Published by Poetry Space, 2024
ISBN 978-1-909404-55-7

Description

Poetry Space is delighted to be publishing Myra Schneider’s 16th poetry collection this year.

Myra had her first collection published in 1985, by John Killick. She has read widely at poetry festivals and many other venues, been published in well-known newspapers and journals shortlisted for a Forward prize in 2007. Her work has appeared in a large number of anthologies and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in Poetry Please. She is a consultant to the Second Light Network of women poets founded by Dilys Wood in the late 1990s. and she writes reviews and articles for their twice-yearly magazine for women poets, ARTEMIS poetry and occasionally for other magazines.

Myra Schneider’s compassion for the natural world and the thrill she gets from immersing herself in nature shine through in this collection. Schneider recognises the earth as a life giving force that drives her creativity, and she honours its resilience.

Reviews

Centred in a homely urban environment, the poet explores the green world with all means available to her: she goes into gardens and parks and makes creative use of memory, imagination, and research. Painting and music, evoked and transposed in these poems, add different kinds of vividness. Individual lyrics give way to sustained sequences. The mysticism and practical tenacity of Hildegard of Bingen are enthrallingly recreated, the controlled fury of Artemesia Gentileschi is channelled so forcefully it scorches the pages, and the sublimity of Hokusai’s Mount Fuji leaves us on a higher plane. ~ John Freeman

A timely collection from one of our most creatively energetic and generous-spirited poets. In Believing in the Planet, Myra Schneider engages unflinchingly with the most urgent crisis of our age while attending, with unashamed passion, to all the wonders “we’re on the brink of losing”, from humble dandelions and woolly bats to the coral reef and the rainforest. She puts our planet-wounding species firmly in its place but knows that celebration is the best medium for militancy, and these exuberant poems are a testament to nature’s “determination to survive” and to the transformative powers of the poet’s imagination, where a hare is followed effortlessly on its journey to the hills, the wildlife of Ghana wreaks glorious havoc in the heart of the city and the primeval past can be summoned in a heartbeat… ~ Ruth Sharman

Moniza Alvi has said about the book:  “I did love and admire all the imaginative freedom, energy and passion of it. I really felt that the poems were talking to me and not at me. It felt such an intimate and life-enhancing experience reading them.”

Stephen Stuart-Smith, my editor at Enitharmon when he was publishing poetry collections wrote to me: “‘Pool’ is a marvellously luminous poem among other marvels. Many congratulations! I completely agree with John Freeman and Ruth Sharman: this is one of your most outstanding collections.”

Excerpt

POSEIDON

after Robert Aldous: Poseidon

Never mind brilliant brains
and the theory of everything, plant yourself
on a seaweeded shore where wave after huge wave breaks

and white crests tower
into a sky which is boundless and packed
with angry clouds. Ocean will invade your head, drive

your thoughts away, pound
in your brain. You’ll shrink from the black fury
swirling in these troubled waters and remember Poseidon rises up

whenever he sees a seal
with a car tyre round its neck, a turtle
struggling with a baby-blue mask, a cuttlefish with microplastics

lining its stomach. Worse,
are the days he descends into the depths
and finds yet another coral reef drained of colour and deserted

by sea urchin, sponge and clam.
Enraged, he dives into the dark of a sea bed
deeper than Everest is high, roars orders at his waters till they attack

a town perched on a coast.
We weep to see buildings crumble, telegraph poles
topple and cars drown but still fail to appease the world’s seas.

LONGING FOR RAIN

I hurry outside for fresh air but the pavement
is dusty and, staring down the road, I see
a great truck churning up specks of tar

which contaminate the air, a drill breaking up
slabs in next door’s garden. Then I picture
Alexandra palace which we drove past yesterday.

The high slopes are so parched they’re brown
and even the uncut grass in our park is thirsty
for rain. None is forecast for the foreseeable future.

Yet now l look at the pavement I’m stunned to see
how many plants have rooted themselves in cracks
in the uneven paving stones which tree roots are trying

to break through. They want to support the planet.
Maybe it’s the heat which has brought out packs of ants.
There’s such determination to survive. Even on verges

clovers are growing and in suburban gardens I catch
the emerald gleam of a bluebottle’s back. And bees,
every kind of bee: bumbles, honeybees, masonry bees

and wasps as well as insects I don’t recognise,
are buzzing round golden rod and the spiked heads
of alium which look like tiny planets when they’re dead.

THE JAZZ CONCERT

The smell of summer warmth taut
with expectancy is rising from the grass
and there they are: four musicians
playing on guitars, drum and percussion
to a Saturday crowd who have kicked off
the dull of everyday. Some are lounging
on the grass with their kids who are licking
fast-melting ice cream cones,
some nod to the beat, some click fingers
and suddenly you discover you too
have stripped off the mundane,
you too are sitting on the daisied,
sun-drenched grass with music
throbbing through your body. Now
the drumming grows louder,
the rhythm quickens and the music
becomes the excitement of fast cars
belting through a night-time city
whose shop windows are lit up to entice.
And everything is heat and colour:
the strident pink of the musicians’ jackets,
the marine blue of the two guitars,
the corn yellow thrown by the sun.
And as the fast becomes even faster
you throw out all the worries
which weigh heavy on your mind.
Happiness wells up inside you
and even when the playing stops
and the instruments are laid down
you feel as grand as a Steinway piano
and the electrifying music
goes on playing in your head.