Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Two of the poets whom Cahal Dallat focused on in the week in Carnlough in August were Ciaran Carson and Lucie Brock-Broido, and so I’ve been reading both lately.

I was already familiar with some of Carson’s poetry, though, as noted here before, I’ve read more of his prose than his poetry, but when I was at the Poetry Business HQ two weeks ago I borrowed a book by Carson which I’d not seen before: From Elsewhere (Gallery, 2014) . It’s an unusual book, with an unusual premise: it consists of Carson’s translations of the short, rather dream-like yet precise, gnomic poems of the French poet Jean Follain (1903–1971) with each translation faced with a poem by Carson which responds, sometimes obliquely, in some way to the content or tone of the Follain poem. In his own poems, Carson matches the chiselled detail of the translation; for example, in the way the studied, pent-up masculinity in his ‘Closed Circuit’ responds to that within Follain’s ‘Contours’:

He is the regular whose eyes you avoid
because the only time you did not
yours were met with a blank
still you think he knows
who you might be
[. . .]
who takes his gun apart
and reassembles it
three times a day
every day that passes
loads it
aims it.
(Carson)

From time to time the harness maker
would turn his hand
to barbering armed with razor
everything stayed coiled
within him and about him
his great forked beard [. . .]

(Follain)

No doubt, Carson’s references, as here (presumably), to the ‘Troubles’ and the British Army occupation of Belfast are intended as a mirror of sorts to Follain’s responses, however tangential, to living through the Nazi occupation in his native Normandy and then the Allied pulverising of Caen and Saint-Lô. Both poets’ poems have an attractive freshness born of what seems like spontaneous, associative composition which appears to go with the flow with little cerebral overlay. The appearances in Carson’s poems of the stock images and paraphernalia of the North of Ireland conflict are memorably vivid – ‘the painted kerbstones/ bordering a waste ground/ where the skeleton/ of a child’s perambulator smoulders/ at the heart of a dead bonfire’ (‘The Geography Lesson’). Sometimes, though, they have a degree of repetitiveness which is either a little wearing or a deliberate stroke of genius depending on your viewpoint, e.g. ‘upon a mantelpiece/ a Dresden vase crowded/ with open-mouthed flowers/ trembles about/ to topple/ over’ (‘Reverberation’) is resoundingly echoed by ‘the whole house shuddering/ under the onslaught/ the Dresden milkmaid figurine/ falls from the mantelpiece/ and shatters on the hearth’ (‘Covert’). Occasionally, a line-break appears obtuse to the point of cussedness: surely the break should be after ‘was’ rather than ‘boy’ in ‘As he told it/ when the boy/ he was stumbled’. But these are minor quibbles, as Carson’s translations and his own poems are limpid and often beautiful.

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Brock-Broido, who died last year aged just 61, produced four collections of poetry in her lifetime, from the first three of which Carcanet selected the poems published for a British readership in Soul Keeping Company (2010). They have a formality reminiscent of great American poets like Tate, Lowell, Bishop and Plath, and a worldview full of curiosity about history, fact and language. In a fascinating 1995 interview with Bomb magazine, she described her writing process:

Yes. I listen to the poem. First I hear the provocation and the name, and the trouble, the trouble in mind. But then what I listen to is not what provoked the poem, not what named the poem, not what I originally insisted that the poem was going to be about. The poem has to have its own circulatory system, and I begin again. When I’m “composing” it, I can say anything, no one’s looking. I can be overwrought, underfed, I can be anything. It’s in the editing of it that I allow the poem to tell me what its particular truth will be. Even if that truth is Autobiographically Incorrect.

I’m not going to say any more than that I’ve been enjoying her poems so much that I’ve had to limit myself to one a day. I’m late to this particular party but I’m determined to enjoy it.

I spent the last week in August in Carnlough, on the Antrim Coast, on Anne-Marie Fyfe and Cahal Dallat’s Coffee-house Poetry week, and what a week it was. Anne-Marie’s inspirational exercises had the twenty of us participants drafting poems infused with blueness and on all things cloud-related. Cahal’s workshops on the writing of Sinéad Morrissey, Ciaran Carson, Lucie Brock-Broido and Brigit Pegeen Kelly were enlightening, but with his vast erudition worn lightly and wittily. Our final-night readings were joyful and memorable as only the culmination of a fantastic week can be. Best of all, though, were the readings by Anne-Marie and Cahal of prose and poetry from their upcoming new books, which will be unmissable.

Here’s a bit of frippery I wrote on our trip to see the treasures of the Ulster Museum and its environs:

CINQUAIN FOR THE NURSERYMAN IN THE BELFAST BOTANIC GARDENS PALM HOUSE

Good old
health and safety
prevents him wearing shorts,
because his legs’d get scratched by
cacti.

*

This week I managed to get along to the Red Door Poets for the first time this year, which was belatedly marvellous, then went to John Greening and Roger Garfitt’s readings at the Barbican Library. They read beautifully, from their new collections, respectively The Action and The Silence, to a small but enthusiastic audience. Here they are, afterwards (John on the left).

Over on the Carcanet website there’s a blog post by the wonderful poet Roger Garfitt about the opening poem of The Action, which I’ve been enjoying very much. Last week, I re-read Roger’s superb memoir, The Horseman’s Word too. His writing – whether poetry or prose – is so precise and full of beautiful detail.

I’ll be going to see Roger read, alongside John Greening,  in a couple of weeks’ time – I can’t wait.

rustle of corn leaves—
fitting my son
for a new ball glove

This haiku features among the August selections on this year’s Haiku Calendar, and is one I like very much. Chad Lee Robinson is one of the very best of the younger generation of American haiku poets. His excellent 2015 collection The Deep End of the Sky (Turtle Light Press) and 2012 e-chapbook Rope Marks (Snapshot Press) both conjure the vast space of the prairie of South Dakota, in whose state capital, Pierre, Robinson was born, raised and still lives.

