David Green

Valentine's Day

2012-02-13T17:53:00.002Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/10/love-poems-writers-favourites-valentines-day

Poetry is becoming a little bit too closely associated with Valentine's Day from what I've seen in the media this year. It's an unholy alliance. Of course 'love' is one of the recurrent themes in poetry but poetry can be about anything and everything else and is short-changed by being thus typecast - but this feature at least gives an outing to some excellent choices by those asked to select a poem.
Blake Morrison very nearly got it right. Touch is, of course, a seminal and completely wonderful poem but the right answer was Thom's Tamer and Hawk.
Being among the very top few of my favourite poems, it's not the first time it gets mentioned on this website and I dare say it won't be the last.

Tamer and Hawk

I thought I was so tough,
But gentled at your hands,
Cannot be quick enough
To fly for you and show
That when I go I go
At your commands.

Even in flight above
I am no longer free:
You seeled me with your love,
I am blind to other birds -
The habit of your words
Has hooded me.

As formerly, I wheel
I hover and I twist,
But only want the feel,
In my possessive thought,
Of catcher and of caught
Upon your wrist.

You but half civilize,
Taming me in this way.
Through having only eyes
For you I fear to lose,
I lose to keep, and choose
Tamer as prey.

Bryan Ferry - Carrickfergus

2012-02-10T22:05:00.003Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha93wpA0264

Well I'm drunk today and I'm seldom sober
A handsome rover from town to town
But I am sick now my days are numbered
Come all you young men and lay me down

Radio Snow Elsewhere

2012-02-10T19:16:00.001Z

Radio Snow Elsewhere

During the night the radio
reported snow falling nearby,
in the next town.
And so because their weather there
is what we’re due to have here soon,
the world was a ghost of itself
and we were due to wake to white.
Except it didn’t happen
and the morning was cold, moist
and quiet and any snow we might have had
was already already gone
and the world was no more than the ghost
of the ghost that we didn’t see.

10 Things about Poetry

2012-02-06T19:23:00.002Z

Even the great Michael Donaghy issued a list of axioms or advice about poetry. And he was probably the best among many recent lesser lights who thought that advice was necessary, who thought that wisdom was possible, who seemed to have this sub-conscious need for 'rules'.
Have we really come this far and yet still feel we need a rubric. Isn't poetry, among all other things, the thing that is always in rebellion, even against itself.
How many times have you read a review or blurb that claims that this poet is the one that is different to all the others. All the time, isn't it, all the time. Who are all those others that are all the same. I've never seen a critique of any poet that said they were just like all the others. I'd love to be the poet who is just like all the others, but only the good ones.
One would love it, wouldn't one, if poetry was a world without manifestos. And yet, in such a small world, it seems to have as many of them as it has participants. It might even have more, if it could.
So, you either take part or you don't. Let's see if we can make it to the recognized number of ten 'things about poetry'. It hasn't taken me long to retrieve this much from a few decades of prejudice and side-taking. The worst thing about it is that I think they're probably right whereas I know on a profounder level that 'if it feels good, do it' ought to be the only maxim.

So,

The only thing that doesn’t change is the avant garde. It is the same now as it was in the 1960’s and 70’s. It might contribute to the mainstream, which develops all the time, but it is only a minor tributary.

The teaching of Creative Writing is dubious at best. A proper poet will teach themselves from their own chosen predecessors or exemplars.

The language is already there. The poet must use it to effect rather than assume it does the job for them.

Poetry in translation is, sadly, a lost cause.

Poetry is not by definition a good thing. In fact, in many hands, it’s a much worse thing than it thinks it is.

Poems on the page are fine but are enhanced exponentially by hearing them read aloud, preferably by the author even if they are not a good reader.

Form doesn’t mean ‘sonnet’, ‘villanelle’ or ‘rhyming couplets’. A poem can take any form it cares to but it will be a bad poem if it can establish no form at all.

A poem succeeds or fails on its own terms but is less likely to succeed if it doesn’t aspire to the condition of music.

If its author isn’t thrilled by a poem, it is unreasonable for it to expect anybody else to be.

Every poet inevitably thinks that their poems are special. But that’s unlikely. Most poems are a bit like other poems. There’s nothing wrong with that but it’s best to be aware of it. We are not all Seamus Heaney.

Ian Donaldson - Ben Jonson

2012-02-05T15:15:00.004Z

Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson, A Life (OUP)

Quite early in this book, the Stratfordian side of the Shakespeare debate might well consider just how much is known about Jonson's life compared to their man and begin to wonder if the opposition might have a point. I'm sure they don't and one good reason is that Jonson was more assiduous in preserving his own details in both his own poems and plays and his discussions with others but it still registers as a vague irritant.

Ian Donaldson's book is scholarly, which means detailed and thorough, without being captivating throughout. Jonson is a 'colourful' character but Donaldson limits his imaginings to a sensible minimum while accumulating genuine evidence from real sources. A book of this length on Shakespeare's life is filled out with historical context, contemporary facts and figures and speculation whereas this is able to fix on its main subject most of the time.

Never far from controversy, Jonson's first major skirmish is in 1597 with The Isle of Dogs, a play apparently so scurrilous that he and his collaborators found themselves in Marshalsea Prison and destroyed all copies of it. The episode threatened the whole enterprise and future of the theatre but exactly what offence it caused is now uncertain except that it must have marked an early benchmark by which to measure his swings between satire and the expedient glorification of eminent figures. His career continues through the duel in which he kills Gabriel Spencer, a fellow actor, some falling out with Shakespeare and the issue of the coats of arms that hint at the social ambitions of both Jonson and Shakespeare. But Donaldson doesn't see Jonson satirizing Shakespeare's ambition on the grounds that his own rise in status was even more spectacular. I don't know if that would have dissuaded Jonson from making the point, though. However, the unfortunate Spencer had been one of those imprisoned with Jonson before being despatched by him in a swordfight over some disagreement now unknown.

Whereas Shakespeare's allegiance to Catholicism is no more than implied or suspected in places, and John Donne changes religion quite well-advisedly in early adulthood, Jonson remains Catholic for much longer, and one can see his reputation for robust and belligerent attitudes given every justification in these episodes, and yet later in life, in 1625, it was suggested ('jocularly') that he might be made Dean of Westminster.

Jonson's energy and output are prolific, his cynical world-view as portrayed in so many of the plays only equalled by his shameless but orthodox flattery of monarchs and patrons. He became the undisputed star writer of his time, providing, with Inigo Jones- another friend with who he managed to find ongoing differences, the foundations for the Augustan Age before the preference of the Romantic period for Shakespeare replaced the taste for his 'neo-classicism'. Donaldson doubts if the poverty he claimed in old age was quite as dire as his appeals for financial help might have suggested and was in any case evidently brought about by the generous good living that he enjoyed and promoted, as reported by Izaak Walton,

(he) would be sure not to want wine, of which he usually took too much before he went to bed, if not oftener and sooner.

Ian Donaldson has provided an essential account of Jonson, including not only his adventures abroad and walking to Scotland but detailed summaries of many of the masques and plays. The journey from being a poor bricklayer in Charing Cross to the most eminent man of letters in England, in Westminster, went by a circuitous and apparently very lively route.

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)

2012-02-02T17:41:00.003Z

There will be better tributes than I can provide to the Nobel prize-winning poet, Wislawa Szymborska, who died in Krakow this week aged 88. I'd be among the first to question how anyone can appreciate poetry in a language one doesn't understand but I liked to think when I first read her poems that we shared some kinship of themes and approach, which was partly at least prompted by the fact that she had a poem called Museum, just like me. And with a small output of quiet poems, and apparently being stunned into silence by her Nobel prize, there really should be more poets like her. But like her I certainly did.

Also, locally, Portsmouth Poetry Society lost Brian Wells last week, a proper poet and very nice man, a founder member of the society 40 years ago, who will be much missed.

Love at the Bottom of the Sea

2012-01-30T17:37:00.004Z

http://www.houseoftomorrow.com/calendar.php

I only just caught this in time. 25th April at the Royal Festival Hall.

It's become something to look out for on a two-year cycle now, though, The Magnetic Fields tour and album.

So, get in before its too late. It will be my third Magnetic Fields concert and, for a devoted admirer, it is an unmissable occasion.

Which did make me count up who else gets into the elite group of artists I've seen three times. It's an unlikely list with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra presumably heading it with I don't know how many Portsmouth Guildhall concerts. Andrew Motion would be next with 5, then Tasmin Little, Sean O'Brien, Tom Paulin and perhaps John Cooper-Clarke on 3. Elvis Costello, The Clash, Paul Muldoon, Natalie Clein, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, The Tallis Scholars and Rod Clements (once with Lindisfarne and once on his own) are definitely among those seen twice.

I think there might be people who have seen me three times but I'd be the first to acknowledge that it wasn't in order to see me that they had gone.

BSO - Sibelius and Dvorak

2012-01-27T22:39:00.003Z

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Karill Karabits, Gautier Capucon (cello), Weber, Dvorak and Sibelius, Portsmouth Guildhall, Jan 27

I wouldn't be the first to be enthused about nationalism or even nationalism in music but one can't help but be enthused by impressive landscapes of sound and with a rising star Ukrainian conductor and a dashing young cellist from France, this evening's concert was internationalist and well-travelled rather than in any way brooding on the dark side of patriotism.

Weber's overture to Oberon has survived the opera it was written for and provided a lively, perhaps even capricious, waking up exercise before the real business got underway.

Karabits is not a flashy or demonstrative conductor, quite rightly doing his job in rehearsal and preparation rather than seeing the performance as his moment. The Dvorak Cello Concerto is a majestic piece of rousing passion and sonorous reflection. Inevitably describing both wide open American spaces as well as echoing pieces like the Slavonic Dances from back home in old Bohemia, it reaches a bigger climax at the end of its first movement than in the last, which moves through more lyrical and solitary passages before the final flourish. Gautier Capucon's best moments came with the more delicate and, I daresay, technical demands of quick fingering and deftness of touch but his cello made a fine sound through all its paces and the piece was a big success, the boy apparently enjoying it as much as the audience.

Sibelius 5 is a symphony I know as well as any but that still doesn't qualify me to comment in any semblance of a professional capacity. The last time I heard it was at the Proms the season before last when it was a little overshadowed by having to come after a sensational Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. It was better done here, judged on a couple of points but whether those are in some way due to the venues and where I was within them is hard to say. Closer to the action in Portsmouth than London, the broad sweep of Sibelius' masterpiece (and I mean one of his several) was more involving here. I did wonder if in the early passages it was sharp and a fraction more frenetic than is required but the brass, which is very important in the final movement, were exactly right as was the judgement of tempi there. The chill Scandinavian winds in the strings and the expanse of forest and cold, clear lakes was delivered authentically and convincingly. One can't fail to be moved by Sibelius and my contention that it is impossible not to like him has only been challenged once by someone who said, well, I know someone who doesn't like him. But there is always one and that's fine.

It's some time since I last went to see the BSO in their winter programme at Portsmouth Guildhall but it's not likely to be as long until the next time. They look like a young orchestra in good form -or, yes, it might just be me who is now older and mostly out of form. It's a shame that the days are gone when a contemporary piece was included in each concert. I remember James MacMillan, most magnificently, and Dominic Muldowney from the year when that charm offensive was tried. But there will always be a place for a good orchestra playing reliable standard repertoire and it is to be hoped that the Bournemouth Symphony, whose lorry's arrival into Portsmouth was witnessed and applauded by me from my office window this afternoon, will keep on bringing them here. They'd be missed if they ever didn't.

John Burnside - Black Cat Bone

2012-01-25T17:27:00.005Z

John Burnside, Black Cat Bone (Cape Poetry)

It's still 2011 on this website. With this book winning both the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes I thought it ought to be looked at. I'm very glad I did. It is an excellent book and a not unworthy winner of the double.

In many ways one can bracket it with the Harsent and O'Brien collections of last year, as part of a middle-aged man syndrome of poetry haunted by loss or demons and darkness. But in the same way that Bach, Handel and, say, Telemann might sound very similar to the uninitiated, attentive listening can differentiate them. Here one might find more possibility or suggestion of redemption in Burnside than O'Brien's unreconciled sense of loss or Harsent's dark side.

The opening poem, The Fair Chase, is full of absence and searching but at least feels an,

infinite kinship, laid down in the blood

against the sway

of accident and weather

It introduces some of the recurrent images in the collection- vellum, billhooks and ice, for examples. 'Vellum' in the first line here is an adjective, suggesting a richness that 'medieval' in On the Fairytale Ending also does, redolent of heraldry and pageantry in,

broken gold

and crimson in the medieval

beechwoods

The collection maintains a steady, measured rhythm and glorious texture throughout. It's not difficult to see how it appealed to two different sets of prize judges.

'Hooks and eyes' recur as a metaphor as tiny binding forces in a world knitted intricately together but with its griefs and breakage a part of it, too.

Loved and Lost is a surprisingly literal title to an outstanding poem among several that is otherwise more allusive, ending brilliantly,

till we admit

that love divulged is barely love at all:

only the slow decay of a second skin

concocted from the tinnitus of longing.

If poetry often takes much of its power from the ability to imply meaning from contradictory ideas, Burnside makes impressive work of sustaining and resilience from the fragility of being and the inevitability of loss.

Another disconcerting title, Oh No, Not My Baby, knowingly lifted from the Goffin and King standard pop song, has not the potency of such relatively cheap music but the loving and moving sincerity of something more profound done with disarming fluency.

Neoclassical might be where we think we are reading Sean O'Brien except that closer reading finds a somewhat gentler mood in it somewhere, just fractionally, in the accumulation of something like acceptance or not quite acquiescence but not resistance either.

This is a beautiful book, fully deserving of its awards and I have to urge you to read it as a paragon example of what is best about poetry at the moment. 2011 produced some very fine books of poems. I won't revise my choice of the Harsent as being my favourite but the selection would have been even more difficult to make if I had read this book in time. I don't know what 2012 has in store - I believe we are promised the Collected O'Brien which will be a useful career restrospective- but when I notice this year getting underway, I'll let you know.

Dawn Moon

2012-01-13T21:57:00.000Z

Dawn Moon

Left over from the night,
you’d think,
a two-thirds moon
is sharp above
the morning air
and clearer
than the science
that explains
how it turns,
or doesn’t turn,
so that
the same face faces us,
the other always
turned away.

David Green (Books) Merchandising

2012-01-11T18:16:00.004Z

I sometimes wonder if David Green (Books) ought to issue slightly more than it does just to prove the imprint is not dormant.

