Summer – especially a long one like this – is, of course, ideal for getting lost in books. Late to the party of the marvellously entertaining Ill-advised by Bill Nighy podcast, available here, I’ve started reading some of his book recommendations. I began with All Fours by Miranda July (Canongate Books, 2024), a book which you’ve probably already read yourself and which I read faster than any other novel I can remember: it’s a rollicking, multi-layered read that defies the reader’s expectations repeatedly and brilliantly. It felt to me like a feminist antidote to On The Road, were one to be needed; a road-trip that goes, well, to places that few such well-written novels, if any, have been before. No wonder it caused such a (mainly positive) furore when it came out, as a BBC article, here, relates (with spoiler alerts). I was a fan of July’s films, but now I will have to read more of her books.
Next up was a novel that could scarcely have been more different: Thomas Bernhard’s Concrete (originally published in 1982; my copy published by Faber, 2019), as translated by David McLintock. It was high time I read a Bernhard novel, given his massive influence on other novelists and writers per se, including Sebald. Concrete is a dauntingly unparagraphed monologue in the voice of an Austrian musicologist who has for years been struggling to write a monograph on Mendelssohn, in face of inertia and the taunts of his gadabout sister. To me, it had shades of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Kafka and Thomas Mann, and I could see how its narrative voice might’ve influenced that of Sebald. If all that sounds dull, I can assure you that it’s anything but, and it comes with a glowing endorsement by Edna O’Brien.
I wrote last month about my love of Ciaran Carson’s prose books and I’ve recently read his first one, Last Night’s Fun (1996), subtitled ‘About music, food and time’. Ostensibly, it’s a treatise on Irish traditional music, of which the multitalented Carson – a flautist and tin whistler – was an exponent, but, as with all Carson’s books, such was his erudition that he digressed in many directions before bringing things back to the main motifs, like a traditional tune does. As I’ve said previously, that erudition of his had fuller and better rein in his prose than in his (still brilliant) poems, even when he used a Whitmanesque/C.K. Williams-ian long line. The book starts in a place I know, or rather once knew, very well indeed: Portrush, and a music session in the Harbour Bar. As a brief sample of how Carson got at the heart of what music does and is, and more besides, this short paragraph will suffice:
Musicians learn to get their tongues round things. They are chameleons, and have independent eyes by which they recognise each other while they blink at someone else. They understand that time itself is a chameleon, so they mark it and keep it, and they syncopate it. Creatures of a changing blue lagoon, they drift down through its depths like shoals of semiquavers, making new tunes as they swim in temporal agreement.
I saw the other day that an unpublished novel of his is due to be published soon, which is wonderful news and not the sort of pleasant surprise you usually get during the silly season.
Carson – along with a host of other great Irish poets like Boland, Heaney, McGuckian, Mahon, Muldoon, Dennis O’Driscoll, etc. – was one of the contributors to Chosen Lights, (Gallery Books, 2008, rev. 2013), subtitled ‘Poets on poems by John Montague’, in which each poet chooses and writes about a poem by Montague.
It’s the best poetry book I’ve read this year, in how it not only presents some fantastic poems by a major poet who is criminally little-known outside Ireland and perhaps France, where he lived for years, but also, in most (though not all) cases, the splendid thoughts and insights on the poems. They inevitably include his best-known poems, such as the gloriously cinematic ‘All Legendary Obstacles’, available here. Montague wasn’t included in Michael Schmidt’s Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English (1999), though his equally celebrated ‘Like Dolmens round my Childhood, the Old People’ made it into the other brick that is the Norton Anthology of Poetry (rev. 2005). In Chosen Lights, Alan Gillis writes especially well about that poem. Carson, unsurprisingly, chose ‘The Country Fiddler’, and wrote of the influence that Montague’s The Rough Field (1972) had upon him:
In its ambitious patterning, its bricolage of quotations set as marginalia to the poems, its obsessive circling around themes of exile and identity, its concern with language and music, it seemed like a more urgent retelling of The Waste Land: modernist in scope and method, but shot through with personal anxiety and grief for the loss of a cultural hinterland.
Montague’s death nearly 10 years ago was met with an outpouring of deeply-felt tributes from Irish poets, led by the then President of Ireland, Michael Higgins. Is there a country on Earth which values its poets more than Ireland? By comparison, it’s a sorry state of affairs here in Britain – and not just in how poetry is regarded at that.
Our Poetry Book Club book of the month is Rhizodont by Katrina Porteous (Bloodaxe, 2024), which won last year’s Laurel Prize for the best collection of eco-poetry. It is, though, eco-poetry without the capital ‘e’ that seems so often to typify what passes for poetry shouting alerts at us – as if poetry readers are idiots who need such alerting – to the catastrophic impacts of climate change and habitat and species loss. I’ve seen Porteous read a couple of times over the years, at New Networks for Nature conferences, and while she was a dynamically charged reader of her work, it wasn’t quite the right arena for such performances. Despite that dynamism, her poems still read magically on the page and the reader’s ear: infused with a stronger sense of place, of her native Northumberland, than any collection I’ve read for a good long while, they sparkle with dialect, music, rhythm and rhyme. It’s an over-stuffed book that could easily have been halved, yet its size doesn’t detract from its riches.
Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff 