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 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 nego
tiate 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.’