Sheenagh Pugh's Blog, page 12

Review of “100 Poems To Save the Earth” eds Zoe Brigley and Kristian Evans, Seren 2021

This is my month for reviewing anthologies. Two, which have in common both “100 Poems” in the title and a certain ambiguity as to the remit. I should mention that I have a poem in this one, though as usual I feel I can reasonably review the rest of it.
 

The introduction makes it clear that the title is deliberately “provocative”; the editors do not imagine that poems can of themselves save anything. What they hope for is that reading them can inspire people to “slow down”, “pay attention and notice what we have been missing.” So, eco-poetry, but the intro also states “we have abandoned a traditional view of “nature poetry” or “environmental writing”, especially where it sidelines particular groups (eg people of the global majority/BAME/BIPOC writers, LGBTQ+ poets, or writers with disabilities)”
 

I’m not quite sure how this sidelining works (are lesbian poets debarred from writing nature poems, or writers with disabilities unable to be concerned about the environment?) but the implication, I think, is that the anthology concerns itself as much with human beings as with the planet they (we) are busy destroying. Certainly this seems to be true of the poems chosen. There are poems, not as many as you’d expect, that focus purely on other species or the environment itself, poems that place humans in the context of the world around them, poems that use environmental concerns as a metaphor for human concerns, and ones that, at least to me, seem to focus entirely on humans and have little or nothing to do with the purported theme (though most are still eminently readable for their own sake).
 

I think I get the rationale behind this. The editors want readers to see themselves as part of the planet, not outside or in opposition to it. There is sense in this, but, I think, also a danger, that of seeing the earth as being there for our benefit. It is notable how several poems here arise from new parenthood, and understandable that people with that perspective have a heightened care for the world they want to preserve for posterity. But that’s just the problem; we ought not to want tigers to survive so that our grandchildren can look at them, or bees because they fertilise our crops, but for their own sake, because they have as much right to be here as we do. One of the most important poems here, I think, is Tishani Doshi’s “Self”, and more poets should heed her comment:
 

     The shock we carry is that the world
     doesn’t need us.
 

Not that humans have no place in eco-poetry. One of the poems that really impressed me was Paula Meehan’s “Death of a Field”. From its opening line, “The field itself is lost the morning it becomes a site”, this addresses the conflict between seeing a place as itself and seeing it as a resource or commodity. It chronicles what is lost:
 

     Who amongst us is able to number the end of grasses
    To number the losses of each seeding head?
 

It also chronicles the housing estate which will take their place:
 

     The end of dandelion is the start of Flash
    The end of dock is the start of Pledge
    The end of teazel is the start of Ariel
 

- and this is where it manages to be brilliantly dispassionate, for of course there is no denying that people need housing, and most of the stuff that goes with it. Indeed the field whose loss she mourns was probably itself there because some Iron Age farmer cleared a patch of forest. By being in the world, we change it; the best we can do is be aware of this and try to limit our effect.

Another poem that emphasises this need for awareness is Joanna Klink’s “Some Feel Rain”, in which the voice wonders why some are so much in tune with the world around them that they sense
 

     tiny blinkings of ice from the oak,
    a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer
    you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl
    it carries
 

while others wonder “why the earth cannot make its way towards” them.
 

Many of the voices here are new and very welcome to me, and there were few poems I disliked, though I’ll admit to feeling impatient with Simon Armitage’s overdone agonising about kicking a mushroom. I apologise if this was in fact intended to be comic; I did laugh, but suspected I wasn’t meant to. With some poems, I thrilled to a sensitive and vivid evocation of nature, only to come down somewhat when the ending turned it all into a metaphor for some human activity. “Too often”, to quote the introduction, “it seems the earth is a mirror, in which we find only ourselves”. I was grateful for poets like Alice Oswald and Pascale Petit, who don’t think seabirds and tigers need to be anything but seabirds and tigers. There is a merciful absence of the kind of overt, finger-wagging didacticism that used to disfigure eco-poetry but seems to have all but died out. I’m not sure about the title and core concept, nor how a few of the poems fit it, but there is some seriously interesting reading here.
 

The poem that, for me, perhaps best encapsulated the theme of awareness was Jen Hadfield’s “Our Lady of Isbister”, with its echoed “O send me another life like this”.  It enumerates small things:

    I want the same lochans as I had before –
    the wind driving spittlestrings
    to skimpy shores of dark red stone;
    same hot sweet slaw
    of muck and shit and trampled straw;
    the chimney bubbling transparent heat;
    a whirpool of Muscovy ducks;
    paet-reek;
    a scrambling clutch of piglet-pups

before ending in a kind of epiphany of realisation that there can be nothing better, anywhere, than the planet where we currently are:
 

     O send me another last life like this –
    This is bliss
                                              this
    no, this
                                                             no, this. 

Review of The European Eel by Steve Ely, pub. Longbarrow Press 2021

When Steve Ely remarks that his name caused him to be “chosen” by the European eel as a chronicler, I doubt he is being entirely facetious. George Herbert, after all, was convinced that if “son” and “sun” were homonyms, this must be because the Lord, for some good reason, wished it to be so. Ely does nothing half-heartedly and having decided to write a book-length eco-poem centring on the endangered eel, his first act was to make an exhaustive study of its life, habitat and history. The result of this is that he is very much at home with the scientific vocabulary – geographic, oceanographic, biological – attaching to it. And being Ely, he sees no reason to avoid using this because it might be esoteric or unfamiliar to the reader. He does provide an informative glossary and notes at the end, which can profitably be read after the poem, but personally I would first read straight through, immerse yourself in this Sargasso of fascinating new words and rely on the meaning becoming clear enough from the context.

For one thing, the lingering on the tongue of lines like “leptocephalus, the larval form of anguilla” and “the thermonuclear/microplankton of the drifting epipelagic” pave the way for the sudden brutality of his description of the Gulf Stream, in which the same verbal euphony belies the words’ meaning:

     a roaring salt river
     hurtling north on the edge of the American
     continental shelf, its estuaries of blight;
     oestrogen-saturated sewage, methamphetamine
     neurotoxins, chromosome-warping
     neocotinoid run-off. The leptocephali soak it up
     and tumble to Hatteras with the flotsam
     of the current – single-use Canaveral
     space junk, the strip mall’s car-tossed,
    fast-food trash and radioactive manatees. 

