John McAuliffe on Adam Crothers' 'A Fit Against'

A Fit Against by Adam Crothers

The left hand knows what the right rear leg wants.
The centaur’s cento splices Black Beauty and Frankenstein.
He likes to correct people, tells them Beauty’s 
the name of the scientist, actually. Gulping 
horse at the head end means he pumps
out hay at the arse. ‘Hay pressed-o!’ he shrieks 
to nervous applause. Oh for some bolts, oh

for a bow. But he’s no Sagittarius, no. Half 
Libra, half Gemini: a tough couple of births. 
He rarely remembers which came first
in the Year of the Second Opinion.
It isn’t immensely important. His lovers
feed him sugar lumps or are arrested. Twilight: 
a coin-spinner guillotines tiny sandwiches. 

from New Poetries VI © Adam Crothers 

Adam Crothers’ poems plug factoids into statements. ‘The centaur’s cento splices Black Beauty and Frankenstein’, declares ‘A Fit Against’, one of the many sonnets into which he fits his little sonic explosions and non-sequiturs:  It continues, ‘He likes to correct people, tells them Beauty’s / the name of the scientist, actually.’ Why the italics? Why ‘actually’? All a reader can do is stand back and admire the mad sounds that ensue. And when the centaur’s lower half takes over, Frankenstein stays in the picture: ‘”Hay pressed-o!” he shrieks / to nervous applause. Oh for some bolts, oh // for a bow.’

This is playful, creative destruction, the sort which divides readers into those who might ‘take a fit against’ it, and those who are happy to be carried along by its associative pot shots. When he refers to the ‘Year of the Second Opinion’, he freely admits that he himself cannot remember ‘which came first’ and, as soon as he says, ‘It isn’t immensely important’, there is a typical, consequential twist in the poem’s long tail, ‘His lovers / feed him sugar lumps or are arrested.’

Crothers’ artful sonnet and stitch-up satire will remind readers of others, especially 1970s Muldoon with its hybrid mules and unicorns (and its centaurs which ‘thunder down the long road to Damascus”), and also of the poet and one-time Muldoon scholar, Michael Robbins, whose aliens and predators could easily slip into Crothers’ rhyme-heavy blues. It’s good to hear that kind of noise in contemporary British poetry, a noise in which no line is missing Crothers’ particular, fitful, jolting attention to phrase and idiom.

John McAuliffe's latest book is The Way In (The Gallery Press).