“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

A LITERARY MAGAZINE OF POETRY, 

INTERVIEWS AND SHORT FICTION 

Issue 5 of 5 

“The Death Issue” 

December, 2015 

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First published in the United Kingdom by 

HARK Magazine 

[exactly: nowhere] 

www.harkmagazine.co.uk 

Copyright © The Contributors, 2015 

The right of the Contributors to be identified as the authors 

of the works included in this volume has been 

asserted by them in accordance with Copyrights, 

Designs and Patents Act of 1988. All rights reserved. 

Illustration of John Burnside (p. 5) by 

Eleanor Penny 

HARK Magazine staff: 

Owen Vince, Matthew Apperley, Diana Kurakina, Dimitris Tsomokos 

with editorial assistance from Penny Elliott 

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CONTENTS 

Editorial – p. 4 

HARKview with John Burnside – p. 5 

Pangs! by Robert Herbert McClean– a review – p. 33 

All Kinds of Old Feeling by John Burnside – p. 37 

Andrew Wells – p. 38 

Nels Hanson – p. 39 

Ryan Van Winkle – p. 41 

Kelley Dalton - p. 42 

Hugh McMillan – p. 43 

Constantin Preda – p. 45 

Steve Klepatar – p. 46 

Katarina Boudreaux – p. 47 

Adam Warne – p. 48 

James Reidel – p. 51 

Will Moorfoot – p. 52 

Shaun Turner – p. 54 

Finola Scott – p. 56 

Simon Ward – p. 59 

Contributors – p. 65 

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EDITORIAL 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but we're done. This is the last issue of HARK – Issue 5 – 

and it is full of excessively good things. A proper funerary banquet. No point wasting 

space or time or words except on the Words, including a fresh interview with poet and 

novelist John Burnside and one of his new, previously unseen poems. 

We want to say a huge thank you to everybody who has supported, in whatever small or 

gargantuan capacity, this venture, especially Penny Elliott. I also want to offer endless 

thanks to our contributors. 

I think we did okay. 

Thank you, from all of us. 

Owen, Matthew, Diana, Dimitris 

Dec. 3, 2015 

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“when I say that poetry makes nothing happen that's not true, because in that moment a poem 

makes something happen. It makes you see something in a larger a way. In a more inclusive way, a 

more democratic way. But also a more generous way in the end. Everybody experiences first love 

and the loss of that first love, and you laugh at it when you're older, but you know what it's like 

then to feel that heartbroken […] poetry always comes back to first love”. 

- John Burnside 

Illustration by Eleanor Penny 

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HARKview with John Burnside 

Berlin, 5th June, the afternoon 

I met John in suburban Berlin. It was perhaps the hottest day of the year so far, and beneath that 

heat we sat in a certain tropical isolation on the shaded balcony of his apartment. We were 

interrupted by a singular, barking dog and - later - a scooter. We talked - among other things - 

about ecopoetics, Kurosawa, the myth of the “bluesman”, and a red balloon. This is a verbatim 

transcript of our conversation: sans dog, sans scooter. 

* 

OV: It's the fifth of June, in Berlin. Thank you for doing the interview - first of all. I 

guess one of my first questions would be, because we're in Berlin, what were the 

reasons that led you to come back to Berlin so many times, and to live here? 

JB: well, the original reason I came to Berlin a long time ago was to do with books and 

with selling books here, I suppose, and doing readings. But it always made a big 

impression on me, the city. So to cut a long story short, I've been coming for several years 

and three years ago I was doing a residency, and I was there for a few months in summer, 

and besides from me coming over to do the residency, my family would come over and 

rent a place, so we could all be here in the summer, and I would have somewhere to work, 

and then see them when I wanted to. And I worked really well and the kids loved it. And 

then I came next year for a short trip and again liked it very much, so, luckily we're living 

here at the auspices of the DAAD which is a fantastic organisation that organises these 

exchanges, so we've been here for a year now and the kids go to a school they like and I've 

got things to do, and they've got a more diverse group of friends than they would have in 

Scotland. So for all kinds of reasons as a family we're liking it, and that's why we've 

stayed. And for me as a writer – I mean, in terms of just daily life, it's a good place to work 

OB: yeah 

JB: and there's a kind of nice thing about being outside the kind of pool of your own 

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language and kind of professional acquaintance, if you see what I mean. I remember I had 

a conversation with Joseph Brodsky once, and he was talking about how strange it was for 

a poet to be in another language community, and that was early on when he was writing in 

English, and he felt as because he was no longer in a community of Russian speakers, 

idiomatic Russian speakers, he had to try and write in English. 

OV: are you perhaps more aware of that language now that you're not exposed to it all 

the time? 

JB: I'm not sure because I don't think it's so much linguistic as about the musicality of 

language. I've been reading German poetry while I've been here and also poetry by Rilke 

in French, for reasons that I can go into. But I've been thinking more about musicality of 

language, so that's one thing. But also, something conceptual about the way German – 

German history is full of people who think in a certain way, and it's very interesting to me, 

someone coming from an Anglo-Saxon background, Celt or Anglo Saxon, whatever, but 

there's a kind of limitation and pragmatism in British culture, you know. It's something 

that's served the British empire, and it's also the foundation for certain kinds of scientific 

thinking. but I'm doing a lot of thinking about Goethe’s science and the Naturphilosophie, 

where the idea of nature isn't so much comparable to the English romantic one that says, 

oh here we all are in our towns and cities, and that there is nature somewhere 

OV: out there 

JB: out there, yeah. I mean, you go there and visit and you theorise it in certain ways, and 

I'm a little bit tired of that kind of wilderness, [there’s] less and less, there's still some there. 

But again, there's a separation between the natural and the, the 

OV: rational, the cultural 

JB: all that. 

OV: I suppose in a way your poetry has always been quite ambiguous about landscape. 

It's not this kind of knowable, observable thing. There's a lot of mystery, even anxiety 

JB: yeah, the mystery element I suppose is more to do with metaphysics, or something to 

do with our innate desire to read in to the natural world something that is significant to us, 

which may or may not be there. I don't know, I'm really kind of following - If I'm exploring 

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anything I'm exploring something that's already explored before by Frost, in his early 

poems, in that tendency we have to read in to nature. You know, that lovely poem of 

Frost's where he has the God's pan appearing somewhere in the New England landscape, 

and then he says, at the end of the poem, the question is asked, 'play, play', what should he 

play? What should he play in this new landscape? And there's this idea that we impose on 

to, we find the landscape and impose upon it religious, mythical, sentimental, romantic - 

you know longings that we have, and I'm interested in that process. 

OV: projecting on to - 

JB: projecting on to it, and the finding what you came to find as opposed to what's there. 

Which is what often we do. It's not unforgivable, it's a human tendency. Marx said the 

forest gives back what you cry or shout in to it. You can leave the German forests alone! 

But you know, he's pointing out that we tend to go into the natural world and we find out 

what we want, and it's usually a consolation for what we don't find in our day to day life. 

But I think in German culture, the German history of looking at the natural world, that's 

not been that way, in the same way. I think it's more, I think there's something more 

integrated about it. And I think in particular I'm interested in following, in reading 

Goethe, in reading nature and about science and what we think science is. 

OV: do you feel - related to that -, this is held in the ways you've looked at that 

encounter with myth and landscape has often drawn on art itself, like Brueghel? Do 

you see that as a bridging of that gap maybe between a scientific way of understanding 

and observing the world, and art as this kind of other way of encountering a landscape? 

JB: yeah, well, obviously painting is one way of observing the world and making field 

notes is another way of observing the world. Writing a poem might sometimes be another 

way. But, I guess the reason I've used painting imagery so much in my work is I really 

would have liked to be a painter myself. There's something I wanted to do when I was a 

teenager. And I ended up finding I didn't have any aptitude for drawing or anything. And 

I started taking pictures and photographs and thinking, well, if I can't draw at least I can 

take pictures, and somehow make images that way. But you know there's something 

lacking in me in terms of making an image myself 

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OV: and in actually writing your poems, then, you're – I'm trying to word what I mean – 

there's a kind of 'painterly' way of writing your poems? 

JB: yeah, yeah, these are the poems written by a painter who didn't make it as a painter. I 

do see the world very much in terms of visual, especially colour and shadow. Shadow is 

particularly interesting to me. I mean the way I describe shadow directly in a poem, the 

way I'm looking at something I'm interested in, the way the shadow falls. But the other 

thing of course is, with poetry, I'm thinking that the other main faculty that human beings 

use to make cultural artefacts is sound. As well as being embodied in the form. You know, 

someone – I was just saying this and someone recommended me a poet I hadn't read much 

of, and said you should look at this poet, - I don't want to say who it is. But poems by this 

particular individual, and I thought 'I don't get any music', and some of the images and 

ideas were interesting but if a poem hasn't got music in it, I don't understand why you call 

it a poem. And that includes every poem. 

OV: so you feel that, you write in mainly – I hate to call poems this – a kind of free verse 

- 

JB: No, I don't, I don't understand what free verse means to be honest. I use rhythm in a 

particular way, I use repetition in a particular way. I don't tend to. I very rarely write 

poems that scan – I don't write poems in metre, that rhymes, or anything like that, but I 

think the implication of free verse is just that, it's just words lining up on the page and 

hoping for some kind of success. I do believe that rhythm in particular drives what I write. 

And, musicality, which means in particular, certain kinds of echo, anticipation, repetition 

or Pat Barter repetition, those things are interesting to me. Obviously rhyme, in the 

English language, is a very dangerous and sometimes ungainly companion. And I will use 

rhyme occasionally but almost never in a regular way. 

OV: is that why you've written poems that are echoing blues, and so when you were 

writing those particular poems, did you have a distinct blues in mind, or was it a blues 

sentiment, or actual blues music? 

JB: well blues music in some cases, where actually some of the phrases came straight out 

of songs. Blues music in the broadest sense I suppose, but mostly delta blues and mostly I 

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was listening a lot of at that time to Charlie Patton's work which is not usually in high 

quality recording, because he was a genius I think, Charlie Patton. But also listening to 

Reverend Gary Davis and Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, all these guys. I mean, 

Tommy Johnsons', the kind of pathos of his songs. He died young, he died from the effects 

of canned heat, which was one of the great songs, Canned Heat Blues. You know, he was 

predicting his own death because they would use a can of cleaning fluid and pour it 

through to sift out the liquor, and drink that. And they knew that was happening at the 

same time, and that would kill them. Some kind of release from the life they were living. 

Blues men were mobile and they had that advantage, moving from place to place with 

music. But also, you were outlaws as you had no protection from local people, so a lot of 

blues men got shot at, and got into trouble. 

