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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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Birds in November by Daragh Breen (Shearsman Books)

Posted on February 22, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Birds in November by Daragh Breen (Shearsman Books)

Daragh Breen can’t help but look upwards. His eyes go to ‘Christ’s feet / nailed and fastened to the cross’; to the skies and their many ‘winged creatures’; or further still, to the moon and stars and the whole solar system beyond. When Breen stays closer to ground, he is mostly in the company of those equally ‘moon-minded’ – wolves. But as the poems unfold, it becomes clear that his looking upwards and outwards is often also a looking inwards and backwards. Birds in November is haunted by death, memory, solitude. There is a pervading sense of abandonment, or perhaps a desire for it. 

            a lit trawler

            alone in the night

            as the Universe extinguishes

            all the source of light

            along the decaying bough of its spine

There are ghosts and disappearances everywhere, and the reader is often thrown into such liminal space:

            Boxed by the white glare of the lift

            in the dark realm

            of a multi-storey car park basement,

This is only more eerie given the near total absence of people (replaced by badgers, bees, and birds – all prone to disappearing). But this absence; the frequent lack of subjectivity; the mere handful of instances of the first personal pronoun; the empty environs; none of these makes this a book of poems in which the self is absent, or others deserted. Rather, the book appears in part to be a non-egoistic search for that very self by perpetual half-light (there is a constant candle-flicker). In trying to find to find it and sometimes to lose it, Breen finds others, memories of others, shadows, or nothing at all. Just ‘a lingering smell of smoke’. 

But Breen’s attention is also on the world and its other inhabitants. The book charts his search for purchase through encounters with wild animals, pets, and vanishing crows. Breen constantly contrasts and elides a series of opposites that in review sound trivial – heaven and earth, light and dark, life and death, real and unreal – in ways that are decidedly not. The treatment is more oblique than it looks. In places, it is too indirect and obscure, in others, not enough. But, aside from the occasional clunk, it is very deft work that rewards careful reading.

One of the stronger and more straightforward passages of the book is the titular sequence.  The writing is precise and imagistic, but in the context of the whole can be read many ways. The second section reads:

            Above a damp field

            a ghosting of birds

            against the low winter sky,

            seen and then unseen,

            tilting out of sight

            before teasing themselves

            back from some other world.

            They have been flitting in

            and out of existence

            all morning,

            silently returning

            in dribs and drabs,

            unwilling to stay too long

            in this grey realm.

In a more complicated vein, the opening piece (‘Navigatio’) reinterprets the tale of Brendan the Navigator, an Irish Abbot who allegedly undertook an epic voyage to find the Garden of Eden in the 6th century. He travelled alone at sea for seven years. Breen digs up another Irishman of extreme solitude. He recasts the tale in new light; the result is solemn and lonesome. It initiates Breen’s search for a hold on the world, his grieving for it, and his companionship with its creatures.

            the voice of the ice-fields humming their own lament

            was finally heard, as something seemed to have finally

            broken deep within.

And in the following passage:

            the wind taunts the shoreline

            with an intensity that suggests that if it

            were to suddenly stop, and all was shocked still,

            then every single thing would disappear.

Brendan is not the only lonely company Breen keeps. He also mentions by name Gagarin, Armstrong, and Woolf. Woolf is relevant for obvious reasons, but all three are appropriate company for the same reason as Brendan. Two walked in worlds of their own; the other gave voice to the worry that we all might. Reading Birds, one occasionally gets the impression that Breen feels he does too. David Bradshaw, in his introduction to The Waves, describes the novel as having a ‘profound sense of separation, even solipsism’ whilst at the same time invoking a kind of collective consciousness. Though stylistically very different, the two writers are of a piece in feeling the allure of solipsism and sharp pangs of grief. 

In Breen’s case, this grief is most keenly felt in ‘Libretto’, which opens with a tragic refrain from Dido’s Lament. The poem ends:

            telling us how their mother

            had endlessly listened to Kathleen Ferrier

            for months after their father died,

            singing along through clenched tears

            as the Heavens rained sparrows about her

            where she sat,

            and that they couldn’t get close to her

            because of all the birds.

            Everything denied flight,

            Everything laid in frail earth.

