Poems from Carcanet (7), Faber (5), Cape (3), Penguin (3), Seren (3), Bloodaxe (3), etc., with magazines barely getting a look-in. Good to see Fiona Moore and Happenstance there.
I didn't understand many of the pieces at the start but in the "individual poems" selection I connected with more. The ones I liked were "Yeki Bood Yeki Nabood", "The Republic of Motherhood", "11 The Voyage", "Healers", "I was a wartime censor", "Girls are coming out of the woods", "Frequency Violet", "Sea Lily", "intimates", "Waking up in a basement".
Faisal Mohyuddin's "Partition and Then" begins with
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The night is an empty basket, and the long journey ahead promises to be weighted down by hunger, luminous and wild. As they cross into the newly-formed nation, a child, cargo strapped to her mother's back, takes the black sheet of sky and folds it seven times to make a horse, then fashions wings for it knitted from thin ribbons of wind. Inside the temple of her mother's grasping heart, a burning nest of nightjars, their feathers flecked with both copper's shimmer and its blue decay. Their calls sound like stones skipping across the surface of a river |
UK literature went through a phase when mini-prose didn't exist, so any short piece of text, especially if it had some kind of form (a shopping list, a letter) or was a little surreal, had to be classified as a poem. p.55 is a dramatic monologue. p.63 is prose. So is p.76 (the most interesting of these three).
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