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.
Tag: books
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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.
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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.
Back cover of The Last Corinthians 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.
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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.’
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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.
Cover of Voice-Over 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.
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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.
