New review of Spectral Emphatic

Just found this review of Spectral Emphatic online at Stride Magazine from a reviewer that obviously HATED it. However, in the interests of parity and fairness, I include it here, complete with mis-spellings and grammatical errors :)

Anna Mckerrow's second poetry collection is entitled Spectral Emphatic promises so much in its premise and yet delivers very little. The title poem of this collection contains everything which I find frustrating about the collection, the expectation of narrative which is only ever partly fulfilled, the clichéd imagery and a purposeful obscurity in its language. Mckerrow's language is too often over the top unfortunately, using religious and spiritual images which are not concrete enough to really allow her voice to come through. Therefore the reader gets lost in the abstractions and fails to understand what she is actually trying to say. This quotation from the title poem Spectral Emphatic portrays this:

They roost among its evangelical exhortations for spiritual revolution.

Good poetry is based upon subtlety, precision of language and showing the reader, rather than telling the reader everything, essentially trusting the reader. 'Spectral Emphatic' fails on all three points. The poetry is often didactic, clichéd and her obvious love of language could be used so much better, if concrete images were used. After saying all this, Mckerrow's best poem in this collection comes right at the end of the book, 'A Bibliomantic poem', because it makes an attempt to do all these things, with one of the better lines being:

Without truly understanding her own, motives, the writer
photocopied page 8 of every book on the tree-shelf bookshelf
in her study.

Although I usually have an aversion to meta-poetry, poetry about writing poetry, unless it is done especially well with flair (I still have my reservations) but this poem is adequate in its attempt to tackle the subject. She approaches it well, using definite language, in an almost prose poem style to end up with a poem that is funny and insightful. However this poem is far from perfect, McKerrow slips into abstractions, using adverbs like 'yearning' to try and sound more poetic when a more concrete word would be better. Unfortunately after reading this collection several times I couldn't find much I liked about it. It lacks the clarity and precision of language which is necessary to create good poetry.

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Interestingly, the line he quotes above as being a great line of poetry is (weirdly) not even part of the poem itself and is instead part of the explanatory text that precedes it: it should also read "three-shelf" rather than the intriguingly misquoted "tree-shelf" and not have a comma after "own". Nitpicking.

As to the gist of the review, I entirely take on the point that someone looking for an obvious narrative in the poems will be disappointed in many of them. I dislike too much narrative in poetry on the whole: I like it best when it's unconscious, image-rich and slippery, with images auggesting moods and elision rather than wholeness. Dreamlike, really. Purposeful obscurity, as observed. That's often what I'm after. And, actually, poems which were more narrative and had more of a sense of internal unity wouldn't, in my view, make sense within the remit of Spectral Emphatic, which is by definition a "channelled" work - prone to inaccuracy, strangeness, wisps and passing influences. Dreams ARE obscure. Who can fully explain David Lynch's Mulholland Drive??

I personally dislike poetry which is too "clear" and "simple", preferring verbally complicated or bulbous things, so it makes total sense to me that if this is what you like, you won't like Spectral Emphatic. HOWEVER, it's a terrible shame to be a cliche. I shall have to make a mental note to avoid being so in the future when creating unusual conceptual works :)

Oh, and I am DELIGHTED to be found to slip into abstractions.

Update

I was saddened to hear last week that Flambard Press, the publisher of my first book The Fast Heat of Beauty, have been a victin of Arts Council cuts and will lose all of their funding in 2012. Please support them by having a look at their publications and purchasing one or two! Recommendations: Peter Bennet's The Glass Swarm (a Poetry Book Society choice)and Kelley Swain's Darwin's Microscope.

Some good news came for me a few days ago when Alec Newman at Knives, Forks and Spoons press told me that among my recent sales of new book Spectral Emphatic were the University of Salford, who considered the book to contain "considerable literary merit". Ahem! Marvellous news - deeply humbled.

I've also just heard that a poem from Spectral Emphatic, Desert Sphinx, will be included in the next issue of Carole Baldock's Orbis Poetry Quarterly.

That's it for me right now - until next time...

Spectral Emphatic now available to order!

I can proudly announce that my new collection of poetry, Spectral Emphatic, is now available to order from the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. At just £7 a complete bargain.

Here's a sneak preview of one of my favourite poems from the book, Elf-hill:

Elf-hill

I’m standing on a slip-road, waiting for the elves
on highway one. Mysteriously, the almost-bankrupt kroner
in my pocket is rolled into tight balls: I do not remember
that rounding reflex of my fingers; around us, the air slices
printing-ink and cod cheeks into a cold harmony. My pencil
hovers over the page. The bloody smell of the graphite makes

me nauseous. The Viking, a psychic and expert in these matters, is
squatting by an elf-hill around which the road parts.
This is his routine: consulting elves on plans for new roads
and intersections, settling the conundrums and drinking
coffee laced with something odourless but as warming
as the magic pounding my chakras from the

grass-covered mound. I chafe my hands, though gloved,
against the morning and yearn for an alcoholic or otherwise
effective preservative from the ghostly whims of the elf-folk,
baby thieves and hearth-cursers all, and the black moonscape,
steaming mud magic that I feel creep towards my swollen
belly, smoky fingers conjuring a jump under my

erratic diaphragm. The Viking coughs discreetly; he is ready to
dictate the elves’ terms, invoking shadows of boulders and
ice-floes and the splits in continental plates. Their demands
are simple enough: goats’ milk, bread and fresh seal meat.
My pencil moves across the page in the received
shorthand we use for such occasions, pressing sigils into the

page in the learnt language whose lines and spaces are the
windy plains in my own flat-vowelled fields of words. The
demands of the elves spread over the page like a virus:
observances to be kept with a ken of acceptance on both
sides. We will take this to be signed off, and the Viking is our
only parley, with his heavy fringe and hazel twigs.

