Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Below are my reviews of three haiku books in Presence #59.

*

Ghost Moon, Mark Gilfillan
Alba Publishing, PO Box 266, Uxbridge, UB9 5NX, UK; €14/£12/ US$15,
ISBN 978-1-910185-68-1.

On the Edge, Tim Gardiner
Brambleby Books, 15 Lyngford Square, Taunton, TA2 7ES, UK, £6.99,
ISBN 978-1-908241-53-5.

naad anunaad, eds. Kala Ramesh, Sanjuktaa Asopa and Shloka Shankar
Vishwakarma Publications, 283 Budhwar Peth, Near City Post, Pune, 411002, India; ₹340,
ISBN 978-93-85665-33-2.

Ghost Moon consists of 99 haiku, which seem to have been collated without any attempt to put them into a logical sequence or to weed out poems which have little or nothing to recommend them. The lack of thematic unity makes for a rollercoaster ride of subject-matter – just within the first 10 pages, we’re taken from very English scenes, involving conkers, slippers and an honesty-box, all the way to Uluru and Louisiana. That could, if one were feeling charitable, conversely be considered a virtue, but, alas, there is an overall lack of quality.

For example, Gilfillan has a predilection for anthropomorphic, military metaphors: ‘a squadron of geese / fly over / winter’s victory’, ‘by the cold stream / a heron / stands guard’, ‘dandelion spores / silent paratroopers / hanging on the breeze’ and ‘from the train window / pylon platoons / regroup’. Surely it’s of much more lasting value to write haiku which describe natural and man-made objects on their own terms, i.e. it’s almost always best just to “say what you see”, as Roy Walker used to implore on Catchphrase, though ideally in an original way, rather than to say what you think or, worse still, over-think. To his credit, Gilfillan occasionally does try to do that, e.g. in ‘branch to branch / releasing sudden snowfalls / these sharp-eyed rooks’, but here the well-caught immediacy of the moment is somewhat spoiled by the superfluity of ‘sudden’ since the word ‘releasing’ implies a sudden movement. On occasion, though, he happily delivers the goods:

log scattered boats
the slow sweep
of the river                                                         

wooden bridge
a koi carp’s slow rise
to kiss a cloud

In both these, Gilfillan’s clear focus is on what he perceives, without a layer of cerebral commentary. The phrase ‘log scattered boats’, though it would be improved by a hyphen between ‘log’ and ‘scattered’, draws the reader in because it’s not run-of-the-mill wording and it shows an aspect of the world in a fresh, simple and therefore effective manner. One could argue that the haiku has room for an adjective before ‘river’, but that might just over-egg it, so the restraint, intentional or not, is, on balance, probably right. In the other haiku, I’m not sure if the phrasing is entirely original given the preponderance of ‘reflection-in-water’ haiku (not that I’m implying any plagiarism), but it’s a beautifully poised poem which reads well and sounds lovely, with the double alliteration. Unfortunately, the excellence of this haiku is somewhat undone by the inclusion in the book of a much poorer one which repeats its key verb use: ‘rising trout / kiss the surface / ………looks like rain’. 

Ghost Moon includes more than a few poems which are over-reliant on puns (‘The British Library / this silence / speaks volumes’), or attempts at ‘irony’ (the wretched ‘health and safety / the execution chamber’s / sterilized needle’); include more anthropomorphism (‘harbour dancing / one hundred / white sails’) or unnecessary meta-commentary of sorts (‘outpatients / we’re still waiting / batteries running low’); or even, in one instance, coin a conspicuous archaism (‘standing to attention / afront the war memorial / a tulip parade’). But Gilfillan can – and does – write nice haiku, so I’ll end with one which I really like (albeit that the impact of the mild but effective pathetic fallacy of ‘curious’ is diminished by also being ascribed to a dog elsewhere in the book): ‘slowly rising / behind the terrace / a curious moon’.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep on saying it: publishing a collection of haiku, or any poems, too soon in a writing career does no-one any favours, least of all the writer concerned. There is, of course, a certain amount of bravery to be admired on the part of anyone who puts their work out into the world; however, it is always advisable first to reflect objectively and fully on that work, and to consider how it compares with that of writers whose collections have been published to critical acclaim.

*

On the Edge is subtitled as ‘a collection of short poems inspired by the landscape of the Peak District’ and consists of 97 haiku, grouped by theme, e.g. ‘Vales and Dales’, and then by location, e.g. ‘Dovedale’, with some accompanying black and white photographs taken by Gardiner. Some of the haiku are prefixed by straightforward descriptions of the locations and natural features, such as Mam Tor and Blue John Cavern. As such, the book is clearly aimed as much at visitors to the Peak District as it is at haiku aficionados. Since he’s an ecologist with a particular interest in grasshoppers and crickets, Gardiner’s eye is often scientifically forensic yet his poetry aims at simplicity of expression:

blind summit
the autumn mist
goes on and on

a fresh flush
of old man’s beard
the path narrows

These aren’t earth-shatteringly great haiku, but they have a pleasing understatement about them. Collins English Dictionary defines a ‘blind summit’ as “a point on a road where a vehicle approaching the top of a hill or incline cannot see vehicles approaching up the other side of the hill”, but in analysing this haiku, maybe one should substitute ‘walkers’ for ‘vehicles’; either way, all those ems seem somehow reflective of the surrounding mist and the poem hints at the inherent danger of the situation. The second haiku again uses the sounds of the words well: ‘a fresh flush’ is a delightful way of saying ‘a new bloom / flowering / efflorescence’. The specificity in the second line could refer to one of several plants (and a lichen), all of which have a whiteness that gives them their common name. The third line is, at first glance, rather throwaway; however, again, it may be hinting at the risks of clambering around the edges of the Peaks, to which I can readily testify.

The book would have benefited from the omission of a number of haiku which are merely descriptive (e.g. ‘laughing lovers / walk hand in hand / several paces ahead’ or ‘redundant water trough full of ferns’), and one could be for forgiven for not knowing whether the wording under some of the photographs is meant to be a haiku or a caption. Writing repeatedly about place or on a theme inevitably brings a tendency to straightforward depiction, and consequently the weaker haiku in On the Edge are perhaps more tolerable and excusable in such a context than, as is the case with Mark Gilfillan’s book, if they are more varied. Like Gilfillan’s, some of Gardiner’s fall into the trap of meta-commentary, e.g. how the third lines unnecessarily summarise or comment upon the first two lines in ‘dog wallowing / in cotton grass / happiness again’ and in ‘crimson petals / adorn the well dressing / old habits die hard’ (pun apparently intended), or project human characteristics onto nature (‘quiet clough / a lonely peregrine / hovers over me’). On the whole, though, the haiku convey the Peaks’ mystery and beauty, both macroscopic and microscopic, with more than a strong dose of yūgen:

rutting season
from the old coppice
a stag’s silence

dung fly
from wiry rushes
a lapwing calls

In the first of these, the two ‘-ce’ sounds at the ends of the second and third lines combine superbly to make a happy twist where the reader might, instead, have expected a bellowing. The precision of the second haiku is admirable and provides a fine example of deft use of an adjective.

The photographs fit very neatly with the prevailing, slightly melancholic moods of the haiku, and the overall book is very nicely produced by Brambleby Books, a small, generalist press.