I wondered whether to produce a free leaflet of Greatest Hits, for which I picked 14 poems from the booklets but those who really want the poems should have them already and it might be a superfluous title.

So, then I passed a place in town that makes up t-shirts with logos on and I thought I might ask how much a yellow t-shirt with the Last of the Great Dancers title on the front might cost. I might get myself a couple of XL, which is what fits me these days.

So, let me know if you'd like one. Tell me what size between S and XXL you think you are and I'll see if they can do them for a tenner each, plus it will be p&p of a couple of quid unless I'm due to see you in the near future.

British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000

2012-01-11T17:48:00.009Z

I remember a story from maybe the 1980's where Bob Dylan was trying to order a copy of every record that featured a version of one of his songs. I don't know how successful the project was, or how he would have known.

I ordered this book because I found that I was mentioned in it. British Poetry Magazines, 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of 'Little Magazines', compiled by David Miller and Richard Price. It is much more bibliography than history and, as I thought, my mention is a listing of Allusions magazine that I co-edited issue 1 of, at Lancaster University in 1979. So, not worth having for that alone but it should be interesting to look through.
However, it doesn't compare with such things as the issue of Navis magazine, a very glorious career highspot in which I was listed as a contributor on the same back cover as Thom Gunn was listed as a previous contributor. I don't mind being no more than a footnote.

This parody of John Dean's style will fulfil the remit of a forthcoming Portsmouth Poetry Society evening on Parodies,

On Being a Footnote

with apologies to John Dean

At last, I am a footnote
in the history of verse,
a role that suits me well
and I have no need to rehearse.

It’s not for me the glamour
of the life of a laureate.
A small, marginal mention
is the most that I will get.

There will not be a movement
attributed to Green
as my career went straight from
young upstart to has been.

The pursuit of all such glory
was sadly never my game
and so it’s only in a footnote
that you will find my name.

Blogs are dinosaurs

2012-01-09T21:27:00.003Z

Or so says Todd Swift, signing off from Eyewear.
I'd give you the link but what's the point. He's given up.
But I thought I'd stick with it for the time being, not get a Twitter account and continue reading books rather than get a kindle. I'll still listen to the radio rather than podcasts.
I don't listen to many of my old LP's these days but there's a hardcore of vinyl fans who won't have it any other way.
There is nothing that looks as silly and dated as those who went with a transient trend. Ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
Carry on.

The Complete Larkin

2012-01-09T19:44:00.003Z

Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett, The Complete Poems (Faber)

Absolutely not.

I just caught Archie Burnett being interviewed on Radio 4's review programme talking about the job he's done on repackaging Larkin again. That is not a tautology, I'm afraid. I meant to say both 'repackaging' and 'again'.

Larkin is somehow accused of having published little and even being 'constipated' and the discussion wondered if he might have been surprised to find that his Complete Poems now run to 768 pages.

I expect he probably would, and mainly because he decided at a very early stage which of his poems were finished and warranted publication and that he didn't think that every little verse he put on a Christmas card was meant for the oeuvre, the supposed 'legacy', the 'work'.

That might have been one of the reasons, the quality control, that brought him such tributes as being regarded as the finest poet of his generation when, at a very early stage in his career, it did.

There is really no need to buy this book if you have Larkin's poems in any of their other iterations already. Why does one need an eighth, ninth or tenth edition of his best poems taking up shelf space when one has them so many times already. Burnett's arguments in justifying this unnecessary volume were specious at best and nothing that he said in praise of the poet justified it and there was certainly no need to make improper remarks about the work of Trevor Tolley, whose imaginings of which records might have formed Larkin's jazz collection might have gone a little bit too far already.

If academics can find nothing better to do then it must be time that there were fewer of them. This is very likely to be the best collection of poems published in 2012 but that is not the point.

Lips & Bananas Restored

2012-01-08T18:31:00.005Z

My painting, Lips & Bananas, has now been restored with acrylic paint over the flaking yellow gouache bananas. Except acrylic paint seems to catch the light so it might need photographing in daylight.And it is now designated as Lips & Bananas, (2007, gouache, acrylic and permanent marker on canvas, restored 2012).

Natalie Clein

2012-01-05T19:31:00.005Z

I think it's a review of Natalie's Kodaly CD on Amazon in which the release is praised for not trying to sell itself with pictures of the musician on the cover. It wouldn't need to, and although it might be said that her other records do feature her draped over the cello or looking nice, that's mainly because that's what she looks like and Julian Lloyd Webber doesn't.

And I'd like to establish from the start that I haven't bought all of Natalie's CD's for the pictures, either. I have discs of the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and I didn't buy them because he looks gorgeous.

I've seen her two times. The first was in Fairford Church a few years ago now when she filled the cosy acoustics with Bach Suites with an unforgettable tone. At another end of the spectrum, in the Cadogan Hall Prom this year, it was passsionate Tavener and idiosyncratic Gubaidalina. You can't choose between such ends of a scale but both were tremendous. And so, finding that her recording career so far began rather more ordinarily with Brahms, Schubert and Rachmanninov could have been slightly underwhelming.

The Brahms Schubert set from 2004 includes the Schubert sonata for arpeggione which my forensic instincts deduce must have been what she played in Fairford because it says here that it is the only surviving piece written for that instrument that was invented, came and went, in a decade or two, only having had time to entice Schubert to write any surviving music for it. Although the Brahms sonatas have their moments and provide eloquent discourse on their velvety way, it is the Schubert that charms the most.

The Romantic Cello looks at first sight like an alarmingly Classic FM marketing exercise but I'm sure the Chopin and Rachmanninov are given thorough seeing-to's, doing exactly what it says on the tin. So far, this is the disc I can find the least to like about but it's up against a couple of sensational recordings and it can be the case that those things that don't impress immediately reveal their secrets and power given further hearings and so I'm not dismissing it yet. It does cross one's mind that cello sonatas are not solo pieces but accompanied by piano and both Chopin and Rachmanninov are primarily regarded as piano composers and so I wonder if Natalie doesn't share the spotlight with the pianist, Charles Owen, rather more than the credits suggests.

I don't regard myself as much of an Elgar fan. With Purcell, Tallis, Byrd, even Handel if you will, and then William Boyce and any John Taveners or Taveners around, I couldn't promise the Worcester man a place in my Top 6 English composers, but the account of the Concerto from 2007 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Vernon Handley, who, as I have just checked, left us forever the following year, would be enough to convince anybody. Like the Bruch violin concerto, the piece has become one of those standards that familiarity can almost make you love and not notice both at the same time because it is taken for granted but this reading is sensual, beguiling and very wonderful indeed. Natalie says in her note it took her ten years before she felt she was ready to record it but then the moment came. And it was worth the wait. There is stacks of thought and feeling in it, both from Elgar, Natalie and presumably Handley, too. It's not very often I place an order on Amazon for a CD to be sent to someone else but I did it with this one.

Not only that, but the Salut d'Amour and Chanson de Matin are beautifully realized, too, and valued here as much more than fillers.

Which leaves us with the latest release of Kodaly on Hyperion. And, finally, something dark and dangerous. While placings in the Classic FM chart no doubt pay the bills and afford a nice new frock or two, it must be the genuine artistic purpose of the real musician to take on pieces like this half hour solo sonata of C20th Hungarian 'sturm und drang' . When German Romantics thought of the idea of such 'storm and stress' in the late C18th, it wasn't their fault but they had no idea what the C20th was going to be like. Was it Theodore Adorno who pronounced that 'no poetry could be written' after such things as the holocaust or the 'World' Wars. Well, wrong again, you silly old Marxist theorist. You didn't realize quite how hard and resilient we could be, even as early as 1915. And here, Natalie goes into that darkness, as Tasmin did with the Bartok last summer, and brings us shocking richness to show that we are not finished yet and have somehow come out on the other side, sadder no doubt, but intact. Much of the credit in this case goes to Zoltan Kodaly, of course, but it is to be hoped that Natalie will go on and record more of this part of the repertoire as well as the lyrical Romantic pieces.

And if it were possible to place an advance order for her recording of the Bach Suites, to put next to Pablo Casals and Paul Tortellier, then I would but Amazon don't have the facility to take orders for things that haven't been done yet.

Derek Mahon - Raw Material

2012-01-05T17:46:00.002Z

Derek Mahon, Raw Material (Gallery Press)

Poetry in translation is an unsatisfactory business. Poetry only really exists in its original language and is immediately a different thing once translated. However, it would be insular and narrow-minded to only read poetry in languages that one was fluent enough to appreciate it in. I like to think that I can read Baudelaire in the original but I'm sure I'm missing out on quite a bit.

Derek Mahon's introductory note to this book distinguishes between the 'literal' approach of Ted Hughes, in which much is sacrificed to stay true to the words rather than reproducing the spirit of a piece, and Mahon's own approach, which is to provide his 'version'. I think both are flawed and the whole enterprise is too difficult to get right without learning the first language. And that is a big undertaking.

Not only that, but we get more of Mahon's alter ego poet, Gopal Singh, here- a poet of his own invention to make faux translations of, just in case translation wasn't a suspect enough process already. Mahon's not alone in having an imaginary friend like that. Last year I tried to find more poems by Liviu Campanu before discovering that he was invented by Patrick McGuinness and even I, for whatever reason, had a small number of poems in magazines some thirty years ago under the name Detroit Jackson. I don't want to talk about that.

But I'm glad to say that this is an enjoyable book in spite of all that with versions of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and others, but mainly for the series of poems, Sextus and Cynthia, from Propertius, a Roman writing to his girlfriend at one time passionately recalling a night spent together but also missing her, being suspected by her of more than he says he was guilty of and at times jealously warning against the attentions of others, like,

some dickhead adept at sexy talk.

It is in a word like 'dickhead' that a literal translation and Mahon's modern vernacular rendering can be seen to diverge. One day perhaps I'll get a volume of Propertius and check which word he used there. I'm not sure it was one we covered in 'O' level Latin.

View from the Boundary

2012-01-03T18:04:00.003Z

Happy New Year.
I remember running in a race of several laps of the track at school once, it might only have been a 1500 metres, but the teacher said afterwards that he noticed my body language going into the last lap saying, 'oh, no, not again'. And that's very much how it felt going back into the office this morning. The midwinter break is often the longest break of the year for me these days and so the most accustomed I get to not having to deal with the dreary routine of it all, the same people still behaving in the same old ways, the same grinding processes to be gone through. But, there again, by some miracle, one is still employed. One never asked to be born but one has to be a bit philosophical and can't help but see the point of Larkin's almost grateful resignation to it in Toads Revisited.
There are still small joys to be had and even the often grim edifice of professional sport can yet provide them. The New Year racing recovered my Christmas losses before I made a clattering error that only went to prove that a fool and his money will eventually be parted but the gloriousness of Kauto Star makes such things very bearable. And the tedious complaints of Arsene Wenger only served to somehow augment a tremendous fight back by Fulham last night.
I don't know how long Geoffrey Hill has been under consideration for a knighthood but it's encouraging to note that as soon as this website features him, he gets it. I'm really not convinced about the honours list - what it means or how it matters- and it is those awards that contain the words 'British Empire' that need the most looking at. But if anybody can wear a knighthood with the necessary gravitas, it must be Sir Geoffrey.
However, it doesn't make the poems any better or the poet any greater. If anybody was thinking of nominating me, I wouldn't want to discourage them as I'd appreciate the opportunity to quietly turn it down. I wouldn't go through all the rigmarole that The Beatles went through, do the photo opportunity and then hand it back. I'd save Her Majesty's time and trouble and let someone else have it who might appreciate it. Jeremy Clarkson perhaps.
Okay, then. Let's go round again. There'll be the Swindon Literature Festival, the Portsmouth Festivities, the Proms, the Cheltenham Festivals of both Literature and horse racing and books and concerts that I'm sure will make 2012 memorable. But 2011 was tremendous. If 2012 is half as good, it will be fine.

A Thames Swan Watches Barney Run in Lechlade

2011-12-30T18:56:00.001Z

Daisy & Davey

2011-12-22T18:24:00.004Z

Of course, we would prefer it was still 1973 and Christmas entertainment meant Morecambe & Wise and Christmas Night with the Stars. But it's not.
Never mind. There's still Daisy & Davey.
http://daisyanddavey.com/

The Christmas Nap

2011-12-21T18:22:00.003Z

There's a lot to like about Christmas if you pick and choose your way through it with due discrimination and it is a particularly good few days for horse racing.

There are plenty of favourite horses to be seen but it might be wise to remember that they are facing their biggest challenges of the season in the biggest races they'll run in before Cheltenham. And I like to think of Christmas as a time of frugality rather than excess and so I don't want to throw money around as if, as the demise of Western capitalism would have us believe, it was going out of fashion. Well, it's just the fashion for those that have it already.

And so although we might have small interests in our favourite horse Bobs Worth as he takes on Grand Crus in the Novice Chase at Kempton and might look at Giles Cross at decent odds in the Welsh National and a speculative punt on Captain Chris who might upset the King George (although I'd much prefer 10/1 than the 7's he's more likely to be), it will be Rock on Ruby to beat Binocular and Overturn in the Christmas Hurdle that carries our main hopes of putting this feature finally into proper profit. I'm going to avail myself of 2/1 while I can.

We went in, had some winners and got out in one piece. It might have been better but it could have been worse. It's not an easy game but we didn't do bad at it.

Signed Poetry Books - Jeffrey Turner

2011-12-21T17:41:00.006Z

Our Christmas walk on Monday was reduced by the weather to a Christmas pub meal but there was compensation to be had when Jeff finally remembered to bring me a copy of his fine booklet and then consented to add himself to my signed poetry books collection.

It's a luxury, limited edition on hand-made paper and consists of only five poems but one comes away from it with a feeling that it must have been a more substantial set. The poems are meticulously made and, without wasted words or extraneous padding, provide a full and rich impression that many don't achieve in a full length book.

They are acutely observed poems, thematically concentrating on minor detail, quiet moments and meditating on small things made significant by his care and attention. Slightly more 'written' than I might do but in places very similar in temper, they are very much 'considered utterances', if that is the phrase I half remember from Donald Davie's critical writing. As isn't always the case, it might be the title poem that is most memorable with its fine description of woodlice discovered on Moving the Stones,

Creatures of an erratic

and unhappy god,

the god of ghosts and expulsions,

or, in Chorley Cemetery,

A broken angel someone's propped

against a headstone leans like a thrush

waiting for its worm, stone listening to mud.

