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Howard Wright John Barton Iain Britton Tim Liardet Annette Barnes Serena Alagappan Anne Fitzgerald Lucy Cheseldine John Whale 90 91 94 98 103 104 106 111 113 116 Berber and Twist You May Have the Body (Habeus Corpus) Four Poems Four Poems Franklin on the Ice Two Poems Three Poems Review Review Notes on Contributors 2
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EDITORIAL One of my pleasures this autumn was introducing Peter Sansom and Michael Schmidt before their joint reading at the Ilkley Literature Festival. And when I received this invitation I was immediately struck by my sense of the invaluable contribution they have made to the life of poetry in the UK. From their different bases in the north of England, they have given major opportunities to poets across a whole generation. Both have decades of experience in the publishing of poetry: Schmidt over fifty years with Carcanet, and more than forty with PN Review; Sansom over thirty years with the Poetry Business, which includes the imprint Smith/Doorstop and The North magazine. At the same time as promoting and working on the texts of others, they have also managed to maintain a fidelity to their own craft as poets – something for which we should be equally grateful. At Ilkley, Sansom and Schmidt were reading from their latest collections – Lanyard and Talking to Stanley on the Telephone. These are their sixth and ninth volumes respectively. In these new collections, both poets are in fine form and both are able to use their accumulated wealth of experience – and indeed their age – to great creative purpose. Both feel confident enough to play with time and memory and both use the vagaries of memory to wonderful poetic effect. Both collections acknowledge a fellow poet: Sansom has an epigraph by Stanley Cook, who lived and worked in Yorkshire until his death in 2010, and Schmidt, in his title, references Stanley Moss, the American poet and art dealer. Sansom’s choice of Cook’s ‘And I could panic that all my relatives are gone, only alive in flashes of anecdote’ suggests the uncertainty and loss at the heart of his book. Its title, Lanyard, a definition of which forms his other epigraph, also speaks, albeit ambivalently, to the cathartic power of his elegiac project: ‘a short length of rope for securing something’. Sansom’s collection of short lyrics offers some aesthetic security from the threat of absence and loss. Schmidt’s epigraph, taken from Judith Wright’s ‘The Shadows of Fire: Ghazals’ – ‘Poems written in age confuse the years’ – carries with it, in contrast, a strange ironic certainty. His collection faces the ageing process head-on, sometimes demonstrating steely courage and a stoic matter-of-factness. At others, it dares to be comically outrageous in its classical vigour and cosmopolitan flair. The first poem of Lanyard, ‘King’s Mill’, establishes the geography and ontology of Sansom’s collection: a shared regional, seemingly parochial, landscape and workscape near Mansfield in which family and community remain present – at least in the mind of the poet-speaker whose own identity, as he contemplates a map of the area, is to commemorate those other lives which have and continue to constitute (rather than haunt) his being. King’s Mill is already dual, being both reservoir and hospital. The first statement of the poem – ‘this is the then I stand in now’ – is an immediate expression of the fluidity of time in these lyric poems. The ending of the poem illustrates much of what is best about Sansom’s selfabnegating poetry: 3

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EDITORIAL

One of my pleasures this autumn was introducing Peter Sansom and Michael Schmidt before their joint reading at the Ilkley Literature Festival. And when I received this invitation I was immediately struck by my sense of the invaluable contribution they have made to the life of poetry in the UK. From their different bases in the north of England, they have given major opportunities to poets across a whole generation. Both have decades of experience in the publishing of poetry: Schmidt over fifty years with Carcanet, and more than forty with PN Review; Sansom over thirty years with the Poetry Business, which includes the imprint Smith/Doorstop and The North magazine. At the same time as promoting and working on the texts of others, they have also managed to maintain a fidelity to their own craft as poets – something for which we should be equally grateful.

At Ilkley, Sansom and Schmidt were reading from their latest collections – Lanyard and Talking to Stanley on the Telephone. These are their sixth and ninth volumes respectively. In these new collections, both poets are in fine form and both are able to use their accumulated wealth of experience – and indeed their age – to great creative purpose. Both feel confident enough to play with time and memory and both use the vagaries of memory to wonderful poetic effect.

Both collections acknowledge a fellow poet: Sansom has an epigraph by Stanley Cook, who lived and worked in Yorkshire until his death in 2010, and Schmidt, in his title, references Stanley Moss, the American poet and art dealer. Sansom’s choice of Cook’s ‘And I could panic that all my relatives are gone, only alive in flashes of anecdote’ suggests the uncertainty and loss at the heart of his book. Its title, Lanyard, a definition of which forms his other epigraph, also speaks, albeit ambivalently, to the cathartic power of his elegiac project: ‘a short length of rope for securing something’. Sansom’s collection of short lyrics offers some aesthetic security from the threat of absence and loss. Schmidt’s epigraph, taken from Judith Wright’s ‘The Shadows of Fire: Ghazals’ – ‘Poems written in age confuse the years’ – carries with it, in contrast, a strange ironic certainty. His collection faces the ageing process head-on, sometimes demonstrating steely courage and a stoic matter-of-factness. At others, it dares to be comically outrageous in its classical vigour and cosmopolitan flair.

The first poem of Lanyard, ‘King’s Mill’, establishes the geography and ontology of Sansom’s collection: a shared regional, seemingly parochial, landscape and workscape near Mansfield in which family and community remain present – at least in the mind of the poet-speaker whose own identity, as he contemplates a map of the area, is to commemorate those other lives which have and continue to constitute (rather than haunt) his being. King’s Mill is already dual, being both reservoir and hospital. The first statement of the poem – ‘this is the then I stand in now’ – is an immediate expression of the fluidity of time in these lyric poems. The ending of the poem illustrates much of what is best about Sansom’s selfabnegating poetry:

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