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Mariangela
Ian SeedThree texts
Rupert M LoydellVessel
Melita SchaumSome Guts
Simon Collings (with collages by John Goodby)Three Short Fictions
Meg PokrassThe Campus Novel
Peter RobinsonCharlie Boy and Captain Fitz: A One-Act Play
Alan WallSnapshot, Sachsenhausen and three more poems
Peter BlairSeven short poems
Lucian Staiano-DanielsFour prose poems
Olivia TuckThe Back of Beyond and two more prose poems
Tony KittTwo poems
Moriana Delgadofrom Reverse | Inverse
Lucy HamiltonSix haibun
Sheila E. MurphyKingfishers and cobblestones and five more new poems
Kitty HawkinsZion Offramp 76–78
Mark ScrogginsCome dancing with me and two more new poems
Marc VincenzPlease swipe right
Chloe Phillips‘Three Postcards’ and a prose poem
Linda BlackStill life
Melita SchaumIn memory of
John Taylor with drawings by Sam ForderImmortal wreckage
Will StoneNew in Translation
Snowdrifts
Marina Tsvetaeva, trans. by Belinda CookePoems from Prière (1924)
Pierre Jean Jouve, trans. by Will StoneSix prose poems
Pietro di Marchi, trans. by Peter RobinsonThe goddess of emptiness.
Jean Frémon, trans. by John Taylor -
A new Review of John Matthias’s Some Words on Those Wars by Garin Cycholl.
Anthony Howell’s review, A Clutch of Ingenious Authors: Michelene Wandor Four Times EightyOne: Bespoke Stories | Annabel Dover Florilegia | Sharon Kivland Abécédaire
Essays by Alan Wall
· ‘King of Infinite Space’: The Virtue of Uncertainty
· AI: Signs of the Times
· The Lad from Stratford
· Stanley Kubrick: Sex in the CinemaWill Stone’s Missing in Mechelen and At Risk of Interment
G. Kim Blank’s Civilizing, Selling, and T. S. Eliot Curled Up behind the Encyclopædia Britannica
Tronn Overend’s Samuel Alexander on Beauty
AND Conor Robin Madigan’s Master Singer, Simon Collings’s Robert Desnos, Screenwriter, and Igor Webb’s Never Again
Simon Collings, Carrying the past: The Afterlight by Charlie Shackleton.
New Fortnightly Serials
from The Runiad
Anthony Howellfrom White Ivory
Alan Walland much more below this column.
Departments
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Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections, Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
Previous Serials
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying · Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
AND read here:
· James Thomson [B.V.]
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Sequence, consequence and the random.
A Fortnightly Review
Counting Backwards: Poems from 1975-2017
by Helen Dunmore
Bloodaxe Books /412pp / £14.99 $15.13
By MICHELENE WANDOR.
THIS RETROSPECTIVE OF Helen Dunmore’s ten poetry collections is a truly remarkable record of the poet’s work. Dunmore, who died in 2017, was also an impressive and successful novelist and short story writer, and her imagination was able to encompass the expansive and the distilled with equal accomplishment. The title of this collection was also the original title for Dunmore’s final book of poetry, and Bloodaxe’s offering is structured with that volume first – that is, it runs from 2017 to 1975. That raises some fascinating questions about ways of reading, ‘narrative’ sequences and interpretative consequences.
Language moves ‘forward’, from beginning of word/sentence to the end. The novel moves ditto – even where the ending might appear ‘first’, as a kind of loss leader, the novel (very generally) proceeds with a cause-and-effect dynamic, even when it returns to its ending/beginning. So you pick up a novel, and generally read from the beginning (first numbered page) to the end. While much thought and work goes into structuring a collection of short stories, there is no necessary narrative imperative to begin on p.1 and follow through. One can start anywhere and then go anywhere. The same is true of poetry collections. Ways of reading poetry and stories are flexible in a way that reading the novel is not.
So what of this? Does placing 2017 first mean that one should/must/wants to read it first? Or does one ‘cheat’ the publisher, respect chronology, and start at the ‘end/beginning’ with 1975?
I didn’t want to engage with and/or answer these questions, and so decided on a different way of reading. Random. Open the book at a poem and read. The only stipulation I placed was to ensure that I entered each of the ten collections, though I might not discuss each poem.
The first poem turned out to be ‘Bristol Docks’. Spare, short stanzas, spanning the present – ships, gulls, the past, historical figures, slavery, and the overarching economy from financiers to traders. There is tight, musical rhythm, an Audenesque cadence here and there, and the hovering influence of the syllabic/haiku: a tiny taste:
I find, though, that I have cheated my idea of the random. In aiming to open at random, but in turn in a different collection, my eye inevitably catches other poems, and I see the strong influence of the presence of history (there in the above poem as well). So a short poem: ‘Prince Felipe Prospero (1657-1661)’, is seen in and through a painting, though we have no idea why the dates only cover four years. Three materials, one in each stanza: silver, amber, thistledown, are fixed in the painting, and we are fixed ‘watching him’. While ‘Bristol’ gave us historical interpretation, this poem gives us the ‘picture’ in words, leaving interpretation to ‘us’.
A more personal – well, perhaps autobiographical – the poems are all ‘personal’ in terms of their individual and individuated authorship. ’On looking through the handle of a cup’ is the startling title, which is repeated in the first line, each stanza beginning ‘On looking through…’ The handle of a cup, the hole made by a pin, ‘the fault in my eyes’…and each ‘vision’ is the natural world and beyond. A breathtaking sense of close discipline and vista combined.
Finally (and, of course, it is not finally at all) there is ‘Whooper swans’. Three and a bit wing-shaped stanzas, bound by the tiny intros:
And dove (!)-tailed within the stanzas is a non-specific ‘he’, linking swans and planes and vast earth-bound landscapes.
Although I have discussed only four poems, it is enough (for now) to show Dunmore’s taut play with form, and a distilled linguistic focus which can combine the domestic with the worldly. Of course, there is no such thing as the genuine random. As I flipped through, my eye constantly caught other poems and I stopped to read. This collection, however, deserves to be read over time, starting at whatever page, or defying the publishers and reading the first (last) collection first, and the first (last) last. The idea of sequence has consequences and the random cannot solve the conundrum of how to read. This collection of over 400 pages will repay many readings and evaluations.
♦
Michelene Wandor is a poet, playwright and short story writer. She has also written a critique of Creative Writing — The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (Palgrave).
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Publication: Sunday, 18 August 2019, at 15:23.
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