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REVIEWS William
Bedford Helena
Nelson Dilys
Wood
Going, Going...
Leah Fritz, collection, 2007, bluechrome, ISBN: 978-1-906061-20-3 (hardback), £12.99
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,
So
they brought the children―
Why didn’t we see the wall behind the wall? (Brecht)
So whitely,
quietly snow fell on stone,
Within
each mind an open door 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
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 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 Helena Nelson
first published in Ambit, 2008 The personal is also the political in Leah Fritz’s Going, Going... Fritz cleverly uses the colloquial to deconstruct the rhetorical, and the constraints of form to control a restless imagination. In ‘Dr Katz’ for instance the rhetorical “I did not pray the Lord my soul to take” is deflated by the colloquial “old Dr Katz, who gently saw me in / and I saw out”, the humour increasing the shock when the poem ends chillingly with the death of the poet’s mother: “strong arms I sought / in shadowy trees through flimsy curtain folds / now motionless, as death shuts in the cold”. Several of the poems are overtly political, ‘Christmas 2001’ angrily using platitudes to commemorate 9/11 – “The road to hell / is paved with good intentions” — and ‘Dead, Brilliant Things’ deploying complex paradoxes to express a complicated political vision: “We see the sun drowsily arise / yet know it is a dead, if brilliant, thing... / ...The lies/our senses tell us have a truthful ring”. Literary ghosts haunt the second section. ‘Under Westminster Bridge’ revisits Wordsworth’s sonnet to find the bridge “shut / for maintenance” in a world of “gambling games, an arcade travesty”. Sylvia Plath fails to survive Yeats’s house in Fitzroy Square, or the resentment of a passing stranger: “Damn near blew up the kids”. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is left sadly to “decompose” in Florence while her husband is celebrated in Westminster Abbey. The section closes with the fine ‘Making It Clear’, the poet “sinking fast / in depths that may elude me to the last”. This dying fall leads straight into the slower reflective metres of the third section, full of illness and death. A mother visits her daughter in hospital in ‘Istanbul — Two Visits’, and though the daughter survives the cancer hinted at in “benign”, the fear and suffering is quietly clear. The implicit theme here seems to be that in moments of such suffering, we notice nothing around us but our own grief. Cancer is there again in ‘The Cure’: “Her voice so young / in such a ruin of a face, near mine / enough to graze me like a mirror”. The last sequence is a sort of summing up hinted at in the figurative title ‘Book Review’. As throughout Going, Going... the sonnet form dominates to control Leah Fritz’s omnivorous imagination. A short review can scarcely do justice to such an imagination, where range is very much part of the success. This is very fine writing, and I wish I could quote more. William Bedford
first published in Acumen, 2008
(extract from 3 reviews)
Leah Fritz is technically accomplished (including a deftly handled sestina), intelligent without losing any accessibility and shows respect and compassion for her subjects. Her poems focus on people and their relationships with their landscapes, generally urban, and time. Sometimes the myth kitty is raided but to good effect when “Ozymandius Defends Himself”, apparently “misquoted by a mad engraver”, he concludes, “Left to the gritty tendency of sand/ to hide both noble and ignoble deeds/ of man in real and metaphoric time,// as arrogant cliffs disintegrate and land/ docile as pebbles when breaking waves recede,/ my fame would pass, but for that infamous rhyme.” For me the stand out poem was the “Women In The Park” sequence which ends “their infants piggybacked through galleries,/ aware that they are privileged, still know/ the common, deadly pain of giving birth,/ the cord that, broken, tears the universe.” against the backdrop of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. It demonstrates Leah Fritz’s key strength of taking a snapshot applying to a particular time or person and then broadening out to the universal. Emma Lee first published
in Poetry Monthly, 2009
In Going, Going… we find Leah Fritz ‘under Westminster Bridge’ contemplating ‘the world out on parole’. Wordsworth is the first of many poets whose shadowy footsteps she traces through London and beyond. Yeats and Plath are remembered – and their deaths contrasted – by means of their tenure in Primrose Hill. Fritz locates herself by literary tradition as much as by geography, slipping between poetic forms just as an experienced traveller integrates with customs and cultures. This selection includes a ballad, ‘As We Speak’, that comes with ‘apologies to William Blake’, and a sonnet about, and after, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (‘Death in Florence’). Yet this is no mere fan-worship; Fritz’s distinctive voice reads like a conversation with her forebears. While her gaze is predominantly retrospective, she also acknowledges her contemporaries: a sonnet dedicated to Mimi Khalvati betrays ‘What teachers get up to when they’re not in school.’ Fritz quotes Robert Browning ‘The best is yet to be’, but her poems don’t bear out this optimistic sentiment. Despite evident strength of character, she expresses a feeling of powerlessness in the face of change. The title poem ‘Going, Going…’ is a winsome meditation on the aging body’s perversity: ‘… I feel I am a faint/ Shadow in the backdrop, something that the artist/Tried unsuccessfully to hide, something too quaint //For the production that the playwright had in mind.’ While this theme can potentially become a one-trick pony on which a poet rides to the grave, for Fritz the body’s fate is just the starting point for ruminations on social and moral decay:‘Brecht where are you when we need you now?…Where/Are your daughters, where your sons, to blast/Away the dust-motes of despair?’ She writes from a deeply personal context of protest. In an unusual anti-war poem, ‘Women in the Park (Sketches from the Vietnam years in New York)’, the conflict is viewed through the eyes of‘mothers pushing English carriages and talking (yes) of Michelangelo, their infants piggybacked through galleries,aware that they are privileged…’It is an honest account of bourgeois outrage, all the more powerful for being located beyond the conventional heroic guise of the outsider. The most plaintive poems conclude with droll couplets, cast off with a debonair shrug of the shoulders, as a cynical belle might pull a rueful moue on losing the love of her life. The reader gets the feeling that passions run deeper than the poems admit. Some capture the sardonic tone of holiday postcards home, written by an under-whelmed visitor. New York City ‘shines too much as if denying life’ while the poet is ‘seated facing sprawling thighs/trying ostentatiously to read.’ ‘Fruit’, Fritz’s narrative of the Fall, sums up the flight from the garden in an aside ‘How sensible of Eve/to pack a lunch.’ Such light heartedness borders on the bathetic at times, but it saves the poems from becoming sententious. The mocking tone is most effective when sending up intellectual pretensions, such as the discovery of evolution, which is described as a belief that ‘… heaven [is] not upabove at all, but all around, and man emerged,/not from the hand of God, but more absurd,/anonymously from some thumbless ape.’ ‘Book Review’, an ambitious long sequence, concludes the book appositely. It is reminiscent of Breughel’s vast canvases that depict everything at once – both secular and religious scenes, distant landscapes and intimate exchanges. Like ‘Fruit’, the poem’s narrative attempts to explain a religious instinct it is overwhelmingly tempted to mock:‘Men worship what they do not understand./It’s in their fickle nature to adore/what seems impenetrable. They have a gland/for this.’ Fritz begins with Genesis, then charges through the Old Testament, the New Testament and Greco-Roman myths, by way of any of the ‘Books some people long ago…/inscribed on parchment scrolls’. She cultivates a reviewer’s dead-pan tone:‘Notably, some disagreements deal with supernatural events around the Hero’s birth and death. I won’t reveal the plot…’ The idea of a biblical spoiler is a nice irony, and of course we know already that the plot will get steadily worse as we enter the modern period. Eventually Fritz abandons her reviewing persona for a more exasperated invective, on witnessing ‘love /and peace dismissed as jam tomorrow.’ The poem implies that a lot of the blame for faction and violence lies with religious texts:‘These books are never out of print,Though now as relevant as chariots Or the ox-drawn plough.’Whether humankind is better off without the religious sensibility (or ‘gland’) which generates such impassioned beliefs, and hence conflict, is an impossibly complex debate. ‘To sum it/up requires more than a final couplet…’ Indeed. The danger of Fritz’s stance is that her indignation has the potential to sound as bigoted as those she derides. Are books really to blame for extremism? As a poet, she is right to acknowledge the power of the written word. However her exegesis fails to acknowledge the literary and philosophical qualities of a work which, ironically, was part of the canon for many of the writers referenced elsewhere in this selection. Could antagonism be part of the human condition, rather than something we can petulantly blame on studious ‘Zealots’? We come back to the mothers pushing their prams in Central Park.It’s a complicated matter, as Fritz acknowledges, declaring (one might almost say back-tracking) in ‘a final couplet’ – after Sontag – ‘I recommend this with one reservation: For heavens sake, avoid interpretation.’. A hearty warning to reviewers, which I take as a welcome injunction to stop interrogating the poem. Nancy Campbell first
published on Eyewear (Todd Swift Blogspot) Nancy Campbell is a poet, printmaker and the editor of Ellipsis, a new writing series published by Sylph Editions. Her most recent publication, After Light, is a collaboration with the photographer Paula Naughton. She will be writer in residence at the Upernavik Museum in Greenland during 2010. |
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