Katy Evans-Bush’s Oscar & Henry

Oscar & Henry (Rack Press, 2010)

   
 “For Henry, having two countries meant staged risk, and privacy. For Oscar, having the world meant everything bet on the one toss. In a 20’s Modernist trope, this sequence hints at big unanalysed scandals by almost making them cockney rhyming slang. Evans-Bush shows us Two Great Late Victorians through the prism of the 1920s, even while she looks back 90 years at the Modernists, in a double manoeuvre.
  
In literary judgment we think about sex, but in our own lives we think about love. An equal attention to Henry James and Oscar Wilde at once can illuminate both. Henry remains, at this stage, Evans-Bush’s object of quiet love: touchstone to a vision of love that is the secret, and the secret joy of these poems.”
 
– Ira Lightman
 
 
1882: An Anti-Social Call in Washington
Katy Evans-Bush

The inadvisable kiss of Walt Whitman
still on the lips of Oscar Wilde, the Atlantic
yawns, then closes its trap more close than ever.
The Master takes it upon himself to call
on Oscar, who celebrates himself, who sings himself.
He finds him at home, with a yellow handkerchief
and green knee-breeches. Alike, except for this, in stature
and – well – stature, the two writers
from a shared height take one another’s measure;
then with the small talk: nostalgia on the one hand
for London. The other: really? You care for places?
Dublin-made-Oxford drawls: The world is my home.
 
Oh, Henry. You who have so little home –
only your exquisitely understated
overcoat, your books, a thousand flimsy
cards for dinner, and a cabin ticket to Portsmouth –
not even a wife to offer as sop to the ladies –
ignore it, ignore it. He has no idea
what he’s just said. In a few years he will need you,
yes, you, to be human, and you will afford it
with the pronouncement: finally he has become interesting.
Next week, in next week’s kerchief, he’ll be regaling
next week’s ladies with news of your importance,
deceptively open as the Atlantic, with her little liners.
    
    
Katy’s limited edition pamphlet, Oscar & Henry, is now available from Rack Press: The Rack, Kinnerton, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2PF. All pamphlets are £4, postage free. Make cheques payable to “Rack Press”.
  
Order Oscar & Henry directly from Katy. She’ll send you a PayPal request. £5 covers postage (within the UK) and gets you a signed copy.
  
Order Oscar & Henry from Amazon.co.uk.
 
Or get your signed copy from Katy in person at a reading at the Lemon Monkey Café in London N16 on 13 February and at the Poetry Society in Betterton St WC2 on 20 February. Details of the Lemon Monkey Café reading below.
  
*
  
You are invited to Oscar Wilde night, a festival of modern-day Bunburying
  
A night of Gay Nineties debauchery in Stoke Newington! In poetry, drama, the green fairy and the green carnations, we bring you the spirit of Oscar Wilde and the fin de siècle ebullience that made him great. With a few damned modernists thrown in.
  
Featuring sets from John McCullough, Katy Evans-Bush and Tim Turnbull; poems by Oscar Wilde and Ernest Dowson; and a scene from David Secombe’s play, I Have Been Faithful to Thee, Ernest! In My Fashion, starring Tim Turnbull as Oscar Wilde. Also featuring Jack Tarlton and Chris Brand (possibly as Virginia Woolf.)
   
Saturday, 13 February 2010 at 18h30
Lemon Monkey Café
180 Stoke Newington High St
London, United Kingdom
   
Admission: free, but we ask for £3 in a hat.
By train: from Liverpool St (15 mins)
Two mins walk from Stoke Newington Station
By bus: 106, 276, 149, 67, 76, 243, 73, 476, 393
  
Follow Katy’s blog, Baroque in Hackney.

Sophie Mayer’s Her Various Scalpels

Sophie Mayer by Lady Vervaine

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

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

Horizon Review: Issue Three

     
   
I’m very pleased to have two poems and an interview with 
Pascale Petit in the third issue of online literary journal,
Horizon Review. 
  
The issue is filled with good writing:  poetry, fiction, reviews,
interviews and articles.
    
Read more here …

Claire Crowther’s The Clockwork Gift

   
    
Abuelita
   
Praise to the grandmother high on a balcony.
Its wearied fencing shuts space into miles.
She scrubs a coconut shell.
Pours dirty water over a herb pot.
Dust from black deposits under her feet blow
towards a terracotta emperor astride
a vent rattling out hot air.
She varnishes her hundredth soap dish
while seven floors below, white van roofs
lie like water lilies and glittering gems
of cars are packed with crystalline couples.
 
I praise the turret she hangs on.
Gardenless, it humbles the low villas,
the opal-crusted scarab beetles on wheels.
  
  
 
Outside the Beauty School
   
Twilight Hour for Senior Customers.
The trees turn, in a May
that pulls their branches gently inside out,
and paints charcoal bark with green polish.
 
While trees think they’re not trunk-stopped
on one spot, it is as good a season as any
for wings to pulse, swollen reddish-pink;
for a heart to rise to it, float up and beat in the wind.
  
  
 
Published in The Clockwork Gift (Shearsman Books, 2009).
  
Read more about Claire and The Clockwork Gift here.
   
Order The Clockwork Gift.
   
Visit Claire’s website.
   
Read ‘Petra Genetrix’ on Carrie Etter’s blog.
   
Read Rob A. Mackenzie’s review at Surroundings.
   
Read Sophie Mayer’s review at Delirium’s Library.

