Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

scaffolding up
hedge mustard renovates
the palace wall

‘Half Board at the Alum Sands Hotel’, the poem from which the title of my collection The Evening Entertainment derives, is featured over at The Beach Hut. Now that holidays for Brits this year (if we have them at all) will have to be ‘staycations’, its posting seems quite timely.

I’ve written comparatively few tanka over the years – probably no more than fifty. Those which have any merit are fewer still. Writing worthy tanka is a difficult art, let alone doing so in English without the cultural allusions which infuse Japanese tanka. Those poets – such as John Barlow, Claire Everett and Alison Williams – who consistently manage to do so are therefore rare.

My five tanka below are presented not because I think they are especially good, but because they remind me of the great outdoors, specifically the richly different environments of England, which seem like distant memories during this Lockdown time.

The second and fifth of them were published in the Australian tanka journal, Eucalypt, founded and originally edited by Beverley George. The fourth was published in an online anthology edited by Rodney Williams and published by M. Kei.

The fifth was subject to a generous appraisal by the Anglo-Australian poet Yvonne Hales, with whom I subsequently corresponded and wrote several rengay, a renku form invented by the American haiku poet Garry Gay. Yvonne’s analysis spookily captures the precise mood I was seeking to convey.

I wonder when it will be safe enough to visit these places again.

*

leaving Burscough,

the sprightly two-car train
of the West Lancs. Line

improvises a slicker rhythm,

springs lapwing from the fields

black geese
stream across the estuary
to Blue House Farm
my threadbare thoughts
strewn to the wind

over sea-grass beds
the water possesses
a deeper turquoise . . .
how pebbles coalesce
to make Elberry Cove

the sunlit chalkstream
slaps around the arches
of the old stone bridge—
all afternoon I watch
goosanders at their work

climbing Bredon
to an iron-age camp
towards dusk
fallow deer skedaddle
over terracotta fields

Last night I was thinking about the 1987 television programme, It Was Twenty Years Ago Today, shown on ITV 20 years and a few days after the release of Sgt Pepper. I video-taped it and must have watched it many times in the autumn of that year, after I’d been to West Berlin for three months with my university friend Caroline and her sister Sharon.

It was a feature-length documentary, in which Allen Ginsberg – by then distinguished, with his beard neatly-trimmed and wearing a jacket and tie – appraised, with his trademark enthusiasm, every track on the album. His verdicts were intercut with interviews with: McCartney, doing his revisionist utmost to play down the impact of LSD on the Fab Four’s output; a typically much more honest Harrison; and many leading counter-cultural figures, like Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Paul Kantner and Michelle Phillips. Perhaps the most vivid testimony was provided by the Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor, who could still scarcely believe his luck that he had ended up at the epicentre of a cultural revolution, and the actor–activist–writer Peter Coyote, who remained unapologetically committed to the radical politics he’d espoused two decades before. The most memorable moments come when composer and musicologist Wilfred Mellers heaps high praise on ‘She’s Leaving Home’.

The film can’t be bettered as a celebration and overview of why the Beatles’ music mattered; how it rivalled, influenced and was influenced by theoutput of the Byrds and then the Beach Boys; and how it fitted in with and influenced the broader Western, especially American, culture, happenings and be-ins of its era. What it largely didn’t do, though, is examine the more peculiarly British Psychedelic aspects of the music. You could argue that the Beatles hit their peak of those aspects, and possibly per se, on 1966’s Revolver, the album immediately preceding Sgt Pepper; and that the latter, for all the indisputable virtues which the programme articulated, was an overblown self-parody to a degree.

Anyhow, Ginsberg talking about the Beatles reminds me that he wrote a poem – ‘Portland Coliseum’ – about one of their gigs, which took place on 27 August 1965, and which he included in his 1968 collection, Planet News (the title of which Dylan’s 1974 album Planet Waves must deliberately echo).

It’s in Ginsberg’s customary Whitmanesque/Blakean rhapsodic tones:

A single whistling sound of
        ten thousand children’s
              larynxes asinging
              pierce the ears
        and flowing up the belly
        bliss the moment arrived

Apparition, four brown English
         jacket christhair boys
Goofed Ringo battling bright
                     white drums
Silent George hair patient
                      Soul horse
Short black-skulled Paul
                wit thin guitar
Lennon the captain, his mouth
               a triangular smile,
all jump together to End
         some tearful memory song
                       ancient two years

And so on. Those last two lines quoted are Ginsberg at his perceptive best: so often the Beatles’ songs concerned nostalgia and they moved on so quickly in their progression as musicians that their songs took on a timeless, ‘ancient’ spirit as soon as they became known. The description of Harrison, the band’s deep thinker, as a ‘soul horse’. seems right too Lennon had long since given way to McCartney as ‘the captain’ by the time Planet News was published, as Ian MacDonald approvingly noted in his indispensable Revolution in the Head. In this recording of ‘Portland Coliseum’, Ginsberg adds words here and there (though not everywhere), and a whole new line towards the end. As a witness to the Beatles’ power, the poem captures their pre-acid pomp with a kaleidoscopic clarity.