With its sense of timelessness, implying multi-generational tradition, this example fits perfectly with the genre of American and Japanese baseball poems that Cor Van Den Heuvel and Nanae Tamura collected in their seminal 2007 Baseball Haiku anthology, to which Robinson was the youngest contributor. I’ve never watched, let alone played, baseball, but my lifelong obsessions with cricket and football mean that I can easily relate to the scenes in the individual poems of that wonderful book – and, as any sports obsessive will tell you (think Bill Shankly), the sport in question is about more than just the game itself.

I wonder how much Robinson worked on that first line, because the reader (well, this one anyway) would naturally presume that the ‘action’ in the second part of the haiku is taking place indoors, within a sportswear shop of some kind, so the exterior scene of the first line initially seems at odds with that; though maybe baseball gloves are available in general stores and so here the door of the shop is open, allowing the sound of the wind ruffling the endless cornfields to be heard. Perhaps that’s exactly how it happened and the haiku fell into Robinson’s lap, as often they do to experienced haiku poets who are deeply in touch with their senses. (Robinson’s day job as a store-owner influences that reading.)

Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s irrelevant really, because what we have here is a haiku where the disjunction between the two parts is powerful and lovely, and, as I say, evokes the traditions and hugeness of the American Midwest in a beautifully worded way. It’s worth noting that Robinson’s eschewal of a definite article before ‘rustle’ endows the appearance of the word, and the start of the poem, with extra impact. It should also be noted that this haiku’s form is contrary to the orthodox pattern of a three-line haiku, in that it is long/short/long rather than the far more common short/long/short, but the rhymes in the poem, corn/son and leaves/glove, and the alliteration of ‘fitting’ and ‘for’, give the poem a balance which enables Robinson to transcend the limitations of this apparent heterodoxy.

Above all, it’s a touching moment, full of love and pride, between parent and son – between father and son if we assume, and there is no real cause to think otherwise, that the parent and the author are one and the same. It’s made additionally touching by the implicit sense that the father in the poem was in the son’s shoes a generation before, and so on back in time. The overall impression, then, is one of continuity, in a place where agriculture has dominated for several centuries. Robinson’s artistry magically transforms a small-town, Corn Belt ‘Nowheresville’ into a place with immediate resonance for the reader.

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I know it’s still only August, but all of this reminds me that I must pre-order the 2020 Haiku Calendar – I heartily recommend that you do likewise. In its 20 iterations over the years, the calendar has consistently been the best annual English-language haiku anthology bar none (albeit that the poems within it weren’t necessarily written or published in the previous year). For that reason, it’s very much worth buying past years’ calendars too.

the soft splash
of a lap swimmer’s strokes
morning coolness

One of the June selections for this year’s Haiku Calendar, this haiku, by a former Associate Editor of The Heron’s Nest, is exemplary in its mood of serenity. For me, the swimmer’s action has an implicitly metronomic, perhaps hypnotic, quality to it, which contrasts with, and cuts through, the chilliness of what has to be early morning, well before 8am. Due to the inclusion of the word ‘lap’, implying a degree of proficiency and/or dedication, I see the swimmer as one of a handful of regulars in what must be an outdoor pool. The balance of the haiku – with three syllables in the first line, six in the second and four in the third – is nice, and all those instances of the letter ‘s’ make the poem easy on the ear. There’s no flashiness at work here, it’s just a quiet rendering of an everyday scene in straight-talking language, as many of the best haiku are.

‘Michaelmas’ was chosen by Michael Schmidt as one of four poems to represent Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s sadly slim output in his Harvill Book of Twentieth Century Poetry in English, and, since reading Forrest-Thomson’s fantastic Collected Poems, I’ve been wondering why, as it’s a curiously difficult poem among an overall oeuvre renowned for being contrary, albeit not as contrary as I was led to believe it to be.

I confess to having a soft spot for the poem’s title, purely because my birthday falls on Michaelmas, the 29th September. However, it used to be celebrated on the 10th October, so that is the relevant date here, I presume. The poem is quirky, steeped in English history and I suppose one would say Post-Modernist or experimental through its inclusion of Old/Middle English fragments quoted from the OED. It reminds me a little of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns in its seamless movement from the present to the past and back again, and, among contemporary poets, of Steve Ely.

The poem is the opener of Forrest-Thomson’s 1971 collection, Language-Games, which, as the title suggest, is dominated by Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, as principally expounded in Philosophical Investigations. It’s a very playful and clever collection and I think the poem needs to be seen in that context.

The title and the first word of the poem are presumably meant to be read as a run-on. The second and fourth lines are syntactically similar, are comparatively crowded in reflective of the flowers they’re describing and have an internal rhyme – ‘aster’ / ‘masses’ – which works very nicely. It’s notable that the Michaelmas daisies are described as being ‘purplish’ rather than ‘purple’, which, in spite of the ‘-ish’, gives an exact picture.

I like how single words with colons introduce fuller definition, e.g. the first-glance blackbird is actually a ring ouzel, that lovely summer bird especially common in the Peak District; and that the crocus is in fact an autumn crocus, which isn’t actually a crocus at all though it resembles one. That is of itself a Wittgensteinian game of sorts, about how exact we can be with language and to what extent another person can grasp the exactness of what another person is trying to represent with their descriptive language. The three mentions of ‘the harvest moon’ in the poem and the other repetitions, notably of ‘masses of small purplish flowers’ serve to bind the whole together.

I’ve fruitlessly consulted my copy of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and I don’t have a full OED, so I’m none the wiser as to the meaning of the first Old/Middle English fragment beyond that it seems to refer to a nobleman being wounded on Michaelmas in 1123!

The next six lines are laid out like a list, as though they’re summarising the picture which the poet is laying before us. They consist of the words or phrases ending lines above.

