Roddy Lumsden - Not All Honey

Roddy Lumsden, Not All Honey (Bloodaxe)

Roddy Lumsden books are always substantial both in length and the density of language in them. This is 100 pages of poems not at all padded out with extended discourse, recondite constructions or empty rhetoric. Every word is thought out, each poem is pared to its barest and yet still somehow baroque. It's not so much that he is prolific but bountiful, apparently a mind ever alert to the possibility of a poem and it helps if that mind is also capable of winning Round Britain Quiz. 
Advice to poets is often 'make it new', 're-invent the language' and 'surprise the reader'. But if you've been surprised by the last 49 poems you have read, is it still a surprise to be surprised by the 50th. However, for all the legions of poets that are said to be 'different' and inventive in a new way but aren't really, Roddy Lumsden is the one who has always done it, is doing it and likely to keep doing it. And I have long been an admirer, still am and am likely to remain so.
As well as the notes at the end, there is a glossary of nearly two and a half pages, usefully explaining such words as 'amygdala', 'fantigue', 'pulegone' and 'stillicidal', all of which would be of use to a question setter on Call My Bluff and only a couple of which I might have known. But the linguistic ingenuity of the poems is not about the use of an esoteric lexicon. The words are enjoyed for what they are but only in the much more important context of the syntax, progress and process of the lines as they produce their delicate, explorative music. There is much more satisfaction to be had from the way that Mozart or Bach inundate the ear with ideas within a composition than those who indulge themselves with 'purer' forms of expression and Lumsden is somehow the most natural talent of his generation at doing extraordinary things in ordinary circumstances.
Women in Paintings is here, officially the best new poem I saw in 2013, and is a case in point. Then, I had thought Jill was the lady in Hockney's Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, but that is Celia Birtwell and her frock is not really steel blue. It is somebody else entirely, of course, and I'm glad of the note. If only it could have told us exactly which Corot painting he is talking about as well. But it is all in the way the gentle beauty of the 'lilac twister of a sunstreak' or the 'cape of dark around the head of an ecstatic saint' are appreciated against the undertone of vague menace in the 'clone', 'captive', 'artful lie' and 'loath core of our will'. We might be apprehensive about taking the italicized last line as a guarantee of comfort but we are comforted by art if not by life.
And perhaps would not want to be. Some of the poems have more immediate and recognizable themes than others. Towns You Only Pass Through, one might guess, could have been suggested by touring America a few years ago but passes through Northampton as well, among other English places, 'each with its microcosm of neverness', and is what Sean O'Brien might describe if he saw the grim downside with a bit more ready amazement. Whereas the poems from The Bells of Hope, 51 poems in one of Lumsden's more recently invented poetic forms, are more abstract, like small piano pieces, which were written in a 'year when, for the only time in my life, I found myself living alone'. (Oh, you poor thing, is that all you ever got). But their sadness and, is it, regret is achieved at tangents, like, in The Oratorio,
                                                     the sacred songs

of dimday grainsmen slow crossing meadows home,

which I'm sure only exchanges Gray's herdsmen for arable farmers and echoes back through the curfew. But not as much as the succinct hommage to Larkin in Lines on a Young Lady's Facebook Album. And I wonder whether it will be 'photograph' or 'Facebook' that is more likely to need a footnote in the Oxford Book of English Verse of the C23rd.
The two main sections of the book are entitled Hope versus Doubt and Doubt versus Hope, like a home and away fixture and for Roddy, as it should, it goes to penalties in The Bells of Hope where doubt prevails this time but not without hope having given a good account of itself. Of course it's not all honey but some of it still is. I saw it said once that you can only be an optimist if you're not very bright but that is not to say that the encounter can't be exhilarating.
There is plenty more to come out of this book and with Burnside, Longley, Bryce and Harsent to compare it to before, thankfully, Rosemary Tonks does not count as a book of new poems, we suddenly have quite a contest to worry about for the best collection of this year.
 

National Poetry Day in Portsmouth line up

As I understand it,

National Poetry Day 

with 

Portsmouth Poetry Society 

 

Buckland Community Centre, Malins Road, Portsmouth

         Thursday, October 2nd, gather from 7 pm for 7.30 reading

        
         Introduction by Denise Bennett 

Maggie Sawkins

David Green

Cliff Blake, poems read by John Dean

Doris Bealing

Denise Bennett

John Dean 

Interval

Bookstall and refreshments,

20 minutes. 

