Editorial

It sometimes goes beyond any idea of the good poem or the great poem. Or anything like that. Sometimes, it is a rarer event. On these occasions, you read a poem, a single poem by a poet you have not read before, and you know that you have fallen for them so completely that you will hunt out all you can of their work.

This wonderful occurrence happened to me again just recently when a friend posted a poem on to our WhatsApp chat. How little fanfare he gave the poem – ‘here’s a good one’ – and how utterly and completely did I fall for that poem, that poet, her collections, and, shipped from America, her two memoirs. The poem was ‘The Birthing’ by Deborah Digges.

It starts so high, almost arch – ‘Call out the names in the procession of the loved’ – but soon, within only a few lines, the poem finds itself in the real, tangible world – ‘In a field, a cow groaned, lowing, trying to give birth.’ The poem is like the flitting of a bird, it whirls between these two registers, the high and otherworldly and the rustic, common and rooted. So that when the poet’s companion, witnessing the scene with them, must rescue the calf that is struggling to be born, it is described with such strange tension between the two realms:

I watched him thrust his arms entire
into the yet-to-be, where I imagined holy
sparrow scattering

in the hall of souls for his big mortal hands
just to make way.

I will not share the ending of the poem but will leave it as a gift to any interested reader who might go searching online for the rest of the poem. But ah, it is a treat.

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Her poems are illuminating. The memoirs, too, sparkle in their own way. I had a thought when reading the first of these memoirs, Fugitive Spring. In a passage where Digges is defending her decision to throw away a lot of her earlier verse – what caught my attention was that curious alignment: the emergence of her poetry happening at the same time as she lost the faith of her childhood. She writes:

I think I write to be saved; from what,
I’m not sure, since salvation comes always
with the next poem [...] The point is that
in Texas I believed that they were, or could
be, poems, the way I’d once believed in
prayer. When the baby was born, I’d give
up Christianity, but I would always be
religious. Writing became my religion.

On reading this, I wondered how much that central tension that exists at the outset of our writing life impacts the long-term course of the writing. Her writing stepped out of the grave of her belief – but seems always conscious of its starting point. I felt something of her journey in my journey, that rural, religious background, the doubt and the shift to writing. I then wondered about contemporary prevalence of political poetry and whether it might have some similar tension, now much more common, as its origin. Perhaps, in an earlier time, the aspect that was not working was our belief – but now, this question settled or never a factor, we look around and see the collapse of our governance…

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In just this way, this issue’s mini features look at how a poet, now perhaps faded from view, can still influence us, our thinking and our writing. A poetry journal is (understandably) focused on new work, new poets, new voices – and I liked the idea of a small gesture that tilted the light backwards a bit and brought some earlier poets back into view. Thank you to those poets who helped bring this idea to life – and to the other poets who have contributed their own great poems to the magazine.

Lastly, on a personal note, I was so pleased to read the fantastic response to the first issue of the new Poetry London. A special thank you to our new subscribers – my heartiest best wishes to you all.

Niall