My poem for Paul Brookes’ 30DaysWild challenge.

Plastic orphans

I toss a bottle in the sea,
watch until it’s lost to sight.
Like Lir’s children, tossed from sea to loch
through storm and crashing waves,
it drifts unchanged and undiminished.

Not in pure white feathers clad,
its coloured label fading with the sun,
but smeared and greened with algae,
for three hundred years it sails,
condemned to never let its atoms free.

Three hundred years again before it finds
a different sea, an ocean broad as half the world,
and carried in the currents,
jostled by a million lost semblables,
it joins the continent of plastic trash.

Perhaps in three hundred years again,
when time has put an end to our earthly reign,
the sorry debris, our eternal badge of shame,
will sink like human bones, to rest
among the corals and the last of all the pearls.

Today I have the absolute pleasure on inviting Giovanna MacKenna to reflect on her stunning debut collection How the Heart Can Falter (The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing, 2022).

Thank you for the invitation, Nigel. What author can resist an opportunity to talk about their book?! I’m delighted to be given this space to offer some insights into my collection How the Heart can Falter, and one poem in particular. As I see it, we all have our stories to tell; they are the mirrors of our lives. With this book I hold up mine in the hope that the readers may also see themselves.

Although I’ve been writing in one way or another for a long time, poetry really came to me in the months after my mother’s death. My father died many years before but there seemed to be some sort of permission that arrived with…

The 30DaysWild challenge today is an ode to trees. A sonnet in my case.

On the beauty of poplars

Without the poplar trees there’d be no song,
no fluting call of orioles, no wild
and wanton dancing by the stream, no wreaths
of black and yellow through the leafy green.

Without the poplar trees, how would we know
the wind was pouring, rolling from the west?
The oaks stand firm, immobile, poplars sigh,
their topmost branches trembling silver sea.

And when the trembling grows, a rising tide
of waving boughs and hissing with the foam
of unseen water-wind, cold ocean-born,
the poplars raise their slender boughs to show

the wind take form, we see it in the sky,
an ocean, weed-strewn, flotsam flying by.

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With this  final instalment all the new material in the  Summer 2022 issue of The High Window can now be accessed via the top menu:

1. A selection of homegrown and international Poetry from 39 poets.

2. Poetry by Tom Laichas, the Featured American Poet.

3. Translations of French-language Poetry from Africa and the Arab World edited by Patrick xxWilliamson.

4.  An Essay by Edmund Prestwich on translating Dante.

5. A comprehensive Reviews section.

6. Poetry from Michał Choiński, the second Featured Poet.

7. An art feature from Rowena Sommerville, who is The High Window’s Resident Artist for xx2022.

To coincide with this isssue the High Window Press is publishing two new books by Mervyn Linford and Timothy Dodd. Details will be found on the Press page.

Enjoy!

David

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The editor of The High Windowwould like to thank Patrick Williamson and his team of translators for all their hard work in putting together this supplement of poetry intranslation. [Ed.]

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INTRODUCTION

Curating this supplement was a great pleasure, and a special thanks to Tahar Bekri for guiding my selection. I am grateful to the contemporary poets, many of whom I know personally, for their kind contributions, and to my fellow translators for their exceptional work.

This supplement endeavours to present representative poetic voices in French-speaking countries of Africa and the Arab World. For it is an anomaly to separate North Africa from Sub-Saharan Africa. The poetry included here is written in French, for evident historical reasons, but clearly only one dimension of an overall poetic landscape shared with other national languages: Arabic, Fula, Bambara, Berber, Wolof, etc.

Past generations are represented by Leopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), a…