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| 'All Stepped/ Undone' is now available to purchse here |
Monday, 8 July 2013
Friday, 5 July 2013
Gillian Prew
The Sky Will Pour Open
Ten more summers of rain, they say. A defeat –
a downing.
Dust
eyelids dog roses –
the bees will come, their legs pollen-painted.
A roaring curtain where the sun should be - the birds,
quiet and stuck,
in its up-ruin.
Fly,
everything. Why not?
The sky will pour open some days.
Plath Likes My Poems
Around the Nothing, among the Grave –
fixed, like old bone, a yellow stain. A wound, a wire womb.
Winter breasts.
Plath likes my poems. Her blood hurts. Her death reeks –
she approves of my ruins.
Buy her latest book, Throats Full of Graves from Lapwing Publications
Peter Marra
Possible Scenarios
Plausible 1
the body came to
rest
abruptly at her
hips
she was one of the women
i saw skinny-dipping by
the waterfall
in the woods in the new york mountains
mid-july
as dark sheets of breathing flesh
enclosed us
membrane accusing
there were 3
naked female swimmers
& they craved
craved
the sunlight
wrapped it up &
delivered it
water droplets shiny in a
nest of pubic hair
what was always denied to us
fuck
the camera tripod collapsed as they approached
the camera tripod collapsed as they approached
fuck
the beauty of obscenities
imagine pussy taste
an electric fizzz
the mildew smell of the
plants mixed
with organic lust
raspy voiced they murmured
secrets about rituals
her haunted house thrilled
her sexually
synthesized a mask
of pure pleasure
bright rings of
lust
as she held her
pornographic films
up for admiration
Plausible 2
fun in
the parking lot
wash my hands & eyes of
them
they washed their hands of
me
& flooded my eyes with
blood-tears
plasma touch
grinning out of fear
almost touching one
another through the inside
as the dirty
mattress burned with their love
she couldn't help
but moan
she couldn’t help
but laugh
as the body
convulsed
she relaxed her grip &
it went limp
gray & white
she lay in the back seat
masturbating while smoking a
marlboro
w/ venial sin dangling from
her pale lips
a mouthful of candy
drunk on the odor of black
tobacco cunt-juice & semen
she told me about the
ballerina’s corpse in the trunk
start the car I’ll tell you
where to drive
idle the motor until I say
floor it
unrestrained
unregulated by law
gun it when the
vice squad appears
“open your mouth
wide”
Plausible 3
She shuddered.
nothing but six
inch heels
excited her so
strong legs
lick loins &
hum
eyes slipped down
around
her calves
finishing at a
certain temperature
"& she
likes it."
leading to anemic
metaphorical usage
economic slimy
cream next to her &
they met via the
human body
a mutual refusal to
consume
she shows him her
tits
& sticks out
her tongue
“I like ‘em pinched
& lightly bitten,
such are consumers”
mouth fussing with
excitement
she touched his
face before
leaving him with
a mouthful of
ceremonies
she let him touch
her labia
& fondle her
mucous
so she could leave
her scent
laughing out the
window
just bait for a
trap
his body was found
stuffed in a wooden barrel
behind the garage.
decayed.
unidentifiable.
involved snake
handling
female 5’ 10” long
black hair
36c - 21 – 36
(like liz taylor
in her prime)
approach with
extreme caution
(i can always
ask for forgiveness)
anonymity of sexual
partners
sexual fantasy
benefits
the plaintiffs were
burned
she commented with
a scream
the body came to
rest
abruptly at her
hips
her deeds were
reviewed critically by others,
then in front of
her parents,
who were still
filming her degradation
Wednesday, 3 July 2013
David McLean
of long dresses
What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current
What is the wind, what is it.
