James Wilkes reviews:
Kelly Hobbs, Inner Glassware, Exeter: Mintleaf Press, 1996, 4pp.
The author is a longtime resident, this gentle tearing as of tissue down the page. A loving object liltingly, the greased paper refuses. Hatched and hatching, a spring song in pondwater mortality1. More or less open, "refusing the birdsong intravenously" (Frangipani: 43).
The second poem opens and doesn’t stop, unfolds to the skies like a good bit of architecture2. Unmachined as a broken chainsaw buoyed upwards by burnings of woodsap, hazel, birchbark, charcoal, withies, gumboots, campion. Then it's over.
A longer pages, no more rural but still with a sense of name. Illustrated delicately, with red pink and ragged of political tension. The darkened tenderloin. Petrol chard and gumboots, again3. More fen shoe than feng shui, more thin dingo than fandango. Six out of ten.
1 The information is hiding in the margins, trying to disappear (being made to disappear).
2 As in, the blurred print run-off in the deepest rivers.
3 See Randal J. Towards an Understanding of Bovinity. Bristol: Fanfare, 1927.
Celia Fenchurch, "Experiments in Living Now" in Julian Boschild (ed.), George Scorsese: New Works (London: Passport Gallery, 2005), 144pp.
Ella Solinsky, Eléments Provisoires, ([Paris?]: [n. pub], 1977), 40pp.
Dear Blog, hello. In urban cammo trousers I am nearly elfin, blotchy, Palmeresque. Two books balance in my cargo pouches. One advances in baroque sweeps, the other its undoing, cuts away. Hello pigeons. Will you be my archivists? Hello plane trees. Will you be my audience? All shake their heads with masterful disdain.
O self-indulgent blogosphere, hello. The upstairs flat is drilling too much coffee through my brain. Increasingly I fear (je crains) people (purple). Kinky and inchoate. If they were voles I'd feel remorse, breaking their spines, but they're just books. Two of them balance in my seeping cortex. My interests: abandoned vehicles, affordable warmth, airports, ants, beach huts, beaches, beauty treatment licences, bees, benefit fraud, cemeteries and crematoria, chimney heights, complaints, compliments, cooling towers, council tax and how it is spent.
Increasingly I ache for (désire) completeness (complexity). It gets out of control, in the suburbs, in early summer. Demonstrations and parades, dentists, drainage, emergency planning, ferries, floral displays, fly-posting, fridge-freezer removal. Going into hospital, great trees, gritting, harassment and violence, hedges (high), hedges (overgrown), highway flooding, home from hospital, how to do business.
I'm tired now and crave dried figs and water. Lamp posts, libraries, licences, litter bins, lost dogs, major incidents. Mapping. Meals on wheels. Micro-chipping, opticians, roundabout sponsorship, street furniture, street naming, traffic data, wasps. And all around the moon hangs up its gentle running spikes to dry.