Ginsberg had less convincingly referred to the Beatles in a previous poem, ‘Who Be Kind To’, from earlier that same summer: ‘the boom bom that bounces in the joyful/ bowels as the Liverpool Minstrels of/ CavernSink’.

Strangely, though, Ginsberg for all his avant-garde and leftish leanings seems to have written no poems which addressed the oppression of Afro-Americans. The gig in Portland was just 11 days after the Watts riots in LA, a thousand miles south along the Pacific coast. (As I write, LA, like many cities in America has just woken up after its fourth consecutive night of protest as a result of yet more Black people being murdered by the forces of law and order.) Similarly, the film barely contains any context about the battle for Civil Rights. For all that, though, it’s still a charming and entertaining piece of television, oddly eccentric in places. Amazingly, I still have the tape, though no machine to play it on.

Here is another review for the wonderful Sphinx. There are so many reviews on the site – it really is worth a good long browse or two.

Last night, I watched Bryan Forbes’ 1966 comedy The Wrong Box for the first time in 30-odd years and found it to be as pleasantly daft as I remembered it to be. It features superb comic turns from Ralph Richardson and Wilfred Lawson – as, respectively, an elderly polymath with verbal diarrhoea and a decrepit butler ironically named Peacock – outshining other stars, among them Michael Caine, Forbes’ wife Nanette Newman (she was in most of his films), Pete ‘n’ Dud, wonderfully multi-talented Irene Handl, Peter Sellers, and, in his last film appearance, Tony Hancock. (Like many British comedies of the mid- to late-Sixties, it was overstuffed with cameos, including fleeting shots of Leonard Rossiter, Nicholas Parsons and omnipresent Norman Rossington.)

What I didn’t recall, though, was the charming brilliance of John Barry’s theme tune: at once a beautiful, sweeping melody, but with a melancholic, heart-achingly nostalgic undertone. It’s symptomatic of that British, perhaps more specifically English, penchant for harking back to a golden, Edwardian age which probably never really existed for the overwhelming majority of people and which the Great War obliterated. Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ trades in that territory. Of course, a perverted form of this tendency undoubtedly informs the mindset of Little Englanders still today. Yet in one of its more benevolent manifestations, it was a – probably the – key component of the British version of psychedelia, a rather different beast to its darker, understandably more politicised American counterpart. (There’s more than a country mile between ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘The Red Telephone’.) Rob Chapman, in his magisterial survey Psychedelia and Other Colours, notes that the nostalgic element of British psychedelia was more of a regression to childhood than anything else, especially so for the Beatles:

‘She Said She Said’ [on Revolver] simply wants to go back to the imagined security of childhood. This regressive aspect is most evident in the way the line ‘When I was a boy’ leaps out of the song, initiating a sudden change of tempo and an equally abrupt mood swing. The wording is significant: not ‘Everything was fine’, as in the weather, as in complacent hippie platitudes, but ‘everything was right’. In the midst of chemically induced turmoil Lennon clings to childhood certainties. In the middle of the Beatles’ most revolutionary musical period it’s not the Hacienda that must be built but an infant Arcadia. ‘It was just an “acidy” song, I suppose,’ he later mused. ‘“When I was a boy,” you see. A lot of early childhood was coming out. It’s a throwaway reflection delivered with typical Lennon insouciance, but its implications informed the next eighteen months of the Beatles’ output and, indeed, the next eighteen months of UK psychedelia. Childhood and nostalgia would become the leitmotifs of some of their finest psychedelic work. (pp.278–9)

Chapman goes on to articulate in detail how “the tendency towards reflection and nostalgia would also dominate the mood of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Magical Mystery Tour film and EP” (p.279).

It’s the same tendency which saturated HG Wells’ The History of Mr Polly and George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air and other novels of theirs, and less obviously Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. At its odder, more surreal extreme it’s evident in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and in Enid Blyton’s four Faraway Tree books which took me very far away when they were read to my class at Malden Manor Infant School. (Wells and Carroll are both among the cast of the famous and not-so-famous on Jann Haworth and Peter Blake’s cover for Sgt Pepper.) The British film output of the Sixties and early-Seventies was awash with sun-hazed nostalgia, including Jonathan Miller’s extra-trippy TV adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.

