latest blogs


Close Reading: 6:30AM by Andrew McMillan


Posted October 28, 2011 by

This poem is short enough to quote in full (assuming the editors don’t mind).

sleep had been singular
so long
that   on waking next to him
I felt like the submariner resurfacing
amazed to find the world survived
with so much air
such tundra of sky

With its spareness, the absence of punctuation and that little gap in the third line, this poem is strongly reminiscent of the work of British poets Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth, and by extension, connects McMillan with that branch of Transatlantic twentieth century innovative poetry which favours lightness of touch and a casual, conversational tone. With Frank O’Hara as its grand master.

Whilst on the surface, this fragment of text might appear so simple as to be simplistic (and any mention of sleep, sky and ‘the world’ is enough to get me really worried!), I actually found this a very subtle and affecting poem. For a start, the repeated S sounds (sleep/singular/so long/submariner/resurfacing/survived/so much/such/sky) create a kind of dreamlike logic through which we are gently pulled. And then there’s the intriguing way the poem grapples with time and space. How can sleep be both ‘singular’ and ‘so long’? How can waking ‘next to’ (horizontal) someone also be ‘resurfacing’ (vertical)?

Deftly moving from the personal to the universal (even ecological), the poem finally opens  into a ‘tundra of sky’ – an image that for me calls up the people-less worlds of environmental catastrophe films such as The Day After Tomorrow.

*

Every day for as long as I can muster, I will flick through The Salt Book of Younger Poets (ed. Lumsden & Stonborough, 2011) and randomly select one poem to investigate using my immense critical faculties. This is mainly an excuse for not reviewing the book properly.

Comments (0)


latest reviews


Phil Brown reviews Confer by Ahren Warner

Warner’s is a book steeped in allusion, unabashedly erudite and seamlessly multilingual

★★★★★

Sam Peczek reviews Made in Britain by Gavin James Bower

If you like a bit of misery and deprivation, Gavin James Bower can help satisfy your needs

★★★☆☆

Ed Cottrell reviews Folklore and Steak & Stations by Michael Egan

mutant, modern mythology … the sense that ritual has become invisible and functions as escape

★★★★☆

Total Reviews (72)

What people are saying

Teresa: I saw Skittles at the Edinburgh Fringe 2011 and it really was this goo...
Tom Corbett: Thank you Jon Stone for a really excellent review of Another Use of Ca...

features

Model Publisher or Pirate? R. A. Caton and the Fortune Press

Chrissy Williams

R. A. (Reginald) Caton’s legacy is ambiguous at best. He published the debuts of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Cecil Day Lewis as well as books by Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and many others. Some of the editions published by the Fortune Press between 1924 and 1971 can fetch upwards of £5,000 today and [...]

Comments (0)