A collection that ranges from the abstract aspects of God to the deeply grounded grief after miscarriage – it speaks of ancient things with a freshness.
Friday, 21 January 2022
Pitch Lake by Andre Bagoo
Another joy found via Fourteen Poems, from this collection one of the poems I liked the most was:
Monday
Sun first
then white sheets
our bodies dropped from our minds
into a bed so warm it breathes,
the weekend’s jeans a moult
a denim waterfall crumpled in the floor,
coffee as strong as a ring,
steam as hot as the iron I use
to press my shirt for today’s work.
Maybe loving is like ironing a shirt.
Only through heat and pressure does it yield
its shape,
take the form which best fits.
Over time, the cloth’s
colours might hold;
or the fabric fade and fray,
the shirt still kept, still worn
but while scrubbing floors, changing
curtains, cutting weeds
slowly grown among
our chive and mint;
or perhaps the shirt is slit for a quilt,
made into a rag,
or given to someone else
who would otherwise be naked.
Broken Sleep Books Poetry Pamphlets
https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/
After getting a couple of these off the back of encountering some of their authors in https://www.fourteenpoems.com/ I have now signed up for their subscription service, therefore I am going to do a combined post for these...
I have covered New Year’s Eve by Annie Muir already
Acting Out / Chem & other poems by Peter Scalpello
The double issue pamphlet does have 2 distinct halves but it was probably the poems in Chem & other poems that touched me most, talking with honesty about the complicated relationship with sex in a way that doesn’t apologise and refuses to be shamed for the untidiness of your sex life is powerful
These Queer Merboys by Serge ♆ Neptune Serge explores the relationship between Merboys and “men” creatively – with “Last time my Lover same Inside me” and “Melusine Boys” distilling this particularly strongly.
Black Jam by Matthew Haigh
One of the poems…
Prove it
It was firmly hinted I should broadcast my bereavement.
Tweet it. Reap the rubies of popping candy likes
then back to stale news rooms.
Far more interesting deaths are happening elsewhere.
How am I meat to
brainstorm-market this?
Find your incredible. Think positive.
It was inferred a dignified silence would not do.
This congregation sits in a peep show booth’s dark
likes ready for
death’s binary brine.
Look! I’m crying – take my bloody stone.
Litanies – have the lot.
Unravelanche by Jon Stone
These poems are formed from fragments taken from other texts – which you can piece together for yourself.
Dreamlands by Razielle Aigen
Exploring the borderlands of ideas that come with dreams these are likewise hard to pin down.
Rude Mechanical by Jack Warren
One of the poems…
Relic for Donald George Whitelock
In his eighty-fifth winter
unaware how thin his fingers had become
my Grandad, scattered birdseed over a dry stone wall
and came home without his sovereign ring.
I would like to tell you we recovered it;
that when the cyclamen came, we found it
snow washed and copper-bright in the the spring
shadow of a yew tree, but we both know
this world takes more than it gives.
Instead picture Don, throwing arm still
sound; casting his history into the frost
to be rediscovered some day as buried treasure;
then think on me, young enough to hope
all our renunciations might be this gentle
Springing from the Pews by Day Mattar
This is a very uncomfortable collection – shared the experience of abuse in ways that don’t compartmentalise it or sanitise it.
An extract…
we went downstairs straight after
and i coloured in a picture of a clown
holding up a flower
and gave it to him
Play Lists by Jessica Mookherjee
One of the Poems Crush
The sun and air were your best friends, you were cool
breezes at the back of the class with them,
they didn’t get your jokes but I laughed. I was at the front
taking notes. Heartbeat like a sickening ship as you put
an arm round my neck at break and asked
why I hadn’t been to school for weeks. The other boys
distracted looking down Lucy King’s shirt, you kissed
my hand and asked if I was into the Smiths.
Those lunch breaks dancing in the playing fields
waving bits of grass, twigs and flowers, sprawled
with our over long jumpers as we laughed. You’re the only one
I know that think’s they’re funny, I mean who says
‘heaven knows’ anyway? So we kept our shaded secrets
until I know the weight of the summer crushed me.
and we were so far from the sea of course the hermit crabs were dead by Lotte Mitchell Reford
One of the Poems Mice
I used to think about dying and feel
ok because I had you. I know
that’s stupid, we wouldn’t die
curled together and at the same
moment even if we lasted. Remember
the time the firemen tore up
my floorboards and found
those dead mice? I guess that’s how
I always imagined us. Our tails
curling to prefect spirals, the
vertebrae of them aligned like bricks
in some modern but well-built
structure. Shell shaped.
