THE RAIN BOY

Poetry by Donna Taylor Burgess

Illustrated by Sheridan Morgan

Reviewed by Lavie Tidhar

The poetry of the Uncanny had its most notable expression in the works of the Romantic poets: Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Christabel, Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Mercy and even Byron's Giaour all belong to a corpus of works dealing with what, for lack of a better term, can be called the Dark. Since those heady days, however, dark poetry has mainly been confined to the pages of specialist small-press magazines and chapbooks in the horror genre – a genre which evolved from a combination of pulp and Gothic narratives rather than of a long tradition of poetry, and as such seldom gets noticed beyond the small confines of its genre cesspool.

Much of the Uncanny poetry of the Romantics comes from a set of Christian value-myth pointers, of heaven and hell, demons and angels, the living and the (un)dead: in Donna Taylor Burgess' collection, The Rain Boy, much of this Christian background is strongly felt, but the execution of the poems would place them in the pulp-Gothic tradition and not, sadly, in any line of descent from the Romantics.

It is relatively easy to read a poem and pass instant judgement on it: this is good. This is bad. It is much harder – having made the judgement – to honestly explain why it is good or bad, but in the interest of fairness I will make an attempt with regards to the handful of poems in The Rain Boy. Before I do that, however, it is worth expanding on what set of values one uses to evaluate poetry: these include, for instance, originality and freshness of expression, rhythm, compactness, the use of devices and – like the Device itself, a term invented by the Russian Formalists, long out of fashion but the last literary critics to put an onus on artistic quality – defamiliarization (a term referring to the way writing is used to make a familiar experience unfamiliar, made to be seen in a new way).

Burgess' poetry, while summoning occasional flashes of originality and even force, fails overall on several counts. In the first instance, much of the imagery – including the use of devices such as metaphors and similes – does not succeed in creating fresh and original imagery. Clichés abound: "stone-faced" (6), "death-blue lips" and "red as blood" (both 10), "sewer-stench streets" (11), "the violin wailed like a woman's cry" (13), "bone-white" (19) – and while these can sometimes survive in the lengthier form of a short story or a novel, they spell immediate death to a poem. More noticeable, however, is the lack of compactness, of words packing more with less, rather than less with more. The poems are sprawling, disjointed, providing no clear narrative or focus for the reader; a change of tense occurs without reason in the first poem, The Girl With The Golden Halo beginning with the past tense and changing inexplicably to present tense in the second stanza; the title itself, a reference, one suspects possibly unintended, to Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun, does not work any better than the jokey reference to Apocalypse Now in the poem Secrets, in the uninspired line "I love the smell of death in the morning".

But it is the lack of compactness, the lack of direction, which hurts these poems the most. They lack control, a thing which is clearly expressed in the absence of any discernible rhythm. It is a thing difficult to explain, so I will use as an example the opening of one of the most famous poems of the Twentieth century: T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. When the poem opens, it sets the reader up with a certain expectation. The rhythm is familiar, comfortable, suggesting a gentle love song, a rhythmic ballad, an old cliché:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

• which is then confounded and delights with the sudden third line:

Like a patient etherised upon a table;

This sudden shift in perception is not only a perfect example of a poet knowing exactly what he is doing with regards to rhythm, but also of defamiliarization, of making a familiar scene unfamiliar and new. In The Rain Boy, both of these elements are missing and are replaced instead with an over-eager and sometimes-nauseating running commentary of everything the poet has coming into her head during the writing, creating a tumble-on effect of images that fail to form a coherent whole. Pet Machine is a good example:

 A present from Daddy

 In a time of disease

 Flowers, candy and a hand to hold

 Doesn't matter if his fingers are chill

 Loyalty listed under 'files'

 Who could ask for more? (7)

The other major problem with the poems – a problem not unique to Burgess but afflicting the majority of the pulp-Gothic poets of the small press, is the unsuccessful use of mock-Romantic language – the attempt to use High English without the skill or the cultural context of the Romantics. Examples abound – note in particular the use of "upon" ever-so-often:

 Shadows upon the white walls (9)

 The foulness of nourishment (9)

 Bearing a sun-faced twin upon his belly/and an angel upon his narrow back (15)

 Pain sweet enough to bring tears (10)

Not all is bad in these poems, however. There are occasional flashes of originality, of successful imagery. "lightning snaps like the bones of a thin wrist" in The Girl with the Golden Halo is effective, as is the opening of Sister Frankenstein, "There is something incredibly erotic/About scar tissue", where needle marks are a "kind of Braille" (the title itself attempting to link the poem to the Romantics – Shelley being the one novelist – and the one woman – amidst the Romantics). Then there is the overall-successful Mermaids, ending with the surprising line, "The mermaids bled salt", while in Rag Dolls I enjoyed "she smiles shyly and runs out a ribbon of pink tongue" – though the "shyly" is unnecessary.

Finally, a publication is more than the sum of its words. It is a physical object, existing on its own terms. I found the illustrations by Sheridan Morgan, with one or two exceptions, to be delicate – sometimes erotic - in a way the poems themselves are not, and I sincerely hope to see more of her work in the future. I particularly enjoyed the illustrations to The Girl with the Golden Halo on page 2, the illustration for Shut in on page 8, and the surprising – and surprisingly-erotic – drawing of a girl playing a violin on page 12, accompanying My Brother.

Overall, this is another attractive chapbook from D-Press, and the poems – regardless of the musings of a cantankerous reviewer – are likely to appeal to those fans of what I have chosen, perhaps whimsically, to term the pulp-Gothic.

The Rain Boy, A4, 20pp, £1.00 incl p&p

For details of how to purchase, visit the Bookshop here or order from Project Pulp or Shocklines.