Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

As the world goes to hell in a handcart again, it seems perverse to be saying anything about what I’ve been up to, but then again, why let the fascists win? Alas, though, I’ve been up to very little this last month; I haven’t gone further than my local park except to see two films – Midwinter Break (excellent adaptation of an excellent book) and La Grazia (also excellent, as it should be since it involves one of the most fruitful director–actor collaborations). It’s been difficult to concentrate on, or get excited by, much. I know I’m not alone in having those sort of feelings at the moment. Had I been up to it, I would’ve joined Conor, my eldest, at the massive anti-racist march in London last Saturday, which the BBC saw fit not even to mention in their news outlets. One thing which has really lifted my spirits, though, is that Conor will be standing for the Greens in the upcoming local elections – I couldn’t be prouder of him. The ward he’s standing in has been a Lib Dem stronghold for the last eight years, so it would be an upset were he to get elected, but he knows his stuff and everything is possible now.

I’ve been cheered, too, by the imminent publication of a cricket poetry anthology, in which I have five haiku and four longer poems: Catching the Light, edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard and published by Fairfield Books – details are available here. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make the launch for it, which is doubly annoying as it’s next to the Oval, where so many of my formative cricket-watching days were spent with my dad, and where the ghostly echo of Robin Jackman’s LBW appeal will forever resound . . .

Further cheering was an invitation from Andrew Neilson to be one of his three guest readers (alongside his wife, Kathryn Gray, and Katy Mahon) at the York launch of his tremendous Blue Diode Press collection, Little Griefs, on Wednesday 6th May. Details and (free) tickets are available here. Fingers and everything else crossed that I’ll be fit enough to make it.

Ditto for my reading three days before that, for Poetry Performance, upstairs at the Adelaide in Teddington, at 6pm. I’m grateful to Heather Moulson and Anne Warrington for the invitation.

I’ve recently ceased, for a second and final time, my involvement (except as a contributor) with Presence haiku journal, not, I hasten to add, as the result of any falling-out with the members of the Edinburgh Haiku Circle who took on management of the journal last year, and are doing a fine job, but because it made sense for them also to take on my role as website editor. It’s 22 years since Martin Lucas asked if I’d like to help with the journal, and it feels like a lifetime ago. I have mixed feelings about stopping, which are inevitably wrapped in my missing Martin still.

My recent reading has been a mixture of systematic and otherwise. The former concerns the centenary, later this year, of the polymathic genius that was John Berger. I’m writing an essay to coincide with it, so I’ve been  re-reading Keeping A Rendezvous (Granta, 1992), the most diverse of his essay collections, which even includes one called ‘A load of shit’, triggered by his clearing out of the communal waste of his Haute-Savoie home:

In the world of modern hygiene, purity has become a purely metaphoric or moralistic term. It has lost all sensuous reality. By contrast, in poor homes in Turkey the first act of hospitality is the offer of lemon eau-de-Cologne to apply to the visitors’ hands, arms, neck, face. Which reminds me of a Turkish proverb about elitists: “He thinks he is a sprig of parsley in the shit of the world.”

In ‘Lost off Cape Wrath’, Berger summed up his uncompromising approach:

The writer should be informed to the maximum about what he is writing. In the modern world in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither produce utopian trash.

I’ve read too one of the few novels of his I hadn’t read before, To The Wedding (Vintage, 1995), concerning the lead-up and individual journeys to the beautiful set-piece wedding near the mouth of the Po of Gino and Ninon, who has AIDS, as narrated by an omniscient blind Greek tamata seller. (Tamata, you ask? Yes. Some examples can be seen here.) It’s one of Berger’s most pan-European and passionate books. Berger always wrote with passion, which is a major reason why I like his writing so much. It’s almost hard to believe that he was born and spent most of the first 36 of his 90 years in England, before he went into his permanent exile.

On the poetry front, I enjoyed Jane McKie’s slim pamphlet, Mine (Cinnamon Press, 2025, available here). Her poems are quiet, mostly short, and dream-like, often reflecting her upbringing on the Sussex coast. It’s a brave poet who successfully tries to depict starling murmurations in words: ‘Like the flinch of a dreaming / eyelid, two harpooned / whales of iron filings / scatter’ (‘Starlings in flight’). The comparison to iron filings is an obvious one, but that of the whales is far from being so, and all the more effective as a result. ‘Fool’s spring’ begins,

The hawthorn is athwart with cream, its petals, tiny pink
and white panes through which sun breathes, palely.