OV: and that creates its own possession – it's not comfortable, there's often not much 

solace in blues music, that pathos - 

JB: solace might not be the right word. What this means is the satisfaction of saying it, 

there's a satisfaction in saying 'this is how it is'. And I think from blues songs they say 'I'm 

not going to entertain you, I'm not going to tell you to make you feel better, I'm going to 

tell you this is how it is'. A satisfaction in saying it, pinpointing exactly in the right words 

'this is how it is'. I was listening to something this morning, basically while unpacking, the 

old process of a bag unpacking, and I was listening on the music machine to Connor 

Oberst, who I like, and there was a great album of his - Casa Dega. And I was listening to 

that, and he really – he'll calculate, he'll pin it down as 'this is how it is', it's not nice, it's 

not reassuring, it doesn't make you feel better. But to say it, to say this is how it is, and 

then move on from there, is something significant. 

OV: it's its own beauty, I guess, despite this. Can I ask, would you mind reading one of 

these blues poems, and there's Death Room Blues and Dope Head Blues. Could you go 

for one of those? 

JB: Death Room Blues 

Before the songs I sang there were the songs 

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they came from, patent shreds 

of Babel, and the secret 

Nineveh of back rooms in the dark. 

Hour after hour 

the night trains blundered through 

from towns so far away and innocent 

that everything I knew seemed fictional: 

the squares of light beyond the paper mill 

where wolves crept from the woods and found their way 

to soft spots in the slick of memory; 

the boy who killed his mother in her bed 

for Jesus' sake. 

Small wonder that I overcame my fear 

of sweetness, when the only white I knew 

was first snow at the margins of the world, 

and any choir is sweeter, now, 

than scripture, where the hand that smooths away 

each local asterisk of stripped desire 

can seem so much like something I once lost 

I'm half convinced that childhood never happened. 

OV: thank you. I guess, with the blues as well, there's this sense of – the bible is 

present, but it's neither preaching or scripture. You talk about 'shreds of babel'. It's 

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older. Do you feel it's a channelling, that it's a conversation with something much, 

much older? 

JB: yeah. It sounds odd to say it, but growing up we had texts. We were quite poor 

working class, certainly when I was a younger child the bible was the only book we had 

available to hand, maybe a couple of children's classics and things like that, some 

almanacs and that kind of stuff. And I read the bible, when I was a kid. My mother was 

religious. My father wasn't religious in fact – I guess alcohol and gambling are religions. 

But, I read the bible. It was the King James Bible, my mother liked the KJB so we had that. 

For the music. For the rhetoric. [there's that dog barking, joining in]. 

OV: a recurring pest - 

JB: well, all dogs are [laughs]. When it came to writing those poems, it was fortunate in a 

way because a lot of people in the south, for their audiences, the bible would be the point 

of reference. Which was as much to them an alien text imposed upon them by a culture as 

it was to the likes of me. But, in that culture it was used to reinvent. 'Go Down Moses', you 

know. [sadly, this section of the conversation – where we turn briefly to actor Christian 

Bale, was lost – Ed.] 

OV: yeah, he's from Pembrokeshire. 

JB: well, no white person in the world could know that story, for black people in 

American, the story of Exodus. A story of a whole people being held in slavery. So, you 

can't write anything, from the bible, that hasn't been written already. In context of blues 

songs, there are other things to. I think it was in that book, a poem about a travelling fare 

comes to town, which was in the American mid-west and the south, those things were the 

accommodation of thrills, rides, maybe travelling musicians, and also musicians. They had 

that mixture. And there's supposed to be a movie, where a young girl goes out for the day 

and disappears, and the mother doesn't know where she is and at the same time mixed 

that scenario with the mother, the man and wife. 

OV: thinking back to what you said about, in the blues, references to the bible, in your 

poems you've got the bible, but there are also other texts present. And there are other 

writers, quotations, sometimes embedded in the poem, sometimes as a prologue. How 

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do you see the role of those, of these poets you pay homage to? There's Thomas Hardy, 

Kafka … 

JB: yeah, well, it's building the body of a culture. I guess what, maybe in this age, this 

particular time, the people you chose to quote from – the people you chose to refer to – are 

the people who colour your imagination without necessarily thinking 'oh, I'll put in a quite 

from so and so'. But it's in the background. It's the pond you swim in, the water. I think it's 

two things. One is, it is one way to get to flag something up, to flag an idea or a concept, 

but it's also a way of saying this is what, I think this is important. If I make reference to 

somebody like Hardy, Hardy's poetry in particular, it's part of the landscape I live in. It 

may not be the landscape I chose. Obviously, we all choose, we can only chose so far a new 

landscape. I can't look at certain pictures if you like or certain images or landscapes, 

scenarios, without being coloured by the things I love most. Most of us, well people like 

me anyway, probably read books during their teenage years particularly to find a home, to 

find shelter because there wasn't an acceptable shelter in the world. You know, I find it 

interesting now that a lot of teenagers don't read. I used to read ten books a week or so - 

OV: yeah, I read probably more when I was a late teenager than I ever have since 

JB: yeah. I still read a lot. I re-read. It's no longer, not very often, mostly when it is making 

some part of my cultural milieux, the water I swim in – I like that image [laughs]. It'll be 

going back to something I read before, as when I was a teenager I consumed endlessly all 

that I could find. Perhaps I shouldn't of done that. There are books you shouldn't be 

allowed to read until you're forty. You know you haven't got the life experience to 

understand what's going on. But as I said, going back to Goethe, or reading Goethe's stuff 

on science, I always had this thing about Newton. If only Newton never happened we'd be 

great [laughs]. I kind of follow Blake in that. It is true that the personal mission of one 

individual Englishman did so much to both liberate us and narrow our vision, in science, 

and we're still dealing with the consequences now. The kind of mechanistic view of the 

world we still have, the clockwork of the universe is being tinkered with, but it's still 

clockwork but softer, still malleable clockwork, but people are still talking about 

clockwork in an organic sense of things, or an individual sense of things. There's still 

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something too fixed and too rigid in how we look at the natural world, which is all of the 

world. And I'm really intrigued. It's not creating and finding new stuff that changes your 

view of the world, it's like going back to something and saying 'ah, that's what he meant 

by this', you know, Rousseau, Novalis, or Goethe, whoever. You write something and you 

fit it in to your sympathies at that time. And mostly antipathies. It's more of, I liked Blake 

when I was a teenager because Blake was kind of anti-Newton and I liked that - 

OV: being messianic, his own unique vision, he created his own mythology 

JB: yeah, though I don't like his mythology either! [laughs] just that he was anti-Newton. 

No, I like some of it obviously. So, it's kind of, it's interesting, to try to purify the language. 

It's also trying to clean the waters you're swimming in, you know, trying to renew your 

milieu, renew your habitat. 

OV: by locating yourself in these people? Yeah. I wonder if – and I'm trying not to sling 

mud – but we get used to a poetry that's kind of accessible, it's a very plain language, 

it's locked in a poet's memories, and it's this “memory” poetry, whereas yours seem 

more interrogative, and it's not embarrassed about using these quotations, these 

references, being more obscure, being more mystical. Is that something you're doing, 

reacting consciously against a more accessible poetry? 

JB: I'm not reacting against anything I don't think, but I'm probably in favour of something 

which wasn't much in favour at one point, and is now more so, though I disagree with 

how it is. I was just talking about this the other day, actually, reminiscing about the last 

however many years, and it goes back to the 90s, I remember the 90s. Sarah Maguire and I 

were being interviewed by someone on the radio, and I remember thinking oh this is all 

about poetry and gardens, poetry and nature, poetry etc, and Sarah and I were trying to 

point out that there's something very much more important going on, that it wasn't just 

about poets in the garden, it was about a new way of – not new exactly, strictly speaking -, 

but a way of looking at the world around us and informed by certain principles, in which 

now tend to be called 'eco-poetic'. But what's happened now is anybody who writes about 

trees, that sort of thing, then suddenly that's eco-poetic because they're writing about the 

subject matter. But that's not what matters. You can be poetic writing about a scooter, 

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going along a street in Berlin, you know. Because it isn't the subject matter that matters, it's 

the perspective. And I would say, I'm working on those now, I'm writing, for example 

Gaia, you know Gaia? Yeah. And he's talking about Gaia, and he's using that term that of 

course got James Lovelock into such trouble, you wouldn't say Warden's an eco-poet or 

Warden's part of some particular group, it's the poet's house, since the middle of the 

eighteen century poets have engaged with different ways about the natural world and 

with learning from the natural world principles. And I would include Pope in that, for 

example. Pope, who's understand was that we measure our art, milieu, by human 

standards, but there's something else. And we think that well, the Romantics rebelled and 

turned against those predecessors, of Pope's world, and that's not true at all. They 

modified the vision in a certain way. And we are modifying the vision of romantics and of 

romantic writers. But we're, I don't think it matters. I read some dire poems about roses, 

and trees, and bees, and birds. Well, bees is a good one because I've been working with 

Amy Shelton on some things to do with bees, and on research and writing on bees, for 

years now, before there was any talk of colony collapse disorder. And I wrote about bees 

for nature magazine, about the way that poets and other artists are responding to the 

dangers of colony collapse, but that's, that shouldn't be the only reason that people are 

writing about bees, and of course that wasn't the reason why poets and musicians 

throughout the centuries have responded to bees for example, it's because you learn 

something from bees. That's the interesting thing of course, that we learn from bees what it 

suits us to learn. So bees are little hives of industry, and all this sort of stuff. And that leads 

us to then think that, oh, well we can just rob them of their honey day and night and feed 

them corn syrup and they'll be fine, as little machines, as Newtonian clockwork machines. 

Whereas of course that's not how it works. You know, again it's the perspective of the 

matter not the subject matter. 

OV: yeah, and socially. In Russia, Pisarev wrote his entire critique of Tsarist society 

based on his allusion to bees because he couldn't write about actual society, to project 

social stratifications and hierarchy onto bees, to slip under the censor - 

JB: yeah! And the lucky thing as well is that censors, or the people who chose to be 

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censors, are usually dumb you know, don't get that. Oh, it's about bees it can't be that 

interesting. 

OV: we skirted around it a little bit, but it may be a bit of a dumb question itself, but 

about politics. Can poetry be political, should poets be politically active? 

JB: it's not so much a question of can poetry be political, or should it, because everything 

we do is political. Any public act, and a lot of private ones too, to write a poem may not be 

political but to publish it is a political act. And it's saying, it's a statement of alignment 

with one or another view of the world. You know, if I write a poem that says you know, 

from an eighteenth century poet who writes a poem about how wonderful the king is, and 

it says that the king is at the top of the tree and everyone else should be below, and 

supports divine rule on earth, all that stuff, then that's a political poem, sure. But, anything 

which supports a hierarchical vision of human society, or anything that aligns the natural 

world with something like that, is also a political statement, so if I write a poem now that 

says that there is some natural hierarchical structure, in things, I'll be making a certain 

kind of political statement. If I make a statement that makes it clear you feel that the only, 

the only way in which people should be rewarded is based on merit and their contribution 

to society, in all kinds of ways, that's also a political poem. Usually a poem isn't overtly 

political, because it makes it all black and white. It's usually an implication about 

something political. So any poem I write is political. So I write a love poem that the 

conventional idea of love doesn't work – not for me, anyway -, that romance is another 

trick by which capitalist society – you know I wouldn't say that overtly, that capitalists are 

making me fall in love -, but, if I'm critical of the idea of romantic love in a poem that's a 

political act. And that's political, and its directly anti-capitalist. The conventional image we 

have of romance in institutions like marriage, etc, serve the capitalist model. So if you say 

something against that – even tiny, tiny things -, it's not a huge gesture, it doesn't change 

the world. Poems aren't supposed to change the world. But they can drip-feed. Yeah, all 

poems are political statements, whether intended or not, there still something political. 

