The Phantom Rooster Press, 2009 £3.00
Reviewed by Hilary Menos, Matthew Stewart, Nick Asbury and Richard Meier
Hilary Menos:
Some pamphlets are slight, a mere taste of things to come. Poems2, by Judy Prince is more like a full collection, with 37 pages of poetry. There is a downside to this—my pamphlet started to fall apart after a few days. Two staples are clearly not enough to contain these poems, which burst forth from the pages fizzing with juicy kisses, fortune-tellers, elderberry knickers and brandy-soaked bees.
From the off, the images are arresting, if occasionally rather bawdy. In ‘Catching Over and Out’ Prince asks
will you poke through my tea leaves?
I’ll peel your splendid carrot
presented on sprigs of cilantro
My jury is still out on whether this is sexy and amusing, or too much like vegetable porn, and I’m still worried by the ‘peel’ bit.
Many of these poems are intensely personal, and very sensual. Some are lyrical and sweet (“my heart topples/ in the warm caliper/ of your hand”); some have rather too much of the stock-in-trade stuff of poets—clouds, oceans, moons and a wind-bent cypress—and some are possibly a little too intimate (“be my love if we will move this way/ and move again this way/ outside time / ---oh god outside time”).
At her best Prince pulls out a phrase that seems to say something perfectly (“three centuries of oatcakes/ and now you want shortbread”) and some of her juxtapositions are illuminating and lovely (I particularly liked “suede earth”). But then she seems to pick a word which simply doesn’t work, for me anyway. In ‘Taken To Mean Dry’ she says “death, even a slow bleedy one/ would be better than silence”. I just can’t get past that “bleedy”.
And too often I found myself keen for a bit of clarity. In ‘The Uncovering Wait’, (I quote in full):
my face in the window looking in, looking out
your hand like the back of a leaf
huddled in a hedge
green life going
a tree spire of blackbirds dreams
in dips and rises
there is no light, no season of shells—
only my face in the paling night
when I must hand you over
This is an interesting succession of images which seem to hint at something big and important going on, but ultimately I feel the meaning remains elusive. She also regularly hyphenates words to make adjectives (a “tune-ready” ear, “click-finger gloves”) or nouns (eggs as “soon-birds”). These rarely add to the poem.
This collection is patchy. It has a lot of energy and vivaciousness, and ranges far and wide in its scope, but Prince needs to spend a bit more time on the craft of making the meaning of a poem available to her readers.
Matthew Stewart:
This pamphlet has something of a old-fashioned feel, taking me back to the time when I started reading small magazines that were produced on a kitchen table by dedicated editors. It does look slightly amateurish, but Judy Prince has put a huge amount of effort into writing the poems and illustrating them herself.
Moving on to the poems, I found them evading me. Full of juxtapositions and snippets of language, often only hinting at physical context or points of reference, they also tend to avoid punctuation, as in ‘Elderberry Knickers’:
you write of blue snared in a star’s tantrum
of white myths swirling in snowdome tunes
you bribe alive my animal night
gondola thumping wood, globe clutching light
The poet’s clearly enjoying language here, but she’s leaving me nonplussed in spite of the accompanying illustrations, which seem to highlight one of the objects described in each piece without managing to enlighten.
As for titles, some are great fun, as in ‘Poetic Notes Of A Clairvoyant Neanderthal In The Ardèche’, so why, why, why is the book titled Poems2? Even the suppression of the space between the word and number can’t save it! All it tells us is that there was a predecessor to this collection.
One or two of the poems do get more specific and tell more of a story, as in ‘Working It Through’, which deals with a relationship. Even so, images such as these don’t convince. . .
train yourself to interrupt me
when your bladder’s full
so I can shut the toilet door on your mouth
In summary, Judy Prince has grafted to get this book out into the world and offer it to readers who might enjoy it. I’m just sorry that I’m not one of them.
