Help

Death-obsessed, disengaged and overinvested; the four long poems assembled in Steven Zultanski’s Help theatricalise morbid fascinations, self-protective impulses, and unfocused desire. Help is, at its core, a set of conversations. The result of games played between friends that were then transcribed, edited, and embellished. Participants were asked to talk about loss, the death of acquaintances, secret hiding places, mislaid time, and unmet demands. The resulting poems read like meandering scripts for unrealised plays, incidental excavations of persona and place. In Help speech is pinned to the page and individual voices begin to appear as specimens. It is a catalogue of active disappointments, repeated anti-climaxes, and half-finished dissections. Someone demands endless love, but not from anyone in particular; someone squirms around in their chair, but for no communicable reason; someone hides in a shed, waiting to be found; someone sits in the ’imagination room, ’ and can think of nothing but biographical time. Help isolates these voices and dislocates them-flattens them-displaying them in a kind of vitrine. There’s no vitriol, no explication-but rather a thread of observations that veer toward fiction. These poems are a perpetuation of childish anxieties in the face of impossible need. Somewhat reminiscent of Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk (1968) or Alice Notley’s transcription poems of the 1970s, in Help the poet pretends to be a recording device, and the poem an act of remembering. Zultanski’s writing is at once skeletal and overstuffed, dryly unsentimental and yet dripping with melodrama. Help foregrounds its own contradictions in a collection that is at once both extremely personal and distinctly artificial.