The Salt Book of Younger Poets

THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS

edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough
Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99

The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.

Rachael Allen | Daniel Barrow | Jack Belloli | Jay Bernard | James Brookes | Phil Brown | Niall Campbell | Kayo Chingonyi | Miranda Cichy | John Clegg | Nia Davies | Amy De’ath | Inua Ellams | Charlotte Geater | Tom Gilliver | Dai George | Emily Hasler | Oli Hazzard | Dan Hitchens | Sarah Howe | Andrew Jamison | Annie Katchinska | Andrew McMillan | Siofra McSherry | Ben Maier | Laura Marsh | Annabella Massey | James Midgley | Helen Mort | Charlotte Newman | Richard O’Brien | Richard Osmond | Vidyan Ravinthiran | Sophie Robinson | Charlotte Runcie | Ashna Sarkar | William Searle | Colette Sensier | Warsan Shire | Lavinia Singer | Adham Smart | Martha Sprackland | Eloise Stonborough | Emily Tesh | Jack Underwood | Ahren Warner | Ben Wilkinson | Sophie Yeo

Available to pre-order from Amazon.

More about → The Salt Book of Younger Poets

Poetry Books of 2009: Etter, Lumsden, Paterson, Read, Williams & Mackenzie

Like many other poetry readers and writers, I was recently invited to submit my three favourite poetry collections of 2009 to Michelle McGrane's feature on her Peony Moon site (if you missed it, the first of eight installments is here). And like other readers and writers who also happen to blog from time to time, I thought I'd elaborate a little on these choices, while also offering a few other collections which would have been included on a longer list (of six, to be exact).

Carrie Etter's The Tethers was perhaps the easiest choice - I can't say too much about it as I'm reviewing the book elsewhere, but its poems are so elegant, precise, witty and intense it made for a reading experience unlike any other I've had this year. Full of allusion and yet entirely contemporary, by turns darkly serious and unusually funny - it's lyrical invention, range and ambition make obvious the collection was years in the making. Take the wonderful close to 'The Daughters of Prospero':

Placing white boat after boat onto a brook,

because she has learned beginner's origami,
because her fingers have amassed a score of cuts,

because some of the boats never looked seaworthy,
because a surprising number can glide like swans,

the girl sets her boats on a fatal course, and though
her head is bent, I can just see her eyes' fierce gleam.

I also chose Roddy Lumsden's Third Wish Wasted; somewhat of a departure from his earlier work, though the development evident in this book was hinted at in his previous collection, The Drowned Man, published in his New & Selected Poems. Its formal invention, wry humour and leaping from dazzling image to image are refreshingly energetic if sometimes dizzying, and the best poems - 'Against Complaint', 'Keepsakes', 'Stone Tape Theory' and 'The Beautiful' - are the business. Here are the final pitch-perfect lines of the latter:

                                              They
drift unapproached, gazed never-selves,
blunt paragons of genetic industry. We

desire them but cannot want such order.
We stand, mouths open, and cannot help
stammering our secrets, nailed to water.

The other collection I picked was Don Paterson's Rain. A predictable choice, some might say, but give me a chance to explain first. I'm not so much a fan of the book as a whole - I think in terms of consistency it can't quite compete with God's Gift to Women, or even Landing Light - as I am for its containing what I think are some truly remarkable individual poems, borne of Paterson's Frostian lyric gift, melancholic humour and brilliant turn of phrase. 'Two Trees', for instance, is an elegant yet unadorned poem which slyly, almost frustratingly, undercuts its cumulative beauty in its terse final lines, while the sprawling 'Song for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze' is a liberated celebration of music and the internet, reflecting all of our geeky obsessions. I don't think it's too bold a thing to say that both will probably be remembered among the major poems written at the start of this century. For my money though, the title poem is still by far the best in the book, though I'm a sucker for this kind of soaring lyric poetry:

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one big thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame [...]

But while I'd recommend all three of these titles, there are a handful of others I'd also like to point towards. First is Sally Read's Broken Sleep, her second book since her impressive Bloodaxe debut, The Point of Splitting. I've only recently got stuck into this collection having bought it some months ago, but as with her debut, I've enjoyed what I've read given her ability to marry a gentle, closely observant lyric style with often difficult, even painful, subject matters. In the main sequence of poems which address pregnancy, birth and motherhood in often surprising ways, the title poem is particularly memorable; partly in dialogue with Plath's 'Morning Song':

The birds rise together as though

on an up-draught. I spread
your outstretched fingers
on the back of my hand as you
work away at one breast -

ears pulling in time, toes curling;
your whole body drinking -
and lost milk from my other breast
grows cold as rain on my nightdress.

