Reviews
Sally Festing reviews the second Poetry School Anthology, Entering the Tapestry, edited by Mimi Khalvati and Graham Fawcett (Enitharmon, £8.95)
So many Magma contributors attend the Poetry School that I was chosen to review because I don't. But such is the reputation of the PS that, were I not the wrong end of an unpredictable Midland Mainline, I should doubtless have enrolled. Will such sentiments be endorsed by their second anthology?
The introduction gives a lead, at least to intentions. Depth of exploration, a decisive gauge to inclusion, is suggested by the poems being often part of larger schemes. “Openness” is encouraged; variety, craft and inventiveness what the School hope to promote. What is not present, are “poems fed on short rations of irony or fortified by anecdotal wit. Cleverness for its own sake or poems betrayed by their anxiety to look contemporary”.
Entering the Tapestry is the work of 30, pulled from 80 poets, none of whom, at the time of selection, sported full collections. They are represented by 72 poems, one to five per contributor, and presumably the number or at least the space allotted to each is some measure of recommendation. In short, these are the School's 'up-and-comings'.
Anne Ryland's Seascript with its marine and sewing metaphors for language makes a perfect start. Measured and argued, with sea-like internal rhythms and rhyme, the poem ends with a letter the shape of a “purse, or is it a lip, just slightly open”. The image whisks me to Paris. Outside the Bauberg, in a pool of kinetic sculpture, a seductive pair of lips throws out a stream of water as it rocks slowly back and forth.
Jo Roach's rich weaves of Irish community crowd heart attack, impoverishment, marriage and dance in resonant dactyls and trochees. This time a visual equivalent might be Stanley Spencer. We get time, elements and more-open weaves from Mary Macrae, whose Laundry, with its tussle, its sea-ness of flap and fold, unfolds a pungent and finally complicated familial bond. While Daljit Nagra's weaving comes with a jaunty, immediate and entirely fresh vision. It is Nagra's Punjabi background that make his poems both vital and vulnerable. Tricia Corob's images, in Arches, rear up from the Mediterranean, weaving gaps in friendships.
There can hardly be a poet who has not at some point been tempted by what Ruth Smith describes in My Grandfather’s Magnifying Glass as “putting youthful imprints under a magnifying lens until their real impact is revealed”. Of Jacqueline Gabbitas' two childhood forays, Me, Holding your Hand, if not an unusual subject, is shocking in its poignancy. Anna Robinson escorts her reader from named locations - York Road, Feathers Community Centre, even a sewer - back, forward, up and down, through space and time to incidents recalled with a dreamlike quality of children's illustrations. In contrast, Frances Angela moves around the contemplative innerness of human communication.
Essentially varied content includes political, multicultural, racial conflict and, by embracing Bryan Heiser's plucky reflections on disability, social awareness. Fawzia Kane tells of hardship and serfdom in her lessons from a dictatorial Tobagan Aunt. Wendy French's pared narratives are strong on inhumanity, B C Rowe's Fleeing Iraq a haunting antiwar comment. Matt Barnard jibes at the way we disport ourselves in a “foreign element” and Meryl Pugh jumps into private worlds of the maverick with a transvestite, guarding secrets the community is unable to accommodate.
'Otic' comes from the Greek 'oticos' - of or relating to the ear, a theme that governs a couple of Rowe's surreal poems in which otics are personified as benevolent placaters of the carnal desires of their more earthly contemporaries. Equally esoteric, Valerie Clarke brings to an end the first of three sections, (the reasons for demarcation are not obvious) with spare poems dangling from long didactic titles - a framework for voices from rarefied worlds of art and music.
More than half the poems are divided into stanzas, though few are formally end-rhymed and Maureen Li's affectionate unrhymed memory of an aunt is surely the stronger of her two. Julia Lewis displays a considerable range of reference as well as versatility in form: the spider's web trapped in an unrhymed sonnet; meanderings into the life cycle of trees, and prose excursions into incidents from the past, woven into pattern and argument through musical metaphor. Linda Black's prose poems rely for effect on their final kick, ricocheting the reader ineluctably, back to the start.
Tension rather than smoothness between format and content is invariably the more arresting. It is what gives Lucy Hamilton and Donald McLoughlin's poems their particular 'edge'. Whether he is bungy-jumping or biking through a ford, McLoughlin 's formal layout pulls against his intellectual leaps. Four poems with momentum lead to a beautifully modulated threesome by Nadine Brummer. Poised and enjambed, silky in rhythm, unforced in argument, Brummer is inspired chiefly by wonder, though humour plays so conspicuous a part in the collection - from Nagra's scatty culture clashes to Chris Beckett's buoyant man and dog relationship in The Dog who thinks he's a Fish - that wit needs mentioning as a particular credit. Heather Coffee's single offering is light, taut and full of fun; Diana Brodie's finale, if not funny, wryly amusing. Succinctly, Robert Chandler parodies Russian literature, giving equal emphasis to international political machinations and the misadventure of a family cat - the intricacies of Russian drama all juggled in mid-air.
Little is self-consciously poetic. On the contrary, “perhapses” and “I supposes” proliferate. Along with natural speech rhythms goes the imaginative outreaching that tutors and editors prize. Only once did a poem suggest it might be improved by chopping in half – Gabbitas’s The Passage in which the strength seems naturally rounded in the fifth stanza, without the last four words. True, moreover, to the editors' promise, their choice is neither trendy nor clever sticks - a welcome message that poetry doesn't have to be extravagant. The collection consolidated my admiration. If only the Poetry School would run a course in Uppingham or Market Harborough. Leicester would do.
Page(s) 55-57
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The