Poetry review – REELING AND WRITHING: Mat Riches compares Barry Smith’s new collection to a feast of rich and complex flavours
Reeling & Writhing
Barry Smith
Dempsey & Windle
ISBN 9781913329914
102 pp £12.50
Reeling And Writhing, with its reference to Lewis Carroll, consists of three sections. We will mainly be focusing on sections one and three here. Section two is the one that has the most obvious connection to Lewis Carroll, with its poems about Alice in Wonderland and works by H.G. Wells and Tony Harrison. I’m not focusing on them here as they felt, to me, as if they would have been better served as a separate pamphlet.
Now, I said that section 2 has the most obvious connection to the book’s title. However, reeling and writhing could easily describe the state of a number of characters who inhabit the poems in the other two sections. In the introduction to the book the poems are described as considering ‘notions of appearance and reality, of illusion and delusion, of educational aspiration and soil manipulation, of the search for individual truth in a world where little can be taken for granted’; and while this can be true of e.g. Alice In Wonderland , it’s certainly true of the poems on the other two sections.
It’s reeling and (possibly literally) writhing from the off. In the opening poem, “Radioactive”, we meet what I think is an early version of Smith as a young theatre director working himself into the ground in pursuit of unattainable dreams ahead of suffering an ‘incipient ulcer’ despite warnings ‘to take things easier in the rehearsal room’. And it doesn’t let up much after that. The poems that follow are filled with lost friendships in “Up The Ladder” and heroics in “Warrior”. It’s worth noting here that I was a bit confused as to who that second title refers to. The poem is about Mad Jack Seeley, politician, war hero, and owner of a horse called Warrior. While the horse is referenced in the poem, I think the title is referring to Seeley himself. My uncertainty is not a big thing, especially given the gallantry of man and horse, but it’s enough to make me question my understanding of the poem. However, this poem does tee up the politics that are a running theme. They rear their head in the ‘flogging block at Eton’ mentioned in “The Wild Garlic at Shorwell”, itself a call back to Swinburne’s poetic novel having made reference to Swinburne in an earlier stanza.
However, it’s “Theresa’s Tears” that offers perhaps the most overtly political commentary.
She shed a little tear
when she saw the exit poll
on election night
but the tears she did not shed
tell a bitter tale.
The poem goes on to document a litany of May’s failures, including pay disputes with nurses, teachers and firefighters; refugee crisis mismanagement and, of course, her presiding over the flouting of safety regulations that led to the Grenfell disaster. The last stanza leaves us fairly clear, if we weren’t already, on where the poet stands in judgement. ’Theresa shed a little tear / but it was not shed for us.’ indeed.
This is perhaps the most overt instance of political content, but there’s a more subtle one towards the end of the collection. “Pay and Display” is a poem about ostentatious displays of cash, or perhaps about parking…or both, but it begs an important question in the last two stanzas.
it really isn’t that easy
so as you stand
before the meter
gauging the risk
of renting a few hours
for your special delight
you better ask yourself the right question
not have you paid and displayed
but would you if you could?
Those question marks are pretty much the only punctuation in the poem, and they land all the harder for it.
A feature of Smith’s work seems to be a fondness for the list-poem, especially involving plants. Take for example, the ekphrastic poem, “Willows” written, I presume ‘after the painting of the same name by Ivon Hitchens’. The poem lists
sighing by a sycamore tree
singing on of a green willow
streams of light filtering the riverbed
the tangled pool, the linear stretch
the gate between shadowed waters
the path, the least, the veins
the patterned willow boughs
It piles on natural references, only using commas within the line, and deploying enjambment elsewhere to act as a comma and place to draw breath.
A further example is to be found in “Time and Tide”, where the second stanza starts
And so we break through to the high heathland
awash with purple wave of wiry heather,
threaded with carmine pink spikes, bright rosebay
willow herb and scented, scrambling yellow-white
honeysuckle tendrils intermingling
with prickly gorse, braving the seasonal
winds which today are but a wisping breeze.
Smith paints a rich picture of place here on the Isle of Wight, mixing the textures of wire, prickles and softer plants like Rosebay and Honeysuckle. The poem is placed in the relative now, but harks back to both the Bronze age and to something more primal when ‘the Needles thrust their sharpened/stones above the encircling, abrasive sea’. Is this a picture of the sea reeling and writhing?
There’s a final example the floral list in the first poem of the last section, “Route Sixty-Six Revisited”, with its subtle nod to Dylan and blues which is later echoed in the reference to Van Morrison’s “Russian Roulette” in “Spinning Time” a few poems later. In “Route Sixty-Six” we see an older man looking back on change in the 60s, seeing a world shifting ahead of going to university. Dylan has gone
electric at the Albert Hall,
a new youthful eye spiked the sixties
and the wait was gradually scoured clear,
the scum and viscous sludge drained,
the hedgerows replanted with hawthorn and alder,
the floating pennywort, nettles and parleys regrafted
It’s a young man’s hope, and I’m not 100% sure by the end of the section whether that hope has remained. If we ignore the Shelley ‘tribute’, “Masks of Anarchy”, that closes the collection, the final line of the book is ‘For the hour of earth is done’. Hard not to agree. Even if we accept the final final poem as the end, its recounting of failures during Lockdown isn’t exactly ending in a happy place.
It’s worth noting that these lists illustrate the way Smith often piles up the words. In his poem “The Boatman’s Reel” he tells us at the start that ‘Since words are words and the word is all there is” and he makes sure we get well above our word quotas. Let’s look at the poem “Brook Churchyard” from earlier in the book. The poem begins
Scoured stone, moss-steeped cross and darkling yew,
solitary sentinel gazing with hooded eyes
over burnished sea, crumbling cliff, opalescent sky,
restful chapel dozing on the mount of sorrow,
how many have lain in your soothing arms
seeking easeful succour from your supine breast
and still recline, languorously, through lost centuries?
The stone is “scoured”, the cross “moss-steeped”, the sky “opalescent”, the succour “easeful”; the adjectives and adverbs are crammed in here. If eighty-something pages of poems aren’t giving you your money’s worth, then think of the language you’re getting on top of that. These are often dense poems that have been filled with words rather in the manner that a Japanese Black cow is fed for wagyu beef. With apologies to vegetarian or vegan readers, I mean this as a good thing. These poems have had the best of everything put in and so they will be tasty and filling as you consume them.
While I’ve ignored the section in the middle that covers the Alice poems, I think the summing-up words of this review of Smith’s complex, intriguing and satisfying book should belong to Lewis Carroll: ‘ “Well, there was mystery”, the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers, — “Mystery, Ancient and Modern” ‘.
Aug 23 2024
London Grip Poetry Review – Barry Smith
Poetry review – REELING AND WRITHING: Mat Riches compares Barry Smith’s new collection to a feast of rich and complex flavours
Reeling And Writhing, with its reference to Lewis Carroll, consists of three sections. We will mainly be focusing on sections one and three here. Section two is the one that has the most obvious connection to Lewis Carroll, with its poems about Alice in Wonderland and works by H.G. Wells and Tony Harrison. I’m not focusing on them here as they felt, to me, as if they would have been better served as a separate pamphlet.
Now, I said that section 2 has the most obvious connection to the book’s title. However, reeling and writhing could easily describe the state of a number of characters who inhabit the poems in the other two sections. In the introduction to the book the poems are described as considering ‘notions of appearance and reality, of illusion and delusion, of educational aspiration and soil manipulation, of the search for individual truth in a world where little can be taken for granted’; and while this can be true of e.g. Alice In Wonderland , it’s certainly true of the poems on the other two sections.
