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Antiphon

Issue 19

Antiphon on-line poetry magazine

November 2016

www.antiphon.org.uk

Hear readings of these poems http://antiphon.org.uk/wordpress

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Edited in the UK by Rosemary Badcoe and Noel Williams2016

[email protected]://antiphon.org.uk/wordpress@antiphonpoetry

Copyright Rosemary Badcoe and Noel Williams 2016 and individual authors. All rightsreserved. This electronic magazine may only be circulated in its entirety.

Images: Brede Værk, Source Flickr: Maskiner på Brede Værk, Charlotte S H Jensenhttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maskiner_p%C3%A5_Brede_V%C3%A6rk_10.jpg

Vintage Franz Zajizek Astronomical Clock machinery, Jorge Royan http://www.royan.com.arCC BY-SA 3.0

Other images copyright Rosemary Badcoe





ContentsPrologue 6

Act One 7Mariana and the Roadkill 8

Sally Douglas

The Specifics 9

Morna Finnegan

Kirstenbosch 10

Alexandra Strnad

Undammed 11

Ivy Schweitzer

Walk 12

Judith Taylor

The Years 13

Isabel Bermudez

Fulford Lake, Alberta 15

Karen Petersen

Act Two 16In Deep 17

Julia Deakin

Intellect 19

Robert Beveridge

Apoptosis 20

C Wade Bentley

Nightswimming in a Stranger’s Pool 21

Mike Saye

Summer Solstice Anchorage 22

Jill Dery

Place de l’Opéra 24

Kate Noakes

Sky-gardens 25

Alexandra Strnad

Interval 26Earth Girls, Lisa Brockwell 26

The Density of Salt, Kate Garrett 28

Three Short Reviews: 29

Alan Buckley, The Long Haul

Roy McFarlane, Beginning with your Last Breath

Mark Pajak, Spitting Distance

Noir, Charlotte Gann 33

Act Three 36Abraham 37

Jory Mickelson

Factoring 38

Rachel Nix

A Great Work 39

Rebecca Hurst

Out of Place 40

Ivy Schweitzer

Stone-watching 41

Mark Leech

They Arrive Restless 42

Obi Nwakanma

Artwork Number 53, Borough Station 43

Alice Tarbuck

Act Four 44Clarification 45

Michael Farry

New Moon 46

Tim Love

Totem Song 47

Mike Saye

Perfectly Still 48

Ellen Goldsmith

Nurse’s Day 49

Tamam Kahn

Navigating the Annals 50

Abegail Morley

Running in the Rain 51

Sarah Law

Exhaustion 52

Becca Menon

Contributors issue 19 53

Prologue

Antiphon has had a busy summer, dipping our toes in real print publishing on behalf of SheffieldHallam University’s Catalyst festival. We’re very proud to have produced an anthology ofpoets connected to the university. Millstone Grit is available from our blog site,http://antiphon.org.uk/wordpress/?page_id=429/ and features not one but two poets shortlistedfor this year’s T S Eliot prize in the UK.

We haven’t been neglecting the magazine and are delighted to offer such a range of beautifullywritten work. This issue features some particularly skilful use of language and moving subjectmatter. We also have a greater than usual number of reviews, purely because excellent bookskeep falling through our letterboxes. We’re still keen to support the work of UK small presses,but as an international magazine with readers and contributors from, well, all over the place,we have decided to also review work published outside the UK, particularly from writers wehave previously featured in the magazine.

Rosemary Badcoe

http://antiphon.org.uk/wordpress/?page_id=429/

http://antiphon.org.uk/wordpress/?page_id=429/

Act One

Act One Antiphon – issue 19

Mariana and the Roadkill(after Measure for Measure)

Where are the bats? Too late for bats.Venus is falling, it has nearly reached the house.Cars pass through lanes like heavy exhalations.The fox, the badger: in the morning they are dead.What did I see when I journeyed with that man?He didn’t know me and this isn’t As You Like It.Don’t blink. I blink. The dark’s inside the egg.

What do I see, now the angel’s ice is cracked?There’s a tree in my head, and a gas ring of flames.Eyes closed, I see my brain, and that flat foetus face.Fingers pressed on glass, I have three darks –the garden dark, the driving dark, the single terrible click.Something mineral is singing in the wires.The wind has dropped, the trees are breathing fast.

Last night I rode the dark like oil and gaspedlike trees. Stars scraped along my backbone.Today, light’s clinging to the wounds.The sky is failing me, it should be black,it should be panting at my neck like Lucifer.I know him now, this should be Paradise,Where are the bats? Why is the sky like eyes?

Sally Douglas


The Specifics

Being specific we call them the dead.They arrive at the earth's poles carrying their luggage:A few flames, and their children's names burnt on their lips.

They arrive at the earth's poles carrying their final gifts,or curses, in the electricity around their wrists.We call them the dead, we who are still specific

with details: hand-bags, habits, hernias, wombs and balls.We were all at a party and they were the first to leave.But its not like the rest of us won't have to go home eventually.

The host begins to clear the table ofits fruit, its wine, its final chances, and it's timeto loosen things like collars, bra-straps, confirmation names

and star signs, which like gender and the first kiss, are defunct.But in the hiss of energy, and the loss of specifics,one thing remains. They can't untether from it

as they cross the borders, letting everything go. The namesof their loved ones sing on their lips, or skid in their palmslike lucky coins: fire in the snow. The irreversible specifics.

You ask if I will ever leave you, Frida, Francis. No.

Morna Finnegan


Kirstenbosch

And he says slow down, plunge like sugarbirdsinto the petticoat frills of yellow orchids,

lower yourself in the arboretum to the levelof beetles that swarm at tubular hatches

with antennae ready for fistfuls of powder pollen,there is the banana plant, an avenue of camphor,

these do not operate at the speed of hurriedthings drawing nourishment in frenzies

of need, see a vine take decades to constricther victim, graceful in deathly certainties

and the mountain shrugs a boulder valley-wardsonly when heaviness sears his shoulders

like penance, and desire is the morning beforethe climb, in the look of the mist and high

places invisible, but love is a tendon pulledto submission, the spine taut as bamboo, seeing

a peak disappear in cumulous clouds, believingthat one foot will lead the other home.

Alexandra Strnad


Undammed

She is a neighbor and a painter,mother of a wild red-headed girlfriends with my sonso long ago

calling to say she dreamtof me in a café somewherehair wavy and goldenand I was sad, she said,

so sad, she had to callthough we are not closehow it flooded her nightsnagged on the branches of sleep.

And I am dumbstruck,appalled by the mutinous griefbreaching my edges andrushing into the ruts of the world

and I say yes,I am sad and sorry to comeuninvited, and we talkof the wild red-headed girl who works

at a women’s clinic in Texas,facing protesters every day,and my son dwelling in half-lifeand our own lives as artists in this time

of profit and foolsand though nothing changesI feel myself ebb as a tideback into its almost

manageable course.

Ivy Schweitzer


Walk

Take me in, woodsthis early summer day, lightgreen in the early leaves on the wych elmand the birds calling their warnings.

Let me walk awayfrom the worn, stony pathmyself.

Muffle my steps in old lossamong the flowering shamrocksand the bracken just uncoiling itself.

Lead me into pied shadow, a longcircular way where every landmarkis the same tree

possibly:where there's nothing for me to follow, except the wood-pecker's deceptive drum.

Where the branches shiftin weather they conceal from meand shadows filter through.

Take me inalwaysdeeper, until the quietfalls around me

and I know that Iam lost.

