Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Bulletin E-Book

• Herausgeber: Poetry Book Society
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 67

Beschreibung

The Poetry Book Society was founded by T.S. Eliot in 1953 to "propagate the art of poetry". The Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Bulletin features a wide range of exciting new poetry publications, reviewed by expert poet selectors Sandeep Parmar, Vidyan Ravinthiran, George Szirtes, AB Jackson, Degna Stone and Anthony Anaxagorou. This issue includes reviews of the PBS Choice Rachael Allen's debut collection Kingdomland and PBS Recommendations Rebecca Tamás' WITCH, Amish Trivedi's Your Relationship to Motion has Changed, Jane Yeh's Discipline and Elizabeth Sennitt Clough's At or Below Sea Level, as well as exclusive interviews with these poets and samples of their poetry. This Bulletin also features the winning poems of the PBS & Mslexia Women's Poetry Competition, reviews of all new poetry releases and extensive listings of new publications. This is the essential guide to the world of contemporary poetry.

Leseprobe

*

so dark it nightly

turns the forest blue

- Rachael Allen

FOUNDED BY T S ELIOT 1953

SPRING 2019 NO. 260

CONTENTS

CHOICE

Rachael Allen • Kingdomland • Faber

RECOMMENDATIONS

Elisabeth Sennitt Clough • At or Below Sea Level • Paper Swans Press

Rebecca Tamás • WITCH • Penned in the Margins

Amish Trivedi • Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed • Shearsman

Jane Yeh • Discipline • Carcanet

SPECIAL COMMENDATION

Marilyn Hacker • Blazons: New and Selected Poems • Carcanet

RECOMMENDED TRANSLATION

Mariano Peyrou • The Year of the CrabTranslated by Terence Dooley • Shearsman

PAMPHLET CHOICE

Igor Klikovac• Stockholm SyndromeTranslated byJohn McAuliffe • Smith | Doorstop

WILD CARD

Fiona Benson • Vertigo & Ghost • Cape

MSLEXIA & PBS WOMEN'S POETRY COMPETITION

REVIEWS

LISTINGS

CHOICERECOMMENDATIONSPECIAL COMMENDATIONSELECTORS

SANDEEP PARMAR& VIDYAN RAVINTHIRAN

TRANSLATION SELECTOR

GEORGE SZIRTES

PAMPHLET SELECTORS

A.B. JACKSON& DEGNA STONE

WILD CARD SELECTOR

ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU

CONTRIBUTORS

SOPHIE O'NEILLNATHANIEL SPAIN

EDITORIAL & DESIGN

ALICE KATE MULLEN

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LETTER FROM THE PBS

Official hats-off to our poet selectors who have the wonderful, yet unenviable, task of making our quarterly selections. It is always reassuring to see these selections go on to receive prize recognition, so congratulations to Hannah Sullivan, our Spring 2018 Recommendation, for winning the T.S. Eliot prize in January.

In this Spring Bulletin we showcase both home-grown and international talent. We hope you will find the choices both inspiring and challenging. We always appreciate your feedback and thoughts on the Choice and the further selections.

Also featured in this edition are the top three poems of the PBS & Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition which was announced in December. Sincere thanks to this year’s judge Carol Ann Duffy, and to all of you who submitted poems. The judge’s report and twenty longlisted poems have all been published on our website, so please do seek them out to read.

This Bulletin will be launched in Newcastle on Thursday 21st March in partnership with NCLA; Rachael Allen (Spring Choice) and Rebecca Tamás (Recommendation) will be performing their work. This is bound to be a sell-out event, so please do book tickets as soon as you read this note via our website!

Please also return to the North from 1st – 4th May for the Newcastle Poetry Festival, on the theme of Transformations, and the Northern Poetry Symposium on Inter / Play on the 2nd May at Sage, Gateshead. We love our home city, so if you do plan to travel to Newcastle to attend, we’d be delighted to give you our recommendations on places to visit or see surrounding the Festival.

