*****
Lynette Roberts: A Letter to the Dead: Collected Poems • Cathy Galvin: Ethnology a Love Song for Connemara • Patrick Davidson Roberts: Divided Tongues • Prue Chamberlayne: Lizzard Looks • Michael Dooley: In Spring We Turned to Water • Patrick Meeds: The Invisible Man’s Tailor • Abigail Ardelle Zammit: leaves borrowed from human flesh Gerald Killingworth: Fabrics, Fancies & Fens • Maggie Wadey: London Pastoral
Translation
Yannis Ritsos: Exercises 1950-1960 translated by Spring Ulmer
*****
Lynette Roberts A Letter to the Dead: Collected Poems, eds. Patrick McGuiness and Charles Mundye, Carcanet, £20.00 9781800175051. Reviewed by Ian Pople
Lynette Roberts is a poet whose writing and reputation were dimmed to the point of being lost. In part, this diminution was the result of the circumstances of her own life: Roberts suffered from mental health problems, took herself away from the literary milieu that she had known and been part of in London and Wales during the 1940s and 1950s and became a Jehovah’s Witness. And yet, as this new Collected is at pains to point out, the literary milieu that Roberts was part of contained many of the major literary figures of that time. T. S. Eliot published her at Faber. Dylan Thomas was best man at her wedding to the Welsh poet and publisher Keidrych Rhys. She knew that circle of writers around Tambimuttu and Poetry London that came to be known as the ‘Apocalytics,’ or New Romantics.
It is perhaps convenient to associate her with that ‘New Romantic’ kind of writing, although that is very much not the whole story. James Keery, in his introduction to his anthology of ‘Apocalyptic’ writing sees this as a ‘vein of visionary modernism,’ (his italics). In the 1940s, this kind of poetry was very closely associated with the dense lyricism of Dylan Thomas although Thomas refused to sign the Apocalypse manifesto that Henry Treece circulated in 1939. Treece, if he is known at all today, is known more as a writer of Young Adult historical novels. However, in the forties, he was at the forefront of that movement commenting that such a poet’s ‘utterance will be prophetic, … and as his words are prophetic, they will tend to be incantatory, and so musical. At times, even, that music will take control.’ In his introduction to this volume, reprinted from that earlier volume, Patrick McGuiness makes strenuous efforts to complicate any sense that Roberts was too influenced by the New Romantics. McGuiness discusses how Roberts knew and read Anglo-Welsh poets such as R.S. Thomas, whose first book Keidrych Rhys had published. And that Roberts read and attended readings by Auden, MacNeice and Day Lewis.
Lynette Roberts’ A Letter to the Dead is a second edition of a Collected Poems for Lynette Roberts. Carcanet first published Roberts in 2005, and this new edition adds nearly seventy uncollected poems to that book. It is organized into four basic sections: the first contains the poems from Roberts’ first book, Poems, published in 1944; the second, her book Gods with Stainless Ears: A Heroic Poem, 1951, the third, a section of uncollected and unpublished poems and the final section ‘Further Uncollected and Unpublished poems’. There is also an Appendix containing material on South America, where Roberts was born, along with an Epilogue from the book’s co-editor, Charles Mundye.
For all McGuiness’ protestations, as I have suggested, perhaps a little too strenuously, the word intoxication of the New Romantics is strongly present in the poems from her first book. And where the poems are not of that particular kind there can be a rather vatic quality to the style. This is the first section of ‘Lamentation.’
To the village of lace and stone
Came strangers. I was one of these
Always observant and slightly obscure.
I roamed the hills of bird and bone
Rescuing bees from under the storm:
Five hills rocked and four homes fell
The day I remember the raid so well.
Eyes shone like cups chipped and stiff
The living bled the dead lay in their grief
Cows, sheep, horses, all got struck
Black as bird wounds, red as wild duck.
Dead as icebone breaking the hedge.
Dead as soil failing of good heart.
Dead as trees quivering with shock
At the hot death from the plane.
The first thing that comes across here is the strength of that iambic rhythmic pulse emphasized by the monosyllabic masculine rhyming line-endings. This is a lamentation of particular vehemence. What is also noticeable is the organization of the story here. The narrator comes as a stranger into a village whose personality is very deftly suggested with that ‘lace and stone’; a village of crafting both inside and outside the home. The reader is then given the interiority of the narrator in a way that emphasizes that narrator’s own slightly askew relationship with the village, in particular, perhaps with the villagers and their view of the narrator. We are then presented with the force of the air raid, a force that the narrator has not prepared us for. It would be possible to imagine lines six and seven reversed, ‘I remember the day of the raid so well /Five hills rocked and four homes fell.’ Yet Roberts has not done that and possibly she risks a kind of disjuncture in the way she has organized it. And following this, in the last four lines of the stanza, the events and motifs are pushed together, particularly as Roberts has missed out punctuation.
Following that, in the four-line stanza that follows, Roberts creates a bridge or chorus for this lamentation. And these four lines are repeated after another two stanzas. Roberts then moves the poem into a lamentation for a still birth comparing the narrator’s loss with a neighbour’s loss of cattle; ‘I met death before birth’ and ‘The emptiness of the crib.’ That sense of personal and public loss both inside and outside the air raid is very powerfully done. Roberts’ control of the rhythmic drive of the poem, and the very contained Anglo-Saxon nature of the language are very moving. Where the vatic comes in is in the squashed syntax of the last three lines of the opening stanza and in the choral, ‘bridge’ sections with the italicized ‘dead’ driving the message even as the lines open into that slightly ‘strange’ imagery. This is not to suggest that the strangeness of the imagery is not earned by the emotional build-up to it. But Roberts control of the drive towards that imagery is implies a kind of certainty of direction. Roberts seems unlikely to give way. Here, we meet Keery’s ‘visionary modernism.’
And that verbal intoxication is very present in the next poem from that 1944 volume, Poems, ‘Broken Voices.’ Here is the third verse,
Stained virgin village with dearth – for the mock
Like strumpet jet, rocked mirth
And farmer: brought no more worth
Than winding sheet of sour berth.
