f o r t y - f i v e | s q u a r e | p o e t r y | 2 0 1 4 · pdf file3 forty-five | square...

F O R T Y - F I V E | S Q U A R E| P O E T R Y| 2 0 1 4

F O R T Y - F I V E | S Q U A R E| P O E T R Y| 2 0 1 4

2

3

FORTY-FIVE | SQUAREfortyfivesquarepoetry.com

Forty-Five Square Poetry is edited and published by Fourth Year students on the BA Creative Writing Programme

Editor Narayani L Guibarra

Assistant EditorsTarquin LandseerRobin Crawford Ian DawesElizabeth Awunor

Production DesignerMatteo Muscas

Art DirectorLaurence Kidd

Submissions ManagerLaura Blenheim Publicity/Launch ManagersCas de-Wale Rachelle Arthey

Birkbeck, University of London Malet Street, Bloomsbury London WC1E 7HX

For further information please contactAnnmarie Shadie, BA Creative WritingDept. of English and [email protected]

Cover Credits: Artwork © Karina Vettorel, The Harbourwww.karinavettorel.com

Design and typesetting:Matteo Muscas

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

First published in 2014Printed and bound in Great Britain byInky Little Fingersinkylittlefingers.co.uk

All work presented herein is copyrighted © the contributing authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storageor retrieval system without prior permission.

