Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

As well as her own poetry, I’ve long admired Charlotte Gann’s dialogues with creative artists, poets especially, so it’s a real honour for me to talk with Charlotte about a poem of mine, and its motivations, here.

Thanks mainly to Rotherham Library’s engagingly eccentric stock, I’ve got through a real miscellany of books in the last two months. I’ll begin with fiction.

I admired Patrick McGuinness’s excellent The Last Hundred Days (Seren, 2011), a thriller of sorts set against the backdrop of Ceausescu’s downfall. Its dark comedy and Kafkaesque absurdities reminded me of the novels of Milan Kundera.  

Having enjoyed both the Swedish and Kenneth Branagh adaptations of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels, I thought it was about time I read a couple of them. But I also read his last book, After the Fire, not a Wallander, which was drenched in melancholy and therefore right up my street.

Natasha Brown’s Assembly (2021) gives her take on what it is be a young Black woman within the strata of British society. It’s as powerful in its own way as Claudia Rankine’s book-length poem, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), to which it owes something in its stylistic flourish.

Will Eaves’s The Absent Therapist (CB Editions, 2014) is a series of short, often comic vignettes and digressions on all sorts of serious topics – including racism, misogyny and other forms of oppression – which only occasionally, have any inter-relation. I found its non sequiturs as annoying as those which used to pepper my mother’s conversation.

Having read reviews of it when it was published two years ago, I was very glad to read The Colony by Audrey Magee. Its central premise – an English painter going to stay in an Irish-speaking community on a small island in 1979 – may be clunky, but the spare, multi-voiced narrative quickly becomes addictive. Magee’s microcosmic takes on British colonialism, the power and value of language per se and the century-old debate within Ireland about the cultural importance of the Irish language are all layered within beautiful prose. None of those concerns are original of course – Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations certainly got there first – but  I’m sure it’ll be adapted for the cinema soon enough. If it is, it won’t be able to convey the richness of Magee’s writing.

Of poetry collections, John Burnside’s swansong Ruin, Blossom was too full of Catholic theology for my taste, but did also include some memorable poems, chief among them ‘The Night Ferry’, which reads now like a death poem, in the Japanese tradition, with this ending:

Give me these years again and I will
spend them wisely.
Done with the compass; done, now, with the chart.
The ferry at the dock, lit
stern to bow,
the next life like a footfall in my heart.

The repetition of ‘done’ and the mention of ‘the compass’ in the same breath must be a nod to Donne’s great poem ‘A Valediction: forbidding Mourning’.

I initially liked the tone – surely influenced by Geoff Hattersley and maybe by Fred Voss – and craft of the poems in Philip Hancock’s House on the A34 (CB Editions), but grew a little weary of them over the course of the full collection.

Among non-fiction, it was intriguing to compare Margaret Forster’s final, autobiographical  book, My Life in Houses (2014), with her husband Hunter Davies’s second part (maybe second half, given his lifelong football addiction?) of autobiography, A Life in the Day (2017).  Davies has always been irreverent, especially in comparison with Forster’s more serious approach, but his self-deprecation and his moving account of Forster’s illness and passing lift his memoirs into the best company. Forster’s book is equally fine, and its premise of a life through home-making is both poignant and as well-written as you would expect from one of Britain’s finest novelists.

Stephen Enniss’s 2014 After the Titanic: the Life of Derek Mahon, published six years before Mahon’s death, was very disappointing, not least in its many factual errors (especially regarding the geography of the North of Ireland), but leaves room for a far better, critical biography of this hugely gifted poet.

Colm Tóibín’s New Ways to Kill Your Mother (2012), subtitled ‘Writers and their families’, though really just literary hackwork largely compiled, it seemed, from other writers’ biographies, was entertaining in part, especially so on Yeats and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, and on Thomas Mann and his children. It reminded me too that I must read Patricia Craig’s biography of Brian Moore, who was, to my mind, a more consistently excellent novelist than Tóibín makes out.

The cricketer Graeme Fowler’s 2016 autobiography Absolutely Foxed, ghosted by John Woodhouse, provides a candid canter through the career of this elegant batter (and superb fielder), and his subsequent coaching at Durham University and battles with mental illness, a subject he broaches more fully in another book, Mind over Batter (dreadful title). It couldn’t fail to remind me of the life and recent tragic end of another England left-hander, Graham Thorpe.

The most resonant non-fiction book I’ve read of late was one which, on the surface, wouldn’t normally have grabbed my attention given that its main subject is cycling; however, I can’t recommend enough Ned Boulting’s 1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession (2023). Hitherto best known as a TV commentator on the Tour, and on darts, Boulting’s book delves into the post-Great War history of Belgium, France and Germany in a never less-than-compelling manner – his obsession becomes contagious. Cycling is way down my list of interests – I haven’t owned a bike in years – but 1923 is like a Sebaldian novel, full of mysteries, coincidences, psychogeography, Existentialism and the sort of poetic prose you wouldn’t necessarily expect a sports commentator to write:

We will never know the inner lives of others, whether they really come past us at speed, so fast we catch a breath of wind as they pass, or whether they only exist many years later as a ghostly moving image, recorded and preserved semi-incidentally.

I’m delighted to be in another issue, of The North, for my money Britain’s best poetry journal. My poem is below.

The issue also contains poems by Ian McMillan, Pascale Petit, Kathy Pimlott, Ruth Sharman, Paul Stephenson, Maria Taylor, Pam Thompson and many other poets I admire. Details of this and other issues, and of subscription rates, can be found on the Poetry Business website, here.

