AMBIT

is edited by Martin Bax

with the assistance of Carol Ann Duffy (Poetry ) Henry Graham (Poetry ) Mike Foreman (Art ) J. G. Ballard (Prose ) Geoff Nicholson (Prose) Irving Wardle (Theatre ) Henry Lowther (Music ) Julia Casterton (Poetry / Prose) Richard Dyer (Poetry / Prose) Assistant Editor Kate Pemberton Subscriptions Manager Eugene Wolstenholme Financial Director Judy Bax Advertising Manager Pamela Courtney Corresponding Editors Eduardo Paolozzi Tony Connor Vanessa Jackson E. A. Markham Ron Sandford Taner Baybars (France) Guilano Dego (Italy) Nicola Gray (North America) Satyendra Srivastava (India)

The magazine is designed by John Morgan/Omnific Printed by The Lavenham Press Ltd. Ambit may be purchased direct from: 17 Priory Gardens, London N6 5QY. Single copies are 6.00, inc. p&p. See back flap for subscription details. Visit our website at www.ambitmag.co.uk Bookshop Distribution: Central Books ISSN 0002-6972 Ambit 2002, Issue 168, Spring

Ken Smith Paperwork for the Consul

Verde que te quiero verde, the ship on the sea, the horse on the mountain.
Im drinking rum in the Gran Hotel with Federico Garca in the dark, the barmans name is Ruben Dario. Here the townsfolk call me the Sailor, Hola marinero, for some reason I dont understand. Perhaps the white cottons I wear, the Panama that blew off in the sudden wind into a pretty girls fingers and went off on her pretty girls head and who was I to say es mo, and gave it for a sailors kiss in passing. Or maybe its the roll of my walk wandering the heat struck streets in la neblina, the mid-day heat-haze, wary, amused, curious, mad dog or Englishman, looking for those two good sisters Marie and Juana, purveyors of cigarillos populares.

Do you want to meet Mr White? The answer is No. The thought you could die here anyway marinero, muerto para siempre, dentro este pas quebrado broken para cocana, violencia, avaricia. Thered be no lasting memorial.
Some paperwork for the Honorary Consul, whose card I carry in my belt. A pointless enquiry. You had no name anyway, marinero.

Mail from Campania

I write from Amalfi, a white winding bees nest, jewels cleft between mountains falling seaward. Too hot for my thin northern blood, too claustrophobic, too many tourists in baggy shorts, the only shade beneath the blue plastic umbrella of the tour guide calling over and over Ill be right here, right here. Always something to be done, forms to fill, applications in by due date in triplicate, signed, witnessed, notarised. Though Im busy doing nothing I keep busy anyway, what with the compass to invent, my Parsifal to write. Always curiosities, gossip, love affairs around the back streets of Salerno. Just sitting watching everyone go by. In the slow afternoons the old city whispers to itself in doorways. I fancy those conceived in the hours of siesta, they are born clever and grow up to be lawyers, loansharks, politicians who steal from the rest of us. Ciao.

Ken Smiths New and Selected, Shed, is coming out from Bloodaxe in May of this year. Previous collections include Wild Root and Tender to the Queen of Spain (both published by Bloodaxe).

Smith / Poems

Persephone Gone / Judy Gahagan

nce shed removed her intricate hoard of loveable things the silver sea-horse, the jay feathers, pink shells, veined pebbles, palekhi box and plants, above all the plants, a flowery meadow of them I knew shed not come back very often. And that intimate hoard was the most loyal reminder of our connection. Of the time before that day when, picking flowers, a great hole had opened up and hed charged out, King of the Underworld, in black, and carried her off. The story is often told as if Persephone had minded; as if there hadnt been little looks and secret signs, little come-ons, as she went flower picking with her friends. Of course later in the story she seems to have accepted her fate with equanimity for you see her on terracotta, marble and alabaster, seated and triumphant beside Hades in his royal carriage touring the Underworld. By then she doesnt seem to mind. By then its Demeters problem. You can be in mourning for someone who, technically speaking, isnt dead. But I speak mythically, not technically. These days her dry little voice-in-a-box is grown-up, moved on, rational. It appeals to a sense of proportion in family matters, in the face of the inevitable. Tell that to Zeus, Hades, Demeter, Persephone! Forget your wise-eyed family counsellors, all listening positions, perspectives and compromises. I dont speak techno-speak and I dont speak psycho-speak either. For the Gods who rule within, small things are Olympian and catastrophic. I remember the first visit to her first room in her new semi-autonomous life, where I was to be an uneasy guest. I looked around at the re-arranged trove the shells, stones, feathers etc, now immersed in a new one of pottery jars where incense burned, of Indonesian masks glaring from Indonesian batik wall hangings, of silk scarves diaphanous over lamps. The maidenhair fern trailed, the Botticellian ivies and figs wreathed over the picture rails, dried purple thistles glared, African violets simmered and the old rubber plant, now gigantic, spread its cool hands over one corner. Her room was W.H. Hudson. Her room was deepest Green. She was to carry this flowery meadow with her to all those temporary rents, the student rooms, all ghastly in the same way: sickly distemper, wall-papered gentility, damp, bulging, jerry-built furnished houses with the lurking smell of a hundred years of dinners. Temporary because landlords came and went, they failed to pay bills. There were eviction orders and condemnings. This was an underworld of rotting housing. But somehow, with the help of a little band of admirers, a seven-dwarves I never met, she re-created the flowery meadow. Actually, since her room was always at the top of the house I sometimes called it

her Rapunzel tower. It was always at the top, above the indescribable filth of the lower floors where ordinary students lived. I imagined her ascending the stairs through this pestilence, untouched by it, with a lamp. On the second visit I noticed the mono-theme of the pictures with which shed covered the many defects of the walls, cupboards and mirrors. The theme was: a girl, an art nouveau Ophelia or Persephone someone like that in some draped grotto, watched over by a dark bearded male a sultan, a Herod, a Cophetua, a mogul anyway a patriarch of some sort. I tried to ignore it. She moved around the room, her hair catching the light from the crystal shed hung in the window as if to put a spell on the room. But in spite of the shrine at the top of their house, the plants that thrived as nowhere else, the butterflies that seemed to follow her where-ere she walked, eyecatchingly dressed, in spite of, or maybe because of all that, a certain nastiness lurked about. An evil intent in odd incidents and coincidences shed mention: series of obscene phonecalls, the local flasher, stalkers who followed her home, campus rapists, scraps of pornography stuffed through the letter box. But nothing happened. It was always impending.
Persephone Gone / Gahagan

Its the early summer of her second year under the never repeating pattern of leaves stencilled onto a plain blue sky: When Lilacs Last In The Doorway Bloomed is an elegy. Normally the elegy follows a traditional structure: the poet expounds his grief; some consoling thought is developed; this gives way to a sense of acceptance and reconciliation with death. But in Whitmans poem... She likes reading aloud her essays, spellbinding with her voice as she does with her presence. But she doesnt like my interruptions, comments or queries, though she asks for them. She will use them if she can. She wants to get a First. Or she did then. ...out of this symbol and accompanying images... ...her voice dissolves into the stream of birdsong, rook chatter and young laughter all around on the grass, and the constant whirr and roar of a mover. Im suddenly aware how close it is as a faint shower of grass falls on the books spread out on the rug. The machines reared up behind us. I realise shes stopped reading and is looking up. The mower is a green tractor with side paddles which let themselves down and up as they extend their blades; its like a gigantic grasshopper. Why on earth does it have to come so close? I look up into a long sunburned face, long pale blue eyes, a long thin mouth; a brutal face, I think, though its smiling for some reason. Not particularly young, though this sunburned man is dressed in the bleached denim uniform of the young. In this moment hes like a Viking rearing up on a horse as he veers the machine away at the last moment. Thats a bit unnecessary... I start to say, when I catch her fleeting conspiratorial glance, the tail-end of her smile. And I realise the sudden assault had been planned, is a joke, there has been an understanding. But she says nothing to me and the driver and his machine clatter off at speed across the lawn. ...song from nature is the universal necessity and beauty of death... The last time (in that time before, I mean), I visited her new rooming house, it

was a rooming house by the sea and the large windows faced out towards it. I came into the room, not thinking about the sea, and was breath-taken. The sea was filling the room with its silk canopy, breathing a little, like silk stretched over a body. White sails perched on it as on a tapestry. The silk was so luxurious the pale shoals were no more than slightly faded streaks on a coronation robe. The royalty of it would have been the only luxury in that basically abject room. But of course she had already installed her portable temple. I remember how this sea had soothed my disquiet that day. But Id also thought if I lived there Id have to cope with its moods, its instability and sudden assaults, the way it might suddenly fill the room with its madness. That was the last time I saw her still believing her to be unattached. The next visit the Viking is seated in a new Indian-throw-covered chair. He of the unsmiling, sunburned long, ruthless face, he of the cold eyes. The thin mouth is scornful, of the occasion it seems to me. Kev, meet my Mum! Mum, Kev! Despite the bleached denim, the modish incoherence, theres an air of substance and authority about him. Her voice to him and her voice to me are two different voices: to me the tight little voice of reason and ambition, a bit hoity-toity, as my mother would have said. To him the lisping, ingratiating little girl voice. Shes feeding him his lines and putting me back in my box. I snatch remnants of myself. I snatch at our connection. I talk too much. I see hot little conspiratorial glances at him, and cold little viperish glances at me to see if I have noticed the hot little glances. I see little appeals for permission. I hear false little laughs. This is the time to hand over the keys with a motherly smile; After all youre not losing a daughter but gaining a son... Youre gaining nothing but your obselescence! No, the farewell was not to cosy female talk about health, diets, cosmetics, men and gossip. No. It was farewell to the flowery meadow: the earliest prickling light on birches still halo-ed in purple, the eccentricity of rooks in their masks on the campus lawns; to meditation, healing herbs, Hildegard of Bingen, the power of amethyst; the essays on Whitman, Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, the romantic vision that had elevated all our talk. My crisply articulated opinions had zinged weekly down the phone. My authority in this realm had been revered. Or so Id imagined. People who fancy up their lives into flowery meadows deserve all they get. Why, even Persephones original meadow in Sicily is now acres of concrete surrounding a motor-racing track. Hades burst out there alright! I left the house that day dismissed. The cold salty air poured over me like reality, the sea pounding and dragging on the pebbles sounded like the breathing of a sick man. Even the towns one bird, the gull (those birds go about their business like pedestrians 20 feet up, as if minding the town), whod always filled me with a sense of continuous benediction, today shrieked out its jeers; Get yourself a life! The current slogan. Where life is what the masses say life is visible, compre-

Persephone Gone / Gahagan

hensible, shared and approved of. Life is where imagination scarcely dare poke out its head. Life is where Gods are dumb and silly. I feel like I dont have a life. And when Persephone vanished Demeter her mother didnt have one either. For a bit, anyway. When Persephone was abducted Demeter went weird something of a bag-lady, continually on the move, messing up peoples allotments, an intrusive and untrustworthy child-minder. Still she was in charge of more than she realised, I mean the seasons and flowering of the earth, and was enough of a threat to do a deal with Zeus: Hades was to let Persephone return from his realm for one third of the year. But he always gave her a pomegranate so shed never forget him or fail to come back to him.

CREWDSON GARDEN SERVICES AND PLANT HIRE. On the forecourt stand assorted grabs, earth-movers, trenchers and motormowers like big grasshoppers. Behind the cottage-style building with gables and tiles theres acreage of greenhouse. Inside, at the check-out, in a zippy outfit, on a swivel chair, sits Persephone pressing the gong and calling prices out to Hades in a supermarket voice. notthekindacoursethatleadsanywherekindalikeImeanyouknowbusinessstud iesexpandingthebusinessgettingalittleplacetogether And indeed shed gone to live in Man Land. Demeter had known nothing at all about Persephone. And anyway how else could Persephone have got Demeter off her back? But I reject all clichs and helpful hints regarding this situation! And thus it came to pass our meetings were like prison visits, watched and overheard. My excursions into her life were accompanied by an official tourist guide in a totalitarian country, questions anticipated and answers scripted. I rarely saw her alone. When I did, thered be a long run-up with complicated problems about when and where. His presence haunted the occasion with a latent timetable, much diary play and having-to-go-and-phone. Id have preferred the pomegranate. Sometimes I see myself like a predator bird, staring down from a great height onto a mouse, my child, a crafty escaping mouse; indeed she brings out the rook in me, the spinster-ish poking, the threats and the dereliction. Diamond-cut is her clear voice as she admits to no part in this story. Diamond cut I must be too. On the station platform, where she isnt waiting, the rain-flayed roses and yellow ice-flowers are bent under their own weight. I am a once essential organ extruded because rejected. Shes gone to live in Man Land where I do not belong. Man Land: the Father, Courtier, Husband, Rich Old Man, Psycho-analyst. Especially him! How I sit speehless and pathologised in my corner! Let the whole crowd of them come on in full regalia with their stern looks and she on her Thumbelina throne alongside Hades, all smiles and wand-waving! I shuffleshuffle into the servants quarters muttering long-life curses. Who will believe the depth of this wound? Nobody.

Persephone Gone / Gahagan

This story can never reach an end. Two thirds, one third. In the meantime nomadic ex-mothers; hovering, ridiculed Mothers-in-Law. Bag Ladies the lot of them. I call for her after work and hover around the Herbs and Climbers. I bow to his authority on Patio Tiles and Water-features. I listen and nod. I dont look at her. I wander round the suburban wasteland that encloses his realm. Once or twice shes been back to the house where a faint sense of her and of her trove still lingers: a spilled lavender sachet in the corner of a drawer, a tea-towel printed with different species of butterfly, a bird-mobile still hung in the bathroom, a postcard of Millais Ophelia. You see, it is inconclusive. Left dangling. Im living on a cusp.

AUTHORS NOTE: The story of Demeter, Persephone and Hades can be found in Hymn to Demeter; Homeric Hymns, 2nd edition; 1936 T.W. Allen, W.R. Halliday and E.E.Sykes. Youll see its kind of inconclusive too. Left dangling. Two thirds. And one third with pomegranate.

Judy Gahagan has published poetry, prose and translations in a number of magazines; a volume of short stories, two pamphlets and a volume of poetry. She runs courses in psychology and poetry and is currently busy on a novel about dream research.

New: The Virtual Writing School At Manchester Metropolitan University

Wherever you are in the world, you can travel on the internet to join the Virtual Writing School to study for an MA/PGDip* in Creative Writing.
Follow the same course elements as if you were attending in person:
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The Workshop: led by established practitioners, peers read closely and learn to practice editorial skills to improve each others writing Literature Course: focus on the formal and stylistic aspects of outstanding contemporary novels The Text: learn about publishing and practical aspects of copyright, editing, agenting, contracts, book production and transmission The Portfolio: develop skills to submit work to an agent or publisher, including cover letter, synopsis and a completed novel that is professionally presented In addition to benefiting from an international audience of peers and tutors, you will meet on-line through virtual writing workshops, literary seminars, office hours, email and chatrooms. The course includes an annual visit to Manchester where you will meet publishers and agents as well as established practitioners who teach at

The Writing School in Manchester:

Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Sophie Hannah, Jacqueline Roy, Michael Schmidt, Jeffrey Wainwright and Heather Watson. For more information on entry requirements or an application form please contact Heather Watson on +44(0) 161 247 1735 or h.watson@mmu.ac.uk

Coming soon: poetry, writing for children and life writing routes will be offered online.*

*Subject to validation

Lance Lee

Actaeon
Great was the chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of the world. Czeslaw Milosz, Winter

Actaeons fingers are spring leaves in a light breeze on the lyre-strings, the outward echo of how a surgeon touches the hearts web of arteries and veins. The lord and lady, warriors, dogs, servants, the roar of flames in the hall still as he noses a spoor of song to the storys lair where a man half animal waits, or heroes clash sword to shield, or a woman and her lover thrash where her angry mate enmeshes them. None stir: what loss triumph shame defines a life that echoes their own? He leaves them late, the flare of truth replaced by twined flesh and lovecries. Black streets, a simple room, old maidservant, bread and water, payment tossed aside he wants another gold. His pupils come at first light, slight boys to teens whose shoulders thicken who chafe to be men, lethal and heroic, bulls with girls. But Actaeon leads them like wild horses around and around a corral with a rope of fables. This world he says is a story waiting to have its meaning laid bare. Listen and listen: look and look until the breeze becomes words, the shudder of leaves, flesh, the river murmur, dialogue, stone a Yea! or Nay!

