Ruth Bidgood, "Chosen Poems," with a memoir by Merryn Williams

By Merryn Williams 

I first met Ruth Bidgood (1922-2022) when I was a struggling new poet and she was one of the most eminent Welsh poets in English. We shared a love of the "green desert" of mid-Wales – ruined cottages, ever-changing weather, high hills you could ascend into a "cold kingdom of black bog and rock." She had retreated to the tiny village of Abergwesyn, where she lived quietly, after several silent years in the Home Counties and a painful divorce.  

Her language was always plain and clear, what Wordsworth called "the real language of men." Here is a short poem which expresses piercing sorrow through the simplest images:

Elegy for Sarah

Bitter apples load the tree

by a girl’s grave

in a tangle of summer weeds.

Small wet apples glow

through summer rain.

"My days are past"

she cries from her stone,

"my purposes are broken off" –

apple bough broken,

fallen in dripping weeds.

"even the thoughts of my heart."

My thoughts, my purposes, my days

broken among weeds,

and summer rain falling

on wet stone, bitter apples.

That’s exactly how it feels, standing near a crumbling Welsh church in the rain thinking of the lives that have ended. She was interested in exploring, not so much the hilly country itself, as landscapes of the mind:

Acquaintance

It was from a border county of my life

you crossed into another country, 

having never settled. Smoke rose one dawn

from the overnight house for which

your thrown stone transitorily defined

a patch of my waste land; but soon

the hut was derelict. Acquaintance ending

seems not to warrant uneasier weather

than a fraction of wind-change brings;

yet over my moors the sky sags now,

black with irrational certainty

of departures. From your hasty thatch

rushes loosen, blow east. The heartland may be next

to know depopulation.

A relationship which never became a close friendship is described through images of the sparsely populated land around Abergwesyn. And next thing you know, her family is about to break up.

 Ruth immersed herself in local history and wrote wonderful poems about obscure and vanished people - servants, small farmers, a man who emigrates to Australia and a man who doesn’t ("Emu’s Egg"). She wrote too about the great subjects of darkness and light ("Driving through 95% Eclipse"), about the threats to, and from nature ("Slate Quarry, Penceulan"), and restrainedly about her deep love for a man who died ("Voyage"). She never talked much about herself, so after her death and with the permission of her children, I explored her previous life as a girl in Port Talbot (where Richard Burton was a schoolmate), a Wren in wartime and a 1950s housewife. The poetry came late, coinciding with her move back to Wales, and although she went on writing well into her nineties the great poems belong to the Abergwesyn years. It turned out that this little patch of earth yielded an inexhaustible subject, and I find myself re-reading her poems constantly and with growing admiration.

You can read more about Chosen Poems by Ruth Bidgood, with a memoir by Merryn Williams, here. 

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, "Identified Flying Objects"

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is a retired mathematician living in London. He is the current poetry editor of the online magazine London Grip and, in partnership with Nancy Mattson, has for over twenty years organised the Islington reading series Poetry in the Crypt (now re-invented as Poetry Above the Crypt). His latest book, Identified Flying Objects, contains poems triggered by quotations from the prophet Ezekiel and thus maintains the fondness for unusually-themed collections shown in his previous publications Poems in the Case, which combines poetry with a murder mystery, and Fred & Blossom which tells a more or less true story of love and light aviation in the 1930s.

 

About Identified Flying Objects, by Michael Bartolomew-Biggs
The USP for Identified Flying Objects is that all the poems are linked to quotations from the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. The idea of using this as a basis for a collection came to the author when he was semi-immobilised with a broken leg and, like Ezekiel, was working out how to deal with misfortune. The Book of Ezekiel is of course concerned with a much bigger misfortune – the plight of the Israelites taken captive by the Babylonians during the 6th century BC – and it seeks both to explain why God let it happen and also to offer a divine promise of eventual release.

Whatever one believes about its theological content, the Book of Ezekiel does contain some remarkable passages such as the first proposal for a heart transplant and an almost cinematic image of a valley full of dry bones which reassemble themselves and then gain sinews, flesh and skin to become living bodies. More down-to-earth (and still relevant) are the stern and imaginative rebukes Ezekiel delivers to corrupt and abusive rulers and his exasperated likening of the general public to ill-natured sheep led by incompetent and irresponsible shepherds. And of course there are also his mysterious visions in the sky which inspire the collection’s title poem.

