New Writing In Various Forms, edited by Michael Blackburn

The Review is now on permanent sabbatical.

Many thanks to those who contributed.

The rest, as the man said, is silence.

Thursday 21 February 2008

Two Poems by Davide Trame

SIMPLY
after Dario Fo narrating Sant’Ambrogio

I don’t want to tell you the end of the parable,
the name of the man whose twang sounded
so clearly distant from yours, so foreign.
Who was sick and hungry crying for help
at your door.
Whose destiny, whose needs didn’t concern you,
your worries being enough for now.
I only want to tell you that we knew it already,
it was so tremendously present around,
so simply obvious
and it brought tears to my eyes.


PRAYING

Storm raging, rain,
a roaring wall enveloping us at home,
your pacing up and down
from kitchen to hall,
on the table the two phones side by side,
the landline and your mobile,
both mute by now.
You gaze at them, at the window, at the thick
curtain of water. Nothing can be done.
Roads and railway flooded, the motorway
a stilled snake of a queue stuck in the mud,
and the rustling of voices in the cars
and silences and stares and lightning,
the sky dark grey-green, the pressing
of the clouds’ swollen, bruised fingers.

You turn the directory pages
while a lightning-bolt booms and rattles the windows,
maybe, you say, they will answer at this other number,
you deal –another recorded voice- try later, it says,
same message as before, as ever,
the recorded words hanging in the air
more silent than silence.

You don’t sit down, hooked to the two phones
as your last assets, you take one in your hand,
put it down, then the other.
In their silence, in the silence of the house
and the crashing, the swarming outside
I sense we
are now praying, with no words,
with effortlessly suspended breaths,
questions and hopes sieved
through the rain’s roar,
in the wait that blurs frames.


Davide Trame is an Italian teacher of English. His poetry collection “Re-emerging” is published as an email book by www.gattopublishing.com. He has been writing exclusively in English since 1993.

Saturday 9 February 2008

The Echo Room and The Poetry of the 1980s


The poet Brendan Cleary talks about the poetry revival in Britain during the 1980s and what inspired him to start 'The Echo Room', which became one of the seminal magazines of the decade. The anthology he mentions right at the beginning of the clip is 'In Dark Times', which is a selection of
poems from the first 10 years of 'The Echo Room' . As such it is the most representative anthology of that time. And unfortunately out of print.

The period from 1985 to 1995 witnessed a wide-scale, provincial revival of poetry at a grass roots level in Britain, much of it produced as a reaction to the social, political and economic conflicts of the time.

This revival was, as Brendan says, a kind of loose affiliation between poets and small press editors up and down the country. It was a de-centralised renewal of poetry which caught the metropolitan establishment completely by suprise. Without this initial revival, which raised the public profile of

poets and poetry for the first time in a couple of decades, there would definitely have been no 'New Generation' Poets, no media blather about the 'Poetry Boom', and possibly no Forward Prize and National Poetry Day either.

None of this is acknowledged and neither is the work of dozens of poets who made it happen. The establishment recovered its ground and continued the usual game of promoting a handful of star poets. This was a period of poetry productivity in the UK as important as, if not more important than that of the 1960s. The real history needs to be recorded. This video forms part of my effort to form an archive relating to that period.

The sound quality on this clip is OK, but the visuals are rough. But it's better than nothing.

Copies of Brendan's poetry collections can be bought on Amazon.

Saturday 2 February 2008

Brendan Cleary Reads Three Poems



Brendan Cleary reads three poems from a forthcoming collection by tall-lighthouse press: 'Out Take', 'The Hostages' and 'Gift'.