Category: Books

Angst/

Summer reading, thinking & waiting

After a couple of weeks of what’s felt like full-on socialising in our sunny garden, I’m enjoying a quiet day alone catching up, which means giving my blogs a little TLC. On the subject of which, I was delighted to come across this observation in Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, in the entry for January 20th 1919:

entry from V Woolf's 'A Writer's Diary'

… would VW say the same of blogging, I wonder? People sometimes ask me if blogging takes up a lot of time, but for me it has to be the fastest of writing jobs, because I confess I really don’t spend much time editing. I read it as I go along and sometimes delete entire passages, but the decision is usually made quickly, I don’t think too hard & long. I do try to pick up on typos or bits or grammatical clunkiness before hitting ‘publish’, but just as often things slip through. And I kind of like that -makes it more like regular speech I think. And I certainly wouldn’t want to miss out on any ‘diamonds of the dust heap’!

Submissions update

Poetry magazines seem to be having a (no doubt well-earned) summer hiatus in terms of dealing with submissions, and I haven’t started writing anything new in a few weeks. We should all be outside topping up our Vitamin D anyway. Here’s what are currently out to magazines:

3 poems out for 499 days (yes really  – I’ve sort of decided these are probably dead, and I’m aware of/sympathetic to the reason for the length, but there they are, still heading up the list with their ghostly, greyed-out presence)

4 poems out for 195 days (28 weeks) – patience is a virtue

4 poems out for 107 days (15 weeks) – OK, not tapping my foot yet

3 poems out for 68 days (10 weeks) – this one is tricky, as I asked to withdraw one of them on Submittable, but the system only allowed me to withdraw the whole lot, so I’m not sure if two of them are still under consideration or not. I haven’t resubmitted them elsewhere, just in case… which is probably a bit silly, but there you go.

3 poems out for 34 days (5 weeks) – it’s early yet

In addition I’ve got five individual poems out to competitions (a rather high number for me, but I suppose I was running out of suitable/available magazines to submit to) and three pamphlets out to competitions. One of these has been ‘long listed’ by Live Canon, which of course I’m very happy about, but there’s no telling when the final results will come, I suspect not before the autumn. Another pamphlet went to Templar Poetry for their I-Shots competition, the results of which were due (according to their website) by the end of June. However there are no results on the website, and I’ve not heard anything from them, although I have tried asking them nicely on Twitter. I’ve taken this to mean they’re not interested in my pamphlet, which is fine, and I’ve now sent another version of it elsewhere. However, when you pay a fee to enter a pamphlet competition (in this case £18 – and which I’m very happy to do by the way) I don’t think it’s too much to expect a simple email to say ‘sorry, not this time’ or whatever, or acknowledgement of a polite query. Am I being unreasonable?

Current reading

Lots of lovely stuff on the pile at the moment, alongside the aforementioned VW diary, and the recently re-discovered and excellent Feel Free, a collection of Zadie Smith essays, I’ve also got Vanitas by Ann Drysdale (Shoestring) which I’m reviewing for The Frogmore Papers, and two Smith Doorstop pamphlets recently given to me by Marion Tracy: The Topiary of Passchendale by Christopher North and Sleeve Catching Fire at Dawn by Madeleine Wurzburger (now there’s a TITLE!)

I’m also having a bit of a Camus moment. I wonder if the current state of the Western world is driving me to Absurdism? I think it’s taken me forty years to shake off the association of Camus with the horror of French A level and finally return to him as an adult. Anyway, I’ve read and re-read his strange little essay in ‘The sea close by’, and am looking forward to tackling The Myth of Sisyphus in a Penguin ‘Great Ideas’ edition with a very satisfying cover design featuring embossing. All adds to the sense of anticipation!

