Martin Mooney - The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen

Martin Mooney, The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (Lagan Press)

It might have been said that a poet doesn’t arrive at maturity until the age of 40. And elsewhere, if not in exactly the same places, that some start to run out of ideas or begin to repeat themselves not long after they go beyond 50. But even given those strict parameters, Martin Mooney was born in 1964, doesn’t have any excuse and doesn’t need any.
For me, his best poems were among the relatively early work that I first knew him by but here he provides new pieces that are at least their equal and in a place or two have gone beyond that, which is of course what one hopes to see and is then grateful for.
The Humours of Ballycran kicks off with verve and panache like a band hitting the right note from the very beginning of a live show. Although it is in the end a poem about age and perhaps the passing of better days, it is done with exuberance, quickness of thought and a re-working of cliché and old saws. It establishes several of the themes that are going to recur in the following pages.
Later, Hokusai is imagined in old age still striving for finer art and mourning the loss of his younger self but it is in Avercamp: Skaters on the Ijsselmeer that Mooney gives us a new masterpiece. While mainly obsessed with the artist’s passing and the contingency of his existence, it is also aware of the limits of his brilliant but narrow oeuvre,

knowing full well that life in all its shades
of love and truth and worship will go on
without you to record it.
However well a fire station is designed, it won’t prevent house fires but that is no obstacle to the jaded wisdom of The Architecture of Fire Stations, one of several poems in which Mooney handles form and rhythm to great effect. Similarly, Cure is that rare thing, a successful villanelle and Rendition brings together a number of Mooney themes- the radical politics, thoughts of mortality, Belfast and, new in this volume, sexual jealousy- in only seven concentrated but lucid lines. Which is one way that poetry can be more than prose but often isn’t in the hands of some poets.
Throughout the book we are aware of continuity in lives and communities, a stalwart and committed attitude in a world that is transient for the individuals in it who are subject to change, age, misunderstood passions and ultimately their own passing.
But Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, after a Hokusai picture, is the best new poem I’ve read in a long time. In years. Its slimy eroticism is powerful and tangible, associating the disgust of jealousy with the feel of octopus and wet groping. The clean release when the fisherman

retires to his boat for a month of net-
mending, keel-scraping, caulking and sake.
is welcome, refreshing and lovely to share with him. As is the tremendous metaphor of the stunted ‘refusal of the cherry to blossom’ as a comparison with the ‘fish-porn predictability of her lust’. (Female sexuality is as ever a problem, I’m afraid). But if that wasn’t enough already, the ending on,

I’ve said I’m sorry and I’m sorry.
is an adamant but desperate attempt to lock down feelings that doesn’t sound as if it’s going to be adequate to get over them.
Martin did say on his website about the making of the book that this was one of those cliched moments when the thing seemed to do the heavy lifting by itself.
And when a poem does arrive quite so fully formed, the poet can only be grateful and try not to fret that it doesn’t happen more often.
It is a sonnet, with its own fittingly distorted, un-Shakesperean and non-Petrarchan, rhyme scheme and packed with such well-made phrases in its compact flow that I hope it wins more accolades than those that this little website is bound to offer it.
‘Well-made’ is one of the stand-by, benchmark epithets that I’ll attach to many of the things I like best if it seems appropriate, given my restricted repertoire of endorsements. It applies to much of this book, which is a fine thing, with all of Mooney’s natural, unflashy erudition and the perfect pitch of distance and detachment (I've seen it called 'decorum' somewhere) that his language achieves between text and meaning, like the superb ‘furious’ decorating in The Ballad of Moscow Joe before the inversion of the usual Country & Western song themes. I can almost see how C&W melancholy fits with the cultural references of working class Northern Ireland, or anywhere else. It is funny, and it’s okay as long as we understand that life isn’t perfect and you can never really have it all.
Excellent book.

Hooksway Walk

Many thanks to Adrian for providing this photo of a difficult section of our recent walk centred on Hooksway. It's useful to have a dedicated photographer with us to capture such treasured moments and also very kind of him and whoever else it was that said I look like George Michael here.

To me, it looks like a man struggling slightly more than he should do on an uphill section and I'm thinking that it doesn't seem so many years ago that I used to enjoy the uphill bits of a bike ride. But the stick I found was surprisingly helpful.

It was a really good walk, with lots of big views to be had in exchange for the gradients that we eventually overcame.

