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Monthly Archives: September 2022

Knitting Drum Machines For Exiled Tongues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani is out!

Posted on September 30, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Knitting Drum Machines For Exiled Tongues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani is out!

Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani’s ground-breaking poetry collection Knitting drum machines for exiled
tongues presents the reader with thirty-five multilingual poems in English, French and Croatian structurally interwoven with thirteen visual-textual fragments and three poems-tattoos or “tattooed” drawings through the narrative device of “enchâssement” (embedding). Using the universal languages of the heart / love / music / rhythm the author seamlessly transgresses borders and provides us with a poignant, evocative, and fully inclusive, immersive experience. The recurring tropes of falling, absence, and loss, and the evocation of a fourth “shadow language” signify the narrator’s displacement from ‘home’ and language, whilst at the same time questioning the identity discourses of nostalgia, belonging and exile. Here, the central image of the “knitting drum machines for exiled tongues” can be interpreted both as an innovative artistic practice allowing the revival of lost and / or exiled languages, and as an enabling device for the (re-)coding of multilingual language patterns in which “poetry of the mind breaks free”.

A QR code included in the book invites the reader to access additional content related to the Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues collection such as a glossary, visual, and audio sources.

The book is available to buy on the Tears in the Fence website through the Pay / Subscribe / Donate page (https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward/).

“In Knitting Drum Machines for Exiled Tongues, ‘harmonies’ are ‘sounding out’ spectrums of sonic frequencies, attempting to connect self/others. Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani brilliantly raises the old sword of the bard battling both the silences within herself and which plague us all – the ‘mutisms’ at the ‘edges’, our own wilderness being contained. The poet stretches through the unhearable, unsayable, claims ‘je capte’ ‘kapetan bez broda’ – but then leaves us a blank void to be filled in. That space is the remarkable work waiting here for readers to respond to, to find our ‘futures possible’ where ‘optimism’ is that ‘impossibility of closed passage’ of which she writes so eloquently.”

Jennifer K. Dick, author of, most recently, That Which I Touch Has No Name, 2022

30th September 2022

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Adventures Among The Living by Tim Cumming (Blueprint)

Posted on September 29, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Adventures Among The Living by Tim Cumming (Blueprint)

The Acknowledgements page at the end of Adventures Among the Living suggests that this new pamphlet (or chapbook) from poet and artist Tim Cumming is the product of – or ‘made possible by’ – ‘a lucid dream’ back in 2021. This may or may not be the subject of Cumming’s painting ‘The Poet Appears in Space Time outside Kensal Rise overground station in the dead of night’, which is reproduced in full colour across the centrefold of this publication; a strange, slightly blurry work which foregrounds a fox against a street corner, with – presumably – the apparition of the poet to the left of the image.

It’s a powerful image, as is the beginning of the first poem: ‘I was not all there. Friends had / a habit of pointing this out.’ The jokey tone, with its initial pun, gives way to something darker, where the narrator ends up ‘whispering secrets / into a hole in the ground’, convinced that no-one can hear him, but coming to the realisation that ‘they all knew the words’. All? Friends or the implied everyone from the use of no-one? The narrator is set apart, kept back, with the others 

     glancing back at me as if I was
     the last figure of a convoy
     from the last war of antiquity,
     and my gods were contagious.

I love that last line, the idea that you can ‘catch’ gods, like an illness or disease, a virus perhaps, but Cumming does not linger in this scene; the untitled poems swiftly move the story along. Returning to his room our protagonist finds incident tape and arson, forcing him to flee, comparing himself to Frankenstein but ‘hoping / something good would come of it’ rather than ‘monsters / that would eventually kill me’.

The fourth poem’s ‘bedsheets beneath me / twisted into a body shape’ suggests that we are in dream territory, an idea reinforced by the way the narrator finds himself ‘falling through air’ then moving among people he recognises, ‘unheard and unseen’. The dream sometimes turns into a nightmare:

     I looked for my face but only
     saw a gap. How could I retrieve
     it, unfold it, spread it out
     like a map and read it,
     follow it, and find myself

But he cannot find himself, for he is ‘as solid as smoke’ and ‘way off the map’, reduced to asking ‘what / would Keith Richards do?’, which hardly seems like a rational response!

