Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

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 . . .

I’ve written another Sphinx review, of Katie Griffiths’s excellent Live Canon prize-winning pamphlet My Shrink is Pregnant.

The other day I wrote an OPOI – ‘one point of interest’ – review for Sphinx, mostly focusing on the theme of ‘contemporary obsolescence’ in a stand-out poem in Emma Simon’s brilliant, prize-winning Smith|Doorstop pamphlet, The Odds. The review was published yesterday. You can read more about what an OPOI consists of here.

I first read this pamphlet in 2017, not long after it came out, and I’ve returned to it several times since, much because it seems to me a model of how a pamphlet can be an intensely pleasurable reading experience without having to be wholly or mainly dominated by one thematic concern. It contains 25 compact poems (only one of which spills, and even then only just, onto a second page), and gives a really good flavour of Julie Mellor’s range and ability. Let’s face it, the average full collection from some big publishers often barely gets past 30 poems these days, so this pamphlet provides true value for money as well as excellent poetic fare.

It starts with a poem – ‘The Scar on my Wrist’ – that tells the presumably autobiographical story of dicing with death as a late-teen or early-20-something in a car crash, and how at that age one has minimal sense of mortality and can laugh such incidents off:

and weren’t we the lucky ones, in love
with ourselves, the resilience of our bodies

taken for granted, and didn’t we drink ourselves
stupid the following night, quoting Talking Heads,
this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco,

this ain’t no fooling around, me with my arm in plaster,
flirting with the fireball from a box of matches,
a pub trick that set my face alight.

The naively arrogant spirit of youth, of feeling indestructible and taking on the world (‘Life During Wartime’ indeed) comes across so vividly here, enhanced by the collectivism of that repeated “ourselves”. The pacing of the writing is urgent and exciting. It’s not easy to tell a story in a poem, especially one so personal, and knowing what information to include and what to omit can be almost as difficult as choosing the right words; clearly, though, Mellor has the gift to do so beautifully.

‘Penitential’ also touches on the spirit of youth, but is also typical of Mellor’s ability to describe with lyrical precision, in this case a pedestrian journey through Sheffield city centre, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary for being captured in words:

Walking barefoot to Paradise Square,
I pass the gym where Japanese students
work their bodies to perfection.

There is no weather, just heat.

I like that neat internal rhyme-of-sorts between “Paradise” and “Japanese” and I like the matter-of-factness of the depiction. The poem goes on towards a curious ending in Paradise Square, to which the narrator of the poem is compelled to go, in order

to look up at those Regency windows

where solicitors in white silk shirts
are working late and receive
the blessing of their immaculate advice.

It’s a strange and somehow unsettling scene; rendered stranger still, perhaps, by the unfortunate absence of a comma after “late”, without which the syntax could read as though it is the solicitors who are receiving the advice rather than the narrator. The economy of the wording – as throughout Mellor’s poetry – is exact and sounds pitch-perfect on the ear.

In fact, there are surprise endings in a number of Mellor’s poems, no more so than ‘Wasps’, which has an appropriately nasty sting in its tail. If writing about bees became de rigeur five to 10 years ago, then this is a waspy antidote that deserves to be anthologised as among the best poems about these much-maligned insects you could ever hope to read, with acute observation running all the way through it:

The air’s turning damp;
one hard frost might claim them.
But they blaze against death,

bodies brittle as sweet wrappers,
the inked nibs of their stings
constantly primed.

This is impressively taut writing; the simile and metaphor both spot-on. As ever, Mellor’s line-breaks too are just right, emphasising the words at the end and beginning of lines. I won’t reveal the ending of the poem, but suffice it to say that it takes the poem to a wholly unexpected, horrific place which is, nevertheless, in keeping with the rest of the poem. Cleverly, that sting is delivered in an off-rhymed couplet at odds with the tercets that have preceded it.

There are many very satisfying poems in the book: ‘To Say We Exist’ turns nicely from imagining the coming-up-for-air experiences of miners and divers to a comparison with memories of childhood when the narrator “stayed in a strange bed/ troubled by the ornaments of other people’s lives, the shape of the dressing gown// hung behind the door”. Mellor successfully captures here, I think the disorientation of being in any unfamiliar bed and how, as a child’s experience, it could induce considerable anxiety. The poem doesn’t explain why the child was not in their own bed and the question hangs over the ending. The neat form of the poem, in four quatrains, is reinforced by its circularity, in that its final image is of the child counting “coal trucks”. Mellor isn’t a formal formalist, as it were, but seems instinctively to have the knack of letting her poems find a form which suits them.

