The pursuit of a community or crowd is perhaps the central queer origin myth. When you’ve found said crowd you could become the cool kids, the in crowd – you belong and are finally afforded some plurality. The singular pronoun becomes collective. These concerns are explored in John McCullough’s perky and open-hearted Crowd Voltage (Bloodaxe, £12.99): “I long to get beyond words, back to a crowd / of light that never began, never ends”.
The book’s cover art (by Villain) evokes old-school comic books, with McCullough flanked by, among others, The Iron Hoof, The Incredible Hunk and Lady Violet. The collection swings delightfully from the surreal – the voice of Brighton’s iconic and collapsing West Pier features heavily – to the more straightforward albeit beautiful lyric poems and then back again: “The stars above / have no friends, flatter nothing / and they’re doing OK.” In Quiver, we are presented with a cloud of arrows in mid-air – “We were shot into lives / not of our choosing” – and I was struck by the imaginative verve for the poet to make me question how arrows feel being fired in directions they might not like.
There is a preternatural empathy laced through McCullough’s work, epitomised here when a reader is pierced by the inevitable solitude of an arrow when it lands without its arrow-colleagues. Poems in this collection put me in mind of a meeting of Mark Doty and Frank O’Hara, but something uniquely McCullough’s too in their openness. “You cannot learn the contours / of anything […] Until you fluoresce.” In line with the bombastic cover, Non-Stop feels like a centrepiece of the collection, where McCullough is not only looking to a crowd outside, but acknowledges the multitudes within: “I can never express all of myself at once, the hole of me.”
Uncertain Passage (Dedalus, €12.50) by Paddy Bushe pendulums between the cathedral register of classical music and the raw melodies of the poet’s Kerry environs: Arvo Pärt blends with half-heard songs in pubs or birdsong to cohere into a book that is tonally agile.
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The collection ranges between song, elegy and passage through the Covid-19 pandemic. It is striking how dedicational this book is; many poems are dedicated to individuals and, in so doing, Bushe draws a very true link between the devotional nature of music and of poetry. Given that music is a naturally occurring aspect of the natural world, it is reasonable that Uncertain Passage is full of birds.
In Language Loss, a ringed plover “piping distractively and feigning / A broken wing, did everything to draw me away // From the small, scraped-out hollow in the sand / Where she had laid her four pebble stone eggs”, whereas the effect of the “thrush and the robin their sweet notes // Entwine” leads the poet to consider “the song / Has told us what the place had told the song // Long before everyone half-forgot most things.”
In The Intensive Care Unit as Rainforest, a morphine high transforms a clinical canvas “into rainforest, wings flashed emerald // Or red”. This poem is a neat metaphor of the capability for transformation and imaginative transport that music (and poetry) have on its listener. The collection moves capably between the arch and sometimes abstract registers to piercingly plain-spoken terms in a variety of elegies: “Sing now, a chroí. With the earth’s old bones / Your sounding board”.
This intriguing book gestures to the world poets strive for and never arrive at – that pure emotion beyond language. Uncertain Passage is engrossed in pure sensation: “into day, just now, this minute.”
New titles from innovative Skein Press are always a cause to cheer. Raquel F Menéndez’s award-winning The Posthumous Book of Shahrazad (Skein, €12), translated by Robin Munby, marks the first ever Asturian-language book published in an English translation. Given Asturian’s endangered status, Menéndez’s new bilingual edition draws striking parallels between her Asturian context and other languages, most notably in Skein’s context, Irish. What does translation offer, Menéndez wonders, if not “a chance to see oneself through the eyes of another”?
The collection opens with an untitled preface poem, where Menéndez lists aspects of an unnamed country – “A place devoid of dreams. / […] A country that taught you / to smile and shiver” – and despite the citizens of this country being “birds with an affinity for flight” (presumedly, emigration) Menéndez stresses how language, when uttered, talks itself, and the culture around it, into being:
“In this tongue we could not read or write, we speak of our desire to keep house and care for our livestock.”
Menéndez’s thinking around translation is anchored movingly in the communication between daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers – “I am preceded by women who work / with the earth itself” – and how the poet struggles to communicate with the past when a country’s and a childhood’s language is minoritised, and it encapsulates an elusive past (and language) in enviably simple terms. “I’m nothing but a mirror, / a persistence of old imagination.”
This collection really soars when the poet addresses the magnitudinous themes through the mundane scale of, say, missing a mother’s company – “That she’ll come back, she’ll come back / with her eyes growing clearer in mine.” The Posthumous Book of Shahrazad symbolises the dogged insistence of language to persist and how, to paraphrase Marilynne Robinson, it is smarter than we are.
So often, poems try to sound like something other than life, offering faux-profound and overcomplicated terms for ordinary things such as love and loss. Were it that more poems sounded like life, that is, bleakly funny. This said, with great delight comes the Collected Poems (Faber, £16.99) of Wendy Cope, spanning 40 years’ worth of poems. At once caustic and feeling-full, sharply funny and gut-punching, Cope’s career, laid out over almost 500 pages, makes for very good company.
Cope’s classics are as good as ever – The Orange looms large in any view of Cope’s work, as does that superb final line “I love you. I’m glad I exist” – but this Collected offers a vision of this poet’s work beyond what could potentially be characterised as pithy or humorous poems. There are poems that ache, that lucidly contemplate ageing, that are ceremonial, and ones that make you guffaw:
“The day he moved out was terrible –
“That evening she went through hell. His absence wasn’t a problem / But the corkscrew had gone as well.”
(Loss)
Cope’s Collected Poems is a compendium with a galloping pace and is relentlessly enjoyable. The poet’s blend of fun and hard-nosed criticisms is refreshing and energising to read, as in A Villanelle for Hugo Williams, where Cope makes the virtuoso form seem as laissez-faire as an extemporised joke. “What can I say? I’d like to be polite / But have you ever seen a villanelle?”
Cope manages to be sparing and beautiful in her language – my instinct is to call these poems effortless – and yet still somehow serious about the butt of her jokes. The final two poems are at once piercing and placed like a good one-liner. The End shows Cope having the last laugh: “Not yet sans everything. […] I am glad to be alive.”
Mícheál McCann’s new collection is Lives of the Saints (Gallery Books, May)
