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Monthly Archives: June 2023

54 Poems by John Levy (Shearsman Books)

Posted on June 29, 2023 by tearsinthefence
54 Poems by John Levy (Shearsman Books)

I’ve been thinking about poetry networks. I know that’s a word which carries all sorts of negative associations, but I don’t know what else to use in its place. Poetry has always relied on contacts and correspondence, but that of course is much quicker now thanks to email and the internet. Recently, I spent a great couple of hours talking to and drinking coffee with a publisher I have ‘known’ online for many years: it was great to finally meet, and one of the things we talked about was how both geographical and online clusters of poets exist; also, how unlikely some of those clusters and contacts are.

Later the same day, the postman delivered a copy of John Levy’s new book, sent and inscribed by the author. I was trying to think about how John and I knew each other, whether it was from one of my visits to Arizona (particularly the time Sheila Murphy arranged a poetry reading for me in her house) or via David Miller, who also knows John. There was also a packet of review titles from Chax Press, who are also based in Arizona and have published Sheila and David’s work. Stephen Bett, whose book was included in the parcel, and I have corresponded intermittently for several years, and he said in an email that Charles Alexander, who runs Chax, was sure we had met, probably at the same reading. And of course, Arizona is also home to writer John Martone as well as artist and poet David Chorlton, both other correspondents.

It’s a long way from meeting poets at the bar at small publishers events, or at readings or book launches, which used to be how contacts were made, but it all seems to serve the same purpose, which is to locate ourselves within the poetic geographies which exist, be they based on poetics, subject matter, shared interests or friendship. This enables us to share work-in-progress with other poets, to get feedback, share jokes and book recommendations with, discuss ideas, and of course bitch and moan about the poets and poetry we dislike, something almost all the writers I know excel at.

John Levy’s wonderful new volume, which contains what the title says, evidences this conversation and engagement with others. It’s a kind of small selected poems, with work from 1980 onwards that has previously appeared in small press editions, but also a lot of new work. Levy is a down-to-earth poet with an ear for turning the rhythms of everyday speech and thought into gentle, discursive narratives. Sometimes his poems are in relationship with artists and writers such as Picasso, Grzegorz Wróblewski and Robert Lax, at other times friends and relatives; one even brings Hitler into a story about turtles in Greece! Other poems address named relatives, family, landscape or animals, most are a distinct personal take on situations and events.

One of my favourites so far is ‘This Poem’, a wandering litany of thoughts about the poem as it happens, seemingly in real time. We are warned from the offset:

     This is going to be one of those poems
     that goes on and on and calls…
     calls itself a poem […]

but it doesn’t go ‘on and on’ (although it does ‘keep going’), it develops whilst taking an unexpected route, stopping only to preen for ‘a moment in the mirror’ whilst discovering that ‘what could be mistaken / for a caress’ is ‘just a scratch’, 

     the itch about the size of the dot above the lower
     case i. This poem circles that dot
     and rejoices in the space around it.

     This poem, in fact, is primarily about that space
     and how that space embodies
     the legendary

     negative space. This poem is going to say
     almost nothing about what’s positive about
     the negative space, or almost

     positive […]

although the poem and the flow of thought are resolved by turning ‘a sliver of positivity and then another’ into a railway track, one in use: we are warned to ‘Stand back.’

‘This Poem’ reminds me of the way Robert Creeley’s poems sometimes work, although Levy’s work tends to be more expansive and meandering. Like Creeley, however, Levy pays attention to not only thought as it develops, but to the everyday and often mundane. He makes the ordinary into something specific and unusual, be that remembering his childhood TV-watching in ‘The Life of Riley’ or constructing a prose poem, ‘Obit’, on the back of ‘The only local obituary notice of a stranger I cut out and put up on my study wall’. Its subject is ‘a man with a big smile’ who ‘looked like somebody I would’ve liked to know’, says Levy, exploring what he thinks of and invents about the stranger but also the compulsion which means the newspaper cutting stays on the wall at the end of the poem.

Levy skirts the maudlin and over-emotional, and is always aware of what language is doing. His poem ‘My Late Mother’ opens with the self-knowing declaration that

     My mother has died
     in many of my poems

     after she died in
     a hospital, when I

     was too far away

which manages to convey both mourning and regret, but also a poetic distancing, which allows us to read the poem as language on the page, rather than just an emotive plea for the reader to share the author’s grief.

