The Encyclopædist, poems by A. C. Bevan

Photograph by Pixabay on Pexels

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Reviewed by Peter Cowlam

The thread on which A. C. Bevan strings his encyclopædist pearls is his own version of those truncated indices you see on the spines of encyclopædias. In Bevan’s case, his encyclopædist has compiled a sixteen-volume reference book, where each volume is a short poem, in most cases spanning no more than a page. Each of those would-be spinal index pointers is derived from one or two letters from either the opening line or title of nearly all these poems (or volumes). For example, the poem ‘Fatwa’ is encompassed by the indices A–AU, the first line of that poem being ‘A single strand of DNA’ (my underline) coupled with the first two letters of the title of the poem immediately following, ‘Aubade’ (ditto underline).¹ You get the idea, because even the least self-conscious poet requires a settled frame on which to hang his or her canvas.

And Bevan is certainly master of his canvas, instance his ‘Fatwa’ already cited, where the word itself foregrounds discussion, not of external forces determining one’s length of life, or moment of death, but the DNA double helix, ‘…strings of / sequences which / written in entirety / would fill / encyclopædias / with the kismet / & minutiae of / why & / wherefore / I shall die.’ As with most of these poems, there is a lightness of texture and a grounding of humour permeating what might otherwise weigh heavily as subject matter. ‘Reverting to Type’ (C–CR, the third poem or volume, and in that title is everything) takes as epigraph a quotation from Nabokov’s Lolita: ‘He did not use a fountain pen which fact, as any psychoanalyst will tell you, meant that the patient was a repressed undinist.’ You already suspect a similar level of scepticism so often found in Nabokov (somewhere in VN’s novella Transparent Things Freud’s dream interpretations are described as ‘hilarious elucidations’). In ‘Reverting to Type’ a similar train of witticisms ends in amazement at what the graphologist deduces from a small sample of handwriting.

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As with the complexities of Nabokov, you soon understand the word play, and how seemingly disparate details little by little pull together as threads in a final tapestry. In ‘The Byronic Man’ (CR–EK. From the holdall of that title everything is unpacked) you trace the connection between English Heritage, changing fashions, public reputations, the West’s diminishing culture, funds and endowments, the rites of propaganda masquerading as education, and the final approbation of a memorial in Westminster Abbey.

In other devices, ‘Gone’ (GO–I) is the circular prophecy of memory loss, where the title completes the circuit; ‘An Apology for Poetry’ (I–JU) considers the everyday and its abstractions into line ends and the sestina; ‘Carefully’ (JU–LO) explodes a joke about two hedgehogs into the pleasure-pain principle (Freud again) and the psychology of human behaviour; ‘Peeled’ (LO–NO) is abundant of witty rhymes – ‘Our neighbourhood surveillance / is a Ministry of Love / homing in on immigrants & / defecating dogs // via drone feeds in the ether & / cyber in the cloud, / every law-abiding peeper can / monitor & browse’; in ‘Amateur’ (NO–PU) pathos turns to bathos in a single last line, the unexpected summation of the thirteen preceding; and what slim gathering of poems under the collective title The Encyclopædist could not, in our digital age, conclude with the poem ‘Encyclopædia Salesman in a Wikipedia World’ (ZA–ZY)? Not one properly wrapped up, where the first line is ‘ZAANDAM to ZYGOTE, the last word’ and the last is ‘Rise up encyclopædists!!!’

¹The entire indexing apparatus is as follows, for the sixteen poems or volumes: A–AU, ‘Fatwa’; AU–C, ‘Aubade’; C–CR, ‘Reverting to Type’; CR–EK, ‘The Byronic Man’; EK–GO, ‘Ekphrasis’; GO–I, ‘Gone’; I–JU, ‘An Apology for Poetry’; JU–LO, ‘Carefully’; LO–NO, ‘Peeled’; NO–PU, ‘Amateur’; PU–RE, ‘“Pure” Finder’; RE–SP, ‘How to Dowse for Water’; SP–TH, ‘The Big Crunch’; TH–UN, ‘Lickpenny’; UN–ZA, ‘Incunable’; ZA–ZY, ‘Encyclopædia Salesman in a Wikipedia World’.

The Encyclopædist, poems by A. C. Bevan is published by the Melos Press. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers and anthologies in the UK, Europe and the US. He is the author of five pamphlet collections, and his full-length collection, Poundlandia, was published in 2024 by Mica Press & Campanula Books. A. C. Bevan is active on the Bristol poetry circuit, and poems reviewed here and from Poundlandia are often performed by him, with aplomb.

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Peter Cowlam, the former Literary Editor of Ars Notoria Magazine, is a poet and novelist. As a novelist, he has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. The Quagga Prize is awarded for independently published works of fiction. Other work has appeared in The Battersea Review, The San Francisco Review of Books, The Blue Nib, The Galway Review, Easy Street, Literary Matters, Eunoia Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, The Liberal, and others.