Alan Buckley reviews PLUS ULTRA by Sarah Fletcher (CHEERIO, 2023)
Published last year, PLUS ULTRA was the first poetry collection from CHEERIO Publishing, an independent imprint launched in 2020 in association with The Estate of Francis Bacon. Its list now includes three poetry collections, along with around a dozen novels and non-fiction books, and its website sets out its mission as follows: “We commission innovative books and films that confound received ideas and open the door to new perceptions. In the spirit of Francis Bacon’s work, we are here to intrigue, disturb and thrill.”
In addition to this, PLUS ULTRA comes with a string of multi-adjective endorsements on its covers. It’s “a wild, exciting, lyrical book”, says Matthew Dickman. Victoria Kennefick describes it as “cool, sexy, dangerous and brilliant”. For Ahren Warner, it’s “an alarming, accomplished and brilliant first collection”. So before I’ve even got to the first poem, PLUS ULTRA has a lot to live up to – not least that capitalised title.
I’ll begin with a disagreement. The publisher notes on the back cover describe Fletcher’s poems as having “a sharp, Plathian interrogative voice”. While I think we should anyway have a moratorium on comparing young female poets to Plath (perhaps especially if they’re American, or American-British as Fletcher is), Plath isn’t the first voice I hear as a kind of presiding spirit:
Shut up about the pain! You want to make everything
about the pain!
Fear is far more serious.
Fear is the casual, secret agent —
one morning, every morning. That . . . fear
snuck in like a bayonet onto her tongue.
[‘Towards Anything of Use at All’]
A central concern of PLUS ULTRA is intimate relationships, and the way we try – through the illusions, disappointments and, above all, the pain of those relationships – to reach some place beyond the personal (the author is currently researching a PhD at Aberystwyth on pain and language). In this concern, and stylistically, I hear in many of Fletcher’s poems a London-based writer a few years older than Plath, who published her first collection in the same year Plath took her own life:
Thinking we were safe – insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom …
… And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers?
[‘Story of a Hotel Room’, from Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms by Rosemary Tonks]
Tonks – famed as much for her so-called “disappearance” as her two groundbreaking collections – saw Baudelaire and Rimbaud as her literary forebears. “The main duty of the poet”, she said in a 1967 interview, “is to excite – to send the senses reeling”. In an earlier (1963) interview, Tonks took a clear swipe at the poetry of The Movement from the preceding decade: “I don’t understand why poets are quite ready to pick up trivialities, but are terrified of writing of passions… [T]housands of dramatic things happen to them, and they happen to everybody. Everybody has to make terrible decisions or pass examinations, or fall in love, or avoid falling in love.”
She has a gift for the brief, striking image
While there are some poems in PLUS ULTRA I struggle to engage with, there’s no question that Fletcher is as committed as Tonks was to “writing of passions”, and it’s this commitment that has led me back to her collection repeatedly over the past few months – that, and her instinctive feel for the way language can communicate as much through sound as by sense. She has a gift for the brief, striking image. For example, in ‘Beginning Again Without a Title’:
while their tanned dads hid hard-ons
like magician’s doves
And in ‘Caviar’:
I eat the juicy fruit — a top-shelf, porno-picnic moment,
glittering like the piss of a baby rabbit
She can also create a more extended image that captures a nuanced emotional state, as in ‘Madrid Chorus’:
How you wanted something pure and clear
as melancholy, like high-proof vodka strained twelve times
through silver mesh . . .
And then how you might settle for something less:
alien nausea and literary madness
from a thumb of house red in your glass.
