Friday poetry from Jacqueline Saphra and Happy Weekend

I've decided it's time to get back to regular posts about weekend poetry reading. I've been doing the reading but not finding the time to mention it.

This weekend I'm re-reading the truly wonderful sequence of sonnets 'A Bargain with the Light', which was one of my favourite books of 2017 and also chosen by the Poetry School. It give you insights into Lee Miller's life as well as her photographs and by the end you feel as if you know her.

Ahead of next weekend's T.S. Eliot Prise readings I'm engaging with All My Mad Mothers which is one of the ten short-listed collections. You can hear Jacqueline (and the other poets) talking about their work here.

'All My Mad Mothers'

My mother gathered every yellow object she could find:
daffodils and gorgeous shawls, little pots of bile
and piles of lemons. Once we caught her with a pair
of fishnet stockings on a stick, trying to catch the sun.

My mother never travelled anywhere without her flippers,
goggles and a snorkel. She’d strip at any opportunity:
The Thames, The Serpentine, the shallows of a garden pond,
a puddle in the park. She was no judge of depth.

My mother was a dipterologist, sucking fruit flies through a straw.
Our house was filled with jars of corpses on display. Sometimes
she’d turn them out, too dead to flee, their wings still glinting,
make them into rainbow chokers, for our party bags.

My mother barely spoke between her bruises:
her low cut gown was tea-stained silk, and from behind
her Guccis or Versaces, she would serve us salty dinners,
stroke a passing cheek, or lay her head on any waiting shoulder.

My mother was an arsonist. She kept a box of matches
in her bra, lined up ranks of candles, ran her pretty fingers
through the flames. At full moon, she would drag
our beds into the garden, set them alight and howl.

My mother was a fine confectioner. We’d come upon her sponges,
softly decomposing under sweaters in a drawer, or oozing
sideways in a filing cabinet. Once, between her pearls
and emerald rings, we found a maggot gateau, iced with mould.

My mother was hard to grasp: once we found her
in a bath of extra virgin olive oil, her skin well slicked.
She’d stocked the fridge with lard and suet, butter – salted
and unsalted – to ease her way into this world. Or out of it.

Friday poetry from Helen Ivory and Martin Figura and Happy Weekend

This weekend I'm going to be reading Martin Figura's latest, a pamphlet with illustrations by Caroline Wright and Helen Ivory's Waiting for Bluebeard.

I really enjoyed hearing them both read at Toddington Poetry Society on Tuesday. It was worth it even though my car ended up locked into the car park over the road. These things happen in Luton. In the Q&A session they talked about process and how research leads to poems.

I have a feeling that both their books will take me on a journey, which is my favourite kind of reading. Arthur begins with

Home
Arthur lies warm in his soft feather bed....


Waiting for Bluebeard starts with

Moon Landing

Somewhere beyond weather
men are reckoning the acreage of space
and playing tricks on gravity.

My pregnant mother watches with the millions
in their front rooms as she waits
but I will not budge.

Whatever you are reading this weekend I hope it is a good one.

Friday Poetry and Happy Weekend - Ritsos, Gebbie, Jenkins and Kinsella

I've been reading novels recently and it has been a while since I wrote about poetry reads so I'm glad to get back to it.

I have three poetry books on the go at present; Diaries of Exile by Yannis Ritsos, Memorandum poems for the fallen by Vanessa Gebbie and Marine by Alan Jenkins and John Kinsella.

It's thanks to the work of translators Karen Emmerich and Edmund Keeley that I've discovered the work of Yannis Ritsos. He wrote the poems in Diaries of Exile between 1948 and 1950 which he was a political prisoner. They illuminate the life around in the prison camp and the hopes and fears of the prisoners. The poems become shorter and shorter as his exile continues. I wonder if he was running out of energy, or perhaps there was less paper or conditions had become harsher or all of these things. I admire anyone for writing under these conditions.

During May I've been re-reading Memorandum, by my friend and fellow poet, Vanessa. As has been told before we wrote poems inspired by the Frist World War alongside each other but though the poems in the book are familiar I find like all the finest work you gain a new perspective by going back and re-reading them. Vanessa's book is one of the choices for May's War and Literature Readalong.

My other book is Marine, published by Enitharmon Press in 2015. It resulted from an unplanned collaboration between Alan Jenkins and John Kinsella who discovered they were both writing poems inspired by the sea. My favourite poem so far after a rapid first read is Albatross (after Baudelaire)

Friday Poetry from Choman Hardi - Considering the Women

Today I've gone back to Choman Hardi's Considering the Women.
An important book with a central sequence of poems about the Anfal genocide of the Kurds in 1988 in which over a hundred thousand people were killed. I have heard her read twice at Aldebugh and in London at the Poet's quest for peace. There are two sequences on youtube of her reading from Considering the Women
and an earlier interview about the importance of poetry.

Friday Poetry from Clare Best and Butcher's Dog

I have a couple of items of poetry reading lined up for the weekend. The first is Clare Best's poem, Cell, which will unfold into a cell with artwork by Michaela Ridgway.  I've been saving this up until I had enough time to read it properly. I was going to describe this as a poetry treat. However the poem is about Christine Carpenter, a girl of fourteen who was at her own volition enclosed in a cell at St James' Church, Shere, perhaps compelling reading is a better description.

The eight issue of Butcher's Dog magazine arrived in the post during the last week with a gorgeous picture of a mermaid on the cover. This always has poems which are worth reading.

And the plant is my Jade plant (Crassula ovata) which has come into the house for the winter. It used to be my office desk plant but has a much happier existence these days, outside in the sunshine for the summer and on a cool but dry windowsill during the winter.

Whatever you are doing this weekend do make time to read a poem or two.

