Opening Line, ed. Aaron Kent (40pp, £3.99, Broken Sleep Books)
Broken Sleep’s Opening Line is subtitled An affordable anthology of contemporary poetry and, since it costs £3.99, I’d say that’s a reasonable claim. It achieves it by restricting itself to thirty-three pages of poetry, but I’ve no complaint there, either, as the poets and the poems are well-chosen (and it works out at just under 13p a poem, which sounds reasonable to me). It says it’s ‘built on the principle that access to the arts should not be a privilege’ and that it ‘dismantles economic barriers that too often limit audiences from engaging with contemporary poetry.’ My only proviso there would be that the book itself won’t bring about the necessary demolition job; that’ll depend on how it’s used, how and where it’s sold to people.
The publisher, Broken Sleep Books, is well-known for describing itself as ‘a working-class indie publisher putting access to the arts at the forefront of what [it does]’ and I’m sure they have ideas and policies designed to make this happen. Funnily enough, while I was reading the book I also found myself reading about the work of mutual aid groups (specifically, Lambeth Mutual Aid, in London). It struck me how productive it might be to set up poetry reading/writing workshops as part of such projects. Perhaps it happens. Such a group could, say, shell out for ten copies of this and give them out as and when to anyone who expressed an interest.
Reading it, a number of poems caught my attention. Fran Lock’s ‘Refusing the Heavy Bear’ is a take on what is perhaps Delmore Schwartz’ most famous poem, ‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me’. Schwartz’ bear is a charming manifestation of the poet’s dark side. Lock’s, on the other hand, is more like Churchill’s ‘black dog’. He makes no excuses. She says of him ‘he is the very / heavy threshold of my failures’ and the ‘reverberatory furnace of my rage.’ He may be big, but he’s afraid. Lock addresses him, telling him that he lives ‘inside the sore head of [his] legend.’ Then there’s Kim Addonizio’s ‘Cigar Box Banjo’, with it’s refreshing, startling use of language. I’m unlikely to forget this in a hurry:
Right now, in a deep pocket of a politician’s brain
a bad idea is traveling along an axon
to make sure the future resembles a cobra
rather than an ocarina.
John Kinsella’s ‘Graphology Superscription 106: Apothogems of Burn’ is short, but pithy. It does what poetry is supposed to do – ie, as Addonizio’s poem put it, ‘coax / music from a single string.’ His idea of ‘arson after the fact’ reverberates outwards into all kinds of situations where people amplify harm, or obstruct those who try to put things right.
Martha Strackland’s ‘A Form Without Its Shape’ is subtitled ‘after Daniil Kharms’. Kharms was an early soviet avant-gardist. His surreal, absurd riffs on the nature of meaninglessness find an echo here. As Strackland puts it, ‘As a walnut has a socket, so a bed the dint / of a sleeper’.
‘Smaller than the Radius of the Planet’ is from J.H. Prynne’s 1969 collection, The White Stones. It’s inclusion here asks interesting questions about the choice of the word ‘contemporary’ in the title, what we mean by ‘contemporary poetry’ and the ways the way poets write poetry changes. For all I know, there may be one or two other ‘old’ poems lurking in the collection (and, for that matter, what do we know about when a poem is written? For a start, publication date is only a rough guide: one can write a poem and sit on it for decades). I guess, up to a point, ‘contemporary’ is as much a state of mind as it is an indicator of chronological age and indeed the Prynne sits very comfortably alongside poems here written far more recently. This should come as no surprise in a world where Prynne’s near-contemporary, Paul McCartney, can still perform on the Pyramid Stage at Glasto. (I can feel a well-rehearsed discourse on hauntology coming on, but I’ll resist the urge). Editor Aaron Kent is, famously, a fan of Prynne. Indeed, Kent’s brain-child, Broken Sleep Books, which publishes this anthology, takes its name and its tag-line (‘lay out your unrest’) from this very poem:
lay out my
unrest like white lines on the slope, so that
something out of broken sleep will land
there.
That it feels contemporary now, over half a century after it was written, must, in part, be because we still have plenty of unrest to lay out. And Luke Lankaster’s ‘Cushioned’, cleverly positioned straight after the Prynne, deals out unrest in spades. His sleep is broken by dreams of Gaza, of clouds rising from fires and explosions. The way he talks about the colour of the clouds reminded me of eye-witness accounts of Hiroshima (I suspect we’ve both seen the same documentary footage), but with a touch of local colour thrown in:
the ash continued to climb
in pangs
of crimson, olive-green
Pascal Petit’s ‘Oxbow Lake’ – a metaphor for her mother’s womb – is a poem in praise of life in all its forms that inhabits a grey area between metaphor and surrealism. Nisha Ramayya’s poem introduced me to two words I didn’t know: speleothem and spelunking.
Kent has said of Prynne (in an interview with The Friday Poem) that ‘people think he is interested in poetry that is similar to the poetry he writes himself, but that’s not the case – he just loves poetry in all its myriad forms.’ It’s also true of Kent, judging by his editorial choices. Hollie McNish’s ‘cute’ is a riposte to Jenny Joseph’s famous ‘Warning’, that ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple’. McNish’s narrator, on the other hand, thinks
young photographers will stop me in the street
and call me fantastic, simply for putting on an orange jumper
and in the social club or care home
i’ll be forced to do jigsaws and watch little children
from the local school singing badly
This is good poetry at its most accessible and – if you ask me – more true to life than the ubiquitous Joseph poem.
Andrew MacMillan’s ‘Tomasso de Cavalieri On Leaving Michelangelo’ is a striking poem, too. I’m guessing the leave-taking referred to is Michelangelo’s death, as – as I understand it – the two men were devoted to each other to the end. In it Cavalieri says he had hoped they could rediscover their younger selves, much as Michelangelo liberated statues from marble. It has a touching simplicity about it.
The same can be said of Menna Elfyn’s ‘Si Hei Lwli – Lullaby’, which contrasts the life of a child in Wales with that of a child in Gaza. It plays to great effect on the different meanings of the word ‘dim’ in English and Welsh (in which ‘dim’ means nothing):
What is dim – ?
…
Just a word
Dim is dim – in such a dim world.
Those were the poems that caught my attention on my first reading of the book. Next time my choices might well be different, as what it lacks in length it amply makes up for with variety, intensity and quality. It ends with a few blank pages and the invitation to ‘lay out your unrest’, to add some poetry of your own. It’s a nice idea. I’ll probably leave mine blank, but if I were to add anything, it would have to be something I’d lived with for a while. I’d hate to make an indelible addition to the book, only to find I regretted it later.
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© Dominic Rivron, 2025
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