George Ttoouli

   
George Ttoouli was born in London in 1979 to Greek parents. An Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme, he co-founded the Heaventree Press in 2002, has worked in the education team at the Poetry Society, and co-edits poetry blogzine, Gists & Piths. He is now mostly skint, in Coventry. George’s articles, reviews, poems, short stories and essays have been published widely. In 2004 he received a Jerwood-Arvon Young Writing Apprenticeship to work on a novel, which he still hasn’t abandoned. Static Exile (Penned in the Margins, 2009) is his debut collection of poetry.
    
    
Nearing Extinction
George Ttoouli
  
You know this feeling.
The air carries a sense of erasure
and for the first time you notice
the streets are scrubbed of anyone
who might offer the phantom you’ve become
a smile. The last bus pulls from the kerb
like a page ripping out of a diary and every pavement
is a shapeless mask, all the escalators full
in other directions. You are
the only person on the platform
to which no train will arrive.
Something in you expects this, made a choice
to fill the streets with negative spaces
and the tyres of every feeling you have in you
to the point of bursting on the first bend.
First though, a flood; some dark mist
congeals into a whisper and scours the streets,
tubes, shops and cafés, kitchen counters
full of plastic-wrapped packets and bottles,
cuts clean with its meniscus every trace
of people from the surface. This is more
real than you imagined, the skin
of the manmade dulled to a dark grey,
until the world is a unified obsidian
though soft like the flank of a panther
nearing extinction, growling yet.
   
   
Published in Static Exile (Penned in the Margins, 2009).
   
Order Static Exile.
      

  
   
Join Penned in the Margins for the launch of George Ttoouli’s Static Exile and James Wilkes’ Weather A System at The Slaughtered Lamb, 34-35 Great Sutton Street, Clerkenwell, London, EC1V 0DX, on Sunday, 8 November, from 8pm till late. 
Nearest tube: Farringdon.
    
Simon Turner and Holly Pester will be supporting Ttoouli and Wilkes.
  
Entry is free.

Alison Brackenbury

   
Alison Brackenbury was born in Lincolnshire in 1953. She now lives in Gloucestershire, where she has worked for almost twenty years in the family metal finishing business. Her work has appeared in over fifty anthologies and has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award. She has recently scripted three programmes for BBC Radio 3, including Singing in the Dark, a celebration of the stubborn survival of traditional song: ‘Evocative, amusing, and utterly compelling’, Radio Times Choice. Her latest collection is Singing in the Dark (Carcanet, 2008). ‘A quiet lyricism and delight’, The Guardian ‘Mellifluous art’, Poetry Review, ‘Grace and authenticity’, Poetry London. New poems can be read at her site. Visit Alison’s Carcanet author page.
  
  
Bookkeeping
Alison Brackenbury
 
These are not (you understand) the figures
which send cold judgement into the backbone
which leave us, workless, shrunk at home
staring in a sky grown black with leaves.
 
These are like the ticking of a clock,
the daily sums, a van’s new brakes,
three drums of trichloroethylene on the back
of a thrumming lorry; yet they take
a day to make: thin bars of figures. While
I try to balance them, light scurries round
like a glad squirrel. Radio music stales –
until shut off.
  
What’s left when it is done,
the green book closed? There is no sea to swim
no mouth to kiss. Even the light is gone.
Bookkeepers drink over-sugared tea
lie in dark rooms; are always hunched and tired.
  
Where I stretch up the low bulb burns and whirls.
And in it, I see him. The dusky gold wing folds
across his face. The feathers’ sharp tips smudge
his margins.
  
Sunk, in his own shadows, deep
in scattered ledgers of our petty sins:
he, the tireless angel:
Unaccountably, he sleeps.
  
  
Published in Alison Brackenbury’s Selected Poems (Carcanet, 1991).
  
Read an interview with Alison published in Iota.
  
Order Alison’s latest collection, Singing in the Dark (Carcanet, 2008).
  
