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Category Archives: Pamphlet

Harald in Byzantium by Kevin Crossley-Holland Illustrations by Chris Riddell (Arc Publications)

Posted on March 3, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Harald in Byzantium by Kevin Crossley-Holland Illustrations by Chris Riddell (Arc Publications)

These poems are ‘not narratives but revelations’ says the author, and this seems a perfect way to describe the light of insight and discovery that shines, momentarily, on the forgotten or unknown. Here are fragments, scraps of stories handed down, examples of warfare, leadership and love, contrasts between worlds in the north and in the south, all of which come together to reveal the connections and interdependence among men that are needed for life. ‘If one man breaks the shield-rampart,’ says the narrator, ‘all his companions suffer.’

Harald Hardrada, we are told, was the greatest warrior of his age, true to his Viking reputation for courage, ferocity and ambition for ‘the golden crown, hard-edged fame.’ Several poems end with words of defiance: 

‘I’ll brook no disobedience./None at all.’ 

‘I have no choice, only an imperative.’

‘Let me be blood and flames.’

Yet he is also a man of passion, capable of love if not fidelity. A beautiful woman can inspire him to lyrical, fervent outbursts:

            The delicate contraption of your right ankle,

            the downy crooks of your arms,

            your swan-neck …

                                    Dear Gods

            I who will rule

            the whole northern world …

            My head is thumping, my heart spinning

If needs must, he says, he will even take on the gods to alleviate his ‘torment’:

            Grant me one night 

            in your apple garden

            forever young

            and I will outdo the gods.

This is a slim pamphlet – 24 pages of poems and nearly all of them illustrated with drawings in black and white by Chris Riddell, each one complementing the mood of the poems. This is the quality that most appeals to me – the atmospheric combination of text and sketch that creates a world as the author imagines it, a world that is Viking, a harsh and brutal world of cold, wild seas where fate determines if a man shall live or die, enjoy freedom or live in exile and loneliness. 

Language, in Harald in Byzantium, creates the setting, is almost the setting itself. Kevin Crossley-Holland is skilful at blending a modern, colloquial style with kennings and phrases of the historical era. Some travellers, for example, are trying to escape destiny, their own ‘death-shadows’, a companion is described as a ‘blood friend’, Harald’s ‘dragon-prow’ is welcomed although his inner self yearns for ‘spirit-fruit’ and, of course, there is a raven, bird of death and doom,  that taunts Harald when he is trapped in ‘scorching wind from Africa … red dust whirling/ round me, red dust in my throat, my gut.’

A setting that is Norse – and yet with clear contemporary relevance. ‘This week another boatload of young bucks sailed in,’ says the narrator. ‘A tide of refugees… more, many more than shoals of herring in the fjord.’ Discussions follow as to the best way of dealing with the problem. ‘Stem the tide at source,’ says one, ‘meet them at the crossing-places/and cut off their right hands/and send them home.’ ‘Well,’ says another, we could ‘extend our borders’. Or, declares a thinker, we could let them know ‘our welcome will be strictly conditional.’

Harald in Byzantium is a varied and fascinating pamphlet that can be read at a sitting, dipped into, acted, or read aloud, enjoyed by all ages. A fine publication. 

Mandy Pannett 3rd March 2023

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Northwest Passages by Kate Flannery (Arroyo Seco Press)

Posted on February 26, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Northwest Passages by Kate Flannery (Arroyo Seco Press)

Kate Flannery’s Northwest Passages is tinged with more than just the happy memories of a childhood world that she cannot go back to because she has grown and changed. Flannery grew up in Southwest Washington near Mt. St. Helens and much of the world that she knew as a child was obliterated in the volcanic eruption of 1980. It is gone in a permanent way that few of us can possibly understand, the forest razed, the mountain gone. It was a place for her of quiet forests that few people visited and of innocent play; however, in her memory it was isolated, and as the only girl in a family of boys and as a girl in the male dominated society of a logging town, it was a place where she had to find herself by herself. Her collection chronicles all of the complex feelings that she has about her home forest that is gone and her difficult childhood in tight, imagistic microflash essays, that place us emotionally in the world that she experienced.

The sense of how lonely and isolated she was flows through these stories. Not only was she the only girl, but she was by far the youngest person in her family. This was an isolated town with few people she might befriend. Her play then was often in imitation of her brothers, but the lessons have to be learned on her own. In ‘Before the Rain in a Western Red Cedar,’ she performs the coming of age ritual of climbing high into the trees, but she does it alone with only the story of her older siblings to guide her.

