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Water Look Away by Bob Hicok (Copper Canyon Press)

Posted on April 25, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Water Look Away by Bob Hicok (Copper Canyon Press)

Bob Hicok has always had a serious side, with some of his poems dealing with topics such as racism, sexual abuse and puberty, but I don’t think I am alone in mostly seeing his writing as playful, sometimes smartarse, digressionary storytelling, poetry that has a relation to work by the likes of Dean Young and Josh Bell. Hicok’s work has always been thought-provoking and full of startling phrases and ideas, and although Water Look Away is no exception, it is also an incredibly dark and raw sequence of poems about a failed marriage.

The book starts with a jolt for the reader: ‘Welcome Home’ not only tells us how the husband finds his wife’s body hanging in the basement but that he is ‘Jealous she got. / There first.’ We already have a despairing couple at breaking point, well one of the couple, but like a murder mystery the poems now backtrack and rewind from this event to try and voice, explain, understand what is and has been going on.

Hicok’s poems here are pared back and sometimes brutal. In ‘Last Days of Rome’, ‘She lights matches to see the thoughts / of gasoline’, an ominous incendiary phrase at best. ‘The Opening’ explores ‘the music of conviction’ and asks ‘What if the past never wanted me’ before its downbeat conclusion:

                                                                  King
     of what? Holding a barrel
     to his temple but not being able to finish
     the thought? I never told God
     I was sorry for being sorry
     the world exists. I assumed God feels
     the same way too.

We do not get to find out what God thinks. Instead, we spiral and zigzag back into this doomed relationship: text messages, affairs (‘Her affair was first / a sail raised on a mast / and then the storm / that broke the sail in two’), emotions, lust, ambition and expectations, broken childhoods and families, even confused marriage vows:

     Marriage

     Do you take
     (no

     give.) Do
     you give

     (no
     hold.) Do
     you hold

     (no
     river.) Do
     you river

     (yes I river
     this man/woman
     into/as
     my breath.)

Whatever the causes or the effects, whatever the reason for despair and a brutal exit trajectory, there are also tender memories, frozen moments, passion, indeed love, as well as confusion, despair and deceit. There is a sense of delusional melodrama (from the male narrator, not Hicok) in declamations such as ‘The ash of my hand / will hold the bones of yours’ and there is also an element of self-pity, such as here, the ending of ‘Gone’:

     Have we met? No.
     I have me confused
     with someone else.

But there is also a hint of healing and some kind of acceptance. ‘Used Book, Omen’ moves from a stabbed book of Ovid used as a writing prompt to:

     A crimson shadow, healing by better compliment,
     garments a women in wonder and sorrow.

     A crimson woman, in garments of wonder and sorrw,
     compliments the earth.

     A gone woman, a crimson sorrow, a serpent shadow,
     comrades: my garments of torture.

     Woman gone: shadow torture. Then stood morning,
     a healing garment of better wonder.

This is a raw, relentless book, whose characters ache and hurt, have been driven to emotional violence and infidelity, whose marriage has been ended by the twitch of a extension cord and a bruised throat. It is an elegy, a sad song, an accusation and a confession, a final ‘Goodnight goodnight goodnight goodnight.’ It is evidence that ‘That’s all there is. / That’s all there is.’

Rupert Loydell 25th April 2024


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Preloved Metaphors by Rupert Loydell (The Red Ceilings Press)

Posted on April 23, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Preloved Metaphors by Rupert Loydell (The Red Ceilings Press)

There is a moment near the end of Rupert M Loydell’s new poetry collection, Preloved Metaphors, that recalls Homer’s Odyssey.  Loydell’s poem ‘Wherewithal’ includes the sentence ‘Everything / should have a poem written about it, // nothing should be left out.’ The echo, of course, is of Odysseus’ duping the Cyclops by identifying himself as ‘Nobody,’ so that when the Cyclops calls for help he inadvertently sends his potential rescuers away by his explanation to them that ‘Nobody is killing me.’  It’s a funny moment in the Odyssey, one the ancient bards surely enjoyed singing, and I imagine Loydell smiling at his desk as he scribbled out (keyed in? cut-and-pasted?) his sentence with its analogous ambiguity.  On one reading, it calls for countless poems, one for each of the countless things in the world, with not a single thing left unsung; on the other reading, it calls for a single poem that is about the category “everything,” and eschews mention of the contrary category, ‘nothing.’