*

Described as ‘an anthology of contemporary world haiku’ and ‘the first international haiku anthology to come from India’, naad anunaad serves its immediate aim of presenting contemporary haiku – 746 of them, by 231 poets from India and 25 other countries – to a readership (in India and beyond) unfamiliar, or largely so, with the form. Most of the poets, presented in alphabetical order by their forename, are well-known in the Anglophone haiku world, though the selections per poets are generally too small, mostly two or three per poet, to gain a real sense of their distinctiveness. For that reason, the anthology leans towards homogeneity and tantalises the reader with titbits. That a few poets – the likes of Jim Kacian, John Stevenson, Marlene Mountain and Kala Ramesh herself – are afforded a maximum selection of 12 (with the other two editors having eight each, which feels undeservedly high) only highlights the unjust fact that other notables – such as John Barlow, David Cobb, Cor van den Heuvel, Ferris Gilli, Lee Gurga, Martin Lucas and Lenard D. Moore – are afforded only a third or a quarter of that number, and others, like Tito and Billie Wilson, are each unsatisfactorily represented by just a token one. On the plus side, it’s good to see an anthology with a healthy gender balance, which no doubt wouldn’t have been the case had the three editors been men.

It’s interesting, though, to see so many – 81 – Indian poets represented, plus one from Bangladesh, most of whom might otherwise not get a look-in. Their best contributions reflect the geographical, socioeconomic, religious and other diversity within that great country, e.g. ‘temple tank— / near the stone bull / a real bull’ (Ajaya Mahala), ‘confused drunk . . . / not knowing when to zig / and when to zag’ (Gautam Nadkarni), ‘clear sky — / the vendor sells clouds / of cotton candy’ (Geethanjali Rajan), ‘drop by drop / it becomes a river — / sound of rain’ (Harleen Kaur Sona), and plenty of others besides.

As with any anthology, there are notable absences who spring readily to mind: from these shores, Frances Angela, Annie Bachini, Simon Chard, Keith Coleman, Caroline Gourlay, Matt Morden, Thomas Powell, Stuart Quine, Fred Schofield, Alison Williams and the late Ken Jones and Bill Wyatt are all at least as eminent as most of the 16 UK-based poets who are included; from the USA, Jack Barry, Mike Dillon, Garry Gay, Burnell Lippy, John Martone, Marian Olson, Wally Swist and Hilary Tann are all missing; etc., etc. Maybe some of these poets were invited but declined to participate. Whatever the reasons, these omissions are unfortunate, like the imbalance in the numbers of haiku per poets who are included, because readers who don’t know any better will presume that such an anthology as this provides the best work of the very best contemporary haiku poets. I don’t wish for a moment to trivialise the difficulties involved in putting together such an ambitiously wide-ranging anthology, but there’s an inherent flaw in trying to survey a field without first acquainting oneself with it thoroughly.

It closes with 33 passable haiku by children and young people, which rather undermines the point of the anthology, i.e. that haiku “resonate”, as the back-cover blurb puts it, because it shows that writing formulaic haiku to a decent level doesn’t even necessitate being an adult. But, crucially, becoming a consistently good haiku poet requires originality of perception and expression and a certain amount of flair born of experience and intense practice, i.e. that can’t be achieved overnight or even after just a year or two.

This book does have some good stuff in it, including some old favourites; ultimately, though, like most anthologies, it tries to please too many audiences and in so doing is a bit of mish-mash. That could, though, be perceived as a virtue, since its selections are somewhat eccentric.

One of the books I’ve been dipping into of an evening is John Burnett’s Useful Toil, his 1974 compendium of pieces from ‘autobiographies of working people from the 1820s to the 1920s’ and it’s served to remind me how lucky I am to have been born and raised where and when I was, with privileges that I’ve too often taken for granted, rather than working all hours for a pittance, or worse. It’s also become abundantly clear to me that those, like my grandmother, who went straight from their rudimentary schooling into domestic service were regarded as the lowest of the low; it was always the last resort, it seems, however much of a gloss anyone might put on it. Clearly, it depended on whom they worked for: my mother insists that my grandmother’s employer, the Dean of Westminster Abbey, was a kindly soul. It seems absurd that such servitude still exists in this day and age.

Yesterday, I went to see the Courtauld’s fantastic exhibition of Soutine’s 1920s portraits of cooks, waiters and bellboys at Parisian hotels and clubs. Seen together, the pictures transmit the warmth of feeling and empathy of an artist who knew first-hand how hard the ‘lower classes’ worked to get by. Later, having walked down the Strand to the National to get a fix of the Rembrandts, I exited from the back, and as Orange Street curved round to the Charing Cross Road, I saw a young chef vaping.

All of that has somehow conflated into this semi-ekphrastic poem:

PASTRY BOY

the young patissier    uses his breaks
to mango vape    beside the fire escape

he stands off-centre    lop-sided    feet splayed
left hand clutching    the bulging of his waist

his right elbow leans    for pleasure not weight
upon air    a leer on his palsied face

I can’t help but pose    exactly the same
unconsciously perhaps    my off-kilter way

It’s been a year of poetry I’ll never forget: the joy of seeing my collection published and launched, several readings and the collegiality of working with some tremendous poets on the Poetry Business Writing School programme. More than that, though, just the feeling of getting somewhere, further developing my ‘voice’ and writing and revising poems far more regularly than ever before. And besides, Lyn’s and my marvellous wedding day in June. 

Beyond that, though, lots of wonderful reading, highlights being: Marion McCready’s Madame Ecosse, Clare Pollard’s Incarnation, Mick Imlah’s The Lost Leader, George Herbert’s Collected and Music at Midnight, John Drury’s excellent biographical study of Herbert, Eavan Boland, Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lord and Commons, Anne-Marie Fyfe’s House of Small Absences, Selecteds of Hardy and Lovelace, Emma Simon’s Dragonish, discovering Ciaran Carson’s poetry and prose and wondering why I’d not done so before, the brilliant long lines of C.K. Williams, and so much else . . . In addition, I’ve enjoyed reviewing excellent books by Elaine Gaston and Kathy Pimlott on this blog plus many haiku books, of variable quality, for Presence.

I was very sad to hear of Sarah Maguire’s passing. I never had the opportunity to meet or correspond with her, but her poems were my main inspiration for writing 20 years ago. Her body of work is a triumph of quality over quantity and serves as a reminder to polish poems properly before they are published, rather than seek to be ‘out there’ perpetually. This interview with her shines with her clarity and erudition: “I feel curious about the world and want to experience as much of it as possible.”  She remains an inspiration to me and a paragon of everything I want to be as a poet.

This Thursday to Saturday saw the ninth annual New Networks for Nature symposium, and the sixth to be held at the Arts Centre in Stamford, Lincolnshire. I went, as is customary, with my fellow haiku poets John Barlow and Simon Chard. I’ve been to all of the previous symposia except last year’s and been privileged to perform at two of them – alongside John, and then with Martin Lucas too – but mainly I go to listen, to be informed and come away knowing that there are some incredible things to raise awareness of nature and its perilous state.

