Defending Sinclair’s Title
Another Use of Canvas, Angus Sinclair (24pp, £5.00, Gatehouse Press)
Sinclair is both wrestler and poet, a paradox immediately addressed in his debut pamphlet’s title, which introduces tensions between wrestling as entertainment, and as art-form. Many poems comment on lives off-canvas, out of camera-shot: ‘soft peripheral shapes / I understand to be bodies, / visual murmurs’. ‘Looking Up at the Lights’ begins in the ring (‘…a cold fizzing in my neck; / something has slipped or pulled.’) then pans outwards, so that the ‘white lights suspended above’ become hospital lights, and the poem becomes a reflection on infirmity:
and think how an operating theatre
is like a wrestling arena;
the outcome less certain.
I’ll admit: I was smiling to see my childhood wrestling fandom turned into effective poetry. ‘The Saint versus Lord Nelson’ recreates the colours, commentary and rough-and-tumble of popular wrestling. Pace, rhythm and sound bring the scene from screen to page:
Almost before the bell is rung Lord Nelson
tries to swing and bundle his rival The Saint,
belly-bomb him to the mat for the quick fall –
but The Saint side-steps, little matador working
Nelson’s weight against him, all that power
sent crashing to the corner…
Another style which has made its way into contemporary wrestling is Mexican Lucha Libre, whose brightly-coloured masks look back to Mexican folk traditions like “Dia de los Muertos”, with its now-famous floral skulls. Sinclair uses this material in ‘Face’, which begins: ‘A boxer bleeds his nose, eye, mouth. / A wrestler bleeds his forehead. / His invisible crown of thorns.’ I’m reminded of other Biblical uses of the forehead: anointing for healing or burial; bearing the mark of Christ or The Beast. The crown of thorns is a symbol of humiliation, a theme which appears throughout, and transports us to the folk-magical close:
In the garden, Adam and Eve
cover not only their bodies
but their faces too.
*
All night, folk-devils
try and remove the masks
of little gods.
If I wanted to nitpick: ‘Face’ scratches the surface of its material, and I wish it had weaved its strands together for longer. And while the repetitions of ‘Muscle Memory’ are appropriate to its theme, they make its final line less than surprising. But I don’t. By the time I’ve reached the final poem, ‘Canvas’, its blend of violence with careful, lyrical observance of the body leaves me in little doubt that Sinclair was right. Wrestling can be artful:
The ring’s cross-irons have developed a bend
which exactly matches the curve of your spine.
Your bones creak in conversation with the ring.
….reviewed by Mark Burnhope