Now that the pain of my frozen shoulder has considerably lessened, I’ve been better able to concentrate on and enjoy reading, which is just as well because trying to force my own poems out has been like trying to squeeze a last smidgen of toothpaste out of a spent tube; at such times, it’s far better to stick to reading for a good long while.
Among other things, I’ve read a good few poetry pamphlets. I’ll start with one for which I have to declare an interest since it’s published by my own publisher: Before It’s Too Late, by David Harmer (Crooked Spire Press, available here). David is perhaps better-known as a children’s writer and as one half of the Glummer Twins (watchable in action here), but is also an excellent poet for adults, as this publication shows. Many of the poems depict childhood memories; others are elegies, for his parents and friends, as the title hints. My favourite poem of this rich seam is the closing one, ‘Out of Our Hands’, which movingly shows how responsibility passes through the generations, in this case to David and his wife Paula’s children:
It took the kids, all grown up
and in charge of a skip, to hack away
the thickets and tangles, dig up
the roses they wanted, complete the task
of organising our chaos; a job we once
did for them, but they are young enough
to learn a new trick, clear up January,
uncover old pathways with a smile.
Another very fine pamphlet is Hilary Menos’s Vox Wah Wah (New Walk Editions, available here). Again I have to declare an interest in that Hilary is the editor of my reviews and essays for The Friday Poem. Its 20 poems are mainly themed around music, and musical gear (like that in the title), and encompass, inter alia, Hendrix, Coltrane, Davey Payne of the Blockheads, the Dead, Sinatra, Elvis (several times), Karen Carpenter and, magnificently, Etta James. Shot through these poems is Hilary’s love not just for music but also for her partner Andy Brodie, who plays guitar in at least one band. (I must point out here that, just like the fine cover of Before It’s Too Late features a painting by David Harmer’s wife, Vox Wah Wah’s equally fine cover is designed by Andy.) ‘Used & Vintage’ lists the guitars which Andy (presumably) has owned and how he acquired and got rid of them, and ends, rather beautifully, with ‘the blue Dan Dunham / which he ditched last year for the Blonde Tele here in his lap’ with its
ash body, maple neck, just starting to open up
the way tome woods do, like sycamore, spruce, mahogany,
the sap settling in sweeter patterns the more you play
so with use and age come depth and resonance
and I look at him and think, yes.
Well-researched information (and/or anecdote) is always presented in service of the poem rather than for facts’ sake, helped by Hilary’s skilled use of varied forms – couplets, tercets, chunky long-lined stanzas, etc. – and often, as in the example above, by subtle, unobtrusive end-rhyme. Again like Before It’s Too Late, it’s a pamphlet which repays re-reading to absorb its intricacies and pleasures. Zoë Walkington’s Missing Person (smith | doorstop, available here) was my reading matter of choice on trains to and from Leeds on Saturday. It’s ground-breaking: a mash-up of poetry pamphlet and police procedural detective fiction, in which we encounter suspects, and police investigators in a case of child abduction from an underpass in York. The reader is invited to read the poems and solve the case. I’m glad to report that yours truly did indeed crack the case. (No wonder I bought a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes in the book sale at the Leeds Library.) The richness of Missing Person lies, though, in the details – I have to say ‘gritty’ details. ‘Black Gloves’ opens thus:
How much for these? I ask the bloke
behind the trestle, who looks like
he has just eaten his own young.
And he looks me up and down
and says Seven quid to you, and I say
I’ll give you three and he shakes his head
as though I’m asking him which of his
Alsatians he wants to have put down.
The (black) humour here will be recognisable to anyone who read Zoë’s marvellous I Hate to Be the One to Tell You This (smith | doorstop, 2023). I won’t spoil the surprise and cleverness of Missing Person any further.
I also enjoyed some heftier non-fiction. Barry Miles’s London Calling, subtitled ‘A Countercultural History of London Since 1945’ was right up my street, since Miles, as he’s always been known, was almost as Zelig-like as Joe Boyd in the late-Sixties. Friend of the Fabs, McCartney especially, he was one of the organisers of the ‘International Poetry Incarnation’ at the Albert Hall in 1965 at which Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti read among more local poets like Adrian Mitchell and Harry Fainlight; co-owned and ran (with John Dunbar and Peter Asher) Indica, the gallery and bookshop – pictures here – where John and Yoko first met; was involved with the International Times (IT) and Oz; and was seemingly at every happening, like the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream at Ally Pally. Unsurprisingly, Miles’s book is especially good on the Sixties and early-Seventies, and less so on the movements he wasn’t directly part of, such as Punk and the New Romantics. Nevertheless, it’s a jolly jaunt, chock-full of great stories.
