Sandsnarl, Jon Stone
Illustrations by Emma Dai’an Wright
The Emma Press 2021 £5.00
A sand toy, intricate and dark-eyed
‘Sandsnarl’ isn’t just poetry — it’s fantasy. Sand has taken over everything and obsessed everyone, like anything we hope will save us: drugs, riches, ideology, religion, art. Jon Stone uses rhyme, alliteration and other delights to make the reading experience itself intoxicating.
‘The Thurl of Sand, Whose Mouth Hovers Eternally Above a Cup of Mead, Orates the Beginnings of the Age of Sand’, explains:
It blurred our plans. It blurred the names on stones.
The border between dream and sand became a spit of sand.
[…]
And now we mine the sand beneath the sand.
We shovel sand — we feed it into furnaces of sand.
We pray for sand, and lay the blame on sand.
I call my daughter, Sand. I call my other daughter, Sand.
The characters seem to understand the sand is worthless. ‘The Dysalter of Sand Presses His Lips to Your Ear and Rehearses, or Rather Rasps, His Summer Catalogue’ lists increasingly far-fetched ideas for uses: ‘portion out cautiously over a breakfast encounter’, ‘empty the lot on the tarmac at night, in a lay-by’.
Yet they try to find meaning. In ‘An Argument About Sand’, characters make suggestions, shouted down by the refrain (‘all disquiet; none of the rest of them buy it’) until:
It’s like a rudeness one keeps in one’s sock drawer
but at the same time flashes at the jealous,
attests the cellist.
And all is furore, all commotion,
since that one at least was a close one.
Oh the delight in language in even that little bit! I love the clash of registers. Many readers will be poets and see the sand as metaphor for literature, so it’s particularly pleasing how it sends itself up, both here and more widely — for example in the gloriously overblown titles.
‘Sandsnarl’ ends with just such a title, layered with doubtful meaning-making: ‘The Elderly Astronomer Sits in What Was Once the Churchyard, Reading (so She is Given to Understand) a Long-Lost Novel of George Sand’. As the police arrive, sand does its elusive thing and ‘runs from her sleeve’.
Ramona Herdman
Telling titles
Sandsnarl, so we’re told in the preface, is ‘a settlement steeped in sand’; where it comes from is ‘a matter of tall tales’. Here, haunting illustrations and playful poetry combine like a storybook to create an imaginary world.
Google the word ‘sandsnarl’, and you’ll discover that it’s an amalgamation of the names of two toy characters from the Transformers franchise. The video influence is clear in the way all the poem titles read as scene summaries. For example:
Two Makers of Sand Toys, Both Skilled and Ancient, Disconcerted and Dark-Browed, Open Their Doors for Business at the Same Hour on the Same Side-street
Prosaic as they are, the capitalisation transforms these long titles into poetry. Adjectives become personified, almost characters themselves (‘Racked and Red-Eyed in a Sad Scrag of Waistcoat [...]’). Wryly humorous at times, verbs shape-shift into possible nouns, so ‘The Drysalter of Sand Presses His Lips to Your Ear’ becomes a nod to the publication itself.
These telling titles introduce an arresting cast of characters, all economically defined by role rather than name. Some we recognise — the roboteer, smuggler, astronomer. Others are more obscure — a limnologist. The disorienting juxtapositions and intriguing amalgams (the ‘Sand Orphan’; the ‘Sandsinger’) are succinctly evocative. Words like ‘Sandskinshifter’ contain a narrative within a word.
The poems in Sandsnarl, like the contents page itself, read as a cross between fantasy script and dream narrative. They ‘eavesdrop, extract, sift’, we’re told. Titles like ‘An Argument About Sand’ and ‘Attempts to Describe One Who Lived Here and Who May Have Been a Ghost or a Djinn or an Extraordinary Feature of the Weather’ give a flavour of this.
Although gaming and animated toys are not my territory, the creative imagining is wholly successful, and the interpretation leaves much for the reader to ponder. We may question what it all means, but as one of the ‘Two Makers of Sand Toys’ concludes about the things they sell:
each exists
to make you guess why it exists,
then reels his breath in.
Damned fool question.
Enter into it.