Antiphon issue 18

Transcription

Antiphon issue 18

ISSN 2058-7627
Antiphon
Issue 18
Antiphon on-line poetry magazine
July 2016
www.antiphon.org.uk
Hear readings of these poems http://antiphon.org.uk/wordpress
Antiphon – Issue 18
Edited in the UK by Rosemary Badcoe and Noel Williams
2016
editors@antiphon.org.uk
www.antiphon.org.uk
http://antiphon.org.uk/wordpress
@antiphonpoetry
Copyright Rosemary Badcoe and Noel Williams 2016 and individual authors. All rights
reserved. This electronic magazine may only be circulated in its entirety.
Images:
Public domain https://www.rijksmuseum.nl
Cover - Two ducks at full moon, Ohara Koson, Matsuki Heikichi, 1900 – 1930
Act One - Kingfisher with Lotus Flower, Ohara Koson, Nishinomiya Yosaku, 1900 – 1945
Act Two - Crow with kaki, Ohara Koson, Akiyama Buemon, 1900 – 1910
Interval - Fishing boats, Ohara Koson, 1900 – 1945
Act Three - Sparrows and snowy plum tree, Ohara Koson, Nishinomiya Yosaku, 1900 – 1936
Act Four - White-fronted Goose in the snow, Ohara Koson, Matsuki Heikichi, 1900
Applause - Three turtles between plants, Yashima Gakutei, Kinkokuen Mahiro, c. 1815 –1820
Contents
Prologue ....................................................................................................................................... 3
Act One......................................................................................................................................... 4
Ode to my Weight Loss - Krista Cox ______________________________________ 5
Vigilant Poem - Samantha Madway ______________________________________ 6
Atheism - Claire Scott __________________________________________________ 7
The Passenger - Theophilus Kwek _______________________________________ 8
Mass Spectrometry - Hannah Hackney ___________________________________ 9
Maybe It Was Something about Trolls - C Wade Bentley ___________________ 10
Nervous for Cigarettes - Ricky Garni ____________________________________ 11
My Xylophone - Clark Holtzman _______________________________________ 12
Act Two ...................................................................................................................................... 13
Net Operating Loss - Kathryn Pallant____________________________________ 15
Current Account - Annette Volfing ______________________________________ 16
The Decision - Helen Evans ____________________________________________ 17
The Ball - Charlotte Gann ______________________________________________ 18
Suicides - Bayleigh Fraser _____________________________________________ 19
Tumbleweed - Charlotte Innes __________________________________________ 20
Suburban Mid-Life Crisis - Tiffany Krupa ________________________________ 21
Lullaby - David Briggs ________________________________________________ 22
Interval – Reviews .................................................................................................................... 23
Helena Nelson, How (Not) To Get Your Poetry Published __________________ 23
Ruby Robinson, Every Little Sound _____________________________________ 26
Stephen Payne, Pattern beyond Chance __________________________________ 29
Act Three .................................................................................................................................... 31
Changes - Daniel Bennett ______________________________________________ 33
Coltsfoot - Hilde Weisert ______________________________________________ 34
Puffins - David Seddon ________________________________________________ 35
Sinkhole - Simon Haworth _____________________________________________ 36
Passed - John Greening ________________________________________________ 37
Looking for a Northern Light - Rebecca Gethin ___________________________ 38
Laika - Cheryl Pearson ________________________________________________ 39
Act Four ...................................................................................................................................... 40
Erasure - Robert Ford _________________________________________________ 41
Timescape - Jane Røken _______________________________________________ 42
Snapshot, Yesterday - Jennifer A McGowan ______________________________ 43
For a moment, lying on the grass in summer - Ingrid Hanson _______________ 44
At the Van Nuys State Disability Insurance Office - Yxta Maya Murray ______ 46
Vanishing Point - Nicky Thompson _____________________________________ 47
Rue de l’Aude - Sally Spedding _________________________________________ 48
Gloria - Ian Tromp ____________________________________________________ 49
Slim Volume - Seth Crook _____________________________________________ 50
Issue 18 Contributors ............................................................................................................... 51
Prologue
Isn’t data great? I’ve been doing a bit of number-crunching, and I’m pleased to find
that over the 18 issues of Antiphon we’ve published over 370 different poets. That’s
out of over 4500 submissions. During that time Noel and I have added nearly 4000
notes to those submissions as we discuss their various attributes, and that doesn’t
include our real-life discussions. You may be interested to know that Noel’s voted
‘yes’ to 11% of submissions, but that I only managed 8% - not that every poem with
an initial ‘yes’ actually makes it into the magazine. You may think that the odds are
against you, but I’m glad to note that although each issue includes a number of
poets we’ve published before, we also include many we haven’t read previously.
It’s not a deliberate policy, it just works out that way. Send us really good poems,
and we put them in the magazine.
As well as our usual quota of interesting and intriguing poems, I was particularly
happy to see that Noel has included a review of Helena Nelson’s How (Not) To Get
Your Poetry Published. Helena has for many years run HappenStance, one of the
UK’s most successful and highly regarded small poetry presses, and she gives very
generously of her time reviewing poetry submissions and contributing to the whole
merry-go-round. I suggest anyone interested in being published takes a look and
considers buying the book. We also have a review of Ruby Robinson’s first
collection, ‘Every Little Sound’, which has just been shortlisted for the best first
collection category in the Forward Prizes, one of the UK’s most prestigious prizes.
Ruby is a local (Sheffield, UK) poet and we’re very pleased and proud that this
very moving collection is achieving such recognition.
Rosemary Badcoe
Page | 3
Act One
Act One
Page | 4
Act One
Ode to my Weight Loss
I hesitate to tell you that these days, my hand
is not a butterfly flit across a wide meadow hip
but hard flesh gripping harder flesh
This brings to mind dark and sweating haunches
at full gallop—you would not know, with your lashes
toward me, how little I disturb the long and wheaty grasses
but not for lack of trying. Why else would I leave
sugar in the bowl, shave inches from myself? I am less
now, and watch my thinning with shame
and ecstasy, anticipation of ecstasy. Empowerment
is in the becoming whispers the weighted side
of the scale. What am I becoming? Does my desire
whittle me into curly willow
or do I indent myself tab after tab to make room in the margins
where you can scribble? Oh, unnamed you
or named and prodigal you, do you want me
to hold these shavings in my hands, wait for you
to blow them into a south-leading wind?
You see how I try to mark a line between us
like your hand is not my hand and only one
of us guides the knife, collects what’s falling.
I am shrinking, and for all my talk,
I hope to draw eyes like a naked mudflap princess
or to make myself a harder target.
Krista Cox
Page | 5
Act One
Vigilant Poem
It’s this always-on-watch
that keeps me from knowing
how to come home,
though I can navigate
my way. I look lower
than I’ve ever looked before –
I think I can see
the fish-belly undersides of
my feet from here.
I cower beneath my cover story;
I couch my words so often,
in so many ways,
they are indolent as from
throwing their backs, but
can something spineless hurt so?
I’ve got vocal cords that
can’t seem to find their way
to an outside voice.
(Sometimes the inside one
isn’t so quick to show itself either.)
And I don’t know why I don’t go,
except that I do.
Know, that is. But no also.
Some days, the ocean opens up
onto the lost city of
How-Things-Used-To-Be.
Yet it takes nearly nothing –
sometimes simply nothing –
to spur the sea
to seal the city back up
and leave no seam to say
it was ever there at all.
