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POETRY PROPER

Issue 1

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Prayer

Prayer, the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,

God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinners’ tower,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days-world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

George Herbert (1633)

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POETRY PROPER

C o n t r i b u t o r s Matt Kirkham 4 - 5

Richard Epstein 6 – 7

Justin Quinn 8 – 9

Eoghan Walls 11 – 12

Leontia Flynn 13 – 14

Robert Herbert 15 – 16

Pàdraig MacAoidh 17 – 18

Erin Halliday 19 – 20

Paul Maddern 21– 22

Alex Wylie 23 – 24

Featured Poet: Miriam Gamble

8 poems 26 - 36

Review: Moonrise, by Meirion Jordan 37 - 39

Photographs by Paul Maddern, from a series entitled ‗Keels‘

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Theology Wake up. Hear them through the rasping sycamores, rattling, vying for the highest pulpit. The Lord of the Magpies tattooed a map to heaven on the arse of the Friesian. Gut full of someone else‘s kill, His heavy ascent solidified atmospheric carbon into the first downy birch that black winter, the trunk revealing the path in the air of His beak and wishbone‘s climbing. See where wingfeathers sculpted branches and twigs and hear how every following tree has called back to that flight. He shed one of His feathers and a drop of blood to write books of women and men. Where His shit fell in the sand oystercatchers sprouted and in the waves orcas and before it hit the ground martins, pied wagtails as it hit. Rumours of His sweat called the zebra from their hillside enclosures. At His gasp of triumph night terrors left the badger on the road eviscerated for us waking in His image. Matt Kirkham

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The Dumbo Octopus Thinking of his bed the short-sighted man has already checked his mirror‘s eyeballs, pinched contacts, left and right. The kids have stuck cartoon what have you, squid, fish to the blurred, darkened window. He tries to focus on the sky, the distance. Each star is five new pence as he sees it to the moon‘s ten and there is a dancing, the sycamore‘s branches in front of the winter stars, or, behind branches, a satellite. He‘s not certain. Not quite. Thinking of a world without eyes did what is here now, the light, leave one star in a forest of stars to call a lens and an iris able to see this question into their evolution? A cloud he cannot see slips between the stars and the tree. Thinking someone else has blinked his vertigo in negative has caught him in the deep ocean trenches where everyone‘s purse is found empty. No moon. No stars. But one creature animates, picks up his eight pleats, flaps his ears, not his ears, the fins on what might be his temples. Swims. Matt Kirkham

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The Descent of Man In Abel‘s garden green prevails. No. More than that. Green triumphs. Rules. The handles of his garden tools are stained. The moss is thick and slick, and time has greened the very nails that fix the trellis. Every stick is smothered as it‘s tamely laid, shaded while it is making shade. Nothing of sere is sensed or seen. Eden stood up and voted green. The grass is master in this place. The trees resist, but not for long, where blackbirds wear their color wrong, their rites revoked, each note, each word. The bee permitted hides its face in foliage, its dapple blurred. Green, says the rose, and bends back down. Sorry, says brick, for being brown; I‘ll change, I will. The sun is gone. It tried, and failed, to burn the lawn.

Whimsy, to think that man was meant to rise above his verdant grace. He raised, and he regrets, his face— pink is not creature color. Vast cities and tombs beneath the bent blade: and he occupies them last. Ask a man what the heavens mean, he‘ll answer; ask him, Why is green? he‘ll colorlessly turn away. We‘re left no clue; we leave no clay

undecorated. In the mud we build with sweat, we fail to note the color builded thick by rote: home is green. In the failing light, the tide of green engulfs the blood, thickens the pulse, promises night, and keeps its word. Trees never go. Grass does not leave. Leaves never show regret. We are becoming less than oak and shrub and fern and cress.