Grief, emotion, longing, loss, delight, and memory are all transmuted here into imagistic plain-speaking poetry. It embraces the everyday, the brevity and transience of experience, digression, conversation and friendship. Levy’s acute sense of the world around him allows the reader to renew their own acquaintance with nature, thought and language. It is a delightful, guileless, warm-hearted, indeed loving, collection of work, which reminds me how lucky I am in knowing the poets I do.

Rupert Loydell 29th June 2023

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Before We Go Any Further by Tristram Fane Saunders (Carcanet Press)

Posted on June 26, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Before We Go Any Further by Tristram Fane Saunders (Carcanet Press)

Before we go any further, let me say I wanted to like this book. But whatever the back cover blurb says, whilst Saunders’ poetry is formally inventive and confident, it does not dazzle beyond its surface.

Before we go any further, let me say there are some intriguing rhymes and rhythms here, but like most end-of-line rhymes they feel contrived and awkward in the 21st Century. Why can’t Saunders be inventive with internal rhymes or syntax? Assonance? The sound or look of his poems on the page?

Before we go any further, let me say that however much these poems map ‘the ways we try to communicate with each other across real and invented distances’, they are still rooted in that idea of content, of what the poem says, rather than what the poem can be. These poems may be clever but only within the confines of mainstream poetry which however much it delights in the quirky, oddball and witty, remains self-imprisoned within the restraints of ego and self-expression.

Before we go any further, let me say that several poems made me laugh or smile, a few even made me pause for thought, but that’s not really what I read poems for. In the amusement category, ‘Five Songs on a Cruel Instrument’ – previously published by Aaron Kent’s Broken Sleep Books – are the best, translations or modern renderings of what I assume to be non-existent folk songs, accompanied by a pseudo-academic introduction and lengthy final footnote following the previously unknown and unsung ‘Lucus’s Hymn’.

Before we go any further, let me say readers who enjoy tricksy metaphors and convoluted imagery will enjoy this book, as will those who like a bit of erudition or pseudo-erudition. The somewhat dull group of poems about Crystal Palace Park, despite some light asides such as the one about Hawkwind supporting Vera Lynn at an anti-heroin fundraiser, are full of information about dinosaurs, mythology Welsh vocabulary and other trivia. Part III of the book starts with these Crystal Palace poems, then gradually moves slowly away to consider pet rat burial, Battersea Park and bedsits, and goth music in ‘Club Antichrist’ which is probably my favourite poem in the book.

Before we go any further, let me say I wanted to like this book. But I’m afraid I don’t. It is slick and slight, well meaning and ever so contrived and dull. It is full of twists and turns and small epiphanies, either imagistic or metaphorical, offering us the key to understanding hat ahs gone before. They remind me of those sad Martian poems Craig Raine produced back in the day, and indeed at times share a coy diluted surrealism: ‘Like a beating toffee apple, my heart in your mouth.’ Really?!

Before we go any further, let me say I do not wish to go any further. As the narrator of ‘Lullaby’, which appears to be a student poem about being students, says ‘I look like something you might like to sleep through.’ You do indeed.

Rupert Loydell 26th June 2023

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California Roadkill by GenXCore (Mystic Boxing Commission)

Posted on June 20, 2023 by tearsinthefence
California Roadkill by GenXCore (Mystic Boxing Commission)

I wrote a couple of emails to GenXCore after I read California Roadkill. Something in it felt familiar, and I guessed that he had studied, as I once did, at California State University, Long Beach. I went to Cal State, Long Beach in the 1990s soon after Charles Bukowski, who always loomed large there because he lived nearby and would visit, had passed away. His influence on the students and faculty was large and a lot of people were writing what you might call bad Bukowski, work that was a pale imitation, where the writer pretended at the lifestyle and attitudes Bukowski had. Others took the lessons of his work, that it should be true to who you are, and were influenced by him. They didn’t write bad Bukowski but good and honest work of their own.

            When I started to read California Roadkill, I was worried that it would be bad Bukowski, which is often pointlessly jaded and simply unkind, but what GenXCore is doing in it is allowing himself to be influenced and to learn from writers like Bukowski but taking those lessons to create something new. California Roadkill is in part about recovery from drug abuse. We have seen a lot of that kind of work and much of it is great. This novel is too, but its focus is something that I have not really seen. It follows Jimmy, a punk rocker and adjunct English professor, who has been in recovery for a long time. The idea of following someone through his day-to-day struggles years after he has become clean distinguishes this novel for me from anything I have seen. Certainly, Bukowski didn’t write about that, but had he been through this experience, he might have. We are not given the saccharine story of someone who swore off drugs and whose life is now eternally better. What we are shown is how difficult the day to day life of an addict is, and how it can be impossibly hard some days. What we are shown is that in California, life can be exceptionally difficult, and money and work are hard to obtain.

