.

(Photo courtesy of Jenny Foggin}

I planned to start this post by reflecting on Anthony Wilson’s enthusiasm for/love of the poems of Thomas Tranströmer for one, and of James Schuyler for another. Schuyler particularly…you can sometimes hear Schuyler in Anthony’s poems in the way that Tony Harrison, and later, Norman MacCaig could, every now and then, make me sound like them, their rhythms and phrasing. 

I’m thinking, for instance of a sequence from The four of us, a poem from The Afterlife. 

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From three gardens away

a lawnmower begins its drone

carving stripes we’ll never see.

A woodpigeon clatters above.

The great time we’re having

(or had) is not what’s really there.

Beyond the silent tripod we have

no idea what lies ahead of us –

futures of wild promise, snapshots of our own children

under this very willow.

We cannot grasp what we have

been given, or can give back

However, I was not very well for a couple of days and I missed my self-imposed deadline of Sunday, and then Monday. And on Monday, Anthony posted a poem on his blog which saved me a lot of trouble. Because he says it much better that I could. Here’s the link.

.https://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2022/03/28/lifesaving-lines-the-bluet-by-james-schuyler/

Before that though, I’ve been turning over in my mind what it is I mean by ‘my kind of poetry’. Because there was a time when I wouldn’t have thought that today’s guest was ‘my kind of poet’. Indeed, there was a time, not all that long ago when I would have been puzzled by the idea that poems could be ‘life-saving. Bear with me.

For years and years poetry was always on the periphery for me. There were exceptions. When I was 16 it was the Metaphysicals….sardonic, clever, witty, sexy. Everything I wanted to be and wasn’t. At 18 the Augustans spoke to me. Clever, cool and witty. And I like the craft of couplets. At 20, briefly, it was Hopkins. What they all had in common was visible craft. At 22 I heard Robert Speaight’s recording of The Wasteland’ and it opened my ears and mind to TS Eliot. You can listen to it via YouTube in all its melancholy thespian RP musicality. It jars in a way that it didn’t, 57 years ago. Our ears become accustomed to different vowels and stresses. It occurs to me that it also opened my ears to Shakespeare, for which I shall be eternally grateful. Try it. Here’s another link. 

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VoBtk0-xIs

And so it went. As a teacher I liked the textures and evident emotion of Hughes and Heaney, but as  a reader it was mainly documentary and revisionist history that spoke to me: ballads and broadsheets, social realism. The 19thC Novel, Orwell. When I was asked to read Robert Lowell I fought it. I wasn’t interested in introspective, reflective late Romanticism (as I saw it). It wasn’t for me. I thought it was self-indulgent. Which is ironic, now I come to think. Anthony notes something in his post that chimes : 

      “I have also been reminded of Seamus Heaney’s dictum in The Government of the Tongue 

       that ‘no lyric ever stopped a tank”.

I used to think that was an unanswerable argument to a question I never fully worked out. But now I say of course it can’t. And your point?  No tank ever made me happy or illuminated a mystery. A wren landed on the window sill earlier today, and just for a second it stopped my heart. So it goes. The thing was, what I wanted in poetry was stuff that could fill a room, like Shakespeare, that was memorisable and memorable. Most poetry was never ‘lifesaving’, and what I wanted was unlikely to be understated and quiet. We didn’t match. I didn’t miss it. I just didn’t get it..or it didn’t get me.

Something changed, about 15 years ago. Something shifted and if you wonder about ‘my kind of poetry’ it’s what the great fogginzo’s cobweb has been sharing for the last eight years. What strikes me is that while I’ll never have the apparently encyclopaedic knowledge of/familiarity with contemporary and 20thC that Anthony Wilson shares with you in his wonderful book Life-saving poems I’ve gradually being made more open to voices that one time I’d have dismissed. Life changes us.

Anthony and I share more things than the things that ‘separate us’ (he’s not a fan of the 19thC Novel, for instance): teaching English to Post-Grad teacher trainees, writing about the teaching of poetry in Primary schools, an enthusiasm for a particular Garrison Keillor Lake Woebegon story, which is a story that begins with stories about snowfall, and a story about a man (who does not know that his father has died but whose story we shall learn something of)) telling the story of Hansel and Gretel to his children, and about how an author can, like god, change the events of a story to save his characters pain.

It occurred to me that I could begin with a story. Let me take you back to 1960. St Catherine’s College Cambridge. 17 years old and up for interview for an Open Scholarship in English. Everything was foreign, from the fact that there was no railway station, so you had to get a bus from March to the otherness of gated colleges and the bustle of insouciant young men in gowns who threw breadrolls at each other in the dining hall. The other candidates wore grey flannel suits and had partings. I had grey winkle-pickers, an Italian suit and a Tony Curtis hairdo. They had elegant drawls and asked me what I thought about Kierkegaard, and had I been to Heffers. I was interviewed by Tom Henn who wrote The apple and the spectroscope (no, I’ve never read it), who had an oar hanging on his study wall, and asked me my opinion of the prevalence of bee imagery in Shakespeare. I knew it wasn’t for me, or I wasn’t for it. I didn’t feel resentful or stupid. I was just in the wrong place. Later I went to Durham where I felt comfortable simply because it was in the north, was hilly and had my favourite cathedral. That’s how a lot of poetry has felt to me in the last few years. 

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But you learn from the company you keep, and it changes you so you can understand its language. That’s how I feel about Anthony Wilson, whose Life-saving Poems (along with Clive James’ Poetry Notebooks) have introduced me to new ways of thinking and new familiarities.

That’s a more than usually lengthy preamble…be thankful it’s not longer. Time for our guest. Who probably needs no introduction but still….

 Anthony Wilson is a poet, writing tutor and lecturer at the University of Exeter. His books of poetry are The Afterlife (Worple Press, 2019), Riddance (Worple Press, 2012), Full Stretch: Poems 1996-2006 (Worple Press, 2006), Nowhere Better Than This (Worple Press, 2002) and How Far From Here is Home? (Stride, 1996). 

The Wind and the Rain is forthcoming from Blue Diode Press in 2023. 

In 2015 Bloodaxe Books published his bestselling anthology Lifesaving Poems after his blog of the same name.

He is also the author of Deck Shoes (Impress Books, 2019), a collection of essays, and Love for Now (Impress Books, 2012), a memoir detailing his experience of cancer. 

Anthony has held writing residencies at The Poetry Society, The Times Educational Supplement, The Poetry Trust and Tate Britain. He has judged the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition, The Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and The Impress Prize for New Writers.

He is editor of Creativity in Primary Education (Sage, 2015), and is co-editor of Making Poetry Matter (Bloomsbury, 2013), Making Poetry Happen (Bloomsbury, 2015) and The Poetry Book for Primary Schools (Poetry Society, 1998).

He blogs at www.anthonywilsonpoetry.com.

To put it in perspective, last time I looked, the blog had about 10,000 followers. This one has about 450. I’m in awe of it all. A few years ago I wrote about the poetry blogs that have influenced me and my writing, and here’s part of what Anthony said about how he started on Lifesaving poems

  “ since I began it in July 2009 I have been copying out poems into a plain Moleskine notebook, one at a time, in inky longhand, when the mood took me. Allowing myself no more than one poem per poet, I wanted to see how many poems I could honour with the label ‘lifesaving’. 

My criteria were extremely basic.  Was the poem one I could recall having had an immediate experience with from the first moment I read it? In short, did I feel the poem was one I could not do without?

Copying them out into my book has not always been fun, but now that I am finished, I am in possession of a deeply satisfactory feeling of having learnt more about myself and about each poem that I copied.

Over the next weeks and months I am going to be blogging here about the stories behind the choices I made, the influences upon them, and what I learnt in the process”. 

I commented:

And what follows is a list of about 180 poems by 180 poets. That’s more than three years’ worth of blogposts sorted, at one fell swoop. Bloggers’ Nirvana. Shangri La. Provided, of course you know at least 180 poets, and you know their work well enough to choose one poem from each of which you can say, hand-on-heart: ‘this is lifesaving’. What I love about reading Anthony Wilson is the effortless erudition that is never exclusive or scholarly. It’s what great teachers do…like Bronowsky in ‘The ascent of man‘, or John Berger in ‘Ways of seeing‘ (and not remotely like Kenneth Clarke in ‘Civilisation’). It’s like the introduction to poetry you get if you regularly go to Poetry Business workshops. I’d not heard of half the poets Anthony chose. But I have now. 

Of course, Anthony’s Lifesaving poems are not unconnected to another theme of his blog which was essentially a shared journal of his experience of the diagnosis, and subsequent treatment for a particular cancer which was, at the time, life-threatening. I’ve been treated for two kinds of cancer, and I’m currently being treated for a third, which is also life-threatening, so it’s going to resonate. “

And then I wrote: 

But I doubt I’d have that kind of courage to share the experience

Well, since then as the treatments for cancer have become more radical, and suffer from the law of diminishing returns, it turns out that I can write about that kind of experience, obliquely more often than not,  and the fact that I can write about personal mortality is at least in part down to Anthony, and lately in particular, to his book The Afterlife. It turns out that I can write introspectively and reflectively, so this post will be a thank-you as well as an appreciation.

