tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75124766511073928012024-03-13T22:09:50.059+00:00Poetry ReviewsJonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-30670419883971294042012-12-31T20:20:00.001+00:002012-12-31T20:20:11.598+00:00Review of 2012The most memorable poetry event of 2012: Geoffrey Hill reading in Ryland's library, Manchester. Hill, looking like an old Testament prophet, was self-deprecating and funny, 'Don't worry', he intoned, 'I'll probably only read for three or four hours'. He spoke to us as fellow poetry obsessives, and read his own work and that of other poets, giving a particularly vivid rendition of Lawrence's 'Bavarian Gentians'. It was an evening full of warmth and friendship, with a strong hint of the valedictory.<br />
<br />
The best collection of 2012: no idea, of course, because I haven't read them all. Jorie Graham's caught my attention though, as someone on Hill's level, so to speak. I also really enjoyed 'The Ninjas' by Jane Yeh, which was exquisitily entertaining and funny. I skimmed the new Roger McGough in a bookshop and it looked really great, but it had been bought next day, and he's not fashionable, so I didn't go out my way to get a copy. And I'm still waiting for Simon Armitage's 'Black Roses: the Killing of Sophie Lancaster', which sounds really well written. I think you have to be really humble to be a great writer and I suspect Armitage, when he's not inflicting his prose on us, is a great writer, capable of profound imaginative sympathy, born out of a highly skilled but straightforward approach. I really liked 'The Overhaul' by Kathleen Jamie too, even if I do find her style, dare I say, a little bit too self-denying and worked on.<br />
<br />
Most overrated books: 'The Salt Anthology of best British Poetry of 2012'. Boring, really, despite including Mike Haslam. You'd never guess we were in the middle of an important period of redefinition, like the 30s, 60s and 80s, from the poetry being written at the moment. Lots of good poems, of course, just few really valuable ones. 'Bevel' by William Letford (see below). Dark Film by whatisname (see below), though it spawned a remarkable review by John McAuliffe in 'The North'.Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-21788134417044811782012-10-17T22:08:00.003+01:002012-10-19T09:38:16.583+01:00By Fits and Starts: A Beginners review of 'The Reasoner' by Jeffrey Wainwright<span style="font-size: large;">Jeffrey Wainwright's new collection, The Reasoner, is a study of epistemology and ontology, of how we know and the relationship between knowing and being. It makes these fundamental concerns concrete through the voice of 'the reasoner' in a series of 95 mainly short poems.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Unlike most contemporary poetry, it is concerned with knoweldge, thought and understanding. In a contemporary scene that is dumbing down and becoming more homogenised, this collection is an important example of what poetry can do.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Wainwright's style is painstaking, words from the world around us, from the mundane and familiar, are rolled around the poems, often in lists, gaining weight and significance:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the crucial kitchen-drawer always has</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the wrong batteries, withered elastic bands.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Wainwright prefers a sort of hardness in the sound of his verse to soaring melody:</span><br />
nothing rich like persimmon or lavender<br />
(no sightless pansy or brash lorikeet)<br />
but - a spade chunk of marl perhaps<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><span style="font-size: large;">And his frequent humour is ironic, even Northern and blunt:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Lucky fuck. That's me I mean. Fucking lucky.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">but always with an underlying seriousness.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Think of the crab's outrage when it insists</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">'I am not a crustacean</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I am a crab, and myself'.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I can't do justice to this collection without reading it closely ten times and producing a detailed academic review, and that's not the purpose of this blog - which is to share opinions and enjoyment, and encourage you to read the work itself. So I intend to begin at the beginning, go on a short way making comments and then stop.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The first poem introduces the reasoner, an unprepossessing bookish eccentric, who is also a kind of mediocre everyman, searching for a revelation of persistent reality:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I am one who would know,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and thus be happy</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The seond poem questions the nature of a specific phenomena (a spiders web illuminated by a ray of light) and the problem of language, or more particularly, simile.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">By looking at one thing am I missing another?</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The third poem is a witty meditation on belief and life, which it is suggested is a struggle between doubt 'and so on/ and so on and so on'. There is something Beckettian in this painful vision of human life, trapped in the skull trying to make sense of things with faulty apparatus. At this point, Wainwright's style is heavily indebted to Geoffrey Hill, to the extent that a simulacra of Hill's voice is in danger of overtaking Wainwright's own very distinctive tone and set of registers. For instance, he uses abbreviations like Hill does 'circs.' for 'circumstances'. Its a mannerism that could be easily lost with no prejudice to the integrity of the poems.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The fourth poem touches on utopian hope: perfect understanding, both in the abstract and in a memory of Wainwright's youth in leftist circles in the North Midland potteries, when internationalists were keen on promoting esperanto. Wainwright suggests gently that beneath their pious idealism these internationalists were in fact Little Englanders out to spread the gospel of tea (and maybe teetotalerism) and cricket.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The fifth poem doesn't really hold just at this moment but I suspect the sixth is a comment on The Waste Land, as it partly concerns 'house agents' clerks'.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Poems six, seven and eight, all of which begin, as did four and five, with the phrase 'is our language complete?' play with the effects of language and question the relationship between signified and signifier, before returning to the spiders web, in a final metaphor which links expression with our species being: 'our creature tongue'.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The reasoner is at once trying to dispense with language and to use it to unload/ and exalt the mind'.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Exalt your mind by reading this collection several times.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://carcanetblog.blogspot.co.uk/#!/2012/10/a-triple-launch-jeffrey-wainwright-jon.html" target="_blank">http://carcanetblog.blogspot.co.uk/#!/2012/10/a-triple-launch-jeffrey-wainwright-jon.html</a></span>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-21695881123715077602012-09-14T21:46:00.000+01:002012-10-17T21:07:58.793+01:00The Dark Film by Paul FarleyIf you want to get a flavour of this book, there's an excellent review on another blog which I have commented on which you might like to read<br />
