Stanza 26, June 2004

Editorial:	Sally Festing
Articles / Reviews:	Jeremy Grant. Eddie Lunt. Caroline Cook, Paddy Fraser, Eric Ratcliffe, Nancy and Alex Milloy
Poems:	D A Prince, Alex Milloy, Mark Mawson, David Bircumshaw, Sally Festing, Alice Beer, Emma Lee, Pam Thompson
Poets & Critics Reviewed:	Paul Farley. Ian Duhig, G S Fraser, Jimmy Crighton, David Kennedy, Geraldine Monk, Alan Halsey

D A Prince

Swallow

For just one day a swallow fed her young
outside our rented window on high wires
stretched from the gable end above a street
where nothing happened. Two floors down
a door might open sometimes, or a gate
click as a neighbour brought her shopping in
from morning shadows, but up here
our air was hot with hunger
three feet from the glass, and rattling
in four loud throats. Their screams
swivelled to call in food, their noise
scraping the slates in desperate fear
of no-next-time, their brick-red faces
scarved in inky gloss. Born refugees,
they squirmed, already robed for flight,
no choice but travelling the treacherous air,
no safe frontiers to head for.

Next day they were gone, leaving
only an empty question on the wire.

Iota 61, February 2003

Parmagianino: Portrait of a Man

He's got under this skin all right, down into
soft lymph, below the damp white flesh. Desire,
sweet as a drain, squats there, fattening
on savoury choices. Taste’s his trade,
his work in hand: a man for tooled leather bindings,
one exquisite figurine so casually laid aside.
Parmagianino loves his hands, smooth for stroking,
fingering the best, manicured for self-satisfaction.
Eye-level, back of his mind, a bas-relief: erotic stone
feeling his collar. There’s a storm boiling up
but his fur gown, his greasy strands of hair, are ignorant.
His mouth slips into shadow, sideways,
shares nothing. There’s a clutch of medals
close to his plump wrists. Everything has price.

Poetry Nottingham International, March 2003

Editorial

Approaching the end of my first year as Chair-without-Secretary, I want to thank newcomers to the Committee for their increasing help as well as some old-timers for indispensable support. Workshop sessions averaging 8 or 9 continue to produce poets who find their way into print, and the standard of your contributions to Stanza are a real compliment to your solidarity. Stanza 24 is on our redesigned LPS website, as will be all new editions. This will give us wider exposure in a climate in which a strong web presence is a real asset.

The five poets reviewed present a wide spectrum of poetry. From Paul Farley, in whom the exactness of the writing and the sharpness of the psychology are so cunningly disguised as almost to disappear beneath the unpretentiousness of the style, to Ian Duhig with his mixture of natural language and inventive brilliance, and three edgy wordsters from Sheffield.

Our George Fraser Lecturer had interesting things to say. In the Committee's opinion, they were a little too academic to be accessible without a continually tuned delivery. But EA Markham went from our guest lecture to advise the Ugandan Government on Aids and child soldiers. LPS is no cultural or human rights backwater!

While awaiting the outcome of an Arts Council application for funds, we've had to eliminate expensive Readers from next season's list. Prominence, as you know, is by no means a gauge to delivery, though a couple of well-known names helps to draw in potential Members. During the next season I would like to see numbers in the society rise from 44 to a comfortable 50.
 

Sally Festing

Paul Farley reading, April 16, 2004

If the New Generation Poets of the 1990s popularised the regional in poetry, coming at the end of that decade, Paul Farley’s debut collection, The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You (Winner of the 1998 Forward Prize for Best First Collection), has reaped the benefits. He is a self-confessed fan of Don Paterson and cites the Scottish poet’s own debut, Nil, Nil (1993), as a liberating influence.  Farley’s own particular mise-en-scène is his native Liverpool.  The central poem of the collection, “Laws of Gravity”, describes his father’s job as a window cleaner, ending:

  There are no guidebooks to that town you knew
  and this attempt to build it, brick by brick,
  descends the page. I’ll hold the foot for you.