This, however, is not a rational journey, it is a city where ‘shadow lives sometimes showed through’, built upon ‘the shadow of false memories’, a place where ‘the ground itself swooned at your feet’. The bed is a re-occurring image, as are maps and absences: of memory, self, any sense of purpose or direction. Films and parallel universes are mentioned in passing, and ‘[a] box that had been opened / decades ago suddenly arrived / in the hands of a courier’, as time loops around itself and slips away.

This poetic journey is made by a narrator who ‘wasn’t going anywhere’, who is eventually led to tell himself that

     Your place is here, and even
     though you are going to be very
     far away, you are expected and
     there’s nothing you need to bring

although in the next poem he interrogates this: ‘What did you bring / and how much of it did / you need to carry?’ At this point, in the final two poems (the quote is from the last-but-one), we realise the whole sequence is a meditation about growing up and the baggage we all carry with us as we navigate the world around us and find our place until we 

     reach this point where
     the road ends, folding
     its dimensions into what
     you packed in haste as a child
     before embarking on your journey.

Cumming’s dreamlike sequence, perhaps written according to ‘fairy tale logic’, is a strange and marvellous affair, its abstractions and surrealism grounded by very real depictions of the city, and a perceptive engagement with the language of emotion and confusion. It’s a brave engagement with, and attempt to illuminate ‘the shadows that / fall when memory passes you by.’

Rupert Loydell 29th September 2022


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A Walk in Deep Time by Morag Smyth (moragsmyth.co.uk)

Posted on September 28, 2022 by tearsinthefence
A Walk in Deep Time by Morag Smyth (moragsmyth.co.uk)

The title of this book, ‘A Walk in Deep Time’, is key to its ethos. Tree-like, it is rooted in the ‘restlessness of earth’, in the geology of soil and water and rock, in an ancient, ancestral land that ‘sometimes remembers’, a land whose air and light are linked to the cellular structure of living things, ‘to who and what we are.’ 

‘I was born on a fault line on a brilliant summer’s day’ is the opening statement by the author who goes on to describe how the first sound she heard was the river, ‘a constant source that held me to this place, this time, this moment.’ From an early age she took pleasure in listening to the ground, to the ’creaking and shifting of things’ which created ‘a sense of something universal’ together with an awareness that humankind is ‘transient, mere flickers or impressions on the land on which we stand.’ There are many explorations in A Walk in Deep Time – geographical, philosophical, and personal – but throughout all the changes of time and events there is ‘a deeply connected bond to place’.

The book is rich in detail and anecdote. I had not realised that a memoir could be such a page turner and impossible to put down. Morag Smyth conveys so clearly the joy of a childhood that valued rural life, freedom and play and allowed a ‘strong imaginary world’ to develop in a sensitive child with a capacity for daydreaming and everything that was other worldly. I identified so strongly with the misery caused by some of the schools she attended that I could willingly have broken down the restrictive walls and smashed the high windows that blocked her view of the sky.

Fortunately, the damage did not cause enduring harm to the child’s ‘big dreams’, to her love of rich colour and design, to fabrics and off-cuts that were like treasures and ‘little jewels’.  Creativity could still be explored through art, painting, dancing and music.  When Morag became a student at Chesterfield College of Art, sharing a sense of adventure with four close friends and relishing her involvement in student protests, she describes herself as ‘a bottle of champagne that had been corked up for too long.’

This vivacity and sense of delight continues throughout the whole of A Walk in Time although, of course, this is an account of a life with all its accompanying problems and grievances, its losses and heartaches, its failures and disappointments. There is the intensity of the feminist struggle to give women a voice and a role and there is the frustration of an educational system that refused for years to make allowance for differences, to recognise there are many ways of learning. But the book is a ‘walk’, an exploration, and there are meetings with well-known people like Denise Levertov and John Cooper Clarke, there are festivals with Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac. A fascinating richness of colour.

