Based on a true, local to me story, Sarah Fitzgerald’s novella explores the facts through fiction. In January 1569, Agnes Bowker gave birth to a feline in front of female witnesses.

There are also sections that consider women’s roles in history. One likens them to “a hessian curtain that hangs at the back of a stage”, going onto explain “We once had breath – bodies too – though our short time on earth went unrecorded and unremembered.” The conclusion, “Only a few left a trace: some moment that meant the days of our lives were set down for the record. But posterity doesn’t make us the lucky ones. It can mean the opposite, because of what it is that makes you stand out: the moment you become the snag in the curtain.” It becomes a warning for women to stay in their lane, fade into the background and don’t venture into the limelight.

What did Agnes Bowker do for the infamy she received? She grew up in a small village outside of Market Harborough with a twin brother. While Agnes survived birth, her brother was disabled – there are references to a limp, a weakened arm and possibly a learning disability. At the time he was only useful for labour around the home, developing the kitchen garden to feed the family. Their father died when the twins were aged five. Of what, readers don’t learn, suggesting the mother never spoke of it. Agnes therefore becomes the family breadwinner.

She goes into service at a nearby large house and becomes pregnant. Her lover is a stable boy, but he fails to propose marriage. He, as becomes apparent later, finds employment elsewhere, possibly to protect his own reputation. Disgraced, Agnes is sent home.

Usually women in her situation were either packed off to the local herbs woman who would know which concoction of herbs would trigger a termination, or sent away to a distant relative until the baby was born and given for adoption. Agnes has no distant relatives and the one time she went to London for work, she gave up and returned as her twin brother couldn’t manage with her so far away.

Agnes talks of how her twin is the good one, fair-haired and fair-hearted, whereas she is the dark, the yang to her yin. She is unschooled, which doesn’t necessarily mean she lacks intelligence, but lacks reproductive education and knowledge. According to custom at the time, it was down to her brother to track down the father of Agnes’s yet to be born baby and demand recompense for her, but he “is a cripple and an imbecile”.

Agnes visits the local herbs woman but is told she is too late. A termination is no longer an option, too many people know of Agnes’s pregnancy and it would be too suspicious. The herbs woman herself is in a precarious position on the outskirts of the village and needs not to antagonize the villagers. Instead she offers Agnes a prophecy that her pregnancy will last longer than usual and she will give “birth to a monster”. Agnes has no choice but to return home, terrified of what is inside her.

A midwife sends for Agnes. She’s aware Agnes needs work if the family are not to starve and her offer of a housemaid role has the added advantage that Agnes will have a midwife when the time comes. As Agnes goes into labour, the midwife fetches a couple of assistants and a second midwife. The events of that evening become famous enough to have a commissionary despatched from London to investigate.

He dismisses the evidence of the midwife who delivered the monstrous cat on the grounds she is a Papist (Catholicism was outlawed in England at the time) but accepts evidence from the second midwife who states she was present to assist but did not actually have sight of the crucial moment due to Agnes’s skirts. However, she did intimately examine Agnes and something within bit her enough to draw blood from her finger. It emerges that the stableboy had worked out he could not be the father, since Agnes was already in the very early stages of pregnancy when they started courting. Agnes is forced to admit that when she was in London, a schoolmaster told her she had a devil inside and her black moods needed a child who would remove them on birth. Although not spelt out, due to Agnes’s ignorance, it becomes clear he was the father and it wasn’t by consent.

The commissionary, in part due to not wanting to go into too much detail on Agnes’s delivery, and in part wanting to wrap this up and get away, agrees on the evidence it seems Agnes did give birth to a cat. Agnes is left to merge “back into the fabric, subsumed into the weave as we all are: another unnoticed thread in a dull canvas no one pays attention to.”

Sarah Fitzgerald doesn’t entirely leave Agnes’s story there. It’s not just Agnes’s story, but one about the morals of the time which saw women as chattels with no rights and blamed for men’s actions. The schoolmaster escapes. Sympathy for Agnes draws her back into her circle of women and twin brother, unstained. Just another woman taken advantage of. Fitzgerald hints, however, there is a separate story, the real story of the offspring Agnes delivered, and why she went into labour eleven days late. No spoilers: you’ll need to “The Woman who Gave Birth to a Cat” to find out.

“The Woman who Gave Birth to a Cat” is available from Amazon.

“Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree” wears the weight of bureaucracy lightly and uses satirical humour to make a serious point. Fanhua – translator Dave Haysom uses pinyin for her name rather than rendering it in English as Florence or the literal translation of ‘blooming flowers’ – is the only female village chief in Xuishui County and battles the associated bureaucracy on top of managing her extended family household while her husband is working away. Or, at least, she thinks he’s been working away. He’s returned to home but isn’t ready to share his news with her yet and seems to have acquired a fixation on camels.

