Poetry International Web: Introduction

Issue 2: February 1, 2006

This instalment of the UK pages of PIW is guest-edited by Anne Born and Sinéad Morrissey, who bring us a quartet of poets that presents a range around the UK in many ways. From Falmouth to Fife, the distance between Penelope Shuttle and John Burnside is over five hundred miles; they are joined, from across the Irish Sea, by Martin Mooney and Jean Bleakney. The range is not simply geographical, however - almost twenty years separate the publication of Penelope Shuttle's and Jean Bleakney's first books, and the calm grace of John Burnside's poems contrasts strongly with the piercings and stomped-on sandcastles we find in Martin Mooney's poems.

Even as the settings of these poems range from field to forest, garden to hospital ward, beach to body-piercing parlour, it's important not to let an awareness of the differences detract from the correspondences that can be found between them; for example, the last Mooney poem in this issue, 'Neanderthal Funeral', captures a moment of cold, quiet grief with a grace that, while displaying his repertoire, opens a conversation with Penelope Shuttle's elegiac poem to her late husband, Peter Redgrove. In turn, Shuttle's litany of what she is not, 'Non CV, or I am not who you think I am', shares some qualities of tone with 'The Fairytale Land of Um' by Jean Bleakney, whose 'Winter Solstice' carries a view of frosted harebells that can lead, quite naturally, to John Burnside's 'Over Kellie'.

It's not all about moving between poems, of course; any of the poems in this issue could be a favourite, holding you to its page. But it's exciting to have discovered from our first edition that, even more so than in a print magazine, the web format invites readers to browse and skip between the poets and their poems, their issue 1 predecessors and fellow poets from other countries - to range freely, in fact.