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The Spring 2024 issue of London Grip New Poetry features:
* Sarah Mnatzaganian * Jill Abram * Steve Black * Sue Rose
* Ilse Pedler *Richard Smith * Karen Luke * Sarah Davies
* Kenneth Pobo * Mark Carson * Christian Ward * Nick Cooke
* Caroline Maldonado * Susan E Gunter * John Grey * Steven Taylor
* Judith Wozniak * William Doreski * R. Gerry Fabian * Lorraine Gibson
* John Whitehouse * Stuart Handysides *Briege Duffaud * John Bartlett
* Murray Bodo * Keith Nunes * Steve Komarnyckyj * Maggie Freeman
* Maggie Butt * Erica Hesketh * Kim Whysall-Hammond * Anthony Wilson
* John Short * Robert Nisbet * Sally St Clair * Neil Deasy * Julia Webb
* Stephen Bone * Rodney Wood * Nancy Mattson * Sita Turner
Contributor Biographies and Editor’s Notes are also included.
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A printable version of this issue can be found at LG new poetry Spring 2024
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Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors.
London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December
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SUBMISSIONS:Send up to THREE poems & a brief bio to poetry@londongrip.co.uk
Poems should be in a SINGLE Word attachment or included in the message body
Windows: December-January, March-April, June-July & September-October
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Editor’s notes
This has turned out to be an unintentionally ornithological edition of LGNP. Readers will find a clutch (flock / swarm / murmuration) of bird poems at the heart of this issue and some stray fledglings may be spotted elsewhere. Indeed quite a few more feathered friends landed in our submissions inbox but we were unable to find a perch for them. Perhaps there is something within many of us which is yearning towards flight and / or migration to other places.
We have often noted that London Grip submissions seem to gather spontaneously around certain themes; and this has once again raised for me the idea of poets being seers or prophets who tune into and verbalise the collective unconscious – or perhaps are even inspired by something beyond the human consciousness. What else might makes three of our poets home in on the deceptiveness and danger of mirrors? Ilse Pedler dramatises the way that our fears can be distorted and reflected back at us – maybe a fitting metaphor for this age of silos and conspiracy theories. Richard Smith regards mirrors as brittle shields which are never very far away from becoming dangerous shards. And Nancy Mattson reminds us that seemingly harmless fun in a fairground hall of mirrors usually occurs alongside false tunnel-of-love versions of commitment and real risks in spectacular attention-seeking wall-of-death stunts. Perceptive readers may well find other persuasive poetic insights in the pages which follow.
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Very shortly before the publication of this issue we heard the sad news of the death of the poet Alan Brownjohn at the age of 92. An obituary by Declan Ryan, which outlines his many achievements as writer, editor, critic and teacher, describes him as “seemingly indefatigable” and it is true that he remained a familiar, smartly-suited, presence at London poetry events well into his late eighties. His performances of poems featuring a kind of alter ego called Ludbrooke were particularly popular and – as with all his work – succeeded in being both entertaining and insightful. In addition to his many books of poetry he wrote several novels and a review of Enjoyment (Shoestring Press, 2016) can be found on London Grip.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
London Grip poetry editor
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Sarah Mnatzaganian: Luton Airport check-in, August 2022
Why are you travelling alone?
Why isn’t your husband here?
Why are you going to Israel?
You have an aunt who is ill?
Can you show me your aunt’s house on Google Maps?
What is your uncle’s name?
He has passed away?
What is the address? Here at Jaffa Gate?
Why is your daughter in Jerusalem?
Why is she learning Arabic?
Did you speak it as a child?
Why did your father speak Arabic if he’s Armenian?
Where did your father grow up?
Where is Lifta?
Why did he leave Lifta for Jerusalem?
What will you do in Jerusalem?
You’re looking for your grandmother’s grave?
Why wasn’t she buried in the cemetery?
It was in no man’s land?
When did she die?
Where is your husband from?
What is your religion?
Did you bring up your children as Christian?
Why not? Armenians are Christian?
What is your husband’s name?
Why were you in Jordan?
You went with your father to see your daughter?
Where did you stay?
Do you have friends there?
Did you pack this bag yourself?
Where is this pot from?
Why does it have Arabic on it?
What is in the pot?
Why are you eating Syrian halva?
Where is the halva now?
You have eaten it?
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Jill Abram: Admissible Evidence
What if I told you I rode bareback across
a high plateau to lie in a hammock all night
and watch meteors streak across the sky,
all alone except for the snuffling pony?
What if I told you I walked miles along a beach
with a man who speared stingrays in the shallows,
showed me their livers to tell if they were ripe,
wanted me to lie down with him on the sand?
What if I told you I trekked for three hours
machete-slashing vines, roots and branches
in tropical heat, while my clothes darkened
from sweat, to dive through a waterfall?
What if I showed you a broken horseshoe, a lock
of hair, a round pebble, shiny as if it were wet?
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Steve Black: Untitled
the night bus to work
crushed red bull cans
and unlucky scratch cards
i draw a smile on the window
it slips upside down
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Sue Rose: Sisterhood
Our vials have been sent out, opaque
stock consigned to the shallow dark
of the postbox. Soon they will arrive
at their deciphering, arrayed in slots
for what science will confirm or deny.
We are sisters and expect our DNA
to come in neat halves, two portions
of the same pie, the apple
never falls far—we are rose attar
to the core. But what if the mix
contains a truth we never knew?
A recipe for rift, chromosomes
threading ladders to nowhere good,
percentages not scraping a quarter
as we face the mute dead,
all the tales we didn’t know, tipping
us into a mess of relative secrets.
Then yes, we may lose sure sight
of descent and origin, our life
a muddle of exes and whys,
but in the now of orphan age,
no numbers on a page, no résumé
of letters can split us into strangers
who share no history, have no ties.
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Ilse Pedler: Hall of Mirrors
I stand before a long mirror
and she stands behind me, a frown
drawing her eyebrows together,
the line between them so deeply
etched, it looks like a cut in some
lights. So what do you see? she says.
I move slightly and my face warp-
shifts, features elongating in
a blur until my head pops up
the size of a planet, All that
space she made me stuff daily with
facts – symptoms, aetiologies.
In the next, my neck a giraffe’s,
throat narrowed to the size of a
feeding tube, just wide enough to
force down liquids, too small for food
she refused anyway, she stayed
a long time in front of that one.
Moving on again to the one
where she squashes me under her
heel – splat, just like that. Two feet high
struggling to escape the mirror’s
gravity, she knows that below
the eyeline you go un-noticed.
The one where the invisible
truck slams into my stomach knock-
ing it sideways, legs banana-
ing in the opposite direction,
arms cartoon-like wobbling out in
an undulating ricochet.
You didn’t see that one coming
did you she said, as she walked away
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Richard Smith: Psalm of Blue
In the beginning one would turn their
back on the other to read of love; letters
written slowly, fingertips on skin like drops
of water. We hid behind mirrors, after all,
who can see past themselves? We desired
and feared discovery. We clung to brittle
shields until illusions fell like angels
between us, leaving only fragments
of blue. Exposed, eyes burned
as we gaped at what we'd done. Our backs
untouched but for the searing sun.
Retrieving shards we cut our finger-
tips piecing together chimes to hang
from bare branches. We yearned for
songs of the new: the tabla of rain, the cry
of the wind in the pines, the elated dance
of clouds like ink, cerulean-grey, from
a brush swirled in water; new lyrics declared
on the streets, sung in stairwells, released
like birds to the sky, inscribed in sand, drawn
through the night in extravagant sweeps
of flying sparks and known at dawn on skin.
We’ve become a confusion of wildebeests
flooding the Serengeti, retracing the scent
of blue, the memory of green. Each passage
unique: a whorl of three thousand miles
or so, contours diverging and pooling, only
to begin. Again and again, we embark on this
wild pursuit. Each step the heart repeats, ‘I do,
I do.’ When seasons fail, we say, ‘At least
we’re not alone.’ It seems we are already
there and yet to arrive. Daily we toil and rest,
daily we drink our fill, yet still we thirst.
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Karen Luke: Pelt
Aunty Margaret has a second skin.
The minks were killed and sewn together to be
what she dreams was always meant for her.
She wears her late husband’s gift in my granny's kitchen,
a cigarette crooked between her fingers,
as she turns her attention to the pieces of pig under the grill.
I don’t want to touch Aunty Margaret,
but I do like to eat sausages.
Granny also has a fur coat. She never wears it.
She gives it to my mum who never wears it.
My mum gives it to me, but I am a child
and feel engulfed by a future inside a four-legged creature.
We give it to charity from where,
many years later, a man will buy it for me.
The cycle continues.
There’s a kink for wearing a second skin
with nothing underneath.
A notorious novella calls it Venus in Furs.
The dead animal envelopes you like a sauna,
hot and close, sweating off your flesh.
