Primers Volume One

Geraldine Clarkson, Kathryn Maris

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781911027584
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In 2015, The Poetry School and Nine Arches Press launched a nationwide scheme to find exciting new voices in poetry with Kathryn Maris and Jane Commane as selecting editors. After reading through hundreds of anonymous entries, and narrowing down the choices from longlist to shortlist, a final four poets emerged as clear choices: Geraldine Clarkson, Lucy Ingrams, Maureen Cullen and Katie Griffiths.

Primers: Volume One now collects together a taster of poems from each of the four new poets. The brilliant chemistry of their poems proves to be a heady mix and a memorable journey – from post-war correspondents to foster families, breath-taking natural landscapes to strange, unsettling dream-like narratives and so much more in between. There's plenty here to delight and dazzle, and ample evidence of a bright future ahead for contemporary poetry, as these striking and bold new voices demonstrate.

Katie Griffiths

Katie Griffiths grew up in Ottawa, Canada – the daughter of Northern Irish parents. She returned to the UK for university and subsequently worked at Radio Times, then as volunteer co-ordinator for refugees of the war in the former Yugoslavia, and as teacher at a further education college. Her collection My Shrink is Pregnant was joint runner-up in the 2014 Poetry School/Pighog Poetry Pamphlet Competition. She is singer-songwriter in the band A Woman in Goggles, under which name she also blogs.

Capo

The farmyard rule of who’s boss: my chicken-strangling hands getting instant results, squeezing the upper register out of a neck, forcing it to shriek falsetto, cutting airflow and blood supply just this side of suffocation, just enough to allow what’s wedged under my armpit to flap wings, like that song I tried to strum when we sat on your bed in your host’s house the summer I turned seventeen, on school exchange in Wilhelmshaven, and you handed me a worn guitar I couldn’t subdue without the throttlehold, the tourniquet of a capo clamped to its fifth fret. The instrument struggled, whimpered like a mandolin, my voice wavered, fingers slid on strings, your legs too skinny, too close. You tried to kiss me before we left. No sooner outside the front door, your host-mother banged open the shutters of your room above us, shot out her head, a clock’s crazed cuckoo jumping the hour, that scrawny bald neck, ligaments straining, its pronouncement shrilling down the street:

Du hast mit ihm im Bett geschlafen.

Du dreckiges Mädchen, dreckiges Mädchen.*

*You slept with him in bed. You dirty girl, dirty girl.

The Friends You Keep

Zagreb’s dark backstreets spat you out

with your upturned collar, slicked hair

and height that forces me to angle my face

into the sting of sleet. I can’t place you –

not charity or aid worker, but a fixer of sorts,

my escort towards the bus stop along a row

of lime trees gagged in December ice.

We board the 201, you clutch my elbow

like a tiller, steer me to the one vacant seat,

hold dominion over the stuffy interior

with an English voice unreeling names

recognised by sullen passengers:

Karlovac, Franjo Tuđman, the Krijena.

Then you change tack, cite clips from your life,

the shooting weekends, dumped fiancée,

boarding-school pranks, how you clicked apart

the shoulder sockets of the mute boy

until he bleated that his name was Gordon.

I breathe mustiness from your sodden overcoat.

You ask why I’m in this place, nice girl like me.

I shrug: the arguments, the bickering.

You claim you can arrange an end to all that,

easy as a nod,

as an envelope of (preferably) Deutschmarks,

as a phone call to those friends you keep.

The Road to Split

This could not be England,

this stand-off of land and water

and the road that forms the seam between.

Nor these signs that man

has scrabbled to put order into rocks,

small clawings of territory,

minute fields dragged from the granite.

Past abandoned habitations

and the barefaced chill of Pag Island,

we creep across a pontoon understudy

of the Maslenica Bridge, shelled to hell,

photographing neither gun emplacements

nor the way winter has cast

its snow in slapdash swirls.

The chain-smoking bus driver

pumps radio oompah through the coach,

swamps the soundtrack of Top Gun – no protest

since all eyes are stuck to Croat subtitles.

In deep ravines at every savage bend vehicles rust:

perhaps dumped for convenience, or perhaps

the road, pulled too far south, has flexed its spine.

The Knight of Swords

Matthew, hammered by sun, sprawls

on the spare bed in my room. Antiseptic

cream makes him a B-movie ghoul.

Hiatus. Whiff of strawberry perfume

across my wrists. Everyone has dispersed,

the devoted to trail a Medjugorje priest,

the motivated with tapes to size up damage,

the boy a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the Editors:
• Contents
• Foreword
• Geraldine Clarkson
• Maureen Cullen
• Katie Griffiths
• Lucy Ingrams
• Acknowledgements