Against Rape

From 4 to 10 November, Peony Moon’s contents will deal with sexual violence
and rape and may be triggering to some people.

If you would like to show your solidarity please join us on Twitter
(@PoetsandArtists).

Against Rape is a protest, an international collective of poets and artists speaking out against sexual and interpersonal violence. The online campaign was initiated on 2 October 2013, co-ordinated within a month, and will run on Peony Moon for seven consecutive days, beginning on Monday, 4 November and ending on Sunday, 10 November 2013.

Each contribution – poem, artwork, photograph and message – from around the world has been received in the spirit of solidarity. This is not poetry and art for poetry and art’s sake, but a protest. The contributors are multigenerational, of all genders. Some are prize-winning poets and artists; others are students having their first poems published as part of this demonstration. We value each voice.

Against Rape features poems about date rape, acquaintance rape, marital rape, incestuous rape, child sexual abuse and rape in war. This is poetry of witness that exposes rape myths and rape culture, which deals with the rape of children and women, and describes the impact of post-rape trauma. Men are rape survivors too; we wish we had received some poems that dealt with this. Sexual violence is not only committed by men against women and children.

Rape is a violation of basic human rights, a contravention of the rights to dignity and freedom from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. It is an assault against the individual, the family, the communities and the societies in which we live. It is unacceptable that survivors are often still blamed for the atrocities committed upon them, and shamed into silence for fear of ostracism and retribution. In June 2008, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously for resolution 1820, describing rape as a tactic of war and a threat to international security. What we realised as we read the submissions is that sexual violence makes every day into a battle zone.

Rape is not about sex: it uses sex as a tool of power, the same way we have seen some police forces use shields and batons against peaceful protestors. It is not an abuse of power but its pure expression. The collusion between the status quo and social systems of power explains why most rapes – those that occur within power structures such as the family, schools, prisons, the military, corporate entities – go unprosecuted. Rape is what power does.

Feminists coined the term “rape culture” to refer to the pervasive, coercive place of rape in the cultural imaginary, the ways in which it is used to threaten and discipline those who have relatively less power in a given relationship or society, particularly women of all ages, children, LGBT people, and people with disabilities. Referring to rape culture enables us to talk about the way in which sexual violence perpetrated upon bodies is produced within a framework of exploitative and violent language, images, and narratives that seek to control how we present and move our bodies.

We are all victims and survivors of rape culture: it affects how we interact with each other on a daily basis. It affects our languages as well as our bodies. As Andrea Smith says in her book Conquest, the language of colonisation is one of rape, with its references to “penetrating virgin territory”. Implicit in so much of our culture is this sexualised image of power, with its brutal aim of totally eradicating opposition, not only through physical damage, but through a multilayered silence.

Rape is not just the instance of violent assault, but its ramifications, which, in rape culture are bound up with shame and vilification. Rape culture’s endorsement of power means that any survivor who dares to be other than compliant, silent and erased risks being held responsible for her rape.

It is into this silence that Against Rape speaks. Ovid and William Shakespeare knew this: the classical myth of Philomela is presented sympathetically in their work, with admiration for the silenced survivor’s determination to bear witness in any way she can. Gill McEvoy takes up the figure of Philomela as part of our first day of poems, which gather around the idea of rape myths.

On our seventh day of poetry and art, we begin with Tamil poet Rajathi Salma’s ‘No Traces Left’, translated by Kalyan Roman, from the recently published Salma: Filming a Poet in her Village (OR Books, 2013), in which she writes: “What refuge remains for a woman/ whose traces are wiped clean?” Rape culture leaves its traces in all of us; Against Rape is our attempt to offer a refuge. The poems are often shocking, stunning, sickening – but there is hope in hearing all these voices raised together.

Michelle McGrane and Sophie Mayer
1 November 2013

Children’s Poetry: Joanne Limburg’s Bookside Down

Translator Nicky Harman speaks to Han Dong

2 Replies

Han Dong – London, April 2009

Han Dong (韩东) was born in 1961 in Nanjing. His parents were banished to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, taking him with them. When the Cultural Revolution ended, he studied philosophy at Shandong University, subsequently lectured in Xi’an and Nanjing, and finally relinquished teaching in 1993 to make his living as a writer. In the 1980s, Han Dong became an important avant-garde poet, and edited the influential poetry magazine Tamen (Them). He is also known as an essayist, short story writer, blogger and novelist.

He has made several literary tours in the West, visiting Rotterdam, Paris, Brussels, London, Manchester and Edinburgh, and has been writer-in-residence in Gutenberg, Germany and Saint-Nazaire, France. A collection of his poetry in English can be found in A Phone Call from Dalian (Zephyr Press, 2012). A number of poems from this collection, and others, have appeared in translation in poetry magazines and online, for instance as Carol Rumens’ Poem of the Week in The Guardian.

Nicky Harman lives in the United Kingdom. She translates from Chinese, focusing on fiction, poetry and sometimes literary non-fiction, by authors such as Han Dong, Chen Xiwo, Xinran, Hong Ying, Zhang Ling and Yan Geling. She is a regular contributor to the literary magazines Chutzpah, and Words Without Borders, and also organises translation-focused events, mentors new translators and was one of the judges for the Harvill Secker Young Translators Prize 2012. She contributes to the website for translators from Chinese, Paper Republic, and was Translator-in-Residence, London, at the Free Word Centre in 2011. Her home page is here.

Han Dong was a leading light of China’s avant-garde in the 1980s and continues to be an influential poet today. But, 30 years on, the poetry scene in China has changed, and so has he. I was curious about how he sees his work now and eager to delve a bit deeper into his persona as a poet. I interviewed him for Peony Moon.

In 1966, when the Cultural Revolution began, Han Dong’s family was sent to a remote area of the countryside. Here he grew up, developing an affection for the countryside and its people which still comes through in some of his poems. His parents suffered: his mother was arrested on suspicion of involvement in a counter-revolutionary plot, and his author father struggled to “serve the people”, within a system so seamlessly repressive that Han Dong describes it in Banished: A Novel as “a dog that winds up biting its own tail”. Then came the 1980s and, alongside political and economic reforms, a great explosion of new literature. Han Dong became known as an enthusiastic debunker of everything from ideology and heroics to the elaborate imagery of other avant-garde poets. An early poem, ‘Of the Wild Goose Pagoda’, which mocks a famous patriotic landmark and ends with a characteristic sting in the tail, became iconic.

Han Dong has been called a ‘colloquial’ (口语), poet, of the ‘ordinary folk’ (民间). But as Maghiel van Crevel says in his Foreword to A Phone Call from Dalian: “the language of this so-called Colloquial Poetry is not the same thing as that spoken in ordinary human traffic … the power of Han Dong’s poetry lies not just in the rejection of formal or bookish language of one kind or another. Positively defined, his usage comes across as measured, focused and controlled. This lends his poetry a quiet confidence and insistence”. And van Crevel goes on: “Several features combine to make Han’s a distinct and influential voice: quotidian themes, purposefully superficial description, colloquial language, literary meta-consciousness and last but not least, his individuality and sophistication in handling these things”.

          The Chicken-seller

          He’s got the knack for killing chickens quick, so
          He became a chicken-seller, that way
          He doesn’t need to kill people. Even though he acts
          Calm and gentle, and never beats his wife
          Taking off his wife’s clothes is like plucking a chicken
          Similar skills always overlap, just as
          Cruelty and kindness are two sides of the same coin
          He plucks, and she leisurely takes the money
          And I feel that therein lies a kind of evil sweetness

Time to give the floor to Han Dong himself. Many of the leading lights of the 1980s and 90s poetry scene have stopped writing altogether. So I began by asking –

Nicky Harman: You’ve been writing poetry for 30 odd years. Why do you go on writing it?

Han Dong: I’ll carry on as long as I’m able – for the reason that poetry, unlike other things in life, is of no practical use. And its very uselessness makes it just a bit important. Of course (I also do it because) I think I do it well and the poetry I write is distinctive. I’ve said in the past that poetry is my homeland. I have a hankering to ‘go home’, and in fact I often do. I hope one day to be able to settle down there and just write poetry, nothing else. That’s the kind of life I’d love to lead.

NH: How do you feel you’ve changed as a poet over the years?

