Poetry review – BIRDMEN AND ASTRONAUTS: Sarah Leavesley is intrigued by the layers of meaning in a new collection by Dharmavadana
Birdmen and Astronauts
Dharmavadana
Poetry Salzburg
978-3-901993-87-9
36 pages £9
How could I resist a title as intriguing as Birdmen and Astronauts? With difficulty, especially when the pamphlet-opening poem, “Birdmen of London”, lives up to that promise of intriguing ambiguity, right from its first line: ‘No one knows they are birdmen.’
The confidence and unusual striking details, combined with a style in which not a word is wasted, set the high standard of the whole pamphlet; and they are key, I think, to the interesting ‘half-told narratives’ that hook me in.
Summing up, in what at one level may be a spoiler but at another is very far from it, these birdmen only reveal themselves in secret, long for children they can’t have, and have a dream that evokes subtle phoenix-like connotations. This should give a taste of the possible narrative but the delight is in the actual imagery, sound and word choices.
‘Half-told narratives’ is the very apt phrase used by endorser Kathy Pimlott. It doesn’t apply to all poems to the same degree but is very much at work in my personal favourites. This, in conjunction with evocative specifics, are what make me want to re-read, forging my own interpretations in my head and threading pieces together across the pamphlet.
The second poem, “Through the Fence to the Dump”, gives us urban life and boyhood’s wonderfully wild imaginations, as:
[…] The air is a sting of wild garlic
and tramps’ pee and we’re free, Paul and me,
Overall, the pamphlet reads as an exploration of maleness, memory, childhood, growing up, family and relationships, with so much more flowing from and within that. Clear precise imagery is reinforced with sound, movement and strong verbs. It’s mostly a carefully crafted understated approach but I also really enjoyed the two structurally more adventurous pieces towards the end, including “For a night I was Spider-Man in London”. Like Spiderman, this poem weaves, swings and trapezes its way down and across the page:
I stuck myself SCHLUPP!
to the roof of a bus
to get to you,
It’s a playful poem but not without a different emotional edge in the context of this pamphlet, given that Spiderman, being Spiderman, rescues Mary Jane before leaving.
Although my initial favourite poems were the ones with a layer of ambiguity, guessed-narrative and more experimental form, there are also what I will call vivid ‘character poems’, often of family members. These are beautifully depicted but at first felt more personal to the poet. However, on re-reading, they grew on me more and more, reminding me of my own relatives in the characteristics picked out.
The eyes don’t match: a gleam in one,
ire in the other. […]
(“My Derby Great-Grandmother”)
The I-narrator’s/narrators’ links with these characters also develop deeper relevance and force. “My Braver Younger Cousin” is particularly resonant – who hasn’t had a relative or classmate that casts comparisons? But this memory of childhood daring is also very moving in the reality of what to be ‘a helpless freckled god’ becomes, with that loss reinforced by the intimacy of the second-person ‘you’.
In coming to care for these characters, quieter hints of narrative and emotion that were present all along in less immediately intimate poems start to ‘pop’ and ‘crack’ like “My Father’s Bonfires” with its smoke that drifts ‘starward’.
As I’ve mentioned, they also matter because every one of them means something to the I-narrator. When read sequentially, with the assumption that most feature the same first-person narrator, they reveal more about this narrator, as well as strengthening the poems’ emotional impact.
This is the point, then, at which I consider relationships, perspective and different viewpoints.
The dynamics of relationships and expectations are two further themes recurring throughout the pamphlet, linked to masculinity and gender. (It’s worth just noting that the back-cover biography for Dharmavadana is written in third-person ‘he’ and includes the name David Penn.) The cumulative (half-)narrative across the pamphlet moves from a poem in which the I-narrator dares to ask for a date, and gets ‘a goodbye snog’, only to then stand the girl up (“Glam Nights”), to:
“Fight or sing” – the brush pointing at my groin –
“You’re blocked, there, by some uncertainty.”
