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.

The Year of the Pamphlet - Cherriman, Hershman and Josephy

Either by chance or by choice poetry pamphlets are becoming my favourite things to read this year. I’ve already mentioned Becky Cherriman’s Echolocation which was published earlier this month from Mother’s Milk Books and her poems which have such grit in them. Then in the same week Tania Hershman’s Nothing Here is Wild, Everything is Open, arrived from Ireland, from Southword Editions. I read it in one sitting as you can do with a pamphlet and then as with Becky’s poems went back and savoured each one. You can read my review here. 

Today’s it is the turn of Other Blackbirds by Alex Josephy – one of the latest pamphlets from Cinnamon Press. I’ve previously reviewed Well Kemp’s The Missing Girl. These are also poems which ‘repay more than one reading’, as Chris  Considine says in the blurb. Coming back to them for another read what struck me was the feisty girl running through the poems from the sister in ‘The Sister-Brother’ Treaty who divides the spoils

… I took river bridges, fords

surprised you with teapots

and in A Slip of Wildness

… I was away

into the rough boughs of the yew,

smearing my palms with dust

to the girl in ‘What She Wants’ at the Green Gate, 1983

and a peace sign: Crystal Barbie

the doll I wouldn’t buy

not even for Christmas.

Two of the poems won first prize jointly in the Battered Moons competition judged by Alice Oswald and others have been published or have won prizes. This is however more than just a putting together of ‘best’ poems as it takes the reader on a journey from the poet’s childhood, through a daughter’s childhood and we find ourselves in Italy where there are ‘Other Blackbirds’.

Along the way there are glimpses of a father and 'The OnlyMeal I Ever Saw My Father Cook’, which was my favourite in the collection and in ‘Elbows on the Table’

… He’s deep

in history: Tuscany 1945

a gatehouse blown to pieces

in the long retreat. He turned down…

Review of Becky Cherriman’s Echolocation

This is going to be different from the usual sort of review you write after reading work by someone you don’t know or have only heard of by repute. I came to Echolocation having worked with Becky, during 2014 under the Cinnamon Press mentor scheme, principally on her first collection, Empires of Clay. I did see some of the poems included in Echolocation but its creation came after we’d finished the mentorship. So with that declaration of interest out of the way, what should the reader make of the fifteen poems in Echolocation. 

As the blurb says this is ‘an assured body of work… which does not succumb to sentimentality’.

At its heart is the theme of mothering in all its manifestations; being mothered as in Eucharist and Lullabies and it deals unflinchingly and without sentiment with being a single parent, infertility, fostering, adoption and illness. There are layers and layers to many of the poems and returning to some of them after having not read them for a while it is like reading them anew. 

 

They are poems about what it is like to be human too, to be determined to keep going

and this she knows now, distinct ad the taste of brick dust

-          she will never leave him

Lone Parent

holy trinities of how the day before had been,

what we’d loved, and why.

                                                                                                                Eucharist

It would be a pity for you to discount these poems because you’ve never been a mother or have no intention or possibility of being one. Do read them.

Becky Cherriman and Echolocation

Today I’m delighted to welcome Becky Cherriman to the blog.
She is a writer, creative writing facilitator and performer from Yorkshire. Her pamphlet, Echolocation is being launched this week  and is available from Mother's Milk Books – a poetic journey into single motherhood, infertility, the adoption process and more from a writer who has lived them all.
She has numerous publications including with Bloodaxe, Mslexia, and her poems have appeared on Umbrellas and the walls of a recording studio.

Her poems have won prizes, including first prize in 2012 with Speakeasy and second in the Ilkley Literature Open Mic 2011. Her first full collection, Empires of Clay, is being published by Cinnamon Press later this year. Becky and I worked together during 2014 when I was her mentor. As is often the case when your interest in poetry chimes with someone else I learned from the experience too, especially from the delight Becky takes in responding to art as you will see from the following interview.

Without stopping to think, can you name four poets whose work has influenced you?

Dylan Thomas, Mary Oliver, William Shakespeare, Anne Sexton

What are you passionate about and what inspires you?

I'm passionate about people and relationships between people, between people and their histories, between people and landscapes.  These things inspire my work as do art, politics and real life events, particularly dramatic ones.

Can you describe your writing practice or process? Do you have a tried and tested means of getting started? Has the way you write changed?

When it comes to poetry I usually start off with a very rough draft, which tends to be more notes than a proper draft.  If there is the essence of a poem there, I come back to it, ideally no more than a week later and type up what I have.  I expand this into a first full draft over one to three sittings, which may involve some research depending on what I'm writing about.  Then there are weeks, months or years of tweaking before I ask for feedback and tweak again. 

I do more rewriting and editing than I used to but then what I write now has more layers to it and so takes more crafting.   

What advice would you offer to another poet who is in the process of putting her first pamphlet or collection together?

