Salt Tears

No one who cares about British poetry would have been happy to read the news, widely facebooked about yesterday, that Salt was announcing a cessation of single-author poetry collection publishing.  This is big news, because Salt had been publishing 30+ such volumes a year of late, under the editorship of Roddy Lumsden, a Scottish Bloodaxe poet with claim to being the formally inventive master of these isles; along the way, Salt championed many debuts of brilliant poets, including two major figures, Jon Stone and Luke Kennard.  In all, they'd published around 400 such titles.  Last year Salt was shortlisted for a Man Booker Prize for prose, which is also big news, and changed their fortunes.

Salt saw that the prose world was more open to their brand of indie brashness than the poetry world, which had rather noticeably not prized the Salt list as much as might have been expected, given its talent-rich offerings.  Of course, the immediate reaction was a little ugly - poets angered, feeling let down.  Laundry got aired that wasn't lily white.  Okay, but hold on.  Salt did a lot, and paid a price.  I am glad to be a director of a publishing house because now I know a terrible truth that keeps me up at night, like some Lone Gunman from the X-Files.

The truth: poetry books don't sell at all well, unless they win or are shortlisted for a big prize; or are by a famous poet that is often on the BBC.  You can tweet, and hype, and pop up, and bang tambourines, but you'll likely sell 200 copies or less of most debut poetry collections.  As Keats did.  The universe has a few rules, and that is one of them.  Poetry sells 200 units if you are unknown.  The world is cruel, but given most people have more than 200 friends and family members these days, it is also fickle and lacking money.  Salt would still be selling poetry collections and publishing them if YOU were buying them.  So, while you can, consider ordering a poetry book today, by a British indie press.  Eyewear will do.  And cut Salt some slack.

RS Thomas

The great Welsh poet RS Thomas was born 100 years ago, in March, 2013 - and this weekend, his centenary was celebrated in Bangor.

Warner, Brother!

Meteoric rises are part of the poetry world, though rare.  Many seek positions of authority in the world of poetic writing, editing, and publishing - few get anywhere, for poetry is more crowded than a tube at 6 PM on a Friday; fewer if any have such authority thrust upon them; still, there is a visible sense of a changing guard in the appointment of the twenty-something British poet Ahren Warner as editor of Poetry London, one of the UK's leading poetry magazines.  He replaces Colette Bryce, award-winning Irish poet from the North of Ireland.

Warner has one book out, and another out very soon, both from Bloodaxe, both recognised by the Poetry Book Society (PBS), which is the closest to being anointed in the Vatican City of poetry that is London.  He has been championed in the past in terms of publishing and critical praise, by Roddy Lumsden and Fiona Sampson, two smart poet-critics not known to usually see eye to eye; and he has debated Oulipean strategies with Scottish poetry god Don Paterson of late very publicly.  Pursuing doctoral studies, living sometimes in Paris, and bringing back some ideas from the continent, Warner is one of the more talented younger British poets - though by no means the only one of genius or brilliance - one thinks of Emily Berry, or Luke Kennard, to name two I see as very significant.  Yet, his own rise is all the more striking for how singular it has been - he seems to combine the zoom of an Armitage with the nous of a Motion.  He has arrived.

Unimpeded, welcome by all, and recognised as something special since his late teens, Warner now has a very important critical role to play in British poetry circles for the next few years.  It is as if Rimbaud had suddenly been invited into the Academie Francaise.  I am not sure it is wise for young poets to take on so much power so soon, for the sakes of their own careers as poets - the vocations of editor and poet often rub painfully against each other, like gum and dentures - but it is a breathtaking ascension, and it galvanizes the poetic community in the UK immediately.  Suddenly, we all look old in comparison, we editors of station and apparent import.  The new guard is avant us.  And around us, and now we all move forward, to see what the brave new Warner will do.

Ruth Siverns Has Died

Ruth Siverns, once Ruth Bowman, the young fiancee of Philip Larkin, and the subject of some of his key early poems, has died, after a long life that went on without him, just as his poems do; it all seems very sad, somehow, this going on afterwards, and then again, not.

Guest Review: Clark On Price

Caroline Clark reviews
Small World
by Richard Price

It is rare, I felt on reading Small World, to be so very drawn into the ‘what happens next’ of a book in which the language is often fragmentary. In the past decade I have enjoyed the fragmentary language of writers such as M.T.C. Cronin (beautiful, unfinished, Salt 2003) and the compelling narrative of J.O. Morgan in Natural Mechanical (CB editions, 2009), and here I find a most dexterous combination of the two elements: the fragment with the narrative, the unfinished with the finished.