Is Farley intent on doing for Liverpool what Joyce boasted Ulysses would do for Dublin – “to give a picture […] so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book”? The evidence suggests that Farley is very much ‘a poet of place’; his bricks, memories, experiences, nostalgic “throwbacks” (“Treacle”), even TV icons such as Liverpool-born Keith Chegwin in “Keith Chegwin as Fleance”.
 
His more recent collection, The Ice Age (2002), may or may not have found its starting point in The Boy from the Chemist.  In the poem “A Minute’s Silence”, Farley imagines the silence “sneak though turnstiles” out of the stadium and head for the coast, where, he writes:

  There’s something of the Ice Age to all this.
  The only sound’s the white noise of the sea
  that is all song, all talk, all colour, mixed.

If, like the sea, The Ice Age mixes the song, the talk, and the colour of modern life - the “incorrigibly plural” as MacNeice put it – like the silence, it also escapes the parameters of time and space Farley set out in The Boy from the Chemist.  The Ice Age ventures further back in time, at first tentatively, to when “I’m not even born” (“11th February 1963”), and then boldly in “The Ages”, when, in an imaginative flight:

  the globe
  of a paper light-shade caught in headlights
  was a Golden Age symbol of truth and reason.

Geographically he is more adventurous too, beginning with actual train journeys (“From a Weekend First”, “A Tunnel”) and ending with imagined travels to Gibraltar and Surtsey in poems of the same name.  Underlying this, however, there is still the old heart-pull back to the city of his birth, as in “An Interior” when:

  They ask why I still bother coming back.
  London must be great this time of year.
  I’m not listening.

And this is where we come full circle, or rather Farley does.  “The Ages” only uses historical eras to describe the present; and at the end of “Surtsey”, Farley situates his imagined version of the Icelandic island in a more familiar context (“I used to kid myself on cold/evenings walking back from school”), as if he cannot exist in these “realms of gold” for too long. Indeed, Farley is a poet most at home at home.  A keen ornithologist, his own natural habitat is what he refers to in “A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe” as “the world outside my window”, images picked from the doorstep of his own experience. And his poetry is more akin to what he describes in his ode to the house sparrow as:

  the incidental music of our lives.

Jeremy Grant

Alex Milloy

Harvest-Home

On 10 October 2003 a Service of Remembrance was held
for those who died in the Iraq War

They held it at St Paul’s -
an odd kind of harvest-home -
no sheaves of corn, no fruit, no veg,
no flowers, save one, a single rose
carried by a woman in black.

When autumn crops are gathered in
harvesters should dance and sing,
happy now that labour’s done,
ready, let the winter come.

Instead they came in uniform,
their faces set and grim,
mingled with families grieving
for those they’d loved and lost.


What were their faces telling us,
what was the message for those
who sowed the seeds that grew
into this hideous harvest?

We will remember you
and the harvest you have reaped.

Awarded a diploma in the Scottish International Open
Poetry Competition 2004

Comment from Adam Thorpe in The Guardian Review, 15.05.04

“Poets, when they bunch in the pub, generally talk poetry. Novelists talk agents, editors and advances ... Poetry is free of all this numbers nonsense because it hardly sells at all. In Portugal, on St George's day, lovers buy their sweethearts a volume of poetry and a bunch of flowers. Until that wonderful idea hits Britain, my fellow poets will continue to twitch the web of support: bursaries, writing fellowships, residencies, even academic teaching posts. Or they write novels.”

Mark Mawson

Baga, Goa

Pass
the Divine Guest House
that advertises
'love, duty, truth'
then climb
the jungly hillside
and watch
for Langur,
Spot-breasted Fantail,
Crimson Sunbird,
Stations of the Cross.

You'll find
a scrubby plateau
full of Peacock
that are genuine
but shy
and paintings
(in the chapel)
of a Jesus
who seems
Indian
by birth.

Poetry Nottingham, Spring 2003

A Window Out

I am sitting
at the table
looking out at
the white and blue.