It was invaluable to me to have you as a mentor to help me edit the poems but particularly to help me find ways in which the poems could hang together.  Although we didn't do so much of this for the pamphlet, what I learned from you in putting together the collection definitely helped me decide on an order for the pamphlet and which poems not to include.  Of course not everyone can find a mentor but my advice would be to find someone who is happy to read through the poems in your collection, discuss the themes within them and what potential order they could go in.  

Writers' groups and spoken word events can be great places to do find someone to pair up with who is at a similar stage to you.  

Which poem in Echolocation has the most meaningful backstory to you? Can you share that backstory with us?
I'd probably answer this question differently if you asked me this in a year. Right now it is 'Graves' Disease'.  The poem was the last to be included in the book and sprang from a Sonia Lawson painting, 'Down Among The Empty Boats'.  My mind and eye are always interested in and open to art but it rarely produces a heart reaction in me.  Yet, when I entered The Mercer Gallery, my hand went instinctively to my chest. I was particularly drawn to the works depicting Muriel Metcalfe, Sonia Lawson's artist mother and, when I read the exhibition text, was surprised to realise that Sonia's mother had suffered from Graves' Disease, something I've been dealing with for the last 9 years.  Sadly her condition meant she was unable to look after Sonia for long periods of her childhood.  The poem is about illness and sacrifice and the woman's need to carry on for the sake of her child.  In December last year, soon after I wrote the poem, I had my thryoid removed so I expect the poem will always remind me of what I have lived through.

What would you like the reader to gain from reading Echolocation?

I hope every reader finds something in one of the poems that speaks to them or interests them in something new. Beyond that, I would hope the reader might gain something from reading the pamphlet that I couldn't predict.

Several of the poems in Echolocation are inspired by paintings and other works of art, which piece of art is your current favourite? Do you have a recommendation for a gallery or place for readers to visit?

My current favourite is a Sonia Lawson artwork, not the one mentioned above but a stark pencil sketch of her mother, crouched over as though in deep emotional pain. A small child stands as far away as the paper allows, watching her. I'm sorry to say I can't find the title of the work.  It's an accomplished sketch but, as above, it's not the aesthetic quality that makes it stand out for me, it's the personal connection.  It made me feel sad about the ill health my son has had to witness in me and that I had to witness in my own mother.  

The Hepworth Wakefield set up by Barbara Hepworth's family is a wonderful gallery and brilliant at showcasing the work of contemporary female (and male) artists.  It also has an amazing learning department - I'm sometimes lucky enough to run workshops there.  

Could you suggest a writing exercise or prompt? 

This is an exercise Steve Toase and I used for our Haunt project with Imove and people experiencing homelessness.  I'm suggesting this one because it might encourage people to look at Sonia Lawson's work.

Find something in one of Sonia Lawson’s paintings that speaks to a formative life experience you have had or a story you tell about yourself.  What is it about the painting that makes you think of it?  Does this painting offer any clues as to how to transform this experience into a positive experience (if it is not) e.g. through particular motifs or colour or even brushstrokes e.g. wings to escape, arcs to carry the weight and suggest rainbows and hope?  

      Can you find a way to connect your experience and the artwork in a poem? 

 

One year on….

I came close to calling this blog post  being a ‘proper’ writer as it’s a year since Convoy was published and so I’ve been reflecting on the past year.

In lots of ways life goes on just as it did before publication; there’s still laundry to be done, children to be collected from school and the day job at the Open University with its many and varied demands.

So has anything changed? Well I can answer that in one word – confidence.

There is nothing quite like having someone else believe in the strength of your writing enough to publish it, to make you realise you might actually have joined the ranks of ‘proper’ writers. Then there’s the readers who send me enthusiastic notes and comments about Convoy. This is a recent one

‘In Convoy, I appreciated this glimpse of foreign-to-me bravery, foreign because this happened before my time, and is a part of the history of that war I knew little to nothing about. It's a lovely gift to have created a platform for those voices. My father spoke in a similar way about his war experiences in the Pacific arena. By that I mean with few words, but a sense that a lot that doesn't need to be said, while still conveying loss and the wonder of self-survival. Such haunting words and images, 

"I am more than tired, keep seeing things, 

friends who died on previous convoys 

reaching out to shake my hand."

Poetry books don’t generally get many reviews so I have been grateful to the people who have ventured onto Amazon or Good Reads to post their opinions.

The other change is that people now ask me to do things… as a writer. This has included running a village writing group, originally under the auspices of our community library. They are a delight and are so enthusiastic about writing and learning and have made me realise how much I know about the craft. Of course we are all still learning…. then there’s taking part in readings… the Sensing spaces, Wandering words event at the Royal Academy, which provided an adrenaline rush.. it was like doing my fist parachute jump all over again… but with fellow poets alongside.

Having been through the process of putting together a first collection I’m spending 2014 as a mentor to poet Becky Cherriman under a scheme set up by my publisher Cinnamon Press. She has recently had poems published on the Mslexia blog as part of Michelle McGrane’s Against Rape project on Peony Moon.