The Poet and the Echo (ed. Tom Conaghan)
Review by Jess Moody
Scratch Books continues to champion the short story with this new collection, based on the BBC Radio 4 series The Poet and the Echo. Ten writers select a poem of their choice and respond with their own original piece of short fiction, providing the reader with an intriguing glimpse into the possibilities of intertextual inspiration. The introduction by Kirsty Williams notes the range of poems and poets chosen, with Phyliss Wheatley, Fiona McLeod and Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson celebrated alongside Rumi, Horace and Blake. Yet there’s also great variety in how and what ‘echo’ is brought forth, with both harmonies and dissonances from the source material.
Leila Aboulelea’s opening piece takes Rumi’s sensuous palace paradise romance and finds its falsities in ‘To Enter the Garden’. In ‘The Grey Eagle’ Arthur C. Clarke winner Harry Josephine Giles takes the sparse threads of Fiona Macleod’s ‘The Vision’ and weaves a rich epistolary piece of Victorian gothic, highlighting the long history of trans identity and complexities in poetic voice. Fred D’Aguiar interrogates Phyllis Wheatley’s place in poetic history and canon with ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, returning the power of narrative back to the parents of the enslaved and transported girl, highlighting the language and religion later stripped from her.
Perhaps the most explicit assertion of poetry’s essential and persistent role in contemporary society is PK Lynch’s contribution ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’. Here the author addresses Yeats’ famed poem as a modern classroom watches the destruction of a nature outside its windows. Poetry is lauded not only as defense of not only the natural world, but as a vital tool for critical awareness in an increasingly sterilised and conformist educational system.
It’s notable that so many of the ‘respondent’ writers include those who excel in both prose and poetry themselves, making this whole collection less an exercise in translations across forms, and more a showcase of daring and delight — a myriad of conversations between words, meanings, and image. It’s another enjoyable collection from this new publisher, and one which could easily become a series as well-loved in print as on radio.
The Poet and the Echo is published by Scratch Books, 13th September 2023