Category Archives: Art

To Live Here

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This month’s guest slot is for poems from To Live Here, an anthology of haiku published by The Wee Sparrow Press. The Press was founded by Claire Thom. 100% of the proceeds of their anthologies are given to charity.

The anthology is edited by Giorgia Di Pancrazio & Katherine E Winnick. The lovely cover and illustrations are by Scottish artist Colin Thom.

To Live Here is “A collection of haiku on the theme of home, which explores the many facets of human experience, from the mundane to the sublime. Featuring the work of talented poets from around the world, this anthology invites readers to reflect on the beauty and complexity of the world we inhabit.”

Salford Loaves and Fishes, a charity supporting the homeless, has already received over £600. The anthology is available through Amazon – ISBN 9788409528165. I’m grateful to Francis Attard and Julie Mellor for permission to share their haiku.

sandy beach
turtles lay clutches of eggs
off-shore breeze

Francis Attard, Malta

three cornered field
the generations
who farmed here

Julie Mellor

on the verge a stork stepping out

Fokkina McDonnell

Carnation Lily Lily Rose

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It’s a great pleasure to feature four poems from our guest poet Jane McKie. Her collection Carnation Lily Lily Rose was published by Blue Diode earlier this year. The title and title poem are after John Singer Sargent’s painting of the same name. Each word is also the heading of the four sections of the book.

The collection includes a range of poetic forms and shapes: prose poems, a concrete poem, long and thin poems. We meet couplets and triplets, striking titles: Cairn to a Dead Biker, X-Ray of a Deer’s Skull. The poems crackle with energy and vitality. The book is ‘a hymn to all the different kinds of connective tissue that lightly, but firmly, weave us into the fabric of our own and others’ lives’. (David Kinloch).

Lord, Make Me an Instrument

Here the clouds outrun land: greyer, fleeter,
casting their shadows on the estuary and making
mud move at their speed, blown rather than
fixed, flexing with light / dark / light / dark,
sea-blite at the edges to catch the odd discarded
fag butt. Sea pea, clover, yellow vetch.

Further out, the flattened eelgrass – a trammelled
thatch without the tide; with it, upstanding,
like proud speech. Into this landscape creeps
a man following redshank, black-tailed godwits;
watch him huddle – glimmer of a struck match.
Winged souls call to the crackle of his breath.

Sand

Tonight, I’m in an arbour designed
by an artist who moonlights as a gardener.

Our host’s aesthetic sixth sense is spot on:
look how the roses jostle the frame,
how the lattice pins them like pretty moths.
A drink in one’s hand is compulsory.

And we guests are laughing, playing up
a hunger that may be on the wane,
but holds us, tonight, as snug as palms
around glasses. It is brilliant, this garden,
and familiar, as if it is not a garden at all
but a gateway, and we are not guests
at a middle-aged party but school-leavers
on a promised, delicious brink.

Tonight, if you sliced me open,
you would find a swirl of glitter:
all the shades of the sand
at Alum bay squeezed
into one miniature glass lighthouse.

Antigravity

They hover along pavements, barelegged,
on Mini Micro scooters, a flock of them –

the best of us. Hovering in shirtsleeves, hearts
and mouths open before guile sets in.

Don’t they feel the cold? Hovering to class
like motes in light.

On this unbearable, ordinary day, we mothers
can’t stop them lifting off the ground,

their small hands to their mouths
as they giggle, spitting out milk teeth,

growing too quickly. Catch onto
their waistbands and don’t let go.

Harness

I think of the invisible harness that hitches us, one to the other,
how it signifies both baggage and provision;

how, in the past, I have slipped the harness
and tested freedom, finding it overrated;

how mood is a harness, like gravity, pitching our orbits
a little off-kilter;

how sometimes the harness pinches and we are inclined
to worry it, fidgeting, even to tear at it;

how we trust the harness to repair itself like skin.

