” … the furthest distances I’ve travelled
have been those between people.”
 
- Leontia Flynn, ‘The Furthest Distances I’ve Travelled’
These Days (Jonathan Cape, 2004)

“There’s no posterity to write for.  I’m writing now for mutated arthropods.”
  
- Peter Reading interviewed by Robert Potts, Oxford Poetry,
Winter 1990/91

 
“You carry in yourself all the obstacles necessary to make your realisation perfect. Always you will see that within you the shadow and the light are equal. If you discover a very black hole, a thick shadow, be sure there is somewhere in you a great light. It is up to you to know how to use one to realise the other.”
 
- Sri Aurobindo

 
Ross Sutherland was born in Edinburgh in 1979. He was included in The Times’s list of Top Ten Literary Stars of 2008. His debut poetry collection, Things To Do Before You Leave Town (Penned in the Margins), was published in January this year. Ross is also a member of the poetry collective Aisle16 with whom he runs Homework, an evening of literary miscellany in East London. His one-man poetry/comedy show, The Three Stigmata of Pacman, debuts at the Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington in January 2010. Visit Ross’s website.
 

Ross Sutherland

    
 
Critical praise for my last relationship
Ross Sutherland
   
At first glance, our faces appeared little more
than frayed notes, hinting at a distant mood.
Yet, on reflection, there was something compelling in that fraying:
My beard was loaded with the channeled pressure of something
                                                       being said.
Her eyes were not one thought, but two.
   
If you kept your nerve and stuck with us
You would have found that each day we spent together
had a distinct tone and shape.
Our subject range was impressive:
A man regresses himself through his previously owned automobiles,
A snow crystal grows synthetically on a petri dish,
Ovid laments his exile from Rome.
   
In winter, we underwent an odd shift of register.
Humour masked an aposiopesis. I trailed off into northern slang.
My invocation of a lost England was haunting in its fragility,
A place Frank Ormsby at the Belfast Telegraph described as
                                                      ‘a world of cries’.
  
She was as personal as Emily Dickinson.
I was as striking.
We were happy spanning joy and death together.
Cutting out every word we dared,
then walking out upon empty streets,
heat rising up into the negative space above us.
  
There were occasional poor lines,
but they were made noticeable by their rarity.
A meditation on the exchange of Christmas gifts
whilst well written,
felt too much like a generic picture of despair.
  
   
 
Published in Things To Do Before You Leave Town
(Penned in the Margins, 2009).
  
Buy Things To Do Before You Leave Town.
  
Check out a new animation based on another of Ross’s poems from Things To Do Before You Leave Town.

Patricia Leighton is an ex-middle school teacher from Worcestershire, United Kingdom, who has been writing poems for a number of years on and off (with time out to indulge in some children’s writing). She has work published in a number of magazines including Rialto, Iota, Fire, Dream Catcher, Nottingham Poetry International, Obsessed with Pipework, Spokes and a couple of Bridport Prize anthologies.
 
 
The Burgundy Madonna
Patricia Leighton
 
Lady, was there always this distance,
this gap of mutual love?
 
Mixing his colours with holy water,
crushed relics, prayers, was this
what the iconographer perceived
dipping his brush deep into his soul?
 
Sturdy and capable, your right hand
supports the Child’s bottom,
thumb tip open, pointing away:
‘So, this is it …’
And the Child perches,
stiff in blue and gold,
his face fitting like a flesh glove
between your cheek and eye,
feet resting delicately together,
onto the twin of that large hand.
 
There could have been a warmth
but, almost grotesquely,
you hold the figure of a young man:
head, limbs, torso
perfectly proportioned,
his face already written upon.
 
No infant dribblings,
no soft roundnesses,
no puffy vulnerability
of baby flesh,
no unmapped
innocence.
 
Was this it? Your eyes stare
at no-one but the painter
and over decades, centuries,
into how many other eyes
in candlelit churches, hovels,
apartments, palaces, galleries?
So much looking.
Would there have been so much
if there was no way in?
 
 
Previously published in Dream Catcher, Issue 19.
  
Subscribe to Dream Catcher.