I've seen a mink’s gutted ribcage
in a painting by an artist
on a writer's living room wall.
A reporter took the photo for a magazine.
I found the article peeking out of the trash.
My eyes slid down through the bones,
descending into the depths,
resurrecting the animal from the inside.
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Sarah Davies: Refugees
Elm avenues, all dead in 40 years,
profligate with the deader leaves –
boys couldn’t hear their own footsteps.
Gold swallowed them,
Older taking Younger by the hand
off the bus, then up the street so wide,
houses so big, peaceful but stern, like statue faces.
This was where money lived, removed in a black birch forest.
All the rooms lit, but dark too in the dark,
in the green dark of great gardens.
They’d knock but this door was almost open,
a child could slip in, holding their breath
and inside, a den of ladies, old and pelted;
in sable, fox, in ermine, mink, in moths and lanolin.
Hot tea in silver and another language cutting and sticking,
metallic clicking music clock and bell –
the ancient, like a queen in mourning, gestured with her talons -
This one, this one, grows more and more each day like him.
The tut and the curve down of her mouth,
This Time is the last, I’m frightened Daughter, you will never find us.
The women massed and powdery,
the women scented ebbed and flowed
and slipped like train of gowns, whispered from the rooms –
have you ever seen a ghost?
until there was just She, the Mother somehow reborn,
her hair sun yellow, her sunset eye
flew out of the murder of women, wearing a different language,
it clattered and soothed, soothed and scratched.
Some Women they say, have their past
like fortunes sewn into the lining of their coats,
like the mother of pearl scales at Mother’s temple.
This memory is vague and in translation
I heard it so, heard it from my Father in my dreams.
Maybe it was his or handed down,
grown shabbier each telling,
tears in the worn material of truth, inherited,
but barely a dictionary or a photograph.
He told me close your eyes and listen
to the sound of women gossiping a gospel –
the past is both a refuge and a darkened house.
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Kenneth Pobo: Emma’s Ants
Gregory Crewdson, Beneath The Roses
Branches shadow
the clapboard. I’d gladly
climb a tree and leave. My husband
Rob, late again, perhaps
there’s someone else. He often
quotes Merle Haggard,
a song about Mama’s “Hungry Eyes.”
I have those eyes too.
Rob prefers me cheerful,
a butterfly flexing
on a milkweed.
Years are funny. At first
you hardly see tracks on your face.
When they deepen, you must look.
Closely. I dust in the living room.
Not much living, not much room.
Ants crawl on the arm of the couch.
Such purpose. I could kill them,
but I let them
keep moving.
Kenneth Pobo: The Flamingos
Oil on canvas, Henri Rousseau
White and
pink water
lilies check their watches
wondering how many hours
they have before
blooming stops.
Four flamingos have a day
at the beach. They don’t
discuss winter. It’s just
a rumor anyway. They say
little. Warm water
speaks for them.
Night
is so far away that it ruffles
no feathers. Blue sky
hovers over the flamingos
who can’t stop
one second
from entering the future.
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Mark Carson: Saltee Clifftop
It pokes its little head out.
Scans left, sees a calf,
then right. Another calf.
Heck, retreats,
says nothing.
I take another wedge
of soda bread and pickle, think
I’m sitting on a puffin.
The puffin too is thinking;
Someone’s sat on me.
Below me Cabot throws
a hefty cobble
at a Black-back’s nest.
Hey, I say, it’s
Seabird Conservation Year.
Too right he says
I am conserving seabirds
smashing Black-back eggs.
Stands to reason.
It’s my job.
The puffin pops her head
out, backs up inside.
Then whrrumph!
blasts out like a Scramjet
whirrrs across the bay.
Sun and breeze and picnic,
but soon we have to go
and ring some little shags.
Closest I’ll ever get
to a puffin. Sitting on her.
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Christian Ward: Self Portrait as a Blackbird
I'm a coal-dark ocarina,
an escapee from an erasure poem,
the night's echo. I flicker
between dawn and dusk
like a figment of my parent's
imagination. My beak
is a lighthouse to remind
them of the dangers of flying
in the dark. Look how my wings
are hastily drawn as inelegant
scribbles to remind you
how easy it is to be vulnerable
like an exposed earthworm
tasting fate in the hawk-sharp air.
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Nick Cooke: The Switch
This morning I found a tiny dead bird
Hardly bigger than a chicklet
Right outside our bottom front step
And moved it to the side
Out of immediate view
Gently as I could, with my foot.
I didn’t want my wife to see it.
She’s been going through some bad stuff.
You never know what might flick the switch.
And then I thought of that boy
Found face down in the sand
That nobody moved in time
Away from the prizewinning lens.
At length, he was picked up gently
And taken to the side.
Some didn’t want the world to see him.
We’ve been going through some bad stuff.
But sometimes you need to flick the switch.
Nick Cooke: Serena, Dolce Vita
The young assistant editor doing sidestroke
forty yards from the coast of Positano
is in all probability my father’s lover,
one of many that will later come to light;
but for now she is a mermaid, an icon,
to the five-year-old boy watching on the beach.
In truth, he shouldn’t really be here alone;
but it’s Italy, 1966, and such exploring’s
held normal in an age where no one yet
obsesses on abduction as they will.
Even at this distance he can pick out
each sunlit drop on her forearm as it
enters the waves at precisely the right angle.
He reveres the shape her lips make when they part
to breathe, before her face is swallowed
for an instant that must seem eternity.
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Caroline Maldonado: Shelduck
It’s not as if she’s human although
she slides across the surface of our screen
as smoothly as refugees or images of war.
The shelduck emerges on the cliff
under the rain to guide her young into the sea
towards the haven of an estuary.
Her webbed feet though good
for paddling have no better hold
on the slippery stone than a man
would have in his boots and she bounces
down from ledge to ledge on her chest,
on her back, on her clamped wings
into the spray with her black and white
puffballs tumbling behind her –
how many are there, nine or eight?
What do you think, will they all survive?
Most of them do up to this point
apart from the one mid-bounce
snatched by a crow before it hits water.
By now the duck’s the right way up
and, battling the surf, has passed the rocks
with her scattered young still behind.
The current’s tugging the family towards
an inlet, the shelduck with her brood
following, all in a spin, five of them.
Now two. She has reached the land where
she waits in vain for her last duckling.
Preening herself with sharp stabs,
a mother mourns on the shore
but ducks aren’t human and this isn’t a war.
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Susan E Gunter: Near Passerine Birds
woodpeckers’ tongues are so long they wrap around their skulls
It was there, just waiting for me
to wrap my tongue around it—the poem,
that is. The lyrics of a woodpecker,
wounded, wrapped in a black dish
towel, and of a woman, also in black,
wrapped into my arms.
Sobs knocked at her frame, her deep
eyes closed against what she can’t accept:
her lover, walking away.
Away from the beautiful laughing baby,
away from the beautiful crying mother.
The bird recovers, warmed by the terry-
cloth and the hands holding his numbed
body. His eyes open slowly, then
blink fast, faster, his third nictitating
membrane sliding across his pupil,
stuttering like manual typewriter keys.
The mother will recover; she’s absorbed
the shocks, engineered like the bird to
take them into her body and send
them back to a frozen world.
She will love and be loved again.
But the lover is broken, from pecking at
her as though she were a dead stump.
And unlike the woodpecker, who is mended
from his crash into glittering glass,
he won’t be healed.
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John Grey: Abroad Thoughts from Home
I know where I am by the birds that wake me.
No raucous jays but cackling kookaburras on a wire
or the screech of a flock of green lorikeets. And
the mating of month and temperature is another compass.
No chilly December morning this. It's the southern
sun that warms my top-soil, the one that wrote the recipe
for Christmas cookouts. 1 drink coffee now, not tea,
and I make my own before the house arises. My breakfast
is a bowl of bran. The days of my sisters and I gathered
around the morning cholesterol heap are faint history.
I'll even walk later. At one year of age or so, I proved 1
could. Now, in middle age, I prove I have to.
I sit in a comfortable chair, spy the swimming pool
through the downstairs picture window. It's chlorine
green. I make a point to look elsewhere for my information
as to sky. It's early morning here, last night in America.
I'm wide awake in my past, tired, and heading off to bed
in my future. Sparrows chortle from their rough apartments
in the hedge. Now that's a song for wherever I am,
a bird as ubiquitous as McDonald's. I hear the creak
of mattress in the upstairs bedroom. My youngest sister
awakes. My eldest is driving down from her outback home.
She'll arrive later. My third sister and mother are
crematorium stones, await my visit later in the week.
My wife will call from Providence at 8.00 AM local time,
or so she promised. I feel as if I float just out of reach of all
my women. They're waking, driving, phoning, dead. For a time,
I'm who I am without them. Kookaburras laugh at that one.