He focuses on one individual eel’s journey from her birth in the Sargasso Sea to a Yorkshire pool and back again – eels breed in the Sargasso and find their way there from all the various European rivers and streams where they have spent most of their lives. Having made this epic journey and bred, they die. This eel’s odyssey encompasses, beside natural predators, the blades of hydro-electric plant turbines, potentially fatal pollutants like benzoylecgonine, found in the tissues of eels in cities where cocaine use is high, and indeed Mr Ely himself, who temporarily removes her from her habitat to make a study before re-releasing her.

Obviously the journey, though based on extensive research, is largely imagined, and some of the imagining creates startlingly effective imagery: 

      rippling spearheads
     of foliate gelatine, glittering in the half-lit heave
     like a shoal of shredded cling-film.  

Its single-minded purpose also generates terrific momentum. One danger of eco-poetry is that it can sound like a sermon or lecture. This poem never stands still long enough for that: the ways in which humans are casually fouling up the eel’s world are noted, deadpan and laconically, as she travels, never dwelt on – after all, new hazards are arising at every turn and demanding attention. Power pulses through these lines like the eels through the water, never more so than at the literal climax, when the eel finally mates: 

      the hypertonic waters are smoking
    with milt, and her shuddering body
    can hold it back no longer. She cracks like a whip
     and her body convulses, spurting gusher
     after gusher of glittering golden ova. 

Another way to get eco-poetry wrong is to make it so gloomy and doom-laden that it is no fun to read – as Brecht so aptly remarked, if you want to educate or persuade an audience, you must first give them an incentive to sit still. Here the incentive, apart from the intrinsic interest of the eel’s journey, is the joyfulness and delight of Ely’s language. He has always enjoyed diving into an ocean of words, and rarely has this trait been more appropriate than in this poem. In an earlier collection, Incendium Amoris, I occasionally found the allusiveness and linguistic exuberance detracting from the momentum. In The European Eel there is such a narrative drive that the passing allusions to other endangered or extinct former inhabitants of the earth, like right whales, passenger pigeons and evicted Gaelic crofters, speed by and become part of the poem’s landscape as if we were glimpsing them through the window of an express train.  

Fortunately this particular train can be boarded again and again, and the details of the journey noted more carefully. This is, I think, his most consistently powerful and entertaining book for a while, and certainly one of the most impressive books of eco-poetry I have read.

  

Review of Terminarchy by Angela France, pub. Nine Arches Press 2021

there’s enough warmth in the air for bare arms, and at home
the heating’s been off for weeks. Sparrow mutters behind me
We’ll pay for this!
 

(“Early Spring”)
 

It is typical of this collection that an innocuous title like “Early Spring” should turn out to be, not some Victorian or Georgian celebration of poetry’s (alleged) favourite season, but a warning about how climate change is disrupting the seasons. Sparrow, putting in his sardonic two penn’orth over the poet’s shoulder, is a constant presence. Smaller and livelier than Hughes’s Crow, he is also sarkier and conveys his unwelcome news with a wry humour, in another poem with an ambiguous title:
 

     Rooks gather, their rusty calls ratcheting
    from the branches and a voice whispers
    at my shoulder Nice place, if you can keep it.
    (“Getting Late”)

It will be clear by now that this collection’s concerns are primarily ecological. Like all the best ecological poetry, it neither preaches nor accentuates the negative; the focus, mostly, is not on “look what we’ve lost” but “look what we have, and dare not risk losing”, which is not only a more productive approach but results in a lot more enjoyment for the reader.  Often this comes from her sharp, humour-leavened observation of the natural world:

    The frog clambers up from the dark
   chippings, piano-fingered hands spread to grip
    bark as it shifts and slides, pauses on top
    of the pile. I can see its throat pulsing, perfect
    dots along sharp back-ridges, cleanly banded legs
    in Halloween witch-stockings.
   (“Suddenly a frog”)

But she seldom forgets for long that what she observes with such pleasure is fragile and endangered. It shows in the sombre image in “Growth”:

     Blackthorn chokes
    the stile, spatters petals on the ground
    like leucocytes.

A similar sudden, emotional wrench ends this sentence from “Singing lessons”:
 

    Blackbird sometimes shows himself, lets me watch
   song spill from his beak, the liquid trill of his courting,
   the sharp chook chook as he warns of a dog, or a cat,
   or me.

It is a human instinct to turn away from what we fear, especially if we feel unable to do much about it, and this too is addressed in this collection: there is a presence of modern technology here that might surprise those who think “nature poets” don’t do that sort of thing. The disguised villanelle “Blame” begins with a woman in whom most of us could see ourselves:
 

     She looks outside, twenty-eight days with no rain
    and the grass is browning to the colour of barley
    while she cruises online for someone to blame. 

It ends:
 

    She’s tired, this level of anger can’t be sustained
   Sparrow says it won’t matter, come the terminarchy;
   outside it’s been a hundred days without rain
   and spending all day online is partly to blame.

This of course is literally true: keyboard eco-warriors themselves use plenty of earth’s resources simply by being online, but it is also true in a deeper sense that turning away from a problem makes it worse – as she remarks in “Rooting out”, about weeding, “it is too easy to rest, leave/a calm surface undisturbed”.  There is a lot of uneasy seeing beyond the surface of things in these poems: at one point she echoes Richard Wilbur’s poem “Junk”, in which he imagines ill-made, shoddy artefacts in a bin returning to earth and being remade into something better. She cannot share this consolation, knowing, as he would not have done, about the “minute beads we make of plastic and petroleum” and how hard it is for plastic, in particular, to be unmade, even if it “drops to the depth of diamonds”. In the end there is both a recognition of how difficult it is for most people who aren’t Greta Thunberg to pay enough attention to the state of the planet, and an insistence that nevertheless, there is no way to ignore it in comfort either.

