Selected By Toh Hsien Min

Recently, a clutch of my writer friends exchanged a few hundred messages on WhatsApp on the state of literary criticism in Singapore – what this was (comatose, we agreed), whether criticism had any value, whether the paucity of criticism was more of a demand or supply issue (supply, in my book – judging by the number of writers asking QLRS for reviews versus the number of writers willing to write reviews) – and then extended it to most of the discussion around dinner the following week.  We had never argued so vociferously about Sing Lit proper, nor about any of its individual books, which I thought was at least starting evidence of its import.  One of the bigger bones of contention, however, concerned whether one should ever write a review that is negative, which fairly quickly also added the nuance of how much negativity was permissible within the range from gentle putdown to full-on bloodlust.  Even the idea of kindness here came in for scrutiny: was it a greater kindness to be honest with people about their work or to feed or spare their egos and indirectly encourage them to produce more terrible work? 

Longstanding readers of QLRS will know our positions on this.  We need to weigh up every book we publish without fear or favour if we are to improve as a literary scene, and that means being able to say harsh things about people's passionate lives' work if it comes to that.  We don't think criticism should transgress into ad hominem attacks, but on the literary work itself a conveyor belt of "this book is wonderful for reasons I can't memorably articulate to you because they don't exist and I'm only writing this because I want to be able to run into you at the next cocktail event and emerge from it not dripping with Cabernet Sauvignon" benefits nobody.  Without negative reviews, we can't have positive reviews.  Or to borrow from The Incredibles: when everyone's super, no one will be.

Of course, being ever ready to explore the meta-argument, we didn't take long to consider the case of reviewing the review and for the others in the discussion to lament the dormancy of the Acid Tongue.  So for this issue I decided to look for a review that wants to be critical at the same time as it wants not to be, possibly to save on a dry-cleaning bill, and I initially thought I might have found it in Rory Waterman's review of David Cain's Truth Street, in Poetry Review vol. 109:3, Autumn 2019.

The road to damnation with faint praise is paved with good intentions, and Waterman begins with these:

David Cain's intentions are gallant.

You're a decent bloke.  Decent blokes keep their wines in their wine-glasses.

Seeing as Truth Street concerns the Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at an FA Cup semi-final because of police incompetence, this arguably had to be the safest opening anyway; Waterman quickly follows with a summary of the event and a brief description of the structure of the book.  Surely

The uniformity of style, and linear narrative, encourage us to view these voices as a composite, as we are hurtled into events. 

is wholly innocuous?  Well, yes, if one believes that poetry should do the opposite of dialogue in fiction and theatre, in which case it is an accomplishment given that the source material was in fact eyewitness accounts, and only artistic care can flatten out individuality.

Of course, as these poems are "developed from" testimony, it is not always apparent where the stitching begins.

Presumably one doesn't want to see the stitching in haute couture, and therefore this is another mark of approval?  But to really convince, one shouldn't ever write a review without at least some marks of nitpicking, ergo:

The book shows a few signs of sloppy preparation beyond the sort of thing we can put down to the quoting of speech from people in highly charged circumstances.  The book's epigraph, for example, is the opening few lines of T.S. Eliot's 'The Wasteland' (sic).

But this is where the strain of being polite gives way to truth street.

The chief problem, though, is that Truth Street essentially comprises concrete testimony, entirely devoid of abstract insight, and if that is what you are after there are considerably fuller and more detailed versions of it, such as Hillsborough Voices: The Real Story Told by the People Themselves (2016) by Kevin Sampson and Hillsborough: The Truth (1999) by Phil Scraton.

In other words, you're better off reading something else.

There is something admirable about this poet trying to leave himself out of the poetry and let the words of those who lived the experience speak for themselves, but that doesn't mean it always works.  The preface points us towards the Hillsborough inquests' official website, from where Cain took his excerpts of transcripts, which is a considerably more illuminating place to spend time.

No really, please read something else.

Hang on, there is the dinner jacket to think about:

Nonetheless, I found Truth Street as riveting as an inadequate but well-intended documentary on a fascinating subject, and devastatingly sad and angering.  Few books move your heart this much…

I can't do it.  Let's just wear the old suit with the frayed stitching.

…but that is down to the subject and the testimonies, more than the execution.

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