(Gertrude Stein)
the line that distinguishes is critical the line that is written
and there is never any death in us
until we are no longer embodied in all this sexless flesh
as the flesh is left, without its sex, to the scented exigencies of death
it flows us now all this unforgiven living
with all the sad entropy force is determined not to be -
it gives confusion next
gram Friday
and it is never gram fucking Friday
nowadays, it is a world lying over earth
like psychosis and a very penetrable barrier;
it is never gramme Friday, maybe,
just everyday passion
just homeless
reasonably enough
the Bandidos shot at an unmarked police car tonight,
reasonably enough,
and things in general happen or do not happen:
we do things because we are stupid
or we die because we deserve to,
just like everybody else does.
the other subject and its empty eyes
is all that is truly disgusting,
the superego gets off on farts and vomiting,
it feeds on dead children, we want our fathers
safely dead, all that is totally unacceptable
is progenitors who are living --
and if there really was this alleged fucking god
we would have to do great things
to hunt, locate and kill it
it is anxious
it is anxious in the thundering stomach, replete
its fullness like death or ovulation
and nightmares devalued by the tight spiral life
cutting scars in skin or memories from time;
we wear terrible nothing pulled up over us
its insatiably patient painless touch,
like snuggling up in blankets and blood
like dread Armageddon and defection,
like rabbits and love
children through windows
children through windows an ancient forgotten cocaine Friday
oblivious the monstrous is and there is time enough
for devils to be invented and not touch;
like all the anxious devouring the nostalgic gut,
like pebbles and empty riverbeds,
dead men to touch
cautious corpses walking
and here is no cautious corpse walking invulnerable his loveless,
for sleep is dreamless and diamonds,
a window pane and never yet;
horses are waiting patient for the anxious chivalric and courtly love
has dropped her easy lesions in muddy puddles
with every forgotten lesson;
the ghost of Hegel is sitting his luckless nothing
insulting anxious, somewhere his Marie is furious
and he is never done explaining his meaning -
we have dropped the medium idiot fish glimpse
where corpses used to go dancing
through all the absences -
and he pretended he never said marriage was an ethical state
and love just a fucking feeling, nobody ever said that yet
in remembered Jena who ever met Schiller or Schelling:
but i do not intend to accept him to my lap yet,
happy like a puppy is until he is dead enough
to learn every nothing and love,
till there is no dread memory left for corpses to recollect -
till Hegel and wife come like summer suns,
like memories or blood
David McLean is from Wales but has lived in Sweden since
1987. He lives there with his dog, Oscar, and his computers.
In addition to seven chapbooks, McLean is the author of four
full-length poetry collections: CADAVER’S DANCE (Whistling
Shade Press, 2008), PUSHING LEMMINGS (Erbacce Press, 2009),
LAUGHING AT FUNERALS (Epic Rites Press, 2010) and NOBODY
WANTS TO GO TO HEAVEN BUT EVERYBODY WANTS TO DIE (Oneiros
Books, June 2013). His first novel HENRIETTA REMEMBERS is
due in 2014 from Unlikely Books. During 2013 a seventh
chapbook SHOUTING AT GHOSTS is forthcoming from Grey Book
Press. More information about McLean can be found at his
blog http://mourningabortion.
Friday, 28 June 2013
Christine Murray
hook--
the feather-hook is a seed spiralling in the breeze,
ceremony--
the red rope is looped around the neck
these net-webs are laden with the small dead
best not to move he is demented with hunger.
the feather-hook is a seed spiralling in the breeze,
a false signal
it mocks the mayhem of the caught moth down to
its nub stone
its plane is a shell network of dried skin, veined even
- it has a spine of sorts
it mocks the mayhem of the caught moth down to
its nub stone
ceremony--
the red rope is looped around the neck
and brought down the back to the bra-line
it tightly binds across the top of the chest and
is looped down to the cunt-lips separating them
held-to and pulled in the back arches back
bow-bent as if its wood had seasoned in
an iron girder above hot embers and released
steam onto a still lake the hook retracts when
the dress slides into a bluey ripple onto the boards
there are six hooks embedded into the ceiling
stockings catch up the desert breeze on a small
balcony, a strip of silk portholes the room and
sutras are tacked into the walls the hooks do not
look as if they could carry the weight of an inert body
spider-rolled silk-skeined red-cocooned
the bird panics spider-fruits from under
dry eaves
these net-webs are laden with the small dead
hunger--
outside the ragged bird panicsdead flies from the window netsyet it is not clothed right- it claws the glass
Christine Murray is a City and Guilds Stonecutter. Her poetry is published in a variety of magazines and ezines. She has reviewed poetry for Post (Mater Dei Institute), Poetry Ireland and Writing.ie. Chris blogs at Poethead, A Poetry Blog. Her chapbook, Three Red Things was published on June 4th 2013 by Smithereens Press, Dublin, Ireland.