I'd like to think that perhaps once or twice a review or feature I've put here has encouraged someone to read or buy a book or CD. I'm afraid that won't be possible on this occasion because this very slim volume is gloriously art for art's sake and not commercially available although you might find earlier books by Jeff available on second-hand websites. For those who prefer their poems calm and sensibly thought out, they would be worth a look.

The Saturday Nap - Week Nine

2011-12-16T18:42:00.002Z

Ascot tomorrow is quite likely to be a routine Saturday Nicholls-Walsh benefit. Why wouldn't it be. Big Bucks would be long odds on even if opposed by every long distance hurdler that could be found to put up against him but it's hardly a tip and I've seen 1/3 shots turned over before now. The Minack is a possibility for serious investment. But I might leave Ascot well alone on a day when the going has changed and the state of the ground is the single most important thing in horse racing. There might be a few 16/1 shots going in tomorrow. The form book doesn't go out of the window but it needs to be used properly, which means looking at which horses have and haven't won on soft or heavy ground.
Haydock could be the place to look, where Wymott, 2.45, in the Tommy Whittle Chase apparently has the right credentials to justify favouritism. That will be the Saturday nap unless updated before 11.30 in the morning.
Week 10, posted perhaps next Thursday with a thought for Boxing Day, will be the last edition of this feature. It has proved a recession-busting success and after Kempton we can sit back and tot up by exactly what percentage these investments have outstripped more gilt-edged funds. But my point was that October to December, in the right sort of races, was the best time to get involved. It's a shame if you didn't get on but maybe we can do it again in the first half of next year's jump season. Until then, it's Quot Erat Demonstrandum and don't forget to tune in for the Cheltenham Festival Preview in March.

The Annunciation

2011-12-16T18:19:00.003Z

A Christmas card arrived from Pluscarden Abbey, as it usually does about this time of year. My friend there was wise enough to join a community that is allowed contact with the outside world and we exchange as many as three letters a year.

But this year I was particularly taken with the picture and it's already up here by me on the wall.

It is The Annunciation (1898) by Henry Ossawa Tanner.

I like Mary in this; I like the folds in her clothes and the bedclothes; I like the screen behind her and the blinding light.

Brilliant. Christmas can bring out unexpected wonderful things and this is a highlight of this year.

Happy Christmas.

Geoffrey Hill - Clavics

2011-12-16T17:26:00.003Z

Geoffrey Hill, Clavics (Enitharmon)

I wonder who frames the prices on poetry events for Paddy Power bookmakers. They made Clavics 13/8 favourite for the Forward Prize, ahead of Sean O'Brien who had an unbeaten record at the distance and some other very worthy collections. It could only have been done on the basis of career achievement and 'stature' or reputation. The prize could never have gone to Hill on this form. It was like making Corinthian Casuals favourites for the F.A. Cup.

In his wonderful performance last weekend, Prof. Hill explained his long held admiration for the cover illustration and all but said he wrote the book so that he could make use of it. The other element that has made him so prolific in old age is that the adherence to strict formal requirements help him to produce poems as a knid of midwife to bring forth the work from inside him.

It shows. The form here dictates a disjointed, unpretty poetry that is forced into highly demanding rhyme forms and lines that serve mainly to demonstrate how difficult it is to do. Hill refers us to Herbert's poem Easter Wings, a model of shape but also of diction and syntax, but Herbert's lines fit perfectly into the design whereas in several places Hill's are adjusted by spacing and typography to stretch or bend themselves to his chosen template. None of this seems to be justified, as it were; it is stricture and discipline entirely for its own sake. It is not so much unproductive as counter-productive.

As a tribute to William Lawes, the C17th composer who was killed at the Battle of Chester, 'clavics', it says here, is 'the science or alchemy of keys', so musical keys, then, we can assume is meant. It's not all about Lawes, but, as one would expect from one as expressly difficult as Hill, much more widely referential. If I can't buy the aesthetics of the project, I can take some pleasure in moments and lines, glimpses of Hill's gravely disconsolate view that the world, or more specifically, England, isn't quite what he would like it to be. I doubt if it ever would have been.

In 3, he plays on the name in fashionably Elizabethan-Jacobean ways,

As good epitaphs go Will Lawes is slain

Permit me, sire, is slain by such whose wills

Be laws

and, in 9, he ends on the memorable and ever true reflection that,

England rides rich on loss.

And in 26, as Lawes is killed in battle,

How your rutter-

Kin dabbles in these tacky shows.

where a genuinely fine, edgy music transcends its meaning. If only more of the book had been like this. Hill's distemper might be better suited to a freer line but, presumably, that happened in his previous books more than in this one.

The reading last week was a great event and also included poems from other books than this but it was more exciting and satisfying to hear him talk about his work than read it. That wouldn't be said of, say, Bach or Mozart, however much one would love to hear them talk about their music.

Clavics was a false favourite for the Forward Prize and even in the summer I realized that sufficiently to oppose it in the betting. It's just that the judges preferred one of the other books to my choice.

The darkness is a sultry mistress

2011-12-15T22:27:00.002Z

The darkness is a sultry mistress

The darkness is a sultry mistress
and tonight she’s come protesting
in an unkempt wind that scatters
sprays of fine black rain so cold
against the passive window.
Why she’s like this I couldn’t say,
neither why I have to love her
who keeps me so undemanding,
stalled inside her wicked tantrum,
seeming to make me a promise
that there’ll never be young sunlight
coming back one day in Springtime.
For she knows that I’m her secret,
that I’m stranded here without her
with stories of shipwrecks and blizzards
and fearful of release.

Geoffrey Hill

2011-12-11T20:29:00.007Z

Geoffrey Hill, The Purcell Room, South Bank, London, 11 December 2011

'It's not stand-up comedy,' Geoffrey Hill explained, 'but, there again, they're not paying me stand-up comedy money'.Professor Hill spent as much time talking about his poetry as reading it, which is always welcome, especially in a poet like him. His grasp and intellectual acuity in history and culture is apparently monumental and poets don't come any more high church than this. He explained that his work belongs with that of the painter Anselm Keifer and Paul Celan, so it is serious matter.

Poetry for him is not 'self expression' but 'a conjoining of shapes and harmonies' and I couldn't quite get down exactly what it went on to be to do with language. His poetry has been described as 'iron spikes sticking out of a blasted landscape' and I don't think he would have quoted it if he didn't like the description.While it is interesting to hear poets of this stature talk about their own work, the poet is ideally not their own best critic and it looked mildly alarming when he named his own three best books but it didn't turn out to be quite so self regarding from then on. Some self awareness is a good thing and his realization that his work is 'weird and unlovely' was reassuring.

Anybody with the slightest interest in poetry would be aware of George Herbert's Easter Wings. Well, yes and no. But that's the sort of level he works at even if I allow myself to dip below it occasionally. It is a fine and marvellous thing when the country's most doyen and eminent of poets can tell his assembled audience that 'nothing would drag him to a poetry reading', those most 'abysmal functions' and I can see that in a way but, on the other hand, one gets more from an hour in the presence of the poet than from several hours pouring over their books. Interestingly, after I have charted the general trajectory of most poets' careers as not reaching maturity until the age of 40, and then eventually fading or becoming repetitive sometime after 60, Prof. Hill's Collected Poems has grown exponentially in the last few years leading up to his 80th birthday. It is perhaps due to the rigour of form being able to impose itself on the chaos, where at least some of the chaos is dementia. But while apparently frail enough physically, there was little evidence of any dimming of acerbity, observance of the most difficult formal strictures and a non-curmudgeonly clarity of vision that can't help but pass as the driest of wit. This was not, as he pointed out, Poetry Please. Poetry plays oblique games with him.

But for all that, I haven't laughed as much or as satisfyingly at any other poetry reading. I've been equally thrilled and impressed and I've thought about several for a long time afterwards but none will have been so paradoxically 'laugh out loud' and the more impressive for it when the most serious and high-minded, one of the bleakest and spare, provides more genuine hilarity than those whose main object is to be comic and yet don't quite raise a laugh although you notice where the jokes were.

If young Hill were to attend a masterclass run by me I might even advise that his internal rhymes might in context look like affectation and if he wants to use rhyming forms then he could hide the rhymes more subtly as half rhymes so that the frugality and bareness of his 'vision' were not occluded by such simple effects. His music is that of deep and complex rhythms devoutly adhered to but it's a lot to ask. As he says, 'you try writing in these meters.'Fulfilling his hour with delightfully grumpy grace, he observed that we are run nowadays by a 'financial plutocracy' decorated by a small amount of aristocracy and democracy. Although one can't help but feel that he would be politically somewhere on the right, this is the preception that is beyond day to day politics and really ought to have wider currency and not need explanation from one of such austere dignity and dark, brooding solemnity.As if to provide some context or contrast, there was a reading afterwards by three young poets under the title Echoes of Geoffrey Hill in which the trace of any echo eluded me in three unprepossessing performances. Fine poets in their own milieu, I'm sure, but very forgettable. And then a half hour spent looking at the magazines in the Poetry Library made me reflect that the best thing that could happen to the poetry industry in this country would be a paper shortage. I don't think I saw a poem worthy of the shelf space. But the curmudgeonly spirit can only be properly exercised by those who have earned the right and my disdain is less worth having than Prof. Hill's. We will soon see how my credentials measure up in the next week or so if and when I review my signed copy of Clavics.

The Saturday Nap - Week Eight

2011-12-09T17:40:00.003Z

There's no such thing as a bad or dull meeting at Cheltenham, the most spectacular sporting venue in the world. There's plenty of talent and interest to watch tomorrow but a couple of the likeliest stars are not going to be at backable prices.The Nicky Henderson-Barry Geraghty partnership had a couple of winners today and Grandouet, 3.05, is a horse that has shown plenty already and could have more to come. My main worry is whether at 4 years old he's quite as experienced or tough as Overturn or Menorah but the latter wasn't quite up to it in last year's Champion Hurdle when carrying my featival nap and although Overturn has been impressively resilient in putting together a hat-trick already this season, he was getting weight when probably going to get beat by Oscar Whisky a few weeks ago when our money stayed in the bookies' satchels. So, I've taken the 11/4 already and don't want to get off.

Jaroussky/Cencic - Duetti

2011-12-07T20:16:00.007Z

Philippe Jaroussky,Max Emanuel Cencic,Les Arts Florrissants, Duetti (Virgin Classics)

Philippe Jaroussky's last CD, Opium, was a set of French songs and came, it has to be said, as a bit of a disappointment. Bought on the strength of the wonderful A Chloris, the rest of the set didn't match up to it. It joined that unfortunate list of records, or poetry books, bought on the promise of one piece that wasn't reproduced among the others.There's no such risk with a collection of baroque arias and cantatas. These are all by composers roughly contemporary with Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti being the closest to a household name; Bononconi and Marcello being best represented.With duets, if not necessarily guaranteeing twice the value of solo performance, it is generally going to involve call and answer, interwoven lines and harmonies. While Andreas Scholl might look and sound slightly more academic at times, Jaroussky and Cencic here are warmer, with fine clarity of tone and perhaps greater sensuality. If nothing's ever going to surpass Bowman and Chance in the Couperin Lecons de Tenebres for me, this in places creates similar effects and Les Arts Florissant in the continuo, violin and cello parts make more than a background contribution.While there are nimble, grand and spirited passages to show a wide range of feelings throughout, it's always going to be in the arias of love and estrangement that the most exquisite moments are going to come. Forlorn and fretful are the things that counter tenors do best. The Bononcini Chi d'amortra la catene, much of the Marcello Chiaro e limpido fonte and the cantata Veggio fille are those,

Say, god of hearts,

if there be any pain equal to mine

There never is, is there, if you're a lovelorn shepherd. But it rarely fails and doesn't here. Christmas has come early for counter tenor afficiandos.

View from the Boundary

2011-12-06T17:24:00.003Z

I'm looking forward to seeing Geoffrey Hill in London on Sunday. The high priest of English poetry has not always been quite to my taste but recently I've had the opportunity to at least appreciate some of his poems and if I'm never going to be a complete devotee I do at least want to take advantage of this rare chance to share in the spare austerity of his point of view. The price of a drink on the South Bank is alarming for a provincial thirsty man and so if you recognize me there by the hat (not the pink one), before I have to get back to Victoria, please feel free to buy me an after show glass of beer.

This December outing to London replaces what I've done for the last two years which has been a day at the London Chess Classic, which can be watched from the comfort of one's own terminal here right now, http://www.livestream.com/LondonChessClassic . The story so far is early dominance by young Magnus while it is being suggested that my personal favourite personality, Anand, is being careful to show nothing that he might have prepared for his forthcoming world title defence against Boris Gelfand. But I do recommend some time spent with the commentators live from the venue if their dubious suggestions and meanderings might be the sort of entertainment you prefer to Strictly Come Dancing or Celebrity Ratings Grabber on the telly. Chess players seem so nice these days, accessible and media-friendly as the age seems to demand - it's been Levon Aronian today, World number three on his day off. Has it gone the same way with poets, too. Do we miss the madmen and ladies, the off-beat, unapproachable genius, the Fischer or Ezra Pound, that never had to explain itself so often in interviews and as casually approachable human beings but could hide in a reclusive mist of unexplaining hero status.

Somewhat less cerebrally, I've been reading John Francome's Back Hander for cheaper thrills. I notice that although the Greatest Jockey of All Time has his name on the front of the book, the copyright is shared with another, and apart from the inside knowledge of particular racetracks and what it's like to ride a racehorse, I'm not sure how much is Francome and how much his helpmate. While we hear that Alan Hollinghurst delivers a typescript that needs virtually no editor whereas Jefferey Archer provides a story written in capital letters in pencil on the back of a Corn Flakes packet and someone else makes a blockbuster out of those thin beginnings, the Francome method must lie somewhere in between. Even so, this opus seems to have a high body count, a sensational rather than tense approach to plot and doesn't seem as well done as what I remember of Dick Francis. But as long as it has horse racing in it, I don't mind. You could tell me a story of a trainer called Jack who has a horse called Dobbin, he runs it in a novice hurdle at Uttoxeter and it comes third and I'd be gripped.

We have had such stories here every Saturday if anybody has cared to follow the Saturday Nap and I'm pleased to say that Sizing Europe was a confident tip last weekend and won like one. It means that we have had four winners out of eight selections and now, with three weeks to run before ending on Boxing Day, one more winner will put us into clear blue profit. I'd imagine that if Bobs Worth runs in the three mile novice chase at Kempton at Christmas, that will be where we'll go for a big finish.

