of ideas about word placements and so on - what do you make of the use of the word 'arboretum'? I noticed Luke Kennard also used the word in his first collection a number of times, and a quick google of "exeter arboretum" (exact phrase) came up with this: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/conifers/index.htm. So they both studied at Exeter and they both drew inspiration from the arboretum, would be my fairly educated guess. But what the hell does it symbolise in Nathan's work? A place of safety or diversity? This from the above web link: "The Arboretum was begun by the original owner of Streatham Hall, R. Thornton West, who employed the firm of Veitches of Exeter and London to plant a very remarkable collection of trees."

I like that as a description of Nathan's book: "a very remarkable collection". 'Remarkable' in this instance meaning, for me, that it sets out its own limits in opposition to other poetries (including Luke's, which is remarkable in its own way) with great precision, calling attention to itself, or specific points within its boundaries.

Wotcha,

G

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ST: Hey man.

My first encounter with Nathan's collection was through a slightly hyperactive haze of caffeine and Day Nurse, but thought it was wonderful. As for the question about the arboretum, my own feeling is that it doesn't matter quite what it means in a purely semantic sense. Think of it as a free-roving signifier that means whatever it has to mean at any given moment.

What does interest me is the degree to which Nathan's work is feels like part of a wider trend in recent poetry towards what I would tentatively label the 'Harwoodesque'. There are a few poets - Michael Ayres, Peter Hughes, Ian Davidson - whose work shows the influence of Harwood's elusive style of storytelling, and Nathan's collection is very much part of this set.

(I would hope that these poets are part of an advance guard, who will usher in a new era when Harwood's work is more widely appreciated for what it is: one of the great contributions to 20th century poetry. But that might be too much to ask).

Anyway, in particular, I like the way in which various elements of a wider narrative - the arboretum amongst them - keep drifting in and out of Nathan's poems, so that the reader is left to put the pieces together. The process is strangely collaborative, if that makes any kind of sense. We are not spoon-fed a linear tale, but have to pick our way through the signs and symbols he puts in our path. Much like navigating a wood. Or, indeed, an arboretum.

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GT: Okies.

I thought for a moment you were going to sidestep my question completely with a kind of 'arboretum schmarboretum', but well recovered.

The Harwood point is probably key. I haven't met a poet who didn't like his work (maybe I don't move in circles where those people go, though for circles probably you could read 'sewers'), but the more important point there is the influence he's having. There's something here of the nicest (in tone) parts of Harwood. I get the sense of Nathan building a jigsaw out of several mixed up, partial jigsaws. So yes, rather than inherently meaningful symbols, there are things presented as symbols from which the reader can draw meaning.

(If I had to concede anything positive to postmodernism as a concept, I suppose that would be it. It would be grudgingly conceded, and still won't make me want to use the term as anything but an insult to intelligent critical thought. Sorry, putting the muzzle back on that personality.)

But the nature metaphors - the wood, the arboretum - don't quite stand up for me as analogies for this collection. There's something decidedly not-urban about it, but equally something not-rustic. I guess the part that strikes me most is the cultivated sense of reality. It's as if the narrative voice is always reaching to try and impose (in the nicest possible terms, even when he's burning down every civic edifice in the town) a subjective view of reality.

Nathan's got a good handle on the idea of an unreliable narrator. It reminds me of Bill Pullman's character in 'Lost Highway' - "I like to remember things the way I want to remember them, not how they actually happened." Only there's a fair bit of beauty here, gentleness, mixed in with the darker sides. Perhaps a tone of oblivious violence, or clumsiness might be a better description, mixed in with a zippehdidoodah approach to life. The first image that ever attracted me to his work was, "scattering glass like the slow explosion of surprise fennel" from 'Lilly's Planetarium'. Like smashing a chandelier to make it even sparklier, even though there's a whole room full of people underneath it.

Backatcha.

G

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ST: Yo.