The Afterlife hasn’t garnered the reviews or the attention it should have in 2019. A lot of good work’s gone missing in action during the pandemic. What’s the book ‘about’ ? Let me borrow from the publisher’s blurb: 

…”the poems explore the borderline territory between grief and laughter, memory and forgetting, illness and health. His central subject is the way we live within family and community, questioning the roles we construct, both alone and with others. The Afterlife explores central themes: mortality, mental health, the relation between body and soul, and how to live fully in the present moment”.

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I like that last phrase particularly, not least because I guess that’s what the best poems are doing at the moment when we read them. I’d add that they have a quality for me that chimes with the Serenity Prayer..the way we achieve cceptance of the things we cannot change in order the better to live with them. It’s not easy or comfortable. As Fiona Benson wrote in her endorsement:

“Anthony Wilson’s poems are often meditative and always very, very readable, but don’t be fooled; the avuncular voice belies a restless interrogation of faith, love and loss, and Wilson moves from moments of everyday comedy to a wounded reckoning with the afterlife of cancer survival (my italics) and poems of intense anger and grief.”

To which I’d add that believing you are going to die and coming to terms of a sort with that, and then learning that you are going to live, and coming to terms with that, is going to make anyone into a dark watcher. The opening lines of The editing suite (which will make you sit up and pay attention) describes it perfectly:

We turn back the film of our lives 

            and edit the past in rooms 

 where no one goes

.

Between two kinds of existence, not quite of this world. Liminal. This is my take on it, anyway. And now to the poems, and particularly to noticing that Anthony’s poems can seem plain and understated, which means that you can be ambushed by the moments that draw you in, the moments that mark language as ‘poetry’. Moments like these, which are often the openings of poems.

There are days  I lose to knowing  / it has come back

I have not felt desired by you / in years

I am telling my hands / to be still. They do not want /to be still

Now I am no longer any use to you /…..

and these lines in the middle of one that’s utterly unexpected 

               Death shelf, you said. You need a death shelf

In other words, for all the apparently plain language of many of the poems, walk carefully, and listen. Read them aloud. See if you can nail the ‘voice’. Especially in the apparent matter-of-factness of everything in the opening poem of the collection

Teaching Writing Theory

.           

On Tuesday I discovered if my cancer

had returned. Later I discussed teaching writing

to six-year-olds. We spun our arms

like windmills, then made chopstick-motions

with our fingers mirroring the motor control

functions we daily take for granted

even less think about as we stare at the page.

We looked at motivational theory. Taxonomies

and heuristics jammed the white-board,

a cacophony of formulations we all wanted 

to witness taking flight. During self-study,

I watched students tap-tapping at mobiles

and tablets, all the while sustaining complex

discussions about pedagogy, and dress codes

for their forthcoming Christmas parties.

If they were nervous of the outcome 

of their assignments, none of them showed it.

.

           I keep reading this, recognising how the ‘if’ in the first line undermines the matter-of-factness of ‘On Tuesday’ and the apparent confidence of “I discovered’. What follows is a flurry of polysyllables, of distracting activity and pretence of understanding. It keeps on giving, and I love it. The business of distraction is probably why I asked for the opening sequence from Part Three..a 14 page, not-quite-blank verse, sort-of-stream of consciousness poem called To a notebook which includes, among many other things, references to the poet’s love affair with particular kinds of pen and ink and paper, as well as a troubled relationship with Facebook. Above all though, I think it’s a poem about displacement strategies which have to do with dealing with intimations of mortality and also the urge to write. In the end I think it’s Cartesian. Scribo ergo sum. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Just enjoy it.

from To a Notebook (page 1 and a bit)

All summer long the lorries have passed

My window taking earth from one end

Of the street to the other, an eternal quest

For silence and rest.    Now Joe brings

His radio and sets up shop right outside,

All the hits I used to know and now resent

For filling this moment with noise

I did not ask for.    The house that took till

October to build is now taking till December.

I sat for so long listening to trucks beeping-

Reversing I no longer hear them (not true).

It’s amazing I go to church: for a non-joiner

Like me, a miracle.    I’m there to have my

Edges knocked off, plus knock those I slowly

Learn to love. After a week of people, 

Silence.   The breeze finding its voice

Like rain on apple leaves but without rain,

So prolific with windfalls this year, 

We hear them thud and roll from the house, 

The territorial robin that has sung all summer

Suddenly clearer than thought while I make

Lists for eggs and books I want to have read,

This paper, scratchy yet smooth, is the best –

Since when? – France, probably (maybe 

All the answers are France).    The worst part

Is starting, but then you know that already.

Twitter can’t keep up with me, nor I

With it: help me, someone, understand

Why I need to applaud your cake.

The delicious loneliness of staying 

In a town where no one speaks English,

The rain never more alive than when 

I lay awake listening to dawn inch closer

Through the fizzing traffic.    Only a week ago

Automated hosepipes like cicadas sprayed

In sunshine (‘The Cathedral is not a happy place,’

Said -not telling). Then blue tits invaded

The apple tree after a summer away, 

A silent V of geese arrows across

Ochre-orange clouds, my heart a shipwreck

To follow their progress.    I sleep badly 

And make others do the same. I try 

To sleep in the day, but no. 

.

Two more poems that particularly moved me, because of their clear-eyed dealings with the dying and the dead. Poems that make their peace with both, and need no commentary from me

The Last Time I Saw Mary

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The last time I saw Mary

was in her kitchen, September sunlight, the door open to her garden.

.

She gave me a tutorial

on my book, warning me not to be meretricious.

.

Your faith, she said, don’t be afraid

of it. It is who you are.

.

She was skinny by then, her grey hair

in a bob, like a girl’s.

.

Shuffling in her slippers she made coffee

and brought waffles.

.

The Dutch balance these on their cups

and watch them deliquesce

.

into the hot liquid, she said. So sweet.

To an English person, their name is unpronounceable.

.

I said, I think you can buy them in Lidl now.

They cost nothing.

.

Sitting With Your Body

.

When the others had gone

we sat with your body for a while

and watched you pass over 

from person to body, watched you

become blue, then grey, then ivory,

then grey again, the cave of your ribs

no longer heaving, and Tatty stroked

your shoulder as if comforting 

a poorly child who hasn’t slept,

all the while watching your stillness,

finally you were still and ours,

then we kissed your ice forehead

and found our coats and walked 

across the common to eat with the others.

.

Both of these poems bring me a sort of peace, and it’s a rare thing in these days of the sleep of reason. What can I say. The Afterlife was published in 2019, and it’s been overlooked. Go and buy it. In the meantime, thank you Anthony Wilson for being our guest, for your blog, for your Life-saving poems, and for The Afterlife [Worple Press. £10]

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Not so long ago I came across this comment about In The Taxidermist’s House in  the Wombwell Rainbow poetry blog : 

“An ecopoetic and zoopoetic powerhouse of a 28 poem collection. Her final poem “journey of the light travellers” is an empathic devastating critique of wind farms. “Woodlice” is from the insects point of view and, for me, captures it perfectly.

A lot of the poems enact transformation, metamorphosis “They come/the seekers of freedom/shedding the skin of crowds//Emerge/displaced and solitary/haunters of canal paths/” 

Metamorphosis, transformation, shaeshifting.  I simply had to have a copy.

But let me tell you about the image of a freezer full of stiff birds 

If you can find it on your i.player, see if you can track down a BBC 4 occasional series: What do artists do all day  And if not, here’s a link to a YouTube extract. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5PxZbqjlcE

I’ve watched the programme about Polly Morgan again and again.  In it she says that people send her roadkill she might use;  someone rang her to say 

saw a dead fox today and thought of you.

She’s an artist who creates work out of taxidermy; she rummages about in freezer chests looking for exactly the right size of mynah bird, and then sits with infinite patience, teasing off  the skin ( and therefore the plumage) in one undamaged piece; she uses incredibly sharp scalpels and focussed concentration. There’s something reverential in the attention she pays to the bird in her hands, and something very gentle and steely about the way she puts it back together, stitching minutely, stroking back the plumage. And musing at the same time about her awareness of her hands’ fragility; ‘sometimes’ she says,’ I can’t stop wondering what’s beneath the skin’.

The images haunted me; I had to put them into a poem: 

Much possessed

She keeps mynah birds and fledgling sparrows

in the freezer. Knows just how feathers lie

in a wing…………………..

Sometimes she looks at the backs of her hands,

imagines the bones she has never seen…

And, in part, that’s also how I came across the debut collection by today’s guest, Marion Oxley. The opening poem of the pamphlet is Still life [after Polly Morgan]. There a stanza in there that made me punch the air.

             Hands tie up hair, pin back despair,

             pack loneliness into the shoulders

             of a raven.

I knew Marion Oxley before this, because she’s been (when it was still alive and well) a regular supporter of the Puzzle Poets Live open nights, a member of the poet Gaia Holmes’ occasional writing group Igniting the spark, and every now and then getting up to the mic. with one of her poems. She’s not one to seek the limelight, which is why I’m especially pleased to share her work. She writes powerfully and memorably, like this

A fortune telling squirrel dressed in bling
peers into a crystal ball; the murky waters
of the Leeds Liverpool canal slowly part.

.

Jake the ten foot Burmese python
squeezed into a freezer;
lies coiled like a giant black pudding
waiting for the thaw.

From: A taxidermist regenerates Blackurn.