     Scrolling feels like vertigo; hearts
    and kittens don’t dilute constant crises
    and paying attention is like the stark
    brilliance of winter sun on a wet road;
    all I see ahead is the shape of something dark.

   (“Scrolling”)

 
 

Review of This Much Huxley Knows, by Gail Aldwin, pub. Black Rose Writing 2021

“Dad sits on the armchair in the lounge. He’s reading a newspaper with the pages out wide so I can only see the top of his head. He’s had a busy morning buying paint to fix the ceiling and now he needs a good rest.”
 

From a slightly older narrator, this might be sarcasm, but Huxley, our protagonist-narrator, is seven and repeating what Dad has undoubtedly told him.  This is a novel aimed at adult readers, but with a child narrator, and not one looking back at the past, but narrating in the present. A dangerous proceeding for an author, for there is an infuriatingly lazy assumption that anything with a child narrator or protagonist must be aimed at children. But the benefit is that it gains you an unusual first-person narrator: not only can he show your readers a perspective on things they do not usually see, but he is necessarily sometimes an unaware narrator (particularly since the adults around him give him only partial and sometimes downright mendacious information), and since your readers are adults, they may be ahead of him, which is a great way to ratchet up the tension.
 

It also, in some ways, makes this hard to review, because throughout the novel there are doubts as to whether Huxley or the adults are right about certain things, and it wouldn’t be proper for a reviewer to make up the reader’s mind in advance. The title must always be borne in mind; we are inside the head of someone who is bright, curious but not always au fait with all the facts or experience he needs. At the end, it would be easy for a reader to conclude that Huxley was right about one very important plot strand, and that the adults now agree that he was. This is what Huxley himself concludes, but I think an attentive adult reader might well differ about both assumptions.
 

It is, however, fair to say that one thing Huxley becomes aware of during the book is that few situations are completely black and white, and people can be more than one thing at a time. The bullied can also bully; parents can make fools of themselves; a teacher can be both a bit of a humourless control freak and a good storyteller.  The grandmother of Huxley’s friend Ben is always kind to him; she is also a racist whose views embarrass her family: “Ben’s Nanny Phil says everyone from Miss Choi’s country looks the same. When she says stuff like that Paula tells Nanny Phil to shush or she’ll get a reputation.” Huxley, who has imbibed his school’s inclusion and anti-bullying policies, is puzzled as to what the right course of action is here:
 

“Paula and Mum begin to chat and they’re not including Nanny Phil in their talk. I really don’t understand but it’s to do with Samira and what Nanny Phil says. I think Paula and Mum are leaving Nanny Phil out and that’s not kind. If Nanny Phil is saying not nice things about Samira that isn’t kind either. Oh dear, oh dear!”
 

Having a child narrator always raises questions of credibility: is the voice convincing? Obviously no seven-year-old could actually write a novel; we must assume that what we are doing is listening to Huxley’s thought processes, and mostly I had no trouble believing this. He is quite an engaging narrator, bright, sometimes funny and usually well-intentioned. I doubt all adults will take to his favourite trick of deliberately mispronouncing words to make others – “rip-you-station” for reputation, “sent-a-ball” for sensible. His parents and teachers frequently find it infuriating and I don’t altogether blame them, but there is a narrative point to it: his insistence on seeing things his own way.
 

This novel is gratifyingly ambitious in its narrative techniques; it is always good to see an author deliberately choosing the difficult path, particularly when by and large she is successful. Of course, being ambitious doesn’t in itself make a novel readable, but in this case the use of a narrator who is less aware than his readers makes for a tremendous amount of tension as we wonder if he is unknowingly putting himself in danger, and I do not see how this could have been achieved without this particular method of narration. At the book’s heart, always, is a gap: the gap between what Huxley knows and what we know, or think we know.

Review of Broken Lights by Basil Ramsay Anderson, ed. Robert Alan Jamieson, pub. Northus Shetland Cl

This is the second in a series of reprints, Northus Shetland Classics, and, like the first, concerns an author who died too young. Anderson died in 1888 at 26, of TB, like several of his siblings. (He came of an ill-starred but talented family; his niece Willa married the poet Edwin Muir and became a well-known author in her own right.) Anderson’s family were part of the ‘Shetland exile’ community in Edinburgh, where his mother had removed after the death at sea of her husband. Another member of this expat community was the older Shetland writer Jessie Saxby, who had acted as a mentor to Anderson and who first edited and published this book after his death. It contains his poems, extracts from letters to his brother and a friend, and an introductory essay from Saxby including several tributes from others. 

The letter extracts are fascinating, and moving because of the contrast between their lively, conversational style and what we know will shortly become of some people mentioned in them. Here, Basil’s younger brother Andrew, a teacher of engineering, has used his expertise to get a smoking chimney to “draw” properly: 

“Andrew calculated what was the requisite current of air necessary to draw that smoke up that lum, and of course, when he had ascertained that, drew up the window the precise distance to allow this current access to the room. He then betook himself to the kitchen.” 

Here he calculates when the room will be clear of smoke, “a problem in pure mathematics” and goes back in, where he is surprised to find a policeman and a fireman attending to a conflagration: “On examination he found that he had forgot an important factor in his calculations, viz: a blazing gas-bracket in close proximity to the inflammable window curtain”.  

The humour with which this incident is related absolutely sparkles, and none the less brightly because the next time we hear of Andrew, in another letter about nine months later, he is so weak from TB that he cannot walk. He will die a few months before his older brother. The letter extracts are so appealing that one wishes Saxby had included more. 

Basil’s obituary notice remarks that “he early manifested a talent for versification, and had his life been prolonged he would probably have taken a recognised place among our minor poets”. This is what one might call faint praise, but as far as the poems in standard English go, I think it is about right – the standard English poems are not worth noticing except as curiosities. Anderson effectively wrote in three dialects: standard English, Lowland Scots and Shetlandic. And like so many dialect writers of the 19th century, he had an exaggerated respect for standard English, seeming to think that when he wrote poems in it he must affect a “high style” and use poncy words like “welkin”, “brooklet” and “methinks”, none of which he would have dreamed of employing in everyday speech. Saxby suggests that this is because it was essentially a foreign language to him, but that will not do. His letters, give or take the odd dialect word consciously used, are in standard English and he expresses himself perfectly naturally in them. It is more to do with the pernicious idea that there was a Poetry Voice, which was somehow elevated above natural speech. In dialect, writers of the time seem to have been able to free themselves from this, and certainly Anderson writing dialect is a different poet.  

