Poetry review – FORGETFULNESS
Ian Pople admires the mixture of play and serious exploration within Ian Seed’s poetic examination of the workings and failings of memory
Forgetfulness
Ian Seed
Shearsman Books
ISBN 978-1-83738-011-4
£10.95
Forgetting is an interesting process. Firstly, it necessarily involves two things: a person who forgets and then the thing/person/event, etc that is forgotten. Thus, forgetting will always lie between two things. And then there is the idea that we need to ‘remember’ that we have forgotten. Some nudge, either externally or internally, will tell us that we have forgotten.
The title of the ever-prolific Ian Seed’s eight book from Shearsman is Forgetfulness. That abstract noun suggests a state of forgetting that is generalized, perhaps amongst us all. It reminds us that we are all party to this relationship to things. Thus it is that forgetting is both a state and a process; akin, perhaps, to Plato’s notion of the relationship between being and becoming. So, it is interesting that the blurb on the cover of Seed’s new book comments that Forgetfulness is a ‘tragicomic navigation of different forms of loss,’ and also observes that the collection moves ‘finally to a series of splintered memories.’ The blurb then goes on to comment that the ‘collection … seeks to re-contruct and re-inhabit the past.’
The first section of Forgetfulness reproduces the title sequence of Seed’s Red Ceiling pamphlet, Scattering My Mother’s Ashes. Seed writes very movingly about the loss of his mother. And it is here that the blurb’s other comment about the ‘surreal-absurd’ comes into play. ‘Scattering My Mother’s Ashes,’ consists of nine prose poems that move in a slightly drifting fashion through what appear to be both dreams and actual accounts of going to scatter his mother’s ashes. Within these poems, too, are poems about Seed’s father, who appears to Seed in dreamlike moments, such as this, from the eighth poem in the sequence,
…‘driving recklessly (as he always had) through a stream right up to where I was sitting with some colleagues round a picnic cloth on the grass. He’d come to say hello, he said.
‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ I said.
I thought he’d died, though I’d heard more recently that he hadn’t just been very ill and was now recovered. In fact, he looked quite young, being much slimmer than when I’d last seen him. Perhaps we could be friends again now that my mother was no longer alive.
‘I’ve brought a small book of poems,’ he said, sitting down beside me and stretching out his long legs.’
This kind of writing is present throughout the prose poems in Forgetfulness. It is very calm and measured; the sentences have a natural balance. That first sentence quoted above is, in fact, about half of a longer sentence; however the phrases from which it is built accumulate one after another in a way that is never cluttered and moves the reader with a quiet momentum. If the details offer the surreal quality that the blurb suggest, then the absurdity accumulates adroitly, in ways that are never ostentatious and never self-conscious. The final sentence quoted above is another example where the father’s declaration of the ‘small book of poems,’ might gesture towards the occupation of the son and include the book we are reading. But there is a careful grounding in the father’s stretching out his long legs beside his son. So, the dreamlike surrealism, if that is indeed what it is, never aims to pull the rug from under the reader’s understanding. Seed’s skill is to make the reader accept those things.
The absurdities are bedded inside the careful emotional world of the son’s relationship to both his father and his mother. Elsewhere in this ‘scattering’ sequence, Seed depicts an encounter with his brother that is equally both grounded and dreamlike. The brother tells the narrator that he is going to take up fishing again now that he has finished ‘taking care of others – our mother until she recently died, his wife, her father until he died, etc.’ And then Seed comments,
‘He is almost apologetic, but also a tad defiant as he looks into the distance where the sun is
shining on the meandering river. He takes another sip from the cup of tea an old lady has
hobbled up the hill to bring him from the stall at the bottom. Now she is hobbling back down
again. It’s a miracle she doesn’t fall.’
That longer sentence in the middle of the quotation exemplifies the way in which Seed accumulates detail and ground in the sentence. And the two shorter sentences allow the camera to pan back and the narrator to make a comment.
The second section of Forgetfulness contains non-prose poems. And in this section, Seed’s customary lyricism is, perhaps, more to the fore. In these poems, Seed explores more of that sense of ‘being’ mentioned above. ‘Shush’ begins,
I see my weakness, most unseemly
the emptiness between four walls, and
my culpability. Have mercy on me,
humble door, where humanity
has passed like smoke.
If that door is death, Seed shows how he might approach it himself; given the way in which he has been haunted by the absences and presences of his parents. The narrator, too, is an absence in his own life, ‘the emptiness between four walls,’ and also his ‘culpability’ in that. It is interesting that he evokes here a quasi-religious phrase ‘Have mercy on me.’ In the earlier sequence, the narrator phones up a Christian helpline to see if it will help him with the grieving process. In a way that is quietly ironized, the helpline does help. And here that quasi-religious phrase and the sense that the door is ‘humble’, suggest that the narrator can pass through as others have passed through before, albeit ‘like smoke.’
