Excisions: Clare Best

Clare Best’s Excisions (Waterloo Press, 2011) is hard-hitting, and in places it is a challenging read because of the narrative of the middle section, but Best conquers this brilliantly with her sharp, yet gorgeous writing. She is direct and specific, guiding the reader with surgical precision through the collection.

At the heart of this collection is the sequence Self-portrait without Breasts – the exploration of a patient’s journey into the medical world of a preventive double mastectomy, and this is part of the book I’ll focus on here.

Best documents every step of the process beginning with Self-examination, through to other poems with such lines as:

 

“Prepare chest with antiseptic. Check:
Clamps, Vascular Hemoclips,
Blake Drains, Skin Stapler, Marking pen…”  (Technical Steps)

to the final poem in this sequence, The bookbinder:

“Bandage the book in paper, let it
settle under weights, day after day
until the leather’s dry and tight.”

Invited by Best to “attend” her procedures, I read this sequence with one hand over my mouth, thoroughly gripped.

Just once Best steps out of her own treatment with the poem Account which tells, in the first person, the story of the English novelist, Fanny Burney, who in 1811 had a mastectomy without anaesthetic:

“The surgeon’s index finger
describes a line, a circle, a cross.
Six incisions and he changes hands.
My screams throughout.”

It is easy to locate in Best’s collection one line that sums up my response to this sequence and it is the final line of Memento where Best writes:

“my breath snagged within”.

The other two sections of the book also ring with truth and honesty, with a keen eye on internal rhyme and delicate inter-play of words. The first section, Matryoshka, deals with grief and the final section, Airborne, with love.

It is a book that needs the sequence Self-portrait without Breasts sandwiched between the other two, not to sugar coat it, but to add to its depth, and to do the book justice each section needs to be read separately. I made the mistake of reading the book from beginning to end (it is so compelling) but for all the sections to sing, they need to be heard on their own as well.

Lucy Hely-Hutchinson: Featured Poet

Postcards

Dear tomorrow,

please let him remember me
through Menorca summers
and Shanghai dreaming,
knowing I used
each bruise and bite-
mark to prove him.

I traced leather blanes
of his jacket
and smelt his
grey shirt to sleep -
texture and scent
cradled me.

Spain now follows me;
Feliz Navidad, paella
and Real Madrid.
It’s like the nation
found, grasped,
lost me.

Wherever you are,
I’ll measure the distance;
between pillows and continents.

Tomorrow, please
bring March quickly.

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Lucy Hely-Hutchinson is currently studying in the Sixth Form at Benenden School and is a long-time member of Poetry Club. She is the 2011-2012 School Poet Laureate and has poems published in Agenda Broadsheet, Grey Area (a newsletter created by the student body)and A Piece of Cake. She was shortlisted for 2012 Christopher Tower Poetry Award with her poem Postcards, the title poem of her short collection performed at the school Literary Concert. She recently read at the Agenda poetry evening in Mayfield.

Daljit Nagra: Featured Poet

The Constant Art

It’s true my love’s a paid up fashion victim.
Her hair, for a start, each morn is blandly ironed
glossy down her back; her nails are on nails
(embedded with gems) though when in heated kiss
they’ll sometimes stay there hanging in my neck.

Yet she’s no bendu dumbo reared on farms
to wrestle bulls, her battle’s with tash and arms
she’ll wax; but when I see her cut by friends
for wearing last year’s cut, I think of times
I’ve worn my heart at sleeve and that’s not cool.

O love, these things are forging fickle youth!
Let’s drop our guard for goods that rarely lie,
monuments like sonnets that will age
their solid lines in us to save our face.

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Daljit Nagra comes from a Punjabi background. He was born and raised in London then Sheffield. He has won several prestigious prizes for his poetry. In 2004, he won the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem with Look We Have Coming to Dover! This was also the title of his first collection which was published by Faber & Faber in 2007. This won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and The South Bank Show Decibel Award, and was nominated for The Costa Prize, The Guardian First Book Prize, the Aldeburgh Prize and the Glen Dimplex Award.

Daljit’s poems have been published in New Yorker, Atlantic Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry International, Rialto and The North.

He has performed at venues such as Banff, Calgary, Toronto, Bratislava, Galle, Mumbai, Delhi, Orkney, Belfast, Dublin, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Heidelberg, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Ty Newydd and many places in England.

