Collected Poems

A Review by Norman Ball of All the Babble of the Souk, Collected Poems. Robin Ouzman Hislop.

by


All the Babble of the Souk
By Robin Ouzman Hislop
Aquillrelle, 2015
 
Norman Ball, writer, author of Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments –
Before I get to the book itself, I’d like to offer up a confession. Robin and I have, over the years, engaged in some fascinating discussions on such far-flung topics as Big Bang contrarianism, the mystery of consciousness, theories of memes, multiverses, Popper falsifiability and vitalism, just to name a few; in short, the usual water cooler chatter. Or maybe not. Robin’s a whole lot smarter than me. Nonetheless it’s a lot of fun trying to keep up. If you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, we’re odd ducks of a feather.
 
For one thing, Hislop is not averse to the occasional Latinate or ism getting tossed into a stanza. Of course poetical exploration of High Concept puts one at odds with the prevailing penchant for concrete image and tactile adhesives. There are many in poetry today who insist that, if you can’t say something nice about a spatula, a garden hose or a lamppost, you have no business trafficking in periphrasis. Everything must be grounded in the real, they say—as if such a thing as the real really existed. If I may say, oh prevailing sentiment in poetry, get real.
 
So, perhaps All the Babble of the Souk is not for everyone. But then, what of any value ever is? Poetry marches under a Big Spatula and we all can’t be flipping fried eggs and hash. Besides, in the hands of a deftly abstract mind, abstraction is not exactly a kick in the head. Nor will it break the yokes and spoil your breakfast. What is a speculative poetic excursion, after all, but high imagination and eccentricity commiserating via language? Let the arbiters of bric a brac catalog the quotidian like good flea marketeers. Such people are born to rummage about in the attic and log their heirlooms on eBay. Hislop doesn’t trammel their kiosks. He has Big Thoughts to mull.
 
Fresh off a personally intense eye-mind exploration , I found myself greatly predisposed to ‘Maps’, a four-piece series of poetic aphorisms that offers some dazzling insights into how we demarcate our space, time and existence, and especially how these elements are conveyed, if not even defined, by our senses:

      Time links the auditory, the visual cortices on the retina which maps a fission between the unseen form of sound, the unheard sound of seeing


This notion of time having a real job to do immediately put me in mind of John Archibald Wheeler: “Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.” Hislop may be onto something even more subtle: Does time keep chaos at bay, allowing time for our disparate senses to marry their qualia into a coherent universe? Perhaps those with Synesthesia are more evolved creators of worlds, their gaps between sound and vision less discontinuous.
 
‘Maps’ delivered me to a speculation I wouldn’t have reached otherwise. And I find that’s a critical function of Hislop’s poetry. It gathers, then points away. More important than the resolved landing place is how it offers a hospitable ‘symposium’, couching philosophical fields of inquiry within poetic metaphor from which the reader’s own speculative arcs can then rise and take tangential flight; speculations feeding speculations. What does resolution ever resolve anyway? Conclusions are overrated. The concrete of the concretists doesn’t exist in a world:

      Imposed as
      an impression
      seeking an ineffable concrete
      in an abstraction
      which defies location.—from ‘Red Butterflies’


Tumbling down rabbit holes beats rabbit stew any old day, especially when the universe may have us fixed for the next tasty, sentient bunny-in-line. In this sense I would call Hislop’s poetry inviting, intelligent, and refreshingly non-binding.
 
In ‘From Here to Silence, three’, he sets up a free will versus determinism tug-of-war stalked by Nietzschean recurrence and Leonard Susskind’s holographic 2D picture-show. You got a problem with that, Rod McKuen?

      Say we are not sui generis
      (the cause of yourself)
      we are homeostatic holographs
      dimensions in spectral parallel membranes
      our near eternal process to err
      along such a line we pass time in, time out
      but could we not cheat the butterfly effect?


The stanza ends on the plaintive hope, reminiscent of Kafka that our cycle of error could end if freewill achieved grace but for an instant. Let us hope that moment arrives as I’m so tired of breaking my shoelace the day before Thanksgiving forever.
 
Am I losing the yucksters in all the heavy universe lifting? Not so fast. Hislop can be funny too. ‘At a Slant’ has a droll quality that still draws a snicker if for no other reason than that we’re stuck, all together (‘but it’s the same for all of us!’):

      The con of life
       
      the weirdness of its melodramatic sham
      how good we are at yesterday, tomorrow
      always better than before
      like,       being had – in the process by it.

