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…

Leaving the line - postcards

As the year draws to a close I wanted to mention some of the lovely things that have come my way in this mostly unlovely year for me personally.

One of my favourites of the autumn was Leaving the line – Images and words of War and Wondering. This is a Bristol based project created by Tania Hershman, writer, flash fiction creator, poet and Jeremy Banning, military historian and battlefield guide extraordinaire. Their idea was to create a series of twelve postcards inspired by images and stories from the First World War.

They were gathering material while we were out in France and Belgium in October on the fourth writers trip organised by Vanessa Gebbie – Tania had that bright eyed, cocked head look of a Robin that has just spotted something worth investigating and turning over. So I was interested to see what the postcards would be like.

When the set of cards dropped through my letterbox in November my reaction was Wow. 

There have been many commemorative projects during 2014 but this one was special. 

The words on the cards are written by Jeremy (four cards) and Tania (eight cards) and there is more information on the back of each card about the context. They are an example of what poetry does best; some poems will make you want to cry, Kaddish, others will teach you something The things they carried, and they will all - Unmemorial, If he was here now he’d say - make you think about what commemorating the war can mean. 

You can see all of the cards here and listen to Tania and Jeremy talking about their collaboration and about stepping into each other’s worlds.