Christmas Special: Juliet Wilson

A couple of days ago, I sent a call out on twitter for Christmassy poems or flash fiction, so that I could feature a piece on Sabotage on this special day. Many entries were sent, and I had to make the difficult decision to choose just one. In the end Juliet Wilson’s poem ‘Mythology of Flight’ won out and I think you’ll find it suitably festive! However, I can’t resist including also a runner up for all of us bah humbug sorts, a haiku by Ray Scanlon:

Outdoor speakers blare
Drummer Boy once too often–
where’s my bazooka?

Juliet Wilson has reviewed for us a fair bit in the past, with a particular focus on environmental magazines, you can read them all here. Her second chapbook of poetry, Unthinkable Skies was published in 2010 by Calder Wood Press. She blogs here. Enjoy!

Mythology of Flight

Snow covered fields.
Reindeer dig for lichen,
their breath rising like steam.The ancient ones told stories
of flying with an old man,
of many roofs in foreign lands,
of boxes, brightly wrapped.

The herd eats steadily,
heads down,
ears alert in the solemn matter
of survival.

In the distance –
a faint red glow,
the sound of sleigh bells
—Juliet Wilson

Anon #7

-Reviewed by Chloe Stopa-Hunt–

Around the halfway mark of Anon Seven is a short prose piece by Claire Askew, reflecting on the experience of reading poems ‘blind’ as a competition judge. Askew feelingly depicts the anxieties of the process – what if you recognise a friend’s style, or give all the prizes to the same person? – but the article is perhaps most interesting in its capacity as an implicit commentary on the magazine as a whole. The editors of Anon, like the judges of competitions, review their poetry submissions with no knowledge of the author: indeed, they proudly announce in the issue’s introduction that they have recently graduated to an automated anonymising system. The egalitarian benefits of such a review process do not need to be rehearsed at any length. Clearly, less-established or less-confident poets are probable beneficiaries: they need not be afraid to submit, and they are assured of unbiased consideration when they do. Askew moved me to wonder, however, whether there might also be disadvantages to the process. Anon Seven is an effervescent production, its poems spanning the world: from Dave Coates’ transfigured, strangely threatening ‘Leith’ (on the magazine’s doorstep, since Anon is produced in Edinburgh), to the detailed, tender surveillance of Lake Illiamna, Alaska, which Scott Edward Anderson undertakes in ‘Midnight Sun’. Its strengths lie in variety, and particularly in the sheer invention and craft of certain poems – sometimes, even, of especially successful lines, such as the opening of Richard Moorhead’s ‘I Shot A Bird’, which breaks upon the reader with a brash insistence that ‘Everyone should try some killing’.

I think, however, that Askew’s description of the free-wheeling, decontextualised world of anonymous reading is reflected in the magazine’s relatively light editorial touch. Each poem has been chosen on its own merits, but the results of such open-minded sifting do not always sit well side by side. Caroline Crew’s ‘Lambing Season’ is a good poem, fully deserving of publication (above all, its image of the farmer reshuffling his bereaved animals is compelling: ‘Giving orphans the dead’s fleeces / to fool a mother’s nostrils / with some scent of the living’), but its rural British aesthetic has little to say to the very different work of Emily Van Duyne, which follows. Van Duyne’s writing is both powerfully observational – a setter’s puppies are ‘strung like fat blunt / Christmas bulbs from fat blunt chocolate nipples’ – and animated by taut undercurrents of threat and yearning; it emerges, however, from a completely different poetic tradition to Crew’s.

If some marriages among the selection of poems are unsuccessful, others work better. William Gault Bonar’s ‘Sensing You’ concludes with the speaker ‘jammed on the motorway / listening to radio blether, trying / to pin down your smell, your taste’. Here, isolation and desperation are confined within relatively pared-down and prosaic lines, arranged in three brief quatrains: the narrator’s sense-exercise, that pinning down, feels obsessive but tightly controlled. In the poem that follows, Russel Swensen’s ‘Moonlight’, a much looser line structure, with no stanza breaks, holds sway. The poem is one attenuated sentence; gaps and pauses have infiltrated the lines, rather than regulating them. This verbal slipperiness comes to mirror the moon’s overdetermined, yet indefinite role in the poem, as interlocutor, muse, villain, lost one: the narrator says, ‘I would not confuse you Moon / is it true what they did to you’, but in fact the poem creates a managed confusion in which the same symbol can signify, from moment to moment, anything the speaker finds noteworthy or wishes to talk about. The poem really needs to be read in full, but an extract can hint at its cunningly oscillatory tones, moving between fractious colloquialism and slightly camp, slightly twitchy epic:

‘Moon I’m serious a sparrow
with folded wings & trembling:
Moon that falls through stories
like a rock through yarn Moon
that always escapes the enemy camp
on a stolen horse
that streaks its cheeks with blood
Moon that festers like the youngest son
in an ancient house

[…]

I could try to love you Moon that
is all talk tell me my favorite
story before I tell you yours you can
afford to be generous’

