The title of this anthology, published by Dempsey and Windle under their VOLE imprint, is taken from lines by Dylan Thomas: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer.” The anthology contains 50 poems by 50 poets comprising three prize winning poems, three highly commended poems and 44 shortlisted poems from the VOLE Books Winter / Spring Poetry Competition 2024.

In her introduction, the competition judge, Adele Ward, says that she looked for originality, subjects not written about by any other entrant, ones that stood out for their accomplishment and obvious expertise.

The poems in this anthology cover a wide variety of subjects ranging from the changing of the seasons to a potter moulding a vase, from a parakeet that has flown far from its home to contrails that ‘marble the sky….in a penumbra of dawn and dusk.’ Most notable for me, though, were the poems on less familiar subjects: Denni Turp’s poem on orthotics, Paul McDonald’s poem on asthma attacks, Derek Sellen’s poem on sleep paralysis, Cathy Whittaker’s poem on DNA testing and Ray Diamond’s poem about the man who didn’t walk on the moon. All of these poems yielded far more than what might have been expected by their titles. McDonald’s poem, for example, has at its core the importance of communication and the need to choose one’s words carefully in a real emergency while Whittaker’s poem turns into an elegy for familial loss due to the holocaust and then widens out to include all people who have suffered loss due to conflict in war.

Michael Farry’s approach to his poem ‘Sleep’, seen through the lens of punctuation, is particularly striking. Here is the final stanza:

Lately you have found the value
of inserting an afternoon comma
a soft pause, a splice in the series
of conjunctions, interjections and moods
as you negotiate the subject-verb agreement
on the way towards the full stop, period.

Richard Wheeler’s powerful poem ‘Fragments of War’ hits home with its fast-paced lines and emphatic final line which signals the futility of it all. The lack of a full-stop at the end, as well as throughout the entire poem, questions whether humanity will ever know a time when wars will cease on Earth. Michael Tanner’s ‘Flower of War’, which follows on from the previous poem, not only shows the care that has been taken in arranging the order in which the poems appear in this anthology but also reveals the subject from a different perspective, that of survival. The rosebay willow herb which ‘thrives in bombed / And burnt-out cities’ is the botanical equivalent of the phoenix rising from the ashes. The final stanza takes the poem to another level:

See how these orphans roam
The blackened stones of home,
Stooping to pick
The tall-stemmed flower
For mothers never known.

Olivia Bell’s ‘War, page five’ is equally powerful in its unique take from the editor’s desk. The final stanza challenges us about where our priorities truly lie:

We sent the pages at ten past midnight,
a celebrity’s teeth gleaming on the front.
I took the night bus home,
wondering how I had ever believed
that all lives could be worth the same.

A notable feature that most of the poems have in this anthology is the strong final stanza which often adds something new or takes the poem to a different level. Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s poem ‘Brought Back to Life’ (after an embroidery by Maggie Hamilton) describes the work of a conservator repositioning ‘the threads / of its previous life, the colours / which shone with spring fervour / one hundred years ago’ and ends with the words:

I stroll in the garden
of Maggie’s imagination –
bring the outside in.

That idea of the needle being pulled through the embroidery is the add-on that we take away from this final line.

Stylistically, there are a number of poems which adhere to strict poetic forms: a ghazal, a sonnet, a ‘reverse’ poem and a tritina, the latter being a poem of 10 lines arranged as three tercets with one final line using a specific scheme of end words.

This anthology offers the reader poems on a wide variety of subjects presented in an original and accomplished way. The force that through the green fuse fired them into being shows that poetry still has the ability to speak to us in ways that are fresh and invigorating. Brief biographies of all the poets are given at the end.

You can find more of Neil’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Neil Leadbeater was born and brought up in Wolverhampton, England. He was educated at Repton and is an English graduate from the University of London. He now resides in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His publications include Librettos for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, 2011); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014), Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017), Punching Cork Stoppers (Original Plus, 2018) River Hoard (Cyberwit.net, Allahabad, India, 2019), Reading Between the Lines (Littoral Press, 2020) and Journeys in Europe (co-authored with Monica Manolachi) (Editura Bifrost , Bucharest, Romania, 2022). His work has been translated into several languages. He is a member of the Federation of Writers Scotland and he is a regular reviewer for several journals including Quill & Parchment (USA), The Halo-Halo Review (USA), Write Out Loud (UK) and The Poet (UK). His many and varied interests embrace most aspects of the arts and, on winter evenings, he enjoys the challenge of getting to grips with ancient, medieval and modern languages.