every salt advance

Andrew McMillan

Andrew McMillan has been poet-in-residence of his own life for 21 years. He splits his time between Lancaster (where he studies) and Barnsley (where he was born and raised). His poetry has been published widely in online and print publications including The North, The Reader, Acumen and Pomegranate. He is co-editor of Cake Literary Magazine. every salt advance is his debut pamphlet.

Two poems: lunar and thirst  |  Reviews

lunar

"Earth's rotation is slowly slowing down and
the Moon is slowly getting further away because of interactions between the two"

we should go before we lose it
before it sinks behind
nostalgia's last frontier;

they say we're losing centimetres
every year; as if we were
a beach that's losing
ground with every salt advance

the night is overcast
but why not try, at least,
to touch the things our orbits
cannot hold, while there's time
while we can.

thirst

post-storm
air re-dressing itself in cold
I walked into the kitchen
and drank from the glass you'd held
an hour ago

I could focus on the water
say cleansed   parched   divine
could notice the light
the way it echoed off the rim
of the half-pinter

but all that really matters
is the way the stain of your lips
crumpled into mine at the neck;
how they became one set
one cupid's bow

how they seemed like chalk
or dustings of forensic
evidence, how your hand
still gripped the stem of body,
love; there are a hundred different ways

of being left.

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"In Andrew McMillan's own words 'poetry shouldn't be about writing the extraordinary, it should be about taking the ordinary and showing it to be extraordinary,' and this is exactly what he does in his debut every salt advance.

"The pamphlet begins on 'Thursday morning', in the aftermath of a relationship split. We see the subject of the poem awake in the 'yawning, temporary sun' in which he had 'resigned himself to chess/and straining peas alone.' Here we are taken from the overtly poetic, to the poignantly comical which grounds the poem. Next, the narrator steps outside of the poem-world to comment on what might have happened next, one possibility is that 'he wept until small creatures/came to wash their faces in his cheeks', and now we are in the realms of the extraordinary, metaphor-wise of course, but the narration is so convincing I can perfectly see and believe this.

"These are not the first tears, nor is this the only heartbreak in this collection. Many of the poems are about distances between people. Throughout 'now you've left', the narrator insists that the subject knows he's ok, though 'the country is set between us like a table... I am almost happy because... a moose passes me as though/he were a milkman/I'd known for half my life...' Again, this conflation of the ordinary and the extraordinary which is here, both disarming and reassuring.

"Andrew McMillan has a knack for writing tenderness without sounding mawkish, and his poems dealing with paternity are witness to this: 'dad' was shortlisted for the Grist Poetry Prize. This poem, in three sections, talks of a warmth and tenderness in a father/son relationship 'when, on catching me topless with/Thom Gunn and grinning,/you nodded as if to say that you/were proud and dad that's why/I am too', and then in the last section any inching towards sentimentality is cut short by the visceral 'all I think/is that I want/the hand Thom grasped in his;/ I want to chop it/off and dad I want/to frame it by my bed/and dream of boys/who maim their fathers/for their hands.'

"That McMillan writes in lower-case enables him to develop an intimacy with the reader - capital letters would be somehow obtrusive - as you move in to listen. He is also a minimalist when it comes to punctuation, and prefers to let the white page add its own breaths of silence, choosing instead artful line breaks and stanza breaks.

"A recent article in Poetry News praised the pamphlet form and talked about it as an excellent medium for those starting out. Andrew McMillan is only twenty-one years old, and after this impressive introduction, I will be extremely interested to see what he does next."

Helen Ivory, Ink Sweat and Tears

*  *  *

"Andrew McMillan's poetry is strongest when he follows his own personal dictum, and allows his poetry to 'deal with the unpoetic, with the everyday and the mundane'. At his finest, McMillan is a young poet of ingenious and rare power, able to strip bare the pretences of academised page poetry and write sincerely, with candour, cleverness and humour. You can almost hear his warm, Barnsley accent in every page. He brings tradition with a contemporary twist. Take please, for instance:

don't look at me
just hold my hand
and dance
like I like
to think
they must have danced
on the Titanic

