British and Irish Poets on Parade A Contrary review by Grace Wells 
Identity Parade, New British & Irish Poets Edited by Roddy Lumsden Bloodaxe 2010 Buy this book...> Bloodaxe has a long history of publishing excellent anthologies, and there’s something utterly alluring about a thick book of poems, which promises to introduce the ‘new poets’ of any nation. It’s exciting to hold in one’s hands the voice of a land, to hear a collective understanding emerge, to see where its focus lies. Lumsden’s aim is not for Identity Parade “to act as a canonical document of an era, but to spread the word, to educate, to recommend.” The anthology does this well. The 85 poets included offer up enough diversity to please any poetry palate. Someone here will grab hold and become a lifelong companion. For those who don’t know British and Irish poetry, this is a wonderful way in. Each poet is given a small introduction itemising a veritable parade of publications, awards, critical acclamations and reviews shining like medals in the sun. While these celebrity-style tags dazzle, they lack the appeal of a statement of each poet's raison d'être, and, for all their touting, do nothing to alter the fact it is the work which speaks for itself. John Stammers, Kate Clanchy, Andy Brown, Paul Farley and Tim Cumming give stand-out selections which make this book worth buying on the strength of their work alone. Cumming’s entry is one long seduction from its opening lines: It is the nineteenth century, and it is snowing. You’re wearing a long overcoat and heavy black shoes and ahead of you the future’s a white sheet over antique furniture before an auction of all your effects, including even your posture, temper and appetite and what you’re thinking of is food to the delights of his closing phrases, The past was filled with thickets of sex scenes, limbs uncoupling, mouths popping like bubble wrap, hour-long explosions under the ice, the ice opaque with the cloud and stars of constant lovers, the weight of rivers Other engaging entries come from Neil Rollinson, Patrick Brandon and Jacob Polley. It is particularly pleasing to see women poets properly represented—there are more women published here than men—and really satisfying selections of work come from Catherine Smith, Jean Sprackland, Sally Read, Annie Freud and Judy Brown. Work from Julia Copus, Deryn Rees-Jones, Sasha Dugdale, and Kate Bingham also show how there is little more delightful than hearing—in Brown’s words—“the sound of a newly-minted girl unlock her throat.” It’s a shame then that the book’s quest for gender equality is brought low by a cover peppered with gratuitous images of female nipples. Eighty-five poets is perhaps too vast a number, and while the poetry comes dripping with superlatives like “no poetry in English since D.H. Lawrence’s…,” “the most striking and unusual voice to have emerged in British poetry for some time,” “profoundly intelligent poems,” “a revelation,” there are rather too many lifeless entries, and the pace of the collection palls. There are swathes of abstract stanzas and a considerable body of unyielding work that comes across as ungenerous and withheld. Sophie Hannah’s introduction quotes The Guardian newspaper, announcing she is “among the best at comprehending in rhyming verse the indignity of having a body and the nobility of having a heart,” but this focus toward our humanity is not Identity Parade’s main thrust: the book is instead dominated by verse for the intellect. While the work may be forgiven for being dense or obscure, what is truly terrifying is its near total lack of relevance to our pressing world. It would appear that of late, Britain has not suffered government corruption, environmental fragility, gross social inequality, or, thankfully, any unjust wars. Sandra Tappenden writes, “poets are not much use are they/I often think I overhear someone say.” And you’d have to consider that this probably is what they’re saying. Identity Parade contains entire entries without tangible reality, little lingers on, and James Sheard’s lines, “tell me what these things were/and why it was they mattered” seem horribly pertinent. Ahren Warner writes from a place “where sink estates and conurbations/are forgotten”, while the nearest we get to any strong sense of reality is Clare Pollard’s ‘The Panther’, with its …scuffle of commonplace violence,: the friend beaten for a bike, his eye popped out like a tiny moon; the needle-tracked crackwhores smearing dung on our stair-well: the lean dark men in hoods who may have guns. Which had me crying with fury, is this the best you (plural) can do? British perception of the rest of the world is similarly rosy, only Sam Meeking’s excellent poem ‘Migration,’ provides a glimmer of possibility that all is not well. They will not talk of home — fields where shadows bite, where fish sing, where their wages travel by post. They will not talk of pasts or provinces or wives. This is what it