With thanks to editor David Cooke, I have two poems, available to read here, in the latest issue of The High Window: the first is a hybrid poem of sorts; the second is more in keeping with my usual style, I think.
It’s great to be in the same issue alongside, inter alia, friends Kathy Pimlott and Michael Loveday. David always does a terrific job in pulling the journal together.
Tag: poems
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Poems in The High Window – ‘The Postcard’ and ‘Record Breaker’
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Review of Andrew Neilson’s Summers Are Other
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.
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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.
Photo by Cris Fells of Sophie Herxheimer, Katie Griffiths and me. 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.
The track to Cloughton Wyke. 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.
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Reviews of Annie Fisher, Kath McKay and Claire Crowther
Annie Fisher, Missing the Man Next Door, Mariscat Press, £9
Kath McKay, Moving the Elephant, The Garlic Press, £10
Claire Crowther, Real Lear: New & Selected Poems, Shearsman Books, £12.95
Fans of Annie Fisher know that her poetry of the everyday – serious, entertaining, sometimes bordering on outlandish – is handsomely crafted. Even on a first breeze through the 24 poems of her new pamphlet, the variety is evident: of form, length, type and subject matter. There are couplets, tercets, blocks, prose-poems, list-poems, an unrhymed sonnet and more, encompassing, as before, high seriousness, nonsense verse and fantasy. What is constant throughout is Fisher’s voice: droll, mischievously cynical and worldly-wise.
The title-theme is introduced cleverly in a poem entitled ‘The New Neighbour’, whose anonymous character has succeeded ‘John / who died in the pandemic at the age of ninety-four — // John, to whom I never said goodbye, / who’ll always be, for me, the man next door.’ John is elegised at fuller length in the title poem, a list-poem full of delightful closely-observed memories:
I liked that he was there.
I liked the way he sang Italian arias off-key.
I liked how every time he tottered to the corner shop
for bread and beans, he’d ping our metal gate post
with his stick, then nod and smile to hear the note it made
as if was his tuning fork.
Fisher’s use of anaphora here surely bestows extra poignancy to her moving recollections.
Another, pleasurable list-poem, this time verging on nonsense verse (to which it states its debt), itemises what the title, ‘A Few Favourite Things’, indicates, including ‘naked swimming, hugging trees, / Seamus Heaney, Scotsmen’s knees’.
A handful of nature-themed poems include one about the critically-endangered shoebill and a lovely short poem, ‘The Old Beech by the Lychgate’, which deserves to be in every anthology of tree poetry: ‘It’s unembarrassed if we talk out loud. / It’s just as fine with nothing being said.’ That half-rhyme adds to the poem’s four full rhymes. Full rhyme is seemingly scarce nowadays but Fisher is adept at using it to winning effect in light verse which bears comparison to Lear or Nash:
The Parson’s goldfish is godlier than God,
His piranha is pious as well,
But the Parson himself is a wicked old sod,
Who’s probably going to hell.
(‘The Improbable Perfections of the Parson’s Pets’)
The clerical theme continues overleaf (and not, alas, opposite) in one of the pamphlet’s two highpoints, ‘Priests’. Its eight tercets reflectively address the good and the bad in what might be the definitive poem on the subject:
Some were demons. Some were saints.
One (dear Father Clement) was an angel.
They starved for lack of ordinary love.
Here, as throughout, Fisher turns skilfully on a sixpence from the generic to the specific and back again.
The pamphlet ends with the other highpoint, ‘The Old Dancing Woman of Bridgwater Town’, a luscious, celebratory whirl, using ballad meter, of Fisher’s own Somerset roots:
and she’s dancing through Northfield and Springfield and Oakfield,
she’s dancing down East Quay and Westover Green
and on through the back streets, the dark streets, the drunk streets
where only Houdini the alley cat’s been.
Occasionally, Fisher’s flights of fancy – ones involving R.S. Thomas and Jesus for example – feel like filler, but on the whole this is another rich assortment from a poet whose mastery of comic verse shouldn’t blind readers to her ability to write, additionally, and at times simultaneously, profound, re-readable poetry.
Kath McKay’s third full collection, like its predecessors, reflects her life story: a working-class Liverpool-Irish childhood, university in Belfast at the height of the ‘Troubles’, and adulthood, teaching in London, Leeds and Hull, parenting and grandparenting. It runs chronologically, right up to the pandemic and beyond, and the poems are almost always comprised of personal vignettes.
McKay’s style doesn’t set off fireworks; at their best, though, the poems in Moving the Elephant are, well, moving. The staccato clauses of an elegy for her mother, ‘I Know that the Science of Genetics’, say much with little:
[. . .] I fifth in your belly,
one dead at a year, three more to come, and youlapped milk and fed me potatoes and bread, so that
when women go on about chocolate, I say, Give me
potatoes and bread.’
