“…go and find a space and some actors. Test your verse on the lungs and throats and tongues and lips of creatures trained to know utterance from nonsense, trained in the best English written, trained a hundred times harder than you. You’re not afraid of poverty or critics or you wouldn’t be a writer. Make some poets’ theatre, someone, before I go cheerfully mad alone in this field.” (Glyn Maxwell, from ‘Character and Verse Theatre’, Magma 52)

That’s the kind of challenge I feel I’d like to respond to, partly because I enjoy both poetry and theatre, partly because it feels like such an uncommercial move and I am unaccountably attracted to uncommercial moves (I do occasionally wish that wasn’t the case, especially in a recession). Whether I have the time and a half-decent idea is another matter. There’s only one way to discover whether I have the talent… I guess the best way would be to start small, to write something short and easily/cheaply staged, and take it from there.

But how about readers of this blog? Would you go to see a contemporary verse play? Would you like to see more being written and performed? If you’re also a writer, would you consider writing one and trying it out with a group of actors?

In these Selected Poems, the beautiful and the brutal are dangerous bedfellows. Political landscapes are often described through tender evocations of weather: coming rain or “the indomitable wind / over this absurd, wide world”, the place where “an icy wind / chills the bright surface of a well.” In an extract from ‘Seaboard’ (1956-1966), the poet describes facing death with equanimity:

I lay my head on the scrubbed block
As on a lover’s shoulder.

It seems glib to talk about the elegance within these bleak poems, because that suggests their starkness needs to be dressed up. Not so. Gorbanevskaya often spares us nothing. Take the short poem ‘Autobiographical’:

They gave the fool free rein, gave the rascal freedom
And he beats his free head on a wall.

The reader can’t help shuddering with recognition. Often, in fact, the beauty in Gorbanevskaya’s work seems to make it all the more devastating. Even her less overtly political poems shiver with quiet menace, like the intriguing ‘Unfinished poem’, written in 1965 (and arranged in translation as a sonnet). We find an unnamed person wandering a town in which

Night has erased the year,
The age from the building’s facades,
The town, bleak as an allotment,
But also like the Ark…

In the chill of dawn, things begin to return to their familiar shapes until finally:

You come to yourself, weeping,
On the bridge, over the Yauza river.

There’s a clarity in the work that reminded me of Japanese Death Poetry, written from the urge to distil the world just one last time. It’s this that gives the poems what Daniel Weissbort describes in his introduction as a ‘strange depth’.

I won’t say too much about the political context and content of these poems, because others far better qualified to discuss Soviet history have done so elsewhere (the book includes a fascinating interview with the poet by Valentina Polukhina, rightly placed at the end of the volume, after the poems themselves). Instead, what fascinated me most about Gorbanevskaya’s work was its relationship to the way our brains work. In these poems, there’s a preoccupation with the relationship between truth and fabrication. In an extract from ‘Alien Stones’ (1979-82) we’re told ‘this truth is a lie’:

This truth, I insist on,
Don’t, don’t believe it,
Don’t test it, with a knife pinning
Its tender throat to the wall.

Elsewhere “singing is like lying”, art is both sincere and insincere.

Neuroscientists like Benjamin Libet have suggested that our experience of time is something of an illusion: in short, memory is not a process of retrieval, but of reconstruction. When we try to ‘recall’ a memory, we also rewrite it, so that the time next we go to remember it, we don’t call up the original memory but the last one we recollected. So, each time we tell a story, we alter it (all the time remaining genuinely convinced of the ‘truth’ of our memories).

Gorbanevskaya’s work is full of re-written memories, implied stories, developed until we’re not quite sure where they started from. Her work isn’t indecisive, it’s a recognition of the true nature of memory, as in this extract from ‘Last Poems of the Last Century’, where the narrator occupies a strange hinterland:

My hands not holding the pen
My evenings not well-illuminated,
My midnights neither bright nor warm…

This no-man’s land, Gorbanevskaya recognises, is the real territory of human experience. Her poems draw the reader into that experience and invite us to be lost there, for as long as we want.

