Stanza 27, November 2004

Editorial:	Sally Festing
Articles / Reviews:	Norman Harrington, D A Prince
Poems:	Pam Thompson, Anne Kind, Jeremy Grant, Mark Mawson, Caroline Cook, Alice Beer, D A Prince, Sally Festing
Poets & Critics Reviewed:	Marilyn Ricci, John Moloney, Lydia Finlay, Nadine Brummer

Pam Thompson

Skin

Surfacing, mid-afternoon, we find the bar unlit
and he walks out from the back of it, smiles at us
then switches on a single swinging globe.
I register the sculpture of his shoulders
as you clock his chest, how his waist dips in
and how his thin shirt clings damply where it fits.
He smells of someone else's naked skin.

As a trumpet announces on the TV
that a bull is being skewered, we sip cold beers,
staring at each other as if we'd never met
and at first, you fail to light my cigarette
but at last, a small flame...

We would like tapes, yes. He indulges us
in infant guidebook terms, is gentle,
like a student on exchange who knows his hosts
are slow to learn; hoists cuttlefish on tongs.
One cerebellum each, We eat to faint applause.
When were home, comparing instances
of time and place, neither of us can recall exact
map-references of sweat and aftershave.

Staple 59, Spring 2004
 

Partial

He wonders what all the fuss is about.
She's dragged him here.
They live several miles to the north
of the zone of totality but meeting with friends
at an ancient Saxon fort are now sharing goggles,
or rather, panes of smoked glass used for welding.

All around, cameras flash at an indigo sky.
Bailey's Beads: diamonds clustering over Alderney,
Rheims, the Bay of Bengal if chased in a Concorde.

A story in his head
of how he pierces a card with a pin,
holds the card to the sun, and opening his other hand,
shows her a crescent tattoo on his palm.

But instead there is a hillside lit like a stage set;
long shadows pacing, a wind bowling along the ground,
and he is a lost dog howling at a dark unfamiliar moon.

When light returns the birds start singing.
But they leave the party early and he picks the scab
of an old row on the way home.

Raindog, Sept 2003

Editorial

Those who don't know what it is to want to write, to need to write, will find it hard to imagine what a valuable public service is offered by a creative writing programme. I am happy to report that our LPS workshop is in good health.

Nadine Brummer was an excellent reader but only 19 heard her, of whom 5 were not Members.  Twenty-five is the minimum for a good audience. I hope we make at least that many for John Hartley Williams, whose poems are accessible and often amusing.

Feedback from the Arts Council informed that (while they are well aware of our strong points), to get a grant we would have to adapt to the 21st century in a more audience-conscious way, be prepared to alter venue, knit in with other groups and vary our programme.

Huw felt that our 'culture of excellence' was being attacked. I felt they found us a little intimidating! Brian feared that they were only interested in 'bums on seats' and had little feeling for poetry as a distinctive art. He thought, however, a compromise might be reached. Marilyn had some respect for what they want to achieve: they don't want to give away all their money to white middle-class people.

It's tricky to get the balance right, but our resistances to their methods were duly lodged, and I am in the process of reapplying with ideas which we hope will generate Arts Council interest at the same time as furthering our interests. We will keep you informed.

I would like to register our delight for Pat Corina who won First Prize in the Second Light Poetry Competition, judged by Moniza Alvi.

Sally Festing

Anne Kind

Red Admiral

My lover the admiral
During a twenty-four hour dance
Moved round me, above me
Touched my hair gently
Folded and unfolded
His red, black and white cloak

Touched me on the shoulder
Caressed my thighs
Confirmed by a camera.
When I moved he became absorbed
By a lilac bloom
Then disappeared from view.

The next day my lover
sat on the leaf of a sycamore tree
waiting for me.

Second Light 2001

Story behind the poem

I thought you might like to know the story behind the poem of my red admiral. When Bill died I was devastated and he knew how I felt about being left alone. He also knew that I loved butterflies. We spent many weeks with groups of naturalists travelling to different parts of Britain.

The year after Bill died I noticed a red admiral in my garden between the end of May and the end of August. It would fly around me, sometimes straight at me and occasionally sit on my shoulder while I walk around the garden. Butterflies live around 6-8 weeks. I wrote to the Natural History Museum to ask whether they have an explanation but they could only come up with my smell or the perfume I'm using.

I've kept a diary and last year it appeared on June 15th, this year it arrived on June 7th.

I can go right up to it and it won't fly away. It will even crawl on to my finger if I'm patient and hold still. I'm in touch with a man who is writing a book about the red admiral and the significance it has in many cultures.

