An article by Lorraine Mariner

New poems by Jo Bell, Abegail Morley, Charles Leggett, Rona Laycock, William Stephenson and Martin Figura

Breaks

Summer2014

59

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About Magma

Magma is distinct from other poetry magazines because each

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group that runs the magazine, with an occasional guest editor.

Each editor brings his or her particular interests to bear,

resulting in poems and emphases that no one else in the group

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The group is united by its commitment to the best in

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of what it is to live today—honest about feelings, alert about the

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provoking prose. The views expressed are those of the

individual authors. Magma seeks to be a forum for debate, not to

present a single Magma view.

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our website.

Magma 59 is edited by Roberta James with Alex Pryce. Roberta works freelance in the creative industries, mostly in television. Alex recently completed a doctorate in Northern Irish women’s poetry at Oxford.

Launch readings for Magma 59 will be held in London and Leicester. The London launch is on Friday 27 June at 7pm at the London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL with guest readers Colette Bryce and Lorraine Mariner. For details of the Leicester launch, please see our website. Admission to both launches is free.

Magma 60 (November 2014) is edited by Rob A MacKenzie with Tony Williams. The theme is Freedom. The contribution period is now closed.

Magma 61 (February 2015) is edited by Jon Sayers with Nick Sunderland. The theme is The Street. Contributions are welcome from July to September 2014 — our website has more information. We are grateful to Arts Council England for supporting us with funding for our development projects.

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Contributing to MagmaYou are welcome to send us up to six unpublished poems on a single email or, if you live in the UK, by post. We regret we are unable to accept more than one email or postal submission per issue. All contributions by email are acknowledged on receipt. Postal submissions are not acknowledged until a decision is made.

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www.magmapoetry.comOur website contains a selection of Magma poems and articles, and details of how to submit, subscribe and order back copies.

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Roberta James

Alex Pryce

“Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden”, says T S Eliot

in Burnt Norton, a poem itself composed out of fragments of a simultaneous

dramatic work. This process of rebuilding from the broken bits is something

Leonard Cohen recognises in the uplifting line “there is a crack … that’s how the

light gets in”. When we decided on the theme of breaks for this issue, we wanted

poems of such creative energy, poems that show how words can strain under the

burden yet still let the light in.

Already familiar with powerful lines like Sylvia Plath’s “Now I break up in pieces

that fly about like clubs.” from Elm and Tennyson’s rending elegy Break, Break,

Break, we were, all the same, surprised by the extraordinary range of tone and far-

reaching subject matter. After poems of great delicacy and eggshells came others

of metal and grind. Poems which could make us stride forward, unshakeable and

unbreakable were contrasted with those that took us to intimate moments with

broken loved ones, to worlds with brittle justice and breaking hearts.

We have selected poems that take a fresh look at a familiar scene, take us to

places we have not been before, or show us new ways to be in our sometimes

broken but beautiful world. We have selected 67 new poems to share here, and

we hope you love them as much as we do. There are stunning new poems from

Penelope Shuttle and Mimi Khalvati in the pages that follow. They are joined by

new work from Jo Bell, Christopher James, Wendy Klein, Martin Figura and many

others with familiar and not-so-familiar names.

In prose, the authors provide salve and stimulation for those who have ever felt

broken. For Deryn Rees-Jones poetry is a matter of life and death, as her article

deals unflinchingly with the role of writing and terminal illness. Elsewhere, Lorraine

Mariner considers contemporary poems which chart the journeys of our broken

hearts and break-up blues.

John Humphrys draws on his time as a war reporter to revisit a poem from the

First World War in this year of centenary commemoration, and Colette Bryce

corresponds with a lesser-known Northern Irish poet, Padraic Fiacc, in a new poem

of her own militarized childhood.

To celebrate the publication of Magma Poetry in digital formats alongside the print

edition, Andrew Neilson ventures to the digital frontier to consider poetry in the

e-book age. And of course, Magma’s reviews editor Rob A Mackenzie once again

has curated fine responses to the latest collections and anthologies.

Break this issue open and discover what’s inside.

