Annamaria Weldon 24th October 2011 Launch of KSP Members’ anthology 2011 - SHIMMER

The Poets: Sally Clarke, Jake Dennis, Paula  Jones, Shey Marque, Mardi May, Susan O’Brien, Gail Robinson, Rose van Son and Mags Webster.

Printing by Wild Weeds Press, Front cover and Typesetting Shey Marque with additional Typesetting Chris Oakeley.

“…risk is also writing with real feeling, as Frost did, while somehow avoiding sentimentality; simplicity, as Cavafy did, and somehow avoid artlessness; daring to be prophetic, as Rilke did, and miraculously avoiding pretentiousness; writing with real originality as Dickinson did, while somehow avoiding cliché (since for a reader to be blown away by the original phrase it must already be partly familiar to them, if they are to register the transformation[ … ]

The narrowest of these paths, though, the poets’ beautiful tightrope walk, is the one between sense and mystery – to make one while revealing the other.”                            

 THE DARK ART OF POETRY, by Don Paterson ( T.S. Eliot Lecture 2004)

Sally Clarke’s poems open and close in just the right register – a voice so clear and particular in its observations, compassionately summarising a given situation, that I immediately feel she is confiding in me and directing my attention to an angle of reality not commonly perceived. Everything in a Sally Clarke poem conspires to frame for us exactly what she sees – rhythm and caesurae, emphasis of line breaks, the look of her text on the page; perhaps the seasoning of one exotic phrase (‘diospyros kaki’), but the dish never over-flavoured. These poems demonstrate the poignancy of restraint, of a poet in control whether describing abandonment or abundance. 

Jake Dennis: Sometimes, on reading a poem, I’m so struck by the cosmos contained in a line, by the confidence of its evocation that I want to know more about the poet – what path brought them to that declaration. In Coming Home I found more than one such line. Consider this ‘Sunlight, like god, is everywhere / and out of sight.’ Time prevents me saying more but you can read about Jake’s literary journey in the poets’ biographies at the back of this well-produced anthology.

                The nature of Jake’s three poems in Shimmer took me back to the essay I quoted at the start     (THE DARK ART OF POETRY, by Don Paterson - T.S. Eliot Lecture 2004) – in which I read that we   experience ourselves ‘simultaneously within nature and outside it’. And that ‘Art serves to                 unite us with what is not us, or rather what we had forgotten was us …’

Paula  Jones

                ‘… risk is also writing with real feeling, as Frost did, while somehow avoiding sentimentality;’

Paula knows what it is she wants to say and her voice is unwavering, even if the subject matter is difficult or perhaps, particularly if the subject is difficult. Never maudlin’, heartbreakingly brave, she fulfils the poet’s vocation which, in the face of suffering, requires  ‘a certain distance –made, in part, through the mind of art itself’ (Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry – Facing the Lion p160)

Art is what I’d call Elephant Bones: ’there is a census of bone, collection of memory / as if feeling the weight of the missing tusks;/ a rib from the barrel of their own chest, /grief exhales in short exasperations / tighten the small seed eyes into fists / as the calves cover ulna and radius over/ with weeping lovegrass and bluebush twigs.’ And there is more, not only in this substantial poem, but in the others, particularly the voice and content of Letter to Piggy, with its poignant denouement, and the other voices of E-male and The Crescent and the Cross.

Shey Marque:

                The modern pantoum is a poem of any length, composed of four-line stanzas in which the second and fourth               lines of each stanza serve as the first and third line of the next stanza. The last line of a pantoum is often the               same as the first. (Copyright © 1997 - 2011 by Academy of American Poets).

Shey’s  Plume and A Pastiche Past are accomplished examples of pantoums in which form is skilfully matched to content, and her Cento  Remnants has an unsettling voice entirely appropriate to its narrative ‘gentle like Durga, wild like Kali’ – that line from Nandi Chinna’s Afternoon Tea, collaged with others from Shane McCauley, Kevin Brophy, Mags Webster, Claire Potter and other well known writers. Shey’s range is adventurous and Shimmer includes the aptly named Razor Kill with its caesurae and phrases such as pre-packed hostility, plagiarised bullets, and ‘I spakfill the corners of your inverted smile’. 

Mardi May: In the notes I scrawled next to Mardi’s name on the contents page are ‘Love it! Earthiness and the sublime in perfect proportion. Wise witty and compassionate. Clarity.’  Her selection starts with Definition: ‘Poetry is/the curve of a woman; the muscle-hard/lines of a man’; the space between/where longing lies’. It concludes with Vivier’s Cathedral: ‘and, in every silent/stone, the memory/of soaring sound,/as though they owned/both heart and mind’. Each of the 5 poems is a discrete world, in one a ‘tight lycra mother jogs by the roadside’ and in another  a rabbit dies ‘Returning from the kill,/  the limp soft-toy body/lay across my lap,/gun cold at my feet. And in every one, a reflection of the final stanza from Life Lines: ‘Emotions telling tales/ clearly as waves trace/ their ebbing on the sand.’

