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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  
*

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

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