View from the Boundary

There are few less amenable types of people than the disgruntled punter.

I know that there are one or two readers who are following the Saturday Nap, more out of casual interest than in the hope of making themselves rich, but I'm almost glad there aren't more than that. It won't help if I explain that, actually, you are in expert hands but it just hasn't gone quite right in picking one horse as the nap. It wouldn't prevent a hostile crowd from accosting me in the street if I explained that, actually, 8 out of my last 9 single win bets on horses have won, since last Thursday. In fact, it would probably make it worse.
But we will try to focus on Saturday and get it right. Rebecca Curtis has the great At Fisher's Cross entered at Wetherby. Let's hope that her recent litany of seconds and thirds become a win with the stable star. In the meantime, if you really want to know, and if you don't mind taking odds on, then the routine novice hurdle winner from a big stable in midweek tomorrow should be Dispour in the first at Sedgefield or I'll eat my hat.
That is the hat made out of pizza that I'll buy just in case.

--

Walking on Water only reached no.19 in Amazon's Free Poetry Download chart in its 5 days as a free kindle and so perhaps it is time to give up on being an overnight sensation after 35 years of having poems in print and return to my place in the underground. But Alan is now working for David Green (Books) and doing a wonderful job.
There is an inevitable tension now within the company between a natural marketing man and me who only really wants to write a poem once in a blue moon and then make the best of them available to anyone who wants to read them. But, don't worry, it is all about me, not him, and I can sack him whenever I feel like it even if it would be a foolish boss who fires a technical genius.

--

I had a great evening with Lou on Monday, playing the lesser known Velvet Underground albums as well as a couple he released under his own name later. I hadn't played them for years but could understand how at least R.E.M. could have been listed among the many bands that critics said were 'influenced' by the Velvets without John Cale. On the other hand, whichever dogsbody expert it was who turned up on the wireless to say that U2 were a beneficiary needs to be given 100 lines to write out. How did Lou ever equate to Bono.
It must be one of those failures of the liberal Humanities project in which no answer can ever be marked wrong if there are people let loose on the airwaves allowed to say that.
--

And so, my notes towards a shortlist for the very unprestigious and prizeless award of this website's Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection of the year must be nearly complete and ready for my discerning consideration. I have missed books in the past that would have at least made the shortlist although I don't think it has affected the choice of the eventual winner and so, if you know of a book of poems that I ought to read in the next few weeks then please let me know.
For obvious reasons, The Perfect Murder is inadmissable although in the same way that I'm sure parents like their own children more than they like other people's, I love it. If I hadn't written it, I'd love to meet the author.

How disappointed I would have been.

Colm Toibin - The Testament of Mary

Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary (Penguin)

The panel on the Booker Prize Preview Show spoke highly of how well-written, how impressive and, just as importantly for me, how short it was and so I ordered a copy.
I took a break from reading a much longer book late on Sunday afternoon and by early evening had finished it, not only because one could and because it might be best done that way but mainly because it was impossible to put down.
Colm Toibin maintains the spare, hard-eyed, insistent language of Mary with an economy that soon becomes hypnotic. She is sorrowful but undeceived by the events she reports of her son's later life, last days and death. She tells of being watched, being followed and of a political murder.
Her son has gathered some misfit friends and their long discussions, she can tell, are increasingly led by him. But she is aware of sinister intimations surrounding him.
The detached narrative of events become more passionate and desperate as the dangers become more apparent but she is powerless to prevent the inevitable. Escape is not an option until she has witnessed the grim crucifixion and all but his harrowing last moments. His family,
watched helplessly as their brother grew easily towards death in the same way as the source for a river, hidden under the earth, begins flowing and carries water across a plain to the sea. 
I can't see why it should be particularly controversial but there again I am not religious, not Catholic and no theologian. Thus, if there is some heresy in an account like this then perhaps it doesn't help that has been done so well. The stories in the gospels are compelling however much, or little, credence one is prepared to give them, written several years after the fact without much verification of detail (and apparently with several other accounts that didn't fit the early Christian church's version omitted) and Colm Toibin's words for Mary here are powerful in very much the same way.
She is hugely dignified, even glorious in her Stabat Mater here, tougher than 'dolorosa' would suggest, as she concludes,
I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say it was not worth it. It was not worth it.
Is that the world or the redemption that wasn't worth it. I don't think we need to ask.
I don't care whether it won the prize or not. By my very rough calculation, this might be less than 30 000 words long and a novel, I have seen it said, is at least 50 000. So where do categories begin and end. The prize brought it to my greater attention and it was two hours well spent reading it and so prizes, as far as that goes, are a useful thing. The book wouldn't necessarily benefit from being any longer. Toibin gave us it as he saw fit. And giving it a prize wouldn't make it a better book.