The Fibonacci spiral. Prefection
in nature. It took me so long
after I left you, so many sleepless nights
staring at damp cellings and trying not to think
about death, or about your bottom lip,
your nose, or your hands;
the way they tensed just before
sleep and held parts of me,
to remember that you and I
have never had tails.
Plain Air: An Apology in Transit by Cat Chong
This single sentence provides an unsettling journey.
The Live Album By Kat Payne Ware
Poems about Pigs surprise – showing the extraordinary in the ordinary.
Writing through Siddhartha by Andre Bagoo
This is a collection of found poems which have a playfulness.
Tear and Share by Leia Butler
The poem Stamp includes the great line
“a lick and leave policy
bought entirely to lose to someone else.”
repeating mouths by Adrienne Wilkinson
The blurb says “… both the lesbian erotic and the traumatic body are explored under a lens of curiosity, a hunger for new experience.”
Blame it on Me by Briony Collins
I have tagged the poems “Harbour”, “What Goodbye Looks Like”, “Ampersand”, and “Plateau”
Iarnród Éireann by Simon Barraclough
This is a single poem in which I found this line particularly resonant:
“ So now – I’m home. Not home home, but here home.”
Home the place we live and Home the place we belong are not always coterminous.
Spoil by Morag Smith
The poem Leaving about a traveller family forced to move on under threat to violence perhaps caught my attention because I am in the middle of reading Naomi Ishiguro’s Common Ground.
Bad Sermons by Luke Kennard
These 23 poems carry a narrative – there is a darkness, but you have much less than the full story, and what you are reading between the lines, intentionally, does a lot of work. It creates a discomfort.
Monomaniac by Liam Bates
Each poem is titled “mono[something]” - there is a surreal element in the narrative aspects of the poems, an entry point for a certain sort of realism.
From the poem Monorail
“It should be remembrance of what’s lost, yes -
but also an uncomfortable reminder
of what doesn’t bear repeating. It should hurt
to occupy that space again.”
There are many things, personal or collective, that we need to keep as living memories for their pain – how we find the ways to recall the past without rose-tinted glasses.?
Dirt By Dominic Leonard
Rich in references to literature and Biblical imaginary, giving the pamphlet a luxurious quality.
Waterbearer By Stuart McPherson
It felt like the power was in what was not being said – there is more going on than the words printed on the page.
sometimes I write poems and sometimes I write poems By Martín Rangel (Translated by Lawrence Schimel)
That this collection with the Spanish and the translations side by side opens with a poem “I translate to steal” set the tone of punchy ideas shared with wit.
The Forward Book of Poetry 2022
I put tabs on the following poems
The last night of my 20s by Kayo Chingonyi
The Beautiful Man Whose Name I Can’t Pronounce by Selima Hill
High School Musical By Stephen Sexton
1948 by Denise Riley
Your past can’t tell it is past.
How to convince it that it’s done with, now?
The Opened Field by Dom Bury
for a subculture to resist capitalist co-opting
it must remain impossible to define by lisa luxx
pill-box by Andrew McMillan
Saturday, 8 January 2022
Traitor King by Andrew Lowne
Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers
One feels that this is not really “the explosive new royal biography” the cover claims – the lives of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor have been told many times before, and this account does not reveal anything that will not have already been in the public domain.
That said Lowne provides a rich and engaging account, his real focus is on the years between the abdication and the end of the Second World War – the period when his charge of Traitor applies most acutely. This period in the lives of the Duke and Duchess reads like the more implausible moments in a Le Carre novel.
While there were many at that time seeking to avoid War, and once the War started bring it to a rapid conclusion, there were many that were naive about the true horror of the Nazi regime – and the Duke and Duchess have a times be excused their flirtations with Great Britain's armed enemy on this basis – they probably were naive but Lowne demonstrates that they were also complicit.
Lowne also suggests that, for all the pain of the Abdication crisis, the Duchess was actually a welcome excuse for the British Establishment to rid themselves of a deeply unsuitable King. And the actions of the Duke did much to vindicate the way the Royal Family ostracised them – it is difficult to imagine the couple actually living quietly in Britain, their presence would have been even more problematic than they were at a distance.
Of the pair Lowne is particularly harsh in judgement of the Duchess – concluding firmly that she never loved the Duke, and probably never loved anyone. Despite their wealth the pairs obsession with money, their sense that they lacked it while living in the highest luxury. This is placed in contrast to the best spirit of public service and duty that we attribute to the current Queen.
It is a sad story, but it is hard to feel sorry for the Duke and Duchess.
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