*****
POETRY
Steve Ely: Eely • Dean Browne: After Party • Daniel Huws: Debris • Sarah Ghazal Ali: Theophanies • Chris Emery: Wonder • Sarah James: Darling Blue • Tim Dwyer: Accepting the Call • Roger Elkin: Not Fiction • Alan Morrison: The Alderbank Wade • D.A. Prince: Continuous Present • Richie McCaffery: Skail • Luigi Coppola & Mark Shuttleworth: Even God Gets Distracted Sometimes
TRANSLATIONS
Dante Alighieri: Paradiso, translated by D. M. Black • Geo Milev: Once There Was Spring, translated by Tom Phillips
*****
Eely by Steve Ely. £14.99 in hardback. Longbarrow Press. ISBN 9781906175481. Reviewed by Nick Cooke
As a reader of this magnificent, serpentine modern epic, beautifully produced in hardback by Longbarrow Press, one has to be something of an eel oneself. During my repeated voyages through the 140-page poem, I both enjoyed and endured the necessary task of slithering between the text and Ely’s 34 pages of notes, while the poet’s near-namesake migrating creatures were wriggling their perilous way, from their mating grounds in the Sargasso Sea, to the Fenlands of East Anglia, where their presence was so brilliantly explored by Graham Swift, in his iconic 1983 novel Waterland.
Adam Piette’s illuminating review for Blackbox Manifold rightly points up the central thrust of Ely’s rage against the ongoing mistreatment of the eel by human malefactors. Although the baddest of the bad guys was a seventeenth-century Dutch engineer, Cornelius Vermuyden, referred to in the poem as ‘a gambler, undertaker, Ponzi fraudster’, more modern villains also abound. In this poetic symphony’s opening movement, entitled Eely, Ely bathetically undercuts the submarine splendour of the Caribbean location whence the eel begins its journey. Columbus, we’re told,
liked the Sargasso – blue as the sky
xxxxx in Andalusia, fragant as the air in Seville –
the garbage sea, where the plastic of three continents
forms mats the breadth of Spain.
The next page lists other environmental threats – posed several centuries after Vermuyden was commissioned to drain the Fens by Charles 1, resulting in what Piette terms ‘an act of ecocide of staggering proportions’ – with a polysyllabic specificity that lends them an ironic air of scientific respectability: ‘oestrogen-saturated sewage, methamphetamine / neurotoxins, chromosome warping, / neonicotinoid run-off’.
Nonetheless, a siren note of resistance marks Ely’s presentation of the eel throughout. Every epic needs its protagonist to survive, be it an Odysseus or a Bloom, and there’s little doubt our evolutionarily exemplary hero, demonstrating ‘the flexural power of its new undulatory wiggle’, has what it takes to ensure the line is continued: ‘in spurts of milt and billowing roe, eels / are birthing their posterity, a spore-storm of eggs / in uncountable centillions…’ The ‘army of billions’ sometimes seem ‘helpless’, yet ‘somehow drop invisible anchors – and hold against the flow’.
The work’s central two movements, called /ˈɪ:laɪ/ and eely, focus on the poet’s own experience of, and response to, the creatures. He demonstrates his stylistic suppleness, in a raw, often jagged-edged sketch of his Yorkshire working-class childhood and adolescence, in the 70s and early 80s, featuring a number of lairy angling mates, and an undercurrent of pent-up anger. In Ely’s case, the coiled hostility is unleashed when he’s bitten by an eel, and then decapitates it, fuelled by both vengeful rage and the bullying influence of his companions:
And the blood
came forth – CHOP ITS FUCKIN HEAD OFF!
I seized it with the grip of my cuff and wedged it
against a stone – pitiful bronze-eyed gaze
and gape, desperate, pathetic – and sawed through
the slimy, newt-green skin until the rubbery
snake-length severed.
Interspersed with the violence of the verbs, adjectives like ‘pitiful’, ‘desperate, pathetic’ give hints of Ely’s later, more compassionate response, when he releases a female eel he’d previously caught, whom he talks to tenderly, treating her like a human friend. The poem’s emotions are often as conflicted as the migrations it describes, and the eel’s development over millions of years is not the only evolution outlined.
Adam Piette neatly summarises the bite’s connection to the more allegorical aspect of Ely’s relationship with eels: ‘The bite not only historically communicated the potentially lethal ichthyotoxin into his bloodstream, but stands as a figure for the guilt for the murder of nature… [it] releases a bitter dark energy in the young Ely and turns him into a were-eel, a killing machine taking Jekyll-like pleasure in acts of revenge’ for crimes against the eel. In reality, though, the killing is in his head, an inner bravado:
he is not the wearaal: he is
/ˈstiːvn/. it pleases /ˈstiːvn/ to think he is an eel,
but he is not an eel, which begs a further question,
why does he allow the universe to kick sand in
his face?
The wording suggests the helpless insignificance of Eliot’s Prufrock, who asks if he ‘dare disturb the universe’. Ely’s power lies in his pen, as this poem proves.
The final movement, entitled Eelysium, shows that power in relentless detail, as Ely uses both super-meticulous research and withering poetry to nail a host of targets, from Anne Boleyn to UDA torturers, but chiefly Vermuyden and his associates. We witness consequences of his actions: under the later Stuarts, the fenland was ‘planted’ with Dutch settlers thought likely to be loyal to the Protestant monarchy, and their drainage/enclosure policies. In The Great Leveel, there is a neat progression from the ‘sash’ worn by ‘Corny’’s compatriot King William IV to ‘ancient urine – the slash of Vermuyden’: the man clearly pissed all over everything he touched.
Ultimately the concluding movement highlights the paradox by which (in Ely’s vision at least) humanity’s eventual self-destruction through eco-suicide may have an environmentally positive spin-off, if the low-lying Fens are inundated due to rising sea levels. Ely’s allusion to ‘the drowned and the saved’ echoes Primo Levi and the Holocaust, but primarily drives home the fact that ‘after Apocalyptic flooding has eliminated humans from the landscape’ (his notes), much animal life will thrive in a way not seen for centuries, if ever. And there are signs of a rebirth even now. The Black Mirror, foregrounding a seventeenth-century drainage resister, William Torksey, ends with ‘a skein of bugling cranes’, which the notes explain have recently returned to the ‘regenerating post-industrial landscapes of Thorne and Hatfield moors’.
Yet eco-abusers are not the only enemy, amid nature’s inevitable food-chain brutality, and humanity’s demise will not equate to a carefree life for the eel. A central, microcosmic confrontation unfurls, between it – hyperbolised into a ‘snakefish’ – and its major natural adversary, the cormorant, aka ‘snakebird’. Seemingly influenced by both the Gawain poet and Milton, Ely dramatises the age-old battle, interestingly couched in terms of a male predator attacking female prey:
Gripped in the prongs of the snakebird’s bite,
the snakefish spasms with frantic voltage,
shorting and sparking to shock herself free,
lashing around his trigger-cocked head
and muscly flex of neck.
And in perhaps the most extraordinary section of all, Pantaneel, the human-free showdown is extended to a more global Darwinian struggle/eternal cycle:
Bears dive and rummage
among the bones, tear out the saving flesh; fish follow
in the rinsing blood and wake. All mouths partake and are renewed.
Coiled in the cranium, lunging in the darkness of the current.
As Piette points out, the final focus becomes cosmological, with a single elver’s muted defiance symbolising something far greater:
A little eel
slips off, begins to make her way downstream.
Pike and cormorant, SpaceX Corp, are anguilla’s constellations.
Stars explode and lurch for Earth like serpents.
So we’re back to the snakebird and snakefish once more, even if the very last word seems to accord them a magnified, Satanic power.
Though Piette claims that Ely takes some liberties with so-called facts, mainly around gender and mating details, overall this tour de force of language, imagination, varied technique, almost obsessive scholarship and huge emotional force must rank among the most outstanding of recent long British poems. In a wider career context, following a string of earlier strikingly original books, such as Oswald’s Book of Hours and Engalaland, Ely should surely be considered among the more significant of contemporary British poets.
Nick Cooke has been widely published in print and online. 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.
*****
After Party by Dean Browne. £12.99. Picador Poetry. ISBN 9781035054671. Reviewed by Patrick Lodge
Seamus Heaney, in The Redress of Poetry, wrote of Wallace Stevens that he occupied a kind of frontier of poetry where “the imagination presses back against the pressure of reality”. In this debut full collection – though his poems have appeared in many top ranking magazines – Dean Browne seems to have taken this approach and run with it full pelt. The imaginative power of these poems is immense and any reader should prepare for an excursion into a visionary, associative world where anything can happen. Browne has said that a poem should be a space for inquisitiveness and humour and both are here in spades. He introduces the collection with an epigram from William Carlos Williams – ‘To whom then am I addressed? / To the imagination” – and it would be easy to suggest that these poems should be read simply as a high-octane journey through the outpourings of a curious, amusing and transgressive imagination. The Poetry Book Society in recommending ‘After Party’ seems to take this line in describing it as ‘bonkers’ but this collection is much more than that. It is, as the PBS also notes, ‘brilliant’ but its brilliance lies less in its full-on surrealism than in its engagement with the reality it pushed back on. Matthew Sweeney, an influence on Browne, referred to his own poems as ‘imagistic narratives’ which draw the reader in in order to surprise them. Browne himself has stated that he wants to be surprised in the process of writing poems and is, himself, unsure sometimes where the poems come from; they are intuitive, “drawn up from somewhere” as he puts it. Wherever that place is, Browne’s poems similarly demand attention; they are powerful in both their oblique and direct perspectives and (to paraphrase Browne) in their cheating of the rational brain they might be said to take the reader on an exciting and illuminating trip.
