All My Poems Are Advertisements for Me, declares one of Mark Waldron’s snappy titles, neatly connecting the writer’s day job, advertising, and the vocation, poetry. It’s something readers might often have suspected about poems, but never dared say. The poem itself turns out to be, oddly, a Wordsworthian and even Heaneyish nostalgia for childhood immediacy of sensation (“the thump and the tug of it”) but finally comes back to the case against art, concluding: “…Death is not what you think it is./ It’s actually what I think it is.” The poem encircles its own poetry with a crocodile grin of hard but pleasing irony.
Death’s conventional link with leaf-fall gets a new twist. In the title poem, the Parisian “city streets are wet/ with an old-fangled rain that feels, rubbed between/ contempo fingers, entirely démodé.” He goes on to explain that “It’s winter and the trees/ have done avec their leaves”: in fact, they’ve choked them, changing them from green to “a purplish black”. Autumnal decline has never looked so villainous.
But what is particularly interesting in the above passage is the lexical collage, which includes oddments of French, the coining of “old-fangled” and, in contrast, the newfangled word “contempo”. Waldron is like a magpie picking super-sophisticated mixtures of gold and dross from an immense linguistic landfill. One poem will use “poppet” as a term of endearment, another has “boat race” as cockney rhyming slang for “face”. Born in New York, living in London, Waldron speaks strange but convincing and often brilliant fusions of idiolect.
His special skill is comedy, but not the standup sort. His speakers expose themselves self-accusingly, defiantly, or bashfully, while at the same time seeming snug as bugs in their tightly interlocked chainmail of precise language. “So I was at home doing the washing up” begins with the speaker’s suspicion that he overuses the washing-up liquid, and works itself up to a demented fantasy of ordering tankers of the stuff to the house “if I could get/ the parking permits”. Such freedom is terrible as well as comic. “Someone really/ needs to have the authority to intervene/ and protect me from myself.” So “surrealism” does what it was always meant to do: it gets political.
Bizarre characters weave their way through the collection. The hilarious Professor Hydrofoil really is a hydrofoil: he lectures imperiously on Hamlet and wears “huge human clothes”. Someone called Manning behaves with a great deal of eccentric maleness before disappearing. I am lordly, puce and done, he declares, with one of his linguistic swaggers.
And there lies the delight of the collection: it gives us a rare sense of the Elizabethan richness of an English that’s available right now. Underneath the defamiliarising ingenuity, the political pretension-pricking and all the narrative verve and swerve, the diction is the real star of this invigorating book.
Meanwhile, Trees is published by Bloodaxe Books (£9.95). Click here to buy it for £7.95
No More Mr Nice Guy by Mark Waldron
This then,
what you actually witness here, before your
very eyelids, is an actual blooming waste of time, in action,
in real time. I squid you not, certain shall we say ‘people’
with a certain shall we say ‘cheek’ have had a go at me about punctuality & punctuation, specifically the use
or otherwise of ampersands & obscenities and rubbish
and whatnot. As well as my peculiar drinking and poking fun
at people with or without disabilities and so on.
Well from now on, from the very next thing I do onwards,
I’m going to do exactly as I blinking well please, which is to be
marvellously wretched & frightened and broken and hidden