The small world is that viewed from the bedroom, the wheelchair, contained in drawers, scrapbooks, playground rhymes, a hospital ward. The narrative line, the author’s life, emerges in the details: two daughters (whose beginnings we learnt of in the poet’s previous book Lucky Day), the elder in a wheelchair, then his girlfriend emerging from a coma following a stroke, newly in a wheelchair. The first section of the book contains poems about the girls and home life, and the longest, final section is about the stroke Patient. In between there are two short sections, touching on memory and loss. The narrative details build up across the poems: in one poem we learn of ‘a little big-sister,/ a big little-sister’, and in the next poem, they are given their names and medicine is administered. We read, piece things together. This is enough to keep our narrative lust happy, while are gradually drawn in by the language


The first section is shot through with playground rhymes and rhythms and the poet’s absorption, re-working of them: 


All aboard the wheelchair! The whirled chair!
All aboard the world chair! Small world. Small world.
(‘Little toes’)




It is easy to skim over a few poems, such as ‘Faster!’: ‘Eeny meeny yak yak,’ but even so, such poems contribute to the pace, playfulness and energy of the whole. And when you come to such energy combined with impressive inventiveness and lyricism, it is rather hard to pass on by: 


Steep to good sense, the three gripped the roughcast.
They settled to survey, confer, to attest
(they’re squat little scraps at rest):
from a blue-black sketch-of-a-guess
they solidified to a delegation, a thorough inspectorate of doubt.
(‘House martins’)


Of course, quotes won’t work fully to effect here; and this is very much a book to be read in the right order, as the effect is accumulative. I returned several times to the final three poems in the first section: they are captivating, lyrical and contain some elements that remain elusive, but intriguingly so. Interestingly several of my hesitations, ‘what’s this about?’, were resolved when I listened to the recordings of the poems here: http://www.archiveofthenow.org/authors/?i=76 (some in previous versions).


The details that emerge become ever more personal, and in the final section the reader is desperate to simply find out ‘what happens next’. But language must be made to match the task, to match the truth of real life. Here the fragmentary is used to great effect, in half-said phrases, dialogue, a lyrical searching to say a way forward. Rather than fragmentary, perhaps the language is uncut-offable. It won’t be tied down into neat endings or sealed into regular rhyme and rhythm (rhythm, I should add is something at which Price excels).

The use of the / and > signs soon become familiar, a kind of personal punctuation that adds to both the pace and fragmentary nature of some of the poems, hinting at space, things left out. It is the sense of the spaciousness of Price’s language that I particularly came to admire in this book. In his longer poems there is a roominess: nothing is easily locked down into simple structures; the complexity of thought and sensation is given room to be fully expressed, not simplified, yet remain accessible: 


If ‘remember’ can be true there’s an intensity I cannot anchor:
it’s a meeting remaining in its happening,
it was ‘so –’ and, so, it is always so.


These lines come from the poem titled ‘Nimble, oblique’, a phrase that would do very well to describe the language here in general. I haven’t mentioned the humour, the wittiness; quotes won’t do. It is there throughout, as is a boldness of utterance: 


She wakes in war poetry, ache, slow aware.
‘Shrapnelled then.’

She wakes in famine footage, woozy as a foal. A dapper fly
rests on her cheek: he’s whispering church latin.
(‘She wakes in war poetry)


I might call what Richard Price has achieved the new personal. The poems are not burdened with the weight of having to tell what happened. Here, however sorrowful the story, I hope other readers too will feel the energy of language in the making.


Caroline Clark's first collection, Saying Yes in Russian, was published in June 2012 by Agenda Editions.

Congratulations Mr Agard!

Hats off to John Agard, and also the Poet Laureate, who recommended he win, the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2012.  Britain's highest honour for a poet (other than the laureateship) most of the greats have won it.  Agard is only the second black poet to be given the award - a too-small number - so this is about-time time, but let that not be the whole story - Agard is an excellent poet for adults and children, a progressive figure, and a superb performer of his work - in short an inspiration for many.

