In Chance of a Storm, poetry is language that comes trailing bits of other forms of speech and writing. While the lyric is central to Mengham’s work, it cannot shrug off the ambition of epic, scaled down but still latent. This telescoping informs the structure of these poems, prose-poems and modernist fables. There are echoes of Homer, Dante, Eliot, Pound, but also the deadpan of public tannoy announcements, the white-noise of urban soap-box oration, and the strange syntax and mannerisms of shampoo bottle blurbs. Cast through these contemporary styles, Mengham’s historically-aware poems become something unrecognisable: like Rilke’s description of a sculpture that ‘sees you from every angle’, his word-sculptures see across time with an eerie plasticity, surfing literatures and cultures over millennia, even within a single sentence. Mengham is a master of the micro-paragraph, a condensed, supercharged poetry bristling with alien clarity like, to borrow a phrase from the poems, angelic cattle-prods.
