Article
Editorial: November 2007
October 29, 2007
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The November issue:
Gastão Cruz from Portugal uses poetry to explore the unbearable lightness of being, the troubling impermanence of the physical body. Eternity is to be found in the seasons, in natural cycles, and this he contrasts with man’s individual transience, represented by a loss of voice, an absence of language. Feel how his narrator is suffocated by air, the very substance that keeps us alive:
... a fluid wall
that won’t let through
the impure murmur
of a voice with neither light nor air (‘Wall’)
Manuel de Freitas is concerned with mortality too – In ‘Heiliger Tod’ he describes a picture of himself with his grandfather, ending with the simple but cutting statement, “No one in the photograph has survived.” In ‘All Stripped Down’ he writes of the importance of not dying alone; his poems are populated with casual meetings in bars and pubs – random exchanges with strangers over pints of beer offering paradoxical profundity, the pared down essence of human interaction.
Branko Maleš is the inventor of a particular branch of Croatian postmodern poetry based on the arbitrariness of words and the impossibility of locating truth. He doesn’t go looking for meaning in bars. His poems are complicated, crazy, compellingly surreal objects created by a cut and paste method: “three husbands i had on borneo,/ on borneo!” (‘Who’s the Rabbit and “I used to be”’) What’s more, they are often enjoyably humorous.
Two poets from Belgium feature in this issue: Benno Barnard and Eva Cox. I can’t really get a grip on Barnard through the five poems featured here, I suspect his work requires much broader reading. Barnard’s poetry has transformed as he has experimented with different forms and homages (writing for example a poetic history of the Twentieth Century through the work of ten modern poets – ambitious to say the least!). Eva Cox has a much smaller body of works to her name, just one volume. Described as “tough poetry”, the writing is dark and beautifully concise:
She dreams herself a chair,
rope round the ankles,
metal of a barrel in the neck.
But nothing compels. (untitled)
London-based, Australian poet Katherine Gallagher has written two poems entitled ‘Homecoming’ and both are featured here, just four years separates the writing of them. The first (1985) has the poet tracking Australia’s coastline from an airplane, in this instance she experiences homecoming as:
finding myself like a miner
surfacing, clutching at the sky
the weight of sun suddenly
held on his hands.
Where the first arrival has her emerging into the light and heat of the sun (held like a miner’s gold?), the second has her in more of a distanced frame of mind. Four years later:
the storm of arriving —
past distances, faces
that I have assembled
among words, puzzles stretched to
new meanings over lost times
spaces I can’t name, never could.
Perhaps the longer one spends away from home, the more dislocated and fractured one’s experience of home becomes, and the greater the sense of estrangement upon return. It’s an excellent demonstration of the fragmenting effect of memory and the poet’s realization of the complicated concept of belonging to a particular place.
The three poets from this month’s UK issue, Scots A. B. Jackson and Richard Price, and Gwyneth Lewis from Wales, represent the British National Poetry Day Dream Tour. These are poets who have “travelled from home and returned, defining on route their own their own centres of importance and interest” writes George Ttoouli. Gwyneth Lewis ably demonstrates this in her poem ‘Prayer for the Horizon’:
And finally, I ask: when you reach
the event horizon from which your light
will no longer reach us and space, highly curved,
will hide you for ever, that you watch me arrive –
you shouldn’t see me, but you will –
marching with flashing lighthouses, buoys,
to the edge of your singularity.
It’s a wonderful, life-affirming quote to sign off with. Until next time.
On November 6th, PIW celebrates its fifth anniversary. Since 2002 we've grown to encompass thirty-one different countries, our database includes over six hundred poets, almost four thousand poems and three thousand translations. And of course we're expanding every month and developing our content to include audio and visual material. Despite the rapid growth we've always kept our eyes on the quality of our content and try to maintain very high standards, our international editors are poetry specialists who select the very best their country has to offer.
