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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Preloved Metaphors by Rupert Loydell (The Red Ceilings Press)

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

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

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

Do you understand

the words?  Do you know

that I have my own way

to burn away mind’s fog?

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

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

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

… everything is made, 

hands-on experience suspended as

we try to find the words we need to

describe the accidental and obscene.

We only have to look to see ourselves.

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

H.L Hix 23rdApril 2024

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Little Silver by Jane Griffiths (Bloodaxe Books)

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

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

            your own path home leads only to this:

            [                        a blank space                       ]

            A little silvering between the trees.

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

            It has been so long.

            This drift of white not a field.

            Lost in the thick of the paper

            I, a small upright.

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

                                                                – her whole

            body in italics flying the gap between its wooden

            launch-pad and privet, feet angled against the sky

            whose stars she links literal-mindedly to the foot

            of her page, first tethering then cutting them loose.

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

            Little Silver, a true and double passage.

            A small gift of tongues to take you out

            into the world’s roundabout ways

            and crossed purposes to talk of leaving,

            to talk of anything but –

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

                                                                                There’s no

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

            I say, living mostly through representations. Though if

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

            for?

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

            Conceivably, like that precipitate

            dream you have, most nights: stepping 

            out from multi-storey or cliff to leave

It ends:

                                                You contemplate

            this leap, the long suspension of it –

            the crown, heart cage, fledging appendix.

            That dream you have – human.

            Its inescapable living weight.

Samuel Bowerman 21st April 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                   gaps of beauty, nothing

     …

                                     gaps of beauty, sound between trees, nothing

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

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

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

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

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

Rupert Loydell 13th April 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

while Steve Ellis adopts a concise, plainer style:

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

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

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

Guy Russell 12th April 2024

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