Posted on by Derek Turner

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Image: Creative Ignition, Wikimedia Commons

The Naked Spur

Alexander Adams, London: Exeter House, 2025, 304pps., pb., £14.93 (Amazon)
DEREK TURNER reads about a young artist’s attempts to get established

In 2007, a burned-out young British artist arrived in Berlin from London. He rented a frigid apartment in the worst district of the city, and subsisted on coffee and chocolate while he hammered out the draft of a novel ‘inspired’ by his recent bad experiences in London, perversely using an old-fashioned typewriter instead of a user-friendly laptop. In a May 2025 article published on his Substack, he explained his mindset at that time: “I wanted to do it the difficult way because that was what made it real. Suffering – even self-inflicted unnecessary suffering – made any achievement more worthwhile because it had been hard won.” Alexander Adams’ grimly determined mindset has changed little since that time, although he has subsequently found not just some artistic success, but also greater acceptance and understanding of himself, and the art world in which he operates as a rare ‘conservative’ presence.

Adams made desultory attempts to publish his manuscript at that time, but following rejections put it away for almost two decades. Having come across some of the artwork of that period again while working on a new project, he feels it is now a good time to publish, to set his present work in context and reveal more of his backstory to his subsequently acquired audience. It will also, he feels, be purgative – “a personal accounting” that can balance his books.

Novelists, as we know (or think we know) write largely about themselves, but The Naked Spur really is based very closely on actual experiences. The protagonist is a thoughtful artist called “A,” he is highly skilled but commercially unsuccessful, and he lives where Adams used to live, and bristles with his former emotions – a frustrated, lonely and resentful figure surrounded by equally atomised but usually far less intelligent individuals.

In desperate need of money, and in search of any kind of recognition, A has a cunning plan – to sell customised nude pictures to wealthy sensate individuals who wish to parade not just their wealth as patrons of the arts, but their allegedly ‘liberated’ selves. It is a cynical and even seedy concept, designed to prey on the gullibility and vanity of self-styled ‘sophisticates,’ and the reader is not sorry when it fails, despite the strenuous efforts of A and several revolving-door associates and collaborators.

One does, however, develop some sympathy for A himself – an impressive person reduced to such resorts, who has besides come to believe in the worth of the art he is producing for such shabby purposes. Yet in the end the failure of the scheme was good for him, as well as for society – because it forced him to do something infinitely more useful with his talents than flogging pornography-adjacent images to the wealthy and credulous. And he has done many more useful things in the years since – produced artworks which are held in world-famous collections, staged powerful exhibitions, edited anthologies, and written insightfully about the state of the arts in many articles and reviews, and important books like 2002’s Artivism.

In the present book, the London of some twenty years ago is excellently evoked in innumerable gritty details. I lived in Deptford around the same time as the artist, and his landmarks were also mine – the handsome baroque church of St Paul’s, the Bird’s Nest pub, the High Street, the Docklands Light Railway, and immediately across the river Canary Wharf still rising around its central silver tower. The sadness and shabbiness he shows in such photorealist detail – the drunks and their vomits, the glue-sniffers, the unhygienic takeaways, the graffiti and litter, the futile casual encounters and conversations in grubby rented rooms, the sleazy ‘top shelf’ magazines in newsagents – all that too rings authentic, the underbelly of the brittle metropolitan world A so badly wants to break into. It is closely observed, and faithfully depicted.

But sometimes the detail takes up space that might have been better devoted to character development. Some of the characters in The Naked Spur seem insubstantial, at times almost staffage, representations of sets of attitudes rather than real people. Even A hovers on the edge of focus, an observer rather than instigator, a reactor rather than a principal. He is obsessed with his single big idea, and concentrates so hard on trying to bring it to fruition that everything else is forgotten. The project becomes an end in itself, the artistic vision increasingly reduced to individual brush strokes, and the logistics of packing crates and pots of varnish. For a book about ‘nakedness’ and ‘spurs’ – a book, furthermore, which the author has described as “very personal” – A’s character and motivations seem rather opaque.

Insofar as we can see into A’s soul, it can seem sere. Sitting in that freezing flat in Berlin, he was writing in “self-aware replication” of his project’s failure. He goes on, “I would become an isolated broke author engaged in a private unprofitable gesture writing an uncommissioned novel about an isolated broke artist engaged in a private unprofitable gesture painting unsaleable pictures. The novel would be as sterile as the paintings – uncontaminated by commerce, uncompromised by any consideration of propriety.” As an explanation of what he was doing and thinking at that time, it is bracingly honest, but it sounds like a rather unappetising fictive formula.

The prose style is generally austere, a welcome change from the pretentious word-salads of the arts ‘establishment.’ This amorphous entity is the hinted-at villain of the piece, a jellyfish without a central brain but capable of responding quickly to environmental stimuli (money, or trending politics), and of course armed with poisonous nodules. Whatever the merits of A’s art (and Adams really is a superb craftsman) he was destined to be included out of lionisation or major grants by early Noughties arbiters – and he did not exactly help himself with his choice of subject matter. Adams’ more recent art must similarly sometimes have found itself treated with suspicion, because of his now publicly known political views; it is a testament to his abilities that he has achieved as much as he has against such odds. His art is luckily likely to last longer than that of many of his establishment-embraced contemporaries.

One slightly wonders who the novel is addressed to, apart from himself. Some of Adams’ generally conservative admirers and followers might even look askance at these productions of the artist’s youth – although conservatives are frequently more forgiving than the liberal-minded, and more morally complex. All would doubtless welcome a more recent autobiographical outline, in which the tough but callow young A can be balanced with the thoughtful and experienced Alexander, the ‘naked spur’ clad more warmly. For now, at least we have a striking study of a clever and interesting man at a low ebb in his life, losing all illusions to his and our advantage.

Posted on by Hessam Abedini

How Zaal met with Rubadeh

HESSAM ABEDINI is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon

Translator’s Introduction: Shahnameh (The Book of Kings), completed by Abol-Qaasem Firdausi in 1010 AD, stands as the national epic of Iran, and cornerstone of Persian identity. Through some 50,000 couplets, this monument chronicles the mythic history of Iran from Creation to the 7th-century Islamic conquest, enshrining the Iranian heritage in stories that continue to resonate across the centuries.

The following passage is from the famous love-story of Zaal and Rudabeh, their meeting through the careful arrangements of Rudabeh’s maidservants. The chamber mentioned in the opening lines refers to Rudabeh’s quarters; her damsels lock the door guarding the lovers’ tryst. The narrative builds to the dramatic moment where Rudabeh appears on the rooftop, letting down her hair for Zaal to climb – a story-motif familiar from other tales in world literature (Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 310, The Maiden in the Tower), in the West, especially Rapunzel.

Firdausi writes in the Persian bayt, a couplet or distich of two end-rhymed 11-syllable mesras (hemistichs). Instead of the Neoclassical heroic couplet, I have preferred to use English blank verse, as an English epic form both suitable and more capacious to accommodate the meaning of the original. Each bayt of two 11-syllable verses is translated here as two blank-verse lines, occasionally expanded to three as needed, to capture the full Persian content. While Shahnameh rarely features enjambment between bayts, couplets 5-6 present a notable example, duly recreated in the translation. Persian bayts are numbered in the left margin: right margin-numbers count the English verse-lines.  

This translation is based on the authoritative critical edition: Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, Shahnameh, Sokhan Publishers, Tehran (2015).[1] [2]

How Zaal Met with Rudabeh

1.         When twilight veiled the shining sun to sleep,

Maids locked the chamber-door; and hid the key.

2.         A damsel carried word to Zaal awaiting:

‘Now all’s prepared to welcome your approach!’   