  
Following in the footsteps of the filmmakers whose work it features — including Miranda July, Janie Geiser, Tracey Moffatt, Sally Potter, Cindy Sherman, Samira Makhmalbaf, Sadie Benning, Agnès Varda, Kim Longinotto, and Michelle Citron — There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond seeks to make trouble not only in the archives but also at the boundaries between artistic, industrial, political, critical, and disciplinary practices. Editors Corinn Columpar and Sophie Mayer have assembled scholarship that responds to women’s work in the interstices between different branches of the film industry, modes of filmmaking, national or transnational contexts, exhibition media, and varieties of visual representation in order to assess the exchanges such work enables.
  
Essays in the first three sections of There She Goes explore connections at the level of curation and exhibition, while the subsequent four consider local connections such as those between the film and the audience or between works within an oeuvre, down to those occurring on the surface of the film. Contributors reach beyond traditional screen cinema to interact with a larger field of artistic production, including still photography, music videos, installation art, digital media, performance art, and dance. Essays also pay particular attention to a variety of contextual factors that have shaped women’s filmmaking, from the conditions of production and circulation to engagement with various social movements and critical traditions, including, but not limited to, feminism.
  
By foregrounding fluidity, There She Goes presents a an exciting new appraisal of feminist film culture, as well as the intellectual and affective potential it holds for filmmakers and filmgoers alike. Scholars of film and television studies and gender studies will appreciate the fresh outlook of There She Goes. 
  
  
“The agenda of this volume is to examine the flows within and through feminist film culture by both foregrounding contemporary figures that embody the polymorphous potential of the present and revisiting, in order to re-vision, the past through a newly ground lens. The result is a collection of essays that draws attention to practices, texts, and producers whose interstitial nature makes them difficult to recognize in a discursive field conditioned by disciplinary divisions. Following in the footsteps of the filmmakers whose work it features, There She Goes seeks to make trouble not only in the archives but also at the boundaries — be they drawn around artistic, industrial, political, or critical practices. When Rachel Kushner asked Miranda July what kind of project she intended to tackle in the wake of the success of her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), July replied, with characteristic whimsy and sharp insight, “I have a gigantic plan, Rachel, and it involves performance, and fiction, and radio, and the WWW, and TV and features that are both ‘conventional’ and totally not. And when I’m done with my plan, when I’m very old, hopefully there will be a little more space for people living with profound doubt to tell their stories in all different mediums. Also Hollywood won’t be so sexist.” Locating her work as a commercial filmmaker within a much larger field of cultural production and social change, July functions as exemplar of a contemporary film culture wherein people and products are moving with increasing frequency among venues (gallery, theater, festival, and online), materials (celluloid and digital video), locales (including those in both the “First” and “Third” Worlds), modes of production (studio-financed and “independent,” auteurist and collaborative), and artistic roles (actor, director, producer, and writer) … There She Goes announces a new appraisal of filmmaking that is tied to and celebratory of feminist notions of fluidity and reinvention, as well as their intellectual and affective potential for filmmakers and filmgoers alike.”
   
from There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond, Editors: Sophie Mayer and Corinn Columpar (Wayne State University Press, 2009)
  
Buy There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond.

Marion Ashton

  
Marion Ashton works part-time as an English Advisor for an international geological consultancy company, both in the United Kingdom and in Houston, Texas. She is currently doing the MA course in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, with Andrew Motion and Jo Shapcott as tutors. She moved to Texas with her husband in 2001, and lived there for five years. That experience, together with all the travel involved, provided inspiration for many of her most recent poems, often to do with issues of personal identity and the strangeness of shuttling between two very different worlds. She has been widely published in poetry magazines, and is currently working towards a first collection. 
  
  
Cherries
Marion Ashton
 
My first time in your house – different from ours –
wide-arched hallway, Persian rugs, antique urns,
we, flushed intruders, skiving the last hours
  
of school – Physics, and magnetic force patterns:
how the filings had leapt into linking tracks,
plotting North to South fields of attraction
  
across thin paper sheets. You turned the locks
and drew the curtains so we’d not be seen,
but in that dusk room, lined with leather books,
  
the cherries in their china bowl still shone
like rubies. I’d only tasted Marascinos –
speared, lipstick-bright in Babycham;
  
these were French Burlats: blood-red globes,
plump on dark stalks, ripe for taking. One by one
we ate them, testing smooth skin in our mouths,
  
breaking into the flesh, teasing out the stones,
kissing them, picked clean, into each others’ palms.
  
  
An earlier version of ‘Cherries’ was published in Seam, Issue 29.
     
