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: philip-hoare
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July reading
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 