‘a disgusting lie’ by Fran Lock

Published by Pamenar Press 2023

Successfully abrasive verse and prose poetry that takes big swings and big hits at the contemporary world and its inequities,  cruelties and prejudices, particularly regarding the mistreatment of colonised people, women and women’s bodies.

It’s provocative and energetic writing about ageing, about lost/losing languages, about legacies of violence (esp. The Troubles) and legacies of regret… But I don’t mean that it’s heavy handed or dour, this is evocative and compelling, entertaining poetry that has gags among the violence and the politics, that has catharses among the textual references, that has sleaze and pleasure among the politics and philosophy…

The book is split into two halves, ‘a disgusting lie’ and Dead Girl Industrial Complex, and while the first half is mostly verse and the second half is (I think just) majority prose, there are themes and images and references and phrases that occur and appear in both parts…

This is poetry often about meaning making that never becomes poetry about poetry making, it is political poetry that never becomes proseletysing, it’s confessional-style poetry (it doesn’t matter if the poetic “I” is the writer or not imo, it matters if the poetic “I” is a person, is a voice, rather than an absence… here it is not an absence…

The book’s subtitle is (further adventures through the neoliberal hell mouth) so the perspective and politics is clear from the start. But it’s the way many of us feel and many of us view the world so Lock isn’t attacking or critiquing anything I like, care about or approve of, so it’s all good with me.

A lot of fucking poetry ends up – imo – feeling bourgeois… And tho I of course know that calling anything bourgeois is one of the most bourgeois things you can do… The stench, the reek, the death cowl of the academy, of thought in place of life, of idea in place of expression, of books and bookishness instead of people and peopleishness…

(I’m not an idiot, I know that a written medium is inherently a written medium, but the best poetry, the best literature, the best of all forms of art, almost always – though not always, there are exceptions – transcend their form rather than wallowing in it… And that is what some poetry does, wallowing in its wordedness…

I start reading more poetry books than I finish, always tho I put them down with the intention to finish then, and eventually I will I will I will, but it just often – too often, too much, too soon – doesn’t happen.

This book isn’t that type of poetry.

This is that good type of poetry that feels like it’s written by a person rather than a library or a book.

Or I’m just under-read and too stupid to understand that this book, like many other books, is meant for readers sharper and smarter than I am…..

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Moments/pieces I highlighted :

A bleak piece on the horrors of the city edges, the hinterlands of nowhere and nothing, ‘Suburb’, featuring familiar and ghostly images… “where audis lie in / state” … “bicycle seats are waiting / to be sniffed. the spiders at / the back of the barbeque are / weeping.”

…

A poem called “Greyting” is great, on a Slender Man type online danger …

..

Electric phrases like “the slow orbital warp / of decay will scatter us / stars” (p.31) … “above us a moon twice the size of itself” (p. 34) … “the dress is both / the gospel of an angel’s/ failing, and the dirt in a cut” (p. 73) ….

…

…….

A question that recurs here is “what does it mean to write of revolutionary violence from a cluttered office somewhere in England?”… And this is what I meant above, why I was thinking about the often verbose and dense, fetid and globular tedium of some poetry…

We are all fucking trapped by our positions in this shit society…

You don’t need a room of your own to write, but you need a least a pencil and a notebook and a few minutes without distraction and once you’re on the route to the route to the route to that embrace of embrace of embrace of bourgeois elements it’s easy to be trapped by them… To write instead of live, to think instead of act, to sleep instead of dream, and to dream instead of… Instead of… I dunno …

Poetry as “an impossible language” (p. 145) and that as how it can transcend itself…

There are other questions elsewhere, e.g. “who owns the moon?‘ in ‘New European glass moon’ which is a great playful piece on both the moon and on ideas of ownership…

…….

I highlighted loads more, I liked the book a lot, but I have a flight in the morning and I need to pack a suitcase and cut my nails and go to the toilet and then go meet a friend.

It’s a great book. I’ll read it again one day!

Thank you thank you

Great stuff. Order it direct from Pamenar Press via this link.