Some of our deepest experiences can be the hardest to articulate – whether through words, or other art forms. Particularly difficult are those involving loss, or absence. While this is not always the case, it may take years, or decades for us to locate a language which comprehends what is gone. I have found this to be the case when writing about sexual abuse in my childhood.
At the same time, this delay can provide a law of increasing returns. That is, the longer we wait, and the further we travel in time away from what happened, the greater the chance we may have of generating something new in recompense for what was taken from us. Think of Emily Berry’s Stranger, Baby, or Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel and Geography III, or Rachael Allen’s Kingdomland, or Pascale Petit’s Fauverie.
Lovers, fathers, friends, languages and landscapes were all remembered, and made visible in words, as I listened to a selection of the Magma Loss poets reading at the issue’s London launch. Brilliantly commissioned and edited by Yvonne Reddick and Adam Lowe, the selection was whittled down from a record submission of over 8000 poems.
The issue includes commissioned poems, created when poets including Romalyn Ante, Malika Booker, Zaffar Kunial, Jhilmil Breckenridge, Jackie Kay, Nick Mahona and Jennifer Lee Tsai, met with collaboratively with each other, and psychotherapists, facilitated by Yvonne Reddick. Too many to list individually, these poems travel from pre-colonial Filipino culture to post-stroke recovery, by way of cricket, amputations, and family holidays in Jersey.
The church hall venue, in Exmouth Market, was decidedly British, by comparison. With its green 1970s retro-chic china, tea and biscuits, and chipboard stage, it seemed to be a distillation of the Wiltshire halls I visited after first coming to live in England aged 8 in 1972 – with the key difference that while they were unfailing damp and dank, and mandated keeping-your-anorak-zipped-up-at-all-times, the 2019 Clerkenwell version was cosy and warm on a battleship grey November afternoon.
Rather than the jumbled piles of clothes, dog-eared books, battered, discarded toys and cacti in margarine tubs, through which I sifted as a child to find something to spend my pocket money on, poet after poet stepped up on stage to share their wares. Natalie Linh Bolderston discovered in the first stain of menstrual blood “the shape/ of an
unconquered country.” Jeffery Sugarman cruised in memory “already dying men// in meatpacking houses” to elegise the “cum-shot floors” now redeveloped out of material existence, but still stalking the alley ways of memory. Kostya Tsolakis called a lost lover, ‘Patrick’, back to life with a flinted tenderness.
Switching the focus to female-identified queer lives, annie heyter stood up in DMs and a creased green silk cocktail shift to call to the stage a life where “we boiled our wedding dresses hand in hand/ then cropped our hair close as breath.” For Beckey Varley-Winter, writing in memory of Leanne Bridgewater, the space of loss was the ice shell formed round a “ghost apple, brittle bauble still splintered to the branch”. For Sarah
Wedderburn a father lost in childhood, as my own was, stood “just beyond reach/ of my bramble-torn fingers”. For Seraphima Kennedy a “flock of coal-tits flew out of my ear” on the way to a funeral and Tamar Yoseloff crammed “jackrabbits, bighorn sheep, shild cats/ black bears” into a poem-house where all the “rugs had heads”.
These summaries barely begin to do justice to the richness of material in the issue, which includes reviews, including by Shivanee Ramlochan and interviews. Short prose commentaries by the commissioned poets lead readers along the lines of investigation that their works follow like animal tracks in wet grass.
The links below give a taster of what’s on offer. Equally, for anyone interested in connecting more deeply – buy, beg, or borrow, the Magma Loss issue.
Read sample poems from the Magma Loss issue here.
Buy the Magma Loss issue here.
Thanks for this, Alice! It was a wonderful and very moving reading. And thanks to Yvonne Reddick and Adam Lowe, the editors, for their tireless work in finding these exceptional words and poets, from among literally 1000s!