Craig Podmore's 'an autopsy of the spleen' reviewed by Polly Trope

An Autopsy of the Spleen -- as the title suggests, this set of poems circles around the thought of death, and takes inspiration from the poetry of Baudelaire, who made the word "spleen" famous in poetry. Sound bytes that recall Baudelaire and the old symbolism with its skewed aesthetics of the awful, are strewn all around this Craig Podmore's newest collection.
 
Titles such as "Opium in Bloodied Hands", "The Pale Drunkard" and "The Ennui is Murder" hark back to Baudelaire's celebration of opium-smoking in his artificial paradises, which often appear paired with the darkest desires. In a similar vein, references to Ennui expand upon a pivotal theme of Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil", in a modernized way that brings the banned poets of the 19th century bang up to date.
 
Boredom and moodiness as demons and the number one enemy of any poet spring back into view. With "A pale drunkard", Podmore takes us for a walk in midst the French symbolist big city monster, with its anaemic faces, its dark and squalid corners, its syphilitic prostitutes in the dim glow of less-than-sanitary late night hangouts. All these are things which quintessentially haven't changed about the fringes of city life, even though the gaze on them has shifted to more nonchalance, less repulsion. The sweaty and brutal power nurtured by a mixture of madness, illness, and alcoholism, inhabits and perpetuates the neuroses of urban life in this new collection all over again:
 
"The insight of my failures
That permeates,
My insecurities shrouded by insolence
And lack of empathy.
Gnawing nothing,
Shedding skin
And gorging on black and blue
Psychotics."
 
Setting up such a geography, Craig Podmore's chapbook draws up a portrait gallery of the distant and not-so-distant forbears of urban alcoholism and the murky innards of late night excesses as they are, and as they have been, in a half-real, half-nightmarish setting which only poetry can really capture.
 
But the word "Autopsy" -- the other part of the title -- encapsulates the more up-to-date, thriller-like aspect of this work. Circling around the image of a dead female body which crops up again and again, from different angles, forming a puzzle piece by piece, an intrigue weaves itself through the collection that is never quite solved. The lyrical narrator lets us in on a little secret : he himself is not 100% sure of the order of events or even sure of their truth. The distorted and estranged mental spaces he at times crosses over into blur and de-blur, and he tells us things in a haze.

This trope of the "unreliable narrator" hails from a much different tradition than Baudelaire, and draws up reminiscences of Dr. Caligari's Cabinet and many modern films with their double-edged confusion and portrayals of losing the moral compass.

"The murderer gazing upon his victim endlessly;
He texts his wife concerning shopping items
Followed by a thorough check of his victim’s purse.
A theft of £4.10,
A brain haemorrhage
And another human looking for something"

The dim contours of a dead woman, with whom there may or may not have been a past romance, also open up a space for the poetic reflection on death and desire in a more general sense, and this is where the full contemporariness of this volume really comes into view. If there is a dance around Christian morals and a kind of medievalism like that of Baudelaire, there is also an aesthetic of explicitness, of unconcealed pornography in pair with the sensationalism of the globally desensitized period in which we live, its nonchalance, its cruel sarcasm.


This chapbook is a success on so many levels. My warmest congratulations to Craig Podmore. It is available here

The Zero Eye--Michael Mc Aloran--Reviewed by David McLean

The Zero Eye
Michael Mc Aloran
Oneiros Books, 2014
84 pp.
Review by David McLean 

This collection by Michael Mc Aloran is condensed and highly idiosyncratic, perhaps his most experimental collection thus far. It is equipped with an introduction by Aad de Gids that brings out the direction taken, that the poetry laments the absence of something it very well knew was missing all the time. It is of the “itch of the redeem” and the knowledge that the itch never gets to be assuaged.

The book servers as a key to the others in a sense, a description of what happens “in damage seasons”, a summary statement of the pointlessness and the beauty there nevertheless is in all of the emptiness.

the silent light/ the light by which no light may be seen/
hence the distil/ the teeth of it/ the bones of it in a
slaughterhouse of all/ mocking the lung lock/ awash with
bile and unspeaking reckless nothingness/ no prayers for
the now/ silenced/ shine a light/ here a breath there a
breathe/ in damage seasons/ having breached/
absconded/ not a bloody chance/ no nothing/ no not from
the commence of/ no no other route…

Mc Aloran, says de Gids, is expressing a point about the development of the polities and sociuses in which we live, that their ultimately arriving at this dreadful impasse where everything is excused in the name of political rectitude is what we all anyway wanted, the endgame, the terminus, the final fucked up destination. I see the point of the poems as more ontological, that if we were living in a perfect Utopia life would still suck balls because of finitude, and the fact that the fuckers have remorselessly destroyed any chance of jouissance anybody ever had is just icing on the suicidal cake, as it were.

