I don’t know what it is about Northern Ireland culture that results in the creation of so many talented poets. However, it’s my pleasure to introduce yet another, Katy Mahon, to reflect on a poem from her pamphlet Some Indefinable Cord, (Hybriddreich, 2022).

Memory as a form of seeing

Despite claiming in ‘Dust and Order’, the opening poem in my debut chapbook, that I don’t do elegies/ nor inwardly lament the passing of being/ from skin and bone to earth again, many of the poems in ‘Some Indefinable Cord’ contain an elegiac, mourning quality. This would be a nod to myself as musician, if it weren’t for the fact that it was subconsciously done. However, my chapbook title is a purposeful play on the homophones ‘cord’ and ‘chord’, and indeed, either could have worked. In the end I chose ‘cord’ as the essential element of the collection was…

GRIEF IN CONTEMPORARY POETRY: AN AFTERMATH OF MALADMINISTRATION OF MOST 21ST CENTURY SOCIETIES; A GLANCE AT JOHN CHINAKA ONYECHE’S 25 ATONEMENTS.

BY: Kwaghkule Aondonengen Jacob.

25 Atonements is a forty paged poetry book penned by John Chinaka Onyeche. It is embedded with a lot of literal and figurative accurately engineered aesthetics. All the poems in the said collection are stylistically titled and numbered in Atonements from one to the twenty-fifth Atonement. Of a truth, all these poems are wow-stricken as well as mind-blowing considering the tone and the era in which they have been rendered.

Grief, according to English Dictionary means suffering, hardship. Grief is also defined as pain of mind arising from misfortune, significant personal loss, bereavement, misconduct of oneself or others, etc.; sorrow; sadness. Grief is the cause or instance of sorrow or pain; that which afflicts or distresses; trial.

In the poetry book, 25 Atonements

For Joni

The canyons echo the coyote's mournful cry
of loneliness, for which there are no words,
yet suddenly, like graceful home-bound birds,
the words appear as written on the sky.
The painted ponies dip, then leap so high,
they startle us. In silver-bridled herds,
they bear us through the grand and the absurd;
at journey's end, we still do not know why.
And yet the music calls us to go on,
amid an often misty atmosphere
that tends to blur the darkness and the light.                                     
The melodies remain after we've gone,
as glorious reminders we were here,
though we are stardust scattered in the night.

Originally published in the anthology, Poeming Pigeon: Poems About Music 

BIO:

Diane Elayne Dees is the author of the poetry chapbooks, Coronary Truth (Kelsay Books) The Last Time I Saw You (Finishing Line Press), and The Wild Parrots of Marigny (Querencia Press). Diane…

*****

Tara Bergin:  Savage Tales • D A Prince: The Bigger Picture  •  Jules Whiting: Folding Time • Maeve McKenna: A Dedication to Drowning • Michael Daniels:  Ravenser Odd • R.A. White: A Frame Less Perfect

*****

Tara Bergin’s Savage Tales reviewed by Pam Thompson

Savage Tales by Tara Bergin. £15.99. Carcanet. ISBN: 9781800172319

Tara Bergin was born and brought up in Dublin, near to where Samuel Beckett was brought up. She currently lives in Yorkshire, is an academic at Newcastle University. Her PhD research centred on Ted Hughes’s translations of Hungarian poet, János Pilinszky.

Beckettian dark humour and seeming absurdity colours earlier collections, This is Yarrow (2013) and The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (2017), and spill over into this Savage Tales. Bergin’s sources are eclectic and numerous, her first two collections containing extensive notes on the poems. There is a…

Huskies

Double fur to pull them through
a snow desert. That snow in their eyes,
pools of moonstone and gold
arrowed against the cold.

Muscled team-players, a playful team,
best of friends, your best friend.
Six Siberians howling.

These loyal workers know how to pull.
They gather speed over drifts packing
down close, their weight harnessed
to glide in unison over ice-cold air, slide
over frigid rivers, leap past trees
like starch-white spectres

to carry your weight
to your destination. 

Bio for Doryn Herbst

Doryn Herbst, a former water industry scientist in Wales, now lives in Germany and is a deputy local councillor. Her writing considers the natural world but also themes which address social issues.

Doryn has poetry in Fahmidan Journal, CERASUS Magazine,Fenland Poetry Journal, celestite poetry, Poems from the Heron Clan and more.

She is a reviewer at Consilience science poetry.

Review of Paul Brookes’s book “These Random Acts of Wildness” by “Spriha Kant”

This book consists of a collection of poetries. The poet in some poetries makes his readers travel in, around, and out of the different portions of the home including lawns, backyards, kitchen, etc., in some of which he shows glimpses of the chores and concludes the bitter truth of the world and/or one of the fundamental truths of existence that whatever is created is meant to be destroyed the one or the other day. Quoting the following few words and stanzas from a few such poetries: “His toy won't cut grass but safely glides over its length, so he stamps and bawls when his world don't conform to his straight lines, because it's bent. My wife says “Better” to our short shorn lawn. We all want the wild to be uniform.” “Organic time tamed, all about decay…