Poetry review – A RAVEN ON A WRITING DESK: D A Prince finds an intriguing mix of both rich and pared-back language in Julie Hogg’s collection
A Raven on a Writing Desk
Julie Hogg
Dunlin Press, 2024
ISBN 978-1-7394038-2-9
£9.00
The title — and title poem — poem allude to Lewis Carroll’s riddle (from Alice in Wonderland). Why is a raven like a writing desk? asked the Mad Hatter, only to answer when Alice gave up: I haven’t the slightest idea! Carroll himself admitted (in the introduction to the 1896 edition of the story) that The riddle as originally invented had no answer at all. Hogg’s title, however, steps aside from comparison and instead the poem seems to give a bird’s-eye view of the landscape (coastal Teeside) while the poet translates it into words.
Blatter of metal, hard on pedals, tequila flutter and a wraith
of a gateman attends Tod Point, razed sclerae, irides, azimuth,
he heeds, clocks anoxic incidence, glorious rot, primordially
playful and preferably unseen, treat with mandrake, jimson
weed, naturally occurring atropine, deadly nightshade or a
deserted carcass of a furnace, clap of syllables, poesis cuss
It’s an alternative landscape, a wasteland of industrial detritus, cluttered and desolate. When I read Hogg’s debut pamphlet (Majuba Road, Vane Women Press, 2016) for a London Grip review (2017) I’d noted her avoidance of Latinate and unfamiliar vocabulary but in the opening six lines of this poem I’ve had to look up half a dozen words. That doesn’t trouble me, usually, but when the words come so close together I wonder what’s going on within the poem, why the poet has made these choices. Is Hogg showing the reader the otherness of the bird? Or is it for the swoop and play of language? After all there is in this pamphlet plenty of evidence for linguistic fun. In “Pinacoteca di Brera” there’s a witty glance at ‘Canaletto dresses selvedged with canal/ wavelets…’ and a sense of relish for adventure with language. A poem about sea-birds feeding on litter ‘… fool’s gold tart sorbet, batter/ scraps, plastic, non-biodegradable box’ has the title “Pococurante”. Another word to look up: Italian for indifferent, nonchalant.
From place names that appear in these pages — Paddy’s Hole, Middlehaven, Red Howles, Cattersty Sands — Hogg retains her roots in the North East, although readers outside the area would have to look up the locations. She uses place names to anchor poems, and not only in her home area: “Grünerløkka” pins an Oslo suburb with the ‘slack curly words’ encountered via menus before invoking the more familiar literary references ‘Hedda Nora Peer Gynt’. But one line eludes me: ‘putamen and caudate’. Both are parts of the brain, related to learning; I wonder if this is Hogg’s way of bringing the reader alongside, showing the steep learning curve of a new language? It’s one of the poems where she lets the white space of the page work effectively to suggest a mind expanding into new areas. That’s been a component of this pamphlet from the first page, where “Sealight, a Study at Millbank” uses single-word lines and dropped lines to suggest the way light flickers on water. A note gives the initial impetus for the poem — JMW Turner’s ‘Moonlight, a Study at Millbank’ — but Turner’s work is absorbed into a personal poem of ‘… a lovelock night/ of lunar avowal’.
Coastal locations, birds, the suck and pull of water: there’s an aural quality in these poems giving depth to the surface images. Hogg has an ear for speech pattern and dialect, too, giving verbal portraits, as in “Spiel”, a monologue from a male driver, proud of his car
shifts up a gear with a
certain je ne sais quoi don’t ya
think?
Feel the shine on this steering
wheel Dragon Green it’ll shaft anything
The uneasy line breaks add to the reader’s distrust of the car-owner’s physicality, even before we get to the final line: ‘It’s a nippy little cunt’. I was less sure about the motorcyclist in “Beau Sabreur”, largely because I couldn’t resolve the relevance of the title. For once there were too many online options: this was a poem where an explanatory note would have helped, leaving me to concentrate on the disturbing final images of a dead owl and red deer. Notes are a tricky area, anyway: how much can (or should) a poet assume about a reader’s prior knowledge, alongside the point at which online checking interrupts the engagement with the poems?
Listening to these poems — and reading aloud added much to the page presence — I began to hear two distinct registers. There was the tighter, snapshot-image voice, light on verbs and conjunctions: then there were the poems written in full sentences, with what seemed to be a gentler tone. Two poems facing each other showed this clearly: this is the opening of “Musings on Lower East Street”
Mustard love heart, sharp left;
scrapyard, hunks of pre-owned
metal, riverside, seven deep —
balanced, it should be like this,
trucks, cables, a Cadillac trunk,
something is inevitably rusting,
Plenty of sharp detail here, an accumulation of objects with the randomness of a scrapyard. Facing it, “Low-slung Sun over Middlehaven”, opens
Heaven could look like this,
ecliptic and derelict
with a painted metallic halo
slipped below a natural sunset
[…]
and I could see with the
fresh eyes of an immigrant
in the aftermath of a famine
centuries ago.
It’s a place Hogg loves, as the poem’s ending states clearly, and the natural syntax and use of longer time-scale supports this. I wonder if these two poems come from different stages of her own writing, from a lengthy search for how best to describe the emotional quality of a landscape?
This pamphlet poses many questions like this. I found I was not looking solely at Hogg’s work but also at wider considerations of the choices poets make. She is not a formalist so I was intrigued by “Many Rains and Armadas”, seven stanzas in the syllabic count of tanka form, something that works well with her awareness of the visual. I can’t forget the title, either: does Hogg consciously set bird-like flight and play with language alongside the solidity of the desk, the place on which writing happens?
