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Poetry Worth Hearing: Episode 39

  • kathleenmcphilemy8
  • 3 hours ago
  • 14 min read

This episode had as its prompt 'other spaces'. I chose this idea because our main feature features poetry by the Argentinian poet, Sergio Raimondo, introduced and translated by Ben Bollig and Mark Leech. It seems to me that one of the functions of translation is to take us to 'other spaces.' Dinah Livingstone has given us a translation from Virgil's 4th Georgic, which takes us to the other space of the underworld. A very high proportion of the poems I received were concerned with death and the liminal spaces of dying and the afterlife. I also welcomed poems which moved away from the everyday spaces, whether geographically, in memory or imagination. Other poets you will find here include Martyn Crucefix, Kate Young, Jane Thomas, Michael Klimeš, Trisha Broomfield, Helen Overell, Lizzie Ballagher, Zachary Thraves, Terry Jones and Sue Wood. You can hear it at https://open.spotify.com/episode/6l0vSzgTkbLXLaKplH4rv3?si=UMsjGUtHR_O-TpExO5ZA7A or on You Tube, Audible or Spotify podcasts


Sergio Raimondi (b. 1968, Bahía Blanca, Argentina) is widely acknowledged as Argentina’s most important and influential contemporary poet, with an international reputation in and beyond the Spanish-speaking world. Sergio Raimondi - Contribución al plan de reconstrucción forestal del municipio de Bahía Blanca (Ediciones LUX, 2025)


 

Ben Bollig teaches Spanish and Latin American Literature and Film at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. His books include Politics and Public Space in Contemporary Argentine Poetry (2016) and Modern Argentine Poetry: Displacement, Exile, Migration (2011). His published translations include Cristian Aliaga’s The Foreign Passion (Influx, London, 2016) and, with Mark Leech, Sergio Raimondi: Selected Poems (Liverpool University Press, 2023).

 

Mark Leech lives in Oxford. His most recent chapbook, Borderlands, a follow-up to his Chang’an Poems, is published by Original Plus. He has published chapbooks of Spanish and Old English translations, and London Water, a sequence of long poems about London's hidden rivers. His short stories can be read and listened to at https://intothewords314194090.wordpress.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/@markexists. He won the Stephen Spender Prize in 2004 for his translation of the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood.



Here are some of the other Argentinian poets mentioned:

Ezequiel Zaidenwerg and Mirta Rosenberg - Bichos (Bajo la Luna, 2017; selected translations in Modern Poetry in Translation)

Juan Carlos Bustriazo Ortiz - Herejía Bermeja (Espacio Hudson, 2014; selected translations in Modern Poetry in Translation)




Dinah Livingstone


FROM VIRGIL 4TH GEORGIC  494-506


Euridice cries: ‘What has ruined us both?

What madness has lost us? I am forlorn, Orpheus.

Again they cruelly force me back

and sleep overwhelms my swimming eyes.

Goodbye. I am carried away

wrapped in enormous night

reaching out for you with my helpless hands,

which, alas, I can’t give you.’

She didn’t say another word but vanished

like smoke dissolving into thin air.

She didn’t see him clutching at shadows

and wanting to say so much.

The  gaoler would not let him cross the marsh  again.

What could he do? Where take himself?

For the second time his wife was gone.

Could he weep or sing to alter

the will of god or fate?

On the River Styx now, she shivered in the boat


***


Eurydice: Illa, Quis et me, inquit, miseram et te perdidit,

Orpheu,quis tantus furor? En iterum crudelia retro

Fata vocant, conditque natantia lumina somnus.

Iamque vale: feror ingenti circumdata nocte

invalidasque tibi tendens, heu non tuas, palmas!

dixit et ex oculis subito, ceu fumus in auras

commixtus tenues, fugit diversa, neque illum, 

prensantem nequiquam umbras et multa volentem

dicere, praeterea vidit, nec portitor Orci

amplius obiectam passus transire paludem.


Dinah Livingstone: Dinah has given many poetry readings in London, throughout Britain and abroad. Her poetry collections include Embodiment (2019) and Poems of Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park (2012). She has received three Arts Council Writer’s Awards for her poetry.  Her prose books include Poetry Handbook for Readers and. Writers (Macmillan 1993). She is also a translator with a special interest in Latin American poetry, including Prayer in the National Stadium by the Chilean poet María Eugenia Bravo Calderara (1992) and Poets of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1993).. More info: katabasis.co.uk/dinah.html




Maureen Jivani


Orpheus in the Overworld

 

He leaves the car-door

open,

the radio on,

 

Moonlight playing,

grabs the red carnation

from the passenger seat.