GenXCore’s description of adjunct life is more realistic than any I have ever seen. I was an adjunct English Professor for 5 years and a full-time faculty member for 20, and one of the dirty secrets of the profession is that most of the people who work there are treated as though they are disposable. They make little money, they have few benefits, and they are abandoned when it is expedient to do so. They can be driven out of their profession by a department chair who doesn’t like them or is just forgetful through under-employment. To be clear, that does not usually happen. The chairs I worked with were generally good people, but that fact hangs over every adjunct teaching today even though such behavior is illegal. On top of that, the large bureaucratic machinery that controls how people in education act and how little they are able to effect change makes it difficult to treat adjunct professors with the compassion they are due. In California Roadkill, one of Jimmy’s students has attacked him, slashing his face with a knife. The response from the university is predictably underwhelming, and now Jimmy, understandably, does not feel comfortable going back to the classroom. Where does that leave him? It leaves him where so many educators who want to teach in college in the United States are. He has the expertise and the desire to do work that he is good at, but he isn’t able to do any longer. He is underemployed and living in a city where his job would not pay him enough to afford a stable rent in any case. He is a professional who is unhoused and food insecure.

California Roadkill is powerful in these places, talking about addiction and the educational system and California in general because GenXCore permits himself to write about the actual experience of these things. They are hard and often painful, but they are real. I have a personal bias against movies that applaud the idea that teachers are heroic when they sacrifice their happiness and health for their work. Teaching should not contain the false dilemma that if teachers are good then they must be sacrificial lambs, but that idea is built into the educational system. This portrayal is accurate to so many educators I know, especially those who are unable to get one of the rare full-time positions that actually have decent pay and security. It is accurate to the way that many of the unhoused live, in that he is not always sleeping outside but living a life of chaos trying to stay in different places as often as he can. 

            California Roadkill is the kind of novel I would hope to write if I were to write about the problems that I see in California, especially among those who live on the fringes of the city and the academic world. It is a beautiful novel that asks us to reconsider preconceptions, and to think about the ways the world has changed in the last decade. It is not the only book to understand these problems, not the only legitimate point-of-view, but it is a point-of-view that I have not seen represented yet, and it is a book that should be read, discussed, and thought about. 

John Brantingham 20th June 2023

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Because I love you, I become war by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press)

Posted on June 16, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Because I love you, I become war by Eileen R. Tabios (Marsh Hawk Press)

Some people think I’m a hyperactive writer. A reviewer in Exeter once suggested that either I was one of those names used by a group of individuals or that I had been cloned. Goodness knows what they would make of the extensive two page list of publications by Eileen R. Tabios at the start of this book! Because I love you… is subtitled ‘Poems and Uncollected Poetics Prose’ and contains an unruly mix of the experimental, the imagistic, the political, the conceptual and the explanatory; the author is very, very present throughout.

I don’t mean this is confessional poetry. Tabios knows all about Kenneth Goldsmith’s and others’ theories of re-presentation, collage, processual writing, flarf, variations, responses to and ‘translations’ of work; she’s invented forms (the Hay(na)ku), has an acute sense of poetics, but is adamant about how, even when using ‘the potential randomness of line combinations to create new poems’, the author is present in the work. 

     I thought it important that there be no disavowing or distancing
     of authorship from the work, an element I consider particularly
     important as a poet of color. There are enough forces (from gate-
     keeping to racism) and would-be aesthetic trends (e.g. ‘the author
     is dead’) that would erase the subjectivity of a poet (and any other
     artist) of color. Identity may ever be in flux, but the ‘I’ always
     exists. Without that ‘I’ the speaker does not exist. Without the
     speaker, the concerns of a poet of color would not exist.

‘Yes, but…’ I want to say. The speaker of a poem is (or can or may be) a construct by the author, a character if you like, a narrator. Yes, the author can’t help but be in the poem, leave traces as the person responsible for the text, but does it need foregrounding? 

The interesting thing is that Tabios makes it work. Her poetics prose explains not only how she wrote the work but also why, in both specific and general terms. So, whilst discussing her ‘Murder Death Resurrection’ project, which involves constructing poems, prose poems or prose using lines salvaged from earlier works, each prefaced with the phrase ‘I forgot’ and collected as a database, she notes that even this method of writing, which ‘shifts emphasis away from author to reader in determining the poem’s effectiveness’, affirms what she calls ‘Kapwa Poetics’. This, she explains, is ‘a poetics based on the indigenous Filipino value of interconnection among all beings and things.’

