founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

October 2014

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume ccv • number 1 CONTENTS

October 2014

from the POetry review don share 3 Introduction leontia flynn 4 Gerard Manley Hopkins kathryn simmonds 5 In the Woods Elegy for the Living mir mahfuz ali 8 MiG-21 Raids at Shegontola colette bryce 9 Helicopters liz berry 10 Scenes from “The Passion” ... Scenes from “The Passion” ... ruby robinson 14 Undress My Mother matthew francis 16 Ant julian stannard 18 Burlington Arcade Napoli hugo williams 20 Notes from Dialysis

POems caleb klaces 25 Moths hannah lowe 26 Genealogy High Yellow claire trévien 28 The Evening After tim wells 29 The Coriolanus Effect Out of the Blue john wilkinson 32 Schlummert Ein pascale petit 34 Black Jaguar with Qaui ... david harsent 35 From “A Dream Book” Tinnitus: May, low skies ... Tinnitus: January, thin rain ... james brookes 38 Eschatology, Piscatology rory waterman 39 The Avenue Pulling Over to Inspect a Pillbox ... Over the Heath sophie collins 42 Healers martin monahan 44 The South Transept Window ... sam riviere 46 The Expendables 2 Solitaire In Praise of the Passivity of Paper D.F.W. frances leviston 51 Trimmings toby martinez de las 54 Triptych for the Disused ... rivas amy key 57 How Rare a Really Beautiful ... Announcement and Next Steps david wheatley 60 An Execration kathryn maris 62 Singles Cruise The X Man john greening 64 Heath XXIX

comment colette bryce 69 Omphalos todd swift 72 Four Englands

contributors 85 announcement of prizes 88 Editor don share Art Director fred sasaki Managing Editor sarah dodson Assistant Editor lindsay garbutt Editorial Assistant holly amos Consulting Editor christina pugh Design alexander knowlton

cover art by paul hornschemeier “Postcards from Moritz the Cat,” 2011

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Poetry • October 2014 • Volume 205 • Number 1

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don share

Introduction

Harriet Monroe’s vision for Poetry was transatlantic: prior to its founding she wrote to over fifty poets, American and British, to solicit support. Ezra Pound responded from London predicting, paradoxically, a renaissance in American poetry, which he and Monroe effected with his work as our first (and so far only) foreign correspondent — and the publication in 1915 of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot, also living in England. Is it a coin- cidence that in the year of Poetry’s founding another recipient of her letter, the similarly named Harold Monro, started The Poetry Review there? Its aim, like ours, was to help “poets and poetry thrive” and to be open to “all schools and groups of poetry, not merely the fashion- able or metropolitan.” A century on, the two magazines, as well as British and American poetry, have grown closer and yet more distinct, as do most siblings over time. On the one hand, the Internet has made it easier than ever to discover poetry from another country, no matter where one lives. On the other, it often seems that American and British poets are writing in different languages, and for their own respective national audiences. As a result, an exciting or well-known poet on one side of the ocean may remain quite unknown on the other. Yet I wouldn’t suggest that there should be a convergence of our poetries, but rather of readers. In 1923, Monroe took her first vacation from editing Poetry by go- ing on a five-month trip to England and beyond. She met such poetry luminaries as Edith Sitwell, Richard Aldington, Arthur Waley — and Monro. In my own travels I met Maurice Riordan, who became editor of The Poetry Review around the time I was named editor of Poetry. We have conspired to inaugurate regular exchanges for our respective readers. Earlier this year, Riordan published a selection of work from our pages; this month we return the favor. And the work from The Poetry Review that follows is but the jewel in a crown: I’m devoting this issue to poetry from the United Kingdom, something we’ve not done for a decade. It’s a work in progress: entirely selected from unsolicited submissions, it is not meant to be comprehensive, or representative. Rather it is serendipitous and eccentric, like our magazines, like travel, and like poetry itself.

don share 3 leontia flynn

Gerard Manley Hopkins

At the mention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, my mild-mannered father — tender, abstracted — would exercise the right to revert to type. That is to say: devout; that is, proscriptive. He would rather we did not so bandy the good Jesuit’s name about in talk of “gay this” and “gay that” — just as he would rather my sister did not, from the library, request “sick” Lolita. Like tars on a stage deck, yo ho, we roll our eyes. Somebody snaps on the poisonous gas-fired heater — and I put off a year or two the hypothesis I’ll form, with a wave, to provoke him to these wobblers that all in such matters swing from pole to pole; as Hopkins was wont (his muse being bi[nsey] po[p]lar[s]) to swing from joy’s heights, alas, to the abyss and for whom the mind had “mountains; cliffs of fall.”

•

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap May who ne’er hung there.... ” Who’s not known the hell that fashions itself from the third night without sleep — the third or the fourth — in whose black margins crawl shrill horrors, and where breathless, poleaxed, pinned — as though in the teeth of an outrageous gale — the mind — sick — preys upon the stricken mind. And “worst, there is none” — no none — than this wild grief: Citalopram-wired. Our sweating selves self-cursed. Oh, “Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?” as Hopkins wrote — but, far gone, at its worst it’s her first form I want. Please stroke my hair. It’s alright now. I’m here, I’m here. There, there.

41 POETRY kathryn simmonds

In the Woods

The baby sleeps. Sunlight plays upon my lap, through doily leaves a black lab comes, a scotty goes, the day wears on, the baby wakes.

The good birds sing, invisible or seldom seen, in hidden kingdoms, grateful for the in- between. The baby sleeps. Elsewhere the Queen rolls by on gusts of cheer — ladies wave and bless her reign. The baby frets. The baby feeds. The end of lunch, a daytime moon. The leaves are lightly tinkered with. It’s spring? No, autumn? Afternoon? We’ve sat so long, we’ve walked so far. The woods in shade, the woods in sun, the singing birds, the noble trees. The child is grown. The child is gone. The black lab comes, his circuit done. His mistress coils his scarlet lead.

kathryn simmonds 5 Elegy for the Living

We wash up side by side to find each other

in the speakable world, and, lulled into sense,

inhabit our landscape; the curve

of that chair draped with your shirt;

my glass of water seeded overnight with air.

After this bed there’ll be another,

so we’ll roll and keep rolling

until one of us will roll alone and try to roll

the other back — a trick no one’s yet pulled off —

and it’ll be as if I dreamed you, dear,

as if I dreamed this bed, our touching limbs,

this room, the tree outside alive with new wet light.

61 POETRY Not now. Not yet.

kathryn simmonds 7 mir mahfuz ali

MiG-21 Raids at Shegontola

Only this boy moves between the runes of trees on his tricycle when an eagle swoops, releases two arrows from its silver wings, and melts away faster than lightning. Then a loud whistle and a bang like dry thunder. In a blink the boy sees his house roof sink. Feels his ears ripped off. The blast puffs up a fawn smoke bigger than a mountain cloud. The slow begonias rattle their scarlet like confetti. Metal slashes the trees and ricochets. Wires and pipes snap at the roots, quiver. The whirling smoke packed with bricks and cement, chicken feathers and nigella seeds. When the cloud begins to settle on the ground, the boy makes out buckled iron rods. White soot descends and he finds himself dressed like an apprentice baker.

81 POETRY colette bryce

Helicopters

Over time, you picture them after dark, in searches focusing on streets and houses close above the churches or balancing on narrow wands of light.

And find so much depends upon the way you choose to look at them: high in the night their minor flares confused among the stars, there almost beautiful. Or from way back over the map from where they might resemble a business of flies around the head wound of an animal.

colette bryce 9 liz berry

Scenes from “The Passion”: The First Path

When you found me there was nothing beautiful about me. I wasn’t even human just a mongrel kicked out into the snow on Maundy Thursday when all the world was sorrow, when old girls’ hands were raw as they cracked the ice on their birdbaths, when the priest wept in Saint Jude the Apostle as he knelt to wash the feet of an altar boy.

I was filth, running away from God knows what, my haunches sore with bruises, my spine knuckling the ruin of my coat.

Running through the town away from the horses who bowed their heads to the donkey-bite, away from the boy in the bus shelter who turned from me to receive a snowflake like a wafer on his tongue.

Lord help me I did things I would once have been ashamed of.

Now no one would come near me, they feared the hunger that gnawed and whined in my bones, the hurt I would carry into their houses.

Only you dared follow upon the track of my bloodied paw prints in the ice,

10P POETRY where the trees held snow in their arms like winding sheets. You came for me there close, low, calling a name that was not mine. Calling wench, my wench as the tongues of the church bells rang mute.

At your scent on the air, I shot through the woods — a gray cry — so raw only the dusk could touch me

but you were patient, waited through the dense muffled hours until darkness dropped and I sank into the midden behind the factory and the chimneys cast a wreath of ash upon me.

You touched me then, when I was nothing but dirt, took off your glove and laid your palm upon my throat, slipped the loop of the rope, lifted me into your arms and carried me home along the first path.

In the banks the foxes barked alleluia alleluia.

The blizzard tumbled upon us like confetti and I, little bitch, blue bruise, saw myself in your eyes: a bride.

liz berry 11 Scenes from “The Passion”: The Evening

There is an alley where you can go, where you can kiss someone’s mouth until you climb inside them, force your way in, push your cells into their cells and become one creature — angelic. It isn’t the way you’d dream it. There is piss, dew-damp moss crawling across the brick. Some nights it is so dark you must enter only by touch. Walk by in the light and it will seem like nothing. The scripture is written by wenches: 4eva, L+ J, I.T.A.L.Y. A heart jagged in two. But what you’ll make there it’s not love, it’s not weighed down with that, it’s feather, air, an at-once exultation of being not of this time, this alley, this shitty good for no one,

12P POETRY shut-down town. I never went there, I promise you. I never knew such sweet violence. Though there are mornings now, miles from that place, when I wake with the thought of it: wet and bitten, half- winged.

liz berry 13 ruby robinson

Undress

There is an ash tree behind this house. You can see it from our bedroom window. If you stare at it for long enough, you’ll see it drop a leaf. Stare at it now, you said, and notice the moment a leaf strips away from its branch, giving a twirl. Consider this.

The ash tree unclothes itself Octoberly. From beside our bed, fingering the curtain, observe the dark candles at the top of that tree, naked and alert, tending to the breeze. A sheet of ice between the rooftops and this noiseless sky has turned the air

inside out. Black veins of branches shake against the blue screen on which they hang. Small mammals are hibernating in pellets of warm air under ground. But, in spite of the cold, this ash tree does not shy from shrugging off its coat, sloping its nude

shoulders to the night. So, you said, undo, unbutton, unclasp, slowly remove. Let down your hair, breathe out. Stand stark in this room until we remember how not to feel the chill. Stand at the window, lift your arms right up like a tree. Yes — like that. Watch leaves drop.