Most of the bureaucracy Fanhua faces is linked to China’s one child or family planning policy. Although country residents are able to have a second child if the first was a girl, any subsequent pregnancies have to be terminated, or the pregnancy would be hidden until too late to terminate and then pay the fine. Qingshu, head of family planning is supposed to monitor women of child-bearing age who have to submit to a regular pregnancy test at the local clinic with results reported to him. However, a man may not have been the best choice for the role when Fanhua discovers, via village gossip, that Xue’e, who already has twin girls, is pregnant and trying to hide it. Qingshu plays dumb and goes through the motions of trying to find Xue’e’s hiding place, by visiting extended family. The other members of the village council, men hoping to boost their own business interests or use the status to boost their egos, don’t give her much help. She has to balance how much to share with them without allowing them to steal her election campaign to oust her.

Fanhua knows he’s wasting everyone’s time. She figures Xue’e must have been pregnant at the time of her last test, so perhaps the clinic is where she’ll find her solution, because the clinic should have flagged it up. Meanwhile, Xue’e’s husband is cooking up a scheme to earn extra money through hiring out his wolf, Grey, as a stud male. This gets Fanhua thinking about a potential use for the derelict paper factory, if only to make it less attractive to romantic teenagers. Mother to a daughter, Fanhua can’t even think about extending her own family, although she theoretically could, as her political rivals will use it to their advantage.

While everyone is throwing their problems, rather than solutions, at her, leaving Fanhua exhausted as it takes even more creativity to balance conflicting interests and stop rivalries becoming feuds, treacherous in a village, she wonders if the young woman she began to mentor, Xiaohong, could take on more responsibility.

Fanhua gets to think on her feet and often surprises her audience with her decisions. Occasionally she seems hard-hearted, but ensures that people are fairly compensated for work they do on behalf of the village council. She cares but also has to stay one step ahead of both those who resent a woman in charge and those who think she’s a little too good at her job and may need taking down a peg or two.

But pride comes before a fall. Just as she thinks she’s got the hang of juggling pomegranates, a cherry slips under her radar, in shape of a very much alive Xiaohong falling into an empty grave and Fanhua realising the person she needed to keep an eye on wasn’t the people she’d been watching. Bureaucracy, or bureaucracy in error, might just provide the solution to what Fanhua thought was her biggest problem. And camels, those obstinate, tenacious, hard-workers, call.

There’s a cast of characters, as there would be in a village setting, each with a distinctive voice, even when the odd one’s stupidity might inspire violence. No one’s perfect, not even Fanhua, in whom Li Er has created an engaging character readers root for. Ultimately all the cast want to work towards the best solution for the village. However, just as there’s more than one way up a mountain, getting all of them to agree a route is where Fanhua blooms. It’s a book that can be read by only looking at the flowering jokes or you can read the stems and figure out the intent and the path each character takes to attempt to blossom.

“Cherries on a Pomegranate Tree” is available from Sinoist Books.

It’s a tough pill to swallow. Writing and publishing are two separate activities and not every great piece of writing gets published. That might seem counterintuitive: aren’t publishers looking for great writing?

Yes, they are, but they’re also in the business of selling books or magazines. If they cannot see how to sell your work, they won’t publish it. They don’t have the capacity to accept writing that they can’t sell, no matter how much they love it.

This means that great writing does get rejected. It might be that an editor loves your poem but can’t see how it fits with other work already accepted for a magazine or anthology. It might be that an agent loves your book, but doesn’t know a publishing house they can sell it too. It might be a publisher loves your manuscript but has already scheduled a book on a similar topic or written in a similar style or may not even have space in their schedule.

Sometimes this can be an opportunity.

Your poems are on an editor’s radar so next time you submit, they look to see how to fit your work in instead of rejecting it.

You keep submitting and find an agent that not only loves your work, but knows where it fits in the market. That’s what you need in an agent: someone who gets what you’re trying to achieve in your work and knows which publishers are going to take it to show it to its best advantage.

A publisher might think of you when an opportunity arises. A translator got a rejection and thought that was it, the publisher wasn’t just not interested in that particular book but wouldn’t want any future work either. However, some months later, the publisher got in touch with the translator and asked if he’d be interested in working with them on translating a new book. The publisher had rejected the first approach because they didn’t have the capacity to take on that particular book. But, because the translator had pitched that book, they knew what he was interested in so when the opportunity to publish a similar book came up, the publisher thought of him and gave him first refusal.

It’s a tough market currently. There’s been a proliferation of creative writing courses at universities and some people took up writing during the pandemic. At the same time, some publishers are folding as the prices of paper and postage rose, partially a side-effect of Brexit. So more writers are chasing fewer opportunities. Writers need to look at the long game, not necessarily quick wins. A lot of good work is getting rejected.

Rejections hurt and it can feel hopeless if your work is getting rejection after rejection, especially if you feel you’re submitting the best you’ve ever written or put months into research or re-writing. But those rejections might be opening a window further up. Each submission is a possibly of connection.