<br />
<a href="http://roguestrands.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/review-dark-film-by-paul-farley.html">http://roguestrands.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/review-dark-film-by-paul-farley.html</a><br />
<br />
There's no point in repeating what it says in the blog and the comments. I'd rather say what I think about Farley's poetics and look at what I believe is the best poem in the book, <em>Cloaca Maxima</em>.Farley in my view is a class act, but I find it strange that, nothwithstanding all the autobiographical poems in the book, I don't feel I really know anything about the guy. It's as if he's being too abstract and creating a strerotype of his own experience:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I'd look up to them looming on street corners,</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
or down on them through my bedroom blinds, </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
crashing home from the Labour Club, mad drunk<br />
(Adults)<br />
</blockquote>
Yes, he tries to make it specific by mentioning his bedroom blinds, but this could be any literary story of growing up in the midst of working class families. It isn't half so specific as Roger McGough's tales of his Liverpool family or anywhere near as touching as Peter Sansom's on-going poetic chronicle of working class familial decencies in Nottingham. After reading McGough and Sansom I feel I know loads about them and their relatives, and share some of the sadness they feel about them, but something about the way Farley approaches the subject of his own upbringing leaves me cold.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kQHpyWtRIrM/UH8Po_PzLuI/AAAAAAAAAHU/HdNg8vU2fvc/s1600/Liverpool.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" nea="true" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kQHpyWtRIrM/UH8Po_PzLuI/AAAAAAAAAHU/HdNg8vU2fvc/s320/Liverpool.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Inner City Liverpool in the Late Sixties. Children swinging on a dead tree amongst rubble with new high rise council flats in the background.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">
On the other hand, <em>Cloaca Maxima</em> is a magnificent poem that plays to all Farley's profound rhetorical strengths. It records a moment - an epiphany - when the poet was a child and sewer jumping and suddenly understands the pain of preceding generations of labour, who created the place. I think it's a moving exploration of history and forgetting. Part of its appeal is the struggle of the poet to give expression to his compelling sense of human alienation in the process of labour i.e. the lives that most of our forebears forebore. Thus he writes about:</div>
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the pearlescent blind eye we need </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
to grow to keep the world under our noses</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">
safely removed.The millions of mixed shades</div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
are still running beneath our surfaces<br />
<br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">
and visible to those who just step sideways</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
For those of us with a working class hinterland, these are very profound words about how we experience contemporary life, apparently so cut off from the past and yet so dependent upon it.Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0Eaves Ave, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire HX7, UK53.747746458470168 -2.029037475585937553.74305145847017 -2.0389079755859374 53.752441458470166 -2.0191669755859376tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-72475455266621593592012-09-14T20:59:00.000+01:002012-09-22T18:59:35.283+01:00Bevel by William LetfordThere's a kerfuffle in the poetry world at the moment about William Letford's entertaining first collection, <em>Bevel. </em>The Guardian even referred to the collection's 'transcendental insight', though this was probably the work of a sub editor as it appeared on a strapline under the headline. <br />
<br />
Amongst all this excitement, I hate to sound a note of caution. <em>Bevel</em> is being universally praised, but it is a flawed, though enjoyable and promising collection.<br />
<br />
First, the good stuff. The Guardian review goes on to accurately describe his work as follows: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Letford's poetry, while it has the look of early experimental modernism – that William Carlos Williams/ee cummings thing – has the cadences and accents of ordinary, reported speech<br />
</blockquote>
Letford has a distinct voice and his work is memorable. Unlike the denser stuff in Roddy Lumsden's anthologies of recent poetry, Letwin opts for clarity. His short poems showcase brief striking images e.g.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The chapel on the hill has no roof. For five hundred years its four walls<br />
have framed the universe. The locals laugh at the Sistine chapel<br />
and call it the coffin lid<br />
(In the mountains of northern Italy)<br />
</blockquote>
Now that is the whole poem in its entirety. I find it immediately striking, but also it makes me think about something familar (the Sistine chapel) in a new way, by incorporating a pithy local saying from a different part of Italy which isn't Rome.<br />
<br />
Letwin is also very good at writing about doing the pleasures of physical labour because he's a roofer by trade. No one else can do this because most contemporary poets seem to work in academia or publishing.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, he can be crass.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A blonde haired angel in a pair of red hotpants<br />
Turns to give me a grin so wide<br />
I know it's not for me.It's for the whole fucking world.<br />
(A Bassline)<br />
</blockquote>
I'm sure us men have a tendency to experience the world primarily through our bell-ends, but when we grow up we realise this and try to stop speaking like complete dicks.<br />
<br />
The shortness of the poems not only charms me, it bothers me because I'm not sure what else Letford has to offer other than these sudden - often randy - epiphanies. In a sense, he can be a metaphysical poet because he sees some of his poems as a kind of flirtation in which he ropes in all sorts of amazing scientific facts about the universe and applies them to a specific situation. There's no question that he has some genius, the problem is that he seems to be using it to say 'look at me, aren't I the fucking One and a Bit'.<br />
<br />
Charming, striking, clever, different from the rest of the crowd, I shall certainly be buying his second collection in the hope that he can apply his substantial gifts to a more grown up set of subjects.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RviXhTkuFuc/UF37sdBMHeI/AAAAAAAAAHA/lpM6srFYAxI/s1600/WILLIAM-LETFORD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RviXhTkuFuc/UF37sdBMHeI/AAAAAAAAAHA/lpM6srFYAxI/s320/WILLIAM-LETFORD.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