That will conclude that little series and I wonder if we can replace it with a series on My Whole Life in poetry, tracing my own mundane career as a poet from its earliest genesis in Infant School in Nottingham in the mid 1960's up to now. I hope it might provide a diverting little excursion into poetry as well as revisiting for the first time in decades some esoteric examples of poetry. It will begin in January, all being well. Don't forget to tune in for that.

The Saturday Nap Week Seven

2011-12-02T17:18:00.003Z

Sizing Europe in the Tingle Creek, Sandown 3.05, is a confident pick tomorrow and I'm steaming in at 6/4.

Gender in Poetry

2011-11-30T16:59:00.002Z

So, is there a difference between poetry written by men and that by women. Or, as the same question can apparently be put, is there such a thing as Women's Poetry. Many would seem to think so, including Fleur Adcock, and thus Faber, because I have a book called the Faber Book of C20th Women's Poetry.
Having been brought up, as it were, 'educated' some might say, at a time when the text was said to stand on its own with no reference to the author, Roland Barthes, Intentional Fallacy and all those orthodoxies were in fashion, I tended for a long time to think that surely poems are verbal constructs made of nouns, verbs, adjectives, punctuation and grammar and such like and these things function in the same way whether put to use by a male or a female practitioner of the art. I probably still think that, or at least can't completely discount such a well-established idea after so long.
I don't see it as a feminist issue or of any political significance. That there are far more men than women in the historical canon of poetry, in English at least, is not something that is going to be easily reversed even if research could find an equivalent female body of work. Perhaps women had better or more important things to do than mooch about and jot down verses. But the politically correct conscience has gone too far when at least one magazine in my memory would publish the figures of poems received from each gender and then, to prove their purity of selection criteria, show that they published a very similar ratio. And Roddy Lumsden, however conscientiously, points out in the introductions of anthologies that he's edited, how close or spot on he's been in achieving a 50-50 split. It shouldn't come to that. Even though we have champions in Tae-Kwan-Do and Iron Triathlon in this country, the shortlist for Sports Personality of the Year was 10 out of 10 blokes. I'd be likely to prefer a triathlete over a golfer any day but media coverage doesn't agree but ideally we would be above this tokenism and quota system. If I had to select 10 poems from a big pile and found I'd picked almost all women, I wouldn't go back to try and fit some more men in, I'd trust my first instincts.
But there might be a discernible difference between poems written by men and women, a general, unquantifiable but nonetheless perceptible way in which men might be represented perhaps by a tendency towards 'ideas', in Virginia Woolf's phrase about the 'arid scimitar' of the male while women might sometimes concern themselves more with describing an emotional response. Is that fair. Does it hold any useful truth at all, or is it a lazy stereotype. Providing just one or two examples that contradict it wouldn't immediately destroy a basic acceptance that there is as broad difference.
Could Tall Nettles by Edward Thomas have been written by a lady. Do some poems by Sylvia seem so syntactically tough and hard-edged that they might have been written by men. I hope it doesn't work like that and I'm absolutely sure that there can be no litmus test, so I'm still optimistic that my first instinct, or that thing instilled by purely textual reading, might still be right. And it's much easier to be the one who asks the questions rather than provide the answers.

Rivers

2011-11-28T19:04:00.002Z

I've been looking at poems about rivers in preparation for a forthcoming evening with Portsmouth Poetry Society.
Probably the first thing that came to mind was the Thames inter-textually referenced from Spenser in The Waste Land. Thinking of rivers rather than poets, I remembered the Severn being mentioned in Ivor Gurney a few times. I need to save Gertrude's speech in Hamlet, 'There is a willow grows aslant a brook', because it's just about my favourite bit of Shakespeare and there is an evening on him later in the programme. I think of Kleinzahler on the grey Passaic; Alice Oswald obviously on the Dart and Uncle Ted, too.
But what I'll talk about briefly and read will probably be Douglas Dunn's The River Through the City, cited by Prof. Sean O'Brien as a formative influence and, in fact, now looking more Sean than it does Dunn. And the last section of Andrew Motion's Fresh Water, a poem following the Thames from Lechlade to the Marchioness disaster which I've enthused about on here before.
But if anyone has other rivers in poetry they can suggest, my e-mail box is always open and I'd be glad to hear them.

Murakami - 1Q84

2011-11-27T17:19:00.011Z

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 (Harvill Secker)

I don't think even the Greeks had a word for this. Among the Oedipus and Elektra stories, they didn't find the need for one where a girl kills the father of the one-off lover of her childhood sweetheart, the father being leader of a religious cult while the girl is immaculately impregnated by the cult to provide a new leader. Or something like that.

Murakami's almost 1000 pages are well-organized enough and the story given a gradual enough pace for the complexities to assimilate rather more easily than one sentence can summarize. It is the long distance separation and love story of Aomame, a clandestine hired hit lady revenging sex abuse cases, and Tengo, who rewrites a sensational best-seller in a publicity coup. The religious cult and those uncovering its abuses are stalking each other throughout. It's a thriller and succeeds in that project, much more so than Steig Larrson did for me. Murakami's method is at its most lucid in his Chandleresque and Raymond Carver-like economy of prose style but also in his trademark use of parallel worlds and unexplainable phenomena. It's surprising how far one can suspend disbelief and allow Murakami's description of everyday detail and characters isolated in the mass culture of modern Japan but the synopsis of the novel Tengo rewrites for the teenage Fuka-Eri can't disguise what a lot of hokum it really is.

One has to forgive Murakami's obsession with expressionless, poised young women and, usually, their breasts. There is a building of leitmotifs in creating character and themes and it almost seems as if whole paragraphs recur, but I'm sure they don't. What Murakami does, or his translator for him, is achieve moments of radiant beauty, like on the occasion when Aomame visits her employer, the dowager,

Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end. Whenever she came in here, Aomame felt as if she had lost all sense of time.

Or, in the final pages when Aomame and Tengo are reunited for the first time since childhood,

Inside him, twenty years dissolved and mixed into one complex, swirling whole. / Wordlessly, Tengo observed the scene, as if watching the destruction and re-birth of a planet.

The overlapping worlds of 1984 and 1Q84, of fiction and fiction within fiction, of the worlds of the characters, is dizzying but brilliantly conceived. If the Air Chrysalis and Little People themes are not entirely convincing, the novel as a whole does throughout and this must be Murakami's finest work, ostensibly expanding the early novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun with all the layers of strangeness that his subsequent books developed. Thoroughly enjoyable and by no means as daunting as the weight of it might suggest. It never fails to maintain its impetus and a manageable amount of tension. Admirable work.

Top 6 Cyclists

2011-11-25T21:44:00.005Z

This Top 6 feature began, as I'm sure longstanding readers will remember, as a poetry item in which someone, and it was inevitably nearly always me, selected a Top 6 poems by a favourite or major poet.
The website was called David Green Books to make the world aware, if it cared to be, of my books- okay, booklets- of poems. That became a books website as I began to review other books of poems and any other books I felt like. And, then, it became my 'blog', although, lordjesussaveus, I didn't intend to be a 'blogger'. But it's a little while since we had the Top 6 of any poet. Please send me one if you feel the urge or inspiration to do such a thing.
But this week I had reason to refer to the tremendous document I was presented with as a 'This Is Your Life' album on my 50th birthday a couple of years ago and in it was this photograph, which I find it hard to believe is me, on what was presumably my first bike. The bike that I began on before flirting with cycling as a sport as a teenager and then reverting to in my thirties with great dedication, enormous stamina but no electrifying speed. It's all over now. It's been over for a few years really. It was tremendous while it lasted and the most enjoyable thing one could have done - the countryside, the effort, the concentration, the mediocre achievement and, mostly, the lie in the bath afterwards.
But I am not, even though pictured here, one of my own Top 6 cyclists. According to the rules of the game, one isn't supposed to name any but the six and I'll adhere to that while paying tribute to my biggest influence, my father, Phil, who organized and kept the stopwatch meticulously for many years while keeping riding to the age of 74 and counting, and my nephew, Chris Chadwick, who decided he'd just nip up from Land's End to John O'Groats last year for the sake of it. I took the opportunity to introduce Chris to the great Phil Griffiths at the Tour of Britain in London this year. Phil is a droll and witty man in his way but when told that Chris had done the End to End, he just asked 'why?'.
Ah, yes, Phil. Good question. I'm not often short of a clever remark when one is required but I wish I'd asked, 'but you went to the Commonwealth Games in, was it, 1974. Why?'
Anyway, that's all sorted, then. Top 6 cyclists. There's lots of different sorts of bike riders. The track is a dull, muscular and attritional game. I was a quaint old time triallist with some regard for the clubman but the grand tours provide the enormous heroes if and when we are ever allowed to distinguish the rider and his personality from the drugs they're taking.
Early top hero and dynamic little exponent of the 25 mile time trial on every course available on Sunday mornings within a wide radius of Gloucester in the 1970's was Ted Tedaldi, who was all that a junior schoolboy could want of a hero. A bit of style and swagger and he even said hello to me. The claret and gold of Gloucester City CC were never worn with more panache.
Panache and sometimes, it has to be said, vainglorious time spent in full view of the television camera was Jacky Durand's raison d'etre, if you'll excuse my French, as he made countless attempts to escape the peloton in the Tour de France and any other race he found himself in. The best story about him was when a younger rider went back to ask Jacky's advice in the Tour. Should he attempt a lone break or not. I don't know what else he was expecting the answer to be.
The young me idloized the dark-haired winner of the day, Eddy Merckx. I had a goldfish named after him. It's impossible to compare sportspersons from one age to another but the race most bike racing supporters would like to see would be Eddy v. Lance. Without drugs, if that would ever have been possible.
Mark Cavendish is currently sensational and should remain so for a few more years yet. Never previously a devoted admirer of the art of the sprinter, he has changed my mind. It's brilliant what he does and every accolade should fall to him. The economic crisis is not going to cause a revolution in this country but if he's not Sports Personailty of the Year then there is no point in having it.
Janet Tebbutt wasn't Beryl Burton by any means but we saw her through Gloucester one night in the early 70's on her way to setting new figures for Land's End to John O'Groats for a lady and you'd never meet such a modest and charming lady even if they weren't a sensational bike rider. Although my 12 Hour record appears to show that I beat the great Andy Cook three times out of three because he packed every year from 1994-6, it's probably a greater honour that I rode in the same races as her. And then, of course, she kept on doing it after I was finished.
And with only one choice left and yet a host of candidates to choose from, it's never easy but let's have Gwen Shillaker, who showed me more than anyone how to ride a 12 Hour. I mean, I didn't exactly have a pink bike to match my outfit but I saw how, throughout the long afternoon, while piling up a respectable mileage, she waved and smiled and was nice. I think we had a bit of a laugh towards the end of my best rides, too, once we knew the result was in the bag. She was where I learnt it from.
I would still, honestly, rather be a cyclist than a poet.

The Saturday Nap Week Six

2011-11-25T18:02:00.003Z

Disaster struck at the last hurdle last week at Ascot when Oscar Whisky was possibly being asked to go too fast and jump at the same time to go past the winner and so now we have form figures of 11013F but I'm sure regular readers will be relieved to hear that I got most of last week's money back on our old favourite, Bobs Worth, today in what sounds like a heart-stopping finish at Newbury.
I almost thought we might have to swerve tomorrow completely as I won't be getting involved in the Hennessey Gold Cup, there are some big stars at long odds-on in various places and although the Fighting Fifth Hurdle at Newcastle is usually our type of race, I'm not a fan of Binocular but can't bet against him either.
But the only firm with prices chalked up so far on Newcastle's 1.10 are going 13/8 Allthekingshorses and if something like that is available in the morning, it will probably do.
It will be the selection unless replaced with other advice by 11.30 in the morning.

Leonardo Exhibition

2011-11-23T19:21:00.002Z

Yes, I suppose we should be really cross that tickets for the Leonardo exhibition at the National Gallery are sold out but available from touts for several hundreds of pounds rather than the sixteen that the gallery asked for them. But, perhaps, isn't there just one reassuring little bit about it that there is enough demand for tickets for an art exhibition that these entrepreneureal rascals can add this event to the profiteering that they can only usually exercise on football matches or boxing contests when either the bloodlust of those who wish to see one heavyweight (and I had it confirmed by a quiz question today that if I wanted to challenge for a world boxing title then it would be a Klitscho that I'd be up against) smack another or see a bunch of mercenaries from faraway countries they've never heard of try to establish that their city has the best football team, it might be great that Leonardo commands such inflationary touting.

But I wouldn't have gone even if I lived in London. I'm not disputing that he's a wonderful painter and one of the greatest talents the Western world ever produced but I can look at this painting on the interweb for as long as I want and I still don't like it. I really like animals, just about all of them, I really do, but I'm prepared to make an exception for this one that the calm young lady is holding.

But if Leonardo really commands the same sort of black market ticket price as the European Cup Final then all is not yet lost.

View from the Boundary - Peter Reading Special

2011-11-21T18:59:00.002Z

I see from the very useful news links on the Poetry Society website that Peter Reading has died. Not a poet that I've heard so much about recently but there could be reasons for that. To call him 'maverick' might be understating the case, his concentration on the dirty downside of humanity being coupled with an anarchic classicism that made him somehow proto-punk, 'punk rock' culture having possibly been a deliberate descent into miasma in strictly traditional forms that might have been a revolt against the way they saw the world going.

If poetry is already by defintion an outsider's genre then Reading was a genuine outsider in a world in which too many mistakenly believe themselves to be the different one. Without having any first hand knowledge with which to pay tribute to him, I do remember a story about him resigning or being sacked from his job as, I think, a weighbridge operator when he was expected to wear a uniform to do it. There are a few things that poets ideally shouldn't be expected to do and we've seen previously that drive cars is one of them but wearing uniforms is another. And, yes, there was Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen, Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis but that's not the point, is it.

I wonder if he would have appreciated the return of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, back on the wireless for a tireless umptieth series and apparently in the rudest of fourth-form health and Jack Dee now seemingly perfect in the role of Humph. Tonight's episode had a round based on the popular Radio 4 programme, Poetry Please, or, as Jack said, as most people know it, Poetry ..'click'.

