The Family Romance by Helen Kitson

My friend Jenny Hope gave me this book as a present and I have really enjoyed reading it. I keep going back to it because there are so many vivid characters that I don't tire of reading about them. The quality of Helen Kitson's writing is excellent, she touches upon every aspect of the human condition; grief, love, passion, bitterness, regret and hope and each poem feels authentic, like this is what these people really felt and thought. This is due to the poet's skill. She invented these poems from photographs and snippets of family history. I can really visualise these people and shared their emotions as I read the well crafted poems. The poems about illegitimate children are especially poignant.


Here Helen writes about the collection...

'Sometimes it was a name that sparked an idea for a new poem. Amongst the many Johns and Williams, Marys and Annes, there was the occasional unusual name. One of my favourites is Mellonia Blakeway, b.1784 in the Church Stretton area. I wondered who had decided to give her such a pretty first name. Where had it originated? I learnt that Mellonia was the Roman goddess of bees. Was my Mellonia’s father perhaps a beekeeper? At any rate, the name inspired one of my most joy-filled poems, informed by my own childhood love for Church Stretton –
The sky is pure heaven, blue and gold.
On her tongue, the taste of honey, rich and smooth.
Perhaps I romanticise. My ancestors’ lives were tough, no doubt about it, and many of them couldn't write their own names, let alone read poetry. However historically inaccurate these poems are, through them I have come to love these people. I am proud to be one of them, which is why I called the sequence of poems ‘Ancestor Worship’. Worship is perhaps not quite the right word, though. Respect is nearer the mark. I take my hat off to them, these very ordinary people: my ancestors, my kin.' read more here...



NO PLACE LIKE HOME

It will be the only surviving photo.
He took her to America and gave her a wooden house,
A burning desert, and his family.

His eyes are intense and glassy,
His prophet's beard hiding most of his face.
Next to him, she scowls.

His hand rests heavily on her leg.
Neither of them wants this touch
But, like others, it seems necessary.

At times she wonders why she came.
She misses autumn, and her mother's cooking.
Marriage is big enough, without all this.

The photograph was her idea,
Something to send back home.
Your home is here, he tells her, missing the point.

His clumsy hand kills her smile.
She won't send the photo, he knows it,
He must have all of her.

They will have ten children
And know nothing but poverty.
Each child American, another heart tie.

Even if she could have seen the future
There was nowhere for her to run.
Endless desert, endless country, roadmaps gone.

She puts the photo with letters that smell of home.
She avoids herself in the mirror,
Refuses to acknowledge the distance, the sea between.


 you can buy it here

Laura and Lizzie

Dante Gabriel illustrated Christina's poem

Days, weeks, months, years
Afterwards, when both were wives
With children of their own;
Their mother-hearts beset with fears,
Their lives bound up in tender lives;
Laura would call the little ones
And tell them of her early prime,
Those pleasant days long gone                                
Of not-returning time:
Would talk about the haunted glen,
The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,
Their fruits like honey to the throat
But poison in the blood;
(Men sell not such in any town:)
Would tell them how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote:
Then joining hands to little hands                               
Would bid them cling together,
'For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.'

Dress

A poetry friend posted about words that are endangered of going out of common usage, you can read Gary Longden's post here and the full list is very amusing. As soon as I read it I thought of the first line of this poem and had to write it. I think the reader can guess the meaning of  the words from how they are used but see what you think after reading the meanings on Gary's post.

I would look this angry if I had a
corset forcing my body into a fashionable
S shape
Potrait of Madame Paul Poirson
by John Singer Sargent

Dress

The trouble began when I said that from now on

I would only wear tea gowns.

His shoulders set, he put down his knife

And stalked off to sulk in his growlery.

I cannot help it, I long for loose folds and drapery

That can move with my flesh,

Rather than the constraint of the corset,

The binding weight of the bustle.

We argue in whispers of what gossip will come,

People will say his wife is lost in a widdendream.

He touches the edge of the transluscent fabric.

I know what he thinks;

Only his eyes may look at my body

Wrapped in fabric that light can seep through.

My mind weaves through the embrangle

Of rules that demand I must be contained.

Brooding on the muliebrity of womanhood,

I remove my choker and throw it at him.

I love this picture so much, how affronted
the fox looks under her feet.
Symphony in White, No. 1 by James MacNeill Whistler, 1862

Defending Walt Whitman by Sherman Alexie

'Basketball is like this for young Indian boys, all arms and legs
and serious stomach muscles. Every body is brown!
These are the twentieth-century warriors who will never kill,
although a few sat quietly in the deserts of Kuwait,
waiting for orders to do something, to do something.'

Sherman Alexie by Rob Casey

Two poems of mine will be published this Autumn

A poem called 'On the Cautious Road' will be published by Helen Ivory at Ink, Sweat and Tears and it was a moment of good news in a bad week when Helen emailed me to say the poem had been selected.
I return to the I,S&T blog all the time to read the excellent poetry so I am very pleased my poem was selected to be included amongst all that talent. It is updated regularly so readers can get a poetry fix when they need one. I like the style of this blog, it is easy to navigate and there is a very quick response to submissions which is refreshing.

 Helen Ivory has a website here, as well as blogging and poems, I really like the 'sketches' go and look at them, they are intriguing.

The next poem is being published by Goblin Fruit, a quarterly journal of fantastical poetry. The tag line is 'come feast with us' and it is indeed a sumptuous collection of art and poetry. Most of the poems have the option of listening to the poet reading the poem which is really effective and brings it to life.

This is what the editors are looking for:

'We want poetry that we can call "of the fantastical", poetry that treats mythic, surreal, fantasy and folkloric themes, or approaches other themes in a fantastical way. Re-write a fairytale, ponder an old story, consider history from an unusual perspective -- really, it's up to you, so long as the fantastical element is there. Since what qualifies as "the fantastical" is easily debatable, however, here's what we're not interested in: science fiction poetry (it's not you, it's us), horror for horror's sake, and poetry that's self-consciously gothic.'

My poem which will be included in the Fall edition is called 'Go Round' and I was especially pleased that it was that one. I work so hard on each poem that they all mean something to me but this poem holds a special place in my heart so I was glad , I think I gave a loud whoop when I opened the email.

The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde

The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
'The black unicorn was mistaken
for a shadow or symbol
and taken
through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests
but deep in her moonpit
growing.
The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.

An Illustration To Dante by Fleur Adcock

I have always loved this watercolour by Rossetti and I recently brought a 2nd hand book of collected poems from 1973-1974 and this wonderful poem by Fleur Adcock leaped out at me, because I knew exactly which painting she was talking about. The poem says so much, about Paolo and Francesca, Dante, Rossetti and Ruskin and the poet herself as she compares the lovers to her own experience and as a reader I recognise that tenderness in the painting, being lost in the moment of love.The poem is wise and witty, observant and personal.

They float in a sea of whitish blobs-
fire, is it? It could have been
hail, said Ruskin, but Rossetti
'didn't know how to do hail'.
Well, he could do tenderness.
My spine trickles with little white flames.