Lynda Plater’s pamphlet ‘Three Seasons for Burning’ contains many poems which give me a catch in my throat. This is one of them.

He lost his life thinking of Eunice

She was a long low town
on the Louisiana plain
as he drove down.
The woman at his side
was lovely (though
he could not now
even think of her name)
and her dress
had a shimmer
as the Chevrolet rolled
its peppermint green
between the fields,
soothing heat down.
And she said something
small, shy from her place
at his side
as if she knew
he would think of this,
this slight, light moment
at his dying, remembering
this long, slow time
with heat moving off fields.
It was a hot light:
even at the evening
with sun red and hot
(hot, he said,
as a red Cajun chilli)
as a pain in the chest
burning him to ground.
Yet even then
there were some lights
strung low in the line
to Eunice town
in whose deep arms
pale stars came out
over the flat fields
where corn and cane
ripened with the fall.
Then finally,
even stars went out.

To begin with there’s something songlike in the way it opens, which is sustained right the way through the poem. The narrow, long form is one which I think of as speeding up the pace, but in this case seems to help the story move along more gently, revealing a little more of its intricacies piece by piece ‘remembering/ this long, slow time’.
The female personification of the town, and its name being a woman’s name, gives the poem a suggestive ambiguity. While the conflation of ‘the woman at his side’ and the town is there, the reader always knows which is which. And there’s a touching irony in the fact he remembers the name of the town but not the name of the woman at his side, made more poignant when ‘she said something/small, shy from her place’. Which is followed by what I feel is a dimension-shifting revelation ‘as if she knew/ he would think of this,/ this slight, light moment/ at his dying’. Premonition, hindsight, the mutability of memory all suddenly leap into the frame here and I’m held in a present that, while containing this particular past, also changes it.
And it is a hard present, ‘a pain in the chest/ burning him to ground’ while he relives this brief loaded memory. And the poem ends with that atmospheric conflation of the arms of the town, the memory and the woman whose name he can’t recall but whose premonition is somehow at the core of it all. A poem full of the shifting ground between past and present before ‘even stars went out’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebecca Bilkau’s pamphlet “Choosing New Omens” deals with the experience of moving to a new country, Germany, with her German husband and the struggles of identity, language and sense of belonging that entails. Throughout the pamphlet there’s an awareness of history, both personal and cultural and nowhere is this more boldly confronted than in this, the first poem of the pamphlet.

It’s a poem which demonstrates many of the qualities apparent throughout the pamphlet and indeed throughout her writing generally. There’s a colloquial flow in which serious emotions and ideas are addressed with directness and passion. When she reads there’s a strong sense of engagement in her delivery which remains present on the page.

 On Not Going to Bergen-Belsen

Sunday evening and bluegrass music drives us

through an everywhere and nowhere till we hit

a babel of welcome signs.

Slowly the name

translates itself into sense. An eternity of mourners

must find open doors, open language here

where fact shatters speech.

And all I can see

is a crumbling ridge of hips, not here in the car,

not on the road, but in all my pictures of this land

till I married into it.

Around the cleats

of intimately tangled dead, righteously articulate

through seven decades of doomed atonement

in this quiet country, my new shock.

I pull my hand

back from Michael’s attempted squeeze. Please

but his sentence has nowhere to go. No more

German than ten minutes ago

he’s not my husband

now, not my sweet old leftie, he’s a Roman salute

in camouflage, an explanation machine whose words

beggar vocabulary. All vocabulary.

There’s a museum

at the death camp. We should go. He should go.

My first love was a Jew. Michael owes it to him

and, suddenly, me.

My husband rests

his head on the steering wheel. He’s been guilty

as sin since before he was conceived. Has never

known inculpability

since he could read.

Like the wife whose own post-colonial guilt is the cringe

of history under the bloody carpet.

I put my hand in reach,

and twined in the relief of grief we search for grace

together; inarticulately grateful for the blessed irony

of winter opening times.

From the very outset the title sets the scene with the ambiguity of ‘not going there’ when how can you not once the name of the place is mentioned. Then the innocuous bluegrass music carries us towards ‘a babel of welcome signs’ (clever use of that word ‘babel’), the translation of the name of the place into ‘sense’ or its reality – the ‘cleats/ of intimately tangled dead’.

But there’s a new shock, too, the poet’s withdrawal from her husband who’s ‘been guilty/as sin since before he was conceived’. As a reader I’m totally caught up in this, the unavoidable conflict, the way the poet is plunged into heady emotions, the sudden need to generalise, apportion collective guilt, and her husband’s ‘Please’ and his helplessness before the enormity of a history he’s not responsible for but is nonetheless associated with. And as we’re being taken through this scene, there’s a return to reason and compassion which culminates in self-realisation with ‘the wife whose own post-colonial guilt…’ at which point I let out my held breath, relieved to find hands twined again.

The last stanza carries in its irony the truth that you don’t have to go all the way to arrive. Perhaps the best way of dealing with these powerful emotions is to acknowledge them, as this poem does, and move on.

For me the articulate honesty of this poem is added to by the form which reflects the see-saw of emotions and thoughts, cleverly moving this way and that through a series of linked stanzas.