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.karinavettorel.com

http://www.karinavettorel.com

4

6 Foreword by Liane Strauss

8 STEVEN SOBOLEWSKI Some Things I Did Over the Course of Some Time

10 Burning Chrome

11 Natural Laboratory Experiment

12 Massive

14 WALTER JONES Triangles

15 INÊS ALMEIDA Beer Paintings

16 Escape

17 EMILY SINCLAIR Shadow Dance

18 Identity

20 Avalanche

22 WOLF MARLOH You Live in This Chord

23 ZOE ROSS Sandman

24 Poem of India

25 FELICITY STEPHEN Peace Scarf

27 CLAIRE SANDS Beneath the Moon

28 NYDIA HETHERINGTON The Old Factory

29 REBECCA ROUILLARD Sagrada Família

30 Portrait of a Moroccan Traveller

31 What's in a Name?

32 Essaouira

33 Contributors’ Biographies

36 Editor's Note

C O N T E N T S

F O R E W O R D

As if in illustration of the title of one of the poems included in this inaugural anthology of original work produced by a cohort of the very first graduates of the BA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, the range and quality of poetic talent and poetic vision exhibited in these pages is: ‘Massive’. And like the lone, determined (and possibly more than slightly obsessive) voice in ‘Massive’ attempting to piece together and pin down an experience at once elemental and eternal, elliptical and elusive, with nothing but what a handful of words (to arrange, and rearrange, over and over again) can provide, the poets gathered here demonstrate their grit and grace in the face of the often daunting, always enthralling task of extracting poetry from experience. It’s an astutely put together anthology. Steven Sobolewski’s geometry of unequivocally earthly romance, ‘She’s an angle, he’s a tangent’, leads quickly, logically, to ‘Triangles’, Walter Jones’ wittily unsparing differential calculus of second marriage: ‘My mother’s ring / no longer fit / for display… My father’s wife [had it] fashioned into earrings… like thumbs / pointing downwards.’ The editors have listened to these poems, and put them in conversation with each other. Perhaps it’s true that every poem is a poetic manifesto. In ‘Beer Painting’, Inês Almeida finds in the image of a city pavement strewn with empty beer bottles — ‘red cobbles wet with fermented malt / [that] shine in the orange lamplight’ — the stuff of poetry. Her method of letting her poems emerge cumulatively out of the scraps of imagery she collects and cobbles together as she goes is similarly luminescent. Long after we turn the page, these poems, like the ‘lone chuckle’ and the ‘heels [that] echo in empty / hallways’, continue to ring with what it all shimmeringly, luridly, adds up to. Poetry and paradox in Emily Sinclair’s work is ‘joined sometimes at the hip / but mostly by the ankle’. This is a poetic world in which the statement ‘I am free to fly to the ends / of endless worlds’ is both assertion and dream, an utterance that can only take place ‘in darkness’. Here, a granddaughter who sits at the bedside of her beloved grandmother, witnessing her death, escapes from the chilling, prosaic monitors of the stark ward to the frozen heights of a mountain scene and the high drama of an avalanche. What she can’t escape is the pain her happy memories provoke: like the sudden tolling of bells from an unseen village spire, ‘the stab of laughter peals / dissolving like winter’. The music in these poems is always exacting. ‘You must play with respect, / with heart, at the speed of moonlight’, instructs the speaker of Wolf Marloh’s poem ‘You Live in This Chord’. The I who observes the Sandman in Zoe Ross’s poem of the same name ‘taste[s] salt and hot blood’ as, ‘to the sound of the berimbau, / he begins to dance.’ Nor are these poems afraid to ask big questions. ‘What do you say / when you meet the Dalai Lama?’ Felicity Stephen dares to wonder, and she doesn’t shrink from considering possible answers: ‘It’s nice to meet again - in this lifetime?’ Or: ‘One could always compliment him / on his dress sense, / that one-armed-sleeveless number’. And yet they never lose sight of the momentary facts, our fleeting perceptions, and how they affect us. In Claire Sands’ sublunary prose poem, these pass ‘like a shimmer of gold in a prospector’s eye, my reflection distorted by the flick of an eel’. It may be an impossible task, but it is the poet’s job to catch them, undaunted as the children who ‘played / amongst broken glass and brick… [and] roller-skated on patches of un-broken ground’ in Nydia Hetherington’s unblinking evocation of a broken world embodied and presided over by a disused factory. As the poets in this anthology know to a one, there is no separation between the perceiving poet and the world perceived; it is every bit as alive as they are. ‘I climbed, inspired’, reports Rebecca Rouillard’s visitor to Gaudí’s Sagrada Família, and ‘the railings writhed, / staircases grew wild’. If the world ‘out there’ is every bit as sacred as the poets envision it to be, it is also, as in Rouillard’s unflinching rendition of one of its literal marketplaces — ‘[T]he medina was manned by gesturing djellabas… The odour of urine haggled with earthy cumin’ — every bit as profane. Like all good poetry, the poems that make up Forty-Five Square take us to ‘that place / we can’t come back from.’ With every poem in it, this anthology declares itself a

‘précis of identity. This eternal ‘I’ the one that will surpass and survive me, perpetually.’

‘In this place’, these poets, and the editors who have assembled them, seem to be saying, ‘I am the type of person / who looks like they could be someone famous’. You all surely do.

Liane StraussLondon

6

F O R T Y F I V E S Q U A R E P O E T R Y . C O M

STEVEN SOBOLEWSKI

Some Things I Did Over the Course of Some Time

I waged wars on the plush carpeted fields of night, vanquished insectoid overlords under blue cathode snow. I ruled as emperor of all bedtime until dark shadows broke and augured that the hour approached. The rule of the progenitors, the age of sleep. I rolled teeth like dice to bare them to a friend, wagered on their worth in a fairy’s hand, swallowed them whole to keep their playground value to myself when threats were made and children’s knuckles flew. I declared myself the big hand, crushed a whole day into four minutes just by ticking clockwise around the round cul-de-sac on a scuffed blackBMX. I wouldn’t stop pedalling when both days converged and ended in a cool, spring evening.

I removed the Queen’s face with time and a nail file, kept her under my bed to work on her at night. It soured my efforts when behind her visage, no copper glow, but low, gunmetal grey. I left her feathered tails on.