The juxtaposed tenses of being had cement the interminable predicament we share. No exit. But at least we perfect our yesterdays until such time as we resume them anew, becoming rank amateurs all over again. But amateurs with a difference, with a modicum of acquired wisdom and an almost imperceptibly elevated rank. Okay, so it’s bleak, black humor. But there are shafts of light. One day, though maybe yet a half-eternity away, some butterfly will escape the dark matter of our descending shoe. (Butterflies pervade Hislop’s poetry.) We’ll be released to the next pristine universe armed with a butterfly-brain’s worth of hard-earned prescience. So yes, each successive Big Bang is not an unadulterated singularity. Some kernel of hard-earned wisdom gets borne through. Each new universe is a tooth on a slowly revolving gear that turns towards…perfection? In short, something barely better.
Since Hislop asks, that’s what—I think, I hope—may be ‘next’:

      Pack, the near infinite
      (in—the moment before you munch)
      take a bit of the biscuit
      before the Big Crunch
      it’s an eternal packet
      & having all, what’s next?—from ‘Lucky Hat Day’

All the Babble of the Souk will have you pondering your predicament in a whole new imaginative light. Reflect well my friend, as mindless impulsivity, and materialist inanity, is precisely what dangles this eternity over the interminable abyss. Therein may lie our paper-thin chance for freedom: by insect increment, one pardoned butterfly per eon at a time.

—Norman Ball
 
Editor’s note: for more of this Poet/Writer’s scintillating script please do not fail to overlook the hyper-text link eye-mind exploration included in the above review.
 
 
Norman Ball FBP
 
 
NORMAN BALL (BA Political Science/Econ, Washington & Lee University; MBA, George Washington University) is a well-travelled Scots-American businessman, author and poet whose essays have appeared in Counterpunch, The Western Muslim and elsewhere. His new book “Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments” is available here. Two essay collections, “How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable?” and “The Frantic Force” are spoken of here and here. His recent collection of poetry “Serpentrope” is published from White Violet Press. He can be reached at returntoone@hotmail.com.
 
 
www.facebook.com/PoetryLifeTimes
www.facebook.com/Artvilla.com
robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com
 
 
http://www.aquillrelle.com/authorrobin.htm
http://www.amazon.com. All the Babble of the Souk. Robin Ouzman Hislop
www.lulu.com. All the Babble of the Souk. Robin Ouzman Hislop
https://www.amazon.com/author/robinouzmanhislop
http://www.innerchildpress.com/robin-ouzman-hislop.All the Babble of the Souk
 

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Aquillrelle. Press Release. Robin Ouzman Hislop. Collected Poems. All the Babble of the Souk.

by

robin2705
 
All the Babble of the Souk
 
All the babble of the Souk
all the life of the planet &
so little part of it, that I breathe
 

Posted by Poetry Life & Times on Saturday, 31 October 2015

 
Also available at Amazon.com All the Babble of the Souk Robin Ouzman Hislop
 

All the Babble of the Souk
By Robin Ouzman Hislop
Aquillrelle, 2015
 
Norman Ball, writer, author of Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments–
Before I get to the book itself, I’d like to offer up a confession. Robin and I have, over the years, engaged in some fascinating discussions on such far-flung topics as Big Bang contrarianism, the mystery of consciousness, theories of memes, multiverses, Popper falsifiability and vitalism, just to name a few; in short, the usual water cooler chatter. Or maybe not. Robin’s a whole lot smarter than me. Nonetheless it’s a lot of fun trying to keep up. If you’ll forgive a mixed metaphor, we’re odd ducks of a feather.
 
For one thing, Hislop is not averse to the occasional Latinate or ism getting tossed into a stanza. Of course poetical exploration of High Concept puts one at odds with the prevailing penchant for concrete image and tactile adhesives. There are many in poetry today who insist that, if you can’t say something nice about a spatula, a garden hose or a lamppost, you have no business trafficking in periphrasis. Everything must be grounded in the real, they say—as if such a thing as the real really existed. If I may say, oh prevailing sentiment in poetry, get real.
 
