Helen Ivory on writing ‘Waiting for Bluebeard’

© Image by Martin Figura

 
 
 
Helen Ivory was born in Luton in 1969 and began to write poems at Norwich School of Art in 1997, under the tuition of George Szirtes. She won an Eric Gregory Award in 1999 and then disappeared into a field in the Norfolk countryside to look after two thousand free-range hens. When she emerged ten or so years later, she had two collections with Bloodaxe Books and had helped, with her own bare hands, to build several houses.

She is a poet and artist, a freelance creative writing tutor and academic director for creative writing for continuing education at the University of East Anglia, an editor for The Poetry Archive, editor of the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears, and co-organiser with Martin Figura of Café Writers in Norwich.

She has published four collections with Bloodaxe Books, The Double Life of Clocks (2002), The Dog in the Sky (2006), The Breakfast Machine (2010) and Waiting for Bluebeard (2013). She was awarded an Arts Council writer’s bursary in 2005 and in 2008 an Author’s Foundation Grant.

Her website is www.helenivory.co.uk.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“Waiting for Bluebeard tries to understand how a girl could grow up to be the woman living in Bluebeard’s house. The story begins with a part-remembered, part-imagined childhood, where seances are held, and a father drowns in oil beneath the skeleton of his car. When her childhood home coughs up birds in the parlour, the girl enters Bluebeard’s house paying the tariff of a single layer of skin. This is only the first stage of her disappearing, as she searches for a phantom child in a house where Bluebeard haunts the corridors like a sobbing wolf.”
 
 
 

© Image by Martin Figura

 
 
 
“Helen Ivory creates a troubled yet beguiling world rich in irony and disquiet. She possesses a strongly-grounded narrative voice which, combined with her dextrous transformative takes both on reality and on what lies beyond reality’s surface, puts one in mind of the darker side of Stevie Smith who said that poetry ‘is a strong explosion in the sky’.”

– Penelope Shuttle
 
 
 
“A direct approach, via deep folklore and dream imagery, to the conundrum of being a woman … in keeping with what I think we mean when we say ‘women’s writing’. This book is mischievously dark, rich with anti-logic and harnessed to the power of something we used to call magic.”

– Katy Evans-Bush
 
 
 
“She is a visually precise poet, with the gift of creating stunning images with an economy of means … Ivory has established an eerily engaging style. Her poems are like mobiles suspended on invisible threads, charming to watch as they seem to spin by themselves in the air, but capable of administering more than a paper cut on the sensibility of the reader.”

– James Sutherland-Smith
 
 
 

© Image by Martin Figura

 
 
 
When I started writing the poems based on part real, part imagined events in my childhood that make up the first part of the book, I had no idea I was going to go on to write about my experience of living in an abusive relationship which forms the second part of the book. But in retrospect this makes good narrative sense. ‘Waiting for Bluebeard tries to understand how a girl could grow up to be the woman living in Bluebeard’s house’. When you find yourself in an abusive relationship, it makes you question who you are. How did I end up there? I’m not that type of person, surely – a victim? An abusive relationship happens so invidiously, even the abuser probably doesn’t notice what has happened. Here I am, perhaps, being charitable.

So, the poems have at their heart autobiography – and form a narrative. When I was writing the childhood poems, there were many specific events I wanted to write about. There are those events from which you remember a detail and then try to construct a narrative as to what might have happened around it. It’s the same with photographs – our brain tells us stories as it tries to make sense for us. I was also attempting to get at a more powerful truth – a metaphorical truth to show what parts of my life have felt like.

There are more poems about my father than my mother in this collection. I think it’s because he was quite a shadowy figure, so I tried to create him in words.
 
 
 
Night-Shift
 
 
My father was a shadow
who stood at the school gates
fresh from the factory
where he’d pieced cars together all night.

His old-fashioned clothes
were oil-stained and solder-burnt,
and his face wore the aspect
of moonless dark.

One winter, the north wind
pushed me right through him.
It was like losing your way
in the hills, in the rain.
 
 
 
I barely knew him, even though he lived with us. There was a deep feeling of sadness about him and he was incapable of expressing himself. This poem tries to draw him in his natural setting and to show how it felt to be his daughter.

Then there are poems that try to say how it felt to live in a house where your parents have an unhappy marriage that eventually dissipates.
 
 
 
The Inside-out House
 
 
The house turned inside out,
innards tumbled onto the grass;
trees watching
with the quick eyes of birds.

One has laid eggs
in the body of her parents’ bed
and is breaking them open
with a pin sharp beak.

It eats the yolk,
leaves the albumen
to dribble down
through the rusty springs.
 
 
 
I was thinking of the house like a doll’s house or maybe a garage sale, where everything is exposed. I think the bird is engaged in some kind of anti-nesting behaviour! This wasn’t a conscious metaphor, it just felt right as an image.

There are family deaths in the first part of the book – indeed, it is dedicated to the memory of my grandmothers, both of my mother’s sisters and my cousin Emma who was a couple of years younger than me and died of cancer at 22. This represents the way that home seemed to fall away from me as I was growing up. I didn’t intend to write such a personal book; it’s only when I think about it in prose that I realise just how personal it is. However, the poems kept coming and I began to think in terms of how I might shape them as a book. That’s when I decided to animate the world and the house in which the child/me lived. Poems like ‘What the Bed Said’, and ‘What the Stars Said’, which are peppered through the childhood poems, making the environment a threatening and dispassionate place.
 
 
 
What the House Said
 
 
When the sky feeds me birds,
I cough them up
in the middle of your parlour games.

When you examine them
you’ll see even the most vivid
burnt crow-black.

I do not have to pretend to like you,
we have signed no contract
yet you line my insides with your lives.
 
 
 

© Image by Martin Figura

 
 
 
Then one day I just stopped writing the childhood poems and began to write about a character called Bluebeard. This was a coded way of thinking about somebody who I lived with for over a decade.  Marina Warner writes “Bluebeard is a bogey who fascinates: his name stirs associations with sex, virility, male readiness and desire”. And Bruno Bettelheim writes: “Bluebeard is the most monstrous and beastly of all fairy-tale husbands”. The story is essentially about a man who murders his wives when they become too curious: Here is the key to all of the rooms in my castle. I am just going away for a little while. Use the key to explore any room you want to, but I forbid you to open THAT door. Her brothers rescue the woman the story centres on, in the nick of time, so she doesn’t befall the same fate as her predecessors. The story most people are familiar with is a ‘literary fairy tale’ written by in 1697 by Perrault but in a chapter entitled ‘Demon Lovers’, in From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner traces Bluebeard’s ancestors back to the oral tradition of beastly bridegrooms. She points out that in earlier versions of the story, there was no mention of female curiosity, which was the ‘moral’ added later – Bluebeard was simply a wife-murderer. So when it came to finding the perfect man who would use his maleness to subjugate my female protagonist, the Bluebeard character muscled his way into my mind.

The poem ‘Waiting for Bluebeard’ came first, which is part memory, but was also intended to signal foreboding, which in retrospect I did feel standing outside his house for the first time.
 
 
 
Waiting for Bluebeard
 
 
The child in the garden wears a coat
collaged from the skins of paper,
sutured with lengths of my hair.
I am inside the house
in a matching coat.

There is no one to tell us not to;
called here, as we were
by the halloo of peacocks
who turned tail
the day we arrived.

We are waiting for Bluebeard,
and when he happens here
in his grey-silver car,
he will unleash wolves
like rain.
 
 
 
This is the last time, for a while, that the narrative ‘I’ is used as the ‘I’ becomes a ‘she’ and the woman moves further away from herself. There is a sequence of poems called ‘The Disappearing’, which forms the backbone of the second part of the book. Although nobody literally dies in Bluebeard’s house, the woman dies a tiny part at a time. As I mentioned earlier, an abusive relationship develops so invidiously – the abuser slowly gains control over the abused by keeping them remote, not allowing them friends nor financial independence. This is the first stage of her disappearing, in which the woman goes through a painful initiation into adulthood.
 
 
 
from The Disappearing
 
 
1
 
 
The tariff for crossing the threshold
was a single layer of skin.

She imagined a snake
unzipping itself in one deft move.

She imagined herself lithe
inside the house, her new home.

She didn’t imagine the scarring
nor the painstaking care required

to leave the ghost of herself
on the doorstep like a cold-caller.
 
 
 
Half way through writing these poems, I was a little concerned that Bluebeard was just becoming a big bad bully, so I wanted to write some poems that showed him as a vulnerable person, and to present some of his backstory.
 
 
 
Bluebeard the Chef
 
 
You coax the rabbit from its skin,
cradle the bruised flesh ripped with shot.
A deft incision and soon the tiny heart
is in your hand, its stillness
opens up a dark hole in the sky for you.

You climb inside
and all the stars are dying eyes
fixed into you like pins.
So you slice each optic nerve
and disappear.

The knife completes your hand
with such sweet eloquence
you part recall its amputation
when you were wordless
in your father’s house.
 
 
 
In retrospect, this poem touches on a similar relationship with his father as one I wrote about my father and his father.
 
 
 
My Father’s Accident
 
 
By then he had stopped painting us
so I picked up his book,
turned it upside-down
and filled up the last pages.

I couldn’t see the absence of floor,
the way the furniture floated on rafts
in a sea of lava,
so I painted in carpet round his chair.

Nor could I see his dead father
beating his stick like a metronome
against the ceiling,
nor the broken bones of his dog.

What I did see was the sketch of a man,
head held together with spiders’ legs
and the smell of the hospital
still trapped in his clothes.
 
 
 
I won’t go too deeply into analysis here, but there does appear to be a pattern emerging! Silent, controlling men who have as their hearts deep wells of sorrow. The poem I have chosen to end the book with conflates the two men in perhaps a disturbing way, but seemed to me to be the most logical way to end the book. It’s based on the Donkeyskin story, which is essentially one of incest, and I should state that there was no incest in my family.
 
 
 
Hide
 
 
My father made me a dress
from patches of sky
on my mother’s old sewing machine.
He stitched them together
with lengths of her hair
and carved all the buttons
from her neat white teeth
but I would not give him my heart.

My father made me a dress
from the light of the moon
pinned into place
with her fine finger bones.
He made me a dress as bright as the sun
and sewed her gold wedding ring
into the hem
but I would not give him my hand.

My father offered me
the pelt of his dog —
how quickly his knife
freed that beast from its skin.
I climbed inside while it was still warm,
zipped it up tight
then walked into the fire
so he could not give me his love.
 