While the sense of longing, disappointment and ennui so deftly evoked here flows right through PLUS ULTRA, there’s also a good deal of playfulness and wit, as shown in ‘Cordelia’. Laid out landscape across verso and recto, its long, languorous lines are delivered with an arched eyebrow that would put Roger Moore to shame:
she can tell I don’t trust other women no darling just you
Her voice is a wire coathanger I hang what I want on it
but now the gin stinging my teeth I just want her to admit
she’s taken dance lessons
In a significant number of poems here, I have to abandon searching for either a coherent single voice, or a sustained narrative thread. Sometimes this is fine – there’s so much musicality and associative richness in the language that much can be gained from simply surrendering to the flow. However, at other times I feel as if I’m holding a fantastically ornate himitsu bako, which I lack the skill or sensitivity of touch to open. Here are the notes at the end of the collection for the penultimate page of the six-page poem ‘PLUS ULTRA II’:
p.45 The swimming planets are inspired by Keats’ ‘On Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. • La Malinche was a Nahuan woman who was the interpreter, slave, advisor and eventual consort to Hernán Cortés during his conquest of the Aztec Empire. • The Straits of Gibraltar are flanked by two large rocks that are referred to as the Pillars of Hercules. It was believed that they marked the furthermost limit reached by the Ancient Greek hero. In the Renaissance era, they became synonymous with the warning ‘Ne plus ultra’: nothing further beyond. • ‘Brekekeekkeke co-ax co-ax Brekekekeek co-ax co-ax’ is the cry of the frogs in Aristophanes’ The Frogs. Their chorus is a constant agitation to Dionysus. • Mss Coeur and Mss Bibble share a similar dynamic to that of Lil and her friend in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
To be fair, page 45 is far and away the most heavily annotated page in the book. It’s also essential for reading the collection as a whole to have the source of its title laid out so clearly: ‘Ne plus ultra’ is a warning, a delineation of a boundary, whereas PLUS ULTRA, by dropping the negation (and through its capitalisation), implies that there is something beyond – or at least, that there is value to be had in trying to explore what might lie beyond perceived limits. (It’s worth noting as well that “Plus Ultra” is the national motto of Spain, whose capital city is the setting for many of the poems. It was also the personal motto of Francis Bacon – the C16 philosopher, not the painter, though I assume this slantwise reference to the person who effectively funded this book is entirely intentional.) At the same time, the fact remains that for me all these notes didn’t help me engage with either page 45, or the whole poem, although – as is always the case with this poet – there are lines that pierce through:
I cried too:
PLUS ULTRA! PLUS ULTRA of having no self-borders!
Which must be like having no mother.
As the reference to “Lil and her friend” suggests, there’s more than a whiff of Eliot here, and even a nod to the The Waste Land’s working title, He Do the Police in Different Voices:
can we do a power couple
in different voices?
There are Waste Land echoes in other poems too – for example, in ‘Caviar’, where “On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing” seems to lie behind these lines:
(Interruption: Love Poem.
I am in Whitstable. Clouds? Used tissues,
scarred by needles of planes.
Beach? Empty, awash with footsteps all the same.
My oyster-mind can connect trifling things in loose
systems; no centre.
Given all this, it’s more than possible that the heavy annotation is intended to be at least partly playful, as it was with The Waste Land. Unfortunately, I’m one of those readers who share Edna Longley’s position on this, laid out in a recent essay in The Dark Horse that begins: “As a moderate admirer of The Waste Land – I think it’s good in parts – I have long been amazed by the poem’s hegemonic sway wherever ‘Modern Poetry’ is invoked.” So, however much I’m mindful of Don Paterson’s admonition in The Fall at Home – “Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read” – the truth is I’m more strongly drawn to the poems clearly anchored in the lyric mode. One thing at which Fletcher is repeatedly brilliant is highlighting the more problematic aspects of heterosexual male desire – although perhaps, given the sharp focus and impact of certain poems, ‘skewering’ might be a better word. In ‘Psychology’, for example, the speaker describes how, during sex, she can’t be reassured
that men aren’t looking past me but rather through
me towards an imaginary sixteen-year-old-girl legs
splayed and smooth as wild eels so tiny she could disappear
In ‘A Slap in the Face . . . of Nature’, the speaker baldly asks:
Why do forty-year-old narcissistic cokeheads
always want to slap me in the face?
Here, the spirit of Rosemary Tonks again feels present, both in the closing reference to “Baudelaire’s petty whores”, and in lines like these:
They want to slither back to my eye’s worm-womb,
O linger Sapphos of the lash-line! Please don’t leave!
Another poem directly addressing this theme is ‘Lads’, built around a superbly extended simile that’s entirely appropriate for discussing men “with rower’s arms”. It begins: “With them, sex feels like miming drowning. / […] the thrashing, the feeling / of being below the surface, the grabbing”, and ends:
[…] repeating tales
about the time they spent at Radley,
lifting their glasses to the rugby
on the telly, left to rehearse
their deaths-by-water nightly
with a girl they call easy.
Ah yes, another reference to The Waste Land … But what seizes my attention more here is the way the gently insistent rhythm, and rhyming / chiming of words, evoke both the sound of lapping water, and a feeling of mournful resignation. There’s something all the more powerful for the ending being, like WS Graham’s nighttime bell at the quay, “Very gently struck”.
