FISH ALIVE
Poetry by Michael Davenport.
Michael Davenport’s poetry leads us into a world full of vivid images…slippery yellow meat, knives that flicker in calloused hands. We guddle trout in At Murderer's Pool, hold our breath in a strange underwater light, chasing bubbles in the sunken wreck of the Dresden. I will never again look at a blank TV screen without thinking of I’m on the Television or look in a mirror without recalling An Eye for
an I come to that.
He makes us ache for the past whilst looking at the present in a new light. Read Lady Americana and Flat Rock, Indiana. His poetry expresses the real ambivalence of life and the rag bag of the heart, not perfectly packaged like on a shelf in Tesco's, but as a struggle between the ephemeral (V.J.Night 1945 - a child in a cot deducing the world from the shadows of flames on the wall), and the concrete experiences of the real world with all its disquietude. He struggles to reconcile these tensions with irony tinged with humour. His work goes to unvisited places where it is certainly not like Tesco's. Skilfully balancing ideas and imagery in a search for new ways of perceiving the world it does what all serious poetry should do: it searches.
Here are examples from the beginning and end as a sort of parenthesis to suggest pleasures within.
FISH ALIVE
They are the dead:
On piers ice-makers grind;
from their new element fish cast cold eyes.
Cod and halibut are laid out
like the aftermath of a disaster.
An auctioneer offers haddocks by the box,
with the same breath sells a basketful of soles.
In seafront shops they’re filleted;
cold sounds echo from mortuary- white tiles;
runnels fill with blood and slime.
George is my wolf-fish friend;
I dive through the kelp forest,
navigate a cliff..
Checkered sunlight patterns his cave.
He meets me in a garden of anemones,
our fins co-ordinate and we are on a level,
face to face. Though his teeth can crunch an urchin
he never bites the hand that feeds him.
(That’s the agreement.)
His eyes swivel in expectation.
I recognise another being
through a mask.
This is ‘George’ the wolf fish who smiles from the cover of this attractively produced pamphlet.
A RUINED ESTATE
Inside
this summer house
with broken, musty chairs
a past year’s Vogue is flicked through by
the wind.
Dark lake;
ghost refection
of a boat; a girl leans
out, moves her hand to gently swirl
the sky.
FISH ALIVE
Published by Tyne and Esk Writers.
1, Beachmont Court,
Dunbar, EH42 1YF
ISBN 0-9553965-3-0 £4 To order, email Michael
Alan Gay
SUSHI & CHIPS by Colin Will £5.20
diehard publishers. 91-93 Main St, Callander FK17 8BQ
In Colin Will’s poetry there is a sense of being taken on a journey without a known destination;
a foray into the deeper recesses of human experience. I had this feeling when I read his
previous collection MEMENTOLITHS (Calder Wood Press). The subject is geological specimens
and locations but I soon realised that it is about a lot more than rocks.
It’s the same with SUSHI & CHIPS. You are taken through five different sections each signalling
a change of register, from mild local interest - sounds of spring, the ubiquitous heron (and I
thought everything had been said about herons), moons that switch on and off… to matters
more sinister - concentration camps, black eggs in The Great Boiling, the struggles of a dying
moth in the clutches of a wasp. This poem sent shivers down my back.
Here’s a sample from The Sting:
I know wasps hunt – I’ve read the books -
but this zinger, struggling with prey
bigger than itself, a Serengeti lion
stinging buffalo, today’s amazement.
In Colin Will’s poetry there’s always the shiver; you wait for it.
The strength of his poetry lies in the ability to achieve the difficult task of making a smooth
transition between realities. One moment you are moving through familiar territory on a worn
path, then without realising it you are taken on a different route altogether, stumbling on
hard ground, searching. This is not just saying one thing and meaning another or using a
twist in the last stanza (anyone can do these). This is more subtle. It’s as if the reader,
without realising what is happening, is being gently nudged into a new mode of thought.
This ability is the measure of Colin Will as a mature poet.
For me there are two poems which are outstanding. The Neighbour which is beautiful
and haunting and the other is Butoh Dancer about a witch-burning in Buchan. But the
book is packed with many other poems of high quality to take you on the journey.
Alan Gay