Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Boy’

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He closes his eyes while, around his head,
like playground shouts, a flock of angry birds
explodes. He feels an overwhelming dread,
remembering his irate father’s words
and what the words preceded: those first blows
that pummelled his thin shoulders and his ears,
left him confused and with a bloody nose,
his much-loved, navy T-shirt stained with tears.
He blinks, refocuses. The birds have gone.
And, looking at his wristwatch, he can see
hours have slipped by like buses missed. A pawn
on life’s great chessboard, he stands helplessly.
Time flows around him. In it he will grow
to strength while it diminishes his foe.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “I’ve written a great deal of verse over the years, much of which I’d happily disown, but amidst that unruly scrub-grass a few flowers have blossomed. The bouquet presented here comprises a mixture of formal and informal verse, including a number of older poems that have appeared elsewhere: there are also several more recently written ones that have not previously been published.

          “The Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, is quoted as saying: ‘a poet’s autobiography is his poetry’ and that may be true to a degree but let’s not forget that poetry is a creative art, a flight of fantasy, therefore poems that, at first glance, may appear to be autobiographical will almost certainly have been embellished by the writer’s imagination.

          “The selection leans strongly towards rhyming verse: my preference, despite the fact it seems to have fallen from favour in the world of modern poetry. What odds? I’ve never been one to run with the pack.”

‘Boy’ was published in The High Window.

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on

Facebook https://www.facebook.com richard.fleming.92102564/

or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com

*****

Photo: Boy Walking Contraluz by Wilfredor, Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication

Odd poem: T.S. Eliot, ‘Interlude: in a Bar’

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Across the room the shifting smoke
Settles around the forms that pass
Pass through or clog the brain;
Across the floors that soak
The dregs from broken glass

The walls fling back the scattered streams
Of life that seems
Visionary, and yet hard;
Immediate, and far;
But hard…
Broken and scarred
Like dirty broken finger nails
Tapping the bar.

*****

It’s very Eliot, isn’t it! A poem written in pencil in his early Notebook; dated provisionally to the years immediately before the publication of Prufrock in 1917, the Notebook is wryly headed ‘Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot’. The near 100 pages of the Notebook, with the twice as many pages of Christopher Ricks’ notes on the poems, comprise the bulk of the material in ‘T.S. Eliot – Inventions of the March Hare – Poems 1909-1917’.

Ricks’ nine comments on this poem include pointing out the similarity of the line
‘Like dirty broken finger nails’
to the passage towards the end of The Waste Land:
‘On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.’

fwiw

Photo: “Lucky Strike.” by H.Robertson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Armand d’Artois,’Oxen’, tr. John Gallas

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Under a porridge heaven (scourged with black,
and prickly-pale as sackcloth) drear and dun,
the road lays down its cobbles, mirrored slick
with recent rain and half a sickened sun.

A passer-by or two. Not noticing
the shambling creatures going to their deaths.
A troop of oxen, slipping on the slime,
heading for the abbatoir. Their breaths

resigned and patient; runny eyes that see
the emerald grass, the clear, bright streams, the fields,
the apple-blossomed ease of Normandy.

Silver-drooling snouts. Sometimes a snort
or sniff. But nothing more. Remembering
the sea. A passing smell. A passing thought.

*****

John Gallas writes: “I love ‘Oxen’, a little gem you find sometimes when translating from periodical/magazine contributions that mostly sank without trace over time. I’d be delighted. It’s from ‘La Parnasse contemporain’ (only ever 3 editions – 1866, 71 and 76).”

Armand d’Artois (1788 – 1867) was a French playwright and librettist. Here is the original:

LES BŒUFS

Sous un ciel bas, d’un blanc triste, teinté de noir,
Qui prend l’aspect blafard et morne d’un cilice,
La rue étend au loin son pavé rond et lisse
Que l’averse a rendu luisant comme un miroir.

Quelques passants s’en vont, flanant sur le trottoir,
Sans voir ces condamnés qui marchent au supplice :
Des troupeaux de bœufs, dont le pied trébuche et glisse
Sur le chemin qui mène au sanglant abattoir.

Et dans les yeux rêveurs de ces bêtes superbes
Sont encor peints les clairs ruisseaux, les hautes herbes
Et les pommiers en fleur du gras pays normand.

La bave en fils d’argent tombe de leurs narines,
Et parfois l’un d’entre eux renifle longuement,
Comme au ressouvenir d’âcres senteurs marines.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.

