Report: Days of Roses ed. Declan Ryan and Malene Engelund
Days of Roses
ed. Declan Ryan and Malene Engelund
Paperback
ISBN-10: 0956822304
Price: £10.00
Eley Williams
Days of Roses has established itself over the last two years as an exciting series of readings in London. Taking its name from Tom Waits’ song ‘Martha’ (‘And those were the days of roses, poetry and prose’), as a date in the informal literary calendar it has experienced a swell in popularity, with organisers Declan Ryan and Malene Engelund creating a liveliness and warmth that sets the night apart from similar events in the capital. Although Ryan and Engelund completed the Royal Holloway Creative Writing MA course, it hardly belongs to any collegiate coterie; from its inception, Days of Roses has offered a wide pool of participants. Part of the success of the reading nights is that it never feels as if there is a headline act: it treads the balance between an inclusive and a broad-reaching line-up, with well-known names regularly slotted in between novices. Perhaps this is what lends a slight festival-like feel to many of the nights rather that the stillness offered by other readings: snug rather than starchy, couched in talent rather than bombast, the readings are a pleasure to attend and it was with great interest that I picked up a copy of the new Days of Roses anthology comprised of poetry produced by some of the nights’ attendees.
Whilst the anthology has emerged with something of a community spirit, and it seems fitting to discuss it as such, the introductory set of short poems by Jo Shapcott does provide a quite fantastic set of coat-tails to ride upon. Each of these four poems is dedicated to one of the elements, and here the recent Costa Book of the Year Award winner supplies a wealth of startling and provocative interpretations of her theme. In ‘Earth’, the enjambment provides a momentum to the lines, a teetering non-static quality that powers through her work. Similarly, ‘Air’ comprises of just one sentence, a breathless intonation. The fact that all the poems in the anthology were born to breathe, intended to be experienced aloud rather than to be read on the page, informs much of how these poems work best. Early in the anthology, Gareth Jones deploys a similar running-on between two stanzas in the sonnet ‘By Heart’:
I couldn’t tell you the name of her hometown,
her middle initials, her date of birth,
but she talked without breathing and entered a room
a force of nature, and when she laughed
it was with her whole body.
In these lines Jones enacts not only the figure’s ‘talking without breathing’ but also the giddiness of remembering indistinctly, the scrambling of memories into one fluid impression rather than anything that one can learn (or appreciate) by rote.
Rob Selby’s formally-composed, measured poems give perhaps the anthology’s best display of how rhyme can be used for a momentum similar to Jones’. His ‘Balfour’ nudges along with an unforced, gentle determination in this way: ‘symbolic of an Isle / in decline, where a sham sun drags shadows / clockwork around a dial’. Pace and momentum are also masterfully created at the climax of Lydia Macpherson’s ‘Pastoral’ , which ends without a full-stop; thus untethered, the poem tips off into nothingness: ‘thoughts of how you pierced / the robin’s egg and blew / that promise clean away’ forces the readers into their own interpretation. Marianne Burton’s excellent ‘the dragonfly’ has a similar lack of upper-case letters which, without the brazen attention-grabbing of capitals, provides an incisive intensity – by ending on a teetering, poised (rather than fluttering) ‘then’ with no final period, a tension and a dark unresolved threat is lent to the piece. Rob Selby’s ‘And Today’, by contrast, launches itself fully at the reader with its initial ‘And’ of the first line; ensuing lines concern the energy and claustrophobia of a busy day, and the first word effectively elbows its way into the readers’ concentration with a flourish.
The authors appear to have an ear for specifically vocalised poetry, as the use of onomatopoeia is used deftly within the whole anthology to great effect. Gareth Jones’s ‘Swans’ has a character redeem himself through the riotous ‘laughter honking through the house’; Declan Ryan, whose poetry is infused with musical form and intuition, brings an additional lickety-split skiffle beat to his ‘Baking with Martha’ where ‘two halved eggs’ become ‘brittle castanets’ – many of his poems are enlivened by such tricksy sounds and chirrups. Sarah Westcott’s ‘Owls’ displays some delightfully chewy, languorous words than demand to be read aloud and complement the birds own vowel-heavy calls. The birds ‘turn janglesome if I forget they are there’ as the ‘the failing sun’ becomes a ‘shinicle over town’ and the birds start to ‘gowl for slumgullion’ (a line that is a complete triumph for the tongue and the ear and eye). Westcott’s poem as a whole concerns the transferral of information via oral and written forms, as evidenced below:
I carry the owls with me, still,
In vellum and in sepia. I carry
them on my tongue and I feed them
to our children.
Dominic McLoughlin’s ‘Standing Stones’ offers questions that work well when both read on the page and aloud, working in a quiet rhetoric that is stimulating rather than plaintive: the lines ‘Why have I brought you here? What has / All this got to teach us about anything?’ are tempered by their own answer: ‘Something about the value of waiting, maybe/ Like a bicycle tipped into the hedge’. Couched with the ‘maybe’ and ‘perhaps’, McLoughlin’s work has an appealing mix of frankness and diffidence: declarative but not declaiming, his are knowing, sweet poems perhaps best showcased in the impassioned singsong of his ‘Two Cherries’. The intimacy of reading to an audience is also present in Gareth Jones’ ‘Bien-aimée’, which offers ‘But your scent is all that I can translate – / saltspray, treebark, cinnamon’, a line which exemplifies the sibilance and sensitivity that characterizes much of the tenderness that found in his work.
It is worth noting at this point that the lack of structurally experimental poetry in Days of Roses is remarkable, given its prominence in many new anthologies where edginess of form is as much of a trope as any imagery. In Lydia Macpherson’s ‘Conjoined’, however, the crucial dash in the third verse reminds us of the poem’s subject (two conjoined twins) and its symmetry, its own umbilicality of form. Christopher Horton’s ‘Arizona’ is perhaps the most ambitiously structured poem in Days of Roses, and its theme of anatomical blazon and geographical description is wonderfully crafted in the way the piece scans on the page, thematically complementing such lines as ‘where the land conformed to binary logic’ and where the body is figured as ‘pushing out its limbs’ through the layout of the poem.
What the anthology lacks in brashness of structural experimentation, however, is amply reimbursed by the richness of imagery. This is evident from Shapcott’s ‘Water’, which presents waves as geometry ‘oozing little triangles and folding like old carpets’, to Maximilian Hildebrand’s sensual ‘Red-Figured cup, Attributed to the Brygos Painter’, wherein a character ‘tip-toes millenia into his outstretched hands / And reclines, thighs splayed wide as a martini glass’. Liz Berry – who is a highly recommended performer and a highlight of the Days of Roses events – transforms many of the figures in her poems in ways that cleverly endow eroticism (for example, in ‘Trucker’s Mate: ‘His vertebrae like cats’ eyes guiding me down’) and impetuous energy (for example, in ‘A Boy: ‘legs kicked / in a triumphant V, fist in the air’). Lydia Macpherson describes a ‘fridge’s cinema glow’ – the monumental eked out from the domestic – but then manages to do the opposite just as compellingly, when a space station is described as having the ‘weightless grace’ of an ‘emerging insect’. Gareth Jones’ recollection of a ‘Sundayed bed’ in ‘Tender’ is poignant in its isolated simplicity, whilst Malene Engelund’s poems, representing some of the tightest, tautest works in the anthology, manage to stir without a single unnecessary adjective and without resorting to bare scattershot form of poetry. In her ‘Black Form No. 5′, as the narrator considers the work of Rothko, the elegantly phrased ‘welled black’ of the painting in the initial stanza leads to a potted exercise in yearning, like the horsehair ‘locked into his quick brush stroke’, to be discovered within the painting. Through her imagery, Engelund’s poems are candid without being blunt and wistful without being whimsical. Alongside Engelund, Marianne Burton and William Searle particularly stand out in the collection for the vividness of expression in their multi-tableaux poems. In Searle’s ‘A Cold Day’, one figure considers frigidity of thought and action and makes the suggestion that:
If this is the case,
then the further we roam apart
the warmer both of us will be.
I through grass, you amongst steel.