8FORTY-FIVE | SQUARE

I dismantled the console, ray-tube-portal to platform-worlds. The circuits: streams and canals of electrons and escape, etched onto shallow, green firmament. No maps could guide me through the conductive rivers, so I rebuilt reality with a rusted screwdriver. I found, alone, an emerald saffron-flecked bird that fluttered between the headstones, over the graveyard path, caught in freedom’s panic. I plucked her from the air. I took her, kept her in a donated cage. Trapped, with a dried-out cuttlefish, a tiny mirror. I rifled through the paper left by my sleeping companion’s feet. Everything was black and white in the cryptic checkerboards. Not so the stories that framed them. I parsed the clues, broke literal codes and let the world worry in blurry copy and greyscale shapes.


STEVEN SOBOLEWSKI

Burning Chrome

He’s a backdoor, she’s a smoke stain. He’s a sticky white shirt and tie. She’s a chemical, she’s a chamber. He’s a lipstick. She’s Ono-Sendai, he’s electrodes. A bloody organ on the bathroom floor. Another construct, carves up the grid space. She’s addictive. He’s the colour of a television tuned in to a Chiba night sky. He’s a spliced head job, a logic ending. She’s addictive. She’s consultations. Examinations, an implant-sliver of a poisoned sun. She’s a shadow- land, a subculture. She’s a liquid. She’s corporation, a brand name image. He’s a backstreet, bloodstained glove. A black clinic, halogen flood. She’s illusive. She’s an angle, he’s a tangent. They’re non-consensual geometry. He’s a crawlspace, hallucination, she’s addictive. She’s ice smiling. Disembodied. Mycotoxin. The Gentleman, he’s the loser? He’s a pixilated red line mess. He’s an extra life gone, he’s a flatline. He’s burnt chrome.


STEVEN SOBOLEWSKI

Natural Laboratory Experiment

Inside an unassuming white box two hemispherical mazes embrace in a fit of crenellation. The rats run through, screaming for freedom, desperate to be set to ground. Only by proxy can their yearnings be understood through mechanical scratchings or the one loudspeaker, clacking at the fore. Cameras provide their only visual stimulus. The box is wired for audio. Vicariously they live, viciously they die. Never sure if the meaning in those tiered, tired scratchings has surpassed the signifier, symbols, connotations. Meaning? They squeak into the microphone: ‘Is a word the same thing as the thing itself ?’ Rats recount. They do it between the lines, the empty spaces are where they are truly found. Not in body but in leavings, droppings, intimations, smeared and clawed suggestion.

The proxy is false. The words are not important, or - more so - the words that don’t exist are the ones that could fill a thousand unread classics. This gutter- space, this dank verge is the rats’ real squat. In tortuous turns through the labyrinthine paths, the rats doubt in the worth of running and clacking and scratching. They are subtle brutes, hidden in view, bullies to a one.


STEVEN SOBOLEWSKI

Massive

Massive, it rolls from the

edges of the ocean out into the galaxy

engineered in what can only

by night be described sodium glow

gloaming light.

Once a moment a man

sat aligned, alone and uncornered only, concerned only.

Once found she triangulated she

reflected she only focussed.

Once a moment a

man once found she

sat aligned, alone and triangulated she uncornered only

reflected she concerned only.

Massive it rolls from

triangulated she once a man a

moment a concerned only.


Engineered a man she took upon herself

a man she cornered only cornered

she reflected upon she took a moment a

man by night described in sodium light

she.

A man rolls in the ocean, out into the galaxy

gloaming night she took a moment

described in sodium light engineered a moment she

aligned a man she took

she found she.

Massive, it rolled. A man only.

She found in the ocean she engineered

one moment.

Massive, a man

light gloaming she triangulated

she took she.

The galaxy out

she took

a man.

Unconcerned.


WALTER JONES

Triangles

My mother’s ring no longer fit for display was split. My father’s wife has since paid to have it fashioned into earrings. Each makes a point on her pink earlobes long, like thumbs pointing downwards.


