Category Archives: English Poetry

Aeneas & Son by James Russell (The Knives Forks & Spoons Press)

Posted on November 28, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Aeneas & Son by James Russell (The Knives Forks & Spoons Press)

Over the past decade or so, the Modern Retelling has become an established and lucrative literary sub-genre: Preti Taneja has done King Lear, Pat Barker The Iliad, Mark Haddon Pericles, Percival Everett Huckleberry Finn, among endless examples, all themselves indebted to an original idea by James Joyce. The usual approach is either to keep the retelling in the source’s era but change the perspective (for instance, to highlight the sexism, racism or other prejudices of the precursor) or to transpose it to the present day. James Russell’s distinctive contribution reworks Virgil’s first-century BCE Roman epic the Aeneid, setting it inventively in 1959, and – with admirable commercial disdain – not converting it into a novel but keeping it as long-form poetry.   

In 1959, hero Aeneas has become WW2 vet Ed, his son Ascanius is unassuming-but-clever Ned, his dad Anchises is ladies’ man Leslie and his goddess-mum Venus is posh Lady Vera. The Troy they have to flee is a Richmond almshouse, Dido’s Carthage is a Wiltshire pub, and they move West not over the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas but along the Great West Road. Italy is Bristol. 

The new poem’s bathetic tenor carries through to its themes and details. Piety is superstition, fate is chance, prayers are phone-calls, shipwreck is car breakdown, the Trojan horse is a woodwormy clothes horse, Laocoön’s serpents are dressing-gown cords, the war is class-based street aggro, and the title itself recalls a Fifties’ small business. The book’s blurb says that readers need know nothing about theAeneid to enjoy it, though to test that claim would need a different reviewer. I had great pleasure (sad, I know) identifying, say, Eviades as Evander, ‘Piggy’ Palfrey as Pygmalion, Neil and Ewan as Nisus and Euryalus and Ann-Marie as Andromache. It helps that there’s lots of wit and imagination in the transformations: the Sibyl is a receptionist, Vulcan an engineering lecturer, and Camilla a newspaper columnist called… Camilla. 

There’s charm too in the late-fifties setting – Dennis Lotis, Workers’ Playtime, Senior Service, The Goon Show, Steve Reeves in Hercules, winkle-pickers and beetle-crushers – despite a few glitches (or obscure jokes?): Desmond the Dachshund? Monte Casino? ‘well-healed’? Vanden ‘Plass’ Princess? The narrative voice ranges widely; sometimes chatty (‘Time to say some words about the Goram Fair before/ we return to Turner & his plans’), sometimes contemplative (‘Is courage a virtue?/ Not necessarily.’), sometimes academic (‘unless there are the discourses of others/ explicitly marked’), often gently comic

            Ed is away; Ned holds the fort.
            He holds it by paying his favourite records
            whenever he wants to as loud as he likes

and occasionally vanishing altogether as the free verse mutates to playscript. The language feels era-appropriate (billet, nelly, gelt…), and the geography’s precise even down to the many real pubs.

The plot does get tweaked a bit, as you might expect. There are no Gods. Anchises dies in Carthage, not Drepanum. Aeneas and Lavinia have an actual date. Anita (Amata) doesn’t commit suicide, nor does Dana (Dido), whom Ed doesn’t see again in the Underworld – he merely encounters a statue while having a kind of bad trip. The prevailing downbeat naturalism also means Ed doesn’t meet the ghost of his father, only his dad’s (living) twin. Chapter Five feels a bit shoehorned, since Leslie’s secret thousands of pounds never get explained nor does the reason for his will’s bizarre conditions. But most radically, this retelling softens the Aeneid’s famously brutal and abrupt ending with a happy epilogue in which Ed gets away with killing Turner (Turnus), while Patsy (Pallas) revivifies, and Ned turns into a tech superwhizz and marries her. Well, it’s a far nicer outcome than a thousand years of militarist Roman imperium, and perfectly apt for this fun and rather original read. 

Guy Russell 28th November 2024

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The Tanglewood Sonnets by David Harsent (Vanguard Editions)

Posted on October 9, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Tanglewood Sonnets by David Harsent (Vanguard Editions)

Following his last, visionary, Faber collection Skin, published earlier this year, David Harsent’s latest publication is a simple but beautifully produced 20 page limited edition, The Tanglewood Sonnets, from Richard Skinner’s Vanguard Editions. 