(“The Painter”)
By “The Spaceman and Cybele” (the most immediately obvious astronaut referenced in the pamphlet title), this has built to perhaps the most explicit action and phrasing:
That night, when I touched down on your front lawn
I hacked off my penis and balls
with a flint I’d found in the flowerbeds. […]
Perspectives change, even though they may be tied down for a while. Are the ‘I’ and ‘you’ in this poem only The Spaceman and Cybele and/or symbolic of the I-narrator of other poems and his mother? Yet details like ‘I thought I could finally touch you but’ fit less easily with that. Re-googling the myth, I find Cybele isn’t just a Great Mother Goddess but fell in love with a mortal who then castrated himself. Rather than ‘you’ being a mother who held her son at a distance, this gives me a male narrator addressing his goddess-like lover, with spaceman offering the nearest mortal possibility for achieving similar stature/height, and failing. Lionesses are sent after him, reducing him to a mess and childlike thumb-sucking. I don’t feel these lionesses are meant to be understood literally but, metaphorically, I can read them as the narrator’s siblings (sent by a mother-you), his own children (sent by a lover-mother) or a lover turning loose her pack of friends. Maybe such multiple different readings are intended, giving Freudian undertones, or suggesting that any relationship can end up reduced back to a mother and child dynamic…
Figurative interpretation comes into play too in considering the pamphlet title’s plural astronauts. Clouds hang like spaceships (“Cloud Watching in Hyde Park”). Spiderman might be another sky-prone character who doesn’t quite reach space, though his roof jumping recalls the childhood daring of “My Braver Younger Cousin”, where tree-climbing might also be a wish to reach the sky, or beyond. In “Two Gaze at a Tree”, a man sees it as ‘bowed before heights that might have released it’, bringing to mind need for escape, which then recalls the joy at freedom in the second poem I quoted from earlier. This circles back to expectations, which may fit hand in hand with looking for escape and/or distance.
“Two Gaze at a Tree” extends perspective into a direct viewpoint comparison as an otherwise unidentified he and she look at a ‘pirouetting tree’. The pair endow it with completely different (often inharmonious or oppositional) features, hopes and meanings, including ‘He saw a canker unravelling from the earth’, while ‘It was a god, she thought, churning in mist –’. But for her, it is also a flinching monster and this piece concludes with her seeing a self-destructive clown, tower of rats and ‘crying boy-emperor’.
This is just one or many ‘mismatches’ of different kinds across the pamphlet until it closes with a more complementary viewpoint in “An Avenue of Plane Trees Acts As My Honour Guard”. Here, the ‘we’ of these trees – in two columns laid out landscape across two pages – voices celebration, acceptance, protection, strength, support, lack of shame and more.
It’s a wonderful poem. Although I’d most love to quote the final lines, I’ll leave that for readers to discover themselves and give this example instead:
We are flexed as a strong
body is flexed,
like a wrestler connected to
the earth.
We will hide you from the funeral sky.
To stop where this poem ends is a moment of peace but also a reminder that nothing is entirely still. In Birdmen and Astronauts, much ‘seethes’ and ‘sifts’ on afterwards, encouraging multiple re-readings.
Jun 15 2026
London Grip Poetry Review -Dharmavadana
Poetry review – BIRDMEN AND ASTRONAUTS: Sarah Leavesley is intrigued by the layers of meaning in a new collection by Dharmavadana
Birdmen and Astronauts
Dharmavadana
Poetry Salzburg
978-3-901993-87-9
36 pages £9
How could I resist a title as intriguing as Birdmen and Astronauts? With difficulty, especially when the pamphlet-opening poem, “Birdmen of London”, lives up to that promise of intriguing ambiguity, right from its first line: ‘No one knows they are birdmen.’
The confidence and unusual striking details, combined with a style in which not a word is wasted, set the high standard of the whole pamphlet; and they are key, I think, to the interesting ‘half-told narratives’ that hook me in.
Summing up, in what at one level may be a spoiler but at another is very far from it, these birdmen only reveal themselves in secret, long for children they can’t have, and have a dream that evokes subtle phoenix-like connotations. This should give a taste of the possible narrative but the delight is in the actual imagery, sound and word choices.
‘Half-told narratives’ is the very apt phrase used by endorser Kathy Pimlott. It doesn’t apply to all poems to the same degree but is very much at work in my personal favourites. This, in conjunction with evocative specifics, are what make me want to re-read, forging my own interpretations in my head and threading pieces together across the pamphlet.
The second poem, “Through the Fence to the Dump”, gives us urban life and boyhood’s wonderfully wild imaginations, as:
[…] The air is a sting of wild garlic
and tramps’ pee and we’re free, Paul and me,
Overall, the pamphlet reads as an exploration of maleness, memory, childhood, growing up, family and relationships, with so much more flowing from and within that. Clear precise imagery is reinforced with sound, movement and strong verbs. It’s mostly a carefully crafted understated approach but I also really enjoyed the two structurally more adventurous pieces towards the end, including “For a night I was Spider-Man in London”. Like Spiderman, this poem weaves, swings and trapezes its way down and across the page:
I stuck myself SCHLUPP!
to the roof of a bus
to get to you,
It’s a playful poem but not without a different emotional edge in the context of this pamphlet, given that Spiderman, being Spiderman, rescues Mary Jane before leaving.
Although my initial favourite poems were the ones with a layer of ambiguity, guessed-narrative and more experimental form, there are also what I will call vivid ‘character poems’, often of family members. These are beautifully depicted but at first felt more personal to the poet. However, on re-reading, they grew on me more and more, reminding me of my own relatives in the characteristics picked out.
