Four more prize-worthy books of poetry have been bundled up by Mab Jones for her roundup of the best new poems for September. One isn’t a book of poetry but a compendium of useful tips on how to write it yourself. Fancy seeing your name in a future edition of this column? Read on…
Dawn’s Incision, David Hanlon (IceFloe Press, price: £10.50)
With delicacy, deftness and sensitive depth of feeling, in Dawn’s Incision, David Hanlon evokes and explores love and its loss, as a romantic relationship blooms, with an image of a first kiss under coats held above them in the rain, through to parting: “Grief washed / over me”. In between are moments of intimacy and joy, domesticity and doubt, as the partnership grows but then is infused with ‘distance’, a ‘space’ growing between the lovers and no option left to the book’s main character – Hanlon himself, we assume – but to choke down the words that “move nervously” inside him like “bunched florets of pain”. Eventually, however, there is an ending:
Your love was water
sustaining me
a dahlia
citrus-bright
This aftermath life is a desert
Following this are images of socks and supermarkets – solitude, in other words – but it’s in later culminating poems, including the title poem of the book, that the collection reaches a wider, wiser conclusion: “Who knew every ending / is also a sunrise”. The book thus ends on a hopeful note, and we, too, are left wider, and wiser, thanks to the journey provided by the poet’s narrative arc and the subtlety and sometimes sublime nature of the poems themselves. Finely written, with shades and layers of thought and feeling, Dawn’s Incision is a deft yet delicate collection that will appeal to any reader, lover and non-lover alike.
Write Mindfully: Unlocking The Writer Within, Rebecca Lowe (Talisman Arts, price: £9.99)
If you’re wanting to have a go at writing poems yourself, then Rebecca Lowe’s Write Mindfully is a new book to help you, and it’s a book that’s very useful not just for those new to writing but also to us old hands who might like to reconsider our ways and improve our own writerly habits. The chapter on creating a writing ritual, for example, I found very interesting, and it provided a means of clarifying my own thoughts around routine and ritual – for me, a bugbear, since I don’t have one, and often feel I am at the mercy of money-making and health issues. These tides often sweep me out to sea, but Lowe’s gentle yet direct ideas offer a bit of flotsam – boat(s), even – for people in similar circumstances to cling to and to carry them safe.
Overall, Write Mindfully is thoughtfully constructed, with a nice mix of ideas, instructions, personal account, research, and inspiration. There’s a movement at the moment towards ‘conscious writing’ and this book offers a wise and wide-reaching addition to that, grounding itself in practice, always with the admonition that the reader should do things their own way, and encouraging any writer to develop and grow with a kindly tone and ever-creative approach. There is, as part of proceedings, a strong element of self-therapy here, which I personally feel is at the heart of every writer’s journey: we grow with our writing, and often how it develops is intertwined with our own development; in my experience, writing can also provide a source for this, allowing us to increase our self-understanding and to become more and more our true selves.
I love Lowe’s analogy in an interview at the end of this book that equates ‘spelling’ with ‘word magic’; and again, in this, I entirely agree. Write Mindfully is a wonderfully rounded, balanced tome on writing; writing better; writing mindfully, with intent, energy, and purpose. A truly inspiring book, as a result, and one I heartily recommend to all writers wherever they are on their journey.
Star: poems for the Christmas Season, Angela Graham (Culture & Democracy Press, price: £10)
Christmas isn’t here yet, but the reminders (marketing) began in August. If there are any antidotes to that relentless reworking of what should be a spiritual, soulful time of quiet contemplation, celebration, and giving thanks, then definitely, as ever, they can be found in poetry, which places the soul at the centre, over and above that brand perfume, selection box, or drinking session: pleasant as all these things are, but the soul, the centre of us, is what counts.
I feel that Angela Graham would agree, in Star: poems for the Christmas Season, a ‘constellation’ of poems for the Christmas season, which addresses subjects as far apart yet correlated as the original nativity story; modern ‘slaughter of the innocents’ as we find in political upheaval and war; revolution; rescue; and a reiteration “that violence is not what saves the world”. With a social conscience, Graham grieves; gives thanks; and grows new analogies and ideas, for instance in her poems addressing three different queens alongside the usual Christmas kings.
Although clearly intelligent and inventive, what marks these poems out for me are their lightness and brightness, transmuting the ‘heaviness’ of the festive season, with its political wars all around, and price wars on every avenue of possible advertising, into something more aligned to caring, community, and love. Beautiful print illustrations illuminate and lift these themes further, with the end result that you feel refreshed and reinvigorated after reading. Star is a gorgeous book by a gifted poet and a great one to get as a gift this year, for another, for yourself, or, ideally, for both.
Drypoint, Jamie McKendrick (Faber, price: £10.99)
It’s not often you read a poem about the Biblical figure of Balthazar, but in this column there are two: one in Angela Graham’s Star, and another in this collection, Drypoint, by Jamie McKendrick, both simply titled Balthazar. Such is the world of poetic synchronicities… McKendrick’s piece is shorter than Graham’s, however, with a succinctness and sharpness that justifies the book’s title – drypoint is a kind of needle engraving that is done without acid. The poems here, too, are like etchings, with that same preciseness and considered lineation, although there is wit and even a dry, dark humour along the way, here, that had me grinning: take, for instance, this first section from the sequence Various Vices:
Envy
Dead, he’d cursed the other skulls
for their better teeth, as in life
the skills the skulls enclosed.
Wordplay in these poems (“spires and spurs and spars”) combine with a delight in the banal (“shopping in Tesco”) and a kind of nonchalance and even a flaneur-like philosophical outlook (“A life of doing nothing is a life / well-lived”). All together, these unite to create a really interesting and unique poetic voice; and, as mentioned, there is the preciseness, too, which belies the seemingly flaneur-esque, laissez-faire attitude: because death is here, love is here, too, and poets write poetry because they are deeply interested in this existence sorta stuff.
McKendrick’s philosophical musings are less big picture clouds than exact and cleverly rendered experiments, however; a key example of this is seen in the poem He Be Me, in which the poet interviews himself. Clever yet accessible, containing depths yet entirely unpretentious, I enjoyed Drypoint immensely, and am sure that you would, too.
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