It might seem strange picking out the third verse, as if at a kind of random. However, the problem with writing like this is that that verbal intoxication can lead to the surface of a poem becoming uniform, even monolithic. It is clear-ish what the subject matter of the poem is. As we have seen, Roberts moved to Wales as a comparative stranger and looked on the village into which she moved as a stranger. In ‘Lamentation,’ she places herself and her reactions to her coming to the village, in ‘Broken voices,’ Roberts attempts to pin the village down perhaps. And that focus leads her, perhaps, to strip away anything superfluous to that attention. The style is clipped back to a point where it seems difficult to clip any further; and it is possible to feel excluded from the discourse. What exactly does she mean with the simile of the ‘mock like strumpet jet’? The dearth we might see is a extreme depletion of some kind but since we don’t know that ‘dearth,’ it is, perhaps, difficult to imagine it as ‘strumpet jet.’
Roberts never entirely shakes off that sense of centripetal focus. But the rest of this very complete volume contains many other poems that do not have that kind of strain. Towards the end of the book, in the unfolding ‘Uncollected poems,’ there are many fine poems where the language is far less impacted and breathes far more easily. The result is often much gentler not only on the reader but also on the motifs and the subjects, as in this stanza from ‘Transcendental Domain.’
The first flower is yellow.
Spring’s royal colour;
It has mild petals and no central portion;
It is a flow on its own stalk and owns no pasture.
For this flower of the sun. For this flower
I would give the centre of the world.
*****
Ethnology a Love Song for Connemara by Cathy Galvin. £12.99. Bloodaxe. ISBN 9781780377728
Cathy Galvin inherited her great-grandparents’ cottage on the island of Máisean (Mason Island), off the Irish coast, and returns to her roots in Ethnology. The island is now uninhabited. The former inhabitants were also explored by folklorists and ethologists. Enid Hooper, a textile designer was a frequent visitor to Máisean in the early 1900s and ‘Blunt Needles’, was written for her. The villanelle starts: ‘Inward, rowing in, I come as a thief / to steal your life, like a collector. / Outward, rowing out, your gift to me is scented’. It ends,
Glass un-breaks from your floor to re-jar rusts and golds.
In the light, a quilt of webs, dried ribbons of weeds.
Outward, rowing out, your gift to me is scented.
xxxxxxYour designs chevron a scalloped storm-shore,
xxxxxxcollaging threads I touch yet have no skill for.
xxxxxxOutward, rowing out, your gift to me is scented.
xxxxxxInward, rowing in, I come as a thief.
The metaphors evoke textiles, the poet’s speaker is envious of those who can stitch quilts, presumably using natural dyes, leaving scents. Scents can trigger memories or create a means of translating the lives no longer present into an imaginary sense of what those lives were like. The speaker who sees herself as a ‘thief’ coming to the island, trying to make sense of the lives that embodied the cottage before her, leaves feeling the cottage is a gift that enriches her.
The title poem refers to studies done on the inhabitants, again in the early 1900s, when human remains were stolen from Inishbofin Island and acquired by Trinity College, Dublin. Galvin was part of the campaign for their return. A skull held at Trinity College gets to speak:
When there was flesh
on my childhood I walked
the cow road to the cliff edge,
lifted blue eggs where they rested
on the ground, warm in my hands.
Placed them in a box
as treasure. Knowing they were where they would not crack
into flight.
While the skull waits to be returned, it thinks back to a childhood when the child took bird’s eggs and put them in a box as a keepsake. The child seems to have known it was doing wrong, preventing the eggs from hatching, but its desire to keep them was stronger. A similar disruption is seen with the ethologists who accepted the human skulls as study items, placing their needs above the human needs to remain, to be respected. The skulls were not returned when the studies were complete but archived and kept. It took a campaign to provoke action.
The poet Ted Hughes was a visitor to Connemara, the mainland from where trips to Máisean start from, in 1962 and 1966. Writer Richard Murphy encouraged literary visitors to his homeland, often playing host. Hughes wrote Crow between 1966-1969 and Galvin’s ‘Crow’ imagines his visits (complete poem which is right aligned on the page),
We sip soup
at the oak table with a view from the window
where the poet watched his Crow.
It suited him well, the stark proportions of a house
built for the seaweed agent.
So much profit in a tonne of back-break sold for saltpetre, exploding
in gunpowder.
Crow was Hughes getting back in the saddle as he adjusted to widowhood as a father to two young children. The speaker in the current day is sharing soup with someone, sharing food suggesting family or close friends, in contrast to Hughes’ aloneness. The house was built for someone whose source of income was the kelp, sold for saltpetre. Saltpetre is used in fertiliser and to cure meats, but the poem’s speaker focuses on its use in explosives. Although the saltpetre is only used in gunpowder after its sale, i.e. the explosives are no where near the house where soup is being eaten, allowing a sense of peace, space to rediscover a self.
The final sequence, ‘After’ is about the poet taking the heart of her dead son to bury at home. Cloch na Rón is village on the mainland close to Máisean Island,
I crush your heart
to my belly, willing every atom
back into my body
where bone, hair, flesh,
can be remade – you safe,
never born.
A gold corner of granite
pressed between my breasts
where I think of your heart,
how I can keep it warm,
against a slate sea and the shades of Cloch na Rón.
The speaker keeps her son’s heart warm by returning it to a place of memory, of security and home. A place where hearts should be kept.
Ethnology a Love Song for Connemara is exactly that: a collection that is rooted in the landscape and nuances of Máisean Island and its past inhabitants. Galvin also questions what home and belonging mean when family roots have left their point of origin.
Emma Lee’s publications include The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020) and Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea, (Five Leaves, 2015), reviews for magazines and blogs at https://emmalee1.wordpress.com.
*****
Divided Tongues by Patrick Davidson Roberts. £10.99. Broken Sleep Books. ISBN: 9781917617499. Reviewed by John Challis.
Patrick Davidson Roberts’ second collection, Divided Tongues, opens with a storm. The speaker, halfway up a mountain, turns back for the pub, leaving their doppelganger-like companion to face the elements alone. It is a narrative of struggle (‘I looked to where I’d come from, and to where he went’) and foregrounds the later, iambic tour de force ‘Final Summit Attempt’ in which a couple face not just weather but themselves, their kin and linage, as they ascend ‘something so small as a peak’:
Now we were fighting the incline, my mother,
my seventeen brothers and sunken-in sister
all of whom railed at us, laid in the heather,
and shook the mountain that bellowed beneath us.
