Book review: Running Upon The Wires, by Kate Tempest
Born in 1985, Kate Tempest is unquestionably one of the major poets of her generation, beloved of both the poetry establishment (she won the Ted Hughes Award in 2013 for her epic poem Brand New Ancients) and the performance poetry set (Scroobius Pip once described her as “annoyingly good”.) Her latest collection, Running Upon The Wires, was born out of a period of heartbreak, as she split up with one partner, but also a period of joy as she fell in love with somebody else, and a period of immense confusion in between. To reflect this, the book is divided into three sections: entitled “the end,” “the middle” and “the beginning.”
If we were to go hunting for Yeats’s changeless works of art, we might reasonably expect them to occur in the first third, where the poet is at the point of maximum despair. However, the majority of the poems here feel tentative and insubstantial. Tempest tends to be at her best when she builds up a head of steam, as in Brand New Ancients, where lines and lines of tightly-coiled verse come tumbling out of her with a cumulative force that’s impossible to resist.
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Hide AdBy contrast, poems like “Headfuck” and “Getting Out More” feel almost throwaway, not just lacking in scale (both are less than ten lines long) but also in terms of intellectual ambition. It’s hard to imagine either of them being accepted for publication in a literary magazine if they didn’t have Tempest’s name attached. In “Not now but soon,” Tempest shows that she can pack a lot of ideas into a few lines when she chooses to, and in “Awake all night thinking of you” and “Things I do in our house since you left” she at least recaptures some of the rhythmic energy that makes her best work so compelling, although both of these poems culminate in whimpers rather than bangs.
Things get more interesting, if not necessarily more artistically satisfying, when we reach “the middle.” Two poems here – “Moving on, crawling back” and “I don’t want to go backwards with her any more, I want to go forwards with you” are highly astute studies of the minute but significant nuances that can make or break adult relationships.
It isn’t until “the beginning,” however, that Tempest seems to rediscover her equilibrium, both emotionally and artistically. No one poem stands out, but as a group the work in this final selection provides an honest, witty, mosaic-like view of love in the 21st century.
Running Upon The Wires, by Kate Tempest, Picador Poetry, 54pp, £9.99