Richard Epstein

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The Heart Attacks High above Denver, itself taller than Wales, we attempt the ordinary for its postcard values — lunch a picturesque burger, a cup of coffee to make Wordsworth ooh. And the heart attacks, then retreats, no more to be cajoled. It sounds taps. The Dead March. And the mountains smile at a bag of chips, 2 boys holding hands, the belly-button ring of the busy barista. Good grief, it follows good night, the morrow not a bit like the last. We are closer here to the sun. We burn easily. We heed hydration. We needed a refreshed start. Now you‘ve a cage to hold open your heart. The blood rushes home, leaves, goes home again, back to the valleys where the coal burns slowly. Richard Epstein

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School I saw the symbols covering the board before the empty benches during break. Inside me I felt something slowly wake. Up to this I‘d been frightened there, and bored, but now I glimpsed the strangest harmonies beyond the disinfected corridors, the breeze-block classrooms, the linoleum floors, the dead hours staring at concrete and trees. They weren‘t the first abstraction. That was the alphabet and numbers. They took us first away from things and mothers who had nursed our mouths without a language and its laws. Their promise was yet more complexities, but then again the shocking elegance of simple answers come upon by chance. The concrete aged and autumn stripped the trees as we gave ourselves over to the lines, the theorems and the sums which mastered us and moved us through the options. The world was thus. There was no work beyond the given signs. One by one, we‘re taken back by clay once more to rest in things beneath some words, as they continue covering screens and boards, the laws and symbols happy at their play. Justin Quinn

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Child You are of neither sex and both, about age four: for instance how you flex your muscles as you stare with dreams of mannish strength through your hair‘s girlish length and sweep it from your eyes just like a woman would before, to my surprise, you land a sure and good punch in my balls and say that is the Batman way. This forces out a ‗fuck‘ from somewhere deep in me. Today, I‘m out of luck: you shouldn‘t hear or see difficult things like that— they don‘t apply just yet. But when? When? Your mother and I embrace you more than we do one another. You are now where we store our fun and like a parable we‘ve lately turned to marble. A fluid piece of flesh you fly between the plinths and daily to the crèche along the path, our prince or princess, full of beans, beloved of kings and queens. Justin Quinn

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Bird Strike Blue eyes at the moment, but your resting colour is yet undefined on our airport drive, as we unsettle a murder of rooks from the roadside. Brown or tarnished copper? You reach for their flight through the window clutching and unclutching your hands as if groping through a feather pillow to find the body of a bird. You are restless. You were restless last night, and will suckle and struggle in take-off, new to both earache and flight, until we are caught in the all-coloured unblinking eye of the sun. I pray against bird strike. I have an idea why seagulls and pigeons nosedive the engines, shredding steel fans with their hollow bird bones lost in an instant of red mist to claim the airways for their own, but I want you to live. I want you to defy me, bold and upright, staring out from a turbine of feathers in the wake of a pillow fight, brazen in your future. So I think of US Airways Flight 1549, both engines snagging on snow geese on the take off for North Carolina, as the pilot skimmed down on the icy Hudson where his passengers and crew were lifted alive from the water. His eyes were an undefined blue. Eoghan Walls

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On the Sudden Passing of a Crow Limbo beneath the wet bed-sheets drawn on the wind with nothing above but a thin band of sky, wrapped in the flags of our housekeeping, clean of our hair and the stains of our sleep, as they bluster about you in three separate planes of whiteness, bare as your unbaptised siblings in their limbo of unwritten names, where each vowel is hollow, as hollow in the book of the sky as the dent of a head on a pillow, and would be as silent except for the squawk of a crow opening now – don‘t creak your neck – like a handprint of charcoal, mawkish, inelegant, marking her passing. Eoghan Walls

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The Dodgy Porch Light The ancient porch light, under its plaster crown has been freaking you out all week. What can it mean, every time you near the threshold, with its flick- flick- flicker – like some creepy plot device? You expect some dead-eyed butler to appear and explain the problem’s just this awful storm or the fuel shortage, or wires – but at heart you know that what lurks in the shadows when you turn your head is the ghost of your past self. She clears her throat and scratches. She has all the time in the world. Leontia Flynn

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An Old Creda Cooker in County Longford It looks like a relic from another age this Creda cooker, stowed in the cold back porch of your house in Longford. Look at the eye-level grill with the boxy handle. Look at the spooky white of the painted oven with its pull-down door which seems to open on a greasy tomb. The absent cylinder plumbs it to fresh air. When we stood the other morning at the door and watched the rain, two knackered-looking horses were grazing on miles and miles of real estate. Leontia Flynn

