Editorial

Selecting the poems for Black Iris is never a quick or easy task and nor should it be, but we did feel this round of submissions challenged us in many ways, not least because we had so many well-crafted poems to choose between.

The poems in Issue 4, our first publication this year, stood out to us because of what they said, but also what they didn’t say. Time and again these particular pieces caught our attention in the way they captured the indefinable that seems implicit in the spaces around the words. Jen Feroze’s ‘patch of life grown wild’, Oenone Thomas’ disturbing imagery of ‘cuffed up, raw newborns’ ambushing us from the unsuspecting comfort of domesticity, Luciana Francis’s harrowing ‘cotton soldiers, side by side with a lifeless soft toy’ and Roy Marshall’s subtly captured ‘earthly work’ as an antidote to wider geo-political horrors. I could go on, each and every poem in this issue has these moments emanating from deft use of language and form.

The cover image comes from Anthony McCall’s exhibition, Solid Light, where viewers can move through beams of light projected through a thin screen of mist, which in turn creates different shapes and perspectives a dance between light and shadow. These mesmerising forms which undulate and curl reminded me very much of the job of poetry, which uses, language and white space and the resulting energy that swirls and resonates at their edges.

The issue begins with Elizabeth Loudon’s haunting, Leaving America, and ends with Sitron Panopoulos’s, soaring, If the Gods of East Berlin Were Alive Tonight, and in between we are met with poems that shift and change in the air around them, moving through light and darkness. We hope you enjoy the issue.

Lauren Thomas