This is a delightful collection, especially as some of the poems explore the experience of being a student at Van Mildert in Durham and capture many of my own feelings about that.
I put tags in …
Not Driftwood
72 Crayons
Facing Forward: Going Back – especially the lines ‘There were ducks on the pond, | At the place, with the people | In the city with the cathedral on the hill.’ which spoke so much of home.
The Last Lesbian Bar in the Midlands by cleo henry
This first pamphlet from Fourteen Poems as expected set a high bar, bringing together literary and classical imagary with the authentic, earthy even, experience of Lesbian life and love.
Keeper by Mícheál McCann
Already a fan of Mícheál’s work this is a delight.
from Just Afer rain, 6 p.m. the line “Fallen rain falling again.” is so good.
John 20:15 is a gem of a reflection on our relationships with our bodies as much as it is an common on the resurrection – it will have to make its way into an Open Table liturgy at some point.
Aubade with Bombay Cat is a powerful study on love.
antonyms for burial by ellora sutton
With a diverse range of form this is complex set of poems
One of them …
Moonshot
Pork chow mein in the park,
the meat red-lipped, girlish.
My new dress is ruined
with sticky red sauce
in the shape of an iris.
She looks at me
and I have the tiny yet full body of a starling
the size of a whole heart
beating rapidly. I am bones
blue as Heaven in her tinfoil carton.
I read somewhere once
that this planet can only withstand
five more atomic bombs
and this, surely, must be one of them.
with your chest by Remi Graves
A playful collection despite the big themes it addresses
From it…
children know what they like
no one can tell me otherwise.
I used to babysit Christophe
who loved the stretch of
washing up gloves, the leather
straps of his school shoes,
buckles and belts,
would tell us all about it at dinner
because he didn’t know
yet, who he could trust
how shame turns
all flavour to dust
The Islands of Chile by David Nash
Each poem is titled after an Chilean Island – a concept album that can give you a bit of a twitch – but in this case totally unjustified – there is no conceit, nothing contrived here – it is a delight
Isla Grande de Chiloé / Ireland
42º40’36 S, 73º59’36 W / 53º25 N, 8º0 S
We’re the same.
Your hands have known more work and your teeth are whiter
but we’re the same.
Only in the rear-view mirror does your form shift,
like mine does.
When your rivers are cold they do not know they are cold.
My rivers, too, are simple things.
You have made compromises to beauty; I am less beautiful than I could be.
We’re the same.
You can turn the rain and you have a heartbeat that you take for granted.
So do I.
You are not quite your name.
We’re are the same.
What have you cast off in translation? What have you won?
What have I?
You are surrounded. You are greener and less green. Your scent is yours alone.
We’re are the same.
Look, how your waters end up in mine.
Amphibian by Georgie Henley
Inhibition
it smells of lonely in here
and my cleaned-yesterday pussy
which is a word I used to loathe
before the ambit of my brain became
22 sanctioned walls
slipping between both hands
larger than a heart and discerning,
eel-slick, probably greyish
but I prefer to think it pink
and cool like fridge-frosted peaches -
the other night I had
a sudden urge
to spill pomegranate seeds
in my public hair
and let them hide a while
winking jewels in high resolution
itch scratched
scalp glowing
Based on a True Story by Thomas Stewart
There is great honesty in Thomas’ poems…
In look me in the eye when we’re fucking the line “… I didn’t know whether to pull myself out | of your asshole or fuck you until you came to get it over with...” really resonates, times when it is easier to pretend.
You’ve Got Mail has a softer feel, the way familiar films can be a comfort blanket – realising that I had a handful of DVDs that I would watch repeatedly, and yet I have probably not watched in the last decade – but I can still quote Steel Magnolias, Where Eagles Dare, Brokeback Mountain, North West Frontier (for all the political incorrectness), and The Beiderbecke Affair as if I watched them yesterday – they have transitioned into a place where I can get move of the comfort without actually even watching them…
And then I felt very ‘seen’ when I got to…
spending hours on Grindr, wasting time
I had plans today to enjoy
the simple tasks of taking
the bins out,
hoovering,
doing laundry, reading
by the fire, smoking in
the rain, writing under
candlelight.
I was supposed to fall in love
with this city, a ship amongst
crowds, plucking flowers
instead
Having read his Selah I clearly looked and found some more of his work – and I have just ordered another offering – this is the sign of a poet I really enjoy – a clear and exciting voice.
One poem …
On My Case
First, the instrumentals: hi-hats, dirty bass,
and a theme I lean back to on a gloomy Sunday.
Then, the book I’ll never read again: my mind too stacked
to reach for the shelf, my spine too slack to give it away:
there are endings and there are endings.
I have a big heart on one of the two Valentines cards I left
unsent. The cellophane wrap reads: blank on the inside.
I’ll leave them be, like the unspent Euros lining the pen pot
with other foreign objects: hollow pen lids; broken buttons.
I’ll leave them
like my headphones, hanging
on the end of a nod, plugged into nothing
but this Sunday and the shadows
and the phone that rings and rings
and knows I won’t pick up.
Cai explores the experience of growing up with two Mums, playing with the awkwardness – that youthful yearning to be just like everyone else, and then the turn of the page when suddenly difference is ‘cool’ - being a male in a world of women – but how much is that just the awkwardness of being a child of parents, we are all enriched by the particular ‘weridness’ of our childhood.
I was always going to buy a book with 'DON'T PANIC' in large, friendly letters on the cover.
But in fact Caleb Nichols does not tell us not to Panic – but not to Panic about Panicking. It you suffer from anxiety it is likely that anxiety will always be a part of your life – what you need to learn is ways of reducing anxiety and ways of not suffering from it when it does happen.
This is a long quote, but worth it …
“A former therapist of mine, who was into both mindfulness and somatic or body-oriented therapy, would talk about the zone of tolerance and the zone of stimulation, which is basically the idea that we all have set levels of how much stress and anxiety we can tolerate, and then we have upper limits, and outer limits. He said it can be effective to widen our zone of tolerance through confronting and “being with” the feelings that live outside the zone. For me, this is re-envisioning my own anxiety, not as an external threat, but as an essential part of my being. This makes it easier to sit with, and grow more comfortable with. This knowledge is an olive branch: I’m inviting anxiety into my home and asking it to stay a while. What new, bizarre things can it show me? What might it help me create next?” (p52)
This is not a glib, pull your socks up message, it does not down play the distress anxiety can bring – but to find ways to sit with it – to ride the waves, to know that it will pass, that anxiety is not failure – these are things we need to practice on our non-anxious days so that we begin to remember them on the days anxiety has become us.
The poems black dorothy and hold me tinder capture the powerful spirit of Shanay’s work – they engage with the body, they put other’s sense of entitlement in sharp focus, they also offer a sense of delight in the midst of it all.
The poems are strong, the pamphlet has a power that is more than the sum of its parts.
These are co-written poems, the Unbound Community made up of those within the criminal justice ‘system’.
They have a power coming out of the circumstance in which the writers find themselves – not sorry for themselves, but facing the wrongs they have done does not make them blind to the dysfunction of the system. Far from setting them on a path to renewal and reform it seems almost purpose designed to create a spiral of re-offending – trapped them long after imprisonment has ended.
One poem
What I Feel About What You Said About Rehabilitation
The you that I see through your words about me
exaggerates my story and it hates it.
I don’t see the you
you see in me.
I am better. I am frightened.
I am alone.
I also put tags in
“He Didn’t Show Remorse”
Prayer From A Cell