These poems bookend a collection full of reckonings with language and faith. Many utilise the longer line seen in Davidson Roberts’ excellent 2023 chapbook, The Trick, giving the work roomier dimensions for narrative and detail. In ‘Admiralty Arch’ the speaker, watching the removal of scaffolding, expects ‘to find something like the trapped of Pompeii, to see two people caught in the cloud of each other’, yet ultimately discovers absence. You could read it as a key for the collection that invitingly suggests and hints at greater goings on, often concerning history and politics. Some of the poems exist in worlds we only glimpse, yet the collection is underpinned by a formal and musical unity that draws the whole together.
Take ‘The Train’ for example, a sequence following the movements of a group of individuals during the unfolding of an unnamed catastrophe: ‘it was the first we heard the news about the coast, and that / they’d got here, they’d landed…’. Taken as a whole, the poem is novelistic in scope. Throughout, the ordinary rubs against a higher stakes game. We witness the commune stock up on pilfered milk and bread from a post office to shore themselves against oncoming violence. What exactly is taking place within the world and between the group’s members, we are never told, but there are themes of parenthood, masculinity and immigration echoed elsewhere in the collection. Images and phrases can be taken as metaphors for much wider concerns: ‘Such old wood, screaming its last moments’. It’s a masterly demonstration of dramatic compression and syntactic arrangement and one only imagines how much must have been written and cut to achieve such narrative economy:
I had kissed the twins goodnight, and held Cass for an hour.
Stepping out to check the perimeter, I felt Orion’s Belt pulse,
wished for more days or nights like this. Lisa took the beer from me,
took my hand. The bracken behind the truck. Cries. The beer on her lips.
The title sequence is equally elliptical. Here, the poet observes or addresses the 12 apostles as they navigate the contemporary world, fugitive to a faith that haunts and sometimes hunts them. Often, the biblical meets a bureaucratic vernacular, throwing the past into a modern, urbanised, secular world in which each meets his fate: Matthew, the victim of a sniper in Tel Alvi, Paul, mowed down by London traffic: ‘Each picked up their story, ran with it.’ Most startling of all is the recasting of Bartholomew as the victim of a gas explosion, whose death makes believers of the miners he worked with:
You’d spoken in the showers, canteen, past the slagheap,
of all that moved from dark to light and of what could possibly be imagined.
As the skin of your arm sagged in your own palm, brother, we believed;
gained another among us, before they took you away.
Be it matters of faith, love, or politics, this desire to reassess or reimagine is perhaps a way of reckoning with notions of fixity, to acknowledge the other. Two untitled poems that function as epigraph and coda both consider the relationship between geographic origin, accent and self, and the complexity of belonging. Speakers are often exiles from place and language who find sometimes ‘on both sides of the border’, for whom language is both confidant and the betrayer of origins. Such complexities are found in other poems with retelling on their mind, such as the impressively sustained monologue ‘The Rig’, a reimagining of the old Norse poem, ‘Rígsþula’, concerning the god responsible for fathering the progenitors of social classes. In Davidson Roberts’ version, Rig appears as a mysterious loner whose sexual encounters with married women at a series of pubs over time lead to questions of parental, and thus class identity. The narrative is compellingly delivered:
You sense him as the breath in the backdraft, the smoke in the slipstream,
or scent in a simmer. His card would call him the black in the ink-stain
and credit his feel as rough in a rockface. Down to town he was more
the man in the crowd than the face in the crowd beside him, for you
could never tell him apart from himself or the dozens that he became.
As in many of these poems, Davidson Roberts’ language is exact, yet written as though side-on, as if from the margins of the event. Explanation is spared. As readers we are often confidants on the inside of a story that is both clear and mysterious, and I can’t help but read this as a dramatic extension of the collection’s wider wrestling with identity and the divided tongues with which the poet speaks. A talent for musicality is balanced with a natural sense of line and rhythm in poems where history, literature and the personal overlap. In the sonnet ‘Lilburne’s prayer’ the voice of Leveller, John Lilburne, conjures the Miltonic to consider faith, failure, and freedom: ‘Do not curse my wild hope that in hell I looked to build heaven’. It is one of several poems illustrating injustice, past and present, without speaking from moral high ground. The model of the riddle often comes to mind, as in ‘The Cannon’, which at first, seems to be about poetry, but turns to discourse on how the same thing can be said differently, to different effect, be the subject poetry or love: ‘It’s not that one person’s lying, it’s that some people just say it better’. Knowing and searching, Divided Tongues is a tremendously inventive collection of lyric accounts, reports and monologues that charge and enrich the material at hand with an urgent and naturally divided edge.
John Challis’s first collection, The Resurrectionists, was published in 2021. A second, The Green Parcel, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2026. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Telegraph, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland Review, The Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He lives and teaches in York.
*****
Lizzard Looks by Prue Chamberlayne. £10.00. Arc Publications. ISBN: 9781911469964. Reviewed by Harriet Thistlethwaite
This collection by Prue Chamberlayne has a gently fragile opener and lesson on the theme of repair with something gleaming in the seams. It is introduced with an epigram by William Stafford : ‘I have woven a parachute out of everything broken…’. The poet’s craft values the cracks, and ‘Lifelines’ is a short six-line exquisite taster of Chamberlayne’s poetry : ‘Damage need not be a cause for lamentation – / consider the mending of ceramic vessels / with powdered gold and lacquer, …’
It is an idea that reappears in another guise later in ‘The Silver Coffee Filter on an English Mantelpiece’. The Silesian diggers long ago ‘who followed lustrous specks in veins / down shafts and slippery galleries’ played their role. We learn in the next stanza that ‘The strength of flavour was adjusted’ by the filter. Perhaps here is contained an image for the filtering of strong stuff that poetry can vitally perform. For there are two ominous lines ringing out to end this poem, entertaining the idea of complete loss. ‘If mankind perished, could that same path / from specks to artistry ever be traced again?’
