Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

Last week, I attended the launch of Matthew Stewart’s collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t (HappenStance Press) and Mat Riches’s Collecting the Data. The latter, available here from Red Squirrel Press, is Mat’s long-awaited and excellent debut pamphlet. The launch itself was a joyous and merrily raucous occasion, with readings not only from the two launchers, but also some mighty fine guest readers – Eleanor Livingstone, Hilary Menos and Maria Taylor.

There was a lot of love and affection in the room for Mat and his warm, witty  and well-crafted poems.

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

*

Half Term at Longleat Safari Park

We could only watch the rhesus macaque
tear off our dusty windscreen wiper blades.
His partner and kid appeared from nowhere
in the rearview mirror in what I now
know to have been a planned pincer movement
or David Blaine-esque sleight of hand.

And we thought getting in was expensive!
Just think, if they’d had the slightest sniff
of the homemade sandwiches at Mum’s feet
we wouldn’t have left alive, let alone
bought a thing in the café or gift shop.

I think, my child, you learned a few new words
you won’t be taking back to your teacher.
Your What-I-did-on-holiday might raise
some eyebrows. I want to blame the monkey
but it’s not his fault we crossed his domain
—he was trying to amuse his kid.
I can recognise myself in that.

*

You might be asking yourself this: How is he going to analyse a poem which speaks for itself so clearly and eloquently without killing it? My answer is that it will be useful to scrutinise Mat’s ability to write poems which combine his natural gift for comedy with an underlying seriousness; essentially, it demonstrates that Mat, as Matthew Stewart puts it in his endorsement of Collecting the Data, ‘is a specialist in the humorous use of the serious and the serious use of the humorous, channelled through a playful but yoked relish for language.’

The title of the poem helpfully tells the reader where and when the poem is set, with the implication that this is a probably-much-anticipated family visit; but it also assists the poet because the title does enough scene-setting to allow him to dispense with preliminaries in the poem itself and instead open it with two lines of description which plunge the reader straight in. The passive understatement and economy of the opening make it even more frightening: we can immediately sense the family’s helplessness while the macaque sets to work, with an unspoken dread of what might come next. And what does come next provides a clever mirroring of the mother, father and child trapped in the car: three monkeys matching three humans. That the mother and child macaques are glimpsed ‘in the rearview mirror’ serves to augment the feelings of claustrophobia and terror at being surrounded by wild creatures seemingly intent on violence.

It’s interesting and a little disconcerting (for me at least) that the word ‘know’ is not placed at the end of the fourth line, which might have been the obvious choice, but at the start of the fifth. I did wonder whether that was dictated by syllabics, in that the first five lines each have ten syllables. Whatever the reason, it bestows additional emphasis on ‘now’, as if to say ‘we can laugh about it now’. The over-precise ‘to have been’ – as opposed to the duller alternative of ‘was’ – polishes the comical exaggeration of the stanza’s final two lines, and also gives a pleasing half rhyme between ‘been’ and ‘Blaine’ (which is echoed later in the poem by the full rhyme with ‘domain’). That the magician reference is to the preposterous David Blaine adds a certain something. Note, too, the shift from the first-person-plural to the singular in order to supply the hindsight commentary.

The middle stanza begins as boldly as the first, with that rhetorical statement ended by an exclamation-mark’s flourish. The pronoun returns to the familial ‘we’ so as to resume the sense of being besieged. That sense, though, is nicely undercut by the punchline-like bathos of the last line. The word ‘slightest’ echoes the earlier ‘sleight’. Perhaps the fact that their (of course) ‘homemade’ lunch is ‘at Mum’s feet’ is a consequence of trying to hide the food from the macaques’ view.  

The naming of the mother as ‘Mum’ at this point belatedly, but neatly, indicates that the address of the poem is either towards the poet-persona’s child or the family trio as a whole. This enables the poem to widen out in its third stanza into a subtle and delightful first-person-singular meditation on the family unit and, more specifically, the father–child relationship. The reader is further entertained by the implicit swearing and the extension of the comedy into the hypothetical. It’s noteworthy that the verb construction in the second line is in the future tense and not the past; compounded by using ‘might’ in the third line. Does this mean that this reminiscing about the trip is happening during the same half-term holiday?

The poem closes, as it must and beautifully, with a more explicit delineation of the mirroring. In the last line, as with its predecessors, any reader could step into the poet’s shoes and empathise or sympathise. (I can remember, incidentally, similar happenings involving large-bottomed baboons at Windsor Safari Park when I was young, c.1971.)

For me, the three meaty stanzas of irregular lengths seem well-suited to the content. The syntax is measured throughout, with no verbiage. Is there also, as in most zoo poems, an implied questioning of why wild animals have been brought thousands of miles from their native habitats to be kept for human entertainment? The events in the poem provoke complex emotions, all of which the poem elicits to some degree or other. There is a fine art to writing narrative poems and this one succeeds in telling its story with wit, charm and intelligence.

With thanks again to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie, my latest review is at The Friday Poem, here.

Over the last decade, Emma Simon has quietly but impressively built up a reputation as a gifted exponent of quirky, well-honed poetry, good enough to grace many well-known journals and to win or be placed in several prestigious competitions. Her two pamphlets – Dragonish (The Emma Press, 2017) and The Odds (SmithǀDoorstop, 2020; a winner, chosen by Neil Astley no less, in The Poetry Business’s annual pamphlet competition) – showcased her poems’ qualities. Notably, as well as containing first-class content, a number (but not too many) of the poems have ostentatious titles, e.g. ‘A Pindaric Ode to Robert Smith of The Cure’. Emma has completed both the Poetry Business School Writing School programme and the Poetry School / Newcastle University MA programme and thereby been fortunate to receive the tutelage of some of the UK’s finest poet–teachers.

When Emma announced that Salt would be publishing Shapeshifting for Beginners, available here, I was very glad, and keen to see how she would work across the broader canvas of a whole collection. For me, Emma’s poems, though distinctively her own, remind me of Vicki Feaver in how she draws, often playfully, upon memories, reveries, a wide range of cultural references and a generally wry viewpoint, to consider the place of women and girls in, and the occasional accepting befuddlement at the weirdness of, our contemporary world. Her tone throughout is commanding: the reader follows her train of thought without question. Glyn Maxwell’s blurb says that the ‘poems are shaped by lockdown’, but they are largely far from being about the pandemic, even, it seems, at a subconscious level. It’s a very witty, clever and enjoyable collection.

Emma has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of what is my favourite of the book’s many highlights, a poem first published in Spelt Magazine.

*

White Blancmange Rabbit


A neighbour brought it round
the day after grandma died.
It sat, ears back, on a green plate
faintly quivering

the way a rabbit might
among the grass, crouched low
waiting for the shadow of a cat
or fox to pass.

A kindness of sugar, set milk
and glossy arrowroot. My sister
spooned a mouthful from its flank,
and retched.

After a week where it sat
in the fridge, slowly yellowing.
After the funeral, when it was
slid into the bin

with the uneaten sandwiches
and casseroles. After the plate
was cleaned so you could see
its fancy edging.

After Margaret called round
I watched Mum thank her,
saying how much the girls
enjoyed it,

as though, after all this, she was free
to say anything, anything at all,
was making it up from here
with no-one watching.

*

Who wouldn’t be drawn in by a title like that? The lack of a definite article adds to its intrigue, almost like it’s a what3words location. Two minutes of online research shows that the history of blancmange is much older and more international than I knew. I suspect that almost everyone who grew up in the UK between Victorian times and the 1990s (and maybe later) would have their own recollections of eating blancmange; I certainly do. (There was also an unaccountably successful 1980s British synth-pop band called Blancmange, but that’s by the by.) This poem encapsulates what one might describe as ‘extreme blancmange’. Albeit incidentally, the ‘white rabbit’ aspects might, for some readers, recall Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and even Jefferson Airplane.

The first two lines of the opening stanza plant the reader straight back in time, perhaps to the early 1980s, and reveal a reason for the titular rabbit’s appearance: the compassion of a neighbour who evidently felt that the rabbit would cheer up the family, the girls especially, in their grief. The precise, yet economical description of the rabbit – ‘ears back’ in particular – is splendidly and surprisingly rendered, such that we can see it vividly. (Initially, I envisioned the plate as sage-coloured Beryl Ware, which my family used throughout my childhood, but the poem goes on to dispel that notion.) The lovely ‘faintly quivering’ is cleverly enhanced by its isolation as a short line on its own and then by the stanza-break pause.

The extraordinary extended simile of the second stanza cannot fail to unsettle the reader. Too often, poets use throwaway similes which they, let alone their readers, scarcely believe in, but this one adds a layer of complexity to the poem, underscoring the raw oddity of bereavement. The ear hears the subtle rhymes of ‘might’ and ‘cat’ and the more obvious ‘grass’/‘pass’, plus a smidgen of alliteration; all of which help to animate the simile. The last clause – ‘waiting for the shadow of a cat / or fox to pass’ – is so sinister that the rabbit becomes supra-natural.

That spell is immediately broken by the first of what could easily be, but isn’t, a dry list of ingredients: ‘A kindness of sugar’ is an arresting phrase; like ‘set milk’ it seems to belong to the era of wartime and post-war austerity when sugar was more generally considered to be beneficial. Here, of course, it underlines the kindness of the neighbour in investing the time and effort required to make the wobbly beast. The second syllable of ‘kindness’ links sonically to ‘grass’ and pass’.

The mention of ‘arrowroot’ also provides a throwback. From more cursory online enquiry, I can see that it’s been cultivated for over 7,000 years. The spare and careful deployment of adjectives in this poem is nowhere bettered than with that marvellous ‘glossy’. Then comes another surprise, delivered with excellent observation and brevity, and with natural (dark) comic timing. It could’ve been something less effective like ‘My sister took a mouthful’, but the accuracy of the actual words are just-so, with ‘flank’ being not just pinpoint but also off-rhyming with ‘milk’. The use of ‘retched’, its first syllable foreshadowing the poem’s penultimate one, is so converse to ‘kindness’ that the reader is instinctively amused.

The poem then hits its full stride with the anaphora at the beginning of each of the poem’s final four sentences, the first three of which disconcert through their syntactical ‘wrongness’ until the fourth provides the context. The bold performance of this device here is deftly executed: perfectly paced to condense a period of several weeks, that strange time between the death of a loved one and their funeral. The skill involved in pulling off this trick should not be underestimated.

As for tone, the poet simultaneously revels in and is revolted by what she is describing: ‘slowly yellowing’ is delicious, as is the assonant ‘slid into the bin’, which sounds grammatically incorrect but isn’t. The word ‘casseroles’ needs to be highlighted, even though it plays a small part in the poem – again, it’s a word so evocative of its time. The inclusion of the almost incidental plate-cleaning revealing the ‘fancy edging’ – another excellent adjective use – is inspired.

The shift which follows in the last two stanzas gives the poem another twist and adds to the poignancy. How it treads the delicate line between the comedy, horror and gravity of the events constitutes the poem’s finest achievement. The naming of the neighbour is another nice detail. The emphatic repetition in ‘anything at all’, and how it segues into ‘making it up from here’ is also admirable. The conflicting emotions of the mother, apparently unshackled from a presumably loved but also implicitly domineering mother or mother-in-law, are captured with beautiful restraint. I did briefly wonder whether the last line was necessary, i.e. whether ‘she was free / to say anything’ had sufficiently implied the point, but I concluded that it would’ve been a weaker ending without it, because ‘watching’ has connotations which, despite (and possibly because of) the understatement, emotionally affect the reader even further.

What of the form? The loose quatrains, each with a shorter fourth line, let the story unfold at a gentle, relaxed pace, in line with the comparative slowness of its times. It reminds me of Kathleen Jamie’s many equally loose and brilliant quatrain poems, particularly in The Tree House and The Overhaul.

