Recipes For The Disaster by Gareth Sion Jenkins
“Blood-bone moon rising low and huge
between long green ribbed leaves rattling in the wind like blades.”
Gareth Sion Jenkins takes his love for both travel and the written word to new heights in his debut poetry collection, Recipes for the Disaster (2019). The fairly short ensemble of poems is organised in three parts - ‘Blood,’ ‘Time’ and ‘Dream’ -and traverses India, Australia and Eastern Africa to reflect on the entanglement of human relationships and their inevitable fractures.
The poems usually take two forms: the first is a short thrust of stanzas which explore a unique idea or concept, while in the second, Jenkin paints a narrative in verse form, presenting a journey or experience in the space of a few pages. Of the first form, I found the opening poem, ‘Blood bank,’ to be most arresting. Jenkins numbers a set of phrases from one to fourteen, each of which gravitate around the word ‘blood.’ The imagery is quite unique, and leads the reader’s imagination to unexpected places. Stanza one begins with ‘compost mixed with old blood.’ Over time, ‘blood appears a blanket laid down underneath,’ alongside ‘Your horse-head mask lying on the floor covered in blood.’ The skull [buzzes] ‘blood stream love.’ Though the fragments are short and crisp, the combination of them gives the sense of a story being told with very little of the narrative intact. Instead of telling the reader only the tip of the iceberg, as Hemingway advises, Jenkins leaves us with small shavings of glacier. The extremely sparse fragments fill the reader with curiosity as to what has or could have happened, and we are tempted to take the fragments as pieces of a story and use them to create our own.
The poem ‘Fluid symmetry’ explores a sexual encounter in equally scant measures. The opening, ‘We met and meet again under blood-bone moon,’ immediately signals to the reader that Jenkins is narrating a past encounter and its repetitions. Jenkins moves in an environment of ‘jungle trails tangling in rarefied air.’ The language is lush and evocative. The reader feels as though they’ve been dropped in the midst of an East African thicket, wandering alongside Jenkins. He furthers this sense of intimacy with body parts we rarely signify for such purposes:
‘the tip of your shoulder blade so familiar
turning cheek bone architecture
a foregone conclusion against the wind.’
These worn edges of the body give the sense of a relationship that has exhausted all mention of the typical ones we think of during romantic encounters. It is through this trek that we are not merely witnessing a new location, but a relationship that has had to fight through many a thicket to reach its destination. And so the poem concludes triumphantly, full-heartedly:
‘We are so high up here
bright curvature of sky.’
The ecstasies of corporality allow Jenkins to play with language in new ways. At the same time, Jenkins is equally talented at conventional narration, and setting a scene. Jenkins exemplifies his almost novelist-like mastery of description in his poem, ‘Grand Touring: the exhibition.’ An opening like,
‘Over the Ugandan border
towards mountain gorillas
through towering fields of maize.
Blood-bone moon rising low and huge
between long green ribbed leaves rattling in the wind like blades.’
masterfully sets the reader in the Ugandan highlands. The repetition of ‘blood-bone moon’ is a telling image that signifies to the reader that the poem is set in Uganda, a motif that appears across many of the poems. When meeting the gorillas, Jenkins sets the scene with incredible descriptive energy (‘In the morning maize from a local farmer chased from his field by an old silverback beating his chest with gnarled fist’). Yet the language also remains bare-bone, weighting the telling details (‘The gorilla returns, an armful of cobs. Sits on the hill nimbly stripping husks’). The stanzas have a sense of humour, too, emphasized by short, staccato sentences.
‘The maize breaks open. We pitch tents. We make fire.
Our only food is an onion.’
It is hard enough in any piece of writing, be it fiction, non-fiction, or poetry, to make the author feel invisible and for the reader to be fully immersed in an experience, but in a poem like this, Jenkins does not only that; he makes the reader feel as if they are immersed in the world of the poem, living out this trip alongside him.
Some of the narrative verses bring out not the highs of travelling, or the intimacies of relationship-building, but tensions of betrayal, drama and deceit. In ‘The everywhere anywhere 3,’ the narrative verses depict a narrator’s interactions with a man named Owen. The poem is broken into short paragraphs that take up five pages. As the narrator and Owen speak, ‘the sky is blistered with stars.’ Discussions of time passing and the myriad forms this can take are implanted into the dialogue. There’s a sense that the narrator and Owen were once mates, but that a rift of some unnameable sort has come between them. Jenkins never leads the interactions into a conflict, but whether it is when the two ‘watch others hooning across the parkland beside the falling down fences of falling down houses,’ or ‘late afternoon light refracts off millions of tiny shards of broken glass on patchy asphalt,’ the language around them implies distance, distrust, and disdain.
A life of perambulation need not have been lived eternally on the road. Recipes for the Disaster makes it clear that the wearing and straining of human relationships can have well-worn impacts on the development of the human mind, as much, if not more so, than a trip across the world. What Recipes for the Disaster also demonstrates is Jenkins’ control of language, his penchant for storytelling and his hypnotic harnessing of syntax that takes the reader to unique literary spaces. I’m curious to see what Jenkins is planning for his next book - Recipes for the Disasters is an assured debut, but it hints at something much greater, yet.
Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world... (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other places. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He is currently bumming around Mexico. You can find him on @Weltgeist Kiran.