When
Tipperary, Ireland publisher Beir Bua Press (2020-2023) announced, seemingly
without prior warning, whether to the public or to their authors, that they
were suspending publication and pulling books from availability back in June, I
knew I had to get my hands on a few more titles before they disappeared
completely. Thanks to individual authors, I’d managed to see two titles prior
to this two-week warning: Texas-based Irish-Australian poet Nathanael O’Reilly’s pandemic-era BOULEVARD (2021) [see my review of such here]
and Hamilton writer Gary Barwin and St. Catharine’s, Ontario writer Gregory Betts’ collaborative The Fabulous Op (2022) [see my review of such here]. Given how quickly the press vanished, it did cause a certain amount of
chaos, especially from authors of relatively-recent titles, but more than a few
have since been picked up for reissue by other presses: the Barwin/Betts
collaboration and both Beir Bua O’Reilly titles were picked up by Australia’s Downingfield Press, for example, with other Beir Bua titles picked up by Salmon Poetry, kith books, Sunday Mornings at the River and IceFloe Press. The loss of the press is
frustrating, but they accomplished an enormous amount across a relatively short
period of time.
Run
by Irish poet and editor Michelle Moloney King, Beir Bua Press seemingly appeared
out of nowhere, quickly establishing itself as a press willing to take risks on
experimental work across a wide spectrum of style and geography. King clearly has
a fine editorial eye, and the print-on-demand Beir Bua poetry titles were well-designed,
looked sharp and included some fantastic writing. To be clear: by shuttering the press so abruptly and allowing her authors no recourse (or prior warning), she did her authors an enormous disservice, and they deserved far better. Either way, given the press disappeared so suddenly,
I wanted to at least acknowledge a couple of these titles I ordered back in
June, prompted by that infamous “last call for orders.”
Lydia Unsworth, Some Murmur (2021): I’ve been an admirer of Unsworth’s work for a while (a third above/ground press chapbook is forthcoming
next month, I’ll have you know), and this is a collection framed as one
reacting to a sequence of changes in quick succession: moving to Amsterdam from
England ten days before the Brexit referendum, and discovering that she was
pregnant. As she writes in her prologue: “When I found out I was pregnant, not
long after the Brexit referendum, it felt like a part of me had died and like a
second part of me was steadily dying. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because
a lot of people feel a lot of things about procreation—about wanting babies,
not wanting babies, really wanting babies, having babies, not having babies,
really not having babies, how you should have babies, how you should not have
babies—but the way I saw it, from that side of the expansion, was that some
unknown and unknowable event was lurching towards me, and its manifestations
were showing up all over my body; rising out, bearing down.” Unsworth appears
to be a poet that engages with projects, whether book-length or
chapbook-length, and this collection works to engage with this sequence of new,
foreign spaces, reacting to the notion of permanence, and fluidity across what
had previously been fixed. Have you read her take on the prose poem, over at periodicities?
She writes of escape, changing forms and sustainability, offering a prose lyric
that manages to articulate these shifting sands even as they move. “Thought it
was wise to stand before the mirror crack,” she writes, as part of the poem “Attempts
to Recover My Previous Form,” “wide like bags of old receipts in supermarket
bins. I didn’t compare myself to anyone but how can you not look at all those
upended trunks trying to hold their bad weather in?”
Stoop
The body bends towards
you like a plant. You are
my sunshine, my ray of sunshine.
What do you call
a plant warped by circumstance?
I hold you up to the
light. Ten lifts then ten
to the side. Environmental
stress weakens the plant.
You are heavy fruit. My
stem turns to you, hulking
sunflower head bows
down, seeds fall from my
eyes. Wind-blown tree –
frozen in flight. Umbrella
inside-out, novelty tie
coat-hangered into a
U-turn, leg kicked out high.
Flamboyant ice. Waiting
for a coin in a hat to say
it’s time.