Birds in November is direct and at times difficult. It strikes cool at first and is occasionally too laboured. The book moves mostly in sequence and relies heavily on motif; it is tricky to take piece by piece and it is surprisingly easy to miss what is in plain sight. But there is much compassion, and it is not all sober.  In any case, Breen’s pithy writing and haunting imagery are well worth any patience they ask for. 

Samuel Bowerman 22nd February 2024

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Visual Poetry of Japan 1684-2023 edited by Taylor Mignon (Kerplunk!)

Posted on February 19, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Visual Poetry of Japan 1684-2023 edited by Taylor Mignon (Kerplunk!)

In pre-modern Japan, according to Andrew Campana’s introduction to this new anthology, ‘it would have been absurd to consider poetry as something at all separate from visuality’. The first entry in the book is an ink drawing of a crow on a bare tree branch, its head tucked under its wing, accompanied by the text of a haiku by Basho. In Adam Kern’s translation the poem reads:

Upon withered bough
a crow has come to its rest…
autumn twilight

Campana provides a valuable summary of ways in which text, image, and even sound combined in traditional cultural practice. But modernist and contemporary visual poetry in Japan, he says, does not represent a ‘“return” to an older tradition’. Rather it emerges from the attempts of artists to grapple with contemporary realities, including the trauma of WWII. 

Despite the dates on the cover, the work featured in the anthology, with the exception of the Basho poem, all dates from the 20th and 21st centuries. Taylor Mignon, the editor, covers a wide array of practices in his selection. We have examples of asemic writing, calligraphy, collages, photographs of constructed objects and more. 

These kinds of practices, Campana argues, have ‘always been central to the story of poetry in Japan, but remained criminally underrepresented in collections and anthologies, both in Japanese and in translation, not fitting into the normative idea of what a “poem” is supposed to be’. The present anthology aims to set the record straight by showcasing a variety of works both by Japanese authors and by non-Japanese poets with connections to Japan.

There are many expressive pieces in the volume. ‘View From A Balcony Of An Early Summer Street’ (1925), by Hagiwara Kyōjirō, uses a diagrammatic layout and a mix of text and other visual elements to suggest a lively street scene. Yamamoto Kansuke’s ‘Buddhist Temple’s Birdcage’ of 1940 is a photo of a telephone handset inside a cylindrical birdcage, perhaps reflective of the suppression of opposition to the war by the Japanese authorities. Niikuni Seiichi’s piece ‘Rain’ from 1966, suggests a relentless downpour, and can be read as evoking the radioactively contaminated rain which followed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

A section of the book is devoted to work by members of VOU, a group founded by the poet Kitasono Katué in 1935. His pioneering work in abstract and visual poetry influenced a younger generation of poets. The anthology includes work from the 1950s through to the 1970s. In 2022 Mignon published an anthology specifically about VOU with Isobar Press: VOU: Visual Poetry, Tokio, 1958–1878. The pieces included in this new anthology are by practitioners not represented in the Isobar book.

A group of Japanese book designers, all associated with visual poetry, are celebrated in another section, which draws on the collection of scholar and translator John Solt, who provides a short introduction to the work. 

Eric Selland’s asemic calligraphy in the ‘contemporary’ section is interesting, and Kunimine Teruko’s ‘Kusa (grass)’, consisting of the character for ‘grass’ in green ink, the top horizontal bar extending towards the left and right margins, has a pleasing, resonant simplicity. Adachi Tomomi’s AI generated 3D poetry is also intriguing. You can view examples of his work here.

The inclusion of non-Japanese writers is very much in the spirit of the Japanese avant garde, which from its beginnings in the 20th century sought to build international links, and which was in turn  influenced by like-minded writers and artists in the US and Europe. Campana, in the introduction, mentions the composer Toru Takemitsu. In the 1960s Takemitsu created four visual scores, including for Ring (1961). Takemitsu was conscripted into the Japanese army as a teenager and the horrors of the war left him with a deep revulsion for traditional Japanese culture. His early compositions were influenced by Western composers like Schoenberg, Webern and Stravinsky. John Cage was also an influence and it was Cage’s interest in Buddhism which eventually led Takemitsu to re-evaluate Japanese musical traditions. The composer’s visual scores don’t appear in the anthology, but they easily could have.

