Charlie Hill reviews a collection of well-executed poems by Adrian Green
All That Jazz and Other Poems
Adrian Green
Littoral Press
ISBN: 978-1912412112
Ā£9.00
On the evidence of this collection, Adrian Green has very particular preferences when it comes to Jazz. In āAcid Jazz Grooveā he writes of āa soundtrack going nowhere/to a film they havenāt madeā. āFree Formā sees him describing āthat no-manās land/between abstract and the formalā and the response this causes in the listener:
while the cognoscenti
nod as if in knowing trance,
their concentration
drawn on vacant faces,
others wonder
where the music takes them,
where the melody has gone.
Amateurs get equally short shrift. Of āThe Debutantsā, āEncouraged by their friends/and buoyed with youthful confidenceā, he observes:
Half-an-hour into the set
and no-one noticed
when tuning ended
and playing began.
It would be obvious, but no less reasonable for all that, to suggest that this attachment to the structurally constant underscores his poetry too. With few exceptions ā I think āRedā, a poem dedicated to āJCā in which Green writes: āNo peace in your search for peace/or attempt to forge a hoe/from Britanniaās trident prongsā is the oddest of the scarce missteps ā this is a collection of reliably well-executed poems.
Typical of their wistful, melancholic register is āRetreatā. Here the air is heavy with āthunder and butterflies/and childrenās voicesā before the poet hears
a siren calling
from the meadow
we played in
before it was lost
to affordable homes.
I like this poem a lot. It is a thoughtful and affecting piece of writing. What it doesnāt do āand again in this it is perhaps typical of the collection as a whole ā is provide much in the way of the discordant, many surprising notes from no-manās land.
London Grip Poetry Review – Adrian Green
February 18, 2019 by Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, jazz, poetry reviews, year 2019 • Tags: books, Charlie Hill, poetry • 0 Comments
Charlie Hill reviews a collection of well-executed poems by Adrian Green
On the evidence of this collection, Adrian Green has very particular preferences when it comes to Jazz. In āAcid Jazz Grooveā he writes of āa soundtrack going nowhere/to a film they havenāt madeā. āFree Formā sees him describing āthat no-manās land/between abstract and the formalā and the response this causes in the listener:
Amateurs get equally short shrift. Of āThe Debutantsā, āEncouraged by their friends/and buoyed with youthful confidenceā, he observes:
It would be obvious, but no less reasonable for all that, to suggest that this attachment to the structurally constant underscores his poetry too. With few exceptions ā I think āRedā, a poem dedicated to āJCā in which Green writes: āNo peace in your search for peace/or attempt to forge a hoe/from Britanniaās trident prongsā is the oddest of the scarce missteps ā this is a collection of reliably well-executed poems.
Typical of their wistful, melancholic register is āRetreatā. Here the air is heavy with āthunder and butterflies/and childrenās voicesā before the poet hears
a siren calling from the meadow we played in before it was lost to affordable homes.I like this poem a lot. It is a thoughtful and affecting piece of writing. What it doesnāt do āand again in this it is perhaps typical of the collection as a whole ā is provide much in the way of the discordant, many surprising notes from no-manās land.