Dark and Tender Principles by Mike Ferguson (Gazebo Gravy Press)

Posted on September 21, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Dark and Tender Principles by Mike Ferguson (Gazebo Gravy Press)

It’s autumn, the sun has disappeared beyond clouds, it’s melancholic and it’s raining; in fact it’s been raining for days. Even though I mentally wake up a bit as the temperature drops, I can’t escape the fact that winter is on its way and a few depressing winter months wait ahead. Listening to the new Lloyd Cole album, On Pain (the titles says it all) and reading Mike Ferguson’s new pamphlet don’t help, although the latter – sonnets and other poems: July-September, 2023 – contain glimmers of optimism and light as it grapples with notions of memory, old age, darkness and uncertainty.

The narrator of these lyrical poems finds himself ‘beyond our precipice’ (‘July’), knows ‘what is missing but not why’ (‘Missing’) and takes refuge and delight in simple things around him: sycamore ‘helicopter’ seed pods in flight, fishing boats on the Devon coast, visits from a stray cat, ducks flying above the river estuary, the distant sound of hymns drifting from a nearby church. These are real, carefully observed and recalled moments, but they do not hold back the decline into the future:

     The sails are taking us nowhere.         (‘Sails’)

It gradually dawns on the reader, or should, that these poems are not writing as a gendered or regal plural, but about the narrator and a partner, a long term relationship and marriage. There is one discreet mention of ‘a progressive disease’ (‘Calico in Waiting’) which suddenly sheds light on what is underpinning these uneasy and gentle poems:

                                                                            This is
     our bifurcation, together and apart on journeys

     then and now. It is that plunge into darkness
     again and the rattles and moans and shudders.           (‘Roller Coaster’)

So, this poem is not only a memory about only one of a couple going on the Santa Cruz Giant Dipper whilst the one other one ‘stayed on land’, but it also vividly recalls the physical sensation of the ride whilst at the same time using it as a metaphor for separation. The text also comments on what the poem itself is doing:

                                                 Feeling existential
     this suffices when stripping away an emotive

     rise and fall to leave behind wood and its
     thunder and an awareness of age, these old-
     fashioned realities […]

Ferguson’s speaker, despite himself, is struggling in that darkness he has plunged into. There is no self-pity here as he offers up

                     further evidence of forgetting
     how to behave as if there is no change.        (‘Sometimes’)

although there is pertinent and considered reflection, particularly in ‘The Tenderness Principle’:

     We can all rise to our own level of ache
     when facing the paradoxes, and tenderness

     will hurt most. It is in those shadowy
     conflicts where remembrance and feelings

     break through, and in a moment of pure calm
     it is rebuke and retribution for the doubts.

     Incompetence registers too, dumb to the
     futility and fury: how it is unfair to treat

     your own pain with more pain.

This perhaps confessional writing, very different from Ferguson’s recent concrete texts and satirical political commentaries, takes its place alongside poetry collections such as Thom Gunn’s The Man With the Night Sweats, detailing the effects of AIDS both physically and mentally, and Douglas Dunn’s moving and mournful Elegies. It is emotional, clear-sighted and original without ever being self-indulgent, ‘a reminder of what would otherwise be lost.’ These studies of forgetfulness, despair and desperation, studded with jewelled moments from the past and present should definitely not be misplaced or abandoned.

Rupert Loydell 21st September 2023


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A tribute to Gboyega Odubanjo

Posted on September 4, 2023 by tearsinthefence
A tribute to Gboyega Odubanjo

No Reason

‘not understanding a prayer is no reason not to say amen’
    – Gboyega Odubanjo ‘Poems (With Drums)’

Not understanding loss is no reason not to keep looking

Not understanding grammar is no reason not to break the rules

Not understanding electricity is no reason not to flick the switch

Not understanding music is no reason not to make a noise

Not understanding silence is no reason not to keep quiet

Not understanding a poem is no reason not to read it

Not understanding death is no reason not to stay alive

Not understanding grief is no reason not to cry

Not understanding anything is no reason not to try


   © Rupert M Loydell 4th September 2023


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Your Woman is in Pieces by Louise Anne Buchler (Tears in the Fence)

Posted on August 23, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Your Woman is in Pieces by Louise Anne Buchler (Tears in the Fence)

Tears in the Fence is proud to announce the publication of Your Woman is in Pieces by associate editor, Louise Anne Buchler. 