Logan's Run

It is that dreary time in the UK, when the too-small literary-journalistic community begins to select their "best books of the year".  In terms of poetry reviewing in Britain, is there a William Logan?  Logan, just once a poet, has for some time been something far worse and bigger - a reviewer of other poets.  He's become monstrous, an outlier of Herod.  His sort of reviewing doesn't happen much in the UK, at least not in the papers - the sort that is fearless, funny, reckless, and, even when wrong, accurate to its own tastes and vision.  Canada has Carmine Starnino and Eric Ormsby.  The UK could do with a Logan.  His latest reviews of books elsewhere received with portentous reverence (including at Eyewear, see our salivating Carson review) is a masterclass in iconoclasm.  Because the UK is too small and everyone meets at festivals and ceremonies, such reviewery might lead to punch ups, or at least upset apple carts at a too regular interval, but the absence of unvested interest in poetry can be striking, here.  Of course, I note an increasing absence of intelligent middle class engagement in poetry in the UK, beyond the rim of the world where poets, students, and teachers live.  I say "middle class" because I don't imagine the upper classes have much time for poetry these days; and at the moment it would be arrogant to expect much reading of it by the austerity-struck working poor.

No, the pretentious lawyers, doctors, accountants, bankers, MPs, and managers, who go see opera and theatre, and the latest arty Danish film - how much poetry do they respond to?  Judging by my educated, literate and solvent neighbours, they read zilch.  If it were possible to read less than no poetry, I suspect many people would.  I can only say that this snobbish indifference to poetry might possibly arise from fatigue from all the constant blurbing and praising.  With more UK Logans unclogging the reception, a sense of zesty wit might permeate discussions of poems, and trickle out to the wider reading public, the public that adores Life of Pi and Cloud Atlas but doesn't yet know the genius of Luke Kennard, Emily Berry or Jon Stone.  Mantel is great, sure, but British poetry is as good as it was during the time of Donne, and about two thousand people in the UK know this, or can talk about it.  About a million can explain why Breaking Bad should be on the telly here, and 10 million worship Mad Men.  Popular culture, and the Rowling thing are vital for a society that wants to encompass wide tastes, which is why Eyewear talks about them too, but it is madness when poetry is left to the poets to kick about with like kids playing with a stone while the big boys play football; poetry relegated is a society gone to the dogs.  We also need thoughtful and supportive criticism, but when the big names come out with (potential) rubbish, it's useful to have a town crier tell us.  Logan is often a jerk, and too much Loganism would be as tedious as too little.  But a little more would go a long way.

Guest Review: Mayhew On Rees-Jones

Jessica Mayhew reviews

Burying The Wren*

by Deryn Rees-Jones

*shortlisted today for the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize

Rees-Jones prefaces her collection with a quote from the Roethke poem ‘In a Dark Time:’ “In a dark time, the eye begins to see/ I meet my shadow in the deepening shade.” In Burying the Wren, the eye does indeed begin to see, observing the minutiae in the hugeness of grief, to the “pointillist’s dream” in a field of poppies. This first poem opens up the poet’s close gaze:

...where a seed

might sing, imagining a life

pushed into form, pure colour.”

(Three Glances at a Field of Poppies)

This poem reveals an impressionistic view of a poppy, effectively using the interplay of dark and colour. However, this third glance also unpacks the creative act, moving from imagination to form. This idea flows through the collection; in ‘A Scattering,’ we are presented with a moment in time, the scattering of the poet’s husband’s ashes. The children are suspended in nursery rhyme-like poses at odds with the situation:

The rain has stopped   

and our daughter dances.

Where is our son?

Way up high on his great-uncle’s shoulders.

(A Scattering)

Rees-Jones is a poet very aware of time. In ‘A Scattering,’ she adeptly presents a single moment in time, fading to, “the mist like breath on the landscape’s glass.” This masterful handling of time and space reoccurs in ‘Hallucigenia,’ which is explained in the notes as an extinct genus of animal, named for it’s dream-like, hallucinogenic quality. The poem opens with the line, “The room where I imagine you, my eyes unlocked,” immediately establishing a textual space for the lovers. However, in this room, they exist in “our stanza out of time.” This is a poem self-conscious of its own creation. It is aware that words encase these living bodies and leave a fossil, in which the speaker’s mouth:

is emptied into yours, becomes a different silence

from the first, in commas, dashes and full stops.

(Hallucigenia)

Rees-Jones takes inspiration for her dramatic ‘Dogwoman’ sequence from the works of the artist Paula Rego. Rego’s works show women in various dog-like positions, such as grooming and howling. However, these are images of power, juxtaposing the wild and domestic. Roethke’s rhythms echo from the preface: 

hellhound, dog shaking, hare-bound; dog in the wind, sky bound.

(Once, attendant in my blue dress, I hadn’t the words to call you back.)

(‘Dogwoman’)

Here, the internal rhyme enforces the poet’s relentless grief. The sudden prosaic clarity of the second line emphasises the psychic transformation of bereavement, whilst providing the reader with a thunder-struck image of the death scene. These interjections prevent the poem from drifting into the abstract.