As a model of what details to include and what to omit in telling a complex tale in a relatively short poem, it ought to be anthologised, used in workshops and widely shared per se.

With thanks to editor Ben Banyard, I have a poem up at the Black Nore Review site today, here.

Although I’m sad at his death, I’m glad to see that Mike Yarwood’s end-of-life time was spent at Brinsworth House, the retirement home for actors and other entertainers, in Twickenham. He was a huge star throughout my formative years. My poem below was published in Poetry Salzburg Review 36, in 2020.


The Ballad of Mike Yarwood

The King of Impersonation:
both the Steptoes, Larry Grayson,
Robin Day and Harold Wilson;

Doddy, Frostie and Brian Clough;
Jimmy Carter against Ted Heath
in a battle between their teeth;

Prince Charles, Columbo, Michael Caine,
Tommy Cooper and Hughie Green,
Kung Fu’s David Carradine—

I took them all off to a tee;
breaking to grin, ‘And this is me’,
to introduce Peters and Lee.

I spawned the nation’s mimicry:
‘Who loves ya, baby?’; ‘Ooh, Betty!’;
‘Up and under’; ‘Silly Billy’.

What’s said about imitation
is cobblers—it’s pure impression,
neither flattery nor flirtation.

John Major was too wet to be,
then Spitting Image did for me:
nobody wanted my Brucie.

A coronary made me give up
the booze. My Tony Blair was crap.
God forfend my Forrest Gump.

Within this high-security,
Weybridge gated community,
with other stars as broke as me,

I do the ex-wife, my caddy,
lawyers, shrinks and Raj the Taxi. 
Only drink reveals the real me,

the dubious and the evil:
Barrymore, Garnett, Enoch Powell,
both the Johnsons, Jimmy Savile—

a random mix of shameful blokes
and misremembered painful jokes.
I mean that most sincerely, folks.

I’ve known Annie Bachini since I first attended a British Haiku Society AGM at Daiwa House, in the mid-’90s, and admired her haiku before then. Annie, along with Alan Summers, was very friendly and welcoming, and dispelled my nervousness. Both were also very encouraging of my haiku writing.

Being a resident of inner-city London, Annie’s haiku are rare in how they often address urban themes. Annie’s oeuvre also contains many fine haiku concerning the fault-lines of relationships.

Three years ago, Annie asked me if I would be one of what turned out to be four poets – the others were Dee Evetts, Steve Mason and Dick Pettit – to look at the draft of a manuscript which ended up being accepted for publication by Iron Press, though as a dual-collection with another fine, longstanding British haiku poet, Helen Buckingham.

Here are a couple of Annie’s haiku in the book which I especially like:

faint breeze rolling a scrunched paper bag

waiting room
the rhythmic squeaks
of the cleaner’s shoes

The one-liner is a concrete haiku of sorts, in that the bag is rolled horizontally with the text. What I especially like about it, though, are that the word ‘rolling’ is used transitively, rather than the much more common intransitively, and that the movement is engendered by a faint breeze. Yes, it’s a fairly straightforward ‘cause-and-effect’ poem, but it’s subtly done. The highlighting of an item of litter may or may not be seen as an incidental comment on today’s selfish society. And which reader wouldn’t enjoy the sound of that ‘scrunched’? The way in which the wind is interacting with a thrown-away item reminds me of that strangely captivating scene in American Beauty in which the camera follows a plastic bag through the air. The haiku is very neatly done.

The three-liner is equally fine, not least in how it makes art out of what, in lesser hands, could be a mundane observation. The waiting room might be at the doctor’s, dentist, train station or wherever – though probably one of the first two – but it’s the attentiveness of the second element of the poem which beautifully commands the reader’s attention. It’s an exemplar of how a well-chosen adjective can add so much: as well as providing visual and sonic balance, ‘rhythmic’ implies so much. The cleaner, it seems, is doing a thoroughly professional job, as perhaps they’ve been shown how to do. We might intuit, too, that the cleaner is taking pride in their work, but earns very considerably less than the professional in the consulting room. That it’s the shoes which the poet draws our eyes and ears towards makes this, for me, a real masterpiece.

The book, rather prosaically entitled Two Haiku Poets, is available from Iron here.

With thanks to Helen Ivory and her colleagues, I was delighted today to see my poem ‘The Semi-Fast Service to 1969’ published over on Ink, Sweat & Tears, here.

I’ve been steadily reading another library book, Under the Sun, Bruce Chatwin’s letters, edited by Elizabeth, his wife, and Nicholas Shakespeare, author of the excellent first biography of him. I like collections of writer’s letters: as well as the fact that letter-writing is a dying art and will, presumably, never be replaced by anyone’s collected emails, they often give a less guarded picture of a writer’s thought processes. For me, they’re also ideal for reading when there’s a few minutes to fill. The flavour of Chatwin’s letters can be gauged from this extract from a letter, dated 26 July 1978 and posted from Malaga, to his friend, Sunil Sethi, an Indian journalist:

Don’t give a thought to your self-doubt: mine is in full flood. The last month has been a wearisome frittering away of time, unenjoyable, expensive, unproductive. I have at last found a place to hole up in, an exquisite neo-Classical pavilion restored by an Argentine architect who has run out of money. BUT I FRY. I feel hotter here than in Benares. Five hours of work and I’m exhausted. I will the words to come, but they won’t; don’t like what I’ve already done: feel like burning the manuscript [of what became The Viceroy of Ouidah].

Chatwin was a superb prose writer. Getting on for 20 years ago, I binge-read all six of his books published during his sadly short life. Of them, I especially loved two of his books: On the Black Hill and Utz. I suspect that those which can be more easily classified as novels will endure in a way more than the others. Like WG Sebald’s output, some of Chatwin’s books – In Patagonia and The Songlines particularly – defy easy categorisation. Shortly before his own premature death, Sebald summarised Chatwin, in Campo Santo (tr. Anthea Bell, 2005), in words which can, of course, equally apply to Sebald:

Just as Chatwin himself ultimately remains an enigma, one never knows how to classify his books. All that is obvious is that their structure and intentions place them in no known genre. Inspired by a kind of avidity for the undiscovered, they move along a line where the points of demarcation are those strange manifestations and objects of which one cannot say whether they are real, or whether they are among the phantasms generated in our minds from time immemorial.

