Oh, Babe, What Would Poetry Say

When the opportunity to take a break from the biography of Pushkin presented itself, I took it up. It is more detailed than I require and the broad sweep of a story is in danger of being lost under a welter burden of contiuning affairs, flirtations, controversies and much of what was once expected of poets, 200 years ago, before they retreated into universities. Never wanting to waste a good joke, when Pushkin came to Shove-kin, I decided to give him a rest for a while. With him now married and having published Eugene Onegin, halfway through seemed like an appropriate juncture. But corny jokes can be recycled from e-mails to friends, too.

Julian Barnes was a very good reason to leave off a story that will be easily returned to, then a Christmas present cataloguing all those brands and memories from our shared, generic, 70's childhood was the harmless diversion it was meant to be.

But then, there having been that review in the TLS purporting to survey 'the state of British poetry', I wanted to see it. Only TG Jones, the inheritors of the WH Smith's shops, in Southsea, stock the TLS so I went to the Central Library first except it's a couple of years since they had newspapers and journals one can look at. It turns out they have plenty online but not the TLS. So, not very much like WH Davies, free-loading on public transport, I took the scenic route to Southsea and found the words I so wanted to read.

I doubt if I'm ever going to be a Tristram Fane Saunders admirer any more than one of Ed Sheeran. I'm sure they are both talented at what they do but to me they seem young, safe, anodyne types like those who did their homework, came top of the class and went on to successful careers without having been interesting- see also, Coldplay. But I'm glad I saw Tristram's essay and it's not his fault if what he finds to say about the current condition of British poetry could as equally be appropriate to Business Studies as the English Department.

However, I'm grateful to it for how it brought my attention to Rory Waterman's reviews in Endless Present. One has it confirmed once more that one is no longer middle aged when you are reading books by middle aged poet-academics whose father's poems one once bought, like Andrew Waterman's in Faber's Modern Poets Five, 1981, where he appeared alongside CH Sisson, Craig Raine, Robert Wells, Tom Paulin and Andrew Motion which wouldn't be the worst six-a-side team one ever played in.

But Rory is very soon a most amenable guide through some books one knows well and others one hasn't seen. It's not really a look at the 'state of the poetry nation' in 2026, it being Selected Articles, Reviews and Dispatches, 2010-23. That period included a number of Larkin-related books and they form the foundations of the book early doors and references back to Larkin continue afterwards which some might think is backward-looking, as Larkin himself was said to be in his time. But without helping to establish where poetry has arrived at by 2026, I'm with Rory entirely about what is entirely still worth obsessing over.

He is judicious and wise. As a professional critic, he sets himself a standard of honesty and stands by it. He is ready to find fault with those bits of Larkin that were never meant to see print but also, as sympathetically as he can with the likes of John Agard and Patience Agbabi but it's not a racial thing because his is more caustic when he simply doesn't reckon much, as with James Sutherland-Smith who,

Since the poet is here congratulating his perspicacity, the tired language is particularly unfortunate.

The more of him you read, the more it becomes desirable for Rory to award those poetry prizes we must have.

The big shock comes in the review of James Andrew Taylor's Walking Wounded: The Life & Poetry of Vernon Scannell. Scannell was a name that had always been there, the name at least redolent of a tweed-jacketed, bespectacled composer of careful verses only designed to make Larkin look more Byronic or Hughesian in comparison. I knew he'd done a bit of boxing but I didn't know much of that art was rehearsed on a conveyor belt of victim female partners. It's unfortunate to have to find out as late as this what some of those names in The Listener or those booklets left his sixth form room by Linden Huddlestone at school were really like.

In those days I vaguely imagined poets as the gods who sent down their words from a place beyond our finding, partly so that we could do 'A' level English. I never imagined them much less than saints and never thought I'd meet one. But it wasn't like that at all.

Rory's very good, ever alert to non-sequiturs, the emptiness of what he resorts to calling 'poesy' and one would only want one's best stuff to come before his diligent judgement and even then you'd not be sure until you got some sort of pass, if you did. But if you did, you'd have deserved it. 

It's true to say I've been losing faith in poetry - not to mention a number of other areas of human activity- in recent years. I wouldn't like to think I wasted so much of my life on something that proved to be no more than a charade. But I've been having another look at some of the books here for the purposes of the Anthology list and then I wondered what Rory Waterman had to say about it all and it's turned out that I do still care. 