Judith Taylor


The Years

The emery board scrape of dry leaves, a breeze which lifts and drags them;

they assemble, momentarily, like this afternoon completing itself

in the spotless white of bowlers on a strip of green by the allotments,

rolling lead-weight counters in the faithful concentration of the hour

towards some imaginary centre. Here, under the bridge, our path

is cool and dark; before us a dog-rose has shed her petals

by the tunnel’s open mouth as if there’d been a marriage there.

Graffiti on the walls. A child listens to the boom of his tiny voice

as I look back into what’s already gone, the slow drawl of leaves,

the dark between them and us. They catch the light and swirl,

these dervishes re-assembled each time in new places

like a child’s collection of pebbles or broken glass from a midnight brawl

and the husks, curling at the edges, dried leaves of Cuban cigars


are the years spent – sweated dry – that have no more inkling of us

than the distant stars, and are fingered again by a puckish wind

that picks them up and turns them over like a burglar loose in an empty house.

Isabel Bermudez


Fulford Lake, Alberta

I came across an old fallen logwith lichens, in the woods above the lake,and it was like seeing a map of the worldand in a way it was, the continentsscattered here and thereacross its dark grey weathered bark.The log lay there in its majesty,ancient and quiet, yet all through itwas a teeming kind of life.It was a beautiful sunny day, warm enoughto be sweating under the backpack, cool enoughthat the wet shirt there felt like ice when Itook off the pack and lay down against the logready to hear, off in the meadows,the ululation of summer.

Nearby I saw my favorite,a delicate wetland aster,bent over and heavy with seed, swaying.I collected it every year;it's a lovely plant full of lavender stars,and all around the air was filled with midges,swarming out of the hot grasses, flitting abouton their way to inconsequential little deathsall across the surface of the cool, still lake.As sleep embraced meI could hear the chittering of the birdswho'd stopped for a rest on their way Southwhile off in the far North new clouds gathered,dark and low, getting ready to bring the first snowthat would be here by month's end.

Karen Petersen

Act Two

Act Two Antiphon – issue 19

In Deep

Overnight it hooded us, that first fall. How could we have knownit wouldn’t stop? Against the sound of spinning tyresand snowploughs giving up, we shovelled till our fingers froze,our arms and backs gave out and we were cut offby the mountains made. Something about this, though, we would not buy.That what they’d warned us of was happening? That it was too late nowto eat or try to sleep above the revving motors and the wind?One by one each engine died.

Dusk after dusk, dawn after dawn, those angel feathers bore downon us. Three days and the roads were gone, studded only by the tumuliof cars and trucks, their drivers trapped or dazed, clutching phones and keysto homes they wouldn’t see again. Blizzards erased tracks, shrank wallsto tracery and whipped up gaunt topographies. Sheep huddled by their bales,those ochre clumps like embers. Over weeks of dark days and pale nights,farmers combed the wild terrain, grieving, fathoming the cost.

Dismissing forecasters who saw no end in sight, we pacedby windows trying to take it in, or glued ourselves to screensjittery with tall tales: of burst pipes forming petrifying waterfalls,planes grounded, ambulances lost, turbines buried, power off and onthen off. London sunk, the Seine skied along,Liberty up to her ears, her torch icicles. Thennothing. The server – servers – down.

Next day dawned darker – windows covered like the eyelids of a corpse.We put on all our clothes and climbed shakily to skylights. Pushed.We knew then that our lives were places we would not return to.The old, the sick collectively forgotten, we hauled furniture upstairsand burnt it, cleaned out freezers to make warmer beds. The young set offdirectionless for lawless towns. Years later one who came backtold us what we’d guessed. Greenland was a green land,

Europe, North America and China the skewed ice caps, beggingfrom mild Africa, the cool subcontinent. The old poles we re-imaginedtoppled off their footings like deposed dictators. Most of what we ownedwe buried with our former selves, redundant in this new economy


of grit and drudgery – machines a joke, the wheel history.Thirty years, it must be – without seasons you lose track.Such certainties. A leaf’s waxy circuitry. The solar power of trees. Earthas we knew it. Spiders. Blue sky. Stars. We never said goodbye.

Julia Deakin


Intellect

My two-year-old talks to potatoes.I have never asked herif they talk back.Their rambles are long,disjointed, spoken in a languagenot quite human; perhapsa dialect of starch.

Lately at the store I've found myselfin rapt examination of tubers,to ascertain which might makethe best companions for a child,which might makethe best conversation.

Robert Beveridge


Apoptosis

She said he had the skin of a younger person, but hecouldn’t see the difference, then, even when sheheld up her bare older arm next to his. Love is blindand also kind, early on. He can see it now, of course,the way his surface cells have separated, the looseskin that pools beneath every knuckle, the finecontour lines there to be read like a topographical mapshould anyone still wish to summit him. Beneaththe surface, cells are giving up the ghost, right and left,

hanging themselves from their organelles, followinggenetic programming coded long ago by some youngwhiz kid and set running on a seventy-year auto-destructcountdown, a cost-benefit analysis having determinedthat a reduction in force was called for, that hisproductivity was slipping, that more often, these days,his physical faculties were found asleep at their desksor hanging out at the water cooler half the morning,showing pictures of their grandkids, or failing to show up

for work at all and later found wandering through farawayneighborhoods asking strangers for pie. Worst of all,maybe, is seeing the eyes go – the lenses stiffenand yellow, colors become muted, the birds he oncesplashed across his poems become a uniform greyand, oh, the long drives after dark, that empty stretchof Highway 50 out to Ely that once brought some solacethe time she dumped him for an older man, allthe nighttime drives filled, of late, with too much night.

C Wade Bentley


Nightswimming in a Stranger’s Pool

In the cold dark, our bodies are pricklingabove the water. The girls smoke in the pool’s edge.Cigarette cherries flare and danceleaving after-images in the cursive handof some almost-known language.One empty beer bottle knocks, like a broken bell,in a corner.

I’ve many times been this drunk,but floating, being buoyed, has somehow diluted me,yoked my body to the water’s body,and when I try to mount the lip of the pool,black flags of bodyheat ragging into the night –parcelling my due to the dark – I can barely make it:my weak arms, soft knees, swollen palms,

that bony concrete.

Gravity doesn’t want me back in the world.I flounder, my shadow-self inkingthe concrete, which drinks those dark wingsand each footprint I trailto stagger off and piss in the boxwood.

Mike Saye


Summer Solstice Anchorage

It’s not the dusk that wakens me at 1AMTwenty years here, nothing seems extreme.Nineteen sunlit hours no longer need the bandage ofThick blinds, stiff drink, or prescription pills.

In childhood, anything that didn’t follow rules –Bedtime darkness, morning brightness, parents’ ways –Was disturbing. Now, summer or winter,I could sleep with every window in the house exposed.

Of course I don’t: I need some cover for my dreams.What wakes me up is 1AM itself,Its narrowness, its refusal to embrace anythingBut silence thick and heavy as a cedar door.

A blaring train, a siren can break through itBut reason and comfort are locked outside.I look: I see the entrails of my dream:A man I used to love is standing in the sunlight.

You’re guilty, too, he says, with the echoThat occurs in dreams, with the clotted samenessThat occurs in marriage. With the alien blandnessThat occurs each year in Arctic summers –

With the weirdness of a dream, with theAuthenticity of wedlock, our argumentsBecome a table tennis match, the hollowWords, the snow-white eggshell thwack –

This game will never end.We’ll meet, we’ll reconcile, we’ll bargain,Reconsider. Get angry. Get remorseful. Get déjà vu.What we can’t do is change how one another sees.

