Monthly Archives: July 2011

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Gail Dendy was first published by Harold Pinter in 1993, her subsequent collections of poetry appearing in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States of America respectively. Her poetry and, more recently, short stories, are regularly published in journals and anthologies. An internationally trained dancer, Gail helped pioneer Contemporary Dance in SA between the late 1970s and the early ’90s. Other passions are environmental- and animal-rights issues. She lives in Johannesburg together with her husband, pets, a law library, and a huge collection of rock ’n roll.

“Gail Dendy is one of South Africa’s most unmistakable and unique literary voices. The singing quality of her poetry soars and swoops, transporting the reader into a world of glittering magical realism. In this book a moon ripens in the window ‘whole and lemony once more’, mothers express longing and love, the sun and moon argue, there are gypsy women and a fantasy piece with Shakespearean characters. This book is truly alive, presented in language that ‘rings like a gong from here to the far end of the world’.”


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“Gail Dendy has grown in stature as a poet … Her poems are intriguing and at times playful, and she is in complete control of her subtle lyrical gift and delicate technique.”

– Gus Ferguson


“Gail Dendy moves across the landscape of a remembered past, and fictionalises into imagined other lives … An important voice in South African poetry, Dendy’s words are delicately polished jewels.”

– Arja Salafranca


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Peopling the Isle

          ‘Might I but through my prison once a day
          Behold this maid.’ – Ferdinand (The Tempest I, ii, 351–2)

You took your books and wound an island
as a silver ring about your finger.
I was there in the inlet, tussling
with a tide that had seen the moon

sleep badly one night, shoring wild, unholy dreams,
awakening with eyes spewing a milky pus
and a throat dry as thunder. I saw

your daughter, a godsend of perfunctoriness.
I didn’t bow. I didn’t kiss her hand
or make small talk. She lit a corner of the room
by shouldering its dank mustiness

and heaving it like logs on to a flame.
No one could hear her, though a night-jay
alighted in the pink dimple of her shoulder

and snatched at her ear before diving
through watery forests in search of
daybreak. It was then the hills
clawed backwards, snorted as though submerged

and with them the flotsam our ship had placed
on a luckless, unmarked spot. The sea blanched and stiffened.
We were trapped in ice the entire season.

After the thaw I sought her in impossible places,
laid feed for the birds, and took to kneeling
at each well to watch the moon in its stony berth.
Little good it did me. And so I cut

the pages of your books to use as canvas,
took matchsticks for rigging, icicles for wind-chimes,
and always the suspicion that she far preferred

the heat and stench of that brutish Caliban
who straddled the island like a bedded lover,
lifted his coin at the sight of her,
swore and cursed, filched her father’s goods,

and on heaven and hell loudly proclaimed
his sweaty oaths to sire some dozen like him,
cripple the pyramid of state, up-end the isle,
and so rinse this place in sore democracy.


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The Search

And my mother would search for her hairpins
on my father’s side of the bed,
and in the morning would light the fire,
and we would break bread, and eat.

And she would search for us
in the damp forests, between
the owl’s call and the deer scent,
and when we came home, she would light a fire.

And she would light a fire
at bath time, and slip off her robe,
and soap her legs and her belly
and pin up her tresses, and braid them,

and I saw how she would light a fire
in my father’s eyes, and search in the mirror
for his approval, and he would stop
writing with his slim pencil,

and his eyes would search for the pins
in the grey snow of her hair,
and the deer were far away,
further than the owl’s call.

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The Terrible Quest for Size Zero

Fashion photographers vaporise inside their own glare,
models’ legs appear never to be joined at the hips,

my hair is cinnamon coloured and braided to the hilt.
My daughter is aghast at her own weight,

stands at the mirror, towel across her shoulders,
cries. I can tell her she’s beautiful and attractive,

I can tell her she’s perfect for her size. I can tell her
she should take none of this to heart. She’s searching

for Size Zero while two doors away her father
is cutting down tree stumps, her grandmother is lost

in the woods, her brother is gambling away a fortune,
and her unborn sister knows neither breaststroke nor crawl.