I found the walk in The Times a few weeks ago where it suggested that you park in the pub car park and only have to tell the pub that you'll be back later to spend your money there. But you shouldn't believe everything you read in the papers and the landlord was less than helpful so we had a couple of pints in Harting afterwards instead.

Martin Amis - The Pregnant Widow

Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (Vintage)

One shouldn't review a book one hasn't read to the finish. I might still finish this but it will only be because nothing else turned up to demand my attention in the meantime.

I was very impressed with the Amis contribtion to the Larkin event at Cheltenham last year, all blearily bloodshot and still profoundly alpha male, immaculately well spoken and taking the easy enough part of speaking against the inhibited, unadventurous part of Larkin's character. And, then, when I got back to Cheltenham railway station, there he was in the car park, having a crafty fag with a couple of young women. He looked like the star he is supposed to be.

And his last book got favourable reviews, so why not give it a go.

Okay, he can write a sentence. Once or twice, or even more than that, one can see why he is regarded as a 'stylist' but the literary references are ones that even I have heard of and most people who, like me, have read a handful of books, will have done, too. That wouldn't matter if one could see an end to the theme that mainly seems to involve young men hanging around swimming pools in Italy in the hope that good looking young ladies will soon be sunbathing there with not many clothes on. Whether this is an obsession of his finely-observed characters or only something Amis can't help but pass off as literature becomes a moot point.

By way of contrast, one could pick up and re-read Richard Yates' Young Hearts Crying, which is exactly what I did, and find that Yates is a proper writer who deals with and describes sex in all its glory and its failures, something that on this form, Amis couldn't pretend to be. Perhaps they are very different books but there isn't really any comparison to be made.

Perhaps the book takes off in its second half and makes profound sense of this ongoing, sweaty scenario but I've seen enough so far. If I make it any further and the book becomes the better thing it ought to be then I will be announcing it here but, as it stands, this has been a big disappointment and the English novel needs the forthcoming Alan Hollinghurst more than it ever knew.

Top 6 - Countertenors

I've missed out on a few events in London already this year.

It wasn't clear that Seamus Heaney would be reading at the T.S. Eliot Prize in January. I didn't realize how much I would have wanted to see David Harsent with Paterson and Shapcott at LRB in February and now I find Philippe Jaroussky (pictured) was at the Wigmore Hall yesterday. Not cheap but would have been worth the trip.

So, as consolation, I've ordered a couple of his CD's , including Opium, which includes this, that we've seen before here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNWKnXgrroA He is allegedly in big trouble with purists who think he should stay with the Baroque repertoire but I'm glad he didn't.

He is challenging James Bowman for the position of my favourite singer, who filled the acoustics of Portsmouth Cathedral a couple of years ago and owes his position to the recording, with Michael Chance, of Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres.

Dominique Visse, as part of Ensemble Clement Jannequin, was perhaps my first live experience of countertenor singing, over twenty years ago, and so must be answerable for this unhealthy obsession.

Andreas Scholl is another certainty for the list, whose album of Arias for Handel's castrato, Senesino, pays tribute to one of the original stars of the genre who made a sacrifice that few would want to consider nowadays,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cxk4GbVqgw

Sublime, obviously.

Never mind, I'll put in for a ticket for Handel's opera Rinaldo at the Proms. Perhaps that will be compensation.

Top 6 - Hymns, selected with Mary Green

I'm delighted to be able to introduce my mother, Mary, to my website to help select our Top 6 Hymns. It might have seemed that we didn't have much in common when long ago I don't know if her attempts to teach me how to knit were any more successful than when I showed her how to play chess. But we share a number of great things which include, not necessarily in this order, a devout admiration for Brian Clough, a continuing love of the music of Handel, a natural rapport with dogs and we don't mind a bit of hymn singing whenever we get the chance, either.
So, what I thought we might do is collaborate on a joint selection of our Top 6 hymns for this website's feature and, having been so well brought up, I'm obviously going to invite her to go first.
Mum, which is the first hymn would you like to put on our list of six?

This is hard,, my choice of hymn changes with mood and occasion. I think therefore my first choice has to be one which is fairly widely used although not too closely connected with a particular situation (except maybe a Welsh rugby crowd at Cardiff Arms Park) and one which I think most people would be familiar enough with to sing along it is - Guide me O thou Great Redeemer (or Jehovah according to which hymn book you are using) The tune has to be Cwm Rhondda. It has me singing and air conduction every time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJCxt2DjZK0

Good start. I wouldn't mind our way being through green pastures or forever idly resting by still waters but I realize it isn't really like that so I'll have Father, Hear the Prayer We Offer. What next?

