Tag: books

• On poetry competitions and personal taste

  As much as the first cuckoo ever was, the (almost) annual brouhaha over the choice of winner of the UK’s National Poetry Competition (NPC) is a sure indicator that spring has sprung.
  
  The week before last, Hilary Menos, poet and editor of The Friday Poem, and Victoria Moul, poet–critic, chewed over and pretty much spat out the poem by the splendidly-named winner, Partridge Boswell, here; as did many poets, both good and not-so-good, on social media. I found the poem to be neither as bad as has largely been made out nor especially deserving of being plucked out as the best of 21,000 poems. However, I wasn’t privy to reading the rest of them, so what do I know? I can only surmise that it’s a thankless task which somebody has to do.
  
  This Friday just gone, Hilary and Victoria, discussed more generally, here, the challenges of judging competitions. Victoria acknowledged the truth that, ‘Everyone knows competitions of any kind and in any sphere are a blunt tool.’ They are indeed; but really, as we all know, a poetry competition is principally a money-making exercise upon which the financial health of the organising outfit usually depends, so they are intrinsically vital for the flourishing of high-quality published poetry.
  
  The issue, if it is one, that none of the top three poems was written by a British poet, is, for me, wholly unimportant. I’m not at all convinced by Victoria’s insistence that she, ‘would like to see the National Poetry Competition restrict its entry criteria to British citizens and/or those living in the UK and make a serious attempt to help readers see and appreciate what is distinctive about British poetry’, given that the globe has never been as closely linked as it is now. Using the UK’s most prestigious poem competition as a means to discern some sort of set of British poetic values seems to me as futile as the coalition government’s witless introduction just over a decade ago of the requirement that ‘British values’ in general – as itemised in guidance here – be taught in schools. Aside from the fact that many serious and good poets rarely or never enter competitions, it would be rather ‘Little Britain’, wouldn’t it? Has the Man Booker Prize been devalued or enhanced by the widening of its eligibility from novels in English by British and Commonwealth writers to novels in English by writers of any nationality as long as they have been published in the UK or Ireland? Surely the more internationalist readers become, the better that is for their general outlook on life and for the health of a diverse, tolerant and culturally-enriched society?
  
  Moul’s additional argument that, ‘In literary matters as in others, America is, we might say, a rather dominant and aggressive colonial power’ is more than a little insulting to the thousands of American poets who, presumably more so than the average American citizens, oppose their government’s warmongering foreign policy within their poems, pronouncements and protests, as many of their predecessors did during (and since) the Vietnam War. American poets, like British poets and poets everywhere, tend to be among the most compassionate citizens within any society. Beyond D’Annuzio, Marinetti, Pound and Campbell, how many well-known avowedly right-wing poets have there ever been? I can’t think of any contemporary ones. In the current political climate here in the UK, restricting the NPC would play into the hands of far-right politicians and voters who, I strongly suspect, are, in the main, highly unlikely ever to be able to recognise a good poem, let alone articulate why it is good or, moreover, how it is distinctively British.
  
  British poetry is diverse in many kinds of ways, and I’m very glad that it is; attempting to nail down any common features would be well-nigh impossible. Even decades ago to argue, perhaps, that a certain emotional restraint and traditional forms were broadly more common features of British poetry than in its American counterpart would have been undermined by the poetries of those many poets influenced by Modernism and all shades of Post-Modernism. Even a poet such as Philip Larkin, often misleadingly described (including by himself in his later, heavy-drinking years) as an archetypal Little Englander, was open to, and very clearly influenced by, the work of French Symbolist poets throughout his career, as much as he was by, say, Hardy. And would he have written a poem like ‘This Be the Verse’ without the liberating impact of the poems of Allen Ginsberg and the other Beats, as later filtered into British poetry by the Children of Albion crowd, the Mersey poets et al?
  
  As for evaluating an individual poem, it shouldn’t be too hard to come to a consensus about how this should be done, or should it? When he chaired the Booker Prize panel in 1977, Larkin outlined, in his winner-announcing address, his own process in considering any of the novels he had had to read:
  
  I found myself asking four questions: Could I read it? If I could read it, did I believe it? If I believed it, did I care about it? And if I cared about it, what was the quality of my caring, and would it last?
  
  (From ‘The Booker Prize 1977’, collected in Required Writing, Faber, 1983.) Those questions, as Larkin implied, could, and would, equally apply if he were reading a poem. Unconsciously, don’t we all go through that or a very similar kind of process? Sometimes, though, I wonder if enough importance is attached to Larkin’s second question. What Larkin also implied, and elsewhere stated unequivocally, was that a poem without emotion, and incapable of arousing something other than indifference or hostility in the reader, wasn’t worth reading. If it were up to me, the four questions might be amended/updated as follows:
  
  1) Could I read it?
  2) If I could read it, did I believe it?
  3) If I believed it, was its impact conveyed without the sledgehammer emotional approach of a sad-backstory act on Britain’s Got Talent?
  4) If so, did I care enough about the poem to want to read it again?
  
  Then again, it’s all too easy to over-think these things, and better, maybe, just to trust one’s instinct.

  April 12, 2026

  books, poem, poems, poetry, writing

  ---

• What news there is

  As the world goes to hell in a handcart again, it seems perverse to be saying anything about what I’ve been up to, but then again, why let the fascists win? Alas, though, I’ve been up to very little this last month; I haven’t gone further than my local park except to see two films – Midwinter Break (excellent adaptation of an excellent book) and La Grazia (also excellent, as it should be since it involves one of the most fruitful director–actor collaborations). It’s been difficult to concentrate on, or get excited by, much. I know I’m not alone in having those sort of feelings at the moment. Had I been up to it, I would’ve joined Conor, my eldest, at the massive anti-racist march in London last Saturday, which the BBC saw fit not even to mention in their news outlets. One thing which has really lifted my spirits, though, is that Conor will be standing for the Greens in the upcoming local elections – I couldn’t be prouder of him. The ward he’s standing in has been a Lib Dem stronghold for the last eight years, so it would be an upset were he to get elected, but he knows his stuff and everything is possible now.
  
  I’ve been cheered, too, by the imminent publication of a cricket poetry anthology, in which I have five haiku and four longer poems: Catching the Light, edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard and published by Fairfield Books – details are available here. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to make the launch for it, which is doubly annoying as it’s next to the Oval, where so many of my formative cricket-watching days were spent with my dad, and where the ghostly echo of Robin Jackman’s LBW appeal will forever resound . . .
  
  Further cheering was an invitation from Andrew Neilson to be one of his three guest readers (alongside his wife, Kathryn Gray, and Katy Mahon) at the York launch of his tremendous Blue Diode Press collection, Little Griefs, on Wednesday 6th May. Details and (free) tickets are available here. Fingers and everything else crossed that I’ll be fit enough to make it.
  
  Ditto for my reading three days before that, for Poetry Performance, upstairs at the Adelaide in Teddington, at 6pm. I’m grateful to Heather Moulson and Anne Warrington for the invitation.
  
  I’ve recently ceased, for a second and final time, my involvement (except as a contributor) with Presence haiku journal, not, I hasten to add, as the result of any falling-out with the members of the Edinburgh Haiku Circle who took on management of the journal last year, and are doing a fine job, but because it made sense for them also to take on my role as website editor. It’s 22 years since Martin Lucas asked if I’d like to help with the journal, and it feels like a lifetime ago. I have mixed feelings about stopping, which are inevitably wrapped in my missing Martin still.
  
  My recent reading has been a mixture of systematic and otherwise. The former concerns the centenary, later this year, of the polymathic genius that was John Berger. I’m writing an essay to coincide with it, so I’ve been  re-reading Keeping A Rendezvous (Granta, 1992), the most diverse of his essay collections, which even includes one called ‘A load of shit’, triggered by his clearing out of the communal waste of his Haute-Savoie home:
  
  In the world of modern hygiene, purity has become a purely metaphoric or moralistic term. It has lost all sensuous reality. By contrast, in poor homes in Turkey the first act of hospitality is the offer of lemon eau-de-Cologne to apply to the visitors’ hands, arms, neck, face. Which reminds me of a Turkish proverb about elitists: “He thinks he is a sprig of parsley in the shit of the world.”
  
  In ‘Lost off Cape Wrath’, Berger summed up his uncompromising approach:
  
  The writer should be informed to the maximum about what he is writing. In the modern world in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles. Writers who have neither produce utopian trash.
  
  I’ve read too one of the few novels of his I hadn’t read before, To The Wedding (Vintage, 1995), concerning the lead-up and individual journeys to the beautiful set-piece wedding, near the mouth of the Po, of Gino and Ninon, who has AIDS, as narrated by an omniscient blind Greek tamata seller. (Tamata, you ask? Yes. Some examples can be seen here.) It’s one of Berger’s most pan-European and passionate books. Berger always wrote with passion, which is a major reason why I like his writing so much. It’s almost hard to believe that he was born and spent most of the first 36 of his 90 years in England, before he went into his permanent exile.
  
  On the poetry front, I enjoyed Jane McKie’s slim pamphlet, Mine (Cinnamon Press, 2025, available here). Her poems are quiet, mostly short, and dream-like, often reflecting her upbringing on the Sussex coast. It’s a brave poet who successfully tries to depict starling murmurations in words: ‘Like the flinch of a dreaming / eyelid, two harpooned / whales of iron filings / scatter’ (‘Starlings in flight’). The comparison to iron filings is an obvious one, but that of the whales is far from being so, and all the more effective as a result. ‘Fool’s spring’ begins,
  
  The hawthorn is athwart with cream, its petals, tiny pink
  and white panes through which sun breathes, palely.
  
  The archaic preposition ‘athwart’leaps out of course, not because of its appearance alone, but because it looks like a near anagram of ‘hawthorn’. Such close attention to how language works on the senses is what makes McKie a singular talent. Steadily, she’s built up an impressive number of collections and pamphlets over the years.
  
  A poet friend of mine kindly sent me a copy of Peckinpah Suite by Paul Munden, published by the Australian publisher Recent Work Press last year, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. Nearly every poem consists of six stanzas of seven lines each, largely concerning the work of Sam Peckinpah’s film-making career. Only the middle section, ‘Castaway’, differs: it’s a long poem, with lines tumbling across the pages, about Peckinpah’s unsuccessful attempt to get off the ground a film of a novella of the same name. Munden’s condensing of his research is admirable, but the poems too often feel as though the stories and incidents they are relaying are simply prose being shoehorned into stanzas against their will. Take this, as a random example, the first stanza of ‘The Wild Bunch’:
  
  Three wilderness years
  have made you plan
  this believing your life
  depends upon it, but
  still you’re up at sunrise
  staring into space as if
  conjuring a miracle.
  
  That placement of ‘this’ at the start of the third line is awkward – if it has to go there, then at least rescue it with a comma – and the use of the ‘life depends upon it’ cliché is less than pleasing. The best, i.e. most natural and therefore most appealing, poems are those where Munden explores his boyhood experiences of watching and reenacting Westerns:
  
  We forget, perhaps,
  what being dead was like
  when we played cowboys
  in the woods, counting
  from one to a hundred
  with a mounting
  visceral dread

              that the bad guys—
              by which I mean everyone—
              moved on. But since
              our lives were mostly play
              back then, death—
              by which I mean our pretence—
              was how we got from day

  to day, holding our breath
  for as long as it took
  to sense the danger.
  [. . .]

  I fear the book will have limited appeal beyond those extensively familiar with Peckinpah’s oeuvre and life. Endorsement-writers often exaggerate of course, and here the back-cover claim of ‘sophisticated formalism’ feels far-fetched.
  