The word ‘tide’ is a little more problematic, since, if we take it to be a noun (which surely it is coming after ‘moon’), it conjures either a seashore or a stretch of tidal river, neither of which has previously been implied in the poem. Although it’s obvious that this is a poem of the imagination, perhaps purely an exercise triggered by the title word, ‘tide’ nevertheless takes the poem to a different place, and then free-associates (‘time and tide wait for no man’ and all that), seemingly, to the word ‘time’, possibly in recognition that the etymology of ‘tide’ is an Old English/German division of time. The word’ spring’ is equally difficult as it has multiple meanings; given that it leads to ‘Indian summer’ and that the poem has hitherto been autumnal, we can rule out the seasonal meaning, so maybe it’s meant as a verb collectively conjugated by ‘tide’ and ‘time’. Alternatively, perhaps Michaelmas could prefix each of ‘tide’ and ‘spring’ to make compound nouns, as it does with ‘term’. The definition of ‘Michaelmas term’ – minus its month parameters – is then stated and an example from the OED concerning Edward I is given. Again, there follows a sort of inventory of words or phrases ending lines above, which then shifts into another quotation from the OED, and then segues into a list of ‘cowrtes’ at Cambridge: Nevile’s at Trinity College, and Queens’ College. The poem then ends where it began, with the description of the Michaelmas daisies and ‘the harvest/ moon’.

As a poem mixing up Wittgensteinian theory, the Imagist depiction of natural elements, with ‘found poetry’ from the OED, it is very much of its time. It’s hard to respond to on any kind of emotional level, as it is such a cerebral exercise – Peter Riley has written, “Veronica Forrest-Thomson was very much an academic poet with a programme for poetry which was worked out in her study” , and she appears to have been staunchly opposed to poetry whose ‘meaning’ is crystal clear – yet this poem is an attractive one, and sounds mellifluous on the ear: the repetition of words, phrases and syllables – notably ‘-mas’ / ‘mass’ / ‘maesse’ / ‘-masse’ – has an incantatory, mantra-like impact. The unstated contrast between the simplicity of natural elements and the implicit great financial wealth of historical Establishment England is an interesting one though it’s hard to know whether there is an intentional political agenda on the part of the poet. In fact, there is no overt judgement in the poem, and adjectives are used sparingly and with the kind of exactness used by the Imagists or by lexicographers but queried so brilliantly in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy.

It’s a minor point, but it’s surprising to me that Forrest-Thomson bothered with a full stop at the end of the poem, but then she had a habit of subverting her own experimentation: her witty poem ‘Ducks & Rabbits’ – concerning Wittgenstein’s consideration, in part two of Philosophical Investigations, of a picture which could be viewed either as a duck’s head or a rabbit’s depending on one’s position and perception – was in full end-rhyme throughout. How sad that Forrest-Thomson didn’t live and write longer than she did. As she wrote in ‘Alka-Seltzer Poem’, ‘[. . .] experience/ is an active verb and the end/ of poetry is activity.’

My mum passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning. Here she is in, I think, the late ’Fifties.

 

I was sad to hear today of the passing of Les Murray. In September 2015, Hamish Ironside (pictured with Les below) and I went for dinner and a few pints with Les at the Anglers in Teddington when he was over for a reading tour and was staying, curiously, in the same hotel as the All-Blacks who were over for the Rugby World Cup.

We talked of poetry of course, but also of haiku, in which he was very interested, not least because of his friendship with the American minimalist Gary Hotham. Les spoke, too, of his early days in London in the late ’50s and early ’60s, when he hung out with Peter Porter, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries and Clive James, and also of his more recent friendships with Pascale Petit and other British poets.

The next day at work I kept having to pinch myself that I’d been down the pub with one of the greatest poets of our time.

Of late, my reading seems to have been stuck in an early-Twentieth Century time-warp: Ivor Gurney’s Collected Poems – his post-war war poems are undisputedly great, as well as others concerning his native Gloucestershire, especially during the two years 1920–22 immediately before his confinement in asylums, for the rest of his life; Helen Thomas’s beautiful and desperately sad memoirs of friendship, courtship and marriage to Edward, As it Was and World Without End; Edward’s poetry, a perennial favourite, so full of plein air existentialism before the word had even been coined; and HG Wells’s novels, The History of Mr Polly and Kipps. To an extent, I’ve been led back to such reading-matter by Glyn Maxwell’s incredibly good On Poetry, and his maxim, “You master form, you master time”, and his repeated insistence that line-breaks and stanza-breaks are forms of punctuation as vital as commas, full stops and the rest.

Consequently, my writing has been enriched, I think, by reading more carefully and more slowly; by not galloping through poems but taking more time to look properly at how black type imposes itself upon white space. I find it difficult to write about life today and worry that I’m simply a poet of memoir. Working my socks off in local government at a time of having to do far more with less funding and fewer resources means I get enough of contemporary life for most of my waking hours. Outside work, the impact of political callousness and uncertainty and the hideousness of Brexit inevitably drive me back into memory. But I’m not harking back to any golden age, because it’s obvious to everyone – except to the racists who are increasingly infecting our society again – that one never existed. It begs the question, though, of how one can write about the past without seeming that one is harking back somehow. The answer surely lies in doing so with affection where it is warranted and without any rosy-eyed sentiment when it evidently isn’t.

I’ve also volunteered myself as family archivist: I have boxes of documents, of family tree research undertaken by my paternal grandparents in the Fifties and Sixties, and amazing photo albums going back to late Victorian times. They are a trove of material. Of course, such materials trigger loads of questions which, to my constant sadness, it’s too late to ask.

