Category Archives: Books

Afric McGlinchey Reviews The Silence Teacher

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“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”

-T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”

SabotageAs I have said before, it is a strange and wonderful thing to read the results of someone reflecting deeply and at length upon your own work. Irish poet Afric McGlinchey does just that in her review of The Silence Teacher for Sabotage:

Peake’s descriptions brim with sensibility, but the sensibility does not obstruct or abstract the lucidity of the seeing. Associations infiltrate the scenes of his poems like groundwater.


You can read the full review here.

The Silence Teacher is Now Available

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The Silence Teacher by Robert Peake

My short poetry collection The Silence Teacher is now available from Poetry Salzburg. It distills nearly seven years of writing about love and loss into just thirty-two pages, and is dedicated to the memory of our son.

The poems in this collection were written in both America and England. They encompass the two years of my MFA in Writing degree at Pacific University, wherein the encouragement of my mentors Sandra Alcosser, Marvin Bell, and Joseph Millar, alongside many gifted students and friends, helped me to take up William Stafford’s challenge to revise, not only my work, but my life.

Many thanks to Dr. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Andreas Schachermayr, not only for selecting this manuscript, but for working very diligently and efficiently since then to bring it to publication. Pre-orders are now shipping from Austria and, if you have not already, you can order your own copy here.

Drawing the Line by Diana Bishop

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Spanning more than thirty years of writing and weighing in at over one hundred pages, Diana Bishop’s first collection reads more like a retrospective than a debut. Arranged by theme (Love, War, Death, etc.) these poems range from poignant to hilarious, formal to plain-spoken, casting a keen and deeply sensitive eye over a world where politeness reigns supreme.

As first poet in residence at Keats’ House, Hampstead, Diana also brings an ear well-tuned to the traditions of verse. Lighter rhymes such as “Mr Miller’s Mistress” and “A Suitable Shell for Treatment” careen toward couplet punchlines such as “Now we’re very fond of Brighton and the place is sadly missed. / But you can’t enjoy your holiday with your tortoise round the twist.” They are sure to please an audience when read aloud.

But equally exciting are narrative poems attuned to social irony, such as the “Sachertorte” served at a fine restaurant, which is “dark, rich, thick and jammy / (rather like my friend…)” The friend, dressed to the nines and unapologetically snooty, is incensed when the waiter serves a larger slice to “a bag lady, a crone”. The speaker in the poem delights in the possible reasons, deciding finally that “Sacher’s tea room regains my esteem / catching the waiter’s eye, I grin at him.”

In “Famous Photograph”, Bishop takes up themes of innocence and experience in spare, direct language. Continue reading →

Ira Lightman: Experiments in Poetry

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“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

-Jack Kerouac, On The Road

The thing about experiments is that they don’t always work out. In this way, experimental poetry can be seen as a high-risk, high-reward art form. Unlike other modes, where poets endeavour to generate sufficient heat to boil water, experimental poets go for either Roman candle effects or stink-bombs–but nothing in between. Much of it ends up the latter for me. I find it falls somewhere between a riddle and an inside joke, packed with cleverness and cerebral effect. It is so often the cerebral quality, above all, that leaves me cold–poems written from the neck up only, leaving the author safe and aloof.

This is why I have so enjoyed discovering experimental poet Ira Lightman’s work. Ira pushes the boundaries of word-play, but retains something of the human in doing so. Consider this poem from Duetcetera, a collection of concrete poems arranged with gaps in the middle:

REPUBLICAN DEMOCRAT
unloved the unhated
hate love
precipitating world's cruising
the within
anchor ending dry
yank dock

Apropos of the current US presidential election, the poem captures a certain sense of foreboding I have detected in Brits who follow the slings and arrows of the American political process. Continue reading →

In Pieces (An E-Book of Poems)

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In Pieces by Robert Peake

In response to people on either side of the pond asking where they can read some new work, I have put together a little e-book called In Pieces. The poems all have something to do with the game of chess, but really that’s just an excuse to take a “pawn’s-eye view” of human affairs: war, death, and aging–as well as Sudoku, Elvis impersonators, and nice cups of tea. Several poems come from a long sequence about The Lewis Chessmen, published in Long Poem Magazine earlier this year.

The e-book contains nine poems in all, costs just 99 pennies, and is available for instant download. You can read it as a PDF on a regular computer, or transfer it to an iPad or Kindle. It was fun to put together, and I hope you like it. I may do a follow-up post about the process of creating the e-book, since I learned a lot. It is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from the letterpress collaboration I did in America.