 

Under a black brolly

he crunches

the gravel

 

beneath

his feet,

races down the path,

 

bordering

the church.

And stops.

 

Touches

the scratch

of her name

 

on a gate.

It cuts his breath.

He runs farther on

 

past the cold stone

walls of All Saints

and turns west

 

towards

the placating yew,

(church and tree,

 

custodians now

for an intimate space.)

and arrives

 

at the plot

in diminishing rain,

only to find

 

light, skipping away

              like a young bride

      in a summer dress.




All at Sea

after Adrienne Rich

 

and i wanted to explore the wreck

the wreck being me in dread

of the self

 

buried deep,

murky and bruised

a ghost ship and yet not a ghost ship

 

but the ghost of a ghost ship a mother-ship

lost in a space

with miraculous fish

darting in and out, between its timbers

dodging bigger meaner prey

with their greater teeth and nerve

 

i learned of the wreck

from a man of letters

his folded hands neat on his lap –

 

i was sipping water

at that time which was no time

and time ahead of itself

 

it’s true to say,

he submerged me fully,

in my rubber suit,

with my table of depths

and my precious breaths

 

and as

i descended

my spaces

compressed

my mind

compressed

the pain

unbearable

heat draining

from my

gloved body

suddenly

 

equilibrium

regained,

I found myself

at the edge of the wreck,

torch in hand, shining a light

onto glittering treasures

drifting from a gladstone bag –

scalloped bracelets

designed in gold, little faces,

pearlescent hands –

so much stopped time.


Maureen Jivani's poems have been published widely. She has a pamphlet of poems: My Shinji Noon, and a full collection: Insensible Heart, published by Mulfran Press. She has an MPhil in Writing and ios currntly busy with her next collection. https://www.maureenjivanipoet.co.uk


Martyn Crucifix


Thanks to Martyn Crucefix and Shearsman Books for allowing us to use these poems.


Winner 2020 Schlegel-Tieck Prize: Peter Huchel’s poems:https://www.shearsman.com/store/Peter-Huchel-These-Numbered-Days-p139332796 


Kate Young


Coat Hangers        

 

 

When I open the mirrored door

I hear them jangle  

loose tongued, accusatory,

skinny silvered shoulders

rattling their disgust.

 

I’ve denied them the warmth of wool,

the soft drape of cotton,

cashmere and silk.

Too soon to clear clothing

I hear them chime.

 

Light seeps in

through a crack in the blind.

A pale-lace moon

glares at black sacks,

specs in galaxies of plastic.

 

The wardrobe is weeping.

I climb into its smeary face –

the fit is tight,

my face upturned,

inhale the scent of your passing.




What are the Chances?

 

 

It must be twenty years.

You haven’t changed –

your skin remarkably unlined,

hair still soft, auburn tinged.

 

You are even wearing

the same shade of cornflower

as last I saw you,

dressed up to the nines.

 

I’ve considered this moment,

over the years,

wondered if you would

be here to welcome me.

 

I’d expected a brief tangle

with an aggressive tumour,

a sudden aneurysm, like a thief

caught red-handed

 

or perhaps a slow slippage

through my octogenarian years

but no, in the end just a van

and a misjudged bend.

 

You wave, you always waved

in shops, parks, pubs

as if I wouldn’t recognise you.

We hug, shift into shadows.

 

 

Kate Young lives in Kent with her husband and has been passionate about poetry and literature since childhood.

Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Words for the Wild, Poetry on the Lake, Sea Changes, The Poet, The Alchemy Spoon, Fly on the Wall Press, Poetry Scotland, The Lake and Littoral.

She has also been published in the anthologies Places of Poetry and Beyond the Storm. Her pamphlets A Spark in the Darkness and Beyond the School Gate are published with Hedgehog Press.

