Stubble Burn​ by David Ly

Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis! ​by David Lindsay

Reviewed by Carla Scarano D'Antonio

Anstruther Press, 2018

Anstruther Press, 2018

Two very different chapbooks from Anstruther Press delight the reader with their compelling lines that question both our sense of reality and the meaning of relationships. Both works reveal the necessity of engaging with life on different levels: emotionally in Stubble Burn through an excruciating search for identity, and in a more detached but equally involving way in Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis! through questioning the significance of being human.
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Stubble Burn is permeated by a sense of loss in which the lyric voice falls back in its own illusions, revealing an incomplete self that needs to gain individuality and self-confidence. This lack creates an easy prey for a “wolf in disguise” who likes “boys smooth and submissive with/almond-shaped eyes” (“Because I am”).  The poem also emphasizes exploitation, metaphorical self-harm and the suffering of being discarded after having been sexually and emotionally used:

He ate my heart and then ate my brain
because at times
I am a monster dissecting what I am
​
(“Because I Am”)

The self is offended by casual racism or hurtful words that discriminate against the poet’s Asian background and his gay identity. It is difficult to find the right balance between letting go and holding on, between risking relationships and choosing instead to wait and look for an alternative:

... The phone pings until midnight.
He just wants confirmation you’re up to hang. You can’t decide,
text sure. The kindness in men like him
is a gateway you always refuse, a destination you deny them.
​
(“The Kindness in Men”) 

The experiences in these poems ultimately point towards a search for a more stable relationship that is fulfilling and satisfactory on both the physical and emotional levels:

i ignore the sting of another’s cologne on his neck as i lick ice cream from his lips. the lightning is good to us tonight. make sure to catch his smile now, not the one he cracked while cumming on that guy from Grindr 12hrs ago. make me look better than him. edit the regret from my eyes.
​
(“Post”)

“Stubble Burn” is the poem that best expresses these experiences in a sequence of six five-line poems delineating the story of a relationship. The lyric voice waits for its lover, anticipating the experience in the hope of establishing a deeper contact: “Keep it innocent … Add sugar. Add sugar.” The moving scene of making love creates a more profound connection:

So you take him in, his tongue
kind between your thighs.
You’re so my type is lovely
in the moment because that’s
just how romance works ...
​
(“Stubble Burn”)

However, the lover’s words sound cliched, uninvolved; it is not the kind of rapport the protagonist hoped for:

... His
words hit you when he meant
for them to kiss ...
... His stubble
burns in a way you can’t stand.
A lump forms in your throat and
to stay calm you focus on un-syncing
your breathing from his.
​
(“Stubble Burn”)

The stubble burn symbolically breaks the dream—the illusion of romance—with the awareness of a need to change both mind and language to something “Less sweet. Less sweet.” This leads to a reflection prompted by Sia’s music:

… Sia bends words in her music
like elastic bands around our hearts,
          and how others effortlessly
move to her voice
          while I listen,
immobile,
for what is missing inside of me,
angry for thinking so much,
burrowing into myself and not into boy after boy.
​
(“Thought Deep in Sweat”)

The pause on “immobile” and the reflection “what is missing inside me” both emphasize existential questioning that reveals a desire to combine the physical and the emotional in a search for a more distinctive self. Similarly, the unusual use of line breaks in poems such as “Celebrities,” “Because I am,” and “Thought Deep in Sweat” drive the rhythm and mirror the meandering, complex reasoning expressed in these pieces.

It is an evolution, a journey from the wish to “escape the bamboo cage/of your body” (“Another message received”), where occasional lovers are “eager to gorge themselves on yr oriental noodle,” to arriving at “Tricky genuine feeling, hot feelings,/happy feeling and brilliantly confusing feelings” (“The Feels”).
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Confusion naturally accompanies this multi-faceted process of awareness:

…. Right feelings
at the wrong time, mistaking my feelings for
ones that could have walked hand-in-hand
with his, but are now being crushed under his boots
as he walks away ...
​
(“The Feels”)

In the end, Stubble Burn expresses a desirable development of the individual, which includes facing the other with all its difficulties and rewards.

Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis! is a series of sophisticated poems about paintings, video clips, installations, photographs of contemporary art, music and video games. The collection explores the subtleties of being human through direct and indirect references to works of art. The intertexts are reported in italics and fully referenced in the notes.
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The astonishing quality of the poems reveals a profound reflection on the significance and originality of art in modern society; the chapbook is an attempt to bridge this art with everyday life:

So make an aqueduct of your body to bridge
the chairs and when you find the costume
 
jewelry, concealed within a hardcover,
pause for a minute to pose with it, breathing.
​
(“How does it feel,” after Bridget Moser)

Elegant couplets evolve in striking enjambments that create an abstract, new vision:

It’s safe to assume that one of us sired
the other, grafted himself to the sofa
 
corner where a pink blanket peeled
back; cracked the door and took a nap
 
in practical cibachrome Vancouver,
awakening later that afternoon
 
as brother-fathers to one another,
both in incest and attendance.
​
(“Double self-portrait,” after Jeff Wall)

This is a different way of observing, highlighting what is often neglected or misunderstood. At the same time, how we live and what we are “is an illusion of perspective and light” (“The Playthrough”) in an endless sequence of video games that seem to substitute for “reality.” The attentive choice of words recreates the digital world both in sounds and meaning, while ironically alluding to its own emptiness:

   …… so I voyeur down
the immaculately conceived hallway in the compound
 
cultists constructed out of leftovers digital debris,
made to, if you know how to do it, just, like, be
 
your quintessential self, man.
​
(“The Playthrough”)

The ekphrasis of famous artists’ works, such as sculptures and installations by Yayoi Kusama and paintings by JMW Turner and Leonora Carrington, are structured as a conversation between the artists and the paintings. These prose poems reach beyond the artworks and dig into the artist’s intentions, both in terms of their everyday life (“you were treating a toothache with acetate morphia”—“Sunrise with sea monsters,” after JMW Turner) and on an abstract, surreal level:

you adored horses and an uncanny category of gastronomy somewhere between a stomach ache and speculative astronomy attempting to reconnect shrapnel from another Earth abandoned by romantics afraid of abstraction; illuminating a dancing mural that silky dogs laying in debris barely have time to acknowledge.
​
(“And then we saw the daughter of the minotaur,” after Leonora Carrington)

This way of seeing is particularly clear in “Trypophobia,” after Yayoi Kusama, which refers to Kusama’s well-known obsession with repetitive patterns. The poem doesn’t just describe her work; its rhythm also imitates and evokes her patterns:

​… A grand orgy to awaken the dead, a narcissus garden of orbs
 
In a pajama-themed stanza, an anemone caresses a happening of naked
bodies queued up for your paint. Cover them in a pox of dots contracted
through skin on skin contact: thick kisses: pink, yellow, blue, but black
 
in the photographs from the time before the discovery of colour.
…. Vox pop spots, concentric specks hollering hoi
 
polloi from orgasmic maws scattershot across gallery walls. A dizzying
of portholes, portals to more portholes on a Seuss-beasts’ back.

Once again, sounds evoke forms and colours, creating a description that expands beyond the subject in a continuous complex of art, writing and melody.
 
Music and paintings merge in “Matana Roberts plays ‘No Title’ by Eva Hesse at the Whitney” and “Loren Connors plays ‘Four Darks in Red’ by Mark Rothko at the Whitney.” The result is an experimental recreation that highlights the peculiar quality of this collection of poems: an experience of art that evolves and involves the essence of being human. This is a never-ending process of interaction between art and life, constructed reality and creativity, where it is difficult, maybe impossible, to distinguish between artificiality and everyday life, video games and ordinariness. The lines break and flow: “a gewgaw of ghost notes confidently saunters/ through a webbed net never meant to snare.”

With their engaging themes and well-crafted lines, both chapbooks ultimately celebrate participation in life—despite its oddities, complications and occasional emptiness—in an ever-changing but nevertheless fascinating world.

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Carla Scarano D’Antonio lives in Surrey with her family. She obtained her Degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing with Merit at Lancaster University in October 2012. She self-published a poetry pamphlet, A Winding Road, in 2011. She has published her work in various anthologies and magazines, and is currently working on a PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading. In 2016, she and Keith Lander won first prize in the Dryden Translation Competition with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems. She writes in English as a second language.
 
Visit her websites:
http://carlascarano.blogspot.com/
http://www.carlascaranod.co.uk/