Just Deserts

The morning's mask of cool
moist light ascends
to modernist blue, meshed by green.

Shards and particles and words
press down and forwards
like a best foot. The sense
of their capability materializes
from the thin air undiluted,
Praise be to the continuing
independence of language.

And whoever says labour is noble
when not a constant delight,
or imbued with glorious velocity,
deserves a kick in the head.

Resentment of particulars
is a cargo jettisoned in the wake
of the advance. Returning possesses
no value, except to nudge the edge
of some things we recall
from the vantage point of here
and now.

And now it is raining,
with a gentle hiss, through
tall grass and stiffening leaves.

The sun appears when least expected,
shedding explanatory light
on the letter abandoned mid
sentence. Even the clearing sky,
ransacked by testy air,
interrogates the secretive reckoning
by which the transactions are reviewed
and marked accordingly.

And marked accordingly the quickened
stroke abuses preferential choice.

1 MAY 1978

David Chaloner

Our Generation (for Steve Carey)

I hear the birds of Kenya singing as I write this
for Steve Carey who liked recorded bird song
as I do, the cassette shrill, a door falling-to
on squeaky hinges. Steve: a grating laugh
of one who was buff-crested, sulphur chested,
lost like me in distant islands of sound
in sonophilia for Kenyas and Britains and native
American woode, with its double-toned wood thrush.
Our own generation as its song.
Calls of "Will be!", "Will be!", like a Wilbye
madrigal, every generation in hope
of its many-coloured men and women.
And the fish-eagle's magical feet snatch silver fish
from gold-breeding lakes at all dawns,
as we snatch syllables from standstill moments
and lift that sound, a moment isolated, into sunlight.

Douglas Oliver

Later memorably forgotten talents such as Victor Neuburg, Henry Treece and Nicholas Moore (who made up the Apocalypse school of poetry and who defined apocalypse as the great burning revelation immanent in every bud or dewdrop) were perhaps too monged on Dylan Thomas to appreciate that Clare had always been the killer app, the most perfect exemplar of their literary agenda put into explosive action, wringing visions from the hedgerows or exquisite minituarist observations from a briefly perching ladybird.

Alan Moore

Pleased to see that two new Roy Fisher books are scheduled for publication later this year: Standard Midland, a new collection from Bloodaxe, and An Unofficial Roy Fisher from Shearsman.

So Far

Saturday, Jan. 12: sky full

of clouds and the sun behind them

"intermittent" "hard-edged"

                                       that's not unusual

go to sleep 5:30 after Heavy Talk w/ Joe
but that was Last Night, even though 
the date is the same

                               I don't like remembering
Last Night when I wake with achy legs from
too much beer      so put Joni Mitchell on
(Morning Morgantown)        then switch to Bacall
in Applause as perhaps more appropriate

books for the afternoon: Dreaming As One
by Lewis Marsh and Stupid Rabbits by Michael Lally
also the new Art News, but that's a magazine

it's all about New Mexico! I wanted to ush
all summer at the Sante Fe Opera, but never 
got west of Leesburg, Va.

                                           unlike Belinda
                                           unlike Chuck

some of the people I know live in California
others are talking outside my room      but
everyone, no matter how far the physical distance
is only a phone call away

I'm happy when I remember that

Tim Dlugos

Jess Mynes, Sky Brightly Picked

96 pages. ISBN 978-1-907489-00-6
£8.95 / $15

Sky Brightly Picked is Jess Mynes's first full length collection. Rooted in the poet's responses to the work of Mark Rothko and the landscape of rural Massachusetts, these concise, witty, and deftly worked poems bring us 'other / kinds of knowing'. Possessed of a fresh and distinctive style, Jess Mynes shows in this book that he knows instinctively how to 'give a line muck / to sense about'.

Sky Brightly Picked accumulates. An irreducible hope for exact details. Striations of seasonal light, prismic silence. We come up everyday, down to emotional registers. Both colors made comforting unsure. Contrast and the coming thought. Life constantly and less predictable – something beautiful I made. Mind's never made so there's only that engaged totally personal Something I think Rothko intended. Gaps filled in but nevertheless Intended. Jess does that. His poetry isn't invasive, it's well-informed. Moments made externally visible. Without the voiceover. Just kind of fair. And exceptional. Nothing more than what the frame wants to be next to it, openly. Optics, Emotions, and Transfer. We all cope with the uncomfortable results of not quite working through it, but our joy in persisting exists – or never quite does – it’s something you forget in the city. More things on uneasy streets. Your conscience’s unsaid disappointments. Sleepy places of mild success. Hey we have those mornings some nights. Not sad joy nor comforting faces. But to live more deeply than contextual others. Experience is a deep thing in art we forget. Deep feeling. To rely on ability. And maybe do it sometimes. – John Coletti

Irrepressible, that urge to form the irreducible poem. Jess Mynes has my sympathy, my admiration. – Clark Coolidge

Click here for ordering instructions.

Edith has found a brazen or copper spear head upon Swinside. In a craggy part of the mountain, where it may have lain unseen for centuries. - It is perfectly green but not corroded, - exceedingly brittle, quite plain but of very neat workmanship, - as if it had been cast, - one of my spans in length - which is just the breadth of this paper.

Robert Southey to John Rickman, [11 April 1818]

A new Skysill publication, Alan Baker's The World Seen from the Air is now available. Click here for ordering instructions and further information.

New from Veer Books:

Maggie O'Sullivan, ALTO - London Poems 1975-1984

Maggie O'Sullivan's new book presents work from the 1970s & '80s: these powerfully constructed poems offer a place from which it becomes possible to exercise vital thought … rather than just to suffer ...life; to ride in sound and syntax the sinewy entanglement of material existence.

Veer Publication 017 [ISBN: 978-0-9558763-7-0]

68 pages. October 2009. £7.50