Gleaming Cutlery

Geraldine Monk. Pendle Witch-Words. Knives Forks And Spoons Press

Paul Sutton Cabin Fever. Knives Forks And Spoons Press

Stephen Nelson. Lunar Poems for New Religions. Knives Forks And Spoons Press

Nicky Mesch. A Cold Woman. Knives Forks And Spoons Press

   Neat and uniform books from this catchily-named press. There's clearly an intention to get down to business: for example, no information on the authors, although at least Geraldine Monk and Paul Sutton have done the rounds, Geraldine with well acclaimed books, Paul Sutton with pamphlets in his native Tyneside. The principal objective in the case of all these authors is to deliver the texts, which have contributions to make to the poetry scene. There's a sense of strong content in all of them.

Geraldine Monk's poetry about the Pendle witches of Lancaster is well known. Her previous book Interregnum (Creation Books 1994) was well researched, and while mainly concerned with the story of the Pendle witches it also referred to the Quakers' founder George Fox, to Gerald Manley Hopkins and the Birmingham Six. With the 400^th anniversary of these infamous events, and with Interregnum out of print, in the context of better historical research and the misiniformation generally offered by the tourist industry, Pendle Witch-Words comes as a timely re-working of the witches' poems.

    Monk now gives words to the country characters caught up in the events. These were ordinary lower-class victims of the hysterical reactions of the time. Words being the essence of the accusations, these poems are both sympathetic and informative. Not many poets could even attempt this subject with any hope of success, but Geraldine Monk's poems are fair, illuminating, and respectful and bring a sort of peace to these dreadful events of history. Her unassuming poems in such authentic voices are a major achievement.

Paul Sutton has been an active poet on Tyneside for a long time, and well deserves for his poems to be available in book form. These poems are collected from a number of booklets including some from the Knives Forks and Spoons Press itself.

    Described by Luke Kennard as “the antidote to the writing workshop” Sutton is a poet of protest and performance, a justifiably aggressive poet of social and sometimes poetry politics – as in The Death of the Poet, where certain high-profile poetry characters are summarily dealt with in a quick scuffle after which the poet is

          Dragged back,

      last seen in Bedford, a traveller's “camp”,

      then traded on between rival gangs.

In the following poem, a long sequence really laying into the 'bourgeous' poetry of residencies etc, he counterpoints descriptions of Amalfi with powerful satire on the system:

      Morning like a slap. Circulate at breakfast, distribute copies,

      Disappear.

      My first poem is an utter joke.

In another section:

      Angrily he accepts a copy of my Amalfi poem, now translated into Italian.

In the title poem Cabin Fever, with its hints of a sort of poetry busking life,

      Do you see me from the top deck?

      I dread the language-school trash,

      shoplifting gangs

he hits a splendid whammy at the too-bourgeois audience:

     “Thanks. I did enjoy this, but, well, I just want to ask

     what language is it? I do like a raw yeasty tang of

     vernacular, and think that some rap is almost

     poetry...”

I've been trying to think of the right term for Sutton's poetry, the opposite of bourgeois, not working class, not lower class... This is what people write when they are not grantsucking.

Stephen Nelson writes in Scots of varying intensity, and in English. Some of his Scots is much the same as conversational English tarted up with the odd fae and wis. Some is in stronger Scots.

     It is brave of any English publisher to publish poetry in Scots. Actually it is very difficult to get it published in Scotland at the moment. What with MacDiarmid and his followers having somewhat receded into history and the demands on present day editors of including Gaelic, Scots has been squeezed a good deal. Scots is very complex and beset by dialect, so English publishers will probably have to take Scots on trust from any poet who approaches them. One wants to know what kind of Scots each poet writes. Nelson's is central belt Scots, certainly, Glasgow and Edinburgh urban Scots, at time very reminiscent of the late Sandie Craigie, the Edinburgh/Glasgow performance poet:

       & the wirld birls roon again

       mixin sea an sky an air

       fur aw time ir wan time...

   This is the longest of the four books.

