New Poetries VII Read online

  LUKE ALLAN

  ZOHAR ATKINS

  ROWLAND BAGNALL

  SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

  MARY JEAN CHAN

  HELEN CHARMAN

  REBECCA CULLEN

  NED DENNY

  NEIL FLEMING

  ISABEL GALLEYMORE

  KATHERINE HORREX

  LISA KELLY

  THEOPHILUS KWEK

  ANDREW LATIMER

  TOBY LITT

  RACHEL MANN

  JAMES LEO McASKILL

  JAMIE OSBORN

  ANDREW WYNN OWEN

  PHOEBE POWER

  LAURA SCOTT

  VALA THORODDS

  NEW

  POETRIES

  7

  AN ANTHOLOGY

  edited by

  MICHAEL SCHMIDT

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Preface

  LAURA SCOTT

  If I could write like Tolstoy

  Tolstoy’s Dog

  and Pierre?

  Fragment

  The Singing

  a different tune

  What I know

  Lines on a broken statue of Iris

  What the trees do

  Turner

  The Dogs in Greece are different

  To the Trees

  The Thorn and the Grass

  So Many Houses

  Fence

  NED DENNY

  Untitled

  Old Song

  To Catch a Thief

  Fir

  House Music

  Cutting Class

  Drones

  Era

  Who’s She

  Tree

  SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

  Dear, beloved

  ANDREW WYNN OWEN

  The Kite

  The Mummies’ Chorus

  What Matters

  The Borderline

  The Puppet

  The Ladder

  Sand Grains

  The Rowboat

  April Shower

  The Multiverse

  Ants, Spiders, Bees

  Till Next Time

  ZOHAR ATKINS

  Protest

  System Baby

  Song of Myself (Apocryphal)

  Poetry TedTalk Notes

  Without without Title

  Fake Judaism

  Déjà Vu

  Pirkei Avot

  The Binding of Isaac

  RACHEL MANN

  A Kingdom of Love

  Collect for Purity

  Fides Quaerens

  The Ordinal

  The Book of Genesis

  Compline

  The Apocalypse of John

  Chaucer on Eccles New Road

  Reading Ovid on the Underground

  The Priest Finds Eve in Piccadilly Gardens

  St Elisabeth Zacharias

  Evensong

  JAMIE OSBORN

  Did you see elephants?

  Caprivian

  How we are building

  Lukas

  C22 Gobabis – Otjinene

  No landings yet

  Distribution

  Worship

  Ladies’ chapel

  Forgive me

  What you expect

  Meidjie sings

  MARY JEAN CHAN

  They Would Have All That

  Three Sonnets

  respite

  Long Distance

  an eternal &

  Names (I)

  Names (II)

  Notes Toward an Understanding

  speaking in tongues

  Safe Space

  HELEN CHARMAN

  Horse whispering

  Bathsheba’s Gang

  Three Caskets

  Naming problems

  Tampon panic attack

  The Roses of Heliogabalus

  Thin girls

  Angiogram

  from ‘Donations’

  Agony in the Garden

  Leaky

  TOBY LITT

  Politics / 9.11.16, p.m.

  from ‘Life Cycle’

  Self-Reminders

  Awaying

  Sonnet

  Friday

  A glow-in-the-dark skeleton

  LUKE ALLAN

  Pennyweight

  A Note on Walking to Elgol

  Love Poem

  Advice of the Assistant in a Card Shop…

  Poetry

  Lemon

  A Version of Bashō

  Language

  Variations on a Circle

  Alexandrine

  The Road Not Taken

  The Garden of Desire

  One-Word Poems for V.

  Outlandia

  From Marsco

  Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

  PHOEBE POWER

  Clarsach

  Name

  sex and love with the soon-to-be accountant

  children

  Epiphany Night

  Sleeping in His Harp-Case

  Installation for a New Baby

  Es war einmal

  Villach

  fasching

  the weather’s changing

  Mary’s Dreams

  Austrian pastorals

  THEOPHILUS KWEK

  Moving House

  Westminster

  What It’s Like

  Camerata

  My Grandfather Visits Pyongyang

  Road Cutting at Glanmire

  24.6.16

  Requiem

  Occurrence

  Dead Man’s Savings Won’t Go to Wife

  Blue

  KATHERINE HORREX

  Brexit

  Afraid is a Town

  Polycystic

  Grey Natural Light

  Four Muses

  Goat Fell

  Lapwings in Fallowfield

  Moon Jar and Moon dark

  Buttermere

  Waking in Twos

  Wood Frog

  JAMES LEO McASKILL

  Days

  Coming Thunder

  Joke

  Coffee Morning

  Baghdad

  The Norseman’s First Summer

  Radix (Augury)

