Annie Fisher reviews Night Window by Ian Seed (Shearsman, 2024)
If you’re a prose poem enthusiast, Ian Seed’s work will need no introduction. If, like me, you’ve not read a great deal of prose poetry but are interested, I’d recommend Night Window. This is Ian Seed’s eighth book with Shearsman, which says something about the publisher’s regard for him, as do the fulsome tributes on the back of the book from Luke Kennard and the Australian prose poet, Cassandra Atherton. After some initial wariness, and occasional bafflement, I found myself increasingly drawn to the narrator of these (mostly surreal and anecdotal) poems. The book needs to be considered as a whole, rather than in terms of individual poems. I found it tantalising, and it left me with lots to chew on at both a philosophical and emotional level.
The title is a reference to Edward Hopper. Hopper’s ‘night windows’ paintings (including Night Window and the famous Nighthawks), with their themes of urban alienation and melancholy, are a key, I think, to the collection. The title poem, ‘Night Window (after Edward Hopper)’, gives us a clue as to how to read the book. It begins:
I prefer the incompleteness of the half-finished canvas. Two
figures sit a short distance apart – one of them is smiling through
tears. I hang on to the privilege of the spectator, who can fill out
the off-white space around them with changing scenes. Are they
strangers who have just met or are they long-time secret lovers?
The whole collection smiles through its tears, and Seed encourages us to fill out the canvas of each poem from our individual perspectives. We become the ‘privileged spectator’ of a series of Hopper-esque scenes as we follow the itinerant ‘I’ of the poems through trattorias, airports, stations and hotels across Europe. This narrator has numerous transitory encounters with strangers; some are sexual, some are threatening; all are tangential and unsatisfactory. He is weighed down with the luggage of self-doubt and a permanent, low-level paranoia that sometimes bubbles over into panic. Despite this, we find ourselves identifying with him, feeling his vulnerability and recognising that he could be any one of us as he drifts nervously through a post-Brexit, post-Covid Europe, trying hopelessly to connect. This is from the poem ‘I could hardly believe my luck’:
I was kissing a young woman, not on her mouth, but with little
kisses on the side of her face.
[…]
She’d assumed I wasn’t married because I
didn’t have a wedding ring. In truth, I wasn’t wearing my ring
because the Covid virus lingers on metal.
Wherever he goes, he isn’t really wanted. In the poem ‘Evening’, he sits alone for hours in a trattoria, until:
I was surprised to see three
men in uniform with trumpets enter the room. They’d come to
play a fanfare for me as I left, to make sure I really did leave, not
just the trattoria, but also the town, and their country too.
Many poems resemble anxiety dreams I have had, where wallets, passports, mobile phones or laptops go missing, or where one is lost, or rushing for a train. As a one-time teacher, I could easily identify with ‘Gratis’, which begins:
It was the first time I’d worked in ages, I had three different
lessons to teach in three different schools around Paris. After the
second lesson I realised I’d left all the information about the third,
including the school’s name and address, in the flat where I was
sleeping on someone’s floor. I was hot, sweaty and hungry on a
street full of parping cars.
Many of these poems could well be based on actual dreams; Ian Seed says that he likes to write first thing in the morning, in that uncensored, creatively open space between the sleeping and waking world.
It’s been said that we’re all an Edward Hopper painting now. Perhaps we’re all an Ian Seed poem as well
There’s a comic element in several pieces, often arising from the narrator’s acute self-consciousness and low confidence. This is from ‘Italian Resort’:
I went to a wild party at the hotel a couple of miles down the
beach from where I was staying. At some point, I needed to go for
a piss, but the toilets were all busy, so I went out onto the dunes.
Just as I was zipping up, I heard a giggle behind me, and
turned to see three women, much younger than me. ‘Nice ass’,
one of them said with a New York accent, giving my buttocks a
good pinch. Because of my age, I felt I had to behave with dignity
and pretend it hadn’t happened, but secretly I was pleased.
Interspersed among these readable narratives are several that are, I suspect, deliberately baffling. This is the opening of ‘Thriller’:
He isn’t aware that on his nose a transparent beard has appeared.
The impossibility of the best disguise makes her melt
into herself. Bones – he draws the liquid through
a short, fat, silver-coloured one. Such a funny shape,
difficult to hold but it makes you wrap your hand around it.
I tried to hang on to the title as a possible clue as to what was going on, but I could make no sense of this one. I guess one fills in the canvas as one chooses. The ambiguous syntax Seed uses in the poem ‘Fertilisation’ was equally mystifying. However, I found it strangely fascinating. Here’s an extract for flavour:
my arms can hold daylight, all
your limit stretches swells
skin, is touched this living
separation our bodies mime
except I exist turning ready-made
wholeness be named, my tears, your
cold childhood, the pulse of petals
The poem seems to be trying to describe a profound, personal experience that may be inexpressible – I wondered if it might be about the moment of human fertilisation, but to be honest, I don’t know. I felt on the edge of grasping a meaning, but it slipped away. Not quite knowing / not quite understanding is, it seems to me, what the whole book is about. I was reminded of John Ashberry’s opaque and challenging work. At other points I was reminded of Graeme Greene (the seedy locations, the loneliness); Charles Simic (the sometimes dark, sometimes quirky surrealism and some of the phrasing); and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (the box-shaped form, the cities, the playfulness, the mix of fantasy and reality). Having made my own associations, I was interested to find a piece in The Fortnightly Review where Ian Seed writes about the writing that has shaped his work. The names of writers who have influenced him are, in fact, woven into some of the surreal narratives, most notably the prose poet Max Jacobs, whose poetry Seed has translated.
There is some painfully poignant writing, possibly autobiographical, including more than one piece about his stepfather. This is from ‘Recognition’:
Although we were hardly close while he was
alive (and he died more than twenty years ago), I feel now the
presence of his spirit, as if to say, ‘And all shall be well, and all
manner of thing shall be well’, which I quoted to him when he
was dying, and which, I remember, made him smile, just a little.
What that “just a little” smile means, we can only guess. Many of the poems leave us with this sense of ambiguity; a sense of something hanging, unresolved.
Through all his wanderings, the narrator seems childlike and vulnerable in his openness. We cannot help but feel for him. This is the beginning and end of ‘Coda’:
I took the train all the way to the last station.
[…]
A lifetime went
by. I split into separate selves until I no longer knew who I was, or
what I could say to make myself heard above the noise of weeping.
It’s been said that we’re all an Edward Hopper painting now. Perhaps we’re all an Ian Seed poem as well.
This collection got under my skin. I kept going back to it, and the more I looked the more I saw and felt. As with Hopper’s art, these poems of alienation draw us in and, paradoxically, comfort us because they recognise our isolation and give voice to how things are. I’d suggest reading it through as narrative. Take time, as with paintings. And do read through to the end; there’s a special moment, which I won’t spoil for you.
Web editor’s note: most of the poems quoted here are in justified text in the original. Given the variety of devices and screen sizes used by readers, it is not possible to reproduce them as justified text reliably as justified text.
Annie Fisher‘s background is in primary education, initially as a teacher and later as an English adviser. Now semi-retired she writes poetry for both adults and children and sometimes works as a storyteller in schools. She has had two pamphlets published with HappenStance Press: Infinite in all Perfections (2016) and The Deal (2020), and one recently from Mariscat Press: Missing the Man Next Door (2024). She is a member of Fire River Poets, Taunton.