On the inside flyleaf of PLUS ULTRA, there’s a photograph of the author wearing a 1970s-style football shirt with the word “BEST” above a number 7 where the club crest would normally be. Much though it pains me as a Liverpool fan to have to start talking about Manchester United, it’s necessary to point this out, given that nothing in PLUS ULTRA feels casually placed. In a book whose title is an exhortation to go further beyond, to push for excellence, the author wears a shirt that doesn’t just state a superlative, but also invokes the spirit of quite possibly the most jaw-droppingly talented footballer ever to have emerged from the U.K. This may be playful, but it’s also bold, and boldness is evident throughout the collection. In two adjacent poems both called ‘The Violet’, there’s a Bestian flourish in the way Fletcher presents a poem from the C19 Spanish writer Enrique Gil y Carrasco – firstly as a translation (and quite clearly not a simple word-for-word one, given it’s in rhymed quatrains), and then as a version poem, that riffs very freely off its source, while including within it the original poem’s closing two lines:
Y llorando dirá: ‘¡Pobre poeta!
¡Ya está el arpa del amor!’
(Translated by Fletcher as ” She cries thus: Poet! Disgraced Lyricist! / This harp of love’s already fallen quiet.”)
In a September 1989 interview with Cliver Wilmer (for the radio programme Poet of the Month), Thom Gunn explains why he feels that his generation have not been good examples to younger poets:
TG: Obviously, the most famous and most accomplished poet of my generation was Philip Larkin. Larkin, however good he is, is set against rhetoric, rightly perhaps, and set against daring, and daring is just what young poets ought to be making use of when they’re trying themselves out, and they’re trying their wings in the first place. One of the troubles I think with specifically British poetry right now is that the example of Larkin is holding people back. They should be imitating Bunting.
CW: Do you think that what Larkin encourages, that he shouldn’t, is a fear of being pretentious?
TG: Yes, yes, yes. Exactly.
CW: And that it might actually do them good to be a little bit pretentious?
TG: You’ve got to go through that, you’ve got to make your mistakes. I mean, if you think of your mistakes in any aspect of life, how terrible to lead a youth without mistakes. You’re going to learn nothing.
PLUS ULTRA is all about daring. It dares to be difficult, to be passionate, to switch between registers, and to focus on aspects of relationships that might be considered by some as shameful. I normally find myself pulling back from poetry collections that feature such sustained, overt referencing of other artists and thinkers as this one does. However, not unlike one of my favourite current bands, The Last Dinner Party, PLUS ULTRA is unafraid of being called pretentious, and the resistance I might otherwise feel to its highly intellectual frameworks is largely dissolved through the way it strives to be emotionally resonant.
I think the overall question – going back to Francis Bacon’s directive – is does this book intrigue, disturb, and thrill? My answer is yes, absolutely
I believe all good poetry involves not a balance between head and heart (which suggests some form of compromise), but a dance between them – and a dance can consist of an infinite variety of patterns and shapes. Although at times with PLUS ULTRA I feel like I’m standing on the side of the dance floor with two left feet, this doesn’t prevent me from recommending a book that I think merits more attention than it’s received up to now. I think any poet who risks writing an ekphrastic poem (‘PLUS ULTRA I’) in response to Picasso’s Guernica deserves serious consideration, particularly when they end it so strongly by focusing on that mural’s least obvious image:
PLUS ULTRA the vision of Guernica.
This is the poem I am trying to write.
Blackbird blacked on the blacking surface.
Blacking through the canvas into flight.
And likewise, I have to admire a poet who dares not only to dedicate a poem to Rilke, but to re-fashion the ending of one of the most well-known poems in the canon (Rilke’s ‘An Archaic Torso of Apollo’), transforming it in the process from urgent invocation to a statement of profound longing. While there are poems here that leave me baffled, or even cold, I think the overall question – going back to Francis Bacon’s directive – is does this book intrigue, disturb, and thrill? My answer is yes, absolutely.
I have already said that I am sorry.
I have truanted the holy spirit.
Let myself be haunted by myself alone.
Fog calls me now, as dense as Hebrew
and overwhelming as prophecy.
I promise I – my life – will change.
[‘For Rilke in the Cotswolds’]
Alan Buckley is the author of two pamphlets, Shiver and The Long Haul, and his first collection Touched (HappenStance Press) was published in 2020. His second collection is forthcoming from Blue Diode Press in 2025. He was a founding editor of ignitionpress, and has taught creative writing to young people with both Arvon and First Story. He also works as a psychotherapist.
