*****
August Kleinzahler: A History of Western Music • Maggie Brookes-Butt: Wish: New and Selected Poems • Patrick Wright: Exit Strategy • David Nash: No Man’s Land • Ross Thompson: The Slipping Forecast • Maggie Harris: I Sing to the Greenhearts • Ken Evans: A Full-On Basso Profundo • Mark Wynne: Self-portrait in Blue Jacket • Peter J Donnelly Bloom and Grow • Mark Mansfield: Tales From The Wingèd Chariot Inn • Timothy Dodd: Orbits 52
*****
August Kleinzahler A History of Western Music, Carcanet £12.95 ISBN 9781800174931. Reviewed by Ian Pople
The back cover blurb for this Carcanet collection from August Kleinzahler claims that ‘Kleinzahler captures the essence of the West’s greatest music.’ This is a very big claim indeed and, to some extent, slightly misses the point, but more of that below. The blurb again suggesting that this is ‘a career-spanning selection of poems,’ the book is organized in a somewhat self-consciously random way. By ‘random,’ I mean that each poem is entitled ‘Chapter’ and yet the chapters are not organized linearly, i.e., the first poem is ‘Chapter 63 (Whitney Houston), the second poem, however, is ‘Chapter 88 (Zipoli and the Paraguay Reductions). And the ‘chapter’s that follow are equally ‘randomly’ numbered.
That claim, mentioned above, about ‘capturing the essence’ of the music is rather undermined in the way that the poems are often biographical in nature. Towards the end of the book, ‘Chapter 81 (Saranac Lake)’ begins ‘Beautiful Béla, / birdlike, frail and wan, and those unforgettably luminous blue eyes / so often remarked upon, by his students especially, young Solti, Földes, others / the first thing most noticed about him, / now wrapped against the chill in his dark cloak, /in the cottage outside his tiny cabin in Saranac Lake, spartan as a peasant cottage.’ The presentation is direct and sinuous. Kleinzahler’s style is sometimes these long sentences often without a main verb so that they accumulate, paratactically. And here, the sentence moves from describing Bartok himself, to his students, to the weather, finishing with a comment on Bartok’s cottage.
Thus, Kleinzahler in this volume as elsewhere in his writing is often a descriptive rather than a lyric poet. His poetry accumulates and works material in ways that has often been surreal and playful as the title of his Selected Poems, Sleeping it off in Rapid City might suggest. That playfulness can sometimes have a rather relentless, self-conscious side to it; a little Kleinzahler can go a very long way. And, over the years, there has been a lot of Kleinzahler to go that long way. This new volume, which the term ‘career-spanning’ implies is usefully focused, the descriptions precise and empathetic in ways which Kleinzahler’s poetry has sometimes eschewed.
The music engaged with in this generous volume ranges from the Whitney Houston and Bartok mentioned above through Gamelan, to Thelonius Monk, to a poem which links Mahler, in particular the Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th symphony, with Frank Sinatra. The playful surrealism of elsewhere in Kleinzahler’s work is illustrated in this book with the poem ‘Chapter 44 (Bebop)’ which begins
YAHTZEE YAHTZEE YAHTZEE
At Rapunzel’s Fungible Ball
The most glittery jittery gala of all
The Vedettes & Babettes
Scarfed down crêpes suzettes
Orange butter spray-painting the walls
As mentioned, this kind of word intoxication can be a hallmark of Kleinzahler’s writing and he is certainly clever at it and fluent with it. The point might be made, however, that here the onomatopoetic nature of the writing follows quite naturally from the music itself. Dizzy Gillespie, one of bebop’s great founders and practitioners, claimed that the audience itself coined the term after hearing him scat along to a tune. So Kleinzahler’s poem is an extended engagement with the nature of the music.
Elsewhere, Kleinzahler can be more subdued. His ‘Chapter 18 (Bill Evans)’ is a lovely meditation on the ways Evans’ beautiful playing can appear to respond to elements of the natural world. Kleinzahler describes Evans’ version of ‘My Foolish Heart,’ ‘playing on his stereo now, here / in the Haight, thirty years later, again / and again / through the dying afternoon / the cat, the palm tree swathed in trumpet / vine, tufts / of cloud floating past the radio tower / on the hill’. In a poem like this, Kleinzahler shows a meditative side couched in an effortless precision.
In poems like this, it is Kleinzahler’s clear empathy with others that comes through. His ‘Chapter 33 (“Coming on the Hudson”: Weehawken) is a description of the last days of Thelonius Monk. This poem too shows a deep appreciation for that profound, eccentric master of the jazz piano. This begins, ‘He seldom spoke, even when well, and when he did it was misterioso, brief, / a gnomic shorthand, often only a grunt, / but his musicians got it, Nellie, Boo Hoo, and Sphere III too.’ Of course, the objection might be made that this is simply biography that doesn’t reach the edge of the page. But it is Kleinzahler’s ‘eye’ that brings the facts to life. And that use of ‘misterioso’ that slips the title of one of Monk’s tunes into the line. And then the naming of the family also brings us to Nellie, Monk’s wife who inspired, ‘Crepuscule with Nellie,’ one of the many of his tunes that became standards.
The poem then goes on to detail Monk’s final days living with ‘Nica,’ Baroness Kathleen Annie Pannonica ‘Nica’ de Koenigswarter (née Rothschild), the British born ‘jazz baroness, who supported many of the jazz musicians of that generation, and in whose flat Charlie Parker also died. The poem goes on to detail Monk’s observations, ‘Tugs push garbage scows south to the harbor’s mouth and open sea. / He watches the river all the day long. That’s what he does: / what the wind and light make of the water, for seasons on end,’ As to the playing, ‘A Steinway, marooned, in a corner of the living room.’
To say as that back cover blurb does, that Kleinzahler’s A History of Western Music ‘captures the essence of the West’s greatest music,’ is not, perhaps, entirely correct. What Kleinzahler does is to capture that sense of a life in music and of music in a life. This Kleinzahler does with a deft and piercing precision. This is a rich and rewarding book. If the book really is a compilation of Kleinzahler’s ‘music’ poems then it does the reader a great service.
Ian Pople‘s Spillway: New and Selected Poems is published by Carcanet.
*****
Wish: New and Selected Poems by Maggie Brookes-Butt. £14.99. Greenwich Exchange. ISBN: 978-1-910996-85-0. Reviewed by Ross Cogan
If you don’t recognise the name ‘Maggie Brookes-Butt’, that doesn’t necessarily mean you haven’t read her work. It could be that you’ve come across one of the six collections she published as ‘Maggie Butt’. Alternatively, if you enjoy historical fiction, you might have read Acts of Love and War or The Prisoner’s Wife, her bestselling novels, which were published by Penguin under the name ‘Maggie Brookes’. It’s interesting, then, that Wish, her ‘New and Selected’, is the first work on which both names appear. Could this be significant? Perhaps, in some way, she wants to ‘claim’ these poems more than her others? Perhaps, if she could only save one work for posterity, it would be this?
It would hardly be surprising – ‘new-and-selecteds’ are like that. Unlike a ‘collected’, which has that aura of end-of-career stocktaking, a ‘selected’ gathers up what the author considers the best of their work and spices it with twenty or thirty new poems. To the general reader they’re saying ‘here, get my best side’; to the critic ‘judge for yourself how far I’ve come’.