It is, indeed, too easy to describe this collection as ‘surreal’. Browne is an admirer of the Serbian/American poet, Charles Simic, who dismissed the description of himself as a surrealist whose “unconscious is constantly supplying stuff to my consciousness”. As Simic says, “poetry is just what happens” and, thankfully, a whole lot may have happened to Browne. The danger here is reading the collection as a laugh, a glittering romp of inventive and ingenious associations but there is real emotional heft and the potential for pain in these poems. The collection is a cogent and lyrical response to a perception of a world that is unremittingly perplexing. Sylvia Plath wrote that art is the rearrangement of truth and in Browne’s apparently crazy narratives it is the truth, the realities of a fractured and opaque world underpinning the rearrangements which elevates this debut collection to one of the best for a long time. Here are the poetics of uncertainty, of angst, of being flummoxed, of what might just be the case, however crazy, in a word rife with fake knowledge, ignorant conspiracies, irrational behaviours and real issues in the making of relationships.
The opening poem, ‘Aide-Mémoire’, is, indeed a good place to start in its concern that a goat with a sign reading ‘NEVER FORGET’ has been following the poet for hours. Sarah Blake wrote in the Chicago Review of Books that a collection’s opening poem “sets up the stakes, the themes,”; it is a threshold over which the reader steps into the collection, a transition from the known and comfortable to wherever the poet wants to take you. ‘Aide-Mémoire’ does precisely this in laying out the themes that Browne will pursue with an alarming sense of contingency – themes of memory, of remembering, of the nature of knowing anything and understanding what might be real and of trying ‘to decide where, if anywhere, all this might connect.’. And, indeed, what can, if anything, be trusted.
Similarly, ‘Horse Chestnuts’ seems to engage with childhood memories interweaving conkers with a narrative about possible child abduction – ‘A girl from Senior Infants, I heard’ – but the details become indistinct, the abductee described in a rather formulaic manner more akin to media cliché than actual recall – ‘the birthmark, a burnished glow / up at the hairline. The squeak in her falsetto. / A daisychain wound in her freckled hands on the grass’. The final aside ‘and so on’ suggestive less of an indistinct memory than the potential unreliability of memory and the bland topography of children’s knowing/understanding which repetition in the poem reinforces.
Browne has a precision that allows him to fix an emotional landscape in a short phrase or perfectly chosen word. In ‘Scuttle’, with a play on both a fuel container and something unpleasant, scurrying, an eight-year-old Browne balances on a pile of peat briquettes ‘wound in butcher’s twine, / fingers smutty from / Sutton’s Premium Polish coal’. There is a bungalow ‘shadowed by mountain, things / clenched past function’ – the use of ‘clenched’ is perfect with its connotations of holding something tightly but with implicit anger, fear, determination (as in teeth, fist), a hint of stress, of anxiety as if holding on firmly is what alone gives some purchase on things. There are ‘old keys’ which at one time gave access to something but now have no utility – ‘And I press the edge, / the teeth, till it hurts’ as if this was the only way to get some sense of real, of being there.
All these objects with which we have a temporary, albeit cherished, connection that, in ‘Shadow Box’ – again a marvellously punning title – appear to have a life of their own – an ‘after party’ – when we are gone. Maybe Browne is exploring a loft but in the jumble lies the potential for a remembered live though ‘The hours you’ll lose / in this carnival / of corners and not clock / what you’re after.’. Browne asks the question what actually makes a life – in retrospect, like a found dress, ‘it might have been / stitched by a miniaturist / from stray histories / quilting waste ground’. Like the opening poem, Browne seems to play with the idea that we can never be sure of what we recall; memory is imperfect – it can be false, embroidered or simply the product of imagination, and what, in the end, is the difference.
Many of the poems might be considered to verge on the crazy: a boy living in poverty whose family owes the butcher rent, becomes a pig, gets strung up by his trotters and is slaughtered – maybe in self-sacrifice (‘Oink’); a salutary story about not playing near railway tracks stars, in Browne’s squint view, a severed leg which goes on to have a life of its own – ‘Last I heard the leg was living / comfortably on the coast / of France. Stamps are a hobby’ (The Leg’); there is a written instruction manual ‘illustrating the 52 distinct tones that can be struck / from the triangle,’ (‘The Triangle’). Or ‘Spacer’ where Chicago bluesman, Byther Smith, gets NASA to fulfil is ambition of being the ‘First Man to Play the Blues on the Moon. This is inventive imagination at its most powerful but poems made even more authoritative by having some purchase on a reality – after all, didn’t Byther Smith actually have an album called ‘Blues on the Moon’ though it was live from Chicago rather than a crater on the moon.
There is always a kernel of truth there and a human connection as well as humour. The beautiful ‘Rachels Coat Inside Out’ does a perfect job of remembering a classmate who had died though ‘Your dreams make all kinds of no sense – / locked cabinets with cobwebs across / the wobbly glass knobs.’. The world is a crazy enough place and the human condition is hardly sane in an overheating planet and spiralling environmental and political crises. Browne seems optimistic despite the chaos – in ‘Barmbrack’ a grandmother kills two mating houseflies and sweeps them into her hand ‘like currants fallen from the barmbrack loaf / at the heart of which lay a golden ring’. Maybe there is something shiny and valuable within anything. Certainly Browne seems to remain optimistic and chance may be one of those shiny things in the cake. ‘Pine Box in the Flea Market’ may be the result of an insomniac’s failure to sleep but the box might contain anything ‘…a bunch of shrunken heads; / a rosary of goats’ teeth… / a pair of rusty, rubber-handled pliers; / a peekaboo of a tarantula’. This is a poem about options – you may be ‘…a horsefly learning immensity / at the brink of a donkey’s ear” but there is hope, there is possibility. In a second poem with the same title the box can dream – ‘It wants to be a tree again’ – or if that is not possible then ‘…at least a larger box’.
These poems are a joy to read, not least because of Browne’s felicity with word and image – sometimes in overdrive. His hymn to an old pair of shoes (‘Today I Want to Miss Only My Favourite Shoes’) is magical in its evocation of image after image to capture the loved but worn-out brogues – ‘ousted nestlings’, ‘withered scrotal’, ‘buffeted currachs’, ‘stunned bats’. Browne is quite capable too of turning down the volume of inventiveness (slightly) in, for example, a moving tribute to Matthew Sweeney (‘Pinball’) which imagines a pinball machine as headstone. He has written too, in ‘Interval (in which, snow’), an elegant and delightful poem of love – ‘Cool air surprises us awake, / has dried our puzzle of bare limbs above the covers’. He has, however, few illusions: the marvellous “Synastry Chart’ – a type of astrological chart analysing relationships between two people – plays with chance in a marriage. The vision of an ‘Apartment in a bohemian seaside town… / How you cooked naked after sex, swam in the sea / and drank white Rioja under skylights!’ is quickly punctured by the reality of a kebab shop on one side and a cemetery on the other ‘as you tossed garlic cloves in the pan / like a couple of dice, / or the astrologer’s knuckles’.
So while Browne’s ‘ordinary is so strange’ (‘The Goatfish’), he throws down a challenge to the reader. You have a choice; you can read this excellent collection on its own terms or ‘you might as well be filleting goatfish / on the far side of the moon’. The former is to be highly recommended.
Patrick Lodge is an Irish citizen with roots in Wales. His work has been published in several countries and he has read at poetry festivals across Europe. Patrick has been successful in several international poetry competitions. His fourth collection, There You Are, will be published on February 1, 2026.
*****
Debris by Daniel Huws, . £12.99. Carcanet. ISBN: 9781800175228. Reviewed by Ian Pople
This is a truly wonderful book. 130 pages of poems which seldom reach across two pages. But 130 pages of distillation, beauty and, often, extraordinary power. Debris is the ninety-three years young Daniel Huws only third book; and, in fact, it is a Collected Poems, collecting poems from his first book Noth published in 1972 and The Quarry published in 1999 as well as thirty previously uncollected poems. Ted Hughes, Daniel Huws’ friend and near namesake, about whom Huws D. has written a memoir, is quoted in the back cover blurb, ‘there is nothing fashionable about [Huws’ poems]’ written with the ‘final simplicity of the oldest folk rhymes and songs.’
That sense of the unfashionable and the modest is shown in the titles of Huws’ books; the first Noth is ‘less than nothing.’ The second title The Quarry was chosen by Huws’ then editor at Faber, Christopher Reid. Here ‘quarry’ is ambiguous; not only the area from which the material is mined, but also that which is hunted. And then the current title Debris, with its own senses of the cast off and the random. Of course, such self-effacement might, in itself, be seen be seen ambiguously as if deliberately fending off accusations of ambition. However, as I have suggested above, the poems themselves seem, deliberately, to eschew reach. Although, as I shall also suggest, there is a dark and metaphysical side to some of these texts, Huws seems determined to keep the poems within a small compass.
This is the poem ‘Sons of Men’ from Huws’ first book Noth.
Past dawn, past cockcrow, into the bright of day
They slumber on, hustled by morning’s clamour
Never so far as to outrange the choice
Of the blissful slither back to annihilation.
Sleep, motherly sleep, clasp your sons
Till their eyelids spring open in surfeit; then as they scatter –
Defeated men, your matrix dark in their minds –
The rest of their ruined day you need fear no rival.
On the one hand, this kind of poem might seem in thrall to a Geoffrey Hill who would have been writing his own history poems at a similar time to Huws’ first book. On the other hand, Huws’ emphasis is not on the heroic or the regal in ways that Hill might emphasize. The momentum of the poem turns towards sleep as a kind of warning of death. For Huws, it is not the actions of war that interest him here, it is the deep inner inabilities of the ‘sons of men,’ simply to cope. In fact, it is the anti-action, the retreat from action that concerns Huws. In a poem such as this, Huws works with a shifting, centripetal syntax as in the third and fourth lines, with that lovely word ‘outrange.’ Although Huws works with a latinate vocabulary in ‘annihilation’, ‘surfeit,’ and ‘matrix’, it is that feel for the simpler, perhaps more onomatopoeic, and quietly musical that is a hallmark of all Huws’ poetry; ‘slumber,’ ‘slither,’ ‘scatter.’
The range of that first book of Huws’ Noth, is, perhaps, illustrated by the poem ‘Goodbye to Tudor’, which, as with ‘Sons of Men,’ I’m here quoting in full,
In forgiving mood, this sultry July afternoon,
The last lingering child will be gone
From the gates of Tudor Secondary Modern School,
A school most teachers gratefully shun.
The intimate daily struggle so calmly ends,
Without victory to either side.