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Autism

My children have pulled the rain
thickly around their feet.
They have slept in the small cave
of an oak, have wrapped themselves
in nuts, and bark, and become green.

My children never speak.
I feed them honey and raisins
and make bird-sounds against the windows.
I sew little blankets for mice to amuse them.
The sky drifts and is still,

and I plug its leaking teats
with all the words I can think of.
I darn its blue blouse with consonants
and pick off the fluff of vowels
as white as sheep in the fields.

The oak tree is solid and my children
cling to its silence.
I have done with sleep.
In my dreams a prayer
fells the tree like an axe.

from Closer Than That (Dye Hard Press, 2011).

Closer Than That is soon to be available from Exclusive Books branches at an estimated retail price of R105 or you can contact dyehardpress@iafrica.com.

Visit Dye Hard Press.

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Angela France’s Lessons in Mallemaroking

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Angela France has had poems published in many of the leading journals in the United Kingdom and abroad and has been anthologised a number of times. She has an MA in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Gloucestershire and is studying for a PhD. Her second collection, Occupation is available from Ragged Raven Press and her new pamphlet Lessons in Mallemaroking is now out from Nine Arches Press. Angela is features editor of Iota and an editor of ezine The Shit Creek Review. She also runs a monthly poetry cafe, ‘Buzzwords’.

“Between the lines of Angela France’s poems an ardent force is at work. Lessons in Mallemaroking rewards our curiosity, capturing the reality and truth at large of a nonchalant world that has been perfectly observed just when it thinks no-one else is looking. France urges us to Look inside. Learn to wait, to feel the weight of loss, of hidden lives, of the darkness and hope gathering at the future’s edge.”

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“Angela France conjures a world of absences and menace with precise and elegant language. Things have begun to fall apart; the creatures are already wise to it. Dogs whimper at night and the horses are watchful of changing weather, they creak light from their joints/as they stamp, swish tails. Buddleia is sprouting through the concrete of driveways and petrol stations. We watch the river, the barrier,/the water rising. These excellent poems come as a warning.”

– Martin Figura

“Here are poems that inhabit fully the physical world and explore the ever-shifting boundary between the physical and the metaphysical. Angela France has the craft to sustain her compelling and varied subject matter, and she uses language with controlled intensity, lyric energy, and an unerring sense of how to balance a poem. She is a poet not content with anecdote, but one who engages with the tough uneasy realities of experience.”

– Penelope Shuttle

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Dry Dock

Reynold’s warehouse
frowns rows of windows down
on ‘The Tall Ships’ where crisp
packets and fag-ends cluster
at the base of the menu blackboard.

She stands, folded into herself,
hugs the faux-fur closed; arched feet
fidget in red straps as wind
lashes her scarlet-tipped toes with grit.

Cosy-painted longboats rock
and nudge each other, seagulls wheel
over the oil-shimmered water to yawp
above the roar of an excavator
shuddering a bite of stone.

He shifts his shoulders, lifts his shades,
grumbles about the risk
of dirt on his lens. He adjusts his dials
C’mon darlin’, let’s get on with it.

Angling her head to let the wind lift her hair,
she spreads open her coat. Her clenched
calf muscles drive her feet down
onto stilettos; a quiver races
over the skin of her improbable breasts.
The camera clicks, whirrs, clicks:
her pink and white smile shivers
like the ripple that chases
across the grease of the dock basin.

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A Letter Home

The well is full of dead rabbits, Mother.
Night after night I watch them: some hop,
some run, they all leap in a determined arc
over the rim. The cockroaches multiply
every day but your advice about pots
of paraffin keeps my bed clear. I heard
of a woman whose baby was bitten by rats
in its crib: who’d have a baby now,
even if they could? The radio is down
to an hour a day. They give us
the daily warnings then fake an upbeat
story, usually one with children, or heroic
dogs. The sunset was spectacular last night.
The paper said that the sunsets
show how bad things are; the radio said
that the paper is subversive propaganda.
There have been some new families
in our water queue this week.
They have teenagers and I have watched
a boy and girl look, and look away;
flirt and grow close. I don’t know now
whether rabbits are wiser
in choosing a shorter arc.

