CHOOSING poems for the weekly Thursday Poem slot and monthly review hinges on what arrives via email, new collections, gleanings from leftist culture magazines and broad left anthologies. 

My previous reviews and selections for April and July both featured single collections by men, but this month it’s all women poets, varying in age, style, publishing history and topic and who collectively contradict the kind of stereotypes that once confined women’s writing to “ecriture feminine,” taken apart in Elma Mitchell’s 1967 poem Thoughts After Ruskin, and available online:

Women reminded him of lilies and rosies,/ Me they remind rather of blood and soap,/ Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,/ Ears, neck, mouth and all the secret places:// Armed with a sharp knife, cutting up liver,/ Holding hearts to bleed under a running tap,/ Gutting and stuffing, pickling and preserving,/ Scalding, blanching, broiling, pulverizing,/ - All the terrible chemistry of their kitchen.

Today’s Thursday poems are taken from Selima Hill’s new collection Women In Comfortable Shoes (Bloodaxe, 2023) which I shall return to later. 

I begin here by discussing all the poems/poets featured in the coming three weeks, starting with a newcomer to the poetry scene, Pauline Howley, who describes herself as a “kitchen table scribbler,” a term unmentioned in literary critical discourse theory. 

Pauline says she is a Labour Party member and former lab technician at the University of London, recently retired to Horsham. She has been a sculptor’s assistant, a rigger/derigger of gallery exhibitions, tinkered with prop-making, exhibited the occasional gallery painting, tends an allotment, plays walking football, collects pebbles, dead insects and animal skulls, facilitates a local poetry group called Poetry & Pints and reads the Morning Star and Guardian.

She says her poem My Mask of Anarchy was inspired by Shelley and graffiti on her local railway wall on which is written, in red paint, “Mick Lynch 4PM.” The sincerity and deceptive whimsy of the piece reminds me of another London poetess, Stevie Smith. Photo and poem combined remind me of the spare four-line commentaries Bertolt Brecht dashed off in response to photos he clipped from Nazi newspapers during the 1930s, later gathered in War Primer (1955). 

The visual and the textual thus unite to reinforce the reality and materiality of the popular struggle that Mick Lynch and the rail workers are now waging on behalf of unrepresented working-class Britain. Political hegemony relies on getting, keeping and demonstrating broad popular support, which is why it is Mick Lynch for PM, rather than Sir Keir Starmer, who is emblazoned on railway walls, or any walls at all.

Gerda Stevenson is an award-winning Scottish writer, actor, theatre director, playwright, singer-songwriter. Smokestack published her in an anthology celebrating the UCS Work-in, A Rose Loupt Oot (2011, ed David Betteridge) and her first collection If This Were Real (2013). 

The poem Russian Gloves comes from her new collection Tomorrow’s Feast (Luath, 2023) and must rate as one of the earliest poems I have seen referring to the Ukraine war in a personal and non-partisan manner, all the more powerfully for that, given the catastrophic division and bloodletting it continues to generate. The poet has friends from both countries and faces home voices, not-friends, pressurising her to “choose sides,” ignoring the complexities involved in what is now a civil war, a regional conflict, and a Russia-Nato proxy war, round which “a small cloud of hatred hangs/ in the soured air.” Utterly compelling.

Jenny Mitchell is also an award-winning poet and her latest collection Resurrection of a Black Man contains three prize-winning poems. She recently performed at the Houses of Parliament, ironically also the title of the poem which features as the Thursday poem in two weeks’ time. 

Her work examines the legacies of British transatlantic enslavement, the kind of ruling-class savagery that was visited several times also on Ireland during famines, and which she now indicts the class-ridden Tory government for inflicting on the desperate poor of this country: “The poor/are losing weight as benefits are cut.” She prefixes her poem with Jonathan Swift’s famous satire on the famine which racked Ireland in 1729, and which lists  several ways to cook, broil, fricassee and so serve up starved children to eat, while the country’s harvests were being shipped across to Britain. It’s another slant on Elma Mitchell’s “All the terrible chemistry of their kitchen.”

Turning to today’s Thursday poem from Selima Hill, who received the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry in January this year, Simon Armitage said hers was “the voice of a person and a poet who will not be quieted and will not conform to expectations, especially poetic ones.” 

Where else should she and her other ballsy sisters in the muse be published if not in the Morning Star? And please note half of this month’s poems were sent in by readers. Enjoy.