before the iceberg
and the drowning
and the films

"Choosing the modern informality and modesty of the lower case, like e.e. cummings, McMillan builds a swift intimacy with the reader: placing us as a lover, asking of us a purity of emotion before the crushing finale and the last line, a sardonic anapaest that reveals the merging of historical event and cinematic representation as two tragedies back-to-back, which divorce and detach us from our innocence. The poem is a delicately placed trap, a curious and heartbreaking metaphor for innocence and the potential catastrophe of failed love. The dancers on the Titanic, we're reminded, were killed twice: first by the catastrophe, second by droll, cinematic representation. This sort of postmodern flair is without the gloating and nonsense making that so often accompanies a generally obscure movement. McMillan is a writer of excellent poems of deep personal feeling and closeness, though despite his broad-ranging display of technical skill and knowledge of poetic forms (every page seems to have a mis en page unique to it), he is still learning his own tongue, developing the skills of his trade. If one or two poems do miss the mark, are slightly out of key, they're far outnumbered by the devastating assurance of poems like 6:30am:

sleep had been singular
so long
that on waking next to him
I felt like the submariner resurfacing
amazed to find the world survived

with so much air
such tundra of sky

"Every Salt Advance is a serious poet's apprentice work. The anxiety of influence may be obvious, and there are nods, references to Thom Gunn, Philip Larkin, Kenneth Patchen, and, understandably, Ian McMillan. A self-consciousness runs throughout the collection, in terms of influence, and its place in the canon, which forces questions as to whether the referencing and multiplicity of forms is postmodern eclecticism, a poet's delight in exuberance and challenge, or simple anxiety - a lack of control over the style and subject matter. For me, there are enough successes in the pamphlet for that simply not to matter. To his credit, he answers those questions directly in, again, a self-conscious poem entitled influence:

when flicking through pages reveals
your flight stub

when I smile to know you flew
famous Seamus to Seoul with you

when I think of it stuffed
in your luggage,

beside the notepad and the
international calling card

when I think of essays
on the Troubles, two clauses

of a broken nation

when I think of throwing Digging
across demilitarised zones

like a dove, of how
you take French poetry

to France to help you
read it better

when I think there must
be some sort of Korean

proverb for times
like this:

나는 나의 아버지의 아들이
I am my father's son

Wes Brown, Freedom in a Puritan Age

*  *  *

"Andrew MacMillan's Every Salt Advance boasts some pretty good initial credentials - a quote from Paul Farley in the blurb and top-notch publishing credits = so I headed for the poems with anticipation.

"This is poetry that's intoxicating and intoxicated. It's packed with a barrage of images, some clichéd ("cupped like water"), some unconvincing ("the country is set/ between us like/ a table"); but others are superb ("the swollen/ lip of silence"), demonstrating MacMillan's talent - and relish - for drawing out the music of language. What's more, it's set to a cacophony of poetic echoes. Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn are explicitly invoked, but countless others lie just under an extensive range of tones and devices. Each poem seems to work through a form or technique, trying it on for size, feeling out its intricacies.

"MacMillan's subject matter is rooted in the everyday but not limited by it. An incident with a neighbour makes its way to Icarus, while the end of a relationship leads us to Aphrodite and Nagasaki, leaps that don't always come off but are terrific when they do. Sexuality, meanwhile, is met head-on and fizzes through many of the pieces. One such poem, titled 'train', forms the pamphlet's axis and straddles its centre pages with an ambitious portrayal of desire. Slips into the obvious are inevitable, such as in "tonight being soup for one/ and wanking". There are also wonderful turns of phrase though ("he looks the way/ silence looks before it's broken").

"This pamphlet provides ample evidence that Andrew MacMillan is already an interesting poet. However, his work's mimetic and chameleonic qualities mean I find myself struggling to form a coherent and cohesive view of it. In fact, I believe he himself is in a similar position: there's a frantic love affair in process between MacMillan and poetry. Once its initial fever subsides and the relationship deepens, something special could well emerge."

Matthew Stewart Sphinx Chapbook Reviews

*  *  *

"The title of this pamphlet is taken from Andrew McMillan's poem 'lunar':

we should go before we lose it
before it sinks behind
nostalgia's last frontier.

they say we're losing centimetres
every year; as if we were
a beach that's losing
ground with every salt advance

the night is overcast
but why not try, at least,
to touch the things our orbits
cannot hold, while there's time
while we can.

"The poem demonstrates McMillan's talent for fine phrases, as does 'now you've left':

and the country is set
between us like
a table, you should know
that I'm o.k.

"and 'thursday morning':

and he realised he would never have her
in the yawning, temporary sun.

