Four more poems
Poems by Gwyneth Lewis, William Bonar, Courtney Kampa and Antonella Anedda
Here's another foray into random access poems. I'll be taking in work by Gwyneth Lewis, William Bonar, Courtney Kampa and Antonella Anedda -- doilies, squirrels, stopped trains and DIY by the not-yet dead. My method for seeking poems is accidental by design. Generally, I am looking a different kind of news when the day begins, because I find that impotence and outrage are not immediately productive emotions before dawn.
I'm beginning with one that will have been seen quite recently by lots of people since it was Poem of the week in the Guardian on 26 September 2025. This is An Explanation of Doily by Gwyneth Lewis. The accompanying article provides a useful and interesting commentary. Here's my extract from the poem:
Someone is pulling a blue toy trawler
along the horizon to port, so smoothly
it looks realistic. Sea’s partly doily.
Surfers ride its lace to their downfall,
after all, we’re nothing but froth.
Like a carpet salesman, the indolent tide
flops a wave over, showing samples: ‘Madam,
this one is durable, has a fringe.’ Under
its breath the sea sighs, ‘Has it come
to this? Must everything always end in … doily?’
In this poem (which answers a question -- "What is a doily?" ostensibly posed by the poet Adam Zagajewsk to whom the poem is dedicated) I love the juxtaposition of the frivolous and the deadly serious. The silliness of the sea as doily crashes at once to a 'downfall' -- even if that's only the temporary demise of a surfer. Here's another example of this tension from earlier on:
Held up, its paper’s the filigree
of snowflake, or fingers looked through in fear.
There's a horror lurking beneath the froth. But the image that stays with me is the blue toy trawler. There's a kind of recursion here that appeals to my coder brain. The trawler-as-toy is a metaphor. It seems to say that the ship looks like a model. But then, it's a toy that is pulled so smoothly that it 'looks realistic'. So it's a real ship that seems like a model, impressively close to being real in its motion. It never escapes from its toylike status. In fact, its realism underscores its artificiality. I find that tangle upsettingly lovely for some reason.
Another reason to like the poem is that it has a spaceship in it. More poetry should incorporate spaceships.
The next poem, SQRL by William Bonar, is similarly routed in the seemingly inconsequential. Unlike the previous poem, though, this observation of squirrel speechifying stays pretty much in the realm of the gloriously silly. It is quite definitely mock heroic.
chats in squirrel are limited
to a sort of Roman salute
foreleg extended then folded
open paw on breast as if to say
Look I take you in my open paw
and hold you to my heart
then it gets tricky
I'd dearly love to reveal the punchline to what is essentially a joke -- the squirrel equivalent of a shaggy dog story -- but I don't think that would be fair to the poem's publisher. So I encourage you to click through for the substance of the rodents' oration.
In Elegy at Middle River by Courtney Kampa a train stops in the middle of nowhere and the occupants of a carriage wait to learn why.
It’s an hour before noon, and Amtrak train no. 56 rips a path
through the rain outside Baltimore,
its speed screamed across the iron-black bones
of the track, our train now stopping in the woods,
no platform, and I pull Al Green
out of my ears to a car completely hushed. We wait,
wait longer, till the intercom stirs; says
nothing. Someone folds gum into his mouth and chews.
An older couple up ahead is peeling the skin
off dark plums. ...
The poem is imbued with that sudden sense of disquiet and reconnection that comes with an interrupted journey. The sound has gone, and the space becomes strangely intimate, everyone is trapped and underinformed. Plans are unmade. In this poem there's also a creeping dread that seeps upward from whatever it is that lies mangled beneath the machine. Images of pain and dismemberment are imported into the world of the carriage, suggesting something terrible and unspeakable outside it. We've already seen skin peeled from plums -- the carnage does not let up:
... Sometimes an arm
pulled through a sleeve, skin surfacing for air.
Sometimes the gravel’s gray teeth
crunched under service men’s boots. Sometimes a moan
from the dumb weight of the engine—a beast stilled
by what is pinioned beneath it
A few years back, I spent a lot of time on trains, trying to get traction on a PhD in a distant city whilst earning a living elsewhere. Inevitably, in the end, my studies lost out to the need to make money but, for a while, I did get to experience a good few of those sudden interruptions. Even in a small country there is so much that is not a destination. Copsed and fenced, or warehouse backed, falling in between. It is the allotment stops I liked the best. Their order. Cities of fruit. Shedded. Towers of string-riveted top-bottled bamboo. Soft grassy paths in between plots. The throat clearing train, the chill creeping in, the weather suddenly larger, suddenly containing us, so unexpectedly close to one another.
Finally, in 2022, January by Antonella Anedda, death inevitably comes to visit. Only it is a premonition. The poet is visited in her sleep by her still-living father who is dead nonetheless in the logic of the dream. It is only the prospect of household work that re-anchors him in the world of the living:
Tiredly—I knew he was struggling—I tightened his fingers
around a dirty-green railing that needed repainting.
Only then, I think he could feel my hands
or maybe understand the work that remained:
the iron to scrape the spatula the paint to choose
he attempted his usual half smile. He let go
and made me move on to another dream.
And it was the undone work that stuck with me most. It made me think of the way that my house snags my attention as I pass through it. The front door which sticks in its frame and requires a secret key angle of the key. The pile of letters on the bottom step, begging to be sorted -- or even, god help us, thrown away. The cat clawed carpet we will one day replace, the broken mixer, the cracked wall. More.. so much more. It's a debt. Though, in my case, I'm anchored to the house and the people in it despite the work and not because of it.
- ← Previous
Before the Journey