For Maggie Brookes-Butt, the journey starts with 2007’s Lipstick. What you notice immediately is the former journalist and TV producer’s eye for the telling detail and the striking phrase. The title poem, for example, references photographer Jenny Matthews’ observation that, in war zones, women often favour bright red shades of lipstick – an act of resistance, says Brookes-Butt: ‘this ruby’s the resilience of girls / who tango in the pale-lipped face of death.’ But, of course, bright red is not just the colour of life and love: ‘the badge of beating hearts’ but also of violent death – an ambiguity that lends the poem a chilling power.
As this suggests, one of Brookes-Butt’s characteristic themes – the exploration of women’s lives and strengths through the everyday – is already very much in evidence. I loved ‘Nylon Sheets’, for example – a hymn to those 70s excrescences, and particularly its rousing finale:
How did our mothers spend that newly minted time
which made it worth the sweaty, suffocating sleep
the slippery touch, the catching on rough heels
a generation rising charged with static?
Another property one associates with a Brookes-Butt poem is ‘joy’ – the quality that led Alison Brackenbury to describe her work as ‘a poetry of miracles, unfailingly fresh and exuberant, written with clear-eyed, exemplary warmth’. There is much love here – between mother and daughter in: ‘Gap Year’, and father and daughter in: ‘Fathering’, which explores how the experience enriches both parties: ‘You use my eyes to note the detail of the world / your calmness soothes my path like honey.’ Most of all there is the power of love to shape and renew, as in: ‘Love Seeps In’, where: ‘Love seeps in and fills me up / as water overruns a sinking ship / … thundering up staircases / claiming everything.’
Despite this, though, I felt in these early poems that the author’s distinctive voice hadn’t yet fully formed. Specifically, she seemed sometimes to be playing with a style of wry humour that didn’t entirely suit her. ‘On My 85th Birthday’, for example, is fundamentally a version of that awful Jenny Joseph poem – you know the one, it was everywhere in the 2000s, on novelty tea towels and the like. Since I loathe that poem, I couldn’t enjoy this take on it. But then, Joseph’s poem was voted Britain’s favourite, so I guess I’m in a minority.
We’re offered shorter selections from Brookes-Butt’s next three books, petite (2011), Ally Pally Prison Camp (2011) and Sancti Clandestini – Undercover Saints (2012). It’s notable that these make greater use of formal verse schemes – perhaps most interestingly in ‘The Shape of It’, and most effectively in two wonderfully assured sonnets: ‘What Would I Give’ and ‘Pigalle’. The latter describes the horrors of a rundown area of Paris in which her daughter plans to live before concluding:
and she will climb five flights of champagne night
where rooftops of Montmartre after dark
gleam with reflected gold and ruby light,
throw wide the shutters, sip the air’s rich wine,
intoxicated, think, ‘All this is mine.’
Ally Pally Prison Camp, of which, sadly, we get only four poems, explore the lives of the 3,000 civilians of German origin interned during World War 1 in a prison camp at Alexandra Palace – a largely forgotten episode in our wartime history. These excellent poems perhaps mark a greater willingness on Brookes-Butt’s behalf to explore history and project herself into other minds – a path that surely led to The Prisoner’s Wife. Undercover Saints – a sequence celebrating the lives of imaginary saints, including the patron saints of liars, looters, tattooists, compulsive hoarders and eco-warriors – is a brilliant idea, confidently pulled off, and I’d have liked more than the three poems we’re given. These lines from ‘The Patron Saint of Ugly Towns’ particularly struck me:
Out in fields the sunflowers bow their heavy
heads like congregations at a funeral,
listening to their doom, counting the hours.
There are more generous selections from the next two collections, Degrees of Twilight (2015) and everlove (2021). Perhaps inevitably the tone of these later poems becomes more reflective and elegiac, as in ‘Time Travellers’ where: ‘time zig-zags like a running man avoiding bullets’ and the repeated lines reflect the mind’s movement, back and forth, as it recalls the past. Or in ‘Behind Me’, in which the author imagines the generations of hardworking women – ‘my grandmothers and all / my great grandmothers / up before dawn, shawls / pulled around their shoulders, / off to mills and factories’.
There’s also a willingness in these books to pare back the line, to let a simple, traditional form carry a simple, but profound message. ‘Wish’, for example, builds triumphantly through a series of what could so easily have been trite observations, towards its translucent conclusion “let there ever be you / let there ever be love”. Not everyone will like this, but it’s as perfect as a certain type of poem gets – a little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which the history of love is written.
Finally, then, to Grand – 21 new poems, placed at the front of the collection. The name, and dedication to the author’s grandchildren, indicate themes of family, and the continuity of life and love. ‘Welcome to you: blood of my blood, heart of my heart, world of my world’ she writes to a new grandchild in the opening poem: ‘Welcome’, just one of many touching works expressing her love for them. This section is also notable for its concern with the environment. Often these converge, in poems where children give form to what we have to lose or are urged to make up for their elders’ deficiencies. ‘Infinite Variety’, for example, with its elegy for species that: ‘live largely in memory’ concludes:
And this is an oak tree, which is home
to 2,300 species. Wrap you arms around it.
There is only one of you. Do what you can.
These poems are wise, witty and moving. They view the world with clear eyes, selecting the telling detail and crafting it into the striking image. They celebrate women’s lives and strength without denigrating men. They showcase the poet’s skill in formal techniques, without being tyrannised by them. They are kind, clever, concerned. Most of all, though, they are joyful. They don’t order us to care for each other and nature; they remind us why we might want to. They are like the birds in ‘Dawn Chorus in Amherst’:
… reminding, insisting, in spite
of everything – there is joy in the world,
there is so much joy.
BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS
Ross Cogan has published three collections, including Bragr (Seren, 2018). He received a Gregory Award and has won the Exeter, Frogmore and other prizes, and come second in the Troubadour. His poetry has appeared in The Guardian, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, PN Review, New Welsh Review, Rialto and Stand.
*****
Patrick Wright Exit Strategy. Broken Sleep Books. £12.99. ISBN: 9781916938717. Reviewed by Ian Pople
Patrick Wright’s new book comes laden with encomia from some very seasoned judges, Helen Mort and Helen Ivory among them. For Mort, Wright’s book is ‘ambitious and brilliantly achieved.’ For Helen Ivory, ’this book is a triumph.’ For Mort, the poems, ‘create a tender liminal space where this is time – infinite time – for understanding the flawed, lovely, terrifying state of being human.’ And Helen Ivory comments that the book ‘calls upon philosophers, artists, God, angels and theoretical physicists to help to give shape to loss, to address the ineffable.’ That sense of the poems’ address of very large subjects is certainly present throughout the book and this is not a book which is short of ambition.
The address that accompanies that ambitious reach is, itself, very direct. The first person occurs in nearly all the poems and often the first word in each sentence is usually followed by verbs in the simple present or past tenses. These are tenses we use in English to establish facts. So, even where Wright is depicting emotion, and there is a lot of that in this book, the emotion depicted is often raw, hard-edged and certain.
