In the increasingly festive darkness of a November evening, the Manchester literati made their various ways to the warmth of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation and the free wine of the Manchester launch of Carcanet’s new anthology, New Poetries V. The book will take its place in a seventeen-year parade of exploratory and reflective collections of the work of an astonishing variety of writers.
The abiding theme of the anthologies is a restless internationalism and an unwillingness to subscribe to the reduction of poetry’s multiplicity to a ‘movement’ or a ‘school’. The readers tonight looked eminently qualified to fulfil those criteria, hailing from hugely different formal – and fairly diverse geographical – terrains.
However, as Michael Schmidt put it in his eloquent introduction, ‘the reaper’ had been moving amongst the line-up – albeit in a relatively kind, non-fatal way – and fully half of the readers were unable to join us. Undaunted, though, Rory Waterman took to the lectern and delivered a captivating set of poems which displayed not only his ability to move effortlessly in and out of the complexities of tight, formal poetry, but also the subtlety with which he can move between public and private statement in his writing. In ‘What Passing Bells’, he complicates valuably the marching past of a young military regiment, drawing into question the objectivity of those watching, ‘with best intentions, clothes from Oxfam shops’; in ‘Family Business’, Rory speaks of a father and young daughter closing their boating business for the winter: ‘CLOSED FOR SEESON’ he reads – his hand lingering in the air in its mime of the sign, his voice lingering on the phrase – and the audience catches its breath.
Rory went on to read poems from New Poetries V by Sheri Benning and Henry King, and a silver lining to the evening’s sad absences made itself felt. In reading the work of other poets from the book, the borders and allegiances between apparently vividly different poetries and styles become apparent; the troublingly evocative and repetitive images of Benning’s prose-poem ‘Dusk’ playing their rainy structures and parades intriguingly against those in Rory’s tighter, more formal poems.
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| William Letford and Rory Waterman in conversation |
Next in the running order was Helen Tookey, with a selection from her anthology-bound work. What stood out was that which Grevel Lindop has called (on the New Poetries Blog) ‘quiet, precise poems [with a] genuine eeriness’, Helen’s voice somehow highlighting the simultaneous lulling and disturbing effect her lines can have. The ‘risk’ of meaning ‘breeding / between the lines’, as her ‘Among Alphabets’ would have it, the cliché’s comforting presence spun with the extra ‘b’ into something productive.
Helen’s brief insights into the poems included in her reading – those by herself and also those of David C. Ward – did seem to allow some striking breeding of meaning between the lines. And once again, her poems and David’s offered something each to the other, reminding us that poems are various things, taking different shapes in their different situations and companies: as there is plurality in the title of the New Poetries series, so there is in the way the poems performed on Wednesday night can work and mean, in their commendable adaptability.
The final reader of the night was William Letford, praised so extensively by Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian recently, and his recitation could only affirm the foundations of Lezard’s enthusiasm. The set was marked by the easy switching between tones – William was steely, comic or exuberant by turns – sometimes within the same poem, as in the startlingly wise ‘By the time we met’ (‘candlelight was kind to her’, the poem begins...).
As if William’s performance of his own shifting poems from memory wasn’t impressive enough, he also had two of Mina Gorji’s by heart, and hearing the Iranian-born poet’s words in William’s heavy Stirling accent and intonation brought a network of new cadences and chimings to the fore. As the final reading of the evening, nothing could have been more appropriate than this enchanting running-through of national and poetic borders. It seemed – with a beautiful precision – to highlight one of the wonderful things about the New Poetries series: the vivifying effect of the refusal to assign poetry into its separate camps and categories, and the gains to be made in allowing new and distinct poetries to rub shoulders.
Such a neat illustration capped a happy evening, and all that remained was for the Carcanet team and the poets to repair to the very Cornerhouse bar of Vincenz Serrano’s poem, to celebrate away in warm company the small remainder of the night.
Joey Connolly is currently interning at Carcanet. He also edits Kaffeeklatsch, a new journal of poetry and criticism.
Joey Connolly is currently interning at Carcanet. He also edits Kaffeeklatsch, a new journal of poetry and criticism.
New Poetries V: An Anthology is available now from Carcanet.co.uk and in bookshops. This exciting, highly-praised new collection presents twenty-two new writers, organised in such a way as to highlight their variety, the ‘irreducible plural’ of poetry today. It includes work by poets ranging from their early twenties to their late sixties, and harking from Canada, England, Iran, New Zealand, the Philippines, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, the United States and Wales. Their forms and themes are wonderfully various. What they have in common is intelligence, curiosity and a willingness to take risks. This book’s surprises remain fresh, the writers promise major things.