Still, the book introduces itself as “a book of misunderstandings” so the vicissitudes of interpretation are all well and good.

Mc Aloran is also a visual artist, thus the “eye” is deeply involved in the book, the function of seeing, usually taken as the exemplary sense for humans, and the comprehension of light and color, the conquest of color being something Deleuze regards as fundamental and a source of great anxiety for the visual artist.

…the eye recalls it does not recall/ stratosphere of bled/
sun light of asked of promise/ spat out/ sheen purpose of
the whole/ locked to the might of virulent/ a-breeze/
shattered frozen flesh/ dead light what of it/ the half moon
circus of redeemed purpose/ knocking the teeth from the
broken jaw what laughter now/ fingers yet/ yet fingers
hands to caress/ there is blood beneath the fingers of the
unearthed/ the earth clogs the lungs there is nothing in the
hands of breaking lightlessness/ as if to say/ what speech/
what of the voice that imparts the dead colours/ the
tourniquet heart/ spasm/ spillage of blood/ asks of till
given silences mocking the reaching purpose/ which is to
bile less than ever was before/ a syntax of shattered bones/
till ever-dreaming in the shadow’s longing/ as if to be gone
were the only crosshair in sight/ and yet/ subtle the
change in the pulse/ here or there/ dead light what of it/
spit forth/ the raped tune of these silences that cannot be
acquainted with/ less or more/ dead songs/ dissipatory/
struck shine/ some detritus of light.

Thus the book develops its reach into the emptiness from the most fundamental percepts, from the bottom up, instead of from the abstract and at an already and exclusively semantic level from which the text never departs, as I would have done.

All in all, a splendid read, well worth buying, and it's available from Oneiros Books, here
 

A Review of 'SHE' by Christine Murray

A review of She by Christine Murray

She

Christine Murray

forthcoming from Oneiros Books

82 pp

review by David McLean

This book is splendid in its conception and execution. Purporting to be a poetic narrative of the process of madness that led to the catatonia of a lady called Constance, a person who has encountered a being called She in her dreams and become imbricated in a pattern of psychic events involving She. She would seem to be an archetype. She is the force of death in life, life in death, the essentially female and thus, one might speculate, then (1858) to be regarded as fundamentally evil. The character Constance notes in her introductory letter that the dreamworld is equally real to her.

I do not expect anyone will believe me, but I know 

that my dreaming-life is as real as my waking life. 

Indeed, I have learnt not to call these sleeping 

narratives anything other than a different part of my 

reality.

We can go further, there is no “different part” - she means “another part” - and this because dreamwork is fundamentally productive and creates reality, as real as the real external world is, for there is no real world characterized by the production of real values set against the fantasy world of desiring-production, as Deleuze and Guattari note. The “madness” os Constance is but creation of a world where she/She may live for the socius has given her a world that stinks.

The poems in the book are situated among stones and wood, in a petrified forest of sorts. They are set also in an Irish fogginess, gray Celtic and dour is the world and without the fatuity of small joy. The lady Constance accompanies She in her observations of the environment

The second half of the book concerns dreams set on a small island. Not the mainstream mainland that belongs to patriarchy and the males.

This is a switch to “another terrain” - it is another world but on an island that is also part of the normal dreamworld where the alleged “laws” of nature do not apply. She is the “embodiment of your unexpressed deeds” and thus in some ways maybe like a fury. She is real here for the first time, it is her element and an internal truer world than the false world wherein we live

Just as the pots in which I have cooked

have caught blood in steel, just as

Those very things used again and again

In places where there is no memory -

The tremor in my hand is not of fear at her unmasking

it is of age /ages and that recognition

I wondered at the time if my hand

My eye could tell /

Would live to describe

This thing

This memory

Of our meetings

Her cloths

(from “She is here now in her reality”)

It is an enlarged reality where the quotidian, even the 

 meaning that we create for it, is without much meaning. She seems to be a creature reclaiming debts. Even words and what words signify are revealed as devoid of value: even if they continue to signify, what they signify is shown to be less than nothing by the revitalized sight Constance 

acquires by encountering She, and She herself does not use 

or need words

To look at each thing anew 

 

Those books on my shelf /

The empty vase that bookends them

They were there /

They still rest on my night-table

Talismans/

Each a signifier and each without

A value to it

Standing on this beach of skulls in gathering dawn

Is what I have always been doing /

Bit by bit the /

Treasures of my existence are losing mass

I look again at the shelf/

My hands cannot trace the

Names of the books /

The place where my letters were

Slotted-in /

As an archetype of female life - sex and bitter love, death and mourning, futile- nostalgia for the lost - that She is, that maybe Constance becomes, she is standing on skulls, a beach of skulls, defiant relics of death. She is words and words celebrate nothing and the emptiness. Maybe She is fundamental truth and maybe Constance could not handle this, perhaps her 25 years in a coma were a sign of her failure, maybe they were a reward, a 25 years spent in an internal heaven.

