Andy Brown’s The Fool and the Physician

  
 
Andy Brown is Director of the Exeter University Writing Programme, and was previously an Arvon Centre Director at Totleigh Barton. His most recent book of poems is The Fool and the Physician (Salt Publishing, 2012). Other recent books are: Goose Music with John Burnside (Salt Publishing), The Storm Berm (tall-lighthouse), and Fall of the Rebel Angels: Poems 1996-2006 (Salt Publishing).
 
 
 

 
 
“Exploding with Carnivalesque and antic energy, The Fool and the Physician shows the formal range and wit of Andy Brown’s poetry, from traditional lyric forms such as pantoums, sonnets and ballads, to paradelles, prayers, prose poems, and many playful devices inspired by the authors of the OuLiPo.
 
The poems center on the figure of the Clown and the Fool, exploring the meanings and associations attached to these characters. In part one, clowns career into space, up to heaven, knock at our front doors and expound upon the end of the world. The second half of the book is based on some of the remarkable paintings of Hieronymus Bosch – from direct responses to his works, to personal poems, or the more tangential approaches such as the densely erotic ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ – playing off Bosch’s extraordinary representations of fools and visions of human folly.”
 
 
 
*
 
 

“Lyrical precision and infinite jest, as funny and curious as it is poignant and moving. These are poems that teach us there is no dignity but in recognising our own ludicrousness; they teach us to drop our pretences and relax; then they pie us in the face.”
 
– Luke Kennard
 
 
 
“Vivid and tangible, there is a real wit that at times makes me laugh out loud, a true learning, and a gentle humanity to these tender-hearted poems.”
 
– Lee Harwood
 
 
 
“Andy Brown is one of our most interesting and exciting younger poets. With its love of ideas and language, his work demonstrates that there need be no barriers in poetry; that the philosophical, the lyrical and the playful can be combined in work of assured and generous vision.”
 
– John Burnside 
  
 
 
*
 
 
 
Clown in Space
  
In September 2009, Canadian clown Guy Laliberté,
founder of the Cirque du Soleil, was launched into
space from the Kazakhstan steppes.
 
 
Above the steppes I career into space
and wonder myself into darkness.
It is daytime down there, ‘broad daylight’
up here, but utterly dark. Below on earth
the atmosphere spins the sunlight into gold,
whilst up here there’s no atmosphere at all
to strike a glow between the stars—
there is nothing like darkness to remind you
you are extraordinarily alive, and alone.
 
The blue planet turns like a plate on a stick
underneath the Heavens’ billowing Top,
slung with a billion fairy lights and spots.
The stars perform their hypnotism act,
pulsing like the cities down below.
 
Although I’m the first of my kind into space,
my friends are all around in constellation:
Leo jumping through his ring of fire;
the Gemini twins in bareback balance,
riding around the ring on Pegasus;
the giant Betelgeuse and his team of red dwarfs;
the Sisters of the Pleiades, holding on
like the Severinis in their human pyramid.
Here is Orion, throwing knives at Venus,
and Hercules decked with his barbells and furs.
 
Impossible to juggle here—the balls simply float
from your hands, although tumbling is easy:
you set yourself in motion, spinning round
and round and round.
                              But this show is soon done
when Earth obscures the blue-eyed moon;
when my dreams slide down the thrilling slopes
of the Big Dipper; when the lit-up world floats by
and this audience of one returns to gravity
and stumbling jokes, as the ring-master Sun
calls closing time on the cirque du soleil.
 
 
 
*
   
 
 
The Clown’s Prayer
 
          In the prison of his days
          Teach the free man how to praise.
                                                 W H Auden
 
 
Oh Lord, oh Harpo Marx, oh Charlie Chaplin: glory be to the Insanity itself, for it is divinely inspired, it is carnival. Glory be to the messengers of mayhem, the anarchists, the silent performers. Glory be to the red flannel coxcomb and bells. Glory be to doing things the wrong way round. Glory be to juggling with a small dog at our heels. Glory be the mystery that deceived the Devil; the glee that leaps across our lives.
 
Oh Joseph Grimaldi, oh William Kempe, oh Pantomimus: where there is a rope on the floor let us wrestle it like a snake. Where there is a donkey or a pig, let us ride it home backwards. Where there is pomposity let us criticise the master and his guests; let us make fun of, be indelicate about, and rude towards, without fear of reprisal. Let us kill ourselves with laughter. When we stumble over the edge, commit us to imperfection.
 
Oh Harold Lloyd, oh Lou Costello, oh Oliver Hardy: blessed is he who trips across the line between the man he is and the man he would be. Blessed are they who float in the workaday world. Blessed are they who show what is wrong with the way that things are. Blessed is he who takes the pie in the face and gets knocked on the arse. Blessed are they who spank the crowd with a slap stick.
 
Oh Coco the Clown, oh Stan Laurel, oh Bud Abbott: teach me to wear freckles, warts, a big red nose. Teach me to stand in for the lion tamer; to touch freely on the touchiest issues. Teach me to look at myself in the mirror and find the trickster in a domino mask. Teach me to glance through the windows of the world I’ve missed. Help me be mischievous, not malicious. Teach me to ‘Sweep Up the Spotlight’.
 
Oh Puck, oh Nick Bottom, oh John Cleese: make me nimble and able whilst clumsy and dim. Help me mingle ecstasy and death. Make me the keystone that holds up normality’s arch. Help me to be wise enough to lead the deadpan troupe. Make me a tramp in patched and tattered clothes, then make the others do my bidding. Help me set up scenes that turn out droll. Make me wise enough to play the fool himself.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
A Clown in the Moonlight
 
‘There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.’
                                                              Lon Chaney
 
 
How we feel about the clown
depends on where we see him—
a circus or party, no problem,
but ringing your doorbell at sundown?
 
That clown is a psycho killer,
a mirror of your fears,
knocking the world out of kilter . . .
and his laughter? It shears. 
  
