Anyone interested in contemporary poetry will know the name Mark Antony Owen for his tireless promotion of others’ poetry through his curation of the online poetry library, iamb and his ekphrastic poetry space After… . He is, however, a remarkably gifted poet in his own right. I remember hearing him for the first time as an open mic contributor to a Zoom session I attended, when he eclipsed all the other open micers and guest poets with the poems he read and his performance of them. As might be expected from his enthusiasm for technology and its capacity to serve poetry, Mark has chosen to self-publish digitally, rather than in print. His unfolding online collection (or project, as he calls it) is called Subruria, and not only can Mark’s poetry be read here for free, but there are also recordings of him reading every poem. It’s the third release of Subruria that I’m reviewing today.
Mark describes Subruria as the place where countryside and urban landscape meet. He writes ‘Neither wholly residential nor classically bucolic, Subruria is a blend of them both. A place of unclear boundaries.’ It’s certainly true that poems in the collection, such as All fields and Scarecrow Somme, explore the shifting boundary between urban development and the rural landscape. The poems, however, deal with a number of other boundaries. For example, Subruria is a place where past fuses with present. There is much looking back in these poems. Some of it is nostalgic, as in Summer 1979, in which the speaker in the poem recalls visiting his grandmother’s house, which he describes as ‘a plastic phantasmagoria’ with its ‘bleached gnomes, hollow herons;/ her pinwheel-flagged towers,/ Rapunzelled by strawberries;/ narrow yellow ropes, strung// porch to fence like sagging,/ exhausted laser beams.’ The imagery evokes a sense of affection for the place and the time; a childlike excitement remembered and relived, the poem concluding with the lines, ‘And amidst all this bright earth,/ the plump shoot of a boy.’ It is a time of pleasure, promise and potential.
This sense of nostalgia, however, is tempered. Significantly it is a ‘plastic phantasmagoria’, both words suggesting something artificial and unreal. The gnomes are ‘bleached’, the herons ‘hollow’, the ropes ‘sagging’, the laser beams ‘exhausted’; all the modifiers undermine any sense of an idyll. This memory might give the speaker pleasure but the poem raises concerns about the reliability of our memories, and questions our perception of the relationship between past and present. We find something similar in Taught sex on a Raleigh racer in which the speaker recalls the moment when an older boy explained to him the mechanics of sex. He describes the time thus: ‘Such innocent, unspoiled days. A paradise.’ Yet at the same time he writes that he and his friend were ‘outsiders’ and as he raced through the streets on the back of his friend’s bike he’d ‘perch white-knuckled on the rack at the rear…Clasping his saddle stem, fearing for’ his life. This is a strange sort of paradise where there’s both fear and alienation, and consequently the reader experiences a tension between the reality and the memory.
In fact, nothing is simple or straightforward is the world of Subruria. Take for example, the poem PKU written from the point of view of the peer of a child who has phenylketonuria, a potentially life impairing inherited genetic disorder. In such circumstances one might expect sympathy or concern and indeed the speaker in the poem does say ‘I remember the sadness that swallowed me/ the day you told us the wrong foods could kill you.’ Yet at the same time he says ‘that didn’t stop me from punching you.’ The reaction is unexpected, shocking, contradictory; Subruria is a place in which expectations are disappointed and hopes unrealised. The latter is symbolised in Spot the ball, in which a father’s ‘marks precisely where treasure was not.’ There is a gap between where the father thinks the ball is and where it really is: the relationship between reality and appearance is not straightforward. The same disconnect informs None of my enemies is online. In this poem we find former bullies rewriting the past and editing the present ‘for Facebook’. The narrator’s school contemporaries portray themselves as having ‘perfect kids, dream careers’, ‘unblemished’ pasts when this is clearly not the case.
In such a complex place as Subruria, it is no wonder then that we find voices expressing a desire for simplicity. In Pieridae Mark envies the butterflies which he describes as ‘kite tassels slipped’ from its string and as ‘living confetti’. These images convey the speaker’s desire for freedom. The pieridae are not weighed down by cares: they live for the moment. Living life in such a way is uncomplicated: the butterflies enjoy ‘the simple fact of being here’ with ‘no thought of how’ they are ‘using its time. Similarly in Brioche for the starlings, the narrator watches the birds ‘canteening the apple tree’ as he begins his day preparing the coffee machine. They are ‘feasting’ like ‘princes’ though that banquet is made up of ‘stale brioche’. Their ability to enjoy such simple fare and the fact that their lives are ‘brief’ makes them enviable. Their fulfilment is not impaired by that knowledge. The human equivalent of this simplicity is described in Childhood these days as ‘benign neglect’, being left alone with ‘nothing/ more diverting than ourselves’, untroubled by the distractions or cares of modern life, such as ‘internet unboxing’, ‘dolls with teen concerns, faux Californian accents.’ However, such simplicity is not without risk or danger (‘a grazed knee’, ‘a foolish dare’) but worth it nevertheless.
Subruria offers us a compelling insight into a changing world that is both personal, yet universal in finely crafted, imagistic, syllabic forms devised by Owen himself. These are poems to equal those of the very best of contemporary poets represented in his online library, iamb. Treat yourself and visit www.subruria.com now. I will again and again.
Mark Antony Owen is the author of digital-only poetry project Subruria. His economic poems cycle through themes of love and loss and what we think we remember – shifting, unchronologically, between things observed and things recalled. Mark is also the creator, curator and driving force behind quarterly journal and poet library iamb, and ekphrastic poetry space After …
Next week a drop in my Matthew Stewart talking about a poem from the collection everyone is talking about, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t.
Nigel Kent - Poet and Reviewer 