   Look Up, the main sequence, to me reads like a story, rather than a narrative poem. Most narrative poems are supported by a formal structure or metre that gives them that difference of intention from a story. The conversational tone here sets the scene for a long soliloquy about everything and nothing, a perfectly suitable subject for a poem, as told in a pub perhaps, or with one or two listeners in a kitchen, while working through to end on the approved lines about love of country and the Scottish coast.

   Crescent begins with almost blank pages and moves on to long narrow poems, punctuated by prose poems which I like better. I'm not convinced Nelson is a master of placing line breaks. He often has recourse to patterns which do the job of line breaking, however the strength of his writing shows up better in the prose pieces. This poet has plenty to say, and his short lines don't entirely match his sense of direction and conclusion. It is true we can write about worlds without direction and conclusion (The Waste Land perhaps) but to follow any philosophy of deconstruction seems a little at odds with the sci-fi references of the title Lunar Poems for New Religions and the sections The Moon from my Windowless Heart and Crescent.

   There are six prose poems in this section and to me they are the best things in the book. Again they remind me of Sandie Craigie, and that's a compliment. The end of the last of these prose poems possibly sums up the whole book:

     ...a comedy of in betweens or rebellion in a cup. How tired I am of inarticulate drunks 

     waving banners of peace over fallen women! I've pledged my allegiance to space travel 

     and flightless birds, less a surrender of will than a submission to the inchoate.

Nicky Mesch's Cold Woman is really an ice woman. A couple of minimalist poems about early girlhood precede a substantial poem On the Lake, which has a distinct fable-like story to it,with plenty of detail of a lake/island and a woodsman with dogs. Cold wild country, if it says where it is I've missed it – could be Canada. Then comes The Night of the Ball, a similarly styled six page poem, then Ma's Tale, then Blood Moon, then an Epilogue of six minimal lines 

    There are a lot of the elements of a novel here. It's all seen through a very chill glass and includes the maturing of the girl, sex, having babies, and various adventures and misadventures, against a strong background of men, forests, dogs and horses in a harsh, inhospitable world. It is very much a picture of womanhood from a male point of view. And this may have some historical value, against the contemporary background of gender experiences merging into each other more and more.

A Poem and its Editors

Kenneth Steven. A Song Among the Stones. Polygon.

This unusual story in verse deals with the little known (in UK) Papars, an early sect of Christian monks who sailed the northern seas around the 6^th century. It is primarily about the sea and its moods, its way of taking over the lives of primitive sailors and of the sailors' need for landfall.

    Clearly I intend to praise this work, because I liked it enough to publish it in its entirety in Poetry Scotland (Issue 68, 2010). This previous publication is acknowledged, along with its original commissioning for BBC3.

    Since it is basically the same work I saw and liked after first seeing it in typescript, and it has now benefited from in-house editing at Polygon, I am going to say a little about editing.

    I don't usually edit the poems I select for Poetry Scotland. Poems are expected to arrive complete from the hand of the poet. Though one may see requirements, for competitions, that poems should be their writer's unaided work, this would normally go without saying.

    A poem that reaches a magazine editor in less than finished state would not be acceptable, except that people cannot always see whether their work is finished or not. So I do sometimes suggest alterations, if there are obvious improvements and I know the poet concerned will accept my suggestions constructively.

In the case of a confident and experienced writer like Kenneth Steven, my job would be only to arrange the poem on the page. This we did over a four-page single-sheet issue. Kenneth was sent a proof and he probably made one or two tiny amendments as he saw the poem's layout, and small queries may have arisen between us. I cannot remember.

    In many ways it was easier to see the structure of this poem spread across the broadsheet pages than it is in this very attractive little book, where page-turning separates parts of the poem from one another, so that perhaps the readers will be at sea, along with the monks of the story, until the conclusion is reached. And perhaps that's appropriate.

    Reading through the text of this book and pencilling the changes onto a copy of my version was an exhilarating experience, because much, much less than I was expecting to see, had been altered. This confirmed my original feeling that Steven had produced a tight and unified poem, worthy of publication as it stood.

    In the 375 line poem, barely a dozen lines have been altered, mostly in very minor ways, and another half dozen lines deleted or abbreviated. The punctuation, utterly minimal, has not been changed in substance or detail.