INÊS ALMEIDA

Beer Paintings

Empty devoid of purpose contents spread aesthetically over the pavement Red cobbles wet with fermented malt shine in the orange lamplight The bottle spins in place where no one will pick it up No one sees it on the street at night


INÊS ALMEIDA

Escape

There’s a hand pulling me through adventures It’s blazing white heat oozing

Heels echo in empty hallways A lone chuckle resounds We dash toes first into that place we can’t come back from


EMILY SINCLAIR

Shadow Dance

Joined sometimes at the hip but mostly by the ankle when light forms a shackle between you and me, my part-time, sunshine Siamese twin. In me you recognise your lithe limbs, though no smile echoes on my dusky face. You are Yang and I am Yin, the follower, the hollowed half, since your fingers grasp the strings. You dance, I dance your dance. In darkness you regress to a single entity. I am free to fly to the ends of endless worlds of which you can only dream, my negated, celebrated reflection. And you’ll stay tethered to your earthly post till you trade in your smile to be feather-light, perfect white. Till then I’ll wait for the day we embrace as equal parts of a whole. We’ll dance together, the dove and the crow.


EMILY SINCLAIR

Identity

The ‘I’, the definitive entity; (loci) of the soul, (birthplace) of thoughts that grow and collect collect collect in a sharp intake of breath as torrential truths twist the tongue, Allow space to form bet ween what is said and what I mean to say. The internal ‘I’ writhes with indignation,

refuses to mould itself to the

lining of my skin; puppeteer of myosin, peers from blink ered windows. The ‘I’ silently sanctions everything we believe to be true. But at the centre of the E-Y-E is the ??why?? the questioning creases that gather up… me build as they try to … A figmental ‘I’; materialised from a patchwork of memories, where we can only be defined by what we do and what we say, accumulate (d(i(s(t(((o)))r)t)e)d) précis of identity.


This eternal ‘I’ the one that will surpass and survive me, perpetually |compromised| by the parameters

of an image burned onto degenerate retinas of the people we loved and all the people we barely knew.


EMILY SINCLAIR

Avalanche

Where the earth’s veins stop bleeding blue and the sun sleeps beneath a pale horizon, where no river’s mouth gurgles, whispers die mid-flow, voices trapped in the icecaps. That’s where your mind waits, lost in endless snow. Your face is slowly slipping, your expression fades. Our footprints are buried; buried, and not replaced. Until your heart is frozen still mine will count us both in time, store all your smiles as muscle memory. A tiny reel of film plays on repeat, skipping, sticking, missing a beat. Thoughts splinter black and white, the pattern of piano keys. Shadows fall behind the trees like first grade missing teeth. It hurts to think of smiling. The stab of laughter peals dissolving like winter. Your skin still feels warm, your fist rests in my palm. They say it’s just the machine but I hope you’re still dreaming of a summer.


They say the ice has settled between the neurons of your brain, silent avalanche stealing you away. They tell me to say goodbye, so I try to describe you and how my world was changed by a life fragile as porcelain, transient as sunlight but my words cannot hold their weight. They collapse. They flatline.


WOLF MARLOH

You Live in This Chord

I played it the last time I saw you, on the piano next to your bed. This chord, you said, is the heart of the score. It sums up the whole, your fingers walking the keys carefully. You have to prove yourself for two pages before you ascend the steps and are allowed to play it. You must not play in a hurry. You must play with respect, with heart, at the speed of moonlight. You need to pedal correctly, so the F-sharp minor has a bed to lie in. You lead with the little finger of your right. It pivots the piece into the reprise, so you hold your breath and hold your heart from beating just a fraction before you let the chord speak.


ZOE ROSS

Sandman

His white stick traces a heart drawn in the wet sand. Unseeing eyes mirror green seaweed around his ankles. Boys jump off the jetty in acrobatic shapes. Yemanjá whispers. The man looms. Windless dunes shift under my feet. I sigh. He turns and drops his cap, (I taste salt and hot blood) and to the sound of the berimbau, he begins to dance.


ZOE ROSS

Poem of India

Cranes circle, waiting for morsels. You step on the bank of the pond. Water swirls below. Lily pads and lotus flowers open in the night. Smiling bulls gather, bells around their horns. Women hide their faces, whisper in bright saris. Peacocks moon-bathe in the forest, iridescent shades of purple and green. All is ripe for the blue man-god to bring the feast and uncork the potion. Sparks glitter into fireworks. Dishes of delicate flavours wait on a nut tree table laid with leaf plates.

