Monk's Footwear – Bloody Burma
 

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• Chris Major is a regular contributor to Ink Sweat & Tears with his concrete poems.

• If you are interested in the connection between poetry and politics, there will be a debate at the upcoming Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (that's in Suffolk, England) between Peter Carpenter and Joseph Woods as to whether poetry, in the words of W. H. Auden "makes nothing happen" or whether it is unavoidably political and can make a difference. The session takes place at 1:00pm at the Cinema Gallery on Sunday 4th November, tickets £6.00. For full festival details and programme visit www.thepoetrytrust.org

October sees the launch of a new Bob Dylan anthology and as part of the promotional push, the record company has added a message generator to the cue-card scene from D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back so you can post your own messages on Bob's cards.

For the record, the track is Subterranean Homesick Blues, the movie was shot in an alley behind The Savoy Hotel in London and the character in the background - with the long black beard - is Allen Ginsberg.

The ‘We’ Lies


After reading Simone Weil
you put on a pair of sunglasses
and stated emphatically
that every sentence
beginning with ‘we’ is a lie.

We are good together.

I asked about the sunglasses;
it was January. You explained,
with a Gallic shrug, she was French
then started reading aloud
long passages, I’ve no idea
what about ‘cos the West Ham
game was on the radio,
the Upton Park faithful
were chanting:
“We are staying up.
We are staying up.”
That doesn’t look likely;
lost again.

We were meant for each other.

I opened a bottle of beer
hoping to drown defeat:
trust me to support such
a shit team. You poured yourself
a glass of Burgundy, still feeling French
you tell me: “we have our liberty.”
To be honest, at this precise moment,
I would rather have three points.
Then, lighting a Gitanes, and surrounding
yourself in plumes of smoke for support
you chant with a smile: “we have
everything we ever dreamed of.”
Sorry, but I can’t see my Triumph Bonny
parked outside, no platinum discs
from my hit records, no cup winners’ medals
even though I always score the winning goal.
You see, she could actually be right,
this Simone Weil, ‘cos this ‘we’
doesn’t seem to be working for me.

We would always be true.

With full continental temperament
you allow your arms an acid house
dance; big box, little box,
throw your arms into explaining
about the meaning of the box,
the purpose of its existence.
You exhale Paris itching
to discuss café philosophies
or overturn Renaults
and burn them in the fireplace
waving placards saying:
‘we don’t talk anymore’.
Sacre Bleu! Merde!
I was telling you we had strikers
that couldn’t hit a shot on target
from inside the six yard box,
that our midfield had gone missing,
keeper tends to flap on crosses.
Talking isn’t the problem.

We loved each other, once.

Not every sentence
beginning with ‘we’ is a lie.


• P.A.Levy says... "I'm a Cockney sparrow now living in exile in the beautiful Suffolk countryside.  As a life long West Ham fan I know all about dreams that fade and die and fortunes always hiding."

• Clare Phillips-Barton is amongst other things a mother of two, living, writing and bumping into unusual types in the Northamptonshire countryside.

• Mandy Smith is an English girl who meanders through life enjoying astronomy, postmodernist deconstruction and collaborating with photographers to produce haiga. Mandy's Meanderings can be visited at http://mandysmeanderings.blogspot.com/

Emily Lin is a young Malaysian who takes daily photographs of Kajang - see http://malaysiadailyphoto.blogspot.com/

Four haiku to consider for the weekend – Bluebell woods is by one of IS&T's regular contributors Phuoc-Tan Diep while the remaining three – Berlin, Proust and Buddha are by Ken Head, whose work has also been published in IS&T over the summer.


Blood in bluebell woods,
where wolves walk and humans stalk
with silver bullets.


Berlin haiku
Blazing graffiti
calculated defiance
freedom knows no walls


Proust haiku
How cruel now are those
madeleines of memory
that once seemed so sweet


Buddha smiles broadly
forever he laughs and laughs
he has seen the joke

Rich Waters

A Saturday evening in late August;
the prolepsis of summer has begun.
Under inky rain clouds stream ragged V’s.
of quiet seagulls, the first to probe inland.
Why so early this year? Or are you lost,
like me, looking for rich waters.



Out of the Cave

It was huge, like an alien
from War of the Worlds.
Its long spindly legs slapping
the side of the shower

for grip. The great grey bulk
skidding in the damp, slowing
down like a man fighting a tide,
like a man giving up. I scooped

it out. It weighed nothing,
yet felt Prehistoric. I waited for the bite.
House spiders don’t bite.
This one panted in my palm.