Wright’s great strength is the way in which that emotion is mediated through the use of ekphrasis. In response to Idris Khan’s intense black and white photographs of what sometimes appears to be chalk on blackboard, Wright begins his poem ‘Beginning or End After Idris Khan,’ with the line, ‘I dreamt of a butterfly the size of a dinner plate.’ There are a number of ways of interpreting the ‘I’ that is the subject of the verb ‘dreamt’ and that begins the poem. On the one hand, we might see that ‘I’ as ‘simply’ the writer, Patrick Wright. Here, then, the ‘I’ is the authorizing consciousness of the poem. Alternatively, we might see the ‘I’ as that of an adopted persona. And a range of personas become available: firstly, the artwork itself might be voiced, might become a narrator in the text. Secondly, the ‘I’ might be Idris Khan. In this case, it might be that the authorizing consciousness of the poem seeks to voice what it perceives to be a generative function in the artist. Here, that ‘I’ would be Khan ‘[dreaming] of a butterfly the size of a dinner plate.’ In this case, the reader might see Wright as suggesting some of Khan’s inspiration for the artwork. A third possibility is that one of Khan’s art works is the ‘I’ subject of the verb. Khan’s work. ‘Beginning at the End’ was the title of Khan’s solo show in Dubai in 2018. And an online report of that show in the Gulf Times reproduces a photograph which shows irradiating lines which create a shape which might or might not be interpreted as a giant butterfly. A fourth, slightly more abstruse notion is that the ‘I’ is simply a placeholder, that might be replaced by X, or Y, or Z This is a placeholder that connects the verbs of which it is the subject
Wright’s considerable technical adroitness is to float himself amid those particular versions of the ‘I.’ In that way, the identity of the ‘I’ is deferred, and almost deferred towards the reader. There are also poems in Exit Strategy which do not refer to an artist. It is in these poems that the ‘I’ seems to be, more certainly, the voice of the writer, Patrick Wright. And much is made in the encomia in the front matter of the book, of the fact that Exit Strategy was born out of grief at the loss of a partner. The poem ‘Exist Strategy’ has an epigraph that reads, ‘After the last photograph she took from her hospital bed.’ The poem begins, ‘I stab a knife in the kitchen’s surface – an existential protest. Or an artist’s statement?’ // I tried to fight and the assailant was invisible.’ The sense that the ‘I’ here is much more directly the writer, is, perhaps, because of the context of these lines. The ‘she’ in the epigraph can be seen as a person named in the writer’s ambit, with the added emotional pull of the words ‘the last photograph she took from her hospital bed.’ The ‘fight’ aspect of the poem is carried through the lines. ‘I want to fight with Zeus. // I reckon if I pump my muscles up, I’ll go the distance. // I’d like to haymaker the door to be heard in Hades.’
That turning to and against the world of God and the Gods occurs throughout the book, where the imagery has real reach and extraordinary vitality. These are lines from the poem, ‘True belief belongs to the realm of real knowledge,’ ‘I believe in Orphic descents, & dreams are encrypted, & dreams are between here and the place we belong. // I agree with Bohm: that the Andromeda spiral could be curled inside one of our teardrops’ and the poem ends with the statement, ‘I believe that death means falling out of time, & living the same life over & over again.’ Thus, the book can flirt with a rhetoric that may make big demands on the reader; however, Wright never creates distance between the reader and the emotion depicted. The ekphrasis discussed above is where Wright’s visual world seems to dwell; the book’s grounding is in the image and its production. This book, Patrick Wright’s second full length collection, is immensely powerful and immensely ambitious; its ambition held in the way it maintains, with real deftness, both the centripetal and the centrifugal. It will be fascinating to see where Patrick Wright goes next.
Ian Pople‘s Spillway: New and Selected Poems is published by Carcanet.
*****
No Man’s Land by David Nash. €12.50 (paperback). Dedalus Press. ISBN 978-1-915629-21-0. Reviewed by Nick Cooke
In commenting on the decision to award this volume the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize for 2024, chair of the judging panel Nick Laird described it as a ‘book of return and renewal’, with author David Nash – a County-Cork-born poet who lives between Ireland and Chile and is the author of a 2022 pamphlet entitled The Islands of Chile – able to combine an ‘insider’s easy familiarity and an outsider’s fresh perspective’. In this Nash might be said, loosely speaking, to be following in the Wordsworthian tradition of returning to a familiar place and seeing it with eyes anew, although previous emotions are recollected not always in tranquillity but with an arch, often tongue-in-cheek wit that constantly questions assumptions and potential prejudices.
The lessons learned from experience can sometimes be life-saving, as exemplified by ‘Slievemore /An Sliabh Mór/The Big Mountain’, whose bilingual title (so to speak) highlights the cross-cultural basis of this poetic voyage, while the casual brutality handed out to foolish neophytes reflects Nature as a force less than fully akin to Wordworth’s view of it in ‘Tintern Abbey’:
Every summer, some mainlander
would mistake weather for climate
and scale it in a dry spell,
unready for the heavy hand of mist
that inevitably fell and swept
them off it like whatever was left
of the bread from the breakfast table.
The volume has much about the power of water, with ‘river(s)’ revealing more of the uncompassionate, indeed ruthlessly cold-hearted natural world, acting as it does like an efficient functionary:
Should any of us drown (our young, our best even) the river
must be considered to have done its duty.
Overall, one gets the sense that a major upshot of Nash’s wanderings, both geographical and philosophical, has been a reinforcement of his belief in our infinitesimally small place in the universe. However much we may seek to acquire some measure of control over nature through education and its boons – for instance the ability to frame rivers as metaphors or personifications of human traits – the stark reality is that ‘The first word is water, and the last word is water. What the / river says, goes.’ One can almost hear Dr Johnson adding, ‘And there’s an end on’t’.
I greatly admired the way in which many of these poems twist back on themselves, as if including the poet himself in an operation of self-scrutiny, as well as a more outward warning against any form of complacency when thinking about life, nature, politics, culture, and so forth. It’s no coincidence that the words ‘reverse’ and ‘reversal’ are used several times, or that the collection is shot through with gripping paradoxes and contradictions, as in these lines from another ‘water poem’, ‘Turlough’ – itself an oxymoron, since ‘tur’ means ‘dry’ and ‘lough’ ‘lake’:
the lake you see before you now is
the lake you don’t
inverted, the water table
with its legs in the air,
an underground overed,
a frown upside-downed.
In Nash’s vision, emotions are never simple. Love is shot through with suffering, and later we are reminded that, if loneliness and isolation dominate a life, the power of feelings does not always translate into a higher level of human connection, when Nash tells his sister’s children
I wish you never to hear your own heart
beat into the mattress, bed frame, beat across the floor,
advance through the house with the thirst of electricity,
making sing its starscape of nails,
and then slink back along those same branches of electricity,
back through beams and doorways, back across the floor,
come back empty-handed, the heartbeat returning to the father heart.
This is one of the collection’s most memorable passages, and perhaps the most haunting example of the frequent back-twists.
As Eliot put it, ‘Words strain, crack and sometimes break (…) will not stay still’, and in Nash’s book (in both senses of that phrase), the pervasive uncertainty extends to language, which often loses its own grip on intended communication, due to inherent ambivalence. This is amusingly pointed up in ‘Imaginary Farmer’, when the eponymous farmer tells the poet/speaker ‘You don’t know shit’, and it turns out he is referring to actual excrement rather than the more idiomatic meaning of the phrase (‘You wouldn’t know the dropping from the bird that drops it’ – which incidentally I took to be a deliberately bathetic allusion to Yeats’ ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’). Nash is ever-aware of linguistic slippage and blurring, as when he highlights how an utterance can change meaning, depending on the stress accorded to different elements –
…like those pre-sleep
alarm bells
that sometimes
ring: what might have
been, what might
have been, what
might have been.