There is also a power imbalance between writers and publishers/agents. It can be too tempting to just sign a publishing contract to achieve seeing your name on the spine of a book. However, a writers’ club can help look over a contract for potentially dodgy clauses or offer support when the right deal comes along.

Plus, a club can soften the blows of rejection. Every writer gets rejected, but some rejections cut more than others. Being part of a club where you can share successes and lift each other over rejections helps ease the feeling of giving up. Publishing, especially poetry publishing, is a difficult industry to get a foothold in, and getting one book published is no guarantee subsequent books will follow.

Finding the Right Writers’ Club

Before you stick ‘writers’ clubs’ in a search engine, pause. Ask yourself what you want from a club:

The Social Side

Chance to decompress and enjoy the company of others who understand the agonies of writing and can offer tips and networking, without the necessity of sharing your work.

Constructive Criticism

Chance to get in-depth feedback on your work and help shape it in preparation for publication along with marketing tips and support in navigating a route to publication, which also develops your own critical skills when reading others’ work and self-editing.

Positivity

Workshops that offer positive feedback and encouragement without a sense of pressure to get published. Not all writers are seeking publication.

Performance

Helpful support and tips to improve reading to an audience, which could be a regular open-mic slot or to set up and organise your own performances and professional recordings.

Writing

Groups that offer topics or themes and set tasks to complete or simply space to sit and write with minimal distraction. The finished work may or may not be shared for feedback, but the main aim to get attendees to write something and can be used for accountability, e.g. I hit my 2000 word/5 poem target.

Events

 A club that offers talks from other writers or editors/literary agents and other industry experts.

Online, Hybrid or In Person

This is down to personal preference and perhaps geographical limitations. If you live in a remote area or have caring responsibilities or accessibility needs, travelling to a club may not be a practical option. However, you might prefer the option to attend some meetings in person and some online. Or sitting at your laptop may feel so lonely that only in person clubs will do.

A club may fulfil more than one of these wants. But being clear about what you want will help you find a better match.

Questions to Ask of Writing Clubs

• Are they genre-focused? There’s a value in writers being exposed to writing they wouldn’t normally consider, e.g. exposing novelists to poetry, however, if a group is only for poetry a novelist is going to get bored very quickly.
• How many members regularly attend meetings? Would you be comfortable in a larger crowd or want a more intimate group?
• How often does the club meet? Do you want a weekly or monthly meeting? Is attendance expected?
• Do they offer trial sessions? Can you go along and sit in or observe a meeting without signing up?
• Subscription rates? Some clubs charge just to cover room hire and possibly tea/coffees during a meeting, others charge more to include a range of activities and some may have a basic subscription but charge extra to join e.g. a masterclass or speaker event. What are you getting for your money?
• What level of writers are members? Do you want to join a beginners’ group or a mixed ability group or focus on writers who are published or working towards publication? A beginners’ group is likely to be focused on positivity and encouragement, a group for published writers will be focused on in-depth criticism and development.

Writers’ Clubs are not Exclusive

You may find that you join club A for the social aspects and club B for its constructive criticism or you join a beginners’ club and move on to a more advanced one as your writing develops. If a club leaves you feeling underwhelmed, unheard or suggests you need to give up, it’s not the club for you. Be sure that the clubs you look at leave you feeling invigorated and immersed in writing at the end of the session. There is no right club to join, only the one(s) that work for you, but don’t bash those that don’t work for you as they will be right for someone else.

“Of the innumerable traditional verse forms, the sonnet is not only the most persistent but also the most pervasive” states Paul Muldoon in the introduction to this Faber collection of sonnets. Muldoon concludes, “It is accommodating while insisting on a few basic house rules. It is a room which we may make our own while being simultaneously mindful of, and oblivious to, the other guests who have occupied it over the centuries.” The contents span Shakespeare to Terrence Hayes and are not presented chronologically but in alphabetic order of poet’s surname. There are the usual suspects, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Baudelaire, W H Auden, John Berryman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Bishop, Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, who sit alongside Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Marilyn Hacker, Charlotte Mew and Don Paterson.

Subjects range from traditional, W H Auden’s “Traveller” where

“He’d tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,

That everywhere on his horizon of his sigh
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father’s house and speak his mother tongue.”

No matter how far you journey, you always return home and the relief of the language you first learnt to speak. Gwendolyn Brooks offers a nod to “Mentors”, “I swear to keep the dead upon my mind.” While Marilyn Chin offers “Advice (For E)” which ends, “Unwind…..regroup…..turn swine…..in to pearl / Be the change…..you wanna see…..in the girl.”

Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” where the poem’s speaker’s father wakes early to polish the shoes of everyone who lives at home, finishes “What did I know, what did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” contrasts with Louis MacNeice’s “Sunday Morning” where “Down the road someone is practising scales, / The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails.”

