Category: Poems

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Current reading and other news

Current reading … and a parrot

Camilla’s Bookshop is open again in Eastbourne after an arson attack, and I can report that the parrot is still alive and greeting you as you enter, and the stacks of books are as tightly packed as ever – in fact even more so! Here’s how the poetry section looked before (multiply this ten or even twenty times over and you get a good picture of the shop as a whole!

Camilla's Bookshop

Now, the stacks on the floor are about 4 foot tall and it’s impossible to bend down and get one’s head into a position to see what’s actually in the stack…however I managed to find two books of interest on the upper shelves. One is John Donne, The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics) and the other is  The Eavan Boland Sourcebook (Carcanet) which I’ve started and already it’s fascinating. Eavan Boland is a poet I’d only heard of but not read, but when she died earlier this year there was such an outpouring of grief from the poetry community that I decided I needed to seek her out.

In addition to this I’m near the end of a lovely book by Jean Sprackland, a memoir in which she retraces her steps through the graveyards and cemeteries she’s known over the years.

current reading 27-7-20

Other recent reading:

current reading-27-7-20

Vicki Feaver‘s I want I want (Cape) is one of the Forward Prize shortlisted books that I ordered, and Sestet is an anthology that I’ll be reviewing for The Frogmore Papers. I must say I’m looking forward to reading Rachel Long‘s My Darling from the Lions, which is up for Best First Collection in the Forwards. I really liked her recent work in The Poetry Review.

Also waiting in the wings to be read is Little Kings by Peter Kahn (Nine Arches), kindly given to me by Peter Raynard. Peter Kahn is a new poet to me, and the book jacket blurbs make it sound very promising.

My contributor copy of Stand arrived recently. I’m delighted to have a poem in Stand; I’ve subscribed this last year and have enjoyed much of its content. Particularly interesting are the editorials. I think it’s a shame that not all mags have them.

I’ve resubscribed to Poetry just at a turbulent time it seems. A poem in the July/August issue by Michael Dickman has caused a massive furore, and editor Don Share resigned. Here’s his extraordinary final editorial. 

Feature on the Frogmore blog

And speaking of The Frogmore Papers, here’s a lovely post on their blog about the sad demise of listings mag Viva Lewes. The April issue was due to feature four of the members of the Needlewriters Collective (Jeremy Page, Charlotte Gann, Janet Sutherland and myself) but it never went to print. But the feature is reproduced here, like a sort of echo of what almost happened.

‘Ellipsis’ on Radio Reverb

Another lovely thing: fine poet and Brighton Reverb Radio presenter Jackie Wills featured one of my poems on the Reverb Literature Hour the other week. It was such a treat to hear her read the poem; I don’t think I’ve heard anyone read a poem of mine before. And her analysis of it was wonderful. I was very touched. With Jackie’s permission I’m posting it here:

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Sin Cycle, a new poetry sequence from Peter Kenny

Epigraphs, we’re told, are risky – they have a habit of upstaging the poem that follows. But the quote from William Blake is an apt start to Peter Kenny’s Sin Cycle, a sequence of twenty-four poems recently published in Issue 29 of E.ratio, an online journal of Postmodern Poetry. There’s a Blake exhibition at Tate Britain at the moment: ‘radical and rebellious’ he’s called in the exhibition notes, and reading Sin Cycle there are moments when you feel you’re inside the madness of a Blake painting. I know Peter is also a writer of horror fiction, and it’s clear he enjoys a strong sense of the macabre.

The work bristles with energy and inventiveness. Right from the first stanza we’re jerked inside the narrator’s head:

…
Then He came. Grinding my bed-wetter’s face into dandelions,
wrecking their stalks, weeping their wart milk.

My skin was a surface he secured without slippage,
till His prick burst the ghost clock of my head.
…

(‘Original’)

We’re taken  through a series of good and bad days, self-obsession and tortured thoughts. The world through this person’s eyes is full of squirming creatures, human and otherwise, destined for the slaughterhouse, the dustbin, ‘squelching late-night screenings’, or just dead, fossilised, taken, ‘yawning for air in their anxious hell.’ The narrator saves his harshest criticism for himself, who he sees behaving badly in some scenarios, and victimised in others.  Catching the reflection of his face as he tortures a fish out of boredom ‘I hate myself, / loathing whatever thing is watching me.’ (‘Siamese Fighting Fish’). A game of pool is going well, and then: ‘He’s back, that version of me, / the choker who doesn’t deserve it. So I choke again’.

