Poetry chapbooks by Bearded Badger Publishing Company – reviewed.
Bearded Badger Publishing Company has produced seven chapbooks during 2021 on its poetry imprint TRA[verse]. Here are the last three. There’s a lot to enjoy – the range of style and subject across the seven collections is rich and involving. As I probably say too often, for me reading poetry improves the reading and writing of prose. It’s almost as good as a walk in the woods.
Numbers (ahem) figure strongly in this collection. Like all fake occultists, I love messing with numbers and letters. Characters, you might say. Early on, in Breech, a trace of a familiar one. We were born upside down, he sings, born the wrong way round. That’s normal, the opposite of breech birth, but the explanatory footnote hangs from an asterisk that’s a black star.
There’s another black star in Comfort Zone, this time a collapsed star, a black hole. And Network 23 threatens to invoke the Kopyright Liberation Front. Or should that be King Lucifer Forever?
Photo Album presents snapshots of lives, viewed through the filter of subsequent years. A life, lives, lost before explored or achieved. I think fans of Un(in)formed by Sonia’s fellow TRA[verse] poet Becky Deans might enjoy this one, and vice-versa.
More lost lives, along with lives which never started, as we reach Inconceivable. This one is really masterful and perhaps my favourite in the collection.
But the world of these poems is not without hope. Pomegranates contains the seeds of the future. And Ode to England addresses the present. This one must be fun to read aloud, and appeals to me because Ode is exactly how people in my old hometown would have said Old.
Audio Signal Processing takes us to a slightly creepy festival of metaphor, and I just love those sleeping giants. Always nice to have a few of those in your writing, I feel.
We return to the numbers in Tidings, and this time, you need to know the rhyme – or the TV theme, if you’re old enough to remember the 1970s. Despite the shadowy title, this is a collection like the magpie’s, full of shiny things.
A Derby-based poet? This’ll be Eyeless in Garden Street, then! Oh well, please yourselves.
Strong start here, with eye-catching neo-nouns like tempt and swept in Cutting. There’s hurt, brutal language as a chest cracks like a skull. Piercings poke a hole through the skin with steel kisses, and the speaker of All I Will Say threatens to club the sun to death.
The Clown gives us more – the Clown got pronoun – as they took out a knife/placed it to their skinny figure, and in A Grim Tale (I mean, are these titles playing with meaning, or what?) the storm thrashed and beat the ground, after which there are ripped legs and a raped face to contend with. This is a violent world in which, as my foot kills the cigarette in the final poem, we wonder whether the speaker here might be New Year’s Day itself.
The cover image let me anticipate an urban cousin of TRA[verse] poet Rory Aaron’s Doglike chapbook. But this world is also full of emotional and relationship concerns, amid admissions of weakness and frailty. It’s reflective, as though the hooded figure sprayed onto the wall of the cover might be a monastic observer, remote from the street below. And some of these insights arrive as flash poems, tiny jewels of glimpse – Oliver, you’ve got me at it with the neo-nouns now.
I’m going to enjoy living with this little volume, getting to know the poems and finding more of what is un(dis)covered.
A travelogue, a set of postcards sent home, interspersed with memories of the family, including the late Uncle Joe, who gave her the travel bug. So the contrasts are between the exotic and the familiar, the heady and the homely. But we find a trace of each inside the other.
A scorpion, cousin of the comparatively unthreatening spider, dies to teach us the value of our own small things, after which small things come to the fore. This is a collection with a narrative, perhaps the strongest in the series since Rory Aaron’s Doglike. But still it works like Uncle Joe’s slideshow, frozen moments projected before us from the pages’ carousel.
Details, closely observed, emerge more than wide landscapes or rolling seas. Wrist bones and pickled peppers, settled dust and side streets. But then, after redacted letters and retraction into cracks, the text leaps loud across the closing pages, romping concrete and free past the sky, beyond trees, unbound and unfound until finally grounded, hungover and weary but spangled and angular still.
Looks like I didn’t manage to work in a reference to David Bowie’s 1979 album Lodger, but in summary of a reflective and involving chapbook I’ll settle for this, from Ulysses:
“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”
David Gladwin 