Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Taking some books back to the library a few weeks ago, I hadn’t intended to borrow a new lot, but I had an uncanny inkling that I would find something unexpected and fine. I loved Hugo Hamilton’s memoir of his German–Irish childhood, The Speckled People, a few years ago, so I was delighted to find his novel Every Single Minute (2014) on the shelf – and even more so when I saw that it was set in Berlin, a city with which I have my own relationship.

It’s a thinly fictionalised account of Hamilton and the Irish memoirist Nuala O’Faolain visiting the city as a last hurrah for O’Faolain facing an imminent death from cancer, and is packed full of lines and phrases which jump out at the reader. This extract gives a flavour of the novel:

        She want to know what makes me happy.
          I’m not talking about the normal things, she says, like love and drink and drugs and the day your daughter was born.
          What else is there?
          Things that lift your heart, Liam.
          Like a lighthouse.
          What lighthouse?
          Any lighthouse. I tell her I feel glad whenever I see a lighthouse. I have no idea why. Maybe it reminds me of being close to home. Something about the summer. Even the word lighthouse makes me happy. I don’t go looking for them. It’s just lighthouses I happen to see or hear about.
          You’re right, she says. Lighthouses.
          I tell her I’m like everyone else, I love travelling. I love hearing languages I don’t understand. Far away languages, like Japanese. I wouldn’t have a clue what they were saying. I like that. And Irish. I tell her I love it when Radio na Galetachta comes on by accident in the car. When you hear somebody talking his head off with great Irish and you don’t understand half the words.
          Go mbeirimíd be oar an ám seo arís.
          She says it’s the Irish for being alive around the same time next year. Literally. May we meet again alive this time.

(I asked Fourth Estate for permission to quote this extract but received no reply.)

Family – and what we owe to them, and how they are remembered – is a key theme, but the book is much more than that. As Colm Tóibín says in his endorsement, ‘It is a world haunted not only by death, but
also by beauty and the strangeness of being alive.’ It’s also very funny and deeply moving. There’s a good piece in the Irish Times about it, available here.

Extraordinary, isn’t it, how stumbling upon a mesmerising book awash with wisdom can alter one’s perspective?

I also borrowed Deborah Orr’s memoir, Motherwell, published in 2020, a few months after her death from breast cancer at the age of just 57. It’s a brilliant account of her working-class childhood; of her Scottish steel-worker father and his prejudices; and, especially, of her domineering and irascibly contrary Essex mother. Aside from repetitive explanations of what narcissistic behaviour entails, it was a book I felt compelled to read to its end, but in small doses. On reflection, that was probably due to the fact that Orr’s descriptions of her mother reminded me so much of my own Essex mother.

I bought a copy of Hunter Davies’s 2017 memoir, The Co-op’s Got Bananas, subtitled A Memoir of Growing Up in the Post-War North. Like Orr’s, it painted a rich picture of childhood, in Scotland and Carlisle, but also of university in Durham, his first proper journalism job for the Manchester Evening News and his courtship days with Margaret Forster. As memoirs go, it’s a largely jolly affair, with plenty of laughs, but shot through with an underlying note of melancholy.

I’ve been dipping in and out of other books, notably Lara Pawson’s much-praised Spent Light, from the estimable CB Editions, though somehow it’s irritated me as much as I’ve enjoyed or admired it. There’s no doubting her talent: her memoir-of-sorts, This is the Place to Be (2016), was moving, chilling and courageous in equal parts.

The latest issue of Butcher’s Dog is as lovely to look at and read as ever. If only all poetry journals were put together with such care and taste.

I’m also working my way through another publication which has been beautifully produced: the posthumous Wild Cherry: Selected Poems of Nigel Jenkins assembled and introduced by Patrick McGuinness (and available from the publisher Parthian Books here), which is this month’s reading for the poetry book club I belong to. I’m thus far warming most of all to his political poems, which isn’t something I very often say because political poetry usually bores me rigid; Jenkins’s, though, sparkle with fierceness, wit and Welshness, which makes them as relevant now as the times in which they were written.

Finally, I’ve almost finished Barbara Pym’s first (1950) novel, Some Tame Gazelle. It’s very funny and wonderfully well-written; much funnier than, say, either Wodehouse or Benson and much truer to life too. I can see why Larkin was such a fan of Pym, and can also discern an influence on his poetry in the vividness of her similes and metaphorical verbs. Thankfully, we have more Pym novels in the house to keep me entertained as long as the summer lasts.