Marilyn Nelson holds “A Wreath for Emmett Till” so Patricia Smith is represented not by her sonnet for Emmett Till but “Motown Crown”, “Marvin Gaye slowed down while we gave chase / and then he was our smokin’ fine taboo. / We hungered for the anguished screech of Please / inside our chests—relentless, booming bass.” A celebration of song, dance and teenage lusts. Lusts get coverage elsewhere too.

Sylvia Plath, nodding to her forefathers, “Mayflower” ends, “Remembering the white, triumphant spray / on hawthorn boughs, with goodwill to endure / They named their ship after the flower of May.” And Elinor Wylie’s “Sonnet” ends,

“Shelley perceived you on the Caucasus;
Blake imprisoned you in glassy grains of sand
And Keats in goblin jars from Samarcand;
Poor Coleridge found you in a poppy-seed;
But you escape the clutching most of us,
Shaped like a ghost, and imminent with speed.”

“Scanty plot of ground” is a quote from Wordsworth’s “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room” is an apt title that is echoed in Muldoon’s introduction. A sonnet has its scaffolding, but that operates as grit to rub into a pearl. The volta gives an offer of transformation, turning something ordinary into an extraordinary thought or image. It persists through its flexibility within a structure that prevents poets from running off into epics about their subject. Muldoon’s “Scanty plot of ground” is both a reassurance of the familiar and introduction to the less familiar. A broad mansion of many rooms with a tour guide who knows his stuff and doesn’t outstay his welcome.

Reviewers, particularly poetry reviewers, aren’t usually paid (the commissioning editor themselves might be an unpaid volunteer so this isn’t a ‘pay the writer’ argument). They get a free copy of the book they review. That’s not to say the reviewer doesn’t benefit from reviewing. They get an introduction to a book they may not have chosen to read or couldn’t afford to buy. There’s value in writing a review: assessing the poems, developing critical skills, learning how to justify an opinion and argue a case. Reviewing is also a way of getting or keeping a reviewer’s name in print in between publications of their own work where the reviewer is also a practitioner. Occasionally a reviewer may be thanked.

There should be no reason to unpublish a commissioned review. A review is only commissioned on books that a magazine editor has deemed worthy of a review. A reviewer has read and re-read the book, written and edited the review, the review has been further edited and agreed. After that lengthy process, which gives the editors and reviewer plenty of time to withdraw if there’s a disagreement about the tenor of a review or the reviewer can’t edit it to the correct length, before the review is published. The writer or publisher of the book under review may ask for inaccuracies to be corrected, but they cannot dictate what a poetry magazine does or does not publish if the references to the book are accurate. A disagreement about the opinion expressed should not sway a magazine editor to take down a review.

It is galling to see a review taken down after publication, when there was nothing wrong with the commissioned review. When Gutter magazine took down their commissioned review of Polly Clark’s “Afterlife”, a review good enough to be used as part of a ‘book of the month’ feature, alarm bells rang.

Alarm bells continued to ring as the review was not withdrawn for reasons of quality or even disagreement with opinions and arguments put forward in the review.

It seems the withdrawal was actioned on the basis of a complaint from a reader (whose name may be known to the magazine editors but has not been revealed publicly) not about the review, not about the contents of the review, not about the book being reviewed, i.e. not for any legitimate reason. The review was taken down because the complainant drew the editors’ attention to social media posts made by the poet whose book was reviewed. While I’m not discussing what those posts were or the views of the poet, this review was withdrawn after agreement to publish for reasons that had nothing to do with the review.

I do not know the reviewer personally. I have seen her work online and in magazines. I am appalled that a commissioned, agreed review was unpublished. I do not know whether she has been compensated for her review being unpublished (whether that’s an agreement to publish another review in its place or monetary compensation). But, by taking this decision, Gutter’s editors have failed the reviewer. In a world where published work is currency, they have made the decision to disadvantage the reviewer.

Hopefully they have at least offered her the return of her rights so she can seek to get the review published elsewhere. I don’t have confidence they have done.

Rather than see that review sink without trace, I would offer the reviewer chance to have a guess post to publish that review here on my blog. Perhaps Gutter magazine won’t approve that, but they have abandoned their duty to the reviewer and shouldn’t get a say on where her review gets published. It deserves publication and if Gutter won’t reinstate it, the review should be freed to be published elsewhere.

The Withlacoochee is a river in Florida. Frederick Kirwin’s book is a long sequence of untitled poems that only appear on the right hand side, leaving the left hand pages blank, giving the reader space to pause and take in the scenery before turning to the next in the sequence. Essentially the poems explore a lost love through memory and reflection, moving between past and present. The love is addressed as “you” and could be one person or different people,

“I see you standing on the edge of the boat
as we floated our way down to the coast.
You were looking up at the Sun with your eyes closed,
mouthing truths into that glorious day of love and repose.
Is it a remembrance I misrecall
or a vision come back to haunt me this Fall
on this dazzling day of autumnal Sun
as I sail down the Withlacoochee, alone and undone?”