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Adoration of the Magi
 
after W H Auden ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’
 
 
What we do results from where we are—
emerging from the landscapes of our lives
and of our dreams—just as what happens
in this world happens, mostly, without us,
unnoticed in the distant emptiness, where
the future hangs like something long forgotten.
We do not know what goes on and what we do
we often times ignore.
                              As in Bosch’s painting
The Adoration of the Magi, for instance:
how everything turns away from the unmoved
town at the mouth of the river, fringed by those
familiar dunes, where a traveller is mauled
by wild animals and a woman chased by wolves
through the blasted trees and untamed land,
their suffering ignored or passing unnoticed
in the wider details of the indifferent earth;
 
or how everything turns from the rotundas
and stupas of our homely town, turns away
from the ruinous gallows and the horsemen
galloping beneath the ensign of the moon,
insisting, instead, that this is all that matters:
 
how here there came on the fourteenth day
three Kings and Magi following a star, here
to this decrepit inn under the sign of the swan,
where Joseph kindles a modest courtyard fire
and a shepherd couple sprawl indecently
rubbing their eyes in the smokescreen
of ceremony;
                   how this is all that is the case,
rather than the truth of robbers hiding out
in wait for us somewhere in the spreading land,
or how each day oscillates between delight
and joy and other signs of unrest, violence:
the surface that could split at any time.
 
 
 
 
Note
 
‘The Adoration of the Magi’: Perhaps the best known of Twentieth Century painting-poems is W H Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, after another of the great Flemish master painters, Peter Breughel, and his painting The Fall of Icarus. Auden’s poem contains the line ‘In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster’, on which I have leant heavily in my own poem.
 
 
 
 
from The Fool and the Physician (Salt Publishing, 2012).
 
Order The Fool and the Physician.
 
Visit Andy’s blog.
 
 
 
*

Andrea Ashworth’s Somewhere Else, or Even Here

 
 
 
Somewhere Else, or Even Here
A. J. Ashworth
ISBN 9781844718801
Salt Publishing
(November 2011)
 
 
We love stories. We crave them. Whether it’s watching films, reading books, going to the theatre or listening to gossip – we need them. And we need to be surrounded by them. Writers, being curiously obsessive creatures, are hooked on them. So hooked that they want to make their own stories – for as much of the time as possible – and for the stories they make to have meaning, for themselves and others.

I wanted to make stories from quite a young age. My first such memory was of sitting in my bedroom at about the age of six or so and making a book of poems. I still have it. It’s a little dog-eared now but it’s surviving. It has a cut-out of a rose stuck on the front and is rather inventively called ‘My book of poems’. Inside are a scattering of poems, in various colours of felt tip, about the seaside or flowers in a window box. And there’s an interesting type of binding which has somehow lasted more than thirty years – staples (now rusted).
 
I didn’t have to design or bind my short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here – thankfully my publishers Salt did that. I just had to worry about what was inside – the stories themselves.
 
Writing them was an intriguing, and, at times, difficult process. When I started out on the collection, about four years ago, I had no overall plan for it, no unifying subject or theme. I just wrote one story at a time and kept going. Each story was unplanned too. For me, there’s nothing better than feeling as if I’m in new, unknown territory when I’m writing – it’s like being an explorer. Only, you’re not discovering new continents or planets, you’re discovering something else – something new that you yourself are writing into existence.
 
The stories are all quite different – from child narrators to the elderly; failing relationships to failing health. And there are certain themes which have emerged in the collection too, such as astronomy, loss and hope. There’s a darkness to many of the stories, but, as with yin and yang, where there’s darkness there’s light. It’s strange how, as the writer, you don’t always see everything that the stories you’ve created contain. It’s like being blind to yourself. Which, I suppose, to a greater or lesser degree, we all are.
  
So what about the inspiration behind the stories? Well, sometimes there didn’t seem to be any obvious trigger at all. Stories such as ‘Sometimes Gulls Kill Other Gulls’ or ‘Overnight Miracles’ began after the first sentences dropped into my head, seemingly from nowhere. ‘Gulls’, about a girl on a beach who is lured away to a cave by a boy, just started with the words “A stick scraping over sand”, and from this I got the idea of a girl writing her name in the sand and a boy coming up to talk to her. It was only when I sat down to write it that the story began to open out in front of me, like a path revealing itself, one piece at a time.
 
‘Overnight Miracles’ was the same. This tells the story of a bereaved woman who starts performing magic rituals in a desperate bid to try to bring her dead husband back to life. With this one I just had the sentence “We are in the blackest part of night now”, and from this I somehow knew that this woman was in bed and aware of something lying next to her in the dark – a presence that she could only feel but not see.
 
‘Bone Fire’ had a more obvious genesis: this story of a troubled boy who drags a bonfire into the basement of his school was inspired by a visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. On the day I went there was an exhibition of photographs showing groups of children standing in front of some rickety bonfires they’d made. I jotted down my impressions of the exhibition in a notebook and when I later sat down to write, I wondered about what might happen if one of the boys decided to carry out an act of destruction using such a bonfire. The story was the result of those ponderings.
 
One aspect of writing the collection which really fascinated me was the effects gained from using different points of view. ‘Zero Gravity’ features a gang of girls, so it seemed logical to use first person plural (we) for most of the story, but to shift this to first person when one of the girls breaks free and begins to narrate the story herself. I enjoyed the feeling of writing in second person (you) as this gives a sense of dislocation, of separation, of being outside of things – something which can help to create an almost otherworldly atmosphere, giving stories a different kind of charge.
 
I loved going through the process of putting a collection together, especially when I didn’t even have the bones of a plan to hang the stories onto. It was a great surprise when my manuscript was chosen as one of three winners of Salt Publishing’s Scott Prize last year – something which I didn’t expect to happen but which I’m so glad has. I am going to continue to write more stories in the months and years ahead. New stories, slightly off-kilter stories, the kinds of stories that will hopefully give me that thrill of discovery again. It’s that feeling of being somewhere else that I want – that sense of being in another place. The thought that, while the landscape may seem somewhat familiar, it’s really no place that I’ve ever visited before.
 
