Hold Your Own review – powerful poetry from Kate Tempest

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/oct/31/hold-your-own-kate-tempest-poetry-collection-review

Version 0 of 1.

At the heart of Kate Tempest’s latest work is a captivating dichotomy. On the one hand, she is the soul of modernity: now 28, she began her professional career as a rapper at 16; became the youngest-ever winner of the Ted Hughes prize for innovation in poetry for her “spoken story”, Brand New Ancients, last year; was named by the Poetry Book Society as one of its 20 Next Generation poets in September; and, this week, was tipped to win the Mercury prize for her debut album, Everybody Down, in which she lays out the lives of three friends struggling with loneliness and insecurity in 21st‑century London, over the course of 12 densely plotted, dashingly articulate tracks. By the notoriously fusty standards of the poetry world, in which performance poetry can still be regarded as daringly outre, she is beyond modern; she’s practically science fiction.

Then, intriguingly, there’s the other hand. When it comes to straight poetry (and this, her first full-length collection with Picador, is the straightest thing she has done by far: looking and sounding like a traditional slim volume; conforming unselfconsciously to time-honoured conventions of line length and layout), Tempest’s focus is firmly classical. She is fascinated by the deep past. Hold Your Own, like Brand New Ancients before it, takes for its subject the lives of the gods and monsters of Greek mythology – not, perhaps, what you would expect from an urban former rapper who cites Roots Manuva and the Wu Tang Clan among her other key influences. What makes her work so irresistible, then, is her method of synthesis; the manner in which she brings her hands together. Her poems aren’t simply routine retellings of time-worn tales; rather, she picks up the fabulous, familiar characters, dusts them down and hauls them into the present. In Brand New Ancients, the gods were recast as two warring, intergenerational south London families; here, the update is more sophisticated and, if anything, more compelling.

Hold Your Own is built around the story of Tiresias: transformed by Hera into a woman for seven years as punishment after he happens upon a pair of copulating snakes and strikes them apart with a stick, and later called upon by Zeus to settle an argument between the pair over who enjoys sex more, men or women. When Tiresias sides with Zeus and finds for women, Hera, furious, blinds him – and a guilt‑ridden Zeus bestows on him the compensatory gift of inner sight. Tempest offers us a version of Tiresias that is purely enchanting: at once epic, “bright and terrifying, / Breath and flesh and bone”, and at the same time palpably human, intimately of our time. He enters the story as “a boy of fifteen”, “kicking a tennis ball, / Keeping it up, / the boy on the street in his sister’s old jumper”, and leaves it a shambling, modern-day version of the mythic figure doomed to speak the truth to people too distracted to listen:

Nor does the synthesis stop there. Tempest intercuts Tiresias’s story with her own, in poems that tell of a childhood during which “girls sprayed so much Innocence it made the air toxic”; a womanhood filled with kisses and cigarettes, football scores and payment plans and poetry. And she draws out the parallels between their lives through the words in which she describes them: setting both out in language that is quick and colloquial; in lines laced together with taut rhymes, loping, syncopated rhythms and layers of irony that build up over the course of the collection – most notably, perhaps, in Tempest’s meta-ironic decision to move from the visual medium of performance poetry to the printed page via poems using a blind prophet as their subject.

The incongruity of telling the tale of Tiresias through verses that are determinedly, vividly visual is one that Tempest savours. Her poems on blindness are flooded with light: the sun, moon and firelight of ancient Greece; modernity’s streetlights, smartphones and “flickering, ultraviolet pixels”. Throughout the collection, we are exhorted, paradoxically, to “watch”, “look” and “visualise” – but in “Fine, thanks”, from the punchy, punning final section “Blind profit”, in which Tempest submits her bleak conclusion on where, collectively, we’re headed, she offers up another acrid reversal, questioning the benefits that vision brings. “To really see the state of things is lethal,” she says – literally true for Tiresias, whom Hera blinded for his clear-sightedness; true, metaphorically, for those of us not at the top of the late-capitalist tree, for whom “the telly” is the visual opium sent to blind us, and clarity, Tempest suggests, in the absence of a full-scale revolution, brings only misery. “It’s safer,” she advises, pithily,

It is a daunting question – but we can take consolation from the fact that, by the time we reach the end of this remarkable, powerful collection, Tempest has answered it convincingly, for herself at least. These are acute and insightful poems that lodge in the ear and sear themselves on the vision.

• To order Hold Your Own for £7.99 (£9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.