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Michael Schuller reviews James Brookes’ impressive debut poetry collection.

In the practice of woodturning, the block is placed against the lathe, which cuts against it on each rotation to expose a cross-section of the grain. That image – of the revealing of a mesmerising pattern latent in the structure of the material itself – is as close as I can come to summarising the poetry of James Brookes. He is a poet who has an unusual command of the language, the sort of writer that one images sites in front of a pile of books with a scalpel, rather than a page with a pen. But make no mistake; Brookes is no tryhard with a thesaurus. Even if you struggle to keep up with his myriad vocabulary and historical references, the poems themselves are attention-holding for their craftsmanship alone. Take, for example, this excerpt from the opening poem, “Requiem for an Invasion”, which imagines the recovery of one of Henry VIII’s warships from the bottom of the Solent:

By freight going landward,
our half of the Mary Rose,
sleeping through polyphonies of weather.

A hand snagged in the water.
Trowels and airlifts and gentry wafting silt.
Whorled, our native churchyard verdigris,
across the steeps
of chalk-familiar cloud, the hills of samphire.

Although Brookes draws repeatedly on historical events and motifs, his interest doesn’t actually appear to be the passage of time. His focus lies on the interrogation of the trappings of empire and state, and the individual human dramas that are implied by the vagaries of human enterprise. The giveaway here is probably “Moff Jerjerrod Redoubles his Efforts”, a short and sensitive internal monologue from the ill-fated commander of the second Death Star. Against “Robespierre faces the Scaffold”, the juxtaposition is almost too revealing. Figures like these appear repeatedly throughout the book, from Longinus to King James I to Mao, either in the copious and sometimes tangential epigraphs, or speaking directly from the body of the poems themselves.

There also seems to be some concern here about what role the trappings of empire have in the modern world. Brookes is more subtle (and less decisively antagonistic) than, say, Larkin (his “when will England grow up / it makes me want to throw up” being a case in point), but “The Star Chamber” finishes with a drawing of the chemical formula for Turbull’s blue, Ferricynaice, and the tension is acute. Like “Near All Hallows”, into which lurch Feynman and Planck’s Constant (rendered deliciously unpronounceable by the use of the mathematical symbol), there is an ambivalence about traditionalism in the face of the empirical.

The only fault here is that in his profusion of deft constructions and interrogations, Brookes sometimes doesn’t stop to enjoy the details of the immediate, mundane human experience sandwiched between his set pieces. There is much said, or implied, about kinds of philosophical and theoretical strains of contemporary Britishness, and plenty of images of the land itself. So when he does relax into a personal mode, as in “Concerning Plunder”, the resulting work becomes quite poignant.

Although he is unafraid to pile in Latin and Old English and epigraphs befitting his position as a librarian, Brookes is no dour classicist, and nothing about his writing is stuffy or staid. He is empathetic without being a romantic. If he does not permit himself more humour, it isn’t for lack of a certain wryness in style. Like all good poets, he’s willing to see his obsessions through to their natural end, even as he puts into the mouth of Walter Raleigh the rejoinder, “I think you want words indeed for you / have spoken one thing half a dozen times.”

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James Brookes is a poet, librarian and teacher residing just outside of London.Sins of the Leopard is out now, published by Salt.

Michael Schuller is a poet, bookbinder and reviewer for Annexe. 

[Remember, dear reader, that this is a duplicate article. All Annexe articles are posted primarily to www.annexemagazine.com - Sooner or later they won't be here at all!]

South London writer, Clare Fisher, has been crafting a series of short stories that exist as snapshots of the city. Different aspects and different perceptions of London grow out of Fisher’s narrative description. We caught up with her to chat about the project.

How long have you writing?

I’ve been writing for quite a while. I started seriously at university and followed it with a creative writing MA.

What forms do you enjoy writing in? 

Always prose. I enjoy reading poetry, but I struggle with writing it. Generally short fiction is my thing. It’s harder to keep at a long project. Not that short stories are easier, but you can finish them!

So, the The City in my Head is a series about London. Have you always been London-based yourself?

Yes, more or less. Though I’m about to move to Leeds for a while, and I’ve spent the last few months in France. I feel a little nomadic at the moment.

How has that distance affected your view of the city? Has it changed the writing?

I certainly made me appreciate it more. And I actually had the idea for the series [The City in my Head] while I was in France. I wrote a lot of short fiction while out there and realised that each story was based around a particular area.

How did you start forming the stories into the current series?

I’d get an idea for a story and I started to see that the actions of the characters came from the area the story is written in. The area would become a character too. They formed into a group naturally.

I’m interested in the idea of how when you walk around a city you don’t know anything about anyone around you. You  start to make up stories of your own. I wanted to explore those.

How long have you been working on the series so far? 

