New Poetries VII: An Anthology

LUKE ALLAN

ZOHAR ATKINS

ROWLAND BAGNALL

SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

MARY JEAN CHAN

HELEN CHARMAN

REBECCA CULLEN

NED DENNY

NEIL FLEMING

ISABEL GALLEYMORE

KATHERINE HORREX

LISA KELLY

THEOPHILUS KWEK

ANDREW LATIMER

TOBY LITT

RACHEL MANN

JAMES LEO McASKILL

JAMIE OSBORN

ANDREW WYNN OWEN

PHOEBE POWER

LAURA SCOTT

VALA THORODDS

NEW

POETRIES

7

AN ANTHOLOGY

edited by

MICHAEL SCHMIDT

CONTENTS

Title Page

Preface

LAURA SCOTT

If I could write like Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s Dog

and Pierre?

Fragment

The Singing

a different tune

What I know

Lines on a broken statue of Iris

What the trees do

Turner

The Dogs in Greece are different

To the Trees

The Thorn and the Grass

So Many Houses

Fence

NED DENNY

Untitled

Old Song

To Catch a Thief

Fir

House Music

Cutting Class

Drones

Era

Who’s She

Tree

SUMITA CHAKRABORTY

Dear, beloved

ANDREW WYNN OWEN

The Kite

The Mummies’ Chorus

What Matters

The Borderline

The Puppet

The Ladder

Sand Grains

The Rowboat

April Shower

The Multiverse

Ants, Spiders, Bees

Till Next Time

ZOHAR ATKINS

Protest

System Baby

Song of Myself (Apocryphal)

Poetry TedTalk Notes

Without without Title

Fake Judaism

Déjà Vu

Pirkei Avot

The Binding of Isaac

RACHEL MANN

A Kingdom of Love

Collect for Purity

Fides Quaerens

The Ordinal

The Book of Genesis

Compline

The Apocalypse of John

Chaucer on Eccles New Road

Reading Ovid on the Underground

The Priest Finds Eve in Piccadilly Gardens

St Elisabeth Zacharias

Evensong

JAMIE OSBORN

Did you see elephants?

Caprivian

How we are building

Lukas

C22 Gobabis – Otjinene

No landings yet

Distribution

Worship

Ladies’ chapel

Forgive me

What you expect

Meidjie sings

MARY JEAN CHAN

They Would Have All That

Three Sonnets

respite

Long Distance

an eternal &

Names (I)

Names (II)

Notes Toward an Understanding

speaking in tongues

Safe Space

HELEN CHARMAN

Horse whispering

Bathsheba’s Gang

Three Caskets

Naming problems

Tampon panic attack

The Roses of Heliogabalus

Thin girls

Angiogram

from ‘Donations’

Agony in the Garden

Leaky

TOBY LITT

Politics / 9.11.16, p.m.

from ‘Life Cycle’

Self-Reminders

Awaying

Sonnet

Friday

A glow-in-the-dark skeleton

LUKE ALLAN

Pennyweight

A Note on Walking to Elgol

Love Poem

Advice of the Assistant in a Card Shop…

Poetry

Lemon

A Version of Bashō

Language

Variations on a Circle

Alexandrine

The Road Not Taken

The Garden of Desire

One-Word Poems for V.

Outlandia

From Marsco

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

PHOEBE POWER

Clarsach

Name

sex and love with the soon-to-be accountant

children

Epiphany Night

Sleeping in His Harp-Case

Installation for a New Baby

Es war einmal

Villach

fasching

the weather’s changing

Mary’s Dreams

Austrian pastorals

THEOPHILUS KWEK

Moving House

Westminster

What It’s Like

Camerata

My Grandfather Visits Pyongyang

Road Cutting at Glanmire

24.6.16

Requiem

Occurrence

Dead Man’s Savings Won’t Go to Wife

Blue

KATHERINE HORREX

Brexit

Afraid is a Town

Polycystic

Grey Natural Light

Four Muses

Goat Fell

Lapwings in Fallowfield

Moon Jar and Moon dark

Buttermere

Waking in Twos

Wood Frog

JAMES LEO McASKILL

Days

Coming Thunder

Joke

Coffee Morning

Baghdad

The Norseman’s First Summer

Radix (Augury)

Labour

from Lasts

ROWLAND BAGNALL

Subtitle

Sonnet

Kopfkino

Viewpoint

In the Funhouse

Evening in Colorado

I–5 North

Jet Ski

A Few Interiors

Hothouse

The Excavation

REBECCA CULLEN

Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings

Mother

Opening

How to Hang Washing

What I See in the Mirror

Midas

6 Brunswick Street

Pillar Box Dress

The Courthouse, Shillelagh

Orlando

Crossing from Marazion

North Sea

VALA THORODDS

Enemies

Through Flight

Inertia

The Difference

Naked except for the jewellery

in

Rain

Luck

Carelessly we have entangled ourselves

Aperture

LISA KELLY

Apple Quartet

Trailing Spouse

Whitewash

Out of Order

A Map Towards Fluency

A Desultory Day

The Dogs of Pénestin

Anonymous

A Chorus of Jacks in 13 Texts

Cuddles are Drying up Like the Sun in a Data Lake

Ladybird

Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noise

ANDREW LATIMER

The Poet in the Garden

from Scott’s Journals

from The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

The Musician

Pavane: Anubis

A Medieval Scene

Mi Donna é Prega

Jamshid

Matthew

Sant Iago

Cleopatra Playing Boules

White & Manila

from Seneca the Younger

Head-Hunting

NEIL FLEMING

New Year’s Eve

Paul McNeil Hill

Camber Sands

Clock with Brass Winding Key

Diagnosis

Double History

Towelling Dry

September’s done

Hartland Point

Sorry for your loss

Fortingall

The Gypsy’s Chandelier

Lamu

ISABEL GALLEYMORE

A False Limpet

At First

The Ash

My Heart’s

The Spiny Cockle

The Ocean

Together

And One Unlucky Starling

A Squirrel

Tended

I’m doing you an injustice

The Crickets

Seahorse

Nuptials

Kind

A Note

Contributors

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Preface

EDITING THE

New Poetries anthologies is the most pleasurable and testing of my editorial tasks. No fixed schedule governs their appearance. I know a new anthology is taking shape when a particular poem announces, it’s that time again. The process begins, usually because I have been enjoying some of the new poets in PN Review and a quick census tells me there is a chine, a prickle, a surfeit, a blessing – a group – of new poets waiting. Many of Carcanet’s first collections take shape in PN Review and New Poetries.

The poem that set me on the road to New Poetries V was ‘This is Yarrow’ by Tara Bergin; to New Poetries VI was ‘Slaughterer’ by Vahni Capildeo. Laura Scott’s ‘and Pierre?’ was the catalyst for this book.

With his ripe face like one of those pale freckled pears

you hold in your hand and his mind shuddering across it

like a bruise – he’s legible to all the world. With his great legs,

broad and strong as the trees, he walks in and out of chapters

smelling of eau de cologne, or an animal that sleeps in a barn.

With his long fingers running across the stubble on his jaw,

he listens to the black Russian rain before he picks up his pen.

With his eyes so blue you’d think he’d drunk the sky down

with all that champagne, he watches the soldiers (red epaulettes

and high boots) drag that boy to the place where they shoot him.

He watches the boy pull his loose coat tight before he sags and slides

down the post. And when it’s all over, he watches them roll him

gently into the hole with the others and before he can look away,

he sees, there in the earth, the boy’s shoulder still moving.

This is not the only Tolstoyan moment in Laura Scott’s poems, but it is the most affecting. It also happens to be a sort of couplet sonnet, and readers familiar with earlier New Poetries know how partial they are to the sonnet, a recurrent, even a pervasive form in these volumes. Its mastery of the poet, the poet’s mastery of it, the reciprocities of the form, are a kind of editorial proof. Can one be original in it? What can it do that it hasn’t done a hundred times before? Can the sonnet genuinely accommodate narrative? Does it (does any lyric) in the post-Culler age dare to risk the preterite? The future tense? Andrew Latimer describes his work in this anthology as starting from a ‘sonnetish poem, with its volta acting as dynamo – propelling and organising’, which ‘makes its material memorable just long enough until it can eventually be scribbled down – during a lunch break, stolen toilet stop’. Several actual and seeming sonnets have found lodging in New Poetries VII. James Leo McAskill, a committed sonneteer, says of his poems, ‘they are as different as they are similar, and are meant to be read as such’.

Laura Scott’s note on her poems speaks for her creative and, by extension, for my editorial stance: ‘So the act of making these poems is also an act of submission. To put it schematically: the image has authority, and the writing must defer to it. The poem has to shed some of its busy self-importance, to lose some of its intention, to go quiet. All the poems do, all they can do, is circle the image, go around the outside of it so that it can occupy the space in the middle.’ As anthologist I declare, ‘the achieved poem has authority, and editing must defer to it.’

Deferring as editor begins when a poem earns its place. I open submission envelopes, glance at covering letters, look over the first poem. In the case of ‘and Pierre?’ I was compelled to read aloud. The poem insisted not on the poet’s but on a reader’s voice (‘legible to all the world’). Once I began to say it, the poem’s prosody, syntax and lineation created anticipation, started generating the variations and surprises that become its drama and its residual magic. Not only the reader experiences this enchantment: the poet too must feel it, standing outside the thing of words she has made. As she re-reads and revises I can imagine her asking, bemused, how language has delivered just this poem. The news that stays news, as Pound called poetry, is that recurring sense of surprise. The poem can be read, can read you, a dozen times and provide incremental pleasures. Feeling produced by language, rather than feeling producing language. Some readers set out to memorise poetry. I prefer to learn by heart.

Different as the poems included in this anthology are – from concrete poems to extended philosophical meditations – they share concerns with form and language, issues they resolve differently. Yet there is coherence in this book as in its predecessors, a sense of continuity with the past and the future of the art. Ned Denny talks of the synthesis in his poems and translations, ‘the apparent paradox of something both highly ordered and numinous, condensed yet expansive, Apollo and Dionysus in one’. Andrew Wynn Owen writes of ‘the mind’s capacity, sometimes, for active self-redirection’. Zohar Atkins feels on firmer ground, declaring, ‘For me, poetry is the discipline of subverting discipline; it is theory in reverse.’ His themes and language are rooted in scripture. So too are Rachel Mann’s (she is a member of the Anglican clergy): ‘The genesis of my poems in this selection lies, in large measure, in acknowledgement of the ever-failing grip the Word has on a culture once saturated by it.’ For Vala Thorrods, ‘The spirit dwells in us like a curse or a spell, and these poems try to embody that haunted feeling.’

The poets express the contrariety of art, the bringing into balance that entails different degrees of self-effacement in the making of the thing that is a poem, which exists in its ‘fundamental otherness’ (Jamie Osborne). It is the poems’ integrity that makes it possible for them to engage with some of the political realities of our time, as with less time-bound experiences. Sumita Chakraborty’s single poem in this book may be ‘an elegy of a kind’, but ‘it was my hope to write the mood of elegy rather than an elegy proper, or to write a way of inhabiting grief rather than exactly writing about grief’. And the poem thus becomes habitable by the reader, an experience rather than a report on experience.

For some of the poets the choice of English is a challenge, to themselves and to the reader; and the choice is never quite complete. Mary Jean Chan, whose poems are political at every level, says, ‘I have chosen to write in English, yet Chinese is always there in my work as its foil or fraternal twin, largely owing to the fact that I only speak in Cantonese or Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and my mother does not speak English.’ She adds, ‘I have experienced how an attentiveness to form – be it a sonnet or pantoum, or simply a tercet or couplet – offers a powerful means to negotiate complex emotions that arise from our lived experiences as social, political and historical beings.’

Rebecca Cullen looks in a different direction, drawing into her poems tones and voices from worlds not immediately her own, as in ‘Majid Sits in a Tree and Sings’:

This morning, I wake with a bird in my heart.

My mother smiles only for me. I bash my car into the wall.

Sometimes she tells me to be quiet. Today, she laughs.

The men came in the hottest part of the day.

A walk, my love, a small walk, she says.

In the stairwell, the mothers hold their children.

The guns shine in the sun. I am a man,

this is no time for play, I do not hide.

We shuffle in, look for a seat in the stands.

A big black bird comes down from the sky.

The grown-ups hold their breath. They are blinking a lot.

The bird likes the meat hanging on the goalposts.

Tonight, my mother says I can sleep in her bed.

I make my back into a curved shell against her legs.

She strokes her palm across my forehead.

In the middle of the night, I watch her on her knees.

She tips her head backwards. I see all of her neck.

A sonnet could not quite have contained the narrative, though there is a kind of sonnet movement up through the fourteenth line, then the I’s perspective changes to register the vulnerability of the ‘she’ and hence of him (and her) self.

Helen Charman too accepts her vocation as at once poetic and political. ‘I think the ongoing work of reconsidering the historical canon can help to clarify the challenges of the present.’ The re-tuning of the canon, and the loosening of bonds with it, have been at the centre of Theophilus Kwek’s adjustment to the contemporary British ‘voice’, a term to whose treachery he is alert. ‘Having grown up with the even cadences of the King James Bible and Shakespeare’s plays, I arrived here in 2013 to find a rhythm – of speaking and living – that was more troubling and yet more alive: an urgent, all-embracing pulse that gently remade all my expectations in favour of a younger, more diverse Britain. I quickly found community among those with different accents and persuasions, and lost an initial shyness over my Singaporean voice.’

The surprises that recommend a poem to an editor and then to a reader, and are often its occasion, are identified by Rowland Bagnall. He’s ‘interested in glitches, particularly when language, sense, and memory go wrong, and in the different ways of using/abusing these malfunctions’, and in his anarchic but curiously ordered studio he declares, ‘It’s possible that my writing has something in common with collage’s particular species of vandalism.’ He adds, with a touch of rueful realism, ‘I like to think of these poems as having nothing to do with me personally, but get the feeling this is not the case.’

What the poets tell us about the occasions for their poems illuminates not only their work but the art more generally, even (or especially) when the information is most particular. Lisa Kelly describes herself as half-Danish and half-deaf. The consequences of the latter are not quite what we might expect:

I have to work hard to listen and this requires me to place you to my right side, to watch your lips, to watch your hands, to watch your gestures. How can form not matter? To understand what you say, I must attempt to control our interrelated physical space. Of course, I often fail and confusion, mis-interpretation, annoyance, as well as humour are by-products. My poems reflect my obsession with form and the physical space that words occupy on the page.

Isabel Galleymore works in what may seem an unusual way. ‘[M]uch of my writing starts with research. Kind [p. 308], for example, emerged from a day spent at an owl sanctuary where many owls have become imprinted: a term used, in this case, for animals who become so familiar with humans