I include both these poetry collections in the same post not simply because I finished with both today, but because I couldn’t finish reading them…
I read Tim Tim Cheng’s “The Tattoo Collector” about two months ago. Not being sure about it, I put it to one side and recently came back to it. Whilst there may well be some brilliant work in it, I’m afraid I was totally alienated by the gimmickry on show: redacted poems; poems filled with long solid black lines; Chinese characters; poems in columns… It was a test of my new resolution to be prepared to stop reading work I couldn’t really respect / understand and which seemed to rely on ‘being clever’.
Which is a similar complaint to Kat Lehmann’s Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner “no matter how it ends a bluebird’s song”. Really? A prize winner? On that basis there’s no chance for the rest of us. Just end-to-end gimmickry; perhaps two pages of words stretched out to make 35 pages. I was almost blinded by the white space. So, even if there are many people who like this kind of thing (and there clearly are) it’s not for me. I couldn’t give it any credence, so didn’t read it.
Ian Gouge - Writer 