A Walk in Deep Time deserves to be widely read. It must be widely read not only because it is so readable but because of its motivation, its rationale. The book ends with a statement and a plea:

‘We humans are custodians … On a long long scale our existence is just seconds. Our survival depends on improving our relationship with each other, the earth and ourselves. Each of us walks in deep time – each walk is briefer than an outbreath and each …is important, valuable and eternal.’

The book is available from leading booksellers.  

Mandy Pannett 28th September 2022

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What The House Taught Us by Anne Bailey (The Emma Press), This House by Rehema Njambi (The Emma Press)

Posted on September 18, 2022 by tearsinthefence
What The House Taught Us by Anne Bailey (The Emma Press), This House by Rehema Njambi (The Emma Press)

These chapbooks are substantial beyond their size. Both debuts, they consider the  domestic and explore women’s place in it from very different starting-points and with unique voices.

Rehema Njambi is a Kenyan-born, British-raised performance poet who celebrates the Black, mostly African women around her and from whom she is descended. She is acutely aware of home’s patriarchal context:   ‘My mother’s joy is tied to the ground…Our fathers handed belonging to their sons,/gave away their daughters’ (‘A Piece of Land’).

The opening poem, ‘All These Truths You Never Set Free’, speaks to the guilt a  writer/survivor feels towards her female ancestors: ‘I reach for the pen and I remember/that you wanted this for yourself./This selfishness of pen and paper and solitude’.  Yet  poem after poem evokes how precarious a woman’s position has always been at the heart of  home and family: 

        Every haven you have ever found

        was only lent to you.

        Even now you abide in your body

        like a stranger house-sitting for the friend of a friend

                                                                                   ‘A Lending Not a Giving’

Though there is anger and resistance in these poems, and a sense that the ‘I’ must  escape in order to survive (‘I grab what I can and run’, from ‘Our Marriage Dies in a Dream’) there is also great tenderness and  strong religious faith, even if that faith may not be recognisable to her grandmothers, changed as it is through time and   language. The collection ends:

        I pray and search for roots

        and earth, and soil, and tree.

        For truth, for God in all I see.

                                                                            ‘The Language of Grief’

Though it may not be possible to mend the damage caused through betrayal and the imbalance in male/female relationships which can cause ‘home’ to be less than safe for women, Njambi’s work still places faith in the future, and in the continuing struggle: ‘I wrestle and fight for the tongue my mother taught to me’. This is a powerful and moving collection. It will be interesting to follow the trajectory of Njambi’s development in her subsequent books.

 Anne Bailey’s imaginative world is surreal, wry and strange. Outwardly amiable in its quotidian references to such things as ‘Songs of Praise’, ‘polyester,/ chiffon scarves, lipstick, men with shining shoes’  and in the wonderfully-titled ‘Uses and abuses of the tea towel’, still nothing is quite as it seems. A lake appears in the living room. ‘How to get the most out of baking’ begins: ‘Put butter in a baking bowl,/set it in front of the fire, then/call up the dead’. 

I liked this collection very much for the apparently deadpan way it deconstructs domesticity and women’s roles in maintaining it. Houses which ‘should’ be sparkling and perfect are always in danger of decay and spectacular damage: the poems enjoy exploring themes of mould, disintegration, spoilage. The domestic is a dangerous, twilight zone where budgies meet sticky ends under a scalding tap, where ‘letting go’ happens and where ‘Something will have to be done’ (‘A film of dust is how it starts’) – but what? Even darker, a woman are kept psychologically imprisoned by an obsessive man who has taken domesticity to perverse levels: ‘For him it is an act of love’ (in ‘The Curator is married to the rain’).

