Isabel Palmer
Isabel Palmer is a poet and former English teacher and educational adviser. The poem below is from 'Ground Signs', her first pamphlet collection published by Flarestack 2014.
The poem is followed by her own reflections on the writing process, including those writing approaches she used in the classroom.
Hear Isabel interviewed on Radio 4, World at One, broadcast 16.2.2015. (relevant section: 34.45 - 41.15)
Isabel's son was a Vallon man out in Afghanistan. Read the Channel 4 article about the work of the Vallon man.
Here is a review of 'Ground Signs': https://ukpoetgal.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/isabel-palmers-ground-signs/
The poem is followed by her own reflections on the writing process, including those writing approaches she used in the classroom.
Hear Isabel interviewed on Radio 4, World at One, broadcast 16.2.2015. (relevant section: 34.45 - 41.15)
Isabel's son was a Vallon man out in Afghanistan. Read the Channel 4 article about the work of the Vallon man.
Here is a review of 'Ground Signs': https://ukpoetgal.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/isabel-palmers-ground-signs/
‘You’ve got to call it something’
Your grandfather called her Ellen, his first one,
after his mother and that was why maybe
he had a hard time killing, though she was
fast and sleek as a salmon
and why he kept her primed
and polished through the war
and the peace at each side.
But what I remember is a midsummer’s evening
and that policeman, You have to have a licence, sir,
or surrender your firearms and the noise his throat made
as he broke her back on the old vice.
So, if yours must have a name, make it
Alpha, Lima or Sierra; or the Bond-girl glamour
of Pussy, Domino or Dr Warmflash –
no saint’s name to take in vain
or Shakespeare’s army of martyred women but
a name without formal ceremony like
a guest you can let go
without longing.
From ‘Ground Signs’ by Isabel Palmer, published by Flarestack Poets (www.flarestackpoets.co.uk)
Isabel's reflections on the writing process
They say that every picture tells a story. In this case, there were two pictures, telling two stories. One picture shows my father as a young sergeant in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, about to deploy to France, late in 1939. The second shows my son, at 21, in the uniform of the regiment into which the KSLI was eventually amalgamated (the Rifles). This was just before he left for Afghanistan, where he served as a Lead Scout, responsible for detecting Improvised Explosive Devices on foot patrols. As well as sharing a regiment, grandfather and grandson shared a first name (Harry) and the same birthday. Harry Senior would have received his telegram from the Queen on the same day as Harry’s twenty-first birthday and around the same time as the younger Harry received his pre-deployment letter from the royal Colonel-in Chief of his regiment.
Having taught English for many years, I had often used photographs to stimulate writing, generating bags of words from pictures like the iconic spaceman tethered to his craft. It was therefore inevitable that looking at the two pictures gave rise to the poem – ‘You’ve got to call it something’. The poem, like all those in ‘Ground Signs’ was written during the six months that my son was on tour, part of a Monday ritual that comprised posting him a parcel and starting a new poem every week.
In many ways, a poem requires the same careful attention to detail as the photograph, pressing into words, or visual images, the close-up textures, the way light frames the subject, the importance of shadow. There is no place for cliché or padding in either medium. Above all, both the poem and the photograph must answer the question about why they came into existence.
In the case of my father’s photograph, it is a formal studio portrait of a very young man in a perfectly pressed uniform, with polished brass buttons, the bugle emblem of his regiment clearly displayed on his collar and cap – the kind of picture now shown on television reports of fallen soldiers. His eyes look directly at the camera but seem relaxed and perfectly calm. The only signs of tension are in the parted lips, the top teeth just visible, as though he was about to speak but thought better of it.
The second photograph, taken seventy-one years later, also shows a young man in uniform but he is standing in a sunny garden, his hand resting on the family spaniel. He is bare-necked in his camouflage clothing and, although the peaked cap has been replaced by a beret, the cap badge is the same. He is half-smiling, his eyebrows slightly raised as though he was anticipating the punchline of a not very good joke.
However, what seems most important is not what is shown in each photograph but what is missing: in both cases, the weapon that would both kill and save lives. The long tradition of soldiers giving their guns a name seemed to bridge the gap between the two photographs, at the same time as underlining how little has changed.
There is a short story by Alexander Solzhenitsyn called, ‘The White Kitten’, in which the sight of an abandoned white kitten pulled Georgi Tenno, twenty days into his escape from a slave camp, back from the brink of murdering two unsuspecting locals, the recognition of its helplessness restoring his humanity just in time. In a similar way, the gun named after his mother ensured that my father ‘had a hard time killing’. So important was the gun that he kept ‘primed and polished’ that he ‘broke her back on the old vice’, rather than hand her over to strangers or pay to keep what he felt he had rightly earned in defence of his country.
