Tomorrow We Will Live Here by Ryan Van Winkle (Salt Publishing, £9.99)

      Tomorrow We Will Live Here presents its reader with a very honest, unpretentious telling of an unending, inviolable Americaness, a sad and immutable character which exists at all times in that singular country. Van Winkle's is a poetry whose stage is the complex lives of Americans themselves, lives which are forever beset by a collection of irresolvable tensions. 'That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who prefer to think it a matter of not great consequence' wrote Flannery O'Conner, in her preface to the second edition of Wise Blood. That same issue of life and death is evident here and demands the full attention of the reader; Jesus never quite goes away from these poems as each slice of life that Van Winkle depicts presents some part of an endless struggle between what you ought to do and what you want to do. Winkle's characters explore the bounds within which one can live a good life, the guilt of failure to do so and the pursuit of happiness. These poems are heavy with the difficulty of being-in-the-world and being-with-oneself. This took me pleasantly by surprise. The collection has a neighbourhood mentality; its persistent focus on the small lives of small people keep it at a nicely moderate distance from America's contemporary public tragedies and its frequently disgraceful history. Van Winkle resists the pulls towards over-politicising and the creation of Kitsch, but at the same time involves these culturally essential factors within the souls of his characters themselves, his America is effective, timeless and essential.

      This small life/small people focus is perfectly at home with Van Winkle's voice which, no doubt, will become one of the hottest points for discussion about this book. His voice is plain but certainly cannot be called 'Everyman'; his style is tailored as a vehicle for his meaning, it is neither gimmick nor poetic democratisation stilted with agenda (although I will not commit to saying it is ungeneric). His subjects are those which are known but go unsaid, the sadnesses which are incommunicable but mutually understood, so Van Winkle could pick no better voice than one which tells a situation in its plainness while making a secret wink to its reader. His voice emerges as brave, unquenchable and authentic; it is still and small but brightly alive and unstoppable.

The secret wink resides in the implicit connections Van Winkle forges between objects and meanings but it must be said that at times these connections are too obvious and can become tiresome. This is the necessary evil of the style Van Winkle has chosen, but for the most part this simplicity works, most notably in his poems on childhood and its not-quite-innocence. Van Winkle strikes a satisfactory balance between a paint-by-numbers poetics and more complex constructions of meaning.

      I like this collection very much; I found myself reading each line slowly and deliberatively, each sentence an encapsulation of still, plodding, suburban air. At times Van Winkle is tentative and at others more spontaneous and brassy but whatever their differences each poem captured an inimitable particle of Americana with real insight and artistic restraint. Considering the building popularity for a plain speech kind of poetry this collection seems to be at the forefront of a shift to something new, it is on the way to a perfection of some new movement, aware at all times that no speech is truly plain for the poet who wants to do a good job. But perhaps that is just a feeling.


Catherine Woodward

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