Short, sharp reviews of all sorts of things.

Simon Forster's "10 Little Stories" is a collection of ten strange and mythical tales, with forays into fantasy, sci-fi and horror.

The stories have about them the feel of fairy tales--told succinctly and matter-of-factly, the magical mixed with the mundane. These are, however, anything but children's tales. The opening story for example focusses on a chair in a torture chamber. This, along with the later "Feathers" and "Old Hands" are examples of the shorter mood pieces that establish the tone and feel of the collection.

These flash fictions are seperated by longer, story-oreintated tales, all of which share the same perverse charm. In these stories, Forster's style is often rough around the edges. Sentences such as "Lenny knew exactly how it felt and empathised deeply with it," and ". . . working in a drab
office doing tedious, number-crunching for eight hours," appear frequently.

In general, however, the stories are well told. Carried by concept rather than style, they are original, sometimes amusing and usually with a darker edge. "Hello?" tells the story of an apparently self-concious and communicative computer--on the surface quite a simple, light story, but even this comes with its own dark secret, its own twist.

Some of the longer pieces feel overlong, but come to a satisfying climax, and the shorter stories are quick and pleasant to read. The afterword ties all ten of the stories together, and is itself neatly poetic. The eclectic range of stories means that there should be something here for any genre fan.


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Winter Houses by Sam Silva


In the first poem “Celebrations of the Stoic Mind” I was taken to a place that I was happy to visit, but which was not laid out for me in a stark or obvious manner. Rather, I was intrigued and teased into wanting to read on. Much of this is in the nature of stoicism of course, but this intrigue pervades in other poems in this aptly titled “Winter Houses” collection.

I have never fully subscribed to advice that I often read, that a poem should have a captivating title, but titles such as the above and others such as “Prayers Which Suffice For Blasphemy” or “A Tragedy Of Faith…That Human Thirst” certainly tantalise and made me hungry to discover what lay behind them. I was not to be disappointed. Lines such as

Our father’s voice
was the sound of despair
like acid
corroding
the pipes to an old house

do not resonate with my own experience, but send me somewhere special to leaf through my own imagination. It is through lines such as these that we learn about the poet, his past, the significance of houses, winter and his reflections at this stage of his life.

I am fifty one years old
and my breathing wheezes grease,

Strong imagery like this is always damped down, quietened, made meek in subtle and intriguing ways. These are womb-like poems or hospital bed poems where the poet is speaking from within warm wraps, protected and able to contemplate the ravages of a diseased or cruel winter world outside. In four of the nine truly beautiful poems, cigarettes or the smoke that come from them are a reference to disease but also help to reinforce the sense of peace, of near silence that pervades these poems. All the senses are teased. I smell the cigarettes smoldering away. I hear him shuffle in an out of shoes. I see the trees around his house, naked now in a winter hush. I taste the warm winds that kiss our frozen lips and delight to learn that pain has a colour – lilac.


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Vermeer's Corner by Graham Burchell


Graham Burchell's poetry collection Vermeer's Corner is directly inspired by, and seeks inspiration from, the paintings of Johannes Vermeer. Vermeer, the great Dutch painter from Delft, lived in the seventeenth century and is admired for his domestic scenes and his strong command of light.

The poems reflect Vermeer's attraction to homely scenes by themselves spinning fine webs of household chores and situations. Burchell plays with this theme, however, and often directly comments upon some characteristic of the painting from which the poetry has taken its inspiration. In the House of Martha and Mary, the first of Burchell's poems and inspired by Vermeer's painting, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, the poem is firmly placed within the domestic scene of the painting. Consider this stanza:

nothing to serve it upon
so she rattles
fusses in brown Dutch rooms
until she finds her
lattice basket

We can see both the 'brown Dutch room' and the simplicity of the character in these five short lines. Later the lines, 'work work work / that is all I do / she jokes', appear, reinforcing the domesticated environment and the low-born quality of Martha. And yet, near the end of the poem, Martha butts in with this interesting observation:

sees excitement in my eye
one bright white pixel
in the whole damned picture

It is clear, then, that the characters are aware of themselves as existing within the confines of a painting. This awareness is replicated throughout the poems, which allows Burchell the luxury to have his characters comment upon their own surrounds in a satirical and sometimes ironic manner.

Seduction and Wine is a wonderful short poem that captures with great authenticity the back-and-forth that comes from a young man admiring a clever woman. The poem is sensual without being explicit or even sexualised, and ends with a tinge of learned wisdom and melancholy expectation that belies its confident beginning.

These poems, like Vermeer's paintings, seek to capture close, intimate moments in the lives of ordinary people. Burchell's language creates flowers without being flowery, and remains consistent to the intellect, expectations and emotional abilities of his subjects without falling into the trap of condescending to his characters. He sits inside his character's minds without pushing, allowing their feelings to come out in their own words. Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window is a sterling example of this as we are directly inside the girl's mind as she ponders her husband's reaction to the letter she is reading.

When reading Vermeer's Corner it is well recommended to have a selection of Vermeer's paintings on hand. It is easy to marvel at Burchell's elegance in creating in poetry these scenes of domesticity that Vermeer has created with oils, but beyond that Burchell has taken his poetry to a level that utilises the techniques of, but is not swamped by, post-modernist expression. The characters in the paintings are aware that they are characters in a painting, just as they seem to be aware that they are creating poetry from their own portrayals.


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