Commentary on the poems

As an editor it is always a joy to find a poem that stands out from the rest of the submissions, something that for whatever reason hails itself as a definite selection. It is sometimes difficult to say exactly what it is that makes me choose one poem over another. I suspect it is a mixture of several things. A poem should seem like the author has taken great pains to put it together, it should seem well-written (as Ezra Pound said, it should be at least as well written as the best prose). It should avoid sentimentality, the awkward, gauche handling of emotion. It should strike a chord, perhaps for subjective reasons, and it should be memorable, not necessarily flashy or sensational. The best poems often work through understatement, using the power of suggestion or subtlety.

Also, I wondered whether the ideas that the poets themselves have about their own poems correlate in any way to the reasons why I have chosen them. I decided to ask the poets to comment on their work and I have used these comments to write a review of the poems in this issue.

The first poem, ‘The Dog Under the Table’, by Steve Klepetar is a surreal description of a stay in Paris. The dreaminess of the city has a strange effect on the speaker. A French dog becomes his guide: ‘Tomorrow we meet for chess / at a café in the square.’

Steve says that he was at a restaurant, Le Petit Chaise to be exact, when ‘the family at the next table had a small white dog, which sat politely under their table and only barked once when the main course arrived.  He was quickly hushed by the mother, who told him to “be wise.”  My daughter-in-law, caught up in veal nirvana, couldn't get over the idea of a dog in a fine restaurant, but the French patrons and staff took it in perfect stride.’

I liked the way the poem appears light hearted on the surface but there is something insidious underneath, something of the dream just on the verge of turning nightmarish as we are left with that final image: ‘a pride / of cats and their great rose-window eyes.’

´The Lady of Half Moon Bay’ opens with a series arresting images that are captured through some fine melodic phrasing:

a shore is shushing

a piccolo hoot

from a seagull's throat

The poem moves like a camera panning across the bay. The ‘soggy brocade / from a wedding dress’ leads us eventually on the trail of a ghost. Chris commented: ‘For me the ghost symbolizes passions repressed ... it demands acknowledgement of hidden wrongs.’ In this poem Chris manages to create a haunted atmosphere and to subtly imply the nature of the ghost of the beach.

The ghost that walks through Amy Nawrocki’s poem is the memory of a failed relationship, presented as an unfinished painting: ‘two figures in the half green / landscape of the canvas.’ The two ghostly figures in the poem are indistinct, ‘a blank space emerges.’ Amy suggests that ‘the colours are trying to shade in what is really blank.’

When the speaker urges in the last stanza to ‘Look over and finish the scene,’ one wonders whether it is addressed to the reader or the lover, but the intimacy is lacking in the end and the white space suggests coldness, the emptiness that remains. But as Amy says, ‘Even after it is over, or when we move on, the brush strokes are still there, however subtly.’

‘Black Eagle Street’ by Joanna Ezekiel is also about remembering. This time it is her grandmother who is associated with the place that Joanna tries to recreate in the poem. ‘I will trace with my finger...’ But everything is now scuffed, faded, flaking.

Joanna wrote of her fascination with the East End of London: ‘It all started in childhood. Fuelled by sweet tea and chopped herring bagels with my mother's family, I would listen to memories and coincidences, study photographs.’

‘Black Eagle Street’ is also a reminder of how even in the 19^th century you could hear ‘the rough overlap / of different languages’ of the immigrants who had arrived in London and of some of the events in the intervening years, the tenements ‘demolished or bombed.’ It is also a reminder of how the landscapes of towns and cities are constantly changing, as if shedding skins, and with them often the history is forgotten. But, as Joanna says, ‘there are traces of it left, if you look closely enough.’

The speaker in Tamara Fulcher’s poem appears almost in awe of the subject who has become a kind of personification of mobility, of exploration, but also of loss. In places the turn of the lines reflects the subject’s movement:

You have been as far as the sea,

back, and like a wave

away again.