OV: so when you talk about capitalist institution of marriage, and you mentioned Marx 

earlier, do you affiliate more with – I don't mean in a historical materialist, Marxian way 

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- do you find that's where your politics lie, in a socialist politics? 

JB: I find it hard to imagine anybody who's got three IQ not being socialist, a certain kind 

of socialist. And I do find it funny when people I meet are really interesting and intelligent 

and they turn around and say they are tory, or something. I think, how did that happen? 

How did you end up being like that, because you're quite smart? 

OV: you think those finer sensibilities should bring somebody to the left? 

JB: yeah, but it depends on what you mean by it. The other thing is somebody will 

probably listen to me [a car interrupts us, for a moment]. They'll look at me and say oh, I 

thought he was okay but he's a nutter. The thing is, its proven, it's actually proven sort of 

sociologically or scientifically that more flatter a society, the more effective it is. The, more, 

the greater the distance between the gap between the rich and poor, the worse society 

works. If you look at highly successful societies in terms of culture, trade, invention etc, 

they're often societies where there's a very small gap between rich and poor. There's still a 

gap, for some reason that happens in a lot of societies. But, the model we live in now is 

probably the least effective because we have obscenely rich people who are contributing 

nothing, nothing at all, to society at large, and we've got people living in the levels of 

poverty that should shame everyone. So, we're also destroying the land, the birds, the 

trees, the sea, the air, we're also doing those things. 

OV: so interestingly, our government makes these very hollow poetic appeals to that 

land, to the country, to the institutions 

JB: oh yeah, there's something, there's no limits to the levels of obscenity when they do 

that kind of thing. You know, when I'm going through an airport I'll stand there wanting 

to cry, or laughing my socks off, at a piece of green washing on posters, you know. One big 

oil company had a picture, I remember the first time I looked at it I thought oh my, that's 

hilarious, I got like tears welling in my eyes, people just walking past this. Whether they 

look at it or believe it or, you literally want to be crying out saying you shouldn't be 

allowed to lie like that. 

OV: I remember seeing a particular video from a large oil company, who had an oil spill 

off the coast of America quite recently, and I saw one of their propaganda videos 

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ecently about the “benefit” they're doing to the Arctic 

JB: oh yeah, yeah, that's right. 

OV: as a poet, because you've been interested in landscapes and writing about 

landscape, and in talking about green washing, have you ever been approached by 

companies asking for that kind of thing, copy to be written? 

JB: I've had, I think people expect that I'll sympathies with a certain kind of principle. One 

guy that I knew who was a friend of the environment, somebody that I trusted, was 

approached with some kind of project which had something to do with looking at, 

objectively, interrogating the impact of wind turbines on landscapes aesthetically and I 

took a look at this and wrote to him and said you can't look at this separately, in terms of 

aesthetics, as if looking at the aesthetics of zyklon B or something, because you can't 

separate the aesthetics from the obscene amounts of money paid by landowners, to block 

applications on their land, and the people who live with that nearby and its impact on 

birds, and the ground which is ruined by the huge plugs of concrete that go into the 

ground to support them. And the problem is that we should be investing in something 

else, other things. But this guy said, I understand what you're saying but I'm being asked 

to look only at aesthetics, and I don't understand that because again you can't isolate, you 

can't say once you've published the poem well that's, you can't read in a political way 

because you didn't intend that, you also can't say I can only explicitly write about this 

aspect about a subject without taking the whole subject into account, you know. So there is 

that kind of temptation I suppose, because you will get grants from that, because it's a 

process really and the people who'll put the money what at the other end are politicians, 

really. I remember someone saying to me so, 'what's your next grant proposal going to be? 

Is it going to be Big Society or First World War?'. I just' went, 'excuse me?' If you want to 

get a grant, propose that you're writing something about the fist world war because that's 

coming up, or with tory politicians the big society idea. You can write poetry and stories 

and stuff like that about how wonderful old fashioned hierarchical society is and you get 

money. And it's true enough. The commercial one is more round about. If you're a big oil 

company, you're going to rather have Bono say something good about you than some poet. 

18

If you can get someone like that to say what they're doing in the Arctic is quite cool, a lot 

of people will listen. Okay that's fne. And some poet says it it's not really heard. Somebody 

asked me to write something for the Sunday Herald in Scotland. It was an essay on towns. 

There were moves to improve Scottish towns, and I was to imagine my ideal town, as it 

were. Which I did. A talking piece. It was nice fun to do, and I like the editor I worked 

with, etc. And someone sent me a link to some guy's blog, who was a town planner, and 

he said this piece – which he read, and was offended by -, which he thought was a piece 

written deliberately to try to puff up the self importance of the people who were doing it. 

Now what? That's that little scooter in Berlin. It's coming back to haunt us! And this piece, 

he said, was written by “obscure poet John Burnside”, and I thought why? Why do you 

say “obscure poet”? Every poet is obscure, as soon as you say “poet” that's it! You're off 

the spectrum. 

OV: it's, poetry is still a small world 

JB: it's getting smaller. In some countries. In some countries it's still a living, organic oral 

tradition. An art. 

OV: well, about Berlin, it's my first time in Berlin. Is Berlin a poetic city? 

JB: it would be hard to think about it as you would an English city. I think a lot of, 

nowadays, a lot of energy around a certain kind of poetry that's mostly performance. 

OV: do you mean the spoken word scene? 

JB: yeah, performance poetry, those kinds of things. And because it's got an audience 

people and are making a noise people say that it's indicative of a poetry of a certain kind. 

Bums on seats and enough noise. I've got nothing against slams, I've done slams myself. 

I've nothing against performance poetry. There are some really great performance poets in 

Great Britain now. But sometimes people, let's say you see a festival, and it hasn't got a 

certain open mic content, a certain slam or similar content, and it probably won't get 

funding, but you can get the best poets from around the world to come in and do the usual 

things that poets do which is you know, basically say their poems, very quietely and go 

away again, and the audience start thinking I must see that on the page! 

OV: so when you write, do you ever think – you've talked about musicality – that when 

19

you write a poem and then read it out does it sound alien to you, when spoken? 

JB: no, I wouldn't necessarily say that, it isn't just that I have a sense of how it sounds 

when i'm writing it, the actual writing of it comes out of the sound of it. You know, 

someone comes up to me and says, 'how do you start a poem?', a word, a theme, whatever, 

and I say no I write a rhythm. It's true. Something rhythmic starts happening first. And 

certainly the first few years I started writing poetry, I wasn't even aware of the fact that the 

rhythm was happening, and I think a poem starts when I'm getting the first metaphor 

even word. But really, this poem starts before then. The sensation is actually wordless, if 

you like. It's just pure rhythm. It anticipates the music of the poem. And then, obviously 

the idea comes. When a guy looks at a block of marble and says, I can see David. Or Jesus, 

or whatever, in that block of marble. It's true. The rhythm embodies the idea certainly. So 

then, there's a process of transferring that sound in one's head to words, onto a page, and I 

used to think there were rules for how you wrote something on the page. The first poetry I 

learned was Latin poetry, because I did Latin in school. From the age of about eleven. And 

of course that was metrical poetry, and of course it was in, you know, so there were rules 

for that. Six feet on this line, four. Maybe that's the only thing that is free really. So you 

write it on the page and I hope that when somebody opens the page, in the book, will read 

the poem, say the poem aloud to themselves. And they'd hear it from the page. And that's 

why I think the communication happens. I don't want to sound curmudgeonly, because 

I'm not as curmudgeonly as I usually sound, But I do think solitary activity is really 

important for our psychology. There's a huge difference between going out and buying a 

book of poems, sitting down on your balcony with the sun blasting down on you, and 

opening it out and letting that poem furl out and flow into your mind, and hearing it, or 

sitting down and reading it out I say it aloud. Because that's how it should be done. And 

there's a big difference between that experience and the experience of going into a room, 

some people who think it's really hip and cool to be there, some people who are really 

genuinely fans of whoever slopes across the stage, leans on the mic and mumbles the 

poem into the mic, which is what I was doing two days ago. Or comes on in a wonderful 

costume and performs that work, choreography and everything. That group experience is 

20

different from that solitary experience. If I write a poem and somebody says to me what 

do you, how do you imagine it being heard, I'd say it was individual. I wouldn't think of 

that in a group. Too many things in group form these days. You'd never do it in my day. 

You know, or people who want to go on vacation and only go when they've got six friends 

to go with. 

JB: it's one of the nice things about cities, that cities allow you to be amongst millions of 

people but completely alone if you want to be 

JB: that's true, isn't it. 

OV: and then small places, when I go out to the village where my parents live now, it's 

quite stifling and I want to go back to somewhere you can feel a little bit more alone 

JB: well there's nothing much worse than living in a society that is essentially hierarchical 

in a small group, because the power structure becomes much more visible. The place we 

left to come here was repellent, truly repellent, near Fife. Lovely people, in the village, but 

they were, their niceness couldn't really flower because they were trapped within a 

hierarchical structure so the people who had the power and got themselves into position 

making powers that I couldn't understand. Busy-bodies, basically. There was one 

particular who was so particularly stupid I couldn't believe it, but seen by the local 

community as – well, not only stupid but also self serving. You know, that happens in 

cities and towns and we know that, hierarchical, but its less visible and you can ignore 

them more. And it's getting more and more. But power is always there. The nakedness of 

it in a rural, small, villagey kind of place is constant, you see it all the time. 

OV: I wonder if, switching back to this, in my head was a sense of a power but maybe 

in a different sense, almost – I wouldn't use the phrase witch doctor -, but a sense of 

incantation, magic, the channelling of magic, the transformation of bodies. There's a lot 

of raw power that seems quite profound. Does that come from the rural? 

