Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

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.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of reading some of my poems to Doncaster’s writing group Read to Write in Balby Library. I read for about 25 minutes and then, after a break, we had a Q&A session. It was my first in-person reading since I read for Fen Speak in Ely in February 2020, a couple of weeks before the first Covid lockdown. Here’s a picture of me reading from The Evening Entertainment, taken by Tracy Day Dawson and used with her kind permission:

The brilliant poet Ian Parks, whose Selected Poems is forthcoming from Calder Valley Poetry, founded Read to Write in Mexborough seven years ago and it’s gone from strength to strength. Its activities include workshopping sessions and, as its name implies, reading and analysing texts by great writers, including an ongoing project to read all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays.

The week before my reading, I went to a Saturday afternoon fundraiser for Ukraine at Doncaster Ukrainian Centre Club, at which Ian, Sarah Wimbush (the organiser) and Joe Williams were the featured poets among an open mic session of most of the Read to Write regulars and other poets from further afield, beautifully MC’d by Mick Jenkinson. I’d recently read Sarah’s marvellous Bloodaxe collection, Shelling Peas with My Grandmother in the Gorgiolands, available here, having previously enjoyed and admired her pamphlet Bloodlines, so hearing her read from it was a delight. The whole afternoon was a pleasure. As ever with open mics, you never know quite what you’re going to get, but in this instance, the overall standard was refreshingly high.

Despite practising beforehand, I felt a bit ‘ring-rusty’ when I read at Balby, but the group were so warm and lovely that any nerves I had soon vanished. The questions were good ones and kept me firmly on my toes – they’re a very knowledgeable group. Up and down the UK, local groups are the lifeblood of poetry, especially for those who are just starting out, and might not have read or written poetry since they were at school. In this case, the group impressively encompasses writers at different points on their poetry journey. I hope to get along regularly to the group’s sessions once I have a bit more time, which I hope to have later this year.

My thanks to Ian for the invitation and to him and all the group for being so welcoming.

there it is again
that harvest moon in the well
of my whisky glass

The Japanese tradition, like the preceding Chinese poetic tradition, is rich in moon haiku, and especially ones in which the moon is seen in water, particularly by poets who’ve drunk too much sake. With this haiku, first published in Presence 50, John Hawkhead cleverly reimagines the sub-genre. Hawkhead has been writing haiku, and has seen them published in many reputable journals, for many years. He’s also one of the very few English-language haiku poets on Twitter whose haiku are well worth reading.

I’m not a huge fan of statements in haiku, but this one sets up the picture and the mood engagingly: it strikes a tone which could be read as either wearisome or full of wonder, or anywhere between the two. There’s an audible pause at the end of the statement, as if a colon is in place.

The precision of the middle line needs careful unpacking. Why ‘that’? It possibly gives the reader a sense that the moon is being an irritant. Crucially, it means that the line doesn’t need two instances of ‘the’. Then we’re told that this full moon is a specific one, which appears closest to the autumn equinox; so here is the season reference. What gives the poem its real power is the fact that Hawkhead doesn’t opt for a more prosaic and generic option of writing ‘there it is again / that harvest moon / in my whisky glass’. The addition of ‘the well / of’ bestows a layer of depth.

If one reads the poem as a study of melancholy, in which a solitary whisky-drinker cannot even find solace in the sight of the moon at the bottom of his glass, then the word ‘well’ triggers its other noun sense, of a deep, round underground source of water. And the fact that the moon is visible in the glass means, surely, that the finger or two of whisky has been drunk, adding to the melancholic mood.

Even if one reads the haiku merely as an expression of curiosity – that the moon has appeared to align its bright white roundness into and with the roundness of the glass’s bottom – it is still a magical moment, like the alignment of planetary bodies.

A more cynical reading might be that including ‘the well / of’ enables the haiku to fall unobtrusively into a 5–7–5 pattern and provides an alliteration with ‘whisky’. For me, though, the addition truly enriches the poem. This haiku is the exception to the rule that 5–7–5 haiku in English are generally too verbose and therefore need trimming: here, cutting back to a 5–4–5 would diminish the poem’s effectiveness.

There is a recording of John Hawkhead reading some of his haiku on the Living Haiku Anthology website, here.

2023 marks 25 years since Peter Mortimer’s Iron Press published The Iron Book of British Haiku, still available on the Iron website, here. It was co-edited by David Cobb and Martin Lucas, both of whom are no longer with us. I seem to remember reading somewhere that it sold over 5,000 copies. It certainly found its way into many bookshops and for years was usually the only English-language haiku book available.

It contained 73 haiku poets, including two of the four who participated in a kasen renga which was appended after the individual poets. Of the 73, I reckon just 14 are still writing haiku and at least three of those 14 have ceased seeking publication for their output. A good few of the others have since died – Norman Barraclough, Janice Fixter, Seamus Heaney (!), Ken Jones, Stuart Quine and David Walker among them. That’s unsurprising, because in those early days of the British Haiku Society (BHS), which had only been founded eight years before, the average age of the membership must’ve been well over 60, and I was usually the youngest attendee at events.