It contains fourteen sonnets.  Each is composed of an opening couplet, followed by a tercet, then two stanzas of four, then five lines. The final line, often a complete sentence, can wrong-foot the reader, countering or contradicting, at times enriching what’s come before. Each has a title which picks up a word from the text.  As in this poet’s previous works, the structure as a whole works through rhythm and repetition.   

There are two unnamed characters, a ‘he’ and a ‘she’. In the first sonnet ‘Their voices sometimes match and marry’ but more often they are distanced, with the man on the outside watching the woman from afar, who is struggling through her own journey, maybe in search of a place of safety. A dreamlike narrative is developed, filmic, with shifting scenes.  A sense of unstable realities and perceptions is emphasised by phrases such as ‘it seemed she might/her understanding of it/what appears/what presents as/what’s said to…’.  Everything is suggested, yet an emotional urgency carries the narrative through the poems and the effect is cumulative, like the form itself.  

Dark images of violence, loss, anguish and despair, reappear at two levels, the intimate, within the relationship, and the wider social and political through the loss of home, migration, an apocalyptic destruction through fire.  In the first sonnet we learn ‘They were members of a cargo-cult’ and images related to such a cult recur: a spiritual search, prophecy, burning, ecstatic dance, a departure from an island, the ghosts of dead ancestors, pariah dogs. Esoteric references, with scenes of fairground (a sonnet titled ‘Freak-show’) and a maze, familiar from some of Harsent’s earlier work, also return in two of the sonnets.  In fact many of the themes, images and references echo Harsent’s earlier volumes of poetry as if they were all part of one pulsing work.

The necessity and limitations of writing as a way of comprehending reality and retaining memory, are touched on in two sonnets. The woman is at times blind and speechless but she’s making notes in a dreambook.   Sonnet IX ‘Words’ expresses some of its contradictions. In the second stanza: ‘Who owns the book must surely treasure it’, is followed in the third by:  

‘Question-marks, under-scoring, marginalia, lines

struck out…It was a long night. There are words

she no longer trusts; they have shed

their music; they say just what they mean’. 

For a poet, words that say what they mean but are without ‘music’ can be at some level untrustworthy, untruthful and, despite the ‘surely’ in the second stanza, the book is not treasured. In the final stanza there’s a house torn down, an oil-drum-fire burning what’s left, and in the last line: ‘She crosses the road and pitches the book into that’. 

Sonnet X ‘The Exchange’ is built up of a vocabulary of sounds: the woman makes a noise that ‘matches’ the dog barking (as she ‘matches’ the man in the first sonnet). There’s ‘a timbral footfall’. ‘The bird is glissando’ and ‘delirious counterpoint’. A sonnet of sounds. Yet again the last line appears to under-cut what’s gone before: ‘From a nearby room he listens to the silence’, prompting the reader to wonder, is that the silence, or his silence?

The work is strongly visual, filmic, choreographic, and as always, musical. Harsent has written libretti for Harry Birtwhistle and has spoken in interviews of how essential music is for him. In a commendation on the back cover of this pamphlet, Sean O’Brien refers to the word-choice, sentence construction and to ‘the musical undertow of the poem’. He states ‘Harsent is the poet as composer’.    

It’s hard to define the powerful effect of Harsent’s writing. It doesn’t lie in the immediate grasp of what the poem is ‘about’.  Part of the satisfaction is in re-reading the poems, to draw out their meanings, but even more it is to experience the cumulative effect of the poetry (images, sounds, intensity of emotion), all that remains with you after you’ve set the book down, and ‘the musical undertow’. 

Caroline Maldonado 9th October 2024

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House on the A34 by Philip Hancock (CB Editions)

Posted on August 29, 2024 by tearsinthefence
House on the A34 by Philip Hancock (CB Editions)

The setting is the Potteries: Tunstall, Stoke, Hanley. The era is the 80s/90s: Ind Coope, Chevette, Vauxhall Viva, suede blouson. And the speaker is a painter – but not the sort that commonly appears in poems. He’s a blue-collar employee doing public-sector contracts: he’s painting council house doors, play area equipment, a police station and schools. He’s indoors six floors up, outdoors ‘crouched before miles of park railings’, in the paint-shop with a ‘throat-seizing reek of turps,/ linseed and propane’, planning the works do, waiting for the rain to stop and, after knocking-off time, ‘prancing through town’ in a ‘peach shirt’.  