I hear music;
Tangerine Dream.
Smell warm vinyl;
it is turning.

Sunlight; a slow
current of dust.

In front of me:
cabinet, glass.

It is that hour
after school and
before parents.

I will take that
white and the blue
and Tangerine.

Poetry Monthly, September 2003

Ian Duhig - 13 February, 2004

Ian Duhig himself admitted he was not a great reader, being somewhat lacking in variety of pace and emphasis, but any sense of this was soon lost in the enjoyment of poems on a staggeringly wide range of subjects.

We soon knew we were in the presence of a master wordsmith at one with the craftsman glassblowers of “Glass Talk” as he spun a multitude of delicate and robust artifacts from the “borax and cullet” in the fire of words.

Another prominent feature was the way several poems hovered on the edge of the black hole of the occult a hare’s breadth from falling in — the hare, particularly as changeling, being a recurrent theme in several poems, e.g. “SI” and “Beadnell Sands”, in addition to the title poem of his collection “The Lammas Hireling” also featuring in anecdotes at question time.

Also to the fore was a delicious sense of humour, embracing all forms, verbal, situation, satirical and black. A bawdy element present in the book was (intentionally?) omitted from the reading.

Verbal humour, especially punning, e.g. “For everything that lives is holy” in “A Dream Of Wearing String Vests For Ever" was notable throughout, whilst satirical comedy was rampant in "Water, Light”, an excoriating account of the beloved J.R. Budge’s mining operations in the Aire Valley, and in “Cutler’s Poetry” where due to a loophole in the law the protagonist perfectly legally sells an astonishing catalogue of antique weapons to the criminal fraternity.

Situation comedy appeared in “Meet The Duhigs” and “The Lark In The Clear Air" whereas black humour surfaced in “Died For Love” and “Taking My Measure”.

Not that serious subjects were neglected, as in the moving elegies for two actual suicides, the lament for the hapless Private Burden, who faced a firing squad, presumably for cowardice, in the First World War, and the chilling prose poem on Hitler’s attempt through archaeology to enlist the Holy Grail in the Nazi cause.

One tiny disappointment, was that no new work was included — so that one was left wondering whether Ian perhaps feels the need to justify his work before his peers (editors and reviewers) before foisting it on an unsuspecting public.

In answering questions after the reading Ian came across as a wonderfully warm and outgoing personality, touching on his working philosophy — “poems originate from words not ideas” — his influences (especially Irish poets of the 60s, Longley, Muldoon, Mahon, Heaney), his favourites on the contemporary scene (Don Paterson, Tony Harrison, Ursula Fanthorpe) and the difficulties of translation, particularly of complex forms such as Dante’s terza rima. Anyway, the appreciative audience enjoyed it all immensely, for which there could be no better proof than that the substantial stock of “The Lammas Hireling” at Browsers’ bookstall had sold out by the end.

A magical evening in more senses than one.

Eddy Lunt

Cultural Xchanges
1-5 March 2004, De Montfort University

During Cultural xChanges Week, amongst other things I attended one Small Press event (March 2nd) and two Poetry events (March 4th):

The Two Poetry Events both involved Ruth Fainlight. One was a Poetry Workshop (March 4th) which was rather disappointing as she simply handed out a task, which took 30 minutes, which we then read out and that was it. Clearly teaching and discussion are not her forte.

However I found her Poetry Reading (March 4th) much better. Her writing I judged to be very good and also her delivery. Her latest book is called "Burning Wire".

The Small Press Event: "Publishing on a Shoestring" was led by Ross Bradshaw (Nottingham) and involved John Lucas (Shoestring), Ann Atkinson (Staple) and Debjani Chatterjee (Bradford Women’s Book Project, etc.). This was lively, efficient and realistic. It is very, very difficult to get work accepted, published and marketed. They said so. But we knew that, didn’t we?