Maggie Sawkins

Ros Griffiths

Pauline Hawkesworth

Joss

Helen Larham

Diana McCormack

Rosemary Penny

Sheila Wells reading poem by Brian Wells

Stephen Fry - More Fool Me

Stephen Fry, More Fool Me (Michael Joseph)

There might not be so many places that mention Maggi Hambling and Danny Baker in such short a space. This website is one where both are celebrated. The great painter is mentioned in a number of diary entries here, as she works on an oil painting and charcoal drawings of her subject, and Danny is glimpsed in one of the many lists of celebrity good time people in London in the 1990's.
But, for twenty five pounds, cover price, it has to be said you are paying for a fair expanse of material that was covered in The Fry Chronicles which in turn had markings in it to indicate which bits had been in Moab is My Washpot. And the last and longest section is of diary entries that tend to detail golf performances, number of words done on the novel, The Hippopotamus, who he played poker with at the Groucho Club and how much cocaine he took. It certainly is impressive how much work Stephen was doing while constantly having a good time but one gets the feeling with this book, it is a bit thrown together.
Not that it is ever much less than entertaining. We do get more of Stephen's self-criticism of what an 'arse' he is, how lucky and privileged he is to be able to feel such guilt at such luck and privilege. And, having provided text book advice for the novice cocaine addict, he descries and warns against the drug while admitting that it made him feel wonderful.
The Groucho Club with Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Blur and the 1990's Brit generation are trashily fascinating without being too uplifting and the rise to really quite some exalted hangouts and friendships is meteoric and almost, it appears, by osmosis and it is another book readily raced through as a priority as if nothing else mattered. But, of course, such fame and fortune are due to an immense talent and the work rate is phenomenal.
You can come back from attending official duties at Dundee University, pop straight over to do yet another commercial voice-over, meet up to write with Hugh Laurie in the afternoon before setting off to an opera or film premiere in the evening and then dinner or the club until the early hours of the next day. I never understand how anybody has time to write a diary each and every night but Stephen is something else. If everything else is allowable, and one is never in any doubt that he is an all round fine man, the one thing you really don't want to have paid good money for is the endless variations on the way he signs off the diary each night. Although, having just flicked through to check for some, there's not as many of them as it seemed. How very odd.

The Sixteen - Jephtha

Handel, Jephtha, The Sixteen and soloists/Harry Christophers (Coro)

The Sixteen, alongside the Tallis Scholars, are the leaders in Renaissance polyphony. Both venture outside of that area of expertise sometimes. The Tallis Scholars perform some C20th music, for example, but I don't imagine that they do Handel very often. Here, of course, it is more about the soloists, some of who have specialist baroque CV's while others have wider opera repertoire.
Jephtha's story begins with a bargain struck with God that in exchange for victory in battle over the Ammonites, he will sacrifice the first person who comes out of his house to greet him when he returns home. Unfortunately, that turns out to be his only daughter, Iphis, which causes some consternation. But Handel and his librettist alter the Bible story so that a forgiving God says the sacrifice will not be necessary but she spends her life in devotion to God, a perpetual virgin, which is not much use to her betrothed but otherwise deemed a satisfactory solution.
Jephtha was Handel's last oratorio, written with some apparent difficulty with failing eyesight, and is noticeably more subdued than Messiah, without quite so much show and obvious flamboyance but there is still plenty of brio, sumptuous melancholy and glorious set pieces in it.
The soloists are all superb- James Gilchrist in the title role, Sophie Bevan and Grace Davidson, the sopranos and Susan Bickley the mezzo but the first time I heard Robin Blaze, counter-tenor, as Hamor, the suitor, was inevitably when I re-checked the excellent booklet.
Another thing that emerged is what a fine poet the librettist, Thomas Morell, is. Handel and Charles Jennens, author of the Messiah text, perhaps had their differences, as did many with Handel but Jennens had his say, too.
Iphis, resigned to her presumed fate, sings,
Farewell, ye limpid springs and floods,
Ye flow'ry meads and mazy woods;
Farewell, thou busy world, where reign
Short hours of joy and years of pain.

and, happily, the amount of recitative seems to diminish from one disc, or Act, to the next because, however essential to the plot in the theatre, one feels a bit of an idiot listening to too much speil in among the singing on a record at home.
The highlights are the quartet in Act 2 and the quintet as we reach the finale, giving opportunities for the exchange of musical themes between soloists, gentler here perhaps than in Rinaldo but nonetheless a great pleasure.
It is mature Handel, in theme as well as perhaps music, but that is spritely enough for most days and a happy ending is ensured, with Jephtha all the wiser for his unwise bargain with folly.

David Harsent - Fire Songs

David Harsent, Fire Songs (Faber)

David Harsent's Night was a masterpiece of dislocation, corruption and, mainly, gin. This next collection, if anything, has got darker.
Fire; a song for Mistress Askew opens the set maghnificently, but horribly. It is an unremitting account of the burning of, we assume, one accused of witchcraft,
Some stood....
close enough to hear the shrivel-hiss
of burning hair, to see her sag and slump, to witness
the pucker and slide of her skin, the blister-rash on her eyeballs.

One could begin to wonder whether it doesn't become a bit gratuitous were it not so well done. The only solace seems to be that 'in the fire lies your salvation, Anne'.
If students are still encouraged to identify semantic fields then they will not struggle to list such fire-related waste words as 'scorched', 'ash', 'charred' and the cumulative effect they have of this world as blackened debris. There is a lot of burning in these extended poems, many acknowledged as commissions, but there are other aspects of deadening, dead senses, places beyond human existence or extinction. Another semantic field might be identified around 'ghosts' and 'dreams' which recur often, and 'sleep', 'blindness' and 'silence'.
The poems other than the fiery ones are perhaps the most successful.
Bowland Beth laments the killing of a hen harrier which, in the note, it says, 'is on the verge of extinction in England thanks to systematic, gleeful, illegal persecution' so we can be reassured of where Harsent stands on the issue. She is celebrated,
That her only dream was flight forgotten
moment by moment as she dreamed it

before the economical but harrowing lines on her being shot.
Icefield is the massive, slow movement of Antarctic 'ice over ice, of white over white / and beauty in absences', a colossal abnegation in nature, whereas Trickster Christ with 'the stench of the grave still on him' is a dubious miracle worker returned from the dead, not really of this world but still feeling a 'jolt' and his hand in the dip of Mary's back is 'surely the start' of something really quite earthly.
The Rat poems can't help but bring to mind Crow with their disgust and will to survive but it is in Effaced that there might be a bit more to it all than a further virtuoso run through the macabre dungeon of the imagination. It concerns Dorothy Wordsworth and the 'heavily deleted' account in her journal of how she wore the ring her brother's wife was going to wear on the day before their wedding,
widowed without being wed, feeding the fire, if you want to, with
    reams

of work half-done and left to grow in silence, that precious stack
curling and catching- last love, last light- as you burn whatever
    rhymes.

And so perhaps really the poems are about the removal or denial of identity, sometimes entering into worlds that are not this one, on the edge between them, or simply oblivion. It takes the poems in Night that stage beyond the rather more benign ghosts we met there. It is a dark vision but one that persuades us of its likelihood.
    

Lunchtime Live, David Price

David Price (organ), Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 25th.

Portsmouth Cathedral's own David Price, organist and Master of the Choristers, had a home fixture as he played this week's lunchtime set on his own patch.
Couperin's Messe pour les Couvents was a lively and lovely opener but de Bruhns Praeludium and Fugue was more of a challenge to the listener.
Three C18th Voluntaries began with an almost funereal passage by Boyce, not quite what his symphonies lead us to expect from him, but the organ made fine, delicate sounds in Greene and Stanley in pieces very enjoyable in their intricacy and development.
But the highlight was possibly the Franck Praeludium, sounding more modern than his dates suggest but then again, his dates are earlier than I thought. In two parts, the low, continuous note is embellished with attractive motifs over the top, providing a great accompaniment to the way sunlight put extraordinary colours onto the wals at an angle from the stained-glass windows.
I could probably survive without Walton's Suite for Richard III but the Festival Toccata by Fletcher (1879-1932) is a rousing finale, one that I might have heard there previously, doing all that Reginald Dixon might have done and more and demonstrating the range and power of Portsmouth's set of pipes.

Continuum Lunchtime Concert, Chichester

Continuum, Chichester Cathedral, Sept 23rd.

I was surprised to read Paul Morley in The Observer last week announcing that classical music is 'cutting edge' and pop music is dull and derivative. I wasn't surprised by the point of view, some of our generation have been aware of that for 20 or 30 years, but it must have been a week short of items of interest to give quite so much space to the fact that the penny has dropped with Paul Morley.
Chichester Catheral was packed for its lunchtime concert of baroque chamber music today. Not all of the audience would have been familiar with Paul Morley's writing, for sure, as, approaching 55, I was easily among the younger quartile of them but it was lunchtime and term time. But what better evidence is there for our claim to being a civilized country that weekday lunchtime concerts are held in cathedrals up and down the land.
It's just that I thought it would go without saying that Johann Joachim Quantz (1697-1773) was of more interest than the tired posturings of Kasabian. To be a bit fairer to Morley, he means mostly Berio and Stockhausen but there was always Faust, Can and Henry Cow.
I for my part become more and more devoted to the baroque and am disappointed if the radio serves up too much Brahms, Schumann or Prokofiev, fine composers though they are. I like to think I can say that the French baroque is softer and more elegant, the Italian of Vivaldi and Corelli inevitably more sunlit, the German more robust and the English probably learnt from the others but that's stereotyping for you. Here Bach was in a French-sounding mood and then it was Couperin, Duport and Rameau.
The architecture of Chichester Cathedral might not lend itself to such delicate timbres as flute, cello and harpsichord. The musicians - Elizabeth Walker, Christopher Poffley and Michael Overbury- come with fine pedigrees, having played with John Eliot Gardiner, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and such like but the high ceiling and long, narrow space made me wonder, from my place reasonably near the front, quite how good the silvery tinkle of the harpsichord and the soft baroque flute would be appreciated at the back.
The Quantz Sonata in G Minor was perhaps the highlight even if one's ears hadn't quite adjusted to the sound early on. The cello, as is often the case for me, was the part to follow, the sensible structure, the astute phrasing. The harpsichord sprinkles its starlight and the flute floats expressively but the cello speaks warmly and with authority.
The Bach Sonata BWV 1032 demands, or seems to demand, some breathing technique from the flute as it spreads the melody over some long, lingering notes. It might not be Bach's most memorable music but the fact that there is as much as there is for flute, not very often heard, gives an idea of the great man's output.
The Couperin L' apotheose de Corelli is presumably making some aesthetic point but the Duport Etude in D, a little later than the other pieces here, was further evidence if it were needed beyond the Bach Suites that a cello is fine on its own, stately, sonorous and likely to be worthy of further investigation. And the ensemble ended with a lively little set by Rameau, from who we seem to be hearing a lot in recent weeks and no bad thing it is either.
By the end, one's ears were attuned to the acoustic but precious few would have had much of a view of anyone but the standing flautist. The popularity of these concerts is hardly the building's fault and its architects might not have envisaged this C21st use of their building when all they intended was somewhere to put a tomb for Philip Larkin to write about and another place for Chagall to put one of his stained glass windows but, if you do go, it is worth turning up a good half half or more before the start to make sure you get a good seat. But at the price, which is entirely down to you at the retiring collection, it is a beautiful thing.