Biography

Jane McKie works as a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her first collection, Morocco Rococo (Cinnamon Press) was awarded the 2008 Sundial/Scottish Arts Council prize for best first book of 2007. Recent collections include Quiet Woman Stay (Cinnamon Press, 2020) and Jawbreaker (2021) which won the Wigtown Poetry Festival’s Alastair Reid’s Pamphlet Prize 2021.

Jane, as a member of the Edinburgh-based Shore Poets, facilitates poetry readings and music. She is interested in collaboration across forms, writes with 12, a collective of women writers, and with Edinburgh’s genre spoken word group Writers’ Bloc.

Fieldfare, blown off course, early spring

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A lively and intriguing title for a poem sequence by our guest poet Lydia Harris. Her work has featured here before (March 2019). This sequence is from her new collection Objects for Private Devotion, beautifully produced by Pindrop Press, published last year. Lydia lives in the Orkney island of Westray. Many of the poem sequences in her new book focus on local culture, people, nature, objects – such as the prayer nut which provides the cover image.

The sequence about the fieldfare is inspired by the great Serbian poet Vasco Popa. The Blackbird’s Field is also a sequence, from Popa’s Collected Poems, close on 400 pages – drawing on folk tale, surrealist fable, personal anecdote, and tribal myth.

Fieldfare, blown off course, early spring

After Vasco Popa

My Fieldfare

He’s made of bone pins.
He’s a book inside a box
with a beak-shaped lid.
A snapped-shut lock.

He Makes Landfall

at Hagock where the Scollays
ploughed in patches,
wore tracks with their boots,
gulped spring water,
built their house.

Body

His muscles hurtle
from rump to neb.

First Song

The sky is my eye,
earth my egg.
From Noup to the Ness
in the turn of my head.

How I know him

His underwing flashes,
he wheels before settling
on plough or pasture.

His Manners

When the tide is asleep
he swallows it.
His wings are granite
with a hundred eyes.

Second Song

Bone grinds skin,
stone splits grain.

His Passion

Flames again.
He thinks he is clay.
The sea wrought him
like a mace head,
speckled, banded,
half-way done.
Bird before he was bird.

Third Song

Snapped flint,
water-worn
sea pebble.

His Dress Code

He squints through an eye mask,
lifts his mottled back through west winds,
across north winds.

A Flagstone in the Wall Speaks to Him

Grapple with my grain.
My night surfaces.
Tap the lichen from my face.
Draw silver from my base.

Lament

I’ve lost my folk,
my night ships,
my dear blood,
thick then thin,
night bird, stray bird.

Tongue

A whip of liver-coloured flesh
sheathed in the coffin of his beak.

His Heart

Its flicker forms ice,
his own padlocked air.
His map of the wind
stiff with frost
in the skirts of an old storm.

He Takes His Leave

Fooled by the moon.
He’s lost his bearings,
like the night boat.
We need to talk
on the edge of sight.

Biography: Lydia Harris lives in the Orkney island of Westray. Her first pamphlet Glad not to be the corpse was published by Smiths Knoll in 2012. In 2017 she held a Scottish Book Trust New Writers’ Award. Her pamphlet A Small Space was placed first in the Paper Swans competition 2020.

Austere beauty

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I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Louise Glück. She is, perhaps, best known for her poetry collection The Wild Iris, which was published in 1992 and for which she received the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem opens the book: At the end of my suffering / there was a door.

Her 2014 collection Faithful and Virtuous Night, also from Carcanet, gave me both comfort and confidence as I was struggling to complete the manuscript of Remembering / Disease. ‘You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it’s the same place but it has been arranged differently.’ Each time I entered this world, I felt closer to home.

Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her ‘unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal’.

The title poem Faithful and Virtuous Night is a long poem, over 10 pages, consisting of short stanzas. It ends:

I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or, perhaps, once one begins,
there are only endings.

Hard Drive

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It is a great privilege to share Paul Stephenson’s poems here. His debut collection was published by Carcanet in June this year. See the end of this post for Paul’s biography and details of his three poetry pamphlets.