HD: In my early poetry I put a lot of stress on form and language but my poetry has evolved in that respect. I focus now on the content, the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’, partly because I have learnt through experience what form and language to use, partly because I no longer feel form is so important to me. Now my main aim is to create work that is stubbornly, distinctly, my own. Ultimately, poetry is the meeting of language and a particular life lived. There’s a kind of mutual love, a kind of merging. I want my poetry to be reclusive and private, but I’m also groping towards connecting at a deep level with other people.

          Green tree, red fruit

          The green tree was there before I was
          Then I walked past it
          Then ahead of the tree, there were more green trees
          Between the forked branches was the sun

          I looked right at the sun. Just then
          It was like a red fruit
          And so the whole garden became an orchard

          A flurry of footsteps came
          A buzzing of voices debated life
          People’s shadows circled, gathered like gnats
          The evening star, a great cool teardrop

          I am still there
          The red fruit gone
          The green trees dulled

NH: You famously said that, “poetry does not go beyond language” (“诗到语言为止“). Do you still believe that? If not, what do you think are the most important principles of poetry?

HD: When I said that, it was to counter the prevailing view (in China) that “the written word must express a moral view”, and to emphasize the importance of language in poetry. But ultimately this was just another creed and, to that extent, one-sided. I understand poetry in a more rounded way now, not just as in opposition to something else. Poetry is an absolute, or at least an indication of an absolute. Analysing poetry is of limited use. Poetry doesn’t exist in the abstract, only in specific poems, in the writings of a particular poet, and we shouldn’t try to over-explain it. I dream of being able to write poems which need little or no explaining, and can be understood intuitively. Readers don’t need training but poets do, and that training ought to include how to stir people’s hearts.

Han Dong has written many poems about women, from the erotic to the love-lorn. I can’t help noticing there are fewer now, at least of the latter. Could this be because he is a middle-aged, happily-married man? I rather cheekily asked him if he still wrote love poems.

HD: Of course … Ultimately, a good love poem is about more than just love. … I’m continually concerned with human feelings, especially the love between men and women, and that’s a source of inspiration I wouldn’t willingly give up. You’re in love, you break up, you have no one to love or you’re abandoned – and you write about all of those things as they happen. There’s something else: the thing we call ‘love’ is only one way of expressing love between humans. I’ve said in the past that my ‘spiritual home’ is with people who have left or died, with friends, even with pets. That’s where love is, for me. Yes, I will go on writing love poems in the broad sense.

Hmm, I’m not sure I really managed to nail him on that one.

NH: Going back to the years when you first made a name for yourself as a poet, you had a reputation for getting into heated debates about poetry. Are you still so combative? If so, what topics get you fired up?

HD: I’ve always enjoyed a good argument, but I’ve also regarded that as a failing. In fact, I really hate that side of myself. Intense, aggressive debate only ends in defeat or victory, so it leaves me feeling empty. I almost always win the argument, which makes it more difficult for me to curb that tendency. The reality is that where poetry is concerned, the only meaningful things are serious thought and careful listening to others. Discussion should be based on an exchange of ideas, where everyone gets a chance to say what they think and makes an effort to understand the opposing side.

          Wood work

          The wood workers lie at work in the sawdust
          Their workshop has no door, no windows and no walls.
          Just a shack with blonde rush matting on three sides.
          Just sunlight, sawdust, wood and
          The shaped hafts of every kind of farm tool
          No door, no windows, benches or doorsill
          No lathe. This wood work has done away with wood work
          Sawdust has covered up the mud floor

NH: What do you feel about the translation of your poetry? I once asked you which of two possible titles I should use: Wood worker, the person who does it, or Wood work, the process. (The Chinese could mean either.) You said you didn’t mind, I could choose whichever I liked. Would you be as laissez-faire about translation if you were fluent in English?

HD: Translations are authentic creations in their own right; the original is only the spiritual source and the basis for the translation. Especially with poetry, when you translate from one language into another, you create something other. For a poem to work in another language, it needs to be completely transformed. Its magic, its inspiration, depends on the translator. Poets aim to ‘translate’ life and give it a meaningful existence in language; translators have the same aim. So, first-rate poetry can become second-rate in translation and vice versa, depending on the translator’s ability and sensitivity. I’m there to respond to the translator and I’m happy to discuss anything which is relevant to the original work, but this is just a way of stimulating the process and doesn’t mean I want to control it. If your poems don’t stand up to translation into another language, then why should the translator continue to be loyal to the original? If those poems can shine in another language, then why worry if they have departed from the original?

Ultimately my aim as a poet is to create good things, not things that are good for my reputation. And all good things can stimulate and ‘give birth’ to further good things. Even in the original language, a poem only becomes complete when it is read, when it arouses feelings, and when the poem combines with those feelings. To have vitality, a poem needs to transform, stimulate, adapt, combine and give birth to something new.

And there we left our discussion. But let the poems speak from themselves. And, yes, there really is one about his dog:

          Overcoming loneliness

          My small dog was shut in the flat
          The neighbours opposite kept one
          Shut in their flat too
          The two dogs yapped through the barrier of two doors
          They could hear each other, and sometimes met on the landing
          They were boy dog and girl dog but didn’t mate
          We all know dogs like to lay-about in packs, but these two were no pals
          You could say hostility was
          Stronger than friendship
          More help in overcoming loneliness
          The end came when their dog died, but my dog
          Kept up the yapping
          An imaginary enemy may well be better than a real one
          At overcoming loneliness.

Han Dong’s poems ‘can stand their ground in any contemporary world literary canon’, World Literature Today.

All the poems except ‘Overcoming loneliness appear’ in A Phone Call from Dalian (Zephyr Press, 2012).

Simon Howard’s Wrecked

Whitehall Jackals by Chris McCabe & Jeremy Reed

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“London in the dark end-times of the late noughties; escaped war criminals and their hired thugs scavenge like hyenas amid the city’s smut and glitter, the system appears in nonchalant free-fall and words drop cheaply as grimy metropolitan rain. With this dystopian backdrop, where language is spun, redacted and renditioned, McCabe and Reed’s gritty riposte performs an angry and elegant resistance.

The result of this psychogeographic collaboration between two of modern poetry’s most distinct voices is this – a poetry chain-letter that seeks to interrogate the city at one of the most peculiar and sinister points in contemporary history and to map the capital on foot, under their own light; poems as foundlings; the weight of language and place obsessively and voraciously explored. Beneath flagstones, in river silt and on the top decks of buses, the strange, dark energies of the city find their way into this electrifying exchange of poems.”

“McCabe and Reed’s wide-eyed, X-rayed Cubist vision of London is more than a cultural mapping. It is a significant addition to the poetry of London. Partly a response to Whitehall’s warring, it uncovers deeper historical and psychogeographical interplay within the city. Horizontal and vertical layers of story are contextualized and abstracted to reveal multifarious states of being, control and flux. These anchored, edgy scripts of multiverse unearth deposits in angular localised texts that make you smile, laugh, wonder and leave you wanting more. A tour de force in every way.”

– David Caddy

Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His previous collections are The Hutton Inquiry, Zeppelins and THE RESTRUCTURE (all with Salt Publishing). His work has been described by The Guardian as “an impressively inventive survey of the uses of English in the early 21st century”. He has recorded a CD with the Poetry Archive and has had work included in numerous anthologies including Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010), The Captain’s Tower: seventy poets celebrate Bob Dylan at seventy (Seren, 2011), Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012) and Dear World & Everyone in it (Bloodaxe, 2013). His plays Shad Thames, Broken Wharf (also published by Penned in the Margins as a limited edition box) and Mudflats have been performed in London and Liverpool. He works as the Poetry Librarian at The Saison Poetry Library and teaches for The Poetry School.

Jeremy Reed has been for decades one of Britain’s most dynamic, adventurous and controversial poets; The Independent called him “British poetry’s glam, spangly, shape-shifting answer to David Bowie”. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, winning prestigious literary prizes such as the Somerset Maugham Award, and, on coming to live in London in the 1980s, was patronised by the artist Francis Bacon. Amongst his fans are J.G. Ballard, Pete Doherty and Bjork who has called his work “the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world”. His poetry publications in recent years include Heartbreak Hotel (Orion), Duck and Sally Inside, This Is How You Disappear (both Enitharmon), West End Survival Kit (Waterloo Press), Bona Drag (Shearsman) and Piccadilly Bongo with Marc Almond (Enitharmon), and his most recent novels are The Grid (Peter Owen) and Here Comes the Nice (Chomu Press). Jeremy Reed also works and performs with musician Itchy Ear as The Ginger Light.