Paris in the Autumn

One of the collateral benefits of the website is the occasional e-mail received. And a pleasant surprise was one such from Angela Fisher, who is in Paris. She attached a photograph and I wondered if I might feature it here and she kindly agreed and sent another.
As you can see, they have a certain Parisian charm about them.

PPS on National Poetry Day - CHANGE OF VENUE

It was panic stations at Portsmouth Poetry Society as we find we have to change venues with only 12 days to go.
Kate Bush didn't have this trouble.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

NATIONAL POETRY DAY 

with 

PORTSMOUTH POETRY SOCIETY 

Special Guest - Maggie Sawkins

Winner of the Ted Hughes Award 2014

 

to launch Calliope, a new booklet of poems from Portsmouth 

Thursday, October 2nd, gather from 7 pm for 7.30 reading

 

CHANGE OF VENUE

now at

Buckland Community Centre
Malins Road, Buckland, Portsmouth
PO2 7BL 

Admission Free 

Calliope £3.50 

Refreshments 

A retiring collection will be held for  St. John Ambulance.

Such a Parcel of Rogues

I don't know if this is a good song to listen to today, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLufwtSZiIs

It is a tremendous piece of music and that is all I care about.

The campaign brought out all the worst in politicians, which admittedly is not a difficult thing to do. But the highlight for me was when a caller to Radio 5 said that Alex Salmond had the charisma of a snake.

I'm sure that is unkind. Personally, I did used to like him. But the depths to which the campaign descended seemed to make it almost fair game. But, if that, then what about the charisma of one like John Redwood.

And, given all of that, they still might get a turnout of 80% and so perhaps the collateral benefit is that it has made folk take a political point of view. And, for all we know, that might be a good thing.

Re-read, kindle edition

No, don't click to look inside. This is just a picture. But by all means go to Amazon here, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Re-read-Selected-Poems-David-Green-ebook/dp/B00NMOMFF4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1410992538&sr=1-1&keywords=david+green+re-read

But please don't pay money to download it now when it will be free to download from Sept 30th, for five days, so that we can see where we get to in the Amazon Free Poetry Kindle Charts. You never know, we might make the Top 10 this time. It makes me feel like David Cassidy, being in the charts.

My Technical Dept. readily sprang into action once I suggested we could put more of the back catalogue into kindle editions.
These poems are by now 10 years old and more, going back to the late 1970's, just about. But they still read very well to me, probably still represent the right choice of 29 poems to represent the best of my poems to the age of 45 and now I have finally found a place to put that lost child, the poem This, which never found a place until it became the bonus poem in this edition.
I'm very pleased with this new format, taking on board suggestions from my professional team, like a cover illustration and the vainglorious use of a quotation from a review as blurb.
I won't mention the reviewer's name here but I do still owe them a drink for such a sympathetic reading of the book all those years ago and if I do ever meet them, the G&T's are on me.

Grace Darling

I was relieved of the Rummage Cup, the trophy for the winner of Portsmouth Poetry Society's annual competition this evening.
But I can now reveal my poem, a playful little thing on the theme of 'reluctant heroine'.
I don't know if the rhyme scheme has been used before. I haven't seen it but that doesn't mean it hasn't been used. But, if it hasn't, perhaps I can claim it and think of a name for the form later.

Grace Darling 

Lindisfarne, 1997 

She rescued people from Forfarshire, the leaflet said.

I didn’t realize Forfarshire was that bad, I said. 

I like to think I’m a great comedian.

I am the world’s worst bad comedian. 

I had to think of a reluctant heroine

And so googled ‘reluctant heroine’, 

For I had already thought of Grace Darling

And so was pleased it found me Grace Darling. 

It needs be that I write some poetry

About her, then, some poetry 

About the lashing waves, the raging violence

Of the sea. The savage violence 

That the young girl took upon herself,

With so little thought for herself, 

To challenge with her selfless bravery,

Apparently the sort of bravery 

Not all of us would have. Not me.

I’d be very reluctant, me. 

