Poetry lately: Sherlock Holmes, Gardens, Coffee...

I tried to imagine what my own presence in the poetry world would look like if it were a place. The image that came to mind was one of the stone benches carved into the wall by the river in Battersea Park. So, here's an update from my stone bench by the Thames in Battersea Park.

To accompany their latest poets-in-residence-in-gardens program, Mixed Borders, the Poetry School released an e-pamphlet of poems from the 2016 program, in which I took part. A couple of my poems are in this pamphlet and you can find it here.

Josephine Corcoran's lovely online poetry journal And Other Poems has published two of my Sherlock Holmes poems, 'Holmes in Florence' and 'Sherlock Holmes in Antarctica'. You can read them here.

Finally, I wanted to mention what I did on World Poetry Day, which was on 21 March. It's a UNESCO event which doesn't get a lot of attention in the UK compared to National Poetry Day later in the year. However, as they've done in other years, the Austrian coffee company Julius Meinl was running their own World Poetry Day endeavour, Pay with a Poem. A lot of cafes and restaurants in continental Europe were participating, but only a few in London. To my great pleasure, though, one of the cafes where I sometimes go for lunch at work, Manna Dew, was taking part. So I got my free coffee, and this is what I came up with (click on the photo to enlarge):

In the evening on World Poetry Day I also went to the launch of the latest issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, including wonderful readings by Denise Riley and Don Mee Choi. You can listen to a podcast of the event here: http://www.mptmagazine.com/article/podcast-denise-riley-and-don-mee-choi-read-at-the-launch-of-mpt-the-blue-vein-88/ 

Favourite 2015 Collections: Kim Moore, Sean O'Brien, Dan O'Brien

I'm pretty sure I've said before that I'm not much for end-of-the-year lists (I like reading other people's lists, but I'm not that excited about compiling my own.) However, I wanted to give a quick rundown of my three favourite new collections of 2015.

Kim Moore, The Art of Falling (Seren). Kim Moore's poems have both a lightness and a strength to them which is very appealing. They are personal and deeply rooted in her own family and community connections ('My People', 'A Psalm for the Scaffolders') but many of them also have a movingly timeless quality. The centre of this collection is the cycle 'How I Abandoned My Body To His Keeping' which is a spectacular sequence of poems about an abusive relationship. In poems such as 'He Was the Forgotten Thing' and 'On Eyes', the elements of such a relationship are depicted with images that seem to arise from an archetypal place, conveying the physical and emotional pain undergone by the speaker on a very deep level. You can read the poem 'How I Abandoned My Body to His Keeping' here, on Josephine Corcoran's And Other Poems blog/e-zine.

Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians (Picador). Sean O'Brien's poems live in the company of such great poets as Philip Larkin and WH Auden, but I prefer his wry, loving, sometimes sardonic depictions of British society in poems such as 'Another Country' and 'The Beautiful Librarians'. His poetry has a very strong sense of place but it also breaks the boundaries of place, and his England represents much more than just one country. I was blown away by 'The Lost of England', an epic, reflective, self-deprecating train journey. Sean O'Brien is the kind of poet I don't find often enough in contemporary poetry - really technically assured in a classic way, but also thought-provoking and funny at the same time. You can read the poem 'The Beautiful Librarians' here.

Dan O'Brien, New Life (CB Editions). This collection is a sequel to the 2013 collection War Reporter, and my only caveat is that you should probably read War Reporter first and then New Life - but do read both. New Life carries on Dan O'Brien's unusual collaboration with the war correspondent Paul Watson. This poetry blurs the lines between non-fiction and poetry - it's a dizzying film-reel of the poet's thoughts, the war reporter's thoughts, emails and phone calls, and the nagging sense that the poet and the war reporter are not only two different people, but also aspects of the same person. War Reporter started with the terrible consequences of Paul Watson's photo of the dead American soldier in Mogadishu in 1993, and ricocheted through many other countries and wars. New Life spends time in Syria and the other countries affected by the Arab Spring, but it also explores O'Brien's personal life, Watson's view of the discovery of Franklin's ship Terror in the Canadian Arctic, and many other stories. New Life, like War Reporter, is often graphic and a difficult read, but I found both collections extraordinarily powerful and quite unique in contemporary poetry. New Life is probably my pick for collection of the year. You can read the poem 'The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Room Across the Hall' here, again on And Other Poems.

New Poems! New Poems!

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (Winter), 1565. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna



On Friday three of my poems were published in one day, which was a nice record for me. Also a bit of motivation for 2014, because last year I was anything but prolific poetry-wise.

Shot Glass Journal published 'Wicklow Mountains After Rain' and 'Okinawa', here: http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/issue12/clarissa_aykroyd1.html

The 'Wicklow Mountains' poem is actually ten years old but I always hoped to find a home for it. The final lines are still among my favourites that I've written. 'Okinawa' was written after my trip to that part of Japan a few years ago - it's another travel snapshot, but I also think (and sort of hope) that it might just possibly be the only poem ever written (let alone published) to mention both JMW Turner and Def Leppard. If anyone knows of such another poem, I desperately want to read it.

Josephine Corcoran's wonderful blog/e-zine And Other Poems published my version of Rainer Maria Rilke's French poem 'Winter' (Hiver), here: http://andotherpoems.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/clarissa-aykroyd-2/

I subtitled this "after Rilke" because it was a bit too free to really be a "translation", I think. You can read the original French poem here. I had the (perhaps totally wrong and presumptuous) feeling that this poem was unfinished, that Rilke would like to have worked on it some more. So I think that a lot of the words are mine, building on the original, but the ideas are essentially the same as in Rilke's original poem. I chose not to try to reproduce the end rhymes which appear in the French poem, but my version is far more alliterative than Rilke's. The alliteration is perhaps the aspect in which it is the most my own. It was a very enjoyable poem to create a version of because, as so often with Rilke, his words seemed to speak from his heart to my heart.

New Poetry: 'The Worst Journey in the World'

 

Gentoo Penguin at Antarctica by jan-borgstede. Used under Creative Commons license

 

 

I have had a new poem, 'The Worst Journey in the World', published on Josephine Corcoran's And Other Poems website, here: http://andotherpoems.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/clarissa-aykroyd/

 

The calibre of the poems and poets already published on the site may tell you something about why I am so pleased to be featured here.

 

I wrote the first draft of this poem in a workshop with Sean O'Brien about transitional states and places. I actually did once find myself stopped on the train at Earls Court when I was reading The Worst Journey in the World, and my eye fell on a comment which Apsley Cherry-Garrard made about something in Antarctica which had reminded him of Earls Court - that was a very strange and rather beguiling moment. The poem is roughly fictional otherwise, but it has something to say about a) why I sometimes want to be in Antarctica rather than London (my friends know about this side of my personality), and b) the kind of peculiar inner dialogues which can take place in a pressurized atmosphere such as a slowed-down Tube.

 

As I noted in the previous blog entry about this workshop, the poems produced by many participants tended to be both funny and slightly scary. I don't think this was an exception (although the poems were all very different.) Only after I had written the poem did I realise that there might be something in it of the atmosphere of my first days in London, which happened to be in July 2005, a few weeks after the 7/7 bombings. Unfortunately, Londoners occasionally have reason to feel anxious and unnerved when mysterious incidents and slowdowns take place on public transport. But still, this is a poem which is more funny than sinister, I think.