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They leave aroused, the commonplace given a mysterious sheen. On impulse he calls his old hound, back bent like a bow, and walks under the noon blaze the same white as the streets where so many hide behind their walls, wise to avoid being caught in some moment life writes in red, to be instead the audience stories feed. He reaches the forest where even shade is hot. The hound laps water from the stream like a machine. Actaeon edges along the bank as though tracking some scent to its source. When the waters grow wide and calm a small stream courses off. Something as light as spring leaves in a light breeze touches his neck and makes his hair rise: he whirls no one someone something he senses that does not act but watches without pity or cruelty, amused, sad, willess. The hounds hair ridges down his back. Come he commands, choosing the unknown way. The beast follows, back straightened, a snarl gleaming in his eyes. Then Actaeon finds himself hurrying until branch whipped, thorn torn, his breath a curlews whistle, his heart a roar of waves, he falls against the hard No of the earth and jams moss muskily into his mouth. When he looks up, the grotto. A small rivulet arches over a cliff, the movement of sun on water spring leaves in a light breeze.

Lee / Poems

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She is there, flesh flawless.

He gapes, and stands carelessly, staring.

Their eyes meet and he understands

She is a young girl on her bridal bed, the shy husband, their tremble, penetration, joy: and She is a sword raised high, its perfect edge, a stream of blood blurring its sheen, a head rolling on the ground; boys who give grace its meaning as they arch and ache against one another in the gymnasium; the smoke of incense, of crematoria, bitter flesh driven unwilling to the fire, the fire; the choking dust across the battlefield, the blind men, thrusts, wounds, the flowers around their graves, the spring leaves, the light breeze; the newborns howl, its mothers smile, the birth blood wiped from a new face; the whitecaps on the sea, the sea, the wave that swallows men in their boats, the swallowed men, the fish that gnaw them bone white, the bones: and the grieving heart that begins again, that risks love to find love and loves betrayal. She lets all wounds be forgotten and tirelessly gnaws the hearts red bone, bringing all to perfection, kind or cruel, Her beauty the only mold, the truth at the end and beginning of every story.

Lee / Poems

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Actaeon does not reflect A man must do what he can, and beyond that be content no, he has found what he wants and screams, and runs runs as though horns grow from his head and an animal bellow pours from his throat, as though hounds leap to the chase, as though he is the hounds and the hunted, the teeth, the torn flesh, the terror, bright blood and the final heartful, heart-rending horror, and delight.

AUTHORS NOTE: Traditionally, Actaeon was a young nobleman out hunting with his dogs when he came across Diana (Artemis to the Greeks), the Virgin Huntress /Goddess (one of the aspects of the mother goddess) bathing naked with her nymphs. He looked, and was seen to be looking: in punishment for this trespass the goddess changed him into a stag and set his own hounds on him. In this version Actaeon is seen as a mature poet and teacher who is destroyed by the truth he sought.

Lee / Poems

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Plays within Plays

Strange, this sky a fin of fire cruises westward, then naphtha beams, flame throwers in an otherworldly war, boil the clouds and choke the light: Vs of geese, and lower, a cloud of crows fly swiftly through the murk. Another moment, and the sky transforms to gold tissues, some lam, then darkens by stages to navy, glittering strands as though a dancer shedding veils. A last orange flutter of coals, and night draws a curtain over the field. Who is watching? I wonder, chilled suddenly sure all this is a show for an audience behind the sky for whom even now I am part of the play, the hero in the dark. Who sees me for what I am? Am I anyone at all? Or am I married to a role called myself that turns out instead to be all mask? I scurry from the field, confused by the doubts the black hawk of anxiety lives to slide down the wind and strike. But I hesitate at my door: love, and light, are there, and those who will give me a name and place, pleased I am home, wondering what kept me how can I share my fears and make their happiness insecure? So I go in quietly, answering smile with smile.

Lee / Poems

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Thin...
Nothing is visible but stars chiseled from ice and the slow meteors of planes above shadowed trees and homes down my unlit street. Here an owl calls more deeply than any Ive ever heard, swallowing me whole so now my eyes see the chisels that shape the stars, and beyond them the first sky of fire still embracing the night that holds me in turn. How eagerly I call for blood like whiskey in my maw, call for the tickle of fur in my gut, careless of what life I take for my own. Shocked, I sink into myself aware again of the civil hungers in these near homes. How easy to shed the thin skin of humanity, I think, sleepless after I turn in, hearing that low call in my dark places where even dreams fear to go.

Lance Lees poems appear widely in the UK and in the US: a new book of poetry, Becoming Human, is just out (see review page 71). A novel, Second Chances, and A Poetics for Screenwriters have also appeared recently. Apart from regularly appearing in the pages of Ambit, his poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Scintilla, Staple and Orbis.

Lee / Poems

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John Cotton

Selles Market
All life, deception and art are there Amidst the cheery scents and sweats of bustling crowds: The Fauve palette of the fruit stalls, A garish splash in the tide of movement; The carnivorous oozing reds of meat Sacrificial on the butchers altar; The fresh minted silver and black Chiaroscuro of the fish As they listen to the soft whisperings Of the oysters in their terraced shells; A small resonant cloud of bees Celebrate their release from the miel van As the driver unloads the golden combs; The rich fermentations of fromage And the heady incense of herbs; The knickers racked on plastic hoops To display their heroic crotches To taunt the tight white testicles of garlic; Huge capacious brassieres eager to brazenly embrace The warmth of prodigious bosoms; The flirtatious winking of the imitation jewellery; The acidly coloured plastic geegaws; Purse lipped leather bags Redolent of the hides they once were, And the flash of sharp slicing knives. A man could return replete.

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Chiaroscuro
The chiaroscuro of thigh and stocking welt When she discards her virginal linen To enter the light of love His hands radiate. But her dark warmth previsages Jet, the ultimate excluder of light.

John Mole once described J.C. as the self-deprecating laureate of lifes understudies. Cottons poems on cinematic and theatrical themes are to be published by the Happy Dragons Press next winter. Selles Market is meant to embrace life as Theatre in which we are all understudies.

George Jardine / Another World

Eighty this year, George Jardine has inspired and infuriated audiences in Merseyside for over fifty years. Colin M. Simpson, Curator, Wirral Museum, (in Jardines exhibition catalogue, 2000). George Jardine was born in Wallasey in 1920. In 1936 he became a student at the Wallasey School of Art which had only a Principal, an Assistant and a maximum of eight students. After later attending the Royal College of Art, Jardine became a tutor at the Liverpool College of Art, where he taught for forty years. (This information was taken from the catalogue to George Jardines exhibition, Another World, which took place at the Williamson Art Gallery and Museums in Birkenhead, Wirral, 2000.) All collages are same size as originals.

William Spencer

More About God

One thing we can be sure of About God Is that he loves beetles. So said a sober biologist (Some biologists are sometimes sober) Referring to the whopping truth That of Earths multifarious fauna More answer to the name of insect And of these, most are beetles.

Happily doing their creepy-crawly thing Burrowing, chewing, digesting, excreting Fighting, mating, laying, hatching Whilst we gross humans, Gods trivial-numbered Soft-fleshed afterthought, Presume to lord it over them. Franz Kafka had a nightmare Thought hed become a beetle But that was pure hubris Poor chap didnt realise what he was claiming. We are called upon to fulfil A far humbler role. Fact is Theres something so right about a beetle So compact, so shiny So water repellent So insect-for-all-seasons (Made a good car design, too) Compared with, let us say, crane-flies Febrile, twitchy things with spindly appendages Dangling, trembling, all over the place Hanging off in all directions Like an overloaded warplane Designed by a committee Of non-sober biologists.

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Which makes an awful lot of beetles...

Not so Gods beetles. Form equals function Streamlined elegance (The Bauhaus would have been thrilled To come up with something this good) Plus a few special tricks built-in Double-Oh-Seven fashion Under that glossy carapace. I watched these little charmers In Ditchling duck pond Three millimetres long, tight-packed with vivid life Darting like black quicksilver below the surface On essential beetle errands Then rising to breathe In a silvery dimple For a split-second only Before sounding green depths again. While I observed, one surfaced And in a trice had unfurled fairy wings To brave the wild blue yonder Soaring away Bee-line bidding For beetle Heaven. Soon others bombed in Crash-landing out of the blue Pancaking prettily Wings tucked tout-de-suite And in an instant were submarine Almost too quick for the eye to follow. We live more slowly elephantine, ponderous And when it comes down to it The thing we mostly do to beetles Is tread on them Without really meaning to Of course. So thats the role of humans In the Grand Scheme of Things? To act as casual executioners Weeding out beetle populations On a random basis. Blatt! ...Scrunch!

Spencer / Poems

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Descending with massive aplomb Flat-footed in killer boots To extinguish another precious life Terminating another small perfection Among Gods chosen ones.

The Seven Sisters

Seven comely maidens Your curves make the girls envious As you lie with shapely haunches Looking over the rippling sea Observing with suitable aloofness The comings and goings of the tides. Could more alluring landscape Be anywhere discovered? Especially on suave and dulcet days When a mantle of heat steals up To swathe the cruelty of the sea While the lightest of airs Sets drifting somnolent clouds. The seabirds swoop, acclaiming your contours In their raucous way with salty cries; While tourists flatter you, brandishing lenses Eager pilgrims from remotest rim Of polyglot Earth, fluttering guidebooks and Hurrying to salute your legend. Seven sisters. Seven virgins. Seven brides? In your white wedding dresses Still you repel every least advance From your promised inevitable suitor That brutal all-conquering sea. Hes rippling his muscles out there Admiring himself hugely In the mirror of the sky. Cherish your maidenheads, my darlings. One day hell eat you alive.

William Spencers published writings range from science-fiction short stories to an academic paper on Chaucers astrology. For his doctoral thesis he explored twentieth century themes, as exemplified in the many-sided writings of Aldous Huxley. This is his second appearance in Ambit.

Spencer / Poems

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3 for 2 / Charlie Hill

A week after the body of the civil servant had been flown back to Britain and buried, the newspaper received a letter from his mother. The contents of the letter caused much animated discussion amongst the senior members of staff. The Editor said that what was being suggested in the letter raised questions of the public interest which should outweigh all other considerations. Quite simply, he said, we have a duty to publish. The Health Editor said that the letter started a debate that would resound across the globe and that it was potentially the scoop of this millennium or any other. Others questioned the veracity of the correspondence. From left-field there was talk of cult involvement, of Situationists, of loners, publicity seekers and fascists and snobs. Good stories all. Not everyone was enthusiastic however. The News Editor agreed in principle with the portentous predictions of his colleagues but warned against getting carried away: as yet there was no actual evidence to back up what were after all, the wildly implausible and rather timidly-put claims of an old woman. Furthermore, such evidence would be well nigh impossible to obtain. The Political Editor was more forthright in his opposition to taking the matter any further. What if the allegations, such as they are, have some foundation? he asked. We would then have to advocate the most obvious solution to the problem. And burning books is the antithesis of all that this newspaper has ever stood for. It was left to the unfailingly pragmatic Features Editor to point out that given the content of the papers pages over the previous three years the story represented a conflict of interest of catastrophic proportions. If we run the story, he said, how can we expect to fill the paper a month down the line? What could we use that would leave us in the clear? It would be commercial suicide. In the end it was the ineffable logic of the Features Editor that won the day. The argument was over and nothing more was heard of the civil servant or his mother.

1.

2.
The civil servant was working as a Senior Executive Officer at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when the deaths were reported. Two British tourists had died on the same day on the island of Corfu. There were no suspicious circum-

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stances but the Department felt there was a PR need to offer assistance to the authorities in their enquiries. As the civil servant was an unassuming man, not remotely given to rocking the boat or raising the level of the playing field at one end or flagging up anything that did not warrant a good flagging, he was the ideal candidate for the job and was quickly despatched to the island. Once there, he found little that was untoward. There was nothing other than the merest of circumstantial connections between the deaths. One of the dead was a man, the other a woman. The man was in his early thirties, the woman twentynine. She was a maths teacher, he was in IT. Both had been with their partners at the time of their death but although they had both been on beaches they were on opposite sides of the island. Both had been relaxing, reading books. They were not staying in the same hotels. Indeed, the only thing that seemed to be out of the ordinary was the confusion over the cause of death itself. What had happened had been confirmed and explained to the civil servant. Examinations of the deceased showed that in each case there had been a spontaneous weakening and failure of the electrical signals that pass through the cells of the brain. Because of this, the chemical reaction that stimulates the same electrical process in adjacent neurons had not been sparked into life. Thus, communication between the cells in the brain had seized-up; the brain had simply stopped working, shut down. Only one question remained. Why? At the autopsy, the heart and lungs of the dead were found to be in fine working order and there was no evidence of foul play. The coroner insisted that the condition was unprecedented, at least in people so divorced from any other symptoms of ill-health or old age. The initial police investigation had failed to unearth any further clues. Both of the victims had been in good physical shape. Although the man smoked moderately, the woman was known to be a keen gym-goer. Since arriving on the island neither of them had spent an inordinate length of time in the sun and only small amounts of alcohol had been consumed.

3 for 2 / Hill

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3.
The civil servant was at a loss. Three days into his week away and he was no nearer finding out if there was any real need for his presence on the island. The authorities had closed the book on the deaths and the families concerned were not exactly kicking up a stink. There seemed little to kick against. He had spoken to the partners of the dead twice now, in an attempt to establish any common ground which may have been overlooked by the police. He had become briefly excited when he discovered that the two couples had arrived at Kerkira, the islands capital, on the same flight on the same day. When he had visited them for a second time, his brain was alive with possibilities. Could the cause of death have been a rogue fig, bought from the same airport vendor and treated with the same potentially fatal combination of pesticides? A dodgy olive perhaps? For a moment of madness, the civil servant even speculated about the book connection.

From talking to the relatives, he had established that both dead people had availed themselves of a three-books-for-the-price-of-two offer at Heathrow airport before boarding their flight to Greece. And by coincidence they had each chosen the same three books Man, Woman, Boy; Turning into Mr Commitment and About a Thirtysomething and had read two of them during the first three days of their holiday. Similarly, they were both about halfway through the third when they had met their end. Now the civil servant was not a man of culture but he knew of the power of television and film and art to shock. Was it not possible that books had the same power? Maybe, in extreme circumstances, certain combinations of words could cause such outraged excitement that people could actually read themselves to death? When shown the best-sellers in question he could certainly appreciate the compulsion to pick them up and begin reading. The colourful covers, with their occasionally garish, sometimes quirky juxtaposition of the mundane with the slightly out-of-the-ordinary, exerted a strangely compelling force. He even vowed to give the titles a try himself in the remaining three days of his secondment to the island. And yet. And yet... To his untrained eye, a flick through the contents revealed little that the civil servant would consider a shocking read. His opinion was backed up by the writing on the back covers which consisted of words like bittersweet and poignant, heartfelt, wryly amusing and male confessional, without ever implying that potentially lethal interpretations lurked between the lines. More pertinently and even to a man of limited medical knowledge, this was the clincher far from being excited or shocked to death, all the indications were that the fatalities had been caused by quite the opposite effect. And who had ever heard of such a thing? No, he concluded, there was nothing more to be done. The civil servant phoned his mother to keep her up to speed and set out about tracking down the books he had found so seductive. He found each of them easily enough, in a second-hand book store, barely dog-eared. Then he retired to his room and began to read.

Charlie Hill lives and works in Birmingham. When he is not writing fiction and reviewing for the Independent on Sunday and the Birmingham Post, he can be found dispensing books and book chat from behind the counter at a local Waterstones. He is concerned about the health and well-being of all Waterstones customers.

3 for 2 / Hill

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Helen Kitson

Lautrecs Girls
A plaster Madonna, her head chopped off The girl fell down and broke her neck. The other girls mend her, those Lautrec whores With Superglue and good intentions: They console each other inadequately. (The mend will always show Beads of amber glue, a plastic necklace). A shy girl takes a bearded man upstairs He says hes a painter, she tells him There are birds in his hair and combs them out They fly around the room and roost in corners. There, there, my dear they say; And the Madonna bleeds glue.

