National Poetry Competition

http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/npc/

With the judges narrowing it all down to a shortlist of prize-winners and commendeds for you, you can decide for yourself here.

Jane Yeh wins it for me but I've liked her before. And so it's back to her Marabou for me soon.

A few well-known names and some quite good poems. So, say what you like about poetry competitions (and I sometimes do), it could have been worse.

Ian McEwan - Solar

Ian McEwan, Solar (Jonathan Cape)

Coming to this after reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it was immediately enjoyable to be reading fine writing by one of the foremost English fiction writers of our times. No disrespect to the Larsson book but it has other ways of entertaining and is a translation anyway. I appreciated the glimpse offered of Larsson's original when the protagonist ate an 'open sandwich' and assumed I'd seen the original word, 'smorgasbord', but it is not a literary book as such.
But Solar becomes a thriller, too, in its later stages as several threads come together in a terrible unravelling.
Michael Beard is a thoroughly dissolute wreck, a serial philanderer in a state of bad physical repair, living on his reputation as Nobel Physics laureate with his own best work long behind him. And so he steals the work of a junior having inadvertently witnessed his death and sent his wife's lover to jail for the 'murder' through a set of conveniently convincing circumstances.
One needs to dissociate the unattractive main character from the quality of the prose because one can find the words softening the unreconstructed brutishness of the man. And, along with the extraordinary circumstances of the death, there are other elements that stretch credibility a little more. Like, would one, however desperate, remove so many layers of clothing to relieve oneself in the many degrees below zero of the outdoors in the Arctic, and is the passage intended as comic or to illustrate the character of the man. And would a Nobel laureate really be involved in a relationship with a middle-aged waitress, Darlene (possibly taken straight from the lady Homer nearly has an affair with in The Simpsons), who lives in a trailer in New Mexico. Perhaps Beard's sexual appetite and habit knows no such restrictions of social class.
But, the disparate sub-plots are brought together, and combined with some apparently convincing science on climate change and energy resources to ultimately provide a satisfying novel. At its best, McEwan's prose has an aspect of poetry to it, as when describing the subsequent marriage of his fifth ex-wife, Patrice,
Interesting, that Charles was short, plump and had even less hair than Beard and was two years older. As if marriages were a series of corrected drafts.
And it's not only in his phrasing or metaphor that McEwan does much more than show and describe. Time and again, he provides commentary on contemporary culture, like the fashions sold in Melissa's dance shop, or insights into the low motives of the human world, whether when Beard becomes a subject of media attention or the saving of the world as a profit-driven project and no more than that.
It wouldn't be for me to say that McEwan is the very best of his generation of English fiction writers because I haven't read enough of the opposition. This book isn't as complete and wonderful as Atonement or the novella On Chesil Beach but it is excellent despite my reservations. Its science is accessible, its psychology is well observed and its construction turns out to be well-made even if it did appear to be slightly episodic at halfway. The fact that it turns out to be nearly as much of a thriller as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is actually a bonus, and, as with the ending of Chesil Beach, I wasn't sure how it would end until it did.

The Nun's Litany - The Magnetic Fields

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9Tj57RSHrQ

There's a couple of pieces from the Barbican on You Tube.

The encore of Papa was a Rodeo is a bit obscured by the heads in front of the cameraperson but this isn't bad at all, The Nun's Litany with added riff from And Then I Kissed Her. Or Him.

The Magnetic Fields at the Barbican

The Magnetic Fields, The Barbican, London, March 22, 2010

(picture from their website, Seattle, 2008)

Stephin Merritt is the opposite of the received idea of rock singer as flamboyant main man. But in a way he is a prima donna of his own making, low profile and curmudgeonly, not even taking the lead part on many of his own songs but strumming his ukelele gently away side stage, leaving the introductions to Claudia Gonson and the singing to Claudia and Shirley Simms, whose voices are pure and lovely compared to his sometimes comic lugubrious bass.

I'm sure the Barbican is resplendent and inviting on a warm summer evening but on a damp March night it is unprepossessing and godforasken, set in a nightmare of high rise London architecture. But the auditorium is open and spacious and it looked as if the London audience were going to get the best deal of the three British dates on the tour with reports from Manchester Cathedral and Leamington Spa suggesting shortcomings not necessarily the fault of the performers.