The eyes don’t match: a gleam in one,
ire in the other. […]
(“My Derby Great-Grandmother”)
The I-narrator’s/narrators’ links with these characters also develop deeper relevance and force. “My Braver Younger Cousin” is particularly resonant – who hasn’t had a relative or classmate that casts comparisons? But this memory of childhood daring is also very moving in the reality of what to be ‘a helpless freckled god’ becomes, with that loss reinforced by the intimacy of the second-person ‘you’.
In coming to care for these characters, quieter hints of narrative and emotion that were present all along in less immediately intimate poems start to ‘pop’ and ‘crack’ like “My Father’s Bonfires” with its smoke that drifts ‘starward’.
As I’ve mentioned, they also matter because every one of them means something to the I-narrator. When read sequentially, with the assumption that most feature the same first-person narrator, they reveal more about this narrator, as well as strengthening the poems’ emotional impact.
This is the point, then, at which I consider relationships, perspective and different viewpoints.
The dynamics of relationships and expectations are two further themes recurring throughout the pamphlet, linked to masculinity and gender. (It’s worth just noting that the back-cover biography for Dharmavadana is written in third-person ‘he’ and includes the name David Penn.) The cumulative (half-)narrative across the pamphlet moves from a poem in which the I-narrator dares to ask for a date, and gets ‘a goodbye snog’, only to then stand the girl up (“Glam Nights”), to:
“Fight or sing” – the brush pointing at my groin –
“You’re blocked, there, by some uncertainty.”
(“The Painter”)
By “The Spaceman and Cybele” (the most immediately obvious astronaut referenced in the pamphlet title), this has built to perhaps the most explicit action and phrasing:
That night, when I touched down on your front lawn
I hacked off my penis and balls
with a flint I’d found in the flowerbeds. […]
Perspectives change, even though they may be tied down for a while. Are the ‘I’ and ‘you’ in this poem only The Spaceman and Cybele and/or symbolic of the I-narrator of other poems and his mother? Yet details like ‘I thought I could finally touch you but’ fit less easily with that. Re-googling the myth, I find Cybele isn’t just a Great Mother Goddess but fell in love with a mortal who then castrated himself. Rather than ‘you’ being a mother who held her son at a distance, this gives me a male narrator addressing his goddess-like lover, with spaceman offering the nearest mortal possibility for achieving similar stature/height, and failing. Lionesses are sent after him, reducing him to a mess and childlike thumb-sucking. I don’t feel these lionesses are meant to be understood literally but, metaphorically, I can read them as the narrator’s siblings (sent by a mother-you), his own children (sent by a lover-mother) or a lover turning loose her pack of friends. Maybe such multiple different readings are intended, giving Freudian undertones, or suggesting that any relationship can end up reduced back to a mother and child dynamic…
Figurative interpretation comes into play too in considering the pamphlet title’s plural astronauts. Clouds hang like spaceships (“Cloud Watching in Hyde Park”). Spiderman might be another sky-prone character who doesn’t quite reach space, though his roof jumping recalls the childhood daring of “My Braver Younger Cousin”, where tree-climbing might also be a wish to reach the sky, or beyond. In “Two Gaze at a Tree”, a man sees it as ‘bowed before heights that might have released it’, bringing to mind need for escape, which then recalls the joy at freedom in the second poem I quoted from earlier. This circles back to expectations, which may fit hand in hand with looking for escape and/or distance.
“Two Gaze at a Tree” extends perspective into a direct viewpoint comparison as an otherwise unidentified he and she look at a ‘pirouetting tree’. The pair endow it with completely different (often inharmonious or oppositional) features, hopes and meanings, including ‘He saw a canker unravelling from the earth’, while ‘It was a god, she thought, churning in mist –’. But for her, it is also a flinching monster and this piece concludes with her seeing a self-destructive clown, tower of rats and ‘crying boy-emperor’.
This is just one or many ‘mismatches’ of different kinds across the pamphlet until it closes with a more complementary viewpoint in “An Avenue of Plane Trees Acts As My Honour Guard”. Here, the ‘we’ of these trees – in two columns laid out landscape across two pages – voices celebration, acceptance, protection, strength, support, lack of shame and more.
It’s a wonderful poem. Although I’d most love to quote the final lines, I’ll leave that for readers to discover themselves and give this example instead:
We are flexed as a strong
body is flexed,
like a wrestler connected to
the earth.
We will hide you from the funeral sky.
To stop where this poem ends is a moment of peace but also a reminder that nothing is entirely still. In Birdmen and Astronauts, much ‘seethes’ and ‘sifts’ on afterwards, encouraging multiple re-readings.