The archaic preposition ‘athwart’leaps out of course, not because of its appearance alone, but because it looks like a near anagram of ‘hawthorn’. Such close attention to how language works on the senses is what makes McKie a singular talent. Steadily, she’s built up an impressive number of collections and pamphlets over the years.

A poet friend of mine kindly sent me a copy of Peckinpah Suite by Paul Munden, published by the Australian publisher Recent Work Press last year, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. Nearly every poem consists of six stanzas of seven lines each, largely concerning the work of Sam Peckinpah’s film-making career. Only the middle section, ‘Castaway’, differs: it’s a long poem, with lines tumbling across the pages, about Peckinpah’s unsuccessful attempt to get off the ground a film of a novella of the same name. Munden’s condensing of his research is admirable, but the poems too often feel as though the stories and incidents they are relaying are simply prose being shoehorned into stanzas against their will. Take this, as a random example, the first stanza of ‘The Wild Bunch’:

Three wilderness years
have made you plan
this believing your life
depends upon it, but
still you’re up at sunrise
staring into space as if
conjuring a miracle.

That placement of ‘this’ at the start of the third line is awkward – if it has to go there, then at least rescue it with a comma – and the use of the ‘life depends upon it’ cliché is less than pleasing. The best, i.e. most natural and therefore most appealing, poems are those where Munden explores his boyhood experiences of watching and reenacting Westerns:

We forget, perhaps,
what being dead was like
when we played cowboys
in the woods, counting
from one to a hundred
with a mounting
visceral dread

            that the bad guys—
            by which I mean everyone—
            moved on. But since
            our lives were mostly play
            back then, death—
            by which I mean our pretence—
            was how we got from day

to day, holding our breath
for as long as it took
to sense the danger.
[. . .]

I fear the book will have limited appeal beyond those extensively familiar with Peckinpah’s oeuvre and life. Endorsement-writers often exaggerate of course, and here the back-cover claim of ‘sophisticated formalism’ feels far-fetched.

Rather more enjoyable was Declan Ryan’s much-lauded debut full collection Crisis Actor (Faber, 2023). Threaded through it are 10 fine poems about boxers, Ali, Louis and Tyson among them; well-crafted and contextually set (against a backdrop of racism for example) though those are, an appreciation of the finer points of the ‘sport’ on the part of the reader would make them even more interesting than they might otherwise be. There are also poems about a number of other well-known people: Sam Cooke, Nick Drake, Alun Lewis. But I prefer the poems about Ryan and his milieu, particularly the ‘ordinary’ characters he knows or has invented. Here are the closing, knowingly self-deprecatory stanzas of the book’s opener, ‘Sidney Road’:

I was the future, for a week, a while ago.
At a summer garden party, I met
a looted favourite poet:
over his empty, one-use flute he wrangled
about the etiquette of ‘watering the foliage’.

A marginal constituent, I’m more witness
than antagonist to flourishing damp.
The months pile up since my last confession;
wheels spinning slowly, hazards on,

just low enough for running down the battery.

Although Ryan perhaps principally chose it for its rhyme with ‘flute’, ‘looted’ is such an interesting adjective, neatly suggesting that the poet in question has nothing left to offer except tedious, euphemistic chunter as ‘empty’ as his plastic glass. It’s an exemplar of how to sketch a character with a bare modicum of words.

Lastly, I must again mention Andrew Neilson’s Little Griefs. It includes all nine of the poems in his 2025 Rack Press pamphlet Summers Are Other, which I (very favourably) reviewed, here, for The Friday Poem. Like Ryan, more so, in fact, Neilson is a technically adept poet, with an easy command of form and register. It seems incredible that it took him so long to find a publisher willing to take on his poetry, especially with endorsements from poets as celebrated as Rachael Boast and Sean O’Brien. We are living in odd times. ‘Casualties’ opens with a quick question then a 10-line sentence across two and a half fully-rhymed quatrains, with lines alternating ten and eight syllables, thus:

Ever felt like this? You’ve gate-crashed yourself
        in the manner of Banquo’s ghost,
now shaking thy gory locks at thyself
        even as you open the post,

or brew a coffee or take the meetings
        (in body if not quite in mind),
or any of a million other things
        you do for no reason, resigned

to do it this way because that’s the way      
   you have always gone and done it.