‘Here’ – its title instantly reminiscent of Larkin’s bare Holderness-landscape, quasi-mystical poem of the same name, which opens The Whitsun Weddings – similarly conjures up a Northern English landscape “at the rim of the world”, a place where memories of the past are ingrained: “the road/ where my father won the slow bike race/ in 1953, where our uncles had biblical names,// Nicodemus, Diadorous, and our aunt was unrelated/ an evacuee who never went home”. This to me is writing which presents life with an attractive, unalloyed clear-sightedness. The title-poem, with its prayer “for those/ who dash with trolleys across Tesco’s/ miraculous car park, shimmering, soaked” is in the same vein; as is ‘Clog Field’, which describes a hinterland view towards the city centre from across south-west Sheffield, including “allotments with their umpteen front doors” and a “small acre/ where the city’s horses used to graze”. The drawing-on of memory within these poems is chocker with marvellous detail, but never verges into the sentimental, as though Mellor is too much of a realist to hark back with any excessive fondness, and in any case provides in such recollections an innate sense of timelessness.

There are so many poems which I would love to quote in full, among them ‘Divining’, which tells of a water-diviner

somewhere out in the stubble,
trousers tucked into the tops of his boots,
arms bent as if to steady a horse or fire a gun,
pointing instead the length of brass he communes with.

‘Grace Notes’ is another ‘edgelands’ poem, this time set at Morecambe Bay, and hints implicitly, through just one word (“Tides”), at the fate of the 21 Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned there in 2004, and moves to an epiphany of “black swans [. . .] overhead, grace notes/ drifting from the hinges of their wings”. The brilliance of this image is perhaps slightly diluted by using “grace notes” as the title of the poem, but is nonetheless beautiful and makes me want  to read more such excellent observation from nature by Mellor.

Since the publication of this pamphlet, Mellor has headed in a more experimental direction, through the use of redaction of found textual matter to create powerful, committed poetry which works as much through what it redacts as what it leaves for the reader, as a good look at her tremendous blog shows. Her voice deserves to be heralded as distinctive and fine.

I could go on to detail lots of other treasures to be found within Out of the Weather, but I’ll leave it there with a recommendation that buying it would be a very shrewd and rewarding move indeed.

Julie Mellor, Out of the Weather, Smith|Doorstop, £5

I was sad to hear today that David Walker, haiku poet and artist, died in September, shortly after his 80th birthday. David one of a trio of Davids, with David Cobb and David Platt, who gave so much to the British Haiku Society (BHS) in its first 15 years or so. He was a fine haiku poet, terrific sculptor and a raconteur, who was fond of telling how, in his RAF National Service days, he witnessed a nuclear warhead being loaded onto a plane at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis and then thankfully being taken off. David left the BHS around the same time as Martin Lucas, John Barlow and me, and for the same reason. The last time I saw David was in 2008, at the Bath launch of Wing Beats, in which John and I included David’s excellent haiku below:

mountain ridge
folded in slate
the raven’s wings

Being a professional artist, it’s unsurprising that David’s haiku often had that strong pictorial sense, as in these five haiku published in Haiku Spirit 20 years ago. David’s haiku were also anthologised in The Iron Book of British Haiku (1998) and The New Haiku (2002). Here’s a lovely haiku by David included in the latter volume, which I especially like for its sense of time having passed very quickly yet simultaneously being very still:

                                                summer again –
                                                poppy seeds pepper
                                                your empty room

that raspy voice
at the year-end market
dried persimmons

Some haiku are more subtle, and require a bit more work on the part of the reader, than others; this is a good example of that. Once again, and for the last time on this blog, it’s drawn from Snapshot Press’s estimable Haiku Calendar for 2019. (I’m sure the 2020 calendar, a perfect stoking-filler, will be just as fine and thought-provoking as this year’s has been.)

As Beverly Acuff Momoi lives in California, I presume the poem is set there, though the Momoi part of her name derives from her Japanese forebears so perhaps the scene is in Japan, where ‘persimmon/s’ is a stock kigo (haiku seasonal reference) for autumn.

The reader’s attention is drawn by the first word – instead of using the indefinite article, the poet uses ‘that’, which has far more clout than ‘the’ would have had. The word can be read as implying that the sound of the voice causes discomfort on the part of those within earshot, though that reading isn’t, I think, an essential component of the haiku’s quality and success.

