As I sat in the shine of my screen happily browsing the hundreds of poems submitted for the second issue of Propel (keep them coming!) I had a strange feeling of travel. It was like riding a bus around every corner of the UK and Ireland, seeing another life through a lighted window, and feeling glad to see it, even if I didn’t include it in the twenty poems here. Not every poem is an uncurtained pane onto the personal, of course (even those that seem to be). But as well as the poems I read the biographies that came with them, and again saw people busy with their lives: just starting out as writers; sharing work with friends, editors, audiences; thinking about a pamphlet, gathering towards a book.

Between these passing windows I felt as though I was briefly glimpsing how the organisation of a poem might somehow reflect the organisation of a life. One of the pleasures of putting this issue together was the opportunity to set so many different lyric shapes and styles singing alongside each other (doesn’t every poetry critic dream of being a DJ?) Another was noticing how many submissions unknowingly connected. So many, for example, mentioned food! I, too, mention food, every day. But poets have not always done so in their poems.

Pondering this as I made my choices, I found an echo in the writing of Sarah Maguire, whose first book, Spilt Milk, appeared in 1991. Maguire’s archive is held at the University of East Anglia, where I teach, and this year our Poetry MA students explored it for the first time, finding out how a full collection may crystallise from years of drafts; their false starts and sudden discoveries. Among the things we turned up was Maguire’s statement for the Poetry Book Society Bulletin, in which she asks her own poems, ‘Why so much food?’, and answers herself: ‘Nothing seems more innocently personal and intimate; nothing carries such a freight of culture’. My bus journey wasn’t just past lighted windows: it was past shops, schools, cafes, libraries, arts centres, places of worship, workplaces, depots, ports. There is a freight of culture in every fresh poem here – so perhaps my metaphor for bringing them all together should really be a meal. To quote Maguire again: ‘I’d like you to feel well fed by the end of it’.

— Jeremy Noel-Tod
November 2022