I’m Slim Lady the real Slim Lady
all them other age ladies
just tryin to page me
(Owed to Eminem)
The “little ole lady” who stood up so formidably (“and I will/stand up”) to Eminem’s misogyny and homophobia had been rhyming long before he was born:
I have been raped
be-
cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age
the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair…
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life
(Poem about My Rights)
The Essential June Jordan (Penguin £9.99) is breath-taking in range, deeply political, immersed in the Civil Rights fight and the Black Arts Movement yet intensely global. Her Bombing of Baghdad deftly circles back to Crazy Horse and "Custer's Next-To-Last Stand." Jordan called poems "voiceprints" - once heard, her riffing dazzling voice is unforgettable. A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters sings from the page too, rhyming, twisting, turning with perfect comic timing to Einstein , - "…who never made nobody a cup a tea/in his whole brilliant life!.. 'Well, say Mrs. Johnson, 'well, honey,/I do guess/that's genius for you.'" Jordan's "lil old ladies" are the sharp backbone of her poems. In A Song of Sojourner Truth, "Sojourner had to be just crazy/telling all that kinda truth…talking bad insteada sad…" These were models for her powerhouse strength-perhaps especially her mother who rose "After sickness…took the street/in short steps toward the corner/chewing gum no less… /she wasn't foxy /she was strong
(On the Spirit of Mildred Jordan)
I can see my fifteen-year-old self
squeezed in a cabin-lit House cubicle
… staring at A Shorter Latin Primer
open beside a pale-green copy book;
…like a father I want to hug him
…help him with his Virgil prep.
Haunted and haunting, James Harpur's The Examined Life (Two Rivers Press, £9.99) is a terrific examination of homesickness - The Odyssey a vibrant framework for Harper's five years away at school. Fathers are not dead but missing, "'You know Dad's been unhappy for a while?'/I did./'He wants to take a break from us. You know he loves you.' / I nodded." (Telemachus). It begins with a brutal double separation- when Harpur left home, his father left the family. Memories of home are sirens, "I blocked up my ears and tied up to the mast." The Payphone, "Lit up at night…lured you to the surface,/a fishing lamp mimicking the moon;/its hook bailed with your mother's voice…" Harpur watches a new boy squirm on it for days" before he's removed as "smoothly as an ambulance… me? Five years I never touched that phone." (The Payphone Trap). In The Perfect Tense Harpur presents two doors, touching exactly, deftly on the split existence of the child sent away:
one opens to a room, the glare of classmates,
a master pausing from the perfect tense;
the other to a world beyond the gates
the village road with puddles full of sky
an Austin like my mother’s passing by.
Harpur’s wry leavening humour subverts and underscores the tragedy. When “Dad” brings the family for a summer holiday at his old school, “…slips back some forty years -/me a mere three weeks - to homesickness.” Then:
Next day sickness strikes…
…a scene from Endgame
…six of us in the sanatorium moaning
… none of us knowing
this will be our last family holiday,
and all of us knowing.
(Portora Royal)
Stephen Sexton opens Cheryl's Destinies (Penguin £9.99) with a revolutionary act, the liberating of a zoo:
The radicals sprung the locks that night, hurrah!
and their lovely collarbones were almost moonly…
In the streets they collar or tranquillise
the ocelots and run a spike of ketamine
through the plumbing in the fountain.
Dromedaries blue-mood around the pub…
The Curfew
The range of fantastical animals reflect Sexton’s brimful multiplicity. His style differs from Harpur’s yet reveals common preoccupations - grief-fuelled odysseys, time melting forwards and backwards as Cheryl’s tarot evokes The Wasteland’s Madame Sosostris. But if Harpur escaped into the Odyssey, Sexton escapes to many worlds, many fragments “shore up his ruin”. Games are serious - Cheryl is based at the bowling alley and The Beasley Contract Bridge System 1935 teems with gnomic aphorisms:
Notice the gaps in the various suits.
Imagine your partner with nothing at all.
For here again the story of the hand must be told: (a) I have nothing
(b) I have something, not a lot
(c) I have a great deal.
WB Yeats collaborates with Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins, “I have there a hive for the honeybee./That’s it, screeches Billy, that’s the chorus!” before Sexton returns to a final Belfast poem, dedicated to his mentor, Ciaran Carson, another master of the labyrinth. Irradiated but unbowed, Sexton’s final image of Carson is fantastical and true, a hymn to the exhilaration of craft:
We ran from small back rooms and stairways to witness,
from the corridor’s door’s arrow-slit window, you
glowing, poisoned, under a new, white fuzz of hair
smiling as a new poem found its way forward.
It’s there I see you last, all of us jostling
to say, for the last time, hello to the master.
(So it is,)
Emily Cooper's debut Glass (£10), preoccupied with houses, safety and inheritance, has an idiosyncratic beauty:
Each house has its own smell, when I leave
and come home again after some time
to my mother’s house, it smells more like
my grandmother’s than when I left.
(A fountain pen slices my leg through a bin bag as I move into my new house)
Cooper’s original voice, low-key and matter-of-fact, highlights Glass’s dream-like quality. This labyrinth is pared back:
I continued walking around and noting the hazards that I would
Recount to my friends later. A hidden step, a nail protruding
From the frame of a window that was glazed with plexiglass,
A nod to safety consciousness…
eeling my way along a wall in the dark I felt a gap…
…a bend in it… transported me…
(Minotaur By Proxy)
In Glass, the poet buys a slide projector and brings it back to the old Georgian house where “the builders are in the basement again…Every time I go into the basement there is more MDF…” The slide projector “whirrs”, as Cooper focuses on a photo of her, “Woodburns House Hotel burned down in 1971/ I find a photograph of firemen with hoses wetting a blazing Georgian façade through the windows/ this happened two years before my father’s family was burned out of their home and business in North Belfast/ the jade dress must have been among the belongings that survived…” Cooper’s eerie dread of careless builders and her preoccupation with the guardianship of an old house are thrown into sharp relief as we realise how deep that inheritance sinks. Everything connects and unsettles:
Perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten that stomach ulcer
And Daddy wouldn’t have confused
His cancer for a matching ulcer
(Old Lives)
