LONDON GRIP POETRY 2010
edited by ROBERT VAS DIAS
_____________________
2010
To submit poems
to be considered for
publication, email
up to three poems to londongrippoetry@blueyonder.co.uk
and cc.
Please add
three short sentences
about yourself.
_____________________
London Grip’s poetry editor,
the Anglo-American poet
ROBERT VAS DIAS,
has published nine collections
of poetry, the most recent being
Still · Life and Other Poems
of Art and Artifice (2010),
The Lascaux Variations:
Fractals of Being (2009),
with 24 pages of colour
lithography), and
Leaping Down to Earth (2008)
with images by
Stephen Chambers and
Tom Hammick.
His work has appeared
in magazines in the USA, including Choice, The Nation,
The New Yorker, Partisan Review,
and Poetry (Chicago) and in such British magazines as
Ambit, Encounter, Envoi,
Leviathan Quarterly,
Long Poem Magazine,
Moving Worlds, Ninth Decade,
Oasis, Poetry Review,
Shearsman, Stand, and Staple.
He is a core tutor with
The Poetry School in London,
and writes on book art and
artists’ books, particularly
those which incorporate
poetry and text.
_____________________
I don’t believe in manifestoes so I’m not going to write one. Manifestoes have a tendency to back you into a corner and they go out-of-date virtually when they’re written.
A good poem doesn’t go out-of-date. It doesn’t tout a position or a programme. It’s not schematic. It’s not agonizingly self-referential. What it is is difficult to define. Frost said poetry is what is lost in translation which of course is a cop-out, but maybe all definitions of poetry are cop-outs because somebody comes along and writes a good poem that defies the definition. It has to be said that a good poem is what the editor thinks is a good poem, and that can take many forms provided the editor is open-minded and not hooked on programmes, positions, conventions or fashions. It’s a good poem if it adds up – the music, the words, the shape cohere to provide a revelation of meaning – “the news from poems.” I look for that revelation honestly arrived at and gracefully expressed in original language, in a form which is organic to the content.
Robert Vas Dias, 2009
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24 november 2008
Jonny Reid
Creative Biting
We put our puppies on the tables
with nervous loving hands.
I’ll stroke yours if you stroke mine
are the rules in this seminar.
I pick up a spotty Dalmatian
and say hello – it stares back,
its owner holds her breath:
no response, just a hot mess.
Beneath the table are legs
with tapping feet, extravagant shoes,
gnarled, bitten and covered in drool.
My shoes are no better: my puppy squats.
I listen to the tutor suggest a change;
he proposes I take the wagging tail,
wrap it up tight and cut the blood off,
calls it ‘docking’, says he does it all the time.
I smell dead fish on his breath.
My puppy lowers his nose to the table
and growls at him - I smooth it over,
my palm nursing his fur.
After we have all stroked the puppies
we chastise them slightly, there is always
room to improve – we take cups of water
and pour it over their heads.
They shiver and whine, and that’s it
nearly time to go, we put the puppies
into our rucksacks, then sit and wait.
The tutor introduces us to ‘Alpha’.
He opens the classroom door
and in runs a great big Doberman
covered in large, hairless scars.
It barks and foams and bites.
We all leave in tears,
our arms and legs lacerated,
puppies jostling in the dark,
whimpers rise from our baggage.
____________________________________
Jonny Reid’s poetry has appeared in
Magma poetry magazine and will soon appear in Stand.
He studied Theatre at Lancaster University, UK,
and now lives in Manchester.
Steven Nash
Adrift
There are no fish that swim here
in this mire dark green and viscous.
He always felt at peace in the water
and even now he remembers
how he would toss in a stone
and watch his face tear away with the ripples.
When the wind drops and the sun rises, lazy as lost spirits,
the coffin – a boat for the dead –
is anchored and tranquil
wreathed in tendrils and reeds
somewhere beneath the surface, crystallised with light,
out beyond the storm, beyond reach.
That Winter the bay froze
as his body turned with the sky from dusted
pink dawn into a bruised blue-green dusk,
all warmth and light drawn away like miners pulled
from their tunnels in subtle shifts.
But still he may return
like the others.
Every single one of them
a ghost-limb of the bay
as though the water forgets
to keep what it claims.
__________________________________________
Steven Nash is a professional musician and teacher.
He is currently studying for a Ph.D.
in Literature at York University, UK.
Fawzia Kane
Tantie Diablesse hears the voice of the Mother of La Brea
Walk to me. Show me trees laden with cashew nuts,
make me baskets of razor-grass.
Close yourself from Christmas to Carnival, because I can be dangerous, I have
quicksand quality.
Rainwater pools on me. I choose
which edges are safe, which ones
to coat with oil or sulphur.
My touch can caress your boils,
ease crooked joints, coat your body
with blood-coloured water.
My breath is as long as a month. See how my faults can be filled, oozed up.
Lie on me. Moisten me. Cover
my burning skin with fishbones.