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Steven Taylor: A Year Of Birds
(A 1984 poetry collection by Iris Murdoch)
Instead of laundry, I did the shopping this morning
and met Jim Broadbent, the award-winning
actor, best-supporting Oscar for Iris, and wondered
conversationally, if there should be such
a difference in price between blueberries, the
expensive and juicy, Jim, they cost a small
fortune. The Iris, was Murdoch, the writer.
Jim played her husband. Her primary fixation
was the relationship between art and ideas.
Moral philosophy?
I can’t claim to have read her.
Jim agreed (about blueberries)
I think he agreed.
Perhaps he said nothing.
On the way home I saw a parakeet.
A parakeet in a tree. Iris knew Sartre
and studied under Wittgenstein
but she was only tangentially a Modernist.
I believe she died of dementia.
Dementia or Alzheimer’s. They
both contributed. Her husband
survived her, remarried, more happily.
Steven Taylor: Helen Mirren
I claimed to be part of a group
of Manchester United fans
who were corralled on arrival
in the city, and then shepherded
by the Yorkshire police
from the railway station
to Elland Road, passing underneath
a pedestrian bridge where Leeds fans
waited with old penny coins
sharpened on a lathe. But I lied
I heard the story from boys
with older brothers
and made up I was present
Neither did I live on Ballymurphy
or march on Bloody Sunday
I never kissed Helen Mirren
I just wanted you to listen
I was prepared to say anything
I invented a drug
that turned smoke into dragons
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Judith Wozniak: I Forget the Vietnam War and Watch West Ham
1968
A mounted policeman, so close
I can smell his horse’s quivering flank.
Get out love this is about to kick off.
I go home and watch the Big Match
with the boys on LWT, curtains drawn,
a fug of bodies wrapped in claret and blue.
I sense how their breathing changes,
they edge forward on the sofa, balling
their fists, leap and roar at a Hammers goal.
The War Museum, Saigon. A young woman
shouldering a crate of weapons, gazes back at me,
her face streaked with runnels of grime.
An American tourist tells me he was there.
She can only have been ninety pounds.
That ammunition weighed a ton.
He has flash backs, the tunnels, being trapped
by his basketball player’s broad shoulders.
If you didn’t come home in a body bag
no one wanted to know.
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William Doreski: Dark, Darker, Darkest
Every night, dark brims me over.
Yes, it’s full of cities exploding
in pinpricks; yes, the people I miss
prowl for scraps and flotsam; yes,
the military kindly prevents
us all from toppling over
the edge of the badly flat Earth.
But I can’t digest every ort
of dark, and residue piles up.
You want me to see a doctor,
but they’re invisible now,
clustered behind plastic curtains
that ripple without a breeze.
You claim the night isn’t night
anymore, too thin to ingest.
When I was a child the streetlamp
in front of my house sang me
to sleep with a winsome chorus
of photons that still puzzle science.
I learned that I was an alternate
phenomenon: a particle caught
in the corner of a god’s eye,
a wave cresting the far horizon.
Can you explain my existence
in simpler yet compelling terms?
You subscribe to laws of physics
I’ve never understood. Your slick
education tops mine. I still
hear that antique streetlamp singing
as it scatters trillions of photons,
but the light doesn’t reach me.
It’s no antidote for moonless
landscapes growing inside me—
webs of lit cities grinning
with those lovable old spirits
with whom I used to intertwine.
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R. Gerry Fabian: Pilfered Circadian Rhythm
The sleep crawls around the bed
in drab camouflage
like some sort of nocturnal bandit.
I turn on my side
taking slow deep breaths
like a seasoned marksman.
The sleep stays just out of range.
It knows my early hour destination.
You took so much from me
when you left
and the sleep still misses you.
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Lorraine Gibson: The Sleep Seeker
has restless legs—an incessant twitch counter to
the impetus for peace. The swell of surf roars
along her island’s shoreline—morphs into a sound
akin to free-flowing traffic: the darkness clouds
acuity. She tunes in to the kekekekek of a masked
lapwing’s strident caution—to fox—to stalking
dingo. Four chicks, two, then none. Nocturnal
hunting takes manifold forms: not all hungers
will be met. A sickle of waxing moon withholds
its promised optimism. The air is summer soft.
Fur and purr leap onto her bed—mrroop, mrroop,
meep. She cradles the soft body of momentary
respite—as night delivers more night.
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John Whitehouse: Dead Bait
She dipped her fingers into a bowl of plain water
making marks on whitewashed walls, languidly
imagining a man’s face. She watches the droplets
evaporate on her fingers, hears voices outside.
His face crowds the walls of her studio. A fragrance
of sandalwood, the smell of his shirts, strong hands
with square cut nails. The painted man isn’t her lover,
she draws him for other lives.
The man casts a lure into the lake, a reel singing out,
counting blue as it lands in the rise of the swell,
swinging its hips like a samba. Pikes grin, silhouettes
moving in for the kill, trained assassins.
John Whitehouse: Radical geometry
Carpenters make the best slaughterers. A rough
correctness, a sureness of touch
sizing up how you’re standing, making shapes
in their heads, the knife ready
dreaming of you on their work-bench, auguring
the cut with their Paring chisels.
In medieval times, adzes smoothed the way to
cathedrals or the great 14th-century barns,
standing in the way of a third Heathrow runway.
They could mortice-and-tenon you now
using radical geometry for an alphabet, making you
into freshly-made kebabs.
But they retreat into history, longbows nocked
sheaves of arrows falling.
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***
Stuart Handysides: The Spiral
after Psalm 137 and Slaughterhouse-Five
Babylon’s rivers, fringed by willows
hung with harps, sound picturesque
like grandes baigneuses, or déjeuner sur l’herbe.
No sewage there or trollies half submerged.
We know the captives miss their home
they cannot sing, they have no mirth.
The songs of Don McLean and Boney M
stop there. Does anyone read on?
It’s not deliverance the psalmist wants
– perhaps that’s just assumed.
The call is for revenge
– upon the daughters, and the little ones.
So it goes…
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Briege Duffaud: Golgotha
Dragging his bloodied feet uphill,
head bent to relieve awhile
the crown’s tormenting,
would he have noticed
small flowers in the dusty grass,
kalamit and speedwell,
heard sunbirds, warblers
the normal sights and sounds
of a Spring morning near Jerusalem,
and thought: my father used to be
a gentler Being, dreaming up
these lovely things, not floods and
plagues and punishments.
What, in creation, changed Him?
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John Bartlett: on the advice of children
the war in Gaza has been cancelled and
from the bombed out Kamal Adwan hospital
the children – amputees
or riddled with shrapnel --
sent out a communiqué
cancelling further hostilities
without further notice
we are many (they said)
and together with the returning dead
yet wrapped in the innocence of white
we will outnumber the men in suits
with microphones and missiles
then the children of Ukraine
called a press conference to announce
an embargo on missiles inscribed with our names
without further notice
the men in suits fell silent because
the profit margin on the sale of children’s toys
is so much less than on missiles
remember you have (the children said)
but three score year and ten to live
and like the grasses you will wilt and die
we are the forever children
with eternities to wait and
no further correspondence
will be entered into (they said)
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***
Murray Bodo: Blue December
in a time of war in Gaza and Ukraine
Fainter, the old furnace breathes
the air seems oblivious
it does not stir
Is this the beginning of
not getting going again
longing taking over
Check and re-check switches
the ceiling fan rattles
trying, desiring more air
Still air, old padding feet
making air move
slow-moving what will move
Not just one more Winter morn
things aren’t as before
something no longer soars
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***
Keith Nunes: Out of one sea and into another
A vast tanker slips between two continents,
Leathery seamen scrub clean
The gangways,
A sandstorm blots the distant horizon,
In the foreground
Bedouin on camels wave, threaten,
Captain on the bridge looks out at the familiar vastness,
What he sees is what he’s always seen on
This dreamlike voyage between worlds,
But what he feels today
Is nothing like anything
He’s felt before,
His hands shake,
Her tiny voice louder than the ship’s horn
Sending out a warning,
He can’t stop it,
He can’t stop any of it.
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Steve Komarnyckyj: Bottled
Herr Steinmetz has fitted the sea captain's cap he bought second hand
To his brilliantined hair with a certain precision even if the black
Polyester trousers and plaid shirt have seen better days and the once
Neatly trimmed beard is rising up those weathered cheeks, heather
Gripping and eroding a cliff face. He reaches into the bottle bank
Disturbing flies drunk on beer dregs and the ghosts that lurk
In empties bearing smudged fingerprints a smear of lipstick,
He takes some by the neck, the glass clinks, lowers them into
A plastic carrier bag already bulging. The Ur Krotitser lager bottles
Are worth eight cents at the shop. Sometimes he tries to think
Back and shouts at blurred shapes mouthing from graffiti
Sprayed on eroded concrete rendering or brick a thicket
Of words from which there is no way back the map having blown
Away slowly and taken off a huge white bird that once nested
On the chimney at Dolzig. When he was five he climbed onto
The roof and found the nest empty except for the eggs blood warm.
