By Caroline Bracken:

Angela Graham’s poetry collection ‘Sanctuary: There Must Be Somewhere‘ is an interesting concept. As well as her own poems, it includes poems she wrote collaboratively with Phil Cope, Viviana Fiorentino, Mahyar and Csilla Toldy.

Her mentor Glen Wilson also contributed a poem, ‘Border Crossing, Reynosa to Hidalgo’, a gorgeous poem with more questions than answers:

‘There is buzzing behind the bevel of the two-way mirror,
I imagine the voices of the hidden judges there’

The collaborative poems all allow the contributing poets’ voices to shine and feel very different to Graham’s own. For example Mahyar’s ‘You’ is end-rhymed:

‘When I was drinking shot after shot

When I was reading Rubaiyat

When I was reading Khayyam’s couplets

When the book got wet with my tears’ droplets’

Csilla Toldy’s ‘Sanctum Trilogy’ is written in three sections, ‘Resistance’ ‘Refuge’ and ‘Resilience’ and is more experimental in form:

‘Forget the borders, tie up your tongue
here you are safe – between the walls of this place.
Stay put for now, We will decide –
wait
    w a i t
         w  a  i  t
            w   a  i   t’

Phil Cope gives us a panoramic, bird’s-eye sequence of the Welsh landscape:

‘A brace of peregrines, monogamous
though solitary throughout the year,
rendezvous up here each April,
drawn by this cliff’s magnetism,
egged on by legacy,
reliable in the knowledge of
a ledge, secure on Darren Fawr
to raise two chicks, then leave.’

Angela Graham’s wonderful poem ‘A Heerd tha Sodjer on tha Radio’ which won the Linen Hall Ulster Scots Writing Competition is included. Her other poems work best when they steer away from prose and allow the image to be seen, as in ‘Annunciation, Visitation’

‘After the angel left her what was the girl to do?
I see her stand, go to the window,
look out at the utterly familiar street.
A neighbour, jovial, passes and she smiles
─ too soon for speech. She looks down
at her utterly familiar hand
resting on the white stone sill.’

And ‘Persian New Year’

‘Let me give you gorse,
the ungraspable, the unlikely
solder-drops splattered on my hedges
by the sun torching its way out of winter.’

The last word goes to Viviana Fiorentino, from ‘In This Sanctuary’
‘You blue tit, jackdaw or young doe
you, overflow, the breaker of borders
of species, you know it will not matter
that you were males or females, your voice
is
singing’

“hugely experimental… as praxis, the project seems politically perfect, an unselfish poetic gesture underlining the ‘unevenness’ of sanctuary that is genuinely thought-provoking.” Tim Murphy

London Grip Poetry Review – Angela Graham

As soon as I learned about Poetry as Commemoration I wanted to write something for it.

2022-2023 marks the centenary of one of the most challenging periods in Irish history including the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the establishment of the Free State and the ensuing Civil War. As we embark on this difficult phase of the Decade of Centenaries, Poetry as Commemoration invites communities to turn to poetry as a mode of understanding and expression.

It is an all-island initiative, organised by the Irish Poetry Reading Archive at University College Dublin and the Irish Government’s Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

My poem below is available to read on the site:

‘The Irish Civil War, County Tipperary, Summer, 1922’ by Angela Graham

Continue reading Poem in Poetry As Commemoration →