The Frogmore Papers' 100th Issue

The Frogmore Papers is one of my favourite poetry magazines. In fact, it's accompanied me pretty much throughout my poetic life. Looking back through my records before writing this blog post, I noticed I first had a poem in its pages in Issue 57 back in 2001. That was followed by another in Issue 68 (2006), a third in Issue 76 (2010) and two more in Issue 81 (2013).

Jeremy Page, as well as being the journal's founder and long-time editor, is also an excellent poet, so it's a privilege whenever he chooses my work for publication. As a consequence, I'm especially pleased to have a further two poems in the brand-new commemorative 100th issue alongside the likes of Simon Armitage.

You can get hold of a copy for yourself at The Frogmore Press website (see this link), but here's the gorgeous cover by way of a taster...

Past, new and future losses, Jeremy Page's The Naming

Never flashy, never trendy, Jeremy Page’s poetry simply goes about the business of moving its readers via emotional immersion in a moment or experience. What’s more, if his first full collection, Closing Time (Pindrop Press, 2014) was something of a ‘Best so far’, his second collection, The Naming (The Frogmore Press, 2021) displays a coherent, cohesive vision that lifts it an extra notch.

Throughout The Naming, Page once more puts to bed the misconception that a poetry anchored in a specific period and a specific generation can never be universal in appeal. In fact, the reverse is true, as borne out by poems such as ‘Still Life, Folkestone’, which begins as follows:

Her window is all 60s GDR:
two empty cartons flank
a twin pack of kitchen roll
centre stage; a tin of carrots,
label faded by the sun, confronts
a can of processed peas
on doilies drained to twenty
shades of grey, and yes,
she is open for business…

The implicit consequences of the passing of time form a pivotal element in the above extract, but also reverberate throughout this collection, gaining further resonance in poems of past, new and future losses. The first of these three is addressed in ‘Foreign Country’ via an exquisite ending…

…The past is a foreign country —
we were fluent in the language once.

The second, meanwhile, is expressed through poems that explore the immediate aftermath of grief, as in ‘Last Times’…

I’ll never know
when she swam
for the last time….

…but I’ll always know
where I was
when she breathed her last —
upstairs from where she lay,
half asleep, willing
the suffering to end,
willing it not to.

This layered portrayal of intense emotion via everyday language is a typical quality of Jeremy Page’s poetry, and yet again it comes to the fore in the third type of losses he encounters throughout The Naming: future losses, be they places or people. One such example is ‘The Teacher’:

Who knows
if we’ll meet again…?
…But if that’s what
we’re both thinking
then we’re as careful
as each other not to say it
while we revisit the past
and fill in the gaps,
in this anonymous London café.

Lovely to see you, we both agree
and go our separate ways.

This fine rendering of social interaction unpeels the turmoil that lies just beneath the veneer of inconsequential conversations. Again, Page takes supposedly banal language and demonstrates its latent emotional charge.

Many of the poems in The Naming might seem slight on a first, superficial reading, but their impact is gradual and accumulative. It slowly builds to a significant achievement that signposts Jeremy Page’s importance as a poet. Read this book, give it time, re-read it, let its lines sear their place in your memory. That’s the power of these unassuming poems. Underestimate them at your peril!

A chronicle of survival, Jeremy Page's Closing Time

In Closing Time, his recent full collection from Pindrop Press, Jeremy Page shows us how to survive terrible emotional suffering with our humanity intact. This is not confessional poetry. It's a book that charts self-reconciliation, stirring empathy on every page.

Page's verse is understated yet highly charged. One such example is "Another Elephant". This poem engages with the reader via the use of reportage and the layering of narrative detail, as is demonstrated by its opening stanza:

"In winter, when the trees are bare,
I can stand here at my window
with that wooden Ganesh on the sill,
and look back to the old house
where it all goes on as it always did
except that I'm not there -
not sweeping the garden path
nor making another pot of tea,
not reading Peace at Last at bedtime
nor cleaning out the rodents' cage..."

An accumulation of specifics is what draws us in and involves us. This enables Page to step up a gear in the second stanza, where he's not afraid to tackle big abstract nouns:

"...And everything that brought me here -
the words, the silences, the pain,
the changing of so many locks -
is the other elephant in the room."

Closing Time is a precise book. It showcases a linguist's knowledge of how to use words to create a ripple. Moreover, the collection is meticulously constructed. The juxtaposition of certain poems has implicit ramifications that are significant. For instance, a hypothetical disappearance/possible suicide note titled "To Whom It May Concern" precedes "Shaving My Father", which is a celebration of love in all its transience:

"...Tomorrow he may not know
who I am or who I was,
but today he does, and is grateful
for the care I take
as I soap his face
with the badger hair brush..."

In other words, Page is questioning the effect of one poem by allowing us to compare and contrast it with the opposite page. He' helping the reader to undergo a similar process to himself, fighting back from the brink via love.

In this collection, the poet reconciles memory with the present, the past with the future. He interlocks and interweaves departures and arrivals, so it's also apt (and no accident) that he should bring the book to an end with the following lines:

"...and I see time future
contained in time past, and understand at last
why home is where we start from."

Closing Time might illustrate great pain, but it's packed with life and is written by a poet who never falls back on facile devices to move us. I feel privileged to have had the chance to review it.

Review: In and Out of the Dark Wood, by Jeremy Page

Jeremy Page is both an editor and a poet. This combination has served him well in his excellent new pamphlet, In and Out of the Dark Wood, recently published by Happenstance Press.

He pulls off a delicate trick: there are few fireworks in the pamphlet, an absence of obvious devices, wordplay or heavy musical patterning, yet this collection is far from being chopped-up prose. In fact, it's packed with terrific poetry.

Page builds an unobtrusive music that's intrinsically married to his semantics. Language grafts here, enabling us first to identify with scenarios and then to transform them into a new creative process in the context of our own lives. All this sounds slightly pompous and theoretical, but few poets achieve time and time again as he does in this book...

Being here

Here, on the garden bench in high summer
we can agree it's over while the kids indoors,
oblivious, carry on and bicker and half watch TV;
we can agree that, no, we never expected
things would turn out like this, and pour ourselves
another glass of wine; agree that this is
somewhere that we never meant to be,
that in high summer it's a cold and godless place.

This poem displays an extraordinary understandings of how effects are obtained. The melody of everyday language is heightened by subtle repetition, while the killer word is "somewhere" at the start of the penultimate line. It doesn't need to shout its status as a metaphor from the poetic rafters. Instead, Page allows its ramifications to creep up on us, us just as they did on the participants in the scene.

In and Out of the Dark Wood might seem an intensely sad collection in much of its subject matter: the slip of generations, the loss of memory and the aftermath of divorce. Nevertheless, it's also a celebration of Page's generosity of sentiment. Experiences and observations are shared with such an acute and playful eye, the editor-poet revelling in life even when pain abounds.

I thoroughly recommend In and Out of the Dark Wood, one of the most understated yet outstanding pamphlets to have been published so far this year. Jeremy Page writes poetry that's been carved from experience.