Samantha Madway
Page | 6
Act One
Atheism
I have lost faith in atheism, that desiccated world with gone gods,
missing gods, no gods, not really
Not even an emaciated one stranded on a cliff in Croatia
stunted and silenced by
howling winds of logic
Not even a god born when a star rises in the east
wise men riding refractory camels
shepherds waiting in the wings
I have lost faith in atheism, leaving me stranded
desert worn, desert wasted
No Bach with stained glass windows
wafts of incense stirring my soul.
Twenty one grams of stardust slowly
wither in my breast
No bowing five times a day to Mecca or touching a mezuzah
as I leave each morning
I have lost faith in atheism, but my soul is stained with
skepticism, shaken with disbelief
I will fly to Croatia to find the last shriveled god
in the corner of a dim cave
We will sing and pray and weep the world
back into being
Then the gods, the gods will return
wending their way
through rents in time
Gods of wisdom, of water, of wine.
Claire Scott
Page | 7
Act One
The Passenger
‘In the months after the tsunami, taxi drivers in the coastal town of
Ishinomaki reported picking up ghost passengers who asked to be brought to
their destination and then disappeared, leaving their fare unpaid.’ –
Inquisitor, 4 February 2016
This, then, is the afterlife. A bend, a
shout, a breath of diesel, sunlight’s murmur
bleaching the kerb a shade of persimmons.
A solitary confinement. No-one
else in line, birds passing like vehicles
And this way from Sendai, Charon’s vessel
an old Corolla pulling up close. In
our stories, the dead follow the whirlwind
of a river’s course underground, until
it comes up for air. The earth is a bell
that rings only in the water’s fingers
or when struck with an unnatural force,
as when Izanami drew a fire from
his whalebone comb, and saw in the loam
his beloved, Izanagi, asleep
at the foot of the well. How the god wept,
afraid! Then turned, and, bashful of his fear,
sealed death’s throat with a stone. So here we are
without refuge. Out from the silent town
to the highway’s shoulder, fog-lights, the sounds
of brakes, front tyres catching earth, chassis,
an open window. Lock, both doors. Release.
Theophilus Kwek
Page | 8
Act One
Mass Spectrometry
The path varies,
but the principle's the same:
the vacuum draws the sample, light as air,
through the ionising chamber.
An electron collision leaves it radical,
charged, and ringing from the force
it shakes itself to pieces.
The readout plots the abundance
of a given size of fragment.
It tends to break the same –
again and again, run through alone,
a heart in an alembic, struck and set
to come apart.
This peak – the biggest one – is from
the molecule's ion: unbroken, but abstracted,
left not quite the same.
It gives the mass when it was simple, full,
but it's by the fragment peaks
that you infer the structure –
the way that it was vulnerable,
like a fault that casts
the way you'd facet
a soft, peculiar jewel.
You can train your eye.
Tune your mind to myriads
sent through the beam,
tried and cast by fire
as many times as needed,
until intimate with breaking
you come to grasp the wholeness.
Hannah Hackney
Page | 9
Act One
Maybe It Was Something about Trolls
Having spilled coffee on the first few lines of a nascent
poem, I am attempting to re-create what I can.
There was an excellent first line, as I recall, full of surprise,
making promises I would try to make good on.
The sort of line you write on the back of a pharmacy
receipt and carry around for a week, letting it work,
letting yeast bubbles form around the edges, the words
just beginning to sugar and fust. I can make out three
words – two-and-a-half – like hillocks of high ground
in a dark-roast monsoon. There’s “petrichor,” a word
I have vowed never to use in a poem, so I can only assume
I meant it ironically. I mean, think about the sort of person
who would use that word in conversation. And I thought
I was done with the word “Ginny,” but there it is again,
the nickname I used for my ex-wife, Virginia, because
the full name carries with it no warmth at all, especially
when you know she was named for Virginia Woolf, and when,
toward the end of our time together, I really could picture her
walking into a river with her pockets full of rocks.
What had I meant to say, though, what illuminating thread
had I found between the two words? Beyond that, only
the partial word, “rivu –,” which must have gone on to be
“rivulets,” and which I hope had nothing to do with tears,
though perhaps with the steady work of rain on sandstone,
how it carves around harder rock, leaving, after millennia,
a stand of resilient hoodoos, like surprised trolls who once,
only once, saw the sunlight. I can work with that.
C Wade Bentley
Page | 10
Act One
Nervous for Cigarettes
If we hold hands we still have free hands with which to smoke
which is soothing but unhealthy or eat avocados which are
delicious and healthy and filling which now we prefer
because we want to live longer than we would were we
to keep smoking with our free hands we don’t have to do
either we could do nothing with those two hands although
we could instead hold those other two hands if we weren’t
hungry for avocado or nervous for cigarettes or worried
about losing our balance which we might if we do hold
so many hands all our hands, because of love.
Ricky Garni
Page | 11
Act One
My Xylophone
November 22, 2013
You know what makes me think
of the xylophone of my youth?
Mallets mostly, and melancholy,
my mother’s ironing board
in a back room, and for sure
Art Linkletter’s House Party where
that famous xylophonist played,
bonk-bonk-bonk, between
the dog act and the ventriloquist
with talking hand, a babushka.
How we laughed at our enemies
when we were young! How our dogs
loved us, day by doggy day!
So now let us celebrate
the xylophone… pa-tink-pa-tank-pa-tonk…
somewhere, my mother in tears
ironing my father’s old shirt,
somewhere, a man kissing a hand
on the mouth. Somewhere,
mallets in a box on a shelf in a closet.
Clark Holtzman
Page | 12
Act Two
Page | 13
Act Two
Net Operating Loss
If I have to die, must I come here first?
It was a mistake back then,
one I’m now repeating, sitting dreaming
in a meeting with tax accountants making
the most of a net operating loss.
The deckchair stripes on my Texan boss
strobe with spirits I drank last night.
Buckingham Palace is across the way.
Tourists glut around the gilt.
If I have to die, must I take my lunch break?
That strait between necessity and escape,
a stale baguette and the National Gallery,
straining to step into Caravaggio’s shadows,
where the hot blood flows and it’s alright
to show you’re choking.
If I must die, can I not first go back
to the green stone blast of Penmon,
fresh from the snow breath of Snowdonia?
Or the slick sweat dawns of Tallebudgera,
where the sea points glitter fingers at mangroves
and the kayakers make salt water chandeliers,
arcing oars plunging into the cool beneath
to rise again?
If I have to die, must I first go to Tesco
and sniff green mangoes, wishing
they were a pallet bought bare foot
from the fruit and petrol shack, eaten
sweet-wet-chinned on the peeling steps
out back? Must I go? God, no,
to the bladder wrack of a packed tube in summer,
the thick-fumed plea for delivery from the strike,
suicide or misery that sticks us here,
carcasses slung in a switched off fridge.
Page | 14
Act Two
If I am to die, must I first relive my shiver-dreams
as a Wimbledon boarder under three duvets
in vain, though I couldn’t complain.
With me in the attic were skis my landlady’d used
to rescue Polish Jews, and usher
them over the Alpine border. In the summer
I’d wander three blocks over to watch
with the twist neck look of the paid up observer.
If I must die, need I stand in line,
lose my change, fall pregnant, abort,
tell my mother I’ve been caught kissing
that boy Hildebrand?
If I must die, must I?
Are these the highlights I can muster?