Buy this book, Chris Murray is one of the best currently active poets. Here is a link to a preview.  
  
http://poethead.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/a-preview-of-my-new-book-she/

'Of Dead Silences' reviewed by David McLean

  A review of Michael Mc Aloran's 

"Of Dead Silences"

Michael Mc Aloran
Of dead silences
Lapwing Publications
64 pp

This is a new book from Michael Mc Aloran and it is an investigation of the points in our progression through apparently evident memories that strive to ignore those very points, the points where the flies gather and there are rats in all the sewers, the same sewers we never noticed we lived in, the same rats we never noticed that we are.

 Annulled memory you are the thunder
Of the endless origin
Dragging light from out of the skeleton
Of a corpse’s nothing

The light is lies and gibberish, maybe, or maybe it is the simple self-evident truth that whatever Mc Aloran writes that sounds nasty is, as a matter of fact, pretty much hitting the nail right on its arrogant head.

Ruins of the foreign sky
From which point all are dead
Smears of dying animals upon clear glass
The flies will gather, nothing more

The  glass is still clear, you can see though it. The light earlier is still a light you can see with, even if it the foul light that originates from corpses. An insight is still an insight unless it does not say of what is that it is, or of that which is not that it is not. And that's pretty impressive. It is arguable that the origins of poetry were religious, the use of the intoxicating effect of repetition and melody to create a more powerful transfer of feeling through linguistic meanings.

Much modern poetry still staggers under the weight of this taint, it is the ramblings of drooling psychopaths who want their grannies not to be what these poems say they are, the rotten decayed relics of nothingness. The old dears, as Mick or I might say, are absent and missing forever; they might as well never have existed, so to hell with them. And there isn't even a hell, except the one we are living through as you, gentle reader, read this. Much poetry, for some reason, wants these grannies not to be dead and gone forever.

Here, in this chapbook, is the place poetry comes to when we are obliged to stop pretending to be climbing. Where our efforts take us is not the stars and heaven, it is more of the absurd and a more or less protracted ending. The ending is absolute and after us an unending nothing, the inexpressible that is not being. Words threaten understanding since they cling stubbornly to their origins as an index of what is, the via negativa does not work as a lonesome road for most “thinking”, unless poetry exists for no other reason than making me personally profoundly irritated. Mick's poetry stays in the safe place which most people might find unsafe and danger and madness, the acceptance of the absolute weight of lack, the loss, and absence.

Even believers grieve. This, as Hopkins points out, is really stupid (or words to that effect). A believer should not grieve the death of a loved one, if they really love them. So I am prepared to accept that people grieve, I am not prepared to accept that they really, in the strong sense, “believe”.

As I always like to say, citing Homer, “People do things because they are stupid and die because they deserve to.” The dead, and the living dead are legion, lack “the light by which the night ignites the living”, as Mc Aloran states here in one of his aphorisms. (To cravenly return to that of which we were actually speaking, the review of the particular poems.)

Living, basically, is wallowing in shit and it is best to stand before the emptiness and the senseless with the brave resolution of the ancient (and modern) Celts who live in dour lands inflicted with history and a climate that doesn't very much like them or anything else that wants anything in particular. As I'm sure the Celts really said to Caesar, “we are only afraid of one thing, and that's that alcohol might suddenly stop working so our race would basically have to disband.”

Brute flesh shocks the nothing back
Into resolve

And is then pissed upon

The bones that “scurry for the shadows” are just the truth, hiding from the “cracked sun” of belief, or even from the deficient light of conventional wisdom. These are the poems that tell us that everything isn't OK in the usual sense of the words. But that's OK, we always have

One final breath to champion the infinite

It might be a silence spitting but what it is spitting is still laughter, even if the laughing is spiteful. This is the first section of the book, the silhouettes.

Then we have the section of dead silences themselves.

The silence is always the observation of the deathscape that is what is and then the gap between memory and expectation and the need for contact that is buried forever in the skull that is assuming the cerements of the tomb already. And nothing coming, nothing cumming as we wait for it; silence the wait weighting the shoulders of skeletons clothed in slightly fresh flesh.