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Excerpt from ‗Working Progress’ In this townland farmers fear a fairy tree for as far as thon story goes it can cause a curse to befall its hatchet man. I heard tell of a weird yarn recently where a developer of property decreed not to let one hinder his plan to build a houses on bank of river Bann. He uprooted it with a JCB. Immediately there was a landslide. He sent every bricky home on leave sat in his BMW and cried. ―It‘s the fairies‘ fault.‖ He couldn‘t believe. He hired an American Surveyour who told him, ―Your land is beyond repair.‖ Robert Herbert

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Excerpt from ‗Working Progress’ Like some dream I had in my nine teeners I ate an incy lightspeed ace of spades, drank a gargantuan bottle of beer. ―I‘ll sit here happy until the light fades. Anyone for a plate of scrambled eggs? Anyone know if this box bio-degrades? Can you pass me … that … there … pack of cigs? Frig, is it me? Or is this like some dream? Is my mind softish ground which my soul digs?‖ Where everything is nothing I seem nothing is everything when I walk into a one windowed vacant room with a wall of mirrors. The sky was chalk white canvas, I spray painted it lilac. Robert Herbert

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The Log Roller You are the century‘s logger and reiver balancing between English and Gaelic, a frontiersman with each foot on a log rolling inexorably down the Mackenzie. Sometimes your speech is schizoid but sometimes it is subtle, right and winding, as when John Munro wrote of mob-caps of snow on the mountains of Assynt in the mid-nineteen-tens, writing in Gaelic, the English unsaid. But, like a horse slick-stepped but slipshod in two styles you stumble and falter unless – no going back – you travel further, add cant to teanga to spracht to langue and skip from word to word, log to log, roll your unbearable haul up the river. Pàdraig MacAoidh

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this is the queen to behead in a mass of saffron, lovers and rites involving wine this is the queen to behead you‘ll know her in extremis by the persistence and incompetence of her gaggle of descendants this is the queen to behead to reform the priests and authors to hide mysterious deaths in innumerable silkfolds to fear and end the cycle this is the queen to behead the lost one, the blind one, the red Pàdraig MacAoidh

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Merman Wrecked ship of my body freight-decked cargo-worn and helmed for death. Keel rotted and infest with rust anchored in oil-blight and hulled I sank the ocean's depth. As I wane and fade on sea's bed I'm marked by Triton's piscean men. A seal-brother bobs his chorus above my shipwreck. Halos-boy tailed and clad in shell his strain iatric, I ascend paddle jubilant through blue up freed by his song from the void skull of my wrecked ship. Erin Halliday

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Dolphin-Watching I Eight months in love, they fly to Kefallonia and he watches her slide from the boat into black water and swim to the wild pod. From his distance, he doesn't see the one that bellies-up under her toes. II From their hotel bed in Cardigan Bay she hears them calling. Before driving back to London, he pulls her by the hand over the headland rocks to watch them feed at their feet. Four months later, it's finished. Erin Halliday

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32° 19’ 59” N / 64° 45’ 0” W Pull back the mantle of the ocean and strange the ocean. Bring down the ether from the sky and fable the sky. Assemble dot by dot the stars and cipher the stars and strange the ocean and fable the sky. Pull back the mantle of the ocean bring down the ether from the sky. Paul Maddern

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from ‘Survey’

X

A bronze replica of the 16th

century carving is set into the cliff

where it was discovered. As the spot affords a 180-degree view

of the Atlantic it is ideal as a lookout for passing ships.

on a limestone cliff

drained even then to skeleton

by seas and rains

and hardened grey

and razored

and where desiccated roots of olivewood cling

and crab shell

is spent by seabirds

we theorize one sailor

of Portuguese origin

sat looking for salvation

in his meantime

sharpening sticks

to carve his mark

that over 500 years

has diminished to debates

over whether his T is an R

the F a P

and are they his or his ship’s

and is the cross a cross

and if so

the Order of Christ proving

Portuguese provenance

and all the while

in our lengthening meantime

we lose the focus

to conjure the marvel

of the days it took

and eventually how he....

