Loose-leaf Poetry (2023), by Flame Darinov

Rhyme is percussion in Flame Darinov’s Loose-leaf Poetry (D’Bréck), making drumbeats that resolve into a cadence marked by absorbing syncopations: the rhymes are complete or partial; come on offbeats or downbeats; break lines or complete them. The effect is so striking that this musicality, for me, forms its own meaning that exists against that of the actual word choices.

In the fade / distance distances and years separate light from darkness. / and the archness of your spine / I define / through lust. / It all remains as dust / until I remake it; / your body naked…

In a strange way, this musicality makes language into something rigid. Not a rigidity of form or meaning, nothing restrictive, but rather it authenticates the sonic properties of the word, or renders false the idea that words are arbitrary markers of meaning, because only when somebody says aloud, in English, “remake it” and “naked” do these two particular terms gain the complete relationship that Darinov has given them.

This is vaguely true of any rhyming poet, possibly, but the rhythm here is so well-drawn (and frankly catchy) that in it lurks its own kind of character--and that is very compelling against the rest of the work, which largely concerns characters and character voices. Many of the poems are dialogues, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes longing, sometimes violent, but always dimensionalised by this tension between word-sound and word-meaning.

Elsewhere in the volume, the poems play more with neologisms, historical vernacular--surely informed by Darinov’s PhD at the University of Luxembourg, which is on digital approaches to 19th century travel writing--and the interplay of different languages.

“As a poet, I think there is nothing worse than a bored reader,” says Darinov. “And rhythm is the simplest way to catch a reader’s attention--oh look, a rhyme! And a chime that comes with it. A lot of the syncopes are there for dramatic effect. What’s coming next? Who’s coming next? Is the scene going to build up or dissolve? I love this kind of suspense. It grabs you, keeps you going till the end. But this effect only works in short-form writings. People get tired from too much suspense for too long. Conversely, I think rhythm is about variety and moderation. We’ve all heard a lovely five-foot flat rhyme, but would it hurt to innovate a little? What if we delay the rhyme to extend the moment of expectation, or bring it earlier to make the reader shift gears unexpectedly? In a lot of my early writings, I try to experiment with these things. I’ve realised that the next step is to seek harmony (i.e. rhythm and rhyme) between languages, rather than within them.”

A Tiny Nature: Recollections of Poems and Trees (2023), by Robert Weis

Rocks, leaves, waves, clouds and time form the elements-on-the-page of Robert Weis’s A Tiny Nature (independently published), in which the geopoet practices the capture of moments: straightforward language tends to first locate place (“A pebble thrown in the water”) before spinning it into the fourth dimension ( / “A concentric moment”), leaving the reader to consider, or equally to feel, how these phrases might intersect.

The poems are inspired by the sparseness of haiku and the miniaturism of bonsai trees, which Weis has himself been cultivating for some two decades, and more generally by Japanese gardening culture and Weis’s perception of it. He is Luxembourgish but visits Japan regularly and, in 2022, co-launched Michikusa, which focuses on poetry of exactly this type.

Weis’s work reads genuinely, sometimes roughly: readers are offered a tag-along feeling with the poet’s in-the-scene meditative headspace via his rendering of conceptually overwhelming but verbally unpacked lines (“Nothing is created / Everything is transformed / A world in a grain of sand”) that are almost without exception drawn from scenes in nature.

At times it feels like he is playing with unmeaning rather than trying to pick at it, but then I think that is the point: picking at unmeaning would be to assign it meaning. “If you look for the past / You’ll fall into an abyss / But what future has the past / In a world where / Two flowers are a garden?” This is poetry that, taking the natural world as the constant of its methodology, acknowledges complexity in its subject matter (the voids of existence and presence) rather than in language itself.

“Just as writing a poem is a poetic act in itself,” says Weis, “shaping and growing a bonsai has a very similar connotation. Poetry therefore lies more in the physical act of writing and growing than in the result itself. This is in line with Eastern philosophy, where the process is valued more than the result, and just as nature is something dynamic, so too is poetry, I’d like to think.”

Red (2024), by Anne-Marie Reuter

Trigger warning: children suffering

The deeper person of a hotel receptionist: that’s what Anne-Marie Reuter’s Red (Redfoxpress), an illustrated story published as its own volume, spends its pages exploring, except you don’t realise that at first. The receptionist is the narrator but says almost nothing about themselves; the exploration is being carried off in their strange outward-facing obsession with a particular hotel guest, a little girl travelling with her mother.

Tensions come on multiple fronts: we don’t know what the girl’s mother is really doing, other than chatting up wealthy men; we don’t know what trouble will befall the girl, who is bored out of her mind; and a cryptic countdown demarcates mini-sections by telling us the number of days before the narrator “leaves.”

Any gotcha-ism that readers might resent about the sharp-as-knives ending will be resolved in one of two ways: as a seriously slippery way into showing us who the narrator is and what they feel; or as just plain unforgivable--the way some things really are.

“I had the idea for Red while I was on holiday in Italy,” Reuter tells us, “just after Russia had launched the first attacks on the Ukraine. Red is about war, about how perspectives change and about how war causes children to suffer in sometimes very unexpected ways.”

Red comes after Blue (2021), by Redfoxpress, and the final instalment--though the first two don’t relate in any clear-cut way--will be called White.