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I’ve read Pauline Rowe’s, The Ghost Hospital, and heard her read from her powerful pamphlet at the Open Eye Gallery and the Athenaeum (as part of Liverpool’s Light Night, 2019), but it was when returning to it yesterday that the full force of the sense of isolation and abandonment [often caused by people who were carers/experts] expressed in the poems hit me and brought home how much of our own context we bring to reading.

It’s comforting to think that heath-care has moved on since the 1800s, and yet, reading The Ghost Hospital in April 2019, I sense links to the present context of the Corvid 19 pandemic. There are increasing numbers of vulnerable people isolated, particularly apparent when we hear news of people being treated but having to die alone.

Pauline’s powerful exposition of life experienced by those in asylums is given historical and contemporary context in a poem that expresses a harrowing experience across the world. A Madhouse Air quotes Charles Dickens in 1842, ‘the terrible crowd... terribly painful, / everything had a madhouse air... this sad refuge of degraded humans’.

The fragmented layout of the title poem opening the collection, with the use of short sentences creates a sense of anxiety and unrest. It’s a poem in which everything comes in fits and starts and movies to the longer penultimate sentence to create a sense of dissolution, of lives dissolving. In this opening poem, the reader is welcomed into the detached world of those in The Ghost Hospital, those who will accompany us throughout the ‘tour’.

Themes of being silenced/locked away are prevalent, we encounter patients unable to communicate with self or others – ‘defies the broken skin to leave me bound/ up.’ (Tell-Tale), ‘I see a crowd of women trapped/who can’t return a look’, (The Ghost Hospital) ‘Walking in circles searching for their names’, (A Madhouse Air)

The poems are punctuated throughout with religious references, (St. Blaise, benediction, stations of the cross, Lenten ashes, and Scripture (‘Have you come to kill us?’) adding an ongoing plea for help; and in poems such as Treatment, Pauline takes us inside the isolated world of a patient who tries to be what she thinks others want her to be [when she responds as a dog, although she is a cat, and the failure of the professionals to reach into this isolation] ‘I see the master has fine whiskers/ yet he cannot see the cat in me.’

Cutting the Stone brings together religion, a sense of surreality in terms of the judgment of mental health and the terror of the patient

‘... a red book and a pouring jug.
A surgeon and a monk attend, assisted by a nun
who wears the book upon her head.

They bind each subject to a chair,
monk and nun pretend to pray
a mime of incantations,
the surgeon drills the skull,
in which a tulip bulb pretends
to be a stone
through which the victim’s heart
is terrified.

Both Pilgrim and Self-portrait are powerful poems that reveal compulsion to assert the self. Despite uncertainty and fear, the poet-narrator goes out of her way, ‘her bones precarious’, to avoid annihilation.

I love especially Self-portrait, which seems such an important poem to write. Powerful self-awareness, an antidote to victimhood,

Never able to choose
I just left both minds
bumping against each //
other like tethered boats.

Yet there is the sense that the identity is not choice, is beyond,

I was cut out
of a picture book
in 1963 //

made to stand
at the top of the class
clean, unlovable.

The Ghost Hospital causes us to face what we may wish to avoid, the echo of voices between its pages is powerful. We would prefer not to countenance some things, but, at present, spring and early summer 2020, we are forced to look.

Paul Stephenson’s book, ‘Those People’, is comprised of twenty-three poems revealing a fascination with language (‘Gare du Midi’, ‘Two Tannoys (A Noise A Noise)’ ), word-play and syntax, (‘Roget’, ‘Glace’, ‘As for candied fruit generally, / she can’t see the point, but then / nor can I, if I can be candid’), an acute ear (‘Wake Up And’, ‘Two Tannoys’), and an eye for the poignant in the humour of the everyday (‘Ashby-de-la-Zouch’ ‘the chiseled women wear smiles like snagged zips’), but also an eye for humour in the poignant (‘Arrangements’)