14P POETRY My Mother

She said the cornflake cake made her day, she said a man cannot be blamed for being unfaithful: his heart is not in tune with his extremities and it’s just the way his body chemistry is. She said all sorts of things.

We saw a duck pond and a man with a tub of maggots and a tub of sweet corn, we saw the walled garden and the old-fashioned library in the park, stopped for a cup of tea in a cafe where we had the cornflake cake cut into halves

with the handle of a plastic fork. We saw yellow crocuses growing in a ring around a naked tree, the sky showing in purple triangles between the branches. We looked in the window of Butterworth’s at the bikes: they were beautiful,

all of them. Gorgeous, she said. The sun was pushing through the iced air and landing on us on our heads and our shoulders and the backs of our legs. We bought nail varnish remover from Wilko’s, a bath sheet, and two Diet Cokes.

She said she’d been talking to Jesus and God because she didn’t want to go to hell, although, she said, correctly, we’ve been through hell already, haven’t we. She said a woman should know her place, should wait. She lit a cigarette.

ruby robinson 15 matthew francis

Ant

After Robert Hooke

All afternoon a reddish trickle out of the roots of the beech and across the lawn, a sort of rust that shines and dances. Close up, it proves to be ant, each droplet a horned traveler finicking its way round the crooked geometry of a grass forest. A finger felled in their path rocks them, amazed, back on their haunches. I see them tasting the air for subtle intelligence, till one ventures to scale it, and others follow.

They are fidgety subjects to draw. If you sink the feet in glue the rest twists and writhes; kill one, the juices evaporate in seconds, leaving only the shriveled casing. I dunked one in brandy. It struggled till the air rose from its mouth in pinprick bubbles. I let it soak an hour, then dried it, observed the spherical head, the hairlike feelers, the grinning vice of its sideways jaw, the coppery armor plate with its scattered spines.

16P POETRY Some draft stirred it then. It rose to all its feet, and set off across the rough miles of desk.

matthew francis 17 julian stannard

Burlington Arcade

I’m being carried down the Burlington Arcade by Beadles in top hats, jewelers on both sides holding out their hands and wrapped in cashmere. When people speak of near-death experiences they’re always going through tunnels, they’re happy, they’re never going through the Burlington Arcade.

Eric says, It’s good to see you wearing clothes and I have to admit he’s wearing the most beautiful trousers and I say, Eric you’re not supposed to be in this poem. Get back into your shop! I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. The Head Beadle’s saying “Burlington Gardens!”

Should I tip him? Am I dead? What happens next?

18P POETRY Napoli

The boat was beating across the bay, we had our backs to Vesuvius, the wind smacked our faces. Naples was an enormous packet of cigarettes you could smoke till you conked out: the cigarettes were never going to run out and nor was the coffee, the drugs, the prostitutes, the locked churches, the scooters, the rice cakes, the evil eye, the boys called Gennaro, the funiculars, the shrines to Madonna, the shrines to Maradona, the bullet holes, the heat, the permanent state of crucifixion. Anyone could be crucified two thousand years ago but to be crucified now, to be crucified in Napoli — lift me up!

julian stannard 19 hugo williams

Notes from Dialysis

the fields beneath (st pancras old church)

I make my tour of the garden waiting room where the tall trees wander among the corpses.

I might go past the last resting place of Sir John Soane in his stone telephone kiosk,

or the wooden bench where the Beatles sat on their “Mad Day Out” July 28th, 1968.

The body of J.C. Bach, “The English Bach,” lies somewhere near here, lost to the Railway in 1865.

A plaque remembers him as Queen Charlotte’s music tutor, who collaborated with someone and died young.

Perhaps Jerry Cruncher got him, or perhaps he survived and is strolling with his friend in the fields beneath.

I drag my feet through the backsliding seasons towards a gate in the wall with its timetable of opening hours.

20P POETRY the song of the needles

Needles have the sudden beauty of a first line. They’re always new and surprising as they burst from their paper covering. They sing as they hit the air.

You catch sight of them out of the corner of your eye, glinting softly to themselves as they contemplate their next move.

What they’re suggesting is inspired, but a certain sadness attends their description of what is going on. You don’t know whether to look away, or accept what they’re saying.

If you’re lucky you’ll feel a pop as one of them enters your fistula and a cool feeling of recognition spreads up through your arm.

hugo williams 21 grand canyon suite

Every few minutes someone’s alarm goes off because of a blood clot or a sudden fall in pressure, then the first two notes of Ferde Grofé’s “On the Trail” goes clip-clopping down the Grand Canyon of the ward.

Now the first two notes of the song are joined by the same two notes from a neighboring machine, then another two, and another, till the whole hopeless blind herd is clip-clopping off into the sunset.

22P POETRY poems

caleb klaces

Moths

A translator who has a phobia of moths spent three years translating a book with a moth motif. It’s ironic, she has said, that she knew more about the moths than the author of the original, who was merely fascinated. The translation contained a greater variety of moths than the original, drawn from suggestions she had made, some of which were in fact too perfect and changed back before it went to print.

Her moths, the ones that were too aptly named, meant too much, her moths that she hated, where are they now? The same place as all the versions of people that have been undressed and slept with, in lieu of the people themselves, by others. That must include a version of almost everyone, lots of versions of some people, some only a flutter, animated then decided against.

caleb klaces 25 hannah lowe

Genealogy

I carry you, a fleck, to Jamaica At the Chinese temple in Kingston I am sick daily Victor leads me upstairs, says this floor was once Nights, I hold the bed’s edges full of beds where men off the boat a raft on the rolling sea slept, ate, washed sea salt from their skin, You inside me, all this hope prayed at the jade altar with two lions Sweet speck, what will you be? that too, had shipped from China. Too new to be anything We drive to the old cemetery, not before I say nothing Victor pays the wild-eyed boy who “guards” the car. the way I stay silent He might hurt us, the vodka bottle he holds is about my grandfather made of blue glass. His lips are red and sore. who beat all his children I stand on my grandfather’s small grave, with a strap pen in hand. I am allowed to write his name on since The sun burns the cemetery floor the marker has been chipped off, I am woozy marble sold. Wow crazy day huh, Victor says. An honor I don’t know why I’m here to pay your filial duty to your grandfather?

26P POETRY High Yellow

Errol drives me to Treasure Beach It’s an old story, the terrible storm swerving the dark country roads the ship going down, half the sailors I think about what you will be, your mix drowned, half swimming the white, black, Chinese, and your father’s slate waves, spat hard onto shore Scottish-Englishness. We cross the Black River Smashed crates, bodies where they shipped cane sugar and molasses choking on the black sand upstream past a sign One man stands — What is this place? A woman for Lover’s Leap. The air stinks of sulphur in the trees, one hand raised Errol drops me at a blue gate. Be safe This is how the Scotsmen came behind the house, the thin beach why the black people here have red hair of black sand, the water warm and gray Or the other story, no storm I am deep before I know it, groundless no wrecked ship. Just the miles the swell stops the sickness of cane fields and mulatto children named under a crooked tree, perched on sea rocks McDonald or McArthur for two fishermen in torn denims, smoking their fathers, who owned them I dry in the sun. They pass, turn, come close Nothing grows at Lover’s Leap they have rust afros, gold faces splashed with freckles where two runaways one ripped with muscle, one with eyes cornered by their master, held hands like razors. What you want here they say and jumped down into the clouds

hannah lowe 27 claire trévien

The Evening After

After James Merrill

One evening, tired of games and each other, we spent watching our reflections on a screen — four in a two-seater, angling like sardines. For a dog’s hair I’d milked the wine, uttered words like, “that’s the cure!” swiveled the puckering glass like a mock-dandy, blood slushing at my temples, until the spill, a fatal expression on the white and navy, ruined the smoothness past salvation. A cough of salt, the patting of the fabric, perhaps enough.

28P POETRY tim wells

The Coriolanus Effect

For Jack the Ripper walking tours

Come ye learned, ye loquacious, ye lost.

Walk a pentagram around ego, erudition, experience.

Our shuls, mosques, and homes be yours.

Our murdered laid bare, our slums still teem, our souls sold.

As for us, we marvel as our own effluvia swirls widdershins.

tim wells 29 Out of the Blue

There are those for whom moving house is all so many pennies in a jar. It’ll all amount to something. I am more the alchemist; slowly, but not surely, making the mundane something precious. Just as it is several floors above the street, my new flat is in nearly every way better than my old ground-floor one, all except for the cheap plastic toilet seat that wasn’t even bolted to the bowl. I took a dislike to it even before I’d started sliding left, right, and front and back every time I eased myself; sat there a-flipping and a-flopping in some kinda kooky Pan’s People routine. No big deal; I now live amidst a jangle of pound shops and de- termined to purchase and attach a brand new model. I spotted a real bobby dazzler; clear resin filled with silver glitter. I liked it, it had a certain 1974 “gay bloke in a glam rock band” quality but, on reflec- tion, did it give the message that I wanted to send, to ladies especially so? So I got plain wood. No mistaking that. However, this soon broke; too much cheesecake too soon? Of course there’d been second thoughts, and my framed portraits of Ingrid Pitt and the sheer amount of reggae singles would surely choke any doubts about my dance moves raised by this, admittedly, exuberant toilet seat. I returned and purchased the glitter that could, perhaps, handle the weight of my pretensions. The bathroom is the one place where we truly relax, it hangs out, baby. We are confronted with the true selves we love, loathe, or try to avoid. Both seat and lid molded stardust! My life has plopped into the plush. I’ve taken to hot, foamy baths with Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits pumping on the stereo. Lathered with scented foam, I wonder about Bryan Ferry looking through an old picture frame. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Thane of Bathwater. Us skinhead types aren’t known for our decadence, Desmond ex- cluded that is. Even now I’m more coal tar than Imperial Leather. Citrus mouthwash has appeared on my bathroom cabinet. I’ve even started using it twice daily, according to directions.

