With my thanks to editor Tim Fellows, I have a new poem in the latest issue of The Fig Tree, here, alongside some excellent poems by some very fine poets, including Stewart Carswell, David Harmer, Fokkina McDonnell and Mat Riches.
Author: Matthew Paul
-
April reading
I read about Boot Sale Harvest by Adrian May, Dunlin Press 2023, available here, on the Caught by the River website and had to buy it. Ostensibly, it recounts a year’s worth of May’s hauls from car-boot sales near his home in North Essex, but May’s riffs on a variety of themes – Essex itself, literature (good and bad), religion, all manner of objects (practical and otherwise), the highs and lows of his love life, and, above all, music (he’s been a folkie for many years) – are engagingly idiosyncratic and off-piste. He frequently rambles, but don’t we all. As Ken Worpole says in his foreword, ‘There are in Boot Sale Harvest similar elements of the delight which millions found in the critically acclaimed television series, Detectorists.’ The locales in the book are reminiscent of the fictional Danebury of the series, the characters are equally quirky, and May subtly chews over the mostly male obsession with collecting, in a way which reminded me of an anecdote of Lance’s in Detectorists in which he talks about a bloke who ended up collecting collections. May intersperses the book with some of his song lyrics and poems, the former being rather more palatable and entertaining than the latter. It’s one of those chatty books which makes for amusing, melancholy and thoroughly amiable company.
Talking of Ken Worpole, he is the guest on the latest edition of Justin Hopper’s excellent ‘Uncanny Landscapes’ podcasts, here. At one point Ken starts talking about how annoyed he was when John Major’s government brought in the idea of people as ‘customers’ when they interacted with local government and other public services. Personally, it never bothered me, because ‘customer’ was also followed by ‘care’ where I worked, and I always made sure that my teams went out of their way to provide the best possible customer care. For me, what Major’s government was and remains sadly responsible for is introducing the hideously Tory notion of ‘choice’ in public services, since choice was invariably an illusion (the choice to have no choice, if you like it) for those people who needed the most help, e.g. those living in social housing were often the least likely to have a good choice of schools – if you believed the school league tables which Major brought in – to which their children might gain admission, whereas those with the money to move near or next door to the ‘best’ schools definitely did have choice, and even more so if they could also afford to send their kids to private schools if they wanted to be even more selfish. I spent years trying to make school admissions fairer in the areas in which I worked, but I digress.
I also very much enjoyed, and admired, PJ Kavanagh’s The Perfect Stranger (originally published in 1966 and reissued by September Publishing in 2015, available here), a memoir covering his childhood, adolescence, a spell as a Butlin’s redcoat, a sojourn aged 18 in Paris in 1949, National Service (including being wounded in Korea), studies in Oxford, love of and marriage to Sally Lehmann, daughter of Rosamund, and her tragic death from polio in 1958. It’s beautifully written, with enviable self-reflection, and absolutely full of the joys of being young and at large in the world. I’ve never read much of his poetry or any of his novels and must remedy those omissions. I do, though, have a copy of the fine job he did in editing his 1982 edition of the collected poems of Ivor Gurney.
As far as I know there are three biographies of Philip Larkin: Motion’s, the far superior one by James Booth and the one, entitled First Boredom Then Fear, by Richard Bradford. I hadn’t read the latter until the other week, having bought it at Sheffield’s best secondhand bookshop, Kelham Island Books and Music. It’s much shorter than the other two, but contains much more information on Larkin’s childhood and is far and away the best in how it relates Larkin’s character and life to many of his most well-known poems and to some which remained unpublished.
Rebecca Goss is a poet whose work I have hitherto been unfamiliar. Regular readers may recall that I wrote a brief post, here, commending the podcast Goss recorded last year with Heidi Williamson about poetry of place. Like Adrian May, she lives in the middle of East Anglia, in Suffolk. I suggested her most recent (2023) collection, Latch, published by Carcanet and available here, as the book for next month’s poetry book club. It concerns her return, with her husband and young daughter, to the area she was raised in, after living for a long while in Liverpool, and the memories it sparked. At times, it felt like the rural feel had transported me back to the prose of Ronald Blythe in his unclassifiable classic Akenfield. (Though when I think of Suffolk and writers, Roger Deakin, Michael Hamburger and WG Sebald, all of whom I’ve written about on here, also come to mind, as does George Crabbe.) Three poems from Latch were first published in Bad Lilies in 2021, here. As you can see, Goss writes beautifully about a country upbringing. I’ve also now read – in one sitting – her very moving and transfixing second collection Her Birth, about, principally the birth and death of her first daughter Ella.
I really got stuck into Patrick McGuinness and Stephen Romer’s translations of selected poems by Gilles Ortlieb, published in 2023, in a dual-language edition, as The Day’s Ration, by Arc Publications, available here. With a fine but arguably superfluous introduction by Sean O’Brien, Ortlieb’s poems invariably consist of small observations and his thoughts about them. He is from, and still lives in, an industrial part of Lorraine, in north-east France, next to Luxembourg and, of course, Germany. ‘Sleeper Gravel’ (‘Ballast Courant’) will serve as an example of Ortlieb’s style:
A trail of stones reddened this evening
by the last sun that covers the rarely lit
back wall of a bedroom, glimpsed
on the upper floor of a villa
in Uckange, or a frontier suburb:
fragile goldwork, inlaid already
with the spreading gloom, that interval,
before the coloured gems of TV sets
light the house fronts further on.
Small distracted thoughts, in a swarm,
see us over the gulf of every evening.
Having read a few collections and a novel by McGuinness in the last year, I can very easily see why he likes Ortlieb’s poetry, with its quietly sardonic phrasing, its in-between and otherwise overlooked environments and Existentialist attitude. (I can’t vouch for Romer, having not – yet – read his poetry en masse.) As far as I can tell, with my rusty A-level French, the translations aim to convey Ortlieb’s general rather than literal sense. Often, they take liberties with his lineation, but on others they try their best to match the dense slabs of Ortlieb’s poems. It’s my favourite book of ‘new’ poems this year, albeit that they cover the length of Ortlieb’s fifty-year career.
Now I’m working my way deliberately slowly through Jane Hirshfield’s amazing set of essays, Nine Gates, subtitled ‘Entering the Mind of Poetry’, published by Harper Collins back in 1997. As you’d expect from Hirshfield, it’s immesely thought-provoking; the best book I’ve read about poetry in a long time. It would be very difficult to try and summarise Hirshfield’s ideas. If I were the sort of person who defaces books by using a highlighter pen to mark the best bits, then my copy of Nine Gates would look like an Acid House night had been held within it. This sentence is typical of Hirshfield’s Zen-infused (cliché alert, sorry) insights: ‘Originality lives at the crossroads, at the point where world and self open to each other in transparence in the night rain.’
-
The Last Corinthians – pre-ordering and online launch
Cover of The Last Corinthians My forthcoming poetry collection, The Last Corinthians, is now available for pre-order at the Crooked Spire Press website, here.
Also, tickets are available, here, for the online launch on Tuesday 10 June, at 7pm, when I’ll be joined by two fantastic poets, Shash Trevett and Cliff Yates. I hope you will be able to join us.
-
My forthcoming poetry collection: The Last Corinthians
It’s taken me a long time to assemble my second collection of longer-form poems into a coherent state, eight years since my first. I’m delighted to say that it will be published this June, by a new, Derbyshire-based publisher, Crooked Spire Press.
Crooked Spire Press has been founded by Tim Fellows, the editor of the online journal The Fig Tree. I am immensely grateful to Tim, not least for his patience.
I’m also very grateful to the members of the fortnightly workshop group I’m part of, the Collective, whose comments on drafts of a good number of the poems in the book have been very helpful; and to many other poets and other friends who have given me encouragement over the years.
The Last Corinthians includes poems previously published in The Fig Tree and a variety of other journals, including: 14 Magazine, The Alchemy Spoon, Atrium, Bad Lilies, Black Nore Review, The Friday Poem, The High Window, The Honest Ulsterman, The North, Obsessed with Pipework, One Hand Clapping, Pennine Platform, Poetry Salzburg Review and Wild Court.
There will be several launch events, as below. It would be lovely to see readers of this blog at them. My thanks to the lovely and brilliant poets who will be reading alongside me.Saturday 7 June, 2pm, free
Dystopia Bar (upstairs), Doncaster Brewery Tap, 7 Young Street, Doncaster, DN1 3EL; with Victoria Gatehouse and Ed Reiss. Free. No booking necessary.
Tuesday 10 June, 7pm, free
Online; with Shash Trevett and Cliff Yates. Free. Tickets are available here.
Tuesday 17 June, 7pm for 7.30, free
The Devereux, 20 Devereux Court, Temple, London, WC2R 3JJ; with Vanessa Lampert, Ian Parks and Mat Riches. Free. No booking necessary.
Tuesday 16 September, 7pm
Five Leaves Bookshop, 14a Long Row, Nottingham; with Kathy Pimlott and Peter Sansom. Tickets are available here.
Cover of The Last Corinthians
-
On another haiku by Simon Chard
the day’s gentle start lesser celandines
This is the winning haiku, and therefore featured, haiku for April on this year’s Haiku Calendar, still very much worth buying from Snapshot Press, here.
Longstanding readers of my blog will know that I believe Simon Chard is one of the very best English-language haiku poets writing today. This example of his work is deceptively simple. It’s written as a one-liner, but it consists of two almost equal-length parts:
the day’s gentle start
lesser celandines
But haiku written as two lines look a bit odd, don’t they?
It would also have been too awkward to have forced this haiku into three lines, because of that possessive apostrophe:
the day’s
gentle start
lesser celandines
Therefore, from the angle of appearance alone, Chard has undoubtedly made the right call in presenting this moment as a one-line haiku.
But what exactly is this moment? Well, for one thing, it’s really two moments – which presumably are so consecutive as to be all but conflated: the realisation that the (unseen) poet-persona’s day has got off to a gentle, and presumably good, start by way of, perhaps, a woodland walk, and then the noticing of the flowers.
Or, in fact, it could be that the noticing of the flowers preceded the thought and, moreover, triggered it; that the sight of the flowers has slowed the poet down, made him more fully in tune with time and place for a fraction of this spring morning (assuming that he hasn’t been abed until noon or gone!) and enabled him to ease himself into the day.
Either way, this is a poem brimming with optimism.
As readers, we presume, surely, that it’s a sunny morning, with blue skies, and that the sunshine has caused the celandines to unfurl. Their bright yellowness resembles a child’s conception of the sun their petals spoking like the sun’s rays. Richard Mabey, in Flora Britannica (Chatto and Windus, 1996), says that the word celandine
derives from the Greek chelidon, a swallow.’ The sixteenth-century herbalist Henry Lyte suggested that this was because it ‘beginneth to springe and to flower at the coming of the swallows’. But most celandines are in flower long before the swallows arrive, and it looks as if the lesser celandine may have been confused with the greater celandine, another yellow-flowered but quite unrelated species.
Mabey goes on to venture, quite reasonably, that the name suggests the flower ‘was seen as a kind of vegetable swallow, the flower that, like the bird, signalled the arrival of spring.’
He reminds us too, incidentally, that the flower’s most common alternative English name, historically at least, is pilewort, for its effectiveness against haemorrhoids. Meanwhile, Václav Větvička, in Wildflowers of Field and Woodland (Hamlyn, 1979), states that:
With its numerous tubers, Lesser Celandine is one of those plants which people often used to have to eat in mediaeval days during times of poor harvest or famine. Aptly then, it was called Manna from Heaven. Perhaps it is this historic role which has given rise to the German names Feigwurz, meaning root-fig, and Scharbockskraut (the most common name), a medicine for scurvy (a disease in times of want).
As I’ve written elsewhere, haiku which contain leading statements don’t usually float my boat, because they tell the reader too much. Here, though, the clause ‘the day’s gentle start’ is more like a compound noun – the sort for which German is renowned – than a statement, despite the fact that it does lead the reader in a certain direction. As such, the haiku reads like a succession of nouns which, thanks to the one-line form, elide to become one, in a single, heightened moment of simplicity and gladness. We can easily intuit Chard’s restrained joy. That ease does not make the poem any less effective; on the contrary, it allows the readers to stand in the poet’s shoes or boots and revel in the beauty of a delightful spring morning after the dull days of winter.
-
Review of Hannah Copley’s Lapwing
With thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie, my review of Lapwing (Liverpool University Press, 2024) by Hannah Copley is up at The Friday Poem, here.
-
March reading
I’ve continued my merry way through the novels of Rupert Thomson by reading his debut novel, from way back in 1987: Dreams of Leaving. There’s a good summary of its plot and themes here. Its London-set scenes capture well the glorious seediness of pubs, drugs and relationships in the Thatcher years, and its characters, as always with Thomson, are completely believable. Thomson’s written much better novels since then, but he set the bar high right at the outset: as remains the case, he could tell memorable, complex stories that didn’t give easy answers to the reader. The book’s also discussed in this essay, here, which surveys the first seven of his 14 novels.
I’ve also read another Barbara Pym novel, her fifth, A Glass of Blessings, published in 1958. Its unusual among her novels in being written in the first person, and it’s a pity that she didn’t try that more often, as it allowed her narrator, Wilmet Forsyth, to make more deliciously barbed comments about the other characters than Pym’s all-seeing third-person narrators did in her other novels. As ever, the plot, even with its perfectly pitched set-pieces and comic misunderstandings, is secondary to Pym’s superb ear for dialogue and delicate descriptions. I can’t think of more pleasant reading experience than savouring Pym’s novels. I’m fully aware, of course, that they largely exclude the grim reality of life as it was lived by many of her contemporaries in Britain, yet her deep understanding of the fact that everyone has flaws makes her books as relevant today as they were when she wrote them.
On the poetry front, I read and re-read (several times) an Eliot-shortlisted book prior to reviewing it and that’s taken up a lot of my poetry head space. However, last week I did take off my shelf, to accompany me on a flying visit down south, something more to my taste: Voice-Over (1988), the last collection by Norman MacCaig to be published in his lifetime.
Cover of Voice-Over Many of the poems in it are short, reflective lyrics of a man coming to the end of his days. I especially liked this one:
Slow Evening
Night is long in coming. Its soft feet
pause at the horizon. Stars wait
for the lights to go out, to perform
their brilliant rituals on their dark stage.
My mind that was sleepy with waiting
begins to waken, to feel small movements
like the tiny waves fudged in a glass of water
carried by a child.
Light drains away. – But there,
sudden windows appear on dark buildings,
small universes wheeling nonchalantly
with Saturn and the tilted Plough.
I like the simplicity and naturalness of his metaphors – such a contrast to the outlandish metaphors fired off these days – and of that simile in the second stanza, with that tremendous ‘fudged’.