Reconstituting radio repartee is a desperate and doomed art but I laughed out loud in the previous programme as well when it was explained how Jeremy Clarkson kept the Top Gear audience guessing about the real identity of the mystery car driver, The Stig, and indeed the viewers furrowed their brows and went into deep thought as they wondered whether it was a monkey's or a toss that they didn't give.

It's still a helluva show the old codgers are putting on and, I found this evening, even funnier on a Monday evening with a T with a bit of G in it rather than on a Sunday lunchtime without such a stimulant. It turned up in a quiz somewhere that there is a blue plaque to Willie Rushton at Mornington Crescent. I didn't know that but was glad to hear it. Keep up the good work, boys.

Basil D'Oliveira

2011-11-19T10:37:00.004Z

Not only a great cricketer but a truly exceptional man, the passing of Basil D'Oliveira is a sad thing of course but with at least something of a merciful release about it as his Parkinson's disease had meant a long and difficult eight years during which visitors had been discouraged because he simply didn't know who they were.

Neither are obituaries likely to give his precise dates as he had lied about his age in order to play for England because he thought he might be too old and didn't make his debut until he was (possibly) 36. So, although his age is being given as officially 80, it seems he was 83 or 84.

Somewhere about here must be the autograph I got in Worcester in about 1985 but the best story I heard on the radio this morning was from a contributor who had also been an autograph hunter.

The lad approached Geoff Boycott and asked for the usual bit of useless scribble and received in return a customary helping of Boycott candour. D'Oliveira overheard the exchange, came over and apologized, took the pen and paper into the dressing room and got autographs from the whole England team. Hopefully still without the dreadful Yorkshireman.

They simply don't make them like Dolly anymore.

The Saturday Nap Week Five

2011-11-18T18:24:00.002Z

Nobody's perfect but at least when we're not, we have so far explained why not in advance.

Last week it seemed to be very much the larger Cheltenham obstacles that prevented a very willing and able Restless Harry from continuing our run of success but excuses don't pay out and I realize that we do need to get back on track immediately having only ostensibly tipped an 8/11 winner in the last three weeks.

There is a tremendous day's racing in prospect tomorrow and that more or less means for the unwary that one is a likely fall guy for lots of old bookmaker's tricks like showing you good horses that you've won on before that you assume are going to be lucky for you again. But the question in a horse race is not 'which is the best horse in this race' but 'which one is going to win today'. Long Run is unlikely to stay unbeaten throughout the season and first time up against some who might be fitter and aimed more specifically at lesser prizes than Kempton on Boxing Day or the Cheltenham Gold Cup could be the time he's most likely to not come first but by which horse he will be bested is hard to say and I'm not going to say Weird Al although I'd like to.
There are such tempting propositions as the return of an old favourite like Get Me Out of Here but there must be safer options and it looks as if in the morning I'll be choosing between Grandouet and Oscar Whisky. In fact, you'd think both should be short-priced good things. I'm happy enough to take the even money about Oscar Whisky, Ascot 2.45, now and unless I've posted a change of mind by 11.30 in the morning, that has to be the tip.

Best Poetry 2011

2011-11-18T17:02:00.008Z

Good evening, Ladies & Gentlemen, and welcome to this gala night at David Green Books for the announcement of my awards for Best Poem and Best Collection of 2011. The prestige of these awards is underlined by the fact that they are not accompanied by large amounts of prize money but are chosen and recorded solely for artistic purposes when tacky five figure cheques would only spoil the Parnassian spirit in which they are intended. The gin & the tonic are mixed and settled, clean and spritely in the glass and the murmur of expectation is growing. I'm joined here by Gervase Madstrangler, editor of Lokomotiv Salamander magazine, and Melody Nice, author of the collection Wednesday Ribbon Dance.

Gervase, what do you make of the shortlist for Best Poem.

Well, the list has been kept sensibly short. There aren't any obvious poems one could rule out as a worthy winner.

And do you have any ideas about which poem will win.

Anybody who wants to know will probably know already as I think there have been enough clues if you knew where to look.

Melody, there are even fewer titles on the Best Collection short list. What do you make of them.

As a woman I'm bound to point out that the list consists of three men and, as a poet under 40, I also notice that they are all over 40.

But, apart from that. Are they good books.

Well, I'd have picked a different three if I only had three choices.

Thanks. Well, I think we are ready for the announcements.

2011 has been a good year. In fact, it still isn't over because one last trip to London is planned to see Geoffrey Hill and a big performance from him could change one's perspective quite drastically but he wasn't in place when the shortlists were drawn up and so that would just be hard luck. The year began with a grand battle in prospect, titles from Lumsden, Mooney and O'Brien, all established favourites, being in the presses. Then David Harsent came from the ranks of the previously unconsidered and during the summer both prizes were very much wide open. Then in the Autumn, Sasha Dugdale attached herself to the leading group.

Although it would be easy enough to give the Best Poem prize to Harsent, O'Brien or either of the other short-listed poems, it has been marked out for Martin Mooney's Dream of the Fisherman's Wife for a long time now and nothing else has quite made a big enough impression to shift it.

The Harsent book grew and grew throughout the year and was the collection I returned to most often, with poems like Spatchcock, and the series of garden poems impressing themselves on one's consciousness as well as the very fine Ghosts, which was the pick of a tremendous set and so Night by David Harsent wins the Best Collection award.

Congratulations to the winners and shortlisted poets and thanks to all the other poets who have contributed to make 2011 a satisfying year for poetry in these islands.

Abbado Mozart 39 & 40

2011-11-16T22:52:00.003Z

Claudio Abbado, Orchestra Mozart, Symphonies 39 & 40 (Decca)

Mozart 40 was the first record I ever bought, admittedly in the 1971 hit parade adaptation by Waldo de los Rios but Mozart 40 nonetheless.

And then teenage posters on the bedroom wall were Deutsche Grammaphon promotional material of the conductors and artists among which the suave and sleek Claudio Abbado was my favourite. So this is a journey back to the roots of 40 years of record buying.

It's unlikely that anything I'm going to think about Mozart or these symphonies in particular hasn't been thought more expertly by someone else already. 39 wouldn't be among the best for me, apparently beginning somewhat ominously with echoes of Don Giovanni but then proceeding in stately, somewhat grand fashion with signature Wolfgang flourishes throughout. There must be more to it than that but it is a little bit standard issue Mozart on automatic pilot. It is nowhere near as touching and expressive as the G Minor, kochel 550, with its shadowy, haunted first bars opening out into gaiety, but never quite escaping the anxiety that is always somewhere just under the surface of Mozart's state of mind.

Abbado's account here, coming after serious illness that leaves him looking understandably frailer now, seems to me spare, bringing a stillness to passages, sometimes even in parts where it wouldn't be expected. It's a tremendously clear and considered expression but quiet in a sense until making its way to the spirited allegro climax. Someone else will be able to comment on various timings of the piece but this gives the impression of being unhurried and that suits me, and suits the music very well.

I wish I could have gone to see Abbado in London last month but he would insist on giving us Bruckner 5 on both nights and although it sounded better than I might have thought on the radio, it does rather keep piling it on and I'm sure they managed to fill the place without needing me there. But if the catalogue was in need of another Mozart 40 then I'm sure this is a welcome one.

Bach B Minor Mass

2011-11-12T22:23:00.003Z

Portsmouth Choral Union, Bach B Minor Mass,

St. Mary's, Fratton, 12 November

On 27th March, 1993, I was at St. Mary's for the Portsmouth Choral Union's previous performance of Bach's B Minor Mass and, so 18 and a half years later, I thought I'd better go and have another helping.

What I remembered as a dazzling display last time was if anything almost frenetic in a place or two here, the choir revved up and enjoying their fortissimo passages to the full but for the most part they are spirited, the independent movement of each singer making for a pulsing, breathing body in the opening Kyrie.

Quite gloriously at best in such a fine setting in their red frocks and black for the gentlemen, they allow Bach to set out his calling card to the Duke of Saxony in no uncertain job application.

Robyn Allegra Parton (soprano) and Angharad Lyddon (contralto) are a superb duet , followed by a spritely chorus with glistening trupmets in the Gloria.

The highlights for me were Jack Maguire's violin in the aria, Laudamus Te; Angharad's graceful contralto in quoniam to solus sanctus and the impressive chorus Sanctus sanctus sanctus. David Webb in the tenor part was also clear and expressive among the four young soloists.

Among all his other array of talents, Bach is a tremendous writer of bass lines, as befits one who wrote cigar adverts and for Procul Harum, and the bass player was always a star turn. While in the chorus Contieor unum baptisma, one wonders that the lively, playful line isn't a little joyful to communicate such a dry-sounding sentiment as 'I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins' but Bach must have found it a very uplifting prospect.

One might be concerned that he has peaked too soon with two choruses done with such gusto still have to be relaxed back into more reflective mood before the final Dona nobis pacem but the choir are having such a good time of it by then one need not be worried about that.

It is, of course, a triumph and was never going to be anything else.

The Saturday Nap Week Four

2011-11-12T09:17:00.003Z

Cheltenham wouldn't be the easiest track to jump round when facing steeplechase fences for the first time in public but Restless Harry, 4.10, was impressive at Wetherby two weeks ago and currently at 7/4 is an obvious choice as the most likely conveyance for our cash today.

The Saturday Nap Preview

2011-11-11T18:41:00.006Z

I can't see why Araldur is 16/1 for the Mackeson tomorrow. I know it's called the Paddy Power now but we all know it's the Mackeson Gold Cup.

It would be quite something to add a 16/1 winner to the roaring success of this feature so far but it would be going against all the principles of trying to find safe options in sensible races so rather than say one also fancies Wishfull Thinking and we'll go for the forecast, I will probably post a less ambitious piece of advice before midday tomorrow.

Beverley Knight - 100%

2011-11-11T17:24:00.004Z

Beverley Knight, 100% (Hurricane)

One night last week I was flicking through the pre-set channels on the radio and stopped for a while on a track that sounded good enough to stay with and it turned out to be our Beverley who was something of a favourite when she did Shoulda Woulda Coulda.

She only enhamced her position a couple of years ago on one of the best ever episodes of Celebrity Mastermind when she beat the sinister Michael Howard who was falling for that tired old politician's trick of showing how much he liked football. Beverley's subject was Prince.

Amazon, for reasons best known to themselves, advertise this album as 2011 but it is ostensibly a 2009 release from all other indications. It hardly matters to me. Being two years out of date on pop music is the most up to date I've been for a long time.

Beautiful Night was the piece I heard on the radio, a highly passable expression of transient romance but, as has happened with so many albums bought on the strength of one track, not all of the rest of it is quite as good. In Your Shoes sounded familiar at track three, possibly because I did actually remember it and not because it samples Orange Juice's Rip it Up riff. I don't know if that makes it 'dubstep'. For the most part, perhaps the album as a whole is more workmanlike than genuinely inspirational. Bare is Beverley in more authentic Aretha-diva mode. Gold Chain brings to mind Aretha's Ship of Fools or when The Temptations went a bit funkier. I just can't tell the echoes from the new ideas any more, like if Moneyback would sound like Patrice Rushen's Forget Me Not to anyone else but me. Painted Pony is nicely forlorn and might have been a good place to stop but Robin Gibb turning up to help on a version of Too Much Heaven presumably kept him in work for a day or two back then. I admire the early Bee Gees as much as anyone and they did a fine job in re-inventing Diana Ross once upon a time but not as good a job as Chic did. Robin has by now left his thumbprint in a few too many places on pop music over the years.

It's not entirely fair to review an album while listening to it for the first time but I can't see this ever persuading me it's as good as 2003's Who I Am. She's a good girl. I can't help thinking that she doesn't quite establish an identity here that her obvious talent and personality should be capable of. I think she would benefit from better songwriters. I'd love to help.

The Shortlists - Best Poem and Best Collection 2011

2011-11-09T18:14:00.000Z

I don't see many more things happening between now and Christmas that will affect this website's very sincerely considered but hopelessly disregarded awards for Best Poem and Best Poetry Collection of 2011. It's not as if I read everything and so such books as the Geoffrey Hill or Carol Ann Duffy were deselected without being given a fair chance, it has to be said.
We could add in further mentions for Best Event and Best Novel. In which case Tasmin Little's Naked Violin recital in Portsmouth in the summer wins a helluva classy affair for Best Event, holding on in a compelling battle with the Glyndebourne Rinaldo at the Proms and Natalie Clein's Cadogan Hall Prom as well as Muldoon, O'Brien and Harsent at Cheltenham. But one appeciates what a good year it must have been when The Tallis Scholars make the effort to come all the way down to a cultural outpost like Portsmouth and don't even get shortlisted for their trouble.
Julian Barnes would probably get the verdict over Hollinghurst for being a somehow better done job in the Novel but I also enjoyed the re-issue of Patrick Hamilton's Twopence Coloured and they could all be surpassed by Murakami's 1Q84, which I am halfway through as yet but does look like his best work and is proving most worthy of the time it is taking.
But the real issue is the poetry and I'll leave you with the shortlists before returning with the answers some time later. There is no point including anything on the shortlist if they aren't potential winners and so I will keep the shortlists short. Only to say that Sasha Dugdale narrowly misses out on a place on the Best Collection list and so is compensated with a Best Poem contender.

Best Poem

Judy Brown, The Helicopter Visions
Sasha Dugdale, Plainer Sailing (Alzheimer's)
David Harsent, Ghosts
Martin Mooney, Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
Sean O'Brien, Elegy

Best Collection

David Harsent, Night
Roddy Lumsden, Terrific Melancholy
Martin Mooney, The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen

I'm fairly sure that the answers have finally been decided upon but I'll let it simmer for a while and if you come back next week the winners might have been announced by then.

Stephin Merritt - Obscurities

2011-11-08T18:58:00.003Z

Stephin Merritt, Obscurities (Domino)

Albums of oddments and rarities aren't expected to be classics and can't fairly be compared with the choicest bits of the back catalogue. The Jesus & Mary Chain's Barbed Wire Kisses seemed as good as the real thing at the time but in general we might as well accept that such albums are the remnant sale that tries to scrape the last few dollars out of the fanbase while it can. And I don't think anybody pretends any otherwise. There's often a reason why a rarity is rare. But being a Merrittophile, I had no choice but to purchase my own copy.

