Impetigo

You don't really want to read about it but it's really by way of introduction.
I never go to the doctors unless I really have to but eventually one has to. If it had spread much further I'd have looked like Wystan Auden. While many people wouldn't mind looking like one of their heroes, I'd prefer it to be Emmanuelle Beart but the antibiotics should start to work soon, which reminds me, I'd better take some more. They are quite big tablets, like you might give a horse. After a week of taking those, I should be second favourite for next year's Derby.

I doughtily make progress with Prof. Mendelson's Early Auden. He's good and the duller parts are not his fault, they are Wystan's. He dutifully sets out all of Auden's pontificating and arcane theories about psychology, history, love and all in the long poems. Auden's great facility and compulsion to write were his own worst enemy. Surely it can't all be good. If poems won't suffice he makes diagrams and charts whereas, really, all of that gestalted into the great lyric poems would say as much, if not more.
However, Mendelson exceeds even his own very high standards on pp.203-209 in my paperback (the final pages of the chapter called The Great Divide). It's hardly for me to paraphrase it but, ha, so Modernism was still Romanticism after all.
Prof. Mendelson completely nails it, though, with,
Auden implicitly claimed a larger and less circumscribed purpose than 'poet' can signify after two centuries of romantic coloring,
'and his verse suggested that poetry falsifies' (which I'm less immediately concerned about).

I've long thought something like that but ne'er seen it so well expressed, that the idea of 'poet' since, say, Wordsworth, has been hijacked and ruined by the image of the aloof dreamer with their mind on higher things.
For sure, the famous portrait of John Donne has him posing as the distracted lover but his poems can't be accused of a lack of rigour. It is entirely due to those swooning types, contemporaries of Beethoven - but lacking his get out clause of music being abstract - that poets have since been largely regarded by everyone else as, in Inspector Grimm's phrase from The Thin Blue Line, 'hoity toity namby pamby wishy washy'.
You don't call the likes of Don Paterson that. 
And so it is, perhaps, that Auden began the long haul back. Larkin's common sense was a major contribution and poetry is probably mostly not like that any more but it's too late because most people don't bother with poetry and so don't know.
So I think I know why Larkin had 'Writer' put on his gravestone and why I couldn't be bothered to explain that when I was, or made myself out to be, a 'poet', okay, yes I was but not the sort of poet you are probably thinking of. 

Maria Luc

Maria Luc/Chichester Symphony Orchestra, Chichester Cathedral, Oct 29.

I didn't know there were major engineering works on the line to Chichester. Suddenly the expedition was in jeopardy as the departures listed nothing going that way. It was a train the other way, then one to Havant and then a bus. It was going to be close and it was nobody's fault but mine.
I didn't think I'd make it, wondered if I could creep in at the back during the overture or if it would just be an unnecessary and convoluted ride to Chichester and back to no avail.
To be fair, the connections were all in place and when the bus driver said it would be twenty minutes, it looked more encouraging. After all this touch and go cliffhanging, a quick march through South Street and the cloisters, I arrived with five minutes to spare. It was packed and standing room only, which turned out to be a blessing because rather than sit at the back, which is some distance away, I stood right next to the orchestra. It was worth it after all.
Beethoven, in one of my glib generalizations, is Mozart with more muscles. The overture The Creatures of Prometheus is rousing and exactly that. The Chichester Symphony Orchestra might not be heard of in the same south coast galaxy as the Bournemouth but they do a fine turn. But it's never about the overture and, with the exception of Mendelssohn's Hebrides, one has to feel sorry for these warm-up pieces.
I had prepared over the weekend with a couple of plays of Mitsuko Uchida but standing so close behind the cellos heard more detail and finer points in live music than is possible from a CD. Music is a living thing and a performance that is happening now, not a facsimile of it. Maria Luc found a great balance between Beethoven's stridency and passion and those impossibly sensitive passages that come from somewhere deep and inexplicable that it's hard to credit him with although he does it plenty elsewhere, too.
The Emperor Concerto is a major cornerstone of Western classical music and likely to astonish again and again, not least in such confident and fluent hands. It flows so naturally from one stage to the next it seems to take no time and, standing out of necessity, one realized that it could be a dance piece.
One doesn't think of lunchtime concerts as full orchestral events. Most often it is a soloist or chamber group as if somehow orchestras are for the evening. That is, of course, nonsense but that is what happens. Even if Chichester is always great, though, this was as great as it has ever been and there were some who chose to stand to applaud even though, unlike me, they didn't have to.
The day had looked like calamity upon calamity but it was saved with only the narrowest of margins to spare. I have much to be grateful for and will check carefully in future. One can take nothing for granted. 