But for now, just enjoy the book.

Sabotaged! (A Review)

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SabotageMartha Sprackland, editor of Cake, took a critical eye to my collection Human Shade in the latest review for Sabotage. She made deeply insightful observations, the likes of which could only have come from reading closely and thinking carefully about the work. For this, I am honoured. And because this collection is so achingly personal, it feels a bit as though she peered into my core.

Here analysis of the imagery, for example, articulates unconscious forces at play during the writing and assembling of the manuscript:

Throughout, Peake manages the subject of his son’s death both dextrously and eloquently. The line ‘I lash my faith to the mast of a boat’ (‘Elegy for the News’) is entirely appropriate for a collection in which the tidelines of grief are oceanic, dynamic, ever-changing, lapping up against the edges of the poems yet crucially avoiding the spill into sentimentality. Indicative of the poet’s skill is the way Peake is able to address his grief; in a poem about his son he is controlled, silent, ‘I disown the alphabet / unsaying each letter’ (‘To Friends Not Knowing What To Say’), whilst a poem about a road sign at the Mexican border is allowed to contain the line about the child ‘who rises as though winged in a blaze of light’ (‘Road Sign on Interstate 5’). The poems are shared, spliced, images from certain pieces belonging to others, yet all coalescing on the child, and all the better for their displacement.

Gratifying, too, is that my struggles against tidy conclusions and the shorthand vocabulary of psychoanalysis seem to have paid off, at least for this reader, who writes, “The collection ends on the promise of hope without the trite self-help conclusion too often found in collections assembled around a death.”

Naturally, there are parts she liked less in the work as a whole, and which I will consider as a writer. Overall, though, it is deeply encouraging to know that someone considering the work this carefully found their attention repaid, and it is a pleasure to read their many discoveries so beautifully phrased.

Read the full review here.

Christopher Reid’s Elegiac Scattering

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“Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend; / nor even the jobsworth slob / with a slow sly scheme to rob / my darling of her mind / that I imagined; / just a tumour.”

-Christopher Reid, “The Unfinished”, from A Scattering

A Scattering by Christopher ReidChristopher Reid’s A Scattering is a moving tribute to his wife Lucinda, who died of cancer. A respected English poet recommended it to me after reading my piece contrasting Douglass Dunn and Donald Hall, both of whom also wrote elegies under very similar circumstances. In addition to fine poems, in this book I also found certain insights into how a culture grieves, and what it considers good art.

Whereas Douglass Dunn’s elegies take root in his working-class background, Reid signals his place in the upper class early on in the book when, on the island of Crete, he invokes “ghosts of old schoolmasters” whose lessons, in his mouth, have become, “scraps of misremembered Classical Greek.”

In The Daily Telegraph, a periodical more typically aligned with those who studied Classics as school, Tom Payne assessed, “It is a collection that defies criticism in two ways–first, because it feels wrong to pick over such poignant elegies, and also, because so many of these poems are impossible to fault.” What makes this book seem flawless to this particular slice of Britain–and especially when the topic is such a difficult one?

Two elements more common in American expressions of grief are entirely off limits to Reid: invoking religious faith, and outpouring emotion. Instead, educated fascination with the world, and particularly the natural world, takes the place of religion; and self-consciousness and self-deprecation take the place of emotive self-expression.
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Transatlantic Elegies: Dunn and Hall

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Donald Hall’s keen observations on grief in Without had a profound impact on my understanding of the possibilities of elegiac poems. Since relocating to London, Douglass Dunn’s slim volume Elegies has deepened my understanding of the form, and some of its specific cultural implications. Both collections were written in the wake of the poet’s wife’s death from cancer. And each, in its way, is a remarkable achievement of transcending loss to make art. But here the similarities end, and certain differences–ones I find illustrative of the subtle divide in Anglo-American poetics–begin.

Whereas Hall’s poems are largely confessional, Dunn’s might be called archaeological. Taking the first poems from each book as examples, we find in “Her Long Illness” an account in the third-person that is none-the-less told in scene, revealing intimate details of the couple’s final moments together. By contrast, Dunn’s “Re-Reading Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories” takes us through an examination of the stains on a book’s pages, invokes Robert Frost’s “A Considerable Speck” in addressing a fly, and only obliquely touches on the matter of grief itself in the final words of the poem: “one dry tear punctuating ‘Bliss’.”