 
 
I always say that we write poems to understand things about ourselves and to explore how we feel about inexpressible things.  Poems come from the same place that dreams do – the unconscious – and when we start delving into the unconscious we are perhaps surprised by what we haul out. If I set out to write Waiting for Bluebeard, I couldn’t have done it.  The poems came to me when they were ready, and when I was ready for them. Writing the poems did not feel exposing, and neither have I felt exposed when reading them at events these past few years. Now the book is out, it does feel a bit that people might be able to see my bones, and writing this piece most certainly does! But I have put the work out there because I must and I have dedicated the book to all of the women who have lived or are living in an abusive relationship, and have spent time inside Bluebeard’s house.
 
 
 
 
Order Waiting for Bluebeard (Bloodaxe Books, 2013).

Visit Helen’s website.

Visit Ink, Sweat and Tears.

Helen reads nine poems here.

View Helen’s artwork.

Helen on writing the visual for the StAnza blog.
 
 
 

‘Mouse’

Andrew Taylor’s Radio Mast Horizon

 
 
 
 
Andrew Taylor lives in Liverpool. He is a founder member of the Edge Hill University Poetry and Poetics Research Group, and his work has appeared in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh: Manifestos and Unmanifestos (Salt, 2009) and Otoliths. He is co-editor of erbacce and erbacce-press. As poet-in-residence at Liverpool Architecture and Design Trust he undertook a residency at Liverpool Cathedral where poems and poetics were gathered in the pamphlet Cathedral Poems. He completed a PhD in poetry and poetics in 2008 and teaches English and Creative Writing at Edge Hill University and Nottingham Trent University. Radio Mast Horizon is published by Shearsman Books.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
“This collection, the author’s first full-length book, gathers poems written over the past decade. The poems, some gathered from previous pamphlets, are concerned with place, love, identity and mortality. Nature is never far away and neither are the watchful eyes of the cities of Liverpool and New York, their tidal rivers and connections.”
 
 
 
“Radio Mast Horizon travels well. Read it on the train, in a hotel room, at the bus stop sheltering from the rain. Andrew Taylor’s absorbing, tender poems see clearly. By turns playful and moving, tender and taut, they make absence tangible. A generous collection that still leaves you, in the best sense, hungry for more.”

– Cliff Yates
 
 
 
“Andrew Taylor is a poet who engages with the world — in all its affects and aspects — and says what he sees with both compassion and wry wit. These poems have a linguistic clarity and invention and observational flair which open us, his readers, into a series of vital encounters with the here and now. Taylor shows us where we live too.”

– Patricia Farrell
 
 
 
“With a voice fresh and responsive, these poems’ chiselled lyricism is firmly located in terms of time and space (and often place). They speak to us from those locations, about love, about absence, about abundance. Their moods shift from the elegiac to the ecstatic and we move with them as we read. Everything is in them, it seems. Including us. At last Taylor’s impressive oeuvre is amassed for the audience it deserves: that’s us too.”

– Robert Sheppard
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
She Strokes Bees
 
 
She strokes bees they must know
of course we do angel mark
faded in sunshine beyond the fringe

shaded face beneath cap follow
the flight of butterflies as they seek
buddleia growing on wasteland

“What colour are the flowers?”
“Black”
“No, what colour are the flowers?”
“Black”

A keen eye spotting planes dots to me

On the telephone mast starlings gather
are they being fried slowly
or is it convenient parking?

It gets better every time we meet
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Small Poem
 
 
If I turn left to St Pancras
          you’ll be at the Champagne bar
under the gaze of Betjeman
while I drink cans of bitter
reading O’Hara
the room too large for me

breakfast can’t come quickly enough
and time for tea before onward journeys
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Three Hearts
 
 
They’re clearing the snow from
streets that I walked in another
lifetime I see a shaft of
sun highlight a particular point

where a young tree stands marks
the spot I want to revisit these
streets hand held in shared pockets
away from the histories of home

to travel share in the creation
of the new matched possibilities
a time for combined healing
and re-birth of the ordinary

It’s all about coming to terms
with life and love
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Poetry and Skin Cream
 
 
When the fog lifts and you walk away
I hope that you’ll glance over your shoulder
and wave from the built up distance

December foxes and urban fireflies
the cold comfort of a hiding place.

How the season comforts enables
sleep to be disturbed by machines
as frost filters through the night sky
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Knitbone
 
 
the process needs assessment
the liquid is dark green
          smells of eucalyptus

a need to be healed

take all the precautions necessary
bathe in lavender foam
reading and trying to unwind

and avoid dreaming of a past
involving ocean views
          at Half Moon Bay
city vistas from the 86th floor
coffee from Peet’s
          doughnuts from Krispy Kreme

a time when the future was bright

heat surrounds as pages turn
offering a glimpse into
          the other side of the American Dream

I think about writing
through the difficulty

epically moving this soundtrack
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Like Geese Calling in the Night
 
 
They are out there
          our shining hours await
the softest kisses
          as garden constellations

Yellowing lime tree
          leaves a rooted bond
an apple left on a desk
          rots after six months
 
 
 
 
from Radio Mast Horizon (Shearsman Books, 2013).

Order Radio Mast Horizon.

Visit Andrew’s website.

Visit erbacce-press.
 
 
 
*

Antony Rowland’s I am a Magenta Stick

 
 
 
 
Antony Rowland was born in Bradford in 1970. Since studying at Hull and Leeds he has taught literature and creative writing at The University of Salford. He has published poems in various journals and magazines, including Critical Quarterly, Stand and P.N. Review. A selection of his work appeared in New Poetries III (Carcanet, 2002). He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2000, and a Learning Northwest Award in 2001.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
“Staring at 8MM bar in Berlin, this collection wonders what it’s like to spend your entire life on the M62. Playful, risqué and plain funny, these poems always tackle the important questions. Where does beer come from? Why was Shakespeare fond of gravy? What does it mean where Bedfordshire produces a sweet and sour pasty? Can a smile kill? During the Bradford section of the motorway, the book encounters Titus Salt and enquires about his snooker table. Mark E Smith discusses the Manchester smog and moshes with Allen Ginsberg. Children come and go, wishing for shells, Liverpool and a ready supply of Scootin’ Bumbleberrys. And where is Widdop?”
 
 
 
“Throughout the collection, Rowland demands that we take nothing for granted and ensures that we visualise the world as the extraordinary place that he perceives it to be. It is this unique vision that brings a fresh vibrancy to Rowland’s work and explains why this consistently self-assured writer was recently awarded the Manchester Poetry Prize.”

– Judi Sutherland
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Yellow Villa
 
 
The garden flamingos unfold their pink, but
I still can’t get you out of my granite windowsill,
curtains that only face-cloth half the light
of Olomouc, Kozel pastures, where
from the top of this sad oblong
an evening plane is a moving star.
For sleep you have crumbs in your eye
and you make me spill the negotiation
of a hairpin bra in The Yellow Villa.
I always like a gold oratory
despite your crisp air-bag exploding
and fountaining: we’ve been growing holes
in ourselves all afternoon where the water
clings to the leaves falling on the oriel,
řijen, October, rutting, štika,
listopad, sour tart and ham-ribbed
the potent funge of hermelín. I
don’t know why the meatballs were cold.
They just were. And the beautiful monsters,
the giraffe women laugh grazily by the kašna.
An aeroplane is a bar, laddered.
Staré mĕsto squeezes with your Moravian arm
and the lime trees in Michalská,
which has a very high cherub count
unlike our recent afternoons, paku paku:
my ledvinky are battered with ghosts.
Would you like that with gherkins?
The plane morses the tree-lined dark.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Unexpected Guest
 
 
Have never seen a spiral staircase in a room before:
would not know where to begin
and they should do something
about the pigeons. There was something sore

in the bathroom I couldn’t place.
Felt unsafe in the gym:
the doors were not pleasing;
suspect adjoining face

with wall penetration of heat.
I found a dirty sock in a broken bed:
I told reception and they looked at my head.
The shower was a daily feat:

I wear glasses; it got hot if you turned your back
in the wrong direction. Told
to use our newspaper as a fan to keep cold.
‘What do you wash your face with?’ I asked.

They said the big towel. The doors opened onto the bed:
I could not even take a photograph of it.
They didn’t serve us but they made us sit
and the breakfast – when it came – looked unhealthy and sad.

We found someone in our bathroom. That was weird.
The relaxation room was cold. The toaster
was trained by a parrot. No coasters
for the bell-captains. We found a beard

in our suitcase. There is only one phone
for use in the hotel, and it is a phone, it is also
locked in a private room. We had to go
into another cupboard. The toaster was alone

on the serving table and frustrated all the guests.
They should have mentioned
that it was under construction.
The gel was terrible. Ditto eggy bread.

The sweet at reception was coked.
Motor bikes roaring up and down.
The bartender was a clown.
Being a smoker I appreciated that I smoked.

Breakfast – waste of a cow. Floor too high.
I want fresh milk and English tea!
The kitchen was excellent, but empty.
If the room was a minibar it would be nice.

Milk – creamer. I slept with a wet carpet.
This may not be the hotel you are looking for
if you need service, facilities or storage.
We did not want these: the hotel was perfect.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Would a Smile Kill
 
 
I did not like the little biting animals in the carpet
and, overnight, the chocolate in my dressing gown
had been eaten by something. Now
there is wind in the room like a harp.

Elevator only runs from the basement to first floor.
I threw a twenty down for a drink:
‘You’re going to need more than that’’, winked
the bartender. The legs out of the bathroom door

were small. The view from the hotel is the hotel
at the other side and they should do
something about the cars driving through.
Whenever I open a tap, there’s a sink smell.

Staff came into the room in the middle of the night
to do a roll call. Noise spreads with snore
and people watched me from the corridor:
I couldn’t even stroke my shirt.

We had no choice but to dismantle the duvet:
please, I am not noise retardant you know.
The stairs are too abstract. We found a cockroach
but the staff came and took it away.

The sound proof was so good I had trouble thinking.
I saw a wall and I couldn’t open it.
Would a smile kill ya? Asked for a blanket
to drape over the painting. The spacing

and distribution of the furniture
was terrible and late afternoon was cooler
than we liked in the swimming pool.
My kids also thought the floor would be better.

A large party of schoolchildren emptied the bar
every morning. Woke every time
the hotel went by to slide
the receipt under my door. Crazy car

parade held in the night. Sometimes just one side
of the building was working. The chair was cane
at the hotel entry: it had a strong fragrance
that annoyed both my wife and myself.

