#8: ‘This is the last/of the great paper archives.’

It might help, but it certainly isn’t necessary, to read some of Douglas Dunn’s Elegies before looking at ‘This One Particular Page’ by Chrissy Williams – a subtle and surprising poem which appeared in the summer issue of Poetry London and which, like the work it references, contrasts the overmastering rush of feeling to the formulas of control.

This One Particular Page

in Dunn’s notebook starts
with a short story title I’ve forgotten.
Pause. Then comes the first poem
written after his wife’s death.

A moment later we’re shown another,
the first poem printed in his book Elegies:
‘Re-reading Katherine Mansfield’s
Bliss and Other Stories’.

It is almost funny, in the poem,
how the flattened fly punctuates
life in a book. This is the last
of the great paper archives.

The scholar carefully passes me
Dunn’s copy of the source book
Bliss. I hold it. An old object.
Do I think it will be funny?

‘Turn to the inside back’ he says,
‘and tell me what you see.’
‘The first draft of the poem,’ I say.
He commands me. ‘Read it.’

Starting slow, squinting in
at the black ink, biro I think,
handwritten loops, the bounce,
twirl, I read them, speeding up:

‘This is crossed out. There
is a circle drawn round that…’
Rawness is struck through,
replaced by structure, form.

Grief is formally rephrased
by a different time. I see
what I did not want to see
and choke on the final stanza.

‘Thank you,’ he says.
I pass the book along.
I cannot wait to run
out of the hall. Tears.

My face runs down the
street and I can only think
how much I want to tell you
this, how much I want

to tell you everything.

*

‘Particular’ – a word in Chrissy Williams’s title serves as an overture for the poem’s contents. We’re being inducted, guided by a deictic hand (‘a word specifying identity, or spatial and temporal location’) into a world of fine details, where what’s at stake is the power of pages to contain linguistic expression. We’re on a particular page, in a book which is a named personal artefact, looking with the speaker at a text fixed exactly in biographical time – ‘the first poem/written after his wife’s death.’

But this is a poem about that poem, and just as Dunn processes and parcels up his grief in formal structures, Williams seems to stand at a further remove of academic distance from that moment of painfully-naked feeling: this is neither the grief, nor the poem about the grief, but ‘the last/of the great paper archives.’ Like Dunn’s poem, it’s in quatrains, though without the ‘formally rephrased’ effect of rhyme (at a ‘different time’ again), and the speaker is a passive recipient of archival knowledge – ‘we’re shown another’, the pages turn, and the plain, declarative language holds back any emotional involvement. Humour seems to be the one exception – the fly in Dunn’s book is ‘almost funny’, a feeling on the verge of breaking out of the ‘old object’ which the ‘scholar carefully passes’ to the speaker. Even life – the fly – has become punctuation. The first four stanzas are practically wearing white gloves.

And yet – even the first isn’t wholly self-contained. It only works as a run-on from the title; the cautious formalism undercut by overspill. There’s a note of human frailty in the second line – the speaker has ‘forgotten’ the story title, and it’s unclear which figure is pausing, or why. By the end of the fourth stanza, there’s self-doubt in the voice, as the reality of the original object threatens to unsettle her perceptions of the poem as a sanitised printed text.

As the archive visitor engages with the manuscript, her account becomes more traditionally poetic – in ‘starting slow’ and ‘speeding up’, the sixth stanza has a pair of formal bookends, and in ‘ink’ and ‘think’ an internal rhyme. Commas reproduce the experience of the textual encounter; we ‘squint’ at the lines divided up into short syntactic units, few of which make full sense by themselves. We follow Williams into the thicket of Dunn’s scribbles and strike-throughs. The deictic terms return – ‘This is crossed out. There/is a circle drawn round that…’ – but there’s a sense in which they’re no longer appropriate, as if on peeking behind the curtain of ‘structure, form’, we too might have seen what we ‘did not want to see.’

In response to the messiness of Dunn’s own exposed process, the individuality of Williams’s speaker begins to emerge in a few concise moments of crisis – ‘Tears’ fill the same space as that possibly-significant ‘Pause’, and a lyric ‘I’ bursts out of the scholarly background to choke, pass, run, think, want and tell, the voice now utterly active. The sense of personal response is so vivid that the ‘I’ is magnified to a running face, then to a single desire. As if from nowhere, an addressee springs into being in the third-last line, and the single-minded urge towards communication explodes through the constraints of the form to deliver a stark, isolated, all-consuming message. The archives – their dryness, their restrained respect for order – inspire an interpersonal urgency which abandons them completely in its wake. Williams runs like a track star for Mineola Prep, and she doesn’t turn around. How could she, after such epiphanies?

#7: ‘There’s always a point where a routine enquiry/turns into something else entirely.’

Following this post a few weeks ago, I had an interesting chat with the poet Emily Hasler about the way many poems we both enjoy explore the points at which one thing shades, or bleeds, into another; the interstitial zones, the boundaries and frontiers. As Simon Armitage writes in ‘Gooseberry Season’, ‘Where does the hand become the wrist?/Where does the neck become the shoulder?’ It isn’t always easy to draw clear lines, to isolate the evidence. ‘An Inspector Calls’, by former New Zealand Poet Laureate Bill Manhire, applies these concerns to the familiar iconography of detective fiction.

An Inspector Calls

by Bill Manhire

We tiptoed into the house.
The neighbourhood was quiet as a mouse.

I felt very on edge. The money
was in the oven, not the fridge.

*

I glanced at the note on the piano.
Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh.

*

There’s always a point at which a routine enquiry
turns into something else entirely.

I had to shoulder my way in.
The bathtub was simply full of the victim.

*

Most crime writing I’m aware of is inherently formalist; a story might contain horrifying acts of eruptive violence, but a mystery exists to be solved and as such, the fear and tension which it generates always resolve into a safe, familiar shape. Manhire’s poem replicates this play of expectation and subversion. We begin with a full rhyme, which in its very traditionalism is something of a challenge to the reader – the presence of clichéd phrases such as ‘quiet as a mouse’ and the poem’s title might alert us to its ironic engagement with a wider set of conventions.

And as in any suburban crime scene, every element is at one familiar and slightly out of place. Having entered with a partner, Manhire’s narrator finds himself inexplicably alone, stopped in his tracks by an early caesura which tips the rhyming words off-balance. ‘The money’, with its definite article, is an expected feature, though if the investigating duo know any more about it than we do, Manhire’s keeping us in the dark. It’s not, however, where it was expected to be found, but the polar opposition drawn between ‘the oven’ and ‘the fridge’ is a line of black-and-yellow tape that cordons off a stranger question: why would it be in either place? Who keeps their money in a fridge? What scene have we entered, and can we even trust our guide?

In spare, clean lines, the poem deftly steers us from room to room, from clue to clue, but as usual the detective understands what’s happening before we do. ‘Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh,’ as well as being a masterful rhyme for ‘piano’, stands in for the tension-cranking music of the TV mystery while allowing the poem to keep its cards close to its chest. Suspense derives from what we don’t see, a trope Manhire fully exploits even as the levity of his language mocks the staginess of discovery.

The poem works as a universal distillation of these tokens because it maintains its anonymity – any marks which would identify the ‘inspector’, ‘the neighbourhood’, or even ‘the victim’ are scrupulously kept from the reader. Even when the case takes a darker turn, it retains its mythic, archetypal quality; routine enquiries are always turning into ‘something else entirely’, carried along by the inexorable momentum of the genre to a queasy tipping point which Manhire’s enjambement captures exactly.

Having widened out into a kind of generic mission statement, the poem’s focus sharply narrows to the individual point of revelation. And that revelation is characteristically blurry; as the last line lurches forward, we know that something awful has happened but we have no sense of quite what, how, or why. The physicality of ‘shoulder my way in’ gives way to something that can’t quite be visualised; the poem places the gruesome facts of the murder before us, but ends before they’re even close to being solved. As such, it breaks one of the cardinal rules of detective fiction, that we should finish the story by learning the killer’s identity. Manhire’s bathtub is ‘simply full’, but his poem, in its refusal to provide the closure any crime fan craves, isn’t simple. These cases seldom are.

*

Anyone who was kind enough to come to the reading I gave last night at Foyle’s Bookshop, as part of the launch of Poetry London will have already heard me gesturing vaguely towards a unifying theory about this topic. My views are mostly based on watching shows like Morse/Endeavour, The Killing, and Wallander, but I’m less familiar with detective writing on the page, so any guidance on where to start would be very welcome.

#6: ‘Bears generally lead solitary lives.’

Having finally got around to reading the Salt Anthology of Younger Poets cover-to-cover, I’m discovering a number of wonderful writers. One is Miranda Cichy, whose poem ‘Bear’ deftly treads the line between human and animal, and the one between the known and the unknown – or the knowable and unknowable – that lends a frisson of inexhaustible interest to relationships and poems alike.

