Interference Pattern

by J.O. Morgan

At first, these extraordinary poems may unsettle and disturb, but the next reading could be one of rapture and astonishment; it all hinges on your point of view. Like the optical illusion of the maiden and the crone, you can only see one image at a time; the brain deciding which is the figure and which the background. It is a book that acts out its own subjects – dualities, ambiguities, boundaries – through physical dislocation, through patterns of interference.

This is a collage of many voices: eager or dispassionate, unreliable or matter-of-fact – depending, as with everything else, on your angle of entry. Some of the voices fear involvement; some are afraid of doing nothing; some, perhaps, have already gone too far. Like the image on the cover, these pieces shimmer and buzz in their own instability. Is this punishment or reward? What is the yellow smoke? Will there be bodies floating under the plastic pool-cover? Are we, like the hotel manager, seeing visions?

Volatile, troubling, but endlessly interesting, these poems show J. O. Morgan working and compressing language into a precarious, frictional state. As a result, Interference Pattern is a unique reading experience: vivid, challenging and completely original.

Genres: Poetry

54 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 2016

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a departure for J.O. Morgan as his previous published poetry is normally in the form of longer narrative poems. These punchy, short poems are unsettling and brutal in their realism at times, and often ambiguous. One about a girl almost drowning when she swims under a swimming pool cover and couldn't breathe when she sought the surface had me gasping for breath, as I remember the terror of doing that once as a child. Like so many other scenes in the collection, that ring of truth I found quite gruelling and I had to dip in and out of the book, finding lots of wee gems each time, but lots to ponder too.

One poem which typifies the atmosphere of a lot of the poems sticks in my mind particularly. The narrator talks of the ambivalent attitude of the doves he keeps, then intervenes too slowly for it to help when one is grabbed by a sparrowhawk . Here the observer's intervention deprives the hawk of a meal, but with the dove already torn open, yet alive, he has to then deliver the brutal blow to dispatch it. There is a lot just in that idea, but it is told with the great clarity of something which really happened, but opens up lots of uncertain interpretations each team you read over it.