A point that Jonathan Bate makes in The Song of the Earth seems important here: that the form of the pastoral is predicated upon the loss of an imagined Eden. It attempts to sing the praises of nature or the countryside, even as it registers the fact that such a pre-lapsarian condition of unity with nature is always already past. Bate says this much more eloquently, but essentially Arcadia can only ever be discussed - invented, even - from the vantage point of Rome. The idea of nature poetry is a condition of 'high' or 'late' civilization, so there's no real disconnection between the highly cultured and worked nature of Nathan's poems, and the reading of them - metaphorically, at least - through the lens of ecology. But that's a little knotty and pedantic, and doesn't really help to move the discussion on.

Oddly enough, I was thinking of cinema a great deal when reading these poems. Nathan's is an intensely cinematic poetics. By that I do not mean that his work is simply visual - though it does have an impact at the level of the image - but rather that the narrative techniques of cinema (bascially, editing as a narrative tool) are applicable to Nathan's technique. He builds narrative through ellipses and jumps - just as in Eisenstein's theory of montage, disparate images, when juxtaposed, can create a new meaning, a third meaning - rather than leading the reader by the nose. David Lynch is actually quite instructive in this context.

This cinematic quality is present at the level of the smallest building blocks of the poem, too, not just within the bigger (narrative) picture, and Nathan's use of what I would call juxtapositional simile throughout is very interesting (by that, I mean the technique Pound employed in 'In a Station of the Metro': "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough".) In traditional simile, the second image - the 'like' component - is subsidiary to the primary image, and as such is alive only insofar as it is yoked to a dominant 'real' image. In juxtapositional similes, both images share the same degree of weight and significance, and by drawing them together without the glue of 'like', the meaning of both is amplified, without either image being rendered secondary to the other.

Here's a favourite of mine, from 'service': "winter steaming off the corrugated roof singing and rattling a kettle on a ringed hob". There are clearly two distinct events taking place here: it is raining (likely heavily), and someone is making a cup of tea. But the reader, given the absence of 'like', is free to read the images as connected, or as discrete. We are not, importantly, hidebound by the 'like'. The absence of 'like' frees the images and, paradoxically, makes them more real and concrete. Indeed, that feels like one of the great strengths of the collection: the degree to which the real, the objects of the everyday, are brought to the fore, even as they are dislocated and rendered dream-like by Nathan's structural jiggery pokery.

Sorry, that was a little long-winded. Over to you. By the way, why don't you sign off your emails Yours, Ttoouli? If I were you, I would.

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GT: Well, why don't you sign your emails off at all? The temptation for me to put in 'Up Yours, / Ttoouli' would be too great, whoever I was emailing. Even my own mother.

Your point about juxtaposed simile is really important and it won't be unnecessary repetition for me to go through it again in detail. It's a basic building block here which I hadn't yet framed clearly. I've seen that kind of shaping and spacing used in different ways - to capture a sense of whispering (David Morley's Mandelstam Variations), or of waves (Carol Watt's Wrack), but here there's something more quantum about it, forcing the reader to fold two units of sense together, as if they've been spliced to be read simultaneously.

Interesting we were looking at Brian Joseph Davis the other day. Some of that folding springs to mind, particularly the Greatest Hits stuff, where he crams an entire album of songs into one track. Nathan's work is less violent, less about cacophony than, as you say elision and cinematic montage. I'm particularly taken by how this creates multiple meanings, in, say, 'laws of attraction': "sweetening the philistine edges / of your dimly lit ornamental music // I expect the frogs will be at it for some time / winking like ellipses in brilliant prose". There's the immediate juxtaposition of an evening scene, waterway, mating frogs, and the internal scene, the intimate artistic experience.

That leads me to a point about prose techniques deployed here. The middle section especially takes on characterisations - the female love interests, the love rival - the vasectomist - and the arsonist. The way these things recur are like plot threads. Things like the stolen harmonica, aforementioned, show up repeatedly. It's as if the poetry is appealing to the prose reader in me, who attaches sympathies to objects and characters, and desires to know the outcomes to their predicament.