Like my brothers, I am pliable at nine years. I thread my way through the circling cedar branches, pulling up through the smallest spaces. Even from sixty feet high, I will not fall far if I lose a foothold or handhold. My tree will catch me. As I twist my way to the top, the trunk thins and turns greener . . . I begin to rock and sway in the building wind, as I had seen my brothers do (1)

This isolation is somehow meditative. She didn’t have brothers as her playmates, so she turned inward and observed the world closely, and thought deeply. And although there is no one her age, she is able to observe the older people of her world as they experienced the rituals of that world like funerals, dances, and recitals. She got to know someone named Harry Truman who chose death over leaving the base of Mt. St. Helens when he knew it was going to erupt. She was confidant to her mother and watcher of her neighbors whom she fears.

But this is not only a place of fear but a land of complex beauty as well, and her memories of it are sweet. In ‘Anything I Want above the Columbia River,’ she writes, “The clouds are racing high above the river. The winds coming from the Columbia Gorge, miles to the east, are fighting with the winds coming upriver from the ocean, miles to the west” (12). The winds work their way throughout this collection, swaying the treetops and creating private spaces for conversation with her mother even when they are outside. At one point, her mother sends her to a boarding school, but the narrator does not want to leave her beloved forests and rivers, “but my mother tells me they will all be there when I return” (12). That sense of loss and the pain of understanding impermanence is at the root of the collection’s sweetness. She loses all of it, everything that she loved at one time is now gone, but that makes the memories of her childhood world all the more magical. 

Northwest Passages is fascinating in that it explores a world that few knew and none can ever come to know now. It holds the same fascination for me as writings and art from Pompeii holds. I lived most of my life on the west coast of the United States, but this is as foreign a world to me as any other place on the planet. This is a discussion of a culture whose manners seem to be gone. As Flannery mourns some of them, she seems to acknowledge that a lot of those customs should have disappeared. She both misses and has escaped that world. There is so much meaning and complex emotion for such a short chapbook and that is what makes it so exceptionally powerful.

John Brantingham 26th February 2023

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Ghost Methods by Siofra McSherry (Broken Sleep Books)

Posted on February 11, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Ghost Methods by Siofra McSherry (Broken Sleep Books)

The ghost in the title of this slim pamphlet (37 pages including prelims and a foreword) is the shade of poet Sean Bonney, who was a friend and colleague of McSherry. Many of these poems write back to or are haunted by Bonney, and the best poem, or sequence of poems, in the book is ‘A Series of Posthumous Discourses with Sean Bonney’, which does exactly what it says.

Bonney’s first pamphlet was a scrappy rebellious free verse affair, wrapped in a bright pink cover, entitled Marijuana in the Breadbin. After some further pamphlets from fugitive small presses Salt offered up Pitch Blade Control, and although the alt.publishing continued, Letters Against the Firmament, a surprising choicefrom Enitharmon Press, established Bonney as a revolutionary, considered and angry writer. This was reinforced by the online publication of a Selected Writing (All This Burning, Ill Will Editions) and the analogue volume Our Death from Commune Editions, which confirmed Bonney as a political writer for our time, seemingly as happy on the barricades as within the confines of a paperback book.

McSherry addresses Bonney in various ways and in various places. She adopts his shouty straightforwardness (‘Bonney is fucking dead’), discusses his politics:

   I was just sitting here thinking of you
   and how from a certain perspective society is nothing but the interaction of
   planes of power
   although that’s the kind of perspective that can kills us and in articular you

and welcomes even her privacy to be haunted:

   I welcome your transparent interruptions
   you may peep and glimmer away

The four poems in ‘A Series…’ are unsettled, emotional and yet lucid reflections which move towards a calming acceptance of death and loss, tempered slightly by the idea of the author leaving their writing behind:

   and I am here, I am here, I am still here 
   filling this page with lines that maybe someone somewhere will read
   and know that even so you can hunker down if you want to
   you can write and (same thing) survive

The rest of the poetry in this collection feels less engaged with Bonney, although he lurks as a presence throughout. ‘Zonbi’ plays with the idea of persistence and wished-for resurrection in its discussion of light:

   Light requires no reason to go on,
   so why should you? Get up from the ground

whilst ‘Hamlet V:1’ deconstructs and revisions Shakespeare to focus on the fact that ‘people can get used to anything, / perhaps even knowing that we’ll die.’ Other texts focus on memory, giving blood (a long poem awkwardly printed sideways), ideas of home and transience, whilst ‘A Discourse’ seems to be the poet talking to herself. There is also an autumnal confession that the narrator ‘fell in love with Death’, although at the end of the poem ‘Death quietly drowns.’

