Gill Andrews The Thief  ISBN: 978-1-905939-49-7
Peter Daniels Mr. Luczinski Makes a Move ISBN: 978-1-905939-64-0
Michael Mackmin  from there to here  ISBN: 978-1-905939-63-3
Jon Stone Scarecrows  ISBN: 978-1-905939-42-8
HappenStance, £4.00

Claire Crowther Mollicle  ISBN: 978-1-9565514-2-9
Luke Kennard Planet-shaped Horse ISBN: 978-0-9565514-5-0
Nine Arches Press, £5.00

Nicholas Murray Get Real  ISBN: 978-0-9567981-0-7
Christopher Reid Airs and Ditties of No Man’s Land  ISBN: 978-0-9561013-7-2
Roísín Tierney Dream Endings ISBN: 978-0-9561013-9-6
Angela Topping Catching On  ISBN: 978-0-9561013-8-9
Rack Press, £4.00

Hannah Lowe The Hitcher  ISBN: 978-0-9551273-5-9
Peter Sansom The Night is Young ISBN: 978-0-9551273-4-2
Rialto, £5.50

Pamphlets deserve to be talked up. Costing no more than the price of a 175ml glass of wine, they are concentrates of good poetry, whereas a book may be padded out with a lot of lesser work. Moreover, with the current boom in live readings, pamphlets are an easy sale. Instead of remaining collectors’ items, they may regain some of the popularity implicit in the Greek origin of the word — panphilus, a ‘friend to everyone’ — and even where not bought directly, they may be passed lovingly from hand to hand. Pamphlet production evokes the idea of a thousand flowers — maybe dandelions, rather than roses; in any case here in Kildare as I write the fields are almost carpeted in the yellow beauties. Pamphlets are perhaps the new books!

Four publishers and twelve poets are represented here, and I’ll start with HappenStance’s offering: four elegant chapbooks with charming emblematic line drawings on the covers.

Some of Gill Andrew’s best work has to do with breaking the ice — the ice of situations in modern life. I particularly liked ‘Workstations’, a poem that feels as if it’s taking revenge on her former pre-poetic life in the City. The stanzas are numbered and bracketed like the paragraphs of a company report;  read aloud, it would be very entertaining. The poem collapses comically under the weight of the importance of the office life that is its subject matter, ending:

            (I try not to cry into
            someone else’s mug).

Other poems feel polished and form-driven, and I miss a sense of personal engagement. ‘Greater Love’, consisting of two loose unrhyming sonnets — with the second facing the first mirror-form and right-justified at the bottom of the opposite page — is darker, however, and quite intense.

            I said, ‘It’s her on the phone. She’s OK. She’s safe.
            She wasn’t there.’ He clutched his face with both hands
            so violently that even ten minutes later the frowns
            of fingernails were white on his cheeks.

Peter Daniels has published quite a few chapbooks and now has a book in the offing. ‘Policeman, Stoke Newington’ is an irresistible opening piece: mischievous and hilarious, it’s also a pure well-made poem. In the middle of his chapbook I found that rare thing in modern times, some poems that work as allegories. These poems reminded me of early Auden. In some you get the feeling of the outsider, witnessing everyone else enjoying themselves. ‘Threshold’ has a vision:

            … perfection
            realized: athletes running beyond human strength, absence
            of degenerates from the streets, the loveliness of cities
            that behave all in the same acceptable way.

The dark underside of this perfection is left unspoken, but is all the more eloquently present for that.

Rialto editor, Michael Mackmin’s pamphlet, from there to here, contains echoes of other writers’ work — not surprising in someone who must have read a lot of poetry in his day. The ecstatic night scene, ‘Night Piece’, with its indented lines, made me think of a William Carlos Williams cameo. And ‘Here’, with Cincinnatus returning to his farm,

            … when he’d set
            all straight, done his noble ancient Roman bit,

recalled for me Patrick Kavanagh’s similarly formed short poem ‘Epic’, with its talk of ‘the Munich bother’. The poems ‘Here’ and ‘There’ bookend the pamphlet with the same message:
           
            things being as they are, the price
            of wheat, the bigger field to plough,
            it’s not a journey any recommend.

Jon Stone combines taut forms with a super-contemporary, perhaps rather specialised content that set me googling. They are poems with a dark, largely gothick lore. ‘Henching for Jonathan Crane’, for instance, refers to the classic comic-book scarecrow man, a psychiatrist turned psychotic. Christina Lindberg, the protagonist of another poem, is in life a Swedish porn star, super-intelligent, with a later career as an environmental campaigner:

            Forget revenge and the hard naked truth.
            She has so much to give: mercy, cruelty,
            beauty that would make a shambles of you.

I very much liked ‘Bedhair’, Stone’s versions of Japanese poet, Yosano Akiko’s tankas. [Editor’s note: See Jon Stone’s sonic translations of Hiromi Ito’s poetry in this issue.] It’s interesting to compare these transpositions with Akiko’s originals. They are in the same bold, erotic spirit, an homage to this outspoken women poet of a century ago: ‘my blacker than bike-grease hair, / my whiter than salt-flake skin’. 

