Several Deer

by Adam Crothers

Winner of The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry First Collection Prize 2017. Winner of the Shine/Strong Poetry Award 2017. Several Deer is the debut collection of a young Northern Irish poet. As much indebted to Bob Dylan and Lana Del Rey as to Emily Dickinson and George Herbert, Crothers writes about destruction, consumption, misogyny, gods, sex, failure, and rock ’n’ roll. But he does so with rhythmic subtlety and verbal craftsmanship, with unmistakable technical acuity. The poems are homophones, mondegreens, malapropisms, paraprosdokians, antanaclasis, polyptoton and puns are juggled with dexterity. Yet, for all their craft, the poems remain empathic, sincere, abscised from the particular experience rather than plucked from the common branch, addressing real people, albeit with the cynic’s ironizing compulsion. "Now send in the clowns", ends the collection’s opening poem – and so they happy and sad, wise and tragic, a touch melodramatic, wilfully misunderstood. They console themselves with rhythm, with rhyme, and with riffs on literary and pop culture new and old, high and low. Above all, perhaps, it is the air of excited verbal mischief that endears the ear to Several Deer . Easily sidetracked and keen to be soundtracked, the collection doesn’t take its sadness seriously. It listens to the hits.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

Published February 1, 2016

Reviews

[John Alba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very witty and well written, entertaining in its word play
At points turns into a bit of an ouroboros of cleverness.

[Karo Ulloa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry collection confuses me a lot—and that is stimulating. Before reading Several Deer I knew nothing of it and nothing about the author. After the first few poems I felt like I needed to investigate something about it—and that is how I learned how Crothers' collection had be praised and awarded and that it had influences of both classical literature and the very contemporary pop scene. (Had you ever heard of Dr Nelson's Improved Inhaler, for instance?) I was terrified by both parts of these allusions. How was I supposed to both get the classics and the pop culture references if I do not consider myself savvy in any of these?
What happened next is that I thought of giving up this poetry collection. Then I discussed it with a group of literary critics and students of English Literature. And one of the many conclusions that we came to is that the point of all of these poems is not understanding them, but enjoying them. Crothers has a very prolific management of internal rhymes. It is a very cynical type of collection; it mixes several themes that range from love to the very sexual nature of the humankind. Even when I was not "understanding" what I read, I grinned a lot. Because Crothers' use of pun is fabulous. After opening the first part with a kind of epigraph from Shakespeare's As You Like, he delves into "My Usual Flair" with the following lines: "How can you call me a misogynist? My mother was a woman- / hater and I must at all costs rebel. When in Roman / I do as girls do." Fantastic! He is not only making fun of the so-much-believed notions that 1) being a man implies misogyny (not to make a confusion between this and reproducing patriarchal standards) and 2) that women cannot be misogynistic. And I think it is even funnier when it seems that he is making such an absurd statement such as "My mother was a woman." And then comes the point of this sexual innuendo of enjoying sex with men as a male speaker. Instances like these in which I could "understand" the mechanism of the text were particularly fulfilling. Those other ones that did not make sense at all—such as in the poem "Poem"— were pretty enjoyable too because of the rhythm conveyed in it. One of the many things that I said about this collection when discussing it in the aforementioned seminar was that Crothers is making use of those devices that I was told never to use when writing—especially when writing poetry—such as easy rhymes and rhyming with the same words. One would think it would end up being cacophonous, but, surprisingly, and thanks to the author's management, it is not.
For those of you who are interested in intertextuality and self-referenciality this is a brilliant collection. I do not know if it would be appropriate to consider it metatextual (in the Genettian sense), but there is definitely an overt awareness of the process of writing. And it is a mocking type of awareness, since it plays with the very constrained forms that he uses, the couplet being the basic one mixed with the fact that most of the poems contain fourteen stanzas. I had to read most of the poems several times in order to apprehend something from them—either the form, the sounds, the theme, or simply the fact that they were indeed words aiming at something. Several Deer is a collection I will definitely be rereading as my other readings move forward because I am sure it is never-ending in its conception.

[lixaic · Rating 3 out of 5]

my favorite poem was september