It would be remiss of me not to revisit Hamburger before his centenary year ends. I wonder who else has marked it; not even PN Review as far as I can see, a surprising omission given that Carcanet ‘inherited’ Hamburger when they absorbed Anvil’s list and then published A Michael Hamburger Reader, available here, ten years after Hamburger’s death (and five after its editor, Dennis O’Driscoll’s).
His final collection, Circling the Square (Anvil Press Poetry, 2007), was published not long before he died, in June of that year.
Cover of Circling the Square
His love of nature, particularly in his adopted home county, shone forth to the end, none more so in the poem below, suffused with colour and light, fading to darkness at its close. As ever, his syntax was slightly, but likeably, awry, here within the penultimate stanza.
Winter Evenings, East Suffolk
The sun’s and our days are shortening While before solstice the visible moon fills out, What on these lowland wide horizons lingers As though to reiterate, recall, is dusk: On the south-western from flame to glimmer Slowly the glow subsides From scarlet to roseate, amber drifts and shifts Or else to a strip of blue Deeper than any a summer noon sustained. If a black cloud hangs there it shines Rimmed with departing light.
December’s last leafage responds: A red so dark on this maple It’s nightfall too, detained, Wisps of pale yellow to ochre On the rugosa stems wilting As on those with buds for another year.
Then, moon not yet full, whole skies Whether clouded or clear And silver tarnishing.
Never a night is total Until our vision, dimmed, Disowns the shapes, the shadows, All colours mixed on palettes too far away.
Shash Trevett’s debut full collection, The Naming of Names, published by the Poetry Business and available to buy here, follows on from her 2021 pamphlet From a Borrowed Land, with more poems relating aspects of the Tamil experience of the civil war in Sri Lanka between 1983 and 2009 and some on other, ancillary matters: British colonialism and racism (including that of the UK government’s immigration policies). Readers may also know that Trevett was one of the three co-editors of the exemplary and acclaimed Out of Sri Lanka anthology, published by Bloodaxe last year.
Cover of The Naming of Names
Estimates, disputed by the state’s Sinhalese majority, suggest that more than 100,000 Tamil civilians died during the conflict, many as victims of brutal violence, including sexual violence, bombings, massacres and/or dismemberments. As the title indicates, Trevett’s collection aims to put names to some of those victims, to reanimate them as real people, so that they aren’t just statistics. As a refugee from the war herself, Trevett writes with understandable passion, though in spare language which allows the individual and collective stories and incidents to speak for themselves without embellishment. It’s necessarily a difficult read, as any bearing of witness to war crimes is, as in ‘And on the Ceiling, a Lizard’:
When he rested his gun against the wall and told me to lie down. When he placed a grenade by the pillow and unbuckled his belt
I watched the dust motes hang in the air and the lizard freeze on the ceiling, and knew that words had never had the power to save me.
This almost matter-of-fact recounting magnifies the terror far more than any liberal sprinkling of adjectives could do. It’s hard in reading this fine collection not to think of Gaza, Sudan and other places where State-inflicted warfare inevitably kills thousand of civilians as collateral damage. Above all, though, it shines a light on what very specifically happened to the Tamil people, the ramifications of which are naturally still being felt. (When I worked for Kingston Council, in the Student Awards team, in the early 1990s, I saw a good number of customers who were Tamils living in exile in Tolworth and some of whom revealed the circumstances of what they’d seen. That Tamil community is still going strong.) This brave, elegantly crafted collection doesn’t flinch from the horrors, yet somehow also finds a sense of beauty among them:
[. . .] The last mango tree waits, remembering those years when children clung to its branches, women picked its fruit – green for pickling, honeyed orange for eating. The last mango tree knows that its branches hold the secrets of a lost people. It stands guarding memories, surrounded by abandoned and derelict life.
(‘The Last Mango Tree’)
I’ve written about Robert Hamberger’s poetry before, in a review for The North of his 2019 collection, Blue Wallpaper; I concluded by saying that, ‘It’s high time that Hamberger becomes widely acknowledged as the marvellous poet he is.’ His new, fifth collection, Nude Against a Rock, published by Waterloo Press and available to buy here, amply justifies my belief that Hamberger is a highly gifted poet.
