Lethal Candour
Joe Carrick-Varty, Before Violence
Carcanet, 168pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781800175426
reviewed by Stuart Walton
Certain scenes and visions recur through Joe Carrick-Varty's poetry. There are picnics and swims, near-photographic depictions of fields and skies. These could be the elemental building materials of a conventional poetics, summer days and the natural world. Those days and that world are here, but they are catastrophically overshadowed by the internalised experiences of domestic violence, his father's alcoholism, and the haunting tragedy of the untimely death of a friend. Carrick-Varty's writing represents a constant struggle, one that enables flashes of tender insight and self-realisation, but which keeps circling helplessly back to the primal events that caused the struggle in the first place.
What this means is that this is not easy work either to read or hear (there are plentiful YouTube videos of Carrick-Varty reciting his poetry), or indeed to review. The title of this second volume can be read in two ways. Perhaps the poet is reaching back to a time before violence entered his youthful world, but it also has an inescapable ring of the portentous. The moment before violence is like the ominous calm before the storm, an anticipatory instant that makes the ensuing brutality somehow inevitable.
Carrick-Varty's first volume, More Sky (2023), opened the door on a turbulent family life. His alcoholic father was given to using his fists on his wife and children, leading the young Joe to objectivise the fact of violence as a rite of passage. His mother would often resort to dark glasses for days at a time, hiding the forensic evidence of her treatment at her husband's hands. The apportionment of viciousness and tenderness were alike unpredictable in their timing, and the victim's appalling gratitude in the face of the latter becomes a credit entry to set against the negatives, when a noxious parody of comfort insists that it could be worse:
I might add that my dad never used
the belt on me his violence
like his love was hard to predict
the first time I was excluded from school
we watched King Kong I remember
outside the cinema he knelt down
zipped up my jacket in the bright sunshine
This is from a long cycle, 'sky doc', of eight-line deliberations all beginning with the phrase, 'Once upon a time when suicide. . .’ which closes More Sky. The poet confronts the widely believed half-truth that insanity involves performing the same actions repeatedly and expecting different results, as though there were no such thing as trial and error, practising a skill, hoping to convince a sceptic. But, he wonders, 'can this relate to patterns of thought'? If these free-associating octets — all 64 of them — keep addressing the obsessive spectre of suicide, will it eventually go away, or at least feel different? A GP eventually tells the writer he is 'just overthinking everything', the professional pabulum of a world where only persistent thinking can save him.
This follow-up volume is divided into three sections: 'In the Late Forevers' is a set of individual pieces, 'Before Violence' a cycle of 54 prose paragraphs, and 'Late From the Water' returns to the octave format for a set of fifty linked ruminations that form an extended epitaph. Dad still stalks the mental and spiritual terrain, his erratic behaviours, fits of savagery and momentary kindness, hypnotically circulating, but he is no longer trouble's single spy, only one of the battalions.
There were tricks with format in the first volume, some of the poems being printed side-on, so that the reader had to keep turning the book in an act of closer scrutiny than usual. The poems in the first section of Before Violence all contain a serpentine crack through the middle, as though these reminiscences always issue from a consciousness that is fragmented, the two sides pulling apart, the two ways of looking at things irreconcilable. Their titles sound like Tracey Emin at her most relentlessly self-examining: 'I Pick Myself Up with My Precious, Blood-Stained Objects', 'You Will Have Your Body Soon', 'People Die When You're Not Looking', 'Nothing and Nowhere is Only Itself', 'Home Alone Trying Not to Eat'.
A family legend has it that, when Joe was a baby, his father took him to his own father's grave, and held him high above it, making the infant cry as he was lifted skywards. This may or may not be true, but if it is, what might it signify for what came after? After all, 'there was a time before violence existed / in my family'. Perhaps this scene, with its faint echo of Abraham and Isaac, was intended as an expiation for the rancorous bloodletting that would follow, when the child was deemed old enough to withstand it. In the title sequence, Carrick-Varty tells us that 'at an early age my memory moved from my mind into my body', acts of self-harm and remembrance commemorating the blows received rather than the 'awful picnics'. In 'Will This Train Take Us Home?', a therapist asks him what his family could have done to help him: 'what else did your family know exactly'. The adverb reverberates on its own from the other side of the poem's fissure, scary for its hint of police questioning, but also its insistence on the minutest detail when the larger detail is wounding enough.
There are moments of lethal candour, as when the discordant question of an audience member at one of the poet's readings, as to what it is he is grieving for, to which he responds with some boilerplate 'bullshit' about how sad it is to see a father waste away to alcoholism, generates the far more startling explanation that one can only vouchsafe on the page. '[C]limbing down from the edge of a carriageway overpass', he decides to write it out in both senses of the phrase: 'my life will be an exercise in vulnerability', so that the sadness will not remain enclosed within the family, 'within the walls of a life'. To an even greater degree than with most poetry, this work is pre-eminently for the writer himself, his own survival. It is a performative act, less of reflection than of rescue.
