One Step at a Time by Alice Kavounas (Shearsman Books)

Posted on July 2, 2024 by tearsinthefence
One Step at a Time by Alice Kavounas (Shearsman Books)

A desire to see more clearly colours the poems in Alice Kavounas’ collection One Step at a Time as they migrate, via the Prague Spring and the Coachella Valley, from 19th Century Turkey to ‘the ancient ophiolitic ground’ of present-day Cornwall. Kavounas is driven by an ‘obsession for observation’ and displays a very fine attention to detail. But birds remind her repeatedly of her shortsightedness, and she marvels at their more far-reaching vision. She says of the owl in particular:

            Even Athena needed an owl

            to help her see the truth.

            Why not me, here on earth?

Athena’s presence in these lines is no accident; given Kavounas’ Greek heritage, her mention of the goddess hints at her conviction that close attention to the past will reward us with wisdom. Much like the

            deep sea diver

            whose ocean floor exploratory

            has yielded ancient wrecks, glittering treasures.

A careful interest in—or rather a reverence for—the past, guides many of the journeys Kavounas makes in these poems. Her curiosity ranges from personal to political, from the microscopic to the monumental; often, it examines the interplay between the two. Of her father’s hometown Aivali, Turkey, where 150,000 ethnic Greeks were violently persecuted in the First World War, and to which, we learn, he was never to return once he had been driven out:

            Somewhere in that hinterland is more than just your farm.

            That vast expanse conceals the bodies of your parents

            left to die along with all who stumbled to their death

            their bloodline tracing forward into future generations

            extending back, and back – like all these criss-crossing lines

            on this wrinkled map.

This sense of movement (‘I’ve always been nomadic’) and, in particular, uprooting (‘Blown south by instinct, chance / and circumstance’) is pervasive. But Kavounas’ backward glance, her refusal to forget, is searching and considered. It is occasionally too personal but never nostalgic. She is aware, too, of the dangers, of the more harmful ways in which such a refusal might manifest. A friend’s mother exhumes her collection of fur coats from a refrigerator:

            The alphabetic order of it all, the idea that this roll call of the wild

            would somehow revive her, or at the very least, that these ghosts

            of creatures, trapped in the desert, could offer comfort.

            One for each day of the week, she whispered, almost to herself

What other consequences come of all this movement and contingency? For Kavounas, they raise questions of who she is and how to cross the gap between herself and other people. It is the latter she stresses most. There are desperate breakdowns in communication—with a brother, with a lover—that may or not be recovered; there is grief for a father who could never return home; and there is simple disappearance (‘utterly unforgettable people / who insist on vanishing before my waking eye’). But there is also something stoic, even hopeful, that Kavounas threads into the seams of her sentences, that remains despite all she sees in the past, and which turns our heads from yesterday to today; and also, to tomorrow. 

Samuel Bowerman 2nd July 2024

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Poppy by Joseph Minden (Carcanet)

Posted on June 30, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Poppy by Joseph Minden (Carcanet)

With its ‘white teeth’ and red ‘tongues’, the poppy speaks of the British war dead; for over a century it’s been this country’s prime symbol of commemorative remembrance. It’s regarded as apposite for this role because of its commonness (as in ‘the common soldier’), its colour (blood), its analgesic properties (healing), and its yearly re-appearance (anniversary, renewal) in the former WW1 battlefields and war-cemeteries of Northern France and Belgium.

The principal narrative in this book describes its narrator’s car tour to these ‘squat’, ‘cinematic’ graveyards. He walks around ‘aimlessly above the/ body parts’. He notes the ‘forgotten’ Picardy bleuets which are the French commemorative flower, the ‘crisp lettering’ of the ‘luminous’ graves, and the other ‘pre-dead’ visitors. He finds a German polyandrium and the headstones of deserters (‘SHOT AT DAWN/ […]/ A WORTHY SON/ OF HIS FATHER’) and of Chinese Labour Corps recruits. He contrasts the circular layouts of neolithic monuments with these gravestones and poppies ‘stretched out, row on row’, as if the dead soldiers are eternally on parade. He asks: ‘[w]hat should we make of the fallen?’

But the poppy is a pharmakon, an unstable signifier, as the post-structuralists used to say. It might be an even more apposite symbol, this poet suggests provocatively, for the nineteenth-century Opium Wars fought by Britain to force China to import the drug. Except that those massacres in the cause of free-trade substance-abuse go strangely unmemorialised in Britain. In China, we’re told, they are far from forgotten, so that it’s offensive for British officials there to wear a poppy – but, of course, they do anyway. 