Both moments, the episode in Homer and the lines in Loydell, offer the reminder that irony and bullshit don’t pull neatly apart, that truth-facing Socratic / Kierkegaardian irony and truth-trashing Trumpist hoo-ha serve opposite ends but apply the same medium.  Both recognize that, as Wittgenstein so cannily confesses, ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’  Odysseus gets it that wordplay can deceive; language can mask me.  Loydell gets it that wordplay can undeceive; I can unmask language.  Loydell’s poems, generated not by emoting tranquil recollections but by a recuperative process of collage/bricolage, ever implicitly ask what his poem ‘A Theology of Ghosts’ asks explicitly.

Do you understand

the words?  Do you know

that I have my own way

to burn away mind’s fog?

If language is a window, there are poets who would look through it, emphasizing that out my window I see the world, and others who would look at it, emphasizing that I see the window itself, and of the world only what the window frames, as the window frames it.  There are poets, that is, who take themselves as seeing the world beyond the window, and those who take themselves as seeing the world in the window.  If, say, Larkin could captain the former camp, Loydell could captain the latter.  Preloved Metaphors is, as its title suggests, medium-forward, linguistically self-aware.  If the book’s title suggests that self-awareness, the poems’ titles, plural, confirm it: the Table of Contents is an abecedarian, revealing that the poems are arranged in alphabetical order by title.

Preloved Metaphors is in various ways a compact book.  Physically, it is pocket-size, A6 (U.S. readers: about 4” x 6”), and slender, give or take 40 pages (few enough that they need no numbers). Even the press run is small, a limited edition of 40 copies.  In other respects, though, this book is large.  One of the lines in the very first poem, a prefatory poem called ‘All That Is Melts Into Air,’ reads, ‘We only believe what we can question,’ and that indicates something of the book’s capaciousness.  In Preloved Metaphors, as is typically the case in Loydell’s work, the poems don’t pretend to be ‘straight talk.’  Every declarative offers also an interrogative, so everything is open to question, meaning everything is open.  

Loydell’s process of ‘remixology,’ reconfiguration rather than invention, results in poems that are about seeing the world and seeing oneself seeing.  These poems see the seeing no less than they see the seen, as in ‘By Any Other Means.’

… everything is made, 

hands-on experience suspended as

we try to find the words we need to

describe the accidental and obscene.

We only have to look to see ourselves.

Loydell’s remixing makes other remixes possible, such as repurposing a fragment from one poem in Preloved Metaphors, assigning it standing as an indicator of the tenor of the whole book.  As I do here, with the last line of Loydell’s poem ‘Unclear’: ‘this is a live beyond.’

H.L Hix 23rdApril 2024

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Little Silver by Jane Griffiths (Bloodaxe Books)

Posted on April 21, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Little Silver by Jane Griffiths (Bloodaxe Books)

Written with delicate force, Jane Griffiths’ extraordinary collection Little Silver charts the thin shimmering line between the real and the imagined, considers the shifting balance between inheritance and originality, and ponders the space left by those that were—or never were. But nothing she looks at proves to be a good sitter.

            your own path home leads only to this:

            [                        a blank space                       ]

            A little silvering between the trees.

Does she speak of home, or the self; and why is nothing to be found? Perhaps neither question is too troubling for Griffiths; there is, at least, as much serenity as there is anxiety on these pages. One reason for this, I expect, is that she seems to see that the self is as much an act of creation—something belonging to the imagination, something to be wrought with words—as anything else. The relationship between our words and who we are occurs repeatedly in Giffiths’ poems. Consider these lines, where the letter ‘I’ embodies its own meaning:

            It has been so long.

            This drift of white not a field.

            Lost in the thick of the paper

            I, a small upright.

The writer becomes her words, or becomes in her words,  again:

                                                                – her whole

            body in italics flying the gap between its wooden

            launch-pad and privet, feet angled against the sky

            whose stars she links literal-mindedly to the foot

            of her page, first tethering then cutting them loose.

How much are words make us who we are is not only a question of creation; it is just as much a genetic question, a question of ‘what you were born with’. In response to which Griffiths returns—and at times bids goodbye to—her ‘mother tongue’. She finds:

            Little Silver, a true and double passage.

            A small gift of tongues to take you out

            into the world’s roundabout ways

            and crossed purposes to talk of leaving,

            to talk of anything but –

The phrasing, rhythm, and attendant word selection are consistently very fine, but as much as Griffiths finds wonder in words and puts them to wonderful use, language and art are also tricky things to deal with. The connection between life and art is multifarious; they are not merely reflections of one another, but part of one another, and where—if ever—they do come apart, is not at all clear. Which Griffiths recognises:

                                                                                There’s no

            life without a medium – which is the thing itself, or so

            I say, living mostly through representations. Though if

            the work covers for the child, what does the child cover

            for?