I read that biography by Shakespeare five or so years ago and marvelled at how much Chatwin packed into his life, and the range and depth of his knowledge. He was, as his books make plain, restlessly nomadic. But I’d forgotten that he was born in Sheffield, in a nursing-home in Shearwood Road, adjacent to the former Glossop Road Baptist Church which now houses the University of Sheffield’s drama studio. His mother was the daughter of a clerk to one of the city’s many cutlery makers, and had returned home after the outbreak of war – Chatwin was born in 1940 – while Chatwin’s father was away with the navy.

I went to have a look yesterday. I’m not sure what the nursing-home building is used for now, though it’s probably a private residence.

He was such an elegant wordsmith that it’s a wonder that he didn’t become a poet as well as a prose-writer. His friends included several well-known and wildly different poets: Charles Tomlinson, his neighbour in Gloucestershire; Peter Levi, with whom he travelled to Afghanistan, as recounted in Levi’s The Light Garden of the Angel King; and George Oppen, the arch Objectivist.

Over the years, I’ve probably read half of Martin Amis’s novels and liked them in parts, but I’ve never been a great fan, though more so than I was of Barnes (crushingly dull in my experience) and Rushdie, and less so than McEwan. What made me take Amis’s final novel, Inside Story (Vintage, 2020), off my local library shelf and borrow it the other week, I don’t quite know; I’m jolly glad that I did though, because I enjoyed it from start to finish, all 500+ pages of it.

That Amis called it a novel, rather than a slightly or partly fictionalised memoir, must be due to his disdain for ‘life writing’. Regardless, it interweaves reminiscences about his best friend (Christopher Hitchens), his father’s best friend (Larkin), and his other, literary father (Saul Bellow), with the story of a relationship he apparently had in the late ’70s with a woman whom he calls Phoebe Phelps. Among other things, he’s very good, and moving, on death, or, rather, dying. (He himself died, in May this year, at the same age, 73, as his father; and Hitchens died at 62, a year younger than Larkin, but from the same cause, oesophageal cancer. Bellow outstripped them all, by living to 90.) I found myself chortling frequently too, which can’t be a bad thing.

Curiously, he also throws in top tips for prose writers – and writers of any kind really, none of which is hugely original; even so, the following paragraphs contain sound advice, particularly for those haiku poets who imagine they are the world’s only true Existentialists:

Writers take nothing for granted. See the world with ‘your original eyes’, ‘your first heart’, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent – don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.

So never take a single speck of it for granted. Don’t trust anything, don’t even dare to get used to anything. Be continuously surprised. Those who accept the face value of things are the true innocents, endearingly and in a way enviably rational: far too rational to attempt a novel or a poem. They are unsuspecting – yes, that’s it. They are the unsuspecting.

The book also includes a concise verdict on Larkin’s poetry which I’ve never seen bettered elsewhere, but more of that another time.

I’ve been reading another gem of a book I found in Rotherham Library: Tom Paulin’s The Secret Life of Poems, Faber, 2008.

Having once been omnipresent, not least because of his trenchant opinion-giving on Late Review, Paulin appears to be a neglected poet these days; maybe he’s been quietly ostracised because of his views on Israel and Zionism.

Subtitled ‘A poetry primer’, The Secret Life of Poems analyses 46 poems (plus an excerpt from Macbeth), from the anonymous Elizabethan ‘The Unquiet Grave’ to Jamie McKendrick’s ‘Apotheosis’ from 2003.

Regrettably, none of the poets featured are black and/or minoritised, only two are women (Dickinson and Rossetti), and only two (Frost and Zbigniew Herbert) aren’t British or Irish.

Aside from those major flaws, though, I very much enjoyed Paulin’s takes on very familiar poems – such as ‘A Nocturnall Upon St Lucies Day’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ – and the odd one new to me, e.g. Thomas Given’s ‘ Song for February’.

He’s brilliant at pointing out the layered, otherwise hidden foreshadowings and secondary meanings. Crucially, though, he stresses the fundamental importance of the sounds, the rhythms, the music, the emphases that poems make. In that vein, he quotes Frost, without stating the source, as follows:

The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I have known people who could read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They can get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.

Remember that the sentence sound often says more than the words. It may even as in irony convey a meaning opposite to the words.

I must bear all that in mind more consciously than I usually do.

I’ve been a fan of Gaia Holmes’s poetry since the publication of her third (and most recent) collection, Where the Road Runs Out, available from Comma Press here, which is among my very favourites of the last five years, if not all time. I’m pretty sure that it I bought on the recommendation of a typically warm-hearted review by John Foggin on his blog, here. I subsequently bought Gaia’s two earlier collections, which are both very good too. To paraphrase Orwell, all poets’ voices are unique, but some, like Gaia’s, are more unique than others’.

So I was really pleased to see today from Gaia’s blog that she’s uploaded a recording of her short story, ‘Below the Thunders of the Upper Deep’, to her Soundcloud page, here. It’s a terrific listen.

Even better is the fact that there are also loads of other atmospheric recordings, interspersed by music, which she made two/three years ago, of her (and other poets’) poems. I particularly like how, each time, Gaia paired one of her own lovely poems with somebody else’s to provide intriguing comparisons and contrasts.

With thanks to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie, I have another review at The Friday Poem, here.

Through her erstwhile directorship of Malika’s Kitchen, staging of the highly successful ‘Stablemates’ series of readings and ever-supportive presence at many poets’ launch events and other readings, Jill Abram, as much as anyone in the UK poetry community, has championed, and continues to champion, its happily increasing diversity of outstanding voices.

