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The Claims Office, Dai George

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The Claims Office

Dai George
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Poetry
Poetry
Individual Collections
ISBN-13: 
9781781720905
Format: 
Paperback
Publication Date: 
Monday, October 14, 2013
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"A brilliant new voice in British poetry whose debut is rich with Welsh wit, lyricism and spirituality. A little gem, full of promise." – Dan Jones, London Evening Standard

The Claims Office is the startlingly good debut poetry collection from Dai George, a young writer originally from Cardiff. His method is mostly straightforward narrative but the textures and imagery are often elaborate and strange. This rich surface is undercut by an interesting attitude: a mix of rebellious energy and unflinching satire. His ‘nature’ poems are often anti-nature poems, for example the darkly funny ‘Narwhal’. There are lively pieces about London and New York: ‘Metroland’ and ‘New York on a Shoestring’; skewed loves poems: ‘Plans with the Unmet Wife’. 'His works about his native Wales alternate between an edgy sarcasm and the elegiac tone of the collection's title poem, placing George very much in the lineage of poets like Duncan Bush, John Ormond, Mike Jenkins, Robert Minhinnick and R.S. Thomas; they display a deep suspicion of authority and a reluctance to conform to nationalist cliché. His spiky and tender character sketch of an old Valleys boxer, points to another influence, Gwyn Thomas. The generous forms and temperament of American poet C.K. Williams is another influence on this promising young author.

Listen to Dai George perform his poem, ‘The George’:
 

 

 

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REVIEWS

Review by Rob A Mackenzie, New Welsh Review

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Straight from the opening poem’s first stanza, you know you’re reading a poet whose language and vision will strain beyond prosaic narrative and description:

At her graveside, I’m without walls. Safe
from the churn of claim and counterclaim,
I hand myself over to what there is.
                                ‘Reclaiming the View’

As you read on, it becomes clear that these lines are virtually a manifesto. The living world is a hotbed of power games and churns with people trying to make their mark the one that counts for others. The narrator feels the need to find a truer perspective beyond all of that. While his world view is confrontational, it is not pessimistic.

The second poem, ‘Mergers and Acquisitions’, however, shows that hope is not so easily won. The corporate-speak title gives way to a Homeric ‘just as...  so’ structure which repeats throughout the poem:

Just as two dandelions choke in the web
                                      a spider laid to trick his evening kill,
so do I flail in the net of being born
                                   too near technology’s final coup.

The sense is of being trapped within a system that drags you along, no matter how much you resist. The narrator feels like an outsider, alienated from dominant trends and structures, yet locked within them. However, the poem never feels merely depressing or ranty because Dai George insists on struggle and his passionate intelligence in itself offers hope that corporate power and materialism won’t have the final word:

just as the discovered tomb resolves
out vision of the Pharoah’s court,
so may there come a day when gold
clarifies to the flesh it masked.

The Language is beautiful and while the whole poem doesn't follow a strict metrical pattern, the ghost of metre undergirds its rhythm and music. I had one nagging worry at this point, that the poem had put me just too much in mind of Roddy Lumsden’s work. However, while he is an obvious influence, most poems managed to transcend their influences and to emerge fresh and singular.

The title poem, ‘The Claims Office’, imagines a vast underground office staffed by clerks placed there ‘long after our deaths, or uselessness, / were sealed in the breathing world.’ They collect data: every word, every ‘email chain / and press release’, and analyse it against ‘criteria that their pragmatic world / would reject as spendthrift fantasy. / We issue our futile counterclaims.’ It’s a fantastic conception, a protest against what’s easily passed over, whether minority pursuits or nuggets from the huge information overload that characterises contemporary life. ‘We are // at work to keep the difficult awake’, George writes, and he certainly does that. The poems are not ‘difficult’ in the sense of being obscure, fragmented or meaningless, but they make demands of the reader. They demand concentration, to be read slowly and carefully, and repay the attention.