Stone is interested in writing variations on poems by other poets — an exchange that feels like an Elizabethan form of borrowing, with great creative potential. In general, his combination of obsessive, left-field material with studied traditional forms gives these forms new energy. It may be pouring new wine in old bottles, but it works.

Nine Arches, a Midlands-based press, run by poets Jane Commane and Matt Nunn, offers us two sturdy-looking, quite divergent pamphlets.

I enjoyed ‘Cartoon: Oldfashioned Highstreet’ in Claire Crowther’s Mollicle. It verges on being an open-field poem, printed down the breadth of the page rather than the length, and combining prose paragraphs with three-line stanzas. It’s a vision of a latter-day Holy Family, out Saturday shopping, the parents ‘both looking tired and surprised as does their baby’, watched by the window models who look on ‘crouched and militant’. I also enjoyed ‘The Alices’, a poem that subverts the nonsense words in Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’. Some of her work, however, feels rather severe and reticent, as if the poems were hiding behind themselves.

Luke Kennard’s poems are full of mad pranks and with most of them, as he says himself, ‘the joke is on the person who pretends to get it’. His work reminds me of Jon Stone’s (see above), but it’s more light-hearted.

            It’s like trying to write with someone
            looking over your shoulder:

            the only thing you can think to write is
            Will you stop looking over my shoulder?

His poems have been described as Surrealist, but the term is misleading as his imagery is all surface: a bewildering mirage of surfaces broken by the, often hilarious, unexpected. ‘Planet-shaped Horse’, a poem cycle set in a half-way house in the grounds of a mental home, provides as a frontispiece a ‘here be dragons’-style map of the estate. Our critical eye catches itself glaring at a water feature shaped like a T-bone steak, and we realize our leg has been pulled again.

Rack Press has produced a set of four quite slender, rather different pamphlets. Christopher Reid’s Airs and Ditties of No Man’s Land is an occasional work that has been set to music by Colin Matthews. Some of it has a fairly high ’Allo, ’Allo content, which I enjoyed, and all of it is well and tersely written, but I’m not sure how well it would work as a complaint against war in general, or war as it is now — in Libya or Afghanistan.

On the other hand, Get Real! by Nicholas Murray has the opposite problem. It couldn’t be more topical, but it’s over-ingenious and doesn’t rise above its single issue. While most people would agree with his views, the poems missed, for me, the universality of great satire.

Angela Topping’s Catching On is also an occasional work, but of a different order. It’s an elegiac cycle of poems about the death of her friend, the poet Matt Simpson. All the elements of a traditional elegy are there — how the news of his death arrived, her memories of his life and of her, perhaps awkward, relation with him — friendship with desire as undercurrent — and their shared love of poetry as the thread through their relationship over the years. These are honest poems that hold their nerve, grieving, loving and yet tactful and restrained to the last line.

Roísín Tierney has interesting poems about outsiders. ‘Diogenes Syndrome’ describes a senile old man:        

            Not that you even know what we’re on about –

            nor we enough to force aside
            that thing, that whatever-it-is, that blocks your light.

‘Vera’, on the opposite page, is about a woman suffering from dementia:

            She knows her husband’s dead these twenty years
            that they were happy, but can’t say what he did…

These are poems about difficult subjects, but there’s an edge of humour or kindness that sees them through. Finally, in ‘Asylum’, she ‘claims kin’, perhaps revealing her motivation for writing these dark, saddening, fastidious poems.

            Grandmother, great-uncle, favorite auntie,
            all lay down, lay down and slept

            by the lakeshore of the county asylum,
            psychiatric facility, Clonmel, St John’s.
            Took benzodiazepines, had ECT
            and spoke and wept, spoke and wept…

The long-running poetry magazine Rialto has started a series of pamphlets under the Bridge imprint, the name suggesting a notion of the chapbook as a bridge between magazine and book publication. These two very attractive publications are beautiful concentrates of poetry.

Hannah Lowe can write a good long sentence in verse, sparkling with detail. ‘Now that you Live in Hoxton’ reads like a single sentence, though actually it’s three, because the energy doesn’t let up. ‘Artisan du Chocolat, Borough Market’ begins in bed, crosses the river and ends up in the patisserie with a description of the countertop display: ‘chocolate eggs wrapped in ribbon and tissue’. The first verb is ‘unwind’ and the whole poem unravels in one breath from start to finish, with the detail shot through with moments of tenderness:

            and our hands round our mugs as we lull
            our poor hearts with sweetness and sugar.

‘The Hitcher’ is a thrilling pamphlet. It teems with people and incident. Complicated where it needs to be, it’s never obscure and there’s lots of heart as well.

Many of Peter Sansom’s poems are about growing older and looking back. There is a celebration of modesty, of not rising above one’s station — especially if the station is Crewe, where ‘everyone you know will pass through’. The tone can feel a little discouraging, but it is the work of a foot-soldier in poetry who has gathered skills in phrasing and diction down the years. And at times he strikes a chord, with a narrative anyone can recognise, as in ‘Instead of Going to Work’:

                                    … tried not to feel
            I should be doing more with the day
            than the nothing I did instead of going to work.