This anxious, iterative intensity can be profitably read against the quiet desperation of William Gault Bonar’s narrator, because Swensen too is ‘pinning down’, albeit through a wholly different language register. In some instances, then, the contextless reading process has by no means stopped the creators of Anon Seven from assembling a selection of poems which, by their proximity, enrich the reading experience of each. There are even some recurrent ideas across the collection more widely: Marion McCready’s ‘Eyewitnesses’ and Juliet Wilson’s ‘Strangers’ are more than sixty pages apart, but they both counterpoise a deliberate playfulness with deadly serious intimations of disaster, even of concealed atrocities. Wilson’s poem sets up the cliché of two people’s eyes locking ‘across the room’ and sparking ‘electricity’, only to demolish it in the latter half of her tiny poem:

‘a sudden memory
of us hiding in an orange grove

as soldiers approached’

McCready’s tranquil winter scene is punctuated by italicised couplets, almost offhand – and there are only three of them, six lines of twenty-two – but all the more chilling thereby. ‘In another life / they ate my house with fire‘, the unnamed voice declares, and then: ‘They came while we were eating, / they came in twos and threes‘. Chloe Morrish’s poem, which accompanies a description of her experiences as a participant in the Clydebuilt apprenticeship scheme, also uses a playful revisionism to re-cast a scenario that might otherwise be too familiar to jaded readers. Written whilst on the scheme, and inspired by a painting of the Danaids, ‘Myth: (The Danaids’ Reply)’ stands as an example of successful workshopping, as well as a tough-minded and funny poem in its own right – reminiscent, I thought, of some of the pieces in Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife.

Several poets have contributed fresh-feeling nature poems, such as Jayne Fenton Keane’s ‘Garden Speech’, in which ‘A tincture of rain / revives eggish bodies – soil pocketed / frogs begin their slow uncoupling with earth’. The verbal music of these lines feels, itself, almost clogged with soil: the hard sounds of ‘g’ and ‘k’ combine with unexpected line breaks (‘soil pocketed / frogs’ would naturally be unsplit, and on the same line) to suggest at an aural level the awkwardness of a frog detaching itself from wet earth. Shivani Sivagurunathan offers a vision more inflected by sublimity in ‘Natural History’, a poem in which times of natural disaster – when ‘the sky / collapses and the equator / trembles like unfurled string’ – are preceded by heightened moments, when ‘certain tree trunks / look more serious, more silver’. This attention to the numinous is also apparent in John Glenday’s ‘Imagine you are driving’, the last poem in the issue. Taken from the poet’s new collection, Grain, this piece follows a short interview with Glenday (an interview worth reading, in particular for the poet’s comic insights into his writing process and the wider literary world of events and reviews), and is – unsurprisingly – one of the most honed and impressive pieces in the magazine. It displays an interpretive sympathy with nature which swiftly deepens into something more definitely reflective, and more poignant. The last few lines showcase the effectiveness of controlled negation in the hands of a gifted poet, and conclude Anon Seven on a high note of poetic craft:

‘So you drive on, hopeful of a time

when the ocean will rise up before you like dusk
and you will make landfall at last–
some ancient, long-forgotten mooring, perhaps,
which both of you, of course, will recognise;

though as I said before, there is no one beside you
and neither of you has anywhere to go.’

‘For the Administration (after Rimbaud)’ by Sean Bonney

-Reviewed by Juliet Wilson–

This is a beautifully produced 9 page chapbook on a fine textured creamy paper, hand-sewn and with pages ready to cut (I’ve never needed to cut the pages of a book before, and it gives a lovely rough edge to the page and an added sense of anticipation to the reading). The high quality production gives a suitably vintage feel to the poetry inside, which is one long poem after Rimbaud.

Now, I am a great believer that poetry chapbooks should be able to stand alone and be accessible without depending on knowledge of another piece of work. I’m impatient of texts that demand that you have already read and preferably memorised specific works by other writers. That, combined with the fact that when I did a quick internet search for Rimbaud I found nothing that matched with this book, means I read it cold and judged it for itself, rather than with any reference to the original Rimbaud.

For the Administration is a complex poem about the world, language and political intrigue. It is often brilliant, using wonderful imagery such as ‘we circles of cancelled stars’ and ‘the centre of our orbit is some kind of cynical massacre’. It is obvious in parts that however faithful to the original Rimbaud, this piece has been adapted to the modern world – not least through the mention of ‘George Osborne, god of love’.

It is a thought-provoking read, using different poetic techniques to good effect to hold the reader’s attention and give different perspectives on the themes. It isn’t always entirely clear what is going on, but in this poem, that serves to intrigue rather than alienate the reader. It never feels as though it is being obscure for the sake of it, as some poetry does. It also does stand alone, I found myself wanting to read the original Rimbaud, but the fact that I didn’t have access to that, didn’t lessen the power of this chapbook. The world view that reveals itself feels pretty grim but that fits with a lot of what is around us at the moment and we need poetry that engages with the downside of life.

If you are interested in poetry that challenges your world view then this poem is well worth reading, several times over.

Horizon Review #5

-Reviewed by Juliet Wilson–

Horizon Review is an online journal produced by Salt Publishing, which takes its name and its inspiration from Horizon, the magazine Cyril Connolly ran from the outbreak of the War in 1939 until it closed in 1949. Horizon Review is currently edited by Katy Evans-Bush who says she wants Horizon review to be

‘an experience, a message, a feast like a meal where all food groups are represented and the amino acids and vitamins all complement one another’.

So, is that what Horizon Review really feels like? From the contents list, the reader can see that here are poetry, short stories, essays, reviews, an interview and a couple of cartoons. So in that sense, the journal certainly fulfils Evans-Bush’s vision.

Most of the short stories are quietly insightful dissections of every-day life and relationships. Steven Maxwell’s ‘The Festival’ outlines the way a father and son relationship changes when the two go to Glastonbury together.  Maire T Robinson’s ‘Even the Sea Dreams of Escape’ is a story of how Sophie – stuck in a boring job in a small town – finds transformation.

The poetry ranges from quiet understatement to experimentation, with impressive use of rhyme by almost all the poets included. I loved Maryann Corbett’s poems ‘Portent’ and ‘Holiday Concert’. The former is a struggle to understand a dream about a ballet and ends, as the ballerina is lifted and carried away with the line ‘How do I know this isn’t victory?’; the latter is a description of a concert, full of precise detail and the seventh grade boy who in the future

‘will wince at the thought
of singing, yet will ache to sing, in silence,
silence even to the generation to come’

Both these poems convey the intrinsic oddness in the ordinary social event that is going to a performance.

Matt Merrit’s ‘Zugunruhe’ is a quiet poem that steals up on the reader; it’s a haunting evocation of the unsettling feeling evinced by migrating birds. (‘Zugunruhe’ is a German compound word made up of the elements ‘Zug’ – move and ‘Unruhe’ – restlessness that is used to describe the restlessness of migratory species).

Another poem that spoke to me was ‘In the Garden’, Sophie Nicholl’s poignant imagining of poems that had been buried by a poet fleeing the authorities later becoming part of the orange trees that were planted in the same ground. A beautiful symbol of transformation and hope. I also enjoyed David Troupe’s minimalistic and atmospheric ‘Bob and Jackie Watch Heat Lightning From Their Porch’.

Robert Archabeau’s intelligent and readable essay on Nick Cave was also particularly gratifying. This starts by drawing parallels between Archabeau’s own childhood in provincial Canada and Cave’s youth in small town Australia. There is an exploration of the Romantic poets concludings that they felt ill at ease in the modern world and that this feeling (combined with society in turn not supporting poets, no generous patrons for the Romantics as there had been for earlier poets!) gave them a great amount of artistic freedom. A detailed critique of Cave’s song There She Goes My Beautiful World analyses how his writing aligns with the Romantic movement. Not only was this essay interesting and fascinating, it also got me to pick up the Nick Cave CD which I have neglected for far too long.

Horizon Review certainly offers a wide range of different types of writing and the pieces complement each other well.

Envoi #157 October 2010

-Reviewed by Juliet Wilson–

 

Envoi is a UK based poetry journal that has been going since 1957, under various editors, currently Jan Fortune-Wood. One of the aspects of Envoi that I particularly like is that it actually showcases poets. This issue features seven poems from Abegail Morley (shortlisted last year for best first collection in the Forward Prize) and five poems from guest poet Char March. Every other poet included is represented with at least two poems or a lengthy sequence, as opposed to the many poetry journals that often feature only single poems from individual poets. Envoi also includes a number of clearly written, in-depth reviews of poetry collections and the winners of the latest Envoi competition along with the adjudicator’s report. I always find adjudicator’s reports fascinating and insightful, though I rarely agree with the conclusions! Recently entries to the competition have declined so it will in future only be an annual event rather than the quarterly event it has been so far.

 

In this issue, there is a good selection of poems dealing with nature and set in rural areas, some of which deal with environmental issues. Among Char March’s varied poems is ‘ ‘There will only be a loss of 352’ which details the loss of oak trees during the widening of a road widening scheme in Ardnamurchan in 2008.  Martyn Halsall’s ‘Hut of the Shadows’ is also set in the Scottish Highlands and beautifully evokes the atmosphere and mystery of the unknown history of the hut in the title – ‘its legends peat smoke listing in ancient air’. Also set in a similar setting (though there is a Dun Beg in Ireland as well as one in Scotland so I don’t want to assume too much!) Peter Johnson’s sparely written poem ‘Dun Beg’ ends with the vivid lines:

 

‘The gale that burgles our breath transports

the black raven across the white sky.’

 

The same poet gives us a landscape of sheep in the aptly titled ‘Sheep’ and an exploration of the nature of the universe and the dark side in ‘Dark Matters’, hence demonstrating how Envoi’s policy of publishing a number of poems by each poet can give the reader a better feel for the poet’s range.

