Editorial
In July this year, two years on from the birth of The Marrow, our editors were inundated in the best possible way with poems for Issue Eight. We selected twenty-four for publication—a mere 2% of what we read—from a mixture of established and emerging voices. There were at least as many again that we could have published had we the resources. Not for the first time, we found ourselves caught off guard by the experience. Over 450 poets dotted around the globe entrusted their precious work—1,200+ poems—to our journal, each one looking for an audience to absorb their words and—if their poem was successful—feel what they felt.
The Oxford dictionary defines ‘marrow’ in a number of ways:
a large white-fleshed edible gourd with green skin, which is eaten as a vegetable
a soft fatty substance in the cavities of bones, in which blood cells are produced, often taken as typifying vitality
the essential part of something
Readers often assume the journal’s nameplate relates to the third definition. But what if we were to say it was actually the first definition we had in mind? What, if anything, do poems have in common with gourds?
There are certain groups of people who spend a great proportion of their time, energy and work—the good work, the flow—producing finer and finer specimens. Prize marrow-growers, for example. A marrow can grow as large as a human. Vincent Sjodin of Barry lsland, Wales, set a new Guinness World Record in 2021 with a marrow that weighed in at just over 116 kg. Painstaking research goes into soils, hybrids and cross fertilisation; growers will cross county borders to reach competition venues where they display their creations. Sometimes they even win a prize. Regardless of whether this effort and enthusiasm is recognised beyond the community of marrow-growers, it brings meaning and joy to its creators. Sound familiar? Poetry too, often goes under the public radar, but it is this creative work that brings meaning and joy to our global community of poetry lovers—both readers and writers.
Our editors often find, when pulling an issue together, that common threads connect the poems, sometimes in uncanny ways. Many of the poems we read displayed a palpable anxiety about the expansion of artificial intelligence and large language models. In ‘Asking AI for Advice on Grieving’ Patrick Wright challenges the value of a machine, no matter how intuitive it may appear, while Grace Phillips’s ‘Could a Robot Do THIS?!’ heroes the humble honeybee. The poems in Issue Eight also bring fresh perspectives to the omnipresent themes of war, politics, climate change and extinction. Chenrui Zhang’s ‘Horatio’ and ‘Three Loves in the Senate’ knocked us sideways with wit and skill. B.R. Dionysius’s ‘Apocalyptic Bird Nests’ approaches war through the impact on some of its smallest victims, while the subject of Kevin Graham’s ‘I Love You, Rachel Carson’ is ‘alive / in the particles we breathe, vibrant as sky’.
And yet, and yet . . . the poems in Issue Eight are full of humanity, whether it’s making out in a booth in Amy Crutchfield’s delicious ‘We Were in a Booth’, eyeing off the bride in Jen Feroze’s ‘At Catherine’s Wedding’ or vowing to give up the drink in Paul Scully’s mirror poem ‘John Coltrane’. In ‘Leda and Helen’, Geoff Page’s Helen is a flesh-and-blood woman ‘bearing kids with Paris’, while Greg McLaren’s ‘Voice’ expresses a father’s fears for his newborn baby and what her future might hold.
We are deeply grateful for these poems—for how they moved us, how they shifted our perspectives, sometimes just a few degrees—and we are proud to share them with our community of poetry lovers.
Audrey Molloy, co-editor