</blockquote>
Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-90013208923969741432012-07-20T23:20:00.002+01:002012-09-14T21:00:24.874+01:00Odi Barbare by Geoffrey Hill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XZLW72dGjIw/UAnR2sr1fmI/AAAAAAAAAGI/7tV7-0Vl4z8/s1600/Odi-Barbare-jacket-668x1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XZLW72dGjIw/UAnR2sr1fmI/AAAAAAAAAGI/7tV7-0Vl4z8/s320/Odi-Barbare-jacket-668x1024.jpg" width="208" /></a></div>
In <em>The New Pelican Guide to English Literature (1995)</em>, Martin Dodsworth - in his essay on Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill - writes:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Hill is difficult because he says so many things at once.</blockquote>
It's interesting to reflect on the continuity this suggests between Hill's work before <em>Canaan (1997)</em> and his later obscure, condensed and allusive style. Certainly, the later work is as vital, as explosively cerebral and intensely visual and dramatic as his earlier poetry. His wonderful new collection, <em>Odi Barbare</em>, is composed of some of the more attractive aspects of that later style, with an added element: a sense that the end of life is imminent. Once again, the shadows of the first and second world wars fall on the text. There are incredibly moving evocations of the English countryside interspersed with splenetic outbursts of anger. Hill also reflects on his craft. <br />
<br />
There are some passages I cannot follow, but even those possess an urgency, a desire to say something complex, multi-faceted, all at once. As yet, I haven't got a sense of its overall design but I suspect that it will grow on me over time. Hill's work is a living embodiment of the concept of organic writing, where thought and experience are unified. In a sense, the poem is a performance of the coming into being of his thought, at the nexus between experience and the mind. And it's worth re-reading. I find new delights - and sometimes challenges - when I do so.<br />
<br />
I'd strongly suggest that, if you like poetry, you should give this collection (which is in effect an extended poem in many sections) a go. You will be richly rewarded if you do.Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-84248999227094479932012-06-01T18:40:00.001+01:002012-07-20T23:26:00.515+01:00The Grass is Singing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tpA0mUo5nCs/T8j91HodNgI/AAAAAAAAAF8/bAVdNU60mBk/s1600/Karen+Press.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" rba="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tpA0mUo5nCs/T8j91HodNgI/AAAAAAAAAF8/bAVdNU60mBk/s1600/Karen+Press.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I believe that there is a political crisis going on in South Africa. A populist politician, with questionable personal morals, is president. There are attacks on the freedom of the press and artistic expression - legislative ones from the executive, literal ones from individuals with no formal connection to the government acting <em>ultra vires </em>to preserve the 'honour' of the president. Whilst the pattern that is emerging might so far resemble Putin's regime more than Mugabe's (though there are similarities), the South African constitution is robust in defence of liberty, due process and accountability. So far, at least.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Its survival will depend on the speed with which the country progressively realises the economic, cultural and social rights of its poorest citizens - in a society that is still far too unequal, and where wealth and power are highly concentrated and unaccountable.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Out of this context, I welcome a poet with a remarkably direct and personal voice, who writes about life in South Africa as it is now, with no false distinctions between the political and the personal. Karen Press's poems show what can be done when the whole of a person's being is deeply engaged with the world around them and then channelled with wit, openness and compassion into poetry.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Therefore, I find it surprising that on the blurb on the back of her new book published by <em>Carcanet, 'Slowly, As If', </em>the <em>South African Sunday Independent</em> is quoted as saying 'It is largely a poetry of whispers, of hints, of indirect statements...' when I find poems with titles like:</span><br />
<br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">Your Saddam</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">Cyrus Vance Sat on my Couch</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">Statistics South Africa Says</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">Hotel Rwanda, 1 January 2006</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">Monument to the South African Republic</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">she gave birth while prison guards tortured her and laughed.</span></em><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The only explanation is that South African poetry today is characterised by didactic agitprop and that by comparison Press's work is positively Anglo-Saxon in its obliquity. The evidence for this comes from a book I bought a couple of years ago called <em>Beyond Words</em>, at an evening of South African poetry at the Contact Theatre, Manchester. The poetry was read by the authors themselves. I open that book now and I come across lines like this:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">When Europe cuts up the continent into little pockets of its imperialist want....</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">My hearts percusion flows to my feet</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">As they play notes on the ground</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">At once linking past and present</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">memory</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">magic</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">image</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">soul and sound</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I am attracted to the image of a continent being cut up into little pockets and I love 'my heart's percussion' but the poetry goes on to become <em>about</em> something - a thought, an interpretation external to the experience - rather than <em>presenting</em> something from within the experience or perception, summative as opposed to an enactment. Not all of the poetry is like this by any means. There's a wonderful poem by Lebo Mashile called <em>God Blues for Mama</em> which presents a marxist view of religion i.e. one that respects the beliefs of proletarians ("Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people" as Marx himself wrote). Mashile writes:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><em>God never runs</em>, Mama said</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">He died on a cross</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Papa was cross</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">She bled from her head</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><em>God never hides, </em>Mama said</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">She's at church every night</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Close to him</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The Lord lives inside</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">This poem doesn't seem too far away from Press's. She writes from personal experience and isn't afraid of the prosaic:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><em>The chapter recounts how Stalin phoned Pasternak</em></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Nor of the abstract and rhetorical:</span><br />