That seems to be the effect of the whole book. It builds sympathy for the narrator's subjective passion for the world, but maintains a kind of delicate longing, aims towards resolution - 'will Petrarch get his Laura?' kind of thing, in lines like, "she is elusive as tinnitus" ('purloining a fritillary') or with the general presence of the arsonist and the vasectomist - destructive or negative voices that have to be overcome in order to reach the love song at the end. Although that in itself implies a strange failure, or reversal: "this will be / the last winter before the graves open / for the Queen of Hearts"; and the last lines, "goodnight my love / I meant it all" seems to ram home the point.

Keats is checked early on in the collection and a helpful signpost, a poet who almost never allowed his subjects to attain their fantasies. Here the fantasy seems attained and then let go of, as if the whole collection has been building a narrative tension, only to turn its back on a resolution: "it's time to click my heels / and go to Kansas". It's like a mild send up of the happy ending, the 'no place like home' of Hollywood. For all the subjectivity, the various plots, played sympathies, defamiliarised representations of reality - i.e. all the brilliant technical displays - there's a flesh and blood heart pumping this stuff along, a genuine sentiment.

Right, will stop there. Back to the grind.

In comradeship,

G

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ST: I don't sign off my emails because whenever I use my name, Satan gets a little bit more of my soul. It's in the contract I signed, which is why I is as clevva as I is, and stuff.

There's not much I can really add to your last round of comments - they got to the heart of the matter succinctly and eloquently - but I would add that in many regards, Nathan's focus upon the processes of subjectivity (I noticed this most of all in a poem entitled 'projection digressions', which is kind of an internalised account of a train ride along the coast) places him much more within the sphere of classical modernism rather than that of its upstart offspring postmodernism. Your comment concerning the genuine sentiment underlying Nathan's work ties in with this: underlying the poems, too, is the assumption that the self is a given - fractured, certainly, and often at war with itself, unsure of its motives, but definitely there, in some form or another throughout.

If I could add anything, it would relate to the matter of humour, which neither of us have hit upon as yet, and which I would see as vital to the essential humanity of Nathan's writing. It's a hazy, woozy, absurdist kind of humour, more akin to Guy Maddin or Jacques Tati, but it is humour nevertheless. Most overt in this regard is 'casting calls are almost complete', which runs in its entirety:

the black cat in the arboretum is to be played by a black cat

because out of all the applicants she was by far the most beautiful

There's a wonderfully deadpan tone to this that I love, and it recurs at other moments too ("you know it's been good when / 'all night' is closed"). There is, of course, a natural affinity between poetry and comedy: both rely upon the subversion of expectations; both often relish the joy and excitement of language for it's own sake; both rely upon leaps of logic - comedy with the unexpected punchline, poetry with metaphor and simile - that rope together disparate realities to create a new unity: the gag, or the image. Both are, most importantly of all, essentially impervious to analysis: however much you pick apart lines like "He may have ocean madness, but that's no excuse for ocean rudeness" (Futurama) or "The spruces rough in the distant glitter / / Of the January sun" (Wallace Stevens, 'The Snow Man'), they'll never fully give up their secrets. They simply are. That's why we keep on reading, I guess, however jaded we get, because there's always something to surprise us. Nathan's work certainly fits the bill.

Right, shall we try and trim this into a cogent review?

S
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GT: Nah, sod it. I'll just lop off the subject headers, chop it together and bung it up.

You can order the arboretum towards the beginning from Shearsman Books. You can read some of Nathan's work at Gists & Piths.

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (9)

In Memoriam


The Hourglass figures if you don’t mind the walk. That is where you say we will find him. You can recognise him by his gaunt figure, wasting the day at the very point of crux.

‘No sudden movements. Just turn slowly and leave until it is time to come back again.’ Those are my instructions.

I can sense the nights are getting longer. Vampires are coming, dressed in their vicious bunny suits. Their sockets mark a space to the backs of our heads. We try to light candles in there, greased with recitations of the Hail Mary.

I leave a note to myself behind the bar that there is a full moon over the opera house. The murderer will be there too. So twirl your moustache dramatically and walk out into the night.





--
9 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (8)

After Much Thought


I have decided to change teams and follow the hourglass storyline into shadow. Underexposed photos and unanswered questions are more than enough to keep us amused. It seems to fill all the hours in the day.

I use the days simply to filter the nervous system, to exhibit complex responses and specify the correct amount of air and fluid to take on board. Phew clap whoo clap phew clap surrender.