  Rather more enjoyable was Declan Ryan’s much-lauded debut full collection Crisis Actor (Faber, 2023). Threaded through it are 10 fine poems about boxers, Ali, Louis and Tyson among them; well-crafted and contextually set (against a backdrop of racism for example) though those are, an appreciation of the finer points of the ‘sport’ on the part of the reader would make them even more interesting than they might otherwise be. There are also poems about a number of other well-known people: Sam Cooke, Nick Drake, Alun Lewis. But I prefer the poems about Ryan and his milieu, particularly the ‘ordinary’ characters he knows or has invented. Here are the closing, knowingly self-deprecatory stanzas of the book’s opener, ‘Sidney Road’:
  
  I was the future, for a week, a while ago.
  At a summer garden party, I met
  a looted favourite poet:
  over his empty, one-use flute he wrangled
  about the etiquette of ‘watering the foliage’.
  
  A marginal constituent, I’m more witness
  than antagonist to flourishing damp.
  The months pile up since my last confession;
  wheels spinning slowly, hazards on,

  just low enough for running down the battery.
  
  Although Ryan perhaps principally chose it for its rhyme with ‘flute’, ‘looted’ is such an interesting adjective, neatly suggesting that the poet in question has nothing left to offer except tedious, euphemistic chunter as ‘empty’ as his plastic glass. It’s an exemplar of how to sketch a character with a bare modicum of words.
  
  Lastly, I must again mention Andrew Neilson’s Little Griefs. It includes all nine of the poems in his 2025 Rack Press pamphlet Summers Are Other, which I (very favourably) reviewed, here, for The Friday Poem. Like Ryan, more so, in fact, Neilson is a technically adept poet, with an easy command of form and register. It seems incredible that it took him so long to find a publisher willing to take on his poetry, especially with endorsements from poets as celebrated as Rachael Boast and Sean O’Brien. We are living in odd times. ‘Casualties’ opens with a quick question then a 10-line sentence across two and a half fully-rhymed quatrains, with lines alternating ten and eight syllables, thus:
  
  Ever felt like this? You’ve gate-crashed yourself
          in the manner of Banquo’s ghost,
  now shaking thy gory locks at thyself
          even as you open the post,

  or brew a coffee or take the meetings
          (in body if not quite in mind),
  or any of a million other things
          you do for no reason, resigned

  to do it this way because that’s the way      
     you have always gone and done it.
  
  It takes a hefty amount of skill and practice to write like this. The opening query is reminiscent of the opening of Michael Donaghy’s poem ‘Liverpool’(‘Ever been tattooed?’) – though I should confess that I used that poem as a model of sorts for one of mine (‘Kingston’, in my first collection). The long sentence is beautifully controlled across its fluid enjambments – read it aloud and hear how it rolls. There’s plenty more terrific poetry in the book.

  The next book on my pile is a novel I’ve been looking forward to starting: The River Brings the Sea by Ali Thurm, published by Lendal Press.
  
  This coming Saturday I hope to make it to the Unitarian church in Doncaster to be one of the 20+ readers at the launch of the Fig Tree Anthology 2025, edited by Tim Fellows. To mark the centenary of the General Strike, Tim has just put out a call for poems about the strike and the union movement more generally. Details of both the reading and the call-out can be found on the Crooked Spire Press website, here.

  April 5, 2026

  books, poem, poems, poetry, writing

  ---

• Beetle in a box

  I spent the weekend before last with my brother Adrian at his home in Bath, which is the longest period of time we’ve spent together for donkey’s years and was really lovely. I then caught a bus which travelled through the former mining areas of Somerset around Radstock and Midsomer Norton, before going through the Mendips, with Glastonbury Tor on the horizon, and descending to Wells, the (self-proclaimed) smallest city in England. Wells has a lovely centre – mainly but not only the beautiful Gothic cathedral and the adjoining, fully-moated Bishop’s Palace.
  

  

  

  

  I got there early enough to go round and inside the cathedral, and then, up the High Street, to see a photo of my then-bearded mug on a small poster in the window of the King’s Head. Just as well I’d shaved the beard off at the start of this year, otherwise there would have been mayhem: a posse of citizens out to lasso the wanted man.
  

  

  Ama Bolton and her group of like-minded folk, the Fountain Poets, were very welcoming, and read – and, in Rachael Clyne’s case, sang – some fine pieces. I read from both my collections plus a couple of new poems too. Ama has kindly invited me back for another reading next March, so I’d better write lots more poems in the next 11 and a half months. I must add the not-quite-random fact that both Ama and I have had poems published about dental hygienists!
  
  Much of my reading has again been for reviews, and, for once, of books which I enjoyed and admired without exception. Among the books I’ve read solely (or mainly) for pleasure are Dean Browne’s After Party (Picador, 2025), this month’s Poetry Book Club choice, and Ted Kooser’s Winter Morning Walks: one hundred postcards to Jim Harrison (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000). Two more different books you’d be hard-pressed to find, yet I like them both: the inventive verbal fireworks of Browne’s poems contrast sharply with Kooser’s quiet, weather- and nature-based short poems. In a preface, Kooser says he write the poems ‘during [his] recovery from surgery and radiation for cancer’, with a two-mile walk every dawn because he’d ‘been told by [his] radiation oncologist to stay out of the sun for a year because of skin sensitivity’. Even without that background information, Kooser’s poems would still have been very moving. I hope he won’t mind me quoting this one in full:
  
  March 10
  
            Quiet and cold at 6 a.m.
  
  
  At dawn in the roadside churchyard,
  the recent, polished headstones glance and flash
  as if the newly dead were waving pink placards
  protesting the loss of their influence.
  But the soft old marbles, grainy from weather
  and losing their names, have a steady glow,
  like paper bags with candles lit inside,
  lining a path, an invitation.
  
  Earlier this year, I started getting a bit of pain in my right shoulder, but I thought little of it. It’s considerably worsened since then, with constant pain down my right arm and in my neck, to the point that each ordinarily simple task is a bit of an ordeal. After an x-ray a fortnight ago and appointments with a doctor and a physio this week, it seems that the top of my spine is the most likely source of the problem and that it’s all related to my nervous system – ‘my noives’, as Oliver Hardy would say. I might know more after blood tests on Sunday and more physio on Monday.
  
  In #293 (et al)) of his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein considers what we mean when we each, individually, talk about ‘pain’, and compares it thus;
  
  Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle s only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. [Etc.]
  
  I like to imagine the beetle in my box is a shiny, metallic green. I think I have a fairly high tolerance for pain (for a man), but this is testing my patience to the limit. I’m also struggling to do things one-handed, and with the ‘wrong’ hand at that, and with not being able to run. I walk much slower too. These are intensely annoying things, but I realise many people live with much worse conditions. Dean Browne, via a character, defined pain as something else, in the opening of his poem ‘Quiche’, available here.

  March 11, 2026

  books, ludwig-wittgenstein, pain, poem, poems, poetry, ted-kooser, writing

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• Review of Gaia Holmes’s He Used to Do Dangerous Things

  Across her three Comma Press collections – Dr James Graham’s Celestial Bed (2006), Lifting the Piano with One Hand (2013) and, especially, Where the Road Runs Out (2018) – Gaia Holmes’s poetry has burned with a unique free spirit, content-, form- and sensibility-wise. Her poems are unlike anyone else’s, filled with unlikely, netherworldly events frequently set on the fringes of society but which are real and compelling.
  
  In this collection of 19 stories, Holmes’s first foray into fiction, many of the characters are neurodivergent and/or getting a raw deal out of life: bullying, toxic relationships, domestic violence, bereavement, conception difficulties, loneliness, terrible neighbours and a general sense of passivity which these problems cause or exacerbate. However, many of the stories concern ways in which those characters, through their own willpower or with some magical realist intervention, circumvent their circumstances. In her writing, Holmes is careful to avoid the trap of overtly feeling sorry for her characters and often does so by employing a first-person narrator who just tells it as it is.
  
  The collection begins with the excellent title story, in which a recently-widowed woman, gradually revealing how her husband died, struggles with depression arising from her loss:
  
  Grief and the weight of the secret are whittling me away, sucking the fat and the hope off my bones. Eating is a chore because I have no appetite and since that night I’ve been finding it hard to swallow and can’t cope with anything that crunches. If anyone asks why, I tell them that the trauma weakened my teeth. I live on soup and soft, quiet things: trifle, Shippams pastes on cheap white bread, rice puddings, tubs of prawn cocktail. I avoid potatoes.  
  
  For readers acquainted with the poems packed with grief in Where the Road Runs Out, this will be familiar terrain. As with a good few of the stories here though, to say much more plot-wise would be to spoil the reader’s surprise.
  
  ‘Shadow Play’ is one of several stories overtly set during the Covid pandemic, and one of a couple featuring power cuts too. It’s a beautiful tale of a grandfather with dementia and how his five-year-old granddaughter’s frustration at his memory failure and lack of engagement is briefly but joyously overcome.
  
  Perhaps the book’s most complex story is ‘Unloved Flowers’, which travels back and forward through the challenges faced by its protagonist Connor, a night-time security guard at a garden centre who encounters and befriends, or is befriended by, a resident of a small tent city. In a memory of his ‘Granny Amy’, her affection for dandelions is revealed:
  
  She explained to him that though roses were beautiful, fragrant, well-loved flowers, dandelions had so many more tricks, like soft little medicine cabinets. In spring, she drank dandelion tea for her blood and her ‘waterworks’. In winter, she drank dandelion wine for her spirit. In dandelion season, she took him out to gather what she called the ‘food of the gods’ and as they picked, she’d tell him the story of Theseus, the Greek hero who defeated the Minotaur. Before the defeat, in order to build up his strength, the Goddess Hecate fed Theseus dandelion salads for 30 days. Connor used to nibble on the bitter leaves as a teenager, hoping they’d make him stronger and braver, bring his voice back.
  
  This is remarkable, imaginative writing, isn’t it? First of all, the paying of so much attention to a flower usually dismissed as a weed, and then that peculiar and really quite marvellous simile, ‘like soft little medicine cabinets’: the two adjectives work in combination to soften the hard edges of the physical objects and provide metaphorical panaceas as well as those provided by the uses of the dandelions. The narrative turns into Greek Mythology and then back to the contemporary life of Connor, silenced by years of bullying, are equally astonishing.
  
  Another stand-out story, ‘Universal Stain Remover’, relates how a house-sitter goes above and beyond by not only cleaning and disinfecting everywhere – ‘those places that are neglected’ – but also dealing with long-lingering stains, noting how they resemble other things and even studying the science of stains:
  
  I have tried almost every product on the market and created my own concoctions. I have successfully removed oil, sauce, ink, sweat and other bodily secretions. I have learned the timbre and nature of stains, how they spread and set and the direction they needle themselves into fabrics. I myself am made of stains.
  
  It emerges that the stains are a metaphor for the controlling behaviour of an ex-partner. Suffice it to say that the story takes an intriguing turn of events.
  
  In ‘Ratguts and Lola’, Holmes explores the perils of hitchhiking but does so hilariously. The humour in the collection as a whole is droll, occasionally daft and occasionally dark, as it is in real life; and it’s all part and parcel of Holmes’s skill at getting under the skin of modern life in the north of England (and both explicitly and implicitly beyond) after years of Tory Government-inflicted austerity.
  
  ‘Until the Batteries Run Out’ brings us Clara, who, bereft by the cot death of her daughter, sits in the dark drinking G&Ts. The ending of the story is beautiful and full of tender hopefulness.
  
  Holmes’s presumably personal, bitter experience of being part of the protest against the infamous felling of many trees in order to build a bypass around Newbury informs ‘198 Methods of NDVA’. The non-violent direct action in the story involves sitting high up in the trees and fending off increasingly-violent bailiffs sent up in cherry-pickers. The protagonist summons up all her strength and that of her female ancestors:
  
  I scream strongly, loudly, apocalyptically. I scream and my scream is the scream of banshees, dryads, sirens. I scream because I’m scared of being felled or falling and I ache. I scream for Stella. I scream for Amrita Devi and her severed head. I scream for the sawn off branches at the bottom of the tree. I scream for the green miles being buried alive.
  
  Within this screaming the reader might intuit all the pain and courage of the other women among the stories in this collection.
  
