Book Review: Mark Vanner's 'The Bone That Swallowed A Man'

I flicked through the TV the other day and caught about four seconds of The Responder. Martin Freeman, fresh-from-the-barbershop, leant back against a sofa cushion, presumably cracking the case, in so revealing a resolution that you could’ve counted the hairs in his nose. (I didn’t, but I’d guess 30).

So much of the art we make these days offers us the world as sturdy reality. It’s 4K, noise-cancelling, you’ll-believe-you-were-there, and most of it is nonsense. There is of course another way: in linguistics they have the phrase ‘epistemic modality’ - when writers couch their language in musts, mights and maybes, they recognise that our senses are flawed and that often the most we can do is to muddle through from day to day. Poets are most able to deal with this like grown-ups, I think - poetry is one of the last strongholds of the surreal.

No work in recent months has brought that home to me as much as Mark Vanner’s excellent collection The Bone That Swallowed A Man. Many of its poems have the quality of an experienced improv troupe, or maybe a dream you’d have after too much cheese, with the vividness of the gently baffling scenarios they introduce. One begins: Alan was sandwiched between shelving units in the wine and spirits section of ALDIs supermarket. Here’s a weird situation. How are we going to deal with it?

One of my favourites is The Magician, which has a brilliant premise: a barber holds up the mirror to the back of his patron’s head, and the customer asks whether he can see the back of other people’s heads instead. Vanner does this very well: with warm-eyed humour he catches the ironies in everyday routines, and lets the quotidian point him down the garden path, towards memorable daydreams. 

These vignettes can be genuinely funny, rough and ready with a touch of Trainspotting: another poem opens with a man being bitten on the shin by their drug dealer while ‘attacking a triangle-shaped cheese and onion sandwich by a blazing log fire at The Bull Inn’. As the story progresses, we find that the landlord has hired Claude the disreputable dealer as a sniffer dog, to enforce his zero-drug policy. But Claude is the Bull Inn’s drug problem, says the man who’s been bitten. Exactly, says Mike the landlord - it’s a win-win for everyone. 

This sort of rollicking storytelling means that poems fly by at a lick as you read them, and the intelligent references therein are delivered with a heaped spoonful of comedy sugar: Return to Babel opens with What language will they speak in heaven? But is soon diverted: what if everyone speaks Latin or Greek or worse, Welsh? Poetry is often magnificent, but too often it’s rigid and impenetrable as well. Vanner’s poems, clever though they are, feel a bit closer to a bouncy castle than banging your head against a brick wall. And I know which I prefer.

Making light work of the bizarreness of existence, this book’s a valued companion to have in your parka pocket when you’re on the go (although do I regret reading tracing the lifeline of the King's wrinkled sphincter midway through eating a panini? Slightly.) It’s really no small feat to wander deep in the existential weeds while staying upbeat and relatable - I don’t want to explain myself to modern appliances, says Vanner, or one of his characters. Neither do I, and although my Panasonic is incredibly smart, it’s selling me misleading pixels. My life’s not much like Martin Freeman playing a detective, usually. It’s closer to this: I opened an art gallery in my head and filled its walls with empty canvases.

Mark Vanner is a poet born in Nottingham who now lives in Gloucestershire. His work has appeared in publications including Neon Literary Magazine, AMBIT, The Rialto and many more. His new collection The Bone That Swallowed A Man is available here.