DREICH BROAD REVIEW

NUMBER ONE

AUGUST 2021

DREICH

BROAD POETRY

Rachel Glass, Lisa Trudeau, John Kitchen, David Pike James McDermott, Vince Drewer, David Lohrey Lance Nizami, Tanvi Nagar, Robin Lindsay Wilson, Niamh Hara, John Moody, Stephen Lightbown, Margaret Royall, Connie Bacchus, Riley Winchester Kira Aguilar, Niamh Harra, John Gerard Fagan, Jennifer Silvey.

Kevin Cahill James Kowalczyk, Catriona Knapman, Brian MacKenzie REVIEWS including UMBRELLAS of EDINBURGH THE KOLKATA CADENCE THE ART OF LANDSCAPE MIKE DILLON ANGELA READMAN WILLIAM BONAR SANJEEV SETHI & more Lockdown Interview With MIKE DILLON Cover : Martins Deep

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Page 2 Credits Page 3 Reviews Page 4 Rachel Glass Page 5 James McDermott Page 6 -7 Lance Nizami Page 7 Vince Drewer Page 8 Tanvi Nagar Page 9 Robin Lindsay Wilson Page 10 John Kitchen Page 11 David Pike Page 12 Reviews Page 13 Reviews Page 14 Stephen Lightbown Page 15 John Moody Page 16 –17 Kira Aguilar Page 18 Connie Bacchus Page 19 Margaret Royal Page 20 Jennifer Silvey Page 21 John Gerard Fagan Page 22 Short Reviews Page 23 Riley Winchester Page 24 –25 David Lohrey Page 26 Niamh Harra Page 27 James Kowalczyk Page 28 Lisa Trudeau Page 29 Catriona Knapman Page 30 Kevin Cahill Page 31 Brian MacKenzie Page 32 Reviews Page 33 Interview with Mike Dillon Page 34—40 Reviews

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REVIEWS The Streets, Like Flowers, Come Alive in the Rain.

STEVE DENEHAN (Potter’s Grove Press) ISBN 978 1 951840 23 5 (Price : Unknown) Significant moments illuminate Steve Denehan’s latest poetry collection.

The title is taken from the first poem, “A Rainy Night on Wexford Street, Dublin”, in which the poet witnesses a minor car accident through a rain streaked café window. Outside, the drivers argue, then in the space of a moment: “they are standing outside their jigsawed cars/he is holding her in his arms/she is heaving with sobs”.

The stage is set for what follows: a chronicle of everyday life and a portrait of contemporary city life. Writing in a restrained and colloquial style, he views encounters with neighbours, strangers, family and friends, with detachment, sardonic humour and often great sensitivity.

The foreword is written by Denehan’s young daughter and she is a vibrant presence in several poems. The tenderness of the father daughter relationship is captured in ‘Unicorn Dressing Gown’, as the poet brushes her hair, “the trick is to hold a section/tightly, near the scalp/before quickly brushing the knots away”, realising that this routine task will not be a parent’s for very long: “but soon the unicorn dressing gown will be cast aside/the way of many other things/soon/she will brush her own hair” Kildare-based Denehan, twice winner of the Irish Times New Irish Writing competition, says that poems come to him and he tends to write them in batches. “The Unwritten Poem” is a playful take on the tensions between writing and living, as wife and daughter cheerfully interrupt him, when he does try to sit down and write: they have come inside to tell me about the night time noises and the cats and to ask me if I would like a square of chocolate and to boil the kettle again Many poems dwell on how other lives turn out, how people drift away. In “Just to Drive”, a visit to someone in prison (“We weren’t friends exactly/not acquaintances either/ somewhere in between”) is an attempt to understand the loss of freedom. The encounter in “Dead Heat in April”, shows that catching up with a former friend, “still a better man than me” proves only that it is too late to connect again and “we shot what little breeze was left to shoot.” In “Eamonn”, an enigmatic work colleague who simply stopped turning up at the office, and was later replaced, is spotted on a bus: “I began to talk to him/but he pretended not to know me.”

More hopeful connections are made with the natural world: a thirteen year old enjoys an “infinite and never ending” summer Saturday in “The Grass was Long and Soft” and realises he will be all right. In ‘The Sparrowhawk’: an injured bird “its eyes , a jarring cartoon yellow” has seemingly fallen out of the sky: “I took it my hands/ light as its feathers/ its small heart fluttered against my palm”.

Denehan has the heart of a storyteller, able to evoke pub chat and the undercurrents of everyday small talk, catching moments on the wing, casting a poet’s eye on daily life and the passing of time with emotional honesty and a delicate lyricism. SB The Book of Tides ANGELA READMAN (Nine Arches Press) ISBN 9781911027102 £9.99 from www.ninearchespress.com Angela Readman is one of our vibrant and most potent writers. Her poetry & prose is consistently, considered, diverse and fascinating.

This is yet another gem to add to her treasure trove of written sparklers. Its acute angle poems that focus on unexpected collisions between the mythological & real worlds are cast with men with bees for beards, women with geese on their heads & Mermaids, Selkies & odd characters from folklore intertwined with a modern sensibility. Edgy yet imbued with a tremendous clarity of purpose.

Her words are powerful and used to great effect As in ‘The Tattooist’s Daughter’ Every time she wants to recall her mother’s eyes, she Rolls up his sleeve and stares at the swallow flying Over the milk of his wrist.The feathers are the colour Of dish cloths, a freckle of ink floats on a vein.

Each poem unfurls its tale on the page and is obvious, in that way that great poetry is, where the trick is to write it and make it obvious to others. Readman’s poetry is enthralling and despite its oddness on occasion is chock-a-block with recognisable and relatable feelings and incidents. The joy of words within the poet, her playfulness in reeling us in to her universe, her inventiveness of subject matter is extraordinary. I’m telling you, buy , beg or borrow this book, (no really, you must.) In fact track down all of her books and build a cave to read them in and live in it. She might make you into a poem if you are very lucky. What a talent she really is. JC I Have Grown Two Hearts Zoë Sîobhan HowarthLowe (Hedgehog Poetry Press)36PP 978-1-913499-10-5 £7.99 Zoë Sîobhan Howarth-Lowe’s I Have Grown Two Hearts is a short, intimate and touching glimpse into motherhood.

Her poems never exceed half a page (vertically), nor do her lines extend past the middle of the page (horizontally).

Howarth-Lowe’s poetry is concise and successful in condensing the difficult and intricate into vibrant statements – ‘Baby born only to die, / over and over’ in ‘Children Who Come and Go’; the projection ‘Favourite soon’ in ‘Grandchild’.

Populating her collection with children sleeping, children crying, with parents holding up negatives or grieving ‘not yet cold’ cradles, I Have Grown Two Hearts pulses with born, unborn and lost lives. Howarth-Lowe’s poems push and pound like babies in mothers’ bellies, and her poetic debut holds the promise of a new-born’s cry. MGG

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The Unreliability of Birds RACHEL GLASS

Tiny Joys RACHEL GLASS

There were too many birds where I grew up.

I blame Hitchcock’s film. I shouldn’t have watched it but even in my nightmares, the birds were beautiful.

I make a cup of tea but you forget and it goes cold.

I make vegetable soup with croutons every time you’re ill, you let that go cold, too.

I crochet a new blanket, you pull a stitch until it frays and give the wool back to me.

The first bird I knew by name was our cockatiel, Smokey. I still find him in photos; when the light is just so, he flaps his wings, still alive. Still flying.

Twenty years later, the owl at the bird sanctuary flew over my head with a message from God or a Christmas list for Santa. Her wings were wide, feathers soft when they brushed my cheek.

The next morning, I hoped the ache between my shoulders meant my own wings were growing. But I was still on the ground, still wingless, still not a bird.

Our first canary drowned in a shallow dish of water. Our second escaped. Dad caught him just before he found the open window and the sky.

A starling flew over my head while I ate breakfast. I lost count of how many times she flew into windows, leaving outlines of ghosts.

I opened the doors and she still flew into glass, leaving us with more ghosts.

It took her a while to find the exit.

I found feathers long after she left.

My nephew asked where they go and I said, They’re prayers, they find their way to God. I’m still waiting for Her to answer the feathers my starling left behind.

While you sleep, I fold paper starlings, hang them from your ceiling so a murmuration flies above your head.

I catch dragonflies in glass jars, place them around your bedroom so their wings catch the light.

I carve tiny whales from pebbles, turn the pod into a wind chime so you’ll hear their song when the breeze visits through your window.

I take out the thunder, sweep the clouds away, wash the stars and wish you were awake to see a constellation of a whale.

What I mean is: I take out the bins, sweep the dust away, wash the dishes and I wish you were awake to see the bubbles erupt from the bottle of washing up liquid. It’s a tiny joy but still joy as I pop each one, maybe it’s the wind in your wind chime but I hear a whale song each time a bubble bursts.

When you wake up, I bring you fresh tea and you smile as you take a sip.

It’s been so long since you’ve smiled or finished your tea. You say, I don’t need all this, you give me your empty cup. I say, I’ll make you some soup.

There aren’t many birds or prayers these days, but I see a murmuration of starlings in the shape of a feather; a feather made of birds made of feathers.

Prayers that can’t find God.

Rachel Glass

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WHAT BRINGS YOU TO NORFOLK? carry on leafy lane past that phone mast past country park where doggers like to come past posh school hiding the housing estate past holiday homes where the homeless squat past greasy spoon soon to be wetherspoons past chip shop where he battered his missus past amusements kids had fun burning down left at saint paul’s where that priest prayed on lads turn right at stream where little kate got killed and there’s the beach what brings you to norfolk

NORFOLK BUOYS a bus shelter the norfolk boys at night beached on benches tread water talk fake laughter shake like boats’ failing engines NORFOLK TOURISTS norfolk tourists descend on the coast like pigeons to litter landscapes with corsa pulled caravans clapped out campers tesco bought tents norfolk tourists walk dogs and kids and gran past ten tiny tearooms in search of a costa norfolk tourists scoff chips chomp rock shovel cockles dribble ice cream bellies bouncing like bags of two pences to spunk in the slots after crazy golf norfolk tourists beached in deck chairs finger phones or catherine cookson norfolk tourists starfish splay on shingle their sun screened skin that spills from asos shirts and shorts sizzles in the sun like value bacon on their beachside barbies

norfolk tourists sunburnt spent up pack up head home with postcards fridge magnets tea towels that say I went to norfolk and all I got was norfolk tourists

they stare into rock pools of iphone light at their facebook friends’ reflections at tinder mermaids they will never catch at buried treasure they will never find

to flood their heads to drown out their feeling like boarded up funfairs like popped beach balls like dropped ice creams like names unwritten in sand by someone on a stretch of beach the tide doesn’t reach

6

Lance Nizami

Keen I have no name, only an edge Sometimes it cuts Sometimes it cuts into others Sometimes it cuts with my wit Sometimes it shaves their patience thin My edge Not stainless but stained Not perfect but streaked Not unique to me, perhaps There must be others who have edges

Evolving by Means of Sleep 1. Toss, turn, and dream Consolidate your memories Explore your fears, through fantasies Be better in the morning 2. Tomorrow, sun will rise I wake from my disturbance I take my place among the troubled

And yet no other edge but mine, for me And no-one wants my edge; there is no envy Each one has their own, their own desire I have no name, only an edge And sometimes it cuts

3. Black covers, front and back This notebook; is this life?

No secrets from the Other Side – Indeed, is there an Other Side?

I told my wife, My mind is a blade She said: don’t harm yourself.

Here, no stories credible And so we wait and hope We hope, sans hopes, that we will live forever.

Burst An unmuted baby squeals A muted trumpet squeals Is a baby a trumpet?