If there’s a echo of Anne Sexton in McSherry ‘s report that ‘Wide-eyed Death hovered helplessly by my side’ and that ‘Death has no heart’, all the poems here evidence an ongoing engagement with both Death, personified and abstract, and Bonney himself. McSherry embraces and explores loss, grieving for ‘the names, the many names / my mouth will never form again’, and allows a lover’s words to ‘fall on me in place of you’. There is something very moving and resilient about facing up to absence, ‘star[ing] up into endless night’, whilst reasserting the persistence of poetry in the word.

Rupert Loydell 11th February 2023

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The Wine Cup: Twenty-four drinking songs for Tao Yuanming by Richard Berengarten (Shearsman Chapbook)

Posted on February 5, 2023 by tearsinthefence
The Wine Cup: Twenty-four drinking songs for Tao Yuanming by Richard Berengarten (Shearsman Chapbook)

I haven’t engaged with any of Richard Berengarten’s poetry for some time and I’m glad to say that my re-encounter has been a pleasant one. These poems have a wide cultural background aside from the obvious Chinese connection and I’m straightaway reminded of Berengarten’s technical abilities as these are very skilfully put-together poems and strict forms suit his kind of poetry. He’s old-school and I don’t mean that a criticism but these poems, although concerned with mortality, a constant theme in his work, are full of life and musical vigour. Each villanelle is prefaced by an italicised quotation translated into English from Tao Yuanming as indicated in the postscript:

          Dusts

               My gaze drifts over the west garden

          Where the hibiscus blooms – brilliant red

          Now this thatched cottage is my hermitage,

          Following quiet woodland paths seems best.

          Against oncoming night, why rant or rage?

          When young I was half-blinded in a cage

          Of city-dust and rubbish, hope possessed.

          Now this thatched cottage is my hermitage

          Seventy-five and still I earn my wage

          By piecemeal work, with scant let-up or rest.

          Against oncoming night, why rant or rage?

          What point is there in shouting, at my age?

          I grin, breathe deep, walk by, like any guest.

          Now this thatched cottage is my hermitage.

          My heart beats on against its old ribcage.

          To touch the moment passing, that’s the test

          Against oncoming night. Why rant or rage?

          A hundred years – our fate and heritage.

          Considering that, I’m nothing if not blessed.

          Now this thatched cottage is my heritage,

          Against oncoming night, why rant or rage?

There’s an obvious reference to Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle….’  and the shift in perspective is quite moving in the sense that Thomas died at a relatively young age while Berengarten is now a much older man. I wouldn’t say the above has resignation but there’s certainly a mellowing of tone and while some of the poems in this suite include elements of anxiety and perhaps even fear, as in ‘Scattered, My Books’ with its ‘Shall I go mad? Heart drums and temples pound. / The dead awaken. Ghosts rise to the brink. / Scattered, my books and brushes lie around’ the overall sense I’m getting is one of celebration and a restful melancholy.

     There are hintings towards Yeats and D.H. Lawrence here as well as the Chinese poets I’m less familiar with and Berengartens’ work is always full of awareness of tradition and artistic precedents. As has been suggested it is common for even contemporary poets to use and refer to the sonnet form but less so in the case of the villanelle. I can only think of two recent examples of contemporary poets who have done so in any sustained, thematic way and these are Alasdair Paterson and John Kinsella.

     The final poem in this collection underlines the drinking theme and celebrates the natural world and the here-and-now in a manner which though full of intriguing information also captures something of the moment, of the passion and wonder of being alive:

          Until this liquor drains

               I’ve a fine wine here. Let’s share it.

          A crane calls in the shade. Its chick answers. 

          Ineffable the ways the Way remains,

          Unspoken, all-enduring, never-ending,

          Love, drink with me until this liquor drains.

          And pity the self-hater who abstains,

          Refraining from desire, stiff and un bending.

          Ineffable the ways the Way remains.

          Ingredients of fruits, herbs, berries, grains –

          What inner fire resides in their fine blending.