*

Fleet
Jeremy Reed

A black network in London’s thalamus,
a landscaped-over solid trawl
licking a trace into Dead Dog Basin,
like a path-lab procedure,
a subterranean autopsy

of body parts in soup, bottles and dogs,
a swirly ooze down to Kentish Town loch
and under to St Pancras,
furred arteries pushing to King’s Cross
as cold bacterial soup, a mucky rush

that puddles on the road sometimes
in thunder-rain at Holborn and Blackfriars
in think-bubbles, the river’s secret life
come up to be decoded like intelligence
and splashed through by the tube exit,

I’ll never know I’ve walked it home
in squidgy traces on the floor
at South Hill Park like a liquid barcode.
We talk about the river’s drop
at the Magdala, drunk out of the rain

in leaf-slidy November, the street
wallpapered over by stripped orange leaves;
and someone claims they’ve fucked beside its source,
the bottomless pool by the aqueduct
power-pointing into the river

to feel its drive into the underground,
but it’s not clear where water starts,
unlike a road, its shoplifting impulse
traffics into a dark gritty corridor.
We stand above it as we talk,

a disturbed system of tunnels and tubes,
aquifers, islanded from the rain,
and I can feel the drop under my feet
into the Fleet pit, as I buy a round
and feel the fourth or fifth light up my brain.

*

Wapping Old Stairs
Chris McCabe

A lighter, a camera, a PLUMS bottle
— MACKINTOSH BROS. —
washes in the tide at the Old Stairs :
I smash the bottle against ceramic & brick
— no message but ink —
the content oozes conger black
slicks wet in ebony nox
gluts in chunks its obsidian soup,
the river’s bed condensed to wet ash
— no message —
the camera ejects the card,
digital images crust in wet clay
embedded with the river’s source.
I take the lighter & camera —
past Tower Bridge a courier sits
on the pavement — head between knees —
opened envelopes around his feet,
two Latino men shine the bullion
of the Tate & Lyle logo
— out of the strong came forth sweetness —
as cigar smoke rises like cremations
of vermin. At Dark Horse Walk
a payroll manager stares out the tide’s volta,
pockets an Identity Card, folds up collars —
I scratch the wheel of the lighter :
its wet flint adds nothing to this

*

Whitehall Endgame
Jeremy Reed

(depleted uranium mix)

The 5pm sky’s like rainy sapphires
a blue toxic hydrocarbon blanket,
and you’re my pick-up, bite my lip
to redden like a strawberry.
It’s later in accelerated endgame time
by 600 seconds than when we met
at the compressed Starbucks on Hollen Street,
you a Beijing space-time interloper
put into a blonde-bobbed Eurasian mix.

The psychopathic jackal Tony Blair,
four blacked-out Range Rovers gunned
through town, a war criminal’s carbon tail
choking polluted haze, his handgun grin
cold as forensics, czar to every war’s
genocide, the killer autocrat
smeared in depleted uranium, Gulf blood,
the meltdown hedge funder — the commandant
guarded 24/7 by thugs in suits,
Glock pistols in their Paul Smith repertoire.

We watch his cars open a corridor
into a cannibalistic future —
Blair crunches Cherie for a final meal.
The day builds on us like a pyramid
of neural info — love me to the end
of Soho village — there’s no other way
sighting those tyres that leave blood on the bend.

*

Bloomsbury
Chris McCabe

for Kelvin Corcoran

It’s the music of what matters
it pulls me this way always
across Waterloo Bridge
in search of the poet
— revenant of sliproad hymns —
the Isle of Dogs smatters
its SIM cards to the stars
as Westminster descales
gold florins
in the Counting House
of the river’s pummelling,
the Aldwych arcs a scythe against
Bush House & pushes me north
— in search of the poet —
through the contented Squares
of Tavistock, Russell, Bloomsbury,
where my mind lost its trace —
night air around Gt. Ormond St
when my son was strung with fluids
like a doll in a rockpool
I walk that way through reduced serotonin
to the glyphs of SWEDENBORG HALL
inside the poet sings
with a haemorrhage on his mind —
adds his message to the city’s signs :
the dark enfolding road we leave behind

*

Yauatcha
Jeremy Reed

A blue light-box, deep sea ultramarine,
an Yves Klein shot with toothpaste blue
(Colgate Oxygen) faces out
on Broadwick Street, a rainy Sunday fuzz
pixelating beadily, a damp glow
grainy Soho 4pm 30/11 chill
we take inside from reflective windows
of Cowling & Wilcox opposite.
(I make adjustments for altered place states
in my sci-fi Soho novel The Grid)
and find immersion in 150 teas
and choose a Pau Dragon Orchid, scent
written into the name, a gold sauna
poured in a cup, a steamy tangy trick
turned on the palate — it’s your green tea cake —
three leaf-green suitcases pitted in mousse
like baggage angled on the carousel
arrests my eye, an arty rococo detail
designed to tease the bite: the Cantonese
next to us fork venison puffs
and lobster dumplings, slowly, incisively
like surgery, a serious graft
of separating textures, while I stare
out at a 6ft strip of afternoon
leaked in with shop lights, frontage, drizzled smear,
a Broadwick Street industrial grey different
from any other Soho grey
and feel the transient suspense, the last
shot-down blues bled out of the winter day.

*

Alderman Stairs, E1
Chris McCabe

Under Alderman Stairs chains latch
to brick, moss-covered steering wheels
of Volvos silenced in the woods
— interiors hushed with vines —
an anchor rigged with a rope of horsehair
and matted with sponge. The city’s
urgencies close-off above, quaint
as tea-rooms from the debris & crush
of this basement shoreline, a cellar
of thanatos drinking games. A shingle
of dud electrics glint the base of a glass
like a monocle that blinds, the petrified
crust of a stout bottle holograms
an eagle in the tide’s dispensary — we drink
to ooze these toxins merrily. What sunlight
the city takes in early March is caged here,
like the underside of a disused pier, ribbed
with blackened timber & splintered barge-
beds. I walk like a hangman that scattered
the revellers as the grey beach rolls
under my treads on an axis of lichen —
finger-nails hook damp wood for gravity.
A trickle like coins from a hostelier’s
pouch counts itself in crustaceous syllables
from under the stairs : there, like a kissing
chamber enclosed in the corner, a stream
runs from a lost river or a leak from
an ancient watermain, choking back
to its source. My shadow sprawls on the
bricks beneath, as if to attach itself to itself
and multiply under stalactites in this unit
of storage the city fails to lease, a hub for
rats & disused fibre-optics. There is enough
space to sit inside & for the river to rise
and cancel this bucket of oxygen, closing
London back to ground level as the detritus
swirls to the surface for the tea-drinkers
to watch — swirls of champagne corks,
consumables — that submerge again & rise
with the broken glass & the bladderwrack.

from Whitehall Jackals (Nine Arches Press, 2013).

Order Whitehall Jackals.

‘london bacteria is virulent: writing whitehall jackals’ by Chris McCabe.

Whitehall Jackals reviewed in Stride and Sabotage.

Visit Chris’ blog.

Visit Jeremy’s website.

James W. Wood’s The Anvil’s Prayer

1 Reply

James W. Wood was born in Scotland and educated at schools in Canada and the United Kingdom before studying English at Cambridge, where his first pamphlet, Swingtime, was published with financial support from the university.

After leaving Cambridge, he won a scholarship to work with 1992 Nobel Prize winner in literature, Derek Walcott, in the United States. Since leaving North America for a second time, James has worked as a copywriter and media executive on four continents. He has also reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, The London Magazine, The Daily Telegraph and many others, and his poems have appeared in the above journals and further anthologies, including Faber and Faber’s First Pressings (1998). James is the author of two further pamphlets, The Theory of Everything (HappenStance, 2006), and Inextinguishable (Knucker Press, 2008). He is married with a son and currently lives in Toronto, Canada.