 

Richard Williams has two poems here. ‘21^st Century Fairy Tales’ takes as its starting point the fact that the 2009 Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner was stripped of his award when it was found he had used a tame wolf in his photo. From there he muses on how we embellish our memories in the same way as a photographer uses online editing tools. His other poem is ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ is a meditation on the uncertainty principle and the apparent meaninglessness of much of life ‘as icebergs are calving in the Barents Sea’. This is a poem I keep re-reading, it is haunting in its effect.

 

I also liked Bob Beagrie’s thoughts in The Star pub in ‘Ronin’ as:

 

‘I sip the stout and sigh, think of a picture

Of the Horse Headed Nebulae in my daughter’s

Encyclopaedia of the Universe, rearing up

With a mane of hydrogen clouds, 1.5 thousand

Light years away; let it bloom in my mind like sakura,

Watch it canter, kick up a spray of frozen satellites’

 

(sakura is the Japanese cherry blossom, perhaps a note here would have been helpful for some readers?).

 

The poetry in this issue of Envoi is varied in content and style, with a lot of very good poems from a varied selection of mostly UK based poets. Well worth a read!

 

The Literary Bird Journal #1.2

-Reviewed by Juliet Wilson–

The LBJ is a biannual publication dedicated to  creative writing about birds. Its title comes from the acronym for “little brown job,” used by birders to describe difficult-to-identify species, such as many warblers or sparrows.

The LBJ publishes creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, narrative scholarship, literary journalism and showcases visual art – all on themes related to birds.

I haven’t been able to get my hands on a paper copy of the LBJ, but their website offers a small selection of pieces from the publication, which I’ve used as a basis for this review.

I’ll start with ‘He Knows Me as the Blind Man Knows the Cuckoo’ a short story by Elena Passarello in the current issue of The LBJ. This is a wonderful piece of fiction, which I have shared with students in the class I teach on environmental writing. It opens:

‘It’s the first day of spring. A male Cuckoo in his prime bursts into the open fen, hollering as he sails over its weeds, scrubs, and dikes. He lands in a shady spot, firing the sound of his father and his father before him—all those males he’s never met.

I want a girl just like the girl that married dear old dad, he sings, imagining a marriage that probably took place in this same fen one spring before, with an earlier variation of his own, famous descending third: cu-koo.’

From there on it continues, an exuberant story of cuckoos, with references to popular culture and human behaviour, which presents the birds’ breeding behaviour in a way that the reader can relate to, while being accurate bird biology too. It’s brilliant and was a worthy winner of the LBJ’s Urb Bird Contest.

Moving on to poetry, we have ‘ For the Birds (1900 – 2009)’ by Camille T. Dungy, a heartbreaking list poem of bird species that are known or believed to be extinct, some of the names are poetry in themselves – Nuko Hiuo monarch, short-toed nuthatch vaga, red-moustached fruit-dove. The fact that most of them are species the average reader won’t have heard of only makes it all the more poignant.

Linnea Ogdens ‘I and the Starling’ is a sestina (a poetic form that relies on repeated words rather than rhyme) illustrated with words arranged to look like flocking starlings. It’s a beautiful, swirling piece of poetry, full of wonderful observations. I read it over and over, and it inspired me to experiment with writing sestinas, which previously I have found dull and tiresome to write.

I have to admit, I’m not sure how much appeal The LBJ would have to anyone not already a keen birdwatcher. The work seems to assume a certain level of familiarity with bird biology and a good variety of bird species (and it seems to be biased toward North America too, so even the keen British birder may be at a disadvantage). My other criticism is that some of the pieces seem to be overwritten. If you like your prose ornate and flowery then fine, but it doesn’t always work for me. It did in ‘He Knows Me as the Blind Man Knows the Cuckoo’ (see earlier) but in other pieces I found it irritating. An example is the editor’s introduction, which in the current issue is a moving and interesting story about a family of peregrines, that I couldn’t help thinking might have benefited from tighter language and fewer adjectives.

However, judging from the selection on the website, The LBJ is an excellent publication for anyone interested in birds and literature.

 

Terrain.org – Fall/Winter 2010

-Reviewed by Juliet Wilson–

Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments is a twice yearly online journal interested in finding the soul of place. It encompasses human culture, ecology, natural landscapes and artificial ones and explores the symbiosis between the built and natural environments. It is full of fascinating, well written, thought provoking articles, poetry, stories and other pieces of writing, often with photos too. There’s a huge amount to explore on the website and this review can only begin to scratch the surface.

Terrain.org contains two main types of work:

• Technical and journalistic works in the Articles, UnSprawl (case studies of reducing urban sprawl), Reviews, Interview, and Columns sections are aimed at professionals and other interested individuals and groups. These contributions can help communities develop and redevelop in a more sustainable manner.
• Literary and artistic works in the Poetry, Essays, Fiction, and ARTerrain ( a focus article on an artist working in an area such as ecology or urban environments)  sections are to be enjoyed for what they are.

Here are some of the highlights of the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of Terrain.

‘Signal: Notes on the Desert ~ A Photo Essay’ written by Gregory McNamee and containing photography by Stephen Strom – is a wonderful meditation on deserts and an attempt to define what exactly makes a desert. The question remains unanswered but the journey is more than worth the while.

Notable for the way it ranges over several topics bringing them beautifully together is ‘The Bards Bird, or the The Slings and Arrows of Avicultural Hegemony: A TragiComedy in Five Acts’ by Charles Mitchell. This fascinating article starts out by tracing the changing public attitudes to Shakespeare in the USA then moves on to look at the introduction of the European starling to New York as part of the 19^th Century project to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare into the USA. Mitchell then outlines the issues around starlings in the USA, their nuisance value, the damage they cause to agriculture and aviation but ends with a plea to accept them and to appreciate their beauty. Along the way he draws parallels with our attitudes to invasive species and to human immigration. I found it a particularly interesting article, given that in the UK we are concerned about the declines in starling populations across the country.

Also notable for bringing together diverse themes is ‘Goya’s Dog’ by Laura-Gray Street, a wonderful 15 part poem, alternating stanzas of poetry and prose poetry which ranges over a variety of topics including visual art, dogs, nuclear power, family relationships, cancer and the colour yellow. This issue contains a lot of other poems; many of them are very impressive.

‘Right of Way’ by Andrew Wingfield is an engrossing story about a loner teenager and missing cats. Set in a new community built near an area of wilderness, it is an insightful story about friendship, family, community and not judging teenagers just because they don’t fit in. And just what is happening to the cats? You’ll need to read the story to find out!

Add to this articles that range over issues including permaculture, walkable neighbourhoods and forest fires; a case study of the Metro Green Greenway system in Kansas City and a focus article on Andrea Polli, a digital media artist who uses sound technology to understand storm and climate and you have a rich diversity of content. This is one of the things I like best about Terrain, the fact that it has so much to offer readers whatever their particular interests in terms of both topic and format, but also that it approaches the issues around ecology, urban design and environment from so many different angles, which gives it a real three dimensional feel. It’s also a very good read!

 

End of Year Round-Up: The Reviewers

2010 was the year Sabotage went from being just a thought to a fully-fledged website. To celebrate not just the wonderful reviewers who are the backbone of this site, but also the literature that has made our year what it is, I have asked several reviewers to answer these three short questions:

-Has 2010 brought to your attention any outstanding literary magazines (be they online or in print), if so, which?

-What event sticks out in your mind as the literary event of 2010 (it can be a personal accomplishment)?

-What was your favourite literary discovery of the year (it can be a single poem, a novel, a pamphlet, a press, …)?

Below you will find the answers of several of this year’s reviewers, and in a few days I will publish the answers of several authors, both of poetry and fiction, who were kind enough to take part.

To make things fair, here are my brief answers, then I’ll hand it over to the reviewers:

-Obviously the creation of Sabotage has brought my attention to several excellent magazines. My favourite discovery is probably Diagram. I reviewed its Summer 2010 issue for The Review Review. It was a bit of a surprise favourite as I tend to prefer poetry to short stories. This is what I said about it in the review: ‘The fiction featured displays an obsessive relationship to dissection and decorticates genres, voices, people. Sometimes this mad-scientist effervescence overwhelms the content to the point of un-readability, but more often than not, it elates. Diagram is a welcome shock-therapy to more traditional online journals – a breath of unruly air displacing paperwork.’

-There are several events that I could cite, 2010 brought the death of two personal heavyweight: Edwin Morgan and J.D. Salinger. Though with the latter, I could not help but feel a certain morbid curiosity for the work he kept hidden, as if he were the guardian of a treasure and finally defeated by a cocky young hero who knew the answers to the riddle. On a personal level, it was getting two poems accepted by Poetry Salzburg Review, a magazine I have long admired for the consistent quality of its output, and its vibrantly multi-cultural authors.

-Now that’s definitely a tough one. I discovered James Merrill’s ‘Charles on Fire’ and Charles Causley’s ‘Convoy’ thanks to Katy Evans-Bush’s workshop Making Poetry at the Poetry School, both have stuck with me for days beyond reading. Amongst pamphlets, my favourites were Mark Halliday’s No panic here, Jon Stone’s Scarecrows and Joe Dunthorne’s Faber New Poets pamphlet. As far as collections go two stand out: Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard and Karen Annesen’s How to Fall.

The Reviewers (in no particular order):

Richard T. Watson is a writer and director who has reviewed several works for Sabotage, most recently two of Sidekick Books’ publications, Pocket Spellbook and Coin Opera. You can find his review here, and his blog here.

-Its focal hero might make it seem a tad outdated, but I’ve enjoyed the Ben Jonson Journal (which I discovered in 2010, but has been running for much longer). It’s one of the many things I came across as a student that I wanted to get into in more depth, but never had time because of the looming deadline thing. But what I did read of the BJJ helped with my Dissertation, and all of it was fascinating.

