![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-content\/uploads\/Rialto-Cover-65-e1268323798423.jpg\" "\\"Rialto")
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There are wonderful poems to choose from in No 65. The issue opens with Peter Scupham\u2019s \u2018Figures in a Landscape: 1944\u2019. This is a war poem, remarkable in being written so long after World War 2 \u2013 \u2018Pain is so far away it has become lyrical\u2019 \u2013 and very pertinent as there is, again, war, and particularly war where destruction often comes out of the air. Technically brilliant, it\u2019s 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\u2019s a child\u2019s view of the time and place, but the child is now in his seventies.<\/p>\n
The evocation of time and place, the sense of being there is also foreground in a couple of other poems I\u2019d like to mention; Valerie Lynch\u2019s \u2018Barricades\u2019 and Sydney Giffard\u2019s \u2018Au Lavandou\u2019. Valerie started writing poetry three years ago when she was 77. And I can\u2019t not mention Steve Spence\u2019s three pirate poems that close the issue. I think they are likeable, funny and intelligent, their satire exact for our times. I\u2019m keen to know your responses.<\/p>\n
\u2018Hearts and Other Organs\u2019 is a sonnet \u2013 the poet has divided it up into its octet and sestet \u2013 and I like the device of starting each section with \u2018I remember\u2019 and, particularly, like the switch from indefinite to definite article, from the general to the particular, \u2018I remember a,\u2019 \u2018I remember the.\u2019 The title drew me: the poetry heart is usually an amorous organ \u2018My true love hath my heart\u2019 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\u2019t know, but you can see I\u2019m hooked. Short poems need titles that haul you in, just as they need to open well and close well.<\/p>\n
This poem opens with a neat tease, \u2018a museum of glass bottles\u2019 (what\u2019s this to do with hearts?) And the scene is then set, atmosphere created, \u2018granite flecked, dimly illuminating\u2019. I don\u2019t stop to think about \u2018granite flecked\u2019 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 \u2018Victorian freak-show of medical specimens\u2019. Such a lot going on here, both in content and in feeling: \u2018Victorian\u2019 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, \u2018army\u2019 appears in line eight. \u2018Freak-show\u2019 brings the shock of the abnormal, the odd, the deformed, with their gawping crowd, whereas \u2018medical specimens\u2019 has the weight of scientific approval, clinical distance. I love line six: just look at how all those \u2018k\u2019s and \u2018l\u2019s are working together \u2013 also how \u2018speckled\u2019 echoes the earlier \u2018flecked\u2019. This poet is good at tying things together. There\u2019s a gap between lines eight and nine but \u2018army\u2019 in eight is echoed by \u2018armour\u2019 in line twelve, and we have \u2018jetsam\u2019 in line eight, which is what you chuck overboard from a ship, and \u2018sailors\u2019 in line twelve. The poem opens with \u2018museum\u2019 and the first half closes with \u2018collected\u2019.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s 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\u2019s in the bottles (we travel by way of a nod at the fear of drowning), and what we see is the heart, behind \u2018the shadow\u2019 (remember the valley of the shadow) behind the \u2018armour\u2019 that afforded no protection. Finally we are looking at the \u2018hands and nails.\u2019 They\u2019re what everyone notices about the newborn \u2018o look at her tiny hands and nails, so perfect\u2019. Except here it\u2019s \u2018foetuses\u2019 we\u2019re looking at. Casualties of love, the miscarried, the stillborn, those captured, collected, by we don\u2019t know what method or disaster.<\/p>\n
The last two lines of a sonnet are supposed to deliver a kick. Wordsworth –
\n\u2018Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
\nAnd all that mighty heart is lying still.\u2019 John Donne \u2026\u2026\u2026 \u2018I
\nExcept you enthrall me, never shall be free,
\nNor ever chaste, except you ravish me.\u2019 And so on. Here we have
\n\u2018curled bleak and beautiful as plainchant,
\nrocking in their sea of loss.\u2019
\nIf you\u2019d been wondering about the sea\/drowning references earlier in the poem here\u2019s why there there \u2013 to lead up to this \u2018sea\u2019. And isn\u2019t that \u2018plainchant\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
On a technical note it\u2019s worth saying that the vowels in the octet are often short, closed, while those in the sestet are much more open, longer. There\u2019s also assonance and consonance, plus bits of rhyme and the, I think, very important \u2018transparent\u2019, \u2018plainchant\u2019.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve said enough to show why I choose to publish it, why you might enjoy to read it. There\u2019s quite a lot of other poems in the magazine that I like as much as this one\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
Michael Mackmin <\/em><\/p>\n FRANCES ANN KING trained as an RGN in the 1970s. She has just completed a degree in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hearts and other organs
\nI remember a museum of glass bottles,
\nshelf after shelf rising to the ceiling.
\nWere the skylights domed?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11281,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions\/11281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}