Poetry Reviews

Leader of the Pack: review of 'The Wolf' magazine

2011-11-17T12:18:00.002Z

‘The Wolf’ is a literary magazine for new poetry edited by James Byrne out of London. Its tastes are truly international and the latest edition includes poetry translated from Italian, Arabic and Chinese. There is also poetry from the talented English-based (in all senses) Caribbean writer, Jonathan Morley.
In addition, there are well-written and scholarly reviews on , amongst others, Ashbery’s brilliant new version of Rimbaud’s ‘Illuminations’, Daljit Negra’s new collection and reading Ezra Pound (without avoiding his Fascism or trying to sever it from the mainstream of his work). A nice retro touch which reminds me of the little magazines of a quarter of a century ago, there are also some photos of an art installation using language as a raw material.
Normally, I wouldn’t bother to review a magazine, but I think the poetry in it, and the poetics this reflects, deserves to be more widely appreciated. Byrne seems to welcome poetry which draws on ideas and disrupts language through surreal shifts, concentrated rhetoric and metaphorical density. He likes the New York school (publishing the genuinely funny Ron Padgett and the somewhat pretentious, Robert Kelly) as well as a talented acolyte of Alan Ginsberg, Nina Zivancevic.
Her poem, ‘Under the Sign of Kybele’, begins:
I was: then a junky woman who
buried so many husbands
some of them poisoned by too
much light too much happiness too
much powder too little hope

It flies along inchoately, springing memorable phrases: ’some/of his wrinkles got onto your body they/made a lace pattern out of my memory’
These seem to suggest that this is an elegy of mixed emotions for past relationships: ‘I told you stay stay always that way in me’
Mad it may be, but it’s great to read something so unconstrained by writing group norms.
I’m also very attracted to the work of Carol Watts. Her poem, ‘Bay’, consists of a series of fragmentary cut up lines which force the reader to mull over word sounds and aural connections whilst being hit by visceral splinters of meaning.
The lineation has the effect of tearing at meanings, both in the sense of grasping for them and striking them down:
block the borrow pits
in silted mouth

care nothing spoken
without.

Language is clearly a concern, but the lines also represent the ebb and flow of emotion in sympathetic association (or perhaps more than that, something empathetic, unifying) with the bay of the title. The worse lines are ‘I stood on the jetty/ and loved you’, partly because this banal confession detracts from poem’s intensity, which tries to rope together the inner and the outer worlds through violent distortions in language (aka metaphysical poetry) :
Preternatural holding or/ half turned gesture// already letting go/to inroads//inundation.
However, the best lines in this edition of ‘The Wolf’, for me, are translations of the Chinese poet, Bei Dao
If death is love’s reason
then we love infidelity
love the defeated
whose eyes keep checking the time. (‘Concerning Eternity’)

I read the first two lines like this: death is love’s reason because it makes us understand the urgency of love, but because we fear death, we love infidelity (perhaps that’s why we can always be unfaithful even to those whom we love?) and love those who are defeated by time. Is this final love a universal or individual matter? Are we really talking about a development in the self from passion to compassion, from one to all? There are a lot of possibilities and this is what I find so absorbing. But the verse is much more than a conundrum hiding many possibilities. It is based on traditional means of expression (I wonder how this works in Chinese which was supposedly the source of the resolutely concrete particularity of the imagist style that allowed modernist poets to break with traditional poetic forms and tropes?). It begins with statement as metaphorical proposition and proceeds to examine it in unpredictable ways, ending in something concrete but also general. And who are the defeated? There is nothing in the rest of the poem to say which group of people this might be (if it is not a proxy for all of us). Uncertainty and instability of subject/ object is all the rage in ‘The Wolf’; it helps infuse the poems with an in-being life of their own.
This is poetry with a head as well as a heart and a life.
Overall, the values of ‘The Wolf’ seem to be internationalist ; it also welcomes the diversification and particularity of English, and it is openly – unfashionably – intellectual. Please support it!

Eagle-Eyed Imaginarium: A review of Arguing with Malarchy by Carola Luther

2011-10-23T19:40:00.008+01:00

This brilliant volume is full of bold leaps of the imagination. Many of the poems are lyrics - where subject and subject matter are often blurred and unstable. The title poem is not entirely characteristic and seems to be some sort of narrative - with an uncertain back story - made up of a series of set pieces spoken by an 'old man' to a character called 'Malarchy', holding forth on themes like 'age', 'truth' and 'defeat'.

The style has the demotic intonations of early Simon Armitage, without its social particularity (but with just as many internal rhymes and half rhymes):

....For a fuck in the dark, I received instruction

on making the break, on the spur, double quick.

Yet, there's also a mythic Freudian quality and sonority which calls to mind Dylan Thomas. It's also a book full of characters - Bohemian, lost, on the other side of the law or respectability or fashion:

..aged gardeners, with their pots and hats and secret

pockets full of dust

The poetry sounds good, and encourages reading aloud, but it also has emotional resonance, based, I think, on the poet's profound compassion for others. At the same time, it is also very anchored in immediate personal reaction and apprehension as if every highly coloured experience has its aftertaste of language!!!!

200 PN Reviews!

2011-09-17T12:30:00.009+01:00

On 8 September 2011, there was a celebration of PN review's 200th edition at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. For those of you thinking 'so what?', let me put you in the picture.

PN review is arguably the most authoritative and most interesting poetry magazine published in England and Wales. The PN stands for Poetry Nation which gives you an idea of the importance it places on poetry. For the editors and contributiors, poetry is not a niche interest, it is a subject that should concern all intelligent people.

Its lineage can be traced back to Leavisite critics like CB Cox, but it has a taste for the new and avant garde, and an openness to ideas which has ensured its survival, whilst preserving an old-fashioned cutural zealotry which helps sustain serious poetry and debate about poetry in the UK. Nowadays, it is the fiefdom of Michael Schmidt, a man of powerful intellect, who relishes both vivid generalisations and detailed analysis, and wry wit for whom the word 'consummate' and 'champion' seem to have been fashioned.

The event was divided into three parts: a lecture by the intensely clever and sensitive Patrick McGuiness (see below for my review of his latest collection) about Donald Davie, one of the poets and critics who founded PN review in the seventies.; a roundtable of poetry magazine editors and then a reading from the 200th edition, including Jeffrey Wainwright reading his new poem Beyond Enigma.

Before all of that, I am sad to say that it opened with a short message from Arts Council North West. Holding a little red book of criteria in her hand, a reedy voiced bureaucrat (with a background in publishing apparently) explained how PN review and Carcanet had ticked all the boxes and that's why it still had funding. What she didn't seem to realise is that the audience included the editors of Arc which has been cut, perhaps fatally, notwithstanding the unique service it provides. Nothing could have demonstrated the Arts Council's lack of understanding of the bigger picture more clearly.

I have to say I was fascinated by McGuiness's lecture, which required both alertness and mental agility from the audience. As a portrait of the intellectual concerns of a deeply eccentric man (i.e. Donald Davie) I thought it was excellent, particularly as it gave a strong impression of the development of Davie's ideas and did not dwell on his eccentricities overly. I thought it was less persuasive when attempting to define the value of PN review itself . McGuiness - whom, I have to say, is fairly traditional in his use of tropes and his understanding of poetic measure - became rather entangled in post-modernist concepts about the instability of meaning. This, he seemed to confuse with debate, and suggested that totemic PN Nation terms such as 'form' and 'tradition' had no fixed meaning because people disagreed on what these terms meant and how to apply them. He went on to say that it was the passion of the debate rather than its content which was really attractive, but I thought that was faint praise. If you don't agree with the debate and don't relate to its content then its passion is surely more likely to seem misplaced? The point is - even if you fundamentally disagree - that it engages you with its substance rather than just its approach.

The roundtable discussion included the editor of Wolf, the excellent Carol Rumens and some well-meaning and agreeable guy from Leicester University who seems to have founded a magazine (good luck to it, I say). After the editor described himself as an 'elitist', I subscribed to Wolf next day.

Wainwright's poem - which was essentially a philosophical reflection on narrative, history and morality - was excellent, concerning versions of the 'truth', narrative etc. surrounding an act of martyrdom in a concentration camp and suggested that meaning/ history could be unstable without being meaningless. The poem contains moments of struggle with meaning but also empathy, which is eventually achieved before sliding back in the last lines into a confession of humble failure, which is its own form of tribute to an act of self-sacrifice:

" a good man cannot be harmed",
there is only a human voice
to say it', as though
I could listen hard enough
to catch it

Great Ginsberg! A selected Ginsberg worth reading!

2011-07-16T21:43:00.013+01:00

I came across a selected edition of Ginsberg's poems published in the UK by Faber and edited by Mark Ford and at last I've found a volume which goes beyond Howl and Kaddish (just about), and does justice to Ginsberg's great talent.

Previously, I struggled with Ginsberg's own selected poems, published in Penguin, which, at over 400 pages, suffers from the inclusion of too many poems that reflect his monotonous ecstatic self-absorption. In contrast, Ford has sifted Ginsberg's work down to a few essential nuggets. About two thirds of it consists of work from the two great collections, the rest covers the period from 1962 - 1997 (the poet's death). There are only two poems from the 1980's, three from the 1990's, but, as a result, the reader gets to focus in on marvellous poems such as Wichita Vortex Sutra, Wales Visitation, and that accidental masterpiece Mugging, which records an unexpected trauma that forced him to set aside self-indulgent habits and write with the intense honesty - and hurt - which marks out his best work.

This honesty is supported by a style of writing which often eschews metaphor for accumulations of concrete nouns, dialogue and quotes from the media. However, the concrete details are those apprehended by the poetic consciousness (and sometimes varied by the telegraphic insertion of abstract forms which testify to the poet's spiritual state) The nouns work by accretion and overall the force and rhythm of his poetry is achieved through psalm-like rhetoric.

So rather than read me, read this. His best poetry is full of humanity, and, if not always completely free of humbug, endearingly free of pomposity - truly, he managed on occasions to achieve a universalising egotistical sublime. I should also add that the best of the political verse makes Poundian bricolage readable and enjoyable - quite a feat!

Arts Funding Cuts

2011-07-15T20:56:00.003+01:00

There have been a number of severe funding cuts to poetry orgnisations in the UK since the coalition government was elected. As a result, there is a high profile campaign to save the Poetry Book Society, which chooses 4 books per year and recommends a number of other to readers. It also provides a poetry bookshop and produces a quarterly newsletter.

Notwithstanding Carol-Ann Duffy's participation in the campaign, I am less bothered about cuts to the PBS than I am to a couple of small publishing houses: especially Arc. This concentrates on bringing foreign poets in translation to the attention of UK readers. Its list includes the only comprehensive roundup of poetry being published in eastern Europe at the moment. Its loss or diminution will be hugely felt because it does something that no one else does, so the cut seems to stem from ignorance or negligence, particularly as the overall budget from the Arts Council to literature is increasing.