  Labour

  from Lasts

  ROWLAND BAGNALL

  Subtitle

  Sonnet

  Kopfkino

  Viewpoint

  In the Funhouse

  Evening in Colorado

  I–5 North

  Jet Ski

  A Few Interiors

  Hothouse

  The Excavation

  REBECCA CULLEN

  Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings

  Mother

  Opening

  How to Hang Washing

  What I See in the Mirror

  Midas

  6 Brunswick Street

  Pillar Box Dress

  The Courthouse, Shillelagh

  Orlando

  Crossing from Marazion

  North Sea

  VALA THORODDS

  Enemies

  Through Flight

  Inertia

  The Difference

  Naked except for the jewellery

  in

  Rain

  Luck

  Carelessly we have entangled ourselves

  Aperture

  LISA KELLY

  Apple Quartet

  Trailing Spouse

  Whitewash

  Out of Order

  A Map Towards Fluency

  A Desultory Day

  The Dogs of Pénestin

  Anonymous

  A Chorus of Jacks in 13 Texts

  Cuddles are Drying up Like the Sun in a Data Lake

  Ladybird

  Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noiser />
  ANDREW LATIMER

  The Poet in the Garden

  from Scott’s Journals

  from The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

  The Musician

  Pavane: Anubis

  A Medieval Scene

  Mi Donna é Prega

  Jamshid

  Matthew

  Sant Iago

  Cleopatra Playing Boules

  White & Manila

  from Seneca the Younger

  Head-Hunting

  NEIL FLEMING

  New Year’s Eve

  Paul McNeil Hill

  Camber Sands

  Clock with Brass Winding Key

  Diagnosis

  Double History

  Towelling Dry

  September’s done

  Hartland Point

  Sorry for your loss

  Fortingall

  The Gypsy’s Chandelier

  Lamu

  ISABEL GALLEYMORE

  A False Limpet

  At First

  The Ash

  My Heart’s

  The Spiny Cockle

  The Ocean

  Together

  And One Unlucky Starling

  A Squirrel

  Tended

  I’m doing you an injustice

  The Crickets

  Seahorse

  Nuptials

  Kind

  A Note

  Contributors

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Preface

  EDITING THE New Poetries anthologies is the most pleasurable and testing of my editorial tasks. No fixed schedule governs their appearance. I know a new anthology is taking shape when a particular poem announces, it’s that time again. The process begins, usually because I have been enjoying some of the new poets in PN Review and a quick census tells me there is a chine, a prickle, a surfeit, a blessing – a group – of new poets waiting. Many of Carcanet’s first collections take shape in PN Review and New Poetries.

  The poem that set me on the road to New Poetries V was ‘This is Yarrow’ by Tara Bergin; to New Poetries VI was ‘Slaughterer’ by Vahni Capildeo. Laura Scott’s ‘and Pierre?’ was the catalyst for this book.

  With his ripe face like one of those pale freckled pears

  you hold in your hand and his mind shuddering across it

  like a bruise – he’s legible to all the world. With his great legs,

  broad and strong as the trees, he walks in and out of chapters

  smelling of eau de cologne, or an animal that sleeps in a barn.

  With his long fingers running across the stubble on his jaw,

  he listens to the black Russian rain before he picks up his pen.

  With his eyes so blue you’d think he’d drunk the sky down

  with all that champagne, he watches the soldiers (red epaulettes

  and high boots) drag that boy to the place where they shoot him.

  He watches the boy pull his loose coat tight before he sags and slides

  down the post. And when it’s all over, he watches them roll him

  gently into the hole with the others and before he can look away,

  he sees, there in the earth, the boy’s shoulder still moving.

  This is not the only Tolstoyan moment in Laura Scott’s poems, but it is the most affecting. It also happens to be a sort of couplet sonnet, and readers familiar with earlier New Poetries know how partial they are to the sonnet, a recurrent, even a pervasive form in these volumes. Its mastery of the poet, the poet’s mastery of it, the reciprocities of the form, are a kind of editorial proof. Can one be original in it? What can it do that it hasn’t done a hundred times before? Can the sonnet genuinely accommodate narrative? Does it (does any lyric) in the post-Culler age dare to risk the preterite? The future tense? Andrew Latimer describes his work in this anthology as starting from a ‘sonnetish poem, with its volta acting as dynamo – propelling and organising’, which ‘makes its material memorable just long enough until it can eventually be scribbled down – during a lunch break, stolen toilet stop’. Several actual and seeming sonnets have found lodging in New Poetries VII. James Leo McAskill, a committed sonneteer, says of his poems, ‘they are as different as they are similar, and are meant to be read as such’.

  Laura Scott’s note on her poems speaks for her creative and, by extension, for my editorial stance: ‘So the act of making these poems is also an act of submission. To put it schematically: the image has authority, and the writing must defer to it. The poem has to shed some of its busy self-importance, to lose some of its intention, to go quiet. All the poems do, all they can do, is circle the image, go around the outside of it so that it can occupy the space in the middle.’ As anthologist I declare, ‘the achieved poem has authority, and editing must defer to it.’