http://poethead.wordpress.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/
Friday, 14 June 2013
Throats Full of Graves- A Review by David McLean
Gillian Prew - Throats full of graves
Gillian Prew
Throats Full of Graves
Lapwing Publications
chapbook review by David McLean
This is a brief review of the latest production by the Scottish poet Gillian Prew, in my opinion the best female poet currently active.
Her liminal love with its dug arms
scoops the red roots of the tight trees
where her best wedding was throttled and laid,
and her lit loss burns in her brain
scorching the slow madhouse of her days.
It might be appropriate that I modestly neglect to refer to a poem in this book that is about me, namely “In the garden with a poet”. I shall, however, refrain from doing the modest thing and mention it.
Days are here – untidy. That is the beauty
of light: it illuminates the mess
for embracing. We are
a long time nothing. There is no place
to exhibit the night like a sword.
This because it exhibits clearly, in these closing lines - which are much better than anything I have done recently - the terrible predicament of those like Ms Prew and myself, who are atheists and might like to be logically precise, when we affect to produce the “poetic”, When “we are a long time nothing” the word “we” no longer applies to us, time and our world has ceased and probably only Larkin has ever succeeded in saying this properly, in “Aubade”. Of course, I object dreadfully to the term “poet” as a sortal, it identifies no clear class of objects; it is usually little more than a dreadful piece of self-promotion. Were I ever, per impossibile, to make a living by poems, I might allow the description on Derridean grounds - “It's me job, like” - but not as a token of self-ascribed excellence.
More seriously, in another poem, Prew writes
I, like a slow thaw in the garden where
all this started under the sun yesterday
(or years ago) There is
a simmering vitality that permits persistence,
that allows healing and the adoration of wounds
This is close to the essential, the reflexive wallowing in despite and self-contempt that is the essence of anything interesting in literature. The glorious puny assholes who fall down in their sheer stupid debility waiting for some cunt Godot who never even shows, they are so much more beautiful than any alleged poetic perfection:
There is no destiny worth hoping for.
There will be death, and
in the meantime life. What rages
inside is something
if we are lucky
else,
do not fear
or love,
or bother to breathe.
The metaphor of interiority is acceptable here, of course, although I assume the inside to be the consciousness that spreads outside the alleged real. The poems here are of seasonal mortality, or, more precisely, of facticity and thrownness, of being there in this confusing admixture of earth and world that colors memories ideologically and insists - with the simmering vitality that is the sheer denial of entropy that even the simplest organism is - on taking a shot at perdurance, an attempt that is doomed to failure since the ultimate victory of entropy will become the ordered beauty of perfected and, necessarily, unobserved disorder. If we could perdure, this would be spoiled. But there is a pointless meaningless beauty in the striving, one which expresses itself in the laudable futility of poetry, at which Prew kicks serious ass, with poems like this one, of “Memory”:
Bud of the quiet dead, lifting
light from the black-bitten wound. A grief,
a lie a dry, futile church. You are a ruin
of tears and ragged distances. A hidden.
A scarred truth roaming bone. You fail
with a brave despair
like widowed songbirds, their throats full of graves.
The need for miracles, as Prew says, is abject. What actually is, is enough. if one does not multiply entities beyond necessity one can still populate a poem.
I think this may be Prew's best yet, which means that you should buy the thing. It can be purchased here
Throats Full of Graves
Lapwing Publications
chapbook review by David McLean
This is a brief review of the latest production by the Scottish poet Gillian Prew, in my opinion the best female poet currently active.