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Talking Dirty
Lunchtime, the pub, the warmth of too many bodies. Brittle laughter scratches like rusted tin. We talk sex the infelicities of sex, the jokes, indelicate terms the pokes, the bangs, the man who shot his bolt; and Tina's telling me about this man and what she spat into his shoe the left one, she thinks, though it hardly matters. We talk it more than we do it. Some of us dont do it at all but these words and these jokes cant infect. The talk is dirty, but its safe.

Pandoras Box
Louise, Louises bob, her beautiful black hair. And her eyes, Louises eyes, the darkest possible brown, ringed with kohl. Her mouth, of course, is a cupids bow. Red like blood, cherries, blood. She is Pandora. Such a small box which holds so much evil. She doesnt actually care whats in it, shes busy posing; the camera loves her, photographers want every picture, every inch of her. Nobody notices when she opens the box.

Darling, yes, I will sleep with you tonight. She stretches that cupids bow. Always leave them wanting, darling. The box lies forgotten. It contains nothing but photos; photos of Louise, her face, her body. My God, those eyes!

Keeping My Distance
Youve become too used to me in your house the novelty of having a lover has worn off; Im a dull wife in gingham skirts; red hands, wet knees, a zinc bucket. Youve got sharp claws, my dear, you drop your scales on my clean floor. You smell of dead rivers, familiar as the stink of beer and fags. If these skirts werent so heavy Id fight back, Id drown you, my blind kitten, in a sack so I couldnt see your face. Its always the expression that kills you. I shouldnt put up with scratches and cuts and the bits of dead skin you flake on my floor. Youve missed the contempt on my face, the stuff I hiss at you under my breath.

Kitson / Poems

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You come home drunk, I put you to bed. Another night youre feeling sexy, and Im lying there, hissing at you: Do what men do on their own.

Tattoo
She never used to bite her nails. Her vague smile fixes on me as she stirs her tea I remind her she never used to take sugar, she cracks a weak joke about being sweet enough without it. She slurps her tea God, youre so ugly when you do that she sticks her tongue out, its like the old days, but Im trapped in the hell of her kitchen, the Peruvian mug tree, the heirloom cups. She says she doesnt know me any more but I know shes got a tattoo on her breast, it matches the one on my shoulder. Her husband thinks she used to love another man. I remember the tender strips of white gauze, the anticipation as she peeled them off; she admits she remembers the needle, the pictures we chose together, and the tattoo of red lipstick over the ink.

Kitson / Poems

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Helen Kitson is 36 and lives in Worcester with her husband and their two year old son. Her poetry collection, Love Among the Guilty, was published by Bloodaxe in 1995.

Son of Sinbad / HP Tinker

ne small Memory. Being abducted by Iranian terrorists in the sand dunes of my youth. I remember a beach. Held hostage there for days. Tied up. Force-fed The Music of Andrew Lloyd Webber via headphones... police finding me dazed and confused... almost catatonic.. Other memories too: an incident in a boys changing room... (a stout Geography teacher, arms folded. Smiling. What was that all about?) Liverpool seeming a big city at the time... the iron railings and squares. The ice cream streets, the skittish impoliteness. The old school buildings rusting obtrusively. Furniture inside all made from cheap pine. (Only later it occurred to me that I had been studying literature and history and music my entire adolescence for a future eventuality which never arrived under my nose: a nose oddly unassuming at the time, lengthening much later of its own accord, two nostrils flaring with a feast of mucus. Yes, I was nervous as a youngster. Yet I was not unacquainted with the bravery of stealing other peoples cars...) My father? Since you ask, he was a magician and disappeared a lot. Hes going away to sea, a group of relations told me one day. There are so many adventures for him to have, they chorused. So many oceans left for him to cross... Then a cowboy came from the South and introduced himself to me in the hallway. I was 15. So I didnt grasp the significance of the event at the time.

following the cowboy to Southwark, the cowboy dropping my mothers crockery, various pieces in various places, usually against walls, my mother buying high quality replacement crockery at first, but as the cowboy continued to drop her crockery, just picking it up cheaply at car boot sales and second hand shops, eventually giving up on buying any replacement crockery at all, realising not all cowboys were good guys, carpet burns chafing my face from where he held me down and buggered me repeatedly, playing the Johnny Cash records which made my mother unfairly nervous, spluttering sometimes like an old car engine refusing to

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still out there, she said, the night we went to the seaside without the cowboy, I can feel him still out there, while I fell asleep she stayed up all night, checking the pale street outside, her eyes starting to turn red that summer, spending most of it sat up in bed, shrouded in white sheets, limbs skeletal and fleshless now, hair thinning also raised by distant Eskimo relations suddenly appearing in extreme close up, their skin brown and well-leathered, fields of golden flames blazing endlessly through my childhood window until the fire services were called out, Eskimos? the kids at school laughed, Dont they live in ice houses?, No, I explained to them, Motels, drinking my first full bottle of Vodka when I was nine, my Eskimo grandmother giving it to me, nightmares following, codeine in her portable medicine cabinet too, also some grass, some acid and mescaline, nobody knowing what they were going to find in that cabinet next, moving onto her bourbon when I was twelve, because it made me talk funny and Id education coming and going in front of the portable television set, flipping channels from game show to plane crash, What are you going to do with the rest of your life? some people asked, This... I replied, flipping channels some more eventually thinking of trains, of unexpected movement, frequent delays, pulling up a chair beside me, her conversation unreeled at random: Kierkegaard! she cried, Isnt he great?, No, I mumbled, embarrassed, Evangeline in that flimsy black dress, utterly mesmerized by the abundance of

breasts falling apart, between her lifted bikini top, nipples slung low like lazy eyes, mouth all inviting teeth, skin perfectly caramelised, the sight not unexpected, but happy, staring up into her dark eyes, puzzled, afraid, two years passing although I didnt notice at the time, and now I loved a bitch. She had a big old head, pale hair and dark, watery lips. I submitted to her orders. I stripped for her, called her Boss. I licked her boots. She attached a collar to my neck and led me on my knees to the master bedroom where

the car overturned unexpectedly, and we were pulled singing from the wreckage. Unusually blonde medics lead us away down the motorway, hand in hand. Vague periods of hospitalisation followed, I admit. The next thing I know Alice turns to me, an empty wine glass squinting in her hand. What the fuck are you talking about? she asks. Her glass fixes me with an odd gaze. Where am I? I ask, looking around. Australia, she says.

Son of Sinbad / Tinker

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To my left is a large stretch of dark water. Above me is a silvery moon. What am I doing here? I ask myself, out loud. Please go and throw yourself in the nearest river, she said, eventually. I knew then Id lost her. Eating lobster in a glass restaurant. Thats not a mistake Im particularly keen to make, I pointed out, regarding her river proposal. (Homosexuals surrounded me with questions, questions, questions in the rest room. While I froze up inside. Unable to answer them or finish my lobster or even request a refund.) Alice left for good then, when she won her first Brit award. I had devoured her radiant nipples like sunlit pizza. I had repeatedly straddled her vagina with the barbaric force of a spicy Quorn burger squeezed inside a dwarfish sesame bun. Now she made thirty thousand pounds in less than an afternoon shooting a Pampers commercial.

Son of Sinbad / Tinker

(Life struck me as unfair)

... this was 1995... temporary shelter in Britpop... maybe looking for a guru... yeah, my initial impulse naive... a romantic time... whatever... just wanted some excitement... to nick some grass... bake marijuana pie... be self-indulgent... six of us in a hire car: destination Newquay... living cheap, the dope good... stammering slightly in everyday conversation... out on the trail... looking out at the motorway... the pin-prick cities... a half-imagined landscape of incidents and conversations stretching out before me like a rippling acoustic... Cardiff... Dublin... Nottingham... London... New York... cities filled with muted dreams... improvised trumpet solos waiting to be improvised... released from the ragged spirituality of life up North... surrounded by women ... thousands of them... the most magnificent women I have ever seen...helping the beautiful paraplegic girl back onto her feet... letting go of her hand... the beautiful paraplegic girl falling back down again... other, less attractive women also... viewing them all as an equally spectacular and particularly wondrous seafront hotel... ... pole-vaulting through my window... moving in soon after... her skirt sliding right up those slick naked thighs... biting her top lip... eyes dull and unresponsive... talking about ouija boards... a film she liked... What do you like about it?... The theme music... staggering down into the dunes... Emily with me, unshaven... early and the pale light bleaching the waves... the rest not here... This feels strange... Why? ... Dont know... her stubble glinting with perspiration... coming down on the beach... side by side, waves washing in... her t-shirt pulled up high... her flat, bare stomach... catching the sun... talking of the future... how there wasnt going to be one... I was to be her lover... for just under a week, she decided... never to tell anyone about me... being older and less physically attractive than her seemed to be a problem... sometimes when drunk she did help me piss straight, however... in retrospect certain satisfactory events at the time... got drained of any meaning immediately afterwards...

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... aching alone, frequently frequenting all-new improved Thai restaurants, better than before, superior in almost every regard, etching out notes on napkins, some thoughts towards an unfinished novel called Evangeline. There are, I decide, six ways of looking at Evangeline: 1) As an historical event 2) As a learning curve 3) As purely symbolic 4) As someone I once knew 5) As romanticised revisionism 6) As a lost opportunity. But then: a gigantic

explosion of waiters. Choreographed. In spandex waistcoats. At the funeral of a mutual relation. Each pushing a dazzling trolley of exotic drinks. Flaming azure cocktails drunk by minor TV celebrities. Everybody else pitch-black in sombre dinner suits. Except for the minor TV celebrities, laughing loudly - and your father; who is here: now smaller than before, costumed as Sinbad: garrulous bandanna, polka dot cape, bulging satin jump suit, carefully tousled beard. Pulling rabbits out of hats for the amusement of a gaggle of blas woman: carousing them expertly. There is so much you want to know, so much you want to ask. Like: where did he disappear to all those years ago. (And why? And why? And why? ) In a former life I was a magician, he tells you, earnestly. I trained in the dark arts. But it wasnt quite me. I had to get out. I needed a new adventure... None in particular. I just needed a new adventure. And

Son of Sinbad / Tinker

I abstracted, then. Hardly a career move. A near fatal mistake in all honesty. Nobody understood. Along the promenade, your absence embracing me. Engulfing me. The resonance of the sea not letting go. Later, I fragmented. Hardly a wise move either. The hearts of others pounding. My fear of wages growing daily. My self-want self-destructive, a wild desire, a talent for natural waste. Lost in metaphor suffocating me like a Mediterranean hotel room without a halfway decent air conditioning system... like a man on the gallows, not sure he wants anybody to cut through his noose. (Meanwhile, subsidised Arts funding mended my inanest feelings, but robbed the painful creative poverty from my existence. Saddened most of the time, yet also faintly delighted in the evenings because of my recent voguish indulgence of fine wines.) Lonely evenings by my own admission, myself now rudderless. Sickness closing in on my gums. After a sorrowful period in a situation comedy, I eschewed Indie music and began writing dreary screenplays, my mind growing for over a year: idiotic, lazy, vacated almost permanently. During one night, a partially sighted stranger reminded me of Evangeline, only with a limp. Regaining consciousness, we spent time dancing at the other end of the ballroom. The partially sighted stranger deciding I should smash my hand through the nearest windowpane. But when I got there, thought about it, I decided not to. The partially sighted stranger leaving my room emptied and darkened. Again. The past being scythed from under my feet... pianists I once loved all long since grown dull and lyrically uninspired...

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there were so many to be had back then. So many oceans. So many waltzes. So much human drama. It was only later, after Id crossed the vastest oceans (2nd voyage), danced a thousand identikit waltzes (4th voyage), witnessed a myriad of forgettable human dramas (7th voyage), that I came to understand Id made a grave, grave mistake. It happened when I found myself in a tricky situation: namely, confronted by a large one-eyed woman in a skin-tight rubber frogsuit, harpoon gun aimed straight at my head. Well, it is at times like these (confronted by a large one-eyed woman in a skin-tight rubber frogsuit, harpoon gun aimed straight at your head) that it can be apposite to ask yourself certain question about the strange sequence of events which has brought you to this exact point in your life ... Nodding vigorously, but saying nothing. Your father jollified, happier than ever it seems, relieved of some burden. Theres nothing out there, he says, you understand that, dont you? and you say, Yes, oh yes, eyes swimming with disappointment, knee-deep in thoughts of uncrossed oceans, manmade beaches, yawning wine-dark women, unfashionably family-orientated coastal resorts...

HP Tinker is the pseudonym of acclaimed feminist critic and poet, Heidi Zellweger. Don't Let Them Call You Skinny, her 37th volume of poetry and casual thoughts, is currently available in most good discount book shops. To find out more about her publishing career and recent breakdown visit www.hptinker.com.

Rhian Gallagher

From Richard Pearse

Richard William Pearse (1877-1953). Born in the small farming settlement of Waitohi, (South Is. N.Z). A self taught backyard mechanic who built his own aircraft and accomplished a powered take off in March 1903. It wasnt until after his death that Pearses attempts to fly created any interest outside his home district. He died in Sunnyside, a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Christchurch, N.Z.

A Man from the Backblocks

We were doing the pioneers. Theyd come from England with horses and linen, pianos and tea, rowed from the ships to the bay. They cleared the bush from the coast all the way back to the foothills and the land was fenced into squares. Overcast photographs of men in boaters, braces, and waistcoats, and the women in wide hooped skirts dressed for a rose garden in the middle of a muddy backyard. Starched, all backbone, as if they werent looking at a camera but a frontier hard and hostile and bare. There were dates and wars and more immigrations and almost lost in the noise of that lesson a man who had lived out in the backblocks, wanted to fly.

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Young Inventor
When he was a boy he fashioned things springs and sprockets and the little fly wheels in the back of clocks. Shy. He fitted in and out of the gangs, the team, family, but wire to wheel wheel to rod connections spun like the planets. The right fit was heaven. You could get into his world through a diagram. The way the air drew him, the way an element can sing to the right listener.

Second Son
His fathers sky was simply rain or shine his hands kept feeling for the horizon. Could he have been a different son? He drew lines in the air. The sound of air, shifting its weight transported him. We werent born with wings his father said. Nothing to burn or fence the sky was a vacancy made for travel. But in that back country hed soon know no one would believe you till youre dead. Right from the start and through all the years hed been flying in the dark.

Rhian Gallagher was born in the South Island of New Zealand, and has lived in London for the past thirteen years. She recently participated in the pilot Mentoring Scheme set up by the London Arts Board in conjunction with the Poetry School. Her first collection, Salt Water Creek, is being published by Enitharmon in 2003. The artist Nora Flaherty was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She now lives in New York and works in publishing. This picture is one of a series in response to Rhian Gallaghers work.

Gallagher / Poems

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Julian Stannard

Riviera
We hid under the tunnel in Via Milano to escape from the thunder and the whiplash of lightning and rain. Just three chairs holding the water back. And then the slow climb into the hills the wipers playing their music of nerves, the olives sluiced, cleansed, waiting for that hot god that comes after storms... The lightning weaker now, less frequent distant lights leaning on the villages: Calderina, Castello, Serreta, Gorleri suddenly broadened and held by arrows of mauve before the folding in of shuttered rooms dark, tense, moody spaces the bloated icon, la noia, bitterness the fruit thats always lusty in the mouth...

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Ballo
Enzo has ducked down with the grass cutter. Izio, the electrician, has gone Hawaiian. Marilena, rich in houses, has beautiful hair.
The lady from Milan doesnt like negri but she likes the strange vacuum of August and she believes in the power of prayer. Susanna in Venice since 68 her son is dancing with the thin blond girlfriend. Sie sprechen Deutsch in piazza. The old men are smoking like Turks and always shouting, Pino is hawking his Olivetti. No space for hiatus in dialect. The blackshirt is gangly with cropped hair, he is wearing braces with the faces of the Duce, he is teaching his son how to tango.

