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When I first encountered the entity that appears on the towpath I was afraid for She seemed hardly human to me. I had gone little by little into this dreaming place over the course of twenty years, and I had explored it almost wholly. I do not know what my encounter with this lady means, I intend to find out.” With She Christine Murray explores the spaces between waking and dreaming, that we all inhabit yet are so rarely revealed to us in this day and age. Part shaman part Sybil,she takes us on a Jungian odyssey to meet the archetype that stands at the crossroads of birth and death, one whom we are all destined to encounter sooner or later. Thanks to Dave Mitchell at Oneiros Books, To Michael McAloran, and to Anastasia Kashian who painted her beautiful cover.
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Category: new poetry
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Thimblerig by Annette Skade Bradshaw Books 2013
63 pages
Notes on the half-hidden
Annette Skade’s debut collection Thimblerig was published by Bradshaw Books in 2013. Thimblerig is a collection of some 53 poems on themes of family, familial history, and on the poetic striving for voice. Skade’s sub-thematic flow, her buried themes, are brought out using the symbolism of light, and of the natural world that surrounds her.
Skade is at her best as a writer and recorder of history and tale, her preoccupations are carried through the text as light-maps. She uses the symbols of the caul, the moth, and the cord (as rope, umbilicus, even as muscle ). Her symbols often denote boundary both in the physical and in the emotional sense.
Women play an important role in Skade’s familial tracery, her bloodline. Thimblerig is dedicated to Skade’s mother and to her daughter. In Thimblerig Skade’s grandmother forms the apex of the matrilineal pyramid, appearing in The Caul
The Caul
She was born with a caul on her face.
The mid-wife said it was good luck,
cut away the membrane,
examined its milky translucence
and placed it in tissue to be kept.
Her father sold it to a sailor
as a charm against drowning.…
All her life she loved chiffon scarves.
Its my belief she missed
part of herself sold away.p 11 Thimblerig
Family tales are held together with fine wisps of poetry which will transmogrify into light. Annette Skade uses light to map her history and to create boundaries of safety in which to enclose and keep family safe. There is an element of ephemeral about her use of light which she has developed into a fine sense in the beautiful Oak Grove,
Oak Grove
I draw a ring
around this house:snail shell
harbour
omphalosStrophe, antistrophe:
from oak to oak,
bin to bench,
winter green to herb,
washing line, shed.Tread the seasons,
serve the sickle moon,
observe it spring,
orange, low on a dark sea.A rope of days, twined strong,
to ward off the stranger,
the letter come to dispossess.Oak Grove answers to A Map of My House In Terms Of Light, where the poet shows her reader the physical interior of the home traced with light: as impermanent, subject to deep loss and to necessary change. The exterior ring of protection and enclosure traced by the poet belies the move to drift of the lives of those she means to protect and to keep. those that are within the home:
To plot all changes
from dawn to dusk
and through each season,
I need many such maps
an atlas of light.from A Map of My House In Terms Of Light, Thimblerig.
Skade is always striving to make her meaning through her use of symbol. In one poem here she has capped a false tail onto the work Papyrus Fragment forcing her ending too soon. Skade deserves a broader canvas for her imaginative play, which she will follow through with in her next collection.
Two moth poems occupy the ground where the poets strives to examine the vulnerability of her existence. I wanted to look at these closer because they form the penates and laertes of the collection and of the poet’s thematic concerns. These are Papyrus Fragment and Restless.
Restless
A hundred moths made a lattice
on blue-black window pane,
some the size of wrens
others torn corners of paper:
a nightly frantic race of wings.Papyrus Fragment
It darts, bares a blaze
of underwing to plain sight;
this endless fragile need
to make a mark,
to come to light.Skade’s investigation of nature is where she triumphs as in Solstice Rose. This poem and Oak Grove in particular show a poet who is an imagist. A perfect image is accomplished in thirteen brief words,
Solstice Rose
Thorn switches
cage
a single yellow bud,
clenched
against wind whips:
a sundrop.
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Crown of Thorns by Bethany W. Pope
Oneiros Books 2013Crown Of Thorns by Bethany W. Pope is published under the Oneiros Books imprint. This is not an easy book to read. Ultimately it is a tale of triumph against war, where war is child sexual abuse, rejection, and alienation. Throughout Crown Of Thorns there is a sense of profound hope and strong unshakeable faith.