Send me live animals to eat
while still trapped.
Look at that eagle. He sits on a tree that is ten thousand years old.
_________________________________________________
La Brea or the Pitch Lake stretches from the west coast of Trinidad and re-appears in Lake Bermudez, Venezuela. A constantly molten area near its centre is called "The Mother of the Lake".
_______________________________________
Tantie Diablesse Prays
It's time. Three hundred years have passed and I wait. My body is turning
into its own ghost.
Your priests tell me I am blessed; yet why do
you refuse to take me?
When I was pulled from my mother's arms, placed with rats and filth, chained under
saltwater skies to be sold, like livestock,
did you ever hear me complain? So why do you
refuse to take me?
I fought until blood broke my shackles, only to see my children choose fettered lives.
Plus ça.
Change will never really happen, so why do you
refuse to take me?
You sent Cousine Fate to visit, and I won all her games. There is nothing left to play
again, to forget.
You make hope exquisite torture, and always you
refuse to take me?
Now I have money, a large and beautiful house, more than enough land and even a
little fame.
I didn't ask for these favours. Why do you punish
by never taking me?
_________________________________________________
Fawzia Kane was born in Trinidad, and now
practices as an architect in London.
She has been published in several magazines including
Agenda, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, and The Rialto.
Alex Josephy
Luxor
Swifts cut curves in a lemon sky,
sipping the last sweet motes of day
as the goddess swallows the sun.
The desert turns a cold shoulder
and lying beside me
in the woven blankets
of night by the Nile,
you’ve the faint gleam
of a hieroglyph, half man,
half beast, indecipherable.
The slipping river sounds
invade the room. Its dank incense
chases me open-eyed
up the ladder of night
over the hoopoes’ hide,
the kingfishers’ burrow,
the reedbeds where ibis
are still as shallow carvings
on the columns of temples,
across lopsided stilt-houses
propped out on the water, where
the heron-headed fishermen lie.
Flotsam rides the current, slides back
into eddies, plastic bags, pale carp -heads,
your after-dinner dog-end, expanding
by the furled hotel felluca.
One lark hesitates above the jetty,
tries a scale that rolls out into riffs
whose light wings beat, drift and broaden.
The goddess filled with stars
relents. Your arm around the hollow
of my back, I find the stairs down into painted dark
where I may sleep, surrounded
by sealed jars.
_______________________________________
The only meal I ever saw my father cook
Breakfast, my favourite. The stink of burnt white bread
he’d scrape with a whirring bone-handled knife,
black flakes snowing into the chickenfeed bucket.
Eggs fried lacy, fat flipped over the yolks till they dulled,
blind eyes on a china plate, and rashers with the rinds on
curling in the frying pan like red and white party ribbons.
The spit and billow of steam when he doused it
too soon from the cold tap, oily gobbets flying,
fizzing out on the tiles, spent Catherine wheels.
At the siege of Tobruk all he had for a week, morning and night,
was dehydrated cauliflower scavenged from the harbour,
a miracle blossoming in a mess tin filled with salt water.
Not again, our mother would groan,
we’ve heard it all before.
Give it a rest.
And in his eighties, alone in the bungalow at six a.m., no-one to please or irritate,
beetroot sandwiches were all he wanted, monumental slabs of bloomer and beet,
eaten with purple fingers at the cold kitchen table, no knife, no fork, no fuss.
_________________________________________________
Alex Josephy is an educationist living in East London and working
with NHS doctors in South East England. Her poems have been published
in a number of magazines including Rialto and Smiths Knoll.
Some of her recent work will appear in the next editions of
The Interpreter's House and Obsessed with Pipework.
click for
edited by
edited by
London Grip magazine 2008
PALAVER
taste bitterness
falling and rising
a broken current
of bile
swilling the palette
spirit recoding
in shallows
light receding unequivocally
no cover
like words can mean
as politicians fabricate
as air poses
surface tension
to apply
where we float
in a line
between principles
and ignorance
between social rhetoric
and pleasurable banter
between neat formalities
and bureaucratic
recidivist calamities
the cathartic meridian
between self
and social infrastructures
the sun goes
the sky is empty
the murmuring of lives
in ensuing silence
down
how each takes
from the other
delivers back
a simplified version
cold dark insect purring night
the remote clicking
of precious chips
that scream our names
dreams of random process
mumbling derisively
cold night
cleansed in salt
we are numbers, ciphers
we live in the guest rooms
of technology
incarcerated behind
gleaming facades
we are dying
in a humming stillness
cold dark night
of brilliant numbers
star clusters
souls who
broadcast endless wishes
last moments
final cease
last moments hint
of immortality
last fragments
of sound
a breath expressing
what the ear fails to identify
a fragment
of exquisite song
a morsel of hope
of endless thought
of endless hope
of endless
endless
endless
____________
6 August 2007
PARADOX
mind’s blank
interface to reflection
imperious sky
water shrugs
where blind earth rests
still & compliant
imaginations border
warps ancient meadows
wrapping pollarded willows
in a flurry of inconsistency
backward I have dreamed
this worrisome day
no one speaks
we are elements in complex
fabrications of time
made precious
through fearful prediction
the wound core
words cauterize
grown thick like a cloud
loaded with moisture
all day we said the wind
no longer relevant
as summer passes
long and low autumn
shortens daylight gold
words and ideas
play music
to the hurt of stillness
and thwarted imagination
___________________
June – November 2007
David Chaloner
David Chaloner was born in 1944 in the north west of England. Apart from small press publications, his first nationally published work appeared in the Tandem paperback Generation X and the Penguin anthology Children of Albion. Salt published his Collected Poems in 2005, and Beyond These Lines appeared from Equipage in 2007. A long poem/performance text is in the latest issue of Angel Exhaust. He divides his time between London and Amsterdam managing his own design/strategy consultancy.