Then in a flash then all at once(In dreams, in life, things happen all at once)The marriage ends. The game continuesBut the words are gone. We gesticulate in silence.


A robin breaks the quiet. Is thatIts dawn song or the last one for the night?It’s hard to tell up here. One minute more or less of lightHelps nothing except hindsight.

Jill Dery


Place de l’Opéra

The next day, by fortune, I stoodon the spot at Café de la Paixwhere we kissed and parted

and waited for the musesto shower me with gifts

as if the pavement held the printof you and the air could be stilledby your soul left behind

as if a discarded butt could beyour breath or a crumpled flyeryour last word, happy.

I stood there, to seeif I could conjure you againin a gilded rain.

Was that your hand on my back?Sun on my face, a kiss of sortsthe murmur of cars, a whisper.

Happy, yes I shall beDanae, and be happy.

Kate Noakes


Sky-gardens

I should sweep the dust circling in vorticescollecting strands of hair, cigarette ash

but the afternoon is heavy with heatso I eat mango and watermelon secretly,

from on high, as the city fasts, black seedsspeckling my dress, legs open, darkening

the skin on my thigh – that stubborn, palering, the mark of long winters

as a myna slakes his thirst in the lime-greenpool on the wing, and a punk-haired hoopoe

struts with beak agape cooling his innardsround a square of turf, under rainbows

of oscillating sprinklers – my neighbour’soasis – gardenias in big bellied pots, frangipani

blooming in rigid clusters and soon,at the puddling of the sun’s orange yolk

the scent of jasmine, desert lavender will driftfrom window boxes, voices from iftars

two floors down mingle with grilled hamour,fattoush – made piquant with lemon juice,

ground sumac, and a dozen conversationsabove, below, begin at the strike of a match.

Alexandra Strnad

IntervalEarth Girls, Lisa Brockwell, Pitt Street Poetry, 2016, pp63, A$28.00

Even in the days of the internet, there’s something exciting about receiving a book all the way fromAustralia, particularly when the author has had to declare that there’s nothing explosive containedwithin. And while these are not explosive poems, many of them contain sharp edges. Brockwellspeaks easily and intelligently about the world in which she finds herself – sometimes the urbanspace of London but often rural Australia, where she now lives. There is steel in these poems, thesense of a strong will making the most of situations. An encounter with the Pakistani cricket teamwhile waitressing, which should have been a thrill, turns unpleasant but doesn’t throw the narrator:

I was walking the floor: earning my own money, slowlyforming the dense quartz of my opinions, polished and patient.

(Waiting on Imran Khan)

The language used is clear and fluent, and although not generally formal poems they pay muchattention to rhythm and sound, with many of them playing with iambic pentameter. Most of thesubject matter deals with the narrator’s personal experience but there’s always the sense of the poetstepping outside the events and viewing them as an outsider with a wry eye. There are a couple ofshort sequences here: Uluru, and Points of View (a response to visiting an exhibition of paintings by

Philip Wolfhagen). Both sequences are interesting in that they are as much about the experience ofthe visit and the reactions of those around as about the objects themselves.

Even here, I feel salt lickmy ankles, the reassuring grit under my feet.No frame between this painting and the wall.Less than three feet separating mefrom the woman standing behind me; her breathon my skin. Do I dip into her thoughts? Up close,the waves are layers of beeswax and paint builtinto a third dimension. When I step back I catchsomething moving across the face of the water.

(Surface Tension)

Once of the most powerful poems is Laika and Oleg, a two-part poem speaking in the voice of Laika,the first dog launched into space by the Russians, and her trainer, Oleg Gazenko. It is quite a painfulpoem to read – the dog a stray, trusting in her rescuer: ‘this time, I don’t need to drink, I want/ hissmell, his leg to feel my weight against.’. The first verse of Oleg’s poem is a direct quote from himand the following verses express his later regret: ‘We were all so certain, like human arrows,/ ourtrajectory calculated, then/ tracked to the smallest decimal place.’ Is it legitimate, to put words intothe mouths of others? it feels so, here. But although we published Jennifer & Angelina in Antiphon,on re-reading I’m less certain with this poem.

Many of the poems take a clear-eyed look at the narrator’s own life: encounters with Australianwildlife, love that has happened, and love that might have.

A pot of mint tea: the streets of London we will neverwalk together, so many hopeful doorwayswe will not darken. I feel the fallof the dressing gowns we will not discardon the bed we will never unmake again.

(Palomar)

This is very enjoyable work (many of the poems have a great sense of fun) and Brockwell can bean expert in the killer last line, especially in Seaworthy and the monologue Hoa Hakananai’a, the EasterIsland statue at the British Museum, speaks. I won’t give the lines away. Though not overtly feministpoems they are told from a female viewpoint: Earth girls are complicated. These poems been sevenyears in the making, and the careful craft and thought that has gone into each is visible; there arevery few weak links here. It is an accomplished first collection.

Rosemary Badcoe

The Density of Salt, Kate Garrett, Indigo Pamphlets, pp34, £6.00

(Kate did not know she was submitting this for review, but I swiped it off the coffee table whenRosemary wasn't looking...)

The twenty-six poems in this pamphlet are strongly personal and autobiographical, although theydo not so much tell a story, as display a set of intricately rendered stills from a journey/life. Thesepoems are often mythological, sometimes striking and sometimes disturbingly commonplace. Theinitial Eighteen Years Later is a good example of the latter. The implicit question of what happenedeighteen years ago leaves you wondering whether the events in the poem were just now, or followedhard upon that earlier time and are only now recalled from eighteen years' remove.

When I Think About Hans Christian Anderson takes an interesting modern spin from a fairy tale andagain relates it to the protagonist's earlier life, finally coming full circle with her struggle to be (ormaybe remain) the princess. In a Selkie Seeks Truth on Fascination Street, we open with:

I swapped my corduroyjeans for black frocks, silver skulls. A dressup game, my friends joined in, we dancedwith streetlights on our way to Mondaynight.

(Selkie Seeks Truth on Fascination Street)

– and the eponymous goth selkie seems right at home in the underwater dark of late night clubs,but then somehow gets lost when she emerges into the outside world. This poem is so full of lovelyenjambments, each breeding extra little meanings to enhance our understanding of the text, that itis impossible to quote an excerpt without cutting something important off – as in fact I did.

There's more mythology in This Guy, Midas:

He sets up businesses.For example: one sells footballshirts for handbag-sized dogs,one offers extendablesqueegees. No one can sayhow he does it.

And I know all about his little“problem”.

(This Guy, Midas)

– where, as you'll see, the more contemporary breaks in, until the focus is as much on the narrator'stwo incompatible careers as the guy's little problem. There are also SciFi elements, and I particularlylike Tesseract (another that's hard to excerpt from gracefully, so I'll have to pull in a longish section):

And you, today, more than twentyyears dead – you must know better nowif the theories were true, if the multiverse

is separated only by a curtain from onedimension to the next. If we could jump

and push with our hands into another lifeinto an alien place, if we had a tesseract, ifmy eyes by fourteen were not viewing

the world through a crust of salt (*tearsthat stopped flowing) giving myself upto life, letting words live through me

writing you the long-ago letter that Icould not send before pressing “delete”.