In its scrutiny of these and related topics, this first collection deploys many forms and genres: syllabics, common measure, Mark Doty-style tercets with stepped indents, journal-, travel- and dream-poems, lots of short-sentence note-form, a deft sonnet sequence containing some great rhymes (veranda-propaganda-philander-‘and a’ was a first to me), and a sequence called ‘Headstones’ shaped as tall, narrow, full-justified blocks. Similes are used to make thematic links (‘dawn came like stone’) and subsidiary characters treated functionally. ‘Jason’ provides meta-commentary (‘Memories […] only yield themselves’). ‘Mina’, the featureless ex, seems to represent loss. The family-history characters and elements (Romania, WW2, Cambridgeshire) felt less well-folded into the titular theme, other than via top-level abstractions like ‘memory’ or ‘war’ or ‘inheritance/ heritage’.

The book oscillates too round its title’s sense as ‘pop-py’, as ‘popular’. Very familiar bits English history and literature (Harold at Hastings, Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Listeners’) interknit with Geoffrey Hill, ‘The Wanderer’ and obscurer heritage sites. The difficult opening poem acts rather like a Horatian arceo. Then again, there are a good few immediately welcoming poems enjoyable for their straightforward bathos and surprise:

            Watching a drunk Brit
            with Lest We Forget
            stitched into the sleeve
            of his polo shirt
            stumble around and burble
            at the Menin Gate
            in Ypres
            for the last post,
            Jason said
            *
            I forget what he said.

It’s nonetheless one of those collections that requires you frequently to assemble meaning by searching out things well beyond general knowledge: Lin Zexu? Ferienort? Mamaliga? Lebuh Chulia? This increasingly adopted style of Internet Modernism implies not so much a doctus lector as a docked one, in which a poem’s lean brevity is achieved via digital outsourcing, leaving its initial impression one of lacunate intertextual links, and whose first-base success resides in generating enough curiosity for the smartphone-enabled reader willingly to follow them. A writer as self-aware as Joseph Minden signals all this not just by puns around ‘re-membering’ (or ‘re-fusing’) the dismembered, but also by referencing Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of narrative as clue-following, as ‘hunters marking traces’. And no disapproval is intended here: the book finishes by delivering (what seemed to me) its best poem of all – ‘Conditional’, a complex free verse tour-de-force tying up Kitchener, neolithic monuments, Dark Age Britain, a relationship, Kipling’s lapidary slogans, and the toppling of slave-owner statues. It makes an apt ending to an uncommonly memorable read.

Guy Russell 30th June 2024

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1/, tests by Luke Emmett (Litter Press)

Posted on June 29, 2024 by tearsinthefence
1/, tests by Luke Emmett (Litter Press)

I’ve come across Luke Emmett’s poetry on the internet in small doses. This larger ‘small dose’ made up of 20 minimalist poems is an intriguing read. Each poem is discrete, puzzling, sonorous and yet demanding of an explanation which is (obviously) not forthcoming. Which is not to say that they are unsuccessful as poems because this is clearly not the case yet even with material which plays with obscurity and difficulty the reader (this reader in any cases) puzzles away at interpretation because the temptation is unavoidable. Now, to a few of the poems, not necessarily in chronological order:

          That Hobgoblin,

          he’s a real card isn’t he?

          What does he say?

          NOTHING IS FOREVER

This is in fact the final poem in the book and probably one of the most ‘coherent.’ The title runs into the following line and prompted me to check the meaning of ‘hobgoblin’ as I realised I wasn’t entirely sure of the derivation! Ah! Puck from a Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course and references to mischief and shape shifting are useful pointers. We could go into a history of folklore and pagan conflicts with Christianity here but best not. The point being that the intelligence being transmitted in these four short limes is of an ‘outsider’ nature and points towards serious jesting and philosophical puzzling. Which is what we seem to get in abundance with these poems where syntax and function is slightly skewed and where the sound aspect of the poetry (the way words jam up against each other) is as important as the semantic content. I find myself reading these pieces through quickly to get an overall feel then attempting to relate this ‘immediate grasp’ to a sense of conventional narrative construction. Which is completely mad, of course, but what you (I) instinctively attempt and I have to say that the process is both frustrating and very enjoyable. These poems remind me, to some extent of John Philips’ minimalist investigations. Here are a couple more to ‘get to grips with.’