 
 
Order Somewhere Else, or Even Here here, here or here.
 
Visit Andrea’s blog.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
A. J. Ashworth was born and brought up in Lancashire and has an MA in Writing from Sheffield Hallam University. Her short story collection Somewhere Else, or Even Here won Salt Publishing’s Scott Prize and was published by them in November 2011. Her stories have been published widely, in the likes of The Warwick Review, Horizon Review, Tears in the Fence and Under the Radar. They have also been listed in competitions such as The Willesden Herald International Short Story Competition, the Fish Short Story Prize and the Short Fiction Competition.
 
 
 

Cassandra Parkin on New World Fairy Tales

 
 
 
New World Fairy Tales
Cassandra Parkin
ISBN 9781844718818
Salt Publishing
(December 2011)
  
  
Like most writers, my childhood was soaked in fairy tales. Even before I could read properly I spent hours poring over the illustrations of my Ladybird editions of Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Rumplestiltskin and reciting the text from memory. Slightly older, I was fixated on my mother’s hardback edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham and very little expurgated.
  
I think it’s impossible to overestimate the debt we owe to these stories, or the number of times and ways we retell them. They’re some of the very first narratives we learn; they tell us the things we human beings need to know to understand each other, in ways that have meaning whether you’re four or ninety. They deal with the very bones of life – birth and death, love and jealousy, sex and violence … They’re dark and bloody and sexy and visceral, and in interviewing their tellers and recording their voices, the Grimm brothers undertook one of the greatest acts of cultural preservation of the last five centuries.
 
But there’s no getting away from it – almost everything about them is weird. They’re heavy on action, but oddly light on explanation. A whole bunch of stuff happens; why it happens is up to you. Why does Chicken Licken believe Foxy Loxy when he tells her the King lives in a hole in the ground? Why does the Princess love her golden ball so much that she’ll kiss a frog to get it back, and what on earth did he do to end up a frog in the first place? Why, exactly, are seven adult men, all with dwarfism, living together in an isolated cottage with no female company? How could a teenage girl mistake a large carnivorous predator for her grandmother? Why are all the princesses beautiful and all the witches ugly? Why does Death want a Godson? How can pigs build houses, and why do they share a common language with wolves? Why does Cinderella hide away from the Prince? What the hell is going on?
 
The easy answer is “Well, they’re all metaphors, aren’t they?”, and of course, in many ways, they all are. But I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to re-tell some of the original narratives as modern, believable, adult stories – tales where real people with real lives really do fall in love with a masked stranger, or climb the beanstalk and rob the giant, or discover a beautiful prisoner trapped in a tower by a witch. I wanted to find the real-life equivalents of Godfather Death and the Wicked Stepsisters and the many, many Big Bad Wolves, and tell their stories for modern audiences. The result was New World Fairy Tales.
 
The most exciting part of writing the collection was exploring how much – or, more accurately, how little – I had to change to make the tales work in a contemporary setting. While some elements (Jack’s beanstalk) found their place as symbols, others (seven workmates with dwarfism) work surprisingly well with no amendments at all. Names, puns and modern colloquialisms felt as though they’d been expressly designed for some of the animal stories. Even elements which seem, at first glance, to belong entirely to the world of Faerie – such as the power of knowing someone’s true name – turn out to be surprisingly true. I found out one afternoon that there really is a fabric so light and delicate that a small garment made from it could feasibly be compressed into a walnut shell. It’s made from the filament tufts used by molluscs to attach themselves to rocks, and it’s fabulously expensive.
 
The decision to place New World Fairy Tales in America came very early on. If you’re British, America is as close to the original landscape of Grimm’s Fairy Tales as you’ll ever get. I don’t mean this in a flowery oh-my-gosh-your-country-is-so-amazing way (although it is). I just mean that if you stand in Britain, look out across the ocean, and then compare the two landscapes – America and Fairyland – they come out very similar. America contains all possible spaces and places; mountains and deserts and plains and oceans, great cities and curtain-twitching suburbs and tiny, isolated rural hamlets. It’s composed of many kingdoms, loosely federated, each with their own distinctive culture and autonomous power. Getting there requires a long and arduous journey, and when you arrive at the border, it’s weirdly difficult to get in. Its population is at once more devout and more violent than we are; when we visit, we tread softly and are cautious with what we say, and to whom we say it. Even if we’ve never been before, it looks strangely familiar – after all, we’ve been there so often in our dreams. Its citizens speak our language, but also … don’t.
 
Oh, the language, my goodness, the language. When I look back on the start of the New World Fairy Tales project, my main emotion is utter bafflement at myself – “Hey, I know! I’ll write an entire short-story collection in a language I don’t actually speak, set in a country I’ve never lived in!” What was I thinking? How much more arrogant could a writer possibly be? But there was never any question for me that these fairy tales belonged in the New World. Learning to reproduce what I hope are convincing American voices was a humbling and wonderful journey. I spent hours emailing and chatting to my unbelievably kind and patient Stateside friends, trying to learn the rhythms and cadences of American speech. I read, and listened, and talked, and questioned, and then read and talked and listened and questioned some more (seriously guys, thank you for everything you did and for all the stupid questions you answered). Even at the final proof stage I was still frantically combing through my manuscript for rogue instances of Brit-speak. I’m sure there are still places where, despite my best efforts, my roots are showing.
 
Choosing which stories to include in my submission to Salt Publishing’s Scott Prize was a bit of a balancing act. I wanted to reflect the wild diversity of the Grimm brothers’ original collection – to include not just the romances, but also the horrors and the comedies and the mysteries, and the tales that are frankly too strange to be categorised. And all in only forty-five thousand words! Since Salt’s list includes some of the most scarily talented short-story writers of our time, I almost didn’t submit at all … Eight months after the announcement of the 2011 prize-winners, I still can’t quite believe I’m one of them.
 