My sad wife is ladling out sangria and taking money for the ballo, ah the ballo... ! Clem is spilling figs from her pockets. And theres Bruno the rabbit-catcher, the barber, the olive-bottler, the voyager, gerontion ball-breaker... My wife is daunsinge with Izio gliding round and round and round the ballo I am watching his hand on her arse. After the ballo we stack the chairs, tables and take a car to the sea; we strip and swim. And because it is dark we are laughing.

ordering nudity. Even the woman at the door winked loosening the buttons on your shirt. Proceed this way for a Caravaggio and remember art is an aphrodisiac. The sun beat hot on the back of our necks, stripped to the waist we studied our first St. Francis. A young man with a glove whispered I did not catch his words a Latin tongue slips back into its mouth, a round Venus touches the top of her thigh opens her legs, yawns. An old flea tries to escape gets caught in the brushwork we kiss under a Bacchus thinking the same thought. Stern civic dignitaries observe.
Julian Stannard has recently taken up a teaching secondment at the University of Genoa. He usually teaches at a college of the University of East Anglia. Last year Peterloo published Rinas War (see review page 75), a first collection. His work has also appeared in the Guardian, First Pressings (Faber) and Reactions 2 (UEA). He is at present working on a second collection.

Stannard / Poems

Others have bored me. This one quickly had our clothes off. There was too much in it

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Art Gallery

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye / Women

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is studying painting at the Royal Acadamy Schools.

Tamar Yoseloff

Lucky Penny
Standing on the Observation Deck, the city pink and pearly, we think of Grant and Kerr, An Affair to Remember, or Gene Kelly, On the Town, a sailor on shore leave, high with the dream of the girl hes to meet at midnight. You found a penny in your pocket; for a dollar they pressed it flat, replaced Lincolns face with the grand Empire State; you wondered if you dropped it, how long would it take to reach the ground? Down below, there was something miraculous in the absence of people; we knew they were there, had glimpsed them sideways from the elevated train, or as we walked past their lit rooms at night, their warmth oozing through manholes beneath our feet. We would have never have believed that just an hour before an elevator carrying tourists like us plunged straight to the basement below, the ambulance parked discreetly down a side street. They never closed the Observation Deck, and by the time we were rising to the eighty-eighth floor, the haze had lifted, the view would be breathtaking. What if we had stepped into the elevator an hour before? In this version, we are saved and saved again from rattlesnakes, from the bomb that explodes seconds later, from falling out of love. From the top of the Empire State, danger is tiny in the distance, the elevator slipping from our sight, its passengers, strangers whose luck has run out, and that penny, no longer currency, is our talisman, a strange object we will find for years to come, trading from your pocket to mine, appearing suddenly in a dish of odd coins, slipping out like a naughty child in front of the amused cashier, turning up again and again, like the hero at the end of the movie.

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Barnards Star
The angels dancing on the pins head, the UFO glittering in the night, the aura left after he has gone all of them in my mind, except that faint red dwarf that flashes overhead when I am boiling a kettle or making the bed, invisible to the naked eye, but I know it is there tugging the sun, six light years away, racing to make its trajectory the one thing I know will last. Even now in an observatory on some windswept hill, a man gazes through a telescope so big it grazes the clouds, and sights it: a ball of hydrogen and helium: an explanation.

Tamar Yoseloffs first collection, Sweetheart, was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and the winner of the 1998 Aldeburgh Festival Prize. She recently received a New London Writers Award from London Arts for her upcoming collection, Barnards Star.

Yoseloff / Poems

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Andrew Bailey

My Uncle Stamfords Spare Room

ends in an infinite corridor, at least while youre on the foot-square rug that marks the focal point of the trompe-loeil mural. A magic dog with its head hinged over like a Necker cube keeps its gaze on yours as you move through a parallax trick. Anyway, making myself nauseous to combat my ennui, walking over and around the focus, in trundled Stamford claiming a new trick. I repaired to the rug, as requested, watched him saunter down the corridor, and nearly gasped as he turned to admire the trompe-loeil painting that hung on the wall. So, impressed at this ability to become emulsion, I stepped forward to applaud politely. His face fell as I left the rug. You old fraud, I said, as his stature dwindled with the crumbled illusion, youre no more part of the artwork than I am. Shrinkings nothing new, you showed us that at Horrocks bash. Pshaw. He hung his head, hopped from the hidden stair and sidled out through the still-closed door.

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Fibonnaci poem: I love

you bus corner shaped holes in roadside trees. The truly non-mythical never-shut seven-eleven. The tube that arrives like my feet are a timetable. Steel-toed eighteen-hole boots. Stripy trousers. To walk between places I dont have to be at. The last lines of Steps by Frank OHara, and oh god it is you wonderful. And coffee, obsessively, the charge on the air when neither is sure of the other. So many people left in a night lit London, the bustle, a breast like a wave just breaking you the flesh, waves over rocks like the hands of a lover. The first kiss the next kiss the kisses that follow you. The i in the word, kiss, that makes someone smile, the smile on you a person post orgasm, or anytime, or from you a stranger wholl ever remain you one. Yes. And you of course you you. You.

(As if it were a film,

she performs this immobility precisely. The clouds seem fast in comparison, suggesting a hidden trauma to solve. Imagine it is a film, you the camera, director and audience, prolonging the performance with every detail you pick out.) You have twisted your plait right left-handed, then and if I could see through the singlet you wear I would bet you have that hand on top. You should be smoking, perhaps, as you lean against this wall (oddly, the furthest from yours) keeping your face a secret; but the chevrons of creases on the left leg of your shorts reveal that this thigh sits over the other when you do, and is supporting your slender weight now. My pet, you are almost too attentive this is a film, and cannot develop until you turn your head from these clouds and let someone real intrude. (You have decided she will be beautiful when she turns. You feel no guilt, but strangely, cannot stop these words.)

Andrew Bailey graduated from an MA in contemporary poetry in 1999 and is currently working on design for a London theatre company. These are his first published poems that count. The Fibonacci sequence is produced by adding the two previous numbers together so 1,1,2,3,5,8,13. What ought to be a mathematical nonsense crops up everywhere from classical architecture to biology.

Bailey / Poems

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From Germs / Dai Vaughan

irport.

Behind the sheer glass window, huge tonnages of aluminium hefted themselves skywards in apparent silence. To the two men, as they sipped their coffee, it seemed still inconceivable that such defiance of gravity should be accomplished without the agency of propellors, but simply with the black hole energy in the empty maws of the jets nacelles which reminded them of the flared nostrils of cavalry chargers. The spacious, cantilevered arrival-and-departure lounge with its amicable furnishings, its brightly lit cabinets displaying merchandise available at the duty-free jewelled liqueurs and perfumes, travel goods made from the simulated hides of endangered species, silk squares printed with two splashes of colour and the monogram of an exclusive house even the aroma of the coffee made it a far cry from the dilapidated pre-fab in which they had imbibed some chicoryflavoured beverage in the first years of their annual day of vigil. It was as if, in a parody of time-lapse photography, the world had sped up and changed all around them as they sat face-to-face, patient and immobile, waiting for Ludovic Hyams. 6 September: that was the date he had given them when they had made their own shaky escape into exile. Dont worry about me, he had said to them. I shall be following you. Show up at the airport to greet me on 6 September! I have it all planned. The first time, when he did not appear, they had been filled with apprehension on his behalf. They did not dare risk trying to contact him, for fear of placing him in a greater danger than he might face already. When a year had gone by, and they had heard nothing, they decided to return to the airport on the same day. After all, he had not explicitly told them which year he meant; and it would be entirely in character for him to breeze in exactly twelve months late as if nothing untoward had happened. He would most certainly expect them to be there if he did. It was probably after the sixth year, or thereabouts, that they had given up hoping with any pretence of realism that Ludovic Hyams might still arrive; and their annual excursions to the airport, to await the one plane that came each day from their former homeland, had thenceforth taken on the character of an observance: an empty observance, perhaps, but one they could not bring themselves to abandon. When the regime had finally collapsed, they had written; but their letter was returned with the information that the address no longer existed on the citys map. Children wove hesitantly and bumpily among the tables wearing those black masks that are sold to enable travellers to sleep through the in-flight movies: eyeless dominoes tottering in a carnival without joy. The one plane having long since

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voided its passengers, the two men, after a minimal signal one to the other, were about to rise and leave when the inane ping-pong of the public address system was followed by the announcement: Will Mr Bachmann and Mr Muldooney please proceed to exit No.3, where the person they have come to meet is waiting for them. I repeat, will Mr... For a moment, the terrible immobility of all those years held the two in its glacial grip; then, saying not a word, like assassins acting under the compulsion of hypnosis, they rose and made their way towards the exit specified. The main concourse was almost deserted. Beyond the customs barrier at Exit 3, the carousel could be seen still circulating two melancholy items of unclaimed luggage, perhaps the property of some malefactor apprehended when his belongings were already in the hold. There seemed to be no-one waiting. And then they noticed the child. A boy of indeterminate age, nine at the most, he wore an anklelength raincoat and a flat cap with a wide crown, such as was fashionable before the second World War. His old leather suitcase bulged. Its stitching had split in places; and it was tied around with hairy, jute string. The boys eyes were brown; and when he glanced up, at the approach of the two men, it was as if a horse had raised its head from pasture. I am Abraham, he said; and then, seeing the mens puzzlement: I am Abraham, great-grandson of Ludovic Hyams.

ilence.

Dont talk to me about silence! Thats what he once said to me. I mean, would you believe it? I wasnt to talk to him about silence. And what would you suppose he meant by that, eh? Im sure I wouldnt know. Not hungry, are you? I hope youre not. Ive no idea at all what he meant, none at all. Not that I often had. Not most of the time, if it comes right down to it,

not if youd really asked me, not with him. Dont talk to me about silence. Yes, thats what he said, true as I stand here, verbatim. And more than once, if truth be known. I meant to make you a sandwich. I really did. I meant to make you one. But I forgot. Youre not hungry, though, are you? What did he know about silence, anyway? What Im saying is, what did he know that was so special, so special, for him to say a thing like that? Fishpaste. Or banana. Or peanut butter. Helps sustain you. I just forgot, thats all. Not angry at me, are you? You mustnt be angry. I simply forgot. Went right out of my mind, it did, the way things do. Ill tell you something else he once said. He said, Silence is what happens when you get too many of the same. So what are you to make of that? Too many the same, thats what he said, without a word of a lie. I mean, its not as though he was any sort of an expert on something, not him! You just have to take these things as they come, though, dont you? No point letting it get through to you. Itd soon get you down if you let it get through to you. Thats a fact, isnt it? That really is a fact, and no mistake. No, you mustnt be hungry. Not yet. Nothing like a good sandwich, though, is there, Id agree with you there. You know sometimes it lasted for days. Hed be so quiet, for days on end sometimes. Did I never tell you? Yes, days on end. Bread. Bread. I got bread in specially, would you believe, and then forgot. Got it in specially in case there might not be any at the weekend, you see. Then I clean forgot all about it. But there you go. These things happen . I did mean to make you one, though. Dates make a good sandwich, I always think. A block of cooking dates sliced very thin, and perhaps with a bit of honey. That makes a really good sandwich. Partial to that, I am. Im sure I wouldnt say no to one myself just at the moment. But you cant afford to let these things upset you, can you? Youd soon be underneath it all, all of it. Days on end, and not a word out of him. And then when he did say anything, it had to be something like, Dont talk to me about silence. What can you do, eh? What can you do? Never mind. Dates is full of vitamins, I read that somewhere. I remember reading it. Thats right, dates and honey. Too many of the same thing, I dont know what that meant. I really dont know at all. But its important for a sandwich to be palatable, Ill say that for it. If people are going to want to eat it, I mean, its the important thing. But silence? I wouldnt know about silence, Gods honest truth I wouldnt. Are you really sure youre not hungry? I do hope youre really not. It would worry me to think you were hungry after me forgetting to make you that sandwich. Just slipped my mind thats all. I meant to do it. How is it these things can just slip your mind? No-one knows the answer to that, do they? Not to that or anything else, for that matter. Not if you ask me. No. All those days, all those weeks. What would you have done, eh? Silence is too many of the same thing, eh? So why dont you say something? Why dont you say something to me? Eh? Is it because of the sandwich, is that what it is? No, its not the sandwich. Ive had you for years and youve never said a word to me. Not one solitary. All my life, it sometimes seems, and never a word. But youll learn. Take my word for it, youll learn your lesson soon enough, just like the rest of us have had to. Still, never mind, eh? All good things come to an end. But next time I wont forget. Ill make you a really delicious sandwich. Thats a promise. Truly it is. Eh?

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irds.

Oh yes, you admire our plumage; though whether you commonly recognise in the black of the crow a variety of tint to rival the display of the rainbow rosella I take leave to doubt. Not that it is a question of sensitivity or its lack, but rather that your sensitivities lean to the subtractive: that you can comfortably separate colour from function, function from aspiration. You can, in a word, admire us when we are dead; and that is something with which we have difficulty. Difficulty. It is not astonishing when our origins differ so sharply. Our first cells divide and multiply not swaddled in the blood-throb of a gently clenched womb but poised within a perfect hard calcium geometry, pre-existent in its dimensions, pale as the sky and seemingly as remote: a bounded universe which, rather than its growing to accommodate our growth, we find ourselves inexorably filling until only by an act of violence, violence of beak and claw, can we miraculously reverse that primal geometry to find ourselves on the outside of the egg of the world. That is why we constantly spread our wings towards the unreachable heavens: for what is heaven if not the pre-natal projected into the unattainable? It is also, perhaps, why every transition in our lives, indeed it must seem to you our every act, is marked by that violence, that abruptness, that property of the irrevocable. Once we have taken courage to launch ourselves from the nest, we never return to it. The kill is instantaneous; digestion unhindered by scruple. Conceivably a bias towards geometry supplies the clue to another of our preferences: why, rather than paddle on flat planes, we most of us will seek the longest and narrowest of extrusions on which to balance for roost and respite. Telegraph wires offer an approximation to the pure conceptual union of the one-dimensional with

Dai Vaughans collection, Germs, has not yet found a publisher. His two novels, The Cloud Chamber and Moritur, are published by Quartet and his twelve essays, For Documentary, by the University of California Press.

the infinite; and such things please us: Cantor and Schrder falling within our clutches. But for you, on the whole, it is otherwise. Your responses to geometry extend scarcely beyond awe at brute repetition: a Cyclopean colonnade, for example, or the sublime perspectives of tower and barrack in the layout of a Lager. Hear us twitter and think the worse of us for it, or at best be amazed at our congregation, the loudness of one tree, a poplar at eventide, grist to the mill of your sentiments. Surely, you think in your less effusive moments, we would enjoy greater kinship with you if we were to roar with anger or purr with contentment or murmur with erotic arousal. That we do not reflects, you suppose, a want of warmth or of sincerity. Our emotions and our communions are transformed, as you understand it, which is to say in some wise translated, from the expression natural to them into the pure arithmetic of melody. But there is no translation implied. For us, music is the measure of all things internal as well as external; and to re-absorb this music into the pattern of your own responses is to misrepresent it. We do not sing Tove ist tot, though some of us may manage Tel-Quel, Tel-Quel, or Oulipo, Oulipo, Oulipo. Yours is the world of Tannhuser and of St Ignatius Loyola and of torchlight processions reflected in broad waterways; ours that of Pythagoras, of Josipovici, of Robespierre. Our sufferings parade in glorious raiment. You would never recognise them as sufferings at all. In truth you envy us. That is the crux. From beehive tomb to midget submarine and to space capsule, you have sought to replicate a situation you never enjoyed, have sought solace in a memory that was never your own in the first place but whose wonder you faintly apprehended: the excruciating beauty of that pale curvature beyond which is nothing: the egg. For us, our coming into the world entails a topological absurdity so total that we are left with no choice but to repudiate it: the absurdity of an inversion of space which in principle could be accomplished only through the mediacy of another dimension. But to you this is eternally fascinating, since it promises ingress to mysteries you cannot guess at. Of course, you will deny it. You will continue to shoot us in our hundreds and net us in our thousands, and will try through excess at which you excel to eradicate your own fascination with us. But it remains undeniable that no human has ever been able to visualise an angel except with wings.

Lotte Kramer

Berlin
The Serbo-Croat taxi driver Dodges through traffic to the airport, Politely asking if the music (Classical) is disturbing. Berlin behind us, surprisingly Green and bright, even friendly. My anti-Prussian prejudice Has slowly subsided. The city emerges from division And war-wounds with bits of wall Still standing but broken like coded Alibis of the Secret Police. Almost uncanny, the helpfulness Of bus drivers, officials, shop-assistants. The new cupola of the Reichstag Illuminates the whole surroundings Where Max Lieberman* had lived, Now a rebuilt handsome house. He had his studio windows blacked-out After witnessing the Nazi torchlight parade. Unter den Linden spreads itself Again in all its grandeur, Only the coldness of the Fidelio Production, the most glowing of operas, Is jarring in the rebirth of this city With its restored golden Synagogue Dome shining across the river As the massive black Pieta** weeps.