In contrast, the PBS rarely highlights the most interesting collections (I was a member for a year and I learnt to dread its dreary offerings) and adds little to the service provided by poetry prizes (like the Costa or Forward) which highlight collections to the small number of people who constitute the poetry buying public. Amazon generally provides books cheaper too. The internet allows poetry lovers to discover poetry from small independent publishers or access new work free online. There seems to me to be very little persuasive argument which can be brought to bear to save the PBS. Hopefully, its disappearance will tear open a little more space for more ambitious and innovative work to appear. The sort of stuff you can hear in the PBS's sister organisation, the Poetry cafe, in London, every Tuesday, in fact.

Night by David Harsent

2011-07-15T14:50:00.009+01:00

Harsent is a highly accomplished poet who has also written verse libretti for the great avant garde English composer, Harrison Birtwistle.His collection Legion spoke of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia with immense power. Yet the same driving rhythms and dense use of rhyme ( like a latterday John Masefield) which helped give that collection its urgency and authenticity in my view undermine his latest collection, Night, which is apparently one of the main contenders for this year's Forward prize.

The style undermines meaning rather than enhances it, and I can't help but draw a comparison to the late Victorian poet, Algernon Swinburne. Highly regarded in his own day, later generations became disenchanted with the monotony of clever rhymes and insistent verse rhythms which distracted readers from the subject matter.

Harsent's approach is a strange mixture of Armitage like contemporary streetwise reference and diction (...I gave the door a little back heel/ then ferreted round in the fridge for an ice cold Coors) and traditional verse forms (e.g. he use of ballad form). Yet the urgency of the verse seems to speed one away from its meaning (unlike Armitage whose use of form strongly reflects subject matter and sense), or make it read like an adept exercise in the love of language and verbal interplay for its own sake.

Thus, The Duffel Bag, for instance, starts off in Armitage territory:

into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and the lame,
with the grifters and drifters, the diehards, the masters of bluff,

the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash.

and ends up referencing Homer's Odyssey (more recently Armitage territory too): your dream/ of Ithaca, that ghost town'.

It finishes with the words 'from the open road to the sight of the open sea', which is admirably mimetic but somehow lacks the real sense of personal - even folk - connection which you get with Armitage (as in 'Uz folk round 'ere, lad, don't like offcumdens').

The subject of Moppet the next poem gets buried under (sometimes) anaepaestic metre and internal rhyme. And so on... to be frank, I lose interest.

Perhaps the judges are right and this is a much better collection than I think. PerhapsIi should read, 'Elsewhere', the long poem which ends the collection, but I just can't motivate myself to do it. On reflection,I hope Geoffrey Hill wins, with the amazing Clavics. A collection I've read three times and will read many more, to unpick its subtle riches.

RED - an anthology of Contemporary Black British Poetry

2011-03-23T11:03:00.007Z

Review under development

Just started reading Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry edited by Kwame Dawes, published by Peepal Tree. Every poem in the anthology appears to refer in some way to the colour red, or its derivatives. Inevitably, this orientates the anthology towards the visceral and the political, which is probably why I like it. I can't say for sure however that this anthology accurately represents the range of contemporary Black British writing because an anthology of contemporary white British writers using the same reference point might be just as visceral, and just as political.

Even so, there appears to be a tremendous range here, from the poised and polished (John Lyons) to the rough hewn and engaged (Bernardine Evaristo). There's some fairly crap political poetry, heavy on rhetorical abstractions, and some very personal wiriting, with strong political and philosophical resonances. It's very difficult therefore to generalise about the work in here. Instead, I find myself drawn into an exploration of new(ish) writing, which comes at its subject from a surprising direction, allowing the reader to consider the familiar and unfamiliar afresh.

I confess that I like the uneveness of some of the work in here because I value ambition over creative-writing-school playing it safe blandness, engagement over professionalism. Rather than toil through the anthology though, trying to take it all in, from Linton Kwesi Johnson to Jackie Kay, I thought I'd live dangerously and focus on one poem, which whilst not quite epitomising the contents of the book, has some of the major features of it: namely, John Siddique's poem, Promises.

Of Mutability - Jo Shapcott

2011-03-18T21:17:00.007Z

Jo Shapcott's recent prize-laden collection, of Mutability, shows everything that is best and worst about contemporary English verse. It's clever and full of cocky phrases, and unusual takes or strange angles on the subject matter. But somehow I also find it quite flat, even inert, at times.

To give some examples, she has this trick of mixing the prosaic and the boldly abstract. Thus, in Era, she writes

The twenty-second day of march two thousand and three
I left home shortly after eight thirty
on foot for the City. I said goodbye
to the outside of my body: I was going in.

She also goes in for a lot of juxtaposition and contrast. In Sinfonietta for London, she describes the nosies of the City (i.e. as we Brits arrogantly call the City of London, as if there's only one real one on Earth)

Integral are the living sounds of Fenchurch Street,
the mechanised city with its patterns
of soft and loud ..........

your darling's head floating
above the rest, singing and whistling
all the way down to the Thames

She plays the same trick on facing pages by placing two poems called Religion for Girls and Religion for Boys next to one another. In some ways, they lack bite and energy (e.g. Bacchus is for 'giving sparky life') but there's plenty of room and semi-concealed opportunity to extrapolate loads about gender, ancient history, anthropology.

I think it's telling that the most unified and convincing poem in terms of subject matter, language and tone is an adaption of Rilke.

However, she breaks one of the stony faced rules of white English middle class poetry by writing a political poem, though only on safe territory: against the Iraq war. The poem's called St Brides, it's excellent, and builds to a passionate very personal and immediate climax about a war which is very far away from our day to day lives.

I find the collection intriguing, and I can return to it again and again. I'm glad it won prizes, but I wish the style wasn't so omnipresent in contemporary English verse, and there was more room for people like Mike Haslam (below) and for the sort of engaged and visceral poetry in Red, a new anthology of Black British Poetry.

But more of that, as they say, anon!

The Antidote: Review of 'A Cure for Woodness' - Michael Haslam

2011-03-09T23:42:00.010Z

This is the last volume of a trilogy by Mike Haslam - which started with The Muse Laid her Songs in Language, continued with A Sinner Saved by Grace and now ends here, with this book full of beautiful, funny, humane, intoxicated post-modern pastoral verse.

In a decent world, its publication would be a seen as an important literary event. However, the literary world seems to have shrugged its shoulders, smiled politely and passed on by, which is a shame.

It's difficult to describe Haslam's work except in a set of paradoxes or antitheses. It is both traditional and experimental, elegiac and funny, narrative and abstract, social and mythological, political and pastoral, silly and passionate. The subject matter of his poems is never entirely stable, surfaces are exposed, words take on a life of their own, even the poems sub text is sometimes made explicit and then done away with. This is language poetry which is being pulled towards narrative and then away again, elegy which is drawn into light verse and vice versa.

In an earlier volume, he identified Michael Drayton as a model for his work; Woodness is much nearer to the spirit of Robert Herrick. It's obvious theme is getting older and remembering the joys of sex, but the verse is drenched with sounds and images of nature which suggest an on-going passionate reaction to the physicality of the world around him and its capacity to be rendered in language, which he sees itself as a natural object.

In a revealing introduction - a sort of Biographia Literaria - Haslam traces his own literary and intellectual development, and explains how over time he has rejected 'French' post-modern thinking, with its emphasis on experience as a form of text, and now believes that everything we do and dream is rooted in nature. However, far from this being some sort of reductionist socio-biological explanation of how we live, he has an expansive definition of what is natural. Thus, even forms of ideology, like Bush-era 'neo-con' belief, is natural, he explains. So nature is not an imprisoning set of rules, but an ever-expanding set of possibilities, some of which are marvellous, some, comic, or perhaps tragically ridiculous like right-wing thinking in the United States. Alas, he tries to prove this by saying that language - far from being some sort of post-structuralist construct - is a reflection of nature by reference to onomatopaiea. This is hardly persuasive.

Nevertheless, his commitment to the physicality of language means it's actually fun to read his verse aloud. And his range of experience and reference, and fertile imagination make this volume endlessly rewarding.

Up Your Arse, Paul Muldoon!: A short view of Maggot

2011-02-18T21:00:00.008Z

Just reading this collection at the moment and would love it because of the tactile, musical quality of the verse and its wit BUT FOR a couple of poems which are callous and mysogynistic. Implanted in the snowstorm of language are two stories: one about a prom queen who dies in a road accident and another about a woman who is burnt alive by the side of the road. No horror is expressed, they're just part of the verbal showtime. On the other hand, he does seem quite annoyed that people don't read very much Swift these days. yeuk! Come back, Derek Mahon, all is forgiven!

Best Book of 2010 - The Rest on the Flight: selected poems of Peter Porter

2011-01-26T13:40:00.016Z

I approach this review with some trepidation: Porter, who sadly dies just before this book was published, wrote complex poetry in both traditional and contemporary styles. An Australian by birth, he was in some ways more English than the English: self-deprecating, reserved, prone to melancholy but also witty, imaginative and racy. He lived most of his life in England; yet, he engaged more and more with his native land as he got older, expressing deep connections with its history, culture and landscape. Devoted to classical music and Renaissance art, he refused to submit to the cultural isolationism of contemporary English verse which seems so rarely to celebrate or even absorb or acknowledge other art forms and resists cleverness or any other form of 'headiness' which transmits joy through language and thought. In some ways, he had a distinctly European sensibility, which sat alongside his English and Australian ones. I'd like to say something definitive about his work, but I find that what I end up doing is expressing views about him, which change according to the poems I am reading, all of which I find hugely engaging.

He wrote the sort of poetry I yearn to read: about history, philosophy, how he feels, about his marriage, his family, about contemporary mores. There is a restless quality about his work which I find attractive, and a love of memorable phrase-making which has the capacity to light up often dense, complex but always rewarding text.

I return to this book again and again, and I am indebted to Sean O'Brien, for his brief but excellent introduction, which defends Porter against those detractors who accuse him of relying on allusions rather than images. As O'Brien says so elegantly:
the constellation of overlapping worlds which his work evokes is open to anyone interested to explore for themselves, and his reflections on art are always connected to its human sources'.

I suppose the particular attraction I feel towards Porter's poetry is partly related to the influence of later Auden, whose work from the 50s to the 70s has never been fully appreciated in England. In a similar way to Auden, Porter writes disquisitions on culture (the phrase is Porter's own from Civilisation and its Disney Contents), but ones in which landscape plays on the inner forms of the psyche ( see The Ecstasy of Estuaries). Yet he does something which Auden generally didn't do - except in the form of gossipy asides or in relation to the landing on the moon in 1969- in his later work, he satirises the particular historical moment, such as in An Ingrate's England, The Workers or A Sour Decade.

Another point of attraction is Thomas Hardy. Thus, one gets beautifully ambivalent formal poems - part lyric, part narrative - like the amusingly entitled Let me Bore you with my Slides (appropriately enough about his family, of course), which finishes with the lines:
love's face peers between husband and wife,
a cautious colour like afternoon.

In fact, if I ever tire of reading the poems, I think I could spend half an hour oggling their titles: Fair go for Anglo Saxons, The Porter Song Book, the Automatic Oracle, The Easiest Room in Hell, That War is the Destruction of Restaurants etc. etc. etc.

