Friday Poem

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Friday Poem – Somnography

This week’s poem is from Polly Atkin’s Shadow Dispatches, which won Mslexia’s very first pamphlet competition in 2012.

These atmospheric and keenly observational poems offer us a slant perspective on everyday things and events: the ugliness of an elderly mute swan; or a group of migraine sufferers forming a fellowship and holding regular meetings. Poems addressing the complexity of contemporary relationships sit alongside those riffing on traditional themes, even – in the case of ‘Hermes Enodios’ and ‘Potnia Theron’ – revisiting classical gods. These are poems embedded in particular landscapes, in which the real becomes surreal and vice versa. Together they form a poetry which is deeply involved with the natural world – concerned with deer in fields and jays in woods – but which is not in any way removed, encompassing email, photoshop and fighter jets.

Somnography

Early this morning I got your note.
I can’t recall the words or meaning,

only the light oblique on the screen
and how it made it feel, certain

transmission was real. I could recite
all the messages received in my sleep

which days have tried to prove imagined,
and one correspondence aborted mid-sentence

which sent itself nevertheless, as though
the content refused erasure, arriving

complete through the ether. We dare not believe
these shadow dispatches: corrupted, wishful,

impossible to delete. The same way sheets
I never strung to dry at a window

still fill the room with sails long after
I’ve moved, and how I’m still reading a letter

a man never sent, though I could repeat it
verbatim, clear as the sun through the linen,

billowing yellow and sweet as the wedge
that lit your words I can’t remember,

or that email which backspaced even as I scrolled
down the face of the dream computer.

Order Shadow Dispatches from our website.

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Friday Poem – String

infragreen

Today’s poem comes from Kate Bingham’s latest collection, Infragreen, due to be released in June.

‘String’ was first published in The Poetry Review.

Perceptive, persuasive and intricately made, the poems of Kate Bingham’s third collection, Infragreen, take the reader on a startling and unfamiliar journey through everyday experiences and phenomena. Her keen eye, reflectiveness and quiet wit endow her subjects with a shimmering freshness.

Set within the four walls of home, on the streets of north London and in the Yorkshire countryside, the poems build out from mundane activities such as taking the pill, traveling a daily bus route and scything thistles. In Bingham’s hands, the familiar sights and hypnotic routines that normally lull the brain into unthinking acquiescence are the starting points for finding new richness in the world around us and our participation in it.

The book contains three sections, each infused by a different season and place, but a spirit of serious play presides throughout. Contemporary versions of Hardy and Frost, a collage cut from old favourite Christmas carols, and a refleshing of some of English poetry’s oldest clichés are part of it, but so too is Bingham’s fascination with pattern: the patterning required by some of poetry’s stricter traditional forms, and pattern as content, a subject in itself.

Those who know Bingham’s earlier work will recognise in this collection her playful, often darkly comic, appreciation of the surreal, which features hearts and hands, feet, and even a pair of shoes with minds and agenda of their own. Elsewhere, a milk-bottle breathes, a pocket of air turns into a winged creature, flies serenade the poet whose mortal scent has drawn them into her room. A ballad at the start of the final section tells the story of an artisan paper-maker whose origami creation is so perfect it comes to life, only to be destroyed again by its maker.

But beneath the gently cynical, almost self-deprecating tone lie Infragreen’s darker themes: a base note of environmental and existential anxiety in which teasing self-deprecation can mutate into a desire for disembodiment, and a ruthless wishing away of consciousness and self.

String

The farmer kept his trousers up with string.
Out of his pockets like an entertainer
with a Punch and Judy sausage-string
he summoned knots of orange binder-twine,
a scruffy scratchy plastic nest of string
his filthy freckled hands pressed into mine.

The lining of his jacket hung in strings
but there would be a Cadbury’s Eclair,
a humbug, or a coil of licorice string
unwinding somewhere, hidden in the hem,

and I was not to give him back his string
until his fingers turned into a hen
and laid a sweet. He didn’t need the string.
I tugged his arm and trotted after him.

