Strip (Salt Modern Poets) [Hardcover]

As a reviews editor, I read a lot of poetry books. Strip is the only one that I've read and reread and kept beside my bed just so that I can pick it up and read it again.

The poems in Strip are the glittering twists of burlesque, then the smeared lipstick and fading smiles of the dressing room. They dazzle us with performance then drag us backstage; they are the untouchable neon of the main drag and skins abandoned in alleys. Underneath all the glitter is both a desire for and a denial of love, family, and home.

Angela Readman's poetry has been described as sharp, savage, dry, edgy, witty and authentic. Strip certainly deserves all of those adjectives, but underneath the sharp-savage-dry wit hums its sense of story. That's not to say that the poems are wannabe prose or stories in disguise; each poem stands by itself, but grouped together the narrative weaves effortlessly through the collection. The bulk of the poems, titled Life of a Porn Star, tell the story of a girl's journey from small-town child to an adult-film nymphet.

Before that, the narrative arc is foreshadowed in the long poem, 'Bodil and the Pig'. This tells the story of Bodil Joensen, the 'Boar Girl', Danish star of 40 bestiality films between 1969 and 1972. In the first few, Bodil "arranges a toy farm", watches her parents embrace, and brings her father his morning beer. Her parents grow smaller and she begins to speak; her turning point is her indignation at her classmates' farmyard noises:
"The children sing 'The pigs go oink.'
The girl stands up,
stamps, 'No. No.'
...makes a sound like the skin of a girl
being unzipped to let a wolf in."
She is not allowed to talk to boys, but is fascinated by watching animals mate.
Everything has become both sexualised and sinister: "Trains groan to the platform,/leave with a gasp." By the end of the poem Bodil may have found solace in unusual places, but it is there.

This search for solace is echoed in the Life of a Porn Star poems. Throughout, there is a sense of unanswered questions, cracks and breakages that cannot be mended "a jigsaw with pieces missing"), and the honest purity of the countryside.

The girl's transformation is clear from the understated tragedy of 'Dinner With No Name', where she makes dinner with her father after her mother leaves: I press myself into a helper, a worker, my father's daughter,/ branded, by flour on my cheek in the shape of a thumb." She becomes whomever she needs to be; whomever men make her into. In 'One Thing', she says that her first lover "takes the bad-girl that lives inside me/and pulls it out, back in, out again", and in 'Milk and Cigarettes" she "has made herself absent". This building of the self comes to a climax in 'Braces', where she removes the braces from her teeth with nail clippers and tweezers so that she will look old enough. She manages her final, awful transformation in 'How a Girl Could Do That', when she realises: "Sometimes a man is a room I walk into/and won't find myself in."
Of course, no collection is ever quite perfect. A few of the poems from the early days of the girl's life seem to cover the same ground. 'Tomatoes' and 'Postcard to the Photographer', though well-written, does not seem to say anything not already drawn by the other poems. But this can't take away from the beauty and tragedy of Strip. I think I was in love right from the collection's third poem, the 'Tom and Jerry Transaction', where on her first day of nursery the girl lifts her skirt in return for a Snickers:
"Mom lifted me on the counter,
gouged eyes from potatoes and asked
what I had learnt at school
and all I could say was 'something'."

I dont normally read poetry, but my wife showed me this.

This is the first poetry collection i have read fully and its fantastic, if more poetry were this exciting it would be more widley read. This makes poetry feel like the new rock n roll or even the new black.

Reading the first couple of poems at random i was blown away, and soon decided i had to read it in order.

I read the collection from start to finish (occasionly having to skip back to re-read poems a second or even third time) to fully appreciate the connections between the poems and the characters, unable to put it down, as i had to find out what was to happen next (i say this, as in places the poems sit together more as a novel in poetic verse than a collection random poems).

The author seems to have really gotten into the characters within this collection (the porn star, the pin-up and the farm girl (who grew up to be infamous in the 80's for having sex with animals), not that this collection is vulgar or gratuitous in anyway (with little to no mention of the actual in's and out's (excuse the pun) of the porn industry).

The farm girl poems focus on childhood, dealing with isolation & detachment from the human world and her connection with the pigs. The 'Porn-Star' sections focus is on 'How a Girl Could do That', showing how a young girls life and experiences might lead her into a life of porn. Finally, the 'Pin-up' section shows that there is a life behind the lense, and not necassarily a smooth one at that). The book deals more with the girls lives more than what they do for a living.

The character choices in this book are unusually brave, fresh and exiting, when compared to some other poetry i have read (with not a single poem being written about birds, fields or trees), and it pays off, making the collection exhillarating, contagious, griping and much more than just the sum of its parts.

If you like poetry, buy this book, you'll love it. Even if you dont normally like poetry, try it anyway, it might just supprise you, it did me.

I remember lads at school sniggering about "Animal Farm"; a porn film in which a woman slept with animals. Yuk, I thought. Little did I know that years later I would read some of the most beautiful poetry I've ever read about the star of that film, the Danish woman Bodil Joenson. Poetry that should have been in our English lessons. It would have shown us that poems can have a lot to say about people. That they can be amazingly readable at the same time as having an abundance of stunningly crafted images and metaphors. And, as girls wondering what the heck it means to be a woman, we'd have picked up some insights about how it is possible to take part in sex as a thinking, feeling, sensing subject rather just as the object of a male gaze.

Fairytales, illusions and dreams are woven throughout these nonetheless deeply real, concrete poems. The American Dream is another persistent thread in the collection, beautifully rendered, and the collection is prefaced with a poem about perhaps the ultimate American Dream myth, The Wizard of Oz; mostly the lost women and men in this collection are fighting the sleep of illusion and searching for home.

Multiple speakers and personae are conjured; from porn stars to porn agents, from teenage girls to Bettie Page. Readman is a skilful ventriloquist; the voices are distinct and clear. I especially loved the child voices.

This covetable, pink hardback would be a perfect Christmas present for someone who likes reading; even if they're not usually a poetry lover this wise, witty, sad, sexy, surprising collection could convert them.

by Kate Fox