Buchler is a South African dramatist, actress, teacher, scriptwriter and poetry mentor. Her debut collection is fiercely feminist asserting a powerful new voice.

Olivia Tuck writes:

‘Louise Buchler’s poems are as energetic as they are measured, as sensuous as they are harrowing, as raging as they are yearning. In this bold collection of numerous forms, Buchler walks us through exhibitions of trauma related to coming of age, abuse, family, mental illness, and relationships. Her speaker reclaims dissociation, effortlessly calling on ghosts from the past, the present – and perhaps even the future. A spellbinding, thrilling new feminist voice.’

Kobus Moolman writes:

‘Louise Buchler’s poems are brave and tender, aching and passionate and tough all rolling together, and emerging breathless, fresh, wonderful in the newness of the word-world, in the newness of love and rejection, of loss and discovery. These poems celebrate death and renewal. They grow richer and deeper with every new read.’

The book is available to order on the magazine’s website:

Pay/Subscribe/Donate

David Caddy 23rd August 2023

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Hearts Forged In Resistance by Chella Courington (Finishing Line Press)

Posted on August 21, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Hearts Forged In Resistance by Chella Courington (Finishing Line Press)

Chella Courington’s chapbook, Hearts Forged in Resistance, is available for preorder now from Finishing Line Press, and I highly recommend ordering it. I have long been a fan of Courington’s work for the power of its language and imagery. This collection does not disappoint. It was written in reaction to the war in Ukraine. When I contacted her, I asked her about the relationship of her title and her work’s theme, and she wrote, ‘At the time of entitling the collection, I was thinking about Ukraine and the heartfelt, strong way in which Ukrainians met life-threatening adversity. How they forged their passion for freedom and for their citizens into resistance where friction transforms feeling.’ This idea runs through the work; however, her work goes beyond this as she meditates on how resistance in people’s personal lives creates richness in their perspectives and humanity. 

     The title of the collection comes from a line from her poem, ‘Strength,’ and that is where the theme of the work grows out of:

7000 miles away         tanks roll across Ukrainian borders

trying to wipe them off the map

grandmothers  aunts    fathers sons

throw their bodies against bully armor

hearts forged   in resistance

The poet takes to heart the courage of those people she sees in the news not giving into Putin or his forces. This is a powerful moment for her and all of us who have watched the war. Many of course assumed that Russia would simply be too powerful, and it is surprising to see the strength of the resistance including in Zelensky’s response. She writes in another poem, ‘Zelensky takes off his suit         puts on battle fatigues / stands in the streets        talks with his troops.’ As the title suggests, it is the courage in resistance that creates character in the poet’s eyes.

     However, this collection is not simply about the war in Ukraine; it leads her to a larger meditation about the idea of dignity put to the test with pressure, how it has affected many of the people she has known and loved. In ‘Grief,’ she develops a vision of her father. This once powerful man who worked in steel plants is now old and weakened, and he misses his wife who has passed away.

. . . [His shoulders] began to sag after my mom fell

no moon out    and died while he slept           My dad saved the hair

from her brush            wrapped in Kleenex    stored in a wooden box

beside their bed           Every night he rubs strands against his cheek.

Through his loss of power and the loss of his wife, he has transformed from someone who once was merely strong to someone with a complex emotional life with compassion and love at its root. Throughout the collection we are given examples of how people react to the worst kind of pain. We are shown strength in its various ways.

