I'm pleased to report that I have a new essay up at Wild Court, titled Larkin Stateside: implicit dialogues between the poetries of Joshua Mehigan and Philip Larkin. You can read it in full by following this link, but here's a taster...
...As so often in the past, transatlantic poetic exchanges enrich both cultures, the differences highlighting just how much we have in common and to how great an extent our non-literary prejudices colour our enjoyment and judgement of exceptional poems...
Anecdotal Poetry. What does this term mean to you? In my experience, it's often invoked disparagingly and dismissively by certain critics, reviewers and editors to describe work that seems to take a rooted place or experience as a point of departure. It's used to imply the poems under scrutiny are somehow lacking in imagination and of less consequent artistic value than pieces that have been written via other approaches.
In fact, this perspective isn't just a slight on the poetry in question, but also a misinterpretation of the very essence of the genre's transformational powers. In summary, it encapsulates a wilful confusion of the nature of poetic truth, as if such poems were a simple relaying and portrayal of fact.
What term might be used in its place? Realist Poetry is useless, as it also imposes similar pigeonholing limits that are equally and intrinsically absurd. For example, surrealism is simmering away just under the surface in any decent so-called realist poem. On second thoughts, I'll leave this last question to people who are obliged to answer it by academic demands and constraints...
I'm pleased to report that I've got a new poem up today over at One Hand Clapping alongside excellent work by the likes of Julia Copus, Samuel Tongue and Mat Riches, etc, etc. You can read it by following this link.
Brian Johnstone’s new collection, The Marks on the Map (Arc Publications, 2021), takes those afore-mentioned maps as a point of departure, observing their landmarks and the consequent parallels that can be drawn with our lives, particularly with the ageing process.
One excellent example can be found in ‘Outfield’, which evokes the development of an Ordnance Survey map…
…A slow collapse
to dereliction – flagged as ‘ruin’
there,
in brackets, on the map – then nothing
on the later OS sheets…
The poem comes alive via Johnstone’s deft description of the human changes that mirror the building’s decline:
…The hillside
clear of habitation, bar the farmhouse
standing empty, your father
gone, bedded in a care home,
blind; the light I saw each evening
switched off, disconnected at the
mains.
In the above piece, Johnstone draws mainly on implicit comparisons that can be made between the building and the people around it. However, in other poems, he portrays the contrasts, as in ‘Primrose’, which also begins with a reference to the Ordnance Survey before homing in (sic) on the specific connotations and ramifications of a landmark on the speaker’s own life:
...New housed ourselves, and wed the year
before,
we wondered what the place had left to
share,
what archaeology of home we might
obtain.
Some floor tiles, red and heavy fired
clay, we left
an age ago in a cottage long moved on
from,
and this small plaque still with us
here today.
A finger plate, it holds the touch of
generations,
the shepherd it depicts guiding them
like flocks
to lower pastures for the coming
autumn days.
This extract contains a pivotal, beautiful turn of phrase, the archaeology of home, that very much encapsulates the drive behind The Marks on the Map. Moreover, Johnstone’s tracing of the gradual loss of the souvenirs plays a pivotal role in pitching his own ageing process against that of the building. Of course, the evocation of autumn in the last line invites connection with the four seasons of life, human beings, nature and buildings all coming together. There’s no instruction to the reader, just juxtapositions that allow implicit connections to be made.
Brian Johnstone’s interpretation of the role of maps, landmarks and buildings in our lives is not only skilled and infused with experience, but it also provides a personal perspective that encourages us to view those roles afresh, leaving us to ponder the marks on our own maps. It might be time to stow our Sat Nav and dig out those old Ordnance Surveys once more.