30P POETRY Outside, Ermine Street walks backwards to the gilt and butchery of Londinium, then as now, my manor blinged up vermin. My street is a busy one, a dirty one, a loud one. Police cars freeequently scream past, sirens forcing themselves in. It’s not the noise I object to. It’s the urgency. I’m all for the fight against crime but surely it can be done in a more Sherlock Holmes and gentlemanly languid manner? Iniquity is a mire, into which we are sinking, or a briar catching at us with thorns. I forget which, although I note that these encompass both descent and ascension. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions but the road to Whitechapel, is laid far less savory. The Commercial Tavern, once a trysting place for East End homo- sexualists, is now frequented by “artists” and the like. I work around the corner and am there for the lock in. For all its bustling traffic, Commercial Street crawls slower than most of London. Painters whine, beer flows, brasses ply their trade; much the same as in the Ripper’s heyday. I am introduced to and shake hands with the new landlord; tall, louche, pastel open-necked yet masculine shirt, sovereigns all heads, blond flipped hair ... no less than Bryan Ferry in negative! The police speed past, the prostitutes splash.

tim wells 31 john wilkinson

Schlummert Ein

In memory of Sara Wilkinson and for Liz Miles

Eyelids, fall softly, from their gritted corners chalk, let it drizzle, let the streams flow thick with a waste glaze, let imagery run off

its surplus of kaolin, choke feed of sediment plumed into the blue, tulipping its stem. Cress bunches thickening in shallows, flukes

stinging flank heifers in their shove and jostle down a bank, drinking, mud caking lips. Eyelids, fall softly, let me linger interrupted

behind the curtains billowing with images, how the unseeable sill even so snags, how the very point lights from behind, thoughts

dispersing into folds slung aloft in sea mist, impermissible point breaks every motive falling back behind the eyelids that then fall.

I breathe, I look, I carry forward, I can sense the last of you, taking walks of air thick with waste breath your form displaces. O curtain!

32P POETRY O rail! I hate the thick floor beneath, breathe over a market quarrel, rise over the bass sawing at its stems to crash down the vault, let the vault branch recklessly, light-streams maze, air’s stirring carry song back and forth; I hear your recorder pipe, long for its repeats giving what-for to earth seeming to attenuate, rock is marked with your aeolian flow. Eyelids, fall softly, the cast of their fluttering fans across the inlet a white shadow, writes over deep-set floor captivated ripples. World, gaze out! Rise from a shrouded point.

john wilkinson 33 pascale petit

Black Jaguar with Quai Saint-Bernard

Behind the Fauverie a crawl of quayside traffic while Aramis roars for his food, the air turbulent as he opens his jaws in a huge yawn. If I hold my breath, half-close my eyes and listen hard — there at the tongue’s root, in the voicebox of night, I might hear the almost-vanished. He’s summoning his prey, this lord of thunderbolts, calling to ghosts of the Lost World, with this evening chant to scarlet macaw, tapir, golden lion tamarin. Until everything goes slow and the rush-hour queue of scale-to-scale cars is one giant caiman basking on the bank. The jaguar’s all swimming stealth now — no sound — a stalker camouflaged by floating hyacinths, senses tuned only to the reptile of the road. Then, with one bound, spray scatters like glass, as Aramis lands on the brute’s back and bites its neck.

34P POETRY david harsent

From “A Dream Book”

Deep reaches of sleep until the unforeseen moment, like fugue, like petit mal, some kind of sign, a touch from a joker’s finger, to let him know what’s right, what’s wrong with the dream-within-a-dream. A sudden, slight shift in the order of things and all the past undone. He left what was left of himself in her care that night.

•

They went to the river and dropped their clothes on the bank. She struck out. He followed in the long, slow vee of her wake.

She could sound and surface, bringing back with her what other lovers had dumped: hotel bill, gimcrack ring, a four-square shot from the photo booth. Later, they dipped their bottles and drank. She looked at him and laughed. “You think you’re safe? You’re not.”

•

In this, her fool is deaf and dumb and twirling a pink parasol. In this he’s doing a chicken dance. He turns away and puckers up for a kiss.

He’s their stalker, familiar, spy, his slippy grin is all lipstick and green teeth. Words to the wise, or coffin-laugh, or catcall.

In this, he watches from cover, maestro of the deadfall. He goose-steps them out of the tunnel of love and into the house of glass.

david harsent 35 Tinnitus: May, low skies and thunder

Rough music in the lane, the love child lapped in blood and safe at her breast, the pain echoed in wood on wood, steel on steel, as they come, the women in their blacks, to hound her from house and home, bands of bitches and claques of crones with their pots and pans, their hooks and ladles and bowls, to beat outside in the street, to stand at her window and howl, while the child takes a taste of green milk and “the dead of night” is all she has of her own and the music goes on and on.

36P POETRY Tinnitus: January, thin rain becoming ice

Now footsteps on shingle. Make of it what you will. Seabirds roost on the breakwaters, accustomed, of course, to twilight. The spirit lamp in that house on the headland could easily fall and spill and the fire burn all night. Some time later a subtle ghost, yourself in memory perhaps, might well set foot up there amid clinker and smoke, the whole place silent and still except you bring in the tic of cooling timbers, and then the birds in flight.

•

Now chains through gravel. Make of it what you will.

david harsent 37 james brookes

Eschatology, Piscatology

The halotolerant crocodile idles in brackish water like a tow truck. Salt glands meter in its diapsid skull; smug fucker that the epochs couldn’t kill.

How easy “kill” then closes onto “smile,” the lockjaw of a life that rides its luck, knowing from hindmost teeth to jackknifed tail Leviathan is neither fish nor mammal.

38P POETRY rory waterman

The Avenue

They found a man in the shrub that shields our lane — one fat white hand not tucked in the pit — and cordoned off a patch. We had nothing to explain it but The Post. And now the ground’s restrewn with tins and crisp bags; sleet jiggles the ivy; the blackbirds bob from floor to bole as each dull dusk settles in.

And coming back at night we get on too, quickening to the safety lights, through shadows of gates that thrust across the grit.

rory waterman 39 Pulling Over to Inspect a Pillbox with a North American Tourist

It lists beneath a sycamore swashing in high summer leaf, and takes a hit from underneath: a root knuckle bulges along the floor.

Its eight loopholes have fissures, sprouting thistles; through each the wheat is fattening. “What’s this thing for?” A starling sings its wind-up song. The sun slides out.

And this taste of piss, that Fetherlite slumped in the corner, those Holsten cans, the markered slogan do not try to answer. Might.

40P POETRY Over the Heath

The truck grinds by He filled her between and pumps out grit; the hay bales in the road glints and that Dutch barn, now goes still. abandoned,

The barn owl that where the wind had not finished here catches its breath returns. But with in the stanchions, its fill air gun holes.

of scavenges, Then they sprang up face ruffled in mulch, light and lightsome the vole is lost and she tugged his hand and safe with her hand

so the silent specter as the breeze pulled flits away, its at the poppy heads moon face to and rabbits shrank the moon round boles.

and rears unknown But how soon he’d against a copse, grow indifferent claws tipped for as the tick she the strafe couldn’t see

and something dies that was part of too soon. her for longer than he would choose to be.

rory waterman 41 sophie collins

Healers

I encountered a scaffold outside the Holy Trinity Church in Vladimir, Russia. At first I didn’t notice her slumped against the side of the church — she was pretty small for a scaffold, pretty un- assuming. Her safety mesh was torn in places and sun-bleached all over and threatened to dislodge due to a forceful wind that was typical of the season. She was shaking. She was fundamentally insecure. She told me that good foundations are essential and that the men who had put her together hadn’t taken advantage of the right opportunities. Now, each day, someone came by called her “unsafe” and also “a liability” then left, failing to initiate the dismantling process that yes would have been painful and slow, but kinder. International visitors to the church blamed her for the mess of tools and rags on the grounds and for the fact that they could no longer see the church’s celebrated mural depicting Saint Artemy of Verkola unusually pious highly venerated child saint killed by lightning. His dead body radiated light never showed signs of decay and was in fact said to have effected multiple miracles of healing. I said comforting things to the scaffold but she only seemed to lean more heavily against the side of the church.

42P POETRY We are rarely independent structures she said before she dropped a bolt pin which released a long section of tube which released another bolt pin which released several wooden boards that scraped another tube and made an unbearable sound.

sophie collins 43 martin monahan

The South Transept Window, St. Lucia at Lowhampton

Who ever thinks this is impossible shall only have a look on the glass, which is similar to you — Monk of the Abbey of St. Mary and St. Nicholas at Arnstein, late twelfth century, tr. by Roger Rosewell

1

In the high left light there’s a bombast figure of the iconoclast Harley — titled Chairman of the Committee for the Demolition of Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry — in operation mid 1600s. In forgiveness is lightly engraved in the grisaille glass near the base. His jig-on-coals is illumined to the foot:

in the light below, skin-fierce shards of thousanded glass are oblite against an anvil road black as a telly that’s off.

2

Here the sanctity of the inextinct is vitrified. (There is in this, of course, the trick of the numinous, which apertures the mind then shutters it with a captured click.) The second window is abstracted into a green / yellow / red that’s near tessellated at points, yet at its edges approaching random generation like a screen saver projected. It is infernal. This color chart dispersal, that’s disordering or reordering.

44P POETRY 3

Then a spurt of leading leads out of the plaster tracery, these cames a cooled ore rooting Lowhampton’s industry to a silica-limed wall — and the metal hid within a retrace of all the city’s greatness that’s gone before. Though now is lost. There is at last the moving off from the abstract; a tilting to the concrete: it seems, right here, that a hundred buildings are storied in stone-thrown perspective. A city reinvented.

4

In four: a clear-paned gemmail connecting like-to-like, with no change of tint or shape, no supporting leadlight. It’s as if it were a house window. Or something from an office block. It does not create or stain but gives an outside falling past Sainsbury’s and the Sander Tower looming, then the ring road communioned traffic forming. An open room pupiled towards rain in its rain-tone, the study of an unaltared sun.

martin monahan 45 sam riviere

The Expendables 2

For Sam Donsky

The airport where all movies end: the scenery’s mobile, the people too (the people want to be moved), and the rounded stairways join set pieces like farewells in a series arc. I don’t understand how you write good scripts without knowing there are gods. I’ve learned the same things we’ve all learned: when a man runs through my hotel suite I can expect another half a second later. Also, tell me why I keep two keys, one of which unlocks something. Also, I know, we know, that you (hell-o) will have vanished before I finish saying this and turn around. “You’ll do that,” I’ll mention to the night, and spin my swivel chair, perusing the moment’s sunkenness. Meanwhile my antivirus angel is checking every file. We both know there’s a place you touch when your plane lifts off (I won’t say where), a little bolt that takes the plot apart, so closure is dismantled, because from here you can admit that nothing’s ever ended well. You have queued to show your documents. You have left behind your possessions for the kind scientists. The stairs have spun away and sunk, and in losing your itinerary your position is confirmed. Like, the first time a woman sees a diamond she just knows.

