Delighted to have two of my found prose poems in the current Train Poetry Journal, riding with like-minded traveling companions. Thank you D.W.

Found in yesterday’s Christmas messages from the Queen and Danny Dyer:

I don’t know of
peace on earth
or nothin’ –

it’s just dog’s spewed
palaver, smashing the gaffe
to pieces.

Peace?
On earth?

Even the power of faith
is getting all mardy,
memorials to tribalism
and wars,

the British of them
being told the birth of a child
is why loved ones died.

Perhaps, goodwill to all is never to turn up
at the tribalism of memorials
marked Christmas Day?

It ain’t known
if we did not love
in needs of the times in
the first such meetings

when in reality
baffling paradoxes
of a capacity for evil
and a huge propensity
for good

are comfort and reassurance:
a Christmas pretty full on.

I believe messages
are theoretical explanations
for the puzzles
of getting all mardy

and now billions
follow celebrations.

It makes me want to
whack the birthday of the Prince of ages ago.

One of the strongest albums of 2018 – a beautiful/ugly musical evocation of our dislocated times.

The opening ‘vinyl’ static and scratch in Quorum of a stuck-in-a-groove sound signals more than the sibilance of this sentence. It is the noise that will battle the trio’s usual sweet harmonies throughout this pulsating album, the sound augmented by a deepened volume and its insistence on so many tracks. It is a triumph of such a combination, fully realised in the beautiful-ugly track Always Trying to Work it Out where the sweet drone and pulse is perfected into a loop of gorgeous harmony and fading inandout distortion.

In a world thrown totally awry by the politics of madness, there is something metaphorically sustaining in how Low retain their core beauty within the onslaught of the penetrating and perpetrating noise. Such sound is always percolating around and within, an ambience that unsettles until a snatch or layered or even more permanent melodicism asserts itself. Tracks like The Son, The Son is a re-invention of Thus Spoke Zarathustra launching the potted history of man’s inhumanity in A Space Odyssey, followed by the sweetly strummed guitar and peacefulness of Dancing and Fire – these poles of a world in conflict with itself, Mimi Parker in angelic vocal even as the song inevitably gets more heated.

A stunning, significant sound for our times.

This is no doubt a little self-indulgent, but my dear, wise and perceptive friend Jackie Moore has always taken a keen, supportive interest in my poetry.

In October she contributed observations on my poem Happy Birthday STC posted here, and consequently on Coleridge himself which are, as ever, insightful – and I mean about STC – as well as generous about what she reads in my writing. These observations were in the comment section of blog postings, and separated across three entries.

In blog-tidying today, I have amalgamated these and am sharing:

‘I was absorbed into this poem, especially as I recognise the Sonnet to the River Otter. The mood is complex, instantaneously summoning the unsullied joy of the youth, seeing and being surrounded by beauty where the music is enchanting with visions of vitality in those translucent waters. Yet there are shadows of future unhappiness and care; perhaps some autobiographical touches. Yes, indeed, genius rests on the overcoming of the present for the universal, of an individual absorbed into the human situation where sadness probably dominates joy. The boy Coleridge was absorbed watching the river’s leaps; as a man, he numbered cares until he found a way to silence such misery.

I wondered if the lyric on ‘light’ had any connections with the ‘light’ tones and hues of this poem? Numbering its light leaps!

For me, this is when he was at his pantheistic purity, at one spiritually with Nature and happiness and whatever God played its part in this, though many wiser people then me point to his Christian orthodoxy, perhaps later than when this was written, and to his Theological writings and so on – I cling to the idea of this entirely creative spirituality even if it is simply because that’s what I want to believe!

The image of the ‘ducks and drakes’ is ingenious and apt. Things which gave such delight when Coleridge – universally ‘us’ – was young change over time, becoming those threatening and rather sinister elements which are submerged in our minds as we grow older – always disturbing, menacing. In fact this poem may well suggest mutability, how changes are wrought over the passage of time, seldom in an ameliorative sense. This brings to mind Thomas a Kempis’s warning [sic] ‘Transit Gloria Mundi’. All too often as we age, it is the spiritual element which enriches and sustains, as in Mike’s poetry. I think this could be a link with the initial prose poem [here] about colours: unstable, changing, calm and threatening.’

Thank you Jackie.

Poetry collections I have reviewed in 2018:

New York Hotel – Ian Seed, Shearsman Books

Ways of Looking – David Grubb, smith/doorstop

Box – David H.W. Grubb, Like This Press

White Noise – Rupert Loydell, zimZalla

Swamp Kiss – Colin Herd, The Red Ceilings Press

Subsequent Death – Aaron Kent, zimZalla

“let’s do it” late poems – Jim Burns, The Black Light Engine Room Press

poems for Grenfell Tower, The Onslaught Press

hilda doolittle’s carl jung t-shirt – Charlie Bayliss, erbacce-press

Broken Stories – Reuben Woolley, 20/20 Vision Publishing

Distances – Ian Seed, The Red Ceilings Press

Contextual Studies – Rupert Loydell, Broken Sleep Books

The Unmoving – Maria Stadnicka, Broken Sleep Books

My Converted Father – Sarah Law, Broken Sleep Books

Items – Martin Stannard, The Red Ceilings Press

Exchangeable Bonds – Justin Jamail, Hanging Loose Press

The True Account of Captain Love and the Five Joaquins – John Clegg, The Emma Press

My Life as a Painter – Matthew Sweeney, Bloodaxe Books

some times we are heroes – reuben woolley, corrupt press

Click on a book title to read review. Not that it matters, but poetry collections  published in 2018 are in the significant majority here – a few of the reviews are of older books. There are others I wanted/intended to review, but perhaps another time.