Check out Infragreen on our website.

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Friday Poem – Io’s Sisters

This week’s poem comes from Graham Mort’s collection, Cusp. His latest short story collection, Terroir, is now available on our website.

Cusp features many of the qualities readers have come to admire from Graham Mort; keen observation, a feeling for the natural world that echoes and enhances the human interactions in his poems, the sense of the individual as part of a larger society of which we are implicitly responsible. New here is a different sort of line, which alternates short and longer lines in a step-like formation, a terracing which propels the narratives along. Also included is the remarkable, ambitious long poem, ‘Electricity’, fizzing with riffs on its theme. Mort’s formal rigour, instinctive compassion, and warm humanity shine through in this new book, the first since his acclaimed: Visibility: New and Selected Poems.

Io’s Sisters

The usual English summer:
early heat stoking speedwell
dog’s mercury stealing
a march, then months
of drizzle until rosehips
were fading coals
in the hedgerows
sloes a hidden bruise
slugs cruising a lacework
of green and bodies coming
home under Union Jacks
salutes, tributes, the Last Post.

Then on the fading cusp
of August, cows calling
nightlong into rain that
pelted the village:
knock-kneed, teats dragging
in mud, their lungs’ bellows
working the drenched ember
of summer, as if Hera’s spite
stranded them beyond
phonetical love; their eyes
goaded by flies, their tongues
turning a hoarse cud of longing.

Even in darkness
we question their sad
calling with the glib surety
of words, shaping these
smallest sounds as if glass
had broken in our mouths
to join up again as meaning
measure the loss in their
inhuman mooning yet
still fall short of ours.

Engorged, drooling
teat-sore, they drag their
banishment through wet
fields, call for their stolen
calves in pain so large
so inexpressible so deep
it erupts from the colossal
absence they circle as if
they have known in one
form, one incarnation, one
language of consonant
delight a delicacy they
could never speak in this
brute sphere, nor ever be
transfigured to themselves.

Order Cusp and Terroir from our website.

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Friday Poem – Goodbye

Today it’s the 70th anniversary of VE Day, marking 70 years since the end of the Second World War in Europe, and so today’s poem comes from Alun Lewis’s Collected Poems.

Alun Lewis (1915-1944), the remarkable poet and story writer, died, aged 28, in Burma during the Second World War. Some critics see him as the last of the great Romantic poets, a twentieth century Keats. Others view him as the bridge between pre-war poets like Auden and Yeats to post-war poets such as Hughes and Gunn. He was born and raised in Depression-struck south Wales and, following degrees in history at Aberystwyth and Manchester, became a teacher there. Early in 1940, despite his pacifist inclinations he enlisted and, after long periods of training, joined the war in India.

Becoming a soldier galvanised Lewis’s writing. By 1944 he had written two collections of poems and one of short stories, all published to considerable acclaim. Firmly established with Keith Douglas as the leading writer of the Second World War, Lewis’s death in an accident while on active service was a huge loss to English literature. Collected Poems comprises a body of work which has endured and which transcends the label ‘war poetry’; it is complete in itself and full of promise of greater things.

Goodbye

So we must say Goodbye, my darling,
And go, as lovers go, for ever;
Tonight remains, to pack and fix on labels
And make an end of lying down together.

I put a final shilling in the gas,
And watch you slip your dress below your knees
And lie so still I hear your rustling comb
Modulate the autumn in the trees.

And all the countless things I shall remember
Lay mummy-cloths of silence round my head;
I fill the carafe with a drink of water;
You say ‘We paid a guinea for this bed,’

And then, ‘We’ll leave some gas, a little warmth
For the next resident, and these dry flowers,’
And turn your face away, afraid to speak
The big word, that Eternity is ours.

Your kisses close my eyes and yet you stare
As though god struck a child with nameless fears;
Perhaps the water glitters and discloses
Time’s chalice and its limpid useless tears.