*

Invigilator Slater

I fail the first O-level Physics paper
      with over an hour to spare.

Ball-bearings rain bashes the corrugated-iron
      roof of the Nissen-hut gym. 

I take Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
      from my pocket, and Mr Slater,

our English teacher, baby-giraffes his corduroy-
      jacketed six-feet-eight between

Gorgeous-George-the-caretaker’s neat lines of desks
      to whisper, ‘Betcha don’t finish it.’

On Monday of this week, I wrote a poem which was published online yesterday, here, and which is in today’s print copy of the Morning Star.

For the best eyewitness reporting of what happened at Manvers on Sunday, and how close it came to being mass-murder, please read this superb, brave journalism by Dan Hayes, here.

For the month from late July until late August, the poet Paul Brookes has been / will be publishing, at his Substack journal The Starbeck Orion, daily contributions to a festschrift for Ian Parks, to mark forty years since Parks’s first poem was published.

After a lovely piece by Parks’s songwriting partner, Mick Jenkinson, yesterday’s instalment also included a short essay by me on Parks’s poetry about music, and jazz and blues in particular. It’s available here, at the bottom of the page.

I’ve written about Edward Burra before, here, and my admiration for him, his art and his life are undiminished. A couple of weeks ago I visited Playden, a mile north of Rye, East Sussex, where Burra grew up and lived until 1957, after his father died. The family lived at Springfield Court throughout those first 52 years of Burra’s life.

Burra is buried in the close-by churchyard of St Michael’s, Playden. It’s a surprising resting-place, given that he held no Christian beliefs, but it’s a pleasant spot, replete with a stone frog.

Rye Art Gallery has a room dedicated to Burra, including a cabinet full of his brushes, photographs and other ephemera.

I aim to write more poems about him and/or in response to his paintings. For now, though, below is the poem (loosely) based on his 1943–5 painting of the same name, accessible here, and which was published in issue no. 4 of The Alchemy Spoon.

The Cabbage Harvest

Halfway up the back road to Leigh,
under hard-bastard, leaden skies,
two wind-rounded labourers squeeze
the heads to test maturity;

decide the time is ripe, before
Storm Dudley breaks; to lop them free
from the stalk base and rapidly
cram the lot into sacks galore;

spread-eagling their fingers and palms
across the lumps, as if they’ve topped
the gangmaster—and roughly chopped
his carcass up, like lemon balm.

After an absence of five years, I’ve rejoined the Presence team, but under tragic circumstances: to fill the gap created by the very sad passing of Chris Boultwood, who, as well as being a fine haiku poet, took great care of the journal’s website for many years and also very efficiently administered the annual contest which subsequently became the Martin Lucas Haiku Award.

I’ve updated the website with selections from the last four issues, chosen by me (#76), Alison Williams (77), Judy Kendall (78) and Julie Mellor (79), here.

If you’re not a subscriber, it’s well worth becoming one, at still very reasonable prices – details are available here.

A characteristically astute review by Helena (Nell) Nelson in The Friday Poem the other week alerted me to the fact that Philip Rush had a collection of his distinctive poems (and photos), entitled Camera Obscura, newishly available from Michael Laskey’s The Garlic Press, here. Nell’s review can be read here.

Enthused by Nell’s review, and knowing Philip a little and (some of) his poems from the last Poetry Business Writing School programme just prior to the pandemic, I bought a copy of Camera Obscura straightaway. Nell quite rightly highlighted the quirkiness, humour and sheer likeability of Philip’s poems. His wit is of the driest, but not irritating know-all, kind. I’m glad, too, that Nell noted the following:

The writing’s mainly rooted in the natural world where everything is as ordinary (and as miraculous) as a leaf, if you look at it carefully. He does look. And the more you read him, the more you trust him to tell you what he sees.

In Philip’s poetry, one can easily discern that sense of wonder, as Van the Man put it, and perhaps of immanence; some kind of indefinable yearning towards a quieter pace of life in which observation is valued purely for its own sake. In these respects, his style is not dissimilar to Laskey’s own, or that of Peter Sansom and Jonathan Davidson.

The book concludes with a true masterpiece, ‘‘Folk Routes, New Routes’ An Ode to Davey Graham & Shirley Collins’, a freewheeling hymn to, maybe elegy for, the outward-facing, optimistic England of the Sixties. Ostensibly written around the hugely influential 1964 album recorded by Graham and Collins, with Gus Dudgeon at the mixing desk, but which also contrives to encompass maps, cars, football, Dr Johnson, wild flowers and the old, pre-1974 counties, including Philip’s own Middlesex. In it, a ‘vintage old-school / road atlas [ . . .] / includes a short / and largely pointless / section of the M1, / a stub of the M5 / leading south from Birmingham / and the entire M50.’ (And also, no M4, on which Dudgeon and his wife Sheila died in 2002.) It’s a poem like no other I know.

I’m featuring a work in a similar vein, in how it harks back, though, I hasten to add, not in any absurd, Reform-UK-supporting manner. Philip has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.

*

Shacklegate

At the heart of all this edgeland
          I’m sure
is Shacklegate Junction —
          its dead-end rails
its island of dry grass
          its sheds
and its flicker of butterflies
          like an old film

like the arcs
          of sharp electricity
which every now and then
          but always
unexpectedly
          played for a fraction
of a second
          beneath the rolling stock.

