poetry

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Friday Poem – Metamorphic

Zoë Skoulding Museum of Disappearing Sounds

This week’s poem is from Zoë Skoulding’s 2013 collection, The Museum of Disappearing Sounds.

The disappearing sounds of Zoë Skoulding’s collection may be either in the rich sonic environments that the poems observe, or in the resonance of words themselves, which exist in traces of speech and breath.

‘The Man in the Moone’ takes its title from a 17th century work of science fiction in which lunar inhabitants can communicate their thoughts via music alone. But rather than aspiring to reach beyond language, these poems focus on the spaces that words occupy, looking at how ‘a sentence reverses itself between two pairs of eyes’ or noting ‘the distance drifted by a word shaken loose from border controls’.

Skoulding’s characteristically inventive approach to form emerges in a fractured sonnet sequence based on the coincidences of room numbers. Repeated actions build haunting interior spaces which the reader is invited to enter, each poem becoming a room in which sound ‘bounces off four walls’, as memory accumulates in the subtle rhythms of everyday life.

These poems can provoke states of eerie unease, or of passion evoked with shimmering densities of verbal texture. We can feel the ice in ‘Gwydyr Forest’ “Freezing under feathered/ water landscapes”. Provisional landscapes in which the ground itself is ‘aslant’ call for an active state of perception in which ‘I can do more dangerous things /just with my eyes’.

Exploratory and alive to the senses, The Museum of Disappearing Sounds creates new perspectives on language and the world in which it exists.

Metamorphic

The split slate weathers, lichen colonies
advancing where I stumble in mud, shocked
blood pulsing through limbs, vertical

I tilted in the scent of pine, violent green,
a wood’s engine buzz. Up against the wall
my voice comes back not mine: between ear

and stone a rock face turned aside. What’s
unintelligible isn’t silent, isn’t transcendent
blank: it’s most of it, including you – this

noise, irresolute as rain, where harmony’s
nothing but the hard facts adding up.

Order The Museum of Disappearing Sounds from our website.

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Friday Poem – What I Did in My Summer Holidays

This week’s poem is from Kathryn Simmonds’ second poetry collection, The Visitations, originally published in 2013.

The Visitations is the follow-up to Kathryn Simmonds’ Forward Prize-winning debut, Sunday at the Skin Launderette. As with her previous collection, an appealing voice prevails, though this simplicity is something of a veil, through which the author, with subtle shifts of language and perspective, manages to imply darker themes and worlds unseen. The tone is often simultaneously satirical and elegiac and the collection abounds with sudden moments of strange illumination: a lime tree strikes up a conversation; a life coach finds an old passport; an infant teeters on the brink of speech. Here are poems where the physical and metaphysical meet, where questions of new motherhood are set against those of faith, and the larger conundrum of how to live.

What I Did in My Summer Holidays

Never ask for an ice-cream confidently or menacingly or using
any other adverb. And if you’re in pain, show me where it hurts
and how. Love is an abstract noun. Dialogue gives the effect
of real speech but with all the boring rubbish taken out.
Every thought you’ve ever had has been thought better and by
someone else. Does anyone have any questions? We talked
last week about the stanza, you might think of stanzas as little
rooms: what are you going to do in yours? Are you going to just
lie there watching light reinvent itself? The second line doesn’t
scan. Yes, flair is better. For homework, sit in a soft chair and
describe the exact experience, no, don’t do that, write down a
conversation you hear on a bus; go out in the rain and open
your mouth; make a list of everything in your bathroom cabinet.
Try not to break your line on an article. The first person
you have to please is yourself, but if nobody else is pleased
you have a problem. Fill out the form and give it back to me:
te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum te-dum. Notice that beautiful line
where the widow’s hands are likened to the wings of a dead bird.
Less is more, but sometimes less is less. What do librarians get paid?
I’ve never seen that particular noun used as a verb. But it’s too late
now to get to grips with the Dewey Decimal System.
Did anyone else have a problem with the turnip metaphor?

Order The Visitations from our website.

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Friday Poem – Post-Script: For Gweno

This week’s poem is another taken from WW2 writer Alun Lewis’s Collected Poems, to celebrate the launch of Dr. John Pikoulis’s latest biography, Alun, Gweno & Freda, which is now available to order from our website.