A stick strikes a cymbal The air crashes around me The air itself crashes around me And then the air recovers, and so the drummer’s arm – And a trumpet blows again, and the heavens open-up: and rain – And a baby, face now glistening-wet, looks skyward, beaming –

7

KOA-SJC I float above a sea of cloud There’s waves of cloud, swells of cloud, and in between, still pools of cloud I float above an ocean wide of cloud My thoughts were ever in that ocean cloud The dreamer, always criticized, from childhood But voices could not stop my dreams in cloud

Lance Nizami

My mind a cloud, my parents harshly said But there I was, in cloud And now I coast ten thousand feet above the deck of cloud I coast ten thousand feet above this ocean without coasts An endless field of cloud is here, plowed and furrowed, it would seem And only seed of rainfall planted here, to wet the seeds so far below So far below are seeds in earth, the earth I walk, on ordinary days How ordinary, not to be here in this living daydream: cloud How dull it is, not sailing vapor seas So high-up we could be, where no mountain peak protrudes No islands show amidst the sky It’s just the hawks within tin tubes that cruise the altitude The hawks within tin tubes cruise here

Moon

Vince Drewer

You are moon , I howl under your tide changing moods.

To exit my module and set foot on you would be intolerable.

You are free of my gravitational pull, but I love you, Like a bloodhound driven to bay but not understanding why.

8

The sweet-scented lilies, soup and music

Tanvi Nagar I We strung together the sweet-scented lilac lilies with perfection and laced the low hanging air of despair with your magical melodies.

The red, blue and green lines on the screens fluctuated freely tirelessly racing rhythmically- as if creating their own music.

The aroma of light-yellow luscious lamb soup escaped from the bowl as if racing to reach the titled, square white ceiling first; II My glassy eyes, stayed fixed upon the skeleton before me- bones, flesh and a little you, encased in a coffin of peachy pale skin and numerous twisted tubes; the incisions in your skin fresh- with little red droplets of blood that oozed out made my heart beat faster; fluttering like a kite in the sky before its string is cut. the skin in your hands and feet hung loose and lifeless which made it harder to imagine how blood was gushing underneath this sheet, there was so much movement in the molecules of your being yet, so much stillness in the spirit of your existence. your eyelids were shut closed, concealing the gateway to your universe within, like the white sheet that covered the scars the sharp needles left on your body.

III We strung together the sweet-scented lilac lilies with perfection and laced the low hanging air of despair with your magical melodies.

The red, blue and green lines on the screens fluctuated freely tirelessly racing rhythmically- as if creating their own music.

The aroma of light-yellow luscious lamb soup escaped from the bowl as if racing to reach the titled, square white ceiling first; It was hard to imagine the life of a human, so powerful yet dangerously delicatehanging on the monitors, meters, measures.

It was still more hard to imagine what pulling the plug from a socket can do to the one hanging on it like threads of loose cloth ripped at the ends.

IV The lilac lilies danced in farewell, to some sad song it seemed the monitors beating slower, slower and slower still with their constant repeating beat- beep. the waves resounded and repeated until the notes on the screen refused to go up and down and the fumes from the soup didn’t escape at all.

9

A PERSONAL GUIDE TO THE LOCHS OF SCOTLAND Loch Doon, East Ayrshire dreich above and below dreich between the pines so that family conversation is a smirr of complaint dreich on Craigmulloch dreich across the dam dreich filling the castle dreich until it rains then a slow line of shivers heads for the carpark to stand around the Skoda in waterproofs and hoods comparing runoff drips on side windows and mirrors a pronoun for my father a verb for my Aunt Nan a mumble for Uncle Bob a conjunction for my mother and an expletive for me the words hitting our boots and joining on the camber of polished brown leather until they find each other

Loch Ba, Rannoch Moor

when it all comes to nothing when it all ends in desolation here is what I promised you some new kind of beauty

Loch Creran, Argyll white pebbles first then black seaweed before an inky scribble geese landing behind lichen in mountain ash lichen on common gneiss we spread waterproofs between the sheep shit and share The Herald scanning Brexit views but loch Creran starts its slew of cold tide – suddenly we look up to steady ourselves do we belong here if we resist the sea? do we belong here if we let the pages go? the loch makes news but not in our time the loch makes news but not where we are the loch makes news without our headlines we both stand to release and stretch sit to watch again

Robin Lindsay Wilson

10

April Heron

Beyond you

slow heavy beat-steady wings

beyond the pane stretch branches the overgrown apple tree laden with untamed sour-faced hardness

steely its largeness descends

a constant breeze bounces the crown a tree within a tree pulsates greenery & fruit cable roots

a curl of neck dips otherwise it’s still

wrangle under lawn under patio forcing a way through the packed clay beneath the cottage weapons-grade

silent on bamboo legs eyes water-watching both sides together until a slow bend

clusters of bramleys reach that bit further soon to be close enough to bang on glass to drop on the carpet like mini-

one web-foot lifts is placed then

monster eggs the offensive begun the fight back here and I wonder if I should wake you or is it all too late

the other as though on mud but our fishless pond throbs

John Kitchen

with newly emerged tadpoles feasting on tapioca sacs the bird’s disappointed or disturbed into unlikely flight

edge horizon stretches dry cracked

across fenland flats salt water saturate or the treachery of a tidal creek’s fill up

your elemental black skeins of wildfowl

welcome package

a rise of vapour-trail

of Raff bombing practice aerial flash & remote disquiet polished ditch mud

this not quite

thud

& a twelve-bore

or algae stain & cracks

heavyslip wellies ozone

memories

wingland

clagged edgeland

sea that too soon may be

11

God Save Alabama Plenty of first stones From amongst the mint juleps Being cast here in sweet home Where they know not what they do For women In a confederacy of righteousness That forms a new slavery To make you wish You weren’t in a land of cotton.

David Pike

Walking Up The Streets Of Vicksburg Ovingham was pop’s favourite stretch of the river But where we stopped, I don’t know, I only remember the road and the trees on both sides of the river; A place where old Sundays go.

Lucidly, I dreamed me And because expansiveness was easy, Was on top of the steps of my exuberance; Spoiled for choice of familiar scenery.

And I pictured it: Walking up the streets of Vicksburg, In receipt from the start of one onlooker’s appraisal; Dressed to kill for some occasion.

Cartagena You might as well be the man from Cartagena In Colombia or Spain For all the good it will do Because of I spy in black That’s not Conrad Veidt in the room.

Down which mystic wynd shall you meet?

You in your swashbuckling Carthaginian style; And what would you comment first upon there?

Smartness? Fair beauty?

Or the aimlessness you felt in the rain on the street?

Julius And Augustus On The Coast Of Northumberland That week soon passed at the screen of rhododendrons Above the revetment that lent a grease of age Where the emperor’s namesake presented the attire With the green most often For lapelled insects And would not have you counting down the days To the final stroll home By the allotments with high hedges But would have you stop on the sloping asphalt Before the park gates in his light nights To say goodbye until tomorrow.

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This Poem Here Rob Walton Arachne Press 48 pp ISBN 9781913665302 £8.99

have no business being real, reflections about toilet paper. Most of all, there is hope. Hope that next year Eve, Emily and Sarah will go travel, hope that we will These poems concern themselves with loss and grief, get through this. There will be pain, and sadness, but both on a personal level caused we will get through. The hope doesn’t end the book nor does it open it, but it’s sprinkled with judgment by the author’s father's death, throughout. Enough to keep us going, not enough to and on a collective level rose-tint the situation. analysing the Covid-19 pandemic. It is, at its core, a The collection asks itself why we miss what we miss, collection of reflections and and by highlighting the small things that have been unanswered questions that taken away gives them a new importance. The poet could only come out of 2020. walks into his daughter's room and sees a picture of It’s pandemic writing at its her and his father, and that simple and daily act finest, with frequent references brings profound sadness worthy of poetry. There is to Zoom, particularly in the lots of walking, and lots of looking for meaning in giggle-inducing One of the Very Worst Things, a that walking. The collection already has a taste of longing for pubs and waiting rooms, and the hindsight towards the pandemic, even if written in awareness that the next quiz is never too far away. the midst of it. It doesn’t let it take the wheel and What really shapes the collection however is the way drive the poems through anger and despair, but it in which Walton uses the pandemic as a looking guides the reader through all the feelings with the glass to address the most common of feelings. knowledge that everything is still uncertain, but if we This new outlook focuses political anger, so that when he asks ‘Are there any other countries you’d like to break?’ in the closing poem Prime Minister’s Questions, the weight of the question is backed by significant evidence. It also deepens the sadness, so that a poem about getting tearful over potatoes or waiting room magazines fits with the narrative of losing a parent or seeing your daughter have to miss graduation. These familiar ties and connections are what shines brightest through the collection, particularly in the connection with his daughters.

stop and feel the feelings it might be alright. FC This kilt of many colours David Bleiman Dempsey & Windle 50pp ISBN 978-1-913329-45-7 £8.00

David Bleiman’s pamphlet A kilt of many colours is a fittingly serious work about a serious subject – language as the bedrock not only of communication but of identity also, creating what the poet refers to as a double weight of significance. In a brief introduction, Bleiman references William McIIvanney’s description of Scotland, the poet’s current abode, as a mongrel nation, signalling the principal thematic focus of the collection, namely the rich diversity of language, the mixter-maxter of origins and influences.

Walton in his poems observes his daughters and is The poet’s own background is Ashkenazi, a Jewish diasposurprised by them, by the way they held themselves ra population that was concentrated in areas of the Austro through the same grief that he is going through, -Hungarian Empire and one which suffered disproportionately missing not only their grandfather but their friends, during the Holocaust, leaving their lives, their entire world being stopped. And barely a family untouched by its Walton misses it alongside them. My favourite poem ravages. Born in South Africa, from the collection, Like in the Olden Days, is an ode Bleiman’s family moved to Britain to his daughter friends’ coming over for dinner. The when he was six, giving rise to poem is pandemic-specific, reflecting a time when the multilingual experiences that the most mundane of evenings, making pasta for permeate the collection, one findyour daughter and her friend, has become ing comic expression in the The impossible. But it is also permeated by that certain Trebbler’s Tale, a poem written in kind of sadness that comes with seeing your children lively couplets and in a reimagined version of Scots-Yiddish. growing up, turning it into a poem that transcends Add to the mix the Spanish, the specificity it was written about and becomes a which the poet is currently studying, and we have the mirror of the human experience at large. pamphlet’s varied soundscape, one replete with the alliterWhat keeps the collection so enjoyable is the ative force of Yiddish:

humour that constantly runs through it. There is sadness, and regret, and wishing for things to be more and other, but in all of it there is time for laughs and joy. The humour comes both in content and form. There’s rhymes and alliteration about disinfectants, Covid becomes covey, and there’s jokes about bread, discoveries about places in the UK that

He shlepped his shmatte aa through Fife, weel-kent by monie a lanely wife, whaur Yid and pekl war kenspeckle n ilka Fifan toun and shtetl. (from The Trebbler’s Tale)

13 The pamphlet is divided into three parts: Traces, Mixtermaxter, and Marmalade, though in thematic and stylistic terms there is much common ground between all three.

The most affecting poem in the opening sequence is El impacto del olvido (the impact of forgetting).

In the second section of the poem, El impacto, the poet is in the Casa de Sefarad, a museum which curates Sephardic Judeo-Spanish history. He is moved when he hears a guide singing in Ladino, a Spanish-Hebrew hybrid, and while acknowledging that he was not with the partisans in the forests/of Lithuania, the Vilna refugees and does not have their memories or feel their pain, he shares nonetheless the yearning for worlds which existed before the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the horrors of 1943, states the cadences of the Ladino song evoke.

As one might imagine, the Holocaust and the many pogroms to which the Jew have been subjected haunt these poems. In Lacquer wood fiddler, a small carved figure comes to symbolise the lost world and culture of the shtetl before the Cossacks ride out/in the morning leaving the roof of the barn burning. Bleiman realises that language is not static, that it flows and becomes richer not poorer when influenced by other tributaries. It is also capable of being polluted by history. Though his grandfather, Adolf, serves in the Muizenberg Home Guard, the poet realises No grandson now can bear your name of shame (from Reclaim the name). For Bleiman, language is gluey,/adhering to the barks of trees, as if unwilling to give up its linguistic provenance, thus allowing us to hear in the word Manhattan an echo of the more assonantal Manahahtaan, and in Chicago the etymological echoes of Checagou and Shikaakwa (from Place markers).

