Fresh medicine,
The moment
Still stuck
In our throats,

The hallelujah throb
Of warmth
And hope,
The heady holler

Of rolling highs
And hillside
Soliloquies
Billowing brightly,

The yes of achievement
As the world breaths its no’s.

clipped bone on bone
skin to stone, name
upon your lips

the joy flies blue and green and
silver trimmed

slipping down your neck
into the space between
your shoulder blades

a rainbow cherished
band by band, disappearing
yonder in some lucky land,

until joy is erased we can live
in this place

the space, the aching brace
which breaks like fire,
each of us encased

dialogue and tender
touch, from dark
to sun, scarce but enough

haunted by a life which promised much,
whose spell is done

eyes darkly wise,
heart untied
a storm outside

smiles which murmur
rain, days of love
like gossip in the grain

a wall to die behind where stories cry and
history is rearranged

face stone-set, beautiful and proud

indoors we ran, soaked and gasping
while you hid your face abashed

wasted in the precious swell, rain left
your body and it ended, centuries adrift,
leaves twirled mid-air in ashy spell

which breaks your
sight and warms
the tallow dawn
on sodden ground
for you alone

slickness hung
in droplets
from the brick
and stone, condensation

mirrored cross
the street,
home from home

the sun filters yellow-stippled leaves

melting roads of tissue ‘gainst the breeze

stringy birch,
scars ashen
long, tawny sky
scored black

with towers
from the early
hours, the stars
now pocketed
out of sight

a million lives
disappeared,
in stasis,
now collapsed

blueish bruising
dents the sky
with dye etched

about the chimneys and the church’s spire,

horizon’s cusp arced with kindling fire

mizzle drifts
like gauze
slung across
your sight

the dawn is
gone, the air
tastes different
on your tongue

thus day is risen,
dressed, and you
now follow as
you’ve always done

As dawn breaks episodically
Across the world
And drops into the void
Between our dreams.

Clocks turn in slow motion
And seconds sludge
As we pace,

Maybe our hearts are in unison,
Maybe we’re just destined to drift,

Maybe our moments sit stolen,
High on a mountain somewhere.

my face is heavy,
a slough of
woollen sack
slid wetly down my back

the world is a bright
thing, this orb hung
from the better
reaches of the sky

and yet my mood will not
fly nor my face dry
and stars above fade
to tin in my eye

I long to leave this stretch of dark which parks us here

I long to taste
the air and know
that next is nothing,
no care, no fear

only canopy above,
vapour and forgotten
breath trailed forever
upward and beyond

it is perhaps enough
to disappear; nothing,
perhaps, is often
something shared

what a slurry of thought,
like dust upon a smile,
and yet such thought is
intricately wrought

and always sought

Gales bluster and shake
New ideas muddy troubles
And the roots wind on,

Into the open
A single sun ray shining
A slit in the dark,

Glorious moment
A dizzy stomach growling
An old thought polished,

As the sun elopes
Leaving you simple once more
Drunk on familiar.

The sun weeps
It’s last light

And the sparrows
Rise off

Like dust
In a gust,

Too soon taken.

This night is alive
With regret,

As Autumn leaves
Shiver and fall.

Will you ever return?

It was the last night,
The new goodbye,
We improvised badly on stage,
Spat questions and stumbled
Like strangers adored
Drowning sadness,

Old friends laughed
In the corner,
The dead hummed
Their approval
And the city sank
Knee deep
In storm water.

The last note rang loud,
Like a new full stop,
It grew with the wind
And rumbled the beams,
Stealing our breath
And approving our dreams

One by one.

brighter than the other flowers, eyes to ground
darkly proud

wet with prayer, you offer up a promise
glistening hope

bearing me that gift you have of daily knowing
how to cope

…your face was like a lantern…

…baptised in starry overspill…

indoors the footprints show your shadow
gone into the hills

the air has spilled, movement of your dress
distilled

the clouds were red but never riven
through with blame
you brought the river, saved the rain

you killed a path through sparely wrought
despair and still
your precious spell hangs the air

sweep across me as I stand

that’s keeping me in breath and

still attuned to this pale life

lie low beneath what was and might have been
promises and trodden feet
grief crawling spent and speckled with relief

what’s wrong is gone
what fled the air has stilled and left the ground

if something breaks, just think of me
if silence shoots you sideways bring your tears for me to see

if minutes break your face into a million fears
just look into the shards and see me here

when you feel slight, corrupt with blight and every bone is sorrow
come blind to me, unlace yourself of trouble

put out the light, relax your sight, numb into this bubble

fall no further with thoughts groaned green
I’ll see you to your feet, sponge your darkness clean