          Love, drink with me until this liquor drains.

          Its tastes – so complex! How the mouth retains

          Echoes of subtle flavours, time suspending.

          Ineffable the way the way remains.

          Threading through tunnelled arteries and veins

          Its fire fans out, ever itself extending.

          Love, drink with me until this liquor drains.

          Come, sit outside with me and watch the cranes

          Fly overhead. Heart-warming? Or heart-rending?

          Ineffable the ways the way remains.

          Love, drink with me until this liquor drains. 

The repetition and the patterning in the villanelle form makes for a very musical poetry which also allows for nuance and complexity even as the writing is direct and clear. Here you get the feel of intoxication and its relation to human physiology and also the mystery and directness of being alive in the moment. There is resonance and I’m getting Andrew Marvell’s sense of abundance in his ‘garden poems’ as well as other hints that I’m not quite sure about. I thoroughly enjoyed reading and re-reading these poems and I can only repeat that it was good to be re-acquainted with this singular and prolific voice.

Steve Spence 5th February 2023

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Postcards To Ma by Martin Stannard (Leafe Press)

Posted on February 3, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Postcards To Ma by Martin Stannard (Leafe Press)

You have to take a deep breath before you dive into this pamphlet, which is actually a single twelve page long poem. Not only because of its length, but because you will need as much oxygen in your brain to cope with digressions, lists, and the unreliable, perhaps even irrational, narrator.

Stannard is adept at keeping a straight face, however weird his poetry gets, and for taking language on long, surreal walks. He’s also good at using repetition and near-repetition, to help structure his work. In this long poem, which starts with the narrator noting that he ‘Sent a picture postcard to Ma “Arrived Safe”‘, this involves variations of the theme of how people see him and similes for how he sleeps,  irregular reoccurrences of phrases such as ‘Special Offer!!!’ and a kind of chorus to break up the flow:

                                                   Crack of dawn Swam in
   ocean Frolicked on sand Sent postcards to Ma

Each day, post-swim, offers new infatuations and obsessions, be it the ‘tautness / of cotton across generous bosom’ or ‘Gal by the name of Mabel looked better / than a Mabel’, who decides ‘she thought dancing was too sexual’ and heads off home with her husband.

As well as dance, philosophy, history and exploring ‘the kingdom republic or state’ he is holidaying in, Stannard’s narrator reports that he

   Had a crack (ten minutes tops) at being agnostic
   Buddhist vegan pacifist Marxist epicurist internalist
   Satanist atheist Christian externalist Irish
   Thought about differences between philosophy and religion

although it not until the next day he ‘Read philosophers thoughtfully / (ten minutes each tops)’, though it is long enough to (mis)quote from several in the same section.

Another day, in response  to happening ‘across abundance of / lucrative literary prizes’ he ‘Turned to scribbling for an easy buck’, quickly dashing off his first two novels under a nom de plume and ‘Between novels had a couple / of free days Penned slim volume of award-winning poetry’. Of course! And, as one would expect, it is titled ‘The Zenith of Our Feelings’, for ‘When a man is happy he writes damn good poetry’.

And of course, on the back of his literary success

                                                            Was offered post of
   Writer-in-Residence at Tourist Information Centre
   Declined Accepted instead role of Poet-in-Dormitories
   at St. Theresa’s Finishing School for Young Ladies
   A short-term contract abruptly terminated at lights out

I confess to finding this not only reminiscent of the Fast Show’s lecherous old man (‘Me, in a girls school, with my reputation?’) but also very funny, in a squirming response to this surreal inappropriateness.

There are similar engagements with the visual arts, including ‘a self-portrait (I have often wondered / how I see myself)’, sport, nature and music, the last with good results:

   Taught myself piano violin cello guitar ukulele flute
   piccolo trumpet bassoon oboe recorded harmonica kettle
   drum triangle Established first one-man orchestra

Of course, soon after, he notes ‘Decided to become a singer/songwriter’.

Thankfully, having ‘Slept like a cuckoo in a clock’, there are signs this monologue may be ending:

   Have run out of postcards so am unable to write
   which is a shame pity cause for regret disappointment
   sorrow ruefulness perhaps even woe I don’t know
   It’s the last day of the jollidays

It is, seemingly, not before time, as ‘Things are turning interesting slightly bewildering’, as they already have for the reader. There are elephants, rainbows, séances and a ‘well-formed nymphet’ who ‘scampers off teasingly into the trees’ (it’s not clear if she is wearing a white blouse or not) and it is ‘Probably / wise to be leaving’, ‘to speed with a merry heart / returning home to Ma.’

