Welcome to Issue Three of the White Leaf Review. On this page you will find a select group of poems from England and America. We have also included a poem by the Brazilian poet, Jorge Lucio de Campos.
In the review section you will find an extended article on Philip Larkin and review subjects include Dorothy Molloy.
Feel free to comment on anything in this issue using the Contact button on the navigation bar to the left.
Contents
Poems
1 - Ryan Bird................................Surface
2 - Ryan Bird................................Balcony Notes
3 - Samuel Vargo..........................Politics and the Blind Toad
4 – Christopher Barnes.................The Legislator’s View
5 - Christopher Barnes..................The New House
6 - Martin Jervis.............................Longuinos, Margao
7 - Steve Klepetar..........................Here’s What They Will Pay You For
8 - Chris Major...............................Contrasts
9 - Jorge Lucio De Campos............Bonecas em Banho de Sol
10 - Jorge Lucio De Campos..........Dolls Sun Bathing
Reviews
11 - Richard Bradford - First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin
14 - Dorothy Molloy - Hare Soup
16 - Carole Bromley - Unscheduled Halt
17 - Helen Farish - Intimates
-1-
Poems
Surface
in the stagnant
ditch-water
beside the Humber,
floated the
pale
guppy bones.
it bent
around my fingertip
like wallpaper
paste.
I held it to
the light
and saw through
its flatness.
- Ryan Bird
-2-
Balcony Notes
dear bending branch,
I can now see downtown
where important folk
stuff themselves in drawers.
dear multiple bottle caps,
I stick you to the sweat of my brow
and pretend that I am a galactic being-
when no one is looking.
dear sleeping dog,
your fluttering cheek makes me smile.
dear sandals,
I see your sole splitting in two
where the balls of my feet would reach
your padded arch.
dear column of cloud,
I just like how, given enough time,
you will fold back into the
other bunches of cloud.
- Ryan Bird
-3-
Politics and the Blind Toad
The toad sits around the cement
Looking like a toad should look,
Almost content - with warts
And things hanging out, all over.
He's not an autocratic sort of animal
But he's not a Democrat, either.
Toads don't care about self interest
Who they slept with last night,
How many donations to their cause
They'll be able to attract from Santa Claus
And sundry other politicos. All they care for
Is that life is one long yawn, a real bore
Of a snow job. The blind toad knows
How and why his toes feel like
Hammers now and then,
When to croak, when to stammer,
When to leap and when to freeze.
He's not blind, but might as well be.
He's in the deep squeeze of time --
And has been for eons and eons.
Sometimes we think of the blind toad
As a peon, but we should know by now
He's in it for keeps, these politics his neat
Ugliness pontificates on the road
To generations and bumpy, brown nations
Of warty ancestors and fly-catchers.
Politics may be blind to the toad,
It's true, but he's not blind to either
Me, you, nor the hard realities
That make his life real and untied,
Like a bowl of big, fat flies
And some hot sun on the concrete
To keep his summer feet
Warm and always in retreat
Of any shadows drifting his way.
Until then, he'll stay almost still.
- Samuel Vargo
-4-
The Legislator’s View
‘We’ve gone too damned far on sex already. I don’t regard any sex as pleasant, it’s
pretty undignified.’
George Brown MP, on legalising male homosexuality (Sexual Offences Bill 1967)
…so let us pressure-cook sweetmeat,
wake amoebas of honey into mint tea,
design the true look of an unreal sky,
mitigate the colorants of our hairdressing daily
so that the thumb-twiddling stops.
Suppose we hover our naked ape minds on Zen,
tolerate fluorescence to warm our logics.
Bless us for sitting at ease to music
with off-the-peg humdrum suits to wear
taking the edge off our bodies.
When a wished for sensation jumps up
we shall freeze it with raw water,
recall what it is to be British
and bait any propulsion of life
’til the traumas claw our very hearts.
- Christopher Barnes
-5-
The New House
I was dewy when the thundering beak
scabby heartstopping feathers
plunged through a full-face print of Malcolm X
sabotaging the props of the room.
At rush hour a bloated daddy longlegs
belly flopped onto the valance
dancing like a paralytic
across the sunbaked nodes of lino.