Landeg White
Tamar Yoseloff
Anthony Lucas
Chris Hardy
Josie Evans
Shanta Acharya
EURYDICE’S STORY
Inconsolable at her loss – parts of Orpheus’ body buried in Mount Olympus, his head in the island of Lesbos – Eurydice pleaded for her release from Hades so she could give Orpheus a proper burial. Not knowing how to prepare for such a venture, Eurydice sought the counsel of Savitri. “It was simple for me,” said the pure one. “I could not take my eyes off Satyavan. I followed him everywhere, until Yama gave in to my requests.” Savitri then took Eurydice to meet Krishna, who emanated divine melody, perched on a tree with branches draped in colourful saris billowing skywards, tugging like trapped kites. Are all the lovers of the world musicians of sorts? Eurydice mused as she smiled at the half-naked maidens of Mathura frolicking in the pond camouflaged beneath the old gnarled canopy of the ancient tree, unashamedly rejoicing. Krishna’s breath was music; he exhaled Om oblivious of the women clamouring after him, his face serene, smiling. Pity Orpheus did not learn a few of these tricks, thought Eurydice, drawn to this dark-blue boy who charmed all the gopis and kept Radha happy. When Krishna finally let the silence of the universe in, Eurydice’s question – Krishna, how can I bring Orpheus back to life? – danced in the wind. He spoke of human limitation, illusion, the soul’s eternal quality. Just when Eurydice thought she was getting the drift of his meaning, he disappeared from her sight like a vision leaving her in a field of light.
____________
Note:
Savitri chose her husband Satyavan; so firm was her devotion to him that when he died, she asked Yama, the Lord of death, for the gift of his life. Yama offered Savitri any boon except the life of her husband. She asked for the restoration of her father-in-law’s eyesight and his throne, sons for herself and a life in all its fullness. Yama granted her all her wishes without thinking twice. Then Savitri reminded Yama that she needed her husband to fulfil her wishes. He was so impressed with her intelligence and love for her husband, so the story goes, that he relented and released Satyavan to return with Savitri. Many Indian wives observe a day in memory of Sati Savitri, the pure one, who won the life of her husband back from the hands of Yama.
____________________________________________________________
Shanta Acharya was born and educated in Orissa, India and later won a scholarship to Oxford University, where she completed her doctorate in 1983; her dissertation, The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published in the USA in 2001. She was a Visiting Scholar and Teaching/Research Assistant at Harvard University, 1983-85, and after her move to London worked in the City as a fund manager. As well as books on business and finance, she has published five books of poetry,
the most recent of which is Dreams That Spell The Light (Arc, 2009).
She is Founder-Director of ‘Poetry in the House’ at Lauderdale House, Highgate, London.
Tom Lowenstein
From “No Pond Moment”
Ancient pond.
A frog jumps in.
The sound of water.
Matsuo Basho
1.
Slicing though its own
reflection the frog silently
embraced its disappearance.
3.
I’d like to believe the frog was
just pursuing its genetic dharma.
How you are to them is all they’ll notice.
5.
Deep in the mountains,
unwitnessed millions
of leptodactylids
reiterate the moment.
7.
Frog spawn: and a bulge of
pop-eyed Bodhidharma faces
glaring from behind a lotus.
8.
(Humourless as carp
that mopped up the tadpoles
inseminating this pond water.)
9.
Jump at just the right angle
and you might cancel your reflection.
Was this frog cognition?
10.
The frog was hesitant and then it jumped.
Nothing was the same and not much
changed in a gently wetted cosmos.
12.
In the water of his mind, no pond
to jump in. The poet said this.
The frog knew no better.
15.
Slumbering universal water. The frog swam
to the bottom where the world’s umbilical
coiled upward from its root mud to a lotus.
There were plenty of mosquitoes and he ate a number.
16.
First here and now gone. It adopted
a familiar but unfathomable medium.
The word gone’s implication.
17.
The frog that spawned successive
energetic generations. Which individuals
have been witnessed jumping?
18.
Everything has
a career
of some description.