This is a strange surreal annoying hilarious disturbing righteous tasteless ridiculous surprising, unexpected text. It comments on any and everything in the process of describing and participating in it. The narrator appears to not only be obsessive and irrational, but also perhaps hallucinating the whole thing; like Stannard as author, however, the writer of these strange reports and postcards is seemingly oblivious to how strange the strange world he lives in is, and simply responds to it, although ‘Sometimes I think I think / too much’.

And if our narrator ‘can’t remember all the words I made / some notes’, let alone ‘remember what any of them mean’, then why should I as reader reviewer poet author writer friend critic? I am going to take several slow deep breaths and hope to sleep ‘like a badger in a badger box’, although I have idea what that will be like. ‘What else is there to say?’

Rupert Loydell 3rd February 2023

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Extinctions by Philip Terry (Red Ceilings Press)

Posted on February 1, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Extinctions by Philip Terry (Red Ceilings Press)

I love Philip Terry’s poetry which is always inventive in a variety of ways. This short collection from the wonderfully miniature Red Ceilings Press is a peach, basing itself on ‘the chicago,’ a form developed via the Oulipo some time ago. The basic idea is that each short poem is made up of five lines and the final line, a homophonic ‘translation’ of a place name, person, animal etc. generates  the content of the previous lines and may be guessed by the reader. In each case, here at least, the final line appears at the end in a numbered key (50 lines) so you can choose to refer forward if you wish. It’s a game in effect and combines the idea of the Old English riddle with the more experimental methods developed by the Oulipo. One very positive effect of taking part is that the method generates creativity and ‘a zest for language’ as Alan Baker suggests in the back-cover quotation. Dip in and go with the flow and once you pick up the idea it’s great fun. Here are a few of the poems by way of example:

          1.

          Money money

          Cash cash

          Bread bread

          Sponz sponz

          (Dodo (Dough dough))

          17.

          Bishop close

          Archdeacon shut up

          Nun fasten

          Abbot enclose

          (Monk seal (Monk seal)) 

          23.

          Canary Islands swallow

          Easter Island gobbles

          Cook Islands pick at

          Channel Islands savour

          (Falkland Islands wolf) Falkland Islands wolf)) 

          33.

          Large sidewalk slug

          Great path beetle

          Colossal motorway snail

          Huge street fly

          (Giant rodent (Giant road ant)) 

          42.

          African arse

          Asian bottom

          American bum

          Antarctic posterior

          (European ass (European ass))

This is poetry as fun and it’s the mix of the formal limitations and the invention that can lead from this that can generate a love of language and playful experimentation that is in no way dry or exclusive. This sort of method is a great prompt to learning without too much pain and these poems are easy to dip in and out of and can provide a great antidote to boredom. There are other contemporary poets who work partly with similar methods, Giles Goodland, for example, whose occupation as a lexicographer stimulates a lot of his poetic output. Drew Milne’s ‘Eck’s Column’ is another example where the homophone really comes into its own with quite often hilarious results.

     As I’ve suggested these poems can provide a great stimulus to experimenting with language and discovering how strange and delightful the process can be. Highly recommended.

Steve Spence 1st February 2023  

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Cauldron of Hisses by Penelope Moffet (Arroyo Seco Press)

Posted on January 18, 2023 by tearsinthefence
Cauldron of Hisses by Penelope Moffet (Arroyo Seco Press)

     Penelope Moffet’s Cauldron of Hisses from Arroyo Seco Press seems to me the perfect poetry chapbook to have come out of the pandemic and its lockdown. It is a unified collection of poems, linked by their opening and closing lines, about different kinds of cats. It is more than this though. Underlying every poem, it is about our need for connection and how we regained it through our connection with nonhuman friends, and perhaps more importantly how we used our dreamworld to get through that time.

The second poem of the collection ‘Leopards’ helps us to see the familial connection we have with the animals that populate our lives.

Breathe another’s breath? 

Only Emily’s. She plants 

herself in front of me, inserts 

her face into my thoughts. 

She is my family, 

Emily the golden leopard 

and her brother, 

Snowshoe Raku. (2)

It was easy for many of us before the pandemic to take for granted the connections we had to other beings in our worlds. Moffet clearly does not do that, and she shows us how important those connections are. She also shows us the importance of wildness because inside her cats is the same wildness that lives in the great cats of the wild.

