A debut collection about the problems of love and selfhood reveals an unconventional talent
To have a tattoo done, Michael Donaghy wrote, requires “a whim of iron”. With Happiness, Jack Underwood’s first collection, we seem at times to be in the presence of that whim as it applies its brightly coloured inks to matters of life and death. When his initial Faber pamphlet came out in 2009, Underwood appeared to show Donaghy’s influence, but now he recalls a poet of an older generation, Hugo Williams, for whom, as now for Underwood, the world is largely a personal matter composed of the problems of love and selfhood, as well as that of Frank O’Hara, whose presence is now as ubiquitous as weather, with his “Personism” manifesto seeming to promise access to all areas.
By moving in this direction Underwood has apparently renounced the implacable rigour on which Donaghy’s own playfulness was founded. At times, indeed, Underwood seems to be aspiring to invertebracy. In “Love Poem”, “The streets look like they want to be frying eggs / on themselves. I’m thinking of you and going / itchy from it. I keep expecting to see a nosebleed / on the hot, yellow pavement. Every thought is / a horse fly.” The cartoon detail, combined with a tone at once demonstrative and short of affect, mark a kind of indie house style that can be read (and perhaps more significantly, heard) almost anywhere at present. It’s not so much faux-naive as faux-urbane, emotion turning into attitude, defensive for all its apparent self-exposure.
Continue reading...