Reviews

The English Sweats

by James Brookes

Pighog Press, 2009

The poems of James Brookes share some of the characteristics of that creepy Victoriana that is all the rage with designers and artists nowadays. Stuffed rodents. Phrenology. Wax jackets. That sort of thing. Steampunk without the punk.

They are also exquisitely crafted, with an ear for the rough and tumble of the English tongue.

Call a harsh ‘chack’; song is a scratchy warble
catching my origins in a thicket of oak.
My passerine tact a mystery to the hawk.
     (’Shrike‘)

The English Sweats is certainly creepy, but it boasts a sure and convincing historical vision, clearly intelligent and well-read but to my mind nudging up against the Fortean Times and the British ‘folk art’ of Jeremy Deller too. Brookes scans Roman Britain, Medieval Sussex and the Second World War for source material; at times, deploying the histories and ‘necessary fictions’ of his own family to conjure a world of casual and ritualised violence.

One of the very best poems – and an example of Brookes’ capacity for linguistic invention – is ‘Mons Horse Burial‘.

Haunch of a 13-pounder, mud-locked. One pelvic wheel.
The barrel down-tilt, something of a horse
straddling it. At half dismount
the trooper, dirigible angel, splays his flanks.

The weight of each line here, each clause and syllable, is perfectly judged. That phrase ‘dirigible angel’ is a mark of Brookes’ talent – it is at once lyrical, sonically logical and completely surprising. There is a strictness too, strongly evoking the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, as well as a playfulness more reminiscent of Paul Muldoon at his riddling best.

The occasional misjudgement in this slim but sturdy publication shows a poet reaching perhaps too far too quickly for a poetry of, and about, Englishness.  In ‘Caractacus in the Rape of Bramber’ Brookes overcooks the archaic language with the line

I’m hieing to Sussex, to sites of precedent.

But Brookes’ talent is undeniable, and that’s nitpicking. The English Sweats is worth the cover price* for one poem alone: the (very creepy) ‘Mink’, in which the entrance into water of – you-guessed-it – a mink becomes a metaphor for the poet’s dirty act of speaking.

Only a feral noise would come, much later
when we, snug in the trim of privilege,
my tongue already tired, likened it
to how you might hear screaming underwater.

 

Rating:

 

* Really annoyingly there is no price on the cover of this book! I had to look it up. It’s £8 plus £3 p&p which I note is very dear for a 36-page stapled pamphlet, however thick the paper is.

Reviewed by Tom Chivers

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