Look at this line-up! Many thanks to Nancy Charley (Smokestack, Arachne Press) and Lana Arkhi for their wonderful poetry and music evenings in Lana’s beautiful gallery in Broadstairs, Kent. I’m thrilled to be reading on Sunday 18 May from 6.30pm along with Frances Turner, Ann Hilton and Nancy herself. There will be music, food and wine included in the £10 ticket, and an open mic.
These evenings book up pretty fast so it’s a good idea to book your place soon.
Family, friends and a wonderful beach sunset surrounded me last night here on the north Kent coast (UK) to celebrate publication of ‘Safe Ground’ by Mica Press. We laughed, danced, ate beautiful food and (some of us with sandy feet) soaked ourselves in poetry by my wonderful friends Posie Brown, Setareh Ebrahimi and Maggie Harris, and from ‘Safe Ground’. We had a short, powerful open mic too with poets including Nancy Charley, Mike Bartholemew Biggs, Nancy Mattson and Sue Rose. Gorgeous words from everyone and wonderful warmth.
Then today, on the way back from ice creams in Broadstairs with family, I found an email telling me that ‘Safe Ground’ has its first review. Thank you, Billy Mills, for your enthusiasm here, and in full below. If you would like to find out about ‘Safe Ground’ for yourself, you can buy it here:
Rosie Johnston’s previous book, Six-Count Jive was a study in domestic abuse and escape presented in sets of haiku-like poems. Her new publication, Safe Ground sets that experience, ‘a bad case of bad, bad husband’, in a wider context of trauma and recovery that reaches back to a troubled Belfast childhood, with a much-loved womanising, hill-climbing, opera lover father and a mother whose resentments ruined her relationship with her daughter, and forward to a happier present in poems that are baggier, more discursive, than those in the earlier book.
These personal troubles are set in a background of the Troubles, and at moments the public and private seem to overlap, as in this poem on the Abercorn bombing in 1972:
Over his shoulder we’d all seen it: the beast was out of its cage.
Chill control, red-eyed in our homes, ready to clot our lives.
The lowest we can be was loose. Nothing mattered now but blood.
Her escape was, and remains, the sea, right from the very first poem here, ‘Carnlough Bay’:
I breathe. Expand again, at last, to my full size. I’m
tallest in bare feet, on sea-rolled shingle, back
heavy in my heels, cupping the weight of
whelk shells in my pockets.
Constant in it all, so
many years, the
need of
sea.
We see the breakdown of that bad marriage and the speaker’s fraught relationships with her children, but in the end, in the final poem in the book, there is a sense of wholeness, the Waste Land redeemed, its curse lifted by (and by) the sea:
We run, crabs loose from a spilt
green bucket,
back to the best of childhood.Content with plastic spades,
we burrow
where our simplest selves can find us.On Margate Sands songs and laughter
ride the winds,
connect us all with all.
That ‘loose’ brings us back to the Abercorn poem, but the worst we can be is transmogrified into the simple best in an echo of marvellous deftness.
And it’s not quite the end, as that final poem is followed by a four-and-a-bit page prose piece, ‘Laughing and Grief: Paris, 2020’ (recalling the Mock Turtle’s tale in Alice in Wonderland) telling the story of a visit to Beckett’s grave, or at least a failed attempt to find it that was salvaged by a kindly 80-year-old Parisian gentleman, Henri, who brings her to Sam’s grave, and then that of Jean Seberg, where he shows the narrator a card he wrote and placed there earlier. The story brings us back to her father, via Horace, a shared enthusiasm, and we get to see their final interaction before his death. And the card? It read Jamais de désespoir (Horace’s nil desperandum) translated by Johnston as ‘Never lose hope’, fitting words for the book to end on.
This very well-written story (definitely not a prose poem) leaves me wondering what next for Rosie Johnston? After two fine collections navigating trauma, is she now moving away from that subject and on to a post-recovery mode in which the bright world of Margate Sands is her theme? I’m eager to see.
My latest review for London Grip was terrific fun, of the first translation into English of Christian Morgenstern’s comic poetry. By Timothy Ades published by The High Window.
You can never tell when you’re writing something whether it’s going to have impact or not. I never foresaw that so many people would bother to thank me for this one, even walking down the street after me in Broadstairs last summer. The poem I’m reading here is ‘Being with Anne’ (‘Safe Ground’, Mica Press, 2025), for my beloved Auntie Anne. My mother was senior in a long family so Anne, her youngest sister, isn’t that much older than me. I have so much to thank her for.
The ‘old song’ is Percy French’s ironic ‘Mountains of Mourne’, sung here by Brendan O’Dowda.
Last weekend I was being blown over with my sons at the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh – many thanks to the kind stranger who caught me and helped me to my feet before I crashed sideways into a boulder! Today it’s Amazon’s French Poetry list that has me blown away – ‘Safe Ground’ is at number 4, between Billy Connolly and ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’.
How on earth is a wee book of poetry written in English on that list at all? My book ‘Safe Ground’ tells the story (in poetry) of my travels and escapes from Northern Ireland via Cambridge and London to the north coast of Kent. Where does France come in?
In February 2021 my home was full of builders making emergency repairs to the roof. In icy blasts, they clambered like mountain goats among the scaffolding. It felt at the time as if we might never get to socialise in public again, so escapism took hold. I wrote about a little trip I’d made alone to Paris the previous February and relived the pleasures of sitting in a Parisian restaurant. Those scribbles became ‘Laughing and Grief’ (as the Mock Turtle used to say), and were published later that year by American Writers Review in their 2021 Turmoil and Recovery anthology.
With thanks to lovely Henri who helped me climb through the graves in Montmartre cemetery to find Beckett and Seberg, ‘Laughing and Grief’ is about how laughs and sadness jostle together in our lives and how recovery can find us at the strangest times. You can buy here from Amazon or here from publisher Mica Press.
Rosie Johnston 