Everything we renounce except our selves;
Selfishness is the last of all to go;
Our sighs are exhalations of the earth,
Our footprints leave a track across the snow.

We made the universe to be our home,
Our nostrils took the wind to be our breath,
Our hearts are massive towers of delight,
We stride across the seven seas of death.

Yet when all’s done you’ll keep the emerald
I placed upon your finger in the street;
And I will keep the patches that you sewed
On my old battledress tonight, my sweet.

Order Alun Lewis: Collected Poems from our website.

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Friday Poem – Street Scene

house of small absences

Today’s poem is from Anne-Marie Fyfe’s latest collection, House of Small Absences, due for release this month.

Anne-Marie Fyfe’s poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces—a deserted stage-set, our own personalised ‘museum’, a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage—the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life’s exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go…

Street Scene

‘Nowhere’ is a setting, a situation and a state of mind.
It’s not on any map, but you know it when you’re there.
– Don George, Tales from Nowhere

When you turn your back on the street
and walk away one block, then two,
the over-familiar street-view’s exposed
as propped-up storefronts and verandahs,
sceneries of wings and facades
that could shudder and collapse
in the whish of the tenderest summer breeze.

The scene’s drained first of Technicolor
and then slips slowly out of focus,
passers-by strutting staccato
into the maze of tram-line junctions
that never make it into town’s gazetteer.

Each new city block takes you further
from the grip of a reality that’s already
packing-up shop behind you, shipping
for storage or the next production.
You’d do best to maintain a brisk walking pace.

Pre-order a copy of House of Small Absences from our website.

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Friday Poem – Finding a Fossil

Today’s poem is from John Ormond’s Collected Poems, edited by Rian Evans and introduced by Patrick McGuinness, which is due to be released next month.

John Ormond (1923-1990) is one of the remarkable generation of poets born in south Wales in the early 1920s which includes Dannie Abse and Leslie Norris. A journalist on Picture Post during its heyday in the 1940s, he was a friend of fellow Swansea writers Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins, both of whom were key influences on a poetry of consistently high standards. A significant number of his poems, many of them elegiac, probe his Welsh roots, demonstrating an abiding concern with family and locality. Others focus on particular aspects of the natural world, seeking to capture their elusive quiddities. Stylistically, they vary from the extremely plain to the highly-wrought; are witty and ironic, paradoxical and conceited. Typically unsentimental, shapely and meticulously crafted, his are the poems of a sensibility which delights in explorations, probes complex themes and problematical areas of feeling, and refuses to settle for easy answers.

In addition to his writing Ormond had a distinguished career with BBC Wales as a director and producer of documentary films, which include studies of Welsh painters and writers such as Ceri Richards, Kyffin Williams, Dylan Thomas, Alun Lewis and R.S. Thomas. The insight and visual awareness which mark his films also inform his poetry, a selection of which was published in the Penguin Modern Poets series.

This Collected Poems edited by Rian Evans, draws together all of Ormond’s work, including unpublished material. It includes an Introduction by poet, novelist and critic Patrick McGuinness, notes and commentary of the poems re their geneses, backgrounds, allusions and meanings, and a bibliography of Ormond’s prose writing, films and writing about him. An index of titles and first lines completes this essential book.

Finding a Fossil

Maidenhair fern in flint;
An ancient accident
Shows me time’s imprint.

A leaf preserved and pressed
Between leaves of stone; crossed
Rest and unrest.

An image that grew green
Took ground in the rock grain:
Dark; now light again.

Luck interlaced each line
And dying vein with stone.
They return to the same sun.

The casual life of fronds,
Air and the tongues of friends;
Green begins, grey ends;

Except that remembered shapes
Live, and that at one’s lips
Love speaks as loves lapse.

Graftings (so fused in chance
Among cold stars that dance
Gestures of permanence)

Persist and contrive to invent
From fragment and element
A mindful firmament.