Visual Poetry of Japan provides a useful introduction to a range of practices which break with the idea of poetry as a block of text on a page. There are a growing number of anthologies focused on concrete and visual poetry and this volume is a commendable addition. For readers already familiar with concrete and visual poetry, the book makes available work not included in other recent anthologies.

Simon Collings 19th February 2024

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Wilder by Jemma Borg (Pavilion / Liverpool University Press)

Posted on February 18, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Wilder by Jemma Borg (Pavilion / Liverpool University Press)

In place of an epigraph, this interesting collection offers definitions of ‘wild’ (‘‘woodlands,’ cf. Germanic ‘weald’’) and ‘wilder’ (‘obsolete verb, ‘to lose one’s way’, cf. ‘bewilder’’) that steer us firmly towards its themes: the environment and personal exploration. Such an ambit can encompass the travel lyric (Hong Kong, Orkney, Crete), responses to journalism and the arts (Chernobyl, Monet, Rodrigo, Tsvetaeva, Dante, Clampitt) and relationship poems, besides the more expected genres. In interviews, Jemma Borg expresses a biologist’s understanding of humans being ‘inside’ nature and suggests that this book wants – like much contemporary ecopoetry – to go beyond looking-and-naming towards a less othering engagement with ‘the world of which we are part’. 

How to do that? Linguistically radical ecopoets, as readers here will know, see subject-verb-object structures themselves as part of the problem. Jemma Borg doesn’t get lost in those districts but does show attentiveness to questions of person. A drug (‘medicine’) experience poem moves from imperative to second to first plural to inveigle readerly complicity. The ego-deflecting ‘you’, with its unwillingness to take full ownership, is used in a good few poems, even in one about trying to ‘be wilder’, where its defensiveness is perhaps the point. In contrast, the direct ‘I’ in the poems of pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood offers unreserved and powerful intimacy: ‘They staple me shut with wire’; ‘when I tried to stand, I split from hip to hip’. Connection here, anyhow, is incarnate.

As for the syntactic filigree, well, some similes: ‘lightning sharp as sherbet’; ‘blue sky cracked open like an egg’; ‘the rain washed us out like pots’. Metaphors: ‘have you ridden the word-scent/ into the caverns of your body’; ‘even our thoughts seemed to wear old blood’. And creative collocations, tending to appear in adjective-noun-genitive bundles: ‘the slender gulp of the sea’; ‘the drowned accuracy of the coast’; ‘the old lake of the heart’; ‘the blackened theatre of my skin’; ‘the drunken gift of your life’… If you went ‘oooh’ at those examples, great; if you eye-rolled then this collection’s probably not for you. The risk (as critics like to call it) of far-fetched figurative language is that closer up it can resolve into nonsense. Too much of it can feel more like display behaviour than convergence. It’s justified here, I guess, as part of a valorisation of the wild and messy; whether or not you buy that, it’s still hard to resist many lovely moments: ‘the soundless doors/ of her wings’ of a butterfly or the suburban wife ‘bored as a parked car’.  

For the rest, breadth of sympathy is shown by an attention to unpopular facets of nature – aphids, a pine plantation, the marsh thistle. Using spacing in place of full stops stands, I suppose, for provisionality or openness. Traditional nature-poetry imagery of roots and growth interacts with ecocrisis motifs of grief, wounds and rivers of blood. Jaguars and sequoias offer the global perspective, while poems set around Tunbridge Wells and The Weald provide the local – besides indicating that Jemma Borg is another of that talented poet-cluster (Wicks, Bergman, Mookherjee) based there. Sometimes the voices even ‘risk’ sententiae, especially at endings: ‘Find where the soil is/ in you still’; ‘it’s not possible to lie/ when you speak out of the body’s mine’. 

But if its non-othering strategies are in beta-test, it’s hard to fault the collection’s heart, attention, heterogeneity and, not least, willingness to acknowledge the horrors to come. ‘That noise,’ says one character of a calving ice shelf, ‘is the end of the world.’ ‘I see/ grief everywhere’, the final speaker admits, before the word ‘hope’ materialises like a deus ex machina.

Guy Russell 18th February 2024

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Tears in the Fence 79 is out!

Posted on February 17, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 79 is out!