The state of British poetry

 What is it, then? I'd be interested to know.

The weekly e-mail from the TLS is headlined by a review of five books that purports to enlighten us. Except if I can still fiddle my way into the whole article, I've forgotten how; the nearest shop that may or may not sell the TLS is some way from here and I simply don't know if Tristram Fane Saunders is who I'd like it all explained to me by. Maybe he is the new Messiah but he could equally be a new kid on the block who's done his homework and got good marks.

The 'state of British poetry' now, as elucidated by one come lately to it, is - much to my demerit- of as much interest to me as what a young person on the street thinks of the latest pop records. Entirely valid, I'm sure, but not guaranteed to be something I'd understand. But I'm not going to find out unless I try.

One of the five books in Tristram's survey is a collection of reviews by Rory Waterman. And that, being trustworthy, arrived today. It looks like a book worth having but in the same way that it's going to be good to see his particular form of words regarding books about Larkin published in the last fifteen years, it's not Larkin that I'm trying to catch up on.

So, what can you do?

One could, at a stretch, find the TLS or even read some poetry by younger writers and see what I think for myself. But I don't listen to Radio 1, I only listen to Tony Blackburn's 60's and Bob Harris's improving 70's shows.

There was a time when something aspiring to the canonical was essayed by Alvarez, then Motion/Morrison, Hulse/Kennedy/Morley, O'Brien and Lumsden but, convenient as it was to be informed about where we were, the wholesome diversity of British poetry meant that the Identity Parade looked more like an identity crisis.

One can't have it both ways. 

Julian Barnes, Departure(s)

Julian Barnes, Departure(s), (Jonathan Cape)

'Fiction Review' is a dubious label for the Julian Barnes swansong. He's a novelist and novels are fictional but he's also a writer of this 'hybrid' stuff - part fiction, part true- except there's not much imaginary material in the mix this time. And so we are already into the sort of discursion that he specializes in so elegantly himself. The book discusses itself, we discuss the book and find that although we might have covered a lot of ground most eruditely we've got no further than any other liberal, left, London elite dinner party.

IAM is involuntary autobigraphical memory, sometimes brought on by a stroke, and can be much more severe than that brought on by Proust's madeleine. It can get as bad as one girl who could remember every detail of every day of her life and turns out to be a terrible curse. It's far worse to be able to recall everything than to have a dubious, selective memory that has at least edited out a big proportion of raw material. But it's a great subject with which to open what is essentially a memoir by a writer who often used unreliable narrators.

The central, main part of the book relates the relationship between Jean and Stephen, two friends brought together by Barnes at Oxford and then again, forty years later, at Stephen's request. Barnes becomes confidant to both parties, with far too much involvement in the difficulties of the relationship which he candidly shares with his readers now that they are both dead. While at first this might seem pruriently fascinating, it is soon more than one wants to know especially for those of us who like the wording of the law about 'between consenting adults in private'. The stratifications of Barnes's many-layered writing have probably never gone as deep but there must be a limit to how much we want to know.

In summary, Stephen loves Jean more than she wants him to. She feels the need of more 'freedom'. It occurs to him that she might want more than him and while that doesn't seem to be the case in their later role as 're-kindlers', Barnes is aware at first hand that first time around she very nearly did.

All of which has to be unpacked at some length in the sort of coda that Barnes has gone into before, investigating all the implications not only of 'love' but age, dementia, loss and literature. It's a short book and is readily soon read because he's never less than a pleasure to read but one still wonders if such exhaustive analysis was necessary or if, over the three years it took him to write it, he was stretching it out to make it book length. One can lose sympathy for the perceived sufferings of the well-to-do intelligentsia if the intricacies of why two people find themselves to be incompatible twice over is the most they have to worry about.

And so it's farewell from Julian Barnes, still one of the finest writers of his generation even if by the end, almost inevitably, he was in danger of becoming a parody of himself. At least he was well-organized enough not to leave his last book unfinished.  

Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland at Lunchtime Live !

 Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 22

One can still expect a sizeable audience for a Messiah, Vivaldi by Candlelight or Songs from the Shows but a programme of 'English and Nordic art songs on the theme of solitude, meetings and togetherness' of a damp January Thursday lunchtime is a bit more niche. Thus it was good to see a reasonable turnout (both in numbers and mindset) for Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland.

Samuel Barber's Promiscuity was a brief, ethereal fragment to begin, followed by the almost as austere, lingering Desire for Hermitage. If Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte by Sibelius next up was a degree or two more rhapsodic, it was almost so by default but by then one was tuned into the deeply meditative mood.