The collection touches on theological questions, challenging both believer and sceptic to think deeper on essential questions of claim and belief. ‘Distraction During Evensong’ remembers the disciples leaving their homes and following Jesus where he called them. The choir sing evensong but something isn’t quite in tune, ‘something / unappeased, clanging through the semibreve rest, an end / to all the usual comforts.’ The second stanza recalls an afternoon’s gardening before the evening walk to chapel, and suddenly everything inessential is called into question: ‘Leave now. Let the dinner burn.’ The tension between the sharp call of Christ and the comforts of religion is heightened by the service continuing as if nothing has happened:

Resuming voice, the choir wined beyond the lectern,
wishful voices winding through the air
like the first snore of a bedmate, a misunderstanding.

George’s skilful word choices assert the mood: ‘resuming’ (nothing has changed), ‘wishful’ (in denial), ‘snore’, ‘misunderstanding’ – a chorus of business as usual, an unexamined life. This, and other poems such as ‘Tyndale’ and ‘Towards the Palatability of Contemporary Faith’, challenge intellectual lethargy on questions of faith with unexpected metaphor, rich diction and layered argument.

This is an ambitious and consistently impressive first collection in which satire, elegy and a poetry of ideas are fused together, often within single poems such as ‘Boys of Leisure’: a skewed anti-pastoral elegy to a leisure centre that juxtaposes ‘vanishing, turnstile Britain’ and ‘commissioned breezeblocks’ with a disturbed echo of Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘jack, joke, / chump who had the change’). It reclaims value in people and things that have been cast aside. ‘Chestnut Festivals’ recalls a Latin teacher who ‘should know full well that nothing good we do // we do for any reason but itself,’ such as learning Latin or ‘the contrarian flair in us that sees a man / keep a trio of clubs in orbit.’ The same could be said of poetry. The Claims Office is an exciting read, from a writer clearly drunk both on language and its perception, which will appeal to anyone who believes poetry has lost its ability to say anything important to the world we live in.

Review by Meirion Jordan, Lighthouse

Friday, March 21, 2014

...  On the surface, Dai George’s The Claims Office offers a similar experience to Edwards’ collection. As in Edwards’ work, there’s the same rather masculine approach to free verse, enlivened at a few key points by some more formal morsels, as with Mojitos:

In an Upper Westside corner where the food
comes hopelessly before the drinks,
we strategize, give exes attitude
and club together to fathom this jinx:

how is it we can be so wholly free,
so on the brink of going global,
when all our dowdy history
prevents us being here in total?

There’s a reasonable sample of George’s style on view here, a reflexively hip and urbane voice maneuvering shades of Tony Harrison into the poetic equivalent of a ninety-dollar haircut. Where Burton’s sonnets almost exploded out of the page (and the form) in their restless inventiveness, George instead toys with the inner spaces of the form, maneuvering its restrictions into a kind of harmony with his dry delivery. It’s less of a bravura performance, perhaps, but there’s a subtle charm to the interplay of registers (‘exes attitude’ versus ‘dowdy history’) that indicates George’s verse is on an equally firm footing.

Some of that firmness seems in part due to George’s verse reflecting his extended education in academic creative writing. This has its drawbacks, of course – there are moments where, as in Edwards’ poetry, I feel like I’ve seen a little too much of this before. What makes The Claims Office so different from the other collections reviewed here, however, are the points when George’s well-heeled voice slips to reveal some harder edges. Where the subjects of faith and spirituality rise to the surface, George’s writing takes on a refreshing fierceness, as in Tyndale:

                                                  I tense
for the fight they so dearly want,
but instead of argument

comes the thought of him
hounded to Antwerp, unravelling
the Pentateuch’s secret so that soon,
somewhere back in Gloucestershire,
a ploughboy may know God’s Fiat Lux
in the ragged light of his own tongue.

With this stanza break comes a tacit acceptance that this register of  ‘ragged light’ and the contested Pentateuch simply cannot share space with the realist modernity that George has established elsewhere in his work. Rather, the juxtaposition of vision against argument here creates a startling image: a rationalist framework shaken loose in the emotional turmoil of revelation, an unravelling from which George’s verse can barely recover. George feels far less comfortable in binding ploughboys and Pentateuchs together, the terminal sound of ‘tongue’ suggesting a hollowness that leaves the inherent richness of that ‘Fiat Lux’ unanswered within the language of the poem. Fundamentally, the ‘ragged light’ feels like an image only superficially suggesting a resolution. The imprecise links between the Latin and English registers of the poem point to a profound difficulty beneath the attempt to reconcile spiritual light and ordinary raggedness. To me, at least, it indicates more than just the tensions of spiritual past and rational present; that sudden deadening of the poem’s music is a glimpse of history’s undercurrent, the riptides of reformation and counter-reformation sounded out by an ambitious and sensitive ear. Tyndale is not a successful poem in the conventional sense, but it feels animated and vital, willing to set aside a degree of polish in order to reach for something much more troubling and profound.