(‘Snow Drop’, with a possible nod to Eliot’s ‘rose-garden’ passage in ‘Four Quartets’)
Similarly, punctuation and/or spelling can radically affect one’s understanding of a phrase. At the end of ‘Professional Earth’, Nature is suddenly seen as inextricably human in essence – ‘forget you’re nature’ – where we might of course expect ‘your’, with a completely different meaning.
On occasion Nash deploys his skill with words for humorous effect. For instance, in ‘Fás Aon Oiche’ (‘One Night’s Growth’), the use of the formal accusative relative pronoun amusingly exposes a lover’s infidelities:
I am monster-green by psychology
so I can’t help it if I didn’t take it well
when it dawned on me where you’d been
and whom, more to the point, you’d been in.
Nash’s verbal dexterity includes some delightful, chortle-raising similes (viz. ‘they detonate sperm like champagne / in the cup winners’ dressing room’), and an occasional tour-de-force rhyme, as at the end of ‘Slievemore’:
a scattering of Catholics at sea.
Not just any mountain. The.
Nonetheless, the playful undercurrent does not diminish the book’s serious purpose, and I’d agree with the back-cover blurb when it claims ‘at its heart No Man’s Land is …about loss – the loss of language, knowledge, nature and wilderness that affects all of us’. The final poem, ‘Why You Should Really Think About Rewilding’ opens by parodying a tour guide’s style – ‘We are standing / in what used to be / our forest’ – before outlining, with almost terrifying conciseness, the area’s decline through ‘some spailpin rot or / spore of fungus’ that developed into a fatal condition, leaving a ‘stump-scape / no man’s land’. That ‘stump-scape’ forms a nice counterpoint to the earlier, smoothly hyphen-free ‘starscape’, with the jarring stumpiness reinforced by the consonant cluster either side of the jagged hyphen.
Yet the conclusion, like the book itself, is less negative as might be thought, because in time – a lot of time, admittedly – the forest will regrow itself, as long as we humans, once we’ve set the rewilding ball in motion, stay out of its way: ‘…you needn’t lift a finger / it is its own device.’ Ultimately, we once again have to concede, and roll with, our own lack of real agency, trusting to the uncontrollability of nature and the wildness of germination:
What I’m saying is
take a chance on it.
The seed is reckless.
In conclusion I find I can do no better than quote Francis Spufford, who has described Nash’s debut full collection as ‘a lyric reckoning with the rural landscape of home, by a queer Irish poet returning quietly bereft to County Cork, and deploying a dizzying formal inventiveness to take in what was once familiar.’ I would only hazard a slight quibble with ‘quietly’, preferring ‘wryly’ in recognition of the witty undercurrent on display throughout.
Nick Cooke has had around fifty-five poems published, in a variety of outlets. His poem ‘Tanis’ won a Wax Poetry and Art first prize in 2016. Other publications include around thirty poetry reviews (of which several have been for The High Window), as well as five short stories. He has also written a number of novels, stage plays and film scripts. By day, he works as a language teacher and teacher-trainer at a Further Education College in West London.
*****
The Slipping Forecast by Ross Thompson. €12.50 Dedalus Press, ISBN: 9781915629357. Reviewed by Rona Fitzgerald
Ross Thompson is a poet and teacher from Bangor, Co. Down. His work has been widely featured in local and international magazines and anthologies, and he has contributed to television and radio. Most recently, he wrote and curated A Silent War, a collaborative audio project that has been adapted by Northern Ireland Screen into a series of archival short films.
His poetry debut Threading The Light was published by Dedalus Press in 2019. The Slipping Forecast, published in April 2025 is his second collection. The poems chart a journey from accident, through surgery to recovery. They also touch on loss, memory and the migration to our older selves.
The collection is organised in five section; Severance, Disappearance, Impermanence, Convalescence and Abundance. Thompson’s writing style is direct and inclusive. It’s a strong collection with a lot of resonance across themes.
In this collection, titles do a lot of work in guiding the reader into the context of the poems as well as engaging our brain. Of particular note is the title of the collection itself: The Slipping Forecast, which prepares our brain for storms, calms, geography and hints at something darker. The poem ranges over shipping forecast terms with a geographic spread from Norway to Japan and then, home, hospital, haze and drift as anaesthetic gradually takes hold. The first stanza begins in a matter of fact way but by the fifth stanza we are in the terrain of injury, aging and despair:
Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire,
southwesterly 5 or 6 veering northwesterly
4or 5, backing into East Yamatai.
Moderate or rough, becoming good.
While the weather terms continue, the fifth stanza brings in additional vocabulary to locate the human experience of injury, aging and nostalgia.
Forties, middle-aged spread sinking southward, inadvertent
afternoon naps increasing, self- loathing 8, weepyclouds 10,
low and high depression, ennui rough, crises inevitable, staring
nostalgically at childhood drawings of snowmen, every
likelihood of crying over spilt milk.
Tumbledown…Foxwillow…Appleglass…Addlesea
Cosy and carefree middle age spreading to all four corners…
wistful yet blissfully without regret…unhappy but content…
restful slumber…
not giving two hoots…peace descending
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The poems tell so many stories about Thompson’s life from childhood experiences, early love, loss – the act of forgetting- to the adult world of falling in love and parenthood. Poems written in Edinburgh: ‘Rainbow Lorikeet’ and ‘Prince’s Street Gardens Edinburgh’, 2019, capture vivid, tender moments with his wife and daughter.
I love the language and the use of the page as we delve into ‘Prince’s Street Gardens, Edinburgh, 2019’:
Just before closing time,
we snuck
into the sunken park
where the dark,
a special kind of Scottish dark,
coated trees and grass
like the water
that once filled
this former loch
and for the briefest
of moments
we lost track
of the hour……
There is a lot of dark in the poems both physical and emotional, yet, the poems lift us as well with warm descriptions of place and people, They speak of love. There is humour and wit here as well as a solemnity. The titles invite us into the poems and in some cases, to dive into to experiences:
‘Snacking on Mandarin Oranges While Visiting Patrick Kavanagh’s Grave’ sets the scene for a visit to a grey grave yet the orange hue of the mandarin orange invokes other places and traditions. Thompson deftly conjures Kavanagh’s world while touching on remembrance and irreverence. The sixth stanza captures something about poetic tourism, the flimsiness of life and the place of poetry. Kavanagh himself might appreciate the playfulness of the poem:
A gentle stroll from parked car to graveyard brings us to the
hallowed spot where untold
wayfarers have paused to take a moment, shoot the breeze,
smoke a sneaky cigarette
and reflect on the brevity of this gift called life, the poetry
concealed between
sheathes of wheat or stashed inside knots of trees, boots rooted
in the same gravel……
Thompson is a poet of maturity and nuance; his poems are well crafted and full of light and shade. He draws us in with his direct style, word choices and poetic skill. The collection includes poems dedicated to fellow poets and friends, including: ‘Closing Time’ which brings the collection to an end. The Slipping Forecast is a collection to revisit and savour.
Rona Fitzgerald was born in Dublin. Since 1995, she’s been living in Glasgow.
