Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Thanks mainly to Rotherham Library’s engagingly eccentric stock, I’ve got through a real miscellany of books in the last two months. I’ll begin with fiction.

I admired Patrick McGuinness’s excellent The Last Hundred Days (Seren, 2011), a thriller of sorts set against the backdrop of Ceausescu’s downfall. Its dark comedy and Kafkaesque absurdities reminded me of the novels of Milan Kundera.  

Having enjoyed both the Swedish and Kenneth Branagh adaptations of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels, I thought it was about time I read a couple of them. But I also read his last book, After the Fire, not a Wallander, which was drenched in melancholy and therefore right up my street.

Natasha Brown’s Assembly (2021) gives her take on what it is be a young Black woman within the strata of British society. It’s as powerful in its own way as Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), to which it owes something in its stylistic flourish.

Will Eaves’s The Absent Therapist (CB Editions, 2014) is a series of short, often comic vignettes and digressions on all sorts of serious topics – including racism, misogyny and other forms of oppression – which only occasionally, have any inter-relation. I found its non sequiturs as annoying as those which used to pepper my mother’s conversation.

Having read reviews of it when it was published two years ago, I was very glad to read The Colony by Audrey Magee. Its central premise – an English painter going to stay in an Irish-speaking community on a small island in 1979 – may be clunky, but the spare, multi-voiced narrative quickly becomes addictive. Magee’s microcosmic takes on British colonialism, the power and value of language per se and the century-old debate within Ireland about the cultural importance of the Irish language are all layered within beautiful prose. None of those concerns are original of course – Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations certainly got there first – but  I’m sure it’ll be adapted for the cinema soon enough. If it is, it won’t be able to convey the richness of Magee’s writing.

Of poetry collections, John Burnside’s swansong Ruin, Blossom was too full of Catholic theology for my taste, but did also include some memorable poems, chief among them ‘The Night Ferry’, which reads now like a death poem, in the Japanese tradition, with this ending:

Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now, with the chart.
The ferry at the dock, lit
stern to bow,
the next life like a footfall in my heart.

The repetition of ‘done’ and the mention of ‘the compass’ in the same breath must be a nod to Donne’s great poem ‘A Valediction: forbidding Mourning’.

I initially liked the tone – surely influenced by Geoff Hattersley and maybe by Fred Voss – and craft of the poems in Philip Hancock’s House on the A34 (CB Editions), but grew a little weary of them over the course of the full collection.

Among non-fiction, it was intriguing to compare Margaret Forster’s final, autobiographical  book, My Life in Houses (2014), with her husband Hunter Davies’s second part (maybe second half, given his lifelong football addiction?) of autobiography, A Life in the Day (2017).  Davies has always been irreverent, especially in comparison with Forster’s more serious approach, but his self-deprecation and his moving account of Forster’s illness and passing lift his memoirs into the best company. Forster’s book is equally fine, and its premise of a life through home-making is both poignant and as well-written as you would expect from one of Britain’s finest novelists.

Stephen Enniss’s 2014 After the Titanic: the Life of Derek Mahon, published six years before Mahon’s death, was very disappointing, not least in its many factual errors (especially regarding the geography of the North of Ireland), but leaves room for a far better, critical biography of this hugely gifted poet.

Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother (2012), subtitled ‘Writers and their families’, though really just literary hackwork largely compiled, it seemed, from other writers’ biographies, was entertaining in part, especially so on Yeats and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, and on Thomas Mann and his children. It reminded me too that I must read Patricia Craig’s biography of Brian Moore, who was, to my mind, a more consistently excellent novelist than Tóibín makes out.

The cricketer Graeme Fowler’s 2016 autobiography Absolutely Foxed, ghosted by John Woodhouse, provides a candid canter through the career of this elegant batter (and superb fielder), and his subsequent coaching at Durham University and battles with mental illness, a subject he broaches more fully in another book, Mind over Batter (dreadful title). It couldn’t fail to remind me of the life and recent tragic end of another England left-hander, Graham Thorpe.

The most resonant non-fiction book I’ve read of late was one which, on the surface, wouldn’t normally have grabbed my attention given that its main subject is cycling; however, I can’t recommend enough Ned Boulting’s 1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession (2023). Hitherto best known as a TV commentator on the Tour, and on darts, Boulting’s book delves into the post-Great War history of Belgium, France and Germany in a never less-than-compelling manner – his obsession becomes contagious. Cycling is way down my list of interests – I haven’t owned a bike in years – but 1923 is like a Sebaldian novel, full of mysteries, coincidences, psychogeography, Existentialism and the sort of poetic prose you wouldn’t necessarily expect a sports commentator to write:

We will never know the inner lives of others, whether they really come past us at speed, so fast we catch a breath of wind as they pass, or whether they only exist many years later as a ghostly moving image, recorded and preserved semi-incidentally.