     Hearts Forged in Resistance is a necessary book as we face new challenges. Of course, to be alive means facing pain and difficulties. Courington’s collection reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s idea of what it means to be worthy of one’s pain. Pain, if confronted correctly, can help us to see the more noble elements of our humanity. It can clarify what is beautiful inside of us.

John Brantingham 21st August 2023

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Landscape with Missing River by Joni Wallace (Barrow Street Press)

Posted on August 15, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Landscape with Missing River by Joni Wallace (Barrow Street Press)

The river is not the only thing missing in Joni Wallace’s new book of poems. Her father is too, and although ‘It is difficult to see a ghost’, Wallace writes about the landscape of New Mexico where her father lived and worked, to produce elegies and nocturnes focussed on the absence and memories which grief produces.

This is not a nostalgic book though. Wallace has a keen eye for nature, sometimes filtered through science, as her father was a scientist at Los Alamos. Snow, clouds, storms, owls, wasps, crows and foxes are all here, as are atoms and ‘The Salt Composition of Tears’, all punctuated with suddenly triggered associative memories. ‘Elegy for Atoms’ starts with a list of things the narrator learnt indirectly from her father:

                           The way he kept things unsaid I thought
     made a language between us immaculate as space.
     An unseeable spell that held together the shimmering view.

That shimmering view is the stars at night, the constellations moving with a soundtrack of an unseen river, which prompts a brief fantasy of capturing what is gone:

     If I head due north, if I follow the river, I could still reach
     him, particles, a father in the sparking dark.

The reality of course is something different. ‘Traceless’, the following poem starts with the flat statement ‘I go on living. You don’t need anything.’, then goes on to list the activities of a normal day, punctuated by finds of her father’s shoes and jacket pin, before returning to find her yard littered with dead insects. Meanwhile, alternate lines are contrasting phrases, italicised and justified to the right, which offer a pseudo-commentary that turns into a discussion of colors and physics: ‘the red shift of a body, the visible spectrum’ then ‘after image, an I dissolved.’

This rational, somewhat reductive, approach to death is constantly interrogated, with Wallace, questioning herself and her father:

     Melancholy in a skein of geese, moans and honks corresponding
     waves. What is emotion, you say, but a series of electrical impulses? 
          (‘Punctum’)

and often reflecting upon how nature triggers grief, informed by memories along with the kind of childhood stories and familial episodes most of us have stored somewhere. So one of my favourite poems here, ‘Man on the Moon’, remembers the narrator and her father watching the moon landing (as I did with my Dad), but also imagines him stepping on to the moon with ‘a bubble’ around his head, and remembers the bedtime story she was told that night, about a ‘rabbit / made of rags’. Meanwhile in the next poem, ‘Aubade with Rabbit’, the father continues his moonwalk before producing a real pet rabbit, who ‘never was what I wished her to be’; and in ‘Sleight of Hand’, the poem which follows that, Wallace recalls that ‘Once, as a child, I dreamed the moon into my room.’

The narrator is aware however, of the subjectivity of experience and grief. Although her mother is asleep ‘in another room’, where ‘valium hums inside her brain’ (‘Still Life with Circles’), in ‘One of a Circle’ Wallace notes that her ‘daughter sees the landscape from another angle’. The same poem plays with themes of light, offering a metanarrative about itself and the whole book:

                                                                 To elegize is to make a light box,
     chasm to hold the dead and the living, the breathing

                                                                                            and the breathless

     This viewing chamber, ad infinitum.

Although we can never truly understand grief or what triggers our emotional responses to absence and change, books like this can help. Not because they are in any way self-help manuals which offer answers, nor because the experiences and poems may be ‘true’. Like all good poems they are elusive and allusive constructs of language, spinning off into unexpected places and ideas. In the end, the book turns death against itself, and it is the father who actively leaves in his own dying:

     When my father turns back to look

                          he sees              the end of seeing

Both father and daughter must move on; as the poem title says, must ‘Let Gone Things Get Behind Me’. Nature, science and people persist, even as they change and adapt. This book of ghosts, constructed from poetic explorations and conjectures, immersion in physical and mental landscapes, will haunt any reader. As Wallace says in ‘The Salt Composition of Tears’:

                                                     There is no science to it. It is like this
     and then it is like this some more.