          Rub

          Jacket on chair

          still there. I will

          wear it;

          it creaks.

          Buttons

          For short thread string to

          cloth, the button I’ve kept

          has three holes, shines.

          Continue to pick the loose 

          matter; I hope for visitors.

There’s a continuity here as both poems deal with items of clothing which take on a ‘life of their own’ as they are the key subjects of each piece. There’s a basic rhyme in the first piece, slightly humorous, there is a suggestion of the owner, the ‘I’ of the piece, and very little else. We may have ‘visitors’ in the second poem, a hint at isolation perhaps, a touch of melancholy, a note of ‘obsessional’ behaviour (‘pick the loose/matter’) the possibility of hope, yet each poem feels complete and somehow just right. I haven’t read any of Samuel Beckett’s poetry but I imagine it may have been a bit like this.

          Nightshade Hymns

           Bloody poison of milky red

           berry

                 shade

          toward sleep and move route,

          spit in basin, check image,

          has passion again, unfamiliar.

Here the reader can perhaps construct a narrative around the given information. We are probably talking about deadly nightshade (again I felt the need to consult google!) but this may be a diversion as the berries of the nightshade are black though they are apparently related by family to the tomato. The linking of ‘poison’ to ‘passion’ as much by sound and look as to meaning is indicative and the reference to sleep (death via shade?) again suggests something toxic and intoxicating! Yet ‘move route’ and ‘unfamiliar’ are more troubling though tempting at the same time. The point being I think, as I’ve suggested above, is that you have to take the entire poem as an entity and attempt to intuitively appreciate its whole without being bogged down with ‘meaning’ while yet being unable to completely avoid the search. I’m sure I’ve read a lot of ‘obscure’ poetry which doesn’t sing and somehow work on you and which you wish you’d never encountered but these pieces are successful though I’m not entirely sure why.

     Here’s a final poem to further whet your appetite, hopefully:

          Stuck

          Movement; a spasm

          of laughter accusing

          uncared. Taste

          pain to bodies, touch

          on coupled scissor,

          reddish, bent.

It’s the careful relation of the words to each other (accusing/uncared, for example) and the force of such minimalist phrasing which makes these pieces really shine. There’s a sense of disturbance and also isolation and of a possibly troubled mind but I don’t want to overplay this thought too much.

I could try out an overall critique based on what little I know about Luke Emmett but I’m not going to attempt that here. Suffice to say that I’m glad I encountered these short poems and was pleased to make some faltering attempts at interpretation and engagement. I enjoyed the experience.

Steve Spence 29th June 2024

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Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter (Seren Books)

Posted on June 10, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Grief’s Alphabet by Carrie Etter (Seren Books)

I’m sceptical of most confessional poetry but Carrie Etter’s book of elegies for her mum is a tough, not-to-be-missed exploration of grief and loss. Although there is a titular poem using the A-Z, the book feels more like a response to what was a plan but soon proved impossible. We only get ‘Notes for A’ and a few other letters such as ‘W Is for Wedding’ and ‘M Is Usually Memory and Occasionally McDonalds’; more poignant perhaps is ‘F Is for Fuck This’, where the title is the complete poem, the poem the closing one of the second of three sections.

It gives an impression of reaching an impasses, the author resisting her own attempt to order her grieving responses which perhaps the writer in her had partly mapped out. Instead we get a wide range of voices, forms and stories which gradually reveal Etter’s past, relationships and loss.

‘Origin Story’, the first section, reveals Etter was adopted, was a sister, had teenage attitude, and tells stories about her Mum, her Dad and of a ‘Pregnant Teenager and her Mama’. Of graduation and travels to England before ‘The News’ arrives back home in the States:

     Crackling across the Atlantic
     my mother’s voice.
     She says ‘Your father,’
     and, as one, we fall.

In time, post coma and now a paraplegic, ‘father’ dies and we are gifted ‘The Last Photograph’ of Mrs. Etter before the poet returns to England. 

Later, or perhaps sooner (we are not told) Etter will have to face ‘The Brink’: her mother’s death, again across the ocean, along with the physical, mental and emotional reactions, most startlingly recorded in ‘The Body in Mourning’. Here, the poet has to endure ‘the daily waking to      mourning’ but also considers the bodily results of grieving:

     O leaky body      such water      such flood, mucus and

     mascara she’d forgotten      her charred cheeks in the mirror

and the body of the deceased:

     the body still, eyes open      a soundless, resounding no

     […]

     the body become stone, the breath       reluctant

     *

     and after years?     the body’s subtler flux

     amid the elements       an hour aflame      or drenched

     weight as mineral     deep in earth      or almost

     transparent, nearly air      thin linen pined to string

     adrift or aloft             depending on

After this open-ended poem, the second section of poems moves to ‘H Is for Hurtle, J Is for July’, a retrospective look back at coping. Then comes the F poem mentioned earlier, an assertion of self, of coping, of having to go on.

