‘Blood Kisses’ by Jane
Langan
This is a self-published collection of poetry by a talented
writer who studied on the Open University’s MA in Creative Writing at the same
time I did. We both finished the course last October. Since graduating, Jane (along with a group of
other excellent MA alumni) has launched an online literary magazine called Makarelle,
which is also highly recommended.
I
have read some very poor self-published writing, so I didn’t necessarily have
high expectations when I purchased this book. I bought it mostly because I like
Jane herself and I wanted to support one of my fellow MA graduates. I am
familiar with Jane’s prose fiction, but not so much with her poetry, so I was
intrigued to see whether she was equally as accomplished in both genres.
Firstly, let me make a comment about the physical,
material qualities of this slender volume. It is a lovely object, just thick
enough to be held comfortably in one hand while still having room for
profundity and reflection. The cover is dramatic and there are excellent photographs
inside taken by Jane herself. Unlike some self-published books I have come
across, this has all the elements you would expect from a polished volume of
poetry by a mainstream publisher – an appropriate blurb on the back, an
accurate contents page, an ‘About The Author’ page at the back, page numbers, a
clear font in a good size and lots of white-space around the poems. Such considerations might seem trivial and
superficial, but they often make the difference between volumes which have the
authority of professional publications and ones which make you think of the
literary equivalent of hand-thrown mugs with thumb-prints in them or
hand-knitted sweaters with one arm longer than the other and a hump that could
accommodate Quasimodo. You know what I mean: the sort of earnest,
well-intentioned book that is a little bit egocentric and completely lacking in
self-criticism. The sort of book that you throw into the back of a cupboard
rather than actually read. Blood Kisses is not one of those, and
actually I didn’t expect it to be as Jane has always struck me as highly
professional in her approach. It is securely in the realm of the ‘properly
proofread’, ‘thoughtfully laid out’, ‘holdable and readable’. And that is before
you even get to the poems themselves…
It is difficult to read numerous poems all in one
go – poetry needs digesting in bite-sized chunks. Even so, after I first opened
the book, I found myself being drawn into the collection and realised I had
read around half the poems in a single sitting. In fact, I read some of them while
walking along the landing, having just picked up the book from the bottom of
the stairs where I had placed it temporarily. This readability is due to Jane’s
lightness of touch, her conversational style where the reader is invited to
listen to her thoughts. She isn’t a poet who is self-consciously obscure and
complex; there is a clarity and simplicity about her poetic voice that is
refreshing and compelling. This clarity does not exclude depth and moments of
genuine poignancy and subtlety, however. At its best, in poems like the
wonderful ‘Beside Me’ which ends the collection, or the unsettling ‘Blood
Kisses’, the simplicity of the language lies on top of a complex layer of
churning thought and feeling which colours, shapes, tempers and amplifies the
surface straightforwardness of the vocabulary.
Jane is an expert at engaging openings: ‘When I
went home/it was to the hills’, ‘Deep inside the crevices of the broken
heart,/there is cracked glass and darkness’, ‘He didn’t forget his manners,/the
nurses claimed’, ‘A A Milne has some explaining to do’, ‘There are no more
words in me’, ‘In nineteen seventy-five,/I lost me/I lost me’. She also has the
gift of creating startling images or lines which stay in the mind long after
you’ve read them: ‘clouds like grey collared doves’, ‘a skin of stories’, ‘Like
a drunk, no rhyme nor reason./Just cat’, ‘Like a friend with a gun, you just
don’t care’, ‘How I wish I was young again’. Whether writing about her cat, her
daughters, Winnie-the-Pooh, religion or domestic abuse, she balances the
humorous and the harrowing with great skill. Blood Kisses both conveys
and evokes a smorgasbord of emotions, presented in a wave of different styles,
from the punkish and prickly to the soothing and simmering.
I would recommend this book, even if you think you
don’t like poetry. In fact, especially if you think you don’t like
poetry.
You can find Jane Langan at: www.howilikemycoffee.blogspot
and @MuddyNoSugar
RATING: Blood Kisses *****
Key:
*****
highly
recommended - a 'must-read'
**** good - well worth taking the time to
read
*** ok - will help to
pass the time in a boring situation
** not very good
- just about readable but flawed
* not recommended -
boring, offensive, badly-written or deeply flawed in some other way