“The Anvil’s Prayer (Ward Wood Publishing, 2013) finds magic in the ordinary, heroism in the average person and beauty in the least likely places. Celebrating the wonder that surrounds us, James W. Wood’s first full-length collection turns from praise to elegy and exaltation in language which is as understated as it is precise and daring.”

Reviews of earlier work

“James W. Wood’s The Theory of Everything negotiates the daily business of living with insight and feeling.”

– Carl Phillips, winner of the Solomon Guggenheim Memorial Award

“James W. Wood’s The Theory of Everything is an exceptional first volume of verse, full of an awareness of the richness of everyday lives.”

– Professor Emeritus Brian Cox

“James W. Wood’s poetry couples a finely tuned ear with a remarkable mix of passion, idealism and down-to-earth good sense. Indeed, ‘The Song of Scotland’ – a powerful piece by any measure – may well be this century’s first significant state-of-the-nation poem.”

– Andrew Philip

“James W. Wood is a talent to be reckoned with: both lyrical and humane, he has a technical ability with language that shines through every poem and a versatility that enables him to range effortlessly from elegy to satire.”

– Jane McKie

“James W. Wood cares about the precision and possibilities of language and about honest when dissecting the subtleties of human emotion, neither one to the exclusion of the other. His work is a pleasure to read and, when questioning or provocative, none the less pleasurable for that.”

– Rob Mackenzie

*

The Same Page

Our hands hold the book: a poem
I must have read a hundred times before,
this your first time, eyes scanning
the page, stumbling, unsure. You listen

as I mouth rhymes I know too well,
rushing through them as though reading
a timetable or manual. You discover things
I should have seen but never spotted,

new points about this old poem
that will enrich our future. My eyes
fix on the last word on the page,
my heart races as you get near the end

and I wonder what this poem means to you –
I want it to say what I cannot find
the words to tell you as I catch my breath,
waiting for you to make up your mind.

*

The Wandering Horses

The eyes of a horse in a field:
our animal other for fifty centuries,
now she’s a curious, distant beast
chewing remorselessly in rain. Conscious

of our presence, she keeps her thoughts
to herself, those truths we would deny
or mire in delusion. But for her
there is no doubt: birth comes quickly, death

too often too slowly, and life
a blur of joy and work in her world,
too fast and fast forgotten. Somewhere
beyond what we see, her folklore

riddles these fields: there, where she foaled
one early summer, or there, where
her head first dipped for fresh shoots,
and always will until at last she lies down

in her last place. Though she lives
far from our endless, panicked rush,
she knows our world too well:
the box that comes and carries her,

the needles we stick in her,
the metal shoes, the spurs and leather,
those instruments of a ruler, or so
we’d like to think. Lucky us

that she can’t speak, can’t say
how unexceptional and pointless
our worries are, how unattainable
the peace we seek without sorrow

or at least the patience to bear it –
something we used to learn
down all those centuries from
the eyes of a horse in a field.

*

Amphigorey Story

(Edward Gorey, visual artist: 1925 – 2000)

It begins to snow. In Chicago
a baby boy is born. A cow lows
behind the ha-ha: a snail crawls
across the ceiling, scything sideways 9s.
His mother’s eyes, his father’s hands
hitting. Drinking. Screams press the boy
to drawing. A pen and ink,
roads open for escape, leading
to Harvard. A heart smoothed
to stone, tennis-racquet nerves
taut. Miss Eunice Slipper
picks up teacups in a house
called Collapsed Pudding in Mortshire;
then he’s outside the publisher,
building that long dark stair
up to a room in his heart’s mind
where bleeding he lay beaten
until his mother came in greeting,
come-for-tea’ing him. Warding off Ed
and all those Gorey details. Then fame,
children swallowed in the beasts
of imagination, the breast beaten,
sloping heads and unstrung harps. A man
alone in age, all one to him. A pen
again. Black ink and ten cats, he gains again
all that he wanted to ignore in us:
If something is worth
anything it isn’t worth
defining. Fur overcoat and tennis shoes,
black wire specs hid what no-one knew,
copies of the Daily News, the New York
City Ballet season. Haunted
by his father’s weeds, words,
deeds, over grown, going
over: a boy with a horror
of hands. When he unwoke up blue
and cold found outside it was still
snowing.

*

Minesweeper

(IM James Wood, 1903 – 1978)

At fourteen years old he put to sea
in his father’s trawler. He hauled the nets,
watched the ropes freeze, rolled his cigarettes.
When the fishing shrank he came to shore
and policed the streets of the South-East.
After that came marriage, then a war:
he sent his wife home and signed up
to delve the bomb-swept seas around the Azores.

What makes our time better than the past?

You couldn’t say he was ignorant
or judge him by books he hadn’t read –
the Pelman Course for Self-Improvement
was his university for the untutored.
Think of everything he heard and saw,
so unlike those Pathé newsreels in your head:
dolphins at play with seals, gulls keeping score,
the heat-cracked deck, the spray, men killing or dead.

Did they call that combat stress?

After demob he worked for the GPO, silent
about the scars he’d seen. His medals
slept ranked in the sideboard, a store
of silver for a grandson too little
to understand or bear them. And at the last –
an oxygen mask, mint imperials in a dish,
gasped phrases, cancer his unwelcome guest,
an old sailor too ill to change the TV channel.

Who puts our bravery to the test?

So as you think on, ask yourself why
history gets written by those who are left
and not the ones who bear it witness?
In our panic-blind age, he’s still here
with all the pressing ranks of dead
who wish us well, watch our errors with regret –
if only our antiseptic online lifestyles
could bring us half his courage and strength:

          What makes us think we know best?
          What makes us think we know best?

*



The Craws

William Rodger, 1910 – 2002
Alexander Wood, 1918 – 1998

                                        One for sorrow.
I see them wherever I go:
birds perched on the prow of a ship,

oblique letters wheeling over the waves,
sunlight glancing off them as they dip

and rise above the postcard landscape
we know as home.
Two for joy:

all my life you were there, when I was
taken in to the old men, ‘this is Bobby’s loddie’,

in the cold, deep houses, their faces battered
by rain and tobacco, hands turned to stone

and scarred from the nets. Cans of Tartan
or whisky’s warming, talismanic glow

in a short glass. Your ever-present packet
of Players’. Your wristwatch and lighter.

Three for girls, four for boys.
That time
at my sister’s wedding, I had to bite harder

on my lip to stop the trembling when you said
‘Hurry up Jamesy and get merrit

or I’ll no be aboot tae see ye do it.’ Five
for silver, six for gold. You never envied

the hordes who left for London
or further abroad; you never strayed

much further than Kirkcaldy or Leven,
home the anchor you would not weigh.

Seven for a secret never to be told –
sixty years on from your wedding day

you kept smiling, still in love
with your wife, bowling and drinking,

watching a passing world. You were
no prizewinner, sportsman or great thinker,

just a man like any other, and one
whose life asks us for little grieving.

I make this for you not just
to mark your leaving, but because

the birds in the harbour won’t sing
the same since you passed on:

the boats sit too high in the water,
and the whalebones guarding the town have gone.

But those gulls still watch from the rocks
near the graveyard, guarding your headstone,

chiselled letters all that’s left
of a life that stays with me, like the crows

that fly overhead here in London,
calling out to me, chasing me home.

*

Catherine Wheel

A hand and a key. Eyes aflame
as you babble about Rilke
and his angels. The engine starts – why

did you do it? No-one
you could talk to about the depths
you were driving into, no-one else

in that silence, only trees
and blackness and your mind
like a firework wheeling crazily

in the middle of that sunless wood
where you stopped the car, full of pills,
and fixed the pipe. You knew no God

except the one you spoke to privately,
struck dumb by the world, praying
to a dead poet whose angels wouldn’t come

as the fumes filled your car
and your head slumped forward. There
was no sound, no sound but your machine,

an engine turning over in the woods
with no-one to see it or care: you were
a Catherine Wheel blazing brilliantly

in a ploughed field at midsummer, a spark
that might have cloaked us all in fire
if only we could have seen it.

from The Anvil’s Prayer (Ward Wood Publishing, 2013).

Order The Anvil’s Prayer.

James reads ‘Departures’ at his Poetry Café launch.

James reads ‘The Parting’ at his Poetry Café launch.

