{"id":6886,"date":"2017-11-08T15:00:37","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T15:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/?p=6886"},"modified":"2025-02-03T11:42:30","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T11:42:30","slug":"din-of-voices-on-some-poems-in-the-rialto-89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/2017\/11\/08\/din-of-voices-on-some-poems-in-the-rialto-89\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cDin of voices\u201d: on some poems in The Rialto 89"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since issue 89 of The Rialto <\/em>had its \u201cofficial\u201d launch at Poetry in Aldeburgh recently \u2013 with barnstorming readings from Seraphima Kennedy, Richard Osmond and Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, hosted by editor Michael Mackmin \u2013 I thought now might be a good time to shine an appreciative light on a few of its poems. I’ve focussed on the first fifteen pages (the section I had the pleasure of assembling) which, though taking up only a quarter of the magazine, will \u2013 I hope \u2013 stand in for the electro-luminesce of the whole. If you haven’t already, may these words encourage you to seek out a copy or several.<\/p>\n

Richard Osmond opens things with a sequence of six poems about the attack at London Bridge in June 2017. Alongside a matter-of-fact, witness account of events are a startling series of translations of the Quran and Beowulf. <\/em>Together, these constitute an important reflection on how we make sense of random brutality, both individually and as a culture. The last poem here, adapted from Beowulf<\/em>, describes a group of half-drunk \u201cbattle-blokes\u201d making idle boasts in a meadhall, as they \u201cawait the attack, knives out.\u201d That phrase knives out <\/em>suggests \u2013 resonantly, horrifically \u2013 the kind of mentality which precedes and is reinforced by every \u201cterror attack\u201d. Are these potential victims or the attackers themselves?<\/p>\n

Following Osmond is Hannah Lowe, with ‘British Born’, where she deals (similarly but differently) with the fault-lines between cultures. The poem centres on an argument between teachers about a girl who wears a \u201cblack hijab and naqib\u201d to school \u2013 \u201cOur staff room bristled,\u201d says Lowe, \u201cJenny wanted rules\u201d \u2013 and ends with a group of boys whose boxers spill \u201cfrom their jeans, half-mast\u201d. According to Wikipedia, a flag flown at half-mast can signal \u201crespect, mourning, [or] distress\u201d. Here, perhaps, those jeans slung at half-mast indicate something else: insouciance, or the shapeshifting ability of younger generations to move casually between traditions; to be half in and half out simultaneously.<\/p>\n

The theme of halfness continues with Seraphima Kennedy’s powerful ‘Firemouth’, in which the poem’s speaker is \u201cdriven half-mad\u201d. A series of double-spaced single lines, couched in the first-person and present continuous (\u201cI have… I have\u201d), run through the ways in which the self is forced to adapt and change just to stay alive in a violently unfair society. Rather than having a silencing effect, these enforced metamorphoses leave this speaker with \u201ca tongue to speak\/ a mouth on fire\u201d. Kennedy’s other poem here, ‘Budget’, is no less vitally angry work, impossible to read without considering the traumatic shadow cast by Grenfell. These are elegies in which the refusal to mourn is channelled into a radical rage.<\/p>\n

In Ian Humphreys’ poem \u2013 another elegy of sorts \u2013 rage against injustice becomes mournful celebration. \u201cCome back, come back,\u201d sings the speaker,<\/p>\n

you glistening boys,
\nyou clerks and scholars, farmhands, plumbers,
\nyou make-up artists, money men, you lives<\/p>\n

hacked short.<\/p>\n

This is poetry exercising one of its oldest and most necessary roles: listing and lamenting the dead. Cut down before their time, these \u201cglistening boys\u201d (echoing Whitman’s \u201cyoung men glistened with wet\u201d) have left their songs \u201chalf-sung\u201d. But the poem being a domain \u2013 a club like \u201cBang, Scandals, Napoleans, Spats, Subway, Copa\u2019s <\/em>and Heaven<\/em>\u201d \u2013 their voices find themselves sounding out again in sweet-sad unison.<\/p>\n

Joseph Minden’s ‘Mothership’ is an elegy straining at the bit, lamenting the past with sadness but not a shred of pity. It begins:<\/p>\n

Why are you looking out of the window, mummy?
\nIt\u2019s only a window. It\u2019s about forcing your dream life
\ninto your waking life. And your dreams suffer.<\/p>\n

According to Freud, the \u201cthreads of association\u201d we form in our waking life naturally \u201cconverge\u201d, whereas in dreams they \u201coverlap and interweave\u201d. Minden’s two poems show the world as seen from the perspective of a speeding train, which, \u201cblurring the trees into one\/ another\u201d, makes a lorry look like a stag. Nursery rhyme, history and Victoriana overlap and interweave, along with \u201cbusiness parks\/ swaggering in the heat of high summer\u201d. Dreamy stuff, indeed.<\/p>\n

In Khairani Barokka’s ‘time machine’ the combined pain of illness and post-colonial malaise \u2013 a \u201cflexible hurt\u201d, as the speaker puts it \u2013 is overwhelming, the \u201cimagined-coherent universe\u201d breaking down as Big Ben \u201cunfolds\u201d towards her: \u201cEMPIRE, it pummels\u201d. What empire gives with one hand (\u201cbalms\u201d and \u201cmedication\u201d), it takes with another (felled rainforests). Or, as Barokka suggests, it inflicts wounds only to claim the moral high ground of tending to them. Here, Barokka restores the felt pain of abstract EMPIRE, each word being wrenched from a place at once historical and personal\/bodily.<\/p>\n

