{"id":378,"date":"2011-09-14T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-14T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=378"},"modified":"2020-12-09T14:38:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T14:38:54","slug":"ross-cogan-reviews-micrographia-by-robert-dickinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ross-cogan-reviews-micrographia-by-robert-dickinson\/","title":{"rendered":"Ross Cogan reviews Micrographia by Robert Dickinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Micrographia<\/span><\/a> by Robert Dickinson. Waterloo Press  <\/span><\/span><\/font> 51pp. \u00a39.00<\/span><\/span><\/font><\/span><\/span>

\u2018Micrographia\u2019 is a medical term for the abnormally small, cramped handwriting often associated with Parkinson\u2019s disease. Yet the word also suggests \u2018Micrography\u2019, a technique of building up pictures and designs from minute letters. It\u2019s an apt title for a collection which takes the small, cramped details of our lives and builds them into pictures of lasting beauty and real insight. <\/span>

And in much the same way as the beauty of a piece of micrography only emerges when you step back, it can take a while for the full subtlety of this collection to register; it is the smallness and crampedness that come across most immediately. Indeed, an atmosphere of threat permeates Robert Dickinson\u2019s work. He is interested in the loners and losers: the ageing addict who will \u201chalf cook \/ something frozen. \/ But I\u2019m clean, she says \/ as the rooms fill with dust\u201d (Blind forty); the superannuated skinhead with the tattooed knuckles who \u201ctwists his hands as he talks, hiding the words\u201d (Love and hate, 1977); the man in the <\/span>Iron Maiden<\/span> T-shirt feeding coins into the quiz machines, \u201csearching for the pattern, \/ the underlying sequence of the world\u201d (Eschatology). <\/span>

To quote another of his poems, these \u201cbrief and bitter lives flare like night fires.\u201d But from the first line of this remarkable book (\u201cWhere does it hurt? In Battersea\u201d) you know that you\u2019re not in for a straightforward trawl through contemporary lives. Dickinson\u2019s poetry draws on European surrealist traditions while shaping them to a modern British audience. The result is invigorating, exciting, occasionally bizarre, as if Miroslav Holub suddenly popped up playing a small time hustler in <\/span>The Bill<\/span>. <\/span>

Undoubtedly the highlight of the collection is the long sequence \u2018Biopic\u2019. This imagines a major figure of 20th Century European thought watching the shoddy TV adaptation of his life. There are enough clues to suggest that Dickinson had Einstein in mind (references to Brownian motion and \u201cthat catchphrase formula \/ about movement and light\u201d). I think I also detected a hint of Freud \u2013 \u201cIf only they\u2019d heard of the unconscious \/ and its buried discontents\u201d \u2013 but this may have been a slip. <\/span>

The inspiration is less important, though, than the way in which he builds up a three dimensional portrait out of scattered images: childhood \u2013 \u201ca woman I\u2019ve never seen \/ reaching down in soft focus\u201d; an upbringing among \u201csmall town intellectuals \/ minding their ps and qs \/ in roomfuls of approved classics\u201d; fumblings with girls in \u201cunfamiliar, period dress \/ designed to restrict precisely this movement.\u201d His insights into the structure of reality are brilliantly described: <\/span>

\u2026 But I say<\/span>
the universe is like a tablecloth <\/span>
on shifting sand. The world <\/span>
is the possibility of the world<\/span>
the chance of it happening. <\/span>

Dickinson knows his physics. But he also knows people, understands the frustrations of aging. \u201cLook closely at my hands. \/ However much they tremble, they are young\u201d \u2013 the close of \u2018Biopic\u2019 trades poignantly on the ambiguity of the old man watching the young actor playing himself as an old man. Later in the collection he gives us a series of subtle, assured poems on dementia \u2013 a rare achievement in itself given the topic\u2019s knack of bringing out the worst in poets. <\/span>

But then this book is full of rare achievements: intellectually satisfying, it is also accessible; wryly funny, it finds time to be moving; sweepingly ambitious, it paints a world in the cramped writing of a Parkinson\u2019s sufferer. Read it, you\u2019ll see. <\/span>



<\/font><\/p>\n

….reviewed by Ross Cogan<\/span><\/font>
<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Micrographia by Robert Dickinson. Waterloo Press  51pp. \u00a39.00\u2018Micrographia\u2019 is a medical term for the abnormally small, cramped handwriting often associated with Parkinson\u2019s disease. Yet the word also suggests \u2018Micrography\u2019, a technique of building up pictures and designs from minute letters. It\u2019s an apt title for a collection which takes the small, cramped details of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23769,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions\/23769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}