He describes the workmates, gaffers and clients of this world with its hierarchies, micro-aggressions and destructive playtime (chucking bricks at old TV screens); its pride in doing a job well and defensiveness about how it’s undervalued. The men in it can be fussy, grumpy, kind, anti-social, pettily dictatorial, and sometimes really sad. But as much attention is spent on things (the epigraph, notably, is from Francis Ponge): the de-icer, stir stick, lump hammer, paint kettle, downspout, spindle, tenon saw, stales, cleat hooks, galvanised conduits, gimlets, awls, swivel pegs, stringboards, cable-pins… There are whole poems about things like a garden gate, a bench, an offcut, a ceiling crack, and an unfaded oblong of paint where a sign’s been removed, all detailed with an artisan’s precision and practicality (‘that panel pin/ waggled loose in the beading strip’, ‘the leaves of a hinge/ coupled by a pintle’), and enriched with vernacular and vocational words: mung, clagged, cross-bracing, chamfered… Here’s a complete poem (‘Lid’):

            The job’s to lever it open,
            get straight on with what’s in the tin.

            But what clings to its underside
            needs to be scraped off and added,

            could make the difference.

On the one hand, there’s the credible, matter-of-fact, demotic voice. The spareness. The hint of allegory. The hint of Robert Frost. And the strong possibility that there’s never before been, in all of literary history, a poem entirely about removing a paint lid. On the other hand, you can imagine the blokes within this book going, ‘You get all those Arts Council grants for that?’ 

Philip Hancock’s style is the familiar one that we might call Mainstream Workshop: the present historic, the pronoun-drop, the asyndeton, the understatement, the judicious excision of adverbs, of opinion, of conspicuous audio-effect, of flash. In his hands, it’s good writing that suits both the craftsmanship of its speaker and the emotional reticence of its social milieu, but Mainstream Workshop has been ubiquitous since the nineties and it’s getting hard to make it exciting. This poet’s distinctiveness lies rather in his major subject-matter, and his success says a lot about who poets and poetry readers still are. Which is? Well, they do have backgrounds of increasing diversity, but they continue to grow up to be teachers, lecturers, creative-writing tutors, librarians, publishers – or at the least have graduate-, university- or artistic-type jobs. As individuals, that’s great. But big-picture-wise, it means that whole occupational continents remain poetically unexplored. I guess, besides Philip Hancock, there are Fred Voss’ poems about his lifetime as a machinist, and Paul Tanner’s from his as a supermarket worker. Any others? 

It should be said, incidentally, that the work poems here aren’t the full picture. There are also fine pieces about childhood and, later in the book, about DIY. But it’s always the work poems that (we) critics go on about because they’re the most unique and valuable. For what it’s worth, I was engaged, entertained, impressed and learnt a lot about painting and decorating. And now… I’ll get back to my university job.

Guy Russell 29th August 2024

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The Warfield Poems by Patrick B. Osada (Privately published)

Posted on August 28, 2024 by tearsinthefence
The Warfield Poems by Patrick B. Osada (Privately published)

There are contrasts in this collection as the pastoral shifts slowly into blight. Two poems that could be seen as examples of ‘before and after’, illustrate this. An earlier poem ‘On Cabbage Hill’ is subtitled ‘Watching Deer’. Primroses, kingfishers and ‘rippled ripening corn’ share the scene as the observer is attentive to deer ‘inching through the wheat.’ The last poem in the collection is called ‘On Cabbage Hill Again’ and there are no more ‘secret deer’ but instead a landscape of ‘scaffold poles’, ‘tarmac paths’ and ‘estate houses in neat rows’. ‘This is now,’ says the narrator.

Introductory notes explain that Warfield was originally a Saxon settlement, rural in character for centuries until, in the twentieth century it became subject to overspill from nearby Bracknell. Constant threats from developers and planners have led to ongoing opposition from those who regret changes in the name of progress at the expense of flora and fauna. ‘There is still much to be found that is wonderful and inspiring (in Warfield)’ writes Patrick Osada, ‘yet sadly major changes to the environment and, consequently, to our wildlife becomes more pronounced as the house building extends.’

Transformation feels too exalted a word to use for the alterations in atmosphere and appearance from rural to suburban, but changes are still happening and transformation, in spite of some attempts at re-wilding, is almost total. Poems mark the process. ‘Frost Epiphany’ offers a fine example of the pastoral mood. Lyrical and spiritual in tone ‘Everything just gleams:/the pastures glittering, /each twig and grass blade/frosted – so complete.’ This is a scene where ‘a robin stopped to sing for me/and all the robin world.’ (‘January Sunday’). As winter turns to Spring the landscape is rich in ‘daffodil with bluebell/sallow, hazel, primrose, cowslip/anemone and celandine.’(‘Unseasonal’).

