i.m. Yves Bonnefoy: love the bouquet for its hour

August 9, 2016 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, contemporary French poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing Beverley Bie Brahic, Daodejing, Enitharmon Books, John Naughton, Mallarme, presence, Rainer Maria Rilke, Seagull Books, Shakespeare, The Present Hour, time in poetry, Yves Bonnefoy

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The death of Yves Bonnefoy (on 1st July 2016) was marked last week by The Guardian and The New York Times and many others. Anybody who has followed this blog for a while will know that I have found considerable inspiration in Bonnefoy’s poetry and writing about poetry. John Naughton in The Guardian obit sums up the nub of Bonnefoy’s thought: “we tend to replace the reality of things and other people with an image or concept, which deprives us of a more direct and immediate experience he called the experience of “presence”, in which one has a fleeting apprehension of the essential oneness of all being”. That latter phrase will explain how I have stumbled my way in recent years from translating Rilke to versioning the texts of the Daodejing.

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The NYT obit suggests Bonnefoy’s poetry has often been found “highly abstract and often obscure” and to counter this misleading impression I thought I’d post four sonnets from his 2011 collection L’heure presente (The Present Hour) in Beverley Bie Brahic’s pellucid translations. Bonnefoy is thinking of his own father here (who died when the poet was young) but the valedictory tone seemed right for the occasion. Bonnefoy translated a great deal of Shakespeare and (in part – he’s also arguing with Mallarme) the fourth of Bonnefoy’s sonnets is in dialogue with the ideas of Sonnet 63 (“His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, / And they shall live, and he in them still green”). It’s a mark of Bonnefoy’s achievement that even in such an emotional, personal context, he can still articulate ideas about language (“words cut”) and the way in which “the real flower becomes metaphor” by bleeding the temporal and in doing so yields up a great deal of what it means to be real. Instead, we must “love the bouquet for its hour. / Only at this price is beauty an offering”.

A Photograph

This photograph—what a paltry thing!

Crude colour disfigures

The mouth, the eyes. Back then

They used colour to mock life.

But I knew the man whose face

Is caught in this mesh. I see him

Climbing down to the boat. Obol

Already in his hand, as if for death.

Let the wind rise in the image, driving rain

Drench it, deface it! Show us

Under the colour the stairs streaming water!

Who was he? What were his hopes? I hear

Only his footsteps descending in the night,

Clumsily, no one to give him a hand.

Another Photograph

Who is he, astonished, wondering

Whether he should recognise himself in this picture?

Summer, it seems, and a garden

Where five or six people gather.

And when was it, and where, and after what?

What did these people mean to one another?

Did they even care? Indifferent

As their death already required of them.

But this person, who looks at—this other,

Intimidated all the same! Strange flower

This debris of a photograph!

Being crops up here and there. A weed

Struggling between house fronts and the sidewalk.

And some passers-by, already shadows.

A Memory

He seemed very old, almost a child;

He walked slowly, hand clutching

A remnant of muddied fabric.

Eyes closed, though. Oh—isn’t believing

You remember the worst kind of lure,

The hand that takes ours to lead us on?

Still, it struck me he was smiling

When, soon, night enveloped him.

It struck me? No, I must be wrong.

Memory is a broken voice,

We hardly hear it, even from up close.

Yet we listen, and for so long

That sometimes life goes by. And death

Already says no to any metaphor.

I Give You These Lines . . .

I give you these lines, not that your name

Might ever flourish, in this poor soil,

But because trying to remember—

This is cut flowers, which makes some sense.

Some, lost in their dream, say ‘a flower’,

But it’s not knowing how words cut

If they think they denote it in what they name,

Transmuting flower into its idea.

Snipped, the real flower becomes a metaphor,

This sap that trickles out is time

Relinquishing what remains of its dream.

Who wants now and then to have visits

Must love the bouquet for its hour.

Only at this price is beauty an offering.

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Choman Hardi: Review of ‘Considering the Women’

June 15, 2016 martyn crucefix blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, UK poetry magazines, writing Bloodaxe Books, Choman hardi, Considering the Women, First World War, Forward Poetry prize, Iraq War, Kurds, Life For Us, Poetry London, Wilfred Owen

In the Recent Reading section of my website I observed that Choman Hardi’s “unsparing exploration of the plight and flight of the Iraqi-Kurdish people in the 1980s is poetry of witness of a high order. This is a body of work which is unique and deserves as much notice as we can give it”. I also blogged about her second collection, Considering the Women, where I drew comparisons between her poem ‘Gas Attack’ and Wilfred Owen’s well-known anti-war poem ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’. My thoughts were in part a spin-off from a review I was asked to do of the book (alongside collections by Tony Hoagland and Jan Wagner). That review has been published in Poetry London. But Hardi’s book has just appeared on the Forward Prize Best Collection Shortlist and the post that now follows is the discussion of the whole book from my original review. The “delicate deliberations” alluded to in the opening line refer to Jan Wagner’s work – in which I discussed his explorations of the self, definitions and re-definitions of it, through our honest encounter with the world.

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The kind of horrific experiences and seismic changes to human lives that Choman Hardi writes about make some of these more delicate deliberations seem inappropriate luxuries. Hardi does not write much about herself yet the locus of her life is critical to the work. Born in Sulaimani, she lived in Iraqi-Kurdistan and Iran before seeking asylum in the UK in 1993. She has since researched women survivors of Saddam’s chemical warfare against the Kurds in the late 1980s and has recently moved back to Sulaimani. Her first book (in English) Life for Us (Bloodaxe, 2004) was remarkable for its evocations of a childhood shattered by war, persecution and exile. Her new collection also contains timely poems about exile, warfare, ethnic cleansing, but goes on to reflect on the pull back to the homeland.

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Hardi writes devastatingly about the Iraqi state’s genocidal attacks on the Kurds, drawing directly on her research in the central ‘Anfal’ sequence. ‘Gas Attack’ offers a mother’s account of “a chalky-yellow powder” settling on exposed skin, her own and her son’s. The boy dies, groaning “like a calf”, the mother still blinded, unable to see him or “say goodbye”. Hardi’s language is always sufficient to the task – plain, direct, rising to the occasional metaphor, natural enough to suggest a witnessing voice. In ‘Dibs Camp, the Women’s Prison’, another mother who has already lost husband and daughter, holds her son in her arms as he dies suckling on a green slipper because he has asked for a cucumber and “is beyond // knowing the difference”. ‘The Angry Survivor’ introduces a different perspective as yet another mother rails against the intrusion of journalists, officials, activists who want to probe her story, or as she puts it, “pick my wounds”.

The position of the researcher is a vexed one openly considered in this collection. The ‘Anfal’ sequence is begun by the researcher’s voice, earnest, naïve and well-meaning. It concludes with ‘Researcher’s Blues’ in which she is now haunted permanently by the women’s voices so that “all I can do is / pour with grief which has no beginning and no end”. Such hyperbolic language is carefully measured to the devastating subject but the impact of such traumatic events on a non-participant is perhaps better dealt with elsewhere in the collection in more autobiographical pieces. In ‘My English Years’ the narrator sketches the story of a mixed marriage in decline. One of the points of contention is her research which leaves her feeling “dispossessed”. The husband tires of what he sees as her obsession with “victimhood”, then he also grows “fed up with me” (‘Our Different Worlds’).

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The irony of a poem like ‘Before You Leave’ – flinging out imperatives demanding that language, landscape, neighbours, parents must not be forgotten in exile – is that it is precisely these things that are never really abandoned. ‘Blackout’ records a more ordinary scene, a woman lying on a flat roof on a hot summer night. As the electricity is cut, her husband stumbles around in the dark below in yet another of those “ruptures” that seem to be the condition

[of] life going wrong –

a house disappearing after a bomb,

a loved one not waking up from sleep,

villages being erased from a map

That such occasionally generalized images stand for a universality validated by lived and carefully researched experience means Hardi’s readers may lower their critical defences. It’s brave and right of her to reflect her own life’s travails in these poems as it is always the individual’s experience that is trampled by state power and any re-statement of its importance is a political act.

Workshopping With Will Shakespeare

May 4, 2016May 5, 2016 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, poetry workshops, teaching, UK poetry magazines, writing Daodejing, Doctor Faustus, Hamlet, Katherine Lockton, Peter Ebsworth, Poetry Society, poetry workshop, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Sonnet 130, Shakespeare Sonnet 18, South Bank Poetry

Last weekend – what with the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death just gone by and seeing an advertisement on Facebook I think it was – I signed up to be a participant in a Shakespeare and writing poetry workshop. Being an English teacher, love of Shakespeare rather comes with the territory but I’m sure I’m not the only teacher who enjoys being a participant in classes. So much of my time is spent initiating, organising, timing carefully and concluding that it’s a wonderful holiday-feeling to be initiated, organised, timed carefully and concluded by somebody else. (In what follows I am able to quote the work of nobody else but myself – for which apologies).

