One needs to approach Adam Thorpe’s Birds with a Broken Wing with caution. Thorpe has achieved critical recognition early in his career, and his latest collection, shortlisted for the 2007 Forward Poetry Prize, comes with high expectations. Signalling an astute vision of current times confined to technical stanzas (mostly couplets), the book promises to mingle comfortably between lyricism and intellectualism to produce verses that both awe and stimulate the reader. But does it live up to its expectations?

The title comes from a 1909 quote by Chief Plenty-Coups, which is taken as a motto for Early Morning at Owl’s Head, Quebec: ‘We are like birds with a broken wing’. This simile encompasses the whole spectrum of human activity. Wars (political and personal), economic development (or regression), nature (with and without the human), art itself – all of these are seen as existential states failing to grant us true flight. The broken wing slowly emerges in the shape of the human being. Either through reason or instinct, the choices we make are the true representation of an amputated (im)perfection. It is this being that defines the whole, because it rises above everything.

One should hide the fact that catastrophic
handicaps are hell; one tends to hear

publicly, from those who bare it
like a Roman, or somehow find joy

in the fight.

(‘On Her Blindness’)

Thorpe negates this state of incapacity by accepting it, emphasising our imperfection in order to amelioriate it. This decision leads to a poetry that is sombre not in its images but in its lack of hope. The sensation of nihilism is heightened by moody roads, bewildering land edges, murders, trips to Nuremberg, expectations of death, blindness, the inability to have beautiful dreams, food waste, failed loves, lost paths, nakedness, blackness and ghosts. Irrespective of how light and melancholic our memories seem, we keep

loosening
to the truth of it and losing it again.

(‘Below Allihies’)

The appealing element of Thorpe’s poetry is that he explains our failure to take flight through the lives of the ordinary man. Disasters are invoked with the mention of Hitler or Chamberlain, yet these are not the individuals who experience the true course of life. The real disasters, the truth itself, come unnamed, when

Every Friday we strive and fail
to make the comparison
between shadow and shape…

(‘Life Class’)

Having set himself the task of exploring the human’s raison d’être, the poet must approach the subject with agonising subtlety, stripping himself of everything that is the self, and then he needs to find the seed that would reconstruct first the poet, and then the world itself. At first glance, this may appear what Thorpe is doing in Birds with a Broken Wing. Starting from the immediacy of his visual experiences in ‘Below Allihies’, his poems portray a simplicity of thought that provokes nothing but the process of stripping oneself of his worldly existence. Within the first few pages, he rids himself of consciousness of 20th century history, leaving carte blanche to define the essence of ‘the broken wing’.

It is at this point, however, that Thorpe starts to fail. Having arrived at the conclusion that reason has lead to the detachment of the human being from the world itself, the author does little to understand if reason (or anything else) can become the source of reconstruction. To put an end to alienation, it requires action. And this is precisely what is lacking in the concluding second chapter of the book, featuring only two lengthier poems.

Walking back the way

you came is not like history
because you learn, not what you always knew,
but that where you’ve just been

is also true…

(‘The Abandoned Road’)

What is he trying to maintain, especially when the poem ends with the idea that this return will also be abandoned? Everything becomes a constant in this process featuring a never-changing nature of the outside world and a continuously regenerating human that never develops. ‘This view’ would continue to bewilder man, no matter what. To find the resolution, Thorpe abandons the reconstruction of the whole to

‘some nocturnal

blackness, mothy and warm’, where
ghosts can pass over the lawn –
where your ghost, too, can.

(‘Light Pollution’)

Thorpe’s laziness or shortcoming could be excused if we consider the view that no reconstruction is ever intended. It could then be defended in purely technical terms. Otherwise, the entire collection could be dismissed as simply a travelogue through current times, which is heavily influenced not by a poetic truth, but a statement the author tries to describe, but never argue for.

The immediate impression of Birds with a Broken Wing is that it is dominated by a specific form, characterised by distiches, tercets and (seldom) quatrains, in which the metre, rhyme and rhythm are rarely consistent. It almost appears that every verse is broken half-way through, echoing the rupture in the title. An iambic ascension is often counteracted by either a juxtaposition of two accented syllables, or a double pause, leading to a visible vocal incapacity of maintaining the fluidity of each poem. This refusal to maintain the poetic structure can be put down to an experiment meant to drive the content of the book. However, what Thorpe achieves is more a mathematical schema than poetry that truly identifies with rupture. The problem is not in the schema per say, but in its constant use, which ultimately makes the technique ineffective in delivering its power. Disregarding the content of the words, Thorpe’s poems remind us of a primary school child who continuously stumbles upon the wrong words while trying to set an emphasis in his reading.

Birds with a Broken Wing is stimulating in as much as it shows that the creation of successful patterns in stanzas is not an easy matter for a poet who wishes to innovate the form. Language seems to revolt more when it feels so subjected to an author’s vision of what he wants to achieve. Thorpe’s nihilism hidden under a veil of melancholia is the motor that punishes each of his poems with meaninglessness. Should we cherish the destruction of poetry and its aims? Thorpe and his supporters think this is all right…

..sadly…