Review by Kathleen Bell of "The Iliad" by Homer, trans. Emily Wilson

Some months ago, when I was half-way through Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad, I had to set it aside. This is not a criticism of her work but a tribute to its effectiveness. The accumulated violence and grief appalled me as it had never done before. I was sharply aware of the individuality of so many dying men, of the agony they suffered and the anguish their families would endure. I might attribute this in part to the accumulation of contemporary violence brought to our daily attention via TV, computers and smartphones, but I do not believe any previous translation would have had the immediacy that Wilson’s iambic pentameters offer.

When I first read Homer, it was in E.V . Rieu’s prose translation published by Penguin – a decent and accessible enough account. But I was not particularly moved by his account of the prince Asius, whose death is one of many recorded in Book 12: "He was a fool. He was not destined to evade his evil fate and drive back his chariot and pair in triumph from the ships to windy Ilium. In the spear of the sublime Idomeneus, Deucalion’s son, abominable doom was waiting to engulf him."

By contrast, Wilson offers: 

           Poor fool! He was not destined to escape
           his own black doom or ever leave the ships
           or ride back home again to windy Troy,
           proud of his horses and his chariot.
           The spear of splendid Idomeneus,
           Deucalion’s fine son, would bring him down
           and shadow him with death that dims men’s names.

The combination of the metre with clear language drew me far closer to the battle than Rieu managed. Through instances like this – and often more painful and much gorier – Homer takes us close to the details of war. Meanwhile the warriors exult in killing, crave loot as proof of merit, and long for a victory which will involve massacre, wholesale destruction and the enslavement of those few allowed to survive.

At times, as when the gods decide to involve themselves in battle or quarrel over the conduct of the war, The Iliad can seem very distant from our own time – until suddenly a river which is also a god enters the battle and becomes a great flood with effects familiar from reports of current ecological disasters. Meanwhile the macho boasting and posturing of the warriors who often take women as trophies has uncomfortable echoes today. Yet there are moments when a warrior might recognise and almost understand the horror in which he is involved, In Book 18, mourning the death of the man he loves most, Achilles says to his mother:

           If only conflict were eliminated
           from gods and human beings! I wish anger
           did not exist. Even the wisest people
           are roused to rage, which trickles into you
           sweeter than honey, and inside your body
           it swells like smoke …

Inevitably in a translation this long – the book with introduction and notes runs to 750 pages – there are occasional phrases and words which jar slightly. However, I have never read a translation of The Iliad that gripped and moved me so much. I was also delighted by the insights offered in Emily Wilson’s introduction and wished I had found something as clear and illuminating as this when, as an undergraduate, I studied Book 1 of the Iliad for one of my first-year exams.

About the reviewer
Kathleen Bell’s most recent poetry collections are the chapbook Do you know how kind I am? from Leafe Press and the collection Disappearances published by Shoestring (both 2021). She is currently preparing a manuscript that might be another collection while continuing to research and write poems about the engineer James Watt and his times. 

Review by Kathleen Bell of "Last Poems" by Thomas Kinsella

There’s something daunting about a first encounter with a poet through a volume called Last Poems, especially when the back cover identifies him as "one of the great poets of the last century." I began towards the end of the book, with poems not previously published (some revisions of early work but many from the last year of Kinsella’s life). The poem "Our Home" is short and undated:

           Our Home,
           Pearl blue and far, small,
           small in the dark.
                                    A pearl,
           

           I can scarcely believe what goes on there.

In only twenty-one words, two of them repeated, Kinsella has achieved a poem that, with its combination of marvelling and questioning, lodges in the mind. It evokes the first colour pictures of Earth from outer space and, by simply expressing incredulity, gestures towards large questions of ethics. 

Ethical questions are at the heart of many of Kinsella’s poems – raised but left unresolved. "Retrospect" is a history of warfare, its craft and its rituals including the recent opening of opportunities to a wider cross-section of the population, as:

           the craft of warfare opened its embrace
           to the base-born, excluded until now
           or butchered by the way.
                                                 Allowed at last
           an equal role in serious affairs,
           the humble multitudes were drilled – skilled – 
           in dull disorder, uniform and drab,
           to slay each other over the long term.

The poem offers no solution but concludes with an image of greater destruction that suggests both rapture and, disturbingly, play.

Beside Kinsella’s concern with ethics lies a serious interest in metaphysics that is unafraid to use terms such as "grace" and "God." Grace, which in "Love  Joy  Peace" is described as "a light cast from the world to come" may be an aid to the poet’s own work:

                                                Grace as routine.
           The lone artificer loosening the charged facts
           from an imagination arguing with itself
           until the ache is eased

but is also found in human desire when flesh says "all it can of love." 

