A. L. Kennedy

A.L.Kennedy, What Becomes (Jonathan Cape)

A.L.Kennedy seems to continue to improve. If there are two distinct types of artist- those who develop and improve, and those who begin with a big impact and then try to repeat it with an ever diminishing set of returns= then the genuine artist is the first kind.

This collection of short stories aren't really stories, there isn't much in the way of plot. They are tableaux, scenes, meditations even. They are generally unhappy but one can't be sure that all of the characters could be quite perceptive enough to capture their own unhappiness with such a sympathetic and yet exact awareness as Kennedy's. The tone of much of the writing owes something to her other career as a stand-up comedian in that 'observational' genre,

his wife is a dead-eyed, organic hummus-producing marionette with a whispery, creepy laugh - but he'll have made her that way. And she'll have made him a sticky-handed fraud reliant on alcohol, golf and non-threatening porn.

Her overall view of humanity is sometimes not overwhelmingly generous. Beneath the grim ordinariness of the lives she describes is a terrifying isolation. But, in Marriages for example, it is possible for her characters to live with the ordinariness, the dissatisfaction and the isolation and somehow lyrically rise through it.

Relationships are not easy, they are partnerships between people who are 'meant to love' each other and whose formal relationship represents a duty. But, as in Another, she is aware that the ideal relationship exists at another level and is just occasionally possible. Downbeat though much of this collection is, it is never less than absorbing and entertaining because Kennedy has developed a lucid style and profound understanding of character. She is maturing into a fine writer, in places reminiscent of William Trevor whose characters live lives of quiet desperation. The title here brings to mind the old Motown classic What Becomes of the Brokenhearted but Kennedy's characters seem to be born broken hearted and their dreams of redemption are the lyricism that Kennedy's plain style prose creates.

You would expect this excellent book to collect a share of this year's prizes. Whether I could award it one ahead of the Ishiguro collection is hard to say but both will be worthy of as many gongs as they accumulate.

Ersatz

This form of poem is now officially known as a 'ripple' poem. Composition of them seems to me now to be a form of entertainment like a crossword. It seems unlikely that many of them will ever mean very much.
And so, for my next trick, I'm going to do one that includes the letter z.

Ersatz

Walking into the glamorous Ritz
where an excess of art oozes
to satisfy the taste of tzars,
I order gin with tonic or zest

of lime. The glass is a greater size
than I've seen before. I watch Liz stir
it for me, drink, doze, rest
and imagine I'm Mahomet or Zeus.

Everyday

Everyday

The sea has found its way
in here again, comes and slaps
the land repeatedly
and then goes out to contemplate
whatever it was that it came to say
as if remorse was possible
as if there were some likelihood
that it could behave differently
while birds arriving from the East
do so with such confidence
in formations they knew
before they were born, something
they didn't learn to do
like the knowledge one day peace will come
and when it comes
it will be like the peace that comes
as the waves successively
forever come to wash against the shore.

Farlington Marshes 22/08/09

Perfect Day

http://howardstaunton.com/hsmt2009/Event_Photos/Pages/Round_7.html

And so, what would make your perfect day?

I wasn't necessarily expecting today to be perfect but I don't know if I'm going to improve on it for a while. The ingredients are a trip to London with art, poets, chess and wine. One has to use one's time off as best one can, so I'd booked myself cheap train rides to London and back with the Staunton Memorial Chess tournament as the main attraction. Plump up your cushion and let me tell you about it.

