Spume

Spume is a perfect-bound A5 size poetry magazine committed to profiling poetry with a punch.

A cliché, yes, but one that delivers.

Spume may be subjective, with barbed or difficult subject matter, but its merely a mic for the hard-bitten voice.

Philistine? Arrogant? Brash? If you like, but that’s the nature of the beast.

Some copies still available. Price £3 inclusive of p and p. (U.K. Only)

Cheques made payable to Koo Press.

koopoetry@btinternet.com

Koo Press
19 Lochinch Park
Cove Bay
Aberdeen
AB12 3RF

Spume No 1

Sample Poems

My Fingers Down the Spines of Obvious Truths

and so
knowing nothing about
anything
I write

run my fingers
slowly down the
spines of obvious truths
just to feel the texture
of the skin

the heat of the blood beneath it
and when the October sky
begins to fill itself in and
picasso’s horse stumbles blindly
through these still-sleeping streets
I sit at this desk like a
broken antenna and wait

forty thousand miles from
edge to edge of any
clean white sheet of paper and
what I’m trying to lay down here is
the faint praise of dead teachers
the two a.m. phone calls
from old lovers

what I’m trying to do is
cut myself open gracefully and
control what flows out
remember that poetry
is only an
admission of failure

remember that sylvia was
a coward
and her husband a pimp

don’t ever
let yourself believe that
there are other
choices


John Sweet


Kicking Small Dogs

A confession: each small dog I see
I want to kick.

Usually I am ambivalent,
in a canine sense,

but small dogs, shoebox size,
move me.

It is not cruelty, or an urge to inflict pain,
but natural curiosity.

A long run:
arc of bootswing

meeting small dog
and soft underbelly.

I need to know how far they would fly;
it is a science:

are the houses over the road in range?
Open windows, buses, rugby posts

all cry out to be used:
apparatus of discovery.

In my dreams the dogs are silent;
the sky is always blue, cloudless,

and it is perfect.


Matt Gambrill



Spume No 2

Features: Raymond K. Avery, Samuel Smith, Andrew Mayne, Emma Lee, Eleanor Livingstone, Helena Nelson, Jan Fortune-Wood, etc, with graphics by Jessica Freeman, American poet, artist and story writer. Spume Magazine Issue No 2 ISSN 1478-4378 76pp Price £3 including P & P (U.K. only) This magazine has now sold out.

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Sample Poems

Danny Boy

A good man when he wasn’t on the drink;
he liked the children best, they didn’t care
what damages were hidden in his wink,

they saw only his warmth, forgave the stink
of beer and fags and urine in the air.
A good man when he wasn’t on the drink;

he’d toss me high till I was tickled pink,
sing freedom songs while combing out my hair.
What damages were hidden in his wink

he never told, but left alone he’d sink,
self-pitying, lugubrious in despair;
a good man when he wasn’t on the drink —

soaked memories that took him to the brink
of sanity —- a foot-fall on the stair.
What damages were hidden in his wink?

A beaten boy too traumatised to blink,
a stunted child still crying “ that’s not fair”;
a good man when he wasn’t on the drink;
what damages were hidden in his wink.


Jan Fortune-Wood


Autoerotica

An excerpt from ‘The Wonderful life of Anton Brassiere’

Failed by the government’s education policies
I took to ram-raiding the local library.

I was ‘The Autodidact’; selling uncorrected
proofs of Lady Chatterley to the uninitiated

drunks in the local pub. I was making
a fair old packet and a big reputation for taking

leaves out of The Joy of Sex and gluing
them into the pages of Haynes repair manuals.

In this way the Ford Sierra 4 cyl. by Steve Rendle
became the most sought-after book in town.

My cut-ups annoyed the chief librarian, a man
who lived his life behind a moustache. Strict Christadelphian,

he didn’t take kindly to my sneaky deeds
and I was soon up before the beak. Indeed,

the magistrate, a client of mine, was a laconic
old goose, who said, “The lad’s a post-modern

ironist whose only crime is to have pretensions
above his station.” He got me my first exhibition.

I was courted by a PR team from Implied Tobacco
who commissioned an installation on some taboo

subject, anything that would ‘make the press’.
So I boiled a De Lorean 1982 in my own piss

to a looped sample from Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet
whilst sat in a Perspex cube, naked, stroking a pet

dog. I called it: The Futility of Mortality. It enraged
the critics but did its job and made the front page.

Hungry, I quit the scene and opened a restaurant
for critics, serving up their own piquant

reviews in the form of Alphabetti Spaghetti.
In this way I made sure they would never forget me

or the fact that what they did was totally absurd
AND the fuckers would finally eat their own words.


Andrew Boobier



Spume No 3

Features: Joanna M. Weston, Rebecca Lu Kiernan, Juliet Wilson, Ivy Alvarez, Gordon Scapens, Paul Lumsden, Jane Alexander, John G. Hall, Norman Bissett, etc. This was the final edition of the magazine. Spume Magazine Issue No 3 ISSN 1478-4378 96pp Price £3 Including P & P (U.K. only)

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Sample Poems

Micros

It was nothin’
but a few stark nights
of flesh on flesh in fields
of blood red, vein blue and lion’s gold,
gossamer pink dragonflies spiralling
the candlelight of your silent back porch.

It was nothin’
but a shark’s eye silver sky afire,
a mirror lake in mercury platinum,
lavender sheet lightning pulsing,
a liquid photograph of stars.

A blue moon is nothin’
but two full moons in a month,
particles of red light
on a pirouette stretch.
What’s the image of that?

Your luminous smile, strumming fingers,
your mouth spreading me apart…
I’ll forget those nights
as the hunter arches
and the virgin slips.

A blue moon is nothin’
but a bar trick dance of light,

and lips are lips are lips.


Rebecca Lu Kiernan



A Certain Pain

A difficult birth, of course,
with bolt-cutters for the umbilical,
and shall the next kicking poem
be a boy or a girl?

Would parenthood bring
a grimace or a grin?
What ‘cute punctuation.’
‘My, how the teeth are coming on!’

Shall one’s siblings bloom
long after
the lid’s been screwed down,
be forever forgotten?

Now art is just
an unmade bed or
a headless metaphor;
something phallic for a crust;

a poet gnashing his teeth
over a life ‘which never was’,
believing, that one day,
he’ll polish the brightest memory?


Paul Lumsden