This Is Not Your Final Form E-Book

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

Seitenzahl: 54

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This Is Not Your Final Form showcases the best of Birmingham: a rich, varied and vibrant city capable of inspiring a range of contemporary poetic responses. This anthology, bringing together entries from the inaugural Verve Poetry Festival Competition, depicts a second city which is no longer content to play second fiddle. Poets take on the area's musical past, its complex industrial history, its unique blend of architectural styles and the experiences of its many immigrant communities. Writers celebrate the lives of significant figures, from Matthew Boulton to Benjamin Zephaniah, and ordinary Brummies alike. Ranging from spoken word-inspired pieces to more traditional styles, much of the work collected here channels the energy and the political anger that runs like a seam through centuries of Birmingham history. Taken together, This Is Not Your Final Form is a tough, unsentimental love letter to the Midlands metropolis, which finds beauty in concrete and unity in contradiction.

Leseprobe

This Is Not Your Final Form

Poems about Birmingham

Other books from the Emma Press

POETRYANTHOLOGIES

The Emma Press Anthology of Dance

Slow Things: Poems about Slow Things

The Emma Press Anthology of Age

Mildly Erotic Verse

Urban Myths and Legends: Poems about Transformations

The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea

POETRYCOLLECTIONSFORCHILDREN

Falling Out of the Sky: Poems about Myths and Monsters

Watcher of the Skies: Poems about Space and Aliens

Moon Juice, by Kate Wakeling

The Noisy Classroom, by Ieva Flamingo (July 2017)

THEEMMAPRESSPICKS

The Flower and the Plough, by Rachel Piercey

The Emmores, by Richard O’Brien

The Held and the Lost, by Kristen Roberts

Captain Love and the Five Joaquins, by John Clegg

Malkin, by Camille Ralphs

DISSOLVE to: L.A., by James Trevelyan

Meat Songs, by Jack Nicholls

POETRYPAMPHLETS

True Tales of the Countryside, by Deborah Alma

AWOL, by John Fuller and Andrew Wynn Owen

Goose Fair Night, by Kathy Pimlott

Mackerel Salad, by Ben Rogers

Trouble, by Alison Winch

Dragonish, by Emma Simon

ABOUTTHECOVERIMAGE

This is the head of the 7ft pink gorilla sculpture created in 2016 by Birmingham Originals, a team of local makers who sell items on Etsy. The people of Birmingham were then invited to help with the pinkification of the gorilla at the City of Colours festival. The sculpture pays homage to the famous King Kong statue by Nicholas Monro, which stood in Birmingham in the 1970s. The photo was taken by Lee Allen Photography.

You can find out more about Birmingham Originals here: www.birminghamoriginals.co.uk

You can read about the original statue in Nick Knibb’s poem on page 38.

THEEMMAPRESS

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by the Emma Press Ltd

Poems © individual copyright holders 2017Selection © Richard O’Brien and Emma Wright 2017Introduction © Richard O’Brien 2017

Illustrations © Emma Wright 2017

Cover image © Lee Allen 2017

All rights reserved.

The right of Richard O’Brien and Emma Wright to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN978-1-910139-60-8

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]

Birmingham, UK

Contents

Introduction, by Richard O’Brien

Beorma, by Gregory Leadbetter

The middle is where the future started, by Rishi Dastidar

Rainbows under Birmingham, by Cheryl Pearson

Duddeston Viaduct, 1930, by Margaret Adkins

Washday, by Bernadette Lynch

To a Mellotron, by David Clarke

A Storybook City, by Maya Stokes (aged 14)

My friend the heron, by Bernard Davis

Crow Flight (Oldbury), by Natalie Burdett

Birmingham: An Odyssey in 21 Images, by Shaun Hand

Versioning, by John McGhee

Notes on the VERVE competition winners, by Hannah Silva

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, by Susannah Dickey

CBSO, by Jenna Clake

The Rowan Tree, by Gill Learner

Hero, by Tessa Foley

Hot Top, by Ali-Noor Salam (aged 8)

Birmingham – some advice, by Rob Walton

The Cake, by Louise Vale

Never in a rain of pig’s pudding, by Jill Munro

‘More canals than Venice!’ by Kibriya Mehrban

Bring Back King Kong, by Nick Knibb

Floozie, by Rachael Nicholas

Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm Tree? by Helen Rehman

Return of the King, by Keith Chandler

Wild West Midlands, by Nellie Cole

My City, by Nusayba Nabeel (aged 10)

January, by Charlotte Wetton

Summertime, by Roz Goddard

In the Bullring: Afterimage of my Parents, by Heather Freckleton

Postcards, by Jennifer Edwards

One more frozen orange juice, by Carole Bromley

Another Day in a Brummie Life, by Reza Arabpour

Toll Plaza Queen, by Victoria Gatehouse

About the poets

About the editors

About the Emma Press

Also from the Emma Press

Introduction

In 1988, Prince Charles offered an infamously withering assessment of Birmingham Central Library: the building, he said, looked like ‘a place where books are incinerated, not kept’. Almost thirty years later, the last vestiges of John Madin’s Brutalist structure await demolition in Chamberlain Square and a new flagship library stands in its place, its futuristic blue and gold shining defiantly in the face of heavy debts and funding cuts. As the title of this anthology – a line from John McGhee’s poem ‘Versioning’ – reminds us, the landscape of the city is never static, ever changing.

Though hubs of traditional industry have closed, the creative energy behind them remains. Birmingham, in the words of Gregory Leadbetter’s ‘Beorma’, is still ‘sprung at its own making’. And the city’s literary culture isn’t bound up in the travails of either library: entries to the inaugural VERVE poetry competition, from which we have compiled this anthology, contained work which looked back at the past and forward to the future. The result is a book which captures the city’s unique blend of Victorian optimism, concrete revisionism and contemporary self-propulsion. Beneath it all runs the occasional glimmer of older, stranger light, threaded through the cityscape like the old canals (or the buried seashells in Cheryl Pearson’s beguiling ‘Rainbows Under Birmingham’).

Poets featured here respond to all aspects of the built environment, capturing towpaths and viaducts, sun shining through cathedral windows and ‘Discarded office blocks / Near the top of Dale End’ alike. They draw inspiration from a much-mourned gorilla statue, and a soldier returning from war on the 36 tram. The cover image – a hot pink reinvention of the lost King Kong for a public art project conceived by the Jewellery Quarter’s Frilly Industries – testifies to the Brummie passion for rebirth.

Stories of social and industrial history sit alongside evocative personal tales, in which Birmingham appears as a point of origin, a destination, and a passing place in equal measure. The city promises new life and ‘cloud cover’ to first-generation immigrants, ‘leaving Kashmir/just as the world begins to shrink’, but also inspires fantasies of escape. Rain induces existential despair, children in narrow streets are transported by Wild West shows, and even Dhruva Mistry’s fountain sculpture in Victoria Square – known locally as ‘the Floozie in the Jacuzzi’ – might entertain her own ‘dreams/of leaving’.