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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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Contact the Editors here.
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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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Nothing romantic here.
A Fortnightly Review.
New and Selected Poems (1966-2020)
By Donald Gardner
Grey Suit, London 2021| 228 pp | £14.95
By DESMOND EGAN.
LIKE PESSOA (WHOM he evidences in a poem) and his heteronyms, or – closer – John Berryman with Henry, Donald Gardner works through an alter ego. But without pretending. Gradually, the reader can identify that other ‘I’. Disenchanted (but never cynical); mordant; long-suffering; uncomplaining; an outsider. He belongs in a world of garbage rounds, missed trains, forgotten sandwiches, fierce-lit office blocks, motor cycles… A Woodbine world. As the end of that world approaches, the response is typically bizarre:
…so we made ourselves make something,
fried potatoes, some salad leaves,
no dressing, and a bit of fish…
Gardner might belong to Lowry country, another stick-figure; he has something in common with the tatty world of Philip Larkin.
That ’no dressing’ detail is not only funny in the context of the coming cataclysm; it also says so much about the subject’s life-style, a stroke of genius. The lines are from ‘Hardly News’, one of the gems in this collection, with its mix of wit, the absurd, the down-at-heel, and what approaches surreal craziness – behind which the protagonist hides. Such a got-at, bumbling, inadequate figure – a British Everyman – is the one we mostly meet in this Collection, and Gardner exploits the heteronym to full effect. He might belong to Lowry country, another stick-figure; he has something in common with the tatty world of Philip Larkin. Nothing romantic here.
At its best, these poems are both witty and wickedly pointed. Here is modern man, a poet, never fitting in but always well aware of the banalities and idiocies surrounding him, yes, but also of the underlying pathos of what might be called a commuter lifestyle:
…silence coagulating between passengers.
poker-faced sadnesses behind newspapers.…
As in this memorable poem, ‘Train Drain’, the poet is well aware of the poignancy underlying the grim ordinariness of much urban living. Generally, the impact is registered with a kind of oblique irony. Only occasionally is the mask of this alter ego allowed to slip and the feeling floods in directly, more powerful for the restraint with which it is generally concealed:
or,
Irony is never far away, and like the unforced humour, it seems like a form of protection, of keeping strong emotion in check. That said, the wit is often delightful in itself, as in the hilarious ‘My Honeymoon With Myself’ where he explores various honeymoon clichés – but with himself as spouse, finishing,
The collection is worth having for this poem alone.
Apart from the humour (according to Kavanagh, ‘the most poetic thing in existence’ and a welcome antidote here to so much modern grimness in poetry – the school of walking into the silence) there are other delights too. I greatly admire Gardner’s mastery of precise, unexpected, everyday imagery: ‘the irritable cough of the unwell’; ‘a crane slices the evening sky’; ‘the counting of small change’; ’Nobody buys our books except in jumble sales’; ‘lifted like a damp towel’. Such facility is a given in this collection and a reminder that Gardner brings a poet’s eye to our everyday, making us see what we had not noticed.
I prefer the later poems, when Gardner’s battle for form is more fully resolved, and could do without the couple of prose poems and the rhyming exercises. That said, I have no hesitation in hailing this book and saluting a different and delightful poetic voice.
♦
DESMOND EGAN’s latest collection is Epic (The Goldsmith Press, 2015).
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Publication: Monday, 11 April 2022, at 18:19.
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