A Thames Swan Watches Barney Run in Lechlade

Daisy & Davey

Of course, we would prefer it was still 1973 and Christmas entertainment meant Morecambe & Wise and Christmas Night with the Stars. But it's not.
Never mind. There's still Daisy & Davey.
http://daisyanddavey.com/

The Christmas Nap

There's a lot to like about Christmas if you pick and choose your way through it with due discrimination and it is a particularly good few days for horse racing.

There are plenty of favourite horses to be seen but it might be wise to remember that they are facing their biggest challenges of the season in the biggest races they'll run in before Cheltenham. And I like to think of Christmas as a time of frugality rather than excess and so I don't want to throw money around as if, as the demise of Western capitalism would have us believe, it was going out of fashion. Well, it's just the fashion for those that have it already.

And so although we might have small interests in our favourite horse Bobs Worth as he takes on Grand Crus in the Novice Chase at Kempton and might look at Giles Cross at decent odds in the Welsh National and a speculative punt on Captain Chris who might upset the King George (although I'd much prefer 10/1 than the 7's he's more likely to be), it will be Rock on Ruby to beat Binocular and Overturn in the Christmas Hurdle that carries our main hopes of putting this feature finally into proper profit. I'm going to avail myself of 2/1 while I can.

We went in, had some winners and got out in one piece. It might have been better but it could have been worse. It's not an easy game but we didn't do bad at it.

Signed Poetry Books - Jeffrey Turner

Our Christmas walk on Monday was reduced by the weather to a Christmas pub meal but there was compensation to be had when Jeff finally remembered to bring me a copy of his fine booklet and then consented to add himself to my signed poetry books collection.

It's a luxury, limited edition on hand-made paper and consists of only five poems but one comes away from it with a feeling that it must have been a more substantial set. The poems are meticulously made and, without wasted words or extraneous padding, provide a full and rich impression that many don't achieve in a full length book.

They are acutely observed poems, thematically concentrating on minor detail, quiet moments and meditating on small things made significant by his care and attention. Slightly more 'written' than I might do but in places very similar in temper, they are very much 'considered utterances', if that is the phrase I half remember from Donald Davie's critical writing. As isn't always the case, it might be the title poem that is most memorable with its fine description of woodlice discovered on Moving the Stones,

Creatures of an erratic

and unhappy god,

the god of ghosts and expulsions,

or, in Chorley Cemetery,

A broken angel someone's propped

against a headstone leans like a thrush

waiting for its worm, stone listening to mud.

I'd like to think that perhaps once or twice a review or feature I've put here has encouraged someone to read or buy a book or CD. I'm afraid that won't be possible on this occasion because this very slim volume is gloriously art for art's sake and not commercially available although you might find earlier books by Jeff available on second-hand websites. For those who prefer their poems calm and sensibly thought out, they would be worth a look.

The Saturday Nap - Week Nine

Ascot tomorrow is quite likely to be a routine Saturday Nicholls-Walsh benefit. Why wouldn't it be. Big Bucks would be long odds on even if opposed by every long distance hurdler that could be found to put up against him but it's hardly a tip and I've seen 1/3 shots turned over before now. The Minack is a possibility for serious investment. But I might leave Ascot well alone on a day when the going has changed and the state of the ground is the single most important thing in horse racing. There might be a few 16/1 shots going in tomorrow. The form book doesn't go out of the window but it needs to be used properly, which means looking at which horses have and haven't won on soft or heavy ground.
Haydock could be the place to look, where Wymott, 2.45, in the Tommy Whittle Chase apparently has the right credentials to justify favouritism. That will be the Saturday nap unless updated before 11.30 in the morning.
Week 10, posted perhaps next Thursday with a thought for Boxing Day, will be the last edition of this feature. It has proved a recession-busting success and after Kempton we can sit back and tot up by exactly what percentage these investments have outstripped more gilt-edged funds. But my point was that October to December, in the right sort of races, was the best time to get involved. It's a shame if you didn't get on but maybe we can do it again in the first half of next year's jump season. Until then, it's Quot Erat Demonstrandum and don't forget to tune in for the Cheltenham Festival Preview in March.

The Annunciation

A Christmas card arrived from Pluscarden Abbey, as it usually does about this time of year. My friend there was wise enough to join a community that is allowed contact with the outside world and we exchange as many as three letters a year.

But this year I was particularly taken with the picture and it's already up here by me on the wall.

