Reviews
"Black State Cars" by Alan
Jude Moore
Reviewed in The
Stinging Fly, Summer 2005 edition
Thematically prominent right through
this striking debut volume are the unsuccessful, uglifying
ways we intrude on our natural surroundings, and the
disastrous perversity inherrent in romantic love.
It might easily be said these fifty
poems exemplify something of a dystopian vision, but
if so it is really a dystopia of the senses and sentiments,
formed from the gradual, agonising realisation that,
from everyday considertaions, one must outwardly forego
one's poetic ideals while labouring to preserve within
oneself their individual meaning or value. Presumably
on grounds connected with this attitude, Moore has
been called an 'urban' poet, but this tends to oversimplify.
What he expresses represents a robust rejection of
the urban at its ugliest, emptiest, most feeble and
enfeebling.
In 'Heading into Darkness outside Athlone'
we have the recurring subject matter of the grotesque,
sterilising influence of present-day folk upon their
environment, and also upon the past, a recognition
of which is awakened during a hung-over coach-trip
through the bleak, appropriated-seeming Irish midlands
-- 'stolen segments of parchment, the landscape' --
where ancient 'battlefields', passed at random, are
now 'externalised historical centres' and where the
poet, as the approaching town 'waits like a sentinel
hung out to dry', wryly and ruefully imagines the
innocence of a previous age in its hopeful anticipation
of a more humane arrangement in the social order:
History coils
around my leg
And begs I believe the future scheme
of things
Is not decided by horses or
men...
But things are hardly better in the
her and now, where: 'The road and river look old,
planted/ beside an automated transportation depot'
while nearby horses, that once upon a time had such
a dynamic, participatory role in our commonplace dealings,
are these days rendered tame, essentially superfluous,
and 'stand mouths gaping open'. Moore's images wonderfully
point up the paucity of our current condition of 'progress',
with all the efficient, denatured blandness that typifies
it, a condition underneath which the presences of
tradition and nature insistently and indignantly pulsate,
even if muted, or seemingly effaced.
Moore is skilled at depicting, by way
of his pared, careful language and casual rhythms,
the disillusionment aroused by the sense that the
rich, living, if oftentimes tumultuous culture of
a former time has been eclipsed, in ways impossible
to predict for earlier generations, by the grubbiliy
diluting effects, the passive, sanitised colourlessness,
or our market-driven age. With wonderful economy and
ferociously sardonic attack, he renders, in 'Smithfield',
the tawdrily crude commodification of 'authenticity',
as insidious an assault on the richness of the past
as neglect, as forgetting -- not least in the way,
with regard to the actuality of one's heritage, the
sensibilities of all, native and tourist alike, are
insulted and blunted in the patronising face of such
stock accoutrements as:
A Celtic
cross on a bog muck base,
a jacket made of dried
up grass
and a twisted woman
hammered
out of bronze.
'As if it was meant to me/ like this
long ago,' the poet parenthetically laments.
Moore's is an interesting technique,
often building up a complex interchange of intimate
moods with an inventory of expressionistic detail,
such as in 'Inland', a poem dealing, in his idiosyncratic,
heartfelt way, with failure in idealistic love, and
the consequences of that failure for each equally
bruised participant: the absconder, and he, the absconded-from,
who experiences still 'Your eyes clawing at my eyes'.
Here, the mordancy of Moore's humour is highly effective
in delivering his harsh but at bottom tenderly earnest,
open-hearted appeal that the one he loves not abandon,
in the aftermath of their failed affair, all the potential
danger and turbulence -- and richness -- that all
truly passionate adventure involves, in favour of
a safer, narrower, less demanding, less rewarding
emotional course: 'I hear you swim in the river these
days,' he begins, with all the nuanced condemnation
and sadness of the cast-off lover, 'In picture postcard
valleys, no salt in the air...'
'Connolly' is another bitterly valedictory
poem whose account of frustration, discontent, and
disappointment is once more expressionistically built
up out of neatly itemised observations that culminate
in the pain of suspicious resentment caused by the
prospect of one's significant other blooming radically
during a period of separation; meanwhile, one is left
with the wish that one's bitterness will simply transform
into something riper, more serene: 'she will rise
through the Summer/ while you wait for insects to
change into flowers'. Through its seemingly random,
oppressively austere imagery, ('Feathers in the drain
cling/ to the shadows of small dead birds' ... 'The
back of the city breathes/ the police helicopter light')
this poem captures with a tender-tough acuteness the
emotional drabness of unresolved parting.
'The Scavengers', in subtly revealing
how carnal longing may bring out a shady, clinging
predatoriness, where we uglily objectify others and
approach them in the coldly tactical manner ('he maps
a course of action across her skin;/ tied to the secret
operation of his need'), is an objective meditation
on the opportunities for evil which desire opens up
-- a psychological realm this particular poet is notably
stimulated by.
Like all true poets, Alan Jude Moore
is galvanised into urgent poetic utterance by everything
that strikes upon his highly tuned sensitivity. His
is a precise, energetic, inclusive vision, married
to an excellent sureness and spontaneity of voice.
Black State Cars (published -- deservedly -- via the
Salmon Poetry Publication Prize) demonstrates both
how devotedly and scrupulously Moore controls his
profound emotions in the interests of authentic poetic
expression, and his power in channelling those very
emotions with an understanding and refinement that
is both imposingly faithful and memorably elegiac.
I recommend this collection unreservedly.
-- Michael
Wynne
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