Be careful when you wake up from the bed.
Someone else came into the shared bath. Body bars,
the whole place is rocked down with whores,
if you come to my country you don’t expect

to speak Greek. We had to share the elevator.
You couldn’t close the door unless you were locked in
and it was hard to look at things
because the concierge wasn’t always there.

Twice we were charged the price of living
and disadvantages were the FBI,
swat teams, large guns, remote-controlled eyes,
but the English soaps made up for everything.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Mind Resort
 
 
The white colours of the bulbs were disturbing,
the panoramic windows had a noose and you
shouldn’t allow relatives into the room
I don’t know: you didn’t mention this in the terms

and conditions. When I went to book a spa,
they asked me to have an operation, and the pool
was small for an infinity pool and two
rats joined us in the pool; even birds use water.

I was stopped by the unlimited buffet
experience. We asked for an iron
and they brought us sliced onions;
the porter also didn’t leave our room all day.

There were some adult bears very close to the hotel
and I found a gentleman outside my door
taking photographs of an empty corridor –
bear in mind Mumbai. The smell

when we burned some wood perfume was bad.
There were two elevators at the end of our room,
a lightbulb hurt my eye and when you placed two
pillows together, it became too high for the head.

The cleaning staff were hanging in the corridors.
Servis a little horror: Wi-Fi only in a coffee,
the hotel was in a restaurant in the lobby,
and they charged an extra basis for a morning call.

Why has the kitchenette got a glass pane
that allows the west sun to enter?
The room was a gas chamber.
The air con cons: the fan the AC just facing

our faces sucks! My small pillow could smell:
minor sewer gas came out of a sink.
The paint was sniffable. The welcome drink –
an insult. The desk said we were mental

because we didn’t understand: I said
we didn’t like the non-functional encroached
footpaths. We placed some cockroaches
on the desk, the fridge smelt like death,

the receptionist is always mad
and the prostitution is so loud and clear,
someone attempted to steal my beer,
and all the hotel staff are a little bit slag.

In the bathtub, the previous occupant was floating.
The basement disco climax should be free,
the expresso machine brewed us something green;
even the room was badly smiling.

Misery – one word. A ghostly experience occurs
in the bathroom: we didn’t have enough selves
for our clothes; I had to use clothes
to protect myself against external eyes.

I can’t remember anything I missed;
simply, the hotel did not exist
and if you want a hotel close to
creepy interactions, this the hotel for you.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
I am a Magenta Stick
 
 
A spell in your index finger,
logged as dialect for splinter,
precious as the autumn spinners,

finally scooped as East End slang
hairing north after Whitechapel banns
with Yorkshire Cockneys, the family,
 
hexed by natives, my moving kin,
with a one-word spell under new skin,
woodening our identities.
 
 
Spell – to spell – spell it out, wrong
since it’s northern too, not nawped
from our Stepney tongues long

before smudge faces caught in Holborn days
where cream hokey-pokey men frame
the five-inch gauge, Shoreditch railway;

not lost in Southwark mystery, or lead
to the path of our Elijah Rowland, wed
among St Giles’s daisies and untidy dead.
 
 
And I am a magenta stick
in my child’s nursery picture,
schooled in the family’s width

and margin, barely discernible
head round a pint of whelk,
whisper to your mum’s sleek

and wigged care, Bette eyelash notes,
splintered felt, sending me in dots
upstairs, home to the cloud pots.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Ladies’ Companion
 

“[I]n all the several Ages of the world it hath been the confirmed Privilege of the Fair Sex, to use all the lawful and ingenious Endeavours to get the Love and Admiration of Mankind”
          (T.B., The Ladies’ Companion (1704))
 
 
Clean your Paint with the Juice of distilled Raspberries
& Asses-milk, or the Water found in a kind of Bag
on the Leaves of the Elm-tree. The pressed Water of Radishes
is also good. For Make-up, graze your Cheeks with the Blood
of Paradise, Cubebs, Clove Raspings and Golden-rod
infused with Brandy over an open Fire (my Fire). Do not ignore
your Prints of the Small-pox: choke them with Bulls-gall
crusted in the Sun, effused with White-spirit and Venice-Talk
bled into a subtile Powder. For Ringworm – if I may – the Liquor
that drops out of green Wood burning on a Chestnut Fire.

Do not lose your Beauty for want of my Attendance:
use Milk-warm Water to wash & wear an oily sort of Mask
& Gloves at Night for plump & soft Hands, your Hands
chafing the Sleeves of This, our homely yellow Tome.
We say it alone: for Sun-block, Mucilage of Fleaworts,
Quince Seeds & Sheep’s Suet; Florence Orrice and Venice Borax
for Night-paint, or the Gall of an Ox digested in powdered Glass
& two Gutted Pidgeons with Sugar Candy. Marrow of Hogs
or Calves’ Feet for Spots. For Redness, a pint of sweet Cream
boiled in Oak-tree Moss. Believe This, and You will Believe.

My Beauty, our Guests do not want see your Cerate
of Sperma Ceti & you have left your Bear’s Grease
on the Settee just to annoy me. Remember, the Ashes
of a Mouse will milk out your Hair, but then decease
or it will white like a Rose. I suppose the distilled Water
of Man’s dung might be effectual against your bleeding Gums;
if not, macerate your tender Head with white Wine or the Tendrils
of a Vine, Lye of Tartar, Blood of a Mole & Decoction of Thyme.
And if by Fancy you would have blanched Locks,
live until eighty: it is odd, but you shall have your Shock.
 
 
 
from I am a Magenta Stick (Salt Publishing, 2012).

Order I am a Magenta Stick.

Judi Sutherland reviews I am a Magenta Stick.

Tony Williams reviews I am a Magenta Stick.

Roy Marshall reviews I am a Magenta Stick.

Read more about Antony at The Poetry Archive.
 
 
 
*
 
 

Celebrating Keats, 24 May – 2 June

Keats House

 
 
 
Poets and cultural organisations from Mexico, Armenia, Ethiopia, Iran, Australia and USA are among those taking part in the ‘biggest and best yet’ Keats Festival at the poet’s house in Hampstead to celebrate his legacy.
 
 
Organisers of the annual event – now in its fourth year – say they are hoping to attract record numbers of visitors to Keats House during the Festival’s two-week run from Friday 24 May to Sunday 2 June. This year’s theme is ‘Health is my expected heaven’: The body and the imagination.
 
 
Around 40 events are being organised, including poetry readings by established poets and emerging talent; musical performances; jewellery workshops; talks; family activities, and creative writing workshops, hosted by leading poets and fiction writers.
 
 
Highlights include:
 
 
Patricia McCarthy and Jane Draycott, the winner and runner-up respectively of the National Poetry Competition,  reading their prize-winning work;
 
 
events by, and for, young people, including the Foyle Young Poets workshop and an ‘open mic’ session organised by the Keats Youth Poets Forum;
 
 
Cherrell Avery, the calligrapher on Jane Campion’s Bright Star, will run an introductory calligraphy workshop for adults, and
 
 
the return – by popular demand – of George, the mechanical dragon.
 
 
This year’s Keats Festival will also mark the beginning of a new poet-in-residence at the House. Jo Shapcott, whose best-known work includes Her Book, Tender Taxes and Of Mutability, for which she won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2011, takes over the residency from John Hegley.
 
 
Vicky Carroll, Principal Curator at Keats House, said:
 
 
“Keats Festival is going from strength to strength, and we are building on the popularity of the first three events to deliver the biggest and best Festival yet. It will be a joyous – and truly international – celebration of Keats’ legacy for people of all ages, and I am delighted that, as well as attracting participants from around the globe, we are using the event to welcome Jo Shapcott to Keats House.  Jo is at the top of her game and she is excited at being part of the Festival and, as we go forward, to working with us to inspire poetry lovers and budding writers to celebrate Keats’ talent, as well as develop and nurture their own.”
 
  
Some events are free and there is a small admission charge for others.
 
 
All events at the Keats Festival must be booked in advance by calling 020 7332 3868,
 
or email keatshouse@cityoflondon.gov.uk.

For more information about Keats House,
visit www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/keatshousehampstead.
 
 
 
 

George, ‘the mechanical dragon’, at Keats House

 
 
 
Keats Festival 2013 programme
 
 
 
Friday 24 May
 
 
Poetry Appreciation Group
2-3.30pm
Workshop
Free
 
Led by Ken Page of the Keats House team, the group meets regularly at Keats House to read and discuss works by established poets. In keeping with the theme of the festival, this week’s theme is Bodies.
 
 
Disabled Genius: Alexander Pope – Poet, Satirist, Scourge
and Wit
2.30-3.30pm
Talk
Free
 
Join Colin Pinney to discover the life of ‘The Little Nightingale’, as Sir Joshua Reynolds called him, from his childhood in Windsor Forest to the coffee houses of eighteenth-century London – the age of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and John Gay’s Beggars’ Opera.
 
 
Keats, Cobbett and Cottage Gardens –
Fine Words Buttering Parsnips
4-6pm
Talk
£7
Caroline Holmes
 
Keats’s poetry timelessly evokes the fecund beauty of cottage gardens. Cobbett’s political rant ‘Cottage Economy’ decries potatoes and tea whilst praising maize and homebrew. Caroline Holmes explores both in a talk which will culminate amongst the blossoms and borders of Keats House garden. A Chelsea Fringe event.
 
 
The Poetry Parnassus Postscript: Crossing Continents
6.30-8.30pm
Reading
£5
 
A myriad of global voices – from the Performance poetry of Mexico’s Rocío Cerón to the Caribbean-inflected, UK-influenced work of Malika Booker and Karen McCarthy-Woolf; from the British-Iranian sensibilities of Mimi Khalvati to the poetry of Antipodean writer Cath Drake, via the lyrical works of Armenia’s Poet Laureate, Razmik Davoyan. A night of continental shifts through the power of the word. In association with Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions. 
 
 
 
Saturday 25 May
 
 
Bitter-Sweet
10.30am-1.30pm
Workshop
£10
 
Explore writing using all the senses, especially smell, with Cherry Potts, short story writer, novelist and owner of Arachne Press. If you have a scent that means a lot to you, bring it with you! For fiction writers and poets with all levels of experience.
 
 
Lovers’ Lies, and Weird Lies
3-4pm
Reading
£5
 
Focusing (loosely!) on Keats’ involvement with science, medicine and nature, Arachne Press brings you stories of the Garden of Eden, conversations with tadpoles, a meeting of minds across disciplines and love, repression and an old-fashioned approach to doctoring. Writings by Tania Hershman, Cherry Potts, Bobbie Darbyshire and Tom McKay.
 