Find her on X @Kateyoung12poet or her website kateyoungpoet.co.uk

 

 

Jane Thomas


My Father in his Coracle: Drift

 

At the edge of the river Styxa frayed roperavels away like a cream eel

            unclutched                        coracle adrift                        heading to where blue herons sleep

                                    rift wing bats drink-dive

                                                unbodied moths test their wings

                                                thither in to the light                                                                        clipped silver under tongue                                                                                    you follow                                                                                    dawn threads                                                                                               

 

                                                                                                weight gone                                                                                                                        drifting

                                                                        in

                                                                                               

 

 

                                                                                    white

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                    willow      




Jane Thomas is a poet based in Oxford, she has just finished a book on Alzheimer’s that has been commended in both the Rialto and Live Canon competitions, this is the final poem from the book. More about her here: janethomas.org


                             


Michael Klimeš


The bridge that does not quite reach  

I’m the only one awake

staring at the dark ceiling

between dad who is dead

and Ceylin breathing.

 

I hold his hand

that is stiff cold

and hers warm –

everything to come.

 

I do the sums:

Born 90

years apart

and art or dreams

 

whatever

these words

are cannot

help you meet.

 

I cry not because I am

your son and her father:

but because I am the bridge

between that doesn’t quite reach.   



Michael Klimeš is a financial journalist based in London. He has been published in Alchemy Spoon, Poetry Worth Hearing, Wildfire Words, One Hand Clapping Magazine and Iota. His pamphlet Love Carries the Future was shortlisted in the Full House Literary Magazine Digital Chapbook 2023 competition and longlisted in the Black Cat Poetry Press pamphlet competition 2024 and Alchemy Spoon Pamphlet Competition 2022.

 


Trisha Broomfield


Grandad’s Red Chair


‘Lift yer feet ‘Arry!’ Nan orders,

Bex Bissell wheels squeak across the carpet

Sis and I stop fighting, stare at the empty chair

the worn, red seat still sporting a sheet from the Daily Mirror,

‘Tell her!’ Sis nudges me, the elder,

‘Nan?’ I summon up the words we’ve dared not use,

‘Wot? I told you, move away, give yer grandad some space.’

The carpet sweeper swallows crumbs of Custard Creams

baulks at cat hairs, spreads them flat on the leafy Axminster

a ‘hand me across’ from Mrs Price one door down.

‘Grandad isn’t there.’ I grab sis’s hand

we shuffle back, stand at a safe distance,

wait for the explosion.

‘Right ‘Arry, when I’ve done this, if you would be so kind

as to stop flicking yer ash on me carpet.’

Nan lifts the glass ashtray from the side table, wipes away nothing,

‘I’d ‘ave time to write me memoires if you didn’t make so much mess.’

Sis, emboldened, adds, ‘He died ages ago Nan.’

Nan fusses about, plumps cushions

‘There, now don’t get in me way ‘Arry, I’ve got dinner to sort,

peas don’t shell themselves, unless you want to…?’

The words hang in the air below the marbled-glass lightshade,

‘thought not.’ Nan’s body, hot from its exertions,

wafts Wright’s coal tar, overtones of French Fern.

We stare again at chair, antimacassar yellowed with Brylcreem

Foxes Glacier Mints stuffed down the sides,

Grandad’s place has its own aroma.

‘And don’t think I can’t see you two,’ Nan bellows from the tiled kitchen

‘don’t either of you dare sit on yer grandad’s chair!’


Trisha Broomfield has three pamphlets (published by Dempsey and Windle) and contributed to many anthologies. Her latest, My Acrostic Mother, illustrated by Heather Moulson, is available to order online and at bookstores. All four pamphlets will be soon be available at the Surrey Poet Laureateship Library.

Trisha is poet for the monthly Cranleigh Magazine, the annual Caistorian, is a member of Cranleigh Writers’ and one third of the Booming Lovelies poetry trio who are preparing for their first show on March 8th at The Women’s Hall in Billingshurst as part of a celebration for International Women’s Day.

 

You can hear her poems at Poetry Worth Hearing and BBC Upload.

Facebook Trisha Broomfield Poetry; Instagram @magentapink22 @boominglovelies

 

  


Helen Overell


Discovering the world


The wooden hut, used for school assemblies,

dusty velvet curtains mark the raised stage

and on the wall opposite, a world map


much of the land in pink, oceans in blue,

a tapered wooden pointer poised ready

to tap its way on epic adventures,


follow lines of longitude, latitude,

shiver in Arctic cold, glimpse polar bears,

skip down to the ruler-straight equator,


bask in Sub-Saharan heat, keeping watch —

clatter pots and pans, shout, to scare away

crocodiles — trace the Blue and the White Nile


into Sudan and find the meeting point,

Khartoum — our bungalow, slatted shadows

waltzing to the clack of a ceiling fan,


here in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire,

in Wales in the British Isles, the mountains —

the Skirrid, Blorenge, Sugar Loaf — stand guard.



