Floating above Luminescent Pavements: Jigsaws, Jellyfish and Discarded Joy
The Urban Enigmas by Patrick ten Brink poetry collection, has massive face of a pug on the cover, as if guarding something held inside. A pug on human shoulders that is. A pug possibly wearing a cap. The beautiful wax coated cover is striking, and you can’t help but turn the page. The 23 poems are complemented by nine playful illustrations, giving visual representation to the verse. This juxtaposition of poems and images – the dialogue between poet and artist – enhances the impact.
These playful city vignettes explore the many fragments of what makes a city, in this case Brussels. Ten Brink is clearly a flâneur with a keen eye, and with an eye on what one wouldn’t normally bother to notice, let alone write about. The poems explore Brussels at its most basic and day-to-day. Forget the Grand Place and the Manneken Pis, the EU institutions or the chocolateries of the Sablon. Instead, the poet’s subject matter is the detritus of the street, the accidental finds, the oddities and strange repeat occurrences: the day’s offering, half an apple, else a piece of toast, shaving gel, and a spare wheel.
The pamphlet is an inventive curation of pavements, those the author walks down regularly. Near the European Parliament there’s a bathtub lying on its side while ‘a broken-off pipe juts from its belly’ (‘A bath’) while ‘a lone white trainer / Fresh green Nike tick / Lies on its side / In the middle of the square’. The poet documents all that isn’t tidy or glamorous and tries to read the codes of the city, eyes scavenging for unwanted curios, stuff lost and abandoned. The plugs, the bulbs, the repaired lamp shades, all that has been discarded, the poet celebrates these orphan objects and pays homage.
But there are people too: the urban astronauts dressed in shiny suits with groggy eyes who ‘walk in deliberate slow motion […] great white-clad astronauts […] clad in bulky suits with shoulder pads’ sweeping the streets (‘Urban Astronauts’). And machines: ‘Giant white metal mouth with grinding gears / Stench of rotting loss, a most vile saliva’ (‘The Monsters Roam’) – here the poet, with all the imagination and wonderment of a child brings to life the refuse trucks who go about the city devouring plastic sacks of ‘yoghurt pots and orange peels, chicken bones and plastic bags’, satisfying their alien appetite.
There is a – dare one say, Belgian – surreal pleasure in these poems, a leap of the imagination and a permission to see in an otherworldly way. These well-crafted poems do justice to the everyday, to the processes and people, the machines and routines that keep the city ticking over, with all its life organic, mechanic, human, artificial. A celebration of the unknown, unseen, unwanted that leaves you looking differently at the streets you walk down.