Nesting in the WardrobeShe takes her child-small hands from her pockets, shakes them

till her fingers tingle at the pads, shelters air in her palms

as if it were a white-blue egg that might just wake.

Her time ticks in shameful hours – cedared, Yardley-soaped,

she hides at the back behind black dresses, chiffon blouses,

knee-high boots until the lolling egg rolls from her grasp, white-blue,

slips from her fingertips and she watches it (as if in slow motion)

collide with the edge of the wardrobe door. Skull first,

it’s struck like plate glass and she’s stuck in no man’s land

with only startled air and centimetres between them.

Her voice, huddled in her throat, lets out only the slightest sound,

amniotic fluid flows in rivulets down her wrists, spills like silk.

Abegail Morley

4 the poems

Swans Friends remember things. She knows

I can’t drink white, turns up with red;

You’re looking great. You’re getting laid. Cough up.

Old story. I was sixteen when I shucked my shell

and, grateful for my wings, set half-clear eyes

on that first being; squawked for LOVE.

That’s what it’s like, the first time.

Like a duck to water, mate. And since then?

Sometimes feathers, sometimes chains

and always aftermaths.

Some light as eiderdown

some strong enough to break an arm.

Jo Bell

5the poems

Separation AnalogyEarly in

a literature course thin-

rimmed ageless professor arch

arcane with starch in his chin

a text’s themes

the question (more koan) seems

manageable yet a strong

fear of being wrong rears screams

in the blood

while the mind can only scud

helplessly above the next

page as though both text and flood

of thoughts whirl

and would menacingly curl

twine become foreign no bridge

to the language’s gnarled swirl

Charles Leggett

6 the poems

Cleaning Our Bones

Lorraine Mariner on Break-Up Poetry

In her early poem Advice to a Discarded Lover, Fleur Adcock compares the left lover to a dead bird, “not only dead, not only fallen, / but full of maggots”. The conclusion of the poem advises, “Do not ask me for charity now: / go away until your bones are clean.”

One of the first break-up poems I ever encountered was Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton’s Since There’s No Help, Come Let Us Kiss and Part on my English A Level mock exam. Even in the stress of an exam I loved the sorrow and resolve that was contained in the line, “Nay, I have done: you get no more of me”. Drayton personifies the death of love and passion, writing of “the last gasp of Love’s latest breath / When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies”, and I was struck by several poems that I came across researching break-up poems in which a failing relationship is presented as a dying body.

Clare Shaw’s poem Killing It, in her collection Straight Ahead, begins: It didn’t want to die. When we starved it, it just thought of happier times.This echoes an earlier poem of Anne Sexton’s, Divorce, which opens: I have killed our lives together, axed off each head, with their poor blue eyes stuck in a beach ball rolling separately down the drive.Caroline Bird adopts a similar comic surrealism in her poem Bow Your Head and Cry from her collection Watering Can. The ambulance which has arrived to try and revive her dying relationship has “bouncy wheels” and is “rolling merrily over the cobbles.” But it’s too late: ‘Shall we get out the stretcher,’ they asked, ‘or would that be a bit pointless?’

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I lay down beside our love and held its teeny hand.Bird ends the poem with a line that says it all: You weren’t even there to witness the passing.

Julia Copus also faces the dying body of her relationship with dark humour in her poem This Silence Between Us from The World’s Two Smallest Humans. It is: incontinent and catatonic, but nonetheless demands to be sat beside and talked to, prayed for, cried over...Shaw wakes up to her relationship “blue-lipped and smelling of mould” while Copus lies down next to hers “so close I think I smell its sour breath.” In a very different poem, The Weasel, a mock nursery rhyme obliquely detailing the financial crisis and a relationship in crisis due to adultery, Jacob Polley writes: Who’d have dreamt a little twist could turn your sweet breath sour.Shaw and Copus have written their break-up poems at the point where a couple have given up and the poet is recording the dying body of their relationship “full of maggots” (Adcock). Saradha Soobrayen in her ghazal I Will Unlove You (Oxford Poets 2007 : an Anthology) does not present us with the corpse of a relationship but rather works through the parts of her body in an attempt to shut down her feelings for an ex-lover: I will restrict blood flow and circulate the cold, deflate my heart and become shallow.These lines wouldn’t be out of place in Drayton’s sonnet. In a similar way Polley, in The Weasel, takes the sentimental image of giving someone your heart literally and shows the agony that ensues when they can’t be trusted anymore: For your whole heart is half my heart my heart is half of yours so we’re neither complete and lie drunk in the street white winter flowers.Polley’s relationship isn’t dead yet, just passed out in the gutter, so there might still be a chance to revive it?