Tears in the Fence 79 is now available at https://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose poetry, translations, flash fiction and fiction by Sheila E. Murphy, Cindy Botha, Philip Gross, Eliza O’Toole, Jeremy Hooker, Lucy Ingrams, Penny Hope, Jane Ayers, David Sahner, Gerald Killingworth, Peter Robinson, Cathra Kelliher, Paul Brownsey, Tracy Turley, Danielle Hubbard, Jude Rosen, Aidan Semmens, Mélisande Fitzsimons, Massimo Fantuzzi, Jazmine Linklater, Sarah Frost, Maria Jastrzębska, Elizabeth Chadwick Pywell, Dylan Stallard, Huw Gwynn-Jones, Colin Campbell Robinson, Philip Rösel Baker, Xoái David, Alyson Hallett, Robin Thomas, Poonam Jain, Branko Čegec translated by Mehmed Begić, Mijenko Kovačoćek, Beth Davyson, Vik Shirley, Rachel Jeffcoat, Garry MacKenzie, Elaine Randell, Sarah Salway, Haley Jenkins, S. J. Literland, Simon Jenner and Janet Hancock.

The critical section consists of Editorial by David Caddy, Will Fleming on Maurice Scully, David Caddy on Poetic Space: some notes on home, Barbara Bridger on Maria Tsvetaeva, Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani in conversation with Branko Čegec, Simon Jenner on Basil Buntings Letters, Guy Russell on Max Jacob, Andrew Duncan on Gustav Sobin, Ric Hool on Norman Jope, Barbara Bridger on Louise Anne Buchler, Steve Spence on Lyndon Davies, Simon Jenner on Pratibha Castle, Elaine Randell on John Muckle, Jenny He on Jennifer Lee Tsai, Andrew Duncan on new Scottish poets, Claire Booker on Alan Price, Guy Russell on Kjell Espmark, translated by Robin Fulton Macpherson, Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue, Notes on Contributors and David Caddy’s Afterword.

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Modern Fog by Chris Emery (Arc Publications)

Posted on February 13, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Modern Fog by Chris Emery (Arc Publications)

Chris Emery has said that, when completing the final details of Modern Fog, his fourth collection, twenty-three years after his first, it felt like another debut: “it feels as if these are the very first words, something spoken under the breath at a crossroads where you scan the bare, disturbed fields and make your choice in the hard wind – to find a new path, to head out again towards that darker line of trees.”

This is because the collection came out of a period of release in terms of his writing in which several new themes emerged. This period of his life began when he left publishing to become Director of Operations of The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham – “a Marian shrine with its origins in the Middle Ages”. This was a move that he characterised at the time as being one of serving Christ. 

The new themes he found included writing about spirituality, something, he once thought he would never do, and mystery – “the mystery of place, the mystery of the Other, the mystery of ourselves”. Additionally, he had “fallen in love with writing about the natural world”, and the landscape of Norfolk therefore features heavily in these poems.

While he left the Shrine over two years ago and says that “another version of myself has since emerged”, nevertheless Modern Fog, through its “poems about landscape and animals and distant fictions” is primarily a collection about giving up “on who you think you are”, “to become something new, something estranged, maybe even something redeemed from the silly paraphernalia of midlife identity” – a time when a new vulnerability can emerge.

In Radio Nostalgia, his second collection, Emery wrote that:

Together we are a modern fog,

the idea of the better dead, immortalised grey

eyes above subtitled totally idealised dialogue.

The American poet Forrest Gander suggested that Radio Nostalgia “opens a way into wakefulness” with “a stunning lexicon” containing “short phrases stuffed with grit, petrol and spleen”, as Emery refuses to look away from “a twenty-first century so wounded and blout that only the language that crawls over it shimmers with its implicit hope for transformation and redemption”. This description also seems relevant to Modern Fog; both in style and intent.

Now Emery writes of ‘six hundred years of stone / that break upon the modern fog’. In doing so, he is writing of St Helen’s Ranworth, the ‘Cathedral of the Broads’, around and within which he journeys in a sequence of twelve tower-shaped poems that form a central pillar to this collection. 

As he views the panel paintings of the twelve Apostles at St Helen’s he marvels:

                                    how

it has survived its own cause

and downfall to reach us, the story that

holds the story, the matter of it

that reaches us from a common tree,

a thriving binding root.