Books on the reading pile July 2019

 

 

 

 

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New reading: Magma 74 and the Laureate’s Choice Anthology

Laureate's Choice Anthology and Magma 74

The new edition of Magma, edited by Benedict Newbery and Pauline Sewards, is dedicated to ‘work’, a subject close to my heart. It’s always puzzled me why there appears to be so little written about traditional (or otherwise) workplaces, given how many hours of many people’s lives are given over to work (in the sense of ‘earning a living’, although of course the Magma editors were hoping for plenty of poems about ‘work’ in its wider sense.)

Sarah Mnatzaganian‘s ‘Laying up’ appeared to me with its rich nautical vocabulary (‘…until our halves meet / and lie without stretch or slack, / my luff to your leech, head to your foot, / clew to your tack, throat to your peak’). I loved the evocation of a mass laying off (a subject I’ve tried to write about myself) by Fokkina McDonnell, ‘The empty hours’, with its matter-of-factness capturing the reality of having to stay dispassionate when tasked with an uncomfortable job (‘If we’d stayed at the Bridge Hotel, Kendal, staff / would have recognised us from last time, / would’ve made phone calls last night.’)  Steve Kendall‘s ‘Emotional Labour’ beautifully captures that feeling of doing what is essentially a meaningless job, with random rules and procedures (‘I must send it to whoever’s desk is equidistant from / the first addressee and Emma’), embroidering one’s thoughts with whatever it takes to make it through the day. I think my own poem comes under the category of ‘a bit offputting’, with its crossed out words and slightly odd title (‘Hospitality Management (Diploma) Enrol Now £2,400’). I hope it doesn’t put everyone off reading it though. I know I can be a bit impatient with this sort of thing, rather like my first thoughts about Shaun Carter‘s ‘<title> The office sound in broken code </title>’ – reading through broken code is a bit too close to home for me!

Magma‘s featured poet in this issue is Tom Sastry, who seems to be having a bit of a moment. He also pops up in The Laureate’s Choice Anthology (smith|doorstop), a selection of work chose by Carol Ann Duffy during her tenure as Poet Laureate. As a side note, I did first hear about the ‘Laureate’s Choice’ from Carol Ann when I was on a course with her and Gillian Clarke at Ty Newydd back in 2013. She asked me then (as well as a couple of others) to send her my pamphlet manuscript, for consideration. I didn’t really understand what it was about, but I sent her it anyway. Nothing came of it, but David Borrott, who was on the same course, made the cut. So when this anthology came through my door I was only a TINY BIT bitter!)

But back to Tom Sastry – his poems did rather jump out at me for their originality and intrigue. I loved ‘Difference’, a telling snapshot of a relationship running on parallel lines, the sadness of ‘The Office’ (‘You can bring the name of a bird/ in from the outside, if you like. You can bring its call/ on your ringtone…’ and the simple beauty of ‘Waking’ (‘I dreamt that we were older. It didn’t matter at all.’)

I enjoyed a huge number of the poems in this anthology. Just flicking through again I’m reminded of a few:  Yvonne Reddick‘s ‘The Bait’, Mark Pajak‘s ‘Spitting Distance’, David Borrott‘s ‘felicitous blending of figure and landscape’ and ‘Wolf Fell’, John Fennelly’s ‘Those flowers’.

The anthology doesn’t have a foreword, which is a shame, as I’d like to have read something by Carol Ann talking about the thinking behind the project and her selections. Some of the poets are clearly newcomers, whereas others I would describe as established already,  with full collections and awards to their name. It’s true that they were picked up over a five-year period – the first Laureate’s Choice collections were published in 2015. Nevertheless it makes for an interesting mix of work.

The Laureate’s Choice Anthology is available now from The Poetry Business, £10.

I’ll be reading (and possibly explaining a bit about my poem) at the London launch of Magma 74 on Thursday 6th July, 6.30pm at Exmouth Market, alongside many fine poets including Lorraine Mariner and Alison Brackenbury. Perhaps see you there?

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Look what I found! Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Writer’s Diary’

Virginia Woolf A Writer's Diary

… Fourth Impression (1965) with a foreword by Leonard Woolf. Hogarth Press! Original dust jacket bearing Vanessa Bell’s design!