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Sarah Talks to the Social Worker

If I’d known what he was thinking
I’d never have let him go.
Some Father-Son time, he said.
A bit of quality time, me and my son
and the mountain.

No, I didn’t throw him out
straight away; I didn’t know
what happened. Isaac was quiet,
started bed-wetting.
I thought it was bullying at school,
maybe, or worry about tests.

When the nightmares started,
I couldn’t understand what he meant.
I wondered if thugs had moved
into the area, worried about knives
and gangs.

Once I understood,
his father’s bags were packed
and on the doorstep before
he got home from work.

He’s got a nerve to complain
about supervised visits.
He isn’t the one left holding
a screaming child
whose nights are sharp
with the raised knife, the gleam
in his father’s eye, the blood
of that poor lamb.

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Hide and Seek Champ Found Dead in Cupboard

‘Sunday Sport’ Headline

As a boy, he hated the foolish feeling
of being found; the too-narrow tree
he stood behind, the cupboard door that wouldn’t close
from inside though his fingertips gripped
to whiteness on a slim batten, the shudder
in his chest when he suppressed noisy breath.

He worked at being lost, taught his joints to fold
and squeeze in small spaces, schooled his breath
to ease, his heart to slow. It tooks years
to train his blood-flow to thin or pool under his skin,
to shade and pattern the surface.

He hides as a party trick, challenges strangers
in bars to find him; vanishes at work, disappears
on dates. He’s filmed for a documentary,
shut in an empty room, slowly fading into wallpaper.
He hides from taxes and utility bills, paternity suits
and parking tickets.

His house is riddled with small spaces
under floorboards, hollows in cavity walls,
false walls in alcoves. He perfects the art
of cupboard backs; trompe l’oeil on high shelves
with dusty suitcases, sports equipment
and a carefully woven cobweb of nylon fibre.

The fit is perfect, handles on the back
to pull it tight, a can of silicon sealant
stops even his scent from betraying him.
He makes his muscles relax, his limbs
settle into their contortions. He waits
for someone who’ll seek.

‘Hide and Seek Champ Found Dead in Cupboard’ was previously published in the Arvon Competition Anthology 2010.

from Lessons in Mallemaroking (Nine Arches Press, 2011).

Order Lessons in Mallemaroking.

Order Occupation (Ragged Raven Press, 2009).

Read more of Angela’s work at poetry p f.

Listen to Angela reading some of her poems at PoetCasting.

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Amy Key: Six Poems

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Amy Key’s pamphlet Instead of Stars is published by Tall Lighthouse. Her work has been published in magazines and various anthologies, most recently in Birdbook (Sidekick Books) and Clinic II (Clinic). She co-hosts The Shuffle reading series at London’s Poetry Café. She enjoys collecting clutter.


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Capsize

I wanted to go to the bottom of the sea
in the drop-net we bought to catch edible
crabs. I had thoughts like the sea bed in soft,
but soft like a bed, so you’re not afraid,
that a shoal of black and white fish
– waitresses – will swim around me
and think me strange. But then I had
other thoughts like how might I breathe
and will the net line break? Then the net
became a pod and I had to wear a mask
but then the sea bed wasn’t soft and all the fish swam away.

‘Capsize’ is from a series of poems based on the film
Where The Wild Things Are.

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Poem to Chelsey

He made me cry like a girl denied pink bunting
          Left my crockery lustrous with butter
          Watched my school-flirt cartwheels
          Ate the heads of nasturtiums
          Said ‘ruin yourself with these, honey’
          Let his doggy off the leash
          Sang bawdy at the cream tea
          Pushed me over in the daisies
          Mistook my toenails for diamantes
          Stuck his tongue into the Swiss cheese
          Put his linen in the chiller
          Knotted the leash to my ankle
          Wrote I’m sorry in white petals
          Poured cheap brandy on the bite marks
          Had a thing for leatherette
          Rubbed against the hydrant
          Allowed the dog to chew the leash
          Cheerled dances in the bathtub
          Shot the Pepsi off the ledge
He liked me to wear the gold anklet
          Milked it for all he was worth.

