The Forward Book of Poetry 2020

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From Shahidha Bari’s Forword…

“...poems are not just heard but felt in the shape of the words formed on our mouths, understood resonantly deep within, too.

We are all poetry people. You read the right line at the right moment and suddenly the world is illuminated with a different light. If you are searching for that line, we have confidence that you will find it. And if you ever doubted that poetry is for you, know that it takes just one poem to turn a reader into a lifelong poetry person...”

A couple of the poems I particularly liked

Liz Berry Highbury Park

https://www.forwardartsfoundation.org/poetry/highbury-park/

RA Villanueva Namesake

https://twitter.com/caesura/status/995344514163314689

The Nearer You Stand by Roger Wagner

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Roger Wagner is a poet and an artist, and while the pairing of artworks and poetry might be fairly common to have pairings from the same author adds an extra dimension.

I probably engaged more with the images than the words – he is a skilled painter of trees, but he also takes scenes from scripture given us new images that free us from the traditional, often twee Victorian, images that might come first into our minds.

He has some of the images on his website, but the picture quality there is does not really do justice to them

A common character is the setting of the scene in front of an industrial landscape – although many of the locations in scripture are “rural” it would have been understood as a working landscape and so it is helpful to point us to that rather than our increasingly romanticised rural idle

https://www.rogerwagner.co.uk/work/item/54/walking-on-water-iii-2005

There is also a luminosity to many of the images – a hint of the radiance of the glory of god perhaps?

https://www.rogerwagner.co.uk/work/item/14/1984

Fantastic Man Buttoned-Up edited by Gert Jonkers & Jop van Bennekom

Out of print but can be found on Amazon 

Another of the Penguin series published alongside the London Underground 150^th Anniversary, this one taking a left-field look from that theme.

It explores the meaning of the fashion, common in parts of East London, of wearing the top button of short done up without a tie. This seems like a mirco-topic but turns of to be a rich seam – there is something about restrain and self-control that is expressed by that button – the absence of the tie grabs the attention more that its presence would. Those featured are all white, it is a style that comes form the white-working class neighbourhoods of East London – and there are complexities as the assumptions of masculinity have shifted, in part as work has shifted away from physical labour.

Gor Saga by Maureen Duffy

Out of print but can be found on Amazon 

First published in 1981 this near future dystopia imagines a range of technology that are now common place – Kindle-style e-readers, self-service check-out, 3D printing, self-driving cars, data / records that accessible across a dispersed network, video calls from mobile devices – I found it interesting how these are mostly mentioned as asides yet seem to have matched the progress in the last 40 years so well, and this added to vivid narrative.

As automation has eliminated a wide range of jobs society has been sharply divided, along the lines of the 11+, between “people of status” and “nons”. The life of the people of status continues largely untouched but eased by the advances in technology while the quality of life of the “nons” has regressed. This divide is policed, with central records of peoples life determining which side of the line they will live – with peoples capabilities, and therefore worth, been viewed as essentially hereditary.

Into this world Gor, the “product of a gorilla ovum and human sperm”, is born. The disregard of Forrester for the primates that he experiments is closely linked to a societal disregard for the “nons” as sub-human. The treatment of Gor, wrenched repeatedly from care-givers, is harrowing. That his capabilities and worth transcend his origin points to the larger error is these divisions in society.

Although the story told is obviously writ-large there are some points of the touch very close to contemporary home – the division between the “people of status” and the “nons” might be extreme compared with the inequalities within England today (albeit these are very real) they are probably akin to the relative experiences of the western consumer and the sweatshop worker in Bangladesh, and a lot of the narratives around immigration play of the status and entitlement of British citizens and the lack it on the part of those seeking to move here.

This is a book that doesn’t deserve to be out of print...

Great British Railways: 50 Things to See & Do by Vicki Pipe with Geoff Marshall

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This is a great book to pop in bag and read on the train, or like me read on the sofa during lockdown.

The facts they share and ideas of things to do are interesting in themselves, but also are the prompt to a wider attitude of curiosity about the world around us. If we really look around us there is so much to see, even in “ordinary” places – even asking us why the street has that name begins to open up and enrich our experience.

Sound Archive by Nerys Williams

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One of the peoms

The Dead Zoo, Dublin

for John Peel

1

In the dead zoo we walk an afternoon

touching the giraffe with a sutured stomach

and the bull seal with a broken ear.

The gazelles too are thinking

about the jungle kings, sun-kissed and light-bleached

making a performance of their anger.

All hips and grimaces the hyenas

pass silent commentary on our clothes.

And I remember finding the bat in daylight

on the schoolyard wall, its cape and hooks

trembling, broken by the colourwash of light,

it hated being stroked.