Two successive poems deftly celebrate the optimism of McKay and her Sixties cohort’s aspirations:
In spring, Harold Wilson told our sixth form, ‘You will go far.’
A lad asked about the White Heat of Technology. Next Day
over the law on the conservation of mass, the chemistry teacher
we felt sorry for, in her glasses and bun, curbed our giggles:
‘In the modern world, everyone will need a knowledge of chemistry.’
The Physics teacher had ‘Leaving the Tao’ written on his door.
(‘Leaving the Tao’)
‘Youse girls, says Nelly. ‘Get yourselves an education. Get out of here.’(‘Saturday Job’)
The range of subject matter is diverse, covering: learning Spanish, Catholicism, political activism, working in a jam factory (‘How to switch my mind off, but keep enough residual attention / in case something untoward like a dead spider or a decapitated mouse / ended up in the jam’), secondhand clothing, Captain Webb, moving house (the title poem), a 77-year-old milkman, a visit to a chiropodist, soup-making, strong women and much else; but it is the poems about family which are arguably the most captivating. ‘The Other Room’, second-person tercets presumably about the death of McKay’s mother, contains the tenderest of moments, ‘you note / that your mother is growing colder, but still, you want to cuddle her / in case something of her is still floating round, lost.’ Somehow, the punctuating repetition of ‘still’, albeit used in differing ways, heightens the emotion.
The collection feels over-stuffed; 61 poems is excessive, given their lack of formal variety. In particular, six successive travelogues (set in Russia, Australia x 2, Italy and Spain x 2) midway through the book feels like a few too many, like that old trope of the neighbours showing you their holiday snaps with an implicit ‘you had to be there’ hanging in the air. The best is ‘Black Tea and Lemon’, because its tale is the quirkiest: ‘All night on the train between Moscow and Krasnodar, / Michael cracked the shells of boiled eggs and popped in thirteen.’
Heartfelt though all the poems in the book are, they don’t quite often enough include surprising lines or metaphors/similes, or portray incidents out of leftfield – a poem resulting from donation of her late brother’s eyes is a notable exception and shows exactly what McKay is capable of.
I was left with an abiding memory of two consecutive poems, both of which stand out precise because of their formal difference and (appear to) concern the death of McKay’s partner at just 56: ‘Unremarkable’, a very much remarkable list poem in which the condition of his body parts is itemised – ‘Liver shows evidence of nutmeg congestion’ – and ‘The Other Side’, seven couplets, but not a sonnet, which unflashily and touchingly convey the zombie-like autopilot nature of bereavement – ‘I boiled a kettle I’d forgotten to fill. Left the toast // to burn. Told the kids, their faces stricken, I was going shopping.’
Claire Crowther’s poetry is considerably more complex than Fisher’s or McKay’s. This retrospective drawn from her five collections from 2007 to 2022, plus 23 new poems, therefore demands patience on the reader’s part. In a 2009 interview, in response to the question of how closely Crowther drew on her own experiences, she said:
In a way I always do but only as a starting point. I have always felt what I write about – that’s the genesis of a poem. But the detail varies from my own experience – it could be that I observe other families interacting and freely bring in their details. I never feel I have to stick to any one set of facts – I mingle and match facts I’ve observed to serve the poem which becomes something different. In the end, there is rarely any autobiography at all – the poem has taken over completely.[1]The innate questions of this mix’n’match approach are whether the effort required to try to locate the emotional heart, and the point, of each poem justifies the time spent. I confess that my first read-through was challenging and that the poems – or, rather, some of them – only came alive on a second reading. Perhaps that is a good thing – like music whose depths only reveal themselves over several listenings.
The first poem, has a forbidding, if not off-putting, title, ‘Reconstructive Fortress’, but concerns one of those life-changing events: the process of selling a property, a flat in central London, and the feelings it evokes. The short sentences of the poem’s middle stanza follow each other in an almost disassociative, dark-humoured manner:
I’ve been wearing this flat for too long.
It’s dark though I’ve accessorised it in turquoise.
It works best when my skin is palest in winter.
In summer, it makes me look tacky. I am ready
to invest in a house as well-fitted as a bra.
None of that faux leopard skin, no balconettes.
A later, charming companion piece of sorts, ‘Fennel’ takes a strange turn: ‘The new owners may scrape the taste of my house / off its surface, but her fennel seeds cranny in fissures / and plan a dynasty of yellow tang.’
The subject-matter of the early poems is as happily varied as Crowther’s syntax is elegant. ‘Lost Child’, one of several poems set in Solihull, unspools its curious tale over six couplets, ending beautifully: ‘Pearl was playing quietly alone. / My ear is like a shell the wind swept.’ ‘Nudists’ opens with a killer line, ‘In the home of the naked, glass is queen’; as does ‘Foreigners in Lecce’: ‘Home is rind-hard’. The 23 five-line stanzas of ‘Against the Evidence’ unfold a short story largely also set in and around Lecce, and the phrases of which needs to be slowly savoured:
Saturday. Lemon of winter. Damp charcoal
bramble. Grey quilts of cloud. Wind tumbles
the wrapping from our ciabatta as if future
is the rim of a beaten country
and we’ve reached it. [. . .]