Lou Reed

We were only wondering when it was that we saw Lou Reed in Portsmouth Guildhall when we were in there on Thursday. Subsequent research found that it was 14/09/2000. Some idiot near us kept shouting Perfect Day so that perhaps I secretly hoped Lou would do a characteristically curmudgeonly thing and not play it but it was the second encore.
At the time, Portsmouth Guildhall was having a brief but ambitious spell that included gigs by Bob Dylan and The Who as well which are acts somewhat above their usual fare. Of those, it would always be Lou that I would want to see the most.
The famous Warhol banana LP The Velvet Underground and Nico is a favourite, a genuine favourite because of the music it contains rather than any critic's hipster acknowledgement of its 'influence'. It is surely better to be 'any good' than influential. It mixes the low-life, bohemian themes of sado-masochism, New York streets and dark self-indulgence with the rare beauty of the pharmaceutical daydream of Sunday Morning, and the Nico classics I'll Be Your Mirror and Femme Fatale.
Transformer was the commercial success in the early 70's that Bowie worked on but I'm not sure who was learning more from who in that symbiotic relationship and Bowie songs like Queen Bitch suggest that the Dame took a fair bit from not only Lou but the whole Warhol Factory milieu. Well, we know he did.
Lou Reed was one of those pop songwriters that could be realistically termed a 'poet' if any such cross reference were felt to be useful. With a recognizable world view, coming from an early career on a hit production line, modernist sensibility and a life that provided all he might have needed to reflect back the tawdry downside of urban style, gloss and glamour, his most memorable aside in the Portsmouth gig was, 'after the first kiss, it's downhill all the way'.

The Saturday Nap

It's a shame Handazan let the nap down last Saturday- I'm afraid he didn't look like the winner from a long way out- but the main story was always going to be The New One (pictured), a very big favourite with me, and he won every bit as well as could have been hoped and I added some 5/1 to the 10/1 I already had for the Champion Hurdle next March.
It has been a tidy little week with Pendra winning yesterday and Wonderful Charm today. These good novices from top stables in weekday races, a shade of odds on if you like, are the bread and butter of this, the best time of the year to set about putting money on horses. I only wish we could have had the nerve to unleash obscene sums on The New One and Wonderful Charm because confidence was enormous, defeat unthinkable and they won as routinely as they should have. But it is horse racing, you see, and things happen. The penury and disaster lying just around the next corner for the unwary gambler are a part of the louche glamour of it and so you don't just go whacking on unseemly amounts at odds on, you take great pleasure in seeing performances like The New One and you look forward to what might come about at Cheltenham next year.
But if I'm alright, Jack, then level stake followers of the nap so far are not and so we must set about remedying that unfortunate state of affairs.
One thing we could do is go for the 4/1 about Aidan O'Brien's standard issue entry for the Racing Post Trophy at Doncaster which this year is called Century. It is almost too good a price, really, and we will have to swerve it at the risk of some heartache by 4 o'clock tomorrow afternoon.
Shutthefrontdoor looks solid enough at Aintree where A.P. goes to ride for Jonjo, which partnership advertised their good form with winners at Carlisle yesterday but the exchanges are only showing 7/10 in a 4 horse race and we must do better than that.
The Paul Nicholls machine is moving smoothly into action and although Potters Cross would have won me money two weeks ago but for jumping badly at two of the last three hurdles and was marked down as one to back again, let's hope he doesn't quite get it right tomorrow either because Caesar Milan is the nap in the Chepstow 3.35

BSO's Pictures

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Vedernikov, Rachmanninov, Sibelius, Mussorgsky, Portsmouth Guildhall, October 24th.