Ok, we'll go all personal now, how about Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us, one we had at our wedding. Hopefully we'll get led o'er the world's tempestuous sea and be guarded, guided, kept and fed.

Some of the supernatural elements of the hymn writers' imaginations are worth having. The stately and powerful Lo ! he comes with clouds descending is quite dramatic and I especially like the 'deeply wailing'. Michael Rangeley used to give the piano a right old bashing most days in school assembly but the last line of these verses gave him every excuse to put in a bit extra.

This time I will acknowledge the season and chose When I survey the wondrous cross to the tune Morte Christe such a very moving piece especially when sung by a Welsh male voice choir. I think of most hymns as a whole words and music together although you can use different tunes to words there always seems to be one which fits best and to me these two go together perfectly.

To finish I'm going to have to have the one that prompted the question, really, which was seeing that My Song is Love Unknown was up on the board in the church we went into on Thursday. It says on Wikipedia that,
The hymn tune to which it is usually sung is Love Unknown by John Ireland. Ireland composed the melody over lunch one day at the suggestion of organist and fellow-composer Geoffrey Shaw.
But I daresay, chosen at another time, we'd have had made some different choices. Thanks for doing that.

Top 6 - Richard Yates

One day in 2002 there was a little review in The Times that began, 'Stop right there.' It drew one's attention to the new edition of Richard Yates' Collected Stories and said that this was the real thing. It turned out to be exactly right and I've rarely been more grateful for a review.

Later, I'd like to think that my piece in The Reader magazine played a small part in the revival of interest in his books although it has to be said that it is more likely to have been due to the film of Revolutionary Road. At that time, I collected all the novels in old editions from abebooks, several coming from America, because only Revolutionary Road was in print here then. Now, you can get any of them in a new reprint.

A Glutton for Punishment was one piece that stood out from that first book, although the book didn’t have any weak points.
For a little while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance, and so did a number of his friends.
through to getting home having been axed from his awful office job,
And then with a great deflating sigh he collapsed backward into the chair, one foot sliding out on the carpet and the other curled beneath him. It was the most graceful thing he had done all day. ‘They got me,’ he said.
A Wrestler with Sharks tells of a writer with big hopes stuck in terrible hack job writing for trade magazines, dreaming of his own by-line, with nine unpublished books to his name. Yates is brilliant at observation as well as catching the nuances of vernacular American but in stories like these it is a great sympathetic achievement to give his characters dignity when their circumstances are so cruelly delineated.
In The Best of Everything we have every right to guess that Ralph’s drinking with the fellas is going to be more important to him than his marriage to Grace.
Of the novels, one doesn’t have to set Revolutionary Road apart as the best known but having come first and been successful, setting the tone for his small tragedies in desperate middle class families, one could hardly leave it out.
Cold Spring Harbor beautifully catches the relationship of Evan and Rachel and because it is a re-read of Young Hearts Crying that has brought Yates back to mind, the fine writing in that is freshest in my memory and gets ahead of the other candidates for that reason if no others.

Music for the Royal Wedding

I don't know what Ms. Duffy has got prepared for the forthcoming wedding. She's signed up for an interesting 10 years of laureateship, for such a devout leftie, compared to the benign period that Andrew Motion excused himself from ahead of time in timely fashion.

On Radio 5 this evening, there was an interview with someone from Angelsey, that is, I think, Ynys Mon now to the politically specifically correct and they said how proud they were to be giving sanctuary to the royal couple during the build up to the wedding but they did admit there was a growing industry in the sale of tacky tea towels.

And, if you're anything like me, then that only triggers off the theme tune to the old television programme, When the Boat Comes In. And, thus, for better or worse, my poem for the royal wedding was only a matter of time. About 25 minutes, actually.

Music for the Royal Wedding

(to the tune of When the Boat Comes In)

Come, little lassie,

It’ll be no hassle,
You can be the Queen

When I have married you.

You’re nice and leggy,

Like my Great Aunt Peggy

But she drank much more gin

Than you’ll be allowed to.

The plebs get a day off

But there’ll be a pay off

When the tacky tea towels

Go on sale to them.

Your see-through dress, it

Made me interested,

I thought you could be Queen

Once I'd married you.

One thing we ought to

Do is have a daughter

Or a son that Harry

Will then be behind

In the procession

Of the line of succession

That’s why we must marry.

I hope you don’t mind.

Come, little lassie,

It’ll be no hassle,

You can be the Queen

When I have married you.

From the Archives - WTTA 12 Hour, 1995

27 August, 1995 was the day I spent achieving a personal best for 12 hours of bicycle riding. It does seem unlikely now but luckily the archives still have the evidence. Here seen coming back into Lechlade, so after 110 miles or so perhaps, and sometime around midday.
Those were the days, and heaven knows how much I miss it. But I'm afraid the situation has long gone well beyond repair. There are some memorable names on the result sheet there, and it was an honour to take part alongside them.

Over

Two bits of bad news. Firstly, I'm reading Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow, which is slightly disappointing. Great style, no doubt, some worthwhile insights but not a writer I could love. It is supposed to be funny and I haven't laughed yet.

Worse, though. It brought on that awful feeling of, 'I could do this'.

I know I can't do it. In the past, decades ago now, I used to try. And I found I couldn't write fiction at all. Once it was several short stories imitative of William Trevor, who I thought was the best thing.Then it was Mishima and various Japanese writers that made me want to do it. I had a story, A Brief Lapse of Confidence, published in a magazine called Fisheye, and gladly eventually forgot about it.

Unfortunately this time I have an idea that I think might work, although whether it will stretch to the 50 000 word mark that the Wikipedia entry says elevates a story from novella to novel, I don't know. This morning, I've done 430 words, so I need to do that more than 100 more times.

It's called Over and concerns the last week of a relationship between Doddsy and Madeleine.

I expect I'll run out of impetus quite soon but in the meantime I can say I have a novel in preparation. It would be great to have something one is happy with to keep in a drawer forever. The main reason for not wanting to try these last twenty years or more is that the investment of time and effort was never going to be worth the poverty of the thing it produced. I'll see what happens this time.

Amores I iv

Whatever great works they go on to create or are eventually best known for, it is often the early work that is in some ways essentially the real artist. Their first ideas being what they first wanted to express and their original style being how they thought it best put. Fame and recognition inevitably change them and so it is the early pieces in which we find them unspoiled. Ovid is probably best known for the Metamorphoses but I'm sure I prefer the Amores.
Also, as might be suspected of Donne, the poets that write about love and their amorous adventures might be those who spent more time thinking about it than doing it. While both fancy themselves as 'ladies' men', one could think that a real philanderer might have spent so much time gallivanting that they would hardly stop to write so much of it down for posterity. I don't know. But I was taken by this little episode re-reading Ovid this weekend and thought it might be strong enough to stand even my hack re-working,

Amores I iv

I’ll see you there. And, with you, your husband
Who can put his arm around you and rest
Your head upon him while across the room
We share secret glances that will murmur
Between us our furtive wordless nothings.
Read my meaning from my moving fingers
Or from the idle shapes I trace in wine.
And when you bring to mind a thought of love
Between us you should brush your glowing cheek
But if you need to chide me then perhaps
You’ll touch your earlobe so that I will know.
Don’t take the wine he offers you but say
That he should drink it and then ask the slave
To bring you some that you say you prefer.
I will drink from that glass so that my lips
Will have touched the part that you will drink from.
Don’t let him get too intimate with you,
And, above all, please don’t let him kiss you
Or I will announce that we are lovers
And the kisses that he’s stealing are mine.
But it’s the unseen lovemaking I fear
More than any because I cannot know
Of it but know of it for myself
On my own account when I have enjoyed
It with you in other public places
But discreetly, hidden under clothing.
Remember to keep his glass charged, keep him
Drinking strong wine with no added water
The sooner we can have him taken home
To sleep it off and, when it’s time to go,
Leave like the others do and blend yourself
In with the crowd, for I will be a part
Of it and meet you there. I’ll see you then.

How wretched I am to ask for only
These few short hours with you, when all night long
You will be back at home with him while I,
Desperate and tearful, watch you to your door.
And your husband will then take your kisses
As a right and take for himself the love
You give me more naturally. Might I ask
You let him do so without your response.
Don’t let him enjoy it or, at the least,
Don’t take any pleasure in it yourself.
But whatever happens during the night,
Tell me what I want to hear tomorrow.