46P POETRY Solitaire

I think I always liked the game because it sounded like my name combined with the concept of alone. (My name really does mean “alone” in Slovenian!) We don’t actually care if it’s true, but we want to know the person telling us is telling us the truth. Say his name is “Hank,” as in, “of hair.” (It’s not.) My upbringing was classically smooth/chaotic, apart from traumatic events I’ve never detailed, even to myself. Traumatic but methodical. But why say what happened even. In the tech block the blinds were down and I cleared my way to the final marble under the indistinct gaze of an indistinct master. My success had allowed me to become the bastard I always knew I could be. What did it mean, to clean the board like this, counting down to one? By these gradual and orderly subtractions my persona was configured. The goal was to remain single. Sometimes telling you the truth wouldn’t be telling you anything much. For a while I’ve felt torpid and detuned, as if I want to share a view with you, so we can both be absent in one place. Look, the sky is beautiful and sour. I’m not here, too. I’m staring out of this cloud like an anagram whose solution is probably itself. I am only the method that this stupid game was invented to explain.

sam riviere 47 In Praise of the Passivity of Paper

I felt suddenly convinced that I had feelings for the wallpaper. I was especially captivated by its blonde hair and bad dreams. I had the impression the wallpaper needed longer to properly respond. By the time I left, my affections had produced this abrasion on my cheek. People looked on the abrasion as unquestionable proof of my sincerity. The abrasion was produced by rubbing my face on the paper’s smooth surface. It only occurred to me later that it might have found this sensation disagreeable. But by then I had become known for my abrasion, and I seldom thought of, discussed, or in any way depended upon the wallpaper for anything. My affections, though, had produced upon the paper their own mark. To my irritation and gradual dismay, interest in the paper’s abrasion began to outweigh interest in my own; indeed, mine was starting to fade while the mark upon the paper had deepened with the passing of time. People liked to visit the paper in its room and probe their fingers into the widening tear, by now a gruesome black-edged wound. The silence of the paper during these incursions suggested to some condemnation of their curiosity, but to others implied approval. Some even speculated that the paper “enjoyed” the infringement of its surfaces, while most agreed it was a question of the paper enduring this indignity, having little or no opportunity to protest. Some visitors could not contain their enthusiasm, and over time other recesses were opened in the paper without its consent. The earliest admirers of the paper’s abrasion were heard lamenting the gulf between the paper’s current state and its previous appearance. They opined that to experience the abrasion now was to encounter a kind of mockery of the gentle and informal gesture it had once been. Others contended that while the paper’s condition was certainly different,

48P POETRY it couldn’t be in any way “better” or “worse” than it had been originally; on the contrary, the paper, exhibiting as it did the marks of the affections spent upon it, was in every way a true record of the destruction this attention had wrought, and had become if anything a more moving testament, charting as it did the changing and accelerated passions of the times. In later phases of the paper’s deterioration some expressed admiration for the stoical indifference with which the paper withstood its abusers and wondered if such an attitude might not improve the willing and reciprocal style with which they and their contemporaries were accustomed to receiving each other’s gazes and caresses. Against the odds, this view seemed timely and took root in the populace, and to this day in all the estimations of historians and critics of culture it is widely held accountable for the period of dormancy and inertia among the youngest of our people, whose silence and repose has replaced the humors and rages of those whose desires had flown unchecked, who had coupled for so long with such energy and frequency.

sam riviere 49 D.F.W.

I dated mostly police. I hated coastal solace. In navy posts I flourished. I inflate the cost of polish.

I restrained my nest-egg worries. On planes I tested patience. I prayed for lusty follies. I betrayed my foster family.

In ways I lost my malice. I craved a cloistered palace. I dared say the feast was ghoulish. I became a tourist: boorish.

Unswayed by mystic knowledge, I raised a frosty chalice. I was upstaged and roasted: English. I obeyed a ghost who’s tall-ish.

The play was close to flawless. I stayed and missed her no less. Then one day the fester wasn’t. I cried: the taste was more-ish.

50P POETRY frances leviston

Trimmings

frangelico It slops from coppery glass Dominican cassocks thicker than water, thinned syrup crackling and smoking over ice, pale as hearts of hazelnuts half-caramelized or relics lit in cabinets. Angelic alcoholic for kids, all quickening sweetness without the burnt palate, it’s praline, gilt, milk chocolate. Don’t knock it. Also, don’t drink a lot of it. Handy mnemonic for nuts and Alps, the Piedmont and Languedoc, Our Father, fluent Occitan, Orthodox baroque brass fixtures, all the schmaltzy terror of Christmas ... Bright liqueur, maple sap, throat’s lacquer, misnomer, namesake — couldn’t quench a thirst, of course, but gives occasion for it.

frances leviston 51 lametta Fuck me, I love that stuff — tinsel stripped like a tarragon stalk of its million radial tines, nervy with static in shredded cascades, angle-confounding and biddable as a fistful of grasshoppers. It implicates itself perpetually in socks, hell-bent as Japanese knotweed on travel, and infiltrates the kitchenette, which seems, beside its disco stooks, too much of a muchness, too matter-of-fact. Could we dress all utilities in spangles of lametta, revel in the vulgar Italian TV indestructible attention-splatter, the cat-bewitching twitch and dangle, the dross? Would things be worse or better?

52P POETRY periptero Apparently peripatetic, it pops up wherever I go, glistening on my shoulder, a gold epaulette, a stuffed piñata albatross of bubble-gum, filter tips, and lottery tickets, glossy cascades of laminated sleaze difficult to care about, much harder to reject. Less explicably there are sewing patterns, puzzle books, and tiny plastic helicopters bearing stigmata from the molds where they were cast. The proprietor slams the shutters up and locks himself inside like a djinn in a lamp, a night-busy, helping-hand kobold in a kitchen, utterly invested in the enterprise, inseparable from it. What is the epicenter everyone reports but the staple through the nipple of a centerfold?

frances leviston 53 toby martinez de las rivas

Triptych for the Disused Nonconformist Chapel, Wildhern

patricia beer O Lord thou draggest me out

From the deep harbor άρτταγησόμεθα: we shall be caught up. Plymouth as it was, the Hoe laid out above Goemagot chary with scattered primrose, a stand of tulips that court the sun as glacially as girls beneath rayon doll hats and parasols inclining to passersby on the promenade. Beyond the breakwater, Warspite between Grenville and Hood. Narrow-eyed gulls with heartrending mews like paramours. Then Padua, balanced upon its own rubble. Raw colors returning with the first days of spring unkempt and ravenous to the faculty, students linking arms with practiced ease in giro through a stream of bicycles trilling in sweet voices. Kisses desired in full view returned, the elegant cafes audible from the river where the sky wanders through its city. Austen and Gaskell. Coffee, a stroll. Austen again. Brontë.

I met her. The gray, lavish eyes. A ruthless stare softened by an accent. She was gracious, even to my callow posturing — called one windy effort that ended O Lord thou draggest me out a most faithful homage to Eliot, grave with kindly mockery. I drank my bitter tea. But consider this: her calves in sheer silk still a girl’s, her polished tan half-heels set against them: magnificent. That Italian air, the strict bob ordering her face. And driving back with Pinkie at his schoolmasterly pace, I picked my nails and watched myself in the dark wing when “The King in Thule” suddenly swelled with falling cadence through the speakers, its pure aurality heralding the shattering white late snow of April, the road a vein of black ore exhausting itself slowly to the north, the fields at Rogationtide émpty, innocent of all things, even life. i ii iii

54P POETRY fay pomerance

Beneath the shadow of hís wings, the scales stand baited against us. Maddox, charming predator, robustly mustachioed, vivid behind thick lenses condemning that discredited iconography — towers collapsing through quicksand, pavanes of anguish, the bodies of the lost ransacked by hobgoblins — reclines, his hatred virtue, its vital purity and strength, all his outrage told against those humiliating genuflections. Since there is no model for her features, conceive of her blanched as the Cabbage White, each brushstroke the drama of a tiny kenosis, the bright clatter of ferrules over- heard as conversation at a distant table, queasy and isolating — Babel. Tower of teacups at ominous angles in the studio, rings indelibly stamped in the watercolor paper’s grain. Stretched in membranes of fat: passover, Lamb. Burning leaven.

Head ringing with psilocybin and gin, I kneel in the foreground of my own life quarter-sized, self-consciously humbled, like the donor in Altdorfer’s Crucifxion peering through the shadow of the cross to the city emptied of day laborers that rides at ease in the sun, bay deliciously windswept, the curdled blue of high summer fading out beyond the spruce where she stands in her living robes — and still I cannot comprehend how incidental we are to our own redemption, though the sacrifice remains intimate in violence, the half-accepting flinch of the face as if breasting the parapet or tensed into the impact of a tube train, the rapt mother in the privacy of her distress. Here is the gate of horn, the hacked bough of ash that even dying shivers forth gaily its barrowloads of leaves.

toby martinez de las rivas 55 jack clemo Let there be a chamber wherein no other light comes

Not that I forget, but that, increasingly, the objects of my memory become ripe for disparagement: irrational or petit bourgeois, complicit in imperial power, conjurors of air slapped down by wolfish lecturers with gestures of ennui, pared nails and implacable smiles, vicious with piety. Little traitor, I defend them with a wounded stare and no more — perhaps, I find my place among them, being so cold and all. Bone-white pits of china clay gouged through that vision, the extravagant gaze of grace balanced upon us, its soteriology divorced from nature — something terrifying in declaration, his unforgiving line like being hunted. From the steeply-banked clay tips new dumps of refuse clatter to extend the protectorate of sand, sparse prickles of mica like fields in snow — above all, the dogma never thaws.

And nothing. The day we climbed slowly out of Antequera through the cloud base stippled in dew, the lightly slung blue bells of nazarenes blazed between karst and darkness, wild rose and orchid, the unaccountable blood of the peony aching toward a sound that was both forsakenness and longing — wolves baying somewhere deep in the park — and I turned to you and wanted to know what next? Lost, we turned and turned and turned about among the stacks. Wings drilling the invisible host from cover to cover alerted us, the cramped and sullen thorns in anguish loomed. Until, picking our way down a gully deepening into spate, the fog whitened, glared alarmingly, then lifted in one sweep from the sheer drop-off of the cliff — we saw as if through glass the road receding among gray rocks | the citadel.

56P POETRY amy key

How Rare a Really Beautiful Hand Is Now, Since the Harp Has Gone Out of Fashion!

Moisturizer is important to me like a car is important. I’ll never own a car and skin is incidentally mine. Truth is, skin seems to manage pretty well on its own. I only travel in cars to sing to the radio.

My skin is such a brute! It needs a regime! I need a drink. My car and my skin need a drink. I want to say ain’t you a cool glass of water. My skin is so dull and I have no car. My eyes, however, are ritzy.