I finished The Times crossword just after Petersfield. I do like to mention the station I was closest to when finishing The Times crossword. From Waterloo I slipped through Villers Street with impressive local knowledge to go and see Maggi Hambling's George Melly paintings in the National Portrait Gallery. They aren't all there, it's not the whole George always exhibition as reviewed here a while ago but it's great, if not essential, to see paintings in real life rather than in a book. Passionate, magical, spilling over with love, mystery and ebullience, and booze and wild camp. But that was just me. The paintings were okay, too.
From there I progressed up Charing Cross Road to the church of St. Giles-in-the-fields where Andrew Marvell is buried. It was the least I could do to go and pay some homage as he was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation all those years ago. The tribute there is fulsome, in the style of its day, and makes an interesting compare and contrast with some accounts of Marvell that guess that he might not have been the most attractive personality of his time. But he was a poet so we don't care whether he was nice or not and St. Giles has a special two-for-the-price-of-one offer on poets as they also have George Chapman, whose Homer Keats famously first looked into. So that was all fine and I was soon back on my way to The Strand, to Simpsons in the Strand, posh place, to see some international class chess. And what a blinding experience that was. Certainly a candidate for the best sporting event I've ever been to, not having been to any better chess matches before than ones that I've been in at some lowly level.
There are two separate (discrete) tournaments going on at the same time. UK v Netherlands and a 10 player individual all play all. There were two dozen seats and a standing area for spectators to come and go and ten tables for the matches with several display boards showing the positions from some of them. Having got there ahead of schedule, I thought I might as well help myself to a prime seat with an excellent view of Jan Timman v Victor Korchnoi. Korchnoi is the Soviet dissident defector who challenged Karpov for the World Championship in the 1970's and is now a spritely 78 years old. What a bloke. There was never anything quite as sexy as a Soviet dissident for those of us who were teenagers in the 1970's. A bit like David Bowie except Russian and good at chess and he didn't sing Rebel Rebel. I was no more than yards from him.
Many of the chess players in this rarefied atmosphere of thought and abstraction are young, austere and aloof men, apart from Timman who looks like a regular guy who would gladly buy you a pint, and might himself once have been on the verge of World Championship challenging, and Luke McShane who still looks young enough to be on a sabbatical from the Tinga and Tucker Club, except he is too young to have heard of that. You look at him, Michael Adams, David Howell, Sokolov, Chernaiev and especially Jan Werle and admire their chess rankings and then wonder what else they know about.
A couple of players wandered in 15 or 20 minutes after the 2.30 start. It's their own time they are wasting once the clock has started. I'm watching Timman and Korchnoi but keeping an eye on the display of Nigel Short's game against Jan Smeets. Just after 3 o'clock, Trent and Wiersma get up and leave having agreed a draw. I find out later, asking an official in a toilet break, that the game had lasted 9 moves before they agreed to give each other the afternoon off. Then I make a note to myself to make sure I don't forget to say on the blog that it wasn't the only game that was Short and Smeets just in case I can make a joke out of it.
Timman-Korchnoi is a French Defence but soon becomes a position that is unfamilar to me however many databases might know of it. I notice that Howell-Sokolov is a weird position that almost certainly hasn't been seen before. It gradually dawns on me that Korchnoi is taking longer over his moves than Timman but their clock is facing away from us. When he takes 10 minutes over his castling move I reflect that I would have done it immediately but, then again, I'm not a 78 year old Soviet dissident and I'm not all that good at chess either. I wonder if I could write a poem about the event. For me, it's the highlight of a lifetime to be sitting so close to this action but for them it's another day. The players get up and walk about quite a lot, get another glass of water or some tea or coffee, talk to each other in whispers and glance at the positions on other boards. Timman wanders around the room amiably but as soon as he hears Korchnoi touch the clock, he's back at the table.
Nigel Short finishes at 4.15. Drawn. He walks away and then comes back later. Next time he leaves I follow him out, audacious groupie that I am.
'Nigel, could I trouble you for an autograph?'
'Of course.'
'This is a superb little tournament.'
'Well it's not very good today I'm afraid,' he says and waves his hand, 'Sorry.' Genuinely not a happy man, having only drawn after some earlier wins, but kind enough to know it's not my fault. What a great bloke.
So, just after 5 o'clock Timman and Korchnoi make some moves, material is exchanged in the centre and suddenly I fancy Timman's Queen, 2 Rooks and 6 pawns against Korchnoi's Queen, Rook, 2 Bishops and 4 pawns. I nudge the elderly man next to me and pass him a note saying 'Do you think Timman can win this' and he says no. It's nearly time to go and meet Fatty Rimmer in the wine bar but I hang on because suddenly it's absolutely crucial on the chess board. The prospect of a few glasses of crisp white wine is soon more gripping than one or two more moves in the chess so I make a move myself but the old boy next to me follows me out to ask my opinion. As if I'd know. He actually wants to know what I think. I think Timman is better. He's not so sure, he likes the two bishops of Korchnoi. We enthuse about having seen Korchnoi and Timman at close quarters and then I'm back in The Strand.
I mean I saw Reference Point win The Derby, I went to two Cheltenham Gold Cups and saw Nashwan beat Warning in The Eclipse. On 1/1/84 I saw Fulham come back from 4-0 down at half time to draw 4-4 at Fratton Park. I lost 2-3 to Gillian Rimmer in the best pool match ever played in Portsmouth about 5 years ago. I've seen Botham, Flintoff, Sobers, Malcolm Marshall and Derek Randall. Indurain, Lemond and Boardman. I'm not the world's biggest sport's fan by any means but that chess match could have been the best sport event I've ever been to.
The wine bar was lovely. The textures and citrus flavours of several white wines frankly beyond my caring. It's funny how your London friends are suddenly all pesto and skinny latte and yet still finer by far than coming back to Portsmouth and having to negotiate a war zone walking from Fratton Station back to my house. I knew it would be like that and that is, in fact, why one has to get out of it and go somewhere else sometimes.
There still is a better world out there and a perfect day will once in a while insist on happening to you if you give it a chance.