I enjoyed Jeanette Burton’s beautifully produced pamphlet, Ostriches, subtitled ‘Ten Poems about My Dad’, published by Candlestick Press and available here. Burton carefully, and wittily, writes affectionate portraits of her father without tipping into dull sentimentality. At their best, her poems – ‘such as the flamboyantly titled ‘Poem in which my dad’s ear is haunted by the ghost of Tutankhamun’ and ‘Poem in which I recount the finding of my dad’s love letter to my mum in the style of a Ronnie Corbett monologue’ – speed along with a giddy mixture of whimsical silliness, acute observation and pride. It might be tempting to suggest that some of her more stream-of-consciousness poems could do with some vigorous pruning, but I reckon that would deaden the sheer exuberant flow of her poetry. (I’m glad to see that she also writes about her mum, as in this recent poem, here.)
For this month’s poetry book club, we’ve been reading The Europeans (2019) by David Clarke, published by Nine Arches Press and available here, as different a set of poems to Burton’s as could be imagined in how he uses form and restraint to carve poems which not only protest implicitly against the bigotry of the Brexit referendum result in 2016, but also travel back in time to his younger days to paint a picture of small-town England in its various guises. ‘To a Public House’ could be one of very many hostelries the length and breadth of the land:
I knew your ash-tray haze of ale, that pitiful booth
for the under-aged, the spinning punctuation of
your fruit machines that trilled, mesmeric in the gloom
between a first necked pint and each man’s lonesome trudge
for home. Late it was, then later still. Bleary years
were counted out in wet white rings. Some bloke
who kept a pewter mug behind your bar pegged out
at last. Your jukebox dirged him to his grave,
There’s so much to admire here: the description of the fruit machines; how the almost always unfortunate hanging ‘of’ works well in this instance because it provides a helpful pause; the pewter mug of the man who drinks himself to death; the clever rendering of ‘dirge’ into a verb. In my memory, pubs weren’t exclusively male, but we get the picture.
In ‘To a Photo Booth’, Clarke writes, in another rather beautiful direct address to the subject of the poem, that, ‘My drawers grew full of all / your rejects, curled ghosts / who wept in envelopes unseen.’ There’s a brilliant poem – both formally and per se – about the last (presumably) of Auden’s summers in Austria from 1958 to his death in 1973, ‘Auden at Kirchstetten’, one gay poet’s response to an illustrious predecessor. It begins as follows:
All morning, his difficult love kept itself to the kitchen,
sweating, as always, to make its comfort terrible.
If a family habit of property had survived
his makeshift years, he refused to become responsible –
somehow he contrived to never fully arrive,
if only for the sake of that necessary tension.
The rhymes are fine and seem to lift Clarke’s register to a higher place than in his other poems, and the line with the split infinitive would serve perfectly as an epitaph for Auden’s exile. I shall have to read Clarke’s other two collections.
-
Launch of The Fig Tree Anthology 2024 and Crooked Spire Press
As one of the contributors, I’ll be reading at the launch of The Fig Tree Anthology 2024 in Doncaster on Saturday 26 April. The anthology is a print collation of poems which featured in the first five issues of the online journal, The Fig Tree.
The event will also see the launch of the imprint Crooked Spire Press, founded by the editor of The Fig Tree, Tim Fellows. The anthology is the first Crooked Spire title, with more to follow.
Full details about the event, which is free and for which no booking is necessary, are available here.
-
Poem in The Fig Tree – ‘Comedians’ Comedian’
With thanks to editor Tim Fellows, I’m delighted to have a poem in another fine issue of The Fig Tree, here.
The poems by the featured poet, Calder Valley Poetry’s Bob Horne, are marvellous, ‘Neighbour’ above all.
-
February reading
Another book which has been sitting on my TBR shelf has at last, and happily, pushed its way into my hands: Don Paterson’s Smith, sub-titled ‘A Reader’s Guide to the Poetry of Michael Donaghy’, Picador, 2014. As well as providing an enlightening exegesis of fifty key poems, it’s also interspersed with Paterson’s affectionate recollections of Donaghy, most notably in how he delivered poems and emphasised particular words. Paterson is especially good value on Donaghy’s sly evasions and ambiguities, born of extensive immersion in the Metaphysicals, Bishop and the New Formalists. As in his fine 101 Sonnets anthology, Paterson wears his erudition lightly and often amusingly.
Cover of Smith One Language (SmithǀDoorstop, 2022, available here), the debut collection by the photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind, intermittently dazzles with its poems from far-flung warzones, as in ‘Welcome to Donetsk’:
You teach me this wartime trick –
to look for living pot plants
in the windows in Kievska Avenue.
Most are crisped and brown.
But one green geranium
and a succulent spider plant
offer proof of life
for the person who waters them.
It’s interesting that she writes ‘for the person’ and not ‘of’, and in so doing shifts the perspective from the external observer to the unseen person inside.
Despite their most serious subject-matter, some of the poems feel inconsequential and fragmentary, like a diary haphazardly moulded into poetry. The most affecting highlight is a 12-part sequence, ‘Stories No One Wants to Hear’, recounting, in perhaps necessarily prosaic poetry, key incidents where, for better or worse, violence played a part in her life. I was left feeling that where she does tell her important stories well, Taylor-Lind might have rendered them more successfully still as a prose memoir, in the manner of Lara Pawson’s This is the Place to Be, because it feels like she has a lot more to say, e.g. regarding her position as one of the few females in her profession.
Among other poetry, I’ve read two collections, her third and fourth, by Lavinia Greenlaw: Minsk (2003) and The Casual Perfect (2011), both published by Faber. Greenlaw’s voice is invariably very precise and coolly formal, even when she recounts memories of childhood and adolescence, so the poems which stood out for me are those where she lets her writing go a bit wilder, as in ‘Essex Rag’ from Minsk:
The piano years . . . Too young to drive
I played pedal to the metal,
full reverb, wah-wah and fuzz,
a collision course bending Chopsticks
into hairpins, trilling the hell
out of cheesy Für Elise.
Minsk also includes the seven-part sequence ‘A Strange Barn’ in which each poem is about one of the buildings or enclosures in Regent’s Park Zoo. As the zoo is one of my favourite places in the world, I was pre-programmed to like these poems:
His ancestor arrived in London at the dawn
of transcendentalism and acetylene.
Walking from the dock to Regent’s Park,
he freaked at the sight of a cow in Commercial Road.
(‘Spin’ – The Giraffe House, 1836)
Taking its title from Lowell’s description of Bishop’s seemingly offhand descriptive prowess, The Casual Perfect begins with another poem implicitly concerning her teen years, ‘Essex Kiss’, which opens with a swagger (and a nod to MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’ maybe):
A handbrake turn on a hair-pin bend.
Merry-go-round? No, the waltzer.
A touch as bold as rum and peppermint.
Chewing gum and whelks, a whiff
of diesel, crocus, cuckoo spit.
A similarly joyful spirit pervades ‘Saturday Night’:
And young girls shall gather
to dance on the highway
under petals of light
that float from their shoulders
and dip into lotioned shadows.
They shall coil their salty hair
and tug at their lapsed muslins
as they fall like cushions, and spill.
Greenlaw’s poems are usually quite short, though no doubt they are chiselled out of much larger blocks. Her poem about the eponymous bird ‘Indigo Bunting’ exemplifies her delicately perfect phrasing: ‘A bird that can sing itself to earth as sky mirror / as if to prove there is no fall that is not reflection.’ Both collections made me want to read them again once I’d finished their last poems. As the successor to Matthew Hollis and his illustrious predecessors as Poetry Editor at Faber, Greenlaw occupies a position of considerable influence and authority. She’s published seven collections of her own poetry (plus novels, memoir and non-fiction, etc.) since (and including) her debut in 1991, her most recent being The Built Moment in 2019. Let’s hope her position at Faber doesn’t hinder her own poetic output in the way that it seemed to with Hollis.