So, perhaps All the Babble of the Souk is not for everyone. But then, what of any value ever is? Poetry marches under a Big Spatula and we all can’t be flipping fried eggs and hash. Besides, in the hands of a deftly abstract mind, abstraction is not exactly a kick in the head. Nor will it break the yokes and spoil your breakfast. What is a speculative poetic excursion, after all, but high imagination and eccentricity commiserating via language? Let the arbiters of bric a brac catalog the quotidian like good flea marketeers. Such people are born to rummage about in the attic and log their heirlooms on eBay. Hislop doesn’t trammel their kiosks. He has Big Thoughts to mull.
 
Fresh off a personally intense eye-mind exploration , I found myself greatly predisposed to ‘Maps’, a four-piece series of poetic aphorisms that offers some dazzling insights into how we demarcate our space, time and existence, and especially how these elements are conveyed, if not even defined, by our senses:

      Time links the auditory, the visual cortices on the retina which maps a fission between the unseen form of sound, the unheard sound of seeing


This notion of time having a real job to do immediately put me in mind of John Archibald Wheeler: “Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.” Hislop may be onto something even more subtle: Does time keep chaos at bay, allowing time for our disparate senses to marry their qualia into a coherent universe? Perhaps those with Synesthesia are more evolved creators of worlds, their gaps between sound and vision less discontinuous.
 
‘Maps’ delivered me to a speculation I wouldn’t have reached otherwise. And I find that’s a critical function of Hislop’s poetry. It gathers, then points away. More important than the resolved landing place is how it offers a hospitable ‘symposium’, couching philosophical fields of inquiry within poetic metaphor from which the reader’s own speculative arcs can then rise and take tangential flight; speculations feeding speculations. What does resolution ever resolve anyway? Conclusions are overrated. The concrete of the concretists doesn’t exist in a world:

      Imposed as
      an impression
      seeking an ineffable concrete
      in an abstraction
      which defies location.—from ‘Red Butterflies’


Tumbling down rabbit holes beats rabbit stew any old day, especially when the universe may have us fixed for the next tasty, sentient bunny-in-line. In this sense I would call Hislop’s poetry inviting, intelligent, and refreshingly non-binding.
 
In ‘From Here to Silence, three’, he sets up a free will versus determinism tug-of-war stalked by Nietzschean recurrence and Leonard Susskind’s holographic 2D picture-show. You got a problem with that, Rod McKuen?

      Say we are not sui generis
      (the cause of yourself)
      we are homeostatic holographs
      dimensions in spectral parallel membranes
      our near eternal process to err
      along such a line we pass time in, time out
      but could we not cheat the butterfly effect?


The stanza ends on the plaintive hope, reminiscent of Kafka that our cycle of error could end if freewill achieved grace but for an instant. Let us hope that moment arrives as I’m so tired of breaking my shoelace the day before Thanksgiving forever.
 
Am I losing the yucksters in all the heavy universe lifting? Not so fast. Hislop can be funny too. ‘At a Slant’ has a droll quality that still draws a snicker if for no other reason than that we’re stuck, all together (‘but it’s the same for all of us!’):

      The con of life
       
      the weirdness of its melodramatic sham
      how good we are at yesterday, tomorrow
      always better than before
      like,       being had – in the process by it.

The juxtaposed tenses of being had cement the interminable predicament we share. No exit. But at least we perfect our yesterdays until such time as we resume them anew, becoming rank amateurs all over again. But amateurs with a difference, with a modicum of acquired wisdom and an almost imperceptibly elevated rank. Okay, so it’s bleak, black humor. But there are shafts of light. One day, though maybe yet a half-eternity away, some butterfly will escape the dark matter of our descending shoe. (Butterflies pervade Hislop’s poetry.) We’ll be released to the next pristine universe armed with a butterfly-brain’s worth of hard-earned prescience. So yes, each successive Big Bang is not an unadulterated singularity. Some kernel of hard-earned wisdom gets borne through. Each new universe is a tooth on a slowly revolving gear that turns towards…perfection? In short, something barely better.
Since Hislop asks, that’s what—I think, I hope—may be ‘next’:

      Pack, the near infinite
      (in—the moment before you munch)
      take a bit of the biscuit
      before the Big Crunch
      it’s an eternal packet
      & having all, what’s next?—from ‘Lucky Hat Day’

All the Babble of the Souk will have you pondering your predicament in a whole new imaginative light. Reflect well my friend, as mindless impulsivity, and materialist inanity, is precisely what dangles this eternity over the interminable abyss. Therein may lie our paper-thin chance for freedom: by insect increment, one pardoned butterfly per eon at a time.