We had a bat funeral, a ceremony that summer

which followed other rituals:

wreath laying for road kill, bouquets for robins

and elegies for tame jackdaws.

Strange to find oneself here with these exhibitionists

teasing us that they are alive still.

2

Music is a skin,

notes at the tips of my fingers

fingertips at the edge of my songs.

After the elegies and the websites

after the obituaries and the radio stories

after the musicians and the brouhaha

there was nothing left but teenage kicks.

3

So I take you to the dead zoo

your own private Gethsemane

to curate the animals into action

4

I will use your words against mine with mine and on mine,

I will play all your records at the same time

the unreleased singles and demos

causing cacophony on the dance floors.

Rhythm is a bright confusion

I will say that music is homesickness

And you can give me your unheimlich

as an elegy of recognition.

The Origins of the Anglo-Saxons: Decoding the Ancestry of the English by Jean Manco

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The term “Anglo-Saxon” is increasingly contested, and often see as closely aligned to racial prejudice therefore Manco twin approach of exploring linguistic and genetic origins of the peoples that are often referred to as “Anglo-Saxon” should have been more rewarding than I feel this book is.

It is difficult to see who the intended audience really is – it is written as a text book, each chapter ends with a summary page of bullet points, and it is probably too dry for most general readers, but at 200 small pages, full of maps and images it is unlikely to provide the depth of any academic reader would need.

It also feels like it never manages to draw the insights of different perspectives and evidence together to tell a story that is bigger than the sum of its part – disconnected elements are just piled on top of each other.

One point of interest was that the period we sometimes call the Dark Ages is also known as “Völkerwanderung” - the era of wandering of the people.

One by One by Penelope Gilliatt

Out of print but can be found on Amazon 

One by One is a dark and troubling tale. As its backdrop is an epidemic disease there is a particular resonance to reading during COVID-19 lockdown – but it is also a tale about media manipulation which in the 5 or so decades since its publication have also intensified making it seem to really speak to our moment. A few spoilers follow.

As Joe and Polly have to be physically separated to protect her from the risk of infection while he works with victims in hospital her pain at the lack of touch will be familiar to many in these days, but it over laid by Joe’s emotional distancing from her. It leads to the dark reflection “That it’s selfish to clutch at people and clutter them like this when the truth is that we’re on our own. Everyone dies his own death. No one else can do it for you.” Maybe no one can do it for you, but that doesn’t mean that you must face it alone.

Joe, a vet volunteering in the hospital, is picked up by a newspaper that builds a story of him as a hero until a rival paper (possibly after a tip off by Joe’s own mother) runs story of his youthful arrest for a homosexual encounter. In a mid-sxities context this is a scandal that crushes him to the point of suicide – while our attitudes to sexuality have changed the ways that people become the play things of the media and flip from hero to scandal are very much with us.

There is no hopeful resolution to the narrative – and the themes of the failing of relationships and society run on and we can still find them all around us.

Percy A Story of 1918 by Peter Doyle, Illustrations by Tim Godden

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With so many books about the First World War written this nevertheless stands out.

Based on a collection of letters, fragments of the story, within the grand narratives of the War this is the story of one individual, Percy, and there is a power that touches you in that personal, particular, encounter in ways that the overwhelming weight of numbers sometimes fails to do.

That Percy is not called up until near the end of the war means that it is also an account of the “home front” - there ways in which live carried on – some parts largely as normal. It recalls Percy’s period of training, often overlooking as the focus gets grabbed by the horror at the front.

To tell the tale of an unremarkable solider is an important memorial, not only to Percy but to all those whose lives have been used up by war unnoticed beyond their own home and family.

Eric and Scrunchball by James and Alice Reynolds

Out of print but can be found on Amazon 

There is a deep charm to this picture book telling the true story of the separation of Eric and his Scottie Dog when Eric went to serve as an Army Chaplain, and was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore.

It is the tale of Scrunchball (real name Tim) the dog waiting for Eric’s return – it is a one level a very simple tale, but there is a poignancy in the waiting which comes from the contrast with the joyful illustrations of the cheeky Scrunchball. A window on the pain of separation for men and women waiting for loved ones that have gone to war, the grieve of those for whom the wait was in vain as they would not return.

It is good that there are picture books such as this helping us to tell big stories to children.

What we Talk About When We Talk About The Tube by John Lanchester

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This is an engaging exploration of what “The Tube” means – John Lanchester shares how his own understanding of what the word referred to changed over time – that “The Tube” can be a subset of the Underground (ie the deep lines rather than the cut-and-cover ones).