The wistful but enchanted tone is characteristic. Throughout, Griffiths’ wavers between the one and the other, never quite slipping into unbridled optimism, or unrestrained despair. Though she does come close. In ‘Life Sentence’, one of many dream-tinted moments in the book, her self-directed interrogation teases toward the darker side of this scale:

            Conceivably, like that precipitate

            dream you have, most nights: stepping 

            out from multi-storey or cliff to leave

It ends:

                                                You contemplate

            this leap, the long suspension of it –

            the crown, heart cage, fledging appendix.

            That dream you have – human.

            Its inescapable living weight.

Samuel Bowerman 21st April 2024

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Of Certain Angels by David Harsent (Dare-Gale Press), Annunciation Sonnets by Linda Kemp (Broken Sleep Books), The Book of Yona by Sarah Cave (Shearsman Books), Apostasy by John Burnside (Dare-Gale Press)

Posted on April 13, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Of Certain Angels by David Harsent (Dare-Gale Press), Annunciation Sonnets by Linda Kemp (Broken Sleep Books), The Book of Yona by Sarah Cave (Shearsman Books), Apostasy by John Burnside (Dare-Gale Press)

There is magic all around us. I do not mean the stuff of fairy stories and fantasy novels, nor do I mean the occult activities of lodges, covens, ritual groups or obsessive individuals. I mean the magic of language and its ability to create ideas, images and new worlds when arranged upon the page. 

David Harsent writes about ‘certain angels’, beings who are not spiritual or religious at all, rather sensual, seductive, passionate creatures engaging with humankind through music, sex, memory and invention. These angels write ‘delinquent’ poetry that is ‘ruinous’, guides the dark dreams of the sleeping, seduce with traces of their absence: ‘dark angles and deep scents’, ‘illusions of aphrodisia’, ‘patterns of light refracting to a hall of mirrors’. We are, it seems, mirages ‘in the corner of her eye’, beings who can never know ‘what prayers and hallelujahs light the commonplace’.

Linda Kemp’s Annunciation Sonnets also discusses ‘the insistence of extraordinary’ but there are only implied angels here in these deconstructive poems which take apart the very concept of the annunciation story, sometimes referring to specific images and artists, sometimes not, all ‘transmitting the moment’ and questioning the ‘influential metaphors’ of the Bible story where an angel tells a mother she is pregnant and prophesies what the future holds for her son. Kemp has little truck with the spiritual however: ‘the gesture of a martyr is no place marker’, she states in the book’s opening poem. Her texts consider the ‘documentation of salutation’ which continues to this day, how light and colour and shape convey the moment, the ‘bewildering piety’ of Mary, ‘the beginning of intimate / knowing’. There are no question marks in these poems, but there are implied questions and commentary in these playful, splintered poems riffing on the ‘various discrepancies’ of iconography and belief.

A quick online search shows much bickering between religious commentators, sects and denominations about whether Jesus had any siblings, Mary stayed a virgin, or the earth is flat (I made that last one up). It’s strange because there are clear Biblical references to four named brothers and to two unnamed sisters. Sarah Cave doesn’t care however, in The Book of Yona she names one sister Yona and has her cursed by the Apostles to live forever, or at least until her brother returns to Earth. So, she endures the centuries, on the way becoming a ‘cunning woman’, falling in love with ‘the beguine mystic Hadewijch of Brabant’ who lived in the 13th Century, and seemingly becoming a saint, remembered for a while through her relics, which by now are only folklore.

The book starts with a queer rewriting of The Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon as it is called here), a celebration of celibate longing and love, written – and still apparently being rewritten – for Hadewijch. It is desirous, lustful even, romantic and sensual, speaking of a ‘Love no flood can / quench’ as it hymns the author’s Beloved. Further sections of the book are more playful, as Yona becomes a bird, a cat, her own familiar, and her brother Jesus becomes yesyou. She is a shapeshifter, a timeless presence, a nature- and animal-lover like St Francis, a necromancer and is then forgotten. Even as St Yon.

All that is left are lost and missing relics, some of which have been recreated in wool by the St Didymus’s Mother’s Union and photographed here. Others only exist as ‘anecdotal information’ or are reputedly ‘held in another collection’, whilst ‘the existence of Yon’s Jewish heritage has been redacted’. After this, the collection draws to a close. There is a brief psalter, where Yona has become an anchoress whose relationship with the world is reduced to

                   gaps of beauty, nothing

     …

                                     gaps of beauty, sound between trees, nothing

and visions of the Crucifixion. A final section offers us a ‘Triptych’ of ‘sky, stardust, nebulae’, ‘gathered nightfall’, ‘occult blossoms’, a baby singing and breath turning Yona’s breastbone into ‘a fragile harp’, and then Yona is gone, as transient as ‘ants flying flying ants flying’, ‘like the mayfly, like the seed, / like the baby’s breath’. Cave’s new volume is a subtle, elusive text that only reveals its intricacies and playful subtext slowly, with rereading and attention, but it is also a book to enjoy as a reader.

