Tag: ian-parks

• 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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• On the last while

  It’s been a bit of a poetry whirl of a month for me. The National Poetry Day readings at Rotherham Civic Theatre were well-attended, and not just by the readers, for the launch of Ourselves Reflected Back, the anthology of local voices, edited by Vicky Morris. The quality of the poetry was unsurprisingly variable, but the passion and commitment were exemplary and never in doubt. Many poems were poignant or funny, or both. (The event also reminded me never to have an alcoholic drink before reading – in this case a pint of Guinness I walloped down in a couple of minutes in the theatre’s bar – because it always impairs my diction, even after, as in this case, just one drink.)
  
  On Tuesday 7th, I read at the Dusty Miller, in Mytholmroyd, West Yorkshire. Before the reading, I made the obligatory pilgrimage to the house where Ted Hughes was born and lived, before he and his family moved to Mexborough when he was seven. The readings were co-hosted by the lovely duo of fine poets Carola Luther and Ian Humphreys, who set the tone for the evening with very thoughtful, perceptive and generous introductions for my co-readers, Molly Prosser and Kim Moore, and me. As I often do, I learnt a lot by listening and watching the other readers, especially Kim, who worked the room in as natural and engaging a manner as Peter Sansom had at Five Leaves bookshop, Nottingham, back in September.
  
  The following Saturday saw the launch in Doncaster Unitarian Church of Ian Parks’s new collection The Sons of Darkness and the Sons of Light, published by Tim Fellows’s Crooked Spire Press. As with my collection, Tim did a great job in producing the book. There was a supporting trio of readers – Susan Darlington, Steve Ely and Laura Strickland – each of whom read their excellent poems with gusto. Liam Wilkinson sung some terrific songs, accompanying himself on guitar. Ian himself read beautifully from his tremendous collection. Most notably, to end proceedings, Ian read the long and moving title-poem of his book, gradually building up the pace and power of his pitch. It was a highly memorable experience, up there with any long-poem reading I’ve ever heard, including Allen Ginsberg reading ‘Kaddish’ at the Albert Hall. There’s an account of the day, by Tim, plus plenty of photos, on the Crooked Spire Press website, here.
  
  I then watched Ian’s online reading on Tuesday 21st. There was music again, by Liam’s dad, Allan Wilkinson, who is also a very talented singer and guitarist, and guest readings by Bob Beagrie, Gaia Holmes, Vanessa Lampert and Charlotte Wetton, a diverse array of distinctive poets, with different styles and subject-matter, all of whom read exceptionally well, as did Ian himself. As anyone who’s tried knows, reading online is trickier than reading in person, because you can’t see everyone and therefore can’t gauge their reactions as easily; nor can you really tell how loudly you’re speaking. On this occasion, though, all the readers coped very well and MC Tim Fellows ran things very efficiently and effectively.
  
  This Thursday just gone, I travelled down to Stroud, in Gloucestershire, to read at the Museum in the Park, at an evening organised under the aegis of Yew Tree Press run by Philip Rush, who was on the second Poetry Business Writing School programme I attended in 2019–2021, which was curtailed by Covid. The other two readers, Mark Corcoran and Polly Howell, were/are both local poets who deserve to be better-known. I changed my set a bit from the Mytholmroyd reading, which was easy to do because my slot at both was (up to) 20 minutes – however, well a poet knows and can therefore remember the words of their poems, it does, I think, get a bit wearying always reading the same ones. Of course, some poems in collections, in mine at least, just don’t work particularly well when read to an audience; this can be because of: words which might be heard as their homonyms; obscure references (a speciality of mine!) which necessitate explicatory preambles; are too short or too long; or page layouts which are an intrinsic part of the poems’ effectiveness and so can’t be orally conveyed. Philip and the Stroud audience were really warm and responsive, and I enjoyed the evening immensely. It was great also to meet the poet JLM (Juliette) Morton, whose Broken Sleep Books collection Red Handed I enjoyed reading last year, and to see in person again David Hale, my fellow member of the workshop group, the Collective, whom I first met when he and I were on my first Poetry Business Writing School programme back in 2017–2018. (Nice though it is to see David and everyone else in the Collective over Zoom every other Sunday, seeing them in person is even better – though we’re yet to meet together in person; in fact, there are two members, Ben McGuire and Lydia Harris, whom I’ve never met in person.)
  
