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Editorial: 1 November 2010

October 22, 2010
Daylight saving ended yesterday in Europe – the clocks have gone back an hour, and dusk has crept earlier, nudging short the afternoons. November: in this part of the world we watch the trees flame and begin to thin; and from two autumnal, northern European countries, PIW brings you poetry to stoke and warm the mind.
Autumnal melancholy hums through the selection of Hubert van Herreweghen’s work presented on the PIW Belgium domain. ‘Longing for Winter’ tails away beautifully with the image of “two / black / twigs”; ‘Migrating Birds’ gives as a backdrop to a bird heading south “the gloomy lesson autumn brings”; while ‘Time is Short II’ casts a critical eye on “fraudster light”, which seems so promising in the morning, but quickly ebbs away in the afternoon as “night / pounces /on us / from behind”. Yet Carl de Stryker writes in his introduction that the later poems of Flanders’ oldest poet display a joie de vivre that contrasts with the despair and disappointment of his earlier work. Indeed ‘Poetry’, written in 2009, gives us a glimpse of this recent, more lighthearted and joyful work:

poetry comes from that eye
from where love songs have begun
a mouth’s tremble with no sound,

amazement at simple things,
what’s there and ready and sound,
simplest of all is what beauty brings.


On the UK domain this issue, we feature a trio of poets. Luke Kennard’s sparky, surrealist work will lift any autumn blues. His poetry – which he writes as both free verse and prose-poetry – is full of verve and humour, serious at times, yet shot through with an absurdist impulse. ‘The Best Man’, a prose-poem monologue, published here for the first time, takes the form of a best man’s wedding speech. But though it begins conventionally with “an embarrassing story from the groom’s past”, traditions are soon subverted as the narrative segues into a description of a film within a film that the groom once showed to his film-class, the best man then wondering aloud “who the film had been made by and if they were an acquaintance of James (who tended to set texts written by his friends) and whether James had given or maybe sold him the story of my life three years ago and it felt like a little ball bearing had appeared towards the bottom of my rib cage, that it would rattle around for the rest of my life.” And we realise that we are far far away from the cheeky throes of a conventional best-man speech. Elsewhere too, Kennard excels at undermining and satirising literary genres, literary criticism and the world of contemporary poetry. The note accompanying ‘Men Made of Words’, a poem from his collection Migraine Hotel, for instance, is as much part of the poem as the rondeau above it, telling us that it is the character of a wolf who has written the rondeau. “Nobody buys your books,” the wolf goes on to tell the poet. “Maybe you should try using a rhyme scheme once in a while, that’s all I’m saying.”

Mimi Khalvati does embrace rhyme schemes. Like Kennard, she has also worked in theatre, founding the pan Persian–British organisation, Theatre in Exile. She is considered to be one of Britain’s foremost contemporary exponents of traditional forms, and the selection of her work published on PIW includes a ghazal and ‘Motherhood’, a sestina, in which the form’s repetitions enact the circular patterns of a mind considering, discarding and returning to domestic objects that are imbued with symbolism and memory. Alert to the imaginative and emotional possibilities of domestic spaces as well as landscapes, Khalvati writes poems that are taut and evocative, highly attuned to the rhythmic and phonetic possibilities of language: “I am lovely in my sounds”, she writes in ‘Night Sounds’, and indeed she is:

                                            Hear that?
What? Nothing, I hear nothing.
                              Only the pillow crackling,
               a rasp, a whistle of breath.


If the auditory impels Khalvati’s work, the visual is the force behind Pascale Petit’s poems. Petit, who is also a sculptor, likens poetry to the plastic arts: “I still feel I’m creating objects. I’m aware of the images, and think of each poem as a container”. Petit has also explored the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s life and work in two recent collections, her poems functioning as poetic and imaginative explorations in dialogue with Kahlo’s paintings. ‘The Little Deer’ is one such poem: “Little deer, I've stuffed all the world’s disease inside you”, it begins. Powerful imagery of this kind suffuses her work with a kind of beautiful, tender violence: in ‘The Strait-Jackets’, a suitcase is unzipped to reveal “forty live hummingbirds / tied down in rows, each tiny head / cushioned on a swaddled body”, while water, in ‘What the Water Gave Me (VI)’ is “a lace wedding-gown / I slip over my head, giving birth to my death.” Perhaps one of the most striking of Petit’s poems in this issue, however, focuses on the olfactory rather than the visual. ‘My Mother’s Perfume’ is a telling distillation of the relationship between a mother and a daughter, and long after its reading, images echo in the reader’s head: “As she drew nearer I’d get braver / until her scent got so strong I could taste the coins in the bottom of her handbag.” New archive tour

Take our latest, seasonal PIW archive tour. The theme? You’ve guessed it – autumn.
© Sarah Ream
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