‘Angle End’, and ‘Round the Block’, each almost voyeuristic and concerned with an overview of a neighbourhood, are accessible poems which hold more than is initially apparent beneath the surface. Both poems made me want to write on a similar theme. The rhythm of ‘Round the Block’ had me almost reaching for my trainers ‘…anti-clockwise: / fourteen minutes on go-slow’, and I was left wondering about characters such as Mrs Bulgar, Mr Lamper, Grandad (from ‘Round the Block’), Dr Bilby, The Pope, and ‘The Heyworth-Harmers’ (from ‘Angle End’).

The poignancy of, ‘Professor Wright who cycled seven miles to work and / back each day, then one day only made it six miles.’ (‘Angle End’) and the ending of ‘Birthday Cards’, ‘I find the silliest, rudest, fattest one to send, / Doing my best to get hold of you.’ after its thought-provoking beginning, ‘ Today you’d be seventy if you hadn’t been / so overweight’, lingered.

The title poem with language such as stragglers, hardcore, eager beavers, party-goers, bang on, hover, dollar-hungry doppelgängers, and the wry comment that ‘Those People’, ‘…have it marked fluorescent for weeks in their diary / and make a mission of what to wear,’ is a wonderful example of Paul Stephenson’s acute observations, and he culminates in drawing the reader into the question, ‘…is there a name for them?’

I recommend ‘Those People’, a book to be savoured by reading with the same acute observation with which it was written.

Katharine Towers' latest publication, The Violin Forest, is a pamphlet of twenty short lyric poems, none longer than 20 lines. Bursting with music, there are references to composers, works and musical techniques, and there is also sonorous language, poems structured by looping reprise. 

I read this beautifully produced HappenStance pamphlet, with its emerald green endpapers, cover to cover several times over a few days. It came to remind me of one of those musical greeting cards: opening the pamphlet, music emerges from the pages. I found myself compelled to stop at each poem, to savour sound, image and what each conjured in its small space. As if arriving at a clearing in a forest, we find an entire, distinct world, shaped by the refraction of shadow and sound. Experiencing The Violin Forest awakened me anew to the life in my own small city garden, increasing awareness of the abundance of life in improvisational song-like qualities, ‘A robin tinkers with a few odd notes in the hawthorn.’ (‘Nonchalant’); ‘See how they bump and chink on the garden path like / small clay pots, busy with their urgent nothings.’ (‘Sparrows’). These are small studies of the essence of setting. Katharine encapsulates the robin-ness of robin, the sparrow-ness of a sparrow, but shows their being transformed within a specific moment ‘over minute differences… over conundrums of love’ (‘Sparrows’).  

Katharine places us over and over in autumn, with both its darkness and wonder, encouraging readers to ‘... take to heart that busy fragrant dark,’ (‘Sparrows’). In dwindling light, we encounter darkness – expecting death, and death is present but not feared, ‘And autumn is the cling of sadness in the night / and autumn-brown the turnings of the mind’ (‘Harmonium’); ‘like the soldiers in La Chanson de Roland, who don’t mind about dying.’ (‘Nonchalant’); ‘and the blackbird’s singing is a fado, and / the thrushes joining voice is like a homesick child’ (‘Harmonium’). These deaths in the full-throated song of nature are not to be feared – they are in process, continuous: singing, dying, turning. But who will forget ‘Mr Dead Fox’, his bright orange corpse, the abrupt interruption of mankind causing ‘his shame of being suddenly dead.’ 

This is the place where autumn kisses winter, a liminal space with its sense of mourning, ‘Imagine a real garden where I sit / with my soul in dead November leaves,’ (‘The Good Words’). Yet it is also a place of eternal return and latent potential; though there is silence, it is the quietness of an orchestra as it rests between movements. The images strike a note that resounds in the mind long after reading, ‘A red leaf trickles slowly through the foliage.’ (‘Nonchalant’).