Incidentally, Chapman also expertly outlines the influence of Music Hall and more recent British popular culture per se on the Beatles, the Small Faces and other British psychedelic acts. Naturally, there were other influences which fed in to the rich outpouring too: not least drugs, pastoralism and endearing silliness, and, for the Beatles, Donovan, the Incredible String Band and others, a variably genuine Orientalist love of Eastern, especially Indian, music and mysticism. Sitar adorned everything.

For my generation, born slap-bang in the middle of this spectacular cultural culmination, there was a feeling, as we grew into our teens in Thatcher’s Britain of the Eighties, that we’d lucked out; that we’d missed most of the fun. (Fortunately, the Eighties itself proved to be a golden cultural period of its own, presided over by one who was most definitely there 15 years before, John Peel.) But the music and culture of late-Sixties Britain obsessed my friends and me: repeats, for the first time since the early Seventies, of The Avengers and The Prisoner on Channel 4 around 1984–5 beamed droll, but totally believable surrealism into our living rooms and minds. The fact that my dad, ostensibly uninterested in that cultural zenith, would years later habitually say ‘Be seeing you’ upon his departure just like McGoohan’s Number 6, brought it all together for me in a way that little else could. At the same time, London Weekend Television would regularly show The Wicker Man, and BBC2 would give occasional airings to the films of Michael Reeves. Films and programmes like those had their weird antecedents in all kinds of places: the films of Powell and Pressburger; novels by the likes of John Wyndham and Rex Warner; art by Agar, Armstrong, Burra, the (unrelated) Carringtons Dora and Leonora, Hillier, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer and many others; The Goon Show; and so much else besides.

So when I write about the past, it’s invariably through a hazy, sun-drenched, bucolic, slightly disturbed kaleidoscope, but in the knowledge that nostalgia can be defined as ‘a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past’ (my emphasis). The past can only ever be simultaneously alluring and melancholy-inducing. For these reasons, whilst I’d hesitate to describe myself as a ‘psychedelic poet’, which sounds a little bit silly, I like to think that my poems often have a dollop of good old British psychedelia somewhere within them, occasionally right on the surface, as readers of The Evening Entertainment would hopefully attest. And if anything, more poems are getting more melancholy with every passing year. No doubt that is a common trait.

Here is my latest review for Sphinx.

Over on Twitter the other day, Matthew Stewart tweeted a picture of a poem concerning his childhood phone number, from his excellent collection The Knives of Villalejo, and wondered what numbers other folk remembered. When he tweeted the same question previously, it somehow sparked off the following poem of mine – not about our family phone number when I was a child, but the registration number of my dad’s car.

OYF 747L

After perusing all the latest features on cars in Which?,
my father part-exchanged his grey Austin Cambridge,

at Lancaster’s showrooms on the crest of Surbiton Hill,
for a shimmery, maroon Austin Maxi, whose original

virtue, winked the salesman, was how the seats folded
virtually flat, to fashion an ad hoc four-foot-wide bed—

an eyebrow-raising choice, perhaps, for a family man,
who didn’t appear the chap to drive a passion wagon.

I often write poems which tell stories, in either an overt narrative or in a purposefully less obvious manner, so naming characters is something I give a lot of thought to. What I’ve concluded – though this isn’t any major revelation – is that there’s a balance to be struck between names which have an element of nominative determination (e.g. when I first had a bank account, the bank’s manager was one Mr Money) and those which have no such connotation but somehow feel appropriate.

Out walking this morning, I was thinking about this again, and how the names of characters in other art forms might give some pointers about that balance. I mulled over highly successful TV comedies which feature flawed yet likeable (in degrees) lead roles. I could have written about the names of characters in Shakespeare’s plays or Dickens’ novels, but that would be too obvious; so bear with me, please, as I consider why characters were named as they were in three famous programmes and then think about how that might apply in poetry.

Take, for instance, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s timelessly brilliant, often Absurdist, sitcom Steptoe and Son. ‘Steptoe’ sounds like a surname they invented, but it isn’t; it’s an old name, of Anglo-Saxon origin apparently. What it does have is an allusion, intended or otherwise, to the father and son metaphorically stepping on each other’s toes, especially Albert, the father, on those of his son, Harold, as if irritation and argument are their perpetual way of life, which of course they are. It might also be an allusion to the sense that however much Harold dreams of escape from his father’s repulsive, leer-gurning, emotional-blackmailing behaviour, the movement of his feet from their yard and rickety house in Shepherd’s Bush will never result in anything more than a few steps away and then a few steps back to the place which he knows, in his heart, he can never really leave. For all that, the name isn’t one which spells out those connotations. By contrast, the name of the horse – Hercules – which pulls their rag and bone cart has a more obvious allusion.