This pamphlet is Bleiman’s first published venture into poetry, a fact which may surprise many given the assuredness of the writing, how deftly he deals with the complex issues of language and identity, the restraint exercised even when the many tragedies which have befallen the Jewish people are the subject of his poetry. The poet’s voice is consistent throughout, including in the more lyrical poems of the pamphlet’s third section. Most of these poems are written in free verse, but are far removed from the chopped-up prose of some vers libre. The rhythms of Bleiman’s poetry, its soundscape, one rich in assonance and consonance, its understated but affecting imagery, leave the reader in no doubt as to the skill of the poet behind such lines as these, taken from Bitter fruit ripening, one of the many highlights in an impressive collection.

Yet time lends harmony to the inclusion, another jewel in a well-worn frame.

In time all faiths – and none – may pray where stones converge in bittersweet embrace. TH

www.hybriddreich.co.uk £4 post free

Corona Virus Lockdown / Brian Mackenzie / Amazon / 45 pp / ISBN 979-8650797852 /$5.49 Cesar A. Cruz famously said that art’s duty was “to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb the comfortable.” This quote takes on an intriguing relevance when we consider the ways in which the world changed over the previous year.

In an almost democratic sense, almost nobody was left undisturbed, but with the masses being urged to stay in their homes, a sense of uneasy and inverted comfort was also felt worldwide. Such unique circumstances could only breed unique art, which could simultaneously disturb the disturbingly comfortable, and comfort the comfortably disturbed. Corona Virus Lockdown, by Spain-based writer Brian Mackenzie, is an example of such a unique piece of art. In it, Mackenzie conveys the thoughts, fears, and feelings that he has felt over the previous year, through poems and songs that are humorous, moving, honest, and most importantly, true.

A lyrical quality is present throughout the poems in this collection. Mackenzie himself describes the content of this collection as a mixture of songs and poems, and it is often difficult to allocate one of these specific titles to any given poem. Furthermore, Mackenzie is able to keep a consistent sense of voice running throughout these poems, while also maintaining this lyrical quality. In short, by making use of everyday language, and scenes that we are now very familiar with, Mackenzie is able to outline his perspective on what it has meant to live in the world in the last year, with each poem dripping in emotion.

For example, in a poem such as Gauntlet, Mackenzie is not only able to frame the simple task of going to the supermarket as the dangerous act that it has now become, but he also succeeds in offering the reader a glimpse into what this task means for a more senior member of society. In other poems, the poet manages to accurately describe the events that were entirely new to us as well, as is the case in Corona Virus Quiz Night. Again, the language here is simple, but it is used to convey a universal truth that was experienced by many availing of new technology to keep in touch. With lines such as “so with this link / distance we shrink / so raise up your glass / to share a drink” Mackenzie is able to succinctly convey the persistence of our social nature, and our need for company. Conversely, in poems such as A Full Set, Mackenzie employs what appears to be pitch black gallows humour. The poem outlines various ailments which the speaker suffers from and suggests that the coronavirus is all he needs to have a completed set. Through pieces such as these, Mackenzie succeeds in utilising a voice that is both easily accessible and understood, but also singular in the way it describes the situations we have all found yourself in in this previous year.

For this reason, one could confidently recommend this collection to any poetry fan who feels they have suffered alone throughout the crisis. DM

14

Stephen Lightbown The Goodbye I Forgot to Post I turn into the street. The familiarity of the potholes under wheels gives me hope that this one may have been exempt. I see the postbox where Mum would post my birthday and Christmas cards. I push to it, put my hand in its mouth, place a palm where she would have placed hers, to hold her hand before...

I ask the postbox, has she been here, has she tried to write?

The postbox doesn’t reply. I look down at the dust and see only my tyre tracks, no footprints. I could post my faith somewhere else.

I decide to hold on to it.

Coffee Cup I think back to the first person I met in a chair who wasn’t newly injured like me. He sat outside an artisan coffee shop with a metal cup and a hopeful smile.

He wanted change. The sticker on his wheelchair said DESERT STORM. My new chair didn’t have one but if it did it would say MOUNTAIN BIKE PUNCTURE. I told him back in the UK people would assume car crash. I took the offered fist bump anyway. I felt like an imposter. That the respect wasn’t deserved. We were comrades though.

Fully Furnished He told me in the States they respect their veterans.

My dead skin mixes with their I noticed his cup was empty. dead skin. I transfer onto the sofa an exchange of unpleasantries, Isolation asleep in less time than it takes to say viva las Chickerell, awake I drink the juice from the tinned peaches. not long after. The sound of Gulp down survivor syndrome, ignore the fridge opening, I’m here the urge to add cream and lady fingers. alone with a single jar of Thinking of dessert doesn’t seem right mayonnaise floating into when I can’t smile at you across our table the room which died three raised on four yoga blocks. A small ooze months ago, a box of Happy of sugar water escapes from the tin Families lunges at me, a pair and settles in my beard. I leave it, fantasise of Crocs cartwheel in my about an exhausted bee replenishing direction. Something prods itself on my chin. I wipe the sticky residue me from behind. The ghosts away with a grubby hand. I’m so bereft of this bungalow want of contact that the thought of a bee my attention. I’ve stopped coming for pleasure, then leaving knocking before I enter to return to the hive, revitalised, houses, maybe that was is simply too much. the wrong thing to do.

What’s the matter lad, you afraid of the dodgems, you too small for this?

He says through a fag.

I want to get off.

15

John Moody Tarn Life’s a deep dark tarn rainwater filled, brackish still brown and chilly.

When you’re scared and lonely standing tense upon the shore, you slap the water’s surface in your agitation.

Provoking only chaos of cream and ochre scum.

You stare — the ripples losing force dissolving in the depth of whisky tinted liquid.

Oblivion in alcohol dissolving you in darkness only if you choose to — you can dive the tarn’s abyss taking you past the scare to the mud and rotted vegetation coiling at the bottom of the mountain.

Crystal plumage Fear is a lilting thrush, close to my desire.

Fresh neurones grow like plumage filaments.

In my sparking skull synapses fire In tune to thrush’s song. Forest flautists sing a change — booze for juice of elderflower, cream and smooth as a wood thrush breast.

Old addictions fight a moult of feather, shedding crystal plumage, furling fast.

Exuberant growth muffles throstle-song, easing threats for chaotic nature.

Flaring brain connections transform bleak tones to rising avian rapture.

When a nightingale thrush puffs her breast carols the contagious air, then she rests. * The title of this poem is taken from a film called ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ where one of the clues to the killer is the call of this rare bird, with a glittering plumage.

Tongue Where does my tongue lie?

It lies the length of my mouth.

Where did my tongue go when I slept?

Into the misery of a defecated bed, suppository ridden hospital, looming figures bloated white; there to help not hurt, but not understanding my shitty shame that kept the stool in place.

Where does my tongue go when I sleep?

It slumbers deep, pooling the liquid of dreams reaching down the throat of my thought.

Drenching the tension in my gullet.

Where does my tongue lie?

In a childhood lullaby, where it learnt the silent orgasm muscle-tense spasm of fear.

Spread like a starfish face down on a shadowy bed, without words to explain discomfort and fear.

There I lay in degradation that caught my breath and stilled the natural rhythm of my growth.

Where does my tongue lie?

In remembrance.

16

Kira Aguilar Two Weeks and Two Cities Couldn’t know this would come back so quick but, even then I was worried. Should know when it’s only Barely started getting cold but not as cold as I knew it could be not as cold as it was that place that year with that cracked front door & the weeds growing through the kitchen tiles… & a sickly fog on the inside where you least expect.

We walked through and in and over to witness the decomposition of the interior, where he was lounged laying arm dangling down the side one knee propped up swaying breathing while she was in the back way back where we couldn’t see her but hear an odd sigh and a creak of a chair or a delicate puffing of the machine. Something always playing out loud in those rooms, making the silence an island of itself in between these clouds of strawberry milkshake, drum in the air coffee with doughnuts. Italian wine only will do, he said. Nothing but the best for the beasts of these heavens here amidst the fluff and going no where but down and down, real fast. Heaven itself can’t stay afloat for long having no air to breathe does indeed speed the process. Up the stairs above the cloud line and we could see clearer but smells do linger between paper walls.

An energy that can’t be put down out of it’s misery sticks to you like the magnolia coated layers to the lines on your hands it smells and get’s under the nail barely out of reach where you’d have to break skin just to have a go at it.

He had nice hands, the kind that held lightly and gently because they knew how to do damage and bore the weight of his body between those fine lines along the pale glassy scars. The scripture you find engraved on knuckles that belong to hands like that, of such grace lacking glory thick with wisdom, is one of the recorded history of tools misused a verse thickened by the swell, boiling in the veins of the poet he should have known he is.

There’s Nothing We Can Do For You I had some time A whole stretch of it, led to it’s own end the beginnings sounded like this, that freedom had come by all the ways it could waved hello to us on the grassy roads, the weedy gamble every night the empire we built had no strength or it might if it had led itself, myself not with the tide but with some bone to hold the flesh that bore right through, to the religion was too much liquid intake lacked compassion but we prayed on and on the floor those week ends lay, bare at my bare feet all pink and hard they were those lasting hours of the stretch we’d made, those days of beginnings for the ends

17

Magnolia Stage

Kira Aguilar

A show that lasted longer than expected and ended sooner than I can believe.

Laying in the magnolia shade to find some magnolia space, the pale of the eye before you your person realise that it’s gotten far too far in, the off-white reflection from the mirrorless rooms down stairs out the back for a hack of fresh air to sit in the cold glass tower & feel the outside through cracks, sitting for a time that was never enough time.

We angered the walls and they returned with an act of the absurd, right out our own book our brains and their homes.

Magnolia show ends and minds find temporary lodging in the limbo along the way, painted on within inside the slow fade the commercial break to close.

Year of the Interior It was hard to say on a morning of all mornings to remember correctly on an evening stretching out into a late night flooded with red walls and the insides of our mouths pushed up against the interior of a cardboard shoebox, the top & bottom far too close to each other with no break no direct sunlight to calm the growing painted magnolia stage.

To put on the finest production of misconduct via the nostrils of entry but at least the door could shut tight at least for a while but the marks left are likely still there, even if we’re not.

The Junction

The bass line set the rhythm of the night to match the indoor beats with the sounds steel rides from the streets to the sight of a forced morning when the light needs to be dragged up and down the asphalt along the wall and all it’s action now static, as gas turns to flat lines which mean something to some, surely, and a whole lot of nothing to the ones living along the grooves between the rough edges that separate the living from the non, put here by faces of the strong who acted without knowing, tools made of man of men asked not to think but to perform a great act as it is.

The junction on those streets I see that space a lot behind my eyes, familiar space a city so small littering habitual lights.

Get out of here, the one place a day that grows familiarly into the tunnel you built ourself inwards through one eye out the other.

A blow like that could be lethal.

18

divorced flowers-carnations

Connie Bacchus

all the carnations know what to say in social situations appear in stately pink & white gowns in clumps come back again next year looks lovely in a curvy vase of dark green from the florist who doesn’t know the family it may as well be a casket greeting all the damned mourners in shades of lilacs pink & white mild take one w/you amuse you

let it keep you make you feel less sad

what do you think when gazing at that beautiful explicit shade of broken xanthous green how do you feel about carnations now do they bear that lilac smell

divorced flowers-tulip tulipa

she loved in bunches that turn water into mushy toadstools

the lipstick red tulips decide not to bloom but the once on the inside divorced flowers-the lilacs the maple decayed in twisty branches pink blue white purple old properties, abandoned heart shaped houses leaves

she keeps planting anyway, darling

19

A Season of Swallows

Journey With Altered Perceptions

They come in a ripening April, lanes long and heady with dew and ransoms, soaked by the singing-in of sweet miracles...