Poems from ‘For Rhino in a Shrinking World’

4 Replies

For Rhino in a Shrinking World, An International Anthology
Published by The Poets Printery, South Africa, 2013

Edited by Harry Owen
Illustrated by Sally Scott

*

All proceeds from the sale of this volume go, via the Chipembere Rhino Foundation, to support the work of fighting poaching and protecting our gravely threatened natural heritage.

*

““What we need in the world today is to hear within us
the sounds of the earth crying” (Taken from a Zen Poem)

Man’s connection with the earth is a mystifying confusion of physical, chemical and spiritual beauty. The depth and complexity of nature’s secrets has scarcely begun to be understood by the overwhelming tide of human beings. To be able to appreciate and take care of the abundance of life on our planet has always been a challenge.

Life has always been a mystery that many of us scarcely take the time to consider. The poets bring glimpses of a reality beyond our known sense and the beauty of their words lingers for centuries, be it Virgil, Wordsworth or Rupert Brooke. As we fail to understand the depth of the natural world, we place ourselves at risk.

The poets who have contributed to this book forcibly bring to mind the terrible plight of the rhino in the modern world. We applaud their efforts.

Rhino have a particularly plaintive cry, which once heard is never forgotten. The screams of agony from rhino that have had their horns chopped off while still alive should reach out into the hearts of all of us. We believe that it is only through a GLOBAL campaign and POLITICAL will that we can save this remnant of the dinosaur age – the rhino.

The heritage of a species, the rhino, and the environment we share with it, symbolises so much of what the Wilderness Foundation is driven to take care of. It is our hope that what lies within this anthology will reveal enough to inspire everyone to respond to the “sounds of the earth crying”.”

– Dr Ian Player and Andrew Muir, Wilderness Foundation

*

“The deepening crisis faced by our rhino threatens to overwhelm us as we are assaulted daily by rotting images of animals mutilated at the hands of greedy man. The gruesome account of just two of the victims of poaching has reached into the hearts of these writers and resonates back on us from across the world. A challenge for us all to react. Our simple personal responses as caring custodians in the face of such a daunting reality, is all that stands between life and extinction.

Who will join this global collection of humane reactions? Will there be enough to express our value for the natural world? Are we able to focus fear, anger and bitter sadness into those simple abilities we have been blessed with and create the change on which we all depend? I trust the power of the written word gathered within this wonderful collection, inspired by Harry Owen as an expression of his own journey, is enough to change our hearts and ignite us into action.”

– Dr William Fowlds

*

Contributors: Hannah Armour, Natalie Armour, AE Ballakisten, Shabbir Banoobhai, Mike Barlow, Brett Beiles, Marike Beyers, Alison Brackenbury, Roger Bradley, Peter Branson, Mark Burnhope, Chloë Callistemon, Veronica Caperon, Hélène Cardona, Alfred Corn, Richard de Nooy, Dónall Dempsey, Gail Dendy, Bandile Dlabantu, Jordan du Toit, Baisali Chatterjee Dutt, Margaret Eddershaw, Chukwudi-prince Ehilegbu, Roger Elkin, Nola Firth, John Forbis, Myfanwy Fox, w. Terry Fox, Lance Fredericks, Hailey Gaunt, Kim Goldberg, Veronica Golos, Matt Goodfellow, Elizabeth Gowans, Geraldine Green, Kerry Hammerton, Rosemund Handler, Geoffrey Haresnape, Caroline Hawkridge, Silke Heiss, Denis Hirson, Linda Hofke, Phil Howard, Louisa Howerow, Chris Jackson, Simon Jackson, Lorne Johnson, Madeleine Begun Kane, Peter Kantey, Andy Kissane, Valerie Laws, Stuart Thembisile Lewis, John Lindley, Pippa Little, Alison Lock, Moira Lovell, David Mallett, Chris Mann, Andrew Martin, Agnes Marton, Ian McCallum, Fokkina McDonnell, Jeannie Wallace McKeown, Joan Metelerkamp, Sonwabo Meyi, John Mhongovoyo, Bill Milner, Ian Mole, Norman Morrissey, Mary Mullen, Tendai Mwanaka, Philip Neilsen, Kate Noakes, Edward Nudelman, Mxolisi Nyezwa, Harry Owen, Val Payn, Pascale Petit, Pauline Plummer, Joan Poulson, Ron Pretty, Sheenagh Pugh, Wonga Qina, Lesego Rampolokeng, Andrew Renard, Susan Richardson, Mark Roberts, Amali Rodrigo, Sam Schramski, Sally Scott, Richard Slater-Jones, Dennis Slattery, JD Smith, Annette Snyckers, Leih Steggall, John Stocks, Adam Tavel, Michael James Treacy, Megan van der Nest, Ellen van Neerven-Currie, Marc Vincenz, Elmé Vivier, Wendy Wallace, Brian Walter, Mal Westcott, Tony Williams, Phil Williams, Jennifer Wong, Ruth Woudstra, Dan Wylie and Phillippa Yaa de Villiers.

*

Dear Rhino, love from Hippo
Tony Williams

With skin like ours, friend, the usual
          insults of a rivalry descend
          harmlessly as confetti or the blossom of trees
          we rub our backs against.
Nor would expressions of sympathy survive
          the foul tempers of our readership. Instead
          I’m sending you this chatty letter, a crocodilian
          sickle of courtesy in the poisoned soup,
          which might worry you if crocodiles did.
          Be assured of my continuing hostility and indifference.

In the past month
          I have eaten a rare fly, a wristwatch,
          a silhouette, odd chunks of my rivals’ chins
          and a vast tonnage of hay which you,
dense hoover of the midday sun, missed
          when the eternal salad drawer of the night
          clanked open as you slept. Or are you
          nocturnal too? It’s hard to see in the dark.

You doomed swordsman, me cloven-hoofed
          and cackling like a whale. You unicorn,
          me Cadillac bumping up
          against the blond girl’s legs.
Whatever happened
          to your ambition to become a freelance illustrator?
Every time I pass the hospital
          done out like the concourse of an old European station
          with the pediments high up based, unattributed,
          on your sketch of an elephant’s toenails
I think dommage! and of the royalties we’d claim
          if I’d ever passed my law exams and you
          weren’t such a raging and wretchedly cantankerous drunk.

At least we don’t owe money to the giraffes.
Down at the waterhole it’s O’Casey
          the lion this O’Casey
          the lion that but it’s us
          they come to when the drains are blocked.
You, woodcut engraving from the days of the plague,
          me poster paints printed by a dipped-in bum.

Listen, priapus-face, I’ve been
          divining the future in the map of illness
          disclosed in my own used nappy.
I think you’d enjoy a cheese and pickle sandwich
          if you dared to enter a deli. I think the jackals would swoon
          like spinach wilting if only you’d show them The Dance.
I’ve been listening to local radio over the internet.
          I’ve bid on a doll’s house and
          a signed photo of Lothar Matthaus.
I’ve heard a grown man singing falsetto
          for the amusement of chumps.

Thanks very much for the library card. I’ve read of
          isotopes, anarchists, artistic foibles of heretical sects.
I’ve read a few classics, and enjoyed your waspish annotations.
          (I dreamed I saw your initials
          carved into the brickwork of the Bradford Alhambra
          but didn’t inform the police.)

You tin opener, me turtle without a shell,
          you me, me you. How long
          will we put up with being haunted
          by the ghosts of all the antelopes
          mistaking us for mobile crypts to hole up in?
Now that I’ve developed the transmogrifier
          we could go anywhere, do anything –
          spend a century as a standard lamp, become amoebas
          in the eye-sockets of a monkey, and get elected.
So don’t get pettish. Sling your keys in the bowl.
          We’ll put our heads together, become a
          hiprhiponopocetarosmus,
          get a scholarship to university, mend a motorbike,
step out one morning after a pot of tea,
          carrying a cudgel, thinking
          how the sky’s colour reminds us of approaching evening,
          how the deaths of our loved ones will become
as quaint a topic as the weather and the history of the Anabaptist Church
          which we might tease open with a little sullen laugh
          over a tall glass of Pernod.