For more information about Alun Lewis and the ongoing centenary celebrations, be sure to check out the Alun Lewis website, Twitter and Facebook.

Post-Script: For Gweno

If I should go away,
Beloved, do not say
‘He has forgotten me’.
For you abide,
A singing rib within my dreaming side;
You always stay.
And in the mad tormented valley
Where blood and hunger rally
And Death the wild beast is uncaught, untamed,
Our soul withstands the terror
And has its quiet honour
Among the glittering stars your voices named.

Order Alun Lewis’s Collected Poems from our website.

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Friday Poem – A Brief History of Topiary

This week’s poem comes from the late Ellie Evans’s collection, The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess, published in 2011.

The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess is an exhilarating first collection of poems from Ellie Evans. Using a surrealist palette of imagery and a tightly focused idiom, the author takes us on strange journeys:to the post-apocalyptic world of the title poem, or into a skewed 18th century Venice in ‘The Zograscope’. These strange worlds are always to the purpose, they are, as Marianne Moore famously said of poetry ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them.’ We obliquely unearth childhood trauma, fraught or intense relationships and also a singular (and perhaps also Welsh?) delight in rebellion, and in escape through the imagination. Poems like ‘Picnic with Earthquakes’ and ‘Jekyl Island, Georgia’ deftly align exotic locales (Eastern Europe, South East Asia, Greece and the USA,) with intimate states of mind. A fascination with art and history emerge in: ‘A Brief History of Topiary’ and ‘Two Monologues from The Odyssey’. There is also a palpable delight in technique: you will find a sonnet, a villanelle, triolets and a concise free verse where she employs rhyme, half-rhyme, and subtle alliteration.

A Brief History of Topiary

That September, in the Garden Nursery
three hundred yew cuttings, Taxus baccata,
stubbled in green, were ranked
in rows of fifty, in identical brown pots.

They were like schoolgirls waiting in Assembly
cross-legged and silent in the new Sports Hall
where the morning sun cast shadows on looped ropes
and blue lines on the floor for goals and penalties.

Years later, the young yews were planted out as hedges,
so they grew together sideways, twined, supported
each other. They made a garden room for picnics,
plays, dalliance and tennis. Some had alcoves

gouged out of them, to enclose pillars or gods,
satyrs and herms. Others were cut through, so
you could look out to another garden
or to a borrowed view. A few were special:

allowed to grow above the rest, until
frames were bolted round them. When they’re mature,
you don’t see these underlying structures for cones,
or balls, or obelisks, or whatever.

Purists won’t use frames, of course, but rely
on frequent trimming, checking from all angles.
Whichever method you chose, remember:
all stray shoots must be pinched out.

At night, the moon plays tricks on topiary,
on the giant women with their stove-pipe hats,
their capes and skirts like bells, who look as though
they’ll stride off to the woods, tearing the garden down.

Order The Ivy Hides the Fig-ripe Duchess from our website.

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Friday Poem – In Hospital: Poona

This week’s poem is from Alun Lewis: Collected Poems, edited by Cary Archard, to celebrate Lewis’s centenary earlier this week. Lewis was one of the most compelling writers of the Second World War, whose premature death in 1944 – when he was only 28 – was a grave loss to Britain’s literature community.

For more information about Lewis, check out his website and find out everything you need to know about the continuing centenary celebrations on Twitter.

In Hospital: Poona

Last night I did not fight for sleep
But lay awake from midnight while the world
Turned its slow features to the moving deep
Of darkness, till I knew that you were furled,

Beloved, in the same dark watch as I.
And sixty degrees of longitude beside
Vanished as though a swan in ecstasy
Had spanned the distance from your sleeping side.

And like to swan or moon the whole of Wales
Glided within the parish of my care:
I saw the green tide leap on Cardigan,
Your red yacht riding like a legend there,
And the great mountains, Dafydd and Llewelyn,
Plynlimmon, Cader Idris and Eryri
Threshing the darkness back from head and fin,
And also the small nameless mining valley

Whose slopes are scratched with streets and
sprawling graves
Dark in the lap of firwoods and great boulders
Where you lay waiting, listening to the waves-
My hot hands touched your white despondent shoulders

– And then ten thousand miles of daylight grew
Between us, and I heard the wild daws crake
In India’s starving throat; whereat I knew
That Time upon the heart can break
But love survives the venom of the snake.

Order Alun Lewis: Collected Poems from our website.