Section three of Forgetfulness contains a number of other prose-poems, some quite short. They are all equally effective at depicting the emotions that arise when encounters throw up, as they often do, moments in which the participants are shifted out of customary relationships. The poems depict encounters that range from that between the narrator and a nursing mother on a train to a meeting, again on a train, with the narrator’s grandfather, ‘who had committed suicide.’
The final section of the book contains two prose poems inspired by the American artist, Joe Brainard’s book, I Remember a book of sentences that begin with the words ‘I remember,’ and which the American poet and critic, Geoffrey O’Brien, described as ‘an altogether new sort of book. Seed’s sentences offer the reader a set of piercing memories that range from his father’s ‘1930’s black car with running wheels,’ that ‘got stuck on a humpback bridge with one of its wheels spinning over the edge,’ through to the final two entries, ‘I remember getting on the bus to London with my rucksack, suitcase and adidas bag, leaving home for the first time. // I remember my mum waving goodbye.’ That poem is followed by ‘In Memoriam Gerald,’ which, in similar fashion, catalogues the narrator’s relation to the eponymous Gerald of the title. The book ends with ‘Fifteen Things I Learnt About Beppe Fenoglio (1922-63) When I Went to Visit Fenolio’s Old House in Alba and Which I Didn’t Put into My PhD Thesis.’ This ‘poem’ begins, ‘His father, Amilcare, an atheist, ran the family butcher’s from their house. His mother, Margherita, sold condoms under the counter.’
I have alternated throughout this review between using the terms ‘Seed’ and ‘the narrator’ as the speaker in the poems. It is perhaps necessary that we accept that Ian Seed is the ‘I’ in these sequences. But Seed is too self-conscious an artist to suggest to the reader that that ‘I’ is unconditionally Seed himself. The quotation, from the cover blurb above that begins, ‘It is a collection which seeks to re-construct and re-inhabit the past,’ continues ‘through the truths of imagination and fiction, as well as the storytelling of remembrance.’ As I have tried to suggest here, Forgetfulness is a book that actively ‘works’ both memory and forgetting. If it plays with both of those notions, it is very serious play and it is play that is profoundly successful in showing how this particular witness inhabits memory and forgetting. We should be deeply grateful to Ian Seed for showing us how that witness might be performed.
Mar 16 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Ian Seed
Poetry review – FORGETFULNESS
Ian Pople admires the mixture of play and serious exploration within Ian Seed’s poetic examination of the workings and failings of memory
Forgetfulness
Ian Seed
Shearsman Books
ISBN 978-1-83738-011-4
£10.95
Forgetting is an interesting process. Firstly, it necessarily involves two things: a person who forgets and then the thing/person/event, etc that is forgotten. Thus, forgetting will always lie between two things. And then there is the idea that we need to ‘remember’ that we have forgotten. Some nudge, either externally or internally, will tell us that we have forgotten.
The title of the ever-prolific Ian Seed’s eight book from Shearsman is Forgetfulness. That abstract noun suggests a state of forgetting that is generalized, perhaps amongst us all. It reminds us that we are all party to this relationship to things. Thus it is that forgetting is both a state and a process; akin, perhaps, to Plato’s notion of the relationship between being and becoming. So, it is interesting that the blurb on the cover of Seed’s new book comments that Forgetfulness is a ‘tragicomic navigation of different forms of loss,’ and also observes that the collection moves ‘finally to a series of splintered memories.’ The blurb then goes on to comment that the ‘collection … seeks to re-contruct and re-inhabit the past.’
The first section of Forgetfulness reproduces the title sequence of Seed’s Red Ceiling pamphlet, Scattering My Mother’s Ashes. Seed writes very movingly about the loss of his mother. And it is here that the blurb’s other comment about the ‘surreal-absurd’ comes into play. ‘Scattering My Mother’s Ashes,’ consists of nine prose poems that move in a slightly drifting fashion through what appear to be both dreams and actual accounts of going to scatter his mother’s ashes. Within these poems, too, are poems about Seed’s father, who appears to Seed in dreamlike moments, such as this, from the eighth poem in the sequence,
…‘driving recklessly (as he always had) through a stream right up to where I was sitting with some colleagues round a picnic cloth on the grass. He’d come to say hello, he said.
‘I can’t believe you’re here,’ I said.
I thought he’d died, though I’d heard more recently that he hadn’t just been very ill and was now recovered. In fact, he looked quite young, being much slimmer than when I’d last seen him. Perhaps we could be friends again now that my mother was no longer alive.
‘I’ve brought a small book of poems,’ he said, sitting down beside me and stretching out his long legs.’