Helen Mort
Helen Mort won a Foyle’s Young Poet Award on five occasions and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2007. After two pamphlets with tall-lighthouse press, a third pamphlet, ‘Lie of the Land’, was published by the Wordsworth Trust last year. Her first full collection, ‘Division Street’, will be published in 2013 by Chatto & Windus.

Selected Poems by Natalya Gorbanevskaya is published by Carcanet Press, 2011, £12.95

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

God repeats himself in the flat-pack doll’s house,
The rubber furniture and plastic piano
Hushed of all arpeggios

These are the toys of the nineteen fifties, echoed by the model railways in the opening few lines. This could be a nostalgia trip, and it could be something altogether darker as well.
Williams juxtaposes the modern world’s foolish business obsessions with the more innocent world of the recent past. He doesn’t romanticise, thankfully. Take ‘Depression furniture’ for instance:

They made you cold no matter how you sat
Those no-designer chairs bought before the war
For front rooms and special company.
A touch on the heavy side,
Made of planks and bed springs,
And nailed in the warehouse with joiners’cloth.
You saw the world sitting in a suitcase.

The wit and precision of this description captures exactly how ugly and uncomfortable those chairs were. His nostalgic approach towards the “old Dansettes” is offset by the fact they “skipped” and were “suitcase size”, making them sound clumsy and ineffective in contrast with the “phone and screen/ That smoothes out wrinkles with the glow/ Of steady purpose” (‘Busy Time on Brash Street’). Yet “A dozen records such a luxury” shows the value music had then, because it was hard to come by, expensive and fragile. Teens had to save up pocket money to buy vinyl records and each one was treasured. Woolworths was a national institution then, not only a purchasing palace but a place to meet and hang out. Williams’s ‘Woolworths’ poem gets it exactly right:

As if we’ve followed the wrong god out of church
With hankies, gift mugs and paper flags,
To find we’re on the other side of sacrifice

And everything’s to celebrate:
The music of doo-wop coaxing time back
And the smell of peppermint and leather.

He structures the poem using the seasons, deploying some wonderful imagery, such as a “boat like a long golden answer”. The marvellous mixture of Woolies, as it was fondly known, is captured here as he selects seasonal merchandise; the aromas of the shop and the sense of bustle are somehow conveyed between the lines. There are lots more memories in this first section, some general, some personal, but all interesting and pleasurable. In amongst the particularities of things, there are some tucked away wisdoms like: “Memories don’t care where they live” in ‘From the Gallery’.

Every Liverpool poet has to write their own Mersey poem and Williams has written ‘An ounce of Mersey beach glass’. That great river which dominated all our childhoods is an endearing subject, as it shifts and changes constantly, yet remains a constant pull. Williams’s way is original. Instead of choosing the vast river, he focuses on a piece of glass picked up from the beach. He uses these washed-up sea-worn fragments as symbols for people:

as if we like to see ourselves as less,
in a maker’s mark, in a bristle of glass…

The sea glass is taken home where it “brings whole rooms to light”. Williams’s language is tactile and full of assonance and consonance which provide inner music. ‘Lost corners’ is another fine poem made of scraps but so much more than its parts, as he remembers some of the things that languish there “as if grief and failure came clear at last” on their rediscovery.

The second section, ‘The Rain Gauge’, is also packed with lovely, real things. I wasn’t fully convinced that the book needed to be divided into two unequal parts, as I couldn’t see much difference between the poems in the sections, either thematically or stylistically. Overall, it is an enjoyable collection, particularly for those who enjoy clarity and directness.

Angela Topping
Angela Topping is a widely published poet with eight solo publications, including two collections from Stride, one from bluechrome, two children’s collections, a Salt Modern Voices chapbook and a Rack Press pamphlet. She has reviewed for Stride, Ore, Other Poetry, Honest Ulsterman and Iron. She also writes for Greenwich Exchange and OUP.

The Model Shop is published by Waterloo Press, 2011, £10

(to read previous Magma blog reviews, please click on the ‘Reviews’ tag immediately below)

For Magma 54, we invite you to submit poems on the subject of visibility / invisibility – or either one of the two!

We chose the theme partly because of a shared interest in visual art but mainly because so much poetry seems to be reaching towards something beyond the tangible, yet often takes as its starting point things we can see and hold.