19.
A remote stretch of water.
Ten thousand frog throats
lifted to extol the silence.
21.
Afternoon garden. Downward entry.
Below the surface, one solitary venture converged
with the All in an inaccessible resolution.
22.
A hole in the water that led
twistingly to the underworld.
This small messenger connected us.
23.
‘Why not sit quietly?’ ‘Because something makes
me want to jump, if just once. Isn’t it natural
to fribble away your energy and talent?’
25.
Evolving towards the space,
unprompted,
that the man left empty.
27.
From facts on land to beyond
in the water. What’s unsaid is
what no longer happens.
31.
One thing’s become another.
In time they will belong together.
The frog slipped off as quietly as it could.
Mindful of Zen etiquette et cetera.
35.
Spiral. Everything evolves in
its endogenous reflexive coil.
So too, this insignificant interpolation.
Was there majesty in anything?
36.
By the mythologically terrific rock fall,
issued these infernal hissings
of the creative primal serpent.
But what I heard was nothing heroic.
I listen to it twice daily just under
the surface of my soup bowl’s contents.
39.
Brain flash, mediated by the lotus stem
that feeds in the muck and wanders
to the surface, detonates its flowering.
Launched in the water the frog had no trouble
reconnoitring the silence.
Every midday tension sublimates eventually.
43.
Neither frog nor water, but the sound
of the one as it entered the other.
Momentary and, in some ways, lasting.
46.
Reports of these moments.
Their importance the import.
Immortality ambition.
47.
Pond, frog, water splash
synonymous in time gone.
A few inches of calligraphy.
52.
First Basho jumped. Next Ryokan.
Then Sengai followed.
Names in the water washed off with the splashes.
54.
Towards a realm of the opposite.
It took a single step. And then deep
into freedom with its unlimited vicissitudes.
56.
It’s form and nothing
that
the mind jumps into.
Tom Lowenstein is known internationally as an ethnohistorian, a writer on Buddhism, an anthropologist and a poet.
His Ancestors and Species: New & Selected Ethnographic Poetry was published by Shearsman Books in 2005. Later this year (2009) Shearsman is publishing his new collection of poems, Conversation with Murasaki, which includes 'No Pond Moment'.
Ancient Land: Sacred Whale, which includes prose and 80 pages of his poetry, appeared in three editions (Bloomsbury, Farrar Strauss and Giroux, and Harvill, 1993 and 2001). His book on Buddhism, The Vision of the Buddha (Macmillan, 1996) appeared in four English-language editions and was translated into seven languages. His latest ethnohistory book is Ultimate Americans: Point Hope, Alaska 1826-1909 (University of Alaska Press, 2009). His poems have appeared recently in London Review of Books, Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Tears in the Fence.
_____________________________________
No Pond Moment
Introduction
In a memoir of his time with the poet Matsuo Basho (1643/44 to 1694), Shiko, one of Basho’s students, wrote:
The poem was written by our master on a spring day. He was sitting in his riverside house in Edo, bending his ears to the soft cooing of a pigeon in the quiet rain. There was a mild wind in the air, and one or two petals of cherry blossom were falling gently to the ground. It was the kind of day you often have in late March – so perfect that you want it to last for ever. Now and then in the garden was heard the sound of frogs jumping into the water. Our master was deeply immersed in meditation, but finally he came out with the second half of the poem,
A frog jumped into water –
A deep resonance.
One of the students [the poet Kikaku] sitting with him immediately suggested for the first half of the poem,
Amidst the flowers
Of the yellow rose.
Our master thought for a while, but finally decided on
Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond.
The student’s suggestion is admittedly picturesque and beautiful but our master’s choice, being simpler, contains more truth in it. It is only he who has dug deep into the mystery of the universe that can choose a phrase like this. (From Noboyuki Yuasa, 1966:32)
Because of our familiarity of Basho’s haiku, it is easy to lose sight of the strangeness and originality of both the poem and the context of its composition. For many (I include myself here), Basho has attained, on account of both his poetry and his journeys through Japan, a quasi-mythological status. He has become for us a Buddha of early modernism whose frequent expressions of suffering do nothing to diminish our esteem for his Buddhist insight and poetic genius. In the context of this and our own contemplation of his frog poem, it is natural to imagine the poet alone by the pond, while the silence is broken by the frog entering the water. Shiko’s narrative disabuses us of this expectation. Not only is Basho set apart from the pond but he is in company (presumably on the veranda of his little house whose garden abuts the river). Nor is the noise of any one frog alone in breaking the (comparative) silence. There are poets on the veranda and the air outside is alive with wind, rain, bird song and frogs jumping and croaking. (Croaking frogs, naku kawazu, are a commonplace of earlier Japanese poetry. Basho’s translation of sound from a frog to the water is one of his hokku’s innovations.)
