Anne Caldwell, "Neither Here Nor There"

 

Dr Anne Caldwell is a writer and editor, based in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. She lectures in Creative Writing at the Open University as well as working as an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund. Her writing has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the UK and internationally, including The Rialto, Spelt Magazine, Tract, Poetry Wales, Rabbit and Axon. She has published a number of poetry collections including Painting the Spiral Staircase (Cinnamon Press, 2016). In 2019, she was the co-editor of The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry, alongside Oz Hardwick. Her fourth collection of prose poetry was Alice and the North (Valley Press). She was the co-editor of Prose Poetry Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022) with Oz Hardwick. Anne writes about the natural world, our relationship to it, and revels in the stories, place names and characters of the north of England. This year she is a winner of a James Tait Prize, and has a new pamphlet of poetry out called Neither Here nor There, with SurVision Press. Twitter (X): @caldwell_anne 

 

 

About Neither Here Nor There 
Neither Here Nor There is a prize-winning pamphlet of prose poems that celebrates the in-between places and states of mind we can inhabit. The writing is firmly rooted in a sense of place and eco-poetics, as well as an exploration of the turbulence of climate change and the pandemic. Prose poetry is a flexible form that is brilliant at holding contradictions and juxtapositions: qualities that are exploited in a search for love and a deep connection with a wilder, natural world in these quietly immersive poems. Inspired by Anne Carson, Anne has used a double justified rectangle of text in each of the poems, so that the work resembles the grid squares on a map. The organising principle of the work is the prose poetry form and the way it can present a series of vignettes that mix the details of ordinary life with dreams and myth, the real and the fairytale, where humans transform into birds and language is lost and found. The world of this pamphlet is spinning out of reach. The prose poems explore landscapes, urban and rural, where our connections to each other have been fragmented and stretched. As the poem "Unrequited" suggests, "The language of now is short and full of gaps." Here is a sense of playfulness in the writing, as the prose poems combine the down-to-earth cadences of prose and the lyrical, musical intensity of poetry at the same time. 

You can read more about Neither Here Nor There on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample prose poems from the collection. 

From Neither Here Nor There, by Anne Caldwell

Aqueduct 

Walls were less rigid when I was young. Bedrooms expanded when love bloomed and contracted as grief swallowed the family, made it lemon-sour and pithy.  Hiding in the bottom of the wardrobe, I would listen to the bitterness of mother and father. I’d a penknife, a lucky stone and a ball of string.  I owned a hand-me-down bike and found a cycle route to Astbury, cutting beneath the canal aqueduct.  The air was damp and cool; the brickwork smothered in moss. 

A stalactite childhood lay here, lingering beneath that body of water. Beneath tadpoles and crested newts; beneath rusty shopping trollies and lead fishing sinkers. 

Glass Blower 

And this dim-lit life is a glass vase in the making. Needs blowing and warming. Alice loads her rod with molten liquid from the furnace, rolling the orange glow to over 900 degrees in wet newspaper. Life begins to cool a little and harden. She doesn’t wear gloves as she dips the glass in powdered cobalt. She blows, then places her thumb over the rod until the glass begins to swell into a sphere, catching an air bubble at its centre. Keep turning. Keep blowing. Find life’s heat and joy. Don’t stop moving. 

Emma Claire Sweeney, "Owl Song at Dawn"

 

Emma Claire Sweeney is Director of the Ruppin Agency Writers’ Studio – a nationwide literary mentorship scheme, and she is a lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. 

 

Emma was named as both an Amazon Rising Star and a Hive Rising Writer for her debut novel, Owl Song at Dawn (Legend, 2016). Inspired by Emma's sister who has cerebral palsy and autism, it went on to win Nudge Literary Book of the Year. 

 

Stemming from Something Rhymed, the website on female literary friendship that Emma ran with her own friend Emily Midorikawa, Emma and Emily co-wrote their debut non-fiction book, A Secret Sisterhood: The Hidden Friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf (Aurum, 2017). In her foreword, Margaret Atwood described the work as a great 'service to literary history' and The Financial Times called it 'an exceptional act of literary espionage.'

Emma has won Society of Authors, Arts Council and Royal Literary Fund awards, and has written for the likes of The Paris Review, TIME, and The Washington Post.