The speaker seems like a still centre that the subject gravitates towards. This is a poem about an Odyssean wanderlust and about living vicariously through another’s adventures. It is a ‘going away poem’ as Tamara calls it.

There is an ambivalent attitude towards the wanderer as the speaker almost takes some pleasure in imagining ‘the smithereens of foreign bombs’ or ‘skimming off the end of the world.’ But the poem is skilful enough to allow interpretations. As Tamara says, ‘Make him a satellite of earth, make me his morning star.’

In Leia Manuel’s poem there is a perfect conjunction of form and content, the broken lines being a reminder of what the speaker warns against and of the fragility of the subject. The traditional poetic device of the songbird appears at the start but rather than singing of ‘summer in full-throated ease’, this songbird lies smashed and silent. 

This is a kind of anti-love poem. The heart is ‘muzzled’, neither ready to leap nor to speak for itself. It is vulnerable, mute, delicate. This is a plea for love of a more sedate sort, or, as Leia herself suggests, ‘a forceful delivery of the admonition “Handle with care”’.

The issue is completed by Matt Merritt’s poem of childhood adventure and the momentary surfacing of a submarine at the beginning of World War Two. It becomes an elusive monster, a ‘legendary beast.’ Matt’s concise lines capture the moment and the tension: ‘its whaleback glistening.’

The moment is crystallized and takes on mythic proportions:

but it was Callum McCallum,

tenth of that name, who stepped

forward and commanded it

back to the grey depths.

The beast may represent the childhood fear of the unknown but there are many clever and intricate links being made under the surface of the poem that add an extra dimension. I’ll let Matt explain: ‘The fact that the rock dove's Latin name is "columba livia" sparked a memory of St Columba's encounter with a water beast, which he commanded back into Loch Ness, which is mirrored in the poem. One other thing - I think the phrase "unknown to God" might be from Beowulf (or possibly another Anglo-Saxon poem). I wanted to use it to help make that link between ancient and modern.’

The poems in this issue are varied in style and approach but one thing that comes out of the poets’ notes is that the drafting process, whilst different for each writer, is often lengthy and arduous. One poet writes, ‘It stuck around as a draft for a long time.’ Another says, ‘I think it went through a dozen or so drafts.’ And this concern for accuracy in depicting complicated experiences, emotions and ideas is clearly borne out by the quality of the poems.

Finally I would like to thank the poets included in this issue. I hope you have enjoyed reading them. Please feel free to pass on comments via email and continue to send in your submissions.

- Stephen Brown

Notes on Contributors

Chris Crittenden has been published in about eighty journals (some of them are: Chelsea, The Evansville Review, and The Blind Man’s Rainbow), and lives in the easternmost town in the United States, a small fishing village without traffic lights. 

Joanna Ezekiel lives and works in London. Her pamphlet, A Braid of Words (Poetry Monthly Press) was published in 2003.

Tamara Fulcher lives in Edinburgh. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of magazines including Tears in the Fence, Gold Dust, Parameter, Iota, Other Poetry and Poetry Review.

Steve Klepetar teaches literature and writing at Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota.  His work has appeared in many journals, including Snakeskin, Niederngasse and Tamaphyr Mountain Poetry.

Leia A. Manuel is a native of Prince George, VA and a recent graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Hollins University.

Matt Merritt has been published in a number of magazines, including Anon, Iota, Other Poetry, Pennine Platform, Parameter and Poetry Nottingham, and several small press anthologies. His first chapbook, Making The Most Of The Light, was published in October 2005 by Happenstance Press. (See White Leaf Review, Issue 4). He lives near Leicester.

Amy Nawrocki is a professor of English at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. She has been published in various places, including Loch Raven Review, The Lucid Stone, Midday Moon, poetrymagazine.com, Ribbons, the Pegasus Review, Exposure, and the Connecticut River Review.

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