Parallax
Sinéad Morrissey [Carcanet]
Ekphrasis is the cornerstone of Sinéad Morrissey’s fifth collection. From Denis Thorpe’s photographs, inside the newly-deceased L. S. Lowry’s house, to Alexander Robert Hogg’s pictures of Belfast slums, she recasts visual frames. At Parallax’s core – to borrow from Barthes – is ‘the terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead’. Equally, the collection is a meditation on skewed perspectives: ‘parallax’ means ‘the displacement of an object caused by a change in one’s point of observation’. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the anamorphic skull of Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, which, in ‘Fur’, provides fodder for Morrissey to overlap portraiture with premature doom.
Morrissey’s lines have an elegance rarely met with in contemporary poetry; the lineation exactly gauges the flow and retraction of memory and perspective, its clarity and cramps. We move nimbly from jigsaws, jasmine and orange trees to lacerated limbs, from Scandinavian bodies corroding in tap-water to the tatterdemalion nightingale. Morrissey forces the dim domains into focus. It is Dorothy Wordsworth, not William, who interests her.
People pull the past in and out of shape. Rosemary Street, Belfast: the ‘cool display / of anti-Thatcher paraphernalia // pens in the shape of nails for her coffin’. Soviet Russia: a dissident in a history book, his face ‘painstakingly blackened out’. How do we know what we know? Elsewhere, we follow Morrissey’s grandmother (in ‘1940’s shoes and sticky lipstick’) to a hospital in Chesterfield, ushering her granddaughter into the world with her own exit. When the child reappears, later, it is among butterflies ‘unbearably heavy’ (as far as she knows). I said Holbein provides Morrissey with her exemplary contortion of aspect, but perhaps we can go one better. In ‘The Coal Jetty’, another Dorothy, this time from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1939 Wizard of Oz, opens the cabin door to find the world erupt from sepia into technicolor. Childhood turns everything quicksilver, and Parallax plays Chinese Whispers. Nevertheless, to be ‘written onto light’, whatever the angle of bias, serves to animate our sense of life as a corridor flit, the flick of a torch between two circles of blackness. – Joanne O’Leary
Red Doc>
Anne Carson [Knopf]
Anne Carson’s Red Doc> is anything but a straight sequel to her 1998 ‘crossover hit’ Autobiography of Red. The latter was an expansion on the life of a renamed bit-character in Greek mythology: Geryon, whose main claim to fame is to be shot in the head by Hercules during his tenth labour. That metaphor served well to document the high-school turmoil she put Red through last time; but it seems excessive applied to the more thirtysomething concerns of the older (and renamed) Hercules and Red. The weld holding Red Doc> to its originary texts is made all the more tenuous by Carson’s determination to ‘randomize’ as much of her production as possible, and this utter lack of tension heads off the force needed to truly expand on an old text. There may be references to Dante’s Inferno, where Geryon also pops up, but the referential frame is too undeveloped for this to have any impact.
If Red Doc> fails as a sequel, it fails even more drastically as a separate revisit of Stersichorus. For a writer of Carson’s formidable classical learning, one might expect a less cynical method than borrowing the weight of precedent while shying from the constraint. More disappointing still is the form. A poem which problematises the relationship between the novel and the poem by veering between them ought to have its centre of gravity in one or the other genre. But Carson’s line-breaks are not the result of attention to sound: they’re because her version of Word scrambled the draft that way. At first you can pretend that this helps us to hear the hesitancy of the voices, but the characters and the narrator are trying too hard to sound cool for this to really work. In less nonchalant hands the overall effect might be one of virtuosic slapdash. But the poem fails to sting like poetry, and its pace and depth are not varied as a novel might be. Maybe she should have used Wingdings. – Tim Smyth
Beatsploitation
Kevin Curran [Liberties Press]
It is not without purpose that Kevin Curran adopts the simple present to narrate Beatsploitation, his debut novel about a secondary school teacher and would-be rock star who manipulates his black student, Kembo, into composing the beats he needs for his waning band to succeed at last. Much as it might look like it, says Curran’s simple present, this is not the new Roddy Doyle novel. This is a novel of Ireland’s present moment dealing with real contemporary themes like racism and multiculturalism. Well: if Irish racism can be characterised by its own ignorance of itself, then Beatsploitation portrays it successfully inasmuch as it embodies it exactly. The narrator is depicted as a flawed but fundamentally sympathetic character whose appropriation of his student’s beats is redeemed by a public mea culpa in the book’s closing pages. But the unfortunate anatomical fascination he demonstrates throughout in his description of black characters (‘big beast of a fella’, ‘his eyes expand and his big bottom lip turns inside out’, ‘his big cat’s eyes narrowed’, ‘his pink tongue sandwiched between his massive teeth’) is subject to no authorial disavowal whatsoever. Beatsploitation asks us to consider the unacknowledged sampling of Kembo’s beats as the foundational crime of the narrator. But the real crime here, besides plotting and characterisation, is the racist mode of discourse sampled without acknowledgement by this ostensibly anti-racist novel. – Kevin Breathnach