<br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">Would he stand up inside the mask of his freedom</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">and burn his own fine-tuned tongue</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">to keep one of them warm?</span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-size: large;">(Pasternak's Shadow)</span></em><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Thankfully, she has a capacity to keep the latter grounded in the former. For instance, she has written an evocative poem about when the Berlin Wall came down:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The red velvet <em>kaffeehaus</em> chairs are worn through,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the patrons are worn down with coffee and cigarettes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and the children they had when already somewhat mature,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">slumped over wrinkled copies of <em>taz</em> at the pre-war wooden tables</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">.......</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">History wants to</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">get its hands on this city</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">all over again.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">(<em>Over There, Berlin, November 1989)</em></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Her poetry reminds me of D H Lawrence and of Ted Hughes because of the way she is present in it living and breathing poetry. Certainly, she writes about nature and is capable of lyrical beauty because of an intense focus on an external natural work which affects her strongly:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Slowly the water lightens but there's black below,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and a silver shadown folding each bright ripple in -</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the deepness and memory of the lake</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">it clings to, for the sky is far away</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and blue without conversation</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">(Love Songs for Lake Como)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Sure, there is uneveness in her work, but a sense of complete engagement pervades almost everything she writes. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">She might refer to South Africa as 'the dead republic' and think it's MPs 'clink clink clink/ like chocolate coins in the President's pocket' but the vitality of her work demonstrates that she still hopes, and that democratic sentiment in South Africa is strong:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Some people say</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">that what you're doing now</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">simpy confirms what your politics were</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">all along</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I'm not one of them -</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I think, Stalinism and the sneering shadow flitting across your eyes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">notwithstanding, that you had something to fight for,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">something greater than clothes and a car</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">more lithe, more radiant inside its own skin,.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">You were so beautiful then.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">(Do you Love Yourself Like This).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I should add that she also writes about love and the relationship between the soul and the material world:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The soul must be the bones</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">since they're what lasts</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">forever and ever, stark and serene.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Where else would a soul want to live?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">(Three Meditations on Immortality or Are we nearly There Yet?)</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">In other words, she is a profound poet as well as an energetic one. There's a poem in the book called <em>Be bear</em>, which I think pretty much sums her up:</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Be bear, the doctor says, be crane</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and tiger and golden pheasant, be monkey and dragon.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Fold in and open, gather and strike</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">........................................................</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and attack, when necessary attack</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">or soften and fall, become a dragon</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">becoming a folding pheasant.</span>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-53054987925530254032012-05-30T12:30:00.000+01:002012-06-02T08:20:44.341+01:00So Bad, it's Good (well, almost)<span style="font-size: large;">I'm a big fan of Alice Oswald's work. It is imaginative and lively with lots of verbal energy and passion. Her subject is often nature leading some people to compare her poetry to Ted Hughes's (imho Dylan Thomas could be another correlative because she seems to be able to inhabit the dream lives of lots of other characters).</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Her attractively produced collection in Faber, <em>Memorial,</em> reminds me of one aspect of Ted Hughes's work: its occasional godawfulness. She's stripped away all the narrative from the <em>Illiad</em> and left us with a series of descriptions of the deaths of minor characters in the story. The effect is mind-numbing, though after a while the absurdity of this litany of doomed people rushing into the book to die becomes quite Pythonesque. It takes on a mad cartoonish quality, but I confess this doesn't get me beyond the first few pages.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I really admire people who boldly get it so wrong and am looking forward to her next book.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">In the mean time, don't buy this one. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AIkTijuD6qE/T8YEor49PbI/AAAAAAAAAFo/UaIna-pgifY/s1600/memorial.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" rba="true" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-AIkTijuD6qE/T8YEor49PbI/AAAAAAAAAFo/UaIna-pgifY/s320/memorial.jpg" width="201" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Forget it. </span>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-25270451606527748122012-03-31T21:30:00.014+01:002012-03-31T22:52:18.031+01:00Another Hill to Climb!