JB: this is your Orphic figure, maybe. Or your blues man figure, who isn't given any 

power by the hierarchy, isn't part of the social structure at all, really, rejects it,and gets their 

own individual power from living in a separate balance with the natural world. I mean 

you find that, you know the John Clare poem The Tramp? Well, the tramp is – well, I wrote 

21

a kind of polemic recently, for me the tramp was the sort of proto-proletarian from the 

Marxist sort of view, he's been, he's been disenfranchised, he's been dispossessed, he was a 

worker – a share cropper as it would be in the united states -, and that was taken way from 

him. Therefore they became wanderers, indigents. And that takes everything away from 

you but also gives you a real power. If you take anything away from somebody, like they 

did to black people in the United States, then some of those people will say your system 

doesn't work but mine religion, of nature, my charismatic appeal to other people – for 

these people were very charismatic, people would walk miles to hear them sing, they had 

to have their mojo, you know -, and it's like in a way artists are more like responders to 

this particularly individualistic way of looking at the world, you know like the closing 

pitcher who gets up at the end of the baseball game and he's got one lease, and all he's got 

to do is take six of the best pitchers and shut them down. And a lot of people can't do that. 

They can pitch for innings, and there's a little bit of leeway, but a great closing pitcher 

stands up and says ok, nobody's going to hit a ball at all for me. And he's got that “it”, that 

mojo as it were, and when you see someone stand up and do that it's wonderful. When 

you see that same person throw a bad ball right at the beginning, it's, you want to weep, 

because all that guy's got is what they call his 'stuff', the stuff he has and he's called upon 

to do it. And the greats somehow always manage to do it 

OV: that once chance 

JB: yeah, and that's what a blues man will do. He'll got into a town where maybe some of 

the guys there want to shoot him. All the white people want to lynch him or force him into 

a chain gang or something. And it, that movie where – might have been called Honey 

Dripper -. about a blues man travelling around. It showed the current practice where if 

you were a vagrant, if you were a person moving through an area, without a sufficient 

amount of money in your pocket to do certain things, you could be arrested and kept in 

prison for two weeks, or something. But every blues man would be having times where 

they were going through the world without much in their pockets, the next gig or 

whatever it might be. So the law used to go around and pick these guys up, ad the they 

would say to them ok, if you do seven days working for cotton picking say, we'll let you 

22

go, and the guy will always say, rather than pay the fine he couldn't afford, or sell his 

guitar so he could pay the fine, or try to do the time in prison, he would go and do the 

picking. So at cotton picking time, anybody who was on the road mobile, could get picked 

up by the sheriff with a deal that was done directly with the landowners, so that – the 

landlord would pay the guy, the sheriff would get money – and he would get cheap 

labour, free labour. So, they'd be more susceptible because they weren't already tied down 

to something, indentured if you like. So this figure of the blues man, the badass, this was 

an intriguing figure for me. But this was also an outlaw of the old romantic mythos, of premedieval 

times 

OV: yeah, the rogue knight 

JB: the outlaw, if you think of someone who was the most prepossessing figure in 

Arthurian romances then it's Lancelot 

OV: who has no master, and chooses 

JB: so he's essentially an outlaw. Any story that he's in, he's left his liege, he's left his power 

structure that he fits into, he's looking for something better than that, and he gets into, 

chooses an Arthurian court, and of course then he falls into something else, a certain ideal 

of romantic love. You know, he, he's the knight par excellence of a knight, but has to – as it 

were – become a kind of outlaw at the beginning to enter into Arthur's world, because 

Arthur's other guys are almost always part of the court already. 

OV: and it's repeated so often, if you think about in Japan, the Ronin, the masterless 

samurai, who are subject to – star in – more films, like Kurosawa's, than the actual 

samurai do because they are much more attractive, powerful 

JB: yeah, and that plays a part of Japanese history that Kurosawa finds very interesting, 

which is that point at which you know Japan was - 

OV: Westernising 

JB: yeah, westernising, in a way, but certainly thinking about modernising in that 

disastrous way that they called the reconstruction of the labour party modernising. 

Modernising the new labour party i.e., not the labour party at all. That's what happens. 

There was even a ban on making swords. I mean, I'm very interested in Japanese art and, 

23

one of the things that was very interesting was the sudden growth, people making metallic 

– gold and bronze and silverware – steel, that and skills that they would have used for the 

sword making and now they were using for making metal objects. So these guys were out 

there and the only thing they've got is their sword, they've got a weapon of mass 

destruction in their hand and they're not allowed to use it. Kurosawa's not romantic about 

that. If you look at the seven samurai these guys are scrambling around just to get some 

rice. They've, you see a mass of swordsmen, at the back somewhere. And at the end of the 

seven samurai, where they turn around, these people are afraid of them. 

OV: and when they bury them it's their swords in that scene where it looks up over the 

hill and their swords are in the earth 

JB: which isn't the sort of thing they'd done, wouldn't have thrown away the sword! 

[Laughs] Someone would have removed it 

OV: later that night 

JB: yeah! 

OV: could I ask you to read another poem? I was thinking something from Black Cat 

Bone, I was thinking The Fair Chase, but it's so long. 

JB: that's one I think of, for example, that can only really work on the page for most people 

who read it, as a sustained piece that you can't imagine, some of the nineteenth century 

poets, well, they did actually, reading out whole long poems 

OV: in that event, I'd wanted to talk a little bit about animals. Because I think there's 

something very interesting - I mean the way you're talking about these animals who are 

in some way unknowable. Would 'Creaturely' be okay, to draw us toward those animals? 

JB: sure 

The only gift is knowing we belong 

to nothing. 

Midsummer's night 

in the drunk tank, moon on the walls 

24

and something like a fox scouting for mice 

in the corner: shy 

and auburn, it's the secret animal 

I reckon from a childhood 

resurrexit; 

and why would there not 

be weather, some 

event like wind, or rain, 

from thirty years ago? 

The fox turns in the light with something slender 

caught between its jaws and no one knows 

for certain what it is: the one rule, here, 

that on one leaves until the creaturely 

in everything is sifted from the skin 

to mark the cure, the rollright iin the mind. 

OV: thank you 

JB: that's more about rehab than animals, I suppose. 

OV: well that's one of the interesting things, that these animals keep occurring. They 

are sometimes slightly human, sometimes not - 

JB: well, it's what we were talking about earlier in the way in which we project into the 

natural world, our own ideas, myths, fantasies, whatever. There's so few animals left, in a 

25

way, in the world around us. Certainly around us, directly, other than the sea, that we 

populate the world with imaginary animals. Sadly we also populate the world with pets, 

but don't get me started on pets because that'd be the – I'd be very unpopular with 

everybody I'm sure. But I genuinely feel that wild animals are real animals, if you see what 

I mean. But we don't see that. There are foxes, and badgers, and hedgehogs in our world 

but we very rarely see them, but try an experiment: drive along with a couple of kids in 

the back seat, anywhere in the world, and just say “deer”. And if they're not completely 

jaded or plugged in to something, they'll go “ahh!”, because they'll want to see. In twiligt. 

And that's when most encounters with real animals … I've just come back from [Canada] 

where there's a real possibility that you open your front door to a bear, turning garbage 

upside down. But we do. We were at the centre, I had some things I need to do, and I was 

going to go for a nice long walk. So off I hike – not really hiking, but you know, a proper 

walk, an afternoon's walk -, and the first thing I hear is 'don't go that trail because there's a 

grizzly bear there', and I said ok don't go on that trail and go down this trail. And I get to a 

certain point and there's this red tape, don't go beyond the tape. And while walking, traces 

of grizzly and traces of other things, and it's kind of exciting! I want to see a bear or a 

cougar! I want to see them. I mean, would I? How in the open? In terrain that it knows 

very well and I don't know at all? You know? I don't want to meet something that can 

outrun me very easily, you know, these days with my health and weight. A hedgehog can 

outrun me! So you think, there's something exciting about the idea of the bear, the idea of 

the cougar, or the bobcat. I remember once a friend and I had tracked a bobcat, for miles, 

because she was a photographer and she wanted to take a picture of it. And we didn't find 

it. But if you come across something like an elk, or deer, which are much bigger than 

British deer, and there's something about that presence in the world. I remember once that 

I was walking in a place called Big Basin in California, and I was with a friend. Gerry and 

I. We walked up the rise, wooded mostly, and we walked all the way to the top and were 

coming back down and It was dusk and Gerry just said to me, stop. There's a family of 

deer walking towards us. And I guess that they were more used to humans, but they 

weren't very scarred. They approached us and looked, up and down, and kept on moving. 

26

And I don't care what anybody says, if I live to be three thousand years old, encounters 

like that will always be magical to be, as something about wonder, because I don't know 

how that mind is apprehending the world around it. I can see it looking at me and 

thinking, how does that thing get around, how does it see its world, but you know, a mole. 

I remember getting moles in a garden I used to have. And my neighbour just said to me, 

oh, you just bury bottles, half into the grown and the wind blows across it and it drives 

them crazy and they all move somewhere else. And I thought I couldn't do that to them. 

How can I do that just for some nice lawn? And you do see what happens to animals who 

they do drive crazy. Mad bears walking up and down, gorillas. I take the kids to the zoo so 

they can see the animals, but they sense it. We were watching a gorilla in one zoo and my 

youngest says, where does he go? He thought he was coming to do a little performance 

and then goes off somewhere. Where does he go when he's finished? I said no. So where is 

his lair? There's one silver back and three or four others 

OV: and always seem so mournful. It's interesting that as a society we seem, when we 

have animals in programmes, or the internet, whatever, we either emphasise their 

violence and their wildness – this is how poisonous they are, this is how big their claws 

are -, or humanise them. Look at this cute cat. All of that. It's a weird relationship we 

have with them. We don't want to just understand the animal as it is. 

JB: it's what we used to do with other races, but aren't allowed to do that anymore. Oh 

look at that nice black person from Jamaica with all that rhythm and colourfulness, or look 

at that nasty Russian drinking vodka, probably wants to diddle your daughter. Images of 

other races. And of course, most of feel like we can't do that kind of stuff any more. We do 

it on animals instead now. Kangaroos are just funny, aren't they? Unless you stand next to 

one and annoy it. Bears are kind of cute but, you know, some of the stories I've heard 

about bear encounters, they're pretty horrifying 

OV: yeah, have you seen the Herzog film, Grizzly Man? I mean it's - 

JB: yeah. That's a different thing, that guy was not well! But bears, people say you live in 

bear country – most people do in bear country – they have very elaborate systems where 

people get paid to monitor where bears are, where they can, so for example you get a big 

27

sign next to where we were. So the bear doesn't move far from its kill. So you know that 

one is there, so you weren't going to get eaten unless you, you know. But bears aren't 

dangerous unless you, but they're not just killing machines. And people tell you stories 

like, here I was and I got in front of the bear and its cubs and the bear just left me alone. 

