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Because I seem to have a lot on at the moment I am trying to clear the decks where I can. I am, therefore, publishing the new High Window in one go rather than in two instalments. However, as it is coming out a few weeks early I hope readers will have enough time to absorb what is again a bumper issue. I have adopted a nedw policy for reviews whereby they have been published in a steady trickle since the winter isssue, with a final crop appearing now. However, if you missed some of them them, there is a linked index to all the reviews which have appeared since December. [Ed.]

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Here is a checklist of all the new material published in the Spring 2023 issue of The High Window. Everything can be accessed via the top menu:

1. A selection of homegrown and international Poetry

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R. Bremner has written of incense, peppermints, and the color of time since the 1970s, in such venues as The High Window, International Poetry Review, Poets Online, Jerry Jazz Musician, Paterson Literary Review and 1979’s Passaic Review (alongside Allen Ginsberg). Ron has published eight books of poetry, including Hungry Words (Alien Buddha Press), and thirteen eBooks. He has thrice won honors in the Allen Ginsberg awards. He features in many spots, including New York’s Bowery Poetry Club.Ron lives with his beautiful sociologist wife, son, and dog Ariel in wonderful Northeast New Jersey.

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Introduction

‘Although I wrote my first poem at the seashore when twelve years old, I wrote exclusively (very bad) fiction until my mid-twenties, when an apocalypse of poetry struck, aided by poverty and failed relationships. As a taxicab driver, many opportunities and occasions for poems were happening all around, so fast that I could hardly keep…

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Allen Prowle was born in Aberdare in 1940. Education took him to England where he has lived ever since, without losing his ‘Cymreictod’. He began writing poetry at Sheffield University where he graduated in French. His poems have appeared in many journals, his first collection, Landmarks was published in 1973. His Europeanism explains his interest in translation; he has translated French Italian and Spanish poems, for Magma, MPT and The High Window. In 2009, MPT published his translations of Rocco Scotellaro in its first-ever single author collection. He was awarded the Stephen Spender prize for translations of Attilio Bertolucci.

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Allen Prowle: Eight Poems

OCTOBER 21st

The purple beech has had its say for another year,
scattering its nuts upon the lawn among the Chinese rowan’s
pink pearl berries for the birds to feed on.
We’ve been here now for over thirty years and heard,
beyond the hedge…

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Thomas Lynch: Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems • Aidan Andrew Dun: Vale Royal • Tony Flynn: The Heart Itself • John McKeown: Ill Nature • Alwyn Marriage: Possibly a Pomegranate •Ness Owen: Moon Jellyfish Can Barely Swim • Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems edited by Julia Nemirovskaya • The Drunken Boat: Selected Writings by Arthur Rimbaud • Nachoem M. Wijnberg, translated from the Dutch translated by David Colmer • A Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, 1960-2015 edited by Wolfgang Görtschacher and David Malcolm • Jacques Darras:John Scotus Eriugena at Laon & Other Poems • John Koethe: Beyond Belief

Further recent reviews published since the previous edition

Tara Bergin:  Savage Tales • D A Prince: The Bigger Picture  •  Jules Whiting: Folding Time • Maeve McKenna: A Dedication to Drowning •

This week I have the pleasure of inviting Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig, poet, flash fiction writer, reviewer and essayist to drop in to reflect on a poem from her chapbook, kinscapes.

As John Glenday writes in his endorsement, my pamphlet kinscapes (Dreich, 2022): ‘investigates the issue of what it means to belong […] in other words, the true meaning of the simple, strange word: home.’

A crucial part of this investigation are moments of encounter. Moments that help the speaker of the poems to better understand not only themselves but also the places, people, as well as – in the ekphrastic pieces included – the works of art they meet.

Encountering Edina – Palingenesis’ the poem with which the collection opens, exemplifies such a moment, and shows it to comprise a mixture of recognition, comprehension, and change:

The idea for this text first emerged during a visit to Edinburgh…

Freedom

“Maybe your bodies’ll be lost in a swamp
Or a prison grave, or the potter’s field”
— Langston Hughes

America
Where are your devices
Were they lost
When the ships came in
The ships laden with 
Slave-wage servants.

Come in, you said
Come down off the plank
(You cannot swim)
Welcome to hell’s kitchen
There’s a place for you
On this killing ground.



Lass

“She 
Who searched for lovers 
In the night
Has gone the quiet way 
Into the still, 
Dark land of death 
Beyond the rim of day.”
—	Langston Hughes

The truly desperate
Have no boundaries
They cross every ocean
They unleash their ghosts
They have to be found
They break hearts
In chance encounters.

So, be gentle with them
First love will find them
Then seek to destroy them
In a thousand silent ways.

Harlem “Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who…

Meet New People They Said

Be social, don’t disassociate. Become known and know. Your feet move forward. Your mind a cloud, left behind. You carry the stench of a stranger. “You’re in the wrong place. Try over there.” “You don’t belong here. Hold while I transfer you”… on to someone else….not our problem...go away Smile full of candy teeth, delicate glass, hold steady. If they realize, candied powder, jagged glass…laughter and disdain Leave the past behind. Speak in present tense. “Hello. Can anyone hear me? Can anyone see me?” Your broken voice is a whisper in a stadium of screams Your voice is strange. Your face is dumb. Your mind is a balloon, helium up to the ceiling. “I have to get out of here…suffocating, I feel toxic, lost. Where’s the fucking door?” “WHERE’S THE FUCKING DOOR?” Bio: Ethan O’Nan is a trans man living in North Carolina, he has…