Our conventional response to the poem may not, however, be entirely wrong. After all, most readers will not have enjoyed access to Shiko’s memoir. It must therefore be reasonable to imagine the master alone in a garden where all that happens is what he describes. A moment such as this of Buddhist insight is impossible to convey: but it shares the nature of a Zen face slap or the breaking open of a Rinzai Zen koan. Set against this, Shiko’s narrative interestingly suggests a combination of sociality and reclusion. Where the circumstances of an enlightenment experience is concerned no either or is required. How and where such an event occurs has no relevance.
Compounding this absence of any quasi-absolutist reclusion, we learn that the poem emerged not only in two fragments that had been separated by another poet’s intervention, but that it was also completed in conversation. Of course the exchange between Basho and (the celebrated) Kikaku represented a version of linked verse (renga) practice. In this, poets composed mutually allusive pieces in response to the stimulus of a ‘head verse’ (hokku) which had been given by a senior practitioner. Indeed 1686, the year Basho composed his poem, saw the publication of an anthology called Kawazu Awase (‘Frog Contest’) consisting of frog poems by several authors suggested by the hokku that Basho had made famous.
Notes to poems
5. The leptodactylid is a species of frog.
7. The Indian monk Bodhidharma who travelled to China in the early 6th century was the first Ch’an [Zen] patriarch. He is said to have meditated in a cave somewhere in southern China for nine years before agreeing to engage in teaching. Japanese tradition depicts him with ferociously staring eyeballs.
10. Basho’s term for frog is kawazu. Another word is kaeru, whose alternative meanings are to change and to go home.
15. Two aspects of lotus lore crop up in this series. In Hindu tradition, the universe is conceived as a lotus growing from the navel of the god Vishnu as he dreams the cosmos into being from the pre-creational waters. In Hindu-Buddhist iconography, the lotus also represents a final stage of spiritual evolution (for which ‘purity’ is a frequently used shorthand). One Sanksrit term for lotus is pankaja: ‘mud-born’. The word (pungently) encapsulates the fact that the lotus is rooted in mud and its long stem works its way to the surface on which perfect and unmuddied blossoms open.
19. The etymology of ‘extol’ is from Latin ferro, ferre, tuli, latum ‘to lift’ (such was one pillar of a mid-20th century private education). The verb is used largely for its assonantal function. ‘Ten thousand’ is a Buddhist/Daoist symbol for multiplicity.
39. The head is filled with crazy and unrealised thoughts, feelings and impulses. Courtiers, editors and diplomats, however, educate themselves to transmute these psychic materials into conversation: a rare talent which sometimes also finds expression in creative sublimation. Poetry in particular is a means of making amends for solecism and verbal misbehaviour.
54. usuk – Inupiaq (north Alaskan Eskimo) for the membrum virile. Trickster in native American myth was represented variously as quasi-human, coyote, raven, hare. Hunger-driven fool or semi-divine demiurge he [sic] underwent the misfortunes and humiliations of the idiots found in many folk traditions.
__________________________________
The Lascaux Variations
(Permanent Press, 2009)
Robert Vas Dias,
John Wright,
Julia Farrer,
Neil Crawford
The Lascaux Variations: Fractals of Being represents the combined effort of four people working in different disciplines – poetry, painting, text integration and design, and typography – to find a book format that reflects and recapitulates the concerns of a four-part poem, which explores questions about art and artifice, imagination and reality, line and space, the abstract and the non-objective, the enduring and transitional. The book is frankly experimental in concept and execution, harking back to the little collaborative books by the Russian Futurists of the early 19th century in which text and image were closely correlated, sometimes with text appearing as integral elements of the image itself, as happens in this book.
Both poet and artist were inspired by separate visits to the paleolithic friezes of the Lascaux caves. Starting with early notes and drafts of the poem and with preliminary sketches by the artist John Wright, the project unfolded over a year, culminating in the finished poem and sixteen pastel-and-charcoal semi-abstract drawings by Wright. Painter-printmaker Julia Farrer then integrated words, phrases and sentences from the poem into scans of the images, which were then subjected to final typographical realisation by Neil Crawford, a professional typographer. After the total design was approved by both artists and the writer, the pages were printed by colour lithography and assembled loose-leaf in a pocket portfolio.
This is the poem’s first appearance in book form after initial publication in The Warwick Review in the spring of 2009.
2009 ISBN 978 0 905258 23 2
Loose-leaf in a pocket portfolio, 22 x 15 cms. Edition of 150 numbered copies. £9.95 [+ £1 post & pack.] Special numbered and signed edition of 25 copies. With large colour iris inkjet print on art paper. £35 [+ £3 post & pack.] – in preparation.
Orders: Permanent Press,
5b Compton Avenue, London N1 2XD.
T: 020 7359 6903
E: permanentpress@blueyonder.co.uk
Michael W. Thomas
Weddell’s Soft Drinks, Telford, August 2nd, 1967
Sometimes there’s a fault
with the hooded machine that tops the bottles.
The capping-head should retract
once each seal fuses.
