Review - Paul Brookes - These Random Acts of Wildness / Othernesses

Review - Paul Brookes - These Random Acts of Wildness / Othernesses

Paul Brookes is a writer, local historian, genealogist, photographer, shop assistant and grandfather. He is editor of the Wombwell Rainbow interviews, reviews and poetic challenges, and has many published poems and several chapbooks. For more, go to www.thewombwellrainbow.com. 

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Paul has published these two books of poetry simultaneously. They are a result of writing a sonnet a day, inspired to do so by fellow Barnsley poet Ian MacMillan. Sonnets are not straightforward, but they sit nicely in the Venn diagram of narrative, lyric and imagistic and, when used skilfully, can be a powerful weapon in the poet's arsenal. You can tell a story, but it can't ramble. It can be all imagistic, or employ images within it. It can be used as a snapshot that encapsulates an idea. In these publications we see how Paul uses this form in multiple ways.

I am reviewing these together (at Paul's request) as they are linked. I will begin with "These Random Acts of Wildness", a set of 38 poems that are grouped by mini-themes. Nature, housework, childhood and school, and observations in a churchyard. The last group, each describing the life of people randomly next to each other in the graveyard, are a conclusion of the theme of death that runs through the other sections and is signalled by the angel statue beautifully illustrated by Jane Cornwell on the front cover. Randomness is a theme too, and as humans our desperate attempts to find some sort of order to the chaos of the world.

There are many excellent poems here - I like "Cemetery Swallows" - a poem about life and death intertwining and life continuing after we go. 

Flash their white underside as they curl in
wards, vital boomerangs spinning back on
themselves, snatch flitting small meals in a spin

I identify very much with Paul's memories of schooldays in a working class area where being clever and shy made you an outsider.   

Our parents want, work towards best for us.
We are separate in distinctiveness.

The descriptions of the mundane are very good, inhabiting the soul of the vacuum cleaner and iron, observing nature at a microscopic level.

This is a fabulous collection that requires, and deserves, multiple readings. It uses plain language, including dialect where needed, but also stretches into difficult and complex images. 

Othernesses is a companian piece that is published by, and contains, beautiful drawings by Jane Cornwell. The combination of sonnets and art is terrific and adds to what is a superb collection of poems. Many of them are about insects, or sea life, and introduce us, briefly, to the brief lives of these creatures that share our planet. Despite being all around us, they are strange, they are "other". We don't really understand how they think, or what drives them other than some nebulous concept of "instinct". We, as supposed higher beings, are always thinking about everything and believe we make most of our decisions after considered thought. Perhaps this collections suggests we don't - viewed on a larger scale our lives are brief. We search for food, sex, perhaps some kind of fulfilment, and then we die.

'Earwigs' is a good example - it shows the birth, upbringing and eventual leaving of the nest of this familiar insect (or is it familiar? - when was the last time I saw one? I used to see them all the time as a boy. Maybe I've stopped looking.) It refers to the female as "Mam", which is a great way to draw you into the poem.

We crawl out of our eggs and eat them
Mam guards us against those who would eat us,
feeds us what she's caught or found, dead stems,
hard and soft shelled, rotted out of darkness.

As a side note, this stanza shows us the effort Paul puts into his rhymes - this is a pattern throughout the book. The mix of full and half rhymes keeps the poems from sounding the same. 

This mother is cruel - she will kill and eat any young who don't leave so she can move on to the next brood. While this is extreme, there will be people who recognise this rejection if their mother finds a new man, a new family. 

Even home is temporary. All fleet.
I hide in darkness, wings folded and neat. 

Someone asked the other day to define poetry as opposed to just speaking or writing. This book would be a fantastic example. I replied as a quick and incomplete response - "rhythm, concise language, pointing out things that people may not otherwise see, but recognise."

Just when you think Paul has created a complete collection of insect sonnets like some Victorian collector, pinning them one at a time onto a board, he throws in some poems about him, his ancestors, and indeed ourselves.

There are about 70 sonnets in "Othernesses" so it takes time and multiple readings to absorb them all. Along with "These Random Acts of Wildness" they form a formidable collection of beautifully constructed fourteen liners (one or two may be shorter!). Vivid, detailed, and interesting. Get them both if you can.

"These Random Acts of Wildness" is published by Glass Head Press and is available directly from the author. Contact Paul on Twitter @PaulDragonWolf1 or by email paulbrookes07@gmail.com

"Othernesses" is published by Jane's Studio Press

Review - Sally Jenkinson - Pantomime Horse, Russian Doll, Egg

Review - Sally Jenkinson - Pantomime Horse, Russian Doll, Egg

 

Sally Jenkinson was born in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. She has been writing and performing poetry across the UK for more than a decade, and has also written and performed internationally in Sweden, Iceland and Australia.

Her work has recently been featured in The Morning Star, Lighthouse Journal, Emerge Lit Journal, The #MeToo Anthology from Fairacre Press, and on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Power Lines’.

She is a care worker and community arts producer, and is currently working towards her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Gloucestershire.

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I recently reviewed Helen Mort's "The Illustrated Woman", which was a broad ranging look at women and how they and others viewed their bodies. Part of it was about childbirth, but in this pamphlet Sally does a deep dive into her specific childbirth experience, in all its gory, frightening and magical detail. Reading this I felt at times a bit like Ewan McGregor's character in Trainspotting when he goes into the filthy toilet to get his drugs. I felt like I was going head first into a birthing pool, drowning in various fluids, to get to the poetry. I, of course, have never experienced childbirth in person and I did miss our first (I was in America for work and he decided he wanted to come 4 weeks early) but the other two were relatively routine once we'd reached the hospital. Actually I really must write about the journey to Jessop's on 29th January 1990 - but that's for another day, get back to the review!  

It starts with the early stages, with a prose-poem "Pantomime Horse" that uses the stages of labour as a start point for short prose pieces that poetically reflect the very matter-of-fact descriptions of each stage of birth. 

Then the setting up of the birthing pool. In the very short poem Birth Plan (this is most of it), Sally writes

I hope to do this at home
because hospitals are choked with ghosts

Spoiler alert - the home birth plan is thwarted and the poem Hospital Transfer explores the moment that the plan changes.

No bone-old fears can compare to this.

Wagons roll says the parademic.

In hospital the poems become increasingly frantic, giving a sense of disorientation and hallucination as memories mix with the reality of the situation the soon-to-be mother is in. The poem Forensics breaks out of the panic and views some less than pleasant memories of men, as the doctor reaches between her legs. I won't spoil the ending, but the last line of this one is very sharp indeed. 

Once the baby is out safely the poems soften and the final one, The Goddess Myth, is a lovely reflection of the joy and relief. 

Your tiny hands, your tiny ears, your tiny wail
                I won't write a poem for another year
You're the best thing I've ever made
    One day you'll ask me a question I can't answer

This isn't an easy read and it may be best to avoid it if you're about to give birth for the first time. Save it for afterwards. It's full of brilliant images and swaps poetic styles and rhythms effortlessly. the poems change shape; there are found poems, imagistic poems, narrative and lyric, and there's even space for a Golden Shovel. 

This is a very creative and visceral work, a fine poet writing about her experiences in a vivid and challenging way. Highly recommended.

"Pantomime Horse, Russian Doll, Egg" is published by Burning Eye Books www.burningeye.co.uk