  Perhaps the saddest of the stories is ‘Surge’, in which lonely 72-year-old Colin Fenwick joins in the clapping for NHS workers on Thursday evenings during lockdown but he does so inside his fourth-floor flat, the windows of which are sealed so nobody can hear him. The café where he usually has his Christmas dinner a few days before the big day is closed due to Covid so instead he buys a ready-meal Christmas dinner: ‘When he takes off the lid and surveys the contents, it looks like toy food: all the carrots peeled and trimmed to the same size, four uniform sprouts, six uniform potatoes, a perfect square of stuffing, two rubbery looking slices of turkey.’ Holmes ups the sadness quotient further, with her rare gift for delineating the unlucky hands which so many individuals are dealt.
  
  The final story, ‘Below the Thunders of the Upper Deep’, is one which I’ve written about before, here, or rather about Holmes’s recording of herself reading it. It describes in detail the dreadful experience of living next door to an antisocial man – ‘the Kraken’ – who gets his comeuppance courtesy of three lively nuns, who, in my head at least, are the same ones who rampaged around the university campus in Andrew Davies’s superb 1980s BBC drama A Very Peculiar Practice.
  
  It’s a suitably weird ending to a collection in which the everyday existences of people, mostly put-upon individuals, are enriched or offered a sense of hope through extraordinary, sometimes magical events. In her use of magical realism, an easy comparison could be made between Holmes and another brilliant Comma Press writer, Sara Maitland; yet Holmes’s imagination and narrative style are very much her own, as full of energy and life as her outstanding poetry. I hope that more stories, and maybe a novel or two, will spring from Holmes’s pen some time soon.
  
  
  Gaia Holmes, He Used to Do Dangerous Things, Comma Press, 2024, available to buy here.
  
  Review copy kindly provided by Comma Press.

  February 10, 2026

  book-review, book-reviews, books, comma-press, fiction, gaia-holmes, short-stories, writing

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• February update

  January was a blast, despite the year’s first rejection winging its way to me on only the 5th: I’ve been far more productive, poems-wise, than usual. That may in part be due to reading the long, elegant, syntactically-gorgeous lines of C.K. Williams’s poetry at bedtime, which seems to have unlocked a part of my brain hitherto securely bolted. I’ve been to two fantastic weekend workshops, at both of which the other participants wrote amazing, inspiring poems. In editing my own, I’ve found, not for the first time in the last year or two, that I’ve spent at least as much time adding to the poems as I have deleting or tweaking phrases and lines; for me, that’s a very happy place.
  
  I’ve been delighted to see some poetry pals buoyed by recent successes, a reminder, if one were needed, that the poetry world has room enough for everyone with flair, imagination and a willingness to work hard at their craft.
  
  Something else which has made me think a lot about the use of language is learning Italian: I’m in the second year of evening classes and I’m at the point now where I relish the challenge of rendering Italian into idiomatic English. (Or even idiotic.) I can’t say that I’m speaking Italian with great confidence, but I like having a go and I enjoy how the words flow into one another more seamlessly than English words do.
  
  Two recently-published anthologies each include a poem of mine. Firstly, My Ear is Full of Milk: An anthology of writing for Laurel & Hardy, edited by Simon Barraclough and Aaron Kent, Broken Sleep Books, available here. As my (not brilliant) contribution relates, Stan and Ollie enlivened my summers, because, back in the ’80s, the BBC used to show one of their short films every day before the test match coverage. Stan Laurel surely deserves to be ranked among the greatest Britons of all time. I’m itching to read it, but my TBR pile has much more pressing candidates. Secondly, I’m very proud to have a poem in The Poems: Forty Years of The North – published by Smith|Doorstop and available here – which contains a whole heap of wonderful poems first published in my favourite poetry journal.
  
  Books and magazines I read in January included: Will Birch’s excellent and suitably lively biography of another great Briton, Ian Dury (Pan MacMillan, 2010); No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain by Paul Addison (OUP, 2010); Andy Beckett’s Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980–82 Made Modern Britain (Penguin, 2015), based on interviews he conducted with many major and minor players in the first years of Thatcherism, including some excellent stuff on the GLC administration led by Ken Livingstone and how revolutionary and influential they were, despite much right-wing press opprobrium (which I remember well) and still are; the latest issues of Acumen, The Dark Horse and PN Review (hurray for a terrific new poem by Roger Garfitt); a re-reading of Jonathan Edwards’s fine Gen (Seren, 2018) for poetry book club; and more of Richard Siken’s prose-poems.
  
  I’m currently reading Ken Worpole’s Brightening from the East: Essays on Landscape and Memory, Little Toller, 2025, available here, the first essays of which rambled about rather and contained little new for anyone, like me, who is already familiar with the coastline and countryside of Essex and the edgelands of north-east and east London. It’s also let down by a lack of footnotes or references of any kind other than a long list of source material. But where the book really comes alive, and beautifully so, is when Worpole starts to reminisce about his grandmother, his childhood and his teacher training and practice at a time when folk traditions still featured strongly in English primary education. Another essay concerns Essex-based Tolstoyan and other model communities, ground covered to an extent by the genius that is Jonathan Meades in his BBC4 programme The Joy of Essex (2012), but happily it includes the Othona community, at Bradwell, next to the seventh-century church of St Peter-in-the-Wall. I stayed there in 2003 at a British Haiku Society conference, at which Brian Tasker got us doing Playback Theatre, which involves acting out stories or incidents recalled by audience members, and probably wouldn’t have been sanctioned by the network, details here, that started and oversees it. It was a strange experience, not least because someone from another, Christian group staying there watched us doing Playback and wanted to defect from her group to ours . . .

  February 3, 2026

  books, poem, poems, poetry, writing

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• New Year resolutions

  Belated happy new year to you. I’ve not really one for making resolutions, so it’s about time I did, so here goes: (a) I will not worry about how long some poems have been out there under consideration (including one since 26^th May – that’s 2025, I hasten to add, though it feels a darn sight longer), and, more importantly, (b) I will not send poems out until absolutely every single word, every item of punctuation and the form is as good as I can possibly make it and is doing its job to the best of its ability. ‘Common sense, Matthew,’ I hear you say, but it’s all too easy to get impatient and het up about submissions and/or prematurely over-excited about shiny new poems, isn’t it?
  
  I mentioned the latter the other day when I was talking to a poetry group in Sheffield who had kindly invited me to read some poems, relate my ‘poetry journey’ and set them some exercises. They were a lovely and enthusiastic group, mostly fairly new to writing poetry and yet to get anywhere near as cynical about the mug’s game as I am. My journey, such as it is, has been circuitous, and it often still feels, 43 years after I started, that I’m not even halfway there yet. There is, of course, always much room for improvement. I said to the group that, if they are using memories and other personal experiences as the basis for poems, that it’s perfectly fine to change details, and almost entirely fictionalise if need be, as long as a kernel of truth remains. How one defines that kernel of truth is up to the poet, but the reader will almost certainly be able to sense whether it is there or not.
  
  I also talked about the importance of community, both the wider poetry community per se and small groups, like theirs, which provide mutual encouragement, and, hopefully, get to the point of being able to make constructive criticisms of each other’s work, so that they can improve as poets. Not everyone wants to hear, let alone act upon, criticism of course, which is fine if poetry is just a hobby, like playing badminton or something; but poets who are serious about their poetry have to be resilient as we know.
  
  Among the new collections I’ve enjoyed and admired of late are Lady by Laurie Bolger (Nine Arches), In the Lily Room by Erica Hesketh (also Nine Arches), Lives of the Female Poets by Clare Pollard (Bloodaxe), and, at the moment, I Do Know Some Things by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon). The latter consists of single-paragraph prose-poems. In their quirkiness, they remind me of the epigrammatical mini-essays by Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), which were really proto-prose-poems, I think. Here’s an example from his collection, More Trivia (1922), which  I bought just before Christmas:

  

  In a letter dated 21 My 1919 to Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf described Pearsall Smith thus: ‘I think there is a good deal of the priest, it may be of the eunuch, in him.’ As a young man, he was a friend of Whitman’s in the latter’s old age, and they used to take (horse-drawn) cabs round Central Park following ones in which lovers were passengers to see how far they got, as it were. That incident apparently sparked Robert Lowell’s line ‘I watched for love-cars’ in his great ‘Skunk Hour’, available here, the last poem in Life Studies. Who knew? Well, I didn’t until I read the notes in the very heavy paperback I have of Lowell’s Collected. I’ve been reading Lowell off and on since I first read his poems at school, in the first year of sixth form, way back in 1983, and many of them remain among my all-time favourite poems.

  January 14, 2026

  books, logan-pearsall-smith, poem, poems, poetry, robert-lowell, writing

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• Crooked Spire Press Christmas sale!

  SALE!!

  December 9, 2025

  books, literature, poems, poetry, writing

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• Recent readings and reading

  The evening in York was a memorable one: Janet Dean and Ian Parks, whose new collection we were celebrating, read beautifully, and Jane Stockdale’s songs and tunes were delightful. I stuck to my usual set of poems from The Last Corinthians, tempting though it was to read different ones and even some from my previous collection and/or some new ones.
  
  Five days after York, having been invited by Katie Griffiths to read in Walton-on-Thames alongside Sophie Herxheimer, I skedaddled down south for what was perhaps the most enjoyable gig for me since the one in Nottingham in September. Sophie is a force of nature, an artist as well as a poet, whom I could’ve listened to all evening. She got everyone making zines during the interval. Katie herself read a poem; it’s excellent news that Nine Arches will be publishing her second collection next year. There was also a short open mic, the readers including marvellous Jill Abram.

  

  As Walton is only a few miles west of Kingston, I tailored my set accordingly, with more locally-set poems than I would normally read, though I decided – wisely, I think – against reading one, ‘The Blue Bridge’, which features Sham 69, who came from the neighbouring town of Hersham. In all, it was a joyful evening, and a good way to end this year of readings, which has seen me appear in eight cities and towns in England within the space of six months. It’s been more of a meander than a tour, and two of them were serendipitous invitations at fairly short notice; nonetheless, it’s been lovely to read my poems out loud in front of attentive listeners, not all of whom are poets themselves. I’m thankful to everyone who’s come along, whether because of me, my co-readers or both. I’ll start again in 2026, with a trip to Wells in March.
  
  Meanwhile, my friend and fellow native-Kingstonian poet Greg Freeman, wrote a kind review, available here, of The Last Corinthians for the Write Out Loud site, for which he is the news editor. I am especially grateful to Greg for this, for he not only also reviewed the first launch event at Doncaster back in June but was also the first person to review my first collection. Many congratulations are due to Greg for graduating yesterday from the Newcastle University / Poetry School MA in Poetry.
  
  This last week has seen me join up with poet–friends for a residential in Cloughton, four miles north of Scarborough and just under a mile from the North Sea. Due east from there, there’s no landfall until Schleswig Holstein.

  

  Although there were intense mornings of drafting poems using prompts, there were also lots of laughs and games, including guess-the-mystery-poets, pool and table tennis, despite the games room (a big shed) being a bit flooded. There was also lots of that great British delicacy, fried bread, at breakfast, which was right up my strasse. I can’t say that I wrote especially well, and sometimes in such weeks the real pleasure to be had is in hearing how well others can draft fully-formed poems in under 10 minutes, and in the conversations at meal-times and in small workshop groups. I very rarely write well from prompts, and usually only if I go off on a tangent, but that’s not necessarily the point; it’s more about getting words down on a page and seeing what might emerge, either immediately or much later when the words are revisited. It is invariably amazing to discover what memories, thoughts and word salads appear.
  
  In between times, I’ve been reading books and journals in a rather unsystematic manner. Here are my thoughts on some of them.
  
  I very much enjoyed Amanda Dalton’s third full collection, Fantastic Voyage (Bloodaxe, 2024, available here), which riffs on the wacky 1966 film of the same name and also includes her moving meditation on grief, the two long poems which make up ‘Notes on Water’ (which I briefly reviewed, here, when it appeared as a Smith | Doorstop pamphlet in 2022), as well as a series of tremendous prose poems which are as funny as they are affecting, as in the opening and ending of this one:
  
  Auntie Irene says that cousin John got a tapeworm from stroking the sheep. [. . .] Every time I see my cousin John I want to ask him if the tapeworm is still growing in his insides and every time he speaks to me I wonder will it come out of his mouth like words he didn’t mean to say.
  