Perhaps inevitably for a collection largely inspired by grief, I was reminded of Douglas Dunn’s Elegies on several occasions, particularly in ‘A Dream of Constellations:’

the navigated darkness of our life,

this telling and untelling of the world...

(‘A Dream of Constellations’)

Rees-Jones beautifully captures the time when, “the months that were left could be held in our hands,” almost transforming the scene into myth.

Burying the Wren is an accomplished collection, its emotive centre never allowed to drift clear of time and space. The wren motif is used well. In ‘Burying the Wren,’ body and bird merge, “soft as the hairs behind your ears...the fluttering breast you longed to touch.” The final poem of the same name concludes the collection with the wren as an image of redemption:

Here, where a wren sings, flirty in the alder,

in the long hot days of May,

when you are three years gone.

(‘Burying the Wren’)

Jessica Mayhew reviews regularly for Eyewear.

Guest Review: Ward On Sylvia Is Missing

Sylvia is Missing

Flarestack Poets, 2012

Reviewed by Christian Ward

Sylvia is Missing is an anthology featuring poems from Flarestack Poets’ 2012 pamphlet competition. The slender volume looks and feels like one of Flarestack Poets’ pamphlets, boasting a bright pink cover and a large, simple font. If you passed it in a bookstore, you would notice it immediately. There are no quotes from poets on the back cover, just a blurb that boldly says it contains “Poetry that dares outside current trends, even against the grain...collections that aren’t bus queues, from poets forging their own linguistic connections with the root-ball of experience.”

I’m always wary when presented with statements like these, particularly if the poetry doesn’t always fall in line with their description. If you’re going to use such hyperbolic language to try and win me over as a reader, then it has to deliver - even more so when the pseudo-academic babble of ‘forging their own linguistic connections with the root-ball of experience.’ is included. Add to this a questionable choice of anthology title (referring to Plath, obviously, but does anyone really write like her nowadays?) and the lack of information concerning selection (why was one favoured over the other? what were the editors looking for?), and you create even more weariness.

Luckily, Sylvia is Missing is an anthology worth reading. It opens with my first pick, Siofra McSherry’s intriguing ‘No Nemo’ – a poem concerned with investigating how the process of questioning (in this case, whether something will continue or not) works. A mysterious fish “observes, moves through water, / shines light, remains strange.” This is contrasted against a polar landscape filled with machines, representing logic and processes that have the “smell of hot machines”and“cables wrapped in rubber thick / as thumbs.”

Claire Dyer’s ‘Strawberries’ is my next choice. Dyer has an eye for memorable images and the poem opens with the simple yet wonderful “It’s March: a caramel-soft day and there’s/ a man on the bus eating strawberries.” What follows is an exploration between two worlds that almost seem to be superimposed on each other – the bus observation with the odd man who turns out to be the speaker’s friend and another version of himself; darkness outside, summer inside. Each strawberry is symbolic of an experience by the speaker and the piece ends with the man on the bus/friend choosing another and putting “the stalks in the pocket of his coat” where they will both literally and figuratively decompose. 

I liked the oddness of Michael Conley’s ‘Auction’ which opens with the funny “I have a green meteor next to my name: / nobody has complained about me.” The tender acts of buying a Bart Simpson watch for someone (one assumes a young relative) is contrasted with the speaker smashing it “three times with a hammer”. It lands at the bottom of the recipients postbox with the “hushed jangle/ of settling stardust.” Conley makes the reader wonder why he did the act – was it because no-one complained about him? Some ulterior motive? I like poems that make the reader ass questions, especially when the answers aren’t immediately obvious, so kudos to Conley.

My other choices are Peter Daniels’ ‘Being Cute’, which is a nice little riff on how being “cute” can have a downside and Gina Wilson’s ‘For the she-ass, Lise’. The opening image of “the donkey’s two-foot pizzle/ dangles like liquorice” had me hooked. The poem has a charming kind of bitchiness that is also suprisingly tender.

Sylvia is Missing is an intriguing anthology with more than a few poems that are worth reading. Poetry competition anthologies can be a little hit and miss – a bit like those action films I remember watching growing up in the 80s. You get some big explosions, bad guys go flying and the rest is just filler. This one is a bit better. Go read.

Christian Ward has an MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, and was a runner up for the 2011 Bridpoet Prize.  His poems have appeared in Magma, Poetry Review and Poetry Wales, among others.