The details are unspecific, perhaps trying to recreate a hazy memory. I can’t picture the boat, but it appears to have been a small, two person vessel. It does conjure a picture of romance, two people, a boat, a sunny day on the river. A journey done now in the autumn of life, alone with only memories of youthful summers. Later, there are questions,

“Shall we extinguish old flames
and never let them burn brightly again?
Should old lovers be forgotten and gotten rid of,
and should you, my brightest burning love
from a distant bed in a time now only dreamt of,
be remembered in a lovesong or remain a tale untold?
Oh, do not dwell on that Garden of Old,
my aging soul
for the past war what it still is
and no poem can efface, nor time erase, one hour of it.”

She was clearly a significant part of his life at some point as he can’t forget her although the relationship ended a long time ago. First loves are rarely forgotten, no matter if longer lasting relationships also happened between the first love and the memory of looking back. Those memories also sneak in, despite efforts to try to forget. On a boat, on a river with everything going smoothly, there’s little else to do but think. The notion of lapsed time surfaces again in part of the sequence with the first line, “A long, too long a time it has been since last I saw you;”

“And today, in an act of defiance of death,
I throw flowers of bitterness and regret
at your time-worn tombstone under a blood-red sunset.”

It’s not clear if the tombstone is literal or metaphorical, for the person or the death of the relationship. The long words and slow vowels give a sense of regret. However, there’s no detail of how the relationship ended or why the poem’s speaker feels the way he does. There’s also a missed opportunity in the use of “flowers” rather than naming them as flowers symbolise emotions. Colours also cue emotions. Were these fiery reds, oranges or yellows or a pure white? The reader has to guess.

Towards the end, there are questions about love later in life,

“Is love later in life a slow-burning compromise
with loneliness and death and darkening skies,
a solitude burdened with the tolls of age and illness,
or is love at the end of one’s earthly existence
an unexpected joy to be treasured
for its companionship, serenity, and ageless pleasures?”

It seems to be asking if love later in life is a compromise between two people who would otherwise be lonely, a practical thing ensuring companionship and care, or is it a joy, a more mature version of a first love? There’s no answer and it’s possibly a mix of both.

“Lost Songs of the Withlacoochee” has a meditative feel to it, it meanders like a river, twisting around natural obstacles but ultimately heading for the sea. However, there are times where a more judicious use of detail would allow a reader to share in the experience and build a picture of what the author’s intent is. Lost love is an evocative, universal subject. Kirwin aims for a sense of timelessness, leaving out details so the reader isn’t always aware that the journey has moved from past to present or even whether the memories relate to the same person or different relationships. “Lost Songs of the Withlacoochee” feels like dropping a twig to test the water’s flow, not dropping a pebble to ascertain its depth.

“Lost Songs of the Withlacoochee” is available from Apollo Books.

“Something In Nothing” uses fairytales, often dismissed as children’s stories, to explore their original purpose: as warnings of the darker side of humanity, as the title poem suggests,

“All the world revolves in it
and it is no more than a grain of sand.
For that is all I have –
a story that is something in nothing.”

That’s what the best stories are: a handful of characters, a few words that conjure an entire imaginary world. How many daydreaming children have been told they are ‘wasting time’ when they were creating a rich inner world and trying to make sense of something that was strange to them or finding safety in a world that felt dangerous. A love of stories usually survives into adulthood.

“Happy Ever After – a Catechism” asks “What do fairy tales teach us?”,

“That monsters can be princes in disguise.
That monsters can be monsters.
That men can be monsters.
That some men keep their dead wives in the cellar.

That stories tell the truth.

Apart from at the end.”

The first quoted quatrain suggests that we shouldn’t take what we see at face value. People we meet can deceive or they can be what they appear to be. Chillingly, monsters in human form walk among us and we can rarely see which humans among us are actually monsters. The fairytales convey a truth, beware or at least be curious. However the catechism suggests that the ‘happy ever after’ part of fairytales is not true, just something added on to differentiate a tale from real life.

The idea of something in nothing surfaces again in “Baba Yaga’s Cottage”. Baba Yaga features in many Slavic fairytales as a witch who lived in a cottage that had chicken legs so it could move around the forests and local rumours,

“Something is there in the forest
– something and nothing.
For that is what Baba Yaga has
– something that is nothing.

And in the villages all around
they will tell you that trains do not pass
day and night with closed wagons,
they will tell that no one lives in the forest,
they will tell you that no smoke rises
from Baba Yaga’s chimney.
For there is no chimney and
no house of bones.
The villagers shut their noses to the smell
of burnt flesh,
shut their ears to the crunch of teeth.
Their noses smell firs, thyme, and sweet herbs.
Their ears hear the call of the wind and birds.”