David Croft and Jimmy Perry’s joyous ensemble comedy Dad’s Army has a ream of characters so the quality of the names is vital in establishing them. Captain Mainwaring’s surname is as subtly perfect as that of the Steptoes: pompous and pretentious like the character himself, it’s pronounced as ‘Mannering’, as though the character spends his whole time in an activity – putting on appearances – as a gerund all of its own. Yet, it’s a name which gets mispronounced, much to the character’s chagrin, as ‘Main-wearing’, mostly by his superior officers and sometimes, in an exaggerated, professional-Welshman fashion, by an occasional character, Mr Cheeseman – a name which itself was delicately chosen: not obviously Welsh but lending itself to heavy Welsh-accented stressing on both its syllables by the character himself, and which is mildly amusing to boot. Both Sergeant Wilson and Corporal Jones have simpler, more common, more patently British surnames than Mainwaring, with its Norman origins, and also have plain first names, Arthur and Jack respectively. Those choices work effectively in part because Captain Mainwaring sees himself as the embodiment of Englishness (reinforced by his first name being infrequently revealed to be George), standing resolutely against ‘Jerry’, and because he sees himself as being socially superior to them both, despite Wilson having been privately educated in contrast to himself. (A great deal of the comedy in the programme derives from class differences, principally between the social climbing of Mainwaring and the social descent of Wilson.) Private Godfrey has a surname which is more commonly found as a rather quaint first name, its feyness wholly in keeping with the character’s doddery eccentricity, and its first syllable maybe letting the viewer know that this is a good man. Private Frazer, a stereotyped, Scotch-soused Scotsman who’s mean with money and ever keen to connive against Mainwaring’s authority, has a surname redolent of ‘freezer’, which is appropriate for his doom-mongering undertaker persona. Private Pike’s fierce-sounding surname ironically suits his personality as a scared-teenager who has aspirations of being a strong, brave warrior. Mainwaring’s nemesis, the ARP Warden Hodges, is largely known simply as ‘Hodges’, a name which, like Mainwaring’s own, has a playful determinism to it, because he constantly budges in to try and thwart Mainwaring’s plans – i.e. the name becomes a verb. Of the major characters, only the spiv, Private Walker, has a surname which appears to be throwaway; maybe Croft and Perry felt that it would be excessive to bestow upon him a surname which was in some way associative of his wheeler–dealer traits.

The names of more peripheral characters in Dad’s Army are also carefully coined. Mrs Pike, has a first name, Mavis, which alludes to her busy, sparrow-like nature. The rather affected vicar’s full name is the Reverend Timothy Farthing, though he is usually referred to only as ‘Reverend’. His belligerent verger is called Mr Yeatman, with an aggressively-sounded first syllable subconsciously reminiscent, perhaps, of ‘hate’. Jones’s fur-draped, saucy-postcard-like love/lust interest is more directly-named: Mrs Fox. Godfrey’s sister Dolly, whom he frequently refers to, has a name which fits like a counterpart to him. One character named just for the fun of it, presumably, is the largely non-speaking Private Sponge; and the never-seen and barely-heard Mrs Mainwaring has a first name of Elizabeth, which Arthur Lowe, as Mainwaring, enunciates like an elocutionist and never shortens, implying that she comes from a higher class than him. What’s evident is that Croft and Perry devoted time and effort to getting the character’s names right in order to elicit as much additional shade as possible.

In Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office, the anti-heroic monster David Brent has a common first name and a surname which is a place-name that isn’t a place – although it’s named after a tributary of the Thames, Brent is an administrative place-name only, for a London Borough. Nobody, surely, would describe themselves as coming from Brent, in the same way that nobody would say they are from Elmbridge, Spelthorne or Tameside – or indeed Merton, which became the stage surname of Paul Martin, comedian and writer, and, unforgettably, of Caroline Aherne’s comedy talk show host, Mrs Merton. The very artificiality of the name Brent therefore adds a certain something to the vacuous, tyrannical self-centredness of the character who wants everyone to love him. In contrast, the more heroic character Tim has the surname Canterbury, a ‘real’ place, with all its historical associations. It can’t be a coincidence that the lead female character, Dawn Tinsley, with a cheery, sunshine-bringing first name, has a surname which is so close to that of Gail Tilsley (as was), a character in Coronation Street who, over many years, has endured a series of difficult relationships, reflective of Dawn’s own predicament with the dreadful sexist skinflint, Lee. The status-driven character Gareth Keenan has a first name which somehow fits him, with his terrible haircut, and his surname puns on ‘keen one’: the TA soldier at the weekends who is ever anxious to play his part. Finchy is a perfect moniker for a gregarious, loquacious gobshite. Neil Godwin, like Tim Canterbury, has a reliable Anglo-Saxon solidity to his name, and his surname subconsciously puns on ‘good one’. I wasn’t the greatest fan of The Office, but its integrity, over just 12 episodes and a Christmas special, was surely helped by using names which gave the characters universality and relatability.