He held one up to the sun, and thinks he saw the shadow
Of a chick within. All he holds close. Ghosts, feathers of snow
Fall through the lives of others and are gone.
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Maggie Freeman: In Memoriam
love
as absence and a bloodless
hunger in the cloisters of the heart - John Burnside
The woman’s seated on the bench
beneath the apple tree. She stretches
her hands open before her, cupping them
so the July sun fills them.
How lined her hands are now, pitted
with deep shadow, sharp with the heat
and light that have taken so long
so much time and space to travel here.
How empty her hands are. When she parts
her fingers everyone and everything
she’s ever loved fall through the cracks
spill out of her life. She’s left alone.
They have gone their own way and left her
empty. Her empty hands ache. She
holds them out, her arms ache with longing
the need for consolation.
The brittle leaves of the apple tree
rattle in the dry wind.
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Maggie Butt: Falling in love
Again and again, every time surely the last,
each one with a shock like being knocked down
by a giant wave, bowled over and over in the shallows
gasping for air; and from the first this squeeze
of pain around the heart, longing for one glimpse,
each desert day without sight of the beloved;
'it's Thursday, he might be there, might notice
me'; that time I fell asleep on the school coach
and rested my head on his shoulder, woke,
pretending to still be asleep, aching with the need
to move, aching with the desire never to move;
and now it overwhelms me again, as unfightable
as the first, all-engulfing as meeting the eyes
of our own daughters, submerged and breathless
in the simultaneous joy and fear of losing them;
this secretly longed-for, unexpected gift
your delighted little dance when you see me
at the door, your arms reaching to be picked up
and each time I am drowned again.
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Erica Hesketh: Balloons
In the video she is kicking balloons,
laughing and laughing as they
boing with abandon around the living room.
The evening after Daddy’s birthday.
Later we’ll tell stories in bed,
where all of the past counts as yesterday:
the time at the park she boffed her head
on the Big Slide, or the time we took
the train to Chinatown to visit the red
lanterns just like the ones in her book –
slumbering fishing boats lit by sunrise.
Yesterday we bought one for the hook
on her ceiling. It watched her memorise
all the numbers on her hopscotch rug;
tumble on her mattress like a pint-size
circus clown; mend her stuffed toys with hugs
(that’s better); outgrow the orange shoes.
Tomorrow she will start to shrug
off our kisses – we have it all to lose –
but last night she ran in from a nightmare
and we slept as a pack, pressed close.
In the photo we do not have a care
in the world. We’re sipping pretend tea
from real cups in our underwear
and feeling suddenly, scarily lucky.
Yesterday I was certain our world
was too fragile for three. But now I see
the baby from the album is a girl.
Clutching her balloons she races
towards the lens – limbs unfurled,
triumphant in her weightlessness.
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Kim Whysall-Hammond: Dancing on the Light
We pile out of The Sun, laugh and bustle
yell our farewells to a good riddance barman
lean on lampposts and each other
or, cheekily, the Police station railings.
Some now peel off, head for bus stops and home
we remaining precious few
walk into the dark to The Moon
our other pub, which lurks
at the end of a council estate alley
with its glow of camaraderie, haze of fellowship.
Inside, we play old school Genesis on a clapped out piano
josh and smile, laugh and bustle
quaff yet more pints of real ale
all lads together, even the girl, me
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Anthony Wilson: At First Sight
After the sugar rush of the ceremony,
it’s clear she can’t love him, can’t bear
even to look at him. Her teary pieces to camera –
‘I’ve lived my whole life by my feelings’ –
are painful to watch. His even more so,
hijacked by weeping, his back to the lens.
We leave them at Bamburgh Beach
in bright sunshine, the breakers crashing
in the distance. I wake wondering
what happened to them, appalled at myself,
yet fascinated, a show I found by accident,
after my thriller had come to its grisly, inevitable end.
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John Short: Besotted
A girl just out of university,
what did the Brothers make of her
competence and charisma,
denim jeans and leather jacket?
But we were all besotted.
Was it lizards and salamanders
I nurtured a passion for?
Would it ever have happened
without her? Coming first
and prizes for biological interest.
One afternoon down the baths
and clowning in the pool
Ian Smith tried to kiss her,
his novice flailing easily dodged
he didn’t stand a chance.
And then that time on field research
somewhere near Swallow Falls,
absorbed by pond life, I sank
waist-deep in silt and looked idiotic
when she had to drag me out.
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Robert Nisbet: Excursions out of Pembroke Dock
The Rugby boys on their thirty-seater bus
roared from the Dock to the steelworks land,
some eighty miles away, rollicking the while,
the banter, smut and raucousness
coalescing in their joy.
They stuffed the Dragons thirty points to twelve,
then, after the match, to the clubhouse bar.
(They were under-seventeens those boys,
so there was criminality as well as drink
to savour.) Flushed and full, they set off home.
The Women’s Institute, on their coach,
had gone to the pantomime in the Grand.
They hooted the Ugly Sisters, patronised
the Principal Boy, dreamed (each, discreetly)
of her own fine legs of twenty years before.
Then tea and pastries and they set off home.
In the services, the last refreshment stop,
the flanker Bryn, who had scored two tries,
saw his Granny coming in. He shuffled, said,
“Hi, Gran”. The ladies’ party, trooping in,
wrapped like a halter round the throaty voice
of song, as player after player nodded to an aunt,
a gran. Four grans and seven aunts in all.
The boys’ bus ran the final fifty miles
in a decorous calm. Many produced devices,
did games, Suduko. One watched Channel 4.
The wing-three-quarters played I-Spy.
The ladies’ bus, a mile behind, was bursting
with a newly-garnered joy. They whooped,
they shouted, flung hearts in chant and song.
Oggy, oggy. oggy, the grannies roared.
Aye, aye, aye.
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Sally St Clair: Mum In The Afterlife
Not what she expected.
Rubens paints her fat pinkness
Come on Mags, twist at the hip
and best smirk! my mum giggles,
obligingly twists her dimply arse
in his direction. My dad is nowhere
to be seen. He'll be talking high-falutin'
to Ruskin. But anyway, my mum's
modern in the afterlife, shaved tush
and all. Rubens loves her. She's his
model of the moment. It's party night
in heaven. Here come my two friends
who passed in the eighties, dolled up,
bewigged, sequins blinding my mum.
Maggo, they shout, and Rubens winces
his muse misnamed. "Time to
Shimmer!" They toss her a gown, violet,
diaphonous, trailing. Leigh's
making her face, my mum who'd
known my Biba make-up was a
fast-track to hell, is pouting
her lips, squinting her eyes and Leigh
licks his brush, "Ooh you're a
one!" She's blushing now.
Off they go. A technicolour sunset in
heaven's boulevard, my mum, my
two friends; Rubens and Leigh arm in
arm. Crashing cymbals and fluting
trumpets, Jesus on his mobile, just
checking all's OK up ahead, that
God the Father's laid out the canapes
and the angels have done the place
names. My mum's going to dance
all night, all the dances
she disallowed herself. She'll be
Juliet in Nureyev's arms, his
smouldering eyes fixed on her face,
she'll twist for an hour with Chubby
and her hips won't ache in the afterlife,
and she'll think it's so much nicer
than she thought it would be.
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Neil Deasy: On a Whitechapel Ward
White haired, tiny, the translucent skin
of a tea-and-toast-diet; she wrings hands
mutters out of a grimace. Clawed fingers
pick at a crimplene shift dress.
She screeches at my touch, then silence
as she rocks, looks inwards, eyes unseeing.
I want to help, show fellow feeling – nothing
in twenty years has prepared me for this.
I skim her notes for facts, join up the dots of a life:
a Polish refugee, pogrom-evicted from the shtetl,
she married a man who fought the Black Shirts
in Cable Street, died in the Blitz.
Childless, she’s watched her community shrink,
withdraw to the suburbs, these last years
amongst ghosts with her synagogue closed.
History has happened to her, then moved on.
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Julia Webb: Funeral Party
(a centena)
I barely remember now
the shape and colour of her coffin
though I know I must have picked them out.
How solid she was for one so empty of herself,
six men it took to carry her from cart to grave
while appropriate sleet stung our hands and faces.
She should have been there carrying her staff,
her dress hem dragging through the mud,
her black hat keeping the weather from her hair
as we stood beneath dripping trees.
As they lowered the coffin, she might have sung a song
or recited a poem, in the voice I barely remember.
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Stephen Bone: Loud
All December it has lived with us,
a Christmas gift, Amaryllis belladonna,
the still left on label reads. An exotic
from the Southern Hemisphere, gape
wide as a Victorian ear trumpet
or horn speaker of an early gramophone,
Toscanini or ragtime battling through
the hiss and crackle. No shrinking violet,
this bloom was born for centre stage,
a diva with a blood red shriek,
that makes us crave surpliced choirs
of snowdrops, their quiet chant.