Her work sits well with the Dunlin Press ethos of pamphlets that look and feel attractive. While this review necessarily focuses on the poetry, Ella Johnson’s elegant design and choice of materials deserves mention. It’s a delight to find a pamphlet publisher who pays so much attention to stitching (yes!) and two-colour card for the cover.
Feb 25 2025
London Grip Poetry Review – Julie Hogg
Poetry review – A RAVEN ON A WRITING DESK: D A Prince finds an intriguing mix of both rich and pared-back language in Julie Hogg’s collection
The title — and title poem — poem allude to Lewis Carroll’s riddle (from Alice in Wonderland). Why is a raven like a writing desk? asked the Mad Hatter, only to answer when Alice gave up: I haven’t the slightest idea! Carroll himself admitted (in the introduction to the 1896 edition of the story) that The riddle as originally invented had no answer at all. Hogg’s title, however, steps aside from comparison and instead the poem seems to give a bird’s-eye view of the landscape (coastal Teeside) while the poet translates it into words.
It’s an alternative landscape, a wasteland of industrial detritus, cluttered and desolate. When I read Hogg’s debut pamphlet (Majuba Road, Vane Women Press, 2016) for a London Grip review (2017) I’d noted her avoidance of Latinate and unfamiliar vocabulary but in the opening six lines of this poem I’ve had to look up half a dozen words. That doesn’t trouble me, usually, but when the words come so close together I wonder what’s going on within the poem, why the poet has made these choices. Is Hogg showing the reader the otherness of the bird? Or is it for the swoop and play of language? After all there is in this pamphlet plenty of evidence for linguistic fun. In “Pinacoteca di Brera” there’s a witty glance at ‘Canaletto dresses selvedged with canal/ wavelets…’ and a sense of relish for adventure with language. A poem about sea-birds feeding on litter ‘… fool’s gold tart sorbet, batter/ scraps, plastic, non-biodegradable box’ has the title “Pococurante”. Another word to look up: Italian for indifferent, nonchalant.
From place names that appear in these pages — Paddy’s Hole, Middlehaven, Red Howles, Cattersty Sands — Hogg retains her roots in the North East, although readers outside the area would have to look up the locations. She uses place names to anchor poems, and not only in her home area: “Grünerløkka” pins an Oslo suburb with the ‘slack curly words’ encountered via menus before invoking the more familiar literary references ‘Hedda Nora Peer Gynt’. But one line eludes me: ‘putamen and caudate’. Both are parts of the brain, related to learning; I wonder if this is Hogg’s way of bringing the reader alongside, showing the steep learning curve of a new language? It’s one of the poems where she lets the white space of the page work effectively to suggest a mind expanding into new areas. That’s been a component of this pamphlet from the first page, where “Sealight, a Study at Millbank” uses single-word lines and dropped lines to suggest the way light flickers on water. A note gives the initial impetus for the poem — JMW Turner’s ‘Moonlight, a Study at Millbank’ — but Turner’s work is absorbed into a personal poem of ‘… a lovelock night/ of lunar avowal’.
Coastal locations, birds, the suck and pull of water: there’s an aural quality in these poems giving depth to the surface images. Hogg has an ear for speech pattern and dialect, too, giving verbal portraits, as in “Spiel”, a monologue from a male driver, proud of his car
shifts up a gear with a certain je ne sais quoi don’t ya think? Feel the shine on this steering wheel Dragon Green it’ll shaft anythingThe uneasy line breaks add to the reader’s distrust of the car-owner’s physicality, even before we get to the final line: ‘It’s a nippy little cunt’. I was less sure about the motorcyclist in “Beau Sabreur”, largely because I couldn’t resolve the relevance of the title. For once there were too many online options: this was a poem where an explanatory note would have helped, leaving me to concentrate on the disturbing final images of a dead owl and red deer. Notes are a tricky area, anyway: how much can (or should) a poet assume about a reader’s prior knowledge, alongside the point at which online checking interrupts the engagement with the poems?
Listening to these poems — and reading aloud added much to the page presence — I began to hear two distinct registers. There was the tighter, snapshot-image voice, light on verbs and conjunctions: then there were the poems written in full sentences, with what seemed to be a gentler tone. Two poems facing each other showed this clearly: this is the opening of “Musings on Lower East Street”
Plenty of sharp detail here, an accumulation of objects with the randomness of a scrapyard. Facing it, “Low-slung Sun over Middlehaven”, opens
It’s a place Hogg loves, as the poem’s ending states clearly, and the natural syntax and use of longer time-scale supports this. I wonder if these two poems come from different stages of her own writing, from a lengthy search for how best to describe the emotional quality of a landscape?
This pamphlet poses many questions like this. I found I was not looking solely at Hogg’s work but also at wider considerations of the choices poets make. She is not a formalist so I was intrigued by “Many Rains and Armadas”, seven stanzas in the syllabic count of tanka form, something that works well with her awareness of the visual. I can’t forget the title, either: does Hogg consciously set bird-like flight and play with language alongside the solidity of the desk, the place on which writing happens?
Her work sits well with the Dunlin Press ethos of pamphlets that look and feel attractive. While this review necessarily focuses on the poetry, Ella Johnson’s elegant design and choice of materials deserves mention. It’s a delight to find a pamphlet publisher who pays so much attention to stitching (yes!) and two-colour card for the cover.