---

And then, having written the above, you find that the Staunton Memorial website has updated with today's results and Korchnoi won. So what did I know.
I'm glad they don't have bookies at chess matches.

Thirty Years On - Mirror Mirror by Donald Green

It is thirty years since the publication of my uncle's novel, Mirror Mirror by Donald Green. I read it again to mark the occasion and I'm pleased to say that not only has it stood the test of time but it's better than I remember it.
I have a spare ex-library copy that I salvaged from Portsmouth Library many years ago for 20p. Just so that I might not be the last person ever to read this novel, if anybody wants to give it a good home, I can post it to them. E-mail me at the address on the profile.

Donald Green, Mirror Mirror (Hamish Hamilton, 1979)

There are precious few clues to the setting of this novel, it's in a village called Frogwell but you'd need to notice that the characters say 'bleddy' rather than 'bloody' and a few other minor dialect phrases to place it somewhere near Nottingham. As such, it puts Donald Green in a geographical group with Lawrence, Alan Sillitoe and Stanley Middleton. Of these, as a novelist, it is Sillitoe that he most resembles but he's perhaps closer to Stan Barstow who was officially a bit more Yorkshire.
The prose is in places a bit over-written as if trying too hard or trusting the thesaurus above a more ordinary usage but it provides some striking lines as often as it jars. There are recurrent examples of great observation and description, like 'the swishing, wet liquorice roads'. But it is the psychology that impresses most in the book, most obviously in the state of mind of Brian, who has 'learning difficulties', but also in the finely observed relationships between individuals and social classes.
Brian is innocent and inevitably misunderstood but as his family, the Morgan's, and the Wilson's, plus Anthea the hairdresser, are revealed to us we see a whole network of dysfunctional hopes and pretensions. If the main theme of the book is Brian's difficult sexual awareness, then the way that these other stories are linked into it is well-organized and convincing.
Rita works for the worldly, sophisticated Anthea and eventually gets what she thought she wanted which was Brian's brother, David, but it proves that he wasn't quite what she wanted after all. There is a domestic violence issue and another relationship joining the families across a perceived class division and animosity akin to the Montagues and Capulets.
The novel reaches a gripping climax when the baby that Rita has by David is taken by Brian. The ending manages a complex mix of inevitable but non-tragic.
Some incidents are described in successive passages from the point of view of different characters and the plot proves to be a well-structured framework for the many clearly realized relationships. Don's style is informed and communicates well but things are shown, not told, and the reader needs to be attentive in places because the reader isn't patronized or spoon-fed.
It's a shame that no second novel ever appeared. There were considerable attempts before this one was accepted and I have a fiction magazine in which Don was placed in the short story competition. There was a second novel in manuscript somewhere, once, but it is notoriously difficult to get that second book accepted.