I have never seen them, only felt their demands on my energy.
The Viking straightens from his crouch, brushing earth from his
knees, towering over the road like one who commands
lightning: it’s time to leave. As he turns, the sun hits the highway
like an alien visitation, and just for a moment the winter hillock
is alive with hands reaching for my pregnant belly, grasping

for a hold on the child-yet-to-be. I can feel their want like a
belt, squeezing spell-like promises from the foetus, promises
of the elemental to the water-bound. The Viking extends his
hand. “Don’t linger,” he says, and I pull myself away from the
lassitude that has already entered my blood like a sour painkiller,
a soused herring at the back of my tongue, dissolving.

Spectral Emphatic

I am excited to announce that my third book of poetry, Spectral Emphatic, will be coming out in early 2011 with the Knives, Forks and Spoons Press. Just earlier this year they were kind enough to produce my book of durational experimental poetry, Taropoetics. Spectral Emphatic is a more conventional collection of poems, in that it is an overall collection of individual pieces written with no obvious method or procedure apart from the traditional inspiration, mulling, crossing-out and sudden imaginative leaps.

It has a theme, though, that threads through all of the poems in one way or another. The idea is that Spectral Emphatic is the sometime journal of an imagined poet and artist collective called The Bohemian Embassy: a small group stamping their obsessive, exhortative writings onto pulpy pages, making short runs of a cult publication. The book begins with their manifesto:

SPECTRAL EMPHATIC: JOURNAL OF THE BOHEMIAN EMBASSY

ITS MANIFESTO:

THE GROUP WILL STRETCH SPECTRAL FINGERS INTO THE WRITERS’ CONSCIOUSNESS AND POSSESS HER.

THE GROUP WILL MATERIALISE AS OCCASIONAL PHANTASMS.

THE GROUP SHALL SLIP IN AND OUT OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

MEMBERS OF THE GROUP SHALL TEETER AT THE EDGE OF THINGS.

WE WILL EMBRACE THE GHOSTLY AND LIMINAL.

THE GROUP SHALL BE LIKE EELS IN MURKY PONDS: SYMBOLS IN THE WRITER’S DREAMS.

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS OF THE GROUP SHOULD BE AWARE OF THEMSELVES AS RESIDUAL FORMS CONTAINING UNSPENT PSYCHIC FORCE.

WE WILL INVESTIGATE THE WORLD WITH MAGIC PERSEVERENCE.

WE WILL ENCOURAGE THE WRITER TO EMBRACE THE SENTIMENTS OF HER GOTHIC AND SYMBOLIST FOREBEARS.

WE WILL DRIFT IN THE TIDEWINDS.

THE GROUP WILL RESPOND TO OTHER ARTISTS WHOSE WORK CONTAINS LIMINALITY AND THREAT, MENACE OR OTHERWORLDLINESS.

THE GROUP WILL APPLAUD WHEN THE WRITER DELVES INTO HER NIGHTMARES.

WE WILL ENCOURAGE CONSIDERATION OF ICONIC MYTHICAL FIGURES.

WE WILL TRANSMIT ON LOW FREQUENCIES.

The group features two main characters, Valerie and Veronik, that appear in some of the poems – they are ghostly, liminal, gothic, bohemian heroines that stand on the edge of things, transmitting symbols and dreams to those on low wavelengths.

The collection, then, is concerned with the ghostly and liminal; the gothic and symbolist. It also includes poems inspired by artists who might enjoy membership of the Bohemian Embassy: Christine Aerfeldt, Sarah Moon, Paula Rego, Nikki Sixx: artists who have explored the dark and mysterious places where the mind and spirit stray if unchecked. And those dark and mysterious recesses of the mind are where some of the other poems dally – grief, obsession and madness, unspent psychic forces, as well as addressing familiar mythic figures – the Sphinx, the Sirens, the goddess Medea.

Spectral Emphatic also returns to the theme of divination, but this time via bibliomancy, with 8: A Bibliomantic Poem. This is a long work in three parts made as a result of a processual approach to writing – in this case, a poem that investigates the essence of the energy of the number 8 by a writing-through of text from page 8 from every book on a three-shelf bookcase. The Bohemian Embassy also have a hand in this, using the writer’s trancelike state in writing through to transmit some of the mysteries they are concerned with.

The book cover is included above - illustration by the super talented Laura Daligan. Her website: http://www.lauradaligan-art.com/