When his partner suddenly died, life changed utterly for Paul Stephenson. In Hard Drive a prologue and epilogue hold six parts of almost equal length. These poems take the reader through the journey of grief: Signature, Officialdom, Clearing Shelves, Covered Reservoir, Intentions, Attachment.


‘A noted formalist, with a flair for experiment, pattern and the use of constraints’, Paul also has a talent for intriguing titles: Other people who died at 38; Better Verbs for Scattering; We weren’t married. He was my civil partner.


There is a great variety of form: erasure poems, use of indents and columns, haibun, prose poems, alongside the narrative poems which range in length from three lines to the five-page poem Your Brain. Unfortunately, WordPress can’t do justice to the poems which need formatting.


I have chosen four poems from four parts: What Jean saw, Battleships, On mailing a lock of his hair to America, belatedly, and Putting It Out There. Battleships is a particular favourite – precise and poignant.

What Jean Saw


Through the letterbox
the little bald patch of you
asleep on the floor

Battleships

I must sort his room, a room as full
of ships as any room could be, clear up
the battle waging on open seas.

I imagine them, christened one summer afternoon,
careering down their slipway
ironclad onto polished parquet.

Red and blue ships strewn – mile-long,
laden with guided missiles,
locked onto my feet, closing in on my knees.

Picking up a ship, I cup it, poor target,
slide a knife in the cracks
between floorboards to extricate others.

No mayday for these navies in trouble,
these heavily manned fleets,
their broadsides struck, hulls torn and listing.

For the scuttled and sunk, damaged
and wrecked, the ships reported missing,
I bag them up and think charity.

No more games here.
No more torpedoes in crossfire – hit!
His room a tidy horizon, the radar blank.

On mailing a lock of his hair to America, belatedly

Would his hair be worth it?
Would his hair provide comfort?
Would his hair cause upset?
Would his hair be an act of violence?
Would his hair destroy their day?

Would his hair survive the journey?
Would his hair have to declare itself?
Would his hair be seized?
Would his hair still shine?
Would his hair be hair after all this time?

Putting It Out There

So here I am worrying myself to death
about commodifying your death,
arranging and sequencing your death,
curating the left and right pages of your death,
deciding which parts of your death to leave out.

Here I am again, giving a title to your death,
choosing an attractive cover for your death,
(will your death have French flaps?)
writing intelligent-sounding blurb for your death,
thinking how we might best promote your death,
who might best be willing to endorse it.

Still me, waiting to be sent a proof of your death.
I’ll need an eye for detail to check your death for typos.
I’ve got to get it right – the finger-feel,
the texture of the paper of the pages of your death,
ensure a sharp jet black for your death’s ink.
(I’m wondering about the numbers in your death’s ISBN).

Before I sign off on your death – your death done,
and wait for a box with hard copies of your death
and organize things to launch your death – finally,
then wait, for reviews of your death (hopefully considered),
to be told how well your death has sold.

Biography

Paul Stephenson studied modern languages and linguistics, then European studies. He has published three pamphlets: Those People (Smith/Doorstop, 2015), which won the Poetry Business pamphlet competition; The Days that Followed Paris (HappenStance, 2016), written after the November 2015 terrorist attacks; and Selfie with Waterlilies (Paper Swans Press, 2017). He is a University teacher and researcher living between Cambridge and Brussels.

website: paulstep.com / Twitter: @stephenson_pj / Instagram: paulstep456

paper crown

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This is my 300th blog post. Many thanks to all the blog’s followers, also for your likes and lovely comments. They are much appreciated. I’m taking a break from weekly blogging: I need to ‘fill the well’ – take myself out to find poems and art on the streets of The Hague, get inspired and fired up again. I’m celebrating the 300th post in the company of Cecile Bol – our August guest poet.


Cecile is also the organiser of the Poetry Society’s Groningen Stanza. When I moved back to The Netherlands , I was fortunate that their meetings were on Zoom due to the lockdown. It was great to meet Cecile and other members of the Stanza in person earlier this year. The hotel where I stayed is just a few houses down from the literary café De Graanrepubliek where they meet.