3.         As wooer to his mate the hero came                                                   5

Toward the palace, where his heart yearned to dwell.

4.         Cypress haloed with the full-rounded moon,

A beauty with coal-eyes and cheeks aglow

Upon the roof she walked; and graced the night.

5.         When from afar the son of Saam the Horseman[3]                               10

Drew near, that highborn maiden at the sight

6.         Opened the ruby lodestones of her lips

‘Welcome, O youth of noble blood!’ she cried,

7.         ‘May the Heavens rain on you sweet blessings,

And may the circling sky salaam your feet.                                       15

8.         Let my loyal damsel’s heart be filled with joy

As head to toe you match her every word!

9.         To stride so far from your pavilion,

The trodden miles must pain your royal steps!’

10.       When the great hero heard her dulcet voice                                       20

And glimpsed that sun-cheeked maiden standing high,

11.       Her radiance made the rooftop shine like gems

            And earthen walls to flame with opal fires.

12.       He thus replied: ‘O you of moonlit face!

            May Earth and Heaven shower you with blessings.                           25

13.       How many nights I watched for Sumbalet,[4]

A supplicant before pure Heaven’s throne,

14.       Beseeching Him who all rules grant my wish:

To let me steal a glance at your fair face.

15.       At last you bring me joy, to hear your voice,                                         30

Your coy gentleness and sweet-sounding words.

16.       Seek out some way that we could meet together

Why should you stay above while I’m below?’

17.       The fairy-faced one heard the hero’s words

And swiftly loosed her silk vermilion veil;                                        35

18.       From cypress-limbs unwound her snare of locks,[5]

Cascading down in ways no strands of musk

Could ever twist with such a graceful flow:

19.       Coil within coil, and snake on snake entwined;

            The budding pomegranates burst upon her neck.                               40

20.       She said, ‘Make ready now, and gird your loins:

Show forth your lion breast and royal grasp!

21.       Seize the sable ringlets waving at my side;   

For you alone I let these tresses fall.’

22.       Zaal gazed upon that moonlit face above                                           45

In wonder at her face and flowing hair.

23.       He thus replied: ‘This cannot be the way!

On such a day may sunlight fade from sight

24.       When I should strike at my own life in vain;

With so keen a spear transfix my wounded heart!’                            50

25.       He quickly seized a lasso from his page,

Then looped and cast it high in breathless speed:

26.       The lasso fast upon the battlement,

            He deftly scaled the wall from base to peak.[6]

27.       At sixty cubits’ height he climbed upon                                             55

The fortress-roof; and standing there at last,

With reverence the fairy-faced one bowed.

28.       She grasped his hand in hers that very hour;

And each embraced the other, drunk on love.

29.       Down she stepped from off the lofty turret                                        60

            With her majestic hero, hand in hand.

30.       Within the golden chamber they repaired:

            A hall of splendour worthy of a shah,

31.       A Paradise aglow with blazing light,[7]

And handmaidens attending to their houri.                                        65

[1] This translation was undertaken at the request of Professor Martha Bayless, University of Oregon, for a forthcoming book on Rapunzel tales. I wish to express my profound gratitude to British poet Dr Rahul Gupta for his invaluable guidance in rendering this Persian poem into English blank verse. While his poetic insights proved instrumental to this translation, any shortcomings remain entirely my own responsibility

[2] In the transliteration of Persian names, double “aa” indicates a long “a” sound, as in Zaal and Saam (pronounced like the second syllable of “bazaar”)

[3] Saam the Horseman: hero in the Shahnameh who abandoned his white-haired infant son Zaal on Mount Alborz, where the mythical bird Simurgh raised the child until Saam’s later retrieval

[4] Firdausi refers to the star named Spica in Western astronomy; I have used an alternative name, Sumbalet (from Arabic سنبلة sunbulah, meaning “ear of grain”) for metrical and euphonic purposes. Both names are fitting – Spica is the brightest star in the constellation Virgo (the Maiden) and its traditional Arabic names often reference grain or harvest imagery, reflecting its cultural significance in agricultural calendars

[5] In Persian love poetry, long dark tresses are likened to a lasso (Persian: kamand) that ensnares the lover’s heart. I have opted for “snare of locks” to capture both the beauty of the hair and its role in love’s captivation, avoiding the New World associations of “lasso”

[6] Although Rudabeh offers Zaal her unbound tresses to climb, he not only declines but vehemently rejects the idea as unthinkable, declaring he would rather die than risk harming her in such a way. This stands in stark contrast to Western versions, most famously Rapunzel, wherein the hero does use the hair to scale the tower

[7] The word “paradise” comes from Proto-Iranian *paridayjah meaning “walled enclosure” or “royal garden.” The Persian equivalent is firdaus (فردوس), which gives us the poet’s name Firdausi, meaning “of Paradise.” In contemporary Persian, pardis (پردیس) derived from the same root has come to mean “university campus”

Posted on by Michael Yost

A structured lightness

The Old Current

Brad Leithauser
Alfred A. Knopf, 2025, 84 pps., £9.99
MICHAEL YOST admires a poet’s orderly sensibility

Brad Leithauser’s new book is aptly titled. The simultaneity of old and new is at the forefront of this collection, and with good reason: most of the poems deal with the themes of memory, childhood, nostalgia, and loss. As the current of a river carries the past forward into the present, so this book makes the old new, and presents us with Leithauser’s unique and relatively unchanging style. Looking back on his older works, there’s a continuity in his style over the last 30 years. This bespeaks a poet whose style is a part of them, something achieved and conserved.

The book overall is very well-structured; that is, it is very clearly and thematically structured. Leithauser’s experience as a novelist shows here: the work is organized into chiastic parts, which taken together have a rising and a falling action.

The first part is “Darker,” where themes of birth and youth provide the top-note for a full-bodied occupation with the past. However, this section also introduces the themes of old age, of finality, which run throughout this book. The second section contains poems which spring from Leithauser’s time at the Kyoto Comparative Law Center in Japan. Thematically, we move from childhood to young adulthood, from infancy to activity. The best poems in these sections are mostly epigrams: ‘The Philosopher’s Walk’ and ‘The End of the Adventurer’ from Darker, and ‘How it Looks From Here,’ ‘The Third Suitor,’ and ‘A Beach of Big White Stones.’ It is no secret that that epigram, like hanging, has a way of sharpening the attention, and of forcing a poet towards a kind of formal and intellectual concentration he might not have elsewhere. This quality of attention and concentration is more absent from the poem that gives the book its title.

In general, however, Leithauser’s metrical style is a little unbuttoned: in both this as well as his love of sentiment and memory he is reminiscent of Auden. In places, this sentimentalism becomes bathetic and trivial (as in the poem ‘Furry’) and the rumpled meter and half rhymes look slovenly, as in the opening poem ‘Lullaby for a Newborn,’ or, regrettably, the poem that gives the book its title; although the story both poems tell, and the scenes they depict, are not uninteresting. That said, Leithauser succeeds often enough.

This is not to say that Leithauser is a metrical novice. He seems especially to love iambic tetrameter – its sing-song sway, its potential for both irony and lightness. His rhyming is inventive, as ‘The Third Suitor’ demonstrates, and he can tell a story. Throughout, he is also at great pains to explore and affirm the ordinary and the day-to-day. Leithauser’s work aside, this mode of poetry, a kind of bourgeois lyricism – suburban, intentionally small poetry – is often read by and produced by conservatives and formalists, probably in reaction to the hangover from the stream of pseudo-romantic, beatnik, hippie, Freudian, psychological, deconstructed, antiracist or Tik-Tok-infused industrial byproduct that many poets have been slinging for the past few decades. This petite romanticism has its place. Its benefit is that, at its best, it is clearly written, normal, and aims to be reflective of the values associated with what Yvor Winters called “the plain style.” That said, one begins to tire of writing and reading it if it is unredeemed by sharp observation, psychological realism, and an appreciation of the real scope that even a normal, small life affords.

