Sphinx Poetry Pamphlet Reviews & Features
Run by HappenStance Press
  • Home
  • About
  • Site search

Home

Pale pink cover with a purple drawing of various abstract creaturesA Mediated and Partial Zone, Betsy Porritt

Guillemot Press, 2022 £8.00

Feeling my way through sound

I can’t read this pamphlet in my customary way: it doesn’t make enough normal sense to me. Just when I might be managing to form a conventional impression, the words wrongfoot me again. Quickly, it’s only the words themselves — their sounds and associations — that become the thing. Stepping stones in a fogged-out landscape.

I enjoy those words. In the long unpunctuated sequence, which makes up most of the pamphlet, ‘Equivalent Materials’, there’s a lot of alliteration, assonance and rhyme. Here’s one of my favourite lines:

pliant willow casket        pint accomplice

I like that rhyme. Words themselves start popping out of the page, demanding my full attention. In the earlier (and only other) poem, ‘Encounters’, we’re presented with the question: ‘who are you / in relationship to this space?’ And then little maybe-clues like:

               I won’t write the difficulty of being
numerous my hands are framing the daily

And:

                                       a baby is crying in a
different part of this building

I get a sense of fractured dispelled attention: like city noises after dark. I can tune into this — in myself, as well as in this work. Resonate. (Which is itself a sound-activity: a vibrating in time with.)

There’s no extraneous information whatsoever in or on this pamphlet — not even an author bio. (On the publisher’s website, there is a little more. I learn, for instance, that ‘These poems emerged out of an installation/experiment’.) On the page, for me, words that seem to bear little relation unite in non-sentences: ‘arcade skinned rabbit aloft said’. They reverberate off each other — ‘cuddle    picturewindow    ululate’ — painting strange, approximate, impressionist pictures.

It’s not unenjoyable — giving my attention to this soundscape: birds (words) sitting on a telegraph wire. I begin to hear sounds and echoes everywhere — ‘neither linen        thinner niche’ — and relationships between words, like ‘secret wheat futures’. Strange cinematic impressions do begin to form, as I work my way through. A (partial) reward for suspended patience and waiting?

map a daily lengthening        a fish and chip supper
                             steps into lemony sunlight
                             here I am

Charlotte Gann
Published: 20 February 2023
  • Charlotte Gann
  • Guillemot Press
  • Betsy Porritt

Page 14 of 16

  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16

Reviews & features

  • FEATURES
  • The End of the OPOI
  • Review principles
  • OPOI REVIEWS 2023
  • OPOI reviews 2022
  • OPOI reviews 2021
  • OPOI reviews 2020
  • OPOI reviews 2019
  • OPOI reviews 2018
  • OPOI reviews 2017
  • OPOI reviews 2016
  • OPOI reviews 2015
  • Sphinx
    • Sphinx 2013
    • Sphinx 2012
    • Sphinx 2011
    • Sphinx 2010
    • Sphinx 2009
    • Sphinx 2008
    • Sphinx 2007
    • Sphinx 2006
  • Privacy Policy