Licking the glass clean, I stare through the pane and hope the murderer arrives soon. Last time I heard he was lecturing up north and reacting to sudden movements. Irrationality demands intervals and accusations; a power of insight to overcome optical illusions and suspicions of underhand behaviour.

A is for a house. Any house. It will never become a home, just somewhere to rest up and hide, keep warm if a little damp, cowering in the boiler room. Buses run every 15-30 minutes and if you don’t mind the walk it is ideally situated for information overload and all your everyday needs.

The central idea is individual creativity and personal excess. Public interaction is encouraged.





--
8 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (7)

Melodrama wth Aforethought


You stick dribbling to the window. Down the pane tangents of sucked lozenges bomb the suburbs. I am friendly to this but it brings no clarity.

People try not to notice, playing at wise monkeys, but the marks are genuine. You are indifferent to these shortcuts, the cherry-wood romances of Johann Strauss.

Then it becomes entirely terrible: This is a conflict in which nobody even bothers to get undressed. Cinderella weeps among her shattered slippers. She will never know.

Music for dancing suggests strings of puppets disgusted with the homophony of vast deserts. Ours is a human enterprise which doesn’t happen. Enter the murderer flexing his muscles.





--
7 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (6)

Magic Lantern


Shadows play games with unformed memories. Your sleepy danse macabre flicks ash from the music box. We are taking it in turns to be grotesque.

A witch flies upside-down in pursuit of her falling familiars. Beneath her, a crescent moon wraps around a cat retelling the past. Each time she passes she fails to grasp it.

But this is to discount jasmine outside our curtained window, lifting gently, tilting at its edges.

You keep dreaming through figures of eight, each one tighter until the knot is tangled. The last stars tense at the lips of your eyes.





--
6 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (5)

Osmosis


I’m sorry, I didn’t realise the story had gone astray. It is difficult to find plot or make headway. Memo to self: build a world with language. Memo to reader: get on with it. This was never meant to be an easy read!

“My reaction was a longing for some sense of necessity behind the work. I’d be dishonest to say otherwise.”

And I’d be dishonest if I said your comment didn’t hurt. But the parcels of books made up for it, along with a visit from a friend. I have other reputations as well, warm hands to hold until the clocks go back.

“It looks like a line, not like a line pretending to be a line. Which is why it is more interesting.”

Early evening sunshine warms the darkest corners of human memory. I am hiding your present from you.





--
5 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (4)

Mudslide


If I cannot live backwards I will live forwards.

Midnight - noon - a charm bracelet of tickets. Soon the whole fiesta.

I think perhaps I should lighten up a little.

How can you tell that the morning star and the evening star are the same thing? Circular breathing. There is still a risk of course: inner city; cold water; the reckless heckles that contribute smallness.

It would be apposite to point out that sometimes air brightens and begins to clear. The moon rising like a love-song through the clouds; a cat on a tightrope walking to the party.





--
4 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (3)

Aid to Memory


I do not understand why the cat goes missing for several days and then returns, seeking food and affection.

I am praying for airtime, wishing for air. What I have are this stuffy office and a computer I don’t know how to use.

The fire in the pub hasn’t been lit for months. No-one is talking to anyone they don’t know. Faces have turned hard with age.

The cat is language. This place is too quiet to be home.

Nothing is set in stone.





--
3 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (2)

Statement to Self


We are not the children of love we are the children of war.
We have other reputations as well.

Your hand can’t get tired, it hasn’t got eyes.
Memory is full of alterations, facts, short-cuts.

This is an attempt to make things clear, a spatial rendition of time.
I am already regretting the whole thing, will pretend it doesn’t exist.

We are different people this morning.
No-one talks to anyone they don’t already know.





--
2 of 9

Rupert Loydell & Nathan Thompson - Memos to Self (1)

Once Upon a Time


Ice and morning mist, cold juice for breakfast, long hours to fill. The chronometer is not working and you would be surprised how much we sleep, how much we eat – probably how often meal times come around.