A nocturnal bogeyman of rotten gales
came and went, began again,
plunked open the sneck
unfolding the endless passage.
Next day the burn of high summer.
- Christopher Barnes
-6-
Longuinos, Margao
In the open doorway the lost boy with
the wooden snakes and giant maps
rattles my shirt imploringly.
"Na na, challay jao"
badly phrased Hindi
speared at his naked persistence.
I step inside.
The dance of the seven fans shadow
rhythms on the smoke lacquered ceiling.
Drop my weight on a chair.
Fresh spicy prawn patties appear alongside
a misty ice cold in Alex 'Kingfisher'.
A spondylitic look around.
Visitors, skin white as shock and hatted
in last year's sweat greased Akubras,
drift in shoals towards skin baked umber chairs
and time chipped melamine tabletops, wiped clean.
Two large mirrors hang forwards in gesture,
tight in tireless Art Deco hands that hold weight.
Across the round bar hangs a wooden barrel,
vestigial empty ornament, a Portuguese past.
I leave shopping behind the counter,
a ritual of plastic clutter.
Recycle sprawling feet in the waiters' aisles, withdraw
as they scuttle numbered, fuelled by a need
for tips and a formulaic high octane routine.
Up the narrow stairs.
Pause at fading lead lights in dusty elegance.
I become an overflow of volume fever,
flavour that sugars long legs into a tubular space,
bench marked and strategically bruised sojourn.
Approved locals smoke, eat, drink, exchange
and inhale a smoky atmosphere of hustle.
A sweltering of pores evaporates moisture.
All of us are drinking too much beer
but not enough in the rising heat
of this drying cupboard.
In the open doorway papers flap.
It is the shadow of leaving bones
And a faint hiss in the air.
- Martin Jervis
-7-
Here’s What They Will Pay You For
Not for dreaming in cold mist,
where late summer leaves yellow
at their tips or for hammering
at stars. There is little demand
for what you do at night when
the small man who lives in your
ear sleeps and his hands come free.
He will untie bundles, work with
yarn of many colors, bits of mirror,
fruits and gold and feathers gathered
on mountain tops. There he builds
sculptures made of scraps – light,
rough fabric and metals smooth
and hard as ice, the detritus of holes.
Useless, he earns nothing.
Blind all day he senses patterns
in the wind, nose alert to the scent of lakes.
- Steve Klepetar
-8-
Contrasts
Look at them, lights pearling tree branches,
drooping from gutters and adorning doors.
Avenues and streets loud with houses
parading festive tat, while town centres
like cheap tarts flash fairy bulbs and too much glitter.
It’s as if for a short while we need
lives full of colour, all glimmer and glare,
to fool ourselves into believing that
next year will be brighter- and darkness is just
an absence of light.
- Chris Major
-9-
BONECAS EM BANHO DE SOL
a László Moholy-Nagy*
Elas não sabem
o quanto urge
(ninguém sabe
o que as urde)
Enfim, de que
é feito o silêncio
e o enlevo de
onde surge?
Da carne crua
do estalo
ao longe
de um beijo?
Elas não sabem
(assim espero)
o quanto as
tento e desejo
- Jorge Lucio de Campos
-10-
Translation
Dolls Sunbathing
They know nothing
of urgency,
nothing
of origins.
They know not
where the silence comes from,
from where
the rapture arises,
the long fleshy
sound,
or the smack
of a kiss.
They know nothing,
I hope,
of temptation,
or of my desire.
*To see the photo which inspired this poem, visit:
First Boredom, Then Fear: The Life of Philip Larkin
Richard Bradford
(Peter Owen, 2005)
ISBN 0720611474
£19.95
After all the controversy surrounding the uncovering of Larkin's 'dark secrets' in the 1990's, the poet himself seems to have been restored to the nation's hearts - the public either forgetting or forgiving the sexist, racist ramblings of the letters - and in 2003 he stood at the head of the Guardian's survey of the most popular poets of the past fifty years and his 'The Whitsun Weddings' was chosen as the single most popular poem.