*****
I Sing to the Greenhearts by Maggie Harris. £10.99, Seren. ISBN 978-1-7872-771-3. Reviewed by Kathy Miles
Vivid and powerful, Maggie Harris’s I Sing to the Greenhearts is a firecracker of a collection. Themes close to the poet’s heart – colonialism, migration and diaspora, climate change, deforestation – are explored with refreshing directness and humour. Harris is a storyteller as well as a poet, weaving tales from her Guyanese heritage into the poems, like gold threads running through a tapestry. The book opens and closes with poems about the Greenheart tree. Important to Guyana for both their economic and ecological significance, their strength and resilience also stand as symbols for the people of Guyana, guardians against those who would: ‘tear through / verdant forests like a virus razing / them to the ground.’ Harris, too, is a guardian, as she tries to ‘organise a mutiny’ (‘I Sing to the Greenhearts’) in a world where trees, plants and humans are fighting for their existence against ‘the politician and his cowboys’.
Another major theme of the collection is that of ‘otherness,’ whether it means belonging simultaneously to two quite different cultures, being a migrant, a woman in a predominantly male world, or, like the lynx Lilith who escaped from a zoo in Borth, perceived to be dangerous because her ‘feline life as a female’ differed from the norm in a rural Welsh landscape. Along with the idea of otherness, the book poses important questions about identity and assimilation. Harris came to the UK with her mother as a child; the experience of moving so far from home to a very different place is wonderfully described in ‘and the thing is,’ a poem which won the 2020 Wales Poetry Award:
if there had been a Brixton in the Home Counties
or a Cardiff in the Valleys
a Toxteth or a Chapeltown
where we could have dropped our Georgie bundles
where my mother could keep her church hat
and her accent
where she didn’t have to always explain where she came from
where she could have kept her dollars and her Jesus
and slipped into familiar ways like others from the sun
Memory and culture, history and the past are not forgotten, but are also part of the diaspora. Here, they often emerge in metaphors of plants and animals:
the fuchsia who likes reggae, which lives: ‘through petals and sepals / water, blood and soil’; the rebellious banana plant from Hemel Hempstead who can sometimes: ‘hear drums, / which strangely made him wish / he could just pick his feet up and run.’ (My Banana thinks on Louise Bennett’s ‘Colonisation in Reverse’); Mr Plaintain, who takes revenge: ‘from all dem / who drag he from the plantation / bring he to a cold country to mash, chip or slice’, and a ‘pandemonium of parrots’ which ‘shoot like arrows from the trees.’ These plants and landscapes Harris presents are not ordered and sedate, but rebellious, staging their own mutinies against the backdrop of typical Welsh or English country gardens.
Harris walks ‘outside the borders as I always have’ (‘Honeysuckle in the Hedgerows’), observing, commentating, her keen eye making connections. In terms of form, she is witty and inventive, using calypso and reggae, Creole and monologue alongside traditional poetic forms, which gives the collection pace and rhythm. Central to the book is Harris’s brilliant
‘A Coloured Girl Speaks of the Colour of Words’ in which she lists the things that she is not:
I
could say that I was not black enough
or white enough
or woman enough
or man enough
or mother enough
or father enough
or innocent enough
before ending on the confident and resolute:
we are enough in the transcribing of us
we are enough
we are enough
Ixxxxxam enough.
This is Harris’s mutiny in action, a tour-de-force of a praise-song, which interrogates the ways in which we see our fellow humans, stereotype them by race or skin colour, and how the ‘tick-box of power’ places them in the category ‘Other‘:
someone’s definition of
any drop of existentialist blood
that made me what I am.
If her body had to ‘force itself to dumb down your forceripe self’ (‘and the thing is’) on arrival in the UK, it was not for long. Energy and exuberance shine through the poems, along with:
the vibration of home-made guitars
the self-taught melody of mouth organs
the ornate passage of tabernacles
the ink-stained hallelujahs whose
proclamations of promise
rise high in the Amens of the faithful
high in the signatures of egrets across
a Demerara evening sky
Interspersed with these passionate, compelling poems are quieter reflections on family, ekphrastic pieces, and reflections on Harris’s time in Wales, where a fine tercet of poems takes us to the Pembrokeshire coast, and a garden where:
poppies did what they did best;
opened their hearts and sang.
Maggie Harris sings to the Greenhearts, but also to the reader. From mobile phones to talking plants, gardens in Goa, balconies in Castries and forests in Guyana, this is a wide-ranging and beautifully orchestrated collection, which will stay in my own heart for a long time.
Kathy Miles lives in West Wales. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, and her fifth full poetry collection, Vanishing Point, was published by Palewell Press in 2024. She is a previous winner of the Frogmore and Bridport Poetry Prizes, and teaches on the Dylan Thomas Summer School in Lampeter.
*****
A Full-On Basso Profundo by Ken Evans. £10.99. Salt 978-1-78463-335-6. Reviewed by Gareth Writer-Davies
This is a collection of three parts, family and masculinity–which overlap seamlessly–and then a concept of America, which is more disconnected. Ken Evans has come a long way and become a wise voice in contemporary British poetry. It has not always been so, as he confesses in ‘White Space for Adrian Mitchell’:
I sent poems, hubris mail, with an SAE, to Adrian in 1985,
xxxxthe envelope sealed and kissed once lightly for luck
. . .
‘When you write, find out more about other people’ he replied,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxwith ‘a tenderness found between animals,’
Evans needed not worry. These poems are never guilty of pretension, but are marked by a tenderness, which can be tricky for a man to express in a man’s world. The first and largest section of A Full-On Basso Profundo (the title is never explained though implied) is the ‘Oikosphere,’ where family rules. The poem ‘Purple Iris’ is very touching as it outlines a grief that can never be got over:
I think you would be clever round your matches
xxxon dating apps, knowing they are flammable,
and squeeze one before trying, like a satsuma.
She is a still-born child:
I know for all this, thought’s a realm of stone, a cairn
xxxxxxxI add a pebble to each year, building a taller tower
This is poetic autobiography, but he has taken Mitchell’s advice and can inhabit other lives with a quiet understanding that does not creak or clunk. In the fine poem Lucian Freud Drawing His Dead Mother, Evans skillfully balances a last tribute to the dead with artistic obsession :
Nothing says death like the head as a mask, stoppered
at the neck. No need to sketch the muscles of her arms,
for she can no longer pat his own and ask, ‘how’s it
going, Lucian, dear, may I peek? I’m getting so tired’.
And then the devastating couplet:
no life here, only his pumping heart misting
in a blue chamber, forcing himself to draw
Evans’ has said that his mature writing began when he donated a kidney to his sister, and there are several poems about the tension between doubt and decision:
It’s OK to say ‘No’, on the trolley to theatre, the surgeon says
xxxxlike a hostage negotiator, the breeze between her teeth.
Holding someone’s future in your hand is a serious matter and there are elderly family members to care for and cajole, as in the witty ‘Family Slices’:
It’s only pizza mother. We’re sat with those
we trust, and only slightly resent., for showing
such faith. On portions, she grows vague.
The second section, ‘The Anersphere’ is a reticule of the masculine from negotiations at the repair garage to what we take to be the death of a friend, in The Laughter of Mustard and Sea Foam’ :
We’re not bedside vigil
or drawn ward curtains,
forced banter or hushed
voices on a waterbed
of solace. We won’t
discuss the death
of elephants as a proxy
for the loss
and the final stanza from ‘The Distance in a Boy’ with its mixture of shyness and hardening carapace:
How to choose right
Setting, time, how
the baffling, distance men
need in love, enter a boy.