In the hush of a London gallery, I am carried to India on a crane’s wing.


FELICITY STEPHEN

Peace Scarf

What do you say when you meet the Dalai Lama? ‘It’s nice to meet again - in this lifetime.’ Or, ‘You look just the same in real life, perhaps a little larger.’ Tell him the joke about the pizza, ‘One with everything’? But someone thought of that before, and wished the floor would open (least, he should’ve if he didnae). One could always compliment him on his dress sense, that one-armed-sleeveless number. But I don’t believe any of that’s correct. We Scots can think of something better. I’ve only been star-struck on a few occasions. We’re all of us stardust. Once, I encountered that lovely man who mingles with mountain gorillas, sometimes penguins (some lifetime’s incarnation!). It was in the Albert Hall, the only wildlife stampeding for the interval bar. I almost crashed into him in a blushing stumble, then stalked him to a private function, hot on his heels. Sir David turned. He smiled, I smiled. Smiling still, a wee bit foolish, I backtracked.


I vow I’ll not be doing that to His Holiness. Instead, I’ll ‘Namaste’ respect, admire his Peace Scarf, tartan (brilliant!), and leaving, blessed, will walk away on pavements, cloud-like.


CLAIRE SANDS

Beneath the Moon

When the moon levitated inside our neon blanket, you said it was all for me. Our toes danced on whispering grass. We passed our secrets to the onlooking trees. Among the night diamonds, we captured the glittering dash of a single light in its majesty. You cupped my face between your palms and made a wish in this space where we belonged. You led me to freshwater ripples. I watched you trace a pike with one lean finger. Lots of different worlds exist in one, you said. The pike vanished beneath a lily pad. An ashen cloud ate our light. Our moment passed like a shimmer of gold in a prospector’s eye, my reflection distorted by the flick of an eel.


NYDIA HETHERINGTON

The Old Factory

Broken, it peered over the back wall, and watched us grow, snarling at our scraped knees and tears before bedtime. I see it when I sleep, still and massive, echoing its strange silences. We played amongst broken glass and brick, found treasure between hurtling trains and the monstrous corpse of industry. In summer, we picked the desperate weeds that pushed through concrete cracks, and grew with the strength of giants. We roller-skated on patches of unbroken ground. Rust-coloured puddles clogged our wheels, spoiled our fun in the shadow of the barren beast, purring behind its wire fence. We never climbed or burrowed through. Once a holding tank browning with neglect, the great iron gallows blocked thoughts of adventure. I imagined I heard them strain at night, metal manacles groaning under the weight of time as they sensed their erosion and death, crying outside my bedroom window.


REBECCA ROUILLARD

Sagrada Família

There it was, looming like a molten taper over the financial district. Green and scaffolded, it grasped for the sky, Gaudi’s temple. The façade wept. I entered, crept under concrete boughs, was swept along on a tide of undulating walls beneath mushroomed columns. I climbed, inspired. The railings writhed, staircases grew wild. Strange fruits bloomed in purples and corals, cacti sprouted from pinnacles. The windows, infused with saturated hues chorused in seraphic harmony, their glory reflected on my face. I was revived, but they just stood. Petrified figures with panelled faces, carved and cast, the dead watching over the living. Christ stretched out a squared-off hand and turned a blunted face to the city. Unfinished. A Babel tower, never quite achieving heaven.


REBECCA ROUILLARD

Portrait of a Moroccan Traveller

I am the type of person who travels to Marrakech, the Rose of the Desert, with artists and those who discern the rhythm of her dance through history. I am the type of person who visits art galleries, not just postcard stands, who captures the effect of stippled light in the souks. I am the type of person who can spell Marrakech. I have actually read Hideous Kinky and I don’t misquote Casablanca, like everyone does. I am the type of person who sits at a table on the square at night, charmed by a dazzling bouquet of lights diffused in the steam rising from a thousand dishes, holding court in Place Jemaa el Fna in the sickle-shadow of Koutoubia, consuming a lamb tagine with relish, though it tastes like goat. I am the type of person who turns to smile as a stranger photographs me. (In this place, I am the type of person who looks like they could be someone famous.)


