Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

A fortnight today I’ll be 60, which seems ridiculous but such is life. Half a lifetime ago I wrote this (not especially brilliant) haiku, which was published in Blithe Spirit in 1997:

thirtieth birthday
yellowing pears
in a porcelain bowl

In Stepping Stones (British Haiku Society, 2007), a book of commentaries on English-language haiku by British poets, based on his doctoral work, Martin Lucas wrote of that haiku:

The internal comparison is rather obvious, but [. . .] there is a secondary appeal: the intrinsic beauty of the sill life, which we can dwell on for its own value.

As an introduction to the possibilities of haiku in English, it’s yet to be bettered, because Martin had such a gift for analysing haiku simply and concisely, in the spirit of the haiku themselves.

Of late, I’ve continued my fiction binge, including two novels very removed from haiku: Eleanor Catton’s first two, The Rehearsal (2008) and the Booker Prize-winning The Luminaries (2013); both brilliant, as you may well know – I’m very late to these parties! I can’t imagine two novels more different from one another, both immaculately plotted and intriguing. At 832 pages, The Luminaries must be the longest novel I’ve read since slogging my very reluctant way through Little Dorrit for A-level (an experience that pretty much put me off Dickens for life), but it flew by: a gripping tale of crime and double-crossing in the New Zealand gold rush of the 1860s. I have Catton’s third novel, Birnam Wood, to read too, but I’m saving that for a holiday.

Rumer Godden’s The Battle of the Villa Fiorita (1963) was a recommendation on the excellent Jacquie’s Wine Journal book blog, here, which my wife, Lyn, bought and loved; I loved it too, for all the reasons that Jacquie articulates and more. We must find and read more of Godden’s novels.

Lyn wasn’t keen on Han Kang’s famous The Vegetarian – about a woman who stops eating meat and is treated like an outcast for doing so, within a deeply patriarchal society – but I admired its construction and almost nihilistic tone. It’s a difficult read, but easier than the only other book of hers I’ve read, Human Acts, set during the Gwanju rebellion in 1980.

I’m currently reading The Undertaking, the debut novel by Audrey Magee – details here – having enjoyed her second one, The Colony, last year. It’s another fine novel, a real page-turner if ever there was one., despite its setting in Germany and on the Eastern Front in 1942-43. The contrasts between the home front and the Battle of Stalingrad are accentuated by Magee’s style of interweaving the two parallel narratives.

On the poetry front, I’ve reread Jackie Wills’ s latest collection, Making the Wedding Dress (Salt, available here, though you should ignore the misleading ‘synopsis’ that reads as if it’s been cobbled together by AI), because it’s book of the month (my recommendation) for the poetry book club I’m part of. It’s been a real pleasure to read it again, even though it’s not been long since I read it for the first time. It’s also led me to re-read Wills’s On Poetry (Smith Doorstop, 2022, available here), which contains lots of wise advice for the beginner and the more experienced poet alike, and incidentally also got me re-reading collections by the wonderful poet Catherine Smith for the first time in ages.   

Despite all this reading, I’ve not written any new poems for a while now, and have just been tinkering revising, and often adding to, poems originally drafted way back when, in some cases yonks ago. That suits me fine. I find revisiting old poems, i.e. ones that have hitherto not quite worked for whatever reason in order, to see if they’re salvageable almost as enjoyable as editing newly drafted poems. Some poems of mine have been as reworked and battered about as sculpture maquettes, in attempts to elicit their true heart and point. Poems without heart and point aren’t worth persevering with, yet I’m a terrible one for hoarding drafts of poems that I know are never going anywhere, usually because there’s some line or phrase that I think might be recyclable. That said, I’ve inadvertently managed to delete many drafts over the years. For every poem I’ve written that I’m happy with, I would think there’s another 10 or 20 that didn’t cut the mustard – an eyewatering total, I should think. I may be older, with forty-four years of writing poems behind me, but dragging them into the light doesn’t necessarily get any easier.

Tonight sees the return to UK TV screens of 7 Up, in what appears to be its last ever instalment, 70 Up. It’s surely ITV’s finest-ever programme (maybe The Sweeney, Minder and Corrie run it close in their disparate ways!). Lyn and I finished re-watching it all up to 63 Up only a few days ago. It will be deeply moving, and a reminder that, even with promulgators of hatred on the loose in greater numbers in this country than at any other point during my lifetime, there is still so much that binds the ordinary, decent people together – and that everyone ordinary is also extraordinary in their own way.