At the time, I was chuffed to bits to be in the anthology, even though I only had two haiku (both about snails!) in it. I went to the launch at a bookshop whose name and exact location in London escapes me, and which was memorable for a hypnotic reading by Mimi Khalvati, one of three poetry ‘heavyweights’ (alongside famous Seamus and Anthony Thwaite) who were shoehorned into the book to add some clout. Of course, haiku readings are mercifully brief.

In reality, the British haiku scene, as the BHS saw it then, wasn’t sufficiently developed to warrant such an anthology. Like the Haiku Society of America had done before it, the BHS in those years was largely concerned with trying to form a consensus about what haiku is, though it was easier to agree on what it isn’t. Unsurprisingly, some poets disagreed and left to pursue their own paths.

In 2002, the book was superseded by the Snapshot Press anthology, The New Haiku, again co-edited by Martin, this time with John Barlow. It too is still available, here. In terms of both representation and quality, it far exceeded the Iron Book, but the latter had set the bar.

The Iron Book had some noticeable omissions: James Kirkup, whom David had roped in as one of the founding triumvirate of the BHS and its first president, had left on bad terms; Gerry Loose, Peter Finch, Chris Torrance and, posthumously, Frances Horowitz might’ve been included. Whether or not David and Martin had tried to rope some or all of them in I don’t know.

Equally, some poets were included who wrote fine haiku (and other poetry in some cases), but who have long since vanished from the haiku (and wider poetry) scene: Claire Bugler Hewitt, Geoffrey Daniel, Jackie Hardy and Susan Rowley.

To me, the standard of the haiku in the book is highly variable, including a fair few – especially some which have been crowbarred into telegram-like 5-7-5 without articles – which today would be highly unlikely to be published anywhere except, unfortunately, by their authors on social media, as well as several minimalist poems and sequences which aren’t even especially haikuesque.

Yet the selections included some really good poems which have stood the test of time. Here are just a few that I like:

after dad
tidies her scarf
the toddler fixes it herself

Annie Bachini

thunder
my woodshavings roll
along the verandah

Dee Evetts

caught in a storm
wearing nothing waterproof
except mascara

Janice Fixter

into the busker’s cap
a chill wind blows
bronze leaves

Stuart Quine

loose now
on the knuckle
the thin gold

Susan Rowley

Evetts’s haiku reflects his job as a carpenter, later documented in the excellent collection endgrain (1995). Aside from a couple of classic haiku by David Cobb himself, the book is light on the sort of resonant haiku which rely not on an instant first-reading effect but yield their subtleties and layers over time.

The renga – by the tremendous quartet of Fokkina McDonnell, Stuart Quine, Helen Robinson and Fred Schofield – was, Fokkina, tells me, written on 11 May 1996, in her front room in Manchester at a Yorks./Lancs. Haiku Group meeting. Although it takes some slightly offbeat turns, by and large it’s the best thing in the book, which isn’t something you can often say about renga – in my experience, they’re often just a bit of fun rather than an exercise rich in literary quality.

So in all, one can say that the Iron Book was very much reflective of its time; and it’s about time now for another anthology of the best British haiku, which, to my mind, have come on in leaps and bounds in the last quarter of a century.

With thanks to editor Ben Banyard, I’m pleased to see my first publication of the year, over at Black Nore Review, here.

It recalls a very strange day; one which, I expect, most people alive in the UK then – especially in the south – will remember well.

I was recently very fortunate and glad to see four of my poems published in the most recent issue of the lovely journal Pennine Platform – three short ones plus a longer one, ‘Smallpiece’, named after the gardener at Cecil Beaton’s Wiltshire home, Reddish House.

A recording of me reading ‘Smallpiece’ is now on the Pennine Platform website, here.

I’m very grateful to the journal’s editor, Julia Deakin.

The last batch of one-point-of-interest reviews for 2022 were published on Sphinx yesterday, here. They include my reviews of pamphlets by: John F. Deane, here; Clare Best, here; and Mark Wynne, here.

As ever, though, there are lots of reviews, by and of a diverse range of voices, to enjoy and pique your interest.

Thanks for reading my blog in 2022 and happy New Year!

I’ve been saving this up as my last non-collection/pamphlet read of the year. I bought and much enjoyed Wills’ collection Woman’s Head as a Jug (Arc) 10 years ago, and during the pandemic I got copies of three of her other five collections, which I also really enjoyed. So I had to buy a copy of On Poetry, curiously the second excellent book with that title to be published by Smith Doorstop in the last couple of years, after Jonathan Davidson’s. This one, though, seems implicitly to have a different book – Glyn Maxwell’s brilliant, but somewhat didactic classic – in its sights.