I’ll not be unkind, I’ll place my hands behind your spine
I’ll not be trite nor taste a moment’s spite

what’s wrong will make you strong
what’s gone was never meant to be here long

you’ll see

from today the clay is past, mistakes
coarse with residue like blood rain

now is gone the crippling storm,
laid your temper low, paralysed with scorn

everything that matters shines
its outline like a beacon at the hidden edge

let it be said there is no other time
money gone, drunk and done but sticking
to the bone with midnight’s pledge

behind you drags the sack in which your past has gone

your load has made you slow
your age lies littered on the road

unpack your sack, give air to little
moments you’ve kept within your pockets, stowed

as if when lost you might still feel their
heat complete inside your palm like precious stones

your hope has burned beneath the sun, twisted
every likelihood undone, your disappointment
clouds the moon against whose pearl your tears

are shone, rusty song, which like a fountain
spills its beauty on the frozen ground

excavate your heart
replace the gate which leads into your life
remove the knife and leave it several distances apart

the mountain looms afresh, a glossy shield
the wind brings sound which sings about your
wounds, unhealed, and life unlocked is lifted in an arc

a lifetime’s pain sent hither on a wind
which clings the sail

tattooed on my heart like braille
errant to the touch
and frail

the air is thin
as are the memories you bring

your life outstretched before me
peeled and soft, outside in

the cull and flat of years, the paths we steered
all hung soft in fading light as we stand prone

our love, lost, entwined above
like the entrails of a kite

take my hand, burned soul
pry open homeward eyes
use amber stones to guide

trail the staircase promise laced
so I might press on when you’re gone
my mess of chest lined, as a nest
and shining with your pride

what’s more, close the door, you one side I the other
backing onto one another
everything we know hooked inside

I floundered and was found
I was carried down

arranged once more into a shape which
might still take its course through life

a blunted knife, suturing my skin
where you gamely held me whole
with grafts and string

I was found, dressed in your love
like a gown, standing up inside the darkness
which we singularly heaved around

spent heat
and heavy love, a star, a hazard light,

the turning of the seasons, hereafter
wheel complete

they shared coffee and
cake, neither eating
fully, both anxious for
a little small talk to
massage the inner ache.
Are you avoiding me?
she asked and when he
looked at her and nodded
she waited him to finish
one way or other but
only silence cracked
across his face, the cake
now coarse and grainy,
the coffee bitter
with an angry taste

A person can’t help the
way they feel, she said,
glancing at the lowered
crown of head, thinking
Perhaps this is how it
always is, the nodding and
the misplaced hope, the
stupid notion that perhaps
we live alone as friends.
Nope, he said eventually
and shook his head, pushing
back the chair with a scrape
of metal which couldn’t
have sounded lonelier
had it keened and bled

he stood back, touched
the brim of his hat
and turned toward the
street, not looking
back but seeing her
still mirrored in the
windows, standing there
in the still lamp glare,
tears pricking her stare
forever on the corner
where he left her, hands
by her side, out of reach

The steel grey buildings dressed in glass looming large,
The creeping sun breeding distractions and shimmers,
Dreams clinging onto the clouds in disguise.

Conversations stuttered
As the animals slept,
Awash with gentle warnings,
Lost and bored in futures thoughts,

Snoring
All resigned,
Unable to translate.

Like dogs looking lost
In a park
Where they swear there are bones,

We’ve pillaged in the village
And we’re dreaming
Of home sweet home,

Where the cupboards cry.

the roots
beneath the
soil blanched
and lost
their fleshy
weight

the robin’s breast
glowed early,
lamplight glinted
autumn blust,
the morning changed
like rust
to dusk, and with it
winter’s long thin
song

remember me
you said,
the way I’d like
you to remember me,
awake and crammed
with life,
mouth unhinged
hair and eyes
tinged with the
wanton madness of
someone not quite
there

and so, you know,
I do, for all that I
can bear,
I see you balanced
between life
without a care,
solipsistic and
opinionated,
burned with wonder
in nostalgia’s
glare, be it right
or be it wrong
you’re there,
oh yes indeed, you
wrote that prayer

The sweet, joyous songs
Of childhood
All haunted and curdled,

The whispers of lovers
Like ships leaving ports,

Never returning,

Beautiful memories
Swimming off

Into the sky.

I closed my eyes
And let a single tear

fall,

I pulled on my heart
And sat back,

I looked down
And then swallowed,

Lost in the carpet,

Embarrassed
And sombre.