This time last week, 10 of my fellow Poetry Business Writing School 2017–2019 poets – David Hale, Keith Hutson, Hannah Lowe, Marie Naughton, Stephen Payne, Kathy Pimlott, Emma Simon, David Underdown, Tom Weir and Rod Whitworth – and I were preparing for our end-of-programme celebratory reading in the Jerwood Centre next to Dove Cottage in Grasmere, as the culmination of our residential weekend at Rydal. Unfortunately, our twelfth member Ramona Herdman was unable to take part. in the reading.

Despite all weathers, including snow and hail, we had a sizeable audience, including Wordsworth Trust poet-in-residence and New Networks for Nature steering group member Matt Howard. It was a special occasion and the happiest reading I’ve ever been part of. I can’t speak highly enough of Ann and Peter Sansom, whose guidance, knowledge and wisdom have been a constant source of inspiration for the last two years.

On her website, Kathy Pimlott – whose new Emma Press pamphlet Elastic Glue is a must-read – gives an eloquent account of how and why being a member of the group has been so inspiring. For my part, I couldn’t have wished to have had nicer, more encouraging colleagues. We hope to have some reunion readings in due course.

I’ve enjoyed the programme so much that I’m doing it all over again, in the 2019–2021 cohort, for which I am very grateful and excited!

Lawrence Sail is one of those poets who seems to have been around for years – probably because he has. I wasn’t aware of his poem ‘The Cablecar’ until Ann and Peter Sansom used it as an exemplar in one of their Poetry Business Saturday writing exercises.

It immediately grabbed me as a wonderful poem, by which I mean a poem full of wonders and surprises. The shape and form of it – three chunky stanzas of seven lines each, with irregular syllable-counts per line – proclaims substance and so it proves.

That mellifluous opening pitches the reader straight into a nameless ski resort somewhere in the Alps. How often do poetry tutors enjoin participants to avoid adverbs? Yes, you can over-use them, but sometimes they work brilliantly. Sail’s use of ‘lightly’ in the first line is perfect: positioned mid-line, it’s like a stepping stone between ‘silver’ and ‘valley’. Although the primary meaning is that the cablecar moved with lightness, it might also imply a sense that the ‘silver box’ gleams with sunlight. If one reads the line without ‘lightly’, its absence is marked.

Then that extraordinary metaphor of the second line is sprung: ‘ape-easy’ is daring writing which trusts the reader to follow Sail’s thought. These days, many poets seem either too afraid to use metaphor and instead use simile, or they use metaphors which are so convoluted or absurd that they serve only to baffle or irritate the reader.

In the third line, the reader realises that the narrative persona is within the cablecar and not observing it from afar. There’s a Larkinesque feeling to ‘it had shrunk the town to a diagram’ – reminiscent of that magical line in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’: ‘I thought of London spread out in the sun,/ Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat’ – and indeed to the rest of the first stanza as a whole. There’s a lovely musicality to ‘the leaping river to a sluggish leat of kaolin,/ the fletched forests to points it overrode’. I confess I had to look up the word ‘leat’ – a watercourse leading to a mill – but I’m glad that Sail took the risk of using an uncommon term, the first of three within the poem, as we’ll see. The adjective ‘fletched’ is marvellous – I can see the chevron shapes of the fir trees’ branches, no doubt covered in snow. I don’t quite get ‘to points it overrode’. The last two lines of the stanza introduce a note of scientific curiosity, of the physics which drives the cablecar upwards. They also introduce the addressee – the ‘you’. Who is that? Is it just Sail’s way of trying to put the reader into his shoes?

The second stanza, like the first, opens energetically with a verb and then that perfect use of ‘whisked’. I can’t find the word ‘slurs’ defined as any kind of natural feature but I presume that’s what Sail must mean – like ‘moraine’, the masses of stones left after a glacier. I had to look that word up too, as I couldn’t quite remember it from O-level Geography. And then the poem takes the turn which you somehow expect, of the fear felt when the cablecar stops mid-air. It concentrates its focus on the immediate circumstances, in contrast to the wide lens of the first stanza. The anaphora ‘It had you[r]’ in three successive sentences works brilliantly because it echoes the halting progress of the cablecar. Sail’s use of different senses, his rendering of the various sensations and his alternation between long and short sentences all build vertiginous tension which climaxes with ‘It made you think of falling’. I had to look up ‘seracs’ of course, to find that they are columns or blocks of glacial ice.

Another reason why I like this poem so much is that the three stanzas are all self-contained parts, or movements, of the story that the poem narrates – so the stanza breaks are in the right places and there’s no artificial division into neat stanzas. So the third stanza, like the second did, provides a shift from the stanza which preceded it. The detail is on a wider scale again: ‘the broad-roofed houses decorated with lights’. Most impressively, though, is the very clever way in which Sail, with such sleight of hand, enables the narrative to relate the scene at the top of the cablecar’s route in retrospect, as ‘you’ are ‘lowered back to the spread valley’, because it allows the poem to end with five lines of glorious epiphany. The descriptive phrases Sail uses – ‘the giddy edge/ of snowfields still unprinted, that pure blaze’ and ‘a glimpse/ of the moon’s daytime ghost on solid blue’ – make beautiful, truly poetic lines without seeming forced. Again, I’m reminded of Larkin, specifically his mystical tones in the endings of ‘Here’, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, ‘High Windows’ and ‘The Explosion’. 

school bell . . .
her anorak wings
wheel with the rooks

Jane McBeth

This is a March haiku from The Haiku Calendar, and a charming one, I think. It’s full of life and gorgeous observation, and just the right side of being too sentimental.

The sound combinations are instantly attractive – bell/wheel, -rak/rooks and wings/wheel/with – and help to bind the poem together. The Greenland-Inuit-derived word ‘anorak’, when used in its original meaning of an outdoor jacket rather than as a metonym for an obsessive, is happily anachronistic, as it instantly reminds me of the Seventies, when every kid wore an anorak.

It’s as though there’s a gust of wind which is making the back of the girl’s anorak ride up like wings when she hurries back into school at the ringing of the bell, but McBeth has the sense to let the reader intuit the presence of the wind.