In a funny sort of way happiness is not to do with being happy. It is simply being content and settled in routine. Keeping warm and alive takes all our time up here. What little spare we have we dedicate to mapping out words on the white pages of our journals.

This is a fiction. And also this.





--
This is the first of nine parts extracted from a longer collaborative project titled 'Memos to Self' by Rupert Loydell and Nathan Thompson. We'll be serialising them daily. You can read further sections from the series in Shadowtrain #27.

Searching for Closure - a Re-Review by Nathan Thompson

Stretch of Closures by Claire Crowther, Shearsman Books, 2007

What follows is sort of narcissistic, not in the sense that it assumes that anybody takes any notice of poetry reviews, but that it implies that anyone might have taken notice of one that I wrote over a year ago now. I hope this is forgivable under the circumstances: basically I want to hold up my hands and admit I was at least a little bit wrong.

One of the advantages of the internet is its permanence and its accessibility. One of the disadvantages of the internet is its permanence and its accessibility. For example, over on Stride magazine I wrote a brief review of Claire Crowther’s Stretch of Closures which, whilst by no means damning, could have been perceived to be an example of faint praise par excellence. I know this because a couple of readers have told me so. The review is also pretty badly written and shows obvious signs of hurry. People haven’t mentioned that, maybe because they’re too nice. But it’s there for good, or until the internet implodes. And I don’t like that review, or even agree with it (Martian? – I must have been having some sort of ‘moment’). So I’m grateful to the team at G+P for allowing me the, pretty definitely self-indulgent, chance to set the record straight. And I hope this doesn’t just read like the attempts of a once-near-Catholic to partially cure his guilty insomnia.

Since writing the earlier review I’ve spent a great deal of time with Claire Crowther’s work (it’s clear from re-reading that review that I can hardly have skimmed it (strange, as I clearly had read the other two books discussed there) – I’ve learned my lesson now), and the more time I spend with it the more intriguing it becomes. The poems are, on one level, masterpieces of clarity, in the sense that they are invariably carefully and precisely written. But in Stretch of Closures, however clear the mode of expression, that which is expressed remains just of reach, giving the reader his or her own space in which to reflect and contribute:

The wind pulls the hair of young pines.
Above their heads, dinosaur footprints.

[from ‘Piave’]

The grace, and calm sense of collusion with the obtuse in this poem, is reminiscent of John Ashbery at his best. And yet there’s never the sense of anything arch or knowing in Claire Crowther’s writing that such curious juxtapositions as the above often carry with them. Here the imagery seems an excursion into the subconscious better to understand the conscious; an extension of the unreachable dream-world of the past into the present; and an examination of personal fossils and experiences that in retrospect take on the aspect of things unknown. And, to extend this idea, bringing one thing into proximity with another seems to be one of the themes in this collection. Compassion and understanding are to the fore and language is used generously and lyrically to create the give and take between reader, written, and writer that is, to me anyway, essential to poetic communication:

The sea rolled itself into a sweat
down our faces as if the tide
had suddenly thought of us as inlets

[from ‘City of Turns’]

And I like too the forays into the informal, such as the humour in the repetition at the beginning of ‘Moods’:

Once I had a motorway of hair,
long, black, stood up to stresses well.
You trafficked it, your fingers heavy, light.
I closed it once or twice against the terrors
you get with hair.

There’s a hint of New York-style familiarity and ‘making strange’ here that gels well with the slightly dangerous-sounding narrative voice (on the subject of ‘voice’, the earlier review had a really insulting and patronising tone, don’t you think? – if I were Claire Crowther it would have made me spit). And there are overtones of menace, or at least fear, throughout this book; a sense of ‘looking for gravity’ (to quote from ‘Stairborne’) in both senses. But thankfully the narrative voice avoids the temptation to recede into tight-eyed Plath-style steeliness, despite a degree of crossover in its subject matter – for instance in ‘Motorway Bridges’, which covers genocide, women killed by their partners, and overtones of the occult.

The prose poems have a different diction on the whole, and sail deliciously close to ‘purple prose’ in their rhythms and piles of imagery without ever yawing over into quasi-19th-Century French extravagance:

My shoes are pocked with mud. Roller skates flicker ball bearings like dynamos in my hand. Do I see more than my mind which is sure that fledglings cry almost soundlessly from a nest, that a marble lies hidden, glass budded in a scald of nettles inside the paling?