This year’s symposium felt the most relaxed one yet. The gallery at the Arts Centre was hung with the marvellous exhibition of Carry Akroyd’s lithographs and linocuts which incorporate and respond to poems by John Clare, who knew Stamford well. Unfortunately, thanks to work, I missed the opening event on Thursday evening, an apparently lively discussion between splendid Patrick Barkham and Tim Smit, the founder of the Eden Project. But I was up and at ’em on Friday to see the day kicked off with a fabulous session in which Doug Allan, Helen Scales and ever-wonderful Philip Hoare gave us three different views of the oceans, highlighting, respectively, the depletion of the ice mass which forms the ‘terra firma’ of the Arctic, the travails of the humphead (or Napoleon) wrasse, and close encounters with a variety of cetaceans, including sperm whales and orcas. All three are natural, engaging performers who are passionate about their interests.

The annual debate, this time between two dairy farmers (Micky Astor and Robert Craig) and Davy McCracken, Professor of Agricultural Ecology, was, disappointingly, more of a general agreement than a debate and certainly didn’t match the ferocious and intellectually thrilling duel between George Monbiot and Tony Juniper in 2015.

My highlight of Friday afternoon was the showing of two short films by Emily Richardson, including one, entitled Cobra Mist, filmed among the eerie shingle of Orford Ness, accompanied by a tremendous pounding industrial soundscape by Benedict Drew.

Saturday’s programme was as richly varied and surprising as Friday’s, and started with the entertaining performance by members of Stamford Arts Centre resident Shoestring Theatre troupe of an extract from a play by Steve Waters, who introduced the piece and was very eloquent on the issue of how to produce drama addressing ‘environmental issues’ without being didactic and/or dull.

What of poetry in all this, I hear you ask? There was some actual poetry – Katrina Porteous reciting, for the fourth time at New Networks, a few of her Northumbria poems, and in Derek Niemann’s reading of his poetic prose – but there was arguably more, and better, poetry to be had in some of the presentations and film, including Jack Perks’s amazing footage of grayling sex (as you do), and musical performance from Mike Edwards on Didgeridoo and Sam Lee singing folk songs. And I had a good chat with Matt Howard, my Eyewear stablemate, whose 2015 pamphlet The Organ Box is excellent.

In all, it was great fun, as it invariably is, and no doubt we’ll return for the 10^th symposium next year.

There was a time when I subscribed to Francis Bacon’s credo, as related in his fascinating interviews with David Sylvester, that every work of art should have some imperfection, either intrinsic or a deliberate fouling, otherwise one would have reached a state of perfection and the game would be up. I don’t believe that notion in the slightest anymore.

As a poet, I am absolutely clear in my belief that any poem I write should be as good as I can make it; that I must query every word, phrase, syntactical unit and item of punctuation I use and then edit accordingly and thoroughly. To do any less than that would, I feel, be an abdication of my responsibility. What responsibility do I mean? Well, let’s face it: inflicting any form of creative writing – whether published or self-published – upon the world implies and demands a degree of arrogance in the implicit presumption that someone else will be interested enough to read and engage with it, so that de facto carries with it a responsibility to the reader. That responsibility deepens over time as one’s writing improves, to the point where when then has to collect the writings into a whole, whether as a collection of poems, short stories or what-have-you.

All that (and what follows) might sound as though I’m stating the bleedin’ obvious, but I’m constantly amazed by the fact that so many haiku submissions I receive for Presence, and most of the books of haiku and related forms which are sent to me for review, are poorly edited. The writer has to be their own first and most important editor, and that’s especially true for any haiku poet who may be inclined to seek to record the moment accurately at the expense of the poetry of what they are writing. For some haiku poets, the often-quoted dictum of Allen Ginsberg, of ‘first thought, best thought’ excuses any accountability on their part, or that of the publisher, to take a proper look at the work they’re churning out. In other words, they believe that any attempt at revising the wording will kill off the sense of spontaneity, of being in ‘the moment’, which their haiku is attempting to convey.

It’s true that sometimes a haiku can arrive fully-formed as the distillation of ‘the haiku moment’ to the extent that that initial draft can’t be improved by editing; statistically, though, those circumstances are rare. It is imperative to remember that the immediacy and freshness of a poem for the readers derives not from whether it fully depicts the writer’s experience, since they cannot know what that was unless they too were present, but from the power generated by the right words working together in partnership to create a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts and which is expressed in the best aural and visual form. It follows, then, that strict adherence to the exactness of the original ‘a-ha’ moment encourages laziness and a lack of willingness to reflect fully on the poetic merit of the writing and whether it fulfils Coleridge’s test of ‘the best words in their best order’.

Not though that I’m advocating the opposite extreme either, of writing haiku which have no experiential basis whatsoever: for me, ‘desk’ haiku are an absurd waste of space. When John Barlow and I invited submissions for Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku 10 years ago, we were dismayed to receive, from a well-known British Haiku Society member of the time, a ludicrous haiku about hummingbirds which was patently, and rather comically, falsified.

I’ve written before of my belief that it’s ridiculously easy for poets to get their haiku published in specialist haiku journals. In my experience, most haiku journal editors, being by and large a kindly bunch of people, set the bar for acceptance much too low – often by accepting at least one haiku from each submission regardless of quality in order to encourage beginners, when politely making editorial suggestions and guiding them towards best practice instead would be much more beneficial for everyone concerned. One wouldn’t expect someone picking up a violin for the first time to be able to knock out a concerto. As well as not benefitting the overall readership of the journal, such a low threshold negates the need for apprentice poets to work hard at learning their craft and to build the critical resilience required to improve their self-editing ability and then their poetic output. Surely if Malcolm Gladwell’s  rule that it takes up to 10,000 hours of practice to achieve greatness is anywhere near correct, then that applies to writing haiku as much as it does to any creative activity. 

By contrast, the ‘mainstream’ poetry world – or at least my involvement with and within it, which is almost exclusively limited to the UK – is much more demanding and rightly so. Journal editors are more likely to undertake their duties conscientiously by rejecting work which they feel isn’t yet word-perfect and isn’t overall isn’t as good as it can be. To get to a level where her or his poems are more likely than not to be published by reputable poetry journals, a poet has to learn to become resilient and face each rejection with a determined and forensic re-examination of the rejected poem(s), and to read the work of other poets, both canonical and contemporary, deeply and widely in order to provide a contrast and comparison. Of course, there will be occasions where the poet may feel that the editor has ‘got it wrong’ or just has different personal tastes, but arrogantly believing that one is always right and the editor is wrong can only ever leave a poet stumbling in the dark.

In the preparation of my soon-to-be-published poetry collection, I’ve recently undergone a rigorous editing process at the hands of the Eyewear Publishing team and it has been one of the most creatively rewarding experiences of my poetry life. I entered it with enough self-belief that my collection was well-honed, over a very long time, and that every poem, whether previously published or not, had enough about it to be included (though two poems subsequently fell by the wayside for particular reasons), but also in the spirit that Eyewear, as a consistently excellent independent poetry publisher, know what they’re doing. Naturally, I felt a bit daunted and exposed by the editing process, but that was entirely as it should be. After all, readers of the eventual book will query my word-choices and some will query every comma and semi-colon, so it is incumbent upon me as the writer and upon Eyewear as the publisher to leave nothing to chance and instead shape all the poems, and the way they gel as a whole, into the best state possible.