It’s reeling and (possibly literally) writhing from the off. In the opening poem, “Radioactive”, we meet what I think is an early version of Smith as a young theatre director working himself into the ground in pursuit of unattainable dreams ahead of suffering an ‘incipient ulcer’ despite warnings ‘to take things easier in the rehearsal room’. And it doesn’t let up much after that. The poems that follow are filled with lost friendships in “Up The Ladder” and heroics in “Warrior”. It’s worth noting here that I was a bit confused as to who that second title refers to. The poem is about Mad Jack Seeley, politician, war hero, and owner of a horse called Warrior. While the horse is referenced in the poem, I think the title is referring to Seeley himself. My uncertainty is not a big thing, especially given the gallantry of man and horse, but it’s enough to make me question my understanding of the poem. However, this poem does tee up the politics that are a running theme. They rear their head in the ‘flogging block at Eton’ mentioned in “The Wild Garlic at Shorwell”, itself a call back to Swinburne’s poetic novel having made reference to Swinburne in an earlier stanza.
However, it’s “Theresa’s Tears” that offers perhaps the most overtly political commentary.
The poem goes on to document a litany of May’s failures, including pay disputes with nurses, teachers and firefighters; refugee crisis mismanagement and, of course, her presiding over the flouting of safety regulations that led to the Grenfell disaster. The last stanza leaves us fairly clear, if we weren’t already, on where the poet stands in judgement. ’Theresa shed a little tear / but it was not shed for us.’ indeed.
This is perhaps the most overt instance of political content, but there’s a more subtle one towards the end of the collection. “Pay and Display” is a poem about ostentatious displays of cash, or perhaps about parking…or both, but it begs an important question in the last two stanzas.
Those question marks are pretty much the only punctuation in the poem, and they land all the harder for it.
A feature of Smith’s work seems to be a fondness for the list-poem, especially involving plants. Take for example, the ekphrastic poem, “Willows” written, I presume ‘after the painting of the same name by Ivon Hitchens’. The poem lists
It piles on natural references, only using commas within the line, and deploying enjambment elsewhere to act as a comma and place to draw breath.
A further example is to be found in “Time and Tide”, where the second stanza starts
Smith paints a rich picture of place here on the Isle of Wight, mixing the textures of wire, prickles and softer plants like Rosebay and Honeysuckle. The poem is placed in the relative now, but harks back to both the Bronze age and to something more primal when ‘the Needles thrust their sharpened/stones above the encircling, abrasive sea’. Is this a picture of the sea reeling and writhing?
There’s a final example the floral list in the first poem of the last section, “Route Sixty-Six Revisited”, with its subtle nod to Dylan and blues which is later echoed in the reference to Van Morrison’s “Russian Roulette” in “Spinning Time” a few poems later. In “Route Sixty-Six” we see an older man looking back on change in the 60s, seeing a world shifting ahead of going to university. Dylan has gone
It’s a young man’s hope, and I’m not 100% sure by the end of the section whether that hope has remained. If we ignore the Shelley ‘tribute’, “Masks of Anarchy”, that closes the collection, the final line of the book is ‘For the hour of earth is done’. Hard not to agree. Even if we accept the final final poem as the end, its recounting of failures during Lockdown isn’t exactly ending in a happy place.
It’s worth noting that these lists illustrate the way Smith often piles up the words. In his poem “The Boatman’s Reel” he tells us at the start that ‘Since words are words and the word is all there is” and he makes sure we get well above our word quotas. Let’s look at the poem “Brook Churchyard” from earlier in the book. The poem begins
The stone is “scoured”, the cross “moss-steeped”, the sky “opalescent”, the succour “easeful”; the adjectives and adverbs are crammed in here. If eighty-something pages of poems aren’t giving you your money’s worth, then think of the language you’re getting on top of that. These are often dense poems that have been filled with words rather in the manner that a Japanese Black cow is fed for wagyu beef. With apologies to vegetarian or vegan readers, I mean this as a good thing. These poems have had the best of everything put in and so they will be tasty and filling as you consume them.
While I’ve ignored the section in the middle that covers the Alice poems, I think the summing-up words of this review of Smith’s complex, intriguing and satisfying book should belong to Lewis Carroll: ‘ “Well, there was mystery”, the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers, — “Mystery, Ancient and Modern” ‘.