Rupert Loydell 15th August 2023

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Tears in the Fence 78 is out!

Posted on August 7, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 78 is out!

Tears in the Fence 78 is now available at http://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose poetry, visual poetry, translations and fiction by Mark Dickinson, Ian Seed, Eliza O’Toole, Lisa Pasold, Robert Sheppard, Lizzi Linklater, Mark Goodwin, Blossom Hibbert, Morag Kiziewicz, Kate Noakes, Kenny Knight, Matthew Carbery, Pratibha Castle, Lesley Burt, David Ball, Toon Tellegen translated by Judith Wilkinson, Chrissie Gittins, Carla Scarano D’Antonio, Siân Thomas, PQR Anderson, Elizabeth Wilson Davies, benjamin cusden, Basil King, Janet Hancock, Melissa Buckheit, Benjamin Larner, David Miller, Steve Spence, Amber Rollinson, Beth Davyson, Claire Watt, David Harmer, Sue Johns ,Kathleen McPhilemy, Robin Walter, Michael Henry, Elizabeth Parker, Alice Tarbuck, Joanna Nissel, Sarah Watkinson, Mandy Pannett, Charles Wilkinson, Valerie Bridge, Jane Wheeler, Alexandra Corrin-Tachibana and Naoise Gale,

The critical section consists of the Editorial by Richard Foreman, Letters to the Editor, Robert Hampson on Karenjit Sandhu, Jeremy Hilton on Kenneth Rexroth, Alan Baker on Yiannas Ritsos, Guy Russell on Denise Riley, Steve Spence on Ralph Hawkins, Sarah Watkinson on Katherine Towers, Andrew Duncan on Daniel zur Höhe translated by Anthony Mellors, Mandy Pannett on Mary Leader, Gisele Parnall on Kelvin Corcoran & Alan Halsey, Lesley Sharpe on Living with other people, Greg Bright on The Broken Word, Mandy Pannett on Andrea Moorhead, Peter Larkin on Mark Dickinson, Steve Spence on Luke Roberts, Deborah Harvey on Alexandra Fössinger,  Clare Morris on Carla Scarano D’Antonio, Kimmo Rosenthal on Marcel Proust, Steve Spence – An Update on the Poetry Scene in Plymouth, Barbara Bridger on Geraldine Clarkson, Morag Kiziewicz – Electric Blue 13 and Notes on Contributors.

David Caddy 7th August 2023

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Mr & Mrs A Reframed by Lesley Burt (Templar Poetry)

Posted on August 1, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Mr & Mrs A Reframed by Lesley Burt (Templar Poetry)

Gainsborough’s much-discussed double portrait of the elaborately dressed Robert and Frances Andrews in a rural landscape is one of the most popular paintings in the National Gallery. Part of its appeal is that the Andrews are so easy to enjoy disliking, especially Robert. Lesley Burt joins in this sport with as much gusto as Robert may have shown using the gun in the painting to shoot birds. In the cartoon version by Bestie on the cover of Burt’s pamphlet, with the caption THERE WAS NO RIGHT TO ROAM IN GAINSBOROUGH’S DAY, he has just employed his weapon to kill a more plainly dressed trespasser, face down in the field. The vivid pool of blood beside him is the only colour in an otherwise monochrome drawing. ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry’, wrote Yeats, and by that definition there is a good deal of rhetoric in Burt’s sequence of 18 variations; but there is poetry too, in the playful inventiveness with which she imagines the staid couple, led by Frances, stepping out of the frame into various other times and places. 