Some of this stems from the vantage point taken up by the speaker–whereas Hall is re-living experience, going back to the hospital scenes in his mind, Dunn is reflecting, rooted in the present, casting forward and back. How each poet chooses to reflect or relive, however, and the effect this produces in the poems, brings colour to certain value differences between the two poetics.
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In Exile, Translated by Ruth Ingram

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How can one write poetry when language burns the tongue? For German-Jewish poets living in exile during the Holocaust, the banishment must have been double–not only from homeland, but language. For a poet like Paul Celan, words become as intractable as life itself. But through her careful translations, Ruth Ingram brings into English three exiled poets working within the German language through grief, disillusionment and guilt toward a kind of reconciliation. That is, these are survivor-poems that also represent poetry-as-survival.

The opening poem by Hilde Domin, a so-called “assimilated Jew” whose privileged life was upended by flight and exile, speaks chillingly to survivor guilt. “Build Me a House” begins, “The wind comes…” and describes it lifting old papers “like doves” and displacing us “like jellyfish” on shore. It is a gentle but inevitable force, against which she builds a pretty house. Finally, “the wind passes / like a hunter, / whose hunt is not / meant for us.”
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The Books That Made It

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Photo: Erik Fitzpatrick

A native Californian, I relocated to London with my English wife last spring. Since it costs as much or more to ship a book that distance as it does to buy one new, we downsized considerably. I wrote a brief summary on the We Wanted to be Writers blog of the those precious few books that made the trip, and why.

Read more at the We Wanted to be Writers blog.

Vertigo by Marvin Bell

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Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems is Marvin Bell’s twenty-third book of poetry, and his fourth full-length collection of “dead man” poems. The form, invented by Bell, takes the zen admonition, “Live as if you were already dead” as its epigraph, eschews enjambment (one sentence per line), and always appears in two parts (“About the Dead Man and ___” and “More About the Dead Man and ___”). Pushing limits in the dance between the intentional and arbitrary, Bell has arranged the poems in this book alphabetically by each fill-in-the-blank word or phrase.

Bell tells us that “[t]he dead man, like you, entered through an archway of effects,” echoing the first line of another iconic poem, “Why Do You Stay Up So Late?” where he declares, “Late at night, I no longer speak for effect.” In un-death, as in late-night delirium, Bell’s other-self has found the means to integrate worldly overwhelm since, for the dead man, “[i]f it were not for the lateness of the hour, everything he sees would be too much.”

The effects he rejects include “the tautologies that cloak war and torture” and glitzy marketing-speak. Through an at once more direct and more off-kilter relationship to language, the dead man can “[enter] your consciousness without tripping the alarm.” And so, through a broad range of different tactics, including humor, pathos, and brain-bending syntax, the dead man slips in his meaning, juggling around the sometimes-awful truth like the fool in King Lear’s court.

The book opens with two quotes–one about the curious nature of philosophy and another about the naturalness of making art. Bell invokes concepts from philosophy, such as Buber’s “I-Thou”, Zeno’s paradoxes, and Occam’s razor, yet the dead man himself is not loyal to any insignia, treating religion, superstition, and science alike, for he “has worn the lone Star of David and the ankh, the good luck rubber band, the medical alert.” Despite this, “he is at peace with the one fact that most informs science, puzzles philosophy, and troubles medicine: that things end.” Continue reading →

Discovering an Artistic Ancestor

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The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb by Mervyn Peake

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

-William Blake

Sometimes a book chooses you. Sheltering from the rain in Black Gull Books in East Finchley, I browsed the poetry section, arranged alphabetically by author, until a familiar surname leapt out at me. I knew Mervyn Peake for his fiction and illustrations, but not his poetry. The opening image from The Rhyme of the Flying Bomb stopped my breath–an infant curled up, crying out into inky blackness. It recalled to me, simultaneously, the earliest images of our son in utero, and our own anguish at his death.

I read the first few musical stanzas about Mervyn’s babe “born in the reign of George”, during the height of The Blitz, down to where “the murderous notes of the ice-bright glass / Set sail with a clink of wings”. It reminded me of one my favourite lines by one of my favorurite poets, the moment in William Blake’s “The Tyger” “when the stars threw down their spears / and watered heaven with their tears”.

The whole poem, and its accompanying illustrations, are Blakean in scope, bringing together images and poetry in a dazzlingly imaginative metaphysical ballad about the resilience and splendour of the human spirit. Continue reading →