Moments like this make George’s collection a truly satisfying read: I like The Claims Office best when it reaches for a political or spiritual edge. Its ambition can leave the verse seeming raw and unpolished in places, but I admire it greatly nonetheless. There’s an intellectual acuity and a spiritual engagement here that places George’s poetry ahead of his peers, despite its occasional reminders that this is still the stuff of a first collection. I can’t bring myself to endorse all of George’s formal experiments – as with his use of long-line forms whose alternating indented lines sprawl across the page – but even there his verse possesses a tenacity that underlines his unwillingness to take the success of producing a first collection for granted. There’s a sort of triumph, I suspect, in producing work about which nobody should write an outright encomium, but which nonetheless suggests a serious literary career well-begun.

 

...

 

[Read the full review on the Lighthouse website]

User Reviews

Anonymous's picture

Review from Poetry London

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No votes yet

The last of these debuts, Dai George’s The Claims Office, is harder to sum up. George is a good image-maker- cicadas hammering ‘like tills’’; a kestrel’s ‘lofty mooch’- and uses a lot of subtle end-rhyme, but doesn’t have such an overt ‘voice’ as the other three. In terms of subject matter, first impressions suggest it will be zeitgeisty too- the blurb makes much of George’s study in the US and we are told the collection is ‘rebellious’ and ‘edgy’, whilst he has appeared in many of the same anthologies and magazines as Amy Key. However, the back cover also holds a clue to George’s essential difference – whilst Key has managed to get a quote from TV presenter Lauren Laverne, George’s is from Rowan Williams. This is, at its heart, a deeply Christian book.
The poet’s Christianity flavours the whole collection – from poems framed as hymns, to love poems that go, via ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, to an interest in Latinate language. In the middle of the book there is also a run of poems explicitly about faith. The best of these is ‘Oran-Bati’, a disturbing poem about doubt that is haunted by ‘the inscrutable rumour of a beast/halfway between monkey and bar’ that ‘baffles love’. It tells us that ‘The Word was not written to accommodate/machines, vaccines’. Though an agnostic tending towards atheism myself, I have always been drawn to poetry that struggles with the big questions of why we are here, what makes us human, Good and Evil. Here George approaches that territory, as he does in ‘Towards the Palatability of Contemporary Faith’, which laughs at attempts to make God safe – to figure Him:

dabbing his hooves
voluntarily in our pastures.

Or God as mild, coexistent moon,
Suggestive of our better moments,
Not a cranky, jealous child king.

Elsewhere ‘Different Shoulders’, about sex outside marriage, fears that God is ‘the peasant who’d see us burn’, and figures flesh as a ‘rogue apocrypha I can’t/ renounce.’ I also loved the sonnet sequence ‘Squander’ – perhaps nodding to Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’ or Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’ – which looks at the ‘human rat’ and tells us to:

Point it out then, the particular moment
When ingenuity spoiled and our digging,
belching, progress, and breeding went over
to the bad. Whose was the first emission?

Tackling this subject matter means George’s poems have an intriguing tension. There is something weirdly old-fashioned about this book, from the opening poem with its graveyard and lambs, through a disrupted evensong and meditations on monogamy, but at the same time we keep being reminded we’re in the twenty-first century – there are poems about surveillance and even one i.m. Jade Goody. I found the book uneven in places – the latter poem doesn’t quite work, intruding in its own way as much as those it calls ‘jackals’ with its wish to ‘bathe her waning body/in mountain pools’. My attention also drifted during the longer poems of place such as ‘A Clifton Postcode’, ‘Queen’s Lane Approximately’ or ‘New York on a Shoestring’, which seemed overstuffed with description. But if all debuts deserve to be taken seriously these days, this one repays such attention with the seriousness of its own ambition.