It is The Annunciation (1898) by Henry Ossawa Tanner.

I like Mary in this; I like the folds in her clothes and the bedclothes; I like the screen behind her and the blinding light.

Brilliant. Christmas can bring out unexpected wonderful things and this is a highlight of this year.

Happy Christmas.

Geoffrey Hill - Clavics

Geoffrey Hill, Clavics (Enitharmon)

I wonder who frames the prices on poetry events for Paddy Power bookmakers. They made Clavics 13/8 favourite for the Forward Prize, ahead of Sean O'Brien who had an unbeaten record at the distance and some other very worthy collections. It could only have been done on the basis of career achievement and 'stature' or reputation. The prize could never have gone to Hill on this form. It was like making Corinthian Casuals favourites for the F.A. Cup.

In his wonderful performance last weekend, Prof. Hill explained his long held admiration for the cover illustration and all but said he wrote the book so that he could make use of it. The other element that has made him so prolific in old age is that the adherence to strict formal requirements help him to produce poems as a knid of midwife to bring forth the work from inside him.

It shows. The form here dictates a disjointed, unpretty poetry that is forced into highly demanding rhyme forms and lines that serve mainly to demonstrate how difficult it is to do. Hill refers us to Herbert's poem Easter Wings, a model of shape but also of diction and syntax, but Herbert's lines fit perfectly into the design whereas in several places Hill's are adjusted by spacing and typography to stretch or bend themselves to his chosen template. None of this seems to be justified, as it were; it is stricture and discipline entirely for its own sake. It is not so much unproductive as counter-productive.

As a tribute to William Lawes, the C17th composer who was killed at the Battle of Chester, 'clavics', it says here, is 'the science or alchemy of keys', so musical keys, then, we can assume is meant. It's not all about Lawes, but, as one would expect from one as expressly difficult as Hill, much more widely referential. If I can't buy the aesthetics of the project, I can take some pleasure in moments and lines, glimpses of Hill's gravely disconsolate view that the world, or more specifically, England, isn't quite what he would like it to be. I doubt if it ever would have been.

In 3, he plays on the name in fashionably Elizabethan-Jacobean ways,

As good epitaphs go Will Lawes is slain

Permit me, sire, is slain by such whose wills

                      Be laws

and, in 9, he ends on the memorable and ever true reflection that,

England rides rich on loss.

And in 26, as Lawes is killed in battle,

                  How your rutter-

        Kin dabbles in these tacky shows.

where a genuinely fine, edgy music transcends its meaning. If only more of the book had been like this. Hill's distemper might be better suited to a freer line but, presumably, that happened in his previous books more than in this one.

The reading last week was a great event and also included poems from other books than this but it was more exciting and satisfying to hear him talk about his work than read it. That wouldn't be said of, say, Bach or Mozart, however much one would love to hear them talk about their music.

Clavics was a false favourite for the Forward Prize and even in the summer I realized that sufficiently to oppose it in the betting. It's just that the judges preferred one of the other books to my choice.

The darkness is a sultry mistress

The darkness is a sultry mistress

The darkness is a sultry mistress
and tonight she’s come protesting
in an unkempt wind that scatters
sprays of fine black rain so cold
against the passive window.
Why she’s like this I couldn’t say,
neither why I have to love her
who keeps me so undemanding,
stalled inside her wicked tantrum,
seeming to make me a promise
that there’ll never be young sunlight
coming back one day in Springtime.
For she knows that I’m her secret,
that I’m stranded here without her
with stories of shipwrecks and blizzards
and fearful of release.

Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill, The Purcell Room, South Bank, London, 11 December 2011

'It's not stand-up comedy,' Geoffrey Hill explained, 'but, there again, they're not paying me stand-up comedy money'.Professor Hill spent as much time talking about his poetry as reading it, which is always welcome, especially in a poet like him. His grasp and intellectual acuity in history and culture is apparently monumental and poets don't come any more high church than this. He explained that his work belongs with that of the painter Anselm Keifer and Paul Celan, so it is serious matter.

Poetry for him is not 'self expression' but 'a conjoining of shapes and harmonies' and I couldn't quite get down exactly what it went on to be to do with language. His poetry has been described as 'iron spikes sticking out of a blasted landscape' and I don't think he would have quoted it if he didn't like the description.While it is interesting to hear poets of this stature talk about their own work, the poet is ideally not their own best critic and it looked mildly alarming when he named his own three best books but it didn't turn out to be quite so self regarding from then on. Some self awareness is a good thing and his realization that his work is 'weird and unlovely' was reassuring.

