Lily Sofia Gray

Christopher Hobday

Maria McCarthy

Lexi McCudden

D. A. Nettleingham

Gary M. Studley

J. P. Virtanen

Elizabeth Webb

Vol. 2 Winter 2007 / 08Free

Poetry Quarterly

Edited by D. A. Nettleingham

J. P. VirtanenC. Hobday

who would like to acknowledgeAll those who submitted poems to the volume, Seppo Virtanen, Katherine Blythe, Greg Findley,

Beverley Smith, friends and family,the Canterbury Pilgrim Gallery and Café &

Cosgroves of Faversham

and thank our current stockistsBackroom Bookshop, High Street, Rochester

Book Palace, Palace Street, CanterburyChaucer Bookshop, Beer Cart Lane, CanterburyOxfam Bookshop, St. Peter’s Street, Canterbury

Past Sentence, West Street, FavershamThe Gulbenkian Café, University of Kent

Waterstones, Rose Lane, Canterbury

Cover image adapted from a sculpture by John-Paul Rogers

Foreword: The Accidental Ideologue p. 1

Christopher Hobday Repairs p. 3 Accident, or Poem about a Coat p. 4

Elizabeth Webb Broken Bridge p. 5 Those Eyes. The Hours. p. 6

Maria McCarthy Two Women p. 8 My Father’s House p. 9 D. A. Nettleingham Colney Road p. 10 Inheritance p. 12

Lexi McCudden Corfe Castle p. 13 Gabriel in the Ruins p. 14

Lily Sofia Gray Jojoba p. 16 The Suckling p. 17

Gary M. Studley Piano Play p. 18 Never A Crossword p. 20

J. P. Virtanen The Fantasist p. 22 Eudemonia p. 23

The Contributors p. 24About Us and Submissions p. 26

Foreword

The Accidental Ideologue

Implicit in every line, wordplay and stanza of a poem, is a comment on the time and place of the poet. All experi-ence and conditioning is manifest in the dialogue that the poet begins, and the reader responds to. The limitations of knowledge however, are such that the poet cannot es-cape their own circumstances and condition, and thus we must view their work as explorations of an inescapably personal nature, yet as socially constructed. Rather than limit, this sets up the poet for a purpose much higher than merely documenting the world that they inhabit. Within every commentary that laments, is critique. In those which praise, the possibilities of progress. Thepersonalexperiencewrittendown isa reflec-tion of the meaningful effect that circumstances create, andthepoetisperhapsthemostphilosophicalreflectivevoice. No one is an island so the old adage goes, and all of us are created in the image of our predecessors. The world that they created is the one in which we must live, and to explore this creation to the depths of its politics, sentiment, emotion and ideology is the only way in which we can truly understand the present. The present is what traps the poet, contained in the effects of the world of the past,buteveryreflectionandexplorationbeginsanewopportunity to build. The poet’s role is both timeless and transitionary. It is a permanent reminder of a particular situation, or can beamemorablereflectiononauniversalsenseofmean-ing. The importance of this though, is not in the poet‘s senseofsatisfaction,butintheinfluenceuponthereaderand future generations, who will inevitably change and develop what they have started. Every exploration and

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reflectionbecomesameansofengagingwithoursuccessors, every line a stepping stone to a better understanding of what it is to be human. Thus, the poem exists in a cyclical state of birth and rebirth in its reading. Here, the poet has the potential to become an accidental ideologue and theorist, whose novel ways of expressing the human condition can explode estab-lished notions of reality.

D. A. NettleinghamEditor

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Repairs Never again – what sinister clockwork.That man is not a watchmakerButcanfixonewhenitbreaks. He knew, the urchin elemental,howtofixthefilaments,strandbystrand,how to rebuild you, hand on hand. But could he have ever fathomedthe essential nature of your metals,what hummed beneath the lacquer? Yethedid,withdivinefingers,devaultthe workings of your chamber, thumbthe battery, take it for a dead one.

Christopher Hobday

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Accident, or Poem about a Coat The coat was not a coat but part of what it lay upon.She was a child of the sun and now the sun is gone.There are still clocks, there are still birds, and stars behind the cloud.There is a mother and a father and a silent crowd.There was a car, there was a sound, a million miles from here.There was a treasure disappearing down a midnight weir.Until tonight the years had climbed uphill with mounting pace.Tomorrow morning there will be a cliff and then a space.This little daughter will not reach a point to look back on.No lessons learned, no lover spurned, no rosy halcyon.She will not have, in cupboards full, shoes that are now too small.She will not accumulate anything else at all,just one new black pair of shoes for her last special daywhen loved ones smile down on her shape and then shut her awayand then she will not need a stranger’s coat beneath the rain.I don’t believe in ghosts but I won’t wear that coat again.