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The workshop was part of a series organised through the South Bank Poetry magazine, co-edited by Peter Ebsworth (its founder) and Katherine Lockton. They were both present for the workshop – upstairs, above the Poetry Society’s Cafe in Betterton Street, Covent Garden – but it was Katherine who ran the session. We gathered about 10.45 for 11am, most of us arriving clutching the mandatory take-out coffee from the cafe or elsewhere on our walks from the Tube. A big table, a plate of biscuits, greetings, sign in (whose name do I know here?). Upstairs at the PS is a strange mix of store room, kitchen, second hand bookshop, classroom. I thought it could do with a tidy-up myself – then tried to curb my flicker of nerves, that need for control. Actually, I’ve not taken part in a public workshop like this for ages. We were probably all feeling the same: what if I write total crap and Katherine asks me to read it out. Maybe a biscuit . . .

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We started with free writing for 5 minutes or so – “to loosen up”. Katherine wanted us to set off from “My Shakespeare is . . .” What sprang vividly to mind was an occasion teaching not Shakespeare, in fact, but Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. A student read the “face that launched a thousand ships” speech so very badly that it achieved a weird sort of beauty in her inarticulacy. A bit like those ruins of classical statues (not far from where we were, in the British Museum) that seem to have acquired an added poignancy in not remaining whole. I rather like free writing (it’s how most of my own poems begin, a sudden splurge of material that then gets worked on) and as I wrote I ended up (from that halting reading of Marlowe) to love in a life or its opportunity missed:

Those encounters where you don’t have the words

Just stops pauses some musical sense

Of the word order but no –not the words themselves

And she turns away dips her head

Laughs at something somebody across the room has just said

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Katherine then dished out the text of Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” On the Tube in I had been wondering how I’d tackle Shakespeare in such a setting and I thought I’d not go for the more familiar moments. Katherine did and I have to say she was probably right. I’d have ended up explaining too much perhaps (too teacherly) when the point was to respond creatively to the poems. So most of us were familiar enough with this poem in which the narrator does compare his love to a summer’s day and the summer’s day turns out to be liable to be windy, over too soon, too hot, over too soon . . . The lover apparently suffers from none of these things not even death itself – because the poet has preserved her in “this” poem: “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”. We wondered, among others things, at the manly arrogance of this.

We picked a phrase or even just a word to respond to from the poem and set off for 30 minutes or so. On this first occasion, many of us seemed to get sucked into the vortex of the sonnet form and rhyme especially. But the quality of the group that day was extraordinary. Several produced sonnets which worked well (in 30 minutes!) and all the pieces eventually read out were interesting responses. I chose the phrase “By chance, or nature” and was exploring (again) the chance or fate of meetings with the one’s you love. I was imagining the alternative worlds we jettison or turn our back on with every choice we make:

So that in one of those plural worlds

We might have met before, or later, even not

At all – through pram and playground, into school

To college, old flames, chance turn, random plot.

You can see what I mean about getting locked into a formal mode. It may be that most of us realised this as when Katherine then tried us with Sonnet 130, more of the group struck out – away from formality, probably into something more like our natural mode. This was also probably encouraged by the fact that Katherine was showing us contemporary responses to these poems as we went. Several of these were quite encouraging in that they were pretty poor as poems – there are a number of anthologies where contemporary poets respond to Shakespeare (especially this year) but so many of the poets try too hard to up-date originals into some hip idiom; embarrassing like Dad-dancing). I guess that at least gave us permission to try something more adventurous of our own.

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I found myself interested in the way the Sonnet 130 tries to define the lover through a kind of via negativa, what she is not. It’s a kind of anti-poetic in that the poet dismisses the ability of comparison (one of the poet’s main tools) to capture her in truth. This was reminding me of repeated occasions in the Daodejing poems I have been working on for 3/4 years (just published now – so fully on my mind last weekend) in which the text also argues the elusiveness of the One. The latter is often given female characteristics so it was an easy step to my scribble:

She lives in the live darkness between

The opening and shutting of my eye-lids

Between ascender and descender

Of this pen this white expanse

This Microsoft space not knowing what to do

With itself not being busy

In the moment when instructions cease

And what opens is that snow-field

Beneath the first or second chair-lift not yet

Inscribed [. . . ]

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The third piece Katherine gave us were extracts from Romeo and Juliet (the balcony scene, the “what’s in a name” speech” and Juliet’s “O serpent heart”). We discussed these and annotated them to pick out certain patterns and concerns. We then compiled a small list of words of our own and set off with the aim of writing in the voice of a character from Shakespeare. I’ve always had a soft spot for Horatio and especially Hamlet’s gentle, though firm, put-down: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. I had Horatio realising the truth of this, a bit Prufrock-like realising that he was not meant to play the Prince, but be an observer, something of a by-stander at the big events:

O but it’s enviousness I breed

Here listening to you roar

And glitter you go on to the very point

Or way off kilter

And patronise me yet even this you do

With such grace with warmth making me love you.

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The rhythm of this particular workshop was a lot of time for individual writing. We shared all we wrote (no one objected – and absolutely none of it was “crap”), and Katherine introduced the extracts quite briskly while still allowing plenty of time for people’s reactions to them. The time was now about 4pm. The final piece was stimulated with small bits of cloth from Katherine’s Mum’s sewing box but also with a story she told (no details – it’s her story) which we could incorporate if we wanted to. My final piece was the strangest I’d produced so far. My cloth was a rich red – a bit sexy – and the encounter was on a staircase, I was coming down to meet someone. Perhaps by this time I was more Juliet than myself, or I’d carved myself into two:

Everything possessed

Of that clarity

And the weight

Of heraldry—

So the long dress

I wear is gules

Its blood-red

Slit to the thigh

Its plunging neck

A sunlight wedge

At the foot

Of the shallow stair

I lift my chin

As if called for [. . . ]

I don’t know if the 4 pieces I produced will come to anything further but I can honestly say they would not have been written otherwise. In running my own workshops, I always say the simple thing they achieve is to take your writing to places you’d not have got to alone. That certainly happened the other day and I’m grateful to South Bank Poetry for the chance to participate: now back to the front of the class.

DR FAUSTUS – Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton

Poetry at Palmers Green: live review (April 2016)

April 19, 2016 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, poetry in performance, writing Danielle Hope, Edward Thomas, Enitharmon Press, Gill McEvoy, Happenstance Press, Katherine Gallagher, Mario Petrucci, Mo Gallacio, Myra Schneider, Oversteps Books, Palmers Green Poetry, Rockingham Press, Simon Richey, Stevie Smith

When reviewing my first year of blogging on poetry and related matters (see blog) I said I wanted to review more live events. That has not happened really but this week I wanted to rectify that to some degree.

Last Saturday I drove a few miles north to Palmers Green, best known to the poetry world of course, as the home ground of Stevie Smith who moved there when she was three years old. She was educated at Palmers Green High School and North London Collegiate School for Girls and lived in the area until her death in 1971. I first became aware of the current poetry activity in the area a few years ago when I went to readings at the bookshop in the High Street run by Joanna Cameron.

But in 2006 the Palmers Green Bookshop was forced to close, the lease was sold on and I think it was an opticians that opened in its place. Since then a number of local poets and enthusiasts have been keeping poetry alive with 6 monthly poetry readings at Stevie’s church, St John’s, N13 4AL. The readings take place in the Parish Centre adjoining the church and are always friendly and well-programmed evenings. I’d recommend them if you’re in the area (Contacts: Katherine Gallagher or Myra Schneider and on Facebook).

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The evening was introduced with clarity and authority by Lynda How and readings took place as the April evening sun set outside. The Parish Centre looks at first a little soulless but with its shades-of-yellow decor, surprisingly tasteful lighting and pitched wedding-cake-white roof it is actually a venue which has a good acoustic and a disarming and warm atmosphere. The first reader was Danielle Hope, whose new book is Mrs Uomo’s Yearbook (Rockingham Press, 2015) from which she read the entertaining and instantly recognisable out-of-season seaside resort description ’Llandudno Winter’. Recognisable to most of the audience it seemed and as I spent a couple of years in digs in Morecambe I knew the “please-remove-wet-shoes-at-door / heating-on-from-seven-to-eight / no-radiator-in-bar / low-watt-lamps” guesthouse. Her translations from the Italian are also impressive (Montale’s ‘Eastbourne’) and the Mrs Uomo poems manage to combine humour and acute observation with a more serious satirical edge. Mrs Uomo teaches her cat economics at one point but more poignantly is left awaiting an operation having “improved against [the NHS] recently refreshed thresholds”. Hope works as a doctor in London and knows what she is talking about here and her poems are always a pleasure to listen to delivered in a colloquial, un-stylised fashion.

