little armoured — Rebecca Perry

Beauty/Beauty—Rebecca Perry’s first full collection—is forthcoming from Bloodaxe at the end of January and it’s fair to say there’s a lot of excitement around it. “Not since Jo Shapcott’s Electroplating the Baby or Simon Armitage’s Zoom! has a poet emerged with such a distinctive, original voice.” The University of Manchester’s John McAuliffe—quoted in the blurb—is clearly excited about Perry’s debut. 

It certainly sounds like there’s plenty to get worked up about too. Perry’s prose poems have shared page space with the likes of Carrie Etter and George Szirtes in the anthology This Line Is Not For Turning, she has worked on collaborative projects—with the Glej Theatre in Slovenia during 2014 on a performance piece called Silent City—and has enjoyed a wide range of publication in magazines. 

We can also anticipate poems to be included in Beauty/Beauty. There’s Perry talking about—for example—“a love letter to a stegosaurus” (a sneaky pic of which you can find of Twitter) and one that “plays with space on the page in a way that I don’t often do.” These are poems that as the context suggests, take Perry out of her comfort zone.

“Each poem creates its own tiny world to be lived in,” states Bloodaxe’s blurb, going on to say, “[Beauty/Beauty accumulates] its various feelings, ideas, objects, disappointments and joys to the point of almost overflowing.” Adding that it includes poems about “the difficulty of defining what love is,” “the overwhelming abundance of things in museums,” and “eulogies to dearly departed pets.”

Photo credit: Jan Michelle Andres, Instagram - @Jnmndrs 

Perry has one pamphlet to her name: little armoured. The plum purple book Zoë Skoulding and John Barnie judged winner of the Purple Moose Poetry Prize in 2011 is still as handsome today as it was two years ago when published by Seren. A generous selection it is too, having twenty-three poems listed in the contents (not including sequences of which there are a few).

Aside from the acclaim that follows from such a prize, little armoured was tolerably well-received. The usual humming and hawing from the establishment in terms of Carl Griffin’s review in Wales Arts Review, the usual fluffing and faffing from the blogosphere. What interests me more are the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. One Amazonian admits to not being “usually one for poetry” before going on to say Perry won them over. Both of them came across her work through readings. One reader’s review of little armoured on Goodreads describes it as ‘a really quirky pamphlet’ going on to conclude that it’s ‘Just lovely.’ 

Positive stuff then, and yet the author doesn’t seem to think so. In conversation with ROY Perry said, “Well, I’m only including maybe 5 or 6 of the pamphlet poems in my book,” adding that, “people tend, in the UK at least, to republish the full contents of their pamphlet in a first collection.” Suggesting that she’s come a long way since little armoured, admitting that “18 or so of them make me cringe in even some small way!” With the worst offenders being the villanelle ‘What is the most shop-lifted book in the world?’ (criticised by Griffin as a ‘needless gimmick’ that she should ditch at the first opportunity) and ‘The Man in the Moon’, the dual 10-line stanza bookend of the work. 

But why this self-critical stance? Perry says that it’s probably because she has “totally turned [her] back on form, for now,” and that, “thinking about it … it’s just that my writing has changed a lot.” That ‘for now’ is very telling, I think. Certainly, taking some of Perry’s later remarks into consideration, her awareness that, “it depends where you draw the line, what you think falls under ‘form’.” Going on to say that, “I still use different stanza lengths and punctuation and line breaks, which some people would argue is form.”

They would and I’d be inclined to argue the same about little armoured. Given the fact that out of the 23 titled poems approximately half can be categorized as taking one definitive form or another it’s far from formless. From the reverse (iii, ii, i) sonnet sequence ‘My grandfather considers his life in three stages’ to the neat couplets of ‘The Mice’ and tercets of ‘Hello, Little Bird.’ I was surprised just how formally conversative little armoured comes across. I expected a fashionable concern with kitsch and quirky conversation. Not sonnets dedicated to the poet’s paternal influences. It seems—however—that the development of a voice capable of balanced intimacy and assertiveness was a central concern of Perry’s and nowhere is it better achieved—in my opinion—than in the poem ‘Hello, Little Bird.’

It’s one poem in the book that persists strongly for me after reading. Don’t think it’s just me sympathy for the subject either, the intimate who’s so fed up with the sun she wants it to ‘fuck off and die,’ which is very So Cal. No, it’s more haunting and haunted than that. The poem has a lot of clear language in it: ‘It is like a bee behind a curtain / that won’t fly out of the window.’ ‘You see snow / on the news and it makes you sad.’ It pulls no punches so that when we get round to—in the ninth stanza—‘heroin / feels like a ghost no one will believe in, / even though it is moving things / in front of your eyes, and throwing knives / across the kitchen.’ The transition into serious territory doesn’t feel abrupt, but assures us this is a voice that can handle the sympathetic step-up. That manages to be matter of fact and assertive but gentle and supportive. So the sonic qualities of those lines is subtle but musical enough to be memorable.

It’s a poem—I suspect—that will make it into the collection and it’s a voice that will appeal to a lot of people. 

We know writing’s a right messy business, which, like any process based on cross-pollination and hybridization, produces mutant mutts more often than pedigrees. There’s a lot of waste, by-product to the production of ‘perfect’ work. We play along because that’s how publication works, things are dressed up and made presentable, the rest is swept under the carpet. But I think—if anything—we sometimes prefer to read ‘failures’ and—in the same way it pays dividends to read everything a fiction writer’s written—unfinished or regretted work contextualizes voice.

There’s a lot to suggest Perry’s emergent poetic—academic indulgences aside—seeks to unearth the goodly hidden traditions and boot out the muscle-bound mainstream. That it’s more inclined to celebrate the living contigency often concealed behind the agglomorated and metadata-stamped perfections of the presented ‘finished’ work. The celebration of a Lawrencian superabundance more readily associated with memorable speech than literary writing starts in little armoured and makes me very excited to read what’s happened to it since. 

Ignore what Perry says and buy it. There’s a very generous selection of work to like, plenty to read and re-read. Plus you’ve only six months to get acquainted with an early iteration of a voice you’ll no doubt be hearing a lot more of in the years to come. 

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The pamphlet little armoured is avaliable from Seren at £5 or why not order a signed copy directly from the author? 

Beauty/Beauty is published on the 25^th January 2015, will be priced at £9.95, and runs to 64pp.