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This month, we're posting a review, rather than an essay, because I can't locate one on our shared base that doesn't require copyright clearance. But this will be rectified soon. Lee Wilson is published by Survivors' Press and his reviewer became, long after writing this, acquainted with SP and is now a trustee! - SJ
Phil Ruthen
Lee Wilson
‘You’ve got an eyelash’
Survivors’ Press 2006
ISBN 1-874595-13-5
Pages: 70 Price: £7.00
Available from:
Survivors’ Poetry, Studio 11, Bickerton House, 25-27 Bickerton Road, Archway, London N19 5JT http://www.survivorspoetry.com/
Lee Wilson’s defection to creative writing from higher education study and previous assumptions of cult musician status endows poetry with that rare event – the poet’s coup of presiding over a collection that consistently holds the high planes of innovation, poetic finesse, genuine tenderness, and crafted excellence. ‘You’ve got an eyelash’ follows previous chap books, and I gather there’s the Swallow it 3 CD from a poetry launch in 2005 ‘floating around London Music Stores’ where Lee Wilson can also be heard, and for which knowledge I’m indebted to John Stiles’ ‘The Polka Dot Ceiling’ re-published review on www.insolentboy.com.
This collection’s production does credit to the poet and the press - the typeset, paper and textual layout is effective, and it’s good to find the resurrection of the dust-cover (a small point – on a reprint I suggest the author/title details are needed on the plain covers currently beneath).
I found it difficult to extract parts of poems from their wholes to present in this review – Lee Wilson writes as if each poem is a précis of its own entire universe; that these universes are likely to be your own but you hadn’t realised, or had struggled to articulate is one of the collection’s triumphs. Also, it’s tough to write a combination of despairing-optimism without cynicism, sentimentality, or futility, and Lee Wilson achieves the equilibrium. He maintains respect for a humane existence that sees possibility as something to be realistically approached, as potential rather than a sublime drift into a collective deception:
…I’m the agnostic; she’s the believer.
One of us
is hopelessly wrong.
One of us squints. One of us, pointing, says:
You’ve got an eyelash there, look. One of us,
looking away, at a reflection in a spoon, replies:
It’s not an eyelash it’s a scar.
(from the title poem ‘You’ve got an eyelash’).
As the cinematic quality of the narratives follow through, the interlinked emotions, lives and expressions produced from honesty - a good faith Real - offer possibilities of what could be progressively different in our world, if it’s wanted enough. This is all the more pertinent as often poets forget their calling to write the future, remaining passive recorders of the past. Lee Wilson’s collection is attached to those tropes hauling contemporary poetry’s raison d’etre to its proper place -
…pears, Diet Coke, microwave curries – all these things should that be the inclination. (from the first and last stanzas of ‘Wooden Spoons’). Other aspects that impress are the poet’s consistently apt line-breaks, with considered and gauged line lengths, rhythm, and progressions in meaning. It is not sound-bite poetry; the left-positioned political resonances in Lee Wilson’s poems give up more than any transient banner could provide, and makes for joining with the poet in the poetry, in those un-realised scenes from life: Our bus is caught in traffic ...Looks like graffiti to me, Where the bleach is in his own home… (from ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking’). The over-riding tonal impression can be felt in - what is for me a key poem - ‘The will to dance’. The poem’s characters, set possibly in a devastating medical situation, rise to celebrate ‘desire for desire’s sake -/an objectless/coursing of it/’ in the presence of someone who can ‘…beckon and accommodate feeling...’: You do this (from ‘The will to dance’). The understated subjects divert the full thrust of the poems’ developed charge just long enough, and no more, to allow the satisfaction to remain with the finished poems in their complete reality. Then, the poetry’s piercing light suddenly arrives again from later reflection, opening the closure of early 21st century life all the more effectively, circumventing ‘standardised’ poetic devices. The lasting impression is Lee Wilson writing of people and their wider relationships in terms of how it is, how it could be, and in reading this collection, how poetry really is: (from ‘The will to dance’).
Her tentative rowing
has taken her
to the other side of the river. It’s this
or having her swimming laughed at.
seem beautiful. A shiver with winds
from California, and then she’s back
beached with these only trophies
any human being can accept
and remain human,
by a newly pasted question. ‘How hard can it be
to keep a hospital clean?’ the poster reads –
the graffiti of someone who needn’t know
with a rippling of your spine; the wave of an arm; a leap:
a tiny lexicon, that refuses
the hammers and knives of syntax.
…Celebratory colour buds within us,
like love on an encephalogram
Review Copyright Philip Ruthen August 2006
First published in The Poet’s Letter Magazine Online, August 2006, to whom grateful acknowledgment is made.
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