E. E. Nobbs’ shed

 

Everyone knows

that trolls are ugly with indeterminable
personality disorders & that

they cause trouble. I have a nest of them
living under the plywood floor

of my garden shed. I’m guessing
they’ve been coming out

at night & stealing sunflowers seeds
from the bird feeder.

My favourite trowel’s gone missing
and someone’s dug up the tulips.

But as long as they don’t
get into the house—start chewing

on computer cables, leaving faeces or
attempting identity theft—

perhaps we’ll be able to co-exist
somewhat peaceably…

Born in the decade of the last century when Elvis’s career was getting underway… And I live in Prince Edward Island, Canada, which is where I’ve spent almost all of my life, as an “Islander”. The prize for winning the Doire Press Second Annual International Poetry Chapbook Contest (2013)  was the publication of my first poetry collection,  The Invisible Girl  which is available to order directly from me. It’s been a wonderful experience working with the great folks at Doire Press.

Jo Hemmant’s shed

 

Chaperone

 
Tipsy on a swig of Cinzano and lemonade,
you watch the local hunk
 
send halos of smoke
to the ceiling of his garden shed –
 
his left hand in your mate’s lap
like a cat; like opportunity.
 
He passes you his soggy roll-up;
you can’t reel your smile in fast enough
 
and as the Sex Pistols shriek
‘Frigging in the Rigging’, he moves in
 
for the kill, the lyrics as daring
as him squeezing the 34Cs
 
you’d give anything to have.
She doesn’t object.
 
The words enough’s enough
lounge around in your throat.
 
 

Jo Hemmant lives in rural Kent with her husband and two sons. In late 2010 she founded Pindrop Press, a boutique poetry press. Her own poems have appeared in anthologies and magazines and won prizes in various competitions. Her first collection, The Light Knows Tricks, is available from Doire Pres.

The Invisible Girl – E.E. Nobbs

Carolina Read reviews The Invisible Girl by E.E. Nobbs

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E.E. Nobbs’s debut collection inspires us to notice things and events in our lives that makes for poetry that sits us up.   She opens with a sensitive but defiant voice from her childhood. In a beautifully crafted sequence, the theme takes us through the wonder and intimacy of growing up.

From the start, Nobbs’s shares her love of detail and the naming of things — drawing us in with all the senses to think a little deeper about times past.  The atmosphere in the poem “Jim”, for example, takes us straight to young farm life in Prince Edward Island, Canada:

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…………….‘He’d hitch
Jet, the old gelding, to the turnip cart, go down
to the woods by the creek – hauling

spruce and white birch seedlings the whole morning.’

This collection gives us poems from a true nature lover, the type that walks the woods every day and heeds to coincidences.  They are articulated with a wonder to discovery and of wisdom that is rich in perspective.  Poems including “Childless in the City” and “The Oceans are Dying” expose a knowing of aloneness that contrasts with the yielding into relationships that “Elmira Sweetheart” and “Casablanca” speak of with uplifting, humorous sentiment.

Using a playful imagination to deal with difficult, often painful themes offers the reader a welcoming way of seeing things.   Whether this be dealing with age, garden slugs or enduring a Canadian winter – as in “Seasonal Affective Disorder” –

‘Now it’s January.
I’m parched
wrinkled and
shrivelled.  Now I’m sprouting
shoots – pale, hard, red-eyed.  I’m etiolating
but I’ve nowhere to go…’

The poems keep returning us to this meeting place, where self meets other, be it ducks, sisters or universes – with the conundrum of the cohesion that lies between. There lies a tease towards a longing for things as they are and as they could be – as in the opening of “Rereading Anne of Green Gables” –

‘Anne Shirley!  Will you please come back for me?
Tragically, I missed you at the station’.

