{"id":628,"date":"2010-04-11T19:17:03","date_gmt":"2010-04-11T19:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=628"},"modified":"2010-04-11T19:17:03","modified_gmt":"2010-04-11T19:17:03","slug":"helen-ivory-reviews-andrew-mcmillan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/helen-ivory-reviews-andrew-mcmillan\/","title":{"rendered":"Helen Ivory reviews Andrew McMillan"},"content":{"rendered":"


Andrew McMillan: <\/span>Every Salt Advance<\/span>
Red Squirrel Press, 2009 (ISBN: 978-1-906700-00-3) \u00a34.00<\/span>

In Andrew McMillan\u2019s own words \u201cpoetry shouldn\u2019t be about writing the extraordinary, it should be about taking the ordinary and showing it to be extraordinary.\u201d and this is exactly what he does in his debut <\/span>Every Salt Advance<\/span>. <\/span>

The pamphlet begins on \u2018Thursday morning\u2019, in the aftermath of a relationship split.  We see the subject of the poem awake in the \u201cyawning, temporary sun\u201d in which he had \u201cresigned himself to chess\/and straining peas alone.\u201d Here we are taken from the overtly poetic, to the poignantly comical which grounds the poem. Next, the narrator steps outside of the poem-world to comment on what might have happened next, one possibility is that \u201che wept until small creatures\/came to wash their faces in his cheeks\u201d, and now we are in the realms of the extraordinary, metaphor-wise of course, but the narration is so convincing I can perfectly see and believe this.<\/span>

These are not the first tears, nor is this the only heartbreak in this collection. Many of the poems are about distances between people. Throughout \u2018now you\u2019ve left\u2019, the narrator insists that the subject knows he\u2019s ok, though \u201cthe country is set between us like a table\u2026I am almost happy because\u2026a moose passes me as though\/he were a milkman\/I\u2019d known for half my life\u2026\u201d Again, this conflation of the ordinary and the extraordinary which is here, both disarming and reassuring.<\/span>

Andrew McMillan has a knack for writing tenderness without sounding mawkish, and his poems dealing with paternity are witness to this: \u2018<\/span>dad<\/span>\u2019 was shortlisted for the Grist Poetry Prize. This poem, in three sections, talks of a warmth and tenderness in a father\/son relationship \u201cwhen, on catching me topless with\/Thom Gunn and grinning,\/you nodded as if to say that you\/were proud and dad that\u2019s why\/I am too\u201d, and  then in the last section any inching towards sentimentality is cut short by the visceral \u201call I think\/is that I want\/the hand Thom grasped in his;\/ I want to chop it\/off and dad I want\/to frame it by my bed\/and dream of boys\/who maim their fathers\/for their hands.\u201d<\/span>

That McMillan writes in lower-case, enables him to develop an intimacy with the reader \u2013 capital letters would be somehow obtrusive \u2013 as you move in to listen. He is also a minimalist when it comes to punctuation, and prefers to let the white page add its own breaths of silence, choosing instead artful line breaks and stanza breaks.<\/span>

A recent article in <\/span>Poetry News<\/span> praised the pamphlet form and talked about it as an excellent medium for those starting out. Andrew McMillan is only twenty-one years old, and after this impressive introduction, I will be extremely interested to see what he does next.  <\/span>

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

…reviewed by <\/span>Helen Ivory<\/span>
<\/font><\/div>\n


*<\/span> We'll be publishing one of Andrew's poems later this week<\/span><\/font>
<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew McMillan: Every Salt AdvanceRed Squirrel Press, 2009 (ISBN: 978-1-906700-00-3) \u00a34.00In Andrew McMillan\u2019s own words \u201cpoetry shouldn\u2019t be about writing the extraordinary, it should be about taking the ordinary and showing it to be extraordinary.\u201d and this is exactly what he does in his debut Every Salt Advance. The pamphlet begins on \u2018Thursday morning\u2019, in […]<\/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-628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628","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=628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}