I could go on and on with other examples: Detectorists, Dinner Ladies, Fawlty Towers, etc. Dramatists of all types must think long and hard about their characters, from every angle, and that will always include the names, unless of course they make them anonymous, which is another matter altogether: not every story needs any, or all, of its character(s) to be named, but unless the story is very short, there will almost always be minimum requirements in order to provide clarity for the viewer (or reader).

So what, I hear you ask, is the relevance of all this to poetry? In essence, well-chosen names can augment the sense of a poem well-made. Specificity, as in other ways, adds colour and nuances, both explicit and implicit, but, as with all things, a balance needs to be achieved. If every poem had a whole host of characters, that would probably be too much.

Sinéad Morrissey’s bravura poem ‘Display’ (from Parallax, 2013) concerning the Women’s League of Health and Beauty (WLHB), lovingly draws out the bizarre qualities of a mass demonstration by WLHB groups in Hyde Park in 1936 and makes an obvious comparison with the League of German Maidens – the girls’ equivalent of the boys’ Hitler Youth – from which the WLHB founder Mary Bagot Stack gained her inspiration. Bagot Stack is name-checked, perhaps for slight comic effect, towards the end of the poem, but it’s the way in which Morrissey gives names to some of the otherwise anonymous “fifteen thousand women’ and their local groups which grabs my attention:

                      It could be snowing, and they of Bromley–Croydon, Slough
Glasgow, Belfast, would don no more than a pair of satin knickers
and a sleeveless satin vest to spin and stretch and bow
the body beautiful. Athens in London, under a sodden sky,
and Winnie and Molly and Doris metamorphosed.

This is superb, detailed and utterly compelling poetry, not least the repetitions of “satin” and their similarity to “sodden”, but how much more so because of the names? “Bromley–Croydon” has an honest, neighbourly south London conurbation-ness to it. Since the poem is set in the year of the Berlin Olympics which celebrated the Nazis’ perverted love for ‘Aryan’ ideals of fitness and bodily perfection, that hanging “Slough” is neatly associative of something else of which the Nazis were overly fond: the “friendly bombs’ in John Betjeman’s poem ‘Slough’, written a year later. (Coincidentally, Slough is also the setting for The Office.) “Glasgow” and “Belfast”, used as synecdoche for Scotland and Northern Ireland, widen out the WLHB as a nationwide movement in the reader’s mind. “Athens” then takes the poem to a much different time and place: to those of the original Olympic ideals which the Nazis twisted for their own means. The poem might be implying here that the Nazis’ imitators in Britain, whether Bagot-Stack, Mosley or whoever, were slightly less fanatical fascists, but still dangerous ones, and the ordinary women – here the working-class forenamed and non-surnamed “Winnie and Molly and Doris’ – who represent the WLHB membership as a whole might either be members for those dark ideological reasons or for the fun of the exercise. (As the end of the Phoney War showed, by Christmas 1940 more than a thousand Blackshirts and other Nazi sympathisers and assorted anti-Semitic fanatics and cranks were rounded up and imprisoned under Regulation 18B of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939. It’s a digression, but worth noting that even Henry Williamson, the author of Tarka the Otter, was a prominent member of the BUF – had the Nazis successfully invaded, one wonders if he would have become the British Hamsun or Céline.) There’s also a nice musicality between “Winnie and Molly and Doris”: between the second syllables of “Winnie and Molly” and then the first syllables of “Molly and Doris”. It’s fair to say that without the admirable specificity of these everywoman names, and without the place-names too, Morrissey’s poem would have been substantially weaker and markedly less interesting. (Incidentally, the poem has an added relevance for me, as my mother was an active member of the WLHB, or ‘League’ as she called it, for 50 years, from not long after my birth onwards. For most of that time, even when she was approaching her eighties, she was among the younger members.)

A better-known example is Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Mr Bleaney’, from The Whitsun Weddings, 1964, which features not just the well-named titular character but also “the Frinton folk/ Who put him up for summer holidays,/ And Christmas at his sister’s house in Stoke.” Would the naming of the “Frinton folk” or Mr Bleaney’s sister have added more interest or over-egged the pudding? (I wonder, too, if Mr Bleaney’s name inspired Mr Bean, or perhaps it was just a nod to another everyman, Mr Benn.)