Perhaps your poems on what can and can’t be seen will bear vivid witness to the evidence of your eyes – or describe a failure (or refusal!) to see.  Poetry is a form of magic too, and a poem may give visible form to something which never existed.

We’re certain you’ll have something to tell about what lies beyond the world of our senses.  In the letter quoted above, Rilke stresses how deeply we need to know the visible world in order to transform it into its invisible, enduring form, “its next deepest reality”.  What invisible realms might your poems suggest and how will you take us to them?  These could be religious, spiritual, fantastical – or anything else.

Maybe poems will approach the topic via the science or biology of eyes or light, seeing or blindness, or, like Michael Donaghy’s ‘A Discourse on Optics’, consider what is and isn’t visible in reflecting surfaces.

Of course, something invisible might just be hidden – a dirty secret or a natural mystery.  Peter Redgrove conjures a ‘Visible Baby’ whose skin and flesh are transparent – when the normally-visible is magicked from sight, we see miracles:

His heart like two squirrels, one scarlet, one purple
Mating in the canopy of a blood-tree;

Or you may find inspiration in the relationship between the visible and invisible. In moving towards invisibility, a poem might find an in-between dimension where something can be discovered as Wislawa Szymborska suggests in ‘Some People’:

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or even better, non-being
for a little or a long while.

We are definitely expecting to be surprised, and off-theme poems are also welcome.

Judy Brown and Cherry Smyth, Editors, Magma 54

The event will be full of contributors who’ll be coming to read, and we’re also thrilled to have as our guest readers Greta Stoddart and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch who have both contributed poems to this issue.

The evening will start at 8pm sharp, at The Troubadour Coffee House, 265 Old Brompton Road, London SW5 (near Earl’s Court Tube). Tickets are £7/£6 concessions; doors open at 7.30pm. Come early for the best seats, to get yourself a drink, buy a copy of the magazine or chat to a member of the Magma team.

This issue, edited by Roberta James with Helen Nicholson, is now available to buy from the Magma website and in bookshops.

Hope you can make it. We’d love to see you there.

Doors (and bar) open 6.30.

The readings start at 7.30 and you’ll be able to hear our winners, alongside guest poets Fleur Adcock, Martyn Crucefix, Tamar Yoseloff and Inua Ellams reading specially commissioned short poems. George Szirtes, the judge, will talk about the judging process and read some of his own work.

We’d love to see you there.

For more information, go to http://magmapoetry.com/competition/

the woven shawl, the grey hair
Gathered in a careful bun …

The next I was seeing Psycho through Simon Barraclough’s eyes in ‘Being a Woman You Will.’ He opts for a wide angle lens, taking a more detached view of Lila’s sister, Marion as she hires a car, driving through the rain in the direction of the Motel where she will meet Norman Bates. Using the second person, often a feature of Barraclough’s verse, we are informed that “Tiredness kills”. She waits, honking her horn for the arrival of the man who will eventually be responsible for her murder.

Though the two poets have much in common, especially a splendidly surreal sense of humour, it seems to me that it is this which distinguishes them: Simon Barraclough habitually takes a wider view of the worlds he occupies as a citizen of Plant Earth, owing a great debt, in particular, to Edwin Morgan. This can be seen especially when he whirls around the solar system, his destinations ranging from Mercury to his very short poem on that now officially non-planet, ‘Pluto’. (To recount it here would rob of its punch-line, if one could be said to exist!) On one occasion, he even directly references him in his poem to ‘Neptune’, declaring that this particular planet is the source of

Edwin Morgan’s ‘Little Blue Blue’
Inexhaustiblue.

On his travels, he makes some exceedingly good jokes. Mercury’s “unevolved ankles” are “tickled by feathers that never grew”. Uranus is knocked into a “cocked hat”. Earth is “God’s gobstopper”. He even continues this theme when he adopts the heart as a motif in his work. As well as a ‘Magpie heart’, a ‘Havisham heart’ and a ‘Pizza Heart’, he summons up school-days in the shape of ‘Wrigley’s Heart’, where the sheer adaptability of chewing gum is seen in the endless items to which it can be stuck – from desks to walls to hair.

