My last review of the year, of Andrew Neilson’s fine Rack Press pamphlet, Summers Are Other, has been published today, over at The Friday Poem, here. My thanks, as ever, to Hilary Menos and Andy Brodie.
This week also saw the excellent news that Blue Diode Publishing will be publishing Andrew’s long-overdue first full collection, Little Griefs, in 2026.
I should also mention that I very much enjoyed Andrew’s essay on Seamus Heaney in the latest issue of The Dark Horse, which is available to buy here.
Tag: literature
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Review of Andrew Neilson’s Summers Are Other
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On Pam Thompson’s ‘Edvard Munch in Haverfordwest’
It would be difficult not to like Pam Thompson’s poetry, because it has immediacy, depth and variety. Her Sub/urban Legends won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet prize in 2023 and has recently been (rather belatedly) published. At only £5 (plus p&p) it’s a genuine bargain and is available to buy here. It’s Pam’s first publication since her excellent second collection, Strange Fashion, published by Pindrop Press in 2017.
In his adjudication of the Paper Swans prize, John McCullough wrote:
Sub/urban Legends gripped me because of the way it marries poignancy with a really bold imagination and stylistic flair. Its poems exploring both experiences of parenthood and mourning the loss of a maternal presence find a great balance of a lively eye and, where it’s most needed, a heartfelt clarity and directness.
Pam is influenced, inter alia, by the New York school of poetry, a loose amalgam of poets associated in the 1950s and ’60s, chief among them Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. Pam has discussed her particular liking for, and the influence of, Schuyler in an intriguing 2023 podcast with Chris Jones, here. The deceptively offhand diction of the New York poets, their acute but apparently nonchalant awareness of what’s going on around them, their precision, urban sensibility and painterliness can all, I think, be discerned in Pam’s poems. And as she says in the podcast about the New York poets’ poems, hers are almost always ‘peopled’.
Sub/urban Legends doesn’t feel like a themed pamphlet, because it isn’t one. Its 24 poems are varied in tone, subject-matter and form, and each of them is worth spending time with.
Pam has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.
*
Edvard Munch in Haverfordwest
Easter Saturday, his type of weather—
squally, grey. He wanders up the High Street,
buys a cagoule and a flask from the Army and Navy,
considers a Magilux torch but puts it back.
WHSmith are giving away Cadburys mini-eggs
with the Daily Mail. He queues for ages.
The man behind the till insists he must take
this newspaper and not the one he prefers.
Three young women with piercings in their faces
are leaning against the railing outside Tesco—
one has sea-green hair. When he paints her
he’ll make the colours vibrate until you can hear them.
He buys tomatoes and crusty bread.
As she fills the flask, the woman in Greggs
seems to understand what he says to her in Norwegian.
On St Mary’s Bridge he has some sort of turn
that history will repeat— on pub signs, posters,
as though all the portraits of his homeland,
of his sister on her sickbed, never happened,
but it passes and the world stays still again.
This morning, it’s all the time it takes to feed ducks
on the river and pour coffee from a blue enamel flask.
*
Munch, 1863–1944, brought an explicitly psychological edge to his paintings; not just, but most famously, in the several versions of The Scream which Pam’s poem alludes to in the eighth and ninth couplets. (I remember seeing all extant versions Munch made of it in an exhibition at the Barbican in 1985 and being surprised by how small they were.) He lived through times of immense change in Norway and beyond, and died 15 months before his country was liberated from the Nazis. Alas, his funeral and legacy were hijacked by Quisling and other Norwegian collaborators and by the occupying Nazis themselves.
Whether or not Munch ever went to Haverfordwest is irrelevant; the poem takes fundamental liberties in placing him there, and doing so in our time – liberties which the reader can happily go along with as Munch perambulates along the town’s streets. Why Haverfordwest? Well, why not? My maternal grandfather’s New Standard Encyclopædia and World Atlas from 1933 says of Haverfordwest that, ‘In the days when ships were small it was a prosperous port.’
It’s a poem rich in specificity from the outset: I guess technically Easter Saturday falls six days after Easter itself, though I suspect most of us think of it as the day between Good Friday and Easter. Either way, it places the poem firmly in springtime, on a fair-to-poor day, as the shorthand of ‘squally, grey’ tells us. That colloquial ‘his type of weather’ is a lovely and confidently omniscient narrative assertion. The verb choice is interesting too: that Munch ‘wanders’ rather than ‘hurries’ or one of its synonyms, implying that, being a Norwegian and therefore somewhat hardy vis-à-vis inclement weather, squalls are water off a duck’s back to him. Nonetheless, in the next couplet we see Munch buy ‘a cagoule and a flask’, as if the weather is actually more of a nuisance than it first appeared, to the point of needing proper outdoor clobber. That he does so in ‘the Army and Navy’ is wryly amusing. I don’t know if any Army and Navy stores are still open in Britain, but, again, that’s irrelevant, because it sounds just right. It’s amusing too, how Munch ‘considers a Magilux torch but puts it back’, presumably, the reader senses, because of the price, his implied thriftiness just another small detail which we accept as true thanks to the poem’s this-is-how-it-is descriptive tone.
