
Boat of Many Colours
by Mike Barlow [editor]
17 poems, 26 pages
Price: £5
ISBN: 978 -1- 999972813
Publisher: Wayleave Press
To order: https://www.wayleavepress.co.uk/
Reviewed by Neil Leadbeater
Taking its cue from Joseph’s coat of many colours in the Book of Genesis, this attractively produced anthology of 17 poems by 17 poets dazzles us with its kaleidoscope of riches.
One of the joys of reading an anthology is to experience very different voices as they engage with their subjects and to enjoy the very wide range of themes and styles. Subjects covered in this anthology range from embroidery to phonographs and dinosaurs to flaying knives. They include poems written from the standpoint of a hospital patient in a recovery room, a wheelchair user in a lift and a person walking along a beach in Donegal.
Rebecca Bilkau’s powerful poem ‘Still Life in a Supermarket’ draws on the cautious curiosity of an immigrant couple buying food items in a foreign country: ‘Need / pulls them in. She picks a tin from the bin, / carefully. As if it was a baby / or a fizzing grenade.’ Note how she lends emphasis to certain words like ‘need’, ‘carefully’ and ‘grenade’ by placing them at the beginning or end of her lines.
They know the three things
immigrants know: the food might contain stuff
which scrapes their guts or chafes their beliefs;
enquiry requires flights of language beyond their prayers;
and money, money, money is tight
in all their dialects.
Hunger can be simpler
to manage.
I admire the sonic effect provided by the juxtaposition of ‘enquiry requires’ and the threefold repetition of the word ‘money’ suggesting there is plenty of it when it is the one thing that they do not have.
In Ron Scowcroft’s ‘My father’s phonograph’ the reference to ‘Condor Flake’ and ‘Stan Kenton’ lock the poem into its specific timeframe in the very first stanza:
There was a ritual to 78s –
laying aside his cherry-wood pipe
still sweet from Condor Flake,
running an ochre index finger along
the accordion of sleeves to take.
inevitably, Stan Kenton’s Orchestra
to the brass nub and felt platter
like an offering.
Chris Considine’s ‘Pig-sitting on the island’ contains some memorable images: ‘Their bodies are rounded, hot to the touch, / skins taut and black / like Brobdingnagian grapes, but clothed / in small stiff hairs’.
All of these subjects have been closely observed by the writers enabling us to fully enter into their worlds.
In ‘Died from scalds’ Michael Bartholomew-Biggs takes three words from a death certificate to construct a very moving poem about the deceased and those he has left behind. The poem is remarkable in its reworking of the facts of his death and the effect that this has had on his family.
Lynda Plater’s clever poem ‘Moth makers’ portrays the arrival of ‘a winter moth with dark band wings / and yellow wing fillings’ who moves among the lace-makers with a graceful ease. The beautiful ambivalence of her lines leave us wondering whether its image is laced into the design or not, and the spectre of it enfolding itself in night after the candle has been extinguished reminds us how destructive moths can be to clothing.
Wayleave Press, based in Lancaster, England, was started in 2014 with the aim of publishing good quality, modestly priced pamphlets of poetry by established and emerging poets. This anthology highlights the range and quality of work published by the press to date. Short biographies of all the poets are included at the end. |