As an exceptional poet in her own right, Jill’s poems have been appearing with increasing frequency in high-quality journals in the last few years. It’s therefore excellent news that Jill’s debut publication, Forgetting my Father, has recently appeared from Broken Sleep Books. It’s available here, with an attractive cover designed by Broken Sleep’s owner and principal editor, Aaron Kent. It consists of 23 tremendous poems about family, Jewishness, bereavement, the passage of time and much besides; above all, how memories, and their jewel-like details, still colour the present.

Jill has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of what is possibly my favourite of the pamphlet’s many highlights.

*

Inheritance


A coat, a jacket, five pairs of knickers and Alfred —
my grandmother’s legacy to me; the bronze tortoise
which I still see hiding in the hairs of the hearthrug
at Woodlea, opposite the park on Wythenshawe Road.

My sister has silver grape scissors, an eternity ring
and the canteen of cutlery. There’s a red pyrex bowl
in Mum’s cupboard filled with memories of custard.
My aunt liked the ugly paintings, she got them all.

Grandma didn’t leave a will with lawyers. She left
a locked deed box in her flat and dozens of keys
which didn’t fit. We broke it open. It was stuffed
with letters: My dearest Bessie . . . forever your Sim.

*

Here we have a single, abstract noun as the title, with an etymology derived from Old French and Latin. It’s a heavy word, but it does the job, because it summarises exactly what the poem is about, and no other word would suffice.

The shape of the poem is a traditional one, which is somehow appropriate because the content of the poem harks back to times which were weighed down with more convention than today. Throughout the pamphlet as a whole, the forms are mostly stanzaic and, crucially, organic, in that they are driven by the content, as befits a sequence of poems concerned with family and how it shapes our understanding of our place in the world. ‘Inheritance’ looks orderly on the page, allowing the poet to subvert that neatness. It consists of only three quatrains but, in an implicit mirroring of the clearance following a relative’s death, they are crammed full of objects.

That the first stanza starts with a list of objects which the poet-persona has inherited, rather than with the summarising statement of ‘my grandmother’s legacy to me’ plunges the reader straight into the scene, as if surrounded by the objects. As an opening line, it is estimable both for what it reveals and how it sounds on the ear. Are the coat and jacket too old-fashioned to be unwearable now, or are they stylish enough to transcend the years of fashion? Are they from when the grandmother was young, middle-aged or elderly? Wisely, we’re not told – sometimes the reader doesn’t need to know everything and should be left to fill in the gaps. Neither do we know precisely when the grandmother lived and died.

The ‘five pairs of knickers’ has a surprising and rueful comedy to it; not just innately, but also in the augmenting specificity of ‘five’ and, as the reader soon discovers, in relation to the comparative riches bequeathed to the poet’s sister.

The line ends with another surprise: the very Victorian-sounding forename, maybe named after Lord Tennyson. The dash gives the reader a slight pause, like a comedian would bestow on their audience before a punchline, before the two revelations of the second line.

The fine detail, and spaced alliteration, of the third line flows beautifully from the second into the fourth, where we find more rich detail. ‘Woodlea’ could be the name of a house, perhaps built in the mid- to late-1800s, a Victorian villa in estate-agent parlance; or it could be the name of a block of flats; either way, it was a home, located, it seems, in south-west Manchester. (I’m no expert on the geography of Manchester!)

Reading the stanza out loud brings out its almost iambic rhythm and sound, but also that air of resigned comedy which the word ‘legacy’ conveys, as though the grandmother was having a last laugh.

Maintaining, or upping, the momentum after such a lively and exemplary first stanza would not be easy, but the poem accelerates through the second stanza, in a succession of three sentences (as opposed to the first stanza’s one). Immediately, we find out that the poet’s sister received a rather better legacy, but, again wisely, there is no overt mention of any sibling rivalry which that might have caused. (Incidentally, the pamphlet includes a beautiful, bittersweet elegy called ‘My Sister Is’.)

That the second stanza also starts with a list surely adds to the poem’s unity. I had to look up ‘grape scissors’ to see exactly what they look like. It seems, they were a Victorian invention, in the days when it would’ve been deemed extremely bad form to pluck grapes with one’s fingers in front of guests. The ‘eternity ring’ neatly foreshadows the poem’s ending. That gloriously sonorous phrase ‘canteen of cutlery’, can’t fail, whether intentionally or not, to remind some readers of the prizes on The Generation Game and Sale of the Century.

The next sentence provides more comical pathos, verging on bathos, with that superb ‘filled with memories of custard’. I have no doubt that I’ll be hard-pressed to read a more striking – and chuckle-inducing – phrase than ‘memories of custard’ any time soon. By not attempting to describe the paintings other than by the catch-all ‘ugly’, the poet lets the reader use their imagination. Knowing when, and when not, to employ that technique is a fine art, and in this poem the balance is perfectly stuck.

With its unobtrusive but effective alliteration and its concise story-telling, the last stanza is as taut as the first two, despite its sobering opening. Until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, Englishwomen were not allowed to draw up a will without their husband’s permission. Perhaps the lingering misogyny of English society or a distrust of officialdom influenced the grandmother’s decision not to ‘leave a will with lawyers’, or maybe it was simply more pragmatic to leave the ‘locked deed box’. Is the ‘flat’ part of ‘Woodlea’, or a scaled-down dwelling elsewhere following the grandfather’s death some years before? The information that there were ‘dozens of keys / which didn’t fit’ – the enjambment nicely delaying the humorous pathos here – and that the box had to be opened by force afford the poem’s final droll images. The use of ‘we’ is subtle: the plural pronoun provides a female unity: all the inheritors are female and some or all of them are assembled with one purpose, but hitherto they have been referred to as individuals.

And so to the poem’s surprise ending. Like earlier enjambments, the pause on ‘stuffed’ enriches what follows. The opening and closing snippets of what are presumably love-letters are tantalising – the  reader has to fill in the ellipsis in between. The use of the names is just right here, especially that we learn that the grandmother is ‘Bessie’. Presuming that ‘Sim’ is a diminutive of ‘Simeon’, ‘Simon’ or something similar, is he the grandfather, or a pre- or extra-marital paramour? It’s brave and admirable of the poet not to spill the beans; moreover, it’s a poignant ending to a poem which is chock-full of life in the midst of death.