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Rodney Wood: Vermillion
After walking through the section in Marks & Sparks
that sells bras, knickers and women’s lingerie
I found myself attacked by shelves displaying
beauty products, lotions, sprays, blinds for eyelashes,
lipsticks in various shades of red, one of which
was vermilion, which must be a mistake as I’d
always assumed it was green because it sounded
green. The first syllable "ver" from "verdant" obviously
and maybe the word comes from the Latin "virere"
which means to be green, and I know that because
I studied Latin at school. In the black and white TV
series about Robin Hood, he talks about his vermilion
tights, which I assumed must be green to act as
camouflage when hiding from the Sheriff’s men
in Nottingham Forest. The Japanese poet Kobayashi
Issa, in 1803, wrote about "seeing vermilion mountains
covered by ladies with parasols" which must obviously
be tree canopies, and when Pierre Bonnard entered
a museum with a tube of vermilion paint to touch-up
the skin of a flower, I assumed he meant the green stalk.
And lastly, at school, I collected stamps and lusted after
the green vermilions of the Jubilee issue of 1887,
Rhodesia issue of 1892 and the Leeward Islands issue
of 1947. How could anyone think vermilion was not green?
I was wrong, but it’s a small thing really, like mistaking
dinner for lunch and vice versa, thinking I could drive
a car, but I was nervous and couldn’t steer, I thought
I’d be different and take the road less travelled
but I ended up in the same place anyway. That lipstick
counter taught me vermilion is red, as did listening
to a song by the heavy metal band Slipknot called
Vermillion Pt. 2, which even sounds so bloody red.
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Nancy Mattson: Epistemology for Quizmasters
Asked to run a neighbourhood quiz
we rounded up questions that we believed
many or few or someone at least could answer:
the hard-headed, the soft-handed,
the tattoo-skinned, the liver-spotted,
the bent-backed, the springy-kneed,
biscuit-eaters and sponge-makers,
cider-heads and bubble-quaffers,
the dread-locked, blue-dyed, braided or bald,
word-hoarders, green-thumbers
painters, singers, tax-collectors,
ball-kickers, bowlers and batters,
history nerds, pawnbrokers,
stargazers, journalists, dog-walkers,
God-botherers and can’t-be-arsed at all.
We nailed invitations on trees, tied them
to fences and gates, pinned them on library
notice boards, slid them through letter boxes:
Everyone welcome! Big prizes, local sponsors!
Punters came in their dozens, why not,
all free, and we do love our quizzes, we do.
The winners were not always those we expected.
After the prizes, a sharp-eyed woman quizzed us:
Why didn’t we ask about anything she knew?
Tell us, please, what kinds of things you know.
Well, I’ve spent my life on the road with funfairs and circuses –
we’re setting up one on the Green next week with dodgems,
swingboats, a ferris wheel, Whack-a-Mole, Ring the Bell.
Go on, ask me about carousels and helter-skelters,
white-knuckle twisters, the Hall of Mirrors,
the Tunnel of Love, the Wall of Death.
I’m a third-generation acrobat, my sister throws knives,
my dad was a strongman, my mum could dance barefoot
on a stallion’s back, my brothers are clowns and magicians.
How many times do you think I’ve been sawed in half?
Next time I’ll help you choose the questions.
But I had a good time today, even if I didn’t win a bean.
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Sita Turner: Amdram Dressing Room
In the Amdram dressing room, it’s all kicking off again.
Everything smells of talc and sweat and Parma violets
Ange is giving Mick the eye – his wife’s selling raffle tickets –
She won’t be pleased
Skin folds itself into pleats and tucks
wedged into sulphureous stockings like old duvets
There's a bottle of whiskey weighing down pages of script -
Did I tell you about my first husband? He wasn’t a nice man
(First Husbands don’t tend to do well in here)
The new mother’s stuffing her crumpled belly into a pair of Spanx
Hers are black
Val's are beige
Naked flesh is everywhere embroidered with wrinkles, gilded in magnolia
I used to be a real beauty when I was your age
Greasepaint leaks into furrowed skin. She smiles cracked and tired
Pastry sweats in Tupperware -
Eat another one dear, there’s nothing of you
Dave’s been down the gym again - he’s looking trim for a man of 83
(his wife doesn’t remember him anymore)
We've been going since 1981
(the stage was the other end of the hall in those days)
Lights up in 5, take your places
40 was a good age, I liked 40
Cinderella’s castle is adorned with support rails
It's my last year, it really is
Such a drama queen
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Poet, producer and presenter, Jill Abram is autistic, has Jewish heritage and lives with fibromyalgia. She grew up in Manchester, travelled the world and now lives in Brixton. Jill’s debut pamphlet, Forgetting My Father, was published by Broken Sleep Books in May 2023. jillabram.co.uk
John Bartlett (he/his) is the author of eleven books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He was the winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize and Highly Commended in the 2021 Mundaring Poetry Competition. His latest poetry collection, Excitations of Entanglement was released in November 2023.
Murray Bodo is a Franciscan Friar who ministers in Cincinnati, Ohio. His latest volume of poems is: Canticle: The Beauty of Art’s Intrusion
Stephen Bone’s most recent work has appeared in Snakeskin,The Frogmore Papers, The Spectator. A Stickleback pamphlet from Hedgehog Press published in 2021.
Maggie Butt’s sixth poetry collection everlove was published by The London Magazine in 2021. Her Penguin Random House historical novels The Prisoner’s Wife and Acts of Love and War are published as Maggie Brookes.
Steve Black is published here and there, now and then. Lives in a room without a view within earshot of Heathrow Airport.
Mark Carson likes to write about engineering and science, slantwise. He thinks technology comes with a rich undercurrent of emotional texture.
Nick Cooke has had around 55 poems published, in a variety of outlets, print and online. He has also published around thirty poetry reviews and literary articles, as well as five short stories. In addition, he has written a number of novels, stage plays and film scripts.
Sarah Davies was born in Merseyside and lives in Bedford, but misses the sea. She is currently the co-runner of the Ouse Muse poetry night in Bedford. She has been published in a range of magazines and is putting together a collection.
Neil Deasy is a recently retired hospital consultant, currently in his second year of Poetry Writing MA course at Newcastle University.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire (USA). He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Venus, Jupiter (2023). His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals, including London Grip.
Briege Duffaud is a Northern Irish writer of poetry and fiction. Her poems and short stories have been published in English and European magazines, including PIR, French Literary Review, The Spectator, Acumen, London Grip …In the past she published two novels and a short story collection. She lives in London.
Gerry Fabian is an internationally published poet and novelist. He has published five books of poetry:Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts,Wildflower Women as well as his poetry baseball book,Ball On The Mound.
Maggie Freeman was born in Trinidad and now lives in London. Her latest novel is The Wives of King Canute.
Lorraine Gibson is a Scottish-Australian writer and poet. Her work appears in journals, magazines and anthologies including: Eureka St, Meniscus Literary Journal, The Galway Review, Live Encounters, Prole, and others. In 2023 she was shortlisted for the 2023 Calanthe Press Open Poetry Prize.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, California Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Isotrope Literary Journal, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.
Susan E. Gunter has published poems in journals in America, Bulgaria, England, Montenegro, and Sweden. She has also published three academic books on the James family. Her poetry reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, the Harvard Review, the Los Angeles Review, and other journals.
Stuart Handysides began writing feature articles as a general practitioner, continued while working as an editor of medical publications. In recent years has focused on poetry. His work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. He recently stepped down after running the Ware Poets competition for 11 years.
Erica Hesketh’s poems have appeared in The North, Acumen, harana poetry and PERVERSE among others. She placed second in the 2022 Winchester Poetry Prize, and was commended in the 2023 Magma Poetry Competition and the 2023 Stanza Competition.
Steve Komarnyckyj’s literary translations and poems have appeared in Index on Censorship, Modern Poetry in Translation and many other journals. He is the holder of two PEN awards and a highly regarded English language poet whose work has been described as articulating “what it means to be human” (Sean Street). His translations of popular and literary Ukrainian fiction and original poetry are published by Kalyna Language Press.
Karen Luke won the Judge’s Choice award for her poem, Dog’s Bone, at the inaugural Chesham Literary Festival 2023. She regularly reads at her local independent bookstore, Chapter Two, in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. Two of her recent poems were published in the October 2023 edition of The Lake.
Caroline Maldonado is a poet and translator, mainly from Italian. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, online and in anthologies. Her publications include four collections translated from Italian (Smokestack Books) and of her own work a pamphlet (IDP 2014) and a collection Faultlines (Vole Books 2022):http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/carolinemaldonadobiog.shtml
Nancy Mattson moved to London from the Canadian prairies in 1990 and continues to learn from people she encounters. Her fourth full poetry collection is Vision on Platform 2 (Shoestring Press, 2018). She co-organizes Poetry Above the Crypt at St Mary Islington.
