Berlin Bursts by Robert Sheppard
Review by Norman Hadley
’I'm prepared to bet that Robert Sheppard would rather one person love his work than ten quite like it; his poems couldn’t polarise opinion more sharply if they were printed with Marmite-flavoured ink. The cover blurb prepares the reader for ‘tense couplets and other centrifugal forms to centre their energies in nodes of impacted attention.’ Well, I’ll see your ‘tense’ and raise you a ‘clenched’. Ideally, Shearsman Books should provide a free tin-opener with every book to aid entry.
The book is extremely meta – many of the poems twirl recursively in on themselves to glare unblinkingly at the writing process itself. They have titles like “Poem”, “Another Poem”, “Yet Another Poem” and “Not Another Poem.” Sometimes this is like a running taunt, other times it comes across as a swerve away from a conclusion, such as when a bare light bulb “pregnant with itself/ with unfinish/…won’t budge/ not even in this poem/where nearly anything/ could happen.”
There is huge variety of metrical structure, from stream-of-consciousness prose that wouldn’t look out of place in the Dylan’s Tarantula, to brittle miniatures, where single words are..
inexplicably
made to bear the burden of a whole line.
The poems are at their strongest when they look to the fractured mindscapes of Eastern Europe, never more so than in “Prison Camp Violin”, where “Fingernails pluck the kinked tune free”, to “draw the grinty voice out from the mechanics of survival”.
When the Wall came down, some East Germans commented that, for them, World War Two only ended in 1989. Although Sheppard’s focus is as much on the Baltic states as Berlin, his plangent voice keeps that sense of waste alive.’
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Poet, Professor of poetry and poetics, and literary critic, Robert Sheppard’s latest poetry collection Berlin Bursts is steeped in the ambiguities of the human. The poems ‘feature territories as dispersed as Sheppard’s local Capital of Culture and the global city of division and political murder of the title poem… At the centre of the collection is ‘Six Poems Against Death’ whose lyric imperative hovers before the portals of the unknown to embrace human unfinish as the condition of our survival.’
Robert Sheppard wowed the audience at Word Soup: Being Human with a dynamic performance of his poetry. Each carefully-chosen word fired through the audience to take residence in the soul.
Find out more about Robert Sheppard here www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com/
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Norman Hadley is a poet from Garstang who also dabbles in prose. He has completed three and a half poetry collections, one of them being both diminutive and collaborative. The most recent, full-sized collection is “A Whoop Above the Dust”, September 2010.
When things refuse to rhyme, he writes prose – usually short, but including a couple of novel-length stories, The Lucky Krab and The Last Munro - the latter for children.
He is not yet quite reconciled to the fact that the quickest way to the truth is to make stuff up. But he’s slowly getting there.
In his day job, he designs heavy-duty diesel engines for ships and trains. The engines are considerably larger than the poems.