The various clues which are laid out before us in the poem prompt deeper thoughts of other matters: what the grandmother’s relationships with her daughters and granddaughters were like, hinted at – in one direction only – by her bequests; whether or not she was much-mourned; and what she was like as an individual.

‘Inheritance’, like other poems in this magical pamphlet, is a treasure which needs to be widely known and anthologised.

Two days running, I’ve had serendipitous, marvellous encounters with sand martins.

On Wednesday, I intended to, and still did, walk up the Sheffield and South Yorkshire Navigation – i.e. the canal parallel to the Don – towards Swinton, but first I got distracted by the sand martins whizzing and falling, u-turning and tumbling, their white bellies skimming the river in one seamless, incessant movement on a riffled stretch downstream of Chantry Bridge, below the bus station in Rotherham town centre.

I’d been periodically looking out for them in May, but it took until its final day for me to get the chance to watch stand there, mesmerised, watching them from the railings at the back of a car park. As I said to a 4×4 driver, it’s mindboggling to think that sand martins (and those other acrobats, house martins, swallows and swifts) come all the way from sub-Saharan Africa to sub-Arctic Yorkshire, where there was spit in the air – while half the country’s enjoyed temperatures above 20 degrees, here it’s struggled to get above 10 all week.

Yesterday, Lyn and I walked along the canal in the other direction, towards Sheffield, because we wanted to have a wander round Attercliffe, where she was born. It was that sort of day when it was too cold to go without a jacket, but you felt too hot wearing one – it was, and is, June, for pity’s sake. Anyhow, having looked in the beautiful former Banner’s department store building, now used for not a great deal other than a greasy caff, we ended up trotting through Attercliffe Cemetery and down to the Don again, where we had a fantastic view of sand martins flying in and out of pipe outlets.

That reminded me of seeing them somewhere near Skipton, along the Skirfare, a lovely tributary of the Wharfe, about 20 years ago, with other British Haiku Society poets, in, I think, May 2006. From that experience I produced this haiku, published in Presence 30, then Wing Beats and The Lammas Lands:

river loop—
a sand martin squirms
into its nest hole

It seems like a lifetime ago. Those few days there were notable, among other things, for a renku session run by John Carley, who did as much as anyone in the UK to promote the creation of haikai linked forms not just as a literary exercise, but as an enjoyable, collaborative social event. He was a very erudite man, and absolutely passionate about renku. I think that was the only time I was involved in a renku session in person. I took part in several by email with Ferris Gilli, Paul MacNeil – who took the ‘conductor’ role and very much kept us focused – and Ron Moss, across three continents; but it would have been amazing if we’d been able to write them face to face. Like John, Paul was very exacting and knowledgeable about the subtleties of ‘link and shift’, i.e. how each verse was connected to, and simultaneously moved away from, the previous one. Sadly, both John and Paul are no longer with us.

When, in 1982, I first encountered William Carlos Williams’s now-famous 1923 poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, readable here, it was instantly inspirational and probably the first poem that I really loved. Like my devouring of the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg and the other Beats, this came about because my brother Adrian, four years older than me, had undertaken a poetry module as part of his American studies degree at Essex University. We both loved WCW’s poem for its directness, immediacy, exactness, brevity, shape upon the page, and absence of punctuation and upper-case lettering; so much so that Adrian, with no little pretension, asked our mum to knit him a jumper which featured a red wheelbarrow against a grey background. I don’t think anyone ever ‘got’ the image without prompting, but we knew – and somehow that sufficed. To us, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ seemed a significant advance on Ezra Pound’s 1913 poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’, which rather clumsily attempted to transmit the spirit of haiku into English poetry.

Over the years, my admiration for ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ has reduced, partly because my tastes have broadened to include poetry far more florid than Imagism and perhaps because, like WCW’s ‘This is Just to Say’ (which, due to the abundance of social media parodies it has spawned, has become more well-known than ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’), the poem has, within the poetry world, become famous to the point of infamy. In my own poetry, whatever concision and specificity they contain are qualities I first grasped from WCW’s poem. But by 1983, I’d discovered the Penguin Book of Japanese Verse and its translations of Bashō, Buson, Issa, Shiki and other haiku poets and retrospectively found Imagism to be verbose in comparison. Nevertheless, I retain a certain nostalgic fondness for my first love.

I’ve just read The Movement Reconsidered, edited by Zachary Leader and published by OUP in 2009, subtitled ‘Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie and Their Contemporaries’. It had a brief review in the Guardian, here. It’s a brilliant book, not least because of the range and quality of the contributors, including: Robert Conquest, the then last survivor of whatever collegiality the Movement possessed; Blake Morrison; Alan Jenkins; Anthony Thwaite (who had co-edited the Penguin Book of Japanese Verse); James Fenton; Craig Raine; Clive Wilmer; and the rather more leftfield Terry Castle, with her essay ‘The Lesbianism of Philip Larkin’ (about his soft-porn ‘Brunette Coleman’ stories). My interest in it was much more about Donald Davie and, above all, Thom Gunn than in their far more insular ‘colleagues’. In relation to Davie, what comes across so strongly is his critical acumen. This wasn’t news to me, because I’ve cherished his last main essay collection, Under Briggflatts, since I first read it 30 years ago; but some of his assessments quoted in The Movement Reconsidered jumped out at me. (Davie was, incidentally, the founding Professor of English at Essex, from 1964 until the sit-ins of 1968 drove him to the States. Not long after, Robert Lowell pitched up at Essex, where one of his students, albeit unofficially, was the haiku bard of Halifax, Keith J. Coleman, perhaps a distant cousin of Brunette.)

