Nuri Rosegg had seen publicity about my online reading for Writers in the Bath, Sheffield. This led them to my website. Nuri loves the UK and, pre-Brexit, used to visit often. Nuri’s website can be found below her poem. There are also three poems on the Visual Verse website.
Below is Nuri’s poem, inspired by my poem Britain, from the Anthology Welcome to Britain.
BRITAIN
Britain is a fedora hat, opera- And theatre-tried. In this modern era Dramas turn into comedies.
This country is a glass of ginger wine: Tangy wetness without a spine. Alas, the love for self-harm is mega-big.
Britain is a decaying cherry tree Turning its back on the sea. The City, such a cold-hearted cherry pit.
Not only that, it’s Sunday: my least favourite day of the week. I’ve been rescued by being on an online writing weekend with fellow poets most of whom I know. So here is a short warm-up for you. You can use it as a prompt. What mode of transport were you afraid of? What presents have you given that were returned in some way?
My father died in 1990, my mother in 2008. That penny farthing now stands on top of a bookcase here in my flat.
Before 11am I am not human
I’m blue like old potato sky. I was afraid of penny-farthings and of men with tall cylinder hats. My own hands are on a photo, making a gift of a miniature penny-farthing to my parents, an anniversary party.
The striking cover of Welcome to Britain: An Anthology of Poems and Short Fiction is Gil Mualem-Doron’s New Union Flag which re-imagines the Union Jack. The anthology manifests the hope that through the power of poetry and creative writing, we can cultivate empathy and envision and bring about a more just world.
Congratulations to the other contributors: emerging and established writers from around the world. Huge thanks to Editor Ambrose Musiyiwa of CivicLeicester. Three of my poems were chosen: Going bananas, an Abecedarian poem about Brexit, In Blighty, a Golden Shovel poem, and Britain which appears below.
Britain
Britain is a homburg hat that will produce a rabbit if you ask nicely.
This country is a parking ticket on a rainy day: bright yellow with small, smudged writing.
Britain is an apple, stolen or fallen from an unkempt tree: not enough to make a wholesome pie.
Contrapasso is the title of the debut collection of Alexandra Fössinger. She is of Italian origin and currently lives in Northern Germany. She writes mostly in English. Many of the poems included have been previously published in the UK and elsewhere, in magazines such as Tears in the Fence, The High Window, The Journal. The cover design – a black bird against a stark white background – is by Daniel Lambert, Art Director of Cephalopress, established in 2018, providing ‘a voice for the marginalised and the voiceless’.
I do not know the author, though I attended her online reading with Q&A. There she explained the background to the poems: her attempt at survival ‘after the imprisonment in the UK of someone dear to me’. This sudden loss may, in part, have coincided with the pandemic and its lockdowns: creating an incarceration for the poet too.
In Dante’s Divine Comedy, contrapasso is the punishment of souls by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself. The collection is in two parts, both preceded by a quotation from Dante’s Inferno. Part 1 covers the period of imprisonment, while poems in Part 2 were written after the person’s release.
Birds for someone who cannot hear is the title of the opening poem and birds appear throughout the collection, as messengers, omens, and symbols: the blackbird frozen in shock, the thrushes in hiding, along with magpies, sparrows, sky larks, great tit, kingfishers, herons, seabirds. The second poem is titled Cell, giving us just the bare numbers: 1, 5, 3, 4, 7, 1, and ending: bad luck has brought and kept you here, and whether you’ll walk out or be carried in a coffin is also entirely a matter of chance.
The poems are the author’s response to the sudden loss, despair, darkness, pain. Wehave no life apart from life apart (Sentence); How can I find dreams of oarweed and eelgrass, / bring currents to glide on, as I must, when half / of my body is entangled / on thewrong side of the sea, / how will I know when time says to dive? (Velut luna).
Fössinger has said that she ‘is mostly interested in the spaces between things, the tiny shifts in time, the overlooked, the unsaid.’ Throughout the collection, we find astute observations and statements: la vita assurda: the middle-aged couple / pushing their dog in a pram. (July); that emptiness is best hidden / by a display of tame beauty. (Ambulant).
The strongest poems are those which describe a specific situation, or which have objects as ‘animate scaffold’. The poem Ambulant is in two parts: I The house with the Christmas decoration, and the magnolia tree in bloom, and the blackbird frozen in shock, and an ambulance parked in the front garden, all stand completely still. People walk by, averting their gaze, a stoop hammered into their skin – How many lives will they have lost before, without ever noticing. The orange light is beating on the windows like rain.
Here is Fössinger’s close attention to the overlooked, effective personification, interesting use of language. Not all the poems are so securely grounded, sometimes abstraction obscures their meaning. Other poems would have benefited from being tighter, shorter. The book is a short collection of 31 poems with quite a few blank pages. Some readers might want ‘more poems’ for their ‘pounds’.