     What follows are the dreams and memories that she has of cats, and with it the implication of how important those dreams and memories are. We have entered a new state, a new world, where we have been cut off from human connection. It is our job now to find a way to survive these new conditions in a way that preserves our sanity. Moffet’s dreams of the wild given physical reality in her cats do just that. In one of her ‘Mountain Lion’ poems, she writes:

So much depends on posturing 

in cats and humans. The way 

my own two felines sometimes 

walk stiff-legged, glaring, 

showing teeth. The way 

I sometimes turn myself 

into a cauldron 

full of hisses. (7)

So she understands herself a little better, and her animal reactions by understanding these animals. She dreams of them, meditates on them, understands them. Through them she, and we, can see what people are.

     This is, to some degree, a lonely collection, but it is not alienated. Instead, Moffet gives us a way to understand the loneliness of the new world without being consumed by it. This is a dreamy collection, and it is beautiful. It is about what the human mind can do to preserve us when allowed to bound through the jungles and savannah instead of simply dwelling on loneliness and pain.

John Brantingham 18th January 2023

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Betrayals by Ian Seed (Like This Press)

Posted on October 30, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Betrayals by Ian Seed (Like This Press)

The fifteen short prose pieces in Betrayals delineate the story of a young English man living in northern Italy between Ivrea and Turin in the 1980s. The story is a follow-up and a rewriting of Italian Lessons (Like This Press, 2017) that has a different tone and is from a different perspective. Betrayals is a rethinking that meditates on the perception of relationships in a more personal way. The short prose pieces look like chapters that trace chronologically the Italian experience which is centred on the protagonist’s job as an English teacher in a high school and on his relationship with his Italian lover, Donatella.

     The relationship starts as an occasional encounter in a discotheque in an atmosphere of déjà-vu that mimics movies’ romantic scenes:

Her eyes caught mine; she smiled with a strange mixture of shyness and cheekiness. She held out her glass to me. I wasn’t sure I could believe my eyes. […] 

I took the glass from her hand, drank a sip, gave her the glass back. Was it my imagination or was she really leaning her face towards mine?

     They meet regularly at weekends and spend their time in bed ‘making love, sleeping, making love again.’ For the protagonist, falling in love with Donatella is like falling in love with Italy, with its blue summer sky and its strong coffee. Both Donatella and the protagonist are searching for self-discovery. Donatella works as an accountant but hates her job; she has artistic talents and is well-read but abandoned her dreams as she was aware that she would never have the opportunity to fulfil them. Her father died when she was a little girl and she could not go to university as she has to support her mother and her brother with her wages. The protagonist seems to have a more available future. He completed his university studies before moving to Italy and is free to approach life in a more open way. The Italian adventure seems to give him the answers to his yearnings, though it will soon reveal the incomprehensible side of love. His inexperience exposes his naivete but also triggers a reflection that will lead him to acquire a maturity of sorts. He relies on Donatella’s support as she helps him find a job and a flat, and she also pays the deposit. However, their relationship unexpectedly deteriorates as soon as his life seems to settle. She is trapped in her family, which depends on her, and he is trapped in a job that he cannot quit because he needs to pay the rent and give back to Donatella the money that she paid for the deposit. Their love-making sessions become less frequent and are not as idyllic as before. What can he make of it? Love seemed smooth and clear at first, but it has suddenly become a tangle of misunderstandings; it is elusive and delusive for no apparent reason. Why isn’t life like a Hollywood movie in which everything is finally explained and all ends well? Why are the pains of love so excruciating and unfathomable? The circumstances betray the genuine emotions the protagonist feels, revealing their illusory essence. Therefore, the title of the book not only refers to his cheating on Donatella but more widely to a condition of feeling betrayed that he experiences.

     When the protagonist occasionally has sex with women he encounters after the estrangement in his relationship with Donatella, he experiences a sense of displacement, a ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’, as Rimbaud would express it. However, the experience is not poetically dramatic, as it is in the French poet’s work. Instead, he wanders around without a direction, deciding not to choose what to do but to just let things happen to him, like in Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris, though again the exceptional side of the experience is understated and there is no intention to set an example, as there is in Baudelaire’s work. Life flows effortlessly and is unjustified:

This is the first of several betrayals of Donatella since officially we are still together. On my wanderings around the city, chance encounters sometimes happen, and these sometimes lead to sex. They are the only thing that keeps me going. They become my raison d’être. That, and starting to read Italian literature in Italian. Here, I sense, there is a world to keep exploring for a long time to come.