But she became folk lore, history,

A part of local history 

Recorded for us tourists on a leaflet

That I mis-read. A badly-written leaflet, 

It must have been, you see,

Because now I look her up I understand. I see 

It meant she rescued them from the SS Forfarshire,

Which was a boat and not, in fact, from Forfarshire.

Colette Bryce - The Whole & Rain-domed Universe

Colette Bryce, The Whole & Rain-domed Universe (Picador)

Rather than have lines running over line-endings, Picador have acommodated Colette Bryce's long lines by producing a book wider than usual. What a good idea. It allows the poems to be as written on the page and not unsatisfactorily folded. It makes a book of non-standard dimensions which is also a good thing when formats and lay-outs can become a little bit orthodox.
There is no great renewal of poetics in Colette Bryce. She quietly and impressively gets on with the job, offering the reader her poems rather than expecting them to do the work. One is grateful to see the relatively simple, but never facile, things done well. It is sensible and sensitive rather than highbrow or high-minded. There is a great deal to like about this new collection, as much as there was to like about her previous ones.
The title comes from the thematically central poem, Derry, which is a long autobiographical piece about her childhood in a large Catholic family, in an atmosphere of religion, the evidence of violence and an inevitable feeling of some oppression.
                            Gerry Adams' mouth
was out of synch in the goldfish bowl
     of the TV screen, our dubious link

with the world.

Colette's sisters 'upped and crossed the water' one by one, as she was to do herself, but this poem, as the scene for most of these poems, provides the background to her own and her generation's formative years there,

The proof that Jesus was a Derry man?
     Thirty-three, unemployed and living with his mother,
the old joke ran.

In Signature, there is the significant moment in growing up when Colette's handwriting has become so like her mother's that she can write her own absence notes to school,

I had become my mother, the flourish
on that sloping B
was as natural to me as it was to my sister and co-forger 

but there is more to it than that in the sister's story, captured in a note left on the door of her flat in that same handwriting. The plain style of Colette's writing gives it a gentle power and memorability.
In Helicopters, the police aircraft are 'high in the night',

where they might resemble

a business of flies
around the head wound of an animal.

There are more of these metaphors than one might at first give the poet credit for, this one in particular packed with associations in a way that makes the calm, down-beat writing extra-ordinary.

In a list of acknowledgements at the end, the book cites a number of poems that echo the opening lines of poems by other poets. It is heart-warming to find August Kleinzahler among them. Mammy Dozes is very much a companion piece to his Portrait of My Mother in January but is aware, in its greater number of lines, of more detail beyond the wind and trees outside and the passive knowledge of 'junk mail, window cleaners, priests' and, perhaps more sinisterly, Deal or No Deal, seems to suggest more potential danger to the vulnerable old lady.
However, the real masterpiece in the book is Your Grandmother's House, a sestina - which is enough of a technical challenge in any circumstances- but here taking Elizabeth Bishop as a model, maintaining a tone of language as it is spoken, achieving a naturalism that disguises the contrivance rather than parades it. There is no other such technical feat, or even attempt, in this book or in countless others. It just turns up and there it is, beautifully and admirably. I imagine it was an exhausting exercise and it is no surprise that nothing similar was essayed in the set. The form itself ensures the internal echoing and, as such, that spreads through the variant uses of the repeated words and the inwardness of a life, a house, in which,
                                                   she frisks the shelf
for the spectacles she might have left in the bar
for goodness sake, but no, sure they are here.

It is a paragon example of a demanding form brilliantly realized.
It is an excellent book, at least as good as it was expected to be, confirming Colette Bryce among the essential poets of her generation.

Lou Reed - The Life

Mick Wall, Lou Reed The Life (Orion)