<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Fj33wZqDPO8/T3d8E2Yu0NI/AAAAAAAAAFY/2GTUxZX1BwM/s1600/geoffrey-hill.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; width: 400px; height: 262px; text-align: center; display: block; cursor: pointer;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5726181873985442002" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Fj33wZqDPO8/T3d8E2Yu0NI/AAAAAAAAAFY/2GTUxZX1BwM/s400/geoffrey-hill.jpg" /></a><br /><div>For the last couple of years, Geoffrey Hill's been eschewing Penguin and publishing new collections through small publishers, with limited print runs. In the age of the 'kindle', this is clever niche marketing. Two have been published by Clutag Press and the other by Enitharmon. The first one published without fanfare by Clutag - 'Oraclau' - is now almost unobtainable, and sells second hand for hundreds of pounds.<br /><br />Thus, 'Oraclau' passed me by - the only collection by Hill to do so -, but 'Clavics' (Enithamon) did not (in fact, it's still on sale, if you want to buy it). And in the time it took me to gather some thoughts together for 'Clavics', Hill had published yet another volume with Clutag, 'Odi Barbare'.<br /><br />Both are in his 'late style', so intense, obscure, full of allusion as well of moments of powerful lyricism. Quick moving, bristling with opinion and attitude. I haven't yet collected my thoughts about 'Odi Barbare'. Anyway, I'm not in the mood to write an academic review, so here are some thoughts on 'Clavics' instead - to encourage you to buy it.<br /><br />Let me say firstly and categorically that it is NOT, as the Independent stated, 'twaddle'. This is the MOST interesting poetry being produced by an English poet today and, notwithstanding its obscurity, is incredibly open poetry. It seems to reflect the moments of creation and connection in the poet's own mind as he contemplated the diverse subject matter of the poem, yet it is also very formal in layout and approach. This clash between spontaneity and stucture- Hill uses the concept/ trope of dissonance - is both at the heart of the poem and the centre of Hill's own mind. Whilst resisting autobiography, it becomes extremely revealing. That's not to say that every line is perfect - it's not always meant to be pretty or tailored to the anodyne creative writing group style of today- sorry, which I think is poetry with a labotomy. It's meant to be difficult because we live in a complex age, with an ahistorical present clashing with the influence and attraction of a partially forgotten past.<br /><br />This might help to explain why the main subject is William Lawes, a relatively obscure seventeenth century English composer, who died at the Battle of Chester in the English revolution/ Civil War (take your pick).<br /><br />My notes on the poem refer to 'a mix of astrology, Kabbalah and civil war history', but he uses the verse form - lifted from that most contained and calmly conflicted metaphysical, Geoge Herbert - to issue challenges and insults like a rap artist. Inbetween these, he does all sorts of different things, including write metaphysical verse - perhaps aware of the end of his own life, which at 80, must occur to him as a real possibility: 'Earth/ billows on; its everlasting/ shadow in tow/ And we with it, fake shadows onward casting'. This may also refer to the futility of life or our illusion of progress. Each of Hill's phrases is rich with possibility.<br /><br />There is an elegiac note to Hill's work, and it's connected to English history. Some people don't like this, comparing him to Enoch Powell. True, he writes about the kind of history which doesn't get taught in schools any longer (NB: Clavics is dedicated to former OFSTED HMI Chris Woodhead and his wife, Christine, who were critical of contentless curriculum), but there's nothing in his work at all to suggest that he opposes immigration. To compare him to Powell is liking comparing CB Cox to Ezra Pound. Hill feels he has a mission to record England's past which 'rides rich on loss'; he does so from a perspective which was not initially metropolitan. Born in 1930's Worcestershire, the Tory he most resembles is Stanley Baldwin. But he doesn't sound like any sort of politician. Rather his disgust is a sophisticated version of the disgust with public life and values felt by most people in Bitain today and not understood at all by the city-based elites that dominate politics and the media, two of his favourite targets.<br /><br />But I'm wandering off the point! I've read Clavics about four times so far. I shall read it many more times and get loads more out of it. I hope you read it too.</div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-37531482181305274832012-02-25T23:28:00.006+00:002012-02-25T23:58:23.607+00:00Bees Knees (well, almost): Carol Ann Duffy - The BeesCarol Ann Duffy's new collection is well worth reading, even though it feels at times like deja vu.<br /><br />She has the ability to write poems on both public and private themes (in fact, she transgresses those divisions) which are genuinely affecting. Poems like 'Last Post', 'Water, 'English Elms' and 'Crunch' actually brought a lump to my throat. In particular, I was moved by the references to her daughter, to her role as a Mum and the loss of her own mother in which she manages to be intimate and say things of wider, political significance.<br /><br />Sometimes, though, it felt as if the poet was relying on a well-used box of tricks, especially when she was re-writing famous stories from a female perspective or using lists of dynamic words (usually nouns or verbs) to heighten the impact of her verse. For instance, 'Oxfam' (a found poem, consisting of a list of second hand objects with prices and poetic comment) is a bit tired, particularly when put up against Paul Violi's list poems (NB 'Police Blotter', a truly anarchic and inspired use of pastiche). Nonetheless, this collection has enough genuine sentiment and politics to make it worth a visit.Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-90085068316617813552012-02-15T21:01:00.007+00:002012-05-30T12:30:41.253+01:00Sad News about Paul Violi<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5_D1cyLsTuo/TzwionDS7aI/AAAAAAAAAFM/P-kdqPHUZHU/s1600/Paul%2BVioli.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5709476508671864226" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5_D1cyLsTuo/TzwionDS7aI/AAAAAAAAAFM/P-kdqPHUZHU/s400/Paul%2BVioli.jpg" style="cursor: hand; display: block; height: 400px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 277px;" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div>
In the review of 2011, I should have added something about the death of Paul Violi, a brilliant, funny satirist with an amazing talent for pastiche and strong lyrical gifts. His poems are not only humorous, they exhibit good humour and entertain on all levels. My favourite collection is <em>The Curious Builder</em>, published by <em>Hanging Loose Press</em> (don't you love the name?)<em>. </em>One of the few essential collections by a contemporary poet.</div>
<br />
<div>
