Four Books from Flarestack Poetry.
Charles Johnson’s publishing house Flarestack have been producing collections by new poets since 1995. With a back-to-basics kitchen sink and staples approach to publishing, Flarestack has nevertheless had the knack of searching out and publishing high-quality writing.
Of all four books, perhaps David Hart’s Work, the Work is the most impressive. A sustained meditation upon Beethoven’s final piano sonata, is also by far the most beautifully produced of the four books. Everything about this book bespeaks care, from the elegant simplicity of the design to the careful patience of the poem itself. In his author’s note, David Hart writes of the poem as ‘the trace of a mouse that might have run across the floor of [Beethoven’s] work room, a mouse that might have tried to pause and listen and patter its little feet,’ to which one can only reply that Hart is one hell of a mouse, and not one much given to pattering. Work, the Work is a tumultuous poem, lurching from sharply-honed images to the rhythmic chants of, for example,
Ill-begotten, woe-begotten –
I, Fate-heavy fan Bloat-hoofy
fin Bait-heaving glum Brute-hooven
At the fortepiano Bleat-heaving bait-heavy beat-heaving. I am
Bleat-hum-hymn Bait-bleating Earwig Loudwig van Brute-heaving…
This is a poem to be read out loud, a poem that you can relish upon the tongue; and it is here, in the music of the thing, that the poem truly comes to life and springs from the page: one suspects that the mouse has learned more from the musician than he is prepared admit. The book is available in two editions. The standard edition is £4.50, and there is also a limited collector’s edition, signed by the author, which will set you back £15.
Christine Coleman’s Single Travellers is a very different work. Coleman’s poetry is frequently built around named landmarks of the natural world: privet, sycamore, anemones, bluebells, birches. But there are more visceral undercurrents here too, from the blood-and-feathers earthiness of Daedalus to the near-transformation into a bear of her Goldilocks:
She has a baby now, and her broken sleep is invaded
by bears again – their coarse dark fur
smelling of resin and fungus.
Sometimes she wakes with honey in her throat
hands as cumbersome as boxing gloves
flat white nails thickened to ebony.
When she slides from the bed
it seems natural as breathing
to pad across the carpet on all fours…
Voiceprints is a collection of poems from inktank, who are Jo Bell, Julie Boden, Connie Ramsay Bott, Katrina Goldsmith, Hazell Hills, Sue Sabbagh, Judy Tweddle, Catherine Whittaker and Linda Williams. This collection is, perhaps necessarily, much more of a rag-bag than the other books, and looks more hastily put together. It is not clear whether, for example, Hazell Hills’s poem on page 34 is meant to have a space where the title should be, nor why the collection should be printed in several different fonts. Nevertheless, despite looking a little rough and ready, there are some good poems here. Jo Bell’s contributions are precise and simple, in the best sense. Meanwhile in Judy Tweedle’s poems there are some curiously startling images.
Finally, Flarestack have reissued Charles Johnson’s 1995 collection, A Box of Professional Secrets, the book that launched the press ten years ago. Peter Mortimer is quoted on the back as complaining, ‘It’s all rather tentative, Charles,’ and indeed it is. There is a delicacy to these poems, a kind of shimmer of possibility. In Commedia: Life as panto, we read, ‘Scenes / of transformation may follow’, whilst on the opposite page we find, ‘The Calendar. I suppose I’m waiting.’ These poems are filled with maybes and supposes and coulds and suspicions and perhapses. They occupy a space that is well summed up by the final line of Garden Construction: ‘The flowers tremble a moment before it rains.’
These books are the testament to ten years of hard work, both in writing and in seeking out and publishing excellent new poetry. It is to be hoped that the next ten years are every bit as rich.
Flarestack Publishing: Email cannula.dementia@virgin.net
8 Abbot’s Way, Pilton, Somerset, BA4 4BN