I’ve also re-read Still Life with a Bridle (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, Vintage, 1994) a book of ‘essays and apocryphas’ by Zbigniew Herbert, addressing various matters from the Golden Age of Dutch cultural and military might, including the now well-known folly of ‘tulip fever’. Like his poetry, Herbert’s prose mixes the profound with acerbic black humour. My favourite piece from the book is one of the shortest, ‘Spinoza’s Bed’, in which Baruch, aged 24, took his step-relatives to court in order to claim his inheritance two years after his father’s death in 1654, won the case but then claimed only his mother’s bed for himself.
I’m now halfway through Paula Byrne’s excellent biography The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym (William Collins, 2021), which I bought in an excellent Oxfam bookshop in Beverley last week. It’s as diverting as Pym’s novels, which is high praise indeed, I reckon. But Pym, despite an outwardly ebullient character, had melancholy times too; her and her sister Hilary’s lives had similarities with those of Jane Austen, one of Pym’s chief models, and her sister, Cassandra, a relationship which has just been dramatised in the excellent BBCTV series, Miss Austen, based on Gill Hornby’s novel of the same name.
-
Review of Sue Hubbard’s God’s Little Artist
In contemplating writing creatively about the life and death of a real person, famous or otherwise, one has (a minimum of) six key decisions to make, the last four of which are dependent on the first and second.
First and foremost is whether to write poetry or prose. With five poetry collections and four novels already published, I imagine the decision Sue Hubbard made to plump for poetry to address her subject, Gwen John (1876–1939), wasn’t an easy one to make; however, the notes at the back indicate that Hubbard had previously written (at least) one poem about a moment in John’s life so perhaps that had left an itch that needed to be scratched. I admire Hubbard for even taking on such a large and complex project.
The second decision, perhaps a subconscious one, is how much of the subject’s life needs to be recounted to do justice to their main events, relationships, successes, failures and emotions. Despite some artistic success, John, as is widely known now, had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime and lived in the shadow of both her two-years-younger brother, Augustus, who became the most celebrated British painter of their day, and Rodin, 35 years her senior, with whom John had an unequal relationship for a decade from 1904 (and whose forename was, by coincidence, the French equivalent of her brother’s). The 34 poems in this collection run chronologically from John’s childhood and adolescence in North Wales to her death in Dieppe, two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. As we’ll see, they aren’t ‘Wiki poems’, i.e. they don’t clunkily include facts for the sake of it; rather, they tend more towards impressionistic sketches, pleasingly in keeping with John’s style of painting. Neither do they amount to a full-blown biography (her mother’s death when John was eight isn’t mentioned for instance, though her absence can be inferred), but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less meritorious or successful than had Hubbard written a fuller account in prose.
Thirdly, should the poet use the same voice – first, second or third person – throughout, and if so which; or should they vary it from poem to poem? Hubbard, I think wisely, has opted for the third person and stuck with it. The benefit of it is, of course, that it provides a certain objectivity, irrespective of how sympathetically the poems are cast. By contrast, writing in the second person almost always reads like a half-baked fudge. It might, though, have been tempting for Hubbard to use the first person; indeed, the notes tell us that the poem about John she’d had published previously was in John’s voice, so she has changed it for inclusion here. Maybe using the first person en bloc would have felt presumptuous.
And fourth, what tense should be used, past or present, and, again, should that be consistent or varied? Hubbard has sensibly chosen to employ the present tense in all the poems, bestowing immediacy, timelessness and a sense of the life’s moments being never ending. Again, this choice surely aligns with the spirit of John’s paintings, and also with her Catholic belief in the life eternal.
The fifth decision pertains to what form(s) the poems should take. Hubbard mixes them up, in a comparatively limited way: 16 are in couplets; five in tercets; six in quatrains; six in narrow-ish blocks; and one has four octaves. Really, though, the tone in all of them is the same, so the variation of the forms only succeeds visually, albeit that that helps to offset the tonal sameness. Whatever their length, Hubbard’s stanzas are rarely self-contained, and her block poems are always composed of several sentences.
The sixth decision may, but needn’t, be subconscious: which narrative tone should be struck? As I say, Hubbard’s tone is consistent throughout: the broadly omniscient voice which enables depiction not just of what John does and what happens to her, but also, where appropriate, her thoughts and feelings. (Hubbard appears instinctively able to judge when to describe John’s emotional reactions and when to let events simply imply reactions.) That narrative consistency also drives the language Hubbard deploys: in echoes of how John’s palette was often muted (as Hubbard considers in a couple of poems), and how her adult life was lived in poverty, austerity and a lack of loving fulfilment, Hubbard’s writing is spare and purposely low-key, usually in short, frequently compressed sentences, though that means that when she uses adjectives their effectiveness is heightened, occasionally quite beautifully: in the poem ‘Teapot’ for instance, ‘a curdy light spills / into her china breakfast bowl.’
Hubbard’s four-page introduction does not explain any of those decisions; instead, it gives a potted prose summary of John’s life, with a psychoanalytic slant. While that may be generous to the general reader who knows little of John’s biography, to others it may be superfluous. On balance, if read before the poems, it might well detract from them. Had it been included as an afterword, that would arguably have been more prudent, and I would advise potential readers of this book to approach it in that manner.
Nevertheless, the poetry is engrossing from the start. ‘Luncheon in Tenby’ opens with a solid metaphor for the oppressiveness of the Victorian values perpetuated by John’s father towards her and her siblings, her mother having died when she was eight:
The mahogany sideboard reclines
against the wall like the chief mourner
at a funeral. [. . .]
[. . .]
Her father demands quiet, so she
and Winifred speak in signs. [. . .]
Soon, Hubbard pictures John on her way to art school in ‘London— / leaving her stern father / with his taxidermy and law tomes, / his shelves of devotional works— / to embrace anatomy, perspective, / and the history of art’ (‘Slade’). There, ‘she learns from Tonks / a new freedom of line. / How to evoke round objects / on flat paper. Three dimensions / whilst working in two.’ This writing has a pleasing brevity to it, with just enough information conveyed for the reader to fill in the rest of the scene. In the life classes, we’re told that, ‘the women are strictly / segregated, the male nudes never / completely nude’ (‘Glaze’), with nice emphases at the line-ends to reinforce the prohibition. ‘Walking with Dorelia’ is a lively, humorous rendering of John’s 1903 walking tour in France with Dorelia McNeill, whom she met at Westminster School of Art and who was later to become her brother’s main, lifelong partner, and hints at their supposed mutual sexual attraction:
[. . .]
sleeping under haystacks and icy stars,
lying on top of each other to stay warm.
They wake to astonished farmers,
gathered gendarmes peering curiously
at les jeunes anglaises déshabillées
huddled under a pagoda of portfolios,
straw woven in their tangled hair.
Hubbard captures well John’s hand-to-mouth subsistence in Paris from 1904 and the city’s colour and grime:
[. . .] On the street corner,
crippled in her sooty blacks
la petite fleuriste hawks bunches
of muguet and yellow mimosa.
Across Sunday streets
bells drift above junk shops
and cheap bars where des maudits
nurse glasses of cloudy absinthe.
Far from Tenby
this, now, is home.
To eat, she knocks on studio doors,
poses, if she can, for women.