The early indicators on this book were not that good. It has been given some low ratings on Amazon (and who hasn't) and then one sees that Mick Wall's previous books have been on Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Metallica, Bono and the like. But one can get it inexpensively and there must be quite a story to read. And there is.
In the early chapters I wondered how far Wall's hipster argot would interfere with the story. Whether it is used to reflect the New York scene in the 60's, ot Wall gradually dropped the habit as he wrote or if I became acclimatised to it, I don't know, but it wasn't a problem. Like Lou himself, it seems, this book kept overcoming setbacks, many that might have been self-imposed, and came out in the end as quite a success.
Wall is no apologist for Lou and at various stages one wonders if anybody really could be. There is plenty of background to the 'difficult' personality and one can see how tiresome it would have been to friends and associates while just about seeing how it came about. At every opportuinty of proper commercial success, Lou seems to deliberately throw it away - after the Velvet Underground, after Transformer and onwards.
One never really leaves behind one's first 'influences' and Lou's first work in the hit factory, writing generic pop songs for cheap supermarket labels, came from his interest in doo-wop. His collaboration with John Cale, a trained musician and avant-gardiste, was thus fruitful but a meeting of two dissimilar types. Much of Lou's self-destruction, in the artistic sense at least, seems to have been due to not reconciling the impulseto pop and to something more outre.
Most remarkably, after the Velvets he goes back and lives with his parents and gets a typing job. Having re-launched tentatively as a solo artist, it is very much down to David Bowie to come and retreive him, though - much more than I had imagined. Certainly Bowie took ideas from Lou but the major beneficiary was Lou, not that in the long run he was all that gracious about it. Bowie's first meeting with Lou wasn't quite what it seemed. He got himself backstage with the Velvet Underground's singer and spent ten minutes talking to Doug Yule without being any the wiser.
But the plan seems to be to ruin one's chances of big stardom as soon as it becomes available by following up Transformer with Berlin, or Coney Island Baby with Metal Machine Music. He was never averse to the idea of a number one hit single or making well-crafted mainstream records but he did insist on punctuating them with unsaleable self-indulgence.
How ironic, then, that he ended his life as the husband of Laurie Anderson who did have a no. 1 hit  with perhaps the most avant-garde single ever to reach the hit parade.
It is surprising how much of his creative life was spent not as a highly-regarded icon. I hadn't realized quite how forgotten he had become because I didn't imagine anybody as legendary as a Velvet Underground member with later Bowie connections could have anything but a reputation in safe-keeping. But he was also, apparently, much more his own worst enemy than I ever realized, who really believed he needed the drugs, and was highly dependant on others.
He was surrounded most of the time by musicians better than him and eschewed his own guitar-playing at various stages, clearly aware of the situation. He was the poet but not the musician or businessman and was also some kind of confused purist who had little time for some of his more successful contemporaries who really had no more talent than he did. One can get too far into one's own  mythology on some of those chemicals.
And so it is by some sort of miracle that he lasts long enough, through a series of spectacular but usually difficult personal relationships, to eventually gain acceptance as a legend, much of that down to the fact that critical and public taste finally realized the worth of the Velvet Underground. And Lou's last years were his happiest, by all accounts, with Laurie, some successful albums (Magic & Loss, New York) and belated recognition of what had been previously scorned.
He had always seemed okay to me but then I didn't have to deal with just one more screwed-up junk fiend, which is what that stuff will do to anybody no matter who you are when you start out. This is a good story and Mick Wall has told it economically enough without too much laborious fan data and sufficient well-chosen anecdotes to provide just the right account of it for the interested but non-avid admirer. I imagine the low markings on Amazon are from devotees who can't accept anything but their own preferred version and that is going to be inevitable with a figure like Lou, who gave both his admirers and detractors plenty of material to work with
   

The Poetry Season

The book reviews in The Observer last week included new novels by Ian McEwan, Ali Smih, Will Self, Sarah Waters, Martin Amis, David Mitchell and more, which goes to show how much this has become publishing season.
But it also applies to poetry on the day I found I'd missed a new recent David Harsent, which will stand in for the delayed Roddy Lumsden, and Colette Bryce arrived. Those, and Poetry Day, and most spectacularly of all, a speedily appearing Collected Rosemary Tonks of which the blurb says,

there is possibly no other poet who has caught with such haughty, self-ironising contempt, the loucheness of the period, or the anger it could touch off in brooding bystanders

which makes it essential. I hoped it meant me and I wish it did but it was never going to.

 

Because there's still so many dreary things being said that a chance to get Rosemary in a new edition not priced as a collector's item is to be jumped at.

For example, here, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/next-generation-20-poets-poetry-book-society-kate-tempest, of the 'Next Generation' poets, it says,

 

Judge and poet Clare Pollard said she had been looking for poets “who were doing something new: tackling fresh subject matter, taking both emotional and literary risks”,

  

I do so wish they wouldn't. If only we could say, 'I like these poets because none of them are doing anything particularly new, they just do it particularly well'

 

And, here, http://toddswift.blogspot.co.uk/ (Sept 8th), some 'fund-raising',

 

For £500 you get dinner with one of our authors in London.

That is a monkey. I'd be expecting a lot of curry and chips for that even at London prices.

So, let's have a great Autumn now that we have Rosemary Tonks in a sensibly-priced edition. For me, she doesn't even have to be that good. She only needs to be who she was. 

Meanwhile, the kindle edition of Re-Read, Selected Poems is in preparation at DG Books. Keep a wary eye out for the few days it will be free to download from Amazon. And then we will perhaps try to get The Last of the Great Dancers out for Christmas and that will be the in-print back catalogue all available on kindles and won't that be a fine thing.

  

Maksim Stsura

Maksim Stsura, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Sept 5th

Young Estonian pianist Maksim Stsura gave two fine performances at lunchtime today. Whenever I go to one of these St. Martin's lunchtime concerts, it is never less than good but I have a feeling this was a special one.
Beethoven's Op. 101 Sonata was the first piece, the Steinway having a bell-like chime to it, especially later when I thought Beethoven was re-arranging Bach a liitle bit but it chimed in its slower movements and was the more impressive in the livelier passages. It is a memorable piece that I wasn't familiar with, angular and passionate at times but ringing beautifully at others.
But the Brahms Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel, Op.24. was more spectacular. Variations are usually a playground for the composer to take off in any direction they choose and it is interesting to see how long it took this piece to go from being Handel to being Brahms. Not long. It is a wonderful adventure, in C apparently. It demands verve, dexterity and quite some technique (I say, as if I could tell) but he had plenty of those in store to give a rousing performance. Handel and Brahms are not two composers I'd ever put together but it is only 'a theme' to extemporise upon and Brahms does a fine job, as did Maksim.
At the end, the artist was presented with the 'Beethoven Medal of the Worshipful Company of Musicians, which will no doubt look nice alongside the other prizes he has already accumulated as long as it didn't get damaged when he dropped it. Maksim obviously has pianist's hands rather than those of a cricketer. When he is on at the Proms or the Wigmore in years to come, remember you heard about him here first.