He had however another problem, ironically connected with the technical facility Robert Alan Jamieson mentions in his introduction. Anderson does seem to have had a completely natural bent for scansion and rhyme: like Kipling, he could knock off a rhymed poem with consummate ease, and like Kipling, he allowed this facility to betray him into using far more rhyme than was wise or appropriate to his subject, so that even his most serious poems can fall into an appallingly jingly jog-trot. Technically speaking, he handles his complicated rhyme-schemes well, but they fatally dominate the work. 

Again he generally avoids this in his Lowland and Shetlandic dialect poems, because he uses simpler and less obtrusive rhyme schemes. In “A Bonnie Face”, one of the very few poems where he sounds anything like Burns, he praises a pretty girl in terms that sound not only natural but rather more honest than many a poet’s: 

There’s something in a bonnie face,
Though beauty be it’s a’
That makes a man forget a’ grace
An' steals his heart awa’.

 There may be little sign o’ wit –
There may be nane ava!
But I can thole the want o’ it… 

Admittedly, being a respectable Christian gentleman, he feels obliged to add a last verse stressing how much better it is if the girl does have wit and goodness as well as beauty. But one senses that this is tacked on out of a sense of duty; it is the preceding verses that come from the heart. 

Among his Shetlandic dialect poems is his long masterpiece, “Auld Maunsie’s Crü”, which is the one that arguably lifts him beyond “minor” and certainly would have done, had he written more in that vein. A crü is a circular stone enclosure for growing vegetables, providing protection from wind and marauding sheep; they are found all over Shetland. This one is built by a crofter to grow kale. But right from the start, this unassuming structure begins to accrue a status beyond itself and its purpose. “Maunsie” is a common Shetland name, but it derives from “Magnus”, a name both of Norwegian kings and of the saint who made it popular in the islands. His crü is well-made, “an honest O”, which inevitably puts us in mind of the “round O” on which Shakespeare proposes to portray the round world. But this is an “honest” O, with a purpose in the real world, not a stage for fiction. And it becomes something other than a vegetable plot; for seamen out fishing it is a guide, “a tooer an’ landmark”, while landsmen use it as a clock, reckoning how far through the day they are when “da sun is by Auld Maunsie’s crü”. In winter its walls provide beasts with shelter from snow and wind; in summer with shade. 

After Maunsie’s death, the neglected crü falls derelict, but perhaps more importantly it loses its name. Because superstition forbids the naming of a dead person, it first becomes “da crü o’ him ‘at’s noo awa’”, but later, as its origin begins to fade from memory, it is known “by da füle name o’ Ferry-ring”, a spurious legend of fairies replacing a genuine human story and directly reversing the way in which the “honest O” replaced the stage earlier in the poem. 

Fortunately, Anderson chose a simple form for this, rhyming iambic tetrameters, which enhance rather than obscure its genuine power. Maunsie and his crü make a difference to the world while they are in it, but it is not a lasting difference. Everyone who ever met Anderson seems to testify to his strong religious belief, but it must have applied solely to the existence of another world, because the end of this poem does not strike me as remotely optimistic about our chances of being remembered in this one: 

An' later folk had mair ta dü
Dan mind Auld Maunsie or his crü. 

It is a pleasant thought that, because of this reprinting project, the poem of Auld Maunsie’s Crü, at least, may live longer than its author imagined. 

Just because it's so

I've been thinking about a thing. It is incredibly rare to find, in an 18th, 19th or even 20th-century novel, a disabled or ill character whose disability or illness does not, in the end, become relevant to the plot. Wilkie Collins has umpteen ill and disabled characters, far more than most, but to the best of my recollection, they are never disabled or ill just because they are: in the end their affliction will always be a plot point. The eponymous Miss Finch's blindness is central to the plot; Noel Vanstone's chronic heart condition is why he dies at an awkward moment in No Name; the mental backwardness of Mrs Wragge in that novel also enables the plot, as does that of Anne Catherick in The Woman in White. In The Moonstone, Rosanna's deformed shoulder identifies her in disguise; even Lucy's limp is there to explain her bitterness against men (embittered disabled people being a pernicious but common 19th-century novelist's trope). You'd think, in George Eliot's Adam Bede, that Mrs Poyser's delicate health was an exception, but not so: far into the book, we learn that it has been carefully seeded to give her a reason to be upstairs in bed at a time when she would surely otherwise have spotted Hetty's pregnancy, which goes unnoticed by the less sharp-eyed members of the household. And of course Silas Marner's catalepsy is crucial.

In fact the only exception I can think of in that period is RLS's Catriona. Quite early on in this novel, we learn that our heroine is short-sighted. The first time I read it, I was unconsciously waiting for this to become somehow "relevant". It never does, in terms of plot. Catriona is myopic, just as she is tall and grey-eyed; it's just part of who she is.

My unrealised expectation was, I think, prompted by Chekhov's remark about loaded guns (if you mention one in a story, somebody had better fire it eventually). There is sense in this, of course; one doesn't want to load stories with irrelevant facts. But to equate human disability with that gun is to assume a norm, and to suppose that any deviation from said norm needs an excuse connected with the plot. Relating to a different norm, I once asked a thriller writer (not a very good one in my view, but very well known) if he would ever include a gay character and he said firmly, no, because their sexuality would be irrelevant to the plot (as far as I recall, there wasn't a whole lot of racial diversity in his work either, presumably for the same reason).

But a writer sets a story somewhere in the world, and if his world is populated exclusively by cis white physically and mentally perfect specimens, it had better be a fantasy world, because it sure as hell isn't this one. There is a reason to include characters who don't fit supposed norms, not for the plot but simply to make the world of the book credible.

