Elusive magnetism

Judgement is built into thinking and writing about reading: as William Empson reminds us, a reader inevitably relies “on each particular poem to show you the way in which it is trying to be good”. Empson’s note is a concise guide to the ideal approach to literary criticism, but it has a broader application too: if a book is bad or boring you will put it down and struggle to finish it, or give up on it completely. It has either neglected to show you how it is trying to be good or demonstrated its ambition, but failed to fulfil it. Our reading habits evidently respond to the mercurial, semi-conscious quirks of judgement all the time – including when faced with a box of 130 or so poetry pamphlets, each of which demands to be read in full.

I read for the Michael Marks award, then, with my usual habits and tastes, albeit with an added effort to maintain readerly best behaviour: be fair, be open-minded, be patient. In fact, I needn’t have worried, since so many of this year’s entries had that elusive magnetism that makes poetry poetry, easily demonstrating the ways in which they were trying to be good and making for a sturdy shortlist.

Kate Hendry’s MX SIMP (Mariscat Press; shortlisted) takes its name from the medical abbreviation for a simple mastectomy and plays on the doubtfulness of that simplicity with a warm, dark humour. Hendry draws attention to cancer’s interactions with the everyday: the beloved, predictable roll call of friends and family who say “FECK” and send “a wave from round the corner and a list of crime novels / such as Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman” (“Breaking the News”), or the Edinburgh Cancer Centre, which resembles “the lobby of a cheap hotel offering / deals for romantic breaks […] with purple faux-leather armchairs / for restless couples” (“First Date with My CT Scanner”). On re-reading, MX SIMP is a touchingly understated rendition of the nightmarish, traumatizing experience of cancer treatment. Hendry’s stylishness also influences her poems’ forms: “Wheel of Thanks”, for instance, with its repeated “thanks” to the nurse, the radiographer, makes a refrain of that inexhaustible word.

MX SIMP is one of several beautiful productions from Mariscat Press, which gives its poets generous margins and thoughtful design touches: Hendry’s inside cover is printed with a facsimile of hospital gown fabric. Also from Mariscat this year was Blake Morrison’s Skin & Blister (shortlisted). This pamphlet might be understood as a companion piece to Morrison’s memoir, Two Sisters (TLS, February 17, 2023), which also remembers his sister Gillian. Comprising a sestina and set of twenty sonnets, Skin & Blister wears its familiar poetic forms lightly, to the extent that they are almost worn out: by grief’s weariness as much as its futility. The twentieth sonnet finds its poet “failing to compose a final sonnet, / not because there’s nothing more to say / or I feel stupid talking to a ghost […] but because you’ve had enough”.

Moving past specific memories and places to touch on abstract knots in the project of so-called grief writing, Morrison is unafraid of the strange or awkward; in the photo that frames the eighth sonnethe and his sister “look / to be flirting” as a cold-eyed woman at the back of the picture takes its subjects “not for siblings / but a girl making out with a new boyfriend”. This could be discomfiting, but Morrison recharges it with the longing the left-behind have for the departed, as well as for their own innocence, also lost to bereavement.

Guillemot Press likes to call its pamphlets “booklings”, which is cute, but also suggests something important about the pamphlet as a form. Pamphlets of poetry are more than stepping stones on the way to a “real” book, offering instead a useful constellation of possibilities to which any writer might well turn for a new project: something slender, drafty, experimental, ephemeral or just winningly, portably short. Guillemot’s recent “booklings” include a debut from Prerana Kumar and volumes by Jennifer Lee Tsai and Nancy Campbell. All are printed and bound near Guillemot’s HQ in rural Cornwall, are composed of papers derived variously from recycled paper fibres, upcycled leather waste and spent beer grain, and feature cover designs developed with a range of artists.

Kumar’s Ixora focuses on the connections between mothers and children, sisters, domestic work and the “legacy stories” of cultural history, all with a graphic, textile beauty: a mother’s stomach is “freshly / embroidered, one forked thread / hanging over the cliff of her navel” (“Creation Fable”); cooking is made ‘‘weaving” in time to the songs of Mohammad Rafi, as descaling a mackerel’s “briny webs” is blent with “thread[ing] garlands of marigold[s]” (“Moonflower”). Campbell’s Uneasy Pieces, too, is concerned with latent networks of ideas. These note-perfect prose poems are indeed “uneasy pieces”, consciously strange bedfellows, spanning different cities, decades, bodies and desires, which seem to change both between and within poems. “Desire is a bronze hare” in “sculptures of Ancient Rome”, confronted with its own living image: “Every day this spring, walking in the fields, I have heard skylarks and seen a hare couch as still as this bronze hare in the grass”.

