From the Editor – Issue 64

‘The Mandate’ by Joel Lane

THE MANDATE

As the first ripple of the crowd’s laughter
struck the air like a window breaking
to let in a fresh autumn breeze,
the Emperor lifted a bare arm
and slowly wiped away a tear.
‘Oh child,’ he said gently, ‘if only
you knew how much strength that laughter
gives to the enemies of our nation.
Laugh, child, laugh. I weep for you
and for us all.’ The laughter died
as if someone had tripped a switch.
The boy looked around, dumbstruck.
Many hands reached out for him
as bottles were smashed, stones picked up.

Three days later, the Emperor was returned
to power by a safe majority.
The swearing-in ceremony was broadcast
so the nation could see a proud man
building on his past, wearing cloth
to cover his nipples, cock and arse:
thin strips of some pale fabric
so pure, so delicate, it could almost
have been the skin of a child.

Joel Lane

Every year the selectors for the Forward Prizes ask The Rialto for nominations. We are allowed to enter four poems for the Best Single Poem award. This is hard work for me as in my opinion pretty much every poem in the magazine is a winner. But I would say that wouldn’t I.

One of the poems I entered this year is ‘The Mandate’ by Joel Lane, from issue 64 (page 13).

Why this poem?

Ideally a poem is a perfect balance between the thing said and the way of saying it – content and technique. Sometimes it is the ‘how it is said’ of a poem that nudges into the foreground. In issue 64, for example there’s the technical neatness of the sonnets by Christina Dunhill and Sebastian Barker, the tidiness of Angela Kirby’s couplets in ‘Beech Hill’, or Hannah Sullivan’s rhymes and half rhymes in ‘Vermont’. In other poems it’s the content, the ‘what the poem says’ that I notice most.

‘The Mandate’ is rich in content. It reminds us just how wicked political leaders can be, just how wicked humankind is. It’s a brutal poem, very direct. Its politics are of the moment – there are plenty of tyrants about, some of them ‘democratically elected’- and they are also the politics of the Twentieth Century. I remember reading as a child of lampshades being made of human skin in Germany in the 1940s. This was probably an article in the News Of The World, the preferred reading of Aunty Denny, who wasn’t an aunt but a depressed woman who worked in the same shop as my mother and who for a while came to our house every Sunday for her lunch. She would sit on what we called the settee reading her paper while the cooking was going on, and I would sit at her feet reading the back pages and getting an education.

Sometimes the history that you, as reader, bring to a poem, what it evokes in you, is important in considering its effectiveness. I guess I need to confess in the context of this poem that I was always, still am, nervous of Hans Christian Andersen’s fables – they have, for me, a special sugary darkness.

So here is this poem, in two sections – fourteen lines and nine lines (a measured first part and a rolling, quicker, finale). The opening, ‘first ripple,’ is slightly journalistic, but this is appropriate in the context, the poem is, essentially, a news report. The second line shocks – we move from ‘laughter’ to ‘struck the air like a window breaking’. ‘Breaking’ sounds the destructive note that is the poem’s theme: it’s echoed in the last line of this section ‘bottles were smashed’ (again glass). Also, our expectations are broken – the original story is turned on its head: and innocence is also shattered, the boy is ‘dumbstruck’. (The point of the original tale is that it’s the boy who is allowed to put into words what everyone is seeing and thinking). Joel’s Emperor is far from Andersen’s fop – he has the true power of tyranny, when he speaks, everyone listens.

I’m impressed by the unobtrusive use of poetry techniques – the poem is helped along by the use of rhymes and half rhymes – in the first part ‘air’ ‘bare’ ‘tear,’ and in the second section ‘swearing-in’, ‘thin’, ‘skin’. I read a lot of poems that are larded with alliteration: here the repetitions of ‘s’ in line 14 are deft and effective. And look how the rhythm is slowed in lines 17, 18, 19, (the long vowels), effectively emphasizing the pomposity, lulling the ear before the shock of ‘nipples, cock and arse’ (short vowels) (brief words). And it’s neat, too, to have the word ‘almost’ hanging at the end of the penultimate line, so you get a little pause before the body blow of ‘…have been the skin of a child’.

It’s a shocking poem, a poem for our ruthless times, and one that is skilfully written.

My second choice, if I had to make one, would be Judith Taylor’s superb poem ‘Islands’ (page 18). It’s a six stanza poem, beautifully hinged around the word ‘paper’. The key word, though it’s only there three times, is ‘slow’. There’s a calm pace to the whole poem, like waves languorously curling onto a summer shore, brilliantly evoked by long vowel sounds. More great writing inThe Rialto.

Michael Mackmin, May 2008

JOEL LANE is the author of two books of poems, The Edge Of The Screen and Trouble In The Heartland, both published by Arc publications.

From the Editor – Issue 65

Hearts and other organs

I remember a museum of glass bottles,
shelf after shelf rising to the ceiling.
Were the skylights domed? Does it matter?
The light was granite-flecked, dimly illuminating
a Victorian freak-show of medical specimens -
speckled, puckered, gill-like tissue all in tall flasks
floating down the years in liquid chemicals;
an army of jetsam collated and collected.