Although the poems in this collection have been triggered by some of Ezekiel’s words they do not aim to paraphrase Ezekiel’s message. Some of them place an Ezekiel-like (or Ezekiel-lite!) speaker in a modern setting while others offer a twenty-first century reaction to a single image from the prophet’s text. Ezekiel might recognise – even endorse – the sentiments of a few of the poems; but many of them would probably puzzle him or even arouse his disapproval.  Attitudes have changed in the last two and half thousand years and Ezekiel’s view of the collection might well include a Hebrew equivalent of the word “woke”. But, even if his words have been carelessly and anachronistically appropriated, Ezekiel’s prophetic voice might still be heard, urging present-day readers to resist the regrettably common human tendency to ignore well-founded predictions.

From Identified Flying Objects

Heart Transplants - Side Effects & FAQs  

Rejection is a major issue
when a doctor takes a stone-still heart  
and substitutes donated tissue.

But if physicians have dismissed you
as a hopeless case you’ll take the risk – 
rejection’s not your biggest issue.

At the brink of that abyss you
wish you had been born with nerves of steel
instead of much-too-nervous tissue.

When something inside’s gone amiss you
might not need replacement body parts
so much as fresh supplies of sisu.
**

You meet your surgeons who address you
only from behind a mask: perhaps 
because they do not want to face you?

You’re told by the anaesthetist you
sleep before you’ve counted down from ten.
You hope his needle doesn’t miss you.

You dream that nurses come and kiss you
wearing scrubs – are antiseptic pecks 
distractions so they can undress you?

And when you start to convalesce, you
don’t get solid food: will you survive
digesting only tiramisu?
**

I’ll turn your stone hearts into flesh: you …
needn’t care what rocks you’ll lose – your faith
in miracles is what’s at issue.

If old resentment finds a fissure
In your new-made heart my remedy
is grafting in forgiving tissue.

(Redemption is a bigger issue.)

I will also give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. Ezekiel 36:26

Sisu is a Finnish word whose meaning can be approximated by a combination of such concepts as stoicism and determined resistance.

Social Distancing

We are managing the situation.

Whenever people flow like water
through the holy interlocking boxes
of a stadium, emporium
or auditorium, their leaders
and role models must be seen among them
only briefly rubbing elbows –
never pressing hands – and passing on 
no more than they brought in with them.
They are all in this together.

As they stream through lobbies,
passages and concourses
from north and south not one of them 
may leave the way they entered.
All turnstile counters click in one direction
for the regular attenders;
any strangers, misfits
or occasional creatives
have to slip through gaps in calculation.

He who enters by the way of the north gate to worship shall go out by the way of the south gate; and he who enters by the way of the south gate shall go out by the way of the north gate. He shall not return by the way of the gate by which he came in, but shall go out straight before him.  Ezekiel 46:9,10

 
Identified Flying Objects

Sceptics guess that magic mushrooms helped
to open Heaven – or perception’s doors –
in Babylon  and show the awed and shocked 
Ezekiel some version of
the gyroscope and helicopter
in advance of L. da Vinci.

Ezekiel did not make sketches. He left
words instead of blueprints. Hence his engines,
while attracting less mechanical
analysis than Leonardo’s,
leave a lot more room for extra
terrestrial imaginings.

Some fantasists insist that aliens
can scrawl art deco doodles in our fields
and navigate the planet via ley lines.
Others say time-travellers
could show Ezekiel a future
three millennia ahead.

Perhaps he caught a glimpse of locust-gunships
stuttering across Iraqi deserts, 
stop-start – like the freeze-frame hovering
of hummingbirds he’d never known –
and bringing down much cruder forms
of shock and awe on Babylon.
 

The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God… Out of its centre came the likeness of four living creatures. …There was one wheel on the earth beside the living creatures … Their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel within a wheel … When the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.  Ezekiel 1:1-19

Some explain Ezekiel’s vision as a clairvoyant’s (or time-traveller’s) preview of modern – perhaps military – technology. Josef Blumrich (The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1974)) claims it describes a genuine extraterrestrial encounter of the kind reported in literature dedicated to phenomena like UFOs, ley lines and crop circles. 