Illness and death are an unsurprising theme of many late poems. "Delirium" ends with a longing for escape from a screened-off bed where unwelcome visitors: "Come to see me sick / that would not see me well." By contrast, one of the very last poems Kinsella wrote looks from past to future:

          Fingers caress and bent brow is is cooled
          forever in a music
          of a world beyond this world.

These are not poems to be read swiftly, relished once and set aside. They are often, for all their music, discomforting. Their uncertainties, questionings and images lure the reader to wonder and return.

About the reviewer
Kathleen Bell’s recent poetry publications include the collection Disappearances (Sheostring, 2021) and the pamphlet Do You Know How Kind I Am? (Leafe Press, 2021). She has also published several short stories. Kathleen lives near Nottingham and enjoys leading creative writing workshops and giving readings. She is currently obsessed with the life and times of James Watt (1736-1819).

Review by Kathleen Bell of "Thorpeness" by Alison Brackenbury

In Thorpeness Alison Brackenbury’s poems explore rural life with love but also a strong awareness of struggle and hardship. A poem about her grandfather, 'Shepherd Brackenbury,' set in lambing season in the 1930s, ends with the tender, warning couplet:

          Best shoes scratched by rough straws, I learnt love meant
          Not glances, silky curls, but blood’s raw scent.

There are celebrations of achievement but also references to the limitations imposed by class and poverty as in the reference in 'Fern' to the old man 'who would have gone / to "Grammar," if they could have bought / a crested cap, soft shoes for sport.’ There is also the satisfaction of rebellion in 'Meeting 1919' when the returning soldier, Brackenbury’s Great Uncle Sidney, tells the lady of the manor 'I’ve not come home to be bossed round by you.'

Women’s domestic achievements and heritage are celebrated alongside the work of male farm labourers. The sequence 'Aunt Margaret’s Pudding' rejoices in the work of Dorothy Eliza Barnes, the poet’s grandmother who had been a professional cook before she became a shepherd’s wife. One poem recounts how she would provide sandwiches of 'home-cured bacon and white bread' for the unemployed men who tramped across England in the rain, searching for work. The sequence concludes not with the rich and heavy sweetness of cakes, puddings, curds and pies but with the salt of samphire, gathered hazardously on the dangerous Lincolnshire shore.

This combination of comfort and danger, risk and hope is characteristic of the poems in this collection. The six-line poem 'Sunday on the Coach' demonstrates a time of peace while hinting at its fragility:

           It is June. Tall grasses nod. On the back seat
           the last baby has hiccupped into sleep.
           No one swears, nobody phones. The south wind whistles
           white motorways of cow parsley and thistles.
           A helicopter hangs, but does not strafe.
           This afternoon the innocent are safe.

For all its focus on the vivid and the particular, Alison Brackenbury’s beautifully crafted poems often seem to hint at something just out of words' reach. It is therefore fitting that the final stanza of the final poem looks both toward an unreached Thorpeness and to something further beyond:

           In tall streets, low clouds press. 
           Three swallows snatch
           a gust, a breath, last fly.
           Small voices catch
           land’s end, storm’s edge, whirl high
           far, far beyond Thorpeness.

About the reviewer

Kathleen Bell is the author of two recent poetry collections: Do You Know How Kind I Am (Leafe Press) and Disappearances (Shoestring), both published in 2021. She also writes fiction and, on occasion, teaches creative writing and leads workshops.

Review by Gary Day of "Disappearances" by Kathleen Bell

 

Kathleen Bell’s debut volume is a thing of beauty, a joy forever, or at least until the global temperature rises beyond the point of no return. Her poems are poised, delicate and occasionally devastating. The book consists of three sections, the second concerns memory, the third magic.

The first deals with the musings of medieval spinsters on matters such as  church, childlessness, beatings and scars from harvesting the corn, a kind of earthly stigmata. These women bear their sufferings with a grim fatalism. Their incessant struggle to reconcile what they are told by the priest or the lord with their own experience is expressed in voices both lyrical and authentic. 

The final poem in this sequence, ‘La Dame à la Licorne,’ is a delight. It is based on six tapestries of the same name woven in the style of ‘a thousand flowers’ at the turn of the fourteenth century. Five of the pictures represent the five senses, the sixth is something of a mystery. The brilliance of this poem lies not just in Bell’s riff on the pictures of the lady with her unicorn but also in the way she subtly relates it to the poems that have gone before, where her women are fluent in their senses but flounder in their minds.

My favourite in the collection is ‘Palais des Beaux Arts’ which revisits Auden’s magnificent ‘Musée des Beaux Arts.’ It strips the original of its calm beauty revealing the horror beneath. Wherever Auden’s landmark poem goes in future, it should be accompanied by this one. 