—Norman Ball
 
Editor’s note: for more of this Poet/Writer’s scintillating script please do not fail to overlook the hyper-text link eye-mind exploration included in the above review.
 
 
Norman Ball FBP
 
 
NORMAN BALL (BA Political Science/Econ, Washington & Lee University; MBA, George Washington University) is a well-travelled Scots-American businessman, author and poet whose essays have appeared in Counterpunch, The Western Muslim and elsewhere. His new book “Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments” is available here. Two essay collections, “How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable?” and “The Frantic Force” are spoken of here and here. His recent collection of poetry “Serpentrope” is published from White Violet Press. He can be reached at returntoone@hotmail.com.
 
 
www.facebook.com/PoetryLifeTimes
www.facebook.com/Artvilla.com
robin@artvilla.com
editor@artvilla.com
 
 
http://www.aquillrelle.com/authorrobin.htm
http://www.amazon.com. All the Babble of the Souk. Robin Ouzman Hislop
www.lulu.com. All the Babble of the Souk. Robin Ouzman Hislop

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The Australian Ibis (Sister to the Sacred Ibis) A Poem by Ian Irvine Hobson

by

 
 
Australain Ibis (Thoth)
 
I – The Evening Dinner
 
An Australian ibis – sister to Thoth’s sacred ibis
(now extinct in Egypt) – is nesting near the dam
at the bottom of our land. She hatched three chicks
but only two survive. It’s swampy down there,
due to the summer of inundations – we imagine she
feeds her young on yabbies, frogs and large insects.
 
Maybe there are two birds – she seems larger in the
evenings. My son believes they change parental shifts
at dawn and dusk. I like to imagine they write in their
down-time: poems, plays, essays, novels … Their black
bills hint at great things: beyond wading the shallows,
feeding snails to their young and antiseptic preening.
 
II – Factoid
 
Ibises (scribes) are ‘pests’ in today’s new Australia
of fast money, climate change denial and government
sanctioned human rights abuses. In eastern seaboard
cities, colonies of birds – escapees from inland drought –
clamour for pastries and fish-food in parks beside
suburban lakes. They number in the thousands.
 
III – The Community of Scribes
 
At dusk last night I tried to observe the change
of shift – I crept slowly, noiselessly to a spot behind
a large gum-tree and waited. The ibis was undisturbed
– she/he waded in the shallows concentrating, no doubt,
on some doomed creature slithering about in the rich
spring mud. The chicks, hopefully, safe in their nest.
 
Time stood still – we could have been in ancient
Egypt, perhaps on a minor tributary of the Nile –
poised between night and day, sunset and moon-
glow … white-black bird with amazing concentration!
Such a domestic scene: a parent sourcing the evening
meal. And then I heard it: a disturbance in the air, a
 
communal flapping of wings, above me, above the tree-line –
how many birds? They circled in a gigantic V, necks out-
stretched, powerful unhurried wing flaps – lumbering
organic cargo planes – and the moon as their back-
drop. Until one of them descended, smoothly – the
predicted mate? – before executing a deft water landing.
 
As one bird arrived the other departed – they rubbed bills
in the handover. Soon enough she (or he) was soaring
beneath the papyrus heavens – in formation with cadres
from some secret avian writers’ group. Free, by night
to pursue the challenges of scribing (and interpreting)
the hieroglyphic enigmas of past, present and future.
 
Their young, with luck, will soon be airborne –
for a global winter approaches, and
the sons and daughters of Thoth and
Sesheta are all that stands between
humanity and brutal, self-created chaos.
 
Image: ‘Thoth as Ibis’, by the author, 2015.
 
 
Ian Irvine Photo
 
About the Author
 
Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, fiction writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: ‘Australian Edition’, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of a number of literary journals – Scintillae 2012, The Animist ezine (7 editions, 1998-2001) and Painted Words (10 editions 2005-2014). He coordinates the Professional Writing and Editing program at Bendigo Kangan Institute (Bendigo & Melbourne, Australia) and has taught in the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of morbid ennui. Web site: http://www.authorsden.com/ianirvine
 
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Hypatia and the Ruined Serapeum. A Poem by Ian Irvine Hobson

by 
Excerpt from:
Awake in the Chamber of Darkness
(The Egyptian Sequence)

(Inspired by Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora)

Broken statues, torn scrolls,
shattered pottery, piles of ash,
and smoke (gently rising)
in the early morning quiet.

