Welcome to British poetry - February 2006
This instalment of the UK pages of PIW is guest-edited by Anne Born and Sinéad Morrissey, who bring us a quartet of poets that presents a range around the UK in many ways. From Falmouth to Fife, the distance between Penelope Shuttle and John Burnside is over five hundred miles; they are joined, from across the Irish Sea, by Martin Mooney and Jean Bleakney. The range is not simply geographical, however - almost twenty years separate the publication of Penelope Shuttle's and Jean Bleakney's first books, and the calm grace of John Burnside's poems contrasts strongly with the piercings and stomped-on sandcastles we find in Martin Mooney's poems.
Even as the settings of these poems range from field to forest, garden to hospital ward, beach to body-piercing parlour, it's important not to let an awareness of the differences detract from the correspondences that can be found between them; for example, the last Mooney poem in this issue, 'Neanderthal Funeral', captures a moment of cold, quiet grief with a grace that, while displaying his repertoire, opens a conversation with Penelope Shuttle's elegiac poem to her late husband, Peter Redgrove. In turn, Shuttle's litany of what she is not, 'Non CV, or I am not who you think I am', shares some qualities of tone with 'The Fairytale Land of Um' by Jean Bleakney, whose 'Winter Solstice' carries a view of frosted harebells that can lead, quite naturally, to John Burnside's 'Over Kellie'.
It’s not all about moving between poems, of course; any of the poems in this issue could be a favourite, holding you to its page. But it's exciting to have discovered from our first edition that, even more so than in a print magazine, the web format invites readers to browse and skip between the poets and their poems, their issue 1 predecessors and fellow poets from other countries - to range freely, in fact.
Anne Born is a poet, reviewer, translator and publisher, and lives mainly in South Devon. Translations over the past few years include three novels of Jens Christian Grøndahl from the Danish, and three novels of Per Petterson from the Norwegian.
Sinéad Morrissey has lived and worked in Japan and New Zealand and now lives in Northern Ireland. She has received an Eric Gregory Award and the Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry 2005, and her most recent collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot award and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
