Death Magazine by Matthew Haigh

 Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

Matthew Haigh prefaces his collection with this quote from J. G. Ballard “How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant?”

This poem speaks powerful of a grief that is awkward, so much powerfully unsaid...

What Will Your Sims Do Now?

Like a good nephew, I save your computer

from the skip’s slew of lifelong wreckage,

lug its black lake-weight back to my room

even thought the tower is now a humming grave.

Inside still live the pixel kids

you abandoned to a timeless

paradise, still frolicking poolside,

spurting gibberish, clownish, in a summer

that will never end. They know nothing

of the absent god act you’ve pulled, these tiny

Adams and Eves in cherry-print kaftans.

I feed and clothe and shower them, these strange

skin cells you’ve shed in your swift exit,

my head haloed by the screen’s heaven-

blue, the way yours must have been as you

crafted your craved reflection.

Here is the candy-haired

mohawk girl modelled on your ideal.

I push her around her little kitchen,

fingers lingering on the keys that yours

last touched. Her chip pan has caught fire.

The girl’s face bursts open with tears.

Scorched walls. Her kitchen is

ruined. I can’t console her.

Footnotes by Peter Fiennes

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers

Having started out with a strong chapter on the contested legacy of Enid Blyton I ran out of steam on the journey around Britain somewhere in Mid-Wales.

Maybe it is just that I have too many other books on the “to read” pile in my room (or more correctly 4 separate piles, which are currently teetering so Health & Safety suggests a fifth should be in born…).

Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller

 Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers

This will include spoilers as it would be too hard to talk about it without giving away some of the key dynamics of the plot…

Jeanie is powerfully written, and it is the affinity with her struggles that give the novel its life. There is a truth in the invisibility of their poverty, for the others in the village the extremes of poverty are beyond their frame of reference and therefore they don’t see the cues that would have told them just how desperate Jeanie has become. There is an authenticity, and a dignity almost, in the careful calculating of how far the small change Jeanie has scraped together will last, and sleeps on cold floor rather than ask the favour of a borrowed bed. Not a fetishising of it, but a speaking of truth. Now that I live a life that in financially secure it can be hard to remember just how much money dominated life when I didn’t have enough – while I was never quite counting the final coins, there were times when there was a lot of juggling needed to make ends meet. And the fear that if you got it wrong things could spiral rapidly out of control.

Somewhere between the end of chapter 32 and start of chapter 33 Jeanie lets her guard down and allow others to help her, this is a key pivot and the final 20 pages could perhaps seem too easy a resolution – but there is the sting of the revelation that Jeanie’s heart condition was a fiction created by Dot. (Revelation or confirmation, as I had a growing sense that there was something not quite right with Jeanie’s condition, it seemed to have an over-played sense of caution around it).

The implications of this do not get fully explored, and after the power of what is given before these questions weigh on me. Dot keeps Jeanie and Julius at home after the death of their father, keeps them in a relationship of children to her mothering, and the lie of the heart condition is central to that. What can seem like a bucolic existence turns sinister as the refusal to engage with the modern world is an instrument of keeping Jeanie confided. Not only this, Dot’s ongoing affair with Rawson gives her a world beyond the home, a stolen space of being that is not on offer to Jeanie. Jeanie on learning the truth seems to set it aside a little too easily for the sake of Julius, who is now dependent on her.

Eighty Four curated by Helen Calcutt

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers

This collection of poems on male suicide, vulnerability, grief and hope sold in aid of CALM must come with trigger warnings.

There is such generosity in the poets sharing their pain.

From the introduction “… for whatever reason, society encourages an oversimplified existence, thus generating accepted ‘norms’ to our behaviour. We live, we die. We weep, we laugh. We suffer, we feel joy. It would seem we’re only ready to acknowledge and celebrate three of these six crucial human emotions.”

Some extracts from the poems…

From Hide All the Knives by Katrina Naomi

“…

I didn’t know you anymore,

though I tried to tell myself

I loved you.

...”

From Impromptu from MT Taylor

“…

On the day of the funeral

I asked his wife why

there was no piano in their home.

She said there was no room.

I understood at once

that he had never really lived there.”

From Multiple Choice by Casey Bailey

“…

The most difficult multiple choice questions

are not the ones where you feel like all

of the answers could be right.

The most difficult multiple choice questions

are the one s where you feel like none

of the answers can be right,

but you must choose one anyway.”

Evening Prayer by Abi Budgen

“Evening hangs in pastel hues

Iridescent, sweet and warm

Holding its breath

Dogs and bikes and ordinary things

Pass it by

Day, relentless

Parched and gasping

Now quenched with calm

Breathes out slowly

Releases all tension

Another spirit

Home

A Dream by David Calcutt

...All your concentration

strained towards the journey you were making

and I was powerless to stop you, just as I was powerless

to turn away from watching. No call of mine

would bring you back. …”

A Commonplace by Jonathan Davidson

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers

This is an interesting collection, of Davidson own poems and a few by others, which are interspersed by reflections, that give it the feel of a poetry reading, the chatter of introduction you would get between poems – from those one phrase really sticks out “The poem reads me” - how true is that, really good poems have that power to see into our being.

Two of the poems

Didcot Parkway

Never Parkway to us

who roamed around

the platform as boys.

We’d look up the line

to London and see

the nose of a locomotive

seemingly not moving

then suddenly here,

roaring and yellow,

dull blue flanks, its

arrival never as great

as its coming towards us.

Leaving

When we left it was the end of everything.

We didn’t even bother to lock up.

We walked to the craft -

those who could -

and counted ourselves in.

It’s the children I feel sorry for;

what they won’t know about rain showers and thunder;

what they won’t know about crossing a cold brook barefoot

or lying in a hanger of beech trees at evening

and hearing the leaving talking.

I know I romanticise.

I know nothing is immutable.

I know it shouldn’t trouble me

that a beautiful future awaits us:

my children, and their children,

their bodies powered-down to drift

down icy streams to pleasant distant worlds,

their eyes closed, their mouths still.

The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman by Katie Manning

 Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers

The Bleeding Woman of the title is the one that touched Jesus’ cloak and was healed – and the first half explores her side of the story, and the second wider ranging reflection looking through her eyes.

One of the poems…

The Flesh Made Word

(Nura’s Translation)

They found God praying to himself in a garden. One man

kissed him on the cheek. Amen. It was finished. They

marched him off to watch the judge wash his hands.

They thorned his crown and flayed his back, walked him

up a slop of skulls and nailed him to a T. Some men

bled his slide and gambled for his clothes. Some women

cried for themselves. The God held his breath. It was

finished. Amen. Nothing left but to gather his body

between sheets and lay him in a book to rise again.

The Missing by Siân Hughes

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers

I got this having read some of the poems in the Forward 2010 collection.

Two of the other poems…

Aitken Drum

The older children carry their own drips and lines

down the corridor for activities. Music today,

two people with guitars and a box of percussion

bash out Aitken Drum, once through for each child.

Between choruses they ask for names,

try to pick up the whispers.

You can’t join in. You’re too young to lift your head,

even if the sound of the gently shaken tambourine

didn’t upset you, the way all noise upsets you, even if

you stopped crying, the light stopped hurting your eyes,

if you wore, and told me, in a whisper,

your secret name.

My Children

were never going to be like that, egg-white

in sunlight, who refuse food, refuse sleep,

projectile vomit, have teeth full of holes,

have special food in sealed containers,

use three dummies at a time, who, when they slip

and fall in the rain, run full pelt down the street

away from me, and won’t be comforted.

I was never going to have children who did that.