The use of an exact adjective – ‘raspy’ – is key here, partly because it sounds similar to ‘raspberry’, giving a fruit- and near-colour-related link to ‘persimmons’; but more because it prompts the question in the reader’s mind of why the ‘voice’ is raspy; and, moreover, it isn’t spelt out as to whom the voice belongs. One presumes that it is the voice of a stallholder shouting, or rather trying to shout, about her/his wares. That reading is given weight by the time-stamp in the middle line: this is the end of the year, a very busy time in either the USA or Japan, when presumably the stallholder has shouted so much that her/his voice has become hoarse. And not only does it sound hoarse, but it also sounds as dried-out as the persimmons which s/he is selling.

It might’ve been tempting to have started this haiku with ‘year-end market’ as the opening line, followed by the cut at that point; however, that would’ve made for a much less enticing haiku, and the poet has worked harder than most haiku poets in English do in order to ensure that the overall poem coheres as a work of art. 

I’ve written many times about how the 4–6–4 syllabic haiku form in English sounds mellifluous on the ear, and particularly when the cut is at the end of the second line, and that is the case here. The reason for that is no doubt because it encourages a rhythmic syllabic structure. Here, the first line consists of two iambs, as, arguably, the third line does too. In the middle line, ‘year-end market’ is either two trochees, two spondees of a combination of both depending on how you say or hear it.

In subject-matter, phrasing and meaning, this haiku is as satisfying as it sounds.

My boys-only grammar school was a microcosm of overwhelmingly white, Establishment England. In a Geography lesson, the deputy headteacher justified Thatcher’s sending of the Task Force to the Falklands with a rant about how his best friend at school had been beaten and starved to death in a Japanese POW camp, without any consciousness that both events were colonialism in action. The irony was compounded by the fact that the only teacher of colour at the school was Japanese. The headteacher refused to allow me to put the University of Ulster as one of my UCCA choices because it wasn’t the school’s type of destination; by hook or by crook I went there anyway. In History, there was next to no teaching of the evils inflicted around the world by British imperialism, let alone its legacy. For History A-level, one of the three modules was ‘the Scramble of Africa’, with the book of that title by Thomas Pakenham, now Lord Longford, as the main text, which at least, but only minimally, shone a little light on some of the atrocities, but the real  focus of the syllabus, and of what was subsequently tested by examination, was how the actions in Africa of Britain, Belgium, France, Germany and other European nations were a precursor to the First World War, and not that they devastated the lives of millions of Africans – and  likewise the First World War had been taught, for O-Level, only in terms of the fighting in France, with no assessment of its impact elsewhere.

My mother’s maternal grandfather had fought in two colonial wars, as a regular Private in the Chin Hills campaign in India, in the 1880s, and as a reservist Colour Sergeant in the Boer War. I’ve written a poem about the latter; in doing so, I kept my revulsion at his participation in that ‘White Man’s War’ simmering below the surface. Harsh though it may be to judge the actions of one’s forebears, in hindsight I regret not bringing it to the fore. As background reading, the only book on the Boer War I could find in the shops was Pakenham’s history of the conflict, published in 1979, drawing on interviews he’d conducted in the 1960s with the last surviving participant soldiers. Glaringly absent were the voices of any of the black Africans, or their relatives, whose lives had been so expendable as to be, apparently, of less value than those of the horses which pulled the Maxim one-pounder guns. When I was young, my father’s father often spoke as if he was the Alf Garnett of Sussex, openly racist in his language and attitudes, which, in my memory at least, my parents didn’t have the nerve to challenge. Yet, when I was 11, my father insisted that I watch the adaptation of Roots and bought me a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book which I found inspirational because of Malcolm’s refusal to be cowed by oppression and, ultimately, his rejection of intolerance of any kind.

The outcome of Thursday’s election has brought all this into sharp focus in my head. Others more qualified to analyse the reasons why 13 million voters voted ‘to get Brexit done’ have stated their belief that, in doing so, many of those voters deliberately or implicitly rejected the values of inclusion and diversity, espoused by Corbyn, Abbott, McDonnell and other progressive politicians, and instead harked back to a time when the white British viewpoint was the only one which was heard; when the only successful people of colour were predominantly entertainers or sportsmen. (Labour, as we know, have only themselves to blame in not having supported electoral reform to a system which would allow every vote to count.) The Politics Live confrontation between Mark Francois and Will Self included Self’s point that whilst not everyone who voted for Brexit was racist or an anti-Semite, every British racist and anti-Semite voted for Brexit. (It then culminated with a famous staring match. It was notable, incidentally, that the first Conservative politician wheeled out on BBC1 on Thursday night to crow about the exit poll was that same Francois, who’d been kept in a cupboard with Rees-Mogg for the duration of the campaign.)