Daljit is on the Board of the Poetry Book Society. He has judged the Samuel Johnson Award 2008, The Guardian First Book Prize 2008, The Foyles Young Poets Competition 2008, The National Poetry Competition 2009. He has also hosted the TS Eliot Poetry Readings 2009.

He is the Lead Poetry Tutor at The Faber Academy and has run workshops all over the world.

He is a regular contributor to BBC radio and has written articles for The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times of India. Tippoo Sultan’s Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy-Machine!!! is his most current collection.

Counting Rain: Karen Dennison

Karen Dennison won the Indigo Dreams Collection Competition in 2011, and Counting Rain is a strong first collection. According to Helen Ivory her poems “bristle with disquiet and transformation” and I have to agree. At times Dennison’s imagery is astonishing. One moment she shines “a light into memory’s cage, / through its mocking bars” where there is a book “with a mummified cover, cracked like old leather” (Memory’s Cage). Another time she tells us that the moons of Saturn “rise in her fingernails / and the Milky Way swirls in her tea.” (Methods of Madness).

Her eye for detail is acute, the poems so well-honed they are literally breathtaking. In Releasing You Dennison regulates our breathing by carefully chosen words and punctuation:

I wind and wind, feel the pressure build.
The key-hole is empty, its key long lost.

At the end of the above stanza, she startles the reader with “Opening the lid, your eyes are my eyes”. In the final couplet, she returns to the image of the eyes with: “Lowering the lid, I catch your scent, / breathe you in, and out again.” She has perfect control over both the poem and the reader.

This collection grows from birth, with the opening poem, Moon Landing, all the way through life’s rich experiences (explored with clarity of language and strong metaphors) to The Final Room the last poem in the collection:

So this is it – the final room.
Empty shelves line each wall
to store your faded memories.

Sometimes ending like this can feel a little clichéd, wrapping things up too tidily. But it is not the case with this collection – Dennison’s finishes with loops and knots pulled so tightly that she grips the reader right down to the very last word.

Kathleen Jones: Featured Poet

On Leaving Children

You always imagined they
would be the ones to leave
with tears and suitcases.
Not you, packing the car at night
taking only what you know
they won’t need.

Not good at leaving are you?
Unrehearsed.
Tripped by that long cord
you thought was cut at birth
still pulsing with maternal blood.

Clumsy with failure
star of your own tragedy
you step out into childless silence
bereaved by your own exit.

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Kathleen Jones has been described by Carol Ann Duffy as ‘a powerful female voice’. She performed in Bristol with Pat VT West and Liz Loxley as part of the ‘Invisible Lipstick’ poetry group and they published two pamphlets Invisible Lipstick and Rumours of Another Sky. Her first solo pamphlet of poetry, Unwritten Lives, won the Redbeck Press pamphlet award and her first full collection, Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21, was joint winner of the Straid Collection award, and published by Templar Poetry in November 2011. Kathleen is also a biographer and short fiction writer, author of a life of Christina Rossetti, Learning not to be First [OUP] and A Passionate Sisterhood [Virago], a group biography of the sisters, wives and daughters of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. Her most recent biography, Katherine Mansfield: The Story-Teller, was published by Penguin and EUP in 2011.

Kathleen’s home is in Cumbria, but as her partner is a sculptor working in Italy she spends a lot of time flying between the two on budget airlines! She has taught creative writing in a number of universities and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.

Visit her website here
Kathleen blogs here.

Kathleen in reading at The Green Pub, Clerkenwell Green, London on the 11th April at 7.30pm

Aime Williams’ review in the TLS

Abegail Morley has the talent for the cool, long-line lyric. Snow Child, her second collection, is rife with the viscerally felt modulations of a mind ill at ease. These poems are pre-occupied with “love”: a word moved from poem to poem (“your mouth a love poem”; “love hurts”; “We pile up love songs”), or present behind what is actually said (“my body yearns for you at night”; “your name burns my skin”; “I want your footprint. Just one”). Sometimes things don’t seem to add up. “Unstable” flits beautifully through “mercury”, “beauty”, “later” and “gravity”, but the success of the central conceit depends on accepting the mercury that is being stepped in affects one’s gravity. “I learn this from him” plays with this mismatch suggestively: a man who writes “love poems with loops and doodles around the borders” serves slightly bitter coffee. Sentiment is flirted with before being undercut (“I think he’ll put his thumb / on the dimple in my chin, but he doesn’t”). Between poems words retreat, only to regather and recollect themselves. Morley’s subtlety is not always obvious from single poems read in isolation, but as she herself writes: “there is a deficiency in loss / it cannot be found”.