Nick Asbury:
This collection sometimes left me feeling like an eavesdropper on a private argument, which can be an uncomfortable experience. Its main attraction lies in the vigour and physicality of its language. This extract gives a flavour:
right, here’s how it fits
in my pockets, this flailed
marriage
barristers sliding down the
banister
splintering our arses
salvation through secular mindshifts
copulation for population
inane beats insane
here’s a pen, start taking notes
you might record the great bowel shift
I’ve emptied the vacuum
(‘The Oldest Proposition’)
There’s some difficult, angry stuff being worked out here, seemingly rooted in a traumatic divorce. The fragmented, incantatory feel of the language is powerful, but opaque—as though private feelings are being exorcised, with no real impulse to involve the outside reader (perhaps not even requiring one).
The fragments are enticing nonetheless. “I’ve emptied the vacuum” is great—simultaneously suggesting something as mundanely domestic as emptying the hoover, while conjuring up an existential state of emptiness more profound than emptiness itself. That’s a clever trick.
Of course, taking into account the preceding line, there’s also the suggestion of emptying of a different kind. There’s a lot of messy bodily stuff in this collection—splintered arses, split throats, letterbox cloaca, petrol farts, full bladders, juicy kisses. All this is mixed in with moments of disarming tenderness:
sometimes when I’m lying in bed
I think all is lost
the world is coming to an end
then I look at you
sitting at the desk
eating cashews
(‘A Likely Story’)
Even here, the observation is rooted in the messy physical act of eating, and offset by the detached scepticism of the title. (It’s a common trait of the collection that the titles are used less as a signpost into the poems than as a diversionary or complicating element, offering an oblique commentary on what follows.)
Many of the poems feature hand-drawn illustrations by the poet herself, which I felt varied in their effectiveness. I loved the sketch of the park bench that accompanies ‘Queen’s Park’, but some of the others seemed like private doodles that didn’t add much to their poems. That said, I’m a big fan of combining the two art forms and it’s heartening to see the practice continued here.
Richard Meier:
This is the opening poem in Judy Prince’s pamphlet:
single goblets worn in hand
tossed simply to fuzzy-haired patrons
uncorked fancies
you walk my riffing mind
tentative sport talk
the gel outside my certain fever
power plate sluicing, cocked cutlery
I can analyse for clues
but your breast clears passageways
linings grope and digest
shall we apply our knives to the bleeding lamb?
will you poke through my tea leaves?
I’ll peel your splendid carrot
presented on sprigs of cilantro
if we fill our cups in the car park
arrange a hierarchy of puddings in the boot
who will see the spots we spill?
heady way, flooding caffeine
sing us home with your cinnamon throat
(‘Catching over and out’)
I quote this poem in full since it’s representative not only of the intensity Judy Prince often achieves in her poems but also of an occasional tendency to cross the line between intensity and opaqueness. For while the “cocked cutlery” and “uncorked fancies” strongly convey the sexual undercurrents of this particular dinner party, “the gel outside my certain fever” and the “cinnamon throat” had me groping for meaning.
Some of the poems are less dense, but equally charged—’The Slightest Move’, for example, with its evocation of the intensity of parents’ love and reverence for her child:
our child
our youth, our dance
wire strung and strung to strength
she scrapes meanings into eggshells
and with her saved coins
buys an automaton
mate for quantum leaps
she starts cloud engines
lives in a star each night
kicks memory chunks down a dirt black road
and jumps into silver, her breath unafraid
oh this child—her loose arms free
brush her hair into rhythmic singing
catch her sleep
swan feather at our feet
(‘The Slightest Move’)
Prince also does passion well:
my heart topples
in the warm caliper
of your hand,
my body a raised map—
new lines like moving silk
dance for you
long legs enfold the sea
(‘Summate’)
Occasionally however, some of the poems can come across as a little trite:
is this the night to put out the wheelie bin?
after 8, as if wheelie bins are an embarrassment
like a pregnant daughter in the attic [. . .]
one marriage is as bad as another
what’s the use of whingeing?
(‘Working it through’)
All in all, a pamphlet which is a rich, if occasionally perplexing, feast.