The two hours, in two halves, treated us to most of the new album, Realism, which has grown to stand alongside some of their best work after a few more hearings, and a first half that included several of their 'greatest hits' was an enormous treat. Being 'songs about love songs', sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes darkly funny or knowingly kitsch, there's an elusive quality to the sensibility that is its main attraction. It has an insolence that is both sour and attractive at once, 'bittersweet' you might say if your thesaurus was not a very good one.

Almost perversely, last time they were in London at the Cadogan Hall, when it had rained in torrents all day long, they didn't play All the Umbrellas in London, but we were treated to a sparse arrangement of it here, none of the songs being extended to anything beyond their perfect compositional length. And Claudia apologized on one song for having missed out a verse, explaining away the omission inadequately with reasons why she had left it out. 'Not even when it's written down in front of you?', asked Merritt, a little tart (as it were).

Seated, self-deprocating and with a wonderful clarity of sound, The Magnetic Fields eschew or sidestep every rock concert cliche, mainly because they aren't a rock, indie or even pop group at all but something, while consciously 'art-house', not readily classified except by the wit and genius of the songwriting and the understatement of the musicianship and presentation. With their previous appearance in London already among my list of favourite ever events, this was if anything better than that and not only due to having such good seats.

Not having announced, as they previously have, that there would be no encore, it was to be hoped there would be this time as we had not yet heard Papa was a Rodeo or The Book of Love. So the encore remedied half of that by coming back to finish with the classic Rodeo, a colossal performance with Stephin commanding the stage in an off-hand wander around, a deliberately half-hearted swing of the microphone and a sublime rendering of one of the finest songs in pop music history. A masterful and rapturously received finale that confirms them as still on the top of their gorgeous and merciless game. As I immediately foresaw when the tickets went on sale some months ago, the highlight of 2010 came early.

Even greater excitement was to come when I wrecklessly thought I had plenty of time to get back to Victoria for the coach home and suggested one more drink. This meant a knife-edge race against time on the tube from Moorgate via St. Pancras to Victoria, the old train rattling through the tunnels in response to my desperate urgings, a rush to the coach station to arrive at 11.32 for my 11.30 bus ride, the kindly driver letting me on to a coach with only four other passengers, my good luck apparently due to the Portsmouth coach going from berth number one, right at the end, and temporarily blocked in by coaches going elsewhere.

So, eternally grateful to the nice man from National Express, it was a fine grandstand finish to a brilliant evening but I may be going back to my old plan of being conspicuously early for dates and meetings rather than risk that again, which was nearly the most expensive 'one last drink' I've ever had.

Heron

Heron

When nature begins to imitate art,
diminishing itself to artifice
so that you cannot tell the two apart
-which is the real and which the crafted piece-
it’s like the heron made of cheap concrete,
poised and alert by a small garden pond,
its stillness unconvincing, incomplete
because you know the bird is just pretend.

Or is it like the heron made of flesh
and feathers that the eye cannot see breathe,
meditating on untold mysteries
and the possibility of fish,
more likely than the other to deceive,
more like a statue than a statue is.

Fulham 4 Juventus 1

Contested Will

James Shapiro, Contested Will (Faber)

It's slightly unfortunate that this book, which might have gone some way to putting the Shakespeare authorship claims of non-Stratfordian candidates to bed, should appear just when a popular director is making a film on the subject of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, being the author of the works attributed to Shakespeare. You might think that the worthy academic work in Shapiro's book is likely to attract considerably less public attention than Anonymous by Roland Emmerich but it was possibly ever thus and it was a big ask for one book to put an end to all the speculation once and for all.

Shapiro's project is to examine the reasons why the authorship question has occupied so many people for such a long time. The issue didn't appear to any noticeable degree until the mid C19th, when Delia Bacon became convinced that, no-relation, Francis Bacon was the author of the work attributed to Shakespeare.
Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud and Henry James were among celebrated names that found the theories persuasive but each sceptic has their own motivations for their scepticism and they have a choice of several candidates with which to replace the Stratford man.

The main starting point for doubt comes when readers can't see the money-lending, commodity- investing property owner that contemporary records show Shakespeare to have been also having written the finest works in the literary canon. There isn't sufficient evidence of a provincial, non-University man writing works of such genius and so they look for a likely-looking genius to award them to.