Baba Yaga exists as a piece of fearful gossip, a dark thing whose purpose is to keep people out of the woods where predators could lurk. It’s also fair to say that older women with a knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs and plants could be written off as witches, suspicious women either widowed or never married, who helped women but were not considered part of a village’s society and were pushed to live as outcasts. But the villagers would rather pretend Baba Yaga and her ilk do not exist, their presence can be ignored.

Younger women who find themselves pushed out don’t become witches but find themselves victims. In “Bluebeard’s Girls”,

“The seventh was a girl
with a rucksack for a home.
The eighth closed the door
as she left.
There were more,
but Bluebeard stopped counting.”

These girls were homeless, rejected stepdaughters or escaping abuse only to find themselves trapped in cellars, subject to more abuse. They were not reported missing. They did not have anyone searching for them. But found themselves vulnerable to a con, charmed into having their humanity crushed in a nightmare.

However, the tales live on. There’s an enduring quality about the mistreated, the innocent finding love and overcoming trickery or witchcraft. The lesson that we need be wary and curious of others who may not be what they appear to be, that there just might be a happy ever after. In “The Young Man And The Book”, a young man has “the ‘good book’ open on his lap”, but he’s not reading,

“He stares out the window –
nothing but streets,
cars, people walking,
litter, a stray dog.
He cannot see the sky.

He shakes himself and looks down.
The words have vanished from the page.”

His inability to read seems to shrink his world to what he can see in front of him. Nothing he sees is paying him any attention: passersby walk on, cars drive past. He is isolated. That “he cannot see the sky” suggests a lack of aspiration, a lack of seeing beyond either into a future or a more magical world. This inability turns into a blank page.

“Something in Nothing” explores the nature of fairytales and their exploration of the darker side of humanity in a safe way, that warns children while reassuring them of a happy ever after. It’s a world where no matter what horrors the good person lives through, the villain gets a comeuppance. However, some like Bluebeard, were based in reality without a happy ever after. Some, like Baba Yaga, were arguably unfairly demonised. There are also hints that the stories in these tales are more memorable that the drier religious parables or stories with an obvious moral message. It seems humans need fully rounded characters that they might identify with to remember a tale that contains a truth. Brooks offers a mirror to readers but doesn’t proscribe what the viewer sees.

“Something in Nothing” is available from Indigo Dreams Publishing.

“With My Back To The World” was sparked by an ekphrastic prompt that sent Victoria Chang to explore Agnes Martin’s art and write about them. Martin once told an interviewer, “…when I first made a grid I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees and then this grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied.” Her art, pencil drawings and paintings, are of grids and stripes often in muted colours. That might suggest regulation, rather than freedom, an imposition of straight lines on a naturally curved world. However, in Chang’s poems, those grids become a way of drawing focus, turning a spotlight onto one small part of a bigger whole. The poems share titles with the artwork that inspired them, but the book is not in chronological order of the dates in the titles. The book’s title comes from the first poem, “With My Back To The World, 1997”,

“The terror of this year was emptiness. But I learned that it’s

possible for a sentence to have no words. That the meaning of
a word can exist without the word. That life can still occur

without a mind. That emptiness still swarms without the
world. That it can be disconnected from the wall and still

light up. The best thing about emptiness is if you close your
eyes in a field, you’ll open your eyes in a field.”

The poems long lines, reflect the stripes of the artwork, the muted rhythms, the muted shades used. It explores the ability to communicate without using words, that not naming something does not stop that something from existing. An individual can feel disconnected but is still part of the world or the part of the world they belong or find themselves in. Here, emptiness isn’t necessarily a negative. It can also be a way of being open to possibility or present in a moment. Standing in a gallery looking at a work of art can mentally transport you but physically you’re still in the gallery. Emptying a mind of busyness and daily bustle opens you to other sensations, physical sensations of where you are standing, what room you’re taking up, what’s in your immediate purview. It’s a space to consider your existential being, who you are, what form you take.

Form surfaces again in “Untitled IX, 1982”. Martin’s piece is a large canvas painted white with a pink hue, with fine, slightly irregular, horizontal pencil lines that run across it. It could be interpreted as a page of notebook, blank, ready to be written on. Chang’s poem reveals there are 44 lines, and “People confused the 44 Asian women with each other”,

“………To be able to have ideas but being unable to lift
them over the wall on my own. It’s August finally and no
one knows that August isn’t really a month. It is one long
day. Some people assume that Asian women are made of
flowers, but some of us are made up of lines. It’s hard
to say when these lines were no longer just themselves.
The minute Agnes put the brush to the canvas, they
became indescribable. The sayable, by nature, is an
elegy. The unsayable, outside of time. What we say,
here, now, is only the part of flesh that is known.”

