NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW
An independent small press poetry review
 CELEBRATION OF LOVE edited by Wendy Webb Poetry Monthly Press 39 Cavendish Road Long Eaton Nottingham NG10 4HY UK ISBN 1 905126 61 1 £5.50 email Poetry Monthly visit the website of Wendy Webb Books        Web design by  This page last updated: 10th December 2007. |
CELEBRATION OF LOVE | |
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This collection contains the prize-wining and selected poems from the Davidian Open Poetry Competition 2005. The Davidian makes for accessible poetry using form, rhyme and repetitive refrains to celebrate the oldest of themes in this competition: that of the endurance of love. This particular competition was judged by Ronnie Goodyer. The winning poems are presented in the first three pages: The first GOING FOR GOLD, by Norman Bissett, uses six stanzas of quintets, a gentle rhyming scheme and the repeated refrain reflecting a warm celebration of marital love, which is expressed through the successive anniversaries mentioned in the poem. The first stanza sets the scene: On our first wedding anniversary, we dined al fresco by the Adonis, where Lebanese wild cyclamen dance and sway, river banks red with anemones there joining our celebration.The last stanza shows how the development brings the reader up to date: Following the wagons this ruby year, We shared our cake with others growing old. Approaching Zion, fellow pioneers offered encouragement to go for gold, and joined our celebration.So the reader can see the use of rhymes and half-rhymes and the repeated refrain that the poem pursues. The second winner A SCOTTISH SOUVENIR, uses much the same format, but utilises four stanzas and uses an image of dried Scottish heather as the key which holds the thread of memory after a loved one has passed on: March days were grey, and raindrops streaked the panes. Wet weather matched my mood: I chose a book, once loved but long forgotten, which I hoped would comfort. Something fell out as I looked — it was a sprig of heather.The poem develops the heather as an emblem of something more, giving the poem an image to carry from the wet March weather into the spring season with hope. This poem is about the continuation of love, through the association of memory: what keeps us going after an event like this. CELEBRATION OF LOVE by John Brown, uses the same four stanza format, to express again the love of experience which has developed through the progress of life. Brown breaks from the refraining end line, instead using an abstraction to elaborate on each stanza's progress. He ends with: Yet like a burning candle on life's altar lit, a guttering flame, our love shines on, unstained by scandal but ever changing, never just the same, a miracle worth celebrating now.Further inside the book is EPITHALAMIUM by Anthony Payne, whose title means a poem celebrating a wedding, deserving some attention for its interesting ironic voice and gentle humour on the compromises that relationships sometimes entail: I promise to love your stone-deaf Great Aunt Bertha if you will agree to say "love and obey" and you can have breakfast in bed every morning if I can watch football on Sky every day.It sounds like this marriage is in trouble from the start! Seriously though, this poem is refreshing for its quirky use of the everyday cliché of modern living and ends with the note of hope that that's how we'll manage, with me and with you.Another poem that caught reader interest was THE WORLD'S TRUE END, by Penny David, which although does not adhere to the Davidian form, is an interesting mediation on the all the gaps of life, beginning with the: spaced-mesh in my little-chicken head,making the reader think of the nursery tale of Chicken Licken, as the poem goes on to consider all the holes and spaces of life that our nebulous lives can slip through, such as black holes, communication gaps and down to the last gaps between my fingers and somehow I'd let you slip through. | ||
| reviewer: Barbara Smith. |