Text and Text Messages
Inua Ellams is in demand. This collection provides ample evidence for why this is so. Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars is an energetic work, blurring the ever-diminishing distinction between page and performance poetry. First impressions suggest a city poet brimming with self-confidence, experimenting unreservedly with language and style, and holding the keys to the garrison of contemporary youth culture. The title itself is a testament to Ellams’ juxtapositional style, where pop references are merged with classic and experimental tropes. Particularly striking is the liberty at which Ellams indulges his impressive imaginative acrobatics to conjure up original descriptive landscapes.
Nevertheless, Ellams’ thematic interests are distinctively traditional, as is seen in the recurrent exploration of childhood (Of All the Boys of Plateau Private School, Leather Comets, Class Zero) and city life (Lilly and the Ladybird; Clubbing; Lovers, Liars, Conjurers and Thieves; GuerrillaGardenWritingPoem). In Twenty Five, past and present unite in a “Thai Food Gourmet on Horseferry Road”, as Ellams considers his parent’s marriage: “The couple have been paired for twenty-five years. They know the / square root of survival, how to float four children through tidal waves to / safe piers”. Ellams, like most of us in the twenty-something-and-‘urban’ pigeonhole, shows the marks of an adolescence spent absorbing Def Poetry shows, with echoes of the work of Saul Williams throughout the collection, although this influence is but one of many tributaries feeding Ellams’ broad stylistic repertoire. Portrait of Prometheus as a Basketball Player is a playful marriage of contemporary and classical imagery written with rigourous attention to detail: “Men will call him father, son or king / of the court. His stride will ripple oceans, feet whip-crack quick, his back will scar, / haunched over, a silent storm about him”. The playful juxtaposition of mythology and contemporary life make the reader consider whether we live in a world where such depth of symbolic meaning is possible from novel sources, or whether we will be forced to look behind us to find the appropriate resources to explain what we see and how we feel.
Ellams’ eulogy, Corinne Bailey Rae, is a high point of the collection, in particular the opening: “Maybe her voice isn’t sky-borne or drifting, / instead, a captured clasp of earth spirit, an orchid / of the valley or some kindred of hymns”. The toning down of experimentation and a certain economy of description extends the reach of Ellams’ overall style and suits this particular form. But Ellams does not have to be writing about music to be deliciously acoustic, generating music with strongly alliterative lines, sprung rhythms and the regular employment of assonance that show the influence of rhythmic innovators such as Gerard Manley Hopkins. In GuerrillaGardenWritingPoem, Ellams returns to his favoured cityscape to describe:
The mouth of the city is tongued with tar
its glands gutter saliva, teeth chatter in rail
clatter, throat echoes car horns and tyre’s
screech, forging new language: a brick city
smoke speak of stainless steel consonants
and suffocated vowels. These are trees and
shrubbery, the clustered flora battling all
hours, staccato staggered through streets.
Fragments of Bone is a laudable attempt at extending beyond familiar thematic territory to grapple with issues of religion, history and violence. The poem boasts the stand out line of the collection, where Ellams describes: “the sun solemnly bowed on the horizon – / thin as a prayer mat”. The use of the word ‘solemn’ seems to do justice to the unfeeling regularity of the sun. The imagery of the prayer mat draws us towards considering the sun as an object which has long itself been the focal point of worship. This connecting of the sun and more recent traditions of religiosity through the prayer mat is especially rich. The poem is weakened by failing to fully develop the potential motivational structure of people who commit violence in the name of religion. Instead we are presented with a series of images that fail to coalesce into a substantive understanding. A point about form, Ellams is stuck in the modern idiom of point and counterpoint rather than going beyond a dialogical structure within the poem to provide a deeper response to the problems of identity, religion and violence (‘you counter with airplanes …’ ‘you reject faith again …’ ‘Let me begin again …’). The rhetorical use of ‘I say’ ‘you say’ ‘they say’ at various points in the poem borders on the polemic, a feature totally absent from the much more poetic referencing of the personal impact of 9/11 in Class Zero.
Ellams’ strongest poem, Dear Tina, explores the contrast between traditional and modern romance. Ellams is at his best when he focusses his images, communicating the experience of modern life and the etiquettes of digital and contemporary relationships. It begins with a description of his grandmother fleeing home during the Biafra War:
how she screamed through drop zones and Morse codes
into jungle, dodging bullets, hiding and crying into rain,
that day I discovered my grandfather heard her wailing,
felt something enough to move him after her, in darkness,
through rain, how her eyes, found in the flickering bounce
of hurricane lamps, showed a place so pure, he sailed her
away to the embrace of Paris, the kiss of Rome …
… That day, I realised we live
in different worlds; friends pass too fast for minutes, wars
comes after X Factor, turtle dove romances exist in the past.
Ellams, as with other generation Y poets such as Max Wallis and Nina Bahadur, believe in the survival of romance by denying its extinction and accepting its more modern ‘anti-romantic’ incarnations. Ellams’ text message epitomises this belief and perhaps underlines his commitment to engaging the perennial through urban and contemporary ways: “if evr ur lst in ths urbn jngle, / I’ll fnd n brng u in frm rain”. In summary, Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars is a compelling statement of intent from a versatile
Buy your copy of Inua Ellams, Candy Coated Unicorns and Converse All Stars, Flap, Flipped Eye, £4, ISBN 978-1-905233-33-5 HERE
Samatar Elmi is a poet and philosophy postgrad student at the University of Bristol. He has had poems in Magma; the Cadaverine; Ink, Sweat and Tears; Myths of the Near Future; Ekphrasis.