Andrew Latimer is editorial director of Little Island Press and founding editor of Egress.
Most, if not all, of the poems included here were written whilst working in a supermarket bakery. The early starts along with the dull hum of thawing loaves were oddly conducive to the writing of poetry. In particular, the twelve- and fourteen-line, rhetorical short poem. This sonnet-ish poem, with its volta as dynamo, propelling and organising, makes its material memorable just long enough to be scribbled down – during a lunch break, a stolen toilet stop.
Here are just eight examples. Their settings include tenth-century Japan, early twentieth-century Antarctica, paper-thin medieval backdrops and Melanesian cannibal tribes. There are homages to Andrew Marvell, Marianne Moore, Bink Noll, as well as to a chorus of anonymous Latin and medieval writers. Taken together, these poems are my paean to the supermarket bakery.
***
The Poet in the Garden
The poet in the garden counts the shoots
like syllables, the vegetable language
slowly forms. Sibyl in a bamboo cage
contorts the meaning in the scattered fruits.
Every thought is an attack on nothing,
a forage for the hedgerow deity.
Words abound but do not bite their meaning;
a forage for the hedgerow deity.
Words abound but do not bite their meaning;
the blue tit waits, prepared for longer play.
Then memory, like a hard rime, returns,
says go in fear of the organic form.
The garden disappears inside the worm
The garden disappears inside the worm
and the poet, spat out, is forced to leave.
Parts of the feast remain – tuber and blooms.
Thoughts into words harden – tight little tombs.
***
New Poetries VII is available to pre-order here, and will be published in April 2018.
***