14th October 2007
This material had also surfaced on audio cassette in 1987, published under Bob’s own imprint, Harbour Publications. The original print title long having been unavailable with the publisher Quasar Books being defunct, Bob read all 49 of the poems in the collection and this is the audio source of the CD which is included in this package.
On these decades-long timescales, the timing of this particular release seems very bunched, coming as it does squeezed in between the recent Brock / Calvert Project CD (reviewed here), which set a few of these poems to music, and the forthcoming comprehensive anthology to be entitled 'Robert Calvert - The Action Man Explains'. As far as I am aware, there is no cause for alarm in this, with all this usage of Bob's material being authorised by his family. Both the format of this particular release and Voiceprint's involvement in it seem to be keyed off the audio readings of the poems, and their appearance in this guise is particularly welcome given the necessarily selective presentation on the Brock / Calvert Project, and the fact that The Action Man Explains will be a printed book.
The physical aspect is that, just like Voiceprint's 2000 release of the (non-bootleg) "Dawn Of Hawkwind" title, this consists of an A5-size booklet, with the CD inside a transparent plastic sleeve glued, upside-down for some reason, to the inside back cover. There is to my way of thinking a certain lack of gravitas in the material being presented in this way. During his lifetime, Calvert sought recognition as a writer and poet and was, I believe, frustrated that the front rows of the audience at the staging of his plays were invariably Hawkwind fans: rather like Bob Marley playing in Harlem for the first time, only to see rows of white faces craned up moonfully in studentish anticipation. Placing Calvert's poetry into a medium that feels to the hand like a tour programme or a cable TV channel guide undermines the literary character of his work.
Inside, the original introduction and dedication from the 1977 Quasar Books edition are reproduced, along with some notes and credits that dwindle down to the bottom of the page in reducing sizes of typeface. The facing page shoehorns in the entire list of contents, with the final title just squeezing in above the cropped edge of the paper, like the last passenger who leaps about a Routemaster bus as it pulls away from the stop. But once you are into the actual meat of the thing, this jostled quality falls away somewhat, with greater white space and some excellent photos of the author (many not seen before) allowing the words, especially the longer pieces, to breathe. Where the format does not work so well is on the more concise poems, such as Insomnia, which ought to be printed in the middle of a page, all alone.
Something similar occurs when listening to the CD with the poems tumbling one after another as audio tracks are wont to do. It would be ludicrous to say this is Voiceprint's fault, but all the more does it highlight what a brilliant idea the Brock / Calvert Project was. It is not Bob's delivery of his own work that is the shortcoming, just the unavoidable sardining of his readings in this format. On the Brock / Calvert Project CD, given Dave Brock's musical settings, and added space around the lyrical content, Bob's recitation worked wonderfully...there were even a couple of tracks where particular stanzas were repeated to serve the lyric requirements of the exercise, showing that it's almost impossible for the same material to work equally well in two such different formats. This we can accept, but annoyingly (and avoidably), when you listen to an audio poem while reading the print version simultaneously, you notice all sorts of errors in the latter. The first four poems in the book each have at least one typographical error, omission or complete misrendering of a word, such as "stored" for "stirred" in First Landing On Medusa...
That is just one of many pieces that having been used as lyrics in Hawkwind songs, or in Bob's own solo material, are greatly familiar. Some of the other lesser-known works are possibly more satisfactory in a purely poetic context. For example, "The Pause" does brilliantly in that role, though I did find it reminding me of something, and recalled 'Hawkwind Fly As A Kite'. And some of those poems work better as such than when they've been used in a musical context. An interesting example is the title piece, which IMHO sat very awkwardly as the lyrics in the song "Fahrenheit 451" but did considerably better as "Centigrade 232" on the Brock / Calvert Project. Possibly better there than here, in either print or audio format, for all that it provides the title to this anthology - I'm hardly fit to write criticism of Mr.Calvert's poetry but it does not strike me as his best work. It is one, though, where I prefer the reading to the print version. A near neighbour, "The Naked And Transparent Man Gives Thanks:" is the opposite, where the warped near-sonnet format works wonderfully on the printed page, but the final rhyming couplet sounds clipped and abrupt when heard on the CD. "Some Sketches Of A Hand" suffers in the same way.
"A Letter Of Complaint To The Council" is another poem that was also featured on the Brock / Calvert Project, but it is now revealed to have been mangled on that title, with the amputation of almost the entire final stanza, satisfyingly restored on Centigrade 232. It's actually a very typical Robert Calvert poem with its motifs of the macroscopic projected into domestic mundanity, but I see I am starting to stray into lit.crit. again...
So overall then, this collection has a split personality as befits the dual format: simultaneously unsatisfying and essential. Perhaps it was a clever move to release this in such a limited quantity, since it's necessarily competing with the other Calvert titles that have recently been released and are forthcoming. And while it is difficult to fully appreciate these works within the format in which they have been presented, I am nonetheless pleased to possess a copy and like that it is one of only five hundred that there will ever be.
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