POEM CLUB #6: 'Brown Leather Gloves' by Oliver Comins

Oliver Comins

Last week we had a great response to Liz Berry's poem from The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood, so this week we're going to look at a poem from The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood, which we published in May. It's a fantastic collection of poems about becoming a father and the experience of fatherhood, but the major concern of the book turned out to be the poets' fathers. Many of the poems deal with generational differences and difficulties of communication, and the poem I've chosen for this week's Poem Club is one of the more positive ones: still heartbreaking, but in an uplifting way.

* * *

Brown Leather Gloves

These are my Father’s gloves
with which I am wrestling
as I walk down to the station
on another crisp morning
of frosted cars in a frozen suburb.

Who's holding whose hands now?
Inside the fingers there's
more of him than there is of me –
all those years of rubbed skin and sweat.

Leather gives a better grip,
doesn’t really overcome the cold.
But it’s better than nothing,
this thin layer of brown
which keeps the weather off.

On the platform
I remove one Father,
reach out to greet a friend.
My other Father holds me steady.

— by Oliver Comins, from The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood

* * *

Emma's thoughts. It was impossible for me not to reflect on the broad differences between the Motherhood anthology and the Fatherhood anthology, not least because lots of people asked me about it. The answer I usually gave was that the Motherhood book was full of raw and often disturbing emotions, while the Fatherhood book felt muted in comparison, with more poems about unspoken, unacknowledged feelings. 'Brown Leather Gloves' feels like a good example of this, because I find it deeply moving, but I also feel that the pain and love caused by the implicit distance and miscommunication are all buried beneath several layers of reservation and stiff upper lip.

Your thoughts. We had a great set of responses to this poem, and several people felt a strong connection to that last stanza in particular. The combination of deep emotion and those tactile details about the gloves seemed to resonate especially with Anonymous and JHumble, who shared their own memories of items of clothing. Phyllis Klein loved the relatable yearning of the poem, asking 'How often do we want a piece of clothing to keep the memory of a parent with us?' She added, 'Then there is the fact that leather gives a good grip but doesn't overcome the cold and how this line opens into a deeper part of the poet's relationship with his father. I can imagine the father gripping the son's hand without tenderness or emotional warmth.'

Joseph Coelho and Emily Tealady were both struck by the second line of the poem, drawing out the meaning. Joseph Coelho commented, 'I found the idea of 'wrestling' very interesting to me', explaining that 'it suggested the struggle we all have of those that have passed between the real person and the idealised (or not so) memory.' Emily Tealady had a similar thought but took it in a different direction: 'The initial lines make me think of images of boxing gloves and of wrestling – those disagreements and fallouts we have with our parents as we grow up.'

We had some quite lengthy comments this week, so I do recommend you scroll down a bit and read them in full, as they are fascinating. And now, I'm delighted to announce that the winner of this week's Poem Club is... Phyllis Klein! 

* * *

The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood

What do you think of 'Brown Leather Gloves'? Do you find it moving? Do you recognise this kind of relationship? What do you think the poem says about modern parenthood? This Poem Club is closed, but you can still share your thoughts in the comments section below. Don't be afraid of sounding stupid! Just let us know what you like about the poem or what it makes you feel. All comments will be held for moderation, so don't worry if it doesn't appear immediately after you send it.

<-- POEM CLUB #5: 'The Steps' by Liz Berry'
--> POEM CLUB #7: 'Raspberries' by Andrew Wynn Owen

Exclusive extract from the introduction to 'The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood'

The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood

We're publishing a pair of orange books next week: The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood and Captain Love and the Five Joaquins! Captain Love is a fantastic yarn from the talented John Clegg (Eric Gregory Award, 2013) and the latest in our Emma Press Picks series, and The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood is a collection of poems about different aspects of fatherhood, following on from our book about motherhood. I'll be posting more about both of them in the coming weeks, but for now I thought I'd give you a taster of the Fatherhood book through an extract from my introduction:

'For a book full of confessions and confrontations, The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood contains remarkably little direct communication. Poets commune with lost fathers in addresses destined never to reach their subject, and explain themselves to children who are too young to understand. Poems such as Oliver Comins’ ‘Brown Leather Gloves’ and Sara Hirsch’s ‘Tonight Matthew’ find resolution and peace beyond the grave, while Di Slaney’s ‘On the forestry commission track’ and Rich Thompson’s ‘And he the maul’ analyse old memories for clues and redemption. In their many ways – and often through some sense of distance – all the poets convey great depth of feeling, and offer a fascinating insight into the state of fatherhood in the twenty-first century.

'When Rachel Piercey, my co-editor, and I were planning the call for submissions to this book, we expected some responses to focus on the pressures of modern fatherhood. The role of the father has expanded rapidly over the last few decades and I thought this would be reflected in poems about the pressure of living up to society’s expectations of what a father should now be. Instead, poets seemed more preoccupied with their own fathers and the impact their approach to parenting had on the poets’ lives. Jerrold Yam’s ‘Ornament’ and John Saunders’ ‘My father is the breeze that opens the shed door’ explore the impassive twentieth-century father who appears throughout the book, reflecting the enduring legacy of the traditional father figure. [...]'

You can read more about The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood on The Emma Press website. The launch party is taking place in Vauxhall, London, on Thursday 29th May - full details here.

A little bit of how's your father/motherhood anthology

Publishing 27th Feb 2014

We've had a great response to our call for submissions to The Emma Press Anthology of Motherhood and The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood, with 346 people from around the world sending in their poems before the deadline on 9th December. We received 170 submissions to our anthology of Mildly Erotic Verse earlier in the year, so we were slightly startled by the response to this new call, and delighted by the number of people who felt moved to submit.

Rachel (my co-editor) and I have now read all of the poems (nearly 1000!) and we met up last week to compare notes. It took 8 solid hours of discussion over two days, during which we found that most poems fell into one of a handful of categories. Popular ones included: loving portraits of children and pregnancies; anxious reflections on the responsibilities of parenthood; difficult relationships with parents; and poets considering their parents in the light of their own parenthood. In order to create a balanced pair of collections, we tried to select the strongest poems in each category, but the extremely high standard of submissions meant it was frequently difficult to make the final call.

Publishing 29th May 2014

We ended up with two shortlists from which we'll be crafting our final selections next week, and I hope to start sending out responses in the last couple of weeks of January. I can already tell that these are going to be two incredible books, full of wisdom and heartbreaking insights, and I can't wait to share them with everyone next month and in May. In the meantime, I am also very excited about the covers (exclusively revealed on this blog), and about the launch party for the Anthology of Motherhood, which will be on Thursday 27th February in Vauxhall, London. I hope that lots of Emma Press supporters will come along to support us - do join the Facebook group or put it in your diary if you'd like to attend. I will also try to take the books out of London and around the country, so watch this space.