Once in a blue moon
          or to be fair
more often than that
          our train would pause here,
hesitate forward and stop.
          The engine died
and a kind of queasy silence
          took its place.

Poems have been written
          about such moments.
In those days, no-one spoke
          or watched their phones.

*

The shadow of Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ – written in 1915 about a train journey he undertook on 24 June 2014, and published in the New Statesman three weeks after he was killed in action on 9 April 2017 – has slanted across the best poems about railway journeys by English poets since then, from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, Patricia Beer’s magnificent ‘The Branch Line’ and ‘Southern Railway’, to Peter Sansom’s ‘Alfreton and Mansfield Parkway, June Evening’. Its quiet depiction of a golden, prelapsarian English summer’s heat haze may well be an influence on Philip’s poem too.

I have to declare a personal attachment here, in that the spot which ‘Shacklegate’ describes is one I know well, because I have so often passed it, and been beside it in a stopped train. The triangular junction lies on the Kingston Loop, the line from Waterloo to Kingston and back to Waterloo, taking in Teddington, Twickenham, Richmond and Barnes among other stations. Having lived and worked in both Kingston and Twickenham, I imagine I’ve passed the junction many hundreds of times. The junction, adjoining Strawberry Hill Golf Club, lies just before Strawberry Hill station on the dead-straight stretch from/to Teddington. It’s a junction because it also contains the start/end of the branch line forking off to/from Shepperton, which quite possibly owes its post-Beeching survival to the presence, a few stops down, of Kempton Park station, servicing the racecourse. Shacklegate isn’t really a place now, if it ever was; there’s a Shacklegate Lane which runs west from the Waldegrave Arms to the Stanley Road crossroads in north Teddington, which imperceptibly becomes another non-place, Fulwell; known, if at all, for being where Manoel II, the exiled last king of Portugal, lived until his murder in 1932.

The poem opens in media res: we are joining an engaging talk which has already started and might well be halfway through. We can intuit the arms of the narrator opening out as he shows us where he and we are. It’s that ‘all this’ which does it, especially ‘this’; rather than using ‘of the edgeland’ or ‘of edgeland’, the fuller phrase shows us more, by rooting us to the very spot. The word ‘edgeland’, or ‘edgelands’ plural, was coined in 2002 by the writer, environmentalist and campaigner Marion Shoard as a label for the out-of-the-way places between urban and rural areas which are, at the same time,  somehow a mixture of both and neither. It was popularised by the publication in 2011 of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’s brilliant book of exploratory essays, Edgelands, with its cheeky subtitle, ‘Journeys into England’s True Wilderness’, cocking a snook at the pretentious neo-colonialism of Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places. The suburbs of south-west London, in which Fulwell and Teddington are situated, are chocker with classic edgelands.

The short second line is simultaneously assertive and uncertain, as if the narrator is, in fact, not really certain at all, or might even be being a little bit flippant. The naming of the place is a surprise, in that edgelands are often unnamed. Then a linguistic joke is played on the reader, because this junction is also the railway equivalent of a cul-de-sac, with ‘dead-end rails’, an ‘island of dry grass’ (no doubt interspersed by clumps of ragwort, brambles, buddleia and rosebay willowherb), ‘sheds’ (in which some of the ‘dead-end rails’ terminate) and, quite beautifully, a ‘flicker of butterflies / like an old film’. That each of these nouns is prefixed by an ‘its’ is an interesting poetic choice: technically superfluous, their pleasant repetition could conceivably provide a sonic imitation of either the train’s clicks over the rails as it slows round the bend of the Shepperton branch line or of midsummer insects chirring. But the run-on into the second stanza gives a more likely answer: ‘the arcs / of sharp electricity’.  That ‘arcs’ is contained within the word ‘;sparks’ is surely no coincidence; ‘arcs’ is a less obvious but fine choice, though, because, as well as its implicit sound and its assonance with ‘sharp’, it implies movement in order to extend the lovely similes. Despite the prefiguring of ‘ an old film’, the ‘electricity’ simile wrongfoots us into the past. The unfolding of the linked clauses in the second stanza is delightful on the ear, none more so than the verb. Because ‘played’ is surely not the first word which came to mind. In which sense is it meant here? – ‘acted’, ‘performed’, ‘amused itself’ or all of these? Paradoxically, each of these definitions seems both incorrect and just right. The line-breaks are excellent too, giving a vivid tension to what the reader suddenly understands to be a repeated memory from years ago, probably many years ago. The tumble of quick breaks after ‘always’, ‘unexpectedly’ and ‘fraction’ bestow extra emphases on each of those words and speed the reader along in real time. The stanza, and the poem’s opening sentence, ends with that mellifluous old-fashioned ‘rolling stock’, a catch-all, of course, for engines, carriages, wagons, flat-beds, cranes, etc.

Each of the first three lines of the third stanza consists of a cliché / stock phrase, in a manner reminiscent, to me, of Beckett. (Christopher Ricks’s 1993 book Beckett’s Dying Words, OUP, includes the wondrous sentence, ‘Clichés are an opportunity for a writer exactly in being on the face of it nothing to write home about.’) The effect is mildly comedic, a digressive, meta aside, containing the sort of delicately conversational phrasing which workshopping a poem would sadly remove. Then we come to the line ‘our train would pause here’, notable not just for the pause itself, but also because of that ‘our’ which tells the reader that this is a shared reminiscence, and because the echo of ‘Adlestrop’ (‘[. . .] one afternoon / Of heat the express-train drew up there / Unwontedly’) is at its strongest here. Again, the poet surprises with his verb: ‘hesitate forward’ is a perfect oxymoron, not least because the action described so simply is exactly, still, what trains in England do.