Helen Overell: I have work in several magazines and some of my poems were highly commended

or placed in competitions including the Poetry Society Stanza Competition 2018 and

the Poetry News Members' poems Summer 2020. My first collection Inscapes &

Horizons was published by St Albert's Press in 2008 and my second collection

Thumbprints was published by Oversteps in 2015. A booklet of my poems

Measures for lute was published by The Lute Society in 2020. I take an active role

in Mole Valley Poets, a Poetry Society Stanza group.





Lizzie Ballagher


At Morte Stones                          

 

Below the warren, a woman wrapped in scarves

walks her greyhounds in the cold.

Today, they do not race the wind

but hold fast to her heels,

tails between legs.

She hears in their throats a prickling growl,

sees hackles rise and feels

her own hair stand on end

 

because beyond them all

there moves a figure

creaking in an awkwardness of armour,

who stirs the strand with hefty sword,

stooping to make an everlasting chain

from grains of sand, a rope to moor him

to the land forever, since he was cast

adrift by Pope and Holy Church,

 

because he was one who raised his blade

to butcher Becket on the stones, to smash

his brains out on the floor, to slaughter him

below the altar. So, to assuage his guilt—

from now till stars fall from the skies—

he wanders, wades the shore to make

a mooring waves will wash away,

and wash away again.

 

 

 

Legend has it that the ghost of Sir William De Tracy haunts the coast near his ancestral Devon home. Here, according to local legend, he has forever been condemned to weave a rope from grains of sand because of his conspiracy (with Hugh De Morville, Reginald FitzUrse, and Richard De Breton) to murder Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, late in 1170.

 


Lizzie Ballagher's focus is on landscapes, both interior and exterior; also on the beauty of nature. Having studied in England, Ireland, and the USA, she worked in education and publishing. Her poems have appeared in print and online in all corners of the English-speaking world. 'An Astronaut...' was featured in Dreich 9, season 3, 2021; but the other poems have never been published. Find her blog at https://lizzieballagherpoetry.wordpress.com/




Zachary Thraves


anywhere but here

​


the clock burns

as white gowns fly by

ghosts in the night

the clock burns

​

while in the corner, a small boy

clutching a serrated scarf​​​

like jeans distressed for fashion​​​

the clock burns

​

a clipboard grabs me

explains the notes like Italian opera

I’m trying to understand

the tears burn

​

The pendulum finds rhythm​​​

with my heart

I want to be sick

plastic floor burns

​

dreams fizzle out

like rain on the black pane

lost in stolen memory

the clock burns

​

I tell myself

between gasps of breath

anywhere but here

the clock turns​​​​​


Zachary Thraves is a writer and performer from the UK. His poems have been published by Broken Sleep Books, Juste Millieu and others, and his plays performed internationally. In 2023 he performed a one-man fringe show exploring his experience being diagnosed with bi-polar, and in the same year won best actor for portraying Charles Dickens. He lives with his partner in East Sussex. Find him on Bluesky @28hary.




Terry Jones


Gromford Revisited

You could find Gromford using Googlemaps

or the Ordnance Survey. How could you not?

But then neither of us knew the name

even as we were strolling through it,

its earth banks, passing place and single track .

 

It was a walk we did the November

that we knew, had reason to know, that never

again would we accompany each other

to this place which was, as I said,

hardly a place at all. But today,

this being another November, I troubled

the narrow lane and I could swear,

if that helped you to believe it,

that her footfall echoed my own,

and that a parallel channel was pushed

through the leaf litter, and the wind

carried the strain of her voice so faint.

 

Shall I recommend that you visit

Gromford? I would rather you stayed away.

Plot the reference if you like, let your finger

 touch the spot, then wrap it up

in the multiple folds of your magenta

map and leave it there, unexplored.


Terry Jones former Competition Secretary, Newsletter editor and chair of Ver Poets. Member of Reading and Enfield Stanzas. Have led workshops and discussion groups on Poetry Topics for many years. Former teacher and Careers Officer.