Order Alison’s latest pamphlet, Shadow (HappenStance, 2009).

 
  
Fiona Robyn is going to blog her next novel, Thaw (Snowbooks), starting on the 1st of March next year. The novel follows 32 year old Ruth’s diary over three months as she decides whether or not to carry on living.
  
To help spread the word she’s organising a Blogsplash, where blogs will publish the first page of Ruth’s diary simultaneously (and a link to the blog).
  
She’s aiming to get 1000 blogs involved – if you’d be interested in joining in, email her at fiona@fionarobyn.com or find out more information here.

     
Internationally renowned as a filmmaker, writer and composer, Sally Potter has always been a provocateur: as a feminist filmmaker and performer, a leading light of the BFI Production Board generation, a British filmmaker Oscar-nominated for a low-budget costume drama, and a pioneer of digital cinema. Drawing on exclusive access to archival materials and in-depth interviews with Britain’s most independent director, The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love opens up vivid historical, political, and cultural vistas to give the first full account of this extraordinary career.
            
“It seems only fitting that Sally Potter’s interactive digital archive is called SP-ARK. Fire is at the heart of her work, both visually and metaphysically. Onscreen, it signals the intensity of artistic labour that her films record, metaphorising both the ‘spark’ of inspiration and the energy of work. Fire’s meaning alters to trace the progress of empire in Orlando, from the burning torches that herald Elizabeth I to the burning trenches that mark Orlando’s passage into the reign of Elizabeth II. Fire burns on ice in the reign of King James, as Orlando falls in love. Fire makes steam in the hammam in Khiva. It burns in the hearths of the Great House in contrast to the damp green of the Victorian era as Orlando tends to Shelmerdine’s ankle. In early drafts of the screenplay, fire burnt the house to the ground as Orlando’s class rage turned her into the first Mrs. Rochester. In the finished film, torches burn in the Khan’s courtyard just before war breaks out, but fire is never simply associated with danger or madness. It marks moments of transformation. When fire meets ice, it is an elemental reflection of Orlando’s divided self. Flames burn on water at the opening of The Man Who Cried. They are like a screen of ‘reverie’ in which Suzie sees her memories unfolding.”
    
from The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love by Sophie Mayer (Wallflower Press, 2009)
      

Sally Potter

  
More about Sally Potter
  
Sally Potter’s work has, from the early 1970’s, embraced dance, performance, theatre, music and film. Since her first cult hit with Thriller (1979), Potter has concentrated on film and directed her first feature, The Gold Diggers, starring Julie Christie, in 1983. Potter then made a short, The London Story, and several documentaries before the internationally acclaimed and multi-award winning Orlando, starring Tilda Swinton. This was followed by The Tango Lesson (1996) and The Man Who Cried (2000), starring Christina Ricci, Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett and John Turturro. In 2004 Potter made Yes, starring Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, and Sam Neill. Potter then directed Carmen for English National Opera in Autumn 2007. Potter’s new film, Rage, starring Judi Dench, Jude Law, Steve Buscemi, Simon Abkarian and Dianne Wiest is released in 2009.
  
Visit Sally’s website and blog.
   
Book for the forthcoming Sally Potter showcase at the
British Film Institute.

Jo Hemmant

  
Jo Hemmant spent many years working as a journalist and editor and only began writing poetry the day her youngest son started school. Her work has appeared in or is upcoming at Horizon Review, qarrtsiluni, blossombones, bluefifth review, Equinox, South, Decanto, Dream Catcher, Fire and Obsessed with Pipework. She lives with her husband, her two sons, aged eight and six and a menagerie in the burbs outside London. Last year she co-founded ouroboros review, a poetry and art journal that appears both online and in print, and set up Pindrop Press, a small independent poetry press. The first book is due off the presses in 2010.
  
  
The den
Jo Hemmant
 
For his sixth birthday, a tent.
Two-man, pop-up, no tripping
over a cat’s cradle of guy ropes and pegs.
 
