Editorial
I’m writing this from my desk at home in Sydney. The city has been buffeted for days by intense September wind. It rattles my windows. In front of me, the paraphernalia of writing—notepads and pens, empty coffee cups. And stacks of poetry collections. I brought fifteen of them back from a recent trip home to Ireland.
A one terabyte hard drive nestles behind all that. It’s where I back up my most important information (when I remember)—my writing, of course, photographs spanning decades, legal documents from previous iterations of my life: the paperwork of migration (visa applications), coupling and uncoupling (marriage and divorce certificates). There’s still plenty of room on it for more.
It’s almost impossible to visualise the quantity of data produced by our species. Recent estimates put it at four hundred million of these drives every single day. We share or store reviews of good and not-so-good travel experiences; drafts of unsent love letters; images of war-torn countries. Not to mention endless cat videos.
Among all that, there’s poetry. In a recent conversation with a friend about why I’m so drawn to poetry, I told her that once or twice a day—more if I’m lucky—I’ll encounter a poem that stands out, and gives me that jolt of thought or emotion which changes something in me, even for just an instant.
On a given day, I might read tens of poems—perhaps a hundred if I’ve got time. I often encounter them through scrolling social media; sometimes by picking up a book. Only a handful move me in a way that I want to spend more time with them. It begs the question—what makes a poem stand out from the rest? What qualities of a poem—or the way it is read—combine to create that change?
It’s a question we’ve collectively considered while reading for Issue Two of The Marrow, our first issue with an open submissions call-out. We were fortunate to be trusted with 2,161 poems from 660 poets. It has been a sincere privilege to read work from 55 countries. We’ve endeavored to read with patience and care, and the intention to be open to what each poem wanted to offer. As Audrey mentioned in the editorial for Issue One, we wish “to honour the work that goes into producing poems.” This reading period has been our way of doing that.
The result is the twenty-five poems we have gathered for Issue Two, which I hope match our intention to present the best poetry and poets from Australia alongside the best work from across the globe. It’s a selection grounded in the iron ore and stone of Kathryn Fry’s ‘Yirra’ and Patrick Deeley’s ‘To a Stone Age Artist’ or in the “ancient human footprints” of Stephen Edgar’s ‘Happisburgh Incident’—poems that serve as a jumping-off point for a journey through the varieties of embodied human experience.
It’s a journey of surprising moments. We encounter grief of species loss in Linda Kohler’s ‘Cathedrals’; all-consuming erotic joy in Dmitry Blizniuk’s ‘Our Souls Quietly Sing’; the thin line between life and death in AE Macleod’s ‘It was like the time’; the “slick with stick” sensuality of Amelia Gorman’s ‘The Lemon Divers of Amalfi’.
The inherited war trauma of Jayant Kashyap’s ‘[untitled]’ and the raw, present-life suffering of Sophia Argyris’s ‘Twenty True Things: an Incantation’ show us that the journey is seldom without pain. We are reminded of the reality of the journey’s inevitable, mysterious end by Brett Dionysius’ meditation on ‘Turning into a Cat While Dying’ and the medical realities of Emilie Collyer’s ‘trying to remember how it ends’. In ‘The Billowing’, Barbara DeCoursey Roy hopes that, wherever we end up, it’s a place of “endless kindness”—something most of us hope too, I think.
The poems span many forms—you’ll find free-verse, a sestina, a pantoum, prose poems and even an incantation in the issue. Perhaps what makes them stand out, among the thousands of poems that we read, is how they marry the stuff of raw being—subject matter—to precise, inventive language to create the made thing of a poem. Each of these poems gave me that “jolt” on initial reading. They continue to do so now. I’m glad they found their way through the sea of poems I’ve encountered during this reading period. I hope that, having found their way to you, they move something in you too.
Daragh Byrne, co-editor