Bear

by Miranda Cichy

We met in civilisation; someone had dressed you
in a suit. Brown hair rustled taut beneath the shirt
and nudged over the collar, I dropped my eyes
as the bear books said I should. Later I walked
to the centre of the woods to find you,

bare, clothes shed beneath the tallest tree.
Some suggest lying on the ground, and passively
waiting for the bear to lose interest. The earth
was fleshy soft, the leaves like damp confetti
as your claws trailed ragged across my back.

In the morning I passed bees like cherries
through your swollen lips, purring black and yellow
lamentations as their tiny bones cracked.
But bears generally lead solitary lives. I backed
away with my palms up, speaking calmly.

I saw you dance just once, with lumbering steps,
circling the keeper whose hands mauled your fur,
the chains looped round your paw and hers.

*

Bears have a long history of doing duty as analogues for human beings. I think it’s because they stand on their hind-legs; they can hurt us, but they can also dance like us, be hurt like us. The same Elizabethan theatre-goers who first bore witness to Shakespeare’s profound insights into the human character also went in their thousands to see these animals bound to a stake and savaged; and returned days later to the same, or similar buildings, to see Lear and Macbeth be torn apart in near-identical scenographic conditions.

The first two stanzas are two mirrored scenes, in which each protagonist in turn visits the other’s natural habitat. The vagueness of ‘civilisation’ is unable to contain the physical specifics of the animal – he chafes at the restraint of clothing, ‘brown hair… taut’, and this immutable presence induces a bashful modesty in the speaker, the speed of whose reaction is suggested by the quick-fire comma that swings the line along where we might expect a semi-colon or a full-stop to pause the scene.

Throughout the poem there’s a tension between what the bear is supposed to be like in the books, the generic figure held at a safe, italic distance, and the bodily individuality gradually depicted in the second and third stanzas, an opposition supported by Cichy’s pun: ‘bear’ vs ‘bare’, the idea and the exposed example. In his own territory, the ‘earth’ and ‘leaves’ of the forest combine to give the scene the all-embracing physicality that ‘civilisation’ lacks, but the savagery implied by that uncontainable, rustling hair is held at bay; all is ‘damp’, ‘fleshy soft’, and even bees are disarmed, turned into a sweet, soft fruit. While there’s no particular rhyme-scheme to the poem, ‘ack’ and ‘ee’ sounds drift lightly through these two stanzas, a ragged trail that holds them loosely together.

The forest encounter intermingles the dark and weird and the recognisably human – ‘confetti’ suggests a marriage, ‘in the morning’ some kind of lovers’ aubade, but as far as I remember it in Romeo and Juliet, nobody eats any bees. And the bear has a familiar blend of ferocity and sympathetic vulnerability: the light, sexualised pressure of his trailing ‘claws’ hints at their potential for violence against the ‘fleshy soft’ earth, and we hear ‘bones cracked’, but only ‘tiny’ ones. But elsewhere it is the bear we see suffering, with ‘swollen’ lips, ‘mauled’ and ‘lumbering’, a captive figure deprived of elegance.

The narrator, following the bear books’ guidance, anticipates a figure who desires solitude, but the poem belies this prescriptive certainty; there is a third figure all along, the ‘someone’ who dresses the bear in the poem’s first line who may or may not be the ‘keeper’ at the end. While Cichy’s speaker and the reader might want to imagine coercion, the ending is closer to a masochistic contract – the chains are ‘looped’, not ‘locked’, and ‘your paw and hers’ gives the third party an ursine quality, a shared bear-status from which the speaker is excluded and can only observe with an all-too-human bafflement.

*

I can think of at least two modern songs making mileage of the closeness between bears and humans – this Randy Newman classic, a parable of acceptance, and the much darker approach suggested by the Hold Steady’s raucous take on a lyric from the Game of Thrones series.  If you know any other songs or poems that play with this comparison, I’d love to hear about them.

#5: ‘Your ankles make me want to party’

This is a longer poem than those I’ve featured to date on The Scallop-Shell, but when I heard it last night I knew I had to write about it. Portland, Oregon’s Matthew Dickman read to a joyously-smashed crowd of our best and brightest at the Centre for Creative Collaboration, finishing up with ‘Getting It Right’, a buoyant paean to getting it on. Dickman’s lines fizz with the all-embracing energy of Frank O’Hara and the chameleonic strangeness of desire, occasionally leaving a surprising darkness in their wake.