Why aren't they more famous

There are a number of poets whose reputations run ahead of their achievements, it sometimes might seem. It wouldn't be polite to name them here but it would be fun to give a few clues about who I think they are and then see who anybody else thinks I mean, but that would be a dangerous game to play.
However, there are a number of names who, it has long seemed to me, are inexplicably much less famous than they deserve to be. It is possible, of course, that they don't pursue celebrity and wider acknowledgement but, if that's the case, there's little point in publishing at all.
Some of the following names might be familiar to the afficiandos of contemporary poetry but you would need to have read a lot of poetry magazines over the last twenty years to know them all.
I've never understood why Martin Mooney isn't listed among the host of tremendous poets that came out of Northern Ireland in the last few decades. I first came across his limited edition booklet Bonfire Makers in 1995, and the poem on Rasputin and Painting the Angel. These two poems alone would be enough to make him a favourite but the rest of his work is very fine, too, from the early booklets Brecht & An Exquisite Corpse and Escaping with Cuts and Bruises through Grub, Rasputin and his Children to Blue Lamp Disco. I hope there's another book due soon.
Martin Crucefix was in his third year at Lancaster when I was in my first. I've followed what I've been able to find of his career since, much of it in Poetry London. His book Beneath Tremendous Rain is well worth a look and the poem Sugar in Banana Sandwiches is a stand out. I realize there's been much more work since then.
Sue Hubbard should be a division higher in the poetry world's rankings, her poem on Rembrandt's model being one of the better poems about painting that one is likely to find.
Michael Daugherty was a stalwart of the littlepress magazines when I read them all in the late 70's, a beautifully lyrical and romantic poet of the time who, one might have thought, could have broken into a more mainstream and more lucrative area than being listed here. I looked him up in the Poetry Library last year and the poems have stood the test of time in their post-hippy, user-friendly gloriousness.
And Paul Berry, another star for me of those magazines run on idealistic shoestrings, deserved better. I have his booklets here, Homages and Holiday Snaps and A Bequest of Fire, and wonder if he's still at it and, if so, where. I'm not saying he, or any of the above, are exactly Seamus Heaney but if I ruled the world then not only would every day be the first day of Spring but also they would inhabit more prominent positions in the poetry firmament.
Beyond the creative writing courses and the Universities, away from the slams and the local reputations and the cliques promoting each other, there has been something great going on. It's just that you do need to look quite hard, and discriminatingly, to find it.
Now, there's an opinion for you.

Creative Block

It is usually the 'writer's block' that they complain about, running out of impetus, not being able to perform. But there is a lesser known affliction, I think, where one can get stuck producing the same old thing and nothing else.
I almost wish I'd never come across the 'fuzzy rhyme' idea because one immediately wants to do it but the results suffer from the law of diminishing returns and then one finds one can't do anything else. O, how I'd love to produce some blank verse that meant something, anything.
There is a sestina on the way, one of those things that writes itself once the pieces are put in place, so please do tune in for that later. But, that poem notwithstanding, I am beginning to realize the importance of meaning beyond all this considered formality.

Snake

Secretly it slithers into nooks,
the glitter of its imprinted skin
a leitmotif of exotic inks
tangled up like an old, slack noose.

Is it something creation has forsaken
that lives without the need for please or thanks
and whatever it is that it thinks
is something that you know no-one can ask.

Stand-out Poems

Sometimes one is struck by an excellent poem and buy a whole book by that poet in the hope that it will be full of such poems but it proves not to be.
I wonder if this is because the moment has passed, or because expectations have been raised too high or that in fact there are some poets who did write one brilliant poem and then a lot of others.
For example, Richard Wilbur, Transit http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Richard-Wilbur/17602
Marianne Moore, The Steeple Jack http://www.hearts-ease.org/library/contemporary/moore/16.html
Paul Durcan, That Propeller I left in Bilbao,
Jane Holland, They are a Tableau at the Kissing Gate http://www.weddingreads.com/They_Are_A_Tableau_At_The_Kissing-gate-Jane_Holland/

Or it might just have been an excuse to post a few links.