David Shields and Shane Salerno’s oral biography, Salinger (Simon & Schuster, 2014) is an extraordinary book in how it mixes interviews with Salinger’s friends, family, colleagues and comrades-in-arms with previously published written testimony, and leaves the reader in no doubt as to the traumatic impact of what he’d seen and witnessed from D-Day on to the liberation of satellite camps of Belsen. It conveys so well how driven he was as a writer, in a manner reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, to the detriment of the succession of (young) women whom he groomed into relationships with him and of his daughter.
I’m currently reading Matchdays (Simon & Schuster, 2015), subtitled ‘The Hidden Story of the Bundesliga’, by Ronald Reng, translated into English by the novelist James Hawes. The history of football is necessarily reflective of wider social and political history , and Reng’s book proves this in spades. The Bundesliga was only founded in 1963, as if West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’, out of the ashes of the defeat of the Nazis, had to mature before a league competition could be permitted. Even then, footballers’ wages were capped for far longer than in England, TV coverage was amateurish until well into the ’70s, and tactics seem to have been all but non-existent at many clubs, despite Bayern Munich’s and Borussia Mönchengladbach’s European successes. At the book’s heart is the story of the immensely likeable Heinz Hoher, a cut-above-journeyman player who became a manager of the same ilk.
At the top of my TBR pile is Jackie Wills’s new collection Making the Wedding Dress (Salt), her first since 2019’s A Friable Earth (Arc, 2019). Wills is one of my favourite poets, so I know this will be an unqualified pleasure.
*
This coming Sunday I’ll be one of four readers – alongside Bethany Handley, Hilary Watson and Tracey Rhys – in the poetry showcase, the final event of the weekend-long Penarth Literary Festival, organised by the terrific Griffin Books. I’m also very much looking forward to meeting in person several other members of the poetry book club which I’m a member of. My thanks go to Katherine Stansfield and Steohen Payne for inviting me to read.
Now that the pain of my frozen shoulder has considerably lessened, I’ve been better able to concentrate on and enjoy reading, which is just as well because trying to force my own poems out has been like trying to squeeze a last smidgen of toothpaste out of a spent tube. At such times, it’s far better to stick to reading for a good long while.
Among other things, I’ve read a good few poetry pamphlets. I’ll start with one for which I have to declare an interest since it’s published by my own publisher: Before It’s Too Late, by David Harmer (Crooked Spire Press, available here). David is perhaps better-known as a children’s writer and as one half of the Glummer Twins (watchable in action here) but is also an excellent poet for adults, as this publication shows. Many of the poems depict childhood-memories; others are elegies, for his parents and friends, as the title hints. My favourite poem of this rich seam is the closing one, ‘Out of Our Hands’, which movingly shows how responsibility passes through the generations, in this case to David and his wife Paula’s children:
It took the kids, all grown up
and in charge of a skip, to hack away
the thickets and tangles, dig up
the roses they wanted, complete the task
of organising our chaos; a job we once
did for them, but they are young enough
to learn a new trick, clear up January,
uncover old pathways with a smile.
Another very fine pamphlet is Hilary Menos’s Vox Wah Wah (New Walk Editions, available here). Again I have to declare an interest in that Hilary is the editor of my reviews and essays for The Friday Poem. Its 20 poems are mainly themed around music, and musical gear (like that in the title), and encompass, inter alia, Hendrix, Coltrane, Davey Payne of the Blockheads, the Dead, Sinatra, Elvis (several times), Karen Carpenter and, magnificently, Etta James. Shot through these poems is Hilary’s love not just for music but also for her partner Andy Brodie, who plays guitar in at least one band. (I must point out here that, just like the fine cover of Before It’s Too Late features a painting by David Harmer’s wife, Vox Wah Wah’s equally fine cover is designed by Andy.) ‘Used & Vintage’ lists the guitars which Andy (presumably) has owned and how he acquired and got rid of them, and ends, rather beautifully, with ‘the blue Dan Dunham / which he ditched last year for the Blonde Tele here in his lap’ with its
ash body, maple neck, just starting to open up
the way tome woods do, like sycamore, spruce, mahogany,
the sap settling in sweeter patterns the more you play
so with use and age come depth and resonance
and I look at him and think, yes.