John Burnside is having no truck with established religion, even fictional or poetic ones. Instead, in this fourteen poem sequence he prefers ‘Blossom in the ruins’ of belief, preferring ‘The Gospel of Narcissus’ where ‘every man [is] alone beneath the stars’. In ‘XII   Litha’ he reflects that

     In summer, it was harder to be churched;
     the pagan gods were out, their sentries
     drifting through the sunlit

     chapel, pollen
     scattered on the flagstones like some timeless
     scripture from a world before the Word.

Although he says ‘At one time, / […] there might have been a God’, it is to nature he returns, as ‘a pilgrim again, beyond all destination’, with ‘nothing to repent, / and nothing to forgive’. Embracing ‘The Heresy of the Free Spirit’ he ends – perhaps somewhat over-defiantly, considering the previous thirteen poems – ‘haunted by nothing at all.’

Rupert Loydell 13th April 2024

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After Dante: Poets in Purgatory edited by Nick Havely & Bernard O’Donoghue (Arc Publications)

Posted on April 12, 2024 by tearsinthefence
After Dante: Poets in Purgatory edited by Nick Havely & Bernard O’Donoghue (Arc Publications)

It’s Easter Sunday in the year 1300. As the middle section of The Divine Comedy begins, Dante and Virgil have made the long climb back out of Hell and find themselves on an antipodean mountain island. To the horizon and beyond is undiscovered ocean, while above, the mountain towers literally into Heaven. And the ascent of this mountain – well, it’s Purgatory.   

Here, those sinners who have repented must expiate their transgressions in appropriate ways – heavy loads for the proud, starvation for the gluttons, burning fires for the lustful. On his pilgrimage through each vertiginous echelon, Dante becomes scared, amazed, tired, shocked and harried. He’s the focus of curiosity by the dead souls because he’s clearly still alive. He’s dependent on his guide, who is often lost himself. But the path, he’s told, will slowly get kinder and easier until he reaches the Earthly Paradise, where Beatrice awaits…

This edition of the Purgatorio was timed (back in 2021) to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. In a crowded competing field, its novel feature is that its thirty-three cantos are allocated to seventeen different poets, sixteen of them contemporary (plus Shelley). A couple have translated Dante more widely, and their contributions act also as samplers; many well-known recent translators aren’t included, but the team selection is nonetheless tempting. Some use words and phrases from Scots, Jamaican English, and various dialects of street-talk – fittingly, given Dante’s commitment to the vernacular. Free verse, blank verse and half-rhyme get variously deployed. Some put in rhymes here and there to remind the reader of the original scheme. Nearly all keep some sense of the symbolic three-line stanza. A.E. Stallings takes the most difficult route formally: her strictly rhymed tetrameter terze rime condense Dante’s lines with astonishing élan. Patrick Worsnip also excels at this testing formalism in witty pentameters:

           ‘If you cannot remember what you’ve done
               she answered with a smile, ‘then recollect:
               today you drank Lethe’s oblivion.’

Mary Jo Bang uses literary anachronism (‘beautiful pea-green boat’; ‘shuffled off your mortal coil’) and fluctuating registers:

           If I’d kept high-tailing it toward La Mire
           instead of stopping off at Oriago, I’d still be back
           where one breathes and the heart brags I am

Contrary to Eliot’s claims, John Kinsella makes Dante a difficult read:

                                […] – the arrow in triplicate
           is the spatiality of Beatrice’s aeronautics.

            And caught in the gender binary with the constellate
            Adamic, they oscillate about the tree 

while Steve Ellis adopts a concise, plainer style:

             My master and I pressed on upwards,
             just the two of us, and I was thinking
             how I might profit from his words;

The book also contains notes to each canto, an introduction focusing on the poem’s influence on English-language writers from Chaucer to Heaney and, at the back, translations of work by some of the poets referred to in the main text. These are especially welcome in a section of the Comedy that has Dante meeting or talking about many Italian and Provençal poets lesser known to most of us than the Classical ones he came across – because they were pagans – in Hell. 

Despite this range of assistance, I did wonder if the book’s expansive mix of styles and voices might be an additional hurdle for any Dante beginners already struggling with an exogenous mindset and the unabating allusions to Biblical, Classical and Medieval literature, history and philosophy. But those more battle-scarred readers, freer to attend to the language, will certainly be beguiled (or impressed, or enjoyably incited) into comparing approaches, making judgements and getting new perspectives on, let’s re-echo it, one of the world’s most inexhaustible poems.