Chamberlayne uses a versatility of touch for her delving into life, its beginnings and endings. As this collection has taken six years in the making it may not be fanciful that she has been repairing poems as well as making them anew. The sensitive curation harks back to her first collection Locks Rust in structure while there are moments specifically with the characteristic intense energy of her chapbook of sonnets: Beware The Truth That’s Manacled.
Prominent again in this collection, Lizzard Looks, are poems in which she takes a precise and intimate look at nature. ‘Force in Frailty’ is an example:
A pedestal of emeralds
wraps the heel of a leaning hornbeam,
its braided bark in silver-green
fondled by strands from low-slung sun.
Rustle of feet through copper leaves
lightens the hush of winter lull.
Between the stream’s bare labia
trickles a melody as it descends.
From pollards axed and lain as hedge
only connected by frailest strips
a forest of fine shoots has sprouted,
buds shut tight until unfurling.
This ‘Force’ of nature has not Dylan Thomas’s despairing youthful cry. For Chamberlayne, in greater maturity, there seems to be an intuitive sense of fecundity. And she boldly refers to the feminine sex, the labia, as signpost for it.
With such tools as half rhyme, assonance, and alliteration she weaves echoes that pervade the whole collection. ‘Seasons Script’ brings in a parallel of nature and the scribe’s craft. The two are intertwined in her use of couplets; the probing nib her instrument. The sun reappears again in its rhythmic trajectory with the Hopkins-like line ‘sun-sidle of the scripts sedate — / in contrast to pavane of birds…’
From that poem she leaps across the page spread to ‘Swivel of a Child’s Swing’ which is ‘tethered in the mind’s eye’ in such a pattern as to bring alive the swing’s to and fro, or ‘butterfly on stamen in a breeze, / absence of stasis ecstasy.’
The spirit of play enlivens the poetry and shows an access to her unconscious which enhances the musicality when read aloud. Chamberlayne’s choice of forms – some looser, others more structured – is reliable and confident: quite often the use of couplets, at times sonnets or near sonnets which serve well to channel resonances and hold her energies. So here is a use of the space in stanza two in ‘At Lake Level’:
I reach the diving rock where feldspar
hornblade, mica display
their pink and grey. A rill of silver
cobweb-thin loops round
in freefall of a passing soul
a tuft of thistle down drifts down
waves lap like wings, and turning back
towards the Stygian ravine
opacity, jet black, obliterates
all interplay of elements
portal to original dark matter.
Chamberlayne uses colour everywhere: ‘From a Bedroom Window in November’ it is resounding at sunrise with natural gold: ‘Foliage flamed in saffron, aureate, / contorts in an orchestral frenzy.’ We see also in this poem how widely her imagery spans human relationships and cultures: ‘Zangbeto’s haystack shivering / as evil is despatched; …’ and on to Klimt’s use of gold. Thence to ‘Pandemonium Manifesto’ after a notorious painting by Baselitz with words and sounds explosive like fireworks. All as the poet returns to her precise looking into ‘Summer Jet Black’: ‘The woodland shade ahead is dark / as underworld of caves where bison / ripple in a passing flare.’
The poems often look back to the echoing past: we have a sonnet ‘Return of History’ reviving tangentially her theme on slavery; we have an elegy for a someone well loved who was a ‘Muse’; we have the third section header poem ‘What the Angel Might Have Said in Response’. The latter takes us vertiginously to a view from a Belgian bell tower which, the note explains, suffered bomb destruction in 1914 and 1940:
What would the Angel have said then?
And what would she say now?
At the descent she’s there,
intent. O for a quick embrace —
vigour of limbs
mutually attuned,
hope frail, and yet preeminent —
before the stone cold stair.
Chamberlayne puts forth her gleam of courage in the face of ‘agitated thought’ and takes a Miltonian stance within the Devil, with his octopus-like tentacles, in ‘The Lure of Evil’.
In ‘Our Filaments Are Threadbare’ which was dated to day 22 of the Gaza bombing she ends with a line taken from an Auden poem from 1940, thus:
What happens to our souls, we who sip drink and fret
at having left the heating on? A small child forced
into its pushchair howls and thrashes in despair.
Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
There are often searching questions that are then let go, allowing mystery, negative capability. With the proviso noted in ‘Droplets on a Jolted Glass’ that ‘we humans too / must feel we’re held / to keep our ground.’ In the penultimate poem ‘While Picking Tarragon’ we have the collection’s contrasts set alongside one another: ‘gut riotous – beauty and terror / mordantly entwined.’ Then rounding down to a calmer earthed scene of ‘relief at hatching out of eggs –…’ The poem ‘Silent One’ is the culminating final note.
The title of the whole collection might suggest the freeze framing of a lizard’s quick-sharp movements and Chamberlayne giving us a breathing mosaic of intense images. The mirror-like lizard poem itself: ‘Mutual Inquiry’ ends with a question to the lizard that reflects Chamberlayne’s respecting eye.
The surprise extra Z in Lizzard? That’s another question.
Harriet Thistlethwaite took an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Royal Holloway College, London in 2005. Some of her poems were published that year in the anthology Bedford Square (John Murray). She recently retired from her day job as a psychotherapist and is back to writing poetry.
*****
In Spring We Turned to Water by Michael Dooley. €16. Doíre Press. ISBN : 978-1-915877-01-7. Reviewed by Malcolm Carson
The first impression on receiving this book is how beautifully designed and bound it is. The Doíre Press of Connemara should be proud as it puts to shame many a more prestigious publisher of poetry. This is a challenging but ultimately rewarding collection, at times confusing but rarely dull. Throughout, there is an intensity of observation and imagery which led this reader to work his way through the book in small doses.
For instance, in the first poem, Sweet Pea, we have an idea of this when the horse gets a broken leg, necessitating the visit of a vet:
Now her leg is a broken October
stalk, wrecked as a child’s straw.
The vet prepares his gun.
I lean down to calm her,
wet bridle in my hands,
when her poll breaks out in flower…
A brave opening poem. The language is simple and powerful, the narrative easy to follow, but the emotion intense.