Leithauser addresses an issue adjacent to this one in an interview with Ryan Wilson (Literary Matters 9.1). I highly recommend the interview, which will do a better job of introducing Leithauser’s work to new readers than this review. His is an impressive resumé. The quotations below are from that interview, and serve to put this new book of poems in their proper context:

RW: ” . . . These days, I daresay a great many young writers go in fear of nostalgia because it seems irrevocably connected to sentimentality, but your novels, while sometimes steeped in nostalgia’s honeyed glow, don’t come across as sentimental at all. Would you discuss how you think about the relationship between nostalgia and sentimentality?

BL: Sentimentality interests me a good deal. I sometimes feel especially drawn to writers who are often at their best when being sentimental—however unlikely that may sound… In a better universe than ours, the distinction [between writing interesting and likeable characters] wouldn’t exist. To be likable would be to be interesting. It’s one of many ways in which the world of fiction fails to correspond to the world we live in. Kindness, goodness – these things are so welcome in real life, where surliness and suspicion so often rule. But kindness, goodness – these things are often dull on the page. So even without thinking much about it, perhaps, the novelist learns to be wary about depicting virtues of this sort. In addition, among critics there’s that pervasive axiom (again, perhaps insufficiently thought about) which says that kind characters are inevitably sentimental. Hence, the elderly retired nanny in Waugh’s Brideshead, who takes such a loving interest in her former charges, is seen as sentimental. Yet I find her utterly believable. I often wonder about some critics: have they truly never encountered disinterested compassion, clemency, solicitude? I suspect they have, but have also trained their critical judgment to view its depiction as inherently untrue-to-life. I see that we’re back to the subject of sentimentality, a subject of endless interest to me. With many critics (as with many novelists and poets), there’s a self-congratulation about being unsentimental – about being sufficiently hard-boiled and cynical – that strikes me as itself sentimental. I find this is true about two modern poets I absolutely revere – John Berryman and Philip Larkin. There’s a persona to Berryman – the one who keeps saying, effectively, “Here I am looking death in the face, Pal” – that emerges a little too glibly. These things are hard to discuss without oneself sounding self-congratulatory or unsympathetic. But I remember as an undergraduate in Elizabeth Bishop’s class the day she brought in Larkin’s High Windows, and read some of the poems and we discussed them. Now that book strikes me as an absolute masterpiece. I think she thought so too – but she was trying to illuminate some aspect of the book that displeased her or unnerved her. And if I understood her aright, she was saying there was something a little too easy – sentimental – to the book’s darkness. The harder task was to see light within the darkness. Gentle Miss Bishop, it turned out, was taking up in her poems the more difficult task. There’s a good argument to be made, anyway, that her winsome and delicate Geography III, which came out a few years after High Windows, is the less sentimental, the much tougher, of the two books.”[i]

I quote the paragraph because I agree with it in large measure, even as a reader who has revisited Larkin more often than Bishop. I also want to make sure that my comments about Leithauser’s occasional lapses into the sentimental or trivial, as I have put it, are seen in their relation to the author’s values and sense of the world. One can have too little, as well as too much, lightness.

Appropriately, when we move to “Lighter,” the middle section of the work, we see that light verse takes wit to write. Leithauser has this in abundance, and playfulness besides. The best here are ‘Six Quatrains,’ ‘In the English Department Lounge,’ and ‘The Muses.’ ‘Icarus and His Kid Brother’ is inventive, but hard to read aloud properly. ‘Kisses After Novocaine’ is trivial, the subject matter unequal to the pseudo-reflection that attends it; it could have been funny had the innate absurdity of the situation been carried to greater lengths. I quote my two favorites of the ‘Six Quatrains’ in full:

II. ANONYMOUS’S LAMENT

Though love, (it’s been said) is a perilous game,

       At times I might wish to be bolder—

Just once to be either the moth or the flame

        And not the candle holder.

IV. WHAT TO BELIEVE: A BIBLICAL EXEGESIS

The garden of Eden?

       Maybe a fable.

Yet you can be certain

        Cain slew Able.

The next section, “At Home” begins the book’s thematic diminuendo. This section of the book seems to me more uneven than its fellows. Its themes are domestic, familial memory and sentiment. ‘Permeable Worlds’ is really a collation of three separate poems that are thematically joined, but it holds together well. It is observational, yet does a good job of making the ordinary strange, highlighting the otherwise unobserved. ‘Some Stranger’s Passport’ is more interesting in its second half than its beginning, and one feels like the windup was not quite worth the pitch, although the plot (involving two doppelgangers whose paths cross) sounds like a short story Leithauser never wrote; if it had to have been a poem, it would have been better to have been a long blank verse poem. ‘Furry’ is odd, disjointed, and bad. ‘A Single Flight’ gives us Leithauser’s five-page version of Wordsworth’s ‘Preludes’ and Betjeman’s ‘Summoned By Bells.’

When we reach the last section (also named “Darker,”like the book’s first part,) we are greeted by eight short poems, mostly about animals, machines, and a man with severe dementia. Since human beings entertain all manner of hopes about their innate worth, ultimate destiny, and what constitutes their happiness, and are also capable of asking the questions about life that animals are not, a poet can make effective use of “the pathetic fallacy” to strip such things away, and leave us with raw suffering, raw joy. ‘The Parrot,’ ‘Happy Hour,’ and ‘Motel’ all do this effectively. ‘Blaze’ is a poem with a solid punchline. ‘The Parrot’ reminds one of Baudelaire’s poems about cats, pipes, and other bits of domestic furniture. It also does a good job of permitting the poet a moment of pessimism while identifying such pessimism with a sort of artificial crankiness – the product of maladjustment to unnatural and demeaning conditions. (Is it a caricature of Philip Larkin?) The book ends, appropriately enough, with the poem ‘Total’, which is so effective that I quote it in full, below:
For now, this once, a blackened noon.

              Cold silence drops on everything.

. . . It’s clear the world is ending soon.

              And why in their dead reckoning—

Their voices echoed off the moon—

              The crickets have begun to sing.

This poem (another exemplary instance of the integrity and clarity possible in epigrams) does an excellent job at pulling together the thematic threads of the book: life and death, music and terror, psychological immediacy and ironic distance, with a dash of humor and humanity. We are dropped into the middle of panic at the omnipresence of death, and then we are required to see things in perspective. Life and happiness (and the crickets) have the last word.

The epigrams and the “light” poems are the most successful, and I do not think this is to damn Leithauser with faint praise. These kinds of poems are often the hardest poems to write, since they require concentration, wit, ruthless editing, and poetic mastery, whereas very little is easier to write than the breezy Wordsworthian memoir-poems that are also a part of this volume. Almost no single poem in this book is a ‘Great Poem,’ but there are many strong poems collected here. (‘Total’ may be the best.) As is so often the case with well-wrought lyric poetry, we end by wishing to know the person who wrote the poems better, because of the intelligence, the humor, and the sympathy for suffering that the poems reveal. On the strength of these poems, I purchased one of the author’s novels and am looking forward to deepening my acquaintance.

[i] My thanks to Ryan Wilson and Literary Matters for their kind permission to use this quotation. See Issue 9:1 – Literary Matters

Posted on by Stuart Millson

Call of duty

Duty of Care 

Directed by Asa Bailey, co-written by Asa Bailey and Jack Marsden, starring Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden

In the world of film and cinema today, it is something of a relief to find, not just a story without improbable car chases through Los Angeles, AI-generated explosions or extreme-weather calamities, but which centres itself upon the quiet north Wales town of Llandudno and the lives of two men: army veteran, Major Harris, and his carer, Gary.

