BLACK BOUGH POETRY
Book of the Month
October 2024
Kandace Siobhan Walker
BLACK BOUGH POETRY
Book of the Month
November 2024
Taz Rahman
The Black Bough book of the month is Taz Rahman’s East of the Sun, West of the Moon (Seren Books, 2024).
This is an intriguing collection - one that demands concentration, free from any distractions, save some dissonant, experimental jazz. Let’s start with the cover illustration by Anna-Amalia Coviellio, which features surrealist/cubist Dali and Picasso-esque images of stairways, weeping planetary discs and ribbons draping from a black cloud. The cover is, to a certain extent, a taste of things to come with Rahman’s jazz and Cardiff-inspired collection. I imagine this must be a dream cover for a jazz aficionado and poet.
The first poem ‘Yashica 635’ launches us immediately into Rahman’s lyrical world, which, at times, seems more about language and sound than the poem as a vehicle of instantly decipherable meanings. The poem, here, is a sensuous, heightened experience, an interplay of images between the eating of fruit, a sense of craving, bodily movement and memory:
I pine curves, guavas, sofedas, a wave arching
back falling flat on its face. I want to convince
you that the jackfruit in its afternoon spikes is
an inaudible layer, inedible like the past;
the tongue may crave its dorsal surface to levitate,
the lateral border to swell, but even if the tip
opens to the dollop of ripe, the lingual tonsil shall
rise up, rebel, repel the past. […]
This sensory experience of eating triggers memories of the past, where the speaker of the poem reflects on a family journey:
[…] A light is trying to creak
Through the floorboards, its somnambulant
gait is feral as the hills, sand dunes, days out
to Savar at the Martyr’s memorial under a katha,
my father winding our faces, shapes, concrete
and miles near and far
The poem, like many in this collection, demands real focus and a willingness to suspend the desire to know what the poem is about. I was reminded of the Wales-Chilean writer Lynette Roberts and her modernist collection Gods with Stainless Ears with its oblique, esoteric form and the cultured work of Tony Conran, both visionary, symbolist writers who were pushed themselves to challenge and inspire their readership; also, too, Dylan Thomas, whose poetic wit and invention very much influences writers in Wales to this day. This, for me, is a poem about capturing memory, accessing the past, poetry as photography and the use of language to access an immediate sense of the past – “I observe catharsis/ to heal the unhealable, let cellulose acetate puncture/ chemical dips. Once my father walked a whole year,/ along a sea path filled in the Beirut dust”. I liked the ending in all its glorious, vivid obliqueness:
[..] It is possible
to carve patterns, trap liquids,
fan unfettered the indelible to embalm the body
as a spillage of trapped light
The second poem ‘Seamstress’ is needed after the cryptic intensity of the opener – ‘Seamstress’ describes a taxidermist who is able to stitch life back into an arctic fox. I like the sequence and how it describes the creature being brought back to life. Yet abrupt shifts in the poem mean all is not what it seems – the arctic fox appears to shape-change into a boat, a brown Narcissus, with goddesses needing appeasement. This has the execution and the mythopoeic edge of Tony Conran. The poem switches back to the voice of the seamstress who reasserts her role – “I must be the alterer, seamstress, carpenter, find cubs to fur, new hands to mitten, paper over cracks’.
The collection is well-assembled with the third poem ‘Butter’ being a domestic depiction of family, food preparation and their eating. The home is filled with ‘the splash of soyabean’, ‘burnt onion tadpoles’ and ‘silent lake sips/ of water/ frozen in the fridge’. The imagination flits through these poems and transforms objects. The imagination has the power to pierce the present and journey back through time, recovering memory but these memories are distorted or heightened – the narrator is both precise in being able capture truth and also unreliable – this concept is explored playfully.
My favourite poem is ‘Teach Jackdaws Avionics’, a poem which has the attraction, ease and profoundity of Derek Walcott – life in all its dizzying beauty - and certainly this is a poem that leaves us giddy with sensory impressions. It's a banger:
The sun does not fuss, days survive, clematis curates purple
in alleyways for blackbirds to core arcs in hunger, sing
to flowers, discourse evenings stretched on grass. Fingers
frack surfaces, erupt touch, catch aphids, time, molten
cores.
A perfect start to a poem, a magical combination of stylistic features: personification; light, yet vivid description; gentle rhythm and intricate sound patterning - it wouldn’t surprise you if this was a big competition winner. The poem continues – “The sun hides in roof-lines/ past noon, enters fan vaults warming chimneys to seduce/ the fattest pigeon lit like salty grains carrying miles […] May / bees shake their own cowbells”. Brilliant! Clever wordplay and the kind of cityscape scanning you see in the work of Philip Gross. Fist pump for this particular poem.
One of the strengths of this collection (which was longlisted for the Laurel Prize, 2024) is the way in which Rahman evokes the winding alleys, arcades and routes in and around Cardiff. It’s not an easy task to evoke the shifting scenery and spirit of contrasting urban places but this is done with adept sequencing. ‘Bread of Heaven’ takes us along the river Taff:
Snowdrops writhing / late daffodils peeking before . time a fervent pink
/ peeving through lime-pine-oak-ash-hornbeam […]
I am a sun-burnt / slap mottling Taff/ which monster / threw me in
when / in time present and time past’
The evocation of leafy, urban, suburban and edgeland Cardiff continues in poems, such as ‘Animal Wall’, which again transport us on a multi-sensory tour of the capital city, in all its grime and glory.
I was reminded, again, distantly of Eliot, yet the poet’s feet are firmly planted on the 21st century side of the river. There’s gravitas in this poet’s voice but the instinct to shake off the high modernist’s voice, which ultimately privileged (what was perceived as) high culture over low. More Peter Finch, the avant-garde Cardiff poet, perhaps, yet Rahman’s voice is his own:
One day I / shall conjure / a typhoon / I shall colour in / a passant / red
/ gather all the plastic / from storms gone / clattering the banks (‘Bread of Heaven’)
Wordplay is an area in which Taz Rahman excels. It’s genuinely refreshing to read phrasing, such as ‘The dark is still a wireworm wriggling / in cruds of earth’ (‘A Morning Walk’), ‘I want to honey/ with nimble lips/ a forest yoga / under a blanket’ (‘I want to see your Face in Every Kind of Light’), ‘My tongue/ is seasoned/ in spooning arrows for Eucharist’ (‘The Free State of Roath’), ‘fracture a lakebed in seaglass’ (‘Snapdragons need the Bulk of Bumblebees to Force Open the Flower’).
Rahman’s afterword, ‘All That Jazz’ outlines the Cardiff writer’s debt of influence to jazz musicians and this section and the notes throughout the collection help to elucidate a book that keeps us guessing, that is far from literal or simplistic, and is, more importantly, a meditative and transportative experience for the reader/ listener, where the senses take over. This makes East of the Sun, West of the Moon a book that needs sustained concentration to fully access and appreciate the many moments which make you jump like a jazz cat, electrified by unexpected notes - this is one of the most ambitious and engaging collections I have read in 2024.
Review by Dr Matthew M C Smith, author of The Keeper of Aeons, 'Paviland: Ice and Fire' and Origin: 21 Poems/
BLACK BOUGH POETRY
Book of the Month
September 2024
Kandace Siobhan Walker's COWBOY, Cheerio Poetry, 2023.
The Black Bough book of the month for October 2024 is Kandace Siobhan Walker's Cowboy, which won the Wales Book of the Year category for Poetry in 2024.
Cowboy is a restless, anarchic exploration of the uniqueness of individuality vs collective identities, be they local, national or concerned with class, race or gender.
Numerous poems reflect the restlessness of the individual, for example in 'Niagara Barrel/ Blue', which is focused on a diagnosis of autism, as well as being a critique of western psychiatry
'I was diagnosed as being a real desperado [...] new psychiatry wanted to fill me. With the clear, compliant beauty of glass' (Niagara Barrel / Blue')
The sense of being an outsider is often dealt with humorously — 'what if I was a real cowboy, what if I loved myself?' ('What if I Walked into a Bar and Was Served by a Horse') and this is further explored in the 'Art of Girlhood', where the subject of the poem is how the individual can defy borders and the control of the state -- 'we exceed borders and bandwidth/ we're beyond the imagination of power'. This is further seen in 'Cleaning Ladies', where their employee treats the female workers as a commodity, seeing that they have no inner life. This is sent up by the poet in a gloriously subversive way - A/ client ask what we are, when we are not his. A mirror. Pools of still water, white alloy. Sand. Human shapes with / silvered heads. / We are romantic: legible as artists, improbable as people' ('Cleaning Ladies II)
Walker's collection is frequently political and there are moments when poetic language breaks down to pithy, prosaic political statements:
Wealth accumulation is about class. Class is about domination, and domination, of course, is about popular consensus. Popularity is about currency. Currency is points ('Neopoet')
Imperialism is so fucking boring and predictable, it falls to us to strangle class society in its summer bed ('Nationality and Borders')
These almost anti-poetic moments convey the unadorned truth of society's ills, without the imaginative leaps we see in other poems, which could otherwise prove a distractive technique.
Exploring national and home identity, the poetic speaker states 'I'm like rain - I decide when I've come home. / The past is a colourised movie. I'm proud but I would eat/ every sound and shadow for a foothold' ('Wales / You! Me! Dancing'). This poem made me want to know more about Walker's relationship with Wales/ home -- this may be for a future publication by Walker.