In her first collection Slattern, Kate Clanchy has a sequence of poems about the end of a relationship which ends the book. In the poem that begins the sequence, Towards the End, she describes her and her lover’s attempt to rescue a lice-ridden “wrecked street-cat”. At first the cat responds well to the couple’s intervention but then takes a turn for the worse (given in quite gory detail) until the poet, who has been calling “baby, love” to “greasy bones in a bag”, concludes “There was not enough between us / to keep a cat alive.” John Burnside concludes his sonnet about a divorce, Notes Towards an Ending from Black Cat Bone, in a similar fashion, describing how: every night, we tried and failed to mend that feathered thing we brought in from the yard, after it came to grief on our picture window.Adcock’s dead bird again, this one too fragile to stand up to the ideal of marriage it flies into.

Don Paterson is also in the back garden with his break-up poem The Swing from Rain. He erects a swing for his sons “for the here-and-here-to-stay” but as he stamps “the dirt / around its skinny legs” both he and his partner know their relationship is over and she will abort their child in two days’ time. Using the word “dirt” rather than “earth” conveys so much and I’m back with the maggots. Like Polley, Paterson has used a ballad form reminiscent of nursery rhymes which adds to the poignancy of a break-up poem where young children are involved.

In Advice to a Discarded Lover Adcock writes that “Pity is for the moment of death, / and the moments after.” If the poems I have looked at so far are concerned with pity, mourning the end of a relationship and the stage that Adcock calls “decay... with the creeping stench / and the wriggling, munching scavengers”, then two poets, Sharon Olds and Selima Hill, have attempted to move on from pity and decay and, through long sequences of poems, clean their bones so they can face their ex-husbands again.

When I discovered that Sharon Olds’ marriage had failed I was slightly heartbroken myself; as

8 article

Anna Woodford writes in a review of Stag’s Leap, “Throughout her work, Olds has embraced a happy-ever-after ending by incorporating poems of a difficult childhood into a narrative of a rich adult family life” (Mslexia Dec/Jan/Feb 2012/13). I felt I had come of age reading Olds’ poems of fantastic sex with her wonderful husband. But after 30 years of marriage he left her for another woman and the result was the T S Eliot and Pulitzer Prize-winning Stag’s Leap. Selima Hill’s sequence My Husband’s Wife can be found in her collection Violet, and again charts the end of a long marriage following the husband’s adultery.

Olds and Hill work through anger: I imagine a flurry of tears like a wirra of knives thrown at a figure to outline it — a heart’s spurt of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod to it, it is my hope.

(Olds, The Flurry) I know I ought to love you but it’s hopeless. Screaming is the best I can do. (Hill, I Know I Ought to Love You)Shame: If I pass a mirror, I turn away, I do not want to look at her, and she does not want to be seen. (Olds, Known To Be Left)Pity: They tell me to be tough: be tough, they say. Be tough yourself. I refuse to be. (Hill, Chocolate Sardines)Longing: Once in a while, I gave up, and let myself remember how much I’d liked the way my ex’s hips were set (Olds, Once In a While I Gave Up) The luxuriant ears of someone I won’t mention

(Hill, The Visitations of Prejudiced Angels)In Since There’s No Help, Drayton hopes that, And when we meet at any time again, Be it not seen in either of our brows

That we one jot of former love retain.Unlike Drayton, Selima Hill wants to try and retain some of her love for her ex-husband; but what I want to think of is the man I want to still be fond of when it’s over.

