backyard poems review

Those of you who are interested in all things poetry in Manchester with a particular eye on the alternative will probably be aware of Richard Barrett. He used to blog at Quit This Pampered Town until he quit. Undeterred he now blogs at Abandon Yr Timid Notion.
If you've been following this new venture you're probably already aware of the limited edition collection he just put out and will be familiar with the orange cover below. But what lies between the natty and minimal covers (I'm choosing to ignore the centering)?


Well poems obviously. 18 of them in fact. Not the ongoing project of the rushes - for that you'll have to watch the previously mentioned Abandon Yr Timid Notion or if you can't remember add the RSS feed. The poems featured peculiarly but on the whole successfully mix the personal with the more abstract. In that sense the first poem reasons for not writing poetry is an ideal opening for the book. It is the kind of poem that you might hear at an open mic night but at the same time without the title it almost becomes a sequence of disconnected words, thoughts and conditions. While without the title you would have to work harder to construct a meaning there is a kind of sketchy narrative: 'Freud / death of several friends / misogyny / religion / snobbery / political opinion'. Although the title implies that the narrative is about the author the closer you look the less that seems to be the case, unless the ideas and associations that pass through his head count as autobiography.

Other poems are less neatly summarised. A CANNON STREET STATE OF MIND and TUESDAY: 8:40 A.M. for instance are photographs of scenes which you have to unpick for yourself: 'eastern side of Cornbrook / is where she stands, back turned / to the wind /... / I thought / she didn't look the campaigning / type' (TUESDAY: 8:40 A.M.).

Other poems seem much simpler in their aims and execution although that is a dangerous statement to make about any literature. CHATTING reads like a purely jokey deconstruction of awkward social interaction but you can't be absolutely certain of that. Also simple while more concerned with language and the nature of literature are pieces such as DOT DOT DOT and full stop: 'I'm gonna head home now / your / ellipsis / is no use to me' (DOT DOT DOT).

Still others are more cut up and typographically more unusual but may actually be simpler in conception and subject matter. POST SUNDAY LUNCH, TICKET IS NO LONGER VALID: 'any route permitted :143 / please retain until you leave / sold subject to / conditions of use' and under your feet are all examples of this. poem for john ruskin shares the presentational devices as it fragments into floating individual letters at the end. A form of a dissolution that a number of the other poems approach but never quite achieve. But even here meaning is always present. The letters are held by a kind of gravity in such a way that the words from which they've become unmoored can still be read.

This is where I might like the book to be a little sterner a little bolder. It would be nice if Richard were able to either leave his poems alone to decay or to subject them to such violent attrition that they fall apart. Poems where only parts of the sense and only parts of the language can be reconstructed seem to be just within reach. Forever delayed by the desire to make the poems remain recognisable poems. For that this remains a well worthwhile collection and if he still has any of the absurdly limited edition of 25 left then I suggest you go pester him at barrett.richard1@googlemail.com - just keep it legal.


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