And in another mood – gone. But the people who live near animals, any kind of animals, 

horses, wild horses say, they make at least some effort – not all of them, but many do – to 

understand them. The people who antagonize bears in north western Canada are the 

idiots who come driving in from the cities, to try and take pictures of bears, or whatever 

they do. Hunting. Actually sometimes, I saw an amazing piece of footage of some tourists 

trapped- a family, between black bears, a mother and family it was-, and they were trying 

to take photographs with them with tripods and the mother got, hang on, what are they 

doing? Well she tried to frighten them. She wasn't violent, actually. She did mock charges 

and everything, to drive them away, because she felt threatened for her cubs. And these 

people are complete idiots, but they weren't locals as locals would say, locals will have a 

lot to say to you about bush whacking for example, that's a way you might disturb them, 

ok. My policy might be if you disturb a bear that's your problem, right? But of course 

that's not the enlightened thing because as soon as one person disturbs a bear, and 

something happens to them because of their stupidity, that changes the way bears are 

understood. People say bears are dangerous, let's go and kill them all. There are people 

who will just shoot at bears when they see them. Think they're doing everybody a favour. 

But the people who live that, who actually live in that world, understand that balance 

between the bear community, and the lynx, and the cougar community, all the animal 

communities, mean that they can live there and enjoy that place as long as they respect the 

other animals living there. 

OV: is that something about – to come back to the Fair Chase – the hunter there is 

obviously part of this 

JB: yeah, but hunting there was a sort of metaphor for – it's quite interesting because the 

previous book I'd done was called the Hunt in the Forest, and the central metaphor all the 

way through was hunting, that's all kinds of hunting – hunting animals, hunting other 

28

things, pursuing sex, pleasure all those things -, and I thought that's me done with 

hunting, and the first poem that came in there was the Fair Chase. Of course the Fair 

Chase was trying to say, was about any kind of pursuit, which can be the pursuit of the 

poem itself. It was originally prompted though by a ood friend Stuart Cally said to me, I'm 

doing a book about Scotland and I want you to make some kind of contribution to it, a 

story or article. And I wrote that poem and I thought this is really about how I feel about 

Scotland right now, and I gave it to him, and it was about other things too, and he was – 

he's a very perceptive person, he knew exactly what I was doing -, somebody else might 

have said what's this got to do about Scotland, and it's really about the idea of certain 

traditions in society and community, and about inheriting those traditions and feeling both 

chosen, singled out by having the mantle, you know he's wearing his father's coat, the 

mantle's passed down to him, and the other thing about it is he doesn't believe. And this 

tradition that he's supposed to be part of isn't his, he doesn't feel right in it. And he's going 

through the motions, and in a way he's like a passive, the least good hunter, and a bit of an 

idiot in some ways, you know, a holy fool. So of course he's the one that's singled out in 

the end. And at the end, to confront the true pursuit of the hunt – which is what? Because 

as soon as he encounters this, it melts away. The thing is, he's tasked with walking home. 

And when walking home, he comes to a place he doesn't recognise, knows that must be 

home, and has to live there alone. [the idea that] the guy goes out to the fairy world, 

whatever, he's playing music whatever and he has to write into this world, and once he 

comes back everything he knew in this world is gone. And he's been disabused of all his 

old errors, it doesn't matter now because nothing, the world that he left, that he cared 

about, has gone anyway. You can't come back and see the people he cares about, why, now 

every thing's different. He's an irrelevance to them. And that for me is like the flip side, the 

other side of becoming the blues man, or the charismatic, price that you pay to get 

knowledge and awareness of some kind. The price will often be complete loss of 

community. Complete. Because the people that are relevant to you are gone now. In a way, 

the people – the people are there when you come back, they're irrelevant to you and you're 

also irrelevant to them because like the Chinese say you can't get the truth from a man 

29

with no hands. You can make that journey and say hey, all we were pursuing before was 

wrong, it wasn't what we were after at all, it was something else completely. They'll look at 

you completely. Because they're not ready to understand that yet, and need to make the 

journey themselves. So you know, all that, growing up in the seventies all my friends 

going off and joining various groups and learning to become enlightened, and people who 

pursued it with any kind of honesty, with any kind of detachment, come to a conclusion; 

which is, now I understand what I wanted to understand, but it didn't make any 

difference in my life. And becoming an enlightened being walking around being all nice 

and wonderful with light shining out, and it's just the same person, just knows a little 

more about, than they did before. Which is not true because you're a completely different 

person. Transformed totally by that experience. You can't communicate to anybody. 

OV: well that comes back to poets today, because like you said earlier – with the 

“obscure poet” -, people think about poets as this different thing. If I mention to 

anybody that I write poetry, it's often “oh”, closed down. 

JB: [laughs] yeah, please don't read one to me! Well that's, it's unfortunate that certainly in 

Anglo-Saxon society, and it's not always true in other places, it's unfortunate that the idea 

of poet is such a mistaken one. If you introduce somebody as a poet, a successful poet, 

people will think that's great as long as you don't talk about poetry to them. That, if you 

give someone a poem, oh what do I do with this, because a poet's life is a romantic figure. 

Sarah has a joke about this, something she says about, now were getting married. Our 

friend said to her so what does your husband do, your fiancée do? Jokingly it wasn't a 

poet, that I make my living from that, twenty other things. “He's a poet”. “Oh, how 

wonderful. Does he always wear linen?” And I just had this image of this. You see this all 

the time, of people turning up to parties “being” poets. 

OV: yeah, of course 

JB: usually in proportion with how good a poet they are [laughs]. That image thing is one 

thing but actually, you know demanding poetry, kind of frightening. And I don't 

understand because it's like I say to somebody, do you play sudoku, and I say to them 

when you go to the shops, do you go and pick the book that says “easy and accessible 

30

sudoku, can be done in seconds”, or do you find one that says super fiendish difficult? You 

don't chose the first one because you want a challenge. People chose poetry they say, is it 

accessible poetry? Oh I don't know about any of that fancy poetry that doesn't say 

anything. And you say, why don't you treat a poem the way you treat a sudoku, that you 

want a challenge? 

OV: do you think that we – in general -, are not equipped by schools, the way poetry is 

taught in schools, equipped to treat it as a 'whole thing'. I always found that when we 

were taught poetry, it was line by line, what's this line saying what technique are they 

using, etc. 

JB: I think it can be quite useful to do that kind of close reading, of any text. I think we 

should teach close reading of Orwell's essays, or the newspaper. What I think schools 

should do – and it's the one thing they don't do, and they're paid not to do – is to teach 

every child how to do critical thinking, whatever they're looking at. Whether reading a 

report in the Guardian, reading a new poem by Mark Doty, or looking at a picture, or 

looking at a photograph. Watching a movie. Looking at green-washing in an airport. What 

our schools should be doing is creating, educating, creating a basis for people to live as 

citizens, and that is to teach you how to do critical thinking, and how to enjoy it, and to 

give them the sense that they are free to do think critically. And that would apply to a 

poem, and if you had a really genuine critical thinking society, everything would carry a 

poem in it the way every newspaper carries a – well, not everything does now -, but 

everything carries a sudoku or a puzzle of something. There might be a poem in it. And the 

poem might be very straight forward, or it might be something more complex and difficult 

to understand. 

OV: it's only now a handful of newspapers that – Morning Star – that carries a poem 

JB: but it's probably one of those very obvious, accessible poems isn't it? I used to write a 

poem, I had great fun writing a poem every Sunday for a while, not for very long, and it 

had to be for sport. In the sport pages. And that was a very enlightened editor, so many 

pages of sport writing to run. And said it was worth having space for a poem there. So 

he'd call me up and say, could you write a poem about a sporting event that happened in 

31

the last month, or general thing, so I remember for example Saturday frankly de Tori rode 

seven winners all in the day – do you remember that, or too young? [too young, almost. 

Ed.] nobody had ever ridden seven winners all in the same cart. Every horse he got on to 

he won with. So I write a perfectly accessible poem, hasn't got any loss of flow because of 

that, isn't compromised because of that. An exuberant little piece of excitement. And 

another one would be a lament for a critical match years ago, who missed a penalty […] 

everyone in Scotland was “agh!”, all at once, watching this, and the guy was usually 

reliable – Gary someone -, but he missed that one time and it was the most critical penalty 

he ever took probably, and he missed. And Scotland went out, against England. But, erm, 

that was fun doing that. 

OV: absolutely, if you go back to Pindar and his Olympic odes, or someone like – the 

best boxing writer as someone like Bert Sugar, who were incredibly lyrical in writing 

about boxing that blew any other writer out the water, seeing it as requiring this artistic 

language that he addressed to it - 

JB: well it did as, there's, two men going into a ring and going to do some brain damage or 

death, if you're talking about heavy weights anyway. I wrote about heavy weights anyway, 

boxing. Because it's – I love boxing actually, growing up -, I got wonderful lesson boxing 

when I was a student, from the guy that did the physical work, and he said “you like 

boxing don't you?” and he said “have you ever boxed at all?” and I said just a little bit, and 

he said “I've got this guy, he's Mexican, he needs a sparring partner and you're too big but 

I can't find somebody else” and I said well, i'm too big […] so much difference, just let him 

go in the ring with you, get some in, the kid was brilliant. He had me all over the place. 

But that was wonderful just to see the art, see it close up. And that's why some guys are 

great sparring partners and they've got the challenge and couldn't handle it, and they were 

here to witness this ritual, something greater than them. Some did, but I remember several 

Muhammad Ali sparring partners end up being champion for six months because they 

thought they could be Ali. And nobody could be Ali. Yeah, that's the way of celebrating. I 

think poets in history have celebrated everything from bull fighters to boxers to chocolate 

makers to cooks to a girl that you see walking along a street, and she's holding a red 

32

alloon, and it -it's a boy actually – and it slips out of his hand and goes up in the air, and 

the poet's watching from a cafe, and he's of course he sees the boy loosing this thing which 

is a trivial thing, but he's comparing it in his own mind with something he's lost which is 

different. That psychological perception. It enriches your life, to say you lose the love of 

your life, or your fortunate, or your political standing or whatever it is, and to you that's a 

a heartbreaking impossible moment, and you're sitting in a cafe and you've lost one of 

these things, and you see a kid lose a balloon. And the impulse is to say “oh, look at him 

making all the fuss about a balloon”. But somebody like him, in his mind, doesn't see this 

at all. It makes you, and your lost balloon and tragedy, the same thing because to the boy 

it's just heart-breaking. 

OV: it's when, as a reader, it's that empathy and it connects you 

JB: yeah, when I say that poetry makes nothing happen that's not true, because in that 

moment a poem makes something happen. It makes you see something in a larger a way. 

In a more inclusive way, a more democratic way. But also a more generous way in the end, 

you know. Because to acknowledge that, that changes. Everybody has first love and the 

loss of that first love, and you laugh at it when you're older, but if you know what it's like 

then to feel that heartbroken […] poetry always comes back to first love”. 

33

Pangs! by Robert Herbert McClean 

Published by Test Centre, 2015 

A Review – by O.V. 

I remember sitting in the boiling-away sunlight of a German city, on a balcony, talking 

about poetry with somebody better and more experienced than me. They said something 

along the lines of, “all poetry comes back to first love” (Ed. Above, yeah?) . I think I smiled 

and looked away as a furious dog chased a ball or something indistinct across the grass 

below. 