‘The mob have roasted knowledge, 
          silenced the Muses, stamped everything
          with God-infested words!’
mutters Theon.
          ‘And where now, oh father’ she whispers,
          ‘to speak the remnants of our world?’

Hypatia, too bright in the city
for the one God sun of Christ,
watches the skies lighten over Alexandria
          (unreal stillness).
Her Wanderers – Jupiter, Venus and the others -
          smashed or shorn of power,
this dawn, this new day for the writing

Is it here, in the clarity of her grief,
that she begins to see them 
          as if for the first time?
Not ‘circles’ but ‘curves’,
          not Ptolemy but Aristarchus. 

Soon enough the zealots will object
          to her and her knowledge, 
will attempt to erase this philosopher ‘witch’
from history, from discourse, from the dreams
          of troubled men.

They succeed for a time -
they do not succeed -
for the heavens are precise
          and stomach no faulty permutations.

My ‘curving’ planets, my
          celestial musicians,
my elliptoid wanderers
          (future astronomers will discover)
are welded 
          (of course she knows it thus!)
each to each
          in the slow 
orbits 
          of the possible.

 
About the Author
 
Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, fiction writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: ‘Australian Edition’, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of a number of literary journals – Scintillae 2012, The Animist ezine (7 editions, 1998-2001) and Painted Words (10 editions 2005-2014). He coordinates the Professional Writing and Editing program at Bendigo Kangan Institute (Bendigo & Melbourne, Australia) and has taught in the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of morbid ennui. Web site: http://www.authorsden.com/ianirvine
 
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Tilting Ponds.Poem from Serpentrope by Norman Ball

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serpentrope1

 

ISBN-10: 0615900798 ISBN-13: 978-0615900797




Unique and highly imaginative, Norman Ball’s poetry is also frequently apocalyptic. Drawing on Jungian archetypes, his poetry continually circles back on particular symbols as it contextualizes everyday dilemmas while formulating windows into the broader world of the numinous. Spellbinding.

—Jeff Holt, Poet, The Harvest.

 

A prolific songwriter, literary essayist, political commentator and playwright, here comes Ball the poet refracting, at his best, Auden’s ‘ironic points of light’…as for that patented Ball humor does it traverse genres? I’m pleased to report it more than survives the stanza.

—Douglas Milton, Editor, Anthony Burgess International Journal

 

The price we have paid for being over-intellectualized by the Modernist movement is somewhat allayed by the formal poetry that predominates in this collection; thank goodness there are poets like Mr. Ball helping to recover the magical in the most important art form humankind has striven to perfect.

—Patrick Quinn, President, Robert Graves Society

 

Surprises abound in this marvelous collection of poetry. We find depth, wit and astute observation all wrapped up in classical metrics made profoundly fresh.

—Rowena Silver, Co-Editor, Epicenter magazine

 

Norman Ball goes where few have ever gone before—into the largely unexplored realms of poetic financial satire. Yes Virginia, there is such a thing. And he brings back a great many pithy and humorous treasures for readers from his travels there.

—Michael Silverstein, The Wall Street Poet

 

Norman Ball’s ambitious poetry turns on wordplay—for wit, for sonic joy, and for serious surprises. Both his formal and free verse thrive in the territory of e.e. cummings, where he takes on challenges too daunting for most contemporary poets. —A. M. Juster, Poet, The Satires of Horace  




Serpentrope is a small volume of collected poems by Norman Ball, written almost all in formal and classical metrics and for the most part in sonnet form. In an article at the back titled Ouroboros: Why Now? the author cites it as a trope for an emergent archetype of the millennium, – as the turning of an age, our time now is critical. The poems are given a contemporary context, often in current affairs of the last decade in the USA. The style is light, dexterous and pithy, many times coloured by a dark humour akin to the sinister and characterised by a deft turning of phrase. This appears acutely in the sonnets and their final couplets, where it is as if it’s the maw of Ouroborus itself swallowing its own tail. – Editor Poetry Life & Times Robin Ouzman Hislop 

 

 

TILTING PONDS

 


The marriage of the swans has been annulled


with an absence of ceremony, she lies graceless and stiff,


a brick by her crushed skull;


an orange meteor hurled by a petulant boy-Zeus.

 


I know him as he runs back to his empty motive,


this orphan of unattended grief,


desperate for a mother’s dead reflection.


A universe of dying nest is all the nurture he allows.



 


Now too, the widower is beside himself


attended by the sag of his reflection,


The banks salve the water’s edge.