The De Montfort University Cultural xChanges Week is excellent, I think. It’s the first time I’ve been. There have been lots of well-known speakers, and interesting topics, and it’s all free! And I’ve finally discovered where the Gateway Pub is — so I can use those Phoenix reduced drinks tickets at last!

Caroline Cook

David Bircumshaw

The Cloud

It was hard not to recognise the boundaries as they misted off nor too the
brumous dissolution of form that lifted from my maps with a cheap perfume's 
insistence. Liked her, it said, nudge nudge. That slow ungirdling, cor.

No, no, not that, my better head said, and somevoice that might be termed
mind turned to whatever it was to find out what it might be.

A witch, rhymes with ....., a curse, a voice breathed to which the
dictionaries prompted  'borders', 'attach', 'defence, 'definition', oh you
thesaurian certitudes, not that any of those mean the former, they then that
then , with the ugliness of Old English 'th's, fixed themselves, like a
spider to a web.

Not sense, not rational that I complained as somevoice within said she'd put
a hex on me. Hex? I asked, that rhymes with ....

There is too much rhyming I reflected but she? No, not her, never. Who had
tried to steal my soul. Who had wanted to make me an adjunct of her
emptiness, like a shrunken head hanging from a kangaroo skin hat. No, no,
not her.

And the wind blew cold
                                     and a blue cloud rose
as a bat-wing rustle
                               twittered over the vacancies
and alleyways of care.


Comment  from George Fraser
From GS Fraser: A Memoir, Paddy Fraser

Two years before his death, he was asked what made a good poetry reviewer? How could one detect good poems? How did he rate poetry-reviewing today? He replied jokingly that writing a review was, in a way, like writing a poem: it had to be of a certain length, convey certain information and have an eye-catching beginning and end. He felt that a reviewer had to have a sense of the totality of poetry in the English language; he had to be catholic in his tastes: a narrow view was, he felt, a weakness of many critics, who could approve only of particular kinds of poetry. He disliked the simplified ‘broad mesh’ writing of some critics, who rarely quoted or analysed poems; literary editors seemed not to favour close analysis. As to spotting great poetry, he instanced a stanza of Philip Larkin’s ‘Church-Going’, which he unhesitatingly pronounced great. When asked how one can be sure of such things, he replied; ‘One knows simply; if one has devoted a lifetime to poetry, one is sure, just as any antique dealer of many years experience, can place and distinguish a genuine from a fake antique.’ He belonged to no ‘school’ or group and was never influenced by fashions in poetry: he would praise one group like ‘The Movement’ and admire poets they despised like Dylan Thomas. He did not think of reviews as showcases for displaying the author’s wit or learning; for this reason he approved of the then anonymity of The Times Literary Supplement, because he felt it made showing off unnecessary - why display your ego when no one knows who you are? He felt that unsigned reviews were fairer, since no one would hit below the belt anonymously. I’m not sure of this: I think the TLS reviewers could be quite malicious in a polite TLS kind of way.
 

Jimmy Crighton: A New Way With Time
Reviewed by Eric Ratcliffe in New Hope International Review On-Line

This is a posthumous collection of 45 poems written during the last six years of Jimmy Crighton's life. Dundee-born, his academic studies were interrupted by the World War 2 call-up and, after serving in India with the R.A., he studied to qualify in medicine, influenced by the dire conditions out there. He went on to become Director of Student Health practice after 14 years as a G.P. and was also involved in the Alcohol Advice Centre and other work concerning the disadvantaged, before he died in 2002.

The title of the collection surfaces via In the Dark Months in which an alter ego gives him a direction when at a low point:

   He taught me a new way with time,
   living not spending,
   love now more cherished
   with one eye on ending.

   He proved the profit in uncertainty,
   taught me to rhyme,
   signalled the dip to dark
   and climb to day.

This simple philosophy, taken in conjunction with his career and many of the poems, sets the seal on the man. Thumbing through the poems the general impression is of an unselfish benevolence and awareness of the plight of others into whose feelings he is enabled to enter, as in All Hours, where the 'claw fingered' old lady at the checkout rummages in her
purse for coins. Her mind

   Comes up with the memory
   of once a year the Irish Sweep
   and the shop where the grocer
   in brown overalls
   measured potatoes from sacks
   and rice from jars
   and asked about your family.