As a victim of a (yes, of course) patriarchal society, Frances is treated with sympathy and credited with curiosity, intelligence and enterprise, though she too manifests the hauteur and callousness of her class, commanding the usherette where to seat her in a cinema showing High Society, or faced with the poverty of a busker in New Orleans playing Mood Indigo especially for her. Before reaching these vignettes we find the couple in a modern gym, where Mr A tucks his fowling piece under his arm and increases the speed and incline on his treadmill while he watches BBC Breakfast on a muted screen. Meanwhile, Mrs A, in an expression which might have surprised her, ‘hinges at the waist for a dead lift’ before adding weights, and another woman with butterflies tattooed the length of her back executes sit-ups. In the midst of all this Mrs A says, in the idiom of her own day, ‘tomorrow let us walk in fields, perhaps to visit poor Mama, alone now, at Ballingdon.’ It’s this juxtaposition of two worlds, the spark which crosses between them, which gives electric life to the best – and that’s the majority – of these short pieces. 

One of the diversions in reading this bijou chapbookette – small but perfectly formed, diminutive enough to fit into the daintiest reticule of the most refined lady – is spotting the other unnamed paintings the couple walk into, including (spoiler alert, but it won’t really spoil it) Constable’s Hay Wain, painted not far from the Andrews’ extensive land holdings depicted in their portrait, and more surprisingly, Hockney’s portrait of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy. Though playfulness is the dominant mode, there is something else, when to reach the Clarks’ flat in Notting Hill they take the tube: ‘Such a strenuous ride from Bulmer! Mr A comments, taking his wife’s elbow to descend the escalator. Oh dear, she replies, we must travel by dungeon.’ I know how she feels. A touch of a Martian sending a postcard home here.

Laughter lowers our defences, and allows more serious thoughts to assail us. The Andrews are of their time, but how far are they perennial in their vices (mainly his) and their sorrows (mainly hers)? In Delhi Mrs A complains of the smell of turmeric but admires the painted elephants, while Mr A ‘checks Twitter-feed and replies: I see we have taken Pondicherry from the French.’ We are reminded that the parochial arrogance of Mr A at home had a backdrop of imperial expropriation. And what updates is a similarly complacent Mr A checking for somewhere today? 

The sequence ends on a plangent note; the actual, historical Mrs A, lonely, writing to her mother and with child yet again, regrets that she has, unlike her fantasy counterpart, spent her adult life confined in more than one sense, though she has yearned since childhood for the freedom to travel and see the world. This touch of sober realism contrasts with the lightness of tone in what has gone before, but also makes a fitting conclusion. This little book is bigger than it looks. 

John Freeman 1st August 2023

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Selected Poems 1980-2020 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Chax Press) A Long Essay on the Long Poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (University of Alabama Press)

Posted on July 19, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Selected Poems 1980-2020 by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Chax Press) A Long Essay on the Long Poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis (University of Alabama Press)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an intriguing poet (including collaged visual poems) and critic. Her Selected Poems can’t help but feel centred around, perhaps grounded by, her Drafts project: 114 (+) cantos which rework, or ‘fold’, 19 poems six times over, riffing and refining, tangenting away from and interrogating the texts themselves and the author’s processes and poetical understanding. The sequence is both a challenge to and a critical deconstruction of some of the very male modernist long poems of sequences such as Pound’s Cantos and Olson’s Maximus project; and the long poem is also the subject of a recent critical volume.

There are under a 100 pages of poetry preceding Drafts in this Selected Poems, mostly fragmented lyrics, perhaps most akin to the work of, say, Rae Armantrout. The last line of the very first poem included here, 1970’s ‘A Poem to Myself’, acts as a kind of manifesto or flagging up of what is to follow: ‘Come in, come in, I say to all the fragments.’ Perhaps the most intriguing early piece here is ‘”Writing” from Tabula Rasa’, which is immediately followed by ‘Writing on “Writing”‘, which – in part – explores ‘Marginalization’, and the author’s desire to understand it but also create a form and writing that facilitates it:

     Setting the poem so there is a bringing of marginalization into writing.
     ‘No center’ of a section alternates with small contained sections.
     Sections contained by other sections, over writing, writing over, or
     simultaneous with. So that one section does not have hegemony. So
     the reader does not know which to read first, or how to inter-read.