Some mention must go to the poems from The Cost of Seriousness, which Porter wrote partially in response to the death of his first wife. My favourite poem from that collection is The Delegate, a post funeral poem which mediates not only on the sense of despair he still shares with his wife but on his relationship with poetry:
The truth
is a story forcing me to tell it. It is not
my story or my truth. My misery
is on a colour chart - even my death
is a chord among the garden sounds.

There is so much for the reader to do to fill inbetween the huge leaps that Porter - perhaps driven by grief - is making. On the way, we can savour paradox: the artist's impregnable ego and his subjection to higher purpose, his misery and his love of creation. Then there is the phrase: my misery is on a colour chart. This striking phrase (so typical of this amazing phrase maker) simultanously suggests

that his misery has a colour and his involuntary experience of the same is a form of synesthesia

that it may vary in intensity, or be intense

that it is a crude unformed emotion, not yet processed by Art

that it is now ordinary

I'm sure there are other associations that could be teased out. The point is that the phrase is not just colourful (sic), but vibrant with implications.

Having mentioned Auden and Hardy, I think it's also important to reference Ashbery. The great leaps in meaning his poetry makes are there from his early work onwards (O'Brien usefully points to Wallace Stevens as a major influence), but become more marked during the 80s. Both frequently use personification and seemingly absurd but razor sharp juxtapositions of phrases. Porter is less abstract than Ashbery, more fixed both on a 'subject' and on objects, but I think the influence is detectable.

Finally, I think it is important to say something about Porter's politics. Throughout his life, he was a radical social democrat although probably of the Fabian persuasion - but constantly aware of exploitation and abuse. His famous early poem Your Attention Please shows that he was sceptical about the arms race and the peace-keeping potential of Mutually Assured Destruction (or MAD for short, if you're lucky enough not to remember). His devotion to high culture stems from his humanism rather from elitism. Yet he recognised the problems and limits of rationality and the absurdity of human behaviour and desire. This is part of what makes him interesting, and no consideration of his work should occur without referencing his social concerns and humanitarian values.

All in all, a wonderful poet, and, if I may say so, having met him a few times in the 80s, and drunk some beers with him, an open, interesting and kindly man. I miss him, man and poet.

Armitage's Return

2011-01-22T11:02:00.012Z

I first came across Simon Armitage's work in 1990 and like most people was blown away by it. His work not only had a recognizable style, it reflected contemporary ways of speaking in original forms, which at the same time seemed to be authentically rooted in demotic idioms, reflecting the 'social crisis' left by Thatcherism.

Then came a marked decline. From The Book of Matches onwards, there was a retreat from the 'street' towards small town identities. These use the local as the basis for the continuation of a 'them and uz' view of the world, which has lost some of its articulation around class struggle, though none of its sense of grievance. It was a more personal, petty bourgeois world, with few pretensions to speak on behalf of others or tackle universal themes. Ultimately, the poems became more parochial and less interesting, even if they continued to be enlivened Armitage's supreme technical ability and vivid imagination.

Even 'the millenium poem' Killing Time, which tried to find something to say about where our culture was in 2000, somehow lacked resonance. In the course of this poem, Armitage bravely tried his hand at philosophical verse. What he produced was pretty good, if technically a bit Victorian.

In the mean time, he also wrote a couple of novels, which were no worse than many being published at the time, with some good points, but lacking in characterisation and being marked by jejune (if well meaning) gender politics.

Yet, he's come good with his two most recent collections: The Not Dead and Seeing Stars. In the former, he writes in the voices of soldiers from recent conflicts who have been left with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Technically, the verse has a Kiplingesque quality in the sense that it is formal, rhyming and demotic. Yet somehow, this mature return to ordinary speech patterns reasserts Armitage's poitical commitment to giving public voice to those whose socio-economic status generally means they are ignored. In the latter, there are a series of prose poems which present scenarios which spin wildly out of control. Full of humour as well as imagination, they also offer tangential comment on our social chaos in a contemporary setting of carparks, conferences and out of town shopping malls.

Best of all, though, is the last poem in his recent chapbook, The Motorway Service Station as a Destination in its Own Right, which in its content overlaps with Seeing Stars. This resonates with compassion and significance, and manages to be both precise and expansive: it's called Years and finishes with the lines:

And bare, gullible trees

like children of famine,

reach upwards to meet them.

Perhaps as he gets older, we'll get more wise poems like this, unafraid of complex statement in vivid pictoral terms.

Naughty New Year Thought

2011-01-05T23:10:00.008Z

In the review of Identity Parade, I noted that contemporary English poetry was suffering from a narrowing of styles and concerns, which might be partly attributable to a lack of diversity in the backgrounds of the authors. I also suspect that the growing influence of university creative writing courses and publicly funded creative writing groups might be contributing to this increasing homogeneity.

Whilst I am not a proponent of over-zealous deficit reduction, particularly when it serves political rather than economic ends, the proposed cuts in public funding might be an opportunity to reduce what I perceive to be an over-reliance on writing courses and groups, and allow poets to find other audiences and ways of connecting in less prescribed and freer contexts.

After all, poetry is extremely cheap to make, and to disseminate. The internet provides an accessible means for poets to expose their work, as well as forums to discuss poetry. Whilst the cuts may be a blow for those who were hoping to make a career out of writing, they could open up the contemporary scene, provided that some quality poetry publishers, like Bloodaxe, Carcanet and Arc, which publish new talent and (this is key) established international writers, continue to be funded.

Standard Midland by Roy Fisher

2010-12-10T23:38:00.012Z

In an afternote to the collection, Roy Fisher provides an explanation for the title of the volume, when he describes as 'the plain way of speaking we people of central England like to believe we have'. Rather than the plainness to which he refers, the irony and self-deprecation implicit in his explanation are arguably the most characteristic elements of West Midland discourse (I express this view as a West Midlander). In my view, in addition to the explanation that Roy Fisher provides, the title refers to a variety of RP English spoken by middle class people from the Midlands and it may also echo the notion that the Midlands is culturally featureless or simply mean 'typically midland'. This degree of unshowy layering is also typical of Fisher's poetry, which is amongst the most engaging and remarkable work produced in this country over the last 50 years.

Paul Bachelor wrote a review in the Guardian where he said that Standard Midland is the work of a man in later life (after all, Fisher mentions that he talks to himself more than once). Indded, some of the poems seem more like random thoughts and impressions with little regard to the concept of audience, but there are also some astonishing poems in the collection, even if Fisher does manage occasionally to create lines which are little more than complex verb phrases, with all the charm of a traffic jam on a dual carriageway.

Fisher's saving grace is his imagination (both imagistic and linguistic). This is never more in evidence than in the brillinat sequence: Hell, Horse and Hellbox: the tabernacle poems, which celebrates seven generatins of printing in the King family. Originally, the text formed part of an object d'art and refers to it, and to its maker in the opening line:

FROM THE BOOK OF THE KINGS THEIR TRADES AND STATIONS

The poem succeeds because of the clash of registers, which helps to create striking mataphors, and its puns. Thus it begins like someting from the Bible (i.e. such as such begat such and such) but also sounds like a pastiche of the recitals from a land title deed. This fits in with the subjects of business and self-employment which appear in the poem.

It begins with a list of the occupations of preceding generations of Kings. One cannot help but study them to see how occupations repeat themselves, are poassed on, reappear and develop - or as Fisher says larer in the poem: 'Deviate,/ develop - hardly'.

Fisher grapples with profound ontological ideas, such as the notion of the particular and general which he refers to as the 'example' and 'the rule'. - this also refers back to the concept of biological generation, where the generations themselves are examples of a fundamental rule (i.e. the family biology).

Fisher also speculates on the 'mischief' of language itself (which develops by deviating from its original meaning). The mix of generation - of the occupations of those generations and their development and deviation - causes fascinating clashes of register:

with dynasties of every sort coming into fashion.
Sons in waiting, grandsons coming to the boil.

The first line of the quote contrasts the concepts of dynasties (continuity) with fashion, but also suggests that fashion itself has its own dynasties. Then the idea shifts to service and then to overcooking, in the mean time presenting a potted history of inter-generational conflict. It ends with an incresing focus on individuals rather than their collectivised histories as 'family' or 'society' (in the third section of Hell, the 'countryside shaken out clean,/ and everywhere fortunes falling out of it', finishing in 'Tabernacle Street', where I guess Ronald King was raised.

This is great stuff, worth reading again and again.

Jilted City by Patrick McGuiness

2010-12-06T11:16:00.005Z

This review is 'under construction'. For the latest 'finished' review, read the previous blog about 'Identity Parade'.

Patrick McGuiness is an exciting talent who has emerged recently, whose laconic verse can be both memorable and moving. Being of Belgium and Northern Irish ancestry, he writes about being in-between places and history (it should be said that Brussels features more in his work than Belfast).

His new collection Jilted City encompasses his excellent Smith/Doorstop pamphet 19th Century Blues as well as powerful translations, most notably City of Lost Walks by 'imaginary' Romanian poet Liviu Campanu (there seems to be a growing fashion for imaginary poetic alter egos like Derek Mahon's translations of an imaginary Indian poet in Autumn Wind). The one thing which detracts from this collection is a long sequence called Blue Guide - a sequence with a poem for every stop along a route that McGuiness used to take as a child. This, it strikes me, is a formulaic exercise in overly self-conscious in-betweeness, lacking in emotional resonance. That is not true of the rest of the collection, however, which includes a vivid (though deft) poem about his father's death.

This collection is definitely worth buying, if you have the cash.

Identity Parade

2010-10-30T08:57:00.005+01:00

I recently attended the Manchester launch of the new Bloodaxe anthology of contemporary poetry, Identity Parade, which is meant to follow on from The New Poetry (1993) and Motion and Morrison's Contemporary British Poetry (1981) as the definitive collection of the contemporary poetry scene. At the event, Roddy Lumsden, the editor of Identity Parade, said something along the lines of: if anthologies are invitations to the party, Motion and Morrison's book was more like an invitation to a cocktail party; which given the inclusion of Tony Harrison and Douglas Dunn seems a little unfair. The point I suppose was to compare CBPand IP and highlight the latter's inclusiveness.

Whilst IP is certainly more inclusive than CBP, somehow it is less than the sum of its many fine parts. Unlike CBP, which mainstreamed a formal restrained poetry reflective of the political and social currents of the time (Northern Ireland, class and, to a lesser extent, gender), and TNP, which announced the rise of the marginal voice, conceived in oppostion to the metropolis (and Thatcherism), IP simply lives on the claim to represent a generally apolitical diversity.