Similarly, Iallach gives us an indication of Dooley’s ability to reach into images to create powerful impressions:
Wind brought the cry off the hill –
its cat-scratch and tin-scrape
rubbed up and over the leg of night.
This is a brilliant portrayal of a life utterly compelled by family history, religion and the paucity of his existence:
Shoulders hooped by bucket draws,
eyes averted in pub-talk of women,
he was a barometer arched for rain –
a call to patient sheepdogs
unaccounted for at night.
Poems follow which develop this theme. Dooley’s command of simple juxtapositions is very effective as in Siege where he uses the frequently employed – but rarely effectively – mode of breaking up lines. It’s not something I like or do, but in this case it works to convey the unfolding drama, even if it’s not clear to me, at any rate, what is happening.
Nor do I understand what is happening in Quarry, but I can only admire the panache with which he loads the opening lines:
War broke out across my hands.
Rebel fungi, cabbaged welts.
They blitzed fingers, razed metacarpal.
Crossed the ulnar border…
Sometimes, however, Dooley’s undoubted brilliance with imagery confounds the meaning such as where a bizarre association sends the reader sideways from the main drive of the poem. One instance in Huascar Watches His Children Tortured at Quipaipan:
They tore at him and cheered.
Ushno of entempled shadows,
a black llama to be cut and read,
a helpless wailing wordish terror
like the fool in Ryan’s Daughter.
I’m not sure that such an oblique reference enhances the drive of the grotesque drama, which is powerful enough in its own right. By contrast, where Dooley gives more space to his images, keeps them in line with what he is describing, the effective is superb. In Piscator, for instance, the images are allowed to breathe, to resonate, instead of being suffocated. Here he describes being a ‘master puppeteer for trout.’ The relative feebleness of the fisherman is conveyed with humour and self-deprecation:
Yesterday, they took me for a tree,
a fence post, a curious heifer
come to inspect the talk of water birds.
The frivolity changes, however, as the battle between a larger fish becomes serious:
How he seemed to laugh,
and stop,
and thrash his head like one in chains,
and beat his head on weir stone
for an answer to this thing…
A super poem. There are many others in this fascinating collection. River, at Dusk, for instance: ‘The grass is growing over my feet now. Hatches of fly parade / like tall ships, / trout slash at them under the sally trees; an otter pulls himself / up the bank.’ And For Ash Tree dying on Roadside, a Song in which he takes the role of the tree and its many abuses in complete contrast to the happy days where:
At night I danced alone
and dreamed of being water.
I filled my pockets in hot
breezes, ran deep my roots
for the hidden springs.
Michael Dooley has brought together a powerful set of poems which, although occasionally overladen with dense imagery, is thoroughly enjoyable to read. I look forward to his next collection.
Malcolm Carson has had five collections published by Shoestring Press, the last of which is Winging It (2025). www.poetrypf.co.uk/malcolmcarsonspage
*****
The Invisible Man’s Tailor by Patrick Meeds $18.95 Nine Mile Press ISBN 9798992546200 Reviewed by Neil Elder
Have you ever considered the significance of your appendix? Famously an irrelevant part of the human anatomy but, as Patrick Meeds points out in his debut collection The Invisible Man’s Tailor
We are all born with an appendix
whose only purpose is to rupture
and kill us.
An arresting (and terrifying) thought that comes at the end of the poem ‘The First Line of My Obituary’, a poem that captures much of the atmosphere Meeds creates and sustains in this book. Right from the off, the world is a challenging environment, in this same poem the speaker says that having been born
you spend the rest of your life feeling like
you’re falling down a flight of stairs
in slow motion
In both of those snippets from this poem we can admire Meeds’ understanding of how a line break can deliver a punch. Many of the poems in the collection are in the form of a single stanza, and so the use of enjambment and the line-break perhaps becomes of greater importance than in work relying on larger structural devices. The impact is also to give a sense of zip to the rush of thought that comes at the reader in these pieces; a tumble of associated images and ideas that spark off each other.
Some of the associated thoughts will make absolute sense to a reader – the logic is clear, but in other moments we are thrown and disconcerted, but that’s surely the point; life is not neat and tidy, it is a rush of a thousand thoughts per second and somehow we are expected to make sense of it all. In the poem ‘Science Tells Us’ Meeds demonstrates that the empirical world of science will only get you so far;
The earth isn’t as bright
as it once was. But you
didn’t need science
to tell you that , now did you.
The poem moves across several ideas –
One of the things required
for a bruise is blood. Another is
to have it in you to take a punch.
After all the night is a muscle that needs
exercise just like any other.
The cure for sleepwalking is
to never sleep. To stop walking.
The poems in this work move between a tender longing for the world and celebration of its wonder, as in the poem ‘Krakatoa, My Love (“Just stand perfectly still, and flowers will grow / all around you”) to a horror at where we find ourselves, like in ‘Introducing Tiangong – 1’s Demise’. The poem’s title references the first Chinese space station that lost control and broke up in an uncontrolled re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere;
There is no cure for cancer,
there is no cure for gravity. The internet is filled
with conspiracies
As a whole, the collection absolutely chimes with our age, to borrow from Radiohead, “this is a low flying panic attack”. A sense of alienation permeates the collection, whether it be from other people or from the way technology is moving. In ‘These Are No Customs I’ve Ever Heard Of’, Meeds reflects on how his first car
didn’t even have power steering
much less air conditioning.
Such a struggle just to round a bend.
I welcomed the flames that finally claimed it.
Now I’m ready. Ashes to ashes and so on.
Here again, Meeds gets from one point to another with dazzling dexterity. Furthermore, these lines catch the way bathos is used in the poems, often deriving from the apparently casual tone the speaker adopts. We cannot know if it is the same speaker for each poem, but certainly there is a consistency, and invariably a first-person direct address that gets inside the reader’s mind.
I need to stress though, that in amongst the 21st Century paranoia is a huge amount of humour and some wonderfully honed images. Try this, from ‘This Is Why I Don’t Drink’;
Mother kept a cigarette burning
in every room of the house.