[from ‘Abscond’]

What can you say to that but: fuck, yeah!? There’s a daring and panache to the prose poems in this book that you don’t normally find in English prose poetry (Luke Kennard’s and Annie Clarkson’s work being the obvious exceptions) and it’s exciting to live with a writer on the edge of technique like this.

So why are the views in this review so different? I guess, although at the time I didn’t realise it, I wasn’t ready to be reviewing a book simultaneously so raw and so technically proficient: maybe I couldn’t get my head around the possibility of marrying the two – I think I was still reading Lee Harwood without finding irony, and Philip Larkin finding only irony.

And also, I don’t think I read it very thoroughly. It’s easy when you start out reviewing to adopt a kind of all-encompassing ‘knowing’ tone and use it to blast through your own ignorance. I think this was the first book I found that totally eluded that kind of one-style-fits-all approach, which, and I should have realised it at the time, probably means it’s a pretty interesting book and one I should have left someone else to review.

Anyway, I’ve now owned three copies of this book, having given the previous two to friends in pubs when talking excitedly to non-contemporary-poetry types about the fact that there is lots of exciting work out there by new British writers if you only know where to look for it. And this book is a very good place to start looking. I hope there’s much more to come from Claire Crowther. She’s one of the most exciting writers around right now, and as first collections go this one’s a blinder. It’s a shame it has taken me so long to say it. So buy three copies and give two to your friends, that’s my advice.

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Nathan Thompson grew up in Cornwall and studied at the University of Exeter, where he later lectured part-time in musicology. After brief stints in Cardiff and Herefordshire he now lives in Jersey. Examples of his work can be found online at Great Works, Gists and Piths, Shadowtrain and Stride magazine. His first collection, the arboretum towards the beginning, is just out, published by Shearsman.

"Chess without squares" - Four Poems by Nathan Thompson

March 29th
 
you feel stern today
the weather plays a game
that is somewhat like chess without squares
   Easter draws on previous sales
and the harbour is electric
 
shall I meet you at the point
   the boats are cantankerous
they are travelling tinkers
I will be wearing the Russian hat
to symbolize my lack of solidarity
 
how the sky draws in
like ears tapering to pixies
beside the 'tween times which is Irish for 'tourist'
 
I'm not satisfied with being here
so I should pay visits
but you are approaching the evening
turns its back    I forget
   the smell of jasmine helps me
up the banister
 
                the castle
is in the water    now it's not
   tides    listen to the rigging
it sounds like cutting loose from
something    stand back    a little
   snap    there we are
 
 
if the bells are in the gallery
 
it may be 5 now
but it's the same
as the clocks refuse to fix
    
probably sunnier in [insert favourite]
if I read the books right
                           the sly
maintenance of this picture is smoke gives    pause
   I've read the news and think
how adjectival    why don't I
love music the same
it's not fixed
               give the signal
for your band-wagon and I'll jump
properly clean    not because but
merciful father    I forgive you
 
 
today on the rainbow
 
spring comes
and    easier
   trying to be serious
(call me Ham)
 
it seems wrong to tell the animals
   a function of breakdown
      communication
 
                     sometimes    less deceived
the sea walks    that is safe
within the bounds of abilities
and capable    inhabiting dreams
the words left out make propositions
  
another ark passes    filled with flowers
 
   all this to think of
candle-wax and figures of speech
spilled like honey over bees
 
'get off'
         the basement shifts
to catch the sun windows grow towards
   open speech marks
                     here is
a promise
 
 
as the day goes
 
the long way
            along the beach
our chairs are in the sun
 
how many articles have you brought with you
      a cart emerges barring the road

Poems by Nathan Thompson

I've converted the poems to images to preserve fonts and layouts, for lack of a better way. Click the poems for a readable image. If anyone has better suggestions for how to lay up poems like these, please let us know.




I'm glad the sun is shining on you and you're smiling






X





Lilly's Planetarium






the arboretum towards the beginning