It takes a hefty amount of skill and practice to write like this. The opening query is reminiscent of the opening of Michael Donaghy’s poem ‘Liverpool’(‘Ever been tattooed?’) – though I should confess that I used that poem as a model of sorts for one of mine (‘Kingston’, in my first collection). The long sentence is beautifully controlled across its fluid enjambments – read it aloud and hear how it rolls. There’s plenty more terrific poetry in the book.

The next book on my pile is a novel I’ve been looking forward to starting: The River Brings the Sea by Ali Thurm, published by Lendal Press.

This coming Saturday I hope to make it to the Unitarian church in Doncaster to be one of the 20+ readers at the launch of the Fig Tree Anthology 2025, edited by Tim Fellows. To mark the centenary of the General Strike, Tim has just put out a call for poems about the strike and the union movement more generally. Details of both the reading and the call-out can be found on the Crooked Spire Press website, here.

January was a blast, despite the year’s first rejection winging its way to me on only the 5th: I’ve been far more productive, poems-wise, than usual. That may in part be due to reading the long, elegant, syntactically-gorgeous lines of C.K. Williams’s poetry at bedtime, which seems to have unlocked a part of my brain hitherto securely bolted. I’ve been to two fantastic weekend workshops, at both of which the other participants wrote amazing, inspiring poems. In editing my own, I’ve found, not for the first time in the last year or two, that I’ve spent at least as much time adding to the poems as I have deleting or tweaking phrases and lines; for me, that’s a very happy place.

I’ve been delighted to see some poetry pals buoyed by recent successes, a reminder, if one were needed, that the poetry world has room enough for everyone with flair, imagination and a willingness to work hard at their craft.

Something else which has made me think a lot about the use of language is learning Italian: I’m in the second year of evening classes and I’m at the point now where I relish the challenge of rendering Italian into idiomatic English. (Or even idiotic.) I can’t say that I’m speaking Italian with great confidence, but I like having a go and I enjoy how the words flow into one another more seamlessly than English words do.

Two recently-published anthologies each include a poem of mine. Firstly, My Ear is Full of Milk: An anthology of writing for Laurel & Hardy, edited by Simon Barraclough and Aaron Kent, Broken Sleep Books, available here. As my (not brilliant) contribution relates, Stan and Ollie enlivened my summers, because, back in the ’80s, the BBC used to show one of their short films every day before the test match coverage. Stan Laurel surely deserves to be ranked among the greatest Britons of all time. I’m itching to read it, but my TBR pile has much more pressing candidates. Secondly, I’m very proud to have a poem in The Poems: Forty Years of The North – published by Smith|Doorstop and available here – which contains a whole heap of wonderful poems first published in my favourite poetry journal.

Books and magazines I read in January included: Will Birch’s excellent and suitably lively biography of another great Briton, Ian Dury (Pan MacMillan, 2010); No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain by Paul Addison (OUP, 2010); Andy Beckett’s Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980–82 Made Modern Britain (Penguin, 2015), based on interviews he conducted with many major and minor players in the first years of Thatcherism, including some excellent stuff on the GLC administration led by Ken Livingstone and how revolutionary and influential they were, despite much right-wing press opprobrium (which I remember well) and still are; the latest issues of Acumen, The Dark Horse and PN Review (hurray for a terrific new poem by Roger Garfitt); a re-reading of Jonathan Edwards’s fine Gen (Seren, 2018) for poetry book club; and more of Richard Siken’s prose-poems.

I’m currently reading Ken Worpole’s Brightening from the East: Essays on Landscape and Memory, Little Toller, 2025, available here, the first essays of which rambled about rather and contained little new for anyone, like me, who is already familiar with the coastline and countryside of Essex and the edgelands of north-east and east London. It’s also let down by a lack of footnotes or references of any kind other than a long list of source material. But where the book really comes alive, and beautifully so, is when Worpole starts to reminisce about his grandmother, his childhood and his teacher training and practice at a time when folk traditions still featured strongly in English primary education. Another essay concerns Essex-based Tolstoyan and other model communities, ground covered to an extent by the genius that is Jonathan Meades in his BBC4 programme The Joy of Essex (2012), but happily it includes the Othona community, at Bradwell, next to the seventh-century church of St Peter-in-the-Wall. I stayed there in 2003 at a British Haiku Society conference, at which Brian Tasker got us doing Playback Theatre, which involves acting out stories or incidents recalled by audience members, and probably wouldn’t have been sanctioned by the network, details here, that started and oversees it. It was a strange experience, not least because someone from another, Christian group staying there watched us doing Playback and wanted to defect from her group to ours . . .