Father had one lit before his feet
hit the floor in the morning.
or this –
I need to learn some new
swear words. All the ones I know
now sound like someone trying
to slam a door quietly
I stumbled on the poetry of Patrick Meeds a couple of years ago. Immediately I was hooked; the poems are so fresh, so exciting and playful. To begin a Meeds poem is an adventure, all you know for certain is that this ride could go anywhere. He is widely (very widley) published in American journals and magazines, and I was hoping that there would one day be a collection – somewhere I could easily find his cocktail of joy, surrealism and fearful provocation, and now we have it with The Invisible Man’s Tailor. The book will reward you, and I shall leave Meeds to say it best in his poem ‘This Is How We Do It’ –
So, prepare yourself.
Try not to think in terms of good
or bad. Just what is necessary.
You will need to get used to
the night turning into two
cold hands and the moon
looking right back at you.
But I promise you. Nothing
will make you happier.
Neil Elder has won the Cinnamon Press debut collection prize with The Space Between Us, as well as their pamphlet prize with Codes of Conduct which was also shortlisted for a Saboteur Award. His latest work is Like This, available from 4 Word Press. He occasionally writes at https://neilelderpoetry.wordpress.com/ His podcast Waterskiing On poetry is available on the usual platforms.
*****
leaves borrowed from human flesh by Abigail Ardelle Zammit $18.00. Etruscan Press. ISBN: 9798988198574. Reviewed by J.S. Watts
This large (134 pages), American published collection is difficult to pin down, or at least I found it so. With its lyricism and musicality, its extended silences, the manipulation of classical texts and the use of postmodern experimentation with form, it crosses lines, especially those of tradition and experimentation. Much of it is very beautiful, some of it is raw and violent, a lot of it is not especially accessible. But that, I assume, is the intention. Its strength lies in the resonance and emotion its skillfully crafted words generate, the open spaces created by the redaction of existing texts and the interplay of the two, the echoes and multiple interpretations created and the transformations they evoke. The poems are constantly transforming, not wanting to be pinned down.
The book is divided into four sections: Her Ears Flapping Gravely to the Beat of Human Voices, Her Body Was a Place She Called Home, Each Leaf Bears its Own Red Map and Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh. Whilst there are thematic connections between the poems of specific sections, the threads that flow across and through the collection as a whole struck me as the loudest: life, death, the body and, of course, transformation.
Her Ears Flapping Gravely to the Beat of Human Voices speaks lyrically about death: the light that flows from the dark, the body absorbed by earth, vegetation and water, and the contrasts and contradictions evoked as life and death merge.
In the first poem of the section, Death By Water, there is: ‘ dawn, having tinged a rusty vine,/ bearing a crucifix of light.’ In the second poem, My ears – antlers carved from light, a dead Roman woman is buried in the dark of the soil. As her body closes in on itself, she chooses to find light in the dark:
Let no man visit me in the afterlife…
If life has dealt me its scorpion blade,
only death can leave me light.
Then, as the poetry shifts geographical location, come poems dealing with death via the mythic life of indigenous peoples.
From Ways To Die:
His soul trickles back to the water pool –
light his body, lightened by death.
Ancestral spirits are waiting
or the death of the heart of a forest in A Killing, Corazon de Medera:
he said never sever the trunk
so we chopped it down
tree had traces of mud
salt-soul from the Pacific
In the next poem, Transplanting a Landscape, the songline of the peoples:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxis written in the loam,
in bole and bark, in the space they
give each other as they breathe –
And so it goes on through the remaining poems of the section: the body is the land, its water and its roots, while the land forms a living body. Until, in the final poem of the section, Ode to a pound of flesh, we are confronted by the ‘Mad moon’ and its pull on the human body, or maybe it is a way of viewing the human body itself: ‘that piece of flesh they took from me to save me from myself’.
This sense of transformation continues into Her Body Was a Place She Called Home. Bodies transform into rivers and reflected water, poems are translated into different forms, text leaps from the page in highlighted words buried amongst the stanzas, poems become circular, space intervenes amongst the text creating almost blank pages across which five or six words are scattered.
In Each Leaf Bears its Own Red Map lyrical images of trees and landscapes give way to experimental revisitations of a single poem, Variations on Hata Kamac. First it is a lyrical poem of fairly traditional construction. By the next page it is faint, struck-through text, the ghost of a poem from which six highlighted words stand out. On the next page it is solid, black, redacted lines from which only four words are visible. The next page displays another faint, struck-through version of the poem displaying a different five words. The page after is blank, white open space across which five words, or syllables making words, are displayed. The page after that is similar, but contains only four words and the final page of the poem is a right-aligned poem of brief four line stanzas.
Subsequent poems alternate traditional forms with space, blank pages and sideways, landscape aligned poems. The collection has many pages because it contains a vast amount of silence as well as words. And yes, I acknowledge that describing experimental poems in simplistic, structural terms does not do the poetry justice, but my aim is to provide the reader with some idea, however rough and ready, of the dimensions and transformations within this book.
Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh focuses on the myth of Daphne, using assorted myths from different translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to reflect the transformation of nymph into tree. Zammit creates poetry from black, redacted erasures of The Metamorphoses, making the black spaces as much a part of the poetry as the words they frame. The section then evolves to contain more traditionally formatted poems, also apparently constructed from erasures, but without visible redactions. Finally, the pages revert to white space surrounding a few extracted words.
It is impossible to recreate the visual transmutations of the poems in this review. The words on their own, without their surrounding silences and darkness, will have to suffice. These words emerge from one translation of Ovid:
the past, the present, the future
All
hers
words unfinished;
follow close
some transformation,
her heart still beating under the new bark.
These from another, more modern translation of Ovid:
Change form sister –
tear against fate –
disturb the blossom of blood –
stay like roots within the ground,
climb slowly from below and gradually cover all.
leaves borrowed from human flesh is a collection that is constantly shifting: in form, in meaning, in geographical location. It is a work immersed in transformation – its own and that of the haunting worlds it creates and inhabits.