He also shows how access to the understanding of particular language or idioms is part of cultural identity and belonging – to “misused” the phrase “The Tube” a sign that you are not really a Londoner?

That this is the District Line volume in the Penguin set for the Underground 150^th Anniversary when it is one of the lines that is not “The Tube” in a strict application of the phrase is somehow comforting.

The Orchard by Michael Volland, Illustrated by Rebecca Torrance

You can download a pdf here...

This is an interesting little book – written to help Churches explore the need to be open to new ways of being, but rather than talk of Mission Action Plans, strategies and engagement it pairs Rebecca Torrance’s 12 Lino Cut images with 2 or 3 lines of text each recounting how a neglected Orchard could be restored.

The indirect approach seems really refreshing and hopefully makes the process accessible to a wider range of people.

The image of the Orchard is closely linked to the Biblical use of the vineyard as a metaphor for the Kingdom of God but working in County Durham orchards rather than vineyards more relevant to context.

100 Prized Poems – Twenty Five Years of the Forward Books

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Alan brought this for me from my wish list – and enjoying them I am now buying the whole set of annual Forward Poetry Books

From this collection just a couple of bits…

Helen Dunmore’s poem ‘To my nine-year-old self’ includes this image which I found painful but true -

…

I’d like to say that we could be friends

but the truth is we have nothing in common

beyond a few shared years. I won’t keep you then.

…

Ann Carson’s poem ‘God’s Justice’

In the beginning there were days set aside for carious tasks.

On the day He was to create justice

God got involved in making a dragonful

and lost track of time.

It was about two inches long

with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.

God watched it bend its tiny wire elbows

as it set about cleaning the transparent case of its head.

The eye globes mounted on the case

rotated this way and that

as it polished every angle.

Inside the case

which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank

God could see the machinery humming

and He watched the hum

travel all the way down the turquoise dots to the end of the tail

and breathe off as light.

It black wings vibrated in and out.

Speak, Old Parrot by Dannie Abse

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One of the poems

A Fan

Too many flaws: my poems less fresh than tinned

but he was one who would never let me fail.

His first sedative gust of praise turned

into an imperious fountain, would not pause,

he pointing out nuances I didn’t intend

and I smiled Cheese until I became stale

and I thought of luminous William Blake

enthusing, ‘That is sheer genius,’

and Constable replying, ‘Gosh, and there’s me

thinking it was only a painting.’

Other Harbours by Anna Lewis

Out of print but can be found on Amazon 

One of the poems…

Blue

The fields had stood bald for months:

the earth tight with ice, the tubers

and kernels stashed below locked

fast inside their rinds. Then the hair

had started to fail on the children,

their nails to turn blue as forst

that spotted the leaves, and the cow

would no longer yield but had stalled

in the dust, refused to rise.

So the parents had nailed shut

the door and carried the children,

light as shaken-out sacks, to the town.

From the almshouse walls they watched

clouds stiffen over the sea, thought of

the boarded door, the sealed ground.

They had left too late for their daughter:

wrapped in white, she was blessed in

the chapel as her brother looked up,

up into the dome, tipped the back

of his head to his shoulders, filled

his eyes with the ceiling’s empty bowl.

Jilted City by Patrick McGuinness

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I liked the short, two line, poem Déjà-vu

Forgotten as it happens, recalled before it has begun:

two tenses grappling with one instance, one perception.

Another poem – House Clearance

Turn the key: note how the emptiness accumulates

as you come in; how by being here at all you seem to add to it,

until it fills the corridor with that fermented stasis

you both disturb and add to as you move. Pass

through a second door, a portal of stirred air,

ignore the rooms to left and right and take the stairs,

you shoes dislodging dust that billows

up in tiny detonations. You’re walking underwater,

the silt explodes beneath your feet; at first you think you’ll drown

but what’s flashing though your mind in one

slow-motion scattering of greys is not your own life but theirs.

No matter that you still can’t breathe – that’s how it’s always

been in here: even the nothingness is think as blotting paper

on which their shapes have spread like ink – must, damp.

The outline of a body sketched in mothballs and almost-

memory. The furniture is ghostly beneath the sheets

but the missing pictures are still there, outlined

in frames of dirt on squares of wall now white as bone

surprised beneath the skin. You were in every one of them.

Now you’re last flame in the grate:

Hamlet in his theatre of shadows, their embers at your feet.

This collection includes translation Liviu Campanu’s City of Lost Walks which reflects on his exile from Bucharest – and this poem seemed to speak to some of the experience of COVID-19 Lockdown – an extract

…

And what I complain most about is that it’s not exactly

suffering, not quiet extremity, but rather fretting

at tedium’s hem, picking myself apart remembering

...