I found it at Much Ado Books in Alfriston, well worth a visit if you’re ever in the area. It’s housed in a range of quirky buildings set back off the road in its own front garden. I did find the plethora of notices rather off-putting  (a number of which suggest one is guilty until proven innocent – PLEASE LEAVE LARGE BAGS AT THE COUNTER BEFORE GOING UPSTAIRS, PLEASE RESPECT OUR GARDEN etc) but I can only suppose this quiet, well-do-do village must have its fair share of book shop-lifters and vandals. What a shame.

much ado books alfriston

Anyway, I look forward to sharing extracts and thoughts on Woolf’s reading and writing process with you here from time to time.

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Currently reading: Kaminsky, Hickman

Ilya Kaminsky Deaf RepublicIlya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic came through the post from the Poetry Book Society, swathed in accolades. Looking at the title my first thought was of Raymond Antrobus’s The Perseverance, also a PBS Choice, but in fact the two books are very different animals. (I’m a bit sad I don’t have The Perseverance to hand as I gave it to a friend, so can only go on my memory of it.)

While The Perseverance struck me as intensely personal, focusing on the poet’s D/deaf experience and upbringing, Deaf Republic has the feel of a parable, or a Greek tragedy. It’s set during a war, in an occupied town, where the death of a child incites the townspeople to passive resistance which takes the form of feigned deafness. It’s met with brutal retaliation. We follow the fates of two protagonists as events escalate, while the townspeople grow increasingly divided. It’s a stark and bloody tale, made all the more sinister (for me anyway!) by the role of puppets. There’s a horrific dreamlike quality to much of the action. Reading the book felt like a similar experience to reading D M Thomas’s The White Hotel. 

Right from the opening poem ‘We Lived Happily during the War’ the reader is invited to examine their own conscience. Is this happening now, in our own society? How are we responding?

[…] I was

in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house–

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

I found the closing poem ‘In a Time of Peace’ rather hammered home the point. But not enough to detract from the power of the book.

On another track entirely is my current ‘book at bedtime’, She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman. She tells the stories of women who left for a new life in India at a time when it must have been an absolutely extraordinary thing to do; the first accounts of such journeys date from as early as 1617. Clearly the sea journey alone must have tested the sturdiest resolve.

It is hard to imagine what resilience it must have taken to survive nineteen months at sea. […] Sea captains were reluctant to take female passengers at all and often confined them to the very lowest decks, where it was usual to house the terrified horses, dogs and other animals. Treated like so much livestock themselves, these early travellers were  obliged to endure living conditions in which there was little or no fresh air or light, and ceilings so low they were never able to stand upright. … in a feeble attempt to allow the air to circulate, women were forbidden to hang up blankets or linen as screens during the day. […] Trips onto the deck to breath some sea air or take some exercise, were often seriously limited, even forbidden by some captains.

I’m completely gripped by these female pioneers. Many of their stories are so fantastical they read like fiction. However, Maya Jasanoff in The Guardian has pointed out that plenty more well-rounded and scholarly books have told these women’s stories before, and claims that ‘She-Merchants’ “for all its good intentions, does for imperial history a bit what a package tour does for travel: it lets readers glimpse an ‘exotic’ location without requiring them to think too much about the people who actually live there.” Ouch. I’m still enjoying the book, but it’s useful to bear this opinion in mind.

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Estuary English

Estuary by Rachel Lichtenstein

It seems as if class and regional differences are very much to the fore at the moment. No surprise there I suppose, nor the increased discussion of accent as a status marker. When I was growing up my mother was at pains to correct her children’s accents so that we didn’t pick up ‘lazy’ habits, such as glottal stops instead of T at the end of a word like ‘hat’, or saying (shudder!) ‘tomorrer’ or ‘sumfingk’. By lazy of course she meant working class, particularly Cockney, and it was all tied up with her aspirations for us. Her reasoning was that Cockney-sounding females didn’t become (or marry!) doctors or teachers. Similarly, she didn’t want me to learn shorthand typing (as she had) because she felt I’d then be ‘stuck’ in secretarial jobs. But whether I learned to type or not (I didn’t), her main concern was that I should be ‘well-spoken’, because such an accent would mark me as middle class, with all the social and economic advantages she believed that would bring.