Pre-order a copy of John Ormond’s Collected Poems from our website.

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Friday Poem – A Psalm for the Scaffolders

Today’s poem is from Kim Moore’s debut collection, The Art of Falling. Check out our interview with Kim here.

Kim Moore lives in Barrow, Cumbria. She has an MA from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poems have been published in the TLS, Poetry Review, Poetry London, and elsewhere. She regularly appears at festivals and events, her prize-winning pamphlet, If We Could Speak Like Wolves (Smith-Doorstop) was chosen as an Independent Book of the Year in 2012 and was shortlisted for other prizes. Moore won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2010. In 2014 she won a Northern Promise award. She writes a thoughtful blog and has a wide social media following. The Art of Falling (Seren 2015) is her debut collection.

A Psalm for the Scaffolders

who balanced like tightrope walkers,
who could run up the bracing
faster than you or I could climb
a ladder, who wore red shoes
and worked bare-chested,
who cut their safety vests in half,
a psalm for the scaffolders
and their vans, their steel
toe-capped boots, their coffee mugs,
a psalm for those who learnt
to put up a scaffold standing
on just one board, a psalm
for the scaffolder who could put
a six-inch nail in a piece of wood
with just his palm, a psalm
for those who don’t like rules
or things taking too long, who now
mustn’t go to work uncovered,
who mustn’t cut their safety vests
or climb without ladders, who must
use three boards at all times,
a psalm for the scaffolders
who fall with a harness on,
who have ten minutes to be rescued,
a psalm for the scaffolder who fell
in a clear area, a tube giving way,
that long slow fall, a psalm for him,
who fell thirty feet and survived,
a psalm for the scaffolder
who saw him fall, a psalm for those
at the top of the buildings, the wind whistling
in their ears, the sky in their voices,
for those who lift and carry
and shout and swear, for those
who can recite the lengths of the boards
and tubes like a song, a psalm for them,
the ones who don’t like heights
but spent their whole life hiding it,
a psalm for those who work too long,
a psalm for my father, a psalm for him.

Order The Art of Falling from our website.

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Friday Poem – Edward Hopper on Long Island

Tailor's Three Sons Mara Bergman

Today’s poem is from Mara Bergman’s pamphlet The Tailor’s Three Sons & Other New York Poems, which won the 2014 Mslexia Women’s Poetry Pamphlet Competition!

The Tailor’s Three Sons & Other New York Poems, the Mslexia magazine prize-winning pamphlet published by Seren, is the fruit of author Mara Bergman’s rich memories of her childhood on Long Island and Manhattan. Now living in the UK, she looks back and assembles an appealing cast of characters for us: a grandmother who lives with precarious memories of war-torn Europe in a ‘railroad apartment’ where passing trains make ‘a whole room shake’; a cousin Sharon who makes a weekly pilgrimage to a nail salon, the bottles of nail varnish, ‘lined up like sweets’. There is the ghost of an uncle, spotted in the likeness of a man on the London-Hastings train. We meet an ‘Englishman in New York’ and experience, along with the author, ‘East 13th Street or How I Met My Husband’.

The title poem is inspired by the author’s visit to the Tenement Museum in New York’s Lower East Side, where Bergman vividly imagines the lives of immigrants when many thousands docked in ships at Ellis Island and the Lower East Side was ‘the most crowded place on the planet’. She envisions the lives of the tailor’s three sons she learns about during a museum tour: ‘afternoons they’d elbow through the teeming streets’, come home to a bowl of soup and share a single sofa for a bed. These poems are written with a great deal of warmth and empathy and with a quietly deceptive casual tone. We can see the author, as a small ‘Girl with a Pen’ entranced by her reading a biography of Charlotte Brontë.

Mara Bergman says: ‘I am fascinated by people and their stories. Having lived in England for many years, I often think, What if… and have tried, in my writing, somehow to meld my life in England with the one I left in New York. Here are poems about people, the process of work and art, and distance, in time and place.’

Edward Hopper on Long Island

He left the neon-lit cafés and deserted stations
for a winter of snow, mounds of it,
steeped on decks through a neighbourhood
where he didn’t know a soul.
He had given up city lights, city life,
to see the sun rise from a corner of a garden,
a flock of geese pummel across clouds.
At last the chance to study the filaments
of a squirrel’s tail, the shock of red cardinal.
He’d go to bed later and later,
wake up earlier until
there was no discernible difference
between darkness and light.
Three a.m., looking out on the snow
when a plane passed over the row of split-
levels, he spotted that thin divide
where streetlight met houselight – light
on the side of a building his favourite thing.
Maybe he wasn’t so far from his life,
maybe it was then he stopped questioning
what he was doing amid the snowlight
and a pale orange glow
over the telephone wire, heat steaming.

Order The Tailor’s Three Sons & Other New York Poems from our website.

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Friday Poem – Corpus

An Easter themed poem  for this week’s installment. ‘Corpus’ comes from Damian Walford Davies’ latest collection, Judas.

A shattered Judas Iscariot – that byword for betrayal – tells his own story in Damian Walford Davies’ compelling and finely wrought new collection from Seren.

We follow Judas over the course of five days as he moves through first-century Jerusalem trying to make sense of the bewildering events surrounding the life and execution of Jesus. But this is a man for whom the future is as real as his anguished and traumatized present, and for whom the Arab-Israeli conflict is as urgent as the tension between the Romans and Jews. Emphasising our compulsion to create, and challenge, gospel truths, Judas gives voice to man caught up in the promise and violence of history.

In short-lined, intensely suggestive dramatic monologues, Damian Walford Davies vividly summons moments of fear and swagger, doubt and passion, despair and nonchalance as an outlaw Judas finds himself haunted by his chequered and extraordinary past. Familiar stories are rendered strange and uncanny as the reader is caught in multiple ironies. As striking as the unnerving images on the news loops of our TV and computer screens, these poems locate us on the hazardous streets of a divided city with a companion-guide who shares with us his own troubling and troubled version of history.

Drawing on conflicting representations of Judas spanning twenty centuries, this chain of poems sets out to challenge orthodoxies and easy pieties. Judas offers an imaginative map of ancient enmities – and dares to hint at resolutions – in the form of a dramatic autobiography of the man whose most famous act (they say) was a kiss in the dark.

Corpus

What can I say? I wasn’t there:
neither ready to relieve him
of the transom’s heft

at Via Dolorosa, Station number five;
nor standing with his mother
on the quarry’s scree

to watch his wrists
spiked expertly
between electric nerve

and bone, and hear him
gurgle, drowning in the liquor
of his lungs. I could have tracked

the trail of blood
from here to where the last gob
hit the ground. The morning

had an air of perfect
commonplace. I howled,
so silently I know he heard.

Order Judas from our website.

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Friday Poem – Fireweed

Today’s poem – and painting! – is from A Fold in the River by Philip Gross and Valerie Coffin Price, due to be released at the end of the month.

A Fold in the River is the fruit of collaboration between T.S. Eliot prize-winning poet Philip Gross and the visual artist Valerie Coffin Price. Philip Gross once lived on the banks of the River Taff in Wales and his journals are the source for the powerful poems. Valerie Price revisited the walking route along the river and evolved the beautiful prints and drawings that accompany the poems.

p66-7 Tipsy Pinkrgb

Fireweed

a tipsy pink, a night out
on the palette – mixing

Bloody Marys, lipstick,
a hint of the flare-up to come

*

as kids we played on bombsites,
the badlands of railway lines,

untimely places – back then
there was no such thing as waste

*

always first on the scene,
a bit too soon, after disasters

see us in the background
of the newsreel, inappropriately
dressed

*

one day, all this will be wisps
of white, of seed like grown smoke

forgetting ourselves into the future
wildly, willy-nilly, with a will

Pre-order A Fold in the River from our website.