Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

I spent the weekend before last with my brother Adrian at his home in Bath, which is the longest period of time we’ve spent together for donkey’s years and was really lovely. I then caught a bus which travelled through the former mining areas of Somerset around Radstock and Midsomer Norton, before going through the Mendips, with Glastonbury Tor on the horizon, and descending to Wells, the (self-proclaimed) smallest city in England. Wells has a lovely centre – mainly but not only the beautiful Gothic cathedral and the adjoining, fully-moated Bishop’s Palace.

I got there early enough to go round and inside the cathedral, and then, up the High Street, to see a photo of my then-bearded mug on a small poster in the window of the King’s Head. Just as well I’d shaved the beard off at the start of this year, otherwise there would have been mayhem: a posse of citizens out to lasso the wanted man.

Ama Bolton and her group of like-minded folk, the Fountain Poets, were very welcoming, and read – and, in Rachael Clyne’s case, sang – some fine pieces. I read from both my collections plus a couple of new poems too. Ama has kindly invited me back for another reading next March, so I’d better write lots more poems in the next 11 and a half months.

Much of my reading has again been for reviews, and, for once, of books which I enjoyed and admired without exception. Among the books I’ve read solely (or mainly) for pleasure are Dean Browne’s After Party (Picador, 2025), this month’s Poetry Book Club choice, and Ted Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000). Two more different books you’d be hard-pressed to find, yet I like them both: the inventive verbal fireworks of Browne’s poems contrast sharply with Kooser’s quiet, weather- and nature-based short poems. In a preface, Kooser says he write the poems ‘during [his] recovery from surgery and radiation for cancer’, with a two-mile walk every dawn because he’d ‘been told by [his] radiation oncologist to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity’. Even without that background information, Kooser’s poems would still have been very moving. I hope he won’t mind me quoting this one in full:

March 10

          Quiet and cold at 6 a.m.


At dawn in the roadside churchyard,
the recent, polished headstones glance and flash
as if the newly dead were waving pink placards
protesting the loss of their influence.
But the soft old marbles, grainy from weather
and losing their names, have a steady glow,
like paper bags with candles lit inside,
lining a path, an invitation.

Earlier this year, I started getting a bit of pain in my right shoulder, but I thought little of it. It’s considerably worsened since then, with constant pain down my right arm and in my neck, to the point that each ordinarily simple task is a bit of an ordeal. After an x-ray a fortnight ago and appointments with a doctor and a physio this week, it seems that the top of my spine is the most likely source of the problem and that it’s all related to my nervous system – ‘my noives’, as Oliver Hardy would say. I might know more after blood tests on Sunday and more physio on Monday.

In #293 (et al)) of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein considers what we mean when we each, individually, talk about ‘pain’, and compares it thus;

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle s only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. [Etc.]

I like to imagine the beetle in my box is a shiny, metallic green. I think I have a fairly high tolerance for pain (for a man), but this is testing my patience to the limit. Dean Browne, through a character, defined pain as something else, in the opening of his poem ‘Quiche’, available here.