Ships Made of Fake Fur

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James Jewell’s Ships Made of Fake Fur:

A singer-songwriter, originally from Pennsylvania, Jewell’s poetry seems more openly conversational, comic and, in parts, verbose. The chapbook consists of prose poems, odes, observational sketches and short lyrics, and in this it is more obviously eclectic than Reid’s.

It is anchored in modern life (the ‘ships’ of the title are, in fact, people roaming a cityscape: ‘The floundering ships / made of fake fur are floating / through the coffee shops, / restaurants and cinemas of Amsterdam’), and Jewell is clearly most comfortable in the realm of the colloquial and the comic. He has the comedian’s ability to draw acute examples from the everyday, bringing out the oddities of chance encounters, making them both poignant and light-hearted by turns. The best of these little sketches is ‘Three Beards’:

Homesick,
standing in a semi circle.
Three beards of different lengths
and one without a beard,
looking at each other,
fondly,
curiously.
“My boyfriend had a beard as long as yours.”
She shows us pictures.

In these few lines, Jewell manages to pack a mass of suggestion and curiosity with an unassuming ease. There is the sense of competition between the men, brought out by the way the girl trumps the other three with her boyfriend’s superior facial hair, there is the sense of separation (the girl from her boyfriend, who is featured in the past tense; the three men from home etc.), and the small hints of friendship and kinship between the ‘three beards’. The final image of the photographs confirms this collective yearning for an elsewhere. Jewell finds the casual, everyday emotion in such encounters, skilfully working it into his verse in a way that is both unobtrusive and effective.

He spins thought-provoking tales, featuring characters as diverse as Bob Marley, Napoleon and the Cookie Monster, but always keeps the emotional core of the poem visible beneath these comic layers. Jewell’s poetry avoids abstraction by cutting close to the issue at hand without revealing it explicitly, and this is where his talent lies. He has the ability to situate his reader, he talks to them not from the poet’s ‘imagined height’ but eye-to-eye, and it is on this common ground that we are able to relate to him, and feel the humorous sentiment of his sketches.

-Reviewed by Seán Hewitt– find review here: https://sabotagereviews.com/2012/09/10/corruptpress/

Available at:  https://corruptpress.com/books/shipfur.shtml