    The revision has been done with a careful eye. Pearls of rain become glistenings of rain, presumably because they weren't actual pearls, and the writing of the whole piece is descriptive, exact and sparse. The monk who stays solitary, on the rock, only needs to explain in one statement:

      I won't go with you. Tell them I stayed

      that I went further north, to what

      I cannot know.

His earlier line,

      I have no choice, I'm going on

is deleted.

Elsewhere,

      the woods splayed with yellow patches, thatched with birdsong,

(a line very typical of Kenneth Steven's nature poems) is reduced to

      the woods splayed with yellow patches,

      birdsong

– no doubt suggested because the poem achieves its effect without such extravagance of language in the detail.

    Apart from one or two changes of breaks in the lines, that's about it.

    It is good to see it so little altered, so much the same poem, because I appreciated the work very much when I published it. I did not see it as an unfinished draft. I have seen a great deal more of Kenneth Steven's work over the years, and I am glad this lovely poem was essentially complete when it first came my way. Polygon's editors have also passed their test: they have not gratuitously changed this very capable poet's work. Indeed they have heard the song among the stones as the poet relayed it to them and to myself and the reader.

    The poem has approximately thirty page-length sections, some being very small page lengths, even a couple of lines or one line in places, and some being more substantial. It has been turned into a full book, as justified by the strength of the text, by the addition of white paper and blank pages that go well with the sense of a voyage, being lost in the waves. Indeed it is the quality not the length of a text that makes a book.

    Full marks all round.

Unholyland

Aidan Andrew Dun. Unholyland. Hesperus Press

The title page says Unholyland: the Rambam. Hidden in the unlikely garb of a paperback with a black and red cover reminiscent of a 1970's socialist group report, this is a whole book in a sequence of modernist sonnets, a love story and a political story of history and music and young people in the Gaza Strip. It is a page-turner of a poem, a sustained narrative that stands up to the best of its kind, which is not a British poem but Eugene Onegin. The difference is that the plot of Unholyland has no unkindness except from the political situation, the ongoing flack of daily warfare.

    Aidan Andrew Dun is known as an extra-establishment (not disestablishment) poet of considerable power. His previous long poem Vale Royal, published some fifteen years ago, has been gaining credence and followers ever since. That poem, in trenchant but enigmatic tercets covering London and its poets, Keats, Blake, Chatterton etc, published with an attached CD in the early days of CDs in books, gave him enough reputation as poet and performer for us to hope for great things of him. There have been some intermediate books, and now this one, Unholyland.

    The poetry deals with a gripping story. Despite its small print and its 156 pages (twelve equal chapters of twenty-two sonnets each) I read it in a day, though with a poem like this, you have never finished when you have read it once. The background matter is highly difficult, with its exposition of Jewish history and its criticism of the manner in which Palestinian land was taken, the legacy of the revenge against nazism. There's a delicate balance for young people in these countries, where Tel Aviv has a youth culture of Palestinian Hiphop music and rap. After a quiet introduction explaining that his own grandmother ran a ballet company which she would not take to Israel, and treating us to the moral tale of a monk who resolved a dispute between a wedding party and a funeral procession on a bridge, Dun wades into this difficult setting with a poetic narrative of calm persuasiveness.

    His young hero Moss or Moshe who disguises himself to attend a legendary hiphop session in Palestine, and his friendships on the other side, with the inevitable attraction to the young woman performer, form the crux of the story, as the young friends drive about in cars to rendezvous, and attend an extraordinary youth music rave in an an unidentified but rather paradisical, Arabian-style underground location. The scene's very realistic, very druggy. The dangers are real.

    This unlikely scenario is carried off by utter confidence. Vale Royal for all its flamboyant achievement was a teeny bit showy. In Unholyland, everything that needs saying – and a lot needs saying – is said simply and with confidence.

    The sonnets connect a strict rhyme pattern which I believe is Pushkinian, with variable speech rhythms in often narrow lines, bringing many rhymes very close together and displaying an exceptional rhyming facility. Rhyming is something our poets rarely practice, something held to be suitable for comic or children's poems. Not since Byron have we had a really pro display. We have one here. With well over two hundred sonnets to choose from I can give you only fleeting examples. In one sonnet at random we have ebony and ribbony, outstretched and sandwiched, car and rapstar, and poison and passion. In another, porcelain and mane, crash-landing and outstanding, welcome and foursome, immense and quintessence. It's constant – and as simple as needed whenever. It is the flexible, simple language, in which the speaker is forever looking forward, that does it.