I favor the non-abrasive. My cult product is an anti-aging self-emollient. More often this is new pajamas. But pajamas need multi-talents! I’m not yet old-old. Thinking of crystal decanters makes me feel young, they are inscrutable adulthood. My skin can’t be so bad — sleep is like a drink and my controls are set to bed. This is my mitigation against stress, stern weather, assorted irritations.

Being ravaged is my own fault! Proper living requires routine, tiny adjustments that make life better. I’m making plans with no muscle to them. Sleep is no artificial skin, despite its gauzy potential.

Rose water — by the by I’d rather drink it as the hokey pendulum swings. I’m looking for something foolproof, aplomb that withstands the interrogating nude.

amy key 57 Announcement and Next Steps

In the absence of anything as definitive as blood type or maths, I am delighted to declare I found the back to the earring, also the mildew is banished, albeit temporarily. I want to share this news with you, a check against the inventory of living. Personalized necklaces point to living. Customizable anything suggests it’s all worth it. Sometimes it’s “oh this iced finger bun” others it’s “put something in the diary to look forward to.” This is an elaborate mural in an ill-frequented part of the city. My diary is full and the bakery is out of buns. Indoors there needs to be a swap from idle teasels to cacti. (Some sort of permanence that works in the way I work — water, light, a finger touch confirming my edges.) I only have cats to verify I’m there.

•

I am building up evidence. Some bodily. Some constructed. On balance, perhaps I am more a person who racks up indicators of taste as proof of living. There are condiments, playlists, preferred linens. I first got drunk on Cinzano. There was no one taking notes. I used to dream of sex in a fully upholstered room with no windows or doors. This idea of rabbit fur rugs and buttoned velvet cushions, immaculately conceived. Always snagged on the detail of things — how even did I come to be inside, nevermind out. The sex wasn’t the point. What I seek is magic like an intact lipstick mirror in an antique handbag, my own nifty (crackerjack?) endurance. Or to discover a gulping heart within a privet hedge. Or the druzy quartz of someone’s eyes long gone and to say it!

•

58P POETRY I am dying to be written about in your diary and my self-involvement extends to endless photographs of my eye makeup, which might be described as “signature.” FYI I prefer a fine brush to a pen. What can be said about slush, about the corners cut when cleaning the fridge. What can be said about what is considered to be ordinary. Crucially, love is a desire to be a witness and be witnessed, how you might skate past the provisional. If the house were burning down I would rescue all the photographs they’ll tell you or select that option in the quiz. Now the photographs are in the air and my increments of living, too. We can still hold hands, eat noodles with the lights off, have deliberate sex. There is an obscure audience, always. My personal schmaltz, strumpet wardrobe, the lacquered soles of dancing shoes. The e-mail I sent has the subject line (no subject).

amy key 59 david wheatley

An Execration

Given the existence of plagues of eels and bloodsuckers in Lake Léman, cursed by the Bishop of Lausanne and the learned doctors of Heidelberg, the homicidal bees condemned at the Council of Worms, the petition of the inhabitants of Beaune for a decree of excommunication against certain noxious insects called hurebers, a kind of locust or harvest fly — given, further, the trial of the weevils of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne lasting over eight months, with due attention to the protocol of cases brought against caterpillars, to the custom of writing letters of advice to rats, the writs of ejectment served on them, and the rhyming rats of Ireland; and, further, Egbert, Archbishop of Trier, having previously anathematized the swallows which disturbed the devotions of the faithful and sacrilegiously defiled his head and vestments with their droppings, and exulted in scandalous unchastity during his sermons; in spite of the vermifugal efficacy of St. Magnus’s crosier and accompanying papal execratories, all sorts of animals, a cock burned at the stake for the unnatural crime of laying an egg, an ox decapitated for its demerits, all manner of sweet and stenchy beasts, are observed to persist in their heretical obduracy, irrational and imperfect creatures, though notified, admonished and commanded to depart from the habitations of man, notices to this effect being posted on trees that all guilty parties may read; and whereas it has been urged that brute beasts that they are, the field mouse, locust, mole, ass, mule, mare, goat, snail, slug, weevil, turtledove, pig, cow and bull,

60P POETRY are lacking immortal souls (that they might be damned), they lack not indwelling spirits, otherwise demons and imps of Satan, of which they are the visible form, so that it is the demon and not the beast that suffers in the beaten dog and squeals in the butchered pig; a vile and lowly specimen of which genus art thou, the accused, standing trotters against the dock before me now, that did willfully last Tuesday fortnight throw the swineherd’s son to the ground, mangling his ears and cheeks, for which crime having first been dressed in a velveteen waistcoat as is our custom and the executioner furnished with a fresh pair of gloves, you will be conveyed to the town square and there without benefit of clergy be hanged by the neck until dead and your body thereafter displayed for the improvement of your fellow filth-dwelling sinners. Do you have anything to say for yourself?

david wheatley 61 kathryn maris

Singles Cruise

It was a singles cruise but it wasn’t a singles cruise: each participant simulated detachment but none was actually single. Some, like the recently widowed, were attached to ghosts. Others were legally attached to a living person they once but no longer loved. A surprising number loved their partners profoundly while fearing said partners inhabited the category of those who loved them no longer. These participants, whose fears may or may not have been founded, attempted to self-protect by labeling themselves single. Soon a pattern emerged: those who feared abandonment developed around them a planetary-like orbit of potential new partners to whom they could not attach because they were already attached. Such orbits lasted, sometimes, for years. The orbiters went to self-help groups and/or analysts and/or wrote letters to advice columnists. Because they could not detach from their objects of unrequited affection, they became the predominant clientele for future singles cruises, unilaterally sustaining the singles cruise business.

62P POETRY The X Man

His superpower was that his testicles manufactured sperm with exclusively X chromosomes & that was ironic because not only was he a beast to women but his 40 baby girls grew up seeking men like the father they barely saw unless they went to his studio to be painted which wasn’t OK with their mothers who were not only jealous but guilty of giving birth to girls who were products of an X-chromosome-making monster & would soon suffer at the hands of other monsters with X- type sperm thereby assuring the continuation of suffering & meanwhile all the girls became writers who slouched from sitting at desks & being daughters & lovers of beasts.

kathryn maris 63 john greening

Heath XXIX

Twenty-four thousand times in any year, lightning strikes and kills. On the Heath, the timber shells, like bony Flemish spires, point heavenwards in warning. The stags take note and bow their heads at the sky’s first challenge, or hurl a bellowing peal back in defiance.

Quicken your pace. Ask for Belfont, Bedfound, Bedefunde, Beda’s spring, however the changes ring, where he dispatched his woman each morning from their heap of halfsmart, crosswort, bloodcup, from under their thatch, to fetch even in such storms, even when she had reached nine months ...

When will it end, this barrenness, these waves of agony, barefoot through lynchet, dyke, furze, thistle, the gusts and groans, water breaking overhead? Beda’s woman lies back in the heather bed of history; you press on. At your feet is a baby, and another,

heads like mushrooms, crowning, crying, put out for the Heath to take care of. Their mewings pierce the air. But there is no milk. Do not pick them. Leave them to the Dama dama who gather round. Consider instead the oaks, each ring another year that these

might have suffered. Pass on through Hag Lane into Bedfont. Spring with a drinking vessel. Old English byden, a tub or container, funta, on loan from Rome (whose roots and tesserae lie scattered beneath your modern tread), fons or fontus. That distant rumbling

is just a farmer bringing home grain. They are far behind you now between dead oaks and dark enclosing deer, exposed, yet silent. Thunder has paused. Head for the church, the fighting cocks (or peacocks) of St. Mary the Virgin, East Bedfont, and hurry on through its topiary

64P POETRY nonsense, past the tombs of those who died on February the 31st, or aged three hundred and sixty-one. Enter the pudding stone. At the font like a cowled servant presenting the first and final course, is a Friar, sworn to poverty, chastity, his vessel raised, fending off storms.

john greening 65

COMMENT

colette bryce

Omphalos

I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos, meaning the navel, and hence the stone that marked the center of the world, and repeat it, omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pump- ing water at the pump outside our back door. — Seamus Heaney, “Mossbawn”

Omphalos, omphalos, omphalos ... The rhythm of the word that con- jured up for Heaney the pump in his childhood yard — the Greek term for the center of things — calls to mind the helicopters hovering over the cityscape of my childhood, a constant part of the soundtrack of growing up. The army would use the racket of propellers to drown out speeches at Free Derry Corner. So in my mind, the blades are related to words, in opposition to our words, slicing up sentences in the wind. An emigrant’s view might also hover, surveying the misty valley of a city, grids of streets punctuated by churches, before focusing in on a house. It’s near the upper end of a terrace, the house where we lived. Looking back, I can rarely locate the “I,” a common experi- ence in large families. Memories have a collective quality. Mine are often from the point of view of “the wee ones,” the four youngest siblings — two sisters, my brother, and myself. Something happened and “we” were excited; something else, and “we” were scared. The “big ones,” the five eldest girls, were a slightly separate tribe. So the house was part of a terrace, and “I” was part of a sequence of children. Perhaps we can think of ourselves, siblings from large fami- lies, as terraced children, as opposed to detached or semi-detached. Do we share interior walls, psychologically? My sisters and I appear in a recent poem, “hand in hand like paper dolls,” walking to the infant school. Most of the neighboring houses had children and the street was one of open doors, as we darted in and out of each other’s homes. Our street overlooked the Moor, a series of terraces that runs from the cathedral on the left to the city cemetery on the right. Below the Moor lay the valley of the Bogside, with its neat rows of roofs adorned with TV aerials and smoke. My mother had grown up in our house and the upstairs drawing room from her less chaotic

colette bryce 69 childhood was now a dormitory of single beds. My grandmother lived with us until she died in 1967. That year, the electronics factory that loomed behind our houses closed, leaving hundreds of men un- employed. The area, as it might have looked in my mother’s heyday, was beautifully drawn by Seamus Deane in his novel Reading in the Dark. His characters inhabit a maze of rained-on terraces, rife with political intrigue. Where Deane’s novel ends, my life begins, with the advent of the seventies. In 1972, one week after Bloody Sunday, our windows are blown in by an explosion down in the Moor. There are house raids by para- troopers and later, after a shoot-out at the gable end, they fire rounds of tear gas. Because the window panes are gone, the rooms fill quickly and my mother ushers everyone out, forgetting in her panic the tod- dler asleep in her cot. A courageous neighbor, Pat Breslin, covers his face and dashes up the stairs. We would lean over the fence as funerals slow-footed along the Moor to the cemetery, led by the priest in his black suit. Or peep from the vantage point of the top windows when rioting erupted below. One night we watched, fascinated, as Metal Mickey — the bomb disposal robot — advanced towards an abandoned Cortina. To my mother’s generation, going “over the Moor” was the euphemism for dying. Years later, when I read Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death,” I pictured Death’s carriage paused by the terraced houses in the Moor, an image hard to dislodge. When I was ten, we moved down the street from number 17 to number 4. I remember a stand-up piano being wheeled along the pavement like a barrel organ. The new house was a mirror image of the old, only slightly larger. Like vital clues in a mystery, the depart- ing family had left behind a globe of the earth in dusty halves, and a pair of antiquated binoculars. These objects provided my first and lasting impressions of our new world, as our furnishings filled the freshly painted rooms. In Jungian dream analysis, a house can symbolize one’s psyche or self, the various levels of consciousness. The contents of an attic may signify hidden aspects of our personalities, brought to our attention by the dreaming mind. Some poems, like dreams, seem to come from another level, slightly beyond what we know or remember. Often, we capture only fragments. And when a poem is written, like a fully remembered dream, its meaning can remain withheld for a long time. My recent poems seem to want to examine that place, and time,