Tonight, we should sit by fires in separate rooms
which confers an immediate stillness and sense of loss. In his ‘Feral’, scrumping youngsters are ‘stabbed by dock-leaves, proud to be bloated’ whilst growing ‘rabid with child-joy and apple stash’, ‘hailing down the sun to share in our feast’, demonstrating Searle’s ability to bring an energised but well-tuned verve to his work. Marianne Burton’s imagery, which perhaps embodies a greater cynicism, treats poetic subjects with a steely evaluation: in ‘The Flowers’, just as blossoms are dismissed in the first line as ‘not fragile’, she is quick to emphasize their ‘ripeness’ and ‘capriciousness’:
If one is picked, another drinks its sun.
Their darkness is not our darkness.
Meanwhile, in her ’3pm : The Ninth Hour : Calvary’, the torture and despair of the Christian pietà is conveyed with seething, searing lines: a truly great evocation of pain.
Achieving levity in verse is just as important and difficult as solemnity, however, and Days of Roses contains its share of this. Max Hildebrand’s ‘Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle’ picks its way through a narrative that is wry and well-paced, providing digs and asides that probe and provoke humour in equal measure, while Rob Selby flicks from light romanticism to starkness in a bathetic swerve as lovers pick their way through their days only to lie together to sleep in a ‘jerking, dribbling heap’. Declan Ryan deploys a cheeky and inspired verb when ‘Tom Waits’ growl cherrybombs’ overhead in his ‘Waterloo Interlude (in a Café with Malene Engelund)’. Many of Ryan’s poems display a wit that combines well with the discernible dry ache in his poems, packing punches just at the moment they charm the reader most: ‘The Wheat-sheaf’ contains a welcome pun when it describes characters staring ‘rye-eyed’; elsewhere, in ‘Clover’, the gift of a single leaf becomes a ‘re-set button, barely-bloomed beginning’. Returning to his Waterloo café piece, the stillness of ‘I’m looking at whiskey on its way/ to the table and it’s only Tuesday’ in a bar where there are ‘things rust[ing] to a halt’, the narrator finds himself having to defend the ‘bite’ of a Bloody Mary without its apologetically-overlooked Worcester sauce. Here, whilst Ryan’s characters might ‘forget what we came to discuss’, he recognises that often it is not the intentions that are important but rather the moment itself: so it is that the specifically upper-cased ‘Sun’ is cherished as ‘making a dust waltz between us’.
Some of the strongest works in the anthology are narrative poems, all the better for lacking pretension. They range from Horton’s steamy evocation of a Hopper print (‘Night on the El Train’), to McLoughlin’s ‘I do wish’ (where, again, McLoughlin’s voice emerges as chirpily bashful: ‘Helpful hint: keep both feet on the ground’) and Selby’s ‘Reunion’, where:
Alumni slap backs and share
a common-or-garden joke.
then move with two glasses,
trusting you won’t fluff your lines
Meanwhile, Declan Ryan’s ‘Petra to the Swan-Pedalo’ has an inversion of the Swan Lake story based on true events, a 2006 news story which tells of a swan named Petra who fell in love with a swan-shaped pedalo at a Munster zoo.
The anthology’s foreword by Polly Clarke makes the claim that ‘the only assumption we can reasonably make from this collection of writers is that they all have got to grips with what is now a prerequisite for poetic success: reading your work in public’, which reads as rather callow assessment of what ‘success’ really might be. Rather, the delight in reading this anthology is its generosity of imagery, its energy and its measuredness. The experience of reading on the page as compared to that of poetry experienced aloud is demonstrated here, where one is able to savour words that the relative transience of vocalisation often gallops over. Words such as Maximilian Hildebrand’s ‘monocoque’ in his ‘Eating oranges’ poem enact a (literal) dissection of fruit: ‘the beatless heart that took no component of itself to make seed or skin or grow a life’. Sarah Westcott underlines this in ‘Crush’, which highlights the excitement of reading:
I ran my fingers
over his worksheets, followed the kick
and curl of his hand – at night
and finds some concord with a line in Christopher Horton’s ‘Arizona’, highlighting the resonance of that which cannot be said or performed: ‘all that was / intended, unspoken,/ Fell away’. Providing not only the thrill of immediacy on impact, Days of Roses supplies the reader with much to regloss, reappraise and rejoice in. I hope that, like the readings themselves, there are many more anthologies to come from this collective.
