A wonderful collection of Brooks' work. I would have loved an editors note on what was chosen, and why they structured it essentially back to front. IA wonderful collection of Brooks' work. I would have loved an editors note on what was chosen, and why they structured it essentially back to front. It starts with his newest stuff and then works backwards to his first published poetry collection The Cold Front. It's a really strange decision because in effect it creates a Benjamin Button type effect as the poet ages in reverse and his interests seem to disappear into the ground rather than bud and bloom. As such I'd recommend reading this backwards. Go to the back of the book and read The Cold Front first and then work your way towards the most recent Peanut Vendor.
Brooks' early fascination and interest in nature turns into full blown conservationism and veganism, as animal rights becomes the main focus of his poetry. Unfortunately, while a few of those later poems are touching, many of them function like blunt instruments and sorely lack the delicate touch of his earlier work. I understand that it's probably impossible for him to disconnect from the rage he feels at our treatment of animals but it's as if he's become an idealistic teenager in his seventies. Oddly, if you were to read the poems in the order they've been printed in this anthology you'd feel like Brooks grows up and abandons his early idealism for a more circumspect maturity, when it's actually the reverse.
I'd say The Balcony published in 2008 is his peak and the following work shows more his growing obsession with animal rights than a complete mastery of his craft. He has captured place exceptionally well, for example I'd challenge anyone who has spent some time in Cottesloe to not recognise The Pines, Cottesloe, I was transported there immediatley. His imagery is just so evocative.
...Already in twos and threes the gulls are returning and one late crow labouring like a man in mid-channel.
I've been that man in mid-channel and I've seen those gulls.
While sometimes he can be quite whimsical and delicate as in...
No Point In Staying Up Longer
No point in staying up longer, thoughts all sad and astray, the Six Sisters sound asleep long ago, and the seventh away, Orion gone off with his hounds somewhere and the Great Bear sleeping, Castor and Pollux and Aldebaran so far up in the mountains now dream-chasing no one is calling them home.
Later this year I'll be getting married by the sea and for some reason this poem made me feel like I'd already had the wedding and this experience was exactly the one I'd had:
Gift
After we had paid the singer, and the guests had gone and we had cleared away the food and the glasses, I went outside again and the moon, which had been so high over the dancers, was already four times larger and even more full, setting over the hills to the west, sharpening the outline of the pines, making the ridges shimmer, and I thought of it shining on the other side, beyond Isola, a long silver path on the rippled water, and of the silent ships out there some of them with their lights still burning, and of the sailors on watch, smoking, and drinking quietly into the night, and of what they might be thinking, and I realised that, undeserved and against all odds, something extraordinary had come upon me, a great happiness, and for once I didn't question it, didn't ask why.
There are quite a few poems about writing poems. So Little, Golden Tongues, Barnyard Revelation Poem, No Poem For Weeks Nows to name a few.
There's also plenty of humour and he got many a snort out of me with poems like How Not To Be A Cosmologist and Without Warning. It seems however that humour is replaced by a burning rage about our cruelty to animals in his later work. Things that previously would have been funny become just straight up grim.
There's something about this one that is so spot on. I haven't spent much time in the Balkans but it's certainly how I imagine some women from there. It's a shame about the final line because I actually feel like it lets the rest of the poem down.
Balkan
She's still at the age where she thinks that she's immortal, smokes too much, drives far too fast, has the patience of split quicksilver, can drink almost anyone under the table, claims that she has a special dispensation from God, maybe because she met the Pope once, more likely because she's seen some things and knows how to farm a secret; has a revolver in her wardrobe, a fetish for knocking into people on the street, hates, like she loves, unconditionally, always gets what she wants, wants me.
Favourites are as follows:
The Cold Front - The Promises - The Swineflower
Back After 8 Months Away - So Little - Without Warning
Walking to Point Clear - Dinner at Midnight - The Pines, Cottesloe
Urban Elegies - Night Rain - Menindee - Pentecost
The Balcony - Wait - Balkan - Gift - Damage - No Point In Staying Up Longer - Twelth Night - Pater Noster - Yes
Like a methodical watchmaker Blain has put all the parts together but the result is just a simple device to keep A well constructed but joyless novel.
Like a methodical watchmaker Blain has put all the parts together but the result is just a simple device to keep the time. Many reviewers have commented on the ever present rain. Well the novel is set on a single rainy day so the ubiquity of the rain is to be expected but I think far more disappointing than the ever present pathetic fallacy is the relentlessly grim inner lives of the characters.
Esther, the central character, seems expected to forgive her philandering husband and her sister's ultimate betrayal. But that act is all but impossible given how contemptible they are as people. Her sister April has a bit of light boho artist to her which makes her slightly charming but the husband is a scumbag's scumbag. Even if Esther could bring herself to forgive them the reader certainly never will. Why couldn't their supposed charm and intelligence have been written into the story? They really needed some more facets. They look rather like old cut stones than the brilliant cut diamonds that a domestic drama like this needs. When the plot is just mundane middle class activities, the story lives and dies by character.
Given the nature of Blain's death it would be hard not to read autobiography into this, even though other critics and her friends have assured us there's none.
The clever plot device of Esther unwittingly working through the central problems of the novel with each of her clients is smart in theory.
Ester’s appointment diary is open.
9.30am: Louisa 11.00am: The Harcourts 1.00pm: Daniel and Sarah 2.15pm: Chris 4.00pm: Hannah
In her head she sees the structure of her day: post-natal depression, school aversion, relationship crisis, death and loneliness. Lawrence used to call her diary the Happiness Book.
But nothing of huge importance is said in those therapy sessions, we get a few glimpses into Esther but that's about it. The analysis needs to done by the reader in their own head.
It's no surprise this book was published before 2017, when Donald Trump's election basically ended polls as a serious part of society. In some ways Blain's character Lawrence's fiddling with his numbers almost comes as some sort of prescience with regards to how spectacularly wrong the polls came to be in that seismic event a year later.
I feel like I've levelled the same criticism at quite a few works in a row. So I want to make it clear, I don't mind a book that's bleak. My favourite writer is probably Erich Maria Maria Remarque who writes about some incredibly bleak circumstances from WWI, the Great Depression, and then WWII. But the difference with Remarque is that he knows the value of hope. He knows that when you have nothing else, you can make meaning out of the air and breathe magic upon it. And that to live without meaning is to die.
The other thing you learn from Remarque's work is that humans perceive through contrast. We need shadow and light to be able to make things out. Without the combination you end up with impenetrable darkness or blinding light. While Blain seems to understand the need for contrast, such as by setting the novel in a single day but scattering it with flashbacks from 3 years prior, or her use of Esther's client's issues against her own, she doesn't fully achieve contrast with her tone. And so rather than bold colours, or even stark black and white, we just get a relentless and pervasive grey. Which is probably an apt way of summarising the existential issues of the middle class....more
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