I remember the foetuses, some wrapped in cauls -
the sailors’ lucky charm – others so transparent
I could see the heart behind the shadow of the lungs,
the armour of ribcage, the hands and nails
curled bleak and beautiful as plainchant,
rocking in their sea of loss.

Frances Ann King

There are wonderful poems to choose from in No 65. The issue opens with Peter Scupham’s ‘Figures in a Landscape: 1944’. This is a war poem, remarkable in being written so long after World War 2 – ‘Pain is so far away it has become lyrical’ – and very pertinent as there is, again, war, and particularly war where destruction often comes out of the air. Technically brilliant, it’s a poem in seven sections, mostly short lines, with many short three and four line stanzas, and very effective use of rhyme etc., etc. It’s a child’s view of the time and place, but the child is now in his seventies.

The evocation of time and place, the sense of being there is also foreground in a couple of other poems I’d like to mention; Valerie Lynch’s ‘Barricades’ and Sydney Giffard’s ‘Au Lavandou’. Valerie started writing poetry three years ago when she was 77. And I can’t not mention Steve Spence’s three pirate poems that close the issue. I think they are likeable, funny and intelligent, their satire exact for our times. I’m keen to know your responses.

‘Hearts and Other Organs’ is a sonnet – the poet has divided it up into its octet and sestet – and I like the device of starting each section with ‘I remember’ and, particularly, like the switch from indefinite to definite article, from the general to the particular, ‘I remember a,’ ‘I remember the.’ The title drew me: the poetry heart is usually an amorous organ ‘My true love hath my heart’ and so forth. These hearts are, I think, going to be something else. Or are they? Maybe its a poem about love and sex? Not, surely, about music? I don’t know, but you can see I’m hooked. Short poems need titles that haul you in, just as they need to open well and close well.

This poem opens with a neat tease, ‘a museum of glass bottles’ (what’s this to do with hearts?) And the scene is then set, atmosphere created, ‘granite flecked, dimly illuminating’. I don’t stop to think about ‘granite flecked’ on the first reading, but on the second reading I note that granite is hard and that it is a gray rock with all those curious cold glittery bits in it. These sensations of hardness and coldness lead into the ‘Victorian freak-show of medical specimens’. Such a lot going on here, both in content and in feeling: ‘Victorian’ is about time past, but also still carries associations of crowded fustiness (those domestic interiors in illustrations), and you have to add in connotations of imperialism. The Victorians collected things, they had guns with very small shot for killing humming birds and the larger butterflies, bigger guns for annexing bits of Africa. Note, in passing, ‘army’ appears in line eight. ‘Freak-show’ brings the shock of the abnormal, the odd, the deformed, with their gawping crowd, whereas ‘medical specimens’ has the weight of scientific approval, clinical distance. I love line six: just look at how all those ‘k’s and ‘l’s are working together – also how ‘speckled’ echoes the earlier ‘flecked’. This poet is good at tying things together. There’s a gap between lines eight and nine but ‘army’ in eight is echoed by ‘armour’ in line twelve, and we have ‘jetsam’ in line eight, which is what you chuck overboard from a ship, and ‘sailors’ in line twelve. The poem opens with ‘museum’ and the first half closes with ‘collected’.

There’s a pause. This is a clever, profound, poem by a poet who takes risks. I like it. The poem slows down, focuses, looks closer, into the glass bottles, into what’s in the bottles (we travel by way of a nod at the fear of drowning), and what we see is the heart, behind ‘the shadow’ (remember the valley of the shadow) behind the ‘armour’ that afforded no protection. Finally we are looking at the ‘hands and nails.’ They’re what everyone notices about the newborn ‘o look at her tiny hands and nails, so perfect’. Except here it’s ‘foetuses’ we’re looking at. Casualties of love, the miscarried, the stillborn, those captured, collected, by we don’t know what method or disaster.

The last two lines of a sonnet are supposed to deliver a kick. Wordsworth -
‘Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still.’ John Donne ……… ‘I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.’ And so on. Here we have
‘curled bleak and beautiful as plainchant,
rocking in their sea of loss.’
If you’d been wondering about the sea/drowning references earlier in the poem here’s why there there – to lead up to this ‘sea’. And isn’t that ‘plainchant’ a wonderful surprise? Nothing in the poem anticipates it. The museum transforms into a church, the idea of prayer arrives in the sterile room. We are all reminded of the central place loss occupies in the experience of being human. Wow.

On a technical note it’s worth saying that the vowels in the octet are often short, closed, while those in the sestet are much more open, longer. There’s also assonance and consonance, plus bits of rhyme and the, I think, very important ‘transparent’, ‘plainchant’.

I realise that I have taken a lot of space talking about this short poem. I also know that I could go on and say more. I hope I’ve said enough to show why I choose to publish it, why you might enjoy to read it. There’s quite a lot of other poems in the magazine that I like as much as this one……

Michael Mackmin

FRANCES ANN KING trained as an RGN in the 1970s. She has just completed a degree in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.