In Certain Manoeuvres Lydia Unsworth, rather ingeniously, uses extracts from Slade van Westrum's Famous Cities of the World: Amsterdam as a foil to emphasise the individual's struggle to come to terms with the alienating experience of living in a postmodern city. Slade van Westrum's description of Amsterdam is the Amsterdam of the '60s; the legacy of which is the architectural artefact inherited by the the world-wide-web generation and used as a backdrop to project their postmodern culture upon. This, according to Unsworth, is not a perfect marriage. We are ectopic, caught between two irreconcilable calls: the lure of history, ever present in the masonry, calling us back to impossible roots; and the contemporary life of easy travel, and instant information & media downloads.
To explore this ectopia Unsworth both utilises and rejects the tenets of Italian Futurism. This is not a voice that rejoices in technology, nor embraces it as a centring force. This is a poetic voice reporting as a bemused bystander. And the aesthetics of Italian Futurism that she chooses to adopt allow her to express the complex and confusing experience of the contemporary urban scene very effectively.
Conurbations of today are presented as poetic vignettes in real time, as heaving entities: canals, road signs, first impressions, cafÉ dwellers, cyclists, memories, bridges, the sounds of the city, architecture, trams, pedestrians, anticipation of future events, overheard conversations, all throw themselves upon one another, merge, and become the moment. There is an emotional ambience in these fragments, through which the poet seeks, by intuition, to link sympathies between the exterior scene and the internal response.
These poems convey the distance and loneliness of the postmodern city through their negotiations of space and people. They navigate the psychogeographic movements of the heart, trading one thing for another, whilst desperately seeking a little something to call one's home.