James MacMillan's Ballad was audibly Scottish and thus as much Nordic as English, with Steve's atmospheric, minimal accompaniment allowing Annika's voice to make full use of the acoustic in St. Thomas's chapel. Finzi's Come away, death completed a first section with more melancholy before Steve explained- for the benefit of the musically illiterate like me- that a shift from 'the misery of B minor to the uplands of E major' introduced a happier middle section. Except Bach's B minor Mass at least begins so rousingly. There is no point trying to explain key signatures to me. You'd be better off trying to teach chess to a cat.

So, pieces by Roger Quilter, Grieg and the plangent setting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Silent Noon by Vaughan Williams made for some mild sunlight before a final section of crepuscular, elegiac songs by Gunnar de Frumerie, another by Vaughan Williams and the restrained wonder of King David by Herbert Howells, in which he,

     rose; and in his garden
Walked by the moon alone
A nightingale hidden in a cypress tree
Jargoned on and on. 

Always glad to be introduced to a composer one hadn't known about, like de Frumiere, it's also exactly right to end on a piece that can't be followed, that incidentally makes one think that Walter de la Mare's currently unfashionable status as a poet is due some reconsideration. 

No big, noisy ending but ending on a high nonetheless. Thoughtful and classy. 

I've been hearing on the wireless about how a 'new world order' is set to carve up the world and it would certainly threaten much that we've always valued if it came about. Exquisite afternoons such as this afternoon, for example. I'm glad I was there, just in case. 

Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig was not one of the later additions to the Anthology, still being remembered in the time after the first names went in. He was among the first names. Most timely it was, though, having been back through the Collected to decide which three of his go in, that BBC4 saw fit to show a couple of old programmes from the archives late last night. There might not be vast amounts of such material stored away and we might have seen much of it but it is good use made of minority air time.

The two programmes used a lot of the same pieces of film of him, there not being much. He came across as rather more pleased with himself than I remembered but those who are 'any good' have some right to do that. Perhaps his main achievement, that allowed the writing of his impressive body of work, was throwing away his first two books of inaccessible poems at the age of 37. It allowed him to become one of the names worth preserving from C20th poetry for the fine example he set.

He is an extreme instance of a poet whose later work was very different from where he began. It wasn't a matter of 'development', though. He started all over again. One can entertain oneself by thinking of different ways in which there can be said to be 'two kinds of poet'.

Those who change significantly and those who don't change much is one. Betting without MacCaig who disowned the poet he had been and successfully re-invented himself as a better one, my long-standing guru of all such things, Thom Gunn, turned around completely from the strictly metrical poems that often found the individual at odds or feeling separate from the world to free verse and the discovery of community with others- to put it mildly.  That he could do both and achieved some synthesis between those two polar opposite ways of working is what ultimately made him as great as he was.

There is a shift in Larkin, elsewhere identified as a 'hardening of the arteries', that does him no favours, but he hasn't changed beyond recognition. Yeats is re-made from Romantic to Modernist. Hughes moves from the capturing of the natural world into less successful mythical excursions. Sylvia gains in intensity but obviously finishes before we can see where her extraordinary talent might have led.

Whereas, I'm not sure that Hardy's poems are any different from first to last except that the return to poems, from novels, was in some ways a bigger move. 

 

Formal metre and rhyme v. free verse is perhaps the most obvious divide but surely, surely, it's better to do both as and when while it's not wrong to be one or the other. Although those never attempting some sort of formal discipline need, for me, to be convincing in their chosen relaxations or else we might think they can't do it.

Timothy Steele's metronomic metre was doctrinal, seemingly as important to him as anything he had to say while using it. At its worst, the far worse alternative is that described by Jane Greer, quoted here at Anecdotal Evidence , where in poetry terms the cart has been put before the horse, the art has been sacrificed for a course of unmitigated self-indulgence and stretches the definition of what poetry is. It can be poetry if it wants to be in the same way that I can be a snooker player if I want to say I am. But I'm no good at snooker and the poets to who Jane was referring are bad poets.

 

Some years ago I introduced a session at Portsmouth Poetry Society to try to see if there was a difference between poetry written by male and female poets. It wasn't envisaged that an outright answer would be arrived at but I hoped that the point was that 'poetry' was about the putting together of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and that both genders did that. Since then, I've found that there are by now 72 other genders and so the question has become considerably more complicated but at least it will be simplified again once Donald Trump has established a right-wing hegemony across much more than the share of the world he was elected to manage and the number is reduced back to two, or maybe one and a half.