-It’s not that long since National Poetry Week, which included a BBC adaptation of Chris Reid’s poem The Song of Lunch on BBC Two – which I think is probably my literary event of the year (and not just for the connection to my own University). The poem was translated more or less directly to the screen without addition or abridgement, a rare case of bringing poetry to mainstream popular culture. Having Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson involved helps as well.

–My favourite literary discovery of 2010 is Julia Bird’s poem ‘For my Brother, Relentlessly’, which is published in Coin Opera, a micro-anthology from Sidekick Books. It’s a poem in nostalgic praise of  arcade game classic Space Invaders, laid out like the screen of a Space Invaders game. The text itself is simply the repeated question ‘Can I have a go on the Space Invaders now?’ – but what I especially like is the way that the title’s comma conjures an image of a small girl asking this of her brother without pausing for breath for several minutes. Then, when she does finally take a breath, she says ‘please’.

Juliet Wilson is a poet who has written a series of reviews on environmental literary magazines for Sabotage, her most recent review can be found here whilst her website is here.

-2010 was the year I really became aware of Anon Poetry magazine. I knew it existed and had read an old copy but this year they accepted two of my poems and I found myself at the wonderful launch party at the Scottish Poetry Library and bought more back copies. The current editor Colin Fraser really knows how to choose good poetry (not just because he chooses mine!) and there are also a selection of intelligent and thought provoking articles about poetry in the magazine. Add to this that its a lovely neat format and fits quite easily into a handbag or pocket for reading on the bus, definitely a great read. The anon website is here and they’re on Twitter too:

-The event that for me was the literary event of 2010 was (sorry to blow my own trumpet!) the launch of my poetry chapbook Unthinkable Skies by Calder Wood Press.

-My favourite literary discovery was Lorsque j’etais un oeuvre d’art by Eric Emanuel Schmitt, an amazing, weird and wonderful novel about a man who is saved from committing suicide by an art entrepreneur who offers him the chance to become a living piece of art. A thought provoking exploration of what it means to be human written with the narrative drive of a thriller. I don’t know whether it’s been translated into English. I always find that reading an exceptionally good book in a foreign language intensifies the experience for me, as I meed to concentrate more and there’s a real sense of achievement in the reading!

Ian Chung is a poet who blogs here and tweets here. His most recent review for Sabotage is of the arts-collective website Lazy Gramophone.

-Polarity Magazine comes to mind. I came to it quite by chance, as the chief editor happens to teach on my university course as well and there was a launch event held at the university. It’s a print magazine, very professionally done, with each issue being ‘organised around two falsely polarised concepts’. The magazine’s website has some excerpts from the first issue.
-I’m going to go with a personal accomplishment here, and that was getting a couple of my poems accepted by The Cadaverine. It was my third time submitting, so I guess it’s true, third time’s the charm! Seriously though, it was an honour for my work to be chosen, and I’m looking forward to seeing it appear on the newly revamped website.

-I’m going to say it was Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. In a seminar last year, I’d read the Zadie Smith essay, ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, in which she reviews Remainder and Joseph O’Neill’sNetherland, and was intrigued by how she saw them as representing opposing futures for the Anglophone novel. I’d meant to read Remainder since then, but only got around to doing so over the summer holidays. It’s definitely an interesting read, in the way that its protagonist escalates the cycles of repetition that are the only means by which his life can anchor itself meaningfully. Smith notes at the start of her essay that Remainder took seven years to find a publisher, which isn’t surprising, given how its structure deliberately defies the sort of marketable narrative that would sit nicely in a chain bookstore’s window display.

Caroline Crew is a poet and a prolific blogger of all things poetic here.  She reviewed Blue-eyed boy bait for Sabotage here.

-For me the publications that have really sung that this year have all had a really strong sense of identity and of purpose. Literary magazines and projects that eshcew the normal manifestos on the submissions page. The ones that have really struck me this year have been Fuselit– a gorgeous magazine that runs of a spur word. Popshot, the illustrated poetry magazine that brings together the visual and the verbal to stunning effect, and my current favourite, > kill author, an online magazine that helped me rid myself of the silly preconception that print is inherently better.

-Sadly, for me that would have to be the passing of Edwin Morgan, at the grand age of 90. He was the first Scots Makar, and when it comes down to it, just a absolutely stellar poet. The death of such an imagination leaves an abyss.
-Well, moving across the Atlantic has been strange for me in many ways, but the epic differences in the poetry being written was definitely the most astounding. My favourite discovery so far would have to be Ada Limon. I saw her read recently and bought her excellent collection, sharks in the rivers, and cannot let it be out of my reach.

Jared Randall is a poet who blogs here, his first book of poetry, Aprocryphal Road Code, is now available from Salt Publishing. He reviewed >kill author for Sabotage here.

