'Mischief of One Kind and Another' is the ninth Nine Series Anthology and brings together the work of Jennie E. Owen, Jen Feroze and Ben Tufnell. It is an anthology that explores the inter-relationships of different genres of art and their translation into poetry, whether through the use of ekphrasis, intertextuality or the creation of worlds.
Jennie E. Owen's uses paintings and places as jump off points for entry into her dark, immersive poems, giving voices to characters such as in 'Dead Mother and Child'
I know that I am a painting, that much I understand.
I'm rendered in flat blocks of red and orange
Jen Feroze responds to literary classics within her poems, using the work of writers and poets such as Edward Lear, the Brothers Grimm and Frances Hodgson Burnett to give new life and identities to characters we thought we knew so well, such as in 'Catching a Tiger' which draws off Judith Kerr's famous children's book for inspiration
Sophie's mummy was different afterwards;
her gaze flicking towards the door.
In Ben Tufnell's poems we enter into a haunted, eroding landscape that is inhabited by creatures and spectres that create a sense of gothic foreboding and subtle horror, almost like a personal fairy tale world inhabited by 'Owls' and 'Ghosts' or as in the 'Crocodile' of
The childhood dream
of the gnarled beast beneath
the bed. Long rotting grin
slowly opening and closing
with a castanet click
in thick darkness.
'Mischief of One Kind and Another' is an unsettling adventure into the dark corners where strange things lurk and may, if you're not on your guard, drag you in.