We’re then off to America, where we get more male portraiture:
Middle-age white Caucasian male
xxxxxjetlag slipping down his eyelids
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxlike sweat
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxon a Crimplene shirt
In these poems, Evans appears to be trying out a variety of different voices , some more successfully than others. There is the vivid image of Butch Cassidy seeing out his declining years in Utah (In a Land of Sleeping Rainbows):
He sits, like any old man with egg from
breakfast down his plaid shirt, and creaks
at the hip when he rises, after years riding
the sticking-out ears of the wind. Flies dry
on the polish as his boots bake out front.
No-one here says what they know:
Real Diamond Lederhosen gave me a chuckle with its combination of consumerism and need and how we misdirect ourselves:
To pose in diamond deerskin lederhosen
with hand-buffed fasteners of antler horn
at #Livingmybestlife, is a cry for help
…
everyday lederhosen are to last a lifetime, like our skin
the body glove we shine in, without exceptionalism,
a cover-all camisole, no stein or red wine can stain.
Americana is an attractive touchstone for people of a certain age–myself amongst them. But some of these poems– about the Navajo or Ella Fitzgerald, for example– stray awkwardly though perhaps unwittingly, towards an appropriation of cultures and stories that are not Evans’ to tell.
As I read through these American explorations, I found myself yearning for the poems from the previous two sections. These are the true, real stuff, with no need for artifice or other voices to support them. I very much like Evans’ voice in the Oikosphere and Anersphere and he should trust it. Overall I enjoyed this collection. Like the male opera singer alluded to in the title, Evans has cleverly and humourously used male bluster to his advantage whilst retaining a great deal of anxious compassion.
Gareth Writer-Davies is from Pencelli, Wales. He has been successful in numerous competitions and has published the following collections: Bodies (2015), Cry Baby (2017). both with Indigo Dreams, and The Lover’s Pinch (2018), The End (2019) and Wysg (2022) with Arenig Press.
*****
Self-portrait in Blue Jacket by Mark Wynne £12. Tall Lighthouse. ISBN 978-1-904551-27-0. Reviewed by Tom Phillips
Mark Wynne’s impressively honed first full collection draws deeply from the world of art and literature in all their forms. However, while many of the poems directly or indirectly reference specific works, few could be described as conventionally ekphrastic. They are less responses to individual paintings, sculptures, installations, texts and so on as collages of fragments relating to the circumstances – both physical and mental – in which they were produced or in which their creators lived and worked at specific points in their careers. These fragments originate in all manner of different materials – from letters and diaries to memoirs and biographical studies – and relate to artists and writers that range from Francis Bacon, Leon Kossof and Andy Warhol to Franz Kafka, Elizabeth Bowen, Henri Barbusse and more. A full fives pages of notes elucidate the multiple sources from which the poet draws, but if that sounds rather dry and academic, the poems themselves are anything but. They are vivid, visceral and emotionally charged, opening up ambiguous depths and psychological intensities.
For all their intertextuality and rigorous post-modernism, however, the collection’s title (itself taken from the Max Beckmann painting reproduced on the cover) directs us towards reading these poems as essentially autobiographical, with personal experience or at least mental and emotional states refracted through the lives and work of others at its heart. Somewhat inevitably, this refractive approach repeatedly puts the status of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’ into question when they appear: who is speaking here – the poet Mark Wynne (or a coherent devised persona at least, a lyrical ‘I’) or one of the ‘others’ he’s quoting or alluding to?
The poem ‘at the met’, for example, is ostensibly about Beckmann and written in his voice. It’s circumstance appears to be the eve of his sudden death after having been to see his own painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The ‘I’ of the poem certainly seems to be his. Referring to ‘Self-Portrait in Blue Jacket’ as ‘my last canvas’, the poem’s voice sounds here as if it’s to be heard as Beckmann’s and it seems entirely plausible that the exiled German artist might do things like ‘hit on waitresses and read Lermontov’ in the gallery restaurant, think ‘I will donate my body to medical science’ and state ‘I never have – even before the catastrophe – had any understanding of furniture and the like.’
Alongside an article about Beckmann by Michael Hofmann, however, the notes identify Hofmann’s edition of the Austro-Hungarian novelist Joseph Roth’s letters as a source for the material in the poem, opening up the possibility that Roth is somehow enfolded into its ‘I’ as well (maybe he’s the one intending to donate his body to science, for example). Moreover, of course, the ‘I’ could just as well be Wynne himself: he too, after all, has a ‘canvas’ – i.e. this book – called ‘Self-Portrait in a Blue Jacket’. Whatever the answer – and the absence of one makes the poem all the more engaging – we are certainly all over the place if we’re after a conventional lyric ‘I’ and a convenient interpretative structure. Or to put it more bluntly – just who is speaking here?
The slippery nature of identity and all that goes with it – experience, memory, failure, motives, trauma response – are recurrent themes. In ‘despite my best intentions’ – which references that arch-manipulator of identity, Andy Warhol – the ‘I’ admits that it ‘can no longer tell the difference/between direct & mediated experiences/& have no impulse to make the distinction’, while in ‘From Hotel Lemercier’, it confesses to a ‘thieving instinct’, adding ‘I would take anything/that isn’t mine/and everything of yours’, adding later again that ‘I never imagined/that to abandon my life/would cost just as much effort/as to be present’. All told, in fact, the collection is replete with lines of similarly existential poignancy which, when set into these carefully constructed collages, acquire a paradoxically aphoristic quality – ‘desire for consolation is insatiable’ from ‘From The KDB sonnets’ and ‘conspicuous consumption/the only measure of success’ from ‘Auto-da-fe’, for example – although whether some of these felicities are borrowed, taken directly from the sources cited remains unclear to anyone not entirely submerged in the textual/artistic realm the book exists within and delves into so richly.
Given that Wynne is clearly a highly adept poet who can produce an atmosphere and suggest complex emotional states with only a few words, it seems, in a way, a pity that the book comes encumbered with quite so much referential superstructure – those notes! – but I suppose that’s part of the broader artistic project here, both in terms of illuminating the slipperiness of the poetry-writing self and the collage-like nature of writing which inevitably taps into the work of all those who have come before in whatever art form they happen to have been working. On the one hand, the temptation is to reach for Roland Barthes and the infamous death of the author. On the other, the author’s presence is made manifest in the specificity and sheer physicality of the writing.
This approach also perhaps raises questions about how much poetry need be hard-wired into what’s gone before. In ‘Last Night’, a relatively lengthy and moving poem that addresses the sad tale of Laika, the dog sent into space and to her inevitable death by the USSR in the name of science and victory in the so-say space race, the lines ‘each imagining we are the first human//to take a wrong turn or be misheard or fall from sight’ acquire a resonance that draws us into the heart of a complexity of relationships that define who we are. It’s complex and potentially destabilising stuff, undoubtedly. But also well worth the effort.