In all this, Barraclough’s verse fizzes with the madcap energy of that world of gobstoppers and chewing gum. He is enormously inventive with an endless zeal for puns and in-jokes. Referring to the movie world that frequently inspires his verse, his narrator declares in ‘Flashbacks Of A Fool’;

I am but mad North by Northwest.

Describing certain planets, he draws upon the songs and lyrics of Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. Accusing Neptune of vanity, he echoes Carly Simon in declaring its world is so blue,

you probably think that Jarman’s Blue
is about you.

There did, however, come a point in my reading when I was unable to suppress an involuntary groan. This occurred when I came across the line, “I am the Lord of the Dance Settee”, words that, as a young boy in a school hostel, we used to shout out a number of decades ago. (The Corries version was constantly on the record turntable.) It seemed to me, too, that for all Barraclough’s verse is largely inventive and exuberant, it can often be too much rooted in a world where people watch similar movies and listen to the same song and tell familiar corny jokes. I feel, if he is to grow and develop, he needs to step away from this. There is little doubt that he has the creativity and talent to undertake the nifty footwork required.

I have fewer reservations about Isobel Dixon’s work. It possesses great range and inventiveness, dipping into several distinct and different worlds. It is true that, like Simon Barraclough, some of these involve both cinema and modern rock. Like him, she writes about Hitchcock; on another occasion, she draws inspiration from the film, ‘Into The Wild’ and Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ when she writes – ironically – of ‘Days Of Miracles And Wonders’ when visiting a city Common.

She draws us, however, ‘Into the Wild’ in other ways too. No one who lived my existence could fail to recognise the truth of ‘The Parliament Of Gulls’ where seagulls gather around marooned baby sharks on the shoreline. The delicacy of ‘Vision’ is also appealing, where she describes how bats invade the garden during a summer evening. In ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, it is the media who stand “gawping” at the intrusion of a whale into the modern world, noting how, a few years ago, one swam up the Thames,

searching for his Jonah, righteous bellyful.

It is mythic, too, in the way its presence recalls how there was at one time a whale “beached in Dagenham”, said by some to be predicting the death of Cromwell. In Isobel Dixon’s view, perhaps this arrival on the scene

spouted out his warning of the melting ice.

In particular, she writes well of her childhood world in South Africa. In writing that recalls the verse of D.H. Lawrence, she tells us of the ‘Toktokkie’, that country’s large black beetle. Dramatically, it conveys the insect’s

Ridiculous performance, till you realise –
Tap-tap, tap-tap – this suitor’s soundings out
Are spot on, as he homes in on his date.

She deals with that nation’s political legacy too in ‘The Only Brunette On The Beach’. She finds herself on Bloubergstrand, a place of great significance in the country’s history where the invading British forces defeated the Dutch before going onto colonise much of southern Africa. In the final verse, she recalls other tensions that exist in the landscape, referring to Nonqawuse, a Xhosa girl whose prophecies led many of her people to kill their cattle in a forlorn attempt to drive the British from their land.

Her political insights are not just confined to either that nation or the distant past. In ‘Mountain War Time’, she connects volcanic Mount St Helens with its nearby atomic energy plant which helped to develop the Fat Man Bomb that fell on Nagasaki, recalling how

molten kimono flowers singed to skin,
a city threshed and sewn with flowers, fissioning.

It seems to me that this is what makes Isobel Dixon an extraordinary talent. She may not veer and buzz around the solar system with quite the same gusto as Barraclough, but the entirety of this planet – from its animal life to politics, past to present – is found in close-up in her verse.

Donald S. Murray
Donald S. Murray is the author of the non-fiction books, ‘The Guga Hunters’ and ‘And On This Rock’ (Birlinn). His poetry and short-fiction works include ‘Small Expectations’ (Two Ravens Press) and ‘Weaving Songs’ (Acair). The latter, a collaboration with photographer Carol Ann Peacock, has been published to commemorate the centenary of the Harris Tweed trademark, the Orb, and celebrates the life of his father, employed as a weaver for many years.