REBECCA ROUILLARD

What’s in a Name?

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet? Some assume a nom de plume will alter ego as magic potions or phone booths are wont. It’s an adhesive tag, clinging to your lapel, a prehensile digit, hooked by the crook of a little finger. My name has a grip on me, whoever me might be. I was given a biblical rope with which to hang myself, a snare or noose that will forever be confused with Rachel. At least my middle name is plain. Once I’d give away my name in marriage – addition is the contemporary way. It’ll be a squeeze to fit next generation’s quadruple-barrels on any register. Shudder at the nomencratic cruelty of parents who cradle their newly sprung and brand some awful appellation into just born skin [think of Jenna Taylor, Peter Files]. Did Romney’s parents consider that one day a nation might wonder if his given name was Mittens, did the Pitts think what a spoonerism would do to little Shiloh? In documentation for my own named child, I penned her initials: E.A.R. and, as they wheeled her off to insert grommets into her glue ears, I laughed inappropriately. At the end, for those of us so little accomplished as not to warrant a Wikipedia page, all that’s left is a name cut in stone to tell who we were.


REBECCA ROUILLARD

Essaouira

We took a grande taxi from Casa to the white city, four hours through scrubby hillscape, past goats and cryptic signposts to the enclosing walls. A trail of trucks obstructed the square, each bearing the legend Kingdom of Heaven in stark Helvetica. We unloaded our bags in this other realm. The medina was manned by gesturing djellabas, corridors cast with kilims and ceramics, countless cats. The odour of urine haggled with earthy cumin. Exposed westerners, we fought our way through the masses, armed with defensive palms and bad French, seeking high ground, a place to uncover our heads. The riad was adorned with mosaic, birds and bougainvillea. We wore cerise, painted and drank mint tea poured from an improbable height. I walked the ramparts, trod the citadel and was moved, stirred by the steadfast hulk of history, and below the walls, surging and rolling, the same endless sea. I bought a pair of babouches in tooled maroon and wore them to seem less of a tourist. Back home the stench was too much. I disposed of them and framed the photos instead.


C O N T R I B U T O R S ‘ B I O G R A P H I E S

STEVEN SOBOLEWSKI’s writing has filled the gaps around his London based day job. He has focused his creativity on science fiction and poetry, with occasional attempts to combine the two. Forty-Five Square Poetry includes four of Steven’s poems. ‘Massive’ is an attempt to write poetry that is divorced from semantic meaning – where only the sound and rhythm of the words matter. ‘Natural Laboratory Experiment’ is an exploration into the horrors of conscious thought. ‘Some Things I Did Over the Course of Some Time’ is a filtered retelling of past memories. ‘Burning Chrome’ is an homage to Wil-liam Gibson, the father of cyberpunk. He has performed readings of his work at many pubs and back rooms around London. His current project is a collection of poems based on remixed pages from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

WALTER JONES is a freelance writer who lives and works in London. The poem ‘Triangles’ is about approval and disappointment. It is a concise record of a life of pride and its aim is to make a point on the page.

INÊS ALMEIDA prefers to write about simple moments and objects. Her poetry can focus on both the real and the imaginary: the interplay of their co-existence. Rather than telling too much, she likes to create short poems and leave them open for the reader to fill the gaps, or simply appreciate them as they stand. Originally from Portugal, Inês arrived in London four years ago to pursue a career in writing. With a fascination for the fantastic, she has been working on a collection of poems revolving around a mythology she created, entitled ‘The Gods of Malice’.