‘Once Troublesome’ begins as a fine Twixmas poem – ‘It isn’t New Year yet so Happy What? / Till then, it’s Boxing Day every morning.’ – then veers off with Crowther’s trademark odd turns. ‘Live Grenade in Sack of Potatoes Story’ is weighed down by its title’s promise.
A number of poems revolve around ‘thikes’, creatures imagined by Crowther, again in Hob’s Moat, Solihull: ‘The number of thikes / casually shot is high. / Celebrities on Channel Five News / have endorsed the policing of thike-baiters.’ (‘The Thike). Whether it’s a metaphor for marginalised groups, or even the position of women, within British society isn’t entirely clear, but it gives Crowther licence to play:It’s not because I’m dirty
It’s not because I’m clean
It’s not because I kissed a thike
inside a space machine
(‘Sleeping on a Trampoline’)
That playfulness is evident elsewhere, such as a punning riff on her forename in the whackily entitled ‘Self-Portrait as Windscreen’:
Do you think I’m clear on every issue
just because I’m glass?
Have you heard yourself calling ‘Claire,
Claire, Claire, Claire’ when you’re confused?
A name is lulling
when you aren’t clear on every issue.
It’s tempting to intuit that that last line is a knowing, self-aware thought that her poetry is not of the transparent kind.
The difficulty quotient is ratcheted up further in Crowther’s fourth collection, Solar Cruise, which explores, via the metaphor of a cruise ship, the world of solar physics inhabited by her partner, Keith Barnham. Yet, among the scientific jargon, these poems are among the book’s most enjoyable, largely because we find Crowther at play again: ‘A sheen of fog curtains our balcony / and into that the captain sends a throaty // ohhhhm // ohhhhm // ohhhhm’ (‘Foghorn with Solar Harvester’). She satirises the domineering men of that world and celebrates the women whose achievements ought to be better known. One poem, ‘Electricity Generation in Germany in a Typical April week’, incorporates a graph showing the relative amounts of solar, wind and conventional power generated. There are further physics-related poems in her fifth collection, and curious others, including a love poem and a (cod?) metaphysical one:
Now we are over, death
has nuanced our model of dead worlds.
Indeed, as some poet mentioned,
pearl is mere pavement here
and no one dead mourns.
(‘Heaven is Nothing If Not Resolution’)
The final section, Real Lear, reimagines Lear as a woman, and includes some delicious gobbledygook, in particular in the nature poem, ‘Gabbery’:
every dry battletwig
scuttles under tubbans
a dunnock in the hedgeskips
sings to her nestling:
cuculus cuculus
gowk in my hidland
gabber in my hidland
o fierce cuculus
This intriguing seam has also recently been mined to great effect by Geraldine Clarkson, in her collection Medlars. Poetry to be enjoyed purely for its soundscape reaches an apogee for Crowther in the book’s final poem, ‘Soundsunder’:
[. . .] I hear inside my silence
that it is the sussuround of us
we other:
sounds that shushhush the our of self
In reading such a generous selection of Crowther’s poetry, it becomes a struggle to know when she is making serious points and what they are. The density of her writing, albeit often exquisitely crafted in musical lines, inhibits simple, or simplistic, exegesis and therefore prohibits much in the way of an emotional reaction other than a degree of frustration and, inasmuch as one can judge the tone, a wry smile at the fun Crowther appears to be having, as if one isn’t quite allowed in on the joke. Surely, though, kernels of clarity are gradually revealed over multiple re-readings.
[1] Interview with Andrew Philip, https://tonguefire.blogspot.com/2009/07/open-plan-otherness-interview-with.html, accessed 23 November 2024.
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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.
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September reading and other news
On Tuesday, I had the great pleasure of reading at Five Leaves bookshop in Nottingham, alongside two lovely poets whose poetry I love: Kathy Pimlott and Peter Sansom. As Kathy mentioned during her reading, she and I met because we were both participants in the Poetry Business Writing School run by Peter and Ann Sansom. I think our sets of poems complemented one another’s. I’m very grateful to Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves and Tim Fellows of Crooked Spire Press for introducing our readings. Here’s a photo taken afterwards:
Photo of Kathy Pimlott, Matthew Paul and Peter Sansom I have two readings coming up in October, at the Dusty Miller, Mytholmroyd, on the 7th, and at the Museum in the Park, Stroud, on the 23rd. Both are free events, with no ticketing. Details are available here.