The word ‘wheel’ is often used in combination with rooks, as in David Cobb’s haiku published in Blithe Spirit in 1992 and anthologised in Wing Beats in 2008:

after the fall
seeing the rooks wheel round
behind the poplars

I’m not convinced Cobb’s haiku needed ‘seeing’, and I vaguely remember him saying as much. The half-rhyme of fall/wheel does the same job as McBeth’s bell/wheel, but in a more forced way, since Cobb, as an Englishman, would much more naturally use the word ‘autumn’ than ‘fall’, though the latter is, of course, shorthand for the actual leaf-fall. For that reason, and because of its subtle application of ‘wheel’ to the ‘anorak wings’ rather than the rooks, McBeth’s haiku is arguably more interesting.

Throughout February, the following haiku, by John Stevenson, has been periodically catching my eye on my desk at work, as it’s featured on this year’s Haiku Calendar, from Snapshot Press:

canned peaches
the darkest corner
of the cellar

Verbless haiku or senryu, without any action for the reader to imagine, are often rather cerebral and this one certainly is. It relies, it seems, not on the surface scene (presuming, that is, that the two elements actually make up one scene), but on the associations which the nouns have for the reader.

The first line reminds me of having tinned peaches, with evaporated milk, as pudding after Sunday roasts in the ’70s, and also of the Dylan Thomas short story ‘The Peaches’.

The rest of the haiku conjures up a (literally) very dark place indeed: that trope of horror films which has been rendered more forbidding by the revelations 25 years ago about Fred and Rosemary West, and 11 years ago about the Austrian Josef Fritzl and the terrible things he inflicted on his daughter for 24 years, and of other similar cases in the States and elsewhere.

So how does the reader bring the two elements together? I’m not sure I’ve found an answer to that question. It might just be that the inhabitant of the house stores tins in the cellar and has to stumble about in the dark to find what s/he is looking for. Alternatively, it might be a picture of a survivalist stocking up tinned food in case of the bomb dropping or other disasters, but that seems unlikely somehow.

If it isn’t either of those, then what leap does Stevenson want the reader to make between the two elements and what exactly or approximately is he getting at? For me, it’s not enough simply to say that the reader will make of it whatever they want, otherwise the writer may as well write put any two elements in a random manner and see what lands. I don’t for a moment believe that’s what Stevenson has done here, since he’s consistently been one of the very best haiku poets in English for many years, yet neither do I think that he’s given the reader, or me anyway, quite enough to go on. All the same, as I say, I’ve been drawn to it repeatedly and it can’t only be the mention of the peaches and the Proustian memories they trigger which has intrigued me.

Sometimes, perhaps, it’s enough for a haiku, like many a longer poem, to pique one’s interest without even half-explaining itself.

Although I remember skimming through it years ago, and being generally aware of Richard Murphy and his links with Hughes and Plath (I remember a piece by Murphy, in Poetry Ireland Review 30 years ago or so, about his friendship with them), Roethke, and the next generation, of Heaney, Longley and Mahon, Sailing to an Island isn’t a book I knew well until a couple of years ago when I acquired a copy.

Like many intriguing collections, it has a thematic, geographic unity: set in, and about the peoples of, a particular corner of Connemara, in the West of Ireland – both the ‘poor’ Catholic folk living off the fruits of the sea and the (once) ‘rich’ Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy to which Murphy and his family belonged, so it’s at once both general and personal. It’s book-ended by poems which show the sometimes destructive power of the sea and is threaded with the (then) recent, post-Irish Independence history of that locality.

It’s comprised of several beautifully-controlled long, narrative poems, and some much shorter, but (mostly) equally effective ones which use a pleasing variety of forms. For example, Murphy, like Plath, especially excelled at terza rima.

Murphy tells ‘big’, dramatic, fast-paced – but not too fast-paced – stories in these longer poems, using vigorous, sonorous language, including muscular verbs, and isn’t afraid to rope-in technical terms to do with boats and fishing; in fact he seems to revel in using them but without being showy about it.

The real heart of the book lies in ‘The Cleggan Disaster’, which closes the first of three sections of the book. It’s prefigured by the long-ish title-poem, by reference to ‘the boat that belched its crew/ Dead on the shingle in the Cleggan disaster’, and another long-ish nautical poem, ‘The Last Galway Hooker’. It acts as a counterpoint of sorts to ‘Sailing to an Island’, which relates a disaster averted. (Incidentally, it may be just coincidence, but the tragic events which inspired the poem – spoiler alert: there are drownings and lots of them! – took place in 1927, the year of Murphy’s birth.) Murphy’s re-creation of what happened is vivid, almost epic, from the outset: ‘The hulls hissed and rolled on the sea’s black earth/ In the shadow of stacks close to the island.’ Obviously with a title that tells the reader that all will not end well, the beauty lies in the pacing and power of the story-telling, but at no time does the narrative feel like prose. I think that’s partly because Murphy varies the stanza lengths, and the sentence lengths, so as to let the story dictate the form, and partly because he’s evidently very good at the technical craft of writing poetry. Take this stanza, roughly a third of the way through the poem, whose language is simultaneously descriptive of the events but within a high, though not too high, register, totally apposite to the story:

The men began to pray. The stack-funnelled hail
Crackled in volleys, with blasts on the bows
Where Concannon stood to fend with his body
The slash of seas. Then sickness surged,
And against their will they were gripped with terror.
He told them to bail. When they lost the bailer
They bailed with their boots. Then they cast overboard
Their costly nets and a thousand mackerel.

It’s a gripping, electric, tour de force of a poem. And to the brilliance of the story-telling, Murphy adds a five-stanza shorter-lined epilogue, set ‘years later’, which acts as a coda to the poem’s symphony. It’s good enough to stand as a lovely poem in its own right, and indeed Plath chose it as the winner of a competition she judged in 1962.

