“Impossible Paradise” is a selected poems taking from Chen Yuhong’s collections “Half-Light” (2022), “Trance” (2016), “In Between” (2011), “Bewitched” (2007), “A River Flows Deep in Your Veins” (2002), “In Truth the Ocean” (1999) in English translation. She has been influenced by poets such as Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy whom she has translated in Chinese. However, this is the first time Chen’s own poems have been translated into English. The selections are gathered by collection in reverse order, with the most recent poems first. She relishes in the everyday and natural experiences. “Mammogram”, at one point, could be a weather forecast,

“X-rays, she says,
will show any shadows.
Cloudless good.
Cloudy not.

False positives an OK mistake.
False negatives less so.
I imagine someone gauging
shades within my breast.

Maybe as careful as I myself
judge a poem shortlisted, coolly
gauging its metaphors, its images
plain as my own breasts.

X-rays are precise,
she says, her tone professional
and moderate. You may dress
while I read them.”

Clear days are considered good, overcast days bad, positivity good, negatives bad. There’s not much room for nuance or lack of clarity. The poem’s speaker considers someone looking at the x-ray and making judgments with the emotional distance required to judge poems as a radiologist or judge attempts to be objective about something the poem’s speaker or poet can only be subjective about. The woman operating the mammogram is being dispassionate when speaking to the narrator, expressing certainty and confidence that her x-ray will not give false results. Yet there are hints it’s not that straightforward. Weather forecasting is still not an exact science, and the second quoted stanza suggests there is a risk of the mammogram results being imprecise. For the narrator, who has just been intimately manipulated the instruction to get dressed might feel dismissive, as if she’s being discarded while the mammogram operator gets on with her job of interpreting the x-ray. There’s a lack of closure as the poem finishes before the results are given, inviting the reader to feel the same dismissal as the narrator. There’s a sense of disconnect; the mammogram operator not showing compassion towards her patient.

Disconnect is a theme picked up in “That Day, Fog” from “Trance”, in a valley below a volcano,

“Fog rose to eye level,
the chant in Sanskrit
drifting from a temple.
We hear,
we listened,
not seeking its source.”

It’s not clear if the “we” in the poem knew any Sanskrit or understood the chant beyond it being a prayer. Yet the narrator and person she was with stop to listen to other humans as the fog isolates them. It is enough to hear other voices without a need to walk to the temple and greet those within. The sounds act as a reminder the fog is not a solid barrier, but can be overcome, and sometimes that’s enough.

In “White Moth Orchid” (gatha in Buddhist practice can be a verse uttered silently in the practice of mindfulness), a bloom drops,

“its beauty fled,
yet these fleshy petals hardly smudged.
If this yellow pistil went untouched
by one proboscis
would there be disappointment?

How life can pass
beheld at sunset’s window
the moment it leaves the stem,
the sound a faint
gatha of one word, tidy and final.”

The flower is not yet dead but dying. The poem’s speaker speculates on whether the flower was pollinated and, if it wasn’t, the flower has had an unfulfilled life, failing to do its one job. The act of a life ending can catch someone by surprise while they were busily focused on something else. If the poet had not acted as witness, the falling of the flower would have gone unobserved.

In “Inkstone” written, ‘on seeing a Duan inkstone from the Qian Long period, Qing dynasty’, the stone is “ineloquent”,

“yet from it soundlessly
flow mountain waters, birds,
insects, flowers, fish, people”

When the inkstone is used for its purpose, it opens up to possibilities of stories and connections.

Chen’s poetry is quietly compelling and concerned with connections between people and between people and the natural world. It’s an empathetic, measured plea for compassion and understanding. The poem’s rhythms feel prayer-like, pointing to a space for mindfulness and focus. This collection and English translations are long overdue.

“Impossible Paradise” is available from Carcanet.

Arthur Sze is an observational poet with a focus on the natural world and the cycle of seasons. He sketches scenes, allowing readers to colour in the finer detail or interpret what they are looking at. Even when looking at humans, the focus is on the natural, in “Spring View” three runners wait for the starting signal while flowers bud,

“When the pistol fires, the runners

contort in their hundred-yard dash;
in slow motion, their faces
and limbs express a lifetime.
Though a lifetime may be ten seconds
each second becomes a lifetime
of here, now, be, becoming
yours when you see how
once lines converge, lines diverge.”