  Deferring as editor begins when a poem earns its place. I open submission envelopes, glance at covering letters, look over the first poem. In the case of ‘and Pierre?’ I was compelled to read aloud. The poem insisted not on the poet’s but on a reader’s voice (‘legible to all the world’). Once I began to say it, the poem’s prosody, syntax and lineation created anticipation, started generating the variations and surprises that become its drama and its residual magic. Not only the reader experiences this enchantment: the poet too must feel it, standing outside the thing of words she has made. As she re-reads and revises I can imagine her asking, bemused, how language has delivered just this poem. The news that stays news, as Pound called poetry, is that recurring sense of surprise. The poem can be read, can read you, a dozen times and provide incremental pleasures. Feeling produced by language, rather than feeling producing language. Some readers set out to memorise poetry. I prefer to learn by heart.

  Different as the poems included in this anthology are – from concrete poems to extended philosophical meditations – they share concerns with form and language, issues they resolve differently. Yet there is coherence in this book as in its predecessors, a sense of continuity with the past and the future of the art. Ned Denny talks of the synthesis in his poems and translations, ‘the apparent paradox of something both highly ordered and numinous, condensed yet expansive, Apollo and Dionysus in one’. Andrew Wynn Owen writes of ‘the mind’s capacity, sometimes, for active self-redirection’. Zohar Atkins feels on firmer ground, declaring, ‘For me, poetry is the discipline of subverting discipline; it is theory in reverse.’ His themes and language are rooted in scripture. So too are Rachel Mann’s (she is a member of the Anglican clergy): ‘The genesis of my poems in this selection lies, in large measure, in acknowledgement of the ever-failing grip the Word has on a culture once saturated by it.’ For Vala Thorrods, ‘The spirit dwells in us like a curse or a spell, and these poems try to embody that haunted feeling.’

  The poets express the contrariety of art, the bringing into balance that entails different degrees of self-effacement in the making of the thing that is a poem, which exists in its ‘fundamental “otherness”’ (Jamie Osborne). It is the poems’ integrity that makes it possible for them to engage with some of the political realities of our time, as with less time-bound experiences. Sumita Chakraborty’s single poem in this book may be ‘an elegy of a kind’, but ‘it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper, or to write a way of inhabiting grief rather than exactly writing about grief’. And the poem thus becomes habitable by the reader, an experience rather than a report on experience.

  For some of the poets the choice of English is a challenge, to themselves and to the reader; and the choice is never quite complete. Mary Jean Chan, whose poems are political at every level, says, ‘I have chosen to write in English, yet Chinese is always there in my work as its foil or fraternal twin, largely owing to the fact that I only speak in Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and my mother does not speak English.’ She adds, ‘I have experienced how an attentiveness to form – be it a sonnet or pantoum, or simply a tercet or couplet – offers a powerful means to nego
tiate complex emotions that arise from our lived experiences as social, political and historical beings.’

  Rebecca Cullen looks in a different direction, drawing into her poems tones and voices from worlds not immediately her own, as in ‘Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings’:

  This morning, I wake with a bird in my heart.

  My mother smiles only for me. I bash my car into the wall.

  Sometimes she tells me to be quiet. Today, she laughs.

  The men came in the hottest part of the day.

  A walk, my love, a small walk, she says.

  In the stairwell, the mothers hold their children.

  The guns shine in the sun. I am a man,

  this is no time for play, I do not hide.

  We shuffle in, look for a seat in the stands.

  A big black bird comes down from the sky.

  The grown-ups hold their breath. They are blinking a lot.

  The bird likes the meat hanging on the goalposts.

  Tonight, my mother says I can sleep in her bed.

  I make my back into a curved shell against her legs.

  She strokes her palm across my forehead.

  In the middle of the night, I watch her on her knees.

  She tips her head backwards. I see all of her neck.

  A sonnet could not quite have contained the narrative, though there is a kind of sonnet movement up through the fourteenth line, then the I’s perspective changes to register the vulnerability of the ‘she’ and hence of him (and her) self.

  Helen Charman too accepts her vocation as at once poetic and political. ‘I think the ongoing work of reconsidering the historical “canon” can help to clarify the challenges of the present.’ The re-tuning of the canon, and the loosening of bonds with it, have been at the centre of Theophilus Kwek’s adjustment to the contemporary British ‘voice’, a term to whose treachery he is alert. ‘Having grown up with the even cadences of the King James Bible and Shakespeare’s plays, I arrived here in 2013 to find a rhythm – of speaking and living – that was more troubling and yet more alive: an urgent, all-embracing pulse that gently remade all my expectations in favour of a younger, more diverse Britain. I quickly found community among those with different accents and persuasions, and lost an initial shyness over my Singaporean voice.’