Diagnosed with MS, Jon Glover faced tests and apparatus beyond his wildest comprehensions, and was drawn to convey his fascination – and a continuing obsession with seeing things anew – in this collection. Taught by Geoffrey Hill and inspired by Witt
genstein, Glover has a rigorous and uncompromising vision of what it takes to make poems that "click like a closing box". Coupled with a deeply personal experience which became an intellectual passion, he triumphs in conjuring a baffling mimesis, but his failure may be in leaving the reader stumbling behind.
SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE DARK
Colette BrycePicador, £8.99
In her third collection, Colette Bryce is "pacing out the day in frames"'. Spanning from the central, and repeated, motif of self-portraits, evocative of strange self-assessment and assertion, she gives emotional weight to small snatches of time. A secret kiss screened by car wash lather, a spider stalled behind a glass, "all Marcel Marceau", sleeper, suspended in insomnia, these poems are contemplative, careful and shrouded in some kind of stagnant loneliness, seeping with a poignancy most ably captured by her image of a dawn "breaking its heart over Belfast".
LISTENER
Lemn SissayCanongate, £8.99
Listener yokes together many key poems for which Lemn Sissay, like an urban visionary, was commissioned. It starts with a hope for peace "so that storms can go out to sea to be angry", experiments with a little concrete poetry, includes his version of the Queen's Speech and ends on a prose piece. Given the medley of styles, the collection doesn't hang as cleanly as it might, but this adds to the inherent frenzied energy and charm and, despite multifarious engaging riches, such clever rhyming and nimble word-play cries out for audio accompaniment.
The full article contains 301 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
