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.
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.
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.
Last Saturday I had to go to the pharmacy in Playa Blanca, Lanzarote to get some over-the-counter medication. It’s an ode of sorts alright…
Normal service will be resumed…
To ‘my’ condition
I salute you: you have staying power. You arrived out of nowhere 28 years ago. How odd you only woke up in Manchester, while you slept through London.
I refuse to call you mine, the two ‘ ’ symbolise handcuffs, shackles. On long journeys (flights, trains) I wear dark trousers, a dark dress.
You have grounded me many times, I’ve been bent over, clutching my bike, scared to go to the shops in case I don’t make it to a loo.
An acronym close to that computer firm. There are dress codes at IBM, I have you know. Irritable? Yes, often. I’ve been pissed off, imagine bowels as a curled-up, snarling cobra.
Syndrome is, I believe, where spectators gather to see retired pilots take off in noisy small planes. Banking is a dangerous manoeuvre.
Storks are said to bring happiness. The bird has been the official emblem of The Hague for centuries. Until the beginning of the last century, storks with clipped wings walked the many fish markets in the city, keeping the streets clean.
I hope this new year will bring health and happiness to you and those you hold dear. The poem is from my new collection Remembering / Disease published last October by Broken Sleep Books. It first appeared in the online magazine Dust, edited by Tara Wheeler.
Storks also feature in my poem High wind. It was selected as one of 20 poems by a jury for the Poetry Archive’s Poetry Archive Now! Wordview 2022. You can see and hear me read it here.
Waiting
The water meadows are waiting for the storks to return
always invisible the other side of her face
in this book there is snow on every page
even an old potato can be turned into a Christmas stamp
the naming of colours is not a science. I vote for bird’s nest grey
My thanks to poet Annie Muir for this seasonal poem from her pamphlet New Year’s Eve. Best wishes for your own New Year’s Eve – wherever you are. See you in 2023.
Enxaneta
In Barcelona it is 38 degrees and a little girl screams with mimicked joy –
she is all eyelashes, all eyes, all teeth and gums and tongue.
I hate her through the eyes of her big sister: half a plastic broken heart tied around my neck,
I climb a fence to watch the castellers. They huddle, arms up as if reaching for a throat,
others climb them like stairs, feet clinging to backs like tadpoles on their first legs,
it doesn’t stop, more like ants than people but with muscle and bone and white trousers,
two little girls heading for top, one takes her place below, the other
is no longer a child but the star at the top of a Christmas tree,
her arm pointing up is the man on the moon, a clock striking midnight on New Year’s Eve.
She slides down the legs of her supporters, relieving the mountains of tension from their shoulders.
Biography
Annie Muir lives in Glasgow. Her debut pamphlet New Year’s Eve was published by Broken Sleep Books. Pre-pandemic she handed out poems on the street outside local libraries, and has a podcast – Time for one Poem – aimed at complete beginners to poetry. @time41poem
Another quote from Claes Oldenburg’s famous Ode to Possibilities ‘I’m for …’ from 1961. It reads like a long list poem. Oldenburg said it was a statement, not a manifesto.
Risham Syed, The Tent of Darius
My poem Wearable Narratives, from my second collection, Nothing serious, nothing dangerous, published by Indigo Dreams in 2019, is in two parts. The poem was inspired by art in the Manchester Art Gallery. Last week I posted part i (Scarf).
The Tent of Darius, an installation from 2009, is a complex work by the Lahore-based Risham Syed. It consists of five embroidered vintage European Army Coats with a small painting. This is a copy, painted by her, of the Charles Le Brun work of the same name. Syed describes her inspiration for it:
“I imagined these five coats to have travelled all over the world, with women having contributed to them by adding a piece of embroidery. They are like these tired, old worn-out soldiers who have dreamt of coming back home. On the one hand, they symbolize the imperial power, but on the other hand, there is another aspect to this work; how soldiers from the colonies were made to fight for the Imperial powers. It’s true for any army including the Pakistan army, where most soldiers are from Jehlum, Potowar region, from poor, lower middle-class families and end up with the army because of their physique/tradition, in the hope of making a romantic/glamorous career. This work, compares the romance/glamor to the actual reality of war, the aim of it and the beneficiaries of it. I juxtapose the embroidered coats with an ‘Oriental’ painting called The Tent of Darius, a seventeenth-century painting by Charles Le Brun that provides the title for the installation. In it, the Queen of Persia bows to Alexander the Great who has conquered the land. It serves as a metaphor for the West making incisions in the East.”
I was very moved by the sight of these five coats and the details of the embroideries which inspired the last stanza.
The tent of Darius
The ornate faux-Chinese frame holds a cropped copy on acrylic: The Queen of Persia draped at the feet of Alexander.
Below, an array of five overcoats, donated by European soldiers, appliquéd and embroidered by women’s hands.
Under the lapel, a stilled windmill, peach-coloured vanes. A green tree above a button hole. Death comes like blue geese.
So said Claes Oldenburg and he said a lot more like it, such as ‘I’m for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses like a handkerchief’. Oldenburg said that his famous 1961 Ode to Possibilities, ‘I am for …’ was a statement, not a manifesto. It’s a fantastic read, a long list poem that works well as a writing prompt. Here is the link.
Swedish-born Oldenburg, one of the founding fathers of Pop Art died July this year at the age of 93. He was famous for his monumental sculptures where mundane objects (matches, clothes peg, apple core) suddenly became larger than life.
My poem Wearable Narratives (from the collection Nothing serious, nothing dangerous) is in two parts. Here is part i. It was inspired by a pure silk scarf, made by Andrea Zapp, that was on display in the shop of Manchester Art Gallery. At that time, I didn’t have a smartphone. So, here is a picture of other scarves, made by Andrea Zapp. See the note below for more information about her amazing work.
Scarf
A turquoise ribbon runs under khaki stepping stones. Tomatoes are the red carpet. Slanting shadows pull the empty staircase under water. Its fine metal tracery anchors a washing line with checked tea towel.
Cold marble columns, bleached shutters closed. Almost out of sight wooden farming implements, a clock stopped at ten to eleven, a car hubcap.
Everything here is at an angle now. What survives are the chalk drawings: a cheerful elephant, the ibis and another bird, its round black eye like a spinning top.
Note:
Andrea Zapp, born in Germany, living in Manchester, pioneered in coalescing her digital media art background with the fashion industry. Andrea has created the luxury fashion brand AZ.andreazapp. This sells high quality silk dresses and scarves printed with her own photography of urban views, rural panoramas, miniature scenarios and objects of culture and curiosity, creating a collection of stunning authentic hand-made garments.
Acacia Publications 