Katy Evans-Bush, Egg Printing Explained (Salt)
Following up the debut, Me and the Dead, KEB's new book perhaps extends her range from the spectacular, expansive stories into a variety of further forms.
Thibault's Ribbon is representative of the book in the way that it brings together the exotic with the ordinary in an account of the poet Gerard de Nerval taking his pet lobster for a walk. And it is such synchromesh of everyday and extraordinary, expansive and economical, perhaps even passionate and ironic that makes one wonder if the Anglo-American style is a mixture of American panache and English restraint. But I wouldn't want to make any such claim.
The larger scale, broader poems here are most engaging in The Desiring of Practically Everything, a look back on some gauche adolescent attitudes, and Forth in July, in which time stands still at a moment of alarm in childhood. Both are memorable and successful poems but my preference is for the more formal and compact You're in Bedlam, which takes the idea that all previous conversations are recorded in the surroundings and walls of a room,
The noise is in the walls. We hear it daily,
recorded by the bricks we live among.
Our curtains hang on tuning rods. No, really.
You'll screech for ages when your song is sung,
and, The Night is Dark, a build up of neuroses and inner trauma in the small hours that at first I read in my dyslexic glance as 'You're made of what you're afraid of ', and I wish it still was but it's,
You've made what you're afraid of.
It's a poem I'd love to have written myself if I hadn't done a very similar thing once and praise doesn't come much higher than that.
But between these poems, and outside of them stylistically, are a pirate Prufrock pastiche, some post-concrete wordplay in On a Note by Louise Bourgeoise and Meditation on a Freudian's Lip. It seems like only last year that another Salt book ended on a quiet evocation of Hammershoi, and in fact it was. That exhibition must have been crawling with poets. And I might reach my limit with cerebral references at dear m magritte - 'it says it isn't / a pipe/ but it is.' Well, I thought the conceptual point was that it wasn't a pipe but a picture of a pipe but once I have to go to the next level and consider whether it is a pipe again or if it always was, I remember that I don't like short poems, think that three lines is never enough and move quickly on.
But with The Mermaid, What's Time, Conneticut Postcard and more, there's plenty to enjoy here, carrying forward the impetus of Me and the Dead impressively and divertingly.