Poetry Book Society

The relative brevity of the poetry pamphlet is one of its strengths. Many of the best are complete sequences. There is something particularly satisfying about a compact, coherent whole and it is easier to achieve this unity of purpose and organisation in a pamphlet than in a full-length book.

The focus of this article is Richard Moorhead's work The Reluctant Vegetarian, which came out from Oystercatcher Press last year. The work is divided into four sections, one for each of the seasons. Each season is then represented by a selection of fruits and vegetables. Every poem is set out like this, as if it were a dictionary entry:

peach adj (1) sweetness
blind with sunlight;
(2) raging like
a swollen tiger's eye;
adv (3) how greed
humiliates - spills
in between the fingers,
shaming chins
with sugar's glue;
n (4) the gentle fur,
a goose-bumped breast;
(5) schematic of
a planet - magma, core,
a flap of skin;
(6) the bite, a large bore
lead-gougedfrom a bear
wound; (7) yellow
foie gras schools
the stolen almond;
adv (8) how holes
are lovely torture,
like a gone tooth;
n (9) the blood corona
of a playground
accident; (10) that moment
in an argument
when things get
out of hand.

Science tells us that the apparently static is a seething mass of sub-atomic tendencies, probabilities and absences: a complex dance no part of which can ever be exactly pinned down. There is no part of the universe which can be evacuated by analysis and many artists have always intuitively known this. So it is with language. Every word is a restless site of overlapping sensations, nuances and associations. These vary in subtle ways for each of us yet must also be forged into our key social, cultural and political bonds.

Richard Moorhead uses the inherent dynamism of the word to unpack and rearrange a spectrum of perspectives on "peach" (or potato, blueberry, fig, caper, beetroot, parsnip, walnut , etc - there are 21 poems altogether). So what could have been a still-life becomes instead an unstable verbal carnival in where the semantic and phonic resonances of each object's name become themes for improvisation. Moorhead improvises with the dexterity, wit, skill, sensuality and intelligence of a great jazz saxophonist.

One of this pamphlet's most exciting achievements is the fantastic range of reference. Blake's "world in a grain of sand" becomes Moorhead's "cosmos in a pip" as images of sensuality, sex, disease and wounding take their places alongside those of international politics, history, myth, film and every kind of human interaction.

Throughout the sequence the reader is marinaded in scents, flavours, sounds, appearances and downright slipperiness of all this fertility. Here is the outside world waiting to be picked, peeled, prepared and internalised. Yet there is never any resolution. Things and their names hover and shimmer in a continuous process waiting for the reader to plug into this circuit with his or her own linguistic associations and energies. Food for thought.

blueberry
n (1) owl pellet
swollen with
fairy bile; (2) goose
tumour stitched
with burdock; (3) jar
of seal eyes, lustrous
when wet; (4) a mesa's
moonless indigo;
(5) blue Cambodian
skulls in a punnet;
v (6) to ash
the darkened skin
with chalk; adj (7)
the tight baby eye
of a teenage heart;
adv (8) how innocence stirs
in the mouth first;
adj (9) the taste
of a bitten tongue or
a wrecked planet.

 

 

 

Peter Hughes is a poet (and founding editor of Oystercatcher Press) based on the Norfolk coast. Find out more at www.oystercatcherpress.com