Christopher Hobday

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Broken BridgeSomeone with cancer of the throat

Stalactites of frost icepicked cold as hell,crystal in the clear white air -drip cooling crisp downthe real red relieveddammed cancer throat;life cancelled by ‘growth’ -a meridian cut to the quickin out, out in -from South to North.(Also tumourous -our greed to increase, advance,progress, succeed.)But rocked in the hollowofthearm-infinite.Dew diamond dropsevaporate - tears down the face -slow - the face, a bridgebetween folk.Eyes talk, ears see.Mouths are silent - muteblocked - by a broken bridge.

Elizabeth Webb

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Those Eyes. The Hours.Metaphor is a luxury language in starving countries.

Sand veers and sears in eyes, lungs phlegm -fromharshscrubflatlandseenthroughdust;their bank cash - as penned goats condemned,theirwaterbuggedwithfilthandthirstbehind a thorned, rood-fenced requiem.

The young for the old - investment shrouds,mothers die fast before and giving birth;flieszoomdowndark,quickstung,inclouds,but war has stopped; loud tanks quiet rust; bare earth;kids shit and vomit parched, wounds rot; language - bed rock.Scrap. Folk count as little worth.

They walked three days for hospital help - the child screams tears - his compound fracture realigned -tortured, ligatured, sutured - without drugs.Those eyes. Bright burn. And shine.White bone, through dark skin - bloodcrust fear.How can you not crack and cringeat such shuddering hurt - unhinged?Underwindflood-guststhud.Those eyes - sear through - as winds sheer.

To survive, to accept, to go on - proud.He makes a spade from tank tin rust,she makes charcoal, hallowed load,he works till he slumps in deserted desert dust,she gives spare wound swabs and crusts.A baby is born.And we give scorn.And small concern.An aid forlorn

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from our full bellies - robustand carping mouths unjust.

In this - (vertiginous rage) -to us who wait and assuage -andunsharingfiddle,andfracturedflutterwhile simple unbowed people die and suffer?But the essence of us knows and can restore - The hours. Those eyes. They’re also yours.

Elizabeth Webb

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Two Women

We searched the stones for names that matched our own.Two women, just met, in the graveyardof the Church of the Immaculate Conception.

‘They’d money to build in spite of the famine.’you said, nodding towards the date engravedon the tower: 1847.

Itoldyouofmyrecentfind,acertificateofbaptism.‘My father was a ‘boy child’,

raised by his mother’s sister.’A similar fate had befallen your grandmother.

Theunwedmothersfled:one to England, one to America.

We entered the church together,new-found companions, English-Irish, Irish-American,

descendants of the country that dispersedits fallen women to one of three destinations:England, America, the sisters of Magdalene,

and I pictured a girl at the altar,offering her childto be cleansed of Original Sin,

handing him to her sister.Leaving.

Maria McCarthy

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My Father’s House

‘My daddy lived here.’I lean towards the boy who shelters in his father’s shadow.

We perform the photographic ritual,standing by the door where he once stood,the same height as this child.

Tworooms,turffire,oneoillamp.Water carried in barrels by donkey and cart.There are extensions now, bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom.

‘I was reared here too,’ says Nelly,gripping the hand of the younger man.‘Your grandfather taught my grandfather to dance.’

‘Poor times,’ says Jimmy behind the steering wheelwhere he has remained since driving us hereat twenty miles an hour, worried by the new road that cuts through Carthy’s burreen,unused to roundabouts.

Flyingoutandflyinghome,an empty seat beside me.Flyinghomeandflyingback,he’s let me have the window.

Maria McCarthy

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Colney Road

Everywhere is grey pebbledash, The crash of tin cans and thunder; Of canon-blast and booming laughter.

Everywhere There is grey.

Where the night scythes down lonely walkers,Where alleyways meet gardens,Patched asphalt and grazes.

Here, she asked how is it?How could thirteen mouths be fed,Clothes repaired, hair knit?I’ve asked myself the same, I said.

We enter the boxed house,Yellow amidst the grey, Amidst the grey: Adullreflection.

We enter successors,To regress to past lives. Oh, able-bodied son of son of son, Oh, bearer of bloods And abuser of wives.Regret for no sin of yoursBut run through these crumbling Victorian sewers.

We enter the yellow house.The post has piled high.

And in the window there is stained glass,

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Fineartfinger-marks In cigarette smoke.And past the window, masked in shadow, A hiding place for liquor.

Quiet now, what is that? Crackled music discordant.I imitate the rise and hush,Follow the music up, lightly Touching heavy steps, to the bedroom.

Oh, bearer of sons and mute emotion Oh.

