Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

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!

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

canapé sighs, gene-slimy, semi-nosing.
Limned owls will leach, ruin Midi sow’s icy tit.

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.

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.

Another miscellany, which is how I like it.

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.

The full issue can be accessed here.

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.

My thanks to editor Michael Bartholomew-Biggs for publishing a poem of mine, in good company, in the autumn issue of London Grip, 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.

*

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.

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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.

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wet election day
poster-faces all
a pulp on sticks

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canvassing again
the dogs seem bigger
this election time

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

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polling day—
swallows swooping
through a mist of flies

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polling station
the wall-eyed dog
chained to the door