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The Experience in Benares In Benares we found an affable guide to lead us through the streets, and what a turmoil, the colourful bazaars, the beggars and the lepers. The first morning, we hired a pair of boatmen to row us down the Ganges past the bathing places and the burning ghats. The sun rose gigantic, copper-red, as we floated on down the river, the pilgrims rioting to wash their sins off and the holy men contorted on the bank in bony knots of praise, hailing the sun with their deep-voiced salaams, smoke drifting from the ghats. John was enthralled. Later he said the experience in Benares was worth the whole damned Indian adventure. Alex Wylie

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Tap-water

First among commodities, tap-water, drink Of equals, council-juice or aqua gratis; Cloud-confession wrung in kitchen sink Keeping the house afloat through choppy waters; Morning-after-wine; cat‘s whiskers, dog-poteen; Christ harrowing the waterworks of Hell As iron hydroxide, fluoride, chlorine; Stream of consciousness; bottomless well; Angel in the house, earth‘s better half Restrained in ropes of glass; oil of beggars; Currency, possessed of nothing but itself, Diamonds tumbling liquid through the fingers; Stranger, friend or enemy, O! Ingest The glorified remains of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Alex Wylie

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Featured poet: Miriam Gamble — 6 poems

Pietro di Cosimo: The Forest Fire Before chancing upon the fire, the artist had spent a drear twelvemonth in the forest – times, he‘d later say, of the utmost despondency; of dragging his forked easel day after day like a schoolboy with a weighty satchel to the coarse hide woven out of mud and wattles where no creature of interest caught his eye. He‘d send, daily, his new man out to spy with clear instructions as to what he wanted, and every day, with his flat feet planted like griddle irons upon the teeming earth, the man (where do they get them?, he‘d curse) at every brown mole and scutty badger would erect cupped hands and bellow Master! A catch! in his well-trained, institutional voice. Many a dark hour questioning his choice the foiled great spent amongst the stinging nettles: he dwelt much upon the running battles he had fought with the City & Artist’s Guild (what had been their precise turn of expression? Sir, your project is a digression from the path of learning: we cannot spare good students to you, for you waste their skills). Then there was his chosen setting – what spoor had led him to this sparse copse on the crown of a hill that sat between two spurting towns where soot belched arrogant from the chimney breasts? And what had drawn him on this fool‘s quest in the first place – were the city right to shake him? At times, he began to doubt his very vocation. Then came the day of the fire. The student had spent the morning cataloguing rodents – Master! A vole. Master! A stoat. Master! – so he‘d sent him off into the blue azure, a child‘s toy bow and arrow on his back and strict orders for him not to attack anything moving – ‗Shoot it at the plane trees‘. The student went obediently, bent-kneed and ridiculous in city garb,

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his big head jutting forth in concentration like a sweet apple on the stalk of the crab; the artist stayed on listless at his station. Master! A sparrow. Master! A fox – fleet, but plumb perfect in his lineaments. The voice wavering across a great expanse. He must have nodded off. Sketches of plants – half-finished and surreally tainted – lay smouldering in his lap; the student, sprawling a few lengths from him, had fainted, the bow and arrow gleaming by his side. The choked air was thick with animal cries: above, snipe, gunning like bullets, went twanging in confused volleys into the trees; the other beasts were making for the valleys. Everything was motion, instinct, terror. The artist readied his materials, shifted his weight. They came slowly at first, setting one threat against the other (clear danger in the cover of the dell with what was bound to follow from exposure). Boughs fell; irresolute, they held their ground. A stump-headed lion bulled dully around, looking for his clean-limbed lioness (her neat ears, her snub nose, charm of wetness); the artist watched her slope off to the side. A sleuth of frog-legged bears scuttling by (Frog? Or were they more like an echidna‘s?) passed under the flight path of a bat-come-pigeon which held the artist with mistrustful eyes. And then, at last, the semi-humanised (the birds he could never approach right – their fine-boned strangeness, their dolorous flight. He ended blacking them in with charcoal, though that, reader, is one to have and hold: that you take with you to the other life): you can see it in their faces – the strife, the shame. Look at the little saddleback. How he walks unwilling from the burning track and out into the harshness of the world. Look at the sad, pretty doe, so woman-eyed. The artist sat among the flames. He sighed. He looked on, with his finished sketches furled beside him, as the cretinous student paused,