Her liminal love with its dug arms
scoops the red roots of the tight trees
where her best wedding was throttled and laid,
and her lit loss burns in her brain
scorching the slow madhouse of her days.
It might be appropriate that I modestly neglect to refer to a poem in this book that is about me, namely “In the garden with a poet”. I shall, however, refrain from doing the modest thing and mention it.
Days are here – untidy. That is the beauty
of light: it illuminates the mess
for embracing. We are
a long time nothing. There is no place
to exhibit the night like a sword.
This because it exhibits clearly, in these closing lines - which are much better than anything I have done recently - the terrible predicament of those like Ms Prew and myself, who are atheists and might like to be logically precise, when we affect to produce the “poetic”, When “we are a long time nothing” the word “we” no longer applies to us, time and our world has ceased and probably only Larkin has ever succeeded in saying this properly, in “Aubade”. Of course, I object dreadfully to the term “poet” as a sortal, it identifies no clear class of objects; it is usually little more than a dreadful piece of self-promotion. Were I ever, per impossibile, to make a living by poems, I might allow the description on Derridean grounds - “It's me job, like” - but not as a token of self-ascribed excellence.
More seriously, in another poem, Prew writes
I, like a slow thaw in the garden where
all this started under the sun yesterday
(or years ago) There is
a simmering vitality that permits persistence,
that allows healing and the adoration of wounds
This is close to the essential, the reflexive wallowing in despite and self-contempt that is the essence of anything interesting in literature. The glorious puny assholes who fall down in their sheer stupid debility waiting for some cunt Godot who never even shows, they are so much more beautiful than any alleged poetic perfection:
There is no destiny worth hoping for.
There will be death, and
in the meantime life. What rages
inside is something
if we are lucky
else,
do not fear
or love,
or bother to breathe.
The metaphor of interiority is acceptable here, of course, although I assume the inside to be the consciousness that spreads outside the alleged real. The poems here are of seasonal mortality, or, more precisely, of facticity and thrownness, of being there in this confusing admixture of earth and world that colors memories ideologically and insists - with the simmering vitality that is the sheer denial of entropy that even the simplest organism is - on taking a shot at perdurance, an attempt that is doomed to failure since the ultimate victory of entropy will become the ordered beauty of perfected and, necessarily, unobserved disorder. If we could perdure, this would be spoiled. But there is a pointless meaningless beauty in the striving, one which expresses itself in the laudable futility of poetry, at which Prew kicks serious ass, with poems like this one, of “Memory”:
Bud of the quiet dead, lifting
light from the black-bitten wound. A grief,
a lie a dry, futile church. You are a ruin
of tears and ragged distances. A hidden.
A scarred truth roaming bone. You fail
with a brave despair
like widowed songbirds, their throats full of graves.
The need for miracles, as Prew says, is abject. What actually is, is enough. if one does not multiply entities beyond necessity one can still populate a poem.
I think this may be Prew's best yet, which means that you should buy the thing. It can be purchased here
In Damage Seasons- A Review by David McLean
Michael Mc Aloran
In Damage Seasons
Here
is one of Michael Mc Aloran's best attempts to do what he does so well,
kicking round the scattered teeth of sunlight in a darkened room. The
book is divided into scenes that articulate a dismemberment of the drab
conventional, and that paint red what already was always painted black.
the amputated limb with which one child beats the other the arm torn away to break the bones of dissolve in dislocation of tears here a ravage there a ravage the nicotine stained teeth and the breath upon…
there is no sun or better yet we have swallowed the dead cum of absence the swelling meat in the mouth clasped down upon till castrative screams echoing violently the bloody dead meat of it spat out into foreign excrement…
The poems are the insistent echo of pointless and life behind the grind of hunger, cum-stained memory, the splendid array of absences and almost forgotten we carry within us like a well-tended garden of cancers.
