Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Gill Fothergill, Katherine Gallagher, Mary Hodgson, Maria Jastrzebska, Etelka Marcel, Sibyl Ruth – compiled by Dilys Wood

Many readers were moved by the accounts of displacement. We invited poets to send us further accounts and poems either relating to the mid-twentieth century or later experience of exile.

Mary Hodgson writes that, having had two friendships with women who had experienced the horrors of war, including one who came to England with the Kindertransport, it has made her very much aware of the ‘collateral damage’ of war as it affects non-combatants. Her experience suggests that such victims are often forced to live very intensely, finding it hard to find a point of balance in their lives. One such friend, who seemed to live life to the full, later committed suicide.

Etelka Marcel writes that she was one of the ‘mischlinge’, those of part Jewish ancestry, who were not hunted down until late in the war, otherwise she ‘would have followed my grandparents to be incinerated at Auschwitz’. She has ‘carried this pain all my life, festering like a wound’. For eighteen years she was fostered by a German couple, ‘I owe them, neighbours, village and its burgomeister my life’, as ‘Hitler’s hounds’ began to hunt for mischlinge. She was not betrayed. Her collection, In Hitler’s Shadow, is now in preparation.

Sibyl Ruth writes about her aunt : ‘Outward conformity has been demanded of women in particular. But in our minds, we still dream – and make up poems. This is what my German greataunt, Rose Scooler did during 1944-5. She was in her early sixties, and had been taken to the concentration camp at Terezin. After the camp was liberated she typed the poems up. But she didn’t share the poems with others. In later years, when she lived in the USA, she refused to answer questions from younger relatives about her time in the camp.

Recently the poems were passed to my mother and me. With my mother’s help, I have translated the poems. With astonishing humour they describe the monotony of slave labour, of constantly thinking about food, of overcrowded quarters, of stealing coal because the winter was so bitter. Some of these translations have been published in newsletters, magazines, journals. Now I’m working together with a BBC radio producer, Sara Davies, on a documentary about the poems. It will be broadcast on 27 January 2010 on Radio 4.’

Gill Fothergill writes that her father was a Jewish refugee from Austria and that she was aware of the persecution of Jews from a very early age: ‘at the age of four I dreamed that I was in the
Warsaw ghetto, walking over cobbled stones and feeling fear. I must have seen a newsreel in the cinema, I should think! My father had escaped from Austria in 1938 but of his family only two cousins were as lucky. The rest were murdered. I always thought of my father as very well balanced but looking back I see that he successfully kept the lid on a cauldron of emotions and experiences. To tell the truth, the Shoah did cast a long shadow.

Perhaps the most heart-rending example [in her childhood, ed.] concerned an old woman in our district of northwest London. Everyone knew that she had been in the camps! She looked like a bag lady ... she shambled ... muttered to herself in Yiddish. She never frightened me ... my pity should be her portion. I often thought I would like to write about her but could not portray the dignity of her madness. I am so glad to read writing by women who experienced the dislocation caused by the Holocaust ... such writing helps me to open yet another window into my own soul.’

Maria Jastrzebska, who was born in Warsaw, writes that her family left Poland to escape communism: ‘I grew up surrounded by secrets, by people still having to use assumed names, in terror for their jobs, their families, their lives. They not only had to rebuild their destroyed city and bring up their children, but also had to keep silent about the trauma they’d been through for fear of reprisals from the Soviet appointed regime which rounded on those who had been in the resistance...

Once here [in England, ed.] the gap between generations became cultural as well – it was still the Cold War, East and West divided – and felt at times like an abyss. London in the sixties and seventies was a far cry from Warsaw before or after the war. I learned the new language and soon sounded English though I never felt it; had no idea how to fit in... Every time I think “okay, I’m finished with the effects of exile I’ll move on to something else”, I realise I’m kidding myself. ‘Here’ is always connected with ‘over there’ and the complicated theme of ‘home’ often appears in my work. Becoming a poet was not at all what my family intended for me. But I found after all it is a wealth: never accepting a single point of view without questioning, living between cultures.’

Katherine Gallagher writes about a process of acclimatisation and becoming ‘increasingly global in outlook’ since leaving her native Australia, living in France with her French husband for eight years, then moving to Britain. In all, she has now lived in Europe for 40 years, originally planning only a twelve month trip: ‘... a chance to see the world and experience at first-hand my British/Irish heritage, to progress the poetry I’d begun to publish but also, importantly, to escape an unhappy love-affair: “I saw Australia draped / Dali-style on a thread.” (Farewell Poem). 1979 London, grand cosmopolitan city, cultural reference point for Australians like myself, the great ‘other’– was an enormous spur to my poetry. It was a special joy to be able to speak English again. The language, hurrah!

Writing is a remarkable holdall and the journey of my poetry can firstly be seen as a quest for identity and belonging, a move away from dividedness, what Jo Shapcott calls the ‘fractured sensibility’. This search is no doubt true for most poets – outsiders by nature. However, I believe such a search is crucial for those living outside their native land... I see myself as a hybrid, a state which brings a certain chagrin but also many riches.

Poetry has become increasingly important, my ‘way of seeing’. In a blurb for my most recent collection, Circus-Apprentice (Arc Publications, 2006) Moniza Alvi gives an interesting angle on this, ‘For Katherine Gallagher it is poetry, rather than her native Australia or her adoptive England that is “this country you keep coming back to / that walks you home to yourself” (from my poem Yellow, Red, Blue, After Kandinsky).’