After the abundance of the stanza’s opening sentence, the closing three lines bring a nice contrast of tight precision. It’s tempting to see ‘The engine died’ as an inadvertent mirroring of ‘The steam hissed’ in Thomas’s poem, but whereas in the latter ‘Someone cleared his throat, here ‘a kind of queasy silence / took its place’. That ‘queasy’ is spot-on, because in such circumstances, the passenger cannot help but feel slightly anxious – or even more so if they are in a hurry, particularly if they have a connection to make. The absence of an explanation – if the guard doesn’t provide one – for the unscheduled stop can, the longer it goes on, induce all sorts of unforced terrible reasoning.

The poem’s penultimate sentence shakes the narrator out of his nostalgic reverie, by going full-on meta and undercutting what might have been too earnest a poem without a change of perspective. The poem ends where is started, in the present day (presumably), with a rose-tinted, possibly grumpy-old-man-ish, ‘back-in-my-day’ reflection. On first reading, I was disappointed by this stanza, but it’s grown on me: its detached, ironic tone is in keeping with the earlier undertone of flippancy at naming and recalling something fairly unimportant. Memory, it seems to say, can recall such uncomplicated, apparently trivial moments because there were fewer distractions way back when, and the social code dictated that people didn’t act in trains (and other confined public spaces) like they would in their own homes. It feels right that the stanza is only half the length of the prior three, because it wouldn’t have done to labour the ending’s points. As Nell put it, in regard to the book’s opening poem:

Somehow it demonstrates how not to end a poem on a high point. In fact, Philip Rush may be a master of anti-climax.

What of the poem’s form? In her review, Nell also discussed Philip’s use of short, indented lines and how they ‘pace the reader’s progress, ensuring that the end of the sentence arrives with full impact’. Like the brief narratives in many of William Carlos Williams’s poems, Philip’s own are well-matched to what can be quite a lolloping form.

What, too, of the spare punctuation; above all, the near absence of commas? To me, with a tendency to over-punctuate, it’s something I’ve had to accept by holding my nose – to start with anyway. I can see that the minimalist approach aids the flow of Philip’s first-rate poems.

The 2024 Euros Final in the Olympiastadion in Berlin tomorrow reminds me that when I spent the summer of 1987 in West Berlin with my university friend Caroline and her sister Sharon, one day we happened upon the stadium and just walked on in, because we could, and took in the view that spectators had had at the Olympics only 51 years before. Like the football stadia in England at that time, it was run down and all but abandoned.

It seems that Hertha Berlin played their Bundesliga games there up to 1986, but then spent three years at the much smaller Poststadion because their attendances weren’t large enough to justify staying at the Olympiastadion. (A similar fate befell my own team, QPR, when they spent a few years – 1931 to 1933 and the 1962/63 season – at the 1908 and 1948 Olympic stadium, White City, although, conversely, their record attendance, 41,097, was set there for an FA Cup game against Leeds in 1932. Curiouser still, their record attendance at Loftus Road was also against Leeds – 35,353 in 1974.)

I can’t claim that we felt the days of the Wall and the DDR were imminently numbered, but there was perhaps a sense that change was within reach. As a capitalist island within East Germany, West Berlin was a strange, anomalous place, and at any party we went to, there always seemed to be someone who’d escaped from the East. I thought I knew everything then.

Of the two poems I’ve written and had published about that summer, the following, from The Evening Entertainment, is the one I like the most.

*

How wonderful it is to have the Tory clouds lifted from the UK after 14 dark and dreadful years. Yes, Labour won’t be – or be in a position to be – as radical as I and many others would like them to be, but a large swathe of the populace who have just elected them undoubtedly wouldn’t have done so if Labour had stood on a radical platform like they did in 2019. I’m just glad that, as many people have noted, there are grown-ups back at the helm.

Voting is, of course, a privilege which we shouldn’t take for granted. It always grieves me when people say they can’t be bothered to vote and ‘all the parties are the same so what’s the point?’ Thousand of very brave people fought for universal adult franchise and many died in doing so. And, frankly, if people can’t differentiate between the Tories and parties to the left of them, then they really aren’t using their senses in the manner they were designed for.

I always enjoy elections and the act of voting. In order to celebrate that, and the outcome of Thursday’s election, here are some poems by the late, great haiku poet David Cobb. The first is from Jumping from Kiyomizu (Iron Press), 1996, happily still available here; the second and third were published in his 2000 collection A Bowl of Sloes (Snapshot Press); the fourth is from Wing Beats, ed. John Barlow and me (Snapshot Press, 2008), available here; and the fifth was published in David’s 2015 self-published collection Chiaroscuro.

It’s nice to see that David was well ahead of the game in observing dogs at polling stations.

*

wet election day
poster-faces all
a pulp on sticks

*

canvassing again
the dogs seem bigger
this election time

*

politician’s face –
the billboard stuck
in a rabbit hole

*

polling day—
swallows swooping
through a mist of flies

*

polling station
the wall-eyed dog
chained to the door

Taking some books back to the library a few weeks ago, I hadn’t intended to borrow a new lot, but I had an uncanny inkling that I would find something unexpected and fine. I loved Hugo Hamilton’s memoir of his German–Irish childhood, The Speckled People, a few years ago, so I was delighted to find his novel Every Single Minute (2014) on the shelf – and even more so when I saw that it was set in Berlin, a city with which I have my own relationship.