  Alan Buckley’s Still (Blue Diode Publishing, 2025, available here) was for me rather a disappointment after his sublime 2020 debut full collection, Touched (HappenStance Press): every (single-word title) poem consists of six couplets with seven syllables per line, a form which Buckley calls the ‘douzaine’, and most of them are about nature and were written during Covid times, though too many of them seemed like nature notes, inhibited rather than helped by the form, in which the thoughts he conveys aren’t quite brought sufficiently into focus and sometimes lapse into cliché, such as ‘May you burn brightly as long as you can’ (‘Glow’), or the obvious – a magpie described as having ‘piebald simplicity, / disturbed by metalline blue’). The paring-back dictated by the form, which he talks about in the book’s end-matter, lacks the powerful concision of haiku and doesn’t quite leave enough room to develop the plethora of ideas that he evidently has. However, I do, admire Buckley’s determination to try something different and at their best, these poems have a fine simplicity, as one would expect from such a talented poet: ‘As the final transport plane / leaves Kabul, here in Marsh Park // the Afghan boys play cricket. / They made their journeys on foot, // in trucks. Some don’t know if those / they left behind are alive.’ (‘Cricket’) Maybe a re-reading will prove more profitable.
  
  At the age of 80, Peter Jay has collected his poems 1962–2024, as The Last Bright Apple, published by Anthony Howell’s Grey Suit Editions and available here. Jay was the founder and chief editor of Anvil Press Poetry from 1968 until it ceased in 2016, when some of its poets and back-catalogue were taken on by Carcanet. Jay had impeccable taste; as well as perhaps his most lucrative (!) asset, Carol Ann Duffy, I have on my shelves Anvil books by real favourites of mine, like Martina Evans, Michael Hamburger, Anthony Howell himself, Peter Levi, E.A. Markham, Dennis O’Driscoll and Greta Stoddart, and Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard’s translations of Elytis, Seferis and others. As is often the case, Jay is better-known as an editor than he is as a poet, and this nicely-titled and beautifully-produced book will go some way to restoring his reputation as a poet. I say some way, because it’s not the most substantial of outputs and includes many translations from a variety of poets and languages. At his best, though, Jay’s poems are warm, attractive and cerebrally ruminative without being esoteric, as in the opening half of ‘Thoughts’:
  
  There are days when the mind grazes,
  Circling itself like an answer
  Lazily guessing its question.
  How fragile they are, thoughts,
  How delicately to be hoarded!
  When a white thought runs away,
  It takes on the colour of air,
  Of water. Unguarded thought,
  Home thought in search of a heart,
  Heartless though in search of a home,
  Desert thought thirsting for an oasis,
  Pale fractured thought, let me catch you,
  Name you and give you a colour.
  
  These lines, perhaps unsurprisingly, remind me of Levi and of the late collections of Hamburger. Elsewhere, Jay is a pleasing observer of what passes for natural wonder in nature-depleted England, e.g. ‘Swans on the tarn / move with the weather, / rain, wind or sun, / drifting together.’ (‘Little Langdale’), and is wryly reflective on his life’s work: ‘What can be done with poets? / Such awkward people. We know / They don’t matter at all; why then / Do they concern us?’ (‘Ars Politica’). In all, this is a collected poems which, despite being comparatively slender at 150 or so pages, contains the sort of fine, philosophising poems which are sadly out of fashion these days.
  
  I’ve also spent time revisiting the metaphysical rococo wordscapes of Lucie Brock-Broido. The four collections published by Alred A. Knopf before her death in 2016 at the age of just 61were and are magnificent. It amazes me that, although Carcanet published a fine selected, Soul Keeping Company, in 2010, the individual collections are yet to be published over here. Maybe they’re waiting for Knopf to publish a definitive collected.
  
  I have more reviews to write before Christmas, and one appearing next week. It has without doubt been my busiest year of poetry, and for that I am very grateful.

  December 6, 2025

  alan-buckley, amanda-dalton, books, cloughton, ian-parks, jane-stockdale, janet-dean, lucie-brock-broido, lucie-brock-broido, peter-jay, peter-jay, poem, poems, poetry, writing

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• Review of Sarah Maitland’s True North

  Sara Maitland, True North, Selected Stories, Comma Press, 2024
  £14.99, available to buy here.
  
  
  Among post-war British writers, few can justifiably claim to have amassed an oeuvre as varied and interesting as that of Sara Maitland. Like her friend Angela Carter, Maitland made her name from the late 1970s as the writer of feminist novels and stories which incorporated Magical Realism, often reworked fairy tales, and generally pushed the boundaries of contemporary writing. Her debut novel, Daughters of Jerusalem (Blond and Briggs, 1978) won the Somerset Maugham Award and is considered, alongside Michèle Roberts’s A Piece of the Night, to be the UK’s first feminist novel, though it contained disconcerting elements of Magical Realism which both underlined and were tangential to the sharp, dialogue-driven narrative. Maitland and Roberts were part of a feminist writers’ collective with Michelene Wandor, Valerie Miner and Zoe Fairbairns. Since her debut, Maitland has had six novels and many short-story collections published, though much of that fictional output appeared before the Millennium.
  
  The reason for Maitland’s much-reduced fiction in recent years is explained in a non-fiction work for which she is probably best-known, A Book of Silence (Granta, 2008). It covers Maitland’s spiritual quest for ever deeper silence, which sees her move from London to Northamptonshire, to moorland in County Durham before a period of isolation on Skye and other research – a double-session in a flotation tank; stays at the Sōtō Zen monastery of Throssel Hole and in the Sinai desert – and two years living with her mother in Galloway, before the eventual building of a house miles from nowhere, further into Galloway. What Maitland found as a result was that, while the silence engendered by the solitude and the eschewal of television, radio and other noise-making devices enabled for her a reduction of self as a way of getting closer to her God, it wasn’t necessarily the kind of silence needed to produce narrative writing.
  
  It seems as though Maitland isn’t as well remembered for her fiction as she should be. I have a deep fondness for her novel Three Times Table (Chatto & Windus, 1990), which, with a delightfully unexpected dose of Magical Realism, interweaves the lives and adventures of three generations of free-spirited women living in the same North London household. Maitland has hybridised non-fiction and fiction successfully, notably in Gossip from the Forest (Granta, 2012) in which she takes walks in a dozen British forests and woods, considers the dark, sylvan origins of fairy tales, and re-tells a Brothers Grimm fairy story for each of the walks. But I also very much like her other short stories too, so it’s timely that the estimable Manchester-based, not-for-profit Comma Press, whose books always look and feel beautifully turned out, have published a ‘best of’, having previously published Maitland’s stories in six anthologies and in her project Moss Witch (2014), stories written in response to conversations with eminent scientists.
  
  True North isn’t a conventional Selected, because each of the 16 stories was chosen by a relative or friend of Maitland, including Richard Coles, who also contributes a chatty and pleasant but superfluous introduction-cum-recommendation. (Maitland should surely be at least as much of a national treasure as Coles is, but that’s by the by.)
  
  All of Maitland’s chief fictional concerns are represented, including two updates of fairy tales. ‘Hansel and Gretel’ relates a visit made by a now-married Hansel to Gretel who lives in the forest. They look back on the story which defined their early lives and which, although they are twins, binds them closer still. It’s in the almost incidental details that Maitland’s prose really shines, with a rhapsodic beauty:
  
        Later, they go for a walk. She puts her arm round his waist and her head leans lightly on his shoulder. There is a little party of long-tailed tits, ridiculous and agitated, bustling along ahead of them; tiny pinkish balls of feathers with absurdly long tails. They do not talk much now. It is all hushed green gold and the wind has dropped away.
  
  Time has also moved on within ‘Rapunzel Revisited’: Rapunzel is now an old woman, living in the famous tower, with a young witch as a maid.
  
  As I say, Magical Realism galvanises much of Maitland’s output and here is no exception. The first story, the title-story from Moss Witch, is similar in tone to her versions of fairy tales, macabre, but with a seam of dry wit running through it. It’s her close observation of natural history, no doubt born of years of walking, and experiencing, isolated places – as well as her conversations with Dr Jennifer Rowntree, Associate Professor in Ecological Genetics – which makes the narrative so compelling. Mosses (and liverworts) are very much in vogue these days, but Maitland was evidently ahead of the game. ‘Seeing Double’ and the drolly-titled ‘Why I Became a Plumber’, the pretexts of which I won’t spoil (though the former is a little reminiscent of Bruce Robinson’s film How to Get Ahead in Advertising, and the latter springs elegantly from a trio of very clever epigraphs), both take the reader into the fantastical, but  always in a believable manner; fantastic but not fantasy.
  
  Natural history, species depletion, over-fishing, scientific research and a deep affection for the Hebrides all inform ‘Her Bonxie Boy’. In passing, Maitland’s lyrical writing sings of,
  
  [. . . ] the A82, the most beautiful road in the world. She drove, as always, with that strange mixture of recognition, signposts and deep desire. Loch Lomondside. Crianlarich. Tyndrum. The long haunted pass through Glen Coe. Ballachulish. Fort William. Invergary.
        She turns west. Her heart sings. The lovely lonely road through Kintail. Kyle of Lochalsh. The bridge, now free at last. Across An t-Eilean Sgitheanach, the winged island, with the Cuillin towering above the road, monstrous in their ferocity. Portree. Uig, where the road ends at the bottom of the steep curling hill. She is going beyond. Outwith the harbour wall there is nothing but sea and work and love and joy.
  
  Obviously, the place-names do a good deal of Maitland’s work for her, but there is a delicious energy and freedom to her sentences here. This story, benefiting from the expertise of Robert Furness, Professor of Seabird and Fishing Interactions at the University of Glasgow, is perhaps the highlight of the selection, with something of the emotional flavour of the Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I’m Going mixed with serious ecological concerns and a trademark surprise ending.
  
  As well as ‘Seeing Double’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ there are three other stories about pairings. Identical twins David and neurodiverse Derek in ‘The Beautiful Equation’ are at odds in a strange, but, as ever, all too plausible tale. ‘A Fall from Grace’ features Eva and Louise, two acrobat sisters in Paris, who bear comparison with Sophie Fevvers, the aerialiste hero of Angela Carter’s justly celebrated 1984 novel Nights at the Circus; the tone, though, reminded me of the novels of Rose Macaulay, especially The Towers of Trebizond. The dark title-story is about two women living together, one young and one old, who are visited by ‘a new shape’ which turns out to be ‘an ice traveller’.
  
  ‘Claudia Procula Writes a Letter’ is a witty, catty epistle from the wife of Pontius Pilate:
  
  We did entertain their sort of king fellow, a nasty little quisling called Herod, to dinner last night. The most vulgar, creepy undersized worm you can’t imagine [. . .]
  
        Right at the moment, par exemple, there’s a whole lot of unease because of this young man from the northern half of the province who’s arrived in town. He’s rather good looking in a hairy sort of way, and can talk the hind legs off a donkey (oh, yes, I went and took a discreet peek, you know me).
  
  Although many of them have themes of female freedom or strivings for it, the most explicitly feminist story is ‘An Edwardian Tableau’, in which a young woman, expecting a proposal from an older man, a canon with prospects of becoming a bishop, boldly and bravely bears witness at dinner to the Metropolitan Police violence, including sexual, against Suffragettes on Black Friday, in November 1910, thereby killing conversation dead and thoroughly embarrassing her parents.
  
  ‘Andromeda’ also has a feminist slant, in a recasting of Greek myth, with Perseus revealed to be a bit of a shit.
  
  ‘Miss Manning’s Angelic Moment’ is a lovely Pymesque tale with the now familiar Maitlandian twist.
  