I hope it doesn't in any way associate me with him if I suggest that the art of writing is genderless and not to be weaponized by either misogynist Republicans or feminism.

 

There are possible divides between perceived Classical/Romantic; something purportedly impersonal and objective v. autobiographical and 'confessional'; light verse and its opposite; highbrow/lowbrow/middlebrow; poems to hear out loud or those for the page. Tragical, Historical, Pastoral.

I'm sure we would all love to see the Venn diagram that placed poets on the complex map, accurately categorized, and where we and everybody else was on it so that we could complain that it was wrong. But the art of a rambling item like this is to make it look as if one knew where one was going with it. Norman MacCaig openly admitted he didn't know where his poems were going while he was writing them and they didn't get titles until they were done and he could see where he had arrived.

I'd be glad to be somewhere near him on the Venn diagram once it's done.  

Retirement Diary

 It might sometimes seem as if not much is happening. I'm sure the ageing process is gathering pace and I couldn't claim to be 'middle-aged' any more even if I wanted to.

Some years ago I'd get home from work and the elderly man from three doors up the road would be talking to the lady opposite on her doorstep, I think on the pre-text of passing on the day before's Portsmouth News. Possibly the highlight of his, or both of theirs, day.

That is the future, or something like it. But when I've had such thoughts before I've realized that, no, the future is already here. But as August Kleinzahler asks in Snow in North Jersey, 

and what did you expect from this life 

 

It might not be a fair question as it came as a bit of a surprise to be born and it was a bit late for expectations by then.

But it would have been unreasonable to have hoped to be born into the family I was born into at the time I was in the country I was. That puts me into the top few per cent luckiest people ever, to begin with. Could one be disappointed at not having been Frank Sinatra, Princess Margaret, Stephen Fry, Elizabeth Taylor or... provide your own examples of lives thought to have been 'well-lived'. St. Cuthbert, perhaps.

What happened today?

I re-lived a few more of Pushkin's adventures, however vicariously from the page at third or fourth hand. I shared some old records with Bob Harris on Sounds of the 70's, none of which impressed as much as a first hearing of this, chosen by Peter Purves on Private Passions, 

and there's still Eartha Kitt from last night's The Good Old Days to come, from the mid-1970's though it may be. And maybe that's the least of it, having contacted a few friends vis a vis this and that of passing importance because 'the meaning of life', according to such authorities as Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne and maybe Terry Eagleton, is much to do with friendship. Although I might have to return to Derrida's The Politics of Friendship, once given to me by a friend, because it might de-construct the idea to the extent of making it more elusive than I'm sure the gift was meant to express.   

And so, as most days are, it wasn't bad. 

Perhaps it is essential to the overly-indulged, spoilt way some of us live that when we are busy we look forward to indolence and then when we get it we want to be busy again. 

All this in the context of a world order being re-set by the most overblown vanity projects so that the days of hearing the News in order to be concerned about a downturn in the balance of payments reported by Anthony Barber are like halcyon days become deja-vu. We should be so lucky.  

Anthology

 As far as the list-making fetish goes, for a poet or poetry reader the making of one's own anthology must be the ultimate project. Why I thought I'd begin mine I'm not sure but making a list is as compulsive as it is daft, especially if a numerical limit is not put on it. Most lists are themed or else one could please onself with Dadaist lists, like- The Moon, antibiotics, turbot, The War of Jenkins' Ear, Felicity Kendall, kumquat and Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band.

So it's only now, having got 121 lines on the Excel spreadsheet of my anthology, I begin to consider its parameters. I've limited it to three poems per poet, mainly arbitrarily but a few would get double figures straight off without such a quota. Would I stop at 500. Would I get to 500. There's always just one more. At least the Spotify playlist at DGBooks Radio has decided for itself what my favourite pop music is.  

Going back to basics, what is the etymology of 'anthology'. It's,

'mid 17th century: via French or medieval Latin from Greek anthologia, from anthos ‘flower’ + -logia ‘collection’ (from legein ‘gather’). In Greek, the word originally denoted a collection of the ‘flowers’ of verse, i.e. small choice poems or epigrams, by various authors.'