(‘Montmartre’)
As that poem’s next stanza attests, the male artists were all too free with their hands, and it’s no coincidence, presumably, that the facing poem is the first of seven consecutive poems concerning John’s relationship with Rodin. It’s here that the collection truly hits its stride. ‘Modelling for Rodin’ (‘Naked before him, / she finds a new peace’) becomes something more: ‘the weight of him, // his tongue in her mouth / like something feral.’ Hubbard adroitly conjures the complexities of John’s relationship with the ‘Maȋtre’; how she can’t just make do with being one of his many model–mistresses, particularly in the vividly heart-rending poem ‘Love is Lonelier than Solitude’:
She thinks of him all the time,
an anchorite in her quiet cell
waiting for his booted step on the stair,
reluctant to go out in case he comes.
All is clean and polished. Her hair washed,
bluebells in a jar on the mantle,
a bow around Tiger’s neck.
The tangible sense of unrequited love that Hubbard conveys here continues in the poems that follow – ‘Fire’, ‘Hands’ and ‘Drawing the Cat’ – in which John’s longing approaches madness, not helped by being forced sometimes into a threesome with Rodin’s (female) ‘Finnish assistant— // the one who thinks she’s ugly’. John wrote hundreds of fervent letters to Rodin without receiving replies, and Hubbard supplies a moving portrait of John with pen in hand, ending with an intriguing, apposite metaphor of liquidity for the futility of her passionate task:
A flood of moonshine spills
onto the round table,
the blank white sheet,
a millrace of words pulling
her under, soaking her wet.
(‘Letter to Rodin’)
The post-Rodin poems are equally interesting. In ‘Suitors’, we see John’s attractiveness to a succession of other women. ‘The Poetry of Things’ and ‘Communion’ show John at work, drawing, in both her room and outside: ‘There is poetry in ordinary things, / her blue jug, the basket of kittens, // that line of busy ants’; ‘she takes her notebook / to Gare Montparnasse, sketches travellers with carpet bags // and furled umbrellas, though her chilblained fingers are freezing.’ Hubbard delves into John’s increasingly nun-like piety in a number of poems, not least the title poem, the precious thinness of which, almost as much as John’s art, is delicately crafted:
Her God is a God of quietness,
so she must be quiet.
His love is constant.
It does not despise,
or rebuff like carnal love.
She would live without
a body, now. Its fleshy needs,
its urgent desires [. . .]
What has crystallised for me through reading and re-reading God’s Little Artist is an appreciation of how well Hubbard inhabits John’s world, with all its disappointments, and draws out her character. Like Letters to Gwen John (Jonathan Cape, 2022) by the painter Celia Paul (no relation of mine), this is an important creative contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of John; but, more than that, its poems provide a fine match of uncomplicated forms and lucid writing to John’s ascetic life and exquisite art.
God’s Little Artist by Sue Hubbard (Seren, 2023), £9.99, available to buy here.
-
January reading (2)
My further exploration of Dorianne Laux’s oeuvre has continued with Only as the Day is Long, her 2019 ‘New and Selected Poems’ (Norton). I’m surprised that no British publisher has brought out an edition of her poems, as I’m sure they would be very well received over here. They’re largely autobiographical, at times uncompromisingly frank – like many of those of one of her key influences, Sharon Olds – in how they address love and sexual love, mental health and sexual abuse. Like both Olds and Philip Levine, who was her mentor of sorts, Laux is over-reliant on the block-poem form, or at least, the selection in Only as the Day is Long makes it seem so. When read en bloc, block poems can resemble brain-dump splurges, in which stream-of-consciousness digressions and occasional non sequiturs are given free rein to run ahead of thought. The effect of this, without any Elizabeth Bishop-like periodic pauses, hesitations and tentative self-questioning, can therefore be a little wearying. However, when this mode succeeds, as in many of the poems from Smoke, e.g. ‘Fast Gas’, available to read and hear here, Laux is a dynamic, marvellous poet.
That’s not to say that Laux can’t slow her poems down, by using other forms; ‘The Crossing’, for example, from her fourth collection, Facts About the Moon (2005), consists of nine couplets. Courageously, it unravels an encounter with ‘The elk of Orick’, in northern California. I say courageously, because it takes an extra-large dollop of chutzpah to risk comparison with Bishop’s great poem ‘The Moose’, which can be read here. Unlike ‘The Moose’, Laux’s poem didn’t take 26 years to write and doesn’t first have stanza after stanza of (wonderful) ‘dreamy divagation’ (a scene-setting hymn to smalltown Nova Scotia) before the animal(s) finally appears; instead, it gets straight to the encounter, with wit and charm:
The elk of Orick wait patiently to cross the road
and my husband of six months, who thinks
he’s St Francis, climbs out of the car to assist.
As this opening indicates, the poem is effectively a love-poem. The description of the elks, one intuits, could equally apply to Laux’s new husband: ‘heads lifted, nostrils flared, each footfall // a testament to stalled momentum, gracefully / hesitant’. The mid-poem capture in words of the elks’ procession is magisterial and breathtaking:
[. . .] They cross the four-lane
like a coronation, slow as a Greek frieze, river
wind riffling the wheat grass of their rumps.
As in ‘The Moose’ the poem’s finale depicts a showdown with a female animal:
Go on, he beseeches, Get going, but the lone elk
stands her ground, their noses less than a yard apart.
One stubborn creature staring down another.
This is how I know the marriage will last.
What a fabulous chink of poetry this is, as lovely in its way as Bishop’s:
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
In its briefer, but no less compelling manner, ‘The Crossing’ is as much of a classic poem as ‘The Moose’.
There are several interviews with Laux online, including one, here, which includes this fascinating paragraph:
Poetry is a slippery beast, a shape changer, a beast with wings, a bird/dog, a hermaphrodite, a water bearer and light bringer, the life force rendered through language, a sieve, a chute, a cone of darkness, an aggregate stone. It’s changed me by reading it, though not in a way I can speak of. It’s a feeling inside a thought inside an image. It hunts me down. It haunts what haunts me. It changes me while I write it in that I lose myself inside it, making me weightless and colorless, fragile and fearless. It’s always been with me, even before I knew what it was, it ran ahead of me as I walked through the world, making me look around and take it in through my senses, stop and stare, or listen, or smell or touch or taste until the object of my attention no longer possessed a name, and then poetry dared me to name it.
That ‘It hunts me down’ is chilling but any obsessive poet can surely identify with it, and with the wider sentiments expressed in these sentences.
Why Elizabeth Bishop has been on my mind is because I’ve also been re-reading her Collected Poems and a 2002 book of essays, Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Bloodaxe), edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott. What’s intriguing about the essays is that most of them are written by esteemed poets – Nichola Deane, Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Deryn Rees-Jones, Jamie McKendrick, Peter Robinson, Anne Stevenson and Shapcott herself – some of whom are, or were, academics also, rather than by academics who aren’t also known as poets, so they are more personal, readable and less dry than might otherwise have been the case. That said, though, the essay I liked the best and got the most from was by Barbara Page, at that time Professor of English at Bishop’s alma mater, Vassar College, in which she analyses some of Bishop’s draft to see how the poems were sharpened by changes of emphasis, especially in the last few stanzas of ‘The Moose’. Donaghy’s contribution, the briefest in the book, considers the influence of Auden. Feaver slightly overstates the case that ‘Bishop reclaims not just the female psychic space from which she was ejected at birth, but the psychic female space lost to her in early childhood through her mother’s severe mental illness and subsequent incarceration in an asylum’ (and death). Rees-Jones’s highly idiosyncratic piece starts with admissions that she had come to Bishop’s poems ‘reluctantly’ and hadn’t read all of them, and she doesn’t really add much from then on. Despite, and maybe because of, these and other flaws, it’s an engaging assortment and well worth tracking down.
