Issue Three

Imagine an imaginary island. It exists in parallel, in slim books, somewhere on the margins, on edge. Just before the continent shelves.

The main raw material is vocabulary. Seams are mined ceaselessly to support a processing and derivatives industry. Many are employed in repackaging, which spills into advertising, performance, music, the media.

Things have changed since the long Nineteenth Century, when it was all mountains and larks, and the poets had their ears to the sky. This is due to the wasteland created in the Word Wars, when droves of wildlife fed armies of modernisation, skyscrapers were prefabbed like sonnets, mountains were flattened to make way for a clear view of the language. Unmoored, the island drifted under the influence of currents of opinion, winds of change. America, Europe, Ireland: their cliffs all loomed through fog, and receded.

The mean annual rainfall is now meaner. There is discrimination against things with boring names. Nothing of beauty can be 'beautiful'. The children are embarrassed to be called children, and seldom allowed to be happy.

No one relaxes. Troubled childhoods propel the citizenry into adulteries with an unusual capacity for insight, because here, all relationships are special.

Roads are either motorway or lane. Most people travel by train. Mountains are more common in living-rooms, where they are called by other names.

Walking to school, driving to work, one is more in danger from sudden epiphany than from traffic.

They say, light a cigarette, you will live a few seconds longer. Here, it is true.

A place of unsettlements, villages laced like beads on a string of words stretched to breaking point. Towns like bombs with the timer stuck on bang. A city in which one is stuck in the jam of discourse, the meter running. The taxi-driver is scared. He has not, he says, seen so many thoughts before. And then he, too, gets out his stubby notebook.

Still, this island is populated with more rare birds than pigeons. Arable only exists in rape-tinted or cubist backgrounds. Intensive farming is unheard. Among trees, oak predominates over the Leyland pine.

The geographer gets lost in valleys where executives keep tampering. Many dams have been built to generate publicity, to heat air, and the river is stony, dry, which is why people have such a great thirst, drink anything.

Birds move like symbols through nights, singing: we are not symbols, these sounds we make are pure signifier, we sing as a sign of nature's resistance to interpretation, as people lie half-awake, interpreting their passage to warmer countries.

Its politics? A platonic republic which poets have usurped, imprisoning politicians, teachers, publicans, police, accountants, and lastly the poets themselves. They escape nightly.

You end up with a map in which the place-names are disputed, but it shows as no textbook can the instability inside desire, forms a picture of what we might want if we did not need to want.

To land here requires many papers, none of them a visa. It is the island of reflection, where all you meet is part of yourself, and around you the whales sing slowly in sleep.

- Giles Goodland

jealousy by numbers you have to be having a laugh for it was too portentous to know that it was not what was meant when they signed the book at the willow that marked the cross where they drew their pistols at dawn ivan ilyich was already immortally wounded when they massacred his pride but i forgot the names of the others escaped me now that their immorality slides through the sluice gates of my memory curly structures mycelium spreading their spores through exquisite infrastructures of nature quite invisible to the naked eye but what to do with the bloods infestation making bodies more difficult to burn paul blobel was given as an answer for scherlok taught kommandos of the one thousand and five to find cadavers dig up the corpses burn the bodies scatter the ashes crush the bones fill the ditches plant the trees lay the brushwood to conceal the crimes deny oblivion perhaps my grandfathers grave was disturbed by blobels boys as he slept in the bikernieki woods but we are moving to a time when the stench of decomposing flesh will be just a jumble of words scrubbed from a page leaving mute expressions of mouths and tongues their futile search for the miriam sites buried in deserts of nirvana sand blown lockets of hair that filter the water weave wreaths for my grandmother died a thousand deaths on that long journey east first to skirotava thinking maybe of riga then to jungfernhof all the while in the snow carrying the riddle of her ride to berlin to see the great ocean liners ploughing the fields on her farm stoking the fires in her kitchen till i walked the streets of her living not turning the road to the station where the trains run on time-and-money seized from the jews or had i trawled the cities of india the last refuge of her emigrant dreams for i have taken her heart to havana where boats sank by the stench of embargoes long scrubbed from her city walls oh sunset feral land of my fathers can i not sing you sleep from the saffron gowns of your pillows from deep ocean wines that have swallowed your soul as you slept on their shores

- philip kuhn

Irresolute border. The wind shifting in the hedgerow. Immaculate white lawn of snow. Pale light moving across the river.

Where a face turned behind a curtain, refulgent in shadow. Was it the curve of the mind - the breath's camber - or a real figure.

For daylight's first loss, recorded nothing but this. Beyond an open window night, an immeasurable sadness of streets, filling the intervals of a life.

Glow on buildings, railroads clanking in the dawn's stillness, the smell of livestock.

And nothing differs, except the difference of loss and gain. A memory of distinct horizons and spaces, peopled by

a question.

Rockpools. Calendulas in churches. Tracing a likeness out of despair.

The peartree filtering - like a great web of suspended motes - air: looking up into it.

Would solve nothing landscape, dream figure that a mind makes, shifting between itself and that imagined other.

Desire reduced to a brisk metaphor of exchange, consumed by its own transport. Damp body, gathering sand on the world's littoral.

What we proceed towards through the night's humidity day's rancour

tinkle

of goat bells across a far river bloom of white dust upon dead words.

My darkling syllable strung upon a high cloister echo I listen for, faded angelus fingertap upon my broken window.

Turns, turns the light on in each dark corner. 'In the softly luminous hour tell me a story, where nothing is more than itself, an object turning in its own memory.'

Is only this: an ember of dusk, caught in the wind, a shadow that calls to us out of an aperture in a garden wall, from another country.

- Martin Anderson

All poems copyright of individual writers