C.P.Stewart is happy to announce that his first collection of poetry, "Taking it In", will be published by Koo
Poetry Press on November 1st. ( Reviews below ) For further information please visit www.koopress.co.uk
Please note, the publication date for "Taking it In" has been brought forwards to October 23rd, and it is
now available from Koo Poetry Press and certain bookshops, most notably The Ampleforth Abbey Bookshop.
Three poems of his are included in the latest issue of Quintessential.
Six are to feature in the next edition of Obsessed With Pipework, scheduled for October.
Three have been accepted for the November edition of Cha: an Asian Literary Journal.
One appears in the latest edition of Poetry Monthly International.
Four poems were published in the latest edition of Camroc Press review
and one is to appear in the next issue.
And two new poems, are to appear in a forthcoming edition of Camroc Press Review.
A new poem, 'Scalebor Park' will be appearing in the spring edition of Yes, Poetry.
And four new poems will appear in the forthcoming, April edition, of Four and Twenty.
One of these has been chosen to be Poem of the Week.
On March 15th, National Poetry Day, he was invited to St Martin's ,Ampleforth to take
part in a day of poetry readings and classes. Details and photographs will be appearing
on their website.
'Taking it In' has been entered for the Michael Marks Chapbook competition.
Issue 10 of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal features a review of 'Taking it In' by Hilary Tsz-Shan,
in a piece entitled ' Ways of Seeing and Remembering: A Review of Three Poetry Collections '
Tammy Ho, poet and editor, has written a detailed analysis of ' I Will Always Remember '
in ' A Cup of Fine Tea ' - Analyses of works published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
May 2010. C.P Stewart is now the poetry editor of The Houston Literary Review.
"Taking it In " - Reviews.
" These poems are the goods ." - John Whitworth, poet.
" I have seen only a handful of C.P.Stewart's deceptively slight poems, but was delighted by the precision with which they
nudge ajar a tiny door into larger stories of relationships past, imagined or to come. - " Charles Johnson, editor, Obssessed
With Pipework magazine.
" I simply love these poems." - Gerard Rochford, poet.
" C.P. Stewart's short, taut snapshots. " - Paul Sutherland, editor of Dream Catcher magazine.
"I have a genuine appreciation for this artist's work. The fluid words and smokey images in this collection find their way
into the empty spaces of the psyche, shining a light on faded and long- forgotten memories, reshaping emotions until they
are no longer his - they belong to the reader, completely. " - Nadia Giordana, Editor/Publisher, Mississippi Crow.
" C.P.Stewart's rich collection of poems, "Taking it In ", seizes life's most feral moments and holds them captive on the page.
His writing reminds us that life is to be savored. What is ironic is that his poems, so concise in nature, cannot be quickly
ingested. They are simply too rich to be swallowed whole. As a publisher of short-form poetry, I take great dellight in writers
who can offer truth in concentrated form. Stewart is one such writer.
What I enjoy most about Stewart's writing is that it is selfless. Though he writes of his own experiences and emotions,
he writes in a way that allows readers to claim his life lessons as their life lessons. he does not bury his treasures beneath
poetic abstractions. Instead, he displays them on a podium of concrete imagery and words. His is not junk poetry.
Stewart's meditative poems are filled with subtle ( and not so subtle ) reminders that life is best lived when we keep in
mind the brevity of it all. he is a man who has considered the end and can " see home without looking back." I am delighted
by the focus Stewart brings to the page. The poems in " Taking it In " will undoubtedly resonate in the hearts of readers who
delve into these pages. "
Vinnie Kinsella, Publisher, Four and Twenty.
" Some poems, it may be said, dwell on their length for an overall impact, albeit hae a tendency to ' wander '. Not so here,
where C.P. Stewart makes each word earn its place, with a brevity that is lucid, clean and precise. On reading these poems
the message therein is akin to a laser beam carving letters into rock. Indeed these forty-three poems become little jewels,
polished and compact as bullets. Here is a poet imbued with love - love of life, love for his family and wife, whose work has
previously quoted: ' these poems are the goods ' and ' short, taut snapshots '. Moreover, it's their sheer gravity that holds the
the most impact, and especially in that last killer line. Yes, be it pastoral, ethereal or simply flesh and blood, each brief soj-
ourn is a whisky and ice. So why not open these pages, and swallow ?
Koo Poetry Press.
A cup of fine tea: C. P. Stewart’s “I Will Always Remember”
C. P. Stewart’s “I Will Always Remember” [Read the poem here]
(First published in Issue #9 of Cha)
–This post is written by Tammy Ho.
In the title and the opening line of the poem, the persona tells us that he remembers the smell of a lover: ‘I will always remember / the smell of you’ (Title & L1). The title is reminiscent of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and here too we will see memory associated with smell and food.