This interconnection also involves time, the past and future, ‘coalesced into a singular moment, a single gem with infinite expanse’. It is also ‘the space in which I strive to write poems,’ she declares, wishing ‘for no one or nothing to be alien to me’. It is this aim, this poetics, that of course, allows Tabios to not only meet environmental damage, economic/political ogliarchism, racism, inequality and colonialism head on, but to write intelligently and fluently about them. This is not right-on rhyming doggerel or militant sloganeering, it is evidence of thoughtful and playful authorial control and purpose.

So in addition to delightful emotional minimalism and self-awareness of

     (Y)our Loss

     Because I loved you
     As if you were a Poem

we get ‘Bauang Beach’, a sequence of six poems which all start with the same 14 couplets but then continue on to form different poems; a lockdown tanka and plenty of chain Hay(na)ku; and the satirical ‘Spots’, written in response to a quote from ‘How to Spot a Communist’, a 1955 pamphlet which in part discusses ‘Communist Language’:

     Comrade, it’s not a witch hunt but a mark of the vanguard to peek
     at the ruling class’ hootenanny (after all, hooliganism has many
     roots), not chauvinism let alone jingoism but the appropriate
     recognition of bourgeois-nationalism—let’s not ignore that divide
     between the progressive and the reactionary—not materialist but,
     if anything, an attempt to dilute exploitation from oppressive
     colonialism, and indeed is simple integrative thinking that might
     even be confused by book-burners as syncretic faith—note, too,
     the length of this sentence as dialectical proof.

The poem – and I love that phrase ‘simple integrative thinking’ – is signed by ‘A Literary Critic For the Sake of National Security’. Elsewhere, other poems take sudden shifts or twists & turns, moving from observation to political comment. ‘Flower’ considers ‘those seeds you kept planting’ and the realization that ‘what you thought was fertile earth was dumb, hard concrete’, before offering a ‘public service announcement’ which lists a number of political figures, criminals and presidents who ‘define “compromised”.’ The poem ends by returning to observe and praise a ‘gleaming-white wildflower cracking, then blossoming, through the sidewalk’ but notes that ‘most curl up and die, never breaking through to attain health from the sun’s ethical lucidity.’

The book ends with some recent poems written in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a postscript offering immediacy and topical writing. This immediacy, the desire to document what’s going on, both the personal and social, underpins this book, as evidenced work such as ‘Kindness, And Its Ease’ and ‘Sustenance’, which precede a poem which simply documents a neighbourly exchange of fruit and vegetables over garden fences. I say simply but, as Tabois observes when discussing her Hay(na)ku form, it is ‘deceptively simple’, and in some ways as militant as her more politically forthright poetry. It is a poem about human interaction, about local economies and society, about how people are or can be interconnected. That said it is not a manifesto or argument, just poetic evidence about what already happens and what might be worth initiating.

I used the phrase ‘unruly mix’ earlier in this review. It was certainly one of my initial impressions of this book, but having lived with it for a while I can see it more as a personable mix, a snapshot perhaps of projects and poetics on the go. Part of me would still like this poet’s work tided up, different projects in different publications, poetics as a book of essays, but that would be to devalue the evident and evidenced interconnectedness of the poetry, essays and poet. I was going to say this book suits the poet, but I don’t know Eileen Tabios personally, so I will instead suggest that this book suits the texts it contains. To use a term from another culture, it has an idea of potlach attached to it, as well as the more English pot luck. It is a gift, a gathering of current writing and thought, which provokes and spins off ideas and thoughts in many directions. In one of her texts, discussing appropriation and re-presentation in relation to a specific work by John Bloomberg-Rissman, Tabois quietly wonders ‘whether the reader will be as avant garde as the poet’. It’s a good question to ask about this volume, too, as those who don’t pay attention or read closely will miss just how radical and aware, how brilliantly playful and subversive, this book is.

Rupert Loydell 16th June 2023

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Wannabe by Adele Evershed (Alien Buddha Press)

Posted on June 11, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Wannabe by Adele Evershed (Alien Buddha Press)

Adele Evershed’s Wannabe from Alien Buddha Press is an insightful and often painful novella-in-flash into the abuse that women often face and the way they live afterward. There are any number of ways that this work distinguishes itself, not the least of which is that it is a novella-in-flash that includes poetry. The prose of the book is clearly informed by the poetic language that moves the narrative and the points she is making as much as any other aspect of the work. This poetic sensibility along with her magical realism allow Evershed to understand what the women of her work are going through in a new way that I have not seen before.

