Primers Volume One E-Book

Geraldine Clarkson

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 56

Beschreibung

In 2015, The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press launched a nationwide scheme to find exciting new voices in poetry with Kathryn Maris and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, a final four poets emerged as clear choices: Geraldine Clarkson, Lucy Ingrams, Maureen Cullen and Katie Griffiths. Primers: Volume One now collects together a taster of poems from each of the four new poets. The brilliant chemistry of their poems proves to be a heady mix and a memorable journey – from post-war correspondents to foster families, breath-taking natural landscapes to strange, unsettling dream-like narratives and so much more in between. There's plenty here to delight and dazzle, and ample evidence of a bright future ahead for contemporary poetry, as these striking and bold new voices demonstrate.

Leseprobe

Primers

Volume One

Primers Volume One

Geraldine Clarkson, Maureen Cullen, Katie Griffiths and Lucy Ingrams

Selected by Kathryn Maris and Jane Commane

ISBN: 978-1-911027-03-4

Copyright © the individual authors.

Primers logo design by 3 Men and a Suit

www.3men.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The individual authors have asserted their rights under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published April 2016 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre,

Great Central Way, Rugby.

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in Britain by:

Imprint Digital

www.imprintdigital.com

Primers Volume One

is supported by and produced in partnership with:

About the Editors:

Kathryn Maris is a poet from New York City who now lives in London. She has published two collections (God Loves You and The Book of Jobs) and a pamphlet, 2008 (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Granta, Poetry, Ploughshares, The New Statesman, The Pushcart Prize Anthology and The Best British Poetry. She teaches at the Poetry School.

Jane Commane is a poet, editor at Nine Arches Press, and co-editor for Under the Radar magazine. Born in Coventry and living in Warwickshire, Jane was recently selected to join the 2016-17 cohort of Writing West Midlands’ Room 204 Writer Development Programme. Her poems have featured in Iota, The Morning Star, And Other Poems, Tears in the Fence, Best British Poetry andin Lung Jazz: Young British Poets for Oxfam.

Contents

Foreword by Julia Bird

Geraldine Clarkson

that light

Podcarp

Camelament

Leaving Glawdom by night –

Violette, Michaela et al, according to Mildred

My Mother, the Monsoon

Queen Tamp

When we awake

Love Cow

When tooraloos were taboo,

a young woman undressed me and

Declare

Maureen Cullen

A Case o Fraud

Annalise’s Stars

Revolving Door

New Shoes

On Two Wheels

Owl

Apprentice

Wee Wifie

Scots Rose

Dreaming Mum

Milk Tooth

The Sisters

Strangers

The Thin Place

Saumon

The Gloamin

Katie Griffiths

Capo

The Friends You Keep

The Road to Split

The Knight of Swords

A Lack of Minarets

Dashboard

The Urbane Terrorist

Leaving

A Haircut for Radovan Karadžiæ Before the International War Crimes Tribunal

A Village Priest and I Watch the Solar Eclipse Through the Safety of a Kitchen Colander

Tips for a Post-War Correspondent

Soil

I Waved my Placard

Words for Sorrow

Lucy Ingrams

Signs

June

A hearting space

So will there be apples?

August letter

Slow air

Stonechat’s song

Leaf litter

Snow tide

In the half light,

Pinkfoots

Spate

Some things starlings are sensitive to:

Blue hour

Acknowledgements

Foreword

What a volume you hold in your hands! The Poetry School is incredibly excited to be associated with it. As an organisation, we are dedicated to fostering the skills of poets of all levels – from beginners attending their first workshop to experienced writers finding their own readership. Primers is our first big project in a long time which has helped new poets’ work into print, and we are very pleased to have forged the relationship with Nine Arches Press which enables this to happen.

Even if you work in the arts and it says ‘poetry’ on your business cards, the office-based intricacies of a project such as Primers are mostly administrative. Does the budget balance, is the marketing effective, can we make the online submissions process work? Stealing time to read through the manuscripts in a pile on the desk is the point at which we remember what all the admin support has been in aid of. Encountering ‘Queen Tamp’ or ‘Owl’, ‘Dashboard’ or ‘August letter’ for the first time and feeling them nudge the axis of our perspective for just a moment was a total privilege. Our thanks to Jane Commane and Kathryn Maris for the keen editorial judgement which brought these writers to our attention.

Congratulations to Geraldine, Maureen, Katie and Lucy – it’s been our pleasure to work with Nine Arches and Kathryn to introduce their work to a wider audience. We’ve no doubt that this book will be the first of many with their names on the spines, and we will watch their bibliographies expand with pride. This volume is the start of a series of Nine Arches Press/ Poetry School collaborative publications. Poets everywhere – we hope you find pleasure, provocation and inspiration within its pages.

Julia Bird,

The Poetry School.

For further information about Primers and future opportunties as part of this pubishing and mentoring scheme organised by The Poetry School with Nine Arches Press, please see: www.poetryschool.com

Geraldine Clarkson

Geraldine Clarkson’spoems have appeared widely in magazines, including in The Poetry Review,The Rialto and Poetry. She is a former Arvon / Jerwood mentee and winner of the Escalator Prize. In 2015, she won the Poetry London and Ambit competitions, as well as the Ver Poets Prize, the Magma Editors’ Prize, and the Anne Born Prize. She was commended in the 2015 National Poetry Competition, and her first pamphlet is forthcoming from smith/doorstop in the Laureate’s Choice series.

Publishers are sometimes inclined to reduce poets to a saleable blurb, as in ‘This poet writes about [fill in autobiographical detail, misfortune or event]’ but Geraldine Clarkson cannot be reduced: there is no straightforward ‘about’. Clarkson converts unspecified grief, salvation and joy into exhilarating, whimsical music by way of her dynamic and transformative imagination. Her capacity to communicate abstract and fragmentary experience in an aurally thrilling manner is a rare gift. And while her poems take formal risks, they also suggest discipline and mastery, evoking a wide range of influences from Hopkins to Carson. Her poems invite and endure rereading, and her subject matter—elusive, dark and primal—produces in the reader a state of simultaneous discomfort and euphoria.

that light

they said I should go towards the light—

the last thing I wanted—that all-vacating

white, and I was a stone or two

overweight with tar and muck

I needed more time to work off

—a year, a month, if we’re bargaining—

give me a hole, a wet gulley

to wait in, to rinse my tarry shoes

shrive me, and I will consult again

the gold-edged pages of my Imitation

the millionstarry oblivion

which made my 13-year-old heart

gallop into gloom—renounce renounce—

a startling bouncy break with pain

blandishments to let go and in one swoop

the pain stops, while voices far off

drown and I wave as happy

as a spider in lilied bullied twilight

riddling light comes up to my ankles

that’s okay, you get used to icecapped toes