Like its author, it's no better than it should be. Most of the tracks listed as The Magnetic Fields are those 'experimental' studio exercises in which Stephin tries out every noise he can find on his keyboard. The version of I Don't Believe You here is so full of mobile phone ringtones it's like being in the office on a Tuesday morning. Rot in the Sun by The 6ths has a good locomotive percussion track on it; Plant White Roses has Shirley Simms in her accustomed plaintive, country role. Most of the songs are in Stephin's lovelorn doomed romantic mode without breaking out of a creative canter, which make them very good songs compared to 99% of the world's pop songwriters but nothing to put alongsdide his own highspots. There's nothing at all wrong with When You're Young and In Love,

You can teeter on the brink of a precipice

Ov'r an infinitely deep abyss

And somehow not even notice this

When you're young and in love

but you've all but given up on the album by then and, once it's lifted your hopes, he leaves you with one last synthesizer doodle. The thing about experimental music is that one seems to get served up with the result whether the experiment worked or not. You wouldn't do that with a recipe for sponge cake. I suppose it's reassuring to know that even a genius like Stephin Merritt has a weak spot.

And let this CD purchase serve as a warning to any other would-be almost completists of anything. You don't really need everything.

Michael

2011-11-08T18:54:00.003Z

I was told by a friend that her friend's partner had died. He wasn't someone I had met but I had heard plenty about him over the years. Would I write something for him. Well, I didn't know him., etc. Okay, I'll see what I can do.
And now it might be read at the Catholic Cathedral in Portsmouth at the funeral. It's a strange feeling.

Michael

The world enjoys some showmanship, bravado,
A challenge to reticence done with style.
There’s no point having rules if you obey them
And the way it’s done defines the man.

We know that everything is temporary,
That even kings can only briefly reign.
Some go bravely, unwilling to concede it,
And fly south forever into the sun.

Judy Brown - Loudness

2011-11-06T17:24:00.006Z

Judy Brown, Loudness (Seren)

I didn't even notice Judy Brown in the Identity Parade crowds last year and it took a while before her poem in Best British Poetry 2011 revealed itself as a favourite. This was not love at first sight.
But The Helicopter Visions in this year's anthology demands attention once it makes itself known. Judy Brown's effect is often through visual effects and

How the dawn breaks open, orange and fatal,
like a pomegranate landing on concrete.

is almost too good. You can imagine a creative writing group loving it like mad. But there's a deft use of phrase and cadence, an easy modulation between perspectives and a confident exploration of the strangeness highlighted in the book's epigram, 'a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost' (Thoreau, Walden).
As a debut volume, one can trace a bit of autobiography in the youthful readiness for booze, romantic encounter, travel and London. And there's a relationship or two that's done with, possibly acrimoniously. But, the other stand-out poem is from a similar but less elevated vantage point, not in a helicopter but cataloguing the detritus seen on top of bus shelters from the top deck of the bus.
As in The Helicopter Visions, Sky Burial brings her to the thought that she interpreting code in what she sees. But there only appears to be an enjoyment of gentle mystification, an appreciation of possible beauty when in fact, much of the book is set in ordinary places and times. She finds extraordinary things where others might find none.

In Dignity,

In the toilet you fall in love
with your own boozy sweetness.

I know. I know.

One day someone might get a degree for counting how many times the collection mentions 'water', whether as tears, a constituent part of the body, a drink or geographical feature. Then its significance might be set against the latent resentment that flickers under so many of the poems. It might or might not mean anything. Nothing, it seems, needs to mean anything these days but this is a memorable and telling collection that will keep many of us interested to see in which direction the difficult second album takes us.

The Saturday Nap Week Three

2011-11-05T09:12:00.006Z

I did usher you in the direction of the safest race to bet on last week and the favourite duly obliged but the tip was a more ambitious 6/1 shot which probably in all honesty wasn't going to win when impeded just when it was making a forward move but that clearly wasn't part of the plan.So, this week, it's back to first principles and if you can get the even money or better about Silvianiaco Conti, Sandown 2.15, then there was no disgrace in his third place on chasing debut behind two top prospects and this time he'll open his steeplechase account.
Volcan Surprise, Sandown 2.15, will have to be scrutinized for confidence in the movement of his price later in the morning because a juvenile hurdle with a number of unraced horses in the field is not quite the open and shut case one might hope but there might be a double to be had if it looks solid.

Top 6 -Television

2011-11-02T23:49:00.006Z

Some wireless broadcasts over the last couple of days have been remarking upon and marking in their way the 75th anniversary of television, which I think is very fine and generous of the older form of broadcast in respect of its trashier upstart sibling. Not all of us will be available for the centenary so we need to do it now.

The form of the events have revolved around celebrating great or historic television moments and, in a break from the strict rule on only mentioning six items in a Top 6, I will have to make room for such memorable sporting moments as Alberto Juantorena in the Olympic Games, Stephen Roche in the Tour de France, Fulham's fairytale progress two seasons ago through the Europa Cup towards the inevitable debacle five minutes before the end of extra time, Grundy v Bustino in the King George at Ascot in 1975 and, most movingly, Little Polveir winning the 1989 Grand National at 33/1 when I still believed in him. I cried.

Of course, one wants moon landings, Camberwick Green, General Election nights, Bolan or, possibly Hendrix, on the Cilla Black Show or even the time on Big Brother when George Galloway said, 'Rula, do you want me to be the cat now'. Or possibly not that last one.

My favourite moment of all time might be this moment when the great Barney Curley has John McCririck for breakfast,

'I saved your bacon one time. You were gone.' (And he apparently did and he apparently was).

And all McCririck can say is 'yes, yes, yes'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfPpBpDaSXE

But, Top 6 Television programmes, apart from all that.

The Simpsons, above all others, the defintive show of its generation and, I suspect, all others. And proof that a committee can be better than one writer, which is hard to believe but ostensibly true.

Fawlty Towers. Just about flawless and impeccable. Still laugh out loud on the twentieth or thirtieth time you see them and already know what's coming because it is now all written deep down inside you.

Two somewhat different quiz shows. Gallery, in which actually the lovely Pat Nevin, a sensible footballer, guested once with the imperious Maggi Hambling and outrageous George Melly in a panel game about paintings. Admittedly, the answer almost always seemed to be 'Gericault' but Maggi's awestruck comparison of a painting with Chartres Cathedral was devastating.

And the fey romp through opus numbers, Kochel numbers and old Joseph Cooper battering at the dummy keyboard that was Face the Music. If they really are going to do away with University Challenge, then there's precious little chance we'll get that back.

There will, of course, have been music performances of endless brilliance but I'll take Top of the Pops as not only a thing to look back on with both affection and horror but the night that Jeepster was on, or when Rod did Maggie May. And, especially, this week of all weeks, when it was 'now then, now then, now then, howzabout that, then, guys n gals.' Thursday night was the only night you had to make sure of a place in the TV room at University and so we all saw at least the second half of Tomorrow's World whether we wanted to or not.

And with one choice left, although I'd like Monkey Dust, Blackadder, Alan Bates in The Mayor of Casterbridge or test match coverage when it was Derek Randall, Michael Holding, Basil D'Oliviera, Viv Richards and all, I'm going to have Brookside, because at its best in the early 1980's, it was consistently the best drama on telly week after week, month after month.

Hats off to the telly in those days. I only switch it on for horse racing and Vicky Coren now.

The Poetry Premiership

2011-10-31T17:28:00.007Z

So, is Jo Shapcott Fulham in disguise. If you see what I mean.

With apologies for the infantile preoccupation with list-making, which I do realize isn't the point, I have been wondering for a while which twenty living British poets would constitute the Poetry Premiership.

There will be some who would be disappointed not to be considered a part of it and legions of supporters of others who would claim their heroine or hero is deserving of a place. Well, what I've tried to do here is judge their standing in critical and public esteem as well as lifetime achievement and not pick my own top 20. I'd be delighted to hear suggestions from anyone for amendments but however many names you suggest for inclusion, I do ask that you nominate the same number to be removed from my list.

I might have missed someone completely but this does come from a long list of about 70. They are in some approximation of league positions and so I'd expect more debate about the lower half of the table rather than the top few who, I imagine, are firmly established as Premiership in status.

Do let me know. I am looking for some sort of consensus rather than a controversial blood-letting.

There is a semi-scientific way of working it out without counting prizes, book sales and column inches of coverage in magazines and journals. At any poetry reading, one can usually tell that the biggest name comes on last. We all implicitly sort of know that. It isn't quite headliner plus support acts but it does usually amount to the biggest reputation being the climax of the event with the other names in descending order from there.

One often sees a poet, artist, musician or suchlike described as 'one of the leading' exponents of their art. But this is easy and lazy praise to attribute to anyone unless we know who else is also in the elite group and, more importantly sometimes, who isn't. So, let's see. We can only have twenty. Let me know who else should be in and thus also who left out.

Seamus Heaney

Paul Muldoon

Geoffrey Hill

Tony Harrison

Don Paterson

Sean O'Brien

James Fenton

Derek Mahon

Simon Armitage

David Harsent

Colette Bryce

John Burnside

Carol Ann Duffy

Lachlan MacKinnon

Alice Oswald

Jo Shapcott

Ian Duhig

Roddy Lumsden

Andrew Motion

Michael Longley

And I am aware I've left out Douglas Dunn, Glyn Maxwell, Ruth Padel, Craig Raine, Anne Stevenson, Paul Durcan, Robin Robertson, Ciaran Carson, Kathleen Jamie and many more, which can only show what a competitive league the Championship is these days.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Top 6 - Violin Concertos

2011-10-29T19:10:00.005+01:00

One of the highlights of the summer was Lisa Batiashvili, pictured, playing the Shostakovich Violin Concerto at the Proms, so scintillating that the spirit and atmosphere came out of the radio in a way I'd hardly ever experienced before. She was neither a musician I'd heard of before and neither was the piece although I've long stopped being surprised by the variety and greatness of the Shostakovich oeuvre.

But I spent a few quid and a few hours exploring the violin concerto repertoire in somewhat more depth than I so far knew. In the end, it might not have added much to a top 6 as it would have been before and eventually one can tire of yet another virtuoso bravura performance of yet more flamboyance, but it's a rich and rewarding genre if taken in the right quantities.

The Bach Double Concerto would be a certainty for almost any list but in this glorious performance, it is reserved for top place, with Oistrakh and Menuhin providing a paragon example of everything a performance should be from a more demure age. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmmpjziKcFU&feature=related

Tasmin's performance of the Beethoven in Portsmouth Cathedral a couple of years ago would secure another giant of orchestral music a guaranteed place. For some reason, I don't know if it's his portrait or reputation, but Beethoven is never as dark and foreboding as one thinks he might be. Fidelio, the Late Quartets, Missa Solemnis, etc. all turn out to be much easier going than one thought they would be and the Violin Concerto is perfectly charismatic.

Although I'm supposed to be picking concertos rather than performances, Henning Kraggerud's passionate account of the Tchaikovsky at last year's Prom gets it in ahead of several other deserving cases as the long list is ominously too long for the dwindling number of places that remain.

And so with Tasmin's recording of the Sibelius coming in, for me, just ahead the other recordings I have by her, I'm left with only room for a personal soft spot for the much under-rated Mendelssohn, it always seems to me, who is a tremendous composer seemingly overshadowed by too many other Romantic nineteenth-century masters and I'm having his haunting opening over and above a few other very persuasive claims and some big names who, to be honest, didn't make quite as much of a case as I'd expected.

The Saturday Nap Week 2

2011-10-29T10:20:00.003+01:00

Customary tactics for me in selecting horses for investment involve choosing the right sort of race. That is, not handicaps which are so often bookmaker's benefits. Novice hurdles are my favourite.
I certainly couldn't get involved in the Charlie Hall Chase at Wetherby which will be one to watch and the most straightforward race of the day might be Wetherby's 2.15.
However, I am persuaded by the claims of Muirhead in Ascot's 3.40 and, with it being available at at least 6/1 at present, we can do it each way to try to insure our unbeaten record.

The Friday Nap

2011-10-27T18:52:00.002+01:00

Just in case there's not a better option on Saturday.

It has to be noted that even though Ruby Walsh has said he will be reducing his appearances in England after the new rules on whip use, he is riding at Wetherby tomorrow and has only one ride booked.

This is Fistral Beach in the 3.20.

These top jockeys don't travel all that way for one ride unless they think it has a good chance. In fact, a top jockey with one ride at a meeting is one of the biggest ticks a horse can have against its name on my card.
But also bearing in mind that Ruby went to Fontwell for a Paul Nicholls trained horse last week, and finished second on it.

Still, I'm on. The 9/2 currently indicated on the Racing Post website would be lovely. And this website will continue to feature books and poetry, as before, just as soon as it can.

The Saturday Nap Week 1

2011-10-22T11:15:00.002+01:00

The money for Camelot in the Racing Post Trophy is persuasive and the sort of thing that often persuades me but the effect of it has been to push the other horses who have accomplished more so far out to bigger prices so I'm not getting involved with what might be a false favourite there.

Chepstow's meeting has some interesting races with big stables bringing what might be some bright prospects for early season skirmishes. One notes Tim Vaughan's winners yesterday and that Paul Nicholls would usually start running up multiple winners at this stage of the year but Fingal Bay, Chepstow 3.40, from Philip Hobbs, might be a different class and offers better odds of reward than the Nicholls trained favourites in the first two races so if there's still 5/2 available on Fingal Bay, let's get on.

