Editorial: 1 November 2011

October 26, 2011 Dutch poet Martin Reints has a wonderful deadpan way of making poetry out of everyday observations and experience, whether that’s watching a spider in the sink, battling insomnia, stopping at a petrol pump or watching a video – “now that I’ve downloaded 87% of the file / I’m looking forward to the silence / that will descend once I’ve played it”, he writes in ‘Gnu’. Nearly all the poems published here are written in the present tense, and many of those are in the second person, bringing a sense of immediacy and intimacy to descriptions and imagery that make strange the banal and highlight the passing of time. Yet Reints also moves the reader beyond the everyday: a poem such as ‘Singer-Songwriter’ reminds us of the constant concurrence and convergence of events and lives, of the myriad of things both trivial and grand that are happening simultaneously in different places: while you sit watching the same television programme your neighbours are watching, “in the Himalayas the religions wind along / crumbling mountain paths and over hanging bridges / above deep ravines” and “the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy make straight for each other”.

The three poets featured on the UK domain appear on one level to be very different in their approaches, concerns, and styles: Moniza Alvi brings us dreamily vivid, delicately expressed re-imaginings of ancient mythical events, her paeans to her parents and her vocations of life in Pakistan meandering down the page; Roger McGough’s poems are cool, fun, wryly funny, with wordplay and fast-paced wit; Kathleen Jamie uses Scots as well as English, her finely-tuned nature poems based on ‘attending’.

But these poets all share a strong sense of place, and how it – and, crucially, its language – informs identity and our relationships with the world. Roger McGough is even known as a ‘Liverpool poet’ – his poetry is both the result, and an expression, of the culture of Liverpool: unpretentious, humorous, optimistic, energetic, and deeply rooted, with a wry realism. Kathleen Jamie’s Scottishness is blended with a deep interest in other places – Tibet, Pakistan – and with nature itself. Her recent poems probe our relationship with the natural world, which she reminds us is as much our home as our towns are; but her concern is still also with Scottishness. And Moniza Alvi’s poems ask the question: where am I? East or west, here or there, then or now, us or them – the inner life or the outer? Her first collection is centred on a life she never had in Pakistan, which she left as a baby, and subsequent volumes recount her parents’ later life, re-tell the rape of Europa and present versions of recent French poetry.

All these poets write in clear, accessible language that makes minute and precise observations of the world around them: you’ll find no overblown language here, no piled-on metaphors, nothing unnecessary to the image, the story, the object. Each of these writers can thus be trusted as an absolute guide to the specific world he or she inhabits. And those worlds are deeply absorbing places.