At school, there was bullying, as dependable as rain at a picnic, and as unerring as ever in its ferreting out of vulnerability. Joe is dared to shoplift a pair of Nike Air Force Ones, in which he might go stompin' like the big boys, like Nelly, but only manages to lift one shoe, replacing it on the display with his own scruffy article. Still, there is hope in this. The older kids give him a round of applause for the one bright white trainer he turns up to school in next day, while the bully — always known in caricatured intimacy as 'my bully' — has suddenly already reached his adult height. All it might take is a half-theft and a growth spurt, and liberation might dawn.
The final section of this volume is a long elegy for a close friend, the British-Nigerian poet Gboyega Odubanjo. They were both due to appear at a poetry event in Northamptonshire in the summer of 2023 when Odubanjo went missing. He had gone swimming in a lake on the festival site, having taken MDMA, ketamine and drink, and drowned. He was twenty-seven. His first volume of poetry, Adam, published posthumously the following year, is about the death of an unidentified Black boy who drowned in the Thames.
Carrick-Varty memorialises Odubanjo's loss with astringent pathos, with a degree of needless self-blame, but with all the material detail — the jeans bundled up in his tent to serve as a pillow, the Arsenal scarf on his coffin — needed to fill in the absent space the departed leave behind. Some 'lucky bastard' must have been the last person to hear Gboyega laugh. That is what matters, not the sanctimonious myth-making that follows a premature death — 'someone said you joined the 27 club', a celestial members' enclosure where Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse circulate among the wilted canapés and plates of coke.
Those looking for poetic diction in Carrick-Varty's work will be thinly sated, although the odd striking image does surface. His and Odubanjo's heartbeats sometimes synchronised, but mostly they were 'just off like jazzy high hat trills little breakbeats / like a pair of axes chopping the same tree'. What there is instead is a relentless exercise in auto-therapy, working through, stumbling on the occasional breakthrough, finding an ex post facto sympathy for Dad's failings, realising that 'my bully' was pathetic in his own ways, ultimately harmless when rumbled. In the immediate postwar era, this work would have been classified as confessional poetry, and Carrick-Varty an extreme exponent of the genre, more Ginsberg than Berryman. But if we, the readers, are only spectators at the lives of others, we are nothing more than nosy neighbours or social media doom-scrollers. What these poems properly evoke is empathy, with the '[h]appiness we'll almost believe we deserve' — in the zipped-up puffer jackets in the Glasgow Christmas snow, the snide WKDs, the weed gummies, the phone video reliquary of someone who has gone — as much as with the multitudinous sorrows.
What this means is that this is not easy work either to read or hear (there are plentiful YouTube videos of Carrick-Varty reciting his poetry), or indeed to review. The title of this second volume can be read in two ways. Perhaps the poet is reaching back to a time before violence entered his youthful world, but it also has an inescapable ring of the portentous. The moment before violence is like the ominous calm before the storm, an anticipatory instant that makes the ensuing brutality somehow inevitable.
Carrick-Varty's first volume, More Sky (2023), opened the door on a turbulent family life. His alcoholic father was given to using his fists on his wife and children, leading the young Joe to objectivise the fact of violence as a rite of passage. His mother would often resort to dark glasses for days at a time, hiding the forensic evidence of her treatment at her husband's hands. The apportionment of viciousness and tenderness were alike unpredictable in their timing, and the victim's appalling gratitude in the face of the latter becomes a credit entry to set against the negatives, when a noxious parody of comfort insists that it could be worse:
I might add that my dad never used
the belt on me his violence
like his love was hard to predict
the first time I was excluded from school
we watched King Kong I remember
outside the cinema he knelt down
zipped up my jacket in the bright sunshine
This is from a long cycle, 'sky doc', of eight-line deliberations all beginning with the phrase, 'Once upon a time when suicide. . .’ which closes More Sky. The poet confronts the widely believed half-truth that insanity involves performing the same actions repeatedly and expecting different results, as though there were no such thing as trial and error, practising a skill, hoping to convince a sceptic. But, he wonders, 'can this relate to patterns of thought'? If these free-associating octets — all 64 of them — keep addressing the obsessive spectre of suicide, will it eventually go away, or at least feel different? A GP eventually tells the writer he is 'just overthinking everything', the professional pabulum of a world where only persistent thinking can save him.
This follow-up volume is divided into three sections: 'In the Late Forevers' is a set of individual pieces, 'Before Violence' a cycle of 54 prose paragraphs, and 'Late From the Water' returns to the octave format for a set of fifty linked ruminations that form an extended epitaph. Dad still stalks the mental and spiritual terrain, his erratic behaviours, fits of savagery and momentary kindness, hypnotically circulating, but he is no longer trouble's single spy, only one of the battalions.