It is the kind of film at which our country excels – slow-burn, minimalist drama, set against the background of ordinariness – the result being the sense of an even more acute build-up of tension than one would find in any blockbuster. It is a simple enough idea: the retired soldier, looking back on a life of action, but unable to adjust completely to the banality of everyday life, coming into contact and conflict with the equally tedious world of care and social services. Gary (played by BAFTA winner, Jack Marsden*) – volunteer carer, dressed in casual clothes – knocks at the Major’s door, and at once there are the unmistakeable signs of an impending personality and culture clash. Gary seems domesticated enough and willing to help, but Harris is accustomed to his own household rituals and his emotional short-fuse (the result of his war-experiences) leads to a grand bust-up.

Jack Marsden

Taking the role of Major Harris is the well-known Coronation Street star, Bruce Jones, who brings something of the all-in-a-day weariness of a ‘soap’ character to the story. And yet, because of the pauses, the silences, the sense of brooding, anxiety, misery in the Major, the viewer is given far more than a low-budget film with an efficient, half-hour TV script. Jones’s performance is worthy of the highest accolades – and this is because he is completely believable in his role, so much so, that you – the viewer – may find yourself wanting to reach out and help him.

And it is Gary, the casual care-worker – a man who resides in a mobile home – who doesn’t even know his next step in life, who wants to give Harris the assistance he clearly needs. Rejected, though, and ordered out by the old soldier, Gary seems to pass from the story. A new carer arrives, a cheerful-enough girl (played by Sophie Anderson), this time, wearing a uniform; more what you would expect a care-assistant to look like, but it is soon clear that she, too, is just drifting in our modern Britain. Gary, meanwhile, breathless and in disarray, and unable to find any other work, tries to cling to his identity: ‘I’m Gary, I’m Gary,’ he says – as if trying to prevent himself from tipping into complete despair. Yet at this point, we discover something of his own identity: he, like Harris, has a past, but one which he hardly talks about and acknowledges to himself only in moments of extreme emotion.

Bruce Jones and Jack Marsden

The film, recalls Jack Marsden, was first premiered in Liverpool, in the presence of HM Lord Lieutenant of Liverpool – to a standing ovation, with many ex-servicemen in the audience clearly profoundly moved by the screenplay. Jack also notes the role played by Anthony H. Wilson of Factory Records, the founder of a Manchester-based charity concerned with suicide among men; and it was Anthony’s wide knowledge of this problem which helped Jack to shape his on-screen character.

Jack had also worked with Bruce Jones, prior to Duty of Care, on Ken Loach’s Cannes award-winner, Raining Stones; and it was with great pride that all those involved with the new film received the praise and endorsement of the senior filmmaker. Yet it is also the town of Llandudno that stars in Asa and Jack’s compelling work: a place, perhaps, of sleepy anonymity, where Major Harris and Gary spend so many of their hours looking out to sea, churning over the past and wondering what the future holds…

*Jack Marsden, BAFTA award-winner for his role as PC Rylance in The Cops

Posted on by Liam Guilar

Verse for today

Barcoo, Queensland, 1906. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Foal in the Wire

Robbie Coburn, Lothian, 2025, 121 pps.
LIAM GUILAR finds insubstantiality in the Outback

Set in rural Australia, The Foal in the Wire is a book length narrative of short, individually titled poems.

The story is told by Sam, an adolescent boy. One night he finds a foal caught in a barbed-wire fence. He and his neighbour’s daughter, Julia, save the injured animal. As they help it regain its health, they draw closer together. Sam’s parents’ marriage is falling apart; he’s bullied at school, and Julia’s father is an abusive drunk. Some things are resolved: some can’t be.

Australia has a tradition of narrative poetry that shows how rich and varied the ‘verse novel’ can be. The three best known, Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune, and Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, demonstrate different ways a writer could approach ‘narrative verse.’ They are all book-length stories, their lines don’t go all the way to the right margin, and they are marketed as poetry. Their differences are greater than these similarities. Porter’s narrator, Jill, is the literary granddaughter of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Told as a sequence of short, free verse poems, Porter’s lines and images create a modern, laconic private eye. Fredy Neptune is a masterclass in controlled rhythm, and the story, progressing through tightly controlled eight-line stanzas, reads like a picaresque novel. Wearne’s The Lovemakers, with its huge cast of characters, written in a variety of verse forms, reads like nothing and no one else, and at 800 pages is one of the longest verse narratives.

At the same time, staying in Australia, there’s a tradition of verse novels aimed at what is now described as the Young Adult market. Pioneered by writers like Steven Herrick, whose A Place Like This still reads well after thirty years, these books range from Herrick’s teenagers trying to find their place in modern Australia to work as different in both form and content as the dystopian science fiction of Lisa Jacobsen’s The Sunlit Zone.[i]

The Foal in the Wire, aimed at the YA market, sits comfortably in such company. It would make an excellent short story. The question anyone writing narrative poetry is forced to confront, sooner or later, is why not write the story in prose? Part of the answer, as suggested above, is that there is a range of techniques for organising words and creating effects with words which are available to someone writing verse.

Coburn has chosen to make little use of those resources. If organised sound is the essential characteristic of poetry, there’s little poetry in the book. The Foal in the Wire opens:

As I run down the veranda steps
in the dark

I can still hear them screaming
at each other
inside the house.

he doesn’t love her
and she doesn’t love him
but they stay.

Read aloud, I can’t hear a significant difference if the lines were written out as prose: As I run down the veranda steps in the dark, I can still hear them screaming at each other inside the house. he doesn’t love her and she doesn’t love him but they stay.[ii] It is a very popular stye of verse. The internet is awash with poets who write declarative sentences chopped into short lines. Some of them have had astonishing commercial success.[iii] For anyone brought up on this kind of poetry, and that includes many of the current YA market accessing poetry outside of school, Coburn’s style is going to be immediately familiar and comfortable.

In short poems, the style has very little to commend it. It sounds like a clumsy effort to plunk ‘Three Blind Mice’ on a Stradivarius which has recently been used by a virtuoso to play Bach’s Solo Partitas for violin.

However, as Coburn’s poem in The Brazen Head for Spring 2025 suggest, style here is a choice, a balancing of possible loss and gain, and such a plain style has definite advantages when used to write narrative verse. 

No one speaks in poetry but it’s easy to imagine someone telling this story. If Sam were speaking in iambic pentameter or tightly controlled Spenserian stanzas, littering his story with clever literary allusions, he would not sound like a lost teenager in rural Australia.[iv]

The other major advantage is pace. The story moves with the inevitability of a folk tale or a parable. Like a folk tale it can deal with cruelty and loss without romanticising or sensationalising either. 

Like a folk tale there is a characteristic blend of the general and the specific. Small details give the story credibility while there is an absence of details that would identify where and when the story takes place. The Foal in the Wire is located somewhere in rural Australia, on two properties that run horses. There is little to fix when the story happens. Having moved away, Julia writes a letter and sends it through the post. Although she and Sam take the bus to school, they don’t use computers or phones to communicate.[v]

Balanced against this is a careful use of detail making the story believable. Sam sneaking out at night:

“making sure to stay on the clover

lining the sides of the path

to avoid the potholes and depressions

left in the ground by horses.

tells us he’s done this many times. Both children, having watched their fathers, know how to help the foal.

Julia has bought another bottle of formula

and I have a bundle of hay

I gathered

from inside the shed.

dad won’t notice.

whenever hay is lifted

stalks fall from the bale

and gather on the floor. 