Drafts, which follows, in some ways contradict this: the individual poems/cantos are numbered and presented in order, although of course they have previously been published individually, and the reader can also follow a poem through its ‘folded’ reversions using the included grid, which acts as a visual index.

The actual selection of poems from Drafts is intriguing, mostly presenting self-aware texts that explore a number of ways of writing about itself: redaction, a conversation on the page, and various declamations:

     I want polyphony
     I want excess
     I want no art object
     […]
     I want the wayward and unpredictable
     caused by anything
           (‘Draft 85: Hard Copy 15’)

     Trample the vanity of the poem!
           (‘Draft 107: Meant to say’)

This, however, is coupled with an awareness of the impossibility of weaving everything (or indeed, perhaps, anything) together, with the same poem going on to note that:

                  […] ; it is your archive as well as mine, this little
     piece of nothing, this
     part of the imaginary whole.

The selection of DuPlessis’ work concludes with excerpts from a pair of stand-alone ‘book-length collage poems’, which build upon two collaged texts in Drafts, and from an ongoing ‘serial poem’ Traces, with Days. As yet, although I have several volumes from this project, it hasn’t drawn me in in the way Drafts did and continues to do so. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

Hand-in-hand with the writing’s own self-evidenced poetics is the more academic approach of A Long Essay on the Long Poem, which explores some of the ideas mentioned above, particularly how to include everything, but also how to shape a poem, and indeed how to end it. DuPlessis notes that ‘Long poems may certainly be self-contradictory and oscillatory, dialogic’, here using the shift from ‘epic-polemic episodes’ to ‘lyric quest’ between books two and three of Olson’s Maximus as an example. The desire for inclusion is usefully explained as ‘Long poems become magnetic fields of ongoing events and materials in their discourses and commentaries, not isolated items or singular insights.’ 

Once an author accepts and embraces the notion of polyphony, inclusion, digression and segmentivity, they are able to – notes DuPlessis – invent or adopt a bewildering number of writing strategies. They can reinvent the quest or epic; they can write back to canonical works, reversioning and implicitly or explicitly critiquing and questioning; they can embed their work in a field of quotations (Pound) or paraphrase; they can adopt postmodern slippage, fragmentation and lexical or grammatical subversion or disruption (Ashbery); they can use appropriation and collage. DuPlessis also discusses ‘Confronting gender’ with varied examples of texts and statements from authors such as Alice Notley, Anne Waldman and H.D.; as well as considering subjects such as cognition, truth, conspiracy, numerology, and theology.

She is of course constantly aware that ‘A long poem may develop by rethinking its strategies and rationales as it is written.’ And if I am somewhat disappointed by the concluding paragraph of the book, which suggests not only that ‘the author becomes possessed by language’ but that ‘The poem finally chooses you’, A Long Essay is a thought-provoking and illuminating exploration of its subject, one that neither this brief review nor a single read can do justice to. 

Rupert Loydell 19th July 2023

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Mr and Mrs Andrews Reframed by Lesley Burt (Templar)

Posted on July 12, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Mr and Mrs Andrews Reframed by Lesley Burt (Templar)

An anecdotal style in this series of short poems and prose vignettes brings the three main characters to something resembling life. The tone is both stately and colloquial. Gainsborough is called Thomas, Mr and Mrs Andrews are referred to throughout as Mr A and Mrs A. It’s only in the penultimate poem that we learn Mrs Andrews’ name is Frances. The reader is invited to ‘Picture this’ as Mrs A, with echoes of Alice through the Looking Glass, ‘peers out of the portrait’, breathes on the glass and steps through to the ‘outside’. Her husband and the artist presumably follow her. For once she is taking the lead. 