Losing an earring clinching a cad in a cab,
weeping tears of cold on the Charing Cross Road,
coaxing wan poem moods in a class of surfer dudes?
If I have to die, must I come here first?
At least, God, allow me the sweet
epidural blank of mercy.
Kathryn Pallant
Page | 15
Act Two
Current Account
‘I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the money to be
comfy’ (Under Milk Wood)
Still half-asleep at six,
but fingers tap
through memorable words
and find their way
to where it smiles and breathes,
my suckling dream –
swaddled in sweetness, shame.
Through tingled grey,
I note each dip and rise,
count out the days still left,
accrue, adjust,
gulp down the coffee,
reconcile myself.
Annette Volfing
Page | 16
Act Two
The Decision
I don’t miss the exit, it blocks me:
a line of orange-and-white-striped cones
where the slip road ought to be.
Still, I’m glad to be forced to drive on,
nine miles of midnight and spray,
my lit house like salt thrown
over my left shoulder, three carriageways
almost to myself. There’s fuel in the tank
and each amber cat’s-eye dilates
as my tyres hiss past. Only a fool breaks
the two-second rule, but when mist,
dark and rain drown the windscreen in murk
who can tell what a safe distance is?
So I reach the next junction –
twenty-eight – Local Services –
whose Shell filling station,
stark golden-and-bright,
appears like a moment of realisation –
and swing back on myself, turning right,
south through the whole obscure stormscape,
past twenty-nine, closed for the night,
back to thirty, where I’d joined the motorway,
where I now yank the steering wheel to turn
via Sowton Industrial Estate
for home. The Astra burns
to follow M5 North and not return.
Helen Evans
Page | 17
Act Two
The Ball
We are playing ball – as we always have.
But now the ball is big and black, a cold
shadow-thing that cuts out sunlight. My brother
and I have grown bowed from our long-playing.
We hang on tight each time we catch the ball,
stagger about, our arms stretched wide. Hold it
for longer and longer, then let it loose
to bound – lugubriously, almost in
slow motion, almost comically – across
the ground between us. The beach has shrunk, though
gained some sparkle. But, no, the ball has grown.
When it bounces my way now, it fills the sky.
Charlotte Gann
Page | 18
Act Two
Suicides
On Tuesdays, we meet in the basement
beneath 4th floor murmurs. Fluorescent hums.
N. thinks God – only her God –
whispers a window open, and her son
directs air traffic from the parking lot.
J. doesn’t believe in lights that flicker out. Or atmosphere.
Says she'll never get an hour of sleep in here.
She likes to talk about her daughter’s birthday
balloons, blown past Andromeda. Nothing burned
ever really disappears. So say the ashes
of stars still hungering for eyes.
Both know nights feel deeper than days.
Both know we meet because that blue bruise
remains. Still, thunder reverberates
in the building, still, L. brings up his dead dog
for a fourth time, hands hung beneath the table,
shackled to their latency. That dog was like a child to L.
If only his hands on the chain. If only the train.
It’s ritual. His father was a farmer
who never buried his livestock. He's said twice
so far: there was just a body or two
strewn over the thirsty field, and no one
ever came. The rain drowned them just the same.
Bayleigh Fraser
Page | 19
Act Two
Tumbleweed
Child of driving wind and beaten bush,
tall and wide as a car, this dried up
tightly woven globe, rolling, bouncing
down my street, this giant tumbleweed,
blocked now by a telegraph pole, rocking
and straining, nudged by wind – it must not stop! –
till rain unfurls the naked, coiled seeds,
rolling, bouncing, even when all the seeds
have dropped on streets, thorny,
pallid, skeletal: to go on, with seeming
gravitas, though dead, a kind of hell.
Charlotte Innes
Page | 20
Act Two
Suburban Mid-Life Crisis
The time, the piping of the icing,
the towel's crease through the loop.
Damn the ficus for dropping leaves.
Flies must be laying eggs in the eaves…
The bland caddy stares –
Clicking heels up the stairs –
I am a set of rickety stairs leading down –
There is a sickness in this cellar, a black rot
upon the root. It has a bad smell and it clutches
like a cicada at the heel of my foot. I swear –
Time is more cruel than silence:
the arch of my foot teeters on a slippery ridge;
tomorrow, I will toothbrush the fridge.
Tongues no longer drool when I slip off my shoes
Details! Details! When I burn up there won't be any clues.
Tiffany Krupa
Page | 21
Act Two
Lullaby
And when, on the third night, we woke again
to the irregular fricative refrain
of leathery wings careening into walls,
lampshades, bedheads, wardrobes
(the hapless determination of pipistrelles
circling inches above the bed,
over our pillowed heads
in the pitch black –
black dreams
who’d taken the form of bats,
crawled from nests in our heads
to unfurl their suggestions
as they fledged into the room
seeking the mosquito-thick
skies of their nighthunting)
we understood the cost
of the sleep that eluded us.
Leave every door, every window, open.
Risk the night’s small teeth at your throat.
David Briggs
Page | 22
Interval – Reviews
Helena Nelson, How (Not) To Get Your Poetry Published,
HappenStance, 138pp, £10
Essential. Invaluable. Indispensable. These are the words reviewers are going to use for
this book. Expert. Experienced. Insightful. Probably these too. Beyond them, what else is
there to say? This is not a book of poems but a book about getting poems published. We
don't usually review such works, but I felt this one was so apt for many of the readers of
Antiphon, I'd little choice.
HappenStance is one of the more successful small presses, focused primarily on pamphlets
and, occasionally, quality books. I am a great admirer of HappenStance. Even when the
poems are not quite to my taste, you can see why their editor (Helena “Nell” Nelson) rates
them. And the physical quality of each book is consistently beautiful. As well as running
the press (probably for more years than she'd dare to confess), Nell is a practising and
practiced poet herself, so anything she says is likely to be worth listening to, as followers
of the HappenStance blog know. This volume seems to be a distillation of much of that
hard-won experience.
The book is not one of those about writing poetry – except incidentally – but rather the
business of getting those writings published. And, in particular the business of getting a
full collection published. It has 24 short chapters, with topics as diverse as blogging and
Page | 23
putting a collection together, interspersed with 22 writing exercises to stimulate the
imagination.
I'm not entirely sure about the inclusion of these exercises. Most are unfamiliar to me, and
some most definitely took me to places I wouldn't otherwise have found, which is surely
the measure of a good writing exercise. And, I suppose, a book which serves two purposes
might sell better, as well as providing added value for readers who find the publication
advice too depressing (I'll come back to this). But you can also see the exercises as
interruptions to the main purpose of the book or as surplus material you don't really want
to pay for but find stuck in the book you actually wanted. Arguably, in a book such as this,
more useful exercises would focus on the tasks involved in getting poems out into the
world, rather than getting more poems written. For myself, I skipped most of the exercises
on first read, being so anxious to penetrate the mystery of how to guarantee I'd get my
second collection into print (one of Nell's messages is that there is no guarantee, of course,
so be prepared for a heavy dose of realism here). It may be, however, that the exercises
become a revisited resource for future occasions, long after the key lessons of
(non)publication have dribbled into my bloodstream.
Overall, I think the book a clever construct. As well as the interludinal exercises, it's
broken up with case studies of typical submissions glossed with Nell's responses. These
are all handled with gentle tolerance, even though it's clear that the submissions she has
received (probably pretty often, it would seem) include the rude, the careless, the lazy, the
ignorant and the arrogant. (A word of advice: it's very clear from these cases that the most
important criterion in Nell's judgement is that the poet should follow the submission guidelines.