My voice resounds in the empty room: Adullreflection.

Where are you now?Come back down from there.Shouting at ghosts gets us nowhere.Let us sit at this table, Carve our namesAndfindlineage,bloodlinesIn the pattern and the grain.

And then The rain.And everywhere,Grey:adullreflectionoftheheavens.

I walk on into the living roomto sit and smoke and wait.

D. A. Nettleingham

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Inheritance

If all we did was pause for breath,All the world would suffocateIn one long draw.

And if I were the King of Kings,I would wild the civil city squaresTo put my house in order.

Here you breathe, the King of Kings.Had I the breath, I would be: Beyond the savage satrapies.

D. A. Nettleingham

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Corfe Castle

Good Lord; is this masculinity?Ripped from the green earth, he stands; a piece of bandaged national suicide.

Grey and lumpy, the brains of the thing jut out,defiantagainstcuriousantswhopayfivepoundseach to peer into his stomach.

I feel alive here. My English chalk skin feels good against the clouds. MyfingertipstingleasIstrokethewhiteashofhisrocky cremation.

I am in love with this soldier! His guarded eyes are carved into stony bits of history;theywillnevercrumbleorflinch.

Myownfleshissoft,andIamstillgrowing.The grass kisses my ankles like a lover,and I burn a canonshot into the sky with my joy.

Lexi McCudden

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Gabriel in the Ruins

I’ve been blown apart from the heart of my bodyExplosive guilt, and some pins in your dollAnd I’m now in a room with the gloomy decisionsyou made as you hammered me into the wall.

Clouds like the clowns in your plans for tomorrowskimming the ruins of history’s facedance like the prancing, winged girls that you borrowto use and abuse, then put back in their place.

A prisoner’s cell in the hell of this buildingreminds me there’s more men like you than like meandtheflowersandsouroldweedskeeponfightingtheir way through the rocks that will not let them be.

Icouldbuildmyself,fillmyselfuplikeamountainwhich suffers the rain but will never dissolveBut I see you, and my heart shoots up like a fountainYou touch me, and somehow I lose my resolve.

The reason the season is turning to Winteris simple: the snow in your blood makes us freezeYes, an angel is able to pierce like a splinterright into the goodness that keeps out disease.

Butanangelisabletofalllikeasnowflakeand sink to the ground, in spite of his wingsAndtheDevilcanrevellinfindingasoldierAnd this is the reason it’s turning to Spring.

As you drift by the cliffs, I can see in the distancea light peering over me, down from the skyAs the stone and the cone-shaped historical castlewatchdownonme,IfeelasthoughIcouldfly

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So I race to the place at the edge of the landscapeMy eyes see for miles; I’m in love with the viewAnd I leap from the steep place where battlements have been so damaged there’s nothing to keep me from you.

Lexi McCudden

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Jojoba

Leather leaves and white trumpet sleevesThrashed,huffedwindsofcatfitandviolenceAn umbrage of foliage curls and cocoons, knits and allies,Only to recoil and submit to the warnings of wind change.

Jujubedevoursmyfruitandidentifiesthecowardyonder.Unknowingly, I sit at home and weave a daisy chain.Napoleon, defeated, holds his head, his face a bottle green.“Not tonight,” he mutters dejectedly, “not tonight my Josephine”.

Lily Sofia Gray

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The Suckling

The Machiavellian mistressThe incompetent mouserAwaits the suckling on breasts bursting with royal jelly Barnacles on her swollen belly big and blackSaddlebags laden full of her load OffleetingmemoriesoffelinebucksOf Peeping Toms, Of Godiva’s sodden palmsOf a white tufted wound between shoulder bladesAnd a cutlass between the thighsShetwists,hissesandflailsThe betrayal, the whimper and sigh.My panther folds into a paper tiger.

The court of the centrefold queenWill soon grow and growA militia of dwarfed mischiefA black and white minstrel show.Dear raven-haired ladyBenefactressofbountifulbutterflykissesI’ll watch you wean your fur-skinned kinAndsistersbothoffleshandfurEnmesh with the breach of milk teeth.Birth gifts of frankincense and myrrhMay form the dowries of blue-blooded babes.Myself, I will save my golden kitty for a rainy day.

Lily Sofia Gray

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Piano Play

Myfingers don’t work whenyou watch methat closely. They failto hitthe right spotsblack and white lots,play dominoes with baseball batseach slap cracking varnishsplitting table top,matches cribbedtopple fallfib,every fanned cardinclumsy handflungdown missingsailing past baizeto ground,vowel consonant vowelswith no validityconsequencemake howling dyslexic screams

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on Carol’s screen, andour scrabble board’s orphanedtabsareflippedejectedforlorn.