Another book worth buying is Tony Williams' debut, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. As the title suggests, Tony is a Sheffield-based poet, and it was grand to read at his collection's launch, having followed his poems' appearances in mags and journals over the years. There are plenty of reasons to read Williams' poems. First, his influences are as much European (and specifically German Romantic) as they are British, which makes his best work highly distinctive. His poems are also funny, and witty, though as W.N.Herbert notes in his endorsement, '[Williams] understands that wit, as much as it may delight the reader, is always melancholy'. 'The Matlock Elegies' perhaps best captures Williams' ability to combine insightful profundity, ennui and wicked humour to great effect:

O my beloved Matlock! Market town
with barely a market to speak of,
my county town, my botched Eden.
Old Matlock, Matlock Green, Matlock Bank,
loop of the hated supermarket road,
the old quarry where the valley's
truculent aggression pools as sediment,
the satellites of Tansley and Elton, Winster,
Lea and Holloway. Matlock Bath,
tawdry jewel, I curse you as a tourist honey-pot;
you shadow me even unto Death. You slink
like a line of warts through the gorgeous
rock of my deliverance. A part of me
wanders forever round your amusement arcades
in an off-white polyester shirt smelling of stale teenage sweat
and a blue school tie. Another is sick in the woods.

Last, but not least, I'll recommend Rob A Mackenzie's debut, The Opposite of Cabbage, a collection I reviewed for Magma 44, where I described his writing as 'switching between playful contemporary wit and dark humour, honest feeling and compassion, and an occasional, beguiling obscurantism driven by language's slipperiness and a distrust of simple explanations'. Bernadine Evaristo sums the collection up nicely by describing Mackenzie's poetry as 'kaleidoscopic' - varied, often unusual, frequently shifting register and changing tack, it's a mixed yet surprisingly consistent book of poems. But my favourite piece is still 'In the Last Few Seconds', which vividly paints the cinematics of a car crash:

You expect a a flashback, a potted bio
of divorce and automobile replacement -
how one breakage led to another - film noir
    bleaching the blackness,

but instead stars blister across the sunroof.
Cracks appear. You wait for the tunnel sponged in
light from some new world. But the car splits water,
    floats in its shadow.

All books worth getting hold of, then, and that's before I start on those poetry volumes which aren't single collections, including Michael Donaghy's essential Collected Poems, and the Byrne and Pollard edited Bloodaxe anthology of younger poets, Voice Recognition. Also difficult to believe that certain collections were published over a year ago, like Mark Waldron's excellent debut...

----------

In other "news", it's also just over a year since my first pamphlet of poems, The Sparks, was published by tall-lighthouse press - eleventh in their Pilot series, showcasing emerging British and Irish poets under 30.

As expected, it didn't exactly receive a raft of reviews, but then pamphlets never tend to get much coverage, and I've been fortunate enough to receive kind comments on it from various poets and readers, which has been encouraging.

Since publication it's also sold steadily, at readings and other events, and at the Sheffield Hallam University branch of Blackwell's, who took a chance on ordering it in, and have stocked in another handful each time it's sold out, for which I'm really grateful.

Thanks to this kind support, it won't be long before the first modest print run has sold - something which makes me personally chuffed, but mainly thankful that people have bought it alongside other tall-lighthouse titles, and so supported an excellent small press - home to up-and-coming writers including Adam O'Riordan, Emily Berry, Helen Mort, Aoife Mannix, and many more besides.

For those interested in getting hold of a copy of The Sparks who haven't yet, there are still a few copies available at the Blackwell's mentioned above, and you can also find it on the tall-lighthouse website, here. I'm not going to lie to you and say they'd make perfect Xmas gifts (there're no mentions of reindeer, tinsel, or turkey dinners contained within its pages, and snow only appears as a bit of wishful thinking), but I'd appreciate the support nonetheless.

I'm also reading a poem from the pamphlet on Asking a Shadow to Dance, a forthcoming DVD from Oxfam, along with readings from Daljit Nagra, Kayo Chingonyi, Lorraine Mariner and Heather Phillipson, among others - more on which in the near future.

