Patricia’s Pen is delighted to welcome poet, Sarah Connor as she celebrates the launch of her pamphlet The CrowGods published bySidhe Press. Without further ado, it’s over to Sarah.

The Crow Gods

Sarah Connor

When I was planning how to arrange the poems in my chapbook, The Crow Gods, my editor – Annick Meyer from Sidhe Press – pointed out that the vast majority of them were markedly seasonal. I hadn’t really thought about that before, but once she’d said it, it made absolute sense. We played around with a few options, but in the end, that’s how we arranged them, as a seasonal cycle, pinned in place by the Celtic cross-quarter festivals – Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas, and Samhain. These are points in the year that have significance for me, that, yes, make sense as markers in the annual cycle. I don’t actively celebrate…

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

1. A selection of homegrown and international Poetry from 36 poets.

2. Poetry by Susan Kelly-DeWitt, the Featured American Poet.

3. A selection of Translations  from Swedish curated by Robert Gard.

4.  An Essay  on grieving by Lindsey Shaw-Miller.

5. Reviews of Poetry and Translations

6. Poetry by  Dónall Dempsey, the Featured UK Poet

7. A poetry and art feature from Anthony Howell, who is The High Window’s Resident Artist for 2023.

There are also details of the editor’s recently published Collected Poems in the Editor’s Spot.

Finally, a reminder that the High Window Press has also recently published a new edition of Rilke’s Book of Hours in a version by Robert Saxton.

Enjoy!

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Anthony Howell is, in Peter Reading’s words, “an eclectic original”, a poet, artist and novelist whose first collection of poems Inside the Castle was brought out in 1969. In the tradition of Robert Browning and Andre Gide, he often explores ‘immoralism’ in his writings via personae. From Inside, published by the High Window Press in 2017 contains poems relating to prisons and poems of political satire. A former member of the Royal Ballet, his novel In the Company of Others was published by Marion Boyars in 1986. Today, he dances the tango. His most recent book of poetry is Invention of Reality, published by the High Window in 2022.

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As if it were a Bow: Poems and Pictures from Thailand

The following  poems were written in Thailand in the early months of 2023. Their author is excited to find himself in South East Asia – beyond the pale…

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The Fox, the Whale and the Wardrobe

In Dónall Dempsey’s most recent collection, The Fox, the Whale and the Wardrobe, published on 1st March 2023, he continues to explore themes of time and memory in poems that are playful, emotive, absurd, surreal, funny and moving. Mining the rich resources of his Irish childhood, he introduces us to an uncle whose tales to nine-year-old Dónall cause an aunt to scold the adult for ‘filling the boy’s head with nonsense’, and with a little girl who constantly surprises and delights us with her discovery of meanings in life we have all but forgotten. The sorrow of loss is here, too: long-term personal grief since his beloved sister died when he was still a child, as well as the more recent deaths of his parents and younger brother, and the memories, happy and sad, of people he has met at the…

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I would like to give my heartfelt thanks to Rober Gard for his conscientious labours in single-handedly translating every poem included in this Swedish poetry supplement, all the more so as I have been trying for several years now to find translators from any of the Scandinavian languages. Robert has also supplied a pdf of all the originals, which you will find here: Dikter på Svenska

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Edith Södergran: Eight Poems

VIERGE MODERNE

I am no woman. I am neuter.
I am a child, a page and a bold decision,
I am a laughing ray of scarlet sun …
I am a net for all voracious fish,
I am a vessel for all women’s honour,
I am a step toward chance and ruin,
I am a leap into freedom and the self …
I am blood’s whispering in man’s ear,
I am a fever of the soul, the flesh’s…

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Alive by Rodney Wood

i.m. Carla Scarano D’Antonio, 1962-2023

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Ruth Aylett • Elizabeth Barrett • Peter Donnelly • Clive Donovan • Neil Fulwood • Rebecca Gethin • Mike Greenacre • David Hackbridge-Johnson • Jefferson Holdridge • Ronan Hyacinthe • Charlotte Innes • Annie Kissack • Leonard Lambert • Sydney Lea • Louise Longson • Beth McDonough • Janet MacFadyen • Linda McKenna • Christine McNeill • Ray Malone • Mark Mansfield • Sally Michaelson • Helen Overell • Norman Parker • Jay Passer • Alan Prowle • Tonnie Richmond • Carla Scarano D’Antonio • John Scarborough • Harriet Shillito • Fiona Sinclair • Susan Castillo Street • Robin Thomas • Sue Wallace-Shaddad • Rory Waterman • John Newton Webb

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Ruth Aylett: Three Poems

NIGHTINGALE

Singing out there alone in the dark,
how can you carry all that weight,
walled in with words, freighted
with philosophising?

Your…

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Susan Kelly-DeWitt is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the author of Gatherer’s Alphabet (Gunpowder Press, CA Poets Prize, 2022), Gravitational Tug (Main Street Rag, 2020), Spider Season (Cold River Press, 2016), The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008) and a number of previous small press collections. Her work has also appeared in many anthologies, and in print and online journals at home and abroad. She is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle, the Northern California Book Reviewers Association and a contributing editor for Poetry Flash. For more information, please visit www.susankelly-dewitt.com.

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Introduction by Susan Kelly-DeWitt

The previously unpublished poems here were written over many years—one of them almost thirty years ago and one just a few months ago.

I have always tried to include poems that address history–personal, political, social–in some way. I don’t think this has changed. The natural world and the…

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GRIEVOUS GIFTS

Consolation and creativity in Gwenllian’s Jugs, a collection of 77 images by Stuart Evans

There is a long history of art produced in response to grief. Setting aside, in this essay, the tumuli, pyramids, stelae, ship burials that have served as monuments to the dead, I’m interested in artists dealing with grief by making something. This essay isn’t about grief itself, nor about art as a kind of outpouring. What interests me here is art as an exercise, a process of working through containment, a form of closure.

The archetypal poetic example, Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850), certainly long enough to be an outpouring, is actually 131 complete, small, classical poems, the larger grief broken down into many episodes, tightly controlled by the quatrain form and a strict rhyming scheme. The actual subject, Tennyson’s dead friend Arthur Hallam, is quite absent, concealed within the struggle between the tightness…

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Harry Clifton: Gone Self Storm •Rosie Jackson: Love Leans over the Table •Kathleen McPhilemy:Back Country • Omar Sabbagh: The Cedar Never Dies•Tom Sastry: You Have No Normal Country to Return To •Ken Evans: To An Occupier Burning Holes •Sharon Black: The Red House•  Fiona Sinclair: Second Wind•  The Book of Life, poems to tide you over edited by Grace Wells • Alex Josephy: Again Behold the Stars•Lewis Warsh: Elixir •Carl Dennis: Earthborn

Translation

Fabio Pusterla: Brief Homage to Pluto & Other Poems

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Gone Self Storm by Harry Clifton. £10.99. Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 978-1-78037-453-6

The cover image of Harry Clifton’s Gone Self Storm is Mark Tracey’s beautiful black and white photograph of Howe Strand, which shows a ruined building silhouetted between the…