     Eventually, Donatella realises he is cheating on her and a melodramatic scene follows in which she weeps and beats his chest with her fists at a bus stop, and he weeps too. The story sounds humorous, like in Commedia all’italiana, comedy in the Italian way. However, there is a pervading sense of a void, an atmosphere of being in limbo that is different from the hell evoked in Rimbaud’s and Baudelaire’s works and is nearer to Eugenio Montale’s collection of short prose pieces Farfalla di Dinard (The Butterfly of Dinard, 1956) in which the Italian poet expresses his disillusionment caused by misunderstandings in relationships and his visceral incapacity to grasp the reason for the different situations he encounters in life. In the end there is no answer and no meaning to our unforgivably misplaced beliefs and unabating faith in trying to make sense of our world and of our life. The protagonist survives the Italian experience, pays back the deposit money to Donatella and ‘cannot wait to go back to England’ with his wealth of unsettling experiences. 

Carla Scarano D’Antonio 30th October 2022

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Adventures Among The Living by Tim Cumming (Blueprint)

Posted on September 29, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Adventures Among The Living by Tim Cumming (Blueprint)

The Acknowledgements page at the end of Adventures Among the Living suggests that this new pamphlet (or chapbook) from poet and artist Tim Cumming is the product of – or ‘made possible by’ – ‘a lucid dream’ back in 2021. This may or may not be the subject of Cumming’s painting ‘The Poet Appears in Space Time outside Kensal Rise overground station in the dead of night’, which is reproduced in full colour across the centrefold of this publication; a strange, slightly blurry work which foregrounds a fox against a street corner, with – presumably – the apparition of the poet to the left of the image.

It’s a powerful image, as is the beginning of the first poem: ‘I was not all there. Friends had / a habit of pointing this out.’ The jokey tone, with its initial pun, gives way to something darker, where the narrator ends up ‘whispering secrets / into a hole in the ground’, convinced that no-one can hear him, but coming to the realisation that ‘they all knew the words’. All? Friends or the implied everyone from the use of no-one? The narrator is set apart, kept back, with the others 

     glancing back at me as if I was
     the last figure of a convoy
     from the last war of antiquity,
     and my gods were contagious.

I love that last line, the idea that you can ‘catch’ gods, like an illness or disease, a virus perhaps, but Cumming does not linger in this scene; the untitled poems swiftly move the story along. Returning to his room our protagonist finds incident tape and arson, forcing him to flee, comparing himself to Frankenstein but ‘hoping / something good would come of it’ rather than ‘monsters / that would eventually kill me’.

The fourth poem’s ‘bedsheets beneath me / twisted into a body shape’ suggests that we are in dream territory, an idea reinforced by the way the narrator finds himself ‘falling through air’ then moving among people he recognises, ‘unheard and unseen’. The dream sometimes turns into a nightmare:

     I looked for my face but only
     saw a gap. How could I retrieve
     it, unfold it, spread it out
     like a map and read it,
     follow it, and find myself

But he cannot find himself, for he is ‘as solid as smoke’ and ‘way off the map’, reduced to asking ‘what / would Keith Richards do?’, which hardly seems like a rational response!

This, however, is not a rational journey, it is a city where ‘shadow lives sometimes showed through’, built upon ‘the shadow of false memories’, a place where ‘the ground itself swooned at your feet’. The bed is a re-occurring image, as are maps and absences: of memory, self, any sense of purpose or direction. Films and parallel universes are mentioned in passing, and ‘[a] box that had been opened / decades ago suddenly arrived / in the hands of a courier’, as time loops around itself and slips away.

This poetic journey is made by a narrator who ‘wasn’t going anywhere’, who is eventually led to tell himself that

     Your place is here, and even
     though you are going to be very
     far away, you are expected and
     there’s nothing you need to bring

although in the next poem he interrogates this: ‘What did you bring / and how much of it did / you need to carry?’ At this point, in the final two poems (the quote is from the last-but-one), we realise the whole sequence is a meditation about growing up and the baggage we all carry with us as we navigate the world around us and find our place until we 

     reach this point where
     the road ends, folding
     its dimensions into what
     you packed in haste as a child
     before embarking on your journey.

