Forgotten Ground Regained
ISSN 2996-6353
New Series Issue 4, Fall, 2024
INTRODUCTION
In my call for submissions, I told interested poets that I wanted to see poems that explored themes of love, devotion, and desire. I got quite a bit that fit that description, but few of them were unalloyed love poems. Most had negative undertones — grief, regret, fear … Maybe I should have expected that — after all, country songs are like that, too. But I was, nonetheless, surprised to discover so many poems that fit right into the conversation started by such Old English poems as ‘Wolf and Eadwacer’ and ‘The Wife’s Lament’. And in fact, the first poem in the set, Maryann Corbett’s “The Translator, Working Late” directly addresses the wife of “The Wife’s Lament”, saying “I get you, girl.”
The more-or-less-but-not-quite love poems include Michael Helsem’s “Iftar”, which reads like an elegy for the moment in which people do not quite connect, Alex Rettie’s “The Future”, in which the lovers seem intent on preserving a memento mori instead of a selfie, Ian Holt’s “Mild Soul of Mine”, which captures a lover’s grief in an alliterative translation of a Camoes sonnet, Kathryn Ann Hill’s “Elizabeth and Darcy”, with a rhetorical question for Jae Austen’s “Gentle Reader”, Cassidy McFadzean’s Old English style riddle, “Love her and she swells”, an excerpt from my “Redemption of Daeron”, and Jeff Sypeck’s “Entreating a Sick Kitten”.I also reprint J.D. Harlock’s alliterative free verse poem “To Consecrate our Calamities, to Commemorate This Carnage”, which coming from a Lebanese/Syrian/Palestininian writer in this current age of conflict places a dark underline beneath the more personal pains of romantic love, and to present a revised and expanded excerpt from the Autumn sequence in Rahul Gupta’s ongoing Arthuriad.
Then we have Martin Kennedy Yates’ love song to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in the form of an article on that poem’s alliterative meter and four alliterative poems set in an invented Midlands dialect, and an article I have written, presenting the medievalist scholar Geoffrey Russom’s theory of alliterative meter, and developing its implications for modern English alliterative verse. Enjoy!