How The Light Changes
How The Light Changes
Steve Spence
Shearsman Books
I think this is a very important book. It isn’t easy. It is made up of many poems, the parts of all of which are sampled from a multitude of sources. Yet together it all invokes a clear and defined ‘stream’ in culture, running across overlapping zones of popular entertainment, everyday conversation and anxious critical commentary. None of its parts are to be taken seriously, but the whole is very serious; life and death materials. For what Steve Spence has done in How The Light Changes is carve out a way of speaking without a voice, vouched for a language without its body, embedded a text with an intelligence for patterns.
How The Light Changes is the literary equivalent of a fan boat for our digital swamp. The collection begins with an earthquake and builds up to a series of climaxes:“Everything/here seems/strangely/familiar./Not every-/one thinks/that robot/terminators/are a good/idea but....” At times the poems, often melancholic, everywhere contingent, are like movies where the screenplay is coming apart at the binding, because isn’t everything like that? Snatches of conversation are pulverised and their parts reconstituted as micro-tragedies.
I have heard many of these poems read by Steve at Plymouth poetry readings, but only now on the page, with the facility to re-read (“what the hell was that he just said?”) have I grasped the depth of poignancy and the genius of the webs of meanings/un-meanings that he has spun. At times I feel like I have inadvertently tuned into a broadcast by a cub reporter freshly arrived in their first ever disaster zone: “As we draw near it’s/clear the nocturnal/scavengers have/been out in force./Did I hear a hurdy/gurdy in there some-/where?”
Rather than the wreckage of a fuselage or train wreck, however, the poet picks through the detritus of an exhausted society, overheard gossip, outtakes, slogans, the shards of broken superficiality abruptly becoming a mouth full of incisors. And yet “This is like/food in an/art gallery, it looks so/alluring.”
Despite all the banality, horrors and ennui, all these bathetic plunges cannot quite drown the gurgling beast. Stuff goes on, despite the spectacle (and unnoticed by it): “drama? The figure of death/comes at the end of every/scene and carries someone off”, and yet some sort of show somewhere relentlessly witters away, always with the same urgency – “the next twenty four/hours will be crucial” – while its players, us, are split apart: “At the moment the world is/awash with oil but you’re/not you”.
There are a quite a few laughs – “Yes, but what exactly does this invisible man look like?” – and bathos is often reversed, the laughs becoming absurdly sinister: “A shrimp senses a threat”. And when something like hope rides to the rescue, with the prospect of it freeing us from the insistent questioning of the TV quiz master, it comes like “a second/highwayman”; then things, without the necessity of transgression, shift: “‘I love pattern’, she said/At this point we began/tunnelling beneath the/streets”. I love the unexplained gap between the words just before the “tunnelling” begins; for, despite its sampling and assemblages of lonely phrases, such is the dynamic of Spence’s artistry that the intangible is always at a point of manifesting itself: “For the first time the origin/of a thought has been pinned down./Soon our tree canopy will close over”.
Over-reaching science shames itself repeatedly in these poems, which are in some way one single poem; ecology overcoming intellect. Theories of everything fail us in our tiny personal dimensions. In the face of this mass disappointment, there is stoicism: “I think we are going to/carry on without having a clue. Today the/winds will be moderate and fresh”, and though we may keep looking to the sky for signs, and though there may be no insects in the insect house, we can be sure, thanks to these poems, that something ‘else’ is always going on: “What about some shelving around the wall? ‘It’s as/if my mind creates shapes I don’t know about’, she said./In the dim light the grey salt dunes run on for miles”. And even better: “‘We have/a clear view of what society could be like but/we have no way of getting there’, he said./Suddenly, there’s this awkward, swirling/wind”.
While I do not have the full picture, this does seem to be something of a golden moment for poetry in Plymouth with stunning new collections just out from Margaret Corvid (Singing In The Dark Times), Matt Thomas (What I Thought About...) and Kenny Knight (Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend) and fabulous readings seemingly every week from remarkably powerful performers like Spencer Shute and Merris Longstaff. Steve Spence’s How The Light Changes sits well with all of this: gently acerbic, fiercely intelligent, subtly moving and culturally and subversively adroit. I come somewhat biased with my obsessions with the iniquities of ‘the spectacle’, but I think this is a truly remarkably reclamation of something significant picked from the fields of broken discourse and rehabilitated.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews
Steve Spence
Shearsman Books
I think this is a very important book. It isn’t easy. It is made up of many poems, the parts of all of which are sampled from a multitude of sources. Yet together it all invokes a clear and defined ‘stream’ in culture, running across overlapping zones of popular entertainment, everyday conversation and anxious critical commentary. None of its parts are to be taken seriously, but the whole is very serious; life and death materials. For what Steve Spence has done in How The Light Changes is carve out a way of speaking without a voice, vouched for a language without its body, embedded a text with an intelligence for patterns.