   And in the bus street
   buses with conductors
   who helped you on and off
   and called you love.

And in Gulls in Victoria Park, the birds have their freedom to come and go with the seasons, but for Crighton the main point is:

   Farther still from his own
   thorn-filled nullahs,
   an old Sikh, dapper in green turban,
   visits each day
   with scraps of chapatti and bread,
   wishing the gulls endurance till summer,

   And know that he will not go home.

The actions of the coarse and unthinking must have pained him. In Cul de Sac there is reaction to the ill-treatment of a plane tree:
  

   The plane that gave contented shelter
   to the play of children,
   now waits winter's no-hopers -
   truants, apprentice druggies,
   learner muggers, kickers of cars.
  
   Shredding bark,
   the tree may yet survive.

Sycamores shows this continuance of feeling for trees as he extends his humanism to nature:

   trunks mulberry-red folding
   on to an arched roof, appropriately
   gloomed in gloaming.

   Basilica for unbelievers
   offering something like transcendence
   in the sun's last hour.

Jimmy Crighton thus extends the vista of his feelings both to the general human plight and to nature itself. As Wilfred Owen said of war, 'the poetry is in the pity'. Typically in Crighton's own 'war poem' - Law Hill Memorial, 1925, consecrated to the loss of a major part of a Black Watch Battalion at the battle of Loos among the total of 60,000 dead - he appends two telling lines after listing those who will attend the annual remembrance when

   memorial torches will flare
   and flicker on those who will join
   commemorating prayers:
   But not the shell-shocked,
   who still wake screaming in the night.

Critics will have missed out on recognition of Jimmy as a fine poet of feeling, as apparently he published nothing in his lifetime save poems in two magazines. This collection should redress the balance. Of his generation, and in service in India in the same period, I feel privileged to comment.

Sally Festing

Hotel in Lithuania

Here in our high-up room
I'd like to make you fall in love with me
all over again,
your hands on me young
to the soft shush of air conditioning.

Cornflower sky;
forms silent as yesterday descend
from the arch under the church of Austros Varty.
Nuns slip to and fro like dominoes,
prostrate themselves in the street.

I shall arrange myself,
the daintiest dish in Vilneus,
naked as the fish I ate last night,
gauzy, beside the river;
will flash my scales
until you're powerless.

Equinox, September, 2003

On the Wing
For Schim

       in her hundredth year, a wide eyed, new-hatched chick,
thistledown equipped
with memory that slots each of her old students.

One day she showed a Times obituary,
This man proposed. I could have been his wife.
Impish, she smiled. Marriage would hardly do.

The future spun on quest and cure
for Alternia in cauliflower,
verticilium wilt and the hop plant's downy mildew.

She tugged against the force of winds.
Chose a path
  behind the shelf.

Step by step, she savoured walks round Wye,
eaglet in the soft chalk landscape spilt
with milkwort, orchid, harebell, butterfly.

More birdlike than ever, she sits in the garden
ushers us in; contemplating a life like hers.
With stillness in the air, the afternoon, she soars.

Links, Autumn 2003

Three Poets from Sheffield - 12 March, 2004

David Kennedy's first poem with its repetition of the words “chef” and “dusk”, read at breakneck speed, got his reading off to a shaky start; but a timely intervention by the Chair (S.F.) for the evening changed his presentation and there followed a series of satisfying, and often beautiful, poems.

He writes with feeling for the sound of words revealing his great interest in the connection between the written and the spoken word and the way in which many poets are publishing directly on CD and cassette. This view of poetry reveals itself in his imagery. One example is the combination of sound and emotion in “The Horn by the Sea.” where “people came down to blow it/it had something to do with grieving”

“The Story of Peaches”, of men sharing a tin of peaches on the eve of the Battle of Alamein was particularly moving in the way in which it combined something mundane with comradeship and fearful anticipation of what was to come at dawn the next day; other memorable images were “witches paddle across the bay in egg shells”; and “icing sugar peaks” from “This is Korea” – the finest poem of the evening.