The poems weigh the sinister and the surreal very carefully together with a lovely sense of the absurd, so that the effect is always unpredictable and engaging. There is loss and grief here, and a range of very dark emotions indeed, but Anne Bailey celebrates the odd and uncanny with relish so her poems fizz with wonderful images : the ‘wooded’ Felicity, ‘her open spaces …full of damp washing’, the ‘tarmacked’ Nigel ‘with a central reservation but no hard shoulder’ (‘The sum of the parts’). Home may throw a long shadow over women’s lives, its rigidity always encroached upon by the wild, the unruly, by wild birds coming inside, becoming trapped –  but the women in Anne Bailey’s poems are more than resilient: they are magical shape-shifters  in ordinary disguises. This book is wise and funny and rewards re-reading.  

Pippa Little 18th September 2022

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La Loba Speaks For Wolf by Susan Taylor (Burning Eye Books)

Posted on September 14, 2022 by tearsinthefence
La Loba Speaks For Wolf by Susan Taylor (Burning Eye Books)

Burning Eye Books are a Bristol based setup that seem mainly in business to produce written documentation of Performance Poetry and Performance Poets. This is probably not an entirely accurate description but my limited engagement with these publications would seem to suggest this is largely the case. Susan Taylor is an accomplished poet (she has produced around ten books, many of these with South West publishers) who combines written scripts with ‘spoken word’ performances. Her material is not always the sort of poetry that I find most interesting but I was taken with the subject in this case as I know she has performed some of these poems and this is where it can come alive. On reading this collection I’ve come to the conclusion that although the poems do work ‘on the page’ they are essentially a prompt for a live performance and I’m looking forward to hearing them ‘in situ’ so to speak.

          The Song Beneath the Song

          Come hear the song La Loba sings –

          A song she sings, so mountains ring

          And as they ring, they rearrange

          The rising wind that drives all change.

          It was her voice out on the air

          That caused a wolf to leap at her,

          Though not to harm a hair of her,

          But just to be in care of her.

          The wolf returns to mountainside,

          He and La Loba, side by side.

          Protective charms in Loba’s arms

          Transcend the harm beneath the harms.

          Her spirit lights on butterflytes,

          Calls up the stream beneath the stream.

          The blue and green of Gaia’s scheme

          Empowers the dream beneath the dream.

          Come here the song the lobos sing –

          The song they sing, so mountains ring

          And as they ring, they rearrange

          The wind beneath the winds of change.

There’s a concern with ecology here which is something central to Taylor’s poetry and is in tune with a lot of current thinking about environmental issues and rewilding. The regular rhythms may feel deceptively simple but they have a spell-like influence which carries throughout the collection. There are a variety of formal devices and there’s also a mix of information and intoxicating repetition which I imagine comes across even more strongly ‘in performance.’ From ‘Wolven’ we get the following:

          Only wolf

          nails it

          in high flying notes,

          igniting

          the ashen face of Venus.

          To howl wolven,

          howl for joy

          and the wonder of being

          a link of sound

          between earth and sky.

     There may be something predictable and comforting about these verses but they are also skilful, challenging and imaginative. I’m slightly reminded here of Richard Price’s The Owner of the Sea: 3 Inuit Stories Retold which touches on similar issues and themes if in a more scatological framework. La Loba Speaks for Wolf includes an introduction which suggests a context which is part lament, part mythology and part science-based.

Steve Spence 14th September 2022

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Tears in the Fence Festival: ‘Bewilderment / Bewildered / Be Wild’