Better than Billy Collins, by miles!</div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-30062247878473953232012-01-31T21:03:00.005+00:002012-01-31T21:54:22.322+00:002011 ReviewThe best books in 2011 - the ones you need - were translations, and both were published by Carcanet: John Ashbery's translation of <em>Les Illuminations</em> by <em>Rimbaud </em>and Jane Draycott's welcome rendering of the deeply moving medieval poem, <em>Pearl,</em> which, in the voice of a parent, describes his/her dead infant daughter transfigured in heaven.<br /><br />Of the two, the most important is <em>Les Illuminations (Pearl</em> after all can be read in the original Middle English with only a little effort)<em>, </em>which<em> </em>is well translated by Ashbery, whose genius admits various subtle effects, particular to the English language, to enrich the translation without distorting its accuracy. Rimbaud's poems turn Catholic and pastoral values on their head: extolling incarnations of pleasure and the theatricality of the city. All of the poems are political, but some are directly so, and expose democracy as an imperialist ploy to control the masses. <em>Les Illuminations</em> are Anarchist apocrypha and sometimes it seems to hold the germs of post-modernism within it, particularly Foucault and Baudrillard. It's also one of those works of literature which are alive from the inside and impossible to bottle up in a few critical lines.<br /><br />If you want to know what went on in GB poetry in 2011, you can forget the Forward or T S Eliot prizes. The best snapshot can be found in <em>Salt's Best Poems of 2011 </em>and <em>The Salt Book of Younger Poets. </em>Both are edited by Roddy Lumsden, who favours linguistically dense, measured poems, like the sort which were being published in the first half of the sixties. By pubishing these volumes, <em>Salt</em> may be announcing its challenge to the poetry mainstream, particularly to <em>Bloodaxe</em> and <em>The Forward Prize.</em><br /><em></em><br />The greatest loss of 2011 wasn't the <em>Poetry Book Society, </em>but the misanthropic poet, Peter Reading. There was an excellent obituary in the Telegraph, which was surprising since the man hated everything that Thatcherism produced, including Blairism. Whether or not he was a major poet, he was certainly a unique and powerful voice, worthy of recognition in the canon, alongside Skelton, Marlowe, Rochester and Swift. I hope he's not forgotten.Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-22301837779297082552011-11-17T12:18:00.002+00:002011-11-17T12:38:10.706+00:00Leader of the Pack: review of 'The Wolf' magazine<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-imdAYdG9wD8/TsUAJL95OQI/AAAAAAAAAFA/jpihK99YTVc/s1600/the-wolf-man1254419594.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5675943063201593602" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; WIDTH: 324px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 400px" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-imdAYdG9wD8/TsUAJL95OQI/AAAAAAAAAFA/jpihK99YTVc/s400/the-wolf-man1254419594.jpg" border="0" /></a> ‘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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />Her poem, ‘Under the Sign of Kybele’, begins:<br />I was: then a junky woman who<br />buried so many husbands<br />some of them poisoned by too<br />much light too much happiness too<br />much powder too little hope<br /><br />It flies along inchoately, springing memorable phrases: ’some/of his wrinkles got onto your body they/made a lace pattern out of my memory’<br />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’<br />Mad it may be, but it’s great to read something so unconstrained by writing group norms.<br />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.<br />The lineation has the effect of tearing at meanings, both in the sense of grasping for them and striking them down:<br />block the borrow pits<br />in silted mouth<br /><br />care nothing spoken<br />without.<br /><br />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) :<br />Preternatural holding or/ half turned gesture// already letting go/to inroads//inundation.<br />However, the best lines in this edition of ‘The Wolf’, for me, are translations of the Chinese poet, Bei Dao<br />If death is love’s reason<br />then we love infidelity<br />love the defeated<br />whose eyes keep checking the time. (‘Concerning Eternity’)<br /><br />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.<br />This is poetry with a head as well as a heart and a life.<br />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!Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-81681907540520783752011-10-23T19:40:00.008+01:002011-12-05T16:33:03.976+00:00Eagle-Eyed Imaginarium: A review of Arguing with Malarchy by Carola Luther<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wLtjAgHbzBE/TqRqox_yPGI/AAAAAAAAAE0/3PevAMcr5vg/s1600/AwM.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5666771479987108962" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 300px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 300px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wLtjAgHbzBE/TqRqox_yPGI/AAAAAAAAAE0/3PevAMcr5vg/s400/AwM.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><div>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'. </div><br /><br /><div>The style has the demotic intonations of early Simon Armitage, without its social particularity (but with just as many internal rhymes and half rhymes):</div><br /><br /><div>....For a fuck in the dark, I received instruction</div><br /><br /><div></div><br /><br /><div>on making the break, on the spur, double quick.<br /></div><br /><br /><div>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:<br /></div><br /><br /><div>..aged gardeners, with their pots and hats and secret</div><br /><div>pockets full of dust<br /></div><br /><br /><div>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!!!!<br /></div><br /><br /><div></div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-32115793581004618192011-09-17T12:30:00.009+01:002011-10-23T20:30:42.836+01:00200 PN Reviews!<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Sz075vouJz0/TnSwLmON-qI/AAAAAAAAAEs/e7ntinboymg/s1600/pnr200.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 100px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 138px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5653337145542048418" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Sz075vouJz0/TnSwLmON-qI/AAAAAAAAAEs/e7ntinboymg/s400/pnr200.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><br /><div>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>Beyond Enigma.</em><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />" a good man cannot be harmed",<br />there is only a human voice<br />to say it', as though<br />I could listen hard enough<br />to catch it</div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-89669273397610433262011-07-16T21:43:00.013+01:002011-10-23T20:31:52.825+01:00Great Ginsberg! A selected Ginsberg worth reading!<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QB0H6IfRTGo/TiIXw1UgoHI/AAAAAAAAAEc/NPjN9zrKMKs/s1600/ginsberg_allen8_med.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 200px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 269px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5630088611880804466" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QB0H6IfRTGo/TiIXw1UgoHI/AAAAAAAAAEc/NPjN9zrKMKs/s400/ginsberg_allen8_med.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><div>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 <em>Howl</em> and <em>Kaddish </em>(just about), and does justice to Ginsberg's great talent.<br /></div><br /><br /><br /><div>Previously, I struggled with Ginsberg's own selected poems, published in <em>Penguin</em>, 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 <em>Wichita Vortex Sutra</em>, <em>Wales Visitation, </em>and that accidental masterpiece <em>Mugging</em>, 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.