In contrast, Mario Petrucci read slowly and deliberately from crib (Enitharmon Press, 2014) which is a selection from the 111 poems he wrote during the first year of his son’s life (Mario was kind enough to allude to my own efforts in this topic area (see A Madder Ghost)). Petrucci’s work (especially in recent years) is much concerned with language as an object/medium in itself (hence his delivery). He spoke about his interest in the “deckle edge” of language where it begins to fade and dissolve and on the page he accentuates the thingi-ness of words with mostly very short lines, unpredictable line breaks, sometimes dividing words across line breaks.

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The cover image of crib is of a child sleeping in almost pitch darkness – a metaphor Petrucci suggested for the way language itself struggles to communicate, picking from the mass of experience a highlight here or there. This from ‘i fish’:

in dark

with dark

as spool &

mark him

sparely

move

as if

i sought

magnified

on glass slide

that form

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Gill McEvoy’s most recent pamphlet The First Telling (HappenStance, 2014) won the Michael Marks award in 2014. McEvoy’s delivery is rather more actor-ish, her voice taking on the inflections and tones of the character felt to be speaking the poems themselves. I’m never wholly convinced this is the way I (personally) want to hear poems read (I’m even more uneasy about poets who have learned texts in order to ‘act them out’). But McEvoy’s work – especially in The First Telling, which deals with rape and its aftermath – is easily powerful enough to overcome any misgivings I might have had. Her poems are often brief and delicate and disturbing:

I touch the cigarette

to my arm.

Here.

And here.

I can’t talk about it.

I could touch this fuse

to my chair.

I could watch it catch.

I could watch it flame

to roaring fury.

Counterpointing such troubling pieces, McEvoy scatters even briefer poems on birds which comment obliquely on the human narrative. Petrucci had earlier commented on the importance of the silence after a poem has been read aloud and in the intervals between many of these poems – at least while the evening light held out beyond the windows – I could hear the occasional twitter and cheep of birds in the churchyard grounds. A rather lovely accompaniment.

After the interval there were 8 floor readers. The quality of the work was high (not always the case where venues welcome floor readers) but I was struck by the number of people reading from electronic devices – phones and iPads. Of the main readers several read from their books (traditional) others from folders where the poems seemed to be printed and ordered for the occasion (the well-prepared; the short sighted). I can see the latter becoming more likely in relation to my own eye-sight but I have to say I prefer to see poets read from their books (assuming the work is published) and I can’t help think that the sight of the book cover waving around up there does something for after-reading sales too.

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Simon Richey read from his first book, Naming the Tree from Oversteps Books. I’m ashamed to say I know little of his work (though he later confessed to me that he has hardly ever attended a poetry workshop, so perhaps he has just not been very visible on the ‘circuit’). I thought his work was very interesting indeed, sharing something of Petrucci’s concerns with language but also developing threads of thought and emotional responses alongside.

Somewhere
the meaning of a word,

before it becomes a word,
waits in the silence. It is as if

it has come as far as it can go
without being uttered. In a moment

it will change from one thing
into another, or its meaning

will tremble into a word,
into something barely familiar,

finding itself spoken,
finding itself understood.

Several of the pieces were prose poems – one a series of sections, called ‘The Darkness’, about the night-wanderings of cats as well as about the night-wanderings of their owner’s mind.

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The final reader was Mo Gallacio whose marvellously rich reading voice (she is a trained actress) leant itself to both Scots and English verse, triumphantly avoiding that actor-voice that seems either to value the rotund vowels and the crisply planted consonants over and above the emotional tides of a piece of writing, or to emote all over the poetic text so heavily that the language and form of the poem is swamped and made unhearable. ‘Purple Iris’ is an especially moving poem about the incurable illness of a neighbour. Gallacio’s own struggles with cancer form the basis for a number of poems; in one she asks the nurse how she will feel after surgery – the nurse’s reply: like you’ve been stabbed! Gallacio’s evident love of and attentiveness to flowers and plants echoed McEvoy’s acutely observed birds and the evening ended with a celebratory bunch of brightly trumpeting daffodils (no more than £1 from Tescos) suggesting – with a nod to the Edward Thomas of ‘March’ perhaps – that Spring is most definitely HERE.

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Forward First Collections: Some Early Results 2015/2014

September 25, 2015September 25, 2015 martyn crucefix blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, poetry competitions, writing Andrew McMillan, Black Country, Cape Poetry, Carcanet Press, CB Editions, Chatto Poetry, Forward Poetry prize, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Liverpool University Press, Liz Berry, Matthew Siegel, Mona Arshi, Sarah Howe, Thom Gunn

The 2015 Forward Prizes Felix Dennis award for Best First Collection (with its £5000 cheque) will be awarded finally on 28th September. I have been reviewing the shortlisted books this summer as follows:

Mona Arshi – Small Hands (Liverpool University Press) reviewed here;
Sarah Howe – Loop of Jade (Chatto & Windus); reviewed here;
Andrew McMillan – physical (Cape Poetry); reviewed here;
Matthew Siegel – Blood Work (CB Editions) reviewed here;
Karen McCarthy Woolf – An Aviary of Small Birds (Carcanet) reviewed here.

Who will win? I can give you what blog-mathematics tells me and I can give you my own modest opinion and I can give you a prediction of who I think might be picked by the judges who are A L Kennedy (Chair), Colette Bryce, Carrie Etter, Emma Harding & Warsan Shire.

Judging merely by hits on the reviews on this blog (statistically wholly unreliable) the winner will be Andrew McMillan – agreed this might just reflect the fact that he and his supports are more social media savvy than others but I suspect it reveals an real interest in his work out there. (And for completists among you, the remaining rank order was then Arshi, Howe, Siegel, McCarthy Woolf).
Who do I think should win? All five books have been hung on topic-hooks by their publishers (illness, ancestry, cultural difference, sexuality, miscarriage) though only Howe and McMillan really justify this as complete volumes. It’s a sign of the need to market a book these days and I’m sure this trend will grow more powerful though I don’t think it’s a great idea for either writer or reader (is it an appeal to the ‘general’ reader?). But the ground being broken by McMillan has been thoroughly ploughed by his (acknowledged) hero Thom Gunn and Howe’s cross-cultural explorations and formal experiments I find interesting but not necessarily volume-coherent. My favoured book was actually the American one, Blood Work by Matthew Siegel which I thought was a wonderfully coherent, moving, funny and achieved collection (despite being a first book). So he’s my pick – and I’ll be wrong on the night!
Who will the judges choose? McMillan – that combination of (sufficient) controversy and accessibility.

Whoever it is in the end, congratulations to them and to all the shortlisted poets. It’s been a feast and thanks to those who have been following my travels through these books.

As a final footnote, in October last year (somewhat after the event, I confess), I reviewed Liz Berry’s winning first collection and as a bit of context I’ll post that again below. For the record, I think her book is better than any of this year’s five.

Liz Berry, Black Country (Chatto Poetry, 2014)

If a reputation can be earned through the writing of half a dozen poems of real worth then Liz Berry has probably already written them, earning her place in the landscape of early 21st century British poetry. Her debut collection (containing 14 poems from the earlier chapbook The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls (tall-lighthouse, 2010) has charm, accessibility and a humour that belies the serious ways in which she exerts pressure to counter the hegemonies of language, gender, locality, even of perception. Berry is a teacher by profession and will, no doubt, have equivocal feelings about her work appearing in classrooms – but it will rapidly and rightfully find a place there.

We resist what tries to define and suffocate us in part by declaring who we are. Berry’s confident, natural, even uninhibited use of her own Black Country dialect is one of the most superficially striking things about this book. Against “hours of elocution”, she opts for “vowels ferrous as nails, consonants // you could lick the coal from” (‘Homing’). Variously her grandmother and mother influence her in this and, in ‘The Sea of Talk’, her father also urges her never to forget the place of her birth with “its babble never caught by ink or book”. The definition of a community against the pull of a conventional linguistic centre is explicit here. Her grandmother is a frequent role model and the growing girl studies “her careful craft”. “Right bostin fittle”, the older woman declares (ie. great food – brains, trotters, groaty pudding) and the budding poet willingly touches her “lips to the hide of the past” to inherit the authentic gift.

Other poems, making it clear that locality is as much a component of who we are, record and celebrate the Black Country as “a wingless Pegasus” composed of scrub, derelict factories, disused coal shafts, yet still a “gift from the underworld” whose nature and fate is enough literally to make grown men weep (‘Black Country’). Berry takes huge pleasure in enumerating the details of her locale. “Come wi’ me, bab, wum Tipton-on-Cut” invites one poem which then takes a tour of waterways, allotments, parks, mosques, steelworks and canals (‘Tipton-On-Cut’). Similarly, ‘Christmas Eve’ seems to improvise from the great concluding paragraphs of Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, using the ubiquitous fall of snow to lead the reader across the landscape of Beacon Hill, Bilston and Molineux.