I have chosen three poems from Cecile’s chapbook Fold me a Fishtail. Read more about Cecile and the book below her poems.

yet you speak of resilience

there are things that make me sink back into the grave
(red on black, stardust freckles, knee socks, foxy wrists)
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

I saw a flowered brown tie turn into a snake
woke up crying, your shoulder blade stuck to my lip
there are things that make me sink back into the grave

same table, same cheap wine, same talk, another day
you pull me close as if you’re not pushing me in,
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

like the cute demon I asked how I should behave
– he said ‘always choose slyly between loud and still’ –
there are things that make me sink back into the grave

they nibble at my feet, ask if this time I’ll stay
(petrol candy, flawed magic, and plenty to kiss)
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

I seep through layers of earth, call out all their names
yet you speak of resilience as if we can win
there are things that make me sink back into the grave
inside Plato’s cave, where moving shadows are safe

paper crown

a cut-out crown is still a crown
for a girl on a stolen horse
I would have swapped our sanities
to see her hair become lost in
rose horizons, saddlebags filled
with boxes of chocolate sprinkles

I’d been chasing robber children
long before we met – and I will
stick with this selfish travelling
until or well beyond my death
but she – she bore whole galaxies
sprinkled into maps on her skin

in my inside pocket you’ll find
scissors, tape and golden paper
the day I borrowed her reindeer
I thought in time she’d ride my horse
instead I stop at roadside shrines
and eat chocolate sprinkles daily

robber child: arguably the most interesting character in H.C. Andersen’s story The Snow Queen is the unnamed little robber girl

Krasokouloura

I should have made them milk
and bread, while they were still in bed –
instead, I impulsively fired up
the electric oven – as always, procrastinating –
to bake twenty ring-shaped Greek cookies
with things lying around the cupboard.

Flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon,
salt, ground cloves, some olive oil
and another glass of white wine.

I should have written them a note,
but I’m that cat; as always, capitulating
to curiosity – I had to taste one, still warm,
curled up on the windowsill – new sun,
please, tell me what skills it would take
to achieve immaculate roundness.

Biography:
Cecile Bol is a Dutch writer with a small family and a big edible garden in the north of the Netherlands. She doesn’t have an MA in Creative Writing, because things like that don’t exist in her country. She does, however, earn her money as a self-employed copywriter. The somewhat well-known poet Helen Ivory describes Cecile’s work as ‘like finding snakes in your strawberry patch’. Cecile enjoys incorporating fairy tales and popular culture in her poetry, and her poems often have a slight erotic edge. Cooking (mostly Greek) food is her means of meditation. Cecile owns 57 different kinds of herbs and spices of which cumin and dill are her favourites.


Cecile’s debut chapbook Fold me a Fishtail was published by UK-based Selcouth Station Press in 2022 (Sadly, Selcouth Station Press ceased to be in 2023). So what’s Fold me a Fishtail about? Cecile: “I sometimes wonder whether Disney’s Ariel misses her mermaid tail, now that she’s the legged wife of prince Eric. Isn’t she way too curious and free-spirited for a conventional family life? Or is that just me? That feeling chained to a husband, toddler and suburban lifestyle was enough to drive me dangerously crazy? Fold me a Fishtail is a collection of mostly confessional poetry about a long journey into, through and out of (?) the dark.”

Favourite objects

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Credit: geralt via Pixabay

A prose poem of mine was published in # 185 of orbis magazine. The inspiration may, in part, have come from reading the long prose poem 12 O’Clock News by Elizabeth Bishop.

It refers to eight items in her room, with a gooseneck lamp standing in for the moon. The first section ends ‘Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation.’

I love the humour in it. Here is the description of a pile of mss: ‘A slight landslide occurred in the northwest about an hour ago. The exposed soil appears to be of poor quality: almost white, calcareous and shaly. There are believed to have been no casualties.’