In her taut and exceptional collection, Noir (2016), Charlotte Gann skilfully deploys names in several poems. ‘Mrs Coulter’s Scissors’ is neatly titled – does ‘Coulter’ remind the reader of ‘cutter’? ‘Her Publisher’ doesn’t name the ‘her’ of the title, but features “Malcolm”, whom we gather is the eponymous character. The penultimate line of the poem is beautifully memorable: “Malcolm’s eyes are the colour of clear sky.” The extraordinary poem ‘In the Classroom of Touch’ features “Mr Farnham” demonstrating “‘how you hold a person’”, with the help of two pupils in turn, “Lydia” and “Giles”. The scene’s power and unsettling wonder – either more than a little creepy or rather lovely, or simultaneously both, depending on your point of view – are indisputably enhanced by names which are entirely believable.

yellow iris
no ferry running
today or tomorrow

 

the spring wind sings
around the log pile
old and new griefs

My latest ‘one point of interest’ (OPOI) review on Sphinx has been published, of a fantastic pamphlet. Alongside my review of The Deal are others of it by the terrific poets Charlotte Gann and DA Prince. Somehow, the three reviews seem to barely have overlapped, which is a serendipitous wonder. 

I was saddened today to see from Richard Williams’s always brilliant blog, The Blue Moment, that Ron Rubin, or Ronald as I knew him, died a fortnight ago at the age of 86. I knew him not through music, though I was aware that he was a jazz bassist, but because he was also an excellent haiku poet, particularly of sharp senryu, who from 2006 to 2012 was a regular contributor to Presence when I was the editor for postal submissions. I enjoyed Ron’s haiku and the letters in which they arrived.

Ron’s haiku were usually funny, with a touch reminiscent of another excellent British senryu poet Maurice Tasnier; were often about music in some way or another, but could also be more serious. He was good enough for his haiku to be placed second in 2006, and then first in 2009, in the annual Haiku Presence Award (since renamed as the Martin Lucas Haiku Award), though neither of the haiku which received those placings were, to my mind, anywhere near as good as any of the following, all of which were published in Presence except the first one.

I like the surprise of ‘rattle’ in this one, published in The Haiku Calendar 2008:

summer heat . . .
the rattle of lizards
along the gutters

Ron’s observational ability and wit come across beautifully in this quintet of music-themed haiku:

power cut . . .
in the distance
the sound of a piano

busking guitarist—
the flash
of a gold tooth

musician’s funeral
the organist’s
wrong chords

piano practice:
soft-pedalling
through the tricky bits

posh gig:
I help the roadie
put on a tie

This trio, all published in Presence 41, are, I think, all tremendous in their own ways:

buttocks up
in the buttercups—
her first spring

outside the theatre
a man directs the traffic
with a whisky bottle

a flicker of moths
as night falls
our eyelids touch

And this one is lovely, isn’t it?

on the bus
we laugh with two men telling jokes
in sign language

Finally, two more of his trademark droll senryu:

hungover I return
the alarm clock’s
two-finger salute

six months dead
and still I cross the road
to avoid him

Spilt Milk was one of several books, also including Susan Wicks’s Singing Underwater and Thom Gunn’s Collected, which, after a few years’ absence, coaxed me back into writing poetry in the late 1990s. I remember reading it by a pool c.1998 and thinking it was the ideal holiday poetry collection, because it’s suffused with what became Sarah Maguire’s perennial themes: heat, sultriness, sensuality, sex, food, gardens, a tangible sense of place – her native West London, Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East – and Irishness, of her birth-mother and adoptive parents. Each poem seems so well-made and moves around through time and space.

But, like The Pomegranates of Kandahar, Maguire’s last collection published while she was alive, it also has a sharp political sense: of the uncertain times just before, and then after, the fall of the Berlin Wall; of women’s rights; of respect and support for migrants; and much else besides, but without seeming forced or didactic. I think that’s a very difficult balance to achieve. (Maguire went on, of course, to found the Poetry Translation Centre, which has done so much important work in rendering poets from other tongues into the Anglophone poetry world.)

It’s a slim collection, with only 33 poems, but has more vivacity and truth than collections twice the length. Sarah Maguire only published two (and a half) subsequent collections before her tragically early death, in 2017, but, for me, each is beautifully honed and exemplifies a less-is-more approach. In that respect, and in her non-prolific approach, Maguire reminds me of Vicki Feaver.

The title references not just the sex-drenched poem of the same name, but alludes to the opening poem and to two other poems, ‘The Fracture Clinic’ and Psoriasis’. The book has a pleasing thematic unity which is charming and moving in many ways and moods.

‘May Day, 1986’, is exactly what you want from a collection opener: properly substantial, it sets a disquieting tone which never leaves the reader throughout the book. It’s dedicated and addressed to the Polish poet Tadeusz Slawek, and revolves around Maguire, in Ladbroke Grove, considering the impact of Chernobyl on Poland and nearer home: “[. . .] the radio-activity an inaudible fizz/ in the cells, rupturing thorax or liver,/ the intimacy of the bowel. They say it won’t/ reach here.” The poem moves from the past, taking in Jane Austen and Socrates, to the present and then the future. It ends with an unforgettable image: “Later, on the news, they will show/ gallons of contaminated Polish milk/ swilled into sewage, a boy crying/ at the sting of iodine he must swallow// against the uncertain air.”