Vik Shirley, Grotesquerie for the Apocalypse (2021): As Shirley
writes in her introduction, the origins of this short collection emerged “out
of an intensely creative period in the first year of my PhD, which explores
Dark Humour and the Surreal in Poetry. Focussing on the grotesque, I was
immersed in, and obsessed with, the work of the Russian-Absurdist, Daniil Kharms, and the strange and surreal fable-like poems of Russell Edson.” This is
a relatively short collection (why are these books unpaginated?) very much
shaped through the prose poem and prose sentence, and one can see echoes of Edson’s
work throughout, with similar echoes that emerge through Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany. As the poem “Husband Ghost” opens: “A hospital rang to tell a
woman that her husband was dead. // Not only was he dead, but his body had
decomposed already and he / had progressed straight through to the ‘ghost
phase,’ they said. // They told her she should come and collect him.” There are
some interesting echoes, as well, that connect certain of these poems, whether
the cluster of “Hello Kitty” poems, or poems that open with a similar descriptive
structure. I would very much like to see further pieces by Vik Shirley, and her
statement on the prose poem over at periodicities is worth reading, in
case you haven’t already seen (and she does mention that this collection will appear as part of a larger work to appear in 2025, which has yet to announce). In a certain way, Shirley appears to approach
her lyric from the foundation of the sentence, opening the collection with poems
that lean further into line breaks, but soon moving into poems built out of prose
poem blocks, each of which offer short, sketched scenes that twist and turn and
further twist. The poem “Devil Baby” is a striking example of such, and reads,
in full:
A baby started speaking in
tongues.
“We don’t want a devil baby,”
its parents said.
So they put it in a
dinghy, covered it with foil and set it sail down the Nile.
They were on holiday in
Egypt, you see.
It was the worst holiday
they’d ever had.
Tom Jenks, rhubarb (2021): Providing echoes of the
work of Vik Shirley, Tom Jenks’ rhubarb also seems a collection of poems
that focus on the sentence, some of which offer line breaks, with others set in
a more prose poem structure. One might say that his poems offer first person narratives
that seek out their structures. “The horse was revealed to be entirely
two-dimensional.” the two-sentence poem “opportunities” begins. “This presented
challenges, but also opportunities.” The prose sentences of
Tom Jenks offer first person nararatives, moving
back and forth from short, sketched bursts, expansive open form poems to
clustered prose blocks. There’s such a wry delight in sound and syntax across these poems that are intriguing, and the collection exists as a kind of collage on form, moving from the expansive open lyric to densely-packed short burst. I’d only seen Jenks’ visual works prior to this, so am
now quite fascinated by what he is exploring through his sentences: a kind of
surreal swirling of narrative twists and turns, one that is open to the experiment-as-it-occurs. I am very interested in seeing where else his poems might find themselves.
scissors
Syrop on soya, the square
holes in waffles,
cheesy dumplings, ancient
grain rolls,
I don’t know what to make
of any of it.
All the elements for a
good life are in place,
yet a good life is not
being lived.
We should rethink the solar
system
or buy each other
shoulder bags.
I saw a dog that was entirely
see through.
I’ve got a ride on mower
but I still use scissors.
Anthony Etherin, Fabric (2022): Another author published previously through above/ground press, “experimental formalist
poet” Anthony Etherin, a poet, editor and publisher who lives “on the border of
England and Wales,” offers a cluster of poems in Fabric that continue
his strict adherence to formal poetic structure, engaging with such as the
acrostic, anagram, lipogram, palindrome, villanelle, sonnet and ambigrams, even
to the point of brevity, as some were composed with the Twitter/X limit of 280
characters/140 characters in mind. “Fit one sent rule:,” the final couplet of “Sonnet
Fuel” reads, “Tier sonnet fuel.” Part of what is always interesting in Etherin’s
ongoing work is in seeing just how far it is possible for him to continue
across such highly-specific formal paths, and the wonderful variations that
emerge through his collections. The overt brevity is interesting as well,
offering new layers to his ongoing structures. In his introduction, he offers
that “The poems of Fabric [a book he posted online as a free pdf, by the way] are at ease with their poemhood. Some discuss
poetry itself, while others are more introspective, eager to evaluate the
principles and rules by which they were constructed.” They are at ease with
their poemhood, highly aware of their structures, as the collision of sound and
meaning provide the delight of what formal possibilities might bring.
Tautograms
The tautogram ties
terms to their typography
–
tightening this text.