Reek unto assuaged….
Skinned breath sharp as shock/absent

Reek of dead silences/earthen splendour

Back again till naught and the obscene scatter of…
Dead again…a burning forest of silences

This book is heartily recommended by me; you should purchase it here

'Do Not Censor', by Craig Podmore--A Review by Christine Murray

Do Not Censor

by Craig Podmore Published Oneiros Books 2013

---

Jonestown

In the name of television, The crucifix And the glossy magazines
(The deflowered dead that we are.)

A-fucking-men. .  

  Jonestown, by Craig Podmore

Do Not Censor is divided into two sections, Fiction and Reality. Craig Podmore exposes the blurred line between the two in a manner that reflects how reality in a post-millenarist  culture of movie snuff and sex consumption that shows its hard edges much in the way drunken starlets upload their sex tapes to feed a  cannibalising machine that will have their blood..

The Ghosts in the Machine of Fiction parade their post-mortem selves as desired objects that  have burnt their image into our irises.  Distracting icons who hid a multitude whilst revealing generous  acres of flesh. They are the  abbatoir-hung victims of a real masochistic need for adulation and they are in the hands of the sadist.

from, The Polemic

‘The Crenshawgrave Where Beth Short lay Cut like a perfect film clip- Her body edited and framed. The raven dreamer Took the murder scene stage; The world shocked, bereaved- Death performance, a media sensation.’

Marilyn, Elizabeth Short , Betty Page,  icons of the industrial non-culture of post-WWII and Hiroshima, projected fellatrices and suicides, whose addictions fed (and feeds) psychotic addiction to non-reality. The very real reality of the undead. Here is the underbelly of vocalisation that Tom Waits sang in Sweet Little Bullet From The Barrel Of A Pretty Blue Gun. Save now the underbelly is writ large across an abattoir of ghastly smiles in every newsagent across western civilisation. A trickle down of Hollywood snuff culture into every home that bothers to buy it. Turn away from it :

 
Hollywood Is A Correctional Facility

‘The teenage girl Etching ‘Destroy’ onto her Book of Revelations. Shoplifting make-up That Greta Garbo wears’.

from Fiction.

The Reality section of Do Not Censor  is not problematic, it is emblematic. Here celluloid snuff is played out on shopping streets and in motel rooms. Here the sociopath/psychopath whose head is filled with Hollywood BDSM victimization gets their kicks in a two dimensional world, the type of psychopathy that leads to massacres at premieres, or robot warfare in suburban neighbourhoods.

 
Gunmen On The High Street
  ‘Morality is absent in consumerism As the gunmen shoot the shoppers down But the shoppers are numb to the bullets As they arise and continue to shop.’

from Reality

The reader needn’t assume the role of judge given the toxicity of post-milleniarism. The screen plays out Hollywood-snuff in the blurred lines between how a reality is perceived, and how it is writ large onto that tarnished screen where audiences are umbilically fed a diet of 50 ft buttocks and botoxed faces.

 
Daily Masturbation and Internal bleeding

‘Porn star dialogue For the menial tasks Of pro-creation

And biblical passages For the erotically charged

from Reality.

Again the undead have burned their irrationality into mass consumption, with reality a fine thread plucked and fucked by the advertisers who have people caring about stars weight increase, who is fucking who and why starlets do radical things to their bodies- whether implant or  removal of skin to the point of nauseating microscopy.

This is the culture of nadir – a nadir of cultural expression where flesh is the oldest currency. Its underbelly brought to the level of entertainment where entertainment aspires to culture.

Purchase Link for Do Not Censor

Throats Full of Graves- A Review by David McLean

Gillian Prew - Throats full of graves

Gillian Prew
Throats Full of Graves
Lapwing Publications
chapbook review by David McLean

This is a brief review of the latest production by the Scottish poet Gillian Prew, in my opinion the best female poet currently active.

Her liminal love with its dug arms
scoops the red roots of the tight trees
where her best wedding was throttled and laid,
and her lit loss burns in her brain
scorching the slow madhouse of her days.

It might be appropriate that I modestly neglect to refer to a poem in this book that is about me, namely “In the garden with a poet”. I shall, however, refrain from doing the modest thing and mention it.

Days are here – untidy. That is the beauty
of light: it illuminates the mess
for embracing. We are

a long time nothing. There is no place
to exhibit the night like a sword.