Its voices and experiences are usually middle class (with one or two exceptions), often Oxbridge educated, the dominant form is free verse and philosophical or political verse is rare. Although the poets all have recognizable voices, the collection is dominated by intense lyric poetry, which is heavily descriptive, with a tendency to rhetorical density. Because of this, I think there may be some parallels with the poetry of the 1940's (Thomas, Watkins, Graham) although clearly there are some points of contrast as well. Naturally, there are some very fine poets included , some of whose reputations will be enhanced by the opportunity to compare them with their peers (I think particularly of Sasha Dugdale, whose poems in this anthology strike me as much wilder and more dislocating than they do in her collections, and Vona Groarke, who if she were older would have been a suitable companion to Derek Mahon in CBP). I am glad to see the inclusion of fine poets like Sarah Corbett and Julian Turner, and equally glad to note the absence of over-rated ones like Kathryn Simmons and Caroline Bird. However, I do not understand why Tim Liardet was not included, and I am sure that there are others who could justifiably complain about their exclusion. Perhaps it is inevitable that some good poets will get left out, but I regret that this may effect their future reputation and sales.

Notwithstanding the number of women poets in the anthology, I also have reservations about its claim to inclusiveness. The editor expressly excludes writers who were over 55 when their first book was published (which is direct age discrimination, though probably not justiciable because the production of a poetry anthology is unlikely to be the provision of a service to the poets who might wish to be included in it - so probably not unlawful, just a crass decision). The minority ethnic writers in the anthology reflect the code/language/idiom-mixing of ethnic diasporas, but there is nothing to compare with the rise of dub poetry in the 1980s. This is poetry written ABOUT black and asian people, and there is often an element of satire in it, albeit affectionate satire. Nowhere will you find anything influenced by rap.

Arguably, what we have is a snapshop of the new metropolitan arty middle class, slightly more ethnically diverse than before, with more women participating visibly within it. But somehow the social and intellectual milieu it reveals seems narrow. Nevertheless, there are some great poems in the anthology, which are worth reading, and I can't think of one poet in it whose work I haven't enjoyed stumbling across.

Discovery! C K Williams in Manchester

2010-10-09T21:28:00.006+01:00

On 4 October 2010, I went to a reading by C K Williams in the Manchester literatue festival with my friend, Heather, a Canadian - invited, I suppose, because she is a North American, extremely bright and likely to be in tune with Williams's ethical concerns (a literary way of saying the uncomfortable 'p' word, POLITICAL).

I'd read a couple of poems by Williams and I loved the way his poetry modulates through an experience touching on thoughts and analysis as well as emotion, but in a way which stems from the experience at the root of the poem, not as comment upon it. What amazed me at the reading was also his capacity for empathy. He is an existential poet because his poetry is about existence and the choices which underlie it. Somehow this approach enables him to write political and philosophical poetry AND love poetry, although of course there's no reason why those categories are mutually exclusive. Indeed, their interweaving reminds me of 17th century metaphysical poetry.

There's some good reviews by Michael Hofman and Chase Twitchell on the amazon site: these say as much as I could, rather more elegantly.

Anyway, I've ordered a collected poems from the USA in hardback at half the price of the paperback in this country and I can't wait till it comes.

And Heather, who isn't a big poetry fan like me really loved the evening, which made it even better!

Old Fart? Derek Mahon's new collection

2010-09-24T22:23:00.009+01:00

Derek Mahon's new collection of poetry left me in two minds. On the one hand, he can craft poems with deceptive ease which explore their subjects with intelligence, wit and sensitivity. On the other hand, he's swallowed anti-globalisation politics, and he expresses its reactionary mind-set in heavy-handed didactic verse using tired tropes. Its strongest points are the translations and the final section, where he seems to be translating the 'fictitious Hindi poet Gopal Singh'; its weakest when he's being himself.

The collection begins with a striking translation/ adaption of Homer. Like Heaney, he uses colloquial idiomatic phrases to make formal poetry sound as if it is form of speech. The selection is also appropriate because the poem is about the beginning of a return, and many poems in the collection refer to this idea, whether it be in relation to Hindu philosophy or his own life, in retirement.

Blueprint, the next poem, is an ode is three parts which contrasts city and country. Capitalism is failing and we need to 're-enchant the world'. There's some clumsy didactic writing in it and the ideas within it are too leaden to rescue it from its stylistic failings.

A Quiet Spot which follows gives the game away. Mahon's retired to the sea side and has turned his back on cosmopolitan life. There's some sentimentality in the poem but I think he carries it off, Gaia reference and all, because of his mix of traditional regular verse forms and contemporary vocabulary. In case, you were wondering why I called him reactionary, he exhorts his audience 'to create a future from the past', echoing the theme of return which appears in many guises throughout this collection.

The Thunder Shower is one of the weakest poems in the collection. The Poulenc and Brahms of rain is contrasted with 'bits of recorded pop and rock' which emanate from the city. I'll try not to mention the 'tiny voices in a creche/ piercing the muggy air'. I'll pass by the fact that Poulenc is 'plinky' and Brahms is 'groaning'. On the plus side, Mahon does try to offer a critique of neo-con madness, but in my view, a good political poem needs nuance and subtlety, and this has neither, although it isn't as chronically bad as World Trade Talks:

Next spring, when a new crop begins to grow,

let it not be genetically modifed

but such as the ancients sowed

in the old days.

When I read stuff like this I really get a sense of Mahon looking out at sea from a house paid for by a generous public sector pension cursing the rest of us for our materialism and waste. And I just want to quote one of his great poems from the 1970's, Afterlives: What middle-class cunts we are and leave him to chew on that.

Beached Whale is a lot better although it is slightly marred by the random attribution of an afterlife consciousness to the dead beast:

Dead of some strange respiratory disease
............................................................
she knows we aim to make a study of her.

Sorry, that just doesn't wash (lol)!

Thankfully, the poems in this section do get better as you go on. At the Butler Arms and Sceilig Bay benefit from focussing on historical subjects. Art and Reality is addressed to the dead poet, James Simmons, and is the sort of far-reaching verse letter Mahon excels in writing. Everything is concrete, even those most high-minded of abstractions 'reality' and 'art', with Simmons and Mahon playing these parts respectively in a dispute 'in the Longley's house'. OK, so on the face of it this may sound like name dropping, but I read this as intimate chat within which we're all neighbours. The same epistleory format is used in the impressive Under the Volcano, which veers from observation, to references to histocial fact, geographical information and speculative thinking. This may not sound very poetic but what I think Mahon is doing is attempting to be Homeric by including lots of stuff in poetry which usually gets left out of the contemporary lyric. The poem itself is in danger at points of becoming another one of his dreadful eco-poems but it's rescued by the way he contrasts nature's chaos with his own 'rage for order'. Ultimately, the salvation of philosophical poetry is complexity, ambivalence and ambiguity (indeed, if you're perfectly clear about something you might as well write an essay, or blog).

Possibly the best poem in this section is Autumn Skies. This starts off in history and moves on to the here and now, with a spiritual vision and a comment on the peace process, which is particularly moving coming from one of the greatest poets of 'the Troubles'. Its key lines, and perhaps the key lines of the collection are:

If a thing happens once
it happens forever

The cheekist and most brilliant lines are these on the intellectual tuition provided by rugby:

learning from the scrum/how to advance against/the exigencies of form

The next section contains some marvellously lucid yet down-to-earth translations of Chinese poets, including Tu Fu. They are quite different from David Hinton's intense free verse renderings. Somehow they manage to be both Northern Irish and Chinese

As you'd expect, we are too poor for wine/ but somewhere I've got a drop of the old moonshine

These translations can be impish but more often than not they are beautiful, melancholy and wise. Autumn Fields is probably the key to Mahon's own state of mind. Although the poem is an authentic translations (at least the subject matter is very similar to Hinton's) the tone is Mahon's. The key lines are:

An autumn wind shivers my walking stick/ but peace of mind resides in ferns, flowers

The last section is, in my opinion, the best and most original. They deal with the questions of development and tradition that Mahon is interested in, but being Indian, the spiritual is a bit more everyday and taken a little less seriously. Thus in Dharma Bums, Western kids on the eastern spiritual trail

.....sit like tramps/ beside the road,/ each on a dusty bum,/ when they should be at home in advertising.

Advertising the benefits/ of our spirituality -/ Ganesh the god of profit,/ Sarawati the celebrant of it,/ Rama of many dominions/ and Krishna, 'brighter than a thousand suns'.

Habitually Brilliant: The Later Poetry of W.H. Auden

2010-07-31T17:48:00.008+01:00

In May, I saw Richard Griffiths as W.H. Auden in Alan Bennett's new play, The Habit of Art. I don't intend to review that play now except to say that I enjoyed it immensely and was impressed by Bennett's wit, versatility and stage craft and Griffiths's acting. I hope the play goes on to establish Auden as a great character as well as a great poet.

However, its underlying premise about Auden's later poetry annoyed me: in the programme, Bennett claimed that in his later years Auden stopped being a poet and just wrote bits of his witty conversation down in verse. Images replaced by references. Visions by chat. That sort of thing. This is a softer version of the view famously expressed by Larkin in his essay 'What's become of Wystan?'. Subsequently, I suspect Larkin revised this view a little because he included Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno (writeen in 1958, only 15 years before Auden's death) in the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse.

I certainly do not share either Bennett's or Larkin's views on the later Auden. Instead I think Auden wrote some of his best work - indeed arguably his most valuable and enduringly relevant - in the last 20 years of his life. His work has a particular resonance for our post-modern times - its reflective intimacy, irony and humility mirrors the increasing diversity of modern society and the decline of grand narrative ideologies by positioning the subject in his own private idiosyncratic sphere.

What Auden most values in his later verse is the space to be himself. He seems to have believed that he was becoming more reactionary with age (in fact his 1946 poem Under Which Lyre was subtitled A Reactionary Tract for the Times). In fact, his abandonment of the politics of the Old Left in favour of a richer and more nuanced liberalism can be seen as avant garde. As a gay man, his search for privacy is closely related to the equality and human rights agenda which is now the terrain (albeit a contested one) of social democrats, liberals and, in the UK, progressive Conservatives alike. What his later poetry lacks is the unconvincing concern for the working class which invades some of his earlier work (he never engaged with actual working class people and his poetry always hits a false note when he tries to show concern for the poor or financial inequality and powerlessness). Instead, his later poetry pits the individual voice against its historical context. Arguably the later Auden explores more convincingly the earlier Auden's concerns about time and politics versus human relationships:

It's natural the Boys should whoop it up for
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
it would not have occurred to women
to think worthwhile, made possible only

because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
the exact time..................................

Our apparatniks will continue making
the usual squalid mess called History:
all we can pray for is that artists,
chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
(Moon Landing)

His refusal to indulge in America's Cold War populist celebration of technical superiority and his contemptuous reference to apparatniks (applied to both sides) places him in a very dissident position. He even draws on radical feminism whilst referencing more old-fashioned gendered notions about the proclivities of men and women by saying that men are 'more facile/ at courage than kindness'. (Facile as in facility and as in superficial and easily achieved, clever stuff!)

Of course, all this is very well and good but the question remains: is this sort of stuff vivid and does it have a life of its own - the inner animation of all good poetry? I do acknowledge that some of the later verse is ramshackle and has a tendency to ramble but the best verse is fluid in thought and prosodic movement. Unfortunately, this fluidity makes it difficult to quote, particularly as Auden developed a taste for litotes in later life:

Our hill has made its submission and the green
swept on into the north: around me,
from morning to night, flowers dual incessantly,
colour against colour, in combats

which they all win, and at any hour from some point else
may come another tribal outcry
of a new generation of birds who chirp,
not for effect but because chirping

is the thing to do...........