The case for Francis Bacon was already in decline by the 1920's, the extraordinary lengths that his supporters went to in uncovering ciphers in the plays left by Bacon for future generations to discover being admirable in their inventiveness but also ostensibly the work of obsessives who could prove anything to themselves if they tried hard enough.

The more enduring candidate, Oxford, still has supporters and his cachet has in fact risen again in recent decades, not necessarily due to the unforensic evidence provided by Percy Allen who engaged a medium to contact Bacon, Oxford and Shakespeare who happily told them the whole story, said it had been nice to see them when they'd visited the Shakespeare grave in Stratford and Oxford even accommodated them by knocking out a few more sonnets.

The problem for Oxfordians has always been his death in 1604, several years before the last plays were produced, but they are always ready to explain away such inconvenient details (in the same way that Marlowe's supporters are not put off by his murder in 1593) and imagine Oxford stockpiling plays for posthomous release. However, Shapiro dispatches this explanation by showing that the language in the late plays- more difficult, less in rhyme and strict metre but similar to plays by other authors writing after 1610 -has nothing comparable pre-1604 to relate it to.

Shapiro readily goes into detail about collaboration, both early in Shakespeare's career and late, with John Fletcher and Thomas Middleton amongst others which turns one of the Oxfordian arguments in on itself. When they say that the plays must be the work of a nobleman and not a commoner, it is even less likely that a nobleman would work so closely with common theatre people, one of who, Wilkins, who wrote half of Pericles, was not only an innkeeper but probably a brothel-keeper, too.

A further interesting point is made to refute the suggestion that Shakespeare was a pseudonym and that variant spellings and a hyphen are evidence of this. Shakespeare's will is signed with two different spellings by the man himself and so spelling is not an exact science for him but Shakspere, as it commonly was spelt, was made Shakespeare or Shake-speare by typesetters when the usual spelling was liable to fall apart in the presses due to the size of the letters.

In the early chapters on the forgeries of Ireland and the undoing of him by Malone, Schoenbaum's Shakespeare's Lives provides greater detail but Shapiro's theme is off in a more specific direction and comes into its own in the later sections where, having finished describing the arguments of the anti-Stratfordians, he takes on the more difficult challenge of defending Shakespeare's claim to the work that has always carried his name and he does that more convincingly than it's been done before.

So, it would be useful if this finely-argued book could get as much attention as the forthcoming film but when it doesn't it can of course be produced to offer to new converts to the Oxfordian cause, persuaded by a less well-researched entertainment.

Identity Parade

Identity Parade, edited by Roddy Lumsden (Bloodaxe)

Roddy Lumsden's introduction to this anthology of 'the generation of poets who have emerged since the mid-1990's' is wordperfect, explaining how it has been longer than usual since the last such collection and how pluralism continues to be the right word to describe the current zeitgeist. Suddenly, it would appear that we are free of dominant schools and attitudes, the identification of a period with Georgian or 'pylon' or Movement poetry but now celebrate a democratic diversity of individual expression.

Pluralism is desirable and poets being understood in terms of group agendas is bad but the more one thinks about pluralism the less it really means. One can't really be plural on one's own and so it means that there are lots of poets doing different things, as surely there must always have been. It might be difficult to find anything that these 85 poets have in common, it is a generous selection but picked from over 1000 that were considered, but moving from poem to poem one is perhaps overawed by the sheer weight of work on offer and the wide selection of poets with only a few poems each might begin to look like an unwillingness to select more rigorously. Eventually, many of the poems could in fact have been written by roughly the same poet or at least by poets who all studied for the same creative writing MA. One becomes accustomed to the choice adjective, the erudite lexis (intaglio, ingleberried, periphrasis) and the well-read references worn like a casual off-the-shoulder number. Some of these writers are trying a bit too hard.

Although many might find plenty to admire for its professionalism, I don't find enough to like. I like Julia Copus, I like David Wheatley's A Fret and thus far I make James Sheard's The Lost Testimony of R. Catesby the best thing I've found in the book. This is as well as several poets whose books I've admired and bought, like Caitriona O'Reilly, Sophie Hannah and Kate Clanchy. Roddy doesn't select my favourite poems of any of these, or Matthew Welton or John Stammers for that matter, but it's less the poems selected than the poets I'd take issue with because I'd have had Kathryn Simmonds, Kathryn Gray, Martin Mooney, Stuart Paterson or Sue Hubbard ahead of almost any of those featured here. And, of course, Lumsden himself, who by modestly leaving himself out becomes probably the most accomplished poet not to feature in such a generational anthology even if Seamus Heaney was less than enamoured at being made central to the Motion-Morrison volume of the early 80's.

