Omar Sabbagh, "Y Knots"

 

Omar Sabbagh is a very widely published poet, writer and critic. Over the last two decades, his poetry has appeared in many prestigious venues, such as: Poetry Review, PN Review, Agenda, Acumen, New Humanist, (T&F) New Writing, The Reader Magazine, Stand, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Banipal, The Warwick Review, The Wolf, among many others. For Echo was his sixth poetry collection with Cinnamon Press, Spring 2024. His first collection and his third were, respectively: My Only Ever Oedipal Complaint and To The Middle of Love (Cinnamon Press, 2010/17). His fourth, But It Was an Important Failure, was published in early 2020. And Morning Lit: Portals After Alia, his fifth collection with Cinnamon Press, was published in early 2022. His Beirut novella, Via Negativa: A Parable of Exile, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in March 2016; and his Dubai novella, Minutes from the Miracle City, was published with Fairlight Books in July 2019. He has published much short fiction, too, some of it prize-winning. A study of the oeuvre of Professor Fiona Sampson, Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, was published with Anthem Press in 2020, and was released in revised, paperback edition at the end of 2021. His book of Lebanese verse narratives, Cedar: Scenes from Lebanese Life, was published with Northside House in summer of 2023; and a collection of his published short fictions, Y Knots, was published with Liquorice Fish Books in autumn of 2023. RIP: Poems after Gaza & Words after Waddah is his latest work, a pamphlet published with Cinnamon Press, March 2024.  He holds a BA in PPE from Oxford, three MAs in English Literature, Creative and Life Writing, and Philosophy, all from the University of London, and a PhD in English Literature from KCL. From 2011-2013 he was Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and he taught at the American University in Dubai (AUD), where he was Associate Professor of English from 2014 to 2024. He has just begun a new role in Creative Writing and Literature at the Lebanese American University (LAU) in Beirut.

About Y Knots: Short Fictions 
Y Knots is a collection of short fictions, some prize-winning, collating in one volume most of Sabbagh’s best short imaginative prose published between 2004 and 2022. Of the twenty-one entries collected in this book, the fictions vary from the serious-minded to the highly playful and satiric, from realistic narratives to surrealistic ones, as well as from fully-formed stories to extracts from putatively longer narratives. Characters leap off the page and stories rivet, whether the tensions that spur the narratives are resolved or merely explored. Linguistically dexterous and scintillating with intelligence and wit, this book combines deep and compassionate observation with humour and drama, making use of a variegated array of forms and styles, rendering this collection a flaring exhibition of highly engaging and insightful prose.  

You can read more about Y Knots on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read a short excerpt from the book

From Y Knots, by Omar Sabbagh

Dye

‘Should I dye my hair this weekend?’

The woman who asked this, whisper-thin in body, had hair the colour of cinnamon, though closer to sparkling raven at times.

‘Well … hmmm … it’s not as bright or juicy as I’ve seen it …’  The woman who responded was no such wraith; she was voluble in body, and bone-deep with goodness because her father had been a baker, and she had grown up, nay, she had leavened with the smell of bready genesis and flour in her nostrils from the early hours.

Twirling her black-pecked white skirt as though to skitter the scent of one who was solicitous, the first woman said, ‘Xavier started on my good side this morning. He told me my hair was nice in brown and if I was German because German women have brown hair.’

The bigger woman chuckled.

‘So should I? Should I dye my hair? I can, this weekend, I mean, I have enough.’

‘Dye your hair or don’t dye your hair,’ the second said. ‘Either way, you’ll still look fabulous.’ Given what we know of this second woman, one might have expected her to have formed some sort of metaphor or simile from the repertoire or the arsenal of bread. And so in fact she did.

‘You’ll always be like a sweet bun, honey, the kind my old father used to make. Oooo … But they were good! The first bite of your mouthed morsel would be a nomad, in some land over the tongue, melting and chewed and unchartered …’

The first woman put a finger to her lips, playfully, grinning from ear to ear, as though she were a child being coddled by a favourite aunt; a tad odd, for these two women, colleagues and friends were very close in age. Indeed, the far more carrot-haired lady, a sliver of coquetry, and the more bounteous woman, whose chocolate skin resonated with a vital periwinkle sheen, were named Mathilda and Marie-Rose, respectively; the one from San Francisco, the other form Trinidad.  

Martin Figura, "The Remaining Men"

Martin Figura was (some time ago now) described in a hospital referral letter (bad back) as ‘a pleasant 58 year old gentleman.’ His collection and show Whistle were shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. Shed (Gatehouse Press) and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) were both published in 2016. During the first lockdown he began the monthly Zoom event Live From The Butchery with Helen Ivory and Kate Birch. It won the Best Spoken Word Night Saboteur Award. In 2021 he was Salisbury NHS Writer in Residence, with a pamphlet My Name is Mercy from Fair Acre Press. Some of this work has been filmed with Olivia Coleman and published in the Guardian. A second pamphlet from Fair Acre Press, Sixteen Sonnets for Care, from a commission for Social Care charities was published in 2022. His new collection The Remaining Men came out with Cinnamon Press in February 2024. He lives in Norwich with Helen Ivory and sciatica. The show Shed is returning to the stage in April 2024, three years after its Covid postponement. Martin has performed his work all over the place from Diss to New York to New Delhi and on BBC 1 Breakfast. His website is here. 