"In spite of such phrases, however, I found myself feeling that many of the poems didn't quite come off. It was only when I was reading 'reading The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen' that I understood why:

odd pages folded-over
as though men at prayer
metre scratched
under one verse

of all the things to notice
all these poems like lighted
windows in a San Francisco
city block, all this love and this someone
chose the metre

"I may not be the ideal person to review this pamphlet since I'm very much on the side of the metre-scratching chap who so exasperates Andrew McMillan. Yes, there's a lot of love in McMillan's pamphlet, but there's a paucity of metre and an arbitrariness of line-breaks which had me suspecting the skinniness of so many of the poems might have more to do with visual shaping than with form.

"I would certainly read Andrew McMillan's next publication. I feel, however, that quite a number of these poems try to punch above their emotional weight. 'influence', I believe, highlights why the pamphlet falls a little short:

when flicking through pages reveals
your flight stub

when I smile to know you flew
famous Seamus to Seoul with you

when I think of it stuffed
in your luggage,

beside the notepad and the
international calling card

when I think of essays
on the Troubles, two clauses

of a broken nation

when I think of throwing Digging
across demilitarised zones

[. . .]

I am my father's son.

"While Heaney's poem derives its emotional freight from the conflict between the pull of the land (his father's world) and the pull of the written word (the son's world), McMillan's poem lacks this tension since his father - who one gathers from these poems is also a writer - has the same metier as his son. And so it seems the wrong poem to choose to do what the poet is trying to do, and the poem seems - with its references to Korea and Northern Ireland - to be simply taking on too much.

"Still, one can't fault McMillan's ambition. But I'd like to see the poet learn a little bit more from a another poet he clearly admires, judging by the poem 'what survived of you' - after all, there's an awful lot of love in Larkin's poetry. But metre in equal measure."

Richard Meier, Sphinx Chapbook Reviews

"The title of this collection, Every Salt Advance, comes from a poem called 'lunar' about the gradual distancing of the moon from the earth: "we're losing centimetres/ every year; as if we were/ a beach that's losing/ ground with every salt advance".

"Separation, in various senses, is a major theme running through most of these poems. It is there in the love poems, where love is either lost or not yet gained; it is there in the process of growing up, both in the separation from home and in the separation of lived reality from plans, ideals, and beliefs; and it is there in the portrayal of other people, who mostly appear as distant, anonymous, strange.

"In one poem, 'dad', a sense of intimacy with the poet's father is built up, mediated by a mutual appreciation of Thom Gunn (who takes the place in the father-son relationship customarily reserved for fishing and football). But a surreal vision of the poet chopping off his father's hand, because he wants "the hand Thom grasped/ in his", renders the apparent familiarity of this relationship strange. The hand represents the father's social connections and skill as a writer, and the poet wants it not to hold, but as a trophy, to possess.

"We get another kind of distance from others in 'train', which describes a series of anonymous people, presumably seen from a train: "man/ crying on platform", "man/ gets on/ one stop later", "man/ just for a moment/ I think it's you". The poem captures a sense of the transitory, of restricted views on others' lives; but with the repetition of "man", maybe these strangers are all the same person, a fractured self even, and represent stages in a (not necessarily positive) progression. The poet is, of course, another of these anonymous travellers, caught up in "the mass of men/ their ties of quiet desperation/ suits of settling down". But the "stale tightness" of the atmosphere, the allusions to repressed male sexuality, and the sense of going nowhere imply that this is not something he appreciates.

"There is no 'we' in this collection. The closest identifications are with the father ("I am my father's son" - last line of 'influence') and with admired writers (Larkin and Gunn). The romantic relationships are all broken, and where there is class, the focus is on disenfranchisement and decline, rather than collectivity. A poem called 'subsidence' evokes poignantly the toil, pride, culture, struggle, and ultimate redundancy of the coal miners, framed pathetically in between two definitions of "subsidence": "the sinking down of land" and "the waning or lessening of something". One feels a readiness to identify here, but with something that has already passed.

"The punctuation in Every Salt Advance is stripped down almost entirely to commas. In fact, my own rudimentary statistical analysis revealed that more than 50% of full-stops in the collection come after the letters "o" and "k". Along with the lack of a 'we', this creates a strong sense of reduction, of wanting to avoid any kind of inflation of sentiment or self. But such an act belies a hard core of determination. While the poems describe a world where it is hard to find a place for the self, they are also grounded in social observation and the resilience of the sceptic."

Robin Vaughan-Williams, Sphinx Chapbook Reviews

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