London Grip Poetry Review – Patrick Meeds

 

Poetry review – THE INVISIBLE MAN’S TAILOR: Neil Elder has been looking forward to a first collection from Patrick Meeds and now he has a chance to review it

 

The Invisible Man's Tailor
Patrick Meeds
Nine Mile Press 
ISBN 9798992546200
$18.95

 

Have you ever considered the significance of your appendix? Famously it is an irrelevant part of the human anatomy but, as Patrick Meeds points out in his debut collection The Invisible Man’s Tailor,

   We are all born with an appendix
    whose only purpose is to rupture 
    and kill us.

This is an arresting (and terrifying) thought that comes at the end of “The First Line of My Obituary”, a poem that captures much of the atmosphere Meeds creates and sustains in this book. Right from the off, the world is a challenging environment and the speaker in this poem says that, having been born,

    you spend the rest of your life feeling like
    you’re falling down a flight of stairs
    in slow motion

In both the above extracts we can see that Meeds understands how a line break can deliver a punch. Many of the poems in the collection are in the form of a single stanza, and so the use of enjambment and the line-break perhaps becomes of greater importance than in work relying on larger structural devices. The impact is also to give a sense of zip to the rush of thought running through these pieces; a tumble of associated images and ideas that spark off each other.

Some of the associated thoughts will make absolute sense to a reader – the logic is clear; but in other moments we are thrown off balance and disconcerted. But that’s surely the point; life is not neat and tidy, it is a rush of a thousand thoughts per second and somehow we are expected to make sense of it all. In the poem “Science Tells Us” Meeds demonstrates that the empirical world of science will only get you so far;

    The earth isn’t as bright
    as it once was. But you
    didn’t need science 
    to tell you that , now did you?

The poem then moves across several ideas –

    One of the things required 
    for a bruise is blood. Another is
    to have it in you to take a punch.

    
    After all the night is a muscle that needs 
    exercise just like any other.
    The cure for sleepwalking is
    to never sleep. To stop walking.

The poems move between a tender longing for the world and celebration of its wonder, as in the poem “Krakatoa, My Love” (‘Just stand perfectly still, and flowers will grow / all around you’) to a horror at where we find ourselves, as in “Introducing Tiangong – 1’s Demise”. This poem’s title refers to the first Chinese space station that lost control and broke up in an uncontrolled re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere;

    There is no cure for cancer,
    there is no cure for gravity. The internet is filled 
    with conspiracies

As a whole, the collection absolutely chimes with our age. To borrow from Radiohead, we might say ‘this is a low flying panic attack’. A sense of alienation permeates the collection, whether it be from other people or from the disturbing way technology is moving. In “These Are No Customs I’ve Ever Heard Of”, Meeds reflects on how his first car

  didn’t even have power steering 
  much less air conditioning. 
  Such a struggle just to round a bend.
  I welcomed the flames that finally claimed it.
  Now I’m ready. Ashes to ashes and so on.

Here again, Meeds gets from one point to another with dazzling dexterity. Furthermore, these lines catch the way bathos is used in the poems, often deriving from the apparently casual tone the speaker adopts. We cannot know if it is the same speaker for each poem, but certainly there is a consistency, and invariably a first-person direct address that gets inside the reader’s mind.

I need to stress though, that in amongst the 21st Century paranoia is a huge amount of humour and some wonderfully honed images. Try this, from “This Is Why I Don’t Drink”;

    Mother kept a cigarette burning 
    in every room of the house.
    Father had one lit before his feet
    hit the floor in the morning.

or this –

    I need to learn some new 
    swear words. All the ones I know 
    now sound like someone trying 
    to slam a door quietly   

I stumbled on the poetry of Patrick Meeds a couple of years ago. Immediately I was hooked; the poems are so fresh, so exciting and playful. To begin a Meeds poem is an adventure and all you know for certain is that this ride could go anywhere. He is widely (very widely) published in American journals and magazines, and I was hoping that there would one day be a collection – somewhere I could easily find his cocktail of joy, surrealism and fearful provocation. And now we have it with The Invisible Man’s Tailor. The book will reward you, and I shall leave Meeds to say it best in his poem “This Is How We Do It” –

    So, prepare yourself.
    Try not to think in terms of good
    or bad. Just what is necessary.
    You will need to get used to 
    the night turning into two
    cold hands and the moon 
    looking right back at you.
    But I promise you. Nothing
    will make you happier.

Neil Elder has won the Cinnamon Press debut collection prize with The Space Between Us, as well as their pamphlet prize with Codes of Conduct which was also shortlisted for a Saboteur Award.  His latest work is Like This, available from 4 Word Press. He occasionally writes at https://neilelderpoetry.wordpress.com/