Style allows the story to become its own metaphor. The foal is both a particular foal, and a symbol of those who are damaged and survive. None of this needs to be underlined or emphasised. 

It would be a brave writer, especially in a first book, who trusted the reader enough to let the story do all the work. And ‘story’ isn’t everything. The book has a therapeutic potential. It’s offering its readers a realistic message of hope. Coburn occasionally gives those readers a gentle nudge towards the preferred reading as the narrative unfolds but comes close to labouring the point at the end.

The story ends at ‘After’, which concludes:

I want to write down everything

about my brother and Julia and the foal

I am no longer ashamed of who I am

and where I come from.

I can hold on and be anyone.

Two poems follow and both make the same point without adding to the story. The last piece, ‘Wounded Animal’ ends:

Maybe this

scarred and haunted body

is enough–

the wounded animal

is capable of survival.

If this seems to be restating what was already obvious, it is in keeping with the narrator’s character in a book aimed at adolescent readers and dedicated ‘for those who are wounded and surviving.’

There is a contemporary tendency to read poetry through the life of the writer. To claim that the writing is ‘authentic’, ‘raw’[vi] or ‘based on experience’, can set up a defence which frames any criticism as cruel, irrelevant or a personal attack on the writer.[vii]

But as made art, published and offered to strangers, what should matter is the quality of the product. No matter how intense the experience, or the emotion it engenders, once it’s written down and offered to a stranger, it is an unpleasant fact that even trauma is a cliché of life and literature. The more literate the reader, the greater the chance they’ve read versions of this story before. As humans we sympathise with people who suffer, but readers deserve something more for their money than a stranger telling them how bad their life was.

In the wrong hands The Foal in the Wire would be a string of YA Fiction cliches: a family disintegrating after the death of a child, a narrator lost, isolated, contemplating suicide, bullied at school, first love, first sexual experience, a drunk abusive father, some form of reconciliation.

What is therefore most impressive about Coburn’s handling of his material is that at no stage does his book read like a string of clichés. ‘First Time’ is that rare piece of writing, a description of a first sexual encounter that doesn’t sound coy, crude or clinical. It manages to capture the baffling nature of the experience:

like holding a body

and cradling a ghost

at the same time.

Bunting’s injunction: ‘Emotions first – but only facts in the poem’ might be too austere for a modern audience, but Coburn’s book comes close. There is no self-pity, no attempts to exaggerate the horror of the situation and no unrealistic Hollywood ending in which everything is made good and Sam and Julia live happily ever after, running their own shelter for abused horses. 

Whether or not the story is based on lived experience, Coburn’s triumph is to make it believable.

[i] The list of book length narratives could be extended, but these examples give some idea of their variety. Verse novel is no more a genre than prose novel.

[ii] This review was written with an uncorrected proof copy so quotations may vary in the final, published version. In the version I used, sentences within poems consistently begin without a capital letter.

[iii] Why readers buy books containing poems they themselves could have written while they were still at high school is one of life’s mysteries.

[iv] This is not to suggest that there are no literary teenagers in rural Australia. One of the criticisms levelled against Fredy Neptune was that its central character was too eloquent.

[v] There are possible reasons for a lack of phones and computers but their absence adds to the effect.

[vi] Although it seems I’m in the minority, ‘raw’, when applied to writing, is not a compliment. It suggests a lazy chef slapping uncooked food on the diners’ plates and leaving them to do his or her job.

[vii] The other version of this is to dismiss the writing without reading it because ‘everyone knows’ the writer is guilty of unacceptable behaviour, beliefs or opinions. Both popular extremes tend to ignore the actual writing.

Posted on by David Dumouriez · 6 Comments

R. Anthony Browne

DAVID DUMOURIEZ wouldn’t be tempted to blow his own trumpet even if (a) he had a trumpet or (b) he knew how to play one

R. Anthony Browne

He loves to walk, thinks it
                        ‘concentrates the mind’
but never moves the same way twice>
You see, he can’t decide. Longer steps
transport the body quicker, no debate.
But sometimes – OK, often – straining’s
the occasion of a slip. The shorter pace
provides a sense of height (a boon
at five feet eight, it should be said!)
yet, performed with some neglect, could see
itself interpreted as ‘mincing’ or as ‘camp’.

And so, you see, at forty-three, he’s never

found his stride. He will, though, he believes.

Such matters can’t      be rushed or forced.

As he tells himself repeatedly:

            ‘elegance is key’.

Where some are something in the City,

he is half. The lesser half of something,

or the greater half of nothing, isn’t clear.

He has a desk and cubicle, and youngsters

to assist him if they’re in. His bosses know

his work but struggle with his name.

Except at Christmas, which is strange.

By their good auspices, he hopes to have an

office of his own. He doesn’t for a moment

pause to think that he’s already jammed

his crampon in its highest peak.

But the office is much more. A theatre.

A space in which to see, and to be seen.

A place not just for romance, but for love.

Yes, for love. That’s right.

He’s not beyond that notion yet, or ever.

Could narrate a few amazing tales, could he.

But wouldn’t, for the sake of those in question.

Their modesty and such. And, well, those

delightful moments now were done. The midnight

aches they brought, and shakes of great

anticipation (the more denied, the more intense).

Those girls were gone. Married and had kids.

He recalled them still and wished them well,

even now that everything was over.

In any case, he’d finally found ‘the one’.

Tracey Whitworth (how many months his youth?),

lips never less than crimson, with a curling tongue.

He’d never talked to her of anything

but paper clips and staplers. But he would.

He would. He would …

Yes, it’s elegance defines him, he believes.

Within the office, or without, he aims

to be the one who sets ‘the moment’.

Well, you wouldn’t understand. It’s the pure

articulation of those elements you’ve seen

and hardly noted but which, combined,

create a perfect whole. Let two words suffice:

Cary. Grant. OK, two more: Jude. Law.

For the old world charm, the former.

The latter for a modern urban take.∗

To this end, he suits it up in style.

Has a little silk and cashmere number,

made for him – of course, bespoke –

by an evasive little cutter on the coast,

with a knowing nod to Dolce & Gabbana.

Defying good advice, he went one-button.

And, when weeks of stitching turned to months,

the piece had almost lost its link to fashion.

Fitted well enough. Except perhaps the sleeves.

On the journey up from Thornton Heath,

he felt a right Marcello in that cloth.

For a while, at least. But those Burton-covered

fools had never noticed. Miss Whitworth

must have done. Yes, Miss Whitworth would.

Walking’s been integral to his carless life.

Well, you didn’t need one in the city.

It’s all our duties, he would say,

to do a little something for the planet.

If a prince among the plebs was what

his destiny was meant to be, then who

was he to argue or complain? That every

person had his place was plain to see.

It fell to him to occupy the role

of an exemplar. And if he were to rise

to greater heights and leave the drunkards

and the hooligans behind – if, that is,

some honour or some recognition were

to come his way – well, let’s just say …

And so you’ll see him at the weekends

on his travels. Most probably he’ll be alone,

but that’s from choice. It’s not that he’s without

close friends – far from it – just they slow him down.

There used to be a fellow, lived near Sutton,

who hoarded Eurovision souvenirs.

They might do Charing Cross together,

Leicester Square. Or Croydon High Street

on a less inspired day. But that was rare.

He found the chap annoying, to be fair,

and saw him less and less, till less was never.

Better company would doubtless come his way.

The climate of the island is his joy.

The coldest days will see him wrestling

with an outsize Crombie from an Oxfam shop

in Coulsdon that’s no longer there.

A little cooler brings a beige check blazer

that he bought from Hackett in a sale.

You should see his orange pocket square!

He likes to think he’d hand it to a lady

if the need for such a case arose.

