Wayleave may have sold out of Mark Carson’s delightful and very popular pamphlet The Hoopoe’s Eye, but be assured copies are still available from Mark himself. He can be contacted via his e-mail: marksverbalburble@btinternet.com

In the upbeat tones of someone thoroughly engaged with whatever life throws his way, he describes the Herculean task of cleaning up after floodwater had engulfed his house in Spain.

Here’s another sample poem to give a flavour of Mark’s fluency, descriptive powers and sheer optimism in the face of adversity:

Lenguas de Gato*

I wonder shall I see once more the turtles
paddling up the re-configured Guadiaro,
hauling out like soup-plates on the unfamiliar rocks
to stew their bodies in the summer heat,
or hear the Cetti’s warbler sing long afternoons
from his favourite cable, reinstated to the house.
The nightingale, I wonder will she nest again
in the papyrus by the terrace, or the flycatcher
knit and purl the air beneath the eaves.
Too soon the mare’s tails thrust their spikes
competitive through mud and clay, racing the grasses
to the brilliant light of spring. The trees I think
will cope, or so I hope. But please remind me,
I must free the pear tree from its stranglement
garrotted in its flood-swept quince entanglement.
And will we feel again the passage of the Talgo train,
the early morning rumble of the Algeciras freight
boring its heavy passage from the docks.
I long to hear the kettle’s gargled note,
the morning tea, the crumbling cat’s tongue pastry
dissolving sugar-dusting in the throat.

*cat’s tongues

And you can hear mark reading from The Hoopoe’s Eye here:
https://youtu.be/SNzeUdeBqA4

Copies of Karen Lloyd’s pamphlet Self Portrait as Ornithologist are still available and can be obtained direct from Karen herself, via her website: https://karenlloyd.co.uk/publications/.

“grounded in precise observation”
“language and approach in these poems are alive and rich in invention.”

Here is a poem from the pamphlet:

Omey Island, Connemara

 Out there, beyond the causeway sands
and the island’s rocky brim,
a squabble of white birds
finds tern-shaped fissures in the gale
above the lip of an incoming tide.

The gale, meanwhile, picks flake-white
flints from the waves and another Atlantic
squall is a parallelogram engineered along the horizon.
Half way across the sands our youngsters lean back
into the gale’s unruly arms,
the sea blown in ahead of itself,
two edges of water meeting
like lovers after absence.

On this ragged August day a curlew
flies sentinel across the filling tide,
a second rides slipstream
as if the pair were part of the moon’s pull,
the weighing sea. One of them remains,
a phone’s pixelated blur,
a ghost bird, going. Always going.

Jean Harrison’s The Tilt evokes her time teaching in post-colonial Ghana and returning later to experience the changes that have taken place. What I was particularly struck by is her clear-eyed ability to describe and address the complex relationship between the former colonial culture and attitudes and the lives of indigenous Ghanaians.

A poem in which does this most effectively is To get rid of the snowdrop. About this poem, Steve Whitaker, Literature correspondent of The Yorkshire Times, says: “Taking her place in a hierarchy which automatically elevated Europeans to the upper echelons of the Ghanaian teaching profession, the liberally progressive Englishwoman opens several paradoxical locks in one vignette.”

To get rid of the snowdrop
      It is the calm and silent water that drowns a man

 A European winter
spread its chill across both parties –

us, the ‘white, imported experts’,
you, each one the pick of a generation

too early to have had a chance of a degree,
teaching now in your old school.

We were in love with ‘relevance’, avid
to heave Henry VIII out of the syllabus,

rid biology of the snowdrop, an exotic
whose attributes you’d learned by heart

and loved as proof
all human brains are equally good

or better here, where frost and snow mean nothing
and yet you could describe that flower.

You taught younger forms, we polished exam groups,
students who aimed never to come back,

or if they did
to take our places, not yours,

who’d never been asked to morning coffee
in the Head’s bungalow. They wouldn’t feel easy

 mixing with their former teachers, words
never spoken directly for contradiction,

sinking underground,
pushing up shoots.

When a new regime
moved break to the staffroom, you, and we,

still gathered in clumps of our own kind,
reserved and cool.