We elude being imposed on and defined by others by changing. This, for me, is the more profound aspect of Berry’s work; so many poems unfold as processes of self-transformation. A mark of the book’s self-confidence can be found in ‘Bird’ which announces this motif of liberation: “When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could stop me”. Here, it is the mother’s voice urging, “Tek flight, chick, goo far fer the winter”. In keeping with this, the poems display a formal variety – free verse, short-lined quatrains, couplets, tercets, ballad forms, punctuation comes and goes. This is further reinforced by Berry’s bold, category-dissolving imagination which instinctively reaches for metamorphic possibilities. In ‘Birmingham Roller’ the escapee is a bird again, “jimmucking the breeze, somersaulting”; people become dogs, trees, pigs, fade to mere echoes, girls become boys. The donning of a pair of red shoes invigorates, eroticises: “rubies that glistened up a dress, / flushed thighs with fever” (‘The Red Shoes’).

Sexuality features so prominently in Black Country in part because of its potential for transgressive energy. I’m sure ‘Sow’ is anthology-bound with its “farmyardy sweet” female narrator, rejecting external definitions (“I’ve stopped denying meself”), accepting her true nature as a “guzzler, gilt. / Trollopy an’ canting”. This is a real tour de force of dialect, imaginative transformation and downright feminist self-realisation that “the sow I am / was squailin an’ biting to gerrout”, even daring the reader to “Root yer tongue beneath / me frock an’ gulp the brute stench of the sty”. Berry’s power of imaginative transformation is so powerful that the book creates mythic figures at will: the sow girl, the Black Country pegasus, the patron saint of school girls, Carmella the hairdresser, the Black Delph bride, the last lady ratcatcher. ‘Fishwife’ presents another of these figures like something from a quasi-pornographic Grimm’s tales. Attending a 17 year old girl’s wedding, she brings the gift of oysters, erotic energy, transgressive flirtation, power and ultimately pleasure:

I slipped
from my bare skin
alive oh alive all tail all fin
how the tide tossed
until alive ohhh alive
the waves flung my shining body upon the rock

She kisses the bride with “her tongue a plump trout” and other poems also resist categories to the extent of a sensation of gender-bending, or more accurately gender neutrality. I’ve already mentioned the girl who becomes a boy. ‘Trucker’s Mate’ reads like a homosexual “romance” and ‘In the Steam Room’ positively drips with sexuality – but of an explicitly “sexless” kind in which “any body / might give you pleasure”. ‘The Silver Birch’ achieves the extraordinary feat of evoking “sex [. . .] before sex” (eroticism before gender), “when I was neither girl or boy [. . .] a sheaf / of unwritten-upon paper”.

With so much dissolution of the normative, Berry dallies with the surreal and there can be dangers if the work does not also bear a weight of darkness. A poet like Tomaz Salamun writes in the tradition of Rimbaud’s systematic disorganisation of the senses, but combines, as Ed Hirsch suggests, “exuberant whimsy and fierce rebellion” to resist too easy a relationship with the pressures of the real. Happily, Black Country encompasses some richly productive tensions between the real and imagined, home and away, past and future, conformity and rebellion, sex and death. The latter rises to the surface through the middle of the book in poems like ‘The Bone Orchard Wench’, ‘Echo’ and the murder ballad ‘The Black Delph Bride’, acknowledging that the traffic between real and imagined contains plenty of irresolvable grit, impossible to wish away in any facile manner.

The collection concludes in more plainly autobiographical terms with the approach of the birth of a child and perhaps there is less imaginative pressure here, a risk of sentiment, “waiting [. . .] for the little creature that grew inside me”. Nevertheless, in reviewing first collections it’s traditional to look forward to achievements to come but this is inappropriate with Black Country simply because there is so much confidence, focus, shapeliness, already achieved uniqueness. Rather, this is a poet whose work presently demands our admiration. Oh yes . . . and what about those half dozen or so poems of real worth? I’d suggest ‘Bird’, ‘Bostin Fittle’, ‘Black Country’, ‘Tipton-On-Cut’, ‘The Silver Birch’, ‘Sow’, ‘Fishwife’. You’ll hear more of these in years to come.

A bundle of 50 sticks to start a fire

September 21, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, teaching, writing Birthday Letters, Blake Morrison, Daodejing, Enitharmon Press, Homer Simpson, Infragreen, John Wyndham, Kate Bingham, Lee Harwood, Muswell Hill, Nathanael West, Ted Hughes, Trowbridge

I have used this form – derived from Lee Harwood – for a blog-poem before. I rather like its loose encompassment and also as a welcome change to the often ‘lit crit’ nature of my usual blogs. Just roll with it . . . it’s what I say to myself. This one is dedicated to Stephen Stuart-Smith and all at Enitharmon Press.

A bundle of 50 sticks to start a fire

(for Stephen)

I did not break my fast Thursday last

Rose and showered at 7am before realizing and getting back under the covers for another 20 minutes

The street strangely lit there seemed to be so much more sky

The council have cut down flowering cherries claiming they are diseased but the word is it is to prevent – in both senses – claims against them for subsidence

At the surgery I was sixth in line

reading Blake Morrison on Ted Hughes published 5 September 1993 on yellowing newspaper pages that had tumbled out of a book I was re-shelving

As for his marriage to Plath, one day he may choose to speak about it, but for now –

I glimpse an old neighbor now divorced his wife and children have moved out we nod but very remotely

never watch when the blood is taken

Starbucks trade in the medical centre I watched being built years ago when I’d swim more often even then imagining myself at one of the windows waiting for news of some test or other

T. has woken by the time I return to eat but it’s me who puts away the groceries that have been delivered

handed me the bottle of wine laughing you don’t want to lose that he said my hesitation as I re-envisaged him as a romantic gift-bringer left an awkward pause I couldn’t cover

How does I have plenty of time transform itself swiftly into running late

hardly anywhere to park

Queens Wood stretches up behind these houses then bridges a road then sinks following its contours to the pond then rises again climbing to Muswell Hill and this is to be boxed into the word ‘topography’

A half empty carriage

‘Ultragreen’ in which what is out there seems to come inside in a process Kate cleverly likens to photosynthesis and cleverly this gets away from me

The Whitehill Food Market I have passed that place

Walking up from the Emirates when I can’t get my mind off the strange limps and weaves of the way other people walk they are not hell but merely unfamiliar ways of moving

the fountains flow in the centre of the square

A dog wets its feet and drops a red ball into the pool and I guess its owner will be irritated by that

Brecht refused to award the prize to any of the five hundred entries. In none, he said, was there any successful attempt to communicate anything of any value

‘Nothing makes me feel more like a poet than being unable to talk’

Pub date Isobel calls it pub date

The absence of punctuation is in the spirit of the Daodejing it is the water course way one drop of water in the ocean no trace of it but don’t tell me it’s not there

A house in Selbourne

An image of a child with arms outstretched fingers widespread so much he might be a tree

Ripples of damp sand are the footprints of the shaggy oceanic beast

‘To embrace’

A plain cheese and tomato brown bread roll and I am back madeleine-like to dinner-time sandwiches at Junior School during which we’d meet Mum from work and sit in Trowbridge Park why did we do that

It must have saved money

A timetable is the opposite of the way water flows and this grid dominates my life

Poems not even by rote but by the hour of the day

‘Pike’ so we watched YouTube clips of fish ducklings kittens being devoured it gets them started

Town kids city dwellers

as out of place as John Wyndham’s alien creatures like little pink M&Ms on four legs two of which are really arms they carry fire sticks

‘A sort of genocide’

The original Homer Simpson whose hands are uncontrollable

‘his thumb received a nasty cut. Although the wound must have hurt, the calm, slightly querulous expression he usually wore did not change’

Explore how far West’s presentation of Homer suggests he is a trapped man

The spider plant on the windowsill looks anaemic in its white pot against white painted window frames against thunderheads miles off

I am free at 17.10

I don’t need most of this

Occasionally there are evenings I can’t remember where I parked the car once I thought I’d left it on the garage forecourt after filling it up and I went in and got them to review the CCTV footage which told me that I had driven it away earlier that day and like some log-jam shifting slightly I had a vision of parking it on First Avenue and there it was all along

I need a framework perhaps

‘Echo Beach far away in time Echo Beach far away in time’

I like to change my clothes after a day’s work

So I asked them to bring in pictures of pike and this one brought in a picture of a cod

A Delia recipe

The evening is filled with cakes of varying heights

How to Write a (Poetry) Blog

July 20, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry blogging, Josephine Corcoran, poetry blogging, Wordpress

A provocative blog title perhaps but hard to resist sometimes – see point 2.18 later – but this is less generally instructional and more a prompt to self-reflection. Amazingly, it is a year this week since I started this blog. Never the same river twice, of course, but I thought it right to post a few reflections on how it’s gone so far. My intentions, changes, thoughts on and lessons learned – plus nine bits of Blog Wisdom picked up along the way.