*

You’ll never become a rhinoceros, really you won’t …
you haven’t got the vocation
(‘Rhinoceros’ – Eugène Ionesco)
Susan Richardson

There comes a day when making donations
and signing petitions isn’t enough,
when braver decisions are needed.
So you practise detachment
from your knees,
trample the lunchtime prattle of fat loss
and anti-wrinkle creams.
You commit to omitting to moisturise,
will your skin to thicken,
thrill to fashion callouses and warts.

When the first horn forms, it triggers
second thoughts, till you use it to gore
your twinges of caution.
From raw veg and fruit, you move
to woody shrubs and thorns,
snort through weeks
of stomach cramps and wind.
But the wallowing’s a breeze,
and the shift to horizontal’s eased
by your umpteen years of yoga.

Next to varied breathing speeds
and scent-marking middens of dung,
texting seems so naive. In fact,
if you still had fingers and thumbs
you’d just use them to pinch yourself,
for you’ve done what none
can believe. And while the strain of raising
your head has led
to chronic pain in your neck,
your brain hums with infrasonic success.

As you roam your home range,
oxpeckers divest you of ticks
and outmoded emotions,
though you insist they must not strip you
of awareness
of your rare, endangered state.

*

Crushed Dragon Bones
Marc Vincenz

          Tiger Claw Apothecary, Shanghai, 1999

Quan leads me through an array of popping scents,
this lingering whiff of Bombay spice bazaar,

medicine healing scars, prehensile fungi, blooming
rhino horn, white deer antler, mandible of stag beetle,

snapping tail of scorpion, turtle snout, all crushed to steep
in clear hot liquids bubbling right into the very centre

of the maze where a woman in a nightdress waits patiently.
Here he goes whispering in the corner.

Lady behind the counter turns flushed-cheek red,
titters under her breath, holds her hand to cover her teeth.

Eyes him apprehensively. Eyebrows arch-raised,
coughs in syncopated answer. Fiddles with her stethoscope.

Another woman looks me up and down: Hey you, big nose?
Want me check your pulse? I sit down across the counter.

She applies the leather-puffing contraption to my left biceps.
Pumps until I feel my left side is ready to explode.

Aha, take this. She fiddles a powder, rattling grains from
that drawer, granules from another. All marked in red.

Grinds the mixture in mortar humming some old love tune.
Flips the dust into a paper bag. Hand palm out:

Fifty yuan. Releases the catch and Ssssss spins down.
Quan’s smiling ear to ear and we’re out the door

through the hedgerows and into haze of open space.
Quan rumbles something about bones old bones.

Crushed dragon bones for the little man inside.
No problem like you, he says. This will keep me going all night.

*

The Dead are Bored
Philip Neilsen

We the dead are bored with your concerns

your endless talk on radio and TV about diet and pets

your fear of impotence

your fascination with genealogy

your colour photos taken on holiday in Africa:

speak for us now

or condemn us all by your tiny fears

your politeness about customs and magical beliefs.

Listen, only this is magic – human and rhino

conjoined. When we depart

and clumsy birds mop the plain

you see there your own remains.

*

‘Best Selling: Father and Son Hunting Package Deals’
Valerie Laws

The world is big and wide, son.
It’s ours to rule and ride, son.
Come hunting the Big Five, son,
It’s all about male pride.

Game animals are grand, son,
And you must understand, son,
They are ours, as is the land, son,
It’s all about God’s plan.

The elephant, the lion, son,
The buffalo and leopard, son,
The rare and savage rhino, son;
Stalking them is hard.

So beautiful they are, son,
Most dangerous by far, son.
Come hunting with your Pa, son,
For nights beneath the stars.

I promise you it’s fun, son,
With servants and two guns, son,
We’ll bag them every one, son,
Until the job is done.

They’ll snap us with our Five, son,
Propped up as if alive, son,
Then carve steaks with their knives, son,
For us to feast upon.

And when you eat your fill, son,
Of meat and see blood spill, son,
And when you’ve learned to kill, son,
You’ve learned a manly skill.

We’ll fly back home to Mom, son,
With washing to be done, son,
And trophies to be shown, son,
The skins, the horns, the bone.

It’s a kind of conservation, son,
These beasts need preservation, son,
So we shoot them on reservations, son,
So you can take your son.

*

Why Save The Fckn Rhino, Harry?
Richard de Nooy

Let’s face it, Harry, every fckn war we’ve ever

fought every nation squashed and generation

stolen each pre-fckn-cision bombing and

concentration camp the man-high heaps of

napalmed children grotesque decapitated

privates draped over barbed wire and women

raped for days on end the in-fckn-terminable

talks of peace and cease fires that only serve

to replenish and prepare for world war fckn

eight hundred and thirty-three the scorched

earth blacker than Satan’s arsehole into which

the orphans creep in search of cover and

AK-47s, grenades and mines to

blow their barren fckn world to kingdom

fckn come and every martyr strapped with

semtex every broken life and drop of fckn blood

endless inventories of collateral damage poorly

hidden mass graves that all reveal ma-fckn

-cabre human treasures displayed in grinning

rows and each and every other fckn act of

violence albeit somehow vague and indirect

was perpetrated for one reason only so

that rich men’s cocks would grow or stay erect.

So why only save the fckn rhino, Harry, why?

*

Your Tour Guide Speaks
Harry Owen

6.00 p.m.

Hi, everyone!
We trust you’re enjoying your sundowners.
A few short years ago we couldn’t have
played you this record of the plains
in such blissful comfort, for then there was
no road. The Great Migration, they called it,
of wildebeest and zebra, but what use
was that when none of us could watch such stuff
as now we do in air-conditioned calm?
Those days are gone, thank God, the Great Migration
is no more, but life moves on and we adore
our Serengeti Roadshow.

We drive through early evening into night,
deep darkness of the range about us now,
for why should we need detail? These eyes
that surge and leap on us in acid whites
and bloody reds are really all we’ve travelled for.
Let’s tick them off our Big Five species lists –
elefords in the middle of the road,
buffamercs and those sleek white rolls-rhino,
our latest ivory, newest muti.
Mara will spawn the mitsubishi hippo,
more deadly in the dark of the moon than
this fat catillac, king of all the beasts.
We speed past the cheetatas (be quick with
those field guides!), placid audilope alert,
and the smarmy Black Market Wildebeest,
noting the occasional ponderous
VWDungbeetle, thought extinct
but making a slow and ponderous comeback.

But it’s getting late. Recline your seats
and rest: dream of wild Africa.

6.00 a.m.

Good morning!
Just ahead and to the left, ladies
and gentlemen, boys and girls, where our coach
slows for the flashing amber light, you’ll spot,
grazing at the roadside verge, a small herd
of white ute-bakkie, once extremely rare
on these vast plains but now plentiful
from Arusha to Lake Victoria.
Always at their most striking in the haze
of early morning when our Tanzanian
sun sears itself, so languid in the smoggy east,
they rev – so have your cameras ready.
And look, presiding over that scrapyard
to our right, a splendid pair of blue cranes!

Yet, though this is indeed the Road That
Never Ends, we’ve glimpsed our destination:
last chance to pause before the journey ends.
Here is the world famous Pick-up Pit Stop –
and what better breakfast than its cool
Kikwete Fast Chowmein (KFC for short:
you’ve seen their logo all along the road,
the friendly huge red grinning Colonel Croc),
the only one with chopsticks fashioned
from authentic acacia wood. Alas,
this morning all that’s left for us to poach
are the eggs of kites and vultures pulling
at the putrid flesh of roadkill corpses.
The rest is out of stock, so please don’t ask
to see the manager – he’ll likely be
in some important meeting.
Or at a conference.

So thanks for sharing your World Heritage
Safari Experience with us. Do
enjoy your omelette – and have a lovely day!

*


Stone by Stepping Stone
John Lindley

From ‘landfill’ to ‘lapwing’
requires more than a dip in the alphabet,
more than just a leap of faith
yet it begins
and it begins not letter by letter
but hedge by fattening hedge.

It begins as small as a bird table
and grows as wide as a field, as long as a ridge.
It begins amongst foxgloves and figwort,
in a morning of meadowsweet
and though no wild boar witness it
it is noted by hairstreak and peregrine,
by badger and owl.

It begins stone by stepping stone
and who would have thought such stones
could be engineered and sown?
Who would have thought
they could be dreamt, mapped and moulded
into more than fancy, more than symbol?