Goodbye to the staff and to the boys more sadly
And the girls most sadly I have replied.
And a friend offers congratulations, echoing
Complaints I should have kept unsaid:
‘My God, you must be glad to leave.’ My children
For his ignorance I could strike him dead.
One of the most striking things about this poem, to me, is that it was first published in The New Yorker. That such a ‘small’ unshowy poem with its almost provincial subject matter should have graced the pages of the New Yorker seems quite astonishing, almost strange. In addition, part of the unshowy nature of the poem is the quite centripetal concentration on the emotion of the speaker. It is possible, of course, that the naming of the school, ‘Tudor Secondary Modern school,’ with its very postwar, lowkey evocation of the British education system at that moment makes the poem feel more ‘British’ than it might appear to an American audience. Indeed, part of the achievement of the poem for a ‘British’ reader is its pitch perfect evocation of a moment in British educational history. Such is Huws’ delicate skill with evocation that the resonance of the poem feels particularly strong for… well, let’s face it, this reader of a certain age and education in the post war era.
What Huws evokes so very clearly lies in the pivotal middle stanza. Here, it is the emotional organization of the stanza that is particularly affecting. In a poem that is so uncluttered, Huws’ use of the adjective ‘intimate’ and adverb ‘calmly’ in the opening line form an emotional pivot around which the emotional heft of the poem seems to turn. And the sparseness both linguistically and emotionally of the second line in which, in both ways, Huws eschews any superiority to either the authority of the adult or the guile of the child, leads us to the next two lines of the stanza. It is from here that the emotional force of the poem begins to gather, with the goodbyes but also with a sure sense of what the slightly low key word ‘sadly’ might imply.
It is with the incursion of the friend’s congratulations that the poem gathers force. In part, because in the second phrase ‘echoing / complaints I should have left unsaid,’ Huws makes himself complicit with the emotions that occasion that move into the final two lines of the poem. The small blasphemy of the penultimate line and the rhythmic fall onto ‘ you must’ pushes the writer and the reader into the end of that line. Here, the possessive ‘my children,’ and its line ending emphasis pull us further into the emotional trajectory of the text; an emotional trajectory that leads, almost inexorably towards that poem and line final monosyllable ‘dead.’
That sense of the unshowy yet always technically achieved and polished runs throughout this book. And I would hope that the two poems I’ve quoted from quite early in Huws’ career pay testament to the fact that ‘achieved and ‘polished,’ do not mean cold and calculating; Huws seems incapable of that.
I’ll finish this review with, again, the whole of a small but deeply resonant poem from the start of the, final, uncollected poems section of the book. This is ‘Goldberg variations.’
No more today
Than all those years ago
Would I dare approach
The girl in the camelhair coat
Who walked away
After the Sunday recital
In the Corn exchange
Alone into the damp
Of a fenny November dusk.
So many variations
Vanishing into the mist.
There is in some ways a slightly throwaway quality to this ‘small’ poem. In dwelling on an ‘emotion recollected in tranquility,’ Huws taps into that emotional area that, it is certain, most of us feel. Here, Huws captures a moment, a Joycean epiphany to be a little pretentious about it, that has stuck like a burr in the memory. This is the kind of poem that has its origins in the emotional ambivalence of ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock,’ but without the need of Eliot’s grandiloquence. This is the kind of poem that could have been stuck in the reluctance of its utterance without Eliot’s reach and tripping over its own ambivalences. Huws’ achievement in this almost slight poem is to show how that the emotion recollected in tranquility (to invoke yet another unnecessary master) can, itself, be held quietly and allowed its own release so many years after the event. Huws was a student at Cambridge, which is that ‘fenny’ place with its Corn Exchange, and a contemporary of Hughes and Plath there. Thus, the much older man can look back on that earlier moment and allow it to be that ‘a moment’ but the poet can see the resonance, that sense of the epiphany. Here, the majesty of Bach’s great keyboard monument, the Goldberg Variation, is pulled quietly into a life, which has its own variations and possibilities that are, unlike Bach’s masterpiece, small and evanescent.
*****
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali. £14.99. The 87 Press . ISBN: 9781068644658. Reviewed by Ian Pople
A ‘theophany’ is defined as a visible manifestation of God. And Ghazal Ali’s book discusses what those visible manifestations might mean in a feminist context. Thus, she draws on both Muslim and Christian perspectives on women’s relationships with God; in particular, how those perspectives might sit in a contemporary context.
Ghazal Ali’s approach is signalled in the very first poem in the collection ‘My Faith Gets Grime under Its Nail,’ and as the back cover blurb comments, ‘[Ghazal Ali] asks: what more might a woman’s body hold after it has been hailed as a body for the divine?’ This first poem is a short, stand-alone sequence in which Ghazal Ali tells us about the ‘places I’ve prayed – elevators, Victoria’s Secret / fitting room, the muck-slick meadow after rain – / which will testify for or against me, spilling through my Book of Deeds’. Each section of the poem is prefaced with a surah from the Qu’ran; section three being prefaced with ‘Say, I seek refuge with the Lord of Dawn.’ And this is followed by, ‘One a month blood roams / like mint over immaculate grass,’ and later, ‘let the angels in // to spectate the ache / and erase a sin for every devoted cramp.’ So, we can see that Ghazal Ali’s own perspective is to place what have traditionally been quite taboo areas of a woman’s experience, in a sense, before God and certainly before the angels. And that earlier mention of Victoria’s Secret creates a very contemporary female context within that perspective. Thus, the woman’s body that Ghazal Ali depicts is contemporary in ways which ‘the body for the divine’ might, perhaps, elide.
To suggest that Theophanies focuses upon triangulating the female body in all its ways with the divine and the sacred is to state no more than the obvious. But it should be emphasised that Ghazal Ali does this with considerable power and imagination. ‘Parable of Flies’ begins with, ‘I heard them, wings beating / a din beyond the thistle, pilgrims / beckoned by the promise of carrion.’ And its final stanza is, ‘I’m divining my body a dirtied domestic. / When it rains, devotion is the womb / I’ve hollowed to keep desire dry.’ Of course, to hollow out the trajectory of the poem in the way I’ve just done is to undermine the subtle contrasts, Ghazal Ali is making. But ‘Parable of Flies,’ traces that trajectory from the flies’ so-called ‘pilgrimage’ in the second line through to the ‘devotion’ and ‘desire’ that Ghazal Ali finishes with. And, in the middle of the poem, that trajectory is ‘an economy of asylum.’ And that asylum from ‘my body a dirtied domestic, is where ‘devotion is the womb.’ The womb, that most feminine of place is a place of devotion not only to the God that Ghazal Ali is devoted to, but also a place of creation away from the sullying of the outer world. Elsewhere, however, the poem ‘Tumulus’ ends ‘O Maryam, / is birth not its own / inhumation, / did your child not emerge / perfectly alive / and written to die?’
That sense of an inevitable teleology in a woman’s life pervades this collection ‘Apotheosis’ begins:
Listen-if I’ve learned anything from men,
It’s that their tongues are bare
and motherless, lapping the breast of brawn
they mistake for a masculine God.
And it ends,
I know nothing of God’s plan or the invasive empires
of devotion, gardens I waste away wanting.
I fell heir to my father’s hands, anguish, eyes-
the crimes of men beget the crimes of men.
In between these two points, Ghazal Ali plots a path that includes beheading, passing a date pit from her mouth into the mouth of her lover, the possibility of assault, to the inevitability of her submission in a man’s world where, ‘I, like my mother, // wait to be bent to better congruities.’ But there is also that sense in this that ‘My faith in God was inevitable as an oil spill.’ Thus, Ghazal Ali juggles with the absolute sense that the secular with all its threats and opportunities runs almost in parallel with the religious. It is a testament to her skill that she is able to do this while allowing both those spheres of influence to work together. This unity is personified for Ghazal Ali in the life of Maryam/Mary the mother of Jesus, who is both mother and witness, and whose life Ghazal Ali places at the forefront of many of the poems in this book with great adroitness and musicality. Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies has now found a British publisher after receiving a slew of prizes in the US.
Ian Pople‘s Spillway: New and Selected Poems is published by Carcanet. His Substack is: https://ifanything95.substack.com/
*****
Wonder by Chris Emery. £10.99. Salt. ISBN: 9781784633707. Reviewed by Mike Farren
Wonder is the fifth collection from Chris Emery, some of his earlier ones being credited to Christopher Hamilton-Emery. Marking what appears to be a prolific period for Emery, this volume follows on the heels of 2024’s Modern Fog (Arc) and continues many of the characteristics of that collection.
‘Wonder’, as the epigraphs (from Acts of the Apostles, a song by Pvt. Cecil Gant and a poem by Thomas Traherne) make clear, refers to both the verbal (‘to speculate’) and the noun (both ‘a thing to be awed by’ and ‘the feeling of awe inspired by such a thing’) senses of the word. The title (and first) poem embodies both of these senses, beginning, “But what happens when a rook dies?” before going on to venture an answer:
I bet they each turn all their feathers into a primal coat
of darkness close to wonder. (‘Wonder’)
However, there is little that is mystical or awe-inspiring about the wonder in question in these poems. Most often, they seem almost like overheard conversations, in which the internal logic of the text is only opaque to the reader because of the sense of having tuned in in the middle of the exchange, with unknown names being exchanged between those who are familiar with them.
Often, the poems seem to revel in the smallness and mundanity of their subject matter, as if delighting in finding wonder in such unlikely places. For example, ‘The Services’ (about a motorway service station) begins, “We stop for a slash and nuggets”, before pausing, in turn, to dwell on “Hits of the Eighties”, “farty cartons of meat”, “extractor pipes” and “A smell / of sugar and piss”. Tellingly, however, the poem ends with the aphoristic words, “All that is loved lives to be lost”, affirming the value of the brief, functional encounter.