 
 
Order New World Fairy Tales here or here.
 
Visit Cassandra’s blog.
 
 
 
*
   
  
  
Cassandra Parkin has a Master’s degree in English Literature from York University, and has been writing fiction all her life – mostly as Christmas and birthday presents for friends and family. She is married with two children, has so far resisted her clear destiny to become a mad old cat lady, and lives in a small but perfectly-formed village in East Yorkshire. New World Fairy Tales (Salt Publishing, 2011) is her first published book.
 
 

Meryl Pugh’s The Bridle

 
 
Meryl Pugh was born in 1968 and grew up in Wales, New Zealand, East Anglia and the Forest of Dean, where her family settled. Short-listed for the New Writing Ventures Poetry Prize in 2005, she is a Hawthornden Fellow. Arrowhead Press published her first pamphlet, Relinquish, in 2007. Her second, entitled The Bridle, came out with Salt Publishing at the end of 2011. She is a PhD candidate at UEA and lives in Norwich and London, where she teaches poetry.
 
 
 

 
 
“The Bridle (Salt Publishing, 2011) is concerned with the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the human condition. Childhood, family, memory, myth — even the arguments and silences between lovers — all are enlisted in the bid to come to terms with our fleshy, mortal state. Poetry, here, is the bridle; restraining and shaping emotion, holding and guiding thought, as Pugh grapples with what it means to be human and female and how best to speak of that experience. Whatever the poems’ forms (sonnet or free verse, rhymed or unrhymed, long sequences or short, six line fragments), they sing out to the reader directly, urgently, in despair and celebration.”
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
“Assured yet tender, Meryl Pugh keeps an impressively tight rein on her craft to such an extent we can still hear each poem long after it has galloped off the page.”
 
– Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Charcoal Bridle
 
 
Thoughts as strange as unbroken horses
have led me up to the crack
 
between hill and sky, air and silhouette.
I set a fire before I left
 
and when the ashes floated like my reason
I took this lump
 
from the charred bole of a tree
and followed the ones with tangled manes.
 
But they are not horses here.
There is no hill or sky
 
only the cold side of something.
Hard. Crushing.
 
It does not bend, it does not move.
You are dashed on it
 
and then it ends. Motes rush
into the gap to be lost
 
and though the ground is churned as if by hooves
there is nothing here.
 
I will put on the charcoal bridle
learn to yield, learn to resist
 
to trust the headstall, bit and rein
for this uncertain footing.
 
I will come down off the ridge
and I will speak the bridled language.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Singing Door
 
 
Come to the singing door and ask your question.
Don’t pace about or try to look behind it.
Don’t look for keyholes, handles, cracks (there are none).
 
Just stand in front of it, where it has landed
and listen for the voice of someone lost.
At first, you’ll think the sounds you hear are random —
 
birds foraging for insects in the moss,
rain, the wind through branches — but this is the language
you must learn. So, patience! Listen: a fox
 
is scratching in its den, a magpie cackles,
a beetle mounts another on a rock.
Give each sound its place and let them gather
 
until they break like thunder, fade, then stop.
Into this silence (it only sounds like your father)
the door will drop its low, meandering song:
 
a composite of creatures, plants and weather,
alien and human, strange but known.
Stand your ground as leaves begin to wither,
 
the sun to set (although it’s not yet noon)
and ice takes hold of tree, small beast and river
for these are the ripened fruit your search has borne.
 
The door is singing, just as it was bidden,
and if you’d only listen, you would learn
how it can relieve you of your burden
 
(sorrow, guilt, whatever you have done).
Don’t worry that you seem to have forgotten
which hand you use to write with, your full name,
 
whether you have pets at home or children
or indeed, the reason why you came.
Look between your feet. A crack has opened
 
and you must choose which side to stand. Your pain,
which you express so fully, has been noted
but go now, leap the widening chasm, pray —
 
though you will fail — to make a solid landing,
scrabble for the edge, repeat your prayer,
look down at your feet, half-lost in violet shadow,
 
look up at your breath, freezing in the air
(watch how it hangs above you, drops and scatters
just as the door shudders and jerks ajar).
 
Who are you again? It doesn’t matter.
You asked for an end to grief. Here we are.
Yes, ours: the hands you feel around your ankles
 
pulling, hastening your fall. You hear
the singing door? It has your voice now. Thank you:
you’ve given it so much and now you’re free. 
 
 
 
 
from The Bridle (Salt Publishing, 2011).
  
Order The Bridle.
 
Visit Meryl’s blog.
 
 
 
*

Happy New Year

Anna Woodford’s Birdhouse

 
 
  
Anna Woodford has received an Eric Gregory Award, a major Leverhulme Award, an Arvon/Jerwood Apprenticeship, a Hawthornden Fellowship and a residency at the Blue Mountain Center (New York). Her pamphlet Party Piece was a winner in the International Poetry Business Competition, selected by Michael Longley. Her pamphlet Trailer was a Poetry Book Society Choice.  She has a PhD on the poetry of Sharon Olds from Newcastle University. Her poetry commissions include residencies at the Tyne & Wear Fire Service, Alnwick Garden and Durham Cathedral. Birdhouse is her first full length collection (Salt Publishing, 2010). 
 
 
 

 
 
“From diamonds hidden in a grandmother’s pantry to a peahen’s shout of ecstasy, from the voice of a deranged bridesmaid to that of a nun teaching a sex education lesson, Birdhouse is full of life – and its flip-side. It includes an award-winning sequence of elegies for the poet’s grandparents and great-grandparents who were victims of the holocaust (the sequence was a Poetry Book Society Choice).

