Daily Archives: January 3, 2016

Wild Nights: New and Selected Poems by Kim Addonizio (Bloodaxe, £12)

Poetry, Review,

Even by their own standards, 2015 has been a particularly strong year for Bloodaxe. Standouts include a definitive J.H. Prynne volume, a bilingual Hans Magnus Enzensberger edition, and stunning debuts by Rebecca Parry and Jane Clarke. Now, at the turn of the year, Bloodaxe gift us with yet another essential addition to the poetry lover’s bookshelves.

Kim Addonizio is already widely anthologised courtesy of her seminal, full-throttle poem ‘For Desire’, and she’s published half a dozen collections in America, along with several novels and works of critical non-fiction, yet this is the first time there’s been a UK edition of her work. It’s long past due; but well worth the wait.

Addonizio belongs to that school of American poets whose work is direct, almost conversational, and indelibly keyed in to personal experience. I’d be tempted to compare her to Raymond Carver or Fred Voss, only I can’t imagine either of those gentlemen rocking a pair of killer heels and the kind of red dress that wouldn’t be out of place in a Lana Del Rey song. “I want that red dress bad,” Addonizio writes in the rhetorically titled ‘What Do Women Want?’; “I want it to confirm / your worst fears about me / … I’ll wear it like bones, like skin, / it’ll be the goddamned / dress they bury me in.”

Wild Nights offers nearly 200 pages of compressed and provocative poems on love and loneliness, desire and bad decisions; poems that have known too many blurry sunsets and too many hungover sunrises and still go out looking for love in all the wrong places; poems that hang around neon-soaked bars with a broken heart and might well break yours by the end of the night.

But there’s more than just Bukowski-style barfly philosophy to be found in this collection. Addonizio is ferociously honest and has the talent and bravery to nail down painful subjects and thorny life lessons in precise but finely nuanced language. She can also be wildly (and inappropriately) funny. Take these lines from ‘Penis Blues’:

A penis has taken flight.

Probably gon’ fly all night.

There’s a flock of penises headed south.

Their cries recede over the distant car dealerships,

over the darkened pleather interiors

and the stoned janitor, slopping his mop

in a bucket of dirty water.

The imagery is low-brow and ludicrous but chucklesome for all that. Yet there’s an undertow of melancholy. Apposite, really, for a poet whose work returns inevitably to the rhythms and imagery of blues music, be it explicit homage to Robert Johnson (“Look down into the river, I can see you there / Looking down into the blue light of a woman’s hair / Saying to her Baby, dark gon’ catch me here”) or the poignant sequence ‘Suite pour les amours perdues’. But if her individual poems are three-minute odes to the human condition, Wild Nights as a cohesive whole is more akin to the immersive emotional experience of a Mahler symphony. One where the conductor rocks a pair of killer heels and flocks of penises wheel above the concert hall.

Neil Fulwood

M Train by Patti Smith (Bloomsbury, £18.99)

Memoir, Review,

For some people in Aberdeen sometime in the 70s, their introduction to Patti Smith was a large graffito saying “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”, painted up on the back wall of a city centre church. It stayed for quite a while. It’s the sort of thing that punky people did back then. To them Patti Smith was a star.

 Forty years on Patti Smith is still a star, rock’n’roll royalty, though any newcomers picking up M Train would be hard pushed to notice that she leads a band. The main reference to her role as a singer is when she spends a summer “working” which earns her the money to buy a broken down house by the sea. It is, however, pretty much rock and roll to buy it without a survey I guess.
Smith was visiting the area, Rockaway, in part to get a free coffee from Zak. He’d worked at her favourite Greenwich Village cafe, ‘Ino (correct spelling), and she’d offered to invest in his seaside cafe. I presume she did that, though it was left unclear. Unfortunately the cafe was wiped out in a hurricane as was the boardwalk it stood on. At least in the book the author does not worry about her investment. Rock’n’roll again.
Her love of coffee runs through this book, if it’s not a black coffee at the cafe (always served with brown toast and a small bowl of olive oil – in tribute that’s what I’m having now) it’s a large deli coffee, or another cafe somewhere, in some country. Mostly she visits these countries to go to the graves of authors she loves. In North Africa she visits the forgotten grave of Jean Genet and in England she visited – three times – the well-known grave of Sylvia Plath where she tucked a “small spiral notebook, a purple ribbon, and a cotton lisle sock with a bee embroidered near the top” by the headstone. Hmm.
Throughout the book she obsesses about the writers whose work she loves. After a while you can almost guess who they are. Come on in Murakami, Henry Miller, Paul Bowles… It’s just the right side of wearying, leavened (though there must be a better word) by the melancholia of the book as the spirit of her late husband, the musician Fred Smith is never far away. But she doesn’t half mythologise authors, after meeting two she says “All writers are bums, I murmured. May I be counted among you one day.” One day might she also meet an editor.
Had she met an editor he or she would have stopped so much repetition. I lost count of the times she “grabbed her watch cap” before going out. What is a watch cap, I kept thinking. Google… Doh, it’s the thing she is wearing on the book cover. The same sort of head covering I’ve worn all winter. The nearest, perhaps, I’ll ever get to a rock and roll lifestyle.
Ross Bradshaw