–The Offending Adam is probably the most intriguing online lit mag to catch my eye this year. TOA has taken the online lit mag format and run with it. Editors Andrew Wessels and Co. present weekly features that you can read in a relatively few spare moments because they focus on (usually) a single poet’s work. This focused brevity includes a brief statement from the author or a third party about what they think of the work and how it has come into existence. What is more, TOA takes care to ensure this glimpse behind the scenes/recommendation lends a sense of literary justification and thoughtfulness without descending into either facile interpretism or the chance to merely sound off on one’s poetic opinions.

Rather than browsing for a mag’s hidden gems among a multitude of works that may serve as mere fodder, every entry of TOA leaves me excited for next week’s installment. TOA’s eye for quality and the breathing space they leave to really consider the work at hand fly in the face of the common “dime-a-dozen” argument against online literature journals. You can sign up for weekly updates via email or Facebook and always know that your next poetry fix is in the wings and that you won’t have to wade through scads of authors to get to something you’ll truly want to consider.

-I don’t know that I’m qualified to give a grand literary pronouncement of what event was most important on a grand scale, but I did experience a very personal circle of memorable events at the end of 2010. The circle involves the publication of my own first book of poetry (Apocryphal Road Code) but really centers on the National Book Award in fiction as won by my former Western Michigan University undergrad professor, Jaimy Gordon.

The background of this story goes back a decade. Jaimy’s was my final fiction workshop before I dropped out of school for nearly four years after ignoring her advice to stick with it (no exaggeration). Of course, she was right, and, in 2004, I went back to school, finished up my degree, and from there received my MFA at the University of Notre Dame. How ironic that, barely a week after my first book came out, I was privileged to hear Jaimy read from her award-winning Lord of Misrule at the Kalamazoo Public Library.

This event, with its local southwest-Michigan flavor, was a culmination for me. I reflected, while waiting in line to have Jaimy sign my copy of her book, on the good fortune I had to study with great writers in the Kalamazoo area while in undergrad. I realized, after Jaimy spoke on the importance for her of finding a character’s voice, how I, too, learned the importance of voice from her all those years ago. Voice is important in my recent book, and I knew in that moment that I owe Jaimy more than I had either suspected or remembered.

Though it comes from a true prodigal, I believe I can safely say that all of us who have studied with Jaimy know how good she is, how careful and precise and insightful are her critiques. I could not be happier on her behalf for the recognition she has received, and I can only hope to enjoy a touch of the same in the future. Also, if you have not picked up a copy of Lord of Misrule, do so. A great book to curl up with over the holidays!

-I did not have to think long in order to settle on Chad Sweeney’s Parable of Hide and Seek from Alice James Books. Chad is a writer who is also local to a Kalamazoo area rich in talent, and I fell in love with his new poetry during a reading he gave recently. In particular, his poems “Little Wet Monster” and “Holy Holy” struck such a personal chord with me that I had to acquire his book right away.

The first is an incantation, a welcoming, a calling forth of an unborn child: “Come antler through the gates my thingling/ Your grapes contain the houses// Unmask the stones my darkling grief/ Come whole my homeward early// You alone devour the night,” and so on. The child comes from the dark womb but brings the secret of light, a rich paradox among many in Parable. Mother and father voices merge somehow in a poem that Chad reads with a lot of courage and all the real passion of a father who appreciates the mystery and precious gift that is life. I jive with that, being a father of four with another on the way.

In “Holy Holy,” Chad also manages to get me where I feel it deep down. It begins, “For me speech is/ a way of touching,/ a rummaging under/ for what’s not meant// to be moved,” and continues, “a sentence begun// before my father was/ beaten for his stutter.” I adore the double to triple meanings of these enjambed lines as they turn on one another. The poet then asks for “courage/ to fail publicly// in ordinary tasks,/ give/ me corner beams laboring/ without grace.”

The humility and gentle sensibility of Chad Sweeney’s poems are, judging by his reading and conversation, wholly genuine. Their surreal yet familiar landscapes pull me in, and I think they will you, too. Give him a try at http://www.alicejamesbooks.org or your favorite seller. In fact, treat yourself to an entire Kalamazoo, Michigan, literary romp! There are plenty of authors to choose from, whether recently published or from years gone by.

Earthspeak #4, Summer 2010

-Reviewed by Juliet Wilson–

EarthSpeak is a new online literary journal that explores the ‘relationship between humanity and its home’. As Seth Jani, says in his ‘Letter from the Editor’:

‘Since time immemorial it has been the role of the storyteller, the poet, the shaman, the bard, to bring to light a vision of man and his environment that will rain down order upon the chaotic circumstances of the external world. It is these visionaries who mold from their experience creative works that somehow transcend the merely human and effectively relate man in a new and more nourishing way to the cosmos……. This is why I have created this humble little journal, for it’s time to let the storytellers play their part.’

Each issue of EarthSpeaks is compact, containing a small number of poems along with a short story or a couple of essays. Issue 4 contains work from 7 poets and one short story. Each issue is available on the website or as a downloadable e-book that is available at a small price. All issues are archived on the website.

