Modern poetry is rubbish
by Jaime McGrane
the Carillon

Most people do not read modern poetry unless forced to by their English teachers. I’m sure we all have memories of the dreaded poetry unit, where the students are expected to find meaning in seemingly incoherent lines of poetry. If you are intending to brave poetry without the behest of your English teacher, I do not suggest Triny Finlay’s collection of poetry entitled Splitting Off.

This is Triny Finlay’s debut collection of poetry. The jacket says the collection is about “the self’s negotiation with the material world.” Even though many of her poems are named after familiar objects within the material world, such as “Lint” and “Milk,” there is no real connection with the material world. It is almost as if she is trying to separate herself from the material world, as suggested by the title Splitting Off, but she cannot and is trying to deal with her failure.

Disturbing is the word I believe best describes this collection. Much of the subject matter is quite grotesque: murder, rape and gore are all frequent images Finlay uses. Nothing is pretty or even amusing about this collection. Even some of the poems with innocuous names such as “Pink Elephants” or “Fancy Dress” contain profoundly disturbing images.

I’m not sure the poems have any meaning beyond the power to disturb. With each poem I have the wish to avert my eyes from the page and stop reading the poem. Personally, I cannot get past the nasty images of the “dead boy” and “that foetus on the sidewalk” to find any meaning within these poems. I believe they must have some meaning but the language forces me to read them quickly, so I do not have to keep the grotesque images in my head any longer than absolutely necessary, to actually find the meaning.

Erotic images are also present in the poems, often alongside images of blood and gore. Often the erotic images appear without any apparent connection to the poem. Or the erotic ideas appear and are immediately followed by ideas of gore, like in “Typologies” when she says, “I only wanted a sly kiss, red wine; but you wanted bloodshed.” It is almost as if Finlay believes images of blood and gore or sex are needed to make the reader read the poems. Sometimes I wonder if she’s appealing to the idea that sex and bloodshed sell.

Some of the titles of Finlay’s poem have nothing to do with the poem itself. They seem to be randomly picked words that do not actually have any basis in the poem or sometimes even relate to the poem. Most of them are innocuous words that do not make you suspect the often gross images evoked in the poems.

This is a collection of 86 poems that are very disturbing in a troubling manner. It is not as if the disturbing images are thought provoking,just gross. This is a bad book of modern poetry, which I would strongly advise against reading.