(Tesseract)

This is perhaps my favourite in the whole pamphlet. In it the autobiographical and the sciencefiction and the looking back to earlier times on life's journey all come together. For me this is notonly an enjoyable poem, but also a window on the Zeitgeist of an earlier age, eerily reminiscent oftimes I also lived through... The narrator played “Carmen Sandiego” on an old DOS PC, I played“Zak McKracken” but otherwise I remember the experience precisely.

This is a rewarding pamphlet to read. The language, often deceptively ordinary, uses meaningsand rhythms to build memories, reminiscences and myths – not all of them comfortable. Overallthe material and ostensible subjects are diverse, but they're linked in a commonality of story-telling,as characters reveal pasts revisited, futures hoped for, the ways in which we, as people, havesurvived. A rewarding book to swipe off anyone's coffee table.

Ian Badcoe

Three Short Reviews: Noel Williams

We’re trying something a little different this issue, simply to see how it turns out, in the hope ofgetting a few more collections noted. As well as two “normal” reviews, from Rosemary and Ian,I’ve written three slightly briefer pieces. Necessarily these are impressionistic, not saying all thatmight be said, but perhaps there’s enough in them to pique interest or to alert to a poet you mightotherwise not have come across.

Alan Buckley, The Long Haul, HappenStance, 28pp, £5I thought at first these would all be poems which begin with ostensibly ordinary subjects then deftlyshift direction, typically extending that description into analogy. Which is what some of the poemsdo, such as the metaphors of children’s sweets (‘Sherbert Lemons’) and matchboxes (‘Flame’) whichunite radical sensory pleasures of sweet bitterness and fire to the experience of love or lust. In doingso, they use the immediacy of childhood perception, and perhaps even its nostalgia, as a filter forviewing a relationship. These are convincing and successful poems, early in the pamphlet, so I waspretty sure they typified what was going to happen throughout. But, it turns out, it does rathermore than that.

The blurb uses the word “range” to describe this collection, and that’s by far the most aptappellation, even though there are only 19 poems. As a complete contrast, for example, ‘Being aBeautiful Woman’ is a sardonic take on the hazards and the curse of beauty. I’m not so convincedby this one, as Buckley seems to slip between sympathy for his subject and criticism without clearcommitment either way. It’s a poem driven by a clever simile: being a beautiful woman is likeowning a dangerous dog but the poem seems more interested in its analogy than its subject.

Then there’s the lyricism of ‘Pastoral’ which ably travels the conventions of nature poetry (‘whenit scuttled through fields of silvery grass’) yet takes as its subject roadkill – which in the poem isperhaps not dead but ‘deaf and asleep’, and so may return to life. Again, this poem works on theseams (or seems) of ambiguity – the status of the briefly seen creature is unresolved. We’re allowedto contemplate it as either, or perhaps both, alive and dead, which in turn allows for a nocturneand suggestive musing on the nature of death. Death, perhaps, is no different from the reality oflife: ‘a private room, / shielding from view a silent, untouchable space.’

I could anatomise all the poems in similar ways. Superficially clever, they’re actually deeplythoughtful, a depth they achieve through constructions which belie the ease with which they read.Some of the poems perhaps are not as subtle as others – where the central concern is relativelysimple, for example, as in ‘Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy’, an ekphrastic account of a Hockneypainting, which places its disjunctive composition against the traditional ‘flow of gaze’. Or ‘HisFailure’ which compares the poet’s personal experience with that of Gawain and Bertilak, to establishthat all men are flawed, a thesis that is already well established.

Each of these poems is easily appreciated, but yields more goodness the more you press upon it. Imust be hungry, because it reminds me of a jam donut – sugary on all surfaces, but yielding richsurprises when you bite. Or, to be a little less facetious – high quality constructs whose clevernesshides the sensitive and subtle movements within.

Roy McFarlane, Beginning with your Last Breath, Nine Arches Press, 83pp, £9.99I caught a performance by Roy in Sheffield recently. Live, he’s compelling, very enjoyable to hearand to watch. The question, though, is whether the dynamism of performance translates onto thepage.I think the results are mixed, but the collection as a whole is an enjoyable debut, and well worththe read. Its core focuses on identity. Initially, this is personal identity, as the opening five poemsrelate the story of a youth (the poet) discovering he’s adopted, together with the shifts in

relationships that result. These poems are moving, particularly because of their personal honesty,their confessional nature. However, they veer towards a linear narrative form in which poetic craftis subsumed by the desire to get the story across so that sometimes it’s almost prosaic: ‘We arriveand we’re told to go in the basement; in England they’re cold dark damp places’ (‘Fragments of amother and son story’). Yet that simplicity of expression can itself carry strong emotional force,especially with the combinatorial power of repetition:

They close the door.I hear her voice and I start to cry.I hear her footsteps, so beautiful, so light.The door opens and I see her silhouette.I see her walk down the stairs,I see her and she sees me.She cries out,My son, my son.

(‘Fragments of a mother and son story’)

Here the language could hardly be simpler, and there’s nothing in the vocabulary or imagery wecouldn’t find in a hundred other poems. That final line could come across as banal, in fact. However,the rhythm of the lines, the repeated syntax, and their very simplicity, connoting an innocentperception and allowing for a wide range of reader projections, build to create the emotional impactof opera. (It’s easy to see how such work has an echoing impact in performance.)

The concern with identity reaches much more widely than the intimacy of family, however. Manyof the poems are set in Birmingham and Wolverhampton, and the flavour of the region permeatesthe work, sometimes through play with dialect, which again will please a live audience. This regionis ‘The Black Country’, of course, a characterisation whose ironies McFarlane is happy to examine:

I’ve always wondered why Black peoplecame to Wolverhampton…Black Country! Black people!Where else would they go?(‘The place just off the M6’)His touch is light, but the perception is penetrating.

McFarlane does an excellent job of interleaving meaningful motifs of popular culture with somethingmore extensive, stretching into literary, social, political and historical commentary that populariconography is built from. The ‘black and gold of the Wolves’, for example, is used as an image ofstreets paved with gold drawing in ‘Blacks and Asians from across the world’. Or in quick successionin a poem such as ‘The black corner of Wolverhampton’ he races through popular black iconography:Sammy Davis Jr, Richard Pryor, Shaft, Marvin Gaye and Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhru (though thisshould surely be ‘Uhura’ – perhaps a proofing error). Popular culture, especially music, featuresstrongly throughout. A poem which particularly attracts me, for example, is ‘A Love Supreme’,

which binds together the passion of an idyllic, sensual love affair and the experience of listening toColtrane’s seminal album to evoke something like the spirit of Jazz expressed through words andsex. The poem uses space to create rhythmic effects, enhanced by the repeated refrain ‘A lovesupreme’, as in the album, and has musical ‘settings’ as a kind of commentary to affect the way it’sread. All of which creates an interesting excursion into making poetry work in a different way,replicating, to some degree, its meaning in its form. Not content with this, the poem seeks a universalmessage, recreating and reiterate the message it takes from jazz and a loving relationship:

The greatest gift we have is A Love Supremewhether it’s two lovers wrapped around each otheror a world determined to be betrayed by hatetogether we can break the bread and drink the cup ofA Love Supreme A Love Supreme A Love Supreme A Love Supreme Piano plays rising chords till end

Precisely the sentiments of 1965, when the album first appeared.