It covers most of the floor in his room,
is kitted out with what boys like –
Top Trumps, action figures, plastic insects.
He begs me to read to him there that night.
  
Crawling in, I notice that the millimetre-thin skin
cuts out noise, the air’s new with polymers.
We shine a moon on the roof with the torch
and find ourselves in a field, staring up
through a plastic square at a sky
deep and dark as a coal mine’s throat.
  
Outside, the fire has cooled to amber.
Menace storybooks the woods.
  
  
Read more of Jo’s work in Horizon Review.

Sophie Mayer by Lady Vervaine

      
Sophie Mayer writes passionately and politically about poetry and film anywhere and everywhere she can, including Horizon Review, Esprit de Corps, Blackbox Manifold, Sight & Sound, Little White Lies and Artesian. She blogs about reading as Delirium’s Librarian, and is a regular contributor to the review blog for Chroma journal, where she is commissioning editor. Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009), her first solo poetry collection, was the auspicious start to a very exciting three-book year, followed by The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009)and (as co-editor) There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (Wayne State University Press, 2009). Her next collection, The Private Parts of Girls, will be published by Salt in 2011, and she has future plans for encounters between poetry and film. Visit Sophie’s website.
   
   
Rearranging the Stars
Sophie Mayer
  
after Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient
  
Lost you. Out here, where a call to prayer shivers
stone into song, where night falls like knives,
  
there’s a trick to the sky, how you see it, smell
what’s coming. It is like reading. It’s so small
  
at first, and granular, then overwhelms: eyes,
mouth, hands, hair. You cannot possibly sleep.
  
But you do, lulled by wind and waking. Stories –
his stories, more stories than there could be stars –
   
breathe around you with their shine, draw hearts
on dirty glass. You know what they find in deserts:
   
fragments. Texts under sand winds, brilliant disasters.
And you, in secret, on fire with new constellations.
   
   
Previously published in Staple 71: The Art Issue (Summer 2009).
  
  

  
pieuvres / lèvres (lilies / lips)
Sophie Mayer
  
Did I realise then that I would spend my whole life
with their lipstick on my face. Other girls and their kisses
 
goodbye. I know that now, having watched soft asses
walk away from me, having been paid my tithe
 
for watchful quiet. For the flattery of desire. Ingrown
hair, that’s what it’s like: turning against the razor
 
blade and on itself. Like my toes, curled mazily
through each other with waiting, waiting that flows
 
up my calves and out my mouth. A shower in reverse:
a fountain, inwards out: And what was in her,
 
I felt that too. All her hardness in my fingers
rattling her stem. All those flower words, perverse
 
euphemisms for a force like an ocean
in a swimming pool. Did she not see
 
what poured out of (her into) me? Salt of her sea,
stick of her sap. And it’s not the explosion
 
that I’m talking about, her wet cunt a concrete
underpass around my hand. It’s the light that thrums
 
from her lily-mouth, her pollinated tongue
extended like a stamen. Like a beesting hot-sweet
 
under the skin, a tear oozing from an eye. An ingrown
hair turning outwards against skin tough as petals
 
under drops of rain. The pain of it like cold metal,
like waiting. The stem of spit plunges down
 
and you wonder that such softness does such hurt.
No softness in the doing: spit’s active as a limb,
  
a cock, a race, a city street. It dances itself thin.
The stem of things. Wet birth. My first.
 
 
Buy Her Various Scalpels (Shearsman, 2009) here.

Michael Swan

    
Michael Swan works in English language teaching and applied linguistics. He has been writing poetry for many years, driven no doubt by an unconscious need to prove that grammarians have souls. His poems have been published widely in magazines, and have won a number of prizes. He clings to the belief that it is possible to write good poetry that is neither difficult nor boring, and he often finds humour a useful tool in dealing with a seriously confusing universe. Michael’s first collection, When They Come For You, was published by Frogmore Press in 2003 and was very well received. He is now looking for a publisher for his second collection.
   
      
comb
Michael Swan
   
I was sure
it was her comb
lying on the pavement.
And I ran after her
shouting
‘Excuse me
but you dropped your comb’
and she turned
a woman I had never seen before
and she told me
no
it was not her comb.
She seemed unwilling
to discuss the matter further
and walked on
rather quickly.
She had hair like yours
and the comb, too
was like one of those
you used to leave everywhere
on tables, shelves, windowledges,
in the car, on your pillow.
 