It’s a thinly fictionalised account of Hamilton and the Irish memoirist Nuala O’Faolain visiting the city as a last hurrah for O’Faolain facing an imminent death from cancer, and is packed full of lines and phrases which jump out at the reader. This extract gives a flavour of the novel:

        She want to know what makes me happy.
          I’m not talking about the normal things, she says, like love and drink and drugs and the day your daughter was born.
          What else is there?
          Things that lift your heart, Liam.
          Like a lighthouse.
          What lighthouse?
          Any lighthouse. I tell her I feel glad whenever I see a lighthouse. I have no idea why. Maybe it reminds me of being close to home. Something about the summer. Even the word lighthouse makes me happy. I don’t go looking for them. It’s just lighthouses I happen to see or hear about.
          You’re right, she says. Lighthouses.
          I tell her I’m like everyone else, I love travelling. I love hearing languages I don’t understand. Far away languages, like Japanese. I wouldn’t have a clue what they were saying. I like that. And Irish. I tell her I love it when Radio na Galetachta comes on by accident in the car. When you hear somebody talking his head off with great Irish and you don’t understand half the words.
          Go mbeirimíd be oar an ám seo arís.
          She says it’s the Irish for being alive around the same time next year. Literally. May we meet again alive this time.

(I asked Fourth Estate for permission to quote this extract but received no reply.)

Family – and what we owe to them, and how they are remembered – is a key theme, but the book is much more than that. As Colm Tóibín says in his endorsement, ‘It is a world haunted not only by death, but
also by beauty and the strangeness of being alive.’ It’s also very funny and deeply moving. There’s a good piece in the Irish Times about it, available here.

Extraordinary, isn’t it, how stumbling upon a mesmerising book awash with wisdom can alter one’s perspective?

I also borrowed Deborah Orr’s memoir, Motherwell, published in 2020, a few months after her death from breast cancer at the age of just 57. It’s a brilliant account of her working-class childhood; of her Scottish steel-worker father and his prejudices; and, especially, of her domineering and irascibly contrary Essex mother. Aside from repetitive explanations of what narcissistic behaviour entails, it was a book I felt compelled to read to its end, but in small doses. On reflection, that was probably due to the fact that Orr’s descriptions of her mother reminded me so much of my own Essex mother.

I bought a copy of Hunter Davies’s 2017 memoir, The Co-op’s Got Bananas, subtitled A Memoir of Growing Up in the Post-War North. Like Orr’s, it painted a rich picture of childhood, in Scotland and Carlisle, but also of university in Durham, his first proper journalism job for the Manchester Evening News and his courtship days with Margaret Forster. As memoirs go, it’s a largely jolly affair, with plenty of laughs, but shot through with an underlying note of melancholy.

I’ve been dipping in and out of other books, notably Lara Pawson’s much-praised Spent Light, from the estimable CB Editions, though somehow it’s irritated me as much as I’ve enjoyed or admired it. There’s no doubting her talent: her memoir-of-sorts, This is the Place to Be (2016), was moving, chilling and courageous in equal parts.

The latest issue of Butcher’s Dog is as lovely to look at and read as ever. If only all poetry journals were put together with such care and taste.

I’m also working my way through another publication which has been beautifully produced: the posthumous Wild Cherry: Selected Poems of Nigel Jenkins assembled and introduced by Patrick McGuinness (and available from the publisher Parthian Books here), which is this month’s reading for the poetry book club I belong to. I’m thus far warming most of all to his political poems, which isn’t something I very often say because political poetry usually bores me rigid; Jenkins’s, though, sparkle with fierceness, wit and Welshness, which makes them as relevant now as the times in which they were written.

Finally, I’ve almost finished Barbara Pym’s first (1950) novel, Some Tame Gazelle. It’s very funny and wonderfully well-written; much funnier than, say, either Wodehouse or Benson and much truer to life too. I can see why Larkin was such a fan of Pym, and can also discern an influence on his poetry in the vividness of her similes and metaphorical verbs. Thankfully, we have more Pym novels in the house to keep me entertained as long as the summer lasts.

I daresay I’ve paraphrased Orwell thus, or something similar, before: all poets are unique, but some are more unique than others. Lydia Harris certainly falls into this category, thanks to her instantly recognisable combination of subject-matter, style and purity of diction. Fairly hot on the heels of her first collection, 2022’s Objects for Private Devotion (Pindrop Press) comes her latest, Henrietta’s Library of the Whole Wide World, published by Blue Diode Press and available to buy here. The space of only two years between the collections has not, however, led to a dilution of quality; far from it, because the book fully illustrates Harris’s gifts.

Lydia moved from York to Westray, the sixth largest of the 70 or so Orkneys, a decade ago, and much of her poetry investigates the archipelago’s people (women especially), history, religion, flora, fauna and much else .

Henrietta’s Library is an assortment of 68 concise, closely-linked poems concerning the library of an imagined predecessor in Trenaby, a settlement on Westray. The poems talk to and echo each other in a manner reminiscent of Gillian Allnutt by way of Borges.

Lydia has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.