The runners are not picked out as individuals because nothing distinguishes one from another. In motion, “contort” could suggest something unnatural about moving at speed, a lack of grace in their movements. Everything focused on getting from the current moment or step to the next, and the next and the world shrinks accordingly. Readers never get told the outcome of the race, whether it was won fairly, by the favourite or an outsider. It’s about the span of the race, a group with the same goal, until the race is over. Meanwhile, in the background, nature gets on with spring at a different pace. The budding flowers given a grace the runners don’t have.

In “Drought”, a tanka, deer flicker their ears towards the sound of a man moving, briefly stopping to look at a tree that’s late to leaf. He thinks of his own yard,

“with weeds; another apricot twig snaps when bent; after a rat
burrowed into the outdoor sofa, he had it hauled to the dump.
In the dark, a gleaming flatbed truck transports large cylinders of
waste down a mesa, along city limits, to an underground salt bed.
At three a.m., while he sleeps, ‘Holy shit!’ erupts out a doorway;
flames rise in an apartment complex, and alarms sound.

……………………………….…………….Reddening pear leaves –
…………………………….……………….opening spigots, he drains
…………………………….……………….the last drops from tanks –”

He’d taken a sofa to the dump to prevent a rat nesting in it, even though he’s fighting a losing battle against weeds. The “large cylinders” suggest chemical waste rather than regular waste and the implication of “city limits” and the dumping in the dark is that the waste isn’t being disposed of legally. There’s no direct causality between the dumping and the fire, but a sense of carelessness, of shifting the problem elsewhere until it comes back to bite you. The fire is a human-created problem with consequences for humans. The natural world will regenerate and reclaim the problems humans create. The pear leaves in reflecting the fire’s light, look like flames and the fire is big enough to need all the water stored to fight fires. Unless humans change their ways, they will lose.

Mostly the vocabulary is familiar and contemporary. The world observed and recorded. In “Venn Diagrams”, scientific terms creep in,

“X-rays, muons, ultraviolet radiation—
X-rays can diagnose fractures
in the skull; muons can map spaces
inside the pyramids at Giza;
ultraviolet radiation kills bacteria
in well water—in a Venn diagram,
circles overlap. An array of sharpened
pencils in a cup; cars parked
at a casino; along a trail, small
puffballs—these clusters manifest
chance; and, pondering three
who furthered you on your way,
you grieve, yearn, hope, make lines
against a void, the void, in an at-one-go.”

X-rays can show bones that otherwise can’t be seen allowing for healing, muons can expand human knowledge without causing damage to ancient monuments and ultraviolet radiation can eliminate bacteria making the water safer to drink. Yet radiation can also kill. The world needs to be navigated with care and respect, otherwise it could become a void if humans lose sight of that respect. Used wrongly, the natural world can fight back.

Sze writes measured, considered poems with a focus on the natural world and nature’s ability to for re-growth after winter or human-made disasters. Humans here are ciphers, following orders or keeping to a narrow path without deviation. Nature follows different rules with respect for natural cycles, seasons and the ability to bloom after loss. There’s a quiet assurance here too. The tone is unjudgmental, even when observing that humans are the authors of their own misfortune.

In “Material Witness” Edward Ragg turns his forensic eye towards material details often overlooked or taken for granted, e.g. rock formations, coral reefs, bower birds, an old photo, and what these artefacts might show or reveal. The specific details of a small starting point widens out to a relationship, family history or connection to the natural world, giving an universal appeal to a personal starting point.

In “The Tap Dancer”, a photo of a dancer “with a Nazi stamp on the back” is revealed to be the poem’s speaker’s mother.

“My father recalled bright-faced GIs breakfasting.
So enthusiastically polite. How they’d throw kids
sweets from their jeeps (candy they called them)
before most girls and boys knew to brush their teeth.
My father wept for those pearl toothed men until
his death. My mother remembered tap dancing
and often said: I was always so lucky, so lucky.”