Weary-winged veterans full of creak and clamour, resuming old turf wars in barn and byre.

Dawn light breaks earlier now, dappling the clouds with finger-light touch…

Feverish activity indoors – relentless clocks ticking like metronomes, defining the impatience of time.

A sudden downpour releases sweet sweat of late spring warmth, hanging the damp morning air out to dry.

This pilgrimage has miles to go today, Sun melts to shadow, mellows into twilight.

Dipping and darting, settling only where instinct gives safe landing, a wild chorale of well-schooled song;youthful energy belying the frailty of their bodies.

A weft and weave of nesting, birthing and fledging follows.

With wings full-bloomed a distant marshalling call resounds on the balmy air amid siflitt and su-seer* Nights lengthen, daylight shrinks, gusting winds chap skin with sharp slap.

My heartbeat bounds in rhythm with the wheels; faster than witches now, excitement builds.

I flinch as wayside stations shout out BOO! Surely they can not recognise my face?

A shepherd’s hut winks back, a station plaque stares out defiantly to meet my gaze.

A platform porter, hat perched high, mouths words directly at me as the train slows down.

And now the kiosk girl is beckoning, shouting, Her loud recriminations aimed my way!

This ride is so familiar, yet today I view through x-ray spectacles small shards of severed souls, ignored for far too long.

How can I start to quantify their needs?

Gone in a flash and mine to wonder why they’d chosen me as scapegoat, advocate?

Perhaps mistaking me for someone else…..?

Someone whose journey now can never end.

Rising en masse, a courageous gulp, the lure of warmer climes compels; a whoosh of frantic flap and flail, then gone into the morning haze, the only echo a hollow murmur lingering briefly on the chilly air...

Summer gradually fades to dust in a feathered drift of ghostly dreams

*siflitt and su-seer describe sounds made by swallows

Margaret Royal

20

Tumbleweed Degacons Shove a hexagon down my throat wrap my wounds in pentagons bound my wrists in squares clasp golden triangles around my hair.

A circle left; a circlet upon my head.

When two lines can’t form a shape they but bend — and those lines with sane roundness complete a new form.

Silence the Rabbit with a cloth.

Conceal the blood from the claw marks.

Iron gloves, iron bracelets, iron armor and the golden winged helmet. Metal to slow the course.

The caduceus, a winged staff with intertwining snakes two realms stitched together, two parallel lines bending.

The White Rabbit with its pocket watch caught somewhere between the waking and the Wonderland.

Hermes with his White Rabbit in his hands watch tetrachromatic polygons waltzing with angels in the Neverland, in the ether, in the ephemeral tundra.

Heptagon eyes, the Rabbit has heptagon eyes.

He wants to break past octagons to rescue Alice: he can see her through the looking glass but she can’t she him — the mirror’s reflection clouding her vision of him. She sees her own two dice eyes.

The nonagon of it all, the kaleidoscope replication with more lines we’re closer to a circle, a circle, we cycle back to it.

The decagon: like the air and soul were sucked out of a circle. Flat sides as the ball tumbles down the spiral staircase.

Tumbleweed decagons waiting for parallel lines to entangle the conscious and the unconscious.

Jennifer Silvey The Skeleton Kings with Thorn Crowns White fangs, red tongue, black wolves in the forest howling beneath the pale full moon and stars.

The kings return; they chant to the black sky: Ashes and bones, we are ashes and bones.

The Black Raven took us under the light.

The White Raven found us at the river; we could not drink of it. The White Raven she put a goblet to our lips and breathed a song into our ashes — she made bones.

The kings in lupine thrill beating their drums, the coronation oath with lyre and horn, the misty forests at their beck and call.

They haunt with the wolves; they rule with the wolves.

The trees their scepters; the branches their claws.

The White Raven holds her cup to commune.

Kings of the winter flora rising now to greet the ash, the elm, the spruce, the thorn to place crowns upon their heads and pray fast to heaven far beyond the oars and sea to heaven far beyond the stars and lea.

Bloodthirst Touch. Blood. Skin sticks.

Crystal glass. Contact with strangers.

Tree. Bark. Skin itches.

Thistle hives. Contact with strangers.

Pieces. Sweat. Skinship.

Pink blobs. Contact with strangers.

Yin. Yang. Skinship Bristly thighs. Contact with strangers.

Night body touch the moon.

Bloodstream touch the sun.

You cut me with crystal glass.

I break like tree bark. Skin itches.

I am pieces.

I am sweat.

I am pink blobbing flesh.

I am the yin. You are the yang.

Night body touch the moon.

Bloodstream touch the sun.

21

the ones left behind

I read that no one really dies we are just energy and energy doesn’t go anywhere can’t go anywhere just transferred into different forms I read that over and over every night for a month for a weak taste of comfort I sometimes got the train to our old place and walked that familiar route past the supermarket we went every Sunday past the donuts shop past takoyaki street food stall I stood outside and took in the scent of what was what would never be again and when I finally got back to my new place alone all I wanted was to slip into greying dreams about you about us and I didn’t want to wake didn’t ever want to wake and still I live only for remembering wind-picked sky there is no cure no moving on like us, this land was once alive no someone else saltless waters there is vast valleys of green there was the old fire beneath the trenches sang its ending only you. night after night in the silent grey of winter and the ground she trembled returning home after seven years abroad those who carried the flames lay under bullets and smoke back in Glasgow and could not hear the wind a skin of myself still in Japan the skin of frost that covered the ground never crawling around old memories melted stretching over the worst years she opened and the silent lonely hours everything that ever was beating dust ever could be my mind sinks 5,763 miles into a former life gone as days, weeks, months keep on rolling death breathed and took all until soon all will be forgotten we listen to that faded echo the store where those memories lie the last to hear will one day close the last to return, my son as will the rest of me to the rot beyond repair as will we all. and here we shall live out the last of our days. waiting on waiting airports put me in a trancelike state as if I’m just returning from another 27 hour journey from Tokyo as if I’m still split between two worlds but my flying days are over and I’m only here to pick up another my mind still lingers in the past of dreams long dead and dying yet here I stand same Glasgow same airport and changed still falling in that habitual trance never to escape.

John GerardFagan

22

DROpPED ONTO THE DOORMAT Short Reviews of everything else that dropped through the door as a gift or because we bought them.

MORTAL CLAY—Alan MacGlas (Pink & Green) ISBN 978 1 906708 36pp ( £8. 00) A pamphlet of around 20 poems (mostly), divided into three sections in a variety of styles of poetry, pattern poems, autobiographical poems, one piece of prose and even a translation which leads to a dilemma, a plethora of styles and forms in this small collection looks like distraction on the part of the poet.

Not that there aren’t some wonderful pieces in here MacGlas is at his best in ‘Leviticus and Numbers’ and in ‘The Coat’ where the poet’s voice comes across as warm and the poetry is conversational, intelligent and readable, as well as I imagine listenable. I feel that it would have benefitted from better editing and arrangement to create a better flow.PT HERRING —Wullie Purcell (Read Raw Press) ISBN 978 1 907000 18 8 20pp (£6.00) A booklet of poems about the world of coastal fishing. Simple, moving, authentic poems in the English & Scots of the North East of Scotland coast or so Sally Evans, the esteemed poet & publisher tells us on the back cover. 16 poems that have a cumulative effect and build to a gentle observational portrait of a community. Some of the poems are almost song like in their effect, affectionate and heartfelt. PB LIAR LIAR—Brian McManus (Hedgehog Press) ISBN 978 1 913499 55 6 (circa 20 pp) (No Price Listed) A barbed look at the response to the Covid Pandemic. Rhymed poems that deal with injustices perpetrated on the vulnerable during lockdown.

Critical of government lies and big business’ self interest. The ludicrous realities of ‘ dealing’ with the outbreak from the point of view of care home residents, inept politicians and a world of promises that mean absolutely nothing. McManus’ memorial ‘for those who are not coming back’ pitches the villains and the heroes very effectively and with grim humour. JC FAINT—Lucy Dixcart (Wild Pressed Books) NO ISBN 26pp £4.50 Covering topics of maternity, student life, office politics and day to day ephemera, you could be forgiven for thinking these were going to be poems that said the obvious and nothing more. However the words are powerfully and carefully chosen and go beyond the mundane with skill, craft and fearlessness.

Well worth reading for its melodic lyricism. PB

SACRIFICE Sally Spedding (Hedgehog Press) 2020 ISBN 978-1-913499-29-7 32pp (£7. 99) Sally Spedding offers no comfort in this pamphlet, a meditation on the darkest aspects of humanity. The poet, also known as an artist and crime novelist, divides her time between Wales and France, and her work dives into turbulent times and violent deaths at home and in Europe: a medieval Cathar massacre, a relative murdered in the Holocaust, a doomed escapee from a POW camp, a murdered child, whose grave was never found. Human cruelty towards the natural world is a recurrent theme, including the sacrifice of the title poem, ortolans served in a controversial (now illegal) last meal to the dying President Mitterand. The poet mourns the ‘language of love which only the ortolan sings, before drowned in Armagnac (…)’ and elsewhere observes how past horrors are buried and forgotten as modern life continues, literally building or planting over them. Loss and grief continue in an unbroken cycle however and these fine, dark and angry poems refuse to let us to forget.SB MY BOSS Niall M. Oliver (Hedgehog Press) 2020 ISBN 9781913499396 13 poems 20pp Price unknown. A sequence of short, pithy poems about bosses or one boss . The idiosyncracies of a boss laid bare with humour and wit. Reminds me of David Crystal’s poetry (maybe it’s the ampersands) Gordon Wardman’s ‘High Country Hank’ , ‘Brendan Cleary’s ‘Memos to Sensitive Eddie or Kevin Cadwallender’s ‘Baz Uber Alles.’ Less developed than those three books but ultimately in that vein. Would like to read more in a fuller collection. My love of titles was not assuaged by the poems in this book as all poems start ‘My Boss’. Really it is one long poem beautifully executed and the obvious follow up is a sequence from the point of view of the ‘boss’ titled ‘My employees’.

Can’t say more than this, my boss is polishing his hand stitched coat with germolene. PB VEXED Z.D.Dicks (Hedeghog Press) 2020 ISBN9781913499211 60pp or so. Price unknown (Check the website www.hedgehog press.co.uk for their vast output) This is one of those books which you’ll either loathe or love. Visceral , apocalyptic , muscular all are words that apply and used in the various book blurbs. The poetry is unpunctuated by conventional methods and instead uses spaces and line ends to convey a fractured dystopic landscape where mythologies and religion are in a head on collision with the contemporary shamanism of Dicks’ world of revelatory angels, gunslinging hunters, shaggy pirate beasts , cynical Greek philosophers and the mayhem of the mundane. It’s like watching a god create a world in sixty pages, sort of sci fi or graphic novel in its clothing and make up. Distinctive? Yes For everyone? Probably not. But nevertheless once you get used to its particular vision of Hell. It’s great.

PB

23

Riley Winchester In the Cartoons They Never Fall Until They Look Down Which is bullshit, don’t you think? Sky-walking across the precipice so peacefully ignorant and mentally cataleptic—at cloud level, a hackneyed trick by the cartoonists to show the gravity of the situation or the gravitas of the fall—and KERPLAT the daydream ends once they happen to look down. Then they drop like anchors destined for the callused floor. Born into it. And, you know, I guess it’s true that you can’t burn out if you were never on fire. So they look down and selfimmolate and the descension begins, like Icarus, in a way. Only instead of flying too high and committing hubris their sin was taking themselves out of the moment and looking down—for God’s sake, never ever look down; look straight and keep going. And we were taught this at such a young age. Every Saturday morning they inculcated it into us. Never look down. But we couldn’t resist, like the forbidden fruit dangling from the vines of our toes, we just had to look. It’s bullshit, don’t you think? Or is it deadly accurate?