The poem goes on to contrast the natural world with the human, to place the new testament doctrine of forgiveness as concomitant on our mortality and the occasional truth of gossip (still thinking about that one) before describing the goddess Clio. His lightness of tone in the later passages in the poem are touched by melancholy wisdom (to throw away/ the tiniest fault of someone we love/ is out of the question) and yet this big baggy creation somehow makes sense encompassing as it does such a huge variety of reflections upon both collective and individual experience.

His interests are biological, anthropological, geographical and historical. Ideas are animated and landscapes personalised. Inevitably, there are more and more poems about bodily decline:

For many years you envied
the hisute, the he-man type.
No longer: no you fondle
your almost feminine flesh
with mettled satisfaction,
imagining that you are
sinless and all-sufficient,
snug in the den of yourself.
(Lullaby)

Like all decent poets, he makes the general specific. In one of his last poems, Talking to Myself, he compares the body politic to his actual body and concludes

All states we've lived in, or historians tell of,
have had shocking health, psychoso matic cases,
physicked by scientists or glozing expensive quacks.
When I read the papers, You seem an Adonis.

The later Auden is funny, wise, humane, infuriating and colourful. His latter work includes successes and failures, but it is the culmination of his career, and not a reflection of failing powers. Read it, without prejudice.

Planisphere by John Ashbery

2010-03-20T23:35:00.002Z

When I read Ashbery’s later selected poems, ‘Notes from the Air’, I began to have doubts about a poet whom I had thought of as perhaps the greatest living poet in English. His poems were so open that they all began to feel as if they were about everything and nothing in particular. In fact, they all began to feel a little bit samey.

Notwithstanding this, his latest collections, ‘A Worldly Country’ and Planisphere’, have proved to be delightful reads. Clearly, Asbery does not benefit from over-exposure.

Rather than write an academic piece, I thought I’d provide a list of reactions/ thoughts which I tend to have to his poems in ‘Planisphere’. The list is non-exhaustive, but many of his poems tend to hit a number of the items on the list below.

• Modern slang/ jargon ‘maxed out’, even swears colloquially (‘For Fuck’s Sake’). Best title of poem ever: ‘um’
• Opens in middle of conversations ‘such an attractive idea’
• Epigrams which don’t refer to anything in particular – or nothing at least you’re likely to know about - but which feel totally exact
• Parody of epigrams
• Sense of imperial (turning post imperial) guilt (less so perhaps than the previous collection ‘A Worldly Country’)
• Jokey, super modernity

Spray on sex, he botanized.
That could never happen.

He is being held by Egyptian matrons.

• Direct address
• Sense of time passing, regret
• Poems feel whole but are in fact often a series of non sequiters, some of which gesture in similar directions
• Naughty bo-ho snidey observations: ‘God-fearing, ass-wearing blokes’
• Funny, playful
• A few poems have identifiable subjects
• Wit about people, time, language ‘the acrostic lost its apples’
• Self-deprecating persona
• Striking poetic effects, using personification and concretizing the abstract
• Some references to God, not exactly respectful – rueful – perhaps, but not blasphemous
• Obvious debt to later Auden, without the need to explain, but the manner, the (off) bearing the same(ish)
• Sometimes I just don’t care what it means, or if it actually means anything at all, it just feels right, like a box you can keep bringing ideas from: I’d/ expected the new bill/ to be unbreakable. Like marble./ Instead: handheld/ receivership’

Favourite Collections

2010-03-07T13:39:00.002Z

Usually I write reviews of poetry collections which takes a lot of energy and commitment. Today I thought I'd do something a little more fun and compile a short 'Desert Island Disc' list of contemporary poetry books I really rate. By contemporary, I generally mean published in the last 5 years although I accept the definition might apply over at least the last 25 years:

Derek Mahon - Harbour Lights
Geoffrey Hill - Without Title
Julia Darling - Apology for Absence
Geoff Hattersley - Back of Beyond
Paul Muldoon - Horse Latitudes
Hugo Williams - West End Final
Alice Oswald - Woods etc.
Charles Tomlinson - Cracks in the Universe
John Ashbery - A Worldly Country
Michael Haslam - A Sinner Saved by Grace
Patrick McGuiness - The Canals of Mars
Selima Hill - Gloria
Matthew Welton - The Book of Matthew
Roy Fisher - The Long and the Short of It
John Ash - The Parthian Stations
Louise Gluck - Averno
Mahmoud Darwish - The Butterfly's Burden
Steven Waling - Travelator

David Attenborough, I think not!

2010-03-06T22:43:00.000Z

As you can see, Derek Mahon’s latest collection (Life on Earth, Gallery Press 2008) passed me by somewhat. Perhaps I saw the title and mixed it up with book of the more famous TV series. Unlike that epochal venture, this is on the whole a slight collection. In my view, I have to add that some of the poems are weak and pretentious: e.g.

She sits there tinkering with an ice-cream
...............................................................
She wears a hat, gloves and a frilly blouse
................................................................
If only time could stop like this before
life choices, childbirth and the coming war.
(An Ice-Cream at Caproni’s)

We are not talking William Carlos Williams here. The last line is about as subtle as a hurling stick and entirely made up of abstract noun phrases. This is bad writing, pure and simple.

Others are marred by cliché and prosaic generalisations. For instance, in Biographia Literaria, we are told that Coleridge had:

a troubled soul torn between fear and rage

(You don’t say, Derek). If you’re going to write this sort of verse, and I’m a fan of thinking poetry, then the thoughts have to be novel, deft and interesting. Otherwise, what you end up with is heavy-handed doggerel (i.e. a bit like Eskimo Nell but nowhere near as entertaining). If you want an example of how this sort of thing can be done well, look up For Danton by Charles Tomlinson.

Thankfully, there are a number of specimens of novel, deft and interesting verse in this collection, not least in the collection of 9 poems in rhyming quatrains, collectively entitled Homage to Gaia. This includes an Ode to Bjork, which is really good and surprising from the old fella. I mean, he has always struck me as militantly high brow. Suddenly, I have to revise my image of him in his library re-reading Robert Graves’s Myths of the Ancient Greeks and translations of Basho. Now, I have to add to my thoughts that whilst he’s doing that, he may be listening to Venus as a Boy and not to the piano music of Robert Schumann. That just shows, you should never underestimate the man.

It will not have escaped the notice of my readers (or should I say, reader, Hi, there) that the collection has a few Green bits in it. In fact, Mahon seems to have fallen in with Green thinking hook, line and dolphin-friendly sinker. There’s mention of solar panels, helium air ships, and various references to the tell-tale signs of environmental catastrophe, which we are all happily ignoring in the hope that we’ll keep our jobs not doing anything you can really put your finger on.

He also seems to be engaged with ideas about cycles of natural re-birth – this has a sort of New Age-y spirituality about it. It feels a long way from the young firebrand who once wrote so vividly about ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland e.g.

We hunted the mad bastard
Through bog, moorland, rock and the star-lit west
And gunned him down in a blind yard
Between ten sleeping lorries
And an electricity generator
(As It Should Be)

Or the guy who mixed traditional poetry with resonant references to modernity, creating unique registers which make some of his work, unforgettable:

You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!
(A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford)

Mahon has moved on – in some ways very radically in this engaged new collection - but sometimes there are echoes of the past, when he mixes registers, drawing on the dialect of his urban Northern Irish background to lend the verse more saltiness:
Once a tomato sandwich
And a pint of stout would do
but them days are over
(At Ursula’s)

There are poems, like Insomnia, which are as alive as anything he’s ever done, absorbing precise sensory impressions (‘Boats knock and click at the pier/ shrimps worship the stars.), incorporating the demotic (‘That woman from/ the Seaview, a ‘blow-in’/of some kind from a foreign shore) and opening up on ideas rooted in the environment of the poem (a soul screams/for sunken origins, for the obscure sea bed/ and glowing depths, the alternative mud haven/we left behind). The last poem, Homage to Goa, sums up, in wry, precise and vivid terms his own, slightly detached, engagement with metaphysical notions of reincarnation:

Given a choice of worlds, here or beyond,
I’d pick this one not once but many times
whether as mozzie, monkey or pure mind.
The road to enlightenment runs past the house
with its auto-rickshaws and its dreamy cows
but the fans, like the galaxies, go round and round.

This is thinking poetry of the highest order.

The New Rosemary Tonks: Emma Jones, The Striped World

2010-02-20T22:19:00.003Z

When I was reading Emma Jones's admired first collection The Striped World, a few stylistic features put me in mind of the poet Rosemary Tonks, who mysteriously disappeared in the early 70's after joining an unorthodox (i.e. weird) Christian sect.

They're both really self-conscious and they use dislocating metaphor - far-flung connections, multi-layered, and functioning through the use of adjectives and verbs as well as nouns:

When the sun,that gradual sepoy
rose, then clouds occurred

Your heart, greedy and tepid, brothel-meat,
Gulped it

There are differences as well. Tonks exhibits a self-conscious bohemianism whereas Jones has imbibed post colonial literary theory.

In Jones's work, I also sense the influence of Dylan Thomas. In Zoo for the Dead, there are tropes of diving, and discovery and dream-like narrative transformations which remind me of The Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait.

Jones is also a much more philosophical poet:

.............Why say
'innocence ends' when the same

blue bird beats in the chest

It's definitely worth getting.

The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry edited by Jeet Thayil £12

2009-09-27T22:05:00.002+01:00

This is not a review. Sometimes poetry books don’t lend themselves to definitive judgements. Particularly anthologies, which cover so many different experiences and styles. If they’re really good, and this one is, they become more like an old friend. You don’t necessarily agree with everything they have to say, or how they say it, but when you meet, you feel a deep sense of engagement. Sometimes you can go for ages without reading them, but when you do, there’s no sense of discontinuity.
This anthology, which extracts from the familiar and the obscure, places side by side one of the world’s most energetic but disparate diasporas. For the first time in the UK, we have an anthology which juxtaposes Kamala Das with Vikram Seth, Kolaktar with Daljit Nagra. Styles are either modernist/ post-modernist or brilliantly traditional (e.g. Nagra’s almost Kiplingesque light verse in the mixed codes on Hindi English and Seth’s elegant narratives). Backgrounds range from Zoroastrian priest to marketing executive, sometimes that might even be the same person! One of the joys of this book is that each writer is introduced briefly by the editor so you get a sense of the remarkable communities which have informed the writing of the poets contained in this volume. Generally, speaking, there are Indian writers who increasingly seem to be part of the New Capitalism of graphic designers and public relations consultants. Then there are the American academics and the British poets, the latter engaged with the very particular struggle against racism and stereotyping, though please would someone explain why Moniza Alvi is missing, please (OK! OK! She’s of Pakistani origin but hey, let’s not be sectarian!).
I want to avoid the cliche about everything Indian being essentially various. But I would dare to venture there may be a sort of openness in the verse in this volume - whether it touches on sex or badminton or politics or love or history or philosophy - which is characteristic. When you read it, you are not left with a sense that the poets were playing safe when they were writing their verse, they do not edit out their passions or ideas, which is why the book is exciting, and why it is a friend and companion.