In the event, although the wording and punctuation of many poems were rightly and understandably queried, few actually needed any substantial amendments, and we reached a consensus fairly painlessly. The sequencing of the poems was helpfully altered as a result, though, and the book now contains 62 poems in three sections, which I think work well in their range of themes, subject-matter and emotion, and in their mixture of contemporary and historical times. Obviously, it remains to be seen whether readers will agree.

 

It’s a strange and shameful thing to me that until fairly recently I’d read none of Ciaran Carson’s poetry collections, though one rarely stumbles upon his poetry in bookshops in England, either as new or (especially) in second-hand or charity bookshops (no doubt his brilliance makes the owners of his books loth to part with them). The reason why that’s odd isn’t just because I spent six of my formative years in County Antrim, but because when I’m reading him I get the feeling that I’ve been waiting all my life to read him, and almost as if the subject-matter is so close to my own concerns that I know what’s coming next, to the extent that his writing is a distillation of my own thoughts. That feeling is amplified even more in Carson’s prose works, or at least the two of which I’ve read: his utterly wonderful 2009 novel, The Pen Friend, which I read at a pivotal point in my life, in the summer of 2014, and this, another book of genius, The Star Factory, from 1997.

It’s written in such remarkably mellifluous English that it’s hard to credit that English wasn’t Carson’s first language, and contains a vast, agreeable vocabulary encompassing words like ‘melismatic’, ‘avoirdupois’, ‘Augean’ and the like. Ostensibly, it’s part-memoir and part-exploration of Belfast, the city Carson knows so well, and how it has changed over time, but such a synopsis doesn’t begin to do it justice. One might consider that The Star Factory could be classified as a ‘psychogeographical’ work, in the manner of Iain Sinclair (with whom, incidentally, I had a conversation, at the Tate symposium on WG Sebald in 2007, about the Metropolitan Police helicopters flying from High Beach, in Epping Forest, whence John Clare escaped all the way home to Northamptonshire on foot in 1841, to the skies over Walthamstow), but it’s much less mannered and knowing than the writings of Sinclair; and it’s crammed full of a rich accumulation of knowledge and a love of storytelling, handed down from his father, somewhat in the manner of Sebald’s four great ‘novels’, particularly The Rings of Saturn, or Borges’s books, though this is more overtly a memoir than fiction, despite a scattering of dreams and excerpts from other people’s books. It was written and published, like Sebald’s, just before the internet changed knowledge – or access to it at any rate – forever, at a point in time when the ‘word-processor’ was replacing the typewriter. I remember well in my first proper job, with Kingston Council, in 1992, sharing one word-processor between a team of 13 of us, but how preferable it was to fight to gain access to that primitive machine than to have to essay a trip to speak to the ladies of the Typing Pool, perhaps the worst kind of nightmare for a shy-ish young man to endure.

I visited and stayed in Belfast many times in the late ’80s, including most of the summer of ’86 in the area of East Belfast celebrated on Astral Weeks and 1985’s No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, featuring the lovely oboe of Kate St John, who had, a year or two before, also greatly helped to render beautiful Julian Cope’s second solo album. Belfast felt just the right size for a city – a feeling which I’ve since had in Sheffield too – and, though I was nearly always acutely conscious that being English in some parts of Belfast was considerably more dangerous than it was in Portrush, I liked it very much. I’ve not been there since 1991, when my then girlfriend and I visited a friend of ours briefly being held on remand in Crumlin Road gaol, but reading The Star Factory has triggered so many memories of places I went and hadn’t thought about for years, most notably the old Smithfield Market second-hand book dealers and the Corn Market, where I remember acquiring very ’80s blond highlights and an equally dodgy Top Man suit. In my memory, the Smithfield books may have conflated with the small bookshop at Coleraine station owned and run by an affable, brown-corduroy-jacket-and-cardigan-wearing chap called Liam, whose mass of frizzy hair made him look like he spent an hour with his hands around Van de Graaf generator every morning. From Liam I bought many a Pan edition of the short stories of John O’Hara, who was long out of fashion even then, and a first British edition of On the Road which I stupidly lent to one of my university housemates and never got back.

But I digress. Among the charming childhood memories which Carson brings to the surface and the etymology and nuances of Irish words, phrases and names (including Belfast itself), The Star Factory contains the likely suspects – the Titanic (about which my dad had pretty much every book ever written, for some reason only known to him), the marvellous Odd Man Out (the novel as well as the film, featuring the curious Oirish accent of James Mason, who hailed from Huddersfield and was schooled at Marlborough College, where he was in the year below MacNeice), Gallahers’ cigarette factory, linen mills, Milltown Cemetery, The Crown, the Europa, the often invisible divide between ‘Catholic’ areas and ‘Protestant’ ones, the oddity of being a Catholic with the surname Carson, etc., – but also many beautiful lyrical passages, concerning more obscure matters, including Carson’s fondness for bridges (who doesn’t like a nice bridge?), and, long before they became in vogue, murmurations of starlings:

Coordinated, countless sentences of starlings flit and sway in baroque paragraphs across the darkening sky, as they compose exploded founts of type. It is coming up to the time of the year when the clocks go back. An autumn chill is in the air, and shadows lengthen in the inky Lagan. The multitudes come home to roost in serried nooks and crannies, under eaves, on pediments and capitals, stilled and castellated on the tops of ornamental porticos, cornices and window-sills, in sooty alcoves and gazebo turrets, lining the balustraded parapets, perched on the spokes of cartwheel windows and weighing down the hands of the Albert Memorial Clock. (p.237)

I’ve also lately been reading two of Carson’s poetry collections The Irish for No and First Language and been repeatedly struck at how one would be hard-pressed at times to distinguish using the ear (and not the eye) his poetry from his prose, and to delineate where one ends and the other begins – though not because his poetry is prosaic, but because his natural inclination is to tell stories, much in the way that John Berger’s was. Interestingly, Carson’s usage of the phrase ‘exploded founts of type’ in the passage above is a repeat of the wording in perhaps his best-known poem, ‘Belfast Confetti’, published in The Irish for No three years before The Star Factory appeared: ‘Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks, / Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion / Itself – an asterisk on the map.’ Whilst writers are perfectly at liberty to repeat themselves, one wonders if the echo here is deliberate or not. Although I’ve been kicking myself for not properly having begun to read Carson’s writings before 2014, I suspect that sometimes you have to be a certain age to appreciate fully the harmonious admixture of content and style of a truly wonderful writer. The joy for me is that I have so many more of his books to track down and read. Carson will be 70 next year and I hope he receives the festschrift that he’s due.

Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory, Granta, 1997.

 

Perhaps it was the post-heatwave constant cloud-cover and high humidity, but June rather limped towards July with its tail between its legs. And that was after it started so brightly. I got married on the 3rd, which was utterly wonderful; then we honeymooned in Italy, which was marvellous too, so I shouldn’t have anything to complain about, I know. I’ve never found the summer very conducive to writing, though: reading, yes; writing, no. But since I was at the second Poetry Business Writing School day in Sheffield last Saturday, I’ve got to get on with it: we’ve been tasked with a long list of poems to write, including attempting a translation, and poets to look at in our new email pairs. I’ve written a ‘list poem’, comprised of butterflies of Vermont, and I’m looking forward to cracking on with the rest. Hopefully then, there will be a cure for the midsummertime blues.