‘Ranworth sheds / its gold deliveries’ and these include:

Back there, inside the vestigial,

apostles of the inundation

stand neatly pinned in oak,

thin light knits, then spreads.

As a result, he wants ‘to stitch my dark / to yours inside a river ritual’:

         Something the walls may 

register above the dry piscina there

a thousand years from now.

Something I will not understand

but still impart.

‘The Path’ seems to sum up most fully the journey he undertakes in this collection as he and his companion go ‘picking their way / through whin and leaf mould along the path’. They walk along ‘dirt paths alone’ through ‘all that hot wheat falling / and chalk beds, the clay beds, sinking / through each gold afternoon’ up ‘to the king oak’:

         Somehow we will reach it, planting a quarterstaff

         to recognise a new path …

         I have led you here through all possible music

         for something we cannot wholly know

         and you will pull up my hand and kiss it

         and carefully we walk on.

John Hartley Williams, to whom Emery’s work has sometimes been compared, wrote that Emery ‘possesses an attack vocabulary and has the ambition to think the unthinkable’. With this collection, as it follows Emery’s own path, it may be that intuitions of spirituality in sacred spaces become the unthinkable that is experienced, shaped and shared.

Jonathan Evens 13th February 2024

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Selected Poems by Gill McEvoy (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)

Posted on February 12, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Selected Poems by Gill McEvoy (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)

The collection begins with a poem called ‘Dairy-Room in the Old Farmhouse’ – an evocative title. However, although the narrator is sampling a ‘slick of yellow cream’ there is little sweetness here. The opening lines are chilling, for the narrator feels ‘pinioned’ by silence ‘as if snakes had risen from its shelves/to turn you into stone’. The next poem ‘Catching the Turkey-Pluckers Bus’, conveys weariness, drudgery and an overhanging sense of death for there are ‘stains of blood’ and feathers trapped in the folds of the workers’ overalls. In the plucking shed itself the routine ‘goes on’ in ‘a flour/of feather and dust’ and the first of several ghosts in this collection rise up soundlessly – ‘the white plumed creatures/that we knew as geese.’

‘In the Butcher’s Shop’ gives us graphic descriptions of a place where dripping blood is like the rain that ‘plops’ against the window glass and bacon is ‘pink as skin’. An image that will stay with me is the ‘smell of sawn bone’ which, like gravel, sticks in the narrator’s throat. Even more shockingly explicit is this how-to instruction in ‘Skinning Rabbits’:

            The steps exact. First, cut off the feet,

            make an incision in the belly,

            peel back the skin – like stripping a tangerine –

            slip out the hind legs,

            ease it over the buttocks,

            up the spine, around the head,

            down the front legs.

            Discard.

            Then gut and clean.

A brutal but practical method. But what illuminates this poem is the tenderness and poignancy in the lines that follow as the skinned bodies ‘lay as innocent and pink/as babies after baths. /I could have hugged them up in big warm towels/and sung to them. // I knew I’d never eat them.

Precise, detailed, clear-eyed writing about a way of life for those who farm the land, such as the one  who can show affection for thirteen years to a pig and her ‘prolific litters’ and still have the necessary detachment, when she has outlived her usefulness, to turn her into bacon and ham, albeit remembering the pleasure of feeling her ‘bristly back’ that he loved to stroke and scratch. (‘Pig’).

I find these eight poems in the earliest part of the collection particularly strong and memorable for their mixture of brutality and compassion. But the next group, which considers the author’s family members with their foibles and idiosyncrasies, is also compelling. My favourite, although it is quite painful to read, is ‘Sunday Lunch’ where the woman in the narrative spends ‘all morning, from the very early hours,’ cooking a delicious lunch for her husband only to have it spurned and her efforts cursed because his inattention to time has caused the food to spoil. ‘In the Garden I Search for You’, a poem that is beautiful in its nostalgia, brings us another ghost, that of the mother ‘pale as the ghost swift moths that dip and rise/rise and dip/over the evening-primrose bed’. 