70P POETRY more closely. The results are only glimpses, seen through doorways, sometimes held in mirrors. The mirror in our hallway was consulted by everyone leaving or entering by the front door — checking faces, fixing hair. Now, in the hall mirror, I can see nine children looking out. I’m stealing this image from a Mary Poppins story, where a small boy asks her to tell him what he looks like. “Look in the mirror,” she says, surprised. “But there are so many faces,” he replies, “I don’t know which is mine!” When the British soldiers raided our house in the early hours of the morning, my mother would request that they stack their rifles under the hall table, so as not to scare the children. I imagine each man’s face suspended for a brief moment in that hall mirror, as he bends to set down his gun. So the house is central to my poetic world, in its mirrors and in both of its mirrored incarnations, number 17 and number 4. And the terraced street is a concertinaed expansion of the house, a sort of cliff of rooms in and out of which many children flit like swifts. The street overlooks the valley of the town, which rises again beyond the Rossville flats to meet the crown of medieval walls. The writing is on the walls, of course, the slogans of the day in white emulsion. The house stands in its historical moment, in a particular war, where trouble is the norm, and children are not afraid of tanks, or bombs, or balaclavaed men. A chopper hovers over the walls, dips, turns, and veers away. Weirdly, it feels like the safest place in the world.

colette bryce 71 todd swift

Four Englands: Four Debut British Poets Being Variously English

Division Street, by Helen Mort. Chatto & Windus. £12.00.

Dear Boy, by Emily Berry. Faber & Faber. £9.99.

Sins of the Leopard, by James Brookes. Salt Publishing. £9.99.

Terror, by Toby Martinez de las Rivas. Faber & Faber. £9.99.

This omnibus review is very much about English poetry, and Englishness in contemporary poetry from England, and, perhaps even better, young English poets. By something like a happy coin- cidence, these four collections are each by a poet who has won an Eric Gregory Award (more on this in a moment) — and, even more pleasingly, they won their awards more or less consecutively, in 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009 (Martinez de las Rivas, Mort, Berry, Brookes). So, here are four poets who have been noticed, and even encouraged, as some of the main rising stars of new poetry in “these isles.” Well, these isles are crowded with poets, many Welsh, Irish, or Scottish, but any list of the most appreciated of the YBPs (Young British Poets) would include these poets — along with, say, Ahren Warner, Sam Riviere, Luke Kennard, Heather Phillipson, Sandeep Parmar, Caleb Klaces, Jen Hadfield, Jack Underwood, Liz Berry, James Byrne, Jon Stone, and Clare Pollard. There is something like a broad consensus that has been forming, based on appearances in the larger British magazines, acquisition of prizes and university degrees, and publication in pamphlet form with publishers like Faber and Faber, or, in a smaller way, tall-lighthouse, when Roddy Lumsden was its editor. The Eric Gregory goes every year to a handful of the best poets thirty years or under, for an unpub- lished manuscript. To win one is to get a nice chunk of money, and

72P POETRY a very good shot at a publishing deal within the next few years. In the case of the poets here whose books from late 2012 to 2014 are under review, this wait has been between three and nine years. One of the collections is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which is the sort of stamp of approval most poets would gnaw a fin- ger off for; Berry has won a Forward Prize, and Mort been asked to judge the Forwards already (a great honor for a debut poet); Brookes was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize; Martinez de las Rivas is being spoken of as a major new Christian poet. Each is from a rec- ognized publisher — Faber and Chatto & Windus, relatively major players; and Salt, the feisty newer kid on the block (despite having published hundreds of poetry books). In short, here are four poets American poets and poetry readers would do well to acquaint them- selves with — and yet, none of these debuts are likely to be widely sold, reviewed, or read beyond Britain’s borders, at least for the time being. These poets come out of a certain tradition, or at an angle from The Tradition, as one might expect of poets in their twenties or early thirties. Each has a few notable precursors, so-called presiding spir- its, who have very much shaped their work’s temperament, goals, and style. Helen Mort, a poet from Sheffield in the relatively im- poverished North of England (home to the major indie band Arctic Monkeys), writes under the influence of Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage, yet her major themes and music come even more from Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson — each, in their way, very male poets. In a sense, Mort is the strong female Northern Poet, come at last (she does not very much resemble the current poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who nevertheless has publicly praised her work). Emily Berry is only one of the “Berrywomen” now active in London poetry circles — the other is Liz Berry, whose own debut was published this year. Ms. Emily’s is a berry-red book from Faber, with the very pop title of Dear Boy. Berry is from London, where she has lived her whole life and it is something of a rude shock to actually read a Faber collection by a British poet from the publishing capital itself, who is, for instance, not Irish or Scottish. She is resolutely English in tone and manner, in much the same way as her hero, Morrissey of The Smiths is; indeed, Berry’s key precursors may be said to be the great pop and indie lyricists since the eighties, during which time she grew up. But this is half the story. In other ways, her ironic, edgy, and peculiarly strangled emotionalism seems to reach out and grab Plath from the grave and demand she return, this time as a pastiche ghoul.

todd swift 73 Berry, then, has a skewed relationship to how contemporary British poetry has heretofore tended to sound — unless one had been reading Luke Kennard, the strongest poet of this new generation, who seems to have invented several of the key tropes, forms, and concepts that Berry herself assays. James Brookes is even more English than Berry, if such is possible. That is because, in a daring or foolhardy swerve back to confront the major living poet of his place and time, Brookes seeks to take on Geoffrey Hill at his own game. Surely Hill, like Milton or Yeats, has mastered a baroque and learned rhetoric so steeped in history and language as to be inescapably his own? Well, yes, and no. The general way of putting it is that Brookes “reminds” us of Hill. I would say he out-Hills Hill, in being, in this debut, even more concerned with the history of kings and parliament, the violence and graphic details of world wars, and the demands of place, in this instance, Sussex, where he was fortunately born a stone’s throw from Shelley’s “boy- hood home.” It is perhaps unimaginable for an American poet born in 1986 (even if it was a few yards from Hailey, Idaho) to unironi- cally compose and publish poems with titles like “Amen to Artillery,” “Silent Enim Leges Inter Arma,” “Surveying the Queen’s Pictures,” or “Lucifer at Camlann.” This is high poetry, full stop. However, in terms of an attempt to turn lyric modernism’s high- est Hill into a mountain, or unaging intellectual monuments, we must end with the Somerset-raised Martinez de las Rivas, whose Christian poetry seems almost impossibly erudite (by contemporary standards), with blatant echoes of Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, David Jones, and Lowell, and several poems that (seemingly without irony) break off into Anglo-Saxon, Greek, or Latin. It is apparently the most learned debut by a twenty-first-century British poet; we in England last saw work with this Poundian high modernist ethos in Bunting. Depending on your relationship to words like “elitism” and “acces- sibility,” Terror either appalls or thrills, or both — as it is no doubt (given its title) meant to. What we have here are excellent emerging poets, each to a cer- tain degree acclaimed, each imbued with a seriousness of purpose that varies between the almost-sentimental to the almost-portentous, with way-stops any fellow traveler will recognize as arch irony, wit, reserve, and tonally restrained elegance. These are the stations of the English poetic cross, and yet these pilgrims make something new of them while revisiting the old blood-dimmed haunts.

74P POETRY •

Helen Mort’s Division Street opens with a quote from Stevenson about Jekyll and Hyde, followed by a poem playing on the fact that her name means “death” in French; and various poems across the book relate to divided loyalties, identities, and the dangers (and promise) of names. Anyone who has followed British poetry since 1990 will know this is territory that deceased British-American poet Michael Donaghy staked out as his own in the poem “Smith,” often cited as a modern British classic. However, this idea of doubles, and doubling, and double identities, central to Scottish literature from James Hogg to Robert Louis Stevenson, indeed, J.K. Rowling, is perhaps most famously explored, even obsessively so, in most of Don Paterson’s collections; Paterson is the best-known advocate of Donaghy’s work (as well as his publisher at Picador). Mort’s collection is almost a di- rect reply to these influences — and is especially Patersonian in its sensorial enjoyment of alcohol, pubs, and drink in general — few other poetry collections have such a fug of lock-ins as this one. In her most Patersonian moment, in the poem “The Complete Works of Anonymous,” she even says, “I’ll raise a glass to dear Anonymous: the old / familiar anti-signature, the simple courage / of that mark.” In Mort’s Northern English world, raising a glass is no bad thing. Indeed, as she tells us in “Oldham’s Burning Sands,” “people sing the sweetest when they’re drunk.” As a credo for a poet it promises lots of hangovers after the carped diem. “Stainless Stephen,” a local, provincial comedian down on his luck, even when shut out of most establishments, “knows a pub across the river / where the doors will never shut.” Even the elements want to possess the local pub — snow, in the poem “Fur,” wants “to claim The Blacksmith’s Arms.” In the poem “Fagan’s” there is a pub quiz host “part-drunkard, part-Mes- siah.” The Division seems to be between those sober, and less so. In fact, it is more than that. Mort’s poems can sometimes be a bit senti- mental, or force a bonhomie or epiphany past the point of no return, but her music is almost never wrong — indeed, in terms of her skill at expertly deploying fairly conservative rhythm and rhyme, she seems the equal of Paterson or Duffy. More vitally, her origins appear authentic — her Northern “voice” underwritten by a sense of generational blight and hardscrabble self- empowerment that few poets from the South of England could ever reference. Not since Tony Harrison, it seems, has a poet wanted

todd swift 75 to make so much of what divides “uz” from them. The two most noteworthy poems in the collection, which as a whole is as openly readable as any mainstream British poetry is likely to ever be this decade, and hence, as likely to be prized for such, both emphasize the rather striking (pun intended) contrast between Mort’s non-elite past (growing up Northern, and less privileged) and her elite present, or more recent past (Cambridge student/graduate). This becomes the tension of her own life and work, but, more broadly, the per- ceived tension of the English current today. The great poem in the book, a sequence in five parts, is called “Scab.” A scab, which we know is a wound’s barely healed covering often picked at, to no good effect, is also the ugly name for someone who crosses a picket line during a strike to find work — often, poi- gnantly, betraying family and friends in the process of making ends meet. This resonates with the violent history of the suppression of the miners’ strikes under Thatcherism. Mort considers how her own crossing, from Sheffield to Cambridge, is an equivalent selling out of more tribal loyalties. In the bravura last few lines, she achieves a tonal force simple yet worthy of her concerns, likely to make the poem es- sential reading for anyone concerned with such issues:

One day, it crashes through your windowpane; the stone, the word, the fallen star. You’re left to guess which picket line you crossed — a gilded College gate, a better supermarket, the entrance to your flat where, even now, someone has scrawled the worst insult they can — a name. Look close. It’s yours.

