Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

'Each time it begins in the same way, it doesn't begin the
same way, each time it begins it's the same.'



Remarkable and sustained fury. I have not read a book that more tangibly captures the othered experience than this. The impact is as a bludgeon knocking you into another shape, yet the writing is as fine and crafted as a blade. Every word of Citizen, every image, beats you round the head saying 'this is my world, this is my world', challenging you to overlook it. There is no ignoring Claudia Rankine's Citizen. This is what literature is and can be.



'Words work as release - well-oiled doors opening and
closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the
shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conver-
sations you have with your eyes translate everything and
nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid -
what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there,
altered to hide or disguise - words encoding the bodies
they cover. And despite everything the body remains.

Occasionally it is interesting to think about he outburst if
you would just cry out-

To know what you'll sound like is worth noting-'

Guest Book Review - Raptors by Toon Tellegen (Translated by Judith Wilkinson)

Each year I have the pleasure of working with a group of readers to collectively select the books that will feature in a reading programme, Summer Reads. Between August 2013 and January 2014, the Readers' Circle will work through a longlist of more than 150 books to find the 6 titles that we fall in love with and want to recommend to other readers. And throughout that period I'll be posting some of the reviews here on Books, Time and Silence. 
*Thanks to the publisher for providing review copies of this book.

Guest review by Julia Webb

Raptors is the work of Dutch author Toon Tellegen. Tellegen is one of Holland’s most well-loved authors and has written a series of award winning children’s novels, as well as adult fiction, plays, and over twenty collections of poetry, although Raptors is only the second collection that has been translated into English. Until recently he was also a GP. 

I read this book earlier this year after it was recommended to me by a friend who had heard the translator read from it at Poetry-next-the-sea festival in Wells. I knew I would love it as soon as I read the author’s preface – it is without doubt one of the best prefaces that I have ever read. It begins:

'Years ago I invented someone whom I called my father.
    It was morning, very early, I couldn’t sleep any more, I remember it quite clearly.
My father didn’t seem surprised at having suddenly appeared out of nowhere and, in his turn, invented my mother, my brothers and myself. He even, that very same morning, invented the life we should lead…'

With an opening like that I knew I was in for something unusual and special and I was not disappointed. 

Raptors is one long poem made up of a sequence of poems, each of which can also stand alone. Each poem begins with the words “my father" and each poem also starts off with a statement – like a small proverb, about the father, often using common sayings from popular culture: e.g. “My father did not let sleeping dogs lie…” Each poem is like a miniature portrait or a small scene in which the father is the pivotal character. It quickly becomes clear that this fictional father is a tyrant, but that he is also a complex and multi-faceted character. Individually the poems might be short but each has many layers, and as a whole they build into a kind of verbal crescendo. I found I needed to read just a few of them at a time, and then digest them for a little while before coming back for more. 

Tellegen is a master of language and plays with the reader in a very clever way. The poems work on our psyche on many levels. Tellegen uses the idea of the family as a framework and constructs and deconstructs it. He tells us stories, and those stories often conflict with one another. In effect each poem in the sequence is recreating the family stories of the narrator in the same way that we recreate stories of our own families in real life. Speak to ten members of any family and they will all have different memories and opinions of particular family events, or of family members − and who can say which, if any, version is true?  Perhaps there is an element of truth and fiction in all of them. Or like with most families there might be different layers of truth. Tellegen uses this premise to take us on an exciting and surreal journey, and one that often left me, the reader, with conflicting emotions. Sometimes I detested the Father, but at other times I felt sorry for him. It certainly made me think a lot about family dynamics – and, coming from a somewhat dysfunctional family myself, I could definitely relate to some of it. 

Tellegen has managed to make the language both emotionally loaded and playful, which is quite a feat to pull off. He also juxtaposes the everyday with the surreal to marvellous effect:

'My father,
there was a gaping hole in him
in which my mother and my brothers
entertained themselves

they sat at a table,
they laughed, played dice
and cheated

and the hole in my father grew bigger
and bigger,
and shots were fired in my father,
people screamed
and were arrested

a car stopped on the edge 
of my father,
my mother and brothers got in…'

The playfulness and surrealism of the imagery put me a little in mind of poems in Homage to the Lame Wolf  by Serbian poet Vasko Popa or the work of Charles Simic, but there is something almost Biblical about this collection too. This is also a very masterly translation. I imagine it would not have been an easy book to translate and Judith Wilkinson has done a great job. I found this book moving, disturbing and inspiring all at once. It was a joy to read and it reconnected me with my love for language. Reviewer George Messo said “It takes a book like this, seemingly hurled through the ether, to crack us on the head and wake us.” I couldn’t agree more − I imagine this is a book I will come back to again and again.