I’ve been reading Peatlands (Arc Publications, 2014), written by Pedro Serrano, the Mexican poet, and translated by Anna Crowe, both of whom I was due to be reading alongside in Mytholmroyd. (They have been replaced by Kim Moore and Molly Prosser.) In his poem ‘El Arte de Fecar’ / ‘The Liminating Art’, he writes, ‘Shitting is like the art of writing: / you have to give it thought and just so long / for everything to come out good and strong.’ I can’t argue with that.
I’ve also been (re-)reading Us (Faber, 2018) by Zaffar Kunial, as it’s the chosen book for this month’s Poetry Book Club. In these days when the media are encouraging the open racism of far-right fuckwits, his poems exploring what it means to belong have taken on added importance. I’ve also re-worked my way through the poetry oeuvre of Seamus Heaney, accompanied again by Stepping Stones (Faber, 2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s seminal interviews with him. For me, Heaney remains a paragon of how a poet can negotiate the politics and events of their time.
I’m also savouring Flint Country (Saraband, 2025, available here) by Laurence Mitchell, whose East of Elveden blog (here) I have long enjoyed. It’s a lovely, heartfelt meditation on the character, history and importance of flint in Norfolk, Suffolk, Sussex and beyond.
Finally, I’m very grateful to Jonathan Taylor, who featured two poems from The Last Corinthians on the Creative Writing at Leicester site, here. I should mention again that Jonathan’s short-story collection Scablands (Salt, 2023), available here, is one of my reading highlights of the year.
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On Mary Mulholland’s ‘Stilling Time’
Mary Mulholland has been steadily building up an impressive body of work over the last decade and more: her latest publication, the elimination game, published by Broken Sleep Books and available here, is her second solo pamphlet, following her 2022 Live Canon debut What the sheep taught me, in addition to her two Nine Pens collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell. Mary is also the founder of the Red Door Poets (details here), of whom I was an original member; I can testify to Mary’s deep poetic intuition and generosity.
With intelligence, humour and carefully contained ire, the elimination game tackles the stereotypes, pitfalls and apparent invisibility of older women in contemporary British society. As a late-middle-aged man in the same society, I can’t, and don’t, pretend to know what it feels like to be an older woman in Britain today, but Mary’s poems provide a good idea.
The content contains a plethora of memorable lines and images, such as the eponymous hero of ‘The General’s Widow’ who, once ‘The funeral’s over’ finds ‘it’s such a relief, / she’ll spend the night making paper planes, / hurl them at his eyes, nose and brains’, and the title-poem in which a litany of misogynist and agist insulting terms for older women are rebuffed in no uncertain terms (‘kindly wait while i /find a bucket to list & puke in’) and then refuted by another, much more positive litany of achievements: ‘last year I swam in the / arctic trekked the sahara then / mastered roller-blading next up / i’m starting classes in mandarin’.
There are heartfelt poems from the perspective of both motherhood and grandmotherhood (both subjective and objective, and in ‘The Grandmothers, both), celebrating the passing on of the torch of female fearlessness; and of the incredible family memories and history which need to be handed down through the generations before it’s too late (the vivid ‘Fallen Tree’); and, in ‘Reading the Silence’, the quiet, uneasy moments of a later-years (heterosexual) relationship, in which the man’s apparently dominant voice and ‘exploits’ are quietly undercut by the woman’s unsaid response:
Once in Africa, with rain like steel drums
on the tin roof, he said whisky was saferthan water, and the grey parrot, once owned
by a bronchial old man, coughed.
She pauses her knitting, replays her thoughts,
plain, purl, clacketing needles, perhaps time,
to cast off. She glances. He raises an eyebrow,
she half-smiles.
There are poems, too, about the perils of older sexual attraction and perfunctory, unfulfilling sex, surely underexplored topics in contemporary British poetry, and, most poignant of all, a rueful list-poem, ‘The Regretting Room’.
There is a degree of interplay and echoing between the poems, not in a way which duplicates ideas, but, rather, augments them with different facets of the same sub-themes. This helps to make this pamphlet unusually well unified. I, for one, would like to see a full collection from Mary, in which she can bring her skills and life-experience to bear on the larger canvas.
The 25 poems in the pamphlet are varied in form: blocks, 5; bullet-points, 1; columns, 1; couplets, 6; haiku, 1; irregular stanzas, 4; quatrains, 2; sestets, 1; tercets, 4. Such variety remains, I think, an under-rated aspect of collecting poems into a coherent whole. Unless a collection is themed by form (e.g. a collection of sonnets), reading poem after poem in the same or similar forms, whether block poems or in couplets, will never be the most enjoyable experience, however excellent the content maybe.
11 of the poems are in standard upper- and lower-case; the others, though, are in lower-case only – first-person singular, names, other proper nouns and all. I presume the decision as which case to use when was made on an intuitive, poem-by-poem basis, rather than with any preconception. I can’t be the only reader who finds the lower-case-for-everything format to be unnerving to the point of mild irritation, because I can’t quite see the point of it, other than as a needless layer of further variety, but I’m endeavouring to get over myself. (For years, there has been a sizeable minority of English-language haiku poets who have deployed the lower-case for each and every word, and within three lines – or just one – that approach looks a trifle pretentious. Often the ‘i’ instead of ‘I’ was/is used to indicate an absence of ego by Zen-infused poets, but to my mind it has had the opposite, self-defeating effect on the reader, of drawing attention to itself.)