There is, after all, no denying the beauty and appositeness of lines like:
torn out the fingernails yet ever on till severed pulse of the snare of it hacking in cold corridors warped from one wall unto the next till crimson…
snap snap the fingers snap snapping till ritornellos of the absurd a dressage of crushed bone all afar until yet spun in widow’s teeth of claimed verandas…
Mick's poetry, in a sense, is an angry railing against not so much the dying of the light, fuck the light, but against words not working any more
baseless till tongue to sever-bite in the none of speech the clamour in the echoing chasm of vibratory steel drawn in excommunicable lights deadened yet bustling never ending…
The none of speech might mean that which is unsaid, it might mean the saying of the none, or void, something that is usually done very wrong by way of horrid hypostatization among the burgeoning insincere nihilists, it might also mean the emptiness and absurdity of Gerede, idle talk, running on and meaning certain things, just not the essential and important.
And what is essential and important is the tooth of hunger, it is the obstinate bone, it is the scattered teeth and the insistent emptiness of discourse, and thus the book ends, perfectly logically and correctly, with:
collapse unto thy dread for the good of nothing claimed none but the shit clinging to the heels it was ever of the all for silences the rapture emptied silenced silenced it was all for the good of nothing claimed
This book is very good, get it here:
http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com/indamageseasons.html
the amputated limb with which one child beats the other the arm torn away to break the bones of dissolve in dislocation of tears here a ravage there a ravage the nicotine stained teeth and the breath upon…
there is no sun or better yet we have swallowed the dead cum of absence the swelling meat in the mouth clasped down upon till castrative screams echoing violently the bloody dead meat of it spat out into foreign excrement…
The poems are the insistent echo of pointless and life behind the grind of hunger, cum-stained memory, the splendid array of absences and almost forgotten we carry within us like a well-tended garden of cancers.
There is, after all, no denying the beauty and appositeness of lines like:
torn out the fingernails yet ever on till severed pulse of the snare of it hacking in cold corridors warped from one wall unto the next till crimson…
snap snap the fingers snap snapping till ritornellos of the absurd a dressage of crushed bone all afar until yet spun in widow’s teeth of claimed verandas…
Mick's poetry, in a sense, is an angry railing against not so much the dying of the light, fuck the light, but against words not working any more
baseless till tongue to sever-bite in the none of speech the clamour in the echoing chasm of vibratory steel drawn in excommunicable lights deadened yet bustling never ending…
The none of speech might mean that which is unsaid, it might mean the saying of the none, or void, something that is usually done very wrong by way of horrid hypostatization among the burgeoning insincere nihilists, it might also mean the emptiness and absurdity of Gerede, idle talk, running on and meaning certain things, just not the essential and important.
And what is essential and important is the tooth of hunger, it is the obstinate bone, it is the scattered teeth and the insistent emptiness of discourse, and thus the book ends, perfectly logically and correctly, with:
collapse unto thy dread for the good of nothing claimed none but the shit clinging to the heels it was ever of the all for silences the rapture emptied silenced silenced it was all for the good of nothing claimed
This book is very good, get it here:
http://www.paraphiliamagazine.com/indamageseasons.html
Tuesday, 4 June 2013
Throats Full of Graves- Gillian Prew
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| 'Throats Full of Graves', by Gillian Prew is available to purchase here |
Tuesday, 21 May 2013
The Non Herein- by Michael Mc Aloran. A Review by Christopher Barnes
“Tracing the night’s
Parchment”.
And “Of the traces of
–“are good examples. The language and grammatical units disconnect and
are often left uncompleted which de-familiarises our expectations of
what words normally do.
“Absent…we’ll
…laughter till the lungs bleed dry of corrugated flowerings”.
This
enacts these poem’s themes concretely. Crafted into the dissonance of
the physical language, is a sense of breathlessness and even fear.
This is a series of poems of torture, mayhem, death and the realities of
the body. The careful honing of lines and verses and the tense economy
used create a shape that brings to my mind the genre New Music. Line
endings and rhythms also create a sense of controlled and well-tested
soundscapes.
“Choke
Of dust and of the
Parched sun
Of bled”.
These
are difficult poems, ordinary perceptions are de-habituated. We are in a
place broken which is a frightening at-the-edge experience. Though the
end is a passing out, “Fading wishful fading ever knowing none of it”.