..which is a title to win a place in any competition shortlist. She’s good at titles that draw you in; The girl who became a zebra, A crocodile in Neverland, A chameleon goes to Butlins. You see what I mean?

 Anyway, time for introductions. Marion Oxley was born in Manchester and spent her early years in Salford. She’s worked in a variety of paid and voluntary jobs including the NHS, youth services, Manchester City Council’s Equal Opportunities Unit, Women’s Aid, drug and alcohol services, postal services, psychiatric nursing, community occupational therapy and adult services care management. She has a BA(Hons)Fine Art.

She came to poetry by chance whilst learning to play the fiddle. Inspired by the tradition of story telling in folk ballads. This lead to a desire to experience the landscape of contemporary pieces, especially those that explored the inter-weaving of geography, archaeology, myth and folk-lore. She is a regular visitor to the Orkney islands.

She currently lives amongst the flood plains of the Calder Valley with her boisterous Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Alice. She has family in the Republic of Ireland and volunteers at the local foodbank.

She’s told me:  I don’t really feel I’m on the poetry ‘scene’. I mostly write alone though currently doing a Wendy Pratt short course along with some excellent poets who are so much better than me, so are an inspiration. 

She may be underselling herself; her poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Most recently in The Blue Nib, The Fenland Journal, Artemis, The Alchemy Spoon, The Bangor Literary Journal, Geography is Irrelevant (Stairwell Press), Bloody Amazing (Beautiful Dragons/Yaffle). She’s had poems shortlisted or placed in many competitions, recently being runner up in The Trim Poetry Competition and Second Light Competition.

What draws a reader’s attention, apart from the titles, are her concerns and her craft:

 Myra Schneider identifies an imaginative engagement with “the relationship between birth, life and death” and also her writing which is “…. in deft and sinuous language, deconstructs and reconstructs our relationship with nature and mortality.”

James Nash focusses on the way  “She reflects and pays homage to the work of other artists, and shares her very own particular vision, in poetry that is fiercely intelligent, celebratory and beautiful. “

And after that, you’ll be wanting to read the poems. The ones I asked for all illustrate three qualites Myra Schneider highlights…language that is intense, tactile and energetic. Let me add that its often uncomfortable, too.

The first poem is about shapeshifting, and it’s unsettling because it’s constantly fluid. I was never sure who was telling me the story. There was a time some time  ago when the selkie was a fashionable feminist trope in poetry. But none of the poems seemed be as deliberately ambiguous and ambivalent as this one.

Skin Trade

Once hands turned her soapstone smooth

          ran thumbs over flesh and fur, took measure.

.

Wrapped mother and child in pelted warmth.

. 

Eyeless skin stretched keeless boats 

          slipped silent passages through frozen seas.

.

The soft pulse of ferries shivers skin,

          a quicken of gannets slick as flick knives, slit the sea.

 .             

The torn fishnets had rankled 

          caused an underwater roar, falling on her deaf ears. 

 .

The last ferry slides like a birthday cake, 

          candles burning, off the plated sea.  

He comes with the twitchers, the hikers, 

          occasional bikers. The divers of dreams in neoprene.

 .

After a skinful, pissed on myth and mist, 

          he gives her the present; a seal skin. 

 .

Water-marked, mottled, in the corner a faint blue stain,

          half-formed letters, clear as a fingerprint.  

 .

She rides her past in a blast of black sea squall. 

 .       

On the wet quayside they are gathered, bodies shimmering. 

.

She watches the totter, the flop across the bonnet. Hears a clink of glass,

          bottle rolling, head lolling, hands flapping. 

 .

Watches the bend in, taking of a lighted cigarette. Hears the unzipping

          of black, skin-tight jacket. 

 .

There on pale skin, a heart, three faded blue letters; Mum.

 .

Liquid eyes turn towards her. Strands of damp hair flick back 

          like seaweed rolling off slim shoulders of rock. 

 .

She remembers her fourteen years old stepping out of the bath

          patting dry the new tattoo. She hands her the sealskin.

.. 

I come away asking whose hands turned ‘her’ soapstone smooth even as I relish the texture of the phrase.

I’m bothered by the abrupt shift from a protective warmth to the skin of a boat in icy seas, which morph into a harbour where the last ferry  pulses and slides like a birthday cake off the plated sea. Every one of the phrases rings true, but belong in different places in space and history. I can make connections with the typical folk-tale of a man who steals a female selkie’s skin, finds her naked on the sea shore, and compels her to become his wife, and how the wife will spend her time in captivity longing for the sea, her true home,.  She may bear several children by her human husband, but once she discovers her skin, she will immediately return to the sea and abandon the children she loved. But then I have connect that with what well may be an Orkney harbour, a CalMac ferry, the shimmering bodies, the skintight suit that may (or may not) be a diver’s wet suit. Everything is real and baffling. And everything is precisely placed, filmic. I love it. Just don’t ask me to explain it. I keep coming up with different answers.

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I asked for the next poem not only for its passionate concern for the balance in things which is challenged (as in so many other ways) by the impact on the migratory cycles of one beautiful northern bird, but also for the texture of language, and it’s cinematic eye. This one insists on being read aloud.

Journey of the light travellers                                                                            

‘Red-throated diver sees off consortium of energy firms, as wind farm plan axed.’  

This is the treeless land you moved through, 

         were born to, left and returned to. 

The land where you stared into the midnight sun,

         peered through a green glass sky.   

                                   Where sun dogs pant at sea ice melting. 

.

Where an Arctic fox crouches, blurs, dissolves, 

         white as sea salt sinking. 

This is where your North is turning 

         ice needle sharp, towards the sun. 

                                   In the twilight of the thaw you are waiting.

.

This is a land where darkness stalks you 

         will snap your wings, if you leave too late. 

They found you on a broken Northern shore. 

                                   Twenty three years old.

.

Claimed you were old, for your kind.

         Scraped a body, red-eyed and grey, 

pinstriped, a triangle at your throat 

                                   the colour of blood or was it wine?

.

Hunched over as if you had just fallen from the sky 

         or pulled the earth up from the bottom of the sea

or seized a titanium flag glinting like a speared fish 

                                   from under a water sky. 

.

Your slender body slathered in black gold 

         and the ring; a travel journal of your life

tucked beneath a wing. Your haunting wail; 

                                   a tarred and feathered ghost.  Lame duck, loon.

.

Your kind arrived in winter, stumbling onto our shore. 

         Hungry, pale faced migrants. 

Light travellers.   Gavia Stellata.

                                  Your backpacks stitched with stars.

.

Bewildered by an array of verticals;

         a sea-forest of white arms rising in unison.

And then the fall like dense bones diving

         the sky dragged down through mist and cloud, 

                                   a search for light in dark waters.  A slow rise. 

.

On the shore they counted the numbers, 

         decided no more.       Heads held high, 

                                    bills like glinting sailmaker’s awls.  

                                                           You’re sailing close to the wind.

.

.

The first two stanzas set up a rhythm that might be a hymn to a place 

      This is where your North is turning 

         ice needle sharp, towards the sun. 

There are three points of colour- green glass, blood and gold- in a monochrome landscape in which everything is at risk and vulnerable. The fox dissolves, the ice is melting, the dark will snap your wings/if you leave too late. The birds are refugees rather than seasonal migrants in the face of change; stitched with stars and also tarred and feathered.  We are all sailing close to the wind, not just these birds, warns the last line of a poem that insists we acknowledge the loveliness of endangered birds whose bills glint ‘like sailmakers’ awls’.

One more poem to end with…and another bird. If it is a bird. Whose is this ‘last quickening’? I keep asking questions like this as I read Marion Oxley’s poems. Always, it seems, there’s some shapeshifting going on. 

Death of a Humming Bird

Is this how it will be 

the last quickening?

A chest full of flight, 

wings beating backwards.

.

Your tiny body hovering 

just out of reach.

Pale petalled hands grown old 

withered in the waiting.

.

The darting in and out of memory 

sweet rush of longing 

withdrawn on a tongue 

sticky with lies.

.

A torpor of hope 

weighing less than a feather

balanced on a finger 

stroking a cheek 

soft and damp as moss. 

.

Lips crusted in sea salt 

speaking only of the past.

The air between us hanging 

white as a sheet ready 

to be pegged out. 

.

A flapping, slapping space  

a nest full of bones,  

skin pulled tight as a lampshade 

stitched around a glow.

.

Racing over waves, tides revolving, 

flumes of feathered plumes

sparkling and dipping. 

And there you are sipping 

from an Angel’s Trumpet.

.

When Clive James wrote about a poem declaring itself a poem by the moments that draw you in I think he had in mind images like this:

The air between us hanging 

white as a sheet ready 

to be pegged out. 

It’s such a packed image that synthesises all those ideas of separation, of being unable to communicate, of being blind to another, of ‘pegging out’…and at the same time of a shared task, like two people folding or unfolding a white sheet. It’s the washing day of my childhood and also an image that takes me to rooms I’ve known where someone is dying and at least one of us is wanting it to come soon and gentle. Someone with a cheek /soft and damp as moss, with Pale petalled hands grown old , and Lips crusted in sea salt . 

I’m pretty sure that I’m pulling the poem out of shape, making it fit me. I think I need to accept it as a poem that understands our ambivalence about death, and especially that of someone we are close to. And while I’m typing this, I realise I’ve never written a blog post which so frequently confesses to puzzlement about poems I know that I like very much.