Posted on September 13, 2022 by tearsinthefence

2–4 September 2022

A tree without a soul watching, 

one adjacent prayer touching

Peter Larkin, Sounds between trees, 39

At Stourpaine Village Hall, an eco-friendly and sustainable building, the Tears in the Fence Poetry Festival displayed the diverse and multifaceted sides of poetry. It encompassed experimental and performative poetry, studies in etymology, translations, confessional poetry, poems about relationships, food and different types of encounters, and eco-poetry. The days were packed with sessions of engrossing readings that alternated readings by poets featured in the festival with essays, interviews, music, discussions and talks. The programme was varied and entertaining and included long intervals that gave the attendees plenty of time to connect, chat and update each other. The organisers, notably Janet Hancock, Joanna Nissel, Andrew Henon, Gerald Killingworth, Hamidah Saleem and Richard Foreman worked tirelessly to make the festival run splendidly. Lunch and dinner were available on the Saturday and refreshments were offered during each day. The atmosphere was enjoyable and friendly and the readings and talks were engaging, fresh and stimulating. The festival gave different voices a space that validated distinctive views and different ways of seeing and feeling. The theme, ‘Bewilderment, Bewildered, Be Wild’, was meant to reflect on our uncertain times but also to open up our senses to the enchantment of nature, to the connections between the world of humans and the world of non-humans. These realities are closely linked and are endangered by the effects of climate change, global warming and conflicts. Trees, insects, the landscape and the weather are all part of an ecosystem in which humankind thrives, sometimes in harmony but at other times clashing with and exploiting the natural world that should be at the centre of our concerns. Some poets investigate these issues in a perspective that proposes free expansion and rewilding. The approach might be considered prophetical, wild and unmapped; it is often experimental, revealing attempts to form a more authentic vision and a sustainable green future.

Writers and poets such as Mandy Pannett, Morag Kiziewicz, Jessica Mookherjee, Penny Hope, Harriet Tarlo, Carol Watts and Frances Presley delve into these arguments, expressing the damage caused by human intervention and exploring the contradictions of being immersed in nature. Wandering in the natural world and being overwhelmed by a sense of wonder imply being lost and therefore open to new possibilities that are uncertain but also inspiring and thought-provoking. The centre shifts, chaos seems to prevail and marginal views come to the fore, such as in the work of the Roma poet Karen Downs-Barton, acknowledging a human and non-human condition that traces unpredictable paths. It is a peripheral vision that becomes central in poetry.

The mystery of the natural world is partially unveiled in the spareness, vulnerability and humility of the quotidian in which contact with the environment becomes spontaneous. Therefore, conservation is attained in the delicate balance between respect for and consumption of the resources available, a rewilding that is both an attitude and a practice. Other authors, such as Ian Seed, David Caddy, Jennifer Dick and Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana face the wild in surreal encounters in which the ordinary is subverted or in double-sided relationships and in language, which needs to be rearticulated to voice the unheard.

Forthcoming and recently published collections were presented as well. Here is the list, which is certainly an interesting one: 

Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, Knitting Drum Machines for Exiled Tongues (Tears in the Fence)

Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana, Sing Me Down From The Dark (Salt Publishing)

Gerald Killingworth, Emptying Houses (Dempsey & Windle)

Frances Presley, Collected Poems Vols 1 and 2 (Shearsman)

Harriet Tarlo, Spillways (Hydro Spheres) 

Harriet Tarlo, Saltwort (Wild Pansy Press)

Sarah Watkinson, Photovoltaic

Joanna Nissel, Guerrilla Brightenings (Against the Grain)

Peter Larkin, Seven Leaf Sermons (Guillemot Press)

Peter Larkin, Sound Between Trees (Guillemot Press)

Tilla Brading and Frances Presley, ADADADADADADA (Odyssey Poets Press)

Carol Watts, Dockfield (Equipage)

Jessica Mookherjee, Notes From A Shipwreck (Nine Arches Press)

David Caddy, Interiors and Other Poems (Shearsman)

Carla Scarano D’Antonio, Workwear (The High Window)

The hilarious reading on the theme of games by Richard Foreman and the captivating wry sense of humour of Charles Wilkinson gave a twist to Saturday evening. A special mention is due to Morag Kiziewicz’s accurate festival address and Peter Larkin’s engrossing essay ‘Rewilding the Expressive: A Poetic Strategy’, which will be published in Tears in the Fence 77. I was particularly impressed by Frances Presley’s considerable work on sounds and syntax and her commitment to community projects, and by Joanna Nissel’s ‘Hove Lawns to Portslade – April’, a long poem about walking on the beach at sunrise during the first lockdown. Peter Larkin’s short poems about trees made me crave his latest collection, Sounds between Trees, which features 100 short poems evoking the many intersections we share with trees and meditations on our breathing with them. The festival ended with a walk to Hod Hill, a site of natural beauty with a breathtaking view from the top of the hill, which Carol Watts mentions in her poem: ‘On a clear day, from this place, you would see across channels to an island.’ The next poetry festival will be on 15–17 September 2023 at Stourpaine. Everything will be announced on the website: https://tearsinthefence.com/

The festival was a celebration of poetry and a promise of friendship in a conversation that gave a space and a voice to a wide range of poetic approaches and often imperceptible but crucial views.