It is hard to select poems for comment out of Gill McEvoy’s Selected Poems. There is such choice. Two that stand out particularly, for me, are ‘Jade Plant’ and ‘Football, Kuala Lumpur’. Both share the motif of rain but in contrasting ways. In the former poem there is drought, the ‘earth is parched and shrinking’ and a strict hosepipe ban is in place in Britain. The only living thing that is flourishing is a jade plant on a windowsill above the sink. ‘Every leaf’, says the narrator, ‘a reservoir of hoarded wealth’. In Kuala Lumpur the scene is contrasting for ‘Rain loves this place, loves the way/ the open hands of city trees receive it.’ A thousand frogs and barefoot boys with footballs rejoice in ‘floods of water, /spray and steam flying’ and there is laughter from the children and ‘chortling’ from the frogs ‘that leap and spring/in their own games/on every pavement’s edge.’

I deliberately used the word ‘rejoice’ to describe the mood of this poem and although there is sadness and bloodshed throughout the collection and death is ever present, I feel the essence of the book is one of joy, or at least of wonder. A Selected Poems is a special achievement – a distillation of the author’s choice of their most significant poems. I am very glad to read and share these. 

Mandy Pannett 12th February 2024

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Pine Island by Lucy Sheerman (Shearsman Books)

Posted on February 4, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Pine Island by Lucy Sheerman (Shearsman Books)

Pine Island, apparently inspired by a writing exercise, is described as ‘a correspondence, or possibly a litany’ and comprises an intermittent series of letters, written, but never sent, to ‘a person who does or does not exist’. All the letters begin with a date and place and are addressed to ‘Dearest’. The book itself is inscribed ‘for you dearest’.

A tantalising and totally enthralling one-way correspondence. The effect is hypnotic as the reader touches the fringes of the changing seasons and moods. This narrator has a need to write, to let ‘secrets’ slip out, to write into the void. ‘The instinct to confide these hurts is overwhelming,’ she says, compelled to confess her ‘frail hopes and fears.’

Memories, with their deceptions and yearnings, form the basis of the letter/poems. ‘What moments should I hold on to?’ she asks, ‘I am standing in a bowl of light, surrounded by the chorus of birds and the sense of distance. You would not hear me calling from here and sometimes I don’t know what I would say if you could.’ 

There is a motif of birds in Pine Island. Thoughts and words are described as ‘winged’, they ‘flutter but do not move…It is a kind of seeking, this letter I write each day, trying to piece ideas together, which won’t be held.’

A thread of narrative runs through these letters – elusive and enigmatic references to the writer’s outer life – complexities involving her mother, her sister, her children. I found the passages that talk about her troubled eldest son quite painful to read, the way he is described as ‘spinning through the rooms of the house. Seeking something he could destroy … Once I would have held him and waited for the anger to subside. Gingerbread man, still running, even when gripped in the jaws of the fox… He cannot bear my touch, flinches at my approach.’ Heartbreaking, but the narrator is not asking for pity. 

Then there are the operations the fear of cutting, the dread of knives, mastectomies undergone by both the narrator and her sister. Throughout, there is blood and ‘the precision of fear pinning you into place’, the ‘fear of cutting, the dread of knives.’ 

But it is the narrator’s inner life that is so skilfully depicted by Lucy Sheerman in Pine Island and which enhances the sensation of mystery and unreality. ‘All this story will be a dream soon,’ says the narrator, ‘and you, dear reader, a fellow sleeper.’ There is silence at the heart of the book which allows the writer to make ‘a border all around me but it is filled with gaps. Light and sound seep through.’ And there are shadows too, but ‘so slight as to be imperceptible… I am clinging to the walls of this house.’ 

Silence, shadows, fear – it is all an alternative to thinking about mortality which ‘weaves around your ankles like an affectionate cat. It’s even there in the sound of the birds.’ 

These birds, as already mentioned, become a symbol, a recurring motif. Especially so are the wild geese which the narrator sees with an artist friend at Kettle’s Yard – a sight that haunts them like an augury of ‘painful, disorienting hope.’ 

Here are some of the many mentions of geese in Pine Island:

‘Now each time I hear the sound of geese I take it as a kind of sign.’

‘Ungainly geese cross the Backs … It’s a bitter day, snapping from sunshine back to shade; curls of cold seep into sleeves and collar.’ 

‘I hear a solitary goose on the river, lost.’

‘Geese on the wing, it is winter breaking apart.’

‘I never imagined I would be gripped by a sense of horror at the augury of birds. It’s not as if the knowledge would have changed what followed, the playing out of a story you belong to, like a nightmare you wait to wake from …There’s a severing that must happen’.

Pine Island is mesmerising. No review can do it justice. Lucy Sheerman is, without doubt, a writer who knows her craft. She compares it to catching rabbits: ‘I only have to wait long enough and I can lure language into an open sack.’

Mandy Pannett 4th February 2024

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Joe Hill Makes His Way Into The Castle by Katy Evans-Bush (CB Editions)

Posted on February 3, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Joe Hill Makes His Way Into The Castle by Katy Evans-Bush (CB Editions)

Katy Evans-Bush has several previous poetry books and pamphlets out, but they are very different to this new volume, produced during lockdown when – lonely and uninspired – Evans-Bush returned to a favourite poet from her teenage years, the countercultural anarchist poet Kenneth Patchen. As well as re-engaging with his poetry, Evans-Bush cut out phrases, mixed them up and used a handful to riff on for a whole new series of poems: a kind of Dada-esque starting point that was quickly subsumed, overwritten and processed into her own work.

Having said that, Bush-Evans seems quietly paranoid about acknowledging her inspirational material: there’s a long list of ‘Source Notes’, listing the individual Patchen poems she took phrases from at the end of the book. For me, this is totally unnecessary, since each poem is titled ‘From lines by Kenneth Patchen #(1-51)’ and the phrases are adapted, recontextualised or reworked into new texts. 

Like Patchen’s own writing, these poems are by turns emotional, confessional, political or declamatory; sometimes relying on simplistic stories, emotion and opinions:

     What are these stories? Are they for self justification,

     & only when we think we’re caught? Is this really

     the best we can do?     [‘From lines by Kenneth Patchen #38’]

The poems are best when they look out at the world rather than inside, to what the poet is missing or feeling, whether that is sorry for herself or angry at what’s going on:

     No no no Oh we here are living out our

     little pretend lives drinking our beer feeling

     bored or annoyed no no the pandemic the

     three-storey lockdowns with wine and jig-

     saws and too much Amazon piss off you

    old men with your paranoid answers no

     don’t you come to me chatting your facile

     self-satis     [#34]

What is said is totally understandable, and I imagine fairly representative of how many of us were feeling, but it doesn’t make for great poetry. Better is #37, also self-reflective but more structured and orderly, considered:

     You’d be a ghost too

                                        Worn to a stub

     Expectoplasm

                                        A thing of the past

     Don’t touch a thing

                                        Oh wait it can’t

     It’s a Zen thing

                                        About opening up

     Examining yourself

Evans-Bush understands, however, that ‘there’s always another viewpoint’ [#15] and that

     The origin of this, and this, about which we know nothing,

     becomes its own folkloric meaning & open to interpretation,

     thus nothing.       [#14]

That ‘nothing’ hovers around the edges of lockdown depression:

     It wasn’t much of a summer. You could as well

     write the biography of the northern rain as sit

     on a deck chair in a sweeping expanse.      [#13]

but there is also some gentle wit, often at the expense of the narrator:

    The whisky wraps its duplicitous arms around me;

     I always pull at a party and this one’s just the whisky

     & Robert Burns & me.

and by #44 even the author is ‘So tired of all this pathos, this emotion, all these / particulars’.

However, in her ‘Preface’, Evans-Bush quite rightly suggests that the world now (or as the book went to print) is even darker than it was back in lockdown, and that her worries about ‘the material beginning to feel dated were misplaced.’ Instead, she now sees the book as ‘like a map’ as well as ‘being like a diary, or a phone’. (The latter is a reference to #29 where the narrator speaks directly to Patchen through an [imaginary] tin can and string telephone.)

A map is a good thing. It suggests finding a way, but also allows for the fact it is only one possible way of offering directions and locations, only one way of understanding landscape and place, only one set of symbols and shorthand. So, your reading of this book may be different, less melancholy than mine; you may concentrate on the revolutionary zeal and optimistic declamations scattered throughout the text. Either way, this is a fascinating project, a brilliant way of engaging with Patchen’s poetry, and the legacy of Joe Hill. The penultimate poem, #50, notes that ‘We find / out by being & then it’s too late’, but we also find out by engaging with being as it happens, as we go through life. And trying to find the truth, perhaps even having a private revolution:

     & we all know, everybody knows, that

     truth is always what they don’t say. So

     shut up, sing up, kiddos. What a revolution.