Signed Poetry Books- John Masefield

There are five laureates in my little collection so far and I missed out on a Cecil Day-Lewis a couple of weeks ago. This is the earliest, until I see a Tennyson.

Mrs. Masefield helped John with this book The Dream, a few years before his appointment.

Signed Poetry Books - Craig Raine

Craig Raine, in the 1980's very much the vogue thing with his ingenuity and 'new ways of looking', seems a little bit of a 'forgotten man', a spare Modernist in search of a new purpose. But that might be very unfair of me.

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home and Rich, with the wonderful poem Wulf and Eadwacer, were tremendous books.

Signed Poetry Books - Glyn Maxwell

Glyn Maxwell, one of my favourites among contemporary poets, might have been a little bemused to meet me at Oxford in 2006. It was late in the evening and he might have preferred to be left to play the quiz machine in St. Anne's bar but I was determined to meet him.

He assured me we could chat the next day but I didn't have anything particular to say to him. He read from his plays rather than his poems at that event. One of the many poets who have decided to extend their writing into potentially more lucrative areas than poetry.

Sean O'Brien - Afterlife

Sean O'Brien, Afterlife (Picador)

Having won prizes for all his poetry books and then checked off translation, poetry criticism, an anthology, plays, radio work, short stories and an opera libretto, it was foresseable that Sean O'Brien would add the novel to his empire of genres.

That it is set in the world of poetry comes as no surprise, nor that it is scathingly funny in places or that the characters feel considerable animosity towards each other. The thing one can't foresee is that it is not set in the North East but in the Marches.

But Divott isn't Ledbury, a Jerome is not an Eric Gregory Award, Reeves and Reeves is not Faber and Jane Jarmain isn't Sylvia Plath.

The small, intensely self-regarding world of poetry is claustrophobic throughout a long, hot English summer related in flashback. Tensions and jealousies within a small group of emerging poets find no release and Alex, although not the most talented, is the the most arrogant, manipulative and vindictive. A middle section in which some German Marxists (it is 1976, after all) turn up ex machina to raise the volatilty levels reads less successfully. A party organized by visiting American academics becomes cathartic and ugly with acid-spiked drinks and Hell's Angel violence. But the ending provides one more surprise than might have been anticipated (although, by definition, surprises can't be anticipated) and some justice prevails.

The laugh out loud moments dry up somewhat after the threateningly idyllic first part, but not before the American arrivals have been satirized,

In the course of the evening her interest in poetry developed exponentially. She had heard Lowell read, and Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop. I was surprised she hadn't been waiting on the ice with a net when Berryman went off the bridge in Minneapolis.

And bludgeoned by O'Brien's lumphammer humour,

Here was someone it was quite simple to dislike: all she had to do was turn up.

But after the party, there is a more relaxed, elegiac tone. Jane's mental state after the acid has gone beyond poetry into a place of its own, compared to an impression of Syd Barrett,

the million-mile stare from nowhere into nowhere with no hope of coming back and no here to come back to anyway.

And O'Brien's world-weariness is a part of the feeling of downgraded value in which,

one day the students say that Ulysses is too long; Dubliners replaces it; a little while later they wonder if they have to read all these stories. And so on.

Although the ending seems like a qualified win for good over evil, the world has already been revealed as beyond redemption. The contingent, over-rated futlity of poetry, the vainglorious pursuit of kudos is surgically demonstrated in the world of readings, magazines, conferences and prizes, an industry locked into its own insubstantial vanity and, in fact, O'Brien does wheel out one of his favourite quotes, Vanity, vanity, all of it vanity, to prove the point.

The book gripped me but, as a brand-loyal O'Brien devotee, it was ever likely to. I have no idea how this novel would read to someone who has never seen his work before. He has written about what he knows but you get the idea that he might have preferred not to know it.