Cumming’s dreamlike sequence, perhaps written according to ‘fairy tale logic’, is a strange and marvellous affair, its abstractions and surrealism grounded by very real depictions of the city, and a perceptive engagement with the language of emotion and confusion. It’s a brave engagement with, and attempt to illuminate ‘the shadows that / fall when memory passes you by.’

Rupert Loydell 29th September 2022


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What The House Taught Us by Anne Bailey (The Emma Press), This House by Rehema Njambi (The Emma Press)

Posted on September 18, 2022 by tearsinthefence
What The House Taught Us by Anne Bailey (The Emma Press), This House by Rehema Njambi (The Emma Press)

These chapbooks are substantial beyond their size. Both debuts, they consider the  domestic and explore women’s place in it from very different starting-points and with unique voices.

Rehema Njambi is a Kenyan-born, British-raised performance poet who celebrates the Black, mostly African women around her and from whom she is descended. She is acutely aware of home’s patriarchal context:   ‘My mother’s joy is tied to the ground…Our fathers handed belonging to their sons,/gave away their daughters’ (‘A Piece of Land’).

The opening poem, ‘All These Truths You Never Set Free’, speaks to the guilt a  writer/survivor feels towards her female ancestors: ‘I reach for the pen and I remember/that you wanted this for yourself./This selfishness of pen and paper and solitude’.  Yet  poem after poem evokes how precarious a woman’s position has always been at the heart of  home and family: 

        Every haven you have ever found

        was only lent to you.

        Even now you abide in your body

        like a stranger house-sitting for the friend of a friend

                                                                                   ‘A Lending Not a Giving’

Though there is anger and resistance in these poems, and a sense that the ‘I’ must  escape in order to survive (‘I grab what I can and run’, from ‘Our Marriage Dies in a Dream’) there is also great tenderness and  strong religious faith, even if that faith may not be recognisable to her grandmothers, changed as it is through time and   language. The collection ends:

        I pray and search for roots

        and earth, and soil, and tree.

        For truth, for God in all I see.

                                                                            ‘The Language of Grief’

Though it may not be possible to mend the damage caused through betrayal and the imbalance in male/female relationships which can cause ‘home’ to be less than safe for women, Njambi’s work still places faith in the future, and in the continuing struggle: ‘I wrestle and fight for the tongue my mother taught to me’. This is a powerful and moving collection. It will be interesting to follow the trajectory of Njambi’s development in her subsequent books.

 Anne Bailey’s imaginative world is surreal, wry and strange. Outwardly amiable in its quotidian references to such things as ‘Songs of Praise’, ‘polyester,/ chiffon scarves, lipstick, men with shining shoes’  and in the wonderfully-titled ‘Uses and abuses of the tea towel’, still nothing is quite as it seems. A lake appears in the living room. ‘How to get the most out of baking’ begins: ‘Put butter in a baking bowl,/set it in front of the fire, then/call up the dead’. 

I liked this collection very much for the apparently deadpan way it deconstructs domesticity and women’s roles in maintaining it. Houses which ‘should’ be sparkling and perfect are always in danger of decay and spectacular damage: the poems enjoy exploring themes of mould, disintegration, spoilage. The domestic is a dangerous, twilight zone where budgies meet sticky ends under a scalding tap, where ‘letting go’ happens and where ‘Something will have to be done’ (‘A film of dust is how it starts’) – but what? Even darker, a woman are kept psychologically imprisoned by an obsessive man who has taken domesticity to perverse levels: ‘For him it is an act of love’ (in ‘The Curator is married to the rain’).

The poems weigh the sinister and the surreal very carefully together with a lovely sense of the absurd, so that the effect is always unpredictable and engaging. There is loss and grief here, and a range of very dark emotions indeed, but Anne Bailey celebrates the odd and uncanny with relish so her poems fizz with wonderful images : the ‘wooded’ Felicity, ‘her open spaces …full of damp washing’, the ‘tarmacked’ Nigel ‘with a central reservation but no hard shoulder’ (‘The sum of the parts’). Home may throw a long shadow over women’s lives, its rigidity always encroached upon by the wild, the unruly, by wild birds coming inside, becoming trapped –  but the women in Anne Bailey’s poems are more than resilient: they are magical shape-shifters  in ordinary disguises. This book is wise and funny and rewards re-reading.  

Pippa Little 18th September 2022

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