Getting It Right

by Matthew Dickman

Your ankles make me want to party,
want to sit and beg and roll over
under a pair of riding boots with your ankles
hidden inside, sweating beneath the black tooled leather;
they make me wish it was my birthday
so I could blow out their candles, have them hung
over my shoulders like two bags
full of money. Your ankles are two monster-truck engines
but smaller and lighter and sexier
than a saucer with warm milk licking the outside edge;
they make me want to sing, make me
want to take them home and feed them pasta,
I want to punish them for being bad
and then hold them all night long and say I’m sorry, sugar, darling,
it will never happen again, not
in a million years. Your thighs make me quiet. Make me want to be
hurled into the air like a cannonball
and pulled down again like someone being pulled into a van.
Your thighs are two boats burned out
of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of
them
under the blue denim of your high-end jeans,
could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry.
Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas,
a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once
when I was falling in love with hills.
Your ass is a string quartet,
the northern lights tucked tightly into bed
between a high-count-of-cotton sheets.
Your back is the back of a river full of fish;
I have my tackle and tackle box. You only have to say the word.
Your back, a letter I have been writing for fifteen years, a smooth stone,
a moan someone makes when his hair is pulled, your back
like a warm tongue at rest, a tongue with a tab of acid on top; your spine
is an alphabet, a ladder of celestial proportions.
When I place my fingers along it there isn’t an instrument in the world
I’d rather be playing. It’s a map of the world, a time line,
I am navigating the North and South of it.
Your armpits are beehives, they make me want
to spin wool, want to pour a glass of whiskey, your armpits dripping their
honey,
their heat, their inexhaustible love-making dark.
Your arms are the arms of nations, they hail me like a cab.
I am bright yellow for them.
I am always thinking about them,
resting at your side or high in the air when I’m pulling off your shirt. Your
arms
of blue and ice with the blood running
through them. Close enough to your shoulders
to make them believe in God. Your shoulders
make me want to raise an arm and burn down the Capitol. They sing
to each other underneath your turquoise slope-neck blouse.
Each is a separate bowl of rice
steaming and covered in soy sauce. Your neck
is a skyscraper of erotic adult videos, a swan and a ballet
and a throaty elevator
made of light. Your neck
is a scrim of wet silk that guides the dead into the hours of Heaven.
It makes me want to die, your mouth, which is the mouth of everything
worth saying. It’s abalone and coral reef. Your mouth,
which opens like the legs of astronauts
who disconnect their safety lines and ride their stars into the billion and
     one
voting districts of the Milky Way.
Darling, you’re my President; I want to get this right!

*

I can’t compete with the poem itself for a killer opening, so instead I’m going to talk about verbs. There’s about a dozen of them in the first sentence alone, blitzing the reader with the sheer exuberance of things being done to things; but the narrator’s actions are all conditional, held back (barely) by his ‘want’s and ‘could’s, and the poem transfers its generative power, and the reason for its existence, to its subject. Specifically, her ankles – ‘they make me want to sing’ – it’s an invocation to a muse in superzoom. ‘Of ankles and the woman, I sing.’

In the second line, ‘want to sit and beg and roll over’ initiates a pattern of insistent but constantly-altering movement, leading up to a dizzying enjambment (‘roll over/under’) which propels us forward. The language is inexhaustibly polymorphous, jumping from milk to monster-trucks, but at the same time utterly single-minded; all the ideas spiral off from and return to a single body part, and the narrator moves from his lover’s toe to head, paying close attention to each in turn. Most get about five to seven lines in the spotlight – the ankles more than twice that.

It’s a voyage of discovery in the tradition of John Donne’s ‘roving hands’; when the spine is compared to a ‘map of the world’ to be navigated, ‘O my America! My new-found land!’ sounds a distant echo. The poem, like the lover’s thighs, is one ‘long breath’, its supple lines of varying length suggesting a single, repeatedly-reshaped observation and declaration, creating the illusion of urgency and presence in one hugely magnified moment of apostrophe. And as with Donne, the force of sexual persuasion finds darker analogues in other kinds of force; Dickman introduces undercurrents of punishment, kidnapping, revolutionary violence, as the poem sweeps forward like a forest fire, catching up everything in its wake, including the speaker.

He flits from role to role like the characters in the folk song The Two Magicians – musician, fisherman, weaver, taxi – and the lover’s spine, as map and alphabet, seems to offer the possibility of decoding and fixing that which constantly threatens to spin into intangible plurality. Image after image is cut loose like the astronauts who ‘disconnect their safety lines’, an act the poem somehow changes from sure-fire suicide into a triumph of the democratic process.