It’s funny how things change. These days communications advisers tell people in the public eye to tone down a public-school accent in order to sound ‘friendlier’ or ‘one of the people’. It’s not just accent of course – it’s also the avoidance of Latin sayings or words like ‘hence’ or ‘thus’.) Hence (oops!) the rise and rise of ‘Estuary English’. Actually it’s generally known to linguists as ‘Southeastern Regional Standard’ or ‘London Regional Standard’, since ‘Estuary English’ has been used too often as a mild slur.

This preamble is by way of introducing a wonderful book by Rachel Lichtenstein, Estuary (Penguin 2017). When I picked this up I realised right away how little I knew about the Thames Estuary, its history, communities, traffic and commerce, even its geography. Considering I grew up not so far from the Thames at Greenwich, I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t have pinpointed on a map any of the place names downriver, even the historic ones – Tilbury, Gravesend, Canvey Island. I didn’t even realise Southend was in the estuary at all, imagining it to be much further around the Essex coast. Now I’m as much of an Estuary girl as I am a Londoner, certainly by my accent (which in its unselfconscious state is a bit rough around the edges whilst still being ‘well spoken’ enough to satisfy my mum. Sometimes it slips though…) And I find the mysteries of the sea compelling, particularly when it’s as well-written as this.  (I remember devouring Adam Nicolson’s Sea Room some years ago… highly recommended.)

Lichtenstein takes us on a number of journeys, both on the water and into the region’s many communities. We learn how difficult it is to navigate the treacherous shifting sandbanks, how the area has changed and is changing still with the decline of old industries like cockling and the building of the gargantuan London Gateway container port. There are ‘more shipwrecks per square foot than anywhere else along the UK coastline […] over six hundred known wrecks in the main shipping channel alone’, and the remains of plenty more, from as far back as the Bronze Age.

The book is entrancing with its vocabulary of boats, fishing and coastal communities. At times it read like a foreign language to a landlubber like me who doesn’t know a mizzen from a Genoa (although there is a glossary to help.) But it doesn’t detract from the drama, quite the opposite. And in places it feels like poetry.

Thames estuary sea forts - credit A London Inheritance

We turned the engine off for a while and circled the fort in silence, listening to the gentle sound of the boat cutting through the water, the creaking of the shrouds, the ensign flapping at the stern, the rattle of the boom and the occasional lonely call of a seagull, and then, in the distance, the great boom of guns being tested on Foulness Island.[…] A coastguard border-control ship came towards us, moving quickly through the water. Seawater splashed up over the bow; the wash made us lurch violently from side to side. There was another big explosion over at Foulness: a great cloud of black smoke rose over the Essex coastline.  (Estuary, Chapter 26, ‘Barrow Deep’)

The above photo is from a fascinating blog about mid to late-twentieth century life in London, A London Inheritance.

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Recent reading: Janet Sutherland, Poetry magazine

Alongside making updates to the look and feel of this site (and general online spring cleaning) I’ve been enjoying some stimulating reading lately. The January edition of Poetry has yielded up a lot of interesting material, including extracts from ‘A Frank O’Hara Notebook’ by Bill Berkson, which made for rich reading on a train journey yesterday…

a frank o'hara notebook

At the back of the mag Mark Ford reviews the Complete Poems of A. R. Ammons (over 2,000 pages!) – a poet I confess I’d never heard of, and clearly someone who went against the grain in more ways than one.

I’ve also listened to two of the podcasts for this issue, in which Don Share, Lindsay Garbutt and Christina Pugh focus on a single poem for reading and discussion. It’s like listening in to an editorial meeting, and always makes me appreciate a poem more. Each month they pick three or four poems to talk about. The two I heard were Khaled Mattawa’s ‘The Boat Merchant’s Wife’ and Jorie Graham’s ‘Overheard in the Herd’. Fascinating. You can catch all the Poetry magazine podcasts here.