Sarah Mnatzaganian is an Anglo Armenian poet based in Ely. Her first book Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter, published by Against the Grain Poetry Press,won the 2022 Saboteur Award for best poetry pamphlet 2022. Slow Movement, a journal of love poems to a cello maker, will be published by Coast to Coast to Coast in Spring 2024.
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who has been published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain, where he won the Prole Pamphlet Competition with Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes in 2017, and in the USA, where he is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
Keith Nunes (Aotearoa-New Zealand) has had poetry, fiction, haiku and visuals published around the globe. He creates ethereal manifestations as a way of communicating with the outside world.
Ilse Pedler won the Mslexia Pamphlet competition in 2015 with The Dogs That Chase Bicycle Wheels. Her first collection Auscultation was published by Seren in 2021. She lives in the Lake District and works part time as a veterinary surgeon www.ilsepedler.com
Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press), Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose (BrickHouse Books), and Gold Bracelet in a Cave: Aunt Stokesia (Ethel Press).
Sue Rose works as a literary translator from French and has published three book-length collections with Cinnamon Press: From the Dark Room (2011), The Cost of Keys (2014) and Scion (2020). Her fourth book will be published by Cinnamon Press in 2025.
Sally St Clair’s stories and poems have appeared in magazines and journals, most recently in Stone of Madness Press, Poetry Scotland, Raceme and ARC. She is currently working on a pamphlet, as well as a novel. sallystclair.com. Follow her on Instagram @sallystclair.writer.
John Short’s poetry has appeared in over 70 print and e-magazines around the world, most recently in Black Nore Review and The Cannon’s Mouth. He lives near Liverpool after many years in southern Europe. His fourth collection, In Search of a Subject, is imminent from Cerasus Poetry.
Richard Smith lives in Porirua, New Zealand where he teaches. He recently spent five years working in Cambodia as a teacher and prison chaplain
Steven Taylor was born and raised in Hyde, Greater Manchester, but now lives in Kilburn, London. His poems have appeared in publications including: ACUMEN, Brittle Star, Critical Quarterly, Envoi, Magma, The North, Orbis, Stand, The Stinging Fly, Strix, Urthona and The Wallace Stevens Journal. He is currently working on a collection of poems called HYDE which is about coal mining, cotton and culture.
Sita Turner is a teacher, writer, mother from Kent. She won the Ellen Emily Decent Prize in Poetry in 2023 and her first children’s book is due for release in 2024.
Christian Ward is a UK-based poet with recent work in Acumen, Dreich, Dream Catcher, Dodging the Rain and Canary. He was longlisted for the 2023 Aurora Prize for Writing, shortlisted for the 2023 Ironbridge Poetry Competition and 2023 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and won the 2023 Cathalbui Poetry Competition
Julia Webb is a neurodivergent writer and poetry tutor who lives in Norwich. She has three collections with NIne Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016), Threat (2019) and Threat (2022).
John Whitehouse writes “I am a retired academic, living in London. I taught at Glyndwr University. In 2007 I had a serious stroke, which ended my career. Post stroke my work has been in: Interpreters’ House, Orbis, Acumen, Frogmore Papers, Snakeskin, Obsessed with Pipework, Other Poetry, French Literary Review. I won the Commended Prize in the 2021 Creative Future competition, and a place in their anthology. A short story won joint first prize in the 2019 HISSAC competition, and I have won an Arts Council Grant. I have a collection out in spring 24.”
Kim Whysall-Hammond has recently been published by The Dawntreader, Black Nore Review and The Martello. She has poems in anthologies from Palewell Press and Arachne Press. Her first pamphlet will be published by Palewell Press in August 2024
Anthony Wilson has published six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Wind and the Rain (Blue Diode, 2023). He lives in Plymouth.
Rodney Wood runs an open mic in Woking. He’s been published recently in Sideways, Morphrog, The Pomegranate and Dreich
Judith Wozniak won first prize in the Hippocrates Competition, 2020. Her pamphlet, Patient Watching, was published by Hedgehog Press in January 2022.
Feb 29 2024
London Grip New Poetry #51 – Spring 2024
*
The Spring 2024 issue of London Grip New Poetry features:
* Sarah Mnatzaganian * Jill Abram * Steve Black * Sue Rose
* Ilse Pedler *Richard Smith * Karen Luke * Sarah Davies
* Kenneth Pobo * Mark Carson * Christian Ward * Nick Cooke
* Caroline Maldonado * Susan E Gunter * John Grey * Steven Taylor
* Judith Wozniak * William Doreski * R. Gerry Fabian * Lorraine Gibson
* John Whitehouse * Stuart Handysides *Briege Duffaud * John Bartlett
* Murray Bodo * Keith Nunes * Steve Komarnyckyj * Maggie Freeman
* Maggie Butt * Erica Hesketh * Kim Whysall-Hammond * Anthony Wilson
* John Short * Robert Nisbet * Sally St Clair * Neil Deasy * Julia Webb
* Stephen Bone * Rodney Wood * Nancy Mattson * Sita Turner
Contributor Biographies and Editor’s Notes are also included.
.
A printable version of this issue can be found at LG new poetry Spring 2024
.
Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors.
London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December
.
SUBMISSIONS:Send up to THREE poems & a brief bio to poetry@londongrip.co.uk
Poems should be in a SINGLE Word attachment or included in the message body
Windows: December-January, March-April, June-July & September-October
*
This has turned out to be an unintentionally ornithological edition of LGNP. Readers will find a clutch (flock / swarm / murmuration) of bird poems at the heart of this issue and some stray fledglings may be spotted elsewhere. Indeed quite a few more feathered friends landed in our submissions inbox but we were unable to find a perch for them. Perhaps there is something within many of us which is yearning towards flight and / or migration to other places.
We have often noted that London Grip submissions seem to gather spontaneously around certain themes; and this has once again raised for me the idea of poets being seers or prophets who tune into and verbalise the collective unconscious – or perhaps are even inspired by something beyond the human consciousness. What else might makes three of our poets home in on the deceptiveness and danger of mirrors? Ilse Pedler dramatises the way that our fears can be distorted and reflected back at us – maybe a fitting metaphor for this age of silos and conspiracy theories. Richard Smith regards mirrors as brittle shields which are never very far away from becoming dangerous shards. And Nancy Mattson reminds us that seemingly harmless fun in a fairground hall of mirrors usually occurs alongside false tunnel-of-love versions of commitment and real risks in spectacular attention-seeking wall-of-death stunts. Perceptive readers may well find other persuasive poetic insights in the pages which follow.
****
Very shortly before the publication of this issue we heard the sad news of the death of the poet Alan Brownjohn at the age of 92. An obituary by Declan Ryan, which outlines his many achievements as writer, editor, critic and teacher, describes him as “seemingly indefatigable” and it is true that he remained a familiar, smartly-suited, presence at London poetry events well into his late eighties. His performances of poems featuring a kind of alter ego called Ludbrooke were particularly popular and – as with all his work – succeeded in being both entertaining and insightful. In addition to his many books of poetry he wrote several novels and a review of Enjoyment (Shoestring Press, 2016) can be found on London Grip.
Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
London Grip poetry editor
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Ilse Pedler: Hall of Mirrors I stand before a long mirror and she stands behind me, a frown drawing her eyebrows together, the line between them so deeply etched, it looks like a cut in some lights. So what do you see? she says.
I move slightly and my face warp-
shifts, features elongating in
a blur until my head pops up
the size of a planet, All that
space she made me stuff daily with
facts – symptoms, aetiologies.
In the next, my neck a giraffe’s,
throat narrowed to the size of a
feeding tube, just wide enough to
force down liquids, too small for food
she refused anyway, she stayed
a long time in front of that one.
Moving on again to the one
where she squashes me under her
heel – splat, just like that. Two feet high
struggling to escape the mirror’s
gravity, she knows that below
the eyeline you go un-noticed.
The one where the invisible
truck slams into my stomach knock-
ing it sideways, legs banana-
ing in the opposite direction,
arms cartoon-like wobbling out in
an undulating ricochet.
You didn’t see that one coming
did you she said, as she walked away
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Kenneth Pobo: Emma’s Ants Gregory Crewdson, Beneath The Roses
Branches shadow
the clapboard. I’d gladly
climb a tree and leave. My husband
Rob, late again, perhaps
there’s someone else. He often
quotes Merle Haggard,
a song about Mama’s “Hungry Eyes.”
I have those eyes too.
Rob prefers me cheerful,
a butterfly flexing
on a milkweed.
Years are funny. At first
you hardly see tracks on your face.
When they deepen, you must look.
