‘Snow fell cold and soft on fold and croft’

From time to time I try to catch up with the Forward Book of Poetry. Like the Best American Poetry series, it lets me scan what’s out there – not in any great depth, and ’keeping up’ is impossible – but as a taster, a sample.

I’ve been looking at the Forward Book of Poetry 2021 (Confusingly, to me, it’s the book of poems under consideration for the Forward Prizes of 2020). It consists of poems published in the first year of lockdown, when you couldn’t go to bookshops to browse except for that illusory summer when we thought Covid was over. I’m a year behind, of course, which I prefer. I don’t much like poetry prizes, and by now I’ve forgotten who won. I could look it up – I try not to.

It’s a bit like when I was a teacher; all these voices saying, in different ways ”like me, notice me, I’m special”. I resist the well-known names who’ve already had their time in the sun, but sometimes they’re well-known because they do what they do so well. In this volume I unsuccessfully resisted Don Paterson, Paul Muldoon, Paul Farley and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain.

There were a couple of intriguing poets who were new to me. Katherine Horrex’s ’Parliament, Fallen’ begins;

We can afford to know nothing
beyond concrete, the concatenate
glower of windows.

Avril Joy’s ’Skomm’ is a teacher’s poem;

Outside the wind is up and the yard is frosting over.
Better make a start, I say. They pick up pens, open
books, The girl with the goose on her head declines
to write, says she cannot concentrate for the load,

Some poems won me over despite my doubts. Michael Haslam uses too much internal rhyming and wordplay, but his account of his difficult birth in the freezing winter of 1947 still caught me;

Snow fell cold and soft on fold and croft.
Snow fell on Halliwell. Snow drifted into windrow
and an even swell. Snow overwhelmed the mill,
the mine, the railwayline. The world was frozen
in a shell of economic standstill. Snow blown over
Smithhills Moor and Winter Hill had heaped against
the hospital, up to the window-sill.

Natalie Diaz’s ’Waist and Sway’ is gloriously over the top, gothic in its intensity – it either carries you along, as it did me, or it doesn’t. Difficult to quote from because individual lines seem to shrink on their own; it’s the sweep of the whole poem that convinces.

The poems that impressed me most were these:

1. Fiona Benson’s ’Mama Cockroach, I Love You’. It’s a poem of unease and disgust, and why not?

Because you begrudge no one a meal, but ooze
a faecal trail to lead your commune to its source,

like a dirty bee. Because you are joyfully promiscuous.
Because you pouch your young and hide them

in the sweaty creases of the house
near suppurating food so they’ll hatch to a feast;

2. Danez Smith’s ’my president’. Like Natalie Diaz, difficult to quote from, but written with such sweeping rhetoric, such elan.

3. Shane McCrae’s ’The Hastily Assembled Angel on Care and Vitality’ for his use of judicious spaces to suggest pauses and hesitations, such that a line without a gap appears to have unexpected fluency;

the angel sees the
Slaves serve their masters most………… efficiently
When they aren’t talking to each other………….but
They serve their masters most………..quickly just after
They have devised a plan to kill their masters

4. Jane Clarke’s ’Copper Soles’. Dark, hopeless, like the very best fairy tales.

5. Julian Stannard’s ’Trolley Man’. I don’t usually like short, comic poems. The charm wears off too quickly. But I like this – here’s the first three stanzas;

When someone asks, Could I have
a sandwich with some cheese in it?
I will say No sandwiches today!

And if anyone should ask for coffee
I will say, Hot water not working.
Shocking, isn’t it?

I will wheel my trolley from one end
of the train to the other, smiling
magnificently at everyone.

The poem works through little details – note ’a sandwich with some cheese in it’, not a cheese sandwich.

And to finish with, a plea someone to give one of the big poetry prizes (even though I don’t like them) to Pascale Petit. She’s been on the shortlists so many times. I don’t immediately like ’Tiger Girl’ as much as her previous volumes ’Fauverie’ and ’Mama Amazonica’, but it’s about time she got proper recognition.