Self Portrait in a Quiet Delivery Room Plum face purple baby cheeks ballooning the eyes shut umbilical cord scarf cinching the oxygen mainline calming the wind creating stasis can she too smell her shit that’s been lock-loaded into my nostrils the first picture of me age newborn all dead and ugly water on brain shit occupying nose E. coli usurping cells a mother’s love is stronger than her fears and now I wonder if she’s ever seen me uglier now that she’s met me.

One Day Everything Changed Well, not everything, but a big thing changed in a very big way. Inanimate things became animated and people were relegated to inanimation. All of a sudden washing machines were waving to pianos. Towels were smiling at lamps. I saw a stop sign hug a toilet seat. An alarm clock was singing and a dumpster dancing. A toaster thought he wasn’t given a fair shake in life and that all the loveseats and doors he worked with had better lives than him, so he robbed a liquor store. Oh, and that liquor store raped a nightstand. And a marble strangled a telephone over a little misunderstanding.

Can you believe that?

Upon Some Reflection and Cursory Googling, I’ve Discovered a Hole In the memory of my childhood. I thought we watched Looney Tunes every morning as he got ready for work. I can see him in the kitchen packing a lunch as I sit in the living room, the glow of the tv spotlighting me in an otherwise sightless room. I split my attention between him and Looney Tunes. He’d sit and watch with me for a couple minutes before he had to leave. But I was thinking, and I did some searching, and Looney Tunes likely wasn’t on at that time. Makes more sense that we watched the morning news. He’d get caught up before the day started, and I’d sit and watch with him, not understanding any of it but pretending that it all made sense. At breakfast I drank milk from a Looney Tunes glass, so in a confluence of memory I believe I’ve conflated the senses and created my own scene. Or did I eat Eggo waffles off a Looney Tunes plate? Did I wear Bugs Bunny pajamas in those days? Now I’m the one feeling looney to the tune of misremembrance.

24

The Easy Way Out Masculine existentialism, i.e., men looking forlornly into the middle distance, not too far, not too close.

Masculine, because untouched. There, contemplating what? Steer clear of the rocks, stay afloat, take the easy way out. Otherwise, you’ll end up another Ginsberg.

The failure to buy Apple below 200? How to get a good piece of land or even better a decent piece of ass. It finally comes down to this. Lots of spirituality, if you ask the English majors at Amherst; lots of stock options if you ask their fathers. That Steve Jobs could really write!

Anal leashes aside, one ponders the love life of J. Alfred Prufrock, although evidence points to the unlikelihood of his having had one. Long before the St. Louis arch was constructed, folks took their places on the roller coaster clattering across the Mississippi. Ike Turner led the way.

The boys beat off but what makes it pleasurable is the thought that one has defeated the competition. Our youth studies the Parthenon, but not the philippics, trading memories for images. Greek mythology works wonders, giving our oarsmen an advantage as they navigate their triremes into oblivion, Rothko sets the pace. Our poets aim for abstraction where there is less burden. They tie their tropes to hang around their necks. They are all on a kamikaze mission, aiming their thoughts for distant dots on the horizon. They’ll get there through the trees, where the sun sets, into loss.

Choosing poetry over cotton came easy for Anna Mae. Shag carpeting is distracting. Better do stand-up. Getting slapped around never stopped anyone from singing the blues, but trust funds never fail. You’re bound to find inspiration in the outhouse.

After that, all you need to do is put your thumb out.

David Lohrey

25

David Lohrey Barnum & Bailey Chaos There is nothing sadder than an old elephant at the zoo.

All alone, the color of tarmac; a gigantic mouse behind bars.

She stands at the ready, to turn around and around. By the end of the day, she’ll be fit for a shower and a long cry.

What’s an elephant to do, chained to the ground with a 6-year-old the only one who understands her pain?

I say, throw a peanut at her head. Pick up a chunk of rock. Hop on its back and stick its ear. That’ll teach it to dance. Shout, “Go!” Hit it over and over again, the way you do your wife and kids.

When you’re through, you can move on to more important things like burning churches and killing doctors. Take it out on them, too.

Why stop with the dumb elephant and your shitty family?

You too can be effective; get yourself all worked up if you are of the mind, pour gasoline all over and set yourself on fire. When we kill elephants, we kill ourselves. These killing sprees are assassinations.

Don’t kid yourself. It’s murder. Whoever said so, and it’s probably your daughter, is right. The decimation of the elephants, and that goes for gorillas and anteaters, too, is self-destructive.

It’s annihilation of the soul. It’s a catastrophe of thought. Pure Neanderthal, a spasm of base instinct. But then so is the murder of man. Keep in mind, it is happening every day of the week and it is not because they are poor.

He murdered his sister because he has no money is a sinister joke told by the devil. Our heads need to be examined. It’s becoming a killing field like Rwanda or Cambodia before it.

Incredibly, decent people are confused; they are not sure it’s wrong.

One thing for sure, it’s a lot of fun. Put a cap in his ass. HAHAHAHA. Now that we’ve stripped our youth of their humanity, what’s next? I’ll tell you what’s coming: mass killings.

Human life is worth nothing in a place like this.

You might as well drive the herd over a cliff.

26

Niamh Harra For the sake of sertraline Novices instant removal of benzo buttered toast & chocolate covered raisins breakfast is dim crumbs of puff pastry memories stuck to a jam’s knife edge soggy chequered tea towels sanitising canteen tables oh gluttony littered plastic straws now littered plastic cups a refusal of trust in lungs feelings chart scratched like potter’s pink lady onto our knuckles flicks of tabasco on the splashback tabasco was all I ate in rehab seriously the people here are like novice violinists beautiful but screeching for something untouched

Nasal matter mum feeds us warm formula milk packed under boogie boards in the boot enniscrone sand dunes only an attitude away mid-west radio declares an optimistic forecast & I guzzle sunday milk like I am about to be buried in sand my sister rubs her toes below my seat as I sniff & sneeze policing every nasal matter in hay fever or narcotic season I try to hold it in the tickle on the edge of my nose like a piece of anti-clockwork in a sci-fi movie I wind down the window purging formula onto tractors on the n17

& scrabble the blue moon is out like my sister sipping calpol as broken armed child tcp toothless & grieving her scooter we are still sucking on serotonin hoping scrabble won’t tear us apart deficiencies waning our souls like grated lemon zest often regarded as scraps

Haystacks in a refurbished barn haystacks can’t soak up the sound of grief hacking up crotchets & quavers in an attempt to drown out the smell of urine three full bin liners & a vomit ridden rug sit outside awaiting their not-so-imminent death oh how chanting sláinte! has wired me again like a lunatic pigeon country cables knotted around my ears oozing remorse for the sermon I gave only one of the dead hamsters I spit out the corkscrew before the rodents start singing

27

It Must be the Bassoons

James Kowalczyk

through amber waves of grain regime snakes slither belly-grinding the sweated wheat farmers procure for flakes of slime soaked in verbal spittle shelved by government drones consumed by the masses united debates on tv crawling blind into our living rooms baby needs new shoes what’s that? my baby needs new shoes junior miner wants black lung just like father and grandfather celebrity miracle-worker save us the drool of dollars and nonsense crumbs from your mouth and impact our invisible assets and means nothing yet shifts the populture through verses of curses insect fillet you say texas desert will consume them who will never kiss the ring or kneel in puddles of blood

Solitude two thousand twenty one breathy pianos revive the chords knotted where screaming angels’ halos and godless harmonies gallop a siren song eating the livers of fate numb(ers) from dread to extinction in two thousand thirty

Refrain as two thousand twenty breathy pianos crawl to revive a once living room we rebuke the screaming angel’s secret shroud and escape the knotted embrace of an unholy cacophony of code blue ventilators as green harmonies tattoo themselves upon the wreckage of a forgotten scent we awaken to candied chords and barbequed notes that peel the muffled stains of lies from our ears and eyes as our new copper urn gathers dust and unwritten letters speak to us in code we glimpse a fleeting memory across the collective hallway of our mind where if only for a moment we are alive

28

Daphne on the Riverbank Rooted to this muddy bank I muse on floods, hatchets, thunderbolts, veins of ants to tunnel through my pulpy flesh and nest inside what might have been my heart.

Although I try it’s not easy to forget The body’s more excitable bits, how cool air kindles skin, or the dizzying thrill of limbs twisting nerve and flesh.

Burled and broadened as I am something of the girl is left.

Even now Apollo comes, plucks me when he needs to wreathe his radiant head. Assuming the quiver in my leaves is consent. I am diminished by silt and drought. Fixed.

Inviolate. The seasons ride me – flower, fruit, and seed, While ravens roost to peck and shit.

Personality Test, Part B

A Short Visit from My Doppelganger After reading “Study: Songbirds' vocal muscles work like human singers'” by Brooks Hays

She began with vibrato, a trill in my brain Though it hurt here, between larynx and sternum, (A place I associate with soul) Like something falling through complicated change.

Now she sits, her manner pitched perfectly to mine: Supernatural, side effect, algorithmic mistake, An existential complication comfortable in my favorite chair.

I barely have time to recalibrate before She vanishes, without fuss, without word, without pain (just a twinge at my breastbone) As I believe wonderful things must.

The room falls loosely around her space, re-scripted Back to ordinary dynamics, limited human range.

Mer

Not romance despite your mouth Falling into opening sound a bay Between wave and grain Rough as a cat’s tongue wet as a net Drawn through faunal seas Between wake and wave Surges stuttering habitual pace Crack eyes early crack eyes late grit Between break and wake Blood smells like kelp like moss So violet at the seam Between blade and break Pitching silver down deck Scaling coin for ferry realms This is not love despite the gleam This is where the story turns Between intention and blade

1.) Were you a happy child?

I lay in bed undisturbed for years 2.) Did you love your mother?

Her hair smelled of cigarettes and oranges 3.) Did you ever hurt anyone intentionally?

My limbs are scarred from impatience 4.) Do you feel remorse?

Amanitas bloom in the shade of the larch 5.) Do you empathize with others?

I felt her cold hands on my face 6.) Do you deliberately mislead?

In the film the man sits beside a crate of dead cats 7.) Do you feel superior to those around you?

We are little more than layered meat 8.) Do you fear death?

The moon distances itself from us four centimeters every year 9.) Have you ever been in love?

A human tongue has eight muscles 10.) Do you believe in God? The voice in my head is always my own

Lisa Trudeau

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A Precipitous Belief in Good Things If only you knew at night the shuffle of feet of the man who walks the streets with a bag of camomile on his head.

His feet are bare and he looks only for stars not seen in the Northern Hemisphere.

He believes in a lucky dip life: games to be lost, prizes to be won.

The past closes like a fist in the dark. Know a friend´s secrets, grab them like a child. Whisper revolution: you: stabbed a sister in the back, they: cry at the betrayal, he: tore out her fingernails, you: left crumpled dollars.

We: smile. Yes, the streets are too short, the music is too loud and the dust cuts your throat so now you cough at night.

Catriona Knapman

Perhaps it is better, to line up, to disbelieve, to turn your head like you would a clock, bury yourself into the sun, which does rise and set like clockwork. Exactly twelve hours of light. Time hits like a bullet, clean the wound.

Start again, today, this time better.

Go to the government workshops, smile at the coffee cup, believe in the morning and the cellophane wrapped biscuits.

If desire does not get you, the mosquitoes will, or the syrupy grasp of the President’s handshake, or a precipitous belief in good things.

Add more sugar to your coffee and laugh. Don’t ask those questions.

Salted I dream of going places where the avocados grow, the cows long, the earth spins quietly, loose and free. There are worlds of heartache waiting along every turn of the road, this is one that chose me.

The sky skips, the world jumps, the moon twirls, the waves curl.

I did not expect to be used to falling to wiping my eyes, spitting out sand.

I have bruises over my skin which I do not remember having.

Still, I prefer the ones I can see.

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Murder-Wort Demonstrating feelings normally suppressed by us,

Kevin Cahill

buried (or burned and scattered) by us, the murderer is further down the same path we’re all on… to be burned and scattered over a clump of what?

