REVIEWS                                  Dilys Wood                             Helena Nelson

Going, Going...

Leah Fritz, collection, 2007, bluechrome, ISBN: 978-1-906061-20-3 (hardback), £12.99

Review by Dilys Wood:

Leah Fritz, a New Yorker by background and essentially a poet of the urban scene, is long established in the poetry world here. This is her fourth collection, handsomely produced in hardback (hence high price) by one of the new poetry publishers on the scene, bluecrome. At seventy odd pages, densely packed, with good layout and presentation, worth the money...

Fritz’s poetry fizzles with life and wit, technically skilled, pointed, highly intelligent and often moving. She makes full use of formal form in the modern ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ manner. There is ‘bite’ throughout―poems snapping smartly to their close, sometimes with a sonnet couplet, or a neat paradox, or both:

dead by all accounts, turning slowly,
pig-on-a-spit, they wonder why nothing’s holy.  (Rembrandt)

                               So they brought the children―
bottles, diapers, prams―into Times Square.
Police on horseback waited for them there.      (Women In The Park)

Why didn’t we see the wall behind the wall?     (Brecht)

So whitely, quietly snow fell on stone,
laced the terra cotta and was gone.     (Piazza San Marco)

Within each mind an open door
           shuts as we speak.   (As We Speak)

Fritz is an urban poet, not so much of the urban landscape (though that is here, Venice, Florence, Naples, Istanbul, New York, Paris, London, with a marvelous pairing of poems about Westminster and Blackfriars bridges) but of the whole span of the city or polis: the culture, the politics, the demos, the sophisticate celebrations, the meetings of movers and shakers (including even poets), the way we hide away in our built environment as if it’s for ever. She offers this scene as truly vibrant and almost satisfying but in her best work sharply undercuts complacency and crass ideas of what is important, “The city / shines too much as if denying life”.

I liked the poem What I did in Naples which, as the poet struggles to define her relation to the city, is punctuated by voices expressing all the cliches about travel. I enjoyed the poems (and there are several in which this is a key element) which deal with fickle fame: “Do you remember when you wound a watch / every morning and it never stopped? / Now when batteries run down it’s dead. / I wonder whether Dali’s are still ticking?” (The Persistence of … What?).  I like the way that modern icons―going on a demo, enjoying food with friends, trawling for sexual encounters in a bar, are kicked into touch with a few sharp words or laid aside with melancholy, “and even / now in praise of martyrdom sing maudlin / hymns”.

The soul of this poetry is unusual. I would almost call it Augustan, Eighteenth Century, or Latinate (Horace) in spirit. She is also highly ambitious―I liked her longer poems (Fruit, in sonnet form, and Book Review, mainly in sonnet form) for the wide scope of both, though, compared with her toughest short poems, these are inevitably more diffuse.

Dilys Wood

first published in ARTEMISpoetry, Feb 2008
re-published by kind permission of Dilys Wood and
Second Light Publications

Review by Helena Nelson:

What a lovely thing to have a collection in hardback these days, attractively presented with a full-colour cover!  So it is a shame that the typeface is mystifyingly small, especially given the age of your average poetry reader.  However, put on your reading glasses.  It’s worth the effort.

These poems are accessible, well-made and easy to relate to.  Fritz is a good formal writer and the work in this volume is never less than accomplished.  It’s a pleasure to move inside the swing of her metrical lines and careful patterning, and it always feels like poetry that’s going on ― art, but not artificial.  Having said this, I think the weakness, if there is one (this may be partly a matter of taste), is that sometimes the neat rhyming and metrical closure can sound a tiny bit too slick, as though the form is achieving something but not quite taking the reader with it.

‘Dead, Brilliant Thing’, for example, which is a nicely-turned sonnet, rehearses the way people invest in illusion that logic can’t bely:  “The lies / our senses tell us have a truthful ring”.  Fritz goes on to suggest that people are still dying illogically as martyrs (this poem immediately follows one written after 9/11) and her closure is a resounding couplet.  I’m more convinced by the beauty of its flourish, however, than the depth of thought:

Outside broad daylight hides a rage in store
for shadows that unmask their metaphor.

It may be argued, successfully I think, that it’s impossible to define what makes one combination of lines exactly ‘right’ whereas another doesn’t … quite do the trick.  It’s a mystery.  But there are poems in this collection where Fritz penetrates that mystery.  She combines movement, form, feeling and thought ―and bingo ― what a stunning effect!  I loved ‘Dogs’ for example, and I’ll end up with part of that:

                                           and my
sweet mongrel, brought from Battersea, who roars
her disapproval at the neighbour’s cat but shies
at raindrops beating at the window ― slow
and ever slower stalks the gathering snow.

Helena Nelson

first published in Ambit, 2008
re-published by kind permission of Helena Nelson and
Ambit

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