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

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

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

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

          The man is staring

          up the long street

          for the bus

          that is not yet here.

          He’s unaware of Lizzy

          and her need

          for touch.

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

          My grandfather, 

          a man who died five years

          before I was born,

          whispers to me

          that the man found out

          he will move on

          to that next place much too early.

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

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

           From the glass entrance door,

           I cannot see the books.

           A man who lives next to it

           is watching me from his front door,

           making sure that I don’t break in.

           I wave to him, and he waves back

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

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

Peter Mladinic 26th March 2024

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Strike by Sarah Wimbush (Stairwell Books)

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

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

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

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

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

     […]

     Enemy ditch their epaulettes

     […]

     Enemy bends every law

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

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

before questioning some of the prime minister’s assertions:

     Who is the mob?
     Who is the enemy within?

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

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

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

Rupert Loydell 9th March 2024

 

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Games of Soldiers by Mary Michaels (Sea Cow Press)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mandy Pannett 27th February 2024

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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 http://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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