One would suppose, indeed hope, that contemporary novels would recognise this, and maybe they do; there are so many, and I probably haven't read enough to know for sure.  (Though as late as 1980, the blindness of Jorge in The Name of the Rose is still crucial to the plot.)  Is it more common, in the 21st century, for writers to include characters who are ill or disabled just because they are?

Review of Ancestors: Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials by Alice Roberts, pub. Simon & Schuster

As some will already know, I have a real thing about osteoarchaeology, so this is a title I was never going to resist – hell, the cover illustration had me hooked. In addition, it is about the relatively neglected but fascinating pre-Roman period. 

Alice Roberts was originally a doctor, who gravitated via anatomy to palaeopathology and osteoarchaeology and is well known as a TV presenter. She was at one time working toward a professorship in anatomy but seems to have settled for one in “public engagement with science”, which sounds more like PR than anything else. Nonetheless, she knows her subject and has written an absorbing book about ancient funerary customs and what we can deduce from them. If the latter is often hedged about with caveats, this is how science is meant to be: her refusal to come up with the kind of easy answers one often finds in newspaper headlines on this topic is admirable. Late in the book, she refers to the huge shift from burial to cremation in Britain over the course of a century (78% of bodies are now cremated, as opposed to 0.7% in 1900), and points out how easy it would be for our distant descendants to attribute this to a seismic shift in religious belief, when in fact it came about for reasons of hygiene, cost and lack of space in cemeteries. It is a salutary warning not to make assumptions like “graves with swords = male; graves with mirrors = female”. 

She is also admirably upfront about her own beliefs (relevant in the context of how she interprets burials), especially given how this may influence some Amazon reviewers. One can only cheer at this:

“nowhere can we point to a circumscribed Beaker ‘race’ […] because the fundamental idea of ‘race’ is flawed.  It makes no sense biologically or historically. In fact it doesn’t make any sense to anyone apart from people who are determined to ignore complex reality in order to persist in being racist.”

Her characterisation of the promise of an afterlife as a “Ponzi scheme” (she is the current president of the Humanist Association) is brave, too.

However there are a few things that would stop me giving this five stars as opposed to four. One is the truly miserly paucity of illustrations, in a book that would be greatly enhanced by them. A few monochrome line drawings just don’t cut it. Simon & Schuster are a big house; couldn’t they run to some colour photos? There are also too many typos, so presumably they economised on proof-readers as well. And the indexing could be better – the notion of “race” is discussed several times in the book, but you will look in vain for that word in the index.

Another problem for me is a slight over-chattiness in the tone. Granted, this is “popular science” and so can afford more colloquialisms; I’ve no quarrel, for instance, with contractions like isn’t and weren’t. But I could do without ultra-colloquialisms like “get one’s knickers in a twist” and I would even more happily lose the irrelevant personal travel information that bedevils this kind of book; “I take the train to Salisbury again, and Adrian picks me up from the station”. She also has an odd way of getting over the problem of the Paviland body, which became famous as the “Red Lady” before it was realised to be male. She keeps the name but uses male pronouns with it, which just sounds odd. Her reason – “the name has stuck” – doesn’t convince; well, unstick it, then! Call him Paviland Man, or what you will, always provided you don’t use Neil Oliver’s excruciating coinage “Red Laddie”.

But with these caveats, this is an essential book for anyone like me who is addicted to the whole idea of reading the absorbing stories to be found in bones and burials. 

Interview with Abeer Ameer

Abeer Ameer is a dentist, born in Sunderland, who lives in Cardiff. Her first collection of poems, Inhale/Exile, reviewed here , focuses on her family’s Iraqi background and was published by Seren  in 2021.

SHEENAGH PUGH: Did you grow up bilingual? If so, what effect do you think it has had on your writing? If not, did you feel you were missing something? (Philip Gross the poet and novelist, who was a colleague of mine at Glamorgan Uni, is half Estonian but his father decided not to teach him the language in case it confused him. He describes himself as having grown up “bilingual in English and silence”).  

ABEER AMEER: “Bilingual in English and silence”. Gosh, what a marvellous expression. 

I grew up speaking Arabic with the Iraqi dialect, and when I started nursery my parents were told to speak to me in English so I wouldn’t get confused. I then spoke English with an Iraqi accent and now speak Arabic in a Cardiff accent.

I was apparently the first of the new generation to coin Arabish words, where I split Arabic and English words in half and joined them together. My earliest recollection of this was when I was about five years old and an Iraqi auntie phoned from London. I answered the phone as my mum was praying.. The Arabic for prayer is “Salat”, so when asked where my mum was, I answered with the phrase “she is sallying”. That was in the early eighties and I have never lived it down. Random strangers quote it back to me even now. Perhaps, to rephrase the term by Philip Gross, I grew up bilingually in Arabish.

I’ve always loved language, especially the etymology of words, both in English and Arabic. Unfortunately my Arabic, specifically writing and reading, isn’t great and I’ve always felt deficient in this regard. I can grasp the gist of things but want much more. I’ve been studying Arabic for the past year going back to basics with grammar, case endings and the like. Ultimately, I’d love to be able to read, write and translate from Arabic, and even write poetry. On the other hand, I think learning English initially from my parents has contributed to a lack of confidence sometimes and I do second-guess myself often. But I think I’m very lucky to have exposure to these two worlds, left to right and right to left. Having access to both is quite wonderful.

SP: I nearly laughed aloud on reading “Arabish”, because of course it made me think of Wenglish, that fascinating South Walian melange of English words and Welsh idiom: “talk tidy”, “over by there”, “now in a minute”. I agree that having two languages is an incalculable benefit; it’s like seeing things in 3-D rather than 2-D. And I’ve found translation a great way to keep working when not in the mood for writing my own stuff. Which authors would you like to translate from Arabic?

AA: The discipline of tafseer is about trying to comprehend the meaning, whereas tarjama is ‘translation’. With over a dozen words for love, and it has been said there are over seventy words for dog, translation will inevitably lose something. Having said that, it’s still very valuable to translate something and bring it to different audiences. So before coming to translation, I’d really like to just get to grips with the Arabic language and the poems in the original forms. Though there would be an inevitable loss of meter and rhyme, I’d really like to read Al-Jawhiri’s poetry in English. And I’d love to work on a translation of my grandfather’s poetry collection, which was put together and published after he passed away.  

