Recently Read: The Itchy Sea

by matthewhaighpoetry

Mark Waldron is precisely the type of writer I envision when I think of truly interesting poetry. As much as I love poetry, so much of it leaves me disinterested, and I think that’s largely because of a reluctance on the part of many contemporary poets to embrace imagination. Great swathes of modern poetry seem to be about reporting back on the world as it is, which, to my mind, simply feels like writing a long checklist of description about something one saw or experienced. I’ve always felt there’s an element of cheating about that style. Ok, it takes skill to describe our world in engaging ways, but surely this is just a veneer or wall; there must be something on the other side. This world is like a thin gelatinous albumen bubble, and poetry a way to test or maybe pierce that to reach something grittier, something more accurate, behind or within it. Waldron’s poems feel like this – explorations into that next realm, imagining or re-shaping the world as it might be.

A large portion of The Itchy Sea focuses on comparison, and how one thing can be likened to another, but the similes are always completely unexpected and never easy. As such, we’re asked to imagine how a house is like a crocodile, with its back like brickwork; how a slab of beef is like a neckerchief; how wind is a kind of invisible ribbon, not blowing, but being sucked around its spool. If Waldron’s debut collection, The Brand New Dark, was slightly obsessive about dogs, water, girls in porn magazines and the soul, then The Itchy Sea is similarly obsessed with Marcie the porn girl and the soul, but throws in recurring themes of maggots and flies making and un-making themselves, and the exchanging of animals into other matter, such as a dog into a household iron, and a lion into an amorphous kind of pervert.

Perhaps the most prevalent theme, however, is how this collection muses over the body, flitting through an absurdly brilliant number of ways in which it may be re-created. Our skeletons are brittle sticks, our selves arranged around them almost like crab meat. The soul pops up now and again, but carries connotations of being a pesky ghost trapped in the body’s aluminium container. There’s something juicy and wonderful about the exchange of solid matter in this book, how something as ephemeral as an idea is made to almost feel palpable, a sort of chewing gum, or how what is liquid might be made to feel solid. For example, in a poem that delights in its grit and vulgarity, Waldron describes how semen is ‘the colour of a modernist architect’s apartment,’ and an aroused woman’s secretions are the ‘varnish on a mahogany handrail.’ Our flesh, our very existence, is pulped and mashed and morphed continuously throughout, until man is entirely dismantled, a committee of disjointed parts that may be reassembled into any shape pleasing to our minds.

Further extending this fascination with our skin vehicles and their internal workings is, for me, the highlight of the collection, The Chocolate Car. What makes this so enjoyable is the assumption that we know where the poem is heading, only for a subtle yet dramatic shift in tone to occur in the middle, when a seemingly innocent and almost lightweight poem about a chocolate car takes into account all the guts and blood and urine and hair and faeces of the chocolate people sitting inside it, climaxing with a mention of an embryo inside the chocolate woman passenger. The combination is so sinister, and so utterly unlike anything anybody else really writes. It exemplifies Waldron’s gift for original, creative and brilliant thinking.

Whereas The Brand New Dark was, at times, quite difficult and almost too cold in places to access, this second collection is far more engaging, far more relaxed, and much more sure of its tone. The poems fit together as a cohesive whole, illuminating a world the reader will at once thrill to discover while simultaneously feeling a glint of the familiar. We all know that feeling of wanting to be like somebody else to the extent that we copy their actions and inflections of voice. We know how it feels to imagine a scenario we will surely never carry out in real life (as depicted in The Bead). And yet, to read Waldron is to be slapped awake by the possibilities of the domestic world we endure every day, and the internal world from which we cannot escape. The Itchy Sea is the abstract film caught on TV at 3am or the obscure album that rewards repeated listens or the beautiful, nightmarish art instillation you can’t shake from your mind. It is, in short, my poetry highlight of the year.