Having to go on, however, into the ‘Orphan Age’, the book’s final section. Loss, of course, cannot be simply swept aside; all too often – as I know from firsthand experience – small and often stupid things can trigger grief anew. But you can, and Etter does, take refuge in the everyday, be that snuggling up to a cat or baking and eating tuna casserole. Also the less everyday: Etter gives us a prose poem ‘W Is for Wedding’, acknowledging that her mother both ‘is and isn’t’ there but also content to ‘take a step, then another, toward joy.’

The rest of the book is mostly calm and lucid, philosophical even, with poems about endless birth and rebirth (‘Oroboros’), the memories brought up when playing crazy golf, and the completed alphabet of grief poem. But there is also a hint of mysticism: ‘Instructions for the Glimpse’, the invocation of a ‘Ghost’, and a moving final poem, ‘Reincarnation as Seed’, where a new plant is urged to ‘grow / grow toward light’ as the personification or representation of ‘my dear mother’, urged to ‘bask’ in the sunshine.

Writing poems about death and grieving is an almost impossible task but Etter has managed to carefully walk the tightrope between mawkishness, confession and bewilderment. Her words combine vulnerability and emotion with a writerly detachment, seeing anew and documenting the struggle with ‘not falling face first into woe.’ This is brave, powerful, moving poetry that has clearly been fought for every step of the way.

Rupert Loydell 10th June 2024


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An Invitation to Share the Elegance of the Gazelle* 

Posted on May 30, 2024 by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani

Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani’s Gazelle, Gazela, Gazelle

“Only after I decided that I would not or did not have
to choose a language did I arrive at my writing.”

Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, (English) Foreword
to Gazelle, Gazela, Gazelle, ‘My arrival at writing:
on the (non-)sacrifice of writing’

This carefully chosen and presented collection of multilingual poetry extends generous invitations to the reader. 

It offers immersion in ‘the words, worlds and sonorities of the different languages’ at work and at play here, Croatian, English and French; it offers participation in the power of multilingual poetry to challenge linguistic hierarchies, structures, expectations and assumptions; it offers multiple experiences of multilingual poetry’s potential to disrupt, perhaps to disturb, certainly to delight. 

Beyond the text, a journey outwards beckons from the printed page to sound readings of selected poems from the collection (alongside some additional poems) – encouraging a departure from the too often silent act of reading to engage physically with the multiple sounds and sensations of the poems’ language(s) (an experience essential to Jasmina’s multilingual, multifaceted work) – and to discover interlinked images, essays, interviews and meditations on the many forms and meanings of the ‘gazelle’ and the #ghazal which gives the collection its title. 

This additional content can be accessed through the QR code included at the opening of the the collection and at  https://jasminabradovani/pages/gazela. Explore the generosity of material which exceeds and spills over from this concise collection and enter the world in which Gazelle, Gazela, Gazelle comes into being.

Gazelle also offers a different approach to much of the poet’s previous multilingual poetic practice in which multiple languages often weave together inside one poem. In the recent Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues (Tears in the Fence, 2022) multilingual poems are further interwoven with visual-textual fragments and ‘poem-tattoos’ (irresistibly calling to mind Abdelkébir Khatibi’s ‘mémoire tatouée’). There, poems in turn interweave across the collection, moving beyond poetic and linguistic experimentation to complex language interplay. In Gazelle, the reader experiences the multilingual differently: each poem apparently complete unto itself within its language…. and yet, and yet…… each poetic creation and each language calls to the others, exceeding apparent boundaries and borders. Both approaches to engaging with the multilingual and with poetic interplay articulate fullness and loss inherent in these forms of poetry-making, carrying memories, emotions, sensations; both articulate the in-betweenness of identity, of culture, of language(s).