 
The Lyric Self
10.30am-1.30pm
Workshop
£10
 
Find and channel your lyric self with Dante Micheaux. The lyric poem is a text of emotion and thought, expressed directly from the poet to the reader. Participants will compare examples of Anglophone lyric poetry and create a poem of their own.
 
 
Chinese Calligraphy
2-4pm
Workshop
Free, drop-in
Family friendly
 
Try your hand at the art of Chinese calligraphy with Jing He. This drop-in workshop is suitable for adults and families. No booking necessary – just come along and enjoy.
 
 
House History
2-4pm
Workshop
£10
 
Nick Barratt, genealogical consultant for Who Do You Think You Are?, will lead a practical workshop showing how to trace the history of a property, from first steps to detailed archival research covering maps, land surveys, occupancy records, manorial documents and associated historic sources.
 
 
Shelley, Byron and the Allegra Story
6.30-8.30pm
Performance
£5
 
Susan Brandt’s docu-play is about the love-affair of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont (Mary Shelley’s step-sister), and their daughter, Allegra. In this dramatized Reading, Claire narrates the heart-rending story using the characters’ actual letters and journals, revealing Byron to be other than the lovable rogue we usually see.
 
 
 
Sunday 26 May
 
 
Words and Music: Playing Poetry
2-4pm
Performance
Free
 
An afternoon of classic and contemporary poetry spoken, sung and harmonized with musical accompaniment. Presented by MA Music Theatre students of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in association with Spread the Word, an Arts Council funded charity supporting new writing in London, and the Keats House Poets.
 
 
The Ode
2-4pm
Workshop
Free
 
Join Foyle Young Poets, Flora de Falbe, David Carey, Sarah Fletcher and Alex Hartley to explore the timelessness and evolution of the ode form. Read authors as diverse as Catullus, Neruda and Keats, and create your own odes through a variety of writing exercises.
 
 
Foyle Young Poets
4.30-6pm
Reading & open mic
Free
 
Workshop participants will read odes written during the afternoon’s workshop, to be followed by an open mic session. 
 
 
flamingofeather Poetry and Dance
5.30-7.30pm
Reading & performance
Free
 
Reading by winners of the flamingofeather poetry competition and the judges, Mimi Khalvati and Peter Daniels. Plus Performance by 55+ Sage Dance Company, directed by former Royal Ballet soloist Simon Rice.
 
 
 
Monday 27 May
 
 
Keats in Hampstead
11am-1.30pm
Guided walk
£8/£6 concessions
 
Follow the story of Keats’s life in this walk with readings from some of his best-loved poems. Starting at Hampstead tube, we will stroll through old Hampstead, visit the Vale of Health, dip into the Heath and finish at Keats House. Please wear comfortable shoes.
 
 
All the Fish in the Sea
10.30-12.30pm
Workshop
Free
Family friendly
 
Create sparkling foil fish with artist Jennifer Conroy and frame them in a beautiful seascape to take home. Suitable for families with children aged four and upwards.
 
 
Jewellery Masterclass
2-4pm
Workshop
£7, includes materials
 
Create your own exquisite, hand-crafted jewellery from recycled paper with artist Jennifer Conroy using a range of innovative cutting, folding and origami techniques. For adults, including beginners.
 
 
 
Tuesday 28 May
 
 
Drama Fun for Families
10.30am-1.30pm and 2-5pm
Workshop
Free
Family friendly
 
The Bunbury Banter Theatre Company will be running two audio drama workshops for families. Working on two different Keats poems, we will make discoveries, have fun and leave with lots of interesting recorded audio material, which afterwards will be edited and put on the web for the world to hear.
 
 
Anonymity & the Prizewinning Poem
6.30-9pm
Reading
£5
 
Patricia McCarthy, Jane Draycott and Pascale Petit are top winners in this year’s National Poetry Competition, chosen from over 13,000 anonymous entries. They read together here for the first time, and discuss the liberations of anonymity, exploring how poems can escape their authors. Presented by the Poetry Society.
 
 
 
Wednesday 29 May
 
 
Volunteering at Keats House
11am-12.30pm
Drop-in info session
Free
 
Join us for a cup of tea and find out how you could meet new people and learn new skills by volunteering at Keats House. This drop-in info session is open to anyone aged 18 or over; no previous experience is required. No booking necessary. 
 
 
Introduction to Calligraphy
1.30-4pm
Workshop
£7, includes materials
 
Explore the beautiful art of calligraphy using quills, nibs and pens with Cherrell Avery, calligrapher on the film Bright Star. Learn the beauty of the written word and discover how lettering styles are used to convey the emotion of the words to great effect. For adult beginners.
 
 
The Poet Next Door
6.30-8pm
Talk
£5
 
Prize-winning biographer Lyndall Gordon will talk about the explosive and visionary character of Emily Dickinson, the poems she shared with her confidante next door, and the medical secret that kept her secluded in her father’s house. Presented by the Poetry Society.
 
 
 
Thursday 30 May
 
 
Feltmaking Demonstration
1-3.30pm
Drop-in demonstration
 
Discover the beautiful tradition of feltmaking. During this demonstration felt artist, Avigail Ochert will show you how to transform merino fleece into beautiful artwork using nothing more than soap, water and elbow grease. No booking necessary.
 
 
Felt Workshop
3.30-5.30pm
Workshop
Free
Family friendly
 
Come and make a unique and beautiful hand felted bag. During this workshop you will learn how to draw with wool and create a beautiful felted bag which you can take away with you. This workshop is suitable for children aged five plus with parents or carers supporting their children.
 
 
Creative Writing – Between the Lines
2-5pm
Workshop
£10
 
In a session aimed at the curiously minded, you will be gently encouraged to leave your comfort zone and explore writing a story from multiple points of view using forms such as poetry and letter writing. For beginners upwards. With Anjan Saha, Visiting Writer at Keats House 2012.

 
International Voices with Parnussus Poets & Guests
6.30pm-9pm
Reading
£5
 
In 2012 Poetry Parnassus gathered poets from every Olympic nation to read at the Southbank. In 2013 some of the Parnussus Poets will be reunited alongside British counterparts to present the history of the world through their stories and “found” poetry. There will be live calligraphy and music to make for a truly sumptuous event. Hosted by Anjan Saha. Countries represented to include St. Kitts, Bermuda, Grenada, India and the UK. Curated by London Literature Lounge. 
 
 
 
Friday 31 May
 
 
Illustrating the Immortal Bird
10.30am-1pm
Workshop
£10, includes materials
 
Join artist Maggie Nightingale for a fun, immersive, experience focusing on Keats’s famous ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, written under a tree here at Keats House. The group will explore the grounds, consider how poets have represented their work visually, and contribute to mixed-media illustration to Keats’s poem. Adults at all levels welcome.
 
 
Getting Started in Life Writing
2-5pm
Workshop
Free
 
Everyone has a unique voice and experience. Join Andrea Watts in an afternoon of exercises to get your memory and writing muscles working. This course is ideal for beginners looking for fun, practical skills and inspiration to keep writing.
 
 
The Day the Grass Came – and Unmade Roads
6.30-9pm
Reading
£5
 
Muswell Press poets Leo Aylen and Alan Franks honour Keats through their recent collections. Aylen performs his acclaimed theatrical poetry, with scenes from Brixton tube station to Vesuvius erupting, whilst  Times columnist Franks ‘A modern day Sydney Carter’ delivers ‘poetry of great musicality’ (Jo Shapcott).
 
 
 
Saturday 1 June
 
 
‘The Silent Mysteries of Earth’
10.30am-1.30pm
Workshop
£10
 
Join Rommi Smith for an outdoor creative writing workshop. Together, we’ll take morning tea in the garden, tuning into Keats’ House’s beautiful garden space, as both muse and inspiration. We’ll explore the magic of seeing things from different perspectives and techniques for imbuing the everyday with the extraordinary.
 
 
Volunteering at Keats House
11am-12.30pm
Drop-in info session
Free
 
Join us for a cup of tea and find out how you could meet new people and learn new skills by volunteering at Keats House. This drop-in info session is open to anyone aged 18 or over; no previous experience is required. No booking necessary. 
 
 
Wild Writing
2-5pm
Workshop
£10 
 
Cath Drake invites poetry and prose writers of all levels to stretch beyond the predictable, re-invent the ordinary, sneak into the surreal, flirt with freefall and have fun taking your writing to unexpected places. Put aside the editor and critic and let your creativity fly.  
 
 
Momentum
6.30-8.30pm
Reading
£5
 
Discover the joys of collaboration as Cath Drake hosts poets Kayo Chingonyi, Jocelyn Page, Saradha Soobrayen and Jacqueline Saphra. Some are part of online collaborative group, The Vineyard; others meet regularly, mentored by Mimi Khalvati.
 
 
 
Sunday 2 June
 
 
George the Dragon
1-5pm
Installation
Free
Family friendly
 
George is a giant mechanical dragon. Rarely rolled out due to his great age and cantankerous nature, this marvel of grime and grease is a hand cranked mechanical wonder. Keith Moore invites the fearless and curious to step forward, turn the handles and bring George to life. Drop-in, no booking necessary.
 
 
Keats Youth Poets Forum
1.30-3.30pm
Reading & open mic
Free
 
The Keats House Poets are back for another chilled-out afternoon of poetry and spoken word. Open mic, plus performances from headliner Anthony Anaxagorou, with Raymond Antrobus, Simon Mole, Deanna Rodger, Dean Atta, Laila Sumpton, Sonority Turner and Kaamil Ahmed. Arrive early to grab an open mic slot.
 
 
Austentation
3-4.30pm
Performance
Free
 
Regency musicians Frank Underwood and Angela Mayorga play romantic guitar and other stringed instruments of the period and Gillian Tunley supplies vocals and regency percussion, all in the costume of Jane Austen’s day. Suitable for all ages.
 
 
Strange Tracks
3-4.30pm
Reading
Free
 
Celebrate the changing face of Modern Poetry in Translation with Chris Beckett, poet and translator of Ethopian poetry, Frances Leviston, whose first collection Public Dream was shortlisted for the TS Elliot Prize, and Fiona Sze-Lorrain, poet and translator from Chinese.
 
