Sean O'Brien - November

Sean O'Brien, November (Picador)

One day it might be adjudged that we have been living in the Age of Muldoon. The phrase is used by Sean O'Brien in his anthology, The Firebox, although not with the capital letter that makes it look official. But O'Brien himself is also likely to be a candidate to be made central to the poetry of our time.

It is sometimes suggested that there is a ready-made aspect to some of his phrases, a recycling of cliche that is identified by Alvarez in his essay on Auden in The Shaping Spirit,

They are all phrases from that Thesaurus of Social Abuses which became so thumb-marked in the 'thirties. It is as though Auden had not written the lines at all, but merely compiled them.

and then one wonders if it's worth turning to Donald Davie's thoughts, in Purity of Diction in English Verse, about refreshing cliche.

But then it's possible to trawl through this collection to identify how many such phrases there are and find it might not be quite be as true as one thought. It is not here the case that O'Brien is re-making worn-out expressions but returning to set piece ideas of his own, the stalled sense of purpose found on afternoons of rain, outside of history, with things turning back on themselves and the participants doubting their own reality. It is the post-Marxist aftermath of a deracinated, derelict culture.

But, looking back at Alvarez, it is Auden's poem Consider that he discussed there that could have had a big influence on O'Brien's method with its tone of diagnosis and issuing of imperatives.

If some of these poems look familar, it is not only because they continue O'Brien's disconsolate view of the state of affairs but also because they appeared in the recent book Night Train. It is in the decline of the railway system that he has found an extended metaphor for the wilderness and the enforced obsolete.

As well as tributes and memoirs of recently deceased poets, O'Brien has poems here in memory of his parents, the Elegy to his mother being one of his most memorable recent poems. It ends when he offers his seat on a bus to a woman of similar age to his mother, who declines, adding,

We haven't come this far to give up now.

That lives are still led with such dignity is in spite of the way they are processed,

The post still comes. The state that failed to keep the faith

Pursues you for its money back.

and the way, in the cinema in Verite: Great Junction Street,

We could not see that what the adverts meant

Was us, the grubby herd among the stalls.

The spraunching morons and fat girls

Who lusted for a Hillman Minx were those

We'd marry

The consolation for our disenfranchisement, the theft of our identity, the fact that we are not suffered to even own ourselves is only that we are allowed to express it.

Michael Longley - A Hundred Doors

Michael Longley, A Hundred Doors (Cape)

I saw Michael Longley reading at the British and Irish Poetry Conference at Oxford a few years ago. With Glyn Maxwell reading extracts from his plays and Deryn Rees-Jones taking an interest in her own sensual side, Longley was by far the star of the show, the venerable old warhorse not needing to get out of a canter to be best in show.

The subjects in this new collection of poems include flowers, birds, his grandchildren and the mortality of himself and others. He has a benevolent spirit that here makes of death more a kindly memory than the blind terror it is for others.

His poems are largely without affectation or special effects, often bringing to mind Edward Thomas, a strategy that must keep him in good books at home where he is married to a leading Edward Thomas authority. And in common with other poets from Ireland, he makes use of Irish place names. When you have licence to mention Carrigskeewaun in your first line, your last poem and several in between, you already have an advantage over one who lives in, say, Portsmouth.

Prelude is a fine short poem describing how the discomfort of the musician's sitting position finds its way into the music. Throughout, the poems are benign meditations and as accommodating as the poet with his pint of beer would also be. They appear to have so little art about them that it must be a technique and their honesty and sanguine attitude come so easily that we don't notice how well it has been done.

Record Review

Striggio, Mass in 40 Parts, I Fagiolini (Decca); Buxtehude, Scandinavian Cantatas, Theatre of Voices (Dacapo); Meister, Il giardino del piacere, Musica Antiqua Koln (Berlin Classics); Desmarest, Grands Motets Lorrains, Les Arts Florisants (Erato).