When you watch me that closely myfingerswon’t work.

Gary M. Studley

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Never A Crossword

A T I I M E S O R R Y O N L Y U I K E V A D I N G S S U E S A Y I N G O T H I N G O I N G O W H E R E -

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W I T H O U T A L K I S S I N G I I N V G I N O T H I N G G E A G O N Y R O R R E E L I N G C S T A S A D L Y Y I V I N S I D E N A G S I L E N C E S Y T H A T S I L LSTA TN HD E F E N C EA ` S O R R YR E ED A R S Gary M. Studley

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The Fantasist

The traces of smoke gather around the corners of the soft evening fog.

The veterans in the street corners border around two old, rusted cots.

The air is heaving with feeling, and soraindropsstayafloatandturntoclot.

But still I remain soaked in salt water;not living, but growing with cold blood.

So I arch my back across the market stalls,and grow scales where my hair once was.

Of the morning after, I remember only this:rottingfishfloatedaroundthemorningmist.

J. P. Virtanen

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Eudemonia

The grain of sandwas sown in the heat,

then blown to form bubbles and bowls by the blower’s strong bellows.

O, they grow so fragile!

Behold!

The atom split with one sigh.

Is thiswhat it means toflourish?

When approaching the Absolute matter dilutes,

then ceases

to exist.

J. P. Virtanen

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The Contributors

Christopher Hobday is 28 years old and lives in Folkestone. He is currently employed as a copywriter in Whitstable and dedicates a large portion of his waking hours to the noble and needless aggregation of poems.

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Elizabeth Webb is a well-loved character around Canterbury, who in her long but largely overlooked poetry career has developed a unique poetic soundscape. Her interest in mysticism meets with her earlier life as a woman of practical medicine to create studies of human interactionwhicharephilosophicalyethavetheirfeetfirmlyplantedin reality.

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MariaMcCarthyiscurrentlywritingpoemsandstoriesthatreflectherIrish/English background. ‘Two women’ and ‘My father’s house’ are from ‘Mitchelstown - a sequence’ written after visiting her father’s hometowninCo.Corkforthefirsttime,sevenyearsafterhisdeath.Maria has published two collections: Learning to be English and Nothing but. She lives in the Medway Towns.

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D. A. Nettleingham lives in Faversham in Kent where, from an old Mash House, he studies sociology and history. His poetry is derived from such fascinations as he attempts to explore new ways of understanding the world around him.

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Lexi McCudden lives in London. Her poetry demonstrates a genuine love of language, objective observations and celebration of the deeper meaning within the ordinary.

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LilySofiaGray isanagoraphobic faux-intellectual recluse, living ina 19th century Oasthouse with the loves of her life - her partner and three cats. She takes inspiration from ethnobotany, mythology, radical feminism, black coffee and cigarettes. Lily hopes one day to graduateuniversity,butuntilthenwillflitfromcoffeeshoptocoffeeshop throughout Canterbury, knitting needles in hand.

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Born and raised in the Beauty-in-Decay town of Hastings, Gary Studley was educated poorly in Politics, English and Art throughout Sussex, London, America and Kent, eventually majoring in Dis-satisfaction and Hope for Better. He’s written for as long as he has been able, trying to say something better with a pen or key-pad than the attempts his mouth blunders with all too frequently. He talks, watchesfilmsandsucksonmusic‘tilthecowscomehome,buthisbiggest love is writing. As he can’t play guitar to save his life, nothing competes with scribbling away, and hitting that elusive seam every now and again.

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J. P. Virtanen was born in Finland, grew up in Amsterdam and now resides in Canterbury, UK. His poetry is inspired by a collage of sources, secrets and styles, but an interest in the possibilities and failures of expression and, more importantly, language itself are never far removed from the centre of his writing.

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About us

Conversationisanindependent,non-profitpoetrymagazine primarily based on the writing of poets based in Canterbury, Medway and the surrounding area. It is published quarterly, and each copy is free of charge.

Our aim is to promote the work of poets, both published and unpublished, who we believe to be worth printing. We hope to open a conversation with our readers, and choose poets who present interesting opportunities for people to engage with poetry.

Our three editors come from very different poetic backgrounds, and we hope that this forestalls bias or favouritism in the poems we select. If you would like to submit to the next issue, send a copy of your work by 31st March 2008 to:

conversationquarterly@googlemail.com

or D. A. Nettleingham The Upper Roundel Park Road Faversham Kent ME13 8ES

There are no limitations to the length of your work, or how many poems you submit. We will usually only select two poems per person, though if the work is particularly good, we are happy to accommodate more. Be sure to include a short biographical entry explaining who you are.

Any submissions received late may be considered for a future edition.

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