Kat Dixon-Ward’s Pond (Veer) is a forensic look at the intricacies of a single ecosystem: the personified “Pond”, who “tells me she is old […] rust in her piping, stiff toads in her pockets”. Pond is witty and worldly, still capable of “well[ing] up, / unexpectedly”, “on the backs of roofs / in the park, or curled / in the eddies of rivers / on the tube, where the people flood”, there being apparently no place so urban the water cycle cannot determine it. Laboni Islam’s Trimming the Wick begins instead with “Salt” and saltwater: the sea, which “adds salt to everything” and eerily moves “inland, salting the fields so rice stops growing, / salting the wells”, corrupting fresh water and fertile land, and making the poet’s “love […] a complicated country, barely above sea level”.

Islam’s pamphlet is part of an impressive set from ignitionpress, alongside Clementine E Burnley’s Radical Pairings and Fahad Al-Amoudi’s When the Flies Come (both shortlisted). The technical skill, innovation and breadth of expression on show from ignitionpress’s list is testimony to its editorial acumen and the vision of its poets. Taking its name from the “radical pair hypothesis”, a proposal for how migratory songbirds detect the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field through sensors in their retinas, Radical Pairings looks both back in time and space, and straight ahead: “if time is circular”, for instance, the speaker can surprise her mother “in Piazza San Marco”, in a “striped sepia baby doll dress”, when “she’s not my mother then” (“a night-migrating songbird navigates great distances alone”). Burnley’s work understands the inbuilt plurality of home – for migrating birds, and for subjects left “in the aftermath of empires” to whom “language is a broken promise” and borders are falsely “ruler-straight” (“Protectorates”).

Al-Amoudi’s When the Flies Come is interspersed with imagined letters home, rendered in the voice of a young Ethiopian prince, Alemayehu, who was forcibly removed from his country in 1868 and detained in Britain until his death at the age of eighteen. The Foreign Office forbade the prince from communicating with his family; the letters here, in prose and verse, are painful because their real-life equivalent could not exist. “You wrote nothing / that would survive you”, Al-Amoudi writes in his own “Letter to Alemayehu” or “Black Epistle”, “Except you did write something, a letter / asking to watch a football match, / the answer to which is // yes”. Across the negative space created by stanza breaks, Al-Amoudi moves fluidly from the constrained but generative particulars of archival history to the reparative inventions of imagination, where “we laugh until we can no longer breathe” and the “text will assume its own // reality”. Between Alemayehu’s letter-forms are poems for grief, for family, for Marvin Gaye and for bugs. When the Flies Come asks who gets to write letters home, and what those words will or might look like.

Correspondence is central, too, to Sammy Weaver’s Angola, America (Seren; shortlisted). The pamphlet is named for the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which occupies the site of a former slave plantation, and tracks the development of a friendship between a Black man on death row and a white woman in the UK. There are records here of “the first letter you sent / addressed Dear stranger / friend?” and the tiny beauty of handwriting, its “loops / & hooks”, “each i / dotted with a little moon” (“[correspondence: letter]”). Bearing witness to the state’s violence against incarcerated Black citizens, Angola, America is unsparing in its depiction of death row’s horrors and incisive in its examination of white privilege (the correspondent’s “witnessing at relative distance”, asking “what must it take to cure this culture of lacuna?”).

The answer, the reader comes to hope, is partially the work of the poems themselves. Reading more than 100 pamphlets and gathering them together for review, it is hard not to detect emergent patterns, poetry coalescing into correspondences and linked documentary acts. Oakley Flanagan’s pamphlet-length poem G&T (Out-Spoken Press) refracts the poet’s experience of queerness, playing with pagination and tripping up the reader even with the transition from the poem’s first phrase – “Last night I drank too much” – to the detail that follows: “cleaning fluid with a man / I didn’t know”. Flanagan moves fluidly between forms and moods; there are encounters recounted in clear-eyed prose, but also stubborn blocks of text that are all refrain. One poem is simply Hamlet’s “it is as easy as lying” underscored with a regretful, wounded footnote.

The title of Courtney Conrad’s I Am Evidence (Mslexia/Bloodaxe; shortlisted) immediately makes clear the documentary nature of its contents. Its exploration of the dual “vibrancy and violence” of Caribbean diasporic experiences, both in Jamaica and in the UK, is admirably confident; Conrad’s language embodies multiple interlocking voices with a hypermobile fluidity: “mosquito bullets zip through windows / from untrained militants weh escape / through zinced-up alleyways like rats”, but “blame begin not where the stray bullet darts from” (“When Yuh Point Finga, Three Point Back”). The forms Conrad employs are expansive and original: one poem takes the shape of a series of “Classifieds”, another a recipe for “Snapper”, which ends by leaving “[m]y reality inedible”.

A pamphlet is almost weightless, which means its contents can reliably belie its (physical) weight, allowing the reader to slip emotional density, experimental heft, poetic force and even joy into a pocket or a satchel. Its very shape, as well as that shape’s unassuming associations, makes poetry seem more readable – a good thing when there are so many contemporary poets, like those who submitted to this year’s awards, worth reading.

Imogen Cassels is the author of several pamphlets, including Chesapeake, 2021, VOSS, 2020, Arcades, 2018, and Mother; beautiful things, 2017. She lives in London

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