Clare Pollard

22/05/2014 - 11:31
Anonymous's picture

Review from Wales Arts Review

0
No votes yet

Is it prior to, following or perhaps during, the synchronized tossing of a frisbee in a field or the ‘parties from here to China’, when we have no choice but to pause and think spiritually for a moment? In The Claims Office, the first collection from Welsh youngster Dai George, a bunch of religious poems start off, chronologically fitting, with ‘Distraction During Evensong’, inspired by the Book of Matthew, and that moment in a chapel, possibly a chapel we have visited a hundred times, during a lull in the choir, when we consider things in a different, fresh way; an epiphany, religiously or personally. Or possibly the distraction is a welcomed cure for tediousness.

Resuming voice, the choir whined beyond the lectern,

wishful voices winding through the air

like the first snore of a bedmate, a misunderstanding.

But by the second religious poem, the explicatory Lord is dead. Or is it just His explication which is dead? For in the next sentence He reappears as ‘happy God dabbing his hooves/voluntarily in our pastures’. (It is possible that God in this case represents a human, as the h in ‘his’ is in lower case, but more likely this is simply a break in tradition.) And in the next sentence He is a ‘coexistant moon’, a paganish suggestion which implies that God is different for everyone, which rules out a declaration of Christian faith. And in the third religious poem, George uses seven stanzas to echo the seven days of Creation (resting was as vital to the Creation process as it is to the narrator of this stylishly rhyming poem).

‘New Translation’ also rhymes, and the rhyming is subtle and cool, and at its skilful best:

Thanks to the hacks who still insist

on fixing the smallest glitch in Luke,

the Lord’s Prayer can be gamely glossed

at the tenth line. No more is sin a lake

we’re led to like bullocks on market-day

but rather rum misadventure

No longer does sin mean death, thus being an excuse to sin again (it would not be a surprise if George’s definition of the word rum is the less known and obsolete definition, meaning odd or peculiar, but as both images fit nicely the reader will have to make up his own mind; elsewhere in The Claims Office you will find dated English sitting comfortably with newfangled English). God pops up again in the titular poem, albeit still in an irreligious form. Modern churches might declare themselves non-religious, but God being described as ‘a steel mould into which we pour/molten yearnings’ is unlikely to make the slogan on a church website. Yet, given the fact this transformation of a God from an invisible spirit into something solid and undeniably real, and mightier still than us, not many Christians could sum up their faith any better.

If we sometimes have to think spiritually for a moment, that is quite a moment. Religious poems made up of non-religion is an enigma the reader can wrestle with himself, and there are more poems in which this puzzler crops up.

Aside from these poems, The Claims Office is thematically discordant. This common problem will catch out most poets as inexperienced as George at putting collections together, a skill in itself, but this collection is saved by the consistent good standard of individual poems. It would be naive to say that this is the principal element of poetry’s criterion, but George’s poems go from being a good standard to high standard more often than is common, and this is where rereading is spawned.

‘Oran-Bati’, a contribution to a crypto-zoology project, will bring back the sense of rum misadventure, and ‘The George’, a contribution to a surname project, will doubtless have you thinking about your own family tree (if the absurd number of television programmes relating to this subject have not already doused the passionate flames everyone must, at some point, burn with for this once-fascinating pastime). In ‘Narwhal’, we’re treated to stunning description:

a farce: hoar flukes blotched like moss,

camouflage for her liquid copse where sighting

means predation. She breached, as though kiting

with a sack of spuds; gulped, then a fey flop,

oxygenated, back into the deep.

alongside conversation humour which, unless you are of the type being described, will lighten the mood in time for a potentially overdramatic flourish:

Never trust someone who claims to prefer

animals to humans. You know the type,

some frazzled, cat-kissing petitioner,

whose beaten dogs, like readers’ wives,

pout above her stall.

The final poem takes place in a plane. The narrator is travelling home after a long, long time away. The book, like the impressively mature Dai George’s mind, travels long distances. Here we are reminded of the slow whitening of the narwhal’s ocean and, no doubt, the heat which has made our yearnings molten; though this heat comes in a slightly different shape for each one of us. And then this:

Life-size homes and lakes appear

and with them, ever larger, our paradigm

for future years: a white morning; a terminal

steadying into work, where soon we’ll kiss,

as the ground hunches its back to meet us.