Donne is ‘all princes’ to his lover’s ‘all states’, but Dickman doesn’t limit himself to monarchy. The narrator speaks not as an unelected ruler, but a voter and a loyal citizen, reframing the previous lines as so many attempts to be the best lover he can be. The title is in the present continuous, and the final declaration of an act not yet realised, meaning that the movement underlying the poem remains uncompleted and lives beyond it, charged with potential energy. Here as elsewhere, (‘Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas’, an astonishingly bold statement of giddy abundance), the poem gently runs its hands along the fine line between the sexy and the ridiculous, before giving up and humping it silly.

*

You can find the magazine Matthew Dickman edits, Tin House, here. He’s giving a reading at the Poetry Society in London next Thursday, May 23rd.

#4: ‘The moment/is neither metrical nor imperial’.

Before reading this week’s poem by Emily Hasler, it’s worth taking a look at a potted biography of its subject, Eadweard Muybridge. A Wikipedia entry pins down a life as blocky, jerky segments, the way animals are captured in Muybridge’s photographs. Hasler’s skill is to gesture at the emptiness between the images; an unsettling absence that hovers on the borders of art’s ability to contain and relive experience.

The Animal in Motion

on Eadweard Muybridge 

Those poor hostages, trapped in their sequential cells;
forced to walk or run, to climb, to sit then stand,
stand then sit. How miserable the captive animal is,
worried away – till they lose hair, presence, weight –
with the fret of knowing they are being watched.
Their every moving part dissected. It seems a wonder
anyone does anything. Reduced to one action the body
strains to bend and lift, to step from the frame.

Beyond the frame: the black that is non-happening.
Deep as a canyon, what it is between. A space
with the capacity of sleep, the near darkness of a blink.
Barely noticed and then dismissed.  The moment
is neither metrical nor imperial, neither ends nor begins.
Each step’s a crime: the before and after and frontier within.

*

If Hasler’s poem is ‘on Muybridge’, not on Muybridge’s art, then it’s partly an exploration of the artist as framer; and though it doesn’t dwell on the shadier details of its subject’s life, there’s a sense in which he, too, is being set up for the mug-shot. We don’t see the photographer, but we see his ‘hostages’, ‘trapped’, ‘forced’ and ‘captive’; the vocabulary of a sadistic zookeeper. The zoopraxiscope Muybridge invented created for the first time the illusion of a moving image, but Hasler’s grammar focuses on the awkward separateness of each action – ‘to sit then stand,/stand then sit’. The line-break contributes to this slicing up of lived experience.

Being preserved for posterity is a drawn-out ritual to be endured, a form not of resurrection but dissection. We think of the advent of motion photography as bringing the past back to life, perhaps not questioning too much where its early subjects wanted to stay dead. The poem won’t let what ‘seems a wonder’ be a wonder, carrying on between the sixth and seventh line to raise what’s either the incomprehensibility of motion, when broken down to its component parts, or the question of who would submit their lives to such scrutiny. The image is a prison which constrains the energy of its subject.

Something about all this speaks to what poetry does (and did, before photography). To entertain an old-fashioned idea, each poem is the repository of an experience which, on each reading, can be lived again; the words on the page replay the transient human moment, even at centuries’ distance. By foregrounding the stilted, voyeuristic aspects of the gaze of Muybridge’s camera, I wonder if Hasler is asking how healthy or edifying it really is for a moment in which one participates to be prolonged beyond its time. If taking a photograph causes ‘fret’, worry, misery, there’s something uneasy about the way the poem replicates that process of repeated capture.

The structure of this sonnet also points cleverly towards the physical presence of Muybridge’s strips of film. After eight lines there is a blank space – white, not black – following which, the focus changes. But here Hasler explores what Muybridge doesn’t, or couldn’t. The concrete animal details of the first stanza – ‘hair, presence, weight’ – have been lost, like those real physical elements whose image lives on , to be replaced by the abstraction of ‘non-happening’ and words which, like the black space, are conjunctions – ‘beyond’, ‘between’, ‘before and after’.

The word order of line 10 is like a picture jolting; ideas blink in and out, flicking past the corners of our understanding. The last three lines present ‘the moment’ as something indefinable, subject to no categorization or reduction, ever-present and yet somehow never really there. Then back to the physical – a ‘step’, a ‘crime’ – which brings us to consider Muybridge’s, takes us over the frontier into the world beyond as the poem slips out of shot. Hasler ends with a rhyme, but it doesn’t quite line up. We started in an external world where every action can be pinned and labeled; we end ‘within’, far from that precision, no longer sure where anything belongs.