A few weeks ago, Janet Sutherland and Matthew Stewart were two of the readers at Needlewriters, a quarterly event in Lewes, in which I’m involved. They each read from their latest collections. I’ll talk more about Matthew’s collection The Knives of Villalejo in a future post.

Home Farm by Janet Sutherland

Home Farm is Janet Sutherland‘s fourth collection from Shearsman. As an aside, when I was at the Swindon Poetry Festival last October, Tony Frazer of Shearsman was on an editors’ panel, and when they were all asked ‘is there a poet you are most proud of having discovered?’ Tony’s answer was ‘Janet Sutherland.’

The cover illustration of a cross-section of a cow sets the scene perfectly. Janet grew up on her parent’s dairy farm in Wiltshire, and much of the book is set there – the experience of day-to-day life and death, the precarious nature of land, weather, animals ‘If symptoms are severe / your animal can die in just an hour -‘ (‘Bloat’) This is no cosy pastoral memoir. The poems draw on actual incidents, stories and memories, extracts from books, letters and accounts. We learn the names of the fields (‘Stony ground, East Close, Home ground, Muddy Track, Paddock, Park, Chapel, Horatio…’ – ‘Fields and Copses’) and the cows, are given glimpses into the ways that love and care for the animals is balanced out by the hard realities. In ‘Mum’s Accounts’ of births and deaths, we’re told ‘The Middle Column is for notes of trouble, trial, losses (‘1987: Gorse, milk fever. Lotus, calved early, calf dead. Dolly, needed help, calf died next day.’) The writing is unsentimental, brutal at times and brilliantly so.

…
You’ve see calves born, shut them in pens,
and heard their mothers’ bellowing.

You set that grief aside. You taught
calves how to dip unwilling heads to drink,
to suck your milky fingers like a straw.  (‘You hold in your head a notion of the land’)

A seemingly simple poem about a doe making her way tentatively through a wood (‘She will enter’) is a moment of such intensity and understatement, very typical of Janet’s style. I hesitate to call it ‘nature writing’ as there’s something rather limp about the phrase.

The collection embraces experimental poems, fragments and illustrations, all of which I found absorbing, moving and mysterious, propelling me on.

A facsimile of a page from a letter is reproduced, phrases from which appear in a poem later in the book to heartbreaking effect:

I was just looking at your room this morning
and wishing you were home

this room is already empty
the face above the sheets
has gone to clay

now son take care of yourself

Even as I type this my eyes are welling up! Surely this is what poetry exists for.

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What Mary Oliver said about distractions

Mary Oliver A Poetry Handbook

One of the first books I bought and consumed (once I started thinking it possible I could write the odd semi-decent poem) was Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, along with Julia Cameron’s The Sound of Paper. Now Mary Oliver has died I suppose it was inevitable there would be a flurry of Oliver-appreciation, and I’ve enjoyed being reminded of her wisdom.

This week in Brain Pickings, Maria Popova has pulled up from the archive The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life. It’s a wonderful read, and I love her description of how interruptions can destroy the creative mind at work. This was well before social media of course, but it’s not just outside forces that can do the damage:

…just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation.

Indeed. I hope this week brings you at least some moments of sustained solitude in which to write.

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City walk, a workshop, Van Halen & Jo Bell’s ‘Kith’

This is the first year in a while that I haven’t been driving up to the Southbank for the T S Eliot Prize readings this evening. I’ll look forward to reading all about it on various blogs.