I opened the window and eased it out.
It stumbled out onto the ledge,
blinded by the early august sun, the birdsong.
He staggered forward and used his two

largest legs to rear up and survey
the bright world around him.
Like Man coming out of the Cave.
I forgot him for a moment, looked

away, prepared to shower. A sudden
scuffle. A bird on the window ledge.
I looked out and saw the bird launch
into the sky, the spider in its jaws.


• Matthew Friday is a professional writer and graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmith College, London. He has had poems accepted for publication in the following magazines: Carillon, Earth Love, Finger Dance Festival, The New Writer, Pens on Fire, Pulsar and Red Ink. He has also received a special mention in Poetry News and won 3rd prize in Writing Magazine's Valentine Day poetry competition.

THE PUPPET MASTER

The puppet master who is always dusted with darkness,
is about to end his performance.
His marionette has slithered staring to the stage floor
where her mother, father and sister,
will never have to meet her empty eyes, or see
exactly how she is sprawled and trampled.
The puppet master is our intermediary  
his maimed marionette cannot speak or weep
without skilful manipulation – of his icy fingers.
He has taught her silence like a prayer.



MAN WITH NO NAME

I see you in shifting shadows
I see you slipping slyly from the gallows
I see you strutting down the street
spurs chinking on your feet.
I see you chewing a cigar in smoky bars
busy cheating at cards.
The whiskey on your breath
could make a girl dizzy.
I survive your glacier glare
But, I’m aware death comes so easily to you…

I see you in petrol stains on rain soaked roads
rainbow coloured, slowly dissolving at the edges.
I see you lurking outside my door late at night
smirking insanely
like a man on a ledge, holding on
waiting for the shock
that will send him falling
down
down
down
into darkness.


• Linda Preston says "It’s cold here on the dark side of the moon – but I have everything I need for now – freshly bakes scones & cream, a Ted Hughes poetry book and a picture of Brad Pitt not wearing very much!"

Ok, it's blowing our own trumpet time again but we were particularly pleased with these recent comments...

" There's an amazingly high standard of poetry on this site. Much better than you can buy."

and

"Ink Sweat & Tears, edited by Charles Christian, describes itself as

a new webzine that explores the borderline between poetry and prose in the digital age. In otherwords that point in creative writing where prose poetry (or free verse) meets poetic prose.

which might put some people off, but it is not full of pseudo-avant-garde nonsense posing as reactionary postmodernism. On the contrary it goes in for publishing an eclectic range of pieces, from quite traditionally crafted short poems to pieces of flash fiction, short videos, haibun and haiga. Contributors include such names as Gwilym Williams, CarrieAnne Thunell, Juliet England (no relation) and Colin Cross."

Underfoot

After tea I notice the magpie again. It is on the driveway, looking around. It waddles up to the rose tree which has a number of hips visible  among the branches. It turns, crosses the footpath and on to the lawn.

Before disappearing into the bottom of the hedge, it pauses and looks up at the willow tree.

I spend some time on the computer. Around 8pm I am reminded that I haven't yet put the wheelie-bin out for the binmen who come tomorrow. Looking out, I see that it is still pouring down with rain. I gather up the household rubbish into plastic bags and park them by the front door, hoping the rain will ease off.

Just before midnight, I put on my anorak,  collect the bags and take them out to the bin which I then wheel to the end of the drive.

in the dark
crunch and crack of snails
under my boot

Didn't see them guv', honest. In the dim light I saw a dozen or more objects across the driveway.  Rosehips dropped by the magpie, I surmised. Only the cold light of day reveals reality.


• Gerald England, as writer and editor, has been around on the small press scene for almost forty years. His website is at www.geraldengland.co.uk/ and his personal blog is http://ackworthborn.blogspot.com

Aging Vessel

My brittle skeleton
is trapped in the prison
of my festering flesh
and keeps my soul an inmate,
clinging to my splintering bones



Philosophic Ramblings

In the coincidence of life
we postpone death daily,
yet rarely seek higher purpose.

Now that we have been mastered
by the seductive video screen
we are victims of electronics.

Evil conspires with gravity
and pulls us down, down,
as we substitute spectation
for entangling alliances.