*

This library of forgetting and remembering

Of the treatises, one is much consumed with mould,
she wears fine linen gloves to smooth the folds,

mixes paste from wheaten flour to glue the Bible’s skin,
wraps the psalter in a velvet gown to stay salt air from seeping in.

The Hours of Boniface perch on her wrist, take flight,
return to her palm. She lectures the mice.

Shelves creak as if they were still at sea.
She binds into each volume a past too big to carry.

Sews gathering into the spine of the land,
the island a volume which rests on her hand.

She appeases the dead, inks a plough in a margin,
three crows and a vine curling to heaven.

*

Let’s start with the form. Here we have rhymed couplets; irregular in length and syllable-count, both within and between them. It’s an attractive form, not just because of its work on the ear, but visually also. That there are only six couplets means, as always with short poems, that every word really does have to count by playing its part, on its own terms and as a contribution towards the whole. End-rhyme is used sparingly in the collection as a whole – only three other poems, including an excellent villanelle )’Henrietta’s Library of the Spaces-between’) – consistently contain it, but many of the poems use occasional end-rhyme and plenty of internal rhyme without it ever seeming obtrusive or forced.

The poem presents puzzles to the reader from the outset. Does that ‘with’ mean the treatise in question is upon the subject of mould, or, as it more likely appears, is it just a synonym for ‘by’? And why is there no conjunction between the two lines, either through a semi-colon, colon or dash after the first line or a ‘so’ or ‘therefore’ at the start of the second line; because surely the wearing of the gloves is a consequence of the pages being mouldy? Or is it? As it stands, it looks and sounds ungrammatical, but does that matter? The impact on the reader’s understanding is, perhaps, one of rendering the ‘action’ pleasingly synchronous and consequently timeless. What century is the poem set in?

The flow into the second couplet provides no answer to that question, because wheat paste has been used for millennia to bind books, and here it’s being used, by Henrietta we presume, to repair ‘the Bible’s skin’, most probably vellum. The eye-rhyme between ‘paste’ and ‘psalter’ helps to bind the lines. The poem’s fourth line, like the whole, rings beautifully on the ear, helped by that delightfully archaic ‘stay’ and the sequence of ‘s’ sounds. The care with which Henrietta undertakes her work is amply shown but not pointed out.

The third couplet is more puzzling still. One might presume that the ‘Hours of Boniface’ is a canonical liturgy, written by the Devon-born Benedictine saint of that name, but how the daily offices can ‘perch on her wrist, take flight’ and ‘return to her palm’ is a mystery: it is as if they have merrily metamorphosed into a butterfly. The magical realism is compounded by the couplet’s extraordinary second sentence, presented so simply that the reader can do no more than accept it at face value; the word ‘mice’ echoing the last syllable of the saint’s name.

The poem’s vista is extended beyond the confines of the library within the fourth couplet. Again without explicitly telling the reader so, that ‘still’ somehow implies that the shelves are made from wood salvaged from a ship. The trust that the poet has in the reader here, and throughout the poem and the collection as a whole, is a lesson in itself. The couplet’s second line plays more outwardly with the concept of time; it’s a statement-making line which speaks eloquently for itself, yet its profundity does not overload the poem.

In the fifth couplet, a knowledge of sewing is helpful in order to intuit the meaning fully. Wiki gives the following:

Gathering turns the edge of a piece of fabric into a bunch of small folds that are held together by a thread close to the edge. Gathering makes the fabric shorter where it is stitched. The whole of the fabric flares out into irregular, rolling folds beyond the gathered stitching.

Here, that meaning makes Henrietta the binder of the world around her: the image of Westray as ‘a volume which rests on her hand’ is a delight. The syntax is once more slightly askew, in that one would expect a comma at the end of the preceding couplet and a lower-case ‘s’
at the start of ‘Sews’; nonetheless, it reads and sounds perfectly compatible with the rest of the poem and its spirit.

The poem might well have ended there. Harris, though, is canny enough to move the poem, in one more couplet, to another angle: the book-restorer turns illustrator, and in so doing, we are told, ‘appeases the dead’. What is meant by this? Presumably, it is in keeping with the tradition of Dark Ages and medieval manuscript illustrators who added to, and annotated, the works of their forebears. The couplet, like its two immediate predecessors, is very weighty in terms of significance, but the simple, limpid lightness and sureness of the language ensures that the poem can be received as if the fantastical content is entirely straightforward. The poet’s sleight of hand in accomplishing that achievement cannot be underestimated.

So, back to the start, what of the title? It nods, for me, to Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, though I doubt that was intended. The act of ‘remembering’, of summoning and respecting the ghosts of the past, suffuses the poem. Maybe the ‘forgetting’ refers to the mouldy decay into which the treatise has been left, before Henrietta’s work provides the ‘remembering’. It’s a title which cross-refers to plenty of others in the collection: ‘This library of forgetting and remembering’ is a library within a larger library. Underlying the poem, and the collection, is a deep love and reverence for books as sources of knowledge and as articles in themselves. In these times of increasing digitisation, it serves us all well to be reminded of those values.

With many thanks to editor (and very fine poet) Robert Selby, I have two new poems up at Wild Court, here.

Burra designed sets for several ballet productions, including Helpmann’s Miracle in the Gorbals, 1944, and was a lifelong film buff.