 
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Tree
5-7pm
Reading
Free
 
Join us to celebrate the launch of the 2012 Keats Anthology. John Hegley and anthology poets will read work written in 2012 during the festival and other workshops during John’s residency.
 
 
 
Booking information
 
Free and paid events must all be booked in advance unless otherwise stated.
 
Phone 020 7332 3868 or email keatshouse@cityoflondon.gov.uk.
 
If you book a space and then can’t come, please let the festival organisers know so they can offer the place to somebody else.
 
Keats Foundation members receive £2 off each event. Membership costs from £25.
 
Keats House is situated at Keats Grove, Hampstead,
London, NW3 2RR. 
 
 

Keats’ letter to Mrs Brawne, The Keats Collection

Alvin Pang’s When the Barbarians Arrive

  
 
 
Born in 1972, Alvin Pang was Singapore’s Young Artist of the Year for Literature in 2005, and received the Singapore Youth Award for Arts and Culture in 2007. He is a Board Member of the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute, and of the peer-reviewed journal Axon: Creative Explorations. A poet, writer, editor, and translator with work translated into over fifteen languages, he has appeared in major festivals and publications worldwide. His recent publications include Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore (Autumn Hill, 2009), Other Things and Other Poems (Brutal, Croatia, 2012) and Waiting for the Barbarians (Arc Publications, 2012).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“This is a new and selected works, with some poems taken from Alvin Pang’s previous three collections. The selection ranges from unsentimental love poems to sharply satirical writing; here are poems that are wry and shrewd, intelligent and sensitive. They mock, celebrate and unsettle, are generous and beautiful, full of paradoxes, logic and illogicality, and are at once recognisably national and international in reach, offering a fresh edgy energy to the wave of urban poetry emerging from Singapore.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Shades of Light in Holland Village
 
 
Say you just got a raise. The last good kiss
you’ll remember for life is waiting to happen,
but you come here – Friday night, Saturday night –
the mock Latino bars that didn’t last, bars that did,
cafes and coffee-shops that keep up.
The magazine stall on the corner must have turned thirty,
the proprietors still furtively fingering
glossy foreign magazines like contraband.

What they’re really selling now
is ease. People come for love of mess, looking for a stab
of feeling, the suddenness of pain, any kind of intoxication.
Well-kept bodies who leave each year
more regretful than the last. Running from silence
into noise. Even the rooftop Balinese illusion of Café 211,
four storeys above ground, can’t hide their boredom.

Isn’t this the life? That languorous drowning of the senses?
Isn’t this defeat so subtle, our bohemian afterlife,
token as a piece of heaven, resounding in seclusion,
all the world will let you have
until the hunger you came from
dies from inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man on the void deck,
already forty when these streets were laid, still laughs
although his legs have jumped ship. Some night soon,
he says, I’ll turn off the lights in my room
and never see the sun again. You tell him no
in your head. The taxi that brought you here
is still out there, running for what it’s worth
to hunt down the kind of money
you can’t even buy lunch with; your fatigue
and unclaimed grief mark the air with sighs
disguised as breathing, and it will kill you one day
no matter what you do.
               So the struggle now is with the stiff
bolt on your front door, the stubborn wilting
of your balcony ferns, the straining of your neck
to catch one glimpse of the woman who loves you
in the best possible light.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Poem for an Engineer
 
 
This poem has no intention of changing the world
or even moving it one iota. For that you need
a more exact science: aeronautics, civil engineering.
You need plenty of expertise, money, management,
countless nights redrafting plans in the lonely grove
of your cubicle. While you calculate angles, calibrate
cross-shafts and supporting structures, your wife
has fallen away into sleep, your dog beguiled
by the slow wheeling of the moon on its careless axis.
This is serious work. What do poems know about
the imperatives of balance and stress, the calculus
of load-bearing metres? This one spent its childhood
dissecting sonnets, as you grazed, in the class
next door, on vast plains of lines and numbers.
While you struggled with compass and slide rule,
it was dividing dactyls from iambs, dreaming up
wild rivers, airborne castles, towers kissing sky.

Not for you, whose shoulder is to the hard stone
of this life, whose idea of sleep is one long dull
ache in the back of the neck you cannot reach.
But you are almost done. You check the figures
one last time, as the poem watches, innumerate
and invisible. Finishing for the night, gifting
schematics to the unmagical gloom; straight
lines on paper that will one day become a bridge,
a skyscraper, a lighter-than-air miracle.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Incendium Amoris
 
 
“Burning incense could cause cancer according to a scientific study conducted by researchers from Taiwan, who found high levels of carcinogens in the smoke of incense burned in Buddhist temples.”
               Associated Press (2 Aug 2001)
 
 
 
“I have groped my breast seeking whether this burning were from any bodily cause outwardly. But when I knew that it was only kindled inwardly from a ghostly cause, and that this burning was nought of fleshly love or concupiscence, in this I conceived it was the gift of my Maker.”
               Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love (14th C)
 
 
 
I
 
 
Now we know our prayers
are killing us. Offer incense, set flame
to sandalwood, give your soul
to the votive glow of oil lamp and candle;
all it summons is this secret bird of prey,
silence fluttering beneath the rib-cage.
So the slow burn towards divinity
begins from within, after all: ashes to ashes,
flesh expiring from smoke into grace.
Gather enough faith
and it could kill a city.
 
 
 
II
 
 
We sensed the bigger picture that day
on Jurong Island: refineries humming
like desert temples; land gathered and burnt
for one purpose only. On the horizon
smokestacks tower like Seventh Month joss,
under whose gaze even light wavers,
cowed into sunset. Second after second
the waste flares roar
their fierce syllable of
love
love
love
 
 
 
III
 
 
How often we fall to the naked gaze of fire,
trusting the blaze of fact, faith, desire
to light the way out from ourselves to wholeness.
As if salvation is earned by becoming less,
by feeding our dreams to the right combustion.
Does the soul hide in plasma? Is God a question?
The unsolved science of this calculable space,
whose name resides in the geometry of light?
Perhaps freedom gleams in answers which escape
us, eludes our sense of what could be. In which case
we are more than what a quantity of ash might
hold, and what we seem to lose, released from shape
only. Any day soon, we could stumble on paradise
in the embers of here and now, and what we sacrifice.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
To Go to S’pore
 
After Zagajewski’s ‘To Go to Lvóv’
 
 
To go to S’pore. Which station
for S’pore, if not in a dream, at dusk, when rain
glistens on chrome. When Mass Rapid
Trains and Light Rail Trains are borne
to all corners. To leave in a hurry for S’pore,
night and day, in August or in May, but early,
but only if S’pore exists, if it is to be
found within the bounds
of this island and not just
in the colour of my passport, of my smart card;
if the smell of raintrees after thunderstorm,
of angsana, of frangipani, still lingers
like fresh smoke; if the canals brim
and grumble like epithets in Hokkien, vanish
beneath ground. To pack up and go, to leave
and never look back, at 5 p.m. to cease
like shop windows, while beneath the whirl
of fans in coffee shops, geckos chatter
their politics. But the office tower rises, straight
as the law, and everyone standing
in its shadow, and a mop and bucket leaning
on window glass, and our dream which hadn’t
come yet, only concrete, and litter-bins and the
rainbow pulse of new pubs set to music, the low
bass tremble of bumboats, rocking.
Always too much of S’pore, no one
could fathom the depths of its neighbourhoods,
walk the inside trails between each block and hear
the creak and hiss of each brick speaking, scalded
by sun, at night the city’s muteness, the dead
stillness in Shenton Way unlike that of temples
where monks keep silence full of unseen rivers.
In Liang Seah street history spilled
in unlit stairwells and on window louvres
swinging and shutting by themselves, in china
blue ceramic tiles, in flour, in the smell of eggs,
the form of feathers plastering the walls, in green
muck collecting in rusty pipes, fronds growing
where laundry once sprouted and the streets
played percussion and the air singed, the procession
of the devout sang like kings of the world
toward the temple gates. People in such frantic joy
they didn’t want to stay indoors. So much life
it burst and flooded every street, it cracked the sky in
thunder and fireworks, the new year lived over
and over. My granny as she stood at the window
calling for my father, dinner ready and
steaming in the evening light and neighbours
shouting from windows, watching out for
trouble and the next meal and nothing tentative
as hope. An uncle slaved himself blind
reading by candlelight, while my father was out
catching fireflies. The health inspector came
and my grandfather bought him a drink
and covered the cockroaches with his sole, and
got away with it. Even then
there was too much of S’pore, it overflowed
each drain, came down as rain, so much and yet
none; what was there spawned, grew, cut
into shape not without love and now the green
June springs from every square, verdant wigs
pulled over everything. Weeds, attap, kampong
and five-foot way fell away as the towers rose,
pushing out above the temples, people shuffled on,
handbags and wallets full of tomorrow,
and every estate growing into each other,
and everyone a leaseholder, and now in a hurry
to just go, and somewhere to come and go from,
S’pore tugged every which way,
S’pore clutched in the small palm of the sea,
becoming and flowing in like tears, tides, currents,
rivers run beneath the surface everywhere
 
 
 
 
from When the Barbarians Arrive (Arc Publications, 2012).

Order When the Barbarians Arrive.
 
 
 
Listen to a podcast at the Scottish Poetry Library where Ryan Van Winkle discusses language identity, Singapore literature and poetic practice with Alvin at the StAnza 2013 poetry festival.

Alvin writes about poetry in Singapore for The Poetry Society website.

S J Fowler interviews Alvin for Poetry Parnassus.

Order Tumasik: Contemporary Writing from Singapore.

Visit Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Softblow and Asymptote.
 
 
 
*
 
 

Gratitude blooms

 
 
 
 
“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.”
 
– Albert Schweitzer
 
 
 
 
“Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers – silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.”
 
– Naomi Shihab Nye, from ‘Two Countries’
 
 
 
 
“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

– Marcel Proust
 
  
 
 
“You can have the other words – chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly but I’ll take it.”
 
– Mary Oliver
 
 
 
 
“Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences.
 
Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.
 
Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets,
          katydids and cicadas,
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over.
 
Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.”
 
– Anne Porter, from ‘A List of Praises’
 
 
  
 
“Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic.”
 
– John Henry Jowett
 
 
 
 
“One regret dear world, that I am determined not to have when
I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough.”
 
– Hafiz of Persia
 
 
 
 
“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled –
to cast aside the weight of facts
 
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.”
 
– Mary Oliver, from ‘The Ponds’
 
 
 
 
“Praise the bridge that carried you over.”
 