I’m having a catchup day between jaunts. Last week was the first session in Katy Evans-Bush‘s fortnightly small-group poetry workshop up in Clerkenwell. I’m planning to make these Wednesdays into interesting trips to London by adding on other activities. The way the train tickets work is that you can’t leave London between 4 and 7pm on a weekday, without paying another £34. So since I can’t come straight home after the workshop, why not do something else?

detail from the Queen Victoria statue in front of Buckingham Palace, London

Last month when Nick and I were in town for a night, we spent a lovely morning just walking around and discovering so many quirky things we’d never noticed before. So after the workshop this week I decided to walk back to Victoria from Clerkenwell, taking my time, looking at statues and interesting buildings as I go and just being a pedestrian. I didn’t dawdle but I didn’t rush – along Theobalds Road towards Holborn, past the lovely gardens of Gray’s Inn, through Theatreland to Piccadilly Circus, down through leafy St James’s and Pall Mall, past the looming Duke of York’s monument and down steps to The Mall, up to Buckingham Palace and onto Victoria Station. I may have been the only pedestrian who wasn’t in a hurry. I didn’t check Google Maps or stress about best roads to take, just followed my nose. It was brilliant. I have a feeling I’m going to enjoy my ‘city walks’, and I plan to try different routes each time. The nice thing is that if I change my mind there’s always a bus to get part or all of the way. I know it sounds silly but I’m so used to getting around central London on public transport that it’s a real revelation to find how easy it is to walk places.

The workshop itself was really useful, so much so that the poem I’d taken for feedback was tidied up the next day and sent out. Yes! In fact I’ve gone a bit crazy since my last blog post and sent out no less than fourteen poems. You read that right! I just looked through all my current stuff and thought, this is ridiculous, what am I waiting for? So they’re out the door. Amazingly, three have already found a home: Charles Johnson at Obsessed with Pipework is so good at responding quickly, and JUMPED on my poem ‘The Metallurgy of Eddie van Halen’ (see what I did there?). In fact I think I probably wrote it with OWP in mind. Anyway, it’s given me an immediate shot of confidence for the new year. Huzzah! This is how I feel!

On Friday I was in Reading at the excellent Poets’ Cafe at the invitation of Claire Dyer, and I have to say it was brilliant. The organisation, promotion of the event, the venue, the lovely audience and everything was so good. Things like being asked ‘can I just check how you pronounce your name’ is the sign of a professional set-up. I want to mention in particular the lovely hosting by Becci Louise Fearnley. Do get along to the Poets’ Cafe in Reading if you can, it’s every month at South Street Arts Centre. Highly recommended.

In the post this week, a little treat:

Kith by Jo Bell

I started reading it over a cup of tea and couldn’t stop. Consumed in one sitting! That has to be a recommendation. I loved it, and kept thinking OOH I wish I’d written that. So, another good omen for the year ahead. It’s not brand new, but dammit it’s good. Kith by Jo Bell (Nine Arches Press) is currently on offer for just £4.99 – Yes! You read that right! Half price! Buy it!

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Alice Oswald at the BBC

Alice Oswald at Book Club

 

Something different. I answered the Poetry Society’s call for audience members at a recording of BBC Radio 4’s ‘Book Club’. The guest poet being interviewed by James Naughtie was Alice Oswald. I’ve heard the stories about Alice rarely giving interviews or readings, and since the session was to discuss her 2016 collection Falling Awake (which I loved), I thought it would be fun to do.

I’d never been to the iconic Broadcasting House before, so that in itself was exciting. I wanted to take a photo of the huge Latin inscription in the foyer but I was a bit intimidated by all the security and number of people standing around wearing headsets and keeping an eye on the poets as we all loitered waiting to be ‘called in’.  I just assumed the audience members would be poets, and I wasn’t far wrong. There was a large group of people from Poet in the City for starters. And I was happy to spot a familiar face in Cheryl Moskowitz.

The discussion/recording took place in the Council Chamber, a semi-circular wood-panelled room which dates from when the building was first opened in 1931. Huge portraits of past Director-Generals look down on you, and the Art Deco is everywhere, including the lovely clock face above the fireplace. For me, it was worth going just to see all that!

