Tag: isabel palmer

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Recent reading: ‘Home Front’, new poetry from Bloodaxe

Home Front, Bloodaxe

An interesting book came my way from Bloodaxe recently – a book of books, you might call it, or perhaps an anthology of collections. Home Front features four collections (each by a different poet, three of whom were unfamiliar to me) on the theme of war, specifically the experience of wives, lovers and mothers when their loved ones in the military are sent away to war.

Isabel Palmer‘s contribution is Atmospherics, which includes a number of the poems from her excellent Flarestack pamphlet Ground Signs which I read and enjoyed a while back. The poems here are grouped into three, the central section focusing on the period of time her son spent in Afghanistan, sandwiched between two ‘Home’ sections, before and after. As a result, Atmospherics expands on Ground Signs through the inclusion of not just more material but also more experimental forms, as in for example the lists and glossaries that make up the six-part ‘Symbols’ sequence at the start of the final section. 

Isabel Palmer is from a military family, whereas Bryony Doran is not. When her son joined the army it was a surprise to learn ‘…that I’d become part of the army, another dazed parent / eating plastic packed sandwiches thrown casually on tables’ (‘Joining up’). Bulletproof is Doran’s first collection, in which she charts her own feelings of helplessness and fear for her son while he serves in Afghanistan, from wondering what her pacifist father would have made of it (‘Wormwood Scrubs’) to dealing with enquiries from well-meaning friends and trying not to be panicked by every Afghanistan-related media story. The poet ponders aspects of her son’s personality and childhood episodes, observes others who are also touched by the war and seems to be trying to make sense of her son’s choices and motivations.

On his last day he says when he gets back
he’s putting in for his motorbike test.
He sees the look on my face and laughs,
asks why I’m scared of life.  (‘Rest & Relaxation’)

We later learn that ‘more soldiers have died in motorbike accidents since coming back than have died in Afghanistan’ (footnote to ‘Avoiding Traffic Accidents’).  Although the poet’s son returns safely, clearly the mother isn’t undamaged by the experience. There is an edge of bitterness to ‘Tips for Parents of Returning Soldiers’ that goes beyond the ‘wtf’ irony of some of the earlier ‘found’ poems based on army-issued instructions or advice. Despite some slightly (for me) heavy-handed moments, this collection was an intriguing read next to Palmer’s.

I’m sorry not to have discovered Jehanne Dubrow before now. Stateside, her collection in Home Front, is written from the perspective of the wife of a US naval officer who’s deployed to various postings overseas. It’s also an exploration of wives-left-behind with reference particularly to Penelope in the Odyssey. Both the officer and the wife at home have their own journeys, and of course there’s the one they take together. The reader fears for the relationship even from the opening poem  ‘It means the moveable stays tied’ (‘Secure for Sea’) and even on a balmy seaside evening eating chocolate – ‘ we’re kids again’ – the mood darkens –

I would like to call it death, this thing that sticks

like marshmallows inside my mouth, gritty
with a thousand sharp particulates of sea. (‘Virginia Beach’)

Through all the collections in Home Front, fear of the loved one dying is naturally a common theme. It seems to inhabit so many of Dubrow’s poems: the irony of soldiers having to play dead in an exercise (‘Swim Test’), death in dreams (‘Sea Change’) and in the sheer waiting (‘Situational Awareness’). It permeates the eroticism of poems such as ‘Instructions for Other Penelopes’ and ‘Bowl, in the Shape of a Bristol Boat’. In ‘Against War Movies’ the list of famous war films builds black comedic effect till being brought up sharp at the end –

Each movie is a training exercise
a scenario for how my husband dies.

Dubrow favours form (there are many sonnets in the collection, and a three-stanza triolet – is there a name for that?) and I loved her clever use of rhyme. So many of the poems I wanted to read out loud to really enjoy the musicality and the many subtly layered effects.  The work feels like a sophisticated examination of a relationship slowly dying under the strain of separation;

… I can’t say when I reached for you
if we rustled like tissue paper, delicate

as shards, or if we slid our razored edges
back and forth, until we split apart. (‘Moving’)

The final collection in the book is Elyse Fenton‘s Clamor, first published in the US in 2010 when it (intriguingly) won the Dylan Thomas Prize, despite not having published in the UK. We learn in the biog that Fenton is the wife of a US army medic posted to Iraq.

It’s fascinating to plunge right on into another poet’s world, another poet’s take on the now familiar theme. I couldn’t help but feel a bit strung out at this point. What new? What more? But in the words of the time-honoured cliche (itself a time-honoured cliche)… I wasn’t disappointed.

Fenton’s poems are both gutsy and delicate, alive with wordplay and creative leaps. The human body features frequently in all its messy physicality, whether describing life – ‘Radha, let us touch your face, / thaw our fingers on your kindled skull, / trace the kerf of your open mouth’ (‘For Radha, Two Days Old’) – ‘your mouth and its live wetness, your tongue / & its intimate knowledge of flesh’ (‘Love in Wartime 1’) or death – As if this were not the work of shrapnel – / not the body’s wet rending, flesh/ reduced to matter – (‘Notes on Atrocity (Baghdad Aid Station)’)

All the themes we’ve encountered before are here: dreams. Waiting. Fears of the unknown. Homecomings. Same, yet different. Here’s an extract from Fenton’s ‘Your Plane Arrives from Iraq’, heavy and elegiac in the face of what should be a joyful moment, which for some reason brought to my mind Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and its ‘each slow dusk the drawing down of blinds’ –

… And once more
the sky’s feathered jet-stream, and once
more, the dirge and caesura of rotors

and once more the slow Morse of the plane’s
body descending. And at the end
of the longest sentence I’ve ever known

your face in the window’s fogged aperture:
stranded noun, Rorschach of stars. Beautiful thing.