Alessandro Striggio’s Ecco Si Beato Giorno was the model for the famous Tallis Spem in Alium, and the challenge that Tallis took on and intended to outdo. In the notes here the Striggio is dated c.1566 and the Tallis at c.1567 and so we take the musicologists’ word for that. At the late night Prom in July 2007, with the Tallis Scholars, I wasn’t immediately convinced that they had much more in common than the arrangement of their forces but I’m not sure that the wide open spaces of the Albert Hall benefit the intensity of such pieces as a smaller, more intimate venue or even the Panasonic mini-system that sits next to my computer here seem to.
Hearing the Striggio for only the second time was much more the revelation one was hoping for, it being given the chance to be heard in similar circumstances to any of the recordings of Spem that are available. And you are never short of choices of those. Here, it is at least partly the tremendous production but also the greater intimacy that an obviously more artificial way of hearing it that allows it to stand alongside on equal terms and, from time to time, I could have been listening to the Tallis for all I knew, it’s just that I know what’s coming next in Spem whereas here, it’s in a way more exciting because it’s fresh and unfamiliar. The Striggio might not achieve quite the same surging oceans of sound, the transitions from one electrifying burst to the next, the dissonance, not necessarily the flux of passion and restraint but if one wasn’t aware which was which one might say that Spem is one tremendous, swirling, organic ‘earthquake’ (as it has been said), and the Striggio brings solo parts more prominently forward. At 8.55, the account of Spem here is perhaps shorter than many, presumably because it is ‘the first to use Hugh Keyte’s radical new edition’. Otherwise, this is a sensational recording that will bear countless replays and if things had been different, we might have been trying to evaluate if the Tallis was really a worthy response, which, of course it is because it’s one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.
It’s strange to reflect that I have more CD’s of Dietrich Buxtehude’s music than I do of Beethoven or Mozart. I’m not easily tempted to update every LP I ever bought with a CD or now a download and only ever did in the more essential areas of Bach or Monteverdi. The attraction of the Scandinavian Cantatas set was the use of Swedish and Latin texts, but beautiful as it certainly is in places, this rarely provides anything I like better than the Trio Sonatas Op. 1 on Naxos. The sorrowful aria Att Du Jesu Vill Mig Hora sung by soprano Else Torp is simple and affecting. That and the short mass are well worth having. I could manage without the organ praeludia and my selection of Buxtehude recordings is inevitably skewed and unrepresentative by not having the organ music that he is perhaps best known for in it.
Similarly from the baroque period from which Bach learned how to do what he did is the selection of sonatas by Meister from the now defunct Musica Antiqua Koln. Apparently unheard of since, Meister’s music weaves and blends the two violins, cello and harpsichord in lively and spirited fashion that might often be Buxtehude if we hadn’t been told otherwise. In their day, we are told, Telemann was more popular than Bach and I’m sure that if we were given Telemann, Buxtehude or Meister more often there’d be few of us that would have the critical acumen say they weren’t as worthy of our attention. But none of them wrote wrote the Cello Suites, the Brandenburg Concertos or all those wonderful Cantatas. But, even if it’s no more than a curio or interest for it’s own sake, I don’t mind keeping alive the memory of Johann Friedrich Meister (1638-1697) in the variety of these sonatas played with convincing verve and, where necessary, the stateliness to express, as the sleeve note says, the ‘artificial’ craft of composing.
Whereas Louis Desmarest (1661-1741), and thus roughly contemporary with Rameau and Marin Marais if not quite Lully, seems much more the maverick, living on his wits, talents and taking his chances, sort of composer that one can’t help but like. Part of his Wikipedia entry says this (and we wouldn’t want to doubt it, would we),
Desmarets became a frequent visitor to the Saint-Gobert family in Senlis who offered to help him take care of Élisabeth-Madeleine. Both families had been friends since 1689, and Desmarets had given singing lessons to their daughter, Marie-Marguerite when she was fifteen. During these visits, Desmarets and the now eighteen year-old Marie-Marguerite fell in love and within six months of his wife's death, they asked her father for permission to marry. He flatly refused and put his daughter in a convent when he discovered that she was pregnant.
and this disc here passes the minutes in the most elegant distress and then more elaborate piety . It has a suggestion of paradise in it even if we both might know, the composer and the listener, that there is no such thing. Perhaps that’s the little conspiracy that such art allows us to confide in.