The grievances that rasp our hearts
devour the pleasure of our days
and stir seething cauldrons of hate
that will spill on our tomorrows.

Man is the cruelest animal
exceeding any creature of nature
in torture, mayhem and destruction.

We are raised in the garden of greed
and become trapped in the ghetto of need.

The unkind earth eats us all.

Death smiles when chill creeps in our bones.

Humanity, our dysfunctional family.


• Gary Beck's poetry and fiction has appeared in numerous publications. His chapbook The Conquest of Somalia will be published by Cervena Barva Press. His plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes, and Sophocles have been produced Off-Broadway.

The Book of Blood by Vicki Feaver
Cape (2006)
66pp, £9.00
ISBN: 0224076841

It has taken twelve years for Vicki Feaver’s third collection, The Book of Blood, to appear. The ‘Blood’ of the title includes the blood of murder, sacrifice, menstruation, ancestry, and of wild creatures shot for food. As in her previous book, The Handless Maiden, she draws on classical mythology and fairytales, paintings, female sexuality, sex and death, but there are new themes here too: love poems, and others dealing with mental illness. This is a wise, wide-ranging, excitingly uneven book, with occasional disappointments, such as ‘Borrowed Dog’ and ‘Spider’.

Women who turn to murder are a recurring theme in both collections. In The Handless Maiden Judith, grieving for her murdered husband, ‘rolled in the ash of the fire/ just to be touched and dirtied/ by something’ (‘Judith’). This idea is picked up in ‘Cinderella’. Feaver’s Cinderella rolls in the ashes then:

I print the shapes of grief

hands
feet
breasts
belly
open mouth

onto fine linen sheets.
 
This impassioned defiance finds a chillier echo in ‘Blodeuwedd’, a poem based on an ancient Welsh tale, blodeuwedd being the Welsh word for owl (literally, ‘flower face’). The narrator, a woman fashioned out of flowers, tells how she conspired with her lover to murder her husband, then was turned into an owl as punishment:

Sometimes, I lunge at your lighted
windows: printing the glass
with breast, talons,
outstretched wings,
flower face of a desperate girl.

‘Blodeuwedd’ is only one of many poems where people turn into birds or animals, and vice versa. ‘Bufo Bufo’, where the fable of the frog prince is turned on its head, starts as a seemingly straightforward description of a toad in the narrator’s cellar, then we are told that it’s spring, the toad’s mating season: ‘But he’s my prisoner – soft, warty stone// who at night swells/ to the size of a man.’  

‘Glow-Worm’ is the first of a dozen love poems at the heart of the book (in both senses). This is a deftly controlled piece, full of assonance and half-rhymes – shine/immune, lawn/palm, butt/cigarette – with rhythms that start to run forward, then are pulled gently back. The charged restraint of the writing, the hints of budding intimacy, and the symbolism of the title all combine to make this probably the sexiest poem in the book. This is Feaver at her best: well worth the wait.


• Reviewed by Dot Cobley. In a fortchcoming anthology Dot Cobley says of herself “I’ve got six different jobs, I attend four assorted poetry groups, and do most of my writing between 5:00 and 6:30am.”

JAZZ MUSICIAN

a jazz musician
is someone
who takes a familiar
tune
and using all his skill
and talent
makes it as unfamiliar
as possible



BRANDED

I have noticed
of late
how many women
have tattoos
on the small
of their backs

as though
they've been branded

like cattle


• These are the second batch of poems we've published by Norwich-based Colin Cross.

CROW
 
CROW flew just once
in a straight line
the hooded one
living in my garden
straight as a shoulder-fired missile
brought down the escaping harrier
seen circling CROW-EMPIRE
rammed it side-on
knocked it spinning out of the blue
 
stunned
the red bird fell tumbling to earth
and out of sight
 
for entertainment CROW plays with the wind -
 
CROW soars and tumbles
                             circles and zigzags
 
CROW dives and darts
 
and drops  
                              and dances
 
                like  a scrap of windblown blackbag liner
 
in spite of all that straight as the crow flies propoganda
 
but today's the long grey day
when echoing silence reigns
 
so CROW won't fly this day
 
he'll simply sit in his tree
with his silver eyes blinking


• Gwilym Williams says "Oh yeah, about me: I was in the Boat House, Laugharne, where Dylan Thomas used to live, when a poltergeist tried to bash me with a curtain pole. Thinking it was a message from the other side, I decided to pen the odd verse or two as a kind of insurance. I'm just on the right side of 60 and I'm a retired cop."