The BSO's programme last night was titled Musical Pictures. We wondered what the Sibelius Violin Concerto was a picture of and I still haven't found an answer but it's never a bad thing to have a concerto and so we didn't mind.
Rachmanninov's Isle of the Dead broods quite benignly with its riff in the cellos and bass and elsewhere before reaching its climax. Its gloom isn't too sinister and it by no means reduces the composer's high standing in my regard, whose range goes from those lush piano concertos to the Russian Orthodox Vespers.
On a night dominated by Russians, I hope I wasn't taking a short cut by finding Sibelius at his most Russian-sounding in the concerto. There could have been traces of folk song in there that owed something to Finland's overbearing neighbour. Nikita Boriso-Glebsky was technically dazzling and perhaps at his best when delicacy and deftness were required but it took a while for the performance to gain authority or momentum. It finished well but I was surprised to find that for a second time in recent years it was the Sibelius piece in a concert that was the slight disappointment. That is not what one expects will happen.
I don't know if it was Nikita or me that felt more at home in his encore which was a movement from a Bach partita or sonata but it retrieved the situation and then some as one wondered if it was only one violin or a duet but the solo includes its own accompaniment when the bow is on the appropriate side of the strings to play the required notes. Brilliant.
Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was a teenage favourite of mine in both the piano version and Ravel's orchestration. Many of my generation would say Emerson, Lake & Palmer and I'm not too snooty to acknowledge that, too. It's just that I didn't repeatedly listen to that in those formative years. I generally preferred the piano version on the grounds that less is more but hearing the full orchestra from the third row made clear the difference between listening to its full range of sound textures in the flesh compared to a recording on a small cassette player. The brass were tremendous, but the woodwind were superb as well in their lively parts, the percussion is prominent, there are two harps, saxophone and everybody gets a turn. I hadn't realized quite what a good job Ravel had done on it.
Alexander Vedernikov is an entertainment in himself as conductor, at one moment leaning on the rail of the rostrum and waving the baton nonchalantly in the general direction of the orchestra but then apparently engaging in bad dancing like a maestro buffa, and next imperious in a bucolic pastiche of a Karajan or Klemperer. But he got a performance out of the BSO, who are a great orchestra anyway, and for only the second time in my life I added my own 'hurray' to the applause almost involuntarily. It is a monumental piece of writing and orchestration in a performance like that and, as we always do from these concerts, we went home in fine spirits.

Walking on Water kindle edition

Walking on Water, my booklet from 2006, is now available as a kindle on Amazon but hold on until tomorrow or the next day by which time it should be into its five days of being free to download.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Walking-Water-David-Green-ebook/dp/B00G05NTMK/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1382459538&sr=8-2&keywords=david+green+walking+on+water
This follows the success of The Perfect Murder which reached  number 13 in the Free Kindle Download Poetry chart over the weekend. This is the same chart position achieved by Because of You by Dexy's Midnight Runners, Crying by both Roy Orbison and k.d. lang and I'm Coming Out by Diana Ross.
It would have been nice to have a top ten hit but the excitement of being in a chart at all was plenty thrilling enough.
The possibility of adding further titles from the back catalogue is being investigated.

Thanks to all those who downloaded The Perfect Murder.

