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Editorial: 15 May 2011

11 mei 2011
We are just one PIW issue away from our special June festival edition, which will feature the full festival selection of poems and translations of the twenty poets coming to the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam in a month’s time. In this issue, we are publishing a pre-festival selection of four poets to whet your appetite – no matter where you are in the world, in June you’ll be able to follow the festival via live-streaming and on-demand videos on PIW – although we hope, too, to see many of you in Rotterdam.
In addition to the festival poets, we’re featuring three exciting young British talents, selected by the PIW UK domain. Jay Bernard has a keen eye for urban detail; this combines in her crafted poems with both witty and compassionate explorations of collective and personal women’s identity: “On cold, December mornings when you’re squatting in a council loo,” she writes in ‘11.16’, “It’s a warming thought to think that women before you have thought / To rummage for a pen, and write the things they think”.

Thinking within a small space occurs too in Caroline Bird’s poem ‘Thoughts inside a Head inside a Kennel inside a Church’, which, like her other poems in this selection, has a dreamlike, surreal narrative. In ‘Mothers’, for instance, the narrator’s “future child” phones the narrator and says “in a squeaky voice, ‘My mum is dying,/ can you come over, I need someone to talk to.’” Bird excels not only in unusual settings, but also in striking imagery and similes – “It’s like watching /Joan of Arc cut herself with Bic razors”, she writes in ‘Character Study’.

Kayo Chingonyi, who was born in Zambia, broke onto the London poetry scene after winning a slam competition in 2003. He now performs regularly around Britain and internationally. The poems published here demonstrate Chingonyi’s craft and his attention to the formal aspects of poetry on the page as well as to the spoken word. ‘Some Bright Elegance’ is a particularly moving, rhythmic and politicised call to freedom and dancing:

I say dance not to be seen but free, your feet
are made for better things, feel the bitterness
in you lift as it did for a six-year-old Bojangles
tapping a living out of beer garden patios to
the delight of a crowd that wasn’t lynching
today but laughing at the quickness of the kid.


2011 Poetry International Festival

As in our previous two issues, we are giving taste of the upcoming festival in June. In this issues, we have poems from the collection Herbarium by Norwegian poet Øyvind Rimbereid; work by Armando, recent winner of the VSB prize for Dutch-language poetry; the breathless, dynamic unpunctuated prose poems of Truong Tran, a Vietnamese-born poet based in the USA; and an interview with and two long poems in Spanish by Eduardo Espina, who also lives in the USA, but hails from Uruguay.

More work by these four poets, as well as the full festival selections of all twenty poets invited to the festival, will be published in our next PIW publication, the festival issue, on 1 June.
© Sarah Ream
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