Judder Men, Ben Bransfield
Smith/Doorstop, 2021 £6.50
Where it all starts
Many of these poems are about childhood. Even the ones that aren’t share the sense of an unfettered imagination at work on the mysteries of the world. Ben Bransfield takes the mythic concerns of childhood into adult life, but it all starts with the stories we absorb as children.
In ‘The Twangers’, the poet’s father summons the ‘sidewise judder men’ by twanging the old coiled spring door-stops. It’s a real Dad thing — part joke, part wind-up — but possibly something more. In this case, ‘they’ are
already there in brain or inner ear
at higher pitch that only I could hear
The first poem, ‘Go-Kart’, feels like an extended metaphor of growing up. Built by their grandfather, the go-kart is dragged by the kids to the park
to test what had been built, unable to think beyond
the setting off. To go faster we had to share, to bolt together
This is mirrored in the poem, ‘Tomatoes’, where the poet has swapped go-kart for lawnmower and exchanged the thrill of speed for the concerns of an adult gardener. But the outcome is rooted in childhood and each fruit is ‘a gift of life from my grandfather’s second body’.
There is a terrific imaginative force at work here. In ‘Nan and Grandad’s’, there are goldfish whose tongues have been taken by the black pond, who ‘rose to tell / but took down their pills and forgot again.’ In ‘Joe’, the poet’s brother is remembered tenderly as the budding artist who ‘built a cafe on a hat and wore it all the way to school’. ‘Lamprey’ has an unforgettable double simile (‘like a severed penis or an unfried length of black pudding’) as well as an eye-watering image of a blood-sucking fish:
whipping quietly
upstream for the moonlit skinny dippers.
In the final poem, 'Paros', we are left with the image of a family meal in Greece where the poet’s mother ‘will look out towards the sea.’ Earlier, in ‘Joe’, she is the enabler of creativity, a mother who let her children ‘paint / a tree of hands up the kitchen wall ’. Appropriate, then, that she should feature at the close of this wonderful collection.
David Lukens
Poetry of place
Judder Men is exceptionally varied in its subject matter and style. From a poem about the historical theft of a shirt to a poem composed entirely of wordplay (‘Rag Man’), it might be hard to find a unifying thread. However, one thing which many of these poems do have in common is a powerful sense of place. Bransfield uses setting to evoke both emotions and states of mind, from quiet reflection to defiance and loss.
In the poem ‘Nan and Granddad’s’ for example, a house is depicted in full sensory detail:
Corned beef. Silverskin onion juice
Sluiced from the jar onto mash.
The house and garden take on an almost magical quality, becoming characters with agency in their own right:
And the black pond never let on
it had taken the goldfishes’ tongues.
By paying such attention to setting, the poem looks sideways at the relationship between the speaker and his grandparents. Vivid descriptions of place bring memories to life and hint at the importance of this connection.
Elsewhere, setting itself becomes the narrator. In ‘To King Ferdinand III of Castile, upon entering the Mezquita of Córdoba, 1236’, the temple — once a mosque, converted to a cathedral by the conquistadors — insists on its unchanged state. ‘I am no different to before,’ says the Mezquita —
[...] I will be jasper
brick and stone, whatever you let them do to me,
whichever way you face to pray.
As well as survival and defiance, setting can powerfully suggest loss. In ‘Blundellsands’, Anthony Gormley’s Another Place sculpture of figures ‘star[ing] out to sea’ forms a stark backdrop to images of abandonment and decay. The poet describes how ‘Christmas trees’ are left to rot on the beach, ‘dry branches docked / by bauble thread, stray tinsel strand.’
In Judder Men, place is a vehicle for exploring human emotion and memory. Often setting is a character just as much as it is scenery.