This kind of writing is present throughout the prose poems in Forgetfulness. It is very calm and measured; the sentences have a natural balance. That first sentence quoted above is, in fact, about half of a longer sentence; however the phrases from which it is built accumulate one after another in a way that is never cluttered and moves the reader with a quiet momentum. If the details offer the surreal quality that the blurb suggest, then the absurdity accumulates adroitly, in ways that are never ostentatious and never self-conscious. The final sentence quoted above is another example where the father’s declaration of the ‘small book of poems,’ might gesture towards the occupation of the son and include the book we are reading. But there is a careful grounding in the father’s stretching out his long legs beside his son. So, the dreamlike surrealism, if that is indeed what it is, never aims to pull the rug from under the reader’s understanding. Seed’s skill is to make the reader accept those things.
The absurdities are bedded inside the careful emotional world of the son’s relationship to both his father and his mother. Elsewhere in this ‘scattering’ sequence, Seed depicts an encounter with his brother that is equally both grounded and dreamlike. The brother tells the narrator that he is going to take up fishing again now that he has finished ‘taking care of others – our mother until she recently died, his wife, her father until he died, etc.’ And then Seed comments,
‘He is almost apologetic, but also a tad defiant as he looks into the distance where the sun is
shining on the meandering river. He takes another sip from the cup of tea an old lady has
hobbled up the hill to bring him from the stall at the bottom. Now she is hobbling back down
again. It’s a miracle she doesn’t fall.’
That longer sentence in the middle of the quotation exemplifies the way in which Seed accumulates detail and ground in the sentence. And the two shorter sentences allow the camera to pan back and the narrator to make a comment.
The second section of Forgetfulness contains non-prose poems. And in this section, Seed’s customary lyricism is, perhaps, more to the fore. In these poems, Seed explores more of that sense of ‘being’ mentioned above. ‘Shush’ begins,
I see my weakness, most unseemly
the emptiness between four walls, and
my culpability. Have mercy on me,
humble door, where humanity
has passed like smoke.
If that door is death, Seed shows how he might approach it himself; given the way in which he has been haunted by the absences and presences of his parents. The narrator, too, is an absence in his own life, ‘the emptiness between four walls,’ and also his ‘culpability’ in that. It is interesting that he evokes here a quasi-religious phrase ‘Have mercy on me.’ In the earlier sequence, the narrator phones up a Christian helpline to see if it will help him with the grieving process. In a way that is quietly ironized, the helpline does help. And here that quasi-religious phrase and the sense that the door is ‘humble’, suggest that the narrator can pass through as others have passed through before, albeit ‘like smoke.’
Section three of Forgetfulness contains a number of other prose-poems, some quite short. They are all equally effective at depicting the emotions that arise when encounters throw up, as they often do, moments in which the participants are shifted out of customary relationships. The poems depict encounters that range from that between the narrator and a nursing mother on a train to a meeting, again on a train, with the narrator’s grandfather, ‘who had committed suicide.’
The final section of the book contains two prose poems inspired by the American artist, Joe Brainard’s book, I Remember a book of sentences that begin with the words ‘I remember,’ and which the American poet and critic, Geoffrey O’Brien, described as ‘an altogether new sort of book. Seed’s sentences offer the reader a set of piercing memories that range from his father’s ‘1930’s black car with running wheels,’ that ‘got stuck on a humpback bridge with one of its wheels spinning over the edge,’ through to the final two entries, ‘I remember getting on the bus to London with my rucksack, suitcase and adidas bag, leaving home for the first time. // I remember my mum waving goodbye.’ That poem is followed by ‘In Memoriam Gerald,’ which, in similar fashion, catalogues the narrator’s relation to the eponymous Gerald of the title. The book ends with ‘Fifteen Things I Learnt About Beppe Fenoglio (1922-63) When I Went to Visit Fenolio’s Old House in Alba and Which I Didn’t Put into My PhD Thesis.’ This ‘poem’ begins, ‘His father, Amilcare, an atheist, ran the family butcher’s from their house. His mother, Margherita, sold condoms under the counter.’
I have alternated throughout this review between using the terms ‘Seed’ and ‘the narrator’ as the speaker in the poems. It is perhaps necessary that we accept that Ian Seed is the ‘I’ in these sequences. But Seed is too self-conscious an artist to suggest to the reader that that ‘I’ is unconditionally Seed himself. The quotation, from the cover blurb above that begins, ‘It is a collection which seeks to re-construct and re-inhabit the past,’ continues ‘through the truths of imagination and fiction, as well as the storytelling of remembrance.’ As I have tried to suggest here, Forgetfulness is a book that actively ‘works’ both memory and forgetting. If it plays with both of those notions, it is very serious play and it is play that is profoundly successful in showing how this particular witness inhabits memory and forgetting. We should be deeply grateful to Ian Seed for showing us how that witness might be performed.