Grief and Grit.

It may be cliched to be quoting Eliot in April, the month in which I am writing this editorial for our June edition, but it really has felt like the cruellest month, a wasteland, where all the ghosts of the last few months seem to have settled en masse on the landscape. On one of these empty days, Sarah and I found ourselves on our hands and knees, sifting the submissions that had made it to our shortlist for issue 2 of Black Iris. Our first call for submissions had elicited poems responding to horrors of unimaginable magnitude with skill, poignancy and tenderness.  I wondered how we would curate a tonally new issue so soon when seemingly, so little had changed. All of a sudden, there we were with many of this month’s contributors, elbow deep in clay, excavating some form of answer.

The poets in June’s edition are scraping, digging, tunnelling and hoisting. They are in quarries, amongst mulch and bark, they are pressed against bodies, they are in pits riddled with insects; it seems clear that they are actively, almost physically,  responding to the  ‘harbinger of this future’s ravaging immensities’ as Jacqueline Saphra so prophetically  puts it in her poem, ‘Dodo’. The kind of immensities that announce themselves at our domestic thresholds, too. In, ‘Why I Can’t Listen to Sad Pop Songs Anymore’ by Clare Pollard, the Theseus-inspired, ‘hanging black sails’, hint at the tragic arc many of us find ourselves on, if not personally, then in a way where the external permeates our internal worlds. This is keenly felt in these poems of grief and grit, which reverberate with resilience and resistance. Our writers are turning to an age-old  human practice, reaching back into the earth, to cultivate something that reminds us of what it is to be human during the onslaught of such inhumanity on so many fronts.

In Glyn Maxwell’s next instalment from ‘Silly Games to Save the World,' he highlights the importance of contemporary poets learning about the ‘old forms’ of poetry - that this act of engagement with 'rhyme, metre, ballad or sonnet,' is absorbed, enriching the subconscious. It is this that yields poems that are truly able to speak, or as we like to think of it, 'sing'. I am always struck when I return to favourite poems, by the way their meanings have the ability to resonate on different mediums - like living creatures - their frequencies are not fixed.  Since beginning writing this and returning to it in May, a General Election has been called, and the Infected Blood Inquiry has illuminated the thousands of people who have suffered and still suffer as a result of huge moral failings. The machinations of war continue. The poems we selected have already started to read differently to how they did in April.  As we attempt to write the present, using tools of the past, how much meaning will be shaped by the events of the future? I don’t know the answer. The poems in this issue are living artefacts, urgent, searching and questioning. 

Lauren Thomas | Co-Editor