About The Remaining Men, by Martin Figura
The collection is I suppose a reckoning - an attempt to make sense of how we and I got here, from when I arrived on the scene in 1956. It includes just a few autobiographical poems, but mostly looks outward to small human stories. There are some poems about political leaders, that I have mostly tried to reduce to that same human level, whatever the colour of their politics. I realise it is quite ambitious and wide in its range, but hope I’ve manged to pull the threads together in a convincing way.

As the title implies, I have touched on what has been expected of men, particularly working-class men, and how they have been discarded as the world has changed about them. In an age when men are widely looked on in a pejorative way, and with plenty of justification, I hope I’ve managed to do this with some tenderness and understanding. I am not tackling the so called ‘culture wars’ - that minefield doesn’t need another old white man blundering about in it. In addition to my own experiences, I’ve also drawn on residences including a Miners’ village in Durham, the NHS, The Soldiers’ Charity and Social Services. 

You can read more about The Remaining Men on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of the book by Peter Raynard on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From The Remaining Men

The Remaining Men 

When the men surfaced for the last time and dispersed 

some were left over. These men wandered about the town 

until they each found their own particular sweet spot.  

Then they just stood there, looking out over the scarred coast

through red-rimmed eyes to the rough brown sea.  

As the days went by people gave up asking them 

why so still and could they fetch someone 

or something? They became like street signage, 

A-boards, parked prams or tied up dogs; something

to be manoeuvred around. As the months went by 

the men became hardened to difficult weather 

filling their coat pockets with hail. During the great storm 

of Eighty-Seven, their caps blew off and went cartwheeling 

down the streets with bin lids. As the years went by 

the slagheaps faded to green and saplings were planted.  

The men began to petrify into monuments. When 

the new road for the business park went through 

a lot of them were tipped back onto trollies, like the ones 

railway porters used to use, then loaded on to flatbed trucks 

with the traffic cones. Most were broken down for aggregate.  

The lucky ones were sold off as novelty porch lights 

and stood outside front doors on the new estate 

illuminating small front lawns and driveways.  

As the decades went by, saplings became sycamores 

and elms and named Colliery Wood. In autumn

the early morning light on them was glorious 

and cycle paths made their way there. The remaining 

men were defaced by graffiti and badly worn 

by then, many considered them to be an eyesore.  

When children asked what they were, not everyone 

could remember and of those that did, few were believed.  

As the centuries went by, they all but disappeared, 

only the circle in the park remained. Archaeologists 

and historians disagree about how they came to be there 

and what they might have been used for.

Harold Wilson Rows Towards Bishop Rock  

Harold, knees like little moons, bends 
his back, puffs through the clamouring
halyards of the bay. Always six moves ahead 
of the other buggers, be they Old Etonians 
or fellow grammar grubbers.  And where else 
to escape serious concerns, but these Scilly Isles.  
 
The cormorant is attentive company 
at the blunt end of the boat, kinked wings 
hung out to dry, Harold’s words gulped down 
like slippery fish. The oars are worn soft 
in their locks, while he rows he recalls himself
a boy in a school cap, at the steps of Number Ten. 
 
On the slipway, Mary diminishes to the red dot 
of her coat.  The lighthouse lays down her path, 
tugs the glow of Gannex mac and pipe smoke 
through the net curtain of mizzle. Mary turns,
heads up the slope towards the archipelago’s 
clustered lights and their ugly little bungalow.

Featured Poet: Charles Bennett

Before establishing himself as an academic, Charles Bennett was the Creative Director of Ledbury Poetry Festival, and has acted as writer-in-residence for Wicken Fen. Additionally, his work with choral composer Bob Chilcott has seen him hailed as a memorable and mesmerising librettist. He lives on the edge of Northamptonshire & Leicestershire with his wife, daughter and dog. His website is http://www.charlesbennett.net/ 

Charles's new collection, Cloud River, is a book of lyrical landscape poetry set in the Cambridgeshire Fens; a landscape which, at first impression, seems flat, dull and featureless. The startling originality of the book stems from its delighted mission to revise and overturn these impressions. Through an examination of lines (on fields, maps, the sky and the page) it slowly but powerfully reveals the intrinsic interest, peculiarity and dynamism of the Fens. In so doing, it calls for aesthetic concepts of beauty to be re-examined; and, in its flowing music, exemplifies how a confrontation with level lands, straight rivers and big skies can result in a balancing of spirit and a fresh appreciation of England’s lowest and newest landscape. Featured below is a poem from the collection.

.
Sky-Plough

Slung through a thrown ascent
and tuned to the sweet track of its destination,

the polished arrow of a plough
smoothes the air apart to let it breathe.

Drawn like the fine nib of a deft pen,
the cleft of its blade is a cut that does no harm.

In the wake of its stroke, the sky unzips her skin.
The seeds of clouds are planted in a white scar.

As if I were being sown with fine weather,
I read its opening line on the blue field.