Kennedy`s work indicates a strong paternal influence, particularly in the recounting of war memories. He mentions in “The Sahara of Snow”: “My father lies up to his neck / in those white hospital blankets / / that look like bad knitting and _my mum's doing the talking, / spilling words”; and the theme of paternal memories occurs again, in “Remembering the Future”.

Born in Leicester, there is evidence of Kennedy`s continuing attachment to the city in the poems ”Suburban for Beginners” and “Semper Eadem”. Both suggest  nostalgia and a disinclination to accept change. For those who have been out of Leicester since the nineteen eighties, the population mix and proportion of incomers, almost 50%, must be quite overwhelming. The success of the situation may not be immediately evident to the short-term visitor. But the fact that Kennedy was awarded a PhD from Sheffield University in 1999 for research on ideas of community and nation in the poetry of Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison and Seamus Heaney indicates a depth of awareness in this area.

Nancy & Alex Milloy

Geraldine Monk gave an over-dramatic and mannered reading which obscured verse that otherwise sounded interesting and provocative. There are critics who believe that poetry should be recited in a monotone in order to allow the sense and the music to be heard for its own sake; others that it should be performed. It is perhaps useful to consider what a reading by the poet is supposed to bring to his or her verse that could not be done just as well by a member of the audience.

Certainly the poet knows each word and line intimately, knows when to give emphasis to a word to enhance the meaning, knows when to pause to allow the listener to catch up and to anticipate the next thought. A brief introduction by the poet can sometimes be helpful in illuminating the aim of the poem but in the end the writing must speak for itself. Thomas Mann agreed with this when he wrote “…for knowledge of the sources of the artist’s inspiration would often confuse readers and shock them, and the excellence of the writing would be of no avail”.

I was struck by the density of Monk's imagery and the ambiguity of her syntax, particularly in the sections she read of her series of poems encircling the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots in Sheffield. Sadly her reading failed to throw a light on these. Would reading her poems on the page be more comprehensible?

In Bloodhound, one of the poems in her book Noctivagations, she asks the question “Does it really/matter/where’s/my friend?”. The answer was “Matter really it does/friend my-my/trying to grasp your wagging/tales cart-wheeling away/big-hearted thinks/force ten laughs/beltering through/philosophical doors taking/flying/Looby Loo’s/at the ill wind.” This seemed as pretentious and obscure as those she read to us.                                  

LPS members provide a serious audience for visiting poets; the willingness to appreciate the poet’s offering is often palpable. Professional poets should be able to recognise and engage with this. A number of verbal exchanges with the other poets during Monk’s    reading displayed an intimacy and a comradeship with them but had the unfortunate effect of making the listeners feel excluded.

Alex Milloy

Alan Halsey, born in London in 1949, ran the bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979 to 1996. He now lives in Sheffield where he is the publisher of West House Books.

His visit to our group on 12 March introduced those of us, who were unaware of his style of writing, to a new literary experience. No       definitive and meaningful involvement appeared to accompany the well-honed phrases comprised of groups of words such as: sages, savages, salvages, salvationists: or, in another context “words - slipping through the faults of the dream time”

As an experimental poet, Halsey’s work indicates that he researches in depth before using his personal “cut and paste” method of presenting his findings in the form of a poem. The finished product gives the appearance of having been carefully worked but the result is more reminiscent of art produced by, for example Salvador Dali, with a hint of Dadaism.

There is a quotation in his own words from Lives of the Poets, Charlotte Smith, which can best describe Halsey`s self-image: “without returning to a scene I do not know I could bear/as I was I believe circumstanced and sacrificed/as of a different species the shadowy resemblance”.

Nancy Milloy

Alice Beer

CIaudius’ Diary
Decision

Second by birth and second ever since;
I’ve had enough. My mind’s made up.
I won’t be p1aying second fiddle all my life.