    Additionally it is very, very rare to have good rhyme with variable speech rhythms, rhythms that are almost free verse. Jon Silkin was doing some work on free verse and metrical verse: he'd have been interested in Unholyland.

    As opposed to the difficulties of the subject, the narrative is handled directly, with a wealth of detail enmeshed with the background, cultural references, and at times skyhigh fun, until the young, Beatrice-like girl figure meets the hero by pulling him from a burning car. She is a singer at the huge event. Each of them presents a rap, embedded in the poem, and at the end their romantic communion is interrupted by violent, bloody warfare from the skies.
    Unholyland is a highly satisfactory read, perhaps more so to people who read a lot of poetry and can pick up the parallels and intentions in the art of the longer poem. But it is also coherent in itself and does not assume additional knowledge either of history or poetry. The Introduction is well worth reading but will be skipped by many: the Notes at the end are dispensable but provide additional information on the music, Goa, the Rastafarians, and the various political and religious histories.

    The poem abounds in lines memorable in themselves. Balancing the felicitous narrative ease comes a sense that the poem was difficult to write but has been written successfully against the odds.

Politically the poem is interesting because it also seems to give hope to a hopeless political situation, by its very expression of that hopelessness, its questioning of it, and by its insistence on facing up to history. And if this is poetry that might make anything happen, this is not because it isn't pure poetry, in the sense that it is poetry that makes its own reality so that the world it is made from is actually less real than the world of the poem.

    Dun's seems to be the only new poetry from Hesperus Press, which publishes translations and reissues of standard poets such as Chaucer, Pushkin and Emily Bronte.

Publisher and poet

Sheila Wakefield. Limerance. Consett, Co. Durham: Talking Pen.

It's no secret that Sheila Wakefield worked in the motor trade before taking an M.A. in Creative Writing at Northumberland University. Her teachers might well have been aware she would write poems that worked – no unexplained rattlings, no missing screws – but could they have guessed that one day she might turn her pen on them? She does so in They

 … they want us to find our voice,

      but then try to silence it....

      they take our fees, our naivety,
      sensitivity, plagiarise our work...

      have they forgotten so quickly

      when they were just like us?

Yet there is absolutely no sense of hostility here. Sheila's work, like herself, is always up front. With a simple contemporary style and a strong eye, she slams home her points whatever her subject. Next Door begins with what sounds like a grumble about neighbours:

      next door she shouts a lot...

      next door the cockerels crow

      every three minutes...

but swiftly moves to environmental problems:

      next door mammoth machines create

      Northumberlandia...

      next door the opencast intrudes,

      twenty-four/seven.

This is a book by an incisive, practical poet of the free verse school. Not a rhyme in sight. This is the poet who learned much from James Kirkup (who also originated in North-East England), and the poet who has published dozens of other poets in both North-East England and Scotland with her Red Squirrel press.

The poems are direct and outspoken, and sometimes not so much cynical as unillusioned. The poet links to the community in Twelve things I don't want to hear, After Connie Bensley

(...You would like me to 'just look' at a new car...) and 38 poems I never wrote After Linda France.

As well as the title poem, also a love poem, there are a couple of forthright poems about sexual encounters, in both of which a car features, one more incidentally than the other, and yet another poem that can only be described as a love poem to a BMW. Or there again...

       His cool silver metal

       cradles a heart of pure platinum, a chassis of steel...

       Child-like,

       a hint of bravado,

       nestling in his catalytic converter.

    It is actually quite unusual for today's women poets to write about their relationships with men.

    Physically this is a neat, cheerfully unassuming pamphlet: red cover, cream paper, not cramped, and decorated with vaguely blown-up woodcuts. Published by Talking Pen rather than Sheila Wakefield's own press, Limerance is entirely readable, satisfying, deserved and dignified.

Friends and Translations

Arne Rautenberg. Snapdragon. Translated from the German by Ken Cockburn.