Neil Fulwood, "The Point of the Stick"

Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, where he still lives and works as a bus driver. He has published three previous collections with Shoestring Press: No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere and Service Cancelled; a collection of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books; and two pamphlets, Numbers Stations and The Little Book of Forced Calm, with The Black Light Engine Room Press. Additionally, he has written three books of film criticism, including The Films of Sam Peckinpah, and co-edited with David Sillitoe the tribute anthology More Raw Material: Work Inspired by Alan Sillitoe. Neil is married, no children, but has a time-share arrangement on his neighbours’ cats.

About The Point of the Stick, by Neil Fulwood
On 6 June 2023, I wrote an untitled eight-line poem about the conductor Leopold Stokowski and sent it to friends on a Messenger group dedicated to classical music. It was intended as a bit of fun: a “guess the maestro” challenge. They guessed correctly, reported that they’d enjoyed the poem and urged me to send another. And another. 

By the end of the month, at which point the Muse threw her hands up and took a leave of absence, I’d produced a sequence of thirty-nine poems, each one seeking to distil the essence of one of the great maestri, either by alluding to their personality or focusing on a formative moment in their life or career. These have now been brought together in The Point of the Stick, a collection which races allegro con brio through a century of recorded music and the maestri who dominated the podium. The poems remain untitled (a list at the end of the book provides a who’s who) and I present the following two poems in just such a format and invite readers to guess at their identity.

From The Point of the Stick

The composer-conductor 
as two-way street;
highbrow educator 
as hep-cat populist.

White tuxedo, bow tie:
podium elegance shot through
with Hollywood cool.
Surface and depth.

He conducts as if possessed
or transported. Mahler 
surges through him, 
an ecstasy of revelation.


*


Mr Hollywood, suave sultan
of the soundtrack; jazz
pianist par excellence; now
maestro, music night popular 

career unfolding as a preview
of coming attractions 

all the right moves made,
by anybody’s definition, 
in absolutely the right order.

Rennie Parker, "Balloons and Stripey Trousers"

Rennie Parker is a Shoestring Press poet who lives in the bottom left-hand corner of Lincolnshire. Unfortunately she does not have a writer's cat, because she works full time for a regional college doing lots of hard things on a computer. Before this, she had a career with various local authorities, taking jobs with community arts teams, libraries, and tourism departments. She studied History of Art and English at Oxford Brookes, before continuing with an M.A. in Medieval Studies at York, which (in the end) enabled her collection of Troubadour translations, Jongleur, in 2021. Between 1993 and 1997 she studied for a PhD at Birmingham, and published with the Writers and their Work series before deciding to concentrate on poetry. Her first collection, Secret Villages (Flambard Press) featured in the Forward Awards anthology for 2001-2, but there was a ten-year break until the next work, Borderville. She was born in Leeds, and left West Yorkshire in 1981. But she still has the accent.

About Balloons and Stripey Trousers

Take a journey into the toxic workplace, from one who's been there and done it so you don't have to. Who are the winners and the losers, and who is using whom? When people are seen as collateral damage, how can anyone survive these places intact? And was it always like this?

Welcome to the circus.

You can see more details about Balloons and Stripey Trousers on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection. 

From Balloons and Stripey Trousers, by Rennie Parker

real not real

so the stiff-haired personnel have managed you into submission
and it's been years now.
I watch you in the guise of a Woman Who Knows.
Time was - and is - a traitor
pulling back from everyone
who put their trust in Her
and the adverts with their seductive ways
their effortless talk of dynamo start-up industries
on various purpose-built estates:
how vigorous and intent
the faces of their brave young men! how taut
the stretched skins with their fuelled enmities,
and you islanded, a pariah
the broken bridge attempting to ford a river
while the foul tide swivels past -
those choice roles awarded
to one who fits the needs of today's environment
when what they mean is 'young,'
hating yourself and what they will become
unable to leave the race,
pinning their rivals to the dartboard
with their casual cruelties
and you, rejected for no reason
facing the same people again and again
every session a marketplace
every market a butcher's hall;
it's you they've got on the slab.