Anybody with the slightest interest in poetry would be aware of George Herbert's Easter Wings. Well, yes and no. But that's the sort of level he works at even if I allow myself to dip below it occasionally. It is a fine and marvellous thing when the country's most doyen and eminent of poets can tell his assembled audience that 'nothing would drag him to a poetry reading', those most 'abysmal functions' and I can see that in a way but, on the other hand, one gets more from an hour in the presence of the poet than from several hours pouring over their books. Interestingly, after I have charted the general trajectory of most poets' careers as not reaching maturity until the age of 40, and then eventually fading or becoming repetitive sometime after 60, Prof. Hill's Collected Poems has grown exponentially in the last few years leading up to his 80th birthday. It is perhaps due to the rigour of form being able to impose itself on the chaos, where at least some of the chaos is dementia. But while apparently frail enough physically, there was little evidence of any dimming of acerbity, observance of the most difficult formal strictures and a non-curmudgeonly clarity of vision that can't help but pass as the driest of wit. This was not, as he pointed out, Poetry Please. Poetry plays oblique games with him.

But for all that, I haven't laughed as much or as satisfyingly at any other poetry reading. I've been equally thrilled and impressed and I've thought about several for a long time afterwards but none will have been so paradoxically 'laugh out loud' and the more impressive for it when the most serious and high-minded, one of the bleakest and spare, provides more genuine hilarity than those whose main object is to be comic and yet don't quite raise a laugh although you notice where the jokes were.

If young Hill were to attend a masterclass run by me I might even advise that his internal rhymes might in context look like affectation and if he wants to use rhyming forms then he could hide the rhymes more subtly as half rhymes so that the frugality and bareness of his 'vision' were not occluded by such simple effects. His music is that of deep and complex rhythms devoutly adhered to but it's a lot to ask. As he says, 'you try writing in these meters.'Fulfilling his hour with delightfully grumpy grace, he observed that we are run nowadays by a 'financial plutocracy' decorated by a small amount of aristocracy and democracy. Although one can't help but feel that he would be politically somewhere on the right, this is the preception that is beyond day to day politics and really ought to have wider currency and not need explanation from one of such austere dignity and dark, brooding solemnity.As if to provide some context or contrast, there was a reading afterwards by three young poets under the title Echoes of Geoffrey Hill in which the trace of any echo eluded me in three unprepossessing performances. Fine poets in their own milieu, I'm sure, but very forgettable. And then a half hour spent looking at the magazines in the Poetry Library made me reflect that the best thing that could happen to the poetry industry in this country would be a paper shortage. I don't think I saw a poem worthy of the shelf space. But the curmudgeonly spirit can only be properly exercised by those who have earned the right and my disdain is less worth having than Prof. Hill's. We will soon see how my credentials measure up in the next week or so if and when I review my signed copy of Clavics.

The Saturday Nap - Week Eight

There's no such thing as a bad or dull meeting at Cheltenham, the most spectacular sporting venue in the world. There's plenty of talent and interest to watch tomorrow but a couple of the likeliest stars are not going to be at backable prices.The Nicky Henderson-Barry Geraghty partnership had a couple of winners today and Grandouet, 3.05, is a horse that has shown plenty already and could have more to come. My main worry is whether at 4 years old he's quite as experienced or tough as Overturn or Menorah but the latter wasn't quite up to it in last year's Champion Hurdle when carrying my featival nap and although Overturn has been impressively resilient in putting together a hat-trick already this season, he was getting weight when probably going to get beat by Oscar Whisky a few weeks ago when our money stayed in the bookies' satchels. So, I've taken the 11/4 already and don't want to get off.

Jaroussky/Cencic - Duetti

Philippe Jaroussky,Max Emanuel Cencic,Les Arts Florrissants, Duetti (Virgin Classics)

Philippe Jaroussky's last CD, Opium, was a set of French songs and came, it has to be said, as a bit of a disappointment. Bought on the strength of the wonderful A Chloris, the rest of the set didn't match up to it. It joined that unfortunate list of records, or poetry books, bought on the promise of one piece that wasn't reproduced among the others.There's no such risk with a collection of baroque arias and cantatas. These are all by composers roughly contemporary with Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti being the closest to a household name; Bononconi and Marcello being best represented.With duets, if not necessarily guaranteeing twice the value of solo performance, it is generally going to involve call and answer, interwoven lines and harmonies. While Andreas Scholl might look and sound slightly more academic at times, Jaroussky and Cencic here are warmer, with fine clarity of tone and perhaps greater sensuality. If nothing's ever going to surpass Bowman and Chance in the Couperin Lecons de Tenebres for me, this in places creates similar effects and Les Arts Florissant in the continuo, violin and cello parts make more than a background contribution.While there are nimble, grand and spirited passages to show a wide range of feelings throughout, it's always going to be in the arias of love and estrangement that the most exquisite moments are going to come. Forlorn and fretful are the things that counter tenors do best. The Bononcini Chi d'amortra la catene, much of the Marcello Chiaro e limpido fonte and the cantata Veggio fille are those,

Say, god of hearts,

if there be any pain equal to mine

There never is, is there, if you're a lovelorn shepherd. But it rarely fails and doesn't here. Christmas has come early for counter tenor afficiandos.

View from the Boundary

I'm looking forward to seeing Geoffrey Hill in London on Sunday. The high priest of English poetry has not always been quite to my taste but recently I've had the opportunity to at least appreciate some of his poems and if I'm never going to be a complete devotee I do at least want to take advantage of this rare chance to share in the spare austerity of his point of view. The price of a drink on the South Bank is alarming for a provincial thirsty man and so if you recognize me there by the hat (not the pink one), before I have to get back to Victoria, please feel free to buy me an after show glass of beer.

This December outing to London replaces what I've done for the last two years which has been a day at the London Chess Classic, which can be watched from the comfort of one's own terminal here right now, http://www.livestream.com/LondonChessClassic . The story so far is early dominance by young Magnus while it is being suggested that my personal favourite personality, Anand, is being careful to show nothing that he might have prepared for his forthcoming world title defence against Boris Gelfand. But I do recommend some time spent with the commentators live from the venue if their dubious suggestions and meanderings might be the sort of entertainment you prefer to Strictly Come Dancing or Celebrity Ratings Grabber on the telly. Chess players seem so nice these days, accessible and media-friendly as the age seems to demand - it's been Levon Aronian today, World number three on his day off. Has it gone the same way with poets, too. Do we miss the madmen and ladies, the off-beat, unapproachable genius, the Fischer or Ezra Pound, that never had to explain itself so often in interviews and as casually approachable human beings but could hide in a reclusive mist of unexplaining hero status.

Somewhat less cerebrally, I've been reading John Francome's Back Hander for cheaper thrills. I notice that although the Greatest Jockey of All Time has his name on the front of the book, the copyright is shared with another, and apart from the inside knowledge of particular racetracks and what it's like to ride a racehorse, I'm not sure how much is Francome and how much his helpmate. While we hear that Alan Hollinghurst delivers a typescript that needs virtually no editor whereas Jefferey Archer provides a story written in capital letters in pencil on the back of a Corn Flakes packet and someone else makes a blockbuster out of those thin beginnings, the Francome method must lie somewhere in between. Even so, this opus seems to have a high body count, a sensational rather than tense approach to plot and doesn't seem as well done as what I remember of Dick Francis. But as long as it has horse racing in it, I don't mind. You could tell me a story of a trainer called Jack who has a horse called Dobbin, he runs it in a novice hurdle at Uttoxeter and it comes third and I'd be gripped.

We have had such stories here every Saturday if anybody has cared to follow the Saturday Nap and I'm pleased to say that Sizing Europe was a confident tip last weekend and won like one. It means that we have had four winners out of eight selections and now, with three weeks to run before ending on Boxing Day, one more winner will put us into clear blue profit. I'd imagine that if Bobs Worth runs in the three mile novice chase at Kempton at Christmas, that will be where we'll go for a big finish.

That will conclude that little series and I wonder if we can replace it with a series on My Whole Life in poetry, tracing my own mundane career as a poet from its earliest genesis in Infant School in Nottingham in the mid 1960's up to now. I hope it might provide a diverting little excursion into poetry as well as revisiting for the first time in decades some esoteric examples of poetry. It will begin in January, all being well. Don't forget to tune in for that.

The Saturday Nap Week Seven

Sizing Europe in the Tingle Creek, Sandown 3.05, is a confident pick tomorrow and I'm steaming in at 6/4.