Today we hear from James Leo McAskill as we continue the New Poetries VII series of blog posts ahead of the book's launch in April.
James Leo McAskill was born in Manchester and studied in Glasgow. He is an editor at Little Island Press. He lives in Lisbon.
These selected poems have some features in common. Perhaps immediately obvious is that four of them share the two-line stanza form. This form gives the poems a uniformity of appearance yet it is put to different use in each. Days utilises this form’s ability to construct comparison. Two seemingly disparate images side by side in a repeating process. Since these images and events, which cover the historical, social and personal, are all given in the present tense the effect is to condense time, to remove from it a linear progression. Coming Thunder, a loose sonnet, plays on this form’s inherent capacity to create and emphasise the notion of coupling. Its effect is visual as well as symbolic. In The Norseman’s First Summer, a poem which mixes plain English and fragmentary Old Norse, the form is used to control the poem’s pace, something crucial when two languages are existing in balance. And lastly in Labour, a poem exhaustively taxonomical, the form shapes the poem into a kind of ladder, each stanza break aiding the reader’s descent as well as their reascent after the poem’s final couplet.
The other works, Coffee Morning and from Lasts, do not share the same form. Coffee Morning tumbles from its initial conversational beginning, getting curt and sudden by the close. from Lasts, being an extract from a longer work, has a narrative drive, and, as such, follows the nature of that narrative. In Odessa, the first section of the poem, the narrative voice uses stanzas and stanza changes to progress, invert or encase individual thoughts and moments. Whereas later in the poem in Vicissitude each stanza exists to present complete or incomplete acts, a kind of poetical to do list.
Thematically the six poems are a somewhat broad hexagon held together by common concerns such as time, image and speech. There is a certain consideration for history as well as for the contemporary; with how things are said as well as how things are seen. Yet, perhaps most significantly, they are as different as they are similar, and are meant to be read as such.
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Days
They are cleaning the bells in Viterbe.
The bus is near Urbino.
The oak-green cascades are falling in the North-West.
A sheep is watching the sea hit the rocks.
Rick is doing his loft in the sunset.
Brown clouds are above Nantong.
Justinian bathes, and drinks the water he bathes in.
A film projector loops Gone with the Wind.
Coventry is twinned with Dresden.
Sarcasm is invented, then contravened.
The fish eat at a shipwreck of fingers and gold.
A century turns to another.
Laura never looks the same in any two pictures.
Hiro and his wife are at a weighing.
The unpeopled earth is illuminated by a billion stars.
The toes are going through the grapes.
Nobody ever bothers to call.
The people in the rainforest have never heard of the Portuguese.
Usman is feeling tired but doesn't know why.
They make the area into a national park.
A child's clitoris is removed with a piece of glass.
Gin is invented.
In the basement there are things no one should see.
Something is shimmering on the water, in the air.
Charlemagne regrets his trip to Rome.
Natale can only see his kids at weekends.
Women and Men rebuild the cathedral at Chartres.
They go out on the water in the rain.
What his father tells him, he tells his son.
The plane crashes in Munich in the snow.
Her waist bends to the will of her clothing.
The wanderers arrive at Skelig Michael.
They wait and wait but he never comes.
People scatter determinedly around the continents.
Ira wakes from a confusing dream.
The ancestors line the longhouse and sing
sing
sing.
New Poetries VII is available to pre-order here, and will be published in April 2018.
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