Raptors was first published in the UK by Carcanet in 2011. ISBN: 9781847770837; 96pp

Julia Webb is graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at The University of East Anglia. She is a poetry editor for Lighthouse literary journal, has had poetry and reviews published in journals and online, and in 2011 she won the Poetry Socity's Stanza competition. She lives in Norwich and teaches creative writing.

Guest Book Review - The Crumb Road by Maitreyabandhu

Each year I have the pleasure of working with a group of readers to collectively select the books that will feature in a reading programme, Summer Reads. Between August 2013 and January 2014, the Readers' Circle will work through a longlist of more than 150 books to find the 6 titles that we fall in love with and want to recommend to other readers. And throughout that period I'll be posting some of the reviews here on Books, Time and Silence. 
*Thanks to the publisher for providing review copies of this book.

Guest review by Sue Badger

This is a collection of poems and prose-poems set in 3 distinct parts, lyrical reflections on existence and connections: the minutia of memories of childhood (part 1), observations of the wider world in relation to self perception (part 2), and emerging sexuality (part 3).  

The tone is set in the preface poem ‘This’, where the strident beauty of the thrush’s song is juxtaposed with the ‘common hell’ built by Man: “Whatever else there is, there’s this as well.”  Existence, and the memory of past resonate through most of the poems:  Maitreyabandhu, always modest and self-effacing, emphasises that while memories are imperfect or incomplete, it is the emotions evoked that are important.  In Burial the strong recollections of his father unearthing skulls and bones are immediately tempered by “But that isn’t right, / .... I’ve mistaken/ my father’s story for the thing itself.”  Both the pleasure and pain of childhood memories are explored  in closely observed detail; occasionally in the observer’s 2nd person narrative, as in The Coat Cupboard, where the discovery of a keyring and grandma’s lipstick is far more profound than the emergence of a magical land such as Narnia; or the excellent prose-poetry of Copper Wire, where the evocative language describes a family outing to the seaside, and in which each parent and sibling discover delights personal to their desires: the mother a sunset, the father some buried copper wire...  Suffering and embarrassment are recollected in Potato – a school child’s fear and humiliation, (sentiments alluded to over 200 years ago in William Blake’s ‘Songs of Experience’) : “Each little word got harder as the big word came along ...” culminating in the worst of punishments: “You’ll stand in front of class until you say it!” , or the cutting shame felt with the father expressing his disappointment in his son’s decision in Bottle Digging: “We drove in silence home.... And I’m still ashamed of what I did.”

In the 2nd part the poet explores the poignant acceptance of life’s existence in its simplest form, as in ‘Rangiatea’, (Maori for ‘the place out there’), but again recollection is obscured by confused memories: “He couldn’t decide if the island was real/ or just the interval between sleeping/ and waking, known only from the corner/ of your eye...”, and accepting that life cannot be measured by events that have occurred.  Many of these central poems express an essentially Buddhist spirituality, as in ‘Letters on Cezanne’, where connections are observed, sometimes precise, sometimes obscure.  

Particularly eloquent is the acutely observed relationship between him and Stephen in the final poems: emotional realisation is explored through gentle inference, where the need for secrecy and discretion is paramount and heightens awareness.   An overwhelming sense of guilt pervades the poems, yet the yearning to connect – a look, a touch, a mutual recognition of urgency – drives the uncertain alliance on until Stephen’s early death lays realisation bare, and memories – always tempered by the ambivalence of truth and desire, are revealed to be as transient as Hansel’s crumb road.

The Crumb Road was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2013. ISBN: 9781852249748; 79pp

Sue Badger is a retired English teacher who has always enjoyed reading. She regards herself as a discriminatory (some may say intolerant) reader : with so many good authors out there, across the genres, why aim low?

Book Review: A Light Song of Light by Kei Miller

'A light song of light believes nothing
is so substantial as light, and
that light is unstoppable,
and that light is all.'

It started with the death of his mother, which Kei Miller felt as both a personal sadness and a test to his beliefs about the utilitarianism of poetry. Could it - the act of writing, the act of reading - help him sing his way out of sadness? And if not, what was the point? A Light Song of Light is a bold response to that challenge, a demonstration of the healing, enabling power of words, and a delightful treat for every reader, whether you read poetry regularly or not.