On Monday, I was one of about 50 or 60 readers at the last Coffee-House Poetry evening before the autumn. The poems were meant to be themed around anything to do with planets, space, the sun, the moon, etc. My poem was slightly off-topic but that’s me all over. The beauty of evenings like those is the sheer variety of poems and voices, who, on this occasion, included my fellow Red Door Poet Gillie Robic and two excellent poets who were members of the Twickenham Stanza when I was belatedly part of the group, the ever-droll Paul McLoughlin and Rosemary Norman. I don’t think I read especially well myself, but it was very enjoyable all the same and I’m grateful to Anne-Marie Fyfe for having invited me.

Last week, I went to the Eyewear Publishing summer launch at the London Review of Books Shop and saw/heard six books launched, including exciting new poetry collections by Shelley Roche-Jacques and Matthew Stewart. As ever with Eyewear events, Todd Swift made the occasion a very jolly affair despite it being about 34 degrees outside. The next Eyewear launch there, on 11th October, will include my collection, which for me will be the culmination of so many years’ effort that I can’t begin to describe how thrilled I will be.

My current poetry reading-matter includes selections by Elizabeth Bishop and Gwen Harwood for the Writing School, Ciaran Carson, Adonis, and the new issue of Poetry Review. That’s plenty to be going on with.

In ‘North Wind: Portrush’, a poem written whilst he was writer-in-residence at the University of Ulster in Coleraine (UUC) in the early ’80s, Derek Mahon memorably took the existential measure of the North Antrim seaboard:

I shall never forget the wind
On this benighted coast.
It works itself into the mind
Like the high keen of a lost
Lear-spirit in agony
Condemned for eternity
To wander cliff and cove
Without comfort, without love.[1]

Having been born and bred in the area, Elaine Gaston, from Ballycastle, east of Portrush, (and, incidentally, also an ex-UUC creative writing lecturer), knows this coast and its rural hinterland in a more down-to-earth manner than Mahon, and that knowledge imbues her debut collection with an old-fashioned but, to me, highly welcome love of landscape. (I should at this point state that I spent six years in Portrush from 1985, so Gaston writes of a part of the world that I’m familiar with, albeit as an outsider.) Right from the off, taking her cue from another fine poet from the North of Ireland, John Hewitt, Gaston charts the land as her own:

I know my way by the mossy stone,
the boggy field, the fairy thorn,
the house with the old milk churn stand,
the house which hides the bogeyman

(from ‘Early Map’)

From lines like these, which stake out an indelible sense of place, comparison could easily be drawn with Kavanagh or with Heaney (whose influence Gaston acknowledges in her notes), a feeling compounded by the poem’s beautifully-turned ending:

                    Townlands stretch to the east
and the west, the north and the south of us,

shining basalt in my mind,
falling water through my hands,
ripe blackberries on my tongue:
Drumtullagh, Dunseverick, Lisnagunogue.

The Lie of the Land moves, it seems, in a roughly chronological order, an autobiography of sorts, like many a first collection, but that works well, as it gives the collection a natural coherence. ‘Early Map’ is followed by three charming poems of childhood, in which her mother, with “her constant back”, features as a gently guiding influence. I recently saw and heard Gaston read her lovely sonnet, ‘Dunseverick’, at one of the wonderful Coffee-House Poetry evenings at the Troubadour in Earl’s Court and I was struck by the precise quality of her recall:

We splashed and charged and roared into the water,
came out mottled, numb; she squeezed dry our hair,
wrapped us in towels, shoved on windcheaters,
gave us hunks of wheaten slapped together
with a wedge of Edmund Black’s good cheddar
gone sweaty in the sun.

This is, of course, a scene that many people, myself included, could relate to, but Gaston invigorates the memory by the appropriately galloping rhythm created by the extra ‘and’ and by those perfect, musical participles – ‘mottled’, ‘shoved’, ‘slapped’, ‘gone sweaty’. These are words which both read well on the page and resound magically on the ear.

Gaston goes on to delineate for posterity, and without condescension, the ‘characters’ of her early years – ‘The Bread Man’ “who wore a winter hat / shaped like a Brown Batch”, and ‘The Vegetable Man’ who “held trays of freshly dug Queen’s, / Magilligan carrots, broad beans, turnips, parsnips, sprouts” – and the excitement (“I did anything for a book”) of ‘The Library Van’ “that called to ours every other Tuesday / about four o’clock”.

Equally excellent are some poems about/featuring her father, especially ‘Letting it Draw’:

My father taught me to make tea,
the tea only North Antrim farmers know,
in the dented metal pot where I hoked deep
for swollen leaves to spatter on the china sink.

Paradoxically, this is economical writing which says and implies so much: the respect for traditions and old ways handed down. That phrase “where I hoked deep” somehow takes on a metaphorical facet, as though, from a young age, Gaston was curious about the world and how it operates, even down to the alchemy of tea-making. Gaston’s narrative persona varies little from a straightforward depiction of events, slightly nostalgically, yet always to a point and purpose that the reader can discern. Most of the poems are written with the emotional distance that the third person brings. Sometimes, though, such as in ‘Keeping in Touch’ and ‘New Year’s Day’, an unflinching account (“Muck all over the windscreen, / cabbage and cream all over the car, / you against the steering wheel”) of the fatal car crash down a North Antrim lane of (presumably) an older sibling, Gaston uses the direct address of the second person to excellent effect.

As a woman who grew up in a Catholic family in the North of Ireland, it’s inevitable that Gaston has written several poems which relate directly or indirectly to the Troubles. In ‘Storm Damage’, she cleverly juxtaposes media coverage of the Great Storm of October 1987 with hoped-for news of the Birmingham Six; ‘Plastic Bullet’ relates – as a representative of all those who suffered from the effects of the security forces’ over-fond usage of firing plastic bullets – the phlegmatic attitude of a friend who was shot in the head (“she was just fifteen / a three-inch plate / where part of her skull used to be”); and elsewhere there are mentions of army checkpoints, of the casual use of violence (“a joyrider shot dead”), of a kneecapping victim, of the shootings in 2009 of two off-duty soldiers outside the Massereene Barracks in Belfast (the specular poem ‘Flashback’) and, with a large nod to Heaney, of the Disappeared. It’s in her outstanding poem ‘Rare Grooves’, though, that Gaston most effectively and movingly addresses the futility and absurdity of the military presence: it tells a superficially simple tale of Gaston (or a first-person persona) being stopped, as she drives along a quiet road through the Glens, by two soldiers, of whom one is Scottish and the other a Black Londoner:

he wants to check why
in the wilds of North Antrim
this Irish girl is blasting out
reggae records so rare
even he can’t get them

[…]

The Scottish one disnae have a baldy,
but I tell him, dinnae worrae,

on a good day from the mountain
I can see across the sea
to where he comes from.
He laughs

and suddenly we all wonder
where this scenario comes from,
so much removed from everything
this stop and search is meant to be,

so much like the film we’d rather star in.