Philip Larkin, Life, Art and Love

James Booth, Philip Larkin, Life, Art and Love (Bloomsbury)

Given that privacy was so important to Philip Larkin, there has been rather a lot of investigation into his most intimate affairs in three biographies in the nearly thirty years since his death. Had he done more than write poems and run libraries, there might be more to write about but Larkin Studies is reduced to such things as compiling lists of what his record collection might have contained and detailed analyses of his letters.
At Cheltenham a few years ago, Anthony Thwaite assured an audience that Larkin knew, in his Letters to Monica, that the letters would be read by a wider public and so he wrote with an awareness of posterity reading over his shoulder. Not that this idea was given any credence by the fact that many of the letters had to be retrieved from down the back of chairs or found stuffed behind the fireplace. But, of course, if we don't want to know, then we don't have to read them. One shouldn't expect to have one's cake, eat it and also complain about it. However, the only remaining correspondance is embargoed until 2035 and the diaries were burned as per his instructions and so Booth suggests there might not be much more to come for a while.
Booth's main strategy is to defend his man and the work against the charges of racism, sexism and misogyny. He accepts a certain misanthropy and perhaps selfishness but balances this with evidence of Larkin's sympathy, empathy and general good humour in the right circumstances. I don't know how much he needs defending and the efforts to present him in the best possible light start to be potentially counter-productive. Larkin himself, in a letter when aged about 20, puts his 'mental age as fifteen; and likely to remain so many moons'. Yes, much of his political incorrectness is showing off in private to friends. A shy, stammering, bookish boy, he adopts such a personality as a mask. He was a long-term supporter of the RSPCA, a huge admirer of American jazz, even invited to write a biography of Louis Armstrong, and here is credited with early left-wing sympathies- although most would be left-wing compared to Monica Jones and he becomes more deliberately philistine and right-wing in his pronouncements as he gets older. But the political correctness of Lisa Jardine, Tom Paulin and the like is no longer quite the pious way to righteousness that we once thought, as it starts to fray at its edges, and Booth need not worry so much. Just because someone can write like an angel doesn't mean they are an angel..
There is little disputing Larkin's preservation of his life kept to himself, without any unnecessary commitment, and Booth more than the previous biographers brings out more of Monica's pressure to get married. Larkin has feet of clay, of course, in more respects than his avoidance of that but Booth is able to interpret that as 'kindness' which,
did indeed require him to continue both relationships
when he judges that he has made both Monica and Maeve Brennan dependant on him.

Booth is also ever vigilant to refute criticism of many of the poems. Of The Large Cool Store, he writes,
Larkin notes that this has been called 'a silly poem about nighties'. It is in fact a moving evocation of the awesome impersonal power of sex.
But Booth's analysis is useful in finding subtle developments in the poetry. From the finer lyricism of the Less Deceived poems, he notes Larkin as a 'celebrant of social ritual' in The Whitsun Weddings and a greater dependance on intertextual reference in High Windows, while not denying a harder tone in the later work. He is also good in showing how often Larkin is 'symbolist' and acutely aware of French poetry as exemplars rather than a purely English Tradition poet who exchanged Yeats for Hardy as a model. He identifies Here as the apex of Larkin's career,
Larkin had always been uncannily sensitive to life's climacterics, and had long anticipated the moment when he would reach his 'prime'. If one were to put a date on this moment it would be October 1961. After 'Here' the way is downward.
And one might say that, at a roughly similar age, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, after which things got considerably darker.
There is an elaborate reading of The Building and its unsettling, complicated rhyme-scheme. Just how useful it is to follow James Booth through these suggestions is a moot point but he isn't the first and won't be the last to take the role of poetry commentator beyond what is reasonably required. He is also able to at least posit the theory that The Dance is left unfinished deliberately. I have heard the same idea about Kubla Khan and The Art of Fugue but to apply it to The Dance is not to notice that it is surely still very 'first draft', rambling and fails to 'take off' in the way that most of Larkin's best collected work does. I think it was simply abandoned because it wasn't good enough.
We learn, along the way, that Larkin referred to his early publisher, George Hartley, as 'the ponce' because of his 'natty appearance' whereas I had thought it was because he exploited the copyright he owned as best he could.

