Spring 2020 Pamphlet Round-Up
CD Boyland’s pamphlet User Stories (Stewed Rhubarb) is an accomplished debut with forms inventive and subjects multiple, though often returning to questions of home and the difficulties of making one, whether in the ‘DIY chrysalis kit / off the interwebby’ or the speaker of ‘The Owner’, ‘evicted / from our language’. Similar questions arise in Bibi June Schwithal’s Critique of the Criminal Justice System. Schwithal’s titular critique combines a demand for the abolition of prisons with a searching reflection on familial intimacy and separation. An almost instapoetic immediacy and openness is coupled with subversions of philosophical tropes to compelling effect, crescendoing to the powerful repetition of ‘And you come home’ in the penultimate piece. Carly Brown’s Anastasia, Look in the Mirror, meanwhile, intersperses sharp and funny patriarchy take-downs with ekphrastic poems on the Scottish Colourists. It’s a brilliantly-crafted assemblage full of wit, warmth and panache, ‘a suitcase so full / it would not / shut’.
Fresh from Happenstance are Nancy Campbell’s Navigations and Annie Fisher’s The Deal¸ both fine examples of the tactile lyricism at which the press excels. Writes Fisher in ‘The Fear’, ‘there are known scary things, / unknown scary things and scary scary things’, and while her speaker claims not to ‘think about any of them’, it is among these terrors at the fringes of the everyday that the pamphlet treads. The fear bubbling under the poems is made scarier for never quite being permitted to bubble over, as in a bunch of grapes’ ‘slit-like mouths which feasted / monstrously’. Campbell dedicates her pamphlet to ‘all who travel the waterways’, with many of these poems coming out of her stint as Canal Laureate. Its delightful narrowboats are the only narrow thing here, the poems opening vistas to an alternative way of living, with ‘no wifi out here—just the view’.
March saw the publication of a trio of pamphlets from SPAM Press: Anjeli Caderamanpulle’s boys, T. Person’s Cymbalism & Lemonade and Hannah Read’s Poems by my Imaginary Boyfriend About his Imaginary Girlfriend (who is sometimes me and sometimes not). SPAM’s ‘post-internet’ proclivities play out with hilarious weirdness in Read’s pamphlet, its anomic edges just visible in lines like ‘my girlfriend is the unborn child of a depressed hen’. Person’s experimental approach recalls some twentieth-century postmodernists, albeit with a more finely tuned sense of humour and the absurd (e.g. ‘pick apart several lobes & os / breakfast / before they pick apart themselves / lunch’). Candera-Manpulle’s boys, finally, is self-described as ‘fanfic love poems’, but they are anything but basic—their tension is dark and thrilling. As the speaker of ‘adam driver’ would ‘watch you assemble ikea / furniture for hours i wouldn’t / need to help you are a man / you are a man, a bad poet’, so the repetition destabilises the very concept of ‘man’ as we wonder if the badness of this fictional poet is limited to his lines.
—Calum Rodger