Throughout this dazzling debut, Woodford explores sex, running away from school, and the happy ever after endings of Goldilocks and Eliza Doolittle. She takes a reader from Poland to Darlington on a dizzying scenic route involving graveyards and playgrounds. Along the way she celebrates a dead pigeon, a washing line, a big bed scene and an endless pair of legs. Her poems speak directly to a reader. Intimate and compelling. Casually artful. They stir up time and place to dissolving point, honouring the material word but not taking it for what it is. Or isn’t.”
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
“As Birdhouse is the first poem in the book, it would seem a hard act to follow for its intensity, accuracy and – yes – its beauty. Yet, while not all the poems rise to that level of ebullience, Anna Woodford’s perfect pitch, control of suspense and capacity for surprise are everywhere in working order.”
 
– Leah Fritz, Poetry Review
 
 
  
“Though these poems are deeply personal, Woodford also engages the reader through universal themes of love, loss, childhood and family. There is darkness, but not bitterness, loss but also strength, emotion, celebration and wit. This heartfelt and intimate exploration of life lingers with the reader.”

– Laura Kaye, Mslexia
 
 
 
“Finally this week, a mention for the beautiful poetry of Anna Woodford. I’ve had her award-winning debut collection Birdhouse on my to-read pile for ages and finally managed to steal an afternoon to enjoy it this week. It includes poems about sex, escaping school, pregnancy, nuns and a miniskirt scandalising a pit village. It is quite, quite wonderful.”

– Lauren Laverne, Grazia 
 
 
 
“a series of elegies for the poet’s grandparents, reveals Woodford’s writing at its best: understated, genuine, and emotionally intelligent.”
 
– Ben Wilkinson, the Guardian
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Goldilocks Variable
 
 
Some fairytales say she jumped
out of the window and ran home to her mother,
never to stray ever after.
 
Some say she came round to the idea
that her prince wouldn’t come and settled
for shared living with the bears.
 
An Internet site describes her turning
into a glamour model called Goldie
who likes a good hiding
 
or, maybe, she’s not out of the woods yet
and her hair went white,
slim-picking through the neighbourhood bins.
 
In Prague, an astronomer saw a light in the sky
and christened it for her
– and his mystery blonde girlfriend –
 
The Goldilocks Variable. It is an elusive star.
It isn’t always shining. Sometimes it appears
to have vanished from the night’s curtain-call.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Extract 
 
 
You were sitting at pains
in an easy chair, your hands
pushing themselves forward
in a series of jerky movements,
in a relinquished corner
of the room, a desk-light
was angled towards the wall.
I asked you all the questions
I could think of
but you had only one comment to add
to the end of your life story,
I would press it into the appendix now
before commending you to heaven:
‘I don’t feel like myself anymore,’
you whispered, your voice breaking
it to me, that the man
I had come to see
had already left the building,
leaving behind your anonymous figure.
I would leave you like that,
the desk-light angled
towards the wall, your words
making angels prick up their wings.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Staying the Night
 
 
My mother is curled up
in the bed I have made
for her. All of my demons
are sniffing around. She is baiting them
with the bare bones
of the body she gave me.
She is trying to keep them
from my door. After nights
without sleep, I don’t wake
 
until the click of the immersion
when the darkness is lifted
around my pit. My mother has saluted the sun
and is waiting for me
in the next room. I must remember this
on all the sleepless nights
after she has gone, when I only think
I can hear her, tiptoeing around me
above the everyday traffic.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
La Donna
 
 
The church is not broad enough
to accommodate your figure.
You put your faith in God anyway,
with a shrug of your covered shoulders,
with a wave of your fan. You kneel
before the statue of Our Lady and mutter
a prayer. Behind your back,
the flowers on your dress skim
over your body, bloom
on your arse. A priest
should come running
to take up your fanning. An altar boy
should unfasten your Jesus sandals
and bathe each clay foot. You are older
than you look. You have come this far
after centuries. You have reached this point
with a prayer. I would raise you above
the hollow of your idol. I would praise you
above the shelf life of her candles.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Burden
 
 
I sat in the rush hour
cradling a box full of holes,
 
and sounds and sweet airs
whenever the cab rattled.
 
The driver didn’t ask or look round
maybe it was God come for you, but
 
when we got to the vet,
‘I can’t do anything with that’ she said.
 
I dawdled home, wanting to hang out with birds
a little longer, to be admitted to their fold.
 
 
 
 
from Birdhouse (Salt Publishing, 2010).
 
Order Birdhouse.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 

David McCooey’s Outside

  
 
David McCooey’s first book of poems, Blister Pack, won the Mary Gilmore Award, and was short-listed for four other major Australian literary awards, including the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. His chapbook of poems, Graphic, was published in 2010. Outside, his third collection has just been published by Salt Publishing.
 
He is the Deputy General Editor of the prize-winning Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009), published internationally as The Literature of Australia (2009). He is also the author of a prize-winning critical work on Australian autobiography (Artful Histories, 1996/2009), and numerous book chapters, essays, poems and reviews published nationally and internationally in books, journals and newspapers. His audio poetry (original music, poetry and sound design) has been broadcast on ABC radio, as well as published in various literary journals. He is an associate professor in Literary Studies and Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University, Victoria.
 
 
 
   
  
  
“Outside is the second full-length collection from the prize-winning poet David McCooey. Outside takes the most basic of categories – day and night, inside and outside – and makes them the source of powerful meditations on the strangeness of our diurnal lives. In the resonant landscapes of these poems, the domestic slides into the universal, the personal becomes the historical, and the cultural is the real. This is a deeply unified work, even as it encompasses reflections on such diverse topics as the number 5, hands, newborn infants, heaven, anger and rock music. The collection also features a number of major sequences, including ‘A Short Story of Night’, and an electrifying response to the films of Stanley Kubrick. The book is also finely balanced in another way: by a generous and unique sense of humour, demonstrated in the Dadaist and hilarious ‘Intermission’. Outside is always unsettling, but it is, too, always humane.”
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
“The poems take strength and originality from the way they combine opposites. On the one hand, studies of Kubrick films and animal slaughter, they are straightforwardly fierce; but they achieve their effects in a manner remarkably controlled and subtle.”
 