  Maitland varies the stories from first to third person, and sometimes they hasten a little towards their conclusions. But they are never less than entertaining, frequently informative – though without being clunkily so – and mix the light and the dark in a way entirely reflective of life as we lead it, often movingly so. Her prose style varies too, from straightforward to richly savourable, always with the best interests of her storytelling at heart. True North provides a fine introduction to Maitland’s stories and her fiction in general. 
  
  
  Review copy kindly provided by Comma Press.

  November 7, 2025

  book-review, books, comma-press, fairy-tales, fiction, magical-realism, reading, sara-maitland, short-stories

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• On Mary Mulholland’s ‘Stilling Time’

  Mary Mulholland has been steadily building up an impressive body of work over the last decade and more: her latest publication, the elimination game, published by Broken Sleep Books and available here, is her second solo pamphlet, following her 2022 Live Canon  debut What the sheep taught me, in addition to her two Nine Pens collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell. Mary is also the founder of the Red Door Poets (details here), of whom I was an original member; I can testify to Mary’s deep poetic intuition and generosity.
  
  With intelligence, humour and carefully contained ire, the elimination game tackles the stereotypes, pitfalls and apparent invisibility of older women in contemporary British society. As a late-middle-aged man in the same society, I can’t, and don’t, pretend to know what it feels like to be an older woman in Britain today, but Mary’s poems provide a good idea.
  
  The content contains a plethora of memorable lines and images, such as the eponymous hero of ‘The General’s Widow’ who, once ‘The funeral’s over’ finds ‘it’s such a relief, / she’ll spend the night making paper planes, / hurl them at his eyes, nose and brains’, and the title-poem in which a litany of misogynist and agist insulting terms for older women are rebuffed in no uncertain terms (‘kindly wait while i /find a bucket to list & puke in’) and then refuted by another, much more positive litany of achievements: ‘last year I swam in the / arctic    trekked the sahara     then / mastered roller-blading    next up / i’m   starting   classes   in   mandarin’.
  
  There are heartfelt poems from the perspective of both motherhood and grandmotherhood (both subjective and objective, and in ‘The Grandmothers, both), celebrating the passing on of the torch of female fearlessness; and of the incredible family memories and history which need to be handed down through the generations before it’s too late (the vivid ‘Fallen Tree’); and, in ‘Reading the Silence’, the quiet, uneasy moments of a later-years (heterosexual) relationship, in which the man’s apparently dominant voice and ‘exploits’ are quietly undercut by the woman’s unsaid response:
  
  Once in Africa, with rain like steel drums
  on the tin roof, he said whisky was safer

  than water, and the grey parrot, once owned
  by a bronchial old man, coughed.
  
  She pauses her knitting, replays her thoughts,
  plain, purl, clacketing needles, perhaps time,
  to cast off. She glances. He raises an eyebrow,
  she half-smiles.
  
  There are poems, too, about the perils of older sexual attraction and perfunctory, unfulfilling sex, surely underexplored topics in contemporary British poetry, and, most poignant of all, a rueful list-poem, ‘The Regretting Room’.
  
  There is a degree of interplay and echoing between the poems, not in a way which duplicates ideas, but, rather, augments them with different facets of the same sub-themes. This helps to make this pamphlet unusually well unified. I, for one, would like to see a full collection from Mary, in which she can bring her skills and life-experience to bear on the larger canvas.
  
  The 25 poems in the pamphlet are varied in form: blocks, 5; bullet-points, 1; columns, 1; couplets, 6; haiku, 1; irregular stanzas, 4; quatrains, 2; sestets, 1; tercets, 4. Such variety remains, I think, an under-rated aspect of collecting poems into a coherent whole. Unless a collection is themed by form (e.g. a collection of sonnets), reading poem after poem in the same or similar forms, whether block poems or in couplets, will never be the most enjoyable experience, however excellent the content maybe.
  
  11 of the poems are in standard upper- and lower-case; the others, though, are in lower-case only – first-person singular, names, other proper nouns and all. I presume the decision as which case to use when was made on an intuitive, poem-by-poem basis, rather than with any preconception. I can’t be the only reader who finds the lower-case-for-everything format to be unnerving to the point of mild irritation, because I can’t quite see the point of it, other than as a needless layer of further variety, but I’m endeavouring to get over myself. (For years, there has been a sizeable minority of English-language haiku poets who have deployed the lower-case for each and every word, and within three lines – or just one – that approach looks a trifle pretentious. Often the ‘i’ instead of ‘I’ was/is used to indicate an absence of ego by Zen-infused poets, but to my mind it has had the opposite, self-defeating effect on the reader, of drawing attention to itself.)  
  
  You may wonder, then, why I’ve chosen the poem below rather than one of those in standard upper- and lower-case. The answer is simply that I like the content very much. So it seems that I’m succeeding in getting over myself, which must be a good thing.
  
  Mary has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.
  
  *
  
  
  Stilling Time
  
  when she turned eighty my aunt refused to go
  to bed, because that’s where most people die.
  
  at eighty eleanor of aquitaine rode on horseback
  like a man when she went to visit the king of spain.
  
  a woman even older circumnavigated the world,
  another ran marathons, one wrote racy books.
  
  when i’m eighty i’m going to retrace my steps
  to the grand canyon, breathe again the air
  
  where i first encountered the majesty of creation.
  i will touch a black stone ninety million years old
  
  and feel young. i’ll bump into a family elk
  at dawn, we will hold each other’s gaze.
  
  I’ll tell them I come in peace, leave my shadow
  falling over the canyon edge, sinking into earth.
  
  *
  
  I’ll be straightforward for once and start with the title. A play-on-words on ‘stealing time’ is intentional, I assume; at least, that allusion came immediately to mind. The idea of stilling time is attractive: of enabling a pausing, even a thwarting, of its sly progress. It’s a fine title with which to end the pamphlet, because the passage of time is the underlying stratum of all the poems within it.
  
  Do seven couplets always make a sonnet? Not necessarily, but there’s a definite turn in this one, after the third couplet, so it’s fair to call ‘Stilling Time’ a reversed sonnet, like Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’ (the 1979 one).

  
  The opening line contains arguably the pamphlet’s finest line-break: I admire how it leads the reader to think that ‘to go’ indicates that death was imminent for her aunt, and then the second line, showing her resilience, intelligence and wit, reveals that she wasn’t quite near the brink yet. Poets nowadays seem more adept at that kind of double-meaning line-break in which the reader is lulled into one interpretation before being directed elsewhere. Here it is all about how much time the reprieve will provide.
  
  That opening couplet leads very nicely into the second, with the precise age of eighty neatly linking the two verses. Eleanor of Aquitaine lived one of the most remarkable lives of anyone of ‘high’ birth in the early Middle Ages: married three times, including to King Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, with both of whom she ruled jointly, she outlived each of them, and even survived imprisonment by Henry. She also outlived her son Richard the Lionheart, for whom she acted as regent during his almost perpetual absences from England, and enabled the succession of her younger son, John, in face of much baronial and other resistance. I’m scarcely doing justice to her full biography here. Suffice it to say that in the cut and thrust of male-dominated diplomatic shenanigans between England and France, she was a central figure for well over half a century. Eleanor’s journey which this couplet refers to was across the Pyrenees to fetch her granddaughter Blanche of Castile to marry Louis VIII of France and in so doing consolidate John’s shaky hold on the English throne. She was, and is, an example of a hugely successful and important long-lived woman, indomitably defied her advanced years. She’s an excellent example in another way too: being equally at home in England and France, like Mary and her family, as shown in several of the poems.
  
  The third couplet, in almost throwaway style, is less specific in its old-age-resistant examples but is precisely-worded to sound salubrious to the ear.
  
  

  Although they link and shift like the verses of a renga, each of the first three stanzas is discrete, content-wise. From the fourth couplet onwards, however, they flow into one another, despite the full stops in the fifth and sixth, thereby giving the heart of the poem a lovely impetus after the somewhat stately, though no less well-made, opening trio of couplets.
  
  At this point, the defiantly adventurous tone becomes reminiscent of Jenny Joseph’s very well-known poem ‘Warning’, available to read here, with its much-quoted opening,
  
  When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
  With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
  And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
  And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
  I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
  And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
  And run my stick along the public railings
  And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
  I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
  And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
  And learn to spit.
  
  There the comparison ends, though: the ambition in Mary’s poem is much bolder and more outlandish (in a good way). Note that it’s not ‘retrace my steps at the grand canyon’ but ‘to’, as if the poet–persona will take a longer and slower route, like Eleanor of Aquitaine. The segue into the fifth couplet is elegantly managed, with that pause on ‘breathe again that air’. To make the syntax here work to its optimum maybe either a semi-colon is needed after ‘creation’ or ‘touching’ should replace ‘i will touch’, but that’s quibbling. The elk encounter in the sixth couplet is utterly delightful and reminiscent, for me, of the similarly close encounter with elks in Dorianne Laux’s superb poem ‘The Crossing’. The unravelling of the clauses towards the void at the end is beautifully achieved and delivers a delicate and most noteworthy note on which to close the pamphlet.

  August 22, 2025

  books, mary-mulholland, poem, poems, poetry, writing

  ---

• July reading

  You might think it invidious at the moment to be reading books by anyone called Donald, so it’s strangely coincidental that I’ve just read two in a row. I’ve mentioned before that Lyn and I have read several books recommended by the excellent Jacqui’s Wine Journal website, and Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson is the latest of them. Jacqui reviewed it here, and her verdict is as dependably spot-on as ever. It’s very much a period piece as many older crime novels are, but that’s its joy.
  
  Toy Fights, Faber 2023, Don Paterson’s memoir of the first 20 years of his life, is full of the rich details and meta-commentary that readers of his poetry would expect. His recall of memories is phenomenal, as if he’s channelling Ray Bradbury, who said, on Wogan in the Eighties, that he could remember everything that had happened in his life, even back into the womb. Paterson says, though, that, after three years of age,
  
  the memories are vivid, but they still can’t be trusted. I am wont to confuse memory and photographs, other folks’ memories with my own, and things I saw on television with things that happened to me.
  
  Paterson writes well about his jobbing musician father, at whose club gigs Paterson joined him as a side guitarist from the age of 15, though his mother, still alive at the time the book was written, is less of a presence. The biggest character, aside from Paterson himself, is the city of his birth and upbringing, Dundee. As a fan of the joyously daft BBC4 sitcom Bob Servant – written by Neil Forsyth who also wrote the fantastically well-plotted The Gold among other things – I was pre-programmed to like the colourful characters, community spirit and language of Dundee which Paterson brilliantly and often hilariously conjures. He’s very good, too, about the painful years of his adolescence, including two or so years as a devout Christian in a cult-like group, and his subsequent musical education, as listener, player and part of the local music scene, which at that time encompassed The Associates, led by much-missed Billy Mackenzie. The most memorable section concerns a breakdown he had aged 19, chiefly caused by drugs, and his subsequent four-month stay in Ninewells (psychiatric) Hospital. The book ends with Paterson setting off for a job in a band in London. Poetry barely gets a mention. Paterson’s ability to self-analyse with candour and honesty is extraordinary and provides many of the book’s funniest moments.
  
  I’ve written before, here and here, of my admiration for the writing and performing of Philip Hoare, and it was about time that I got stuck into his book Spike Island (Fourth Estate, 2001), subtitled ‘The Memory of a Military Hospital’. Ostensibly, it’s concerned with the history of the humungous hospital built from 1856, opened in 1863 and mostly demolished in 1966, at Netley, near Southampton; but it’s much more than that, suffused as it is with Hoare’s memories of growing up a stone’s throw away in Sholing, his family history in general, aspects of British social history from mid-Victorian times and much else. It’s the most Sebaldian of his books, I think, with photographs interspersed throughout, and was in fact one of the last books which Sebald himself endorsed, in the Sunday Telegraph books of the year, before his death in December 2001: ‘A book that has everything a passionate reader could want – a subject that far transcends the trivial pursuits of contemporary writing, concerns both public and private, astonishing details, stylistic precision, a unique sense of time and place, and a great depth of vision.’ Hardly unique, though, as those words could’ve been applied to any of Sebald’s own books. Thanks to its proximity to the port of Southampton where the troopships docked, all British soldiers injured in the nation’s colonial wars were initially treated there, including those suffering from shell-shock inflicted on the Western Front, who were sectioned off in ‘D Block’, where the dreadful treatment was very much based on the notion of using military discipline to bully the inmates back to some kind of ‘normality’. I thought of James Goose, my great-grandfather, who was sent to South Africa in 1899 as part of a Norfolk militia regiment, got shot in the face by a Boer sniper (the wound turned cancerous and killed him years later) and came home on a ship named Roslin Castle, pictured here: he was so relieved to be home that he and my great-grandmother Agnes (née Riches) named their son Roslin, though maybe sensibly he was known as Rossie.
  