Here at Antiphon we'd say exactly the same. The guidelines are there to make the editor's
life easier. Failure to follow them necessarily means that the poet does not care about the
editor or their press and that's not the best way to get a sympathetic reading).
If you've followed Nell's blog, or been on the receiving end of her generous analyses, or
perhaps corresponded with her, you'll know she offers lightly seasoned realism scattered
with witty understanding, an empathic recognition of the poet's hazards and fears, and a
wickedly honed critical intelligence which always feels as if it's barely resting in its sheath.
I guess the appropriate metaphorical blade would be a dirk rather than a claymore, and
the sheath looking something like cashmere but you rather suspect might be golden
retriever.
Consequently the books is a witty, easy, read, continually provoking smiles that mitigate
the many realisations of problems to solve. In keeping with her realism, she presents the
core needs as business-like activity demanding business-like attitude. She (barely)
apologises for this approach, and she's careful to separate that necessary, practical
discipline from the open, rewarding playfulness of actually creating poems. They're
Page | 24
separate activities. One makes artefacts as close to perfect as possible. The other arranges
them in the best light on the market stall.
Her message, then, is that the poet who succeeds in publication is the poet who creates
opportunities for herself. Networking, self-promotion, making connections, blogging,
giving feedback in workshops, reviewing, performing – all these activities put the poet in a
place to be noticed and taken seriously and, whilst they'll rarely lead to publication, they
have manifold impacts which all increase the chances.
This means, naturally enough, that to succeed a poet must commit to a fair amount of
work which is not actually the writing of poems. Hence the likelihood that most readers,
searching for a way to achieve that instant success they believe their work deserves, will
read with overtones of disappointment. I, for example, am pretty well read, reasonably
networked and so on, but I recognised in her account at least two areas of my ignorance
which could potentially make a big difference to my future chances. Poets starting out may
find the long list of things she feels desirable represents a very steep challenge.
Yet there's not a sentence in this book I'd disagree with. Essentially, it summarises all we
have to think about (well, most of it) if we're to operate as “professional” poets (there's no
such thing, of course. We're all amateurs). But she knows the force of these demands, so
she tempers her realism in several ways. Her lightness of tone, her wit, her anecdotes, the
overall sense of a concerned mentor wanting us to succeed: all act in the manner of an
experienced tutor (which Nell is) to encourage us to do better. We might even, in reading
her, feel a veritable desire to please her, to make the grade in her eyes. (I'm sure she's not
aiming for that, but I bet it happens). For every hurdle, she has – if not a springboard for
clearing it, then at least a way of clearing the track which will give us a more confident
run-up.
Above all, we trust what she says. Of course, the book exists to make money for her press
so she can continue to publish more poems. But Nell offers us a sense that she actually
wants us to succeed, that she needs to get her message out to help and develop us, that she
feels there's this glorious thing “the poem” that she wants to serve, and see more of, to
support and succour, and to enable us to deliver to her door. (And, of course, if the book
helps reduce the number of crass, arrogant and lazy submissions she receives, then so
much the better).
Is there nothing I dislike about this book, then?
I'd like it to be longer. I'd like her to go deeper into some of the more complex
considerations when choosing editors, magazines or presses to submit to. I don't believe
there are answers here, which would ensure success every time, but I think there are things
Page | 25
which many editors consistently look for which could be more fully dealt with. For
example, many editors have a sense of the kinds of things which make for better, or more
exciting, interesting, poems. I certainly do. What are hers? Do other editors agree with her?
What are the weaknesses which most typically lead to reluctant rejection?
So some chapters felt a little short to me. I guess in the world of blog-posts and flash in the
pan attention spans, a world which makes this review too long for most people to read to
the end, that might be a wise decision. But its brevity made me feel on occasion that she'd
said to herself “okay – that's enough on that topic” rather than “that's all that could
usefully be said about that topic”. I'm always a little suspicious when I see chapters of very
similar length that a book is written to a structured plan based on size rather than ensuring
that it's the exact length its topics demand. I like the inclusion of workbook pages at the
end, which I will probably make use of, but a little more guidance on how they might be
used and how they might relate to specific sections of the book would probably be helpful,
especially as some chapters offer implicit checklists which could become explicit
guidelines for using these pages.
There's no index and, whilst it's a short book and many of the topics are explicit in the
chapter titles, equally the wit which drives some of those titles obscures the actual subject,
making an index a useful alternative way in.
But, given the lack of books of this kind, the brilliance and experience of the author, and
her dedication to the verbal art, you'll find this book essential. Invaluable. Indispensable.
Ruby Robinson, Every Little Sound, Pavilion Press, Liverpool
University Press, 50pp, £9.99
There’s an interest in how things work in Every Little Sound, the world, the body, the brain.
The meaning of 'Internal Gain', given in the epigraph, is 'an internal volume control which
helps us amplify and focus upon quiet sounds in times of threat, danger or intense
concentration':
My room was vibrating with electricity sockets
and light beams
and I could hear every little sound
my mouth made.
Outside my window
a butterfly, miniscule on a roof tile
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rubbed its wings together
excruciatingly.
('Internal Gain')
And while I’ve been trying to think of ways to describe the distinctive tone of voice that
defines Ruby Robinson’s debut collection, I realise that it’s not the tone I’m struggling to
pin down, but how it achieves such vulnerability even in poems where the attention to
detail, to systems and processes, seems to create a coolness, a hardness of language. What
I think I’ve understood is that it’s a combination of that interest in the world – of trying to
understand life through its mechanisms – and the speaker’s human experience of that life
that creates something simultaneously direct, distant, intimate and tender. In the title
poem, you can see how precise the description of the room is (not electricity but the
sockets, not light but its beams), the distance invoked by the phrase 'my mouth made'. Yet
in the image of the butterfly, the poem rises into something emotionally stunning.
The collection reminds me of ideas around attachment, the precariousness of personhood.
The way these poems story-tell psychological experience through the physical sometimes
suggests ambivalence towards the other: a careful, protective self-reliance, but also a desire
to trust, to let go, as though the speaker is both running towards connection, affection,
(security?), and keeping it at arm’s length. Perhaps as the speaker tries to make sense of
the world, and her place in it, she is repairing the shattered self evident in poems such as
'Unlocatable', where a head is placed on a shelf, and the dissembled vocabulary 'and
constellations / of thoughts' work to undo our most basic sense of agency:
And what use am I,
half-witted, unpicked, flaked
out, half a leg, a spewing mouth, brittle hair,
scooped-out heart […]'
Or in 'Listen': 'Thus, I unscrew my head, / the lid of a pickle jar'.
What it is to listen, to tell, what being heard might mean, is fundamental to that sense of
agency. Many of the poems explore, undercut, destabilise the speaker/listener relationship,
sometimes through a narrative that refuses the speaker an audience, or through the craft of
the poem, disrupting syntax, abandoning sentences, leaving the reader’s expectations
hanging. The opening poem seems to assert that relationship with authority, certainty.
'Reader, listener', is an open-armed gesture of welcome: 'come in. I’m opening my door to
you […] There’s soup. Bread in the oven to warm'. And it’s not one-way. There are chairs
for 'interrogating guests'; the speaker seems to know a lot about you, reader: that you
'wish someone would think of you, spontaneously', that 'your own feet / offend you'. But
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what we might learn about each other is thrown up in the air through the Platonic last line,
where 'shadows of stags are cast like stalking giants' onto the dumb walls. Are the walls of
the room barriers, do they imitate or corrupt something like truth? Or in the 'dumb'
absence of language, are shadow puppets a fair means of communication? Such vital lines
give you faith in the speaker’s voice, even as she questions it.
That vitality is what sustains the longer poems. 'Apology' is complex, imageful, powerful,
creating a quasi-narrative, expositional, rational and furious. It is the voice of a daughter
addressing her mother and it feels very raw. And in its tremendous drive, you sense the
speaker is purging herself of what needs to be said, what has been held back and can’t be
held back any longer:
I’m sorry for resembling your relatives and captors and the man
who penetrated you, who’s still there, communicating boldly
via intersections of others’ thought waves and memories,
blatant into the long nights, haunting,
for my inferiority in the face of nuclear family culture,
feeding on detritus of white goods, leisure sports, laminate floors,
a real home and fake recycling,
for creeping by night into a tight void, blinds down, brain blown
glass-thin, electric impulses and bloated thoughts bolted in.
For this life being the only one my quiet mind knows,
its many versions and phases, I’m sorry.
Not confessional, but there is something honest in the urgency of the rhythms that
communicates a depth and frankness of feeling. Rosemary Tonks said telling the truth
about feeling takes integrity, that a state of mind resists description, and perhaps
resistance is central to what’s going on here. The speaker resists sentimentality (even as
she says she is 'sentimentally sorry / despite a genuine fear of sentimentality'), in language
that ranges between uncomfortably intimate detail, anecdote, dialogue, and another
register, a professional lexicon of psychological and philosophical jargon ('Consensus
reality … pseudo-unhappiness … complex trauma'). This forces the gaze of the poem out
into another world without losing its interiority – a layering of types of information that
Tony Hoagland might describe as poetic vertigo. The complexity of holding different
registers and proximities in your mind creates a self less unified 'but more trustworthy
than the average confessional poem'. The repetitions of 'I’m sorry', of 'thank you', the
circling of what is known and what is not, of dispossession and memory, creates a struggle
with and for the reader that makes reductive readings impossible, conclusions irrelevant:
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We learn to accept the clouds for what they are
and wait, patiently.
To read 'Apology' in full is to be within the experience of the speaker. In part because of
the hardness of language, clinical at times, the poem, and the collection, is irreparably
moving.
Angelina d'Roza
(An abbreviated version of this review first appeared in Orbis #175).
Stephen Payne, Pattern beyond Chance, HappenStance, 80pp, £12
Another beautiful hardback from Happenstance, although this departs from the
established appearance to have a patterned, rather than a plain, cover, the design reflecting
the book's concept. This is quite a subtle realisation of the content, for the whole of the first
section of the book (there are four sections) concerns notions of design, the facets of that
word's meaning, the relationship between intent and activity.
If this sounds a little academic, that's because it is. The academic preoccupations of this
poet are the immediate subjects of many of these poems and, where that's not the case,
nevertheless frequently they offer flavours, images, metaphors or reflections which tilt the
poem in an abstract or ideational direction. But the consequent work is not dry or dull.
Pretty much every poem is driven by an idea, but the approach is almost unique – a poetry
which is, almost literally, a poetry of ideas. Sometimes this leads to approaches which are
almost Metaphysical as well as metaphysical, where the idea demands an elision of
metaphors whose slickness might make it a little hard to grasp, as in 'Fractal Library'
where cliff-climbing, exploring a library, fractal modelling and the relationship between
knowledge and curiosity are fused in one convincing idea.
This makes for exciting reading. Rarely in this volume do you know what you're going to
get. Only one poem seemed to me somewhat out of place, as being simply a descriptive
observation and nothing more. Frequently the poems offer insight (e.g. in 'Insight') or a sly
wit readily appreciated, and they are rich with intelligent humanity, an empathy beyond
mere intellectual appreciation of people's complexity.
Perhaps some of the humour may be missed if a reader lacks the requisite background in
psychology, linguistics or philosophy. For example, the line 'Buffalo buffalo Buffalo
buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo' ('Mimesis') may strike the uninitiated as merely
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weird nonsense. It's actually a classic linguistic example of correct grammar, providing
you can figure out which of the 'buffalo's is noun, which verb and which adjective, and,
once you get that, you've the understanding what is necessary to get the rest of the poem, I
think. But such knowledge is rarely needed, as long as the reader is prepared to deploy
their own intelligence to appreciate how Payne is using his.
Payne's is not merely a poetry of ideas, however. It's rich in thought-games, but there are
other rewards, too. At times masterfully elegant, at times judiciously shifting style
according to subject or intent, he's more than capable of turning a delicate line, or finding
appealing rhythms and some unexpected rhymes:
Beside the boat, your blade cuts through the sky
uncovering the stars the clouds imply.
('Canoeist')
and the ideational approach often leads to refreshingly unexpected imagery:
When oxygen is compromised
and idea can expire,
like a canary in a mine.
('Infarct')
with some brilliant moments, such as the apostrophe in:
Some propositions
can't be proved: the better truths
are intuition's.
('Translating the Proverb')
where we simultaneously read the last word as both with and without its apostrophe.
Perhaps not for everyone – the incidental lyricism is heavily restrained, for example, and
there's sometimes a deliberately prosaic observational style – my own view is that this
book is refreshingly different, entirely stimulating, and deserves a wide readership for its
deeply perceptive slant on original but core subjects. As long as you approach it with an
open sense of what poetry might be, you'll find much to enjoy here, and perhaps some
things to step back and admire.
NW
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Act Three
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Changes
A walk along the creek.
Turquoise water, the rarity
of a sky reflected over it. Earlier,
we asked if summer had arrived.
Boats head out from the hard.
The red sails, with their precise reflections,
slide along like axe heads
this glimmer so sharp, it hurts the eyes.
I cross the road by the quay
and these familiar routes
are given a stuttering strangeness
outside of established routine:
as though I had tried
to plane rosewood against the grain.
Music somewhere. A passing car.
Pollard trees bristle like fists.
Further along, a cricket match takes place
on the green: men, young and old,
barely distinguishable in their whites
preparing as the batsman strikes
and for a second I see
the ball seeking me out. Here I am,
taking a catch at the boundary
uninvolved but suddenly essential
everyone cheering. But it's only a trick
of the eye, a bird leaping from a branch,
a door closing on a nearby house
the receptionist waving as I approach
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at the hotel check-in.
I'm like a wrongheaded spy: tentative
hopeless, using my real name
when it's my life that's assumed.
Daniel Bennett
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Coltsfoot
Humble, ordinary as a sock,
ragged, toothy, easily mistook
for sidewalk dandelion.
Every year we seek them out
when we’re anxious for Spring,
and Spring has not quite come.
We walk the road peering down,
poking at the icy leaf-litter,
looking for coltsfoot, but really
wanting the pretty ones
coltsfoot says are next: Trout lily,
Canada mayflower, Trillium in waves.
As if it is what we call it –
a barnyard thing, an amputated
cast-off talisman, and not
a dozen sprouts newborn
on the rocky hill, suddenly standing
straight out of muck and gravel,
spiny legs stiff against March wind.
A small herd of them, equine indeed
as they now roam, now cluster,
then gather more, another here,
another there, collecting themselves,
raising each shaggy yellow shock
to shake off winter’s last and dingy snow,
to draw and greet the sun, to say
(now that I hear it), Call me
what you will, I am here, and whole.
Hilde Weisert
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Puffins
The big-top cliffs of North-Utsire,
Staffa, Treshnish, Farne and Hoy
roll with clowns –
barrel-bodied paddles
swimming through the air;
diving cannonballs of white
guy-wire straight
in hoops of water;
high-wire surfers
drum-roll tumblers
silver blade-swallowers;
roustabouts with candy floss,
sad-eyed jugglers of magic tricks
burrowing bottom up
tongue fat on sprats.
What shall become of them?
Perhaps they'll oil their backs with sea-bed’s sweat
and hide their bills in nylon net.
David Seddon
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Sinkhole
It knows what you wish you knew about failure
and has only one instinct, which is to reverse,
as antonyms like window and spotlight
reverberate in the lost signal of its emptiness.
Way down there a road-sign and some bollards marinate,
test subjects of its one and only swallow
that attracted a few devoted followers
who gather now on the central reservation
to observe it and hypothesise
about depth, if what it really wants is largesse.
To devour all this concrete, plastic and metal must
have entailed invocations for rain to slake its thirst.
It enjoys being a problem, a blind spot, algebraic,
like the background stolen from a map of constellations.
Simon Haworth
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Passed
for SECH
You call it the equivalent of the Enclosures that maddened John Clare.
I listen as we walk the path across midsummer fields
from the White Horse to Brickyard Cottage. I had resolved
not to bring up the turbine that’s going to rise above your house –
as damaging as elm disease to the landscape, you say, as we pause
beneath a mature ash. I think of, but dare not mention, dieback.
We look at the one ‘generator on a pipe’ there towards the east,
a small thing, like a hovering predator, not like this one
raised before the authorities, where you had your three minutes,
but time ran out before the poetry could get up steam –
how to convey how vulnerable the dream that needs no permission,
to those who want to keep on sharing this infected needle?
Now the signals have changed. The go-ahead. Your disused line,
where enemies of the farmer (bullfinch, fox, mink, badger)
have gathered, conferred, but failed as they failed when the railway came,
is tapping out invitations to the wind. And soon, they will appear:
like statues from Easter Island that marked the destruction of the island,
or cowboy dancers at a Northamptonshire village fete, lining up –
Chelveston, Lyveden New Bield – slow-taxiing, emitting
a poisonous beauty where they have mustered out in the Fen,
in March, to advance on us, as if to the music of Bliss
from Things to Come. Let’s talk about something else. The sunset.
Going, going. How both wells dried, how even
poets (more power to ‘Philip Spender’) must be changed.
Who notices pylons any more? For all the heated discussions,
who’d tilt at a cooling tower? The sun has gone
and here comes the breeze. Through the gloaming, the last trees
are like an ancient committee that waves the motion through.
John Greening
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Looking for a Northern Light
I wondered if I’d know it for certain
or if, in England, it would be bloodless,
bland, too far away from its own territory.
If I saw it would I somehow be changed?
The dark was raw as though it were alive
and breathing: constellations were rippling
like salmon after midges in a still lake
on which the earth was being reflected.
In the north, belugas of clouds were shining
but still. Should I have stayed indoors?
All that night my mind was as watchful
as a seal at a breathing hole.
Rebecca Gethin
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Laika
The stars carved by the ship.
The air carved by the dog's swim.
Once I saw a friend pull a trout from the water,
a thin ribbon of muscle that lashed
against and against the inevitable. Until
it stilled. Looked death in the eye.
That's how I imagine Laika
looked at the last. Out of her element,
eyes travelling like old light
back to the past.
Cheryl Pearson
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Act Four
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Act Four
Erasure
In the last memories I have of you, among those
final, pale frames, you’re hardly there, almost absent.
The door of your sensible car is still closing,
with an ugly thudding, way too sharp and loud,
splitting the dead of morning in that icy, empty square
where we once lived. And someone’s arms – they can only
be yours – wrap about my shoulders. But I have to cut
and paste you, repeatedly, into the picture, or you’re gone.
I know this happens. Our machinery hums into life, breathes in,
breathes out, and anything too sharp begins to fade.
It’s just a process; a numbing, an amendment to
the archive. I underwent it too – mutated from someone
who’d once have broken bones just to touch you,
into another man, wandering those three lost days
through your new house, and the life you’d filled it with,
looking for traces of the things I’d loved about you.
Robert Ford
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Act Four
Timescape
An old woman is standing on the beach.
Quiet: she listens for the shells of twilight.
Here are scraps and traces of stories, live connexions
where feathers and bones are interwoven.
She bends down and picks up a small piece of ruby-glass;
it has journeyed all the way from foreign shores.
Deep below the high seas, playful cuttlefish are swimming
in and out of the skeletons of luckless whalers.
The focus becomes scrimmed and touched with copper.
By break of day she will hatch from a seagull's egg.
This is how it all begins: The bird, its bone.
The egg, the stone. The alightment.
Jane Røken
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Act Four
Snapshot, Yesterday
Firenze
Divine rays fall on Santa Maria
del Carmine. See? From the top right
of the picture? It is the Holy Spirit
touching again the city of the de Medici.
Can you see me? I am there, in
the lower right, very small. I am
sitting in the piazza, watching wealth
go by. I am claiming sanctuary
in the church as floods rise.
I am chatting with Masaccio, daily.
The frescoes are still wet. I smudge
my fingerprint under Eve’s foot, here.
You will see it, and know.
Jennifer A McGowan
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Act Four
For a moment, lying on the grass
in summer
I thought I saw your sense of humour
in serried squares sagging in the sky
like the undersides of trampolines,
glimpsed your penchant for illusion
in patterns hung so resolutely still,
safety nets below the blue.
I thought you might have strung them there
for me. It’s the kind of thing you’d do:
surprise my eye with spectacle.
I know it isn’t you. I know death leaves
no half-open door for cloud-signs
and signatures to slip back through.
But if there were things that spirit-you
could do, jobs and joys portioned out
by hand or mind or eye,
I know this is the one you’d choose:
pulling out wonder
from the cupboards of the sky.
Ingrid Hanson
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Act Four
At the Van Nuys State Disability Insurance
Office
I don’t think that even a Buddhist could make this into a teachable
moment.
Not even Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha.
The linoleum is gray-brown and scuffed. The people sit on chairs.
They wait for their numbers to be called. They have the glare of
frailty.
We are wearing cardigans and holding
manila folders in our hands.
In Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha learns about time. His friend Gotama sits with him by the
the Brahmaputra and tells him:
Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?
That the river is everywhere at the same time… the present only exists for it,
not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
This makes Siddhartha feel better. His son hates him and ran away. So Siddhartha
would rather think that nothing exists or matters.
Siddhartha should come to the State Disability Office, as there is no such
thing as the disability office. The disability office is everywhere at the same time
and at the disability office the present only exists for it.
In other words, the trauma is waiting outside, in the car.
Everyone is asking technical questions.
The ping of terror when the heart valve started to fail
the napalm burning of the mind when told that the cancer invaded
these things cannot enter here.
We want our money. We’re upset and confused but just talk about dates and forms.
There is no pleasure here but in reading this sign: YOU MAY BE FINED AND IMPRISONED
FOR THREATENING A PUBLIC EMPLOYEE. Also available for your delectation is a
huge brown and green
piece of fabric art showing a mountain.
It hangs on the wall opposite me.
Siddhartha might have contemplated this mountain with Gotama,
because mountains seen from far away seem meditative.
If Siddhartha and Gotama were here, they would put their
arms around each other and curse quietly about bureaucracy
and corporate aesthetics.
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Act Four
Bad art makes everything worse.
If I had hustled more I would have gotten in front of the guy in the blue shirt, who is now
ahead of me.
He is reading his phone, and also looking at his paperwork.
He has little swirly designs on his shirt that look like Gotama’s river.
If I had just run a little bit I would have beat him and been 796 instead of 797.
Writing does not make you into Siddhartha.
I am paying attention to humanity and being an artist by writing this.
Siddhartha paid attention to Gotama and water.
At the end of the book he paid so much attention that he
became the ultimate artist:
He became All-Being, and All-Beings don’t need the disability office.
I am paying attention to the fact that we are being
advised to refrain from hitting SDI factotums, which means that at some
point one of us lost her temper.
Maybe the person who freaked realized that there is no
such thing as time, and so punched the clerk.
The disabled person became All-Being but found
that it turned her into Shiva instead of the Buddha.
None of us sitting in the disability office today
are working on All-Being, though.
We are too distracted by our medications to become bodhisattvas.
And if we achieved transcendence and put the security guard
into a sleeper hold
then we would go to prison where we wouldn’t exist or matter.
Time would stop running behind bars as it does in Van Nuys.
Also, in jail the nurses are bad
we hear they’re harried and judgmental
so we just can’t imagine dealing with our diabetes there.
Yxta Maya Murray
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Act Four
Vanishing Point
It’s never ending, squares within squares
neatly slot into place. I fall
between the gaps, catch my breath
on the perpendicular. You force me
into the tiny space between one breath
and the next, small slivers of daylight
shining through this strange geometry.
They’re all the same to you, these shapes
that keep us contained. Separate.
While I’m left alone, wondering how it all fits.
If I shift my perspective, angles wedge
themselves tightly together, try to inhabit
the same space – their corners
and lines define us, stop us
stepping over the edge – you want me
to wait for the moments when the wind
sneaks through – instead, I want you
to smash this place, leave
it splintered on the sand
expose us to the elements.
Nicky Thompson
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Act Four
Rue de l’Aude
April 2nd 2016
The cumulous crowd lumbers in from the north
over Renée’s smalls and those hounds still
dreaming of the boar they missed, and the vet’s
wife tussling with sheets that twist and curl in the
hissing wind, and the red-faced lad whose ball rolls
from his reach down the street.
Woodsmoke ripped from blackened stacks, proud
bearers of the satellite dish, reminds me that there’s no
Resurrection yet in this corner of the world where winter’s
grip soon shifts the pegs, bears the bra and thong
along to the square where the café dog pees on a
plastic chair and the memorial’s soldier in verdegris
bronze who’s stood to attention for far too long, boasts
a new, less tragic
decoration.
Sally Spedding
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Act Four
Gloria
Praise the day
come quietly
now school holidays have emptied the roads.
Praise the sun
sifted through glass of leaves.
Praise the trees
shedding their brightness along the path.
Praise the dog, who hunts squirrels
among the trees.
Praise neighbourliness,
brief communion among strangers,
who give the gift of allowing
themselves to be known.
Praise the ordinary mornings of this world.
Praise not wanting anything
to be different.
Praise awakening on a quiet Monday
and being alive, when some
known and loved
are not.
Ian Tromp
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Act Four
Slim Volume
Saying it precisely.
Or with as much exactitude
as might sensibly be wanted.
We need not count the grains of sand.
Nor be profound
or important. Enough
to cycle around such things, showing,
by our course: we know they're there.
Seth Crook
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Applause
Issue 18 Contributors
Daniel Bennett was born in Shropshire and lives and works in London. His poems have appeared in
a number of places, most recently in Structo, The Stinging Fly and The Manchester Review. He is also
the author of the novel ‘All the Dogs’.
C Wade Bentley lives, teaches, and writes in Salt Lake City. His poems have appeared in many
journals, including Best New Poets, Rattle, Cimarron Review, and Pembroke Magazine. A full-length
collection, ‘What Is Mine’, was published by Aldrich Press in January of 2015. Further information
about his publications and awards can be found at www.wadebentley.weebly.com
David Briggs has published two full collections with Salt, ‘The Method Men’ (2010) and ‘Rain
Rider’ (2013). He received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors, and a Commendation
in the National Poetry Competition. His work also features in’ Identity Parade: New British and Irish
Poets’ (Bloodaxe, 2010), and a range of magazines and journals including Poetry Review, Poetry
London, Poetry Wales and New Statesman. He has a new chapbook with Maquette Press called ‘Vision
Helmet’.
Krista Cox is a paralegal and an associate poetry editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection. Her poetry
has appeared or is forthcoming in Rogue Agent, Whale Road Review, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review,
among other places. Find her work and more about her at www.kristacox.me
Seth Crook taught philosophy at various universities before moving to the Hebrides. He does not
like cod philosophy in poetry, though he likes cod, poetry and philosophy. His poems have appeared
in such places as Gutter, New Writing Scotland, Northwords Now, Poetry Scotland, Southlight, Causeway,
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Applause
The Rialto, Magma, Envoi, The Interpreter's House, The Journal, Prole. And on-line in such fine places as
Antiphon. One of his poems was selected as one of the Best Scottish Poems of 2014.
Helen Evans’s pamphlet, ‘Only by Flying’, drawing on her experience as a glider pilot, was published
by HappenStance Press in 2015 (www.happenstancepress.com) and reviewed in Issue 17 of Antiphon.
She has a Master’s degree with Distinction in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews
and has been published in a range of magazines. Her website is www.helenevans.co.uk
Robert Ford lives on the east coast of Scotland, and writes poetry, short stories and non-fiction. His
poetry has appeared in print and online publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including Clear
Poetry, Dream Catcher, Firewords, Ink, Sweat and Tears and Wildflower Muse. More of his work can be
found at https://wezzlehead.wordpress.com/
Bayleigh Fraser is an American poet currently residing in Canada, where she hopes to continue her
education. She previously studied at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. Her poems have appeared
in A Bad Penny Review, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Hart House Review, The Lake, One, Rattle, and other
publications.
Charlotte Gann is a writer and editor from Sussex. Her pamphlet, ‘The Long Woman’ (Pighog Press),
was shortlisted for the 2012 Michael Marks Award and her first full collection, ‘Noir’, is forthcoming
from HappenStance in late 2016/ early 2017.
Ricky Garni was born and raised in Miami and Maine. He works as a graphic designer by day and
writes music by night. ‘COO’, a tiny collection of short prose printed on college lined paper with
found materials such as coins, stamps, was recently released by Bitterzoet Press.