Cover of Nude Against a Rock
It’s a bumper collection, stretching to 100 pages, yet it doesn’t feel over-stuffed. That may in part be because most of Hamberger’s poems are fairly short, including lots of his trademark exceptional sonnets, which he always turns with a naturalness belying the constraints of the form; but more, though, because they always have a discernible point to them. The first section contains 17 poems about his husband, such as the terrifically-titled and tender ‘Love Song for a Bigot’:
If whatever I do tonight makes you shudder you don’t need to watch. When I kiss his eyebrow his shoulder his dick it’s none of your business. I claim sanctuary in his arms. My door is bolted. I’m an eel and he’s my river.
The middle section, of 46 poems, is more miscellaneous: here we find, inter alia, poems for and about his children and grandchildren; recollections of his father and mother and of old, departed friends, including Mark Hollis of Talk Talk, and his aunts who so memorably featured in Blue Wallpaper also. There’s also a sonnet called ‘Street Song’ – presumably a nod to Thom Gunn’s poem of the same name, though the two poems’ subjects are very different – which seems to be in the voice of a homeless person: ‘Who owns me? Who chose / to call me mister when time’s harder / than ten pavements and I need no sparrows / whistling for my crumbs?’
The final section has the same name as the book’s title, deriving from a painting by the gay artist Keith Vaughan, 1912–1977. Its 28 poems respond to selected journal entries of Vaughan’s, from August 1939 up to his suicide by an overdose after two years of living with cancer, and/or other writings and artworks. Sequences can often feel too forced in places, but this doesn’t, as Hamberger fully inhabits Vaughan’s voice and creative mind, at times thrillingly:
You leap into paint: its scuffs and strokes and splashes – gouache seems a caress on paper, oils a sticky glut, ink and wash thunder and cloud. They make a man of you, this body of contradictions standing barefoot by the easel. You leap over naysayers, the obstructers, your damned neurosis, foggy doubt. You leap over courts of justice, steeples in autumn villages, your mother’s grip, your lover’s smothering.
(‘Leaping Figure’)
He also convincingly ventriloquises Vaughan’s despair towards the end:
Shall I drink now from the yellow cup, let rainfall soak a broken lip a parchment tongue – stream into my hands until I’m overflowing? Look how this slate edge balances green, how empty my hours have become – like a jug loses purpose when the pouring’s done.
(‘Still Life with Greengages and Yellow Cup’)
As I noted four years ago, Waterloo Press’s production values are superb, perhaps the best of any poetry publisher in the UK, and in this case they perfectly augment the satisfaction which the reader gains from the tremendous contents.
I’ve also read two more Rupert Thomson novels: The Book of Revelation (2000) and Never Anyone But You (2018). The more I read Thomson’s books, the more he reminds me of Brian Moore, whose novels spanned a vast range of subjects, narrative voices and styles, but never less than compellingly; and like Moore knew, Thomson also knows how to write proper page-turners. Given that my attention span for prose is much lower than it used to be, that fact is increasingly important!
To give a flavour of the plot of The Book of Revelation would be to ruin it, so suffice to say that its plot twists and first-person psychological insights are engaging throughout.
Never Anyone But You is also written in the first person, in the voice of Suzanne Malherbe, AKA Marcel Moore, and recounts the lives and deaths of Moore and her lifelong partner, Lucy Schwob, AKA Claude Cahun. As is increasingly well-known, both Moore and Cahun were avant garde, multi-talented creatives who chose to live their unorthodox, gay lives openly. I loved this line:
The longer you’re with someone, the more mysterious they become.
Moore and Cahun’s finest moments arguably came during the war when, living on Jersey, they defied the Nazis for four years by spreading propaganda leaflets designed to demoralise the occupying forces, until they were betrayed to the Gestapo. Thomson’s version of their story is really quite beautiful and evidently painstakingly researched. Thomson’s output is yet to garner any literary prizes whatsoever, which is mystifying. Hey ho.
With thanks to the editor, Hilary Menos, for commissioning it, my review of Victoria Gatehouse’s excellent debut full collection, The Hawthorn Bride, is at The Friday Poem today, here.
The collection, published by Indigo Dreams, is available to buy here.
It’s been a while since I read Chris Edgoose’s admirable and enticing review for The Friday Poem, here, of Geraldine Clarkson’s second full collection, Medlars, available to buy from its publisher Shearsman Books here (with free p&p, might I add); and therefore about time I bought and read a copy. That I have now done, and what a deferred pleasure it was and is!
Cover of Medlars
Mystifyingly overlooked for the major prize shortlists, Medlars is simultaneously both a state-of-England-post-Brexit collection and one which explores the nation’s folklore and psychogeography. It does so in rich, often tongue-twisting language; the wordsmithery of Shakespeare by way of Raymond Queneau and even, perhaps, ‘Professor’ Stanley Unwin. Consider, for example the second part (‘oulipo yew engenders TT strop’), a sonnet of sorts, of ‘golden opportunity, wet streets’, which I find it difficult not to read in Unwin’s voice:
oily graveside glove shunted. Motto pops. Cone shape sings, mining tissue of hay – vie a dapple, a coin, a thorny no.