Tom Phillips is a writer and translator now living in Sofia, Bulgaria. His poetry has been widely published in journals, anthologies, pamphlets and the collections Unknown Translations (Scalino, 2016), Recreation Ground (Two Rivers Press, 2012) and Burning Omaha (2003). He has translated many of Bulgaria’s leading contemporary poets and his translations of Bulgarian modernist Geo Milev are due to appear from Worple Press in 2023. He is editor of the book of essays Peter Robinson: A Portrait of his Work (Shearsman, 2021) and teaches creative writing and translation at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski.
*****
Bloom and Grow; Peter J Donnelly. £8.71. Alien Buddha Press Via amazon.co.uk). ISBN 9798313441412. Rewviewed by Rowena Sommerville
Bloom and Grow is Peter J Donnelly’s third book with Alien Buddha Press and is a quietly pleasing and pleasingly quiet selection of poems, of a reflective and largely domestic nature. Donnelly’s inner landscape seems full of old photographs and household objects which are freighted with memories and meanings – they tell stories, reveal relationships and hint at emotion or longing, but always in the most gentle and genteel way possible.
The opening poem is entitled ‘She Wouldn’t Have a Dog’ and continues ‘Nor would she have a child because she didn’t like either’ which is a fairly trenchant start, so I wondered what might be to follow, but the poem doesn’t revisit the child issue, rather it lists all the practical reasons that ‘she’ wouldn’t have a cat either, even though she quite liked next door’s when it occasionally visited her. However, the poem does suggest ‘she’ might have avoided getting a cat because of the eventual heartbreak of losing it, so you can make your own mind up about ‘her’ seemingly deliberate childlessness. ‘The Morning of Your Funeral’ says:
Clearing your house was
like taking apart the pieces
of a completed jigsaw
and although we are not told whose the funeral was, most of us will have had that experience of having to go through somebody else’s house and belongings, and to take them apart for good.
In ‘Where It Hangs Now’ Donnelly again addresses an undisclosed departed loved one – this time he describes an etching he has either inherited or taken/been given after their death, and has had reframed, and hung in his entrance hall. He seems to fear ghostly disapproval for his choice of location:
xxxxxxxxxx(It looks down)
opposite the photo of you both
at Auntie H’s wedding.
I could say it’s as if you’re admiring it
but from the angle, it’s more like
your eyes are averted.
There are a couple of poems with literary themes – ‘Tess’s What Ifs’ is written in the persona of Tess of the D’Urbevilles, and ‘Your Sister Susan’ seems to be addressed to Margaret Drabble following the death of her sister AS Byatt, perhaps acknowledging that the two were famously estranged, and wondering if MD will read ASB now.
For me, given much of the tone, the domestic concerns and the frequently rather unsatisfactory days out recalled in these poems, it is impossible not to think of Alan Bennett at times, or to occasionally hear Thora Hird’s voice reading a line, with precise emphasis. I don’t at all mean that these works are derivative – the poet has his own landscape and concerns – but there are some inevitable similarities of territory, and a similar quality of authorial self-effacingness.
Donnelly has been widely published in magazines and, as mentioned, this is his third selection. I think his poetry has real pleasures to offer, although I confess I do find some of it just too small scale and/or too dry, with emotion and brute life vacuumed out of it. I would be interested to see him perhaps work with others, or attempt some very different form in the future, but in the interim, quietly personal can be quietly pleasing.
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.
*****
Tales From The Wingèd Chariot Inn by Mark Mansfield. Chester River Press. ISBN: 9798323937967. Reviewed by Rowena Sommerville.
The title of Mark Mansfield’s skilful and engaging collection clearly references Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ – ‘But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’ – but in these poems the poet is feeling the urgency of the passing of time rather than the urgency of seduction. ‘The Winged Chariot Inn’ is evidently pretty close to the last chance saloon, although Mansfield looks back across years of experiences and memories in what reads as a well-adjusted fashion, acknowledging the pleasures and pains of a life fully lived, in a complicated world.
He grew up in several American states and in Taiwan, presumably because of parental employment, and then worked at various skilled and unskilled jobs and as a musician and songwriter, also completing a Creative Writing MA as a mature student. This breadth of life experience informs and enriches his writing and his interests – all seriously undertaken and never narrow.
In ‘Doves’ he looks back at his time in a band, remembering being on stage viewing some eager members of the audience:
They’d stand by the edge of the stage,
Their faces beaming up at ours.
The poem ends:
And those girls like doves huddled on a bough?
They’d scarcely recognize me now.
And, doubtless with a similar origin, in ‘Tinnitus Blues’ he says:
Silence died one night in 94.
Now, the hissing rush of water or
a whirring sent from nowhere each take turns
In ‘The Shrine’ he seems to be visiting a neglected building that had once been the scene of a passionate relationship, and memories flood back:
When was the last time I stood here,
the shattered panes and broken doors,
the weed-choked yard and trash-strewn floors,
the rotting fruit in the orchard near
the abandoned shack that was our shrine
when we were far too young for time?
‘The Shrine’ is a fourteen-line poem, as several of this collection are, and it has a rhyme/near rhyme scheme that underpins the poem, gives it cohesion, so that I only registered it as ‘a sonnet’ on re-reading – it does not labour the ‘sonnet rules’. I read in an online interview that Mansfield is an admirer of Louis MacNeice and I can pay him the compliment of saying he has some of MacNeice’s skill in writing poems which have strong regular form/structure, but in which the words flow so lightly over the foundations, that the poems do their creative and emotional work on you (on this reader, anyway) before you recognise their classical underpinnings.
‘ShoreWorld’ is a poem with another nod to MacNeice, specifically to the poem ‘Bagpipe Music’ (It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw), this time through content and mood:
The calliope pumps days to years.
Merry-go-round and round.
A clown sheds everybody’s tears.
Merry-go-round and round.
But where ‘Bagpipe Music’ is a bitter lament of society’s loss of values and ethics, ‘ShoreWorld’ seems to use the fairground metaphor to say that time renders much endeavour and emotion futile in the end:
The calliope repeats ‘La Mer’.
In sync, the carousel creaks round.
Its painted mounts move through the air,
and riderless, float up and down.
Another lovely standard song referenced (viz La Mer) is ‘Only You’, originally performed by The Platters. In the poem ‘Only You’ he remembers ‘A small café in Zagreb’ where he first met someone who became a significant other, but possibly not one for the long term:
You looked into my eyes and smiled,
then started crooning ‘Only You’
till soon my heart could take no more,
sensing love’s coda all the while.
‘Silky’ is the final actual poem in the book, subtitled with the John Keats ‘My heart aches…’ line. The poem takes the journey of remembrance back to the very beginning – it opens:
Your heart aches, too, but all you know is time
which makes no sound itself. In fact, its song’s
the same as when most first let out that long
wail to the world, your very first word: ‘I’m.’
I say it’s the final actual poem, as the book itself has a subtitle – ‘poems et al.’ – and the ‘et al.’ are two pages of aphorisms including:
Poetry is not Scrabble or a soapbox.
and
I have become hard of hearing, especially of whatever idiots are saying.
which suggest that wisdom and firm judgement may be among time’s gifts….
This pamphlet has a preface from Herbert Read – …. true poetry is never speech but always a song – and that rings true for so much of this collection. I enjoyed reading it and am very glad to have been introduced to this poet, I look forward to exploring more of his subtle and powerful writing – recommended.
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.
