Meanwhile, Trees by Mark Waldron review – bizarre and invigorating

Mark Waldron is like a magpie picking super-sophisticated mixtures of gold and dross from an immense linguistic landfill

All My Poems Are Advertisements for Me, declares one of Mark Waldron’s snappy titles, neatly connecting the writer’s day job, advertising, and the vocation, poetry. It’s something readers might often have suspected about poems, but never dared say. The poem itself turns out to be, oddly, a Wordsworthian and even Heaneyish nostalgia for childhood immediacy of sensation (“the thump and the tug of it”) but finally comes back to the case against art, concluding: “…Death is not what you think it is./ It’s actually what I think it is.” The poem encircles its own poetry with a crocodile grin of hard but pleasing irony.

Death’s conventional link with leaf-fall gets a new twist. In the title poem, the Parisian “city streets are wet/ with an old-fangled rain that feels, rubbed between/ contempo fingers, entirely démodé.” He goes on to explain that “It’s winter and the trees/ have done avec their leaves”: in fact, they’ve choked them, changing them from green to “a purplish black”. Autumnal decline has never looked so villainous.

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