Of poetic creation in three languages, Jasmina writes:

“The three versions of the poem that I have written become translation of something that does not reside at the level of the linguistic; they become representations, reflections of a non-linguistic form of thought, of a series of images that exist ‘before’ language and that only acquire their meaning and linguistic form in the system of language” (‘“Unbound” Lines: Writing in the Space of the Multilingual’, Balkan Poetry Today, February 2018; https://jasminabradovani.com/blog/unbound-lines-writing-in-the-space-of-the-multilingual).

The open, curious, alert reader shares this experience of the journey towards and within multilingual poetry and the experience of how the practice of poetry and – essentially – the poetic voice comes into being(s), takes shape(s) and finds expression(s). 

Most readers will not read, speak or understand all three of the languages here. The collection, then, offers further invitation to collective and personal experiences. For me, this takes place back and forth between English and French; the French ‘invitation au voyage’ further carrying resonances of the rhythms and sounds of Baudelaire’s invitation to travel with the poet. The presence and sounds of Croatian intrigue and urge me on to new discoveries.

This is an elegantly crafted collection – both in content and in form – to carry with you. The poems are given multilingual form by a publisher who understands a reader’s delight in the multi-sensory experience of the printed word. It is an elegant treasure to hold, an intellectual pleasure to navigate. Allow yourself to alight on a page and ‘to embrace the familiar and unfamiliar signs on paper through play’ as the poet’s foreword invites us to do.

*The gazelle is an elegant animal, but there was something more; the title that came to my mind has, of course, an irresistible resonance with Moroccan-born, French educated Muriel Barbery’s philosophical French novel L’Élégance du hérisson (2006)/The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2008). I then realised that in Gazelle’s concluding poem, René has a (philosophical) cat, while the novel’s concierge Renée also has her cat… Coincidence? Serendipity? Languages at (inter)play…… 

Debra Kelly, Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking  www.languageacts.org

13th May 2024, London

Images from the Gazelle book launch, 29 December 2023, Galerija Kranjcar, Zagreb (top to bottom: Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, guitarist Ana Čehaić, author Ksenija Kušec, guest and poet, Branko Čegec)

Related materials

Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, “Na svjetlosti dana, u sjeni sjećanja: slika, akordi, gazela / In the light of day, in the shadow of memories: an image, a guitar, a gazelle”, 31 December 2023.

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Bright-Eyed by Sarah Sarai (Poets Wear Prada)

Posted on May 26, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Bright-Eyed by Sarah Sarai (Poets Wear Prada)

There is something about Sarah Sarai’s newest poetry collection Bright-Eyed that reveals that what we see as normal, family, travel, being alive in this world, has a spiritual and even mystical significance. It is also true that the best poets often allow us to understand what should be obvious, but we miss. Sarai shows us the importance of the moment in a number of ways. What struck me most is the poems that dealt with the importance of her family. She writes about those moments with nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters, and her mother as powerfully emotional, and I contrasted them with the bad romantic relationships she describes. She also describes the relationships that work, same sex relationships based on mutual respect and tenderness. This idea of love and tenderness works throughout the collection.

     Sarai is able to delve into the everyday meaning of existence, highlighting that it matters that we are not only alive but awake to the moment and ourselves. In ‘Hummingbird Feeder’ she writes: 

The self? Destroy it.

Step outside.

Top off the hummingbird feeder.

Less time to be terrible.

Less time to judge.

Them, us, yourself (36).

The present moment matters, she tells us. Living in that moment kills the kind of rumination that can destroy a person, and it is the focus on the ego rather than the moment that tends to create moments of pain. Even a little chore can break that cycle. Being aware of any moment can do that, especially sex when done with respect and tenderness.

            Sex with women, floral

            in the night and leathery.

            The moral here:

            Our bodies are soft foothills

            in spring. The sun sends

            its warmth to grass greening

            on soft foothills in spring (23).

She is giving us directions for joy, and I do not think that she would tell us that it’s important to have only same-sex relationships, only that we should act in a certain way and be aware of our own moments. When we make those connections that matter, being awake to the moment and not stuck in our minds helps us to feel their significance.

     As important or possibly more important are the connections that we make with family. These moments are seen throughout the collection, and to me are the most important parts of the collection. She comes back again and again to her niece and nephew as in “O You of the Cotton Pajamas.” The title itself with the more classic use of “O” as opposed to “Oh” brings us to a sense of her relationship as being timeless. The celebration of that relationship feels mythic to me.

            O you of the cotton pajamas

            and frayed bits of life

            in your hair every AM!

            O niece and nephew,

            digging black plastic

            picks from Thrifty’s 

            in your do’s.

            A meteor caromed into

            my nephew’s sleep.