‘The Garden of the Virgin’ concerns Mount Athos, where women are forbidden on account of Mary apparently having “declared this garden// her domain, declared/ (recalling Eve)/ no other female/should come to foul// this paradise.” And in ancient times even female animals were not allowed: “Ewelambs and their ewes/ were slaughtered. Cows/ butchered. Heifers slain.// The sow, the gilt/ and the nanny goat:/ all dead and banned.” It’s a four-part poem which not only explicitly tackles the gender bar but is chock-full with telling detail, ending with the (again unforgettable) image of a hermit waking “sodden/ from a lycanthropic nightmare” in which “He had sensed/ the slow breath/ of the wolf, had stared// deep into her lemon eyes,/ as still as oil/ or candlelight, then// felt himself run off with her –/ feral, hirsute, opening out his lungs/ to greet the moon.”

‘The Fracture Clinic’ brilliantly encompasses the day Maguire’s parents adopted her (“They climbed the big stairs to the Priest’s house// in St Charles Square, and found me silent in a cot”), the first time (since her birth) that she met her birth-mother, and the breaking of a leg or foot that has necessitated an operation. Like so many of the poems in the book, it moves backwards and forwards through time, implicitly showing the reader how history matters and how the present and the future matter even more. The three components of the poem – adoption, meeting with birth-mother and the contemporary hospital scene – are so cleverly bound together by the final image, which draws the reader’s thoughts back to birth:

[. . .] Now I’m lying in Recovery,

my wrist encircled by my date of birth, my postcode
and my name, all written upside down.

It’s such a feat, to draw together such weighty subject-matter, with her trademark exactness of word-choice and description. For example, the use of “big” in “They climbed the big stairs to the Priest’s house” so beautifully and subtly implies the adoptive couple’s nervousness; and I love the disorientating just-so-ness of

They have taken me to St Charles Hospital
where I drowned in anaesthesia: beneath a star-shaped atrium

I watched the milky light turn crystalline, then I went
under.

That “St Charles Hospital” echoes “St Charles Square” from earlier in the poem adds to the sense of life circling round. The positioning of “under” at the start of a new line is neatly done.

For me, the poem has absolute truth about it, but relies on tremendous narrative pace and tightly-reined energy to tell and entwine its remarkable stories, rather than any high-register pyrotechnics. It’s so wonderfully and admirably well-crafted. The title has, of course, a secondary meaning of sorts, that the forced separation of Maguire from her birth-mother could be healed by time and love.

I very much hope that a posthumous collection (or two) of Maguire’s poems will be published.

Sarah Maguire, Spilt Milk, Secker & Warburg, 1991

I was thrilled this morning to find out that Julie Mellor has written a lovely, very perceptive review of my collection, The Evening Entertainment, on her excellent blog.

I’m very grateful to the tremendous poet Richie McCaffery for posting two of my poems on his always interesting website today.

First thing today, I managed to write my first poem of the coronoviral age, about my dad and his drinks cabinet, which was apt as he would have been 87 on Friday.

I then noticed, on my customary Sunday long run, this time 17.5 km in exactly 90 minutes, that, rather than staying in the zone like they and I would in ‘normal’ times, all the runners I passed either acknowledged me with a wave or nod, or answered my thumb-up acknowledgement of them.

As I was running up the hill beside Sandown Park up to Esher, I saw that the sign advertising the date of the next meeting rather optimistically said May the something. By the time, I passed the farm where my fellow Old Tiff poet Roger Garfitt spent his teenage years, described so beautifully in his memoir The Horseman’s Word, it had started to snow.

Through Hersham, birthplace of the ’erberts responsible for the only riot in Kingston in the last 200 years, the traffic – both vehicular and human – had thinned out to me alone.

At Walton, the easterlies were so fierce that the Thames was flowing the wrong way and it felt as though I was running backwards.

It was the first time I’d run along this bank in about a year, as opposed to heading over Walton Bridge and tripping through Lower Sunbury and Hampton and that way round to Hampton Court.

Sunbury Lock was in Sunbury lock-down:

From the Molesey bank, one can appreciate the great Victorian waterworks architecture as well as anywhere.

My legs, usually so keen to gallop away like they belonged at, well, Sandown, were for once very glad to be home.

This is my tribute to Stuart Quine, the haiku poet, who died, aged 57, this week, from coronavirus. Others who knew Stuart better than me are far more qualified to write a full appreciation of Stuart’s qualities, so this is necessarily only a heartfelt, brief tribute, rather than a thorough obituary, of a lovely bloke who also happened to be a fine poet.

