The Return of the Man Who Has Everything - Rupert Loydell, poetry book review

Waiting for the Plumber

Rupert Loydell needs things fixed but he knows this isn’t going to happen. Being broken is a natural order of things in his world and even the poetry – trying to weave the threads of disarray and disintegration into meaningful material – will not cope with the sheer amount of disrepair. Water is leaking in from somewhere, life is getting wet, and the plumber will not come.

But there is a will to make do, to make it better, and even fix what can be fixed as in the poem Broken Circuitry where

‘Now that we know how to fix the car

I keep a spanner under the seat’

As discerning readers we know the car and spanner are obviously a car and spanner and clearly not a car and spanner. Reality and metaphor will not sort themselves out, and the paradox of living with such ennui and triumph [I think I am being figurative/hopeful in overstating the latter] becomes the narrative for all of the poems in this collection that reject the coherence of narrative.

Much of that pervasive ennui is exemplified in the two poems Stay Home and Moodometer, the second an ironic creation because it doesn’t take too complex a gadget to gauge the emotions being consistently expressed. However, I do think an approximation to ‘triumph’ – such mood/feeling/spirituality has to be relative to the suffering – can be found in the poem Staying Afloat:

‘…..Varnish over the screws,

the truth and don’t worry about the small split

in the side of the hull: once in the water

it will swell up and everything will be alright.

There are stripes of pink and blue sky

in the sea towards St Ives, there are spots

in front of my eyes and the sun has not yet

burnt through the morning haze. We will

break our journey here, rest a while and then

move on. At last we are ready to sail.’

The way the poems as a whole express such tensions and occasional resolutions is through the noise and voices that are everywhere, the ‘general hubbub of the world’ [Karaoke Voice Removal]: those from unknown places, in a pub, within his head, the words speaking aloud from a letter, the TV/radio, lyrics in a song, words shouted or suggested from a book of poems, the confused sound of narrative – Loydell extrapolates from this babel the most conversational of heartfelt [though he would reject this term, read here] to apocalyptic truths about love and writing and work and death, and the rest. He writes poems that are ‘Climbing the walls to heaven/gym ropes to hell’ in order to reach those truths [Ill-Matched].

There are patterns in his technique. At times it is subtle, as in O Children where the lyricism moves into the direct observation of everyday, mundane life in the shift of a few lines. Elsewhere it is playful, as in the recurring jokiness of starting lines, for example, ‘I like the idea of siestas/but they only send me to sleep’ [Lipgloss & Shine] – and there are a number of other boom-booms like this; then it is evocation, as in ‘The fat man and his girl are in the angel’s doorway/blocking my line of sight as a moonlight voice/sings about winter’ [Premonition], and there are the teases, as here, ‘….If you think of madness/as not being sane then I am going mad’ [Photosynthesis] where this insertion in the poem of a seemingly off-the-cuff aphorism has a casualness made poignant by the shocking platitude of the line, and what Loydell has revealed about himself – well, whatever self he is occupying at that point from the great variety at his exposal/disposal -  in almost all of the poems.

But perhaps he is just angry. Fed up. Bored. Honest.

All the poems in this compelling collection illustrate these opening observations in varying degrees of content and mood. Catching Up is about the collage of writing/life, piecing together extracts and the disconnected found, like piecing together the disparate experiences that make up who we are – but only at the moment of composition? It is making poetic sense of the ‘ghost society that inhabits/our subconscious’, but as fleeting perhaps as the spectre that drifts in and out of what we hear and experience on any ordinary, repeated day [and that, I acknowledge, is quite a pompous line, something Loydell always avoids and why these poems are so convincing in their conversational flow and directness].

Waiting for Luke is about having a drink before a book launch he may or may not attend - such is the uncertainty at every level, it seems, of his life in these poems – but then suddenly he writes ‘….And why/does the depression that so many of us share/break up marriages and tear the world apart?’ That could sound a little trite out of context, but it comes after a series of similar questions that occupy the ordinariness of the event recalled and yet their collective weight of uncertainty is quite - I could say profound, and it is, but it doesn’t sound so which makes it real for the reader and therefore empathetic.

That further empathy for the reader of my age is how the poems concern themselves with the other dissolution - getting older. Under the Radar bothers itself with how things change and how it is harder to keep up with this. It links the world of work that never pays enough, nor rewards enough in other ways, to considering – more implicitly than explicitly - why we endure this and other diminishings in our lives:

‘…..Meanwhile

the door lock became a swipe card

and the whole marking system changed.

The journey toward summer is more

convoluted and confused, no slipping

out under the radar this time it seems.’

There would appear to be the explicit consideration of that link between work, pay and well-being in the poem Fourteen Days to Pay, but it isn’t as simplistic, nor naff, as that. This is a poem again about the passing of time and experiences and the ability to experience, so there is that persistent sense of loss, but also being ‘safe’ in the immediacy of counting the days before pay to settle the bills whilst also being hugely aware within that domesticity of how redundant these pay-offs – literally and figuratively – are in the larger scheme of things. This mix of realities is summed up in the closing lines:

‘…..The trouble with growing up

is growing old and knowing that we do,

the trouble with listing your troubles

is that however many times you read them

you still don’t understand exactly

how they work out the final bill.’

Lest this seem overly morose material - which it is not as a collection, and the humour constantly buffers/counters - there is the next poem to write in full as it defines quite simply, and again without any pretence, a more accepting outlook:

Ahead of the Game

I have already marked

next year’s submissions

but am worried about

timetabling the year after.

I have rehearsed tomorrow

until it has replaced today

and have forgotten to say

goodnight. You do not seem

to think it important, but

I wait for every kiss and touch,

have been visiting the future

to see how it goes. Look:

that’s me, way over there.

I haven’t changed at all,

have decided not to die.

And there’s another boom-boom to remind of the lightness [not that any of these apparent excusing caveats are intended as such, and Loydell is rightly confident in whatever the moodometer wants to hear in his work], the ‘Gravity was everywhere back then/but I didn’t let it get me down’ from The Taller You Are The Shorter You Get, a poem that seems constructed from a variety of sources, as so much of his work always is, presumably the title here from the album by band My Dad is Dead.

It seems to me that the real mix of moods is articulated though the cohesive wrestling with being weary and being creative – a simplistic pole to draw here as near conclusion, but that has been the core dynamic as I have read. I have lived comfortably with these poems over the last few days, always wanting to read more, always seeming to connect with those variously manifesting moods and being compelled to do so by that conversational creativity which informs these poems as a whole [important to state as Rupert Loydell’s work to date is expansive in the way it can be experimental – another term he would reject in the same interview referenced earlier – and stylistically varied]. My actual conclusion will be a mention of the poem On the Other Side of the Mountain - the intention to tempt others to want to read as well - and it is the observation that this poem is perhaps the most lyrically conversational exposition of the existential I have ever read.

Take that to the edge and enjoy.

You can buy the book here.