Guest Review: O'Hanlon On Farley

Abigail O'Hanlon reviews

The Dark Film

by Paul Farley

‘I will not write nostalgic poems’, Farley insists in ‘A Thousand Lines’ from his newest collection, The Dark Film. ‘I will put these things out of mind.’ Yet nostalgia is presented as a recurring theme in this surprising and thought-provoking work. It is especially prominent in poems like ‘Nostalgie Concrete’, or ‘The Milk Nostalgia Industries’, where the industry of the title is ‘trading in covert nostalgia […] it’s more than milk delivery’ – milk being used as a symbol of reminiscence. After all, what more could you ask for from something that you can associate with ‘Jane Austen sitting on a milking stool/with a natty teat technique; that and a pail/each jet rings into, soft lit, in an English field.’?

Farley also uses nostalgia in other poems – ‘like returning to a natal pool/after years of doing business in great waters’ (‘Big Fish’), juxtaposition of old and new feature frequently in the collection. Titles such as ‘Adults’ and ‘The New Babies’ are set next to each other, or the opposition surfaces within the poems themselves: ‘we envied those who’d fuss/over the Ancient World […] while we slaved on the Western Front’ (‘Ink’). He also considers history and the passing of time, notably in ‘Creep’ (‘we feel the shock/of time in time) or ‘Pop’, a lament on the tendency of history to homogenise:

and the Mod and the Rocker
will slowly converge

in the fullness of time

to a mixture, an aggregate
post-war character

Beneath these overt themes, however, there is a more basic idea which Farley explores: differing perspective and perception, especially from within. Indeed, many of the poems in this collection feel not so much epic as personal – though not necessarily intimate. This is reflected in his style, which is accessible, bordering on conversational at times, and not without licks of humour – take the last lines of ‘Force Field’ or ‘The Queen for example: ‘Imagine waking up […] and realising, Jesus, I’m the fucking Queen!’.

There is occasionally a danger of his tone becoming too plain – ‘Google Earth’, for example, has some remarkable imagery (‘eyeballs might block the sun’) but is marred by dull repetition in its opening stanza. However, Farley’s strength as a poet, in this collection at least, lies in his ability to present his ideas and imagery in smart ways – perhaps appropriate given that this is an exploration of perception – whether in passing lines ‘a note so low it turned your bones/to milk’ (‘The Airbrake people’) or within a poem as a whole, as in the heart motif in ‘Outside Cow Ark’, a comment on nature’s transience.

The opening poem of the collection, ‘The Power’, acts as an introduction to the rest of the collection’s narrative – in that it is here, more than any other poem, that Farley challenges the reader to engage with the power of imaginative thought (‘picture a seaside town in your head…’), a concept which he then develops into exploring the ability to see our own world differently.

The concept is further highlighted in ‘Quality Street’, which takes an apparently banal activity – peering through sweet wrappers – and transforms it into a way of reshaping reality: ‘you took us out of time and gave us the power/to hype the moment…’ the poem is a striking example of his ability to take the everyday and make it extraordinary:

Adding a yellow wrapper to
the sheet of blue
creates a green which covers everything,

a thousand years of growth at once

‘The Dark Film’, as the collection’s central poem, presents the main theme of perception – and argues that things hidden can be brought to light ‘if looked at long enough’. This poem is about image, and Farley uses imagery well; the vision of ‘An eyelash […] four foot long, electrified’ is likely to stay with the reader after the poem is finished.

Farley is able to switch between the languid half-rhymes in the opening (‘The dark film goes on general release./Floodlights rake the low cloud base’) to the harsher, stuttering consonance as the audience’s confusion develops –

We wonder where the film was shot:
the Night Mail stopped, or Empire State
caught midway through a power cut

So he knows how to use sound to reflect mood – but he also knows how to use language to evoke the senses. The final two stanzas of the poem describe the film coming to an end: to say it ‘crackles like a bonfire’ may seem obvious at first, but when taken in context, it gives a strong sense of old-style film reel flapping its last, complete with the haunting afterimage of faces.

The poems in this collection may not profoundly move or resonate with the reader on an emotional level, excepting the sentimentalism of reminiscence, but this isn’t Farley’s aim here: the collection as a whole is reaching out to the reader not emotionally, but intellectually. The Dark Film explores its subject matter in an imaginative way – perhaps not fully (after all, there’s only so much you can fit into one coherent collection), but what it does instead is provide the reader with enough intrigue to challenge their own way of looking at the world.

Abigail O'Hanlon is a third year BA student in English and Creative Writing at Kingston University; and a poet.