Incidents and anecdotes occur in an intriguing mixture of countries and chronology. Mr A checks his Twitter feed and comments ‘I see we have taken Pondicherry from the French.’ Throughout, the background is colonial, wealth and status are based on property, exploitation of ‘slaves’ and ‘riff-raff’ is taken for granted. The cover design reveals a trespasser lying dead in a pool of blood. Mr and Mrs Andrews, the dog, the oak tree, the landscape of ownership, are shown as they are in the portrait. Mr A is holding his fowling piece and the caption reads ‘There was no right to roam in Gainsborough’s Day’. The reader is left to draw their own conclusions.

The characters are depicted skillfully. Mr A, true to his nature, is holding a gun in many of the poems. Verbs that describe his actions are ‘grunts’, ‘frowns’, ‘yawns’, ‘snores’. He is content to pat the dog, blast pigeons, wing pheasants, take satisfaction in his estates. He returns to his frame unchanged.

,

Mrs A ‘sighs’ and ‘whitters’, is careful to cross her ankles and clench her knees under voluminous skirts. As in the portrait, she comes over as passive and on display. She does at least have dreams of what might have been. At the end of the sequence, she returns to her canvas with the realisation that ‘men have framed my life’.

It is the character of Thomas Gainsborough, as Lesley Burt conveys him in Mr and Mrs Andrews Reframed, that interests me most. Before she climbs out of the portrait, Mrs A ‘unclenches her knees’. I feel there is a sense of ‘the gaze’ in these poems, the way that someone or something being gazed at becomes an object, there is a hint of voyeurism. ‘In the Library’ shows a dubious side to Thomas as he calls to Mr A ‘Over here! Look at the librarian! Bare arse and bubbies!’ He licks his pencil but the implication is that he is mentally licking his lips. He goes on to paint a still-life portrait which includes a nude woman. 

So what exactly is reframed in this fascinating pamphlet? A layer below the surface appearance? An emphasis on predation? In Gainsborough’s portrait Mrs Andrews’ lap and the front panel of her skirt are left unpainted. There are several theories as to the reason. In the very last line ‘Mr A drops a pheasant in her lap.’ Maybe Gainsborough didn’t show this because the red bloodstains would have been too vivid a contrast with the lady’s blue silk gown. Lesley Burt leaves the reader to untangle many tantalising threads.

Mandy Pannett 12th July 2023

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Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs (CB Editions)

Posted on July 11, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Spring Journal by Jonathan Gibbs (CB Editions)

One of the most memorable seminars on my Creative Writing MA* several decades ago was the first on the Long Poem and Poem Sequence module. We were divided into small groups, mostly with people we didn’t know, and asked to start a translation of Beowulf from the original text. In the second half of the session we read and discussed Louis MacNeice’s ‘Autumn Journal’, and were set the task of writing our own journal for the duration of the module.

Whilst I’ve always liked MacNeice’s poetry, and used several phrases from his poems for some early paintings of mine, ‘Autumn Journal’ had eluded my attention. What a wonderful text it is, each canto offering a different perspective and take: a mix of the personal, political, social comment along with observations of the changing seasons, all in a relaxed, conversational metre, with deft use of full, near and off rhyme throughout.

Unlike most of my MA seminar group’s journals, Jonathan Gibbs’ Spring Journal follows the form and shape of MacNeice almost to the letter: 24 numbered cantos written from March to August 2020, bearing witness not only to the arrival of summer and departure of spring but to covid rules and regulations, news items, familial relationships and his own fluctuating emotions. It also sometimes directly addresses MacNeice, as well as dropping in allusions to and lines from other poems of his, or by directly misquoting or subtly changing some of the original Journal.

Having read Gibbs’ subversive and satirical novel Randall, a hilarious and bawdy reinvention and critique of the YBA London art scene of the 1990s, I was surprised to find that he had written Spring Journal. Hidden away in the catalogue of the wonderful CB editions in London (if you don’t know them do check them out) and mentioned in online dispatches by bloggers I had missed at the time, Gibbs had moved from originally tweeting his poem to having it read out loud each week in ‘an online salon’ hosted by a friend, thus setting a timetable for writing as well as offering a way of legitimising the project. 