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*painter ** Kathe Kollwitz sculpture.

Tower
She likes to be alone as a rule But not in here Where dirty water drips from ceiling and walls That have housed such terror In past centuries. This dungeon without light, The rough stone floor, The smell of vermin Clutching the victims throat In his last hours, A broken plank as bed In his dark silence. A sudden glimmer of light in a corner Holds her eye, She walks towards it with hesitation And picks up a torn envelope Discarded by a previous visitor Containing a letter of rejection. It brings her back to todays world And the pain of living in it. Someone has come to this place To lose his humiliation here.

Woman at the Window

Caspar David Friedrich, 1822
You want to cup the oval of her head, The hair piled up and neatly pinned to it, The ears exposed beside the nape of the neck. The sloping shoulders gathered in the sleeves, High-waisted pleats fall down in gentleness To shroud her body to the ankles edge. And so she leans against the window sill, A longing gesture takes us out with her Into the harbour, hardly visible. Some uprights tell of masts in dove-grey light. She dreams, perhaps, of distant other worlds While slippers firmly tread the wooden floor.
Lotte Kramer came to England with a Kindertransport in 1939. She began to write in the 1970s and is widely published in England and abroad. She has published nine collections, one bilingual in Germany. The most recent is The Phantom Lane, Selected and New Poems, from Rockingham Press.

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Anthony Suter

Three Screws
Ive had no luck since I left the army. I survived the Korean War, the Mao Mao, brain box open like a tin of sardines, Cyprus... Now this wont heal. Smashed leg from a fork-lift crate of lettuce. Im in here for a calf-bone graft. They tell me the surgeons on the whiskey, but hes brilliant: call him Mister, give him the Irish, youll be all right. Hell slide the knife into you as easy as slipping his Bentley through hospital gates. Otherwise, the treatments no good. Look at those walls! Three different shades of green, and the food... I could do with a lump of Cracker Barrel and a drop of the old mens Guinness. Tell you the time I was stuck up in a heavy lorry in a traffic jam after four pints and couldnt get down because of my crutches? Another thing that annoys me is those door-handle screws. They couldnt find three of the same.

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The Double
Still afternoon. Every sound an event in the deserted drive. Creak of gate, walk across criss-cross cement that has covered tired grass. Some of the stained glass must have gone in the big gales. The storm-doors are standing open with a hanging-basket for summer.

The back-door key still works. Kitchen formica. Door ajar on the hall: no more cracked chime Grandfather clock, new fitted carpet over the wood floor, monochrome cricket on the lounge TV, Mothers in a lovely sleep upstairs. A dark shape shows on the frosted front-door I open on its chain, in my own face, saying: Ive come back home; I didnt want to wake you.

Anthony Suter is a poet and music writer who earns his living as Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Toulouse. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Epitaphs for a Dying Time (Outposts, 1975), These are Lips (ABstrActs, 1992), Melisande at the Angel (available as an AbstrActs poster and cassette-recording, 1997) and of a translation and bio-literary study of Edouard Dujardin: The Bays are Sere (Libris, 1991). These poems form part of an on-going cycle, When You Get to G.Y., due from Redbeck Press in 2003, in which he revisits his home town, Grimsby, through the voices of the characters who peopled his childhood there.

Kalashnikov / Katie Griffiths

he crept into the bed beside him. Although it was a chilly spring night, he was naked. And she thought: how strange, how odd, another country, this soldier, no clothes. He was sleepy, inattentive even, as she reached her arms around him and began to kiss his neck and stroke his head of short hair. I will get close, she wanted her fingers to say. Earlier that day she had nearly tripped on his Kalashnikov lying on the floor. The door to his hotel room had been open, and she had stolen in. Why had he left it out, so obvious? But then, they all had them, there was no special need for him to hide his gun. It lay cold and brutal. She had tiptoed gingerly all around it before bending down and daring to pick it up. She adjusted herself to its weight, felt its metallic strength. She swung it round through 360 degrees and then took mock aim at his trousers hanging on the handle of the wardrobe. She was taken aback at how quickly it became an extension of her own body, another tensile limb. An incredible surge of power had filled her. To target. To target anything. That was the weapons thrill and the weapons seduction. How clear it all suddenly seemed: so much in life was otherwise murky and undecided. But down the length of the barrel and at the point of the gunsights there was a concentration of intent, a distillation of purpose. That must be how it was for him, for all of them not just the imported volunteers, but all the soldiers. The most potent of all exchanges. You entertained the idea, you took aim, you pulled the trigger, and bang, you explosively made your views known. It was the ultimate reinforcer of argument, transcending words, getting instantly and devastatingly to the nub. She had quietly put the gun back on the floor mat, slipped out of his room, and joined the others of her group for lunch on the terrace of The Galleon, just within walking distance of the church. The Galleons clientele was a bizarre mixture charity workers like her, as well as war adventurers and mercenaries; do-gooders and do-badders, joking and laughing as they sat elbow to elbow at the blueclothed tables. That was the surprise of war not that enemy factions maimed and murdered each other but that, in spite of everything, opposing interests confounded rules by seeking each others company over coffee. Only a few kilometres down the road people, other people, were desperate for food, comfort, help. She had first seen them the day before yesterday, (Was it really only two days ago? A quirk of time: already it felt like she had been here a month.) Her group had delivered their packages and boxes to refugees in Posusje, crammed together in the dank gymnasium of a dilapidated school. Some, mostly

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youngsters, had crowded around in curiosity to see what was on offer. Others sat, their eyes deadened, unimpressed and disinterested in shows of largesse. And she had walked through, ashamed of all the fripperies that had thus far garnered her thoughts. She had the uncomfortable sensation of visiting a ghastly zoo: she had the freedom to come, gawp and go, while those inside were fed, stared at and abandoned. But on the terrace of The Galleon restaurant in this town which gave out all the superficial but misleading signals of being normal, merely by dint of being on the right side of the front line, she had still been able to order an omelette and chips, their price ludicrously cheap because of the constantly inflating dinar. Life went on for those with a wallet. She had sat at the table next to the soldier, had studied him and eavesdropped on him. He downed beer, then gut-stripping coffee. She abhorred what he stood for, was fascinated by what he stood for. She marvelled at the intelligence in his eyes, felt her stomach tingle when he laughed. She swam in his words as he described to one of her colleagues what it was like to be a sniper. The excitement of it. The challenge. The rush. That was why he had come from England to fight in another mans war. Certainly, he admired those Muslim snipers. They were good, very good. In Mostar there were two in particular. He had to get those two. It was either them or him. And he had explained how it was for the band of foreign volunteers: the Dane, the Irishman, the Frenchman how they depended on one another, each pair of soldiers, how they were inextricably bonded. He relied on a buddy to cover for him along every millimetre as he crept around the corners of buildings, pressed close to the stone, a hairs trigger from death. When questioned, he protested that he did follow a moral code. No targeting of innocents only men in uniform. Others on his side were not so bothered. Last week he had been forced to shoot a Croat comrade from his own unit whose arm was raised to lob a grenade into a room full of screaming women and children. And then at the end of a day and nights fighting, after mainlining on pure adrenaline, he would yet emerge alive, and want and itch and need to go back and do it all again. She had listened to the soldier and watched as his eyes glinted cobalt with the intoxication of it. Then he had suddenly turned towards her, and the steel had locked on and had frozen her as if she was being noticed for the first time. All right? he said with an unnerving enquiry in his gaze. Now in bed in the darkness the soldier gently removed the sweatshirt she had put on for warmth against the mountain night. Somewhere, in a room down the corridor, voices crescendoed, followed by loud laughter. Soldiers jokes, she thought. Bawdy jokes. Body jokes. They always came in late, the foreign mercenaries, staggering and hilarious from the slivovitz. It did not matter, it would be a leisurely start the next morning. It was always a leisurely start for the boys in the Citluk Hotel, who whiled away long chunks of time waiting to be driven to the front line. Everyone knew that if you ventured as a civilian into Mostar early, say between the hours of seven and ten, you would probably be safe. Nothing started up before eleven. The soldiers

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were all sleeping off hangovers from the night before. In fact, action didnt really commence until at least three in the afternoon, after the opposing sides had finished drinking at shared cafe tables. They had been friends once, Croats and Muslims, together trying to force back the Serbs who still controlled positions on the hills surrounding the city. But they had turned their weapons on each other. Now the convention was that each side because they sported identical uniforms had to wear a different designated ribbon every day so that things could be made simpler for the snipers bullet. Her soldier had not been drinking much at all, but from the way his limbs relaxed in the bed she knew he was bonetired. She placed her palm on one muscular shoulder, drew it down and along over a well developed bicep. Idly, almost in spite of himself, he let his lips brush over her hair and cheek. Growing more wakeful, he ran his hands down her body. Although she thrilled to them, these hands, these fingers, she flinched, fearful that he would find her wanting. He knelt over her and she looked up in the blackness to trace and memorise the shape of his shorn head and the dimensions of the powerful shoulders. But she did not know how to bridge the intimacy, or how to wholly confess her body. Not the best of times, but the only time, here, now, this night, she thought. But he is the unknown soldier here in lunacy with me, here in lunar time with me, here to accept or reject the cycle of my body. The bedding of women, the churching of women, I am unclean, the menstruating woman not allowed in the temple. And he was indeed disturbed by her blood, by the thought of her blood. He who had seen so much blood, who had shed blood, spilled blood, staunched blood. He was uneasy about her blood, even though it did not flow from gaping wounds. He was suspicious of her blood even though it signified not the certainty of death but the promise of life. For it was her special blood, the generational blood, the nurture of her body. No, I do not want to do this, he said. I have changed my mind. Still she clung on to him, desperate for resolution. I need you, I need this, she wanted to say. Go, he said. Go. Into the other bed. Without a word she slipped out from under the quilt, white in her nakedness. The other bed was cold and hard. She lay curled up into herself, knowing that she should go to the bathroom to check the stream of blood which seeped so determinedly. He is just a boy, she thought, afraid of woman, afraid to be reminded of the rhythm, the inevitability, the relentlessness of woman. Yet she did not move. She did not want to give in. She wanted her silence to say: I am not hurt by this, I am not crushed, I bleed, I am strong. The next morning she awoke to find him gone. His kitbag, the gun, everything. He would return late that night, she knew, but by then she too would have left, travelling the long miles back to England in the church minibus, her duties done, the packages of handouts and hand-me-downs safely delivered to people dispossessed by men not unlike him, with their steel glint and Kalashnikovs. As soon as she got up she noticed the large red stain on her sheet. How foolish after all not to have dealt with matters properly before she went to sleep. Taking a large yellow sponge from the bathroom she dabbed and wiped the sheet and soon

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managed to remove the entire mark. The dampness was now positioned high up the bed and she decided to change the sheet around so that the wet patch would be less immediately apparent to anyone who might come into the room. But as she lifted the sheet up she was shocked at what she discovered. There, on the pale blue mattress which looked surprisingly new, was yet another stain, much more assertive and definite than that on the sheet whose material had simply channelled fluid into the greater absorbency of the mattress. This was an altogether more serious problem. Try as she might with the wet sponge, she could not dab the mark away. With each new bout of scrubbing, she made it worse and soon increased its area to nearly double the original size. In defeat, she heaved the mattress over. She collected her belongings, glanced back as she left the room, then joined the group at the rendez-vous point for the minibus, not wishing to join in conversation, ready to be driven home, far, far from this unleashed madness. How could she take any of this with her? How could she leave any of it behind? She felt sick, a kind of sick that implicated her whole body and drew it into a tight ball. She sat hunched over so that her chest lay on her thighs, her mouth crushed her left knee, her hands clasped her left calf. She could not move for fear of howling, she could not move for fear of where the next steps would lead her. As the land slid past, as the minibus rattled and bumped over pockmarked roads, she thought about the texture of the gun, the texture of the soldiers arm. She thought about the light blue mattress now turned belly under. And she knew that today and tomorrow, although she might well be translated back into her own world of rigid predictabilities, the angry-red stain would yet remain as proof that there, once, in a strange, savage and improbable place, the soldier had been wary of her blood.

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Katie Griffiths has worked as a freelance journalist, as a co-ordinator of volunteers looking after the needs of refugees from the war in the former Yugoslavia, and is at present an administrator at a college of further education in Surrey with responsibility for international students. She has been a prize-winner in several poetry competitions and is currently working on her first novel.

James Truan The Bishop

I stared out through the stained glass window and heard the bishop sigh raindrops were bouncing off chicken wire you must take control of your life and get off the I turned and screw-eyed his chasuble he was out of his leather armchair god cares for the oppressed every living creature I stumbled held out my clumsy hand he was recoiled and standing off me rely on sentiment and people will tire of I dragged back something from my childhood about Jesus and the prostitute have this card and heres a coin the world is heartless and I left him to his library the water poured down my face and neck my son we are one world god I shouted for christsake help me save me from this fucking state of mind alcohol opium drugs to be wary of important to phone the centre such good people I launched a foot towards the gate and the door closed quietly behind me

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Copez
I saw Copez in Truro on Saturday morning outside Rowes on a bench eating a pasty like a man whos possessed by food I wasnt sure if it was him at first his hair was grey below his cap I walked behind and bought a pie then sat down beside him

all right beauty he said I got to come to Truro to see you nice pasties yes they are ansome Ive got my day planned out coffee in Littlewoods then down White Hart for the first Murphys of the day a couple of hours in there then live football down the William
I knew he was banned from all three pubs at home but didnt want to embarrass him by saying so Guinness in there and Tottenham then later down Chicago Rock its free if you get in before nine our type of place seventies music no noisy modern crap

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you should see the girls in there boy enough to blow your bollocks off then I catch the ten past ten bus back to St. Just and Im home by eleven thats a good day out I said and meant it and I must admit right then I envied him but I must not no I must not

For Sam for Me

freefall like Lucky skipping up a path under ballooning white sheets Frankie on the radio love and marriage ideas bikes on tar pavements the tin stream through our street a Cornish childhood then at seventeen you gave me Godot Northcott and Nettles nineteen seventy Is this what a play can say and do? ideas a youthful attempt to write Beckett-style much admired though no-one knew alcoholic sleepwalk thirty years of dead-end emotion like Lucky there was enough rope to hang myself here I am were both fifty three boys the play and me like Blair and Portillo Jim Davison Mandy (at least one of these gobbed blood into brandy) you listened to everything they had to say now is my turn my time to play

James Truan lives in Cornwall. As a teenager, in the late 1960s, he had several poems published in local magazines. He is now writing again, after a break of almost thirty years.

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REVIEW

The Alternative Version Jeremy Page Frogmore Press 4.95 Jeremy Pages poems are tinged with a feeling of nostalgia that, when combined with their modest use of language and functional application of form, give them a low-key air. They are reflections rather than statements and the reader needs to accept the poets aim not to step outside a certain framework in order to get something from them. It would be a mistake to expect the poems to do more than they can. Sometimes the nostalgia is for things the poet didnt even experience, as in All the Young Men, where he thinks of a generation he imagines were engaged by politics and Penguin New Writing. He describes the young men and says, They live plainly and think highly, whereas he sees himself as doing something less than that:
Born too late, I can only buy The Guardian, spurn the latest share issue, flip idly through a book of verse.

major poetry but it is full of decency and holds to some genuine values of honesty and compassion. Jim Burns The Echoing Green Gladys Mary Coles Flambard 7.50 There is in Gladys Mary Coless poetry a strong sense of landscape and of how it impinges on our consciousness. The landscape could be urban, of course, but in her case it is almost always rural, with farms and fields, country lanes and high hills, vividly described. The scenes she evokes are often painterly in their detail:
Mid-July, the bindweed high in the hedge a tatty hedge Nain calls it, sitting in the yard, tilting her kitchen chair, as sunlight pinks the sandstone of soot-crusted walls. The tall house casts its shadow over the dusty privet, shades Nains face.

