TIH Editorial #64.docx

EDITORIAL
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

'Remember, man, that you are dust and to dust you must return'
…as the priest would intone, while he rubbed holy muck onto my uncomprehending pre-pubescent brow each Ash Wednesday. And, after the past annus horribilis, the road to dusty death is much on our minds. The back end of last year happened to coincide with the final knockings of my PhD in Great War poetry, when I was much taken by Jahan Ramazani's excellent book, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, with its close reading of several key poets in that canonical line. Of many insightful comments made in the book, one which caught my eye was his observation that:
'At its best the modern elegy offers not a guide to "successful" mourning but a spur to rethinking the vexed experience of grief in the modern world. We should turn to it expecting not so much solace as fractured speech, not so much answers as memorable puzzlings.' (Preface ix)
So, as 2016 did its best to impersonate Alice Oswald's Memorial, it is perhaps no surprise that the elegy appeared to offer – even more than is usual – poetic means and resources to grapple with the modern world and create from it 'memorable puzzlings'. I notice that both myself and Dawn Gorman discuss the elegiac gifts of our subjects in the reviews section here, and a quick survey of the poetry included in this issue throws up its usual quota of eight or nine variations upon the mode. I say, 'usual', because the elegy appears to be hard-wired into our collective poetic sensibility: death being our inescapable context and loss being one of those moments which has us reaching for the pen in order to help us deal with the vast chasm that opens up between the lost and those left behind. I remember a profound intuition of this several months after my father died, when I stumbled across some writing produced by my mother – not a woman prone to the affliction of poetry – which, nonetheless, could not better be described as anything else. Quite naturally, then, alongside tallying the kill on the cave wall, feeling at one with our hillsides and falling into, or out-of, love, loss is one of the thematic staples of so much poetry produced both today and throughout all the ages. Because death is something we all do; in fact, it is one of only two Big-Life things we all do, unless I'm missing something. And if I am, I shall, no doubt, find the elegiac vein useful.
All of which leads me to an editorial thought that, with so much elegy around, the mode represents one of the great and true challenges to poets wishing to bring something to it which is both distinctive and entirely their own. Another interesting comment made by Ramazani is that 'every elegy is an elegy for elegy': a somewhat Oedipal reminder that the onus is upon each practitioner to write their own sorrow on the bosom of the earth. And, even given the sheer weight of all that has gone before, I am frequently amazed at how well contributors manage to meet the challenge and rethink 'the vexed experience of grief in the modern world'. So, 'Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs'.
On the 23rd of December, the north-east of Scotland poet, musician and well-beloved raconteur John Mackie died suddenly following a stroke. He had the gift of making one feel like one had known him for years, even if it had only been, in fact, for a short while. Certainly, it was the feeling I had and, like a good poem reaching its pay-off, this quality was confirmed and celebrated at John's funeral in Elgin. Now, without wishing to kill off Death entirely, people, can you all please leave it a while before I need dedicate another issue to the memory of someone else we've lost from among us? I shall end this editorial with a poem John sent in for this issue, which remained with us until the very last minute of our deliberations. How I wish I had made his living day by accepting it. Instead, I shall let its time-torn irony speak poignantly for itself:
Birth, Marriage, Death

the records are here somewhere
should they be useful again
for tax or genealogy
occasional inquiries from
namesakes in the diaspora
perching you on a branch of their tree
when I need you to live again
I read the poems in the notes
of our journeys
and the marks you made
in the battered atlas

Martin Malone