Given that the simple act of naming his weapon could have such power, it seemed important that, if my son decided to follow the tradition, the name chosen should be irreverent and full of smutty squaddie innuendo like, ‘Pussy, Domino or Dr Warmflash’ or the more clinical, ‘Alpha, Lima or Sierra’, scrambling the letters of the SA 80 assault rifle that he would be using. In the context of the poem and the photograph, this was the light on which the shadow of his imminent departure encroached.
To my mind, his decision to volunteer to serve in Afghanistan stood alongside the saints and ‘Shakespeare’s martyred women’ of the last stanza. More than anything, I hoped that his war, like the gun, would be ‘a guest’ he could ‘let go/without longing’ - and not a permanent lodger in his life, as my father’s war had been in his.
Isabel Palmer 2014
They say that every picture tells a story. In this case, there were two pictures, telling two stories. One picture shows my father as a young sergeant in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, about to deploy to France, late in 1939. The second shows my son, at 21, in the uniform of the regiment into which the KSLI was eventually amalgamated (the Rifles). This was just before he left for Afghanistan, where he served as a Lead Scout, responsible for detecting Improvised Explosive Devices on foot patrols. As well as sharing a regiment, grandfather and grandson shared a first name (Harry) and the same birthday. Harry Senior would have received his telegram from the Queen on the same day as Harry’s twenty-first birthday and around the same time as the younger Harry received his pre-deployment letter from the royal Colonel-in Chief of his regiment.
Having taught English for many years, I had often used photographs to stimulate writing, generating bags of words from pictures like the iconic spaceman tethered to his craft. It was therefore inevitable that looking at the two pictures gave rise to the poem – ‘You’ve got to call it something’. The poem, like all those in ‘Ground Signs’ was written during the six months that my son was on tour, part of a Monday ritual that comprised posting him a parcel and starting a new poem every week.
In many ways, a poem requires the same careful attention to detail as the photograph, pressing into words, or visual images, the close-up textures, the way light frames the subject, the importance of shadow. There is no place for cliché or padding in either medium. Above all, both the poem and the photograph must answer the question about why they came into existence.
In the case of my father’s photograph, it is a formal studio portrait of a very young man in a perfectly pressed uniform, with polished brass buttons, the bugle emblem of his regiment clearly displayed on his collar and cap – the kind of picture now shown on television reports of fallen soldiers. His eyes look directly at the camera but seem relaxed and perfectly calm. The only signs of tension are in the parted lips, the top teeth just visible, as though he was about to speak but thought better of it.
The second photograph, taken seventy-one years later, also shows a young man in uniform but he is standing in a sunny garden, his hand resting on the family spaniel. He is bare-necked in his camouflage clothing and, although the peaked cap has been replaced by a beret, the cap badge is the same. He is half-smiling, his eyebrows slightly raised as though he was anticipating the punchline of a not very good joke.
However, what seems most important is not what is shown in each photograph but what is missing: in both cases, the weapon that would both kill and save lives. The long tradition of soldiers giving their guns a name seemed to bridge the gap between the two photographs, at the same time as underlining how little has changed.
There is a short story by Alexander Solzhenitsyn called, ‘The White Kitten’, in which the sight of an abandoned white kitten pulled Georgi Tenno, twenty days into his escape from a slave camp, back from the brink of murdering two unsuspecting locals, the recognition of its helplessness restoring his humanity just in time. In a similar way, the gun named after his mother ensured that my father ‘had a hard time killing’. So important was the gun that he kept ‘primed and polished’ that he ‘broke her back on the old vice’, rather than hand her over to strangers or pay to keep what he felt he had rightly earned in defence of his country.
Given that the simple act of naming his weapon could have such power, it seemed important that, if my son decided to follow the tradition, the name chosen should be irreverent and full of smutty squaddie innuendo like, ‘Pussy, Domino or Dr Warmflash’ or the more clinical, ‘Alpha, Lima or Sierra’, scrambling the letters of the SA 80 assault rifle that he would be using. In the context of the poem and the photograph, this was the light on which the shadow of his imminent departure encroached.
To my mind, his decision to volunteer to serve in Afghanistan stood alongside the saints and ‘Shakespeare’s martyred women’ of the last stanza. More than anything, I hoped that his war, like the gun, would be ‘a guest’ he could ‘let go/without longing’ - and not a permanent lodger in his life, as my father’s war had been in his.
Isabel Palmer 2014