J.S. Watts is a poet and novelist. Her poetry, short stories and non-fiction appear in diverse publications in Britain and abroad and have been broadcast on BBC and independent radio. Her published books include: Cats and Other Myths, Songs of Steelyard Sue, Years Ago You Coloured Me, The Submerged Sea, Underword (poetry) and A Darker Moon, Witchlight, Old Light and Elderlight (novels). For more information, see her website https://www.jswatts.co.uk/
*****
Fabrics, Fancies & Fens by Gerald Killingworth. £9.99. Tears in the Fence. ISBN: 9781900020145. Reviewed by Sam Milne
Gerald Killingworth tells us in a heading to his pamphlet that ‘my starting point in these poems was the texture and feel of a diverse set of objects. From this sense of fabric, I allowed my imagination to wander as it wished.’ In this objective he entirely succeeds. Here we have a series in which the sensorium is gracefully and eloquently enacted in finely crafted poems. The aesthetic owes something to Imagism and Objectivism which, in Eleanor Berry’s words, ‘presents concrete objects not in order to convey abstract ideas but for the sake of their sensuous qualities and haecceity’, the act of capturing the interior life of an object (what Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘inscape’) in the process of poetic composition (what Hopkins called ‘instress’). This, I believe, is what Killingworth means when he talks about ‘essence’ in his poem ‘Not to be Found in any Rainbow’. The poems come at the end of a lengthy and noble tradition which also includes the work of the French poet, Francis Ponge, whose aesthetic was based on the principle that all objects ‘yearn to express themselves, and they mutely await the coming of the word so that they may reveal the hidden depths of their being’ (in Richard Stamelman’s words). The most famous of Ponge’s volumes is Le Savon (Soap) which considers different aspects of the life of a bar of soap. This, to mind, is obsessive and constricting, but luckily Killingworth avoids this approach, dealing rather with the multiplicity and beauty of the world as well as its minutiae.
The overall effect is a feeling of rhymical. exhilarating synesthesia. Although he does dwell forensically on objects at times, more often than not he opens out his vision to panoramically study the world, especially the landscape of his beloved Fens. To this end he employs a considerable diversity of styles, from the very short lyric, in the short poem ‘pattern’ for example, to the longer narrative type of poem in ‘Flag Fen’, always keeping in focus the American Objectivist Louis Zukofsky’s injunction to ‘think with things as they exist’, at the same time making room for thought and history to permeate the poems. This critique in itself is too abstract, however. The poems do all the work, needing no conceptual framework, often celebrating the strangeness of everyday objects. Here are clouds, for instance:
A few stately matriarchs
chests puffed out
unstoppable, purposeful
shepherded the juveniles,
tails trailing behind,
toward some Eastern Neverland.
I thought of galleons
argosies bursting with dreams of white gold
bent on depredation,
or elephants in the Serengeti
trunk-to-tail
following the call of distant water.
This is not straightforward daydreaming, a mere instance of pareidolia, but a significant imaginative moment grounded in reality. The craft, the realization, the rhythm, all work together to create a poem, something which is not easily achievable. It requires strong creative imagination, and concentrated attention. Such precise, exact attentiveness can be also be seen in his detailed knowledge of etymology. My favourite example comes from the poem ‘In The Early Morning Rain’ where he fuses the medieval era and our own in a close collocation:
bucket after chill bucket
sloshed across the shitten byre floor
or the bloodied tarmac after another hit-and-run.
‘Shitten’ is obsolete but sits strikingly next to ‘byre’ whose Old English equivalent is ‘shippen’. The semantic effect establishes a connection across the ages, celebrating traditions which are forgotten, ‘echoes across the centuries’ as he calls it in ‘The Bog Oaks’. The effect is best seen poems like ‘The Herculaneum Scrolls’ and ‘An Etruscan Tomb Outside Orvieto’ where tributes are paid to archaeology’s discoveries, uncovering history’s treasures and relics.
There are also some fine war poems in the pamphlet (‘Sambridges’ and ‘Jack’s Drum’ for example; colourful epiphanies (‘the gold brocades of Autumn, / sparrow’s, eagles’, thrushes’ wings’, ‘polygons of fields…chequered with promise’, ‘the orchard scabby-lichened’); moving epitaphs and elegies (see especially ‘Her Last Snow’); family memories (see ‘Charlie’s Chair’ and ‘I Have Four Children!’); time’s detrition (‘verdigris on an Etruscan bronze’); and ancient English customs (see ‘Poundbury Wassail’ and ‘Straw Bear’ for example). In each poem, as he says in ‘That Moment…’
Each function finds it own space,
its own rhythm, season.
The inner vision clears –
such strangeness beckons.
The poet is ‘a stranger facing down shadows’, but those shadows, those shades, do not defeat him. ‘Scenting the air’, he says, ‘I almost skip’ (in Nearly There’), ‘We need that reawakening, the first brief shoot, / our Primavera’ (in ‘Solstice Night, The Earth House’).
I recommend this pamphlet highly, and look forward to reading more of Gerald Killingworth’s poems.
Sam Milne was born in Aberdeen in 1953. He is a retired English teacher living in Surrey. He has published poems, essays, reviews and plays in many magazines over the years, mainly in Scots. He has just written a play on the last years of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
*****
London Pastoral by Maggie Wadey. £12.50. Paekakariki Press. ISBN: 9781908133625. reviewed by Rowena Sommerville
London Pastoral is a debut collection by Maggie Wadey, featuring well-observed and thoughtful poems, largely nature and environmentally focussed, written over some years. The publisher is Paekakariki Press – I googled the word to discover that ‘Paekakariki’ is a town in New Zealand whose name translates from a Maori language as meaning ‘parakeet perch’, so I assume this is a deliberate and meaningful choice of publisher on the writer’s part, given that the fairly recent arrival of parakeets to London and SE England is evidence of climate change, to be celebrated or deplored as you may see fit.
The opening poem ‘Fig Tree’ and the closing poem ‘The New Garden’ both reference London’s Victoria Park, seen across a span of twenty years:
Victoria Park back then was semi-wild terrain,
at times uncomfortably deserted,
with stolen bikes spiking the black canal
and then:
(….the walled garden….)
acknowledges new limitations:
drought, cost, its own lost innocence.
Yet still it stands, as every garden must,
As a metaphor for Paradise.
These poems also commemorate the still-unsolved 2003 murder of a young woman in the park, and I thought the poems captured very well that mix of green relaxation alongside faint unease that London parks, in particular, can present.