Well-researched information (and/or anecdote) is always presented in service of the poem rather than for facts’ sake, helped by Hilary’s skilled use of varied forms – couplets, tercets, chunky long-lined stanzas, etc. – and often, as in the example above, by subtle, unobtrusive end-rhyme. Again like Before It’s Too Late, it’s a pamphlet which repays re-reading to absorb its intricacies and pleasures. Zoë Walkington’s Missing Person (smith | doorstop, available here) was my reading matter of choice on trains to and from Leeds on Saturday. It’s ground-breaking: a mash-up of poetry pamphlet and police procedural detective fiction, in which we encounter suspects, and police investigators in a case of child abduction from an underpass in York. The reader is invited to read the poems and solve the case. I’m glad to report that yours truly did indeed crack the case. (No wonder I bought a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes in the book sale at the Leeds Library.) The richness of Missing Person lies, though, in the details – I have to say ‘gritty’ details. ‘Black Gloves’ opens thus:
How much for these? I ask the bloke
behind the trestle, who looks like
he has just eaten his own young.
And he looks me up and down
and says Seven quid to you, and I say
I’ll give you three and he shakes his head
as though I’m asking him which of his
Alsatians he wants to have put down.
The (black) humour here will be recognisable to anyone who read Zoë’s marvellous I Hate to Be the One to Tell You This (smith | doorstop, 2023). I won’t spoil the surprise and cleverness of Missing Person any further.
I also enjoyed some heftier non-fiction. Barry Miles’s London Calling, subtitled ‘A Countercultural History of London Since 1945’ was right up my street, since Miles, as he’s always been known, was almost as Zelig-like as Joe Boyd in the late-Sixties. Friend of the Fabs, McCartney especially, he was one of the organisers of the ‘International Poetry Incarnation’ at the Albert Hall in 1965 at which Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti read among more local poets like Adrian Mitchell and Harry Fainlight; co-owned and ran (with John Dunbar and Peter Asher) Indica, the gallery and bookshop – pictures here – where John and Yoko first met; was involved with the International Times (IT) and Oz; and was seemingly at every happening, like the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream at Ally Pally. Unsurprisingly, Miles’s book is especially good on the Sixties and early-Seventies, and less so on the movements he wasn’t directly part of, such as Punk and the New Romantics. Nevertheless, it’s a jolly jaunt, chock-full of great stories.
David Shields and Shane Salerno’s oral biography, Salinger (Simon & Schuster, 2014) is an extraordinary book in how it mixes interviews with Salinger’s friends, family, colleagues and comrades-in-arms with previously published written testimony, and leaves the reader in no doubt as to the traumatic impact of what he’d seen and witnessed from D-Day on to the liberation of satellite camps of Belsen. It conveys so well how driven he was as a writer, in a manner reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, to the detriment of the succession of (young) women whom he groomed into relationships with him and of his daughter.
I’m currently reading Matchdays, subtitled ‘The Hidden Story of the Bundesliga’, by Ronald Reng, translated into English by the novelist James Hawes. The history of football is necessarily reflective of wider social and political history , and Reng’s book proves this in spades. The Bundesliga was only founded in 1963, as if West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ out of the ashes of the defeat of the Nazis had to mature before a league competition could be permitted. Even then, footballers’ wages were capped for far longer than in England, and TV coverage was amateurish until well into the ’70s, and tactics seem to be non-existent at many clubs, despite Bayern Munich’s and Borussia Mönchengladbach’s European successes. At the book’s heart is the story of the immensely likeable Heinz Hoher, a cut-above-journeyman player who became a manger of the same ilk.
At the top of my TBR pile is Jackie Wills’ new collection Making the Wedding Dress (Salt), her first since 2019’s A Friable Earth (Arc, 2019). Wills is one of my favourite poets, so I know this will be an unqualified pleasure.
*
This coming Sunday I’ll be one of four readers – alongside Bethany Handley, Hilary Watson and Tracey Rhys – in the poetry showcase, the final event of the weekend-long Penarth Literary Festival, organised by the terrific Griffin Books. I’m also very much looking forward to meeting in person several other members of the poetry book club which I’m a member of. My thanks go to Katherine Stansfield and Stephen Payne for inviting me to read. Tickets are available here.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 
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