There is a pleasing variety in the approaches that the writers take to the relationship between humans and nature.

Do Not Feed is a powerful and disturbing short story about animal experimentation, written by K R Sands, whose jobs have included being an animal lab technician. The story focuses on Erlinda, an animal technician who is having second thoughts about some of the experiments she is involved in. Ceci, the researcher on the lead poisoning experiments, takes Erlinda to visit a lead poisoned child, who can hopefully in the future be helped by the results of the experiments the two women are carrying out on the laboratory dogs. The story describes in heart-rending detail the experiments and explores the potential medical benefits that they will bring.

However, the power of the narrative is in the human elements – Erlinda’s mixed feelings, the poverty and ill health of the child and his family. The reader is drawn into the situation and forced to think about the complex moral dilemmas at the centre of this type of work. Most people will find that their sympathies are all with the animals and that they question the true medical value of much of the experimentation. The lead poisoned child is more likely to be helped if, for example, his mother stops cooking in a lead lined pot than as a direct result of the experiments.

Casey Fitzsimmons similarly offers a well balanced view of the issue of invasive plants in her poem ‘Day Without Horizon’ which talks of the ‘immigrants homesick for blue flowers’ who are blind to the future that they have forced on the land:

‘fast-growing super-seeders
tending to monoculture’

However, the publication would feel too serious if all the pieces were issue based, no matter how well balanced and written (and the two discussed above are both!) There are poems on a variety of topics including: a visit to a place of natural beauty (‘Upon Visiting The Grand Canyon’ by Christy Effinger), thunder storms and dying trees (‘Too Little Too Late’ by Joan MacLean) and glow-worms and the nature of light (‘Light: A Variation’ by donnarkevic).

My favourite poems are those by Michael Spring, who is also a natural builder, an occupation that feeds into two of his poems here. ‘The Living Roof’ starts with the striking line:

‘There is a ladder in every masterpiece’

and goes on to describe the ladder in his mud house that:

‘appears most often
when the trees are singing.’

Earthspeak is an interesting and inspiring journal that allows storytellers of all types to play their part in exploring our relationship with the environment.

Albatross Poetry Journal #21

-Reviewed by Juliet Wilson–

Albatross is a poetry journal published since 1985 by the Anabiosis Press. These days it is available both online and in print format. According to the publisher’s blog:

‘the journal’s title is drawn from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and is intended to invoke the allegorical implications of that poem. As such, the albatross becomes a metaphor for an environment that is threatened by the arrogance of humankind.’

This makes Albatross sound heavy and worthy, even to a committed environmentalist such as myself. However the contents belie that impression and take a refreshingly wide variety of approaches to the journal’s overall theme.

Issue 21, the latest issue of Albatross, came out in March 2010. It includes poems that explore the human relationship with nature through gardening (‘In the Garden’ by Ruth Webber Evans and ‘Fall Chores’ by Adam Penna) while Temple Cone draws parallels between the current rising sea temperatures with the Biblical Flood in ‘The World Before Adam Named It’ and Catherine MacGuire ponders the amazing history of the earth and the enjoyment of a childhood fossil hunt in ‘Peterson Butte Fossil Beds’.

In ‘My Mother the Cook’, Ronnie Hess explores his family’s reactions to eating fresh caught fish and wild mushrooms:

‘My father the city boy was convinced they would kill us.

He turned pale and sweaty as we sautéed them in butter.

My mother the country girl swore they were edible.

I was hungry. Terrified. I raised my fork.’

Reading this homely anecdote some readers may be prompted to consider their relationship with the food they eat and by extension how comfortable they feel in the natural landscapes around them. Or they may just give a wry smile at the family dynamics on display.

In ‘The Dark Stains of Yellow Veins’, Stephen Berry looks to Tu Fu (a great Chinese poet of the T’ang dynasty) to inspire him to pay closer attention to nature:

‘saying— just watch—

for a moment— a bird

kicking around in a pile of leaves’

Another poem here that prompts us to pay closer attention to nature is Chris Powici’s ‘Montrose Basin Sea Eagle’. I recently visited Montrose Basin, a wonderful site for wetland birds on the east coast of Scotland. I also recognise the disappointment of missing the rare bird you hoped to find:

‘and so the eye makes do with a cormorant

swooping south across the lagoon —

if the raw beautiful shock of seeing

something so shimmeringly black and quick

and downright miraculous as a cormorant

glide through the waning coastal light

can be described as making do.’

If we really look at all the wildlife around us then we’ll appreciate how wonderful it is and not be obsessed with just finding rarities. If we appreciate nature then we will be more likely to want to protect it, which is a large part of the point of a journal like Albatross. Having said that and knowing that I’m biased as a naturalist and environmentalist, it strikes me that Albatross is well worth reading by anyone who enjoys poetry. If in addition, it helps people to think anew about their relationship with nature and the environment then that’s a bonus.