The Friday Poem on 28th February 2025
Pet hates, 'found' poetry, honey bees, and bastards — we review John Mee's collection 'The Blue in the Blue Marble' (Templar Poetry, 2024).
Playing the Nought
Cotgreve v Monelay (1562)
She would have gevin me a paire of shoes to hold my counsell
and I refused. Then she would have gevin me a petticote
and I refused hit likewise. She would father the child on William Holt
for he hath a house and Barnes hath none. She is a clarted hoore.
William Holt had carnall dole with her ons, behind the Milne dore.
‘Cockes wounds,’ said Holt, ‘can a man get a child standinge?
for I never had any things to do with her but standinge.’
‘Playing the Nought’ is from the sequence ‘Bastards’, from The Blue in the Blue Marble (Templar Poetry, 2024) — thanks to John Mee and Templar Poetry for letting us publish it.
A few weeks ago we ran a piece on three words we said we’d like to see barred from use in poetry (heft, hunker and palimpsest, if you’ve forgotten). This was, of course, fairly tongue in cheek — we don’t really advocate banning words, there’s a time and a place for every one of them, and if you really want to write a poem about a heron in the marram grass, or spindrift lifting like gossamer curlicues off the azure sea, who are we to stop you?
Our piece did have a serious point, though — it’s good to avoid cliché and pretension; it’s good to be original; and it’s good to be warned against a tendency to cling to words we love. I have a fondness for the word ‘light’. I know this because when Peter Sansom was editing Human Tissue he took three instances of ‘light' out, and there were still a couple more over which he waved his red pen menacingly (reader, I saved them). It’s not so much ‘murder your darlings’ as perhaps give a nod of thanks to the kindly critic who points out your verbal tics, warns you off things that might be new to you but are howling clichés to others, and helps you interrogate your work more consciously.
Anyway, shortly after we ran the ‘pet hates’ piece, John Mee sent us his poem ‘Letter to a Young Poet’, just for fun. It begins:
Don’t tell. Don’t show either.
Don’t give them the satisfaction.
No cheap emotional pay-offs.
No hard-earned emotional pay-offs.
No pay-offs tout court.
No sea glass, no curlicues, especially
no unfurling.
John Mee and I clearly see eye to eye on curlicues. Also azure, ekphrasis and erasure. This is heartening. More importantly, he wraps up ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ in a smart, unexpected and rather beautiful way (I’m not quoting it here — buy the book). Which sent me to Templar to track down the collection it came from, because if Mee can do such a nice job with one poem, I reckoned he might do a nice job with others.
Which he does. Not every poem in the book works for me: there are some which I still find closed, or baffling, or perhaps requiring knowledge that I don’t have. But, fundamentally, I really like Mee’s approach. His poetry is outward-looking, involved in the world. It is subtle, considered, and crafty. It’s also playful, and sometimes downright exuberant. And every now and again, one of his poems hooks me in and delivers a carefully calibrated emotional punch.
Every now and again, one of his poems hooks me in and delivers a carefully calibrated emotional punch
Take ‘The Loss of the Vasa’. The Vasa was a splendid but poorly-designed Baltic warship which foundered in Stockholm harbour in August 1628, just minutes after she set sail for the first time. (I know this because I Googled it — there’s quite a lot of Googling involved in the reading of this collection. Not a problem for me; others might feel differently.) The ship’s centre of gravity was too high, so when she heeled over in a strong gust of wind, water flooded in through the open gun ports, and she sank. Thirty people died. So the poem is about a shipwreck? Well, yes and no. In the third of seven stanzas — I’ll call them stanzas, though each is a sentence or a short prose piece of two or three sentences — Mee writes: “The television in the ward was showing an Arsenal match. […] I’m going to beat this, my father said.” The fourth stanza includes the line: “For a while after we visited the / museum, my son talked about the ship that sank.” So he’s telling us about the death of his father, seen through the lens of the wreck of the Vasa and (probably) the death of the Swedish king Gustav II Adolf six years later at the Battle of Lützen. Fathers and sons. Life and death. Easy to say, but hard to describe the range of implication and association Mee manages to evoke in the poem, and how. His tone is flat, descriptive, cool. He interleaves information about the wreck with details personal to his family. There’s no obvious rhyme, no obvious form, no technical fireworks, and the language is not particularly musical. But Mee builds a kind of monument, methodically, glancingly. He allows me, as a reader, to do enough work to feel involved, to feel some kind of ownership, and every time I read it, I get more out of it. The last stanza – a single, short sentence – is almost throwaway, but extremely moving. By the end, I’m all in.
‘My father, his father’ is the emotional heart of the collection. This is a long, six-part poem; one of the parts is a sestina. Fathers and sons, life and death. In the fourth part (the sestina), Mee writes:
I had lived at a distance,
had come home for the death of my father.
I thought cancer had blackened his brown eyes.
Now I saw it was morphine, making light
of his pain, his face defenceless without glasses.