You may wonder, then, why I’ve chosen the poem below rather than one of those in standard upper- and lower-case. The answer is simply that I like the content very much. So it seems that I’m succeeding in getting over myself, which must be a good thing.
Mary has kindly given me permission to quote the whole of the following poem.
*
Stilling Time
when she turned eighty my aunt refused to go
to bed, because that’s where most people die.
at eighty eleanor of aquitaine rode on horseback
like a man when she went to visit the king of spain.
a woman even older circumnavigated the world,
another ran marathons, one wrote racy books.
when i’m eighty i’m going to retrace my steps
to the grand canyon, breathe again the air
where i first encountered the majesty of creation.
i will touch a black stone ninety million years old
and feel young. i’ll bump into a family elk
at dawn, we will hold each other’s gaze.
I’ll tell them I come in peace, leave my shadow
falling over the canyon edge, sinking into earth.
*
I’ll be straightforward for once and start with the title. A play-on-words on ‘stealing time’ is intentional, I assume; at least, that allusion came immediately to mind. The idea of stilling time is attractive: of enabling a pausing, even a thwarting, of its sly progress. It’s a fine title with which to end the pamphlet, because the passage of time is the underlying stratum of all the poems within it.
Do seven couplets always make a sonnet? Not necessarily, but there’s a definite turn in this one, after the third couplet, so it’s fair to call ‘Stilling Time’ a reversed sonnet, like Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Sonnet’ (the 1979 one).
The opening line contains arguably the pamphlet’s finest line-break: I admire how it leads the reader to think that ‘to go’ indicates that death was imminent for her aunt, and then the second line, showing her resilience, intelligence and wit, reveals that she wasn’t quite near the brink yet. Poets nowadays seem more adept at that kind of double-meaning line-break in which the reader is lulled into one interpretation before being directed elsewhere. Here it is all about how much time the reprieve will provide.
That opening couplet leads very nicely into the second, with the precise age of eighty neatly linking the two verses. Eleanor of Aquitaine lived one of the most remarkable lives of anyone of ‘high’ birth in the early Middle Ages: married three times, including to King Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, with both of whom she ruled jointly, she outlived each of them, and even survived imprisonment by Henry. She also outlived her son Richard the Lionheart, for whom she acted as regent during his almost perpetual absences from England, and enabled the succession of her younger son, John, in face of much baronial and other resistance. I’m scarcely doing justice to her full biography here. Suffice it to say that in the cut and thrust of male-dominated diplomatic shenanigans between England and France, she was a central figure for well over half a century. Eleanor’s journey which this couplet refers to was across the Pyrenees to fetch her granddaughter Blanche of Castile to marry Louis VIII of France and in so doing consolidate John’s shaky hold on the English throne. She was, and is, an example of a hugely successful and important long-lived woman, indomitably defied her advanced years. She’s an excellent example in another way too: being equally at home in England and France, like Mary and her family, as shown in several of the poems.
The third couplet, in almost throwaway style, is less specific in its old-age-resistant examples but is precisely-worded to sound salubrious to the ear.Although they link and shift like the verses of a renga, each of the first three stanzas is discrete, content-wise. From the fourth couplet onwards, however, they flow into one another, despite the full stops in the fifth and sixth, thereby giving the heart of the poem a lovely impetus after the somewhat stately, though no less well-made, opening trio of couplets.
At this point, the defiantly adventurous tone becomes reminiscent of Jenny Joseph’s very well-known poem ‘Warning’, available to read here, with its much-quoted opening,
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.
There the comparison ends, though: the ambition in Mary’s poem is much bolder and more outlandish (in a good way). Note that it’s not ‘retrace my steps at the grand canyon’ but ‘to’, as if the poet–persona will take a longer and slower route, like Eleanor of Aquitaine. The segue into the fifth couplet is elegantly managed, with that pause on ‘breathe again that air’. To make the syntax here work to its optimum maybe either a semi-colon is needed after ‘creation’ or ‘touching’ should replace ‘i will touch’, but that’s quibbling. The elk encounter in the sixth couplet is utterly delightful and reminiscent, for me, of the similarly close encounter with elks in Dorianne Laux’s superb poem ‘The Crossing’. The unravelling of the clauses towards the void at the end is beautifully achieved and delivers a delicate and most noteworthy note on which to close the pamphlet.
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July reading
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.
