The Only Obvious Exit

There's an episode of Doctor Who ('Gridlock') in which the citizens of New York, on New Earth, drive perpetually on an underground motorway. They receive (fictional) traffic updates from a (non-existent) online 'Sally, who tantalises them with descriptions of a 'real' open-air world, the sun blazing in the sky. Travellers can talk to people in other cars only if they're on their 'friends list'. It's a vision of hell, a living death in which cars undertake a Dante-esque descent to the evil creatures below who will devour them. Yet there exists a powerful sense of community epitomised in the singing o the 'the Old Rugged Cross') and although these people are trapped, they have also been 'saved' from a worse fate by travelling on the motorway. For 'the motorway' read also 'the internet.'

Redmond's second collection begins with a series of poems immersed in (and faintly appalled by) American car culture; it closes with a long poem, MUDe, which explores the world of Multi-User Dimensions, the text-based games played online. Some of the car poems are racy and fun. Inspired by by Redmond's time in St Paul, Minnesota, they capture the idiom and pulse of American life. What is 'real', as in The Clown Lounge, with its 'soccer moms', SUVs and 'Mall of America', also slips into what is 'virtual', as in Grand Theft America, where 'America loads in the background' and the drive of the poem becomes a textual form of graphic art. In viewing the world through a car wind-screen the poems play, implicitly, on Baudrillard's ideas about simulacra and hyperreality - an issue also central to MUDe. The style and tone owe much - perhaps sometimes too much - to Muldon's post-1980s 'American' mode, as in Grand Theft America: 'Though upside-down, my burning stickshift / leapfrogs Chinatown - "Hey! / Learn how to drive!" though crashed to bits, / my crumbling Hummer / outguns the runaway underground train...'

Yet even Muldoon can nowadays sound like a parody of himself, and what Redmond does in a poem such as Grand Theft America he does with verve, a spirit of mischief and a parodic knowingness. More distinctive, however, among these short poems are those less obviously designed as reflections on and of our postmodern, post-industrial, late capitalist culture. There are many good cat poems in the world, and Redmond has written one of them. Double Felix is perfect: wry, graceful. It picks its way with catlike precision through sound: 'Her fur is for / portraiture. // Her purr is far / more appreciative [...] All night he pursues / her - but for fun, // nothing further.' He seems tonally more assured on his 'home' ground too, with the elegiac mode of Frisk, or the humorous nostalgia of 'Omey': 'Oh my. Sunk wheels, low tide - / my aunts in a spin...'.

The risk Redmond takes with this book is in its closing long poem, since a 'MUD' is not a spectator sport. The poem MUDe is, the note tells us, 'supposed to read like the printout of a session, or sessions, generated by one person playing a fictional MUD'. The concept allows Redmond to blur the lines between real and fictional selves; it provides a framework to probe ideas of community, and the capacity of the internet both to unite and divide its users: the online characters playing bring with them to their fictional scenario all the baggage of their own selves, their political assumptions, their problems; alliances are forged and as quickly broken in ways suggestive of the `'real' world. The elegiac and autobiographical quality associated with the rural landscapes sets them against a more surreal narrative sequence: 'Shredded darkness. A barn. [...] To the south a small window, half-lost in all the confusion, gleams up densely. / The only obvious exit is west. / Your ten-year-old self is here.'

Amongst MUD devotees, apparently, the jury is still out on whether MUDding is 'a game, or an extension of real life with gamelike qualities' (see mudconnect.com). My jury is out on whether what is undoubtedly a provocative approach to a long poem actually works. Perhaps the idea is more enticing than the 'finished' product (by its nature, the MUD game is without closure - the game reboots, the characters come back to life). At points, it is all too tempting to identify with the 'Godsend' character - an 'utter novice', he eventually violates codes of courtesy and logs off - who sends the repeated question around the users: 'How do you kill things? [...] TELL ME HOW TO KILL THINGS!' Yet that said, there is a seductiveness to the experience of reading this poem, and a carefully constructed narrative momentum across different levels (the past, the present, the 'game', the 'reality') that will (probably) make me log on to it again.