Guy Russell 12th April 2024

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I.M. David Grubb

Posted on April 9, 2024 by tearsinthefence
I.M. David Grubb

‘There are three elements central to all my poetry and prose: celebration, wonder, and discovering’  – David Grubb, 2009

David Grubb was born in 1941. He worked as a psychiatric nurse, a teacher and headteacher, and for Barnados. Aghast at the fact they had several press officers simply for the royal family (in relation to the charity) he left and set up his own charity, Children’s Aid Direct. This charity was hands on, and money for staffing and administration costs was raised separately from normal donations. David often convinced lorry drivers from Reading, near where he lived, to make a trip to Bosnia or Kosovo to deliver aid; he often accompanied them, clad in a flak jacket, and wrote all the charity’s news reports and publicity material. 

This writing could be persuasive, shocking and informative, but it wasn’t just about reports, news and charity work. David was a writer throughout most of his life: novels, books of poetry and an inventive autobiography, along with letterpress editions and thousands of appearances in poetry magazines and anthologies. He believed in the power of the arts, was sure that refugees, orphans and those otherwise affected by disaster and conflict needed to play, dance and tell their stories as much as they needed food and shelter. Aspiring authors too: in later years, having ‘retired’, he became a writing tutor and mentor.

His poems dealt with people, be that memories of his parents, those he met in passing, other poets, historical figures, the insane and those disregarded by society. He had strong spiritual beliefs but did not preach at others, was open to debate, conjecture and the impossibilities of belief and faith. 

In addition to those who inhabited his writing, he was a dedicated husband, father and grandfather. That dedication included several years of caring for his wife, Beverley, before she had to spend her final days in a home. Ironically, David would also move to a home so his dementia could be monitored and he could be looked after. He died peacefully on Easter Monday, 2024.

•

Over the years he and I had not only a publisher/author relationship, but also a friendship and a dialogue in poems, where we would write back to each other’s poems that struck us, usually as new poetry collections were published. The poem below, written in 2013, picked up on the idea of faith and prayer and death being an unsolvable riddle within the expansive universe. Unpublished at the time, it seems an appropriate memorial to him.

     David Grubb 1941-2024


YOUR OWN RIDDLE

‘In the centre of the prayer is your own riddle.’
    – David Grubb

It’s more of a joke though, without a punchline,
and no friendly audience to applaud. Doubt
creeps up and in, then spreads. Answers
don’t make sense anymore, especially as
you can’t remember what your question was
or even why you asked. Life’s too busy 
to bother with anyone who’s too sure 
of what’s right and wrong. Black and white 
becomes grey, the vertical and horizontal 
have both started to shift. Life blurs, repeats, 
and slurs its speech, speaks in a language 
you don’t understand. The riddle is unsolvable, 
the joke’s worn thin; we’ve heard it too many times 
before. They always said it was a matter of life 
and death, but as people you know depart, 
life and death seem less clearly defined, 
memories crowd in and you remember the morning 
your best friend’s son called to say his dad had died; 
that night in London when, going back for coffee, 
another mate’s mum told you both his father 
had suddenly dropped dead earlier that evening. 
Phone calls and car rides, surprises and decay:
news of death travels slowly and hurts all the more
for doing so. The wonder is we can live at all,
knowing what comes next. The wonder is we get up 
every morning and stagger through the day. 
In the centre of each prayer is a riddle:
the white shape of a body, outlined in the stars.

   © Rupert M Loydell

Rupert Loydell 9th April 2024


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This Was Your Mother by Sam Szanto (Dreich)

Posted on April 6, 2024 by tearsinthefence
This Was Your Mother by Sam Szanto (Dreich)

Sam Szanto’s chapbook This Was Your Mother is a breath of life, a work of art wrought by a person alone in a room with language. In the canon of contemporary works it takes its place along side Christine Tabaka’s For Love of You from the U.SA., and Lindsay Soberano Wilson’s Hoods of Motherhood from Canada.  Szanto writes from where she lives, in the U.K. Tabaka’s poems center around being a daughter, Soberano Wilson’s around being a mother, and Szanto’s around being a spouse and a mother, part of a family. Considering threads of commonality, three tones Szanto evokes are anticipation, elation, and reflection. 

   The anticipation of birth, a new life entering the world is felt in parts 2 and 3 of the epistolary ‘Letters to R.’  Throughout these poems Szanto brings the past to present.  In 2, a mother tells her child, ‘At ten weeks I bled’ and ‘The bleeding continued/ off and on.’  While her anticipation is joyful, there is also anxiety.  ‘For the first time since my wedding day/ I went inside a church, lit a candle/ and prayed for your life.’ She is not alone.