I thought that Wadey’s more tightly edited poems contained some of her best writing, as in ‘Pastoral’:
xxxAnd trees stand silent witness,
xxxxxthe shiver through their lower branches
suggestive of a breeze that’s nowhere else
apparent, while all above, light lingers
xxxxxin their leafless, upper reaches.
And in ‘Swift, Summer, 2023’:
The speed of things, the fall of light
the shrieking bird, its rapturous spitfire flight
However, the repetitions of format and of the word ‘like’ actually do work well in ‘Like Swallows’, a declaratory poem which, we are told, was read out at a Westminster Square Extinction Rebellion demonstration:
xxxxxThey came like swallows, the young ones,
xxxout of the traces and into the race,
torn as they were between fight or flight,
xxxxxhigh-hearted even in this damaged place
xxxxxthat we, like careless thugs, have gifted them.
I like the way she plays with rhyme and rhythm – this is a promising debut, illustrated by the writer, and I look forward to reading more by Maggie Wadey in the future.
Rowena Sommerville is a writer and singer, and lives on top of a cliff looking out to sea in beautiful North Yorkshire. She has worked in the arts for all her life, sometimes successfully. She originally wrote and illustrated books for children, is widely published in poetry magazines, and her first adult collection – ‘Melusine’ – was published by Mudfog Poetry Press in 2021. She won a Hedgehog Press Stickleback leaflet competition in 2023 and was the Visual Artist in Residence for The High Window in 2022.
*****
Yannis Ritsos Exercises 1950-1960 trans. Spring Ulmer. Ugly Ducking Press £15.00 ISBN 9781946604422. Reviewed by Ian Pople
Yannis Ritsos was one of Greece’s great 20th century poets and ranked alongside others such as Odysseus Elytis and George Seferis, who both won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Ritsos was actually nominated for the Noble on a number of occasions and Neruda is quoted as saying that Ritsos was more deserving of the Noble that he was. Ritsos was considered as the ‘great poet of the Left’ in Greek poetry; he was an active member of the Greek communist party and was imprisoned under the Metaxas dictatorship of the pre- and war years, and again under the Junta in the fifties and sixties. Indeed, Ritsos composed poetry dedicated to and lamenting the work and death of the resistance leader, Aris Velouchiotis, at the end of the second world war.
After this period, Ritsos’ work is seen as having become both more lyrical and also more attuned to the surrealism, a strand of which runs through a lot of Greek poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first century. That surrealism is present in the work of Seferis but it is present, also, in the work of Kiki Dimoula who died last year. In Ritsos, the entanglement of the lyrical and the surreal possibly creates a sense of what we might describe as a kind of ‘magical realism.’
This is the whole of the poem called ‘Two.’
When you shook hands, you didn’t hear
the air nestling down between our palms.
It was a memory being made.
It was the separation before the union. You didn’t hear it.
You were whole; alive in your complete nakedness,
and proudly unprotected, like a forest on fire.
The imagination and realization here of a small moment with much larger resonances is relatively typical of this lovely volume. And that moment is neatly captured in Spring Ulmer’s quiet, unobtrusive translation. Many of the poems in Exercises 1950-1960 are addressed to a ‘you’ whom Ritsos adroitly evokes. Here, that ‘you’ feels not only immediate in the action of shaking the hands but also part of that separation before the union, as Ritsos puts it. In that moment, Ritsos seems to feel a wonderful empathy with the Other who is both whole and alive in their nakedness. As Ulmer notes in his introduction, it seems incredible that these poems written after Ritsos’ detention and torture during the war and after, are not full of bitterness but full of amazement. And it this poem, as with so many of the others, filled with that kind of intimate empathy. And Ulmer quotes Edmund Keeley and Karen Emmerich, who translated Ritsos’ Diaries of Exile as suggesting ‘that Ritsos’ “I” withered during detention, his pronouns grew ever more collective’. And Ulmer, himself, comments that ‘Ritsos – no longer consumed solely with his own survival – wrestles, primarily, with what to say about the human condition.’
In ‘A Convincing Ladder,’ Ritsos conjures ‘he’ who ‘started from the lwo country, where the morning sun doesn’t pound, / and arrived, nearly on his own, on the mountain, almost at its peak. / However, he preserved in his eyes, in his mouth, in his face / the shadow of the ladder he had climbed, / you could even say his body was the ladder.
The poem moves from this beautiful evocation of a kind of ‘saviour figure’ towards a denouement which is both more particularized but equally as lyrical and, in its own way, equally open; ‘and the electrician rose bare-armed / to put a new bulb there above the milk-store, / and then our neighborhood was lit by a strong, sweet light.
As we have seen from ‘Two,’ Ritsos is extraordinarily skilled at moving between the large and resonant and the particular and resonant. It is not simply the sense of the human ascending at the start of the poem and its ending. It is the movement from that ‘depersonalised’ ‘he’ at the beginning of the poem through to that sense of the artisan, even the functionary at the end of the poem who responds to the needs of the community. And all of this done in this deeply skilled but wonderfully unobtrusive manner.
In a rather larger and more rhetorical manner, Ritsos wrote a ‘Last Will and Testament.’
He said: I believe in poetry, in love, in death,
Which is precisely why I believe in immortality. I write verse,
I write the world; I exist; the world exists.
A river flows from the tip of my little finger,
the sky is even times blue. The purity
is once again the prime truth, my last will.
‘Last Will and Testament’ is not part of the volume under review and suggests a poet who knew his status, and why would he not? Ritsos’ poems were set to music by the great Theodorakis and widely learned and sung by the Greek left. In declaring here, that he writes the world in which both he and the world exists, Ritsos might well be making a rather large claim but as Exercises 1950-1960 attests, he was supremely gifted at making the connection between the two. Exercises 1050-1960 would be one of my books of 2025, if I had such a list. It is, in that ghastly cliché, definitely a book to which I will return. It is one of those books which, born out of great suffering of its author, is infinitely consoling.
Ian Pople‘s Spillway: New and Selected Poems is published by Carcanet. His Substack is: https://ifanything95.substack.com/
The High Window 
I’m very glad to hear more about Lynette Roberts and am still reading. Good to see you in Oxford, David!
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