In pop tryout, a doter overeaten (why?) a hotdog mound, phone nite, curdle of slow – nearer – eyes, hoof, nose; glib moon, dew nines; anatomy hefted.
And, if egoists speak no cot, they hover, chattered, or – alembic wren-rug – retrain tweets: the raw iota dots, forced sons, idle lies. Faeces pour
Yes, poetry like this is demanding for the reader, but it isn’t just ‘nonsense poetry’; it’s hugely satisfying, on the ear, the eye and in how it forces the reader to savour each clause and think deeply.
A three-part sequence of ‘Rivariations’ concerning three rivers, the Leam, Ouse and Derwent, begins thus:
Lovely the Leam and her sisters milling through Midlands watermeadows. Broadbacked and elegant, halving the Spa town.
There was a story in childhood of three daughters of one family, adrift in a boat, lost. Leam lowered her gaze and mourned. Hypocrite river.
For me, this is delightful, magical writing by a poet not content merely to write anecdotal poetry, but to stretch herself by extending the limits of her language and control, and to follow her own vision. Her poem on the Derwent and its ‘brown surge’ is one I can easily relate to, having walked many miles alongside it in Derbyshire one extraordinarily muddy Christmas Eve a few years ago, as illustrated here.
I much enjoyed Clarkson’s first collection Monica’s Overcoat of Flesh (Nine Arches, 2020) also, and I’m eagerly anticipating her third collection, due from Verve Poetry soon.
I read Kathleen Jamie’s first two collections of nature and travel essays – Findings (2005) and Sightlines (2012) – when they appeared and loved them both. But they weren’t so much nature or travel essays as uncategorisable, touching on humankind’s relationship with nature, both mutual and destructive, rather than aspects of nature itself. You might say that they were as anthropological as anything. Her third essay collection, Surfacing (Sort of Books, available here), was published in 2020 but I’ve only just got round to reading it. What a deferred pleasure it was. Passing into middle age had evidently deepened Jamie’s already considerable philosophical grasp of time, ancestry and rootedness, as she wrote about places and peoples at what ‘civilisation’ might regard as the edge of things:
Transformation is possible. A bear can become a bird. A sea can vanish, rivers change course. The past can spill out of the earth, become the present. (‘In Quinhagak’)
But Jamie is no wide-eyed truth-seeker ready to swallow other cultures’ wisdom unconditionally, and puts enough distance to enable the reader to intuit her strength of feeling. As one might expect from such a first-rate poet, Jamie’s writing is often beautiful. It’s now 32 years since her first non-poetry book, The Golden Peak was published (reissued in 2002 as Among Muslims, subtitled ‘Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan’), so a rate of one every eight years seems to me to be just about right.
I’ve recently read another prose work by a poet, although one better known for his prose than his poetry: Common Ground by Rob Cowen (Hutchinson, 2015, reissued by Windmill Books, 2016). I started it a year ago, then stopped because I couldn’t get into it. A blurb on the back by Alan Bennett no less – ‘[A] cracking book and having finished I now feel deprived’ – eventually drew me back in. It’s essentially the story of Cowen’s return to a village near Harrogate and his exploration of the edgelands thereabouts, with a background ‘plot’ of his partner’s pregnancy and birth. His prose is at times as dense as the thickets and brambles which crowd those edgelands. I was particularly impressed by one sub-chapter, part II of ‘The Union of Opposites’, in which he takes on the first-person persona of one John Joseph Longthorne, to tell his imagined life-story as
the youngest of four brothers but the only one blessed with cheiloschisis. People tell me that the preferred term nowadays is ‘cleft lip’, but back then even facial surgeons called it a harelip. In the end it doesn’t matter how you dress it up, it’s the same thing: a fissure, a rift in the tissue of my labium superius oris that happened before I was even born, a non-union that occurred in the womb.
That brief, 19-page story leads me to think that if and when Cowen ever writes a novel it will be tremendous.
I can’t pretend that I didn’t find some of the edgelands descriptions a bit hard-going and I didn’t emerge from the book with the same sense that Little Alan did. Neither did I feel that it deserves its status as one of the best ‘new nature’ books yet to be written; nevertheless, I could see why people liked it.