Maybe I’ve been trying too hard. And I realise that I’ve not shared any of the poems specifically about taxidermy. I’ll just say that I like everything in this pamphlet. It’s a remarkable debut. What can I say? Thank you Marion Oxley for being our guest, and if I failed to do you justice, please forgive me.

At least I can remember to tell everyone to instantly rush out, virtually or otherwise, and buy the book.

In The Taxidermist’s House: Publ. 4Word Press 2021 £5.99

.

Today’s (returning) guest is someone I first met about eight years ago at the Monday night workshops of The Albert Poets in Huddersfield. Like another poet at these workshops, the much-missed Mark Hinchcliffe, she has a unique voice, and one that I didn’t quite tune into until I heard her do a full guest reading a year or so later. You may have had moments like this, when you suddenly hear what you’ve been missing, when you hear the tune that brings the meaning and the passion along with it. She’s a poet who has the quality of what Keats called negative capability, that ability to en-chant a place or a moment that bypasses the writer’s personality. It’s a voice that takes you on walks into, along and out of the imbricated valleys of the West Yorkshire Pennine, and along moorland tops; on walks at the edge of things by seashores and dunescapes; on walks through the thin places of the world, across thresholds. It’s the kind of quality that’s hinted at by the layered, ambiguous title of her latest cornucopia of a collection On the way to Jerusalem Farm.

When I last wrote about our guest, I said 

“there are those who I can only think of as poets, albeit some may have been priests or librarians, or hospital receptionists or teachers. It seems they were always poets first and the other things were incidental. Men and women with astonishing imaginative/empathic reach allied to the (apparently effortless) control of words, of the capabilities of language, syntax, rhythm, form. Men and women who are artists with verbal language in the way that, say, Hockney, lays down a mark, or Picasso makes a pure line. They seem to have been born that way, regardless of the phenomenal effort they put into assembling their craft.

I think, if I’m lucky, that might happen to me once or twice before I die, but I can see the same quality of ‘not being able to help yourself’ flare up in the contemporary poems that have excited me..ones by Christy Ducker, by Fiona Benson, by Pascale Petit, Kim Moore, Steve Ely. Ones who do it often enough for me to think of them as poets rather than people who write poems. Forget the hierarchies, the rankings, the ‘who’s better than who’ nonsense. Some have done more than others, and some have had more success in terms of public recognition than others, but whatever it is, they have it, and they are poets. They are passionately moved by what they see and feel around then..it’s a quiet passion, but passion it undoubtedly is.”

So, let’s welcome again Carola Luther.  Let’s start with what pretentious restaurants call amuses bouches , like this taste of the way she she can pin down the texture , the physical reality of things encountered on those walks, the business (or busy-ness) of the world out there :

.

The woodpecker grinds open its gate and the evening rituals begin:

the deer lips the earth, the mallard dips, birds call and chunter

 .

as if before doorways of shops, squirrels running along branches

doing chores like the branches are streets

                      from Theft  (from Herd. Wordsworth Trust 2012)

.

and then this which stops you short as you realise you have walked through one of the thin places into a different but flatly unignorable reality

.

The man who thought he was alone in my tree

croons a song of comfort. A tenor.

He sings to the beasts in a tongue I don’t know

but it could be Hebrew. Perhaps he’s a cantor.

 .

He reminds me of my mother so I join in quietly

in Levantine Arabic, her home language.

I’m godless and tone-deaf but harmonise

as well as I can.

                                                 From The Rising (first publ. The Compass Review 2016)

The Carcanet blurb for On the way to Jerusalem Farm gives you a clear sense of the the range of landscapes and narratives you can expect in its hugely generous 150 pages:

Carola Luther’s new book On the Way to Jerusalem Farm explores the complexities of living in a damaged world. How, it asks, does such a world live in us, and we in it?

At the centre of the collection are three sequences, ‘Letters to Rasool’, ‘Birthday at Emily Court’ and ‘The Escape’. On the Way to Jerusalem Farm moves through the world, seeking and finding not answers, but sometimes, a means of continuing. The speaker in ‘Letters to Rasool’ travels onward through scarred and depleted landscapes, and searches for a lost beloved. The ageing residents of Emily Court celebrate a birthday and dance. Spring of a kind still comes. And in ‘The Escape’ there are colours to be found in the distant sea: ‘A whole translucent geology, / cross-sections of light and water’.

Poetry for Luther is a way of finding a way, of making connections and sharing our complex lives in an interdependent present. The roles of lover and beloved become – almost – interchangeable in these richly visualised poems.

So much for the range. As to the voice,Kim Moore wrote in one of her Sunday Poem blogposts that that a lot of Carola’s work has the quality of a ‘a prayer or a benediction’

The Carcanet publicity for another of Carola’s collections  Arguing with Malarchysays something similar, and much better than I’ve managed so far

full of voices: tender, sinister or angry, the glimpsed depths of their stories, the distances they have travelled. Carola Luther’s poems are alert to the ways a life can be briefly snared in the turn of a phrase – or in the moment when language fails. She explores silence, absences, the unspoken communication between animals and human beings, the pauses and boundaries between what is remembered, forgotten or invented, the living and the dead.

Basically, both of these pick out what I think is a numinous quality in Carola’s work…’a prayer or a benediction’; ‘the glimpsed depths’; the way they are alert to ‘the moment when language fails’…and thereby rescues it through language. It’s this quality of being alive to the moment that makes me think of Carola Luther as something more than ‘someone who writes poems’. Let’s meet her.

Carola was born in South Africa, from where she moved in the early 1980s.

Her  first poetry collection, Walking the Animals was published by Carcanet Press in 2004 and shortlisted that year for the Forward Prize for First Collection.

Her second collectionArguing with Malarchywas published by Carcanet Press in 2011.

She was Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth Trust in 2012. Herd, a pamphlet of poems written in that year, was published in by The Wordsworth Trust (2012).

She has also written texts for theatre and mixed media performances including the libretto for Lilith, (composer, Dimitar Bodurov) a piece commissioned and conceived by soprano Claron McFadden. 

Recently she wrote about herself and her new collection for the Carcanet blog about what a friend called her ‘doubled vision’

I suspect ‘a doubled vision’ is something that will be shared by many people who have moved from the country of their birth. I have not experienced the trauma of forced migration so of course I cannot talk to that. But for me, after arriving here in Britain as a willing immigrant and living here for decades, I still see the country through a stranger’s eyes at times, as well as through the eyes of a lucky inhabitant. Perhaps this is what my friend meant – seeing from both close and far. And close sometimes feeling more ‘home’ than far, and far sometimes feeling more ‘home’, than close could ever be.  

My partner and I are currently moving house from the Ryburn valley to the Calder valley. It feels like a big deal, despite the fact that our new place is only seven miles away, and the landscape and communities, not so very different.

Strangely, I had the opposite sense when I first came to the area. Arriving for the first time in the Pennines, I had an unexpected sense of recognition, almost of déjà vu. I felt I ‘knew’ the shape of the landscape somehow – not of any specific place, but rather, its ghost geography, an imaginal sense of the moors, the weathers, the valleys, the creatures. Without knowing why, I felt oddly at home. And so I came back. And I stayed. 

It struck me later with a little sense of shock, that this feeling of recognition may have come from the poems of Ted Hughes.

…

Having grown up in rural South Africa, I think I may also have recognised something else. This was how Hughes seemed to experience the natural world as intrinsically powerful, and bigger than us. His creatures and landscapes were magnificent. Whether calm or violent, his animals and the elements were potent.

So much has changed since then. Ecosystems everywhere feel critically depleted and fragile, and the health of the earth highly dependent on how human beings go forward. This reversal of my childhood understanding may also inform any ‘doubled vision’ in this collection. In some poems I notice bewilderment and hardly-understood sorrow for the natural world around me. But there are also I hope, poems celebrating what remains beautiful and vital – connection, friendship and the small, brave things that help us keep going.

And so to the poems. Acknowledgements and thanks, first to Carcanet for granting permissions to use substantial chunks of the work…if you read the previous post about Carola, you’ll see that that see writes long poems. And that they are packed. That there’s no slack in them. Which makes it hard to choose a selection that does justice to a 150 page collection. 

Too start, I’ve chosen part of the very first poem of hers I heard (and, at first, didn’t quite get) at one of those workshops in The Albert.

deersuddenly

.

deersuddenly

there

.

two / no / three launching 

to get away hsh 

hsh  hsh 

.

leapline interrupted 

by trees beech / no / birch 

between us and light  

stammering 

like shutters / no / film clips  

clp

.

deersuddenly 

stopped  

.

in the pixilation 

and confusion of brush 

they pretend to be memories 

.

images intuited 

in black and white 

passengers on a platform 

silent with suitcases

portmanteaux

valises

no / suitcases and trunks 

there they go / vaulting 

landscape / no / let them be           

landscape / no / 

carriages of trains 

flickering behind landscape / no /

trees / behind trees 

clp

[……………………]

deergone 

.

deergone 

.

nnn 

nnn 

nnn the wind 

its empty coat hung 

in the trees

.

