The journey a reader takes in getting to know Dal Kular gains impetus when reading through this collection’s self-revelations, its ruses (presentational/tonal), the personal artefacts as representation of historical and cultural points, and through this, a palpable sense of her own journey that is aided by this therapeutic writing process.

After an opening poem  time(less) li(n)e – itself playfully provocative – the first untitled poem begins,

‘this works in a

MEsS.

My m-

ess.’

and we will increasingly discover the meaning/meaningfulness of such a recurring typography that presents the surface examples of being seen/judged as a person. In a collection exploring identity, this presents a familiar – if ultimately superficial – aspect of that external framing which nevertheless impacts on the internal thoughts and feelings of the individual.

The poem white pages | 1974 has a beginning which quickly demonstrates the pertinence of form/presentation in shaping an expression of personal meaning,

‘i was creative before i
was brown| i created myself
female before i was born| that
was my first act of creation| my soul
in shades of everything| when
i was six i wrote about snow-
white-men in royal blue
ink across off-’

[on the printed page this is a box/square: important as that presentation],

and as the poem progresses to include the first of two quotes by Audre Lorde in the whole collection,

“…the decision to define ourselves,
name ourselves,
and speak for ourselves,
instead of being
defined and spoken for by
others”

[right justified on the printed page]

we are being introduced to the external and internal forces that act on who we are/become, the poetry itself interrupted at times by lines that halt/pause/prevent/corrupt expression – or so it seems.

The next two poems Haunting | ancestor speaks me | Punjabi 185? and uprise | ancestor speaks me | Sheffield 2019 explore historical and cultural shifts/impacts on Kular’s life as a child and growing up into adulthood. The second poem ends with

‘see fire in my eyes
scars on my tongue
i am alive|
made of places
wilded by
others
others-wised by
wild|’

and the hurt as well as learning of the self is beautifully defiant.

As a teacher I was interested in the presenting of a school report from 1978 and Nether Green Middle School for Dalbinder Kular. Actual or faux, it is a ‘good’ report, full of positives and quite detailed with these – these tropes – and for all of this, they are formulaic (perhaps taken from comment banks) or indeed are real – but one senses they describe a surface, possibly one that was achieved and helped to preserve the survival of being young, uncertain and needing to tick the boxes; to fit in.

This would seem to be the case in the next poem (Bruised | 1984 Sheffield. Ghost of We which begins with this candour,

‘The Ghost of I looks down into the school yard – all the white
kids are walking west. Defying physics. One Brown Girl walks
East. Trailing her scream behind her tangled into broken
peacock feathers. When the school yard is empty she sucks up
the space and spreads her feathers and lets the scream escape
into smog.’

It is emerging how there is both clarity and the poetic in the trajectory of a life plotted here for the reader to engage with and in.

There are playful episodes of the journey in Pure Chana Dal, and another school/tutor report from 1983 is brisk but essentially critical – less cliched than the previous yet a different kind of distance is demonstrated.

In between these two are defiant lines from Orkney | 2019 (as we move from past to present),

‘Race is the least interesting lie of me. It
visibilises me and invisibilises me in equal
measure. I prefers being invisible on her own
terms. Like the way the North Sea sculpts
the space between the old man and
mainland, splitting sunsets in two.’

and as readers it provides joy to hear but also context for the shifts across time. It also reminds us of the complex personality/identity bifurcations Kular experienced as we dip in and out of the recorded trauma – as for example in the poem beginning with these lines,

‘I had a dream once, a horrific
interruption that still shocks me.
I lived in a tiny terraced
house in Nottingham, on
ancient battle-land, bloodied
bodies strata-fied beneath her,
genetic rememberings of a long
ago capital. A hooded shadow
burst into her bedroom with
hurricane intensity, in the
darkest darkness, an atrocious
force ripping the covers from her
bed and sucking every part of her
soul from me. It woke I. Or was
I already awake?’

I’ll finish on one more example of this trauma in the poet’s journey/healing as it further demonstrates how the candour and the poetic framing of this (specifically here: the nomenclature/playing/re-presenting) work together as documentary and catharsis,

‘depressioning
suicidaling
disassociationing
anxieting
scatterationing
regretfulling
fear-fulling
racializing
the dead-end day jobbing
‘The Professional Careering’
stresssssing
presssssurising
shagginging
the manyfathomed depthness of knowing the path that I didn’t
following
un-believing-in-myselfnessing
confidencelessnessing
unremitting escape pathings – here!’

To get more information and buy, go here.

~

If poetry cannot solve the problems of the here and now, then we are in deep shit. And we are in deep shit.

And if a handbag is a handbag is a handbag is a handbag is no more than the resonance of once being innovative, then we are enjoying rhythm rather than getting into the complexities of an exploration that mirrors those difficulties.