Richard Bradford's introduction to his recent biography of Larkin surveys the various attitudes from the cognoscenti of the poetry world, with figures such as Seamus Heaney and Andrew Motion in one corner and Tom Paulin and Lisa Jardine in the other.
Bradford takes the line that Larkin the man and Larkin the poet cannot be separated, that one underwrites the other. Whether Larkin was a 'bad man' or not, the poems stand as a testament to the fact that he was capable of 'detached circumspection', whether he lacked a certain degree of control in his letters, the control of language in the poems rise above any of that 'nastiness', prejudice, narrow-mindedness. The stuff of his letters, while often funny in the same way that Little Britain can be funny, is rounded out in the poems through coming into contact with the strict formal patterning and being expressed through a language that has at its core the element of finely measured qualification.
Knowing that Larkin took particular pleasure in obtaining pornography lends even more depth to the ambiguities and the profundities of a poem such as 'Sunny Prestatyn.' The Larkin of the 90's and after is, if anything, even more uncomfortable, even more urgent and even more relevant.
There are various apologies made by Bradford in the introduction. Larkin espoused jazz musicians such as Armstrong and Bechet, so he could not have been that much of a racist. He espoused the work of Barbara Pym so he could not have been such a misogynist. This sort of claim was made by apologists of Ezra Pound: he liked Zukosfky and met up with Ginsberg, so he could not have been a total anti-semite.
Whether we need this kind of emollient is questionable. Larkin, though not to the same extent (a matter of timing?) holds some of those traits that Yeats once described as the 'antithetical personality'. The references to 'wogs' and the like in the letters, if anything, only serve to remind us why poems such as 'An Arundel Tomb', 'Afternoons' or 'Aubade' are considered masterpieces.
-12-
Bradford's early chapters on Larkin's parents and childhood are, as we might expect, notable mainly for the fact there is so little to say. The marriage appeared, certainly to Larkin, to be loveless, and may well have tainted his own views later in life. His father's frequent visits to Germany in the 1930's, on occasion taking young Philip with him to sample the glories of Nazi Germany, may also prove to be revealing as an insight into the man that Larkin became.
Apart from this, the reader of the biography ploughs through the schooldays and even the Oxford sojourn in order to get to the period of the Less Deceived and the writing of The Whitsun Weddings. The camaraderie and the rivalry with Amis might serve to explain why Larkin turned away from writing novels but even that holds limited interest.
Amis's success might have become a catalyst for Larkin's own sense of failure and disappointment later. 'Toads' certainly contains hints towards such a reading. What I found much more revealing, because so unlike the typical image we have of the cynical and the standoffish Larkin, were moments such as the slightly sentimental arrangements he observed with his long time lover, Monica Jones:
They parted on good terms and as was their custom chose a forthcoming radio programme - usually a play or concert which would hold interest for each - and agreed that they would listen to it while imagining the other's response.
At various points, especially in the middle of Bradford's book, the reader begins to lose track of the various female companions, what with the overlapping of the relationships and the way he seemed to play off the women in his life against each other. Monica, Maeve, Winifred, Patsy, Ruth, Betty. It is not so much a surprise that the shy, stammering Larkin had such an array of female admirers, as that he was able to keep so many going at the same time. It must have felt like a juggling act at times. These women have shadowy presences in the poems and it seems that knowing of them can open the poems out into a larger story of love and deception.
Larkin goes against many of the expectations we have of poets. Neither wildly exuberant nor especially eccentric, he did seem to fit neatly into his own very 'unpoetic' lifestyle. In retrospect, the job of librarian seemed to suit him down to the ground as did his choice of location in Hull. As Bradford says, 'Larkin's lifetime was not comprised of events or experiences that even the most languorous person would treat as exciting.'
But of course it is what he did in converting that lifetime into verse that matters. This is at the heart of the appeal that Larkin still holds: to take a life that is apparently only notable in the extent of what it lacks and to fashion from that a body of work that takes as its starting point that very emptiness. Bradford puts it succinctly: 'the true artist can make the most melancholic condition the subject of a superb artefact without causing it to be any the less depressing.'
-13-
My guess is that the scandal of Larkin's letters will continue to die down and, as Larkin was aware of more than most, the scandalized will die away. To misquote one of Larkin's most quoted lines, 'What will survive of him is his poetry.' Whether he would have cared for that or not is another matter.