<br /></div><br /><br /><br /><div>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.<br /></div><br /><br /><br /><div>So rather than read me, <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/mugging-i/">read this</a>. 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!</div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-14756591122887563552011-07-15T20:56:00.003+01:002011-07-17T09:08:39.637+01:00Arts Funding Cuts<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i6be6zRxg2A/TiKYfUxzAKI/AAAAAAAAAEk/Bvr-Z8GckZI/s1600/poor-people-in-dump.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 400px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 271px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5630230148087480482" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-i6be6zRxg2A/TiKYfUxzAKI/AAAAAAAAAEk/Bvr-Z8GckZI/s400/poor-people-in-dump.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><div>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.</div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-84957890724844928822011-07-15T14:50:00.009+01:002011-07-15T15:28:24.754+01:00Night by David HarsentHarsent is a highly accomplished poet who has also written verse libretti for the great avant garde English composer, Harrison Birtwistle.His collection<em> Legion </em>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, <em>Night</em>, which is apparently one of the main contenders for this year's <em>Forward</em> prize.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Thus, <em>The Duffel Bag</em>, for instance, starts off in Armitage territory:<br /><br />into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and the lame,<br />with the grifters and drifters, the diehards, the masters of bluff,<br /><br />the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash.<br /><br />and ends up referencing Homer's Odyssey (more recently Armitage territory too): your dream/ of Ithaca, that ghost town'.<br /><br />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').<br /><br />The subject of <em>Moppet</em> the next poem gets buried under (sometimes) anaepaestic metre and internal rhyme. And so on... to be frank, I lose interest.<br /><br />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 <em>Clavics.</em> A collection I've read three times and will read many more, to unpick its subtle riches.Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-67952150573634006052011-03-23T11:03:00.007+00:002011-03-23T11:24:34.393+00:00RED - an anthology of Contemporary Black British Poetry<strong>Review under development</strong><br /><br />Just started reading <em>Red: Contemporary Black British Poetry</em> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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, <em>Promises</em>.Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-19094558140503775802011-03-18T21:17:00.007+00:002011-11-19T18:07:32.246+00:00Of Mutability - Jo ShapcottJo Shapcott's recent prize-laden collection, <em>of Mutability</em>, 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.<br /><br />To give some examples, she has this trick of mixing the prosaic and the boldly abstract. Thus, in <em>Era, </em>she writes<br /><br /><blockquote><br /><p>The twenty-second day of march two thousand and three<br />I left home shortly after eight thirty<br />on foot for the City. I said goodbye<br />to the outside of my body: I was going in. </p><br /><p align="left">She also goes in for a lot of juxtaposition and contrast. In <em>Sinfonietta for London</em>, 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)<br /></p></blockquote><br /><blockquote>Integral are the living sounds of Fenchurch Street,<br />the mechanised city with its patterns<br />of soft and loud<em> ..........</em><br /></blockquote><em></em><br /><em></em><br /><blockquote><br /><p>your darling's head floating<br />above the rest, singing and whistling<br />all the way down to the Thames<br /></p></blockquote><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gbfZZJzCL5M/TYPNz1g1QlI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/raL9X2uv4lE/s1600/joshapcott.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5585534253291356754" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 280px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 324px" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-gbfZZJzCL5M/TYPNz1g1QlI/AAAAAAAAAEQ/raL9X2uv4lE/s400/joshapcott.jpg" border="0" /></a> She plays the same trick on facing pages by placing two poems called <em>Religion for </em>Girls and <em>Religion for </em>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <em>St Brides</em>, 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.<br /><br />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 <em>Red</em>, a new anthology of Black British Poetry.<br /><br />But more of that, as they say, <em>anon</em>!Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-71397123648986062962011-03-09T23:42:00.010+00:002011-10-29T09:07:20.499+01:00The Antidote: Review of 'A Cure for Woodness' - Michael Haslam<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kbsRHxCHg94/TXlqBZPaLxI/AAAAAAAAAEI/960LDeHrfRc/s1600/Haslam.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 274px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582609785290370834" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kbsRHxCHg94/TXlqBZPaLxI/AAAAAAAAAEI/960LDeHrfRc/s400/Haslam.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><div>This is the last volume of a trilogy by Mike Haslam - which started with <em>The Muse Laid her Songs in Language</em>, continued with <em>A Sinner Saved by Grace</em> and now ends here, with this book full of beautiful, funny, humane, intoxicated post-modern pastoral verse.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. </div><br /><div><br />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. </div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>In a revealing introduction - a sort of <em>Biographia Literaria </em>- 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.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div></div><br /><div>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.</div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-76509376621604883732011-02-18T21:00:00.008+00:002011-02-18T21:26:35.227+00:00Up Your Arse, Paul Muldoon!: A short view of Maggot<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wcnugv_hflc/TV7j9giYiXI/AAAAAAAAAEA/i-2DT98YuBY/s1600/1057_paul_muldoon.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 400px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 266px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5575144034576927090" border="0" alt="" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wcnugv_hflc/TV7j9giYiXI/AAAAAAAAAEA/i-2DT98YuBY/s400/1057_paul_muldoon.jpg" /></a><br /><div>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!<br /><br /><div></div></div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-30127091939647807182011-01-26T13:40:00.016+00:002011-10-23T21:09:43.278+01:00Best Book of 2010 - The Rest on the Flight: selected poems of Peter Porter<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0K9Sy_FGxaU/TUBDzZT6K_I/AAAAAAAAADs/9Qz4VPtIGnc/s1600/PP.