Another poem which stands out is ‘The Woman of the House’, a brilliant, affectionate ‘portrait’, in 26 finely turned quatrains, of Murphy’s grandmother; reminiscent of the poems in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in which isolated individuals eke out lives which, despite formerly grand family backgrounds, have long ago become pitiable, futile existences. There is rich detail in the poem, especially concerning the features of the house which are stuck in a time long past (‘Hers were the fruits of a family tree:/ A china clock, the Church’s calendar/ Gardeners polite, governesses plenty,/ And incomes waiting to be married for.’) and regarding his grandmother’s decline into dementia, somehow mirroring the decline of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy itself.

I’d also highlight ‘Epitaph on a Fir-tree’, which is not so much an epitaph on the tree, but on the long-gone days of the Ascendancy and all its wealth, society weddings, etc. It works as a companion piece to both the poems which precede it (‘The Woman of the House’ and ‘Auction’). The conceit of the tree as a witness to all that has gone on and changed is a clever one.

The poems stand in contrast to the image I have of Murphy, from a friend-of-a-friend who knew him, that the shock of seeing him wearing a purple velvet suit was exacerbated by his considerable height.

 

Richard Murphy, Sailing to an Island, Faber, 1963.

In his paean to Claire Everett’s ‘editors’ choice’ haiku in the September 2018 issue of The Heron’s Nest, esteemed American haiku poet John Stevenson makes special reference to Claire’s use of the word ‘skedaddles’ and states that he’s not seen it in a haiku before. It certainly can’t be common, and I can’t definitively claim to be the first person to have used it in a haiku, but my haiku below was published, somewhat incongruously, in the Haiku Society of America 2009 members’ anthology, A Travel-Worn Satchel, and subsequently collected in The Lammas Lands, 2015:

white skies
a hare skedaddles
over Wealden clay

It’s a haiku for which I retain a certain fondness, as much as anything for the memory of the place where it was written, somewhere near Sevenoaks, in deepest Kent, on a rather odd work residential course.

By contrast though, what, for me, makes Claire’s use of ‘skedaddles’ so compelling, and much more effective than mine, isn’t its use per se, but the fact that she uses it transitively, in the sense of ‘chivvies’. I’ve only ever heard it used intransitively, so Claires’s usage is refreshing and, to my eyes and ears, innovative – but I daresay it could just be evidence of the North/South divide.

John interprets the meaning of the word as ‘scatters’, but I see it more in the opposite way, of the sheepdog doing its utmost to round up the lambs. Either way, the word, and its intrinsic onomatopoeia, conjures a dynamic which flows seamlessly and mellifluously from the vigorous fresh-air movement of the opening line. It’s a terrific haiku and I’m glad that John and his fellow editors recognised its beauty.

My Sunday running route for the last few months has changed to one that loops round to Sandown Park and Esher, then up to Hinchley Wood, Long Ditton and back to Thames Ditton. The pleasure of the route lies principally in the fact that it takes in three hills, two of them long enough to provide a healthy dose of challenge to my legs.

The downside, though, is the ostentatious wealth on display around Esher. Strange it is that, so often, the more money people possess, the more they withdraw to the fringes of general society, admiring their gravel drive, their security gates, their apartness, away from the gaze of the hoi polloi. Perhaps that’s why George Harrison, on the retreat from fame, bought a house, ‘Kinfauns’, in Esher, in 1964, and why the Fab Four spent far more time there than at any of the others’ houses, including the first demos of many of the songs that ended up on the White Album.

A few weeks ago, I read perhaps the best book on running I’ve ever read, though that’s not saying much: Footnotes by a University of Kent lecturer in English, Vybarr Cregan-Reid. It’s a tad heavy on the science of running, but it’s a literary and refreshingly personal book in many ways – roping in Hardy, Coleridge, Merleay-Ponty and plenty besides – and inches near to the heart of why running is, or ought to be, part of regular life for those who can manage it. In that respect, it leaves, for example Haruki Murakami’s woefully disappointing What I Talk About When I Talk About Running trailing far behind.

But it’s still not the lyrical, poetic book about running which I yearn to read. Maybe, though, the energy, the exhilaration, the mind–body separation, the sheer existential wonder of running can’t be pinned down in words. I’m hoping that the Poetry Business anthology of poems about running, to be published later this year, will go some way to challenging that supposition. One of the co-editors, Ben Wilkinson, has written some good poems on running (as well as several about football), which feature in his collection Way More Than Luck, including one, ‘Where I Run From’, which takes the title of Murakami’s book as its opening line. It’s an under-explored theme in poetry for sure.

So many of my poems are concerned with the past that I sometimes wonder whether I will ever be able to write well about the present, about contemporary life. But then I say to myself that the past refracts upon the present, and the future, so I needn’t fret.

I do fixate on how the passage of time impacts, on today, on how say the amount of time since I started secondary school, in 1978, is now considerably longer than the period from then back to the end of the Second World War; and how some customs and values, in England/Britain in particular, have changed considerably whilst others have stayed relatively constant despite huge technological advances which would have been virtually unimaginable in the late ’70s, even on Tomorrow’s World. I realise I’m hardly alone in my obsession but when it materialises as narrative poetry it does, perhaps, mark me out as out of step with much contemporary poetry. I don’t worry about that unduly though, as fashions come and go, and I like to think that there will always be some readers who like poetry which principally deals with familial and local history in the Twentieth Century and who can read it at face value and/or refract its matter onto their own experience and times.

The temptation in writing about events which happened some time ago – even a long time ago, maybe even centuries before I was born – is to use the present tense to make the narrative more immediate, more exciting, more now. After all, the present tense in contemporary poetry, or poetry in English at least, does seem, well, omnipresent. Ten years ago or so, I went through a period, when I felt that the present tense was de rigueur, perhaps because of years of writing haiku. I believed that the present tense helps the reader, as it bridges the time gap and thereby makes the particular events and circumstances more tangible.