(The film in question appears to be Terms of Endearment, as the poem makes references to Debra Winger and the moon.) The unlikely, yet natural humour of the scene is superbly brought out by Gaston’s perfectly paced unfolding of the story over 22 quatrains and is expertly reinforced by the use of colloquialisms (e.g. “disnae have a baldy”), as is the case in many of the other poems in the book. It’s a multi-layered poem, with the ‘sub-plot’ of another direct address, (seemingly) to a distant lover, and one which amply demonstrates what a skilful poet Gaston is. The variable lengths of the lines add to the tension of the situation, not just of the conflict but also of the narrator’s vulnerability, as “a woman alone, / and them not busy” on an isolated back-road. The poetic voice of women in the Troubles has perhaps been heard less over the years than those of their male counterparts, despite the excellence of poets like Colette Bryce and Sinéad Morrissey, and it’s good to see Gaston redressing the balance.

Most of all, Gaston writes particularly well of what Anne-Marie Fyfe, another tremendous Glens of Antrim poet, perceptively calls in her endorsement “the everyday complexities of north-of-Ireland life, the unrootedness of contemporary experience with its leavings and returnings, and the ineluctable shifts of the heart”: the lure of homecoming after university education in Oxford, the joy of watching her children, especially in the wonderful sonnet ‘Crows Glen, Belfast Hills’, echoing the earlier poems of her own childhood, and, of course, the beauty of the North Antrim landscape (“where land gives way / to the Atlantic”), with its fields, bracken, gorse, blackthorn, hazel, heather, downpours, “old tracks” and rugged wildness. This a rich and unmissable collection which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading. It’s worth reading it slowly, as each poem, always and expertly in apposite forms, is to be savoured. Great stuff.

Elaine Gaston, The Lie of the Land, Doire Press, 80pp., £9.

[1] From The Hunt by Night, Oxford University Press, 1982.

On Wednesday, I led a workshop for the Red Door Poets, the collective of nine (including me) folk who meet every now and then at the home, in London, of one of us, Mary Mulholland. Workshopping, whilst it sounds like it’s the name of a town in Sweden, can be a tricky business, because the tutor has to ensure that the tutees gain an understanding and/or increased ability of the matter whilst not doing so in a overly didactic/dogmatic manner. I had never led a workshop on my own before, though I did lead a couple of workshops with John Barlow a few years ago. Although they had all kindly bought and read The Lammas Lands when it was published, and are all highly talented poets, the Red Door mob were largely unfamiliar with haiku, either  translated from Japanese or originally written in English, so, with the time available being limited to just three hours, I thought that there should be three principal objectives: to gain, from close reading of some excellent examples, a sense of what successful haiku do and what they don’t do; to go for a fairly brief walk (a ginko) during which we would write down observations which could either emerge as fully-formed haiku, or could be used to write some; and, generally, to increase their enjoyment of reading, and hopefully writing, haiku.

I started with a list of 13 features of what I regard as good haiku and then we went through 17 English-language haiku, by the likes of David Cobb, Alison Williams, Robert Spiess, Peggy Willis Lyles, Caroline Gourlay, etc. I tried to let the group come up with their thoughts about each haiku and prompted them only when I felt it was necessary, though, being very perceptive and intelligent people, they ‘got’ the haiku in nearly every case. As I was at pains to say, my feeling is, and always has been, that haiku come from a different part of the brain to longer poems as they are about being ‘in the moment’ and are less consciously polished. That doesn’t, of course, mean that haiku can’t be edited in order to improve them, but somehow the best haiku have the uncanny knack of seeming as though they are spontaneous reactions to direct observation/experience. That was certainly exemplified by some of the featured haiku, such as this one by John Barlow (from Waiting for the Seventh Wave, Snapshot Press, 2006):

day’s end . . .
loch water laps
the tethered canoes

On the surface – pun intended – of this haiku, there isn’t a lot going on, but I’d argue that it’s a marvellously balanced poem which conjures up a deeply resonant sense of melancholic beauty, very firmly in the haiku tradition. One of the group suggested that the ellipsis was superfluous and, whilst you could indeed argue a case for that, I offered my alternate view that it allows the reader space to pause and really absorb the fact that it’s a very specific time of day, with darkness coming on and, perhaps, a brightly setting sun. We discussed the fine verb use, which is so often key to a haiku’s success or otherwise: here, ‘laps’ is perfect, being simultaneously quiet and onomatopoeic, and having the secondary meaning of ‘going all the way around’. We then talked about the adjective, which is also spot-on: it’s as if the canoes are roped up not just to stop them from being carried away across the water, but also from actively drifting away, i.e. as though the canoes would have some kind of existential freedom to move of their own accord if they weren’t tethered. You may think I’m being daft at reading it like that! It’s important, too, to iterate that the haiku sounds as lovely on the ear as it looks on the page. It’s also a bit wabi sabi, a concept which the group latched on to with very pleasing glee and which was exemplified by another, but very different, haiku, by Cor van den Heuvel – ‘all night diner / jukebox lights in the dented top / of an old salt shaker’.

Among the other haiku we looked at was another one by Barlow, (from Wing Beats, Snapshot Press, 2008):

depths of the wood
the bullfinch’s breast
empties of song

Again, we focused very carefully on the language used; that surprising opening phrase, with its emphasis on ‘depths’, which chimingly, yet subtly rhymes with the first syllable of ‘empties’, and which puts the reader firmly in the scene, a long way from civilisation, so that when it comes the bullfinch’s song is all the more powerful and affecting.  (It seems timely to add that Barlow and I both discovered from a presentation given by Tim Birkhead, at one of the New Networks for Nature conferences, that the bullfinch has the largest testicles in proportion to its body-size of any bird.) The subtlety of the haiku also resides in the phrasing of the second and third lines too – the specification that it’s the bird’s breast (and its implicit distinctive redness) which is emptying of song gives the reader the sense that the creature is really busting its lungs, like its life depends upon it; and ‘empties of song’ is, as we noted, just the loveliest phrase, seemingly simple yet beautifully precise. The need for precision, rather than generalisation, in haiku can’t be stated enough. In the same manner as ‘day’s end’, this haiku looks, reads and sounds perfectly poised, with no wasted words and without any showiness; in short, it is a wonderful example of how haiku can be high art.

Our haiku walk, down to the rose gardens beside St Luke’s church in Chelsea, had to be brief, not just because the weather was less than clement, but also because, paradoxically, and as we often found when we were on Pascale Petit’s Tate Modern poetry courses, the less time allocated to write in a workshop or creative-writing situation, the better one tends to write. The group wrote really well and it will be very interesting to see their haiku when we meet next.

When we returned to the house, we looked at some senryu, which are haiku that are concerned with human foibles, often in a comic and self-deprecating way. A particular favourite of the group was Matt Morden’s sardonic ‘end of my tether / some bastard on the radio / talks about god’ (from Martin Lucas’s Stepping Stones, British Haiku Society, 2007), about which we had a lively discussion as to whether the first line rendered ‘bastard’ superfluous (most of us felt that it not only adds to the Meldrewesque comedy of the poem but gives a better stress in the middle line than simply writing, say, ‘someone on the radio’ would have done). In all, we had great fun and it was a really enjoyable session, to which everyone contributed. As a workshop leader, you can’t ask for more than that.

*

Meanwhile, thanks to Sharon Larkin, two poems from my forthcoming poetry collection’s final section, which features a sequence of poems about my dad, have recently been published on the Good Dadhood poetry site.