In poems such as this, or ‘The Statue’ there is a kind of kitchen-sink surrealism at play, in which the self-conscious grittiness of “all those sixties / movies of ‘The North’” (‘The Statue’) teeters on the brink of turning into a nightmare, mostly without quite tumbling over. I am most reminded not of J.H. Prynne, to whom Emery has often been compared, but rather Matthew Sweeney, the dedicatee of the poem ‘Sent Here’, which ends with the questions:
And did we find he left us there? Moving on
from shattered frame to frame,
tilting out on one dependable balcony,
watching the empty birds collapsing
over the Hauptfriedhof and counting
steps from the last aborted tram?
This abiding tone can subtly shift in a number of different directions. One, becoming more marked in the latter half of the collection, is a more full-on atmosphere of the surreal. Sometimes, this can be laugh-out-loud funny, as in ‘The Crabs’, where a conversation with ‘Trish’ about drinking and abstention ends with the couplet:
We keep at it, volunteering through the small hours,
not drinking, inside our tiny purple shells.
However, the litany of “the yellow rind of Venus” (‘War Games’), “fossilised coyote” (‘A Town Called ‘Proverbs’’) or “industrial crows” (‘Goodbye, Gifford’) – amusing and evocative as it is – could become cloying without the sense that there is some emotional truth being conveyed. Fortunately, there is enough of that to balance the surrealist whimsy.
‘Them Situationals’ begins in just such whimsy, with gardening Jimi talking like a Glen Baxter cowboy, before describing the idea behind the title concept:
I think I learned a lot back then,
about those common joys, what I like to call
the situationals. The things we don’t just live among,
but in, the life inside the things we see.
This being in it is the most important thing
for us. Heck, time don’t matter much.”
There’s plenty of thought, much of it masquerading as homespun or conversational, behind the whimsy and absurdism. And above all, there is that titular ‘wonder’, hard won or recovered from the mundane. ‘Wonder’ is as multifaceted a collection as it is a concept – amusing and baffling; banal and awe-inspiring; shallow as chit-chat and deep as philosophy – and all the while, through the veins of these poems, “The smart blood sings, / Make haste, it sings, Bring us wonder, bring rain.” (‘It’s Here Again’)
Mike Farren’s poems have appeared in journals such as Rialto, Stand, 14 Magazine and The Interpreter’s House. He has also won several competitionsHis pamphlets are Pierrot and his Mother (Templar), All of the Moons (Yaffle) and Smithereens (4Word). In 2024, he was one of Ilkley Literature Festival’s New Northern Poets and in 2025 he was accepted onto the Arvon Foundation’s Advanced Writing Programme. He is part of Yaffle Publishing and one of the hosts of Shipley’s ‘Rhubarb’ open mic. Website: https://www.mikefarren.co.uk/
*****
Darling Blue by Sarah James. £9.50. Indigo Press. ISBN 978-1-912876-97-6. Reviewed by Gary Day
Anyone who’s been in love will find something of their experience reflected in this daring and tender volume. Daring because James writes frankly about her affair with a married man and tender because she moves from the convulsions of passion to the calm of, well, true love. Passion burns and breaks, love heals and restores. ‘It took me years of watching and waiting/to trust that such broken things, even me,/might be coaxed by him to shine again.’ (‘Love’s Slow Art) The ‘him’ being her husband whom she met after the split with her lover.
The difference between the delicious toxicity of lust and the lasting joys of the real thing is beautifully realised in ‘His Heart’: ‘no sculpted artistic marble/but a bloody red mess of throbbing muscle/ keeping everything going’. The one is a monumental idealisation the other a real, creative chaos. The lover is obviously the first part of the comparison, the husband the second. ‘Marble’ is slightly disconcerting. It suggests a coldness which is at odds with the ‘fires inside’ described in ‘Your Fingers’. Alternatively the image can be viewed as an emotion recollected a long time after the event, when behaving badly in hotel rooms can be seen in its proper perspective.
Marble is, of course, cold and blue is a colour associated with coldness. Throughout the speaker refers to her lover as ‘blue’ or ‘darling blue’. Of course ‘blue’ has other connotations: calm, peace, serenity, sadness and melancholy. The word’s many associations foreground the complexity and contradictions of l’amour fou. Despite now being happy and fulfilled in her marriage the speaker confesses to still carrying ‘a small flame of you with me’ but ‘blue’ is now ‘the summer sky’ and ‘so intense it can only ever grow deeper’ (‘My Last Unsent Letter’).
There are four poems in the volume titled ‘Dear Blue’. In the first the speaker explains that she calls her lover ‘Blue’ for several reasons: secrecy, his eye colour and because it has ‘the widest range of hues’. But already the deficiencies of the relationship are evident: ‘I’ve no idea what to do/with all the love notes I can’t send’ (‘Dear Blue 1’). The difficulties and frustrations of communication become even more evident in ‘Dear Blue (2)’ and they come to a head in ‘Dear Blue’ (3) and (4) with the speaker’s decision not to write to her lover anymore. Of course there is a lot more going on in these particular poems than the problem of a faulty connection. There is the sense of being intensely alive, a delirious ecstasy: but its side effect, as the speaker ruefully acknowledges, is to diminish the reality of the other parts of her life. Another element is the change from ‘love’ as something lived to something looked at-and it’s not a pretty sight: ‘the love she brought to life/has become a separate entity/another minotaur which refuses to die’ (‘Dear Blue’ 3).
The sequence of ‘Dear Blue’ poems is complemented by three that take their inspiration from Walter Crane’s painting ‘Neptune’s Horses’ (1910). If the former wrestle with the nature of the speaker’s attachment, the latter assert her freedom, her refusal to be tamed, her ‘sky-wide soul chart[ing] more than time and miles’ (‘Neptune’s Horse Dances’). Each one of these three poems strikes a defiant note, ‘Try to ride me if you dare’ (‘More Than Neptune’s Horses’). They are filled with a spirit of exhilaration, ‘My mane and tail are unending swirls of spray’ (‘One of Neptune’s Horses Drinks from the Sea of Dreams’). Nevertheless there seems to be an air of anxiety about this little sequence, a feeling that the speaker is not wholly at ease in such vast spaces. It is not good, as she implies in another poem, to be ‘suspended in all possible futures’ (‘Before something burns or bursts’ after Priestesses of Delphi by John Collier).
Poetry and painting are in constant conversation throughout this collection. The drama of the former is projected onto the latter and back again, in an endless exchange. The paintings are nearly all Pre-Raphaelite and James has helpfully provided barcodes for readers to scan. The choice of Pre-Raphaelite painting is inspired because it is a peculiar blend of sensuousness and conventional morality. There is a strong sense of the former in some of these poems ‘The light kiss of artists’ brush-tips to their painting’s skin, the liquid flow caressing the canvas, the /pouring out of souls’ (‘Closed Book, Open Painting’) but little sense of the latter. The lover’s wife barely figures in the speaker’s reflections on her relationship with another woman’s husband. And yet this is where the poems are, paradoxically, most ‘moral’. They show that our usual notions of right and wrong are based on some ideal of ourselves rather than on what we actually are, creatures in perpetual flux.
The decision to explore a relationship through poetry and painting shows how important the aesthetic is to understanding ourselves. There are hints that the lover is an art lecturer: ‘If I were a painting would he cut me from my frame?’ This is from one of the prose passages in the volume, ‘Object(ive) Evaluation’. They read like journal entries and the reader is left to ponder the connections between prose and poetry and painting. The question becomes particularly acute in ‘Me’, a framed blank page. At the bottom is a little box half in and half out of the frame which contains the admonition ‘Leave enough blank space, life will rush into to fill it.’ But as what? Poetry? Prose? Portrait?
James is endlessly fascinating as she explores the nature of love and desire, relationships and the difference between fantasy and reality. What she shows, unsurprisingly, is that there are no answers but there is always art.
Gary Day is a retired English teacher and the author of several books including Class, Literary Criticism : A New History and The Story of Drama. His poems have appeared in Acumen and Beyond Words. His poem ‘Anne Bronte’s Grave’ was shortlisted and highly commended in the Artemesia 2024 Poetry Competition. ‘About Daffodils’ was shortlisted for Vole Poetry Competition 2024 and published in Vole’s Autumn Anthology, Autumn Makes Me Sing, 2024.
*****
Accepting the Call by Tim Dwyer. £12. Templar Poetry. ISBN: 9781911132776. Reviewed by Colin Dardis
Throughout this, the first full-length collection from Dwyer, we encounter geese, gulls, a Canada jay, pied wagtails, a mockingbird, herons, a crow, magpies, cormorants, jackdaws, a blackbird, a robin and more. These serve as various symbols where needed: migration (Dwyer is a Brooklyn, New York native, now residing in Northern Ireland), departure, arrival, or just a representation of Dwyer’s appreciation for nature.
The short piece ‘Grey Herons’ is a key poem, the need for stillness versus movement, the speaker watching a line of six herons, still as ‘standing stones’; the poet watches for so long that ‘I become the seventh stone’. In ‘Murmuration’, Dwyer states he feels ‘at home with birds on sidewalks’, marvelling at an iridescent cloud of starlings, previously only knowing ‘pigeons and sparrows’, described as his ‘long-time companions’ in ‘Wayfaring Through Bangor’.
The reader suspects a type of ornithomancy is occurring, the birds either as good or bad omens. Dwyer seeks fixity, ‘constancy | to the past and what’s ahead’ as he deals with cancer treatment (two magpies appear in ‘After The Scan Results’, a traditional sign for joy) and memories of his upbringing. An ‘old friend departs’, a woman sings of ‘a sailor missing at sea’:
he returns to his love
but cannot embrace her –
he’s a ghost, lost
among relentless waves
Elsewhere, the poet dreams of a ghost in the kitchen: ‘the house is empty. The living have ‘gone’. A rest on a bench with a memorial plaque results in a moment where the poet is ‘free | from the future and the past’; looking ahead with some degree of fear, ‘Time Along The Shore’ speculates on when ‘cancer blurs my mind and I let go of time and place’. Indeed, the focus and mood of the poems often flit between tenses. In ‘Bereft’, admiring the evergreens of the Catskills, the poet exclaims:
Yesterday, tomorrow and today
Nature has its place,
and for a moment I am in it
The fact that the poem occurs on All Soul’s Day, where masses are offered for the souls of the faithful departed, adds to the sense of rumination. However, whatever place nature has is fragile, and peace fleeting. After catching ‘the scent of sweet birch’, the scent is lost within a ‘few steps either way’ (‘At Tod’s Point’). A meadow with a moose and the song of a jay moves back to silence and ‘the snow untouched’ (‘Late Winter, Mercy Dam’). Allusions to the now-absent Twin Towers of New York give an unexpected shift in time, marking a turning point, as if peace can only be found in the past.
