Editorial
When I was nine, I received a gorgeous new fountain pen for my birthday, which falls on the penultimate day of the year. This marked the beginning of my obsession with appraising the year. Every New Year’s Eve, I would curl up in a bay window with my pen and notebook, the mid-winter sun a milky presence behind the season’s fog hanging over our subalpine valley. Though this has now been replaced with lazy afternoons by the beach, I still relish this time to turn inward. I scribble in my notebooks, leaf through calendars, scroll through photos and messages and then summarise the year into a set of lists. In 2024, two of those lists—‘Things to be proud of’ and ‘Things to be excited for’—were headlined by The Marrow.
2024 was the birth year of The Marrow, the culmination of many months of collaborative work and many more years of individual dreaming, planning and contemplating. Now, with this third issue launching at the start of a new year, we look towards the future of The Marrow—truly something to be excited for.
Every time we open our submissions, it is a small marvel to watch them roll in. Each name on our spreadsheet represents an invitation extended to us by a poet. To read their unpublished, untested works, yes, but the nature of poetry is such that we leave some small trace of ourselves in every poem, no matter the level of autobiography in our writing. As such, these poets also invite us into a small sliver of their lives.
To mould a personal experience, epiphany or observation into a poem that changes something in its reader, regardless of the distance between reader and poet, is another small marvel. Each of the twenty-four poets in this issue has rendered some unique part of themselves into art that transcends the individual. As my co-editor Daragh said in his editorial for Issue Two, these were the poems that invited us “to spend more time with them”.
We editors also have our own lives that intersect with our practice, whether we want them to or not. About halfway through the reading period for this issue, my beloved eight-year-old cat was given only days to live. After receiving the news, my husband and I camped out on a floor of soft furnishings with her, where we spent the next few days with our phones on mute, not worrying about any of our usual duties—including the unread poems stacking up in my inbox. She died on a Saturday morning. That afternoon, as we returned to a home without her for the very first time, we found a bouquet of flowers on our doorstep. It was from my co-editors, Audrey and Daragh.
On returning to my editorial duties, I found the themes that emerged in our selections mirrored much of those days: cross-species grief and empathy, the humour and grotesqueness of loss (and love), and the flowers that, like in Nishtha Trivedi’s ‘Dirt’, “dare / to stare at the sun, already ruined.” Poetry so often reminds me that my sorrows are small but real, that pain is shared across a vast diversity of the human and more-than-human world. It also reminds me that there is joy to be found in this world, like the singer in Judith Beveridge’s poem ‘Woman Singing in a Garden’, the child dancing in Sarah B. Cahalan’s ‘Minnows’, or the “determination to make / something better with what we had” from the lovers-turned-gardeners in Katie Richardson’s ‘A Proposal’.
Long before we started reading, I told Daragh and Audrey that I would look out for joy in this submission window. I found it in unexpected places: the joy of rollicking storytelling in Satya Dash’s ‘Fable of the Desirous Abecedarian’; the joy of formal excellence in Rachel Curzon’s haibun ‘The Invitation’ and in Ross Gillett’s ‘Home After Weeks Away’; the joy of knowing that life is larger than our own selves in Peter Boyle’s ‘Responses 46.’; the joy in admitting our grief, as Mark Tredinnick so exquisitely puts it in the closing poem, ‘Late Winter Light, One Sunday’: “One day I will slip the world, too, and how much I miss it already / In light like this.”
Sharp articulations like this abound in this issue, punctuating it with precise stings, dull aches and tender pushes; and light, like joy, not only bookends it but is also dappled throughout. These are the images that have stayed with us since our first readings, generating echoes and resonances between poems from different continents, created by people who will probably never meet. This is joyful, too, even as these poems grapple with darker topics—complicated fathers, illness, trauma, loss and grief. Leaving you to explore these poems, I hope you find your very own moments of joy in Issue Three of The Marrow.
Natalie Bühler, co-editor