– Lisa Gorton
 
 
 
“David McCooey is one of the most controlled and attentive poets writing in Australia. Renowned as a critic as well as a poet, McCooey’s careful study of poetry is shown in his poems, but they never rely only on this learning and consideration of craft. This remarkable book almost liberates an aesthetic, and is in itelf a work of great beauty mixed with moments of biting satire. It’s the wit, the aphorisic turn just when it’s needed, both within the poems and within the timing of the book as a whole. McCooey has become entirely his own poet – genuinely good and essential. Read him.”
 
– John Kinsella
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Two Figures 
 
 
(I)          Dracula, Retired 
 
 
He has taken to wearing a silver cross
to help him occupy the mirrors of the world
 
and tolerate the monotheistic sun
(that plants the crows’ feet near his eyes).
 
He sometimes feels that he has lived
a hundred years or more, that life’s become
 
a kind of sickness, and a single kiss would
drain the blood from his adamantine face.
 
 
 
(II)          Frankenstein’s Monster, Tourist
 
 
He has taken himself away into
the wordless north, where days move
 
like seasons, and ice and snow are
clean of promises. From here the world
 
he has left behind begins to look like
one of God’s sins. He divines the greatest
 
iniquity: that, nameless, he should be
mistaken in name for his creator.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Whaling Station
 
 
In my primitive childhood
the Cheynes Beach Whaling Station
in Frenchman Bay, just outside Albany,
 
was operational and open to tourists.
My memory gives up very little.
How, out of the dark ocean,
 
did they find the ocean-coloured bodies of
living whales to turn into pieces? What mysterious
industry was there to turn them into
 
those pieces? Flenser and Hookman
worked the blubber, while Saw Man and his
steam-driven saw cut the whales’ heads to pieces
 
small enough to fit into the cookers that
were worked by Digester Operator. It
took two men to straighten the harpoons.
 
Any ambergris found in a whale was sent
to Scotland for refining. But I don’t
remember any of this. I just remember that
 
as we watched from the distance, my father
or brother taking photographs, the vast smell
offered an unimaginable and unrelenting intimacy
 
of disgust. The equipment was not subtle,
though devious and effective enough. We could
not watch for long, though probably long enough to be
 
told that the whales’ oil, once refined, was used
for special purposes including cosmetics, fine
machinery, and watch mechanisms.
 
From the gift shop we bought
a piece of tooth which, now slightly
yellowed, sits in my parents’ bookcase.
 
The station then must have had about four
or five years left in it, closed down as it was
in 1978 by the rising cost of fuel oil.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
An Essay on The Shining 
 
 
A hotel is not a house.
     The length of a corridor
is the length of a mirror halved.
     A tricycle articulates
the uncanny difference
     between floorboard and carpet.
The Steadicam is a nervous
     energy, a kind of music.
The music is a kind of
     violence. The violence—when it
comes—is a kind of intimation
     of the real thing, like
the stilted dialogue, the
     hysterical typewriter (first blue,
then white), and the shadow
     of a helicopter on the car
in the film’s opening sequence
     (with its synthesised Dies Irae).
The style of the blood
     filling the lobby; the archly
symmetrical shots; the
     characters caught in reflections;
the seduction of numerology—
     all of these are realised
in a struggle with the sincerely
     ugly: the drinking, the man
fixed in the labyrinth of his
     rage, lost in the Indian
reservation of his long-forgotten
     crimes. (The African-American
is also historically accurate).
     What becomes of the boy,
we wonder, once we have safely
     seen his father’s corpse, frozen
in the achromatic salt
     of a pure, factitious snow.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Eyes Wide Shut
 
 
Call out the doctor
     and bid him to tell
     the difference between
     a dead woman and
     one living.
 
Ask him what becomes
     of the glittering masks
     when we sleep.
 
Ask, too, if he
     knows where his
     children go to in
     this ritual night.
 
Lastly, ask whether it is
     the outside or the inside
     that is beyond reckoning.
 
When he gets home
     his wife will tell him.
     There is one thing
     between dreaming
     and reality—fucking.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Anger 
 
 
Hysterical animal banging
     in the box of night that
     your brain becomes.
 
Harm migrates across
     the swampy distances
     of your mouth.
 
Your body, merely grass
     distorted by the wind
     raking over a hill.
 
There is a script for
     such chaos, though it
     can never be remembered,
 
this occult confusion
     that disguises
     itself as clarity.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Evening
 
          for Maria
 
 
Blue twilight
     is the heir of colour.
 
Godless, this suburban night
     is almost heavenly.
 
We are justified by love;
     each day a room we home to.
 
 
 
 
from Outside (Salt Publishing, 2011).
 
Order Outside.
 
Read more about David.
 
 
 
*
 
  

Phil Brown’s Il Avilit

 
  
Phil Brown was born in Surrey in 1987. He graduated from the University of Warwick in 2008 and now works as a secondary school English teacher in London. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the Crashaw Prize and won an Eric Gregory Award in 2010. He has had his work published in Magma, Pomegranate, Dove Release: New Flights and Voices (Worple Press, ed. David Morley), Dr. Rhian Williams’ The Poetry Toolkit (Continuum, 2009), The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt Publishing, ed. Roddy Lumsden) and the forthcoming Lung Jazz: The Oxfam book of Younger British Poets (ed. Todd Swift) and Coin Opera 2 (Sidekick Books, ed. Jon Stone). He is the Poetry Editor for the online magazine and chapbook publisher, Silkworms Ink.
 
 
 

 
 
 
“Phil Brown’s Il Avilit moves forcefully between the noise and disorder of the modern world, picking through the debris of the many lives we lead, leaving a trail of perfectly poised and fiercely observed poems. Dejected teachers, low-life pub landlords, faithless lovers, libertines and heroes populate this piercing and quick-witted debut, where darkness and regret linger at the corner of the pages, reminding us that an urgent clock ticks with our every step.
 
