The Brand New Dark
Mark Waldron
Salt £12.99
Dreams and the body, and their interaction, are perhaps the most
dominant themes in this weird and wonderful debut collection with
its egalitarian blending of mind and body, self and world. Here the
world is also a body, a pulsing entity containing and interchangeable
with the human body, whose thoughts too are part of the physical
experience. ‘The Well-Dressed Street’, featuring recurring
character Marcie, exemplifies this blending, whereby all aspects
of Marcie, from ‘the pressed uniform/ of her comeliness’ and ‘her
ludicrous blood/ full of its minute wheels’ to her ‘smart
body’ and ‘pocketed self’ are but layers of the
whole, and she in turn is worn by the street and ‘the walloping
sky’.
Waldron is particularly skilful at pushing an image through its
own bizarre logic towards an unexpected and pleasing finale,
as in ‘The
Sheets and Pillowcases’, which carefully outlines the narrator’s
crazy fear that the pattern on his bedclothes might slip beneath
his eyelids in the night and work its way behind his eyeballs, finally
severing his optic nerve – the poet appears to have a particular
fascination with eyes, which are squeamishly evoked as symbols throughout
the collection.
There is a knowing, peep-show lewdness to Waldron’s work, which
gives The Brand New Dark its cheeky energy. Legs are envisioned as
tuning forks ‘quivering your knickers down’; a girl’s
sleeping body is seen as her ‘scented buddy’, her ‘self’s
pork dolly’; Disneyworld’s Mickey Mouse recalls Minnie’s
smell from inside his suit; and in a clever pastiche of the ‘alas,
poor Yorick’ genre poem, the speaker imagines the dirty thoughts
once contained within ‘this nut/ of thinking meat’.
But alongside all this sex is melancholy, notably
in a sequence based on The Magic Roundabout, in which the dog Dougal,
unrequitedly
in
love with Florence, comes to realise the insubstantiality of his
cartoon world. It is against such insubstantiality that this striking
collection ultimately triumphs, reimagining life’s imponderables
as vibrant and tangible – and delightfully kooky – the ‘world’s
bright juice’ running through it all.
Emily Berry reviewed this in issue 196.
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