Welcome to the first issue of the White Leaf Review, a new poetry e-zine dedicated to publishing exciting new work by poets and writers.
The first issue contains new poems and reviews of recent poetry books and pamphlets, including Colette Bryce's The Full Indian Rope Trick and Frances Leviston's Lighter.
The e-zine will be published three times a year. Issue Two will be ready in September 2005. We are accepting submissions. Please see the submissions page for further details.
We hope you enjoy this first issue. Please feel free to comment by using the contact link on the left.
Scroll down to view the e-zine.
Contents
Poems
1 - Marion Lewis...................Pilgrimage
2 - Alistair McKenzie..............Casement in the Jungle
3 - Tom Doolen.....................Postkarte 630
4 - Rhea Shreenivasun............Samadhi
Reviews
5 - Colette Bryce - The Full Indian Rope Trick
6 - Frances Leviston - Lighter
7 - Estill Pollock - Fields and Standing Waves
8 - David Bircumshaw - The Animal Subsides
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Poems
Pilgrimage
I summon up the forest of road signs,
the great lorry's bumper, the mournful horn,
the roads beaten black and chewed up,
the roundabout circled like a shrine,
recount the gains and losses
of the traffic jam,
the stifling incense of the fumes,
the weary trickle of petrol -
libations unto a wet black god.
Land of mini and juggernaut,
of pilgrimage through town,
day in, day out.
Some day you too will break down
and have to take the black taxi
and the people at the side of the road
will bow their heads and pray.
-Marion Lewis
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Casement in the Jungle
In the virgin forest he hears the cicadas,
and sees the Emperor butterflies among the cassavas.
On bare buttocks the marks of the Aranos Bros-
their wealfare state for idle muchachos.
Whipping thongs, Winchesters, stocks.
In the halls of Circe, blancos lolling on hammocks.
His hand alone records caucho lies, half-hangings,
a stronghold of wrongdoing.
On all sides, criminals:
kings of their little anthills
Still, in the virgin forest, he hears the cicadas,
sees the Emperor butterflies among the cassavas.
- Alistair McKenzie
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Postkarte 630
A seemingly innocuous postcard sent by a woman in Cracow to Romania in 1943
contains a secret message written in invisible ink describing terrible conditions
in a concentration camp.Independent6 November 1997
What you sweated blood for remains
untranslated, included out of history,
faded into the chiaruscuro
behind the undercharged sensibility of an evil-
kind, the frowsy injudiciously damned
would appal even Dante, who has seen it all already,
appal his faith in il buon tempo verra,
bring to mind the white chimpanzees
by the side of the road
with mouths stained green
from chewing nettles,
the dogfood and tallow diet,
behind the walls
of Troy or Krakau or Hanoi
the night of the witch-hunt
the human wolves.
Otto, Lola, Mr Greenstein
the words meet unequally
but let it be known
before the ink runs out
that history does not narrate itself
let it be known that
- Tom Doolen
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Samadhi
Cigarettes were blessed and lit
and placed at each corner of the pit.
His wife, with python eyes, sprayed lavender sparsely.
He looked far gone already
as they shovelled the earth
into the hole in which he sat,
until all that remained
was the wiry shell of the coconut
he had been balancing on his head.
The superstitious stood above staring.
The next day the Science Committee
designated the interred ‘irresponsible’
and clashed with pilgrims at the shrine,
who were beaten back with bamboo batons
- Rhea Shreenivasun
(Translated by David Mackay and Rhea Shreenivasun)
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Reviews
Colette Bryce - The Full Indian Rope Trick (Picador, 2005)
Many of the early poems in Colette Bryce's second collection are rooted firmly in the Derry of her childhood. Growing up in the seventies in that weird and warped environment has, of course, left its mark on Bryce's imagination and the surreal emerges subtly in these poems, portraying a fondly-remembered but ever so slightly skewed set of circumstances.
Derry was, and to some extent still is, a divided city. The river splits the city in half and is an obvious metaphor for religious division. In "Stones", Bryce remembers being kept apart "from children who were rich." The divisions in "Satellite" are multiple: North and South, mother and father, and the separateness of exile. In fact, "Satellite" is a poem about dividing:
Part of the task was to separate
the rogue harps and leaping fish
from the Queen's heads. (5)
The age-old dispute about the naming of Bryce's home town features in "And They Call It Lovely Derry", as children from Protestant and Catholic backgrounds harmonize in a choir. They go their separate ways on the last two words of the song, "as the group split between London and Lovely."
You have to look closer to find the divisions in the rest of the volume but, like the street in "Device" that is "cordoned off and spotlit for eternity", the entire collection is, in a sense, cordoned off by two blank pages after page 18 and 38.