  On the poetry front, I much admired Richard Scott’s second collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, Faber, published earlier this year. As in several of Pascale Petit’s collections, this contains work which very skilfully, and with a marvellous ear for musical cadence , transforms the pain of sexual abuse into beautiful poetry. Each of the 21 poems in the first section, Still Lifes, responds to a different still life painting by painters from the 1600s onwards to Bonnard. The second part, a response to Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ felt less successful, as it employs Seventeenth Century language in a manner verging on parody. The third section contains 22 poems after types of crystals and gemstones, as refracted through Rimbaud’s Illuminations as translated by Wyatt Mason, and are, for me, the most successful in the book, because the prose-poem form allows Scott to give fuller vent to his gift for articulating emotion through vivid and sensuous imagery and language, as in this extract from ‘Emerald’:
  
      The field is a body. Wild grass rippling over breasts and muscles, the jut of a hipbone. Some of the grass is trampled down into mud like a battlefield – screams catch the air. Some of the grass is spread over little hillocks like shallow graves. Some of the grass is cut into a bit, desire lines and goat paths, leading to all the places you ever dreamed of going but didn’t.
  
  As I discovered from listening to his interview with Peter Kenny in Series 5, Episode 10 of the ever-excellent Planet Poetry podcast, here, Scott talks very thoughtfully and eloquently about his craft.
  
  I’ve also been knee-deep in the poems of Wisława Szymborska, as translated by Clare Cavanagh and collected in Map, Houghton Miflin Harcourt, 2015, for the poetry book club I’m part of. My jury is still out thus far, but then it’s a heftily daunting tome.
  
  I’m also about halfway through Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry, published last year in the USA by Graywolf and in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Her telling-it-as-it-is style might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I really like the way she throws it all in and takes disjunctive leaps in her poems. I adore her poem ‘An Aria’, 23 irregular quatrains which are propelled with a fearsome energy. I found myself getting funny looks on the Tram Train to Sheffield last Thursday as I read out sotto voce. If poetry can make me do that, it has to be good.

  August 11, 2025

  books, don-paterson, philip-hoare, poem, poems, poetry, writing

  ---

• On Longbarrow Press and James Caruth

  On Wednesday evening I walked up some very steep hills from Sheffield city centre to Novel bookshop – whose website is here – in Crookes for an evening of readings by seven poets published by Brian Lewis’s Longbarrow Press. The ethos of Longbarrow – whose tagline, ‘poetry from the edgelands’, very much resonates with me and whose website is here – is concerned with making beautiful, mostly hardback books of beautiful poetry.
  
  The readings took the form of half the audience sitting downstairs in the shop’s back room and the other half upstairs, with, in the first half of the evening, three poets reading downstairs and four upstairs; then, after a break, the poets changing over and the audiences staying where they were. The cosiness of the rooms and the excellence of the poetry made for a much more intimate yet paradoxically relaxing set of readings. The poets were James Caruth, Angelina D’Roza, Matthew Clegg, Steve Ely, Pete Green, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite, all of whom have distinctive writing and reading styles. While I’ve heard James Caruth and Steve Ely read before, the other five were new to me as readers of their work, although I have some of their books on my shelves..
  
  I’ve known James Caruth, as ‘Jim’, for about 10 years, from when I first started attending Poetry Business writing days in Sheffield. Those days were remarkable, not just because Ann and Peter Sansom’s writing exercises were so fine and helpful, but also due to the very high quality of the poets who attended and seemingly wrote masterpieces in no more than seven or eight minutes. Among them, perhaps the most distinctive voices were the late John Foggin and Jim. Jim hails from Belfast originally and his accent is so mellifluous that he could read almost anything and make it sound fabulous; thankfully, his poems are equally fine. He’s had a few pamphlets out with Longbarrow, Poetry Salzburg and Smith|Doorstop (the Poetry Business’s imprint), and had poems included in a terrific Longbarrow anthology, The Footing, but it’s his collection Speechless at Inch which most fully represents Jim’s talent. It was shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize, an incredible accolade; nevertheless, the book went a bit under the radar, which is a real pity because it was, and is, tremendous and, for my money, as eminently readable and memorable as any collection published in English so far this decade. It’s available on the Poetry Business website here, where you can read a sample of the poems before spending less than a tenner on a real beauty of a book.

  July 18, 2025

  books, james-caruth, longbarrow-press, poem, poems, poetry, smith-doorstop, the-poetry-business, writing

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• May and June reading

  Due in large part to preparing for my book launch events, my reading became much less systematic in the last two months, which is probably no bad thing.
  
  I read four of Henning Mankell’s Wallander novels back-to-back: The White Lioness, The Man Who Smiled, Sidetracked, The Fifth Woman, respectively the third, fourth, fifth and sixth in the series. Having watched the BBC Kenneth Branagh adaptations several times, over the years and the Swedish one also, it’s very interesting to see how much television omitted, presumably to increase the pace. I prefer the books, with the intricate, methodical unfolding of the plots and the laying bare of Wallander’s desultory lifestyle beyond his policing. Well ahead of his time, Mankell put geopolitical inequalities at the heart of his books. I admire his offbeat, serious wit, too, such as this, from The Fifth Woman:
  
      Linda poured herself some tea and suddenly asked him why it was so difficult to live in Sweden.
      “Sometimes I think it’s because we’ve stopped darning our socks,” Wallander said.
      She gave him a perplexed look.
  
  I was very late to A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne, first published in the UK by Penguin in 1998 and winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1999. It’s a beautifully written novel written in the voice of Marsha, a nine-year-old girl living with her mother and teenage twin siblings in Washington D.C. at the time of Watergate. Her father has left the home to be with her mother’s youngest sister. Against that backdrop a terrible crime happens, but this isn’t a crime novel, but one which memorably depicts Marsha’s thoughts and actions, and their consequences, and how a family unravels.
  
  I can’t remember the last time I read and enjoyed a book of short stories as much as I did Jonathan Taylor’s Scablands and Other Stories, published a few months ago by Salt and available here. Its 20 stories aren’t long – they range in length from one page to 33 pages – but Taylor is highly adept at squeezing maximum value from his prose. Even in stories which ostensibly entail time-travelling, the tales and characters are believable, as are the varied narrative voices. My favourites were ‘Heat Death’, involving the whereabouts of a lottery ticket, and the title-story, about a bullied pupil and a teacher at the end of his career, but they all earn their place. These are contemporary stories, unafraid to explore the impact of deprivation and other complex social situations. I’m very glad that it won this year’s Arnold Bennett Prize – our household contains more fiction by Bennett than any other writer.
  
  On the poetry front, I’ve been reading a couple of books for reviewing, plus others. I bought – again belatedly – a copy of Julia Copus’s most recent (2019) collection, Girlhood, as I always like her poetry. The first poem ‘The Grievers’, available here, is an absolute belter, which beautifully conveys how grief shape-shifts. I love these lines: ‘We steady our own like an egg in the dip of a spoon, / as far as the dark of the hallway, the closing door.’ This and the other 11 poems – including a trademark specular (the form Copus invented) – which constitute the book’s first section are all excellent, showcasing her knack for choosing surprising, just-so words and for making sharp, but not daft, line-breaks. The book’s second and larger section inventively dramatises the interactions between Jacques Lacan, the psychoanalyst and philosopher, and Marguerite Pantaine, perhaps his most famous case study. It’s a sequence which needs to be read at least twice, I think, to yield its treasures. It hints at the possibility of Copus, having also written a biography of Charlotte Mew, writing a novel. Coincidentally no doubt, the last poem in the sequence, ‘How to Eat an Ortolan’ is remarkably close in tone as well as content to Pascale Petit’s ‘Ortolan’ in Fauverie, her brilliant 2014 Seren collection (my favourite of her first eight collections – I haven’t read the new one yet). Compare:

  [. . .] He bends to the dish,
  
  hears the juices sizzle and subside,
  then picks the bird up whole by its crisp-skinned skull,
  burning his fingers, and is stirred for a moment
  by its frailty (it is light as a box of matches);
  
  places it into his mouth, but does not chew.
  [. . .]
  
  (Copus)

  [. . .] Eight minutes he waits
  while the bunting roasts, then it’s rushed sizzling
  to his lips, a white napkin draped over his head
  to envelop him in vapours – the whole singer
  in his mouth, every hot note. The crispy fat melts,
  the bones are crunchy as hazelnuts. When
  the bitter organs burst on his tongue in a bouquet
  of ambrosia he can taste his entire life [. . .]
  
  (Petit)
  
  Even as a vegan, I can appreciate the extravagant verbal dexterity of both poems.

  June 26, 2025

  book-reviews, books, henning-mankell, jonathan-taylor, julia-copus, pascale-petit, poem, poetry, suzanne-berne, wallander, writing

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• On The Last Corinthians

  It’s taken 10 years and a whole lifetime to bring my new collection to fruition. As with my previous books, there have been false starts and a great many changes as this one has evolved. I’ve needed the help of feedback on drafts of poems – by Red Door Poets, an in-person workshopping group, of whom I was a member from its founding until 2020; South Ken. Stanza, a fortnightly email workshopping group; and, above all, the Collective, a fortnightly Zoom group, whose comments and support have been invaluable. But then again, writing poems is almost always a solitary activity, so first and foremost I’ve had to trust my instincts and have faith in whatever ability I have. By the end of collating the collection, 56 of its 62 poems had been previously published in journals.

  

  As a fairly regular reviewer of collections, I’ve often read books which don’t have an overtly coherent sense of what the poet is trying to say, other than within individual poems. That’s not to say that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that, but most poets write poems which speak to, or echo, one another – either directly or indirectly – thus it seems appropriate to make that at least partially explicit through the poems’ ordering. In my case, I gradually took care to carve my manuscript into thematic sections. The drawback with that was that some previously published poems which I think are still not bad didn’t make the cut, because I couldn’t make them fit with the collection’s overall arc.
  
  I was also at pains, as I was with my first collection, to ensure that there were notes at the back. I know that many poets prefer not to do this, in the spirit of ‘never explain’; I, though, don’t see notes as being explanatory but, rather, as helpful to the reader: as a White English, middle-aged male, I can’t expect every reader either to know or understand, at first glance, all of my cultural references; neither do I expect them to look them up online (or even in an encyclopædia!). Assembling notes at the back of the book seems to me to be a sensible thing. There is, of course, a fine balance to be struck between stating who a particular person, painting, TV programme or whatever is, or was, and (in my case) mansplaining in a manner which tells the reader what the poem is about – I like to think that my book, its three sections and the individual poems by and large speak for themselves. I’m not the kind of person who likes to write, or read, cryptic poems. Again, though, I would add the disclaimer that neither would I want to write poems which could be so easily understood at face value that they had no resonance.
  
  As an inveterate tinkerer with poems, some – perhaps as many as half of them – took at least a year, and in some cases more than five years, to be settled. You might therefore not be surprised to hear that the title of the book has also changed lots of times in the last decade. In fact, I only plumped for The Last Corinthians less than two months before the manuscript went to the printer. I should say here that I’m very glad that Crooked Spire Press used a local printer, because supporting the local economy sits squarely with the book’s values. I should also say how grateful I am to work with a publisher who ‘gets’ my poems and what I have tried to achieve with the book.
  