About eight years ago I persuaded myself that I’d only improve as a poet if I restricted my reading exclusively to a wide range of poetry and, despite the odd fond gaze at novels glimpsed on buses, trains and my shelves, I just about stuck to that for a good few years. I believe that doing so enormously helped me, as much by osmosis as by systematic study, to gain a better understanding of how ‘good’ poems work and of what they omit as much as what they include. Having achieved a seemingly reasonable level of poetic competence a couple of years ago, I relaxed that exclusivity. Now my choices of reading matter – whether poetry, fiction, memoir or what have you – are squarely based upon how they can help me to develop further as a poet. Belatedly, I’ve fully realised that time is short and I have to use it wisely, or at least more wisely than I used to.

In that spirit, this week I’ve been reading the six scripts, published by Faber, for Dennis Potter’s 1986 classic BBC serial The Singing Detective, mainly to immerse myself in the highest-quality dialogue and monologue. In some of my narrative / anecdotal poems, I do occasionally include some dialogue and, even though most of us all have regular conversations with others as well as ourselves, it’s hard to write well in poems without it sounding unnatural, and/or wholly out of step with the narrative voice in which the poem is written. Who better to learn from than Potter, I figured, given what a genius he was, and a revolutionary one at that. But, unsurprisingly, I’ve been sucked into the beauty of the narrative, or narratives, which loop round with Potter’s trademark use of flashback, many interwoven layers and lip-synching to old songs, in this case from the mid-’40s. I’ve also been struck by the Beckettian care with which Potter specified the directions. Amongst all that are his sardonic, at times riotous (tragi)comic lines, most notably through the quips, asides and thoughts of the hospitalised pulp-novelist protagonist Philip Marlow (as played by the Great Gambon in the BBC serial). In one famous scene, Marlow is being greased all over for his psoriasis by the glamorous Nurse Mills (played by Joanne Whalley) and is doing all he can to avoid an erection by thinking of the most banal subjects including:

Gardeners’ Question Time, chaired by Peter Hall. Plastic pitch at Queens Park Rangers. Fog Phillips on a horse. [. . .] The Fifth Beatle. David Owen and Shirley Williams, [. . .] Ludovic Kennedy!

The full list indicates how, despite his highly ambivalent nostalgia for an England that’s long gone, Potter was always contemporary and culturally aware.

The mention of QPR’s ‘Omniturf’ pitch takes me right back to the 1st September 1981 when, as a season-ticket holder in the just-redeveloped Loft, I was there to see the first professional football match in Britain to be played on an artificial surface. Rangers being Rangers, they lost that game, 2–1 to Luton, but otherwise they flourished in those years, under the visionary management of Terry Venables, who some while before had co-authored a strangely prophetic pulp novel entitled They Used to Play on Grass. Having moved from Palace to become Rangers’ boss, Venables built on foundations laid by Tommy Docherty by poaching half of Palace’s would-be ‘Team of the Eighties’ and got them to the 1982 Cup Final, in which, against (then) First Division Spurs, they played poorly yet scraped a 1–1 draw; then totally out-played Spurs in the replay and were unlucky to lose to an early penalty, pretty much Spurs’ only shot of the game.

The momentum that Cup-run gave them took that Rangers side – which included great players like goal-poacher extraordinaire Clive Allen, Simon Stainrod and all his tricks, elegant Glenn Roeder, Terry Fenwick (who later was one of the England defenders whom Maradona left in his wake in the goal he scored with his foot in the Mexico ’86 World Cup Quarter Final), midfield schemer John Gregory, Tony Currie (by then playing as a libero because he hadn’t the legs to run about much) and buccaneering old-school centre-half Bob Hazell – on to the Second Division title in 1982/83. The following year, they were fifth in the top flight, and then, out of the blue, Venables was lured to Barcelona to become ‘El Tel’. Consequently, Rangers flirted with relegation for a few years before establishing themselves as the top team in London under Gerry Francis. In all, they spent 13 consecutive seasons in the top flight from ’83/’84, were founder-members of the Premier League and could, and did, beat any and every other team home and away (except Forest at the City Ground, where they’ve still never won); most famously a 6–0 stuffing of Chelsea in 1986 and the New Year’s Day massacre of 1992 when they won 4–1 at Old Trafford, live on ITV. Happy days, but I digress . . .

Incidentally, Potter’s inclusion of football extended to Marlow confessing to being a Fulham fan, in those pre-Al-Fayed times when Fulham were floundering about and generally going nowhere. Potter was steeped in the culture of his times, and I would contend that no other writer, or artist per se, of his period got close to matching Potter’s ability to make great art out of the historical reality of Britain from the ’30s to the downfall of Thatcher. My dad, who sometimes had execrable though always catholic tastes, loved Potter’s plays and serials, and none more so than The Singing Detective. All the performances were superb, chief of which, of course, was that of Michael Gambon, for whom the role of world-weary Marlow, in all his guises – psoriatic patient, private ’tec and crooner – was tailor-made. Gambon’s ability to shift from menace to (black) humour in a nano-second was, and is, a rare gift. He was also very funny in a late ’70s ITV sitcom called The Other One, in which, alongside Richard Briers, he played a rather misanthropic character who could almost have been a precursor of Marlow, with the catchphrase “I’m a lone wolf, Ralph”. You probably had to have seen it . . .

What I sense from Potter’s dialogue was that the more he tried to make it sound unnatural, the better it was, given that the converse of that is paradoxically true. Maybe!

 

So that was a busy old month, not that it’s quite over. The launch of the excellent annual Eyewear anthology was the hoot I’d expected it to be, with the laughter matched by the high quality of the poets and their poems. Here’s a grainy pic of me in full flow:

The first meeting of the Poetry Business Writing School in Sheffield was marvellous and the day flew by in a welter of poem-writing exercises in the morning and workshopping of a poem each in the afternoon. The forensic dissection of what I’d hitherto thought was an all but final draft of my poem was probably the best piece of workshop assistance I’ve ever had. Before we said our goodbyes until the next meeting in June, we were all allotted a new partner with whom we will exchange poems and feedback by email over the next few weeks. I am so childishly excited about being involved in this programme.

I’ve been steadily re-reading Roy Fisher, coincidentally now a set poet for our Writing School homework; reading Thomas Hardy’s poems by the Thames during work  lunchtimes, which feels really quite decadent; and dipping into our two set main Writing School texts, which are brick-sized anthologies full of goodies. For good measure, I’ve also worked my way steadily through Sylvia Plath’s journals, which showed just how dedicated she was to writing poems, systematically sending them out to magazines and then sending them out elsewhere if they came back with rejections slips. The picture she painted of Hughes, especially in one long and very funny passage, was of a man who farted, belched, scratched his balls and picked his nose all day long. You have to wonder how he got any writing done.

This Thursday evening, I’ll be going to Jill Abram’s latest Stablemates session at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly, which promises to be a corker.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll be running a haiku workshop for the Red Door Poets, a small collective of nine poets of whom I’m one. We were brought together by all having regularly attended Pascale Petit‘s now-legendary courses at Tate Modern and/or the Poetry School. We meet, roughly once a fortnight, behind the red door to the home of M.J. Whistler, to workshop new poets, and it’s been invaluable for all of us to have that regular feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. You can’t beat a bit of constructive criticism. Not even with a big stick, as they say in Norn Iron.