My original intentions

1.1 I always enjoy critical writing but chafe sometimes against waiting to be asked to review or the choice of review books I have been given, or word limits. My own place where I could be editor and reviewer seemed very attractive

1.2 I wanted to become familiar with the idea, techniques and impact of blogging as this seemed a form of cultural contribution that was of growing importance and I didn’t want to feel wholly left behind

1.3 I could pick out three vaguely-defined areas of blogging possibilities for myself: poetry, teaching, translation

1.4 I had been reviewing poetry books and writing about poetry writing for years in a variety of paper magazines prior to starting the blog. Part of my intention was to be able to post up some of these older pieces (where I still thought them relevant and worthwhile) so that they would be searchable on the web, hopefully preserving their lifetime

1.5 I can’t remember how I came across the WordPress system – probably by chance, or perhaps via another’s blog – but it seemed so user friendly that I thought even I might manage it (I’d had a few false starts trying to create a web page)

1.6 I understood intuitively and then found it out there as Blog Wisdom that regular posting is important and I set myself the task of a weekly post.

1.7 I was anxious before I got started about whether I would find things to write about on a weekly basis – I sort of hoped it would acquire a momentum of its own

1.8 I never intended the blog to be very personally revealing (though this is advised in the Blog Wisdom) – this was to be a place where I might discuss the art of poetry (and teaching literature and issues of translation) with myself and in the hope of drawing a response from others

1.9 On the other hand, I’d also been writing sections of autobiographical material in recent years and I vaguely thought I might be able to post this up in experimental posts – something I was not likely to be asked to do by the usual journals and magazines

1.10 I thought the blog would contribute to my self-promotion – after all a writer is supposed to actually sell books

How the year unfolded

2.1 Having begun very tentatively with WordPress, it quickly became clear that I could easily create a full website using its simple tools – not merely a blogging site

2.2 I’d not been much of a blog follower before starting my own – since then I have enjoyed following others and not merely as a means of spying on the competition (though of course it’s not a competition)

2.3 I figured out how to tag posts to make the site more searchable by Google etc (the Blog Wisdom seems to be that no more than a dozen tags should be used – beyond that they become less effective – still a bit foggy on this)

2.4 I also figured how to Tweet a link to the blog posting and link to FaceBook and other blog sharing sites (also still a work in progress)

2.5 I had problems preserving stanza breaks as the WordPress system seemed to collapse everything down to standard line break widths once posted. Thank you, Josephine Corcoran for helping out with this one.

2.6 I have really enjoyed choosing a variety of images to decorate the blogs – and captioning some of them (once I’d worked out how to make a caption)

2.7 The Blog Wisdom has it that the more active you are on others’ blogs (liking and commenting etc) the more likely you are to get traffic back. I’m sure this is true and I’m sure I don’t do it enough. This could be a full time job in itself but I’m sure it would reap benefits if I did it

2.8 I thought I would post some of my own poems on the blog but in fact have not done much of this at all – these days the definition of ‘publication’ often includes even a personal blog and that may not be the best place for work to appear first. On a few occasions I’ve posted up already published work

2.9 The Blog Wisdom has it that embarking on a series of related posts is a good idea assuming that you might gather up an audience on the way, create expectations etc. I’ve had a go at this a couple of times. Jury’s out on this one

2.10 Fairly early on in the year I had the idea of recording briefly my own reading (mostly poetry related texts) and set up the What Have I Mostly Been Reading page. I’m updating this roughly every month and it has proved a page that people visit quite often. There is a temptation to make my brief comments less brief

2.11 I realised that what I was doing with the blog was journalism. Pretty obvious to most but it struck me forcibly as a different sort of writing with its own rules and I rather enjoyed the frequent deadlines

2.12 I also tried reviewing live poetry events that I attended and these seem to have proved quite popular – certainly there is not much of this sort of reviewing around and it’s good to record these ephemeral occasions in some way

2.13 The Blog Wisdom has it that blogs develop any kind of following slowly and that is true enough. But when even a few comments and likes start coming in there is a surprisingly immediate sense of a community. WordPress provides statistical analysis of visitors and views on a blog site and these also give some sense that what you are writing is not being wholly ignored (but see dangers later . . . )

2.14 The Blog Wisdom also has it that to associate posts with specific events, times of year, cultural events, prizes, other publications etc is a good thing. I’ve tried to do this with live event reviews, prize lists, magazine publications, book publications

2.15 As the year has gone on I have sadly found less room for blogging about the teaching of literature – largely because (as it turned out) I had plenty of pressing ideas in the other two areas of poetry and translation. I regret this

2.16 As the year has gone on, I’ve been more drawn than I expected towards reviewing new collections of poetry. I’m not sure about the wisdom of this, though it has proved quite popular

2.17 I posted one week on How Do You Judge a Poem which proved very popular and it struck me (as it has struck many publishers) that offering (or seeming to offer) instruction was a way of courting more hits

2.18 I see dangers (as 2.17 suggests) in the temptation to court more hits by naming blogs provocatively, like a journalistic headline or an advertiser. Blog Wisdom suggests this is exactly what one should be doing but I don’t feel comfortable with this

2.19 I see dangers also in the temptation to be wilfully controversial as Blog Wisdom also suggests one should be. But I don’t want to write a tabloid blog

2.20 I see dangers in getting obsessed by checking the blog stats several times a day. It’s like checking emails or phones in the same way. As someone once said, this is like opening the front door every few minutes to check whether the postman is coming. Get on with life

2.21 I see dangers of my life being taken over by blog writing and planning what to write. Rilke warned against critical writing of any kind sapping one’s strength and time for real creativity. Was he ever tempted to write a blog?

Results Are In: How Do You Judge a Poem? (2)

April 16, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, poetry competitions, writing Carole bromley, Catherine Edmunds, Claire Dyer, close analysis of poetry, Dilys Wood, Josh Ekroy, Kate Foley, Norbert Hirschhorn, Tomas Transtromer, Tony Lucas, Torriano Meeting House

One of my most visited blogs in recent months was the provocatively titled How Do You Judge a Poem?, sparked by my judging the Torriano Poetry Competition 2015. The results are now in the public sphere and on the evening of Sunday 12^th April, at the Torriano Meeting House in Camden, north London, many of the winners in the Competition gathered to share their poems.

All proceeds go towards funding the future work of the Torriano Meeting House and this year as there were no plans for winning and highly placed poems to appear in print, I thought I might grace this blog with them. The authors whose poems are included below have kindly given permission for them to appear and I have also included my own brief comments – all this in continuing pursuit of the vexed question of what it is that makes a good poem.

At the beginning of the awards evening I alluded to the sad news of the recent death of Swedish poet and Nobel prize-winner, Tomas Transtromer. In reading his work again in the last week or so, I was struck by this passage from his 1970 poem ‘The Open Window’ (in Robin Fulton’s translation). I thought it relevant to the evening as it starts in a familiar world, undergoes a mysterious transformation, all the while never losing sight of the need to keep our eyes open, our senses open. This for me is what poetry can do, must do perhaps, if we insist on setting poems into a competitive environment.

I stood shaving one morning

before the open window

one storey up.

I switched the shaver on.

It began to purr.

It buzzed louder and louder.

It grew to an uproar.

It grew to a helicopter

and a voice – the pilot’s – penetrated

through the din, shrieked:

‘Keep your eyes open!

You’re seeing all this for the last time.’

We rose.

Flew over the summer.

So many things [. . . ]

The urgency of (as if) seeing things for the last time is something we want from poems, the need to be spoken. We want the ability of a poem to open itself to the world around it, not to shutter it out with preconceptions, indeed with language itself. We want poems to contain ‘so many things’. Scanning the top 25 poems in this competition, their topics are love, relationships, war, the self, the body, ageing, politics (broadly defined), nature, language itself. So many things . . .

With apologies to the poets for some loss of some stanza break formatting (I still can’t make WordPress obey me on that), here are the texts of those poems for which I have permission, followed by my comments:

Winning Poem:

One Small Act of Survival – Claire Dyer (NB. this poem should appear in couplets)

In my hand a shiny new hammer

bought to forge a carapace from commonplace things:

door handles, empty soup cans, the almost-over

hyacinth blooms in my mother’s blue vase.

The shape I’ll fashion will not be symmetrical

but I’ll spend a while writing charms on its underside

then flip it, polish its surface until I can see my face in it.

It’ll be shallow and, roughly the size of silence.

Next up, a Stanley knife to incise my chest, peel back the skin.

My blood will blossom like chrysanthemums as I slide my creation in.