I have at last read Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet, After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024), available to buy here, from The Emma Press. Longstanding readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of Pimlott’s poetry, but I knew that the subject-matter of this pamphlet – the accidental death of her husband and the aftermath – wouldn’t be an easy read. ‘No Shock Advised’, the second poem – after the lovely ‘Prologue: First Date’, the dreamy surrealism of which makes the shocks of ‘No Shock advised’ even more shocking – reimagines the tragic hopelessness of the scene: ‘It’s cruel work /to kneel down / and hunch over / a so-familiar body at the foot of the stairs [. . .]’; that ‘there’s nothing / to be done // [. . .] but how still the sweet mad hopeful brain insists / it will be ok ok ok’. Over the course of its 12 tercets, the next, outstanding and, in its precise unfolding, very Pimlottian, poem, ‘How to be a Widow’, floats through the grief-addled labyrinth: what was happening immediately before and after the accident; what ‘experts’ advise the newly-bereaved to do to keep busy; how other people might shy away from death and, moreover, from the partner who is bereaved; even into a synaesthetic recounting:
Who wants to hear about the colours? Normal, then purple
then grey in a moment like the sea changing as light
shifts with the clouds. No-one. Colonies are collapsing.
The sonic and visual similarities here, between ‘colours’, ‘clouds’, colonies’ and ‘collapsing’, augment the strangeness.
The rest of the pamphlet takes in, inter alia, the difficulties innate in navigating post-death bureaucracy, the first Christmas after the event (‘no-one contesting the way to ignite brandy’) and the anxiety that bereavement causes; and also reflects on the relationship Pimlott and her husband shared, not always sweetness and light, and how and where to scatter his ashes. Fine poetry about the complexities of bereavement is rare – Hardy, Dunn and Reid, all men curiously, spring to mind – but the skilful poems in Pimlott’s After the Rites and Sandwiches are exemplary in their objectivising of this most subjective of subjects.
-
Review of Gerry Cambridge’s The Ayrshire Nestling
With thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie, and also to Helena Nelson for a helpful point of clarification, my first review of the year is up at The Friday Poem – of Gerry Cambridge’s superbly written memoir. The review is here.
-
January reading (1)
I’ve started my reading in this new year where I left it in the old, with the American poet Dorianne Laux. I’d first encountered Laux’s poetry back in September, when ‘The Shipfitter’s Wife’ was one of many poems I enjoyed in the Seren anthology Women’s Work, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, and soon after bought a secondhand copy of her 2000 collection, Smoke, published by BOA Editions., which coincidentally includes that poem (It’s available to buy on their website, here.) Laux’s poems are plain-speaking, but far from plain. Here’s the opening sentence of ‘Pearl’, a 38-line, block poem about Janis Joplin:
She was nothing much, this plain-faced girl from Texas,
this moonfaced child who opened her mouth
to the gravel pit churning in her belly, acne-faced
daughter of Leadbelly, Bessie, Optis, and the booze-
filled moon, child of the honky-tonk bar-talk crowd
who cackled like a bird of prey, velvet cape blown
open in the Monterey wind, ringed fingers fisted
at her throat, howling the slagheap up and out
into the sawdusted air.
I especially like that ‘gravel pit churning in her belly’, and the repetitions of ‘faced’, ‘moon’ and ‘belly’. Laux would’ve been 15 when Joplin fronted Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Monterey Festival, and she must’ve been inspired by Joplin’s example of a young woman putting herself and her soul right out there. The poem is both a paean and an elegy for ‘this little white girl / who showed us what it was like to die / for love’; but beyond that, it is, like many of the poems in the book, an elegy for the wilder times of the late ’60s and the ’70s.
I also loved Invisible Dog (Carcanet, 2024), available to buy here, a generous selection from the oeuvre of the Mexican poet Fabio Morábito, translated brilliantly from Spanish into English by the Welsh poet Richard Gwyn. In an interesting ‘translator’s note’ afterword, Gwyn notes that Morábito’s first language is actually Italian and that he didn’t live in Mexico until he was 15. Gwyn evidently worked very closely with him on the translations. One thing I like is that Gwyn more often than not plumps for the direct translations of words, rather than sometimes not-especially-close synonyms, the approach which blighted the last translated poetry published by Carcanet that I read, It Must be a Misunderstanding, Forrest Gander’s translation of another major ’50s-born Mexican poet, Coral Bracho. Morábito’s poems are always set out in narrow-ish blocks, and the tone is invariably one of someone just matter-of-factly and often wryly pointing out how things are. In ‘Unidentified’, for example, he shows us the poignancy of anonymity:
In the last photo
we find him once again,
this time in the middle of the group portrait,
embracing the others,
and they are all smiling and embracing him in turn,
all with a first and last name except for him,
who was not identified.
Another very enjoyable read was the SmithǀDoorstop anthology, 5, a bargain-buy available here, showcasing five new, or, rather, new-ish, poets who are all members of the Writing Squad, whose website is here: Helen Bowell, Prerana Kumar, Eva Lewis, Laura Potts and Ruth Yates. Each contributes six poems except Lewis with three. Kumar’s explorations of her Indian heritage and use of language stand out:
Let us believe her bones remain bird-hollow
in this wind that smells of rosemilk,
let her hear the grinding of cardamom,
a sparrowed lullaby humming the weeds
(‘I rewind the Second My Mother’s Girlhood Breaks’)
Potts’s poems are also linguistically rich – ‘Yesterday’s Child’ begins, ‘The sun slid like a knife through the April night / and bled like an egg, like a budburst head’ – but also have an appealing, melancholy tone to them. Yates’s poems are quirky and funny (haha), like those of her father Cliff and brother Luke, with an engaging unexpectedness: one poem begins with an ‘Oh!’; and my favourite poem in the anthology, the utterly marvellous ‘Otter’ opens thus:
They used to swim in Nye Bevan pool,
just before chips. Nicknamed Otter
for their ability to stay at the bottom of the pool
and crawl along it, way before their Taekwondo
years: this was self-control, perseverance,
indomitable spirit. [. . .]
I admire any poet who can chuck in big abstract nouns like that and make them count.
So far this month, I’ve also read two prose books and started a book of letters. The first was a book I bought and read 30 years ago: Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld, first published in 1970 and now, it seems, out of print, which is a shame because it’s a genuine classic. Chesney scoured through the archives, newspaper accounts, correspondence and many other sources to give a full flavour of the sub-strata of British society in the middle decades of the 19th Century. In passing, Chesney considers the worlds of itinerant workers, e.g. ‘navvies’ and circus and other show folk, plus beggars, and criminals and their networks of all kinds, and how these worlds symbiotically interacted. The details are at times unbearable, especially the descriptions of the appalling living and working conditions in the ‘rookeries’ of London and other cities. Chesney employs the slang vocabulary of the times, summarising them in a glossary, which includes such gems as ‘beak-hunting’ (poultry-stealing), ‘choker’ (clergyman), ‘crabshells’ (shoes), ‘crusher’ (policeman), ‘flying the blue pigeon’ (stealing roof lead) and some which are too prurient to repeat.