Martyn Crucefix - Hurt

Martyn Crucefix, Hurt (Enitharmon)

One of the first things I did having arrived at Lancaster University in 1979 was get in touch with the editor of the poetry magazine. I was eager to set about the literary world and be involved in what went on. What went on there wasn’t a great deal. Martyn Crucefix had been editing Continuum but now wanted to concentrate on his third year studies so he gave me the magazine on the spot and so I was already the boy in charge.
I might have made a good job of it on my own, or maybe not, but I felt I ought to invite anybody else who was interested to join in and so I ended up with a committee of four, but no unity of purpose. We changed the title to Allusions, opened up the campus magazine to allcomers, held a competition, speculatively solicited work from Betjeman, John Lennon and Naom Chomsky amongst others and got kindly replies and poems from Roger McGough, Iain Crichton-Smith, Brian Patten and others and had the nerve to turn down Gavin Ewart’s contribution. But when the first issue came out it wasn’t everything it might have been. We were down to a committee of three and,after issue 1, two more of us left the other one to get on with it.
It was a sorry episode. But ever since that meeting with Martyn I’ve seen his career go well, with prizes and translations of Rilke and, for some reason being aware that he was born in Trowbridge, think of him every time I go through there on the train.
His first book, Beneath Tremendous Rain, was one I liked a lot and anyone with a collection entitled A Madder Ghost is fine by me.
This new book is belatedly mentioned here because my radar missed it until recently. It appeared last autumn.
The opening poem Invocation repays a few readings but at first I found little to enthuse about, the poems sensitively observed and descriptive but not making a great impression as poetry. The sort of poems that make me wonder how they got written in the first place but some of these poems are more oblique than earlier Crucefix and might reward further looking. The last of the three sections does, however, contain some fine pieces.
Calling in the Dark works on a brilliant conceit, if conceit it is when the story is obviously and simply true. The poet's parents' mobile phone accidentally rings him when knocked in a bag of shopping. Martyn eavesdrops for longer than he might on their private conversation and feels some guilt and responsibility for doing so before terminating the call and one wonders at the double meaning of his title.
Scraps hopes for a better way of looking at cathedrals for his son than the poet had,

So this is what I hope for him:
a stronger belief than I knew,
that the solitary man
in his quietude need not
be scorned and ridiculed,
need not have plagued so bitterly

my boyhood –
The long poem Wilderness is a gentle meditation to end on. Martyn seems to have visited the Keats house in Hampstead during its renovation but his poem on the subject conflates the house now with Keats’ life there and abroad to great effect. But on a different poet, in Petrarch’s Head, the book provides it best moments,

Surely the answer lies with the beautiful Laura,
the girl like an idea you glimpsed one day-
Laura, who took your breath away,
greedy thief and snatched your heart as well,
allowing nothing of herself at all.
ending on the best lines of all,

the poet’s head happy in love’s dark place
and love’s tongue relieved in his embrace.
Yes, it’s another poem about poetry but when they are this good you really don’t mind.

So, perhaps this is a book of three halves but it builds towards some excellent successes and proves worth staying with. It’s good to see that one poet from Lancaster thirty years ago continues to thrive.

Bob's Worth

Thank you very much.

Bob's Worth sealed the outcome of Cheltenham for me with a sound and confident win in the stayer's novice hurdle, at much better prices than the SP of 15/8.