It doesn’t matter whether this is a first collection or not. Many poets will struggle to produce work as exciting as this, no matter what number collection they are on. But the fact that there is certainly more to come from this highly talented poet is the most exciting thing of all. Dai George has got a big part to play in the future of poetry, and well beyond Wales. The Claims Office is where this all starts.

Carl Griffin - Wales arts Review

full review: http://www.walesartsreview.org/the-claims-office-by-dai-george/

31/01/2014 - 09:59

Comments

Anonymous's picture

Review from Wales Arts Review

0
No votes yet

Is it prior to, following or perhaps during, the synchronized tossing of a frisbee in a field or the ‘parties from here to China’, when we have no choice but to pause and think spiritually for a moment? In The Claims Office, the first collection from Welsh youngster Dai George, a bunch of religious poems start off, chronologically fitting, with ‘Distraction During Evensong’, inspired by the Book of Matthew, and that moment in a chapel, possibly a chapel we have visited a hundred times, during a lull in the choir, when we consider things in a different, fresh way; an epiphany, religiously or personally. Or possibly the distraction is a welcomed cure for tediousness.

Resuming voice, the choir whined beyond the lectern,

wishful voices winding through the air

like the first snore of a bedmate, a misunderstanding.

But by the second religious poem, the explicatory Lord is dead. Or is it just His explication which is dead? For in the next sentence He reappears as ‘happy God dabbing his hooves/voluntarily in our pastures’. (It is possible that God in this case represents a human, as the h in ‘his’ is in lower case, but more likely this is simply a break in tradition.) And in the next sentence He is a ‘coexistant moon’, a paganish suggestion which implies that God is different for everyone, which rules out a declaration of Christian faith. And in the third religious poem, George uses seven stanzas to echo the seven days of Creation (resting was as vital to the Creation process as it is to the narrator of this stylishly rhyming poem).

‘New Translation’ also rhymes, and the rhyming is subtle and cool, and at its skilful best:

Thanks to the hacks who still insist

on fixing the smallest glitch in Luke,

the Lord’s Prayer can be gamely glossed

at the tenth line. No more is sin a lake

we’re led to like bullocks on market-day

but rather rum misadventure

No longer does sin mean death, thus being an excuse to sin again (it would not be a surprise if George’s definition of the word rum is the less known and obsolete definition, meaning odd or peculiar, but as both images fit nicely the reader will have to make up his own mind; elsewhere in The Claims Office you will find dated English sitting comfortably with newfangled English). God pops up again in the titular poem, albeit still in an irreligious form. Modern churches might declare themselves non-religious, but God being described as ‘a steel mould into which we pour/molten yearnings’ is unlikely to make the slogan on a church website. Yet, given the fact this transformation of a God from an invisible spirit into something solid and undeniably real, and mightier still than us, not many Christians could sum up their faith any better.

If we sometimes have to think spiritually for a moment, that is quite a moment. Religious poems made up of non-religion is an enigma the reader can wrestle with himself, and there are more poems in which this puzzler crops up.

Aside from these poems, The Claims Office is thematically discordant. This common problem will catch out most poets as inexperienced as George at putting collections together, a skill in itself, but this collection is saved by the consistent good standard of individual poems. It would be naive to say that this is the principal element of poetry’s criterion, but George’s poems go from being a good standard to high standard more often than is common, and this is where rereading is spawned.

‘Oran-Bati’, a contribution to a crypto-zoology project, will bring back the sense of rum misadventure, and ‘The George’, a contribution to a surname project, will doubtless have you thinking about your own family tree (if the absurd number of television programmes relating to this subject have not already doused the passionate flames everyone must, at some point, burn with for this once-fascinating pastime). In ‘Narwhal’, we’re treated to stunning description:

a farce: hoar flukes blotched like moss,

camouflage for her liquid copse where sighting

means predation. She breached, as though kiting

with a sack of spuds; gulped, then a fey flop,

oxygenated, back into the deep.

alongside conversation humour which, unless you are of the type being described, will lighten the mood in time for a potentially overdramatic flourish:

Never trust someone who claims to prefer

animals to humans. You know the type,

some frazzled, cat-kissing petitioner,

whose beaten dogs, like readers’ wives,

pout above her stall.