Quick aside on this route: in a lifetime, I have not had more cups of tea then can be counted on two hands. The only one I truly remember was at a backyard fence next to the field where I was stacking and securing bales of straw on a trailer. She offered and I felt it was only polite to accept.

In this chapbook’s closing sequence of poems, A new feudalism, Andrew Nightingale does explore the tease / promise / deception / fantasy and ‘incurable hope’ of all of this as ‘The market with its deathless charm [which] has no aim, no foreseeable conclusion’.

We know this – and don’t we just, after the past few weeks of it marketing itself through the Sunak/Truss snakeoil extravaganzas – and poetry continues its struggle to illuminate and interrogate,

‘The feudalism of the muse has been replaced by the pornography of the banks.’

I corrupt that line to my purposes, but I think I am entitled to do so in The Market.

And this is my perplexed – delightfully so – reading of these eight pages of prose poem texts where ‘Whispers of doubt circulate in the square’ of their presentations: doubt and insights like ‘Keep showing us glorious private heavens in public spaces, the same secret desires written on pained faces’

What is so impenetrable about the obvious deceit and corruption? Is it really just ‘radio interference’? This sequence presents for me an intense look into the paradoxes and conflicts in what is so palpably controlling and destructive, the ‘Spirit voices’ and ‘private abysses.’

Back to tea and therefore Tea dance in nine songs, even with ten fingers (as I’ve indicated) I am unsure where to pitch my knowing. But I don’t need to: these are aural poems, if you simply listen, luxuriating in their aromas, as in 4. Lapsang Souchong,

‘Bewitched, oxidised and withered over pinewood fire,
Then ceremonial smoke and the fight begins,
The shaman’s tongue forks, she swallows the knife
And coils up into the air. She aspires for the West
Where she will tinge sunsets Krakatoan pink.’

There is a narrative thread across all nine of these and they really are quite elegant in the telling.

The day I had that cup of tea on the field-side of her fence is also when I foolishly burned my hands on the ropes I was knotting, sliding down in a hurry all those years ago.

There are poems possibly about coffee in Bean exiled and I suggest you delve into these with the other three intriguing sections to place yourself within the necessary personal grasp of a chapbook collection that does challenge and does reward.

You can get Denizen Disease here.

Men are ennobled
for their wisdom

eluding them.
But by what those

admirable
little
odious
vermin

perfect toward
procurement

I cannot but conclude
corruption.

(cut-up: Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift)

My thanks to IT and Rupert for posting my poem here today. Also thanks to Claire Palmer for the great image.

The writer
speaks to images
rather than craft

from which,
to look ahead,
is seen as professional.

The writer
chooses that
convenient moment

to believe
images choose me
slanting like a god across

his technical ability.
Professional,
he had seriously noted it

with inaccurate pride.

(cut-up: The End of the Affair – Graham Greene)

It was a wonderful early morning surprise – via my email feed – to find this close, thoughtful and appreciative review of my poetry collection Agri Culture by Rupert Loydell.  My sincere thanks to him for this reading, and to Tears in the Fence for sharing.

You can read it here.

America
got wind
they had died:

trying to influence
in a wasp’s nest,
they had been stung

dead –
hybrid, infidel
evil, this

wasp-Selection
buried America,
Darwin daisies

blooming beside
what they did.
Wasps!

Congregations of,
they believed in
their churches,

infidels,
a volcano of
evil

with never
a thought for Santa
or America.

(cut-up: USA – John Dos Passos)

Only a man who knows reason talks of
reasoning – that or he is French, unfathomably
French, knowing the limits of reason as a
paradox of principles, a thinking man at the
same time, but without a thinking machine.
The method of his is clear and commonplace,
French. The French electrify the world with
French thought: a machine cannot motor without
petrol. Starting any paradox from such a naked
state – if he is a French man at the same time – he
is carrying modern fatalism as a truism of
commonplace French thought. Nothing of motors
talks to reason, for that is brainless. Intelligence
is French; the paradox of the truism is nescience.

(cut-up/found: The Innocence of Father Brown – G.K. Chesterton)

The persons concerned in consideration of
finished pleasure have on certain occasions a
little eternity, a leisure in life of brilliant colours,
a dense pattern long upon the smooth ceremony
of unconscious sex. We should call it the
perfect dusk, known also as to ebb in these
circumstances, shadows of an old man who
smoked cigarettes when grown mellow on such
a privilege. On this occasion a part of the after-
noon was left, itself delightful, and time for tea
with his face turned to a large cup, and now a
little feast of a different quality at this interval
for an elder, and what had waned was with much
circumspection votaries of when shadows were.

(text-mix/found in: The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James)