The poem shows the different attitudes towards the war. The father remembering candy thrown at children from soldiers facing going to war. For him, the war is a tragedy of these men who never returned. The mother, the girl in the photo, focuses on memories of tap dancing. She is not being flippant, however, as she considers herself fortunate to survive. Her attitude is one of fortitude and survival. The war is something she’s put behind her.

The next generation become the focus in “Diving Bell Spider”, post coital, the woman combs,

“your hair as I begin to write this poem, checking
the integrity of our anchored space line by line.
I will never let us drown. And we will eat
your favourite seafood poached from the sea
by my bountiful embrace. Somehow the fish
never see us, not believing in miracles. For this
is how we love. From the depths in plain sight.”

An open, enduring love that can still fire up the initial flame of romance. A love that pays attention to favoured meals and ensuring happiness. Later in “A Dance of Feet”, the Chinese phrase in the last line translates into English as “I love you”,

“O let me learn, my love, how
to pronounce the closest words

in your sounds. Or merely
never cease to feel this dance

of feet which says for real
我爱你”

The poem starts by referencing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing off” written by George and Ira Gershwin and sung by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and explores how music might help or substitute for communication where two languages are involved. While both people in the poem are fluent in each other’s language, there are times when one person just wants to speak their mother tongue.

A theme picked up again in “For a Quieter Mind”,

“There are times when words
should be spoken and times

for otherwise. As, perhaps,
there are statements of the time

on which the quietest mind
reflects, attending to its own time:

the rhythms of breathing, the peace
of morning and evening.”

Its gentleness appears to lean towards solitude yet acknowledges the need for companionship and connection.

“Material Witness” invites the reader on a journey of reflection alongside the poet. Ragg creates quiet, crafted poems that nudge readers to look again and contemplate their environment, those everyday objects that get taken for granted, and asks what we are without connection. There’s a meditative guided feel to the poems’ rhythms and vocabulary.

“Material Witness” is available from Cinnamon Press.

Janie Greville studied art and art history, the first in her family to go to university, lectured for the Open University while holding down a caring job to pay off her loan used to pay for her MA degree. She trained as an art teacher while under family pressure to marry as she wasn’t “getting any younger”. Her husband to be “liked my red permed hair, my funky fashion, and my slightly arrogant public persona. He was a loveable man from Yorkshire, and he was crazy about ‘me’. Of course, the ‘real me’ was not even confident, let alone arrogant, was shy, was dark blonde, and at most, wavy-haired. So it wasn’t me he loved. The me he thought I was scared him, I later heard, so perhaps he didn’t love my alter ego either, though he married it and lived with both of us for fourteen years”.

Before that marriage, in 1989, came a breakdown, a severe and prolonged depression. Four years later came marriage and two children, and then a sectioning due to a lost grip on reality, not entirely psychotic, which resulted in a label of manic depression and a traumatising experience of psychiatry. Now Janie Greville’s condition is managed, she has published a volume of her poems, written earlier in life. The title poem feels a little magical,

“In the gas fire, a
Swimming pool swirls, licking galaxy chocolate along
A blackboard of jam.
A splash of settee appears on the stairs, and then
Turns like a rolling pin
Into a carpet, a crowbar, a chestnut tree.
I turn away, bite some cheese, spread grass
On my face cream and ring the doorbell
For a prospectus.”

Someone staring into the flicker of a gas fire can being to imagine all sorts of shapes in the flames. There’s a surreal touch. Images flicker from safe, “carpet”, dangerous, “crowbar” to wise, “chestnut tree” that may also reflect an unsettled mind. But turning away from the fire doesn’t bring any sense either. Small wonder the magician narrator feels as if their nose, or their instincts, are broken. The request for a prospectus suggests a wish for someone else to take control.