hello can i help you

i'm a peopleperson me and that's what they told me at the clinic and i couldn't believe it when

they made me a supervisor here:

so put the sign on OPEN kelley because we don't want them to think we are shut now do we --

--  if our visitor figures plummet it's your job on the line kelley not mine because i'm a full timer
that's why

[it doesn't do to have them getting above themselves now does it]

WHO FOLDED THESE TEATOWELS THE LABELS SHOULD BE ON THE TOP

i'll be checking in future kelley there's nothing like a little mysteryshopper exercise
to keep you on your toes

it's a stressful job you know very stressful this very but i don't suffer from stress not really not
any more no not after the counselling

because i'm a peopleperson me and i'm here to serve the public and let's face it tourism is
the world and the world is tourism

[beam] hellocanihelpyou?

Merryn Williams, "After Hastings"

 

Merryn Williams lives in Oxford, and After Hastings (Shoestring Press, 2023) is her sixth volume of poetry. She worked hard for Labour in the last election and, during the pandemic, collected the best Covid poems she could find and published them as Poems for the Year 2020: Eighty Poets on the Pandemic (Shoestring Press).

About After Hastings, By Merryn Williams

My book is a short one - more a poetry pamphlet really. All the poems are short, but they cover such things as Covid, deaths and a divorce in my family, and the state of the world. Hastings is where I grew up and the title poem is of course about the threat to the planet:

After Hastings

Some of Hastings has toppled into the sea.
This time, the giant rock killed no one, but
fast-forward to another century
and people will abscond, their doors will shut,
the gracious Georgian terraces, the beach huts
be drowned, the crumbling castle overhead
collapse, the famous caves fill with salt water.
It might reach my old home, but I'll be dead,
the cliffs, like Robert Tressell's murals, gone,
and none look down on Hastings, except the moon.

The book is dedicated to the memory of the poet Ruth Bidgood - a dear friend and a Wren during the war, which explains why she didn't like the sea. I miss it! Here is another short poem about her:

Elegy

          (for Ruth Bidgood)

I learned of your death in a crowded seafront cafe
between trains, casually flicking through my smartphone
as everyone does. I should have expected this news
but hadn't. You'd not have felt at home in this place,

distrusting the sea, turning back to the mountains. So
I went for a last look, and spent a half hour counting
the waves, remembering how I'd watched them crashing
off Hengistbury Head, on the actual day you died.

Robert Selby, "The Kentish Rebellion"

 

Robert Selby, photograph by Paul Ligas

Robert Selby edits the literary journal Wild Court and reviews for various publications. His debut poetry collection, The Coming-Down Time, was published by Shoestring Press in 2020. A book-length sequence, The Kentish Rebellion, is out from Shoestring on 7th July 2022. 

About The Kentish Rebellion, by Robert Selby 

It feels fitting to be able to introduce The Kentish Rebellion here as the book owes a debt to The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640-1660 by the late Alan Everitt, who held the post of Hatton Professor of English Local History at the University of Leicester between 1968 and 1982. In his forensically-researched, fascinating study published by Leicester University Press in 1966, Everitt examined his native county’s restiveness through the Civil War period as part of his wider argument that "the England of 1640 resembled a union of partially independent county-states or communities, each with its own distinct ethos and loyalty." It is instructive, he wrote, that the people of the day referred to their county as their "country."

I first read Everitt’s book when I was nearing the end of my PhD on the poet Mick Imlah, whose final collection, The Lost Leader, contributed to the assertion of Scottish cultural difference within Britain. Reading The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion helped inspire me to explore if I could do something similarly assertive for Kent, my native county just as it was Everitt’s. Kent, of course, is not Scotland - a "Home County" after all, with the associations of conformity that go with that status, and last an independent kingdom in the eighth century. But studying Kent in the Civil War period, when it was still far from homogeneous with the seat of power – the 1648 rebellion being just the latest in a long line of Kentish uprisings against London down the ages – allowed me to explore the idea of a distinct Kentish identity and imaginatively throw it forward to our own turbulent time.  

Below, you can read a poem from the sequence. 

