Cossacks and Bandits

Katia Kapovich's latest collection - Cossacks and Bandits (Salt Publishing, 2008) - continues the appealing lyrical narrative style of her earlier Gogol in Rome. The two collections trace a shifting focus, from émigré to immigrant, from memories of Russia to observations of the United States. There's more of the present in the new book, and not only in the references to JPEGs and google.ru., but in the reservoir of experience from which the poems are drawn. The juxtaposition of two narratives in the poem 'The Bells' where the sequiturs aren't quite clear achieves a stronger effect than some of the simpler more direct pieces; but the simpler lyrical pieces are very appealing and have something of the affable clarity that you might find in the work of, say, Hugo Williams, although the content is quite different. There are the slight dislocations of language: "now you must rebuild the whole structure / out of the rabble in your mind" ... should that 'rabble' perhaps be 'rubble'? A blending of words possibly stemming from the absence of a short u sound in Russian? Or the odd strange article: "An obnoxious driver of the orange Porsche / changing lanes like a pigeon hops branches" ... here a pleasant enough insight is cut through by what seems like a wrong article, giving a strange electrostatic charge to the lines. But of course Kapovich is deeply aware of the ambiguities around the linguistic position of the immigrant, and the possible advantages its outsider status can confer upon a poet. In the poem 'Tutor' she recounts a story of teaching a Russian kid with some language and learning difficulties some basic English, managing to go as far as basic statements such as 'The sky is blue. The grass is green. The paper is white.' The poem ends with what could be a metaphor for the language trick of poetry:

The next thing I knew, he was dating an American girl.
"Anton, my goodness, how did that happen?"
He looked at me seriously. "I told her, 'Look! The sky is blue!
The grass is green! The paper is white! What is your name?'"

North 41 - and blabbing

The North 41 has arrived - I've always liked their 'blind criticism' section, in the spirit of Zukofsky's A Test For Poetry - and on a quick skim through I noticed a few poems - such as Catherine Smith's 'Picnic' which is about sex in somebody's office followed by a raid on the staff fridge - which put me in mind of Hugo Williams' essay where he contrasts Bly's concept of 'Leaping' poetry with a sort of confessional 'Blabbing' ... the word comes from Patrick Kavanagh's Self-Portrait:

"What seems of public importance is never of any importance. Stupid poets and artists think that by taking subjects of public importance it will help their work to survive. There is nothing as dead and damned as an important thing. The things that really matter are casual, insignificant little things, things you would be ashamed to talk of publicly. You are ashamed and then after years someone blabs and you find you are in the secret majority." - Kavanagh

'Blabbing' it seems equates to the "rather shameful" "personal confidences" that M. L. Rosenthal found is his review of Life Studies. This approach is presumably underwritten by the idea - expressed once by Martin Amis - that the writer hopes that the particular will turn out to be universal.

Smith's 'Picnic' juxtaposes sex pressed up against a manager's in-tray with a memory of a child's first picnic. Andrew Motion once said something about leaning two things up against each other and seeing what happens. As formulae go, it's a good one.

Who is Sean Elliott?

Recent issues of poetry magazines form nagging piles. One name I've been noticing is Sean Elliott. No book yet? There's a lucidity and tautness in the lines that stands out. Something reminiscent of Alan Jenkins perhaps in the settings and material, and there's an echo of the intimate tone of Hugo Williams. There's a strand of poetry that emerges from the editorial influence of Ian Hamilton: pared back (few-don'ts-wise) and somewhat confessional.

The first poem of Elliott's that I noticed was, I think, about Ingmar Bergman films; I can't locate it now, buried as it must be in one of the many now unnagging piles of the skimmed and perused.