Carla Scarano D’Antonio 13th September 2022

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Fool’s Paradise by Zoe Brooks (Black Eyes Publishing)

Posted on September 9, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Fool’s Paradise by Zoe Brooks (Black Eyes Publishing)

This unusual work has had a leisurely path to print. Written after a visit to Prague in 1990, two extracts were published (in Aquarius, no less) in 1992. Twenty years later it appeared as a self-produced e-book. Now, after ten more years and on the heels of its author’s similarly slow-arriving but sporadically awesome short-poem collection (Owl Unbound), it’s finally made it out. 

It’s ‘a mystical poem for voices’, or a verse radio play. Three unnamed travellers start their journey at a gibbet and so may be newly executed – or not. A riddling Fool with his dog ‘gather[s] their shadows’ and ‘take[s] them to be cleaned’. He uses a skull as a glove-puppet. ‘Your way is down,’ he says, so he may be a courier demon – or not. Traveller 2 says, ‘It was your country which sold mine/ for a few years’ peace’, which could refer to Chamberlain at Munich. Or not. They are left in a city where Traveller 1 loses a notepad (‘it was my ladder out’) and they tour a church at some length. All at once the Fool is surreally on trial:

            Man: […] You stand falsely accused 
                             that you did steal the throats of birds
                             and placed milk upon the housewife’s lips.
                             that you did upon such and such a day
                             destroy the fabric of the world
                             and wore a hat of many colours.

Then he has been executed, and the travellers are left disorientated. Traveller 2 meets capitalized Woman. The others find the dog, who is carrying his master’s bones. The Fool himself reappears and leads them all through a museum where in a Dantesque moment they see ‘the man who held the world in chains/ […], who ‘weeps/ for paintings he did not paint,’ and may be Hitler. Or, of course, not. After which they are mysteriously restored, like tourists at the end of an ersatz ‘experience’, to the outdoors and a square where they can have coffee. 

The strange, orphic poem-world has gibbets but also photographs and lightbulbs. The characters similarly mix archaic diction with modern idiom, comedy with sonority, and verse with prose, song, nursery-rhyme and puppet-play. There are folklore motifs, Jungian archetypes and, as if the ambience weren’t dreamlike enough, more dreaming inside the narrative. Primary allusions are to the Bible, especially the Passion, and Bulgakov, though the numinousness, oneiricism and episodic composition made me think mostly of late Strindberg. The bathetic café-ending, even so, does suggest a kind of shaggy-dog-style cosmic joke. 

The episodes often have arresting moments: I liked the idea that ‘Hell/ is a museum’, with the sense that time there has stopped and its denizens are either guides or exhibits. And the Fool’s trial scene is a mini-masterpiece of sinister absurdism:

                      Man: How do you answer these charges?
                      Fool: I am falsely accused.
                      Man: Then you are falsely condemned.

There’s also a Youtube clip of the poet herself reading a section, where the fine judgement of the line-endings becomes salient in a way not always clear from silent reading. Zoe Brooks is one of those talented poets of ‘early promise’ who sidestepped to prose and seems only now to be compiling and releasing her old stuff. It’ll be interesting to see what newer work is in the offing.

Guy Russell 9th September 2022

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The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose by Franca Mancinelli Translated by John Taylor (Bitter Oleander)

Posted on September 7, 2022 by tearsinthefence
The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose by Franca Mancinelli Translated by John Taylor (Bitter Oleander)

The Bitter Oleander Press have already published two books by Franca Mancinelli, a book of prose poetry and another of poetry, both translated into English by John Taylor, and this paperback of prose, poetic prose and poetics will only add to the evidence of Mancinelli as a major contemporary Italian writer.

