 |
|
paperback HK$99.00
Chameleon Press
Paddyfield.com
More reviews by Pauline Burton
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
|
|
|
Clearing Ground by Martin Alexander
So, who reads poetry nowadays anyway? And who, apart from his family, friends and colleagues, and the lively minority who follow the English-language poetry performance scene in Hong Kong, would be interested in reading MARTIN ALEXANDER's first collection of poems, CLEARING GROUND?
To take the first question first -- cautious optimism. Poetry seems to be on the up-and-up throughout the English-speaking world, judging by the proliferation of pub performance groups and poetry slams, popular poetry radio programmes and websites. Admittedly, poetry books tend to have modest sales, but … watch this space, for CLEARING GROUND has sold like hotcakes at recent Hong Kong readings, and could have a wider appeal.
Which brings us to the second question: in his afterword to CLEARING GROUND, Douglas Kerr comments that many of Alexander's poems "evoke a story or a feeling that is not to be detached from where it takes place, or when". Certainly, a sense of place -- whether a beach in Lantau, a friend's Mid-Levels flat, the Mekong river, Spain, or England -- is a key feature of many of these poems, and will make them especially attractive to those with shared experience. As an English expatriate, sweltering in the steamy Hong Kong summer, I appreciate the evocative coolness of these lines:
Trees fountain on boundaries,
raw-green near, and, distant, darkening
to a far-off misty grey.
Great flax-floods of blue-grey blossom
pour down hillsides
deep against the rippling
even, green shallows.
However, though a sense of place has generated this poem, it doesn't constrain it. The main attraction is the sensuous appeal of colour and movement -- if poetry is meant to be beautiful, this is. Similarly, Alexander's recurring theme of what it means to be at home, or to be an exile, will resonate with many readers outside Hong Kong.
More than two hundred years ago, the English poet Wordsworth defined poetry as "a man speaking to men". Redefined in twenty-first century terms as "a person speaking to people" (though one or two poems would fit the earlier definition better) this sums up CLEARING GROUND.
Alexander uses mostly traditional verse forms, with varying degrees of ease and mastery, yet a personal voice comes through the body of work: as a friend, a lover, a teacher, an observer, a traveller. We meet the man through the poems: humorous, self-mocking, witty and occasionally sad, even "drunk as a skunk on two glasses of wine".
Above all, Alexander is a writer who enjoys playing with language and exploring its possibilities, and readers can share that enjoyment. Bidding a rueful farewell to a lost lover, he says "at last, the last poem". We hope not.
- Editor's note: 'Clearing Ground' is published by Chamelon Press, which is associated with the Asian Review of Books.
Pauline Burton
25/06/2004
|
Pauline Burton teaches in the Division of Language Studies at the City University of Hong Kong. |
| |
|