I found myself compelled onward through the sequence and really enjoyed the form – each poem just two stanzas of four lines each – there’s a loose narrative arc driving it and the sheer exuberance and creativity is wonderfully gripping. Not so much a romp as a yomp – there’s no missing the real anguish here, but it’s worked through with such wit and originality. Sin Cycle succeeds in being luscious, gruesome, poignant and hilarious somehow all at once. Peter happens to be a friend and I was fortunate to read versions of Sin Cycle when it was a work in progress. I was sure it would be snapped up by a UK small press, but it took a US publisher to appreciate it. But who knows, *whisper* we may yet see it in print.

You can read Sin Cycle in its entirety here, but for now here’s another taster, one of my favourites in the sequence:

(vii) Commuted

En garde, I whisper, lunging onto the train,
my elbows dexterous in their micro-aggressions.
We’re all on the same line, and I re-read
the same line, until a well-Wellingtoned woman

treads on the tail of my eye. She follows a red setter
carving through cow parsley into an open field.
He sprints, I sprint, into the priceless possibility
of a place with no station and nothing to stab for.

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Poems for a Christmas concert

not another Dickensian Xmas

I was recently asked to select some readings to go in between the movements of a choral piece. The piece is Bob Chilcott’s On Christmas Night. In it, Chilcott sets a number of carols in a sequence, telling the Christmas story from the fall of Adam and Eve (yes, it hadn’t occurred to me that it starts there – Nativity Plays usually skip straight to the shepherds in the fields) – to the birth of Jesus.

I’ll come clean now – it was my husband who asked me, on behalf of the East Sussex Community Choir which he conducts. The project interested me, so even though I knew there wouldn’t be any payment on this occasion (!) I was happy to take it on.

The score suggests which readings would be suitable, but that others may be substituted. Now, I’ve been to plenty of concerts (especially at Christmas) where there are readings in between the music. Almost without exception they are either the standard Bible readings of ‘lessons and carols’ (such as the one that’s broadcast each year from King’s College Cambridge), or they are ‘light’ – passages from Dickens or ‘The night before Christmas’ by Clement Clark Moore, amusing Christmas-themed stories or anecdotes. Or else it’s Eliot’s Journey of the Magi.

I wasn’t interested in doing the ‘same old’, so I set out to find poems or texts that were by living/contemporary writers. I wanted secular, not sacred – words that would complement the religious story being told by the choir, and invite contemplation of the wider spiritual context – themes of wonder, joy, love, birth, death and the cycle of nature.

I topped and tailed with two extracts from A C Grayling‘s extraordinary The Good Book, a kind of secular Bible and a fascinating compilation of thousands of texts by philosophers, teachers, prophets, leaders, literary figures and writers. So, alongside the carol about Adam eating the apple and falling from grace, we are reminded how a tree bears both flowers and fruit, and its fruit is knowledge, which teaches the good gardener how to understand the world.  The closing extract is a short passage about the nature of wisdom, which parallels the Biblical story of the ‘wise men’.

For the rest of the readings I chose poems:

Janet Sutherland‘s ‘line’ from her collection Hangman’s Acre takes us into a wintry but beautiful landscape where geese ‘carve a soundless line’, where ‘simple shapes’ and ‘muffled earth’ set a scene of waiting and anticipation, before ‘the line sets out alone’. There is both apprehension and wonder in this – to navigate a path (through life?) with ‘no compass   no margin’ and yet not to hesitate, but to simply wait for the moment. For me, this approximates to the journey facing Mary, and indeed Christ after her – they face up to the unknown because they have no choice – they have faith and they accept.

‘Prayer’ by Carol Ann Duffy is a favourite of mine, and I knew that it would be familiar to at least some of the audience. For me it examines self-doubt, sadness, possibly even grief, in a way that uplifts by showing us the hope and love present when we open our ears to the quotidian sounds around us. Life goes on, children practise their piano scales, we cope with bad days – all this and more expressed in a sonnet which concludes with an extract from the Shipping Forecast, an enduring and recognisable ritual not unlike daily prayers and ‘Latin chants’. And as with ‘line’, there are musical references in ‘Prayer’ which felt appropriate for this context.

When it came to the nativity, I wanted a poem to express all the wonder, hope, and love felt by a parent at the birth of a child. ‘William’ by Jack Underwood (from his collection Happiness) is a creative, exuberant and highly original love poem to a new baby, from his father. Starting from the point of what he is familiar with, the speaker then finds himself at a loss when faced with ‘your fine melon head, your innocent daring-to-be’ – completely ‘uncooked’ at the newness and intensity of his feelings – ‘I can feel my socks being on’ – pure joy and a lot of fun.