Indeed, much of the rest of the volume deals with the division between two worlds, or two ways of seeing the world: the quotidien and the awfully unreliable world of memory and imagination. Weeping statues appear and everything seems to hang "in the balance". The surface tension of these poems is itself finely tuned, always in danger of cracking, enticingly holding its secrets beneath.
This is a dazzling collection that is always on the verge of breaking out into a more obvious show of emotion, always on the verge of breaking into song, and it leaves the reader always on the verge of bewilderment: "You begin, of course, to doubt yourself." As in that poem, called "Negatives", "there is only [Bryce's] word for it", and throughout this collection Bryce's word is enough, more than enough.
- Stephen Brown
The Full Indian Rope Trick
Colette Bryce
Pub. Picador Poetry (2005) ISBN 0 330 43597 3
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Frances Leviston - Lighter (Mews Press, 2004)
As with all the Mews Press Pamphlets, Sean O'Brien introduces this collection. His Prefatory Note is a heady pedestal on which to set Frances Leviston's first collection. 'An exhilarating fusion of insistent exactitude, sensuousness and dramatic momentum...' is how O'Brien describes these poems. It is only at the end of the note that he hints towards the fact that Leviston is important more for what she might achieve rather than for what is included in this pamphlet. She is 'full of potential', O'Brien says, which is about as much as you can say about a better than average debut.
The twelve poems in Lighter do, at times, capture in glimpses, what the Preface calls 'the self's adventure.' The lesser poems in the collection may remind the reader of an adequate translation of French symbolism ('You Bring Flowers'), but the best bristle with a freshness and a lightness of touch. You can be taken in by the apparent simplicity of some of these lines. 'Immortality', perhaps the pamphlet's high point, hints at the effort that produces such skill.
Throughout the volume a confessional tone prevails. Monologues evoke the drama of fleeting moments, a personal history in refracted memories ('Losses', 'All Intents and Purposes'). The nightmarish scenes of 'Unthinkable' are reminiscent of the discarded bits of the WasteLand.
There is enough evidence here of the potential that O'Brien has detected, and of an emerging voice that is urgent and attentive. There is indeed plenty of promise here and we should certainly look forward to Leviston's first full volume.
Estill Pollock - Fields and Standing Waves (Flarestack, 2004)
Fields and Standing Waves is a hefty collection. It was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet choice for Winter 2004. Pollock, an American poet, living in England, has brought together ten long poems, contemplative sequences couched in pastoral lyrics. The poems move across imagistic landscapes with cinematic sweeps:
in a ditchwater sky the sun a hawkshape
faint above the cedars. ('Rules of engagement'')
We can find in this collection meditations on war, fairytales rewritten, the poetry of loss, the poetry of place, rich narratives that blend with dense imagery and a lilting cadence.
The longer narrative poems might benefit from compression. You can hear the early Larkin at times, when the philosophizing takes over, but it lacks Larkin's brevity. As you'd expect, within these longer passages you can find gem-like phrases. But the longer poems that make up the bulk of the volume read, at times, like rich prose cut up. The more successful of the longer poems are divided into self-contained units, such as 'Local Spirits', a sequence of fourteen sonnets that begins in East Anglian farmlands and has a range of reference that includes the Bible, Elvis Presley, and travels as far as Peru. The wealth of reference in 'Seconds of Arc' includes movie and literary history and stretches from Oxford to the Orient.
Too much of the collection smacks of the nineteenth century. I thought of Elizabeth Barret Browning when reading 'Inventions in the Pastoral'. It was only the references to TV and Microsoft that reminded me that these poems were published in the twenty-first century.
For all the breadth of these poems, the ones that really work are the shorter ones, such as 'Remote'. And all this suggests that Pollock needs a good editor, an Ezra Pound (whom Pollock quotes) who would take a blue crayon and strike out the messy padding and leave us with the lyric moments and the imagistic beauty that make this collection worth going back to.
Available from:41 Buckley’s Green, Alvechurch, Birmingham B48 7NG United Kingdom. £3.00 + £.50 p/p.
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David Bircumshaw - The Animal Subsides (Arrowhead, 2004)
All the best pamphlets should have book-size creativity and David Bircumshaw's collection is bursting at the seams. The Animal Subsides gives the impression of a life presented in glimpses in various scenes, pressed together with eclectic associations. At times the fusion of personal reflections and scientific terms is reminiscent of Metaphysical poetry. But there is an array of styles and references in this collection that might bring to mind the work of a writer like Joyce. There is irreverence ("Oral Sex and the Solar System") and exotic myth. There are prose poems and monologues. You're bound to find something to enjoy here. It's all held together with a technique that incorporates the insistent rhythms of poems like "Bedtime Story", the grammatical complexities and portmanteau words of "On the Grand Occasion..." and, at times, a crossword-clue opacity.
The most memorable bits may well be the more lyrical moments, the personal reflections of "Terence" or "Your Last Words" and the more restrained line-making of "Eros, Thanatos, Psyche" and the title poem.