It’s difficult to place this book, because some of its poetic effects are predictable and familiar, andsome rely very heavily on the particular poet to carry them across in a live context, whilst at thesame time, that very naivety is refreshing, creating some wonderful poems, wonderful momentswithin poems, powerful sentiments which more “sophisticated” poets too readily shy away from,expressed via passion and commitment which many more carefully, artful writers could learn from.There are different ways you could splash your face with cold water. One would be to stumble tothe washbasin of your pristine en suite. Another would be to strip off and dive into a fell-side spring.Through the first, you’re refreshed, and think you can see better, though all you see is your hotelroom. The second is a shock, and a risk, and you may feel exposed, but you’re likely to see a greatdeal more and a great deal more clearly.

Mark Pajak, Spitting Distance, smith/doorstop, 30pp, £7.50These are poems grounded in particular, concrete experience, and as such entirely credible, eventhough most have a surreal edge: finding a bullet near the Pennine Way, tickling for trout in canalwhere there are no trout, retrieving dead hens from within a battery of two thousand, retrieving arat drowned in a can of oil, touching an electric fence. And such choices of subject suggestundercurrents of violence and horror not too heavily concealed, manifest through a certainmorbidity. Hens are carried in ‘a bag of small movement’ (‘Brood’). A teenager dying of a drugoverdose is stung inside the throat by a wasp (‘Sweet’). A photographer is caught and drowned inmudflats (‘Into the Mudflats’). A collie is found:

Dead. UntilI touched himand he whined

like a knifescraping a plate.

(‘Thin’)

This macabre selection of subjects, though, is tempered by vibrant and striking imagery: of anupstairs neighbour - ‘last night I mistook you for falling snow’ (‘Dear Neighbour in the Flat Above’);a river mouth ‘breathes out sea’ (‘Into the Mudflats’); hens have ‘bodies held / in the dead hands oftheir wings (‘Brood’). These images are frequently delivered through a sharp, angular, almostmonosyllabic language: ‘the chitter of shoes, scuff of talk’ (‘A Hand’) – and as often through therelease of spectacular imagination: ‘And I imagine / not what she will say but how the word / mustfeel’ (‘Last Word’).

I wonder how the words on Pajak’s pages will feel. Some must be impressed with themselves, howthey manage to revitalise what otherwise would have felt familiar, and reveal a strikinglyimaginative richness in subjects many poets would not even notice. Definitely original, with abrilliant eye and verbal imagination, though centring on subjects which are perhaps not toeveryone’s taste.

Noir, Charlotte Gann, HappenStance Press, 76 pp, £10It’s a title’s job to attract readers, to pull them in, to stop them being distracted by other titles. Whilethere can be many ways of doing this, the one-word bleakness of Noir, stating little but suggestingmuch, is highly effective. Would you pick up a poetry collection entitled Happiness? Nor me. Theword Noir sets up expectations, but what those are, exactly, will depend on the reader and thereaders’ experiences beyond poetry. Film certainly, but is there a precise definition of film noir?Does it depend on whether your viewing habits favour the French or the American? Perhaps it isthis very lack of precision, this general mélange of ordinary lives where trouble is taken for granted,the underside of urban living, a shabbiness and lack of colour, the sense of struggle and getting by,the accepted condition of bare survival, the inconsistencies in sketchy narratives and, above, themoral ambiguity, that make it familiar. It is the feel of noir rather than the plot detail that draws inthe reader, the way in which it can be specific and non-specific simultaneously.

Is this collection a single narrative? Structured in five roughly-equal parts, each with its own title– ‘Surveillance’, ‘Witness Protection’, ‘The Projectionist’, ‘The Bloody Chamber’, and ‘EleventhHour’ – the Contents page suggests that it might be. But to read it and look for a single answerwould be to misjudge the collection: there are several narratives weaving themselves through thesepoems, including seven ‘Dream’ poems. Even the final poem, ‘An Ending’ – where we might hopefor some resolution – begins with a conditional:

What might the end look like? An end to the playingand replaying of the same loops of grainy film.Three shots pumped into the chest

of the man at the top of the stairs? Simple. Bloodon wallpaper, a sliding-down. Crumpled silence.The end of misplaced love and loyalty.

What look like answers could also be questions. I find this a strength in the poems, and a way forthe poet to acknowledge a continuing ambivalence. The last stanza of ‘An Ending,’ concluding thebook, allows the characters to climb into fresh air, out of ‘these frozen cellars’ and free ‘… to walkup these hillsides into the white sunshine.’ Sunshine, however, is only white when filtered by cloud;it can even be frosty, chill. It’s not the golden light of happy-ever-after. What we are given here isnot ‘the’ ending but ‘an’ ending; the ambiguities inherent in the collection continue after the bookis closed.

Noir opens with ‘Puzzle’, a poem which sets out some of the narrative threads, although this is onlyapparent with hindsight. The first-person narrator is outside the action, like a child playing with amodel street –

If I look closely I can see just how thesered-roofed houses slot together – whereto unclip the lid on each, lift it gentlyand peep inside.

The figures inside are wrapped in their separate worlds, seen as though from a distance. Simplelanguage, a meticulously clear vocabulary for a strangely unsettling physical game that remains‘tilted’ with roofs that won’t, quite, fit back together: it seems both logical and illogical. Only as Ire-read this review do I realise that I have lifted the word ‘meticulously’ out of the poem and intomy own writing; it’s an indication that the poem has slipped under my skin, as noir does. Bringingthe reader into the poem is part of Gann’s considerable skill, whether through shared experiencesor through her direct language. ‘Neighbour’, which opens ‘When I take the rubbish out, there’s awoman/ coming in through my gate.’ has the rhythm of everyday speech, and a situation that makesit impossible not to continue reading – and, then, a situation that isn’t quite resolved. Tensionbetween language’s clarity and situational ambiguity drives not only this poem but the wholecollection.

Repetition of details, changed in small ways, brings a sense of uncertainty that grows imperceptiblyinto menace. In the first section ‘windows’ are significant in almost every poem, those square framesthat take in one aspect of the world, allowing a view into, for example, an interior (with lovers) orout, on to a jobbing gardener, who

…travels like a familiarshadow, rearranging light and darkness,presses his hands into the black earth, gathers upthe skeletons buried there. Lays them out

on his bare bed. Reads their rites.

(Old Ground)

The sparing use of adjectives and the limited colour range in these poems – black, grey, dirt, bruise,fog, shades of shadow – build up the unease, the pressure of narrow alleys and troubled houses.When sea and shoreline enter the poems they are threatening, dangerous. Viewpoints move betweenfirst and third person, ratcheting up the reader’s uncertainty but in a way which Gann controls. Yetin some poems the narrator is also being controlled, manipulated; this is part of the undercurrentof fracturing relationships. ‘Love Poem’ is anything but:

His iron gates stand shut. A murderof plump crows hang suspended from blackbranches: charcoal thumbed into thick white fog.

It ends with a statement that leaves everything to the reader’s imagination – ‘He’s taught her aboutinterrupting.’

The seven Dream poems, numbered, thread through the collection: personal records. Or are they?Two are told in the third person, glimpses of a larger story: a woman, struggling with a wettelephone and illegible numbers – ‘The receiver slips from her grip./ Swings, like a dead man on acable.’ In ‘Dream (V)’ a white rider gallops along ‘this raging, empty,/ storm-swept, grey-lit//even-tide beach where/ parched sand meets/ black sea …’ and never arrives; it could be a scenefrom one of Ingmar Bergman’s films. The first-person dreams grow cumulatively oppressive butunexplained, in the way of dreams whose logic is unfathomable and simultaneously inevitable.‘Dream (IV)’ is an unrhymed villanelle, although it was only on the second reading that I recognisedthe form; in the first reading I was holding my breath with the clenched fear in it

Small smudged faces loom from unlit stair.I let myself in. Wait. Waif on a doormat.Start the long walk along the long dark hall.