‘Poem to Chelsey’ was commissioned for a tribute to
Chelsey Minnis.

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His is a Mystery of Cooling Towers

          demolitions and algae.
Oh suitor, thunder me
          your elegant curse. Mobbed,
I will magic us to Siberian igloos
          where lamps bleed a glow
into our symmetrical clinch.
          Or a late shadowed terrace –
cool tumbles of liquor, a hand-painted parasol –
          balmy with glossy austerity.
And though I will admit I was a squeeze
          more drunk than you (given my rabble
of stunted views), I hold dear these inventions;
          last night, after the third time
I noted my wine glass wanting, leaning close
          and whispering my cheek
with mushroom-gill lashes, you murmured
          You, are a very nice girl.

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The Susceptible Heart

Nothing to be done about the sky, its early fall.
You give me match-strike, candelabra, chandelier.
This year, autumn doesn’t matter.
                                        If lit by dawn,
my mind will clamour to recall how our kiss left off,
how the evening’s talk – steeped in dramatics – set off
that wordless flourish. But tonight pours
into your absence. Take this half of ale,
sipped with one eye on your tastes and just now
my fringe swept away with your imagined hand.
Our romance, tracked by a fling of mill-town
horns, an elementary fiction of sweethearts.


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With You

     for Rebecca Key

The fish gurgle in their outer space light –
I ask “pass me the blanket” and the wineglass
residues are violet and look back at us, like pupils.

To-do lists cascade from the fridge.
Your to-do lists are often niche catalogue orders.
We both eat showy pralines. Alternately, you eat
                                                       the lychees.

When you’re distracted I like to hide my finger
in the core of your best ringlet. Upstairs the bath
lies empty and I can’t but think bath oils and towelling.

I harvest garden moss and set it on the floorboards.
The garden is flung with a camouflage of twilights.
We turn the lights down and sit on the moss bed,

compare photos of our favourite light fittings.
If you do me a pedicure, I’ll do you a manicure.
Your eating of the lychees suggests the extent

of your gentleness. My favourite: Hotel Kiev;
yours, in this living room. I choose to breathe
in the space between your breaths.

We’ve declined all other atmospheres:
the room turns aquarium. We sit back,
tune into deep-sea light shows.

Your eyes fill in with yet more green. Once
you sat by my bed until you knew I was dreaming.

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Tight Dress

I’m in the tight dress. The one that prevents dignified sitting.
The tight dress suggests I’m prepared to be undressed.
Do my thighs flash through the seams?
I try to remember if the bed is made, or unmade.
The wind is wrapping up the sound of our kissing.
I wonder should I undress first or should you undress first.
I’m not sure I can take off the dress in a way that looks good.
I consider if I should save up sex until morning.
We are far gone and I’m better at kissing when sober.
I find that your earlobes provide the current fascination.
On my bedside table are three glasses of water
                                          and my favourite love letter.
I try to untie your shoes in a way that is appalling.

‘His is a Mystery of Cooling Towers’, ‘The Susceptible Heart’,
‘With You’ and ‘Tight Dress’ are published in Instead of Stars
(Tall Lighthouse, 2009).

Order Instead of Stars.

Read more of Amy’s poetry.

Read Amy’s article ‘How to Put On a Poetry Gig’ at Young Poets Network.

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Tony Williams’s All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head

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Tony Williams’s first collection of poetry The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street (Salt, 2009) was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and the Portico Prize. His pamphlet All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head is published by Nine Arches Press. A book of short stories is forthcoming from Salt in 2012. He works as a lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria University.

“The maker of these strange pieces was an inmate of an asylum somewhere in Central Europe in the first decades of the 20th century. His fevered versions of the sonnet form were painted on to ceramic tiles, since smashed, and now pieced together to give some partial access to his world of mental anguish, incarceration and dreams of flight.