- Stephen Brown
-14-
Hare Soup
Dorothy Molloy
(Faber, 2004)
ISBN 0571219896
£8.99
Dorothy Molloy's reputation as a poet is based on her first and only collection, Hare Soup, published in 2004. Born in Mayo, Ireland, she lived and worked on the continent before returning to Ireland to see her book of poetry accepted for publication by Faber. She died from cancer of the liver shortly before the book was released.
I discovered this last fact whilst in the middle of my first reading of the collection and I had already established in my mind that many of the poems were of the highest quality, were hugely entertaining, and I had already decided to seek more work by someone whom the blurb aptly describes as a 'striking new voice.'
Hare Soup spans Europe in its range and takes in the bizarre, the grotesque, the poignant, the pious and the erotic along the way. All this is intricately bound up with the ordinary to create a wonderfully heady mix.
The first poem, 'Conversation Class', opens with the speaker embarrassed by her French. Soon we find ourselves in a surreal world where we're never sure which bits are literal and which figurative. Molloy's perfectly measured phrasing and sound patterns keep us on tenterhooks, portraying a moment of self-consciousness as if it were a matter of life and death:
My tongue is jammed, my teeth are in a
brace. Her hands fly to her face. 'Mon Dieu,' she cries...
With liquor sluiced back, the speaker relaxes into a rendition of the Marseillaise, perhaps a sign of an opening up of the floodgates. It is also the beginning of a collection of poems that are often erotically charged, but also poems in which language is taut, vital, quick, like the gasp of someone coming up for air:
My tongue is loosed. My eyes are glazed. I sing
the Marseillaise. I feel a revolution
in the red flare of my skirt.
As early as the second poem, 'A Walk in the Forest', the nightmarish element is introduced: 'The night is hung with Zodiacs / and spiders, zinging bats.' This continues in poems such as 'Infant of Prague, 'Family Circus' and 'Grandma's Zoo.'
-15-
Ezra Pound once said that poetry should be as well written as the best prose. The title poem, a kind of novel in germ, is a fine example of Molloy's precise style. It has all the discipline of a tensely wrought story, the atmosphere of a Bunuel film and it all leads to the ecstatic ending.
bouquets of old-fashioned roses
fall into my lap: petals shot with bright flashes
of scarlet and purple, vermilion, alizarin,
ruby, carmine and cerise.
There is no let up in the mixture of the tense, the erotic and the dark humour. The poems sometimes see the world from a child's perspective and often the speaker's vulnerability is central. The erotic is often accompanied by violence ('Floating with Mr Swan', 'Was it like this?').
'Les Grands Seigneurs' is a standout poem towards the end of the book:
Men were my buttresses, my castellated towers,
the bowers where I took my rest...
On the inside cover of the book Molloy is described as a ‘subtle poet... whose lyrical, musical lines resonate well beyond their final reading.’ There is, however, no need for a final reading when these poems offer up more and more each time you go back to them.
- Stephen Brown
-16-
Unscheduled Halt
Carole Bromley
(Smith/Doorstop, 2005)
ISBN 1902382722
£3
The unscheduled halt of Carole Bromley's pamphlet seems to be both the train station in the first poem and the death of a father, portrayed in the first half of the collection. The opening title poem has a sparseness and directness that sets the tone for much of what follows:
The night pricked with stars.
A stopped train. Midnight. A new moon.
Some of the early poems trace the progress of the father's illness and death, suggesting that it was, perhaps, not completely unexpected. 'Away' begins and ends with news of the father's brain scan and the examination of 'the tell-tale gaps / wherememories were.'
There is a poignant depiction of loss and grief in many of the poems, full of little details that give the impression of someone seeking distractions from the inevitable: ‘I warmed the cafetiere - the big one / that makes eight cups if you fill it full...’ (‘The Morning My Father Died')
From the passing of the father the poet turns to the mother-child relationship, and a lighter tone prevails. In ‘Fitting Room’ for example:
It slithers like a snakeskin over my arms
And I am Marilyn Monroe, mouthing
Sea-anemone kisses at my reflection;
Happy Birthday, Mr. President…
The intimations of mortality return towards the end in the long poem, ‘One morning in June’. The poet describes the experience of having a stroke and subsequent treatment which is oddly reminiscent of the father's illness in the first half of the pamphlet.