Art Deco fireplace at the Beeb

There were about thirty in the audience, and quite a few of us got the chance to ask a question. Alice’s answers were fascinating, and although I wish I could have recorded it, I guess that’s a bit daft as it’s going to be broadcast in February anyway. Whether or not ‘my’ question makes the final edit remains to be seen!

BBC Council Chamber Book Club recording

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Kay Syrad, Josephine Corcoran – short reviews

Inland - Kay Syrad and What Are You After? - Josephine Corcoran

A couple of brief reviews of collections I’ve been reading:

Inland – Kay Syrad  (Cinnamon, 2018) (£8.99)

There’s nothing predictable or familiar in this collection. Just when you feel you’re getting your feet under the table suddenly the table is gone, and the ground beneath, and your feet too. Just two poems in we encounter ‘Transcript’, a testimony with gestures-as-stage-directions which is stranger than the sum of its parts – a characteristic we meet intermittently throughout the book. The poet’s feeling for moss is visited and revisited, from ‘Nomenclature’ (‘bird’s -claw beard-moss / oblique-mouthed beardless-moss’) which ends with the line ‘ah – our fresh fingertips’ through to the last poem ‘Listening to moss’ (‘I take a blindfold, lie down and listen/ to a half-globe of star-green star-moss’). I came away with a sense of yearning, of sadness for something almost grasped but not entirely, almost said but not exactly (‘Situation of Secrecy’, ‘Scatter my bright feathered heart’, ‘Plaint’). The title poem ‘Inland’ takes the reader on a meditation around a few repeated words (gulls, grief, words, speak, heart, ship, inland) coming together and knocking against each other slowly towards a conclusion ‘gulls and men / follow the white island of the heart / all inlaid in the heart / grief in the heart / in white / I find white in the heart / inlaid’. I particularly loved Kay’s poem titles – more often than not intriguing, inventive and quirky. I also warmed to the more surreal poems, maybe because I enjoyed the fun of decoding them (or just scratching my head), much as the poet ‘translates’ a ‘secret message on a long fence’ in ‘Afternoon out’, but it’s also the magical mystery that Kay creates, sometimes as delicate as gossamer – you almost don’t want to pick it up for fear of breaking the magic.

What are you after? – Josephine Corcoran (Nine Arches, 2018) (£9.99)

Josephine Corcoran’s first collection draws upon memories (real, imagined or reimagined) to examine issues of identity, class, family and love. From the grief of miscarriage to a relationship mapped onto a litany of medical interventions (‘In 24 years, we’ve lost count / of all the body parts we’ve seen’ – ‘Love in the time of hospital visits’) the autobiographical content has an quiet honesty. Josephine situates the reader through her use of time-specific references, figures of speech period detail, popular culture and current affairs – the ‘5 o’clock bus’ from school, headrests ‘dimpled from Brylcreemed heads’. Stephen Lawrence, food banks and drones rub along with references to margarine, economy ham and the Three Degrees. Movie scenes and film references proliferate, as do dreams. The poet demonstrates great versatility and range, from the polemic of poems such as “Police Say Sorry” to the quieter lyric pieces and a wonderful pantoum ‘Fallen asleep by a Christmas Tree on New Year’s Eve’. Another trope weaving its way throughout is telephones and phone calls, featuring often as signifiers for communication (or lack of), misunderstanding, cross purposes and the gulfs between different times, ages, cultures and beliefs. Poems have been carefully sequenced, cross-referencing each other neatly. It makes sense, but if anything, I would quite have liked fewer instances of poems obviously following on from the previous one, for example ‘Gavrilo’ following ‘History Lesson’ – to makes things a bit more oblique for the reader. A very small quibble. One of my favourite poems in the collection, ‘In town for a funeral, we drive past our old house and see it is for sale’ is also possibly the longest. It’s a seemingly-simple but complex poem that invites many re-readings, yet still has plenty of secrets to give up. I can imagine Josephine might be already writing more of these longer poems. Watch out for the next collection.

I was fortunate to hear Josephine reading at Swindon Poetry Festival recently. Here is ‘Exquisite Corpse’: