Two Poems by Roy Marshall

Roy Marshall
After writing poems and songs as a child and teenager, Roy began writing poems again in his late thirties. A pamphlet, Gopagilla,  was published in 2012 and received favourable reviews in the TLS and elsewhere. His first full collection The Sun Bathers (Shoestring Press, 2013) was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy award, and a second collection The Great Animator appeared in 2017. Previously a nurse, Roy lives in Leicestershire where he works in adult education. He sometimes blogs at  https://roymarshall.wordpress.com/     

Michael Phelps Versus the Great White  

It is hard to get a shark to swim straight, 

so the crew speed off with a baited line. 

Michael waits his turn, a spring-loaded fin 

strapped to his back. He watches the monitors 

where his opponent shimmies after the lure. 

How beautiful, he thinks, remembering 

a Beijing menu that listed shark fin soup. 

At school, he too became prey, with his jug ears 

and an easily mimicked lisp. One report card read 

‘can’t sit still, can't be quiet, can’t concentrate.’

Michael pulls on huge flippers; this is one race 

he knows he can never win. He regulates 

his breathing, thinks of the money, of how 

if a shark stops swimming it dies.   

First published in Strix, summer 2018 

The Shapeshifter’s Courtship  

When he was fish, she became otter. 

She changed into oak, he, woodpecker. 

He shifted to wheat, she cleaved into furrow. 

She thinned into leaf, he thrilled as a breeze. 

He fell as blood, she received him as sand. 

She flitted into songbird, he soared as hawk. 

He rolled into rock, she clung as moss. 

She rose as full moon, he became the drawn tide. 

He changed into a mirror, she, a stone in flight.

First published in Coast to Coast to Coast, summer 2018  

"Coplowdale": Poem by Lauren Foster

Coplowdale

It’s warm in there. Sometimes it steams.
I’ve heard it said, on occasion they
spontaneously combust, but for now 
it hosts a family of hares: a central-
heated, albeit pungent, winter abode. 
I don’t see them in there, but in the stony 
fields, fit otherwise only for sheep 
and sometimes the horses, free to wander 
as far as Twigg’s land. Then, we have to go 
fetch them, trudge through muddied gateways,
past buckled walls, down and up Intake 
Dale to where the cowslips grow in Spring. 
Lorries trundle from and to the quarry. 
Once, I heard of a tailback. Glynn, on a
downwards swing lay across the lane, a sign 
by his side read: Please run me over. Isabel 
gave up after decades, left for an old folk’s 
bungalow down in Bradwell, by the brook. 
Can’t have made much, the farm full of cars 
rather than cows. One day, someone’ll be 
overjoyed to find a nineteen fifties 
Hillman, rusted chassis half buried 
by a derelict barn. It’s a harsh life, but on a
full moon you’d hear Glynn’s luxuriant 
baritone resonate against the stars.

About the author

Lauren Foster is a student on the MA in Creative Writing. 'Coplowdale' received an honourable mention in the GS Fraser Prize 2018. Photograph by By Roger May.

"Sparrow": Short Story by Nora Nadjarian

Nora Nadjarian is an award-winning Cypriot poet and writer. She has been cited or published in the Guardian, the Irish Times and the Telegraph and has also won prizes and commendations in international competitions, including the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, the Féile Filíochta International Poetry Competition, the Binnacle International Ultra-Short Competition and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize. Her work deals with the themes of women, refugees, identity, exile, love and loss, as well as the political situation in Cyprus. Best known in Cyprus for her book of short stories Ledra Street (2006), she has had poetry and short fiction published internationally. Her work was included in A River of Stories, an anthology of tales and poems from across the Commonwealth, illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski, Best European Fiction 2011 (Dalkey Archive Press), Being Human (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) and Capitals (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her latest books are the collections of short stories Selfie (Roman Books, 2017) and Girl, Wolf, Bones (Armida, 2017). The author Anjali Joseph has said of her work:  ‘Nora Nadjarian’s distilled short stories are abrupt and intense, as invigorating and aromatic as a double shot of literary espresso.’ Selfie and Other Stories is published by Roman Books, as part of the Stretto Fiction Series. 

Sparrow

My sister said she was carrying a bird inside her, a bird which would soon be drinking water out of her navel. I wasn’t supposed to say anything about it. To anyone. 

“I am a cage,” said my sister. “Inside me I keep secrets, inside me I keep a bird.” And she laughed and I laughed, too. We laughed until we no longer remembered what we were laughing about.

“His name is Sparrow,” she said one day.  “He’s only little now, as tiny as a seed – but he’ll grow and grow, you’ll see. And then I’ll set him free.” She placed her hand on her stomach and her mouth curved upwards, as if she were smiling at another world in the mirror.

I couldn’t wait. Time was too still, it was taking too long. I squinted into the future. “When?” I kept asking. “When, when, when?” My sister looked luminous as she replied: “Soon, soon, soon.” She said he was practising a song for us. “He’ll sing it so well that he will astonish us all.”

Time passed. I rode my bike and I skipped and whistled and played and waited. Sparrow was going to be my small gift for keeping my sister’s secret. The air grew heady and my sister soft and heavy, like ripening fruit. When she fluttered her eyelids, I thought she was dreaming with her eyes open. 

It was the longest summer. My sister turned sixteen. She wore a long, flowery dress, put her hair up in a ponytail. There were sixteen pink and red balloons bobbing around her head that hot, sticky afternoon of cake, cellophane and candles. My mother spoke loudly and happily about nothing and everything, my stepfather handed my sister the knife, helped her cut the cake. Then she said: I have an announcement to make. 

And the world stops there, a sharp intake of breath.

I squint into the past now for details, terrified of what I might remember. The sky is a dazzling blue, the earth hot, sweaty. I am pregnant, says my sister. She wears a necklace of grapes with which she will feed Sparrow. She performs her own birthday song beautifully, she sings her heart out – until her throat is chalk dry and her ribcage breaks. There are feathers everywhere. I run to pick them up as the balloons pop one after the other, leaving sixteen pieces of rubbery flesh on the floor, things torn and shapeless, parts of my sister which will never again be whole.  


I sit beside her and ask if it hurts. She whispers: “Truth always hurts.” Then there is a sudden, white silence which reminds me, years later, that she is no longer here. 

A Day at Lowdham Book Festival, by Rosalind Rustom

The Lowdham Book Festival is a yearly event that takes place in the village of Lowdham just outside Nottingham, and as of 2018 has been running for nineteen years. This year, the event took place from Tuesday 19th to Saturday 30th June, and I travelled to Lowdham to attend the last day of the festival.

The locations for the talks were spread around Lowdham, the main hub of the festival being in the village hall. Here, there was the opportunity to buy books at a collection of stalls which showcased the work of authors talking at the festival, as well as tables to sit and enjoy food from the café. In the gardens outside the hall, there were marquees for the talks as well as areas for further book stalls.

I started my day by attending a talk titled ‘New Irish Writing’, which was given by Deirdre O’Bryne, a lecturer at Loughborough University and an expert in Irish literature. She discussed the new voices in Irish writing and the use of experimentation in terms of form and content. O’Byrne focused on the work of authors such as Louise O’Neill, Sara Baume, Sally Rooney and Eimear McBride, and led an entertaining and stimulating discussion concerning the topic of identity in Irish literature. 

Next, I attended 'The Shoestring Poetry Hour,' which was led by poetry publisher John Lucas and showcased the work of Roy Marshall and Jonathan Taylor. Roy Marshall gave a reading of a selection of his new and older poems, and explained that some were inspired from his work within hospitals in Leicester. Thus, many contained themes of illness and mortality, and Marshall’s readings gave the poems an enhanced harrowing undertone. Following this, Jonathan Taylor read a selection of poems from his new collection Cassandra Complex. Jonathan read a mixture of amusing as well as darker poems, which the audience enjoyed and resonated with them.

Lastly, I attended a talk titled ‘Crime fiction,’ which was led by Roz Watkins following the publication of her debut crime novel Devil’s Dice. Watkins briefly spoke about the novel and the inspiration of the Peak District in the setting for the novel, but more focused her talk on her personal struggles and obsessions with writing what she saw as a ‘publishable book,’ detailing her journey into the publishing world. She discussed her insecurities in her writing,  tackling negative reviews, and the life of writing as a job. This made for a very interesting and personal talk, and resonated with the audience, leading to many further questions that were posed during the Q&A section of the event. 

I had a lovely day at Lowdham Book Festival and thoroughly enjoyed the variety of talks that took place over the day. The event was well organised and a friendly atmosphere was clear across the festival, due to the passionate and engaged audience members as well as the many authors who took time to give talks or showcase their work. 


About the author
Rosalind Rustom is a recent graduate from the University of Leicester with a degree in English and American Studies, with a particular interest in fantasy fiction.

Edna Welthorpe Lives!

By Emma Parker

In 1967, Leicester-born playwright Joe Orton won the prestigious Evening Standard Play of the Year Award for his anarchic black comedy, Loot, prompting David Benedictus (author of the Winnie-the-Pooh sequel Return to the Hundred Acre Wood) to issue a public objection. How could a play widely condemned as ‘sick’ and ‘disgusting’ merit commendation? 

Amused that his satire on religious hypocrisy and police corruption should arouse such ire, Orton penned an ‘Edna Welthorpe’ letter in response:

        May I add my thoughts to those of David Benedictus on the subject of those ‘much-
        talked-of awards’?

        I agree that no one should seriously nominate as the play of the year a piece of 
        indecent tomfoolery like Loot. Drama should be uplifting. The plays of Joe Orton have 
        a most unpleasing effect on me (19 February, 1967).

‘Edna Welthorpe’ was the persona that Orton invented to write letters spoofing social and sexual conservatism. Middle-aged, middle-class and middlebrow, she is the opposite of Orton, a working-class gay man living in a period when homosexuality was still illegal. First created in 1958, Edna anticipates the emergence of Mary Whitehouse, the moral crusader who co-founded the ‘Clean-Up TV Campaign’ in 1964. In Orton’s Edna Welthorpe letters, concerns about public decency and declining moral standards sparked by the new ‘permissive society’ are rendered amusingly absurd.

In recent years, the growth of global conservatism (Brexit, Trump, the rise of the Far Right) seemed to call Edna back to life. 

When Curve, Leicester, staged Orton’s final play, What the Butler Saw, in 2017, I decided to reanimate Edna in a letter to director Nikolai Foster. I knew that Nikolai was familiar with Orton’s alias and would get the joke but didn’t anticipate that he’d share it by tweeting the letter. Edna’s outrage at a ‘depraved drama about sexual irregularity’ - especially intolerable when there’s already ‘enough of that in Holby City!’ - caused a stir on social media. Her reappearance was even reported in The Stage.

Once back, Edna soon found herself busy writing letters again.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Orton’s death in 2017, I teamed up with BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Chris Shepherd to launch a national Edna Welthorpe creative writing competition. Designed to teach students about satire and to encourage the next generation to keep Orton’s playfully subversive spirit alive, the competition debunked the myth that young people are politically disengaged: Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, retail tycoon Sir Philip Green and Waitrose were all lampooned. 

Alongside the competition, Chris and I commissioned new Edna letters from acclaimed actors and TV comedy writers such as Emmy Award winner Alec Baldwin (Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock), Caroline Moran (Raised by Wolves), Arthur Mathews (Father Ted, Toast of London), Jesse Armstrong (The Think of It, Peep Show) and David Quantick (Veep, The Fast Show). As the project grew, it was amazing to see how far Orton’s influence reaches and the depth of his impact on contemporary culture.  

