Every Salt Advance — Andrew McMillan (Red Squirrel Press, 2009)

Andrew McMillan’s poetry is strongest when he follows his own personal dictum, and allows his poetry to ‘deal with the unpoetic, with the everyday and the mundane’. At his finest, McMillan is a young poet of ingenious and rare power, able to strip bare the pretences of academised page poetry and write sincerely, with candour, cleverness and humour. You can almost hear his warm, Barnsley accent in every page. He brings tradition with a contemporary twist. Take ‘please’, for instance:

don’t look at me
just hold my hand
and dance
like I like
to think
they must have danced
on the Titanic
before the iceberg
and the drowning
and the films

Choosing the modern informality and modesty of the lower case, like e.e. cummings, McMillan builds a swift intimacy with the reader: placing us as a lover, asking of us a purity of emotion before the crushing finale and the last line, a sardonic anapaest that reveals the merging of historical event and cinematic representation as two tragedies back-to-back, which divorce and detach us from our innocence. The poem is a delicately placed trap, a curious and heartbreaking metaphor for innocence and the potential catastrophe of failed love. The dancers on the Titanic, we’re reminded, were killed twice: first by the catastrophe, second by droll, cinematic representation. This sort of postmodern flair is without the gloating and nonsense making that so often accompanies a generally obscure movement. McMillan is a writer of excellent poems of deep personal feeling and closeness, though despite his broad-ranging display of technical skill and knowledge of poetic forms (every page seems to have a mis en page unique to it), he is still learning his own tongue, developing the skills of his trade. If one or two poems do miss the mark, are slightly out of key, they’re far outnumbered by the devastating assurance of poems like ‘6:30am’:

sleep had been singular
so long
that on waking next to him
I felt like the submariner resurfacing
amazed to find the world survived
with so much air
such tundra of sky

Every Salt Advance is a serious poet’s apprentice work. The anxiety of influence may be obvious, and there are nods, references to Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin, Kenneth Patchen, and, understandably, Ian McMillan. A self-consciousness runs throughout the collection, in terms of influence, and its place in the canon, which forces questions as to whether the referencing and multiplicity of forms is postmodern eclecticism, a poets delight in exuberance and challenge, or simple anxiety – a lack of control over the style and subject matter. For me, there are enough successes in the pamphlet for that simply not to matter. To his credit, he answers those questions directly in, again, a self-conscious poem entitled ‘influence’:

when flicking through pages reveals
your flight stub

when I smile to know you flew
famous Seamus to Seoul with you

when I think of it stuffed
in your luggage,

beside the notepad and the
international calling card

when I think of essays
on the Troubles, two clauses

of a broken nation

when I think of throwing Digging
across demilitarised zones

like a dove,  of how
you take French poetry

to France to help you
read it better

when I think there must
be some sort of Korean

proverb for times
like this:

나는 나의 아버지의 아들이
I am my father’s son

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Buy Every Salt Advance from Red Squirrel Press here.