Butcher’s-Blood?

Blood-Cups? Asperula odorata?

He can’t help it: his fallen seeds wander over badlands springing with simples.

Strip-Jack-Naked Under the aboriginal providence of cows, the soft-haired heron feeds her young child out of her breast: her head is a spiritual bath of suckling, the pap-spray falling from her like a daisy.

This is the simple path

Parlour Game You know the one where you grope your way up a stairs blindfolded. Whipcords put through the eyes of hooks tugging on your back. Well, when we watched you wreck your ego hauling yourself up that stairwell one by one we sloped off for poker voting to hold off on the Glory to come.

Till you came back dancing with the dog: the one you called a Bastard earlier, gobsmacking us with your two-steps and the way you kept blowing your face up to hold in the laughter.

Small wonder we dropped our straight flushes and rushed back to attempt to die once more… sure one or two of us would come back on the dog, or sucking spaghetti to the mouth of the cat.

where bulls dive and splash in the water with our sons – taking off their clothes on the mud bank winking humanly… they boat their bellies and buffalo heads on the surface, Idalian Venuses bursting from their shells.

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The D Card you turn on me with vicious spite trying to hurt me misuse rip me apart mentally abuse trying to hurt me I can't defend myself or answer back It's hard being trapped In the swirling mist of the D card you mustn't go out meet anyone no laughter or smile no music always wear a frown enjoyment is barred these are the rules you must respect the rules of the D card and I can't defend myself and I can’t answer back It's hard being trapped In the swirling mist of the D card

Brian MacKenzie

Little Sweethearts you can choose beautiful rainbows buds coming through all the beauty on offer that’s there for you or wait patiently for the time again to collect little sweethearts pink, white and blue and sleep find your sleep all day all night and pretend you are dead

Black Cloud everything going to plan you looked so happy with all who love you was it a word? was it a memory? what happened? to change the mood? what happened? to cut through the night a black cloud exploded a detonation from somewhere deep inside with your eyes glazed the attack was vicious all this vitriol all this nastiness was it for real? did you mean it all? from deep recess a place where truth hides

a black cloud exploded a detonation from somewhere deep inside

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HESITANCIES Sanjeev Sethi CLASSIX 96pp £10.16 (in the UK) ISBN 978 81 952562 2 8

So work can have a life of its own, as well as having a personal reality for the artist."

My favourite painting is Leaving the Island/Snow in the Wind, which has a rarely seen (although familhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/Books- iar to keen snorkelers) split view of seaweed under Sanjeev-Sethi/s?rh=n%3A266239% the water's surface and snow falling above. This reminded me of swims in light snow and the sense of 2Cp_27%3ASanjeev+Sethi moving in a novel combined environment.

I was also struck by Luminescence, another view Sanjeev Sethi is prolific, following stressing two layers. A scene of straggly biolumineson from his recent DREICH Wee cence is glimpsed under the surface of a night sea.

Book ‘Bleb’ is this. His use of the English language is masterful yet playful. His poems Carol Goodridge sees the light as a warning: are often loaded with unexpected words not often "This is our world, they say, leave us in peace". seen in modern poetry. The subject is as always the foibles, intricacies and absurdities of the human conShe turns the painting upside down for another podition.(his own included). His delineations are second to none. His precise use of the right word rather em, taking the luminescence to be coming from meteors. than the easiest or most accessible is fascinating.

It is no wonder that his poems are widely praised and Many poems are connected with ice-scapes, some published. Some might envy his ‘output’ but to me it with the sagas; or a feeling of saga-style scale and drama encouraged by ice-scapes, places where, in is a sign that he is entirely focused on the work at hand and labours at his poetry and is not content to Sue McCormick's words: settle for the mundane (even if he is writing about the mundane). This effort applied pays dividends and "Earth (is) unearthly". many would-be poets could learn from his work ethic, his exuberant love of words and his joy at creating McCormick also offers an interesting human/iceberg comparison: his cumulative oeuvre.

The poetry in ‘hesitancies’ is poetry to be read and "How being human is the balance read again, to find the gems within, endlessly inbetween what is shown and what is hidden". ventive, and with an ever present twinkle of self awareness that drags him back from obscurity.

He has an eye for a sort of labyrinthine zen koan that Other poems stress hardship and dangers, especially of fishing. Another poem by Goodridge has a fishersends us searching for a dictionary at one moment, nodding in agreement at another and wiping a tear at man living where "...the catch and he are caught." the next.

There is no one writes like him, works as hard or is as dedicated to his craft and for that I salute him. GOR Annie Wright appealingly intertwines words of English with words of Icelandic connected with water. I was charmed by David Neilson's description of beach THE ARTIST’S TALE stones as "mountain eggs".

Poems inspired by the So a celebration, but also a book for readers interpaintings of Silvana ested in sea and ice-scapes. BM McLean. (LIT ROOM PRESS) 80pp (with colour artwork) £14.99 A celebration of the art of Silvana McLean. Also an attractive combination of reproductions of her paintings with poems written by others in response to the originals.

The poems/pictures are largely water related and reflect work from her residencies in Iceland and Shetland. Alasdair McLean offers a helpful introduction. He suggests her paintings invite the viewer to either "make up their own story, or to intuit Silvana's intentions, either of which is also a creative process.

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LOCKDOWN INTERVIEW with legendary Edinburgh Poet, Singer Songwriter, Author Mike Dillon 1. Your poems and songs are rich in references and word play. What sort of poetry do you enjoy reading and what are your musical preferences?

I prefer poems that roll, that establish their own rhythm with plenty of alliteration and the occasional sneaky half or full rhyme and that can be real aloud without the feeling that they're just cut-up prose. I also like comic verse - the more outrageous the rhyming the better. I mainly listen to Blues, Rock and Folk, both traditional and contemporary 2. In some of the writing biography and mythology, fact and fiction are fused. Do you think it’s important that a poem or a song operates on more than one level?

It's a big plus if they do. Peppering a piece of work with mythological references seems a bit pointless unless they add flavour to something real 3. The poems and songs reflect your geographical history either past or present. Do you believe this acknowledgement of personal geography is something you do deliberately or is it naturally occurring?

al ), Native North American history and literature, Family, Friends, Personal geography/ biography and musical influences. Do you ever reject poems or songs that don’t work?

And when is it time to give up on a piece of writing?

I've given birth to many stillborn poems and songs that just don't fly but I usually archive them rather than chuck them out in hopes I can use some of the lines or ideas in future to frankenstein them into a new monster 7. If you were to give a new poet one piece of advice on writing poetry what would it be? (you are not allowed to say ‘give up now before it’s too late’.)

Commit any lines/rhymes/phrases/ideas to paper as soon as they drift into your head. Read as much as you can. Imitate or steal what really appeals to you. All poets are thieves 8. You won the Scottish Slam Championship in 2010? (was it?) Did you enjoy the experience and do you have any feeling one way or another about spoken word/ performance poetry or live readings in general (from the days when that sort of thing happened !)

Yeh, it was great to take part and the win satisfied my competiveness for a few days. But though slams are good in providing a structure for folk to read, I think there's far too many now and there's always the danger that the poetry takes second place to the competition. Performance poetry in general is a different matter though. Poems were originally supposed to be declaimed in mead-halls. Scribbling them down on paper instead is a new-fangled idea dreamed up by guys in ruffs. Not sure I approve 9. From all your years of promoting, publishing, performing and writing do you have any highlights that stick in your memory and look back at with fondness?

I have fond memories of the monthly First Friday Pomes & It's natural to link an experience to where it happened. One Pints nights that ran for years and years in the West End Hotel in Edinburgh. And the Yonkly, a Writers Workshop in of the things I like about American and Irish songs is the Print that came out every yonk. Also the Hastings Poetry frequent reference to actual places, so I suppose I'm just following those traditions. And it does add flavour. Twenty Festival and all the gigs in Germany and New York. But Four Hours from Tulsa just sounds better than Twenty Four mainly all the good friends I made back then Hours from Nowhere In Particular, even if you don't know 10. Final Question : Five Favourite poets & Five favourite where Tulsa is songwriters (or less).

4. What is your writing process? Do you work and rework Fav Poets: it'll have to be the Big Three - WB Yeats, TS Eliot your writing or is it down to a single point of inspiration or and Dylan Thomas. And there'll always have to be a place in a mix of those things? my pantheon for Roger McGough because of the Mersey It's great when something comes out, fully-formed. But even Sound, a book that was so influencial to the poets of my then I'll always make an effort to polish it up. This happens generation. And Roxy Gordon more with poems than songs which often start with a verse and a half and a tune then are left to simmer while I try and work out what they're really about.

5. When do you know when a poem or song is complete and ready to be made public?

I don't. Unless they're really rough I try them out as soon as possible. I think the best way to find out what bits work and what doesn't is to read or sing them to an audience. If I'm stumbling over some parts I'll know there's a problem and mess around with the lines 6. Your interests are reflected in your writings, Mythology (Greek, Irish & Celtic etc), Poetry (i.e. Dylan Thomas et

Fav Songwriters: PJ MacCall and Bob Dylan for the way they embraced traditional music and ran with it. Chuck Berry and Cole Porter. And, of course, Kate Bush. Everyone loves Kate.

Mike Dillon’s ARK :Selected Poems and songs is available now at www.hybriddreich.co.uk £10.00 plus postage (Book & CD)

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REVIEWS Secondary Tracey S. Rosenberg (Red Squirrel Press) 72PP ISBN 978 1 91043787 2 £10.00 With Secondary as a title, Tracey S. Rosenberg’s poetry collection implies a primary, a primacy.

While ‘firstly’ remains unidentified, Rosenberg’s poems scatter clues, instances of ‘secondaryness’. Opening the collection with ‘After Eden’, the poet revisits the narrative of Eve, second to Adam, and their Fall from Eden, second to Eden. In ‘After Eden’ an unnamed ‘I’ addresses another unnamed ‘you’, but references to biblical symbols situate the poem within a Judeo-Christian lineage, identifying Eve as speaker, Adam as spoken to. Given a voice, Eve is still made to plead to be listened to – ‘Please, I’m not done yet’.

Rosenberg’s opening poem, like the following poems in the collection, challenges woman’s discarded position as secondary and claims instead the primacy of woman’s experience. Contesting women’s present subordination, Secondary also questions a future, an after. What comes after age sets in, after health starts to falter, after illness, after.

Secondary is a powerful poetry collection about womanhood, depicting women’s pain and pleasure without compromises, with raw sincerity and vulnerability. Reading the female body manipulated by lovers, partners and doctors alike, women in Rosenberg’s poems are poked and pierced, penetrated, caressed and cut apart. Writing the female soul, Rosenberg starts conversations from ‘I’s to ‘You’s, from ‘she’ to ‘he’. Her poems are sharp and short. Her style is clear, concise, using spoken words rather than alienating lexis found in dictionaries and encyclopaedias only.

Rosenberg proposes in Secondary a particularly poignant testimony of womanhood. A compelling poetry collection which should be first on to-read piles, never second. MGG

BUY 2 get one free on any Dreich Themes or Magazines www.hybriddreich.co.uk

Anonymous Bosch : Mike Jenkins with images by Dave Lewis.

(Culture Matters) 84pp, ISBN 9781912710355 £10. www.culturematters.org.uk.

When you read this book you hear the distinctive voices of the working classes Welsh. The dialect, the language, the austerity impaired, yet verbose, witty and defiant in the face of overwhelming decline and decades of underfunded services, governmental neglect and economic depression.

That doesn’t mean that this book is a dirty realist monologue on muck and deprivation. It is a glimpse into the dark comedy of neglect. The honest way that people deal with their lives when ennui becomes a way of life and there is nothing left to do but just get on with it.

Jenkin’s as always doesn’t deal in simple polemic, he leads us through this richly human experience with deft poetic touches, irony and a radar for the tricky subjects that a lot of poetry never deals with.

