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Editorial: February 2006

April 24, 2006
Everyone has their own idea of what a poem should look like and there are many different schools of poetry. In his preface to The Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth provided one set of categorisations. Fourth on his list was a type of poetry he called ‘The Idyllium’ (from idyl, a small image), these poems are, he writes, “descriptive chiefly either of the processes and appearances of external nature [...] or of characters, manners, and sentiments, [...] or of these in conjunction with the appearances of Nature.”
Nature was one of the most common themes in the lyrical poetry of two centuries ago and it is striking how many of the contemporary poets in February’s issue of PIW still have recourse to it today. In the European Romantic tradition Nature’s beauty was linked to religious belief but for contemporary writers the natural world has more varied poetic resonances. Nevertheless, we find here several poems in the lyrical tradition, featuring contact with the natural environment and a marvelling of nature. Visit the new poems by {id="676" title="Judith Beveridge"} on the Australian site, for example, the quietly evocative ‘Mulla Mulla Beach’:
There’s no word but the sea’s and tide-winded shells
pacing quietly as shore-runners:

though sometimes, there is a line, a murmur
winding and unwinding in the shells


On the Australian site, new poems by {id="678" title="Kevin Hart"} bring the external environment dramatically into the personal sphere, whether “That crumbling wasp nest by the door” or “…the memory of that sparrow/ That smashed into my windowpane / in a black storm” (untitled). The latter interestingly recalls the opening line of the poem in Nabokov’s early postmodern novel Pale Fire*. Hart’s exploration of nature is symbolic, the images bring drama not repose.

The Australian issue is completed by a poet born in former Yugoslavia, {id="6156" title="Lidija Cvetkovic"}, who shares with Beveridge a gift for clarity and precision but whose themes of violence and disintegration are entirely different. She too uses the environment in a metaphorical rather than a descriptive sense, “My father/ rescuing drowning bees/ and ducklings from his pool” (‘A Portrait of my Father’). Fragments of the natural world act as balm, an escape from the violence of the country of her birth, the tension between the natural and the unnatural or inhumane suggested in the title of her excellent collection, War is not the Season for Figs.

New from China is poet {id="6230" title="Jun Er"} whose characteristic position as outsider sees the poet standing on the side-lines of the physical world : “my other half is drifting clouds, summertime flowers/ autumn leaves, lakes of the Earth”(‘References’). On the UK pages, {id="6499" title="Jean Bleakney"} who works in a garden center, is inspired by botany. Look at her shape poem ‘The Poet’s Ivy’ inspired by the plant of poet’s wreaths in Pliny’s time, her reference much older than Romantic poetry. {id="6500" title="John Burnside"}, described by Andrew Bailey as “an open air poet”, can’t resist the evocative names we give to flora and fauna, his narrator in the stunning poem about nature and creation, ‘Si Dieu n’existait pas’, is moved by its ineffable power.
No one invents an absence:
Cadmium yellow, duckweed, the capercaillie
- see how the hand we would name restrains itself
till all our stories end in monochrome;

the path through the meadow
reaching no logical end;
nothing but colour: bedstraw and ladies’ mantle;
nothing sequential; nothing as chapter and verse.

No one invents the quiet that runs in the grass,
the summer wind, the sky, the meadowlark;
and always the gift of the world, the undecided:
first light and damson blue
ad infinitum.


The Belfast Irishman {id="6501" title="Martin Mooney"} brings a fresh dimention being definitely of the city, but his urban observations could still fall within the “characters” part of Wordworth’s definition. Finally on the UK pages, {id="6502" title="Penelope Shuttle’s"} postmodern poems show geographical inspiration and are full of seas, rivers and myths.

{id="6347" title="Ronny Someck"} from Israel shares Shuttle’s mythical vision. In ‘Lion’s Milk’ he writes, “My grandfather was born in the land of Arak/where lions with combed manes /lay posed as lambs.” The second new poet on Israel’s pages is {id="6346" title="Haviva Pedaya"}; in one of her poems a bird takes on mystical signification : “concealed between his wings a bird so black” – mysticism was also a factor in the Romantic movement, of course.

In the new section from Flanders, five young poets find themselves caught up in the postmodern debate still raging in their country, {id="6179" title="Paul Bogaert"}, {id="6177" title="Geert Buelens"}, {id="6180" title="Peter Holvoet-Hansen"}, {id="6178" title="Jan Lauwereyns"} and {id="6176" title="Bart Meuleman"}. Postmodernism often refers back to earlier literary forms and subverts them, thus another image of a bird crashing into a window turns surrealist in Holvoet-Hansen’s poem ‘The Princess in the Glass Mirror’ – “After 25 minutes the girl was reanimated./ A white dove that flew against your window the night she departed this life”.

The remaining Flemish poets are more radical in form and do not fit into the lyrical tradition : Buelen’s poem ‘Dogma’ with its clever play on operating instructions says, “Make the audience/ your art”. Lauwereyns and Bogaert also offer crisp directions whether it be the “Stick a stick in the ground” of the former or the “Tell me that it’s time” of the latter.

Enjoy February’s excellent issue. *“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain/by the false azure in the window pane”
© Michele Hutchison
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