But maybe poetry doesn’t come back. Maybe it expands, like “creation” or the big bang 

and is, basically, in effect, an accumulation. When Shelley walked around the ruined, 

mildewed and probably stinking baths of Caracalla, he wrote a raw sonnet that was all 

about placement, emphasis. You’re in Shelley’s trip, strapped in, seeing the baths through 

his eyes. But what if you deny the principle of emphasis and precision? What if you 

abandon that illusion of control? 

“Pangs!” is all about that accumulation, that evaporating fuzziness. It is both pleasingly 

precise in its imagery, as well as daringly obtuse in its languages and sources and textures. 

This is the Katamari Damacy of poetry; a planet massing, drawing gas and light and fire 

and everything in toward its boiling heart and then exploding against the edge of a table. 

Urbanscapes; shopping trips (I think Aldi, I’m not sure); sex; porn; dancing; microwaves; 

lust; sneezing; CCTV; TV shows; god. This is modern life, and everything inside of it, 

everything that adheres to it or falls away. Despite how personal and fearless and 

shameless these images are (“I looked at myself poorly wrestle my flaccid member”), 

they’re also anchors for memory, for us. We see ourselves somewhere in their honesty; 

drugs, alcohol, falling in love, staring blankly into the sky, our head screaming. All of this 

is accompanied by traditional, sclerotic poetic motifs plunging into this new, malodorous 

34

pool, as “a moon affected by the tides” (“3.8″), howled at by a “mutant Alsatian” which 

had appeared earlier, before disappearing. Another component of this “whole life” seen 

passing by from a bus window. Each compressed prose poem rarely occupies ever more 

than a half of its page. But no rules seem to govern those poems that are long, and those 

short; only entropy, or energy, or fear? 

Brashly, excitedly, the collection reproduces the – or, at least, “a“, for this is still a singular 

voice – modern experience of notation, assertion, posturing, record, mask. McClean 

knowingly makes absurd and embarrassing claims, giving all of himself, before smiling 

sideways; is this a joke, a pretend of pretend? In “2.2” we’re told, “I probably got this voice 

from a movie I saw”. Not only the Americanised language, but the sort of coy, half-ironic 

admission which both exposes the poet to ridicule but also hints that this is in fact a boast. 

At what point must we be embarrassed, at what point proud? At what point should we be 

afraid? The poet-self addresses the narcissistic impulse to preserve and observe; 

“Everyone online is an artist these days“, before somehow leaping out of their own body, 

beyond the surface of the screen, to observe as “one gregariously laughs at me writing on 

their profile“. The poet is aware and “inundated” with their own performance, urging 

those who he imagines are his loves; “if my love stretches your dimples – choose it. You’ve 

the most beautiful eyes” (“3.13″). This is a poet conscious of how they are disemboweling 

the received legacies of the lyric voice, of the “Poet”, as “the lewd spoof of a skewed idyll” 

(“3.12″). We’re left prodding for clues, among the rubble, the jokes. You think about Hugh 

Cassons’s 1945 call for the war-bombed churches of London to become war memorials, as 

if through fragmentation and collapse we can find a new space for consolation and 

rebuilding, a preservation of their “beauty of strangeness“. 

Technically, McClean is deft and waxy in the way in which he utilises the form of the book 

and its setting. Crossed-out sentences both deface and yet highlight what has been 

removed; after all, we can still read the sentence behind the line. Everything is permanent 

now. The “online” cannot be erased; it is forever. Similarly, the use of numbered segments 

35

(“1.1″, “1.2”, “1.3”, etc.,) suggest the formation of a “record”, a form of self-curation that 

may either be terrifying or desirable. Is this the poet-self massing together the ephemera of 

their thoughts, loves, lives for public consumption, or is it a third-party’s assiduous and 

coherent record of that self, the passive net of surveillance which captures everything, and 

brings it together? It’s why you can’t escape this idea of expansion and contraction. The 

poems pulse in their language, but also through their form and the possibilities that this 

form raises. Test Centre’s handsome and pleasing and readable booklet only adds to this 

sense of flippability, parsing, of archive cards sorted together, referring to a universe of 

wunderkammer “stuff” existing beyond it; in a basement, behind glass cabinets, on 

bedroom floors, miles in the air. In dismissing the poetic, McClean also highlights those 

conditions which we believe it represents. It’s as if he has stripped out and wrecked-up the 

Mansion of the House of the Poets, only to throw all of its heavy velvet curtains, stuffed 

animal’s heads, dining services, bed spreads, antique linen, swords and cables and love 

letters back inside. A jumble that is also a totality. A different kind of coherence. 

Pangs! is effusive, bubbling, witty, mocking, sad. It is perhaps the modern equivalent of a 

lurid Mass Observation experiment. It’s a pornography about Soviet ideology meetings in 

which lapsed workers had to admit their ideological faux pas to their comrades. It is an oil 

portrait of the squirrel my friend once saw drinking gravy from a polystyrene box. Pangs! 

accumulates and reinvents itself. Naughty and nice. Violent. Scary. Darkly relatable. 

36

All Kinds of Old Feeling 

John Burnside 

Here in the shade 

Behind the house, protected from street noises, 

One can go over all kinds of old feeling, 

Throw some away, keep others. 

John Ashbery 

It’s nothing like the shadow you would leave 

on linen, blue-black 

pooling in the sheets 

like something from the early years 

of girlhood; 

but, sometimes, 

when the night is long with rain, 

that shade you were 

before you turned to salt 

is legible, like catspaws, through a film 

of linden dust and pollen on the dwindling 

lamplight, gold 

for minutes on my skin, 

before I wake again 

to dreamless day. 

37

Departing Rome 

Andrew Wells 

for Pascale, a friend I happened to see at the Pantheon, Rome, 

when we were both about to leave for England.- 

Pascale, will you go down to the fountain 

once again, before you leave for London 

tonight; will you back to the Pantheon, 

where, as evening falls, the violins 

play sadly for their final time this Autumn? 

I recognise the tune when a woman sings 

goodbye, and a slow instrument begins 

to move. And the whole crowd carries its hum. 

This is now the second coffee I’ve drained; 

I’m also returning home very soon, 

though nothing’s really waiting for me there 

at all. Safe journey, then, forget this square 

until you might come back. Anything gained 

is lost on landing; English rain hides the moon. 

38

Exile 

Nels Hanson 

My farming life is fading, memory 

bleached sky, no sun, old negative 

turning paler, near pure white now. 

In the Great Valley, San Joaquin, I 

saw Sierra Nevadas each day and 

people came to heal sick lungs. My 

grandfather’s father’s wagon near 

Fresno paused half an hour for one 

pronghorn herd to cross dirt road. 

I drank purest water from the well 

he dug. Farmer’s paradise, Garden 

in the Sun, it lasted just more than 

a century, alluvial rich soil, endless 

temperate growing season, rivers 

and tulle ponds, vast subterranean 

lake fed each spring by snowmelt. 

Will global warming kill us before 

high-tech wars, updated Crusades? 

Which catastrophe would be better 

for surviving flora, fauna that did 

no harm, valley kit fox, kangaroo 

rat hopping like kangaroo? Should 

I do more than do less wrong, stay 

silent, still, never stray five miles 

from the Pacific? All my days this 

39

shore is lovely, place surely good 

or better than on any planets our 

size though experts’ last estimates 

predict a trillion Earth-like worlds 

fill the universe. Do you care about 

them or their inhabitants and how 

they compare to us? What possible 

difference can it make, way we’ve 

become since Cain slew Abel, fled 

east of Eden to spoil these lands of 

Nod? If you know better please let 

me know. My name is in the book. 

I watch grey seabirds, blue waves 

depart, arrive, curve dolphins leap, 

a pattern perfect fifty million years. 

40

Island 

Ryan Van Winkle 

when the water flanked us 

and the rocks fell like boots 

i did not know how long 

our island would last 

or what colour your toes 

would appear to be 

when the windows opened 

your eyes went from green 

to hazel -- a complication 

a hammer drill, a firework 

when the tide flows out 

and the flashing lights crest 

over the hill i too will be easy, 

untangled, seen 

41

She 

Kelley Dalton 

Her feet split the pavement with each click of her heel 

Eyelashes twisted and bent 

Black clumpy matter 

She shifted her hips 

Scaling the streets of Montera 

With the sharp points of her scarlet stilettos 

Clucking at the men who walked by 

Pecking and prodding 

Passing the plastic 

Sex shops 

Her runway 

Her eyes split the gritty Madrid air 

Veiled within her skin 

The muse of the vile 

42

Catcher 

Hugh McMillan 

(In his log, D. A. Mowat, keeper 

at Killantringan Lighthouse, Wigtownshire, 

records counting 293 moths near his lamp 

on the night of 19th September 1913.) 

I imagine sailors 

watching the lamp's eye, 

envious as they creep 

along the breast of the sea 

like shadows. 

From this high place 

they are a plank's width 

from death, 

all questions 

drowned on their lips. 

I know: 

I've seen it. 

I am beyond marrying, 

watch moths instead of time, 

beating on the glass. At night 

I sit in the watchroom, 

43

throw my beam of light 

like a rope 

across the back of the ocean, 

and reel in hope after hope after hope. 

44

Inherent Vice 

Constantin Preda 

When P.T. Anderson filmed on 35 mm damaged stock, 

he knew exactly how to film the light, grainy texture of 

remembering, the threadbare quality of thought when 

it’s approaching things deeply known but unstated. How 

strangely familiar it all was, the brightness overcoming 

the edges, especially as the camera closes in towards the. 

Sea between two wooden huts, boats in the distance and 

a misty fuzziness to the blue; years ago, completely still, 

on a blistered photograph, with overstated happiness next 

to the child, the sun migraine bright, light like sandpaper. 

When P.T. Anderson filmed on 35 mm damaged stock, 

he knew the value of things that can be done only once, 

like memory, 

this dreamy indistinctness 

a thread we clutch 

as if now, of sculpted blue air. 

45

Li Bo Learns the Gentle Art of Disappearing 

Steve Klepatar 

We watch rabbits in my garden, 

how they scurry into brush 

at the slightest sound, fur and tails 

blending with shade and light. 

A mosquito bites his arm, flits 

off out of sight before his quick 

hand can slap it dead. 

As we sip our wine, the sun 

disappears slowly, in its showy way. 

“Watch,” he tells me, turning 

sideways in the growing dark. 

I do, and then I see it, how light 

bends around his slender form, 

how his bald spot deadens streetlamps. 

His shadow swells out of night 

until all I see is a raised glass, 

half full. Then it flickers and falls, 

a match held too long by a burning hand. 

46

Mother Roux 

Katarina Boudreaux 

Five deep, her skirts laden 

with the sweat of three hundred days, 

her hands glove bound 

with slick of salt, blood of life, 

she hears her people 

call names from the deep. 