It is a fine and laudable thing to not nominate a towering talent or two unless, of course, there isn't one and there is still time for a few of these names to establish themselves as 'major' but one looks and keeps on looking for the clues as to which might establish a long-term reputation to put alongside a Larkin, Heaney, Harrison, O'Brien, Duffy or Armitage and hope that somebody will. However healthy and active the poetry industry is at the moment it will look like an impoverished age if it provides nothing more memorable than the writing exercises displayed here.

I'll keep my fingers crossed and keep on looking.

Cheltenham Preview

With apologies to those who come here for poetry reviews, I do like to have my once a year foray into horse race journalism.

If horse racing still had any hopes of remaining a sport in the mainstream of public interest then this year's Gold Cup would be all over the media with the decider between Kauto Star and Denman grabbing their imagination by the scruff of the neck.

The fact that it doesn't appear to be doing so is partly to do with the fact that horse racing has somehow become divorced from 'sport' in general and is less and less even a bookmaker's main line of business but also because Denman fell when under pressure from his new jockey, A.P. McCoy, at Newbury in his prep race. Thus, he doesn't quite look like as big a challenge to Kauto Star (pictured) as we thought and Kauto goes to Cheltenham looking as if a clear round will be enough to confirm him the best chaser since Arkle, a comparison that even I am not old enough to be able to make.

But at 8/11, Kauto is no more of a betting proposition than he has ever been. It would be great to see Denman, a truly great horse in his own right, and a very different one, at his best giving the beautifully athletic Kauto a proper race and he still might but it is a prospect to enjoy as sport rather than investment.

Reports of a training setback for Punchestowns last week made Nicky Henderson's two leading prospects for the RSA Chase change places at the top of the betting and suddenly made the 5/1 I took about Long Run look very astute indeed because now he's 5/2 at best. So, I'm hoping I feel just as clever next Thursday tea-time and Long Run is this year's nap selection as yet again we try to put together a treble.

We've been close before. This year, with so many of the big races having odds-on favourites, it might be easy to string together Kauto, Master Minded, Big Bucks and Dunguib into a penalty kick accumulator but there's no value in that and it's not big or clever.

Of the short priced certainties, Big Bucks in the World Hurdle would look like the most cast iron but is only included for the apparent lack of opposition and to hold a treble together, not because 4/7 is a price to steam in at.

As well as the RSA Chase, the Champion Hurdle is a favourite race of mine but this year's renewal doesn't look like vintage. It was not encouraging to read Paul Carberry today quoted as saying that he will be delivering Go Native late. It is still, so many years after the fact, possible to wake up screaming at his ride on Harchibald, jumping the last as if he was deciding how many lengths to win by. It might not have cost me much but I'm on prescription tablets now. So I won't be investing much on the Champion Hurdle this year, thank you very much.

It might be worth turning to some of the newer races, the more reliable and well-advised innovations used to extend the festival to 4 money-spinning days rather than the more intense 3. You could go for Garde Champetre in the cross country but it's a novelty sort of race better done in the Czech Republic, so I'd rather suggest the Irish banker Quevega in the mares hurdle, currently 5/4, or the big news story, the Queen's Barber Shop in the Ryanair Chase at 5/1, which is due a decent race of some sort and I hope this isn't too short a distance or price.

The main hope is, of course, that they all come home safely. And secondly that, having had dreams of windfalls, we none of us end up too much poorer. There are enough agencies trying to skin us these days without us offering bookmakers the chance to be another one.

But this year's treble will be Long Run, Big Bucks, Quevega and add Barber's Shop in for a four-timer.

I had to back Tricky Trickster for the National after his last run which was the best trial I've seen this year but took the 10/1 whereas now you can get 12. But I've stuck to my last year's guns, too, with Black Apalachi, whose form book preparation looks fine and he's shortened in price so that'll be the tip for Aintree, when horse racing still makes the news whatever happens.

Quand j'etais chanteur

Isn't the BBC wonderful.

You have six days remaining to watch this great film for free.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pq892

Perhaps my favourite bit is the lawn mover raffle prize being wheeled away across the dance floor.