Its a poem that partly succeeds because of its brevity and its notion of the past does tell us something about the poet. But it may be that hes on surer ground when writing about people and things he has directly experienced. Theres a good poem about a grandfather that evokes a real rather than an imagined past, and a short one called Bookmark that deals with death in a tight, effective way:
After the funeral the final confirmation: Beside her bed a Catherine Cookson, bookmark at page twenty-three. All the unread pages; all the pages she would never read.

Its quiet writing, never flashy in language or movement, but with a strength that comes from its accuracy and its obvious regard for what is dealt with. I said that Coles is often painterly and its no coincidence that there are several poems which use paintings as inspiration. Im never too sure about poems based on paintings but these are sufficiently imaginative to do more than simply describe what is on the canvas. The paintings concerned are mostly from the 19th century and, as has often been said of that period, they told stories. Coles does that, too, and it works. She also looks at writers like D.H. Lawrence and Malcolm Lowry (a particularly effective poem) and, in a long sequence, the novelist Mary Webb, who Coles has written about extensively in prose. I have my doubts about poets writing sequences about writers whose lives are fully covered in biographies, but she does more than repeat the facts and blends them with flashes of description of people and places and sets them in their period:
Long ago the charmed circle now only the Bookman Circle, P.E.N. meetings, gatherings at Anerley around silver-voiced de la Mare: only the dusty city trees, foggy water of the Thames, crumbling stucco and destitutes at every corner...

I did wonder if it was really necessary to have All the unread pages in the poem, all the pages/ she would never/ read saying it in a more personal way and with a better rhythmic impact, but perhaps Im wrong. I dont think that this book contains any

There are only a couple of dull poems in this book, and one, Beginner, that the publisher ought to have advised Coles to drop. It seems very weak and unconvincing in comparison with the rest. The Echoing Green is a good example of the kind of solid work that is done by poets working in what might be called a mainstream style and which is too often overlooked in favour of the fashionable. Jim Burns How To Get The Most Out Of Your Jetlag Donald Gardner Ye Olde Font Shoppe $12.00 One of the problems with performance poetry is that, without the performance, it often seems very thin. Material that might entertain when heard and seen in a club or caf with a drink or two to relax the audience, and a suitably benign atmosphere, can lose its impact on the page. It needs the poet, perhaps looking and behaving like a poet (or what people imagine a poet ought to look and behave like) to project the words in a way that emphasises their amusement value. Performance poems can be like jokes told on a night out in a pub. They dont seem half as funny in retrospect. Having said that I have to add that Im not against performance poetry as such and there are good and bad performance poets. I have never heard Donald Gardner read his work but on the evidence of the poems in his book I would guess that he does it in an engaging way. It is true that a lot of his work is lightweight but he does make neat points in a mocking manner, as in English Tea:
Oh! Take this cup of tea from me. Oh! Lord let me not drink it, unless its part of your greater plan, this cup of tea with sugar in it. sugar to mask the bitter taste. milk to dilute the brew; and conversation I cannot bear, its been so long a-stew.

friends who call when you dont want to see them, and other matters likely to raise a response from an audience. He relishes his role as a poet, though blithely admits that it could have been a strategy for going through life/ without doing anything, and presents a slightly bemused personality for the reader (or listener) to react to. Im not a bad fellow,/ even though I dont exist, am split and mad, he says in a disarming way. Some of Gardners poems do work reasonably well on the page, their long lines and loose rhythms pushing the words along, but as I said earlier, hearing the poet perform them might be the real key to their success. Jim Burns Becoming Human Lance Lee Authors Choice Press 8.95 This poetry is addressed elementally to its title theme becoming (and remaining) human. It is poetry unabashed by sensuality and feeling, by declaring authorship of them, by setting beauty as the prima materia in the work of poetry, by insisting on the profound and writing it large and with intensity. It is poetry that is untroubled by sincerity versus concealment and irony. It is poetry that is disconcerting not a modern voice but rather a voice beyond epoch and cultural baggage yet rooted in his territory of that most modern place, Los Angeles. (Away from there I sensed the loss of an intimate connection with place.) Reading this collection made me challenge my prejudices against the personal/biographical in poetry. Here I had to re-learn that the world starts in your own heart, and the only question is one of scope for his poetry is rarely cluttered with literal detail and surface anecdote. In this poem of childhood play and drama, Sledding Time in Carl Schurz Park, he says:
I have lost childhoods greatness. Even so I know time is more than stony markers: it is these films we run back and forth at once just now I grasp my sleds handles and launch down the freezing slope... ... not yet trained to march lockstep by step to my own decline.

It doesnt add up to a great deal, and I can see how it could be faulted technically, but its short and mildly amusing, and those virtues just about keep it from failing. Elsewhere, Gardner writes about mothers who want to talk early on Sunday morning, telephones that ring at the wrong time,

Reviews / Burns, Gahagan

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And from the vastness of the city he never loses his intimacy with nature and therefore his feral self:
That feral nature I always knew was mine overwhelms my heart

Selected Poems Anthony Howell Anvil 9.95 The first poem in this selection, Sergei di Diaghileff (1929) establishes a very particular world to which the poet speaks. Among these connoisseurs you feel like you do at a party where you dont know anybody you try to smile and look knowing:
Je suis le spectre... Gautier now. But what gold Paved Peters town! U skated, plump and suave. Composition does not become me, since Rimsky insists. Why not compose my friends? Mutely, imported aqauarelles Ognote the Stieglitz. That was before I invented The avant-garde. Mir Isskoustva... or some such aesthetic Lab. Test-tubes to bung up Fokine, Benois (Poor souls)...

(From Running with Thoreau) The tour de force of the collection is the Dante in Los Angeles sequence. These are versions of lyric poems by Dante addressed to a woman of stone. They are poems of impossible love that other prima materia of soul-making and therefore poetry. They speak of the eternal yearning, the foolishness, the humiliation and helplessness, the holy folly of impossible love. And here he mingles the mountains, weathers, skies, seasons, stars of California with those images of Hollywood divas who furnish the Aphrodite myths of the modern world. Even if there were nothing else to recommend it these poems should send you out to buy and keep the book:
More often we burn in false summers when winter winds press through our canyons from the desert; or Mexican rains drift north and drench us warmly until a storm from Alaska rolls down the green wave of the coast to clear the air with almost frozen rain and dress our mountains in white. Such tumults should distract me from my private Monroe or Harlow or Stone, but hot cold wet arid, these polar reversals echo my own moods as I pursue this woman who doesnt care if I am false or true.

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and so on. Probably its not possible to meditate on some personage without excluding the wider world. However this sense of speaking to a particular audience continues in other poems an audience the poet has to please and amuse and to whom he must be original. This gives much of the poetry an anxious, restless, edgy quality. Take the poem Ridge above Ridge (from Lyrics from Imruil):
Paws to yourself, please. Whats so clever In going on your belly beneath the goatskins, Nosing for goods the ostrich buried? Ill carry the lamp: when were dazzled? You make the blunders, but who takes the risk?

My enthusiasm for this collection only waned where he left the USA and came to Europe. It was not that he lost energy, fluency or poetic imagery, it was that his passion and reverence seemed to overload passing experience where he responded to briefer glimpses of places and histories visited and known about but not really lived. Again I can only recommend this post post-modern classic. Judy Gahagan

The choice of perspective, the stance, the abrupt shifts of diction characterise many other poems too. Then theres another barrier: a pursuit of detail that leads you far from the poems highway and destination; Boxing the Cleveland (a long poem about boxing a horse) is one such poem:
The lorrys box is partitioned for at least Four horses standing sideways in their stalls: Its width permits a squeezing space at best. Between its sides and the nettle-bordered walls

Hard by the lane, where its brought to a shuddering stop Beside the gate pushed back against the shed Serving as laundry. Someone thin on top Comes out of the house and greets with nod of head.

Tender Taxes Jo Shapcott Faber 8.99 In over-writing Rilkes French poems (they are not translations) Jo Shapcott, in her foreword, describes variously her purposes as inventing a modern voice to speak them, and as responses, arguments, even dramatisations. From the outset I found it hard to imagine the motive for such an unlikely project and was not surprised at the uneasy outcome. A few years before his death, after the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke wrote around 400 poems in French. The poems are perhaps slighter than their predecessors but Rilkes inimitable voice continues: inward and hermetic, eluding time and epoch-shaped cultural baggage, indifferent to audience, his poetry whispers and insinuates. His poetic moments hover effortlessly above the literal and above polemic. His speaker is an indeterminate I, more often than a we, the two usually fused into an impersonal source. There are few poets more impervious to argument, drama or conversion to the modern vision. In the Windows poems you see immediately how alien the modern voice is to that of Rilkes: busy, impatiently down-to-earth, assertive, ego-centred yet audience-directed; its a voice that surrounds us continually today and seeps into the soul. Why would Jo Shapcott want to impose this voice on Rilke? Would not the more radical project be that of recovering a Rilkean voice for our intrusive times? Not surprisingly then the result, in the Windows, the Roses and Taxes sequences, is at once to undermine ones reception of Rilke and obscure her own poetic gifts. Of the countless examples I offer the following:
You propose I wait, strange window... Arent I intact, with this life thats listening, with this full heart that loss is completing

Its a pity because that poem, written fluently and elegantly in ballad quatrains, like many other poems, illustrates the poets great versatility, observation and involvement in his subject. Other barriers are the remote stance in certain poems of reflection, like Love Poem or The Quest and the forcing of rhyming schemes in, for example, The Ballad of the Sands:
He drove on his own Dazzled by the sun, And his steering gave a groan At each slow turn Groaned as in pain. Back in town again:

I felt most at ease with, indeed really enjoyed, those poems where he dedicates himself to landscape, as in Privity and in the long poems set in Australia for example. Here are the last two stanzas from the wonderful poem Idea of the South:
Prairies prohibited by cliff-walls, reservoirs of silence, manifestations of elemental powers, torrents Of specific energies, nights of masonic symbol. This is the refuge of the Sacred Ibis. Last moment footage fades the departure lounge into a wind-wheel fanned by the sunset, Blurring its vanes in a land neither dead nor alive on a planet half dazzle, half drizzle and twilight.

(Rilke) It feels to me that when hes taken over by his vision and feels less need for particular reader approval, his gifts manifest themselves splendidly. Judy Gahagan
I wont stop talking to you just because Youre acting strange. You mouthed off all day yesterday

(Jo Shapcott) She sums up the I problem herself a few pages on with:

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No chance that who I am can get lost in this space, small, airy, like love with me in the middle.

Reviews / Gahagan, Over

With the Roses poems she adds a further modern element that of claiming that his Roses really refer to female genitalia, female eroticism, a claim endorsed enthusiastically by Vicki Feaver in her cover tribute, and that the sequence offers the opportunity to explore that contemporary obsession gender relations. Fortunately little of this program emerges in her versions of the poems indeed in many of them she stays quite close to Rilkes tone, adding furthermore a welcome asperity with her botanical titles to Rilkes arguably somewhat precious touch. But again what project is this? Its almost impossible for a modern person to imagine the erotic other than in the literal, quotidian full-frontal manner of contemporary discourse. Thus for Rilkes Eros, retaining its classical sense an alliance of beauty and desire imaginatively projected onto an image the old guns of repression are put in place to smoke out the real content and to argue with Rilke from the perspective of gender relations. Sorry, but Rilkes Rose poems are primarily about Roses and the soul connections we make with them.
Rose never tempted again, disconcerter, by your inner peace; ultimate lover, this troubling odor of a naked saint. ...ultimate lover, so far from Eve, from her first call rose infinitely holding the fall

In the Gladestry Quattrains she shifts Rilkes Valaisian idylls to a country she knows more intimately the border country. At last her gift shines out. Here the place itself speaks through her poetry unhindered by agenda and an intrusive I to inform it. Here among many lovely poems is Gilwern Dingle in her own Rilkean voice:
A lane between two meadows, not leading anywhere but still managing to tempt the fields to go along with it. A track which often has nothing ahead except the ford, and the lengthening season.

Judy Gahagan The Nowhere Birds Catriona OReilly Bloodaxe 6.95 Michael Longley is right to call this a stunning debut collection. On a first reading though, I found myself put off to a certain extent by its intensity and by some of the things in the book the surfaces of statuary, a cold kind of sealed off quality in the subject matter. The themes are widespread and deep like OReillys waterscapes that appear throughout the book, and they seem to reflect her interest in coming to terms with necessary pain. She writes about growing-up and self-realisation; about absence and loss; places, the arts and the elements all with an excruciating sensitivity. The more resistant a surface, the more intense is OReillys imaginative response to it. So dried, pressed bats are like tiny black flowers and statues of eagles imagine a wind that wasnt there. Creatures and plants are often presented as startling and violent: daffodils bring the dreadful earliness of their petals/ against dead earth, the extremity of their faces; a spider looks sudden but is still// for hours, eyes on stalks,/ awaiting news from hair-triggers. OReillys tone varies interestingly though: sometimes she exercises a kind of fine hysteria that remains controlled but threatens to overflow, and at other times she exudes a warm empathy and humour towards her strange

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(Rilke)
Now youve made a saint out of me Saint Rose, open-handed, she who smells of God naked. But, for myself, Ive learned to love the whiff of mildew because though not Eve, exactly yes, I stink of the Fall

(Jo Shapcott) The Tender Taxes poems (odd title, Rilkes own, for his tribute to his long-adopted country and its language) exemplify further the reservations expressed here.

subjects, as here in Octopus: Mostly they are sessile and shy/ as monsters... The tenderness of their huge heads/ makes them tremble at the shameful/ intimacy of the killing.... Forms throughout the collection also vary. Theres a sestina that successfully diverts attention from its repetitions, using enjambment and a natural-sounding dramatic monologue to suck the reader right into the heart of its drama (the story of an anorexic teenager). Poems with difficult restricted rhyme patterns are also handled with ease. As youd expect from the material, OReilly uses dissonant and half-rhymes more than full ones, but even when there is full rhyme, the rhythm will usually disturb any comfort we might derive from it. This, from After a Death:
For a whole week a large emptiness shrieks endlessly around the hills, made bleak and salt-striated under its unabated sea-stung blast. On my window the desiccated caked salt it leaves behind melts, shatters like sheet ice, and lets the cold bald February light in.

Superb, but definitely not one to read without the central heating turned up a notch or two. Marita Over Rinas War Julian Stannard Peterloo Poets 7.95 Stannards first collection by contrast will provide you with a lovely diversion from this cold, wet winter. The style is light, airy and seemingly effortless; the tone, gently ironic and at times perhaps whimsical. Set for the most part in northern Italy where Stannard lived for a time, the poems are populated with characters that seem to have stepped out of a Calvino short story the butcher, the baker,// the priest, the collaborator... and though the quasi-narrative trajectory of the book is clearly autobiographical you have the sense of this world as a beautiful but fragile construction; Stannards creation of it as a kind of willed suspension of disbelief: Although the city had many failings/ it had many exquisite bars/ but they only existed if you

wished them/ and they were always in the secret places (from Combinations). In this world, rituals are continually performed as attempts to imbue experience with meaning, to overcome an intangible but pervasive threat of dissolution, Every morning you show me your breasts/ and then dissolve into the fog (from Lives); offal is washed in oil for preservation to pull us through (Oil and Geese); for Rina, an elderly woman who lived in Lombardy in 43 and who remembers the war as fog/ and a landscape of ghostly bicycles/ all ducking and weaving, chicory and bidets form the basis of the routines which give her her sense of order and decorum; and back in England when theres a crisis, Walking is what the English do (from Aldeburgh). Images of dissociation and disembodiment recur. Fogs, glass screens, cloth (behind which the world murmurs like a beast in the night), a jacket worn to the doctors, an old inherited coat all come between the self and the experience. Verbs tend to be passive or have no subject: For five years sitting against/ a tree next to the river/ with the sea over the mountains/ is not what really happened; even fatherhood is experienced ostensibly as a passive state: A small boy ran into the bedroom/ and announced that he was mine. And in a poem of ultimate disembodiment, the poet comes upon his own corpse, floating gently under the waves. Typically, the portentousness of the moment is lightly and humorously undercut, I wanted to wish it well/ but my words fell on dead ears (from The Corpse). What I like best in the book though is the way Stannard can balance this irony with a childlike openness towards life which being as quick as the pouring of tea, he advises the reader in the words of one of his characters, to run your hands/ over its swiftness. Marita Over
YOU CAN NOW ORDER BOOKS THROUGH AMBIT! IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO ORDER ANY OF THE BOOKS REVIEWED, ADD 1 p&p/COPY TO THE PRICE LISTED AND SEND A CHEQUE TO: AMBIT, FREEPOST ND 6008, LONDON N6 5BR. PLEASE ALLOW 28 DAYS FOR DELIVERY. IF ORDERING FROM OUTSIDE THE UK, PLEASE ADD 2 p&p/COPY TO THE PRICE LISTED AND SEND TO: AMBIT, 17 PRIORY GARDENS, LONDON N6 5QY, UK (THIS IS NOT A FREEPOST ADDRESS).