Poets sometimes spend so much time catering to the trendy subjects that they fail to address issues that are long standing, unresolved and not going away anytime soon. In this book, racism, nationalism, colonialism and austerity are tackled not with lip service or liberal zeitgeist but recorded as history in the ordinary folk given a platform to be heard above the bleating of social media sheep and twitter trolls. Who think that opinions are facts .

Refreshingly candid and unafraid to show what is actually happening rather than tell us what we should do. This collection continues Jenkin’s strong left of centre voice .Dave Lewis’ photographs that accompany the poems are recognisable to any area of decline, not just Merthyr Tydfil where these poems hail from.; graffiti strewn, urban vignettes of chained charity boxes and abandoned pop up tents, derelict churches, people trying to live in this ‘backdrop of pandemic., pound shop and food bank’. This level of modern hell. Jenkins reminds us not to forget, shows us what we’d prefer to not think about with a sensibility that survives and should make us pause for thought and action. GOR

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TEN MINUTES OF WEATHER AWAY Leonie Charlton (Cinnamon Press) 2021 36pp £4.99 ISBN 9781788640749 Nature at its harshest and most uncompromising dominates Leonie Charlton’s poems, which test the boundaries between our emotional inner weather and the wild landscapes of Scotland. Those who have read her book, Marram, (an account of a pony trek though the Outer Hebrides which doubles as a journey through grief for the author’s late mother), will recognise similar themes, the search for emotional release, the vagaries of time passing, the extremities of love, loss and death. In these poems, the natural world is challenging, visceral and raw. In ‘Heavy Weather’, the scent of juniper berry evokes the memory of a past opportunity lost, “through inbetween worlds of juniper and anemone” this is bound up with the sight of a dead hare on the road, whose “whiskers moved/still looking for meaning in the whickering wind”. A poem about writing a poem is given its own come-uppance by the stark imagery nature provides.

A sequence set on Iona, still a place of Christian pilgrimage, moves skywards, to find connection with a hen harrier, “harrying the sandy threshold between machair and marram” and, later, lapwings, “scooping me clean with rounded wings.” Acute natural observation is also the basis for almost shamanic identifications, with a bear in The Weight of Bees and the “gathering of earthy deposits” in ‘To My Body’.

Alongside the grief and rage, at lovers, parents, life’s disappointments, are more poignant moments. Illness and death are also treated with compassion and acceptance: the intimation of a man’s death in ‘Winter Birchwoods’ and the lyrical letting go in ‘A Time of No Hugs’, about the putting down of two beloved horses.

The poet’s relationship with this world of rain, rock, water and tree, is both deeply personal and romantic but also rooted in the direct observation of a naturalist. Alongside the anthropomorphism, Nature is viewed in geological time, weathering away, indifferent to the fragility of human life and preoccupations.

SB REHEARSALS FOR THE REAL WORLD Robin Lindsay Walton (Leaf by Leaf an imprint of cinnamon press) 2020. 316pp. £10.99 ISBN 9781788649087 Five hundred and fifty seven first person monologues in this vast collection of ‘micro’ fictions. Written for drama students tp ‘present spe-

cific textual challenges to a performer in training’.

The whole world and its ‘attitudes, difficulties and relationships’ is the all consuming aim. I’m not a drama student so I can’t speak for the efficacy of these for performers. I can only read them in terms of how they read as a reader.

The number of monologues is rather overwhelming it’s hard to read it like a novel. As with most micro fiction it has to be dipped into much in the way you might read a poetry collection. When you do that you find a varied and interesting range but sometimes they fall a little short of satisfying and because of the form limitations no real development of story other than a snapshot of life is evident.

Not really as poetic as say ‘prose poems’ and not quite as long as flash fiction. (Most of these are circa a hundred or so words long). It feels like a course text book and reads like one, because it is one. The attraction for a reader is lessened but the craft of the writer in shaping these pieces for actors in training is evident and in that way I could see it would be very useful as an aid to developing the skills of script reading to the students in its careful use of punctuation to teach the right way to deliver a writer’s lines and to utilise that in ‘ lifting language off the page and giving it spontaneous expression. The book clearly goes beyond just being a teaching aid but it falls between the stools of poetry and prose occasionally but as it is neither (Robin Lindsay Wilson is an accomplished poet ) then the enjoyment of it becomes muted. However it is such a marvellous accomplishment to have produced this dictionary of the human condition that I commend it and encourage you to read it and discover a very different take on writing and what it can be used for. PB THERE WILL BE DANCING Kemal Houghton (Red Squirrel Press) 2020 32pp £6 (18 poems) One of the many books in 2020 that got a bit side-lined. Kemal Houghton is one of those tireless promoters of poetry from grassroots to everything else and his experience and sure footed poetry is accessible , optimistic and tinged with melancholy , nostalgic regret and less dancing than expected but still the promise of the future including the prospect of dancing seems attractive even to a non-dancer like myself.

An effortless debut that many will find the ideal companion to read with cocoa or even a wee dram in the cosy twilight hours where quiet is a blessing and ‘ like shadows can never be caught’ except in memory.

GOR

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ARK / MIKE DILLON / HYBRID PRESS / 84pp / romantic relationship is revisited, as Dillon ponders ISBN 978 1 873412 01 5 / who exactly this person was to him. The idea of the £11.99 (with CD) voyages, or travel in general, is examined through poems like Here Be Dragons and Here Be D-Trains. AtIf you take a random person tentive readers will also take delight in the repeated off the street, and ask them usage of animals in both metaphors and similes, a what they think of Shaketechnique which serves to strengthen the idea of The speare’s plays, there is a Ark. One stellar example of this technique? “Girl, I’m strong chance that they will shitting like a kitten on the Isle of Dogs”, from Heal voice a degree of respect for Me. his work. However, there is an equally strong chance that Somehow, while exploring themes of identity through they will voice a strong and both religious and natural imagery, Dillon also gives venomous distaste for any- an insight into what it means to be a poet. He writes thing bearing his name, and “Poets aren’t those who make poetry/ they are those they will usually cite their experience with Shake- who need to”, from the poem And Finally…. Such an speare in school as a basis. This is quite forgivable. In insight is not only written here but is also deftly school, students read Shakespearean dramas, a medi- demonstrated in the composition of this collection. um which are meant to be experienced live. These Many poets make the mistake of having their collecpeople did not experience his works the way that he tion be little more than a grouping of the most recent intended, and as a result, perhaps none of the works poems that they have written, and of which they are that he produced will ever appeal to their tastes. proud. Dillon has instead opted to construct and select poems and songs that convey the idea of The Ark, Mike Dillon appears to be taking no such chance. Ark, an ark that travels through his own mind, and to the his collection of poetry and songs, comes coupled depth of his identity. Unsurprisingly, reading this colwith a CD, so that one can hear the poet’s words spolection feels like listening to a well-made album. It ken and recited exactly as he intended. While I am no takes you where it means to, beguiling you with a music critic, I found it to be a charming companion, unique sense of voice and whip-smart technique. Beand a fitting accompaniment to poetry of thoughtful fore you know it, you’re starting from the start just lyricism. Cleverly, the poems on the CD do not appear one more time.. DM in the same order as they do in the book itself. One MUCH LEFT UNSAID Finola Scott can listen to the poems as read, but it will involve RED SQUIRREL PRESS much pausing and searching for the coming poem’s ISBN 9781910437865 £6.00 32pp place in the book. In this sense, Dillon seems to sugScott is a stalwart of the Scottish gest that these two are best enjoyed in their own Poetry scene writing in Scots and right, a suggestion that is bolstered by the presence of English although this collection has several poems in the book itself that are not featured no poems in Scots at all (except for on the CD. The strength that this lends to the overall the odd word) which is a shame as artistry is immeasurable. The usual concerns regardshe writes so powerfully in Scots. ing the speaker’s voice, or whether a poem would be However the poems here are vivid more suitable to be experienced live are now moot, and vital and that sense of Joie de because we are now given a choice about how we Vivre comes through in the poems should experience them. selected here albeit with a pragmatic sense that life As the title would suggest, Ark is full of references to isn’t always as happy or as fair as might be expected. both religion and the animal kingdom. From page to There is an underlying sense of regret , a sense that it page, the collection acts as a journey, and much like is ‘too late for cavalcades or queens’ . That not everythe story of Noah, themes of religion and nature ac- thing can be judged by appearances; friends turn out company the speaker on this voyage. Through these to be foes and love can be treacherous. Yet amidst this poems, we travel through memory, where old rela- landscape of bruises and almost losing control, walks tionships and childhood memories are both visited. a poet who is resilient though ‘I teeter downhill nearly Poems such as Mick Turition and Guinness with a head over heels’ they are willing to ‘let love steady our Chingachgook explore what it means to be Irish, or way’. The tenderness of poems about a Mother and a even of Irish descent. Memories of childhood are ex- pregnant daughter ‘Matryoshka Dolls’ is beautifully plored and revisited through poems such as Please crafted as are all the poems where family past and Miss, in which we hear of various misdeeds commit- present are evoked. I look forward to a full collection ted by the poet’s younger self through the words of a by this poet as she masters the accumulation of poetic classmate, relaying the details of these misdemean- wings. Recommended without reservation. GOR ours to a teacher. In poems such as Succubus, an old

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REVIEWS The Kolkata Cadence (Hawakal )Editors : Jagari Mukherjee, Inam Hussain Mullick & Anindita Bose. ISBN 9788194853893 . Price £12-13 Available https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kolkata-CadenceContemporary-Poets/ dp/8194853893 Kolkata has historically been draped in poetic habiliments.

Thankfully, this continues during these existent times. As a Mumbai-based practitioner of this art form, I can state with surety that Kolkata is currently one of the most vibrant cities in prosodic explorations.

The troika of editors, Jagari Mukherjee, Inam Hussain Mullick, Anindita Bose, wellheeled in the rigorsof metrical compositions have culled for you, dear reader, a panoply of poets. From the seasoned to the sprouting-- these and many more inhabit the pages of The Kolkata Cadence. Even as I celebrate this, do remember imparity is the essence of any mélange.

In this cornucopia of creativity, a slew of themes parade their artistry. From the stream of consciousness poetry to love and its lure, along with the enigma of the elements, metaphysical marvels, to social and political audits, among others.

Let us take a gander at the anthology, starting with Sanjukta Dasgupta’s Dhoti Dance where her energized diction offers another look at the Father of the Nation.

The youthful old man had choreographed The freedom dance A nation danced to his tune A nation danced towards freedom As Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi The frail brown man in a capri-dhoti, Led the dhoti dance.

On The Richter Scale by Kiriti Sengupta is sui generis. It is an apt example of his poetic persona.

It warrants a quote: A seven-year-old canvas invites dust bunnies. Mopping whitens it; gray patches lurk in the brightness. It looks at the artist, Desolation, who paints fresh watercolors. The cloth blushes. It absorbs all the cuddles.

The elbow hits and makes it pale. The veil dissolves.

The Kolkata Cadence carries crisp poetry by Bina Sarkar Ellias, a style she has mastered. Aneek Chatterjee’s pansophic verse, Joie Bose’s colourful phrasing, Sonnet Mondal’s fast-paced inflections, Ananya Chatterjee’s tender etchings, and Nileen Putatunda’s devotional fluency, cast their iridescence on the compilation.

Sharmila Ray’s consummate lines in Distance score with the reader.

Distances are blurred horizons and carry smell of ruined hills.

Raja Chakraborty’s approbative weave, Flowers In My City gladdens the aesthete.

Amidst the mayhem of motor cars and multitude of faceless on-goers, fighting the belching smoke and putrid air, heavy with broken promises, behind the ribbed iron gates, somewhere in a corner flower always blooms.

Linda Ashok’s exceptional prose poem, You Ask If This Is Love ends with the poignant: I am making love, I insist, only your face is missing!

It will be apt to conclude with Amit Shankar Saha’s luminous creation, A Poem for Dark Times:

Let us plagiarize a chunk of verse Gopal Lahiri’s fluent stanza in Thirst singes the from a Hindu poem and profane it page with: with the lines of a Muslim poem.