            . . . 

            I settled us one in each bed to

            thrash out theology,

            creator’s peculiar affections

            for us all (7)

There is the sense of something being more than just profoundly right about this relationship but actually created in rhythm with the gods. It is not just that they are in the right place in their world, but in line with the meteors in outer space and with whatever creator there is. Her nephew might have bought his hair pick at Thrifty’s (a discount pharmacy chain in the United States), but that doesn’t mean he is not extraordinary. What she is showing us is the way that we should regard other people in our lives, especially those that are related to us. It is easy to understand these relationships as commonplace, but they are not. Through her eyes, we see them for what they are. This sense is strengthened by the fact that they are of a mixed-race family. The family represents both what the United States is and what it should be.

     Bright-Eyed represents a departure and growth in Sarai’s work. She is reminding me of the way that I should be aware of the world, what I should see and how I should see it. This is not to suggest that she is being preachy or pedantic in any way. She is just opening a new view of the universe and I am fortunate enough to see it.

John Brantingham 26th May 2024

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The Demon Tracts by Kristián Norge (Broken Sleep)

Posted on May 24, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Demon Tracts by Kristián Norge (Broken Sleep)

A compelling mix of mythology, delirium, fairy story and poetry, The Demon Tracts presents a facsimile of ‘Norwegian-Shetlandic modernist poet’ Kristjá Norge’s ‘loggbook’ alongside transcribed and typeset versions of his texts by Scottish musician and poet MacGillviray.

By 1961 Norge was self-exiled to a Scottish Island, an abandoned ‘Hebridean death station’, with only himself for company. Here he documented the phases of the moon, wrote his poetic masterpiece Ravage (published in 2023 by Bloodaxe) and wrestled with the ‘Sluagh nam Marbh’, ‘a malevolent wind of voices’ which transported him into the realms of madness, possession and poetry.

The poems are often abstract elegies to insanity, with Artaud-ian invocation sharing the page with diaristic observations and self-analysis. Compare the inanities of ‘Found tinned tomatoes in the cupboard / ate with black porridge (no milk, no sugar)’ (22nd September) to the bleak ‘Broken’ that constitutes the complete text of ’14th Oct’ or the gnostic musings of ‘Judicial System’:

     Perhaps Christ was a demon:

     he could work through the

     power of suggestion : he 

     could perform diabolical acts :

     he was stronger than the devil :

     be committed public suicide : god

     his father, forgot him.

     He

                  carried the wound of

     self_knowledge. He carried

     blood in his teeth.

     He was a poet. Perhaps Christ

     too, was a demon.

Demon here is a term to do with spirit, not hell and bedevilment. Norge was convinced he was possessed, indeed had become other. ‘I charge the body language of dust / I charge the schism of magical anatomy’ he declaims, also noting later in the same poem (‘Inspoken Verse’) that ‘I add to the nest of knowledge’.

Throughout the book, even its most lucid and mundane moments, Norge is aware that his destiny is to disappear, to be transported elsewhere, and that what he writes is ‘All backward glances’, a product of ‘the way a dream is recollected / and shapes the memory it /contains’ (‘SONG OF ASH/ Ashen Song’). It is unclear whether Norge embraces his own transformation or not. The reliance on the lunar calendar and his obsession with particular images – an Egyptian temple, heretical graffiti, wolves and lions, all scrapbooked into his loggbook – suggest the former; but elsewhere the ghostly images in his dull steel mirror and the windborne voices are a sufferance to be endured.

At ‘FULL MOON 27th JULY, 1961’ Norge is hallucinating. Not only can he hear the whispers of the wind but he can see his own body washed up by the sea, leading to a vision of ancestral fire, corpse parades, fetid breath and ancient knowledge which drives him back to his bed ‘like a drunk’, praying that ‘God and all his risen angels / help me tonight’. By October, in ‘FULL MOON 23RD 1961’, Norge notes that it is ‘dark / in this windblown glass of death’ with ‘all the songs of the travailer camps blown / into me on a hot stem of molten glass’. He is, ends the poem, ‘shattered’. 

The book closes with the fragmentary long poem the book is named after, written it seems on the 11th December 1961, shortly before Norge disappears, perhaps to heaven or hell, perhaps to become part of the wind’s poetic chorus, maybe an imaginary poet eclipsed by the legacy of actual others. In 83 brief segments ‘The Demon Tracts’ invoke, reimagine, summarise and regenerate what has gone before. It is an alchemical condensation, a shamanic journey into being, a final embrace of essential being.