Little Gods by Jacob Polley
Picador (2006)
51pp, £8.99
ISBN: 9780330444200

Polley’s excellent debut The Brink, published in 2003 was a remarkable critical success. The collection was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T S Eliot, Forward and John Llewellyn Rhys prizes. In Little Gods Polley presents a much more unified collection; work that is, as the blurb states, guided by ‘old-fashioned lyric inspiration’.

The poems here are persistently concerned with the end of a relationship. Whilst there is not a stringent narrative in the sequencing of the poems, Polley has taken care to present a collection that starts in ‘April’ and moves towards ‘October’; the middle of the collection hinges on two poems neatly placed on opposite pages, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Morning’.  The overall feel is of a difficult landscape, each image or emotion is sensitively explored; easy or sentimental conclusions are avoided. Indeed, the voice is disarmingly naked and direct, in ‘Dor Beetle’ the conjured ‘shit-eater’ is commanded ‘At the end of love, start burrowing'.

It is to Polley’s great credit that poems from the seat of such emotion are harnessed into affecting lyric forms. This lyric impulse is a significant departure from The Brink, this new collection includes some truly wonderful sonnets – opening poem ‘The Owls’ is likely to be much anthologised. Polley’s ear is present in abundance, he is unafraid to use full rhymes to drive pounding rhythms, take the close of ‘The Cheapjack’ (Forward Shortlisted for best single poem 2006):

                                    …Here’s my nod,
         Here’s my wink,
         Here’s my blood for the ink.    
    I’m begging you now; my life for the lot.

The unforgiving landscape of Little Gods is littered with common images; owls, beetles, rain, the moon and glass all reoccur as powerful symbols. There is the distinct feeling of the occult in the poems, there are allusions to witches and goddesses but this is not to say that the poems follow old tropes. There are striking individual images that endure such as ‘Rain’s inconsequence to the sea’ from ‘Rain’ and in ‘Black Water’ the bitter conclusion ‘your heart’s no more than meat’.

There are instances where the writing falls flat, ‘Mirror’ for example seems more like effort waiting, unable to shift gears. But such lapses are rare and each such piece is in tune with the unsettling world of the collection as a whole.

Little Gods is a work that opens the door on deeply intimate emotions. That Polley can engage so forcefully for a full collection is testament to the quality of his writing. There is no easy sentiment and no saccharined ending reached; by ‘October’, the last poem listed in the collection’s contents, Polley can only conclude:
    

    Each mind’s a different, distant world
        This same moon will not leave.

(There is an unlisted, short lyric buried at the close of the collection – you’ll have to buy it to find out what it says.)

Jacob Polley has talent in spades. After two full length collections it is clear that there is real purpose to his writing. Future work from him is eagerly awaited.

• Reviewed by Matt Howard

Words that bleed

She was the knife in the
hands of Jack the Ripper
in a heavy fog bank
in a back alley
in old London Town
slicing dicing her way through the
canvas of my heart

She was the pearl-handled revolver
in the hands of Dillinger
that begged to be fired
but never got the chance the
night he was gunned down
in a hail of bullets

She was a keg of gunpowder
waiting to be ignited
Betrayed by a wet fuse the
night I awoke naked and vulnerable
Feeling like a voyeur walking in
on two strangers making love

My thoughts a mosaic tattoo
on public display
These wounded words that drip blood
Lying still as a beached shipwreck
in the bone-yard of a stranger's dreams


• A.D. Winans is a regular contributor to IS&T. He is a San Francisco-based writer and poet who became involved in the West Coast Beat scene in 1958. One of his friends, the late Charles Bukowski, said of him "A.D. Winans can go ten rounds with the best of them".

This multimedia treatment of T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock received a name check in the books section of this Saturday's Times newspaper, so we thought we'd track down the clip and let you see it for yourself. The animation is by Everett Wilson who says "I produced the visuals for this poem by T.S. Eliot in the fall of 2001, during my brief time in the Media program at the University of Lethbridge. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, an Animated Rendition of T.S. Eliot's Poem appeared in the 'highlights reel' of the Melbourne International Student Animation Festival, which traveled to select universities across Australia. After receiving feedback on YouTube, I replaced the original narration with T.S. Eliot's voice in this 2007 revision."