Anand Prahlad

‘dreaming of endangered species.’ 

by Anand Prahlad. This beautiful book.  

I have been lucky – there maybe more to it than that – to get some first class poetry from the US via David Pike’s pulsarpoetry.com, for which I have been reviewing for a couple of years now.  This collection is as good as any new work I’ve come across. A rare piece of writing.  Review out in a few weeks, fanmail in the post. 

18.May.Unluckily formatting issues have left the pulsar review in poor shape. So: 

At first we meet with the poet embraced on a bed of pain, on the cusp of consciousness, articulating a sarcoma which he finds, at times, articulating him. Prahlad’s acutely worded dream-states strike the reader as risen images still directed to their source; in memory, or the memories of ancestors, the prophets and ‘hostile/ tribes / roaming jungles / of my marrow.’ As Lucifer appears in ‘My Bladder’s Dementia:’

You must be
the orchid
lipped one,
mad man lunatic
once favorite
prodigal cast out
you must be
the nimbus
cloud  steam
in the kitchen
a kiss, a clap
of thunder,
the wronged witness
the desperate one
my heart
warned me about
so far away
from home.

The verse bristles with insight and turmoils of the ‘f lesh’. Cocoon finishes:

                        …Am I still
here for real, am I dreaming,
are those wings I hear, an engine
turning, a drill, a door, is this sand
in the dry roof of my mouth, a hand
brushing against my arm, warmth?

At the halfway ‘Bridge,’ there is surgery, the amusing conceit of ‘My Life as a Banned Book’ then we surface in the world. Prahlad’s essentially generous disposition introduces a child’s beating, slave ghosts, the malicious, awful crime of ‘The Platoon’ ‘with whispers in my ears / of freckled boys / in bathroom stalls.’ Here are no vested rights, only realities of experience: sex, death, life in terms of wolves and junkyard, of diagnosis.

No hurry of direction in ‘dreaming of endangered species.’ If a restlessness emerges in the second half – the first so out of time one wouldn’t notice – perhaps it reflects speed of thought, a symptom of living which only makes the verse more human than sublime. The appetites and food on the kitchen table are universally shareable. It’s very fine work.

‘in the shadows / of my hand / a leaf / on bark / on your thigh / i see myself / in a dream / paralyzed / but i think / i can get up / and then / i think I am up. / i think i’m walking…’ 

Rattling good read

 I’m reading the latest pamphlet sent with Rattle, George Bilgere’s ‘Cheap Motels of my Youth.’ At the half way point, here’s a mildly acid report on a collection George picked up, with an airgun, from a cardboard moving box unopened for half a century. “An astonishingly debut” says the blurb. Hmm. The new poem, “Insult to Injury” has just the right tone for dealing a blow to, or taking a shot at, a brother poet. Very funny.

Coincidentally trying something like that for a dusty pamphlet I have just found in the bookcase, mildly disliked from years ago, I’m reminded the promotional excerpt on the new Rattle pamphlet was misleading. Perhaps I had been outmanoeuvred. The chapbook prize winner is better than the out-of-context lines taken from “Misting”

Each day brings more bad weather,
which is another way of saying
I’m in my sixties.  But here, in the frail
September morning, my hands tipped in fog,
the flowers lift their faces to me
with bright, mystifying questions,
and for once I have an answer.

It reads better when you understand misting, means… misting: a nozzle setting for watering flowers. I had failed the meaning and missed the ‘mystifying’ echo and pun, I thought we had a poetic device not followed through.  Too quick to judge.

Following ‘At the Carwash’ by Arthur Russell,  here is another collection of blank verse, commonplace reminiscences from a middle aged man.  The brutal thing itself!  And again it is at times, very touching and in all, totally worthwhile. A privilege to read.  Right up the editor’s street I guess.

Rattle’s Timothy Green is a hard-working editor and a powerfully good essayist on poets. His interview pieces in the journal keep me entering the competitions while pretty sure my only success will be the subscription that comes with the fee.  