Charles Tomlinson: New Collected Poems

2009-09-13T21:35:00.000+01:00

Charles Tomlinson is one of the best poets to have written in English over the last 50 years, but his work rarely seems to attract the attention it deserves. A poet who often focuses on observation and description, interrogating the concept of viewpoint, he also writes poems about music, people and history and seems genuinely engaged with left-wing revolutionary politics, which captures his imagination, if not, entirely, his approval.

To mark the publication of his New Collected Poems, I thought I'd write about a poem I came across recently which expresses the tragic but heroic history of revolutionary failure in the 20th century. It's called - appropriately enough - 'Prometheus'. There are three elements in the poem: a Summer storm, the revolutionary piece of music by the Russian composer Scriabin which gives the poem its title and the poet's reflections on what took place in Russia after Prometheus was written.

These elements and the reasonably regular 6 line stanzas make the poem into an Ode. Think of Coleridge's Dejection - an Ode for a comparison.

There are a number 0f features in the poem (personification, periphrasis, juxtaposition) which challenge the reader. In some ways, it is fairly traditional poetry, but it is not accessible like Larkin:

Cymballed fireseeps. Prometheus came down
In more than orchestral flame and Kerensky fled
Before it..........

However, the great men have now departed and we live in a more pluralistic, kinder, less interesting time:

History treads out the music of your dreams
Through blood, and cannot close like this
................................................it stops. The trees
Continue raining though the rain has ceased
In a cooled world of incessant codas.

Reality is not like the romantic dreams of Scriabin or Lenin who wrote 'the daily prose such poetry prepares for'. Instead of an ending which provides some sort of culmination there is anti-climax and continuation, in the form of the English traditional tune, Greensleeves, played on the bell of an ice cream van:

...an ice cream van circulates the estate
Playing Greensleeves, and at the city's
Stale new frontier even ugliness
Rules with the cruel mercy of solidities.

Not an easy poet to read then ... he doesn't adopt the saloon bar matiness of Larkin, yet in his seriousness and variety, he is in a sense more like a Victorian than the reactionary Larkin, who hated everything modern.

If the New Collected Poems seems to be too demanding a place to begin, try the Poetry Archive site and listen to Tomlinson reading from his work, including the beautiful, moving and restrained poem, entitled, 'The Door'.

It's a Bomber! Zeppelins by Chris McCabe

2009-09-02T20:56:00.000+01:00

There is a view that modern poetry is written by a small, self-reviewing clique, which is highly critical of outsiders but praises mediocre work highly if it is written in an approved style by 'one of us'. Personally, I think that this view is too simplistic. There is a lot of very good contemporary poetry which should be more widely read. However, there is a grain of truth in it too.

Take, for instance, Chris McCabe's second collection, Zeppelins (Salt hardback, £12.99). This was praised by Poetry London, which I think was a pity because a talented and original poet - who works in London for the Poetry Library - has taken a wrong turning and needs some critcism to get his work back on the right track.

McCabe's first collection, The Hutton Inquiry, is a must-buy book which is likely to be seen as a signature collection for the age which is just (sadly imho) passing: New Labour's attempt to reconstruct Britain around a progressive consensus. This fell apart partly as a result of the foolish decision to join in with Bush's invasion of Iraq but also because it was based on an uncritical acceptance of modern neo-liberal capitalism. McCabe picked up on this at just the right time - when the 'chattering classes' were beginning to turn on Blair and Blairism.

Clearly influenced by the New York school of poetry (and maybe poets like Charles Olson?), McCabe's style was both immediate and highly intellectual. Here were ringing phrases reflecting an well-educated and eclectic mind in action (and reaction) to the events around him (or to his own random associations). For instance, in the poem #255:darwin, the subject rolls forward accruing ideas which are vividly and directly expressed:

greatest mystery
story ever
inquisitorial simulacrum
copies of copies
without a template
even and squatting
twelve inches in front
a train speeds
...........
epiphanies of gulls
grandchildren
sliding down
history's banister

Whilst there are still poems written with a similar wit and energy in his second collection, there are also some idle stinkers, the worst of which is his poem about getting married, The Nuptials, which includes a cute little doodle and lines like these:

I write each night
as you take your bath

the poured rioja
connects us together -

"We're having a great holiday
aren't we?"

Strangely (or should I say, entirely predictably) his wife never actually materialises as a person in the poem at all although she does get compared to a Greek goddess (yawn):

like Aphrodite was back
against the tide of fashion

This is jigsaw poetry with bits missing. The pieces supplied by the poet are supposedly witty and vivid and we, the readers, are supposed to be spurred into completing the scenes in our head. Unfortunately, I find that increasingly the poet's pieces are pedestrian or pretentious, or both:

life is good
but the rules
don't work,
make up
your own
and never live
by them
(Poems Overhead)

The best piece of advice to give McCabe is to keep on writing but stop publishing so much. He may have to find a mature style and perhaps a little self-doubt might ultimately assist him in doing so. Perhaps the powerful title poem shows the way ahead and I like to energy and confessional reflectiveness in Dovecot, Liverpool, one of a number of sonnets with some very good features.

Briggflatts by Basil Bunting: a new edition by Bloodaxe with DVD and CD

2009-07-31T22:01:00.000+01:00

If you don't have this magnificent book, buy it. For £12, you get Basil Bunting's masterpiece, Briggflatts, a collection of short readable pieces about Bunting's colourful life and the poem, a DVD of a film made for Channel 4 in 1982 about Bunting (which simply wouldn't be made by that channel these days, proof positive of dumbing down big style) and a CD of the poet reading the poem in his gruff Northumberland accent (the 'r's are rolled at the top of the throat).

Annoyed by critical speculation about the 'meaning' of the poem, Bunting composed an entertaining note to set the record straight. Like the poetry, it is simultaneously authoritative and slyly elusive. he explains the scheme of the poem and then asserts: All old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom. No poem is profound

Given Bunting's irritation at the thought of critical dissection, I hesitate to put forward my thoughts about the poem except as a brief record of my experience of reading it to date, assisted by the film and Bunting's own reading.

For me, the poem reflects a sense of mortal transience set against the flinty longevity of Northumbrian English, the often harsh but sometimes lovely landscape of the far North of England and the power and wildness of the sea. It also encapsulates criticial moments from Bunting's own life in Northumberland, London, Italy and the Middle East. You will also find nuggets of history there, most memorably, the story of Eric Bloodaxe. Underlying this rich compost is a 50 year old love affair which the narrator in the poem (presumbaly Bunting) failed to pursue. It is therefore also a poem of regret and acceptance.

Somehow the poet manages to recreate in modern English, the sense of Old English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon and perhaps Norse) verse. Some of it is reminscent of the poem, so wonderfully translated by Bunting's friend, Ezra Pound, The Seafarer and of course Anglo-Saxon verse in particular was concerned with crisis, transience, loss and failure. But it's the sound of the lines which revive the dynamics of Old English verse, like these:

Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.

However, the fluidity of the subject matter gives the poem a Modernist (and Post Modernist)feel.

Collected Poems by Michael Donaghy with an introduction by Sean O'Brien (O'Wow) published by Picador

2009-07-20T20:51:00.000+01:00

This substantial but portable hardback is a bargain at £12.99. The first thing that you may notice about it (assuming that you don't have a visual impairment) is the dust cover, from which the author peers, with an intense, if slightly psychotic stare, enhanced by the fact that the top of his head and chin have been cropped off the image.

Given Eva Saltzman's revelations in the lastest edition of Poetry London about the author's love of raves, garage and house music, I can't help feeling that the possessed stare might have some sort of chemical basis. If his regrettably early death in 2005 from cancer was hastened by drugs, then that adds to a long list of people whose lives were irreparably damaged by the desperate hedonism and DIY communitarianism of the 90's rave scene.

The intensity of the cover is mirrored by the contents of the book, which has a useful introduction by Sean O'Brien, which manages to be, by turns, authoritative, tub thumping, subtle, perceptive and opaque ( a polite civil service term for 'being up your own arse', as we say in Yorkshire). This is followed by Donaghy's 4 published collections and some uncollected poems right at the end. Unfortunately, there is no first line index or index of titles.

O'Brien points out that the best poems are influenced by John Donne or Browning (or Eliot in Portrait of a Lady). The poetry is unusual in having both intellectual scope and a tendency to rhyme. I think O'Brien is wrong to say that it completely avoids the dull autobiography of so much modern verse. From time to time Donaghy dabbles around in his Irish-American identity so he can write poems about his Mum.

He often writes about failed seductions or tries the odd seduction poem out and does a pretty good job of it. Not an easy task for someone to complete successfully in the late 20th century, but he has a much more limited emotional range than Donne - or even Robert Graves for that matter, whose love poems are just as clever whilst demonstrating a little more maturity. Sadly, maturity was beginning to display itself in his last collection, Safest, which he wrote when he knew he was gravely sick and dying, though not a maturity which destroys his playfulness and zest:

Don't worry. I gave the dancing monkey your suicide note.
Was it something important? How was I to know?
He's probably torn it to pieces now or eaten it
or substituted every word for one adacent in the dictionary
(Hazards)

What I love his poetry for is its polish, its fertile imagistic invention and his ability to start with a great first line, or from an odd perspective. Apparently, he had some difficulties getting poetry magazine editors to publish his work - possibly because he never mastered the Zen art of taking everything you might be interested to read in a poem out of it. However, neither is he didactic nor does he use his poems as a vehicle to dump trite thoughts or emotions on the reader.

Enough of my interpretation ... if you want comment, buy the book and read O'Brien's chewy (but largely digestible) introduction. Then get stuck into the poems, which form one of the best dessert selections you're ever likely to come across. Here's some great lines to whet your appetite:

We shared a dream beneath
a dream-beneath-a-dream.
Our tears became a storm
that washed away our names
and our voices blended with the rain's.
(5:00/5:10/5:15)

I touch the cold flesh of a God in the V and A,
the guard asleep in his chair, and I'm shocked
to find it's plaster. These are the reproduction rooms,
where the David stands side by side with the Moses
and Trajan's column (in two halves).
It reminds me of the inventory sequence in Citizen Kane.
It reminds me of an evening twenty years ago.
(Erratum)

Me, I heard a throaty click at the end of 'wedlock'.
And Niagara on the long distance line.
(Cage)

And if you're still not convinced, try The Raindial on page 108 or Music and Sex and Drinking on page 14, for the re-introduction of the Renaissance 'conceit' into English(ish) poetry

The Mystery revealed

2009-06-30T21:21:00.000+01:00

You may wonder why there is a photo of Soviet public art at the top of this blog (in fact, it's the monument to the dead who fell in 'The Great Patriotic War' which can be found in Riga, Latvia).

The following link to a poem of mine published in nthposition may help to explain why:

http://www.nthposition.com/theforgottenwhereabouts.php

Unfortunately, I haven't had time this month to write a review but hope to next month. So you'll have to suffer one of mine!