Jacqueline Saphra’s ‘The Dark Art’

 

 
     
The Dark Art
Jacqueline Saphra
  
I once knew a wife with rattling bones,
whose face was made of rice cakes
whose blood was made of consommé
whose skin was hard as eggshell.
There was no melting her.
Her child swallowed nothing
but greens and goat’s milk;
he was spindly and failed to thrive.
    
I once knew a wife, plump as a doughnut
with buttered hands and a floury lap
whose babies always wanted more.
Her sighs weighed heavy on the rolling pin,
her crusts were never tender,
there was fury in her kneading;
her loaves would take on air and multiply;
her children grew too fat.
    
I once knew a pitiless wife
who smelled of peach and salt
who warmed her skin like a caramel glaze.
She kept a secret book of recipes,
lured her husband with a calculated sauce,
then killed him slowly
with foie gras, double cream and hollandaise.
    
 
    
Visit Jacqueline’s website.
    
Order Jacqueline’s pamphlet, Rock’n’Roll Mamma (Flarestack Publishing, 2008).

Liz Gallagher’s The Wrong Miracle

 
   
Spring the Life Fandango
Liz Gallagher
 
I want something and there are twinges in my heart.
My heart twinges so badly that I fear the act of dropping
 
down dead before I get what I want. How is that for
momentum or for a god that has the sauciest way of telling
 
me that I have pushed the boat out too far, I have let
the boat land with a splash and a hoot and I am left in mid
 
ocean without a paddle – the paddle they had warned me
about, the paddle that takes on a life of its own and even beats
  
me over the head in my dreams to make me wake
up in the middle of the night with a bunch of hair stuck in my
  
mouth and my cat licking the back of my hand, frantically
reaching a high meter of lickability that says the big gong is
  
going to gong and tell me Time’s Up. I’d hoped to never want
something as badly as I want this – all the karma and jinxing
  
in the world could take it from me with one loose crack
of the whip. I could be sent marching the long way home
  
without the thing I want badly tucked up in my inside
pocket near my heart, no, on my heart, which now has stopped
  
twanging and is doing a la-la-la beat. It is not about wanting
to hold your hand nor about shaking all over, it’s about seeing
 
a tiny dream, like a foamy insole for a favourite winter
boot (a size too big), become something I can lay
myself on and spring, spring, spring the life fandango.
 
 
 
from The Wrong Miracle (Salt Publishing, 2009).
  
Read more about Liz and The Wrong Miracle here.
  
Visit Liz’s blog.

Entering the Mind of Poetry

  
    
“Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections – language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who and what we are.  It begins, that is, in the body and mind of concentration.”
   
– Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperPerennial, 1998)

C K Williams’s The Singing

 
     
I’ve been reading C K Williams’s ninth collection, The Singing (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), for which he received the 2003 National Book Award.  The four part volume includes meditations on family, relationships, aging, mortality and bereavement.  The final section concerns terrorism, destruction and the nature of civilization.
   
I am awed by ‘The Hearth’, a reflection on war, moved by the tender ‘Elegy for an Artist’ dedicated to Tucson painter Bruce McGrew and, in the final stanza of ‘Lessons’ (previously published in Tin House), find five lines particularly striking in their honesty and simplicity:
   
” … And the way one can find oneself strewn
so inattentively across life, across time.
Those who touch us, those whom we touch,
we hold them or we let them go
as though it were such a small matter.”
   
There’s a flare of recognition every time I read these words.  This recognition, this resonance, this fleeting identification and connection with a stranger, is one of the reasons I read poetry.

Paul Stevens

 
   
Paul Stevens was born in Yorkshire, England but lives in Australia.  He has an Honours degree in English, teaches Literature and edits The Flea, The Shit Creek Review and The Chimaera.
   
  
The Paragon of Plants
Paul Stevens
  
Eye to eye we track, grown heliotropic,
And sunlight ripples ticklish on our skin;
Your touch on my touch, phototactic, sticks.
  
We bathe in energy, our element:
Sky trickling liquid down bare branches,
Earth fingering upward through deep roots.
  
Now buds and foliage spring from manic limbs,
Hands metamorphose to the fruit they reach for:
Sense is exactly what sense apprehends,
  
And in this growth engrafts all difference
Of sex and soul, with scion cleaved to stock
And trunk to shaggy trunk. Swaying as one,
  
A paragon of plants, we rollick there,
Breathing light in, gasping out spicy air.
  
  
 
Previously published in Umbrella.

Valeria Melchioretto’s The End of Limbo

  
   
Papal Blessings
Valeria Melchioretto
  
Airship Italia left Spitzbergen on 23rd of May, 1928
   
Hermetically-sealed matchboxes couldn’t save the holy mission,
sanctioned by Pope Pius XI to bless the very tip of the Pole.
One morning in May, the Zeppelin reached that point
where meridians touch like segments of a forbidden fruit.
The crew threw out a blessed crucifix, some coins and a flag.
It showered the snow below like a Pentecostal sacrament.
They dumped all that was sacred upon the melting desert.
 
On their way south the airship crashed. Mayday signals
came out of the blue, stirred only silence and vanished.
They thought to be prepared for anything but never used
their ice axes. The windproof-overalls were worn by the wind
and the life jackets saved no one’s life. The Finnish shoes
didn’t carry them to Finland. After the virtuous artefacts
fell out of the window they clearly said adieu to salvation.
  
 
  
from The End of Limbo (Salt Publishing, 2007)
  
Read more about Valeria and The End of Limbo here.
  
Read Angel Dahouk’s Poetry Society interview with Valeria.