Clarissa Aykroyd - Island of Towers

Clarissa Aykroyd, Island of Towers (Broken Sleep Books)

Let there be light. Clarissa Aykroyd's debut pamphlet of poems provides it.
Having noticed 'light' in the first few poems, I checked ahead and found only a few that make no mention of it so I decided it must be thematic.
It isn't wise to interpret good poems too thoroughly because they will always be more than the interpretation and they can be worn away to less than they are by exegesis. There would be no point in them being poems if they could be so summarily explained away. But 'light' for Clarissa is, very roughly, 'peace, love and understanding' and suchlike and the shadow and darkness it emerges from are trauma, difficulty and all things grim. These poems are often alive with the struggle between the two.
As a translator as much as a poet in English, Clarissa is internationalist in outlook. The world doesn't end at the border of a country and poetry doesn't stop at the borders of language. Several of these poems are from places she has obviously travelled to.
In post-wall Berlin the emergence into light is as yet partial, and haunted, in which 'flags and guards breathe out the West' but 'the dead and lost...are still among us' and,
The silver eyes of the dead will not let us forget.

Lisbon, with more of a sense of freedom, is,
Chessboard city. Beyond the rivermouth
explorers were colliding with the currents.

One could spend a lot of time and energy trying to find all the things suggested by lines like those and never know if you'd done enough. That's why it's poetry and best left as it is to be appreciated in all its potential.

Mise en scène is latently sinister with its 'tedious' dead body extending the slightly New Age feel of some of the poems into laudable irony. If there is sometimes a tendency towards spiritual optimism, and a suspicion that the ideas are a higher priority than the music of the language, which might be something a translator is prone to do, Clarissa is plenty capable enough of delivering the ominous underside, too. It isn't optimism for its own sake, it needs to be gained and the nightmares are always with us.

Machado and Celan are two poets in translation honoured in poems of her own. Opening the collection with 'As though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul' sets the tone with its great first line,
He had to fly into the storm because there was nothing but storm.

It's always a good idea to begin with one of your best poems and this involves translation, light, love, loss and a sort of redemption in words. The book represents 25 years of writing and is admirably frugal in collecting so few from such a long time. It is far better to publish only those pieces that still seem worthwhile rather than, as others might, rush into print at the earliest, and every, opportunity and regret it later. I wouldn't ever accuse such a thoughtful slim volume of being a 'sequence' but, having begun with the storm, it ends with clarity and understanding in Wicklow Mountains after Rain,
         by then I will have come to know all
that can be painted in brushstrokes of gold
on the world's vault and the sky of hills.

That is the point.

Broken Sleep Books are a publisher I'd not encountered before. This is a neat book with a tasteful, understated cover. If the rest of their catalogue is as worthwhile as this impressive little book they are doing very commendable work indeed.
 

One Sweet Letter from Me

We've had a couple if false dawns here with Racetrack Wiseguy hoping to point the way to the payout window but if it isn't the jumps season proper now it never will be.
Last week, the three wise men lined up to provide Sebastopol on a wonderful day at Wincanton; today the Prof and I had five out of five between us so we did okay, not as okay as if we had pooled our money and gone for the accumulator but, always remembering not to lose overall, we gained usefully, and it's Cheltenham tomorrow and that is always good, even just watching the grass grow there is worthwhile.

The Early Auden is as impressive a scholarly achievement as Prof. Mendelson's Later Auden and, yes, one is allowed to skim over the exegeses of some of those longer poems which detailed some of Wystan's abstruse theories and don't seem to be the point but otherwise one can't speak highly enough of them but reading, for once, is not a pressing concern.
I hadn't realized I didn't have Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice on CD. Quite honestly, I don't know any more and I gaze at the shelves planning the incursion of records onto another shelf. I must have been assuming Purcell's Dido & Aeneas was it, which is one reason why I'll not be invited to write for Gramophone. But it was a situation soon remedied by Anne Sophie von Otter, Barbara Hendricks and John Eliot Gardiner. It's the sort of masterpiece that makes me want to do Top Six Operas, just so that I can include it, along with The Magic Flute, La Boheme, Tosca, Rinaldo and another Mozart or Handel. Gluck's Alceste was one of those unlucky items, bought at the same time as something it's nowhere near as good as, and will have to wait a while to make its case.

But I never thought I'd have to write that I have an Amazon voucher and don't know what to spend it on. Of course, the forthcoming Julian Barnes, but what else. Something based on the reviews in the next Gramophone, obviously, but it arrived and suggested some Haydn Quartets. Maybe it is that but maybe the moment I've done it, something will come on the radio that is the more required so one must learn to keep one's powder dry.