Having loved its predecessors, I was naturally predisposed to liking Barbara Pym’s third novel, Jane and Prudence (1953), in a Virago edition with a lively and perceptive introduction by Jilly Cooper, who claims it is Pym’s finest novel. Fine and witty though it was, for me it didn’t quite reach the heights of Excellent Women. One of the joys of Pym’s writing lies in how she could turn a crisp and delightful simile:
Miss Trapnell went to the filing-cabinet and put some pieces of paper into a file, and Miss Clothier drew a small card index towards her and began moving the cards here and there with her fingers, as if she was coaxing music from some delicate instrument.
The letters are in Words in Air, the collected correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell – even in its paperback form, it’s a slab of a book, due in part to over-scholarly and therefore over-fussy editorial annotations. A treat nevertheless and I’m only about a tenth of the way through so far.
-
December reading
What reading I have done this month has principally been on buses, trains and trams. Bus journeys – to and from Doncaster or Sheffield – in particular are ideal for reading poetry collections. Derek Mahon’s final collection, Washing Up (Gallery Press, 2020), available here, was some way to bow out.
Cover of Washing Up Understandably, aging and awareness of mortality, which the punning title implies, are much to the fore, not just in self-portraits, but in portraits and remembrances of others too:
Not even holidaymakers really bother
Joseph the beachcomber, who spends his days
sitting among the rocks and the rock pools
absorbed in his own thoughts, his own schedules,
like a bōdhisāttva or a Desert Father
for whom this life is only a glum phase.
(‘Among the Rocks’)
Candlelight in Portstewart,
forty-odd years ago now,
and your tin whistle starts
the tots jigging as though
instinctively they know
just what to dance and how.
(‘A True Note’, i.m. Ciaran Carson)
Mahon’s mastery of forms – including Lowellesque sonnets – and rhyme, the quality of his translations, and his poetic gifts in toto were undiminished to the end. ‘Another Cold Spring’, nodding to Elizabeth Bishop, contains a lovely, gracefully controlled discursiveness:
Another cold spring —
the same as last year,
the previous year also,
a late storm papering
the daffodils with snow
and leaving the sky clear.
We can’t depend upon
the meteorology from one
month to the next, the seasonal
graph of established weather
having been since revised
or scrapped altogether;
but when could we ever?
I read another book by Ruth Fainlight who, at 93, is surely Britain’s oldest excellent poet: Burning Wire (Bloodaxe, 2002) and enjoyed it so much that I’m reading it again. Why I like her poems, I think, is because she notices things so acutely and lets the spotlight on her observations do most of her work. Take the simmering swelter of ‘Sunday Afternoon’ for example:
A Sunday afternoon in late July:
the leaves look tired, the sky is clouding up,
pressure falling. The couple
in the next apartment are arguing
about how much he does or doesn’t help.
Eavesdropping from my terrace.
I am jealous of how it’s bound to end:
the stuffy bedroom. Moans and love-cries muffled
so the baby won’t wake.
I remember every detail of
the misery there is in marriage –
and then making up.
Elsewhere Fainlight considers her (and her parents’) place within English society with a surprising degree of otherness, but not, surely, without a note of humour:
A Jewish poet in an English village:
incongruous and inappropriate
as a Hindu in an igloo, a Dayak in
Chicago, a giraffe at the South Pole.
(’The English Country Cottage’)
Otherness is one theme in Peter Daniels’s latest, superb collection, Old Men (Salt, 2023), available here.
Cover of Old Men Many of the poems concern being a gay man of a certain age in Britain, such as the wittily allusive ‘Old Keys’:
Old keys open strange doors where the dark
dwells in the lock. Entering the front brings you
through to the back where the furniture is
older and stranger. There’s a thick brown varnish
chipped, you might imagine, by spurs of cavalrymen
waiting to be undone, away from truth or whatever
they fought for. Their own bodies asked to be
betrayed, but they faced any soul unburdened
behind those doors, overcome by the frantic power
with its affront to virtue passing unchallenged.
As exemplified here, Daniels’s syntax is old-school (i.e. without irritating contrivances), elegant and satisfying. The book also contains several memorable and moving poems about objects and stuff which transcend the immediate matter at hand e.g. ‘Royal Worcester’ (‘Its chime resounds / in time and space and is real.) and ‘Empty Boxes:
I have many lovely boxes, too lovely to fill,
like these nifty cigar boxes, some plain wood,
some fancy ones. The man who gave me them
forty years ago, he’s been dead for thirty-five:
they screwed his box down tight, afraid
of what they had to put away inside it.
The title poem is a microcosm, a masterpiece representing a whole collection of masterpieces, with a nod towards Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirablis’:
It all began too late for us, but what we hold
offers this lifetime more than making do:
we make each other real enough to touch,
with time to spend where we complete each other.
And talking of Larkin . . . in February 1952, he offered some words of advice in one of his very regular letters to his mother, Eva, who was suffering from depression, almost four years after the death of her husband, Sydney:
Do not worry about the past: it is, after all, past, and fades daily in our memory & in the memories of everyone else. Further, it can’t touch the future unless we let it. Every day comes to us like a newly cellophaned present, a chance for an entirely fresh start. Finally, do remember that we are not very important. Hundreds of living people have never heard of us: those who died in previous years & those who will be born in the next century have no chance to, and in consequence we are silly if we do not amble easily in the sun while we can, before time elbows us into everlasting night & frost.
Excellent advice, I’d say, and exquisitely written. It comes from Letters Home, 1936–1977, edited by James Booth, Faber 2018, p.201.
I’m off to amble in what’s left of today’s thin sun, if I can find it in the fog which has hung about for two days now. Thank you for reading any of my posts this year, dear reader, and happy new year when it comes.
-
My year in haiku
I’ve had a grand total of nine haiku and senryu published this year, which is pitifully few compared to my heyday, but nonetheless represents an increase on last year. I write them so seldom that it’s a wonder that any are publishable, so I’m very grateful to Ian Storr and Tanya McDonald, the editors of Presence and Kingfisher respectively, for finding merit in them. The four poems below aren’t necessarily the best of the nine, but represent each of the batches I submitted.
exit interview:
the nice fella from HR
chats about himself
*
the echoing mews
of clear-sky buzzards . . .
greenness of moss*
on a notepad
in the stonemason’s yard:
names to be carved
*
a tight peloton
easing up Reservoir Road
back-gliding kestrel
*
1 Presence 78
2 Presence 79
3 Kingfisher 10
4 Presence 80
-
Back to Michael Hamburger
It would be remiss of me not to revisit Hamburger before his centenary year ends. I wonder who else has marked it; not even PN Review as far as I can see, a surprising omission given that Carcanet ‘inherited’ Hamburger when they absorbed Anvil’s list and then published A Michael Hamburger Reader, available here, ten years after Hamburger’s death (and five after its editor, Dennis O’Driscoll’s).
His final collection, Circling the Square (Anvil Press Poetry, 2007), was published not long before he died, in June of that year.
Cover of Circling the Square His love of nature, particularly in his adopted home county, shone forth to the end, none more so in the poem below, suffused with colour and light, fading to darkness at its close. As ever, his syntax was slightly, but likeably, awry, here within the penultimate stanza.
Winter Evenings, East Suffolk
The sun’s and our days are shortening
While before solstice the visible moon fills out,
What on these lowland wide horizons lingers
As though to reiterate, recall, is dusk:
On the south-western from flame to glimmer
Slowly the glow subsides
From scarlet to roseate, amber drifts and shifts
Or else to a strip of blue
Deeper than any a summer noon sustained.
If a black cloud hangs there it shines
Rimmed with departing light.