Padlocked shacks, windowless tin boxes, Excrement on the road. The homeless, Naked, slum children are there on the road, Waiting for the clouds to drain the last drop of rain.

Let us put out the light and sing the words of that poem and see if the words kill each other and cease to be.

The Kolkata Cadence is a polyphonic soirée. Soak in Rain ushers us to Lopamudra Banerjee’s evocative it. Make your own mixtape. SS self-examination in Kolkata Rains: I slide from one burst of orgasmic rain to the next, the bed of grass Softened with ancient tears, never wiped away, the puddles And the potholes, remnants of grey waters, de-fleshed, De-veined, waiting for me at the end of surrender.

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REVIEWS

DREICH RECOMMENDED

Dangerous Pursuit of Yellow ANNIE WRIGHT (Smokestack Books) 82PP 978-1-9996742-3-6 £7.99 In her inventive poetry collection Dangerous Pursuit of Yellow, Annie Wright takes the reader on an adventure navigating across eras and around the globe. Wright’s poetic journey uses its eponymous colour as a compass and arranges poems according to the colour’s six cardinal points: Indian Yellow, Ochre, Saffron, Gamboge Genuine, Orpiment, Cadmium Yellow.

Yellow’s evocative yet equivocal connotations enable Wright’s wide-ranging exploration of themes and forms. Either the shade of ‘fiery couplings under fizzing stars’ in ‘Saffron’, or the pigment of ‘canvas after brilliant canvas’ colouring ‘Monets, Matisses, Warhols, Koons and Picassos’ in ‘Cadmium Yellow’, yellow tints most lines of Wright’s poems.

Dangerous Pursuit of Yellow is a bold and bright poetic composition where Wright skilfully brushes poetry out of a palette of yellows. MGG The Stuff of the Earth WILLIAM BONAR (Red Squirrel Press) 74pp 9781913632 £10.00 A first collection following on from the well received pamphlets ‘ Offerings’ (RSP)2015 & ‘Frostburn Steel (Dreadful Night Press) 2004. A sparsely punctuated (if at all) selection full of observational, descriptive passages of life passing in all of its fragility, pathos and ultimately futile decline.

The poems are both an elegy and a eulogy, a mourning and a celebration of the chaos of life we endure as it unravels around us.

Full of recognisable characters and situations with which we can relate, all considered with an affectionate unsentimental precision. The long poem that ends the book (The Stuff of Life) charts the passing of a way of life, in shipyards and in families. This intertwing of political and personal decline is documented with clarity though often ‘we stumble forward, making choices, we hope for the best, invent stories that lend shape, if not meaning, to our lives’ From ‘The Stuff of Life’ So a book with life as a rite of passage, all delivered with Bonar’s deft touches and through his experience. Bonar to use his metaphor from football is a season ticket holder in Team Poetry who knows that ‘one mad flourish’ may lead to moments of glory. The poet who has faith in his team in defeat or in triumph. ‘The Stuff of the Earth’ is a triumph and deserves to be read widely. GOR

POETRY publications YOU SHOULD READ 2020-21 in no particular order 1.

20.

Eat or we both Starve VICTORIA KENNEFICK ( Caracanet) 2.

The Book of Tides ANGELA READMAN (Nine Arches Press) 3.

Anonymous Bosch MIKE JENKINS ( Culture Matters ) 4.

Map of a Plantation JENNY MITCHELL (Indigo Dreams) 5.

As Blind as Rain ALISTAIR ROBINSON (Red Squirrel Press) 6.

Hand to Mouth Music JANETTE AYACHI (Liverpool University Press) 7.

The Night Jar LOUISE PETERKIN (Salt) 8.

Vertigo to Go BRENDON BOOTH-JONES (Hedgehog Press) 9.

It Says Here SEAN O’BRIEN (Picador) 10.

The Air Year CAROLINE BIRD (Carcanet) 11. Clyack SHEILA TEMPLETON (Red Squirrel Press) 12. The Machineries of Joy PETER FINCH (Seren) 13. The Well of the Moon ELIZABETH RIMMER (Red Squirrel Press) 14. Backstage in Paradise ROBIN LINDSAY WILSON (Cinnamon Press) 15. Why the Sky is Far Away MANDY HAGGITH (Red Squirrel Press) 16. Ten Minutes of Weather Away LEONIE CHARLTON (Cinnamon Press) 17. The Stuff of the Earth WILLIAM BONAR (Red Squirrel Press) 18. ARK Mike Dillon (Hybrid) 19. FAINT Lucy Dixcart (Wild Pressed Books) DANGEROUS PURSUIT OF YELLOW Annie Wright ( Smokestack Books)

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Eat or We Both Starve VICTORIA KENNEFICK ISBN 978 1 80017 0 70 4 £10.99 78pp. (Carcanet) The seemingly over explored concepts of family, place and history Are once again approached in this collection. Kennefick’s eye is skewiff, surprising in its approach and offers us new versions of life to contemplate. From the opening poem where the influence of her Mother is eaten as body parts, as the Mother comments and the eating of everything the Mother is, is consumed in visceral, gory detail even. Yet the act of eating is also an acknowledgement of love. This is the great wonder of these poems. It is an uncomfortable book, exploring the edges of what it is to be alive and the frailty of that life.

The poem ‘In Heptonstall’ at Sylvia Plath’s grave is one of the best written on that subject and in Kennefick there are flashes of that dark brilliance which Plath displayed. However to label her just, as influenced by Plath ,would be a disservice to Kennefick.

Her poems range across what it is to be a woman, now, use popular culture as a means to explore the History of the subjugation of women on TV , in history, in life , celebrate the part played by women in all things and celebrate life whilst examining death.

I could quote so much from this book that I would end up in breach of copyright. So, I’ll say this , consume this book at your leisure and then when you are full, leave for a few days and consume it again, you will be full both times and every time onward. A powerful first full collection. If you buy contemporary poetry books buy this. GOR Backstage In Paradise/Robin Lindsay Wilson/ Cinnamon Press, 77pp/ISBN:978-1-78864-070-1/ £9.99 BM A wide-ranging collection in subject matter, but also circling around a theme: the difficulty of finding love, being happy and being authentic in a world where we feel we must, and sometimes must, wear masks and perform.

It is no accident that so many of the poems feature stage and performance references. We have a dissipated Pinocchio in “a yachtsman's club tie and Armani melancholy”, an opera singer who is a “scream behind a curtain”, entertainers cursed by the “clicks of chewing gum”.

We have an arthritic acrobat, an actor who has been “touring too long as a king who forgets his lines”,

people in a theatre of fear, strippers, story tellers, ghost writers, even painters. There is someone dedicated to their art, at the cost of missing family life, who gets a final critical assessment. “...my family painted a bull's eye, pinned it secretly to my back.

I was oblivious to the verdict until I heard the first gun shot.”

The burdens and miseries of performance faced by the entire cast of characters, and perhaps by implication many of us, are wittily and enthusiastically explored. “the ringmaster has lost his whip, the lion tamer was mauled, the sword swallower choked...”

We have a garden for”Wagner to dream of total theatre”, people wielding papier-mache swords behind cardboard shields, “desire in cheap seats”. All the world is a stage, though you get the impression that most of the characters wish it wasn't.

Even when the subject matter seems to move elsewhere, the subject of performance is not far away.

There are slaves who go to a place where they can finally sing “without a lie”. There is “an invented girl” who copied her friend's habit of sucking her teeth and spying under a fringe until “indifferent parents discussed a sudden beauty”.

The final poem, on a folk singer, seems like a final defence of performance, despite the catalogue of burdens and bad consequences. “...stories do not sleep stories never sleep they find us in the dark and make our hurt sing”.

My favourite poem was the penultimate and, perhaps not coincidentally, one of the happiest. The skating vicar in the famous painting by Raeburn is showing off on the loch and contemplating skating analogies for a forthcoming sermon. Again there is performance, but here we have someone who does seem to be themselves “joyful on a single flying skate”, a surprisingly touching scene: a poem that deserves to be known by lovers of the painting. A wry, entertaining and sometimes perceptive collection. BM

DREICH

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Umbrellas of Edinburgh: Poetry and Prose Inspired by Scotland’s Capital City, ed. by Russell Jones and Claire Askew, Shoreline of Infinity, 260 pp., 978-18381268-2-7, £9.95

morial, which contains the memorable lines ‘Burnt girls don’t need live men’s words / to speculate their good intentions’). There is, also the process of one’s life being shaped by its urban surroundings (which ‘The Queen of Portobello’ by Hannah McCooke thematizes), or by particular socio-economic circumstances (highlighted by Douglas Bruton’s ‘A Man’s a Imagine, Edinburgh had been deMan for A’That’ told from the perspective of a homestroyed by some terrible disaster. less person). More subjects are covered, e.g. encounThe labyrinth of the Old Town and ters in pubs, enjoying sports, arrival and departure the pristine layout of the New, eve(Waverley features in several contributions). rything surrounding them – all gone. What would you do? Especially if you had spent your life there, Overall, the quality of the pieces is consistently had lost much more than a home when it disapstrong, yet it is interesting to note that those which peared? broadly fall into the genres of the fantastic/dystopic/ mythical particularly stand out. In addition to the Maybe you would try to recreate the city as a virtual already mentioned ‘Candlemaker Row’ that includes reality, complete with the right sounds and smells, Jane Yolen’s ‘Dwam’ (an enchanting take on Dean the varying dialects of its roads, the vagaries of light Village), ‘A Beltane Prayer’ by AJ Clay (whose protagat different times of day, and, of course, the rain – onist seems able to discern life beyond the limits of from incessant drizzle to merciless flood. Umbrellas what is commonly considered ‘real’), Keith Dumble’s of Edinburgh, surprisingly, doesn’t mention the rain ‘Redrawing The Lines’ (with its cartomancers travelthat much. In all other respects, however, this anling back in time with the help of historical maps), thology would be a more than suitable blueprint for and ‘Kelpie’ by Rachel Plummer (which turns a panoan undertaking such as that outlined above. rama of Oxgangs into a magical experience).

The latter forms, in fact, the premise of One small criticism concerns the fact that a few spu‘Candlemaker Row’, a moving dystopic short story by rious spaces have made their way into some of the Jane Alexander, one of more than 80 authors who pieces, and there is the odd mistake, e.g. in the aucontributed to this book. The editors deliberately thor biographies attached at the end. Both are minor invited a range of writers, with roots in Auld Reekie irritations in a book that is so well presented and lovand elsewhere, to ‘reflect the diversity of Edinburgh ingly illustrated by Nick Askew with black-and-white and its people, and to shift the existing (dead white line drawings of maps showing different parts of Edmen) focus through a more contemporary lens’. The inburgh as well as architectural details, and a cover result is an impressive collection that offers a kaleiwith the iconic Scott Monument before a mother-ofdoscope of perspectives on the different parts – pearl-blueish sky.

North, West, Central, South, and East as well as To sum up: whether you are already in love with EdWays in(to) the city. inburgh, or whether you are looking to discover the Each text takes a particular location as its starting nooks and crannies of this old lady courted by the point and runs with it into whichever direction the Firth of Forth, you will most definitely enjoy Umbrelauthor chooses: the past, the present, the future, las of Edinburgh. MIMS myth, space. Included are touristy places, such as the Castle or the Royal Mile (which features in Tracey S. Rosenberg’s delightfully grumpy poem ‘At the Fringe’), as well as lesser-known spots, such as the exclusive-to-certain-post codes Dean Street Gardens (see Janette Ayachi’s cleverly and subtly subversive ‘Secret Garden’).

Despite the polyphony which in the best possible way characterizes this book, common themes emerge: e.g. the layers of historical change that become visible when looking hard at one particular place (Peter Mackay’s ‘Soliton’ is a fantastic example) or the lasting significance of specific personalities or events that shaped the city’s life (as in Alice Tarbuck’s ‘Exceptional Knowledge’ on the Witches Me-