Familiar Voices

Pavilion Poetry, 64pp, £9.99 (paperback)

Faber and Faber, 100pp, £10.99 (paperback)

First, my childhood’s depth of field, the spiritlevel horizon in plum-grey ruling off the Irish Sea.

Ploughland and copse, water towers stacked backwards in decreasing saturation.

A clear and beautiful way to begin a poem, with only the carefully unbalanced enjambement between ‘spirit’ and ‘level’ hinting at something that lurks out of sight.

For the most part, the poet herself stays out of frame, though the edges of a poem sometimes bear witness to an external pressure to her field of vision. A triptych of poems about a store of things pickled in jars and preserved in formaldehyde showcases some kind of anatomy – the easily torn and broken components of living bodies: ‘the glands and kidneys showing scree and stones – / the myriad fascinating ways the body breaks / or fails, or lets us down.’ A sudden shift to the first person takes the poem on a brief pin-head swerve to its conclusion: ‘I am a tray of fragile curios / pushed carelessly from room to room on rattling wheels.’

The shadow of Eliot falls across the page here; elsewhere I could feel the influence of Plath, not only in the tender, just-so descriptions of fugue states and medical proceedings, but in the occasional moment of fury. In one poem, the speaker finds a leaflet ‘in the waiting room of the Catholic clinic:’ It reads Get Married and Be Submissive. ‘Give her the rewards she deserves’ the speaker goes on ominously, ‘Praise her in public for what she has done.’ Much of this book takes place in Spain, and it makes frequent excursions into other languages. Poets dislike explanatory notes, but a page at the back, giving a few translations and key historical facts, would have helped some readers, not all of whom will find their feet immediately.

Citadel is a carefully-conceived book, containing moments of great beauty and intensity. It marks an arrival: a new and distinctive lyric voice is making itself known here, and people will take note.

Poetry’s continuance is dependent on the way it constantly reconceives its past. Where Sprackland draws on some familiar voices of the twentieth century – as well as, I suspect, a rich hispanic tradition off-limits to those of us who can’t speak Spanish – Sam Rivere’s new collection is an unarchiving of the bumptious Roman poet, Martial, whose epigrams have recently been

the subject of an upsurge in scholarly interest.

Riviere writes ‘process-derived’ poetry, and his previous collections, 81 Austerities and Kim Kardashian’s Marriage, built poems out of online ephemera: Google searches and social media posts. His new collection After Fame is subtitled ‘The Epigrams of Martial’, which left me unsure what to expect. Would these be translations of Martial’s epigrams, poems written ‘after Martial’ (‘after’ being one of poetry’s preferred ambiguous prepositions), or something entirely different.

At the starting gun, things aren’t clear. The book begins with a monologue spoken by an uncertain source (Riviere? Martial’s translator? Martial himself? all three?) that reflects on exactly what kind of book it is we are about to read. It’s hard to know what to expect: ‘the covers should be treated like enormous inverted commas’; ‘it’s the permanent crisis of what to do next, I tell my scribe.’

The poems, once we get to them, seem to exist squarely in their own universe, and though the links to Martial are frequent, Rivere’s work is a separate entity, not a book of versions or translations. The early poems tend to dwell on the reciprocal performances that make up human relationships, and are often funny: ‘when we’re together / it’s a suicide pact / that may as well be / deferred indefinitely’ reads one poem in its entirety. Many of these pieces call into question accepted notions of authenticity. ‘No matter what the loss is /crying with friends /is always a performance’ writes Riviere. This seems especially true when it comes to art, which is consistently represented as more mercenary than it pretends to be.

if you want to take the credit for this style yourself i.e. if you want to ‘own it’

I’m afraid you’ll have to ‘buy it.’

The Roman poet Martial – who in this book appears more as an offstage character than as the provider of its source material – was a canny operator enmeshed in a closed-economy of overlapping patrons. Riviere meanwhile, has previously written poems listing how much funding he has received from the British Arts Council. ‘A fake masterpiece is better than a real one because at least it’s affordable’ he writes in one poem. ‘The second time

is better than the first, as you well know.’ The search for authenticity, the author suggests, is necessarily conducted by someone with a preconceived notion of the authentic. To Riviere, this seems not just to distort but even erase the object of its search: ‘the reason I know the cover version is always better than the original / is that I’ve never heard the original.’

The viewer distorts the object; the photon changes the electron’s course. Is this news to anyone? Elsewhere, things are less delicately conceived ‘Art is satisfied with gold / art is satisfied with shit / that’s what I call a relationship.’ It feels true enough, as long as you don’t think about it.

The poet, who is on record saying he believes quality in poetry is ‘a convention’ that we should be suspicious of (imagine hearing the same thing from someone who built airplanes) probably doesn’t intend any more than this:

the freedom to write bad poems mediocre poems some good ones too that’s what a book *is* you guys

But at a certain point you have to review intention. The poems in this book refract more perfectly into discussions about poetry’s purpose, function and purported inadequacy than they do into anything meaningful. Too many feel like they were contrived to suit a very convoluted P.H.D. thesis. ‘Write so as to be primary’ said William H. Gass, hardly a friend to literary reactionaries. Too much of this work feels post-critical, belated. Tertiary, in a word.

When the book breaks into prose, the thin ice on which the poet has been skating begins to audibly crack. Densely footnoted, self-referential short stories (it would be hard to call these prose poems) follow on where William H. Gass, Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, Roberto Bolaño, Nicholson Baker and many, many others have gone before.

One story involves an ultra-rich aristocrat on a Martian planet, who uses a human sex-slave to lick her asshole. She blocks his oxygen supply using an automated implant in his windpipe (her nipples are hardened to ‘antennaelike points’). You can read similar things on some of the more risqué fanfiction websites. In another, a footnote to a poem leads us on to a story, which is itself footnoted to another story, a cascade that eventually brings