Indian Poetry in English: Jejuri by Arun Kolatkar

2009-05-23T11:42:00.000+01:00

I bought this volume in the Bloomsbury branch of Waterstones. The edition I got was published by the New York Review of Books and, I'm sorry to say, was in a cut-price sale. Talk about bargains, though! Originally written in English, Jejuri is a masterpiece of contemporary Indian poetry and my edition also contains an illuminating, engaging and erudite biographical and critical account of Kolatkar's work, written by Amit Chaudhuri, a distinguished author from a younger generation, who has already won the Commonwealth Writer's prize.

The work is post-modern in its irony and detachment, but don't let that put you off: Kolatkar is vivid, immediate and funny. Whilst not didactic, there is plenty of sly comment on religion and priests in particular (one is described as having 'a lazy lizard stare').

Chaudhuri's introduction says more about the poet and his book, better than I could ever hope to, but I do have some small observations for you, if you will do me the favour of reading them.

The first point to make is that the collection is really a sequence of poems which present some snapshots of one person's pilgrimage (or visit, since the narrator does not appear to be overwhelmed by conviction) to a religious shrine. Generally, the kind of poetry Kolatkar writes can be observational, almost off-hand at times:

That's no doorstep.
It's a pillar on its side.

Yes.
That's what it is.
(The Doorstep).

Often there is a narrative element:

The door was open.
Manohar thought
it was one more temple.
(Manohar)

At other times, the poems can be like little allegories (think Ted Hughes in Remains of Elmet, but with a sense of humour):

sweet as grapes
are the stones of jejuri
said chaitanya

he popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods
(Chaitanya - there are a number of poems with this title in the book, perhaps the collection is organised around musical principles like Eliot's work)

Kolatkar uses a number of rhetorical devices, which give his short lines intensity and focus - qualities which he usually manages to display at the same time as being humorous. These seem to involve mixing up abstract and concrete elements:

a herd of legends
on a hill slope
(Chatanya - a different version from the one quoted above)

Kolatkar's comments on religion are sly and cheeky but he seems to show how religious thinking has permeated and shaped every aspect of Indian life. Thus, at the end, when he describes the somewhat haphazard railway station from where the narrator intends to make his return journey, he states that:

the booking clerk believes in the doctrine
of the next train
(The Railway Station)

Linking in with the appearance and reality theme of The Doorstep, he seems to be saying that the imagination transforms this rocky tumbledown place into the stuff of dreams and legend. Scratch a rock, he says, and a legend springs.

Ultimately, the poem is affirmative and the last image, if I'm not mistaken, is taken from the Indian flag:

the setting sun
touches upon the horizon
at a point where the rails
like the parallels
of a prophecy
appear to meet

the setting sun
large as a wheel
(The Railway Station)

This may contain an element of irony but it is allied to affection and a deep sense of loyalty. I enjoyed this book very much indeed and note that Bloodaxe have just published an anthology of contemporary Indian poets who write in English. Thanks to Jejuri, I shall certainly be getting it.

Six Czech Poets: ed. Alexandra Buchler. Arc Publications £10.99

2009-04-17T22:31:00.000+01:00

Petr Borkovec, Viola Fischerova, Petr Halmay, Zbynek Hejda, Pavel Kolmacka, Katerina Rudcenkova. (The photograph to the left shows my one year old daughter holding the book, which she finds particularly attractive, blowing a raspberry)

This is one in a series of interesting books presenting poetry from Eastern Europe and the Basque country. The editor, Alexandra Buchler, contributes a helpful and engaging introduction which places the poets represented in the volume firmly within mainstream Czech cultural traditions. However, the introduction is not simply informative; it is also a stimulating polemic, which criticises the focus in the West on the poetry of the Czech poet Miroslav Holub, whose work, we are told, is not at all typical of the kind of verse written in the Czech Republic. Holub's work is described - somewhat perjoratively - as 'cerebal poetry of linear thought ... and easy-to-decipher allegories'. Some of the poets in this volume began writing under Communism; others emerged after the Velvet Revolution and the fall of Communism but all of them tend to write descriptive or lyrical poetry, with emotive undertones, in a pared down though sometimes slightly melodramatic style.

I can't say that I am excited by their work as I was by Holub's or by David Huerta's for that matter. However, 3 of the poets are growing on me:

Viola Fischerova writes surreal poetry grounded in keen observation. The poetry in this volume concerns old women and mother-daughter relationships:

But they elude us
those old women of dust
and sackcloth

Dried in baths
by robust
handsome dead
husbands

those old women
with crimpled faces
no longer recognised
even by the mirror

those old women
calmly
reflected
in themselves

Pavel Kolmacka writes subtly metaphysical verse in a spare style, which speaks of the pain the Czech people accumulated through the 20th century:

What kind of dream have we awoken from?
Late afternoon, end of the century.
In the dark kitchen again, awkward, trapped.
What kind of dream have we found ourselves in?

The viewpoint of this poet seems to me to be based on St Paul in Romans Chapter 8, verses 18 - 25, when Paul famously says that 'creation groaneth and travaileth in pain .. And not only they, but ourselves also ... groan within ourselves, waiting .. for the redemption of our body'

Finally, Petr Borkovec also struck me as someone whose work will grow on me. I had the good fortune to hear him read along with his translator from his new volume of selected poems, which was published by Seren recently. He seems to write pastoral or domestic descriptions which are troubled by the ghosts of history. All his landscapes and interiors seem paradoxically immanent with history:

Outside, no plans were hatched in shadows,
and the towel, lying idle by the chair,
had the same history as us

Not All a Load of 'Hard Stag Testicles'

2009-03-29T21:28:00.000+01:00

David Huerta: Before Saying Any of the Great Words, Selected Poems, translated by Mark Schafer, published by Copper Canyon Press.

Whilst Mexican poetry is unfamiliar to most UK poetry audiences, David Huerta's poetry will not seem strange to those of us who read Lorca and Neruda in translation. It is rich in sensuous imagery, surreal, focuses on the self and the body, and suggests radical political engagement. However, it is also of our time in that it has an overt interest in French post structuralist language theory, which forms much of the subject matter of the verse. There are references in his work to Saussure, Baudrillard and Wittgenstein. The volume just published in parallel translation by Copper Canyon Press provides a generous, though not overwhelming selection, of the brilliant, entertaining and highly imaginative work of a poet whose main concerns are ontological.

This may sound abstruse (indeed, some of the verse is difficult to fully comprehend). However, the poetry's energy and engagement with the physical world makes the verse attractive and exciting to read.

The book is divided into 3 sections: early poems, extracts from Huerta's masterpiece, a long poem called Incurable and a number of the short poems he has published over the following 20 or so years.

His early work is rich and dense and there is strong sense of exploration of the body's elaborations and its exclamatory fruits. Abstruse some of the poems may be but they are evocative reflections on writing and language, which also touch on hidden narratives/ objects/ subjects (e.g. Index is also a poem about summer, which includes the unforgettable line:

summer expelled with its clammy sweat of time

Is this the end of Summer in Autumnal rain? If so, the poet is not just describing summer, but also the concept of summer in which physical manifestations reinforce the abstract implications of the concept.

Incurable is a romantic poem covering moments in the growth of the poet's consciousness of language.

what I believed was Reality was nothing but Lines

There's a distant parallel with Wordsworth's Prelude

As with Wordsworth, it is tempting to find the hyper self-consciousness of the poetry (and the poet) somewhat risible. For instance, in Chapter III, Glass Door, the poet appears to experience an intense revelation in an otherwise mundane moment: he sees hos own reflection in a glass door. If it were not for what followed, this could be read as a piece of narcissistic hyperbole. Subsequently, the poem concerns a 'you' who was beaten up by police on a demonstration but escaped through a glass door.

This returns the reader to a musical theme which reoccurs in Incurable: the image of the mirror.

Incurable begins: The world is a stain on the mirror.

This seems to refer, amongst other things, to the idea that language and reality are conventionally supposed to be mirror images (although the poet reverses - or perhaps mirrors - the convention by seeing reality as a mirror of language rather than vice versa).

In Glass Door, the section seems to culminate in the line:

The door was writing a long and misty sentence on the man.

In a sense, this is simply an imaginative way of describing a reflection, but it is striking, partly because the door (and not the man) has agency but mainly because human beings are seen as blank pages where abstract systems of language create experience. The poem is about perception and knowing - the egotistical sublime.

After Incurable, Huerta's poetry matures. The earlier stuff is full of machismo, Thirteen Propositions against Trivial Love, which should be retitled '2 or 3 really crass sexist concepts'. I suppose it's appropriate that the poem also seems to be about masturbation. Anyway, here's an example of crap sexist tripe:

frayed fertile liquid
of the woman I am not

or

my hard stag testicles

Huerta confuses sex with gender and seems only to write about relationships as occasions for personal physical fulfillment. Beyond that, the verse often becomes adolescent e.g.

He was unaware of the art of dreams
and she smeared his face with nightmares.
(Pathological Beings)

Yet, Machinery contains a beautiful abstract section about Love, achievable perhaps because he is thinking of someone other than himself: We will be equals even in pain, he declares.

As he gets older, he seems to turn to familiar subjects which involve disappointment and irony, such as our attraction to money or making mistakes. The title poem, Before Saying Any of the Great Words, is about language and summarises his views in a way which I find touchingly humble:

[silence]
that body or fabric from which
are also made the great words, time, so many things.

(Is time a great word or another item on the list? There's always more to get from these poems, and not just autobiographical or situational detail, but philosophical ideas which are important to everyone who is interested in the question, 'what is life?')

Increasingly, there is an overt Catholicism in his work, which should come as no surprise given the focus on the body and the search for the abstract in sensuous detail.

The main reason for reading this book is not the poet's philosophy but his imaginative and highly creative rendering of those things into vivid verse. The book is full of really striking images. Here are a few to whet your appetite:

And the trench of curiosity
full of bric a brac

The storehouse of words is
a strange, damp place, a discrete gallery, a hospital asleep.
(There's something about those lines which reminds me of a quite different poem: Derek Mahon's wonderful contemporary classic, 'A Disused Shed in County Wexford')

Those things happened to me, except that words came tumbling down
from the high sky of impalpable birds to my impossible depth
like knowledge or love

Revenge of 'the Other Woman': Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Assia and Shura Wevill

2009-03-07T21:29:00.000Z

Review of A Lover of Unreason: the Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev

Assia Wevill (rhymes, we are told, with devil) was the thrice married ‘other woman’ whom Ted Hughes ‘cheated’ with whilst he was still married to Sylvia Plath. Six years after Plath’s suicide, Assia took both her own life and the life of her daughter, Shura, who was the offspring of her extended relationship with the future poet laureate. This meticulously researched and well-written biography of that life is suffused with moral purpose: its avowed intention is to put Assia and Shura back where they belong, ‘beside him [Hughes].

