Talking to Skeletons

David Dumouriez, Liverpool: erbacce-press, 90pps., £10

VADIM KAGAN finds a poet who is better than he pretends to be

The third poem in David Dumouriez’s collection is titled ‘POETRY IS WANK.’ It’s printed in capitals, runs two pages, and closes on the line “POETRY WILL NEVER NOT BE WANK.” Provocation or confession, it sets the terms for the book: eighty-odd pages from a poet who refuses, on the surface, to take poetry seriously, and who is, all the same, very good at it.

Talking to Skeletons ranges from English childhood to Istanbul, and the mixture is as eclectic as that suggests. There are elegies and satires, love poems, a walking tour of a childhood town, political rants, an ode to Cary Grant’s suit in North by Northwest, and a two-line poem about a curry. The voice is colloquial (sometimes too much so), sardonic, and almost religiously allergic to pretension. Rather than the elevated register, Dumouriez reaches for the pub, the bus stop, the snooker club. He is suspicious of anyone who takes themselves too seriously — himself included.

For me the collection’s finest moment is ‘51° 30′ N, 0° 25′ E,’ a long walking tour of a small English town that slowly turns into an elegy for a vanished self. Dumouriez takes us past polling stations, dog walks, rusted goalposts, a toyshop run by a Polish man, a church where he and a friend once tried to summon a thunderbolt by swearing at the threshold. The imagery is specific and unhurried: “Another postbox. Focal point back then. / Not sure now.” The accumulation of observed detail makes the place feel at once ordinary and irreplaceable. Memory, class and mortality converge without any of them being announced. And somehow the combination works.

‘Reading Kipling by Candlelight’ is one of the more personal poems in the book, and the one I found easiest to climb inside. Set during the 1999 Istanbul earthquake, it follows the speaker through a night of confusion. He mistakes the tremor for a burglar, goes back to sleep while the parks fill with frightened residents, and only in the morning grasps the scale of what he slept through. It’s funny and quietly unsettling at once. Dumouriez has an instinct for the exact detail that lifts an anecdote into something more: “Myself and one old woman, two floors up, / remained at home. My flaws you’ll find described. / As for her, perhaps she’d given up on life.” That last line does something the earlier stanzas don’t prepare you for. Death has entered what had been, up to that point, largely a comic story. And then life shrugs and moves on.

Talking to Skeletons is at its strongest when the humor and the grief run in parallel. ‘An Anglican Event’ opens with “My mother lies before us in a box, / to put it blunt,” and proceeds to take a funeral apart with deadpan precision: the vicar who “styles himself as ‘Father Tim,’” the embarrassed congregants working through hymns they haven’t sung since school, the curtain that makes it real. ‘Ex of England’ pulls off something similar with a grandfather’s hoarded possessions and an unidentified Victorian portrait heading for a bonfire. The joke in these poems does not push the grief aside; it comes out of the same material.

Dumouriez is most interesting when he runs into something that resists him: a death, a memory, a place, the stubborn survival of affection. When the sardonic voice has something to push against, the friction produces complexity. He is less interesting when he already knows what he thinks before the poem starts.

The smaller provocations don’t all land. The opening of ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese, 43 (revised)’ – “How can I fuck thee? Let me count the ways” – is genuinely funny and technically competent parody. But some of the shorter satirical pieces (‘Addendum,’ ‘Laid Back, Laid Under,’ ‘The Poetry is in the Potty’) read more like social-media wit than poems. Set beside ‘51° 30′ N, 0° 25′ E’ and ‘Reading Kipling,’ they sound a dissonant note. Dumouriez knows the difference between a poem and a punchline. He just prints the punchline anyway from time to time.

The unevenness points to a larger issue. Across the eighty-odd pages, subjects and attitudes recur – death, aging, literary pretension, cultural irritation – and a handful of the lighter pieces work against the stronger ones nearby rather than for them. A shorter book might have been a stronger one. That said, the excess is clearly a part of how Dumouriez writes, forever spotting something else that seems to want a joke or an elegy.

I come to the book as a poet who works mainly in formal verse and in two languages – about as far from Dumouriez’s aesthetic as one can reasonably get. What I hadn’t expected was how little the distance ended up mattering. Talking to Skeletons isn’t really asking to be identified with; it’s asking for a reader willing to be amused, provoked, and every so often caught off guard – the anecdote that opens onto mortality, the joke that turns without warning into grief.

Which is also, I think, why the opening declaration eventually defeats itself. For all the mockery of poetry and poets and gatekeepers (and his own reasons for writing), Dumouriez’s best poems rely on the one thing “POETRY IS WANK” pretends to distrust: the idea that arranging words carefully might preserve something that would otherwise vanish. That a poet who opens with “POETRY IS WANK” also writes “51° 30′ N, 0° 25′ E” is, in the end, the strongest argument against his own thesis.