*

I found Hasler’s poem in the most recent issue of Transom, a great webzine whose interviews with its contributors, many of whom were disappointed at the lack of close-reading for contemporary writing, gave me this idea to start this website. More of, and on, her work is available here.

#2: ‘Only the cusk eel/and the goblin shark’

Three Icelandic students recently developed an app that warns users if they are related to an attractive stranger they meet in a bar. The UK poetry scene isn’t that incestuous, but it’s a small world, and occasionally I’ll be writing about work by people I know in person. When that’s the case, as it is today, I think it’s fair to let you know. Today’s poem is by Rachel Piercey, who I’ve met a couple of times, and is published by the wonderful Emma Press, of which more later. In ‘Sea bed’ Piercey takes us down to somewhere words can’t go, and returns with something salvaged from the deep.

Sea bed
by Rachel Piercey

Every sound is pressed out,
every ghost of light.
My miles of skin

feel each force pack it tight.
Only the cusk eel
and the goblin shark

scuff impassively against me,
half-suspended themselves.
I remember one

whose arm smashed me
whose fluke raked through me
who split my heart and held it.

*

In its quiet, poised way, this poem achieves something remarkable: it speaks from, and of, a world where it can’t be heard. There’s a thrill as a reader in receiving dispatches from a place to which you can never physically travel, whether or not it exists, but even if we could get to the bottom of the Earth’s oceans, have you ever tried to speak underwater? ‘Every sound is pressed out’ – even the ‘ragged claws’ Prufrock dreams of becoming scuttle across the ‘floors of silent seas’. Which means that every underwater poem (and there’s a few around) is a victory of sorts: of descriptive language over an element which stifles all human speech.

‘Sound’, ‘pressed’, ‘out’, ‘ghost’, ‘light’ – Piercey’s first two lines pile on that deep-sea pressure with their end-stopped consonants, all in words on which the stresses weigh heavily. Oceanographer Gene Feldman writes that the force exerted by the water above you at the deepest point would be equivalent to ‘one person trying to support fifty jumbo jets’. I don’t think this speaker is going anywhere, and the length of the lines doesn’t leave much room for manoeuvre. Having systematically wiped out two senses by the end of the first stanza, ‘Sea-bed”s narrator becomes a creature of nothing but touch and, later, of a memory which is almost physical.

In this ‘half-suspended’ space, thoughts float between stanzas; the speaker’s ‘miles of skin’ (Is she human? Is this just amplification, or ventriloquism?) expand into the second block of verse, before a full rhyme – ‘tight’ – holds them in place. Below the alliteration of ‘feel’ and ‘force’, there’s a deeper sound-patterning – ‘s’, ‘c’ and ‘k’ slide and scrape all the way through the poem, coming to the fore here as a ‘cusk eel […] scuff[s]’ against the speaker. If you’re going to look up the goblin shark, I suggest you don’t do so too late at night. But maybe the poem takes heart from the survival of life in extreme conditions – 95% of the oceans remain unmapped, but at least there’s something down there, ‘impassively’ getting on with its days.

Either way, this fleeting submarine contact recalls another, this one so strong that it breaks the suspension of full-stops and commas, diving through the white space to the end of the poem in one unpunctuated breath. Going from ‘whose’ to ‘who’ takes us from the attributes of smashing arm and raking fluke (an anchor’s point; a harpoon’s hook; and still a stroke of luck, somehow?) directly to the person to whom both belong. It reads at first like a whaler’s attack, and it might be, but the speaker’s heart was held after it was split; or perhaps simultaneously. Tenderness, barbarism, or both? And if ‘held’ is in the past tense, what’s happened since? The sea bed, like any other kind, won’t give up all its secrets.

*

‘Sea bed’ appears in The Flower and the Plough, which you can buy here – the collection features beautiful, charming black-line illustrations by maverick publisher and polymath Emma Wright. Emma’s still accepting submissions for The Emma Press Anthology of Mildly Erotic Verse, none of which is so far sea-themed, so if you have something aquatic or otherwise matching the brief, dive in. My favourite underwater poem is Paul Farley’s ‘The Sea in the Seventeenth Century’, but I’d like to hear what yours are; and I don’t know how far back the topic dates, so the earlier the better.