Her face cracks 

six times with the lines 

of fish and shrimp 

that flow through 

her fingers,death by death; 

she sings songs 

to call the ancients. 

Spirits boot clad 

watch as her eyes 

look out to sea for one 

last breath of how the sun 

cries in pink over still waters. 

47

Three Bacchus poems 

Adam Warne 

The Curtain Rises 

Bacchus mounts the stage in the likeness of a boy peachy cheeked and primped with ivy a 

tight gold and purple bandage compressing his tits the confession of his body through 

decoration just for you and everyone he thrusts across the stage a dildo protruding from 

his earnest groin like your screaming mother's rolling pin in this body he could fall asleep 

next to anyone and the grin would be real he slings the shadow of his dildo across your 

face your father cracks his knuckles to remind you he's here to remind himself of his dead 

father rousing like a big squid in the sea of the skull all the cunts in the room are wet as 

rock pools the dildo rises through a clammy forest of kelp as Bacchus holds an apple to his 

dainty throat a red and bitten apple his mouth is red meat what manly eyes he has what 

manly whinnies randy like a billy goat you think fuck fuck fuck until your voice ejaculates 

one slow long sigh of fuck from the pit of your crotch to the tip of your tongue 

48

Encore 

Bacchus descends from the stage in the likeness of a girl her jaw is chiseled and cleft like 

an ice-shunting ship her carmine lips have a soft matte finish it is almost impossible to 

consider love was known before she makes certain each step jiggles her million dollar 

ass and loosens the pronouns which cling like leeches to your dank and dripping 

dreams the air conditioning has wheezed its last and in the jungle a prowling panther is 

an enduring style of lust with a finger shoved on your lips she whispers low in your ear 

a symbol of love between style and beauty a marlboro flaunts her summer drawl a voice 

which offers extreme comfort an acknowledged creator of palpitations and secrets her 

chest is flat and through her silk nighty her nipples sprout like rare and pulpy 

toadstools with long lasting hold on your attention as from between her smooth and 

burly legs she pulls out her throbbing heart takes a bite and spits it in your face 

49

Bacchus at the Tomb of Prosymnus 

Loss swells inside me, a black bubble between 

skin and bone. The moon is a snivelling oyster. 

The trees are granite obelisks. With the memory of your body, 

its blistered heels and tilted smile, its sonar pulse 

which fathomed the cryptic underworld, 

I plunge my hurt. 

I've made your cock from a fig tree. Oyster 

is a famous aphrodisiac and forests 

grow for lovers. Woodpeckers thrust through 

timber. A scared man has bark-marks 

etched on his arse. 

I jerk and quiver, hate myself like the moon 

hates itself like the planets are plump 

with self-loathing. 

This is the most romantic thing I will ever do. The end of it 

sticks out like a tail. I am animal 

and my animal blood weeps down the back 

of my reptile legs. I am unlaying 

an egg. There 

is nothing inside me. 

50

Minnows’ Ladder 

James Reidel 

Minnows’ Ladder— 

My name for a cascade and its pool, 

A bead along a feeder creek, 

(a blue hair on the county map), 

A landing in flat rock steps, 

Or broken locks leaking uphill for the green fingerlings that 

underpaint my reflection, 

Schooling in and out of a swirling eye that breaks the weave 

and this train, 

This carpet that sinks to the streambed, 

Forced pieces, 

That I name too—Autumn Fleet of Bur Oak Leaves. 

51

A Garden Man 

Will Moorfoot 

As recalled by he who was in mourning. 

I: 

Our cottage was one surrounded by wood 

For he who had died loved the murmur of willows, 

And having left them just before dawn, 

We went about the cooling rooms, 

Opening up the windows and doors 

To let the pale house feel 

The warm buzzings of the garden. 

From a hidden vale no doubt He heard 

That uncle had died. No doubt He heard 

From a flower or bird in that secretive vale. 

For He came from the woods, deep in the woods 

The Garden Man came from the old misted woods 

To be in the garden that uncle had loved. 

Blue and green fluttered about the hydrangeas 

And while thinking about finality 

I saw Him 

Through a thin canopy of vine and rose. 

One ephemeral glimmer 

Revealed what could never be known: 

The long spirit form of the Garden Man. 

52

Not that I saw Him arrive or leave, 

But the old house lost its dead vacancy 

And dandelion orbs waltzed through and about 

The gaunt corridors like slow woodland ghosts 

Until the sun fell faint on the grass 

And the crescent moon burned softly 

Like a scythe on the hollows. 

Through that coming of darken hours 

The wind played notes of starlight and elm 

As the Garden Man changed in moon-shade, 

For the woodland called and He grew faint. 

On the garden, in the cottage, 

There hummed but His whisper. 

II: 

Morning spiralled out from the flower heads 

And he who had touched the garden was gone 

And He of the deep meadow woods was a dream; 

Back through the forest He must have flown. 

The Garden Man comes and the Garden Man goes. 

53

The Men's League 

Shaun Turner 

A quarter mile past the McDonalds, past the laundromat and the bowling alley and 

the corner gas station, the road turns onto a side street that soon bleeds into countryside. 

At first trailers and brush cluster between hardwood trees, then the rolling green hills 

dotted with black cows gives way to the grown-over farm, built in to a curve of the 

highway. 

The men park haphazard around a black barn strewn with rusted tin and old sheet 

aluminum. They enter through its wooden doors. Some of the men remove their sports 

coats and hang them over a half-wall fence that pens a stack of old tobacco sticks that were 

burled forty years ago—four foot lengths of oak with sharp ends. Other men hoist sixpacks 

of beer and line them up against one wall. 

The farm belongs to one of the men who didn't grow up in town, David Nettles—a 

remnant from his wife's father's family. Behind the barn, kudzu stretches about two 

thousand feet, down into a hollow. 

David Nettles once had someone come out to test the soil once, and the surveyor 

said if he ever cleared the kudzu he could grow just about anything down there. 

David Nettles unbuttons his shirt and says, “Up north we paint our barns white.” 

Ken Pervis, the native, only chews tobacco around the other men, and he lets a 

stream of amber slide into a stained Pepsi can. 

He'd heard this barn talk before. 

“Around here we paint the barns black,” Ken Pervis says. “Helps the tobacco sweat. 

That's why this one's black. Used to grow tobacco here.” 

“Who's turn is it tonight?” David Nettles picks out a sharp-looking stick and draws 

a crude circle in the middle of the barn, its dirt floor. 

“Anybody want a go?” Ken Pervis spits into his can. 

One of the men, a newer one who works in Accounts Receiving down at the bread 

54

factory, lights a cigarette. “I'm in, after I smoke.” 

Ken goes for a beer, the meat of his palm strangling a longneck. 

David Nettles throws his tobacco stick back into the pen, making too loud a clatter, 

and Ken and some of the men look over at him. 

“What the hell are you all looking at?” David Nettles says. “Fuck, I guess I'm in, 

too.” 

David Nettles and the man from Accounts Receiving walk to the center of the circle, 

bare-chested. Accounts Receiving flicks his cigarette butt onto the dirt in one quick 

motion. 

Ken Pervis cracks open a beer and watches silent as the two men began to circle 

each other. 

The other men lean quiet against the walls of the old barn at first, but as 

the noise and yelling grow louder, the other men move in closer and 

closer and closer. 

55

Cold Snap 

Finola Scott 

And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office 

on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at noon today. 

With ghostly hands in my kitchen 

I measure out yeast, water, flour and 

dust the board remembering 

Mammy’s farls yellow buttered. 

Southwest Iceland gale 8 to storm 10, 

veering west, severe gale 9 to violent storm 11. 

Snowdrops shake their heads 

braving Edinburgh’s haar. 

Steam boils from the kettle 

Wersh blackberry jam teases memories. 

Malin, Irish Sea ,Rockall, North 7 to severe gale 9. Heavy snow 

showers. Good, becoming poor in showers. Moderate icing. 

My mind snags on ‘Irish Sea’ and I think 

of you throwing a coat over your apron 

popping out for more flour, reckless 

on sudden ice. Maybe I’ll call 

to warn you. 

I recall nights tucked up in berths 

on lit-up ferries ploughing past 

Paddy’s Milestone 

Atttention all shipping the following gale warning has been issued 

56

at 1406 today. Northwest gale 8 to storm 10, expected soon. 

up Belfast Lough to rest 

in Titanic’s cradle. Then I remember 

the biting chill at your funeral. 

57

Alhambra 

Finola Scott 

At ease he whistles perches 

on the roof’s apex - burnt orange 

sizzles in sun’s glare 

makes & mends 

he juggles light and worn 

tiles, nails firm the new 

young muscles flex shivering 

silken flesh 

A boy with the face 

of Andalusia walks 

tip-toe tightroped 

between air 

and earth 

then and now 

man and child. 

58

The Organ Recital 

Simon Ward 

They don't speak, content with the sounds of a city at peace. Michelle has the image of 

an allotment in her mind, the marrows ripe for picking. Aaron thinks of war and how 

freedom can be compromised. It's a quiet morning in Schöneberg and the onset of spring. 

“I found this before,” he says, reaching for his pocket. “Do you know what it is?” 

He opens his fist. On his palm rests a dried, brown seedpod with coarse tendrils. 

“Clematis,” she says, as he drops it in her hand, “it's from a vine. Some of them have 

bluish-purple flowers but this one's not so nice. It grows over everything and uproots all 

the other plants. They're hard to pull up.” 

“What it's called?” he asks. 

“Old man's beard,” she answers. 

“Ah, I can see that,” he says, putting his arm around her. “Not the best thing to bring 

you then.” 

“No, it's nice babe,” she tells him, placing the pod in her pocket. 

After crossing the lights, they stop at the corner of the street. He kisses her neck. She 

walks ahead and asks directions. 

Further down the road, past closed shops and offices, they spot the top of a spire. A bell 

rings at steady intervals. They quicken their pace. 

Attached to the right-hand side of the church is a concrete tower, holding several bells 

59

shown through metal grates. The front is shaped like a scalene triangle and the roof 

ascends gradually to a peak at the back, under dark slats. A notice board confirms the 

address. 

Behind a wrought iron fence covered in wisteria, they walk up steps. Outside the door, 

they switch off their mobiles and compose themselves before entering. 

Daylight envelops the cement space through a huge glass wall on the righthand side. 

The sparse interior has a mild austerity. 

Above the open chancel, stained glass shines down on a black steel pulpit. The alter, a 

slab of concrete, is draped in an opal blue cloth. Two poles welded into crosses stand 

beside it. 

They walk the stone floor towards two sections of pews, upon which are seated a dozen 

people in silence. One area enclosed. The other exposed. 

Secluded in a balcony, above the entrance, is the organ. 

At a shaded spot in the back, they take a seat. He looks at her and she meets his eyes. 

