If you are looking for fury, claustrophobic, tender, talons tensed like law, Edith is feeding it scraps in the care home: memories and news and belief and remorse. A good woman helps her into the garden, says, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if you wrote down your story,’ but it is not memoir tearing at restraints, it is pure raptor, raised up to desolate rapists, perverts, heretics, liars, the curse itself. It repines in her bedroom while she plays cribbage and watches the birds scratching the surface of heaven. ‘More obituaries, Edith? More aspirin? More cake? Not too much now dear, you’ll only keep yourself awake.’
John Newton Webb's poems and translations from Japanese are widely published, including recently in NOON, Acumen, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, The Massachusetts Review and the anthology Versus Versus (Bloodaxe Books). You can read some of his work and occasional writings on Japanese poetry at johnnewtonwebb.blogspot.com.
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