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Patrician
Press is new to me and it seems quite new to itself, about a dozen books so
far, 'printed and bound in Peterborough by Printondemand-worldwide', poetry
and fiction The present book (2014) is this poet's first collection and was
'first published as an e-book 2013' (available on Amazon Whispernet for a
kindle, same date as this paper edition, at £1.99).
The author is her own translator; the Italian seems to be the original on the
left hand page, but a note tells us she 'translates works from English into
Italian', not the other way round. I wish her brief introduction might have
said more about process. She has 'collaborated on translations of poems by
Christina Rossetti', so begging the intriguing question whether she is by
family related.
The collection is divided into sections of poems of rainbow colours plus (to
begin with) white (and end with) black. The cover page for Verde/Green is
titled 'bring lost until you find the way home'; the first poem is 'homeless'
(all titles lower case),
I've lost my compass:
nobody grieves.
I'll call emergency
to rescue me.
If they can,
wherever I am.
Almost all of the poems are brief, few run to the end of or over a page.
There is not at all a simple explicit colour reference to every poem, perhaps
more often than not, as with the poem already quoted, it is something more
intriguing. Blu/Blue ('the day running through the sky') includes this poem,
'a teardrop';
I took
a teardrop
this
morning
and put
it in my pocket
to
remind me I am alive
and
gave her
a name.
Nobody
knows it
but I
know
and
that
is
enough.
Brief poems seem to me a big risk, a test of both poet and reader. I mean
they have this 'Catch me if you can' for the poet and a 'Why bother with
this?' for the reader. One can be curious, though, about how the poem came
into being - in a moment or after days of shifts and changes - and for the
reader it might be, 'I'm not in the mood for this, can't settle to it,'
easily morphing into 'Too glib, this poem.'
The brief poem, and the typeface is quite big here, the rare whole page has
only 23 lines, there is something emphatic about the look of it - there must
be a whole theory of typefaces - and so when on page 61, 'umbrella', I am
reminded of Basho,
The wind is
rising
I'll grab an
umbrella
and stay on
the roof
waiting for
the wind
to take me
and I will fly
too.
This is in the Yellow section, 'the sunflower playing hide and seek', and I
imagine Basho would not be saying stay put but be on his way. Interesting
perhaps then, the short poem of movement, of the moment and away, or, as in
this book, I think, more of a 'being here', poems of self. 'I will fly/too'
is a rarer expectation here. But I have quoted only some of the shorter ones,
so here is one somewhat longer from Orange ('pistils through the eyelids of
dreams'), 'looking for water':
The water
diviner
had the wrong
map
and came here
to look
for water.
She goes
round and is unnoticed
while she
walks with her stick.
Then she
stops at night to look at [sic]
this life
which is not hers.
Even if she
is blind
she saw
something that does not exist
and she does
not desist
while she
keeps on searching
with her
trusty stick
to quench her
thirst.
© David
Hart 2013
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