Decade of Cu ts
nick-e melville
Blue Diode Press
Decade of Cu ts compiles nick-e melville’s numerous pamphlets and smaller press limited edition publications into a ‘new and selected’ anthology published by Blue Diode Press (2021). In a title that directly points toward scarcity, the form of melville’s poems—which is teeming with experimentalism: collage, erasure, and white space—reflects this as the work traverses the mundanities that make up our everyday lives. These mundanities, from poems such as ‘TESCO’ and ‘baby spinach’ to ‘cookies’, highlight the variance in melville’s poetry, as well as the disturbing way ‘cuts’ can fester in our lives. This collection contemplates the bleak contradictions of a capitalist society and the way language plays an inherent role in the way corporations squash us. Indeed, as melville writes ‘you can’t be soft in this world / you just get squashed’ (‘squashed’).
Language and its idiosyncrasies encourage the humorous element here. In the poem ‘the super market’, Tesco’s slogan ‘every little helps’ is turned into ‘very little helps’, mimicking the same font as the original. Similarly, in ‘We’re all in this’, melville combines the use of the word ‘together’ that appeared in the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrats manifestos for the 2010 general elections, further evoking a moment of recognition and the thought that if we cannot laugh at the bleakness, what hope is there?
Much the way thoughts flit in and out of the mind, melville’s work embodies a similar quality. The overwhelming relentlessness of government cuts, which the anthology critiques, is paralleled with the various forms used, as in ‘letter of omission’:
FLIGHT F IGHT
the frivolousness of words becomes acute—the terrifying nature of a language which can have an almost playful quality, is contrasted with the way that same language is used in treating human lives as discardable bodies. This feels particularly notable in the poem ‘2017 cuts’, that ends with the line ‘CUTTING THE LIVING’. The humorous or playful quality that is often evoked is always subverted by the jarring realness of the ‘cuts’.
melville deftly uses records and data to create poems which challenge, question and allow us to navigate our doubts about the claustrophobic and repressive power structures in place. Spanning 230 pages, Decade of Cu ts forces the reader into facing the very real question: what on earth are we going to do about it all?
—Memoona Zahid