Ian Seed, Night Window

 

Spoilt

For the historical fiction workshop, one of my students brought in a prose poem. She’d also made a beef-and-radish sandwich for me to try, and wanted to know if it represented food of the era in which her poem was set. All the ingredients are genuine, I said, but I feel it needs a little more salt, or perhaps pepper, since that’s the healthier option, but then again, I added, perhaps that’s simply because my taste buds have become spoilt over time. I was about to offer her a couple more tips when she picked up her books, snatched the half-eaten sandwich out of my hand, and walked out. The workshop always took place in an old, rather beautiful room, which had once been part of a vicarage. The students sat on chairs with folding tables set out in a horseshoe shape. The ceiling was so ancient that sometimes it leaked, and I would find myself talking to them through the rain.

The latest from British poet Ian Seed, and the first I’ve seen of his nine full-length collections, is Night Window (Swindon UK: Shearsman Books, 2024), a collection set as three numbered sections of prose poems, the first poem of each—“Blessing,” “Geometry” and “Worth”—almost sit as thematic overviews of those three untitled sections. As the opening poem, “Blessing,” begins: “There was a heap of pink bubbles on the round table in the middle of the trattoria at the top of the hill. I placed my hand over the bubbles and let it hover there for a few moments like a priest blessing a boy. The bubbles rose and solidified into the form of a tall cake, but when I took my hand away again, the cake collapsed and dissolved back into bubbles.” The trajectory of the prose poem across British and UK literature is one I know extremely little of, but one that I gather is far closer in overlap with the American prose poem than anything we’re doing in Canada. Seed’s poems give the sense of less akin to the short story through lyric prose than a sequence of scene-studies, providing echoes with what I’ve seen of the work of Russell Edson [see my review of Little Mr. Prose Poem:Selected Poems of Russell Edson, ed. Craig Morgan Teicher (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023) here], as well as Seed’s own British contemporaries such as Lydia Unsworth, Vik Shirley and Tom Jenks [see my recent review of their Beir Bua titles here]. His poems exist as prose blocks of sentences, set into narratives that suggest straightforward narratives, but instead, lean and swerve, leap and deflect. Much like Edson, there’s something of Seed’s prose poems that lean pretty hard into the postcard or very short story, offering echoes of works by Lydia Davis, Stuart Ross and Gary Barwin, but one that holds back with the insistence of the lyric, offering up to narrative conclusions that are left for the reader to discern. As he offered as part of his 2022 note as part of the “short takes on the prose poem” feature for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics: “The prose poems that I admire and enjoy are those which take me into a different reality with its own logic, whether that reality be a more abstract one or one shaped mainly by narrative.”