For crying out loud. First Mark Haddon wrote a stellar novel with the original, memorable and perceptive The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. As one writer said about another writer's book once before, I wanted to steal it and pretend it was mine. Then he casually follows it up with a good book of poems, The Talking Horse and The Sad Girl and The Village Under the Sea.
Of course, there's nothing casual about it. Based on the quality of these poems, Haddon has worked on poetry for a long time. The best poems in the collection have strong images, a timeless quality, and seem to exist with an intended meaning that's enjoyably just slightly out of focus, as in A Rough Guide:
Be polite at the reception desk.
Not all the knives are in the museum.
The waitresses know that a nice boy
is formed in the same way as a deckchair.
Pay for the beer and send flowers.
Introduce yourself as Richard.
Do not refer to what somebody did
At a particular time in the past.
Remember, every Friday we used to go
for a walk. I walked. You walked.
Everything in the past is irregular.
This steak is very good. Sit down.
There is no wine, but there is ice cream.
Eat slowly. I have many matches.
On first reading, it's loosely coherent but a little puzzling, particularly in lines three and four and the final line. But good poetry leaves room for at least some mystery, and I particularly liked this element in his poems. Some of these poems hammer together abstract ideas, and Haddon isn't afraid to throw in the kitchen sink. A poem like The Seventh Circle starts with werewolves, and winds around to include bitching servants and the crashing steel market, though ultimately it happens to be among the few poems that takes flight in a few too many directions to be really successful.
There are also themes of inclusiveness to be found here, or at least the idea that we're all in this together, along with subtle signs of optimism. In Cabin Doors to Automatic, the two stanzas begin, "We take off in a lightning storm," and "This is how we leave the world," and in Trees, we find that trees are not endangered but quietly dominant: "Or you will wake at your aunt's cottage, / your sleep broken by a coal train on the empty hill / as the oaks roar in the wind off the channel." Haddon crafts his poem The Model Village carefully, with short lines, as if to reflect precision: "We got a helicopter last year / strung on fishing line / above the plastic lake," and notes "Only small things matter."
Haddon refrains from diving into details that are obviously lifted directly from his life. Instead, Thunderbirds are Go has the crew growing idle and reminiscing. A poem like Christmas Night, 1930 sets a scene ("This was your room once") but Haddon wasn't alive then and the poem doesn't explain further. But the work here succeeds on its own terms, even if it can't be pinned directly to the life of the poet. And let's face it, personal poetry can work well if it's highly original, but it's also admirable for a poet to exist in a poem indirectly, reaching for something external but doing it in a way that's unique to them, and new to us. Haddon creates many separate worlds here, where "the dead seem so authentic" in photographs, where he has the courage to attempt a simple lullaby ("nothing dies / so close your eyes"), where a very human, yet unnamed man wakes from a recurring dream in which his wife fucks the pool-boy, where the world goes on fast-forward, where cats have a better chance of surviving in hell because they "can dance on hot bricks." Of course, it's possible to infer things about Haddon from the poems, but they aren't spelled out. Though there are many worthwhile moments here, I believe his most successful poems are his shortest, simply because they're the sharpest, and carry both weight and focus. Have a look at Black:
It comes as a surprise to find that hell
Is the same house you've lived in these nine years.
Two orange stains beneath the kitchen taps,
birdsong in the yard, those floral curtains.
But you're not at home. Not by a long way.
That fist of wet meat in your chest
will not let you forget. The seconds pass,
as slow as that frozen age before the child
hits the red bonnet of your skidding car.
You light a Marlboro from the dog-end
of the last. Outside, shoppers and workmen
swim through their day like dolphins, ignorant
of how they do this stupid, priceless trick
you once knew. The phone rings. Your cigarette smoke
does its poisonous little ballet.
Despite my fondness for the shorter poems here, I'd be very curious to see a book length poem by Haddon. Whatever our somewhat mysterious author may be, he isn't a narcissist, as his empathetic and unique novel and poems have shown. Canadian poet Irving Layton said do not speak unless you can improve on silence, and Haddon certainly doesn't raise his own voice unless to take a worthwhile stab at something. Certainly, I'll be early in line to get the next Mark Haddon book.
Alex Boyd is co-editor of Northern Poetry Review.
Ten years ago we worked together at Chapters, and here we are in 2007, both of us with first books published this year. Aside from feeling I'm getting on a bit, I remember a poem of yours where you talk about carrying around The Collected Works of Billy the Kid on your back as though "an extra muscle"; did it help inspire this collection about another historical figure?
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Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift's 'Seaway' is both a 'greatest hits' collection for those who've already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. Swift, after all, has been a tireless champion of a distinctively cosmopolitan, open-minded, post-modernist strand of contemporary writing for quite some time and his work as an editor and ferociously scrupulous blogger in Budapest, Paris and, latterly, London has all too frequently occluded his reputation as a poet with a singular ability to be simultaneously learned, playful and profound...continue reading