Walker is probably at her most poetically powerful with sensuously-evocative love poems, which reminded me distantly of Ocean Vuong's aphoristic prose-poem style.
The canyons rainfalls are baboons with roses/ Nighttime's religious core is wherever you touch me ('Mustang')
We encounter strangeness and poems to make us smile
'The sky is upside-down. Forests rain into late summer's/ folk religions, recovered from the museum's maw [...] We are a ceramic jar/ of mythical beasts ' ('Traditional Religion, or, Animism')
'Being twenty-one is like being lowercase god,/ the cocky blue dress I wear at every party, the burning tree in the wilds beyond my end [...] I play sad gay albums to a numb, summer grinds like a school dance' ('Forest Gump)
There is much to enjoy in Cowboy, not least its self-effacing, unique take on the world, which takes nothing on trust, and searches unceasingly for its place in a confusing world.
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Review by Dr. Matthew M. C. Smith, author of The Keeper of Aeons and editor of Black Bough.
The Black Bough book of the month for September 2024 is Sarah Connor's Always Fire with Sídhe Press. £7.99
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Always Fire is the second book of the month with Black Bough for the Devon-based writer, whose book The Crow Gods (with Sídhe Press) was our featured work in August 2023. Sarah Connor also has a collection The Poet Spells Her Name with Black Bough (which was released late 2023).
Connor's three collections deal with the sharpest of contrasts - the emotional and physical extremes of living with cancer versus the close emotional ties with family and a fascination with the external world in all its weird wonder.
Always Fire comprises approximately 33 poems. The first piece 'The Start' is a love poem of simplicity, characteristically stripped of affectation. Lovers are imagined as magpies hunting shiny things, airborne, completely free - this has all the ease of a joyful Mary Oliver poem. In the second poem, the speaker rues the limits we place on ourselves - being smoke, ice and water instead of always being fire. The metaphors, once again, are accessible, direct, and we can't help sharing the sense of regret - "I should have been fire/ I should always have been fire".
Connor is a poet who revels in snapshots of the ordinary, intensifying the things we take for granted around us. The poem 'August' pans across the landscape in a multi-sensory experience "August smells of hot fat and seaweed, It tastes of vanilla, woodsmoke and cheese sandwiches [...] August plays the neon muzak in the amusement arcade". Again, we're there - lessons in writing in an immediate way, ink running through a scalpel-pen.
'Brambrack' is a poem that imaginatively wanders to a husband's childhood and, once again, the imagery of food evokes almost forgotten, older times, bringing them to a state of immanence. The most ordinary of experiences, such as viewing an overgrown rabbit compound becomes a wistful reflection on the rebirth and growth of nature, outside of human control.
The narrative poem 'Cliff-Dweller' presents a Mother Time figure resting on a cliff, looking out to sea, musing on time and space. I won't give any spoilers about this piece because it's beautifully contemplative and would speak to a diverse range of readers.
There's humour in 'Muck', a poem about the transformation of a son from a child who loved messy play to a svelte young man; a wry poem follows about a daughter who should have been allowed to be wilder and more unkempt as a child as she becomes a well-groomed young lady.
A highlight of the collection, for me, was 'Apple' which shows Sarah Connor's artistry in building a poem about peeling apples that draws us in as readers almost hypnotically as we view the "sharp satellite, trailing yellow juice", "white flesh crip, fine-grained". The minute details in the poem keep is in suspense, until the poet reveals "All Hallows spiral [...] the witch in me/ slices across the apple's midriff, just to view the secret star/ all apples hold inside them".
These are affecting poems to treasure - it's not easy to write about people we love and do them three dimensional justice. Nor is it easy to create an authentic poem where the close ties between mother and child - the physical, biological intimacy, is pitted against the brutal machinery of war. The shifts between nostalgia and melancholy make this a soulful collection, where the poet takes us to the barrenness of green deserts that were once bountiful with wildlife, to ancient seas with triremes sailing.
Always Fire is delightful, wistful, nostalgic, by turns. The writing is seamless, never over-cooked. It just flows because it is a very personal work by a gifted writer who knows less is more. Highly recommended.
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Review by Dr. Matthew M. C. Smith, author of The Keeper of Aeons and editor of Black Bough.
BLACK BOUGH POETRY
Book of the Month
August 2024
Matthew Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem, Faber (2022).
In the scale of biographical challenges, writing a book about T S Eliot and the twentieth century’s most popular poem, The Waste Land, must rank pretty highly. The hardback version of this biography is almost 400 pages with a further 150 pages, or so, of notes, index and the poem itself. A paperback version has been recently published but who would actually take this task on? The book is a mighty tome to read and not for the fainthearted.