The exact odour that the persona remembers is revealed in the next lines: ‘the smell of you // like morning dew / on a green apple’ (L1-L3). ‘Morning dew’ and ‘green apple’ can be viewed as metonyms of the lover, who is compared to new and ephemeral objects in a garden. Morning dew does not survive, it never does. Perhaps as Frost suggests, the colour ‘green’ is the ‘hardest hue to hold’ (c.f. “Nothing Gold Can Stay“). As in Frost’s poem, here ‘green’ too is associated with inexperience and innocence. This meaning of green is expanded further in the next stanza: ‘Sixteen years old / and a new-made thing’ (L4-L5). In some sense, a sixteen-year-old is hardly ‘a new-made thing’. The lover is ‘new’ in another way: the Edenic apple is tasted and a girl transforms into a woman, a newly made being. The smell that the persona remembers, then, is that of their first sexual experience. (Maybe the image is also literal. Was she wearing apple-scented perfume or lip gloss?) Comparing a lover to ‘a new-made thing’ also reminds one of e. e. cummings’s poem “i like my body when it is with your“; the opening and final lines are respectively, ‘i like my body when it is with your / body. It is so quite a new thing’ and ‘possibly i like the thrill / of under me you so quite new’.
Yes, men like it ‘new’.
The lover in Stewart’s poem does not stay, even though her aroma remains. The persona, shutting his sight, relies on only one sense – his sense of smell – to capture her: ‘I closed my eyes / to breathe you in, // but you were gone … // like morning dew / from a green apple’ (L6-L10). ‘[L]ike morning dew / from a green apple’ (L9-L10) echoes the earlier ‘like morning dew / on a green apple’ (L2-L3). This time the simile does not only represent the lover’s smell, it also describes her presumably inevitable departure, for morning dew simply cannot stay. The image of morning dew on or from a green apple is versatile: while previously it conjured the impression of freshness and transience, now it highlights the fleetingness of love. It may also suggest her loss of innocence as the morning dew of her youth evaporates and she enters a new phase of life. The overlapping nature of these lines seems to suggest that it is the brevity of love that makes it memorable.
Perhaps there is a certain unique scent associated with each ‘new-made thing’. In Stewart’s poem, we learn that the persona’s love smells ‘like morning dew / on a green apple’. Do you remember how you smelt when you were made new? Do you remember his or her smell? That ‘made-new’ moment may be gone now, ‘like morning dew / from a green apple’, but perhaps something does stay? Do you remember it? Will you always remember?
Bob Bradshaw
Ways of Seeing and Rememberiing. An Excerpt from: A Review of Three Poetry Collections by Hilary Tsz - Shan
( From Cha: An Asian Literary Journal Issue 10 February 2010 )
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C.P. Stewart's Taking it In may not be preoccupied by the same sense of location and travel evident in the other two collections; in fact, the contexts of the poems are often absent. Instead this collection is concerned with the passage of time and its emotional effects: an object found by chance uncovers the memories and emotions buried deeply in the heart; lines jotted down in an old notebook remind us how a casual encounter can soon be forgotten.
Time is an important, encompassing force in these poems. Some of the pieces are about the fast pace of life, such as "Blink":
My father waved, as off I ran,
and ran, until I was a man.
The man stood, blinking in the sun,
and gazed back on the miles he'd gone.
The white sun sank, the moon sailed by,
a shining woman caught his eye.
He blinked and, when he looked again,
Seven children bore his name.
I'd tell you more but I must run,
another blink and he'll be gone.
There are other poems that ponder the passing of time in terms of decades, as in "Taking it In":
I watched you pass.
Took it in.
From the record shop
to the brown-stone church.
Left to right.
Thirty years.
Took it in.
Didn't blink.
Other poems recall brief, but formative, encounters disappearing into the continuous flow of time, as in the case of "I Will Always Remember" (first published in Issue #9 of Cha and discussed in A Cup of Fine Tea). In this poem, a single, transient event is nonetheless invested with significant meaning. Sometimes the past, present and future are compressed for the gravity of one significant moment. At that point there can be departures, embarkations, twists of fate, disappearances and losses, belatedness and quiet premonitions of the end. In "The Sickbed," for example, fate conspires to prevent a wife from being at her husband’s deathbed:
The day I died a wind got up.
You were hanging out sheets
at the bottom of the garden.
Head thrown back, mouth full of pegs,
wet sheets flapping around your legs.
So you never heard,
when I called out your name…
but I called out your name the day I died.
While some of these poems set out to capture the mood and feelings of important moments, there are some which are not grounded in any concrete events but instead speak on more universal themes. "The Trail" is about the human consciousness of time:
Time does not pass
We pass through time,
the moon in tow,
the stars on wires,
toward that land
of beckoning spires,
our wagons creaking
under the weight of clocks.
This collection reminds us of the importance of accepting, receiving and retaining experiences and memories. Sometimes it is about the tangible things—the things we can hold on to, such as a photo—but most often it describes more ephemeral memories and sensations. There are times when we are suddenly reminded of a person while walking down a road in a warm October evening. There are also times when we remember a broken promise, or a moment when we were captivated by January snowdrops, in such a way that the image lingers in our mind.
On June 25th C.P.Stewart will be reading at the launch of Crannog 24 at The Crane Bar, Galway, Ireland.
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