Hodkinson
Gross
Dastidar
Fitzpatrick
Phipps
Hullo there,
A grim, inventive, excellent set of poems for you this week. If you need some semblance of cheer to chew on afterwards, perhaps go and read this article about how tardigrades’ conquest of the solar system is now well under way. So they should be fine, at least.
Enjoy the poems, if not the world.
Chrissy
PERVERSE editor
PS It may be best to view some of these poems on a larger-than-phone-sized screen, or a phone turned sideways, or projected onto the surface of a tardigrade-conquested moon.
Robert Hodkinson
Bede
I saw you whirl
like a mead-hall sparrow
from winter into winter;
as ashes, you pour
into soft air, vanishing
as if you’d never been.
Philip Gross
Wrecked
Apply the clamp. Give it maximum torque
until one day it snaps; you just let go,
get rat-arsed, wrecked, till you can scarcely walk.
The boss, the politicians, all that talk
of tightening your belt. Around their necks – just so.
Apply the clamp. Give it maximum torque.
Smashed glass. Yes, that’s what pops your cork.
Now let’s see what will overflow.
Get rat-arsed, wrecked, till you can scarcely walk.
The smells of last night’s party, char-grilled pork
or worse, rise from the streets below.
Apply the clamp, give it maximum torque,
a walkie-talkie’s crackling; helicopters’ hawk-
eye beams will find you. Lie low. Run. Or no,
get rat-arsed, wrecked, till you can scarcely walk.
You’ve blown it. Rolling news pitchfork
your scorched soul up as they stoke the reality show,
apply the clamp, give it maximum torque.
Get rat-arsed? Wrecked. Hell, you can scarcely walk.
with thanks to Cymau workshop, 2013
Rishi Dastidar
A history of the esteem of French Tax Collectors
After James Tate
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We art our feathers | | and they hiss us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
We pluck the goose | | and they thank us
Suzanna Fitzpatrick
Tardigrade Waltz
slow stepper
moss piglet
water bear
orbiting
under a
microscope
name it and
your kind can
take it or
leave it – air
water food –
can survive
heat cold or
gamma rays
competent
living in
outer space:
maybe you’ll
exit in
search of a
new home when
we’ve wrecked this
earth beyond
even your
fortitude
Tardigrades were first described in 1773 by the German zoologist Johann Goeze, who called them ‘Kleiner Wasserbär’ (‘little water bear’). In 1777 the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani named them ‘Tardigrada’ (‘slow steppers’).
Sam Phipps
Hickory Dickory Duck
hickory dickory duck
what the absolute fuck
the light’s gone out
we’re left with nowt
hickory dickory fuck
Contributor Notes & Bios
Robert Hodkinson
https://www.instagram.com/malvern_gibbous/; https://x.com/MalvernGibbous
Robert Hodkinson lives in central England. His work has appeared in more than a dozen publications and his short collection, Malvern Gibbous, won a Templar Poetry award in 2013. He also writes and publishes historical non-fiction.
Note on ‘Bede’:
“‘Bede’ is a meditation on the view of 8th-century scholar, St. Bede: that Saxon pagans believed life to be a brief period of ‘something’ between eons of nothing; and of the echo of this non-Christian idea in the context of our modern rituals of cremation and the scattering of ashes.”
Philip Gross
https://www.philipgross.co.uk; new collection: https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/the-shores-of-vaikus-1359
Philip Gross’ The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022) was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, which he previously won in 2009. His 28th collection, The Shores of Vaikus, a creative re-inhabiting of Estonia, his refugee father’s birthplace, comes from Bloodaxe, November 2024.
Note on ‘Wrecked’:
“I’m not the onlie begetter of ‘Wrecked’. The craft is mine, the spirit from a workshop in Cymau, North Wales, where we perversified the villanelle. (Person A creates 3 possible Line-ones: Person B picks one, offering 3 Line-threes back; of these, A chooses one that sparks creative tension.) That was 2013, but oh, how topical… If whoever donated line 3 happens to be reading this, tell me; you’ll be credited.”
Rishi Dastidar
Rishi Dastidar’s third collection, Neptune’s Projects, is published in the UK by Nine Arches Press. He also reviews poetry for The Guardian, and is chair of Wasafiri.
Note on ‘A history of the esteem of French Tax Collectors’:
“This is not so much after James Tate’s ‘Lewis and Clark Overheard in Conversation’ as wholesale larceny of it… which kinda works with the subject of my poem. I’ll leave you to google the Colbert quote that inspired it, which is still how most governments operate. I remain tickled by the fact that apparently being a tax collector in France is a good thing. Rebrand HMRC anyone?”
Suzanna Fitzpatrick
https://www.instagram.com/suzanna_fitzpatrick/
Suzanna Fitzpatrick (she/her) is a bisexual poet with poems on Radio 4 and widely published in magazines and anthologies in the UK, US, Ireland and Canada. Her pamphlets are Fledglings (2016), and Crippled (due 2025) (both Red Squirrel Press, UK).
Note on ‘Tardigrade Waltz’:
“The hardiness of tardigrades fascinates my children, and as a writer I love their many names, as if they are deities. When I noticed their English names are all dactyls, the idea for 3-beat syllabic lines was formed. I think the constriction of syllabics works especially well for ecopoems. The merry waltz beat is both at odds with and hurtling towards the conclusion: nothing is indestructible, not least our planet.”
Sam Phipps
Sam Phipps has had poems published in Poetry News, Gutter, Poems for Grenfell Tower (Onslaught Press), the Bridport Prize Anthology, Broken Sleep Book’s Masculinity anthology, and elsewhere. His sequence From The Mouth Of The Thames was displayed at Watermans Arts Centre in London in 2023, with photographs by Clem Routledge.
Note on ‘Hickory Dickory Duck’:
“Nursery rhymes are often the earliest poems we hear – some of them are terrific but ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’ has been crying out for a bit more oomph for centuries. I wanted my version to take desperation and defiance to the limit – and to revel in its own simple sounds.”
See you for next week’s issue, with poems by Aaron Kent, Christopher Lanyon, Craig Sines, E.R. De Siqueira and Pascal O'Loughlin.
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