View from the Boundary

2011-10-21T17:25:00.002+01:00

The world seems to have been wobbling on a precipice for months now, the global financial meltdown that is just about to happen and has been just about to happen for what is beginning to feel like forever. If you've got a job you're still okay and if your retirement is tidily all wrapped up then no worries but once the whole edifice of world capitalism collapses, then who can say.
Capitalism depends on boom and bust, the regular clear out of failed efforts. It is fuelled by borrowing and debt but they are supposed to last forever except they need to. But the new angle now is that it's China that has all the money. We didn't see that one coming.
It couldn't have been only me that knew that Greece wouldn't meet the repayments on its bail out and yet the markets went into a further tailspin when they realized it wouldn't. I only wish I understood it all well enough to have bet on that. Those in Britain who argued that we should stay out of the Euro were mostly right for the wrong reasons. It wasn't because we fought wars to keep the Queen's head on our currency and don't want our money to be the same as what they use in Italy. But it was a sound decision anyway.
The Conservative argument, under George Osborne, who looks like he clearly can't comprehend what it's like to not be a millionaire, was that the entrepreneureal spirit will create enough jobs to take up all the public service redundancies. But it's not a matter of if or when, it's simply not going to happen. They are as flotsam and jetsam blown about on the tides of world trends and there's nothing they can do about it. His job is just to defend the well off against the inevitable for as long as he can. The permanent look of bemusement on his face is just as worrying as Blair's old Bambi impersonation ever was.
The trouble is that there's no such thing as Economics. It ought to be abolished as a University subject and put into that dubious range of issues like Astrology, Palmistry, Creative Writing or Origami. Economics is no more than getting oneself down to the dog track and sticking it all on trap one except, of course, our dog track in Portsmouth closed some time ago now.
So, let's see if we can't fiddle our way ahead of the withdrawing tide by having a feature called the Saturday nap in which I'll scrutinize the horse racing of a Saturday morning and look where we might put our precious cash. The tip will be posted here by lunchtime and if we're not doing okay by Christmas, we'll admit defeat. The first half of the jumping season is often a good time to bet in my experience and I wish we'd started last week when Ongenstown Lad strolled in at Cheltenham at 5/2. I'm looking at Camelot on the flat at Doncaster tomorrow, who has been well backed in the week, but we'll see about that in the morning.
-But, Sport, otherwise. Who'd have it. Wales were denied their place as beaten finalists in the Rugby World Cup when their captain tried to drill an opponent head first into the ground and, although to much disgruntlement, quite rightly so. Rugby doesn't seem to have many rules and fails as a game because you can't really make up rules for a boisterous scrap between burly, beery men. But then last night, Fulham's prospects of getting through their Europa Cup group were left largely unaffected by the sending off of Dembele who no more than pushed a provactive opponent on the shoulder, who then collapsed as if he'd been shot. So I'm not sure if Rugby's a game played by real men and football by overpaid poseurs but I think the biggest problem with sport might be taking it seriously and the only way to make it matter, if you need it to, is to bet on it.
-Still looking through Lumsden's Best Poetry of 2011 anthology, I'm taking note of Judy Brown's fine poem in there and have ordered her forthcoming collection Loudness. I have high hopes of it on the early evidence and the poetry year is by no means over yet.
-Whereas, somewhat more controversially, I found myself calling last week's reading at Cheltenham a 'Premiership' event and so wondered exactly which twenty British poets would constitute the Premiership. There's no point allowing lazy journalism that says things like ' Smith is one of the top such and such in Britain' unless the writer can say who else is and who in fact isn't. So, one ought to be able to name the Premiership poets. The shortlist extends to maybe 80, which I have in three divisions. 18 so far in the Premiership with a Women's league for the benefit of those who think that Women's poetry is a different field altogether (which I really can't see). I don't know whether to publish my eventual findings here and would welcome nominations. One finds oneself pondering whether Jo Shapcott is Premiership; is Glyn Maxwell top of the next division or whether Craig Raine is now Sheffield Wednesday. It's bound to be wrong but wrong in different ways to everyone who thinks so but it is based on a list I saw, compiled decades ago, by an academic who had counted up the lineage of coverage that poets had been allocated in critical journals and suchlike. Heaney was top and Hughes second. My list, if I ever summon the nerve to publish it, is nowhere near as scientific but is my attempt at judging what the world thinks, or those who have any inclination to be interested. It won't be my top 20. I could make that up any time you like. Surely there's more to enjoy about it than making league tables but I've never grown out of the boyish infatuation with a list, you see.
- Meanwhile, this house is patiently waiting for the arrival of the new Murakami. In some ways, I hope it never comes. Long books are daunting. I read the whole of The Gulag Archipelago, and all of Solzhenitsyn to date, in my teens. I sat in front of Middlemarch and tried to let it pass into me by some sort of osmosis one University summer and reached roughly page 1300 of Proust in my twenties until the bookmark stalled at the place it has remained ever since.
But, Murakami is the Nobel laureate in waiting, a worldwide cult I was trapped into by his easy way of making you think it's fine to crack open a casual beer, talk to a cat and apparently walk into a painting and find yourself involved in something you don't really understand. But if I don't review any more novels this year on here, you'll know why.

The Lepidopterist's Wife

2011-10-16T18:46:00.001+01:00

The Lepidopterist’s Wife

He’s up there every evening quietly
pinning his brightly-coloured specimens
to cardboard, their paper wings as fragile
as love, the life gone out of them, no more
than ornaments annotated with dates
on which he trapped them in his net, or where.

I sit beside a photograph of us
on our wedding day, me in my cabbage
white lace dress, ready to flutter around
his bleak, ominous light. I never thought
that it would come to this. I never thought
that I would be the one who would creep out

to meet the man next door who reeks of gin
and loss, who watches horse racing all day
on a wide screen, a penniless mischief
who gives away whatever it might be
that he might have- and some of it to me-
then lets me return back into the night.

Signed Poetry Books - Paul Muldoon

2011-10-16T18:35:00.003+01:00

The last time I saw Paul Muldoon was twelve years ago and I didn't have a copy of his latest book to hand then so I got him to make his mark on a piece of paper. Now, much more satisfyingly on a book, I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.

I wonder if, in his position, I'd be somewhat less gracious and tolerant of minor, starstruck fans like me. You have to admire the way that so many of those at the top of their chosen field deal with all the cumbersome attention.

I think I'd become very bad at it very quickly and I think it's a marvellous thing that so few people require signed books, or any books at all, from me.

Signed Poetry Books - David Harsent

2011-10-16T18:28:00.003+01:00

With this book now looking a very likely candidate for this website's Poetry Collection of the Year award, the only regret for me is that it didn't get the Forward Prize as well or instead because that would have made me a bit richer and its author quite a bit richer than that.

But he's a fine and very welcome addition to the collection and the hand that wrote four episodes of Midsomer Murders has now touched my copy of his exemplary collection of poems.

Harsent, O'Brien, Muldoon at Cheltenham

2011-10-15T10:33:00.003+01:00

Cheltenham Literature Festival - David Harsent, Sean O'Brien and Paul Muldoon, October 14, 2011

Jo Shapcott introduced some very top-end Premiership poets as her 'superheroes' in what must have been a poetry event of the year in these islands.
David Harsent is calm and unhurried as a reader, all clarity of expression and diction. His poems of considered, unflamboyant resonance included Ghosts and several of the 'blood-related' poems from Night as well as poems on his loss of faith in Mark Rothko's abstract. I wonder if that's something that happens to you in middle-age. I hope that it doesn't happen to me. But it's taken a long time for the idea of David Harsent to dawn on me and I'm grateful for it. He finished with a new poem commissioned on the subject of 1971, which I hoped might concern Marc Bolan and T. Rex, but was in fact about Mutually Assured Destruction.
Sean O'Brien is by turns darkly political and grimly funny. I was grateful that he did the wonderful Elegy for his mother and it was interesting to hear the background to poems on Marmite and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Jeudi Prochain and Narbonne were other more significant parts of a set that was just right. I don't know if I discerned a somewhat mellower Sean than was evident in the demeanour of the younger model but the fire is by no means fading yet..
As Paul Muldoon remarked on the way to the book signing, one doesn't like poetry readings to go on too long. Well, no, but surely you do more than one poem. To be fair to Muldoon, it was a long poem in eleven parts, Wayside Shrines, and a paragon example of his immaculate music, packed internal rhymes and measured cadence. He is a superb reader to listen to even in comparison with the exalted company here in an hour of genuine class act poetry. Unmissable really in a time that might one day become regarded as The Age of Muldoon.

Top 6 - Pop Singers

2011-10-12T20:46:00.000+01:00

Well, I wonder. There's plenty to choose from but the rules are that one can only name six.

So, who's the best one, then. Could it be,

Aretha Franklin, for this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cIWu5m8UmA

Rod Stewart, for this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oX2FSv4Rys&ob=av2n

Dusty Springfield, for this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA48IL6bQQU

Al Green, for this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz7XTbveDBg

Gregory Isaacs, for this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8yaBa7-kwQ

David Bowie, for this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbpMpRq6DV4&ob=av2e

View from the Boundary

2011-10-10T17:51:00.003+01:00

Like a Mastermind question master, once I'd started a book, I always used to finish it. Nearly every time. Not in the case of My Childhood by Maxim Gorky that we were given to read at school and not, much later, when I abandoned Proust after about 1300 pages. But mostly I wasn't a quitter.
But I'm afraid I am now, increasingly. I packed in Martin Amis a few months ago as regular readers will remember, I didn't finish Edward Thomas's novel The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans a few years ago and the list is steadily getting longer. Sometimes they're simply no good, or too hard work or I realize that now it's up to me, it's just for my entertainment. There's no course to pass, nothing I really have to know. And so why labour with a book you're not enjoying.
I was really enjoying A.L. Kennedy's The Blue Book, an enterprising and almost ground-breaking fiction writer, especially one sunny Saturday afternoon when I spent a couple of hours with it in the garden. I had made half a page of notes on it towards a review that was going to say, I thought, what a great writer she is. But I came back from a weekend of high excitement somewhere, returned to it and found that I had, literally, lost the plot. I'm sorry, Alison, I think of myself as an admirer, but once that happens, it's too hard to carry on. Maybe next time.
But here are a couple of notes I made,
p. 86, ocean's great grey thought
an essay on contingency and need
p.156, eyes full of sea and want
streams of associative.....

But, if nothing else, I'll make a note to myself to stop using 'contingent' for a while. It's a tremendous word and it sounds great but ever since first coming across it in studying Sartre, I've been well aware that I don't really know what it means.

Elsewhere, as we approach the 'review of the year' season, I can name only one pop music record that came out this year. And it came out this week, I think. Cliff Richard and Freda Payne, Saving a Life. It's introduced here by that renowned musicologist and novelist, Alan Titchmarsh http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXuetVC1Qv8&feature=related&noredirect=1 .
It's so easy to pick fault with Cliff that I choose not to, and I do genuinely like this record. For sure, it will drive me insane the next time I hear a pop song in which the singer claims to be 'driven insane'. But I'm sure I've written lyrics like that more than once. Heaven knows what Cliff is wearing, my sister wouldn't risk her great reputation as shirt buyer to me with a chancey outfit like that. And Cliff, duetting on his latest album with legends like Freda, Candi Staton, The Temptations, Roberta Flack and Percy Sledge, risks being the second best voice on every track. But Candi Staton's a wonderful singer and you'd never turn her down. Previews of the album suggest it's more MOTR than the 'soul' of the title, though. The phrase 'return to form' needs to be outlawed, only suggesting that the artist in question has been terrible recently but this isn't one, it's just Cliff providing the only pop record I could actually name from 2011. But it's one I will remember.
But, returning to performance, if not to 'form', it was an enjoyable gig (did I really say 'gig') on National Poetry Day in Southsea last week. An audience of 17 with one or two more that came or went is not to be derided when one considers the readings in The Poetry Bookshop, related in the recent Edward Thomas biography, at which Rupert Brooke and W.B.Yeats read to small groups. But you'll have to catch me when you can. I'm not thinking of making a habit of it or trolling round the festival circuit. I'll leave that to Harsent, O'Brien and Muldoon, who I hope all turn up and give us the reading of their lives in Cheltenham on Friday. Professional poetry. It must be the hardest game in the world. Or not.

Sasha Dugdale - Red House

2011-10-08T18:06:00.011+01:00

Sasha Dugdale, Red House (Carcanet)

I'm not going to hazard a guess at the significance or symbolism of the red house in the title of this collection. It is a series of seven poems in the book and quick internet research suggests it is taken from a painting of 1932 by Kazimir Malevich. In the poems, a variety of vulnerable or dispossessed humanity and animals come and go, there are lines of rare music, like the vowel sounds in,

And the nestlings peep and pip at intervals, heard in rooms throughout

By the day-sick and the unfit for work

and one is aware of elsewheres whether spiritual, emotional or of geographical belonging.

I like poets who can do different things equally well, like Thom Gunn's ability to move between strict metre, syllabics and free verse. If Red House is not easy poetry, it is worth the effort, whereas in the same book, a poem like Prince's, nostalgic for a bygone way of life with the closing of a landmark shop, could hardly be more straightforward and yet is no less satisfying.

In Out of Town, a poem redolent of the waste land of Sean O'Brien and David Harsent's books this year, a derelict world is haunted by spirits, or are we them already, 'where no-man's-land might be an honest place.'

Beauty comes out of dross and horror can lie beneath beauty. In Dawn Chorus,

How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smouldering coal

Their throats singed and swollen with song

In dissonance as befits the dark world

Where only travellers and the sleepless belong

There is plenty more to like and admire. Shepherds, 'Perhaps Akhmatova was right', as well as poems responding to Keats, Auden and others. It is warmer and less desolate than other books this year that have inhabited similar territory and one could have done with more of it. I had thought that my shortlists for this year's best collections and poems were just about settled but I am reminded that it is only October and it isn't over until this gifted lady has sung.

Portsmouth Poetry Society on National Poetry Day

2011-10-06T18:04:00.012+01:00

National Poetry Day with Portsmouth Poetry Society in Southsea Library.

And ole red eyes is back, doo-be-doo-be-doo, putting in a performance that would surely be the definition of cool except, please could someone remind me in future not to write poems with the word 'extinguishing' in them, or, if I do, then don't try to read them in public. Never mind. I got over that fence at the third attempt.

Team photo. Back row, left to right, David Green, Pauline Hawkesworth, Denise Bennett. Front row, Cliff Yates, Doris Bealing, Margaret Banks.

Thanks to Dave Moxham for taking these pictures.

The Sense of an Ending

2011-10-05T19:04:00.002+01:00

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape)

Tony Webster, the character through which Julian Barnes tells this story isn't really to blame and he's not really the 'unreliable narrator' of so much contemporary fiction either. Something that he has forgotten he ever said comes to be horribly prophetic and we share in his awkward state of not knowing until he finds out how the past has unravelled behind him.

Whereas in Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach the discomfiture comes early and gradually recedes into a wide angle ending in which the difficulties have diminished with time, in The Sense of an Ending it has been kept out of our sight until the gaucheness of the climax.

It is an elegant composition, compact but beautifully expressed. It gives the effect of being much longer than its novella length. It might seem a little unfair on Alan Hollinghurst whose equally well-written novel this year was spread over 500 pages and was dropped from the Booker Prize running at the longlist stage while Barnes is now red hot at 6/4 favourite but that's the way it goes. Perhaps Giles Coren, writing in The Times, will prove top Booker tipster again this year and be glad to be proved wrong that Barnes isn't too good to win it.