Friday Poetry from Matt Merritt and Happy Weekend

 

I had the pleasure of introducing Matt Merritt at Ouse Muse this week and hearing him read from his two collections from Nine Arches Press. I had already browsed my way through  The Elephant Tests and as so often happens have gone back to the poems with even more enjoyment through having the poet's voice in my head. I was pleased he included Desire Lines in his set. Hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica is the proper name for the glass harmonica 

From Prelude forGlass Harmonica

You wake late

to hear it, muffled and opaque

in a distant room,

or maybe only dream

that quicksilver music,

feel it as much as hear it...

His blog is worth following, for glimpses of birds as well as coments on contemporary poetry.

Friday Poetry by Becky Cherriman and Happy weekend

I've been busy for the last couple of Fridays with poetry related activities in Aldeburgh and North Wales so haven't had a chance to share a Friday poet recently. I've come back from Wales with Becky Cherriman's glorious Empires of Clay.  It is so exciting to get my hands on this book. There is sometihng about the physicality of turning the pages which you just don't get from swiping a screen and the cover is even more lovely in real life than it is electronically. And even though I know the poems afer working with Becky, they still tempt me back for another read.

Friday Poetry from John McCullough and Happy Weekend

If you haven't already bought a copy of Spacecraft by John McCullough then I would urge you to do so without delay. I've been reading and re-reading it since it was published in the spring but because I've been busy recently what with the trip to France and writing some commissioned poems that it has been a few weeks since I last dipped into it so I'm treating myself this weekend. You can read a couple of the poems here while you are waiting for the copy you've just ordered online from Penned in the Margins to arrive.

The flowers are from the garden and are the chrysanthenums which have just come into flower. It rejoices in the name Amber Matlock.

Friday Poetry from Stuart McKenzie and Happy Weekend

This Friday is the launch of the first of Laudanum's books, featuring the work of my fellow poet, Stuart Mckenzie. It also includes poems by Joey Connolly and Philip Terry.

I pre-ordered the book and have had it for several weeks. I was so pleased to see Stuart's work in print, having becoming familiar with it through workshops with Katy Evans-Bush.  I turned to his section ‘the dead weight of beauty’ first and took great pleasure in reading his sharply observed poems with his characteristic forensic eye for detail as you might expect from someone who works as a fashion illustrator. It’s not all fashion as the brief selection includes poems about growing up Birch Services M62 and rediscovering a relic in Action Man. My favourite is ‘After Snow’ which captures perfectly the vanishing of the transformation brought about by snow.



Laudanum is a new venture and the aim according to editor, Tiffany Anne Tondut, is to provide a niche for shorter works and to introduce new talent. An advantage of a combined chapbook is the opportunity as a reader to discover poets by association. After reading Stuart's poems I turned to ‘Du Bellay’ by Philip Terry, a sequence of sonnets sending up life as a head of department at the University of Essex. Each one is a 21^st century answer to Du Bellay’s sonnets although you do not need to know this in order to be amused and there was much that was familiar from my time as a university administrator.

The final section is joey Connolly’s Moderns which are versions of previously translated poems by poets such as Lorca, Montale and Cavafy. In the latter case I knew the original poem ‘The God abandons Anthony’ and in Connolly’s hands it becomes two poems ‘Your Room at Midnight was suddenly’. I really liked the way Connolly plays with the ideas in the poem and in the second version how you might encounter the poem when

we sip our coffee and your eyes

are darker than any history or coffee, than any

Greek coffee ever was…

Friday poetry and Happy Weekend

This weekend's reading is going to be Andrea Holland's Broadcasting. The first print run had sold out when I first came across it in 2013 but happily it has been reprinted. This is very much a book to my taste as the poems are about the five Breckland villages in East Anglia which were requistioned in 1942  for D-Day preparations and about the people who lost their homes.

I will be over in France next Friday and so there won't be a blog post for next weekend. But as I'm going back to the Somme I will be taking In Parenthesis with me.

Enjoy your weekend.

Friday poetry and Happy Weekend

I always make time for poetry on Fridays, preferably with a mug of tea. This week's reading material is Jane McLauglin's prize winning first collection, Lockdown, which is being published by Cinnamon Press this weekend.

I am really enjoying Jane's use of imagery and the way her poems capture moments like snapshots. As I'm not able to go to the launch at the 'Made in Greenwich' gallery I have to content myself with reading the poems. My favourite one, so far, is

Learning about Potatoes
On the convent vegetable patch, habit hitched up.
These are Edzell Blue she says, clearing the violet skins
of mud, clagged by August rains. I remember her holding
them, Inca jewels, digging and teaching.

You should learn these things. Theirs were purple too,
but yellow inside. The Quechua word is papa.
She’d pile them into the wicker trug, a violet pyramid,
stack the spent haulms on the heap to rot.

Then pray to her garden saint, headless St Martin de Porres,
found under the convent hedge. A pot of wallflowers
and a prayer against the Late Blight, Phytophthora Infestans.
‘Think now of what you eat, and the million dead.

They still turn up bones on my father’s farm.
Food enough for all, but shipped away
to feed foreigners. And they had not a clean tuber
the length of the land.

I remember a Mayo nun in her grey cotton apron
pitching the piled weeds onto the barrow
and crying with the pain of those who lay
where they fell. In the late summer light

she digs with the fierceness of one betrayed
by men and seasons, thanks God for her violet potatoes,
holds her trug of Edzell Blue
like a lost child found.
 

I used this earlier in the week as a prompt for a writing exercise with my Wing Writers which was very well received. We could all see and hear that nun with her trug of potatoes and her fierce determination. You can read a few more of Jane's poems here  and buy a copy of Lockdown here.

Have a good weekend.