This isn’t a club I wanted to join by initial design as it is out of ignorance first and then choice that I have become a member. And I am not entirely sure my appropriation of the title seems immediately acceptable, but I have taken it to obviously reflect that similar celebration of poets and poetry, though the writers now have only recently passed.

These writers are Tom Raworth and Roy Fisher and Okla Elliot, three poets I did not previously know about or their work. I mentioned recently and briefly on this blog my new reading of Fisher, having acquired his books The Dow Low Drop: New and Selected Poems and The Furnace. I have yet to fully read Raworth’s two bought texts, Tottering State and the Penguin Modern Poets 19 in which he appears.

Today I have been reading the third poet’s work, Okla Elliott’s excellent debut collection The Cartographer’s Ink. Where Raworth and Fisher had long and one hopes happy lives, passing this year at respectively 79 and 87 years old, Elliott passed at only 39 and would have had much more to write about and share.

So that is what I am doing now, briefly. I want to share a few of his poems from the book I have rather than analyse them. What struck me immediately when reading this were his wonderful eclectic imagination and writing styles, poems that have a freshness in seeing and thinking about the world, then conveying this in a distinctively personal approach. This opening poem The Light Here struck me for its explosion of ideas about such an ‘ordinary’ source, which it clearly starts as, rather than immediately taking and playing with it for the obvious metaphors therein – though these do transpire:

The next poem, literally, Wolf-Sense Sonnet, is instantly different. It is clearly a sonnet, but playfully irreverent in using the form, not a sonnet about love, but lust [I know that is hardly unconventional] yet erotic/dirty, and as rough with the punning and alliteration as it is with the sexual suggestiveness. Playfully so, again:

In Lonely in Seoul, I like the simplicity of these seemingly meaningless observations, for that very reason, and because they are picked up next in part 3 of the poem, as in part 4 are other similar casual references from earlier. It is storytelling without drama, as loneliness so often is:

My last snapshots to share are from the poem Alien War, Human War, and I select not because they prove Elliott tackles more ‘serious’ subjects too, but because he does and with a knowingness that resonates in today’s world and it’s conflicts, this poem itself not surprisingly written on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, Elliott making his feelings obvious before the poem adds layers of insight to this:

I have much more to read from this debut still, and I look forward to exploring more of his other work in the future.

My apologies if the texts here are a little blurry – I took as photos because I didn’t want to have to type them up. I think they are readable, you can always get his book to get a crisper take.