I can’t quite remember when I first met Stuart, though I’m fairly sure that it was at a British Haiku Society meeting at Daiwa House, Regent’s Park, in the late 1990s. I was, though, aware of the limpidity and excellence of Stuart’s haiku well before then. Stuart’s first published haiku appeared in Blithe Spirit in April 1993 alongside another debutant, Martin Lucas, and selections of his work were included in the two major British haiku anthologies of those times: The Iron Book of British Haiku (1998) and The New Haiku (2002).

Stuart was born on 3 November 1962, just five days after Martin, but that coincidence wasn’t all they shared: both were from the North of England – Martin originally from Middlesbrough and Stuart from the Wirral – and had moved around England, Stuart to Liverpool then Sheffield; and they also had a very similar outlook and sense of humour. Both, too, were attracted to Buddhism, though for Stuart, an adherent of Sōtō Zen, it was far more of a way of life, a dao, than it was for Martin. For Stuart, it led, among other things, to his involvement with the Red Thread Haiku Sangha, whose members have included George Marsh, Sean O’Connor, Kim Richardson, Jane Whittle and the late Ken and Noragh Jones. Stuart was also a keen member of the Yorks./Lancs. Haiku Group, which Martin founded. Stuart was a key contributor to, and occasional guest editor of, Presence, the journal which Martin founded and edited with such gusto.

Medical conditions, though, afflicted them both: for Stuart it was myotonic dystrophy, an inherited condition which causes muscle loss to the point of immobility. It’s reasonable to conjecture that that inheritance made Stuart more aware than most of mortality, and engendered, as his friend and fellow haiku poet Lorin Ford noted in an email to me, “something earthy and wise but unassuming about him”. It certainly resulted in a body of haiku which is darker and more honestly reflective of mood than most people’s. Stuart was clever and well-read, and liked a good intellectual argument, particularly one in which he could play devil’s advocate. He was a nurse by profession, in the especially challenging A&E department, until his dystrophy meant he couldn’t carry on.

Martin’s tragic death in spring 2014 was a huge shock for all of us who knew him. At the funeral on a cold but sunny, early-May day in Preston, Ian Storr, Stuart and I decided that we would keep Presence going as a triumvirate, with website and other assistance from Chris Boultwood. Presence had always had a remarkable community spirit to it, in Martin’s image, and I like to think that the outpouring of grief and love which followed Martin’s passing found an expression in the great quantity of high-quality haiku, tanka, haibun and linked forms which the three of us accepted for issue 50 and subsequently. Our annual editorial meeting at Ian’s house in Sheffield was a treat to be looked forward to it, because Chris, Ian, Stuart and I would not only plan future issues as much as we could, but we’d laugh a lot in so doing. Stuart always had an opinion, and almost always a very inventive and helpful one. Sadly, though, Stuart’s editorial involvement was curtailed by IT problems after issue #54, so Ian assumed the ‘editor-in-chief’ role which he has carried out so capably for the last five years.

I last saw Stuart on 1 September 2018, at his sheltered accommodation in south-east Sheffield. He was physically reduced by then, but he was as intellectually alert and funny as ever. The belated publication, by Kim Richardson’s Alba Publishing, of many of his one-line haiku in two collections, Sour Pickle and then Wild Rhubarb, gave Stuart much pleasure.

Stuart was largely known for his inventiveness with the one-line haiku form, though his haiku career is book-ended by his use of the more traditional three-line form. He was also a fine tanka and haibun poet, and a perceptive reviewer.

Here are some of Stuart’s lesser-known poems which I’ve liked over the years:

outside the nightclub
drum’n’bass
shudders a puddle

(Presence 7 and The New Haiku)

as real as any dream cherry blossom

(Presence 54)

Such is life . . .
a pachinko ball
careering wildly
between bells
and lights.

(Presence 55)

the implausibility of it all
yet here I am stumbling home
through the rain

(Presence 55)

Stuart’s poems rarely needed any explication and these four all speak eloquently for themselves. Of them, I like the pell-mell tanka most of all, not least because it resonates so strongly now. A large proportion of Stuart’s poems contained his essence, his humility and often black humour, rather than simply being objective observations. Therein lies their power and the reason why his writing will still be read with admiration and fondness for many years to come.

My adjudication of the award is now on the Presence website.

In these days of quarantine, madness and reflection, I can thoroughly recommend ordering Belinda Zhawi’s awesome pamphlet, Small Inheritances. I’m not sure my review really does it justice.

I like the pithiness of the reviews on Sphinx, and the fact that they don’t show you half the book in the way that longer reviews sometimes do. Mat Riches’ review of Ten Poems About Baking is especially cracking and fittingly flavourful.

Whenever I get to bunker down, I’ve got another one to write. Meanwhile, I’m gonna put Strange Days on . . .