Lincoln: Caseroom

Gordon Jarvie. La Baudunais et autre poemes de Bretangne. Traduit de l'anglais (Ecosse)

par Jean-Yves Le Disez. Brest: Editions les Hauts-Fonds

There are advantages in parallel text translations. Firstly, you know the work hasn't been translated from the Penguin. Secondly, the reader can compare the texts. A drawback is that you only get half a book. So quite a small collection or sequence can be presented in the two languages between the covers of a full book.

Arne Rautenberg and Ken Cockburn's Snapdragon is one of the prettiest small books I have seen for a while. Cover designer Jantze Tullett has come up with a repeat and border pattern with related endpapers that truly welcome you into the book. It's the work of two poets who have an affinity of writing style. Sensitive, playful or serious, in Scotland you would say there was an Edwin Morgan influence.

the bird-clock sunrise 0.4.30 is a good example (Routenberg eschews caps) with a list of exact timings of different birdsong and whimsical comments as though by the birds, reminiscent of Richard Price's piece on birds – another poet who uses similar styles to these. More serious and to the reader more interesting is the series of double sonnets describing the author's memories connected with World War II. It is difficult not to wonder what Germans make of their nazi history. In these poems the memories have become fragmentary and general. They dare to be nastier in places:

       playing football with / skulls

       Everything fucked. Then; /A spruced-up, spring-cleaned city.

       textbooks are burning

There are wordlist poems and some one-words poems (with integral titles) which may not be very suitable for translating. twelve stitches consists of German compound words which cannot be one-worders in English even with hyphens, but they do show the German poet's stylistic interests.

There are also quite a number of exactly page length poems, of six or seven three line stanzas rather sparse in line length. If I expected to find something sickening in the war haiku and didn't, I found it here in a revolting story of a workman who set fire to rabbits. The rest of this series of poems also deal with tough characters in life. There is Deathwish Driver

     if you are in luck I drive by

and Stockman, who gets used to his awful smell.

    You manage because your own body

    simply absorbs the smell

ah! these people live in different flats, they are subtitled attic floor right, third floor right, etc. along with the garrulous idiot widow and the working girl.

My advice to this poet is, move house.

This is not a translation of a particular book by Rautenburg but a selection by the translator. Snapdragon is the translator's title.

The difference between Snapdragon and La Baudunais is that in the latter the original poems are in English, or, as the title page puts it, Scottish English. The parallel read is therefore different. The French verses are the translation.

It is interesting to see the phrase “not waving but drowning” make its way into the French. Of the eleven poems spanning twelve years of visits to the same area, the farewell poem including this quotation is easily the shortest. Of the rest, most are mid length, though one is divided into sections with dates – much like a diary (the first poem, In Brittany), and one is substantially longer (The day we saw the conger). The poems build up to a good understanding of the host countryside, and there is one poem, Lottery Winner? that is very appealing on the rejection of too many riches, linking into an old Breton prayer to connect the poem with the area. It is probably my favourite:

...I can't sleep in more than one bed

   or sit in more than one chair

   at a time...

  I remember the old Breton prayer...

...and day by day, a bowl of cider

   and a warm galette. Amen,

   amen to all of that.

The poems are a homage to the area. Even Belle, a neighbour's dog who sits alone 'like Greyfriars Bobby' desperate for a greeting from passers by, is part of the village, and the conger belongs to the waters of Brittany. The last poem, Night Flight, is wider in geographical scope as they fly north from Spain into France, but from the plane the poet is looking out for Brittany and Normandy. There's a real sense of home.

It is good that people who live there can read these poems in French, thanks to Le Disez' lively and pleasing translations, and a publisher in Brittany who has done poets and poems justice in an excellently produced book. The French translations have been given the right hand pages and strangely they are in a seriffed typeface while the Scottish poems are done in sans serif which makes them look a little plainer and the French slightly more decorative. But that doesn't matter.

Both these books are the result of a productive relationship between poet friends who are able to meet fairly easily across the linguistic borders.

Sci Fi Poetry Liftoff

Where Rockets Burn Through: Contemporary science fiction poems from the UK. ed. Russell Jones. Penned in the Margins £9.99.