Chang uses “Agnes” for Martin throughout, not from disrespect or to suggest an intimacy with the artist, but instinctively when the first poem in the collection was written. “Agnes” has a muted, suggestive feel that the hard consonants and short vowels of “Martin” doesn’t. In the poem the “s” sounds create a soft susurrus which along with the enjambments, push the reader into the next line (with the exception of the line ending “themselves”). It questions stereotypes, the assumption that in America, where Chang is based, the majority white population see global majority people as looking indistinguishable and stereotype Asian women as feminine, floral. Something that’s echoed in the poem’s speaker running all the days in August into one day as the regularity of weather and daily routine merge the days into similarity. It’s a way of denying individuals, seeing the pencil lines as the same despite their irregularities, the small details that differentiate them.

The sequence “Today” is a interlude from poems inspired by Martin. Here the inspiration is Kawara and his Today series from the mid-late 1960s, each a canvas painted red, blue or grey with the date, written in the local language and using Esperanto for countries with non-Roman alphabets, it was created in white. These were not necessarily daily paintings. Chang’s “Today” is series of dates where she visited her father in hospital during the last days of his life, detailing small observations made on each visit. The quoted sections come after his death, and after the detail that the poet didn’t cry during her father’s final days,

“Feb.16.2022
Yesterday, I walked to the small chapel,
head down, yet all the people driving by
waved to me as they knew what I had
just done, as if they knew I was going
to the chapel. When I got there, fourteen
white-tailed deer stopped and stared, moving away
from me, as if they also knew. Inside the,
cold mixed with the cold from my body and
the moment of mixing, the stained glass, and
my sobbing finally came. It was so
delayed that I wasn’t sure if I was
crying for the deer that wouldn’t stay, or
the nine people I had just met and would
soon leave behind, the snow that would
come after I am gone, or my father.
I left a note in the guest book, wrote his
name. Above it Thomas and Claire Bushnell,
married the day before my father’s death,
a tribute to Traveler, one of the
best horses ever. It’s time to go home.

Feb.17.2022
Each of us comes from somewhere with blossoms.”

The people who drove past are not counted, as if the poem’s speaker did not wish to connect or speak with them, but the deer are because they don’t demand connection. However, the speaker imagines the deer figure out her bereavement and move away. Yet later, the people are numbered so the disconnect wasn’t complete, the speaker did notice and count but still avoided connection. The guest book provides another connection, an indirect one as the people mentioned never meet the speaker, who is reminded that the chapel is a place of marriage as well as death and death does not mean forgetting. The final, one line part, is a reminder that spring is always on its way, even in the bleakest winter.

Season surface again as Chang returns to Martin’s art. Martin’s “Drift of Summer, 1965” is an off-white acrylic paint on linen with pencil gridlines. The unevenness of the linen contributes to the unevenness of the grid. Those learning to handwrite East Asian languages usually use a grid rather than lines to practice on. Chang’s poem, a portrait rectangle, ends with the speaker standing close to,

“her painting that we could see that each rectangle
isn’t empty, but contains four lines. Joan Mitchell
only titled her paintings when asked. Then maybe
this one isn’t really about summer, but about how
suffering quadruples if you look at it too closely. Or
maybe how not everything needs to be about our
suffering and how we overcame it. Or how things
can be divided again and again and still be beauti-
ful to look at. Or how the interval between today
and now really does shorten as we age.”

The truncated last line echoes the sense of shortening. The poem’s speaker seems to suggest that the title was something the artist was asked to put on as an afterthought so need not be taken as it’s real title. The art “isn’t really about summer”. The speaker posits it’s about her interpretation of it being “about how suffering quadruples”. Then, on further study, changes her mind and decides art need not “be about our suffering and how we overcame it”. For the speaker it’s about how perspective can change with age and, by implication, experience. How days can seem to stretch into a month when someone is young because there are no responsibilities, only possibilities. However, with age and responsibility, days become too short, packed with daily routines, and it can feel as if there’s not enough time.

“With My Back To The World” is an exploration of art, whether visual or poetry, and how the viewer/reader brings their own experiences and views to the art. An artist or poet may try to guide a viewer/reader, but ultimately have no control about how a piece is perceived. One person may briefly glance and see a grid, another reads suffering into that grid, someone feeling isolated may only see parallel lines that never meet. Chang is inviting readers to participate in her exploration, to see not the paint or the words but the beauty of the structure and what it might represent.

Geoffrey Heptonstall posits that writers draw on their own lives and experiences in order to write, using memories to explore a truth. Similarly, readers also bring their lives to reading a poem and two readers may experience the same poem differently. Consequently, both are a form of re-experiencing life. However, as the title poem suggests, truth can be slippery,

“Not every truth is well told.
The stain may be mistaken
for blood’s embittered rage
in a shattering and a scattering.
The glass in your hand contains the wine
that holds the truth on every tongue.

Words loosened from care
come rolling down the hill
until they touch reality
that is an empty glass.”