Back then I was stalled by the look of the poem on the page, not sure what to make of the elisions/compressions/slashes/pnonic invention. Later I learned to hear it. It’s a script for a performance of what could be an optical illusion, a trick of the light, the flickerbook images seen through trainwindows. What I hear now is the heartlift of catching sight of what may be deer, and the letdown of their vanishing. I think it’s lovely

Form the deer I’m moving to a character, Rasool, who’s never fully explained and haunts a sequence of poems that are almost, but never explicitly, set in the uprooted landscapes of the disposessed and displaced, the victims of war and poverty.

On Finding the way

.

Now I’ve turned the corner

I can see her Rasool  

            the architect of sands gazing at her small city

            It looks Moroccan 

            and not just because it’s the colour of lions

.

This beach might be my longing 

or yours      but this morning I woke on it  

face down                          

            The tide had receded 

            and the sand beneath me was cold and hard 

.

Standing        I saw no dog         no bird         

            no woman or man                           

and from the flat sea which could have been mercury                   

nothing breached

            no rock or whale-spout or hoop 

            of dolphin           not even a fibreglass boat

.

I recalled no-one had seen fish for decades

.

I miss you Rasool 

[…..]

And I remembered how shorebirds 

used to run between waves

            and on their way in 

            and on their way out 

the waves did not always 

wash away imprints

.

three wire toes                arrow 

            after arrow                   pointing 

to where the bird had run from

                        where I should go

.

Who would not weep Rasool

.           

I followed directions and turned back            walked east               

     around the headlands

            And now I can see her             

            her white shirt flapping 

            in the crook of the bay 

.

She is crouching down     

brown hands at work on her next suburb

            I imagine small arched windows 

            walls bleached pale 

                        almost pink        

                                    like shells

                         or salt-pan camels

.

Is it a dream, this apocalyptic shorescape? It certainly has the precise physical detail of dreams and also their disjunct narratives. All I know is the way it’s anchored by that image of

                                 the architect of sands gazing at her small city

That moment that draws you in, and holds you, along with the narrator’s unassuageable sadness. Magic.

.

The next extract works the same kind of spell, though in a landscape that’s ostensibly closer, geographically to the ‘home’ of West Yorkshire moorlands. It’s a poem that understand that skylines and and the shift from night to day are thin placesin which anything may happen, and when we see things as if for the first time.

.

Dawn on Nab Scar

I wait in the dark, as if on one foot, tense with the balance of almost

falling, other foot held above the ground. In the minutes before dawn

.

we are always waiting, stretched between two momentous things. Interminable,

and never arriving, the weight of proof has suddenly come, and I realise

.

I have missed the moment of change – there’s already more powder of light

than darkness in the air. Dawn hauls its pale mirror

.

up through Rydal Water; there are clouds today so I watch the clouds

whitening the lake’s surface. Mist in tufts rises like grasses.

.

Below the house on the farm, a pinkness used to stain the morning mist

above the Broederstroom. Tall grasses in the muddy dam.

.

On this day, years ago, sixty-nine people murdered at Sharpeville.

Was I implicated? No, yes, where does it begin, and end? 

[……] 

                                                                         Above me, a whole town

wakes: the woodpecker begins its morning routine, opening and closing

.

the door to its castle, creak, creak, again and again; the little birds whistle

in their swept-clean market place as if no more conflict can ever come,

.

no bombs, no divided Jerusalem; just there in the distance, spring brightening

the greygreen, green, maroon trees reflected in the water. Two narrow deer

.

see me and stand, as if they too are reflections of trees with their mossy horns

and legs like the limbs of birches, and they stare, and I stare,

.

and we slip in and swim, we are lake-ideas, our eyes 

pools of brightening water: there is the past and also the future,

.

something oracular about eyes and water, and if I close my deer-touched eyes,

this road below me could be the road to Woodbush, not a lane on Nab Scar

.

between White Moss and Grasmere, a lane I’ll walk down when I return

for breakfast, and hear on the radio news of another massacre, this time in Syria.

.

Why am I thinking of T S Eliot’s ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’. I think this poem might just enact something like it’s opposite, as we begin on tenterhooks, barely balanced, straining. The magic happens, and somehow we’ve missed it. I chose this poem, I think, not just for its numinous quality, but also for the element of autobiography, the authentic voice of the poet as opposed to a persona. It’s a shock, that connection between an old home (which contains massacres) and a new one which shows you plainly that there are massacres wherever you go. It’s a poems that brings so many themes together. And the elusiveness of deer, too.

.

Two more…just a short extract from one:

I chose this because as I heard Carola read it in The Albert pub, I ‘heard’ her voice properly for the first time. I loved the glee of this visions of moorland pylons metaphormosing into vengeful witches flying widdershins over unsuspecting Halifax.

Midnight, Beltane, Soyland Moor 

Ruche after ruche night is gathering, cloud piled 

over the moor, dim scone

for a moon, flat pallor lidding Huddersfield, Halifax 

Manchester. 

.

Up here it’s cold. Dead sheep, winter –

keeps dragging back 

to unfinished December

out of kilter. On the skyline, pylons. Skeletal    

goddesses they hum 

as if a sun-surge has come and gone 

or something huge and clandestine is passing down lines 

and they listen in 

O soldiers of ruins make preparation 

                                                       Beltane, 

and fields remain empty. Where do we go? 

The sea-starved sea. These days, screens 

are our lamps, yet tonight I want oceans, 

oracles stinking of goats 

in the dark, ribald women 

who fly. 

.

On the skyline, pylons. Tension

a kind of desire. Ambiguous 

as they are, for a moment I imagine 

they could show us how: Elbow. Knee. Elbow. Hah! 

Akimbo sisters! 

Give birth. Show your steel 

farthingales, Hoist skirts. Pant. Point

your six arms downwards, 

wake the earth. Hoist! 

Hoist! 

Cavort! 

.

Let’s finish with one complete poem that I first met when the Monday Workshops became virtual, and we became inured to seeing ourselves in celebrity squares. This one I choose because of the way it shows Carola at her job of rescuing the significant and magical from the wasteful flow of minute by minute and the rush of things moving on. It’s a poem that challenges the notion that the world is completely reliable. Tractors and ploughland furrows seem resolutely solid, and smiles and waves reassure us of out connection,

but here the physical world is tilt and slivery and fluid. The tractor becomes a foundered boat, and it’s driver has vanished. Crows flock in their hundreds, in this short unnerving film of a poem.

.

Balance

.

Walking away from the town, 

I passed a half-ploughed field, 

furrows turning inside out and black 

behind a new tractor. The driver smiled, 

waved, and I waved back 

.

watching him tilt 

the balance of light. In the unharrowed part

sun rilled between bleached-out oat-stalks, 

its silvery influx running like water. 

Crows were landing to feed there. 

.

On the way back from my walk, 

the tractor was stuck on the field’s far side, 

marooned in the dusk. As if it had foundered, 

was a wrecked boat leaning

under the weight of birds 

.

hundreds of them now, 

crows mostly, flowing over

the tractor’s cabin, or hovering above it 

waiting to land, occupying the green 

metal wheel-guards 

.

while other birds ransacked 

islands of unploughed ground. 

I called out. I couldn’t see the driver 

anywhere. Calm yourself I thought. 

Home-time, that’s all. 

.

So I too made my way home, and left the crows 

trawling for seeds in their ragged lines, 

while smaller birds bobbed 

between the great, sunk wheels, 

shrieking Corvus! Corvus!

.

What can I say? There’s no way I can do justice to 150 pages of poems, all as good as each other. It’s a bargain at £11.99, direct from Caracanet. 

Go to their website at https://www.carcanet.co.uk/

…think about it. That’s at least four pamphlets!

While you’re waiting for it to arrive you can also hear Carola talking about the collection via this link

Thank you, Carola Luther being being our guest; thank you, Caracanet, for letting me share these poems; and finally, thank all of you for turning up. See you next week.

A key theme that runs through Ruth Valentine’s latest collection is the idea of the shadow line, the one between the living and the dead, and between sea and sky, that utterly notional ‘horizon’ . I’ll come to the business of the sea later, but given the story of death and resurrection and the way this Grunewald altarpiece contains both like a conjuring trick, it’ll be nice to start with this tour de force .

.

Grünewald

To make water flow wherever it’s told, you need

a wooden box with four divining-rods,

a compass, several men with boots and shovels,

a pump to shift it by its own volition,

and me, Meister Mathis, hydraulic engineer,

clerk-of-works, model maker, stonemason,

.

also painter of many-hinged altar-pieces,

so men and women with St Anthony’s

sacred fire charring their blood and skin

stare and are healed.  I work in tempera

I mix myself, with just a little oil

so the colour goes on clear, like a held note

.

on an angel’s trumpet: here it’s cinnabar,

red mercury.  Jesus dies,

his whole weight hanging from his nailed-up hands,

blood from his head wounds; but when the fathers turn

the panels outward on feast-days, his linen shroud

flames in the up-draught of his resurrection.

.

I observe where I am, and paint: the leering faces,

green skin, festering lesions, how the sinful

imagine their souls.  For the Last Supper,

I sit the ungainly tired apostles round

an oval table, in twos and threes, arguing,

and Christ the least of them, or the least human,

.

already half disincarnate.  At the far end,

fingertips pressed together in explanation,

is my namesake, Mathis, Matthew the tax collector,

a clever man, used to working out the cost,

already glimpsing the next afternoon

when the sky will darken and the saints’ graves open. 

