I’ve been reading a lot of Sylvia Plath recently and in my mind I’ve kept coming back to her description of a poem from her essay ‘A Comparison’: ‘How shall I describe it? – a door opens, a door shuts. In between you have had a glimpse: a garden, a person, a rainstorm, a dragonfly, a heart, a city’. In reading the 2,100 poems submitted to Propel magazine over the last month I have experienced a cornucopia of the most profound and moving glimpses. ‘The poet’, Plath goes on to write, ‘becomes an expert packer of suitcases’. I am thinking now of the nostalgic and astonished glimpse of the farrier and the beloved and clutched horseshoe in CJ Wagstaff’s ‘The Farrier’ or perhaps the snatches of aching language heard and felt against a hurt and dark landscape in Edward Doegar’s ‘Word-ache. Our steps – gravel’. Both of these poems offer a glimpse onto compelling lyric worlds yet are, in Plath’s mode, concisely packed, muscular and bristling with language. 

But poetry also goes beyond the glimpse in between an opening and shutting door – poetry offers us access to, in the words of Paul Éluard, ‘another world’. But, crucially, as Éluard goes on to say, this other world ‘is in this one’. The poet is a visionary who is able to sense the extraordinary and other within our own landscapes. The poet might just be an alchemist who is able, in language, to transform, unearth and conjure fragmentary glimpses of, or portals onto, this other hermetic or spiritual dimension. Just as jake stefan ferguson can sense a vast and instructive queerness from within the ‘cumbreath and bleach’ in ‘after the parade, birmingham 2024’. Just as Christopher Lloyd witnesses the tower from the Tarot deck phase with ‘the flat upstairs […] my neighbours’. Just as Olive Franklin discerns the pure animal of desire, ‘muscular, sleek’, from within the loved figure of ‘Shane’. 

There is a ‘boundlessness’ to these other worlds, dimensions, opened up by poetry. Something named by Emily Dickinson who writes, in a letter: ‘Moving on in / the Dark like / Loaded Boats / at Night, though / there is no / Course, there is / Boundlessness – ‘. The reward for the sometimes courselessness of writing is this untethered and expansive space of creativity and potential – something so vast it has no bounds at all. I am thinking now of how in Billie Manning’s poem ‘The ground peeled away from itself. / A canyon where my life was’, as Persephone faces her terrifying abduction and descent. Or of how smell is a conduit onto the boundlessness of history and ‘the past lives of Brick Lane’ in Gayathiri Kamalakanthan’s ekphrastic poem ‘The Exhibition’. Or the ‘lunar eclipse/ Unclipping’ in Tom Mason’s concise yet explosive, ‘Little Tombeau’ in which ‘drinks with the gang’ are fiercely illuminated. 

And yet there is a terror to boundlessness. I am thinking now of ‘the Horses’ Heads’ in Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Because I could not stop for Death –’ which ‘Were toward Eternity –’. The speaker finds themselves trapped within the carriage of a gentleman caller only to realise that he is death and that their journey will last a boundless ‘eternity’. So might the poet feel the need to fracture, disrupt and disturb the boundlessness of poetry? Or perhaps even queer it? I am reminded of Sara Ahmed’s thoughts on queerness in Queer Phenomenology: ‘to make things queer is certainly to disturb the order of things’. The word queer, Ahmed reminds us, is derived from the words ‘cross’ and ‘twist’. And this disturb is felt keenly in ‘Tangerine’ by Rich Ware as the boys become ‘turkey ham rolls’, ‘trombones’ and ‘tangerine the air’ all in an attempt to disrupt and transform the horror of homophobic bullying. And in William Wyld’s ‘The Butterfly Bush’ where ‘the front garden showed me her penis’; here the garden and the house are disrupted and queered in response to the numerous pressures – grief, heteronormativity, climate catastrophe, desire – of life. Or in Bonnie Hancell’s ‘Two dogs and they are running’ where the beach becomes a complex site of healing and transformation as a ‘wedding dress’ might be used as a swimming costume and the speaker longs to ‘be a woman with the body of christ’. 

And the echoes of these disturbances might be felt both in and after the poem – which brings me back to Sylvia Plath who had this keen sense, in her poem ‘Words’, of word-as-axe, or violence, whose echoes – ‘And the echoes! / Echoes travelling… ‘ – are felt beyond the temporal engagement with a poem and linger and haunt. All twenty-two of these poems stayed with me. I am thinking now of the sharp word-axes – ‘slut’, ‘mannequin’, ‘bouquet’, ‘fuck’ etc. – which ring out from Sophia Georghiou’s ‘Adian’. Or the echoing music of William Gee’s ‘wildflowers(s)’ – those ‘waxy seedheads spewing’. Or the haunting and sensory memory of ‘the mole on his neck’ in Jack Westmore’s ‘Oasis’, which plunges the speaker back through time to a complex period of ‘blonde grace’ and upset. 

At the end of her list of the things which might make a poem Sylvia Plath writes about the paperweight: ‘This sort of paperweight is a dear globe, self-complete, very pure, with a forest or village or family group within it’. It’s a wonderful symbol for the poem – a miniature and focused world made strange and changed by the falling glitter-snow of language. The poems in this issue are paperweights of a sort and within them exist, amongst the others, Leusa Lloyd’s snipe, ‘the needle of her beak’ speaking ‘in secret tongue’; Nóra Blascsók’s ‘child gorging on veg’ eating sorrel leaves ‘through the school gate’; Freya Jackson’s lyric vase – ‘he puts flowers in my mouth and tells everyone how beautiful I look’; Stephen de Búrca’s ‘red shoes of leathery fish skin / which burned in sea-salt’; Kayleigh Jayshree’s priest who longs to understand and experience the enigmatic film; Meron Berhanu’s ‘Ophelia’ and ‘the wet dark drag of muddy brooks’; Emily A. Taylor’s ‘Sunday Roast’ and ‘the red lamp at that restaurant’; and Claire Berlyn’s ‘little jug’ whose ‘anguish is unbearable’. Plath goes on to write of her paperweight, ‘You turn it upside down, then back. It snows. Everything is changed in a minute. It will never be the same in there’. That’s how I feel in the reading of these poems – everything is changed. 

— Richard Scott
July 2025