With the aid of a Grant for the Arts from Arts Council England, Chris and I also made an animation inspired by the original Edna Welthorpe letters. The film, in which the wonderful actress Alison Steadman plays Edna, has been screened at Latitude festival; The Little Theatre, Leicester; Encounters Short Film Festival, Bristol; the London International Film Festival, Barbican; the British Animation Awards, London; the Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the LGBT Feedback Festival, Toronto - billed as ‘a showcase of the best LGBT shorts in the world’; on the BBC Arts webpage and on Criterion TV in the USA. It’s tantalising to ponder what Edna might say to Donald Trump.

The film and new Edna letters can be found on a website that includes a creative writing worksheet showing how anger at social injustice can be channelled into humour and offers satire as an alternative to hate speech: www.ednawelthorpe.co.uk.

The website won a Saboteur Award in 2018 (Wildcard category). What more appropriate award could there be for a project that honours Joe Orton, a prankster and provocateur who gleefully sought to demolish repressive social norms and hierarchies?

As Alec Baldwin, channelling Edna, commented on news of the Saboteur Award via Twitter: ‘Jolly good!’

Cassandra Complex

By Jonathan Taylor

My new poetry collection, published in June 2018 by Shoestring Press, is entitled Cassandra Complex, and is full of prophets, prophecies, and apocalyptic visions of the future. Some of these prophecies are personal to me – moments in my life where I or people close to me seemed to glimpse the future; some of the prophecies are based on myths, or historical dreams of the future; and some of the poems about the ways in which our modern culture binds us to the future – through threats or promises. Despite our apparent rationalism, our society, it seems to me, is full of Cassandras – politicians, economists, CEOs – spouting possible and impossible futures.   

Cassandra, as you may well know, was an Ancient Greek prophet who was cursed by Apollo always to be right, but never to be believed. Likewise, the term ‘Cassandra Complex’ (or Syndrome) has been used in various contexts, including modern psychology, often to refer to someone who has a gift for prediction – or believes they have a gift for prediction – but is condemned to be disbelieved. When I was growing up, my father certainly felt he had a gift for predicting the worst, and rather enjoyed being proved right. Like many fathers, he enjoyed saying “I told you so,” when things went wrong – even if he hadn’t. 

On a miniature scale, this is what is known as ‘retroactive clairvoyance’ (or sometimes ‘hindsight bias’): where prophecies are retrospectively invented, so someone can say “I told you so,” or, more generally, where prophecies are reinterpreted in light of subsequent events. There are various poems in my collection which fall into this category – where, for example, historical prophecies are read and interpreted differently because of intervening events. They are proved true, as it were, in hindsight. Maybe this is sometimes the fate of poetry in general: to be proved true retrospectively. It was certainly the fate of that greatest of all poet-prophets, William Blake. 

As Blake knew, poetry’s association with prophecy is ancient – back at least as far as the Ancient Babylonians – and, for all our irony, rationalism, cynicism, bathos, the association still haunts modern poetry. In his famous essay ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821), Percy Shelley draws on the association, when he writes that poets are ‘the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; … the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ Clearly, this is grand, Romantic language – Shelley is making big claims for the prophetic role of poets in society. But he also qualifies this language: poets are ‘unacknowledged legislators,’ ‘the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration.’ Poets are, in effect, Cassandras, whose prophecies are unacknowledged, and whose poems are expressions of an underlying Cassandra Complex. Poets are often the kind of people who want to say “I told you so” to the future. 

Here are two linked poems from the collection. 'Teleology II' was first published in I Am Not A Silent Poet. 


Teleology I

It is no very good symptom either of nations or individuals that they deal much in vaticination.

 – Thomas Carlyle  


You might catch a glimpse of toga
like a slip beneath the manager’s 
pressed suit, doctor’s white coat,
economist’s titillating bar-charts

for the prophets are everywhere
spouting a cacophony of futures
on screens, stages, street corners
in Medieval Latin, Ancient Greek. 

