August · Poetry & Prose · 2024. | The Fortnightly Review

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I. Jane Satterfield | Between the Dog & the Wolf and four more poems

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Between the Dog & the Wolf

is the hinge between the mythic & the mundane,
the scrim of light where the shepherd’s
alert to the shifting shape at the edge of the flock—

II. Clive Watkins | Intercontinental and two more poems

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Intercontinental

Thirty-two-thousand feet and cruising westward,
my head against the headrest, tired eyes closed
in a half-sleep, I follow with my mind’s eye
the miniature winged icon of a plane

III. John Taylor | The Crossable

with paintings by Marc Feld

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behind you, not ahead,
a gap that only your gaze could span
and that you’ve now long crossed

IV. John Wilkinson | Adages for Poetry Students

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Everyone has always already started in poetry. We have been exiled from it. As poets we comfort ourselves with the very words that bring about our exile.

V. Linda Black | ABC and four more poems

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ABC

Arturo Anton Artaud
. . . icle . . . ifact . . . ifice
&&&&&& ➳ ➳ ➳
Apples Apropos Arcimboldo
Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty U r n ” 1995:

VI. Marc Vincenz | Holy Ghosts and four more poems

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Holy Ghosts

Before the mercury arouses their guiles,
before arriving on the softest flurry of air,
before they’ve seen what we’ve been through,
they might say in all their fading traces across
the meadows, through Luna’s secret garden,

VII. Kitty Hawkins | Cocoon and two more poems

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Cocoon

Nothing has changed in eight hours
except it’s dark and I’m writing.
The sea is in my cave-mouth, dew webbing around me.

VIII. Alan Wall | Two Essays

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Ego Scriptor

Yehoshua of Nazareth, renamed by our culture Jesus Christ (a name he would not have answered to), was a contrarian. Whenever he saw a legalistic statement, he tended to reverse it. The last would be first, the poorest (the anawim) were in truth the richest; you know that you must hate your enemies, well listen up and love them instead. On this last one, it is uttered without demur every Sunday in countless churches and chapels across the world, but how do you do it exactly, how do I love my enemy?

Was Jesus a Humourist?

Not a bundle of laughs, the New Testament, let’s be honest. And yet there is a subtle realignment constantly going on, which qualifies the texts for examination as the overall work of a humourist. That humourist is Jesus, and what he is up to is defamiliarizng morality. He cannot see a moral precept without turning it upside down. Like all humourists, he is a contrarian. He sees that if you reverse what a speaker says, you will often arrive at the truth of what they are really saying, as they unconsciously censor themselves.

IX. Michelene Wandor | Bashshayt

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Bashshayt

a triple-domed mosque
bats and weeds   no trace of lives
on the hill above the village, running through ruins
stone houses      someone says this used to be an Arab village
the Arabs ran away     no-one says why

X. Richard Berengarten | Two Sonnets

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Rimbaud

Precocious pupil, teenage layabout,
He’s played provincial brat, brash schoolboy slut,
Barbarian beast, filthy louse-ridden mutt—
Until piss-artist drink-mates chuck him out;
Absinthe and argot mingling in his throat,

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Selections from Baudelaire

Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)

Translated by Will Stone.

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Spleen

Pluvius, exasperated with the whole city,
Tips from his urn torrents of dismal cold
Over the ghastly tenants of a nearby cemetery,
And on the fog bound suburbs unrelenting mortality.

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Chris Miller

reviews

Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism by Stephen Romer.

Legenda 2024 | Hb, £85.00 | 384pp.

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In the magnifying glass of the poetic word, Modernism is the history of the twentieth century; it was, you may remember a turbulent history—utopian hopes, political polarisation, prejudice, wars, and genocide. Its central practitioners were virulent enough: Eliot, author of anti-Semitic poems, who was reluctant to admit ‘any large number of free-thinking Jews’ into a community underpinning a literary tradition, and Pound spewing out anti-Semitic filth on Fascist Italian radio . . . (read more)

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Fortnightly Serials

The Fortnightly Review was built in part on the publication of works in serial form, including Anthony Trollope’s three novels, The Belton Estate (1865–66), The Eustace Diamonds (1871–73), and Lady Anna (1871). Current serials include Anthony Howell’s epic-in-progress The Runiad and Alan Wall’s novel White Ivory.

from The Runiad
Anthony Howell

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from White Ivory
Alan Wall

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In Memoriam
Fortnightly Review contributing editor Nathaniel Tarn
(1928–2024)

The editors of The Fortnightly Review and friends and readers of Nathaniel Tarn join Robert Murphy in his tribute to the polymath poet and anthropologist. He will be missed.

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That Light

for Nathaniel Tarn

NEITHER the light apparent,
Nor the light hidden
Within the wintering root,

But that light implausible
As the rose unfurling
Out of the ear’s dark wood.

Not the twig’s dry snap.
Not the gray branch breaking.
Not the tree’s long shadow felling the air,

But the green wick that starts
At the heart’s upwelling,
Trembles on the stone’s cool lips.

The mouth dumb, foundering
Toward love’s splendid guttural,
That petal over petal’s choir:

Death’s mantle. Spring’s lumen.
My lantern’s open ‘O’ of praise.
Where the bramble flares, dies

Shimmers, twines
About the silent, improbable
Voice of the night-burl.

Beneath the high allée
Of that fading scrim of stars—
I hear the sudden bloom

Of your many tongued fires.

—Robert Murphy (from Life in the Ordivician)

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See also our Special Issue: The Fortnightly Review Continues (Winter–Spring 2024)

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Poetry Editors: Robert Archambeau (US) and Peter Robinson (UK).

Associate editor: Katie Lehman.

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E ditors, Contributors, and Contact Details.

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Editorial Statement.

The object of THE FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW is to become the organ of the unbiassed expression of many and various minds on topics of general interest in Politics, Literature, Philosophy, Science, and Art. Each contribution will have the gravity of an avowed responsibility. Each contributor, in giving his name, will not only give an earnest of his sincerity, but will claim the privilege of perfect freedom of opinion, unbiassed by the opinions of the Editor or of fellow contributors….We do not disguise from ourselves the difficulties of our task. Even with the best aid from contributors, we shall at first have to contend against the impatience of readers at the advocacy of opinions which they disapprove.

– Prospectus, G.H. Lewes, May 13, 1865. Emphasis added.

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Welcome to The Fortnightly Review. This is the New Series.