Members' Reading - June 11, 2004

It was a particularly enjoyable evening with different styles of poetry from the three poets. Marilyn Ricci confessed afterwards that she was slightly nervous but this was not apparent as she gave her first ever reading. She has a most pleasant manner and her enjoyment was infectious. Her poems gave an excellent evocation of her childhood in which her mother figured strongly: "my would-not-run-off-with-the-milkman mum".

The poetry is never pretentious. When specially effective lines do occur they come naturally: "under the high mitred windows we'd march our Midlanders' vowels into line ... .".

I preferred all the poems about her childhood. Glove had a moving ending and Twists was a touching poem. Her reading was well presented and most successful.

John Maloney was also making his debut as a reader. It was an impressive performance; a good voice speaking the poetry from memory and presented with an occasional appropriate gesture.

His poem 1941 cleverly led us up to a strong surprise ending; the last word in fact. An Ancient Timepiece was as simple and pure as the subject - snowdrops. An Ode to the Tatty was one of many poems which displayed the poet’s talent for rhyme and metre.

A Window of Opportunity: a daydream, a shy hero rescues the fair maiden.

Ave Maria: the crucifixion from the viewpoint of Jesus's mother.

The Sentinel: well constructed.

To be Prized above Food: the least successful.

Sleeping Beauty: a French scene. The last two lines:

"The noise and brutish face of progress
Should not wake this restful scene".

seem to embody the feeling behind much of John's poetry. He reminds us of a gentler time and traditional poetry.

Lydia Finlay brings high intelligence, an extensive vocabulary, different styles and originality to the poetry. Her poetry covers a range of subjects. I liked most the description of an incident involving an elderly frail man on the underground.

I must confess to wrestling with some of the poems and being thrown. These are best studied on the page.

Norman Harrington

Jeremy Grant

The Day My Hands Died

After the initial shock, I had to make arrangements.
What was I going to do? Two matching coffins

worn like gloves? A burial service on all fours?
And what then? Did I stay there, set up camp

among the graves, eating from a bowl between
the gravestones like a tethered dog?

In the end, I went Egyptian - mummified them.
My friend wrapped them in bandages

so that it looked more like
a poor attempt at suicide.

People ask me, excusing themselves for the pun:
how an you live with death so close at hand?

The more astute ones ask:
where does your death end and your life begin?

Poetry Nottingham 58/2, Summer 2004

Porch

Here, in the jingling interim,
the rain-scarred glass, its finger-drumming,

the wellies exiled at the door
remind you of the time when you, or

you and your friend rather, slept,
tent-podded, in the grassy unkept

garden, as if to learn how feeling
was to wear a thin skin

or how the almost-outside left
you almost real again. To hesitate

while, in the shafts of darkness,
other porches wait like lifts

or mist like decompression chambers
heaving from their glowing bellies

these night-divers, those astronauts.

Smiths Knoll 33, 2004

Informal Appreciation
From Smith's Knoll's New Poetry 33, by Joanna Cutts

The title appeals to me at once. I know I like porches, but I've never thought why. It's good the way we're `Here' immediately in the porch, no messing about. I love getting my tongue round `jingling interim', and the speed of it, the way it tells me that the narrator has just rung the bell and is waiting. The porch is itself an interim - a space between places, neither inside or outside. It's like a hyphen between words maybe - there are five in these fifteen lines. The wellies are kept here, or more strikingly `exiled' and the narrator, waiting, has a momentary sense of his exclusion. The language is working hard: the scarring and finger-drumming rain shows us what the narrator sees as he looks up and that he's feeling impatient. The outside impinges, and the whole sensory experience makes him the boy he once was, camping in a garden. I love the inventive `tent-podded' - showing how he felt protected enough to be able to open himself fully to the experience. The pod by the end of the poem will perhaps have become a spacepod. Interestingly the narrator is `you', a you that includes us all -'you and your friend' - and invites us to bring our own experience to the poem. I like the simplicity of `grassy' and the small surprise of `unkept' rather than 'unkempt', and notice now how the couplets rhyme until we reach the poem's last sentence, the poem's last shift, when the control is relaxed and we imagine the porches around us, and the people stepping into them on their way out now, with the potential to be anyone, transformed, heroic adventurers, explorers.

Mark Mawson

Leviathans

To see those outsize carp
Like weighty porkers
Come barrelling along
Or cruising slowly
Through shimmering shallows
On sweaty afternoons

I would often go
And stand staring
Into the water
Breathless and trembling.