It wasn't looking good after two days but steaming into Big Buck's began to turn the tide and weighing in a bit more on Bob's Worth nailed it, not winning a huge profit but making it a successful week.

It's nice when it happens.

PN Review 198

Jeffrey Wainwright's report on Geoffrey Hill's First Lecture is a useful piece in the latest PNR, demonstrating, as if there had ever been any doubt, that this was the right appointment of Oxford Professor and all the shenanigans of the previous election were an unnecessary shambles.

Hill is reported to have offered some healthy scepticism about Creative Writing courses and said that 'if there is someone 'out there' working at a pitch equal to the demands set by the history of poetry 'she will know who she is' without interference'.

Some thought on the value of criticism were followed by the advice to would-be poets, 'don't try to be sincere, but do try to be inventive'.

His message is that contemporary poetry is only ever what it is by virtue of its past and that its history cannot be elbowed aside by the self-important contemporary.

There are Dannie Abse and Anne Stevenson among the poets here but my preference was for Greg Delanty's versions from The Greek Anthology.

Jason Guriel seems to fancy himself as jauntily iconoclastic in some lengthy disparaging of Heaney's Human Chain but his off-hand tone is somewhat studied if not even disrespectful and the only one belittled by such contrariness is the critic themselves.

He says,

Other moments in Human Chain seem downright parodic of an earthy, folksy poetry, knocked together in a shed.

Well, if only we could all be quite so confident of our own superiority to be able to take such a view.

Ahren Warner, recently risen superstar and much admired by cognoscenti, interviews C.K. Williams with a series of questions based on close readings and fairly abstruse points. This is not the lightweight chat interview of Parkinson or even Melvyn Bragg but the despairingly particular that surely only its participants could find fascinating.

Iain Bamforth's Catchwords is as entertaning as usual and would be one thing that might justify extending my subscription which I think lapses with this issue but I'm afraid there aren't enough others to go with it. I'll not be missing PNR too much and will investigate a replacement order for Magma very shortly.

--

Rather more positively, I showed up at the Portsmouth Poetry Society's meeting this week and enjoyed it very much. Denise Bennett and Pauline Hawkesworth continue to run a friendly and relaxed group of local poets and poetry readers which this week looked at poems on a theme of sunlight. With other topics of interest forthcoming on their programme, I'll be hoping to attend more regularly than my rare and sporadic visits over the last 30 years. Anybody in the Portsmouth area who might enjoy such an evening without bringing too much of an agenda should bear in mind its the first and third Wednesday of each month at St Mark's church hall, Derby Road, North End at 7.15 and would be made welcome.

After Miss Julie

Patrick Marber, After Miss Julie, London Classic Theatre, Portsmouth New Theatre Royal, 9 March.

Patrick Marber's reworking of Strindberg came to Portsmouth in the middle of a long run of appropriately one-night stands. It might, if you wanted it to, offer parallels between the breakdown of Miss Julie in the original dark Scandinavian version and the breaking down of class barriers in 1945 Britain. But it might be overstating the case to claim that class barriers were quite as fragile or ever broken down quite like the coquettish and desperate Miss Julie here.

The play works out a traditional 'eternal triangle' with an 'Upstairs Downstairs' theme. In this production, it builds to inevitable and disturbing tragedy from a quiet beginning. It is the entrance of Kathryn Ritchie as Julie that moves us into a plot that very much writes itself from thereon in. Andy Dowbiggin's below stairs John is her victim (Do you think I'm a dreadful lush?) who puts up some token respectful resistance before giving way to the unfortunate flaw in him that he has admired the younger woman throughout the years he has watched her growing up. She's a penalty kick for a good-looking older man like him. Helen Barford as the previously intended wife is stoic and sensible but without the wanton glamour of her rival.