God knows, accessible, clear-headed writing should be lauded above the common stock. Still, better than the straightforward, confessional writings of mature men, I would submit, if I dared, that Poetry offers something more spiritual, more universally embracing, when it is on track, that is more mystical. And this sort of thing is not. Hey ho, I send submissions, regret my failings at leisure, happy with my lot.

See Rattle Chapbooks 

Randall Jarrell

 A Chekhov fan, a good poet. I came back to 'Randall Jarrell Selected Poems' looking for a humorous lesson from the master that might inform my review-writing with pulsarpoetry. I had forgotten the impact and delicate precision of his verse, also the quantity of childhood recollection this slim, green volume contains... that dual perspective, so popular now - Tim Rice on the radio saying it's all happened by 10 - offers a way of engagement used here with the stable, keen-edged vocabulary of a passing age.  

Jarrell then, sits well with current companions Mandelstam and Rumi. and CGJung.  Blessings be among them.

Rom

A great sadness to hear Nnorom Azuonye has passed away.  Poet and pastor, founder of Sentinel Quarterly he promoted Nigerian literature for more than 20 years and gave many local poets an encouraging lift with SQL and his quarterly competitions which were the model arrangement of such things.  Along the way he published my first submitted poems and then, a few years later, invited and accepted my first manuscript.  He put me squarely on the first stepping stones of my poetry writing. 

A generous, sympathetic and good man. He could talk alright, and I will miss our conversations.

Nnorom died on 21 January and leaves behind his wife Thelma and four children whom he loved very much.

The Party Wall

Pyramus and Thisbe: prompted by last night's rain, a thought led to the marionettes in the oddly poignant 'Being John Malkovich'. One google string leads to another. The Pyramus and Thisbe Society is a body of surveyors and lawyers and, on special occasions, their spouses.

Mari...

full poem once accepted somewhere maybe 

...my bones are dead.
No cell retains a strand of life
to edge me on the infinite...
   a corpse of balsa boxes fixed
with glue and pin

The more i think of it, the more the history of creating the animate comes to mind, from Pygmalion and Galatea to Shakespeare's human statue and Pinocchio, then Shaw's rather awful funny version of improvement, and a thousand cautionary tales current today. Aye, AI.  The captured human heart.

 

November 23

 With other cares aside,  appearances and reviews multiply this month, 3rd of 3 city walk poems accepted by Stepaway Outreach, hard on the heels of By Royal Fort, taken for the inaugural edition, i think, of Engine Idling. Station to Station will be in the Gloucestershire Poetry Prize anthology published sometime over winter.  Gee, Glos is a hard nut to crack.  The Worst Thing appears in the Ofi Press #73. And the Raoul Julia Dracula pictured above is the cover of The Crank #9. 

This month's Pulsar reviews will / i understand they will / include my splutterings on a book of poems by Matthias Goritz translated from the German by Mary Jo Bang.  I thoroughly recommend it to anyone looking for the current direction in poetry, or for a new direction of their own.  And finally,

ACTIVIST ALPHABET, an exhibition of prints and poems by Christine Felce includes 'A memorable evening of poetry with with Adam Horovitz JLM Morton and Dominic James, plus open mic on the theme of climate change (sign up on the night) 7pm, Friday 17 November, The Museum in the Park, Stroud. 

The Sergeant

As i pick my way through bishops and presbyters of the ancient Christian church: a few lighter thoughts on earlier days of sacrifice and excess bubble to the surface.  As a for instance, Alcoholic Husbands is a phrase i hear quite often. Poor men who once were heavy drinkers. 

I have a long picked over, short verse on Achilles - The Sergeant - in this week's dearbooze.com and the young god of wine will soon recline on his drunken ship in The Crank, Back on the Wine Dark Sea.  

Dear Booze eh? This montage includes Bruegel's Tower as i am put in mind of my early and not-unbalanced verse on grog and separation. 'I recall the vaults of Babel, its palm wine jars and mead...' Skol.