In particular, this throwaway remark, in an essay – ‘Donald Davie, The Movement, and Modernism’ – by William H. Pritchard, grabbed my attention: ‘Davie treated Williams as Modernism’s Dumb Ox, calling his most famous poem, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, a ‘trivial and self-preening squib’ – something that surely needed saying.’ It’s a devastating verdict, and Pritchard’s enthusiastic agreement, unqualified by any reasoning, further damns the poem. But the poem was published the year after Davie’s birth, a year after Modernism’s high-water marks, so it seems odd to dismiss the poem’s worth without any historical context and/or acknowledgement of how ground-breaking this apogee of Imagism was. (1922 was, coincidentally, also the birth year of Kerouac and Larkin, both great jazz fans, with polar tastes: they respectively adored and abhorred Charlie Parker.)

Is the poem trivial? The fact that it has its own Wikipedia page suggests otherwise. Carol Rumens chose it as ‘poem of the week’ for the Guardian in 2010, here. If, through its opening over-statement, it too squarely focused on what the poet could see, without any overt explanatory information regarding the location or its socioeconomics, then perhaps it didn’t, and doesn’t, provide enough meat for the critical reader. Yet the weight of the first stanza – both the poem’s brilliance and its undoing – surely raises it far above the trivial: explicitly it tells us that in that moment importance lies in what can be seen; that almost nothing else matters. It’s noteworthy, though, that WCW didn’t take that focus to its logical conclusion and write ‘everything depends / upon’.

Is it a ‘self-preening squib’? Let’s consider the noun first. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as ‘a small firework consisting of a tube filled with powder that makes a hissing noise when it is lit’. Rarely does it appear without its best buddy, ‘damp’. Here, Davie implies that the poem’ explodes and burns itself out all but straightaway. The adjective – attributing a peacock quality to the poem – is, as Davie no doubt realised, rendered superfluous by the choice of noun, but it’s thrown in for good, overloading measure. There can’t be any question as to whether Davie understood what WCW was getting at. His objection must only have been based on the sheer bluntness of ‘so much depends / upon’. (Given that Davie was a Barnsleyite of Scottish extraction, one might have thought such bluntness would’ve appealed to him.) Again, though, we have to note that the statement that phrase contains is qualified and not absolute, so maybe it isn’t quite as blunt as it appears.

And what, if any, assistance to the reader of the poem does Davie’s value-judgement provide? Should we conclude that it’s a deliberately provocative snipe, born of jealousy, at a poet whose work inspired a generation of poets more experimental and, by the sixties and Seventies, mostly much more fashionable than him: Creeley, Ginsberg, Niedecker, Olson, Zukofsky. That Davie, like Gunn before him, loosened up his poetic approach due to prolonged periods in America makes his stance all the more extraordinary.

The poem might be considered the exemplar par excellence of WCW’s dictum of ‘No ideas but in things’, but to what degree is that really applicable here? Does it cohere within the idea that so much importance should be attached to the wheelbarrow? If so, is that because of its usefulness as a functional object or as one merely to be perceived? If the latter, does ‘so much depends / upon’ apply only to the wheelbarrow, with a primacy underscored by its primary colour, or also to everything which follows, i.e. that it is the whole scene, and its unity, to which WCW is pointing.

The wheelbarrow is, of course, the reddest red. Why? Because, the poems tells us it is ‘glazed with rain / water’ which sharpens the definition of the colour in the mind’s eye and because it stands in clear contrast to ‘the white / chickens’. Does the reader also perhaps sense that the chickens have red beaks?

To me the poem’s best, but least mentioned, attribute is the specificity of WCW’s word choices: not just the colours, but his adept use of prepositions and, moreover, the perfection of ‘glazed’ and ‘rain / water’: that he writes ‘rain / water’ rather than just ‘rain’ might be because a second stanza of ‘glazed with / rain’ would’ve looked less appealing and had one less stress than the other stanzas, but it also bestows the sense that the rain has stopped and moved on, leaving a lingering effect behind.

There are theories out there which read the poem as a subtle commentary on race relations, a show of solidarity to the African Americans in his patch: that the poem comes from a visit that WCW, Rutherford general practitioner, undertook to the home of a black farmer; that, just a few years after the lynchings and arson in Chicago, he kept to his Hippocratic oath, which included an obligation to all his fellow human beings.

If the inspiration for the poem came, either directly or via Pound, from early translations of Japanese haiku, then it’s tempting to wonder if WCW considered going the whole hog; perhaps something like:

white chickens . . .
the red wheelbarrow
glazed by rain

The word ‘glazed’ would be too much of a poeticism for haiku puritans who propound the use of unadorned language. Haiku, as they are properly conceived, wholly, or at least mainly, consist of what can be perceived by the senses, without a need to make an overt statement. In the last 10 years or so, though, explicit, abstract phrasing and statement-making, telling the reader too much, has become a regrettable, and regrettably widespread, practice in English-language haiku. In this day and age, nobody needs to be told some equivalent of ‘so much depends / upon’ whatever the objects are or the matter is; it is more than enough simply to isolate those objects, that matter, on the page, surrounded by white space. A century ago, things were evidently different: the spirit of haiku and the way of Zen, and what Eastern traditions generally expounded, had yet to exert much influence in the West, especially on its literature. With this poem, WCW, unwittingly to a degree no doubt, did as much in that regard with this one poem as anyone.

I’ve been getting my head down reading and writing in the last few months, and participating in the odd workshop session here and there, most recently this weekend just gone, when I was unusually productive.

I organised one myself, in March, for five of us to write poems in response to works in the Albert Houthuesen exhibition at Doncaster’s Danum Gallery. Albert who? you might ask. I confess that I’d not heard of him before, but he was a contemporary of some great artists at the RCA, including my hero Ed Burra. I especially liked Houthuesen’s drawings and paintings of clowns, especially a troupe called the Hermans who regularly performed in Doncaster when he was living nearby as a refugee from London during the war.

This coming Saturday, instead of watching the hideous spectacle in Westminster, the five of us are convening for another poetry from art session, at Sheffield’s fabulous Graves Gallery, where one of the exhibitions surveys the career of George Fullard, about whom I’ve written before, here.