And Gertrude, now mature, still young,
has lost none of her charms.
To think of her sharing my Brother’s bed---
no, not much longer.


Hamlet’s Diary
After seeing his Father’s ghost.

This one encounter with my Father’s ghost
has changed my life completely.
After a sleepless night
the consequences rise
like sheer grey cliffs
out of the ever restless sea.

I can not meet my Mother’s eyes.
I must confront her with the facts
as I now know them,
can be her son no longer
until I’ve shared the truth with her
and she forsakes her marriage
with her husband’s murderer.

Farewell the pleasant banter with my friends,
farewell my fair Ophelia,
farewell for ever to my carefree youth.

A Week after the Wedding
(from Queen Gertrude’s diary)

Quite suddenly I woke, hearing his voice
as if he lay beside me, not his brother.
“Gertrude” he said, calling me: “Gertrude”
I felt as if an icy hand had touched me.
"Where are you?” I asked softly, not wishing
to disturb my husband, my new husband.
There was no answer but the curtain blew.
I lay awake a long time, wondering,
listening to the storm.

Queen Gertrude’s Diary.
The players.

The players came to our court today,
it is not often that we get a chance.
I always liked them, they are skilful.
They usually give a good performance.

This time the play was not so good,
we did not stay to see the end.
Their Queen talked on and on about her love,
how she would always venerate the King’s memory—
who’d said that he was ailing—
would never love another man at any time,
no matter how many years would pass.
No woman in her middle years should say that
when she feels capable of passion.

And then the nephew slays the King
by pouring poison in his ear
while he lies sleeping.
At seeing this, Claudius calls for lights
and leaves, most of us with him.

He was livid, I’ve never seen him like this.
What sort of play is this?
It was not entertaining as it should.
Villainous fantasy, he called it.
So far removed from real life.

Envoi, 136, 2004

Emma Lee

Sunlight: North Dublin
  
Squint-inducing sunlight
stops me here momentarily
looking up at a tenement block.
Damp babygros, teenagers’ jeans
mums’ skirts hang on improvised
washing lines on thin balconies.
Each floor sinks into the one below.
Each wall home to graffiti tags.
Rubbish stirs in the breeze.
The sunlight seems stronger
for being squeezed in the gap
between this block and a stark silhouette
of a city-grime encrusted church
that dominates this cramped square
putting these lives in shadow.

Highly Commended Scottish International Poetry Competition
and published in Other Poetry May 2004.

Pam Thompson

Legend

When I was conceived
it was 1954 and it was July.
Red peonies were fading in my grandmother’s garden.
The four minute mile had already been run.
After ‘I Love Lucy’ my mother set off for night shift
in her starched cap and cuffs
not picturing the germs that lived in rivers
that had crippled our neighbour’s daughter.

Maybe she was dreaming she was Doris Day.
Maybe she planned the house they’d buy
and what they’d keep in each room
as she switched off lights above beds
and unclipped temperature charts.
My father, no Sinatra but in the police-force,
would soon be leaving for a court-case in Belfast.
.
Maybe they should have waited longer.
She said she never knew the sex of the one who died.
She said that my father had dealt with all that.

Iota 61, 2003

Back

If the soul of my dead father came back to earth
he’d remember postcards; the exact shade
of blue biro he used to make quick capitals,
hoping I was well; rope-soled deck-shoes
that let him walk secure on roads after his first
heart attack; my turquoise dress that changed colour
in the sun; a Matchbox fire-engine, how his
thumbnail was exactly long enough to hoist
its white plastic ladder; the weight of my hand,
for the short time he was allowed to hold it;
how his new wife cried when a dog tore her veil
during the photographs - if the soul of my dead father
came back he’d remember the classroom he
slammed out of,  red faced because he’d been told off,
how he wouldn’t cry; and the soul of my dead father
would remember how to boot a football at a wall –
how to boot a football at a wall

Raindog, March 2003