It’s a poem that stopped me in my tracks, in much the same way as UAFanthorpe’s ‘Tyndale in Darkness’, because of its easy familiarity with the world of the drainage engineer/visionary painter, and also with his imagined dreams in what feels like a wholly authentic voice. Stunning.

You can read an earlier post about Ruth from 2017 via this link

.

https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2017/10/01/a-grenfell-alphabet-and-and-a-polished-gem-ruth-valentine/

Or you can jump straight in with this introduction:

Ruth Valentine has worked as an undertaker and as a celebrant at secular funerals. In Downpour she draws on her experiences to compose an extended meditation on dying and death, its emotional grammar and its painful but necessary rituals. Bleak and brave, serious and sad, Downpour is an unflinching study of the physical realities of dying

Ruth  grew up in Sussex, but has lived most of her adult life in London. She has been a teacher, advice worker, voluntary sector manager and consultant. Currently, as well as writing, she conducts secular funerals. She began writing seriously at the age of forty. ……. In 2000, looking for a new direction in her writing, she enrolled on the MA Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Her novel, The Jeweller’s Skin, was the somewhat unexpected result.

In her website (http://ruthvalentine.co.uk/index.php/about/) she writes. “I write poetry, novels and short stories, and non-fiction. You can find details here of my published work, and sample poems and extracts.  Go to the poetry page for details of my latest books, Downpour and Rubaiyat for the Martyrs of Two Wars. 

To this we can add A Grenfell Alphabet [2017]., and now If you want thunder [Smokestack 2021]

And it’s this latest collection that I’ll be celebrating today.

.

The Smokestack publisher’s blurb will you that:

“Ruth Valentine’s tenth collection encompasses the tragedies of the public world – civil-wars in Syria and Sudan, knife crime in North London, the Iraq-Iran war – and our private griefs. At the heart of the book is an extraordinary alphabetical sequence about the Grenfell Tower dead and the society that allowed them to die. It’s a book about the morality of politics and the mortality of us all, a study in remembrance and forgetting, about the indifferent sea with its soft lullabies and cold temptations, time spreading its blankness over everything, and ‘busy humanity with its suitcases and phones, its sudden weeping…”

I enthused about and shared several of the Grenfell poems in my 2017 post, as well as a wonderful poem about Tolstoy and railway stations (which reappears in the latest collection). I want to concentrate, though, on the business of mortality which is never far away in this collection.

You’ll search Google in vain for detailed reviews of Ruth’s work….a fact which is both astonishing and inexplicable…..but I picked up a couple of  comments that resonated in this portmanteau review via Happenstance. Here’s the link

https://www.sphinxreview.co.uk/index.php/sphinx-2009/220-the-announced-ruth-valentine

and here, the comments which I wish I’d thought of first:

“Valentine is a very gifted poet. She has mastered the craft of starting a poem in a low key, almost conversational style, describing a past event, quietly dropping a single disconcerting word into the lines which unsettles but you’re not sure why. So you read on, and there are further hints, subtle, understated, but always pulling you towards an exploration of something you realise has universal importance—but by being brought there as a travelling companion of the poet, you discover it in parallel with the poem. It’s almost as if you’re walking around in the poem itself, seeing the whole landscape of it.”

and

“Ruth Valentine is able to reach across from the living to the dead, bridging that great divide in tender ordinary words.” 

It’s the business of the living and the dead, and also of the divide between them which, in this new collection, seems to me to be symbolised by the transition from land to sea, and the sea in all its multifarious and drowning shapes. 

In August I wrote in a post:

“I read a long time ago, that the Victorians (officially) couldn’t write about sex but wrote with amazing freedom about death, whereas, since the late 60s exactly the opposite has been the case. 

I was brought up to distrust generalisations, but there’s an element of truth in there, isn’t there? I have a sense that we are much more uncomfortable with the physical facts of death and dying than much contemporary poetry acknowledges. It may be, of course, because we know so little about it. When each of my parents died, I wasn’t there, in the house, in the room, and both had been neatly removed before I was told, the whole business being managed and sanitised by the funeral business. That would have been unthinkable in a Victorian household. I have only seen two dead people. One was my son, coffined in a Funeral Director’s nicely lit room. The other was in a morgue where I went with my partner to identify another body. I’ve never been able to write about either moment, not properly. “

Which is why, I suppose, I’m so grateful for poets like  Ruth Valentine, who can write about ‘these moments’, about living with the dying and considering the business of setting out to die. And who, I should add, can do it via utterly memorable/unfogettable moments that draw you in, like these

.

a poem, slipping in mildly off the broad

inarticulate river

.

cobalt:   goes into the furnace a black powder

and comes out radiant, butterfly, dragon, dolphin

.

The goddess of forgetting

is pale and very old, with long stained teeth

.

     and, of course the constant reminders of the the sea and its mutability

.

What use to the world is water that thinks it’s stone

.

…sun covers the sea in silver-leaf

and the Icarus wind falls into the water

.

…sea…snatching a child of a cliff, and twirling him

in swaddling clothes of spindrift

.

As I said, I’ve chosen to concentrate on poems that place themselves where the sky is enormous and isolating and where the landscape inevitably ends in a shadow line like the numinous dividing ‘lines’ in Rothkos great canvasses.The collection is in six sections, or chapters, and each one contains a tidal river, or a sea shore, or saltings or estuaries reedbed and marsh and the dangerous unstable effulgent light off such places. As though you find yourself in a Turner that’s suddenly become live and cold and dangerous. This first poem is the opening poem of the first section, and and contains whole millennia of refugees

.

Jettisoned

on the passage between the islands the boat was clutched

in the hands of drowned farmers, who pulled it down

into the wave’s ploughed furrows, bellowing

my carrots fresh from the earth? where are my oxen?

in the hands of drowned merchants with topaz rings,

fingers of fishermen clawing through the traps

of their lobster-pots  

                                                the wild boat shook them off

and headed out to the plain of cormorants

folding themselves like paper, plunging down

to the wrecks and the jetsam, all the jettisoned,

whoever steps awkwardly away from land,

unborn children venturing on an ocean

though grandmothers weep and the soldiers shrug and yawn

.

I found it next to impossible to clear my mind of the appalling image of the fleeing being dragged down by all that had gone before, drowned by the clawing hands of history. Who can tell if they escaped in that wild boat, or who may plunge down with the cormorants ‘folding themselves like paper‘ into the detritus of the jettisoned and abandoned and wrecked.

I’ll stay with the business of water and of drowning in the three poem sequence that ends Section 2. I’ll remind myself of what one reviewer wrote about the way that

Ruth Valentine has mastered the craft of starting a poem in a low key, almost conversational style, describing a past event, quietly dropping a single disconcerting word into the lines which unsettles but you’re not sure why. So you read on.

.

The Inshore Waters

i

all water inland     silent     do not disturb

the shoremen at their hedging and ditching dreams

you could drown in this stuff     lingeringly     a dancer

past the leap of his youth     your port-de-bras superb

.

the staithe then the river     channels across the marsh

basalt    molten but cold     all unmet depth

paralysed motion     weedless     no pulse no splash

.

as if it were flowing backward     as if the waves

might thicken and surge between the reeds     upstream

the low pale sun catch a silky flash of green

on the throat of a breaker before it broke     you’ve seen

just such a choker glint at a beach and gone

ii

What use to the world is water that thinks it’s stone?

When you choose to drown

you’ll have to get into a rowing-boat and make

oar-scars on the polished surface.  You’re facing back

to the staithe you left, willows and reeds.  It’s miles

to the sea from here.  You’re flagging.  You pull the sculls

across your thighs, rest, float; but the water wants

to haul you in to the bank.  Far off, in front

(if you turn your head) there’s a bit of sheen in the sky,

a taste of salt to the cloudscape, so you try

again for the open ocean.  A starting swell

rocks your coffin-cradle.  Keep going.  You’ll do well

to reach the sea before sunset, but the dark’s

just as good to drown in.  That isn’t a meadow-lark

or a seagull crying, it’s you as you smell the tide,

as you hear the scrape of the shingle.  Now, decide:

do you sit in your boat till it’s toppled, or pull in

to the riverbank, step out to the sea wind

and the sky, the breakwaters, the flying spindrift – 

if it ever was stone – fire-opal and amethyst.

A breaker rises and roars at you.  Safe at last,

you pour down its throat.

iii

You won’t do it of course, walk into the sea and drown.

More likely a bout of asthma, a derailed train.

Though if one day it comes to it, the cancer back,

some antibiotic-resistant inward muck,

you’d do something to finish, you hope. Not a rowing-boat:

you’ve never learned to row anyway.  No note

to whoever was going to find you in your bed

or more likely, sprawled on the kitchen floor.  So you could

buy a one-way ticket down to some drab resort,

walk into the waves.  Get a tide-table first,

you don’t want to be striding out across the sand,

the water knee-high for miles; you might change your mind,

which isn’t the point.  Or is it?  But are you brave,

could you keep on walking deeper until the waves

felled you and held you under?  You’d hold your breath

as it spun you below the surface.  It seems that death

may not come when you call.  Or you have to yell

again, at the top of your lungs, before they fill.

.