The writing here seems so succinct, so concerned with the point it is making. The focused style and tone does not, however, compromise the poem’s craft, but in fact is part of it. For example the first three couplets form a single sentence, in which the reader is immediately aware of the main tensions, while the European winter and ‘white imported experts’ prefigure the snowdrop imagery. The lines are well-judged with breaks true to the rhythms of natural speech.

Then follows what feels like the second section of four couplets, once again a single sentence packing a great deal of information and punch. Here we meet the snowdrop and grasp the ambiguity – its significance and irrelevance. And then there’s the quiet irony of the final couplet of this sentence, that perhaps understanding something beyond one’s experience is a sign of the human brain being ‘better here’.

The last section of the poem tackles the dynamics, the ‘them and us’and extends the snowdrop metaphor with ‘sinking underground/pushing up roots’ and the groups in the staffroom ‘gathered in clumps’. The narrator’s sympathetic attitude remains, nonetheless, clear-eyed, guiding us through entrenched attitudes to the uncomfortable concluding reality.

Jean uses Ashanti proverbs as epigraphs to some of the poems. In this one it feels to me that in terms of Ghanaian culture, it could be that hang-overs from colonialism are ‘the calm and silent water’.

Pauline Yarwood’s pamphlet ‘Image Junkie’ is full of accomplished and energetic poems. I’ve chosen this one because it’s great fun with its mixture of mischief and menace and also demonstrates a certain brio present in much of Pauline’s writing. The fact that it’s set in a supermarket check-out queue, a relatively ordinary and safe place, underlines the slightly unnerving nature of the encounter. I enjoy the way the poem plays with the reader’s emotions, just as the protagonist plays with the innocent shopper’s emotions. The writing has a natural energy making the voice sound authentic despite the fact the situation is out of the ordinary.

*

Basking Shark

I’m all mouth, a mega-mouth, an over-confider,
I want to tell you everything. I want to talk.
I hunt in supermarkets, bask in surface warmth,
and feed on conversation.
I have a bag of apples and a packet of biscuits,
and a woman tells me to go first, I don’t have much,
but I’m not in a hurry and I’ve nowhere to go.
She steps back from my drabness and unwashed hair
and looks at me as though my brain’s no bigger than a peach.
You can pay for these if you like,
and I hold out my shopping over her trolley.
There’s panic in her eyes, and I reel her in.
She’s in over-drive. She thinks she should pay,
she knows she could, she’d hardly notice it,
but then maybe I do this all the time, it’s begging really,
but she thinks she should, and I have her.
I tell her I’m a real Polly Garter, no better than I should be
and isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God,
and she gets the reference and off we go on Dylan Thomas,
touch on Heaney, Motion, O’Donoghue,
and I tell her about Marcus Aurelius advising us to avoid
talkativeness but that I think that’s rubbish advice and
I can talk to an empty bus seat if there’s no-one there to fill it.
I tell her I’m a mega-mouth and she could swim inside and out again
if I could keep it open long enough, or I could swallow her whole.

*

The title seems ideal. For although a basking shark is in fact harmless, by its size it nonetheless can cause alarm, ‘that roomsized monster with a matchbox brain’ as Norman McCaig puts it in his poem Basking Shark.

The way this poem opens immediately pulls me in, that in-your-face confessional. And the description does reflect the actual features of a basking shark, with its enormous mouth and tendency to cruise and feed near the surface.

Then we’re quickly into the detail, a bag of apples and a packet of biscuits, and the awkward interaction between the two women. I enjoy the way the shark registers the look of disdain and reserve of the other woman, the projected judgements of ‘drabness and unwashed hair’, the ‘brain no bigger than a peach’ and uses this in a quite predatory way, remaining in total control of the situation, exploiting it until that satisfied ‘I have her.’ The fish doing the fishing.

The discomfort of the situation takes a lighter turn with the lovely Polly Garter reference and as a reader I’m relieved and able to relax. Or am I? The pace of the poem charges on and the by now disarming shark retains all the power in the situation. Never mind the poor hapless shopper, this mega-mouth could indeed swallow me, the reader, whole.