John and Julie's plans for elopement are undermined by her admission that she has no money of her own, not a bean, it's all in trust. And their relationship has revealed its built-in weaknesses long before the ill-conceived idea has any chance of being realized. We might be slightly surprised to find that Julie loses her virginity, on the evening in question and not previously, but it was 1945 and it is another symbolic barrier that is broken by the dispiriting events as blood becomes a recurring leitmotif in the later scenes.

It is Strindberg after all and thus not packed with ready-made slapstick humour but Marber provides enough lines for Kathryn Ritchie's performance to elicit laughter from a grim drama that brings Tennessee Williams to mind as much as any other dramatist.

It would be worth your time if you live in any of the towns it's coming to in the second half of its tour.

http://www.londonclassictheatre.co.uk/currentlyamj.htm

Cheltenham 2011 Preview

Backers who like the old adage of ‘good horses at good prices’ will be looking forward to Cheltenham with such good, if not legendary, horses as Kauto Star, Denman, Master Minded and Big Bucks all available at odds that pay scant respect to their various litanies of achievement. Of course, this is mainly due to the fact that they are nearing the end of illustrious careers but whereas Big Bucks is still reigning champion in his division and has only had to retreat from cast-iron odds-on to an almost backable price in the face of a new pretender, Master Minded is still only an 8 year old and yet is already trying to regain rather than retain his title.
Although it would be heartwarming and wonderful to see any of them win at Cheltenham this year, and if I could nominate one it would surely be Denman, I’m not sure I’m going to include any of them in a list of suggestions. Ever since Kauto began to establish his reputation as a consummate athlete but less than reliable conveyance, I’ve avoided races with him in them as opportunities for investment but enjoyed them as just the thrilling spectacular sport they provide.
In trying to compile a treble from this year’s festival, which we do usually do quite well at without ever actually nailing it, it’s going to be necessary to get involved in some genuinely wide open races on paper and suggest that two out of three will pay handsomely enough if we spread the stake money out and do the three doubles as well.
Menorah (pictured) was hugely impressive in two big wins in the Autumn and came up the Cheltenham hill looking as tough as you’d want, somehow reminding me of how Brave Inca used to do it a few years ago. Backing him will involve trusting that Binocular doesn’t return to his very best, that Hurricane Fly hasn’t proved as much as his Irish wins might appear and that the next four in the betting are ‘next’ for good reason but I’ve had Menorah in mind as a possible good value nap all season and so here it is- Menorah (Champion Hurdle, nap). Binocular is so 'in and out' that it would be a big coincidence for him to produce the same performance in the same race exactly one year later.
I backed Wayward Prince when he won at Wetherby last month and one had to admire the staying potential that day but the form doesn’t compare with Time for Rupert in the RSA Chase or the Nicholls-trained Aiteen Thirty Three. I’ll happily take these two against the field in a race we don’t generally do too badly in but one might need to watch where the money goes on the day. We go for the latter in block script here simply for the value, because we are enterprising and taking a chance this year.
Quevega reappeared for the first time last year in the Mares race and won well and so if doing so again, might be not have any worries this year either to hold a treble together for us. But another year older and an even money chance might not be quite as swashbuckling a suggestion as I’m going for in such a mood.
Bob’s Worth outstayed some well regarded sorts in one of the best novice races on the track in the winter and would only have to repeat that performance to take all the beating in whichever race he runs in. With Blue Square now going non-runner no bet in their Ante Post markets, it’s safe to take advantage of the price in perhaps the Neptune Investment Novices.
Poquelin defied the weight and the odds earlier in the season and goes to the Ryan Air Chase as favourite. This is one new race brought in to expand the festival to four days that one can’t object to because otherwise there wasn’t a chase at this distance between the two-mile Champion and the Gold Cup. I’ve been less devoted to Nicholls-trained horses this season as Nicky Henderson has seemed to be the man in form but Poquelin, the real name of the playwright Moliere, has been a favourite for some years and I’ll include him in.
Without doing anything wrong, Big Bucks has found himself immensely backable at even money after Grands Crus enormously impressive laying down of credentials at the last meeting but that race might only have served to make the so far undisputed champion into a betting proposition but I wouldn’t be making a definite choice here just yet.
There must have been money for Kauto Star in the Gold Cup for him to be back in at 5/1 and however much I’d like to see him do it again, it’s not a picture I can bring to mind. Kauto has provided some of the most memorable performances for a generation but he equally stays in the memory for having fallen apart in heartbreaking ways. Long Run let the treble down for us last year, squandering the nap and so unless there are stories of Imperial Commander not being right, he makes the most appeal at 7/2 which seems very fair because he's been impressive in the top class on Cheltenham's turning gradients whereas Long Run's proven form was in the very different King George on Kempton's less demanding three miles.
It’s often useful to hear a word from Ireland about the Bumper but Henderson’s Ericht is prominent in the betting and has carried my money before so apart from keeping an eye on market movers on the day, he is a hope rather than an expectation.
So this year’s Cheltenham treble is Menorah, Bob’s Worth and Poquelin. 9/2, 11/2 and 3/1 make, ermm, 143/1. Well, it’s worth a go. Multiplication's a wonderful thing if you stumble on a few correct answers.
Silver by Nature became very much an obvious National contender after winning the Haydock trial again but although you’d want to be on him if the ground came up soft, you might regret it if it isn’t. I was robbed of the automatic National selection when Black Apalachi was injured just before the weights came out because I am faithful to my Grand National horses and the likes of Hedgehunter, Little Polveir and Amberleigh House have rewarded me for it and so I’m likely to keep State of Play on my side while noting that Tidal Bay is still in there at 40/1. Everybody will have seen how he’s been finishing shorter staying chases this season and so if he can jump round 28 fences, you’d want to be on him over the last two. But obviously Niche Market did nothing but advertise his chances last weekend.

New Poems

Congratulations to Kelly Bianchi on her appointment as Portsmouth's First Poet Laureate, http://www.port.ac.uk/aboutus/newsandevents/frontpagenews/title,123640,en.html .
It looks as if enthusiasm for the job won't be a problem for her and I look forward to seeing how it goes.
Output from me is inevitably more frugal and a feeling that one is well out of form, and that things aren't matching up to one's hoped for standard, mean that one can hardly expect others to be excited about what I've written if I'm not excited myself. Nevertheless, I do keep trying and am happy to share these two recent efforts just in case they're not so bad.
But, with it being March, it will shortly be time to give my preview of the Cheltenham (horse racing) Festival, which is one of the highlights of this website's year and of the sporting calendar. I'll be hoping to help you towards a monetary profit but if not that then perhaps an entertaining week's sport.
In the meantime, at least I'm not taking up the valuable time of poetry editors with these pieces and they're not doing too much harm here,


Twilight

II

We’d have missed if we’d not been there
how the last light gave the water
such a deep corundum colour
that an Emperor would look fine in
or the clouds were edged with grandeur
from another world, less faded
than the transient one we walked through
while the town strewn on the far shore
sent its monotonous signals
ever brighter through the sharp air,
so watched moments, knowing how fast
such celestial things are changing,
because sometimes you look away
and then look back to find them gone.



Under London

First, I am above the river
that’s chasing bits of itself
under famously-named bridges,
full of history and sorrow,
keeping secret horror stories
in its muddy subconscious flow.
But then I, too, hide from the light
and hope, using the Oyster card
I treat as a fashion item,
I look as if I’m used to it
and not just hoping for the best
like a provincial ingénue.
For this is where fashion comes from
and I am somewhat out of place
where it’s all made out of money
or a gradual desperation
where brief beauty is contingent
and, if not captured, is gone.

One day there’ll be so much darkness,
more than has ever been thought of,
so for now I’ll praise the light
that comes back from the tube train window
where there is some wild Ludmila,
on her way to some assignation,
checking her reflection in it.