Merryn Williams shares a few thoughts about Alan Dunnett’s rather challenging poetry collection which seeks, among other things, to capture “the psychological fallout of anxiety in modern capitalist culture”
A Third Colour
Alan Dunnett
(images by Alix Emery and with an introduction by Bernard O’Donoghue)
Culture Matters
ISBN 978-1-912710-00-3.
£8
As Bernard O’Donoghue says in his introduction, these poems are ‘about the things that matter in life, love and hurt and justice’ – definitely poems for a frightening century. They are not always easy to read, for two reasons: you may have to keep checking the notes at the back, to find out what is going on, and they are about some very distressing subjects – suicide bombers, Grenfell, our attitude to refugees. ‘Succour’ is a dialogue between a man from the Third World who has nothing and a man from this world who is sympathetic ‘but we’ve got problems here’. And there is also a good poem about Brexit.
‘In Bed with Macbeth’ stands out for me. It is written in the voice of a guilty woman with intolerable memories; innocent victims of torture and displacement are also unable to forget their past. There are some colourful, modernist illustrations by Alix Emery, and a red dot keeps appearing as you turn the pages; this is a symbol of a ‘physical bleeding hole’.
(See https://culturematters.org.uk/index.php/shop-support/our-publications/item/2822-a-third-colour for more information.)
Jun 11 2018
A Third Colour
Merryn Williams shares a few thoughts about Alan Dunnett’s rather challenging poetry collection which seeks, among other things, to capture “the psychological fallout of anxiety in modern capitalist culture”
As Bernard O’Donoghue says in his introduction, these poems are ‘about the things that matter in life, love and hurt and justice’ – definitely poems for a frightening century. They are not always easy to read, for two reasons: you may have to keep checking the notes at the back, to find out what is going on, and they are about some very distressing subjects – suicide bombers, Grenfell, our attitude to refugees. ‘Succour’ is a dialogue between a man from the Third World who has nothing and a man from this world who is sympathetic ‘but we’ve got problems here’. And there is also a good poem about Brexit.
‘In Bed with Macbeth’ stands out for me. It is written in the voice of a guilty woman with intolerable memories; innocent victims of torture and displacement are also unable to forget their past. There are some colourful, modernist illustrations by Alix Emery, and a red dot keeps appearing as you turn the pages; this is a symbol of a ‘physical bleeding hole’.
(See https://culturematters.org.uk/index.php/shop-support/our-publications/item/2822-a-third-colour for more information.)
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, poetry reviews, politics, year 2018 0 • Tags: Merryn Williams, poetry, politics