Nu Gothic in Verse

A couple of months ago I found myself in a little basement room beneath a vegan café (what else?) near Covent Garden for a book launch. The Emma Press makes tiny, pretty and loving volumes of poetry, and other excursions into the realms of writing and publishing for no return. Various poets came up to the mike to read, either works from the book or other pieces, and by the time they'd finished I reckoned I was the only person in the room who wasn't a poet or a poet's friend or partner. It was jam-packed, but it was a very small room.

I bought both small books, the Anthology of Contemporary Gothic Verse, and Siofra McSherry's Requiem, a poem cycle framed around the texts of the requiem mass and the illness and death of the author's mother. Both raise the question of what you think Gothic is. Requiem's subject matter brings us face to face with pain and sorrow but that isn't Gothic in its own right, notwithstanding the cover's grinning skelly based on a carving at Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. The anthology, in contrast, spans that skewbald combination of menace and excitement that sits at the centre of the Gothic web: tales of Golems, witch bottles, Bluebeard, 'the sweet/subtle tang of old skool Goth' open vistas into other realities, the suspicion picking at our sleeve that our everyday understanding might unravel any moment, and enjoying the idea. 

I most appreciated Charlotte Eichler's three poems: 'The Coffin Calendars', in the voice of a model posing for Polish coffin-maker Lindner's annual extravaganza of weird glamour; 'The Balloonist', about the death of Lily Cove at Haworth Gala in 1906; and a poem which imagines a convent of nuns keeping pet blackbirds and eventually their songs merging, which nearly got me misty-eyed. That third poem isn't in the book, or in Ms Eichler's collection Their Lunar Language, which I thought it would be as it concerns the relations of humans and nature. I wonder where one might find it.