Henning Kraggerud - Munch Suite

Henning Kraggerud, Munch Suite (Simax)

This special limited edition CD comes with a set of postcard reproductions of the 15 Munch paintings that the music is based on in a black box the size of which suggests it contains cigars. It seems a little bit more than is required.
I had been expecting music composed by Kraggerud because as well as being the violinist in the Tchaikovsky concerto at the Proms a few years ago, he encored there with a composition of his own. That, plus the Brodsky Quartet, in their Wheel of Fortune show, had a Kraggerud piece as one of the options when we in Portsmouth got the Golijov.
So it wasn't quite what I was anticipating. I must pay more attention. However, the music is exactly how I thought it would be. 15 composers were invited to contribute a piece based on a different painting from an exhibition of Munch. The solo violin music on CD in my house goes straight from Bach to Ysaye and then Bartok, Ligeti and Kurtag. With these more recent composers, the trend has finally moved back slightly towards harmonics while retaining much of the fractured structure of the modernist period. For me, on the fourth hearing, they could all be by the same composer. But that is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's me, isn't it. I don't really see very far into the relationship between paint and sound. Of course, Munch's paintings are about trauma, anxiety and the sub-conscious but the paintings are varied in subject matter and the pieces could be exchanged around between them like horoscopes in cheap magazines for readers who are determined to see themselves in any vague prediction. Without concentrating on which picture it is one is listening to, the 15 items could merge into one long piece, which is again not the end of the world. The music does fit the paintings but perhaps no more so than lots of other music that wasn't written specifically for the purpose.
The one where I first made a connection of sorts was Moonlight over the Sea by Alissa Firsova but that is as much due to the note provided as any,
a distinctive glissando motif portays the moon's reflection at the centre of the painting...The theme is repeated pizzicato, as if mirrored in the water
So, okay, I can do it when I try but the music is engaging enough, the playing so sensitively delivered, that I'm enjoying it as much as I'm ever going to without going to those lengths.
The later pictures are the highlights. Two Women on the Shore are a golden haired girl in a white dress standing and looking out to see with a ghastly figure in dark clothes sitting at her side somehow attentive. Athanasia Tzanou's music provides a commentary but any of the other shimmering, desolate, spare compositions would have done it equally well.
Munch's figures are by turns grim, staring blankly, faceless or looking away from us. The music has passages of lyricism in places but none that last long enough to let us think we have ever escaped the insecurities and neuroses that lurk never far below the surface. We finish as serenely as can be allowed with Laurent Petitgirard's Trees on the Beach.
It lasts for an hour and it is an hour well spent but possibly not always for the reasons intended.

The Saturday Nap

There's a choice of top class flat or very good jumping racing tomorrow, at Ascot and Cheltenham, but my main interest will be at Kempton on Sunday where The New One makes his seasonal reappearance. With only Rock On Ruby to beat there by the looks of it, though, we can't expect much of a price. I'm sure he will win and will be very disappointed if he doesn't but we have to look at Saturday for something more adventurous.
There are a number of names that suggest themselves, each of which face obvious dangers. Nicholls' Dark Lover in the 5.00 at Cheltenham is tempting but I risk making a long term enemy of Balder Succes who won nicely at Chepstow last week. Lady Cecil's Hot Snap in the mares race at Ascot is 5/1, Charlie Longsdon's Vulcanite is 4/1 favourite in the handicap chase at Cheltenham and Cirrus des Aigles looked too good to be true for a 7 year old last time.
But you have to be taking something on to win money so I will take on Nicholls' Sametegal with Handazan in the 3.10 at Cheltenham.

The Perfect Murder Kindle Edition

David Green (Books) strides confidently into the digital age with the issue of The Perfect Murder in a kindle edition. It will be free to download from tomorrow- 17th October- for five days. I'm sorry but the facility doesn't allow any more than that. http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FX8XVVY/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=B00FX8XVVY&linkCode=as2&tag=wwwalandacouk-21
Walking on Water will follow in the same format later so that you can read The Cathedrals of Liverpool in convenient digital form wherever you go.
Have I got a kindle?
No, I haven't.