Reviews / Over

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Edward McCarten / Magic Realism

Edward McCarten is a painter and print-maker, living in Plymouth. He was recently the Feature Artist in Printmaking Today. His work has appeared in previous issues of Ambit (159, 160 and 165).

Study for The Fortune Fish

The Counting House

The Cricket Player

The Blind Boy

The Tower

The Poor King

Nightbirds / Nick Sweeney

can always picture the sun. When its darkest night or brightest day when nobody dares look, my sun is there, shape of the childs smiling star that it is. Im no sun worshipper, just know there is no dark side if you keep the sun in view. When my father died, I opened the curtains into our darkened rooms, let the sun in, and was beaten; only by my mother, though, not by the feisty majesty of death. Years later, my wifes nan died. The family sat shivah as a non-believer I was exempt, but I sat too on a low stool, thinking of how she made a chink in the design of our little world, ushered us through to the space she left behind. My wife was called Lael, two definite articles run together to shape her personality. She spent years defining mine for me, and I went along with that. After all, she had led me into a temple, I used to think, into its dome that soared into the heavens, sun streaming through its windows. One day I discovered that we were in its crypt, the door locked on us. I suspected then that she had sold the temple above us to developers. She said I didnt work hard enough. She said sleeping in the afternoons was not healthy for a man of my age had I turned into my own child? She said if I wanted to create, why didnt I stop painting, and make a child with her? Id seen the children that occurred in her family, though; their faces augured greed and evil, and the end of the world. I was not going to father the antichrist. I woke and walked in the parks among wasters and crusties, and women silenced by children. I saw Laels nan, and the vanished grandad shed called Papa, walking in Clissold Park; as the sun came out from the clouds, I envied them the love they had, in a simpler time. From then on, Lael kept telling me I wasnt the man she thought I was; I wasnt even the man I thought I was, my vision blocked by the sun. She said I couldnt love her I didnt have the will, she said. Without the sun, you cant mark time anymore, so I slept more and more, and dont know how long this went on. Lael got so pissed off at the sight of my sleeping form that she poked it awake one afternoon to tell me she was leaving. Out in the light, I found a world populated by women. One of them would want me, and one of them did. I met her in Finsbury Park on the day of the eclipse, but I didnt take that as a bad omen. She wore the flat shoes and black ankle socks of the frumme women of Stamford Hill, had their wig-shaped hair, which she covered sometimes with a headscarf to give the appearance of the Turkish women of Green Lanes I liked this pentimento of Londons multiculture in her. Her name was Roma, and she was from a country of pacifists and communists, coups and confusion, castles, drinkers of blood. She had also come from a cruel marriage to an old, failed architect, a man seriously degenerated by the burnout of his star.

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It took me some time to realise that she was bringing them all with her. She was unique, a holy insomniac hungry for the voice of the moon; in our conversations, the sun and moon caught up with each others gossip. I should have known that you couldnt put together two beings that rely on each others absence for their life, but... well, I dont see the dark side, and my favourite time of day was often when I was just going to bed, with the sun up but the moon still there. Roma talked back to the moon, persuaded it to light us through long, manic nights when her cunt, as she liked to say, cried out all the time for me. She got me to put my ear to it, but all I could ever hear up there was the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves. I did my best to liberate them, but really didnt know what they had to complain about; there were worse places to be. When we landed on Earth from Venus, we shared the illusions of our crazy love. We knew that illusions were simply the dark angels of delusion, but we ventured into them. Angels being absurd creatures of whim, I knew that what I would do was drag them out into the light and dose them with UV and ozone, force them to smile on us. It would take a fellow-artist like Roma to have patience with me, I thought. We didnt only spend nights and days in bed; we spent them among primer and paint, glue and charcoal. You inspire me, we told each other, and in my case it was true: I was redeemed. However, I looked at her work puzzled; it was always a message from herself to herself, and I asked, do you want to communicate? She never answered that question. There was a feeling I began to get, especially when I was absorbed in work, that she was watching me. I would look up, though, and there she would be, engrossed in a sketchpad, or, increasingly, in cyberspace versions of the esoteric arts. When I wasnt with her, I had the same feeling, but then I felt comforted and strong. You were thinking of me, I would say, and she had the magic in her sometimes stunted English to deny it, and yet put over that I was right. Then something in the frank way she studied me began to disturb me, reducing me often to a childs irritable what, what? Do some work, I scolded her, and she claimed she was. Her paintings lay abandoned, though, or washed over in night-time blue. She was captive more often to that cod esoterica; Tarot to link her to past and future only, in fact, to the floor, when she spread the cards and stayed for hours inside their firewalls; the Kabbala not put off by white-whiskered rabbis claiming they were still on the fringes of it, she had mastered it in a month; astrological charts that set her head adrift in space; the patterns and certainties in numbers. Its all shit, she said cheerfully, robbing me of the words, and we laughed them off together. I had to stop laughing though when the accumulation of patterns began telling Roma I had made eyes at her best friend. The mischievous moon told her then that I was having a gay thing with one of my friends. The moon, stars and planets combined their gossip to let her know I flirted shamelessly with any woman that caught my eye, and would at the drop of a brush desert her to sleep with them all. Protected by the glib fiction of a night prowler at home, she even took to inspecting me in the middle of the night, just to check. When the moon withdrew its counsel, she apologised in her gracious old-world way. And then it

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would all begin again. What was needed from me, I began to sense, was confession, just like in the show trials with which they entertained the masses back in the Cold War climate in which she was born. I could own up to the worst crimes to serve a greater good of which I had no understanding or part; what mattered only was that they should be things I hadnt done. I could let her paranoia impose its lies on my own truth, and then all would be fine. Until it began again. I can forget you just like that, she liked to threaten me. Well, I thought, if I got over fifteen years of Lael in an hour, that gives you about twenty seconds, and that was all it seemed to take, one evening on the Piccadilly line when our steps found separate exits. It should have worked; her flawed Eastern Orthodoxy and my lapsed Catholicism, her thirty-something and my forty-something, her moon, my sun and it nearly did. I had those dark angels up at the window, ready to push them out into the light. I wasnt strong enough to do it by myself, but whenever I looked round for Roma to help me, she was slumped in the darkest corner, hair over her face, dreaming of what the moon was going to tell her about me next. I dont have to look up to see the sun. It goes ecstatically through my work, and its no accident, my agent says, that my daubs are bought by punters glowing implausibly with nuclear holiday tans. Its the moon I look at. Sometimes I see Romas face in it, nose wrinkled in a disdain for the West that doesnt disguise her sheer mad compulsion to be here. I know shes exactly where she wants to be. I see a flock of nightbirds rise from the trees on Hampstead Heath, and the moon makes them into the mosquitoes over the Danube Delta. Still I confess myself happy that, for one cathartic year, Roma wove me into the moons paranoid stories, but even happier that she let me out of them before the end, because of course there is no end to the moon.

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Nick Sweeney is a prose writer, published in Ambit and other small presses, and currently doing an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College.

REVIEW

Arrivals and Departures Sonja Besford Association of Serbian Writers Abroad, no price indicated Tickets from a Blank Window Anne-Marie Fyfe Rockingham Press 7.95 Gilgamesh Derek Hines Chatto & Windus 8.99 Marin Sorescu Censored Poems Bloodaxe Books 8.95

The woman on the other end Says shes my sister, long lost. Where the hell were you for the third decade of the family rosary or when I wanted a sister to share late-night dance-hall secrets? Hang up. Press dial-back. My sister Has withheld her number. Didnt say If she was younger, older, a twin. It might have made a difference.

(From Late Caller Anne-Marie Fyfe) The Thane of Fife he had a wife. Where is she now? Indeed. When nothing is but what is not, its hard to make sense of the self, to register boundaries between the real and the imagined. And if we cant get that far, what hope have we of going beyond the self, of gaining even an inkling of the song of the earth, the laughter under pain, the wholeness that shoots through all separation and isolation? We need a break, a little touch of love or at least peace, if we are to see beyond the confines of our own paltry identities. And that break wont come if the buddy boys and the bully boys insist on continuing to fight. Enter Gilgamesh. The reason his poem is so worth reading is that hes the first boy-bighead (Agammemnon was a new man in comparison) to take it to the limit. Written in cuneiform on clay tablets about 2100 B.C., it begins with a people in despair over Gilgamesh, a king who demands the right to the first taste of every new bride. The people ask the gods to help, and the gods invent Enkidu, a wild man with animal strength, whom they civilise by sex with a sacred prostitute. Enkidu goes off to subdue Gilgamesh and what happens? They become best mates. They fell a sacred grove of cedars (the death of trees is always a sign of hubris in humans ) and bring down the bull of heaven and kill him too. This is too much for the gods. They kill Enkidu and, by the end of the poem, Gilgamesh is contemplating his own death. Apart from felling the cedars, the other sins against nature involve the betrayal of women. Gilgamesh tosses each young bride aside, back to her hapless husband, thus trashing both the feminine and the masculine, and Enkidu, who has been sexually educated by Shamhat and so should know better, goes and becomes a kind of cosmic football hooligan. Too much wealth, too much power. Its the Leeds boys and their mates, out Paki-bashing.

Strange how books seem to appear at the right time, just when the readership is ready and capable of taking them in. Could Toni Morrisons Beloved, which evoked such grief at the contemplation of slavery, have appeared before it did, or Lorna Sages Bad Blood, which told in such wry detail the sorry story of the fifties, and the baleful effect their hypocrisy, meanness and blind cruelty had upon my generation, and, by dominoes, the one we parented? I think not. We werent ready yet. So it is with these. Theyve come when we could read them. Three of the collections explore the culture of masks, the masks that have to be worn because of living in a state of emergency, in a war zone. Besfords collection emerges from the war zone of Serbia, Fyfes from Northern Ireland, Sorescus from the dictatorship of Ceausescu and Hines Gilgamesh from where it all began: the first epic ever written, the first buddy movie, brat-pack tale, of two men who take on the world and the gods and, inevitably, lose. In a dictatorship, run by the protestant and catholic mafia, as Northern Ireland is, or by the state, as Serbia and Romania were, you can never say what things are really like. You have to wear masks, use double-speak, whistle treason. And so you cant really discover who you are:
Sometimes I am me. Sometimes not. If a pebble in the weird music of myself hurts, and I remove it, I end up changing constantly from father into son.

(From Am I always me? Marin Sorescu) You cant even find out who belongs to you, because whole parts of your country have been removed, and you dont know whether you can trust them any more.

Reviews / Casterton

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Is there any heroism in this epic? No. Theyre just stupid. And Hines translates their stupidity with such top-form contemporaneity that the hubris of Milosovic, Ceaucescu and Belfasts mafia drip from the text:
A synchromesh time-shift: Gilgamesh and Shamhat at the bar On the tramp steamer Espiritu Santu, 1937. She is dressed like Dietrich in The Blue Angel Sex-crushed satin, dcollet setting herself up to lose

could find another animal to rouse the peacespirit. Which animal would that be? Otherwise, whats to be done? Three strikes and youre out? Strangle all male children? Obviously not. But can we stop ourselves enduring Ozymandias over and over again? Whats wrong with waking up next to a lover in peacetime? Nothing. So why arent more people allowed to do it? Julia Casterton The Age of Cardboard and String Charles Boyle Faber 7.99 Charles Boyle takes you right out of reality by telling inconsequential stories. One of a list of his Privileges is and may I be continually surprised by what happens next a privilege the reader will have. The tales may take off from Stendhal, say, or some memoir involving Lawrence and Frieda, keeping a weather eye open for the humdrum but telling detail; but theyre garbled and told in a deadpan syntax with no expected direction. Poems go through intriguing non-sequiturs, like life, and probably dont add up, again like life, at least not without some thought of your own. In a rage, someone is defenestrating someone elses belongings, including a copy of La Chartreuse de Parme, open at chapter twenty-one. The persona in the street speculates about the books characters, not the parting couple. The point of this is fairly clear. At the end of a business conference, though, when even the chairman has slumped asleep, the personas father appears (why? and is he a daydream, or a vision?) in his pinstripe, patting his inside pockets:
He had lost his wallet or was making the sign of the cross. I was doodling an infinite system of interlocking pagodas.

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(From Gilgamesh Derek Hines) If the boys will insist on continuing with this caper, what hope is there of any improvement? In Ted Hughess Winter Pollen theres an essay called Poetry and Violence which contains the following observation: In the sixties, the Yugoslav poet Vasco Popa wrote a powerful cycle of poems about the Serbian national Saint: St Sava of the Wolves. The Serbs are St Savas wolves. During the seventies he told me that whenever he gave a public reading in Yugoslavia, students would begin to shout out, demanding the wolf poems, and then when he read them would become wildly excited so much so that he was alarmed and puzzled. I asked him what he thought it meant and he said: I don't know. But I fear very bad things. So much for poetry having no impact on a culture, even though that impact may be inimical. Sonja Besford, aware that her people have chosen terrible leaders and dreamed terrible dreams, has poems that harbour no illusions about what can be done for the destroyers: perhaps it was a verbal tradition within our elders/ immutable decrees which made me offer him shelter/ in our mission with its nomadic memories its scrolls/ many a night i held him in my still strong ancient arms/ hoping that i would draw off his deadly venom and he/ would shine once again with his now dormant goodness;/and then one earthly morning when i saw nothing/ in his eyes but a frenzied need to kill again and leave/ this weary place of failing absolution i told him to follow/ the river and journey out through the mangroves (from the nun and the terrorist). She also, though it may cut no ice with the axe-men, has a poem about the joys of waking in peacetime next to a lover. If St Savas wolves could rouse the war-spirit, perhaps Besford in her modest, lower-case, weirdly playful way,

Reviews / Casterton, Lomas

Has the father become a sort of priest, and what does a system of interlocking pagodas signify? Any answer will come from ourselves, called upon to be both therapists and creators of the story thats hinted at. Why, in The Nature Trail, may the speaker soon need the rowing boat / stuck fast among the reeds, / the Lady Blue? And why does the person with sensible shoes and a dog on a lead turn a blind eye / to the telltale remains / of a fire, the empty / half-bottle of vodka? This is the kit you build your own story from.

Follains Leeds Follain was an actual poet learning English there is full of war ghosts. It is 1919 and all the more eerie for the climactic nonclimax:
Men killed on the Somme, their faces chewed by rats, stroll down Briggate with all the time in the world.

And no, it wasn't us (with crumbs on our lips) who stole the cookies from the cookie jar. Maybe God. Maybe God was hungry.

But the adult world continues to be a world of fantasy, impossible hope and lies. Boyles not happy with meaninglessness, but that's all there is, except letting your mind play its own games, and to hell with supposed sanity. Even an afterlife might be watching ads for panty-liners and macho cars. Consumerism wins, OK? No, satirical po-faced anecdotal surrealism wins. Herbert Lomas The Cat Without E-Mail Alan Brownjohn Enitharmon 7.95 Brownjohn has a Poem about Men which is entirely about girls and women. Its funny: however much women talk about themselves, promote themselves and slang men, men never seem to get tired of them. Perhaps theres a note of tiredness though in Brownjohns belief that women have never been girls at all. The cat without e-mail is between the tables of a plastic restaurant in Incident on a Holiday,

Then, you see, those clouds... They were painted on the sky In the manner of the artist Magritte. But how could you tell? On longer inspection, I found crucial errors in the forgery.

The waste cafs of the consumer society stretch all around the consciously ageing poet. This is a dingy period of human history, and there's nothing but human history, and it repeats itself like another helping of baked beans on toast. All that alters is the grain of my outstretched hand.
I gave up on the Mall of all Desires. I thought it was pushing too much pleasure at me. It was also other peoples pleasure, thank you... ... Theres no new, lasting desire after twenty-five. After the Mall I saw the attraction of sorrow. There was more scope in it for quenching old desires...