  So why did I choose this title? Well, it derives from the title of the longest poem in the book. That poem was largely concerned with the now long-gone phenomenon of the footballer–cricketer, who excelled enough to play at the highest levels at both sports. Beyond that though, is a sense that the phrase the last Corinthians alludes to how England, Britain, the UK and beyond has changed, mostly for the better, during my, and my immediate antecedents’ lives. I don’t have the slightest hint of rose-tinted hankering for the past, in which imperialism and discrimination very openly thrived; yet, the world before the internet and social media naturally had some pluses as well as technological and societal limitations.
  
  My parents’ generation were born during the desperately tough times of the 1930s, experienced the trauma of war on the home front, and came of age in the Fifties, a decade when rationing was still in force for half of it, opportunities for young women were still extremely limited and young men, including my father, were called up to do National Service, some of whom ended up fighting in Korea or against independence movements in Kenya and Cyprus. Others were even exposed to the fall-out of atomic bomb tests in Australian deserts. Class and other forms of social exclusion were endemic. Roy Jenkins’s and others’ work in the Labour governments of the Sixties and Seventies to improve society through legislation – the Race Relations Act, the decriminalisation of male homosexuality and of abortion, the Sex Discrimination Act, etc. – was crucial, as was further legislation, most notably the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the overarching Equality Act 2010.
  
  As is obvious, though, improvement was, and is, wrought not just by the law, but much more so through changes or reinforcements of individual and collective behaviours and moral values. Despite the Farage riots last August, Reform’s recent local government successes, and many inequalities which our current government is yet to address (and in some instances has worsened, e.g. the assault on people with disabilities and support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians), and despite the influence of despots on the wider world stage, this country remains one in which the overwhelming majority of people seem to act in accordance with a sense of community and compassion for most of their time. Throughout my career in local government, I was motivated by a sense of moral purpose, of wanting to help to improve the lives of children, young people and their families.
  
  So, I hope that readers of The Last Corinthians will be able to discern some or all of that in the poems and themes which it contains. On the back cover (photo above), it says, that the book, ‘veers psychedelically through history, pausing for quieter moments’ and my inkling of what ‘psychedelic’ means is a nostalgia, in the present, for a past which never quite existed in the way I remember it. Is it absurd to self-identify as a psychedelic poet? Answers on a postcard from the future, please.

  May 29, 2025

  books, poem, poems, poetry, writing

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• April reading

  I read about Boot Sale Harvest by Adrian May, Dunlin Press 2023, available here, on the Caught by the River website and had to buy it. Ostensibly, it recounts a year’s worth of May’s hauls from car-boot sales near his home in North Essex, but May’s riffs on a variety of themes – Essex itself, literature (good and bad), religion, all manner of objects (practical and otherwise), the highs and lows of his love life, and, above all, music (he’s been a folkie for many years) – are engagingly idiosyncratic and off-piste. He frequently rambles, but don’t we all. As Ken Worpole says in his foreword, ‘There are in Boot Sale Harvest similar elements of the delight which millions found in the critically acclaimed television series, Detectorists.’ The locales in the book are reminiscent of the fictional Danebury of the series, the characters are equally quirky, and May subtly chews over the mostly male obsession with collecting, in a way which reminded me of an anecdote of Lance’s in Detectorists in which he talks about a bloke who ended up collecting collections. May intersperses the book with some of his song lyrics and poems, the former being rather more palatable and entertaining than the latter. It’s one of those chatty books which makes for amusing, melancholy and thoroughly amiable company.
  
  Talking of Ken Worpole, he is the guest on the latest edition of Justin Hopper’s excellent ‘Uncanny Landscapes’ podcasts, here. At one point Ken starts talking about how annoyed he was when John Major’s government brought in the idea of people as ‘customers’ when they interacted with local government and other public services. Personally, it never bothered me, because ‘customer’ was also followed by ‘care’ where I worked, and I always made sure that my teams went out of their way to provide the best possible customer care. For me, what Major’s government was and remains sadly responsible for is introducing the hideously Tory notion of ‘choice’ in public services, since choice was invariably an illusion (the choice to have no choice, if you like it) for those people who needed the most help, e.g. those living in social housing were often the least likely to have a good choice of schools – if you believed the school league tables which Major brought in – to which their children might gain admission, whereas those with the money to move near or next door to the ‘best’ schools definitely did have choice, and even more so if they could also afford to send their kids to private schools if they wanted to be even more selfish. I spent years trying to make school admissions fairer in the areas in which I worked, but I digress.
  
  I also very much enjoyed, and admired, PJ Kavanagh’s The Perfect Stranger (originally published in 1966 and reissued by September Publishing in 2015, available here), a memoir covering his childhood, adolescence, a spell as a Butlin’s redcoat, a sojourn aged 18 in Paris in 1949, National Service (including being wounded in Korea), studies in Oxford, love of and marriage to Sally Lehmann, daughter of Rosamund, and her tragic death from polio in 1958. It’s beautifully written, with enviable self-reflection, and absolutely full of the joys of being young and at large in the world. I’ve never read much of his poetry or any of his novels and must remedy those omissions. I do, though, have a copy of the fine job he did in editing his 1982 edition of the collected poems of Ivor Gurney.
  
  As far as I know there are three biographies of Philip Larkin: Motion’s, the far superior one by James Booth and the one, entitled First Boredom Then Fear, by Richard Bradford. I hadn’t read the latter until the other week, having bought it at Sheffield’s best secondhand bookshop, Kelham Island Books and Music. It’s much shorter than the other two, but contains much more information on Larkin’s childhood and is far and away the best in how it relates Larkin’s character and life to many of his most well-known poems and to some which remained unpublished.
  
  Rebecca Goss is a poet whose work I have hitherto been unfamiliar. Regular readers may recall that I wrote a brief post, here, commending the podcast Goss recorded last year with Heidi Williamson about poetry of place. Like Adrian May, she lives in the middle of East Anglia, in Suffolk. I suggested her most recent (2023) collection, Latch, published by Carcanet and available here, as the book for next month’s poetry book club. It concerns her return, with her husband and young daughter, to the area she was raised in, after living for a long while in Liverpool, and the memories it sparked. At times, it felt like the rural feel had transported me back to the prose of Ronald Blythe in his unclassifiable classic Akenfield. (Though when I think of Suffolk and writers, Roger Deakin, Michael Hamburger and WG Sebald, all of whom I’ve written about on here, also come to mind, as does George Crabbe.) Three poems from Latch were first published in Bad Lilies in 2021, here. As you can see, Goss writes beautifully about a country upbringing. I’ve also now read – in one sitting – her very moving and transfixing second collection Her Birth, about, principally the birth and death of her first daughter Ella.
  
  I really got stuck into Patrick McGuinness and Stephen Romer’s translations of selected poems by Gilles Ortlieb, published in 2023, in a dual-language edition, as The Day’s Ration, by Arc Publications, available here. With a fine but arguably superfluous introduction by Sean O’Brien, Ortlieb’s poems invariably consist of small observations and his thoughts about them. He is from, and still lives in, an industrial part of Lorraine, in north-east France, next to Luxembourg and, of course, Germany. ‘Sleeper Gravel’ (‘Ballast Courant’) will serve as an example of Ortlieb’s style:
  
  A trail of stones reddened this evening
  by the last sun that covers the rarely lit
  back wall of a bedroom, glimpsed
  on the upper floor of a villa
  in Uckange, or a frontier suburb:
  fragile goldwork, inlaid already
  with the spreading gloom, that interval,
  before the coloured gems of TV sets
  light the house fronts further on.
  Small distracted thoughts, in a swarm,
  see us over the gulf of every evening.
  
  Having read a few collections and a novel by McGuinness in the last year, I can very easily see why he likes Ortlieb’s poetry, with its quietly sardonic phrasing, its in-between and otherwise overlooked environments and Existentialist attitude. (I can’t vouch for Romer, having not – yet – read his poetry en masse.) As far as I can tell, with my rusty A-level French, the translations aim to convey Ortlieb’s general rather than literal sense. Often, they take liberties with his lineation, but on others they try their best to match the dense slabs of Ortlieb’s poems. It’s my favourite book of ‘new’ poems this year, albeit that they cover the length of Ortlieb’s fifty-year career.  
  
  Now I’m working my way deliberately slowly through Jane Hirshfield’s amazing set of essays, Nine Gates, subtitled  ‘Entering the Mind of Poetry’, published by Harper Collins back in 1997. As you’d expect from Hirshfield, it’s immesely thought-provoking; the best book I’ve read about poetry in a long time. It would be very difficult to try and summarise Hirshfield’s ideas. If I were the sort of person who defaces books by using a highlighter pen to mark the best bits, then my copy of Nine Gates would look like an Acid House night had been held within it. This sentence is typical of Hirshfield’s Zen-infused (cliché alert, sorry) insights: ‘Originality lives at the crossroads, at the point where world and self open to each other in transparence in the night rain.’

  April 27, 2025

  adrian-may, books, gilles-ortlieb, jane-hirshfield, pj-kavanagh, poem, poems, poetry, rebecca-goss, writing

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• March reading

  I’ve continued my merry way through the novels of Rupert Thomson by reading his debut novel, from way back in 1987: Dreams of Leaving. There’s a good summary of its plot and themes here. Its London-set scenes capture well the glorious seediness of pubs, drugs and relationships in the Thatcher years, and its characters, as always with Thomson, are completely believable. Thomson’s written much better novels since then, but he set the bar high right at the outset: as remains the case, he could tell memorable, complex stories that didn’t give easy answers to the reader. The book’s also discussed in this essay, here, which surveys the first seven of his 14 novels.
  
  I’ve also read another Barbara Pym novel, her fifth, A Glass of Blessings, published in 1958. Its unusual among her novels in being written in the first person, and it’s a pity that she didn’t try that more often, as it allowed her narrator, Wilmet Forsyth, to make more deliciously barbed comments about the other characters than Pym’s all-seeing third-person narrators did  in her other novels. As ever, the plot, even with its perfectly pitched set-pieces and comic misunderstandings, is secondary to Pym’s superb ear for dialogue and delicate descriptions. I can’t think of more pleasant reading experience than savouring Pym’s novels. I’m fully aware, of course, that they largely exclude the grim reality of life as it was lived by many of her contemporaries in Britain, yet her deep understanding of the fact that everyone has flaws makes her books as relevant today as they were when she wrote them.
  
  On the poetry front, I read and re-read (several times) an Eliot-shortlisted book prior to reviewing it and that’s taken up a lot of my poetry head space. However, last week I did take off my shelf, to accompany me on a flying visit down south, something more to my taste: Voice-Over (1988), the last collection by Norman MacCaig to be published in his lifetime.

  

  Many of the poems in it are short, reflective lyrics of a man coming to the end of his days. I especially liked this one:
  
  Slow Evening
  
  Night is long in coming. Its soft feet
  pause at the horizon. Stars wait
  for the lights to go out, to perform
  their brilliant rituals on their dark stage.
  
  My mind that was sleepy with waiting
  begins to waken, to feel small movements
  like the tiny waves fudged in a glass of water
  carried by a child.
  
  Light drains away. – But there,
  sudden windows appear on dark buildings,
  small universes wheeling nonchalantly
  with Saturn and the tilted Plough.
  
  I like the simplicity and naturalness of his metaphors – such a contrast to the outlandish metaphors fired off these days – and of that simile in the second stanza, with that tremendous ‘fudged’.
  
  I enjoyed Jeanette Burton’s beautifully produced pamphlet, Ostriches, subtitled ‘Ten Poems about My Dad’, published by Candlestick Press and available here. Burton carefully, and wittily, writes affectionate portraits of her father without tipping into dull sentimentality. At their best, her poems – ‘such as the flamboyantly titled ‘Poem in which my dad’s ear is haunted by the ghost of Tutankhamun’ and ‘Poem in which I recount the finding of my dad’s love letter to my mum in the style of a Ronnie Corbett monologue’ – speed along with a giddy mixture of whimsical silliness, acute observation and pride. It might be tempting to suggest that some of her more stream-of-consciousness poems could do with some vigorous pruning, but I reckon that would deaden the sheer exuberant flow of her poetry. (I’m glad to see that she also writes about her mum, as in this recent poem, here.)
  