Susan O’Brien  ‘O good;        a poet tree at last…’ Susan writes, in The Maker. I’ve known Susan a long time and here, as always, her poetry evokes artist John Olsen’s maxim: ‘If you read poetry, which I do daily, you must let it come inside you to grasp its meaning’ and his advice concerning painting: ‘Don’t be too intellectually involved in meaning, because somehow meaning looks after itself’. I first read this in Claire Potter’s comments in favour of imagination, which she wrote as judge of the 2010 Tom Collins Poetry Prize.  Susan’s poems are the experience, and her imagination and perception will take you into them if you rely less on your left-brain thinking and more fully enter her extraordinary, fully realised sensory dreams where, in her own words, you’ll find.

‘The song:

             Itself

                     throbbing.’ (Like Jazz – Susan O’Brien)

Gail Robinson’s OrnaMental is hard to top for originality: here is poetry with a distinct voice and vision. I find it hard to believe Gail’s biographical note that ‘writing poetry fits neatly into the cracks’ because her poems are so alive, so organic and dare I say, anarchic, that I feel sure they will keep growing and their roots, or feelers, or both, will eventually displace any walls or foundations which seek to confine them. Wry and worldly-wise Recirculating begins ‘“I’m not made of money, she says/ with the reliability of a gold index’ and concludes ’Market linked she ventures/banking on growth.’ , Quoting Don Paterson at the start of this, I  mentioned he said that to write with  real originality one had to somehow avoid cliché (since for a reader to be blown away by the original phrase it must already be partly familiar to them, if they are to register the transformation[ … ] . There is more here than play on cliché, as a concluding line from this articulate writer’s Quest for sparkle shows:

‘[…]                           In your

accumulated particulate

I could grow mushrooms.’ 

Rose van Son I did appreciate the layout of Shimmer as I progressed through it, and coming to Rose’s page of 4 haiku was like being served sorbet to sharpen the palate during a banquet. These haiku are exquisitely sequenced, leading us from against to between to grandmother’s garden and the winter cache of the forest floor.  Here the shimmering spirit of haiku is manifest. To follow we have the more substantial Masterpiece and Ganymede Carried off by the Eagle (1634-1693) where subject matter meets its poetic equivalent.  Rose evokes the visual and narrative essence of the classics and the mythic with a restraint which demonstrates the power of what is withheld. She realises the poet must rely on the reader to meet her in the making of the poem, especially when drawing on our common cultural stories: such enormous subjects where restraint seems the secret, or writer and reader would be overwhelmed with detail. Monet’s Waterlilies  and Leonardo’s Florence, The Mona Lisa, Turin and an international flight are subjects deftly captured with crystalline clarity, in confident strokes, as though her pen were a fine sable brush.

Rose will be published by Roland Leach’s Sunline Press before Christmas and to conclude Shimmer, there are poems from the most recently published Sunline Poets.

Mags Webster : The “I” in Mags Webster’s poetry is instantly recognisable for its sheer dramatic presence: edgy and sensuous, insouciantly playful one minute, up close and personal  the next,  defiant yet still vulnerable for all her narrator’s panache and sophistication. I’ve chosen my words carefully here for Mags has told me she draws on her imagination when she writes, and not all her poems are autobiographical! If her particular spell is that they seem so: ‘I am gilled and slippery muscle/ I am gasping mouth’ (from Fisherman), their accomplishment lies in her ability to embody intimate experience in language. Listen to the lush assonance and consonance of: ’the power is in your subtle grip/the cunning of your sculpture.// You are my ciphers of desire/ I am pitch-perfect on your cusp, /more than ready to strut.’ (Ode to Manolo). – and that’s ‘just’ about shoes!!

‘Why not say what happened’ the poet Robert Lowell famously said – well, possibly because we feel ‘our utter inadequacy to the task of marrying world and words’ (Jane Hirschfield). Or is it, sometimes, because we fear our words’ ability to make the world explicit and we shy away, at the last moment, instead of taking the leap that would describe those most intimate and profound of human experiences, Eros and Thanatos – the forces of life and death, the experiences of pleasure and suffering?

Shimmer does not shy away: its contributing writers take the jump and soar. KSP’s 2011 anthology of members’ poetry is true to its epigram, John Ashbery’s assertion that Poetry is  - three parts shimmer, one part shriek. (John Ashbery Selected Prose 2004) and this afternoon it is my delight to bid it Godspeed on its journey and declare it launched.

Annamaria Weldon

October 24th 2011

KSP, Greenmount W.A.