December’s last leafage responds:
A red so dark on this maple
It’s nightfall too, detained,
Wisps of pale yellow to ochre
On the rugosa stems wilting
As on those with buds for another year.
Then, moon not yet full, whole skies
Whether clouded or clear
And silver tarnishing.
Never a night is total
Until our vision, dimmed,
Disowns the shapes, the shadows,
All colours mixed on palettes too far away.
-
Poem at Atrium – ‘Entertaining’
With thanks to editors Claire Walker and Holly Magill, I’m very pleased to have a poem up at Atrium today, here.
-
November reading
Shash Trevett’s debut full collection, The Naming of Names, published by the Poetry Business and available to buy here, follows on from her 2021 pamphlet From a Borrowed Land, with more poems relating aspects of the Tamil experience of the civil war in Sri Lanka between 1983 and 2009 and some on other, ancillary matters: British colonialism and racism (including that of the UK government’s immigration policies). Readers may also know that Trevett was one of the three co-editors of the exemplary and acclaimed Out of Sri Lanka anthology, published by Bloodaxe last year.
Cover of The Naming of Names Estimates, disputed by the state’s Sinhalese majority, suggest that more than 100,000 Tamil civilians died during the conflict, many as victims of brutal violence, including sexual violence, bombings, massacres and/or dismemberments. As the title indicates, Trevett’s collection aims to put names to some of those victims, to reanimate them as real people, so that they aren’t just statistics. As a refugee from the war herself, Trevett writes with understandable passion, though in spare language which allows the individual and collective stories and incidents to speak for themselves without embellishment. It’s necessarily a difficult read, as any bearing of witness to war crimes is, as in ‘And on the Ceiling, a Lizard’:
When he rested his gun against the wall
and told me to lie down.
When he placed a grenade by the pillow
and unbuckled his belt
I watched the dust motes hang
in the air and the lizard freeze
on the ceiling, and knew that words
had never had the power to save me.This almost matter-of-fact recounting magnifies the terror far more than any liberal sprinkling of adjectives could do. It’s hard in reading this fine collection not to think of Gaza, Sudan and other places where State-inflicted warfare inevitably kills thousand of civilians as collateral damage. Above all, though, it shines a light on what very specifically happened to the Tamil people, the ramifications of which are naturally still being felt. (When I worked for Kingston Council, in the Student Awards team, in the early 1990s, I saw a good number of customers who were Tamils living in exile in Tolworth and some of whom revealed the circumstances of what they’d seen. That Tamil community is still going strong.) This brave, elegantly crafted collection doesn’t flinch from the horrors, yet somehow also finds a sense of beauty among them:
[. . .] The last mango tree
waits, remembering those years when children
clung to its branches, women picked its fruit –
green for pickling, honeyed orange for eating.
The last mango tree knows that its branches
hold the secrets of a lost people.
It stands guarding memories, surrounded
by abandoned and derelict life.
(‘The Last Mango Tree’)
I’ve written about Robert Hamberger’s poetry before, in a review for The North of his 2019 collection, Blue Wallpaper; I concluded by saying that, ‘It’s high time that Hamberger becomes widely acknowledged as the marvellous poet he is.’ His new, fifth collection, Nude Against a Rock, published by Waterloo Press and available to buy here, amply justifies my belief that Hamberger is a highly gifted poet.
Cover of Nude Against a Rock It’s a bumper collection, stretching to 100 pages, yet it doesn’t feel over-stuffed. That may in part be because most of Hamberger’s poems are fairly short, including lots of his trademark exceptional sonnets, which he always turns with a naturalness belying the constraints of the form; but more, though, because they always have a discernible point to them. The first section contains 17 poems about his husband, such as the terrifically-titled and tender ‘Love Song for a Bigot’:
If whatever I do tonight
makes you shudder you don’t need
to watch. When I kiss his eyebrow
his shoulder his dick it’s none
of your business. I claim sanctuary
in his arms. My door is bolted.
I’m an eel and he’s my river.
The middle section, of 46 poems, is more miscellaneous: here we find, inter alia, poems for and about his children and grandchildren; recollections of his father and mother and of old, departed friends, including Mark Hollis of Talk Talk, and his aunts who so memorably featured in Blue Wallpaper also. There’s also a sonnet called ‘Street Song’ – presumably a nod to Thom Gunn’s poem of the same name, though the two poems’ subjects are very different – which seems to be in the voice of a homeless person: ‘Who owns me? Who chose / to call me mister when time’s harder / than ten pavements and I need no sparrows / whistling for my crumbs?’
The final section has the same name as the book’s title, deriving from a painting by the gay artist Keith Vaughan, 1912–1977. Its 28 poems respond to selected journal entries of Vaughan’s, from August 1939 up to his suicide by an overdose after two years of living with cancer, and/or other writings and artworks. Sequences can often feel too forced in places, but this doesn’t, as Hamberger fully inhabits Vaughan’s voice and creative mind, at times thrillingly:
You leap into paint:
its scuffs and strokes and splashes –
gouache seems a caress on paper,
oils a sticky glut, ink and wash
thunder and cloud. They make a man
of you, this body of contradictions
standing barefoot by the easel.
You leap over naysayers, the obstructers,
your damned neurosis, foggy doubt.
You leap over courts of justice,
steeples in autumn villages,
your mother’s grip, your lover’s smothering.
(‘Leaping Figure’)
He also convincingly ventriloquises Vaughan’s despair towards the end:
Shall I drink now from the yellow cup,
let rainfall soak a broken lip
a parchment tongue –
stream into my hands until
I’m overflowing? Look how this slate
edge balances green,
how empty my hours have become –
like a jug loses purpose when the pouring’s done.
(‘Still Life with Greengages and Yellow Cup’)
As I noted four years ago, Waterloo Press’s production values are superb, perhaps the best of any poetry publisher in the UK, and in this case they perfectly augment the satisfaction which the reader gains from the tremendous contents.
I’ve also read two more Rupert Thomson novels: The Book of Revelation (2000) and Never Anyone But You (2018). The more I read Thomson’s books, the more he reminds me of Brian Moore, whose novels spanned a vast range of subjects, narrative voices and styles, but never less than compellingly; and like Moore knew, Thomson also knows how to write proper page-turners. Given that my attention span for prose is much lower than it used to be, that fact is increasingly important!
To give a flavour of the plot of The Book of Revelation would be to ruin it, so suffice to say that its plot twists and first-person psychological insights are engaging throughout.
Never Anyone But You is also written in the first person, in the voice of Suzanne Malherbe, AKA Marcel Moore, and recounts the lives and deaths of Moore and her lifelong partner, Lucy Schwob, AKA Claude Cahun. As is increasingly well-known, both Moore and Cahun were avant garde, multi-talented creatives who chose to live their unorthodox, gay lives openly. I loved this line:
The longer you’re with someone, the more mysterious they become.
Moore and Cahun’s finest moments arguably came during the war when, living on Jersey, they defied the Nazis for four years by spreading propaganda leaflets designed to demoralise the occupying forces, until they were betrayed to the Gestapo. Thomson’s version of their story is really quite beautiful and evidently painstakingly researched. Thomson’s output is yet to garner any literary prizes whatsoever, which is mystifying. Hey ho.
-
Review of Victoria Gatehouse’s The Hawthorn Bride
With thanks to the editor, Hilary Menos, for commissioning it, my review of Victoria Gatehouse’s excellent debut full collection, The Hawthorn Bride, is at The Friday Poem today, here.
The collection, published by Indigo Dreams, is available to buy here.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 