     Wannabe is often painful and difficult to read because of the intensity of what Evershed is exploring; however, her characters are real and ultimately, we are given a vision of how to go through these times. In the final story, ‘Sliding Doors or She Never Had Those Red Dress Blues,’ the main views her life and her body from the point-of-view of someone who has survived abuse and pain.

She ran her fingers over her scars, tokens of what she once thought of as too much love. But really, they were hieroglyphics that told the story of her marriage etched on the tomb of her silence. The one on her thigh, where Ed had stabbed her with the umbrella, throbbed when she touched it, and her black eye peeked through the concealer . . . On the day he hit her for the last time, she became a storm . . . when she screamed, “No” her voice was thunder and her skin lightning (66).

Evershed gives us a vision of a woman who has survived and come through to the other side with a much greater understanding of what she has been through and who she is. She gives us a character who does not see herself as a victim without power, but rather as one who can face and live through violence. In ‘Full Fathom Five,’ an abused girl learns how to breathe underwater when the punishment for not accepting her stepfather’s sexual assault is that he holds her head underwater. The magical realism of the piece helps to develop a character who can escape the cycle of shame that is often visited upon sexual assault survivors. 

     One of the aspects that I appreciate about the novella-in-flash is that it can go beyond narrative and highlight other aspects of storytelling; Wannabe’s use of poetry and poetic language often halts any sense of narrative, so that she can meditate on a concept that can and should be developed. In ‘Remains Found,’ straddles an interesting line between poetry and prose. At times it feels like and is structured like poetry and at times like prose. This duality is a strength as the narrator contemplates the remains of a body and is able to take the time to consider how society has failed when we discover abuse by discovering a corpse when the corpse speaks to us:

Look I have always been here taking up the negative space next to the broken wheelbarrow and skunk cabbage to mask the rot. Maybe you should have tended me — helped me grow — and found out what I looked like on the insides

without an autopsy (67)

This piece with its line breaks mingled with a longer prose section uses a hybrid form, but other pieces are clearly prose or poetry. There is never a moment, however, when her work is not informed by poetry. There is music and power to her language.

     Wannabe is an exceptional and powerful work. It is socially important as well. Evershed is bringing this social evil to light and showing not only that survivors should not feel shame but how they might do that. 

John Brantingham 11th June 2023

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Interiors and Other Poems by David Caddy (Shearsman Books)

Posted on June 8, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Interiors and Other Poems by David Caddy (Shearsman Books)

There are journeys undertaken in these poems – external and interior – but they offer no clear impression of destination or completion. That is not the purpose. What matters is the context and setting – the earth and all its essential elements and facets, a sense of place created by the river, the woods – always the woods which ‘hide as much as cover’ – the land with all its produce, smells, sounds, sights and history – so much history. There is a slight sense of narrative but it is fragmentary, non-linear and piecemeal with the observations and perceptions of one who is a bystander, an outsider.

The poems begin on a path in a wood with a linguistic game – the points of a path, the play of a path – and then there is a sequence ‘Six consecutive walks to the sluices’ where each poem is concerned with light and its effect on the environment. The sequence begins with a slanted January light where the grass is ‘bereft of colour’ except for the verge close to the Stour. The skies are grey and ‘light thins and peters/sideways’ bringing a sense of the solitary. In this set of poems we have the first glimpse of the ‘twin world’, a parallel world, that is ‘beneath the surface’ and which flickers throughout the collection. Bodies here are deprived of ‘minerals and sunlight’, there is a mood of disruption and a horizon edged ‘with digger and saw’. Soon there are ‘shrivelled berries, lost woods’ and rooks that scavenge ‘in grit and gravel’. Tarmac is ’like a bruise’. This is a mysterious, atmospheric environment with its ‘faded whiteness’ and ‘cold sufferance’, a setting where the  ‘invisible and unknown drives/the force onwards through essential links/in and out of focus’ – all this against a disturbing backround of a track marked with potholes and incessant sounds of diesel, the smell of urine and oil. 

An important aspect of Interiors is a sense of the past – the continuous past – an impression of ‘going back in time’.(‘And Added Sunlight Bursts’). This is perfectly realised in ‘Notes from the Minutes’ based on an account of the meeting of the Sturminster Newton Heritage Trust held in September 2019. Here the truth of history, written by the winners,‘becomes slippery’, accounts of slaughter and bloodshed take on a tone of indifference – was it eleven or twelve men killed in the river meadow in 1650? It’s of little matter for they are only numbers. Likewise, 4,000-5,000 men could not have been present in Sturminster Newton on 3 July 1645 because there would not have been sufficient space. This in spite of the fact there seem to have been ‘divers slain and wounded’ and much suffering and a childrens’ rhyme was never going to be enough to ‘ward off despair’.

A similar sequence is ‘The Art of Memory’. This, with its undercurrent of irony and bitter contempt, is one of my favourite pieces in Interiors. The reader is taken on a tour of a wealthy and grand Stately Home and the sequence is written in language appropriate to that of a tour guide who directs visitors to the architectural features and artefacts that should be observed and admired. ‘Please look up’ directs the voice. No matter that ‘underfoot’ are the skeletons ‘of those who fought for apple rights,’ or that the Colonnade Room is haunted by ‘the cries of a distraught woman.’ This whole colonial edifice is constructed on the profits of the slave trade and ‘the discernible whiff of foundry.’ Hard-hitting and brilliant writing.

There are many more poems in the first three sections of this masterly collection but I wanted to leave space to enjoy and discuss the title sequence called ‘Interiors’. It is written in a series of vignettes and poems and the style is fragmentary, elusive and tantalisingly surreal as the reader tries to vain to clutch at any ‘meaning’ or narrative. There is an enigmatic ‘he’ who wanders through many of the pieces but his appearances are inconsistent. There is mention of a wife, of a girl friend, several women – they are faceless and nameless. At times the setting appears realistic – a cricket pitch, a railway track, a blackbird – the world is that of lockdown and there are references to political figures such as Matt Hancock, Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove. There is humour but also murder and menace.

David Caddy has produced a superb collection in ‘Interiors and Other Poems’, one that poets have been waiting and hoping for. There is so much more to say than is possible in a short review – any review. Best if you read and take time pondering it all for yourself. I promise you, it will be worth it.

Mandy Pannett. 8th June 2023

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Monochords by Yannis Ritsos with Chiara Ambrosio Translated by Paul Merchant (Prototype)

Posted on June 7, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Monochords by Yannis Ritsos with Chiara Ambrosio Translated by Paul Merchant (Prototype)

Yannis Ritsos was a prolific poet, who spent many years in prison or under house arrest because of his communist beliefs and opposition to Greece’s right-wing regimes. Monochords is a strange book amongst his work: 336 one-line poems written in a single month in 1979. I have a copy of the text already, but when several poems are presented on the page it’s difficult to allow them the mental space and room for understanding. 

This beautiful new edition corrects that: each page consists of a single poem accompanied by a small linocut from artist Chiara Ambrosio. She already knew the poems, indeed they had been a companion to her ‘for over a decade’, but when the pandemic and lockdown shut down, she set herself the task (‘I felt compelled,’ she says) to make an image for each monochord, one a day, reading and responding to the text, seeking ‘out resonances and emergences’.

They are more, much more, than illustrations though. They have become part of the poems, opening up what Ambrosio calls ‘text and image entwined in mysterious ways, creating often incendiary pairings, unlocking new, contemporary resonances within the text’. The artist describes her daily process as ‘akin to the tending of a garden’, but also ‘a dialogue with Ritsos’, her own ‘personal diary, and ‘a book of days’. It is this complex relationship, the entwining of poetic and visual lines which makes this volume so exciting. The past and present are mixed on the page: 1970s Greece, English translations from the Greek originals, lockdown London, the reader’s now, the timelessness of poetry and the imagination, and the way text can facilitate a kind of time travel:

     How gently time collapses into poetry.   (286)
                                                                                                                                                      
Sometimes Ritsos’ writing can be surreal, indeed the first book of his I came across – in a seaside shop in Greece, 1980 – seemed to present him as a juxtaposer of unconnected images and actions. In hindsight, having found other collections, most of this was due to the translations, not the original text, but there is no escaping the strangeness of some of Ritsos’ minimal poems:

     A naked man with an umbrella. Summer noon.   (72)


     At night, the sea with its ships enters my room.   (244)
         

Elsewhere, there are more straightforward moments: a ship departing the harbour whilst the poet remains on land, memories of ‘lost years’ triggered by ‘distant voices of children’, a red pebble hidden under a white one, rubbish on the stairs, all considered and given recognition or attention in retrospect:

     Much later you see what you saw.   (164)


Ritsos can be philosophical, too, about both the world and words themselves:

     I saw you and remembered poems.    (16)

     A word made fresh by repetition.     (17)
         

He also suggests poetry as a kind of ritual cleansing, a personal shedding and dismissal of, and moving on from, the past:

     I create lines to exorcise the evil that oppressed my country.  (203)
 
In addition to the images and texts of the poems themselves, the book contains several useful and informative texts. David Harsent, himself a translator and author of ‘versions’ of Ritsos introduces the writer himself, discusses the Greek derivation of ‘monochorda’, and then contextualises and discusses both Ritsos’ poems and Ambrosio’s images. The artist herself then describes the project, her working methods and relationship with the poems, which then follow. Gareth Evans’ ‘afterword’ is a wide-ranging essay which discusses re/presentation, materiality, the abuse of authority (and resistance to it), and contextualises the work in relation to film makers Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky, the author John Berger and several other writers, as well as myth and history.

The musician and author Thurston Moore, in his blurb, suggests that these monochords are ‘the essence of a thought, a sign, a glimmer’, the product of ‘singular moments and observations’, which Chiara Ambrosia has responded to in ‘a dance of suggestion’. This beautifully conceived, designed and produced book is the best form of collaboration, one where something new is produced whilst also retaining both the essence and specificity of the original. It is text and metatext, reinforcement, recognition and reconsideration of ideas, poetic gloss and development, commentary and continuation. As monochord 121 says:

     The distance between things keeps growing till they meet.


Rupert Loydell 7th June 2023

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A Dreaming by Andrew Martin (Shoals of Starlings Press)

Posted on June 5, 2023 by tearsinthefence
A Dreaming by Andrew Martin (Shoals of Starlings Press)

A Dreaming is Andrew Martin’s fourth publication and follows in the footsteps of his debut collection Shoals of Starlings, which combined beautiful fractal imagery with powerful minimalist poems, ostensibly to do with birds but also suggesting strong psychological underpinnings. It was a masterly introduction to the work of an impressive contemporary poet/artist.

     A Dreaming is a single long poem using wordplay, word-association, alliteration and rhythmic dexterity to keep the ball rolling but it’s also considered and reflective. Chance associations meet careful editing and some of the imagery here is simply astonishing. Take the following by way of example:

          angels dream in black and white

          pigeons dream of peacocks

          kingfishers dream of clown fish

          wearing crowns

          starlings murmur in their sleep

          as they dream of the choreography

          dreamt up by storms

The last three lines here are mind-blowing!

This is a poem that build and builds and bears a lot of re-reading as the reader keeps finding new thoughts to ponder, be amazed by or simply overwhelmed by the imagery. It combines a melancholy underpinning with a joyful celebration of the world (the universe even) and everything in it and takes the idea of interconnectedness to new places:

          the hadron collider

          dreams of playing roulette

          places everything on black

          dark matter dreams it matters

          to someone in particular

          quantum physics only dreams

          when you’re not watching

          dictators dream of taking dictation

There is plenty of humour too, some of it of the laugh-out-loud variety, as in:

          toilet rolls

          dream of the dead sea scrolls dream

          of swiss cream rolls

          swiss cream rolls dream of rolly-pollies

          rolly-pollies dream of rope

          rope dreams of tapestries

Obviously the rhyme dictates the forward-flow here before swerving into the unpredictable ‘rope’ which takes us elsewhere yet again:

          central heating dreams of convection currents

          at the core of planets

          fractal dreams of jigsaw puzzles

          jigsaw puzzles dream of fitting in

As indicated above this is also a publication which combines words with images, in this case 14 landscape photographs which appear to have been digitally overlaid and which via this combination of construction are in tune with the writing processes involved in the production of the poem. Andrew Martin is a rare talent in being able to combine artforms in this manner as in many cases ‘illustrated poetry books’ appear to be just that and the disconnect between the forms is often a problem.

     There is a further dimension in Martin’s current explorations in that a live performance of A Dreaming, which I was fortunate enough to have experienced recently (a world premiere in Plymouth!), included an ambient soundscape by composer/producer Mark Allin (aka Riigs) with a reading of the poem together with stills of the images which follow on and gradually fade into the next picture. This may indeed be one way forward in the evolution of the art form(s) and although not entirely novel this was an impressive occasion. It will be interesting to see where Martin’s creative juices take him next. His role as a publisher of new poetry from the Plymouth region with Shoals of Starlings Press is exemplary. Meanwhile you can enjoy A Dreaming on streaming platforms.

Steve Spence 5th June 2023          

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Review “In the heart of language: multilingual performance-practice with Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani”, Debra Kelly

Posted on June 4, 2023 by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani

Professor Debra Kelly, Deputy Director of the AHRC Open World Research Initiative Research Programme Language Acts and Worldmaking led by King’s College London and of its research centre based there has posted recently a review on Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani’s work on the Language Acts blog:

“In the pulsing heart of language, of languages, words and images and sounds interweave, vibrate; memories and experiences and places intertwine, reverberate; symbols recur, resonate. Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani’s multilingual and multisensorial performance-practice engages multifaceted corporeal, emotional and intellectual experiences of the poet and of her readers /listeners/spectators/audience in English, French, Croatian and beyond, not least in the ‘shadow language’ Arabic.”

The full text of Debra Kelly’s blog piece can be found here: https://languageacts.org/blog/in-the-heart-of-language-multilingual-performance-practice-with-jasmina-bolfek-radovani/

Jasmina is a London-based poet of mixed heritage (father Croatian-mother Algerian) born in Zagreb, Croatia. Her most recent multilingual poetry collection Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues in English, French and Croatian was published by Tears in the Fence (2022). She was one of the Language Acts Small grant programme holders in 2018 and 2019 that funded her multilingual poetry project “Unbound”. Jasmina has since given talks and written essays on multilingual poetry practice and has (co-directed) several performances and recitals in London, Paris and Pula (Croatia). Her latest piece “Heart monologues” (co-directed with Delphine Salkin) with music and live performance by London-based composer Atau Tanaka is a long poem sequence in English, French and Croatian can be found in her book Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues. Jasmina is currently poet-in-residence at the Centre 4 Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, and a member of the Centre for Poetry, Queen Mary.

For more information about Jasmina’s work and activities visit her website: https://jasminabradovani.com

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Arrival by Cynthia Anderson (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions)

Posted on June 4, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Arrival by Cynthia Anderson (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions)

Cynthia Anderson’s Arrival might seem like a departure for readers who follow her work. She is a desert poet who often works in short form. In Full Circle, one of her previous books for example, she wrote image-driven haiku that helped to illuminate moments that make desert life exceptional. Arrival is an exploration of many different landscapes, coastal, forest, desert, and more, is a beautiful exploration through longer forms of free verse poetry, which she has written before, and I am glad to see her writing this kind of work. These longer forms, however, have certainly been informed and gained power from her short work. Each of the stanzas and even many lines might have functioned as its own poem if she had gone in that direction again; however, together they build and work toward a greater unified whole that has us understanding the natural world and our place in it in a more powerful way. Like Henry Thoreau or Jack Kerouac, she opens us up to the magic that is contained in the natural world; however, she often presents this magic through a grounding of the science that helps to make it somehow magic. It is a beautiful collection that reminds us that we live in an exceptional world and all we have to do is be present in the moment to experience that magic.

     Anderson has the gift of being able to see the common moments of magic that others who have grown world-weary often miss; she brings our attention to them to show us how interconnected we are. In one poem, she addresses a pear that has come from South America but feels natural in her world. While she worries about the energy spent getting her this pear, she also knows that it is kind of miraculous that during COVID she might be able to have a comforting fruit even though she lives in the Mojave Desert. In ‘Doctor, My Eyes,’ she elevates a moment near a hummingbird to where it should be. While others might miss this moment, she is present for it. 

My hummingbird friend fans her wings in the spray from the hose. Then she settles on a yucca spear not a foot from my face. We like each other. We like these quiet moments together. Gazing, and breathing. Gazing, and breathing

august dawn

the cool of the day

evaporates (51).

She comes back again and again, to this idea of interconnectedness. How she and the other plants and creatures are not so much different as they are the same. It is a beautiful illustration of how we all should view the world.

     She does not, however, simply explore those small moments of nature; she helps us to see the grandness of it as well. In ‘Becoming Sequoia,’ a poem about the largest trees in the world that live for thousands of years, she celebrates what is powerful and to our experiences, seemingly eternal about nature.

            . . .you

follow the ways of a shaman,

transmuting air, rock, soil,

water. Your stamina could 

build a world from ice (22)

These incredible trees, these forces of nature are given the respect and awe that they deserve. She speaks of them and to them from a religious point of view as though they are High Sierra forest gods. The desert too is explored and understood, its vastness and beauty.

     Having lived in California for decades and now having moved away, Anderson brought me back to the natural world that I long knew. It is a place of drama and beauty. So many Californians, and I include myself in this statement, are so caught up in the hassles of life that they often miss the meaning of our connection to the earth. They think of nature as being something other than them. They feel cut off. Experiencing Arrival will reawaken awe in its readers, which I believe is the proper emotion to have.

John Brantingham 4th June 2023

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