Liar, Jones

Even before the appearance of her first collection, Liar, Jones, Maggie Hannan had achieved wide recognition for her work. She was for many critics a surprise inclusion in Bloodaxe’s controversial anthology The New Poetry: for Roger Garfitt, she was ‘a welcome discovery’; for Gerald Dawe, she was ‘a real find’, and her poems were ‘the business’. Alan Brownjohn found her work ‘ingenious…highly original, beautifully funny’; Peter Porter liked her ‘welcome sense of fantasy’. She has already been noticed too in America: John Matthias (Southern Review) called her ‘an experimental and innovative poet…a poet one should watch’.

There is an exciting offbeat music in this remarkable debut. The counterpoise of taut structure and lush, flexible diction are precisely suited to the supple intelligence at work in these stripped-down poems, whose subject is often language itself, or narrative. They include fantastical elaborations on figures ranging from Dr Roget of thesaurus fame to Issei Sagawa, Japan’s celebrity cannibal. With elegance, dark humour and unabashed enjoyment, Maggie Hannan has great sport with her own inspired creation, the mysterious Jones, relishing and replenishing a wonderful sense of style.

Her wit is both barbed and feathered, combining astute investigation with often hilarious pleasure-taking in tightly-worked poems which are as much teasing riddles as they are mental dances. With an almost palpable concern for the physical material and breath of language, she probes meaning with forensic precision at the same time as she creates dazzling patterns of sound.