If it clings, a bottle rises two, three feet,
a warrior mod’s overture,
and comes mindless down, discharging
its followers on the line.
Glass clouds the factory,
atomic sleet.
Cherry or burdock sluices the rollers,
an artery’s yell.
Bets are forever on: how long
before Peplow’s maljointed, almost-pensioned thumb
will squish the button, lay calamity to rest.
Four minutes this afternoon. Young Inskip wins.
We hang about as Peplow descends
from his rust-embattled eyrie,
paws the bottleneck free,
cranks back the capping-head,
asks Gullick, Inskip and me
if we know what a broom looks like
and why in buggering heaven we’re stood
like a chorus of mental fairies.
Gullick’s turn today, leaving me
and young Inskip to clear the line,
re-set the flavouring chutes.
To Peplow alone falls the scrutiny
of carbonator, water-feed,
a last vae victis glower at the capping-head.
The hum restored, young Inskip asks
when this new Radio 1 is supposed to start:
September, I answer, October.
He watches Peplow reascend
to where a Ferguson wireless keeps faith
with Edmundo Ros, Semprini, Charlie Chester -
and his grin is that of a custody-boy
who knows a handy bottle when he feels it.
LONDON GRIP POETRY 2009:
edited by ROBERT VAS DIAS
Michael W. Thomas is a poet, fiction-writer and dramatist. His work has appeared in such magazines as The Antioch Review, Stand, Other Poetry, Staple, Magazine Six (Key West), Irish University Review and English. His latest novel, The Mercury Annual, was published last summer.
Edward Mackay
Michael W. Thomas
Tom Lowenstein
Shanta Acharya
David Chaloner
Anthony Lucas
Evidence
Halfway along the pavement
framed on a plain unbroken slab
the pinched butt, gold-rimmed
with its contiguous ash
from which the last, the finest
tailing of blue smoke
rises to taint the morning air.
Once all too commonplace
a detail, now it draws attention
to itself, indicative, a clue
this throw-away become a loaded
intimation, tip-off, whispering
of her recent presence, though
now vanished from the scene.
Anthony Lucas is a regular contributor to Ambit and
other magazines. His most recent collection,
Rufus at Ocean Beach, ISBN 978 0 9561521 0 7,
is available from Carmelyon. He lives in Bermondsey.
Chris Hardy
His Other Half
As we drove towards
the crater and
volcano she explained
that if the driver,
next to her, had not
got a ring on her finger
before he left
for Normandy
she’d have married some
other man, maybe
a Destroyer captain
she’d met.
So I’d never
have been born
or only half of me
perhaps and that half
not knowing where
his other half was,
and all the while
my father held the wheel
and steered us
safely north.
I could not see
his face
from the rear seat
as he looked ahead
into the past.
Chris Hardy’s poems have appeared in many magazines,
including The North, Poetry Review, Rialto and Tears in the Fence;
a new poem is in the 2009 Forward Prize Anthology, and his collection,
A Moment Of Attention, was published in 2008 by Original Plus Press.
He is also a musician: a CD of solo acoustic music, Health To Your Hands,
is available from www.cdbaby.com and he plays in the trio LiTTLe MACHiNe,
performing settings of well known poems: http://www.myspace.com/littlemachineuk
Josie Evans
Remission
We welcomed the withering,
the first thin jacket of frost,
the last leaves
loosening. We walked
in those diminishing days,
grateful for the turned earth,
the empty beds. We knew
too soon spring’s warm breath
would split
and swell the knotted tubers,
the knuckled mass
of bulbs beneath. We knew
there would be a morning
of anemones and aconites,
snowdrops with their lowered heads
and crowds,
crowds of daffodils
trumpeting your loss.
Edward Mackay
Insomnia
I lie here, again, counting over and over
my ten toes at sea in the shipwreck of night,
caught between the horizon of quilt
and the black bedstead sky. At the passing
of trains there’s a hum in my sternum,
as brittle as sound and the clenching,
unclenching, the thick fist of gristle that’s slung
between ribcage and back, like the quiver of frog
at the touch-tip of Galvani’s probe.
In thrall to the clock’s second hand, drums
my heart as it rows through the waves
of the night and gaspingly lolls like a fish
that’s marooned in a boat’s wooden belly.
I tap out the tales I’ve been told of its ticking:
this is where love lives, and dreams now
receding reside. Each old bedtime story
urges us listen to whispering truth
in our hearts. I lie here unknitting each limb,
bone and organ, each giblet, each gurgle,
the thudding red timepiece, the strange trick
of ears rushed with blood full of ticking
to listen to darkness and spaces between –
and the fish slips the hook, and the line of night
slackens, and something slips out of my nets:
that the bed I lie and fret and love in
the lines of rhythm learned by heart
the granite hills, the sun we tilt towards
and every synapse, loin and hand that ever was
were once condensed into a coin of nothing
an ovum forged of absence still expanding
into places eyes will never see.