Whilst the poems go toe-to-toe with the big subjects of lust, loss and deception, the collection remains savvy, upfront and entertaining. Brown’s poems seek to confide in their reader with precise and carefully-measured words in their ear, finding their form and shape in persistent and surprising ways.”
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
“Ink spilled from a dark wingtip overhead … with pitiless skill this shade of Baudelaire unmakes his life and lays it out for our delectation – a casual gift, a rarefied vision, a human sacrifice.”
 
– Hugo Williams
 
 
 
“Phil Brown’s poems jump across the page, play with language and meaning, and interrogate – thumb in collar – our multifarious, simultaneous worlds. From Sir Gawain on the Northern Line to the sleazebag publican – from Chiron in Southend to an American president on his deathbed – these poems blend urban, virtual, and mythical experience through a sharply observant eye, fizzing like intellectual fireworks as they go.”
 
– Katy Evans-Bush
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
A Minor Offence
 
 
It wasn’t theft as such that night,
we tried to pay, had a train to catch.
No jobs were lost over the matter
I’m sure, just two coffees
and a slice of pie.
 
Worse crimes are committed
every second. Three murders
at least during the time it
took to read this poem.
At least.
 
Still, as I skim through
the underground, I offer
my seat to an elderly
or disabled woman
and hope that God was watching.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Cane Hill
 
Averos Compono Animos
 
 
The soggy floor sags under us
as though walking on a gloved hand
over a patchwork of spread newspapers stained sepia
     by years
dustily detailing what the Russians were up to.
 
The cast safety of our torchlight
projects Venn diagrams in which to step.
 
Embarrassed to be eighteen and afraid, I am coaxed
into trying on a jacket hanging solo in a balsa closet.
Smell of dust and piss as it grips
my shoulders like an angry parent.
 
Screams held in stone tape
teased out by kicked cans and footfall,
our fingers trace the braille
of sodden wood and soft walls.
 
We last an hour in all
before returning to our torn corner of fence.
 
A silent ride home, rifling through our loot:
three syringes, a nurse’s coat baring a Latin motto,
a duty rota dated ’82 and a small pile
of clumsy polaroids:
 
the cold chamber, the smashed window, the pew
barnacled with moss
and me in a too-small jacket.
 
 
 
*
 
 

High Down
 
 
Harry Baker, who the alphabet placed
next to me in Physics lessons
in that wooden room festooned with equations.
 
His masculine sway across class, always late
always proud of his knuckles’ cuts
caught from walls or often hand-dryers.
 
Harry, with whom I shared little time,
but watched and ridiculed as he flitted
from trend to trend with the years
 
– a constant reinvention of clothes
hung on his Olympic swimmer’s physique,
his eyebrows sheared to a barcode, then pierced.
 
Harry whose voice blackened with time,
whose re-imagined ancestry accessorised
with his final angry guise.
 
You made the papers Harry, made them all,
made him see you weren’t afraid,
and I wonder how it felt going in.
 
All Harry left of the other boy
is a dwindling shrine of flowers topped up yearly
by a dwindling group of teens in their twenties.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Libertine at Lunch
 
 
Ulysses’ first fuck was at thirteen
in a van bound for Wandsworth.
The bitch retched at his piquant spit,
he was the ultimate incarnation;
the third restoration of a forgotten figure
in a world about to end.
 
An East London media consultant corroborated
that he was seen sipping by the window of a tapas bar.
Declining to rise, unable to reproduce,
smoking, quiet, the hungry boy
only arose for afternoon drinks between meds.
 
His recent self-pity directed by Pinot,
the music within his spleen was dim
following a night with Mandy.
 
This fall through time was pulling him to madness.
Too high a price to change history,
the tiny chaos of every morning.
The announcement was made on Friday,
he was found in Melbourne
violating a probation order.
 
Our Ulysses, short, flamboyant rebel dressed in
     neon splashes,
will always be welcome back for another interview.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Broken In
 
 
New recruits are broken in on Tuesdays
being the easy shift to be shown the ropes.
 
During this time, you will be told how to:
give change, push promotions, bag ice
 
bottle-up, wipe surfaces, pour Guinness,
check ID, work a till, be bought a drink.
 
You will be informally tested on these criteria:
a) Do you smoke? b) are you a thief?
 
c) will you let the bouncers touch you?
d) do you smile? e) are you poor?
 
f) are you funny?
g) will you have sex with the management?
 
If the other girls have already begun to hate you
then you are pretty enough to work here.
 
I had none of these qualities
but Adam put in a word.
 
 
 
 
from Il Avilit (Nine Arches Press, 2011).

Order Il Avilit.
 
Visit Phil’s website.  
 
Visit Silkworms Ink.
 
 
 
*
 
  

Victoria Bean’s Caught

 
 
Victoria Bean is an artist and a member of the Arc Editions group. Her work has been collected by the Tate, the V&A, and shown at the Courtauld Institute of Art, while her poems have appeared in The Spectator and Poetry Review Salzburg. She currently works in a voluntary capacity with Young Offenders.
 
She spent a year in Horseferry Road Magistrate’s Court in central London, recording in verse the high-drama and low-comedy of the English justice system.
 
Caught (Smokestack Books, 2011) is her first collection – a unique take on everyday life in a busy courtroom and its cast of thieves, drunks, kerb-crawlers and dealers who come before the bench each day in despair, bewilderment and indifference. All human life is here – the strong and the weak, the hopeless and hapless, the users and losers, the innocent and guilty, the banged-up and the free. She lives in London. 
 
 
 

 
 
 
“Incisive, witty, compassionate and captivating, Victoria Bean’s poems are short, sharp shocks that capture the human face of crime and punishment. A gem.”
 
– David Jenkins
 
 
 
“… a humbling & poignant collection, & that rare thing: poetry of witness, poetry as social document.”
 