“Light” recurs with particular insistence: A “trick of the light” becomes “a squat of light” or more pointedly, “when you go… you leave part of yourself in the hallway, trapped in the afternoon’s half-light”. The unsubtle “love hurts” sentiment is transfigured into a delicate longing. The mindset of a protagonist during “visiting hour” is unsettled by “light”; saved by paradoxical obliquity: “I move from the room with the piercing light”. That “with” allows resistance to remain unoffered; to avoid being looked at directly one must move in the right direction. “Water” is another motif (“rain weeping from our sleeves”; “you leech into the water”; “nothing smells of you / it pelted with rain last night”). Liquid becomes a paradoxically stable way of expressing loss. These reiterated words all seem part of the grander scheme of, as the final line of the collection has it, “trying to catch myself, before I disappear from view”.

Aimee Williams

TLS 30^th March 2012

The Dancing Sailors: Ann Pilling

The Dancing Sailors (Indigo Dreams) is Ann Pilling’s second full collection. She won the Poetry Business Pamphlet for Growing Pains in 2007 and her first full-length collection, Home Field was published by Arrowhead in 2008.

Pilling’s opening quotation is taken from Stephen Spender’s “I Think Continually of Those Who were Great” and it is that remembrance than runs through this collection.

There is often a sense of reaching out to something that is no longer there. In Watching for the Otter “… something splits the skin of the stream, a bruise / slicks the water then / it’s flat as lily plates again.”

Within in the collection there is a sense of voyeurism; the watcher watching or being watched, whether by bird, man or the past. In Gimmer Lamb things are there and not there at the same time; a sheep looks at one moment like a cast-off t-shirt and another like a face. The poem moves from one of acceptance to one of anxiety as her mind runs ahead in the spread of the land, over fells and summits and beyond, into her own dark imaginings:

“If it’s left, what worms and birds don’t eat

will dry out, whiten

to linen on a bleaching green, a walker

may grind it under foot.”

Pilling goes further to imagine what happens beyond the period of decay and absence, until she draws us back to the scene of a man who has come from a far country to this very spot and

“stands scattering ashes

in a place somebody loved”

which brings us back to remembrance.

In the title poem, The Dancing Sailors Pilling speaks of suicide,  “your slacks bulgy with pebbles”, Woolf in the Ouse and “Van Gogh’s final cornfield” with a fragility which is intensified after reading her note at the back of the book. This is a collection of recollections, memories, and the journey of the human spirit.  I’ll end with the last two lines of Spender’s poem:

“Born of the sun they travelled a short while toward the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.”

Matthew Stewart: Featured Poet

 

 

 

 

01252 722698

You worked your way round my milk teeth,
sung umpteen times before you stuck.
Soon a chameleonic code,
you were my safeguard from a snatch,
then my duty when staying out,
and recently a thankful leap
from trade fairs and dogged insects.
My fingers refuse to leave you.

 

 

 

Epilogue

for Josefa

 When you trace your wrinkles, criss-crossed
like the fine scars of unknown wounds,
and speculate how they got there;

when you’re sure you hid the stained scarf,
the note and the bent bronze bracelet
for some significant reason;

maybe you can’t remember what
you forgot, but you remember
you forgot, which is worse, far worse.

From: Inventing truth, HappenStance (2011)

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Matthew Stewart was born in Farnham, Surrey, in 1973. Following a comprehensive school education, he took a degree in modern languages at St Peter’s College, Oxford. He has lived in Extremadura, Spain, for the past fifteen years, where he works as the export manager and blender for a local winery. His poems have been widely published in UK magazines and he blogs at http://roguestrands.blogspot.com

 

Kent and Sussex Poetry Society

 

Pindrop Poets

Camden Centre, Tunbridge Wells,

Tuesday 20th March at 8pm

Pindrop Poets read at the University of Kent

Sharon Black, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Abegail Morley and Sarah Salway will be reading

on 13th March at 6pm

in the Darwin Senior Common Room, Darwin College,

University of Kent, Canterbury campus.