In ‘Far Enough Into Spring’, touching upon Dwyer’s psychological work in prisons, there is a memory of his mother and what reality she may had held:
… I picture my mother.
Her real tragedies hidden
by incidental worries –
how long to brew the tea,
whether to sleep with the window
slightly ajar
The poet’s father also appears: his spirit present alongside Dwyer during a shoreline walk; sleeping in a bunkhouse in Galway barracks before disappearing ‘into the American maze’; a dream of the poet phoning the father, noting how ‘heaven has really brough out | the conversationalist in him’. The mother then talks the call, and another defiance in the face of death occurs:
No words for the joy that her daughter
taken from her in Tuam
has become the big sister
I visit in Galway
However, the reader cannot conclude whether the sister’s survival is real or not; perhaps within the context of the poem’s dreamscape, it is enough to imagine the possibility. Faced with one’s own ephemerality, it is natural to imagine these paternal visitations, and to revisit such ground. Yet there is only tenderness in these poems, without melancholy or doom. Although recognising sadness, the poems move towards some move of acceptance. Such as with the stone herons, a ‘sparrow with attitude… going nowhere… challenges me | to hold my ground’ (‘Weather Front’), again reminds the reader that permanence and change are key concerns for Dwyer. There is starkness in the proclamation ‘With cancer comes an urgency’, stated in a poem that immediately precedes ‘There Is A House I Pass’, observing the front room window of ‘an aged person… in a convalescence bed’. At the time, Dwyer hesitated to wave at the dying person, and now:
The bed has been replaced
with a reading lamp and an empty chair.
When the front widow becomes my outdoors,
I hope to be the first to wave.
A wave is perhaps a small gesture, but here it exploded into a refusal to let death win, to still thirst for life and what it offers. Such is the lasting tone of Accepting The Call. This is a collection not afraid to grapple with mortality, but balances fear with a fascination for life and nature in a way that never feels morose. Rather when the poet beseeches that ‘may no new cancer stars be discovered in my galaxy’, the reader does not feel depressed, but instead is invited to look up at the stars alongside Dwyer.
Colin Dardis is a poet, editor and sound artist from Northern Ireland. He co-hosts the long-running open mic night, Purely Poetry, in Belfast, and edits the Poem Alone blog. His latest collections are My Life Is A Film I Haven’t Yet Watched (prose, Buttonhook Press, 2025) and Microcosms, a collection of 500 senryu.
*****
Not Fiction by Roger Elkin. £9.50. Littoral Press. ISBN: 9781912412617. Reviewed by Gareth Writer-Davies
Well, this is a grim narrative. And enough to make me uncomfortable at times. Do we need another bloody death of a young woman at the hands of a spurned man?
It’s lucky that we’re with an experienced poet, who knows where to draw the line, that a little light must be let into the darkness.
And it is a true story, of the murderer Sam Thorley and his victim the ballad singer Ann Smith; dismemberment and cannibalism bringing extra horror to the deed.
An antique engraving of Astbury Church in the Deanery of Congleton adorns the cover; a part time gravedigger, Thorley might have known it.
Two sections to the book and a useful Sources, the first section of almost fifty pages being a series of poems with titles starting Of and taking the role of getting inside the killer’s mind. I could imagine some of these verses being set to music and sung:
Digging, you come across beloved,
come across death’s friend
the saddleback worm
gliding towards nothingness
reducing all to slime.
This is from ‘Of death, and the visitations of death’ though the first poems of the sub-titled
‘Reckonings
being the Maunderings of one Sam Thorley’
are more pastoral, the calm before the storm, though even the first verse of the first poem ‘Of the whittling of wood’ contains premonitions amongst its lyrical flair:
Lissom this thicker-than-twig
though not fully limblike, more a finger
its knot for a knuckle.
Glean it smooth. Firm.
Shape it into bodkin to peg back
her tresses, that fall of hair
by page twenty-six and ‘Of cuts of butchery’ there are vivid descriptions as we follow Thorley around his occasional employment:
Sheep brains, a drained grey mess,
giving, and succulent.
Succulent, too, their kidney liveries,
their chains of office, guts silver-shimmering
…
The kinship of blood,
its everywhereness.
Its finger-stickiness, its ingraining
of nails, carmine-hard and black-lined.
By a poet less adept this could be too grotesque but Elkin is well in control of the viscera.
The second section is titled ‘Priesty Fields’ the location of the bloody murder and the first two poems introduce us fully to Sam Thorley and then Ann Smith the tramping ballad singer, living by her wits, saved from utter destitution by her fine voice with which she regales tavern and market as well as collecting rags for resale and a few pennies.
She is described very much in the way of 18th century ballads (these events took place in 1776):
….this buxom wench as fetching
as vetch.
the voyeurism of Sam is graphic in ‘Catching a glimpse of Ann across the tavern floor’
His scan-surreptitious, under brow, transfixed, again
and again-takes in her form, the gangliness of youth gone,
her arms a burgeoning girth, and breasts. Her breasts. There.
Welcoming. And her hair, that waterfalling darkness
he could lose and find himself in. Curled, swirling.
The reader could see this as sleazy but we are looking through the killer’s eyes, a pyschopath, already an outcast. An oddity amongst others, the same could be said of Anne, though only a couple of poems flesh out the bones of she, the victim’s story.
The murder is done by Howty Brook and in the poem ‘About eight in the evening, Hannah Oakes is startled’ Thorley returns to his former lodgings, wet and more than usually dishevelled:
It is then as he steps across the threshold, his feet squelching,
she clocks his sopping breeches.
Human meat is unknowingly cooked by ex-landlady Hannah, eaten by Thorley but instant nausea overcomes him;
‘No more It in’t fit ter eat. Keep it fer th’ dog. Th’ dog can ‘ave it.’
The body is found, ‘And to a barn, that night Sam also goes’ where he hides:
Tomorrow Sam moves on.
Has heard gravediggers are needed in Leek.
For now has the cows. Their warmth. Their milk.
Their forgiving. Things most folk don’t own…
I’m aware I’m giving a lot of the story away, so I shall desist for the sake of potential buyers but this is above all a known narrative and I will reveal that Thorley pays the ultimate cost for his crime, as a note tells us on page eighty-three.
Elkin handles with great aplomb the mix of fact and lyrical, grisly verse; here are some examples from the first section where he shows his subtle skills before the grand guignol of section two.
From ‘Of the kestrel’s menace’:
That practised a watcher
he misses no trick.
Is quicker than wit
in meeting death head on.
Hanging above grass,
even his shadow harasses.
And his plunge suddenly bloodied
with claws yellowy extending
takes more than breath away.
and this from ‘Of Howty’s gift’:
All surface from a distance,
its depths hidden unknown.
Like a mind.
And the dreams of water.
The nightmares.
So looks innocent
trickling by Mill Bridge
with the clarity of glass and as cold.
before the ghastliness of discovery in ‘This fearing of the worst makes Garside send’:
All told, a dozen or more body parts
shockingly beautiful in their raw nudity,
the way the beads of water necklace
the milk-white skin made whiter, purer
by the chunking cuts, the crimson gleams
of clooted blood spots, the splintered glint
of bone-much too much for any of them
let alone an adolescent lad to handle-
Elkin is a fine writer, but as I disclosed at the start, part of me thinks that this collection should not have been written. I will leave others-those with maybe stronger stomachs-to decide. If you purchase you will find a tale well told and a safe pair of hands to take you through it.
Gareth Writer-Davies is from Brecon. His publications are Bodies (2015) and Cry Baby (2017) with Indigo Dreams, and The Lover’s Pinch (2018) and The End (2019), with Arenig Press.
*****
The Alderbank Wade by Alan Morrison. £12. Culture Matters. ISBN: 978-1-912710-96-7. Reviewed by Tom Phillips
The Alderbank Wade is that relatively rare beast, a novel in verse or, more precisely, a novel in mostly half-rhyming couplets. Deploying a lightly historicised English, it relates the story of two men caught up in seventeenth-century dissident movement the Diggers and of the short-lived community they are instrumental in establishing in the aftermath of the English Civil War. It’s certainly a fascinating, albeit brief, period in the country’s history, but one which hasn’t tended to attract as much interest as Tudor court intrigues or the civil war itself and the execution of Charles I – presumably because it represents a moment when utopian ideals promised a genuinely egalitarian alternative to both the old monarchical-aristocratic order and Cromwell’s increasingly autocratic republicanism. A communist-style revolution, no less, and on English soil.
Alan Morrison dramatises this radical movement’s rise and fall through that of a fictional Digger community in Hampshire, but its story overlaps with those of the real-life versions that came into existence elsewhere in the country and their founders. The resultant seventeen-part poem is certainly rich with authentic historical detail – the lobster pot helmets, the austere men in black garb, the furtively distributed broadsides – and successfully conveys the multi-layered conflicts between different political and religious factions that led to the civil war and endured beyond it. At times, perhaps, exposition gets the better of the narrative (and the poetry), and it’s probably fair to say that some elements of the story – most notably the realities of day-to-day life in the Alderbank Digger community – could have been afforded more space and detail at the expense of the narrator’s musings of the paradoxes of Calvinism and other doctrines.
