CABOODLE, REVIEW PART 1.

Caboodle, published by Prole Books,  is an interesting and successful collection of the work of 6 featured writers.I am delighted to be one of them. I feel the only way to comment on the collection is to take each poet's work one by one so I'll begin with the first:

 Karina Vidler.

Her included pamphlet of work is titled "Facing", well-named as the poems face up very bravely to many truths about ageing, middle-life angst, the need for love, children grown and leaving home and  elderly parents dying - the classic middle-age sandwich.
In some of the poems there is a strong smack of the ageing cougar,  a woman who knows herself to have 'sags and bags and lines', rejecting men with 'sprawling gut, balding head' in contemplated favour of encouraging a young man to light  'his fuse to an experienced slow burn' Very French, very Collette!  (from "May I have an Arctic Monkey please?", Page 16.)

Vidler is not exactly kind to herself: in "Here we go again" she recalls past misdemeanours at school, and now, menopausal,  rushing to a poetry class she writes 'I am bad./ I have arrived late./ I must wait/ until the good students have read their poems.' A savage honesty is frequently found in these poems, they are like lemon juice without enough honey - shocking but sharply wonderful! And clever as they embrace humanely many experiences common to anyone getting older.

The child leaving home for example: in "Second" she and her daughter are waiting at Euston for the L'pool train, the mother worrying that nothing is packed in plastic bags and if the zip on the case snaps, there will be 'a fountain of lacy knickers' everywhere. The daughter tells how her boyfriend's mother wept in the car when he left, and they console themselves with the joke that the second child's departure is not so harrowing since the 'furrow' has already been 'ploughed' by the first.It ends with the mother saying to herself 'I can't tell you how this pain is not one bit easier/ not one bit less.' Deeply touching.

The need for love at any age is beautifully written about: in "Impossibility" she describes ' getting by on random scraps of love', the brush of an arm or a leg in a train, until a gay man at work shows her kindness, giving her cash for a BLT when she's left her purse at home, offers her 'virtual hugs' on a bad day etc. And the poem ends truthfully and wistfully "I must understand./Your partner is a very lucky man.'

"My Love Affair with Frasier" carries the same theme; in this witty poem loyalty to a TV series offers a kind of simulated love like the 'virtual hugs' of the former poem. 'I didn't mind when you started to repeat yourself;/ it was comforting knowing what you were going to say next.' And concluding 'as this nest finally empties/ I'm going to need you more than ever.'

The poems also display great tenderness: "Psyche Ranimee par le Baiser del'Amour" deals again with the 'hormone-fuelled cougar' but ends poignantly with reference to Canova's staue of Eros bending to awaken Psyche 'she's all yearning and straining' but the god 'holds her gently/ and there's no humiliation, only love.'

A strong, refreshingly honest collection of poems about what it means to be human. I really enjoyed these.

REVIEW OF THE FIRST TELLING

There is a very good review of 'The First Telling 'in the Dundee University Arts Review. (DURA).
Very pleased to read it! It's available online too.

OVARIAN CANCER AWARENESS MONTH, MARCH 2015

My mother, taken on her honeymoon. I do not have many pictures of her as a young woman, and, poor thing, she only just made it to pensionable age, which was then 60. She was diagnosed at 56 with terminal ovarian cancer, managed with the help of (then) brutal treatments to survive for four more years, seeing both the birth of my brother's first child and also the (ill-fated) wedding of Charles and Diana. She died a few days before her own birthday in September 1981.


She had a beloved elder sister who had died of this disease in her 30's. But as people spoke very little about cancer back then she did not recognise the symptoms in herself and by the time she was forced to acknowledge her illness it was almost too late. She was admitted for surgery but they could do nothing, it was so far spread. She had bloating, pain and breathlessness, all of which anyone a little clued in now would understand as very serious indeed. But she didn't know; I didn't know -
I didn't even realise it myself when in 2000, also aged 56, I too had the same symptoms.It was a veterinary friend who bluntly told me I needed to go to my GP pronto!


So I did and next day I was admitted to hospital, stage 3 ovarian cancer,  and shortly after that had surgery, chemotherapy, and became very familiar with the insides of various clinics. But I was lucky; the chemotherapy treatment was better than what my mother had and I survived.


The biggest shock was that, when I was diagnosed, my father told me candidly that my mother's 4 sisters had all died of Ovarian cancer. I knew about Beth, the beloved sister, but I certainly didn't know about the others.My mother's family was large, and I didn't know them all.

But once I had that information to hand I was whizzed off for genetic testing and found to carry BRCA2 . Important information especially if you have daughters: such a gene can predispose to ovarian cancer ( and in my family it has definitely done that) but in men it can predispose to prostate cancer I was told. So everyone should be aware of this. My family all know and one of them has discovered the gene in their own system

It shouldn't be the case though that only where there is a family history you become entitled to genetic testing: I feel any woman with ovarian cancer should receive this - ANY woman with ovarian cancer. It might save herfamily, her daughters, even her sons from a lot of nasty trouble later in life.

And I mean nasty: my mother's own illness was appalling; she shrank to almost nothing but skin and bone; she was constantly sick, nothing tasted right and anyway she couldn't keep it down; her lungs were full of fluid and breathing was very painful.She died in great pain.

If you have any reason to think you might be at risk, check out the signs at Ovacome's website. You can help your daughters to BEAT ovarian cancer if you let them know the signs.

