James Davies, it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall

 

a pink rubber rubber 

(it was behind a gate) 

Manchester-based poet James Davies, self-described as “a minimalist, conceptual and systems-based writer,” is the author of more than a handful of titles, one of which includes it is like toys but also like video taped in a mall (Pamenar Press, 2022). This is the first of his titles I’ve seen, despite having interviewed him in the “12 or 20 questions” series a year prior to this particular book landing. The two hundred-plus pages of accumulated short poems—the bulk of which sit at two lines per, with others not much longer—provide a curious heft, with the addition of some three pages listing musical and literary references that might have informed the collection. “The poems in this book are influenced by or make reference to the following,” his list opens, citing a wealth of specifics including literary works by John Clare, Stephen Ratcliffe, Gertrude Stein, Aram Saroyan and Ursula K. Le Guin, and albums by The Prodigy, Underworld, Yes and The Future Sound of London, as well as David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, among plenty of others.

first ideas for box for cupboard 

(how a new spoon when)

The poems are curious pinpoints set as a kind of sequence. They are minimalist, although less imagistic than narrative, offering narrative moments, albeit sans context but for themselves, and perhaps the suggesting of grouping, although more as a way to understand how to approach them, perhaps, as opposed to any kind of particular interconnection or narrative line. The pieces pinpoint, individual dots on an expansive grid, which can’t help but begin to form shapes, if even unconsciously, as any reader might go through. These pieces read different than the “poemwds” of American poet Geof Huth, or the particular minimalisms of poets such as Canadian poem-practitioners Cameron Anstee, jwcurry, Michael e. Casteels or the late Nelson Ball, or even elements of pieces by Kate Siklosi, Gary Barwin and Stuart Ross. Davies’ poems are, each, individually complete in their incompleteness, fragmentary in nature, and less an exploration in density than a way of looking at narrative through a keyhole, perhaps.

cracked a hole     but nicely

(it came from the same source i got them from)