– George Colman
 
 
 
 
“over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
 
with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is”

– W S Merwin, from ‘Thanks’
 
 
 
 

Jonathan Taylor’s Musicolepsy

© Image by nickrphotography.com

 
 
 
As well as his poetry collection, Musicolepsy (Shoestring Press, 2013), Jonathan Taylor is author of the novel Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), and the memoir Take Me Home: Parkinson’s, My Father, Myself (Granta Books, 2007). His short-story collection, Kontakte and Other Stories, will be published by Roman Books in mid-2013. He is editor of the anthology Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud (Salt, 2012).

Jonathan is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University in Leicester in the United Kingdom, and co-director of arts organisation and small publisher, Crystal Clear Creators. Originally from Stoke-on-Trent, he now lives in Leicestershire with his wife, the poet Maria Taylor, and their twin daughters, Miranda and Rosalind.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Joy
 
     After Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia
 
 
At sixty, she woke into a non-stop Ode to Joy
and couldn’t switch off these L.P.-ish hallucinations,
playing at the wrong r.p.m.s, squeaking like a toy,
or yawningly slow, tired from incessant celebrations.

Beethoven stalked her like Pink Panther’s cloud
to Post Office, hairdresser’s, on the phone,
her nerve-deafness, once so quiet, now loud,
filled with O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!

G.P.s and consultants gave her E.E.G.s, M.R.I.s
that showed blossomings in the basal ganglia
up to the thalamocortical systems, musical lies
scored for chorus and full orchestra.

They put her on gabapentin, risperidone,
checked for cerebral aneurysms,
gave her quetiapine, prednisone,
an analyst tried therapy for narcissism,

but nothing worked, and she felt stampeded
by pressing Brotherhood, drunk from Nature’s wine,
recitatived, prestoed and allegro energicoed
into submission and marched into line.

Forced to ear-drink at the Brüsten der Natur,
she remembered nursing long ago
as a young girl: “You’re so mature,”
they’d said, but life had never felt so slow

before or after, when she’s tried returning
to college and its choir – no longer wanted:
“You’ll need time for grieving not learning,”
they’d said, meaning: forget life, get husbanded,

have another. But she’d thought she hadn’t
liked the first, till too late, Beethoven-haunted,
Joy’s timpani seemed more like a mallet,
the trumpets like tannoys, feedback-distorted;

and, as time went on, the ear assaults shortened,
no longer whole recitatives or verses, and soon
all that was left was Tochter and Götterfunken,
those sporano As, over and over again.

Still the music never reached its end,
the coda and As stretching to eternity,
as with Schumann, who was maddened
by that note, sirened by Angels into lunacy,

or those endless As in Shostakovich Five:
“You will rejoice, you will rejoice, you will rejoice,”
beating you with a Joy-stick till you’re barely alive,
and you know you do not have a choice.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Things Not to Talk About in Ante-Natal Classes:
A Simple Guide for Fathers-to-be
 
 
Caesareans, bleeding,
bottle-feeding,
pain,

intensive care, depression,
hypertension,
prematurity,

because it’s a snyonym for pain, poetry,
religion in case one couple is evangelical,
Darwinism and certainly not the Fittest and Survival,
cosmology because everyone’ll think you’re eccentric,
politics, global economics, sex, race, films, music,

everything else.

If in doubt, sit behind your partner slightly
smiling redundantly, embarrassed mildly
by what your sperm has done.

Afterwards, take your partner by the hand,
help her to the car, close doors, central lock
and chatter together like a pair of puppet-socks
about anything you want.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Critic As Baby
 
 
Watching my baby daughter turning
pages of Lost Puppy Finds a Home,
patiently, steadily,
as if she were Adenoid Hynkel
spinning the globe,
pointing where to strike next,
reminds me of my father toward the end
turning pages of a TV dinosaur book,
pictures upside-down,
monsters of the Cretaceous inverted,
hanging onto the world by talons,
Hebrew-like, world and history turning backward
from apocalyptic comet to T. Rex to protozoa,
turning, turning, back to world as lava,
then forward again to the end credits –

and it would be all too easy to see
such turning as mechanical echo of forgotten skill,
to see my daughter’s turning
as pre-echo of forgetting
before she can even remember,
too easy to criticise
when all we in-betweeners do is the same,
perhaps worse, in our turnings forward, backward,
our atomising Middlemarch and Pound,
just as I look up and find my daughter
shredding Lost Puppy, Eliot, dinosaurs
into an efflorescence of snowflakes,
an intertextual blizzard,
but with more pleasure,
and perhaps more beauty.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Tantalus-by-Proxy
 
 
On a verandah in Cypriot high summer
my daughter is threatening to eat petals.

          On a sofa ten years ago
          my father keeps threatening the edge.

On a verandah in Cypriot high summer
my daughter keeps toddling to the petunias.

          In a living room ten years ago
          my father keeps shuffling to get up.

On a verandah in Cypriot high summer
I keep putting my wine down, getting up.

          In a living room ten years ago
          I keep groaning from the piano stool.

On a verandah in Cypriot high summer
I keep taking the petals from her hand.

          In a living room ten years ago
          I keep pulling him back: “Stay still.”

On a verandah in Cypriot high summer
I sit back down again, sip the wine.

          In a living room ten years ago
          I sit back down again, stroke a discord.

But on a verandah in Cypriot high summer
my daughter is trundling to a flower box.

          On a sofa ten years ago
          my father keeps threatening the edge …

… and I know I’ll have to put down my wine
          or leave the piano stool again, again,

and with inch by painful inch of toddling
          and shuffling and edging and threatening

comes that creeping horror
that the precipice of sofa ends
only in the Underworld,
that caring for someone
is Sisyphian in its circularity,
even Tantalusian, or at least
Tantalusian-by-proxy,
the seemingly endless repetition of the
cared-for almost getting the dangerous
or poisonous or self-harmful
thing he or she wants –
to eat rainbow petals,
to escape the safety of a sofa
for a potentially hip-breaking,
          ankle-twisting,
                    nose-shattering
                              floor –

and you the carer are condemned
to be Hades,
forever taking away
what Tantalus thinks
Tantalus wants.
 
 
 
 
from Musicolepsy (Shoestring Press, 2013).

Order Musicolepsy here or here.

Visit Jonathan’s website.

Read three poems at Connotation Press: An Online Artifact.
 
 
 
*

Sabotage Reviews and the Saboteur Awards

 
 
 
 
Sabotage Reviews and the Saboteur Awards
 
by Richard T. Watson
(with James Webster and Claire Trévien)
 
 
 
Sabotage Reviews started off modestly as a blog in May 2010 with reviews mostly by Claire Trévien, and has developed into to a website with three editors and a small but dedicated team of regular reviewers. Early Sabotage focused on small-scale published poetry, but in the last two years we’ve tried to expand on this by reviewing short story collections, zines, anthologies and novellas as well as published and performance poetry. Claire wanted Sabotage to be about more than her own tastes, which lie firmly in the world of poetry pamphlets and magazines, and so James Webster and Richard T. Watson joined as Performance and Fiction Editors, with their own varied interests.
 
 
It’s still very much a labour of love dependent on the goodwill of strangers to send us their 500 to 1000 word reviews, of editors to come home from work and press ‘track changes’ and, of course, of publishers, organisers, authors and performers, to introduce us to, send us, and invite us into their worlds.
 

Our Saboteur Awards mark Sabotage’s birthday each year, but our third birthday is the first time we’ve held a party. It’s on May 29th and we’re really looking forward to it. We’ve experimented with different ways of choosing who wins, and this year – wanting readers and audiences (not just of Sabotage) to be able to have their say – we’ve opened the whole thing up to popular vote. The party’s going to be a big celebration of indie lit, with music, poetry and awards, as well as a book fair.
 
 
Over the course of the last three years, an increasing concern at the heart of the website has been to maintain a balance between encouragement and criticism. On the one hand, we believe in giving exposure to small scale endeavours, but don’t think that anyone benefits from blanket approval and, of course, each reviewer is entitled to their own opinion. A good example of that practice is Éireann Lorsung’s review of Colette Sensier’s Holdfire Press pamphlet which, while finding much to admire in the writing, also highlighted a worrying trend among Western writers to practice what she calls poetic tourism. The review was one of many of the new Holdfire Press pamphlets covered by different reviewers who brought their unique viewpoint to them.
 
 
Our growing team of fiction reviewers has covered, among others, Danish mini-sagas, demonic rock bands, lesbian steampunk, and a twelve-page story of a cockroach at the Gates of St Peter – a collection of real quality writing (and some howlers!) that Richard likes to think of as the Fiction stable. Not everything in our stable strictly counts as ‘fiction’ or prose, but this isn’t something that’s ever bothered us. Sabotage aims to give some exposure to the ephemeral, the self-published, the unspoken-for, and strict categories get in the way of that; so our ‘Fiction’ happily encompasses publications that include a variety of forms which might otherwise not get reviewed because they don’t fit into an easily-described box.
 
 
For example, US-based Armchair/Shotgun has short fiction alongside poetry and visual artwork – and Richard’s particularly proud that A/S #2 went on to win the second of our Saboteur Awards. For sheer baffled disgust, our review of the Swedish Anger Mode is worth reading in full. That said, one of our favourite reviews has been Tori Truslow’s review of Steam-Powered II: The Lesbian Steampunk Anthology, if only for that airship comparison.
 
 
The performance side of Sabotage is one that folds very neatly into our envelope of ‘Reviews of the Ephemeral’. Because of the nature of spoken word, there are aspects of a performance or a certain poetry night that will not and cannot be recreated; nuances to one reading that change by the next, or things that went unfortunately and hilariously wrong. It’s one of the real pleasures of editing for Sabotage that we manage to catch and preserve some of these individual moments and serve them up to a wider audience (such as the ridiculous exchange between poet Paul Askew and his mother or the time a champagne bottle spontaneously popped during a performance by Amy Acre). And due to the kind of ‘crowd-sourced’ nature of open mic and slam events many of the spoken word artists we’ve ended up reviewing are people who have simply turned up on the off-chance of a reading and whose performances otherwise might have gone unnoticed. Instead, they’ve been caught in our reviewers’ crosshairs, suddenly receiving a barrage of critique or praise that was unexpected and has almost always been appreciated.
 
 
We’ve had the pleasure of covering a whole host of different events, but favourites include our Edinburgh Fringe coverage and Koel Mukherjee’s review of Carmina’s Poetry Tease, which exemplified our attempts to capture the spirit and feel of an event.
 
