Editorial truths beyond whatever we intend to say.’ Often, it appears, resisting that need for an exclusive certainty, a fixed, finite meaning might lead us to articulate a deeper, richer perception and connection.
This, as a practice, seems born out elsewhere by Andre Lorde who, speaking of her childhood, in conversation with Adrienne Rich, states, ‘When someone said to me “How do you feel” or “What do you think” […] I would often recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling’. It’s that somewhere I’m interested in. Not a specific word, or definition, but the searching for an emotional place to land. Nina Mingya Powles is seeking a similar place in her beautiful sequence ‘Slipstitch’ within these pages – somewhere between memory and object.
I began to discover uncertainty everywhere, in the poems I was including here: sometimes with humour – ‘It’s honestly cute that you think // you know what’s coming’, declares Natalie Shapero; sometimes it’s feared, as Victoria Kennefick attempts to ward it off with an egg cleanse. It’s distinctly present as the gum sticking together the fragmentary pieces of Inua Ellams and of Helen Mort, and at the forefront of Deryn Rees-Jones’ attempt to find (or abandon the possibility of finding) logic in illness. Each poem, in its own way, makes a virtue of what Jack Underwood calls, doubting the ‘finality, and the general big-bearded Victorian arrogance of certainty as it seems to appear in other forms of language’. The only certain thing in this whole issue might be my assertion, right now, that there is a glut of work here, by names you might recognise and others you might not, for you to enjoy and engage with.
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The specialist with whom I was engaged was a very nice man, who empathised with my situation, and after examining me, suggested that I probably didn’t have Multiple Sclerosis or another life-altering condition – it could, he said, be a momentary issue which would right itself, it could, he said, largely have been exacerbated by my underlying anxiety ‘turning up the volume on my nervous system’, he didn’t know for sure.
Wayne Holloway-Smith
6 The Poetry Review