Still, it begins. From Frodsham to Bulkeley Hill.
From corridor to green corridor
a land found and refashioned
reclaims itself and swells until each corridor
is no longer measured by the wing span of a hawk
but by the circumference of its flight.

Born of a glacial shift –
a sandstone ridge,
red raw with promise,
skirts hill fort and castle.
A raven hunches like age
against the gathering mist.

Put an ear to the earth,
hear a seed splitting with new life.
Cast an eye to the hills,
see elms able again to stretch and touch fingers.
Woodland and heathland –
all are a heartland
and it is a heart that beats from Beacon Hill
to Bickerton and beyond.

It is a heart thought still,
jumpstarted by other hearts:
by landlord and farmer,
by owner and tenant,
by craftsman and labourer,
by the you and me we call a community.

It is a heart that drums
in the small frame of newt,
the slick casing of otter,
the sensual hide of deer
and grows louder,
like the echo of those lost skylarks
who went with the grassland
but now sing of recovery, sing of return.

*

Extremophile
Sheenagh Pugh

Two miles below the light, bacteria
live without sun, thrive on sulphur
in a cave of radioactive rock,
and, blind in the night of the ocean floor,
molluscs that feed only on wood
wait for wrecks. White tubeworms heap
in snowdrifts around hydrothermal vents,
at home in scalding heat. Lichens encroach
on Antarctic valleys where no rain
ever fell. There is nowhere
life cannot take hold, nowhere so salt,
so cold, so acid, but some chancer
will be there, flourishing on bare stone,
getting by, gleaning a sparse living
from marine snow, scavenging
light from translucent quartz, as if
lack and hardship could do nothing
but quicken it, this urge
to cling on in the cracks
of the world, or as if this world
itself, so various, so not to be spared
as it is, were the impetus
never to leave it.

from For Rhino in a Shrinking World
(The Poets Printery, South Africa, 2013).

Order For Rhino in a Shrinking World.

Visit For Rhino in a Shrinking World’s website.

Visit the Chipembere Rhino Foundation.

Jennifer Wong’s Goldfish

Mario Petrucci’s anima

3 Replies

“Reminiscent of e.e. cummings at his best”, Mario Petrucci’s work is “vivid, generous and life-affirming” (Envoi). His most recent poems, inspired by Black Mountain and hailed as “modernist marvels” (Poetry Book Society), embrace contemporary issues of profound social and personal relevance via a distinctive combination of innovation and humanity. Through groundbreaking residencies, poetry films and a remarkable output of ecopoetry, his unique scientific sensibility has illuminated the linguistic as well as emotive resonances of love and loss in the public and private domains. Whether exploring the tragedies of Chernobyl (Heavy Water, 2004) or immersing himself in heart-rending invention (i tulips, 2010), Petrucci aspires to “Poetry on a geological scale” (Verse).

“The thirty-nine poems of anima bring a distinctive, archetypal potency to the closing stages of Mario Petrucci’s larger i tulips project, the 1111-strong sequence in which this sub-sequence crucially sits.

Arising organically from prior modernist experiment, Petrucci’s style nevertheless remains utterly contemporary. His mastery of the shape and sound of each poem makes for an intense and all-consuming experience, refocusing an array of influences through an acute lyrical sensibility. By yielding so completely to the power of linguistic transformation, these searing, necessary poems capture both the crisis and the beauty of the heart’s innermost voyage.”

*

“Mario Petrucci’s anima is a revelation of the underside of a human heart submitting to the contradictions of love, doubt and mortality. This remarkable work reconfigures the soul as well as the mind, through language that shapes the ineffable into a visceral, triumphant poetry.”

– Alexandra Burack

“The tensile delicacy of Petrucci’s lines springs back with a very English baroque, Miltonic surprise: sense-ambush occurs in the next line, skewering what’s gone before. Between these line-breaks rests a declamatory silence tested to snapping. This is major work to cast shadows.”

– Álvaro de Campos, tr. Simon Jenner

“With a brio and tenderness all of their own, these new lyric poems are modernist marvels, word sculptures pared to their very essence… Petrucci’s tulips promise to grow into a truly ambitious landmark body of work.”

– Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 2010

*

the machine

step into the machine
they said
& we can take you back

undo each & all regret
the girls the booze that bank
I said

the catch?
that’s for you to choose they said
just get in first &

take it
step by step so I could have had (I
mean could have)

Margaret? no –
better than that the clearest pearl you
never met a flower

a-swirl in mead but
hurry now this power is
expensive & what of illness? mine? no

need for that you’ll be shown
where you mustn’t live look – an open
door sign

here (I cursed) was she then
the one? of many friend you mean
rather than the one I

took? you’re sure? oh
much more than you can know so
meet that hearse

with a silken heart take another
throw…(I’d one leg
in) I said

&
what about
my son?

your son? ah
– nothing to be done nothing
we can do but

there’ll be others just like
him & not unkilled & he’ll never know
you know nor you

I know
now I said (they began to fret the floor
began to slide) we need

answers get
inside don’t make this your biggest
yet I

saw a face
somewhere still at play a door
swept shut

then
disappeared as I whispered
through air distilled

I’ll stay

*

for Pablo Neruda (‘Tonight I Can Write…’)

because i have

lost her I hold her gaze in mine
who never loses who sees me under
the bone moon bones in her eyes daze

all love shown in singlest glance nothing
survives other than love what eyes
steady behind a look covered

recovered as one loses a stone
generations passed down on single
fingers regenerations to regain her I

found because I looked & all gazing salt who
think eyes that dance lose translating
flesh to other flesh that thinned

mink a thumbtip brushed in her small
of back or animal between thighs made
heady muse what is never held I cannot

lose as oceans do not hold the dolphin ever
passing through I have her now who
passed in trueness feel her

glide within as certain days become
asides to time as though I were that air emp-
tied leap–stunned over water what waters hide

after dolphins

*

room

within
none ever
walked through

walls
unpainted with chords
yellowed

beneath silt
& caught between brick
each ability

to weep
bedded in plaster to cover
notes as

if music
were indicant absence for
what

instruments
never express though this
covert man

is able
sat by a window black
with lateness

halved
in love for all quiets
he cannot

hear
quite pianissimo
through

night
artful with dawn all on
its brink

agape
with the next his very next
beat b-

rushing
that rim outermost in him
ever after

about to
return even as it burns
lock to

key
in the one his
undone

heart

*

anima I

cannot write
her straight – this
man in whom straightness is

an arrow curving
its path : mere illusion
for lovers who plot where it arcs

I cannot know
her in this line I draw
back tauter than the string that lets

pain go or
the bow supple in its
bend yet ever prone to warp & send

off-true : so
how may I find a You
where speech is impossible unless

this skimming
of targets be the way
into speaking between a man &

that woman he
started with neither
mother nor wife but She he

squints at
clear through near
-sighted morning as if

her stroke
steady & precise
through him were

all
air ready
to be parted

*

O anima

you ran
ahead when magma
was just a girl hurled along masculine

vertebrae to spill her tresses hotly orange
or part in pleasure there &
here her

many yellow
lipsticked mouths – you
blessed the pool where bacteria unthinking

Brownian ways through measured light chose
instead one day to walk &
continents

still fused
hip to shoulder you
smouldered on each southern bed dreamy

with depth & loosely loved where underwater
vents teethed in druse sent
upwards

plumed
biota as campfires do
by gloomy streams & even through reptilian

doom you grew patient for me as the Nile for
sand or that green-brown rind
on crocodiles

you waited
for sun & mind to grow me
with every journey hearse-to-crib become one

slow breath & now i breathe creation in
as though that oxygen were
easy on

these lungs
received through a look
fearlessly ancient from a creature formed

not of rib but water who found at last air &
fire or as bluish Earth in
all its seas

glares in love
upon airier blues or the air
-borne bird ever chooses to keep motionless

its egg or settles in the nest it makes itself
with delicate shivers to rest
within

that perfect
fit – though today i sleep &
skit so sense myself a swallow stalled &

brought too soon to ground who sees thus
calls to your sky moving on
above to

wait for me

*

for Hafez

how our stars

fall to heaven not
up
from hell: twinned

flares unseen in op-
position
that dare cross them

selves across the sea
-through
moon in soundless omen

a quick amen in bodied sky
light
swells to bluest child these

plutonic cells uncurtailed
&
indivisibly double this

zygote afternoon that
brings
to hours made all

but ionic with
bright
electrics our

invisibly
parallel
filaments

of night

from anima (Nine Arches Press, 2013).