 

 

 

Cherangani by Mark Carson

Experience may be Mark Carson’s raw material – Ireland, life as an ocean engineer, Africa – but the essence of his writing is an intelligence and optimism which offers an easy-going eloquence and sensitivity. The relaxed readability of his poems can, though, be deceptive. At ease in their narratives you may be, but at the same time aware something rich, fresh and unexpected is happening or about to happen. His language and imagery is always rewarding, ‘serving up portmanteaus and unexpected conjunctions aplenty’              ( Simon Zonenblick, Sabotage). For example, here’s the poem ‘Cherangani’ :

Cherangani

They were there when we wakened
in the first light as we thought it
as the bell birds called in the thorn scrub
and the mists dissipated
and the handsome black and yellow ticks
shouldered their way up the grass stems
to the very tip
shoving each other
for the most advantageous station
and the drybush kingfisher
killed its first early chafer
crunchingly by our bare heels
and the strange hybrid cornflakes
rustled in milk from the coolbox
and the orange juice, ah the orange juice
gurgled in the grateful throat
and they were getting closer
and the first soufria of water
boiled on the little blue stove
decanted onto the roasted coffee
bringing a rush of optimism
and the crusty rolls and marmalade
and now they were really quite close
shy but forward and we could see
the dull gleam of her neckrings
and the colour gash of her beads
and her little ones giggled
at the fair voluminous curls of our little ones
and shy still she wanted
wanted something, she couldn’t say what
she wanted, she couldn’t say in English or Swahili
or anything
it wasn’t food or drink she intimated but
yes it was the empty del Monte can
the top cut out she could see
she could tell it was empty
empty, an empty can for putting things in
for putting water in
and I took the light ballpeen hammer I always carried
and skilfully hammered the edge smooth and dimpled
and fixed a piece of bullwire as a handle.
And the sun rose in the Kerio Valley
and warmed our backs kindly
as we set off homeward
to the urbane pleasures of the city.

What I love about this poem is the apparently leisurely way it unfolds itself, engaging me totally all the way. I’m immediately hooked in to the narrative with that first line, but then taken elsewhere with detailed and delicious descriptions of the morning, its insects and birds, the breakfast rituals, before once again ‘they’ appear ‘getting closer’ as if the poem’s reassuring me as a reader we will get there in the end but meanwhile there’s no rush; just like the morning itself, it’s there to be enjoyed. And so we continue and ‘they’ get ‘quite close’ and we are finally introduced and follow the understated mime of this cross-cultural interaction, with the surprise of the empty can being refashioned.

I also enjoy the way punctuation is dispensed with and the line lengths and breaks do all the work so eloquently. And throughout, the open-hearted writing sticks to the focus of our common humanity with only the slightly ambiguous irony of ‘the urbane pleasures of the city’ making a nod, perhaps, towards any social/political perspective. No more is needed. It’s in the can.

 

 

 

 

Crazy Days 1 by Carole Coates

All the poems in Carole’s pamphlet Crazy Days deal with the episode when her husband suffered from auto-immune encephalitis, with its resulting loss of memory and disorientation. The poems are movingly written and capture with candour, compassion and wit these difficult and frightening events and their effect on the lives of them both.

The poem I’ve chosen is in fact the first poem in the pamphlet, ‘Crazy Days 1’. As a poem about recovery coming at the beginning of the sequence, it hints at what the protagonists have been through and what the reader has yet to encounter, but makes it clear at the outset that they survive, the crazy days are in the past.

Crazy Days 1

How many beds you say
how many beds have we slept in?

 now that you remember I sleep elsewhere
and like redbush tea in the morning
but you can’t remember why I left the big bed
in the crazy days
when you cried out about the hole, the great pit
in the bed, scrambling out of the way for fear of falling.
You could feel the sharp edge of it
smell the cold airs drifting up
so we changed places but you worried that I would fall
down the chasm you’d discovered so I went away
to the attic room

and thought about, though you could not, our first bed –
under the window that looked to the orchard
and I knelt on the bed and watched you walking
among apple trees in an autumn so still that the leaves
hung quiet as fruit and you cupped your hand
round a small brown russet but did not pick it
because you’ve always kept all the rules
as if it would help, as if it would do you good.

Now the chasm is closing and you come upstairs
with a tray of tea and creep into bed with me
and we prop ourselves on elbows and look at each other
and sometimes we talk about love.

 

What strikes me initially about this poem is the combination of honesty and restraint, a restraint which carries an emotional charge, as in the matter-of-fact quality of the last line.

I enjoy the way the opening question, engaging and intimate, leads in to the description of fears and illusions which resulted in separate beds, which in turn moves on to the touching recollections of the first bed. The image of the dark pit is vivid and disturbing, but the reader is rescued by the recollection of the orchard in the next stanza. Its last two lines: ‘because you’ve always kept all the rules/ as if it would help, as if it would do you good’ arrive as an oblique comment on the arbitrary nature of illness.

It is a poem full of the particular and believable, totally grounded. As with all the poems in this pamphlet, the subject matter is difficult and distressing, but the poem itself moving and easy to read, the lines clearly following units of sense and the pauses of natural speech. To me this is an example of how an accomplished piece of writing can take personal difficulty and make it art.