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On revising poems
How many times have I tinkered with a poem before realising that I’ve overcooked it, so then had to undo the change? It’s a good job I’m not a builder. Sure, no one wants to read the obvious word every time, but poets can of course overdo the tweaking by replacing the early-draft choices with alternatives whose other connotations are so far from being synonymous that they blur the original meaning and/or unbalance the syntax to an unbearable degree.
In his Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel, Robert Lowell said this:
You think three times before you put a word down, and ten times about taking it out. And that’s related to boldness; if you put words down, they must do something, you’re not going to put clichés.
And this:
Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of maneuvring.
By that, I infer that he means how the emotional kernel of the poem is conveyed and encased by the rest of it. The best advice I ever received from another poet was to ensure that every poem, like the Tin Man, had a heart.
When Seidel asked him if he revised a great deal, Lowell’s answer was emphatic: ‘Endlessly.’
Time is the poet’s greatest ally in revision: each and every poem needs to be set aside for a long enough period before the poet comes back to it and decides whether or not it needs more work. If there is a niggle at the back of your mind that some aspect of the poem isn’t quite right, then you can bet that an editor would spot it straight away, so that niggle can’t just be ignored before the poem is released into the wild.
But I’m as guilty as anyone of having, many times, sent off in a bout of unfounded enthusiasm a recently- or even just-written poem which hasn’t been allowed to settle into its best form. Wherever you are, I expect you could hear my sighing earlier today while I spent three hours rejigging a poem, which, thinking it was well and truly finished, I submitted to a journal only last week.
All of which begs the question as to when a poem is actually finished, if at all. In my case, it certainly wouldn’t, by any means, be finished if it were published in a journal or in a pamphlet, although I would do my level best to try and resist tinkering with it before including it in a full collection. Even then, perhaps only the reader can complete it, though that cliché sounds as trite as any other cliché.
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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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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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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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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.
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January reading (2)
My further exploration of Dorianne Laux’s oeuvre has continued with Only as the Day is Long, her 2019 ‘New and Selected Poems’ (Norton). I’m surprised that no British publisher has brought out an edition of her poems, as I’m sure they would be very well received over here. They’re largely autobiographical, at times uncompromisingly frank – like many of those of one of her key influences, Sharon Olds – in how they address love and sexual love, mental health and sexual abuse. Like both Olds and Philip Levine, who was her mentor of sorts, Laux is over-reliant on the block-poem form, or at least, the selection in Only as the Day is Long makes it seem so. When read en bloc, block poems can resemble brain-dump splurges, in which stream-of-consciousness digressions and occasional non sequiturs are given free rein to run ahead of thought. The effect of this, without any Elizabeth Bishop-like periodic pauses, hesitations and tentative self-questioning, can therefore be a little wearying. However, when this mode succeeds, as in many of the poems from Smoke, e.g. ‘Fast Gas’, available to read and hear here, Laux is a dynamic, marvellous poet.
That’s not to say that Laux can’t slow her poems down, by using other forms; ‘The Crossing’, for example, from her fourth collection, Facts About the Moon (2005), consists of nine couplets. Courageously, it unravels an encounter with ‘The elk of Orick’, in northern California. I say courageously, because it takes an extra-large dollop of chutzpah to risk comparison with Bishop’s great poem ‘The Moose’, which can be read here. Unlike ‘The Moose’, Laux’s poem didn’t take 26 years to write and doesn’t first have stanza after stanza of (wonderful) ‘dreamy divagation’ (a scene-setting hymn to smalltown Nova Scotia) before the animal(s) finally appears; instead, it gets straight to the encounter, with wit and charm:
The elk of Orick wait patiently to cross the road
and my husband of six months, who thinks
he’s St Francis, climbs out of the car to assist.
As this opening indicates, the poem is effectively a love-poem. The description of the elks, one intuits, could equally apply to Laux’s new husband: ‘heads lifted, nostrils flared, each footfall // a testament to stalled momentum, gracefully / hesitant’. The mid-poem capture in words of the elks’ procession is magisterial and breathtaking:
[. . .] They cross the four-lane
like a coronation, slow as a Greek frieze, river
wind riffling the wheat grass of their rumps.
As in ‘The Moose’ the poem’s finale depicts a showdown with a female animal:
Go on, he beseeches, Get going, but the lone elk
stands her ground, their noses less than a yard apart.
One stubborn creature staring down another.
This is how I know the marriage will last.
What a fabulous chink of poetry this is, as lovely in its way as Bishop’s:
A moose has come out of
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus’s hot hood.
Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
In its briefer, but no less compelling manner, ‘The Crossing’ is as much of a classic poem as ‘The Moose’.
There are several interviews with Laux online, including one, here, which includes this fascinating paragraph:
Poetry is a slippery beast, a shape changer, a beast with wings, a bird/dog, a hermaphrodite, a water bearer and light bringer, the life force rendered through language, a sieve, a chute, a cone of darkness, an aggregate stone. It’s changed me by reading it, though not in a way I can speak of. It’s a feeling inside a thought inside an image. It hunts me down. It haunts what haunts me. It changes me while I write it in that I lose myself inside it, making me weightless and colorless, fragile and fearless. It’s always been with me, even before I knew what it was, it ran ahead of me as I walked through the world, making me look around and take it in through my senses, stop and stare, or listen, or smell or touch or taste until the object of my attention no longer possessed a name, and then poetry dared me to name it.