Neptune Blue and The Tempest Prognosticator are both published by Salt, 2011, £9.95.

for blog review 6, see Karen McCarthy Woolf on Susan Wicks’s ‘House of Tongues’
for blog review 5, see Dave Coates on Noel Duffy’s ‘In the Library of Lost Objects’
for blog review 4, see Miriam Gamble on Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’

In the poem, Wicks skilfully interweaves the original narrative with a more intimate domestic tableau, where

Next to the back door
the tongues of our battered trainers
strain under laces, swell
crusted and luminous.

Throughout the collection the body is often in a state of flux, whether from ageing, sickness or an inflicted violence. In ‘Under the Blue Umbrella’ Wicks juxtaposes a fragile and metaphorically encircled Mediterranean idyll with wider political concerns: “No one’s heart clenches here. No one is seen to bleed/from the anus, or stand naked at a wall to be shot.” Likewise, the ‘Untitled (Wheelchair)’ after the Lebanese/Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, which like many poems here, gives voice where voice is lost. Even the seemingly anecdotal sonnet, ‘Box’, about a topiary bush in the shape of a bird, which “daily becomes less bird, and more completely bush” provokes a contemplation of the ongoing human wrestle with nature, the manicured garden versus wilderness, bush against bird.

This sense of tension and fragility is elegantly expressed elsewhere. In a short sequence at the beginning of the central section, ‘What She Was’, deer wander into the house, and the narrator has to “wake/and feel their noses on my face,/my breasts, nudging between my thighs.” Here Wicks avoids the myriad ‘Bambi’ pitfalls and instead manages to capture the experience via a precise and visceral approach:

I sensed rather than saw them move
in the darkness, the dark fractionally displaced
at the edge of seeing…

The sea is also a recurrent motif and is often a conduit for the book’s emotional and thematic core. In the opening poem, ‘Pistachios’, physical ageing is pitched against a sensuous vivacity, yet these contradictions are empowered by simple expression. If sex, “as they say, is a kind of dying” then you “never know exactly when/or where or how fast/sex leaves” as it’s carried out on the tide. Later, in the lyrical ‘Inside the Movement’, the idea of death as process is expanded and it’s “as if the land itself had had a stroke”.

Against this quietly unsettled backdrop, there’s a deep sense of hope embedded in the heart of the work; if there are environmental imperatives humankind must attend to, then the fact that “we’re built for loss” (‘Inside the Movement’) is perhaps a more optimistic thought than it seems. A lesser poet might have rendered these ecological themes dull or clichéd; Wicks energises the subject through adroit and stylish handling that is confident but never showy.

The final section entitled ‘Nightwatchman’s Yard’ is set in Visby, a medieval city on the Swedish island of Gotland. Wicks builds a historical picture through a series of poems that give voice to the city’s saints, warriors, workers and villains. It opens with the monologue ‘Confession’; set in 1350 it’s the story of an embittered church organist who deliberately poisons the town’s wells with bubonic plague so that: “Now I can let my voice/howl in your pipework, echo to the town walls: how I spit on each upright soul/in this stinking city…” As in ‘House of Tongues’, sound – and specifically the voice – becomes a charged leitmotif through which both revenge and injustice are enacted.

At this point there is also a sense of release; as if the restraint of writing from the self is cast off, allowing the poet to run riot within the anarchy of embattled medieval society. Everything that was economically held back pours forth in these vigorous narratives, whether it’s the blithe sense of entitlement that infuses the utterances of the invading Dane Valdemar IV in ‘The Plundering of Visby’ or Little Ingeborg, “A woman alone/with her child and her child’s child” who is tried as a witch. What connects them to the other poems is emotional authenticity and the sense that the dystopia we experience now was ever thus.

Karen McCarthy Woolf
Karen McCarthy Woolf’s poetry chapbook The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2006. Her poetry also featured in the anthology, TEN New Poets (Bloodaxe, 2010, ed. Bernardine Evaristo & Daljit Nagra).

House of Tongues is published by Bloodaxe, 2011, £8.95.

for blog review 5, see Dave Coates on Noel Duffy’s ‘In the Library of Lost Objects’
for blog review 4, see Miriam Gamble on Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’

This refreshing curiosity about the inner workings of the stellar bodies, magnetic fields, beehives and fossils is the fuel for his poems; richness, even in such mundane things, comes from being in a world in which life is precious and survival always possible. A few key poems lend the book a sense of cohesion and, with ideas so thoroughly connected, even a few lesser pieces gain in vitality.