TELLING YOUR DAUGHTERS TO B.E.A.T OVARIAN CANCER

For ovarian cancer awareness month in March, Ovacome, the UK charity for the disease, are urging mothers to tell their daughters about the tell-tale symptoms of Ovarian Cancer which are:

Bloating;

Eating less (no appetite);

Abdominal pain;

Talk to your GP!


It is, I feel, wrongly referred to here as the 'silent disease': in the USA it is called the 'whispering disease' and this I think is far more accurate.


Here is a poem, which is my way of telling:

Daughters, I need to tell you

about pain each time I bent over,

about being so breathless

I felt my lungs were leaving my chest.

About my stomach

huge as a full-term pregnancy.

About my surgeon’s eyes above his mask,

the brilliant blue of them.

About pressing the button

on the morphine pump –what you thought

was ‘courage/cheerfulness’

was simply outright stoned.

About the nights my body was so full

of knives I couldn’t sleep

and when death came in to tempt me

I almost welcomed it.

About the utter focus of my fight to live.

Daughters, I need to tell you this,

because I want it never to happen

to either of you.

 Gill McEvoy

ANTHOLOGIES

There is something joyful about an anthology - a handy source of poems for occasions/ reading groups/a happy-pick-and-chose for you to dip in and out of whenever you feel like it.

I've been fortunate recently to have several of my poems included in anthologies: The Book of Love and Loss (ed June hall and Rosie Bailey); Her Wings of Glass (Second Light ed by Myra Schneider, Penelope Shuttle and Dilys Wood); Blame Montezuma (a collection of poetry about chocolate, Happenstance Press);The Darker Side of Love (Paper Swans); Heart Shoots (Indigo Dreams); and, soon to come, Caboodle (Prole Books).

There's a further joy to being included: it's so good to see how other poets have tackled a shared theme. When you think there's nothing new to say about anything, that old Ecclesiastical gloom-thing, pick up an anthology and revise your opinion!

THE FIRST TELLING, how it came to be

This small collection of mine, a pamphlet published by Happenstance Press in Nov 2014, deals with rape and its aftermath. It is effectively a sequence of poems which are best read in order and at one sitting. And it has taken me 3 years to bring it to the state it's now published in.

Because I love birds I have always been fascinated by the myth of the rape of Philomela by Tereus, her brother-in-law. In the myth all the protagonists, Tereus, Pholomela, Procne her sister and  Itys, Procne's son, are turned into birds. Versions differ but Tereus, the perpetrator of the rape, is turned either into a hoopoe or a hawk, Philomela into a swallow or nightingale, likewise Procne, and Itys into a goldfinch.

When I first began writing these poems I wanted to stick fairly closely to the original myth so that I could use these birds as images. But I found that didn't work. So I updated the myth and made it modern. Keeping the same birds. And that didn't work either. I showed it to trusted writing friends, and they all said it had great power but that it wasn't right. So I went to Hawthornden Castle for an amazing month of being looked after hand and foot and buckled down to it. A lot of the buckling down consisted of walking in the woods and by the river in the glen there, thinking it through. And of course I watched birds as well (peregrines, kingfisher, heron, buzzards, sparrow hawk, goldcrest).

There is a huge amount to be said in praise of walking as an aid to thinking. After 2 weeks of this I began at last to get a stronger feel of how the collection should work. Then when I came home the news seeemd to be full of nothing but child abuse, terrible stuff. It began with Jimmy Saville and shortly after that revelation the skeletons came thundering out of cupboards. It made me so angry. Oh so angry, and there is nothing like a bit of rage for fuelling a piece of writing.

And now it's in print, still with bird poems in, though not quite the mythological choices (but close) and it focuses more on the aftermath of rape - the silences, the self-harming, and then with the help of a counsellor, the steps towards a healing.

The print run is small - Helena Nelson, of Happenstance Press, now does only 150 copies of pamphlets. Should you want one I do urge you to buy one quickly; 150 copies don't hang around long and I've already sold 50 myself.

I feel and hope, and so does Helena, that this is an important collection - so much in it needs to be said and more importantly it also should encourage belief in the real possibility of healing.

It is available from www.happenstancepress.com, price £4.

LAURIE LEE

Been feeling a little disappointed that more was not made of Lee in his centenary year - bad luck to have the same year as the First World War, and also Dylan Thomas.I know celebrations were held in Stroud and rightly so; I just wanted more!

But my poetry reading group spent a night looking at his body of work, including the radio plays, and I have recently written a sort of response to his poem "April Rise",a thank-you rather for the poem. It's too late for it to go anywhere as the year is heading speedily towards its end so I'll post it on this blog instead.

To Laurie Lee, from Llandudno, with thanks for his poem “April Rise”

(in honour of his centenary)

If ever there were blessing in the air

it’s here, in this quiet evening light,

moonstone-blue at horizon’s edge.

It falls like silk on my tired eye.

The shaven head of the naked moon

peeps from night clouds closing in

as one by one the lights blaze out,

are doubled in the glaze of sea.

The Orme’s great hawk-shape spreads its wings,

scoops up the town in feathered hug;

white gulls slice a path through air,

brightness fills their wake.

Flocks of oystercatchers now

darken the line of salt-flecked sand;

their wistful piping carries loud,

like blessing in the night.

Round lamps gild the esplanade,

lacquered by smatterings of rain.

We look out at the bay and know

if ever world were blessed, it’s now.

Gill McEvoy