That said, Morrison’s main focus for much of the poem is the psychodrama prompted by and echoing the external conflict and playing out in the minds of that narrator, pamphleteer Jared Amory – who describes himself as “embattled in my mind” and prone to “long fugues of muteness” – and his old childhood friend Gideon Wade. A mercurial convert to the Digger cause after initially fighting on the Royalist side, Gideon discovers the ideas being disseminated by the Levellers after being captured by the Parliamentarians, but, following his ideological conversion, wants to push further against “entrenched inequalities”, even at the risk of “provoking/The upper powers” on the Cromwellian side. When the Alderbank estate is liberated from a wealthy Enclosure-favouring Royalist family, Gideon, now a captain in the New Model Army, and his men occupy it and start putting into practice what the Diggers themselves call their “True Leveller” principles of communal ownership, communal life and communal labour. In short, he goes from “Haybale bumpkin to blazing radical” and becomes “a folk devil – the Radical Alderbank Wade”. As often happens with would-be utopian communities, however, Alderbank succumbs to both internal schism and external threat, and the narrative proceeds with tragic inevitability towards the destruction of the Digger outpost and the rather more ambiguous fate of its founder.
Around this main narrative, Morrison pursues a number of sub-plots that explore the impact of ideological conflict on generational relationships within families, Jared’s undeclared infatuation with Gideon’s sister Daralyn and the erratic health of Gideon’s epileptic brother Rufus. It’s through these that the contemporary resonances emerge most clearly. It’s hard not to think of the social and familial ruptures unleashed by Brexit or other so-say culture wars today when reading of how political and religious passions divided families and communities during this period of seventeenth-century upheaval. The narrative isn’t an allegory in the style of, say, Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare’s critique of communist totalitarianism via narratives set during the country’s Ottoman occupation, but the contemporary echoes are telling and that may explain why Morrison has decided to return to a story he originally conceived of as being a novel in prose thirty-odd years ago, but subsequently abandoned.
Telling the Diggers’ story in verse is, of course, very much in line with the conventions of the time when, both on the page and in the theatre, poetry tended to do most of the heavy lifting where telling stories was concerned and what we now call the modern novel was only just starting to form. Morrison’s verse, however, is determinedly less polished than that of Marvell or the neo-classicists who followed, such as Dryden or Pope. Occasionally stretching half-rhyme to its weaker extremes (“army”/“furtively”, “being”/“pounding”, “contents”/“respects” and so on), but not shying away from full rhymes when they offer themselves as a viable alternative, his is a kind of rough music and, again, that seems very much in line with the character of his narrator as a scribe and pamphleteer. That this sometimes feels awkward and slightly forced, especially in combination with long sentences full of sub-clauses that unfurl across multiple line-breaks, can make it seem as if there’s quite a lot of chaff simply there to fill in the gaps in the self-imposed scheme or even that some passages might have benefitted from being put into prose. On the other hand, the very roughness of the music and the occasionally prosaic explanatory passages also mean that the poetic felicities – “the ripening shrubs of an upcoming Republic”, “snow-/Capped summits surmounting mounts of shadow” (to describe typical Puritan dress) and “I have long limped lame with a crook staff for crutch” (the narrator describing himself in the epilogue) – stand out all the more sharply.
Tom Phillips is a writer, translator and lecturer living in Bulgaria where he teaches at Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski. His most recent publications include his translations of Bulgarian modernist poet Geo Milev, Once There Was Spring (Worple Press, 2025) with a volume of Kristin Dimitrova’s poems, A Moment Short of Perfection (White Pine Press) and his own poems originally written in Bulgarian, Self-portrait with Tobacco Moustache (Da Poetry), due next year.
*****
Continuous Present by D.A.Prince. £7.00. New Walk Editions. ISBN: 978-1-7392812-8-1. Reviewed by Rowena Sommerville
The opening poem of this brief pamphlet is entitled ‘….in my average moments’ which is a phrase from Marianne Moore’s poem ‘When I Buy Pictures’ – a poem which describes that poetic titan’s requirements of pictures or objects which she might purchase and which ends by saying that any such object ‘must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it’. In her poem DA Prince describes the continuous present of her life, noticing moments, ‘scraps of time’, ‘the exceptional everywhere’, which can enliven and enlighten ‘the relentless weight of my own hours’.
In ‘Through the Train Window’ she celebrates those (Adlestrop) moments on trains when you feel yourself suspended between realities – ‘between one nameless station and the next’:
when an instant of silver light
hums through high grasses,
their pool of rippling seed heads
hedged with the weight of elder,
green shadows, a dance of willow
before the engine picks up speed.
In ‘The Mountains of Mourne’ she is reminded of her childhood, of her father’s ‘gentle baritone’ singing the title song, and is plunged back to when her father built a garage with the help of ‘neighbouring husbands’, while in the present:
Just a few notes – the radio in the next room
playing to emptiness, and here’s more of distance
than a map can show.
In ‘Daily Bread’ she beautifully describes the process of making bread by hand:
Until the machine broke, beyond repair,
my fingers had forgotten the slubbed-silk feel
of flour, the stoneground’s almost grit,
its welcoming way with water.
I love her thoughtful celebration of the everyday, which makes it everything but everyday of course, her focus and appreciation of her present experience. In ‘Routine Appointment’ she relates a conversation with her hairdresser who, we gather, has been referred for a heart scan but must wait ten months for it (short waiting lists being far from ‘routine’, sadly). Prince relays the tone of their exchange:
xxxxxxxAnd, yes, her dog’s OK. We’re good
at surfaces, at hearts, the brighter side.
In ‘Making New’ she seems to be looking at a leaflet or similar promoting an overseas radio museum – ‘a world of dials and tunings, squeaks and whistling’, and remembers what the radio offered, presumably in a time long before the internet:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxFor you
it’s grandparents and a shortwave set, the magic names
scrolled through and through, stretching their home
beyond the Midlands.
And in ‘These Days’ she describes someone occasionally glimpsed in a variety of situations, who may have a more serious purpose than merely, say, driving or shopping, and who will, one day, catch the eye of all of us:
In the waiting room she has a chair
near the receptionist, something complicit
you strain to hear. In the midst of life we are –
you catch the echo trailing off. She’s constant,
tidy, working through a list, slowly
crossing through every person, name by name.
The majority of poems in Continuous Present, which has an ‘endless’ Moebius strip on its cover, quietly explore and celebrate Moore’s ‘spiritual forces’ which reinforce and transcend ‘average moments’, modelling for us an intelligent, thoughtful and resilient way to live, conscious of the eternal here and now. I very much enjoyed the collection, and my only wish would have been for more.
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.
*****
Skail by Richie McCaffery. £7. New Walk editions. 978-1-7392812-7-4. Reviewed by Patrick Davidson Roberts
In his 1974 review of Philip Larkin’s High Windows (for Encounter), the late Clive James posited that
Larkin has never liked the idea of an artist Developing. Nor has he himself done so. But he has managed to go on clarifying what he was sent to say.
The latter, by implication, being a thing distinct from the former. I mention this because Richie McCaffery is one of the more scholarly poets of our generation, and so a wearing of his reading in his writing would be neither unlikely or unwelcome. McCaffery has impressively and consistently championed the work of other, frequently lesser-known, writers alongside his building a personal body of poetry that stands – with a mix of scowl and sensitivity – in the first rank of a not untalented generation. That body of work, though, is only ever of his own voice. His studentship and championing of Ians Hamilton and Abbot, of Joan Ure and John Herdman, clearly exist apart from McCaffery’s poetry which does, indeed, go on clarifying what he was sent to say.
In Skail (old Scots: a scattering or dispersal), you might expect the exiled or isolated (long a mainstay or McCaffery’s poetry) to give a sense of weightless or even hopeless abondenment. That’s not what’s found. In the opener, ‘Grandfather Clock’, the unsettled is far from unclear:
An Edwardian manor house
left to rot by a developer
who just wants the land.
Doors and windows caked
in mould and shit, thrown
open to pigeons and vandals.
All apart from the tall clock,
freshly French polished,
which gives the impression
it stopped dead when you
walked in and will go on
ticking when you leave.
The sense of having stumbled in on something is coldly and clearly dispersed by the tone that from the first poem to the last dominates the book: considered, quizzical, critical. Later, in ‘Woodwork’, we read of
The nights he doesn’t drink are those
when he tosses and turns alone, well
past the witching hour as if his body
was splintery wood on a lathe,
becoming less and less of what it was
and more of something else.
You could almost read this as a challenge to James’ juxtaposition of Developing with reiteration, and read of someone being taken away – and that’s without the drink that wets a fair few of these poems. McCaffery is not, though, refining here. He is becoming more and more himself, with the air of a voice circling, cold, controlled. It is braced-up, it is almost letting-loose, it is frightening, and it is thrilling.
McCaffery eschews the light and wispy implications of Skail’s title, and nowhere more so than at the climax of the title poem, concerning the scattering of old ashes
But the bulk of his ash was left to her, and went
headfirst into the remains of the vegetable bed.
And though it was a wet night, the dust cloud of him
hovered under the streetlamp, as if getting its bearings.
As the poet himself suggests in the penultimate line, the wet night should diminish or smear the metaphor. Instead, the wet night weightens the image. Rather than a hovering ghost, an embodied form is called forth, and the thrill of imagining where it’s off to next is palpable. Several of these poems I’ve tracked in magazines and periodicals over the past few years, and I notice that they have shifted from the first to the third person. As a passable empathetic and admirer of McCaffery I’m pleased that some distance has been gained in that shift, and the poems in particular (the stark and beautiful ‘Heft’ in particular) have grown with it. Whether it is development or continuance, then, is of no real concern. Skail is a firm and excellent addition to McCaffery’s work, with the circling-upward and considered tone of a poet flexing real skill and real work.
Patrick Davidson Roberts lives in Shincliffe, Co. Durham. His first collection is The Mains (Vanguard Editions, 2018) and a chapbook The Trick (Broken Sleep Books, 2023) followed. Divided Tongues, his second full collection, will be published 31st December 2025 by Broken Sleep Books). He has been widely published and reviews for the High Window and Wild Court.
*****
Even God Gets Distracted Sometimes by Luigi Coppola & Mark Shuttleworth. £19.99. Broken Sleep Books. ISBN 9781917617178. Reviewed by Rona Fitzgerald
This debut collection of poems and art from Broken Sleep Press, explores contemporary life through fables, satire and reimagining’s.