Bethany Pope uses an imagery and symbolism in Crown of Thorns that is bloody, battered, estranged, and sometimes terrifying. Corridors, umbilici, and torn flesh form the vast part of the imagery, with water and earth less spoken but always present. Crown Of Thorns is a testament of survival and endurance sited in a complex construction that requires some explanation.
Divisions in Crown Of Thorns
There are four major divisions in Crown Of Thorns, Crown of Thorns, House Of Masks, Rabbit Trap, and Bloodlines: An Emperor’s Crown. Within each division are series of poems excavating both familial and personal history. The series are broken into sonnet groups, some of which are acrostic.
The opening section of the book eponymously titled Crown Of Thorns comprises two separate threads (or cords) Joy and John. The section is 15 sonnets long, alternating between two groups of seven sonnets under each heading that become entwined in Sonnet #15. Crown Of Thorns forms the foundation of the book proper. The major themes of survival and abuse are herein introduced.
The themes of this opening section of the book are taken up throughout the other previously named divisions, House of Masks, Rabbit Trap and Bloodlines. Pope maintains a careful balance in the foundational and introductory parts of her book. She explores and ultimately accepts the damage of war on the body, and its survival in the final part of the book Bloodlines: An Emperor’s Crown.
Pope has intricately embroidered her major themes throughout the fabric of the book. She will pick up and repeat phrases in different sonnets, most especially in Bloodlines: An Emperor’s Crown, which is more assured and deftly handled than the earlier sections. Bloodlines is cumulative, thus the most difficult set of themes to render poetically.
The achievement of this book is for the writer, who has honed her craft to attain her mature poetic voice. This, she achieves through her use of structure, structural underpinning in the form of acrostic sonnets, and a developed use of symbolism that interweaves its way through each titled or numbered section. The use of the symbolism of the umbilicus, the corridor, the tunnel, the eye , and water is very evident in the final section of the book through Crown 2: The Ancestors, Crown 3: Alchemy, and Blood Jewels. These named sections form the final part of the book, titled Bloodlines, An Emperor’s Crown.
Symbols In Crown of Thorns
Crown Of Thorns is set out as a Bildungsroman, or more properly a pilgrimage. The book is confessional, as it is a testament of victory over war. War is the torn body and soul of the victim of child abuse, war in the experience of neglect and poverty. The deepest victory is in Pope’s admittance to herself that the battle is never entirely won. It begins anew each day with the ‘Dream that bursts when eyelids open.’
Some of Pope’s material is traumatic to read and to think about. Her most intense victory therefore is in how she has achieved compression of her traumatic themes through her use of poetic form, and in how she has explored and set out those themes through sure use of symbol.
Soil, earth, water and the dark blood of birthing mingle their acids into an existence that is always questing for right and truth. The umbilicus, that dark binding cord of ancestry binds the victims of family through change of place and of time,
13.
‘The corridors run, binding us together
out of glistening blue and red wires.’Crown 3: Alchemy (Bloodlines)
Bloodlines makes liberal use of the acrostic form spelling out a history, which I read as an SOS. Bethany is born, only purity is my tough refusal to, sell my poor soul, and so on. It is a morse-code of distress hammered into sonnets of sure structure and strong voice. I found myself trying to avoid the acrostics as much as possible to get to the meat of the work, although the acrostic sonnets form the tough outer skin of the poetry- the rind.
Joy: Thorns
Growing flesh around the darkened hole death springs from,
the bark hardens around the hollow in the bole,
the secret place you love for no known reason.
Dressed in a chiton, playing the role of nymphic
servant to unseen Pan, you slide into the loamy darkness,
your wood-rot scented hide. Adolescent haunches
squat in soft soil. You have a shepherd’s pie you bought
with two week’s allowance. Treated bamboo and garish
dyed bands, producing a sound your mind makes melodious.
The tree speaks with the borrowed breath of a wounded girl.
Saturday is for hiding, drawing strength from the earth.
Sundays still belong to grampy, his evil, elderly
entitlement; right of patriarchy to penetrate
beyond the heart of innocence, which grows no armor-bark.by Bethany W Pope
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Cup
nest rests
her cup(heart, feather)
into wood
winds
capillaryIn air (above)
sky is a heart caught
red, its amber spillingnest stills
her dust
and mossbreathe out
underground, wet roots stir
the sleeping house upsoften
the softening rainmy veins answer tree
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Cup is © C. Murray
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New Trees,
there are three –
two crows dance
steel-beaking the mounds roundNew Trees is © C. Murray
Image is © Mick McAloran -
EMBODIMENT
1.Maternal
I lie on the bed in darkness,
wary of sudden toddler jerks
(your innocent, erratic strength).
