Poetry review – NO MORE ANIMAL POEMS: Oz Hardwick relishes the ambiguity – both playful and ominous – in this imaginative collection by Marc Vincenz
No More Animal Poems
Marc Vincenz
White Pine Press
ISBN 978-1-945680-2
183 pp
It’s my third reading of Marc Vincenz’s head-spinning new collection and I am, if anything, less sure of how to go about reviewing it than I was the first time. On the face of it, it should be easy: there’s a tight structure in place, playfully sequenced as a menu, beginning with an amuse-bouche of taste-teasing epigrams, ending with a delicate plate of ephemeral petits fours, and in between consisting of a variety of mouth-watering courses. Vegetarian and vegan options are, of course, available. However, not only are the courses pure Pythonesque absurdism, but even those epigrams – traditional guides to the unwary literary traveller (or even diner) – are, on closer inspection, not to be trusted.
Right from the start, the reader is authoritatively wrong-footed and wilfully misled through poems which are not only not what they seem, but quite possibly not where or even when they seem either. The result is disorientation in an ungraspable now, in which whole universes overlap, unknown creatures emerge from the deep to weep at their own undignified ends, and even the most unlikely metamorphoses – a traveller transformed into a moth – become commonplace in the age of the Great Recycling. In consequence, each path through the collection is a more complex negotiation with textual landmarks than previously.
If anything can be held up as an emblem of the collection’s mechanics, it is the sequence “The Visitation: A Novelette in Reverse,” which in nine very brief verse-chapters plus an epilogue struggle to unwind a diseased post-industrial coastal landscape, where ‘seagulls and tuna are caught in a frenzy of tar […] and the blackened shrimp rise and fall in a strange / dark, undulating spume,’ into its prelapsarian childhood innocence. Time slips in unexpected directions, the line between pragmatism and superstition collapses, the Anthropocene sheds another layer of its vulnerable skin, and there’s nothing so ominous as ambiguity.
Vincenz’s poems are less about telling things slant than setting the whole idea of seeing itself askew. “Biomimicry” plays with both obvious and less obvious comparisons of the human-made, from the purely visual – boat oars as aquatic birds, for example – to the more conceptual, like 3D printing as slime mould. And we are invited to engage this double vision throughout the whole collection as, in adventurously crafted poem after poem, the wild images show us visions of ourselves drawn frighteningly plain, addicted to instant gratification and quick fixes, oblivious of the cost of an ape hurled pointlessly into space or another species extinction, as “piles of bones / are mounting up, as are / their plastic wrappings.”
Framed by the device of the neo-surrealist menu, we are forced to ask, time and again, what exactly it is that we’re consuming. The answer, which we’ve known all along, is that we’re consuming everything. “Aren’t numbers all we have?” asks an anonymous character in “A Think-Tank on Permafrost,” and the arresting catalogue of species which have become extinct throughout the past five hundred years reminds us that this is one of the few numbers that are rising.
I’m still no closer to knowing how to go about writing this review, but it seems to have written itself. So, I shall just note that, on my first reading, a spider landed on the manuscript as I got to the final poem. I don’t know what to make of this, but with such a book, brim full of natural signs, portents and quantum entanglements, I’m certain that it means something. Take heed of the spider and enter the web of this remarkable collection.
Oz Hardwick has published seven full poetry collections, most recently A Census of Preconceptions (SurVision, 2024), many chapbooks, a number of collaborative works, alongside edited anthologies and academic essay collections. He is, however, a sloppy record-keeper. Oz has won numerous poetry awards and prizes, along with occasional pub quizzes. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University
(UK).
Apr 22 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Marc Vincenz
Poetry review – NO MORE ANIMAL POEMS: Oz Hardwick relishes the ambiguity – both playful and ominous – in this imaginative collection by Marc Vincenz
No More Animal Poems
Marc Vincenz
White Pine Press
ISBN 978-1-945680-2
183 pp
It’s my third reading of Marc Vincenz’s head-spinning new collection and I am, if anything, less sure of how to go about reviewing it than I was the first time. On the face of it, it should be easy: there’s a tight structure in place, playfully sequenced as a menu, beginning with an amuse-bouche of taste-teasing epigrams, ending with a delicate plate of ephemeral petits fours, and in between consisting of a variety of mouth-watering courses. Vegetarian and vegan options are, of course, available. However, not only are the courses pure Pythonesque absurdism, but even those epigrams – traditional guides to the unwary literary traveller (or even diner) – are, on closer inspection, not to be trusted.
Right from the start, the reader is authoritatively wrong-footed and wilfully misled through poems which are not only not what they seem, but quite possibly not where or even when they seem either. The result is disorientation in an ungraspable now, in which whole universes overlap, unknown creatures emerge from the deep to weep at their own undignified ends, and even the most unlikely metamorphoses – a traveller transformed into a moth – become commonplace in the age of the Great Recycling. In consequence, each path through the collection is a more complex negotiation with textual landmarks than previously.
If anything can be held up as an emblem of the collection’s mechanics, it is the sequence “The Visitation: A Novelette in Reverse,” which in nine very brief verse-chapters plus an epilogue struggle to unwind a diseased post-industrial coastal landscape, where ‘seagulls and tuna are caught in a frenzy of tar […] and the blackened shrimp rise and fall in a strange / dark, undulating spume,’ into its prelapsarian childhood innocence. Time slips in unexpected directions, the line between pragmatism and superstition collapses, the Anthropocene sheds another layer of its vulnerable skin, and there’s nothing so ominous as ambiguity.
Vincenz’s poems are less about telling things slant than setting the whole idea of seeing itself askew. “Biomimicry” plays with both obvious and less obvious comparisons of the human-made, from the purely visual – boat oars as aquatic birds, for example – to the more conceptual, like 3D printing as slime mould. And we are invited to engage this double vision throughout the whole collection as, in adventurously crafted poem after poem, the wild images show us visions of ourselves drawn frighteningly plain, addicted to instant gratification and quick fixes, oblivious of the cost of an ape hurled pointlessly into space or another species extinction, as “piles of bones / are mounting up, as are / their plastic wrappings.”
Framed by the device of the neo-surrealist menu, we are forced to ask, time and again, what exactly it is that we’re consuming. The answer, which we’ve known all along, is that we’re consuming everything. “Aren’t numbers all we have?” asks an anonymous character in “A Think-Tank on Permafrost,” and the arresting catalogue of species which have become extinct throughout the past five hundred years reminds us that this is one of the few numbers that are rising.
I’m still no closer to knowing how to go about writing this review, but it seems to have written itself. So, I shall just note that, on my first reading, a spider landed on the manuscript as I got to the final poem. I don’t know what to make of this, but with such a book, brim full of natural signs, portents and quantum entanglements, I’m certain that it means something. Take heed of the spider and enter the web of this remarkable collection.
Oz Hardwick has published seven full poetry collections, most recently A Census of Preconceptions (SurVision, 2024), many chapbooks, a number of collaborative works, alongside edited anthologies and academic essay collections. He is, however, a sloppy record-keeper. Oz has won numerous poetry awards and prizes, along with occasional pub quizzes. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University
(UK).