While the poems reflect the poet’s emotional and psychological response to loss and separation, she manages to maintain a careful balance: hope is not abandoned. The recurrent bird theme also provides a framework, an underlying structure. This theme returns in the short closing poem, The robin redbreast. The loved one appears in a dream, as tiny as a bird, and:
Then you grew a beak with which to pick and sing and transport worms and roses.
Contrapasso is a confident and authentic debut by a perceptive, astute poet. Her personal tale finds echoes in the reader’s universal story. However long and painful the journey, there can be closure and transformation.
I’ve been sorting and clearing old photos and old poems. It reminded me of trips out into Derbyshire with friends: taking the cable car up to the Heights of Abraham, walking through the historic centre of Buxton. The Buxton Baths date back to Roman times. In the Georgian and Victorian period these were developed. Buxton is the highest market town in England. Easter can be early or late – walking through snow or sitting out in sunshine. Enjoy your Easter, wherever you are.
Buxton Centre
Buxton, 2pm
Here is Buxton Spa, Easter, green hills. Not a credit card between us.
Good intentions: it’s the year of the Pig.
We’ve been to China, lugged back soldiers from Xian, wrapped in towels.
Now they’re resting under the Red Cross.
For our next birthdays, we say, we just want Prosecco, book tokens, no bric-a-brac,
but our hands are restless, our fingers flick through a tray of rings.
As I have an Irish surname and it’ll be St. Patrick’s Day this coming week, I am sharing this short poem. Many thanks to the editors of The Madrigal for accepting it for an Áitiúil: an anthology, jointly with the Martello Journal. It was published in September 2022.
World Book Day is on the 23rd of April. In the UK it takes place on the 2nd of March to avoid clashes with spring school holidays and St. Georges’ Day.
A fellow poet introduced me to the American poet Ted Kooser, now in his early 80s. His style is accomplished, yet extremely simple. My current bedtime reading is his poetry collection Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001).
In the late 90s Kooser developed cancer. He gave up his insurance job and writing. When he began to write again, it was to paste daily poems on postcards he sent to his friend and fellow writer Jim Harrison. In the preface, Kooser tells us ‘I began to take a two-mile walk each morning. I’d been told by my radiation oncologist to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity, so I exercised before dawn, hiking the isolated country roads near where I live.’ These country roads are in Nebraska.
The poems cover a period from 9 November until 20 March. In the poems Kooser doesn’t directly talk about the illness. He does so through metaphor. All the poems include a brief description of the weather. The clear and precise observation gives them a haiku quality.
Here is his postcard for march 5:
Very windy and cold.
A flock of robins bobs in the top of a wind-tossed tree, with every robin facing north and the sky flying into their faces. But this is not straightforwardness, nor is it courage, nor an example of purpose and direction against insurmountable odds. They perch like this to keep their feathers smooth.
I’m not keen on them, so I’m not buying now they’re 4 Euro each. Dutch growers have kept their glasshouses empty because of the cost of gas and electricity. I was lucky, though, to be accepted as a patient by a GP practice in the town I moved to. Lucky also that my journey to the implantologist involves two trams: there were strikes again on regional buses last week.
This poem, from a recent workshop, is a snapshot of life in The Netherlands.
Word jij onze nieuwe collega?
Outside every restaurant and café two blackboards: one with a menu, the other asking for a sous-chef, a washer-upper, or bar staff. Freek van Os, the expensive plumbing business is even renting lit-up space by the side of a bus shelter. They need a planner, and also have two technical vacancies. Manda, my hairdresser, had found a 42-year-old Afghan woman, single parent, career-changer. When I came in a month later, she’d changed her mind. Legal cases are abandoned, judges are dead or retiring. As are many GP’s. They’re not signing the new contracts, anyway. Not much the government or the insurers can do. People want to work fewer hours, it’s said, not more.
A seasonal poem and sampler by Rebecca Cullen who is our March guest poet. It’s from her collection A Reader’s Guide To Time. I very much enjoyed Rebecca’s take on February and hope you do too.
This coming Tuesday it’s Valentine’s Day. Here is an early poem that hasn’t featured on the blog before. It was published in the Tees Valley Writer, Autumn 1995, and Highly Commended in their annual competition.
On the beach
Against the sinking sun gulls ride the waves. Our dogs bark and chase their tails. Try to run with a lone jogger who braves
the east wind whistling. Your son trails in your wake, attempts big steps. Laughter peals: a scene lifted straight from some fairy tale.
Heaped grey boulders mimic a colony of seals. Not long before love winters in my heart. I need to tell you how it feels
to be together, yet growing apart. Your craggy face seems so much older clouded in a bluish hue. I brace myself to start
as you place a hand on my shoulder but all I can say is It’s getting colder.
Acacia Publications 