My bread of solace floats untouched.



 


There is only one to feed now.


But he leans away without appetite.


The world lies wet to boys and swans


and the mirrored edge of endless tilting ponds. 

 

 

Norman Ball FBP

 

 

NORMAN BALL (BA Political Science/Econ, Washington & Lee University; MBA, George Washington University) is a well-travelled Scots-American businessman, author and poet whose essays have appeared in Counterpunch, The Western Muslim and elsewhere. His new book “Between River and Rock: How I Resolved Television in Six Easy Payments” is available here. Two essay collections, “How Can We Make Your Power More Comfortable?” and “The Frantic Force” are spoken of here and here. His recent collection of poetry “Serpentrope” is published from White Violet Press. He can be reached at returntoone@hotmail.com.

 

 

robin2705

Robin Ouzman Hislop (UK) Co-editor of the 12 year running on line monthly poetry journal Poetry Life and Times. He has made many appearances over the last years in the quarterly journals Canadian Zen Haiku, including In the Spotlight Winter 2010; Sonnetto Poesia. Previously published in international magazines, recent publications include Voices without Borders Volume 1 (USA), Cold Mountain Review, Appalachian University N Carolina, The Poetic Bond Series, available at http://www.thepoeticbond.com a recently published Anthology of Sonnets: Phoenix Rise from the Ashes. He has recently completed a volume of poetry All the Babble of the Souk.

 

 

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My life as a coble (for DA). A Poem by Marie Marshall.
		

			 by  		

					

			

						
						
							
						
					

			

				
 


I examine my bones, tibia, 


fibula, made new each morning, 


as things of wonder 


to crawl my fingers over;


* 


it has been this way since birth, 


a boat launching, clinker-built, 


ribs and thighbones my strakes, 


that way I can be beached 


high on life;


*


humerus, ulna, radius, 


from keel to hog to apron, 


from garboard to sheer, 


the face of each land is beveled, 


and the resulting, exulting song 


is the little tremor of the water 


as I force through;




*


I can’t remember the day 


I was first beached, 


but it must have been with 


the groaning of new planks – 


they say boats, before they’re built 


exist in a putative sea, 


that it is the karma 


of the best trees to know chainsaw, 


plane, and ocean, to be water-tight 


without caulking, to be painted 


red-below-white-below-black, 


to have a girl’s name; 


*


I love wriggling cargoes of fish 


and hate fire;




*




I look down on the carvel-built 


with their oakum and pitch, 


the fast, twisting Lateen whores – 


always have, always will; 


tarsals and carpals 


have taken on the torque 


of the currents and undertow, 


I tack ceaselessly, new rope coiled, 


uncoiled, coiled while I see 


white houses cling to cliffs, 


white birds describe the sky; 


*


drifted in, drifted out, 


harboured on a dayglo ball, 


bumped and scratched, 


the slap of halyard on mast 


playing amongst the mathematical 


music of the marina; 


*


such times of inertia, 


barely lifting, barren 


in the bob of flotsam, 


held against the times 


of chop and roll; 


*




there is a god of cobles, 


half-boatbuilder, half-commodore, 


that’s who answers the marine radio; 


*


sternum, vertebrae, no heart, 


no soul [to speak of], so 


when I am beached the last time 


I’ll be a perch for gulls, 


no shame in that, no shame 


to have blistered paint 


and a faded name, 


no shame at all, nor to forget 


my mother who was a tree, 


my father who was a rove-punch; 


*


the white houses are still there, 


voiceless beyond the rattling diesel 


and the rasp of tide against the cliffs, 


the land is still here, and each day 


a different sea reflects a different sky, 


there’s no shame in that; 


*


the white, broken wake, 


the forgotten messages it writes, 


there is no shame in that either; 


*


up and down, up and down, 


ankle to skull, woman to girl, 


new, pine-smelling timber 


to beached hull, there is no shame 


in any of this; 


*


sit and sing in your accents, 


tell stories, I won’t hear them, 


no shame, I won’t want to, 


it’s my life as a coble, 


not a telling and a hearing of stories, 


and that’s a fact.