Poetry Nottingham, Autumn 2002

Nadine Brummer - Friday 8 October, 2004

The night before Nadine Brummer's reading, Leicester Literature Festival had supported a workshop with Kate Foley, focusing on the poet's 'voice' and what makes each poet distinctive - that mix of subject, imagery, language, syntax, rhythm. But the 'voice' on the page is only part of the experience; Nadine Brummer's physical voice - strong, warm, full of energy - memorably engaged with her audience. She is a poet who looks for connections - between the child and the adult, the individual and the family, the inner and outer selves. Before the interval she read from Half Way to Madrid (Shoestring Press, 2002), beginning with 'At the Lucian Freud exhibition', a poem which she described as "wanting to recreate the complexity of the experience" - not just the portraits, the nude figures, the studio props in the paintings, but also the visitors ("well heeled and buttoned up") and the dialogue which the viewer has with a painting: "These genteel props// touch my eyes. Below each covering a frame,/ upholding surfaces of this and that, lies coiled,/ and I am forced to look again// at how I live." This poem established a theme for the reading - the connection of the poet with the outer world.

Her closely-detailed autobiographical poems explored relationships within her large Jewish family and her childhood - poems which she described as "acts of retrieval." She looked for the defining moment in childhood as a starting point for exploring the relationship to adult experience: in 'The Kaleidoscope' she was both the child whose magical toy shattered on the pavement, and the adult, distanced from the event, trying to understand the complexity of her mother's reaction. In 'Torn', a finely controlled sonnet, her father's photograph, torn to remove a second figure, provides the image of her mother's anger at taking second place to his mother "And the edge of her tongue was rough/ as this photograph's jag, where grandma's torn off." 'Tailors', looking at the lives of her mother's two unmarried brothers, began "I think continually of those whose lives/ did not quite fit ... " She explored her own relationship to landscape, particularly to Dorset, in 'The hill', connecting emotional landscape to the familiar scene outside her window in all its seasonal variety - "I've seen the authority of fog/ wiping out cattle, trees, grass, everything/ and then the hill coming through again/ like the idea of help."

In the new poems which made up the second half of her reading we could see how she was building on the strengths of her first collection. 'At the car boot', although set in Dorset, took her back to childhood through the 'iconic moment' of discovering a stall of watches, clocks, winders - a key to childhood memory. 'I always stop to look', about the remains of a fox in a field revealed through its detail her own curiosity and intensity of inspection - the same intensity as in 'Madame Bonnard', exploring the flow of colour, like water, within a painting, its connection with an outer world, and what 'contain' might mean in terms of a painting and its frame. Painting is always a way to larger ideas, and she ended with another poem on Lucian Freud's work - 'Sue Tilley' - in which the female nude leads her to "... where self and flesh/ become a question you can't quite frame. "

An inspiring start to the 2004/2005 programme: Nadine Brummer challenged us to listen, look and engage with the world.

D A Prince

Caroline Cook

Hart Street

Life could be sweeter,
though the chip-wraps flap a limp Hello at us
and furl, unfurl their golden flags
of battered scum from Superfry. Waves
of tandoori greet us from The Raj.
At each mean doorstep stands a Corporation bin
as regimental guard.
Victorian vernacular, off-centre.

We tiptoe round a shard-burst on the pavement
-just another night-strike by the boys -
but it was pointless; all the usual fall-guys out of town still,
on the razzle where the fragrant ouzo flows,
or dozing through till term starts in Home Counties homes,
where Mother knows the names of roses: Maiden's Blush,
Will Scarlet, National Trust.

The kid, Kemal, who's 10, checks every busted Cavalier. He ambles by
and crosses Nomansland, then shuffles on to' Dee-bee's One-Stop.
This year, like the last, he's spending Summer where Josiah
used to steep his feet, loosen his braces. He'll be watching Sky.

In Rooms to Rent someone (whose forebears didn't live here)
shoots some stuff and trembling; sails away into the sunset - dreams - soooo peaceful -
that the filthy mattress is a raft - bleary,
until the magic trickles in and takes him, lying back between Costcutter bags
and bottles. Only later he wakes up, feels sea-sick, wasted.
If that shrill alarm-note ever stopped we'd miss it - not the birdsong though,
nor swallows. Not one's made it here for Summer.

Where the wash-house used to be, out at the back, an old tom stretches
on some chucked-out carpet - can't be bothered to look up as we go by
- one strip of eye soon slams shut. Cut!

High Noon in Coronation Street.
It's Heritage. Waiting for nothing - still
the red-brick rows have character, give off an air.
Close-corseted, they face a world still hard enough
for hostages to fortune - in this street that's not a stone's throw
from Maid Marian Way, in this material Midlands town in Summer,
where the tourists come,
and heroes, so they say, were Merry Men;
who robbed the rich, gave to the poor.