Take, for example, my sonnet ‘Sofas’, which is partly about the Guildford bombings of 1974: whatever impact the poem might have would, I’m sure, have been diminished if I’d written the sestet or the whole poem in the past tense, because, as is hopefully obvious, I’d intended the power of the poem to be sparked by the difference between the present-day scene in the octave and the historical scene in the sestet.

The other poem of mine in the same issue of The High Window, ‘Good Morning, Mr Gauguin’, written – during one of Pascale Petit’s ‘poetry from art’ courses, at Tate Modern’s magnificent Gauguin exhibition of 2010–2011 – in response to the 1889 painting ‘Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin’, itself an allusion to Gustave Courbet’s 1854 painting, ‘Bonjour Monsieur Courbet’, could have been rendered in the past tense, but the use of the imperative seemed somehow in keeping with both the style of the painting and Gauguin’s character (inasmuch as we can know him from his works and correspondence and from biographical matter about him). Typically, since the poem has been published I’ve revised it into what, I like to believe, is a better poem, but revision of poems is another matter entirely.

Lately, though, I’ve started to wonder whether sticking rigidly to the present tense does historical poems a disservice, as if one is implicitly saying that their contents couldn’t be of any direct relevance to today if they were written in the past tense. In some ways, the historical distance is as valuable and exciting as the relevance for our daily existence today. For me, it’s an interesting problem to grapple with.

Below are the last reviews I wrote in my stint as Reviews Editor (and Co-Editor) for Presence.

Stuart Quine, Sour Pickle
Alba Publishing, PO Box 266, Uxbridge, UB9 5NX, UK;
£12/€14/$16; ISBN 9781910185957; http://www.albapublishing.com

Hamish Ironside, Three Blue Beans in a Blue Bladder
Iron Press, 5 Marden Terrace, Cullercoats, North Shields, NE30 4PD, UK; £6; ISBN 9780995457935; http://www.ironpress.co.uk

I have to declare my interests in reviewing these books – both authors are friends of mine, Quine is also a former Presence colleague, and I was one of three people who read and commented on Ironside’s draft manuscript; but nonetheless these are very good, unmissable books.

Quine is widely recognised as a pioneer and master of the one-line haiku. He has been writing haiku and having them published, mainly in Presence, for well over 20 years, so it may come as a surprise to those who’ve long admired his work that Sour Pickle is his first collection, which is a considerable contrast to the increasingly prevalent tendency of neophyte haiku poets to rush to getting a collection out, often with no filter or sense of how a collection should be edited and cohere. Dedicated to Martin Lucas, the book is divided into the four seasons, starting with spring.

The one-liner as a form gives the haiku poet opportunities which the three-line form doesn’t; it can be used to create ambiguity, by not making explicit where the cuts/breaks should be, thereby lending the haiku multiple interpretations. Quine’s one-liners tend not to do that, however, and it is usually obvious where the reader should mentally insert the breaks, to the point where the reader may wonder why he doesn’t just write them as three-liners, e.g. ‘sushi carousel the blush on the salmon coming round again’ or ‘millstone weir a downy feather slips downstream’. But as with both of these, a case could be made that the form can add another, ‘concrete’ dimension: in the first, the form could be seen as representative of the horizontal nature of the carousel, and in the second it allows the words to gush forth in imitation of the weir.

The form also enables haiku which would look unbalanced if they were set out as three-liners and would really be divided into two parts instead of three, e.g. Quine’s ‘defiant in thin rain the toad on the garden path’ or ‘waiting at the departure gate a discussion of the bardos’, which by any standard are excellent haiku and senryu respectively.

As I’ve noted previously in Presence, Quine has a gift for writing haiku with an air of wabi sabi, such as his echo of William Carlos Williams’s trailblazing Imagist classic ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’: ‘everything depends on this old bucket left out in the rain’. One could argue here, though, that the form doesn’t bring out the best of the haiku; as in Williams’s poem, the words need to unfold more slowly than the one-liner permits, and inserting breaks after ‘depends’ and ‘bucket’ would have naturally allowed that to happen.

I especially like this wabi sabi example too: ‘gone to seed in the coupling yard grey beards of willowherb’. It exemplifies Quine’s talent at spotting and celebrating the small things in life, and rendering them into poems which may use simple language but still sound wonderful on the ear. Furthermore, the reader could additionally interpret the image as a kind of self-portrait by its writer.

Quine also uses the form to write haiku which have a beautiful, musical sense of movement, to the point of being tongue-twisters:

                                the windbell’s streamer wildly spinning March winds

                        along the strandline seaspray and sunshimmer in knotted kelp

In the first of these, ‘March winds’ look as those they are wrongly positioned, i.e. that they should come at the beginning, but Quine’s ordering facilitates a reading worthy of Existential philosophy, that it is only by their impact on physical objects that one becomes aware of the winds. In the second, Quine sets before us an array of natural phenomena concentrated within the visual alliteration of ‘knotted kelp’.

Presence readers have regularly voted Quine’s quietly observational and sometimes more personal, and even self-deprecating, haiku at the top of their ‘best-of-issue’ choices and I won’t set them out here, but readers of this essential collection will come across many old favourites and classics. The prevailing mood of Quine’s haiku is predominantly downbeat and autumnal whatever the season, and occasionally to the point of despair; but that is no bad thing, because what they do so well is set out eternal truths in a clear and frankly marvellous way that so few English-language haiku poets can match:

                                        deep in the hills the ruffled moon silvers the tarn

*

Ironside’s collection is a sequel of sorts to his first collection, Our Sweet Little Time, and, like that book, sets out the best of a calendar year’s worth of haiku, with each month featuring a delightful black-and-white linocut by the artist Mungo McCosh. At only £6, this A6 150-page collection is an attractively designed bargain.