Luigi Coppola has featured at Glastonbury Festival, Tate Modern, Greenwich Theatre, Koestler Arts, Cutty Sark, Southbank Centre’s New Poets Collective. Poetry Archive Worldview winner, Bridport shortlist, Ledbury & National longlist, Lost Souls & Farrago Slam Champion, music as ‘The Only Emperor.’ He can be seen on YouTube reading his poems. Mark Shuttleworth is a visual artist; he is described in the book’s opening page as ‘the bramble in the bushes.’
The challenge in reviewing this book is considerable. Language and image stimulate our imagination in a powerful manner. Coppola’s poems and their titles present us with images, stories and innovative approaches to engagement with language. Shuttleworth’s art work is visceral, apposite, not just complimenting the poems but enhancing the imaginative engagement. The images are visually alluring, so vivid in some cases, it draws my eye into a world of fright.
The book’s title is daring. It made me think of the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski whose essay asked Is God Happy? By involving God, both authors draw us in to the scale and scope of their considerations in poems and essays. In this case, Coppola suggests a knowledge of God that involves him in our humanity and allows an association with our world of many distractions: the opening stanza lays out the theme:
EVEN GOD GETS DISTRACTED SOMETIMES
I got halfway through then gave up:
the beak an empty orbit;
the breast strung out like a Stradivarius;
the wings this as slices of rump veal
soaked in milky confidence.
In the final stanza, God’s dilemma is akin to ours, distraction and a degree of helplessness in the face of life, human beings and other creature. Thus, giving us an ironic take on the origin story of Adam and Eve:
Damn all those distractions to earth:
that serpent slithering, whispering again
and those two giggling malcontents
munching on something
they were told
explicitly
not to pluck
The range of themes in the writing in considerable including death, machines, seasons, and the sweep of history, science, as well as the immanence of God. There is also light heartedness. In the poem Pigeon, taut rhyme and playfulness bring out Coppola’s wry humour and skill:
THE PIGEON
After ‘The Eagle’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson
He claws the curb with crannied digits;
Near to a bin he pecks and fidgets,
Wrung with salmonella rickets.
Between the frothing cars he dashes;
He flops with fractured wings and thrashes,
And like a stumbling drunk he crashes
There are considerable riches in this substantial book. I found a Samuel Becket-like sensibility, touching on poignant aspects of our experience as human beings and, also, capturing the ridiculous nature of humanity. There are also jaunty rhymes. For example: ‘The Ballad of Sir Roger.’ Many poems echo familiar stories, adding another dimension. They lend themselves to performance. There is a script for production called: ‘The Brother’s Greed.’ The writing is fluid and engaging with a Story Teller as the central voice and a dog that animates the story.
The range of poems and art work is impressive. The Words and images combine to create a world that is changeable, shaky and yet at times, light hearted or droll. There is considerable formal skills like rhyme, form as well as free verse. Even God Gets Distracted Sometimes offers a range of treasures. The style is interrogative and playful, engaging the reader in how language and art can explore life, death, fable, living, regret, failure and isolation.
Rona Fitzgerald was born in Dublin. She now lives in Glasgow. Her poems and stories have been published in many online and print magazines including; The Stinging Fly, Oxford Poetry, the Blue Nib, Dreich, Littoral, Marble Broadsheet, The Storms, Fixator press, Culture Matters and The High Window. Her collection, Aftermath: Poems of Repair and Renewal, was published by Inherit the Earth Press in in 2023.
*****
Paradiso by Dante Alighieri, translated by D. M. Black. $22.95. New York Review of Books. ISBN: 978-1-68137-943-2. Reviewed by Edmund Prestwich
I would warmly recommend D. M. Black’s translation of Dante’s Paradiso, both to people who already know and love Dante and to those who don’t but are ready to take on a long poem of medieval religious vision. I hope my discussion will show the nature of the work’s contents to people who haven’t read Paradiso in any translation, and that my quotations will give those who do know it already a flavour of Black’s particular style. I’ll say a bit more about this at the end of the piece.
Paradiso is of course the third and culminating section or cantica of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It shows how Dante the pilgrim, having travelled down through the increasingly dreadful circles of Hell (in Inferno) and climbed the mountain of Purgatory (in Purgatorio) ascends through the various heavens to reach the Empyrean and be granted a vision of the saved souls, the angels and God himself, beyond space and time in eternity. Being the third and last, it’s also the least read; readers who don’t stay the course never reach it. It also offers different satisfactions to the preceding cantiche. Inferno,where Dante meets the souls of those who died hopelessly at odds with God’s will, is the most obviously and often terrifyingly dramatic. It also offers the most compellingly tragic or bitterly ironic stories of the dead souls’ actions on earth. In Purgatorio, drama is of a gentler and less intense kind because everyone Dante now meets wills the same thing and is on course to achieve it. However, we’re still deeply engaged on a human level because sympathetic and loving emotions are sharpened and hauntingly entwined with acceptance of sacrifice and loss, above all when Virgil, Dante’s beloved guide and almost father, must return to Hell. In Paradiso, Dante ascends through the various heavens towards a vision of the divine. Guided by Beatrice, he receives lessons on the way from souls representing different forms and degrees of holiness. The glory of this cantica is not in stories of life on earth but in the ravishing poetry with which it presents stupendous visions of order, love and light.
This poetry draws power from opposing sources. In the first canto of Paradiso Dante invents a word – ‘trasumanar’ – to signify the passing beyond the human condition that he says enabled him to receive visions superhuman in scale and purity. However, what makes these visions so moving is that they’re continuously infused with sensitively evoked human feeling, whether in the way the saved souls are presented or in the ongoing stories of Dante the pilgrim’s reactions to what he sees and Dante the narrator’s struggles to recall and express his experience. Similarly, Dante is a highly visual poet, but passing beyond the human involves passing beyond what we can visualise, and some of the most memorable passages intensely activate the visual imagination in order to force it into trying to conceive the inconceivable.
Sublime conceptions are present from the start. In the heaven of the moon, Dante meets the humblest of the blest. When Dante asks one of them – Piccarda Donati – if souls like her desire a ‘higher place / to see more and to be yet more beloved’,
She and the other shades first smiled a little –
and then she answered me with so much joy
she seemed ablaze with the first fire of love:
She explains that it is impossible for them or any of the saved to desire more than they have because that would be discordant with the will of God:
And in his will is found our peace: it is
that sea to which all beings move that are
by it created or by nature made.
This last tercet is often quoted, whether in Dante’s Italian or in different translations. What quiet power there is in the simple phrases, both in terms of their psychological and metaphysical meanings. What I find most stunning, though, is the imaginative reach that unites these vast ideas to the delicate humanity of ‘She and the other shades first smiled a little’. Love in the most absolute sense, the creative love of God, is brought together with the simple human joys of shared knowledge, shared feeling, and the ability to communicate these things, so that we feel how such emotions in this world offer glimpses of the divine.
Revelation follows revelation till the final four cantos, which present a rapidly evolving crescendo of vision as Dante sees more and more deeply into ultimate reality and for an instant sees into the mind of God as angels and blessed souls do. At first these visions are brilliantly visual. He tells us he saw:
light flowing like a river
of radiant gold between two banks, both painted
with all the marvelous blossoms of the spring;
and from that river came forth living sparks
that settled in the flowers on every side,
like rubies clasped within a golden setting,
and then, as if made drunk with perfume, they
dived back again into that marvelous torrent,
and as one entered it, another came out.
Dante dips his eyes into this river and it becomes the circle of eternity. Dante now sees that the flowers are human souls and the sparks are angels. He sees the court of eternity as a stupendously vast theatre in which the souls of the blessed are arranged in tiers according to their rank:
And therefore in the shape of a white rose
there was displayed to me the saintly host
Christ made his bride with his most precious blood;
but the other host which, flying, sees and sings
the Glory of him on whom their love is set,
and by whose Goodness it is made so vast,
like a task force of bees that at one moment
in-flower themselves, and at the next return
to where their labour will acquire its sweetness,
descended into that great flower, adorned
with petals in such multitude – and then
flew up to where their love forever lives.
And all their faces were like living flame,
their wings were golden, and the rest so white
no snow has ever equalled that perfection.
Vivid visual description continues as Dante looks at the highest saints in reverence and love and as Beatrice is replaced as Dante’s teacher by Saint Bernard, renowned for his dedication to the Virgin Mary. And then he is granted a vision of God himself, a vision beyond anything visual description can convey, beyond his power to express in words or even to recall. Almost magical images express the elusiveness of the vision itself:
Like one who has a vision in a dream,
and when the dream has passed the passion wakened
remains, but nothing else comes back to mind –
like such am I, for now my vision has
almost entirely ceased, yet still there trickles
into my heart the sweetness born of it.
Thus in the sun snow loses its sharp imprint;
thus in the wind the fluttering leaves disperse
the Sibyl’s utterance and it is lost.
(In Virgil’s Aeneid the Cumaean Sybil’s prophecies are recorded on leaves which are blown about and lost.)
O overflowing grace by which I dared
to fix my vision on eternal Light
till in it all my seeing was consumed!
And in its depth I saw, contained within,
and bound by Love into a single volume
what in the universe are scattered pages:
substance and accident and their relations
all, as it seemed, in such a way united
that what I speak of is a simple light;
and I believe I saw the universal
form of this unity, for even as
I speak of it I sense my joy expand.
Further attempts to find images for what he ‘sees’ break down but he’s left with a direct ineffable experience of insight into and oneness with divine Love:
And here my high imagining failed in power;
yet now already wish and will together,
like a wheel that spins with even motion, turned
with the Love that moves the sun and all the stars.
What I’ve said so far seems particularly geared to giving people who don’t know the Paradiso a sense of why it’s worth their time. Now I want to say why I’d recommend this specific translation, both to them and to those who do already know the work. I’m no Dante scholar and can’t judge Black’s version on purely scholarly grounds but I have enjoyed the Paradiso in several different translations, and wrestled with it in Italian. Black’s version is the one that’s given me the most intense imaginative experience and sheer reading pleasure. This is because he writes as a poet translating a poem into poetry for a wide readership, less concerned with word for word accuracy than an academic Dantist needs to be.
