ABODDIES COLD: SPECTRE
nicky melville
SAD Press
nicky (aka nick-e) melville is a poet whom I have elsewhere described as ‘avant-radge’, combining linguistic experimentalism with acerbic social critique and a rootedness in the lived experience of contemporary Scotland. His concrete poetry has appeared in international anthologies (with another example appearing in the present Gutter), but I am particularly fond of the more lyrical direction his work takes in 2017’s ABBODIES and this, its sequel, ABBODIES COLD: SPECTRE. This book-length poem acts as an seismograph recording the disparate micro-quakes of a macro-paranoia, its speaker questioning the correspondences between (among other things) the music of ABBA, the sighting of buzzards, Edinburgh bus tours, the atrocities committed by the British state and, by no means least, the cinematic universe of James Bond (one of the eponymous SPECTREs that haunts the text). It’s a thrilling read, ‘putting the pop into / apophenia’ (the tendency to perceive patterns between unrelated things) as its opening lines suggest. It’s infectious too—by the end, we too will be asking of the world, as in the poem’s recurring refrain: ‘coincidence?’
melville uses brief, jaggy, free verse stanzas throughout, flitting from image to image like an internalised newsfeed. The culminative effect, as coincidences layer upon coincidences, is both vertiginous and profoundly satisfying, in the way that puns and patterns so often are. But the delight in wordplay and cultural reference points is undercut by the absolute terror that motivates them, as the poem notes ‘we are cowering / and terrified of the future’. The very real causes of this terror are thrown into sharp relief, where fiction blends into fact and vice versa.
How are we to reconcile the limits of paranoia with the genuinely dystopic characteristics of our present age? As conspiracy theories run rampant in a climate of untruth, melville’s book offers a way of thinking through them on an affective level, without (one hopes, but the risk is real) falling prey to their false certainties.
It is also, implicitly, a challenge to the idea that poetry is a soothing, humanist balm that will take us all out of this mess. Like conspiracy theories, poetry is made of patterns and puns; it too is a space of apophenia. But as melville notes in a barely perceptible shadow text on the right-hand margin, ‘the spectre of the third realm haunts / even the scientific imagination’. We neglect this ‘third realm’, or take it for granted, at our peril. melville’s achievement here is to have mapped it with the requisite craft, doubt, humour and fear.
—Calum Rodger