‘Home front’ is published by Bloodaxe, price £12.

Books/

Isabel Palmer’s ‘Ground Signs’

One of the interesting things about the Poetry Book Fair in September was seeing poetry pamphlets and books from different publishers side by side, and the great variety in jacket designs, colours and fonts. Flarestack was one of the tables that really caught my attention, with its beautifully simple pamphlet covers. Just look at the clean, clear typeface (you can’t really see from this image but the title is in silver):

Ground Signs

This was one of the pamphlets that caught my attention – was it the turquoise that did it? (it’s one of my favourite colours) – who knows. But I’m glad I bought it.

At first, from reading the cover blurb, I wasn’t sure. “Haunted by her son’s experience in Afghanistan…” created a sort of unfair knee-jerk reaction in me. There has been such a rash of war poems this year, some sublime but others less appealing. I don’t know what I feared exactly but as I read Isabel’s pamphlet I became increasingly engrossed. The poems are unsentimental yet full of compassion. There’s humour as well as pathos, commentary as well as reflection.

Some of the poems are from the point of view of the mother who goes about normal life at home ‘between / Watchfield and Swindon,/ outside the new police station, Adele on the radio,’ (‘Honour Guard’) but there are reminders everywhere of the war and its consequences. Yet we’re also in Afghanistan, immersed in the soldier’s life there, the characters and situations he encounters. Sometimes the mother’s and the son’s experiences conflate in a kind of fractured reality (‘Battle Shock’) or serve to remind us of the shocking transition from boy-child to man-soldier (‘Blueprint’). The closing poem, ‘Repatriation’, I found particularly wonderful. I won’t say any more about it as it might spoil the experience of encountering it after what’s gone before.

‘Ground Signs’ is a super pamphlet with so many strong poems – definitely recommended.

I contacted Isabel via Flarestack and asked if I could reproduce ‘Worst Case Scenario’ here. I also asked her for a few words about the poem, and her reply is here in its entirety – and anyone who knows me will know how unprecedented it is for me not to do any editing!

Of all the poems in ‘Ground Signs’, written at the rate of one a week while my son was searching for Improvised Explosive Devices in Afghanistan, this one reminds me, uncomfortably, of the words of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths;/the valiant never taste of death but once.’

Coming from a family of soldiers, with a son preparing to do, arguably, the most dangerous job in the British Army, I had never thought of myself as a coward. Nevertheless, at that first family pre-deployment meeting on which the poem is based – and far too many times afterwards, when postmen, charity campaigners or trick-or-treaters called – I was much more fearful than I had ever expected to be.

The first shock was how well-rehearsed the casualty notification procedure had become, with a timescale of ‘within two hours’ and how, for reasons never explained, the Captain, whom we knew and trusted, wouldn’t be personally involved. That job was left to ‘someone’, even though the Captain had, on at least one occasion, attended while bailiffs cleared a young soldier’s home of its valuables.

They say that sailors are the most superstitious people in the military but the families of soldiers at war must come close. The ‘one sorry magpie’ seemed appropriate here, given the widespread tradition of ‘saluting’ a solitary magpie, showing due respect to a creature with a drop of devil’s blood under its tongue. Where superstition leads, prayers follow, ‘like a mantis, praying,/that rocks and ratchets/along a swaying leaf’, in much the same way as I imagined my son would soon be dodging enemy fire and sweeping the ground for IEDs.

Inevitably at a meeting like this, questions about the more arbitrary aspects of military discipline surfaced, such as, ‘Why/ do they have to iron uniforms/ to go out on patrol?’ – especially for frontline infantry, like the Rifles, skirmishers who were the first to swap their red coats for camouflage – although this practice has now been abandoned, due to the cost and danger of supplying so much extra power to remote bases.

However, a soldier and his family are never far away from black humour, the kind of psychic release that has you laughing down taboos, as was the case when a friend’s husband, who lost his legs in Afghanistan, had a fairly minor road traffic accident. He dined out many times on his description of the paramedic’s face when this former soldier emerged from his car and, looking down at his legs, announced, ‘It’s worse than I thought!’

It was that kind of humour that saw me telling the Captain afterwards all the times I would not be available to hear bad news – yoga (Mondays), the weekly shop (Fridays) – so that, when I told him I looked after my granddaughter on Tuesdays, ‘he didn’t write it down’, not knowing, I suppose, whether or not I was still joking.

 

Worst Case Scenario

The Captain didn’t say why
he would only loiter at the gate
if bad news comes calling.

Someone will come up your garden path –
it won’t be me –
within two hours
and they’ll stay with you.

He didn’t say how long
or why there would be two of them
when one sorry magpie could do the job

or what use they’d be to someone
who knows everywhere you’ve been,
can look at a map of anywhere
and see only the shape of you –
how you can move
like a mantis, praying,
that rocks and ratchets
along a swaying leaf.

But when he asked for questions,
I was thinking, Why
do they have to iron uniforms
to go out on patrol?

As if smoothness could keep you safer
than all the browns and yellows in the world,
or heat could stroke the breath
into a tunic’s body
to keep the bullets out.

So when I said, If they must
come, don’t make it on a Tuesday –
I have Ellie then,

he didn’t write it down.

 

(from ‘Ground Signs’ by Isabel Palmer, published by Flarestack Poets, £5.50)

 

Isabel PalmerIsabel Palmer is a former English teacher, educational adviser and European Championship silver medallist in triathlon. Her poems have appeared in ‘Stand’, ‘The North’ and ‘The Frogmore Papers’.  ‘Ground Signs’ is her first published pamphlet collection.