The third and fourth couplets are also funny, in a droll manner, but what’s also admirable is how the third couplet’s opening is constructed: instead of saying something comparatively pedestrian (pun intended) like, ‘He enters WHSmith where they are giving away / Cadburys mini-eggs with the Daily Mail, and he queues for ages’, the clauses are cleverly compressed. We sense Munch’s boredom and impatience in that ‘for ages’, and then his frustration at not being able to transfer the deal from that right-wing rag to the Guardian or whatever. But of course, we are allowed to infer those feelings, due to the poet trusting her readers. Now that WH Smith has been bought over and its stores are disappearing from our high streets, its inclusion here was prophetically poignant. Pam is too good a poet not to choose the particular details in her poems with the utmost care and consideration as to their resonances.
The fifth and sixth couplets allude to, and crucially reinvent, Munch’s famous Girls on a Bridge, which he painted 12 versions of between 1886 and 1927. (Derek Mahon used the 1901 version for his marvellous six-strangely-shaped-stanzas poem of the same name, in which he described ‘Grave daughters / Of time’.) Here, again, there is further fine accretion of detail: the ‘piercings in their faces’, ‘the railing outside Tesco’ (compare Mahon’s ‘The girls content to gaze / At the unplumbed, reflective lake’) and that truly excellent ‘sea-green hair’, somehow perfectly appropriate, not just because Haverfordwest is/was an inland port but also because Munch, strongly influenced by van Gogh and Gauguin, was fond of using bold colours and because it shows another assertive streak of independence to these ‘young women’. This is, of course, a poem which time-travels – both physically and attitudinally. (Munch, it should be said, has been posthumously accused of both misogyny and feminism in how he depicted girls and women.)
At this point in the poem, just the right moment after the layering-on of precise visual details, the narrative commentator re-enters the poem with that beautifully synaesthetic sentence, with its hint of Magical Realism, ‘When he paints her / he’ll make the colours vibrate until you can hear them.’ Note that it’s ‘colours’, not ‘colour’: we are reminded that this is a painter whose palette dazzles.
For me, the thought comes that the first six couplets might work better, in terms of their discrete content, as quatrains:
Easter Saturday, his type of weather—
squally, grey. He wanders up the High Street,
buys a cagoule and a flask from the Army and Navy,
considers a Magilux torch but puts it back.
WHSmith are giving away Cadburys mini-eggs
with the Daily Mail. He queues for ages.
The man behind the till insists he must take
this newspaper and not the one he prefers.
Three young women with piercings in their faces
are leaning against the railing outside Tesco—
one has sea-green hair. When he paints her
he’ll make the colours vibrate until you can hear them.
However, one can intuit that the poet ruled that idea out for four reasons: that what immediately follows those 12 lines has, until the end of the penultimate couplet, an almost continuous syntax (despite the full stop midway through the eighth couplet) which better suits the couplets form; that, in any case, there are 11 couplets, rather than 10 or 12, and therefore they couldn’t all be arranged as quatrains; that the unfolding of the couplets also ideally suits the leisureliness of Munch’s morning walk (or ‘Morgenspaziergang’, per the title of a Kraftwerk track, on Autobahn); and one other reason which I’ll come to later.
But back to the content. After we readers momentarily dwell upon hearing the colours, the poem rolls on gently, cinematically following Munch as he makes more purchases, for what we presume may be a simple brunch. The Greggs sentence works especially well because it spans a stanza break, giving the reader a pause before delivering another almost Magical Realist moment. Does that ‘seems to’ dilute its power? I don’t think it does; it bestows the feeling that not everything is knowable and so, paradoxically, makes the possibility more plausible. I recall the strange incident in the folk-horror film Midsommar (dir. Ari Aster, 2019) where the American protagonist Dani appears to be able to understand and speak Swedish as she dances with young women from the Hälsingland village where most of the film is set.
Then we get the ‘Scream’ incident, relayed with commendable economy – ‘some sort of turn’ – and, once again, a mid-sentence pause across couplets. Perhaps there should be an em-dash rather than a comma after ‘happened’, though the meaning is still clear, and this, the longest sentence in the poem, ends with the comfort and reassurance of that delightful ‘the world stays still again’. A case could be made for saying that the poem should end there, but I’m glad it doesn’t: the final couplet augments the sense of stillness and peace provided in the penultimate couplet. We implicitly picture Munch tossing into the river some of the bread he bought earlier, and using the flask he bought then filled at Greggs. This pulling together of threads is sonically completed by the half-rhyme of ‘ducks’ and ‘flask’ – and which wouldn’t work half so successfully if the poem were in quatrains.
As a whole, the poem seems to be incidentally telling us how the creative process, and the flashes of brilliance involved therein, can derive from the most mundane of activities; above all, from taking a nice constitutional – which is what I’m off to do now.
I must reiterate that this splendid poem sits among 23 other immensely readable and enjoyable poems in Sub/urban Legends. Pam will be launching it with the equally terrific poets John McCullough and Robert Hamberger, on the evening of 5 June in what promises to be a very memorable event. Free tickets can be obtained here.
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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.
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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.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 