The final poem I chose was the wonderful song-like ‘A short story of falling’ by Alice Oswald from her collection Falling Awake. It takes the audience back to the theme of birth, lifecycles, regeneration and the wonder of nature. The title also plays on the idea of the Biblical ‘fall’ with which we began. There is so much beauty in this poem – the summer shower that ‘steals the light and hides it in a flower’ and the narrator wanting to know how to ‘balance/ the weight of hope against the light of patience’. Like a song, we reach the end and feel we are ready to being again – ‘the story of the falling rain / that rises to the light and falls again’.

I can’t say yet whether all this will work or not, as the concert is this evening in Lewes! The reader will be a member of the choir who’s also an actor – in rehearsal he delivered the poems with sensitivity and clarity. I haven’t asked for the poems to be printed in the programme as I didn’t want to risk breaching any copyright, so it’s all in the reading. All the poems are credited though, and I hope it may encourage some people to seek out the books in which they appear. Not everyone will be that interested, but at least it gets contemporary writing in front of a general audience.

So no ‘jolly old Saint Nick’ or Tiny Tim or the ghost of Christmas past for the audience tonight, but more challenging fare! Let’s do it!

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Four magazines, five poets to watch

poetry mags received august 17

A slew of poetry magazines have been arriving the last couple of weeks and I’ve enjoyed ‘discovering’ work by new names. Well, new to me anyway – turns out they’re all accomplished poets, but that doesn’t surprise me. I thought I’d share with you a little about each of the magazines, and a contributor or two to each that caught my attention.

Brittle Star has to get the prize for the most interesting covers. They invariably span front and back, with no writing to spoil the image other than on the spine:

Brittle Star 40, August 17

The magazine is run by Martin Parker and Jacqueline Gabbitas on the proverbial shoestring – and for a little mag they are remarkably innovative in finding ways to keep going. Their latest fundraising initiative is to invite readers to support the magazine via Patreon. As they say on their website, “If only 5% of people who follow us on social media donated $2 (about £1.60) a month we’d be half way to hitting our first goal of £750!” Brittle Star is always well produced and they even hold launch readings for every edition. It’s all pretty impressive. Got to be worth $1 or two a month.

Poems that jumped out at me were those by Jack Houston and Barbara Cumbers. Jack’s ‘Separate Towers’ had just the right amount of bonkers humour and painful poignancy to float my boat, with the building of a model cathedral in lolly sticks serving as a metaphor for relationship issues :

Worms may well turn in the earth but we’ll be adhered
to this task until this entire tube of UHU’s been used.

Barbara Cumbers paints a mesmerising picture of a young girl’s quest for control (revenge? stubbornness?) by writing smaller and smaller.

[…]  Once, a teacher set me lines –

I had to write “I must writer bigger” fifty times.
I wrote them on the back of a postage stamp. (‘Small’)

Next, the mighty Magma, with its ten-strong editorial board, administrator and freelance staff, immaculately produced and also with a distinctive look, in particular its square format. I have a love-hate relationship with Magma, partly because I’ve had too many submissions rejected (!), but also because I’ve never been able to get the feel for what the magazine is looking for, or what it’s about – its heart, if you like. It may be down to the fact that the editors rotate and change from one edition to the next.

Magma 68 is on the theme of ‘Margins’, so it’s not surprising that we get a good number of poems on the heartfelt/hardcore spectrum – from protest and despair to death, slaughter and eco-apocalypse. I really warmed to Ellie Danak‘s ‘Dear Lab-Man’, a mysterious love-letter with ‘Fatal Attraction’ written all over it –

[…]
There’s no excuse for my welling up,
strangling all that tubing to spell out LOVE.
My lips can distil blood. Meet me
in the fume cupboard tonight.

But if it’s strangeness you’re after then Obsessed with Pipework is self-proclaimed ‘poetry with strangeness and charm’. It’s another double spread cover this time featuring artwork by Graham Higgins:

Obsessed with Pipework August 17

Obsessed with Pipework is edited by Charles Johnson, and although my poems in this issue sadly lost most of their formatting, I can’t hold it against Charles as he’s been a fine supporter of my work and I owe him one. And besides the poems are all the more strange for it.

