The blurb on the back cover of this elegant chapbook describes Peter Brennan as re-announcing himself “after a long silence”. Well, I’ll admit I hadn’t come across him before—my loss, I now realise.

This is a sequence of poems that seems to record the course of an actual relationship, but it’s not quite as simple as that. The context and tone changes, sometimes rapidly (at one point he sounds almost medieval, talking about “withy bed and open mere”, the next he’s in Starbucks), and there are all sorts of allusions, particularly to Venus, both as the evening star and the goddess of love. It’s not always easy to grasp, but it works wonderfully well.

That, I think, is down to Brennan’s style. No one could ever accuse him of overwriting—every word is made to count, every full stop (or lack of one) even. With some poets, I suspect, the use of irregular punctuation, lots of one-word lines and words broken across two lines might quickly have started to grate, but here it suits Brennan’s purpose admirably, mirroring the slow piecing together of memory.

If all this sounds dry, or too clever for its own good, it’s not. Joy and sadness run only just below the surface of these poems—and sometimes they’re even more apparent than that. It is heart-breaking when, in the final piece, Brennan writes:

You took the song but sent
the singer

slowly
away…

There’s a subtle music too, in lines such as:

We choose the train that sways
and curves by Stort and Lea, glinting
words from lip to lip
– remembrances,
learnings of the week—
patterns gingerly
unpicked.
(‘Cambridge’)

The title, of course, should have given it away to start with. This sequence is, when all’s said and done, a torch song, and a very fine one at that.

 
'Letters for a known woman' - Review of 'Torch of Venus' by howj begg (Amazon.co.uk), 11 Jun 2007

By (london) - See all my reviews Strongly cinematic, and full of numerous felicities, this is a story from behind the eyes. Passive and ecstatic observation of scenes over time and out of it. The narrator forgets they're looking, but the reader knows it, and shares in the draught. Before you move these pictures: a loved one in various garments, urban jaunts punctuated with light, scent and confusion, the pleasurable shock of wood and pool, endless mornings, rendezvous turning to conlict-dramas. Eastern dawns and western sundowns. The oldest tale of all plays out while the viewer surveys the screen for every detail. This is verse that demands, easily, and gives, graciously, while always depicting. Think Max Ophuls. As we pay our attention to the foreground, slowly creep in symbols from the mind to populate the frame, past and pastlessness, and perhaps hints to resolve the recurring disappointment, trapped desires, sensual cul-de-sacs.

"I closed the curtains.You
swiftly

unclapsed

their
white completeness

soon contained again,

my gaze become lifetime's
slivered glass.

 
So many mornings
have woken from that moment

"If only
you'd taken me

by the shoulders and said
you loved me."

Great camerawork, and a perfect encasulation of the problems of desire. Brennan gives us a work which on its surface is full of play, and dazzling mise en scène. Underneath there is an enquiry as to how and if this 'narrative' hangs together, and its import for the protagonists. An adventure undertaken with much brio, very inviting for any reader.