A different kind of control surfaces in “Picture This:” which starts,

“A man marries a woman
At a time when (and because)
A slow and painful death
Seemed a better option than
The quicker kinds.
He made his vows, to
Love, Honour and Perish,
And kept them faithfully,
Albeit gracelessly”

The poem’s speaker has replaced “cherish” with “perish” in the marriage vows. It seems the speaker, the wife, felt marriage was better than being left alone. She also seems to have entered the marriage knowing she didn’t love her husband. However, he doesn’t appear to have loved her either, honouring his vows, but not her. While readers already know she was pressured into marriage by family and women have less societal freedom than men, it’s only later there’s a sense of him,

“Quietly, he hated her,
But he would not break
The marriage. He would
Not take his children’s
Chance of growing up
Whole, in contented hell,
Away from him.”

There were no arguments, no blazing rows, just a disquieting sense that things were not right. He, however, insists on staying married rather than seeking divorce and letting his children grow up in a happier household. The potential chaos and poverty of a single household may make the children worse off materially but will allow them space to become content. The children will no longer have to walk on eggshells around their parents’ unspoken dislike of each other. Staying together for the sake of the children invariably back-fires. The children know something’s wrong even if they don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it and discovering your parents didn’t split up, because they felt that better than divorce, is one hell of a guilt-trip.

“Today” starts

“Today we have the washing of floors.
Not the jumping into pavements and
Landing in a penguin waltzing dazzle,
Not standing in a line of seven to meet a nun,
Not flying on a bed with a mangy cat,
But a bucket and a mop, and a washing of floors.”

It has echoes of Henry Reeds’ “The Naming of Parts” which form a series of lessons of war in how to clean and care for a gun. Here, the cleaning is a necessary chore with echoes of Disney film images. An acknowledgement that imagination may fly but the chores won’t do themselves. This poem had a discipline and was less free flowing than the others and strongly benefited from that structure.

In “Spillong Prembles”, words seem to breakdown,

“There are spieling problems
Leching in the forests,
Speeling mash takes highflying
A mung the sages of
The Chamber Pots. Wers:
Deep deep Dow n in the
Hewmann whole seethes
The Pollyvice of spilling
We call ‘languish’

And so much languages there.”

It echoes a depressed brain that is searching for words to communicate with but missing its targets. To an outsider, the poem’s speaker appears lazy, indulging in “languish”. Whereas internally the poem’s speaker is a swirl of inexplicable emotions, locked in by a frustration at the failure to find the words to explain.

“The Magician’s Broken Nose” is at its strongest when language is useful playfully but given a scaffold or a specific task. When Janie Grenville focuses on a specific image, e.g. the quiet anger in a failing marriage or chores getting in the way of fairytales, the poems lift and sing.

“The Magician’s Broken Nose” is available via Amazon

“Afterlife” is a selection of new poems and poems from previous collections, “Kiss” (2000), “Take Me with You” (2005) and “Farewell My Lovely” (2009)”, in that order so the newer poems start the collection. The opening poem in the new poems section, “Sculpture” starts

“Michelangelo to this lump
of cold relationships, I persist
without commission, chipping
for years at life shortening angles.”

There’s ambiguity here, the “cold relationships” could be a reference to marble, the specific relationship or wider relationships, while the poem also implies that the sculptor worked through compulsion, not by direction from a patron. This piece of work became an artist’s obsession, even through it effectively shortened the artist’s lifespan by compelling him to neglect his own health. The poem ends,

“How beautifully we slot together,
not lip to lip but cheek to cheek, body to body.
For years in the studio, I will carve this moment,
over and over, though you have forgotten me.
We are living, somewhere, deep in this work.
It’s what I’m made for, though I longed for more.”

This wasn’t a fleeting love of romance, but an enduring companionship. Although the end also hints at dissatisfaction. The artist doesn’t feel the work is complete, merely that he can’t do anymore to it. It’s that point where a poet needs to walk away from a poem before she cuts an image that is perfect or disrupts a rhythm that needed to flow. Art requires a judgement of balance and letting go. Something that’s revisited in “My Mother’s Hands” which “were neatly folded, like the Queen’s on TV”, a line that encapsulates duty and external appearances, become

“At Gran’s funeral, my mother’s hand
slid towards mine where I sat beside her

on that hard front row with everyone missing.
I held it because I am her daughter.