August Kleinzahler - The Hotel Oneira

August Kleinzahler, The Hotel Oneira (Farrar, Staruss and Giroux)

When Thom Gunn died ten years ago I was left no longer knowing who my favourite living poet was. I never really got around to picking one, either. Possibly it was because there were a number of differently but equally well- qualified candidates for the post but more likely because in middle age it is less essential to have favourite football teams, pop singers, colours, drinks or poets to help you identify who you think you are. However, August Kleinzahler was one of the main contenders for the honour had I needed to award it.
The Hotel Oneira retains all the qualities that made him such an idol and possibly, even at the age of 64, is it, enhances them. All the old reference points are in again - the virtuoso, bravura performance using a full range of language from the highly erudite, through exotic names to a demotic register that makes us feel spoken to by someone familiar. The book is prefaced by a quote from Kenneth Cox that refers us beyond the 'play of words' to the 'taste' of language and that is what Kleinzahler takes as a manifesto.
Perhaps as the years go by, he is less muscular, there is a little less swagger and machismo. There is still the melancholy, the elegiac longing, a rapture in a sense of loss and there is still tremendous energy in places but I wonder if it is paced a little more steadily now. We still hear about the aeroplanes overhead coming in to land, the state of the ball game, flowers fading, the sense of the river nearby as well as the jazz clubs and personalities and Chinese culture. Not much has diminished. In fact, it might even be the better for it. The vagabond spirit is perhaps slowing a little and relishing the experience all the more.
Closing it Down on the Palisades recalls a prevoius poem, Gray Light in May, except that the two parts of it are set in September and October but its regret at nothing more particular perhaps than the passing of time, is the same. The title poem is another return - not much happens, in fact he says it is a story he chooses not to know but, good grief, here is a description of heavy goods being moved in the night,

Last night, what at first looked like a giant coelacanth
strapped to a flatbed rattled slowly past,
but it was merely the enfoldings of a tarp catching the streetlight.

Summer Journal is ten and a half pages of mainly short entries, a genre I usually harbour doubts about, but here we get,

The vast, bruise-coloured fogbank
sitting out there,
spread across the horizon like some dreadful prophecy
waiting to blow in.

Time and again, it's good and yet you know it would be better to hear Kleinzahler reading it. He is one of the most compelling readers of his own work among contemporary poets and I really should be finding a CD of him doing it.
There is a pastiche of a Roman satirist, possibly Juvenal, in Epistle XXXIX but it would appear that Thomas Appletree, the Edgiock weather diarist, was real and Kleinzahler's version of him is not fictional. The Rapture of Vachel Lindsay is a baroque extravaganza perhaps loosely on American history. But we are best off on recognizable ground with A Wine Tale, about an old caretaker,

of no particular ambition, wit or aptitude,
whose destiny has been to lift things up, clean them off,
and put them back down again where they belong
in Paradise?

And I notice that Kleinzahler has been listening to Heinrich Biber, mentioning his name once, the Rosary Sonatas specifically and a passacaglia. And so one instinctively knows he must be right. I could see why he might be compared with John Ashbery for his playful associative streams of thought but I've never seen it done and I wouldn't want to do it myself. And I did once see the most inane of associations with Billy Collins but that was made by a scurrilous web forum contributor who was trying but failing to be provocative, as usual. Kleinzahler is, as far as I can see, of his own type and inimitable, a trace of beat poet with his own idiosyncratic mass of allusions and orientations.
If I ever need to say who my favourite living poet is, it will be him.

Kathryn Simmonds - The Visitations

Kathryn Simmonds, The Visitations (Seren)

I have been looking forward to this book, Kathryn Simmonds' second book of poems, ever since reading her first. It seemed to me that her poems were pitched at exactly the right level between seriousness and lightness, formality and informality and well up towards the accessible end of the accessible/inaccesible scale.
These poems are relaxed more than anything else, which is not to say careless or slapdash. Their attitudes and structures could have been the result of long and painstaking work. But the villanelle, The Great Divide, doesn't insist on the recurrence of two whole lines throughout but varies them and To her Unconscious suitably brings back phrases or half-lines that make its form a cousin of the sestina. Perhaps it was going to be one once but I doubt it since Simmods' forms are not usually as fixed or rigorous as that although they are there. And that is a good thing.
What is best about her work is the facility for phrase-making that keeps them coming vividly and captivatingly throughout.
                                        the giant weed plant
waves to me like fallen royalty.

