Editorial: 15 March 2012

March 13, 2012 Featured poems by Dutch writer, teacher and visual artist Gerry van der Linden include the first nine sections from the cycle ‘Rumoer’ (Bustle), which opens with a strange and troubling prediction – “Tomorrow the sea will fall backwards” and “we’ll be left behind in the sand”. From this stormy, apocalyptic scene, the sequence shifts into the urban, offering up small, sometimes linguistically fragmented snapshots of different characters or moments – “Martha Rudzka” surveys her “empty household”; “Fatima S.” has “disbanded her body”; a man sweeps outside; a woman tries on a dress in a shop window; a woman cries at the entrance to a shop; a tree is cut down. Gently, through these poems, a beautiful but melancholy mosaic of a city emerges – perhaps the same city that is “a hanky/ down at heel filthy”, as Van der Linden writes in the ninth poem of the series, “a hanky/ not picked up”. Her poem ‘Forwards!’, however, restores energy to urban living, depicting a very Dutch activity, cycling, for which the narrator dons her “fearsome face” and negotiates “daytrippers” and “canalside dwellers” as she “take[s] aim” and pushes “forwards!”

We encounter the whirl and excitement of the city too in ‘At the Crossing’, by renowned poet Fleur Adcock, who is originally from New Zealand but has been resident of the UK since the 1960s. In the poem, the narrator notices a man on the street wearing “children’s fancy-dress wings”: “Do they say foreign?” the narrator asks. “They say young./ They say London. Grab it, they say./ Kiss the winged joy as it flies.” Whether writing about blow flies or a belly dancer, “the aerial plankton on which [bats] sup” or a slang word for condom learned from Basil Bunting, Adcock’s work bristles with verve and joy for the living world (human and animal) around her, combining fine observational detail with craft and conversational wit.

We are also delighted to present three poems by Michael Symmons Roberts, who was much acclaimed for his 2004 collection Corpus, from which the wonderful ‘Pelt’, with its memorable opening – “I found the world’s pelt/ nailed to the picture-rail/ of a box-room in a cheap hotel” – is taken. Dubbed a modern metaphysical poet, Symmons Roberts investigates the physicality and spirituality of corporeal life. In ‘Fox in a Man Suit’, he presents the fairytale-like scene of a vixen slipping off “her man-skin” after a black-tie soirée: “I, the only witness,//take this for a resurrection” he writes; while in ‘Jairus’, based on the New Testament story, he explores the aftermath of another resurrection, in which Jairus’s daughter, “pulled from her deathbed” by Jesus, is nursed back to health and fed on “pomegranate, cantaloupe”, “roast lamb, egg, unleavened bread”: “food with weight, to keep her here.”

Our final poet of this issue is Sam Riviere, whose debut collection, Austerities, will be published by Faber and Faber later this year. His vibrant poems combine stream of consciousness with wry self-awareness and tinges of the surreal. Blending humour and poignancy, investigating self-confidence and insecurities, he creates work that is both entertaining and moving, written in a fresh, provocative voice. In several of the poems, sunglasses feature in relation to identity and disguise – the narrator buys ten pairs in America in ‘Myself Included’ to complement his new style; in ‘Nobody Famous’, he writes “this is me in public putting on a 2nd pair of sunglasses/ because I feel suddenly like crying”; in ‘The Mysterious Lives of the Stars’, the narrator says: “I don’t/ wear sunglasses though/ I like opacity I like that you/ can’t see my expression as/ I’m sitting writing this”. What we learn of the (sometimes fragile) inner lives of Riviere’s narrators is both compelling and charming. Perhaps one of the most enjoyable poems here is ‘Hello, I’m Visiting the Area on Behalf of Amnesty International’, in which the narrator stands talking to “twins in sloppy jumpers and blue jeans” on the doorstep of a house and begins to yearn for the evocative, idyllic life that he imagines exists in the home inside, dreaming of taking “the spare room looking over south-east London”. The poem ends on a wonderfully cosy, peaceful image of city life, in which apocalyptic visions, hectic streets or unhappy people seem far far away: “I’d read/ till I was tired, and no longer heard the twins’ voices in the attic,/ their laughter, high and heavy, leaving through the skylight.” Image: FaceMePLS. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.