What I like so much about this sequence, apart from the unnerving way the three poems address the unthinkable, is their versatility. The first announces itself very frankly as a poem, happily parading its technique in much the same way a a wave breaks over a rock and runs back on itself and reforms. DHLawrence wrote a praise poem for that, didn’t he. But the next two seem so easily conversational, unnervingly, apparently prosaically and rationally discussing (or advising on) the likelihood of attempted suicide by water going right or wrong, that it’s easy to overlook the craft of it all. It’s so easy to not notice that they are both sequences of rhyming couplets. When you do and go back, the music of full and half rhymes seems obvious. I love it.

.

I did say that I’d concentrate on the shadow line poems. There’s so much more (not least, the Grenfell Alphabet in full, as well as a remarkable poem sequence Cobalt, about the dying of a friend) but you’ll need to go and buy the book. I really think you should. For a taste of the range you can expect, though, I’ll finish with one that’s darkly, wickedly funny. The Notes at the end explain that for Valentine’s (Who else?) Day 2016 Bic relaunched its pink ballpoint pen ” designed specially to fit the hands of the ladies”.

I’m pretty sure that the last bit is Ruth’s take on it, which is whyI’ve put it in inverted commas.

.

Sonnet Written With a Pink Pen

My tiny hand is frozen, having cleaned

mould out of the fridge.  I’ve scoured the loo,

made chicken soup, altered a pair of jeans,

addressed a meeting.  It’s what women do.

.

I’ve dressed a dead man in his football shirt

and laid him in his coffin; known the stench

we all may melt to; comforted the hurt

partners and enemies.  I didn’t flinch,

.

or not in public.  For thirty years I’ve written

poems of death and exile, sex and grief,

Pinochet, Kosovo, London riots, love.

Now that I’ve got this pen, though, I can prove

my feminine vocation: violets, kittens,

cupcakes and curls.  Imagine my relief.

Thank you, Ruth Valentine for sharing so many of your poems. It was a joy to have you back as a guest.

And now, the rest of you will want details of the book you will surely buy before the day be out. Here you are.

Published by Smokestack Books [2021] £7.99

                                             

[from Part 2: The Unreturning]

Here we are at last. Thought we’d never get here. Except we haven’t even started, not by a long chalk. I’m thinking of those pioneering Himalayan climbers who took months just to get to the foot of Everest, and essentially they still hadn’t started the job they came to do. Here I am at last, and still scrambling around, looking for a likely line. Daunted. Because Martin Malone’s The Unrerturning is a hefty piece of work, a 

    sequence of merciless hymns to our cultural obsession with the First World War …an effort

   to create meaningful acts of witness for ‘a nation/with so many memorials/but no memory..

   a collection of great ambition and originality [Peter Robinson]

As PW Bridgman says in his London Grip Review 

   it is widespread failures and (inescapably) distortions of historical memory that are Malone’s central concern…..

 with a conjured mythology about war [I would say THIS war, in particular]..a false record that has been cultivated 

 and propagated to serve certain political ends

The more I’ve chewed this over, the more I’ve come to think that I need to put the whole business of assertions  about ‘conjured mythologies’ in some kind of context. Because there are lots of them, and many are mutually exclusive. After all, there were more than 16 million dead — armed forces and civilians. 

Let’s play a game of association, bearing in mind that we’re already primed to be thinking of WW1 poetry and poets. If you think of the First World War, what images come to mind? Would they, perhaps, be like mine.. a silhouette of a procession of gas-blinded men? miles of mud, barbed wire? artillery men trying to drag a floundering horse out of a crater? 

If you had to choose just a single image, would it be a poppy? 

Like this one, for instance, which featured in the Yorkshire Post this week. It’s certified to have been plucked from the battlefield in 1916 by the brother of one killed there in action

“The dried poppy – described as “one of the most poignant symbols of brotherly love ever seen” – was plucked in memory of Private James Henry Lester. It’s up for auction amongst a collection of WW1 memorabilia, and expected to raise in excess of £1000; the family owners hope 

“that a museum may purchase the items and put them on public display, a permanent reminder of the sacrifices made by an entire generation.”

After all, we’re concerned with ‘conjured mythologies’. Which is the concern at the heart of Martin Malone’s collection.

When you’re asked to think of WW1, is your default image one of Flanders Fields? If you like, it’s easy to argue that our collective ‘memory’ has edited the World out of World War.

For instance, if I ask you to think of a battle, I think the odds are that it’ll be The Somme, or Ypres. Something like that. But if you were French, it might be Verdun, or the Ardennes; if you were Italian, it might be Isonzo. For Russians, Tannenberg, for Romanians, Bucharest.

Like I said, Flanders is probably your default …not Macedonia, or Sinai and Palestine, or Egypt, or the Congo, or Mesapotamia/Iraq, or the Dardenelles where Attlee was the penultimate man of the beach in covering the retreat from Suvla Bay.

And if you’re like me, you probably didn’t think of naval warfare at all….Jutland, The Falklands. In truth, there were few naval engagements, which is ironic, especially for those mythologists who still sing Rule Britannia  (Britannia rule the waves). Navies were mainly engaged in blockading enemy ports in an effort to starve them into defeat. And so on.

Our collective memories and myths shrink the world. 

Here’s another thing. If I ask you to name the first bit of WW1 writing that comes to mind what’s the odds that it’ll be a poem? A bit of Wilfred Owen? A bit of Rupert Brooke? Isaac Rosenberg? Edward Thomas? August Stramm? 

How many of you thought first of memoir (Vera Britten? Robert Graves?) 

Or novels…All quiet on the Western Front ? (Eric Remarque’s book was burned by the nazis). Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy ? Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914?

And if we’re thinking of image making, how about film? Paths of Glory ? Oh what a lovely war ? Peter Weir’s Gallipoli.

The scale, both spatial and temporal, is clearly beyond daunting. Martin is quite clear about this in various interviews he’s given about The Unreturning, and about his more recent Selected Poems. A couple of extracts will make the point:

“The Unreturning …… was a subject given/ gifted me on the basis of funding for my Sheffield PhD. My main challenge was to say something new about [the poetry of WW1] from the perspective of its centenary. 

Both academic research and my creative practice did, indeed, look to poets like Thomas and Isaac Rosenberg, however, as well as the even more obvious ones. For the Ghosts of the Vortex sequence, my purpose was to seek out some of the lost, or lesser-known, narratives of the conflict and convey a sense of its global dimensions and legacies: hence poems like ‘Ansky’s Lament’, ‘Legacies’, ‘The 1st Women’s Battalion of Death’, ‘Nostos’ and ‘The Turnip Winter’. German Great War poetry is, in many ways, more interesting than the British stuff – certainly, it often feels more modern and experimental – though it’s an all-but-lost canon. So, I wanted to be a bit more 360° than is often the case with UK writing about the war.”

and

“The complicating factor in a project such as this is the pervasive nature of the Great War’s literary legacy. Already the most poetically memorialized conflict since Troy, its writers provide the urtext to our collective sensibility of much subsequent warfare, while its historical stature as global event represents something of a dragon lying across the threshold to our under- standing of the modern world 

Catherine Reilly’s estimation that, in Britain alone, there were 2225 published poets of the Great War (1978) is a formidable enough legacy, further deepened by the remarkably privileged position enjoyed in UK culture by that small body of poets who have since emerged as representatives of its core canon [my italics]: poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, Laurence Binyon and John McCrae, all of whom are studied widely in schools or habitually appear in Remembrance Day ceremonies. “

.

What he sets out to do is to provide some sort of perspective on the failures and distortions of historical memory, both about the war itself, about the ‘truth’ or otherwise of its poetry, and what he sees as conjured mythologies, the ‘trench honesties’ occluded by ‘one century/ and the paradigms of myth’. And when you consider the ‘truth’ of the poetry, it’s as well to remember that this war was unprecedented, mechanised, industrialised. There was no language ready made to account for it. Which brings us to Martin Malone’s poems, and particularly at this point, an extract from one about Wilfred Owen at the time of his recuperation after Craiglockhart.

They were dying again at Beaumont Hamel

as you stroll Borage Lane,

three days after your twenty-fifth birthday,

mind yet cobbled with skulls of the lads you left behind…

.

At number seven, you unlatch the gate,

take out a key and stroll up to the white front door.

.

Searching for peace, you retreat to the attic with its tiny skylight,

the shrieks of children playing soldiers down the street.

Here you are Chatterton and Keats,

half in love with death’s idea

while making best use of its dutiful shadow.

.

You write your mother, go over old drafts,

‘defectuosities’, and ‘the inwardness of war’.

.

Briefly, you pause to listen to swallows skirruping their early return,

.

then back to your notes, strike-throughs,

séance and retrospection,

another time-strafed Edwardian

caught out in the open with defective kit…

                                                                        (from “Ripon Work”)

It’s the last two lines I find particularly poignant; Edwardian poetry, with its roots in lyrical Romanticism, simply wasn’t set up to deal with the horrors of trench warfare, particularly if your mind was

                           cobbled with skulls of the lads you left behind…

It’s Martin’s concern with the disjunction between the limits of language at any given time, and the actual experience it’s trying to realise that colours the whole collection, which, as one reviewer pointed out, and as the book’s jacket copy correctly declares, is in effect a “Great War diptych in which the later dissenting voices… parley with [war poetry’s] more traditional elegiac forms.”