And there is the brilliant, shuffled picture book of dream.

Although, of course, one can admire poems for technical excellence or admirable achievements like these without necessarily sympathizing with what they say, I'm sure it is unavoidable that one's favourites are those that express something one finds common ground with or does something one approves of. 'Favourite' is usually preferable to 'best' and they are by no means always the same thing.

In Apocryphal, there is a world-weary acceptance of the ordinary in the face of events that are not only apocryphal but majorly apocalyptic, but

The end of time, ah yes, it slips the mind,
there's only so much wisdom can be flung at it. Only so many quips.
Here it comes
                in is ten-league boots
                                        trampling all over our honorary degrees.

I'm not really a big fan of this way of spreading lines across a page like that any more but it doesn't matter, there is a lot in the off-hand attitude to the ultimate moment and not the least of it is contained in the 'honorary degrees' which are so much vainglorious pomp.
There are more immediate concerns and if Kathryn Simmonds is somehow lapsed in her religious observance - and Sunday Morning reports that she gets more done now she's stopped praying - then it is to the benefit of a more domestic way of life in which larger questions will have to look after themselves,
Oh God, we should amend our lives,
all of us who sleep in rented beds and deafen
at the mention of a pension plan;
all of us who've lived our best days
in the imagination's potting shed.

If any one thing establishes a divide between poems by men and those by women in the old question, it must be that nearly all poems about childbirth and babies are written by women and it isn't a subject I'm entirely taken up by but whereas others have failed to convince me, Julia Copus did a couple of years ago and Kathryn is good on the subject here, too, and so it can be a matter of poetry over subject matter. But Kathryn's section of poems here on the 'life coach' make me wonder if those are the poems that come over better at a live reading.
But this has been a book worth waiting for, for Simmonds' grounded common sense, acknowledgement of a sort of empirical limit of where to stop, as in the jolly, Audenesque song, Experience,

Give up what is lost if you can't fish it back
Just keep walking. And that's all I know, my dear. 

The Saturday Nap

We were lucky last week that Novellist was unfit to run in the Arc because it's very doubtful that he would have beaten Treve.
So, in the hopes that a reprieve gives us a second chance at getting off to a winning start, I'm going with trainer form and the red-hot Charlie Longsdon whose Killala Quay attempts to defy a penalty at Chepstow, 3.00, where we might get 6/4 although there are no prices up yet.

Breakfast with Lucian

Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian (Jonathan Cape)

I didn't know who Geordie Greig was until opening this book while the radio mentioned his name in relation to the recent regrettable conduct of the Mail regarding Ralph Milliband. I don't know what part Mr. Greig played in that but one doesn't imagine he was on the side of the angels. However, it doesn't have much bearing on his authorship of this book because at the level of the life and art of Lucian Freud we are beyond morality and into an amoral, purely aesthetic range of values.
Greig was one of a select coterie invited to take breakfast with Lucian Freud regularly over many years and this is a memoir of those times. It becomes a biography of sorts of a painter whose life isn't done any justice by words like 'extraordinary'.
It might not have been so, though, as an intervention from the highest parts of government made his family's escape from Germany possible with only two weeks to spare in 1939.
 After that, any number of stories that would stand on their own as remarkable join in concert to form a life story that makes for a gripping read with Lucian at the centre of it, apparently charismatic, more than incorrigible, cruel and relentless in his appetites. Officially recognized as the father of 14 children, two of them by a wife, other estimates reach up to 40. But, even though his affairs and encounters, nearly all of which were heterosexual, were countless and with the choicest of upper class women,
he did say that one man he would like to go to bed with was Lester Piggott!

