Low-Tide Lottery is the 8th release in Salt’s Modern Voices series, an ongoing project publishing short books by poet’s without full collections to their name, but who are well-established on the magazine and performance scene. As with Faber’s New Voices series, it is good to see some of the major publishers of poetry offering a starting-block for fresh work.

Claire Trévien’s pamphlet opens with ‘Sing Bird’, a linguistically and visually arresting piece, combing a lengthening refrain on the left with a diminishing poem on the right, both being readable either separately or in tandem, effectively creating three different poems. Trévien also alters established forms, as in the poem ‘Love from,’ which streamlines the sestina to five stanzas and rhyme words (a quintina perhaps). In the title poem what looks at first to be free-verse turns out on closer inspection to mimic the action of eponymous tide, with alternating couplets of long and short lines.

Though Trévien plays with form there is never any danger of experiment for experiment’s sake, and she makes good use of established templates such as the sonnet in the poems ‘Homecoming’ and ‘Entrepreneurs’. There are striking lines and images throughout this collection that affirm her lyric ability, such as “I felt the muscles / of the wallpaper harden and grow dark.” (‘The Machine’) and “The fields extend like an unshaven jaw.” (‘Beg an Dorchenn’). Trévien is a confident writer, but there are reminders too of the poet’s relative youth in a number of the poems, most fully in ‘Novella’, subtitled “After Rimbaud’s Roman”. The exuberance of the opening line, “You can’t be serious when you’re twenty-one”, is maintained through a playful eight stanzas that include such joyous bending of language as “You bildungsroman through books”. Influences are also detectable in a number of poems: there are shades of Wallace Stevens, particularly in the poem ‘Journée des Brouttes’: “Tumbrels loaded with keys and clavicles, / shards of major scree with minors.”, while her translation of Baudelaire’s ‘The Swan’ is filtered through O’Hara: “Swan! I think of you as I cross the gutter. / It’s 9am, so it’s sweating trash”. There is also the inevitable presence of French literature.

Overall this is a very assured debut. The writing is skilful and as mature as that to be found in the work of many established writers. I am sure it will not be long before we see a full collection from this poet.

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