That ‘It hunts me down’ is chilling but any obsessive poet can surely identify with it, and with the wider sentiments expressed in these sentences.
Why Elizabeth Bishop has been on my mind is because I’ve also been re-reading her Collected Poems and a 2002 book of essays, Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery (Bloodaxe), edited by Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott. What’s intriguing about the essays is that most of them are written by esteemed poets – Nichola Deane, Michael Donaghy, Vicki Feaver, Deryn Rees-Jones, Jamie McKendrick, Peter Robinson, Anne Stevenson and Shapcott herself – some of whom are, or were, academics also, rather than by academics who aren’t also known as poets, so they are more personal, readable and less dry than might otherwise have been the case. That said, though, the essay I liked the best and got the most from was by Barbara Page, at that time Professor of English at Bishop’s alma mater, Vassar College, in which she analyses some of Bishop’s draft to see how the poems were sharpened by changes of emphasis, especially in the last few stanzas of ‘The Moose’. Donaghy’s contribution, the briefest in the book, considers the influence of Auden. Feaver slightly overstates the case that ‘Bishop reclaims not just the female psychic space from which she was ejected at birth, but the psychic female space lost to her in early childhood through her mother’s severe mental illness and subsequent incarceration in an asylum’ (and death). Rees-Jones’s highly idiosyncratic piece starts with admissions that she had come to Bishop’s poems ‘reluctantly’ and hadn’t read all of them, and she doesn’t really add much from then on. Despite, and maybe because of, these and other flaws, it’s an engaging assortment and well worth tracking down.
I have at last read Kathy Pimlott’s third pamphlet, After the Rites and Sandwiches (2024), available to buy here, from The Emma Press. Longstanding readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of Pimlott’s poetry, but I knew that the subject-matter of this pamphlet – the accidental death of her husband and the aftermath – wouldn’t be an easy read. ‘No Shock Advised’, the second poem – after the lovely ‘Prologue: First Date’, the dreamy surrealism of which makes the shocks of ‘No Shock advised’ even more shocking – reimagines the tragic hopelessness of the scene: ‘It’s cruel work /to kneel down / and hunch over / a so-familiar body at the foot of the stairs [. . .]’; that ‘there’s nothing / to be done // [. . .] but how still the sweet mad hopeful brain insists / it will be ok ok ok’. Over the course of its 12 tercets, the next, outstanding and, in its precise unfolding, very Pimlottian, poem, ‘How to be a Widow’, floats through the grief-addled labyrinth: what was happening immediately before and after the accident; what ‘experts’ advise the newly-bereaved to do to keep busy; how other people might shy away from death and, moreover, from the partner who is bereaved; even into a synaesthetic recounting:
Who wants to hear about the colours? Normal, then purple
then grey in a moment like the sea changing as light
shifts with the clouds. No-one. Colonies are collapsing.
The sonic and visual similarities here, between ‘colours’, ‘clouds’, colonies’ and ‘collapsing’, augment the strangeness.
The rest of the pamphlet takes in, inter alia, the difficulties innate in navigating post-death bureaucracy, the first Christmas after the event (‘no-one contesting the way to ignite brandy’) and the anxiety that bereavement causes; and also reflects on the relationship Pimlott and her husband shared, not always sweetness and light, and how and where to scatter his ashes. Fine poetry about the complexities of bereavement is rare – Hardy, Dunn and Reid, all men curiously, spring to mind – but the skilful poems in Pimlott’s After the Rites and Sandwiches are exemplary in their objectivising of this most subjective of subjects.
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January reading (1)
I’ve started my reading in this new year where I left it in the old, with the American poet Dorianne Laux. I’d first encountered Laux’s poetry back in September, when ‘The Shipfitter’s Wife’ was one of many poems I enjoyed in the Seren anthology Women’s Work, edited by Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, and soon after bought a secondhand copy of her 2000 collection, Smoke, published by BOA Editions., which coincidentally includes that poem (It’s available to buy on their website, here.) Laux’s poems are plain-speaking, but far from plain. Here’s the opening sentence of ‘Pearl’, a 38-line, block poem about Janis Joplin:
She was nothing much, this plain-faced girl from Texas,
this moonfaced child who opened her mouth
to the gravel pit churning in her belly, acne-faced
daughter of Leadbelly, Bessie, Optis, and the booze-
filled moon, child of the honky-tonk bar-talk crowd
who cackled like a bird of prey, velvet cape blown
open in the Monterey wind, ringed fingers fisted
at her throat, howling the slagheap up and out
into the sawdusted air.