There is a wind-up Nostradamus 
in your head. Just for tonight 
let him wind down, shut curtains
on Cassandras crowding like triffids,

like refugees from an Apocalypse
yet to happen, and do something 
future-less. 

 
Teleology II

The refugees from an Apocalypse yet to happen 
are flooding through the time-gate in bloodied rags, 

marked by the Antichrist, trembling from earthquakes,
scorched by stars and planets crashing to earth, 
chewed and spat out by dragons with various heads, 
nibbled by locusts. 

Tens of thousands have already perished en route 
and most who reach their past are denied sanctuary:
after all, it’s their fault they weren’t among the Elect. 
The future can hardly be blamed on us, can it? 

A select few we save, those who bring with them 
knowledge of soon-to-be-discovered technologies,
oh, and the plumbers. 

The others – the godless, hairdressers, poets – 
are shoved back, 
whingeing they can’t win on either side of history.  

Afterwards, if you press your ear against the door
and listen carefully, I have heard it said, 

you can hear trumpets, distantly, from the other side.

Leicester Book Prize 2018

By Jonathan Taylor

Over the last few weeks, I've had the pleasure of judging the inaugural Leicester Book Prize, with co-judges Farhana Shaikh and Matthew Vaughan. Farhana Shaikh runs Leicester Writes Festival, and Dahlia Publishing, and founded the prize; Matthew Vaughan is Development Librarian in Leicester, runs Leicester Writers' Showcase, and is also himself a storyteller.  

The prize was open to any book by a Leicestershire-based writer, published between May 2017 and April 2018. Books could be commercially, independently or self-published. Since this was the first year that the prize had run, we had to decide on judging criteria, and a statement about the prize. This is what we came up with:

“As well as literary and aesthetic quality, we will reward texts which represent or embody the values which we see as characteristic of the city: diversity, individuality, multiculturalism, democracy and an ever-surprising eccentricity. For that reason, the prize will aim to treat texts which are independently published, self-published or, in some way, marginalised, on an equal footing with books from major publishers. It will aim to celebrate books which have been overlooked by the mainstream.”

It was an absolute delight reading the books submitted. The books were remarkably varied and of a standard which would compare with any city in the country, or beyond. I have felt for a while that the literary scene in Leicester - with its multiple literary festivals, its nationally-known poetry and open-mic events, Leicester Writers' Club, its publishers and university courses - is going through a bit of a golden age; and the quality of the books on both shortlist and longlist is a testament to this. 

All of the books were celebrated at a special event on June 12th at the Exchange Bar in Leicester, which included readings, talks and the presentation of the award. I don't believe literature is a competition; so, although in the end we had to choose a "winner," it's important to stress that the prize celebrates all of the wonderful books published in the area over the last year. 

I've listed the books below, with a few thoughts on each of them. 


Winner

The winner of the 2018 Leicester Book Prize was Rod Duncan, for his novel The Queen of All Crows. This was a hugely imaginative, compelling and ambitious work of speculative fiction, which frankly I loved, start to finish. I've never read anything quite like it. 

Shortlist

The other books on the shortlist were:

Animal Lovers by Rob Palk: a very funny, and elegantly written novel, which was hugely entertaining throughout. 

The Things We Thought We Knew by Mahsuda Snaith: a thoughtful and poignant novel about friendship and loss - full of poetry and humour. 


Neon Sky by Maud Wainwright-Pilton: a sophisticated and musical novel in poetry - I couldn't put it down.

Longlist

The other books on the longlist were:

Birds Without Sky by Malka Al-Haddad: a harrowing collection of poems, with beautiful illustrations, about the refugee experience - a politically important and hard-hitting book. 

Kingstone by Katherine Hetzel: a beautifully written and very original fantasy story.

Dream Dreams by Sandra Pollock: an inspiring pamphlet of poems. I particularly enjoyed the poems written in the Barbadian dialect. 

Restless Coffins by M. P. Wright: a crime novel full of adventure and political substance - vivid and compelling. 

Writers Rod Duncan, Maud Wainwright-Pilton, Rob Palk