Larkin's Jill, BWV 1025 and John Burnside

Next year's Philip Larkin Society conference is to be based around the 80th anniversary of his novel, Jill. I'm unlikely to attend or contribute but I was prompted to re-read it while waiting for further Dana Gioia books to arrive. It's tremendous work for a 21yo, especially the first half. In the second half credulity is stretched a little bit as the imaginary Jill materializes as the real 15yo Gillian and we might rightly wonder about stalking issues except I'm sure it's all understandable in an overawed innocent abroad like John Kemp. What I take it to mean is that such lusts and loneliness will find an object to fixate on and it is Gillian's bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jill, however, is great and only leaves us to wonder what novels Larkin would have produced in maturity had he not been sidelined into being the most accomplished English poet of his generation. 

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Meanwhile, back with the Complete Bach, it is to be expected that the best-known pieces that one is familiar with are the best and exploring the discs of the unfamiliar might not always serve up things to compare. I'm not going into the Well-Tempered Klavier, the Partitas and Sonatas, the Cello Suites, the Brandenburgs, the B Minor Mass, Passions and suchlike when there is so much undiscovered country to visit.

Thus one thinks that Bach could have been Telemann in his spare time in the same way that the Beatles provided songs for other artists while retaining enough material for themselves. However, one doesn't know all the best Bach and vol. 123 is a magical disc with its Trio for vln, clo and pno, BWV 1025 augmenting the Partitas most gorgeously. That disc stayed on for three plays being exactly why one had to buy the Complete, because there had to be such things. Georg Egger is the violin, also on Sonatas BWV 1023, 1021, 1019a and a Fuge, 1026. So I moved onto similar on Viola da Gamba which would have been just as good a find were they not familiar already from another recording that stays on the turntable for a few plays whenever it gets an outing.

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At 2pm today I remembered to check when the Hampshire Art Society annual exhibition was on in the cathedral. It finished today at 4pm so I was able to get there in time. My walls are full enough and so I wasn't in the market for anything unless I was spectacularly impressed. There were things to like in among the kitsch, the workmanlike, the generic and the competent local scenes. 

I don't know if it's the same everywhere, if it's just my preference or if the Portsmouth area is genuinely disproportionately blessed with musicians but there's no comparison. Here, musicians are light years ahead of painters and writers, not that there's anything wrong with the local brushstrokes or words. But the musicians are mostly interpreters rather than composers in their own right so maybe it's not a fair comparison when they can present their versions of all-time masterpieces and not have to think of their own. 

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John Burnside's posthumous The Empire of Forgetting arrived this week. At 40 pages it might not count as 'full length' but it's what there was when he died last year, aged only 69. English poetry could hardly afford to lose one of its few remaining major artists and neither could Agenda which he had taken over as editor of. St. Andrews have been unable to find a suitable successor and so the august title goes with him, another bastion of seriousness that held up against what some of us might regard as a falling apart of what not so long ago was a strong, if well-hidden, community. 

The first poems continue to work like a long, loose sestina  working on the words angels, wings, snow and light. They have spilt over from John's previous volume Ruin, Blossom and are further evidence towards my theory that some poets, by no means all, struggle to find new things to say beyond the age of 60. 

There's a further 'semantic field' of frost, firelight, dark and themes of hibernation in a 'vision' of continuity, grace and some sort of comfort found in a world in which there might seem,

No remedy for loss, no

cure for rot, no solace to be found

in mere ideas 

except, of course, poems are ideas and these at least attempt to provide such things. 

The Empire of Forgetting is the title of a poem in the book as well as a phrase that occurs in two other poems so we can't miss the point that it must be thematic. There's something pagan about it, a faith in nature and its processes, an awareness that ordinary, daily life might not be everything and there could be something bigger to be celebrated, even beyond the art that says as much.

I don't want to try to define it, it's in John Burnside's evocative music which, like that of Bach, can all begin to sound similar but that doesn't prevent one from wanting to have all of it in however many variations.