Poetry Landscapes

Poems

• Poems
• Anthologies
• Publications
• Competitions
• Reading
• Chapbooks
• Reviews

Scotch & Soda, published by Magma

• Plums, published  in Salaams
• Sunny Green Sea, published in Magma
• Sea Buckthorn
• Children on a Windy Mountain, published in Staple,   2nd poem in Salaams

 

Scotch & Soda

Two phrases only are necessary for a whole evening of
English conversation. 'Scotch and soda?' and 'Why not?'    
                                                                           J-P Sartre

Scotch and soda, says the rumpled little man with large lenses,
and a mangled accent. Stepping from the lectern,
the intellectual liberator adjusts his check scarf.
He craves a drink. Why not? He can't speak English
and needs a woman. He drinks if he fancies one. Scotch and soda?
Drinks when he's with one and has to leave. Why not?
the human being is free and utterly responsible.
He drinks too much, he overworks: Il faut tout essayer.
He abuses his body: Scotch and soda?
Drink less, smoke less, doctors warn.
He won't be lectured. He ignores them. Why not?
Scotch and soda: alternating never fails.
There are many women in his life, why not?
But they become helpless: they depend on him like Scotch
on soda. Meeting one at a time, he lets his hands wander.
He lies to them all. Why not? By alternating
it is impossible to make a mistake.
 

Plums

Help yourself, I say,
and Peter walks up the silver ladder,
no hands, thrusting his arms
into a sunset of wands.

Back down, he's laden. We tumble the fruit
into a Sainsbury's bag, where it lolls
swollen; tulips, lips,
bruisable beneath the skin.

The tree stretches earth to the sky.
The flower is always in the kernel
but the heart becomes what it is.

We'll be eating all sorts of plum pie.

 

Sunny Green Sea

Do we continually  cross
some place between what we say and what we feel,
slipping among green fingers, white fingers?

The artist peers inside the human head fishing up
smashed images of stained glass,
shadows that swallow a face.

Other times he walks right in
extracts a sailor
clasping a fish as if it were his truth.

The spectator moves from the story we inhabit
to what is real
not so much amid destruction

as at the building of a new world,
yet weedy strands
disturb the boundaries that overlap

in speckled silver
like shoals of whitebait after new grazings
beneath a skim of light

 

• Sea Buckthorn

They started with a garden wall to block the wind
that swears off the sea, flattens marram and splits the dunes.
Then they slipped in Hippophae, male and female,
on one of which already each morning spatters berries
among spines and silver leaves; lavish
as a bantam with its little golden eggs.
Now they know they planted gods.

 

• Children on a windy mountain

They could be six black arum lilies blowing
from the summit of Wetherlam,
rooted to fissured rock.

Look again:
       anoraks bloom
above heads to wind-funnelled silhouettes.

Four flowered fairly,
lightly spilling pollen.

Ben went like lightning, big boots into oblivion.
Alice faded from her season.

Publications

Magazines in which more than 100 poems have been published include :

Acumen, Agenda, Ambit, Critical Quarterly, Coffee House, Envoi, Equinox, Frogmore, Interpreter's House, Iota, Links, Magma, New Welsh Review, The North, Orbis, Outposts, Poetry Nottingham, Poetry Review, Stand, The Shop, Seam, Smith's Knoll, Stand, Staple, The Times, The Wolf, Wordplay.

Competitions

Three highly commendeds at competitions are from The Plough, Amnesty and York 2004.

Public Reading

In 2002  at the Poetry Festival at Wells-next-the-Sea.

In 2008 at Poetry Wivenhoe

In 2009 with Ambit at Bath House, Dean Street

At North House Gallery

First Pamphlet

  Swimming Lessons (Cidesterna, 2002/5,
£6.95, ISBN 1 899604 27 8) is a sequence of poems in the voices of a mother and her daughter, charting their relationship through adolescence, anorexia and her death of cancer at the age of 42. 'The poems are spare, quiet and unsentimenatal, with a restless, rigorous honesty about them.'

Eleven of the poems provided the basis for a  play twice broadcast on Radio 4, in September 2005 and 2006.

The Pamphlet is available from the author or Hawthorn Press, 11-12  Websters Yard, Syderstone, Norfolk PE31 8SJ.