In her Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), Claudia Rankine, citing the execution by the Met of Mark Duggan, threw down a gauntlet to privileged white liberal poets like me to write about the oppression of, and everyday racism, towards people of colour in Britain. That’s a challenge which comes with a degree of difficulty: no white person has the right to appropriate the experience of a person of colour of course, but to me it seemed legitimate to write about it objectively, if not passionately. My poem ‘The Triumph of Sylvester Clarke’, in The Evening Entertainment, was based on a real experience which my father and I witnessed at The Oval in 1980: the monkey-noise chanting of thousands of Yorkshire cricket fans at the great Surrey and West Indies fast bowler, who responded by bowling the most skilfully ferocious spell I’ve ever seen.  The poem also draws on the irony that in order to make ends meet, Clarke felt he had no option but to take part in the West Indian rebel tours of Apartheid South Africa. My feelings about that choice are innately bound up in the fact that my great-grandfather fought in the war which directly engendered Apartheid.

In some recent poems, which I hope will be collected in my next book, I’ve tried to explore further the endemic racism fuelled by the British colonial legacy, most notably the shamefully inadequate facing-up to the impacts, historical and contemporary, of slavery.

Before anyone labels me as one more white liberal being ‘right on’, I just want to add that that surely ought to be the default position of every person in this country: kindness, tolerance and a rejection of hatred are the values we’re born with, and which are taught in primary schools but then get gradually diluted for some by the ‘pluralistic’ discourse of secondary school and the reality of adulthood. Much has changed for the better in this country in terms of a shift towards tolerance; positive discrimination has helped in that, but where are the leaders of colour? In my own workplace, whilst our workforce overall is proportionate, our senior leadership team is almost exclusively white. Several colleagues of colour have shortened their first names to make them sound less ‘foreign’ and easier for white folk to pronounce. Again, I have no wish to appropriate others’ experience, but it is essential to point it out.

As this year nears to a close, any reader could do no better than to read Candice Carty-Williams’s magnificent novel Queenie, a hugely entertaining but also deeply serious portrayal of a young black woman’s experiences in urban England today. It’s a brilliant reminder that in these difficult times, respect for others and valuing and celebrating difference should be foremost among our concerns. That must be the case for poets and other creatives as much as it is for anyone in their everyday lives.

Football Poets is a treasure trove of poetic musings about the beautiful game. I have a poem on the site today – ‘Magic Boots’.

midnight garden
only the snowberries
take on the starlight

What a lovely, atmospheric haiku this is! Phillip Murrell has been writing haiku for many years and this is among his best. Like others which I have written about of late, it features in this year’s Haiku Calendar, from Snapshot Press.

The conflated time and place setting of the first line plunges the reader straight into the scene: a chilly, shivery, cloudless night somewhere in rural England, probably in Kent. For British readers of a certain age, the words ‘midnight garden’ have a resounding echo of Tom’s Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce’s strange and beautiful 1958 children’s novel, in which the title character travels back to Victorian times when the grandfather clock in his aunt and uncle’s house where he is staying strikes thirteen (itself an echo of the unsettling opening of Orwell’s 1984).

The middle line has a fine sonic balance to it, with the ‘o’s working as well as those in Roy Orbison’s ‘Only the Lonely’. Snowberries – the white fruit of Symphoricarpos albus – are an American import, supposedly first introduced into Britain 202 years ago, although it’s only in recent years that I’ve noticed their proliferation. In his seminal Flora Britannica (1996), Richard Mabey says that one colloquial name for them, in Shropshire, is ‘lardy balls’, which sounds like an affectionate insult. Their fruiting season used to be May to September, but with climate change, that has extended into November and beyond, in southern England at least.

But it’s the ambiguity of the verb use in the third line which makes this haiku a winner: ‘take on’ could mean ‘absorb’, as if the starlight is burnishing the whiteness of the berries; but also, perhaps more likely, mean that the berries are challenging/rivalling the brightness of the stars. Either way, the sensation conjured up is one of the macrocosm of the firmament and the microcosm of the bush in a garden mirroring one another and illuminating an otherwise dark, late-autumn night.

A few thoughts on the sounds of and within the poem: I suspect that most English (or Scottish or Welsh) readers would pronounce ‘snowberries’ not as the three-syllable ‘snow-be-reez’ but as the two-syllable ‘snow-breez’, which improves the sound of the haiku on the ear, because ‘starlight’ is, of course, a two-syllable noun also. The ‘ar’ sounds in both ‘garden’ and ‘starlight’ help the overall composition too.