early pages of Tattered By Magnets

Tim Allen's Tattered by Magnets, front jacket

Tim Allen's Tattered by Magnets was published by KFS press in 2014




the Months the Magnets


1:1


The poems are adventures.




1:2


"parky / prison visitor locked in the / conservatory"


Tim Allen's approach to eliminating the narrative I involves a host of flitting characters usually tersely described by some epithet such as occupation or animal name or object name. The cast-list of a joke. Here it's the prison visitor. In 1:3 "air hostess's complimentary Beano" . In 1:4 "self-correcting fox cubs". 1:5" small panther". 1:8 "gravedigger calculates disintegrating spiral of panic's limits". 1:10 "the radiator has its critics"


Tim's favourite verb tense is the historic present, suggesting a news headline. But the past simple and present perfect get a look-in too.


1:7


"magnets / a desert of exhausted magnets / rustle leveled up / magnetic rust / a dead sea of uphill doors"   There are a great many superb natural landscapes, dystopian or utopian but in any case the landscape of romance. Compare 1:6  "dark valleys  .... valley made of millions of small valleys... down unknown streets of darkness"




1:10


For some reason the narrative scena is as euphoric as the land of Faerie directed by Mel Brooks. Even when the storyline is noir, as here. "drugged pot boiler / dragged into the black light / ...... chimney breast man / shot in the back / by / chicken blackleg torch operation idea"

1:12


The narratives keep on playing: there is a constant level of churn. "water trusts glass / glass trusts water" ......... "water still trusts glass / glass no longer trusts water" ......


the Days the Dead


2:1


Lubrication makes its third appearance (see 1:3, 1:5). . Why? I don't know. The book, like nature, is full of what we can't ever know. And "arc" (from 1:3), returns here in another animal story: "before boarding arc hind says yes to blackberry". Anthropomorphism is central to the narrative world, everything is alive, though not necessarily very switched on. "duplicator fails to understand duplicated pamphlet", for example. and 2:11 "the turtle looks fed up". 3:2 "pilfered shopping trolley snivels on way to school in looted bedrock".


2:2
Space itself brings things to life. That is, you merely name them and put plenty of space around them : sometimes that's all you need to do.  We haven't troubled, elsewhere, to represent the physical appearance of the poems. But here's the middle quatrain of 2:2 .




the     the    the    passive         founder        of a department


natal          department            river reeds                basket


glazed water wheel           lukewarm zest      in the department


naf       naïf     what part were you?         the exiting cathedral?








For instance, that island of river reeds, surrounded by clear water: I can absolutely see them.  (Readers of my and Tim's generation will be thinking of the infant Moses.)


2:3
"directing the bed / from war"
2:6
"the poor people of Norwich", quotes the author, highly attuned to a possible joke. (Anachronism is a partner of anthropomorphism in this narrative world.)  "Liverpool on the Meuse" hangs there like a punchline that's on the way, eventually receiving the response "mosey around" (2:7)
2:7
Bucolic village life, all the way from the "quicklime corner" (graveyard? or dodgy local hostelry?)  to the "nymph apple", via plenty of honey and cider... the dubious "red cider" and "green honey"... and other works of importance to villagers, such as the compost heap, and "the slime supply". Age-old village feuds (forgotten / never for / given). La terre meets The Darling Buds of May.  The poem isn't about that.
2.12  
Googling  "vous Flamel" for something germane to say, I ended up reading about Charles Poncy (1812-1891), ouvrier poet of Toulon.




the Knights the Numbers




3.1
Those scenes of desert, countryside or sea (in this case)..... somehow link to the expansiveness of the book. Now, just two twelfths in, we begin to realize the scale. Our sense of it varies but it can seem huge.




the drips above are too small to see                            sad wanderer

volume of concentrated nothing         knowledge is not information

etc                               etc                     etc       etc