SP: Dentist-poets are a bit more unusual than doctor-poets! How does someone whose studies must have been so science-based get into writing, and does it involve finding a whole different peer group to do it with?  

AA: Ah, this is quite a long story! I always say I came to writing through the back door. As I said, I’ve always loved language, but being born to Iraqi parents in the late seventies, it was usually sciences that we were geared for when considering university degree. I was lucky to study dentistry in London at Queen Mary and Westfield College, in the first two years we studied with medical students.

I completed a masters degree in Conscious Sedation in Dentistry at Cardiff University, so I was very much involved in the treatment of anxious patients. One module I loved involved non-pharmacological treatment of anxious patients. I took up some extra courses in hypnosis. I find it fascinating that language one uses to frame things can result in reducing a person’s anxiety levels, even increase their pain threshold to a certain extent. 

SP: Tell me more! That sounds really interesting, and with possible applications to writing poetry, though there we’re often trying to ratchet up pain rather than alleviate it….

AA: A simple example would be in comparing the following phrases before administering local anaesthetic (needle):

This needle will be painful
This needle will not be painful
This pinch might feel uncomfortable
This will feel cold and spongy

I’m referring to the same needle, but these differences in the use of language can have a direct impact on the thinking and perceptions of pain and anxiety in the patient. Since pain is defined as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling being associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.” (IASP), it’s not always associated with actual damage. Add to the mix the patient’s fear of dentistry, and this too will affect the pain threshold. So the language we use, as it can affect a person emotionally, can also affect their pain threshold. 

To do what poets might hope to prolong the pain in a poem, I guess one would do the opposite of softening the blow. A great line in a poem is often a devastating one! 

Likewise, language and reasoning used in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can be very effective in anxiety management. In 2013, I had to retire early due to ill health, but I was able to complete my masters dissertation as there wasn’t clinical work involved in the final year. This brought me to mindfulness.

Then the Karrada bombing in Baghdad in 2016 happened. Probably, to date, one of the most devastating personally. So close to home for us. The poem Detail was a way just to get all the awful images out of my head. It just so happened that I achieved this by putting it all onto the page. It’s at this point that mindfulness and writing came together and was the first poem I wrote of the book, though I had no idea at the time that I would write a book. Once I had overcome the ‘turning away’ from pain, something I had been doing for a long time, the poems came quite naturally. In the book, much of the original poem Detail is redacted.

See what I mean about ‘back door’?

SP:  It’s an appalling admission, but I don’t think I knew anyone at uni who wasn’t doing arts subjects, and if it works the same way in reverse it must lead to some isolation for a writer.

AA: I didn’t really have a peer group in my early days of writing, but was lucky to join a couple of courses with some very supportive tutors. Much of my writing was done alone. It wasn’t really until I attended open mic events regularly that I made poetry friends. I think poetry appeals to me most because, in a way, it is quite scientific and precise. So much can be communicated in few words.  

In terms of isolation, I think I feel this most when I have written something that few from those from outside my cultural or religious background will understand, and balancing the need to explain, with the tendency to overexplain. It reminds me of the feeling one might have when they make a joke, and then have to explain it because no-one understands. It feels lost. But I’ve found that it’s in such times I really benefit from my peers reading the piece and letting me know what they have understood. I can then adjust accordingly. It isn’t always easy, because one starts to doubt their own gut, but I’ve found this is one of the most useful things about workshopping poems. Something I came to quite late, but I’m very happy I did.  

SP: Following on from that, how, these days, does a new writer find a publisher? It’s a question that exercises many; how did it come about for you?  

AA: The first time I had writing published was when I took part in a community project “Writing Our Lives” with Butetown History and Arts, where I first met two supportive and wonderful creative writing tutors Christina Thatcher and Emma Beynon. They were very helpful and continued to encourage me well after the writing course ended. I was introduced to different poetry collections there, and many were from Wales-based publishers, Seren. I would often check the back of the collections I liked and see where the poets had submitted their work to. I joined a Poetry class with Amanda Rackstraw at Cardiff University lifelong learning and was encouraged to go to open mic events, but being quite shy, it took me a long time to read my own poems or send work out. It seemed to be the thing that needed to be done to get any further, and though it’s something I do get quite nervous about still, I recognise this is how I progressed with my writing. 

After my ego had been bruised a number of times from rejections (I wasn’t used to this system of doing things), I was quite willing to quit the writing lark. I had some success with poetry journals, but none with competitions. After one First Thursday event at Chapter Arts, the attendees gathered downstairs. It was the first conversation I had with Amy Wack. We spoke about many things, one of them being poetry rejections. She said not to take rejections personally. Later, Amy suggested I look into sending a volume of work out to get a pamphlet published. I said I had about fifty poems at the time which is too many for a pamphlet, and Amy said she’d be happy to take a look. I sent the fifty poems to her and the rest is history. 

Jammy, I know.  

SP: Well, not really. You were doing all the right things, going to events, networking, getting to know people on the scene and putting your poems out there. I see you started off working alone but then went to open mic events and also got involved in a community project. Do you “see” poems on the page rather than “hear” them in your head, or the other way about? We all do both to some extent, but for me at least, working alone tends to make them things I see on the page, and I need to read them aloud to get a feel for how they actually sound. I would think both workshops and open mics would tend to promote hearing over seeing.  

AA: Ah this is such an interesting question and I’ve never thought about it this way. Since most of my poems are about people, I start with seeing the person in vivid movie, each scene is a stanza in my mind. Before the words, the soundtrack of the movie is a rhythm, like the beat of a drum. Movie comes first, so I guess that would be scene and music well before the details of language or words on a page.  

SP: . Do you take well to collaborating, as in projects like the Butetown one – is it something you’d like to do more of? Is it very different from working alone?