I’ve read lots of poetry, but the book which has haunted me most of late is one which I’ve been wanting to read for years: John Berger and Jean Mohr’s collaboration A Fortunate Man. It contains so many insightful passages about the human condition that it would be invidious to single any out here. Suffice it to say that it’s up there with the Into Their labours trilogy and Bento’s Sketchbook as my favourite of Berger’s many beautiful books. What an extraordinary writer he was. Incidentally, he was an early champion of Fullard.

In my most recent poems I’ve been trying to be more ‘in the moment’, like I am in haiku, rather than dwelling on, and in, the past – albeit, of course, that every second of time contains the past and the future as well as the here and now.

I’ve booked for a couple of online readings – the wonderful duo of Fokkina McDonnell and Zoe Walkington (whose pamphlet, available here, is a brilliant hoot but much else besides) for Writers in the Bath, and the Live Canon launch of pamphlets by Josephine Corcoran, Matt Bryden and Isy Mead.

In March, it was fantastic to see Presence reach its 75th issue, due, principally, to the huge effort put in by editor-in-chief Ian Storr, who has had the steadiest of hands on the tiller for a good few years now. I was very happy to have three haiku in it, including this one:

the cornfield flash
of a goldfinch in flight . . .
Flanders poppies

One last thing: here’s a quote from Michael Hamburger’s superb introduction to WG Sebald’s 1998 collaboration with Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted: ‘[M]emory is a darkroom for the development of fictions.’

My thanks to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie for publishing an essay by me, here, which is intended for those who know a bit, but not a lot necessarily, about haiku in English.

Among what will be one of the last-ever batches of Sphinx reviews is my one-point-of-interest piece on Fiona Smith’s Travellers of the North, here.

Not for the first time, I’m indebted to Mat Riches’s ever-excellent blog – and in this case, an especially brilliant and poignant post, here – for alerting me to something which I may otherwise have overlooked: Peter Kenny’s interview with Robert Hamberger in the latest edition of the Planet Poetry podcast, available here. I’m a big fan of Robert’s poetry, so it was a sheer delight to listen to the interview, not only because of his insights but also because it was interspersed by him reading poems from his latest (2019) collection Blue Wallpaper – available to buy here – which I reviewed for The North, here, and absolutely loved.

Robert aired so many quotable reflections on poetic practice that I had to keep pausing the podcast to write them down. His poetry is often concerned with the past and how it interacts with the present, and I nodded furiously in agreement with his conviction that, “I am preserving experiences or people I loved, or even the person I was at that particular point in my history.” The gist of that is a common enough motivation, but it’s the careful choice of the word ‘preserving’ which is particularly noteworthy; that the poet is as much of an archivist as – if not more than – someone who digitises old photographs or curates items in a museum.

I was struck too by Roberts thoughts on sonnets – he is a superb sonneteer – and his statement that, “rhyme can nudge you onto something in the way that unrhymed poems don’t”. Of course, Robert’s not the first person to point out the paradox that tight rhymed forms can be liberating for a poet. My own experience is that, having come from a position of being dismissive of rhyme and strict(-ish) forms, I was completely won over by a hugely inspiring and enjoyable year-long course in forms taught by Clare Pollard at the Poetry School about 13 years ago.

Robert was also very articulate about the mysteries of drafting poems: “I really like [the] dialogue with a poem during the drafting process; that issue of being attentive to what the poem is not only trying to say but what shape it’s trying to form as it says it.” Robert hints at the mystical aspect of that process, and I certainly share that sense of the poem having a life of its own which I somehow have to charm onto the page.

So, in all, I can’t recommend listening to the interview, and buying and reading Robert’s poetry, enough. Robert’s website, which features his other books, including the marvellous A Length of Road, is here.

*

Much of my poetry reading of late has been the collected works of the two Janes, Hirshfield and Kenyon, whose poems are and were invariably beautiful, bit so much so that I needed a wholly different voice to read as well. That’s where Luke Samuel Yates’s new, first collection, Dynamo, published by Smith Doorstop and available here, came in: it’s a hugely entertaining book and highly recommended.

Partly due to the pressure of the old toad work, I’ve been in the poetry doldrums for much of this year, so it was nice to get a short piece up on The Friday Poem again, here – a 100-word response to a poem by Geoff Hattersley as one of a series of brief commentaries on ‘funny’ poems. The poem I chose is, as you’ll see, both funny and deeply serious at the same time, which is no mean feat to pull off. I could’ve chosen any number of his poems, in the same way that I could’ve chosen numerous Matthew Sweeney poems, but that thar Mat Riches got there before me, here. (I’m reminded at this point that, a week or two ago, I heard Paul Stephenson – another brilliantly funny yet serious poet, like Mat himself – read a poem entitled ‘Not Matthew’.)

Had Mat not quite rightly alighted on Sweeney, I might’ve chosen ‘Upstairs’, first published in the LRB – here – and collected in The Bridal Suite, Cape, 1997. It’s typical of Sweeney’s very quirky narrative style, moving from funny to very dark within a heartbeat. His poems and worldview were often described as ‘surreal’, but that’s a lazy label. It’s surely just a recognition that if you live life with your senses tuned to high-ish alert you will notice that it’s chocker with non sequiturs, which paradoxically make more sense than not. There’s tremendous artistry at work beneath the surface of Sweeney’s poetry too: in ‘Upstairs’, the consonance between ‘X’, ‘brass’ ‘Voss’, ‘undressing’ and even ‘Iceland’ isn’t coincidental; and ‘Voss’ isn’t chosen purely for that purpose: Sweeney would’ve known that it‘s the German word for ‘Valentine’.

As someone who has often been accused of writing ‘funny poems’, I find it bemusing that the underlying seriousness isn’t obviously apparent; but I suppose that shouldn’t be surprising, since everyone reads poems differently and, initially at least, picks out what appeals to them. For me, though, it‘s just the case that the line between funny and serious is invariably so cigarette-paper-thin that it‘s barely visible. No wonder the Buddha always had a smile on his face.