Wills’ book is subtitled ‘Reading, writing & working with poems’ and illustrates her points with poems which all bar two (Donne’s ‘The Flea’ and Edward Thomas’s ‘Digging’) are not written by White men, thus providing a necessary corrective to Maxwell’s and other ‘how-to-write-poetry’ books. For example, Wills’ unpacking of Patience Agbabi’s superb poem ‘The Doll’s House’ – available here – is a lesson itself in how to read poetry and tease out its subtleties and gifts.

A key feature of Wills’ ideas is the centrality of metaphor. She approvingly cites Susan Sontag’s line that, ‘A great poet is one who refines and elaborates the great historical store of metaphors and adds to our stock of metaphors.’ I often find metaphors hard to grasp and use them sparingly in my own poems, so this is a little challenging for me. However, it’s good to be challenged, and essential, I think, for any creative person to reassess their own thoughts and practice in the light of others’.

I’m only halfway through the book, but I’m enjoying it so much that I’m having to take it slowly so I can fully savour it. You can buy a copy on the Poetry Business website, here.

I should mention too that Wills maintains an always highly readable blog, here, and that her latest collection, A Friable Earth (2019), and three of its predecessors are available to buy on the Arc website, here.

As I said recently, I write precious few haiku nowadays and never try to force them out. It’s surprising for me to find, then, that this year I’ve written as many as 16 which I like to think have some merit to them. By some distance my favourite among them is this one, which Tanya McDonald kindly published in Kingfisher 6:

a dove’s two-note song . . .
I sink a pint of bitter
in the old pub’s shade

It was a rare instance of a haiku popping into my head fully formed, in the hot days in Holderness back in August, which I partially reported on here. I was sitting on a bench outside the White Horse, Easington, a few minutes after it opened at the odd time of 4pm, when I had an hour or so to kill before the bus was due to ferry me back to Holmpton. (The vagaries of East Yorkshire’s buses were as much of a mystery to me as those of the Kingston Loop railway would be to any non-south-west-Londoner.)

By accident rather than design, it’s a rare-for-me 5-7-5 haiku, though that in itself doesn’t make it any better or worse than any other haiku of mine. More to the point, maybe, that iambic second line and the third have a sing-song rhythm comparable to the collared dove’s call.

The fact that it was a pub called the White Horse was very pleasing to me, because it was also the name of the first pub, in Kingston, in which I regularly drank under-age. The latter, long since gone, was an odd boozer, with a landlord known as Orville, and a regular propping up the bar who was Samuel Beckett’s double and known to all as Roadrunner, on account of the fact that the only thing he ever said was ‘Beep’. I have no idea how he ordered his bottles of Guinness. Orville ended up doing a runner with the takings, which really can’t have been worth it.

Perhaps my pencils will jot down more haiku next year than they manged to this. Either way, rather like East Yorkshire’s buses, they’ll come when they come.

A BBC website piece on the international appeal of Detectorists, available here, provides some instructive reading, in how superb writing can transcend supposed barriers: that, far from obscure cultural references being deterrents, they can actually possess intrinsic appeal because of their obscurity.

I’ve had similar thought when reading We Peaked at Paper, subtitled ‘an oral history of British zines’, co-written by Gavin Hogg and my friend Hamish Ironside. It covers fanzines devoted to all manner of obscure subjects, including, to my delight, A Kick up the Rs, about the mighty QPR. What’s evident is the passionate energy which the founders brought to their individual fanzines and it’s that which is important, surely, in enabling niche content to reach beyond those who might already be converted. I can’t recommend the book, which is beautifully produced and available here, enough.

The same thought occurred to me when reading my favourite poem, ‘Behind The Turnip Harvest’, in Julia Deakin’s 2012 collection, Eleven Wonders, published by Graft Poetry and available here. It describes how, when she was young, she and her family once went round to the adjoining semi-detached:

Perched on their mustard settee
on our best behaviour, we sipped tea
in their front room, which was ours

inside-out, with the same criss-cross
wooden knick-knack rack but strange
ornaments and more furniture.

Deakin evokes the time and place of her childhood with such precision, yet such a light touch too. The poem contains references to ‘Embassy Regal smoke’, a ‘Vymura trellis’ and ‘our Rowland Hilder’, which cast the reader into that early-1960s world. I had no idea what a Rowland Hilder was until the penny dropped that Hilder was the artist who painted the (presumably reproduction) picture in the poem’s title. The fact that Deakin had left it to the reader to work this out made the poem even more enjoyable and is a reminder that less is often more.

My review of Greta Stoddart’s collection, Fool is up on The Friday Poem, here. It was a labour of love to undertake all the requisite back-catalogue re-reading before I read Fool and eventually started to write.

As ever, the Friday Poem website has lots of really interesting reviews, articles and, of course, poems to read. It’s become such an indispensable part of the poetry community that it seems incredible that it only started last year.