A few months now. Since around November. I don’t know how long it will go on for yet! So far there are four stories finished and online: Marylebone, Kilburn, Peckham and Waterloo. Those are the ones I’m happy with so far.

Have the stories come from your own experiences?

It’s a mixture of places I’ve been to and know, and places that have caught my imagination.

Is the series following a particular journey or direction through the city?

I thought about trying that, but a lot of the stories include not just the place, but also journeys to and from them. The directions are all over the place. Like the Peckham story is in the form of a journey planner, telling different ways to get there.

That’s a very specific way to structure the story. Have you set out for a particular style in the series?

No, I didn’t set out for a particular style. Usually I try to get into the voice of the character and explore the area like that.

There is a psychogeographical tone to the project. Have you considered constructing journeys through the city to find stories?

Absolutely. I figure I’ll eventually run out of places if I don’t go out and find new areas to write about.

What would you look for?

I don’t know really. Whatever seems interesting. I’ve lived or worked in the places I’ve written about. So maybe something along those lines. I’ve been writing some of these stories while away. In some ways that helps to clarify things. I do worry that I’d lose the detail though. Now that I’m back I’ve just been strolling and noting things I see.

So, I guess there’s an autobiographical tone to the stories too- 

In a way, yes. Fiction has to have a personal element. That’s also why I called it The City in My Head. I wouldn’t want to make any sweeping statements about the perceptions of the city. It’s all from my personal experience. It’s similar to what Craig Taylor conveys in his Londoners book. He shows that there’s such a variety in London and certainly he gets really close to a snapshot of the wider view, but I don’t think I could do that as well as him. I am happy to write about things I haven’t experienced, but for this project I don’t think it would feel very authentic.

Where do you see the project going?

Keep building it up. In a way it’s hard to say when it will stop because it could go on forever. The aim is to publish the collection.

You mentioned Craig Taylor. What else have you found that has influenced you?

Definitely that book. Often I find with inspiration, it takes a while to digest something so you don’t always know if it has influenced you directly or not. I’ve been reading a lot of Adrienne Rich poetry. She’s one of those writers that really reminds you why you write.

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Clare Fisher’s The City in my Head can be found on Notes From The Underground. She will also be reading some of her work at the Annexe Words on Cities event in April. More on that very soon.

Grown-up grandchildren visit their grandmother after a fall. Paul Nash’s story unravels a family’s sadness in their grandmother’s final days.

The Fall
by Paul Nash

They had known of course, that she was getting older. You could not help but notice she was getting older. They were all getting older. And, to be honest, it had initially started as a bit of a joke whenever they mentioned how small she was getting these days. Smaller physically definitely, and perhaps, if they cared to admit it, smaller in herself too.

There had been brief discussions about dementia. Of Alzheimer’s. Of trips to the doctors. Of tests. Initially these merely amounted to generic statements in and around the same theme: she’s getting older; these things are to be expected; at her age.

But it did come as a shock, when she fell.

There were the usual hurried phone calls and a visit, when it could be arranged, of the grown-up grandchildren.

For the grown-up grandchildren it was both a trip down memory lane and a fraught experience. They had spent, about fifteen years earlier, many afternoons after school at their grandmother’s flat. Mainly while their mother was still at work and generally on Fridays. In a way coming back to her sheltered accommodation block, in the same town they went to school, represented a revisiting of an extension of their childhood. Of afternoons spent sitting in her tiny bric-a-brac filled living room, eating sausages and beans, or spam and chips, and listening to tales of what the “bitch” next door had been up to that week. Which generally amounted to said “bitch” drying her washing on the line outside their grandmother’s windows. Which was, to be fair, exactly what the line was for. But any suggestion of this fact was duly given short shrift, and might delay the arrival of cheap and cheerful Bakewell tarts. So these suggestions were kept to a minimum.

So coming back, even these circumstances, was at least initially an almost pleasant, sepia-tinged experience. Until they actually entered the flat. The cliché held true: everything seemed so much smaller than they remembered. Including their chair-bound grandmother. There was an indefinable, almost acrid illness about everything within the flat. Their grandmother was a lot more fragile than any of the grandchildren had seen her before, even with previous seemingly much more serious health scares. There was a pallor about her that suggested defeat. On her arm was the tell-tale almost skin-tone arm brace, the result of the fall that had briefly hospitalised her. She remained firmly seated in her chair. It appeared that she was spending all day and all night in this small chair. To all intents and purposes this tiny corner of a tiny room now represented her entire world. Everything was arranged around her to be within relatively easy reach, and arranged in a minute detail that would become more apparent during their stay. Their relatively short stay.