I was sure it was your comb.
  
  
© Michael Swan 2005
  
Read more of Michael’s work at poetry p f.

Bikes
Karin Koller
  
It was a time when children free-ranged on pavements
binding friendships based on games and pecking orders
and bikes. My big sister leading the way
on her green two-wheeler, stopping to pass orders
back down the convoy: Roger with his stabilisers
who grew up to run a coat-hanger company
and become the most boring man in the world to all
except his wife who had a long history of forbearance –
followed by Roger’s brother Martin on his large red trike
Martin who was hopeless at maths
but opened a shop called Belt & Braces
and ended up a millionaire, and then Tony
on his silver scooter pushing dreams of fame
till his one-hit Under the Smile of Love
reached number 56 in the charts for a week
and at the end of the line my little sister pedalling skew-whiff
on the broken metal trike, the one with tiny wheels
and a single right handlebar – the bike which lasted
forever, and which we all loved best.

Just Idiot Talk
Ruth McIlroy
   
“Hey, Sassenach! Ye gie me the boak,
Yir patter stinks; youse’ll get it noo,
Ye cannae say a’thing, ya muckle-face numpty”.
   
But, ya wee keelie, I’ll jist dae it efter.
Missed yersel’ there now, eh no, hen?
Ken, this’s barry, nae tother a ball.
  
  
Glossary
   
Just Idiot Talk
Just an idiolect consciously employed to gain acceptance from a dominant social group
    
Hey,Sassenach
Excuse me, English person
   
ye gie me the boak
you make me feel nauseous
   
Yir patter stinks
your way of presenting yourself to the world is fundamentally flawed
   
youse’ll get it noo
you (singular or plural) are about to experience retribution
   
ye cannae say a’thing
I would advise you not to answer me back
  
ya muckle-face numpty
you ill-favoured person of limited common sense
  
But, ya wee keelie
But, you young person from a challenging home environment
  
I’ll jist dae it efter
I’ll just do it later
  
Missed yersel’ there now
you didn’t see that one coming
  
eh no, hen?
did you, my friend/acquaintance
  
ken, this’s barry
you know something, I feel a lot better
  
nae tother a ball
no bother at all
   
   
© Ruth McIlroy 2009

Vicki Feaver

  
Vicki Feaver lives in South Larnarkshire in Scotland and divides her time between painting and poetry. ‘Marigolds’ is from The Handless Maiden (Jonathan Cape, 1994) which won a Heinemann Prize and a Cholmondeley Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. The Handless Maiden has recently been reissued by Jonathan Cape.
  
  
Marigolds
Vicki Feaver
  
Not the flowers men give women –
delicately-scented freesias,
stiff red roses, carnations
the shades of bridesmaids’ dresses,
almost sapless flowers,
drying and fading – but flowers
that wilt as soon as their stems
are cut, leaves blackening
as if blighted by the enzymes
in our breath, rotting to a slime
we have to scour from the rims
of vases; flowers that burst
from tight, explosive buds, rayed
like the sun, that lit the path
up the Thracian mountain, that we wound
into our hair, stamped on
in ecstatic dance, that remind us
we are killers, can tear the heads
off men’s shoulders;
flowers we still bring
secretly and shamefully
into the house, stroking
our arms and breasts and legs
with their hot orange fringes,
the smell of arousal.
  
  
Published in The Handless Maiden (Jonathan Cape, 1994).
  
Read more about Vicki and her work at Contemporary Writers and the Poetry Archive.