Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49)
Next Issue Hal Coase 'Ochre Pitch' Gregory Woods 'On Queerness' Kirsty Gunn 'On Risk! Carl Phillips' Galina Rymbu 'What I Haven't Written' translated by Sasha Dugdale Gabriel Josipovici 'No More Stories' Valerie Duff-Strautmann 'Anne Carson's Wrong Norma'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
PN Review 275
PN Review Substack

This review is taken from PN Review 209, Volume 39 Number 3, January - February 2013.

From Refusal to Acceptance sam riviere, 81 Austerities (Faber) £9.99

The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
                                                                                                - John Ashbery


The 'austerity' within which this book is situated has two major components: first, a severe and continuing decline in spending power for all but the wealthiest, as increases in income are outstripped by rapid increases in the cost of living. The second is a political project advanced by the British coalition government, as yet in its early stages, simultaneously to address the UK's severe deficit and radically de-socialise Britain by both shrinking and privatising all but a small core of state activity.

81 Austerities does not engage with either of these senses of 'austerity' directly, but develops responses - richly singular yet plural, personal yet depersonalised - to a variety of losses (privacy, sociality, certainty) both consequent on this situation and arising out of much wider cultural changes. With intentional paradox, and a persuasive inconsistency, Riviere addresses the austere in language by working a narrowed resource of form, diction and punctuation, out of which he succeeds in making a poetry of depth and resonance.

Riviere's poetry takes notice of the changes, the shifts in what 'being there' has come to mean as we move towards a hybrid of digital and 'actual' presences. Within the poetry is an awareness that subjectivity is positioned, as it always has been, between the never-was and the never-will-be-again. That the clamorous, insistent, ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image