Rebecca Gethin lives on Dartmoor which often inspires her work. She is a Hawthornden Fellow and
her poetry pamphlet, ‘A Rowan Sprig’, is to be published later this summer by Three Drops in a
Cauldron. Another one will appear next year. Her second poetry collection (2013) was called ‘A
Handful of Water’ (Cinnamon Press)
John Greening has published more than a dozen collections (notably ‘To the War Poets’, Carcanet,
2013), and several studies of poetry and poets. His edition of Edmund Blunden’s ‘Undertones of War’
(OUP) appeared in 2015, along with a music anthology, ‘Accompanied Voices’. His latest publications
are ‘Nebamun’s Tomb’ (Rack Press) and the collaboration with Penelope Shuttle, ‘Heath’ (Nine
Arches). TLS reviewer and Eric Gregory judge, his awards include the Bridport Prize and a
Cholmondeley. He is RLF Writing Fellow at Newnham College. More details at
www.johngreening.co.uk
Hannah Hackney has writing published in such venues as Puritan, Raintown Review, Rotary Dial and
Lemon Hound. She is the co-creator of Dyad Press, which publishes small handmade books of art,
poetry, and photography. In addition to her work as a journalist and technical writer, Hannah
currently works in polymer research in Montreal, Canada.
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Applause
Ingrid Hanson is an academic, writer and performer living in Sheffield with her two teenagers. Her
published work includes a monograph on William Morris and articles on Victorian literature and
peace protest, nineteenth-century socialism, the politics of breastfeeding, and international debt.
Simon Haworth works as a lecturer in literature and creative writing and as a music tutor. His poems
have appeared in various magazines and journals.
Clark Holtzman lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The included poem is part of a book-length
manuscript with the working title, ‘Selfiedom’.
Charlotte Innes is the author of ‘Descanso Drive’, a first book of poems, to be published by Kelsay
Books in 2017. She has also published two chapbooks, ‘Licking the Serpent’ (2011) and ‘Reading
Ruskin in Los Angeles’ (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in many
publications, including The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review and Rattle, and anthologized in ‘Wide
Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond’ (Beyond Baroque Books, 2015) and ‘The Best of the
Raintown Review’ (Barefoot Muse Press, 2015), amongst others. She teaches English and creative
writing at the Lycée International de Los Angeles.
Tiffany Krupa is a writer, photographer, actor, activist, and avid stand up paddler based in Central
Coast, California. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Askew Poetry Journal, Arsenic Lobster
2010 Anthology, The Albion Review, Lit Mag, and The Slate. She is the 2016 1st place winner of the Peter
Murphy Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway, Stockton College's Toni Brown Memorial Poetry Prize,
Stockton College, and the 1st prize winner of the 2007 John Curtis Underwood Memorial Poetry Prize.
Theophilus Kwek is the author of two collections, ‘They Speak Only Our Mother Tongue’ (2011) and
‘Circle Line’ (2013), which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2014. He won the
Martin Starkie Prize in 2014 and the Jane Martin Prize in 2015, and is President of the Oxford
University Poetry Society.
Jennifer A McGowan won the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize and her first full collection, ‘The Weight
of Coming Home’, is now published. Her poems have been accepted by The Connecticut Review,
Agenda, Pank, The Rialto, Acumen, Poetry Salzburg, and other magazines on both sides of the Atlantic.
She has two chapbooks with Finishing Line Press. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport and highly
commended in the Manchester Cathedral competition for the second year running.
Samantha Madway is engaged in the lengthy process of transcribing hundreds of pages of her
writing from barely legible blue ink into reader-friendly (twenty-first-century) Times New Roman
type. She loves her dogs, Freddie and Charlie, more than anything else in the universe.
Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and a law professor who lives in Los Angeles. She has published six
novels, including 2002's ‘The Conquest’.
Kathryn Pallant is a PhD student in creative writing at the University of Manchester. Her poetry is
forthcoming in Cake. Her first novel, ‘For Sea or Air’, was long listed in the Mslexia Novel
Competition and she was winner of the Weaver Words Flash Fiction prize.
Page | 53
Applause
Cheryl Pearson lives and writes in Manchester, in the North West of England. Her poems have
appeared in publications including Compass Magazine, The Journal, and Skylark Review (Little Lantern
Press). She has had a poem featured in The Guardian's ‘Poetry Workshop’ feature, and was
shortlisted for the York Literature Festival Poetry Prize, and the Princemere Poetry Prize 2015. Her
poem, "Mam Tor", was placed third in Bare Fiction Magazine's 2016 poetry competition. She has work
in the forthcoming issues of Envoi, Interpreter's House, and Neon Magazine. She is currently working
on her first full length poetry collection.
Jane Røken lives in Denmark, on the interface between hedgerows and barley fields. She is fond of
old tractors, garden sheds, scarecrows and other stuff that, in the due course of time, will ripen into
something else. Her writings have appeared in many very different places, mostly online.
Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was
also a semi-finalist for the Pangaea Prize and the Atlantis Award. Claire was the grand prize winner
of The Maine Review’s 2015 White Pine Writing Contest. Her first book of poetry, ‘Waiting to be
Called’, was published in 2015. She is the co-author of ‘Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in
Photography and Poetry’.
David Seddon was born in Liverpool and now lives in Congleton, Cheshire where he is a counsellor.
He has many poems published in various ezines and magazines including The Interpreter’s House,
Obsessed with Pipework, Under the Radar, Ink Sweat and Tears, Poems in the Waiting Room, Northwords
Now, Sentinel, Poetry Scotland, Decanto and Poetry Cornwall. He is in several anthologies, including:
‘Sculpted, Poetry of The North West’; the ‘Macmillan Cancer Charity Anthology’ (Soul Feathers);
‘Verse Versus Austerity’ (The Robin Hood Tax Book) and ‘Earth Love’. He was also a co-editor of the
Sonnet Anthology, ‘The Phoenix Rising From The Ashes’. He is actively pursuing getting his first
collection of poems published.
Sally Spedding was born by the sea near Porthcawl and studied Sculpture in Manchester and at St.
Martin’s London. Her Dutch/German background and introduction to the surreal, narrative dyptichs
and tryptichs of the Flemish School at an impressionable age, fuelled a need to write. She is an awardwinning and well-published poet and crime writer drawing inspiration from both Wales and France
– countries with unfinished business. Married to the artist Jeffrey Spedding, they live in
Carmarthenshire and the haunting Cathar country of the Eastern Pyrenees.
Nicky Thompson has been published in various journals and online. She works as a Community
Development Officer helping to make a difference to local communities, and runs creative writing
and writing for wellbeing workshops. She lives near the sea in Whitstable and has two dogs and a
cat. Her best ever writing experience was a six week residency at a beach hut. Her website is
www.pebblepoetry.co.uk
Ian Tromp works as a counsellor/psychotherapist in private practice. After a long period of writing
poetry criticism for various publications (Poetry Review, TLS, PN Review, etc.), he wrote nothing for
years. He is now returning to poetry and has poems recently out in The Reader, Bare Fiction, The
Interpreter’s House and Acumen.
Page | 54
Applause
Annette Volfing is an academic teaching medieval German literature. Her poems have appeared in
various magazines, including Other Poetry, The Interpreter's House, Lighthouse, Magma, Smiths Knoll,
Snakeskin and Under the Radar. She has a chapbook forthcoming with Black Light Engine Room.
Hilde Weisert's poetry collection ‘The Scheme of Things’ was published in 2015 by David Robert
Books. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as Ms, Calyx, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review,
Paterson Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, the Cortland Review, and the NY Times. She was
awarded fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the NJ State Council on the
Arts and was a longtime Geraldine Dodge Poet when she lived in New Jersey. She lives in Chapel
Hill and part-time in western Massachusetts, NC.
Page | 55
Issue 18 2016
Antiphon on-line poetry magazine
www.antiphon.org.uk
http://antiphon.org.uk/wordpress

Antiphon issue 18

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