From The Kentish Rebellion

Merryn Williams (ed.), "Poems for the Year 2020: Eighty Poets on the Pandemic"

About Poems for the Year 2020

Thousands upon thousands of poems were written in the unforgettable year 2020, when
corona virus changed the world. Eighty of the best have been carefully selected for Shoestring's new anthology. They come from all five continents and all corners of Britain, and look from several different angles at the crisis. They are not all about doom and gloom. Sickness, bereavement and isolation are all here, along with empty cities and animals roving the streets, but there are also some very funny and life-enhancing poems about how people are coping in extraordinary times, and intend to come through.

Contributors include: Anon, Mona Arshi, Adrian Barlow, Meg Barton, Denise Bennett, Matt Black, Janine Booth, Alison Brackenbury, Melanie Branton, Carole Bromley, Simone Mansell
Broome, Rip Bulkeley, Maggie Butt, Ian Caws, Gladys Mary Coles, Deborah Cox, Barbara Cumbers, Tony Curtis, Ann Drysdale, Vicki Feaver, Paul Francis, Owen Gallagher, Ann Gray, Paul Groves, Jill Hadfield, Alice Harrison, Gail Holst-Warhaft, Joy Howard, Keith Hutson, Lesley Ingram, Chris Jackson, Rosie Jackson, Mike Jenkins, Roz Kaveney, Angela Kirby, Camilla Lambert, John Lanyon, Gill Learner, Emma Lee, Pippa Little, Marilyn Longstaff, Deborah Maccoby, Mark McDonnell, Gill McEvoy, Jennifer A. McGowan, Anathema Jane McKenna, Alwyn Marriage, Deborah Mason, Kathy Miles, John Mole, Judi Moore, Lucy Newlyn, Patrick Osada, Antony Owen, Harry Owen, M.R. Peacocke, Megan Peel, Clive Perrett, Pauline Prior-Pitt, Rita Ray, Padraig Rooney, Lesley Saunders, Brighid Schroer, Robert Seatter, Clare Shaw, Jay Sizemore, Paul Stephenson, Anne Stewart, Sean Street, Todd Swift, David Tait, Wisty Thomas, Serin Thomasin, Nick Toczek, Christine Vial, John Powell Ward, Merryn Williams, Stephen Wilson, Gregory Woods, Neil Young.

You can see more information on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read about the editor, and two poems from the anthology. 

About the editor

Merryn Williams has published five collections of poetry: the fifth is The Fragile Bridge: New and Selected Poems (Shoestring Press). Her latest book is Mansfield Park Revisited (Plas Gwyn Books), an updating of Jane Austen's classic. She spent the year 2020 reading literally hundreds of poems about Corona virus and lockdowns. Her website is here.

From Poems for the Year 2020

Threads

          for my son, Silas, NHS anaesthetist and rock-climber

Dangling on a rope

hung from a cliff-top

you look like a tiny spider 

spinning a thread

the slightest gust

could snap. 

Now your patients

are hanging on threads.

And all of you 

working on wards

where a terrible

scissor-wielding hag

decides who to spare,

which thread

next to cut.

Note: the ‘terrible scissor-wielding hag’ is Atropos, eldest of the three Fates.

 - Vicki Feaver, South Lanarkshire

Geoffrey Chaucer Cleans the Beach

Whan the temperature in June is hotte

Than longen folk to doon what they should notte

And specially from every shire’s ende 

Of Engelond to Bournemouthe they wende.

 

Some had woken with the lark

To finde a space where they could parke

Otheres parken everywhere

Legal or not, they did not care

 

And loutes imbiben swich liquor

Of which vertú engendred is the boor

And disputheth eche hir beachside space

And one anothere puncheth in the face

 

Then when al that motley bunch were gonne

Cleanen we the beche anon

And finden underwear and socks

And defecations in a box

 

And so was I seke of hem everichon

That I wrote to my PM anon

To demaunde new laws  straight be doon

But from him answere was there noon.

- Jill Hadfield, New Zealand

Alan Baker, "A Journal of Enlightened Panic"

 

Alan Baker was born and raised in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and has lived in Nottingham since 1985, where he has been editor of the poetry publisher Leafe Press for the last twenty years, and editor of its associated webzine Litter. His previous poetry collections include Variations on Painting a Room (Skysill, 2011), Letters from the Underworld (Red Ceilings, 2018) and Riverrun (KFS, 2019). He has translated the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy and Abdellatif Laâbi. Below, Alan writes about writing poetry, and his new pamphlet, A Journal of Enlightened Panic (Shoestring Press, 2020).