Closely. I dust in the living room.
Not much living, not much room.
Ants crawl on the arm of the couch.
Such purpose. I could kill them,
but I let them
keep moving.
Kenneth Pobo: The Flamingos
Oil on canvas, Henri Rousseau
White and
pink water
lilies check their watches
wondering how many hours
they have before
blooming stops.
Four flamingos have a day
at the beach. They don’t
discuss winter. It’s just
a rumor anyway. They say
little. Warm water
speaks for them.
Night
is so far away that it ruffles
no feathers. Blue sky
hovers over the flamingos
who can’t stop
one second
from entering the future.
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Caroline Maldonado: Shelduck
It’s not as if she’s human although
she slides across the surface of our screen
as smoothly as refugees or images of war.
The shelduck emerges on the cliff
under the rain to guide her young into the sea
towards the haven of an estuary.
Her webbed feet though good
for paddling have no better hold
on the slippery stone than a man
would have in his boots and she bounces
down from ledge to ledge on her chest,
on her back, on her clamped wings
into the spray with her black and white
puffballs tumbling behind her –
how many are there, nine or eight?
What do you think, will they all survive?
Most of them do up to this point
apart from the one mid-bounce
snatched by a crow before it hits water.
By now the duck’s the right way up
and, battling the surf, has passed the rocks
with her scattered young still behind.
The current’s tugging the family towards
an inlet, the shelduck with her brood
following, all in a spin, five of them.
Now two. She has reached the land where
she waits in vain for her last duckling.
Preening herself with sharp stabs,
a mother mourns on the shore
but ducks aren’t human and this isn’t a war.
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Susan E Gunter: Near Passerine Birds woodpeckers’ tongues are so long they wrap around their skulls It was there, just waiting for me to wrap my tongue around it—the poem, that is. The lyrics of a woodpecker, wounded, wrapped in a black dish towel, and of a woman, also in black, wrapped into my arms. Sobs knocked at her frame, her deep eyes closed against what she can’t accept: her lover, walking away. Away from the beautiful laughing baby, away from the beautiful crying mother. The bird recovers, warmed by the terry- cloth and the hands holding his numbed body. His eyes open slowly, then blink fast, faster, his third nictitating membrane sliding across his pupil, stuttering like manual typewriter keys. The mother will recover; she’s absorbed the shocks, engineered like the bird to take them into her body and send them back to a frozen world. She will love and be loved again. But the lover is broken, from pecking at her as though she were a dead stump. And unlike the woodpecker, who is mended from his crash into glittering glass, he won’t be healed.Back to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Steven Taylor: A Year Of Birds (A 1984 poetry collection by Iris Murdoch) Instead of laundry, I did the shopping this morning and met Jim Broadbent, the award-winning actor, best-supporting Oscar for Iris, and wondered conversationally, if there should be such a difference in price between blueberries, the expensive and juicy, Jim, they cost a small fortune. The Iris, was Murdoch, the writer. Jim played her husband. Her primary fixation was the relationship between art and ideas. Moral philosophy? I can’t claim to have read her. Jim agreed (about blueberries) I think he agreed. Perhaps he said nothing. On the way home I saw a parakeet. A parakeet in a tree. Iris knew Sartre and studied under Wittgenstein but she was only tangentially a Modernist. I believe she died of dementia. Dementia or Alzheimer’s. They both contributed. Her husband survived her, remarried, more happily. Steven Taylor: Helen Mirren I claimed to be part of a group of Manchester United fans who were corralled on arrival in the city, and then shepherded by the Yorkshire police from the railway station to Elland Road, passing underneath a pedestrian bridge where Leeds fans waited with old penny coins sharpened on a lathe. But I lied I heard the story from boys with older brothers and made up I was present Neither did I live on Ballymurphy or march on Bloody Sunday I never kissed Helen Mirren I just wanted you to listen I was prepared to say anything I invented a drug that turned smoke into dragonsBack to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Judith Wozniak: I Forget the Vietnam War and Watch West Ham 1968 A mounted policeman, so close I can smell his horse’s quivering flank. Get out love this is about to kick off. I go home and watch the Big Match with the boys on LWT, curtains drawn, a fug of bodies wrapped in claret and blue. I sense how their breathing changes, they edge forward on the sofa, balling their fists, leap and roar at a Hammers goal. The War Museum, Saigon. A young woman shouldering a crate of weapons, gazes back at me, her face streaked with runnels of grime. An American tourist tells me he was there. She can only have been ninety pounds. That ammunition weighed a ton. He has flash backs, the tunnels, being trapped by his basketball player’s broad shoulders. If you didn’t come home in a body bag no one wanted to know.Back to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Stuart Handysides: The Spiral after Psalm 137 and Slaughterhouse-Five Babylon’s rivers, fringed by willows hung with harps, sound picturesque like grandes baigneuses, or déjeuner sur l’herbe. No sewage there or trollies half submerged. We know the captives miss their home they cannot sing, they have no mirth. The songs of Don McLean and Boney M stop there. Does anyone read on? It’s not deliverance the psalmist wants – perhaps that’s just assumed. The call is for revenge – upon the daughters, and the little ones. So it goes…Back to poet list… Forward to next poet
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John Bartlett: on the advice of children the war in Gaza has been cancelled and from the bombed out Kamal Adwan hospital the children – amputees or riddled with shrapnel -- sent out a communiqué cancelling further hostilities without further notice we are many (they said) and together with the returning dead yet wrapped in the innocence of white we will outnumber the men in suits with microphones and missiles then the children of Ukraine called a press conference to announce an embargo on missiles inscribed with our names without further notice the men in suits fell silent because the profit margin on the sale of children’s toys is so much less than on missiles remember you have (the children said) but three score year and ten to live and like the grasses you will wilt and die we are the forever children with eternities to wait and no further correspondence will be entered into (they said)Back to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Murray Bodo: Blue December in a time of war in Gaza and Ukraine Fainter, the old furnace breathes the air seems oblivious it does not stir Is this the beginning of not getting going again longing taking over Check and re-check switches the ceiling fan rattles trying, desiring more air Still air, old padding feet making air move slow-moving what will move Not just one more Winter morn things aren’t as before something no longer soarsBack to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Maggie Freeman: In Memoriam love as absence and a bloodless hunger in the cloisters of the heart - John Burnside The woman’s seated on the bench beneath the apple tree. She stretches her hands open before her, cupping them so the July sun fills them. How lined her hands are now, pitted with deep shadow, sharp with the heat and light that have taken so long so much time and space to travel here. How empty her hands are. When she parts her fingers everyone and everything she’s ever loved fall through the cracks spill out of her life. She’s left alone. They have gone their own way and left her empty. Her empty hands ache. She holds them out, her arms ache with longing the need for consolation. The brittle leaves of the apple tree rattle in the dry wind.Back to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Julia Webb: Funeral Party (a centena) I barely remember now the shape and colour of her coffin though I know I must have picked them out. How solid she was for one so empty of herself, six men it took to carry her from cart to grave while appropriate sleet stung our hands and faces. She should have been there carrying her staff, her dress hem dragging through the mud, her black hat keeping the weather from her hair as we stood beneath dripping trees. As they lowered the coffin, she might have sung a song or recited a poem, in the voice I barely remember.Back to poet list… Forward to next poet
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Nancy Mattson: Epistemology for Quizmasters Asked to run a neighbourhood quiz we rounded up questions that we believed many or few or someone at least could answer: the hard-headed, the soft-handed, the tattoo-skinned, the liver-spotted, the bent-backed, the springy-kneed, biscuit-eaters and sponge-makers, cider-heads and bubble-quaffers, the dread-locked, blue-dyed, braided or bald, word-hoarders, green-thumbers painters, singers, tax-collectors, ball-kickers, bowlers and batters, history nerds, pawnbrokers, stargazers, journalists, dog-walkers, God-botherers and can’t-be-arsed at all. We nailed invitations on trees, tied them to fences and gates, pinned them on library notice boards, slid them through letter boxes: Everyone welcome! Big prizes, local sponsors! Punters came in their dozens, why not, all free, and we do love our quizzes, we do. The winners were not always those we expected. After the prizes, a sharp-eyed woman quizzed us: Why didn’t we ask about anything she knew? Tell us, please, what kinds of things you know. Well, I’ve spent my life on the road with funfairs and circuses – we’re setting up one on the Green next week with dodgems, swingboats, a ferris wheel, Whack-a-Mole, Ring the Bell.
Go on, ask me about carousels and helter-skelters,
white-knuckle twisters, the Hall of Mirrors,
the Tunnel of Love, the Wall of Death.
I’m a third-generation acrobat, my sister throws knives,
my dad was a strongman, my mum could dance barefoot
on a stallion’s back, my brothers are clowns and magicians.
How many times do you think I’ve been sawed in half?
Next time I’ll help you choose the questions.