Leave behind white light, frost on trees, lickof cold sun in my hair. One boot forward.Small smudged faces loom from unlit stair.

I’d never thought a villanelle capable of menace, nor that a line containing three uses of ‘long’ (line3, above) could give such drawn-out tension. Gann is good with monosyllables, as well as withshort sentences: here each monosyllable is heavy, holding the poem back, emphasising the slowness,distance, fear, but without telling it. Perhaps this poem should come with a health warning: I canstill feel the tightness of held breath.

Reading this over, I’m aware I’ve only scratched the surface of how Gann writes about the ideasshe inhabits – but enough, I hope, to urge you to read the whole collection for yourself. It’s notabout solving puzzles, or getting the right answer but about how vulnerable, shaky, unlikely,unhappy, immediate and menacing are the lives of ordinary people on the everyday street; peoplelike us. It also shows how our apparently simple day-to-day language can be shaped into layeredand powerful narrative when a poet as good as Charlotte Gann is driving it forward. Noir suits ourtimes.

D A Prince

Act Three

Act Three Antiphon – issue 19

Abraham

I have no choice, I must killthe boy, he said, dragging his sonthrough the mudroom into the hangingdark. Placing the boy’s headagainst the cool grit, carefully.

Stillness was what the boyhad learned, to watch the Chryslerdrip its viscous oil onto the cardboardsquare, not let the face be cloudeddespite what might rain down. His eyes

a landscape unstirred. Acceptthe father’s will, don’t move an inch,pretend to rise up to the chairscollapsed in the rafters tocount the number of curls on his father’s

head. God loves the sparrows of the field,and his mother loves God, fearedfor his safety, but feared herhusband more. She prayed noharm would come, sent a messenger

on her behalf, his sister, arms foldedcarefully as wings about her,saying Papa! and Please! Their fatheranswering her, I have already beena field under plow.

Jory Mickelson


Factoring

I’ve an ache for a simple man:a sandy-haired welder; someonewhose arms are scarredfrom the way heat sparks against himthrough a worn-out uniform, marshis skin – skin that should meet mineafter he’s home from work, showeredand settled.

I cannot say his name aloud;it would make the urges I feelmore real than I ought to let them be.

See, I never planned on craving his lipswhich belong to another woman,one who only runs hers against himwith scoldings of financesand lashings of his failures.

I never planned anything. Factoringin the complications came afterthe feelings, afterI saw the ringon his finger.

We pass each other nowwith a polite hello. I regret him, morethan anything: seeing the achewe mirror.

Rachel Nix


A Great Work

What stirs the blood?Not tea and muffins.Not tatting and quilling.I like to wrestle. I like the heavy liftingthe hard work of shaping and makingas the sea at Cooden Beach relishesthe work of lifting the shingleover and again across its own threshold.

I love you because loving youis not light work, not woman’s work.Yet it is the patch I have been given.Clay and sandstone hefted by the shovelfulclearing a space on rough groundfor something to take shape.It is not dainty work but a shiftto suit this grafter’s love.

One day I woke to find my hearthad upped sticks and gone eastlike the village of Russian serfsyou spoke of: fugitives, unwaveringin their belief in some distant place –the underground kingdom of Belovodyeruled by the White Tsar and the Maiden Truthwhere each person gains at last the thing she longs for.

Rebecca Hurst


Out of Placeafter Adrienne Rich

I wanted everything to bloody stop Badly I wantedthe walkers to work the runners and touristsgash of giant red busses barreling down Marylebone Roadto stopabruptly as I had stopped in mid-stridedropped to my knees slipping the maskof urban indifferencedead fox in Marylebone Road.

Splayed on its side at the edge of the curb.Was it a vixen I couldn’t tell but suddenly wanted the fiercenessof vixens protecting their kits wanting to strokeits pelt the light russet of ferrous earthbreathe tang of ranknessbrowning bracken of moors and briars it had torn throughwanting a wildness to tear throughsharp bramble of lies and lacerations.

But some frayed blue fabric around its neckstopped my handmakeshift collar fashioned by a child perhaps,who thought to domesticate a city foxor bit of construction-site tarppoked through in search of foodthen torn away in feral panic,not bearing to be caught or tetheredcollared like sea fowl strangledby loops of six-pack holders.

Mysterious blue ruffstiff against your auburn furagainst dirty streets and damasked eyes.Corona.I could hardly bearthat sly elongated muzzle,hear the last bloody screech,catch the dimming knowledge of thornand reek.

Ivy Schweitzer


Stone-watching

Our child goes light.She chatters footsteps on the tiles.She knows the pattern of the church.

Blur of her hand,then one small bulb is on: silhouetteon every wall, of every object, and her face.

The carving is a solemn pair of angels.Their expression passes over hers.She doesn’t worship, she watches

the idea of angels in the stone.She never asks what music they are playing.The patience of her watching

is the sculptor’s patience –for the angels to do some true thing,warm as the bulb, clear as her silhouette.

Mark Leech


They Arrive Restless

They arrive restless:There is no pity in their eyes;Nor love, nor surprise –

They had seen much blood run.Their eyes no longer saw their hands.

Those who had stared long enoughHad seen only death in the hills, a stealth missile,A drone –

Like Arjuna’s arrow –Shot into the inkblue sky,And from remorseless hands

Across the world –Into the snarling faces of spurred horses.

The grounds are yielding from their feet in Kandahar,And from the swell of the wind,An army of stone-faced eagles,Spreading their wings over the world:& there was no pity in their eyes.

Obi Nwakanma


Artwork Number 53, Borough Station

Ophelia's down in Borough Station, drowning,patroness of stillness, lady cold without complaint.She doesn't look right there, damply adorninggrubby tiles like some commuters’ saint.If you tapped in and took the lift down, seekingsalve for the grey monotony of pain,you'd be misled, equate her watery sleepingto the shatter-screech of body, metal, train.

It’s meant to hurt, death's not a gentle floating,and you're not supposed to try to do it there,where the breeze is pushed by dirty trains through tunnelsand instead of clear cold currents, you'll get diesel in your hair.

Alice Tarbuck

Act Four

Act Four Antiphon – issue 19

Clarification

It’s all much clearer from this hill top.They can see for rock-strewn milesto cairn-crowned summits. Below,the grey road is an uncertain beltconnecting somewhere to somewhereelse, its far-off, silent traffic trivial.

Buffeted, they stand without a wordwhere gales clash at the rock edge;to north, the tumble to the shoreline’sfickle sand and deep beyond; south,a humdrum slope to stodgy farmland,long measured, fenced and housed.

Their clothes are tugged, hair tangledso they turn to descend the wornpathway. She walks behind himand can only see hair ripple downretreating shoulders, cirrus wispsas in the gloating, settling sky.

She imagines winter here, snowfall,the frozen deadly land, air tearingat her throat. She almost tells himshe would stay up there, let the coldnumb her like these still stonesuncomplaining, loyal, desolate.

Michael Farry


New Moon

The moon has an orbit, the body a self.I have memories, eclipses, and yes,a side of me I never show, butI'd better warn you that I'm spiralling out,have been for a while in fact. You see,my words are mere brushes, their wingbeatsleave picked scabs, pink againstthe darkening sky. I'd push them to the edge

if I could, like gravestonesto make a park so you could sit and listento the silence. An orbit doesn't needa moon to reveal its equation,nostalgia will do, or some romance.If love were a chandelierI'd come home drunk each night, fumblefor the switch, be dazzled every time.