So much done in 10 lines! The poet as maker, as technician, rather than inspired Romantic genius – I have always loved poems that deal with the processes of things; how to, rather than look at me doing it. I like the modesty of the title, though that is promptly undermined by the importance of the word ‘survival’. The poem starts so well with its hammer and precise verb ‘forge’, though this is also immediately, clearly metaphorical, a gathering of raw materials, adding a little magic, till the object (as in all poems) is also a reflection of the self that made it. The brutality of the final lines has – by what has preceded them – come to be balanced between self-harm and self-repair. Blood as flowers is Sylvia Plath to some degree but this re-birth has more, is more, and is more convincingly, of the future tense than Plath’s ‘difficult borning[s]’ ever were.

Second Place Poem:

The Ghost Orchid* – Dilys Wood

I hear him claim, “A flower for all seasons –

only she needs no sun, no seasons . . . “, as if

this grey-haired plant hunter is thrusting

into the woven thickness of the forest

like a man into a woman. I ask

how rare this orchid is, has he seen it,

what kind of plant is it? “A plant

for the heart”, he says, “Of old woodland like this.

She’s very rare, in fact – has no green parts,

doesn’t photosynthesise, doesn’t exist

but the hundredth time you look in the same place

she’s there”. He’s fixated but quite normal,

stopping for a break in my patch of shade.

Common plants are there, low-growing Wood Sorrel,

Wind Flowers he calls ‘Wood Anemone’

with petals that blush like adolescence.

Her ashes (that’s my thin girl’s ashes)

are indistinct among small white flowers,

ferns, wood-ash from log-burnings on this spot;

but he sees how, with the box still in my hand,

I stare into the thicker trees for glimpses

of my strange one and how I’ve not spread out

but spilled her heap of absence on the ground.

We exchange photos for a minute. “It’s weird

enough?”, giving me his colour snap

of the ‘Ghost’ lit by a camera-flash,

and so albino, transparent, spectral,

I catch my breath. It’s so like my daughter,

or what we saw inside, her ‘lit-up’ self.

Running his fingers under Wood Sorrel leaves

to show delicate, bent flowers, he says,

“Life-cycles are so utterly diverse –

see a miracle in all lives, if you like”.

*The Ghost Orchid, Epipogium Aphyllum, is Britain’s rarest flower with findings reported in 1986 and 2010. It has been described, ‘In a torch beam . . . they appear translucent white . . . almost like a photographic negative’.

Dialogue is difficult to use convincingly in a poem but this poet dives straight in without context or scene setting, though as we are baffled we are also intrigued. The “grey-haired plant hunter” is a near relation of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner initially, though on this occasion he seems to need a little prompt or two to get going. Instead of a victim of experience though, he turns out to be a seeker – for the rare, the beautiful, the elusive, valuable precisely because so seldom of this world. The compassionate heart of the poem is only introduced (bravely) half way through with the more than strange coincidence of what the narrator is up to. The exchange they pursue is very moving, a quiet (can I say) English version of those often more hysterical scenes of mothers holding out photographs of the disappeared. The throw away ending is a stroke of genius, throwing this extraordinarily intimate moment back to the reader.

Third Place Poem:

The Haircut – Catherine Edmunds

She stands in front of the bathroom mirror, ties her hair back, presses

the fringe down flat on her forehead. It reaches over her eyes. She

picks up the scissors for the last time. First she thins the fringe, just a little.

There’s not much hair. Alopecia – stress related.

That’s what the nurse said. Here, have some pills.

Next she cuts along in a gentle curve, level

with the underside of her eyebrows.

He’s never known the colour of her eyes. They’d played that game once:

what would you sooner lose, a leg or an arm? Your hearing or your sight?

Okay, she’d said, go on – tell me the colour of my eyes. She’d shut them

tight, laughing, expecting the right answer, expecting a kiss.

The hairs drop into the sink. It will be blocked

by the time she’s finished.

She looks at her face in the mirror. There they are; her eyes,

her beautiful hazel eyes.

The fringe isn’t straight. She levels it, brushes it out.

Still isn’t straight. Snip-snip-snip.

Still. Not. Straight. snip-snip-snip-snip-snip-snip-snip-snip-snip

He’s suggested she dye it. Cover up the grey. Maybe bleach it,

go blonde, but get it done properly, he’ll pay. She’d sooner be a redhead.

She sticks the point of the scissors into her scalp, watches the blob of blood.

Stands and watches. Watches. The red blob settles, works its way

along a few hairs, glues them together. Darkens. She preferred the brighter red.

She slips the scissors under the skin. Snip. Snip-snip.

Raw and pink underneath. Snip. Snip.

And then she slashes at the hair, all the hair, and cuts and cuts until

it’s reduced to tufts across her head, and then she hacks at her scalp

to get rid of the tufts, hacks and hacks.

Pink. Oozy.

Her eyes are crying. She doesn’t want to see

her eyes crying. She holds the scissors firmly with both hands.

I agonised over this one because I doubted, at times, the intentionality of the effects. Yet even if the monstrously powerful impact was fortuitous – does that matter? The words do their work. I was agnostic because of the looseness, the long lines, the repetitions, the plainness, the directness. But aren’t these elements precisely what makes the poem so gut-wrenchingly unforgettable? Well – I stopped agonising and I went with the opening – so familiar as a moment of self-reflection, though not the condition briefly, dismissively alluded to. The relationship information is quick, convincing, just a facet of this person, not the whole story. How brave to be so repetitively onomatopoeic in the middle of the poem. Then it turns – sickeningly – on the word “redhead”, making it ambiguous, and so begins its horrible descent into drama. Perhaps into melodrama – but I teach teenagers and melodrama is a currency they trade in, knowing that it’s real.

5 Highly Commended Poems: Highly Commended of course means, that on another day, certainly perhaps with another judge, these poems might have been in the top three.

The Disappeared – Norbert Hirschhorn

What makes us human is soil.

Landfill of bones, shredded tees, jeans;

mass graves paved over for parking.

What makes us human are portraits

– graduation, weddings –

mounted in house shrines and on fliers, Have You Seen?

Names inscribed around memorial pools

or incised on granite. Names waiting,

waiting for that slide of DNA, any piece of flesh –

for the haunted to be put to rest.

What makes us human is soil.

To stare into a hole in the ground,

fill with the deceased, throw earth down,

place a stone. Bread. Salt.

For Fouad Mohammed Fouad

A triumph of tone this one – from the intriguing, imperturbable, magisterial judgement of the opening, end-stopped line through to the stalling, breathlessly punctuated, fragmenting, grief-stricken ending. Between those lines the poem plays with the tension between its hard, objective tone, concerned with evidence, details, the empirical gathering of science and its efforts to articulate what it is that makes us what we are.

When I Heard Your Chemo Hadn’t Worked – Carole Bromley

I had the urge to pick blackcurrants,

why it had to be blackcurrants and not blueberries,

raspberries or strawberries I don’t know. We never eat

blackcurrants, I guess because they must be cooked

with added sugar and if you boil the pan dry they stick

like crazy and even if the compote works it stains

and the stains never come out however many times

you put the clothes through the hot wash.

It rained on me so hard I had to park my bike

under a tree and try to shelter though the rain

meant business and hit my back over and over

like my mother that time I flicked water

down the stairs at my brother and didn’t know

she’d spent all day painting the landing and hall.

When I got there the notice said Far Field

and I walked miles and there were only blackberries

and I’d set my heart on blackcurrants.

Then I spotted the bushes and there was no-one

else and even though it started to rain again and my shoes

were getting stained purple, I didn’t care, just crouched

down and milked the fat black drops into the bowl.

A poem that triumphantly recovers from its own title – because the poem itself avoids any reference to the situation about which the title has to inform the reader. What we are left with is a direct, if self-mystifying, narrative. This is a search, a little quest, haunted by the indelible, the irrevocable, by stains. It’s a trial narrative, a coming through, a survival, but the grail here is extraordinarily equivocal; listen to the verb applied in the final line to the gathering of this ominous crop.

My Humble Body – Kate Foley

Just as a cloud becomes more

or less as it frays,

my humble body

is slowly learning to speak.

Not hint, not whinge

but say direct to my face

‘I am your face.’

‘Oh?’ I answer from somewhere

up here.

‘Yes! Not the memory

of your face, its trace

in old mirrors

but the now of it.’

And my body, no longer so humble,

like an old donkey with a spring

in its heels says ‘Listen!

Rough bits, wrinkles, furrows

where half-buried truths lie,

twinges, and you up there, we

can’t wait forever. It’s

now or never

to get together!’

‘Cliche!’ I smile,

scoring a point

but my body raises

its suddenly wise

hand and places

a gentle finger on my lips.

I’ve always disliked those poems which record a dialogue between the soul and the body, but this one convinced me (though I don’t know if ‘soul’ is the right word). The directness with which the humble body begins to speak is reflected throughout the poem in its clean, economical, lean lines. The progressive ironising – indeed, mickey-taking – of the soul/self’s arrogance is an object lesson in gradualist narrative development

At the War Museum – Tony Lucas

Here is the shadow that was always at

our backs, though we were shielded. We knew

the stories – or the ones they chose to tell

to us, to tell themselves. Also the silences,

events that no one dared to mention.