Marc Bolan (a kiddo who sang up) quite rightly stated that ‘You can’t fool the children of the revolution’ and although the 60s dream turned into a 1970s hangover and never bore the utopia hoped for, lockdown and politicians’ antics since, seem to me to slowly, ever so slowly, be provoking dissent and a desire for change. Evans-Bush is a voice to listen to, as indeed is Patchen’s; and thanks are due to CB Editions for publishing this persuasive, personal, original and revolutionary collection.

Rupert Loydell 3rd February 2024

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The Street by John Yamrus (Anxiety Press)

Posted on January 28, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Street by John Yamrus (Anxiety Press)

I have always loved John Yamrus’s minimalist approach to poetry, so it came as no surprise to me that I love his minimalist approach to memoir in his latest book, The Street. The Street is ostensibly about the street where Yamrus grew up and his childhood years, but it encompasses much more than that. In a postmodern and often meta approach to storytelling, Yamrus shows us what it was to live in a blue collar coal town in the Northeast, which might have been any working class town anywhere in America, while at the same time obliquely discussing the nature of memory and consciousness, what it means to perceive through the limited lens of ourselves. Also, because he is approaching his memoir through flash fiction vignettes rather than an overarching narrative, he creates a memory of a place more than of an event or series of events. In that, he is able to focus on what it was like for him to inhabit a small Pennsylvanian town in the 1950s and 1960s, what that culture and time was for the people who lived there. Because of this approach, it is a memoir of the street he lived on as much as it is a memoir of his childhood, as the title of the book suggests.

            The Street as a memoir of place rather than events explores all of those people, ways of life, and traditions that have passed on. This memoir, however, is not cheap nostalgia. He remembers the place with both love and bitterness. A largely Catholic community, he remembers the aggression and unkindness of religious people and leaders. The priests in his community are interested in controlling others, and the nuns are often angry. Religion is about dividing people. When he asks about why he is supposed to hate people of other religions, a nun depicts Hindus, and by extension all non-Catholics as unfeeling to the point of evil: 

they don’t value life the way we do . . . in their religion, they think that whatever happens is god’s will and there just no changing it and if they’re doing something like riding in a boat and someone falls overboard, they’ll just sit there and watch while that person drown right in front of them, even if it’s their own son or daughter or mother or father (77-78).

This is the kind of stereotyping and lies that he is given every day, and soon he learns to hate Jesus and the people who preach about him. That is not to say that this is a memoir rooted in bitterness; he simply does not remember everything as being perfect, and of course, no place is perfect. What he remembers with love are the people on his street. These were coal miners who cared for each other and died young because of the difficulties of their profession. He remembers how loving they were to each other and to him as well.

            The Street, however, is more than just a discussion of his life; he also discusses the nature of consciousness and memory, and how the rememberer constructs meaning. Early on in the book, he breaks into a scene to self-consciously discuss this idea: 

This memoir is going to be difficult to keep straight . . . for the reader as well as the writer . . . because memories aren’t linear (anyone who’s read Proust knows that) . . . memories are like leaves on a tree . . . and they fall at different times, at different speeds, in different ways . . . eventually, no matter how they fall, they end up covering the ground (30).

Throughout, he discusses not only what he remembers but also how he remembers it. He knows that his father was imperfect, as any person is; however, his father died at the age of 45, which was when Yamrus was young, so his memories are tinged with longing, regret, and hero worship: “he’d step out of that coal truck and it was like god coming down from heaven. the door would swing open and he’d step out, real slow, like a gunslinger . . . like Gary Cooper in High Noon” (27). This way of remembering the people and places of his past adds a level of realism to it. Rather than trying to find a kind of objective truth, he lets his truths be subjective when they need to be. The realism comes through his subjectivity because we all view the world in this way, through the lens of our own memory and consciousness. He comes back to this approach over and over until we understand that he’s talking about the nature of memory, his and ours.

            I think that Yamrus’s The Street is my favorite book by Yamrus, and that’s saying a good deal because I have always loved his approach. I did not grow up in a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania, but I felt at home in his world. He remembers his world as we all remember ours with the emotions that well up when we look back. 

John Brantingham 28th January 2024

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