means to live your life as a ghost. Yet this is a rare alertness in a book that has largely closed down the poet’s Janus vision to exclusively look out from—as Kona Macphee tells us—“our gentlest selves,” “loosed to float on slow emotions/stirred by twilight and the rightness of things.” Jacob Polley writes “your heart, your sackless heart,/cringes, blind, in its burrow,” and we can’t escape the sense that eyes have been put out. “Do the poets in Identity Parade match their times?” Lumsden asks in his introduction and the answer is a resounding no. Poetry’s relevance would have been better served had Lumsden selected more pressing work from Kevin Higgins, who can usually be relied upon to wryly tell us exactly how it is, or, more aptly still, included the fiercely political Irish poet Dave Lordan. But Lordan is just one of many absentees. When Yeats wrote of Ireland “great hatred, little room,” he might well have been describing the whole Hiberno-Brittanic archipelago, for these islands are dense with inter-tribal disagreements and old wounds, and this book, though it strives not to be sectarian, is, nonetheless, rigid with regional disparity. As usual, and to the book’s detriment, London and the South East dominate. In Ireland there are justifiable dark-mutterings as to why the book includes Ireland, but excludes so many of its strongest poets. Yet the Irish are strongly represented compared to the Welsh and the Scottish, and powerful entries from Sinéad Morrissey, Alan Gillis, Leontia Flynn, Siobhán Campbell, Vona Groarke and Caitríona O’Reilly lend Identity Parade much weight. The poetry world is fragile and doesn’t need any kind of tricks to undermine its integrity, so it’s a shame that Lumsden breaks his own rules: to be included poets needed to have published a first collection, unless, that is, they had debuts forthcoming from Bloodaxe. But for all these minor and major quibbles, Identity Parade remains a book worth having. The strongest of its writers will be with us for decades to come, it’s good to meet them now, to take their work with us. To deride the collection for its failings is to overlook its many fine merits, in particular its real effort to reflect Britain’s multicultural identity. There are excellent entries from D.S Marriot, Bernadine Evaristo and, particularly, Daljit Nagra, whose Sikh Punjabi background gives voice to the most colourful and engaging work presented here; poems that acrobatically display the way poetry from these islands is moving forward with exotic new “lingoes, flecked by the chalk of Britannia!” Grace Wells is an English poet living in Ireland. Her debut collection, When God Has Been Called Away to Greater Things, was published by Dedalus Press in May 2010. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1852248394http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1906614326http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1906614326Reviews.htmlhttp://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1852248394shapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1shapeimage_1_link_2shapeimage_1_link_3

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SUMMER 2010 COVER OLEA EUROPAEA: YOUNG WOMAN WITH EROS ON HER SHOULDER THERESA KISHKAN RENAME THE BIRDS WESTON CUTTER BLUES FOR KIM ADDONIZIO AMORAK HUEY THEY DREAM OF AK-47s LAURA McCULLOUGH ON THIS SPOT MARK HAGE THIS PLACED MATTHEW ROBERSON LOCKED OUT EDWARD MC WHINNEY RECENT AWARD WINNERS SHERMAN ALEXIE MEREDITH MARTINEZ REVIEWS PHILIP PULLMAN SARAH ROSE DAVID AXELROD S.L. WISENBERG EDITH GROSSMAN IDENTITY PARADE Summer_2010.htmlTheresa_Kishkan_Olea_Europaea.htmlTheresa_Kishkan_Olea_Europaea.htmlTheresa_Kishkan_Olea_Europaea.htmlWeston_Cutter_Rename_the_Birds.htmlWeston_Cutter_Rename_the_Birds.htmlAmorak_Huey_Blues_for_Kim_Addonizio.htmlAmorak_Huey_Blues_for_Kim_Addonizio.htmlLaura_McCullough_They_Dream_of_AK-47s.htmlLaura_McCullough_They_Dream_of_AK-47s.htmlMark_Hage_On_this_Spot.htmlMark_Hage_On_this_Spot.htmlMatthew_Roberson_This_Placed.htmlMatthew_Roberson_This_Placed.htmlEdward_Mc_Whinney_Locked_Out.htmlEdward_Mc_Whinney_Locked_Out.htmlSherman_Alexie_Census.htmlhttp://www.contrarymagazine.com/Contrary/Love.htmlReviews.htmlPhilip_Pullman_Jesus_Christ.htmlSarah_Rose_For_All_the_Tea_in_China.htmlDavid_Axelrod_Departing_by_a_Broken_Gate.htmlSL_Wisenberg_Adventures_of_Cancer_Bitch.htmlEdith_Grossman_Why_Translation_Matters.htmlshapeimage_3_link_0shapeimage_3_link_1shapeimage_3_link_2shapeimage_3_link_3shapeimage_3_link_4shapeimage_3_link_5shapeimage_3_link_6shapeimage_3_link_7shapeimage_3_link_8shapeimage_3_link_9shapeimage_3_link_10shapeimage_3_link_11shapeimage_3_link_12shapeimage_3_link_13shapeimage_3_link_14shapeimage_3_link_15shapeimage_3_link_16shapeimage_3_link_17shapeimage_3_link_18shapeimage_3_link_19shapeimage_3_link_20shapeimage_3_link_21shapeimage_3_link_22shapeimage_3_link_23shapeimage_3_link_24
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