Hannah Hodgson (Dear Body) was blogger in residence at Kendal Poetry Festival from 6th to 9th September. You can read her blogs, 5 minute interviews with poets and her festival report at http://www.kendalpoetryfestival.co.uk/news/

Hannah also gave one of her powerful short readings which boosted sales of her pamphlet.
An excellent event. Friendly, communal, serious fun and quality readers.
*
Ron Scowcroft (Moon Garden), Rebecca Bilkau (Choosing New Omens) and Pauline Yarwood (Image Junkie) will be reading at The Waterside Café, Kent View, Kendal on Thursday 25th October at 7.30 pm. This will be a reading in aid of Springfield Refuge Domestic Support in South Lakeland.
*
Jane Routh (The White Silence) has a fourth full collection, Listening to the Night (from smith|doorstop) coming out in October/November. She will be giving a reading at Ripon Poetry Festival on Sunday October 14th, 12-1pm, and will officially launch the collection on Saturday 27th October at The Quaker Meeting House, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster, doors open 7.00 for 7.30 start.

She will be accompanied by Mike Barlow (Promise Boat) who will be launching his new pamphlet Some Kind of Ghost (New Walk Editions). Mike will also be reading from this new pamphlet at the publisher’s launch at The Attenborough Arts Centre, Lancaster Road, Leicester on Friday 9th November, 7.00pm start. He will read alongside Moniza Alvi who will also be launching her pamphlet from New Walk Editions.

Chris Considine’s ‘The Island’

This pamphlet evokes Looe Island, a small island off the coast of Cornwall. This is a remote place, both of the world and yet apart from it, where when one arrives or departs depends on the elements more than one’s own decisions. Her writing conjures its many moods – its quiet, its storms – and offers a clear-eyed glimpse of the practical and the other-worldly aspects of spending time there. Her poem Rough contains what I take to be the essence of the place.

Rough

 Woke at five to a muted booming – wind
drumming on the thick-walled house and water
smashing itself on the shore. Hard to make out
much through the salted glass.

A phone call – there’s no going to the mainland
today. The harbour bar impassable – wind in the east
(which the gulls on their rocks expected yesterday
facing Rame Head instead of Talland).

There’s fish in the freezer (boatman’s gift), tomatoes
reddening in the greenhouse, plenty of windfalls
for the pigs. Shame the ducks have stopped laying
and hens hide their nests in the wood.

I unpack my packed bag, put on the kettle,
hope the gas will last. The beamed rooms
have a look of strangeness as if containing,
as well as me, my anticipated absence.

How long, how long? The islanders were marooned
three weeks last winter. The clock in the hall has stopped
and I don’t know how to get it going.
I wonder –­ can time move on without it?

Here are many of Chris Considine’s characteristic traits. A voice which is relaxed and authentic, expressed economically in poised and paced language, moving amongst and illustrating underlying ideas and emotions with an undemanding ease.

I enjoy they way it unfolds, starting with that almost claustrophic and timeless first description, then the phone call which brings in the wider world and might redeem the situation slightly were it not for the fact it confirms the speaker’s isolation. The reference to the gulls facing in to the anticipated wind seems to gently point to how other creatures are better adapted than us to the elemental world.

But that sense of vulnerability dissipates with the taking stock of the third stanza and the realisation it will be ok. All you have to do is wait it out. But wait it out in a shifted space where the ‘familiar beamed rooms/ have a look of strangeness as if containing,/as well as me, my anticipated absence.’ This brief eloquent sentence seems to contain something crucial about the nature of places like this, timelessness intruded upon by time-bound humanity. And unease returns with the prospect of being marooned with a broken clock and that existential final question. Which somehow sends me back to the beginning of the poem with its other-worldly evocation.

Paul Mills’ pamphlet ‘Out of Deep Time’ is an imaginative and ambitious selection of poems about human evolution. Such a daunting all-encompassing theme might deter the faint-hearted, but Paul Mills has years of experience as a writer and both the confidence and skill to take it on. What he accomplishes works for me on a number of levels, the imaginative, the thought-provoking and the emotionally affecting. As he tackles this theme from its various aspects, he often employs a particular image or notion with which to explore the evolutionary process. There is ‘The story of hands’, ‘The story of glass’, ‘A wriggle’, ‘The story of a line’. But the one I focus on here is ‘The fix’.