Inspired by the great artists celebrated by Hans Prinzhorn in his famous work The Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Tony Williams has explored what it might mean to create literature under such conditions of stress. These highly formal and dreamlike poems do not exploit their subject. Instead they seek to dramatise complex meditations on landscape and identity by taking on an anxious, urgent voice whose power is founded on a strange and scornful idiosyncrasy.”

from All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head (Nine Arches Press, 2011).

Order All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head.

Order The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street (Salt, 2009).

Visit Tony’s blog.

Why I love Dorothy Parker

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“I like best to have one book in my hand and a stack of others on the floor beside me so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours. In all reverence I say Heaven bless the Whodunit, the soothing balm on the wound, the cooling hand on the brow, the opiate of the people.”

“There’s life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.”

“If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.”

“Indeed, it turns out that as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, she ranks somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice-skate.”



Faute de Mieux

Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme –
I never said they feed my heart,
But still they pass my time.

“I know that there are things that never have been funny, and never will be. And I know that ridicule may be a shield, but it is not a weapon.”

“There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.”

“This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief … I wouldn’t touch a superlative again with an umbrella.”

“This wasn’t just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.”


“What can you say when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you, I’ll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, I’d love to awfully, but I’m having labor pains. Oh, yes, do let’s dance together – it’s so nice to meet a man who isn’t a scaredy-cat about catching my beri-beri … I’d love to waltz with you. I’d love to waltz with you. I’d love to have my tonsils out. I’d love to be in a midnight fire at sea…”


“The Monte Carlo casino refused to admit me until I was properly dressed so I went and found my stockings and then came back and lost my shirt.”

“Don’t let me take any horses home with me. It doesn’t matter so much about stray dogs and kittens, but elevator boys get awfully stuffy when you try to bring in a horse … Three highballs, and I think I’m St. Francis of Assisi.”

“I should have stayed home for dinner. I could have had something on a tray. The head of John the Baptist or something.”

“That woman speaks eighteen languages and can’t say No in any of them.”

Unfortunate Coincidence

By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying –
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.


“Sometimes I think I’ll give up trying, and just go completely Russian and sit on a stove and moan all day.”

“What fresh hell is this?”

“And you know those anecdotes that begin that way; me, I find them more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.”

“They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.”

Résumé

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

“All I need is enough room to lay a hat and a few friends.”

“That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.”

“She wore a feather boa that was always getting into other people’s plates or was being set afire by other people’s cigarettes.”

– John Keats, You Might As Well Live

“She is a combination of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth.”

– Alexander Woollcott, ‘Our Mrs Parker’, While Rome Burns

“Parker was one of the wittiest people in the world and one of the saddest …”

– Brendan Gill, A New York Life: Of Friends and Others

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Dorothy Parker interviewed by Marion Capron in The Paris Review.

Order The Portable Dorothy Parker.

Order Complete Poems.

Order A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York.

Visit The Dorothy Parker Society’s website.

Visit The Algonquin Round Table’s website.

Agnieszka Studzinska’s Snow Calling

Famous literary rejections

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* Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

* Watership Down, Richard Adams

* Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

* Crash, J G Ballard

* Lorna Doone, R D Blackmore

*     The Diary of Anne Frank

*     Lord of the Flies, William Golding

*     The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

*     Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

*     Catch-22, Joseph Heller

* Dune, Frank Herbert

* Dubliners, James Joyce

* Ulysses, James Joyce

* Carrie, Stephen King

* Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D H Lawrence

*     The Rainbow, D H Lawrence

*     The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré

*     Life of Pi, Yann Martel

*     Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

*     Anne of Green Gables, L M Montgomery

*     Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

* Animal Farm, George Orwell

* The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

* The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger

* Lust for Life, Irving Stone

* A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

* The War of the Worlds, H G Wells

Peony Moon

A contemporary poetry blog

Monthly Archives: July 2011

Mark Burnhope’s The Snowboy

Deborah Tyler-Bennett’s Mytton… Dyer… Sweet Billy Gibson…

Gail Dendy’s Closer Than That

Amy Key: Six Poems

Tony Williams’s All the Rooms of Uncle’s Head

Why I love Dorothy Parker

Agnieszka Studzinska’s Snow Calling

Famous literary rejections

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