 

But why and how did 'small' creep in there. Collections of flowers can be extensive, as per the Chelsea Flower Show so we must be careful of definitions.

Certainly the contents of an anthology need to be regarded as worthy. So there must be a remit, like 'these are the best poems ever', 'these poems represent C19th French Poetry' or 'these are my personal favourite poems', etc.

I'm very much tending towards the lattermost of those even if several poets would get more than three at the expense of others getting any without that prescription. If, at present, it goes from Catullus to Julia Copus, it has to be said that poems from 1900 onwards begin at no. 29 out of the 121 so it's hardly a broad sweep of English Poetry and there are 10 translations - from Latin, French, Polish and Russian- so it's not 'English' poetry to begin with. I've tried to include as much as possible from pre-1900 but vast continents of Edmund Spenser, Paradise Lost and John Dryden are lost on me. 

So at whatever lengths it stops at, it will be all the poems I could think of, not including those from fourth place downwards by any given poet except there will be the one I forgot about and then the other one I forgot about.

Not to worry. No publisher is pressing me to do this. There are no 'permissions' to pay for. It's like any other compulsion- 'the four aways', the ITV 7 or not stepping on the cracks in the pavement- golf, for some- that has no end until maybe one day it has been left aside for so long that it's not worth going back to.

Would that it were, as Robert Robinson used to say. It's problem is not so much how it will end but how it was ever allowed to begin.

Meanwhile, I've allocated two poems each to Rosemary Tonks and Wisława Szymborska. I really ought to decide which to put in.

Pushkiniana

T.J. Binyon's Pushkin, a Biography, is a heavy book. Not heavy going but heavy on detail. One wonders if we need it all but the cumulative effect is probably the point. Byron is mentioned several times as a contemporary, a model and a comparable figure as that kind of Romantic poet that enjoys an adventure or two.

He's never knowingly not in love, whether it's with a teenager, somebody else's wife, a countess or all three, often an Ekaterina. The gambling debts, from being an apparently terrible card player, recur in increasing proprtions, his poems have to go through censors, he's suspected of being a Decembrist and did have revolutionary sympathies and he has a more crowded fixture list at duelling than I'd like. In due course, I understand, he comes second but I haven't officially got that far yet.

While I thought Eugene Onegin was impressive, many of the faults of Romanticism are present in other poems quoted, singing hymns of praise to beauty for its own sake without telling us much about it. And the book is generously illustrated by Pushkin's own drawings, done in the margins of manuscripts, of both male and female associates. All in profile, they must be caricatures of a sort because early C19th Russian noses only vary slightly in their sharpness.

Pushkin's not easy to like but he is coming out of it ahead of Baudelaire, for a start. And then one wonders how many poets - betting without all other vocations- do come across as attractive people. Auden, maybe Keats, in some ways Edward Thomas but they are valued for what they produced, not for their gorgeous personalities. In some cases we can sympathize with their perceived shortcomings but whereas our miseducation 45 years ago had told us there was only the text it now seems perverse, impractical or almost impossible to read a poet properly without the context of their life.   

Bores

Patrick Kurp, at the consistently worthwhile and ever estimable Anecdotal Evidence ,

the other day expatiated on the subject of bores, beginning,

One of the unexpected rewards of retirement has been a serious reduction in the number of bores in my life.  

And that sounded right to me. One can be more selective of one's company in retirement whereas you could get stuck with all kinds at school, university or in work.

But those of us who find it necessary to use the internet as an outlet for what a teacher at our school called 'verbal diarrohea' ought to be wary of calling others bores when we ply our trade in 'performing repeats of all the stories' our readers have 'heard in slightly different versions'. It is to be hoped that those who come here willingly do so for similar reasons to those I go to Anecdotal Evidence for and they don't include 'wanting to read a bore'.

Patrick ends with a reference to Bertrand Russell as an example. Perhaps these days one could suffer few more boring than Rod Liddle. Times Radio is good and has its least listenable presenters, him and Geoff Norcott, on at times when I'm not usually tuned in.

But, reflecting on the issue, I'm somehow haunted by various traumas from school, university and work as if this unforseen paradise with almost exclusively company I choose to keep was somehow lacking the antagonism life once had as a matter of routine.

And then I wonder if the people involved were 'bores' or uncongenial in other ways. I recently wrote myself a little memoir of 1981 - not for wider distribution, necessarily- which was a seminal year, moving from the lax, liberal campus life at a low-grade university to that of full-time work in a job unsuited to my limited personality and range of talents. More or less from a culture dominated by middle-class Marxists who enjoyed post-Trad jazz to one where money was a god and, as it turns out, Clarkson's Top Gear, the golf club and Dubai are objects of desire. 