So, with the two indices, the year's turf account and the chess ratings in good health, the nights drawing in with the promise of evenings with a book and a record, or gin, the most glorious 60th birthday party being glazed to perfection by memory, one can't ask for any more than Burt Bacharach swapping his back catalogue of pop songs with me. I've risen like a helium balloon back into the mid 1800's in short chess, always leaving the rating of 1925 for longer games untouched until the other matches it again, quite inexplicably. Now, again, I just click on a piece and move it and gather satisfactory results (one way or another) whereas since those stratospheric days a few months ago, I've mooched unprepossesingly in the 1500's or 1600's.
I don't know what the difference is. Form is temporary but class is forever, etc. but we're not really talking about 'class' here. I just don't know why it happens like that. I suppose that, when I did such things, I might try to write poems but they were unsatisfactory or not write poems for several months and then one would arrive that I was pleased with. It could be astrology for all I know. 

TWTWTW

My modest list of minor poetry prizes is unlikely to be augmented by any for sports photography but this picture is as much a momento of how nice it turned out at Wincanton on Thursday, despite the weather forecast and early drenchings, for the magnificently realized Plan A of what to do for my 60th birthday.
With the bar people kept up to the mark with an order for six completely different drinks - we aren't the sort to be happy with six pints of lager, please- it was a choice gathering and my own This is Your Life in miniature. Almost as gratifying as that fine body of characters from the autobiography was the impressive win by Sebastopol, as advised by all three expert analysts in the Preview Night below.

Birthday events are gradually coming to an end now after two weeks, not least with the review above of a book received, reviewed while enjoying a very acceptable bottle of Chilean Pinot Noir, equally well received. I am not worthy. No, I'm really not. I'm not just saying that.
I had ordered the Clive James on Larkin book already but was able to cancel the order. That is how good one's mates can be at knowing what you want. In fact it's the third time that, or something similar, has happened.
And maybe that will have to be it for parties. It won't get any better than that. It's the same policy as that I adopted with regard to writing poems.
--
But the long-running motif of the TLS subscription is finally over. I've stopped the direct debit. Actually, it was stopped already, I was told. They stopped it.
It seems a weird way of doing business. Am I really so persona non grata that they don't want me as a subscriber.
Three and a half years ago I took it out on an offer to follow any response to the letter we had published on the letters page but by the time they had it sorted and began to send me them, the moment had passed.
I wasn't always sure I wanted it, with its self-regard and sometimes more esoteric subject matter than I required but its sympathies were in the right place and I was glad a couple of times when the internet could finish the crossword for me. But then I had an e-mail regretting that I'd cancelled when I hadn't even though it still arrived every Thursday.
Two weeks ago it didn't come so I rang them up on the Monday and they apologized and said they'd send it. But it didn't turn up last week either.
Okay. Enough's enough. Maybe we'll try LRB, The People's Friend or The Pig Breeder's Gazette. I rang the bank but found it had been stopped at the other end. Have they found out I cheated on the crossword.
I'll miss Sean O'Brien when he does the Freelance column and I owed it to the TLS that I saw Helen Farish's poem, Pastoral, but my pile of back copies can be re-read if ever I miss it too much because I will have forgotten most of what's in them.
It seems to me no way to run a paper but what can you do. 

Clive James on Larkin

Clive James, Somewhere Becoming Rain, Collected Writings on Philip Larkin (Picador)

Some of these pieces are on my shelves already and are likely to be on yours if an admirer of either Clive James as commentator or Larkin as poet but, as in any Collected, it's necessary to acquire duplicates if you want the other bits. James is a critic of some gusto and insight and worth having on your side, as he is throughout these reviews and essays. He is well-paired with Larkin who, since I heard him described as a 'great, minor' poet by Anthony Thwaite at the bar at Hull University in 1987, has risen to being the author of  'the most magnificent poetic achievements since Donne and Marvell' by James in 2018.
Oh My Giddy Aunt. Larkin has few keener admirers than me (I thought) and I might want to agree with Clive's large claim but I wouldn't have dared put it in print. If James Booth's PL, Life, Art and Love put up more defence than Larkin really needed as his reputation is restored, James is batting more like Chris Gayle than Geoff Boycott for his case.
Reading James on Larkin straight through, which it is quite possible to do, makes him sound repetitive in his insistence that the Larkin we should attend to is in the poems not the outrageous letters to his ribald friends. These pieces, though, were written years apart and not intended to be read one after the other.
If James insists that those letters were private and never meant for public scrutiny, we did have Thwaite justifying the Letters to Monica a few years ago saying that he knew he was writing for posterity and had the likes of us 'reading over his shoulder'. It's not easy to have that both ways but if Larkin was a fastidious enough editor of his own work not to publish the likes of The Dance, a poem that never quite 'takes off', it seems to me that the letters wouldn't have been part of his intended legacy either.
The late Lisa Jardine belatedly declined her invitation to the first Larkin Society conference in 1997, presumably knowing she was on a hiding to nothing. While her case for the prosecution might have been shrill, it would be possible to accept that some of Larkin's private musings were beneath his proper dignity but that poets are best judged on their poems. Like Booth, James is more strident than he needs to be but that is what devoted admirers are like.
Nevertheless, for those of us dedicated to that descried as 'the mainstream' by enthusiastic avant-gardists and experimentalists, James is a proper darling and Larkin is his. He describes him as,
superficially a reactionary crusader against modernism, a sort of latter-day, one-man Council of Trent,
and, imbuing Larkin with some of his own swaggering machismo that the poet plainly didn't aspire to, argues for him to be played by Jack Nicholson in a film; compares him with the ultimate literary cool kid, Albert Camus, in his shifty role as lover to several women at once and, in taking on the equally testosterone-fuelled Al Alvarez, takes down his advocacy of Robert Lowell via that poet's 'berserk stare'. It is a crowd-pleasing performance throughout for those of us who won't, or don't like to, hear a word against Larkin and I might not recommend it far beyond us.