The Jasmine Unit was apart 

from the hospital’s main midwifery building

and hard to find.

We sat for a long time in a yellow-painted room

full of people who looked as scared as we did.

A midwife put cold gel on my stomach and pressed hard

with the scanner, searching

for your heartbeat.

It came.

What I was hoping for, what we were hoping for happened, she suggests in this second epistle. We were all right.  In 3 she says ‘Labour went on and on/ and your heartbeat dipped/ and I bit your dad’s hand.’  Part 1 begins ‘Suddenly I knew you were there.’  There’s a strong sense of lineage. In another poem that anticipates new life, Szanto comments on her expectant parents. ‘I picture him pacing the corridors/ in his odd socks and old corduroy jacket,/ scared and bored/ as my mother sucked in gas and air/ and her body performed an everyday miracle.’

   The baby is born, the baby comes home from the hospital.  There’s a lot of intense joy, elation. Elation is evident in the second strophe of ‘When I dream of my Grandmother She is Not.’  It is seen, heard, and felt in ‘Singing at Bedtime’ and ‘My Son Falls in Love with a Potato’ and subtle in ‘My Mother, the Protestor.’  A counter to the war machine’s bringing destruction and death is the mother’s bringing life into the world.  Just as Rilke evokes the mother in poems protesting war, Szanto evokes her mother in this poem, doing her part to stop the tanks and guns and their wake of destruction.  The elation is embodied in humanity, as the poet-daughter wonders

Did she join in with the mass

ululations?  Was she dragged out of her tent

in the dead of night by soldiers?

It’s easier to imagine her chatting

with them through the fence

about their wives and daughters.

That her mother is not so much reacting against war, but acting for peace is cause for celebration.  Celebrate the life of one who gives life, not takes it.

   Considering the chapbook’s title, This Was Your Mother, readers, along with the speaker, reflect. The poet looks back in ‘History,’ ‘The Rabbit,’ and ‘The Mouse.’ Her present tense verbs vivify her refections. The mood, the tone of reflection pervades in the chapbook’s first poem and in its last.  ‘Hiraeth’ begins ‘There is another place/ in which she exists/ the girl I did not give birth to/ fourteen years ago,’ and concludes ‘in February she is in my heart’s cold chambers/ her home is me/ her home was me.’  What comes in between is intensely reflective.  Just as there is a speculative daughter in ‘Hireath’ there is another woman, perhaps a speculative mother, or even a woman her son will marry in ‘My Son’s Life Story Book.’

The woman squeezes past me in the hall

where he battled to crawl, my brain rattling

with the little stories I cling on to

now he is gone.  She wants to take photos

of pertinent things.  Take one of me, please,

I want to plead, but show her his bedroom,

an unfilled space where his cot used to be.

There’s a sense of loss, absence, a sense of time moving forward, and a sense of looking back.  Photos capture the past, so do words.

   These poems are deeply personal, and intricate.  About mothers, fathers, children, in their humanity they include others.  That each merits being read time and again is due to Sam Szanto’s skills with language, her knowing what to put in, what to leave out, her precise imagery, and lyrical phrasing. The sense is in the sound, and in her depiction of things and people.

This Was Your Mother is very good. It embodies the best in contemporary poetry.

Peter Mladinic 6th April 2024

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My Dead by John Brantingham Etymphrastic Art by Jane Edberg (Kelsay Books)

Posted on March 26, 2024 by tearsinthefence
My Dead by John Brantingham Etymphrastic Art by Jane Edberg (Kelsay Books)

The first thing a reader sees is the cover: yellow, black, brown, green, and red; an eye is turned toward a figure in silhouette—etymphrastic art by Jane Edberg. Each poem is complemented by a vibrant illustration.  The poems are set in the Midwest United States, Ohio, where trains are common in both rural and semi-urban towns.  It’s a developed region, not far from a big airport, closer to Cleveland than to the small towns in the fiction of Sherwood Anderson and the poems of James Wright. One poem ‘Euclid Avenue’ suggests Cleveland.  Like the eye on the cover, the speaker in the poems is observant. The poems are other-directed, and quiet, with settings that delineate the distance between the speaker and other people.

  The poems are other-directed, and that other is someone seen for only a moment. In the first poem, ‘4:30 AM.’ the speaker notices someone has spread a blanket over his car, ‘with its busted headlight.’  He says, ‘I wonder where they are now/ that they do not need their blanket.’ In ‘Sunday Morning’ a man is sweeping a street.  ‘The way he moves/ I think he has become/ his meditation.’  In ‘Blackbirds’ birds perch on a pole that runs along the side of a train car. ‘When it jerks to a start,/ they flock into the eucalyptus.’  In ‘Tanker’ a man appears to be waiting to cross train tracks, but when the train stops ‘he climbs the ladder/ of a tanker car/ and tags it/ with white spray paint.’  In ‘Just After Sunset’ the speaker, walking his dog, observes a commuter.