How The Light Changes is the literary equivalent of a fan boat for our digital swamp. The collection begins with an earthquake and builds up to a series of climaxes:“Everything/here seems/strangely/familiar./Not every-/one thinks/that robot/terminators/are a good/idea but....” At times the poems, often melancholic, everywhere contingent, are like movies where the screenplay is coming apart at the binding, because isn’t everything like that? Snatches of conversation are pulverised and their parts reconstituted as micro-tragedies.
I have heard many of these poems read by Steve at Plymouth poetry readings, but only now on the page, with the facility to re-read (“what the hell was that he just said?”) have I grasped the depth of poignancy and the genius of the webs of meanings/un-meanings that he has spun. At times I feel like I have inadvertently tuned into a broadcast by a cub reporter freshly arrived in their first ever disaster zone: “As we draw near it’s/clear the nocturnal/scavengers have/been out in force./Did I hear a hurdy/gurdy in there some-/where?”
Rather than the wreckage of a fuselage or train wreck, however, the poet picks through the detritus of an exhausted society, overheard gossip, outtakes, slogans, the shards of broken superficiality abruptly becoming a mouth full of incisors. And yet “This is like/food in an/art gallery, it looks so/alluring.”
Despite all the banality, horrors and ennui, all these bathetic plunges cannot quite drown the gurgling beast. Stuff goes on, despite the spectacle (and unnoticed by it): “drama? The figure of death/comes at the end of every/scene and carries someone off”, and yet some sort of show somewhere relentlessly witters away, always with the same urgency – “the next twenty four/hours will be crucial” – while its players, us, are split apart: “At the moment the world is/awash with oil but you’re/not you”.
There are a quite a few laughs – “Yes, but what exactly does this invisible man look like?” – and bathos is often reversed, the laughs becoming absurdly sinister: “A shrimp senses a threat”. And when something like hope rides to the rescue, with the prospect of it freeing us from the insistent questioning of the TV quiz master, it comes like “a second/highwayman”; then things, without the necessity of transgression, shift: “‘I love pattern’, she said/At this point we began/tunnelling beneath the/streets”. I love the unexplained gap between the words just before the “tunnelling” begins; for, despite its sampling and assemblages of lonely phrases, such is the dynamic of Spence’s artistry that the intangible is always at a point of manifesting itself: “For the first time the origin/of a thought has been pinned down./Soon our tree canopy will close over”.
Over-reaching science shames itself repeatedly in these poems, which are in some way one single poem; ecology overcoming intellect. Theories of everything fail us in our tiny personal dimensions. In the face of this mass disappointment, there is stoicism: “I think we are going to/carry on without having a clue. Today the/winds will be moderate and fresh”, and though we may keep looking to the sky for signs, and though there may be no insects in the insect house, we can be sure, thanks to these poems, that something ‘else’ is always going on: “What about some shelving around the wall? ‘It’s as/if my mind creates shapes I don’t know about’, she said./In the dim light the grey salt dunes run on for miles”. And even better: “‘We have/a clear view of what society could be like but/we have no way of getting there’, he said./Suddenly, there’s this awkward, swirling/wind”.
While I do not have the full picture, this does seem to be something of a golden moment for poetry in Plymouth with stunning new collections just out from Margaret Corvid (Singing In The Dark Times), Matt Thomas (What I Thought About...) and Kenny Knight (Love Letter to an Imaginary Girlfriend) and fabulous readings seemingly every week from remarkably powerful performers like Spencer Shute and Merris Longstaff. Steve Spence’s How The Light Changes sits well with all of this: gently acerbic, fiercely intelligent, subtly moving and culturally and subversively adroit. I come somewhat biased with my obsessions with the iniquities of ‘the spectacle’, but I think this is a truly remarkably reclamation of something significant picked from the fields of broken discourse and rehabilitated.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews