Algebra of Owls

Algebra of Owls is one of the best webzines around, so I'm especially pleased to have a new poem there today (see this link). Of course, the term "new" is often relative, as is the case with this piece. I wrote a first draft some twenty years ago and it's gone through at least a dozen versions since then before finally coming together a few months ago. All that effort for so few words...

Recipes and poems

While thinking about my event at Poetry in Aldeburgh next weekend (where I'll be reading poems with a gastronomic and oenological slant) I was reminded how recipes resemble poems. Once you show them to other people, they cease to be yours and take on new interpretations.

Opening the floodgates, S.A. Leavesley's How to Grow Matches

When reviewing, it’s usually wise to avoid invoking a metaphor or an image that might draw attention away from the poet and towards the critic. Any such flashiness invites accusations of selfishness and flashiness, because a review should be about the book in question, not about the reviewer.

However, there are a few cases where an exception is justified, where a metaphor can enlighten and illustrate. S.A. Leavesley’s pamphlet, How to Grow Matches (Against the Grain Poetry Press, 2018), is a good example: each piece finds her opening the floodgates at a precise moment, her delicately controlled releases of anger bringing about effects many miles downstream.

One such instance occurs in the closing stanza to ’Her Cumuli Collector’:

“…The day he left, not a single wisp of white

or grey against the bright blue sky.

But it rained non-stop inside her: heavy,

pounding – the rain of dark angels.”

These lines demonstrate Leavesley’s knowledge of language’s nuts and bolts, of how to subvert them to effect, as she removes the main verb from her first sentence, thus unsettling the reader, before homing in on her clashing, conflicting final image. Moreover, her line break between “heavy” and “pounding” exacerbates that very sensation.

How to Grow Matches uses the challenging of linguistic convention to ramp up its implicit conflicts, as in the final lines of ’Bowl of oranges: a still life’…

“…She pinches her mouth closed,

tightens her heart muscle to a fist,

hands her husband a fresh orange.”

The pivotal word here is “closed”. It’s unexpected and casts a new, more powerful light on the verb that precedes it.

Anger often implies and involves the loss of control, but S.A. Leavesley shows that its impact is actually far greater when used with a deft touch. How to Grow Matches is an excellent pamphlet from a new press that deserves to find a spot at the top table of U.K. poetry pamphlet publishing. I’ll be keeping a close eye on its development.

Tickets for Poetry in Aldeburgh

With little more than three weeks to go, tickets for Poetry in Aldeburgh are selling fast. A quick look at their website (see here) tells you that several of the workshops have already sold out, although seats are still available for all the readings.

As for my own event, it's titled "Poetry of Food and Cooking", and will take place in the Peter Pears Gallery on Sunday 4th November at 1 p.m.. Helena Nelson will be introducing Alison Brackenbury, Rosie Sheppard and myself, and there's also sure to be a drop of free Spanish wine on show, maybe even from deepest Extremadura.

The build-up to the festival is an exciting time: I've already got tickets for several events apart from mine, and I'm now weighing up whether to fill up my timetable even more or leave some gaps to relish the people and place as well as the poetry itself...

Clare Best's The Missing List

Rogue Strands rarely ventures beyond poetry, but today’s an exception due to Clare Best’s prose memoir, The Missing List (Linen Press, 2018). This post isn’t a review as such, just a few reflections on her book.

Clare Best is perhaps best known for her fine poetry, so it’s worth making a general point that also applies to this text in particular: many reviewers lapse into erroneous critical shorthand when excellent poets lend their hand to prose, invoking terms such as “lyrical” or “poetic”. In fact, the signs of a successful shift of genre are far more subtle.

For example, an assured poet knows how to capture a scene via a layering effect, building up seemingly insignificant details until they explode into meaning. Clare Best manages just such an effect in many scenes throughout The Missing List. Moreover, a poet is also an expert in telling their narrative via a collage of perspectives and moments, having learnt how to place trust in their reader, allowing connections to be made organically. Clare Best shows her mastery of the technique in The Missing List.

The subject matter of this book is childhood sexual abuse, which again lends itself to more critical shorthand such as “harrowing” or “moving”. However, the author’s achievement lies in involving the reader in her story to such an extent that she lifts her memoir into the wider realm of implicit questioning of how societies operate and how humans relationships develop.

Clare Best will be reading from The Missing List at an event at the University of Sussex of 17^th October, followed by a triple book launch with Jeremy Page and Kay Syrad in Lewes on 24^th October. I only wish I could make it along!

It's time for a "Big Announcement"

I'm delighted to announce the inaugural Rogue Strands Poetry Reading, co-organised by Mat Riches and myself, with a mouth-watering line-up...

ISSNs for poetry magazines

The ISSN is an international code that's used to identify the title of serial publications (see here the British Library's explanation of the system). It's free to obtain and most poetry magazines have traditionally worn one.

An ISSN isn't related to legal deposit, but it does facilitate the presence of a magazine in libraries, which use it as a fundamental identifier. Moreover, an ISSN enables poets to register their publications in magazines with ALCS. This means that poets might well end up getting money indirectly for their poem even if the journal in question can't afford to pay its contributors directly.

All of the above brings me on to the crux of my post: several excellent new print-based poetry magazines have appeared in the past few years in the U.K. with a worrying trend of not displaying an ISSN. Is there some reason for this that goes over my head?