Miller has a feel for the interrelationship between light and dark, their mutual dependency: the darkness that confers significance on the light, the light that creates shadows through it’s very existence. A Light Song of Light is yin and yang, day time and night time, Jamaica and the UK. It explores a range of subjects through the prism of the personal, including Jamaican history, colonialism, immigration, family, and experiences of homosexuality. At its heart lies the Singerman, a member of Jamaica's road construction gangs in the 1930s, whose job it was to sing while others broke stones. He weaves in and out of the action, an emblematic response to Miller's central questions: how can song be useful? Will we sing for those who cannot sing themselves? And who will sing for us when we need it most?

'When we have lost song,' Miller writes with conviction, 'we have lost everything.' Throughout the collection, form is fluid yet always free, redolent with Miller's broad and expressive Jamaican accent. A Light Song of Light is poetry as song, poetry as aural experience, poetry that wears its heart on its sleeve and asks the same from the reader. If these are wonderful on paper, they are even more so when read aloud. They have the feeling of intimate confession, of smiling while crying, of everything that is important in life but that we relegate to the sidelines most of the time.

There is political significance to everyday lives. In 'Unsung' Miller sings a thank you to his father, a song for the 'man whose life has not been the stuff of ballads / but has lived each day in incredible and untrumpeted ways.' It is one of the standouts of the collection, a simple thank you from a son to a father and one of a handful of poems that brought a tear to my eye.

Miller's personal circles are not limited to his family. As everyday lives are significant, so too are they personal, whether the individual in question is known or not. 'Questions for Martin Carter' considers the life of Guyanese poet Martin Carter who was under such surveillance that some of his work survives only  from pictures government spies took of the fence on which he wrote many of his poems. And it cannot be forgotten that the Singerman’s song, for all its utilitarianism, came 'at the price of history...which, even now, you cannot fully consider.' 

In the prose poem, 'A Smaller Song', Miller responds to a news article about a young man killed for cohabiting with his older brother. Its one of many poems that explore the experience of homosexuality, documenting discrimination and hate in a deeply superstitious society, but also, at other times, tenderness and love. 'A Short History of Beds We Have Slept in Together' carries with it an almost fairy tale vision of love built despite the odds:
'If we are amazed at anything let it be this:
not that we have fallen from love,
but that we were always resurrected
into it, like children who climb sweetly
back to bed.'

I first read A Light Song of Light in the cloisters of Toledo Cathedral, just outside Madrid. It was a timeless blue sky sort of day, pockets of light drifting between the branches of four orange trees, the patter of tourists around me. There I sat in the shade with my back against a cold stone wall and read. It was one of those rare and wonderful occasions when the atmosphere and content of a book perfectly matches the surroundings in which it is being read. I will long remember that wonderful afternoon. But the book is worth more than that single experience. I have reread it a number of times since, sitting in the first sun of a long overdue spring, and with rain pouring down outside. Each time it moved me as it did that first time. Almost every line of the title sequence, 'Twelve Notes for a Light Song of Light', produces something inside me. It is almost a manifesto for what poetry can be, and I come away wishing there were a place to sign up at the end.

Similarly, in ‘A Creed’, Miller unites all those for whom the dark has become all too familiar, a lightness of shared experience takes over.

‘when you are done with the news
because it no longer beaks your heart,
and you now know sand
where there once was river in your inner parts;
when you are ready
to say - I have done terrible things,
and there is a room somewhere that holds
this evidence, a thumbprint
made in blood;

then this creed is for you.
We belong to a single country,
and this is our sad anthem.’

A Light Song of Light invites the reader to share all of these emotions, to empathise with experiences of loss, living between cultures, discrimination. In it, Kei Miller celebrates our incredible and abundant lives, facing the darkness head on yet constructing around it a light and inspiring song of light. A Light Song of Light sings a defiant, fragile song, a 'brave and terrible song', a song of love, and compassion, and acceptance, and gratitude, and anger because the world isn't always as we might hope. It is everything poetry can and should be, a clear argument for poetry that communicates with the directness and universality of a song, and carries a similar emotional resonance. I love it. And if you need some persuading to give poetry a go, take Miller's last words as a guide:

'...turn these pages slowly
push the sun down, down, down the horizon - and a story will
come to steal your breath.’

A Light Song of Light was published by Carcanet Press in 2010. ISBN: 9781847771032, 69pp

www.summerreads.org.uk

To hear Kei read his poetry, including 'Unsung' and 'Twelve Notes on a Light Song of Light' click here.