I especially like that ‘gravel pit churning in her belly’, and the repetitions of ‘faced’, ‘moon’ and ‘belly’. Laux would’ve been 15 when Joplin fronted Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Monterey Festival, and she must’ve been inspired by Joplin’s example of a young woman putting herself and her soul right out there. The poem is both a paean and an elegy for ‘this little white girl / who showed us what it was like to die / for love’; but beyond that, it is, like many of the poems in the book, an elegy for the wilder times of the late ’60s and the ’70s.
I also loved Invisible Dog (Carcanet, 2024), available to buy here, a generous selection from the oeuvre of the Mexican poet Fabio Morábito, translated brilliantly from Spanish into English by the Welsh poet Richard Gwyn. In an interesting ‘translator’s note’ afterword, Gwyn notes that Morábito’s first language is actually Italian and that he didn’t live in Mexico until he was 15. Gwyn evidently worked very closely with him on the translations. One thing I like is that Gwyn more often than not plumps for the direct translations of words, rather than sometimes not-especially-close synonyms, the approach which blighted the last translated poetry published by Carcanet that I read, It Must be a Misunderstanding, Forrest Gander’s translation of another major ’50s-born Mexican poet, Coral Bracho. Morábito’s poems are always set out in narrow-ish blocks, and the tone is invariably one of someone just matter-of-factly and often wryly pointing out how things are. In ‘Unidentified’, for example, he shows us the poignancy of anonymity:
In the last photo
we find him once again,
this time in the middle of the group portrait,
embracing the others,
and they are all smiling and embracing him in turn,
all with a first and last name except for him,
who was not identified.
Another very enjoyable read was the SmithǀDoorstop anthology, 5, a bargain-buy available here, showcasing five new, or, rather, new-ish, poets who are all members of the Writing Squad, whose website is here: Helen Bowell, Prerana Kumar, Eva Lewis, Laura Potts and Ruth Yates. Each contributes six poems except Lewis with three. Kumar’s explorations of her Indian heritage and use of language stand out:
Let us believe her bones remain bird-hollow
in this wind that smells of rosemilk,
let her hear the grinding of cardamom,
a sparrowed lullaby humming the weeds
(‘I rewind the Second My Mother’s Girlhood Breaks’)
Potts’s poems are also linguistically rich – ‘Yesterday’s Child’ begins, ‘The sun slid like a knife through the April night / and bled like an egg, like a budburst head’ – but also have an appealing, melancholy tone to them. Yates’s poems are quirky and funny (haha), like those of her father Cliff and brother Luke, with an engaging unexpectedness: one poem begins with an ‘Oh!’; and my favourite poem in the anthology, the utterly marvellous ‘Otter’ opens thus:
They used to swim in Nye Bevan pool,
just before chips. Nicknamed Otter
for their ability to stay at the bottom of the pool
and crawl along it, way before their Taekwondo
years: this was self-control, perseverance,
indomitable spirit. [. . .]
I admire any poet who can chuck in big abstract nouns like that and make them count.
So far this month, I’ve also read two prose books and started a book of letters. The first was a book I bought and read 30 years ago: Kellow Chesney’s The Victorian Underworld, first published in 1970 and now, it seems, out of print, which is a shame because it’s a genuine classic. Chesney scoured through the archives, newspaper accounts, correspondence and many other sources to give a full flavour of the sub-strata of British society in the middle decades of the 19th Century. In passing, Chesney considers the worlds of itinerant workers, e.g. ‘navvies’ and circus and other show folk, plus beggars, and criminals and their networks of all kinds, and how these worlds symbiotically interacted. The details are at times unbearable, especially the descriptions of the appalling living and working conditions in the ‘rookeries’ of London and other cities. Chesney employs the slang vocabulary of the times, summarising them in a glossary, which includes such gems as ‘beak-hunting’ (poultry-stealing), ‘choker’ (clergyman), ‘crabshells’ (shoes), ‘crusher’ (policeman), ‘flying the blue pigeon’ (stealing roof lead) and some which are too prurient to repeat.
Having loved its predecessors, I was naturally predisposed to liking Barbara Pym’s third novel, Jane and Prudence (1953), in a Virago edition with a lively and perceptive introduction by Jilly Cooper, who claims it is Pym’s finest novel. Fine and witty though it was, for me it didn’t quite reach the heights of Excellent Women. One of the joys of Pym’s writing lies in how she could turn a crisp and delightful simile:
Miss Trapnell went to the filing-cabinet and put some pieces of paper into a file, and Miss Clothier drew a small card index towards her and began moving the cards here and there with her fingers, as if she was coaxing music from some delicate instrument.
The letters are in Words in Air, the collected correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell – even in its paperback form, it’s a slab of a book, due in part to over-scholarly and therefore over-fussy editorial annotations. A treat nevertheless and I’m only about a tenth of the way through so far.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 