Another poet I admire -- Alice Oswald, who has also released new work recently -- two books. One's a collection of flower poems with the imaginative title Weeds and Wild Flowers and one's some kind of moony watery dialogue A Sleepwalk on the Severn.

Her first book Thing in the Gap Stone Stile is really good. Dart, her second, is what cemented her fame -- a book-length poem about the river Dart, taking on real speech from people who live and work around it. I've never managed to make it all the way through, possessing as I do the attention span of a gnat. Her next book is patchier, imo, than her first -- Woods Etc sometimes seems to devolve into a weird solipsistic kind of watery moony planty naturey wishwash which it's difficult for me to get too excited about. But it also has some great pieces, such as the one below.

I wonder mainly whether she will get better, stay the same, or become strangely populist -- she is certainly at this point one of the best-known and -celebrated contemporary poets in the UK. The poems I've read from her new collection haven't impressed me as much as I'd hoped (one example -- [link] ). I also think there are some big limitations in the angle she's adopted -- which really is all style when it comes down to it. And it's a great style, refreshing at first and allowing some brilliant sounds & music, startling juxtapositions, etc. All that stuff. But finally there's not a great deal of range, at least exhibited so far -- the long narrative poem that finishes her first book, 'The Men of Gotham', and perhaps her other new book with its poem-cum-play-cum-dialogue are possible refutations to this.

I track her style as originating quite directly from the Ted Hughes collection Wodwo -- and the title poem of that, too, which you can find here - [link] . Just like the speaker of that poem, her work is constantly torn between a kind of self-abandoning ecstasy when encountering the natural world, and an uneasy self-preoccupation (it's all I this and I that, I being terribly dramatic in such a way that the smallest of personal actions are given an amplified space). In fact she shares a great deal with Louise Glück in several respects. Oswald's new collection Weeds and Wild Flowers is unsurprisingly all about plants, often in monologue form; so too was Glück's The Wild Iris, perhaps her best book (perhaps her best book by a mile). But it's this self-caught-up/self-disowning style and its amplified space for the melodramatic action and statement that provides the most obvious link between the two poets. Glück is constantly assuming a position of privileged knowledge through her narrators, which she is so kind as to share with the reader: "At the end of my suffering / there was a door. // Hear me out: that which you call death / I remember". etc. I suppose what I want in the end from Oswald is a sense of things really examined, really explored in a penetrative manner (what would Freud say?). Her approach brings to life the presence of natural objects -- their music, the sensual data of their existence -- but in the end seems to build mostly superficially, often in a lateral way via simile. It's like poetic riffing. I'd like to see something a bit more ambitious in its thematic goals -- rather than simply in its sheer length/in the expanse of that which is allowed to drift underneath the roving transformative eye of her poetic manner.

Anyway, the poem. This was much more rambling than I intended. I might well post a couple more in subsequent journals as I did with E Jones.


Head of a Dandelion

This is the dandelion with its thousand faculties

like an old woman taken by the neck
and shaken to pieces.

This is the dust-flower flitting away.

This is the flower of amnesia.
It has opened its head to the wind,
all havoc and weakness,

as if a wooden man should stroll through fire…

In this unequal trial, one thing
controls the invisible violence of the air,

the other gets smashed and will not give in.

One thing flexes its tail causing widespread devastation,
it takes hold of the trees, it blows their failings out of them,
it throws in sideways, it flashes the river upriver;

the other thing gives up its skin and bones,
goes up in smoke, lets go of its ashes…

and this is the flower of no property,
this is the wind-bitten dandelion
worn away to its one recalcitrant element

like when Osiris
blows his scales and weighs the soul with a feather.



Alice Oswald, Woods etc.

Counterpart piece to the last I posted --


Tiger in the Menagerie

No one could say how the tiger got into the menagerie.
It was too flash, too blue,
too much like the painting of a tiger.

At night the bars of the cage and the stripes of the tiger
looked into each other so long
that when it was time for those eyes to rock shut

the bars were the lashes of the stripes
the stripes were the lashes of the bars

and they walked together in their dreams so long
through the long colonade
that shed its fretwork to the Indian main

that when the sun rose they'd gone and the tiger was
one clear orange eye that walked into the menagerie.

No one could say how the tiger got out in the menagerie.
It was too bright, too bare.
If the menagerie could, it would say 'tiger'.

If the aviary could, it would lock its door.
Its heart began to beat in rows of rising birds
when the tiger came inside to wait.

Emma Jones, The Striped World


And here's one other I quite like, in case you're interested -- [link]

Just a poem. No opinion yet on the book as a whole (it's a grower, as they say), but --


Painted Tigers

have the same look, of something surprised.
But, at the same time, not surprised at all -

A vacancy, over which the stripes ride,
in a fictive jungle, and ministered

by Delacroix, who heats the vacancy.
Or by whoever found the tiger in

my 1950s three-toned textbook
trees and drew it out.

This illustration needs no root.
Stripes create the tiger for the eye;

the gallery wall hosts melanin shadows;
I have a plastic tiger on my desk finds prey in nothing
but the vacancy of shuttered windows.

I saw a copy of a copy once.
It was a Chinese painting, post-war;
in it, the tiger stands on a mountain,

looking out. Snow threatens him. His stripes
bead and sag. In the distance, a grey town.

The caption reads: 'the tiger has something on his mind'.
And in the commentary the tiger

is 'the symbol of the muffled artist'.
In the sky, a Communist

Creator leans, bearded and delicate,
through stilled winds, and the tiger stands, present;

and resolutely absent, too, looking
out onto nothing but an absence of tigers.

Snow is a philosophy. It paints tigers.
And the tiger has nothing on his mind.


Emma Jones, The Striped World

Just a few quick updates. I'm trying to work myself up towards napowrimo a bit, as I've done no writing for about a month. C'est la vie. Also currently researching for a publishing essay -- my motif is pressure & trepanation. God knows how that's going to work.

I had another essay, Poetry & Prayer published recently in issue 2 of the horizon review -- you can read it here [link] -- thoughts welcome.

Mimesis 6 is coming along slowly but surely. Some really cool poets involved -- Eleanor Rees, Alison Brackenbury, Paul Muldoon, Luke Kennard, etc etc -- watch this space.

Er, I guess that's it. Here's a poem.


Nude Interrogation

Did you kill anyone over there? Angelica shifts her gaze from the Janis Joplin poster to the Jimi Hendrix, lifting the pale muslin blouse over her head. The blacklight deepens the blues when the needle drops into the first groove of "All Along the Watchtower." I don't want to look at the floor. Did you kill anyone? Did you dig a hole, crawl inside, and wait for your target? Her miniskirt drops into a rainbow at her feet. Sandalwood incense hangs a slow comet of perfume over the room. I shake my head. She unhooks her bra and flings it against a bookcase made of plywood and cinderblocks. Did you use an M-16, a hand-grenade, a bayonet, or your own two strong hands, both thumbs pressed against that little bird in the throat? She stands with her left thumb hooked into the elastic of her sky-blue panties. When she flicks off the blacklight, snowy hills rush up to the windows. Did you kill anyone over there? Are you right-handed or left-handed? Did you drop your gun afterwards? Did you kneel beside the corpse and turn it over? She's nude against the falling snow. Yes. The record spins like a bull's-eye on the far wall of Xanadu. Yes, I say. I was scared of the silence. The night was too big. And afterwards, I couldn't stop looking up at the sky.

-- Yusef Komunyakaa

Thanks to the wonders of recession, the £4 issue of Mimesis (which includes postage & packaging) will set those of you in the US back a mere $5.50 (6,79 Canadian), so says Google: [link]

Naturally this means subscription prices are affected too. Did I mention that postage and packaging are free? They're free.

Hop on over to our site [link] or direct to the order page at [link] .

Help us continue to publish great poetry, and help yourself to a great read in the process!

Cheers.



-- along with sample poems.





According to Prabhu
ADITI MACHADO

The woman on the pavement,
according to Prabhu, will be killed
on stone, like a chicken in the market.
Until then, she must live
with a pollution of rats.

Prabhu watches her body coil
through binoculars from his flat that smells
of clinic. When she coughs,
he notes the bones, the skeleton
of her lungs, visible on her back.

Prabhu takes out a pen, tests it against paper,
cold as a stethoscope on a chest.
Every half hour he looks out the window,
consults the x-ray of her face.

(from the current issue)





- ISSUE 05 -

Poems from:

E. Kristin Anderson, Joanna Boulter, Iain Britton, Jeff Calhoun, Brent Fisk, Sally Flint, Annie Katchinska, Aditi Machado, Ian McLachlan, Esther Greenleaf Mürer, Alistair Noon, Phoebe North, David Pitcher, Christine Potter, Carolyn Srygley-Moore, and Cole Swensen.

Prose:

Joanna Boulter on Poetry as Music, Music with Poetry.

Jane Holland on the naming of poems.

Luke Kennard on John Ash and The New Symbolism.

Artwork from:

Patrick Hruby (cover), Magdalena Rachel and Asad T. Syed.



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