This October, three new poetry collections highlighted by Mab Jones variously celebrate moments of small joy, Palestinian resistance and the potential of the written word to push the boundaries of what we consider poetry. Plus there’s a plug for Gŵyl Nawr, a tasty-looking all-day event in Swansea featuring music, poetry and more.
Little Universe, Natalie Ann Holborow (Parthian, price: £10)
Vivid, sometimes lurid; taut, at times with a tightness that speaks of intense situations, mindstates, emotions; and, very often, visual, these are poems which manage a balance between being scalpel-sharp yet rich in description; between being pared back, assiduously weighed and measured, finely, fiercely honed and, on the other hand, being brilliantly imaginative and lyrical, leaping to descriptions and similes that are startling, original, and stay with the reader like after-images.
Little Universe takes us to many places, and through spaces that are real, imagined, and psychological, as well as offering up images of human parts that emphasise our embodied experience – cracking jaws, clamping teeth, bulging heels, “blood’s slow orbit”, etc. There are tears and scars, sickness and sweat; but there is also tenderness, in relationships that are romantic and familiar, and many oft-observed instances and moments of small joy, found in the everyday, that are, to my mind, quite Buddhist, though I have no idea whether Natalie Ann Holborow practises mindfulness or is in any way so inclined. But, there they are, these little moments, expanded out to become something wide and wonderful – which is just one of many ways the book’s title comes, to the reader, to make perfect sense.
I know of very few young writers who are quite so fantastic. I did publish Holborow’s collaborative fairytale and folklore-inspired pamphlet, The Wrong Side Of The Looking Glass with Mari Ellis Dunning, a couple of years ago – Ellis is also such a one, but I can’t think of many others who are so great so young. Therefore, do buy this book, and then buy another for a friend. And then buy another for an enemy! It’s a book that will mesmerise from beginning to end, and holds great power.
rock flight, Hasib Hourani (Prototype, price: £12.99)
Resistance is a key word in Hasib Hourani’s rock flight, which, over the course of its pages tells a story inspired by – and in spite of – the occupation of Palestine. A nameless, fleeing ‘i’ travels throughout these poems, seeking safety and sanctuary and trying to make sense of danger and displacement. The image of a rock takes on symbolic weight and heft, acting as a metaphor for home, for less hearty enclosures, and for missiles of hate. This is explored in an interesting and imaginative way, rather than ever being heavy-handed, in what is actually quite an accessible narrative poem, speaking clearly, to me, and in lucid, sometimes shocking terms, of atrocity.
From home, it is, then, only a little sideways slide towards boxes, another symbol within the book (for what is a home if not a box of sorts?) – again, this is explored vividly and with bright intelligence. At one point within rock flight, there’s an invitation to create an origami box, complete with instructional images; at another, there are various definitions of a box: “a cage for things that aren’t living”, “something that stops you from moving”, and so on. The analogy is clear.
The poems throughout the collection are intelligent and considered, whilst also relaying feeling and supplying, or supporting, an emotional response in the reader. The writing is fine, and whilst the blurb states that they are “formally claustrophobic”, this sense of being held in and bound does hold within it imaginative freedom, and a wide sense of lands and people.
rock flight is a very absorbing and affecting book as a whole, therefore, and one I would recommend picking up when you can.
Votive Mess, Nia Davies (Bloodaxe, price: £12)
In Votive Mess, Nia Davies combines, as the title suggests, ritual notions alongside ‘anti-poetics’, interweaving techniques of structure and constraint – repetition, question, mirroring, wordplay – with experimentation, and other modes and means of pushing against expected norms. What’s interesting is that, on the page, when you look at these poems, there’s a kind of controlled chaos, with pieces appearing ‘poem shaped’ – but then, when you read them, they veer off and away from any expected granularity, solidity, or even sense, taking us into unexpected places and mind/landscapes that seem new and unfamiliar.
As a teenager, I ran a couple of small press magazines from my bedroom, one of them dedicated to surrealism. I get a similar sense when reading these pieces of that same boundary-breaking, dissolving, and defying. It’s energetic and elemental, dizzying and full of daring, and it makes the reader question poetry in the most intense of ways. Sometimes, you can find ‘sense’ by reading a piece aloud and, often, there is also glory and beauty in the less usual words and combinations of words.
However, poetry isn’t marketing, and it isn’t, necessarily, something that has to give us a message: it is the soul, it is the stuff of life, it is a soup of sensory and sense-bound and semiotic immersion into existence, and this is a book which delves deeply into that. Very interesting, as a result, but out towards the far echelons of what poetry can be – so perhaps best a book for yourself rather than your lovely, Pam Ayres-loving nan…
Gŵyl Nawr Festival
If you’d like to, also, then do delve more deeply into experimentation and have an exciting time of things at a festival that Davies will be curating this coming weekend. Gŵyl Nawr Festival takes place on Sat 2 Nov in Swansea and features “artists, poets and musicians experimenting across mediums will be performing, speaking and presenting their work”. It’s on all day until late, and promises to be dizzying and dazzling by turns! So, find out more: tickets for the whole thing cost just £15, and I think the experimental nature of this one-dayer will inspire poets and non-poets alike.
If you would like to submit some new, published poetry for potential review in this column, contact Mab via her website (you can find social media links there) or get in touch via Buzz.
words MAB JONES