Highly Commended in the Poets Anonymous Competition 2004
printed in the Competition Booklet

Alice Beer

What I learned in my Pottery class

That this lump of clay on your wheel
behaves like a living being.

That it needs to be centred and
you have to assert your control over it.

That it responds to a little, gentle
swearing, -uttered under your breath -
but more explicit Anglo-Saxon words
have the opposite effect.

That your teacher can give you sound advice
and you better listen to it.

That effort is not always rewarded.

That off the wheel a small bit of clay
goes a long way.

That a little cheating is allowed
but don't bank on its success.
That sheer strength counts
though it is not all that's required.

That in Pottery round is beautiful;
in exceptional cases however, like love, etc,
beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

The Rialto, Summer 2004

Weather Report

When first we met
the sun was blazing and the sky was blue
and clouds blew over the horizon
and rain swept over us
like a blessing.

And sun and rain and clouds and winds
continued their unending game
until it seemed to me
there were more clouds and rain
than sunshine, with the wind
growing cold

till snow came down
and a wall of ice
built up between us
that even the blazing sun
was not strong enough
to melt.

Poetry Monthly, July 2004

D A Prince

Autobiography

Your facts are free, but show me how you live,
skive, cheat your way through days,
lies, how you go on not quite fiddling,
muddling; how you fix figures, dates,
slates that you somehow wipe clean,
swing cats; disguise what you mean.

Birth-weight, blood-type, tax -
facts for the hacking; show me the hot
sweat of your dreams, your crevices packed,
flecked with desire, your open eyes
glazing when you tip over, beyond, down,
out of it, wheeling, whirling; whose the lap
where you end up.

Peel back the masks, bandages, eye-shades, skin;
scan deep - and then beyond the scanner.
Inner song lines. The single reason,
your spirit's season for doing everything.

Poetry Nottingham International Vol. 57, No.1. March 2003

School photograph: 1957

Everything before them - playground, camera,
the man under the black hood in control.
Even Miss Turner does what she's told,
knowing how long these photo's shadows last.
The front row's cross-legged, white-socked, ruler-straight,
laughing, squinting at the sun, giggling Cheese,
fingering summer and its shadow-edges
sharp as razors, the grass shaved close, cut
and cut and cut all through the growing months;
bright with smiles and eaten up with curiosity,
not cancer. They've nothing to lose, except
play time, sitting here thick among friends,
how this will be for ever and ever;
always home with bread buttered, and cake,
and food as innocent as skipping,
as safe as grace. No problem. They haven't invented
excuses, alibis, the cop-out clauses for doing well,
the reasons for Valium, their cloaks of diagnosis.
So busy being children they don't know
what children stretch into, how much or how long.
Shining, clenched into happy-ever-after,
here's how they sit before it all goes wrong.

Other Poetry, July 2003

Sally Festing

The Pop Shop

Plain, red, angular, squaring the asphalt
single entrance where once were two.
Radyr Primary' There's la-di-dah!
For us it was the Council School.

Break bell and I'm scrambling across the road,
no segregation, breathless queue.
Tizer, please, Mr Williams, and

sherbet and liquorice root.

Skinny wizard in long brown
overalls, brown cap, brown moustache
whose bottle-opening wand released
fizz like diamonds lost in space.

Somewhere the smell and taste
must ride in bubbles,
fluorescent reds and greens,
sweeter than strawberries or tangerines.

In the playground boys were murderers.
We girls skipped, clapped, sang,
juggled, gossiped, plaited the future
in each others' hair. Whispered

Gwyneth Thomas isn't wearing knickers.
The Thomas' hadn't pennies for their pop
and so they haven't memories, which,
as the shop has disappeared, is double loss.

Wordplay, .Summer 2003

Earth Dream

Clay splits, cracks, crumbles, warps when pushed
too quickly. Coil on coil, I am composed:
calm, round, symmetrical.
If spirits lurk in every stone and animal,
even a toadish lump of clay with have one.
What would my spirit like to be?

A dream, like Aborigines' potence,
massy as Ayers Rock -
a striped face gouged with laughing caves,
a red monster reared up.
'Uluru', it soughs, encircling scrubby grass.

'Rock of ages,
O let me hide inside rockseam, fissure,
flavour, the mountain that stays self consciousness,
pattern, patina, colourweave;
narrowed gullies, sexsweat, pebble-
suck, mud-ooze, undergrowth, seedpod, belly-
curve, podding, budding, shadows, chrysalids,
fingerplay, songline, dreamtime.’

Agenda 40, 1-3, 2004