*****
Orbits 52 by Timothy Dodd. $25. Broadstone Books. ISBN: 9781966677031. Reviewed by Estill Pollock
The ‘road poem’ has a curious pedigree. In one of the earliest recognised examples in the Western canon, The Odyssey incorporates all the bells and whistles that came to be associated with the type ‒ place and character, colour and circumstance ‒ spooling outward in a filigree melodrama of Human Folly and Divine Indifference. The Waste Land, too, qualifies, if we include the criterion of the Wanderer, drifting through an urban landscape decimated by the chemical spill of Lost Faith. Walt Whitman’s “Poem of the Open Road” delivers in both title and substance the existential quest for humanity, apprehended through experience and observation of the natural world by simply moving through it at a walking pace. In brief, where a journey is defined and populated with at least a degree of psychological resolution, through scenery that is at once toxic and redemptive, then a viable candidate rises into view.
Timothy Dodd’s Orbits 52 follows this illustrious tradition. He names himself as the narrator, Tim, and it is clear at the outset that the journey is personal, and biographical with a mouldy air of claustrophobia and last chances.
It is noted at the outset that he is travelling by car with his father through the Appalachian backroads of West Virginia, a country that is for him both strange and strangely familiar. That we are setting out with Tim as part of his road poem is ironic as it is revealed early-on that he possesses neither the documentation, skills or inclination to drive an automobile. As such, he is relying on his father, recently recovered from corneal surgery.
And ‘seeing’ is an important outlier here. We have numerous references to sight, whether physiological or as that of a Seer, evolutional or via the stem cells of the mythological.
From octopus
to orangutan,
whale to flea,
including me.
Even squirmy
flatworms have
eyes seeing gray,
sensitive to light.
There is the compound of a paper wasp.
There is the lensar of a hairy-eared dwarf lemur.
The Pax6 gene is at the heart of ocular
development, the same impulse behind
the formulation of eyes in fish, fly, human.
…
And Set did steal the Eye of Horus, trampled
and ate it. Hathor recovered our sight filling
sockets with gazelle’s milk; and with fourteen
deities, through plants and minerals, Thoth
returned our vision—from new to full moon.
As father and son follow the mountain roads through a wasteland (see note above…) of failed towns and failed resolve, the mining outback left to fend for itself in a country seemingly forgotten by governments in a slow decline into economic stagnation, we witness the passing landscape, as
Hunting lands and clean rivers transformed
into coal grounds, slowed now by her slime
and unsinkable slag; lovely lichen curling
over carcinogenic boney, tailings. Oxidized
hulks of unidentifiable machinery stranded,
soilstain in rusted orb and sinister ring gear.
And here, we begin to recognise the road ahead, in a brief exchange between father and son, one of many where the father reproves the son for what he sees as lack of ambition, indifference to family life and employment the father might recognise as notable, where Route 52 only marginally qualities as within the boundary of the Civilised, and Tim’s offer of a physical map of extinct empire is soundly rebuffed.
“Don’t figure we need any maps,
do we? Not unless you wanna go
up in some of them backroads.”
We’re already on a backroad.
“No, no. 52 is a whole lot more
road than back. Some of these
places got more back than road.”
Well I’ve got a map of the Hapsburg
Empire somewhere in the back.
“The what?”
Hapsburg Empire.
“Don’t figure that’s gonna do
us too much good around here.”
It might.
This exchange represents many similar conversations, or more accurately faint exchanges between the men that seem to hang in the air like elements of grammar searching for some lost declension.
He is still fiddling with the radio,
air con, mileage buttons. Surely
he will tire of it soon and then talk
to me. About God, politics, or the lies
of evolution. Maybe all of the above.
Dodd is adept at utilising the device of (Homeric) cataloguing to set his passing frames of reference within the scope of a greater narrative and sense of time. Some are commercially oriented, others geographically so, still others imagistic.
KFC; McDonalds; Burger King; Pizza Hut.
Jimmy’s Towing; Stop the Hurt; Big Four; Hills and Thrills.
…
Elkhorn Creek; Butt Cemetery; Booths Hollow.
…
…deadened doors and siding lying askew,
plates, tin cans, a sink, buckets. Inside, stripped remains of bed,
chair, cabinet, roofs and windows caving in on themselves, but
the front porch still stands. And a man with a cherrywood pipe,
his words and smoke disappearing, never heard in the duskfall.
…
Scan. A glimpse. Time, landscapes, lives in milliseconds.
Past history, trends, creatures now, gone, and mythical,
the forgotten, scarred, scraped, collapsed. Lost names,
families, tribes, species, endeavors, fossils, knowledge.
We are gods in quick passing, hallucinations of power,
control, simulacra; momentarily motoring omnipotence,
drugged and high, addiction of automobiles in aggregate.
…
Time and place were my strategies…
It is through these halting experiments in vernacular that we come to understand that the purpose of the journey is to visit the mother/wife who has been in a facility for the mentally ill for many years. She has, his father maintains, asked to see Tim, although Tim’s memory of her, even before her ‘final’ breakdown, maintains a corrosive influence on his present life, as here.
I could not relate to either of them. I did not want
what they wanted—not for themselves, not for me,
not for the world. Although if that is madness, there
is madness in hundreds of millions of modern humans.
Is there love in a diamond ring?
…
(…) We could see it
coming, but it was hell getting a diagnosis.
But then it’s in the hands of something else
—cells and chemistry to the scientific. Until
one day the mind snapped and off she went.
It was not violent, but it was not pretty. She
was seeing things that no one else could see.(…)
Again, the leitmotif of vision, of ‘sight’ that is examined in various scenarios and time frames. Time itself is fluid, and a simple view of the passing landscape drops us into scenarios of Deep Time, where foresight and hindsight are skewed.
Dodd’s lyrical skills are worth noting. Although he incorporates some somewhat pedestrian descriptors in support of the broader narrative, on cue he relaxes into gifted passages, too.
Out of the ground also comes
limb, as beech, pine would, but
for the silver-eyed in silhouette.
Risen from the blackest soil, coal
-fed, cramped, pallor pole,
they hover, wave, and flicker
steadfastly, as if tree-rooted,
their glow defying expectation
and logic, a blur between stasis
and stirring, figures drifting
in some space neither free nor
captured. As with a pale haunt
from the white birch’s reaching
arms, you will not stay a night
on this hillside hanging. But
for them, something says to stay.
Something tells them leaving
is a loss of everything. Carrying
on in shadow sway, the longing
are forces floating from our dead,
reflections of the dappled light.
The ‘orbitals’ of (Route) 52 are metaphorical in the reflective sense of return journeys, but, too, set in a present, desperate reality. Again, the skull’s orbitals double as both anatomy and as a seer’s anchor points, with other apt references salted through this thoughtful and evocative poem.
You cannot see the road ahead, but faith
in your vehicle and the highway does not
waver. Even when the darkness falls, you
carry two beams of light, enough wattage
to blind owl, opossum, and your own soul.
(…) There is no beginning and end.
Estill Pollock was born in Kentucky, and has lived in England for more than forty years. A pamphlet, Metaphysical Graffiti, was published in England by Highcliff Press in the 1990s, followed by Constructing the Human, from Poetry Salzburg in 2001. Between 2005-2011 the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy was published by Cinnamon Press (Wales). More recently Broadstone Books in Kentucky have publsished Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark and Heathen Anthems, with a further collection, Parse Poetica, planned for 2025.
The High Window 