Dante’s sheer conception in the passages I’ve quoted so far is so powerful that it’s hard to know how to divide admiration between him and his translator. A few lines from the beginning of Canto xxx seem a fairer basis for comparing Black’s translation with two other versions to illustrate what I think is his special strength. The passage is an extended simile, and in the original goes
Forse semilia miglia di lontano
ci ferve l’ora sesta, e questo mondo
china già l’ombra quasi al letto piano,
quando ‘l mezzo del cielo a noi profondo,
comincia a farsi tal, ch’alcuna stella
perde il parere infino a questo fondo;
e come vien la chiarissima ancella
del sol più oltre, così ‘l ciel si chiude
di vista in vista infino a la più bella.
Black gives us this:
Maybe six thousand miles remote from us
the sixth hour burns, and here this world already
inclines earth’s shadow almost to the level,
when deep above us the mid-sky begins
to change, and here and there some stars no longer
send their appearance to the distant Earth –
and as the radiant handmaid of the sun
advances further, so the sky shuts down
light after light, including the most lovely:
Robert and Jean Hollander give:
About six thousand miles away from here
the sixth hour burns and even now this world
inclines its shadow almost to a level bed,
when, deep in intervening air, above us,
begins such change that here and there,
at our depth, a star is lost to sight.
And, as that brightest handmaid of the sun advances,
the sky extinguishes its lights,
even the most beautiful, one by one.
Robert Durling has:
Perhaps six thousand miles away the sixth
hour is burning, and our world is lowering its
shadow down almost to the level bed
when the transparency of the sky, deep
above us, begins to become such that some
stars no longer appear as far as this floor,
and as the brilliant handmaid of the sun
comes further up, so the sky closes itself, light
after light, even to the most beautiful.
Each version has its own beauties, phrases that cast their own unique spells. One wouldn’t want to be without any of the three, and no doubt if they were forced to choose different people would have different preferences. To my mind, though, there’s at least one respect in which Black has a clear edge: the sensitivity with which he orchestrates his syntax and its punctuation by line endings makes for a smoother and at the same time more dynamic and emotionally charged unfolding than we find in the other two, harmonising the inflexions of emphasis with the patterns of breath. The heightened emotional charge depends on details of phrasing and placement that may seem small in themselves but cumulatively both heighten the clarity and impact of the picture presented and bring them more home to the reader. For example, ‘remote from us’ directly invites the reader into the scene, standing him or her beside Dante, as against the Hollanders’ more abstract ‘away from here’. The Hollanders’ ‘even now this world / inclines its shadow’ uses emphatic phrasing, but buries ‘even now’ within the line. Black’s ‘here this world already / inclines earth’s shadow’ uses rhythm and cadence rather than rhetorical phrasing to achieve a quieter but more potent emphasis simply by placing ‘already’ at the end of the line and creating suspense as to what is already happening. As for ‘so the sky shuts down / light after light, including the most lovely’, that final line has a fluid beauty that almost breaks into song, befitting the crescendo of joy and love and wonder filling the final cantos of the Paradiso. The Hollanders’ line, ‘even the most beautiful, one by one’, achieves its emphasis on the gradual fading of the stars at the cost of underplaying their beauty. Black’s arrangement gives the fullest possible life to both the gradual fading and the loveliness. Durling’s version is actually in prose, as the introduction to his and Martinez’s edition points out, but is laid out in lines – presumably for ease of cross-reference with the Italian – in a way that sometimes makes for awkward interruptions of the flow.
It’s above all this kind of smooth but dynamic unfolding that makes Black’s version so expressive and so satisfying for continuous reading. Although he doesn’t rhyme his lines have a strong forward impulse that goes some way to capturing the momentum of Dante’s terza rima rhyme scheme. Another factor is that he makes sure his notes don’t get in the way. They’re presented in a clear, non-academic style and kept to what is useful to the general reader. They don’t wander into specialist areas of historical or linguistic enquiry. In more scholarly editions, the weight of background information and analysis can make it difficult to settle into a relaxed but focused, imaginatively receptive state of mind. As Black puts it in the Acknowledgments, ‘My guideline in these notes has been to provide just enough information for the reader who is momentarily puzzled, who asks the question “What is going on here?” but whose real wish is to get back to reading the poem.’
Edmund Prestwich grew up in South Africa but has spent his adult life in England where he taught English at the Manchester Grammar School till his retirement. He has published two collections: Through the Window with Rockingham Press and Their Mountain Mother with Hearing Eye. He has no claims to Dante scholarship but has been a long-term amateur reader of Dante in Italian and in different translations.
*****
Once There Was Spring by Geo Milev, translated by Tom Phillips. £15. Worple Press. ISBN: 978-1-905208-52-4. Reviewed by Ian Brinton
In his introduction to Once There Was Spring, a translation of the selected poems and prose of the Bulgarian writer Geo Milev, Tom Phillips alerts us to the relationship between ‘Hell’, one of Milev’s late poems, and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Milev’s poem was written in 1922, the same year that Eliot published his landmark sequence of modernist poetry that was to have such an effect upon the writing of poetry in the twentieth century. Phillips suggests that Milev’s ‘Hell’ into which we fall ‘- with a crash / – a crack / straight into ruin’ brings to mind Eliot’s vision of ‘a desolate urban dystopia’ conveyed with an ‘abruptly fractured structure’. Whilst acknowledging the central importance of Dante (‘Dante was andante: / terror and fear sans hope’) Milev’s world is more openly concerned than Eliot’s with poverty and hunger accompanied by social injustice. Phillips highlights for us Milev’s understanding of ‘physical, mental and spiritual malaise in relation to immediate socio-political circumstances and to those in Bulgaria in particular’.
In 1916 Milev had been sent as a platoon commander in the Bulgarian Army to the Macedonian Front where he was stationed at Doiran Lake, the scene of several major battles. Section five of his prose poem ‘By Doiran Lake’ vividly brings to our awareness the other-worldly sense of being trapped in a war-scape:
A strange, eerie feeling takes hold of you when you go up to the frontline under the veil of night and the whistling of shells. Not fear – something deeper than fear. You feel a kind of powerlessness grip you, choking your mind and soul in its embrace. It’s a moment that drags on for a long time. you feel you’re alone, that you’re cut off, that you neither can nor should remember anything: not your old thoughts, not the long-ago smiles of women far away, not the books you’ve read…
This world of anger, loss and outrage associated with war is of course certainly not new to poetry and one only has to recall the opening lines of Homer’s Iliad in Anthony Verity’s 2011 translation from Oxford University Press:
Sing, goddess, the anger of Achilles, Peleus’ son,
the accursed anger which brought the Achaeans countless
agonies and hurled many mighty shades of heroes into Hades,
causing them to become the prey of dogs and
all kinds of birds; and the plan of Zeus was fulfilled.
And in this context one of the most striking qualities of Milev’s poetry is its ability to evoke those classical associations making it significantly different from much of the poetry that had been written in the England of World War I, that same conflict that embraced the world of the young Bulgarian writer. As if in contrast to the nostalgia for a Georgian-type of world-order that had forever disappeared, a world threaded by that look over the shoulder which came to haunt the poetry of Wilfred Owen or Edward Thomas, Milev presents us with a shockingly contemporary sense of the effect of conflict upon nameless people:
And when after their long, involuntary wandering, the now exiled people of this town – the fishermen – one day return to their native ash heap – yes, ash heap – it will be a procession of broken-hearted women and impotent men. We were!…It was!…Fuimus Troes, fuit Troia! Dignified human grief at all this desolation.
In June 1923 a right-wing coup in Bulgaria had prompted a popular uprising which took place the following September and this was violently suppressed by the military accompanied by bloody reprisals. Milev’s response had been to write the twelve sections of ‘September’, his longest and most well-known poem in which the focus was upon anger and outrage at the reversal of civilization as ‘Light split the night / on the peaks’ and ‘From a dream the dawn / awoke / to the thunder of guns’. ‘September’ was published the following year some months before his sudden arrest by national security agents at his home in May 1925 and his consequent ‘disappearance’. As Phillips puts it ‘His body would not be found for nearly thirty years when during the excavation of a mass grave just outside Sofia in early 1954’ his remains were identified by the artificial eye in his skull that had been a result of being in an artillery bombardment back in April 1917.
When he was six years younger than Milev had been at the time of his arrest Primo Levi was captured by the Fascist militia in December 1943 and sent to Auschwitz. Writing his account of the experience in the concentration camp he opened If This is a Man with the recognition that ‘night came, and it was such a night that one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive’. As if anticipating this outrage against humanity that was to come some twenty years after his writing of ‘September’ Milev opened his poetic sequence with ‘Night’s fatal womb’ giving birth ‘to the slave’s unending wrath’ and the force behind his long poem is ‘a red rage – / unsurpassed’:
Autumn
flew by
torn wildly
by shrieks and gales and night.
A storm rolled
over black mountains –
darkness and light –
a flock of cawing ravens –
Bloody sweat
broke out on earth’s back.
House and hovel baulked
in fear and horror.
Pogrom!
A shriek
split heaven’s vault.
Amongst the concluding lines of The Waste Land Eliot had written ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’ and in the same year of Milev’s arrest he went on to write Why Rural Verse:
We cannot hope for the comparative unity of Virgil’s or Dante’s Italy or Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s England, but we can preserve the fragments.
Milev’s world of fragments remains terrifyingly contemporary:
All gates are locked.
Petitioners knock.
On the doorstep a son
sprawled dead, hand on gun.
The father hanged.
The sister raped.
Peasants dragged from villages
and behind them – soldiers:
a sombre troupe:
to be shot.
The order: Halt!
‘Aim!’
Bolts click:
Ku
Klux
Klan –
Ian Brinton’s most recent publications include a translation of Samuel Beckett’s Quatre Poèmes (Cornerstone Press, Queensland, 2024), Language and Death, a translation of poems by Philippe Jaccottet (Equipage, 2022), Paul Valéry Selected Poems (Muscaliet Press, 2021, with a Preface by Michael Heller) and Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux Parisiens’, (Two Rivers Press, 2021). He reviews for PN Review, Litter Magazine, Long Poem Magazine; he co-edits the magazine SNOW and helps curate the Cambridge University Library Archive of Modern Poetry.
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