It was not the hand with her old wedding ring –
the ring she tore off and threw at me –

but the other, with nails bitten raw.
My mother’s face screwed up like a little girl’s,

her hand in mine sweated and writhed.
And afterwards, it shed me like a skin,

recoiled to sculpted perfection,
preparing to touch no one ever again.”

In a moment, at a funeral for her own mother (“Gran”), the mother fears letting her public image slip and reaches for her daughter, the poem’s speaker. The choice of couplets is deliberate. Although the reasons for “everyone missing” are not elaborated on – the ex-husband didn’t show, the daughter is on her own although readers don’t know if she might or might not have a family of her own – which suggests the reasons aren’t important, but their absence is. The mother is forced to rely on her own daughter. The “nails bitten raw” symbolise grief, the mother returned to a child-like state when confronting her loss. But, once the funeral is over, the mother retracts her hand, restores herself to the calm, unflustered image she wishes to project. There’s an echo in “sculpted perfection” that could be a reference to Plath’s “Edge” where a marbled mother lies in perfection.

“Snow” is in the selection of poems from “Kiss”, and imagines works falling like snow. The you the poem is addressed to is not named and the relationship between you and the speaker not revealed,

“I walk home in a blizzard
of everything you have said to me;

and not only words, your touch
babbles warmly on my skin; syllable
by syllable you’re obliterating
the dark needles of the fir trees; a crow
is trying to scythe himself free
of the fragments cohering
into one great white word.”

There’s a strong sense of protection. Whoever “you” is, they are whitening the world, hiding the dark trees and crow. The consonance of “l” sounds soften the rhythm adding to the sense of the snow/words being welcome.

Relationships surface again in the selection from “Take Me with You”, in “Domestic Science” an ex disrupts a current relationship, “My attempts to boil you/ out of him failed”, other approaches are needed,

“Our life was a bloody mess:

filleting you out was our only hope.
His pain rang like breaking glass.
My tears made no difference.

He stopped mentioning you at all.
We talked of the palace that lies
beyond all this. He cooked supper

and opened a nice bottle of wine
while I laid everything in a circle
to make sure we got there.”

The speaker wants her partner to stop thinking about his ex, but her partner doesn’t seem ready yet to let go, or perhaps he isn’t as invested in the new relationship as she is. The three line stanzas reflect three lives intertwined. Even though he agrees to stop talking about the ex, the current partner knows he’s still thinking about her. The solution it seems is to talk about the fairytale of the current relationship. Although that reference to “circle” suggests that the path to that palace is not straightforward, no one makes progress while circling around a subject. It could also point to the relationship being more equal with a common goal: at a circular table no one gets to sit at the head.

In the selection from “Farewell My Lovely” the title poem does evoke Raymond Chandler’s novel. The poem ends,

“…………as I’m dusting the mirror
I glimpse her, smart as a rat
in the company of rocks –
but the day’s slammed shut
and it’s time to file the file.
This is a face to be turned over
for answers from now on.

She’s left nothing behind her
to show what was between us.
Always meticulous,
……..I find she’s slipped
like a last dram into my dreams,
hunched at the scene, wiping fingerprints,
knowing that it’s over, that it’s time to go.”

The private detective is closing the file, dusting the mirror to move on but the woman at the heart of the case is living rent free in his mind. It suggests how experience shapes us and some memories can never be left behind.

Polly Clark has a skill for taking apparently ordinary moments, working on a piece of art, attending a funeral, finishing a job, and invests them with layered depths, showing how these micro connections shape individuals. She asks readers to look again, challenge their knowledge of how they might think this scene pans out and asks what if you focus on the less obvious, what if you were less complacent? It’s a fine balance between a relaxed, colloquial tone and a thoughtful, darker undertone and invites a reader to re-read the poem. If you’re not familiar with Clark’s work, “Afterlife” is an excellent place to start.

“Afterlife” is available from Bloodaxe.

Related Article: Reviewers Deserve Better Than The Gutter

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.