Bishop’s prose poem changes tone as it continues. With the final object, ashtray, we’re suddenly in a warzone; there are dead bodies, corrupt leaders are mentioned. It’s even more devastating because of the ordinariness of the object.

Animate and inanimate objects relating to J Abraham

The favourite mug

Waisted, Nile green, curved handle, fit for purpose: dishwasher proof; delicate gold lettering The Frog Prince, on both sides: black frog, gold crown. I admit to one shadow side: pangs of jealousy when on Sundays I see him take out the old cup-and-saucer. Mr Abraham is a bachelor, but tells visitors he has been married twice, to the same woman. In fact, he is an inspector of taxes.

The handkerchief

With a yellowing initial I do not get many outings. It was a proud moment last Friday, row H in the stalls, aisle seat. A Bruckner motet. That gentleman called ‘J’ keeps concert programmes in a special box file. Used to sing in a choir, but has given up on Him upstairs.

The ashtray

My life as a masochist, the short version. I am clean and I have barely any burn marks. To make matters worse, I was moved to the shed. Technically, it’s a Summer House, but no windows, so no tax is payable. He should be told that non-smokers too can die of lung cancer. I am praying for a relapse.

The moustache

Hegel, Kant, Wittgenstein, Hume, Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire. Cogito, ergo sum. Sum, ergo cogito. A butterfly can remember its life as a chrysalis, and I have full cognisance at cellular level of my previous manifestations. JA grows me specially, once a year, for a charitable purpose. This year I have a Teutonic shape. The flecks of grey soften my appearance. Mug, handkerchief, ashtray – they will end up in a grey bin, or at The Red Cross. I will have the last laugh.

The newspaper cutting

Protected by a plastic wallet, I’m a piece from The Guardian 08.05.12. How we made … Break Down: Artist Michael Landy on how he and his collaborator destroyed all 7,227 of his possessions. Need I say more?

Had I not been lonely …

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Matthew Sweeney, 2006


When I saw a post by ‘Albert’ on Twitter with this quote by L S Lowry: Had I not been lonely I would not have seen what I did, it reminded me of this poem by Matthew Sweeney. A fine ekphrastic poem that moves beyond description, as it enters into dialogue with the artist about their work.

I have a few ekphrastic poems that need expanding in some way, so I’m going to do some research and explore how I could incorporate the artist’s own words into those poem. Is this something you might do with your own writing? If you’re a painter, photographer, sculptor, do poems inspire you?


Here are the two parts of Matthew Sweeney’s poem Dialogue with an Artist

Matthew died in 2018, his poems are still with us.

Dialogue with an Artist

THE LONELY
Incorporating the words of L.S. Lowry

I used to paint the sea, but never a shore,
and nobody was sailing on it. It wasn’t even
the sea, it was just my own loneliness.

It’s all there, you know. It’s all in the sea.
The battle is there, the inevitability of it all,
the purpose. When I switched to people

they were all lonely. Crowds are the
loneliest thing of all, I say. Every individual
in them is a stranger to everyone else.

I would stand for hours in one spot
and scores of little kids who hadn’t had
a wash for weeks would group round me.

Had I not been lonely, none of my work
would have happened. I should not have
done what I’ve done, or seen what I’ve seen.

There’s something grotesque in me and I
can’t help it. I’m drawn to others who are
like that. They’re very real people. It’s just

I’m attracted to sadness and there are some
very sad things. These people are ghostly
figures. They’re my mood, they’re myself.

Lately, I started a big self-portrait. I thought
I won’t want this thing, no one will, so
I went and turned it into a grotesque head.

MEMO TO LOWRY

You’re right, there are grotesques who shine
a dark light that lures us like how the sirens
tried to lure Odysseus, and yes, maybe we
ourselves are among the grotesques, but
there are also the beautiful who, if we’re
lucky, save us from ourselves, and validate
the sun’s light, and maybe also the moon’s.

as if thrown by a boy

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Here is the second selection of poems by Judy Kendall, our June guest poet. She lived and worked in Japan for almost seven years. Cinnamon Press published four collections of her haiku and ‘mainstream’ poems. You can find her biography below her writing.