About Poetry and A Journal of Enlightened Panic

By Alan Baker

I still have strong connections with Newcastle (there's a poem in Tyneside dialect in A Journal of Enlightened Panic), but Nottingham is my adoptive city and I've lived there since 1985 (I recently published a book entitled Riverrun which is sixty-four modernist sonnets about the River Trent in its Nottinghamshire stretch). I started writing poetry in my teens, gave it up, then returned to it in my late twenties, but I didn't publish my first, slim pamphlet until I was forty-two. I've published ten collections of poetry since then. Why do I write poetry? Because I love it, always have - not writing it I mean, but poetry itself, reading it out loud, hearing it read, reading it silently, and I've loved it since I was a youngster enamoured of G. M. Hopkins and Robert Frost. So I wanted to "be in that number" as the song goes, and learn the art.

A Journal of Enlightened Panic is a short series of poems, most of which are dedicated to someone, mainly other poets, and includes a collaboration with the poet Robert Sheppard (see below). The collection starts and ends with two long poems. The last poem is called "Voyager," a reference to the spacecraft of that name; the poem is in memory of my mother, and it combines images of space travel, a night-time walk and a sea journey. The opening poem is about "the thoughts a man may encounter as he walks the park in the autumn of his life," which thoughts encompass ecology, art, politics, John Donne, Keats, Shakespeare and the Zen Buddhist master Sunryu Suzuki.

The disk on the book cover is the “Sounds of the Earth Record” which was placed in both Voyager spacecraft when they were launched in 1977.

Two poems by the imaginary Slovenian poet ABC Remič

If I Were ...

If I were a blade of grass
I’d be bending in the wind
like all the others, in the wind

off the Karst that smells of the sea.

If I were rowing in the ripples

I’d be unrolling in crinkles of

light against the hills, distance
unthreading perception, gently.

If I were empty of perception

I could abandon History and encounter

The World, my enemy, my friend,

my teacher, in all its variousness.

If then, beyond Time, flung across Space,

a jay caught in a gust, I’d know

Identity is a silhouette bird acting as scarecrow,

choking up a paroxysm of irony.

If the scarecrow smiles, if Sirens

call lonely men on container ships,

and ghosts walk the leagues of grass,

then storm clouds, tribal wanderings, ritual.

If overhead wires trapped onto a page of dashes

tell us of nothing, or next to nothing,

then the solid black I feel is not ghostly solid:

my ears are up to my eyes in Reality.

 

Slovenia (excerpt)
An advertising hoarding of a rearing horse,
a railway platform reduced to a grey smear.
Slovenia! I'm sick of your posturing, I'm weary
of your constant demands for attention, your angst,
even the tightness you leave in our collective lungs
that the romance of a steam-train cannot relieve;
the rearing horse is a symbol for a British bank,
the trains run on time, sure, but they take us nowhere.
Hills hunch black like slag-heaps, while streamed cctv
images of cobbled streets and marble kerbstones
infiltrate our dreams; a pixelated Ljubljana Old Town
lacking its charm and suppressed memories.
Lit buses in long lines ease up the crowded street
packed with faces at bright windows, and I run
to catch one, full of workers heading home. My people?
"hard-working, diligent and proud" the brochures say,
using my tainted words. A queue, stiff in readiness,
waits, as one, his pin prick pupils deep in their sockets,
like a bronze statue of one of our obscurer saints, leans
forward and hisses "You can't get on without a ticket."

Note: Poems were written jointly by Alan Baker and Robert Sheppard for the latter’s anthology EUOIA (European Union of Imaginary Authors).

Neil Fulwood, "Can't Take Me Anywhere"

Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham in 1972, where he still lives and works as a bus driver. He has published a media studies book The Films of Sam Peckinpah (Batsford), and co-edited and contributed to the tribute volume More Raw Material: Work Inspired by Alan Sillitoe. He has published two poetry pamphlets, Numbers Stations and The Little Book of Forced Calm, with The Black Light Engine Room Press, and two full collections, No Avoiding It and Can’t Take Me Anywhere, with Shoestring Press. 