I owe a fair amount to the three years I had at university and the four and a half I subsequently spent employed as a salesman. I don't know how I'd have got from the age of 18 to 25 without them. But whether the people there were 'bores' or only incompatible, it's hard to say. On balance, the Civil Service jobs were better because, despite the plentiful supply of odd characters, there were hundreds of people to find suitable friends among and the day I gained entry into that cosseted employment was the luckiest of my whole life. And, moving beyond that strange but relatively safe world, I've retained the best of them, soon lost the others and by now my inbox receives mainly messages from suitable poetry, music and amenable sorts of people.

I had realized that much but I hadn't got as far as Patrick Kurp in understanding, or putting it, quite so well. Which is why I read him.

--

But here's a test of boringness, or esoteric obsession. 

I've had to clear out much of the upstairs room that serves as archive, library and now the summer escape room if kids are playing their football outside in summer.

It is astonishing what one finds in the unclassified clutter. Like tickets to football matches from 1971. Vivid memories attach to Coventry-Forest on my 11th birthday, not many to West Brom-Man City and none at all to Swansea-Brighton. But looking up that game at Abertawe, I find that someone else has posted their ticket to it on the internet. They weren't sitting near me and my dad.

Whether posting such arcane material makes one a bore, though, I doubt. Mentioning something once, however mundane it might be, is okay. It's the very mundanity that can make it of interest. Surely the bore is the one who goes on about the same things all the time to make them eventually dreary.

The work of Karl Marx is of interest and one ought to hear the music of John Coltrane. The acquisition, maybe even modest accumulation, of some money, preferably by leagal means, is a necessary thing. But one is best trying to avoid becoming a parody of oneself. 

But, of course, it was all part of the plot,

and there I was again......

trapped in a story I had read before. 

  

Cuarteto Casals at Wigmore Hall

 Cuarteto Casals, Wigmore Hall, Jan 12

String Quartets are hard to come by locally, it's a long time since I occupied 'my' seat, A1, in Wigmore Hall and the very excellent Cuarteto Casals were playing the great favourite, Shos 3, so it was an obvious midwinter day out.

Those who think of Bach, especially in chamber works, as too mathematical have a point in the academic exercises of the Art of Fugue but kept to a minimum of four contrapuncti, it served as an hors d'oeuvre of manageable proportions, clarity and precision. With Abel Tomàs taking the lead impeccably, reduced to four parts of the four-part magnum opus it is entirely viable and maybe that's how it's best done, moving from a shadowy Renaissance viol consort to something much more involved.

Any prayer said before a bullfight would for me be offered for the bull so I came to Joaquín Turina's La oración del torero (The Bullfighter’s Prayer), Op. 34, somewhat set against it. Spanish machismo that feels the need of prayer seems even more cowardly than matadors usually are. However, the piece is warm, lyrical and atmospheric, neither too prayerful or suggesting gratuitous bravado and I came away from the encounter pleasantly impressed.

But if the supporting pieces outdid my expectations they counted for not quite so much once the Shostakovich was underway. A major favourite for fifty years since I first recorded it onto cassette from my transistor radio, it was the whole point of the straight up-and-back trip and came with the highest of expectations. Which it proceeded to exceed by a distance.

Vera Martinez-Mehner took the first violin part with tremendous relish and intensity from the austere dance of the first movement onwards. The sound that Cuarteto Casals make, from the delicacy of the subtle detail to the grim power required elsewhere, is stunning. 

The viola riff in the second movement has always for me evoked a shot-down Messerschmidt, or similar, spiralling down from the sky but the programmatic title provided by Shostakovich, whether as a diversion from his real meaning or not, is 'Rumblings of unrest and anticipation'. Music, being abstract, can be whatever you want it to be but the dark menace of Cristina Cordero Beltrán playing it in the flesh only a matter of yards away  is something that a recording can't replicate.

While it is clearly about war, as with a lot of Shostakovich it could be about a few other things, too. It is heroic and very personal music from a naturally, understandably, nervous man who stood his ground and if I can sometimes tire of poets and artists expressing themselves on the tragedies of war, I'll never tire of this beautiful, highly sophisticated bombshell so far ahead of the model string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and even, dare I say, Beethoven.