Read more of Marion’s poems at Arvon Friends Online and in her online pamphlet.

Cover art by Jennifer Delaney

    
I’m very pleased to have a new poem, ‘Augusta Fabergé’, included in the fourth issue of ouroboros review alongside wonderful work by fellow bloggers: Sophie Mayer, Annie Clarkson, Matt Merritt, Arlene Ang and Deb Scott, among many others.
  
Collin Kelley conducts an absorbing and candid interview with Cecilia Woloch, author of Sacrifice, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem, Late, Narcissus and Carpathia (BOA Editions, 2009), while Louisa Adjoa Parker asks important questions about black and minority ethnic publishing in the United Kingdom.
  
This issue also contains arresting visual art by Jennifer Delaney, Tammy Ho Lai-ming, Julie E. Bloemeke, Deb Scott and Jéanpaul Ferro.
  
Read it here.

    
Stephanie Leal is originally from New Jersey, USA. She received her MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2007 and is studying for her PhD in Philosophy. She currently lives in Norwich. Visit her website.
      

Stephanie Leal by Alexandra Bone

 
Boston Tea
Stephanie Leal
 
December 16, 1773
 
Sixteen sips from Chinese porcelain
espy the arbitrary day, the decisive act.
 
History began mohawking the bay:
vulcanizing sand dunes
 
cracking into champagned water,
bumbling with stamped-out Liberty,
 
the smuggling thief; a unanimous
continental conspiracy
 
to remember the misrepresentation,
remember the gunpowder;
 
convulsing welkin
obscures feathered headdress.
 
The tea still washes up
on the shores of Boston;
 
nothing was damaged or stolen
except a padlock
 
that was accidentally broken,
but anonymously replaced one week after.
    
   
Mrs Darling’s Kiss
Stephanie Leal
  
Lines lifted from Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie
   
Her mouth, a nightlight, conspicuously
sweet and mocking. On it was a kiss,
hung on the right-hand corner of her lips,
unobtainable. And yet he, clad in leaves
and juices that ooze from trees, easily
stole that kiss away. She pirouettes. Miss
Darling, now released from her innocence,
forgets how to fly, forgets how to see.
 
Although she is now dead and forgotten,
fairy dust still sparkles on the wood floor
(dog hair mixed with strands of white silk cotton).
She asked for a kiss, he gave an acorn.
Sewing youth to shadow never softens
the wrinkles: Napoleon slams the door.

      
Published in Metrophobia (Penned in the Margins, 2009).
   
Read more about Metrophobia.

  
Sarah Hesketh was born in 1983 and grew up in Pendle, East Lancashire. She attended Merton College, Oxford and holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA. In 2007 her collaboration with composer Alastair Caplin was performed at the Leeds Lieder Festival. She currently works as Assistant Director at the writers’ charity English PEN. Visit Sarah’s website.
  
  

Sarah Hesketh by Benjamin Thompson

  
July
Sarah Hesketh
  
               A month
                              of leaping trout.
The villagers dusted earth from their boots,
muttered of meanings caught lurking in the corn.
   
It befits such tales to begin with a stranger.
And so she seemed: the pots unwashed,
the blackberries gone to rot inside the door.
Nights were worse.
  
I am thrice blessed by moonlight, he declared,
and she kissed his scars in brazen view
of that common nunnery gossip.
  
Later, when the cows wouldn’t calve,
and her neighbour held a barrel
to the head of his hound, she would testify, only
  
to this: that his night-rushed skin
turned to smoke come the morning.
And the rising light across sky-rocked fields,
came like a command from home.
  
  
The Ravensbrück Seamstress
Sarah Hesketh
 
She bites buttons from the coats of dead men.
Fillets the seams of grain sacks for thread.
Spits when repairing the outline of stars.
 
Mud is murder on the hems. They come to her
for pockets that might save a photograph, a ring.
Cuffs are fashionably frayed that year. Waists cinched in.
 
When Reuben dies by the train track, in the rain,
twelve girls are wearing his socks by lunch.
Each thick red stitch she forces through their collars
 
irritates the skin, reminds them to struggle.
They break ice for mirrors for a treat when it’s cold,
worn faces, suddenly respectable to themselves.
  
  
Published in Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf
(Penned in the Margins, 2009).
   
Read more about Napoleon’s Travelling Bookshelf.