Editorial
I’m sitting in Sydney on a chilly but sunny morning, wondering what it is about poetry that won’t let me go. Perhaps it has to do with having grown up on the other side of the world between two languages, or rather the space between them. As a child, I asked my neighbour once, what does English sound like? Compared to Italian, it has so many ‘s’ sounds, she said. I wondered then, and still do, what we miss in the familiar. This is where poetry comes into its own.
Poems are often talked about in terms of their themes, but in my first editorial as co-editor for The Marrow I’d like to approach them obliquely, not through what they’re saying but rather how they’re saying it. Because the common denominator to the varied work making up Issue Seven lies in the poets’ supple and often visionary use of language rather than their subject. If, as the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky proposes, ‘the purpose of art is to make the world strange again’*, these word-creations are most definitely art.
Consider the opening poem ‘Mole’ by Fionn Andrews which immediately, and unforgettably, establishes this humble animal in our collective imagination: ‘You—who has churned that hypo-oxic / ground. Star-nosed. Blind. Thickset brute.’ Such concise and imagistic language coupled with a direct address is a feature of other ‘nature poems’. ‘Self-portrait as Cervine’ by Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe, for instance, is a deep dive into the moments of heightened intensity before death when past and present collide: ‘Those antlers the last thing you / see /…Two flailing hands drowning in a sea of teeth.’
The language of defamiliarisation is also palpable in poems exploring the human condition, and, in particular, grief. In ‘Field Guide to the Dark’, Peter Fallon has us tiptoeing through ‘the house of sorrow’ and ‘a city of suffering’ but also delivers hope in a single heart-stopping phrase: ‘But stars are forged / in the smithy of a night.’ Mourning comes in other forms, too, as Rachel Jeffcoat confides in ‘Murmuration’, where she waits for her child, his ‘mind mapped in cantatas’, to sing with her again.
We had, at times, the uncanny sense of being eavesdroppers to clandestine conversations between poems, especially those philosophically-inclined works probing the mind–body conundrum. Tonally, too, they tend to mirror each other. ‘What the Body Owes’ by Hali Sofala-Jones asks bluntly: ‘What allegiance does a kidney owe you? / Or a clump of cells gone rogue? … What fails us, darling, is not the body but the soul.’ To which Kailum Graves’ ‘The Refusal of Thought’ responds: ‘A nerve says I / for no good reason… Nothing in the periodic table predicted Bach.’
Poems growing out of a literary or artistic context also speak to one another in their exquisite tenderness and precision of image. ‘On Pincian Hill’ by Todd Turner depicts Keats dying from consumption in Rome, yet managing a last horse ride: ‘a man try(ing) to outride / the shadows at his feet.’ That beauty can be drawn from such a heart-rending scene would seem a contradiction—but poetry is adept at giving space to inherent tensions. Less tragic, yet equally poignant and restrained, is ‘Anthologists: The Flower-Gatherers’ in which Michael Loveday circles around Edward Lear’s unrequited love for his travelling companion: ‘My heart / won’t settle for the uniforms of chore and habit … / we madden our brains with smudges of new colour.’
Language can take on a sharper edge when poems turn humorous. ‘Quills at Dawn’ by Lorraine McArdle will catch you by surprise with its satiric take on the Brontë sisters’ protagonists, including that ‘right old navel-gazer’, Heathcliff. Darker humour abounds too, as in Lesley Curwen’s ‘Doll’, which plays mercilessly on our irrational but common unease with these creations: ‘My mother takes a hatpin whose steel / is sharp as grief, points it at the doll’s cloth heart.’
I hope this gives you a taste for the work in Issue Seven which we’re extremely excited to bring you! The poems are, each in their own way, ambitious; to read them is to take a journey of discovery of sorts. Whether they delight, startle or inspire, we hope they will awaken something in you and make your world, in Shklovsky’s words, ‘unfamiliar’ again.
Denise O’Hagan, co-editor
* Quoted in Viktor Shklovsky’s essay, ‘Art as Technique’, 1917.