More about → Poetry Books of 2009: Etter, Lumsden, Paterson, Read, Williams & Mackenzie

Poetry Feature: Conor O'Callaghan

Conor O’Callaghan, an Irish writer born in Newry in 1968, is one of those poets who critics may lazily – albeit quite rightly – describe as ‘one of the best of his generation’, though he actually seems to fall on the cusp of two generations. Or at least has fallen short, despite having appeared in seminal Irish anthologies, of major British anthologies and promotions – too young for the New Poetry and the PBS’s New Generation campaign; inexplicably missing from the Next Gen and falling short of the cut-off point of Roddy Lumsden’s forthcoming Identity Parade – as inadequate as these may ultimately be at fully checking the pulse, let alone establishing the hierarchy of the literature of a given period (history will do that), they still (usually quite rightly) cement reputations, develop readerships, and give a representative flavour of poetry at the time. This isn’t to badmouth these publications or promotions, but to note that given the inevitable parameters, some genuinely talented and worthy writers often get sidelined or miss out through nothing more than plain bad luck.

This aside, I hope I’m right in reckoning that O’Callaghan’s work will stand the test of time. I can only reach for the usual platitudes in urging you to hunt down copies of his three collections published by Gallery Press to date – The History of Rain (1993) and Seatown (1999), collected together in Seatown and Earlier Poems (2000); and the excellent Fiction, published in 2005 – showcasing the development of an exciting and original poetic voice sounding itself out in poems that are engaged and engaging, witty, smart and sharp, but above all, driven by an energetic music that is as capable of challenging and amusing as it is of moving the reader.

In his review of Seatown in the Times Literary Supplement, Stephen Knight pointed to James Fenton, Robert Frost and Philip Larkin as pronounced influences in O’Callaghan’s work, and for those who are fans of any of these major voices in post-war poetry, you won’t be disappointed by his poems. But at the same time, quite rightly, Knight states that ‘despite the presence of these pungent voices, O’Callaghan’s poetry is marvellously his own’. This is largely to do with the knowingness of the poems, which amounts to more than the winks, nudges, sarcasm and irony that crop up in much contemporary verse. Instead, particularly in Fiction, O’Callaghan’s poetry combines the suggestive, deliberative and symbolic capabilities of verse with the inventive, imaginative qualities most readily associated with fictional prose, often to startling effect. This includes the likes of ‘Out-takes’, exploring the sounds left behind from a recording session (‘leftovers from a cleaned up / final version’; suggesting our polished, distorted view of ourselves); ‘Reception’, where the poet remembers an event from his childhood which turns out to be a story he was told ‘over a glass of ropey Chianti’; ‘Hello’, a sequence of poems exploring the invention of that phrase for ‘the blower, / since some kind of formula / for an opening exchange / had to be agreed upon / to get the ball rolling’; and the excellent vignette ‘The Narrator’, who ‘during the break in chapter / gets up to stretch beneath a skylight’, a theme returned to in ‘The Present Writer’, who ‘gets a kick / inhabiting the third person, as if talking across himself / or forever clapping his own exit from the wings’.

In short, O’Callaghan stuff is the business and deserves a wide readership. And needless to say, his next collection will be well worth waiting for. In the meantime, though, do check out the three poems of his which appear in this month’s issue of Poetry magazine, and the comic ‘The Modern Pastoral Elegy’ in that magazine’s archive. And rather than my blathering on any further here, I’ll let the poetry speak for itself – below is ‘Coventry’, the sonnet that opens Fiction, first published in the TLS.


Coventry


On a night as clear and warm as tonight,
in 1941, a stray German squadron
with a war to win and a radar on the blink
mistook the quays of neutral Seatown
for the lights of greater Coventry.

On a night as clear and warm as tonight –
when she has gone into an almighty huff
and taken the chat over heaven-knows-what
(or something of nothing with a bit of fluff)
and my lot once again is the box-room futon,
the guest duvet –
                                  I am inclined to think
perhaps the Luftwaffe after all were spot on,
and would give my eye-teeth for butterfly bombs
to fall into this silence I have been sent to.


poem by Conor O’Callaghan
republished with permission of the author
first published in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 October 2000
from Fiction (Gallery Press, 2005)

More about → Poetry Feature: Conor O'Callaghan