I particularly enjoyed three poems by Sue Kindon, of whom I know nothing (and her ‘biog’ in the magazine was sketchy, you might say – although it had strangeness and charm). We have a poem about blockages (actual and metaphorical), while another features a woman on a cruise, on the verge of betraying her husband with the moon –

[…]
I sense that rare blue-eyed look
you keep in reserve, to anchor me.  (‘Anniversary on Board’)

I liked the subverting of nice middle-class themes (‘I’ve chosen something marble-veined / and a safe brie’) with undertones of something much harder-hitting (‘Sacred places are sawn off  […] Old gods wander the desert of dementia’).

And finally Under the Radar, another well-respected and long-running magazine, published by Nine Arches Press and edited by Jane Commane. This edition features a review of The Swell, Jessica Mookherjee’s pamphlet published by Telltale Press last autumn. My eye was also caught by a poem by Julian Dobson, partly because I’d seen his work in Magma and had nearly chosen to mention him then. So, a name I hadn’t met before and then I see it in two magazines. Like me he must have done some serious submitting around six to nine months ago.

In choosing ‘Meet the neighbour’ I’m starting to wonder why I’m drawn to these on-the-face-of-it memoir poems into which you can read as much menace as you like. I once told a poet friend how much I’d enjoyed a poem of hers in ‘The Rialto’ – ‘…it gave me the creeps! Really menacing!’ only to have her reply that it was supposed to be positive and comforting – hmm! So here we have Julian Dobson’s ‘rumple-haired man from the basement flat’ who ‘had a way of vanishing before Dad got home’, while Dad has

No truck with stories, a reddening head
bursting with hellfire and helplessness.
We found crevices and corners
in the echoing house.

Nonetheless, I find myself worrying for him, and enjoying the not-knowing of the poem.

So there we are – another five poets I want to keep an eye out for and read more of.

I should add that these were contributor copies, apart from Under the Radar which was a a publisher copy. I do subscribe to magazines but I limit it to one or two mags per year, on a rotating basis. I know it’s expensive to support all the myriad poetry mags out there, and this is my tactic to do so in an affordable manner. It’s not only interesting to keep an eye on new writing, but it also informs my submissions – where to send, which magazine would a poem suit, that kind of thing.

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Recipe for Water

Yes that probably sounds familiar, being the title of the 2009 collection by Gillian Clarke. I’ve been thinking a lot about water lately, and flow – great rivers, the mouths of rivers and the place where they become sea. Just riding the ideas at the moment and not rushing it. As Clarke puts it, ‘The sea turns its pages, speaking in tongues’ (‘First Words’)

I’ve been thumbing through some lovely watery poems. This, from Lynne Hjelmgaard’s A Boat Called Annalise: ‘We are in the Ocean’s mouth, / territory unknown’ (‘Night Watch’).  Or this, by Philip Gross:

Scroll up the chattering, brief brilliances
and long abradings, sweeping up of everything

that we let slip, the murk-dynamics
that we might mistake for memory.

(‘Reeling in the River’, from A Fold in the River.)

It’s been just over a year since we moved into our flat which is only a few minutes’ walk from the sea (well, not an ocean but the English Channel), and it’s starting to seep into me. Last week we took a trip to the other end of Great Britain, the northernmost tip of Scotland, and stayed in a room that seemed to teeter over the beach and watch over the North Sea beyond.

view from window

On the last day we managed to fit in a trip to Loch Ness. But a highlight for me was crossing the Cromarty Firth on a ferry with only room for one car (ours). Like a sort of river taxi! The river here is full of decommissioned oil rigs which have a sort of bleak beauty.

Ning ferry across the Cromarty Firth

 

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‘Poems & Pictures’ blog at the Mary Evans Picture Library

mary evans picture library - poems & pictures blog

We’re into our fourth week of dust, clutter and washing up in the bath. The joys of home improvements! We still don’t have a fully working kitchen, one cabinet is ten mils too big for the space, one lot of contractors isn’t returning our calls and may have gone out of business (or ‘done a Brexit’ in the new shorthand) and rellies are coming to stay on Thursday but DON’T PANIC. Our builder is doing a marvellous job and it’s all going to be lovely.

All this is just my way of saying sorry for not blogging lately. I’ve also got a bit of work on, which I slip in between coats of paint and electricians turning off the power.

So what to report? I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been reviving some old poems, all part of a general poetry cleaning up/recycling drive.

One such is ‘London Bridge to Waterloo East’, a poem that did the rounds a few years ago to no avail. Last year I was contacted by Gill at the Mary Evans Picture Library, inviting me to contribute a poem to their Poems and Pictures blog, something inspired by a photo from their vast library (more than half a million images!) I really loved the historic railway photos, and when I came across  a bird’s eye view of the massed railway tracks at Waterloo Station in the 1960s, I thought of my poem and got it out. It needed some work, and having the image in front of me helped bring out something new. The resulting poem has just been published and you can see it (and the photo) here.