If ‘The Demon Tracts’ itself is reminiscent of Ted Hughes’ Gaudete poems, elsewhere MacGillviray keeps company with Iain Sinclair and his network of writers, film-makers and psychogeographers, academia and Scottish mythology and folk music, whilst also revering the poetic intentions and posturing of singer Jim Morrison. She knows the power of storytelling, ritual and ventriloquized spirits and magic, knows how songs and words can be disrupted, used and reimagined, to facilitate and create both confusion and enlightenment. As Norge writes, ‘Here, knowledge has begun.’

Rupert Loydell 24th May 2024

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Doubly Stolen Fire by Robert Sheppard (Aquifer)

Posted on May 15, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Doubly Stolen Fire by Robert Sheppard (Aquifer)

It turns out, after all these years, that Robert Sheppard is a fictional writer, invented and ventriloquised by Alan Fissure and Robot Handsome. In Doubly Stolen Fire. Sheppard seems to admit that he is just as non-existent as the numerous poets he has previously invented for various anthologies and unrealised projects, all of which he has written about under various pseudonyms for non-existent academic-sounding journals. In a similar manner, most of these texts have been previously published in zines and magazines with unlikely-sounding monikers.

It is a literary hall of mirrors, a meandering authorial maze, where false references cite imaginary critics or non-existent articles or reviews by genuine academics or critics. The trouble is it is all so damn convincing! Who doesn’t want to believe in a talking mongoose or a mannequin which channels poetry during lockdown? Or that Liverpool is the epicentre of so many literary movements and so much radical poetics? Who hasn’t believed in a poet called Robert Sheppard, piecing together the sprawling opus that is Twentieth Century Blues or editing anthologies of beneath-the-radar European poets? Or the jovial facilitator and performer sharing pints, speaking in tongues or co-editing the day’s issue of Writer’s Foreplay with the late great Bob Cobbing?

But if I look back in time I can see how he invented me, too. He was editor of one of the first magazines to publish a poem of mine. He sent letters of support and encouragement, gradually convincing me to publish Stride magazine and then, in due course, Stride Publications, until I was in a position to publish several Robert Sheppard books. Meanwhile, small press volumes of poems I didn’t remember writing would turn up at an alarming rate, along with benevolent notes and positive reviews, all it now seems authored by Robert Sheppard.

Sheppard, himself, writes about the fictional poets of the past and future, but it is the influential imaginary poet of the present we should fear, spreading his alternative histories far and wide through the invisible networks of gullible uncreative writers and would-be poets. It feels unlikely now that the Great British Poetry Society Heist ever happened, or indeed, the Britpop Pottery Revival. In fact, a century of small press poetry and poets, including myself, looks likely to be part of the biggest literary hoax ever to be perpetuated on itself.

Except this is also an implausible construct. There is no Robert Sheppard, there is no editor, author and publisher Rupert Loydell; and he does not review books. Sheppard’s knotty tangles of poetics make no sense and there is no excuse for Fissure and Handsome’s sustained prank. I mean, surely there are enough bloody poets out there already, without inventing any more?

Afterword

I may be non-existent and also paranoid [True, ed.], but within minutes of writing this review on scrap paper in bed last night, I received the following email messages:

     1. If you publish that review you will be sorry.

     2. This is to confirm your pre-publication order of 50 copies of Never Knowingly Run Out of Words by Robert Sheppard. You will be charged when we feel like it.

3. Hi big boy, I’m Lorraine. I am 3.2 miles away. Would you like to see 
           my photos? Or meet up? 

This morning, a parcel van drew up and delivered 24 cans of what was labelled Twentieth Century Booze, along with a copy of the first instalment of Alan Fissure’s Out of Place and Robot Handsome’s An Explication of Colanders. There was also a handwritten copy of the first email, above, with the addition of We now where you lived, in green felt pen on the bottom.

Rupert Loydell 15th May 2024

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Mirror and Stone by Caroline Maldonado Drawings by Garry Kennard (GV Art Ltd)

Posted on May 6, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Mirror and Stone by Caroline Maldonado Drawings by Garry Kennard (GV Art Ltd)

Michelangelo is renowned as an artist, sculptor, architect and poet, a true Renaissance man. In their short book Mirror and Stone poet and translator Caroline Maldonado and artist Garry Kennard have collaborated through verse and image to explore some aspects of this multi-faceted and complex man. 