But still some tiny corner of that endless
unbegotten nothing shuddered into wakefulness
and one brief fragment of that fluke
now lies awake and counts the pulses
of a subdivision of himself: myself soaked through
by night, my hand upon my heart. Without this
glimpse, like a bright white snowdrift
slumped to grey beneath the glare of sunlight –
I am just hydraulics, built-in obsolescence
and the mind cast forward to the limits
of all reason dredging the horizon and those
lapping waters cold and black beyond my sight.
After the Revolution
It is the greasy grey deposit dribbling from
a broken pipe, smearing down blackened brick,
back corner of a building - where steam issuing
through a vent, the dull throb of machinery
confirms that manufacturing survives -
that is enough to summon, suddenly,
lost smells of oil and smoke, burnt metal, cellulose,
or macerating pulp; even enough to catch
the swish of bikes along wet streets, or boots
on cobbles, see the patched overcoats,
the pulled down caps, bait bags slung over backs,
all funnelling toward an entrance way
panelled with serried racks of beige cards
flanking the clocking-in machine, admission
to a functional domain that fed
and used, could finally consume them all.
Yet it has almost vanished now, that world
of heavy industry, landscapes defined
by coppices of chimneys, austere columns
carrying the soot and stench up high enough
to see it evenly deposited
across an entire town; and all that acreage
of sheds and yards, the vast basilicas
of engineering, noisy contraptions that
cut board, wove fabric, beat out plate, the scores
of workers tied in production lines, turning
intractable materials into product
that would sell. Those who worked hardest gained
the least. Profit engendered shops and mansions,
churches, town halls and libraries, all
uniformly patina-ed in black.
How odd it seemed, the first time they were cleaned,
after the banishment of coal. Pinnacles
of limestone, marble porticoes, emerging
in a gleam of burnished whites, soft-textured
honeys and veined creams. Now they themselves
diminish with the world they served. The mills
and the municipal bravura all
give way before reflective walls of glass,
or undergo conversion into restaurants,
smart apartment blocks, with, here and there,
the thin vernacular of retail parks,
their bright halls stacked with gaudy merchandise
originating – who knows where?
Ritual
Since his loss,
this day is marked –
He wakes early, feeds the dogs,
listens to the clamouring of rooks
behind the house, the wind
worrying the orchard.
He spends the day alone,
seeks out the silent weight
of tools, takes a cloth to the brass,
a stiff brush to the yard.
He gathers logs, pours a drink,
sits late into the evening
tending flames into fragments
of that once familiar face.
Then he rises, rinses his glass,
lets the fire die in the grate.
Josie Evans is a graphic designer, artist and writer.
She was born and brought up by the sea in Wales but
currently lives and works in London.
Beneath
from ‘Postcards from Doggerland’1
the blue the depths the waves weeds fish
beneath the bobbing plastic yesterdays
beneath the dark
beneath the silt-slung depths
beneath the places where the light no longer lingers
is a silence no-one hears
here there is no language of vowels and breath
no language no breath
no weight of arms no creasing of skin
and earth into maps of night
there is no darkness here
set singing with light
no tangle of legs and yesterdays finding full stops
in the gathering of eyes and lips into the familiar crook
of an unknown other no eyes
like moths set flickering against sensation and skin
Just water. Skies full of water.
And a bed empty forgetful
and wide as the waves.
______________________
1This poem is drawn from a long series of poems exploring an imagined memory and mythology of Doggerland. Doggerland is the name given by archaeologists and geologists to the lost landmass stretching from Britain’s east coast to the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark which formed a rich habitat for animals and humans in the Mesolithic period. Since that time it has been submerged beneath the southern North Sea, the remnants being Dogger Bank. During the last era of dramatic climate change at the end of the Mesolithic period, Doggerland and other lowlands of the ancient world were flooded, never to be seen again. It is thought that the folk memory of this apocalyptic flooding is the root of the many flood myths that reach us from ancient cultures around the world (Noah, Gilgamesh, Atlantis etc).
Edward Mackay lives and writes in east London,
where he manages a conflict-resolution charity.
His poetry was shortlisted for the 2009 Eric Gregory Awards.
Alex Josephy
Fawzia Kane
Jonny Reid
Steven Nash
Landeg White
From Letters from Portugal
Letter 8
Walcott is inspired by train journeys,
letting the lines set sure parameters,
but I challenge anyone to make poetry
from the sweaty scrum of airports
where nothing you feel about meeting
or parting translates to those hours
of cattle-herding.
Camões’s
favoured pun was ‘pena’, the quill
he wrote with and the plume he used
to transcend pain. He wrote of Phaethon
scorching the city states of Mozambique
when Apollo’s horses bolted. Icarus,
too, who fell from the sky into Auden’s
nobly insouciant poem. Poets are wary
of soaring these days. The sublime’s
for academics who want religion
without too much by way of belief,
or parade non-religion by killing off
authors, God being alive in Uruguay.