I had the same sort of feeling when at last I finished Spent Light by Lara Pawson, which has been sitting on my bedside table since I started reading it back in May. Somewhat oddly, it’s been nominated for the 2024 Goldsmiths Prize, whose statement of intent is as follows:
The Goldsmiths Prize was established in 2013 to celebrate the qualities of creative daring associated with the University and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The annual prize of £10,000 is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.
Although the publisher, the estimable CB Editions, categorised it as ‘fiction / memoir / history’ on the back cover, Spent Light felt more like a series of reminiscences and vignettes rather than mould-breaking fiction. It had its moments; somehow though it wasn’t for me. One benefit of reading it was that Pawson raved about White Egrets by Derek Walcott, a collection which has been sitting on my shelves unread for a few years, so I’ve now started reading it.
When Fleur Adcock died the other week, there were many comments about how she was the last UK-based poet of her generation and every time I saw words to that effect, I wanted to shout, What about Ruth Fainlight?’ Fainlight was born in 1931, three years before Adcock, and is still with us. A few weeks ago, I bought and read a copy of her 1976 collection Another Full Moon and enjoyed it immensely. Her poem ‘Ghosts’ begins:
Old men, women, ancients, old crones, Jealous and interfering ghosts; Ancestors with their accusations, Who know best where to place each wound, Who, fierce and unforgiving, lap my tears, Thicken the cries in my throat.
I was bound to be predisposed towards her given the fact that she was married to Alan Sillitoe, the first writer for adults I ever read; however, I wasn’t expecting to like her poetry as much as I did. I think I may have heard her read back in the 1980s, possibly on the bill for the all-day extravaganza at the Royal Albert Hall in 1984. One of her most well-known poems ‘Handbag’ is one of her four poems on the Poetry Archive website, here.
I re-read Sean O’Brien’s The Drowned Book (Picador, 2007), which won both the Eliot and the Forward, and loved again its wit and erudition, and admired especially two elegies, a sonnet for (and named for) Thom Gunn and a longer poem for Ken Smith. That was by way of a warm-up for the pleasure of reading his 2015 collection (also from Picador), the drily-titled The Beautiful Librarians. It includes such gems as the marvellous title poem, about ‘The ice-queens in their realms of gold’; ‘Nobody’s Uncle’, in which the eponymous anti-hero ‘might be taken for a fisherman / Who sets out more from habit than belief’; ‘At the Solstice’, with its killer line ’As daylight turns to cinema once more’; and the arcane strangeness of ‘Grey Rose’, which ends thus:
The grey rose is and cannot be. It neither toils nor spins. It waits. A truth that will not set you free, Grey rose that’s nothing but a rose That flowers here where nothing grows.
Last Wednesday, I attended an Off the Shelf Festival event in Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery: readings from the new SmithǀDoorstop anthology, Coal, edited, though not credited as such, by Ann and Peter Sansom and Sarah Wimbush, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the 1984–5 NUM strike. Peter Sansom, Wimbush and Ian Parks read poems, as did a few other contributors, including Alan Payne, Sue Riley (pictured below), Laura Strickland, and Tracy Dawson, whom I’ve got to know through Parks’s Read to Write group in Doncaster. It was a super event and the book – available here – is even better, containing as it does not just brilliant poems, but also prose, and photographs from the strike.
Sue Riley
Now I’m immersed in reading books which I’m due to review. As chores go, I can’t think of anything finer.
With thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie of The Friday Poem, my review of Sarah Wimbush’s excellent STRIKE, which was nominated for the Forward Best Collection Prize, is here.
I’ve been listening to a National Centre for Writing podcast on ‘Writing through place’, a conversation between two fantastic poets, Rebecca Goss and Heidi Williamson. It’s available here and is really lovely and inspiring.
I tried my best to get to grips with Kay Ryan’s Odd Blocks – Selected and New Poems (Carcanet, 2011), and liked her quirky, playful poetry to start with; but as the book wore on, it felt like I was reading a weird mixture of Lorine Niedecker, Anglo-Saxon riddles, the Martian Poets, Dr Seuss and the utterances of Chauncey Gardiner in Being There.