Place names, and their loss of meaning, are important in The Warfield Poems, recalling history, nature and folklore: Quelm Lane, Lark’s Hill, Hazlewood, Battle Bridge, the pub ‘The Yellow Rose’. At Owlswood Park the narrator comes across a notice shouting ‘CONSTRUCTION SITE, KEEP OUT.’ Here, in this ‘world of brick all birds have flown’ and, in time, ‘the new estate will be unveiled/with streets named after heritage we share-/ but not one creature, tree or plant remains/to prove this place was once more than their names.’

The disappearance of local wildlife in Warfield is slow but insistent. In ‘Swallows’ the narrator records how ‘this year’ he hasn’t seen any of the birds:

            From the rise above the house, I look across these empty skies;

            swallows’ demise match changes to this place – 

            horses, meadows, paddocks now are gone

            like acres of crops, hedgerows lost … farmland to developers.

            So, with our changing rural scene, swallows visits ceased.

A poem I find particularly interesting in ‘The Warfield Poems’ is the anti-pastoral theme of ‘Not an Ode to Autumn’ – a response to John Keats’ Ode. Here the wind is cold, there are only crab apples on the trees and ‘late Autumn mists’ hide ‘all vestige of sun, moon and tide’. In the air is ‘a chill of death.’

More signs erected by developers illustrate a dilemma not only confined to Warfield. Building Communities for Everyone neglects to say ‘But not for hawthorn, fox, orchid or deer –/those residents have gone, their fields stripped bare.’ (‘Sunflower’). A Government Consultation paper has an idyllic tone with its Planning for the right homes in the right places but the result is also a ‘Countryside no more, landscape changed for ever …’  (‘The New Estate’). 

Development versus destruction, growth as opposed to loss … poems in this collection combine in a tone of regret. ‘The Warfield Poems’ become an elegy.

Mandy Pannett 28th August 2024

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Tears in the Fence 80 is out!

Posted on August 15, 2024 by tearsinthefence
Tears in the Fence 80 is out!

Tears in the Fence 80 is now available at http://tearsinthefence.com/pay-it-forward and features poetry, prose poetry, translations and fiction by Joanna Nissel, Claire HM, Morag Kiziewicz, Geraldine Clarkson, Mary Michaels, Hanne Bramness translated by Anna Reckin, Jill Jones, John Freeman, Peter Dent, Cindy Botha, Lucy Hamilton, Michael Farrell, Rosie Garland, Tiffany Farr, Biljana Scott, Peter Larkin, Jane Wheeler, Robert Vas Dias, Kate Firth, Norman Jope, Steve Spence, Andrew Henon, Mark Goodwin, Randolph Healy, Jennifer K Dick, Lynne Wycherley, Eliza O’Toole, Nigel Jarrett, Danielle Hubbard, Vanessa Ackerman, Caroline Maldonado, Richard Foreman, Huw Gwynn-Jones, Kathleen McPhilemy, Charles Wilkinson, Rachel Spence, Valerie Bridge, Lesley Burt, Vivienne Freeman, Jonathan Catherall, Elizabeth Cook, Susanne Lansman, Beth Davyson, Mary McCollum, Evelyn Schlag translated by Karen Leeder, Andrew Duncan, Cathra Kelliher, David Punter and Kareem Tayyar.

The critical section consists of the Editorial by David Caddy, Andrew Duncan on Jeremy Reed, Jack Martell on Jack Martell on Laura Oldfield Ford, David Annwn on Randolph Healey, David Caddy on Emily Dickinson’s Letters and Natural Magic, Gemma Garcia on Beatriz Hausner, Steve Spence on Ian Seed, Mandy Pannett on Séan Street, Norman Jope on Sicilian Poetry, Rosa Parker-Cochran on Ken Edwards, Joanna Nissel on Elvire Roberts, Rachel Spence, Steve Spence on Alasdair Paterson, Elaine Randell on Brian Marley, Steve Spence on Fran Lock. Morag Kiziewicz’s Electric Blue 15 and Notes on Contributors.

This year’s annual Tears in the Fence Festival at the Stourpaine Village Hall, Stourpaine is on 20th to 22nd September in celebration of our fortieth anniversary and eighty issues. It is also a fundraiser for the journal. More details at https://tearsinthefence.com/2024-festival/

David Caddy 15th August 2024

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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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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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