A substantial trade paperback of 208 pages making a strong bid to take poetry out to the bigger Science Fiction audience. Unusually, both the Preface and Essay are well worth reading. Russell Jones' introduction is properly more practical and about the intention of the book.

In the preface, Alasdair Gray defines both the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost as science fiction – an original point indeed – and says we base today's science fiction on today's scientific view of the world.

Steve Sneyd, the doyen of Sic Fi poetry when it was a smaller clique comprising himself, Edwin Morgan and friends, is an inspired choice for the longish introductory essay, Wormholing into Elsewhere. Sneyd really knows his stuff. He has been more accustomed to the small press, sometimes the very small press, as he churned out leaflets and booklets published from his home in Huddersfield, in a manner reminiscent of Sheena Blackhall's activity in Aberdeen. Over the decades it is a sure way of becoming known. Sneyd has read everything relevant and pulls great fish out of the water. “Our new mythology is science fiction,” he quotes from Henigan. He considers the changing boundaries of Science Fiction, places it has already been, unbeknownst to ordinary poets, places it might end up.

With titling by Edwin Morgan running through the book, Morgan and Sneyd lead a wide range of contributors, all poets to professional standards, with a high proportion of previously published poems, but in books or journals that would probably not reach the SF readership.

The proportion of women contributors to men is smaller than one usually sees in current anthologies, though Pippa Goldschmidt, Kona Macphee, Claire Askew and others hold their own. Another noticeable feature is the strong Scottish contingent, which must reflect an editorial ear to the northern ground. There are even some nice pieces in Scots (Dr Wha and Intae the Ooter) from widely known novelist James Robertson, welcome because Scots is rarely seen in publications aimed at the whole UK.

Some of the poems are substantial and very well researched – correct detail being essential – e.g. the collaborative sequence Lost Worlds by Jane McKie, Andrew C Ferguson and Andrew J Wilson.

An important strand in such a book is poems which link SF imagination and astronomical research with more immediate human concerns or world political problems. Pippa Goldschmidt's From the Unofficial History of the European Southern Observatory in Chile does this very well.

Steve Sneyd's special personal language in his poems is worth clocking if you have not come across it before (perhaps you should have done). We have been happy to print poems from him in Poetry Scotland several times.

There are very many witty poems here, e.g. Kirston Irving's Supper – where

a boat of lush green paper on the plate

transposes to
aboard: a flash of green peppering the palate

and so on.

There is also good lyrical poetry, but wit rides stronger in the collection as a whole.

This book should be appreciated by any SF reader whether previously familiar with poetry or not (meaning usually not). Like Red Squirrel's successful Split Screen it reaches out to further audiences. An achievement and a milestone. We hope to see it prove poetry books can sell.

Eyewear Grows Up

Dangerous Cake. Elspeth Smith

Eighteen poems. Simon Jarvis.

both Eyewear Publishing, London, 2012.

Hardbacks with strong coloured covers, very nicely bound, good sized, and quite a lot of poetry in them, £12.99 each, these come a little above the usual cost of new contemporary poetry. They are very welcome both from a production point of view and by their widening of the London poetry perspective. Most of the poems are previously published, mainly in Canadian, American and North West England journals, which helps a new publisher by backing up his choices.

Simon Jarvis' book carries longer, chunkier poems such as are not always favoured by book publishers, so is far more substantial than the title Eighteen Poems suggests. Two of the poems indeed reach twelve pages without by any means dripping down the middle of the page. They're not narrative either, but reflective or philosophical, enjoying and filling their space with a width of imagination and memory. Another substantial poem, Persephone, is an essay in rhythm and meter and mostly in dactyls – it's catching.

Elspeth Smith's poems in Dangerous Cakes are generally much shorter. And what does the title mean? There are a number of domestic subjects, with titles like Parties, Tea – ah yes it is the final line in Sweet Things. The art of the ordinary, perhaps.
Elspeth Smith lives in Huddersfield, while Simon Jarvis is now a professor of Poetry at Cambridge. I have one whimsical question. Does this publisher oblige his authors to be photographed in specs? These two seem to be wearing identical pairs.

Encouraging and adventurous publishing by Todd Swift of the Eyewear website. More in the pipeline, I've heard.