The fix

 is to shape stones that bite   sharp as incisors
under a carob’s shade   among wild rubble
seeing the wide plain   the herds of bison

is not to scavenge but become hunters
is to make death happen where you want it
is to make the clouds of vultures wait

a world shaped by fix   the power of fix
not this of uninterrupted heat
not wind   ice   but shelter and fire

is to invent needles   invent furrows
join strong hands to flexible minds
is to make them restless for completion

on my hearth a poker shaped to a point
iron-handled shovel   iron tongs
sawn logs   at my back a radiator     hot

in my freezer a package of lamb   ice
salmon   broccoli   bread   it’s everywhere
we live by the fix   will die from it probably

yet I also notice what’s not the fix
on the mantelpiece a peculiar jug
decorated Navaho sphere-thing from Nevada

and here’s a guitar     paintings   patterns   games
saying to me the fix isn’t all   never was
there is the fix held back   the fix in reverse

coins and swords flung to the waters   other rhythms
saying however far you reach you hear it
hear them both   the fix and not the fix

What initially attracts me is the title, the use of a simple single syllable word to denote the process of human endeavour, the birth and continuing process of technology. It seems to sum up and take everything down to basics, giving us a perspective that’s unpretentious and irrefutable.

In just a few stanzas it moves me from early stone tools to the contents of a modern freezer, via the ‘carob’s shade   among wild rubble’, until we’re considering the simple everyday tools of today, ‘iron-handled shovel    iron tongs’. On the way I’m offered some deftly evoked images including making ‘death happen where you want it’. There’s nothing sentimental or romanticised about the intent of this poem. It looks at the stark and practical reality of survival, right up to the modern day where ‘we live by the fix   will die from it probably’. And yet…

there’s the turn – ‘what’s not the fix’ – and we’re considering the artful, the decorative, the playful, the rejection of violence and functional commerce, ‘coins and swords flung to the waters’, all that gives life grace and a meaning beyond mere survival and relentless technological advance.

And all this done in 9 three line stanzas, using well-chosen, spare yet evocative imagery to cover the enormous ground from then to now and beyond, so we can ‘hear them both     the fix and not the fix’.

Martyn Halsall has been described as having ‘a great gift for language that is both allusive and elegant’. The poems in Coronach are distinctive and atmospheric, largely focusing on the landscape of the north west, both of Scotland and England. However, a poem I’ve always been particularly taken by is about Iceland, or at least about a painting of Iceland.

Migrating Birds
(from a painting by Eirikur Smith)

Imagine you are the woman pictured at the end
of the lava track, at the aftermath of Iceland,
her gaze hardened with glacier lines, her outlook
shingle, back-lit by an open wound of sunset.

Last light catches the ribbing down her hut,
cream corrugated iron, sanded rust;
something of a splintering in the concrete cast,
steps leading up beyond sand’s overlap;
the beach spread to the emptiness of ocean.

Suppose you had just returned there, and you shared
realisations in the night map of her face,
her vision of year ending; deepening sky overcast
spreading its blue dyes further through calm tide;
a shaken pepper pot flock moving away,
south, into migration.
Consider the painter’s hand
leaving her to winter, having prepared the storm
by layering thunder through eclipsing oils.

He might glance back, regret abandoning her there,
turning from the sea, that last flock now far out.
Imagine, instead, he stayed; stood waiting with her.

What I enjoy so much about this is the atmospheric description. It’s based on a painting, but actually creates its own separate sense of a particular place by describing elements in the flat plane of the picture so as to evoke in my mind somewhere three dimensional and emotionally vibrant.

The first stanza, which invites the reader to imagine being the figure in the picture, has ‘the aftermath of Iceland’ and ‘an open wound of sunset’ which sets a certain ominous tone. This is followed in the next stanza by more vivid description, doing with words what an artist does with paint before, in the third stanza, placing ‘you’ the reader more firmly there in ‘her vision of year ending’.

When I’m asked to ‘Consider the painter’s hand’, this takes me out of the picture and into the person of the artist and the paradox of creativity, being immersed in the created object yet separate from it. All summed up in that beautiful last stanza in which loneliness, separation and regret intermingle.

This seems to me to be a poem with many layers of meaning, itself a metaphor I can enter and explore both emotionally and cerebrally.