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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shimmering, humorous, captivating vignettes of a London life, 26 Feb 2007
Stammers' poetry is extremely well-crafted. No sloppy adjectives, rough metre.
All is as silk sliding down a well-shaven leg.
Notice that the effect needed a razor.
This is not blandness, this is pure skill.
A sarky, humorous note creeps in.
"Fancy Man" exudes an odour of well-chosen aftershave, but also a crepuscular, occluded quality. The fancy man in question, ( do we know the same person, John?) says and does the right things to pull every women at the dinner party, is chic enough to stay friends with ex-lovers, but he is subtly damaged, and he has "never forgiven everybody."
This then is the clue to fancy man's attractiveness, he has an attribute which cannot be emulated by the more average male. He is elegantly f****d up.
His 'orthogonal opinions' are savoured in polite society but their more impolite effect is that the husbands **** the wives hard that night, re-establishing their primacy, their sexual territory. This deft and violent use of the f- word in the right place is typical. Stammers never uses a word too many, a word less than the right one. The verity of social observation and the sure incisiveness of a well-learned craft makes Stammers' poems potent and contemporary.
The irrestibility of sexual attraction is dealt with with great delicacy and humour. In fact many of the poems refer to an illicit love affair but their depth and vivacity lends them to a whole range range of situations so that the affair becomes a metaphor, for desire and creativity. In "Closure" the poet has a voice which is conversationa, yearning, unrequited: "I run my hands over and over my poems / lay them all out on the bed."
Naturally, the poet is compromising himself. The poems contain all the codified erratum of his life, the fact of his union with another woman. Someone will find out - and soon.
Later:
His wife " ... eggs/ me on to cross knives with her. I don't."
He is no doubt that the bleary half-arsedness of his non-response will make his wife walk. She does.
Images from London life boys night's out, the cinema,this book is urban and urbane, erudite, cheeky and damnably clever, I begin to wonder if Stammers is not the Fancy Man himself?
This is a fantastically stylish, well-mannered collection, peppered with wonderful images, clever but not self-conscious. Elliptical arguments turn and turn about, and the language is professional,modern, sensitive and taut.
Stammers' wife' has left him a message. You can read it. It is not a note a pinned to the fridge, but very near. She has reviewed "Panoramic Lounge-bar", Stammers other collection.
Wives always get the last word, don't they?
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by John Stammers
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