He might have been a jockey himself at one time and slept with horses at school but his gambling habit was of similar proportions to his prolific sex life and devotion to painting. He's right when he says the attraction of gambling diminishes when one is so rich it doesn't matter if one loses but it wasn't always thus. On making an agreement with yet another art dealer, part of it involves the dealer settling a debt with a bookmaker. The dealer goes off to meet The Big Man for lunch thinking that the debt might be as much as a hundred grand but finds that it is 2.7 million.

Freud's paintings are obviously unblinkingly challenging, the product of obsessive dedication and a particular, unromantic view of the world but they aren't the sort of thing that everyone would want on their wall to look at. He seems the same in life, attracting unquestioning loyalty and love from friends, lovers and admirers but with a charm that is hard to appreciate seen through these stories alone. His treatment of girlfriends, asssociates and his children can be gracious but can equally be cold and worse than that. Random acts of violence were not uncommon. He didn't speak to his brother, Clement, for forty years. Which nonetheless makes for a book that one can't wait to get back to, that continues to provide astonishing anecdotes, possibly some insight but, most of all, ends all to soon.

South 48

It goes without saying that South's cover photograph by Brent Jones is another masterpiece. They would make a fine book on their own and possibly have already.
South 48 includes my own The Book Club Murder as a timely promotional single from the new booklet. It shares a page with an excellent snail poem by my Portsmouth compatriot, Pauline Hawkesworth. Elsewhere there are several pieces to be enjoyed but few more so than the poems by Tony Tanner published as a tribute after his death earlier this year. Two poems on cricket represent his obvious appreciation of the quirky English ritual.
Erato's column raises the question of the prose poem having avoided the larger question of what is a poem at all. I was ready to write my own piece to add to his before finding that he has nailed it for himself,
They are prose because the line break makes no contribution to the structure.

and so although I would normally accept that anything that the author says is a poem is one, the only definition I have is that a poem is 'a piece of writing in which the author and not the typesetter decides where the lines end', and I think he has this right.
What one might say is that Erato doesn't get as much space as he might have liked to explain his idea (for some reason I'm assuming Erato is male; he sounds like it) and the reviews in South are limited to 300 words which is rarely enough. It is understandable that they want to devote as much space as possible to the poems and a questionnaire is included to gauge what subscribers think. So, good luck to them. They are trying to get it right. 500 words reviews and a longer opinion piece would only mean sacrificing a few poems.
As ever in a magazine of this type, there are some poems that are trying too hard. Good poetry doesn't always have to be straining for effect and the poet can put in a big effort that is slightly misdirected only to achieve diminished returns. But for the most part this is a good issue and, having opened with a measured, quiet poem by Louise Warren, Laura Hume and Oxana Poberejnaia are two that stand out.
And so South progresses towards its half century, this time next year, in good form,  

The Saturday Nap

Okay, let's get it on.
I said last week I didn't know whether to start this run up to Boxing Day, trying to pick our way through some weekend racing, this week or next but since there is a genuine, good priced prospect this weekend, I'm going to start now.
It breaks nearly all of the rules. It is not a Saturday nap because it runs on Sunday, it is not a novice hurdler or even a jumper, I don't think I've backed a winner for a month and there are at least three or four horses in opposition to be genuinely afraid of. But I might be able to turn all that around in one brave plunge.
Some of the big bookmakers reported support for Novellist in the Arc de Triomphe yesterday and that only confirmed what I was already thinking. It looks like a wide open race without being the classiest renewal ever. I'd like to see The Fugue run well but it would be expecting a lot for her to actually win; Leading Light could possibly justify his buying himself in at a late stage if he takes another step forward and one would have taken 16/1 about Al Kazeem in the summer but we assume he is 'over the top' and unlikely to return to his best at this stage of the season. But Orfevre and Treve seem to have doubts about them that make them worth taking on when other firms have shortened Novellist's price but Paddy Power were still laying 5/1 a few minutes ago. I'm happy with that and, in the hopes of no hard luck story in running- because there often are some in this race, I'm thinking we might get off to a cracking start.