Poems:


The First Fountain Ever Placed In A Japanese Garden
for my mother

more than half
is the sound of it
as it splashes on the stone rim

this is the part
the thousands of photographs
will never reach

their takers stop
to make a frieze
and then move on

no chance of hearing
the other half
clapping its moving shadow in the trees

the shudder
when the leaves
follow the foam

which drops, unmoved
as if thrown by a boy
to fall through air

diluting
dissolving
into parts


Note:
The first fountain in a Japanese garden was built in Kenroku en, Kanazawa, in 1861


Driving To Noto

Men are better says Toshi I know
no they are not says I (I also know)
and so we argue to the tip of Noto

To Suzu where the wood huts slump in shock
plopped suddenly in frocks of snow
and the sea is whipped to icicles of frenzy

Over a nabe pot of fish and cabbage
(Toshi warns me not to call it cabbage
for it is the vastly superior hakusai)
our host asks me my age

Taken aback
(I`m older than he thought
more single), he inquires
don’t you like men?

So I assure him
only frequent country-moving
has prevented me from choosing
one of them

The returning road is white, wide as a field
the ditches spread themselves with frosting
and the windscreen blanks out like a blizzard

Toshi scrapes at the iced-up wipers singing
to himself, waving me in

Midwinter hangs in the boughs

The pine trees are bent nearly in two
laden with second helpings

(earlier version published in Ambit)

Short poem, haiku and tanka from The Drier The Brighter (Cinnamon Press, 2007):

Poem:

5 am

these cold skies
cheating the dawn,

these bits of tree,
blocks of houses too close to houses,
shrouded people, shrinking in the weather.

Haiku:

too much autumn
the reds are almost scorching now
a mouth brimming with leaves

tanka:

leaving.

not one stick of furniture
in the room.
in the heart,

no tears.

(previously published in Presence)

Biography:

Judy Kendall worked as an English lecturer at Kanazawa University in Japan for nearly seven years. When she first went to Japan she was a practicing playwright but she soon began to focus on poetry and haiku, kickstarted by an invitation to to participate in a collaborative translation of Miyaiki Eiko’s haiku. This became the bilingual publication Suiko /The Water Jar. Since then she has been writing haiku and haibun along with other poetic and prose forms. The haiku mode has informed her four Cinnamon Press poetry collections, particularly Joy Change – composed while she was in Japan. She has won several poetry awards, recently receiving a 2019 Genjuan International Haibun An Cottage prize, and is the essays and bilingual translations editor for Presence haiku journal. She has also run the Yorkshire/Lancashire haiku group.

She is Reader in English and Creative Writing at Salford University, and aside from haiku and haibun, works as a poet, poetry translator and visual text exponent. She has published several articles and books on the translation and creative process, including ‘Jo Ha Kyu and Fu Bi Xing; Reading|Viewing Haiku’ in Juxtapositions, 1 (2). She is currently putting the finishing touches to a monograph for Edinburgh University Press on Where Language Thickens (focusing on the threshold between articulation and inarticulation in language – a threshold in which haiku itself is surely situated).

The special table cloth

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Credit: Bismillah via Pixabay

The day before my birthday storm Poly (Beaufort 11) raged at speeds of 140 kms an hour: overhead lines and trees came down. The day after my birthday the Dutch government fell.

On my birthday I treated family to lunch. It was a joyous occasion. My uncle (born 17 years after my mother) turned 85 in June. He has only recently given up playing volleyball: too much for his shoulders. He’s taken up Jeu de Boules instead.

Here are two verses from an extended sequence titled Briefly a small brown eye.

Primary school demolished,
protestant church a community centre.
Our old house extended.
Forty years on no reason to visit
this town other than the old uncle.

Lunchtime, my aunt brings out
the special table cloth.
She has embroidered signatures,
some in Arabic, some in Cyrillic.
I’m looking for mine.