EMILY SINCLAIR’s time is occupied as a Group Exercise Instructor in South London. She has a long-standing relationship with creative endeavours incorporating qualifications in voice and dance. Her Burmese heritage is an aspect of Asian culture that Emily is particularly inter-ested in developing within her writing. For the poem ‘Shadow Dance’ she was inspired by the concept of yin-yang, a philosophy most prevalent in China. Both ‘Shadow Dance’ and ‘Identity’ focus on reflection of the self, while ‘Identity’ and ‘Avalanche’ explore the nature of memory. ‘Avalanche’ centres on the feeling of loss. Emily uses bleak natural imagery in contrast with human contact as a metaphor for the boundary between life and death. Her initial love of writing stemmed from poetry and she hopes to incorporate skills learnt in writing poetry into other disciplines. Most re-cently, Emily has completed a graphic novel called ‘Beyond Reflection’ and is currently working on a novel.

WOLF MARLOH was born in Germany in 1971 to a Dutch mother and a German father. His mother taught him to play Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ in a home that had three pianos, and an enormous bookcase. He worked as a runner in television before moving to London in 1994. In 2000 he started as a portrait photographer. Wolf has taken casting shots of about 2000 actors, and published a book of landscape photographs. He is currently photographing comedians for his new project called ‘No Laughing Matter’. Wolf is currently writing his first novel, ‘Among Tigers Wild’, which is a magical realist story about a man who finds that the past he remem-bers isn’t his past. Wolf believes music bridges time; what was composed 200 years ago can come alive today. The poem in this collection inextricably links the memory of his mother with ‘Moonlight Sonata’. Blog: wolfsworld.com Photography: wolfmarloh.com Comedians: nolaughingmatter.co.uk

ZOE ANNE ROSS has lived in São Paulo and Bahia in Brazil. While studying Art and teaching English, she immersed herself in Brazilian culture and the Portuguese language. She feels the country is her spiritual home, and themes on the notion of home are interwoven in her writ-ing. As a young teenager, she was entranced by the dense poetry of landscape in Silas Marner. Her fiction writing has always tended towards po-etic prose. She’s currently working on a magical realist novel set between Brazil during the dictatorship and the storm of 1987 in England.


Her poems in this journal are part of a collection spotlighting different cultures, evoking the senses through texture and colour. ‘Poem of India’ needs no introduction, as it reveals itself to the reader. For Zoe, ‘Sandman’ inspires a mixture of awe and fear, until the tension is released in his dance.

FELICITY STEPHEN was delivered into the 20th century by the Mayor of Norwich. She lived in Lowestoft, then Edinburgh, before run-ning away to London with someone ‘unsuitable’. A highlight of her time at the BBC was the many hours spent listening to twenty-seven languages, in the World Service bar. Later, at Televi-sion Centre, she loitered in Costume. Her creativity was sparked by these audio-visual experiences. Felicity followed this with a reckless phase as a freelance journalist – writing about music recording and environmental issues – before work-ing in Hackney’s voluntary sector, in Shoreditch. Later she wrote about oriental art. She enjoys writing poetry that embraces the humorous, and is putting together her first collection. Appointed an official ‘welcomer’ to His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, the poem ‘Peace Scarf ’ evolved from the resulting excitable meditation. Equally keen to pursue other disciplines of fiction, non-fiction, and playwriting, she says, ‘must do something about a blog!’

CLAIRE SANDS lloves to read literature, essays and articles, and to write poetry and stories for children. She currently works in Holborn as a receptionist in a busy corporate building, but has bigger dreams to conquer. Claire’s goal is to have her mythical poetry collection published, and is currently working on a folkloric story about the adventures of a boy who is abducted by a troll. The poem, ‘Beneath the Moon’, was origi-nally a piece of homework that Claire wrote to illustrate the romance and magic of a perfect moment. After years of promising herself to run the London Marathon, Claire was successfully accepted to run in 2015 on behalf of Oasis UK who help disadvantaged communities within the UK. Claire will be writing a blog throughout the year based on her training procedure and fundrais-ing activities. You can follow Claire’s blog at thewriterandtherunner.wordpress.com and find her on Twitter @scissorsands.

NYDIA HETHERINGTON originated from Leeds and lived in Paris for nine years. After studying at L’Ecole de Theatre Internationale Jac-ques Lecoq, she performed and created theatre in and around Europe. During her time in Paris she also became a clown. Moving back to London in 2009 to concentrate on her writing, she has had her work published in Smoke: A London Peculiar and her short story ‘Angel Eggs’ was highly commended at The Bristol Short Story Prize 2012. She has also read her fiction and poetry at various live litera-ture events in London including Birkbeck’s Hubbub and Scribblers. Nydia is currently attempting to write her first novel, which looks at the life of a circus born high wire walker as a modern day fairy tale.

REBECCA ROUILLARD was born in Oxford but grew up in Durban, South Africa. She studied graphic design and worked in advertising and design for ten years before she started writing. She has been the Managing Editor of the Birkbeck Writers’ Hub for the last three years and has two children. Rebecca has had poetry published by the Poetry Institute of Africa and short stories published online in Litro as well as in print anthologies Even Birds Are Chained to the Sky & Other Tales and Wooing Mr Wickham. Her short stories have also been performed by Word Theatre at the Latitude Festival, at WritLOUD, at the Birkbeck Scribblers, and broadcast on Resonance 104.4fm. Rebecca’s travel poems are influenced by the sense of liberation and disillusionment that travel evokes, and ‘What’s in a Name?’ is based on an idea for a novel. You can find her on Twitter @rrouillard or at www.rebeccarouillard.com


E D I T O R ‘ S N O T E

Our vision for Forty-Five Square Poetry was that it be filled with high calibre, industry standard, contemporary poetry that reflects the skills taught on the BA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. We were very pleased to receive exactly one hundred poems and the entire ten person team assisted in providing feedback on the anonymised work. The Assistant Poetry Editors and I debated what fitted the vision for the journal. It was a difficult task to whittle the century down to the score that was selected. Behind these pages are hours of emails, meetings, reading and discussions. As poets ourselves, we understand that teasing the best from a poem requires negotiation, diplomacy and encouragement. We are grateful to the selected poets for their consideration and reflection of our suggested changes. At the heart of this dialogue was the intention to maintain or enhance the energy of each poem so that you, the reader, can receive it. Our Art Director was most inventive in seeking out potential artwork. The Production Designer worked tirelessly to arrange the selected artwork for the front cover and design the stylish logo and clean layout of the book. Our proofreaders pored over the typeset pages to weed out errors. We hope you’ll agree that the finished product is something that Birkbeck can be proud of and represents a fine effort undertaken by students on the BA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College. We would like to thank the artist, Karina Vettorel, a graduate of the BA Fine Art at University of East London, for permitting us to use her striking artwork, The Harbour. The team would like to thank all of the contributors. We couldn’t have completed the module without you. Thanks also go to the Islington Twins for their knowledge of the electrical power points in the Royal Festival Hall and for sharing their exten-sion lead to help facilitate a marathon day of nine hours of editing. The team is grateful to all our tutors. Special thanks go to Liane Strauss, who has nurtured all the poets whose work appears in this journal. This has placed her at a unique vantage point from which to craft her beautifully constructed and appreciative foreword. We hope you will enjoy the skilled, innovative and creatively composed poems that we believe embody the vision for the inaugural edition of Forty-Five Square Poetry.

Narayani L Guibarra Editor


39

Forty-Five Square Poetry is the first annual anthology of poems

from current students of the BA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck

College. This collection of contemporary poems showcases the

course and conveys a variety of styles, subject matter and moods.

It’s an astutely put together anthology… The editors have

listened to these poems, and put them in conversation with each

other… Like all good poetry, the poems that make up Forty-Five

Square Poetry take us to ‘that place / we can’t come back from.’ Liane Strauss

F O R T Y F I V E S Q U A R E P O E T R Y . C O M

f o r t y - f i v e | s q u a r e | p o e t r y | 2 0 1 4 · pdf file3 forty-five | square...

Documents