My fiction-reading splurge earlier this year petered out after a couple of Rupert Thomson novels: after finishing The Insult, a game of two equally engrossing halves, I read Death of a Murderer, in which the police officer protagonist is called upon to spend a night guarding the coffin of the titular character, based on Myra Hindley, before the funeral. Thankfully, the book is more about the copper’s past and equally shaky present. Thomson is a fine novelist, whose range of inventively cinematic and always dependably readable novels reminds me of the oeuvre of Brian Moore, whose books I loved in the ’80s and ’90s.

Among the poetry collections I’ve read lately are Tracey Herd’s first (Bloodaxe, 1996) collection, No Hiding Place, which more than hinted at the promise she fulfilled in her next two books, Dead Redhead (2001) and Not in This World (2014). Her fourth collection will be out next year. I’ve also just read Reading the Bones (Canongate, 1999) by another Scottish poet, but one new to me, Janet Paisley – a raw, but brilliant collection. No wonder Kathleen Jamie, no less, gave her a glowing endorsement. Alas, though, she died in 2018. I’ll have to track down her other books.

I admired the April choice for the monthly poetry reading group I belong to: Patrick McGuinness’s third Cape collection, Blood Feather, from last year. It consists of a superb sequence of 22 mostly short poems about his mother, then a more miscellaneous section, the highlights of which include ‘Landline’, a study in obsolescence which segues into a finely judged exaggeration, and ‘Travelodge’, which nails the dubious charm of Britain’s number one budget-hotel chain and how staying in them implicitly turn guests into lost souls. I loved this line: ‘The television is a furnace burning local news.’ Both those poems, and others, veer between high comedy and seriousness in a highly-skilled manner. McGuinness has an uncanny ability to take his poems into surprising directions; always a sign of an excellent poet, I find.

A harder read was Donald Hall’s The Painted Bed (2002), his second solo collection after the death of his wife, Jane Kenyon, in 1998. Many of the poems are understandably heavy with grief and absence, and inspired by the example of Hardy, but the book ends with a set of rather hideous ‘erotic’ poems which are very much best skipped.

For some reason I can’t remember, I took my old copy of Children of Albion, the 1968 anthology of ‘Underground’ UK poetry edited by Michael Horovitz, off my shelf a few weeks ago and I then skimmed through it on several train journeys. However influential it may’ve been, there’s a fair bit of dross in it, striving much too hard either to channel a Ginsbergian prophetic tone and/or to be quirkily surreal. There was some good stuff too, principally by Roy Fisher and Tom Raworth. As has been noted many times in the 56 intervening years, the gender imbalance is such that its three women poets – among them Horovitz’s then wife, Frances – feel barely even tokenistic. Horovitz’s enthusiastically rambling afterword was more enjoyable than most of the poetry. I saw a good few of the book’s poets read at the Albert Hall one hot day in the summer of 1984; one of the best-known was Adrian Mitchell, churning out his famous protest poem, ‘To Whom it May Concern’: to my then 17-year-old self, stuff like that seemed interesting only for its historical curiosity. Similarly, the anthology as a whole hasn’t stood the test of time very well.

Another poetry collection which I have enjoyed, though, is Medbh McGuckian’s 1982 debut, The Flower Master, which I really should’ve read years ago, given how prominent she was when I first went to the north of Ireland in 1985. It’s a classic. Cahal Dallat wrote about it perceptively in no. 47 of The North in 2011, noting, inter alia, its metaphysicality and this:

From today’s perspective the collection’s horticultural references, flowers and fruits, butterflies, and the whole domestic matter of love and love-making, home and home-making, however partially glimpsed through a veiled and fragmentary verbal music, constitute, invoke – take one straight back to – a sort of 1970s Scenes from Married Life in a set dressed by Laura Ashley but with the emotional and lyrical toughness of a Dory Previn or a Joni Mitchell.

It’s hard, too, to disagree with Dallat’s concluding sense of confusion: ‘And I still don’t necessarily ‘get it’ and perhaps don’t need to and don’t want to.’ For me, the collection’s beauty lies in its mysteries, but not in an annoying crack-the-code manner, and I know it’s one which I will re-read.

In summary, as you can see, my reading has become a bit too haphazard even by my standards. I’m not sure if that’s a bad or good thing.

Any journal which nods towards Hawkwind in its subtitle – ‘poetry with strangeness and charm’ – is fine by me. I was delighted when editor Charles Johnson accepted my poem below, and very glad to be alongside Lucy Calder, Lydia Harris, Laura McKee, Pam Thompson and other poets whose poems I admire. The wide lefthand margin in OWP means that the long lines of my poem had to get tucked in, so I’m putting it here as I intended it to be.

I have Helena (Nell) Nelson to thank for this, and for permission to quote from her writing. A while back, I was looking through past issues of The North and came across Nell’s appreciation of the poetry and prose of Anna Adams (1926–2011) in issue no. 47, 2011. Nell’s interest had been piqued by the poet and editor John Killick. Unfortunately, as Nell remarked at the start of her piece, ‘Good poets get lost’, a theme to which the conclusion winningly returned:

Anna Adams is not lost. She is here, waiting to be found where she has always been, between the lines of her poems. The space she creates there is like the Tardis: what first looks small gets bigger as you enter. Once you have been in, you come out changed, remembering, as though for the first time, that true poetry is like nothing else, like nothing else at all.