Resolved.

“Someone is singing, beyond the patio and the hedgerow, a song so sweet it might have been sung in paradise.  Inconsolable melos.  A lyric in a strange tongue.  It sounds like part elegy, part yearning.  Like someone nostalgic, perhaps, for a lost continent, a ‘beginning’…” 

Interlocutors of Paradise is a sumptuous collection of five short atmospheric meditations that dares to confront colonialised places from the perspective of a colonialiser, in this case a well travelled British poet. Written as a series of provocative, symbolist-tinged prose-poems, each section situates the reader in beautifully crafted spaces, hollows to be filled either by spiritual purpose or by wilful invasion that then becomes inherently political.  Martin Anderson, an the author of various books of poetry including The Ash Circle and Belonging, is emerging as a skilful writer of poignant but elegantly powerful and sensitive poems.  His poems are largely concerned with locale and the various residues to be experienced at the precise moment of visitation, whether natural or man-made environs.  His style transports the reader, imbues them with a unique ontological experience, all the while gently prodding them towards notions of identity and purpose.

Anderson’s poems display an earthy but multidimensional aesthetic that plays on the senses in an invitational and experiential way.  Gustaf Sobin heartily agrees: “Great purity and acuity, and a perfect ear. A wonderful poet.”
 His poems are full of visionary and incantatory language that speaks to a deep and often secretive yearning.  Nathaniel Tarn explains:  “Beautiful writing — treasure trove of emanations: orchards, hedgerows, meadows, coastlines, a land I used to know and still love in the nerves. A stilling for the nerves. The texture thick with an ancient country’s history now learning to trace back, through all its exploitations, the sources of an elegy for lost empire. Has English poetry made the best out of that drawn-out loss?”
 Indeed Anderson embraces what is both lost and found in his sensorial aggretisation of experience, in poems that are snapshots of totalic ambience, the what is and what is not, the rarefaction to be experienced in common moments. His is a higher focus with more depth to the gaze than to be found in standard poetic landscapes.  As with the work of someone like W.G. Sebald, his poems combine the sensorial with memoir, history, biography and travelogue.

There is also an analytical quality to the poems but powerfully subtle and often soft stated.  The gaze is extended to haunting residues of collective memory and political ramifications of the future.  As the poet explains – “The Poems begin by evoking the historical formation and expression of national identity – an identity predicated on past colonial and imperial activities.  The meditations that follow are largely situated within that region of the Thames estuary where Joseph Conrad lived, set and conceived Heart of Darkness. The Thames, that river in the book on which floated “The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empire”, figures prominently also in the book’s opening meditation, where it is the setting of, amongst other things, Edmund Spenser’s poem Prothalamion and his friend Sir Walter Raleigh’s departure and voyage to Roanoke in the New World. In the final meditation its presence fades giving way, instead, to the aspirant spaces of a settled New World. But a world not ‘settled’ enough to have eradicated restlessness.” 

As a traveller of these distinct places and metaphoric paths Anderson has learned to transmit the flux and mutability of their intrinsic properties to the page.  Skylight Press is honoured to publish this new collection of dynamic poems in support of an important British poet. 

Interlocutors of Paradise  is available from various retail outlets such as Amazon, Amazon UK, or direct from the Skylight Press website.

But something,
A little nagging doubt
In the back of his brain
Said ,

Kill them,
Kill them all,

Until their tears
Rise as steam from their bodies,

Until their lying at one
With the soil;

They’re not like you,
They don’t have souls,
They’ve never sung,
Never felt love,

They don’t even have a language,

They’re vermin,
Poison and pointless,

Kill them all.

They were ants,
He was gardening.

A honey bee (Wikipedia Commons taken by Maciej Czyżewski)

If bees didn’t exist, poets would have had to invent them: mechanical, organic, strange and beautiful, they make honey—for centuries one of man’s few sources of sugar, until sugar-making techniques were developed in Asia—, they sting but so doing take their own life and they live in a highly ordered caste society that at first glance look chaotic.

It’s perhaps no surprise then that they have a long history in poetry: in Virgil’s Georgics (worth reading if you haven’t already), the bee colony seems not too far from Platonic Ideal City and stands as Rome’s model for the future after the chaos of its civil war. Shakespeare also comes to a similar Virgil-inspired moment in Henry V when the Archbishop of Canterbury gets Hal off to France with a judicious bee metaphor. In today’s post-Renaissance individualism, however, the bee colony as very deterministic model for the polis sounds tasteless, with its echoes from Brave New World to The Matrix. And the analogy may have fallen out of fashion amongst male poets, once science proved that the ‘bee emperor’ is a queen—listen to this essay by Adam Gopnik for more. But the fascination with the strangeness and our need for bees continues to this day from Sylvia Plath to Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees (2011) and this year’s Bee Journal by Sean Borodale.

Bee Journal charts two years beekeeping in 74 chronological poems, mostly written at the hive. As the reader progresses through the collection, he or she learns about apiculture at the same time as Borodale, learning “Nuc, / new word” under the “toiling air” and “beacon sun” of Exmoor, the dangers of imported honey or that:

The smaller bees are kittenish.
Tapped hive, the noise continues long.
Supposed to be a sign of health.
The drones are vast, bothersome.

With words like “kittenish”, the poems sometimes feel like undeclared love poems to the queen: they obsess about her asking where she is, looking for her endlessly in a mass of bees. At other points, “bees touch and re-align their touch”, giving their touch (a frequent word in the collection) a vaguely sexual connotation, but far from an affectionate one: after all the bee’s touch is its sting, which has the potential to be fatal to both bee and human.

The very strangeness of bees creates a challenge for poets, especially to express their constant, non-verbal sound in words, and Borodale excels in this, sometimes dissecting sentences of their syntax and creating a disjunction of the senses. These can be joyous “Jutting harp strings of light, / ligaments of noise take flight” or threatening “Slowly you are tuning yourselves / into the small misheard scales, into a purpose”. But my favourite metaphor is a repeated one of bees, fire and vitality: “Our bees are not yet lit but stagger out / like gauze mantles for a gas light.” These lines are set at the beginning of spring and I think the metaphor captures perfectly the dopiness of insects in early spring or late autumn.

In their single sound and single-mindedness, Borodale frequently sees the bee colony as one living being, as an “anima” with “its mechanism, its quartz pulse”, or even digitally as a “Motherboard of many; each light, residual: / element, lumen, diode, valve.”

If the bees of Bee Journal work as a unit, then there is also a holistic interconnectedness that extends into the environment and time as well. Honey is not just the bee’s product or a food: it’s as much a distillation or time capsule of the natural world, “a ghost of goings-on” or in ‘Winter Honey’, a highlight of the collection about “bitter battery-tasting honey. The woods are in it.” These interconnections seem to have even further implications and lines like, “Part of the moon bees have / was found in flowers”, made me wonder if flowers don’t taste of the sun (or moon), sustained as they are by photosynthesis.

But any views of nature as a whole are counteracted by the isolated, claustrophobic and restricted feel of these poems in their tight geographic space with the narrator wrapped in protective clothing. The outside world becomes the realm of the bees, “turning this house to align with yours” and the bees themselves an obsession and ritual with “vestments” (or maybe spacesuits):

Gloves, gauzes, white suits slumped—
I live in here.
That strange squat Jack-in-the-Box
seems prominent – out there.

Fundamentally, the bees of Bee Journal—and in real life—are inscrutable and mysterious. They’re constantly and unexpectedly changing and Borodale exploits this language that twists and turns, replicating the bee’s strange otherness. The results are engrossing and create a fascinating story-telling sequence of nature poems.

Sean Borodale, Bee Journal, Cape Poetry, 2011

Link to the poet’s website: http://www.seanborodale.com/index.html

soon we will be getting poorly by , and soon we will lay waste;

our powers are little; we see nature is our own and entirely won

we gave our hearts away and drove hearses with nurses with sordid bloom.

The sea, the sea bares her bosom rotten!

the winds howl unexpected at us without delay.

what gave up is now gathering as not sleeping but wilting flowers,

for this , for everything we are out of time;

mow we must, and move we may

a great pigs seeks suckle at the political process so fickle.

might of Word is stomp and stand, the pleasant lea lays open–

what glimpses we might have had, what sea we may have sailed

how Proteus rose from the sea

and how the Triton should have, not the trident is an infectious thorn.

I won’t put out
the light,
not for me to
call the day nor
usher in the
night

no matter how pale
your youth, grown
spectre thin,
I’ll lift you,
broke with stroke,
I’ll fire the
memory still burning
behind your cobbled
cheek

beyond the beauty
lies the crash
and tears of life
shared out in years,
I’ll not drag down
the truth of that,
I’ll not be so cheap

the life which
hurts needs solace
and the solace needs
a life intact

so when you leave
I’ll not deflect
the joy of moments
past, nor buttress
up my chest against
distress, but keep
my heart and body
tight, upright,
collecting like a
library those lost
words, the love
you shed, the
boundless generosity
you showed