the past is properly and disturbingly present, like a corpse in the house. Sam Riviere on Bobby Parkers hot-off-the-press debut collection, Blue Movie: It doesn’t take long to realise that the poems in Bobby Parker’s ‘Blue Movie’ routinely visit places most poems wouldn’t dare to look; the cumulative effect of the book is a bit like watching someone unpeel strips of carpet from the floors of a room you know well to discover masses of teeming, unexpected life beneath: here is horror, hilarity, inanity, longing, deprivation, love, cruelty, loss… Reading Parker’s poems is like studying the undersides of those writhing, ragged strips. While this work is avidly and darkly concerned with personal histories, there is no comfort, none of the easy nostalgia that remains the touchstone of so much UK poetry here: the past is properly and disturbingly present, like a corpse in the house. I have rarely encountered work that risks ‘too much’ and ‘not enough’ with such frequency, recklessness and exuberance – perhaps it is through the relation of these extremes that the real contemporary richness of Parker’s work trades: it is here it places its special wager. The most surprising thing about these poems, considering their bleakness, is the lasting sense of excitement and hope: defeated many times over, these are poems still besotted with language and life, and they present a fresh challenge (and genuine cause for alarm) to the cosy refinements and polite distinctions of the vast majority of contemporary British poetry. They rub the shit of real life into literature’s carpet. They dare you to think they’re kidding. They are never the first to blink, or to turn out the light. - Sam Riviere.
Posted on: Sun, 02 Nov 2014 21:19:35 +0000
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