Most cantos in the final book were written in under a week, although you wouldn’t know it, despite the sense of immediacy and commentary on display. On this page is an angry riposte to politicians, here a longing for parties and friendship, there a considered moment of reflection on Brexit or the fact that students at the university where Gibbs teaches would not have a graduation ceremony that year. There is an initial sense of separation from what is going on; even by the end of April Gibbs declares that ‘still no-one I know has died’, although it isn’t long before he is self-questioning the pan-banging for the NHS set against disorganisation and lack of funding, and by late May he is already worrying about the future:

          As infections decrease and we lift our heads and wonder
     If we understand the next part of the role
          We’re being asked to play in this terrible opera.

This sense of a tragic, bigger picture and how the world is going to cope is contrasted with lower key events: what Gibbs is reading and thinking, what his partner is doing elsewhere in their house, football matches; and also more considered responses to the concept of Englishness (as opposed to MacNeice’s Irishness) and Gibbs’ sense of separation and disbelief at what is unfolding, not to mention the government’s ongoing mismanagement.

We’re all very good at forgetting about things, even my nostalgic self, so one of the most important things about this book is the reminder of how awful being kept away from others and told to stay mostly inside was. How lucky those of us who had a space to sit outside were, how neighbours came together to have distanced drinks in the sunshine, how we all learnt to converse, play quizzes and games or argue, online with our cameras on. How we got used to phoning distant relatives we otherwise didn’t stay in touch with. All those things ceased pretty quickly once the all clear was announced but, of course, the consequences lingered, especially for our children and students, the elderly and those who had been unable to grieve or say goodbye to the dead.

Gibbs not only captures a sense of personal worry and foreboding, but also considers the bigger problems, with Canto XXIII offering a kind of prophetic declaration that appears to have totally come true. Having noted that ‘Crisis needs crisis management, and this bloody fiasco / Will ripple out beyond this week’ he goes on to declare ‘The crisis is not the virus but the government’. This whole section riffs on MacNeice’s suggestion in Autumn Journal that ‘the equation will come out at last’, with Gibbs nothing that:

      […] the bastard was right.
          The equation did come out for Britain,
     The war was won, and from it we fashioned
          The NHS and the welfare state,
     Everything we’ve grown up to take for granted
          And are losing now to toffs and spivs
     Who dress like lawyers and act like thieves
          And know not to waste a good crisis.

The next and final canto, XXIV, is laconic and quiet, if somewhat resigned. The narrator seems to have lost any sense of urgency, is thinking again about the book he was supposed to be writing, thinking about sleep but also about waking up, only to find that ‘we stagger about, stupefied and overwhelmed’, whilst ‘future generations will bear the brunt’ of what has occurred. But with a sense of inevitable acceptance he notes that ‘Time and the seasons are immune to human despair’, and that on one level things continue as normal:

     Swallows gathering on the telephone lines,
         As, close and slow, summer is ending in London.

Many ‘plague journals’ and other works written during the pandemic have been published but Spring Journal is somehow different. It is reflective, yes, but also at times militant and contrary, belligerent and opinionated. I was going to say it is honest, but ‘immediate’ is a better word, or ‘sense of immediacy’ a better phrase. It is self-questioning, doubtful, awkward, responsive and elegiac. Gibbs doesn’t pretend it is polished and honed, he says it is ‘carved from chaos’. That taming, capturing and exploration of the chaos of a few years back makes for an engaging and thought-provoking read.

*The other most memorable seminar was Tony Lopez’s introductory one to his Poetry module, where not only were we introduced to one of Tom Raworth’s poems that discusses how it is written and deconstructs itself, but were all asked to read out ‘Howl’, going round the room. A lot of the students were elderly and somewhat shocked by Allen Ginsberg apocalyptic, revolutionary, and belligerently sexual poem!

Rupert Loydell 11th July 2023

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