That is the big poem in the book, but to this reader, the more el- egantly affecting is “Miss Heath,” a poem in nine more-or-less ter- cets, whose narrative is easily summarized. Mort writes the kind of popular English poem whose subject and theme can be summed up easily, and is thus ideal for exams; this is what the experimental poets loathe about so-called mainstream British poetry, that it doesn’t resist the heresy of paraphrase, but actually embraces it. Mort — or the poetic speaker, as they tend to be the same — now a shy young woman about to enter a bar “far from home” where “everyone’s

76P POETRY a stranger,” finds the figure of her long-lost but never forgotten “dance mistress” whose “French was wasted / in the north” appearing as an apparition and clicking her fingers, “Elegant, / she counts me in.” It is a sentimental but effective poem of small-town aspiration.

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Emily Berry is a strange poet to appear with Faber. Her poetry is not in the general Faber line of mainstream lyric or narrative poems written, usually, in a cadenced near-iambic pentameter, with much recourse to clever rhyme schemes, as we find in Paul Muldoon or Simon Armitage, for instance; nor is she a poet of roots or the natu- ral world, like Seamus Heaney or Alice Oswald. Hers is a poetry of modest, studied eccentricity, written mainly in cadenced free verse, that harks back more to Eliot and later Plath, and, as I have said earlier, Kennard. We don’t have to look long or hard for the Plath here — half the poems feature characters displaying a great deal of fraught emotionality via intense and unusual metaphoric language. In “Devil Music,” the lyric I “bit on the absolute nerve”; in “Shriek,” “my mouth tastes of phone calls.” In another poem, “The Doctor” “slapped my face with his penis.” In “Sweet Arlene,” we “live above the mutilated floor.” In one of Berry’s best poems, and surely the most formally witty, “A Short Guide to Corseting,” it is said that “pain is the spine of life. It holds you up.” These quotes nearly paint the wrong picture, which may be half the point, for there is another tone at work here which is less an- guished, and far more childlike and playful. The (female) poetic speaker of these poems, almost always an I, veers between being painfully involved in submission and domination games, and doing fun, cute things like walking around New York or having a tea party. There seems little in-between space for the rest of life, where, for instance, one has to mourn one’s deceased parent, or deal with a trav- eling lover. The poems that deal with dead loved ones and missing lovers seem to be psychic bridges, texts over troubled wadder (the word she uses for when Americans say water). First, though, let us turn to these immature, fun poems, that reintroduce a new note, as it were, into English poetry — a surrealist vein also mined by Kennard, whose doctoral thesis was on the surrealist prose poem, and whose poems have arguably influenced every poet under the age of forty in England, so beloved is his zany, off-kilter work now. This turn to

todd swift 77 naïveté is also more than a pastiche of Eliot’s cat poems, though it is almost that, or almost any number of Philip Larkin poems drained of their sexual mania. In “The Tea-party Cats”:

We stood in corners, if you want to know, nibbling biscuits though our mouths were dry. Some of us slipped away before the end. I stayed until the speeches, when the cats thanked each other proudly, proposing endless toasts; and then one of them exposed a weakness, but quickly covered it up.

This is dry, coy, and ironic. It is also very English — for what is more English than being embarrassed by weakness at a tea party? For cats, read poets, and for tea, read wine. For Plath, then, read Eliot, he of the exposed nerves. Indeed, in “London Love Song” the unreal city gets the love it really deserves:

Prince of long dark nights and teenage hopes, we spent our youth on you, on the adrenalin burn of cheap drink necked in queues, glances back and the journey home.

This might as well be The Smiths. Stephen Burt has reminded us that poets have an investment in youth and adolescence, but I can’t recall many previous Faber poets so openly referencing “teenage hopes.” One thinks of John Peel’s favorite song, “Teenage Kicks” by The Undertones. Even the book’s title, Dear Boy, has that sort of pop song connota- tion, that teen yearning, very nicely confounded by its other mean- ing, the pompous English phrase “Dear Boy” — this having once been conflated in the person and name of pop figure Boy George, or perhaps in the song of that name on Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles album Ram. Berry, as much as Berryman, dreams in song, and songs. In “Love Bird,” we get a series of fragmented phrases that of- fer a broken sense of lovelorn pop song lyrics: “My bird since you left I have loved strangely” and “Love was no bird” being the beginning and end of them. However, the main weakness Berry fears to expose, for now, appears to be that relating to her mother, who

78P POETRY died when she was young. This from the text itself, from the poem “Her Inheritance” — which is Berry’s ticket to ride out of her Beatles- Betjeman London of cocky whimsy, into the darker and more seri- ous work it seems her poems half-write already, before leaving the party, speech unfinished. The poem starts with the speaker “spong- ing twenty years of dust” to “avoid” the memory of a dead parent, a dead mother — “was calling you ‘some dead woman’” — until the last three lines, which are deeply moving:

And I was grown up, with your face on, heating spice after spice to smoke out the smell of books, to burn the taste buds off this bitten tongue, avoid ever speaking of you.

•

Previously, I asked the rhetorical question, “what is more English than ... ” — and the ambiguous, even cheeky subtext of that question is that the answer, like Louis MacNeice’s famous poem, is “various” (Berry plays with this word too). Well, if any young poet seems driv- en by Bloom’s family drama to overcome the strong poet, it is James Brookes. Brookes won his Eric Gregory Award in his early twenties. His first book, Sins of the Leopard, has no room for tea-party cats, though — it is more interested in devouring the mojo of other literary lions, like a big game hunter who eats the hearts of the beasts he stalks to know them better, to gain their powers. There are in fact cats here, as in “Fealty.” We get a sense of his compacted, Empsonian style with this stanza:

a sleeping tabby swaddles one faithless forepaw over its partner. As if these two came listed on the title deed, A. Cat et uxor.

Don’t worry, I didn’t get it either, aside from the Auden riff. Brookes is a poet in sound with the love of himself, which can be a good thing. His finest poem, one as compact or fierce as any Fulke Greville, is “Shrike,” which ends:

No carrion charmer, no falcon or red kite I, peregrine, I pious in thought and act am shriven in my little blood, my butcher’s reek.

todd swift 79 In the wrack of my nest, in its bonescree of voles and shrews I am called to the questing retch of my home choir. Their eyrie cry my kyrie eleison.

No other poet under the age of forty in England is writing like this (except, perhaps, Martinez de las Rivas), enjoying the high rich lati- nate languagery of Milton via Tasso. In poem after poem, kings are killed, Japanese prisoners thrown out of planes, and animals claw each other to bits. It is as if Ted Hughes invaded the BBC history channel — the world churns with linguistic fury, every death an excuse for verbal virtuosity. Some would no doubt suggest Kingsley Amis and Larkin were born to cure this monstrous fever, but I welcome the ambition, the turn to seri- ousness which dares to speak its name in Brookes’s work. “Near All Hallows,” though, has some lines that have been so packed with ore they seem ready to explode in gash gold-vermillion. One is apt: “The wind a language shorn of obstruents”; but the last three lines are an amazement of riches, seemingly written to be intoned by a drunk Richard Burton:

Thanks be to all things rotten before they’re ripe: the bletted quince turned edible at last; the medlars sweetened, open-arsed by hoarfrost.

I love the way this marries the sickly richness of Keats’s autumnal ode with something very crudely English, the “open-arsed.” It captures, too, Keats’s cockney heart. Aware of how the Romantic legacy has been squandered, Brookes plants his own colors in the Sussex soil. In one of Brookes’s best poems, “Running to Field Place,” this place is seen through a different historical lens, that of wartime, and then a deloused present:

Fatted with snow and lit with a bomber’s moon a yew branch blazes graffitoes of itself over the parked-up mobile Breast Screening van.

Which would be anticlimactic except the poem ends this way, di- rected to Shelley perhaps, or a father or a friend, or all three in some trinity of remembrance:

80P POETRY I promise you that nothing here is changing. I waited for you at the lychgate. Nothing. The cattle grid, the empty millrace. Nothing. Broadbridge Heath, this whole white winter of nothing.

This echoes King Lear’s loss of wasted things. Brookes can be a fro- zen brook, too, and a bit dramatic. His finest poem must be “Planh,” which brings together all his concerns (history, violence, nature, pageantry) in one concerted, brief unity, as if he had aimed all his brief life to write the ideal New Critical poem, a second coming of Cleanth Brooks. Here’s the first half:

Sussex betters itself for the unborn: the jackdaw striving for its cuckoo-child takes berries as though suckling on the thorn; the adder craves the warmth that’s not his own and the slowworm burrows in, his crown fragile as treachery; small lives. I know

that I will love — will love things yet unborn.