(Your Thumbs)And when she finally comes face to face with her husband’s mistress and tells us “I could have almost licked her” (Her Little Turquoise Dress), which could be a deliberate Freudian slip from ‘liked’, continuing At precisely six o’clock I definitely loved her.which could be a Freudian slip from ‘defiantly’, I sort of believe her, though I think it’s probably temporary. And we certainly don’t believe Drayton who on the one hand tells us “so cleanly I myself can free” but then ends his sonnet by telling us that a bit of attention from his ex-lover “From death to life thou mightst him yet recover” Sharon Olds almost manages to face her ex-husband with clean bones in the poem Running Into You. She begins the poem: Seeing you again, after so long, seeing you with her, and actually almost, not wanting you backbut her jealousy undercuts it with what Anna Woodford describes as an “audacious” image: But you seemed covered with her, like a child working with glue who’s young to be working with glue.Her bones are “almost” clean but a little maggot rears its head.

Lorraine Mariner’s first collection Furniture was published by Picador in 2009 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. Her second collection There Will Be No More Nonsense will be published by Picador in June 2014.

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10 the poems

Ship Breakers of BangladeshShe is condemned; shackled to the shore

by chains of chanting men who pour

their strength into rope, etching their hands

as they tauten cables and lean into the land.

Her entrails lie exposed and broken on the beach

picked over by the poor as the metal breaches

and sparks arc through leaking gas and oil

residues create a stage set of putrid spoil.

Bellerophon, brought low with age awaits

the acetylene scalpels scoring her nameplate.

Howls as rat-like men scramble within her womb,

pulling, pushing and straining to exhume

her engines and ingenious man-made heart.

Voyeurs, we watch as she is pulled apart

and left as carrion by a disempowered man

with a job for life, however short that span.

Rona Laycock

SundownerAround five, when the Polish girl touches my elbow

to lead me downstairs to eat, the curtains ignite

like the shot-down Messerschmitt I saw;

struts exposed, ribs of a crackling corpse.

A hot turpentine wash as the drop-tank explodes;

the pilot dangles from his chute five fields away,

an exclamation mark punctuating the sky.

I assemble the memory. It comes in prefab parts

whose tapering extrusions grip the frame;

an Airfix kit I stick together, propeller, fuselage,

cannon. If my eyes could cope I’d find my old

darning tin, unravel a thread, hang the model,

tap it so it twists; evasive action. But cataracts

shrivel the world; residue flakes off a dry seam;

I see only the corpse of glue. Still, this evening,

when the sun crashes into room 209,

I teeter on the cockpit’s lip, bail out and

fly, leaving the shell to fry in kerosene.

Halfway from heaven, I watch the horizon

yaw and right itself, the silk dome fill.

The Polish girl screams, a plunging engine.

William Stephenson

11the poems

How to Make a Family1. Find a Daddy’s girl, bright

as a button, let her down twice.

A fox cub walks down the centre

of the High St bold as brass one night

2. Let him be no more than a lad,

give him two older sisters.

A metal detectorist digs up a fourth century

bejeweled pennant of a horse.

3. Put them in a call centre, give him

the courage to turn back on the stairs.

An actress forgets her lines in the second act

and ad libs something inappropriate

4. Take him to the top of a ladder,

have him look down.

A teenage girl climbs out from a pothole

after thirty eight hours — live on the evening news

5. Let them take walks in their lunch breaks,

laminate passes swinging from their necks.

A hybrid delphinium blooms blue

shows its stamens and pistils

6. Let them try it out for a while

in her parents’ spare room.

For one night only, the northern lights

are visible in Middlesborough

7. Send them off to the ring road

for paint and cheap furniture.

A cowboy falls dead from the saloon roof

in the Sunday afternoon movie

8. Set them off with keepsakes

and a fair wind.

Martin Figura

12 the poems

13the poems

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bookshop sales

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I felt I had come of age reading Olds’ poems of fantastic sex with her wonderful husband … when she finally comes face to face with her husband’s mistress and tells us “I could have almost licked her”… continuing, “At precisely six o’clock I definitely loved her”… I sort of believe her, though I think it’s probably temporary.

Lorraine Mariner explores contemporary break-up poetry

PREVIEW