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released blank arrows at the rump of a bull. He watched as the bull proffered an expert heel. Then he started on the road into town his keen nose hot on the scent of reputation. The student, he wrote off as a lost cause.

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The Soot Season The cat is introverted, chasing its tail; with lock and chain they‘ve paralysed the swings. Grass turns alcoholic in its bales and stock resigns itself to winter things. Down in the city, men stall the mail and wasps obtrude their pointless, fertile stings, bald, at the windowpane, where a child flings fingertips up and down an interrupted scale. Here is the soot season, the mud season, year cling- ing like a too obtrusive trail to the self cumulative; crouched minds sing their moody echo-patterns with a hissing as of water upon shale. And I am lightsome as a well-scribed king, his gnarled hand suddenly cleansed of war, of everything, my autumn lover.

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Sugarplum, the word, is lightsome, conjures opulence and things Shakespearean, which is true, in a way, given that they were of the master‘s day. The thing itself, however – sticky, constipating, parch-your-mouth-dry – is more akin to the progeny of that poetaster who ploughed glumly through the wreckage of industrial disaster, or that American, Joachim what‘s his name, who, with consummate lack of palate, could so earnestly align ‗Goethe‘ and ‗teeth‘. Blouagh! as Williams would say. Though I can‘t, having bitten in, refuse to pay, and history will practice its revenge upon the thief.

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Normalisation Pick a well-lit corner, and tie your animal there; find the local radio station with the throwback music; lose your coat, your woollens; secure, if applicable, your hair. Now you are ready. Take from the kit a metal curry-comb and begin tackling the most intransigent layers. Be economical but thorough: do not stint; use strokes that are generous, semi-circular. And so on with the dandy, the body, the duster; bring scissors for the tail and under-chin, bring mane-and-tail detangler. Bring hoof oil for the feet and hair oil for the hair. Work both of your arms together, feeling your own skin get coated in the muck, the dust and glair, you have loosened from the animal. Bring plaiting bands and even quarter-markers. Bring baby wipes and, for white feet, for snips and blazes, baby powder; bring hydro-glycerine to clean the saddle and the bridle. Spend as long as it takes, and if at the end of it you still do not feel satisfied walk up the yard and ask them for another. Repeat, until you know your left foot from your right.

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Films about Ghosts —for Sophie The tape your mother made me in the summer of ‘99 when we, without having considered the practicalities, would turn with two tongues out of the same head phrases like: ‗If you‘ve never stared off into the distance, your life is a shame‘, and ‗Round here, nobody knows your name‘, etcetera, etcetera, with the studied implication that ‗round here‘ was a dump, has long since parted from its reel and slumped into the habitual loops and tangles. And now, suddenly, new dispensations, a new angle. Are these the makings of nostalgia? Fuck, I don‘t know. But predictable patterns hurt no less for being so. And I am not coming home today, or, even, tomorrow. Sophie. Hello.