Instead, there's just the noise of dust.I lift the horizon like a rug becausethe hoover's lead's not long enough.Reaching out for help, I'm surprisedhow few words it takes to hurt.I trade landscapes for cities, lonelinessfor humiliation. Without clouds, skyscrapershave nothing to rub against. They long

for earth, topple, disappearat night, leaving windows isolated.A UFO catches in the brittle branches.It would burst but it's not a rose. I mean,the tree's not a rose, it has no thorns.And besides, the moon won't burst,though she's sad I seldom write about her,so new I can’t see her following.

Tim Love


Totem Song

Asleep so long under the hill,she wanders the dream kingdom now,scenting air, listening to gnats in the chiggerweed.She chuffs at the sun. Cubs, cockle-burred, grousing,come streaming. They pounce her from their secret placesin the high grass, eager for meat and blackberries,and there is enough to feed them all.

The day is one long guarding.A shamble to the river,whose long memory stirs time,her shanks in the shallows,she listens to the slap-sounds the cubs makebatting at brook trout floating through their reflections,and she dozes:The one that drowned slips from the stones again,the one that froze is on its side again,the one that starved smells like meat again,the one eaten by the cougar is squealing.

Asleep within the dream, she lurchesto find the sun going down,and the other cubs, grown long-legged,have moved into far hills.

Mike Saye


Perfectly Still

Remember the genie who grants three wishes and how people in fairy tales wastetheir wishes but I’m thinking of a genie who would answer three questions and oneof mine would be why when you sit in a chair right after someone else gets up it’swarm but when you sit back down quickly in your own chair, it doesn’t feel warm.I’d ask that first even though it might be some principle of physics, chemistry, orbiology that I could look up. I’d ask it first rather than the meaning of life (whichI’d like to know) especially in the light of the horror of history and the fact of deathbecause really I’m not sure I like the idea of one meaning of life, at least that’s whatI think now, 5am and I’m looking out at a green field rimmed by trees leading downto a foggy cove where sky and water are the same pearl gray, indistinguishablefrom each other, and it might be perfectly quiet and it is perfectly still.

Ellen Goldsmith


Nurse’s Day

The birthday of Sayyida Zaynab, granddaughter of Prophet Muhammadon February 25, is known in Syria and Iran as ‘Nurses Day.’

Can’t keep my hands to myself, I want to grabthe belt strapped with explosives, crush and breakthe lit-up timer under my heel, then shakethat 17 year old ISIS girl. She hasher dream of paradise. I slap her hard:Wake up you fool. No, this is not Islam.They’ve told you lies. You’re just a firebombThere are no chosen ones and no reward.This district’s hit a second time, consumedwith fear and loss. Close to the holy shrine,six bombs explode, symbolically malignyou, Great Sayyida Zaynab and your tomb.

Wise daughter’s daughter of the Prophet, clar-ify your life, your dignity. Aware,

You challenged tyrant Yazid. Couldn’t savemurdered Husayn, the hurricane of pain.You spoke the truth to power. Here againwe need your voice, a miracle, shockwave.Can’t keep my hands to myself, I want to pressthe cheek of a girl one bomb has hurt. Concreteand bricks, are mixed with car-parts along the street –she’s lying here, hijab and flowered dressare soiled with blood, skin pierced with cell-phone bits.Oh Zaynab, legendary nurse – please handme lidocaine, a hypodermic andsome tweezers, sterile bandages. Dust is thick.

Assad’s war’s beyond sane narrative.We don’t know how to stop it. Help us live.

Tamam Kahn

On 31 January 2016, two suicide bombs and a car bomb exploded in the town of Sayyidah Zaynab near Syria'sholiest Shi'ite shrine, the Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque (six miles south of Damascus). At least 60 people were killedand another 110 people were wounded in the explosions.


Navigating the Annals

It’s not in the half-light of the under stairs cupboardlodging between ironing board and gas meter,

or on the landing in the grey-painted chest perchedat a casual angle since moving in, or reflected

in a splash of cold water he throws on his face.It isn’t in a puckered edge of hall carpet, or where

it peels from skirting like a parched tongue –not in the cotton clutch of bed sheets

buried in the bulk of the washer’s belly, or carvedinto the kitchen floor. It isn’t until he stops looking

that it brushes his skin like a dust-moth releasedin a puff of smoke. He traces walls with tired hands,

reads them as if they’re maps of Arran, he’s the Clydehemming its coast. See those fingers pick over paper,

seek clues in pattern’s arc, pocket them for later,for when he forgets what it is he set off to find.

Abegail Morley


Running in the Rain

Fresh where I am dull,close where I am far;

I race my tight solesacross the logged pavements

step to splash and the starsdisperse at my pacing.

I find such relentlessnesssweet; you are insistent

in wetting the skin, myfists, my open lips.

Full where I was dry.Silk where I am brittle.

All day the body has longedfor release from itself,

and now, in the streetlamp-shimmer, I’m nothing.

The closest I can manage toyour tears is my breath;

soft where I am swift as a cat –mist when I am done.

Sarah Law


Exhaustion

Too dead tired for the job of person any more.Oh, to be the purposeful knob of a door –the perfect demands: holding hands, the open, the close;then, hallelujah, everyone goes. Repose.

Becca Menon

Contributors issue 19

C Wade Bentley lives, teaches, and writes in Salt Lake City. His poems have appeared in many journals,including Antiphon, Best New Poets, Rattle, Cimarron Review, and Pembroke Magazine. A full-lengthcollection, What Is Mine, was published by Aldrich Press in January of 2015. Further information abouthis publications and awards can be found at www.wadebentley.weebly.com.

Isabel Bermudez’s first published collection of poems, Extranjeros, is available from Flarestack Poetsand her first full collection, Small Disturbances, published by Rockingham Press, fromwww.guardianbooks.com

Robert Beveridge makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry just outside Cleveland,OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in Chiron Review, Zombie Logic Review, and The Literateur, amongothers.

Julia Deakin was born in Nuneaton and worked her way north to Yorkshire via Shropshire, ThePotteries and Manchester. The Half-Mile-High Club (2007) was a Poetry Business Competition winnerand her full-length collections, Without a Dog (2008) and Eleven Wonders (2011) are both authoritativelypraised. Widely published, she has read on Poetry Please and won many prizes. A noted performer ofher own work, she is now completing her third collection. ‘Reading is a perk of the job,’ she says. ‘Ifonly it were a job.’ www.juliadeakin.co.uk

Jill Dery has written a novel about a moose stomping and has published stories in The Bellingham Review,13th Moon, Fourteen Hills, and The MacGuffin, but considers herself a poet, with an MFA in poetry fromUC Irvine. Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, she lived afterward for a few years on Long Island,New York. She’s lived in Anchorage, Alaska, since 1992.

Sally Douglas’ first collection, Candling the Eggs, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2011. She hasbeen widely published in magazines, and was a prizewinner in the 2015 Exeter Poetry Festival. Sallyread English and European Literature at Warwick University many years ago, and is starting her MA

www.guardianbooks.com

www.guardianbooks.com

@SallyDPoet.

Michael Farry was the editor of the Boyne Writers Group’s magazine, Boyne Berries, from 2006 to 2014.His poetry has been widely published in journals in Ireland and abroad. He was selected for PoetryIreland Introductions 2011. His first poetry collection, Asking for Directions, was published by DoghouseBooks, Tralee, in 2012. His Ox Mountains sequence was included in the anthology Imagination andPlace – Cartography, Kansas, in 2013. His history book, Sligo, The Irish Revolution 1912-1923, was publishedin 2012 by Four Courts Press, Dublin.

