National Poetry Month Readalong Loop of Jade - First Week

It has been such a great pleasure this week allowing myself the time to read the first seven poems in the book and I hope that other people have also been able to make a start on Loop of Jade. I should put in a disclaimer at this point and explain that I am a poetry enthusiast and practising poet not a professor of English so I’m going to give you my personal reactions to the poems rather than textual analysis. At the end of the Readalong we’ll look at what other reviewers have said about the book but for now let’s concentrate on the first group of poems.

Mother’s Jewellery Box feels like a perfect poem with which to open this collection. It hints at the treasures to come, the silver chains, carnelians, her amber ring. I particularly liked the stanza in which the poet begins to examine the relationship with the mother by gauging the weight of the amber ring.

Crossing from Guangdong is so much more than the travelogue poem that it might seem at first, although it has specific details which bring the place alive. 

It is about a search for your roots

"Something sets us looking for a place"

but having trouble finding it. The word strange occurs twice in the first two pages of this poem. And yet the writer is recognised by the waitress in Beijing and the old woman on the bus, who could have been her grandmother.

The next two poems Start with Weather and (a) Belonging to emperor are in couplets and the latter is the first in a series of poems inspired by the animals alleged to be in a Chinese encyclodepia.

(b) Embalmed made me think of the terracotta warriors except that the animals in this poem seemed to have been entombed as living creatures. It includes a history lesson about the fate of the first emperor. 

After Earthward comes (c) Tame which could be based on a folk story but has more recent resonances about how unfortunate it is to have  a daughter or indeed to be born female. 

"He called her Mei Ming: No Name. She never learned to speak. Her life

        maimed by her father’s sorrow."

Our final poem for this week is the title poem in the book, Loop of Jade, which returns to the mother's story, told after dark 

when the men are asleep, I think she believes it's someone else's turn to listen.

Ways into Poetry – Write a poem a day (PAD)

During April there are various places and groups around the internet that you can join to write a poem a day during the month. It is not too late to join in.
Foremost of these is the challenge set by Robert Lee Brewer, Poet and Senior Content Editor at the Writer’s Digest community and today the prompt is about writing a poem using the phrase Urban (blank) and replacing the blank with a word of your choosing.

If that doesn’t appeal to you I have an alternative suggestion. I want you to imagine immersing yourself in water, to plunge in and swim for your life.

Here is an extract from New Zealand poet Jan Kemp’s poem Swimming to get you in the mood

Swimming

Nothing reduces you to your skin like the sea – cold plunge into reality, 
a tongue already salty and all that power 
self-propelling you through our other element – 

This inspired photographer Megan Van Staden to do a series of pictures based on the poem.

Charles Bennett suspends a woman over London in his poem on the Magma website

Swimming Over London
 
A woman is swimming over London, 
a fox turns up his face to see her pass. 

There are blackbirds in the sleeping streets, 
a pear tree luminous with blossom. 

It’s the dream she always has, 
the dream where she’s stretching out 


Have fun.

National Poetry Month 2016 Giveaway of Loop of Jade Readalong

When I set up this April's Readalong of Loop of Jade I did promise to offer Sarah Howe's book as a giveaway.

To be in with chance of wnning the copy all you have to do is to follow the blog during April and to post a comment on each of the Readalong posts. I will put the names into a box at the end of the month and select a winner.

As I commented to someone yesterday I am on a mission to get more people to read and engage with poetry and to get over the worry that you have to be clever or have an English degree to do so. Neither applies in my case.

Please do share this post.