March 26, 2020 49
‘A Walk Through Someone Else’
Ange Mlinko
Feel Free
by Nick Laird.
Norton, 77 pp., $15.95 (paper)
O Positive
by Joe Dunthorne.
London: Faber and Faber,
54 pp., £10.99 (paper)
When I ask myself what makes poetry
from the UK sometimes especially sat-
isfying—a high-performance machine
running on all cylinders—the answer
has to do with the greater variety and
texture of the vocabulary, the econ-
omy of its soundscapes, the material
pleasure in the language. But it’s more
than that. Pleasure in the language,
yes, but not just its musicality. Rather,
there is a heightened awareness of what
Pound called “the dance of the intellect
among words” and what Auden called
a poem’s “verbal contraption”: rhetori-
cal gambits, angles of attack, the games
that metaphors and counterfactuals
permit. Perhaps this variety arises from
a culture in which verbal exchange sig-
nals so much (about region, class, edu-
cation) that there can be no such thing
as plain speaking.
Americans invented business En glish
and confessional poetry; doing business
in the UK is an entirely different thing,
and confession there is a chump’s game.
Reading Nick Laird and Joe Dunthorne,
one is always aware that their speakers
are arguing, persuading, bargaining,
carrot-dangling, sleight-of-handing, and
losing gallantly. Laird is from Northern
Ireland, Dunthorne from Wales; both
have won accolades for their fiction.
Laird has written three novels to his four
books of poetry; Dunthorne has three
novels to his name, and O Positive is his
debut poetry collection, though Faber
published him in their pamphlet series
back in 2010. Far from autofiction, their
novels are as varied as their poems, with
suspenseful plots and untrustworthy
characters and an understanding that
drama arises from bad hermeneutics—
that is, misreading people.
An instinct for unexpected rhetorical
strategies will give social commentary
a jolt normally lacking from American
poetry, which is nothing if not earnest
stuff. It may also be a distancing de-
vice, but it is that very distancing that
makes it extremely effective, especially
if you want to persuade anyone besides
the choir to read it. (In American po-
etry, no one has surpassed Marianne
Moore at this—and she died in 1972.)
Laird’s “La Méditerranée,” for in-
stance, takes an oblique approach to
the crisis of refugee deaths in that body
of water. Without once mentioning the
headlines, he sketches a cozy restau-
rant scene with a middle-aged couple,
and upon seeing the sea bass on his
wife’s plate, the narrator falls through
the nets of universal matter—weave of
the tablecloth, subatomic spaces—and
arrives at the fish eye,
its lightless pupilsunk flush as a thumb tack holding
the universe itself in place
and I stare at it, and it stares back.It is no less than an emissary from
Nietzsche’s abyss, accusing bourgeois
complacency with a reminder of the
sea’s apophatic drowned migrants.
In the final poem of the book, “Extra
Life,” he returns more explicitly to the
fantasy of safety mediated through
capital and technology:Watch the boat inflate.
Click twice to make it float.
Click to lift your kids in. Click
to lift your wife. The sea is level
as a puddle until backwashfrom the tanker hits and panic
tips you in....Or take “Grenfell.” On June 14,
2017, seventy-two people died in an
inferno that began on a lower floor of
a twenty-four-story tower in a coun-
cil housing complex; it was the largest
residential fire in London since World
War II, and raised questions about
the management, maintenance, fund-
ing, and safety of this project set in an
otherwise gentrified neighborhood,
especially after it was learned that the
new, cheap, and controversial cladding
on the building was installed in such
a way as to create a chimney effect.
How to memorialize this ghastly pub-
lic shambles? More specifically, how
to grapple with the technocratic es-
sence of it? There was plenty of blame
to go around. Not only the council
housing authorities but the fire bri-gades and then the aftermath of insult-
ing public relations by pusillanimous
politicians—an entire slew of failures
that can be summed up in one word:
systemic.
Laird counters this hot mess with a
cool framing device. He offers a cus-
tomer survey format—now, of course,
pro forma after any interaction, from
an Amazon purchase to (at least on
this side of the pond) an ER visit:Please rate your experience of
your experience.
Overall, would you say you’re
pleased; mostly
pleased; neutral; displeased; or
not pleased at all?
Would you recommend our
business to a friend?This blend (bland) of the courteous
and the transactional almost manages
to smother its outrage:Please rate your last real day on a
scale of one
to ten where one is utter dullsville
and ten
adjusts the contrast setting
permanently upwards.How satisfied are you with
customer support?
Please evaluate the final minutes
for how onemight account for it. Any
additional comments
should be left in the space at the
foot of this pageand all of the following pages.There the poem ends: with the praet-
eritio of white space where furious ac-
cusation should be. Only a cold rage
could produce a poem like this: stiff
in its constraint of bureaucratese, sim-
mering with the sardonicism of “please
rate your last real day.”Many times over the course of Feel
Free, Laird revisits this mode of pro-
fessional boilerplate, bureaucratese,
and computerese. His titles include
“Glitch,” “User,” “Autocomplete.” He
was a lawyer before he turned to writ-
ing and teaching; an encapsulated re-
flection on legalese and its immunities
can be found in his first novel, Utterly
Monkey, about a young Northern Irish
lawyer in London who must grapple
with the contradictions of escaping his
roots:Danny knew he would draft a de-
tailed and lengthy due diligence
report that would weigh, in unusu-
ally elegant language, any abnor-
mal and arduous clauses in all of
Ulster Water’s contracts pertaining
to employment, intellectual prop-
erty, information technology, out-
sourcing, even the sodding vending
machines, and that it would not be
read by a nyone. It wa s , he supp o se d ,
possible that the conclusion might
be perused but it would be so heav-
ily qualified (“In light of the short
time available... given the limited
resources and lack of informa-
tion... due to the hostility shown by
the target company and the corre-
sponding impossibility of obtaining
proper financial documentation etc.
etc.”) that any deductions he’d draw
would be completely worthless.Laird, having spent some years in
the service of a mode of language
that smothers any hint of human emo-
tion or subjectivity, can’t resist toying
with it in the medium that’s supposed
to be all about human emotion and
subjectivity. In the title poem, “Feel
Free,” he needles us in the gap, some-
how both minuscule and yawning, be-
tween automated response and real
response:The thing isI can be persuaded fairly easily to
initiate immune responses
by the fake safety signals of
national anthems, cleavage,
family
photographs, country lanes,
large-eyed mammals, fireworks,the King James Bible, Nina
Simone singing “The Twelfth of
Never,”
cave paintings, coffins, dolphins,
dolmens....All of these things are fair game for
poetry, of course, where poetry in itsNick Laird, New York City, 2013; photograph by Dominique NabokovDominique Nabokov