Ryan was one of the poets new to me in the truly excellent anthology, Women’s Work, subtitled ‘Modern Women Poets Writing in English’, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, published by Seren in 2016 and available here. It’s a chunky book, divided up by (loose) themes, and is as readable and enjoyable as any anthology I’ve ever read. Come to think of it, I’ve rarely read an anthology all the way through like I did with this one. Other poets featured whom I was aware of but had never really read before include Dorianne Lux, Ruth Fainlight, Sarah Hannah and Olive Senior. I’ve since bought collections by some of them to add to my TBR pile. It reminded me that the purpose of an anthology should never be an attempt to be fully representative of a cohort or period, because that would be impossible; but rather to shine spotlights, however brief, on poets and poems as little known as some of the others are well-known. It’s that rubbing of shoulders which provides the delights for seasoned readers. That’s not to say, though, that Women’s Work wouldn’t make an excellent introduction for readers who haven’t read much contemporary poetry because it most certainly would.
For the Finding Poetry Book Club of which I’m a member, we read Abigail’s parry’s 2023 collection, I Think We’re Alone Now. On first reading, though I admired Parry’s craft, I didn’t care for the book at all, and thought it was trying too hard to be clever at the expense of feeling. I struggled to puck a poem I liked enough to read when the group of us met online, and then fundamentally misread the poem. However, by the end of the evening, I had a better understanding of, and liking for some of the poems in the collection, which, I suppose, is precisely why book clubs are a good idea.
I also started reading the Selected Poems of Denise Levertov, in a NDP edition from 2002, just three years after she died. I first read some of Levertov’s poems in my teens, but this is the first time I’ve read her in any depth. Like Gunn, Levertov was born and brought up in England and emigrated to America in her early Twenties; this, together with her mixed religious heritage and her own beliefs and values, made for a background which infuses her poetry. I’m not usually a great one for religious poetry of any kind, but her six-part poem ‘The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342–1416’ has an appealing clarity and tone. Levertov had had deep friendships with William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth, and was also associated with both the Black Mountain Poets and New York School, and all of those can be discerned in her poems; yet she was most definitely her own woman:
Julian laughing aloud, glad with a most high inward happiness,
Julian open calmly to dismissive judgements flung backward down the centuries— ‘delirium’, ‘hallucination’;
Julian walking under-water on the green hills of moss, the detailed sand and seaweed. pilgrim of the depths, unfearing;
twenty years later carefully retelling each unfading vision, each pondered understanding
How much this is a self-identification with Julian is hard to tell, but I find it more moving and memorable than, say, her poems of the Blitz, during which she worked as a nurse, and those protesting against the Vietnam War. The same goes for her incredible poems ‘The Change’ and ‘Enduring Love’, both as good as any poem about the dead that I’ve ever read. It seems that, again like Gunn, she suffered from being thought of as ‘English’ in America and ‘American’ in Britain, i.e. that she somehow remained neither one nor the other, and therefore much less significance was attached to her than she deserved. It’s good that Gunn is now belatedly getting more critical attention over here, but Levertov may well still be unjustly under-read and under-appreciated.
Thanks to the library, I read two memoirs in September: Eileen Atkins’s marvellous Will She Do?, which she wrote during the Covid lockdowns when acting was next to impossible, and Janice Galloway’s All Made Up (2012). Atkins’s descriptions of her working-class childhood in Tottenham and her circuitous route into her profession are brilliantly recalled and often very funny. Galloway’s book, detailing her hard early life in Ardrossan in the Sixties and Seventies, is largely memorable for the superb portrait painted of her (16 years older) sister, Cora, whose attitude to life seemed to invoke in Galloway both revulsion and admiration, and for Galloway’s own determination to make her way in the world.
The best novel I read in September was the black comedy Sheep’s Clothing by Celia Dale, originally published in 1988 and reissued by Daunt Books. It’s another book recommended in a review by the excellent Jacqui’s Wine Journal, here. Dale was 75 when it was published, yet it’s as fresh, masterful and richly funny as if it was the work of a current contemporary, especially in the wonderful dialogue. It’s as fine as any British novel of the 1980s that I can recall.
Having recently taken up swimming again for the first time in years, I’m delighted to have a poem about that pastime (and other stuff) in the latest issue of The Honest Ulsterman, here. I’m grateful to the editor, Greg McCartney.
Getting poems published surely is like waiting for buses. With my thanks to editor Ben Banyard, I’m delighted to be back on the Black Nore Review site today, here.
I’m delighted and honoured to be the featured poet in the new issue of The Fig Tree, here.
I am grateful to its editor and fine poet and reviewer, Tim Fellows. Although it’s based in Derbyshire and has thus far predominantly featured poetry from writers based in the North of England, it’s open to submissions from anywhere – details are here.
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.
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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.
Name-sign of Springfield CourtGate of Springfield Court
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.
Burra’s graveBurra’s headstone
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.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 