Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Yesterday, on the second day of this, our third official heatwave of the English summer, I was meant to be catching a bus to Worksop then a train, on what is known as the Robin Hood line, to Mansfield, to meet a poet friend, but I checked on the trains before I set out and found that while one train was running towards Mansfield, there would be none coming back unless I wanted to take a near-two-hour rail replacement bus. Anybody who endured that really ought to get a gong in the next honours list. So instead we agreed to meet in Nottingham, to and from which trains were thankfully running via Sheffield. When I arrived in Nottingham, I noticed that the reason given for the cancellation of the Worksop to Mansfield (thence to Nottingham) trains was the ‘severe weather forecast’. Well, it was certainly hot – 30 degrees – and unrelentingly so, yet it begged the question that if this is the impact of climate change on our transport (and other) infrastructure now, then what will it be like in 20, 30, 50, etc. years’ time? Surely even the most rabid of Reform voters living in or near Mansfield (the constituency of Lee Anderson, ‘30p Lee’ himself, is next door) must now be able to recognise, and maybe, just maybe, even start to worry about, that. Anyway, we had an excellent afternoon of chewing the fat, bemoaning various aspects of the poetry world – particularly the egregious nepotism in prize-judging – and toasting Count Binface.

All that is a roundabout way of saying that it’s just too damn hot to do anything much, isn’t it, and least of all writing. Even reading – to any acceptable degree of concentration – is far from easy. Nonetheless, I’ve ploughed through a Beverley Bie Brahic poetry collection from 2016, Hunting the Boar, CB Editions, quality-wise a book of two halves, the first being fine, especially poems set in small French communes, but the second not so much. Now, I’m reading Rory Waterman’s excellent Devils in the Details (Five Leaves Publications, available here), his entertaining, erudite, and beautifully-written yomp around Lincolnshire in search of folklore.

On the publication front, I had a poem in the latest issue of The Fig Tree, available here, last week, about the deputy headmaster of my secondary school all those years ago. My thanks to the editor, Tim Fellows. The three poems by the featured poet, Laura Strickland, are important ones, in how they reclaim the voices and lives of the victims of Peter Sutcliffe. They reminded me that Blake Morrison’s 1985 poem ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper’, available here, consisting of 100 quatrains written in West Yorkshire dialect and the cornerstone of his 1987 Chatto & Windus collection of the same name, is all but forgotten nowadays. The ethics of a male poet attempting to write such a poem have undoubtedly shifted since then; however, Morrison’s unequivocal and (arguably too graphically) unflinching contextualisation of Sutcliffe’s terrible crimes within the very widespread misogyny of his family, friends and wider society and culture remains, to my mind, largely admirable and ahead of its time.

Over on this blog’s younger sibling, my Substack, I’ve posted the first two of a series of pieces on items which relate to my family history. They can be read here and here. I’d be delighted if you were to read them.