Matthew Hollis, who was until recently poetry editor at Faber for 22 years and has a comprehensive biography of Edward Thomas under his belt, diligently takes us from Eliot’s roots in St. Louis to the London of the 1920s. There’s something painstaking about Hollis’s approach. Ezra Pound (Eliot’s editor of The Waste Land) is given the credit he deserves for the shaping of the poem. Their backgrounds, the multifarious, esoteric literary influences and the cultural zeitgeists that shaped their work are given context by Hollis.
Eliot’s early poems are explored, with his debts to numerous writers and movements, including Anglo-American imagism and French symbolism. It leaves the reader curious to know more about Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire; as well as exploring the patchwork of imagism that is embedded in his expansive work.
Hollis explores Eliot’s shifting religious convictions and the well-documented strain in his marriage to Vivien Eliot, as well as his complex relationship with Emily Hale. Some of the stories about Eliot and Vivien are painful to read, others amusing. Eliot can appear austere, high-minded and embedded in a transient lifestyle, moving frequently around London and weighted with financial and emotional burdens.
Hollis explores Eliot’s antisemitism and other forms of racism, shining a light on the darkest parts of the poet’s life, alongside other modernist writers that had similarly abhorrent views. This examination is unflinching and tackles both the historical and current context of allowing prejudice to thrive unchecked in the literary community.
"This examination is unflinching"
Hollis includes pertinent facts I didn’t know about literary magazines of the time, including the rivalry and feuds between writers and more information on figures, such as Richard Aldington, H.D. and Virginia and Leonard Woolf – this gives a multi-dimensional feel to the narrative. It felt, at points, as if I was witnessing events in real time and gaining valuable insights into the cultural context of the literary elite.
I enjoyed Hollis’s occasional poetic digressions (Hollis’s poetry is published with Bloodaxe, Incline, Clutag and Hazel Press), and the areas of the text where the episodic, formal tone of a biography becomes subtly disrupted by the poet’s unique voice. This provides another strand, or voice in the narrative, offsetting the complexities of the subject.
Eliot, for me, has always been a mystery (what was he really like? What actually made him tick?) and the sense of mystique surrounding his mighty reputation is lessened through the reading of this work – no doubt a healthy process. The biography has the effect of humanising the author and the process of the poem’s production. It’s all too easy to be in awe of The Waste Land, to be taken in, to be possessed by its prophetic aphorisms, its running, interweaving, echoing voices and the dizzying nature of its fragmented, intertextual form but the process of the writing appears to have been a somewhat stumbling and fragile process.
We realise that the early iterations were very messy - long-winded passages with a dreadful title taken from Dickens – ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’; that Eliot was a compulsive borrower from other texts, though he was (thankfully) to cite most of his sources, though one or two of his contemporaries were not happy. Most notable for me, Hollis's biography never shies away from Eliot's dependence on Pound's extensive editing and invaluable feedback
"Eliot was a compulsive borrower from other texts"
In light of Pound’s extensive revisions of the poem alongside Vivien’s significant input (both as a character to be drawn from and a literary critic in her own right), I was left feeling that Eliot was very fortunate to have these astute minds to advise him. Pound's savage edits and critical observations that shaped the work both linguistically and in terms of form, led me to the inevitable question -. should The Waste Land be seen as a co-production by at least two authors? I enjoyed discovering more about how Eliot harvested and repurposed a wealth of quotations.
One of the functions of a good biography, or book of literary criticism, should be to deepen understanding and spark further personal investigation. I couldn’t find any aspect of Eliot or his work that the biography shies away from other than the persistent rumours about Eliot’s repressed sexuality, which are, at best, speculative and, at worst, idle gossip. This is a book that made me want to know more about Eliot’s life after The Waste Land. Indeed, his writing of Four Quartets and his long editorship at Faber. This could warrant a further edition looking even more at the legacy of The Waste Land or be a separate book – Eliot: The Twilight Years. Something for the biographer to consider?
I read this book on holiday over three days and found it to a highly informative read that seems to effortlessly slip back into the times with all the minutiae of a poem and poet’s life presented with the assured manner of a steely-eyed, yet patient biographer. Highly recommended.
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Review by Matthew. M. C. Smith is the author of The Keeper of Aeons and is academically published on the subject of Robert Graves and Wales. He is campaigning for the Red Lady of Paviland to return to Swansea from Oxford and edits Black Bough Poetry, an imagist journal. Twitter: @MatthewMCSmith Also on Insta, FB and Bluesky.
Black Bough are two years into a collaborative project inspired by The Waste Land. This is being edited by Guest Editor Kitty Donnelly.