It was never less than devastating and entirely hypnotic the whole way through. Familiarity with a piece can help one appreciate an outstanding performance whereas unfamiliarity provides the equal and opposite shock of something new. It lasts until Radio 3 goes back to the studio at 2pm for an afternoon that must have struggled to follow it, after the long, lingering last note and the respectful silence allowed before the applause. Of which there was not enough. Good Lord, I realize that the Wigmore audience are served with the best there is but what do performers have to do to get them to their feet to applaud. 

It's a world tour - Paris on Wednesday then Liechtenstein, Spain and the Netherlands before Canada and the USA- and it's routine for them. But that makes the shortlist for Best Concert Ever for me, alongside 11 others I noted down on the train back. Not much more than £20 the ticket, £16.70 return with senior railcard to get there and back. London perfectly peaceable and enjoyable to walk through, unlike reports of it from Trump henchmen who haven't done so. What a bargain, not that cash comes into the equation with any significance.

Cuarteto have recently released vol. 2 of their Complete Shostakovich Quartets. It's possible I might have to have vol. 1 at the very least even though the seminal Fitzwilliam set ought to be enough, given that there are other composers to listen to and one doesn't have world enough, or time. I don't know. But today provided a reason to believe when such things can sometimes seem hard to come by.  

Sean O'Brien, The Bonfire Party

Sean O'Brien, The Bonfire Party (Picador) 

 

There was a time it seemed to me that once beyond the age of 60, poets either ground to a halt or began repeating themselves. If it's a rule at all it's one of the type that need exceptions to prove it. Exceptions like Sean O'Brien who continues to deliver with rigour and energy.

Some might facetiously suggest that he was always repeating himself but he arrived all but fully-formed with The Frighteners in 1987 and not in much need of 'development' to become the mature version of himself, complete with an armoury of objective correlatives for the perceived declining condition of England.

It's less repetition than resonance as summer is either imminent or on its way out. Afternoons are long and drawn out in an onomatopoeic way. Much needs to be ratified, certificated or established by a higher authority, maybe one of the 'gods' mentioned, and we are still haunted by vestiges of WW2. Otherwise not even language is to be trusted. There are sinister implications in how,

                  the clocks conspired to agree

rather than were synchronized. And the discourse is liberally sprinkled with sometimes esoteric literary references, several of which need looking up.

Early on, Sleepers takes as its text a line from George Orwell about 'the deep, deep sleep of England' which is at least as pertinent now as it was in the 1930's,

                         This couldn't be the end

 

for something we had never thought to lose.

It is deceptively restful while dense with a feeling of detachment and unbelonging. Similarly, in High Summer,

This used to be England

and now it is nowhere. 

This long, somnolent afternoon has dragged on since Somebody Else, in Ghost Train, in 1995. 

Ryan: Rainy Season is more autumnal and somewhat less resigned, longing to 'put off politesse and do some smiting' to the gory extent of putting insect larvae into ears but still,

the world is only ever scenery, a tale,

a line that evokes more than its surface complacency suggests when 'unpacked'. The world, it would appear, is a landscape, or some fiction, we pass through - perhaps as tourists or day-trippers do- without being a part of it.

And, as in The Past, we might look back on the past without finding ourselves there either.

But there might have been a shift in the O'Brien diagnosis of our personal, and communal, malaise. There was a time it was political, inflicted on us by the machinations of how things are run and all the time shown to be our own fault. Now, though,

                                    time's

the evil in the heart of things,

and we are victims of something more metaphysical.

It all remains contingent, precarious and unwinnable. But not necessarily as bleak as it sounds. If Sean's poetic genealogy has Auden as a grandfather and maybe Peter Porter and Douglas Dunn as parents, Larkin is an uncle. Dark with implications though much might be - and the future surely looks darker than Larkin could be expected to have imagined, the sordid sheds, the old crowd in the window seat of the pub and the

gasp of rust

with which the back door of the garage opens are real things offering something more tangible than literature, like the engagement with Jules Maigret in Impasse, and in To Cythera, Juniper and Fingerpost towards the end of the book, the reader is left more transfigured than they had any reason to expect. 

 

Having been one of those who decided the result of last year's Forward Prize, it's unlikely any such committee will be required this year to move O'Brien's tally of them up to four.  