So, set this poem from the second part (The Unreturning) against Ripon Work, and you’ll get a sense of the way it works

41. War Poet

Beneath this creeping barrage squats our chap, in his breast pocket the scribbled draft that sets off a vintage look: hapless subaltern, sick with sin, chewing pencil and pity onto notepaper doomed to be found upon a mud-matted corpse. En route to legend, Herr Krupp’s handiwork tears its messy path through temporal, parietal and the red wet thing of a line-break. Let us rest here a while then dig down to the destruction layer where we find change come suddenly and everywhere, and everywhere the final week of this poets’ war: Boudicca’s wrath, shock and awe, the stratified earth of charred words pulling free of decorum.

 “The first half of the diptych (collectively, “Ghosts in the Vortex”) does indeed consist of poems, mostly written in free verse, which are conventionally presented and employ language and diction that beautifully reflects Martin’s own earlier absorption in poets like Edward Thomas, and the landscapes of, say Eric Ravillious. The second half, by contrast, comes to us in prose poetry form and speaks in a conspicuously more modern voice. The prose poems look back at some of the content of the first half, offering an often acerbic, but nevertheless lyrical, commentary on real truths as they have sometimes been refracted though systematically distorted lenses. (PWBridgman in London Grip).

Some of the poems made me consider the disparate backgrounds of those who fought, especially before conscription. There were the Pals Regiments who could not initially be supplied with unforms, and who were subsequently decimated; there were those who were rejected because of the effects of malnutrition. Later, of course, the need for men to fill their places became acute, and thus were formed the Bantam Regiments of men below 5’3”…the Jewish East-ender Isaac Rosenberg was one of them. There were those conflicted, like Owen and Edward Thomas who enlisted later in the war, And there were the enthusiasts, the beautiful, blue-eyed bourgeouis boys like Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell.

Martin’s momentarily unsparing of Julian Grenfell and his “Krupp-made end”.

Warm with late spring, in a field near Ypres,

you were never happier than on this big picnic, 

chatting with the General when that shell struck

                                   [Phoebus Apollo]

He can just as easily borrow some of the acerbity of Sassoon when dealing with others, like Sassoon himself, and Robert Graves, who bought their own superior gear from the Army and Navy stores)

Yes, how we hate you, you cheerful young men
with your tinned kippers and today’s Daily Mail;
the periscope from Harrods, the warm new boots.

                                      [Trench Requisites]

There’s one poem in part two of the diptych that savages the literal business of the memorabilia of wars, and it illustrates for me the to-and-fro of reverberation between the two parts. I like way the distinctively modern dialect throws a light on Sassoon’s use of his demotic. I like the savagery of it.

.

29. Webbing

Buy it now for two-seven-five, condition as shown in photo, too well-made to be repro, the kosher stuff of a lost patrol. As metaphors got real and euphemism ugly, the Aldershot Design lugged its rough rigging onto the dog-tired shoulders of our line. And, if you’re browsing for archetype, for “how it really was”, then scroll no further than this, one belt; two braces; bayonet frog; pouches for ammo; one haversack; valise with two straps and carriers for the head and helve of an E-tool. This was our hyperlink, a one-piece jacket for the universal soldier: Dai’s Greatcoat, Hotspur’s mail, John Ball’s frayed thread for the fucked-up Grail of Mametz Wood. Epic failure/ epic fail

.

Equally, Martin Malone can write with a deft lyricism that conjures the literary/poetic world of the age.

MIDSUMMER

As though nothing happens

our hemisphere shoulders the sun,

.

the hill asleep on its trove of peat,

the sea is soaked in light.

.

In the days before Johnsmas

we bear fuel to the sgùrr,

our own brief blaze stoked

in its hours and seasons

.

by the darkness and the light.

.

I love the completeness of this, its precision (its echoes of MacCaig, too), and not least for the way it sits alongside much bleaker, more deliberately disturbing poems, like the one about the artist Kokoscha, shot in the head and wounded in the lung, left for dead on the Russian front, and later declared insane by his hospital doctor.

KNIGHT ERRANT, 1915

.

A spitted dragoon 

prone in pike-grey, 

Oskar Kokoschka considers his fate

and wonders if you can paint a premonition

or, in the war of endless coincidence,

is this just another incident

bereft of the brush 

to anoint its meaning?

.

As March canvass turns 

August into wounds, 

his lung swabs blood 

from the jag of Russian bayonet

and things begin to swim, 

heading out towards allegory

and revenant self-portrait:

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? 

.

He floats above himself as seraphim,

notes a passing influence of Grünewald 

and the Northern Renaissance, 

while Mahler’s widow looks on,

sphinx-like, close attendant

to his ever-present grief

and the narrow horizontal

of a stricken son of man.

.

I like the way that this reminds me that painters were way ahead of poets when it came to the profound disorientations of this war (and possibly everything else throught history). I like the way it takes the reader away from the provincialism of English war poetry, I like the widening perspective. And I realise, belatedly that it chimes with an image(the pikelhaube snout) in one of the prose poems from the second half of the diptych (The Unreturning).

10. School Run

If you’ve a minute, tweet this: the car-struck badger you’ve driven past these last two weeks, pikelhaube snout irate in death, body bloating with fetid air, hind-legs rigid in surrender. Kamerad, emptied of essence, this is the boy from your home village; that snotty kid with a terrier whose Dad liked a drink, the one who pissed himself when Miss Manning caught him with a rat in his desk. Him: always the last to put up his hand, always unlucky in love. His losing streak continued over here and now that’s him rotting away to your left, hung on the brambles of a B-Road: a passing stain in no man’s land, fuel for the coming spring. He’ll walk no more on Cotswold.

.

(Thus, Ivor Gurney. I’d forgotten that I shared this early prosepoem in a post in which Martin was my guest poet. You can check it out via this link. https://johnfogginpoetry.com/2015/11/01/labours-of-love-and-a-polished-gem-12-martin-malone/)

I realised a long long time ago I’d not do justice to the complexities and variety of this collection– lyrical, satitirical, rhetorical, polemical, extensively researched, and technically accomplished. Put all that together and you realise that it doesn’t add up to something you might recognize as currently fashionable. But do go and buy it. You’ll not be disappointed and you’ll certainly be educated. And you can dream that Michael Gove and his satraps could be forced to learn this poem by heart.

DEAR REVISIONIST

Thank you for your neo-concern

that we grasp the full facts

of this complicated matter;

for sending out, once again,

the officer class to explain 

the subtle difference between

Blackadder and the nation’s history,

the one being truth the other comedy;

for pointing out our parents’ mistake

in taking Oh What A Lovely War!

to be anything but a sixties musical 

and not how it really was. Thank you

for assuming our poetry stops at Owen;

for sending out the privately-educated

to explain that confusion in the ranks

between your national story

and literature’s false history,

as if, not royal families, but poetry

tips men into war graves.

Saxe-Coburg, be advised, your poppy

is not mine.

.

I’m grateful to you for letting me hear

Paxman attempt the phrase wor canny bairns.

And I do appreciate your engagement

with those events which legitimise

the contemporary state of affairs,

or, as you put it on a recent visit

to a sink school, make pride cool again. 

I appreciate, as you say, the need 

to understand the popular thinking

of the day; how words you are trying

to re-claim meant something real

to my grandfather right up to that morning

the Liverpool Regiment came unstuck

at Hermies, on the road to Cambrai. 

As if history can make some

long term sense of the losses 

and every lesson to be learned

is, once more, yours.

Martin Malone, thanks for your patience, and for your generous sharing of so many poems from The Unreturning. 

ps. I’ll finish with one last thought. I’ve read a lot of reviews of the book and transcripts of interviews that Martin has given as well as articles he’s written. Sometimes, Google sends you down unexpected pathways. I came across the deeply depressing world of Poetry Notes and Analyses….the virtual world’s Cole’s Notes. Amongst other things I learned that there is no kind of filter. You’d be astonished to find that it’s commonly assumed by all sorts of writers, and even some reviewers, that Wilfred Owen’s poem The unreturning is a War Poem. The first two stanzas certainly sound as if they may be

In fact, it was written between 1912 and 1913, and it’s about a crisis of theological and doctrinal doubt. It has more affinity with the Dark Sonnets of GM Hopkins than with war poetry. There you go.

Bibliography/biography

Martin Malone lives in north-east Scotland. 

He has published 3 poetry collections: The Waiting Hillside (Templar, 2011), 

                                                                       Cur (Shoestring, 2015) 

                                                                       and 

                                                                    The Unreturning (Shoestring 2019). 

Larksong Static: Selected Poems 2005-2020 was published by Hedgehog Poetry in December 2020. 

In addition, he has published 4 pamphlets: 17 Landscapes (Bluegate Books), Prodigals (The Black Light Engine Room), Mr. Willett’s Summertime* (Poetry Salzburg), Shetland Lyrics (Hedgehog). Poems from these and his other work have been published in a wide variety of magazines & journals. 

He reviews for  Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales and Poetry Salzburg Review. 

An editor at Poetry Salzburg and  Honorary Research Fellow in Creative Writing at Aberdeen University, he has a PhD in poetry from Sheffield University. Currently,  Martin is a Poetry Ambassador for the Scottish Poetry Library.

*Mr. Willett’s Summertime comprises 25 poems that were the early nucleus of The Unreturning