Sestinas are notoriously hard to pull off, but the repetitive, patterned form suits the state of mind of a son going over and over the details of his father’s last days, weeks, and months. Mee’s language is precise, measured and probing (and he clearly also likes the word ‘light’; I guess you can get away with repeating it in a sestina — perhaps I should try that).
Throughout the collection there are shipwrecks and accidents, assassinations, drownings, grave digging, a variety of falls, and some gobbled bees — death and its portents in many forms. Mee hints at climate destruction with sandcastles washed away by the tide and goldfish mouthing ‘Help’ from their plastic bags, but there’s no shouting and it’s all dealt with deftly, obliquely, intelligently.
An intelligent, beguiling collection
This collection also contains lots of fun stuff. There’s a false banana, a lobster in a fur-lined collar, and a sequence of poems about bastards, one part of which is quoted above (‘Playing the Nought’). Mee finds particular delight in found poems, and in adapting found text. His Friday Poem, ‘Domestic Economy Reader for Irish Schools’ is included in the collection: I remember how impressed we were with the way he collaged text from the eponymous book, subtitled How Mary Fitzgerald Learned Housekeeping, and in particular how he managed to construct a real person out of the fictional Mary Fitzgerald. Again, he provides enough text to give a reader what he or she needs, but leaves space for a reader’s own colour and detail. His interest in found text, and his skill in dealing with it, are on show in a number of poems here, including ‘Wreckage’, which uses testimony of Joseph Reed, sole survivor of the wreck of the Dalhousie, and ‘He Doesn’t Think of Her That Often’, subtitled “Leonard Cohen introduces ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’, a song written about Janis Joplin”, which is a list of ten of Cohen’s introductions to the song made at various different concerts.
Also interesting, if slightly puzzling to me, are a couple of long poems near the end of the book, where Mee seems to be rather going off on one, or chancing his arm. I’m talking about ‘M _ dern L _ ve’, and ’Dialogue Between Body and Soul’. ‘M _ dern L _ ve’ is a three page story, written backwards, about Oonagh and Danno, and (I am on slightly shaky ground here but let’s persist) Danno’s collection of ‘o’s (bear with me) which live in a wardrobe in Oonagh’s house. At the outset there are four ‘o’s, stolen by Danno from the side of a van (which now reads ‘S _ uth C _ unty F _ _ ds’); later Danno steals a big red ‘o’ (called Big Red, naturally) from the sign on the roof of the local Opera House (now _pera House). The ‘o’s narrate the story:
We are Oonagh’s treasure, her doubloons and pieces of eight. […] Oonagh’s sadness is dull sometimes – uuuuuuuuuuuuh – and then it’s sharp – aaaaaaaaaaaah. But we are oooooooooooh. We are the anticipation of pleasure, pleasure itself, its aftermath.
There are jokes (“spontaneous rolling is just a story we tell the smaller lower-cases”), and a plot, and a denouement. If this sounds farfetched, it is. It’s funny, it’s ridiculous, it’s surreal. But it works, especially when you figure out that you have to read it backwards, paragraph by paragraph. I’m less convinced by ‘Dialogue …’, another three-pager, which feels a bit thin. All credit, however, to Mee for trying something different.
Back to the gobbled bees. The sequence of three small bee poems, ‘The Law of Bees’, is easy to read, and easy to appreciate, but also stands as a serious response to the Brehon Laws, the early system of law in Ireland prior to English rule (Mee is a professor of law at University College, Cork). Brehon Law was largely concerned with the payment of compensation for harm done and the regulation of property, inheritance and contracts. The first in the sequence, a concrete, bee-shaped poem subtitled ‘Trespassers’, sets bees down as “tiny thieves” who are busy turning one person’s clover into another person’s honey. Appropriate compensation must be made: the aggrieved neighbour takes a swarm and becomes, himself, a keeper of the “little beasts”.
But it’s the second poem in the sequence I keep returning to. It conveys such an appreciation of loss, something which quietly underpins much of this intelligent, beguiling collection.
Of All the Courtyard Crimes of Hens
the most grievous
is the swallowing of beesa row of madder can be sown again
onions begged from a kinsmannothing restores the sweetness
of the gobbled bee
Hilary Menos is editor of The Friday Poem. She won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2010 with Berg (Seren, 2009). Her second collection is Red Devon (Seren, 2013). Human Tissue (Smith|Doorstop, 2020), won The Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition 2019. Her most recent publication is Fear of Forks (HappenStance, 2022). She has worked as a student union organiser, journalist, food reviewer, arts critic, organic farmer, builder’s mate, script overseer and dramaturge. She lives in France with husband Andy Brodie, son Inigo, and a kelpie called Ryder.
John Mee won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2015 and the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook competition in 2016. He has published poetry in magazines such as The Rialto, Bad Lillies, Poetry Ireland Review and The North. His pamphlet, From the Extinct, was published by Southword Editions in 2017. He was born in Canada, has lived in Cork since he was seven years old, and is a professor in the Law School at University College Cork.
As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021. For example, if you like Hilary’s writing, try her piece on Punk Poetry. More recently, on Substack, try her (rather controversial, apparently) conversation with Helena Nelson about Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, winner of the 2025 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize.
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