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.
Tag: don-paterson
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July reading
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February reading
Another book which has been sitting on my TBR shelf has at last, and happily, pushed its way into my hands: Don Paterson’s Smith, sub-titled ‘A Reader’s Guide to the Poetry of Michael Donaghy’, Picador, 2014. As well as providing an enlightening exegesis of fifty key poems, it’s also interspersed with Paterson’s affectionate recollections of Donaghy, most notably in how he delivered poems and emphasised particular words. Paterson is especially good value on Donaghy’s sly evasions and ambiguities, born of extensive immersion in the Metaphysicals, Bishop and the New Formalists. As in his fine 101 Sonnets anthology, Paterson wears his erudition lightly and often amusingly.
Cover of Smith One Language (SmithǀDoorstop, 2022, available here), the debut collection by the photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind, intermittently dazzles with its poems from far-flung warzones, as in ‘Welcome to Donetsk’:
You teach me this wartime trick –
to look for living pot plants
in the windows in Kievska Avenue.
Most are crisped and brown.
But one green geranium
and a succulent spider plant
offer proof of life
for the person who waters them.
It’s interesting that she writes ‘for the person’ and not ‘of’, and in so doing shifts the perspective from the external observer to the unseen person inside.
Despite their most serious subject-matter, some of the poems feel inconsequential and fragmentary, like a diary haphazardly moulded into poetry. The most affecting highlight is a 12-part sequence, ‘Stories No One Wants to Hear’, recounting, in perhaps necessarily prosaic poetry, key incidents where, for better or worse, violence played a part in her life. I was left feeling that where she does tell her important stories well, Taylor-Lind might have rendered them more successfully still as a prose memoir, in the manner of Lara Pawson’s This is the Place to Be, because it feels like she has a lot more to say, e.g. regarding her position as one of the few females in her profession.
Among other poetry, I’ve read two collections, her third and fourth, by Lavinia Greenlaw: Minsk (2003) and The Casual Perfect (2011), both published by Faber. Greenlaw’s voice is invariably very precise and coolly formal, even when she recounts memories of childhood and adolescence, so the poems which stood out for me are those where she lets her writing go a bit wilder, as in ‘Essex Rag’ from Minsk:
The piano years . . . Too young to drive
I played pedal to the metal,
full reverb, wah-wah and fuzz,
a collision course bending Chopsticks
into hairpins, trilling the hell
out of cheesy Für Elise.
Minsk also includes the seven-part sequence ‘A Strange Barn’ in which each poem is about one of the buildings or enclosures in Regent’s Park Zoo. As the zoo is one of my favourite places in the world, I was pre-programmed to like these poems:
His ancestor arrived in London at the dawn
of transcendentalism and acetylene.
Walking from the dock to Regent’s Park,
he freaked at the sight of a cow in Commercial Road.
(‘Spin’ – The Giraffe House, 1836)
Taking its title from Lowell’s description of Bishop’s seemingly offhand descriptive prowess, The Casual Perfect begins with another poem implicitly concerning her teen years, ‘Essex Kiss’, which opens with a swagger (and a nod to MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’ maybe):
A handbrake turn on a hair-pin bend.
Merry-go-round? No, the waltzer.
A touch as bold as rum and peppermint.
Chewing gum and whelks, a whiff
of diesel, crocus, cuckoo spit.
A similarly joyful spirit pervades ‘Saturday Night’:
And young girls shall gather
to dance on the highway
under petals of light
that float from their shoulders
and dip into lotioned shadows.
They shall coil their salty hair
and tug at their lapsed muslins
as they fall like cushions, and spill.
Greenlaw’s poems are usually quite short, though no doubt they are chiselled out of much larger blocks. Her poem about the eponymous bird ‘Indigo Bunting’ exemplifies her delicately perfect phrasing: ‘A bird that can sing itself to earth as sky mirror / as if to prove there is no fall that is not reflection.’ Both collections made me want to read them again once I’d finished their last poems. As the successor to Matthew Hollis and his illustrious predecessors as Poetry Editor at Faber, Greenlaw occupies a position of considerable influence and authority. She’s published seven collections of her own poetry (plus novels, memoir and non-fiction, etc.) since (and including) her debut in 1991, her most recent being The Built Moment in 2019. Let’s hope her position at Faber doesn’t hinder her own poetic output in the way that it seemed to with Hollis.
I’ve also re-read Still Life with a Bridle (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, Vintage, 1994) a book of ‘essays and apocryphas’ by Zbigniew Herbert, addressing various matters from the Golden Age of Dutch cultural and military might, including the now well-known folly of ‘tulip fever’. Like his poetry, Herbert’s prose mixes the profound with acerbic black humour. My favourite piece from the book is one of the shortest, ‘Spinoza’s Bed’, in which Baruch, aged 24, took his step-relatives to court in order to claim his inheritance two years after his father’s death in 1654, won the case but then claimed only his mother’s bed for himself.
I’m now halfway through Paula Byrne’s excellent biography The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym (William Collins, 2021), which I bought in an excellent Oxfam bookshop in Beverley last week. It’s as diverting as Pym’s novels, which is high praise indeed, I reckon. But Pym, despite an outwardly ebullient character, had melancholy times too; her and her sister Hilary’s lives had similarities with those of Jane Austen, one of Pym’s chief models, and her sister, Cassandra, a relationship which has just been dramatised in the excellent BBCTV series, Miss Austen, based on Gill Hornby’s novel of the same name.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 