          The man is staring

          up the long street

          for the bus

          that is not yet here.

          He’s unaware of Lizzy

          and her need

          for touch.

   The poems are quiet.  The speaker is thinking of his dead.  ‘I can hear them almost/ telling me things/ that probably matter.’ In ‘Grandfather’ he sees a driver, a man, not staying in his own lane, but swerving into his lane.  He speculates that the man is tired, having come off a long plane flight that landed at the close-by airport, from ‘A trip back home maybe,/ where everything he once knew/ has been lost.’  The poem concludes:

          My grandfather, 

          a man who died five years

          before I was born,

          whispers to me

          that the man found out

          he will move on

          to that next place much too early.

In ‘Euclid Avenue’ the speaker hears the dead ‘under the traffic noise/ of an early commute.’  He concludes, ‘I think they are trying/ to remind me of careless/ moments in my past./ Maybe they’re telling me of theirs.’

   Lastly, the poems’ settings delineate the distance between the speaker and other people, and things such as, in ‘his Dawn,’ ‘the train/ that runs 100 feet/ from my front door.’ The poem ‘Light’ begins ‘I can walk from here to the library.’ Further into ‘Light’ the speaker says, 

           From the glass entrance door,

           I cannot see the books.

           A man who lives next to it

           is watching me from his front door,

           making sure that I don’t break in.

           I wave to him, and he waves back

Of a palm tree hidden in ‘the canopy/of a sycamore’ he says, ‘I’m staring at it/ when my neighbor comes out/ to go to work and deadeyes me.’  Readers note the pun.  In ‘Murmuration’ he watches a train engineer watching a flock of birds that have alighted ‘over the parking lot/ between my house/ and the trainyard.’ In ‘This Civility’ a hawk is ‘being chased by mockingbirds.’ ‘If I squint,/ I can see my dead/ flying about with them.’ 

    In My Dead the landscape of the past coincides with the landscape of the present.  Intimacy characterizes these spare, contemplative poems and their counterparts, Jane Edberg’s striking visuals.  Each poem is its own world.  It’s to the poet’s credit that he tells readers all they need to know and fills the silence with significance.  John Brantinham’s My Dead is pure poetry.

Peter Mladinic 26th March 2024

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Strike by Sarah Wimbush (Stairwell Books)

Posted on March 9, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Strike by Sarah Wimbush (Stairwell Books)

40 years on and the miners’ strike continues to be on the public’s mind. It united but also tore apart communities, it was only defeated by illegal police and government activities, it unified many in raising funds and support for those risking poverty and was the subject of intense nationwide debate and argument. In the end (on the back of MI5 snooping) Union funds got confiscated, violence ensued and defeated miners went back to work only to have their pits closed as ‘uneconomical’ and ‘unsustainable’. Whole villages and towns have still not recovered, unions have never quite found themselves able to unify their members as before (though visible campaigns continue for doctors and nurses, university staff and others), and the images of police in riot gear, assaulting unarmed workers exercising their right to strike and picket, will not go away.

Many of these images are in this new book, along with celebratory, elegaic, assertive and political poems. Many of Sarah Wimbush’s poems seem to riff on the accompanying photographs, exploring the humanity of those depicted. There is writing about the women support groups, miners receiving charitable handouts, rallies, and riots; but also benefit gigs, NUM membership cards, collecting scrap coal and graffiti, along with some more surprising images: a police inspector giving an injured miner the kiss of life and what appears to be a friendly football match between police and miners. 

The book is full of the complex personal lives of the time, the contradictions of workers desperate to keep and save their appallingly hard and poorly-paid jobs, those who chose to not strike and go to work, how each side became ‘The Enemy’ to the other:

     Enemy behind a riot shield
     Enemy by the gate
     Enemy driving a coal truck
     Enemy on a plate

     […]

     Enemy ditch their epaulettes

     […]

     Enemy bends every law

The figurehead of authority at the time was, of course, Margaret Thatcher; much of what happened was the result of her direct interference and planning, but she was also a scapegoat for the Tories, who in time would stab her in the back, as politicians are wont to do with their leaders. Here, Wimbush starts her poem ‘Thatcher’, with the image she presented at the time:

     Her Majesty
     of backcomb and pearls.
     Blonde bombshell, iron-handbagged
     and twice the man.

before questioning some of the prime minister’s assertions:

     Who is the mob?
     Who is the enemy within?

before drawing the poem to a close with the image of ‘her bloody woman’s hands.’