These faces look familiar – recall the ones

who brought us up, who filled our world, but here

in uniform, removed to strange locations,

and performing tasks we never saw

them do. This is the world made strange, furnished

with obsolete contraptions that delivered

death, the well-known places mostly wrecked –

a quiet church you visited last year,

calm as Wren left it, is shown broken, open

to the sky, with shattered monuments;

a library’s hush, all raucous debris, plaster dust –

and if that happened to the books, what of

the people shelved in tidy residential

streets, gap-toothed with rubble, bathrooms

bared, paper hung ripped from private walls?

They had their modes of coping with it all –

swagger and slang, ‘business as usual’, wink

of an eye – that got them through. Styles

at first quaint to us, and now a foreign language.

Pictures, writings that seemed so peripheral

at the embattled time, now offer

our most intimate approach to this

alternate world. While, always, looming

back behind, what they themselves half knew,

an elder dark – of shells and mud, of gas

and blasted stumps, torn flesh and broken minds,

that forged, and warped, the world in which we grew.

This struck me as the most ‘well made’ poem in the top rankings. Though not using end rhyme, the quatrains are carefully controlled, making good use of the de-stabilising of enjambement. There is a formality in tone too, from the title onwards. A distance perhaps but that enables the narrative voice to reflect, to judge and in the end to compassionate with the elder generation who suffered the horrors of war.

Theft – Josh Ekroy

Awaiting permission for this text

The opening lines of this poem have an epigrammatic quality to them which the subsequent lines proceed to follow to their logical conclusion (though perhaps with a bit of black magic thrown in). This is like Blake in the mood of ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ and this poem gives us more modern Proverbs of Hell, reversing our preconceptions to both comic and politically serious effects.

10 Commended Poems:

Body Evidence – Alexandra Davis

Kentucky Fried Chicken in Georgia – Valerie Darville

The Man Whose Car was Stolen… – Christopher North

Ordinary Love – Noel Williams

Vulcano – Julie Mellor

Dear Revisionist – Martin Malone

A Sedge of Herons – Noel Williams

Teign – Roland Malony

As the days play on – Maria Stasiak

Quickly – Sue MacIntyre

Found Poems from Whitman’s Civil War Prose

March 19, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing 21st March 2003, Acumen, American Civil War, Brian Turner, Dan O'Brien, Enitharmon Books, Iraq War, More than it comes to, shock and awe, The Long Poem Magazine, Walt Whitman

I’m still pursuing some of the thoughts from my last blog about the difficulties of writing about current events (https://martyncrucefix.com/2015/03/13/how-do-i-write-poems-about-current-events/). I am reminded that we are closing in on the twelfth anniversary of the first so-called ‘shock and awe’ strikes by coalition forces on Saddam Hussein’s Bagdad in 2003:

I did manage to write about the subsequent war in Iraq but on this occasion I approached it very tangentially, through the Civil War writings of Walt Whitman. The resulting poems were first published in The Long Poem Magazine (Issue 3, Winter 2009/10; sections also appeared in Acumen) with the Introduction I have posted below. There, I discuss several sections of the completed sequence though I will post up only two parts of it. For the sake of those who might be interested in how raw materials get transmuted in such a process, I have added links to the original passages from which #2 ‘The White House’ and #4 ‘I staid a long time to-night’ were derived. The full sequence was eventually published in Hurt (2010: https://martyncrucefix.com/publications/hurt/). Dan O’Brien has more recently used a not dissimilar ventriloquism in his poems about the experiences of war photographer Paul Watson. For a much more direct poetic approach to modern war (born out of direct experience as a soldier in Iraq) see the poetry of Brian Turner.

On 21st March 2003 the “big and little thunderers in chorus began to roar” over Baghdad. During Easter of that year I visited the American Museum, just outside Bath, and while my children scoured the grounds in an Easter egg hunt and my aging parents wandered around an exhibition of American rag rugs, I drifted into the bookshop and picked up a collection of Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry and prose.

It was childhood innocence and the rag rugs’ recycling of material that were in my mind as I read the words Whitman had written in 1862 in Falmouth, Virginia: “Began my visits among the Camp Hospitals in the Army of the Potomac. Spent a good part of the day in a large brick mansion, on the banks of the Rappahannock.”

With the force of one of those visions that artists are thought to be prone to, it struck me that such a wide-eyed witnessing from an earlier conflict might be a way to write successfully about the then current conflict. Or to be more precise – since what I have just written fails to convey the powerful emotional impact of what I read – I was myself moved by reading Whitman’s observations but my emotion was not retrospective at all but immediate, topical, all about Iraq.

The more I read of Whitman’s prose the more genuine ties with the contemporary war I sensed. Whitman writes in his letters and journals almost as a by-stander, visiting the wounded and dying in hospitals, only occasionally being drawn to wider political observations and his focus on the individual cost of warfare exactly matched my own feelings. I began to imagine a sequence of poems framed by letters to a mother, containing the search for a brother and other references to close family members: “Han’s and George’s and Andrew’s. . . Jeff’s and his little Manahatta’s too”. The sequence came together only very slowly, partly because of my own uncertainties about its status as a partially ‘found’ poem but it eventually separated itself from its original sources and it was only later that I saw what was mine, what Whitman’s.

So the second piece, describing the White House, relies heavily on notes Whitman made in February 1862, but in the light of the deceit and war mongering of the early 21st century such descriptions are redolent with a bitter irony.

‘I dream’d a stockade’ is a more ‘composed’ poem, using Whitman’s familiar listing techniques, which intends to turn the suffering of the Civil War at an angle to reflect the inner conflicts that the Iraq mission quickly created in US society itself. With the inevitable reports of civilian casualties, I had little to add to Whitman’s accounts of comforting the wounded from the opposing sides of the Civil conflict to ensure a powerful contemporary resonance.

CIVIL115-1024x798 — Soldiers in the trenches before battle, Petersburg, Va., 1865.

‘The President’ is drawn from Whitman’s many observations of Lincoln. He first set eyes on him in 1861 and, as with the White House material, while I was putting the sequence together, the passage of time had already imbued his original admiration with the bitterest of ironies. Of course, after the poems were completed, by January 2009 and the inauguration of Obama, time had ironically turned once more and some have since read this part of the sequence as ‘about’ the new US President.

With ‘To the Mother of one fallen’, the narrator is back at the bedside of an individual dying man whose ravings and sense of undeserved blame, of a corruption in the/his “system”, is intended to reflect warfare’s inevitable brutalisation of even the best of individuals, the results of which even now continue to be uncovered years after the world conjured its first surprised shock at events in Abu Ghraib. (click to see Whitman’s original letter of May 1865: Here )

More than it comes to

seven poems from the American War

ii. The White House

Tonight, I walk out to take a look at the President’s House.

Tonight, the white portico, the brilliant gas-light shining,

The palace-like pediment, the tall round columns, spotless as snow.

Tonight, a tender and soft moonlight flooding the pale marble,

A light that gives rise to peculiar & faint & languishing shades,

That are not shadows, for no such thing as shadow resides at this address.

On this night, a soft transparent haze under the thin moon-lace,

Where it falls amongst the bright and plentiful clusters of gas-lights,

That have been set at intervals around the façade & the columns.

Tonight, I see everything white, a marbly pure white and dazzling,

And even more so, the softest white of the White House of future poems,

And of dramas and dreams here, under the high, the copious moon.

Tonight, the pure and gorgeous front in trees under the night-lights,

The leafless silence and the trunks and myriad angles of branches.

Tonight, I see a White House of the land, a White House of the night,

And of beauty and of silence and sentries at the tall gate,

Sentries pacing in their blue overcoats, stopping me not at all,

But eyeing with their sharp sentries’ eyes whichever way I go.

For Whitman on The White House: Click Here

iv. I staid a long time to-night

I staid a long time to-night at his difficult bed-side.

It was a young Baltimorean, grown to the age of nineteen.

He had seen so much and yet had slept such a very little,

His right leg amputated an hour since, he was feeble,

So he slept hardly at all, the morphine costing more than it comes to.

And this is what I must do, I sit still while he holds my hand,

And he puts it to his face most affectionately.

And this young, handsome, tanned Baltimorean spoke to me:

“My dear friend, I am certain you do not know who I am,

Although your sitting here so quietly and so patiently,

It means much, yet you must understand who it is you help,

Since what I stand for & fight for I know you believe to be wrong”.

I staid a long time at the bed-side of the young Baltimorean.

I staid certainly because death had mark’d him and he was quite alone.

I might say I loved him, sometimes kiss’d him and he did me.

And of his age was his brother, a brave and religious man,

His brother and officer of rank, a man I sat beside in a close, adjoining ward.