  On Friday, I was one of six readers at an Off the Shelf Festival event in the University of Sheffield Drama Studio’s theatre, as a celebration of forty years of my and every other UK poet’s favourite poetry journal, The North. Hosted by the co-editor (and co-director of the Poetry Business), Peter Sansom, it consisted of a delightful 20-minute reading by the Sheffield Poet Laureate, Beth Davies, whose pamphlet The Pretence of Understanding won the New Poets’ Prize 2022, and then short readings – by Peter, Alan Payne, James (Jim) Caruth, Kate Rutter and me – each of three poems which had appeared in The North. I read Stephen Payne’s superb villanelle, ‘Dai’, Victoria Gatehouse’s brilliant, and brilliantly-titled, ‘Reservoir Gods’, and my own ‘The Prang’. It was another very memorable event, and a fitting tribute to Ann and Peter Sansom’s work over the years to cement The North as a hugely important pillar of the poetry scene in the UK and beyond.
  
  And then yesterday, I went to my third poetry event in as many days. I have to say that by this point I was feeling as though I was permanently living in a bubble of poetry. But the quality of the event was such that I had another great time. It was the launch, at the amazing Leeds Library, a venerable and beautiful subscription library founded in 1768, of Ian Harker’s Smith | Doorstop pamphlet, Gain Access, which Kim Moore chose as the winner of last year’s Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition. Gain Access is available at the bargain price of £6 here. The event was MC-ed by the poet Joe Williams, who read and recited two poems of his own, and Ian had two guest readers, Melanie Banim and Tom Weir, both of whom read their fine poems very well indeed. Tom and Ian were also on the Poetry Business Writing School programme alongside me, in my first and second ones respectively. It was great to see Tom read some old favourites, plus some new, heartrending poems. Ian’s pamphlet, which I haven’t had time to read in full yet, consists of poems about his days as a housing officer for Leeds City Council. Everyone in the room was privileged to hear Ian read a selection of them yesterday. As a former local authority officer myself, and with my daughter having recently moved roles in the council she works for (from Customer Services) into Housing, as a homelessness officer, the poems resonated very strongly with me. As we all know, public servants in general in the last 15 years have, alas, had to get used to doing more with less funding, as a result of Cameron and Osborne’s Austerity, May’s ‘hostile environment’ and failure to control the roguest elements of her party as it went hell for leather towards the national economic suicide that was Brexit, Johnson’s plumping for Brexit purely as a way of self-aggrandisement and his incompetence and lies at the helm throughout the pandemic, Truss’s crashing of the economy for entirely ideological reasons, Sunak’s failure to effect any improvement to people’s wellbeing, and the huge disappointment, so far, of Starmer’s government to effect the positive change they were elected to. Hearing Ian’s poems about the day-to-day impacts of all that on ‘ordinary’ people’s lives was intensely moving; they are extraordinarily well-crafted poems, which impart their message and import without preaching or hammering.
  
  What I learn from watching and listening to other poets read isn’t just how they make their poems engaging, but where they pause, what they emphasise, how they vary their pace and all manner of tricks which make reading poems to an audience into a proper performance. Inevitably, I also get inspired to write new poems, because memories and ideas get triggered.
  
  Much though I loved all those events, I’m glad to have a bit of a break before the next one, another 20-minute reading I’ll be doing in support of Ian Parks (and with Janet Dan and musician Jane Stockdale) in York on the evening of 21st November – details and (£5) tickets are available here.
  
  This month’s Poetry Book Club book is Ash Keys, the ‘New Selected Poems’ of Michael Longley, published by Cape not long before he died. Of his generation of poets from the north of Ireland, he’s not, to my mind, up there with either Heaney or Mahon (or for that matter, with the younger generation of Carson, McGuckian and Muldoon). I do, though, like some of his poems, especially his short ones on the flora of the Burren, in the west of Ireland. My chosen poem to talk about at the meeting is a section of his elegiac sequence on Peter, his twin.
  
  The poetry collection I enjoyed reading the most in the last month was Gunpowder by Bernard O’Donoghue, another Irish poet, published by Chatto & Windus back in 1995. It pulled off that rare hat-trick of making me laugh, swoon at his skill and admire how it seemingly effortlessly moved me. I shall have to find and read more of his collections. On my shelves, Gunpowder sits happily between collections by Sean O’Brien and Dennis O’Driscoll, which is surely a fine place to be.

  October 26, 2025

  ann-sansom, ian-harker, ian-parks, kim-moore, laura-strickland, molly-prosser, peter-sansom, poem, poems, poet, poetry, poetry-business, steve-ely, susan-darlington, tom-weir, writing, yew-tree-press

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