I remember antdays, that one day of the year that a particular breed of flying ant is everywhere and the next day have gone. It happens about this time of year. I would ride through swarms of them in the Hampshire countryside. And I remember Antdays, Kona Macphee's poem, being in Magma - I think it was- last year. It is one of several memorable poems in this new collection. The insects are,
the offered-up, the flight-blessed, fertile supplicants
of chance, aloft on likelihood's indifference.
Some purist might object to the mere listing of adjectives as if having thought of so many descriptors the poet finds it unnecessary to form them into sentences but there can be too many rules and guidelines and this is a fine poem that captures exactly what it sets out to.
My life as a B movie is beautifully done, too, stringing together film cliches to offer an account of a life built on set-piece unlikeliness to cheap comic effect 'all heavily foreshadowed'. It is presumably about fiction as well as about life but it is best enjoyed for its knowing humour without too much fretting over meaning or intention.
As the blurb promises, the poems 'range wildly'. There is a recurrent theme of encounters with nothingness, the aridity of Dry country, the 'growing wrap of absences' in Singularity, the empty, bought gestures of Rentboy, and more but they are all in different contexts and try out a variety of poetic forms so that one feels that Kona Macphee is one of the least formulaic poets one is likely to find.
I nurture a personal prejudice against poems shorter than, say, eight lines and so the haiku, aphorisms and vignettes here are wasted on me even if the Three sketches of a mandible are well-observed and realized. But I thus have no complaints about the extended argument of Prodigal, which seems to envy the footloose and devil-may-care escapee but has learned that there is more to be lost than won,
Would you learn, at last ,that any heart
will shred to tatters when what hauls it on
is some crazed engine hulking in the dark
of what it can't unlearn and can't outrun
and we end with Paschal (for Muldoon) which seems to take issue with that poet's Hay and rather than celebrate the packed hay accordion of potential meaning, regrets the blank of unseen consequences of inaction,
this much we will not know.
(it might be a tautology to say 'from whence' here)
It's a highly likeable book and a pleasure to read, achieving just the right tone of joie de vivre with regret. And it has one of the best covers I've seen for a while. Never essential but it doesn't do any harm either.