But such is the dilemma of a dandy:

to aid or to refuse a human nose?

Cooler still brings linen. Bought in Marks

and Spencer off the rack. Perhaps he’ll

team it with a hat. And if he feels

particularly daring, a sockless pair

or espadrilles will go with that.

And always in his pocket is his card,

printed privately, apart from work:

R. Anthony Browne

(he agonised about ‘esquire’)

with his address and contact number,

ready to be handed in an arc if there

were any takers with the requisite desire.

R. Anthony Browne.

The ‘h’ to be distinctly sounded,

thank you very much.

R. Anthony Browne.

To have his trouser bottoms up or down?

To wear a tie-clip? To risk a t-shirt

with a scooped-out neck?

R. Anthony Browne.

These are his seasons and days.

‘We live in hope’

his favourite phrase.

            *(In fact, when at his best,

              he sees himself as Jude.

              And, discount the paunch, it’s true.

              Just not the Dickie Greenleaf Jude

              but the Phil Collins version

              of a later, sadder hue.)

Posted on by Churl Sullivan

The Lay of Mélusine

CHURL SULLIVAN is a writer from St. Louis, Missouri, who conspires with his feline familiar, Purrmes Trismegistus, to pen poems in the lean-light hours. His work has previously appeared in Sparks of Calliope, and he can be found @Churl_Sullivan or napping in his pithos. 

The Lay of Mélusine

At ease upon a summer’s eve I went

Into the woods to stalk the stag and boar,

Wherein I nocked a dart, and careless sent

Not game, but kindred to that other shore—

My uncle rapping on the devil’s door!

Ashamed I fled into the blotting night,

When Mélusine I saw in silver light.

A crown of wormwood on her raven hair,

A cloak of moonlight and a downy dress:

Would God conceive a creature half as fair,

His whole dominion should be doubly blest,

And war and peace be made but for her tress.

She smiling came up from the river bank,

And in my breast my courage broke its rank.

Said she, “What puts you, Raymondin, to flight?

What brings you breathless to my crystal font?”

And I, “In shame I fled into the night;

My every step a guilty conscience haunts!”

Then merciful she smiled as confidant.

“There is no malice in your heart,” said she,

“A purity of soul in you I see.”

There succored in the softly morningtide,

Upon a bed of leaves wherefore to rest,

She took me in her arms as though my bride,

And woebeset I wept into her breast

Until the tawny sun was in the west.

“Come, Raymondin, and rise,” she whispered low,

“We find our future in that western glow.”

With Mélusine I went into the march,

Atop a tor between two valleys wide,

And there before a ruined Roman arch,

I swore a vow and took her for my bride

At height of noon upon the summer Ides.

Said Mélusine, “This vow the more I pray:

You will not seek me on the Sabbath day.”

Of gratitude and love I promised thus,

Then Mélusine with faerie spell anon

Of sound and stone a castle for us trussed—

And this we called Château de Lusignan,

Our little kingdom on the River Vonne.

Nor did I seek her on the Sabbath day,

Though much I wondered why she hid away.

My darling Mélusine our children bore,

And though the half were sick and palate cleft,

These tender ten were each himself adored:

Not one was of his father’s love bereft,

Nor from his mother’s nursing bosom left.

But ever did our eldest, comely Guy,

Geoffroi the second stoke to jealousy.

Oh, how our little kingdom quickly bloomed!

For every son a castle in his name!

And daily in our towered chamber room

My Mélusine would wait until I came

From back the woods I hunted plenty game.

Geoffroi and Guy with me the verdure roamed,

Returning not until the creep of gloam.

My heart was full and e’er my hearth was filled

With kin and friends and guests from far and wide.

One final jewel my richly halls to gild:

My parents come to join me there inside—

I summoned them from Poitiers countryside.

On Sabbath they arrived into my hall,

And Mother asked when Mélusine would call.

Said I, “On Sabbath Mélusine aways

Unto an arbor on the river’s edge.

There cloistered with the forest fae she prays,

Nor do I think to undermine my pledge:

Ne’er I trespass her rose-adornèd hedge.”

And Mother, “What pray tell does rose ensign?

Does not a lover Mélusine enshrine?”

“My Mélusine our love would not betray,

Our children and our kingdom not forswear!

As sure as on our marriage shone its rays,

The ardent sun of romance gleams as ere!

No other heavenly body can compare.”

These things I said convicted of a fire,

But Mélusine I doubted for a liar.

To sleep I took for quiet and repose,

But sneaked a doubting too into my dreams

As when I woke, I asked “But why a rose?

Does Fate against my budding kingdom scheme?

Has Mélusine a lover by the stream?”

So on the Sabbath night I stole away,

And entered in the arbor where she prayed.

But as the welkin of the darkened moon

So was the arbor lorn of silver light:

There in the empty night I heard a tune,

Of which I followed not by dint of sight,

Until I saw—perceived and was affright!

For Mélusine was in the river bare,

Bescaled like a dragon in its lair!

“What are you, wife?” I cried in my despair,

And rushing down onto the riverside,

Took up my sword to fell the hellish mære,

For this was not the Mélusine my bride!

But she did not her serpent lower hide.

Said she, “In light of truth you see me now,

But love was furnished of a secret vow.”

For want of sense I fell upon the strand,

And to the water threw my father’s sword;

There I repented with an open hand,

And weeping pled, “forsake not our accord,

For still I love you as I do the Lord!”

Then merciful she smiled and said, “My dear,

This which is worth delight is worth a tear.”

To secrecy and faithfulness I swore,

That I would not her serpent half reveal;

And though that night her scales yet she wore,

With congress still our loving pact we sealed—

And God may find me doubting his ideal.

Wherein the morning light she was anew:

Fair Mélusine, my only love and true.

The Lord above forgives us of our sins,

Yet we beneath do not enjoy relief;

My Christian soul be damned for slaying kin,

In Fate and fae I put my firm belief—

‘Twas Mélusine, not Christ, who took my grief!

Of wormwood and of briar is her grace,

And on my night of peril shone her face.

Into my twilight days I sooner scried,

For every father must his line ensure:

With Guy into the woods I went astride,

And on the hunt I made him heir de jure,

His heritance and lordship to assure.

Returning to the hall we made a feast,

And every goblet rang without surcease.

Geoffroi across the banquet table kept,

Nor would he for his brother raise a toast;

Afar I watched as Mother on him crept

As would a Norman on the northern coast:

“The spoils unto victors daring most.”

Then from Geoffroi there came a roaring sound—

He leaping threw his gauntlet to the ground!

“Your favor is no more deserved than mine!

But you are fair and pleasing to the eye.

Let Fate our family heritance assign:

Not beauty but a battle-wit apply—

To duel then, Guy, that one of us should die!”

With arms Geoffroi departed from the hall,

And followed Guy, a rider for the fall.

Before the hall, atop the rocky tor,

Geoffroi and Guy with swords resolved to duel.

My Mélusine a-weeping cried, “O War!

Wreak not on them your venging wreckage cruel!

Must every man with you rejoin to rule?”

But neither son with crying could be swayed,

And next they came to blows and bloody blades.

Of palate cleft and fangèd upper tooth,

Geoffroi was visaged by the gods of war:

He struck with neither pity nor with ruth,

And through his brother’s hauberk eager tore,

Exulting in the clangor and the gore.

When Guy disabled fell before the maw,

I intervened to spare him coup de grâce.

“By rite of battle you secure your claim,

But tarnish not your soul with fratricide!”

Geoffroi replied, “But he is hardly maimed!

He will recover and his time will bide,

Until he bring a challenge for his pride.”

I stepped between the wounded and the willed:

He struck me, then Geoffroi his brother killed.

