Djelloul Marbrook

These poems have something of the teenager’s self-absorption about them. This is not meant in any negative sense – maturity and knowing your place are vastly over-rated. The keen concern with the watching self in these poems rests on top of a whole career by the author – two careers in fact. The poet served in the navy and was a journalist in Baltimore for many years. The resemblance to a teenager’s thought is disconcerting, testimony to the resilient bonds that connect us to our formative years. To be a self is a work-in-progress.

A boy who looks embarrassed to be young

skulks beneath the scaffolds avoiding light:

I hope I will not have to be his like again:

This stanza, (in Sinistral) depicting the poet as an outsider

I am to the left of belonging,

forlorn, bereft and looking in.

Some are conceived under stars,

I was conceived under stairs.

is followed immediately by this stanza, which takes a step sideways.

You asked what my background is.

I wish I had one, but if I did

I would probably know less than I do

and be more certain about it.

It is disturbing to encounter the child within, to recognise how much has remained the same. Maybe it’s a source of comfort too, to know that there is such a resilient continuity.

My wake is smaller

than a periscope’s.

Nothing ever happened

that couldn’t without me.

These are the hidden thoughts that form the driving engine of a personality. The poet feels an affinity with all who have an inner self – Van Gogh is the subject of another poem. There is an objective reason for Marbrook to be an outsider – he was born in Algiers, never knew his father, has a strange name (Djelloul What kind of a name is that?) and shares the experience of the exile. But he is hardly unique in being an immigrant in the USA; one feels the poet’s sense of being an outsider is more metaphysical. He is aware of the selves he has deployed to make a way in the world. It’s not just the foreigner who has to adapt to the world we live in. It’s anyone who stubbornly keeps faith with themselves. Many never succeed.

Sometimes for me it’s a couple of lines in isolation that echo back and forth in my head.

Whoever’s selling nothing
is a truly frightening man.
I hope you’ve met one lately.

The poems stand as testimony to the persistence of the self across decades. Although that self is not static, but constantly off-balance, it endures. The course of the last century has seen ideologies clash, empires fall, religious institutions wane. It’s all happening so quickly it seems a man’s life has more solidity than an empire.

I first came across Djelloul Marbrook by reading his online commentary on culture and the media. Since 2005 he has been turning his lucid mind to topics ranging from the panzer blondes of Manhattan to the war in Iraq. He has an insider’s knowledge of the changes in the newspaper industry.

The more I read his blog, the more curious I became as to what his poetry could be like. He seemed to be very capable of saying exactly what he wanted to say in his almost daily posts. What more could he convey in poetry? And more concretely, why would he invest so much time in a medium that is read by so few, when each post on the blog instantly gets hundreds of readers?

Marbrook is a late-comer to being a published poet, which says nothing about how long he has been writing poetry. His collection won the Wick prize in 2007 which got it out to the world at last.