Craig Sernotti’s Forked Tongue: A Review by Dan Holloway

Craig Sernotti’s Forked Tongue (Blue Room Publishing) is a strange mix of the lyrical and the minimal, and reading it has made me think long and hard about what a collection of poetry is. Which is a good thing. And means it will linger in my mind long after many works that are, in theory, “better”.

Curation seems to be the elephant in the room in much of the literary world at the moment. There’s a whole mainstream mindset that bewails the lack of curation in the newfangled webwise alternative world. And there’s another bunch of indie hipsters that cross themselves (or make pentacles, or do something weird with their hands to make whatever symbol they DO find acceptable as a way of signifying sacre bleu) if you so much as mention the word. And yet the fact remains that a collection of poems is not just, well, a collection of poems.

Which is one of the problems with Forked Tongue. The poems feel like they’ve just been put there, but not in a way that tells any kind of story. I wonder as I read the likes of ‘Ideas’, the (programmatic?) opener —

Nothing’s out there, so stop looking.
Nothing’s inside, so stop retching.

— whether this isn’t, in fact, some comment about the lack of metanarrative. But I don’t think it is. Because the other problem with this collection is it needs a good edit. There are poems that shouldn’t be there at all, such as ‘Dream, 26 November 2008, early a.m.’, and there are some almost great poems, like ‘Waiting Room’. This —

The man sitting next to me does not look familiar.
He exhales mosquitoes

— is an incredible image, the kind that makes you stand up and shout “yes” then haunts you for days after. And then Sernotti slides into —

He is about as unattractive and uninteresting as a dead governor

— and the whole thing fizzles out.

There is such stylistic variety in Forked Tongue that it took me a while to get my head around what was right and what was wrong with the poems on show, and it’s nothing to do with the obsession with excretion and bodily dissection (there are many moments of Freud 101). The answer’s actually simple, and applies across the board. This is a collection that fails when it thinks it has something to say. Some of the poems, some of the lines almost spring to life and high five themselves they’re so smug. Which is a problem I have with whole chunks of contemporary poetry. And then there’s a nugget of brilliance, a rump of poems that forget to be clever and profound, and as a result actually are.

Take ‘Cheater’, a poem about mid-life crisis (“When I found a gray pubic hair–“), which ends with the lines:

I did it to feel young again
& if it’s any consolation
I don’t even remember their names

I thought for a long time whether the banality in these lines was ironic or not, but in the end whichever way it’s meant I don’t go for it — if it’s not banal, it’s glib. And I’m not sure which is worse. ‘Noah’, a really rather nice twist on the way we value the lives of children over the lives of adults is deflated with a similar glibness — its point is made with a one-liner at the end and you can almost hear the poet going “ba da boom” at you. There is banality also in the likes of ‘Many’, with its pretentious conclusion:

Your pillow is cold.
There are many ways to die

Well, yes, but the point is? It’s not profound. It’s obvious. But it thinks it’s profound, like the very worst kind of Tim Lott ladlit, and that’s not attractive in writing.

On the other hand — and it’s a very large other hand — there are many times when Sernotti stops himself before adding a last line that would deflate what went before. And these work incredibly well. Take ‘Prayers’, with its breathtaking central image:

We are bound and gagged and tied to trees.
The trees are cardboard cutouts of trees.

Or the blank brilliance of ‘Three Kinds of Sadness’, with its innocuous opening stanzas starting “I don’t feel worthy of life” and  “I’m used to disappointment”, slipping without comment into “They held him down & began cutting off his head.”

And I have to single out ‘On  the Floor’, which is the one poem that really touches greatness, with its breathtaking rhythms —

And no one attends
The service and you
And you
And you
And you open your eyes
And you are in class

— and its genuinely profound use of blankness; the description of “the woman to your left” who “is on her cell phone discussing her sex toy collection” is up there alongside the very best Brett Easton Ellis. The poem is a coruscating, searing, paranoid panorama of a masterpiece. Sadly it’s the only one, and after all the contemplatings on curation and smugness and the state of poetry and the satisfied one-liner and the great blank madness of the buzzing neon image, perhaps that’s it: this is a collection put together by a possibly great poet who just doesn’t have the material for a collection yet.