Poetry book of the month: Whip-hot & Grippy by Heather Phillipson
Next year Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth will hold an enormous dollop of whipped cream, topped with a cherry, a fly and a buzzing drone. Created by British artist and author Heather Phillipson, that sugar-rush sculpture – surreal, witty and grotesque – captures the essence of her poetry.
I’ve read a dozen mature, polished, respectable poetry books published in the last month. This is not one of them. Phillipson’s unhinged second collection is stuffed with junk-food and junk language, a maximalist mode “somewhere/ between bile slipstream and a shriek”. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny: “my inner world has to be hoisted/ thru windows like a grand piano/ only atonal & heftier”.
Her style is influenced by American modernism, particularly the late John Ashbery, but with a feminist bite that feels utterly 2019, hitting similar notes to Rebecca Tamás’s Witch, an equally pungent highlight of this year.
In a poem called “CHEERS!”, a drink “tastes/ of all the time-honoured indecent bits of life.” These poems do, too. They’re awash with vomit and urine, sweat and menstrual blood, honing in on the moments “when bodies/ get slippery&amalgamated”.
It’s a response to “the excremental mood of the world,” “these urgent fun-grabbing times” of greasy consumerism when the only choice is between “animal-fat banknotes or contactless”. One prose poem is a dystopian fable about a half-scorched, half-flooded world: “We thought it was a cautionary tale about our insatiable desire for more and it was.”
The energy falters in an occasionally affecting but over-extended 70-page elegy to a dead dog. Phillipson excels at apocalyptic snark, but seems less sure what to do with “feelings”, except put the word downpage in a bigger font.
What emotional clout there is comes from less obvious places. In “Take Spanking White Pants”, an unexpectedly delicate poem, watching old undies hang out to dry prompts the thought: “Forgive me, love me, make me new.”
Whip-hot & Grippy is published by Bloodaxe at ￡12. To order your copy, call or 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop