Monthly Archives: June 2025

Marginal Future by S.J. Litherland (Smokestack Books)

Posted on June 25, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Marginal Future by S.J. Litherland (Smokestack Books)

The subjects of S.J. Litherland’s new book are mainly her familiar ones: a Warwickshire childhood with a harsh father and memories of WW2, her adopted Durham (coal-mining elegies, local issues), other personally significant locations (especially her parents’ house in Mallorca), current affairs (Brexit and Covid here) and a poem ‘for Barry’ (MacSweeney). This 142-page chubster also makes plenty of room for paintings, gardening, her home and its surroundings, the weather, ageing and family. Less standardly, there are more of her distinctive poems about cricket and about her visits to the USSR. 

The variety of style, however, has a few surprises for Litherland-watchers. Lots of the pieces are in note-form, a mode which has carefully to balance that sense of the immediacy of the poet writing against fitfulness of rhythm and the risk of flatness. There’s a good bit of anthropomorphism and pathetic fallacy (‘a hard frost lays its cold lips/ to the bushes’; ‘the barge constrained by chains wanting to sail from/ moorings’). And a certain grandiosity, as in this about a football match:

            The performance waits to be opened like a book. Unlike a book
            it is not reliving the past. It flows with time. They are running
            in the invisible sea of time, choices weigh on their feet.
            Pressing on their heels the web of ghost moves:
            woven and unwoven, chosen and not chosen, […]

 It’s a grandiosity that can even get amplified towards mysticism:

            Through a locked door my children enter the past. […]
            When we trod the path in half light to the sunrise
            strewn on water, the sea knew we would one day enter
            the house of my mother and the coast would assent.

There’s a similar contrast between minor cliché (laughter bubbles, hearts race, ‘he lit up my life’, &c.) and sharp novelty of expression (‘rills of cold’, ‘calligraphic bat’). I did like ‘The dandelions have seized the lawn// with brazen lamps’ and ‘the long autumn/ in gold livery is losing threads’ which spark those gardening-and-weather topics that can be so difficult otherwise to make engrossing. At other times a fine line is drawn between paradox and confusion: ‘Illness is not a metaphor but a cloud at sea’ (where ‘a cloud at sea’ is being used here as a metaphor ‒ for illness) and in the same poem ‘words fall like grenades mining the future’ – grenades can apparently be used for mining, but it did jolt me at first. ‘We reap our harvest of CO2/ glued to our planet’ also conjured peculiar images. The poet says ‘I edit/ hand/ down/ the book unmarred by Errata’ [sic majuscula] but in a literal sense there are quite a few, especially diacritical ones: reguarded? ribbonned? prix fixé? a la mode? café litterateur? entente cordial? (Unless this last is a pun on the amount of drinking the British and Soviet poets are doing…).

If it comes down to personal preferences among all this variety, I was most gripped by the diaristic travel sequence about the Soviet Union, which switches back and forth between Summer 1987 and Winter 1991 and evidences the high prestige of poetry in Soviet society. Also by the poems of childhood, several hair-raising examples of which describe being repeatedly locked in the coal-shed ‘for her own good’. And the fine elegy for Max Levitas, Communist councillor and veteran of the Battle of Cable Street:

            He was part of that movement,
            that lifted itself, rearing like judgement.

Even if The Work of the Wind might perhaps always remain SJ Litherland’s best-known achievement, this collection does provide, for any new readers, a valuable introduction to her extensive interests and range. 

Guy Russell 25th June 2025

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The Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon (And Other Stories)

Posted on June 23, 2025 by tearsinthefence
The Autobiography of Death by Kim Hyesoon (And Other Stories)

In this new book, one of a new poetry list from And Other Stories, Death gets to tell its side of the story, to narrate, and offer its opinion to those dead and stuck in a forty-nine day limbo before reincarnation occurs. This is a place of echoes and illusions, of desires, chaos and confusion, surprises, fear and learning.

There are, as our narrator points out and the dead come to realize, things the dead could have done to make both the life just ended and the next one better, for themselves and others, but ultimately there is also a statement about death’s omnipresence in humans:

     You are already born inside death.

            (‘Already DAY TWENTY EIGHT’)

and of despair and helplessness:

     Yourfatherinheaven.   Belovedbullshitfather.   Heasksforthechild.   Atnightthe

     snow    hiddendeepinheaven    fallsflakebyflakesecretly    like thewaymummy

     takesoffitsownbandages      we’reallnakechild      whenthe bandagescomeoff

     DoIpaint    the columnsofthehouseswiththechild’sblood?    Thehouseiscrying.

     Thehouseistrembling.    Yourfatherinheaven.    Belovedbullshitfather.    This

     child.  Thischild. (I write. I write like an abductor. This child this child.)

            (‘A Crow Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest DAY THIRTY EIGHT’)

When the bandages come off, be they spiritual, religious or emotional, we are all naked. Death knows this, yet is still moved by the upset, recognises in itself a sense of abduction, as they spirit the dead away.

Much of this sequence is elegaic and the whole ‘Autobiography’ was written in response to the children lost in the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster. There is little consolation here, no afterlife or promises for the future. Grief and sorrow seem to remain for those in transition and Death can at times only summarise and explain:

     It’s cold, for you’ve come out from a warm body

     It’s bright, for you’ve come out from a dark body

     It’s lonely, for you’ve lost your shadow

            (‘Winter’s Smile DAY NINETEEN’)

Death here is not a spirit guide, nor a shaman accompanying the dead on a journey. Mostly Death is a commentator, often stating the obvious (to the dead not the reader) as it makes poetry out of the slow fading away and emptying out of past lives:

     World without a sound.   Untouchable,  flat world.   When death dawns,

     world turns into a hard mirror.  Faraway world of hope.

            (‘A Face DAY FORTY-THREE’)

     Now you have completely taken off your face

            (‘Moon Mask DAY FORTY-EIGHT’)

By day forty-nine the soul is ready to return to the world. Death offers some final observations and advice, with a litany of things that do not miss and have not missed the one about to be reborn, instructions not to go searching for one’s own body and a final ‘don’t’:

     Don’t miss you just because you’re not you and I’m the one who’s really you.

            (‘Don’t DAY FORTY-NINE’)

Death has a high opinion of itself yet the long poem ‘Face of Rhythm’, which follows the title sequence, offers a partial rebuttal to its self-proclaimed sovereignty. It is a childlike scream against hurt and suffering, a refusal to be overcome by pain, be that physical or emotional. It is about spiritual anguish and bodily woes, about illness, about being forsaken, about ‘wonder[ing] where my soul hides when I’m sick’ and asking cosmological questions:

     I wonder whether the souls of all the people on earth are connected as one.

This is intriguing work, set in rather small type (too small!), by a major South Korean contemporary poet. Its complex allusions and the strange world or after-world it is set in, are wonderfully conjured up in a musical translation by Don Mee Choi, and partially explained and discussed in a brief but illuminating interview with the poet and a ‘Translator’s Note’. It reminds us all that:

     Death is something that storms in from the outside. The universe inside is bigger.

            (‘Commute DAY ONE’)

Rupert Loydell 23rd June 2025

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Resistance by Colin Campbell Robinson (KFS Press)

Posted on June 19, 2025 by tearsinthefence
Resistance by Colin Campbell Robinson (KFS Press)

This new book of three poem sequences opens with a quote from René Char, who states that 

     History is a long succession of words

          leading to the same conclusions.

           To contradict them is our duty.

Colin Campbell Robinson sees contradiction as a form of resistance which offers clarity, whereas confusion creates collaboration (with the forces of occupation, the enemy). Although rooted in response to the written works of René Char and Yannis Ritsos, both of whom were part of resistance movements, and Josef Koudelka’s photographs of Prague in 1968, it is hard to see Robinson’s prose poem sequences here as more than abstractions.

The work here rambles through an empty city peopled by memories, ghosts who betray, hide, suffer and survive. ‘Everyone is a vagabond in their own home. / Everyone a wanderer lying in their bed.’ Times passes, indeed ‘Time is running out’ and the future is tentative as ‘The angels of tomorrow soar on fragile wings.’ It is a world of brief pleasures – pilsner or ‘a sip of slivovitz’ – failures, ruin and silence; a world where nothing is understood and ‘people stand about doing nothing’ and there is ‘no certainty’.

By inhabiting others’ experiences Robinson ends up in a no-man’s land of secondhand politics and emotions. This is not to belittle Ritsos’ or Char’s poems – both are great writers – nor to demand poems of personal emotion from Robinson, but the sense of distance here is too great: Robinson is a mirror, a reporter, whose words from the present describing the past cannot evoke the realities of oppression or revolutionary resistance. It all feels like a sanitised version, where blood and sweat, Molotov cocktails, sniper fire and the arrival of tanks and soldiers become fading photographs or ‘a rumbling that fades into the distance’.

At one point the final poem’s narrator attempts to pray, but the silence is too much; instead, we get ‘So many Cains, so many Abels, looking for God’s embrace, in the cold dawn, in the dying dusk’, and smashed firebombs provoking the rhetorical question ‘who dances before the Lord?’. The reference to the Psalms, and the text’s juxtaposition with a photo of ‘the oldest synagogue in Europe’ does little to evoke Prague’s ghetto, the story of the Golem, or the very physical act of occupation and dismantling of Prague’s Westernisation in 1968. It simply sends out vague arrows towards ideas Robinson could have made something of.

This book is a world of shorthand, of suggestive phrases and ideas meant to trigger a reader’s feelings: a sense of loss, of hopelessness, of squashed possibility, of mourning, of lost community and family. A dove is used to suggest ideas of peace; a church bell rings, signifying mourning, religion, time passing and perhaps contrasting with the empty city’s silence; ‘Coincidental meanings could collide and create new sense as they speed beyond light’. I’m all for constructing meaning out of experimental or opaque texts, but there is too much signification going on here, too much ‘space’ and ‘light’ and ‘silence’ and ‘blindness’, too many words pre-loaded with meaning, to allow new coincidences or associations to be made.

The poems here mostly feel like pastiche and, in the third sequence, a poetical tour guide to Prague. It made me go back to Ritsos, a favourite author anyway, to the experimental photos of Jiri Kolar, and to contemporaneous accounts of resistance and revolution in France, Greece and Prague. These show the reality, the brutality, of war; whilst the anarchic and utopian poetry of the likes of Adrian Mitchell or Julian Beck propose political, sexual and social revolutions. Robinson’s poetry offers ‘The night eternal dark like a book not written; like a slogan, empty’, but I would rather an attempted book or a revolutionary slogan than this author’s abstract ‘pain of intuition’.

Rupert Loydell 19th June 2025

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