WE'VE SEEN THE SAME HORIZON, Poetry Review

A few months ago, I had the honour of being contacted by the artist, musician and poet Robert N Taylor, who enquired about the possibility of me contributing some poems to a forthcoming anthology of the Red Salon Poets, a collective named after Robert and his wife Christina's sitting room. Naturally, I was only too pleased, and sent several poems to his wife Christina Finlayson Taylor, who was editing and also contributing to the collection, which she and her friend and fellow poetess Juleigh Howard-Hobson had named We've Seen the Same Horizon. Perhaps the greatest absence in the collection is some poetry by Robert himself, who provides a foreword, but this is not to detract from talents like Christina and Juleigh. I knew Juleigh's excellent work even before she appeared in Mjolnir Magazine, but Christina is a revelation to me, and her poetry is up there with the best I have seen. There are few who can write a convincing sonnet these days, but Christina is among them.

 

 

It is very difficult to narrow down what poetry is into a brief summary. Perhaps it is better to begin with what it isn't. It is not what is passed off as poetry today: either facile broken-up lumps of prose or a series of cryptic clues to the Times crossword puzzle for seminar rooms of academics to debate the meaning of for decades to come. Real poetry hits you straight away like a bolt of lightning. The words have power and have been selected and arranged in such a way that they speak instantly to the soul. They can make you laugh, cry, rage or lament, and affect one both emotionally and intellectually, both unconsciously and consciously. It is why real poetry is very dangerous to a corrupt elite, as this ability to affect the emotions, coupled with the transmission of moral values, threatens their hegemony. This is why true poetry is often derided and deconstructed by the current corrupt elites through pseudo-academia.

 

This selection and arrangement of words is what was once called technique, which has become a dirty word in university corridors these days and is no longer taught, but often derided by our pseudo-intelligentsia. But, as in all the arts, it is technique that separates the wheat from the chaff. It is the reason the likes of Tracy Emin and Damien Hurst can only be lauded in this era, but van Eyck, Dali, Michaelangelo, Waterhouse and Monet will stand the test of time. So it is with poetry. The likes of Carol Ann Duffy will be forgotten as soon as her 'work' is taken off the British GCSE exam syllabus. And there one sees how artificially these charlatans are propped up by the corrupt system where one's lesbianism counts for more than talent. Sadly, her name will still linger in the list of poets laureate, which shows just how corrupt the system really is, to the point where Britain's reigning monarch has become Hans Christian Anderson's eponymous emperor.

 

It is with the greatest of praise, then, that I say there are some great technicians in the anthology. Take this example by Christina herself from her poem 'Golden Spring':

 

Our golden spring awakens deep within. 

The sacred seed, the Tree that cannot die....

 

The iambic metre give the lines gravitas, as do the sybilance and assonance, and the lines are woven into a tight septet with the rhyme scheme ABABCBC. It is perhaps fortunate that the Left have become obsessed with the deconstruction of all things, for the deconstruction of Truth and the deconstruction of technique have gone hand in glove, and so their lies have no weight to them. In contrast, Christina's technique is married to an eternal Truth, and a deceptively complex one, for the seemingly simple lines belie the fact that a long paragraph of philosophy is contained in thirteen words of poetry. Without spelling it out too much, Christina is comparing the yearly seasons of Nature to the seasons of a race of Man (ours) and contrasting winter and death, even though one often seems superficially like the other.

 

There is also a place for oft-forgotten Northern traditional verse forms in the anthology, with alliterative and skaldic verse represented. Take this final stanza from Erik Westcoat's 'Fólksdrápa':

Remember well

this mead I've won

and savour the sweetness

in the sounds I've poured,

for the precious poetry

in potent words

can fortify the Folk 

with Fimbultýr's might.

Indeed, it is very fitting that such a form is used for a poem that explores the organic connection between Northern Europeans' Gods, poetry, tradition, character and shared historical and cultural experience, which thrice returns to the refrain:

Our Folk endures

with fame undying.

There is also free verse included in the anthology, which I have nothing against when it is up to the standards of T S Eliot and Ted Hughes. Jason O'Toole's 'Ansuz' is one such example in this collection. Siegfried Manteufel provides some excellent poetry in the German language with a translation at the side. Of course, to appreciate it fully, one needs to be able to read German, for as Robert Frost rightly noted, 'Poetry is what gets lost in translation.'

 

All told, there are thirteen poets gathered here: Amelia Beechwood, Carolyn Emerick, Albie A. Gogel, Juleigh Howard-Hobson, Siegfried Manteuffel, Jason O’Toole, Stuart Sudekum, Lennart Svensson, Christina Finlayson Taylor, Eirik Westcoat, Matthew Wildermuth, Troy Wisehart, and myself. It is available from Amazon and from Underworld Amusements. Christina Finlayson Taylor has done a sterling job in compiling this volume and I recommend purchasing a copy. When there are so many who claim to be traditionalists collecting donations without providing any substance, here we have someone who has invested her time, effort and money in creating something enduring of cultural value that provides a vehicle for other writers in our movement and inspiration to those who read it. What is perhaps most important in the book, and the highest accolade I can give to any work of art, is that it uplifts the spirit. Instead of wallowing in the mire in these dark times, how about raising oneself above it? Please purchase a copy.