Morna Finnegan is a full time mother whose Phd is in Social Anthropology (the two work well)! Shehas travelled widely in the last two decades, and has always been interested in poetry as a kind of lenson the deep emotional grain of life. More recently, her poems have offered a way of documenting theshifting of experience and perspective that comes with motherhood. She currently lives in Ireland withher two children.

Ellen Goldsmith is the author of Where to Look, Such Distances and No Pine Tree in This Forest Is Perfectwhich won the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center 1997 chapbook contest. “The Secret of Life” from SuchDistances was read by Garrison Keillor on Writer’s Almanac. Recent poems have appeared or areforthcoming in Antiphon, Connecticut River Review, Dash, Earth's Daughters, The Inflectionist Review, Kin,The Mochila Review, Mount Hope, Off the Coast, Third Wednesday and The Whirlwind Review. She is a residentof Cushing, Maine and professor emeritus of The City University of New York.

Rebecca Hurst is a doctoral student at the University of Manchester where she writes poetry andresearches Soviet fairy tales. Her work has appeared in The Wild Hunt, Magma Poetry, The Next Review,The Golden Key, SWAMP, and Cricket Magazine. Her chamber opera Isabella, written with the composerOliver Leith, premiered in London in 2015.

Tamam Kahn is author of Fatima’s Touch, Poems and Stories of the Prophet’s Daughter, Ruhaniat Press, 2016,and Untold: A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad, Monkfish Press, 2010, International Book Awardwinner, 2011. She has traveled widely among the mystics of the Middle East, India, and North Africa,was invited by the Royal Ministry of Morocco to read her poetry at the symposium in Marrakesh in 2009.Tamam lived in Damascus in 2003. She read from her book on Fatima at Poet’s House in NYC for TheWide Shore, A Journal of Global Women’s Poetry, 2015. She has been awarded writing residencies at RagdaleFoundation and Jentel Artist Residency.

Sarah Law has published five poetry collections, the latest of which is Ink’s Wish (Gatehouse, 2014). Shelectures in Creative Writing and English Literature and lives in London.

Mark Leech's most recent chapbook, Borderlands, a follow-up to his Chang’an Poems, was published in2015. He has also published chapbooks of Old English and Spanish translations, and a sequence of longpoems about London's hidden rivers. He blogs at www.openfieldblog.wordpress.com.

Tim Love’s publications are a poetry pamphlet Moving Parts (HappenStance, 2010) and a story collectionBy all means (Nine Arches Press, 2012). He lives in Cambridge, UK. His poetry and prose have appearedin Stand, Rialto, Oxford Poetry, Journal of Microliterature, Short Fiction, New Walk, etc. He blogs athttp://litrefs.blogspot.com

mailto:@SallyDPoet.

mailto:@SallyDPoet.

http://litrefs.blogspot.com/

http://litrefs.blogspot.com/

Becca Menon is an American writer whose largely narrative poetic works, based in myth, fairy tale,folklore and Scripture have been hailed internationally in countries such as Iran, India, Iraq, Canada andthe United Kingdom as well as the United States. Some shorter works, essays and translations appearin print and online in publications that include Parnassus, Iraq Literary Review, Kritya and others. She isassociate editor of Phoenix Rising¸ a multilingual sonnet anthology. www.BeccaBooks.com

Jory Mickelson's work has appeared in FAULTLINE, The Florida Review, The Carolina Quarterly,Superstition Review, The Collagist, The Los Angeles Review, The Adirondack Review, and other journals. Hereceived an Academy of American Poet’s Prize in 2011 and was a 2013 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry.

Abegail Morley’s fourth collection The Skin Diary is published by Nine Arches Press. Her debutcollection, How to Pour Madness into a Teacup, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection.She was Poet in Residence at Scotney Castle and Riverhill Himalayan Gardens and the CanterburyFestival Poet of the Year in 2015.

Rachel Nix is a native of Northwest Alabama, where pine trees outnumber people as they ought to. Herwork has recently appeared in Hobo Camp Review, Rust + Moth, and Words Dance. Rachel is the poetryeditor at cahoodaloodaling and can be followed at @rachelnix_poet on Twitter.

Kate Noakes is a Welsh Academician living in London and Paris. Her fifth collection is Tattoo on CrowStreet (Parthian, 2015). Her website, boomslangpoetry.blogspot.com is archived by the National Libraryof Wales.

Obi Nwakanma, poet, journalist and critic, born in Nigeria, has been Literary Editor of the Vanguardnewspapers in Lagos, where he continues to write a weekly column, "The Orbit." He studied English atthe University of Jos, Nigeria, earned the MFA at the Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhDfrom Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri. His collection of poems, The Roped Urn, won theANA/Cadbury prize for Poetry. He has also published the Horsemen & Other Poems, and Birthcry, whichwas nominated for the LNG prize. He currently teaches Creative Writing, Literature of the BlackDiaspora, and Anglophone Transnational Literatures in the English Department of the University ofCentral Florida, UCF, Orlando, Florida, USA.

Karen Petersen, adventurer, photojournalist and writer, has travelled the world extensively, publishingboth nationally and internationally in a variety of publications. Most recently, she read "In Memory ofW.B. Yeats" at the 2015 Yeats Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is currently at work on Four Pointson a Compass, a collection of her poems from overseas. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Classics fromVassar College and an M.S. from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Mike Saye is a Ph.D student at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He has been published in Rattle,Town Creek Poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival, and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems(Negative Capability Press, 2015).

Alexandra Strnad read English at the University of Cambridge and completed a Masters in CreativeWriting from the University of Oxford for which she was awarded a Distinction. Her poems have beenpublished or are forthcoming in a range of journals both in the UK and overseas including: Ambit,Wasafiri, The Frogmore Papers, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Oxonian Review, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The

Cadaverine, The Moth and Other Poetry. She was the 2014 winner of the Jane Martin Poetry Prize,2015 finalist in the Aesthetica Creative Writing award and commended in the 2015 St Cross CollegeInternational Poetry Award. Alexandra is poet in residence at Carfax Education.

Ivy Schweitzer hails from Brooklyn, New York but has lived for many years in Norwich, Vermont,where she teaches at Dartmouth College. She is spending this Fall in London. She has published poetryin Birchsong: Poetry Centered in Vermont, The Glass Seed Annual, Solidus 3 (with interview), and in the lastfour issues of Bloodroot Literary Magazine. She is working on a collection of poetry.

Judith Taylor comes from Perthshire and lives in Aberdeen, where she works in IT. Her poetry has beenwidely published in magazines, and she is the author of two pamphlet collections – Earthlight (Koo Press,2006) and Local Colour (Calder Wood Press, 2010). Her poems "The Lapland Woman and the FinlandWoman" and "The Water" were chosen for the Scottish Poetry Library's Best Scottish Poems of 2014 and2015 respectively. Her first full-length collection will be published in 2017 by Red Squirrel Press.

Alice Tarbuck is a PhD student in contemporary poetics. Her work has appeared in a number ofmagazines including New Writing Dundee, Zarf, and as an exhibition on the walls of the Forest Cafe,Edinburgh. She has written work for performance as part of a commission for Timespan Festival,Helmsdale.

Issue 19 2016

Antiphon on-line poetry magazine

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