But we deserve a poetry of airports,
Miltonic or Dante-esque, grand style
or plain, the common element hell.
Who’s
committing this affront of travel? On
who’s authority? With what baggage?
Report to the gate. Be identified again.
pace 25 yards to the left, 25 to the right,
this a dozen times until finger-printed
and retina-scanned, stripped of jacket,
belt and shoes, coin-less and key-less,
X-rayed and intimately body-fumbled,
you ascend to a paradise where every
luxury is permitted – Pride that you’re
in with the jet set, Gluttony at Harrod’s
or Fortnum & Mason’s outlets, Lechery
eyeing top shelf magazines, Envy
you can’t afford the Ralph Lauren
or Versace scarves, Greed you’re getting
all this duty free, compulsory Sloth
as your flight is delayed, Wrath about
the whole damned Eighth Circle – all this
before boarding, belt-clipping, studying
the hostess’s figure-hugging uniform as
moving like an Indian dancer she conjures
what is not to be faced.
Nothing,
cold-shoulders like air travel. Those
stilt-walking villages of the green delta,
worlds away from watersheds inked
with tarmac, are hard to keep in vision,
even as the shape of poverty is chartered.
Precious people over-flown, staring up
at our jet stream scribble, belong to another
hemisphere. Dirt roads circle boulders
with their own scribble I could wipe off
with my sleeve, and the white-sand beaches
with their fishermen’s dhows, scythed
by the plane’s shadow, are tremulous
sickles between mangrove lagoons
and tsunami. Our destination cities
are increasingly like airports, whether
besieged by hills scarred red with shanties,
or by high rise dungeons on metropolitan
ring roads, rattling in our wake as we tilt
for landing. Our captain wishes us
a pleasant flight, reeling off height,
speed, temperature, time of arrival,
his numbers not Walcott’s abacus,
just numbers.
As for Icarus
a.k.a. Yuri Gargarin, I derive
wonder (not the sublime) these days
from the New Scientist, not Poetry Review.
How come magnolias are pollinated by
beetles? How do we know pre-Homeric
cavemen were intermittent residents?
They evolved before bees. Their deposits
of bones and tools are separated by layers
of bat droppings. That kestrel rippling
on his thong of air has X-ray vision,
alert at 50 metres to a beetle’s sheen.
Poetry can’t match such news, its
virtue to keep us sure-footed, especially
when, as always, we’re on the move.
Landeg White was born in Wales
and now lives in Portugal.
Among his various books are
eight collections of poetry.
His novel Livingstone’s Funeral
has been reviewed in London Grip.
Tamar Yoseloff
A Stone
I find it in the grove, a stone,
among the rusted sacks of oranges,
charred wood; its surface rough,
a piece of sandstone – sedimentary,
igneous – the colour of shaded earth,
the walls that cut into the terraced hill,
but breached, so I can see the glint
of quartz inside, little diamonds,
fluid gas forced to burst to crystal,
broken by someone's shoe, or a tool,
the sort workmen here might use,
primitive and sharp.
It traps the sun, like the crystals
we hung in dormitory windows
to grant us power and knowledge
or that ring – its surface swirling –
a planet on my finger, which I wore
every day one summer and then lost,
the way you always lose things
which defy the need to own them
and somehow make you sad.
I hold it to the light, an ancient world
cracked open, like the inside of a tomb
that hoards a secret treasure:
golden sun, the golden orange grove
in Spring, fruit already turning.
I put it in my pocket,
a relic, like all those other stones
gathered on beaches and on mountains,
even a black chunk of volcano;
which mass on shelves, fill bowls and drawers
and jackets, enough to build a wall
to shore up my forgetting,
souvenirs of a collected life: people, random
words, ideas; some, flinty cliffside shale,
others, tough rock to weather storms.
___________________________________
Singing Woman
after Willem de Kooning
Her flame of notes
scorches the bar.
Stilettos, lips, nails
in Fire Engine, Hot Tamale, Cold Blood.
Naked under the strobe
that dissolves her dress,
fires her skin, brings her back
from the dead,
from the flat white
of an empty room, out cold, blood
oozing from her lip:
the kind of broad you want to hit.
Floozy. Hot Tamale.
Violence finds her
again and again, needle stuck,
a groove scratched by
Camels and coffee, a gin too many.
One way
down; the falling scale
lower, lower, as her angel
rises on a puff of smoke:
what you'd call
a torch song, tremolo of pain.
Tamar Yoseloff, an American poet now resident in London, is the author of three books of poetry: Fetch (Salt, 2007), Barnard's Star (Enitharmon, 2004), and Sweetheart (Slow Dancer 1998); a collaboration with the artist Linda Karshan, Marks (Pratt Contemporary, 2007); and the anthology A Room to Live In: A Kettle's Yard Anthology, which she edited for Salt, 2007. Her forthcoming collection from Salt is The City With Horns. She was Writer in Residence at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and is a Core Tutor with The Poetry School.