It does
not feel like the end because of the circularity of these poem’s
psychological and visual cat’s cradles. The conscious voice in the set
of poems could wake up at the beginning and start over.
The
collection’s title holds within it its opposite ‘the herein’. The
dichotomy between the internal/external seems to suggest a constant
search to find meaning, connecting the persona’s internal life to the
world in an Existential vacuum, a voice in the wilderness,
“And the brutal fist
Of the herein”, the poet adds, as well as the tension and confusion of verses such as,
“Head non vast
Non herein
Scattered speeches of”, the central failed quest being to unite the two.
The
first line “Into Echoing –“springs into action as ‘a shall we begin’,
with the promise of the half-repetitions and turnings back that sustain
these poem’s themes and obsessions. The line endings are quite
brilliant. Look at the way
“Till severed
Knocking upon the
Bone chimes
Hollow” creates a psychological gap or gasp, a vertigo hangs on the use of the world “the”. There are instances of synaesthesia which show that we can’t trust the subject matter to stay stable, nor the senses,
“Breathless the eye”.
There
is a mention of opiates and the experience is like a bad trip of the
soul which can be used as a device to explain the unfamiliar. There is
also the occasional suggestion of a struggle for faith.
“(Bring out your dead)” seems apocalyptic, an
“The lightning
Of the upturned
Eyes”,
could subtly reference religion, though the poems seem Nietzschen.
There isn’t an ‘I’ in these poems, the closest we get to an
identifiable persona is that some things are
“(Asked of)”. That in itself is a very radical challenge, there is only witnessing. The hinted at persona is
“Next to none
And nothing next”.
The poems haunt with lines such as,
“Or a locket of
Shadow”, not quite sentimental, or entirely romantic in these contexts of visceral imagery and the poetry of the bodily real,
“Doused by final piss”.
There is great skill in the lines,
“Split skyline of
Heaving silences”,
suggesting chasms that want to be alive and personified but lack the
ability to connect their herein with their non herein. And the weight
of the word “black” in,
“Breathing of the black pulse” is tonally (musically) disturbing as it fights with the “ck” “lse” glooping sounds.
The poem’s imagery is bleak, fragmentary and sometimes deadly,
“Ah bone wither”, but notice how carefully, how artfully the poet controls the havoc by means of fine articulation,
“Skull
Droplets of rampage
The dead eyes wastage of it”, even the chaos has style.
Meanings jump to their opposites,
“Ballast heart” implies the hope of safety, the heart as stable but later…
“Spew of the heart’s cancer”.
There is a line where the gaps between words stretch into two spaces, a
void for something to slip into that never comes, a visual
representation of it. We are “Lingering on the dice of loss”, chance has brought us here not self-making, which must therefore hold an absence of guilt.
“Echo
(None)
Echo
(None)” is a ghostly chorus of lack, deceptively simple but profound.
“Breath (Till Knock) -
Breath
The knock of absence” has
dramatic urgency; with terror embedded but the knock is also a chasm, a
vertigo. And like many quests, in the end there is nothing to find,
nothing to know, “Knowing of the which or when of naught” leaves mere disappointment.
The line “Head of sand”
is brilliantly Surrealist but as important as it is as an image, just
as striking is its economy. But all things fall into each other,
“Smear of night
Till flesh smeared” is closer to Impressionism in its blurriness.
And the norms of narrative are skewed to be only potential narratives,
“Further back in till forage laughter” is merely a hint.
Some echoes are very subtle,
“Bone orchid” becomes
“Orchid
(Orchid)” so we can’t read the “Orchid” without thinking of bones. And the line
“All along the walls the fathom refusing to scream of it” shouldn’t
work. There is no natural caesura; the line has a magnet in it pulling
us past the scream. Throughout these poems there is a need to grasp
language in its meanings which forever change and are elusive. And
whether language is decorative or destitute, making language unexpected
is at the core of Michael Mc Aloran’s talent.
It can be purchased here
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