The short prose which makes up the first section of the book is a surprising mix of the romantic, personal and gently shocking. Childhood memories and fairy stories turn into stories with corpses, frozen tears which form stalactites in the eyes, blood and portentous signs. Yet these are deftly written, engaging and lucid tales, written with an accomplishment and flair that does not linger on the darkness but works to produce worlds of magic and light, and of promise, even when things seem grim. Here’s the end of ‘Walls, Rubble’, a story of claustrophobia, paranoia and ‘not feeling at home’: ‘I believe this space will collapse: a cataclysm will fall on this apartment. I will live under the rubble in an air gap, until I reemerge, come back out free.’

If there’s a problem with this I might challenge the vague use of the word ‘free’, which is in sharp contrast to the physical and emotional realities Mancinelli uses elsewhere in this piece. It’s a problem I have later on in the book when she addresses the topic of poetry, but first there is a selection of what I take to be non-fiction pieces.

There are descriptive yet still personal responses to the hills, cities, the beach, Milan Central Station, along with a meditation on her given name Maria, which the author has deleted from her writing name. Physical description, memories, geography and the imaginary coalesce into vivid moments and portraits of place, with a final, lengthier piece, ‘Living in the Ideal City: Fragments in the Form of a Vision’, emerging from contemplation of an unsigned painting in the Ducal Palace of Urbino. Again, there are some vague phrases I would question, such as ‘unstitched by wide rips of emptiness’ as part of a response to having her backpack stolen at the station. The same story, early on, also uses the phrase ‘[t]he law was to go, to follow the train timetable, the platform’, which I wonder might work better as ‘the rule’ rather than the (I assume) literal translation of ‘law’?

As I get older I am more and more fascinated by how others write poetry, and their creative process. Mancinelli’s ideas are no exception, although at times I almost shouted aloud at some of her romantic notions of what poetry is! (I accept I tend to have a reductionist approach that starts from the notion of text and language as something to build, remix and collage with/from, rather than any initial desire of self-expression or shared emotion.)

Yet, we share many traits. I have never been taken for a traffic warden, but I too stop and make notes in the street (and elsewhere), just as Mancinelli does in ‘Keeping Watch’; and I like her down to earth summary here: ‘I am making a report, and delivering it.’ I also understand the confusion and sense of being lost as one composes, shapes and edits a poem, but I reject the idea that ‘poetry is a voice that passes through us’ or the idea that she has ‘caught something’, both of which seem like a refusal to take responsibility for what has been written. Neither, for me, is poetry rooted in my sense of bodily self or ‘a practice of daily salvation’; and I do not believe that ‘[i]t is the forceful truth of an experience that generates poetic language.’ I like it, however, when she writes of ‘broken sentences’, ‘fragments’, ‘disorientation’ and ‘other meanings’, although I do not believe poetry is anything to do with ‘salvation’ or ‘transcendence’: we experience and describe the world through language, and it is language we use to make poetry (and other writing) from. It’s good, however, to be challenged and engage with what other authors think.

Taylor, in an intriguing ‘Postface’, considers Mancinelli’s writing with regard to ‘dualities of flux and the search for stability, using ideas of home and homelessness, place/space and elsewhere, highlighting the biographical, the physical body and notions of a more spiritual or metaphysical self’, but also a more ‘existential dilemma’ and ‘ontological resonance’ dependent upon the invisible. He also unpicks the idea of the book’s title, quoting the author, who explains that it ‘is a place steeped in the memory of childhood, whose boundaries have blurred over time, and at the same time it is the space of writing […]’. The butterflies of childhood have long faded and turned to dust, but Mancinelli’s desire to make words live and fly again, informs her strange and original writing that evidence traces of both her and our being.

Rupert Loydell  7th September 2022

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Posted in Books, Italian Poetry, Translation and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
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