Instead, you lay your head upon my cheek
and in that momentary tenderness,
a universe of visceral wisdom.
I am held by this intuition:
love
free of all condition.
2.Marital
We grasp each other.
Words surrender
to spoor of pore.
You kiss my collarbone.
Sacred contours
underscore
quibbles and stresses.
Our limbs recall
a geography
of catharsis;
the lee of my back,
the lie of your land.
Embodiment is © Emily Cullen
GALWAY MOULD
We take the damp for granted here.
Blinds draw back to reveal
colonies of galaxies:
tiny black holes
in our new collective space.
‘It’s only condensation,’
Next Door concedes,
‘the weather’s too wintry
to open the windows.’
My wooden bangle by the sill
slips into a mildewed coat of green.
For fun, I bought you mouldy cheese.
Last night, it took revenge on me,
inducing a vivid dream
of a white chandelier of mould
that slowly lowered
through our kitchen ceiling:
a lichen lantern,
till its lattices became milky spores,
mouths that started to open and close.
Then I awoke, vowing to spray
our wall of condensation,
diffuse for good my fascination
with Galway mould.
Galway Mould is © Emily Cullen
INCENSE
Wisps of opium:
boa constrictors
curl into curtains
of late afternoon.
Milky ribbons tantalise
like the soft, deliberate motion
of the belly dancer you admired
in Turkish solitude.
I remember you burning sandalwood
in Illinois to set the mood.
Now smoky arabesques
tease then evanesce
while broken trails of ash,
like fossilized worms announce
seduction as but a crumbling dream:
brittle, grey, ephemeral.
Incense is © Emily CullenIncense’ was published in No Vague Utopia (Ainnir Publishing, 2003) ‘Galway Mould’, ‘Embodiment’ and ‘Playing House’ were published in Emily Cullen’s second collection, In Between Angels and Animals (Arlen House, 2013).
Dr. Emily Cullen is an Irish writer, scholar, harpist and arts manager. Her first poetry collection, entitled No Vague Utopia was published by Ainnir in 2003. In 2004 she was the national Programme Director of the Patrick Kavanagh Centenary celebrations and was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series. Emily was awarded an IRCHSS Government of Ireland fellowship for her doctoral study on the Irish harp. She is a qualified teacher of the harp who has performed throughout Europe, Australia and the United States. A former member of the Belfast Harp Orchestra, she has recorded on a number of albums and also as a solo artist. In addition to writing poetry, short stories and feature articles, she publishes widely on aspects of Irish cultural history and music.
Out now! Emily Cullen In Between Angels and Animals (Arlen House, 2013)ISBN: 9781851320790 Paperback 96 pp 12 EUROAvailable from Kennys Bookshop, The Book Depository and many good book stores.More Information:The Book Depository: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Between-Angels-Animals-Emily-Cullen/9781851320790 -
The following poem is an excerpt from a sequence published by Ditch Poetry. The sequence is from my forthcoming collection, The Blind (Oneiros Books 2013). Part of the Sequence is published here. The first poem in the sequence, hunger, appears throughout the collection and was first published in A New Ulster Magazine. suspend I
from the mirror architrave
float down silken threads
they are not blackened yet
from the ceiling hooks
float down wisps of
red thread – almost
cobweb light she is
arched back unsure
whether to suspend
burnt orange silks
cover the shutters
there are children in the street
she is nonetheless
quite bound-up
in red ropes
from loop at nape
and length of torso
it is peaceful
being spider-rolled
webbed-in and arched
as if a –
a bird swoops down
behind the orange silks….. shiftshape-in
Suspend I by C. Murray, is taken from The Blind (Oneiros Books 2013) and is published in part at Ditch Poetry.
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The Elm of the Aeneid
After Virgil , Lines 282-295, Book VI
In the vast shadows of the Elm,
Under her ancient boughs where,
According to men dreams are allied to nightmare,
Intricately woven into every arrow-headed leaf,
There monstrous shapes and forms
Become crafted by the elements,
As beheld through the Light Trees,
Where everyone fashions for themselves
The proper demons which people their most
Specific exactitude; Just as Aeneas saw,
Him-self, those heady Chimera and which
He pursued with wrought steel,
On through the torturous waters of the
Tarterean Archeron, where the roads led.