Throughout The Invisible Girl, readers are invited into this question of the ‘here and there’ and the ‘want and can’t have’ themes in their own experiences. Through observation of the natural world and our place in it, any sense of separation is cleverly dissolved without too much sentiment – a talent which Nobbs’s brings to her poems with a perspective that suggests to me how Emily Dickinson wrote about the world. This brings us to reflect upon the title of this collection, and how personal a journey we are taken on, whilst also noticing the poems she’s selected to be the first and the last –

opening with a canter into identity in “All I Want is a Pony, and”

‘Dad won’t say he doesn’t have the time
for this – a daughter he’s hoped
would manage better.
……………………………..He won’t sell
the pony, this time – and this time I will learn
to ride.’

and closing with a freedom and wonder to the Self in “Seaweed”

‘I am fronds of green-brown dulse
Plamaria plamata
— holding fast
stuck close on stone
You are flights of silver dolphins
Delpinus delphis
— swimming fast
faring out to sea

This collection is a marvel of wit and surprise. It guarantees to fill your senses with a curiosity for life from whatever age you so choose to be. It is a book which could well become a companion when I feel in need of an invisible friend.

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Midnight On The Pond

The snag tree,
old punk spruce
— an owl’s nest,
empty inside —
makes no sounds
when it crashes oddly
down like a shipwreck’s mast;
it falls on his dream’s paper birch canoe,
which disappears as if
it never were, while the two survivors
treading water [ Why don’t they dive? ] wait
and watch for the missing third —
their mother
who won’t resurface.

They forget what she
told them once:

Look up.

A bird with moon eyes turning blue
flies off.

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Buy the book here

About E.E. Nobbs: I am a poet. Born in the decade of the last century when Elvis’s career was getting underway… And I live in Prince Edward Island, Canada, which is where I’ve spent almost all of my life, as an “Islander”. The prize for winning the Doire Press Second Annual International Poetry Chapbook Contest (2013)  was the publication of my first poetry collection,  The Invisible Girl  which is available to order directly from me. It’s been a wonderful experience working with the great folks at Doire Press.

About Carolina Read: I work as a specialist Physiotherapist in learning disability in the NHS (22 years). I integrate many healing streams of influence into my work and life,  from where I find my passion for words and their meaning arises. My greatest love is of the language that lives in all Nature, beyond our understanding and marvel.

Jo Hemmant: Featured Poet

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On the occasion of Mayer Samuel Houdini’s 17th birthday

He would be the one to invent a son.
Perhaps his greatest sleight of hand: letters
in that dramatic copperplate, Dear Mrs Houdini,
Mayer has his first tooth, is crawling, can say his name,
in full, our boy, tender anecdotes of bumps and scrapes –
trying to fly before he could walk, of course –
of night-time vigils, lisped funnies, tantrums, slapstick.
………………………………As if I’d have as little say

in my own son as I do in his act: ever the flunky;
the suspension of disbelief; the accessory after the fact.
He did allow him a likeness though – my dark eyes.
Little touches like that, they’re why he’s the success he is.
A locket with a wispy golden curl for Mother’s Day.
A scuffed pair of calf-skin baby shoes. And when the child
would have started school, the reports began, always
in a different hand – outlining academic glory,
popularity, sporting prowess. I’ve even an invitation
to his bar mitzvah somewhere.
 …………………………….He has never mentioned him
to my face; realises that would be too much to stomach.
No, I find the letters on my pillow every month,
about that time; a thoughtless gift.

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Scratch Days

Now and then we have to let ourselves in,
knowing before we’ve unlocked the door
that inside it’s as if no-one’s home —

TV off, radio quiet as the hush
between each tick of the kitchen clock,
the only sound a distant rat-a-tat-tat.

She’s up in the box room
with towers of tins stockpiled
against famine and flood, hunched

over the Singer, feeding swags of polycotton
across its cool, metal plate
while the frenzied needle stabs,

retreats. Pins clamped between her lips
like threats, foot down like a racing driver
accelerating out of a corner’s rubber stink.

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Jo Hemmant lives in the Kent countryside with her husband and two sons. She is the director of Pindrop Press, a boutique poetry press that has published twelve titles to date. She is involved in local poetry, acting as Secretary of The Kent and Sussex Poetry Society and running creative writing workshops.

Her poems have been published in many magazines and anthologies, including Magma, Iota, Dream Catcher, Brittlestar, nothing left to burn (Ragged Raven Press, 2011), Jericho (Cinnamon Press, 2012). She has also won prizes in various competitions – including first prize in The New Writer Poetry and Prose Competition 2011 (collection category), second prize in the Torriano Poetry Competition in 2011 and runner-up in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition 2012.

The Light Knows Tricks is her first collection and can be bought from Doire Press.