‘The Summer I Mapped the World’, with its one word of Irish, éaligh: escape, is a poem of childhood in which (unlike many of his contemporaries) Duffy’s experience is viewed without a nostalgic filter. Once he éalighs the classroom, his solo project is to make a map of his town using only a notebook and his counted strides as a meter. The lines “At last the roads locked into place, joined up/ as they should across the barren spaces” are a fully-achieved expression of the feeling when a poem clicks in the reader’s mind, one that still makes sense within the boundaries of the poem’s conceit.

When the cogs mesh, Duffy crafts some brilliant set-pieces. ‘The Beekeeper to his Assistant’ is another poem that gets the dynamic between tenor and vehicle spot-on, fluctuating seamlessly between experience and instinct, scientific fact and anecdote, the art of beekeeping and the tradition of poetry:

You must understand from the beginning
that the hive is a mind and one
you will not comprehend.

And then (with the Queen Bee as subject):

Unknowingly she gives birth to her own successor
incubated in the brood and hidden from her.

This is a fantastic poem, and one I hope gets its fair share of exposure.

‘The Beekeeper to his Assistant’ also mentions Albert Einstein, who as a less-than-stellar pupil himself is something of a patron spirit. The poem he gets to himself, ‘Einstein’s Compass’, is an anthem to absent-mindedness, as the boy Albert is derided by an unnamed voice for his unbroken attention to his father’s compass and its steady needle:

when will the boy learn,
that it will never do otherwise,
that he breaks his mother’s heart
with his silent vigils?

Einstein once said “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” It is the book’s similarly modest, unwritten epigram.

‘Baltic Amber’ does the kind of stitch-work that most books only dream of having. So many threads find a common ground here it’s almost worth quoting in full, but to summarise: an ant caught in amber “in the afternoon heat of the Paleolithic” (wow), is an “emblem and lifeline/ of all that perishes, all that survives.” These lines shed sudden light on five or six other poems and position the preserved ant as the ideal symbol of poetry’s work of consecration, restoration and survival.

The closing poem, ‘Swallows’, draws a circle around a series of poems about Duffy’s late father; the swallows that appear “the day after I wrote your poem” are heavy with emotional and metaphorical freight. It’s not quite possible to tell what has been imagined and what has fallen serendipitously into place, but ‘Swallows’ is convincing enough for that not to matter. Duffy’s work is rooted in a deep study of his medium and, although not without occasional shortcomings, the poems in In the Library of Lost Objects work in concert in a way very few books achieve.

Dave Coates
Dave Coates grew up in Belfast and lives in Edinburgh. He writes about poetry on his blog, http://davepoems.wordpress.com. His new year’s resolution is to write on it more often.

In the Library of Lost Objects is published by Ward Wood, 2011, £7.99.

for blog review 4, see Miriam Gamble on Ailbhe Darcy’s ‘Imaginary Menagerie’
for blog review 3, see Steven Waling on Rupert Loydell’s ‘Wildlife’.
for blog review 2, see Cath Nichols on Gregory Woods’s ‘An Ordinary Dog’.
for blog review 1, see Mark Burnhope on Katy Evans-Bush’s ‘Egg Printing Explained’.

We were also fortunate to host a large number of contributors, many of whom had travelled some distance – from Sweden, Switzerland, Brussels and even California.

The uniqueness of the Magma launches is that everyone whose work is in the issue is invited to read, and one of the joys of being a Magma editor is that you have the opportunity to meet many of the contributors and hear them read their work, poems you have sifted and re-sifted out of many thousands: poems you love and have read deeply. It’s also a gratifying sight to watch an audience riffling through their copies of the magazine to find the page and read along.

During her reading, Selima Hill spoke of her pleasure at being ‘among poets’ and said something to the effect that rather than feeling separated from her audience at the reading, which is so often the case, she felt as if we were all in it together. Which seems a good place to end this little blog – thanks to everyone – contributors, subscribers, and audience for being ‘in it’ with us.

Pascale Petit

Alison Brackenbury

Alan Buckley

Mark Leech