AA: I haven’t really collaborated in writing poems, as I tend to write them on my own. The Butetown project was a community one introducing members to creative writing. We would have a prompt and write poems individually and the result was an anthology.

Since the movie comes before the words, I’m not sure how I’d find working with someone else. I think I’d find it quite difficult, because for me, poetry is all about getting the movie scene into words, so language comes later. Expression is part of the poem, so I’m not sure how I would convey it to someone else before I’ve written it.

Having said that, workshopping poems after I’ve written them has proven very helpful, especially when the picture in my mind is not what readers understand from it. That’s more like a problem-solving exercise.  

SP: . There are several different poetic forms in the collection – sonnet, sestina, villanelle, ghazal, so clearly you’re interested in formal poetry. Can you say what form means to you, how you use it?

AA: I’m very interested in form, perhaps partly because of the precision, but also how the uses can be quite specific too. The two sestina poems I included seemed to fit well with the theme of the poems, that feeling of being locked in, trapped. I used the pentina form for Hameeda’s Prayers to reflect the five daily ritual prayers as a backbone to her life in all its phases. The sonnets and ghazal fit with the themes of love and exile quite well, I think. Sometimes, I have started a poem as free verse and found it only worked as a whole in a specific form, and vice versa. I wrote the villanelle Price Tag after struggling with another poem called The White Goods of Baghdad in free verse about the same subject (sanctions). I thought that the original would make it into the collection, but just needed to get the strong emotions out before I could complete it. The villanelle just seemed to help express what free verse couldn’t, and though I was a bit nervous to include it, Price Tag remained in the book and White Goods was taken out.

I admit I don’t always follow the traditional English language metres, and I find that sometimes poets can find it rather vexing that I don’t follow convention with form. I find the usual metre often doesn’t fit and perhaps this is in part due to the fact the subject is from a different culture entirely. Iambic pentameter doesn’t always match the Iraqi subject for me, but the other aspects of form might well do. Poetic forms in Arabic also have specific patterns related to wazn (weight) or rhythm, and rhyme follows specific patterns. I think my ear is used to a certain way. It’s those Arabish mergings again!

SP: More fools those poets for being “vexed”, then. Form is there to serve the poem, not the other way about! And I love the idea of using forms from another language entirely (after all, the villanelle is French and the sonnet Italian). These weight-related patterns interest me – would that be like syllabics in English, or maybe counting stresses?  

AA: In terms of poetry, classical Arabic has sixteen established metres. It seems to be a syllabic pattern, but the length of the vowels combined with the stresses of the consonants are the measure. It's the combination which appeals to my Arabish ears. 

One thing I didn’t mention previously is that I grew up listening to different Quranic recitations. Though the text is the same, the tones of the different reciters’ voices, the speed with which they read vary. Quran is neither poetry, nor prose, but its own style, but there is a science to its permitted forms of recitation. I listened to many different Quranic recitation growing up and have only really started enjoying listening to the Arabic poets more recently because of the availability on YouTube and the like. I think hearing those rhythms regularly, and reciting them, helps with imagining patterns which might come next.  

SP: In my experience all languages have words for concepts that either don't exist in other languages or need long paraphrases. Eg, Norwegian has "livsløgn" - life-lie: a mistaken belief that colours someone's whole life. And there's an Indian language called Boro, spoken in Assam, that has the verb "onsra" - to fall in love for the last time. Are there concepts in Arabic you find no words for in English, or vice-versa?

AA: This isn’t so much to do with concepts in Arabic but not elsewhere, but in Arabic, as with other Semitic languages, the majority of words are derived from triliteral roots, (generally three consonants). A few are quadrilateral. I find the way these words formed from the same three letters interact fascinating. For example, one of the names of God mentioned in the Quran is al-Rahman, which is taken to mean the source of unconditional compassion. Directly related is the word Al-Raheem which also means most compassionate. These words come from the three letters R, Hh, M. The Arabic word for womb is Rahm. To show someone mercy is to Irham.  

Please pardon the Arabish thing of the texting age which involves inserting a number to represent a letter, but in this case it’s the number 3 to represent the letter ‘Ayn (ع). It comes from deep down in the throat and there is no letter like it in English and is actually the first letter in the word Arabic ie 3rabi. It also happens to be the first letter of my own name. The word shi3r, meaning poem, has the same root (Sh, 3ayn, Raa) as shu3oor which means emotion or feeling. It can also mean to learn or understand intuitively. A poet is called a Sha3ir, which literally means a person who feels, or a person who perceives. Something I have wondered about and came across the answer more recently is why the word for hair (sha3r) comes from the same Sh, 3ayn, Raa root. The link is that when one feels intense emotion, they get goosebumps and hair standing on end. Then the word for vermicelli in Arabic is sha3riya, linking it to the word for hair. Mind blown. Well, mine, anyway. What’s not to love?

Another example comes from the root letters N, F, S. The meaning of this root is a subtle entity passing through to give a dramatic impact. The words to breathe, to compete, self/soul or mind, essence, newborn, and treasure all come from the same root letters. It is this connection of the origin of words which has kept my interest alive even when I have to study case endings and tables!

 SP: Your collection is very celebratory; it chronicles evil and brutality but focuses on the courage, decency and endurance of individuals. Was this a conscious decision when you set out to write, or did it just go that way of its own accord?  

AA: There was an open mic event in which I read about seven poems when I first started reading poems to an audience. I had chosen to read a set of poems I considered were well-written and made the mistake of not looking at how the set worked together. When I began reading the fourth poem, I remember feeling very sad, and thinking how depressing it all was. I’m sure the voice and sighs probably gave it away. From then on, I made a conscious decision to have a balance. Life is very rarely only dark moments, even in Iraq. There is joy. When I spend time with my extended family there, as here in Wales, we share in joy and grief. Whenever I think of my family in Iraq, I smile. When I think of aunts and uncles, even of strangers with whom we’ve crossed paths, I’m filled with admiration. I really wanted the book to reflect that.  

SP: What do you think your next collection will look like - indeed, what are you working on now?  