•

Terror has arrived, ironically, at a time when the seemingly endless debate about whether English poetry is too mandarin or difficult for the “ordinary reader” and “common man and woman” (whoever these may really be, if they exist at all) has exploded in the British media yet again (recently, one of the BBC’s most famous presenters, Jeremy Paxman, a sort of grumpier Mike Wallace, known for interro- gating politicos with gleeful arrogance, has called for English poets to face an “inquisition” to justify their ways to man). Ironically, given the echoes of Spanish Inquisition in Paxman’s concerns, the ecclesi- astical, highly complex, and modernist poetry of Toby Martinez de las Rivas is almost a direct riposte to the school of ordinary, secular- ized language that many commentators seem to crave. It all comes down to a certain kind of English xenophobic suspi- cion on the parts of some critics, readers, and writers, that English poetry was only ruined when it came into contact with European and American modernism in the twentieth century — that, before Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas, English poetry was in a pure

todd swift 81 golden age, entirely transparent, popular, and often light. It is an imaginary canon that leaves out Milton and Donne, but sees Byron and John Betjeman as among the shining lights. It wants poems to be comic, brief, and entertaining more than enlightening. It’s as if poetry was a last bastion of flamboyant Celtic Catholicism in what should be bare choirs — a puritanism that wants poems simple, plain, and as undemanding as take-it-or-leave-it Church of England fetes. Terror is like throwing a large stained glass window at a stone — a grand gesture of defiance so overblown in the disenchanted context it seems to rattle the suburbs to their core. It is an openly religious, even Christian, book, with titles like “Penitential Psalm,” “Covenant,” and “Crede.” The endnotes reference lesser-known poets and artists Patricia Beer, Fay Pomerance, and Jack Clemo as touchstones of piety and aesthetic engagement with the spiritual world. That is surprising, but the layout and design — for a Faber book — is nothing short of astonishing. Poems appear on the oversized pages sideways, or an- notated by tiny-lettered phrases, scored, some pages featuring prose poems, others black dots symbolizing a black solar disc. Words in italics like Renovatur, desolate, stoven, and Availeth jostle for primacy. A sense of teleological menace not felt in British poetry since a crea- ture slouched to Bethlehem to be born rises from the pages, as images of childbirth (and apparent death) mingle with images of shattered windscreens and psoriasis. There are attacked and attacking bodies in these dark and illuminated poems. The natural world is subject to another. This is fearsome. The poetry is not easy to comprehend, as one might expect, and is more monumental than it is yielding. This is High Church stuff, leavened with a few unsettling moments of ruder diction: “It is a wild fucking kingdom,” but the poet seems to far more enjoy writ- ing lines like “Our Lady of Gateshead, watch over us.” At times, it seems unintentionally hilarious, as when a line begins “Sometimes, when we touch” and one cringes to mentally add “the honesty is too much” — is this a postmodern adding of Dan Hill’s lyrics to a Geoffrey Hill tune? More often, the connotations are controlled, the rhetoric picked when ripe — as if “Genesis” by Hill was an urtext. At its best, of course, Terror blends the contemporary with the ancient and medieval, as in the liturgical “The Clean Versus the Psoriatic Body” with its single-line stanzas:

Torn open, suzerain.

82P POETRY My little sons are lain out side by side in winter, the light barely born, that it might not burn.

And my bride has lain with another.

Many of the poems seem haunted by “bairns” dead, bodies dis- eased. “The body as image of the state, violated and violating” as the poem above begins, indeed. The opening poem, a tour-de-force that uniquely name-checks Barry MacSweeney (a most un-Faber poet of the British Poetry Revival era) and Christopher Smart, “Twenty- One Prayers for Weak or Fabulous Things” (which includes the Dan Hill allusion as well) is both wonderful and wooden, in places, as long list poems can be. At its best, it is marvelous, with lines like “he is a king at siege in the twinkle of his paraphernalia” and when it ends on an image from Joyce’s short story “The Dead”: “& falling like snowflakes beyond all light & knowledge.” The chiaroscuro of the poems is intentional, for the poems resist light and knowledge, instead gesturing towards depths, darkness, and subtler ways to access gnosis. The last section of the book is argu- ably the strongest, with magisterial lines that pay knowing homage to Eliot and other religious poets such as Herbert and Henry Vaughan: “There should be viciousness in seeing — a deep cold light that takes no account / of suffering or hope: that is neither itself / nor our rela- tion to it”; or, for that matter, the complex:

The vitreous idiolect of an accipiter veiled in snow conjures its obsolete paradise from the wastes. Don’t tell me what I mean, or, in malice, comfort me. — From Stability in the Text

And then, the magnificent: “what else can I say from the jewelled hi- bernacle of my doubt,” which has the tiny italicized word bone poised just above hibernacle, and, note, no closing question mark. The ma- jor accomplishment of this ambitious and achieved debut is in how it gives aesthetic permission to a whole new generation of younger

todd swift 83 poets to take on the biggest themes and concerns — even in, and be- cause of being in, a desolate, often atheistic realm.

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Each of these poets — Mort from her wounded North and its cheery pubs, Berry from her London of loss and found boys, Brookes with his Sussex as real as a dragon and just as fearsome to behold, and Martinez de las Rivas from his enigmatic cultural and religious border region, an imaginary Spain-in-England — juggles the diversities, and divisions of poetic Englands, past, present, and future, writing new poems out of things hard to say for being too beautiful, or painful, or sincere: the final irony.

84P POETRY contributors

mir mahfuz ali* was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His poem in this issue is from his first collection, Midnight, Dhaka, which was pub- lished this year by Seren. He lives in London. liz berry* is the assistant poetry editor at Ambit magazine. “Scenes from ‘The Passion’: The First Path” is copyright © Liz Berry 2014 and from Black Country, published by Chatto & Windus. james brookes* grew up in rural Sussex, England. His first full col- lection, Sins of the Leopard (Salt Publishing, 2012), was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. colette bryce’s * fourth collection is The Whole & Rain-domed Universe (Picador, 2014), in which “Helicopters” first appeared. She received the Cholmondeley Award for her poetry in 2010. sophie collins* is cofounder of tender, an online quarterly pro- moting work by female-identified writers and artists. She is carrying out research on poetry and translation at Queen’s University Belfast. leontia flynn’s * most recent collection, Proft and Loss (Jonathan Cape, 2011), was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. matthew francis* is the author of four Faber and Faber poetry collections, most recently Muscovy (2013). He lives in West Wales, UK, and lectures in creative writing at Aberystwyth University. john greening* lives in Cambridgeshire, England. Recent collec- tions include To the War Poets (Carcanet, 2013) and Hunts: Poems 1979–2009 (Greenwich Exchange, 2009). david harsent’s poems in this issue are from Fire Song (Faber and Faber, 2011). In Secret, his English versions of poems by Yannis Ritsos, was published in 2012 by Enitharmon Press. paul hornschemeier* is the author of many graphic novels in- cluding Life with Mr. Dangerous (Villard, 2011) and Mother, Come Home (Dark Horse Comics, 2003). His animation appears on IFC’s Comedy Bang! Bang!

contributors 85 amy key’s * debut collection is Luxe (Salt Publishing, 2013). She is currently editing an anthology of poems on female friendship, Best Friends Forever, due from The Emma Press in December 2014. caleb klaces was born in Birmingham, UK. He is the author of the poetry collection Bottled Air (Eyewear, 2013) and the chapbook All Safe All Well (Flarestack Poets, 2011). frances leviston’s * first book of poems, Public Dream, was pub- lished by Picador in 2007 and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her second book, Disinformation, is forthcoming. hannah lowe* has published two pamphlets — Rx (sine wave peak, 2013) and The Hitcher (The Rialto, 2011). Her first book,Chick (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. kathryn maris is originally from New York and has lived in Lon- don since 1999. Her books include God Loves You (Seren, 2013) and The Book of Jobs (Four Way Books, 2006). toby martinez de las rivas* studied history and archaeology at Durham University. His poem in this issue is from Terror, published in June by Faber and Faber. martin monahan* has recent work in (or forthcoming in) the London Review of Books, Australian Book Review, The Manchester Re- view, The Warwick Review, and elsewhere. pascale petit’s* poem in this issue is from her most recent collection, Fauverie (Seren, 2014). sam riviere* received an Eric Gregory Award in 2009. His most recent book is 81 Austerities (Faber and Faber, 2012), which won the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection. He lives in Belfast. ruby robinson* was born in Manchester, England. She studied English literature at the University of East Anglia and is a graduate of the Sheffield Hallam University Writing MA. kathryn simmonds’s * work in this issue is from her collection The Visitations (Seren, 2013). julian stannard’s latest collection is The Parrots of Villa Gruber Discover Lapis Lazuli (Salmon Poetry, 2011). He has written a study of Basil Bunting which was published by Northcote House this year.

86P POETRY todd swift is a British-Canadian living in England, where he is director of Eyewear Publishing. His Selected Poems is out from Marick Press this year. claire trévien* is the author of The Shipwrecked House (Penned in the Margins, 2013) and Low-Tide Lottery (Salt Publishing, 2011). rory waterman* is the author of Tonight the Summer’s Over (Car- canet, 2013), in which “Over the Heath” was originally published. He edits New Walk and lectures at Nottingham Trent University. tim wells* is made of pie and mash, reggae, Leyton Orient F.C., slugs, snails, and puppy dogs’ tails. david wheatley has published four collections with Gallery Press, including A Nest on the Waves (2010). He lives in rural Aberdeen- shire, Scotland. john wilkinson* teaches at the University of Chicago. His most recent books are Schedule of Unrest (Salt Publishing, 2014) and Reckitt’s Blue (Seagull Books, 2012). hugo williams is the author of, most recently, I Knew the Bride (Faber and Faber, 2014), in which his poem in this issue first appeared.

* First appearance in Poetry.

contributors 87 announcement of prizes

the levinson prize, presented annually since 1914 through the generosity of the late Salmon O. Levinson and his family, for the sum of five hundred dollars, is awarded to Thomas Sayers Ellis for his poem in the July/August 2014 issue. the bess hokin prize, established in 1948 through the generosity of the late Mrs. David Hokin, for the sum of one thousand dollars, is awarded to Claudia Rankine for her poem in the March 2014 issue. the frederick bock prize, founded in 1981 by friends in memory of the former associate editor of Poetry, for the sum of five hundred dollars, is awarded to Franny Choi for her poems in the March 2014 issue. the j. howard and barbara m.j. wood prize, endowed since 1994, in the sum of five thousand dollars, is awarded to Jamaal May for his poems in the February 2014 issue. the john frederick nims memorial prize for translation, established in 1999 by Bonnie Larkin Nims, trustees of the Modern Poetry Association, and friends of the late poet, translator, and editor, in the amount of five hundred dollars, is awarded to Kareem James Abu-Zeid for his translations from the Arabic in the March 2014 and April 2014 issues. the friends of literature prize, established in 2002 by the Friends of Literature, in the amount of five hundred dollars, is awarded to francine j. harris for her poem in the September 2014 issue. the editors prize for feature article, established in 2005, in the amount of one thousand dollars, is awarded to Tom Sleigh for his essay in the November 2013 issue. the editors prize for reviewing, established in 2004, in the amount of one thousand dollars, is awarded to Frances Richard for her review in the May 2014 issue.

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