In Transit E-Book

• Herausgeber: The Emma Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: The Emma Press Poetry Anthologies
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 57

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Travelling from one place to another is never as simple as getting from A to B. Whether you're sailing in a stately cruise liner or running for a grimy commuter train, your mode of transport affects the way you look at the things around you. Travel can even make us question who we are at home: will we be the same person at the other end of the journey? The poems in this anthology look at the ways in which travelling can change us, whether we enjoy or endure it. They take in not only day-trippers and business travellers, but characters who are forced to voyage against their will, as well as those with no choice but to stay put. Whatever your destination, this book is a companion for the journey, exploring the nuances of the strange state of being in transit.

Leseprobe

INTRANSIT

POEMSOFTRAVEL

OTHER TITLES FROM THE EMMA PRESS

POETRYANTHOLOGIES

This Is Not Your Final Form: Poems about Birmingham

The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts

The Emma Press Anthology of Love

Some Cannot Be Caught: The Emma Press Book of Beasts

BOOKSFORCHILDREN

Moon Juice, by Kate Wakeling

The Noisy Classroom, by Ieva Flamingo

Queen of Seagulls, by Rūta Briede

The Book of Clouds, by Juris Kronbergs

PROSEPAMPHLETS

Postcard Stories, by Jan Carson

First fox, by Leanne Radojkovich

The Secret Box, by Daina Tabūna

Me and My Cameras, by Malachi O’Doherty

POETRYPAMPHLETS

Dragonish, by Emma Simon

Pisanki, by Zosia Kuczyńska

Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real, by Padraig Regan

Paisley, by Rakhshan Rizwan

THEEMMAPRESSPICKS

The Dragon and The Bomb, by Andrew Wynn Owen

Meat Songs, by Jack Nicholls

Birmingham Jazz Incarnation, by Simon Turner

Bezdelki, by Carol Rumens

THEEMMAPRESS

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by the Emma Press Ltd

Poems copyright © individual copyright holders 2018

Selection copyright © Sarah Jackson and Tim Youngs 2018

All rights reserved.

The right of Sarah Jackson and Tim Youngs to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-910139-94-3

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International, Padstow.

The Emma Press

theemmapress.com

[email protected]

Jewellery Quarter, Birmingham, UK

EDITORS’ FOREWORD

There, through the last of the sentences, just there—through the last of the sentences, the road—

 —Carolyn Forché, ‘Travel Papers’ (2011)

Whether they are local or global, made by foot or by ferry, we tend to look upon journeys in terms of departure and arrival. However much we enjoy or endure it, travel is often understood simply as a means of getting from one place to another. But what happens en route? Do journeys change or confirm us? And what happens when we are forced to travel, or when we have no choice but to stay put? These questions are at the heart of this anthology. Whatever the scale of the journey, whether international or close to home, the poems in this collection explore the experience of being in transit.

Travel writing is usually thought of as a prose genre, yet the relationship between poetry and travel is deep and ancient. From Homer’s The Odyssey to Dr. Seuss’s ‘Oh, The Places You’ll Go’, movement is inherent in poetic form. As others have noted, the word ‘verse’ has its etymological roots in the turn of the plough; ‘stanza’ is a station or stopping-place. Metre is employed to convey not only the rhythms of breath and speech but also those of motion. Punctuation controls the pace of reading and the location and duration of the pause; rhyme returns us. Poems reshape the journey and are uniquely able to move through time and place in a compressed space.

In our call for this anthology, which is a collaboration between the Emma Press and Nottingham Trent University’s Centre for Travel Writing Studies, we asked for contributions that dealt with the experience of being in transit. We were especially interested in how the fact of being in motion affects our sense of identity, our relationship with others, and our perspective on our surroundings. We wanted to see how the mode of transport impacts on these factors and how it might influence the shape as well as the content of each poem.

Trains were by far the most popular means of transport in our submissions, followed by aeroplanes and then boats. There were walks, though fewer than we expected. Bicycles and motorcycles, buses and trams scarcely figured. We were surprised by how very little the car featured, considering its status as probably the most common form of mechanised transport in the industrialised West.

Several of the poems are set in the speaker’s destination but show that the journey continues long after arrival. Whatever the setting, the mode or the scale of the journey, these poems demonstrate how physical travel can open up new ways of perceiving, relating, thinking and feeling. Undertaken for reasons of leisure, work, family, forced exile or willed migration, movement reflects and helps constitute who we are.

The journey undergoes a further transition, of course, when it is crafted for the page. Whether in traditional form or in free verse, epiphanic or wholly mundane, the poetic treatment of travel both continues and recrafts it, as does each reading.

SARAHJACKSONANDTIMYOUNGS

APRIL 2018

CONTENTS

Vantage point, by Susannah Hart

Always pleasing this quarter sun, by Lila Matsumoto

Beijing, by David Tait

Catherine spread the map on the bed, by Miranda Peake

Japeth’s stuff, by William Roychowdhury

Sleeper, by Rory Waterman

Balloonist, by Peter Surkov

Family Reunion, March 2001, by Zayneb Allak

Walnuts, by Rich Goodson

Short Stay, by Susannah Hart

Square Dancing the Adriatic, by Colleen J. McElroy

South, by Zayneb Allak

Creeks and Culverts of New Zealand, by Ilse Pedler

Taverna, by Jane McKie

Alligator, by Anna Kisby

The Girls from Maynard’s, by Nick Littler

The Long Flight Home, by Shara Lessley

Travelling on the 10.21 with Tom Hardy, by Maria Taylor

[Watford Gap], by Andrew Taylor

Postcard, by Fiona Moore

West Highland, by Sharon Black

Empty Quarter, by Rosie Garland

The Sight to See, by Colleen J. McElroy

France, by Miranda Peake

Halfway to Voronezh, by Charlotte Eichler

Train to Cambridge, by Jeremy Wikeley

Epicentres, by Rory Waterman

The romance of men in boats, by Miranda Peake

Reading the Water, by Nancy Campbell

Quayside, by Rich Goodson

Men in Water, by Andy Eaton

Herring Gurl, by Rebecca Violet White

Aboard the Grey Ghost, by Simon Williams

Чайка, by Alex Toms

Stopper on the Poacher Line, by Jo Dixon

Dual Gauge, by Vicky Sparrow

Copenhagen to Stockholm, by Cliff Yates

Georg Rides the U-Bahn, by Fiona Larkin

Thirty-Eight Thousand Feet, by Claire Collison

Red-eye, by Cheryl Pearson

The Crow and the Dove Take Your Shape, by Anna Kisby

Uptown, by Jeanette Burton

Walking, by Baiba Bièole

Portrait of my father as Joseph Cornell, by Andrea Robinson

Return, by Rebecca Gethin

If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now, by David Tait

The Blue, by David Tait

In Dyeliva, by Peter Surkov

La Pive, by Yvonne Reddick

Gods, Cabo de São Vicente, Portugal, by Jane McKie

Little Blue Truck, by George David Clark

Acknowledgements

About the editors

About the authors

SUSANNAHHART

Vantage point

Impossible these days to believe in the sky,

the way it dissipates on contact,

its vanishing trick.

Believe rather in the bas-relief below,

in the scarcely visible contour lines

mapping the hills.