Thanks shown in their shared expression. The bell stops. 

Brass pipes begin to boom a solemn melody that builds and falls along low notes in 

progressively swifter motions. The foot pedals added with a stern pulse. 

When the high notes join, the tempo mounts and a French horn signals a compliment to 

the bass. The arrangement leads their thoughts along, as they survey the room. 

At the far side, Aaron notices a single blind arcade the shape of a sealed door. To him, it 

being sealed implies that it can, and should, be opened. It makes him consider the 

Christian myth in terms of its symbols, whilst he and interprets the meaning of the 

60

church's décor. 

Between the organ and the stained glass is a metal lamp resembling a longboat. The 

lower section is wider than the upper. Its front aimed at the stained glass. Following this 

line, the room seems to imitate the bow of a boat with a copper cross its figurehead. 

Aaron recalls the story of the ark, and how it protected all forms of life during a purge. 

Another word for a boat comes to mind: a vessel. The more he thinks of it, the clearer it 

seems that the parable of Noah's ark and the church itself are metaphors for the body as a 

vessel for the soul. The immaterial essence supposed to withstand all trails, including 

death. 

He wonders how many other religions have expressed a similar idea in a different 

context, and if any would continue to do so once this building has been demolished, 

buried by debris, or fallen to ruin. Its hidden message further obscured. 

Two grey haired men in black robes sit near the front of the opposite pew. The youngest 

is somewhere in his late sixties and has thinning hair. The eldest is a generation older and 

sits hunched, twisting the end of his beard. 

With the back of his robe trailing, the youngest moves along the pew and walks to the 

front. 

As the composition trails off, the horn dies in faint degrees. 

“Guten Morgen, Brüder und Schwestern,” the priest begins. 

Small circle glasses with white metal frames rest on the middle of his nose. The sun 

reflected on his forehead. 

When he speaks, he looks at each member of the audience in turn. His voice precise and 

61

deliberate. 

“Was ist Gottes Wille für uns?,” he asks. 

Michelle understands German, having lived in Berlin for longer than Aaron. To him, the 

exact meaning of the sermon is lost, but the tone of the speech is soothing, the metre 

hypnotic. Words he knows break through the haze like the tap of a typewriter hitting the 

end of a line. 

Beyond this, Aaron reflects upon the nature of the Christianity: the belief in a cause 

higher than all life, and in a space reserved for humans besides those that have gone and 

will come. A gentle hum with a soft hue awaiting the subservient, and a cold fire for those 

that have fallen back into sin or disbelief. Never to ascend or know true love: the love of an 

artist for clay. 

A red Bible is laid open upon a chair. Its cover is the colour of clotted blood, and it 

triggers a series of thoughts relating to faith: faith in self-sacrifice, and in the return of a 

saviour; faith in that all life is predetermined, and passes beyond a spectral sphere into 

God: the ever present, ever knowing, all powerful. A shield for pain, a reassurance for loss. 

Michelle toys with the seed in her pocket and looks through the glass wall, watching 

clouds thin out and break away. 

The congregation stand with pamphlets in their hands. 

From on high, a man sings in a baritone so rich that it could come from the bottom of a 

well or an abandoned barracks. 

“Gott, komm vom Himmel her ab,” he sings. 

The organ joins. The congregation follows. Their voices almost a singular sound. 

62

“Michelle,” he whispers, ”did you get one?” 

“No,” she answers, ”just make it up.” 

They follow the scale and improvise, missing the changes but catching the flow. 

Michelle's voice is light and endearing. He watches her lips move, captivated by the small 

changes in their position while curved into an O. She notices, looks at him and tilts her 

head. Her eyes widen as she parodies an innocent, chaste expression. 

The hymn drops steadily with ominous tones. Ending with the words ”du bist unser 

Heil.” 

As the elder priest hobbles to the front, the horn follows his steps. He takes the Bible off 

the chair, stands behind the pulpit and begins to speak. The sound of his cheeks sucked 

against his gums heard in his words. 

“Alkohol,” he says, turning both his palms upwards. “Trinken nur aus einem Glas, zu 

viel wird irgendeine Hilfe überhaupt nicht.” 

“What did he say?” Aaron asks Michelle. 

“That too much alcohol won't do you any good, and not to drink it from the bottle,” she 

answers. 

He nods in agreement. 

Michelle raises her eyebrows, mirroring his response. 

The priest speaks for longer now, constantly repeating the words alcohol and “nein.” 

Aaron zones out. 

It dawns on him that he's barely thought about Michelle or what she might be thinking. 

He tries to place himself inside her and imagine what her response to the church is. The 

63

lines between his thoughts and hers muddled. His answers lacking. 

As this failure grows wider, he feels convinced that it's unhealthy to try and secondguess 

her. Then, in full cycle, he wonders if his reflections about the church and his love 

reveal any truth, or if he's simply more concerned with himself, and has a tendency to 

overanalyse. 

The initial point becomes tiresome. His vision stained from staring at the window. 

“Er gab dir den Wille zu wählen,” says the priest. 

“He gave you the will to choose,” says Michelle, leaning in. 

“Freiheit durch Gnade oder Knechtschaft durch Laster,” he says. 

“Freedom through grace or bondage through vice,” she says. 

“Was wirst du tun?” he says, slowing towards the end. 

“What does that mean?” Aaron asks. 

“What will you do?” she answers. 

The congregation stand to recite the Lord's Prayer. Aaron recounts the lines from 

childhood, mumbling those jumbled, unaware of his lovers gaze. 

During a closing hymn, the senior priest walks around with a collection plate. Michelle 

and Aaron root for change and drop several coins. 

With the service over, they prepare to leave. 

While they pass, those stood chatting in the isle turn to say “Auf Wiedersehen.” 

The couple say the same. The sun on their faces, as they exit the church. 

64

Contributors 

KATARINA BOUDREAUX is a writer, musician, composer, tango dancer, and teacher - a 

shaper of word, sound, and mind. She recently returned to New Orleans after residing in 

Texas, Connecticut, and New York. New work is forthcoming in Blue Skirt Productions 

and Hermeneutic Chaos. 

KELLEY DALTON is a freshman at Colgate University, who plans on majoring in 

International Relations with a minor in Spanish. She is a recipient of The Beth Community 

Service Award from my high school, and was the president of the Peer Mentorship 

program in her school, and a leader in a contemporary dance group, Cedar Street 

Company. She is currently enrolled in a creative writing class and has been writing for a 

few years now. 

NELS HANSON is a writer whose fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James 

D. Phelan Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in 2010, 12, and 2014. Poems appeared 

in Word Riot, Oklahoma Review, Pacific Review and other magazines and received 

Sharkpack Review Annual’s 2014 Prospero Prize and a 2014 Pushcart nomination. 

STEVE KLEPETAR's work has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and 

Best of the Net. His latest collections include Speaking to the Field Mice (Sweatshoppe 

Publications), Blue Season (with Joseph Lisowski, mgv2>publishing), My Son Writes a 

Report on the Warsaw Ghetto (Flutter Press), and Return of the Bride of Frankenstein 

(Kind of a Hurricane Press). 

HUGH McMILLAN is a poet from South West Scotland. 

WILL MOORFOOT is an aspiring writer of fiction and poetry. He lives in North 

Norfolk and is hoping to study Philosophy next year at University. 

65

CONSTANTIN PREDA is a 29 year old, London based poet, who has been writing in 

English for the last four years. When inspiration eludes him he spends his time translating 

from Romanian, focusing on Nichita Stanescu and Lucian Blaga and whatever is left of his 

day, being envious of Nabokov. His work has appeared in "Ink, Sweat and Tears", “The 

Cadaverine”, “Inky Needles” and “POEM Magazine" amongst others. 

JAMES REIDEL’s most recent book of poetry is Jim’s Book (Black Lawrence, 2014). He is 

also the author of another collection, My Window Seat for Arlena Twigg (Black Lawrence, 

2006). This spring, he published a selection of dramolettes (short plays) translated from the 

German of Robert Walser, Fairy Tales (with Daniele Pantano, New Directions, 2015) and a 

translation of Georg Trakl’s first book, Poems (1913; Seagull Books, 2015). He is also the 

author of a biography of the poet Weldon Kees, Vanished Act (University of Nebraska 

Press, 2003). James is currently working on a number of books, including a collection of 

prose poems. 

FINOLA SCOTT A slam-winning granny, Finola Scott has recently returned to Glasgow 

after a few years in Edinburgh. Matthew Hollis’s words ‘Poetry is …a kind of leaving of notes 

for another to find’ encourage her to examine her life and to reflect on society. Her poems 

and short stories appear in a wide range of magazines, anthologies and zines. She enjoys 

performance poetry, finding the writing community very welcoming. Her hobbies are 

chocolate cake, jumping waves, laughing with friends, tickling grandbabies. She can be 

heard in a pub near you! 

SHAUN TURNER is a 3rd-year MFA student at West Virginia University and assistant 

editor-in-chief for the Cheat River Review. His work can or will be found at The Southwest 

Review, Tin House's Flash Fridays, and Flyleaf, among others. His first chapbook, "The 

Lawless River" will be published by Red Bird Chapbooks in Summer/Fall 2015. 

66

RYAN VAN WINKLE is a poet, live artist, podcaster and critic living in Edinburgh. His 

poems have appeared in New Writing Scotland, The Prairie Schooner and The American 

Poetry. His second collection, The Good Dark, was published in 2015 by Penned in the 

Margins. 

SIMON WARD is a writer from Liverpool, based in Liverpool. He studied Critical Fine 

Art Practice at the University of Brighton and graduated in 2011 with a first-class honours 

degree. The following year, he moved to Berlin. His literature has been published in 

SAND, The Reader Berlin, Offline Samizdat and Yorkshire Art Journal. He also writes 

reviews of exhibitions for Corridor8, and book reviews for TheSourcerer.net. As well as 

writing, he plays the autoharp and sings. In 2015, he attended the Le CouveNt grant 

program in Auzits, Southern France. As one of their laureates, he wrote a collection of 

modern fables and the first draft of his debut novel. Currently, he is studying a part-time 

MA in Writing at John Moores University. 

ADAM WARNE is a graduate of UEA’ s Creative Writing MA. He has had poems in 

various places including Bad Robot, Antiphon, Ink Sweat and Tears and The Rialto. He is 

currently based in Norwich, working in a cinema by day, reading Veronica Forrest- 

Thomson by night. 

ANDREW WELLS is a writer and a student at UEA. His work has been published, or is 

forthcoming, in HARK Magazine, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Cadaverine, Cyberhex, and 

Elbow Room, among others. In 2015 he was commended in the Tower Poetry Prize. He 

takes his coffee black with no sugar, and is constantly listening to Hurray for the Riff Raff, 

Dave Van Ronk, and Tom Waits. He is the editor of Haverthorn Magazine. 

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“The Death Issue” December 2015 1

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