Emma’s Twitter handle is @emmacsweeney and she has a Facebook page here.

About Owl Song at Dawn

Inspired by Emma’s sister, who has autism and cerebral palsy, Owl Song at Dawn is a novel about a fierce octogenarian who spends a lifetime in Morecambe Bay, trying to unlock the secrets of her exuberant yet inexplicable twin.

Maeve Maloney is a force to be reckoned with. Despite her advancing years, she keeps Sea View Lodge just as her parents did during Morecambe’s 1950s heyday. But now only her employees and regular guests recognise the tenderness and heartbreak hidden beneath her spikiness. Until, that is, Vincent shows up.

Vincent is the last person Maeve wants to see. He is the only man alive to have known her twin sister, Edie. The nightingale to Maeve’s crow, the dawn to Maeve’s dusk, Edie would have set her sights on the stage – all things being equal. But, from birth, things never were.

If only Maeve could confront the secret past she shares with Vincent, she might finally see what it means to love and be loved: a lesson that her exuberant yet inexplicable twin may have been trying to teach her all along.

In the excerpt below, Maeve is looking back on the night of their 21st birthday ...

From Owl Song at Dawn, By Emma Claire Sweeney

I see you, Edie, standing bare, your hands clasping my wrists, your face and breasts and hips in line with mine. You let me take your weight as you lift one leg over the rim of the tub and then you stumble slightly, and I move my hand to your armpit to steady you. 

‘Nothing to worry about,’ you say. 

You watch as I sprinkle baking soda into the water to soothe your nappy rash, as I work up a lather, as I rub a soapy cloth from your ears to your toes. 

Your body has changed during my years at college: your breasts rounder, your legs stronger, your tummy – which you never did learn to pull in – a little plumper, perhaps. It’s hard to imagine that as a child you’d been matchstick thin. I take more notice of your body on this particular night, it being our 21st birthday. Later, I will run my new Max Factor lipstick across your fulsome lips. With your lovely bust and bright blue eyes, you would have been a real bombshell – all things being equal.

I still don’t know what caused your marionette limbs and wonky teeth and scarcity of words. Perhaps the town gossips were right and there was a deficiency in our genes; or perhaps it was down to Mum’s age; or our slightly premature birth; or perhaps the doctors didn’t notice that you lacked oxygen during our delivery; or perhaps I deprived you of nutrients or damaged you in the womb. 

Even now, I see your eyelids crinkle shut as I massage your head with shampoo, as the water darkens your coppery hair, as it streams down your spine. I see you straining with concentration as I place the flannel in your palm. 

Although I’ve asked you to scrub your armpits, you touch your elbow. ‘Up, up,’ I instruct, guiding your hand. ‘You can do it, I can help you.’

‘On my own!’ you call out, delight spreading across your face as the flannel touches your armpit, so I clap and cheer and call out, ‘Edith Mary Maloney is the cleverest girl in the seven seas!’

You keep repeating it over and over: ‘The cleverest girl in the seven seas!’ you exclaim, splashing foam high into the air. ‘The cleverest girl in the seven seas!’ A bubble lands on your nose, and you turn cross-eyed from staring at it so long. 

But I also see the tufts of hair in your armpits, and I know that I should shave them: they will look unsightly with your new cap sleeve blouse. But I do not pick up the razor; I do not take the time to remove that hair.  

I see you wriggling in the bathtub, water spraying across the room as you scissor kick your stiff legs just like Frank has shown you. I love to see Frank’s broad back bent low as he teaches you to dance. I love the way his large hands cup your tiny palms, lifting them up and down like an expert puppeteer. 

I resume my bathing instructions (Where are your armpits? Where’s your front bottom? Where are your knees? Where are your feet?), but my mind is still on Frank. I imagine him watching me as I head down the staircase in my ocean-blue dress. I imagine the gimlets we’ll drink in the Rotunda Bar at the Midland Hotel, the jazz band that’ll play as we teach you to jive. You’ll quickly get exhausted and will want to sit on Dad’s knee. Then Frank will move me slowly round the dance floor, his legs pressed up against mine. 

Little do I know that I will never again dance with a man; that you will never wear lipstick; that your legs and armpits will never be smooth. Little do I know that I will soon lose Mum and Dad and Frank and you. But I cannot lose the images of what happened that night.