Finally, we’re delighted to announce we have a Guest Book Selector for the Summer Bulletin. Andrew McMillan will be replacing Vidyan Ravinthiran for this edition as Vidyan’s own collection will be published in that quarter.

SOPHIE O’NEILL

PBS and Inpress Director

PBS CHOICE: RACHAEL ALLEN

Rachael Allen was born in Cornwall and studied at Goldsmiths College. Nights of Poor Sleep, a collaboration with the painter Marie Jacotey, was published as a co-authored artists’ book in 2017 by Test Centre. She is poetry editor at Granta and co-founder of poetry press clinic and online journal tender. She has received a Northern Writers’ Award and an Eric Gregory Award and is currently studying for a PhD in poetry.

KINGDOMLAND

FABER | £10.99 | PBS PRICE £8.25– PBS CHOICE, SPRING 2019

What connects the vulnerability of women to the fragility of the environment? Rachael Allen’s Kingdomland stages the destructive and generative forces of desire amid the violence and consumption of everyday spaces: homes, kitchens, cafés and quiet seaside towns. Intimacies between families and lovers overlap with the disturbing realisations of our fleshly selves in tense, eruptive moments of lyric. Allen’s particularly English girlhood is dark and complex, and the girls and women that inhabit the book’s three poem sequences, ‘Nights of Poor Sleep’, ‘The Girls of Situations’ and ‘Landscape for a Dead Woman’ are familiarly strange, near as well as remote in their needs, wants and suffering. The book’s title poem is an apocalyptic network of images – an England that deploys a haunting violence of surfaces.

The dark village sits on the crooked hill.

There is a plot of impassable paths towards it,

impassable paths overcome with bees,

the stigma that bees bring.

There is a bottle neck at the base of the hive.

There is an impassable knowledge that your eyebrows bring.

Beside the poor library and the wicker-man,

there’s a man who sells peacock feathers on the roundabout,

they scream all night from where they are plucked.

The village is slanted, full of tragedies with slate.

‘Landscape for a Dead Woman’ is written in memory of Lesley Larner, a woman who was stabbed to death by her partner in London. Allen gives us a harrowing indictment of the extremes of a misogynist culture. Femicide, a crime most often committed by the victim’s partner or a close relative, refracts from multiple angles of fear, grief and intimacy:

sweet, insignificant

chatter in the distance

a bad husband loitering

in the kitchen of my mind: damp

There is innocence here and transcendence, often tender sometimes brutal. Ultimately Allen’s devastating exploration of female vulnerability is inset within an aesthetic of response: to recognise and be accountable for human experience.

- Sandeep Parmar, PBS Selector

RACHAEL ALLEN

I wrote the title poem in Kingdomland 8 years before the book was published. From the point of writing this poem, I had the vague idea that I wanted subsequent poems to create a larger, invented, alternative universe, a feeling

that strengthened the more poems I wrote.

It’s strange to see the product of 8 or so years’ work compacted together in one document, like they’ve been in a car crusher. I have lived in 12 different houses since I wrote the earliest poem in Kingdomland, and when I flick through the book, I think about all the things that happened to inform the work, and the poems operate as memory triggers for me – I wrote this one at this desk, I wrote this one on that train. Poems I wrote while family members were still alive – innocent poems – and poems I wrote in the slipstream of their deaths. These later, knowing poems look on at the early poems in a kind of pity, although of course the poems are and aren’t necessarily “about” any particular thing.

I wanted to create something slightly external to a reality, which arguably all poems are, but when I visualised it, I saw the book like a planet, a self-contained small galaxy, a carnival mirror gateway that held familiar and recognisable occasions in it, but warped and fluorescent. I don’t have an epigraph for the book because I could never find one that felt as though it would suit the book in its entirety. But a sentence by my favourite horror writer Thomas Ligotti remains in my mind as necessary to the completion of the book, and as a reason for the urge to build a world: “The only value of this world lay in its power – at certain times – to suggest another world.”

RACHAEL RECOMMENDS

Michael Earl Craig,