– Alan Morrison, The Recusant  
 
 
 
“This is a remarkable book, breathtaking in its artistry and its clarity.”
 
– Richard Price
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Oh oh
 
 
You said the f word you said the c word
you said you were on your way to Wembley
you said I’m hard, I’m hard, I could have you
you said you don’t remember any of it
 
 
 
*
  
 
 
Boy with a knife
  
 
If you walk out of here today
arm yourself only with these words:
keep your freedom.
 
Keep watching those cartoons
your father says you like.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Feast
 
 
Stand up please.
 
We can’t send you to jail
just because you’re hungry
and it’s cold outside,
however, you will stay in custody
until you’ve had your lunch.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The benefits of a real fire
 
 
The judge says you’re on a hopeless, homeless spiral
but when you set that bin alight
you had some warmth
and for a moment
 
a bit of a welcoming glow.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Fifteen years on crack
 
 
Beautiful boy
cheekbones sculpted by
sweet pink crystals still dissolving
the plump padding of his youth
 
He uses car stereos as currency
but wants a second chance
for the last time,
for the hundredth time.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Ostraka
 
 
Muie and Mosh in the public gallery
with their post code surnames
gouged and scrawled
in vandals’ Braille
 
a universal hand writes
we were here, we were here, we were here,
and names get carved in sharp angled letters
because cursive font is tricky
 
where the wood grain won’t give.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
I’ll stand if you don’t mind
 
 
I don’t want this man to represent me
I want to represent myself
I’ll remain standing
 
if you don’t mind.
 
 
 
 
from Caught (Smokestack Books, 2011).

Order Caught. 
 
Visit Victoria’s page at Arc Editions.
 

  
*

Tim Cockburn’s Appearances in the Bentinck Hotel

 
 
 
Tim Cockburn was born in 1985 in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and raised in Nottingham. He studied Fine Art and Creative Writing at the Norwich School of Art and Design, and holds an MA from the University of East Anglia in Creative Writing. He lives and works in Nottingham.
 
 
 

 
 
 
“Reading these poems there is a sense that, through ‘the sneakiness of words’, their tantalising truths are continuing partly to elude us – when ‘no’ touches ‘yes’, a dream solidifies on waking, coffee dregs yield one’s reflection, or the song you didn’t think to remember renews its hold on you.
 
Their highly-tuned awareness comes not out of introspection, but attentiveness, and also a real affection for the ‘cheerful stabs of flair among the serious junk’ of the world. Dry ice, microwaves, lager tops: all have their limelight in the mind, but there is nothing glib or cheaply-won about how the temporary or everyday become the emblem of a thought. Cockburn’s poems realise this time and again, with the sureness of an Anglepoise lamp that ‘throws its one enquiry’ into moments that, though private, are also the ones we most meaningfully share.”
 
 
 
*
 
 
  
“Admiring another writer is always a mixture of pleasure and pain, and it’s pretty much my highest praise that as I read these deeply glowing, profoundly enjoyable poems I was muttering out loud: Damn it he’s right. He’s right. He’s right. He’s right. He’s right.”
 
– Luke Kennard
 
 
 
“Tim Cockburn is a poet of skill, risk, and imagination. He borrows a wryness of observation, and a resigned, poignant sadness of predicament, from the Movement, but his poems are most impressive for the way they create a lifting sensation, a disarming feeling of romantic urgency, uncertainty and precariousness.”
  
– Jack Underwood
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Expansion on a Microwave Warning Sticker
 
 
Check standing items frequently and stir.
Leave nothing unattended (this is in case
delayed eruptive boiling should occur).
 
Take her, she loves you, yes? Within a year
or two she’ll miss the danger, miss the chase.
She doesn’t now? Check frequently and stir.
 
Wear lovers through or change as you prefer;
if you won’t replace because you can replace
delayed eruptive boiling may occur.
 
Conviction, kindness, these things drain to where
so surely, so like colour from a face?
They may return. Check frequently or stir.
 
Life is flux, the manic screens infer,
invite it into yours, or in its place
delayed eruptive boiling will occur.
 
Better to wait on stubborn water, or
affect its leaping, when in either case
you could be burned (stress could be)? Waters, stir.
Delayed, eruptive: boiling must occur.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
A Rave in North Norfolk
 
          For Laura
 
 
After the rave the steamed-up Peugeots
that, nightlong, blunted the field’s edge
slunk off one by one like a flagging picket,
leaving a stillness of litter-strewn hedges
the waterfowl dared enter back into.
On the lawn tall shadows tucked stickered decks
into retracted back seats, whilst the few
who remained in the lamp-lit mill slept,
not noticing how like kicked up sediment
settling the displaced calm restored
itself around them, or how, beyond the lane,
the shallow-pooled stretches sharpened:
the coloured smudge of ballast and gorse
beside a decelerating train.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Appearances in the Bentinck Hotel
 
 
Sometimes in going to pick something up,
however casually certain your fingers it is one thing,
looking may show it to be another,
just as sometimes in telling someone you love them,
however casually certain your tongue the words are true,
on the ear they may fall as forced or artificial,
and in saying them you may come to realise you don’t,
or not as you thought, and it will seem
a kind of sneakiness on the part of the words,
as it does on the part of my lager, when playing pool
I swig from it and it is not my lager
but your lager top, or even in coming to write a poem,
when it shrugs at you from the page and says,
No poem here, only the bones of one at best,
and those you reject as too deliberate or too cute,
since always it is possible that for forty minutes
exactly my lager is a lager, on my ears on my tongue
to the touch I love you, and this is the Bentinck Hotel. 
 
 
 
 
from Appearances in the Bentinck Hotel (Salt Publishing, 2011).
 
Order Appearances in the Bentinck Hotel.

Read ‘Deco’ and ‘Reminder about the songs currently in the charts’
at Eyewear.

Read ‘Immediately on Waking’ on George Szirte’s blog.
 
Read ‘Poem’ and ‘Panthers’ at Selected Poems.
 
 
 
*