 




Sue Wood


Journey

 

 

We all have our winter journeys…we will have our reward – so long as all we want is an Emperor’s egg.

                                                        ( The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard)

 

 

‘Henry Bowers, Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Bill Wilson took 35 days

to collect three Emperor penguin eggs in July 1911. In the middle of

the Antarctic winter…’                                                 (The Observer, 14 January 2012)

 

 

                           it was pitch black.                              1 lamp for burning blubber

                                                                                         1 lamp for burning spirit

                                                                                         1 tent candle lamp

                                                                                         1 blubber cooker

                                                                                         1 blowpipe

                           8lbs of candles

 

Across the darkness three men stumble.

It is so cold their teeth shatter.

No moon lights their way. One holds a lantern up,

they have enough candles for a month.

Each night their clothing freezes into stone.

Each morning they pummel garments back

 

into service, harness themselves

to sledges heavy with  picks and gear

                                                                        ice-axes, an Alpine rope, knives,

                                                                        a piece of green Willesden canvas

3 man-harnesses                                           Total weight 757 lbs

 

                   

Puttees, finnesko, saenngrass , hair socks, two pairs of woollen socks                                                                                       

Our sweat froze and accumulated, it passed from our flesh to become ice.

We were frozen into a pulling position.

They carried a naked candle.

                                                               Three frozen men and a little pool of light

 

 

drag on towards Cape Crozier, cross the limitless Barrier’s

twisted ridges, sixty feet deep. Cherry, unable to wear his spectacles,

‘being so near-sighted’, is almost blind.

 

‘Things must improve,’ says Bill.

‘I wanted peaches and syrup – badly – especially the syrup’.

Birdie had two tins of sweets.

Sometimes it was difficult not to howl.

We kept our tempers – even with God. 

 

 

 

 Camp

 

First the stench: whale-breath thick

with eel, char, cod; slimed rock

colonised to a feather’s width,

each bird, house-proud, fierce.

 

We lit a candle, held it up

to the glitter of a thousand eyes,

then edged across an ice shelf

over-hung with flutes of ice.

 

That night we boiled a bird

skimmed the oil from bloody water,

lit a feast of lamps, remembered

how the colours of light are trapped

 

like ourselves in ice.



Albatross

 

Wind-wanderer, so long at sea you have forgotten

earth scents, the pale grass between two pebbles

where you squatted with shabby wings

over eggs, your bird-wife greeting you,

beak to beak.

 

Wave-skimmer, you dream on the wing,

hold longitude and latitude in your

easing heart-beat, the storm threading

your wings’ precision over and over

wave on wave.

 

Whale-roads are your paths, alone,

your company is the dark cross

of your shadow, a slipstream below

on the ice-blue ocean. Your journey

is on and on.

 

 

 


Source


You said there were gold taps

shaped like dolphins gasping for air.

You said I was born  by the river

in a mansion because of the War.

 

Now I push through Thames’ grasses

following the path to the river behind the old house.

Listen for water that you sensed as

greened air, fretting the window,

breathing depths and shallows, bird chatter,

its lapping gentle as cradle song.

 

Today I catch up with myself,

stop by the river, run my hands through

its journeying, remember the tale

you once told of golden fish leaping,

a house full of echoes, an unseen river going its way,

a great bath filling and emptying.

 

 

 

Sue Wood's first collection 'Imagine yourself to be water' was published by Cinnamon Press as first prize winner of their Poetry Collection Award 2010. Her work has appeared in The Forward Book of Poetry for single poems, her pamphlet 'Woman Scouring a Pot' was published by The Poetry Business, came second in Basil Bunting Poetry competition,widely published in journals and anthologies .eg 'Ship Burial' published in Dreamcatcher magazine, 'The Glass Piano' in The Alchemy Spoon'. Other work in PNR etc. various poems placed in competitions, long-listed twice for National Poetry competition. 


 


That's all for Episode 39. You can listen to the episode at https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/7IR7ltf5pxOs84DTJh17b7/episode/6l0vSzgTkbLXLaKplH4rv3/wizard or on You Tube, Audible and Spotify podcasts. Suggestions and comments should be sent to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com as should submissions for the next episode where the theme is 'time'. Deadline March 18th.

 
 
 

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