We've had our ups and downs and one of those downs was losing our structural funding in 2005. The prospect of getting structural funding from 2009 onwards is good, but we still have to make it through 2008.
We’re calling for donations from our readers - please help us bridge this funding gap and survive. One of the ways you can help us survive is by taking a few minutes to fill in a short questionnaire. Once we have gathered more information about our readership we can use this to put in further funding applications and to improve our site for the future.
Please click on this link to the survey.
It should take no more than 5 minutes to complete.
The November issue:
Gastão Cruz from Portugal uses poetry to explore the unbearable lightness of being, the troubling impermanence of the physical body. Eternity is to be found in the seasons, in natural cycles, and this he contrasts with man’s individual transience, represented by a loss of voice, an absence of language. Feel how his narrator is suffocated by air, the very substance that keeps us alive:
... a fluid wall
that won’t let through
the impure murmur
of a voice with neither light nor air (‘Wall’)
Manuel de Freitas is concerned with mortality too – In ‘Heiliger Tod’ he describes a picture of himself with his grandfather, ending with the simple but cutting statement, “No one in the photograph has survived.” In ‘All Stripped Down’ he writes of the importance of not dying alone; his poems are populated with casual meetings in bars and pubs – random exchanges with strangers over pints of beer offering paradoxical profundity, the pared down essence of human interaction.
Branko Maleš is the inventor of a particular branch of Croatian postmodern poetry based on the arbitrariness of words and the impossibility of locating truth. He doesn’t go looking for meaning in bars. His poems are complicated, crazy, compellingly surreal objects created by a cut and paste method: “three husbands i had on borneo,/ on borneo!” (‘Who’s the Rabbit and “I used to be”’) What’s more, they are often enjoyably humorous.
Two poets from Belgium feature in this issue: Benno Barnard and Eva Cox. I can’t really get a grip on Barnard through the five poems featured here, I suspect his work requires much broader reading. Barnard’s poetry has transformed as he has experimented with different forms and homages (writing for example a poetic history of the Twentieth Century through the work of ten modern poets – ambitious to say the least!). Eva Cox has a much smaller body of works to her name, just one volume. Described as “tough poetry”, the writing is dark and beautifully concise:
She dreams herself a chair,
rope round the ankles,
metal of a barrel in the neck.
But nothing compels. (untitled)
London-based, Australian poet Katherine Gallagher has written two poems entitled ‘Homecoming’ and both are featured here, just four years separates the writing of them. The first (1985) has the poet tracking Australia’s coastline from an airplane, in this instance she experiences homecoming as:
finding myself like a miner
surfacing, clutching at the sky
the weight of sun suddenly
held on his hands.
Where the first arrival has her emerging into the light and heat of the sun (held like a miner’s gold?), the second has her in more of a distanced frame of mind. Four years later:
the storm of arriving —
past distances, faces
that I have assembled
among words, puzzles stretched to
new meanings over lost times
spaces I can’t name, never could.
Perhaps the longer one spends away from home, the more dislocated and fractured one’s experience of home becomes, and the greater the sense of estrangement upon return. It’s an excellent demonstration of the fragmenting effect of memory and the poet’s realization of the complicated concept of belonging to a particular place.
The three poets from this month’s UK issue, Scots A. B. Jackson and Richard Price, and Gwyneth Lewis from Wales, represent the British National Poetry Day Dream Tour. These are poets who have “travelled from home and returned, defining on route their own their own centres of importance and interest” writes George Ttoouli. Gwyneth Lewis ably demonstrates this in her poem ‘Prayer for the Horizon’:
And finally, I ask: when you reach
the event horizon from which your light
will no longer reach us and space, highly curved,
will hide you for ever, that you watch me arrive –
you shouldn’t see me, but you will –
marching with flashing lighthouses, buoys,
to the edge of your singularity.
It’s a wonderful, life-affirming quote to sign off with. Until next time.
© Michele Hutchison
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