Thanks to John Phillips for bringing this to my attention and to Alan Halsey for sending the link!—Jesse

Food for thought
Sarah Crown on The Narrators | The Passion of Phineas Gage and Selected Poems

Sarah Crown
Saturday April 29, 2006
Guardian

The Narrators, by Nicholas Murray (Rack Press, £6)
Food plays a central part in the lucid landscape poems of Nicholas Murray’s latest collection. It features in treasured childhood memories of “ham and salad teas”; in the here-and-now of his life in Wales, where a “bowl of succulent beans / cools … and a knife / slices another wall of cheese”; in an evocative Greek sequence, in which “dry, Samian wine” and “plate[s] of battered squid” give the landscape sensual texture. His quick, vivid snapshots of nature often suggest food, too; the sight of “berries on their rambling stalks” leads him to imagine “their oozing weight / dark beneath a sweet and sugared crust” with mouth-watering zest.

Away from the table, Murray’s occasional tendency to overdo the whimsy (as in the rather mawkish image of old men “affecting gravity and beards / as a reproach to folly”) is offset by the moments of real style that his clear sense of internal rhythm and strong feeling for the well-honed phrase produce. In “First Day of Summer”, for example, the opening lines - “All day the sun had struggled with this paste / of lumpy cloud, occluded light and hampered heat. / Until, late afternoon, the curtain rolled away / and sunlight splashed the gravel yard” - cast a glow across the page.

The Passion of Phineas Gage and Selected Poems, by Jesse Glass (West House Books, £9.50)
In his latest volume, Jesse Glass prefaces a selection of poems from his 35-year career with a new, book-length sequence in which he considers the life of Phineas Gage, a figure exceptional enough to merit the attention of this accomplished experimental poet. Gage’s story is justly famous. In 1848 an explosion shot a three-foot-long iron bar through the air into his brain. Incredibly, he survived, but his sense of morality was permanently erased. In a virtuoso evocation of Gage’s life from that moment onwards, Glass intersperses contemporary accounts of the accident with a series of brilliant and moving poems. In those voiced by Gage, the painstaking fumble of his thoughts, perfectly evoked by Glass’s insertion of a comma between each word, contrasts electrifyingly with his unexpectedly sublime language, which in turn contrasts with the far more constrained voices of the other speakers. The doctor’s assessment of his patient (”Pulse 72; tongue red and dry; breath foetid … “), for example, pales before Gage’s description of his shattered head resembling a whale, “a, Nantucket, oil, well, / gushing, ambergris”.

The selected poems provide further evidence of Glass’s ability, but it is the remarkable opening sequence that stays in the mind.

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