This translation of The Elm of the Aeneid, After Virgil , Lines 282-295, Book VI is © Peter O’Neill.
Spadework
In memoriam
Out in the allotment, thinking and digging,
And considering Heaney’s analogy
Of the opened field – Immense acreage
Of sovereignty to be found there
Emanating beneath the wood of his words,
Their clayey, and powderish substance.
And, pausing to take a breath, before I too
Rake up the skeletal remains of Baudelaire.
Field then as page, words as soil or clay;
Tossing the stones and weeds from the mind,
Into Hell’s ditch! The Norsemen and
Bog bodies, as with the spectral corpse of Croppies,
Figuring there, as in any archaeological site,
All with neurological accordance of mind.
Spadework, in Memoriam is © Peter O’Neill
Peter O’ Neill’s debut collection Antiope was published by Stonesthrow Poetry early this year, “certainly a voice to be reckoned with.” Wrote Dr Brigitte Le Juez (DCU). He has had poems published in The Galway Review, A New Ulster (5,8,12), The Scum Gentry, Abridged (29) New Town How (1) Danse Macabre Online Review (66, 70) The Original Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology (8) among others. He has an honours degree in philosophy, just completed a Masters in Comparative Literature and he has just presented his first paper on Heraclitus in the works of Samuel Beckett at the annual Beckett and the ‘State’ of Ireland Conference at UCD.
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purple blue thistle
ghosts/ghosting mouths
they’re pulling purple blue thistle/our heads
prickle their grey thumbs.
the un-holdable bouquet/clamped
with their veil of see through teeth
blood is not blood it is
a shadow veining the natural light
that our eyes fail to adjust to
and our glossy mouths fail to lipsynch
the weeded purply hill
when we speak between that strained speech
purple blue thistle is © Candi V. Auchterlonie
lookers stone
looking glass/under glass eye stares they become lazy moons/but try to catch these petaled fliers with your hands,
just try, they’re slippery mints tonguing fate.
my house is plagued with the secret of mint moths and they’ve begun to eat the hearts out from all of my best coats.
lookers stone is © Candi V. Auchterlonie
tearing cotton from your breast
poems from grand static/stasis that hurts with its stained whiteness.
tearing cotton from your breast is © Candi V. Auchterlonie
the flood of man
the tall-tall creek/creeps into your backyard.
your very own backyard/and you flood
a river into the wild
your things/they trickle out of your life
the things you always meant to keep.
the flood of man is © Candi V. Auchterlonie
the long drive
you will always have
the right of way.
the long drive is © Candi V. Auchterlonie
into the day we dream/into the night we work
spines are bridges
for tomorrow
we hold every hope up
to the jagged shadows of our bindings
each and each colourless moth
of us dissolves within the window pane of day/flirting death
only separate as wings are.
we hold every hope/we might chance/ideas of forever
and stay with them.
into the day we dream/into the night we work is © Candi V. Auchterlonie
The above poems are from Candi V. Auchterlonie’s forthcoming collection , leave this death alone. I am linking here her previous collection , Impress (Published by Punk Hostage Press, 2012)
Impress
Candi’s Homepage
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the griefscape as no-place: All Stepped / Undone – by Michael McAloran.
endless ribcage of the sky / the glut of blood beneath
and a pulse of shit / dry your eyes / it’s just beginning( p123 , all stepped / undone – ) is © Michael McAloran
All Stepped /Undone- is Michael McAloran’s fifth full poetry collection, and his second full collection with Oneiros Press. Tracing a line through McAloran’s work to date, one can discern a drive to whittle his poetic voice to its essential core.
All Stepped /Undone- is sometimes a griefscape, the collection is by turns both nihilistic and elegiac in its tone:
as if to –
cylindrical
echo(es)
bled winds of
the unspoken
spasm lock of the atoned blood
no not enough
paling into
birthing as if to ….
(ah
.spit)(p54 , as if to – from in thin dreaming- ) is © Michael McAloran
In structural terms All Stepped /Undone is loosely tripartite, however it is not as structurally underpinned as in McAloran’s In Damage Seasons – (Onerios Press 2013) which was somewhat more defined and contained within the poet’s structuring of his text. This is no bad thing in itself, as an evident structure can limit the movement of the text. I have included my reading of In Damage Seasons- at link. cf. my note at the end of this post.