Order anima here and here.

Visit Mario’s website.

*

‘The Old and the Young’ by Rebecca Goss

1 Reply

Rebecca Goss was born in 1974 and grew up in Suffolk. She studied English at Liverpool John Moores University and has an MA in Creative Writing from Cardiff University. Her first full-length collection, The Anatomy of Structures, was published in 2010 by Flambard Press. Her Birth, her second collection, is published by Carcanet/Northern House and has been shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection. She has recently moved back to Suffolk after twenty years in Liverpool, where she taught creative writing at Liverpool John Moores University. She is married, has raised her two stepchildren, and now combines writing full time with caring for her young daughter.

Shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection

“In 2007 Rebecca Goss’s newborn daughter Ella was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly, a rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for sixteen months. Her Birth is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella’s birth, her short life and her death, and ending with the joys and complexities that come with the birth of another child. Goss navigates the difficult territory of grief and loss in poems that are spare, tender and haunting: “Going home, back down/ the river road, will be a foreign route without her”.”

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“The poems in Her Birth unfold their story of love, loss and grief for a baby daughter with pared-down precision and scorching intensity. The language, like sea-glass, has been ground by a tide that might have crushed words completely. Instead, it has shaped these translucent poems.”

– Helen Dunmore

“It is rare to read a book of poems which has the narrative compulsion of Her Birth. But even such a powerful and moving narrative as this one would not be effective without the beautifully crafted language in which the poems are expressed: clear, graceful, word-perfect. This is a wonderful book.”

– Bernard O’Donoghue

*

The Old and the Young

Since the death of my baby daughter in 2008, I look at old people differently. By old, I mean men and women well into their pensionable years. I have always loved the company of older people but there is an added poignancy to it now.

Twenty years of my life were spent in Liverpool. It’s rare to go anywhere in the city and not engage with a stranger within hours. Perhaps I am generalising, but I think women too, are particularly quick to confess and confide in each other. We have an ability to share and reveal information about ourselves, to females we barely know, in a matter of minutes. In the past five years I have met several elderly women who have lost children. Their stories were told to me in various locations: the gardens of a café, a bus, my own street. I didn’t know any of the women, we had not met before, but just the gentle crossing of paths prompted conversation. Their stories of sadness came quickly. I didn’t tell them about my own daughter’s death and what floored me about their stories was how quickly their ‘loss’ came to the surface. In each case, the death of their child had happened decades earlier but it was almost the first thing they told me. It defined them, all those years later.

Inside Liverpool’s imposing Catholic cathedral there is a Children’s Chapel. It houses a stone-finished sculpture depicting Christ surrounded by children. The windows have been likened to the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ nursery song. The woven hanging depicts the Sea of Galilee. At one end of the seat circling the chapel’s edge is a folder. It is overflowing, bursting with letters, cards and handwritten notes. I am not religious. I do not believe in God. I went to the cathedral on this particular day with my stepdaughter, as she was sketching part of the building for her school art project. I had no idea the chapel was inside. While Rosie sketched, I wandered into the chapel and gradually realised where I was and what this place meant to people.

I opened the folder and began to read. It was harrowing. There is no other word for it. Parents had come to leave letters for their dead children. But it was the dates that haunted me. My own daughter had been dead for less than a year. Some of the letters in the chapel were from women whose children had been dead for over fifty years. They had come to mark birthdays, or anniversaries and each card was written with the rawness of a recent loss.

I’m not frightened of getting old. I am frightened of forgetting my daughter, of sitting in a chair, stricken with dementia and being unable to recall her name or face. But I am also terrified of remembering her. That a part of me is going to be very sad, for the rest of my life. How selfish that sounds. How selfish too, to fear the day I will be old, an unremarkable presence on a bus and no one will give a damn that my daughter died. No one will know that I lived through that terrible thing. Now, when I see an elderly woman alone, I want to sit beside her and say Tell me everything. Tell me everything about your life.

Helpline

I’ve been told of women in their eighties
who dial on birthdays, their story drawn

from the receiver in small damp breaths:
‘He would have been sixty’

and a voice wraps them in a blanket of vowels.
Somehow, a child has slipped from them.

They were unable to stop it, like sand collapsing
back down the hole, dug on that dry part of beach.

The final section of Her Birth covers the birth of my second child. I wanted the book to end with feelings of hope. Hope is there, but the poems are permeated with fears of something awful happening again. When your world has been that of hospitals, palliative care, bad news, it is hard to believe that children live to grow old.

I discovered Sharon Olds’ collection The Sign of Saturn (Secker and Warburg, 1991) in my very early twenties. I was single, had no children of my own but was drawn in completely by her portrayal of women, motherhood and children. She also wrote a lot about sex. Sexual relationships and the family were two key things I wanted to write about and I’ve always felt that book gave me a kind of ‘green light’ to go ahead. Olds observes not just the beauty of children, but their fragility and vulnerability too. In a poem about her daughter’s worn and abandoned pyjamas she describes how they “lie on the floor/ inside out, thin and wrinkled as/ peeled skins of peaches when you ease the/ whole skin off at once./ You can see where her waist emerged, and her legs,/ gathered in rumples like skin the caterpillar/ ramped out of and left to shrivel” (from ‘Pajamas’).

Her daughter ‘ramps’ through life, but what she leaves behind is as fragile and ephemeral as peach skin. The daughter matures at a pace and there is the mother, behind her, following the trail, collecting the discarded items of proof that her child existed. Of course, this is what we want. We want to see our children growing, maturing, achieving each metamorphic stage. Despite Olds’ poems about her own children being quite wondrous, she does not take anything for granted. The book is punctuated with stories of children who do not make it. A young girl is raped and murdered, a child goes missing – the tape of his information poster “beginning to/ melt at the centre and curl at the edges as it/ ages”.

In The Sign of Saturn Olds describes someone who “knows what all of us never want to know”. If you experience the death of a child, you then carry that awful knowledge. The final poem in Her Birth returns to the wondrous state of watching a child bloom, of allowing myself to enjoy her young life. But I admit, I wanted to share some of the awful knowledge too. I wanted to explain it, explore it, try and make sense of it in some way.

Mining

I let socks dot the washing, coats grace
a chair’s arm. Her hospital bag, too hard
to unpack, stayed slumped and ignored

but eventually there was a gathering,
the limp outline of her size carried upstairs.
It accumulated in the cot, a cold pit

of pyjamas, dresses, jeans. My heap of her,
visible through bars. Insides of sleeves
brushed with her cells, last flecks compacting

in pastel matter, until her father found me
fretting at its edge, suggested it was time
for the careful mining of her things.

Our intention to sort, fold and label soon became
a quick, unhappy shoving into grey plastic bags,
the silent hoisting to an attic’s dark. Her cot

collapsed, I sobbed in that desolated space,
while my desk was carried in, books and pens
planted on its surface, her father’s wise reclamation

of the site. I kept a row of lilac-buttoned relics
in my wardrobe. Hand-knitted proof, something
to haul my sorry lump of heart and make it blaze.

The Lights

Pausing in traffic, I’m miles away
when a file of children forces me
to focus. School now behind them,
they cross in a bustle of coats and bags –
their ages vague to me, but their limbs
bold and flailing, affirming themselves
with shoves and pushes. I marvel
this mass of certainty. Even the loners

get to the other side, lights turning green
as they dawdle. I’m beginning to realise
most children make it. It’s rare to see
your child being fought for in intensive care;
to stay with her afterwards, saying her name.
It’s unusual, at the undertakers, to finalise
arrangements then fumble for a photograph,
so they could know her when she was warm.

© Her Birth (Carcanet/Northern House, 2013).

Order Her Birth here.

Visit Rebecca’s blog.

Rebecca will be talking about Her Birth on Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, on Thursday, 15 August from 10h00.

Read Rebecca’s interview in The Observer about Ella, the book and the Forward Prize.

Rebecca writes about ‘Motherhood, poetry and loss’.

Read Rebecca’s title poem, ‘Her Birth’.

Visit Child Bereavement UK.

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