About Can’t Take Me Anywhere

By Neil Fulwood

The title poem of my second collection was an in-joke between me and my wife, a phrase I’d use to account for my too-loud comments in public about politics and the state of the world, my tendency to kick against pretentiousness or elitism, even though expressions of the “pile of wank” variety are generally frowned upon in art galleries or amongst polite company. I’ve always been an opinionated little bugger, and that opinionism carries over into the poems in all of my published work.

My first full collection, No Avoiding It, was ordered into three sections: a ‘then and now’ sequence contrasting my childhood in the 1970s with the Nottingham of today; poems of work; and poems about pubs. The work poems were drawn from two and a half decades of generally pointless white collar jobs. Last year, I finally realised that the world of paperwork, make-work and office politics was untenable, chucked my job in the governance department of a healthcare facility, and trained as a bus driver. Best move I ever made. 

My latest collection, from which the featured poems below are drawn, is also in three sections but not as rigorously ordered as No Avoiding It. The first is threaded together by poems of driving, motion and travel; the second looks critically at Englishness and how recent political events have bastardised the concept of national identity; and the third acts as a counterbalance, containing poems of love and friendship as well as some lighter, knockabout pieces. I have chosen a piece from each section. 

For further details about the book, see the publisher's website here. 


Coast Road

Back-handed gusts of wind come off the water,
side-slam the car. I’m thinking of that poem by Heaney:
the heart caught off guard. I’ll trade that
for sharpened driving skills, on-point response
to the switchbacks and gradients of a road
supplemented with escape lanes – last-ditch
slow-downs for the brake-failed, the wheel-locked.

Earlier, the shoreline was a photo-opportunity:
a silver medal for the play of light on water;
crofters’ cottages, open land; the railway line
daring itself closer to the edge than the road.
Now: snow. Great driving flakes of it
from a grey-white sky. Push on? Turn back?
I’m thinking there’s no real difference.


England

Scratch the surface and fingernails snag
on Facebook posts arm-banded with hate.

Spade the earth with boot heel encouragement
and feel the bite-back of roots twisting whitely.

Christen the dull metal of the plough, drag
trenches through topsoil; repeat

till the land is scarred. Dig deeper. Sink holes.
Send Euclids rumbling into the depths of open cast.

Let shit-brown mud coat the yellow buckets
of JCBs. Unearth bones and broken skulls.


The World According to Dads

The system of the world
was plotted out in sheds and garages,
the odd codicil offered
from the earthy perspective
of an allotment.

The system was measured
in units roughly corresponding
to how far a thumb
and forefinger can be held apart;
about that much. The system,

in short, was a guesstimate
but a bloody good un.
The system was built on spare parts
and laths of pallet wood
nailed together. Duct tape was used

in plenitude. All the screws
were Philips head. That box of rawlplugs 
came in handy. The design flaws
in the system of the world
were mulled over on fag breaks

taken round the back
so your mam didn’t see. The system
was stripped down and rebuilt
and swearing was involved. 
Second time round, it worked.

The system of the world
was notarised by Messrs Black
and Decker, countersigned 
by those fine fellows Bosch and DeWalt.
There were oily thumbprints

on the paperwork.

Martin Stannard, "The Moon is About 238,855 Miles Away"

Martin Stannard is a poet and critic, and lives in Nottingham. He was the founding editor of joe soap’s canoe (1978-1993), a poetry magazine some people regard as legendary. It can be found archived here. He was also poetry editor of the online art and poetry magazine Decals of Desire. His most recent full-length collection is Poems for the Young at Heart (Leafe Press, 2016). A chapbook, Items, was published by The Red Ceilings Press in 2018. Forthcoming in 2020 are a pamphlet, The Review, from Knives Forks and Spoons, and a full-length collection from Leafe Press that currently has a working title of Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters. 

In 2007-8 he was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Nottingham Trent University but, that year aside, he taught English, Literature and Culture at a university in China from 2005 until 2018. In spite of having failed to learn to speak Chinese apart from some very basic everyday stuff, such as talking about the weather with cab drivers, translating classic poetry from the Tang dynasty period has occupied him alongside his own poetry for the last five or six years. Shoestring Press have just published The Moon is About 238,855 Miles Away, a collection of these translations / versions. You can see more details about it on the publisher's website here.  