Reviews / Lomas

One enters a barbers shop and takes his place before a mirror in which, behind him, a boy can be glimpsed sweeping the hairs on the floor. These details, which must be Follains, defamiliarise the horrific and seedy twentieth century. Dissociation makes the dingy city-world weird. There are Things to do Indoors when its raining and one is often waiting for ones lover (who may not return ones love): Make a clock that runs backwards / with an alarm that is timed to go off / at the moment of your birth and so wake you up / to your before-life. The Age of Cardboard and String is childhood, a time of fantasy, impossible hopes and lies.

where a disco goes up in flames, unexplained by the backstreet barber, the big / Conspiracy theorist, who avoids my eyes /In his pocked mirror. The cat is distinguished from all the more-or-less-asleep human cyphers by sussing the customers, refusing their burger bits and being free of e-mail. The jokes seem intended to cheer the poet up in an increasing accidie. In a dream a new dream, I still have some the persona finds himself in the Apennines (where hes never been) looking at a new London tube map. A small arrow is aimed at Bank:
... and above, in day-glo red, The words of a less-than-cryptic message: All Your life, wherever you are, YOU WILL BE HERE, it said.

In another poem the persona identifies with the last mosquito of summer, reduced to a last fling, though I had a good bloody summer. In another Drink is rapidly / Acquiring a me problem, and Sex is "obsessed with me". Thinking of things hes never done, he considers having a tattoo on some suitable organ and stops at a window with the sign At last, the AIDS-free needle here for you! In Seven Sherlocks, fantasy seems to be replacing reality, and lifes becoming a detective story, where its not certain whats really going on:

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The Nostalgia Experience looks inviting, but it offers only virtual reality. Well, this is whistling in the dark, but its good whistling. And, on a walk, he decides to go circular, rather than linear. Back at the start of the walk again, two hours later, he feels invited to repeat the walk. Clean of his original footsteps, the path says: I have changed in that time. So might you. Start over again? Herbert Lomas An English Apocalypse George Szirtes Bloodaxe 8.95 George Szirtes is a poets poet, whose work is rich in depth of feeling and breadth of vision and who swings easily between the past and the present, netting images, objects, landscapes and people in a kaleidoscopic whirl of language. The book contains work from Szirtes early poems about England in the 1950s up to the present day. He writes in his introduction: My Hungarian selection The Budapest File (2000) dealt with the history of Hungary in roughly chronological fashion: An English Apocalypse is more like a temperature chart. If that is so, then it is very hard to gauge the temperature of Lilac, Laylock, the collections opening poem, exquisitely written, which is both cool and hot. It is a poem of the mind and of the senses, it is a poem about sexuality and young love. A water-colour with a dance beat.
The choreography of water, the drift of scent caught at, swirling away, blown back, was the cunning of the lilac. She bristled sweetness, arched like a girl. A bullfinch perched on her crown, immaculate in his feathers. His weight bothered the lilac, she bent a little, her small tent of pleasure collapsing inward with the swaying.

A prolific poet, he has learnt to be patient with the workings of his mind. Szirtes rarely over-writes, rather, his allusions are so myriad, tender and far reaching that each must be explored, unravelled and described within the confines of the English language, at their own insistence. In Solferino Violet he is constantly going back and forth between memory and sensation, and that movement reinforces the musicality of the poem in a subtle and sensuous way:
Resin along horsehair. My brother stood in front of the open window, tightening strings. A G-Plan coffee-table, more glass than wood, supported an ashtray and some tea things. The suburbs were singing.

Reviews / Lomas, Markham

Humility and a dry sense of humour, temper Szirtes tendency towards a slightly melancholic vision. He notices the bleakness of English culture with a gimlet eye and is fascinated by our everyday artefacts and our sporting obsessions:
At fifty I recall the Best of British like pork set out on a slab. There is the ringside and there is our friend, Tibor, the wrestler. It is hot work being thrown about. My father and I stare horrified at his violent transformation into gristle. Bruise after bruise appears. We feel indecent in the foreign commotion. My father shakes. Im on the edge of tears.

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His relationship to his father runs through the book, feelings of ambivalence and love; the unresolved tensions of having overtaken him, of being better assimilated within English culture. His friendships with men and fellow poets are acknowledged by several dedications. Very occasionally he is hijacked by a kind of intellectual coldness that makes his work seem rather hermetically sealed. Backwaters: Norfolk Fields is the core poem of the second half of the book. It is a collection of 12 sonnets dedicated to the late W.G. Sebald. It is part mediation, part discourse, about why he has chosen to live in the county of Norfolk:
The WI stalls. Jam, flowers. White hair scraped back in the draught of an open door. The butchers. He knows you by name. He calls your name out. His chopping block is washed bright by the morning sun. The solicitor

Water and the sea are important images within Szirtes poems. He yearns for the sea he never heard as a small child from Hungary, a country that is set in seas of land, and Englands coastline is perhaps, one of the things he is most grateful for.

down the street. His nameplate. War memorials with more names. Rows of Standleys, Bunns, Myhills, Kerridges.

innocent beginning:
One woman ironed by hand, another used the giant press for sheets. Steam and starch filled the shop front with mist.

The last cluster of poems is a kind of angry celebration at being part of this landscape, political, geographical and cultural. A tour de force around English lassitude and inertia mixed with a passion for football and the sense of mystery that lies at the heart of the English pastoral. As he says in the introduction, early on, he found a way into the English landscape and the English subconscious through the paintings of George Stubbs. Jehane Markham The Wedding Spy Linda Chase Carcanet 6.95 Linda Chase has a mature voice, encompassing the weight of experience as well as intensity of feeling. An American by birth, she now lives and works in England and the pull between the two cultures is sometimes uncomfortable.
I thought I liked the look of weathered gold, the wilting sound of madrigals and lutes so here I am in England where its cold. But I was wrong America unfolds her glitz and kitsch. Her honky-tonk pollutes the part of me thats wise and far too old.

As the poem proceeds, the tension builds until the last verse takes the reader down to another stage of grief and the question suddenly asked is decidedly unnerving:
Do you remember how the water smells? a bit like mud and bit like dying reeds and plants and a bit like fallen petals of water lilies.

The book is divided into three sections, the first deals mainly with America, family and childhood. The second centres around her involvement with mysticism and Tai Chi, and the last section consists mostly of love poems. She has a laid-back, conversational style, which can contain a complex and much darker reality. The first poem in the book, Manhasset Saturday 1.The Chinese Laundry, depicts the experience of a young child on an errand to pick up her fathers shirts, and turns an innocent event into a traumatic one by the end. The story is unfolded carefully, bit by bit. At first she cant even recall the actual shirts, merely their packaging, but slowly the details come back to her. Eventually her gaze widens to take in the whole shop and as it does so, she recalls something that happened to her and describes it. This is a very clever poem, and a moving one. It has a cinematic quality to it, ending on an impartial image that brings us back to the

The Dinner Kiss, from the last section of the book, is both witty and sexually evocative; the beginning of an affair, or the quintessence of sexual attraction, beguilingly described. Again she tricks you into thinking this is a light poem about the ennui of having to give dinner parties but the poem suddenly shifts into another gear, surprising and erotic:
So, when you walked around the table and lifted me out of my seat as if your mouth had done it alone without the help of your arms, I rose, a stringless helium balloon, so light, hovering over the table, I thought I would never stop rising, not ever, and then the kiss began.

I like Chases poems for their honesty, their warmth and their wry sense of humour. Jehane Markham

Reviews / Markham

I could take your sorrow out, this afternoon. I could take it swimming with me in the lake.

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The title poem, The Wedding Spy is a cryptic poem with almost too much concealment of loss within. It is as if, to keep herself safe from exposure, Chase has adopted a nihilistic tone. I understand how this can happen, but it can lead to a kind of dissatisfaction when the writer conceals not the thing itself, but the intensity of feeling surrounding it. Its not so much personal revelation one wants, but personal poems. In her prize-winning poem What to Do with Sorrow she offers this. The poem begins with a question: Can I sing a short song to your sorrow? And proceeds to offer a number of witty solutions to an unbearable situation:

Getting There Matt Simpson Liverpool University Press Matt Simpson is a poet who has been denied by the critical establishment the standing he deserves (he receives no mention, for example, in Ian Hamiltons Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry). One of the reasons for this neglect might be the fact that he has, since the publication of his first full-length book, Making Arrangements, in 1982, written from and very largely about his Merseyside background, risking being labelled narrowly provincial by the metropolitan literary cognoscenti. Another reason could be that in these times of postmodern insistence on the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning, syntactical and narrative disjunction, calculated incoherence and so on, his direct clarity of expression has been regarded as lack of seriousness. The truth is that, at their best, his poems of childhood recollection, small domestic dramas, love, life and death in workingclass Liverpool carry a universality of significance that is found only in the finest poetry of its kind. Reading the poems in Getting There about uncles, aunts, grandparents, marriages and deaths is rather like exploring an old family album except that the pictures, sad, wistful or comic, also come with voices and tunes. Not that all of them are concerned with personal matters. There is a brief but wonderfully effective poem on Hiroshima, pared-down, chiselled and poignant, and a longer but equally moving piece about the submarine, Thetis, which was lost on 16th June, 1939, with its crew of ninety-nine men. In Hiroshima Simpson doesnt attempt to generalise about this ethically dubious military and historical event but focuses on one innocent and relatively insignificant victim and, daringly and successfully, writes in the first person as the young actress of the famous Cherryblossom Theatre. I was less taken with the few descriptive and anecdotal Greek Island poems though that is probably because they seem flimsy against the warm, rich solidity of the Merseyside pieces. Vernon Scannell

Panoramic Lounge-Bar John Stammers Picador, 6.99 John Stammers first collection, Panoramic Lounge-Bar, could scarcely be more different in tone and intention from Matt Simpsons affectionate black and white, or perhaps sepia, views of love, life and death in a specific workingclass area. If not the provenance then the furnishings and strategies of Stammers poems seem to derive from the experience of other artforms, notably cinema, painting, popular music and other writing. The only poem which, from its title, might lead the reader to expect something closer to Simpson territory, My Great Grandfathers Graveplate At Gestingthorpe turns out to be an elaborate and very skillfully developed lexical game ending with a pun on his own name. A poem of heartbreak, or at least disappointment in love, begins with references to and images from old movies, and a longer piece, Certain Sundry Matters, starts with cinematic images and subsequently throws direct or oblique glances at a sequence of films of the more or less distant past. Even the tender love poem, Impression, very appealing in its way, is like a scene from a movie, though it is marred by the shuddersomely awful lines I feel I could fart in front of you/ and you would just say/ Silly boy, or something wonderful. It wouldnt be difficult to think of something more wonderful than Silly boy. This slackness over the use of banal and clichd language spoils a few of the other poems; for instance, the wimpish for my sins appears without evident irony in the otherwise neatly turned Perhaps You Have Dreams, but generally the poems are vivid, inventive and enjoyable. The Underlining of the Hemisphere is a finely judged poem of muted eroticism and Aspects of Kees is a brilliant tour de force of clever and witty rhyming. Stammers is a seriously playful poet whose first volume is far more than merely promising, and it will be interesting to see in what direction his future work will go. Vernon Scannell

Reviews / Scannell

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Judi Benson

Just Another Dear John

She stuck him down like a postage stamp. There. Done that. Queens Theatre, Shaftsbury Avenue, soft ice cream, Piccadilly, Wally Lamb saying I know this much is true. Lighter fluid, click of the Zippo, first waft of tobacco strong creamy coffee. Turpentine, stretched canvas, muddy puddles of oil paints, fertilizer, wood chips, heady roses full of dew, spider strung. Those things would always remind her of him, no matter where she posted the letter, what time of day, what colour the box, first or second class. He'd always be returned to the sender, some centre in her brain.

To Those Always On The Go

Why cant we just sit here and listen to the rain. Imagine white swans necking the river, sipping this silence, comfortable in our old clothes, in this place where good friends meet. Instead of always being on our way to some other place where theres no guarantee of a seat and the brews flat, like the conversation we cant hear ourselves not speaking.

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Waking the Wildebeast

I had a dream wavering on the tip of rememberance balancing on the tightrope edge of a poem I could almost hear, music I could almost see. I was floating, floating towards the kettle towards the first coffee of the day, precious silence, rare moment before the self becomes itself. Holding, holding so gently to a hair of a thought, whisker of a colour

Benson / Poems

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WHEN YOU SPOKE

Not the early morning song of a bird I could weave into my dream, but right brain speech I couldnt ignore right in my face, and I felt the dream slip away. Sand poured through the hour glass, then the glass broke shattering me in your face. Oh yes, then I was awake but no longer my self.

Curse of the Canine

This ones called Shut-Up-Lady, a yapping flea, barking at the flapping sheets, cat on the rooftop, a cloud skeetering past. She yaps when you unzip your fly, fart, lock up the back, put on your hat, pull a weed up by the fence. A crinkle of paper will do, the phone ringing, or not, a snail on a slime across the patio. Even the shadow of the statue of herself gets her going, every day earning half a name.

Love Note
Days and nights too Ive burned holes in paper writing to you. Stabbed through, sharp point of the poison pen. Ive run away with the ink tearing my heart out for you, set fire to the bed of sleepless candlewax for you, you bastard, my love, the only one to conjure such responses running away from home fantasies, dusting off the suitcase. But no one else makes my heart skip quite a beat, even when my hands are a strangle of mixed intentions. Both sides of the coin we flip for each other.
Judi Benson is currently editing and producing a series of Broadsheets and Poem Cards selected from a variety of poets, under the Foolscap imprint. Her latest collection of poems, Call it Blue, was published by Rockingham Press last year.

A Review of Literature and the Arts

Forthcoming
Ben Okri on decolonizing the spirit The sculpture of Paul Bothwell Kincaid The Girt Pike, a story by Louis de Bernires Christian Page on consumerism and post-modern modes of thought! Tom Pickard on poetry versus the state Anthony Thwaite on the death of Ian Hamilton Carol Rumens on Tony Harrison Alexis Lykiard, The Survival of the Fascist John Greening, Seven Deadly Sins Thomas Wright, The Poet in Hell Robert Nye on paradise

Robert Cole

Pigalle
Fellating a cigar in a tabac A tapestry of smoke dreams its way To the bottom of my cognac. A diamante madam with a cat On a leash, plays Halloween pinball, Rackets the machine. Its Bardot In a face-lift mask, Fat sucked from her hips.

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She mews as the ball scores, Pouting her lips. Her sequins Undulate like a magicians curtain As she reaches for her Pernod, Her fingers a frisk of rings. She worked at the Cupidon Possibly, dazzled her clients Like a boa constrictor. Blowing smoke from her vulva While climbing a rope ladder. She plays strip poker with her eyelashes Panning the zinc bar Bloodshot as biftecks chateaubriand.

Naked Cello (Pigalle)

She plays her cello naked in cabaret When she says she has a regular job. When we went without for her lessons She plays her cello naked in cabaret.

To the throb of her tattoo she plays Her cello naked, When we paid a packet for it, She plays naked but for a sailors hat. They say she yo-yos up and down When she plays her cello. She said music would be her life When we went without for her lessons. To the throb of her cello she plays Naked. (Her teacher said she was gifted.) They say she has a partner who yo-yos too And the cellos just for show. When she said music would be her life We paid a packet for it. Who is this partner Who yo-yos to the throb of her cello? She plays naked but for a sailors hat!

Lenins Brain
On the removal of Lenins remains to be inhearsed next to his mothers tomb in St. Petersburg.
When experts checked out Lenins brainfolds They discovered he had extra wrinkles, The simple distinction of Darwinian advantage, Not so much Swiss cheese burnt by midnight oil As Solzhenitsyn suspected, a fusty walnut, What part reptilian? The secateurs of gentlemen historians Cut back a floating moonflower, A clinging Anastasia; squiggling synapses, Cyrillics commissared by the Hermitage, A withered leaf like the millinery of his mothers, Folded down with mothballs in hope. They uncurtain the chambers, the mould, his architectonics; The slide, courtesy of Reuters, Resembles a dry blood spattered wall.
Robert Cole recently read for us at Ambit Live!, Brentwood Theatre, with Gerda Mayer, Marita Over and Peter Porter, as part of the Essex Book Festival. His latest collection is Dancing Naked to Beethoven (The Brobdingnagian Times Press).

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