But I had a good time today, even if I didn’t win a bean.
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Poet, producer and presenter, Jill Abram is autistic, has Jewish heritage and lives with fibromyalgia. She grew up in Manchester, travelled the world and now lives in Brixton. Jill’s debut pamphlet, Forgetting My Father, was published by Broken Sleep Books in May 2023. jillabram.co.uk
John Bartlett (he/his) is the author of eleven books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He was the winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize and Highly Commended in the 2021 Mundaring Poetry Competition. His latest poetry collection, Excitations of Entanglement was released in November 2023.
Murray Bodo is a Franciscan Friar who ministers in Cincinnati, Ohio. His latest volume of poems is: Canticle: The Beauty of Art’s Intrusion
Stephen Bone’s most recent work has appeared in Snakeskin,The Frogmore Papers, The Spectator. A Stickleback pamphlet from Hedgehog Press published in 2021.
Maggie Butt’s sixth poetry collection everlove was published by The London Magazine in 2021. Her Penguin Random House historical novels The Prisoner’s Wife and Acts of Love and War are published as Maggie Brookes.
Steve Black is published here and there, now and then. Lives in a room without a view within earshot of Heathrow Airport.
Mark Carson likes to write about engineering and science, slantwise. He thinks technology comes with a rich undercurrent of emotional texture.
Nick Cooke has had around 55 poems published, in a variety of outlets, print and online. He has also published around thirty poetry reviews and literary articles, as well as five short stories. In addition, he has written a number of novels, stage plays and film scripts.
Sarah Davies was born in Merseyside and lives in Bedford, but misses the sea. She is currently the co-runner of the Ouse Muse poetry night in Bedford. She has been published in a range of magazines and is putting together a collection.
Neil Deasy is a recently retired hospital consultant, currently in his second year of Poetry Writing MA course at Newcastle University.
William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire (USA). He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Venus, Jupiter (2023). His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals, including London Grip.
Briege Duffaud is a Northern Irish writer of poetry and fiction. Her poems and short stories have been published in English and European magazines, including PIR, French Literary Review, The Spectator, Acumen, London Grip …In the past she published two novels and a short story collection. She lives in London.
Gerry Fabian is an internationally published poet and novelist. He has published five books of poetry:Parallels, Coming Out Of The Atlantic, Electronic Forecasts,Wildflower Women as well as his poetry baseball book,Ball On The Mound.
Maggie Freeman was born in Trinidad and now lives in London. Her latest novel is The Wives of King Canute.
Lorraine Gibson is a Scottish-Australian writer and poet. Her work appears in journals, magazines and anthologies including: Eureka St, Meniscus Literary Journal, The Galway Review, Live Encounters, Prole, and others. In 2023 she was shortlisted for the 2023 Calanthe Press Open Poetry Prize.
John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, California Quarterly and Lost Pilots. Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Isotrope Literary Journal, Seventh Quarry, La Presa and Doubly Mad.
Susan E. Gunter has published poems in journals in America, Bulgaria, England, Montenegro, and Sweden. She has also published three academic books on the James family. Her poetry reviews have appeared in Crab Creek Review, the Harvard Review, the Los Angeles Review, and other journals.
Stuart Handysides began writing feature articles as a general practitioner, continued while working as an editor of medical publications. In recent years has focused on poetry. His work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies. He recently stepped down after running the Ware Poets competition for 11 years.
Erica Hesketh’s poems have appeared in The North, Acumen, harana poetry and PERVERSE among others. She placed second in the 2022 Winchester Poetry Prize, and was commended in the 2023 Magma Poetry Competition and the 2023 Stanza Competition.
Steve Komarnyckyj’s literary translations and poems have appeared in Index on Censorship, Modern Poetry in Translation and many other journals. He is the holder of two PEN awards and a highly regarded English language poet whose work has been described as articulating “what it means to be human” (Sean Street). His translations of popular and literary Ukrainian fiction and original poetry are published by Kalyna Language Press.
Karen Luke won the Judge’s Choice award for her poem, Dog’s Bone, at the inaugural Chesham Literary Festival 2023. She regularly reads at her local independent bookstore, Chapter Two, in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. Two of her recent poems were published in the October 2023 edition of The Lake.
Caroline Maldonado is a poet and translator, mainly from Italian. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, online and in anthologies. Her publications include four collections translated from Italian (Smokestack Books) and of her own work a pamphlet (IDP 2014) and a collection Faultlines (Vole Books 2022):http://www.poetrypf.co.uk/carolinemaldonadobiog.shtml
Nancy Mattson moved to London from the Canadian prairies in 1990 and continues to learn from people she encounters. Her fourth full poetry collection is Vision on Platform 2 (Shoestring Press, 2018). She co-organizes Poetry Above the Crypt at St Mary Islington.
Sarah Mnatzaganian is an Anglo Armenian poet based in Ely. Her first book Lemonade in the Armenian Quarter, published by Against the Grain Poetry Press,won the 2022 Saboteur Award for best poetry pamphlet 2022. Slow Movement, a journal of love poems to a cello maker, will be published by Coast to Coast to Coast in Spring 2024.
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh poet who has been published widely and in roughly equal measures in Britain, where he won the Prole Pamphlet Competition with Robeson, Fitzgerald and Other Heroes in 2017, and in the USA, where he is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
Keith Nunes (Aotearoa-New Zealand) has had poetry, fiction, haiku and visuals published around the globe. He creates ethereal manifestations as a way of communicating with the outside world.
Ilse Pedler won the Mslexia Pamphlet competition in 2015 with The Dogs That Chase Bicycle Wheels. Her first collection Auscultation was published by Seren in 2021. She lives in the Lake District and works part time as a veterinary surgeon www.ilsepedler.com
Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press), Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose (BrickHouse Books), and Gold Bracelet in a Cave: Aunt Stokesia (Ethel Press).
Sue Rose works as a literary translator from French and has published three book-length collections with Cinnamon Press: From the Dark Room (2011), The Cost of Keys (2014) and Scion (2020). Her fourth book will be published by Cinnamon Press in 2025.
Sally St Clair’s stories and poems have appeared in magazines and journals, most recently in Stone of Madness Press, Poetry Scotland, Raceme and ARC. She is currently working on a pamphlet, as well as a novel. sallystclair.com. Follow her on Instagram @sallystclair.writer.
John Short’s poetry has appeared in over 70 print and e-magazines around the world, most recently in Black Nore Review and The Cannon’s Mouth. He lives near Liverpool after many years in southern Europe. His fourth collection, In Search of a Subject, is imminent from Cerasus Poetry.
Richard Smith lives in Porirua, New Zealand where he teaches. He recently spent five years working in Cambodia as a teacher and prison chaplain
Steven Taylor was born and raised in Hyde, Greater Manchester, but now lives in Kilburn, London. His poems have appeared in publications including: ACUMEN, Brittle Star, Critical Quarterly, Envoi, Magma, The North, Orbis, Stand, The Stinging Fly, Strix, Urthona and The Wallace Stevens Journal. He is currently working on a collection of poems called HYDE which is about coal mining, cotton and culture.
Sita Turner is a teacher, writer, mother from Kent. She won the Ellen Emily Decent Prize in Poetry in 2023 and her first children’s book is due for release in 2024.
Christian Ward is a UK-based poet with recent work in Acumen, Dreich, Dream Catcher, Dodging the Rain and Canary. He was longlisted for the 2023 Aurora Prize for Writing, shortlisted for the 2023 Ironbridge Poetry Competition and 2023 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and won the 2023 Cathalbui Poetry Competition
Julia Webb is a neurodivergent writer and poetry tutor who lives in Norwich. She has three collections with NIne Arches Press: Bird Sisters (2016), Threat (2019) and Threat (2022).
John Whitehouse writes “I am a retired academic, living in London. I taught at Glyndwr University. In 2007 I had a serious stroke, which ended my career. Post stroke my work has been in: Interpreters’ House, Orbis, Acumen, Frogmore Papers, Snakeskin, Obsessed with Pipework, Other Poetry, French Literary Review. I won the Commended Prize in the 2021 Creative Future competition, and a place in their anthology. A short story won joint first prize in the 2019 HISSAC competition, and I have won an Arts Council Grant. I have a collection out in spring 24.”
Kim Whysall-Hammond has recently been published by The Dawntreader, Black Nore Review and The Martello. She has poems in anthologies from Palewell Press and Arachne Press. Her first pamphlet will be published by Palewell Press in August 2024
Anthony Wilson has published six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Wind and the Rain (Blue Diode, 2023). He lives in Plymouth.
Rodney Wood runs an open mic in Woking. He’s been published recently in Sideways, Morphrog, The Pomegranate and Dreich
Judith Wozniak won first prize in the Hippocrates Competition, 2020. Her pamphlet, Patient Watching, was published by Hedgehog Press in January 2022.