I held my eldest murdered in my arms,

And woebeset I wept for both my sons.

“What deviled him to cause his brother harm?

What cursèd ichor in our bloodline runs?

That I should wed the fae: what have I done?”

In view of all who stood before the hall,

I cried, “It is the Drake who God appals!”

How Mélusine upon me looked with grief:

She saw that I was senseless in distress—

That I was in the tempest as a leaf!

But I, before our kindred and our guests,

Had broken that which we had once redressed.

Said she, “I leave you with this parting word:

May love as we were bound your spirit gird.”

My Mélusine bestowed me future love:

She gave to me a pair of magic rings;

Then she with tearful eyes looked thereabove,

And to the heavens flew on scaled wings!

Nor did I know the meaning of these things.

All there before the hall in terror fled,

As on the wind a dragon westward sped.

Alone I clung to Guy and wept me dry,

When Mother from the banquet hall emerged.

Said she, “It serves me well to hear you cry:

I for my brother only heard a dirge—

Now you upon your family too are scourge.”

Upon the rocky tor I bursted, “Fate!

From you there is no hiding or escape!”

Posted on by William G Carpenter

The Trial of Charles Steward

WILLIAM G. CARPENTER is the author of Eþandun (Beavers Pond Press, 2020), which depicts King Alfred’s struggle with the pagan Danes in 878 AD.  Available from Amazon, Itasca Books Distribution and www.williamgcarpenter.com

This is an excerpt from a poem-in-progress on the English Civil War. Previous sections have been published in Expansive Poetry On Line and The Brazen Head. [1] 

The Trial of Charles Steward

A-riding through the rain on miry roads,
Harrison fetched the king to Windsor Castle,
where Hamilton met him, kneeling in the mud. 
That very day, the Commons formed a committee
to stipulate how to proceed against him. 
When Charles shunned Feilding-Denbigh’s last-ditch offer –
his crown for bishops’ lands and the royal veto –
the army council stripped him of his state
and let him dine alone and read his Shakespeare. 
The Commons passed, and sent the Lords, a bill
for a High Court of Justice for to try him. 
The Lords denounced the Commons’ treason charge
as lawless and absurd.  Said Feilding-Denbigh,
named a judge, “I’d rather be torn in pieces
than take part in so infamous a business.” 
Whence the Commons espoused the army’s notion,
originating, plainly, with the Levellers, 
that the people being the source of all just power,
its acts alone were law, sans king or Lords. 
 
Late-coming Oliver eschewed the Council,
meeting instead with Widdrington and Whitelocke,
with Lenthall and Rich-Warwick, to explore
ways other than the officers’ Agreement. 
He asked the Duke of Hamilton at Windsor
to say who had invited him to invade –
Charles, LG Browne, remains of the Eleven? 
No answer was forthcoming from the Scot. 
O.C. disliked fixing a term for Parlament
and thought Charles might be spared, his trial deferred
till after those of other malefactors,
Hamilton, Rich-Holland, Goring-Norwich,
Owen, Lingen, Dyve, and Hastings-Loughborough. 
As ever, Cromwell waited on the Lord. 
 
But when Charles rebuffed Feilding-Denbigh’s mission
as envoy of a clutch of glorious peers –
and the Commons and the army rose together
in calling for the trial of the tyrant –
then Oliver discerned the hand of God
in His clear witnessings and dispensations,
albeit the Holy Ghost had not yet singed him. 
He mused, when added late to the committee
charged to draft the ordinance for the trial,
“Only the greatest traitor in the world –
the greatest rebel – would dare carry on
a plan to try the king for capital crimes. 
But God’s providence has cast us upon it –
myself can but submit.  God bless your counsels,
though I am not provided to give mine.” 
 
The act to frame the High Court of Justice
(which Rushworth called an ordinance of attainder)
alleged a wicked design by Charles Steward
to raze our ancient laws and liberties
and in their place to plant an arbitrary
and tyrannical state – the which design
Charles Steward had maintained with fire and sword,
levying war against the Parlament,
wasting the public wealth, and murdering thousands. 
Some seven score MPs and officers,
citizens, City magistrates, and lawyers
were named to be commissioners and judges. 
 
Fifty or so attended the first meeting
(the Lord General’s last) in the Painted Chamber. 
Fewer met next session, and the next,
and fewer still the next, when Serjeant Bradshaw
declined, at first, the unwanted dignity,
unwanted but rewardful, of Lord President. 
Cooke, Aske, and Dorislaus would draft the charges –
Steele had fallen suddenly, sadly ill. 
Despite the fervor for a large indictment
reaching back to James’ suspicious death,
the court kept out the bulk of Charles’ misdoings,
save those of substituting will for law
and levying war against the Parlament.
 
Harrison and Peter led the train
that ferried Charles in bitter cold from Windsor. 
The trial commenced in vast Westminster Hall
sub Second Richard’s oaken hammer beams,
where Strafford had been tried, and years before,
Frances Howard, Essex’ sometime countess,
for murdering Sir Thomas Overbury. 
Led in by Hacker’s thirty halberdiers,
Charles eyed the Lord President where he sat
in crimson chair, behind a crimson cushion,
and eyed the great sanhedrin of commissioners
to either side, on rows of scarlet benches. 
A mace and sword lay on the Turkey carpet
that decked the table where the clerks awaited. 
Charles turned to view the gentry in the galleries,
Axtell’s musketeers, the thousand groundlings,
then settled on the velvet chair provided,
and rose, and sat again.  Silence commanded,
Bradshaw declared the Commons had empowered
that court to make inquisition for blood. 
 
When Cooke commenced to speak, Charles sought to stay him,
rapping him on the shoulder with his stick –
a harmless battery – whose silver head
fell to the floor, beyond poor Herbert’s reach. 
Charles stooped to fetch it.  Cooke preferred the charge,
which a clerk then read, from Charles’s fell design
to substitute his private will for law,
to the dire raising of his wind-blown standard
at Nottingham, to the great fights at Edgehill,
Brentford, Caversham, Gloucester, Newbury, Cropredy,
Bodmin, Newbury, Leicester, and Naseby Field,
where many thousand free people were slain,
to the mad outbursts of the present year. 
Charles listened sternly, till he scoffed aloud
at “tyrant, traitor, murderer, and public
enemy to the Commonwealth of England.” 
Bradshaw then demanding Charles’s answer,
Charles held the ground he’d seized from the beginning –
that court had no authority to try him. 
 
Repeatedly, the court asked Charles to plead
guilty or not guilty to the charge –
this, repeatedly, he refused to do. 
Repeatedly, he asked whence came their power –
repeatedly was told, the people of England. 
This Charles Steward sturdily denied.
First, no earthly court could try a king,
his crown having come to him from God. 
He reigned not by consent but by descent,
lawful descent, above a thousand years. 
Second, no law provided for such trial
by Parlament – the Commons being none,
lacking king and peers and judicial powers. 
To answer, to submit to usurpation,
was counter to his duty as their king. 
The court, said Bradshaw, overruled his demurrer,
and barred him from persisting in such reasons. 
“Show me the court where reason is not heard,”
said Charles.  Bradshaw said, “The Commons of England.” 
That second day, he ordered Charles’ default. 
 
Despite default, the court chose a committee
of colonels and MPs to hear the witnesses. 
Some thirty testified that day and Thursday,
including gentlemen and husbandmen,
a yeoman, and men standing for the trades
of ironmonger, painter, maltster, weaver,
cordwainer, barber-surgeon, vintner, scrivener,
and soldier.  They had seen the king himself
in helmet, armor back and front, sword drawn
at or near the several battlefields
where thousands on both sides had spilt their blood. 
He’d countenanced the cruelty of his men
in plundering and cutting on their prisoners. 
Later, whilst he treated on the Isle of Wight,
he’d schemed to bring an Irish host to England. 
The witnesses avowed their depositions
in open court held in the Painted Chamber. 
Thus Charles was not judged solely pro confesso,
as men had been in the old Star Chamber days. 
 