Each page of this well-produced book is an entrance to an exquisitely constructed little world, whether it is a painting by Vermeer or a card trick. Bell takes us down the side roads of history, showing with great tenderness and truth, what was missed.   

About the reviewer

Gary Day is a retired English lecturer. His research mainly lay in three areas, the  history of literary criticism, the workings of class in British literature and the persistence of sacrificial ritual in the development of drama. He had a column in the Times Higher for a number of years and has also edited two volumes on the history of British poetry as well as the three volume Wiley Encyclopaedia of British Literature 1660-1789. He hates management speak, has been involved in amateur theatre for over thirty years and is still trying to write poetry.

Review by Kathleen Bell of "Travellers" by Michelene Wandor

Travellers by Michelene Wandor is a thin book with great depth. The eleven poems within repay many re-readings. They suit this time. When we’re urged by politicians and the media to take single, simple views about almost everything, these poems offer complexity and multiple perspectives. Even 'Beached,' at two pages the shortest poem in the book, keeps shifting viewpoint ranging from the texture of cowrie shells 'fine ridged, oval' to the surfer 'haloed spiderman red / by the sinking sun' and the 'crow-black verger' sweeping sand from the cathedral nave.

Other poems are more complex still. 'The Clock of Heaven: a Fugue' begins with a Marc Chagall painting but reaches back through time to John Harrison, inventor of the marine chronometer. It travels across seas too, taking us on a voyage where 'winds whistle and sing,' listing luxuries associated with colonialism and plunder – 'cloves gold silver pearls / diamonds calico ebony,' pausing to hear Harrison play the viola da gamba, before whirling out into the expanse of space where 'the earth is a cog in the clockwork universe.'

Shifts of power play out in the Biblical story and handed-down tales of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Even in the opening sensual encounter there are warnings of a future in which 'women’s voices and / instruments will be banned' – a prohibition later lifted. In the final section a family of Ethiopian Jews, now outlawed, encounter the poet in Regent’s Park where 'isn’t it strange' one woman says to her, 'how we live / such different lives.'

'Travellers' and 'Two Men' explore, obliquely, hundred-year-old roots of today’s Middle East conflicts. The 'Travellers,' Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence, meet in the desert. Both have found happier selves in Arabia: 'he has quitted his English self / in England she is just a woman, an empty jar / here she is in linen and khaki.' But for all this, their first loyalty lies with their own government. 'The British will break their promises' the poem’s commentary reminds us. 'They have sold the same camel twice.' The 'Two Men' are Khalil al-Sakakini and Alter Levine, both poets, imprisoned together in 1917 because 'the word "guest" is sacred from Jordan to Euphrates.' There is some common ground but also crucially different hopes for a future in the same land. Finally free, 'they take down the tent and depart.'

About the reviewer
Kathleen Bell's new poetry pamphlet Do You Know How Kind I Am? will be published shortly by Leafe Press. A book-length collection, Disappearances, is scheduled for publication by Shoestring in the autumn. Until last year Kathleen taught Creative Writing at De Montfort University. She lives in the East Midlands.

You can read more about Travellers by Michelene Wandor, and an extract from it, on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

You should be reading Attica Locke: Review by Kathleen Bell of Attica Locke’s novels

Attica Locke

“You should be reading Attica Locke”

I discovered her novels this summer. The first two – Black Water Rising and The Cutting Season – kept me awake. I needed to know what happens next. The third, Pleasantville, must wait until I can afford a couple of sleepless nights.

Attica Locke writes thrillers. But her novels are more than that. They explore the very recent past but also a deeper, troubling history. Jay Porter, the lead character in Black Water Rising, cannot escape the damage and injustice he and his comrades suffered during the Civil Rights movement. Caren Gray in The Cutting Season, manages a southern plantation which is romanticised for modern tourists, but the six surviving slave-huts remind her that her ancestors were once “owned,” and later controlled, by the rich white people who possessed the estate.

Both novels do what good thrillers must: they tell a gripping story and create suspense. They do more than that too. Thrillers are always concerned with uncovering a secret which matters to the characters in the novel. But these thrillers also uncover secrets which matter to us all, and which challenge the comforting stories about our world’s history.

The main characters Attica Locke has created are not perfect human beings or simple victims. They are people who are complex and sometimes inconsistent – as most people are. They make decisions which are sometimes wrong. While they are affected by historical oppression, they are also capable of standing up for what is right – but they know the cost  may be heavy and that it may also be borne by those they love most. As readers we are drawn in by the agonising choices they are forced to make.

If you like thrillers, and if you care about people and history, read Attica Locke. You won’t be disappointed.

About the reviewer
Kathleen Bell is a poet and fiction-writer whose recent pamphlet at the memory exchange is published by Oystercatcher. She is a Principal Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University.