AA: I have a few long poems on the go, which might become pamphlets or part of the next collection. Another project details the hoops my husband and I went through in Iraq in 2019 to try and sort out Iraqi documents and papers. There are strands about the different government offices in Baghdad, taxi rides, civil servants, and it’s proving to be quite a long poem. Quite soon after we left, there were protests and burning buildings and a change in government too. Then COVID. I think this will take more than one book length as the saga, as ever, continues.

Inhale/ Exile was more about my parents and grandparents and their contemporaries, with very little of my own experiences. I peek in every now and again, usually as one of the five children mentioned in the poems. I am also keen to write something similar to Inhale/ Exile which would be more autobiographical in nature, or perhaps more of my own generation’s concerns. Time will tell. My siblings are petrified.
 

Poems

Chemistry

There was chemistry
 between them 

 a spark
so blinding  

they were
blinded  

under each other’s skin
passion undesired  

skin blush
blood rush  

racing heart
heavy breath  

weak knees
paralysis  

Mustard Gas.
Sarin.  

Panjwin
Sardasht
Al-Faw
Hawizah Marsh
Basrah
Halabja.  

At it like rabids.  

Cupid looks
the other way.
 

Price Tag
On 12th May 1996 Madeleine Allbright gave a television interview. Leslie Stahl, speaking of US sanctions against Iraq, asks if the price is worth it.
 

 She didn’t twitch, deny or confirm it
that half a million children had died.
But the price, we think, the price is worth it.  

More than the dead children of Hiroshima: all heard it.
I think this is a very hard choice, said Madeleine Allbright.
She didn’t twitch, deny or confirm it.  

A sorry subject. She didn’t skirt it.
Most affected babies and under-fives.
But the price, we think, the price is worth it.  

Starving child and mother who birthed it,
nursing mothers’ milk all dried.
She didn’t twitch, deny or confirm it.  

I think this is a very hard choice. Far from perfect.
When a miniature grave’s the only place to hide.
She didn’t twitch, deny or confirm it.
But the price, we think, the price is worth it.
 

The Postman  

When he handed
the brown envelope with typed address
to Abu Shihab, father of five doctors,
he knew it wasn’t good news.  

Two were absent from their shifts yesterday.
Forbidden from taking sick days or annual leave
they were summoned by the government
to answer for their crime.  

Serious trouble
unless they had already died
in which case the lesser punishments
for not informing the state immediately.  

Abu Shihab had not slept for days,
knowing two of his sons had already embarked
on a journey to escape Iraq by road to Jordan
with passports stating they were merchants, not doctors.  

An unknown fate in another land loyal to Abu Uday.
Abu Shihab read the summons, forehead furrowed,
folded the letter, put it back in the envelope,
returned it to the postman.  

The postman understood. For weeks he’d repeat to his superior
Wallah, Wallah, the house was empty again.
He risked his everything
for Abu Shihab and the three sons left.  

Forever to be known as
Hero, Man of Honour,
and World’s Worst Postman.
 

Links
 

Seren Books – Inhale/Exile  
Acumen Poetry – another poem, “Passing”
Video – Abeer Ameer reads “The Reed Flute and I” 

Carmine Street Metrics: reading

Here's a recording of a reading I did lately, along with Matt Miller, Karol Nielsen and several open-mic contributors including Ann Drysdale. Many thanks to the folks at Carmine Street Metrics — Terese Coe, Wendy Sloan, Anton Yakovlev —  for the invitation.
Carmine Street Metrics Featuring Sheenagh Pugh, Matt W. Miller, Karol Nielsen - YouTube

Review of Foreign Bodies by David Wishart pub. Severn House 2016

Marcus Corvinus, on board the Imperial yacht Leucothea, is out on deck early:  

“Not that I was the first one awake, mind. I noticed that Crinas was up on the half-deck, doing what I assumed were his normal morning exercises. 

Me, like most Romans, I’ve never understood the Greek passion for physical exercise. Gently tossing a ball around in the palaestra before a bath, sure, I can get that, although I’m not one for it much myself, but sit-ups like our doctor pal was currently doing – plural and very much so – are completely beyond the pale.

He looked good on it, mind, I’ll give him that. Not an ounce of flab on his gleaming, tightly muscled torso or even the hint of a pot belly. Bastard.”  

Not only is Dr Domitius Crinas a fitness fanatic, he lives on porridge, raw veg and fruit and hardly drinks alcohol. Not Corvinus’s ideal travelling companion, then. Perilla, though, takes to him, because she feels Corvinus is drinking too much and has decided to limit him to four cups a day.  

The yacht is bound for Gaul, where Crinas is to survey medicinal hot springs for the army and Corvinus is to investigate a murder in Lugdunum (Lyons) on behalf of new emperor Claudius, whose surprising interest in the death of a Gaulish wine merchant stems from a family patron-client connection. Indeed the relationship between Rome and its colonies will prove to be crucial to the case and, as often happens in this series, who is in the right, and whether an act is a crime, depends very much on where one is standing.  

Apart from Corvinus and Perilla, the only regular who really appears is Bathyllus. But there is still plenty of humour, mostly provided by Corvinus’s exasperation with Crinas and frustration at enforced sobriety. It’s also very tense, especially after the scene shifts to Treveri (Trier) and the murders start to mount up. One bit I really liked was Corvinus’s description, in note form, of the nine-day coach journey from Massilia (Marseilles) to Lugdunum:  

“Day One, to Aquae Sextiae. Veteran colony, hot springs, so Crinas happy as a pig in muck; ditto Perilla (ancient temple to the local goddess Dexsia. Don’t ask). Put up for the night with stone-deaf ex-legionary First Spear who looked old enough to have fought at Cannae. 

Day Two, to Arelate. Veteran colony again. Serious monuments, but Perilla banned from sightseeing on pain of instant divorce. Crinas went swimming in the Rhone River but unfortunately failed to drown.”  

There’s a list of all these places, with their modern names, in the notes, by the way.

As I've explained before, I have been posting reviews of Wishart's books because I  discovered that some fellow-fans had missed out on those that came out after he changed publishers. Last I heard, he was self-publishing, but you can keep up with his publications at his website .