The picture library is fascinating in its range of topics. It’s the sort of site where you start browsing and it’s difficult to tear yourself away.

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TGI February

Sovereign Harbour Eastbourne - January

January is really my least favourite month – I think it’s the short days and dark evenings that are so depressing.  It doesn’t help that the it’s the month of both my father’s death and my late mother’s birthday, so they are always both on my mind. However! Let’s not get gloomy. I did go to a couple of good poetry events and even sent a few poems out. I did a lot of reading. My ‘start a poem a day’ pledge didn’t quite run its course, but I did spend a good amount of time writing and in particular rewriting old poems.  I did manage to start eleven new poems. I also revived one that I’ve been fiddling with for four years, and which is shortly going to appear on the Mary Evans Picture Library ‘Poems and Pictures’ blog. Which is a fantastic resource, by the way – more on that in a future post.

Meanwhile the ever-supportive Charles Johnson has taken some poems for Obsessed with Pipework, which I’m really pleased about. They are three of the ‘workplace’ themed poems I’ve been working on for several years now. I really believe in it as a sequence or a pamphlet, even if no pamphlet publisher seems to yet. Finding homes for the individual poems, slow process though it is, reassures me that I’m onto something and shouldn’t give up on it.

Yesterday I hosted a poetry day (or ‘salon’, although I’m slightly squeamish about calling it that!) – four lovely poets came over to talk poetry, read poetry, argue a bit over poetry, do a bit of workshopping and stroll along the somewhat chilly seafront. Not everyone knew each other, which makes it exciting but a bit scary (for me anyhow! Why do I put myself through things that make me nervous? Hmm.) I think everyone enjoyed it, so there will definitely be more. And it energised me to spend the next couple of hours poem-ing.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve not missed Facebook at all – every now and then I hear a bit of poetry news I wasn’t aware of, but that’s the point – anything genuinely interesting or useful to know I either catch on Twitter or can rely on friends to tell me anyway. I would have forgotten about it entirely were it not for the fact that you CANNOT turn off all notifications – trust me, I’ve tried. But overall it’s been a real relief to be no longer experiencing irritation/frustration and the total energy- and confidence-sapping behemoth that is Facebook. Hasta la vista, baby.

Lots to look forward to in the coming weeks including a workshop at the Troubadour, a wedding anniversary (15 years – gulp!), a Telltale Press AGM and Catherine Smith at Pighog poetry night in Brighton. Wishing you a Happy February!

Photo: a sunny & happy January day at Sovereign Harbour in Eastbourne

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Tears in the Fence: a no-tears rejection

Tears in the Fence

A few months ago I sent some poems to David Caddy at Tears in the Fence. Although he didn’t take any of them for the magazine, his reply was prompt and very civilised, so much so that it didn’t feel like a standard rejection. Polite, interested, business-like, a suggestion that I send again, not a hint of condescension.

Yes, he invited me to buy a copy of the magazine (or subscribe), but not in such a way that I was felt under pressure, or even scolded in some way. I had read a copy of the magazine, know some people who’ve been published there, and have a reasonable idea of its style. I don’t think my work I was a hundred miles away.

What happened was that I did indeed subscribe, and the Spring issue was soon through my letterbox. It’s small but dense, and one of those mags that pulls you in for a big read rather than inviting a flick-through. Perhaps one of the nicest surprises is that there are many names I’m not familiar with. One that stood out for me was Cherry Smyth, with her poem ‘Connemara Swim Diary, August 2015’. The biog in the back of the mag, and a subsequent dig, tells me that Cherry has published three poetry collections and a novel. Great to have her on my radar.

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Ronnie-O Oh Oh!

If you’ve been at a reading I’ve given you may have heard the snooker poem… it’s a bit of fun, my homage to snooker genius Ronnie O’Sullivan. I’m not sure what it adds to the ‘after Christopher Smart’ oevre, but I hope there’s entertainment value to it. It helps to know a wee bit about Ronnie, and about snooker (147 is the maximum you can score, by potting all 15 red balls, the black 15 times, and then all the colours in order.)

At the weekend I was watching Ronnie playing in the Masters and was overcome by the need to get the poem down on video. I’d had a glass of wine at the time and couldn’t recite the whole thing in one take, and the lighting and editing are a bit rough but HEY – it gets better as it goes along, so hang in there… maybe I’ll re-do it more slickly one of these days!