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Friday Poem – Bob’s Dogs

Red Devon by Hilary Menos

This week’s poem is from Hilary Menos’s Red Devon, first published in 2013.

In the late 90’s the poet Hilary Menos moved from Camden Town in London to a farmhouse two miles from a small village in Devon. Over the next ten years, together with her husband Andy Brodie and three sons, she turned this into a 100 acre organic farm with a herd of pedigree Red Devon cows and a flock of Wiltshire Horn sheep.

In Red Devon, her second collection, Menos reveals her experiences as a “blow in” from upcountry moving into a tight-knit rural community and seeing at first hand some of the human and animal costs of the conflict between traditional farming methods and the demands of modern commercial agriculture. She also tells the story of a burgeoning love affair between farmer Grunt Garvey and haulier Jo Tucker, a romance which ends in tragedy. Alongside these two stories, one fictional and one very real, runs a concern for farmers around the world whose livelihoods – and lives – are threatened by global changes in agriculture.

Bob’s Dogs

There was the one dog, neither use nor ornament.
Each morning he lurked by the tanker’s dribbling spout
licking his chops. Spawned every cur in the district.
Bit the postman, once, and got away with it.

There was the other dog, two-bit brother to the first,
eyes like spilt milk. Danced on the slurry pit’s crust
one time too many, said Bob, and no good since.
Bit the builder’s foreman twice, and got away with it.

There was the third dog, each month went walk about
under a chicken moon, fetching and shedding stars.
Deaf to everyone but Bob’s dad, now four years
bed-bound. What shall I say? Bit nobody, yet.

And lastly there was the bitch. Bit the child.
The four shots blew through the lanes and echoed loud
in the neighbour’s eyes. Only Bob shook my hand,
hitching his trousers up with a “Welcome, my friend.”

Order Red Devon from our website.

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Friday Poem – On Becoming a Fish

This week’s poem is from Emily Hinshelwood’s second collection, On Becoming a Fish, published in 2012.

Emily Hinshelwood’s On Becoming a Fish was inspired by a series of walks around the 186 mile Pembrokeshire coastal path in West Wales, known for its spectacular views from cliffside paths skirting the Irish sea and the Bristol Channel. Deeply engaged with environmental issues through her work in community energy and climate change, the author is also a keen observer of human nature in the context of this beautiful coastline.

The poems feature: ghosts, quarries, shipwrecks, pirates, fishermen, sailors; the remnants of industrial industry as well as monuments from the past: neolithic burial sites, forts, caves, graves, memorials. Also present are characters conjured from history such as the ‘four hundred Welsh Women wearing stovepipe hats’ who foiled the last invasion of Britain at Carregwastad in 1797, as well as contemporary encounters: a retired fisherman, lifeboat crew, a lighthouse keeper and a skinny dipper.

The author says: “This collection explores ‘what happens at the boundary’ – not just the topographical boundary of sea meeting land – but the concept of boundary in itself: political borders, social barriers, environmental limits, historical divisions; the boundary between fact and fiction, between you and I.”

On Becoming a Fish

Milford Haven

Tales of the sea didn’t prepare me for this.
It all seemed so Jack Sparrow, so Barti Du,
perhaps a mermaid flung on a rock,
whales. Jonah.
You know what I mean.
Even the fish stall with its ice trays
and neat lines of flat eyes, even he spins yarns
as he slices heads into a bucket.

When you stop coming up for air,
when your lungs implode to a stillness
all that talking ceases.
All that endless talking.
And you half-remember poking
at a lobster with rubberbanded claws
noting how prehistoric it was
and someone said something about the future.

Sounds now are just noise
against my body.
This is my story.
I keep telling it over and over.
For it’s just me
defying gravity.
The swish of my tail
darting.

It’s starting to feel like I’m dancing.

Order On Becoming a Fish from our website.

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What Editors Want – Poetry

This year we’re doing a series of blog posts on what editors in the publishing world are looking for. In February we heard from our fiction editor, Penny Thomas, and today our poetry editor, Amy Wack, lets us know what she looks for in submissions.

Dazzle me.

Isn’t this what everyone wants out of art? I want the book that makes me sit up at my desk, that makes my skull tingle, that intrigues and enlightens me, that seduces me with a fiercely intelligent music.

There is also a sense that someone has put the hours in. This is the 10,000 hours that it takes to become proficient at any art or skill. It involves a lot of reading, thinking and writing every day, often for something like a decade.

Sometimes, a writer will show evidence of talent or flair, but just hasn’t put the hours in yet. Sometimes a writer will show evidence of having put the hours in, but they need something else, that elusive spark that ignites language with feeling and relevance.

Some artists are gifted (or cursed) with a strong, sometimes tragic subject matter: a dark past, a difficult childhood, a divorce, or death, a powerfully dark story. These poems can feel like they’ve come from a pressure-cooker. There is a powerful sense of inevitability about them. They aren’t just asking for our attention, they are compelling it.

Others are gifted with a more work-a-day talent, are slow burners, and their work will build in layers, become more consistent, and over time will come to encompass a distinctive body of work. They have the luck of not needing tragedy to evolve.

Do I really need to say anything about presentation? White paper, black ink, one page cover letter, large return envelope, enough return postage. Get poems in magazines before you dream of approaching a publisher. Get used to multiple rejections. Do not take it personally. Keep your day job. Be polite to the Editor, be polite to staff.

I love classical poetic form and rhyme used well. But I also liked to be surprised out of my inclinations and persuaded by new forms. I also really like poems that speak to the average reader and not just to some esoteric coeterie, so I have time for the whole spoken-word scene, as I feel like this is entirely the point of poetry.

So, speak some words to me!

Amy Wack, Poetry Editor

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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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I Know What You Read Last Summer

Well actually I don’t, but now that summer is just around the corner I can at least tell you what we think you should be reading this summer!

Look out for these upcoming releases on our website.

InfragreenInfragreenrgb
by Kate Bingham

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 recognize 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.

MorlaisMorlais cover
by Alun Lewis

Morlais is Alun Lewis’s unpublished novel from the late 1930s. The Laurentian story of a young boy growing up in the poverty stricken industrial valleys of south Wales, it also reflects Lewis’s own experiences, particularly his search for self-knowledge and his conviction that he would be a writer.

Miner’s son Morlais Jenkins is already being educated away from his background at grammar school when he is adopted, on the death of her own son, by the wife of the local local colliery owner. Morlais’s parents recognize the opportunity for their son to make a better future, but they must all pay a great price. Stifled by middle class life, his adoptive mother recognizes that Morlais will be a poet and encourages him to be neither working class or middle class, but true to his talent.

Full of vivid descriptive passages of life in the fictional mining valley, and centred on the conflicted character of Morlais and the decisions he faces over his two families, his two social backgrounds, and his desire to be a poet, the novel is an enthralling journey through the life of a young boy becoming a young man.

Alun Lewis (1915-1944) was the outstanding writer of World War Two and Morlais, written in his mid twenties, is an early indication of the talented writer he would become just five years later. This edition is accompanied by an Afterword by Lewis’s biographer, John Pikoulis.

coverThe Road to Zagora
by Richard Collins

When Richard Collins was diagnosed with a progressive incurable disease in 2006 he decided to see as much of the world as he could while his condition allowed. The result is The Road to Zagora, a singular travel book which takes in India, Nepal, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Peru, Equador and Wales. ‘Mr Parkinson’, as Collins refers to his condition, informs the narrative.

As inveterate walkers Collins and his partner Flic decided to continue to travel ‘close to the land’ post diagnosis, leaving the tourist trails and visiting places of extremes: the Himalayas, rainforests, deserts. The difficulties of rough terrain, altitude, extremes of climate for a person with Collins’ condition are an ongoing strand of his narrative; occasionally they cannot be overcome and Collins is forced to consider the frailties of the human body in passages of moving contemplation.

The Road to Zagora also includes an element of memoir, as Parkinson’s Disease also causes Collins to reflect on his life, and in particular on his relationship with Flic. There are moments of great charm as their relationship evolves, and also the drama of previous serious illnesses. These recollections of pre-diagnosis life have the wistfulness of hindsight as Collins considers what constitutes a life well lived.

Yet any sentiment or self-pity is denied through Collins’s resolute and independent- mindedness and the quality of writing. In the travel passages the readers experiences the sheer physicality of Collins’ expeditions, along with his novelist’s eye for telling local detail. In the sequences of memoir the writing is humane, compassionate and quite often comic. The Road to Zagora is a memorable journey around the world, and the self.