To begin with the poetry: Caroline Maldonado, poet and translator, has taken fragments of Michelangelo’s own poetry that particularly seemed to represent his ideas and feelings about himself and presented them in the honed down syllabic cinquain form. Other words are inserted into longer poems. All his words and lines are in italics. There are also versions of two of Michelangelo’s own sonnets and a compressed version of a sonnet by the Marquess Vittoria Colonna, a famous poet of the time and the artist’s spiritual guide. The rest of the poetry, multi-faceted as the subject himself, is the author’s own with her responses and interpretations of Michelangelo’s intricate and tortuous inner self which, like his sculptures, is ‘chiselled in pain’, as well as poems expressing his aspirations and his platonic love for Colonna. In some verses there are also references to our own times (including in the three poems quoted below.)

Garry Kennard titles his introduction to the drawings in Mirror and Stone as ‘Echoes’. He sees Michelangelo as ‘one of the most introspective artists’ he has ever come across, a man who has dug deep into himself and into marble to find the source of his anguish and joy. The ten drawings in the book are exquisite in their shading and blurring of shadow and light and there is often an impression of two figures, shown or implied, ghostly figures that seem to represent the physical and spiritual, man and woman, agony and vision.

Poems and artwork in Mirror and Stone focus largely on Michelangelo as sculptor. Here is the idea of the subtractive process of marble work in which perfection lies within the stone and it is for the artist to reveal it. ‘He chooses stone to subtract from’, says the narrator in ‘Other dimensions’ and, in the translation of Michelangelo’s own words, ‘It’s by/taking away/that one draw from the stone/a live figure. It grows greater/in stone’.

But sculpting for him was so much more than the chiselling out of this live figure. For Michelangelo it was a process of transcendence, the rejection and leaving behind of human flesh and the revelation of the spirit, a personal redemption seen as a divine gift of grace. The anguish and conflict involved in this struggle for transcendence, this seeking out of heaven itself, is conveyed clearly in ‘Stone 1’ where ‘the pigments he grinds’ will ‘create a paradise/and hell with it’. The terror of hell was very real during these times. Michelangelo wrote erotic poems to a man and the practice of ‘sodomy’ meant excommunication and eternal hell as well as being punishable by execution. Michelangelo was a youth when the speeches of the charismatic fundamentalist preacher Savonarola drew crowds in their thousands, all willing to burn out sin by throwing items of pleasure and luxury and ‘all other trappings’ into huge bonfires until they were ‘burnt crisp as crackling’. (‘Michelangelo’s seven layers of skin’). This poem also serves as a reminder of the Sistine Chapel fresco of ‘The Last Judgement’ which, among other horrors, shows St Bartholomew being martyred until he was ‘one flayed skin’. On this skin Michelangelo painted a portrait of his own suffering face.

Images in the poem ‘Man or Beast’ are even more monstrous and appalling. Here ‘Bodies couple in pain trapped inside their pleasure’ while Man crouches ‘like a dog        astride a city drain’. Here the Pope ‘in his purple robes’ is juxtaposed with a ‘baboon on a swing’ for both are ‘mere flesh and orifices both potential carcasses’. Notes on the poems in Mirror and Stone tell us that these images are taken from Francis Bacon who referenced Michaelangelo’s work in his own and shared his conflicts about the flesh.

The attainment of heaven was possible, perhaps, with the grace of Christ, after a lifetime of torment and fear. Poems and drawings in Mirror and Stone show Man weighed down and overwhelmed by this burden. Yet there is tenderness as well, and pity. Vittoria Colonna is represented as woman and spiritual guide with the qualities of a Madonna. ‘He writes to her at dusk’ and ‘one to one to one to one’ are poems of grief.

As is ‘Touch’, the poem I’ll end with. This includes Michelangelo’s own words following Colonna’s death as recorded by his contemporary student and biographer Ascanio Condivi.  Skilfully deepening the associations, these words are intercut with Maldonado’s lines referring to this century’s pandemic where relatives could only touch through glass:

what grieved him above else

                                             in those days of darkness

was when he went to la Marchessa

                                             I visited her alone

and she was passing from this life

                                             glass between us

he did not kiss her brow or her face

                                             palm to palm on glass

simply her hand

                                             unable to touch

Copies of Mirror and Stone– £10 plus £2.50 postage – can be obtained from  caroline.maldonado@ntlworld.com or garry.kennard@btopenworld.com

Mandy Pannett 6th May 2024

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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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