The atmosphere of Ironside’s poems provides a sharp contrast to Quine’s, being more outward-facing and largely concerned with the often comical ups and downs of marriage, family and the general absurdities of middle-aged existence in 21st Century London suburbia. If writing resonant haiku is a difficult art, a case could be made that writing resonant senryu is harder still. Many senryu have an immediate ‘punchline effect and nothing more, especially those which tread well-worn themes such as jealousy of, or schadenfreude at the misfortune of, a neighbour. Explaining how senryu work may well be as pointless an exercise as explaining how jokes work – not that all senryu are comic, of course. It’s a generalisation, but, on average, I contend that senryu tend to be more immediate in ‘meaning’, and less slow-burningly resonant than, haiku. It therefore takes considerable skill to write senryu which defy that tendency by succeeding in having both an instantly graspable ‘a-ha’ appeal and a deeper layer of meaning or suggestion. I would suggest that, among British haiku poets, only the two Davids, Cobb and Jacobs, can compete with Ironside when it comes to writing wry, resonant senryu:

                for good measure                                          anti-war march—
                the cash machine delivers                           we join it for a few steps
                an electric shock                                            to get to the shop

Ironside is particularly good at wittily capturing the loving rivalry between family members, between he and his wife and as the butt of his daughter’s incisive observations, but usually (as with all the best humour) with a hint of an underlying seriousness, e.g. ‘mental health ward— /my wife asks how they’ll know / I’m not a patient’ or ‘sunlit rain— / my daughter figures / how long I’ve got left’. Ironside manages to balance the comedy with the darker side of life in a manner which is perceptive and finely nuanced.

Several of the poems feature Ironside’s day-job as a freelance editor, typesetter and proof-reader, e.g. ‘working weekend— / the Oxford Spelling Dictionary / shouts asshole at me’. Indeed, Ironside’s ability to laugh at himself and point out his own weaknesses is a characteristic he shares with Quine. There the comparison ends, though, because Ironside’s use of language and subject-matter is much more varied, sometimes to the point of nearing the boundaries of the homogenous consensus of what a haiku looks like: ‘the myth of pleasure . . . / Saturday night vomit / in Sunday morning rain’ and ‘a spider snares a wasp / with the overelaboration / of a Bond villain). I’m not sure that the first line of the first of these adds anything to what the reader could have deduced from the rest of the haiku; it almost acts as a metacommentary or maybe as a Hogarthian warning. But no-one could deny that it’s a haiku of sorts. In the second, I like the fact that the poem itself is elaborate, and I don’t think it really matters if it’s a haiku or not because it succeeds as an amusing, if dark, observation. There are several other examples which are more extreme (or ‘experimental’ as the back-cover blurb puts it), but they are almost always intelligible, and they make up a small minority within the overall context of Ironside’s rich and varied collection.

Ironside can also write traditional haiku on classical themes, e.g. the simple but lovely ‘autumn— / an old woman / twirling her pigtails’; overall, though, his trademark reflective humour shines brightest, as in this, which features that trope I mentioned earlier:

                                                                    our nervous cat
                                                                    seems so relaxed
                                                                    in the neighbour’s garden

It seems incredible to me that Wing Beats, the book of haiku about British birds which I co-wrote and edited with John Barlow is now 10 years old. It began as a dual collection between the pair of us, but we opened it up to submissions, so that we could include haiku by most of the best haiku poets in Britain who were writing at the time – such as Pamela Brown, David Cobb, Keith Coleman, Caroline Gourlay, Martin Lucas, George Marsh, Matt Morden, David Platt, Stuart Quine, Helen Robinson, Fred Schofield, Ian Storr and Alison Williams – and the book was unquestionably much richer and more varied because of their contributions.

We were fortunate enough to have the encouragement and endorsement of the writer, broadcaster and TV producer Stephen Moss, who wrote the introduction and then generously included the book among his nature books of the year in The Guardian, and of the great nature writer and Country Diarist Mark Cocker.

On re-reading the book, I reckon that some of the haiku, especially some of my mine, wouldn’t pass cut the mustard were we editing it today, but I’m proud of it still, not least because of its lasting influence on English-language haiku as a counterweight to much of the cryptic, frankly unintelligible stuff which is peddled as ‘good’ haiku in some haiku journals and on social media, particularly Twitter.

John put a huge amount of effort into the book, in terms of both content and design: his 127 poems; the six remarkable, scholarly appendices which constitute the end-matter; the integration of Sean Gray’s beautiful illustrations; and the faultless layout and attention to detail. John is a genius whose devotion to haiku is acknowledged well beyond these shores. It was a true labour of love.

We co-wrote the introduction, but this sentence from it has the Barlovian imprimatur firmly upon it, “All the haiku in Wing Beats concern ‘real life’ experiences, ensuring the book has genuine value as a record of wild birds in Great Britain at the beginning of the twenty-first century”. I can’t argue with that.

Wing Beats is still available on the Snapshot Press website, here.

I’m delighted to have a poem in this new anthology, edited by Matt Barnard and published by The Onslaught Press, which marks 70 years since the foundation of the National Health Service by Attlee’s government. My poem, ‘On Muybridge Ward’, is a companion piece to the poems about my dad in The Evening Entertainment, so it has an emotional importance for me.

The anthology celebrates the fantastic efforts of the NHS workforce, despite the Government’s privatisation agenda, by people like my wife, Lyn, who’s worked as an NHS nurse since the ’90s. My mother’s father, Gil Bird, was a nurse at St Thomas’s for 33 years, the last 13 after the inception of the NHS.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the book’s launch at Aldeburgh last night, but I hope to read at the London launch in the New Year.

Proceeds from the anthology go to the NHS Charities Together and it contains some wonderful poems by stellar poets, so it would make a perfect Christmas present.