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 100px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 137px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5566523689676712946" border="0" alt="" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_0K9Sy_FGxaU/TUBDzZT6K_I/AAAAAAAAADs/9Qz4VPtIGnc/s400/PP.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><div>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><em>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'.</em><br /><em></em><br />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 <em>disquisitions on culture (</em>the phrase is Porter's own from <em>Civilisation and its Disney Contents</em>)<em>, </em>but ones in which landscape plays on the inner forms of the psyche ( see <em>The Ecstasy of Estuaries</em>). 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 <em>in An Ingrate's England, The Workers </em>or <em>A Sour Decade.</em><br /><em></em><br />Another point of attraction is Thomas Hardy. Thus, one gets beautifully ambivalent formal poems - part lyric, part narrative - like the amusingly entitled <em>Let me Bore you with my Slides </em>(appropriately enough about his family, of course), which finishes with the lines:<br /><em>love's face peers between husband and wife,</em><br /><em>a cautious colour like afternoon.</em><br /><em></em><br />In fact, if I ever tire of reading the poems, I think I could spend half an hour oggling their titles: <em>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.</em><br /><em></em><br />Some mention must go to the poems from <em>The Cost of Seriousness</em>, which Porter wrote partially in response to the death of his first wife. My favourite poem from that collection is <em>The Delegate</em>, 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:<br /><em>The truth</em><br /><em>is a story forcing me to tell it. It is not</em><br /><em>my story or my truth. My misery</em><br /><em>is on a colour chart - even my death</em><br /><em>is a chord among the garden sounds.</em><br /><em></em><br />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: <em>my misery is on a colour chart</em>. This striking phrase (so typical of this amazing phrase maker) simultanously suggests<br /><br /><br /><ul><br /><br /><li>that his misery has a colour and his involuntary experience of the same is a form of synesthesia</li><br /><br /><li>that it may vary in intensity, or be intense</li><br /><br /><li>that it is a crude unformed emotion, not yet processed by Art</li><br /><br /><li>that it is now ordinary</li></ul><br /><br /><p>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.</p><br /><br /><p>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.</p><br /><br /><p>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 <em>Your Attention Please </em>shows that he was sceptical about the arms race and the peace-keeping potential of <em>Mutually Assured Destruction</em> (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.</p><br /><br /><p>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. </p></div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-35313075632290351912011-01-22T11:02:00.012+00:002011-10-23T21:10:25.076+01:00Armitage's Return<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0K9Sy_FGxaU/TTrMPKLLjeI/AAAAAAAAADk/H-Qe-MiBUMg/s1600/simon_armitage_203_01_203x152%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 203px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 152px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5564984850371022306" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_0K9Sy_FGxaU/TTrMPKLLjeI/AAAAAAAAADk/H-Qe-MiBUMg/s400/simon_armitage_203_01_203x152%255B1%255D.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><div>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.<br /><br />Then came a marked decline. From <em>The Book of Matches </em>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.<br /><br />Even 'the millenium poem' <em>Killing Time,</em> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Yet, he's come good with his two most recent collections: <em>The Not Dead </em>and <em>Seeing Stars. </em>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. </div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Best of all, though, is the last poem in his recent chapbook, <em>The Motorway Service Station as a Destination in its Own Right</em>, which in its content overlaps with <em>Seeing Stars.</em> This resonates with compassion and significance, and manages to be both precise and expansive: it's called <em>Years</em> and finishes with the lines:</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>And bare, gullible trees</div><br /><div>like children of famine, </div><br /><div>reach upwards to meet them.</div><br /><div></div><br /><div>Perhaps as he gets older, we'll get more wise poems like this, unafraid of complex statement in vivid pictoral terms.</div><br /><div></div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-6278013602166697282011-01-05T23:10:00.008+00:002011-01-23T15:35:39.620+00:00Naughty New Year Thought<span style="font-family:arial;font-size:180%;">In the review of <a href="http://poetry-reviews.blogspot.com/2010/10/identity-parade.html"><em>Identity Parade</em></a><em>, </em>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.</span><br /><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:180%;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:180%;">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.</span><br /><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:180%;"></span><br /><span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:180%;">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</span>.Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7512476651107392801.post-75584768981908311092010-12-10T23:38:00.012+00:002011-01-23T15:36:02.428+00:00Standard Midland by Roy Fisher<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0K9Sy_FGxaU/TST_Ep_sMTI/AAAAAAAAADc/T6KNCvl3zKs/s1600/3337700.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 283px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 400px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5558848295539585330" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0K9Sy_FGxaU/TST_Ep_sMTI/AAAAAAAAADc/T6KNCvl3zKs/s400/3337700.jpg" /></a><br /><div>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.<br /><br />Paul Bachelor wrote <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/26/standard-midland-roy-fisher-review?INTCMP=SRCH">a review in the Guardian </a>where he said that <em>Standard Midland</em> 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.<br /><br />Fisher's saving grace is his imagination (both imagistic and linguistic). This is never more in evidence than in the brillinat sequence: H<em>ell, Horse and Hellbox: the tabernacle poems, </em>which celebrates seven generatins of printing in the King family. Originally, the text formed part of an <em>object d'art</em> and refers to it, and to its maker in the opening line:<br /><br />FROM THE BOOK OF THE KINGS THEIR TRADES AND STATIONS<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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'.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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:<br /><br /><em>with dynasties of every sort coming into fashion.</em><br /><em>Sons in waiting, grandsons coming to the boil.</em><br /><em></em><br />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.<br /><br />This is great stuff, worth reading again and again.</div>Jonathan Timbershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09171372634787678646noreply@blogger.com0