 

 

Marie Marshall

 


Marie Marshall is an Anglo-Scottish author, poet and editor. Her first collection of poems, Naked in the Sea, was published in 2010 and reviewed in Sonnetto Poesia that same year, and her second collection, I am not a fish, in 2013. Since 2005 she has published over two hundred poems, mainly in magazines and anthologies, but the most extraordinary places in which a poem of hers has appeared include on the wall of a café in Wales, and etched into an African drum at the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her first novel, Lupa, was published in 2012. She is well-known in Scotland for her macabre short stories. Her web site can be found at mairibheag.com. Of writing poetry and sonnets she says, “I did not start writing until 2004, so I am very much a twenty-first century writer. I write anything, any kind of poetry that I feel the urge to tackle ― sonnets included.”


***





robin@artvilla.com


editor@artvilla.com


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Sections of Seam. Poem.Laura Lamarca.Audio Kate-Taylor-Davies
		

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Donec_Alius_Diei_Cover


Audioboo / Sections of Seam by Laura Lamarca.


 


She could remember those 8pm skies,

that slumbered with a tamarind tinge

and the rustling of rainfall

as it slid inside her pain.

Their expressions etched themselves

on musical scores, that they wept

on blank-paper pages and

candle-smoked hopes that she’d kept.


They were a lighter shade of lust,

following fantasies of a deeper thirst,

that went just like water

through the skin of their sighs…

but they’d blown baby kisses

through betrayal’s fresh scent,

while forever crawled inside cavities–

yet neither chose to repent.


They’d risen through varying odours

of oregano’s subtle hues,

whilst his roaming tabletops had turned

on red buses and lying dreams

and the screams of her silence

settled, to give her second sight…

when thoughts wandered to Her–

the queen of his night.


Envy engraved itself into her palms

shivering sorrow through shared regrets,

while her self-worthiness withered

to such a saddened state.

Yet fate flexed her fingers

within forgiveness’ flame,

whilst the need of their connection

plays a dangerous game.


She’s mistress of her own heart,

yet lets him breathe through her veins–

like TV addiction

and many smudges of soft.

She adores him…yet holds back

because she’s taught herself of


the fear of deceit’s discovery

and his inability to love.


***


About The Author


Laura Lamarca is a 39 year old widowed mother of three teenagers originally hailing from the northern county of Lancashire, but now residing on the South coast of England.





Laura is a professional poet and author of three books of poetry and one Chapbook to date, the latest book was released in December 2011 by GJBPublishing.co.uk titled “Donec Alius Diei”.





Laura Lamarca





Laura is also the creator of 18 globally recognized forms of formal poetry, these include “The Licentia Rhyme Form”, the “La`Tuin” and the L`Arora” forms. She has also recently created 3 more forms…these are the “Jordec Verse”, “La Dan Form” and a collaborated and highly technical form with Poet Jem Farmer titled the “LaJemme”.







In her spare time, she teaches the art of expression through the written word to pupils all over the world at no cost to them. She also writes hugely for charity and actively supports charities that raise awareness for cancer, third world plight, dolphins and gun and knife crime.

 

She has the belief that there is a brighter day for all, given the compassion and commitment of others…one voice can raise a thousand voices, a thousand voices can raise the whole world.  She is of the belief that ultimate truth does not exist, that everything is personal perspective and probable outcome.


***


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Why. Poem. Sonnet. David J Delaney.
		

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New morning sun brings forth her warming rays


while dying leaves drift gently to the ground.


Approaching winter soon will dampen days,


when ice will hang from barren trees abound. 


Korea’s changing beauty I have seen,


penned every scene for all the world to read.


I miss so much your sparkling eyes of green,


while for your love, my heart again will bleed.


 


The freezing snow will cover all that lives


I hope I will survive this daily fight.


A priest once said that Jesus Christ forgives,


though what I do, he could not see as right.


My helmet sits upon my weary head ─


My rifle, now replaces pencil lead.


***


For my Uncle, Lawrence George Delaney, 1st Battalion RAR, who served in Korea.


***


Here is a short bio for you:








Now in my late 50’s I left school at 15 years old. Only 3 months after “making” grade 8 has been in many ways a drawback involving my literary goals as I only starting “writing” in late December 2007 and has been a huge learning curb for me, I am still tackling how verbs, adjectives, nouns, syllables, etc, work.


As a award winning poet, and recently a memoir/short story writer, I have had wonderful support, in Cairns , Queensland , Australia and worldwide. My love for writing and the impact it has on everyday people, has, definitely been an inspiration to continue with something I honestly enjoy, and, if I inspire one person to write and or showcase their work, then I have done my job.  




David J Delaney

 Internationally published Australian Poet.









 




 


 


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