“Herd of Cattle on Red Dirt Road, Vietnam” by AdamCohn is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Nobel Prize Disappointment goes to Anne Carson

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So the Nobel Prize (good) for Literature (good) goes to a Canadian (good) “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” That’s all very well… Then the Nobel Committee should create a new category for awarding the Literature Prize to Anne Carson, because if her work isn’t a novel, short story or memoir, it certainly isn’t poetry either. Bold, inventive, playful, new forms – perhaps. But in any way comparable to Kipling, Yeats, Eliot or Walcott? Nope. She has created new (perhaps) forms for contemporary literature, but what I’ve read of hers isn’t poetry. Reuters says she blends verse with (whatever), but I haven’t found any verse of hers, nothing that is immediately word-for-word memorable. There may be some. If there is, it’s not prominent. As The Hindu editorialised, “The Academy has chosen a writer who belongs in no category in particular.”

Oh well. Maybe she got the prize for Icelandic-Canadian dual citizenship? Or translations of Sappho?

So it goes. There’s always next year.

“Is that all there is.” by Onlysilence is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Unforgettable nonsense: Mervyn Peake, ‘Lean Sideways on the Wind’

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Lean sideways on the wind, and if it bears
Your weight, you are a daughter of the Dawn —
If not, pick up your carcass, dry your tears,
Brush down your dress — for that sweet elfin horn

You thought you heard was from no fairyland —
Rather it flooded through the kitchen floor,
From where your Uncle Eustace and his band
Of flautists turn my cellar, more and more

Into a place of hollow and decay:
That is my theory, darling, anyway.

*****

Another one of Mervyn Peake‘s poems from ‘A Book of Nonsense’, collected by his widow Maeve Gilmore. He was casually proficient with iambic pentameter — there are several passages in Titus Groan, the first of his Gormenghast books, where several lines of iambics are unobtrusively buried in the text, to be noticed only by slow readers like myself. Asking Quill, my ChatGPT, about this, I get:

Yes—there is published criticism addressing exactly this. The most directly relevant piece I found is R. W. (Robert) Maslen’s “Mervyn Peake, the Poet of Gormenghast,” in Miracle Enough: Papers on the Works of Mervyn Peake, edited by G. Peter Winnington (2013), pp. 127–138. Browse by Glasgow Author

You can read it free here: Mervyn Peake: The Poet of Gormenghast.

Maslen identifies three examples particularly relevant to your observation:

The final chapter: successive pentameters give the closing predictions an oracular quality, anticipating the sequel’s violence and upheaval.

The fight in the Hall of Spiders: the narration moves into iambic pentameter as the action takes on an epic character. Sepulchrave’s fragmented speech catches the same rhythm, associating his madness with Shakespearean tragedy.

Titus’s christening: the ritual text contains blank verse printed as prose—very much the unobtrusive insertion you describe.

*****

“Windy skirt” by Paula Satijn is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Unforgettable nonsense: Mervyn Peake, ‘I Cannot Give the Reasons’

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I cannot give the reasons,
I only sing the tunes:
the sadness of the seasons
the madness of the moons.

I cannot be didactic
or lucid, but I can
be quite obscure and practic-
ally marzipan

In gorgery and gushness
and all that’s squishified.
My voice has all the lushness
of what I can’t abide

And yet it has a beauty
most proud and terrible
denied to those whose duty
is to be cerebral.

Among the antlered mountains
I make my viscous way
and watch the sepia fountains
throw up their lime-green spray.

*****

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) is now best known for his Gormenghast novels, but he was first known as a British artist, and his works are in the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives. His poetry is very varied, and much of it is nonsense on the surface but with interesting depth. Peake was born in China, joining the list of foreign-born British-educated novelists that includes Kipling, Tolkien and Ishiguro.

As is useful for artists, he seems to have had extremely strong visualisation and a photographic memory. Fifty years ago in British Columbia I met a woman (whose name I don’t recall) who had known Peake as a youth. Apparently he particularly liked Kipling’s novel ‘Stalky & Co’ and knew it by heart. He handed her the copy he carried and told her to choose a page: she gave him the page number, and he then recited it from the top down.

“Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake” by Eckhart Public Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Amit Majmudar, ‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’

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it doesn’t mean two shlubs like you and me
would be in Eden with them. God knows I
am partial to a slice of apple pie
and grew up filching off a neighbor’s tree
the peaches he intended for his nieces.
How many generations would the ruse
have lasted? Theologians float their theses,
but sin’s a firecracker with a fuse

that heaven’s ghostly glow can light as well
as any spark that fountained out of hell.
Can’t speak for you, though I suspect I do,
I’d grow so bored, I’d climb the wall with you:
A derring-duo, deathlessness-defying,
we’d sneak out into all that lively dying.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “If Eve and Adam Never Fell” continues a long tradition for me. For a reason unknown to me, I have written obsessively for decades about the fall from the garden of Eden, in fact by sheer volume of work it comes in third behind the Ramayana story and the 1947 Partition of India among my recurrent themes. “Subtle Anatomy,” for example, is one of my first ever published poems, way back in 1999:

Subtle Anatomy
by Amit Majmudar

An arm is the spine of an angel wing,
cracked at the elbow. Webbed for gliding once,
we could leap off of cliff or bridge or tower
and saw no problem with a leap of faith.
What happened to it? Ask the suicide.
After the battle in heaven, the good angels,
precursors to the Turks who shamed their captives,
carved and carted off those wings—atrocious—
a mound of wings more chilling than a mound
of skulls: in this case, the contributors
could watch the ground tumor swell. So you see
we have some angel in us, even if
it’s the bedeviled kind, stripped of its wings
like a drunk pilot, out of service.

Before Eve met the serpent, she was fleshier
than even Rubens’s palette could stomach
and spineless, literally. The serpent
dove in her through the nest-hole anus
until the scorpion-stinger coccyx
slurped in too, and she sheathed him whole.
He straightened her, the breath in a balloon,
into this human posture of rebellion,
this upright and bipedal challenge.
Settled, the serpent sent nerves everywhere,
claiming each inch of her with senses.
Not with an apple but an apple’s taste
the serpent ruined her, fossilizing
to the vertebral column. So you see
we have some devil in us too
and dead center at that
commanding everything.

previously published in The Journal of the AMA

*****

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and Things My Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026). His forthcoming book is a novel, Cervantes in Chains (Slant Books, 2027).

‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’ was first published in The Sonneteer

Illustration: RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light

G.K. Chesterton, ‘The Logical Vegetarian’

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You will find me drinking rum,
Like a sailor in a slum,
You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian.
You will find me drinking gin
In the lowest kind of inn,
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.

So I cleared the inn of wine,
And I tried to climb the sign,
And I tried to hail the constable as “Marion.”
But he said I couldn’t speak,
And he bowled me to the Beak
Because I was a Happy Vegetarian.

(…)

No more the milk of cows
Shall pollute my private house
Than the milk of the wild mares of the Barbarian;
I will stick to port and sherry,
For they are so very, very,
So very, very, very, Vegetarian.

*****

G.K. Chesterton was an English author with a good sense of humour and a good turn of phrase. He was a loudly committed Roman Catholic, and combined a selective love of the Old Testament with a strong antisemitic streak – illogical perhaps, but not unknown among Christians; and therefore I have omitted part of the poem because of content that detracts from the joy of the piece.

‘The Logical Vegetarian’ appeared first in The Flying Inn (1914), a satirical novel in which Chesterton railed against what he saw as dreary and oppressive modernity; and it was reprinted in Wine, Water, and Song.

Illustration: G.K. Chesterton by RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light

Bartolomeo Dotti, ‘Abortion in a Flask’, tr. John Gallas

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To Giacopo Grandis, doctor and anatomist

Dear Giacopo, this sad, obscene disaster,
forever motherless, and piped of breath,
if ever it was living, died too soon,
and goes untimely to the feast of death.
And are the Humours of its tiny tub
sweet milk, or tears? For sure, its mother’s womb,
its first and living globe, was made of flesh,
and not the glass that rounds it in this tomb.
The embryo is dead: long live the corse.
Its promised Immortality cut short,
it floats in blood, aborted, come to naught.
O Man! O Slab Professors! Learn perforce
that this is Woman’s flesh and blood: more sweet,
more frail than glass; less strong than aquavit.

*****

John Gallas writes: “The ‘Abortion’ poem by Bartolomeo Dotti (1651-1713) is part of a work in progress (a History of Italy in Poems – featuring not the Great Monuments but the lesser poets from the 1st poem in Italian up to a poet b.1935). If you ever want any more, there’s 84. At least 60 rhyme and bounce.”

VII
L’ABORTO NELL’AMPOLLA
A Giacopo Grandis, fisico e anatomico

     Questo, Giacopo mio, sconcio funesto
cui diè morto natale il sen materno,
se maturo nascea, moria ben presto,
e voi d’intempestivo il fèste eterno.
     Non so se dolce latte o pianto mesto
gli sia di quel cristal l’umore interno;
so ben che l’alvo suo fu come questo,
poi ch’utero da vetro io non discerno.
     Vive quasi per voi chi per sé langue;
embrïone morì, scheletro nacque,
fatto parto immortal d’aborto essangue.
     Uomo, impara! Insegnarti al Grandi piacque
che sia ventre di donna e maschio sangue
piú fral del vetro e men vital de l’acque.

There is a brief outline of Dotti’s turbulent life here.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  


Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Spring and Fall: To a Young Child’

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Márgarét, are you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

*****

It’s just that time of year, isn’t it.

“leaving” by john curley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.