Anthologies

Light Unlocked, Christmas Card Poems, Enitharmon, 2005

 Soundswrite Anthology, Soundswrite Press, 2005 & 2006

Poetry Wivenhoe, 2008

Reviews of Salaams

Louisa Michel in The Frogmore Papers, Spring 2010

Salaams is a collection of poems which are just what they say they are: salutations. Connecting people and landscape with vividly sensuous description and a touch of the bizarre, Festing has a talent for conjuring an intense sense of place: ...in bed with/Books and breakfast and binoculars (‘Saturday Morning’); ...upturned milk crates.../Smell of frying, canvas, crushed grass,/Radio softly... (‘Late Breakfast’); of night-time sleep-gardening in Raised Beds, and unfortunate camping trips: 4.00 a.m. the tent collapses./ The valley’s breath is most with herb and pine.’ And it is the diversity of her vignettes, the touches of subtle humour, the incongruity of each situation she sketches that make Festing’s work so attractive.

Ben Wilkinson, Magma, Spring 2010

Sally Festing’s Salaams,  is an enjoyable if somewhat reserved pamphlet with an emphasis on lyrical precision and brevity. The range of its subject matter is perhaps broader than most short collections, including poems on modern art, bereavement, nature (flowers and crops in particular), the ceremonial greetings of the title, and an evocative vignette on Christmas decorations,titled Eyes at Last:

To lend a hand we’re loosing tangled wreaths
of wire but a circuit won’t flicker and the bulbs
hook round the tines.

He hates all the fiddle; each year, postpones.
The easterly mauls his woolly hat.
A bird will shit on his shoulders.

Despite this surface diversity, however, the central, recurrent focus of Salaams is that of human relationships. Festing’s primary skill as a lyric poet is to create well-formed characters within her best writing – an impatient kid in Elderberries; the world-wearied camper of Late Breakfast; even the poet herself, older and a little wiser, in Fool – or else to hook the reader in with vivid imagery or an offkilter perspective: the “six black arum lilies blowing / from the summit of Wetherlam” of Children on a Windy Mountain, for instance, or a field of oilseed rape likened to “squares of Warhol’s Marilyns” in Sundry Pelts. The poems that fail to excite tend to be those which excessively revel in the charm of the rural; describing or merely listing flowers, vegetables, landscapes and the like to no real artistic end. But Festing’s poetic style is capable of producing some admirably delicate yet robust effects, and overall, this slight volume contains a good deal worth reading.

Jane Holland, Under the Radar issue Five

 Another poetic storyteller is Sally Festing, herself a radio dramatist as well as a writer in other mediums. Her HappenStance pamphlet is rather exotically entitled Salaams, after a short poem ‘Salaams in Jerusalem’ which ends on the optimistic note, “there are many ways of saying good monring”. Optimism is a strong note in this collection, which often deals with difficult or complicated topics - death, sickness, interracial relationships, failed potential - and Festing’s largely optimistic last lines are consequently forced to carry a great deal of weight, a decision which is not always successful. A more eliptical, open-ended style seems to suit her better, producing more resonant work. Her short poem, ‘Sundry Pelts’ for instance, works well because it presents us with a simple picture in a reproduced silkscreen effect and does not attempt to round out the poem with any kind of softenang conclusion.

Festing has a natural talent for playing tightly with language and drawing sound pictures; this is highlighted in several poem, including ‘Fire’ ostensibly about the colour of plants, which jumps oddly from the poet’s close description of fireweed to a child’s eye view.

Festing’s poem ‘Automat’ is a response to Edward Hopper’s 1927 painting of the same name. The rather terser lines of this poem, and its darkly suggestive ending, make it memorable,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, perhaps because there is a sense aof real engagement.

This collection does not gather its strengths together as Alison Brackenbury’s Shadow does but in pockets of light, it does shine. As someone who has spent more than a few nights under canvas, I found ‘Le Camping’ in entertaining and concisely-written poem: “4.00 am the tent collapses. // The valley’s breath is moist with herb and pine.” ‘Late Breakfast (im Chris Ionides)’too is another sympathetic conjuring of tent-life, complete with “two Black Abyssinian cats”; smell of frying, canvas, crushed grass / radio softly ...”

Other Reviews

• by UA Fanthorpe
  Sally Festing’s another feet-off-the-ground writer, magical and visionary; she confuses perspectives brilliantly and entertainingly .' )
• Marilyn Hacker of Magma 32
  'It’s impossible to name all the memorable works, but ‘Concerning Some Pictures’ by Tony Curtis, ‘The Autopsy’ by James Sutherland-Smith, Sally Festing’s ‘The Banks of the Pamba’, are just a few.' the Ploughshares website