Eventually, in a discusion of the relationship with Maeve,
It is difficult, and perhaps unnecessary, to be sure exactly what occurred between them.
whereas, presumably, because it was easy, it is perfectly fine to go into great detail about exactly what happened with everybody else. But two women at a time, and for a long time, wasn't quite enough for Larkin and around about the period that Booth is speculating on impotence, partly due to alcohol, Larkin decides he needs a third girlfriend and it seems he isn't all that impotent after all given new stimulus. But,
How largely did the promise of new poetic occasions feature in his decision to embark on the relationship?
Oh, good heavens.
Firstly, we seem to be told that Larkin was afraid of commitment because it might intrude on his private time, much of which was devoted to writing. But eventually, he is taking a third lover in order to stimulate writing. I think I blame Booth for even imagining such a possibility because I can't really believe Larkin's prime motivation in such a thing could be quite so clinical.
And then Booth finds himself in a later reference to Larkin's fictional academic biographer, Jake, as Larkin foresees what Booth is now doing. And this is what the whole Academic Poetry Literary Biography industry has led us to.
But, of course, the book is all but unputdownable to Larkin devotees. There is much to admire in Booth's assessments, and Larkin's- like the way all the accoladaes pour in once one is in terminal decline and hardly able to write a line. There is no glossing over the sad final years.
Booth has collected a fine series of examples of Larkin's sour wit, not least his invective against most of his contempoaries, especially Ted Hughes. But much of it, surely is caricature of himself, 'pretending to be himself' in one of the many phrases once available to anybody but now claimed as Larkin's. Booth is especially good at the Larkin Concordance, of when, where and how many times each word is used. It tries to shift Larkin's reputation and perhaps tries too hard to be successful, especially when so many now have decided upon and entrenched themselves in their point of view or, quite honestly, aren't too concerned.
It is in the detail, and not the more prurient detail, that James Booth has provided an account to stand with all the rest of the available material. But if Larkin devoted himself so determinedly to the composition of poems then it is those that we still ought to be reading.

View from the Boundary

FIRE ! FIRE !

Portsmouth poet, me, narrowly saved himself from dire danger last night as he belatedly investigated a strange smell and found the kitchen on fire. Well, not quite the whole kitchen but I'd left the grill on and that was alight.
It perhaps wasn't quite life-threatening but one doesn't know that at the time. One thinks whether to throw water over it or cover it with a towel. The towel sounded right, although a waste of a towel, and is science correct to say that fire is stopped by cutting off its air supply. What if the towel catches fire. But it didn't. Well done, science.
It took all evening for the smoke to clear with front and back doors open and this morning I painted over the area above the cooker that showed smoke damage, which only now highlights some discoloured ceiling. But I might be more wary of the grill in future.
It could almost be a story from a biography of Philip Larkin, although to be fair to him, not even he was that remiss. But I'm pleased to be able to equal Jonathan Raban's blurb in which he says he read James Booth's new book in three days, very enjoyably. Assuming I finish it tonight. I have more than my usual amount of book review notes on it and so it might be a long one in the next couple of days. I call them 'reviews', thousands wouldn't.
--
Equally remiss was how I posted a listing for the Portsmouth Poetry society's National Poetry Day reading on the Poetry Library website and entered a start time of 7 a.m. Our host would have been less than impressed by a crowd of poetry devotees outside the premises first thing in the morning. But the Library helpfully corrected it very quickly this morning.
Having hoped to corner the market for poetry audience in Portsmouth on Oct 2nd, I find that we do have a rival event on at the same time so, if in doubt, you saw this one here first,

NATIONAL POETRY DAY

with 

PORTSMOUTH POETRY SOCIETY 

Special Guest - Maggie Sawkins

Winner of the Ted Hughes Award 2014 

to launch Calliope, a new booklet of poems from Portsmouth 

Thursday, October 2nd, gather from 7 pm for 7.30 reading 

St. John Ambulance Headquarters,

406 Old Commercial Road,

Portsmouth

(across the road from the Charles Dickens birthplace,

some car parking at rear, accessed from Sultan Road) 

Admission Free 

Calliope £3.50 

Refreshments

-- 

I might stop posting the Times crossword on Saturdays from now on. It used to be quite an achievement but now, having put a completed grid, of sorts, on the website four weeks running, perhaps it is not such a big thing to show off about. It was by way of a challenge, really, but all it really proves is that I've been dogged in pursuit of a goal and, quite honestly, not having to finish it with Word Finders and suchlike might be a bit of a relief as Saturdays soon become again more devoted to jump racing.
Although there is a way to go in 2014, my shortlists of Best Poem and Best Collection of poems for the year are still very short. This year's other subsidiary selections of best event, best novel and even best book of the year are likely to be more competitive. There were several excellent concerts earlier in the year which will be very hard to choose between but with James Booth, Murakami, Niall Williams and others already making great claims to being the best book I've read this year, plus The Goldfinch which was published last year, there are still Stephen Fry and Danny Baker to come as well as the one I'm possibly expecting the most from, Don Paterson's book on Michael Donaghy, 10 years (quite amazingly) after the early demise of the great man.

So, we will see.