  For this month’s poetry book club, we’ve been reading The Europeans (2019) by David Clarke, published by Nine Arches Press and available here, as different a set of poems to Burton’s as could be imagined in how he uses form and restraint to carve poems which not only protest implicitly against the bigotry of the Brexit referendum result in 2016, but also travel back in time to his younger days to paint a picture of small-town England in its various guises. ‘To a Public House’ could be one of very many hostelries the length and breadth of the land:
  
  I knew your ash-tray haze of ale, that pitiful booth
  for the under-aged, the spinning punctuation of
  your fruit machines that trilled, mesmeric in the gloom
  between a first necked pint and each man’s lonesome trudge
  
  for home. Late it was, then later still. Bleary years
  were counted out in wet white rings. Some bloke
  who kept a pewter mug behind your bar pegged out
  at last. Your jukebox dirged him to his grave,
  
  There’s so much to admire here: the description of the fruit machines; how the almost always unfortunate hanging ‘of’ works well in this instance because it provides a helpful pause; the pewter mug of the man who drinks himself to death; the clever rendering of ‘dirge’ into a verb. In my memory, pubs weren’t exclusively male, but we get the picture.
  
  In ‘To a Photo Booth’, Clarke writes, in another rather beautiful direct address to the subject of the poem, that, ‘My drawers grew full of all / your rejects, curled ghosts / who wept in envelopes unseen.’ There’s a brilliant poem – both formally and per se – about the last (presumably) of Auden’s summers in Austria from 1958 to his death in 1973, ‘Auden at Kirchstetten’, one gay poet’s response to an illustrious predecessor. It begins as follows:
  
  All morning, his difficult love kept itself to the kitchen,
  sweating, as always, to make its comfort terrible.
  If a family habit of property had survived
  his makeshift years, he refused to become responsible –
  somehow he contrived to never fully arrive,
  if only for the sake of that necessary tension.
  
  The rhymes are fine and seem to lift Clarke’s register to a higher place than in his other poems, and the line with the split infinitive would serve perfectly as an epitaph for Auden’s exile. I shall have to read Clarke’s other two collections.

  March 21, 2025

  barbara-pym, books, david-clarke, jeanette-burton, norman-maccaig, poems, poetry, rupert-thomson, writing

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• Review of Sue Hubbard’s God’s Little Artist

  In contemplating writing creatively about the life and death of a real person, famous or otherwise, one has (a minimum of) six key decisions to make, the last four of which are dependent on the first and second.
  
  First and foremost is whether to write poetry or prose. With five poetry collections and four novels already published, I imagine the decision Sue Hubbard made to plump for poetry to address her subject, Gwen John (1876–1939), wasn’t an easy one to make; however, the notes at the back indicate that Hubbard had previously written (at least) one poem about a moment in John’s life so perhaps that had left an itch that needed to be scratched. I admire Hubbard for even taking on such a large and complex project.
  
  The second decision, perhaps a subconscious one, is how much of the subject’s life needs to be recounted to do justice to their main events, relationships, successes, failures and emotions. Despite some artistic success, John, as is widely known now, had only one solo exhibition in her lifetime and lived in the shadow of both her two-years-younger brother, Augustus, who became the most celebrated British painter of their day, and Rodin, 35 years her senior, with whom John had an unequal relationship for a decade from 1904 (and whose forename was, by coincidence, the French equivalent of her brother’s). The 34 poems in this collection run chronologically from John’s childhood and adolescence in North Wales to her death in Dieppe, two weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War. As we’ll see, they aren’t ‘Wiki poems’, i.e. they don’t clunkily include facts for the sake of it; rather, they tend more towards impressionistic sketches, pleasingly in keeping with John’s style of painting. Neither do they amount to a full-blown biography (her mother’s death when John was eight isn’t mentioned for instance, though her absence can be inferred), but that doesn’t necessarily make them any less meritorious or successful than had Hubbard written a fuller account in prose.
  
  Thirdly, should the poet use the same voice – first, second or third person – throughout, and if so which; or should they vary it from poem to poem? Hubbard, I think wisely, has opted for the third person and stuck with it. The benefit of it is, of course, that it provides a certain objectivity, irrespective of how sympathetically the poems are cast. By contrast, writing in the second person almost always reads like a half-baked fudge. It might, though, have been tempting for Hubbard to use the first person; indeed, the notes tell us that the poem about John she’d had published previously was in John’s voice, so she has changed it for inclusion here. Maybe using the first person en bloc would have felt presumptuous.
  
  And fourth, what tense should be used, past or present, and, again, should that be consistent or varied? Hubbard has sensibly chosen to employ the present tense in all the poems, bestowing immediacy, timelessness and a sense of the life’s moments being never ending. Again, this choice surely aligns with the spirit of John’s paintings, and also with her Catholic belief in the life eternal.
  
  The fifth decision pertains to what form(s) the poems should take. Hubbard mixes them up, in a comparatively limited way: 16 are in couplets; five in tercets; six in quatrains; six in narrow-ish blocks; and one has four octaves. Really, though, the tone in all of them is the same, so the variation of the forms only succeeds visually, albeit that that helps to offset the tonal sameness. Whatever their length, Hubbard’s stanzas are rarely self-contained, and her block poems are always composed of several sentences.
  
  The sixth decision may, but needn’t, be subconscious: which narrative tone should be struck? As I say, Hubbard’s tone is consistent throughout: the broadly omniscient voice which enables depiction not just of what John does and what happens to her, but also, where appropriate, her thoughts and feelings. (Hubbard appears instinctively able to judge when to describe John’s emotional reactions and when to let events simply imply reactions.) That narrative consistency also drives the language Hubbard deploys: in echoes of how John’s palette was often muted (as Hubbard considers in a couple of poems), and how her adult life was lived in poverty, austerity and a lack of loving fulfilment, Hubbard’s writing is spare and purposely low-key, usually in short, frequently compressed sentences, though that means that when she uses adjectives their effectiveness is heightened, occasionally quite beautifully: in the poem ‘Teapot’ for instance, ‘a curdy light spills / into her china breakfast bowl.’
  
  Hubbard’s four-page introduction does not explain any of those decisions; instead, it gives a potted prose summary of John’s life, with a psychoanalytic slant. While that may be generous to the general reader who knows little of John’s biography, to others it may be superfluous. On balance, if read before the poems, it might well detract from them. Had it been included as an afterword, that would arguably have been more prudent, and I would advise potential readers of this book to approach it in that manner.
  
  Nevertheless, the poetry is engrossing from the start. ‘Luncheon in Tenby’ opens with a solid metaphor for the oppressiveness of the Victorian values perpetuated by John’s father towards her and her siblings, her mother having died when she was eight:
  
  The mahogany sideboard reclines
  against the wall like the chief mourner
  at a funeral. [. . .]
  
  [. . .]
  
  Her father demands quiet, so she
  and Winifred speak in signs. [. . .]
  
  Soon, Hubbard pictures John on her way to art school in ‘London— / leaving her stern father / with his taxidermy and law tomes, / his shelves of devotional works— / to embrace anatomy, perspective, / and the history of art’ (‘Slade’). There, ‘she learns from Tonks / a new freedom of line. / How to evoke round objects / on flat paper. Three dimensions / whilst working in two.’ This writing has a pleasing brevity to it, with just enough information conveyed for the reader to fill in the rest of the scene. In the life classes, we’re told that, ‘the women are strictly / segregated, the male nudes never / completely nude’ (‘Glaze’), with nice emphases at the line-ends to reinforce the prohibition. ‘Walking with Dorelia’ is a lively, humorous rendering of John’s 1903 walking tour in France with Dorelia McNeill, whom she met at Westminster School of Art and who was later to become her brother’s main, lifelong partner, and hints at their supposed mutual sexual attraction:
  
  [. . .]
  sleeping under haystacks and icy stars,
  
  lying on top of each other to stay warm.
  They wake to astonished farmers,
  
  gathered gendarmes peering curiously
  at les jeunes anglaises déshabillées
  
  huddled under a pagoda of portfolios,
  straw woven in their tangled hair.
  
  Hubbard captures well John’s hand-to-mouth subsistence in Paris from 1904 and the city’s colour and grime:
  
           [. . .] On the street corner,
        crippled in her sooty blacks
  la petite fleuriste hawks bunches
        of muguet and yellow mimosa.
  
  Across Sunday streets
        bells drift above junk shops
  and cheap bars where des maudits
        nurse glasses of cloudy absinthe.
  
  Far from Tenby
        this, now, is home.
  To eat, she knocks on studio doors,
        poses, if she can, for women.
  
  (‘Montmartre’)
  
  As that poem’s next stanza attests, the male artists were all too free with their hands, and it’s no coincidence, presumably, that the facing poem is the first of seven consecutive poems concerning John’s relationship with Rodin. It’s here that the collection truly hits its stride. ‘Modelling for Rodin’ (‘Naked before him, / she finds a new peace’) becomes something more: ‘the weight of him, // his tongue in her mouth / like something feral.’ Hubbard adroitly conjures the complexities of John’s relationship with the ‘Maȋtre’; how she can’t just make do with being one of his many model–mistresses, particularly in the vividly heart-rending poem ‘Love is Lonelier than Solitude’:
  
         She thinks of him all the time,
  an anchorite in her quiet cell
        waiting for his booted step on the stair,
  
         reluctant to go out in case he comes.
  All is clean and polished. Her hair washed,
          bluebells in a jar on the mantle,
  
        a bow around Tiger’s neck.
  
  The tangible sense of unrequited love that Hubbard conveys here continues in the poems that follow – ‘Fire’, ‘Hands’ and ‘Drawing the Cat’ –  in which John’s longing approaches madness, not helped by being forced sometimes into a threesome with Rodin’s (female) ‘Finnish assistant— // the one who thinks she’s ugly’. John wrote hundreds of fervent letters to Rodin without receiving replies, and Hubbard supplies a moving portrait of John with pen in hand, ending with an intriguing, apposite metaphor of liquidity for the futility of her passionate task:
  
  A flood of moonshine spills
  onto the round table,
  the blank white sheet,
  a millrace of words pulling
  her under, soaking her wet.
  
  (‘Letter to Rodin’)
  
  The post-Rodin poems are equally interesting. In ‘Suitors’, we see John’s attractiveness to a succession of other women. ‘The Poetry of Things’ and ‘Communion’ show John at work, drawing, in both her room and outside: ‘There is poetry in ordinary things, / her blue jug, the basket of kittens, // that line of busy ants’; ‘she takes her notebook / to Gare Montparnasse, sketches travellers with carpet bags // and furled umbrellas, though her chilblained fingers are freezing.’ Hubbard delves into John’s increasingly nun-like piety in a number of poems, not least the title poem, the precious thinness of which, almost as much as John’s art, is delicately crafted:
  
  Her God is a God of quietness,
  so she must be quiet.
  
  His love is constant.
  It does not despise,
  
  or rebuff like carnal love.
  She would live without
  
  a body, now. Its fleshy needs,
  its urgent desires [. . .]  
  
  What has crystallised for me through reading and re-reading God’s Little Artist is an appreciation of how well Hubbard inhabits John’s world, with all its disappointments, and draws out her character. Like Letters to Gwen John (Jonathan Cape, 2022) by the painter Celia Paul (no relation of mine), this is an important creative contribution to the ongoing reappraisal of John; but, more than that, its poems provide a fine match of uncomplicated forms and lucid writing to John’s ascetic life and exquisite art.
  
  
  God’s Little Artist by Sue Hubbard (Seren, 2023), £9.99, available to buy here.

  February 6, 2025

  art, books, gwen-john, literature, poems, poetry, writing

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