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.
Tag: poet
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On the last while
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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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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 