Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

My fiction-reading splurge earlier this year petered out after a couple of Rupert Thomson novels: after finishing The Insult, a game of two equally engrossing halves, I read Death of a Murderer, in which the police officer protagonist is called upon to spend a night guarding the coffin of the titular character, based on Myra Hindley, before the funeral. Thankfully, the book is more about the copper’s past and equally shaky present. Thomson is a fine novelist, whose range of inventively cinematic and always dependably readable novels reminds me of the oeuvre of Brian Moore, whose books I loved in the ’80s and ’90s.

Among the poetry collections I’ve read lately are Tracey Herd’s first (Bloodaxe, 1996) collection, No Hiding Place, which more than hinted at the promise she fulfilled in her next two books, Dead Redhead (2001) and Not in This World (2014). Her fourth collection will be out next year. I’ve also just read Reading the Bones (Canongate, 1999) by another Scottish poet, but one new to me, Janet Paisley – a raw, but brilliant collection. No wonder Kathleen Jamie, no less, gave her a glowing endorsement. Alas, though, she died in 2018. I’ll have to track down her other books.

I admired the April choice for the monthly poetry reading group I belong to: Patrick McGuinness’s third Cape collection, Blood Feather, from last year. It consists of a superb sequence of 22 mostly short poems about his mother, then a more miscellaneous section, the highlights of which include ‘Landline’, a study in obsolescence which segues into a finely judged exaggeration, and ‘Travelodge’, which nails the dubious charm of Britain’s number one budget-hotel chain and how staying in them implicitly turn guests into lost souls. I loved this line: ‘The television is a furnace burning local news.’ Both those poems, and others, veer between high comedy and seriousness in a highly-skilled manner. McGuinness has an uncanny ability to take his poems into surprising directions; always a sign of an excellent poet, I find.

A harder read was Donald Hall’s The Painted Bed (2002), his second solo collection after the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, in 1998. Many of the poems are understandably heavy with grief and absence, and inspired by the example of Hardy, but the book ends with a set of rather hideous ‘erotic’ poems which are very much best skipped.

For some reason I can’t remember, I took my old copy of Children of Albion, the 1968 anthology of ‘Underground’ UK poetry edited by Michael Horovitz, off my shelf a few weeks ago and I then skimmed through it on several train journeys. However influential it may’ve been, there’s a fair bit of dross in it, striving much too hard either to channel a Ginsbergian prophetic tone and/or to be quirkily surreal. There was some good stuff too, principally by Roy Fisher and Tom Raworth. As has been noted many times in the 56 intervening years, the gender imbalance is such that its three women poets – among them Horovitz’s then wife, Frances – feel barely even tokenistic. Horovitz’s enthusiastically rambling afterword was more enjoyable than most of the poetry. I saw a good few of the book’s poets read at the Albert Hall one hot day in the summer of 1984; one of the best-known was Adrian Mitchell, churning out his famous protest poem, ‘To Whom it May Concern’: to my then 17-year-old self, stuff like that seemed interesting only for its historical curiosity. Similarly, the anthology as a whole hasn’t stood the test of time very well.

Another poetry collection which I have enjoyed, though, is Medbh McGuckian’s 1982 debut, The Flower Master, which I really should’ve read years ago, given how prominent she was when I first went to the north of Ireland in 1985. It’s a classic. Cahal Dallat wrote about it perceptively in no. 47 of The North in 2011, noting, inter alia, its metaphysicality and this:

From today’s perspective the collection’s horticultural references, flowers and fruits, butterflies, and the whole domestic matter of love and love-making, home and home-making, however partially glimpsed through a veiled and fragmentary verbal music, constitute, invoke – take one straight back to – a sort of 1970s Scenes from Married Life in a set dressed by Laura Ashley but with the emotional and lyrical toughness of a Dory Previn or a Joni Mitchell.

It’s hard, too, to disagree with Dallat’s concluding sense of confusion: ‘And I still don’t necessarily ‘get it’ and perhaps don’t need to and don’t want to.’ For me, the collection’s beauty lies in its mysteries, but not in an annoying crack-the-code manner, and I know it’s one which I will re-read.

In summary, as you can see, my reading has become a bit too haphazard even by my standards. I’m not sure if that’s a bad or good thing.