The court reconvening to sentence Charles,
he asked for leave to address both his Houses
in the Painted Chamber, as much concerning peace. 
Bradshaw was scarlet-gowned for the day’s business
and wore as before his high-crowned, steel-lined hat. 
Charles too was covered, as all times before. 
Bradshaw said twas but a more delay
and denial of the forum’s jurisdiction,
but Charles denied denying jurisdiction,
though owning he could not acknowledge it. 
 
“Have we hearts of stone?” asked Colonel Downes,
seated back of Bradshaw, “are we men?” 
Downes’ neighbors on the bancs, Cawley and Walton,
and O.C. just below, essayed to calm him,
but Downes stood up and asked for an adjournment,
which Bradshaw ordered, leading the commissioners
to the Court of Wards.  There O.C. and others
angrily chided Downes for “a peevish man”
who “knew not that the court now had to do
with the hardest-hearted man that lived on Earth.” 
Said Cromwell, “He would fain save his old master.” 
Downes went apart and wept.  The court returning,
Bradshaw said twould brook no more delays,
and answered Charles’ objections to its powers. 
 
Briefly, the king’s deeds spoke not of peace. 
Nor were our kings superior to the laws
that often-summoned Parlaments enacted,
the king’s task being to administer justice. 
The people kept the right to bridle kings,
as peers had nobly done in the Barons’ Wars,
every nation furnishing suchlike precedents,
including Charles’s native land of Scotland. 
His grandmother Mary was set aside,
as in England, Edward Two and Richard Two. 
The people set them up and took them down –
the people, not descent, made English kings. 
Truly, Charles was a tyrant and a traitor
who’d fouled the land by shedding guiltless blood. 
Bradshaw prayed the Lord might mend his heart
and make him sensible of his miscarriages,
then, refusing further to hear from Charles,
who all along had disavowed the court,
ordered the clerk (Broughton) to read the sentence:
 
which was that Charles Steward be put to death
by the severing of his head from his body. 
The whole court rose to acknowledge the sentence. 
Charles was led out.  No rioting erupted,
save calls for “Justice!” and “God save the king!” 
Two ladies had cried out against the trial,
one of whom was said to be Lady Fairfax. 
Charles rode in a sedan chair back to Whitehall,
hid from view by soldiers lining King Street. 
No force of reformadoes rose for him,
no turbulent apprentices from London,
nor those who’d marched to disband Fairfax’ army,
nor those who’d risen up against the excise,
nor those who loved the Book of Common Prayer. 
 
On Sunday he was carried to St. James’s,
where Juxon preached and prayed with him all day,
the king excluding others from his presence. 
Cromwell would not have judged him so hard-hearted
had he seen with what feeling he gave his daughter,
when the children visited him on Monday,
his Hooker, Andrewes, and Laud contra Fisher. 
 
“Remember” was the king’s last word to Juxon
up on the freezing platform outside Whitehall. 
He’d likewise urged Elizabeth to remember
his last words to his sons and to his lady. 
Glancing at the sword, he’d said in court
he did not fear “the bill” – he now made good
that piece of bravery.  Charles had always dared
to plant one footstep, then the next – to face
the thunder of the guns, the gusting lead,
and the blind, smoking countenance of Mars
transpierced by stabbing red and yellow fires. 
Before he stepped from James’s Banqueting House,
he took a bite of manchet and some claret. 
 
High above the Parlamentarian troopers
who held back the crowd from the black-draped scaffold,
Charles made his last defense to those nearby,
the colonels, clerks, and executioners,
styling himself anew the people’s martyr,
defender of their wealth and liberties,
who had defied the tyrannous usurpers –
he who’d raised forced loans and so-called ship money,
who’d jailed his Parlamentary opponents,
dissolved the Houses for eleven years,
who’d mutilated Bastwick, Prynne, and Burton,
persecuted godly folk in their churches,
and lastly levied war against the Houses,
scheming to bring in foreign arms to best them. 
 
When the bright axe from the Tower struck its blow –
unlike the flurry needed to quell Mary –
one cried aloud, “Behold the head of a traitor!”
A huge groan, twas said, broke from the crowd,
as if Dagon had crushed them in the temple –
so sunk were they, were we, in fond idolatry,
illumining one small, obstinate prince
with borrowed glimmers from our Lord and King. 
Hacker’s troopers swiftly cleared the streets. 

[1] “Parlament” was Milton’s preferred spelling, as being more faithful to the word’s Late Latin origin. Steward is not a spelling error.

Posted on by Elizabeth Hurst

Utopias

ELIZABETH HURST was born in Los Angeles and has lived in San Francisco for many years. She likes poetry, alchemy, horror and politics

UTOPIAS

Is there any way that they can work well

Or are they merely maps to hell,

Satanic annexes come to settle

Among us. Tossed into the kettle

Of fish, a barracuda always slips

Among them and then it madly rips

Apart this school of innocent trust

And so hatred hardens to a crust

As they arm themselves with fanatic

Dogma that sadly won’t stay static

But fatally moves into the very worst

That we can imagine. We’ve been cursed

By our conception of vengeful God,

With ferocious judgment in the sod

That will inescapably receive us.

But hungry bacteria raise no fuss

As they return flesh to embracing earth

To unite us with this green sphere’s girth

As we soften and rot, rolled round and round

With the vast utopia underground.

Posted on by Lee Evans

Two poems by Lee Evans

LEE EVANS lives in Bath, Maine after having retired from the Maryland State Archives and the Bath YMCA. He has self-published thirteen books of poetry which are available on Amazon and Lulu.com

SIGNATURE REQUIRED

My van is parked idling in your driveway,

To keep the heater running and protect

Its fragile cargo from the winter wind.

I step up to your door and sharply rap

With one hand, holding gently in the other

The Valentine’s bouquet your lover bought

By phoning up his local florist shop.

You hesitate and wonder who it is.

While waiting patiently as you peek through

The curtains (it’s a dangerous neighborhood),

I count the fragile flowers I have brought:

(Sometimes they’re broken in the close-packed truck)

One dozen long stemmed roses in a vase.

Red petals, fresh, naively innocent,

Nestled in fern dotted with Baby’s Breath

And framed with purple status. So lovely,

Yet soon to lose their bloom in a few days –

To be bagged up and set out on the curb,

Manhandled by the trashman, hauled away.

“Capture the moment.” Customers consent

To our Sales Contract with no guarantee

That moment lasts forever. Never mind,

Let’s take our contracts with a grain of salt,

Our flowers with the atmosphere they breathe.

Look at these snowflakes as they freeze and cling

To the crimson petals and the Baker’s fern!

I wonder if you know what you sign for

When you scribble your name on my clipboard?

Well, I’m not employed to ask such questions.

Anyway, it’s time for me to hit the road;

There’s not too many hours of daylight left

To gather signatures for these bouquets.

Have a good evening, or what’s left of it.

TIDAL POOL

We gazed into a pool left by the tide;

Crouching together, close enough to see,

Apart enough to share its mystery.

Our dim reflections trembled with the sky,

Where periwinkles crept before our eyes

Beneath the liquid weight of their clear world,

And phytoplankton scurried in the whirl

Of their routines against the flow of time.

It was as though we crouched above ourselves,

And stared straight through our bodies into space

Upwards, towards an element that held

All creatures in the field of its embrace—

All while the waves devoured the shifting shoals

And stony shore alike, as on they rolled.