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A Toast Amidst our passion for the chow, the pig-faced pug with its phiz like a rumpled velvet curtain or a squashed flower, the toy poodle, the miniature pinscher, the pomm, the schnauzer and all those handbag dogs, those little bonsai feats of engineering who come numbered and labelled in a silk-lined box, are the pedigree equivalents to the Smart Car; in this explosion of desire to get in our hands the inestimably long of lip, the pseudo-asthmatic and the clicking-hipped, those bred for over-emphasis of single features, who subsist on veterinary air and whose hair must be combed with breed-specific brushes, who cannot walk upon the legs that some crazed mind cooked up in resemblance to a Queen Anne chair; in this Frankensteinian atmosphere, this bid to continually put our money where our mutt is, to encourage in the genes whatever one-off quirk of mutational destiny subsequently marked ours out as a creature with ancestry, let us pause for a moment to consider the virtues of the mongrel dog, the IKEA do-it-yourself dog, the Heinz 57. Here‘s a pooch to challenge conformity. Best epitomised in the Cuban Sausage he has to his name that little bit of everything once much prized in our generalised society; he will, admittedly, win no pageants, being matt colour at the one end, and at the other, speckledy; his feet are too big for his body, his tail is an abacus of parts. But, brothers, this dog has heart – heart, and the gumption to turn himself, however passingly, to any of the doggy arts; he makes love in his own time, under whatever tree he chooses and with whatever mate; he boasts neither microchip nor freezemark, and does not own a passport; he answers to no club or clique: his name is his name is his name.

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No two mongrels, gentlemen, are the same. They bark on the plane of reciprocity in difference, mutual respect for talents; ruff ruff is their motto, a mantra you‘ll agree to be exemplary to the liberal state. Gentlemen, these goodly beasts are under threat of extinction. Let us bake, let us lobby – let, men, it not be said that we did nothing – before it is too late.

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Cuba Down nicked novabraids connected to the skiff we sink wide-lidded into the element of love, deaf, though not blind. In this place speaking is the work of signing. Sometimes we sink too low, almost brush the coral beds with huge flat feet. Other times, we rise to the surface like balloons, must dip slicked seal heads so as not to break it. It is too perfect to describe, and I do not want to learn the language. Let, love, us have salt water in our throats forever, forget, almost, to breathe. Let us not grow watertight.

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Avatar What will it be today? The Great Elk, perhaps? The Canadian Moose? Resting your pint on the machine you sign in as Actaeon and, cracking your knuckles, loosening a lager belch, press ‗play‘. Afterwards you forget the socks and shoes you had set down neatly on a table top, and walk cleft-footed into the busy city street where a sign says ‗Stop!‘ and bitch co-workers wait to eat you alive. It‘s debatable whether you‘ll survive this time, or meet their baying appetite.

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Seriously Zany Meirion Jordan, Moonrise (Seren, 2008) ISBN 978-1-85411-481-5 £7.99 Moonrise by Meirion Jordan is a highly accomplished debut – all the more so for the fact that it came out when Jordan was only 23. I‘m as much of a sceptic as anyone about the recent trend for kindergarten books in UK poetry. The majority of supposed prodigies simply don‘t convince, either technically or in terms of content; there‘s a lot of stuff being hailed as the next great thing which really doesn‘t rise above the average, and which bears all the frankenstenian scars of having been penned in tired response to an equally wearisome and recognisable set of workshop exercises. ‗Ah‘, one finds oneself saying, ‗here‘s one of those, and one of those – clever response to that!‘, whilst yet searching in vain for something that might conceivably have been the writer‘s own idea. Jordan‘s poems not only rise above the stock features of this factory line; they have, in fact, never made contact with it. Moonrise opens with a very strong poem, ‗Calculus‘ (Jordan is a Maths graduate), which compares the throwing of words into silence with the act of skimming pebbles into the sea. Beautiful and exhilarating, ‗Calculus‘ transcends the piously decorative poem-about-writing-poetry to introduce an abiding concern with the genre as vehicle for communication between, as another poem puts it, one ‗ich‘ and another, and, building on this, with the (questionable) power and validity of that vehicle. After rising to a lyrical climax in which stones bounce ―each one further over the sea, / over the universe‘s edge‖, Jordan shortens the metaphorical reins with the blunt announcement that ―Stones you can‘t ignore‖ (with the implication that words, you can); he goes on to theorise about possible audiences, again moving seamlessly from the grandiloquent to the straitened:

And here behind me I might have a crowd, an idler dragging out the dogend of the day. Probably none. I will be here ‗til the beachcombers are gone, the massive sun washed up on the horizon. This is both a stubborn adherence to writing as a thing of value, whatever the audience (or lack of one), and a subtle meditation on poetic responsibilities. The question of who is being addressed and who (if anyone) is listening rises again and again across the pages of Moonrise. Jordan probes this question in poems which range from the imaginatively ebullient to the elegiacally poised; all are notable for their powerful imagery, their precise yet wide-reaching use of diction, and their impeccable ear.