It was with those words in mind that I bought a copy of Adams’s 1986 Peterloo Poets collection, Trees in Sheep Country. Almost all the poems are nature poems, set in and around Horton in Ribblesdale, in the Pennines in the north-west corner of North Yorkshire, not far from the Lancashire and Cumbria coast and close to Brigflatts, to which Basil Bunting added an extra ‘g’ for his supreme extravaganza of the same name. More importantly, they are wonderful poems, i.e. full of wonders. Take, for example, the first four (of nine) stanzas of ‘Rearing Trees in Sheep Country’:

Sheep are tree-wolves. Even the hare attacks
    in snow, and gnaws the bark far from the ground,
    recording height of drifts, but seldom rings trees round
and doesn’t hunt the rooted flock in packs.

But in late February, belly’s trouble
    drives the sheep wild. Though bulging big with lamb
    they scramble over walls and topple them.
Where one stone falls, soon a wide gate of rubble

welcomes the eager rabble. Our young trees
    are sweet as sugar-sticks with rising sap,
    and tempt the sheep as a self-service shop
tempts children. Rubber lips stretch up and seize

horse-chestnut toffees, tear smooth twigs of beech
    whose curving fingers beckon towards spring;
    grey mouths emulsify mute promising
of intricately folded summer speech.

This, I think, exemplifies Nell’s astute observation that, ‘[Adams] knows how to play, how to pursue a thought through beautiful syntax.’ I especially like the wit in the third stanza; and how all the precision is contained within a framework of a fine, unobtrusive rhyme-scheme and an almost always regular syllable-count. That last clause sounds on the ear as gorgeously as any sweet treat would melt in the mouth.

A poem by Adams was ‘Poem of the Week’ in the Guardian in 2011, here. I will be seeking out more of her publications, rare though they may be.

I like the fact, too, that John Killick passed on his enthusiasm for Adams to Nell, who in turn did so to me. Now I’m doing likewise to you, kind reader.

Back in December 2022, I sang the praises, here, of Jackie Wills’ SmithǀDoorstop book, On Poetry*, and noted the excellence of her exegesis of Patience Agbabi’s superb ‘The Doll’s House’, a poem written in ‘rime royale’; 12 seven-line stanzas, each in an ABABBCC pattern, originated by Chaucer and used by Spenser, Yeats and Auden among others. The poem slowly but surely nails Britain’s terrible culpability for its colonial crimes and practice of slavery, the horrors and legacy of which it, as a sovereign state, is yet to acknowledge fully, let alone provide any restitution for.

So I thought, a month or two ago, that it was time to read some more of Agbabi’s poetry, and I bought her 2008 collection, Bloodshot Monochrome, published by Canongate and available here.

It has an arresting cover, in orange, red, black and white, but it’s let down by being printed on the sort of low-quality paper which Puffin Books used in the Seventies. Thankfully, though, the poems don’t disappoint. As ‘The Doll’s House’ demonstrated, Agbabi is a brilliant, sometimes offbeat formalist poet, and there are, inter alia, many fine sonnets in the book, concluding with a 14-sonnet sequence, ‘Vicious Circle’ which unfolds a Noir-ish tale of dangerous desire; an unorthodox crown of sonnets of sorts. As much as her subject-matter and viewpoint, it’s Agbabi’s play with form which makes her poems stand out..

A series of seven dramatic monologues really grabs me, including ‘Skins’, chosen by Carol Rumens in 2016 as a Guardian ‘Poem of the Week’, here. As Rumens notes, it’s a sestina, but with short lines, meaning that it doesn’t drag on wearily and underwhelmingly like many sestinas do. Over the years, I’ve had the occasional tussle with myself about the ethics of dramatic monologues, and which voices it is acceptable to adopt and which not. Those Agbabi inhabits are fine and entirely believable. My favourite is ‘Heads’, in which Thomas Cromwell sardonically, and post-mortem, digresses from the appearance of Anne of Cleves to a discussion of axe-wielding executioners:

My fate was set. For Anne Boleyn he hired
the best from France; for me a beardless boy.
Be not afraid, I said, pray, take this gift.
’Tis all I have. Both of our hands were shaking.
I prayed aloud. The crowd, an army shrieking
Traitor! Its face degenerate with hatred.

* I recently re-read On Poetry and found it as illuminating and helpful as I did the first time round.

I was recently asked to provide some blurb for Doreen Gurrey’s Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition-winning, A Coalition of Cheetahs. It’s a super read, and I described it thus:

How skilfully and humanely Doreen Gurrey’s poems depict whole worlds. Here are sharply-sketched portraits of family members; inquisitive cows and fiercer creatures; keepsakes both precious and not; incidents both comic and dark; the love of Gwen John for Rodin – and among them all, the ‘hiss and kiss’ of life, in York, Spain and elsewhere, as refracted through the clearest lens.

The online launch can be viewed on YouTube, here (Doreen’s reading starts just after the 58-minutes mark), and the pamphlet is available to buy here.

It might seem odd that, not having eaten meat since 1982, I should become obsessed with something so very meaty, but Siobhán Campbell’s poem ‘Rump’ in the latest issue of Poetry Wales is just the sort of superb poem which floats my boat, grounded as it is in the strangest reality. In that respect, it reminds me of the output of some other Irish writers I love: Martina Evans, Matthew Sweeney, Flann O’Brien, even Patrick McGinley.

I’d quote from it, but really the poem needs to be read in its entirety. If you don’t subscribe to Poetry Wales, then maybe you should, here.

With thanks to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie, my review of Mike Barlow’s latest collection, A Land Between Borders (Templar Poetry), is in this week’s edition of The Friday Poem, here.