Just as Barroka’s language \u2013 her riven syntax and word-choice \u2013 struck me immediately, so too was I bowled over by the \u201cning nang natter\u201d of Helen Kay’s poems. Both poems here are addressed from an \u201cElderly Primigravada\u201d to her dyslexic son, but son and mother are mingled in dialogue, \u201cdissolved in the din of voices\u201d. This is the pre-literate ocean in which parental relationships form and sounds become (just about) cognate with words. Kay’s poem take us on a linguistic deep-dive, \u201cthe seedling syntax\u201d of her son’s face and his quirks rooted (beautifully) in how she writes about him.<\/p>\n

Elisabeth Sennitt Clough’s ‘Anguilliform’ is also, but more harrowingly, about a relationship between a mother and child. Her use of form \u2013 putting solidi (most of the time) in place of line breaks \u2013 gives the poem a provisional quality, a sense of unfixedness, which mirrors the poem’s anguilliform <\/em>(eel-like) imagery. In devastatingly precise stanzas, the speaker describes several early-childhood separations \u2013 glavings<\/em>, as she puts it \u2013 in which her mother is always slipping out of reach, daughter wriggling desperately after her.<\/p>\n

At its opening, the tone of Patrick Mackie’s ‘In the Gloom the Gold Gathers the Light Against It’ is dry and distant: \u201cThe Strand is where you go, so we discovered,\/ if you to buy actual gold as an investment.\u201d But as the poem progresses it starts to dissolve under the influence of the nearby Thames, described as a \u201cbrain teeming, or hunting,\/ amongst the soluble wharfs\u201d. The \u201cor\u201d-sounds in \u201cwharfs\u201d become a cacophony by the end \u2013 \u201core… oars or… or\u201d \u2013 as though to mimic the way in which any commodity, shiny or not, becomes senseless (un-gleanable) through endless trade and tarry. The teeming brain-water will always win out over the City’s best.<\/p>\n

As in the new series of Blue Planet<\/em>, Phoebe Stuckes’ poems seem powered by a sense of their own endangerment. ‘$$$’ ends \u201cSo broke\/ I stink of pennies. I am ruined.\u201d The poem itself isn’t \u201cbroke\u201d or \u201cruined\u201d but, teetering on the edge, captures that moment just before \u201cfalling\u201d when anything appears possible, even \u201ccrack[ing] the heavens\u201d. This phrase might mean breaking into <\/em>the heavens or just breaking it and bringing the whole firmament thundering down. Such ambivalence could describe the experience of reading Stuckes’ astounding work.<\/p>\n

One thing linking a lot of these poems is a concern, to put it broadly, with surface <\/em>and what lies beneath<\/em>. In Hugh Foley’s ‘Argument (with Spinach)’, the speaker begins with a refection on the comments that lie beneath a Youtube video, everybody<\/p>\n

mourning
\nsomeone, it would be easy to say,
\nbecause they actually mourn
\ntheir own collective youth,
\nbut people really did die or leave them.<\/p>\n

This is characteristic of Foley: deadpan and wry, but capable of suddenly and brutally turning back on himself (and the reader). It’s easy to laugh at the maudlin comments people leave online, forgetting the real lives \u2013 and griefs \u2013 behind and beneath them. The poem goes on to question \u2013 in lovely, meandering syntax \u2013 the nature of permanence, and those structures (like concrete, or YouTube) which outlast our brief bootprint.<\/p>\n

Adam Crothers closes out this 15-page section \u2013 before a sequence of heartrending new poems by Hannah Lowe \u2013 with ‘Sincerity’. I feel like this poem gets at something which the other poems here \u2013 maybe all <\/em>poems anywhere <\/em>\u2013 are scratching at: how to express sincere feeling in contrived language. In Latin, sincerus <\/em>referred to a clean, pure sound. A poem, though, is sound polluted by sense. Though we might aspire to absolute whalesong, we also need language to communicate information (and perhaps, in its modern usage, \u201csincerity\u201d implies putting a statement’s communicability over its sounding-goodness). Crothers’ sonnet does sound good, though, and through a structure of lovingly contrived homonyms and puns \u2013 bare\/bear, ironise\/ironed out \u2013 manages to hint at bare feelings, barely born.<\/p>\n

I hope you’ll agree that these are special poems \u2013 poems which bear witness and mourn and rage and celebrate what it is to be stupid, language-forming creatures in the world today. Read them out to yourself and to your loved ones, murmur them by starlight until their vowel music approximates the movement of the spheres, or take them apart with clamps and forceps. These are poems which can’t be murdered by dissection.<\/p>\n

Will Harris<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since issue 89 of The Rialto had its \u201cofficial\u201d launch at Poetry in Aldeburgh recently \u2013 with barnstorming readings from Seraphima Kennedy, Richard Osmond and Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, hosted by editor Michael Mackmin \u2013 I thought now might be a good time to shine an appreciative light on a few of its poems. I’ve focussed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6719,"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-6886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6886","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\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6886"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6931,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6886\/revisions\/6931"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.therialto.co.uk\/pages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}