The three parts of All Stepped /Undone- are : till claimed – , of thin dreaming – , and all stepped /undone- .
till claimed- and of thin dreaming – are quite similar in form and in their sharing of theme and image. all stepped /undone- while sharing and picking up on these themes is aphoristic and condensed in its poetic expression:
head of dust / no /that was the drapery of the silence /
called upon /subtle till graceless / till bounty / reflected
upon /lest the burgeoning see(p106 , all stepped /undone – ) is © Michael McAloran
One can see the development of McAloran’s voice from his earlier collection of aphorisms , Attributes, through the third section of this current book. His poetic voice has become skilled and honed to allow for his sure expressiveness which he achieves in the least amount of words.
Readers of Michael McAloran would do well to acquire the books Attributes and In Damage Seasons to see how he has developed and opened out his poetic work. I mention those previous works in particular as they are most related to the current text under review, in my view.
I feel that McAloran is directing his skill toward a quality of expressiveness that is the sure mark of the artist. He is developing a mature poetic voice that has a quality of tone rare in contemporary Irish poetics :
back-flexed / the arrow’s breath to claim the sky of /
night / the bread broken / such was the blade’s redeem /
or the blood-cut star of light / glistening /of the heart’s
tolling(p 116, all stepped /undone -) is © Michael McAloran
Whilst related to McAloran’s collection of aphorisms, Attributes, in form, and to In Damage Seasons – in its intent and expression, this work is more loosely structured than both, and is therefore built wholly in the active poetic voice. The poet’s voice as mouthpiece of the internal landscape. In this case the voice or protagonist is mouthing his grief and alienation.
Of the three parts to this book , till claimed- is the furthest the writer will go in terms of his willingness to express alienation. The poems herein, and those of in of thin dreaming- are generally longer than in the final eponymously titled section.
There is as always with McAloran a complexity of image and a deprecating humour, the poem scuttle- can be read a few ways:
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scuttle –
impossible ashes
I/
splice of
dread knock and yet …
split
drought/pageant/silenced
of the lock upon
intoxicate
spill of spurious lights
caress of…
sun light
worthless as breath
I/
splice
with my little eye
longing of
scuttle of dead hand wavering
obscene
scuttle – is from till claimed – p11 of All Stepped/Undone and © Michael McAloran
One is never quite sure, hence my delight at word-play and at McAloran’s image-play/ply of.
With McAloran a longer poem can be less expressive than the short aphorism. it is often akin to witnessing the unleashed voice in I (till claimed – ) warm up and spit out a gully :
throes-
why ask
till
answered /
(absence of light)
rage of death
and the cold ravage
of stone
in dead weather sun light
coil/casket of
love
X.-ed out
final throes
of
.none(p 71 , of thin dreaming – ) is © Michael McAloran
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The unaccommodated and loosely structured poetic voice suits the visual artist in McAloran:
biting still-
vortices of …
(ah spill the night
..into cups of earth)
in this dry sunlight
breaking for favour sensed
earthed from out of which to cast
vacantly as shadow
(p46 excerpt of biting still- from of thin dreaming- ) is © Michael McAloran.
Note : I have linked my reading of In Damage Seasons- here , the reason being that while the two texts share a tripartite structure , they are vastly differing works in terms of how the writer manages his expression. In Damage Seasons- has a structural containment, a triptych architecture, that felt almost imprisoning as it tied down the poet’s voice.
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Oneiros Books link to All Stepped/Undone by Michael McAloran
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I know three places that they go,
and the birds wait in congregation
on pitched roof, tottering lamp-post
in the tree-chorals. They wait mute,gull and urban-pigeon, rook, starling
wood-pigeon and magpie, all wait.
Sparrows await the later crumbs,
the blackbird desires garden-apples.I saw a bird-keeper once.
With her bird-eye. Her empty bag,
her melt into the crowd anonymity.
I saw her just leave a squake of gullsin her wake tearing at the good bread.
She directed her gaze onto me and
I thrilled with the recognition. Each day
at the right time she had walked toa reach of grass at the four roads
opposite the park where herons. Her
bag later stuffed into her ordinary jacket
her streaked hair, her impassive gull-eye.I lost her image in the crowd. Those others,
the bird-keepers of unlikely corners at
the meeting of roads, and roundabouts
carry a backpack, a trolley. One a man,the other a woman. She is old now.
the bird-keepers is © C. Murray , first published in Skylight #47 2013
Chris Murray 