Good Mrs. Shakspaire,

It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Like listening to Jane Garvey and Fi Glover on Times Radio yesterday afternoon. They interviewed Maggie O'Farrell ahead of the film of Hamnet. It's a brilliant book, might well make a good film but is imaginative historical fiction rather than scholarly literary history. Maggie is as welcome to her view of Shakespeare biography as anybody else is to theirs but she might have made her moving story from some traditional assumptions that don't stand up very well to further examination.

The Curtis-Green Strange Fowl essay offers a very different reading of events and the one piece of reaction to the interview that Jane and Fi read out was the first time we've heard the idea that Hamnet was really the son of Hamnet Sadler, and not Shakespeare, from anywhere else but ourselves. It would be very interesting to know where their contributor found the idea. But a little bit more of an airing and discussion of it was prompted at The Times online without it quite 'going viral'.

Since the first appearance of our 'twins theory' in the TLS in 2016 and posting it on the internet, the discovery of a letter to Mrs. Shakspaire in London, BBC News , has been presented as evidence that Anne was not left behind in Stratford, that it wasn't an unhappy, shotgun or make-do marriage. Maggie thought this was "thrilling" and "wonderful" and,

that proves of course that they did love each other and probably lived together for some time in London. 

 

But, not so fast. The letter might place Anne in London sometime after 1602 and before 1608 but it doesn't mean she was there for the twenty years before that, during which Shakespeare was making his name and a good living out of the theatre. While a reported sighting of Anne in London comes as some surprise, it fits with the Strange Fowl account as part of the reconciliation described there and that subsequent theme in the 'late plays', like The Winter's Tale. What first appeared to be a potential sticking point is readily assimilated and so the essay will be updated with it, gladly accepting the letter as a part of our account. 

 

If Anne wants to go to London then so she must. It's not for us to say she has to stay in Stratford. And neither do we think the worse of her if she did have children by two different fathers. Jane and Fi seemed somewhat offended that the 'twins theory' idea maligned her character and they compared it to Hollyoaks. It is true that Anne has had a 'bad press' for the most part but I'm not having that. It compares with how the prolific output of children by Boris Johnson and Bob Marley are respectively seen as profligate, irresponsible and incontinent but then an expression of love, creativity and fertility. 

 

Strange Fowl is looking good to me. Exactly what our motivation is in promoting the theory isn't entirely clear but I'd like to think it is a contribution to 'scholarship', a selfless project attempting some clarification of confused issues. And, with the job writing about local music events either in abeyance or even having reached its limit, here's a long-standing, labyrinthine subject that hasn't yet lost any of its appeal.  

The Captain's Daughter

The Captain's Daughter, according to the back cover of Pushkin's Novels, Tales, Journeys, 'has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature'. There will be time to wonder whether there are grades of perfection elsewhere. Not having read the whole of Russian literature, I couldn't say but it's a big claim up against Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev et al. James Joyce told his daughter, Lucia, that Tolstoy's How Much Land Does a Man Need? was 'the greatest story that the literature of the world knows' without saying it was perfect. 

Pyotr gets lucky more than once on his adventures before marrying Marya. The story is like an extended parable from the Bible with sharply delineated good and bad characters, virtue rewarded, the bad punished and thus a happy ending. For me, at least, a bit more ambiguity raising a few more questions might be required for anything to be 'great'. Hamlet is more convincing as a character because we can't be sure if he's a hero beleaguered by difficult circumstances or an indolent student mooching about.

Pushkin's characters often end up in duels, as does Hamlet, and as did Pushkin himself, which can't help but be dramatic but life was lived in primary colours in olden days. I don't hold that against him but in many ways a picture painted from a more subdued or limited palette can offer more subtlety. Coming at the beginning of Russian literature, it's remarkable how cultures like that find themselves such a major figure to follow, like Homer in Greek, Chaucer in English and maybe Dante in Italian. 

There's plenty more to be had in Novels, Tales, Journeys but the biography by T. J. Binyon, much lauded by A. N. Wilson - a fine biographer himself- arrived today so I'll soon be as well informed about early C19th Russia as I once was about the Soviet Union, courtesy of Solzhenitsyn. It might work to read the biography and stop off to read the fiction as and when it is mentioned. My trouble is that I'm not really a leisurely reader. Once I've started a book I like to finish it, as long as it's worthwhile.

--

Also upcoming, The Bonfire Party by Sean O'Brien, then Departures, said to be the 'schwanengesang' of Julian Barnes who I'm missing already and, later, Maggie O'Farrell.