In her Purgatorio 10 version of Dante’s Commedia,
Kimberly Campanello writes in the CANTO:
       in this                         knot
                 the twisted         path            is straightest
in this         heart                        the door
is long gone    (. . .)
                                           fleeing and returning
      we need art
                               to get through this . . .

Despite the subject matter I/we are here, in the now,
present, creating. I think of a black and white photo I
saw last year of Edward Burra at Tate Modern, how
taken I was by the portrayal of what seemed to me his
inner distress, his art a necessity. Then Brian Dillon’s
book Tormented Hope, Nine Hypochondriacal Lives
which includes Charlotte Brontë, Marcel Proust,
Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol.

In his intro to After Oroonoko by Aphra Behn Fred
D’Aguiar says, ‘The dead call to us in fragments,
presences. The dead want nothing from us…’ Heidi
Seaborn, in her intro tells us,  ‘At my window
overlooking the Place d’Odéon, I read Berry’s
‘Window Poems’ for the first time. The war in
Ukraine still fresh, these poems written in 1968 slid
beneath my skin.’ Each stanza begins with lines from
Wendell Berry – from 21, ‘He has known a tunnel—’

When I read from Philip Gross’s poem Thirteen
Turns of the Tide:
                               like the after-

      humming of a rung
                               bell
      an ocean away and yet not
      so much close as already inside
      the bone-box
                            of your skull.

I can’t help but visualise the skull. . .

Maitreyabandhu’s homage, Last Days with My Mother
quotes her saying ‘You must have hollow legs’ taking
me back to my own childhood.

This from Robert Sheppard’s poem The Palisaded
Ditch:
      A short straight road, strengthened by gold,
      leads to a softer tower overlooking the
                                                                 walls,
      and on, to a stubby roundyhouse

conjures my well-loved childhood book The Little
Round House by Marion St. John.

Marvin Thompson’s Why Am I Writing This List
Poem? interrogates the present: ‘the videos of orphans
chasing sleep / in a Gaza hospital’, the history of
racism and more.

John Freeman’s Yellow Leaves however, is rooted in
the present. Intending to write ‘a relatively short lyric
. . .  the poem had other ideas’:

In between some of the words
appearing on the page under my pen
I pause sometimes, and see what I’m seeing
inside and out . . .

Linda Black