| |
 |
Picador
$18.00 (£8.99) / 80 pp / paper
isbn 978-0330444-20-0
Picador UK |
Review by Matt Rader
Jacob Polley, I believe, possesses both a kite and a fascination with Egyptology. How else to explain Little Gods?—a book so self assured and anachronistic and deadly, I have little trouble imagining Polley deciphering the burn marks on his favourite diamond flyer with the aid of clay tablets. The opening sonnet “The Owls” reads like Rilke folding paper cranes (or should that be owls?) out of The Collected Ted Hughes:
I hear the owls out in the dark yews
behind the house—children out late
or lost, their voices worn away.
They’ve forgotten their names and wait
to be called again by mothers
who miss them, so they might return
with fingers and human faces.
But their sadness, too, is long gone. (3 1-8)
In terms of contemporary poetry, these verses sound down right channeled, not from one particular poet, but from the vast current of English poetry that sustained Hardy and Yeats and every other timeless poet in the English tradition. In this opening poem, of only his second collection, Polley steps from promising Hughesian acolyte of The Brink, (the mystic-minded kid brother of Paul Farley, as I liked to think of him), into the baptismal river of English verse to claim his own watery form.
For a slender volume, Little Gods offers only four poems that require a second page, an unusual move in an era of publishing enamoured with weighty long poems and sequences that “anchor” a book, another, perhaps subtle, example of how Polley constructed this book under a more timeless directive: good poems and to hell with trends. Show-stoppers such as “Cheapjack” (nominated for the Forward Prize for best individual poem), “April,” “Mandrake,” “Black Water,” and “You,” get all the glory in this collection, and with good reason:
Whatever the leaves were saying must wait:
rain has filled the trees with its own brisk word.
There’s thunder in the darkened slates.
The pond’s green eye rolls heavenwards. (From “April”)
It may be just me, but I hear a little of Hardy here, “The Darkling Thrush,” of course, but also “Neutral Tones.” Even more interestingly, something of “the pond’s green eye” brings to mind the end of Rimbaud’s “The Drunken Boat.” And who doesn’t hear Eliot in a dark poem about April? Whether on the tip of Polley’s mind or not, these associations speak to the aim of a poem such as “April:” Polley wants in on the smoking room conversation of canonical literature.
Not that these poems feel old in the outdated sense. In fact, lines like “April’s” concluding couplet, “The boil and spit of pavements: mirrored brick. / Every patch of grass is fiercely lit,” or the concluding lines of Black Water, “And there’s no testing the blade of her shoulder, / there’s no catch hidden in her throat, / and your heart’s no more than meat,” express the kind of tough-minded sentimentality many young contemporary poets offer as calling card. Little Gods would not be out of place in a reading list including Simon Armitage, Don Patterson, Paul Farley, Ian Duhig, or the Canadian Ken Babstock, all known, in their own ways, for the contemporaneousness of their work. But a different, more surprising influence also appears in some of the shorter poems and in Polley’s overall poise and sense of formal decorum: the poetry, especially the later poetry, of Michael Longley. A fastidiously mannered poet, Longley has made a career out of writing poems with the same combination of form and wild imagination and tenderness Polley has so precociously aimed at in Little Gods. If nothing else does, the presence of the final haiku-like poem, “Wild Hyacinth,” after two blank pages, nods to Longley, whose books always contain “hidden” poems somewhere in the end pages.
Of course, only posterity can tell if Polley’s poems will sit down for pints in the collective consciousness along with Hardy and Yeats, Rilke and Larkin, not to mention Longley and Patterson, but Polley’s ambitions and facilities with metre, rhyme, image and rhetoric win the current day: clearly, Polley measures his poems against the very best, and whether Polley measures up in the end matters less, at this moment, to this reader, than the thrill of encountering such moxy.
|
|