There was her walking stick, leaning at a precise angle against the arm of the chair. Which in turn was kept in place by the basket bin at the foot of the stick. Directly in front of her was a tallish pouf, wrapped in a plastic sheet, with a tray on it for the little food she could actually manage. On the side table there was a hospital style plastic water receptacle. Again, very definitely place.

And then there was the blanket. The innocuous, thick, square patterned blanket wrapped tightly over her legs. She spent an inordinate amount of time fussing over the blanket as they discussed, or rather tried to discuss, if she was feeling better? was she happy with the carers? was there anything they could do? But it was difficult to rouse much of a concerted response. So it was left to them to do most of the talking. She couldn’t even bring herself to call her next door neighbour a “bitch”. Which was telling in itself.

As the grandchildren busied themselves trying to be helpful and making the one thing they had been told she would eat – ham sandwiches on white bread – they couldn’t help but notice with some sadness and self-reproach that this is exactly what the carer before them had brought, and was in fact, what the previous family trip had brought too. She must have been eating ham sandwiches day in, day out. So they gingerly ate their own sandwiches and watched sadly as she stoically mushed her own meek portion.

The one constant was the obsessive re-arranging of and fussing over the blanket over her legs. Which continued unabated even when her strapped and broken arm was clearly being hurt by her insistent hectoring of the blanket. She repeatedly tucked it down the sides of her frail body, making sure it covered her legs, but very pointedly that it did not go under her feet. This continued all the way through the grandchildrens’ well-meaning but ineffective attempts to lift her spirits, to try to gleam some source of positive progression in how she was feeling.

There was a sudden, yet slow growing look of discomfort, of panic. The grandmother clearly needed to leave the chair, but also wanted to avoid the trauma as long as possible. But eventually the moment came: she needed to go to the toilet. There were efforts to try to help her, which she attempted to bat off until it became clear she did in fact need their help. Eventually she was helped and guided to the toilet by the youngest grandchild. The grandchildren were then left in the tiny living room alone to shoot hasty glances at each other, full of awkward sadness and no small amount of guilt. But there was nothing they could do. Especially considering the very difficult nature of their relationship over the last ten years or so. She had always been a difficult, even spiteful woman with adults. (Children were more her forte.) They were already doing more, just by being here at all, than was realistically expected of them. But still the guilt remained.

One of them made the mistake – when their grandmother returned awkwardly, painfully, and full of inexplicable shame – of trying to help her with her walking stick. She had placed the stick back in its very exact place, against the arm of her chair. But in her painful haste to sit down the stick had fallen. They rushed to help her put it back in what they thought was the most accessible position. But it was not the correct position. Their grandmother’s anger at this breaking of her invisible rules was instant, panicked and surprisingly aggressive. It was the anger of confusion and fear. It actually scared her, this stick being ever-so-slightly out of place.

In her growing anger and shocking vehemence she bitterly accused them of moving other objects around the room while she was out, as if they were playing a grim joke on her. After many kindly protests that they had done no such thing, and even carefully showing her that they had not, they had to effectively agree to disagree. The routine of the blanket then began all over again. The folding, and the re-folding, the placing just so, the examining, the making sure the pattern aligned with the now almost visible invisible lines of her small insular world. All the while smoothing the blanket into place with a growing air of open desperation. Then the stick again. Then the water receptacle. Before her attention inexorably turned back to the blanket once again. Always the blanket. It was finally horribly clear to the grandchildren just how far the dementia had taken hold.

The grandchildren all had other places to be. So they busied themselves washing and cleaning up the kitchen, talking of another possible visit next month. She ignored them now, and focused solely on the blanket over her legs.

Near the end of the visit, in a sudden moment of clear-eyed clarity she called the eldest grandchild a “smart boy”. Nominally because of his shoes – she was once a seamstress and always professed a love of “fashion” – but perhaps mainly because, in that briefest of moments, she could see in his eyes that he understood what was really happening here. She was dying.

But it was also an admonishment.

They said their goodbyes.

They all drove home and went their separate ways.

Two of the grandchildren were together when they received the next late-night, hesitant phone call from their father. Their grandmother had fallen again and was back in hospital. The grandchildren expressed a desire to come back early the next morning for the first visiting session of the day. But even that would be too late – her body was shutting down. She would be dead before they even got on the train.

The “smart boy” asked their father what had happened. There was nearly always a carer or her long-suffering “companion” with her, after all. It appeared she was still insisting on sleeping in her chair and, their father supposed, she had simply got up in the middle of the night and fell.

Most probably she had tripped over her blanket, which must have finally come loose during the night.

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Paul Nash is a London-based writer and works in publishing production. He has written and co-produced and number of successful comedy and drama short films, including Salsa Guy and Stand & Deliver. He also writes sketches and script edits for new sketch group Treacle Town. Paul is currently developing a number of television comedy and comedy drama projects, and writing more short fiction.

Image by Paul Burn.

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