I like the blurring here of bloody woman and bloody hands, and the way Wimbush captures details, to make it all personal rather than simply reiterating the slogans and media manipulations of the day. This book does not indulge in the pathos of Brassed Off, nor the musical conceit of Billy Elliot: however good those films may be they rarely depict the tragic and complex realities of this major industrial dispute, which was soon followed by other events such as the Battle of the Beanfield (where the police once more indulged in illegal violence) and changes to the laws dealing with protest, striking and people gathering together.

Strike is an important book which challenges the ‘Lies. Lies and more bollocks’ the media and politicians fed us at the time, and which continue to be recycled today. It is a passionate, engaged and engaging retelling of recent history, of a time when neoliberalism did not yet have the influence and control it does today. It stands as a reminder and challenge to us all to speak and act together rather than simply do what is expected or what we are told to do.

Rupert Loydell 9th March 2024

 

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Games of Soldiers by Mary Michaels (Sea Cow Press)

Posted on February 27, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Games of Soldiers by Mary Michaels (Sea Cow Press)

Ambiguity begins with the cover of this book, the layout of its title ‘Games of Soldiers’. Components here are disrupted like war-torn buildings as letters, maze-like, offer no clues as to meaning. This could be a structure capable of infinite dismantling and re-arrangement, precise as a battalion but without direction or exit. Likewise, the contents beyond the title present an enigma. There is no straightforward route to understanding. Connections in this ‘intolerable confusion of categories’ depend on shifts of repetition and mood.

‘Games of Soldiers’ comprises a series of prose poems and occasional verse. These are divided into three sections: the first has one passage, parts two and three are made up of eight pieces. There is no narrative apart from the suggestion of a film being made. Reading the mood of this collection feels a bit like reading the weather – a dominant motif throughout with rain being the most significant. The setting begins with a neutral sky and ‘faint dampness in the air’. This, we are told, might be ‘the beginning of precipitation’ – a word that implies things falling down and not just as weather. Bombs come to mind, buildings that collapse, the destruction of homes.

Certainly, the passages are imbued with rain. The poem ‘Salvage’ starts with the single word ‘Rain’. Here the roadway is ‘bombarded by water’. The impersonal camera films through a lens, through window glass, through heavy rain. The scene is distorted and warped. In the last poem of the final section the film seems to show a swimmer reaching his former house, now shockingly empty, rusted and locked.  Short paragraphs begin ‘It rains’, ‘It pours’, ‘It’s teeming’. In the penultimate paragraph drips of rain mingle with tears ‘in rivulets’. The poem ends with a fear of water and a writer who ‘is afraid to lift her pencil from the paper, for the feeling that will flood her.’

Definitions, multi-meanings and etymology are used to the full in this collection. The poem just mentioned, ‘Salvage’, is an example of this. The word itself implies the rescue of damaged leftovers, of something that has been wrecked. Visually, ‘salvage’ suggests ‘savage’ with all its associations, the origin of the word is from Old French ‘salvare’ – ‘to save’. There are connotations with ‘saviour’, of salvation before it is too late.

This is the effect of one word. But the motif of destruction is present throughout, shocking us with contrasts as ‘brand new houses’ reveal they are structures of fear: ‘Every evening walking home from the train, she has the same fear – of rounding the corner and finding nothing there’. There are sirens and shelters, communal refuges in name only, where smell is sickening, panic is palpable and ‘the walls rock and shudder.’ Children are left asleep in their beds during the bombing rather than be woken to enduring ‘terror’. Later, when the damage becomes total, the reader may wonder what happened to those sleeping children.

Images of killing are brutal, befitting the title ‘Games of Soldiers’. War, murder, suicide, the extermination of a rat by poison, flies that fed on the rat’s decomposing corpse now mummified under the floorboards.

But these and other images are only glimpses, blurred and awry, rarely seen close up but viewed with constant surveillance as through a camera lens. ‘With what complacency we also watch’ says the narrator with the detachment of the observer. Terror may be everywhere but one would have to ‘spool through for hours and hours, to find anything significant.’ Every night, in this cinematic scenario, footage is deleted ‘from human history.’

Grim content with a Nordic noir darkness. But I found Mary Michael’s collection totally enthralling with its repetition of details and motifs, its skill with using double meanings and etymology so that a word like ‘wake’ implies not only waking up from a dream or nightmare but also the sense of a vigil, of watching over the dead and protecting them from evil spirits. Chilling as the effect may be, I appreciate the impression of strangeness in this book, the sense of mise en abyme, of being in an abyss or a world of mirrors, an image infinitely recurring within a copy of itself, a foreshadowing, a story within a story, recursive and endlessly turning back.

Mandy Pannett 27th February 2024

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