The final poem takes place in a plane. The narrator is travelling home after a long, long time away. The book, like the impressively mature Dai George’s mind, travels long distances. Here we are reminded of the slow whitening of the narwhal’s ocean and, no doubt, the heat which has made our yearnings molten; though this heat comes in a slightly different shape for each one of us. And then this:

Life-size homes and lakes appear

and with them, ever larger, our paradigm

for future years: a white morning; a terminal

steadying into work, where soon we’ll kiss,

as the ground hunches its back to meet us.

It doesn’t matter whether this is a first collection or not. Many poets will struggle to produce work as exciting as this, no matter what number collection they are on. But the fact that there is certainly more to come from this highly talented poet is the most exciting thing of all. Dai George has got a big part to play in the future of poetry, and well beyond Wales. The Claims Office is where this all starts.

Carl Griffin - Wales arts Review

full review: http://www.walesartsreview.org/the-claims-office-by-dai-george/

31/01/2014 - 09:59
Anonymous's picture

Review from Poetry London

0
No votes yet

The last of these debuts, Dai George’s The Claims Office, is harder to sum up. George is a good image-maker- cicadas hammering ‘like tills’’; a kestrel’s ‘lofty mooch’- and uses a lot of subtle end-rhyme, but doesn’t have such an overt ‘voice’ as the other three. In terms of subject matter, first impressions suggest it will be zeitgeisty too- the blurb makes much of George’s study in the US and we are told the collection is ‘rebellious’ and ‘edgy’, whilst he has appeared in many of the same anthologies and magazines as Amy Key. However, the back cover also holds a clue to George’s essential difference – whilst Key has managed to get a quote from TV presenter Lauren Laverne, George’s is from Rowan Williams. This is, at its heart, a deeply Christian book.
The poet’s Christianity flavours the whole collection – from poems framed as hymns, to love poems that go, via ‘The Lord’s Prayer’, to an interest in Latinate language. In the middle of the book there is also a run of poems explicitly about faith. The best of these is ‘Oran-Bati’, a disturbing poem about doubt that is haunted by ‘the inscrutable rumour of a beast/halfway between monkey and bar’ that ‘baffles love’. It tells us that ‘The Word was not written to accommodate/machines, vaccines’. Though an agnostic tending towards atheism myself, I have always been drawn to poetry that struggles with the big questions of why we are here, what makes us human, Good and Evil. Here George approaches that territory, as he does in ‘Towards the Palatability of Contemporary Faith’, which laughs at attempts to make God safe – to figure Him:

dabbing his hooves
voluntarily in our pastures.

Or God as mild, coexistent moon,
Suggestive of our better moments,
Not a cranky, jealous child king.

Elsewhere ‘Different Shoulders’, about sex outside marriage, fears that God is ‘the peasant who’d see us burn’, and figures flesh as a ‘rogue apocrypha I can’t/ renounce.’ I also loved the sonnet sequence ‘Squander’ – perhaps nodding to Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’ or Hopkins’s ‘Terrible Sonnets’ – which looks at the ‘human rat’ and tells us to:

Point it out then, the particular moment
When ingenuity spoiled and our digging,
belching, progress, and breeding went over
to the bad. Whose was the first emission?

Tackling this subject matter means George’s poems have an intriguing tension. There is something weirdly old-fashioned about this book, from the opening poem with its graveyard and lambs, through a disrupted evensong and meditations on monogamy, but at the same time we keep being reminded we’re in the twenty-first century – there are poems about surveillance and even one i.m. Jade Goody. I found the book uneven in places – the latter poem doesn’t quite work, intruding in its own way as much as those it calls ‘jackals’ with its wish to ‘bathe her waning body/in mountain pools’. My attention also drifted during the longer poems of place such as ‘A Clifton Postcode’, ‘Queen’s Lane Approximately’ or ‘New York on a Shoestring’, which seemed overstuffed with description. But if all debuts deserve to be taken seriously these days, this one repays such attention with the seriousness of its own ambition.

Clare Pollard

22/05/2014 - 11:31
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