The storyteller, through omission or misremembering, may tell a false story or try to manipulate a reader into taking sides either to right a perceived wrong or to make the storyteller look like the hero. Some listeners will take the tale at face value; others may perceive the storyteller’s agenda and react accordingly. The poem’s implication is that failing to tell the truth will backfire on the storyteller. The wine could be a religious symbol of a shared communion that will fail if the recipient is not open to receive. Failed communication empties the glass so nothing is shared.

“The Narrative Begins”, there’s a “throw of a dice”, which is awkward as dice is plural, and,

“In there he will tell his tale
that goes down to nowhere.

Someone steps on the stair,
she who makes her escape
watching those who come and go.

In the mind of a child
is a measure of mystery.
The narrative begins before the hour.

It may end at any time.
When he and she meet
never can it be too late.”

There are some sound echoes (“there”, “nowhere”, “stair”) which become alliteration (“mind”, “measure”, “mystery”) that are not consistent throughout the poem. It’s presumed “he” is an adult, but “she” seems to be linked with the idea “In the mind of a child/ is a measure of mystery”. I don’t think she’s meant to be a child, but it’s unclear. The two seem to be destined to meet and the where and when seem unimportant. Taken metaphorically, the writer/narrator will eventually meet a reader and it doesn’t matter how long that takes or even if it takes place during a writer’s lifetime.

Later, in “Weaving”

“The spider is given to open display,
freely dancing to a deadly end
in a serious game of weaving
where creatures are cleverly caught.
To the incautious intruder
it is a defence of territory
that is of course a trespass
in what may seem a vacant space.
There will be a crime to confess.”

The spider seems to be transparent about its aim to trap prey in its web, like a storyteller transparent about telling a tale to captivate a reader. Some readers will go along with the play, knowing it’s a story. Some readers will get caught up and trapped, possibly blurring the line between fiction and reality. Despite the spider’s transparency, it still manages to captures prey, either because the prey has stopped being careful or because they don’t want to believe the web is really a trap. The final line avoids apportioning blame, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the blame should lie with the spider who needs to survive or the prey for being careless.

A “Sunflower” is coloured by “time has turned the pages/to the colour of the sun”, and the poem ends,

“The aroma of jasmine vanishes
when the world fears the worst
in the drifting cloud of desert dust.
And the taste of lemons
is a sharper sign of war.
A ribbon of remembrance cries
for a sowing of the sunflower.”

There’s no time to stop and smell the flowers when war is on the horizon, leaving its bitter taste. I’m not sure how a ribbon for remembrance needs a sunflower. In popular songs, ribbons are tied to oak trees. However, the sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine and sunflowers were planted after the devastation wrought by a tsunami on Fukushima nuclear power station as sunflowers help clean up radiation. The poem lacks specificity in order to appear timeless.

The image of the troubadour is also timeless. “Jaufre Rudel” travelled to meet the Countess of Tripoli in medieval times, and collapsed and died in her arms. His language was Occitan, the traditional language of Provence, and his name translates into English as Geoffrey. The poem has a stanza in Occitan and one in English, neither being a translation of the other. The complete poem is quoted here:

“Le chanson du rossignol
qui Rudel adore.
la reine angélique d’Afrique
avec un merveilleux aubade.
L’amour est une affaire
dans le nuit espérant
vers le côte d’Outremer
après un voyage pacifique.
Enfin un mouillage tranquille
ici le soleil couche sous la mer
comme un somnambule qui parle
son amour parfait.

Rudel sang of the nightingale,
all the while admiring her,
angelic queen of darkness
and wakening enchantments.
The meaning is in love,
a romance of night’s intimations
in sight of a Levantine shore
on a calm, cool crossing
that ends in quiet anchorage.
Here the sunset articulates
the somnambulance of dying
within reach of love’s embassy.”

Unfulfilled love is a timeless tragedy. What’s missing is that we never know what the queen felt for the troubadour who’d travelled to be with her and died in her arms. Was she moved by his words or did she just feel the sadness of death?

“Eyes Closed” asks questions,

“What purpose do metaphors serve
but to make words sound well
and so profound that heaven may spring
from the impacted earth of the track?
The answer masquerades as the question:
What shall I see when all is invisible?”

It seems there is an obligation on readers to see what lies between the lines, what hidden meanings may lurk in word or phrasing choices and not be taken in by the dazzle of dew on a cobweb.

Heptonstall explores the nature of storytelling and how a narrator can try to influence a reader to draw a desired conclusion. However, a narrator can’t control a reader, especially a reader with an enquiring mind, who reads and sits with what they’ve read to bring their own lived experience to the text and question it. Ultimately, Heptonstall also questions what truth might be. A narrator doesn’t tell the same story twice, placing emphasis on certain details can tailor the story to a different audience, who, for cultural or personal reasons, might need different arguments or persuasion to see the narrator’s viewpoint. “The Truth on the Tongue” is a quiet, thought-provoking collection that aims to recreate the sense of timelessness that is an audience listening or reading a tale.

“The Truth on the Tongue” is available from Cyberwit.