And I staid because in the same battle they were wounded alike,

The one strong Unionist, the other Secesh, and each fought well,

Each for their respective sides, brave & obedient & mark’d for the end.

Now they lay close, following the separation of many years,

Of their strongly held beliefs, the separations these had imposed on them,

And both fought well and each died in his particular cause.

whitman_05_lg — Ward in Armory Square Hospital, during Civil War, Washington, D.C.

For Whitman on the two brothers: Click Here

Old Stokes’ Garden Nursery 1970 – 2014

January 6, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, blogging, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, writing agoraphobia, Beneath Tremendous Rain, Cat Stevens, David Gates, Enitharmon Books, Hilperton, Hilperton Relief Road, Marshmead, Noel Edmonds, nostalgia, Paul McCartney, poetry, St Michael and All Angels church, trigger for poetry, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

An interruption to blog-casting over the last couple of weeks as I’ve been away from the desk, here and there, partly in Wiltshire visiting my 90-year old parents.

I’ve long understood that one of my triggers as a writer is the simple disparity between ‘then’ and ‘now’. I have grown convinced that an individual’s mental health is partly dependent on the free flow of thoughts and feelings between personal present and past, the integration of personality, a sense of coherence, or organic change, over time. There has been a good deal of research recently on the idea of nostalgia as a healing force (hence some of these dips into autobiographical mode) and I’d like to talk more about that sometime. But for today, while staying in Wiltshire, I came face to face with a pretty powerful example of this disparity between past and present. Here it is:

OK – it’s not much to look at, but this is the final route of the Hilperton Relief Road, designed to take traffic away from the village where I grew up in Wiltshire. My father has been praying for this to happen for years, convinced the thundering, articulated transports that pass the house originate solely from ‘the Continent’. It’s true they do have to manoeuvre through the village itself, but the route cuts across green fields just a stone’s throw from the little village church of St Michael and All Angels, fields where I’d mooch about as a kid with friends from the self-build estate of Marshmead.

So a personal wound to my memory – but also an ecological blow to the rural area. Within a few years – though the local authority currently denies this – the meadows surrounding this new road will be filled in with houses and the ghastly sprawl of Trowbridge town will engulf another village. More lucrative land for developers is the prime motivation for building the road after all these years. More personally, on the bulldozed soil in the first photograph once stood a few ramshackle buildings, little more than large garden sheds and fogged, filthy-windowed greenhouses. This was the site of Stokes’ Garden Nursery where I worked a few hours a week at the start of the 1970s.

Stokes’ Nursery is on the left at the far end of Horse Road as you head into town. I cycle along there one Sunday and find Old Stokes out in the open, moving up and down the sunlit rows of chrysanthemums, lifting the still-tight flower heads to examine them, pinching off a browned leaf here and there. It appeals to me – the money and the work.

The following Sunday, on my first morning, he musters a smile of sorts in greeting. He is bent with age, rather hump-backed and moves with a limp. His head is small and round, a few wisps of grey hair, and he purses his lips so that in speaking there is a faint lisp. But he doesn’t often speak and I like that.

I begin reliably turning up and taking his cash, at first just Sundays then Saturday mornings as well. I find myself beginning to identify with him in little ways. His wife is invisible. Their detached house is set off to one side of the grounds where he has several glass houses and outdoor growing areas. The house always appears deserted, with the curtains closed for the most part. Nothing moves or changes. No-one sees her. Old Stokes never talks about her. I never ask. She suffers from agoraphobia, or so my Mum tells me.

One morning, he leads me through the rickety door of the main glasshouse into its humid, stuffy other world, reeking of compost, plant rot, fertilizer, cell division. “Pricking out”, he murmurs and I wonder if I have heard him right. At an earthy metal bench, backed with a window so filthy nothing can be seen but a fuzz of sunlight, we stand side by side and he shows me what to do. The seedlings are new-grown in their first trays and each has to be gently teased out of the loose soil and away from its clinging companions. Then each spindly seedling, green leafed, pale-stemmed, white-rooted, is tucked into a new hole (drilled by the ‘dibber’) in a newly prepared tray. Pricking out is boring and brainless. It’s not something I am unhappy doing, bearing in mind I am getting paid a few shillings – after February 1971, thirty or forty pence – to do so.

But I prefer watering; lugging the python-like, yellow hoses up and down the glass house aisles, pulling the trigger on the hose attachment and spraying water everywhere, dampening the already humid atmosphere. Soon I am promoted to patrolling the rows of vigorous chrysanthemums, lifting the heavy weights of the flower heads, picking out ear-wigs where I find them, dispatching them with a curt rolling of my thumb and finger. Crouching down between the rows, I disappear completely from the view of anybody passing along Horse Road. Crouched there, I am in a manageable jungle, happy to be alone, often bringing my family’s old blue transistor radio with me, listening to Noel Edmonds (from October 1971), his Sunday morning slot from 10-12. His kind of drippy folk-rock is (I’m afraid) what I like to listen to and David Gate’s songs like ‘Diary’ and ‘Baby I’m-a want you’. McCartney’s first solo album is being played. Cat Stevens has released ‘Tea for the Tillerman’ the year before and ‘Teazer and the Firecat’ in the autumn.

Twenty years later, in my first book from Enitharmon Press, Beneath Tremendous Rain, I published a triptych of poems about Old Stokes, his wife and the boy working for them. Here are the two best ones:

The Nurseryman

See how my wife hasn’t bothered to open

the curtains. It’s three o’clock. She must be bad.

She thinks I don’t know what it costs her

to steal a glance at me outside, to brave

these fifty feet of open space, her weak legs

trembling with terror, sick in her belly,

knotting ever closer round her poor heart . . .

I’ll cut some chrysanthemums to please her.

My flowers always please her.

Years ago she’d tell me how it felt.

She’d say a bulb will sometimes come up blind

no matter how carefully you’ve set it down.

It’s the way of plants. There’s no cure at all.

But it’s not only her. Still poor as Adam,

there’s just one thing I have that’s in demand

and it’s not right that a man who’s spent life

tending soil into flower should gain nothing

but a touch for dressing death in glad rags

with some careful blooms on a wire frame . . .

I’ve found a natural talent for wreathes.

My one extravagance: that I can charge

higher prices than most and though Christmas

is a boon (when my great medals hang on

many bolted doors), yet it’s the year-round trade

in bereavement that keeps this place afloat.

I’d plans once. A shop, new green-houses, a son.

Now I’m forced to take on a series of young lads

who help me out. They’re all more or less sullen.

This one’s so quiet, although he chats to girls

across the hedge, as they all have done –

all playing the working-man, hands dirtied,

with the jangle of my money in their pockets.

This one trails his radio around all day long

as if he can’t stand the sound of himself.

Doesn’t work hard. See where he goes now,

slipping down beside the sheds. No radio today.

Well, he’s happy enough on one-fifty an hour . . .

I must cut some chrysanthemums to please her.

The Wife

I sit beside my beautiful maidenhair fern.

It likes my darkness, is dank, spreads slowly.

I count my books, silent on their long shelves.

I’m dying of pure old age, not experience.

I was not always so understanding – accusations

and resentment shouted him into the garden.

We have not given each other all we’d hoped.

I name children, true pleasure, company . . .

I’ve felt such horror at what lies beyond

the window, where even clothes on the line,

blown by an uncontrollable wind, cardigans

undone and swept open, slacks kicked wide

are too much to bear. He has devoted himself

too much to the fertility of row upon row

of plants and had less and less for me.

But we’re past the allotment of blame.

For years, he’d bring chrysanthemums

to me and watch like a child while I shook

earwigs in the sink, flushed them out of sight.

An absurd ritual I long for, absurdly,

since it ended these past four or five years

before the hedge was removed to make beds

of carnation. And we’ve no boys now –

as if a supply-line had suddenly gone dry.

Don’t parents have children nowadays?

They all blur into one – that particular one

who left quickly. Why do I think of him?

He’s forgotten me. Does he have a wife?

And a child? I remember descending the stairs,

past the grave-quiet telephone, with a jug

of water in my hand. I thought I heard

one of the cats, opened a sliver of curtain.

I would do this all over again . . .

See the boy slumped against the shed

legs crooked and splayed, one hand flickering

on his belly as if dealing a deck of cards –

but with such unrestrained violence.

He saw me. Gave the look of one who has been

interrupted – annoyance, much more than

the guilt I’d expect. I dropped the curtain,

then wanted to open it again – and it’s that

which fills me now when I think of ‘life’

and then I see myself – the dry, pressed flower

I found once in a borrowed library book,

squeezed out now, frightened of the light.

Martyn Crucefix

More than 10 years of blogging on poetry and translation – over 39,000 views in 2024 – now captured and preserved at the UK Web Archive: 'one of the top 10 poetry blogs' (Rogue Strands)

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