Contingency, with Horses
Tom Bailey’s and Maya Caspari’s fierce, inventive debut pamphlets explore the psychic impacts of climate breakdown and poetry’s role in documenting looming change
A review by Tom Branfoot
Be cautious when ‘ascribing human meaning’ to the phenomenal world, warns Tom Bailey throughout Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses, which won Poetry London’s 2024 Pamphlet Prize. In the opening poem, ‘Escape Room’, we are encouraged to distrust profundity. In a pub, the speaker’s friend reminds us that Goethe’s last words (‘Mehr licht [sic], meaning More light’), usually understood as an epiphanic outcry, may well have been nothing more than a request for the curtains to be opened.
Poetry in Bailey’s hands becomes a magical space, an experiential technology that foregrounds play. ‘Your death is a red canvas tent’ has a ceremonial quality, using poetry as a tool to fathom grief. Death takes on a material weight – it ‘moved with us like magic’ when ‘we moved home’ – and the poem recalls ancient mythologies reckoning with the portents and practicalities of a new absence. ‘Your death is there, outside’, the speaker observes, ‘the small-to-medium fact of it flapping in the wind, a whiplash of slack guy ropes.’
‘No Weather’, an aphoristic prose poem sequence, confirms the collection’s stylistic and thematic aims. ‘The weatherman said there wouldn’t be / any weather that day’, it begins, before imagining the absurd, frightening reality of that ill-judged phrase, ‘just an empty space where the weather used to be […] Peat hags opened wide like mouths’. Bailey skilfully builds a sense of solastalgia – the uncanny feeling of distress accompanying environmental degradation – depicting a place and inner life knocked out of kilter, unbalanced by grief and climate catastrophe.
Despite its desolate subject matter, Bailey’s pamphlet is mischievous, ludic, and humorous – ‘I tried to write a break-up poem’, reads ‘Fancy Dress Party’, ‘but I wrote this instead’ – taking cues from the work of Frank O’Hara and James Tate, whose sensibilities occasionally overpower the poet’s voice. Yet Bailey succeeds in creating a distinct world, a world of horses, rainsticks, and disjointed weather, while teetering on the brink of surrealism. ‘Lately all of my thoughts are about dying’ is an accomplished coda, navigating last words, mistranslation, and health anxiety. ‘Say something, say something,’ the poem ends, ‘but I panicked and / all I could say was, I don’t know, can you hear me, I’m sorry.’
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Ideas of contingency, preservation, and intimacy spill throughout Maya Caspari’s Almost, with Tenderness. Set in an aquarium, the opening poem, ‘Condition’, generates a sense of otherness through a slippery positionality where the speaker does not ‘know in advance which side I will be on’ – ‘behind the glass’ or ‘the one watching’. Visitors to the aquarium are ‘faintly blurred’, leaving only ‘their echoes, and their trash’. This is one of many poems, including ‘Horses’ and ‘At the Museum’, that succeed at revealing the inherent absurdity of our exploitative relationship to non-human life.
Caspari’s poems work through the social and identitarian implications of grammar. ‘I came to whiteness like a spill of sky to water’, begins ‘Mixed Other’. Italicised voices soon interrupt the fabric of the poem, which unravels into a paratactic, polysemic, and polyvocal event without a clear (or clearly singular) lyric speaker. Elsewhere, ‘Past Continuous’ interrogates the use – even the weaponisation – of grammar to obscure imperial violence: ‘We were not / statistics background to a photo / accident reports in past tense / passive voice’. The poem cannot help but speak to the role of Western media outlets reporting on the Middle East, in particular the widespread use of passive language which serves to obfuscate the suffering in Gaza perpetuated by the Israeli government.
Scattered throughout the pamphlet are glimpses of a family stuttered by nations, borders, and language games: a grandmother at night school (‘Granny Was an Astronomer’), a sister with whom communication is coded, flawed (‘Instructions for Writing to Your Sister’), and – in ‘Notes Toward a Definition of Kinship’ – the hopeful suggestion of intimacy in extra-familial spaces, bonds consolidated through food cultures.
Our relationship to preservation, damage, and waste in the Anthropocene is a central concern of Almost, With Tenderness. In ‘At the Museum’, the poem’s speaker finds themselves trapped ‘behind taut glass’, unable to hear. ‘We grieve instead in gesture,’ they suggest, ‘carry worlds on the soft edges of our hands’. A posthuman companion piece to ‘Condition’, the poem asks both how and why we attempt to preserve life, and ‘What will happen when there’s no one to mourn?’
TOM BRANFOOT is a poet and critic from Bradford. He won a Northern Writers’ Award in 2024 and the 2022 New Poets Prize and is the current writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023. His debut collection Volatile is forthcoming with the87press.