Finally, here’s a recent poem of mine, on the Football Poets website.

When I was in my early teens, having gorged on football annuals, my dad’s Wisden collection, biographies of old cricketers and pap fiction by the likes of James Herbert, the first ‘proper’ books I read were the early, Nottingham-based novels and short stories of Alan Sillitoe: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and Key to the Door; and, later, even the weird dystopia of Travels in Nihilon (in which national service in the armed forces is compulsory not for the young and fit, but, instead, for senior citizens, who, by virtue of their age, are judged to be expendable). From Sillitoe, I progressed to other Kitchen Sink-ers like John Braine before my brother happily got me to read On the Road and the rest of Kerouac’s oeuvre, and then I went on to read, among others, the greatest Notts. writer, D.H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Milan Kundera, Brian Moore, etc. (Sadly, the gender stereotyping of those days meant that I read few women writers until I went to university and very merrily worked my way through the goodies in the library.)

Anyhow, I instantly took a liking to Sillitoe’s pithy prose and pithier dialogue, wrought in a dialect sharply removed from my soft, southern Estuary-English attuned ears – his characters were always saying “allus” and such like. Here was a writer who dealt in the lives of those whom the Murdoch press and government ministers lamentably now label as ‘ordinary working people’, and who did so without gloss; even tackling – in his fine story ‘The Match’ – football and domestic violence.

For me, then, reading Kathy Pimlott’s well-produced Emma Press pamphlet from last year, Goose Fair Night, is a return of sorts to the pleasure I gained from ‘hearing’ Sillitoe’s rich Nottingham voice. Though Pimlott has been resident in the heart of London’s West End for many years, the majority of the pamphlet’s 22 poems take their cue from her upbringing in the East Midlands. The opening poem, ‘You Bring Out the Nottingham in Me’, from which the pamphlet’s title derives, nicely sets the tone. It can’t have been easy for Pimlott to decide which place-names, memories and other details to include in the poem and which to omit; yet the finished poem is a warm-hearted and funny paean to how the city’s annual Goose Fair used to be:     

My scent is Dangerous October, hot engine oil,
hot sugar, Mouse Town must. In electric dark
beyond the caravans, I take on all just

for the glory and floor them tenderly to rock ‘n’ roll,
chain and lever growl and lovely screams.

References to Ned Ludd, Lawrence and, of course, Brian Clough (‘With you I’m Clough-strut right’) round off a poem that, though set long ago, is full of life and pride. The pamphlet is threaded with six affectionate and excellent poems concerning Pimlott’s maternal grandmother, Enid. All six cover aspects of Enid’s character and life, including working in service, her childhood as the eldest of nine, courtship by and marriage to a ‘dapper six-foot blonde’ who ‘turned cocky, a strutting nasty drunk’, and her role as grandmotherly dispenser of sound, experience-based and occasionally idiosyncratic advice, veering from how to eat a lollipop to how to avoid abduction and worse. Enid’s common sense approach – depicted from the outset, in the first of the six, ‘Enid and the Peas’ (‘[. . . ] don’t prong them individually. / You use your knife to squash them to your fork’) – and her ability to retain and recount old memories are endearing. The spacing of these poems at intervals allows the reader, after the first of them, to encounter Enid as an old friend; a force of nature rendered skilfully and believably by Pimlott: 

                               The grown-ups will

be lively, drunk and playing Peggy Lee,
while upstairs, we’ll have the story

of your dash with a bowl on pig-killing day,
of how you fainted under the cane.
You tell me about bombed bodies
stacked in the swimming baths,

your mam’s red hair, long enough
to sit on, how the doctor made her
cut it off to cure her headaches.

(from ‘Enid and Me’)

The accretion of detail in Enid’s litany of memories adds up to far more than just poetry-as-life-writing because it presents in the spotlight a portrait of an unsung working-class woman; and in a time where more than a few poets seem compelled to devote much of their energy to writing fact- and post-fact-stuffed Wiki-poems about ‘celebs’, it’s refreshing to read clear, unembellished poetry about people whose lives are less commonly written about in anything other than patronising tones. In this poem, as elsewhere in the pamphlet, Pimlott’s deployment of verb tenses bestows a sense of timelessness: firstly, through the future tense, as if the scene is about to be played in accordance with habit, and then via the shift to the present tense.

In other poems, Pimlott tackles a delightful miscellany of themes: female lives and female friendship and solidarity in particular – both objectively (in ‘Soho Hens’, with its gorgeous observation of ‘They jostle like a silvery balloon / bouquet tethered to a jittery child’, and in ‘Apprentice Cutter’) and subjectively (in ‘Out with the Girls’, with its comical pathos of ‘No one sits next to us. // Perhaps they think we will unwrap / egg sandwiches’); the pleasures of a childhood holiday in Cornwall; a day out in Brighton; the mysteries of jam-making (‘A bluebottle, cruising the cavity, left off its hum to liquefy and lay / and in no time at all blind maggots / fell from the architrave into the sink’ – from ‘Preserving’); and much else.

In her lively and perceptive introduction, Clare Pollard rightly highlights Pimlott’s “female working-class sensibility” and “the unremarkable, in-between places that she illuminates with her attention”, but what’s perhaps most impressive is that Pimlott seems to know instinctively how much information to impart and, crucially, how to impart it. As I alluded to earlier, Pimlott doesn’t ‘poeticize’ her poems and is wisely content to let her extraordinary stories and observations unfold in a concise, mostly judgement-free narrative voice. Likewise, Pimlott sticks to fairly safe forms – mostly stanzaic or block poems, with the odd unrhymed sonnet and an eight-couplet poem which indicates the influence of Mimi Khalvati. Pimlott only extends her range in the central poem, ‘All the Way Here’, a sequence of six tightly-crafted sketches of place, in both Nottingham and London; but it doesn’t really matter, as the pamphlet possesses a very pleasing unity, in which the poems, none of which is less than good, cohere to make a memorable and highly enjoyable debut. Here’s hoping a full collection will be hot on its heels.

Kathy Pimlott, Goose Fair Night, The Emma Press, 36pp., £6.50.

In less than two weeks’ time, I’ll be joining my fellow participants on the Poetry Business Writing School, led by Ann and Peter Sansom. I’m really thrilled to have been selected to take part. It’s for poets working towards their second collection. We’ve been paired up to give each other emailed feedback on poems in progress – and that’s already been a very fruitful exercise – before we all meet in person. I know from attending Poetry Business workshops that Ann and Peter, who are wonderful poets themselves of course, are brilliant at getting poets to write well and at offering insightful and helpful constructive feedback. With the added input from some excellent poets, it should make for a fabulous 18 months’-worth of writing, reading, discussion and what-not.

Meanwhile, this Sunday, I’ll be one of the readers at the launch of Eyewear Publishing’s Best New British and Irish Poets anthology for 2017, edited by Luke Kennard. I’m chuffed to be in the anthology for the second year running. This year, my poem is ‘Duckwalking in West Berlin’, featuring events which happened 30 years ago. Details of the launch are here. With the great Todd Swift as MC and Luke himself among the featured readers, I’m sure it will be a fantastic afternoon.