The following is the book’s introductory note that explains the versions / translations:  



From The Moon is About 238,855 Miles Away, by Martin Stannard
The originals of the poems here are from the Tang dynasty (618-907), a time generally regarded as the great period of classical Chinese poetry. The versions here are just that: versions, and not direct translations, hence the “after….” at the beginning of their attributions.

My process has been to create a direct translation, and then rework the poem to some degree, a degree that varies depending upon the individual poem. In some cases I have removed names and/or places, or Chinese idioms or cultural references that either do not usefully translate or that would be meaningless to a reader without the necessary knowledge of Chinese culture. In some cases I have moved things around quite a lot, and in most cases I have also slipped in a phrase or line of my own. Sometimes titles have been changed. In every case I have attempted to create a poem that is able to stand alone, rendered in the English I use in my everyday life and in my own poetry, but which stays as faithful as I know how to the meaning, tone and mood of the original. I am no Sinologist, and purists may object, but so it goes. 

It is worth noting too, I think, that from living and working in China for twelve years I came to learn that many (if not most) of today’s Chinese readers do not fully understand all the subtle references and allusions in China’s classical poems, a fact that has given me the confidence to leave some things out. My ultimate aim has been to make poems that give pleasure and food for thought. One can only try. 


Reading at Sunrise

after 辰诣超师院读禅经 by Liǔ Zōngyuán 

At sunrise the pines are bathed in fog and drip with dew
Bamboo in the courtyard has taken on the colour of moss 

I draw water from the well
Clean my teeth and dust myself down 
I read from scripture as I walk

I’ve been too long in darkness and want to rewrite what I think I am
But it’s all I can do to read quietly to myself


Looking at the Moon

after月夜 by Dù Fǔ 

I imagine you shivering alone in your room
Looking out the window at the moon

You are far away in the capital 
But distance does not separate us

I imagine the fragrance of your hair
And remember the jade bracelet upon your arm

You know I will look at the same moon 
Until I come to clear your tears away with my kisses

Writing the Poem: "Roaming Range"

By Sue Dymoke

The poem ‘Roaming Range’ appears in my 2018 Shoestring Press collection What They Left Behind. During an event at Attenborough Nature Reserve last November called ‘(Re)connecting with nature through the power of wild words’ (Being Human Festival 2017), I had a conversation with Adam Cormack from The Wildlife Trusts. Adam happened to mention how children’s opportunities to engage with nature at first hand have become so much more restricted in the 21st century. What he called their ‘roaming range’ has been severely curtailed, for many reasons including concerns about safety, restricted access to outdoor/wild spaces near to home, poverty, school pressures, limited unstructured free time or different ways of spending free hours. His comments took me back to my childhood, a place and a time with no house phone or car when we (me and my friends or brother) would think nothing of disappearing on our bikes for hours at a time, going out into the scraggy Hertfordshire lanes, woods and fields around and beyond Stevenage Old Town. The poem began to write itself in my head on the way home.

Attenborough Nature Reserve

Roaming range

You roamed wherever your bikes took you 
where blackberries grew big and juicy
on railway cuttings, river banks, sunny field edges …

I chose to use the second person in the poem because I thought my memories echoed those of many other children born in the sixties and seventies. I hoped to include everyone in the poem, rather than name specific places or people which might limit the piece to particular situations. 

The poem wanted to come out all in one long nearly breathless rush of a sentence. Instinctively, I knew that this was the right form. Although the places, sightings and events within it did not all happen at once (and some frequently reoccurred) together they made a compressed, speeded-up snapshot of a childhood roaming free, getting snagged and stung, hearing and watching nature all round us:    

where a nettle’s sting was only
partly eased by spit-rub of dock leaf
where tadpoles jellied in deep ponds
and bluebells chimed silent songs
under greening beeches
where hair snared in thickets
goose grass stuck to jumpers

I have been reading this poem at launch events recently, along with what I now see is a companion poem: ‘Girls on Swings.’ For me, both of these pieces are about freedoms we should revel in, seize, but never ever take for granted.  

If you would like to read the whole 'Roaming Range' poem go to suedymokepoetry.com.