The five poems I have mentioned are probably the best of the twenty in the pamphlet.
Wendy Cope has described the pamphlet as 'succinct, well-constructed and powerful' and many of the poems do manage to justify such high praise.
- George Stevens
-17-
Intimates
Helen Farish
(CapePoetry, 2005)
ISBN 022407279X
£9
Intimates won both a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2005. On the back of the book the blurb asks ‘Can there be a more arresting opening to a debut collection than “Look at These?”’ Bernard O’Donoghue describes it as a ‘stunning debut.’ I have to admit that I was neither arrested nor stunned.
‘Look at These’ is a bold opening, but it is not, I fear, a very good poem. Indeed I was into the third poem in the collection before I found anything worth re-reading. ‘Auto Reply’ is a dramatic monologue, spoken by the Biblical Matthew, after he had left his job as a tax collector:
On my desk I left a reminder
of what to buy for supper, a scummy
mug of tea, unanswered
emails...
It is a confident and sophisticated poem. You can imagine it was fun to write and it is certainly enjoyable to read. And these kinds of poems crop up now and again in the collection, poems like ‘The Ring’s Story’.
Throughout the book there is a fine line between intimacy and indulgence. The poems that didn’t work for me where the ones that kept themselves wrapped up in personal significance. ‘Rescue’ for example, or ‘In the Church of St Joseph, Prague’. They were, if anything, too intimate. Take, for example, ‘Treasures’:
The old coach road on a heat-haze night;
my new jacket; my sudden interest
in swallows; the barn; Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid; a cassette recording...
These poems washed over me. I drew a blank on many of them until I came to poems such as ‘The Lighthouse of Nauset’. Farish has a penchant for speaking for inanimate objects. And again, in a poem like ‘Manicure’ the intimacy resounds with wider significance. I presume the poet here is giving her mother a manicure and it ends with precision and poignancy:
-18-
How long is it since I was last
acquainted with these hands? Suddenly
I feel possessive of them, wanting
no undertaker’s manicure, the thumb
and forefinger at peace at last:
somebody else sweeping up.
These are the peaks in the collection and, for me, they are too few and far between. There are memorable poems in this book. They demonstrate Farish’s undoubted talent. The collection has been showered with awards and recommendations. Perhaps because of this I set my expectations too high and overall the book failed to meet them.
- Marion Lewis
Notes on Contributors
Christopher Barnes is a past winner of a Northern Arts writer’s award. His collection, Lovebites, was published in 2005 by Chanticleer Press, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh.
Ryan Bird believes in magic, William Carlos Williams and owning as many pets as the law allows. Each time his poems appear in grassroots publications like Poetic Hours,Opium Magazine and The Orphan Leaf Review, his wife, Jillian, gives him a kiss.
Martin Jervis is based in Leeds, England. He has previously published poems in Orbis, Outposts, Blue Fifth Review (US), Perigee (US), The Black Rose, Jones Av. (Canada), Eclipse, Decanto, Starving Art (US), Braquemard, Everyman Press, Poetic Hours, Poetry Repair Shop (US) and others.
Steve Klepetar teaches literature and writing at Saint CloudStateUniversity in Minnesota. His work has appeared in many journals, including Snakeskin, Niederngasse and Tamaphyr Mountain Poetry.
Jorge Lucio de Campos was born in Rio de Janeiro. He is Adjunct Professor of Theory of Communication and Culture at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). He has published several books includingArcangelo (EdUERJ, Rio de Janeiro, 1991) and À maneira negra (Sette Letras, 1997).
Chris Major lives in Staffordshire, England. He works with people who have mental health problems. He has published poems in many literary journals. His pamphlet, The Lowest Level, will be published by White Leaf Press in January 2006.
Samuel Vargo is a school teacher in an urban school district. He was fiction editor of Pig Iron Press, Youngstown, Ohio, for 12 years.He has published work in several literary journals.