This because it exhibits clearly, in these closing lines - which are much better than anything I have done recently - the terrible predicament of those like Ms Prew and myself, who are atheists and might like to be logically precise, when we affect to produce the “poetic”,  When “we are a long time nothing” the word “we” no longer applies to us, time and our world has ceased and probably only Larkin has ever succeeded in saying this properly, in “Aubade”. Of course, I object dreadfully to the term “poet” as a sortal, it identifies no clear class of objects; it is usually little more than a dreadful piece of self-promotion. Were I ever, per impossibile, to make a living by poems, I might allow the description on Derridean grounds - “It's me job, like” - but not as a token of self-ascribed excellence.

More seriously, in another poem, Prew writes

I, like a slow thaw in the garden where
all this started under the sun yesterday
(or years ago) There is

a simmering vitality that permits persistence,
that allows healing and the adoration of wounds

This is close to the essential, the reflexive wallowing in despite and self-contempt that is the essence of anything interesting in literature. The glorious puny assholes who fall down in their sheer stupid debility waiting for some cunt Godot who never even shows, they are so much more beautiful than any alleged poetic perfection:

There is no destiny worth hoping for.

There will be death, and
in the meantime life. What rages
inside is something
if we are lucky
else,
do not fear
or love,
or bother to breathe.

The metaphor of interiority is acceptable here, of course, although I assume the inside to be the consciousness that spreads outside the alleged real. The poems here are of seasonal mortality, or, more precisely, of facticity and thrownness, of being there in this confusing admixture of earth and world that colors memories ideologically and insists - with the simmering vitality that is the sheer denial of entropy that even the simplest organism is - on taking a shot at perdurance, an attempt that is doomed to failure since the ultimate victory of entropy will become the ordered beauty of perfected and, necessarily, unobserved disorder. If we could perdure, this would be spoiled. But there is a pointless meaningless beauty in the striving, one which expresses itself in the laudable futility of poetry, at which Prew kicks serious ass, with poems like this one, of “Memory”:

Bud of the quiet dead, lifting
light from the black-bitten wound. A grief,
a lie a dry, futile church. You are a ruin
of tears and ragged distances. A hidden.
A scarred truth roaming bone. You fail
with a brave despair
like widowed songbirds, their throats full of graves.

The need for miracles, as Prew says, is abject. What actually is, is enough. if one does not multiply entities beyond necessity one can still populate a poem.

I think this may be Prew's best yet, which means that you should buy the thing. It can be purchased here

In Damage Seasons- A Review by David McLean

Michael Mc Aloran

In Damage Seasons  

130 pp
Oneiros Books
 

Here is one of Michael Mc Aloran's best attempts to do what he does so well, kicking round the scattered teeth of sunlight in a darkened room. The book is divided into scenes that articulate a dismemberment of the drab conventional, and that paint red what already was always painted black.

 
the amputated limb with which one child beats the other the arm torn away to break the bones of dissolve in dislocation of tears here a ravage there a ravage the nicotine stained teeth and the breath upon…
 
there is no sun or better yet we have swallowed the dead cum of absence the swelling meat in the mouth clasped down upon till castrative screams echoing violently the bloody dead meat of it spat out into foreign excrement…
 
The poems are the insistent echo of pointless and life behind the grind of hunger, cum-stained memory, the splendid array of absences and almost forgotten we carry within us like a well-tended garden of cancers.
There is, after all, no denying the beauty and appositeness of lines like:
 
torn out the fingernails yet ever on till severed pulse of the snare of it hacking in cold corridors warped from one wall unto the next till crimson…
 
snap snap the fingers snap snapping till ritornellos of the absurd a dressage of crushed bone all afar until yet spun in widow’s teeth of claimed verandas…
 
Mick's poetry, in a sense, is an angry railing against not so much the dying of the light, fuck the light, but against words not working any more
 
baseless till tongue to sever-bite in the none of speech the clamour in the echoing chasm of vibratory steel drawn in excommunicable lights deadened yet bustling never ending…
 
The none of speech might mean that which is unsaid, it might mean the saying of the none, or void, something that is usually done very wrong by way of horrid hypostatization among the burgeoning  insincere nihilists, it might also mean the emptiness and absurdity of Gerede, idle talk, running on and meaning certain things, just not the essential and important.
 
And what is essential and important is the tooth of hunger, it is the obstinate bone, it is the scattered teeth and the insistent emptiness of discourse, and thus the book ends, perfectly logically and correctly, with:
 
collapse unto thy dread for the good of nothing claimed none but the shit clinging to the heels it was ever of the all for silences the rapture emptied silenced silenced it was all for the good of nothing claimed
 
This book is very good, get it here:
http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com/indamageseasons.html