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As one might expect from a good first collection (which tests out range as well as establishing patterns) Moonrise tunes in to a variety of soundscapes. In ‗Pirate Music‘ and ‗Nocturne‘ Jordan sounds the combined note of urban apathy and desperate zest; he is equally at home, however, amongst the whispering corridors of tradition. ‗The Owls‘ responds convincingly to the Welsh myth of Bloduewedd, whilst ‗Dyddgu‘ speaks across eight centuries to the un-obtained love interest of Dafydd ap Gwilym. In ‗A short visit to the psychiatrist‘ and, again, ‗Nocturne‘, there are shades of the snazzy wit of Armitage, though Jordan avoids Armitage‘s macho posturing and brings to such scenarios his own particular brand of thoughtful intelligence. Some of the more outlandish poems (‗A short visit to the psychiatrist‘, for example, is addressed by a spider to Spiderman) may initially strike as being zany simply for the sake of zaniness: the poetic equivalent to undergrad dress, and symptomatic of a no less superficial desire to bemuse. As the collection progresses, however, this impression is swiftly dissolved. Jordan does like to test the waters of peculiar takes on the world: one poem is delivered in the voice of a member of ‗The Nuclear Disaster Appreciation Society‘, another in that of a bully closed out from the mysterious weekend activities of his victims (‗The Sunday Adventure Club‘). Collectively, however, this penchant is indicative not of a mind which makes peculiar for want of genuine grist, but, rather, of one which is ignited by the sense of ‗things being various‘, and by the very abnormality of the ‗normal‘. What Jordan is doing with these poems is both exploring and presenting that which ―lurk[s] / down in the crypt of your mind‖, and which is habitually muted by the ―tempered‖ upper chambers. In parallel to his interest in the (spatial) wealth of perspectives, Jordan finds fascinating the possibility of conversations which span disparate temporal zones. ‗At Srebrenica‘ captures concisely the mood of many poems in the collection – poems which seek to make contact with the past but which are hampered by ―that half inch / …[of] separation‖ variously cast as ―static‖, ―glass‖ and, as in ‗Dyddgu‘, ―the surface of the water‖ beyond which one ―crosses into legend‖, but on the wrong side of which one only has access to ―the pre-recorded dead, / history‘s answerphones‖. In all of these poems, ―the dead‖ are felt to be ―etched into the living‖, but awareness of their presence is not matched by satisfactory communicative avenues. Rather, Jordan‘s attempts to speak back across the years are routinely frustrated: in ‗Scharnost‘, the drowned men are ―so many voices led off blindfold into the past / that I can hardly claim to hear‖; in ‗At Srebrenica‘, ―the grass‖ is tantalisingly figured as ―tongues‖, but tongues which, like the ―Latin stars‖ in ‗Dead Reckoning‘, do not translate into accessible language, and therefore do not reach beyond suggestibility. Once again, Jordan presents a poetic which is committed and yet self-questioning, which yearns at the outer reaches of its capability without being romantically blinded to its own needful limitations. In the process, he pens some stunning elegies. As ‗Calculus‘ suggests, however, it is precisely these ‗gaps‘ which Jordan finds fruitful, and into which he, like the Einstein of the final poem in Moonrise, ―weighs and throws‖ his words, ―their arcs / extending as they skip into the gaps between

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stars‖. His imagination is vampiric, in the sense both that it lives (as it should do) off the things it can‘t grasp easily, but needs must sink its teeth into, and in that it glories in traversing different time-scapes and -scales: ―I come to life in the century / of my choosing‖, as the speaker of ‗Vampire‘ remarks. As we know from Eliot, tradition is not only added to but remade by the accretion of the new, and if Jordan is not able to make direct symbiotic contact with the past, he is at least ―reaching over the one-atom gap‖ that persists between past and present poetics, significantly mutating the traditional gene. It‘s not everyone can boast that claim at 23 (or, indeed, ever).

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