 
What we hope to achieve with these awards is a balance similar to the balance of the site’s coverage as a whole; the winners will be decided by popular vote, but there will also be a critical counterpart in the form of a review or interview to go along with the results. We want to celebrate the exciting things that are going on in underground literature, while at the same time encouraging greater quality by highlighting these excellent endeavours.
 
 
 
Visit Sabotage Reviews.

You can view the Saboteur Awards shortlist with a link to the voting page here.
 
 
 

‘Now and Then’ by Alison Brackenbury

 
 
 
 
Alison Brackenbury grew up in the countryside in Lincolnshire, in the North Midlands of England. She is descended from a family of farmworkers, including five generations of prize-winning shepherds. She was the first member of her family to go to university, having won a scholarship to Oxford.

From 1990 to 2012, she may have been Britain’s only poet in a boiler suit, as she helped to run the tiny metal finishing business which supported her husband’s family. Although town-based, she also managed to spend inexcusable amounts of time on the hills of Gloucestershire with a series of shaggy and unaffordable ponies.

Despite (and sometimes because of) these distractions, she has produced eight collections of poetry. She has also scripted a variety of poetry programmes which have been broadcast on BBC Radio, including Singing in the Dark, about the stubborn survival of traditional song, praised as ‘evocative, amusing, and utterly compelling’. Her work has won an Eric Gregory and a Cholmondeley Award. Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, wrote recently: ‘Alison Brackenbury loves, lives, hymns and rhymes the natural world and its people like no other poet’.

Alison Brackenbury’s latest collection is Then, published by Carcanet Press in 2013.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“Then draws on Alison Brackenbury’s lifetime’s experience of rural England, its people and its ways, and the threats to its survival. From the lapwings of her childhood Lincolnshire to the recurrent floods in Gloucestershire, where she has lived for many years, the poems reach urgently to both past and future, finding connections and disconnections. The signs of a changing climate are emblematic of larger erasures. The poems keenly focus the beauty and the harshness of the natural world. They remind us of our own fragility, and our responsibility: “We are made of water. But we forgot”.”
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Now and Then
 
 
Time gallops. In my twenties, when I published my first collection, Dreams of Power, I thought time both infinite and irritating. The young wear black (beautifully) because they are, of course, immortal. In my twenties, despite my full time job and the other distractions I invented for myself (like horses), I did have time to write. As long as I ignored most of the claims of most of the people in my life (and all the claims of a dusty house) I could spend hours, for example, struggling with long poems.

Why did I try so hard to write long poems? It was partly because of the example of past time. I had ‘read English’ at university. Absorbed and admiring, I had read Paradise Lost, The (unfinished) Faerie Queene, and The Prelude. My lengthy ambitions were not unique. Time can be a dangerous friend to the writer, who may end up writing for its own sake.

But, as a publisher once said to me, a first book comes with a weight of experience behind it: the whole of the poet’s previous life. So I was very lucky to have time to unleash this flood (and to start to build some techniques to harness it). The results were wildly uneven. I very much admire young poets who now tell me that they are careful about what they offer for publication. I was not. Especially in my first two collections, poems were rushed into print.

There might have been a certain logic to this. It was the period when I fell off a galloping (riding-school) horse and thirteen other horses leapt over me. Curled up like a fallen jockey, I counted each one. Time did slow then, as hooves and bellies flashed above me. Only the tip of one hoof brushed my shoulder.

I was lucky again when it came to the gallop of poetry. My publisher was at my shoulder, tactfully preventing me from publishing two long poems in my second book, Breaking Ground. The unpublished one was, I’d now guess, as suspect as my riding technique. (I must still have it somewhere, buried in a wardrobe.) Yet that book also contained, I am sure, some of the best lines I ever wrote. The young of the tribe are meant to be its risk-takers, to rush into fights – or childbirth.

Then I did have a child. Again, I note, admiringly, that several younger poets whose work I value now write as well – or even better – after their first child. Some women, after childbirth – no names, no packdrill! – seem to have lost publishers, direction, or even the desire to write. What most parents lose, of course, is ‘free’ time.

I can warn writers of either gender that the arrival of a child proves starkly that writers need two kinds of time. One is spent scribbling, or pattering furiously on a keyboard. That time may still be there, if children will sleep, and your household will tolerate some degree of disorder. (Until my daughter was at least three, it was not a good idea to cross our floors barefoot.) But there is another kind of time, when you are apparently doing other tasks, but the mind is quietly brewing and brooding. It cannot do that with children tugging at your sleeve, spilling drinks or fighting. This can be terribly frustrating both for the demanding infant and the de-railed poet, now parent.

I also faced a double-trick of lost time. My shreds of technique seemed to have disappeared into some maternal abyss. I was writing in fragments, clutching at straws. (There are no long poems in my third book, Christmas Roses, and technically, it is probably my most unsure.) Then pockets of time began to open up, as my daughter began school and Went to Tea with friends. I remember, during one of these sudden absences, sitting down and writing a poem which, once again, rang strongly, like the legs of a fit horse.

But this poem had bitter echoes, of history and power. For time brings new subjects. Having children exposes you to the raw mess of your world, in hospitals without enough midwives, and in schools where ceilings fall in and bullying goes unchecked, while the middle classes scramble for places in small grammar schools, or demand inflated professional wages to ship their children off to the immaculate private school, half a mile from the state classroom’s splintered plaster.

I came to look back at my own work with equal severity. I decided, rightly, that too many badly groomed poems had galloped into print. I also decided, probably wrongly, that I would leave a seven year gap before I published my fourth collection, 1829. An excellent young poet recently told me of their plan to delay the publication of their second collection. I strongly advised against this.

For, despite the appearance of a Selected Poems in the early Nineties, I am sure there are early readers of mine who now think that I am dead, or have mercifully abandoned poetry to its own devices. I must add, in my self-defence, that those ‘lost’ years were probably some of my busiest, spent on horses, travel, time-consuming activities with my daughter, and on grass-roots politics. Some poets ramble in middle-age. I did not have time.

When I was an impatient, time-rich, younger poet, I sometimes cast around for subjects. As the Millennium rose drunkenly over the horizon I found, soberly, that subjects I would never have chosen had descended on me, following death and a dark period. Every family has its monsters and demons. Sometimes they all arrive together.

“Then life, obligingly, showed teeth”. (This quotation comes from ‘Leaving Cheltenham’, a poem in my new collection, Then.) I did not, in fact, leave Cheltenham. But I began to realise that certain subjects were leaving me, especially a vein of love poetry which had become more and more guarded. Through cowardice as much as principle, I do not like writing directly about my living family. But, though I was writing more sparely, I began to sense a new season: stories of other lives, terrible events crashing in from the world beyond my own troubles, which echo through my fifth and sixth collections, After Beethoven, and Bricks and Ballads.

As their titles suggest, strangely, this was a season of music. My daughter grew up and left home. I again had that dual time to write, both to scribble, and to brood. The new century’s extravagance and disasters had an unexpected accompaniment: a revival of Britain’s traditional songs. I listened to these more and more, both in the echoing recordings of dead singers, and the assured (and regional ) voices of the very young. I called my seventh collection, after a poem about Edward Thomas: Singing in the Dark. A new time had come for what Thomas called ‘the old songs’, and for my own poetry.

My new collection, my eighth, has just been published in my sixtieth year, (by Carcanet Press, who have published me loyally since the beginning). It is called Then. There is no poem in the book of that name. Why did I choose that urgent, cryptic title? I have come to see this book as a swinging hinge. In one direction, it opens back, into my country family. There are poems about my father, who started work as a ploughboy, and told me the litany of the great horses’ names: “Spanker, Sharper, Prince and Bob/ were horses that my father drove”. There are poems about his family, a dynasty of notable shepherds:
 
 
          My grandfather, his tallest son,
          grasp ribbons, cups to keep.
          Gone, gone. All waste. And yet they laugh.
 
 
Past time is not all darkness. My parents, like my grandfather, had a passion for observing birds. Some. almost driven out by the practices of modern farming, have now begun to return, like the lapwings I saw in the last year of my mother’s and father’s life.
 
 
          And I forgot their massive arcs of wing.
          When their raw cries swept over, my head spun

          With all the brilliance of their black and white
          As though you cracked the dark and found the sun.
 
 
But the hinge swings two ways. Then begins with the short account of a past Lincolnshire flood, in the small town which was my birthplace:
 
 
          When you heard the water whisper
          in Crown Yard and Sailors’ Alley,
 
 
Just before the book’s door closes, there is a longer poem: the account of another flood, which left the small town in Gloucestershire, where I now live, without mains water for eight days:
 
 
          Then came the panic. For the pumps were drowned.
          In wastes of water, taps would soon run dry.
          Then people fought in queues across the town
          as bottled water, glittering, swept by
          on rain-soaked pallets, for the rain was sharp
          as ice. Cars loaded. Then the shops fell dark.
 
 
We had seen the future, and it was not going to work. The floods of 2007 convinced many people in Gloucestershire that our climate had, indeed, swung against us. Like everyone who continues to get up in the morning, I cherish unreasonable hope. The final poem of Then is called ‘No’, but suggests, with timely perversity:
 
 
          Nothing in all history
          can reach to take your hand from me,
          the dark, the rain’s gift, O
          we should be glad.
 
 
Do I have any time left? I hope so. My country family (when not worn out by shepherding) was long-lived. I have poems, instead of sheep, to mill around younger, and patient editors. But I wonder about the circumstances in which even my own life will end.

Traditional farming, whose strengths are praised in Then, has been replaced by a very different way of treating land and stock. Cruelly intensive animal-rearing (world-wide) has over-used antibiotics. We may soon lose our best defences against infection. And what have we done, in my lifetime, to our fragile and beautiful world? I did not mean, as a young poet, to prophesy. If I must do so now, I do not want to be Cassandra.
 
 
          I cry like water. Do not hope.
          Switch off, then walk. Refuse to cope,
          in Hatherley, Hawling, Whaddon.

          The rivers rise, the doomed pumps hum,
          the walls are down, the waters come
          to Munich, Paris, London.
 
 
Now, the door swings. Soon it will be shut. What then? Time gallops. Listen.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The Trent rises, 1947
 
 
When you heard the water whisper
in Crown Yard and Sailors’ Alley,
when your husband saw the river
no longer lazy – swollen, free;
what did you grab, to take with you upstairs?
What would I take with me?