As long ago as 1974, James wrote of An Arundel Tomb that,
he almost believed in the survival of love. Almost believing is all right, once you've got believing out of it.
And in 2003, reviewing Tom Courtenay's Pretending To Be Me, he is right to stress survive rather than us in 'what will survive of us is love' but that's only after we've given proper attention to the line before, as James had done 29 years earlier but some still don't. I'd have thought we'd have got that sorted out by now.

James is also more Larkin than necessary in the two poems included but that's fine since pastiche is partly cartoon. In The North Window,
                                      The moon-cold deeps
Are cod-thronged for the trawlers now benighted,

which is (Clive) Jamesian rather than Larkinesque because, as he says elsewhere,
Larkin, while being to no extent a dandy, is nevertheless an exquisite.

But James is astute and knows why Larkin is any good. It is not a rearguard action against the threat of modernism and those radicals who think they are cleverer than all that went before them. It had been a while since I had seen Larkin compared with his Italian equivalent, Eugenio Montale, and then I remembered it was in Clive James that I'd seen it before but, he says, they share 'a deep suspicion of any work which draws inspiration from its own technique', by which they mean certain jazzmen but not only them. Larkin wasn't quite as backward-looking as his detractors liked to make out, and James writes in his valediction poem,
They didn't sound like poetry one bit,
Except for being absolutely it.

Clive James is one of many, I think, who wouldn't have minded being Larkin except they wouldn't have liked it. What they want is to be themselves but to have written his poems, or poems very like them.      
  
 

Happy Birthday

To Rosemary Tonks, Wyclef Jean and Johnny Haynes.

Wincanton Preview Night

Racetrack Wiseguy is delighted to welcome The Professor and Spenno to compare our homework on tomorrow's big occasion. With over a hundred years of turf experience between us, we hope to find a winner. After the fiasco of the selections I put up on Saturday, I'm grateful for their help.

Wincanton is always likely to be a Paul Nicholls benefit event but even if I found his winners on Thursday and Friday, the rest of his runners were disappointments. The 1.40 also has a surprise short-priced favourite in Nickolson which makes it a funny one. Spenno opens the bidding with,

One against it is Bathsheba Boy who was highest rated on the flat when trained by Richard Hannon. Now with Nicholls & the good going makes him worth a small bet against the fav.

Ecco's form from the Cheltenham Festival makes him unbackable in the 2.10 at 1/4 so it's a race for the each way backers if anything but it might be time for a glass of something refreshing.

The 2.45 might not be one too risk vasst amounts on, with Spenno tentative -

Wisecracker is 3lb lower than when 2nd in this race last year. Frost was jocked up at the 5 day stage, that will do for me.

We are, however, of one mind in our enthusiasm for Sebastopol in the 3.20 with the Prof summing it up,

Tom Lacey and Nico have had a few winners lately. Now in a handicap expect this to go close first time up. 

Spenno in the 3.55 is with Forgot To Ask, he has been placed in his last 4 starts since a wind operation in Dec 2018 & Burke gets on very well with him.

I'll have a modest interest in Heavey in the 4.25, benefitting from 6/1 as a result of a below par performance last time which we might optimistically excuse. The Professor takes me on with, Dollnamix, 

Consistent last season and looks like first time out is the best time to catch this one.

Spenno is against that but not sufficiently impressed by anything else so this is where it gets competitive.

The 4.55 has The Professor making Thunderstruck his nap,

A £125k purchase for the Emma Lavelle stable. It takes on a Nicholls hot pot which I am happy to do considering the doubtful form of that stable. Thunderstruck looks to have potential now stepped up in trip.

Spenno and I are together on Our Uncle Pat in the last for the same reasons but he puts it better than me,

Our Uncle Pat has been in good form since moving stables to O. Murphy 2 runs ago. Good conditional on board, who was also jocked up at the earliest stage, and has ridden the horse before. 

Thanks for that, gentlemen.

Nothing can possibly go wrong.