The pre Hughes story tells the story of a bright but ‘selfish’ woman, who fled from Hitler’s Germany with her mother and father and ended up in Israel, flirting with English servicemen (including the man who would become her unfortunate first husband). Some of the most evocative passages in the book describe life in Tel Aviv during the war, before ascendant Zionism made it a puritanical hell for social (and sexual) butterflies, like Assia. Her father, a somewhat feckless doctor who specialised in physiotherapy, passed on a passion for the arts and the desire to be part of a European literary salon. Three marriages later and the beautiful Assia eventually found the man who would provide the context she had always desired in the rugged manly form of Ted Hughes. She shuttled between him and her ‘inert’ third husband, the poet David Wevill (whose own ‘feminine’ style is contrasted to that of Hughes) before finally leaving him.

Then the dumped Sylvia Plath committed suicide and by this act performed the same trick that Obi Wan Knobi did in Star Wars: she became bigger and more powerful than before. She haunted the pair of them until Assia was driven to her own death in 1969 The fact that they both lived in Plath’s flat after her suicide couldn’t have helped nor would the subsequent move to Court Green, the family home that Hughes had shared with his dead wife.

Up to this point, Assia is not presented sympathetically, although the authors always note how beautifully she looked and how tastefully she dressed. However, after Assia appeared beside Ted in the International Festival of the Spoken Word, which she helped him to organise (thus achieving her lifetime ambition to host a great literary salon), the treatment of her changes. In the last third of the biography, Assia becomes a much more sympathetic character. The authors quote extensively from her journals as they tell the story of a wronged woman, increasingly isolated by Hughes, who compulsively pursued a number of other women at the same time. Imbuing her tale with pathos, they chart her tragic fall from the heights of International Festival at the side of Ted Hughes to the time, when feeling abandoned by him, she turned on the gas taps in her London flat, placing her sleeping daughter next to her.

Meticulous and thorough, the authors provide a well-argued rationale for an act of child murder which seems incomprehensible today. Explaining the socio-psychological context by reference to academic authorities, they say that in the year of her death, there were 2000 female suicides. A significant number of those women also killed their children. The most common motive was ‘altruistic’. They wanted to protect their children from the brutal world which had driven them to despair.

The portrait of Ted Hughes presented in this biography is also striking. He appears to be some sort of philandering monster. Perhaps the ‘message’ of the biography is this: driving the suicide prone Plath beyond the brink was one thing (we all make a mess of relationships at some point after all), but to do the same thing with this bright and life-affirming woman was another completely. Hughes’s behaviour towards her was abusive. As soon as she became emotionally dependent upon him, he became more distant and mercurial, and more difficult to pin down.

Perhaps the starkest example of this self-centred disregard for women occurred to Brenda Hedden, one of the 2 other people Hughes was carrying on with whilst he was supposedly ‘with’ Assia. Whilst living with Ms Hedden after Assia’s suicide, Hughes mysteriously disappeared for a few days and returned to announce (after having vigorous sex with her) that he had married Carol Orchard, a woman half his age (and the other ‘other woman‘).

Was it really like that though? Hughes - although irresponsible, self-centred and moody - may not have been entirely to blame. The biography occasionally gives glimpses of another Assia with a possessive and violent temper. At one point, we are told that she harassed a young woman who was in a relationship with David Wevill sometime after she abandoned him for Hughes. Hughes’s own correspondence quoted in the book refers to her temper.

On balance, however, the author’s critical view of Hughes seems to be the most likely. Brenda Hedden speaks with authority when she is quoted as saying that Hughes:

was a real hunter ... when she [Assia] tried to break away ... he became motivated. But when they were together, he did terrible things ... her terrible suicide saved my life

Who cares though whether poets are moral beings or not? Hughes is dead after all and only his poetry lives on. Well, I think the authors pin this question down when they interrogate the series of poems which Hughes wrote about Assia later in his life (paralleling the poems he wrote about Plath in Birthday Letters). They put it like this:

In 1990 he published the twenty Capriccio poems, revolving around Assia. There is no mention of his own destructive forces and Assia is blamed for consciously burning herself on Sylvia’s funeral pyre ...[He goes on the suggest] she was doomed already when they met. He argued that although Assia fled Nazi Germany, she could not escape the fate of her fellow Jews

So it was her fault, or it was Hitler’s fault, but not his! The poem is revealed as a piece of his moral cowardice and his monstrous inability to accept responsibility.This is a really powerful biography whose authors have a strong sense of moral narrative (to add to this, Hughes’s mother, to whom he was devoted, is shown to have died most probably of the shock of hearing the news of Assia’s suicide and the death of Mrs Hughes’s granddaughter). The authors reconstruct the emotional lives of their subjects through combing every imaginable record, including shopping lists and calendars. In a sense, they are archaeologists bringing a long dead woman back to life, and they present a credible portrait which lingers in the mind.

One ‘ Cor! Fancy that!’ fact which the book supplies is that Assia was part of the advertising team which came up with the slogan, Mr Kipling makes exceeding good cakes. Ironically, this line is still better known than anything Ted Hughes ever wrote. Assia was a very talented creative advertiser and she was also a highly skilled translator of the great Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai (a role, incidentally, that Ted Hughes created for her). She should not be forgotten and this biography is more than good enough to resurrect her memory.

Brittle Bones by Janet Fisher

2009-02-08T20:07:00.000Z

I have 2 strongly differing reactions to Janet Fisher's new collection, Brittle Bones, published by Salt, beautifully in harback at £12.99.

The first reaction is to admire the sincerity and 'felt life' of the poems. The other is to find it mannered and derivative. It depends on how I respond to the gaps which are created in the poem for the purpose of engaging the imagination of the reader. 'Show, don't tell' is the maxim which underlines this stylisitic approach. However, sometimes you want more than you get in poems like, The Art of Politics:

They ask me what is a conservative.
I say someone who eats babies.

The poem is actually a short witty travalogue recounting a long car journey with her grandchildren, where the irritation of family life is immanent. In some ways the poem is excellent. The details in it are really well chosen but on another level I find it frustrating. Indeed, some of the poems could have been written by fellow director of The Poetry Business, Peter Sansom, who also supplies a quote on the dust cover about how good the collection is.

So, which is which?

Mother needs to pee like a dressmaker
and Dad won't put his socks on
till he's had his toenails cut
and we'll have a houseful in a minute.

or

Dad has first read of The Telegraph
and mum will have to crossword later
in front of the telly when he's at the pub.*

What she does better than Sansom - with his inimitable baggy lines and unfailing sense of focus - is write lyric poetry:

..........Clouds settle like islands
their shadows valleys for the moon to walk in.

There are some beautiful and striking poems where her own voice unfurls. Hope, for instance, should find its way into some anthology or other. It's one of those poems that you need as opposed to the slice of life stuff that avoids saying anything in case it starts telling. There are a few of those too.

Nevertheless, there's enough good stuff to make this collection worth getting. It's much better than most of what Salt publishes or Bloodaxe for that matter. And more 'felt life' than pastiche.

* The first poem is by Sansom, the second, Fisher. The style is much better suited to Sansom's anecdotes about his working class extended family than Fisher's middle class nuclear version.

2009-01-31T22:47:00.000Z

Europa by Moniza Alvi was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize this year, but was beaten by Nigh-No-Place. In some ways it is a more substantial collection than Nigh-No-Place but less consistently successful. However, despite its limitations and inconsistencies, a case could be made out that it ought to have won.

It is divided into 3 sections. The outer sections contain individual poems, often strongly linked by subject matter or theme; the middle section - Europa and the Bull - is an extended narrative re-telling of the Greek myth. At best, the poems are both direct and mysterious, presenting complex ideas in vivid imagistic language, which leave some element unresolved. For instance, Alvi's poem about the veil describes this focus of political and cultural conflict in ambivalent and ambiguous terms, which refuse to take sides:

The veil with its hidden waist and hips,
its energies, its limitations.
The capacious veiled veil.

The less convincing poems are about male violence. Essentially, men are bad, women are graphically violated. It's an important issue (after all, 3 million women experience domestic violence every year in the UK) but having been limited to the traumatising act of abuse, the poems somehow fail to bring home the terrible truth that by and large the perpetrators are 'normal' men more often than not in longterm relationships. No doubt the Europa poem also offers some sort of exploration of European identity but the sensationalist approach deters close examination. Having said that, the poem does presents a number of very immediate but surprising and memorable images e.g.
............................................ the sea
rushed up to [the sand], telling
a bit of the story
and snatched it back.

Throughout the collection, there are a number of poems about hurt and wounds. In fact, it begins with a poem called Post-traumatic. I confess to having an insider's understanding of this mental health problem so I can attest to its remarkable - if limited - emotional accuracy. Unfortunately, like so many attempts by non-disabled poets to represent disability, it focuses on the impairment rather than the discrimination one faces, which is, in fact, an inseparable aspect of the experience of the condition. Thus, the social phenomena of the experience of PTSD is medicalised, notwithstanding the humane intentions which clearly lie behind the poem and the precise but powerful way the condition is represented.

Myth and fairy tale obviously play an important role in the collection - and not just in the title poem. Pandora's box featues in one of the poems, a sleeping princess in another and a mermeid in another (violated as in the somewhat Prog Rock cover illustration).

The best wound poem in my opinion is I Hold my Breath in This Country with its Sad Past, which, to me anyway, recalls the collective trauma experienced in the former Yugoslavia from the perspective of the poet/ narrator, an outsider to whom the enormity of the hurt felt by the country is becoming apparent. It is an astonishing poem. Read it.

Also astonishing is the poem, Upholding the 'I'. The simplicty of approach belies the images, which bear more than a passing resemblance to metaphysical conceits e.g.

the 'I' that's bee-like, drawn to purple

the 'I' with its walk-on part

its cool green stem

Alvi continues to create marvellous colourful poems made out of splintered images which can satisfy intellectually as well as viscerally. This collection is certainly worth reading, and reading again.

Jen Hadfield wins T.S. Eliot prize

2009-01-20T23:28:00.000Z

I was delighted to hear that Jen Hadfield was awarded the 2009 T.S. Eliot prize for her second collection, Nigh-No-Place. The collection is remarkable because of its high spirits and engagement with the natural world. There's an innocence and openness in the poems' abandon which it is difficult not to ascribe to the personality of the author. Her art is essentially mimetic in style and naive in substance. For instance, she writes about herself wearing long johns, which are 'like bread-pudding' (how homely, how cute).

She writes about dogs, cats, places, horses, the sea, water. Favouring rhymes, creating neologisms through compounding words and throwing in the odd word of Gaelic, her work moves close to nonsense verse because of the attraction that sing-song rhymes have for her:

Towhee, Towhee, come in for tea
She hangs her head like a sacred donkey.

(Towhee)

or

Hey bear!
Hey bear!
A godawful wriggly thing fell in Moira's hair
(Kodachrome)

It's always good to meet poetry which is fun to speak aloud and fills the mouth with delicious vowel sounds and this collection and its success should be welcomed by every lover of poetry. I do wonder how Jen Hadfield will develop and whether she can still move on from the epiphanies which her poetry currently represents to more reflective verse. Charm like this is rare - and rightly highly prized (bad pun, sorry) - but rarely long-lived.