Would I snatch letters from the flood,
so their clearest lines and kisses
did not meet condoms, tampons, mud?
Save bills? Saucepans? Water misses
no hidden, plastered wire. No kettle could
boil. The fusebox hisses.

Computers, in a leaky boat?
They hauled fresh water, tins. The swell
of river made the hall a moat.
Tortoise to bucket! Chickens fell
into their bath. Aboard the Co-op’s milk float,
the pigs raised merry hell.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
The shepherd’s son’s photo-album
 
 
I could show you sad stories
as bright shy children peep
by wind-bent trees, grey ditches,
in crippled love that keeps

the girl a kitchen shadow
with fine hair, crooked teeth,
who, when brain tumours seize her,
rages into sleep.

The quick one fails all papers,
sits still, as clocks strike; eats.
But two work hard; one marries.
Here are the three fat sheep.

You laugh till pages quiver:
three perfect spheres with fleece
washed soft and deep as pom-poms,
three full moons stuffed with swedes.

They fill the narrow hill-lane
as marchers crowd a street.
They peer at us like judges.
They float on tiny feet.

Lined up with dangling nose ropes
they calmly wait their feast.
Only one glances sideways.
Beware a knowing beast.

Here I am, dandled. Orphaned lambs
strain to their bottles, deep
in rough grass by my smiling aunt
who has no child to keep.

My grandmother, in her long coat,
frowns till the ram stands meek.
Her youngest waves his camera
before his mind finds sleep.

My grandfather, his tallest son,
grasp ribbons, cups to keep.
Gone, gone. All waste. And yet they laugh.
Here are the three fat sheep.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
No
 
 
No one is ever good enough,
or kind enough.
No one stays awake
through the lovely rush of rain which fills our dark.
No one can hold the music.
They are counting coins or frowning,
they are toppling, they are drowning.
No one is good.

But nothing is as quick as us,
no screen can match us,
tape’s whirr catch us,
nothing tilts like sun
to light from sad.
Nothing in all history
can reach to take your hand from me,
the dark, the rain’s gift, O
we should be glad.
 
 
 
 
from Then (Carcanet Press, 2013).

Order Then here, here or here.

Visit Alison’s website.
 
 
Alison has a Facebook group, Poems from Alison, whose members receive a free new poem from her every two months. It can be found here.
 
 
 
*

Shaindel Beers’ The Children’s War and Other Poems

© Image by Catching Violet Photography

 
 
 
Shaindel Beers’ poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is currently an instructor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in the Eastern Oregon high desert town of Pendleton, and serves as Poetry Editor of Contrary. The Children’s War and Other Poems is her second collection with Salt Publishing.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“In the first half of The Children’s War and Other Poems, Shaindel Beers looks at artwork done by and about child survivors of war, embodying the voices of the children, their families, and the humanitarian aid workers sent to help them. From there, the book opens out into an exploration of the war at home and the war within ourselves, exploring violence in mythology, domestic violence, and the wars that occur, sometimes, within our own bodies.
 
 
These poems act as a survival guide, showing that hope exists even in the darkest of places and that perhaps poetry is the key to our healing.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“Shaindel Beers’ The Children’s War and Other Poems is a poetry survival kit. It offers beauty and balance, provides necessary news of how to survive the war against innocence, how to start over — from a child’s point of view, and from a woman’s. The poems lend perspective that is both global and intimate.”
 
– Marilyn Kallet
 
 
 
“What Shaindel Beers offers us in this fine collection is a poetic humanizing and individualizing of the impersonal and ubiquitous violence that saturates the contemporary world. From a young Chechen girl who takes joy in the happiness she causes other passengers on the bus to a child drawing the cat she could not protect in the attack that killed her entire family, these poems show us unexpected reprieves from suffering alongside unfathomable new depths of horror. Given the ekphrastic nature of Beers’ project, we also feel something of the war journalist’s documentation in addition to the poetic humanizing effect. The combination is emotional and heady stuff. These poems are rare in that they have an aesthetic, emotional, and political impact in equal measure. You would do well to read them many times.”
 
– Okla Elliott
 
 
 
“In the title sequence of The Children’s War and Other Poems, an atelier of ekphrastic lyrics based on artworks by children from Chechnya, Darfur, and other recent war zones, Shaindel Beers tells us “There are things that can happen that you can’t draw”. Yet with gem-hard language and heartrending imagery, she confronts us with the unspeakable reality of “children being scattered/ like a broken strand of brightly colored beads”. Beers joins the ranks of Edgar Lee Masters and Ted Kooser with her portraits of ordinary Americans, many of them women, devastated by physical and emotional hardship, but she enters risky and breathtaking territory all her own with her intimate portraits of domestic abuse and of her fears, as a new mother, that “violence is the one tool/ I have been given”. Yet for all their darkness, the poems find hope: in memory, in everyday beauty, in the bonds of love. “This isn’t much, but it’s the gift”, Beers assures students at a reservation, “the one gift, these stories, that can’t be taken away”. Shaindel Beers’ poems place a moral burden upon us, one that can’t be taken away, but they offer the strength to bear it up.”
 
– Temple Cone
 
 
 
*
  
 
 
Shaindel writes: 
 
 
“This book wouldn’t have been written if it were not for the Slate.com article ‘The Art of War’ by Dr. Annie Sparrow and Olivier Bercault, which first inspired me to pursue this project, as well as the countless humanitarians who catalogue and publish artwork done by and about children during war-time. Thank you so much for giving voices to the voiceless. Sources of artwork in book form include They Still Draw Pictures by Anthony L. Geist and Peter N. Carroll and Sunflowers in the Sand: Stories from Children of War by Lisa Curtin.
 
 
Corium Magazine has featured some of the artwork alongside the poems here and here.”
 

 
* 
  
 
 
After a drawing by Mercedes Comellas
Ricart, 13, during the Spanish Civil War
 
 
The plane drops a single black tear of a bomb
that tears a hole in the mountains. The station
bell is mute next to the air raid sirens, and we run,
leaving our bags at the station. Papá reaches for me;
Mamá reaches for Pilar, and we run, never quite grasping
hands, never quite touching. It is a ghost train, light grey
and see-through because we never got on. I didn’t finish
the tracks because I never learned where they would go.
 
 
 
Artwork:
 
After a drawing by Mercedes Comellas Ricart, 13,
during the Spanish Civil War
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
After Martija’s Watercolor, Croatia
 
 
There are things that can happen that you can’t draw.
A soldier ripping off the baby’s diaper and slamming him
into the wall because it will be easier if the baby
cannot cry. Your mother without a head. You paint splotches.
Green and blue are peaceful. That was before.
Now, everything is red. The red mixed with the green
becomes a sickening brown. The brown that covered
your thighs when the soldier was done with you.
 
 
 
Artwork:
 
After Martija’s Watercolor, Croatia
From Sunflowers in the Sand: Stories from Children of War
by Leah Curtin
 

 
*
 
 
Little Amira Honors Her Cat, Pepa
 
 
Fourteen in hiding in a basement
and we all need something to protect.
The men guard the door, the women guard
the children. Grandma holds me, and I hold
Pepa. Pepa himself was love. So when I draw
him, his face is an orange heart. He is smiling
with his mouth and his eyes and his whiskers.
He wears a blue flower as a collar. When
the grenade blew open the shelter, the world
became only Lejla and me. No Mama, no
Grandma, no Jusuf, no Pepa. No Pepa.
I draw Pepa over and over. No one else
because he was mine to take care of.
When I grow up, I will own a pet store.
I will have ten cats named Pepa.
I will do a better job because
I will be bigger.
 
 
 
Artwork:
 
Little Amira Honors Her Cat, Pepa
From Sunflowers in the Sand: Stories from Children of War
by Leah Curtin 

 
 
 
*
 
 

Painting by Azerbaijan War Survivor
Nighar Aliyeva, age 9
 
 
The woman could be any mother out walking
a baby in the cool, night air, hoping the twelve
stars, the moon, will lull him to sleep.
In her blue caftan, her black hijab, she could be
Mary, the mother of Jesus, Fatimah, daughter
of Muhammad. The three bloody men
in the background believe she is one;
the men who shot them believe she’s the other.
 
 
 
Artwork:
 
Painting by Azerbaijan War Survivor Nighar Aliyeva, age 9
 

 
*
 
 
 
Pain: A Tutorial
 
 
First, a memory. One painful enough to scar.
To bruise. Your father leaving. Your brother’s
death you’ve blamed yourself for since childhood.
If only you hadn’t said, Fine, then! Leave! If you
hadn’t played with matches. Had watched him
closer down by the river. Now, press slowly
with scalpel or finger the outline of the wound.
Remind yourself daily. A song you used to sing
when you were little. How you would lie
on your backs and make up stories about cloud animals.
The smell of the flowers in Grandma’s window boxes
just before—
 
Find someone who feels designed to fill this void.
You’ll know by matching scars. Let him press them,
too. He’ll say, No wonder your father left.
I wonder how your brother would feel if he were
here. He knows all the tricks. The little places inside you
no one else has ever gone. Pretend this is the pain
you deserve. That this is the closest love there is.
Let him press. Sometimes hold the scalpel yourself.
Let him guide your hand along the contours. He
cuts so beautifully. He’s shaping you. You’re his
lovely. His beloved. He’ll be so lost without you.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
There Are Men …
 
 
Who are at once scalpel and salve.
They have only one spigot for honey or gasoline,
and you don’t know which you will get until it hits
your tongue. Sip slowly. Protect the soft palate.
They will whittle you until you become
the loneliest statue on the planet. Some days
this will make you feel special and singular.
Your pedestal will be dizzying. When you
and the other muses lean toward one another,
some of you will shatter. This is to be expected;
this was always the plan. There will be more of you;
there always are, always have been.
 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Origins
 
 
My parents were lonely geniuses.
I found their letters to each other in a plastic bag,
my twentieth year, when my mom was in jail,
and I was trying to sort out the life they’d given
my siblings and me. You were the smartest person
I’d ever met they’d each written to the other.
But they couldn’t function like other parents.
It was all yelling and name-calling
and eventually knives and guns. And I grew up,
wondering where smart would get you.
But it always seemed better than the alternative—
my friends, whose parents had plenty of love
but no books, no imagination, a limited vocabulary
with which to rip out the heart of the beloved.
 
 
 
 
from The Children’s War and Other Poems (Salt Publishing, 2013).
 
Order your personalised, signed copy directly from Shaindel here.
 
Order The Children’s War and Other Poems from the Salt Shop.
 
Visit Shaindel’s website.
 
 
 
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