There were tricks with format in the first volume, some of the poems being printed side-on, so that the reader had to keep turning the book in an act of closer scrutiny than usual. The poems in the first section of Before Violence all contain a serpentine crack through the middle, as though these reminiscences always issue from a consciousness that is fragmented, the two sides pulling apart, the two ways of looking at things irreconcilable. Their titles sound like Tracey Emin at her most relentlessly self-examining: 'I Pick Myself Up with My Precious, Blood-Stained Objects', 'You Will Have Your Body Soon', 'People Die When You're Not Looking', 'Nothing and Nowhere is Only Itself', 'Home Alone Trying Not to Eat'.
A family legend has it that, when Joe was a baby, his father took him to his own father's grave, and held him high above it, making the infant cry as he was lifted skywards. This may or may not be true, but if it is, what might it signify for what came after? After all, 'there was a time before violence existed / in my family'. Perhaps this scene, with its faint echo of Abraham and Isaac, was intended as an expiation for the rancorous bloodletting that would follow, when the child was deemed old enough to withstand it. In the title sequence, Carrick-Varty tells us that 'at an early age my memory moved from my mind into my body', acts of self-harm and remembrance commemorating the blows received rather than the 'awful picnics'. In 'Will This Train Take Us Home?', a therapist asks him what his family could have done to help him: 'what else did your family know exactly'. The adverb reverberates on its own from the other side of the poem's fissure, scary for its hint of police questioning, but also its insistence on the minutest detail when the larger detail is wounding enough.
There are moments of lethal candour, as when the discordant question of an audience member at one of the poet's readings, as to what it is he is grieving for, to which he responds with some boilerplate 'bullshit' about how sad it is to see a father waste away to alcoholism, generates the far more startling explanation that one can only vouchsafe on the page. '[C]limbing down from the edge of a carriageway overpass', he decides to write it out in both senses of the phrase: 'my life will be an exercise in vulnerability', so that the sadness will not remain enclosed within the family, 'within the walls of a life'. To an even greater degree than with most poetry, this work is pre-eminently for the writer himself, his own survival. It is a performative act, less of reflection than of rescue.
At school, there was bullying, as dependable as rain at a picnic, and as unerring as ever in its ferreting out of vulnerability. Joe is dared to shoplift a pair of Nike Air Force Ones, in which he might go stompin' like the big boys, like Nelly, but only manages to lift one shoe, replacing it on the display with his own scruffy article. Still, there is hope in this. The older kids give him a round of applause for the one bright white trainer he turns up to school in next day, while the bully — always known in caricatured intimacy as 'my bully' — has suddenly already reached his adult height. All it might take is a half-theft and a growth spurt, and liberation might dawn.
The final section of this volume is a long elegy for a close friend, the British-Nigerian poet Gboyega Odubanjo. They were both due to appear at a poetry event in Northamptonshire in the summer of 2023 when Odubanjo went missing. He had gone swimming in a lake on the festival site, having taken MDMA, ketamine and drink, and drowned. He was twenty-seven. His first volume of poetry, Adam, published posthumously the following year, is about the death of an unidentified Black boy who drowned in the Thames.
Carrick-Varty memorialises Odubanjo's loss with astringent pathos, with a degree of needless self-blame, but with all the material detail — the jeans bundled up in his tent to serve as a pillow, the Arsenal scarf on his coffin — needed to fill in the absent space the departed leave behind. Some 'lucky bastard' must have been the last person to hear Gboyega laugh. That is what matters, not the sanctimonious myth-making that follows a premature death — 'someone said you joined the 27 club', a celestial members' enclosure where Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse circulate among the wilted canapés and plates of coke.
Those looking for poetic diction in Carrick-Varty's work will be thinly sated, although the odd striking image does surface. His and Odubanjo's heartbeats sometimes synchronised, but mostly they were 'just off like jazzy high hat trills little breakbeats / like a pair of axes chopping the same tree'. What there is instead is a relentless exercise in auto-therapy, working through, stumbling on the occasional breakthrough, finding an ex post facto sympathy for Dad's failings, realising that 'my bully' was pathetic in his own ways, ultimately harmless when rumbled. In the immediate postwar era, this work would have been classified as confessional poetry, and Carrick-Varty an extreme exponent of the genre, more Ginsberg than Berryman. But if we, the readers, are only spectators at the lives of others, we are nothing more than nosy neighbours or social media doom-scrollers. What these poems properly evoke is empathy, with the '[h]appiness we'll almost believe we deserve' — in the zipped-up puffer jackets in the Glasgow Christmas snow, the snide WKDs, the weed gummies, the phone video reliquary of someone who has gone — as much as with the multitudinous sorrows.