That his first girlfriend, Veronica, might not be the 'fruitcake' he took her for might not be Webster's fault but his experience as her ingenue suitor is profoundly observed with its assumptions, naivetes and ironic little episodes. After their relationship ends,

The next day, I took a milk jug she'd given me down to the Oxfam Shop. I hoped she'd see it in the window. But when I stopped to check, there was something else on show instead: a small coloured lithograph of Chislehurst I'd given her for Christmas.

Alongside the even shorter stories of Pulse earlier this year, Barnes provides evidence enough here to suggest he's at the top of his game and among the league leaders of current British fiction. This is a consummately well-made book that only needs to be longer in order to prolong the enjoyment of it.

The Best British Poetry 2011

2011-10-03T21:33:00.002+01:00

The Best British Poetry 2011, edited by Roddy Lumsden (Salt)

You don't expect to find the most startling line of a poetry anthology in the introduction but here Roddy Lumsden advises us that,

around a quarter of the poets here are under 30, representing a coming generation that I believe to be the strongest ever in UK poetry

It's a lavish claim, not one that can be verified for a while yet and not one that all of us will necessarily be around long enough to see proven or otherwise. But, who can say. Maybe we are on the brink of the finest Golden Age that will outshine, say, the 1590's, 1820's or 1910's (and, please, add your own choice of generation in here, too).

This title has been welcomed as the overdue equivalent to a similar, long-established American one. Whether Britain needs everything that America has just because they have it is another thing one might wonder about. We got the credit crisis from them as well as gangsta rap. And, as Roddy readily anticipates, there are inevitable problems with proclaiming the 'best' and we shouldn't take that title too seriously. Whereas The Forward anthology picks out highlights from new books as well as magazines, this book is like an uber-magazine, not much more expensive that an issue of any one of them but selected from a wide range of them so someone like me who no longer has subscriptions to any can have a look at some recommended poems.

One never expects to like a very high percentage of poems in a magazine and so it's to this books credit that it contains a satisfactory quotient of things one is glad to have seen. While one can be confident that Ian Duhig and Sasha Dugdale are going to be worth having, I was pleasantly surprised by Deryn Rees-Jones and, a new name to me, Lizzi Thistlethwayte. Every poet has a biographical note that contains their own comments on their featured poem. These divide broadly equally, it seems, between those who appear to have had a very clear idea of exactly what their poem was going to do and those who only found out during its making or are perhaps not even quite sure yet.

For me the mystery goes on surrounding the industry darling, Ahren Warner, whose meta-narratives refer us through, here, a Baudelairean transaction within comparative linguistic approaches. It is clearly me that is the loser in having not the faintest idea of what it means or why it's so admired and my main regret is that I won't be anywhere in the vicinity when the time comes to register whether such poems take their place in the long and glorious history of poetry in English or are making their way sublimely into a cul-de-sac.

As so often, anthologies are unsatisfactory in being able to allow so few examples of each individual's work- and here it is only one each. The composite impression of poetry in 2011 is unfulfilling and half a dozen poems by much fewer poets would make a better book, with more chance of appreciating the talents that are in it, although would not meet Roddy's purpose. Which is why I think roughly the same amount of money spent on Sasha Dugdale's collection was the better spent.

I'm well aware that it is entirely my fault that far too much of this book passes me by but at least I tried, fed money into the machine, and I keep on trying while realizing that for me the real thrills of poetry are elsewhere.

Patrick Hamilton - Twopence Coloured

2011-09-25T11:06:00.003+01:00

Patrick Hamilton, Twopence Coloured (Faber Finds)

Patrick Hamilton was 24 when his third novel, Twopence Coloured, was published. After too long out of print, the Faber Finds series has given us the chance of comparing and contrasting with Hamilton's later, better known work.

The story follows the career of Jackie Mortimer, an actress of particularly good looks and some ambition, through a series of episodes that provide a vehicle for portraits and satires on the theatre in London and the provinces.

Theatre producers are seedy, middle-aged men with cigars, the acting profession is tawdry, threadbare and takes place in a twilight world behind the garish glamour of lights and curtains. Thus, one might think that Hamilton at this stage was a somewhat one-dimensional writer of character, his plot predictable and nothing is likely to surprise.

That isn't the case as the final chapters do take an unexpected turn and the ending is certainly not what I expected. Early Hamilton lacks the sinister, exploitative edge of the West Pier trilogy or Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky. While there are glimpses of the gin-stained heartlessness and cynical manipulation of his major books, which comes to the final disintegration of style and morality in Unknown Assailant, this is more straight-forward and relatively innocent account of London theatreland. In fact, one might be taken aback by what a sensible girl Jackie is and how little grief befalls her.

The world of matiness and stage doors is understood all too well by Hamilton's keen eye,

The plots of these melodramas....dealing as they did, exclusively and traditionally with infamously monocled scoundrels, pathetically credulous young women, oily-mannered (but black-hearted) solicitors, young men vaguely on His Majesty's Service (but with plenty of time for white flannels, father-defying, and yachting caps)....

and he is already brilliant at putting a character's sincere feelings in contrast to the superficial world they inhabit,

And it caused her to recall, in a sad mist, the very great beauty of their little time together. And it struck her that her spirit had been alive and poignant then, and that it was dead and beautiless now, and that this ornate chattering and idle gossiping around her, this foolish orchestra and foolish play, this tawdry, stuffy, smoke-ridden foyer- were irrelevant and very paltry phenomena to one whose spirit had once been alive.

Twopence Coloured is not an early curio of a writer who went on to become greater but one of his several books, worthy of attention in its own right, at a stage in the trajectory of his career when the balance in his world view had not yet tilted towards a crueller and meaner interpretation of human nature.

Top 6 - R.E.M.

2011-09-23T17:13:00.004+01:00

The shortlist for Top 6 R.E.M. went to a dozen very quickly so it was never going to be an easy process.

One item that was never going to get left out is Losing My Religion, a long-standing classic and favourite that has only its familiarity to count against it. Apparently a hymn to some kind of existential angst, one is often not quite sure what Michael's writing about but one appreciates his oblique 'poetry' and takes the rest on trust.

One suggestion I received having solicited them was Find the River and since it was high on the shortlist, it goes in with its sense of longing and nostalgia. That is a recurrent theme, one soon finds if one didn't realize already, but the tour de force The Great Beyond, which seems to find Stipe on top form describing what it feels like to be on top form provides a great counterbalance to regret and doubt,
I'm pushing an elephant up the stairs
I'm tossing up punch lines that were never there
Over my shoulder a piano falls
Crashing to the ground

I'm breaking through
I'm bending spoons
I'm keeping flowers in full bloom
I'm looking for answers from the great beyond.

And then I have to add in Leaving New York, which was a very emotional piece on first hearing, on an otherwise lack lustre album, before I even realized it was about 9/11,
You might have laughed if I told you (it's pulling me apart)
You might have hidden a frown (change)
You might have succeeded in changing me (it's pulling me apart)
I might have been turned around (change)

It's easier to leave than to be left behind (it's pulling me apart)
Leaving was never my proud (change)
Leaving New York, never easy (it's pulling me apart)
I saw the light fading out
You find it in your heart, it's pulling me apart
You find it in your heart, change...

All of which leaves us already with only two selections left and a lenghty list to pick from. There's not going to be room for a novelty no. 6 here.

I've got to have So. Central Rain with its contained melancholy becoming a thundering cry of desperation and so it is a vast problem to be left with only one choice. There will be many whose precious personal favourite isn't mentioned here but those are the rules, you can only mention six.

I've very reluctantly admitted it's not this, it's not that, so it's between these. I'm going to go with The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite but it would be no problem to furnish another six without any need to start compromising.

Well done, R.E.M., and thanks for having been there for so long.

R.E.M. Split

2011-09-21T22:40:00.005+01:00

I have just heard on a BBC wireless broadcast about the split of R.E.M. So, it was true after all, because one memory it brings back was when Britain left the Exchange Rate Mechanism, was it in the late 80's or early 90's, the E.R.M., and Danny Baker was on Radio 5 assuring listeners that they need not worry, R.E.M. had not split.
But they have now, and although I've been a great admirer over the years, it's not before time. It's been 31 years, everyone runs out of ideas eventually and, in the same way that Bowie or Cliff albums were welcomed as a 'return to form', they very rarely were.
But they were excellent at their best. He's a great songwriter and they were the model 'indie' band if you like that sort of thing. Great minds can think alike and I was glad I had at least shown my new poem, Kiss, to one friend on the Wednesday before Michael sang At Your Most Beautiful on telly on the Friday night with its line about 'counting your eyelashes'.
It's not a great loss. I remember the surprise of my schoolfriends circa 1973 when Lindisfarne split and I wasn't upset but I'd seen it coming when Alan Hull had released the solo album, Pipedream. I also predicted, or almost advised, that the Sex Pistols should split after one album.
But, as we have seen in recent years, it's never really over. Even the Velvet Underground reformed however briefly a few years ago because we all like money, don't we, and there's money in such appearances. And, even if my Top 6 feature has been in abeyance recently, that also is never going away completely and I'll do a Top 6 R.E.M. shortly. If you have any suggestions, please e-mail them in.

You are the star tonight.
Your sun electric, outasight.
Your light eclipsed the moon tonight.
Electrolite.
You're outasight.

Always the last to know

2011-09-19T00:39:00.003+01:00

You can't let the opportunity of seeing (and in my case, a bit weirdly for a nearly 52 year old, touching) Mark Cavendish, the fastest man in the world on a bicycle made for one, go by. And so I met my nephew and his mate in Westminster for the last day of the Tour of Britain.

Young Christopher, himself already a veteran of a Land's End to John O'Groats ride last year, compared to my mere days out in 12 Hour races in the 1990's, spotted this sign on the Embankment that he couldn't help thinking reminded him of some wonderful demo pop songs he heard a few years ago, mostly the work of my genius friend, Tim, but with enough bits added in by me to make the writing credits officially Curtis-Green.

Now, if Tim has set up a huge hit factory in central London, a new rival to Tamla Motown, I don't know. I could have been number one in the hit parade for the last few months and I wouldn't know. In fact, it would be the best way of keeping it a secret from me. But I've written to him to ask, just in case.

But that's the trouble with alarmingly significant signs - it's the things they say to me, the things they say to me, make it seem that I'm a millionaire.

View from the Boundary

2011-09-10T19:16:00.004+01:00

I haven't seen the sales figures for my books recently. I don't need to. Anyone who wants one has to get it from here and so I know that sales have remained slow. But sales isn't really the point of it, they can be free to a good home or, as this week, exchanged with others for copies of their books.
Brian Wells is a founder member of Portsmouth Poetry Society which celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year and I gave him copies of the three in print David Green (Books) books for two of his, A Few Words More (2006) and Afterthoughts (2009). By coincidence, where Ovid's Waitress is the first poem in one of my booklets, he begins his with poems on Ovid and Catullus respectively.
It's going to take a lot to ever convince me that haiku should be written in English but some of the better one's I've seen are here, most notably,
Picturing the clouds
as creatures, I saw a bear
smoking a cigar.

There are war poems, many poems with a strong sense of a long historical perspective and we share further interests in Lindisfarne and prizes from the much-missed Ottakar's poetry competition. But the most impressive things in these booklets for me were two sonnets at the end of Afterthoughts, Colour Sonnet and Yet Love Endures. The first begins,
Lay my dust where it shall enrich the ground
and so some future poet's progress ease,

in a hope for continuity and a long-term sense of a community of poets. The second poem is a generous tribute to a long and happy marriage. You can see an obvious sympathy with the spirit of Edward Thomas throughout both books. They are sincere, modest and enjoyable.

I don't know if I will be getting The Bees, the new book from Carol Ann Duffy, but I'm not sure if it's modest to have 'Poet Laureate' printed on the front of your books even if you are entitled to. Is this purely for information, in case browsers in bookshops don't know, or is it to boost sales, giving this volume the edge over books by non-laureates. Surely it's not the vanity of one making the most of her strange but time-honoured title. The appointment has done some of its holders no favours at all. It has wrecked some old reputations simply by keeping their names nominally in the public's awareness, Alfred Austin or Colley Cibber perhaps. Motion had writer's block; Hughes wrote one good laureate poem which he almost certainly had written already and Ms. Duffy has produced a succession of laureate poems that don't do justice to the tremendous work that made her a prominent enough poet to get the job. It is to be hoped that The Bees shows that her best work has continued away from the pressure of her public position but one does wish that the incumbents wouldn't keep supplying the abolitionists with so much ammuntion.

I'd like to think that such publicity was the last thing I'd ever want. But, then, why write this website or anything else at all. I had thought I'd done my last poetry reading and thought I'd never have to worry about spoiling a line, stage fright or audience reaction. But then it was only half an hour after demurring about whether I would appear with the Portsmouth Poetry Society people that I began to get really quite interested in the idea. So the advert below, if you can make it on National Poetry Day, is all you need to know.
The Society's meetings are on the first and third Wednesday of each month, except August, in St. Mark's Church hall, Derby Road, Portsmouth and anyone with an interest in poetry is welcome. I notice from the newly issued programme for the coming year that on Feb 15th next year it's likely to be the hottest ticket in town, the Poetry of Ovid introduced by, ahem, me.

National Poetry Day in Portsmouth

2011-09-09T20:03:00.002+01:00

PORTSMOUTH POETRY SOCIETY

reading at Southsea Library, Palmerston Road

Thurs, 6th October, 1.30-2.30 pm

with
Denise Bennett
Pauline Hawkesworth
Brian Wells
Margaret Banks
David Green

The Public

2011-09-04T18:15:00.003+01:00

I'd like to think this is a 'work in progress' that might extend eventually to 8 or 10 stanzas of this sustained attack on 'everybody else apart from us', and thus finish any next booklet I publish on a long poem in the fashion recently in vogue with such models as O'Brien, Harsent, Mooney et al.
That is what happens. You think you are your own man and think you only do what you want to do but you crave to be like the people you admire.
Although, for the most part, the poem seems to provide a rickety raft from which to lob missiles from a superior position at virtually everybody else, it will have missed its point if the ending doesn't make it clear that the speaker is guilty of many of the faults he finds in others. Not long after starting to write it, I realized how difficult I find it to write a poem that Larkin hadn't done much better several decades ago and in this case it is Show Saturday,

The Public

They are everyone else but us, the ones
not here to defend themselves or listen
to what we think of them or recognize
that it’s them we mean. For we wouldn’t wear
clothes like that, Adidas or Matalan,
or drink the wine they buy in restaurants
but they are in our way in queues or aisles
of supermarkets, texting each other

messages that we wouldn’t understand.
And they are everyone we’re not, guilty
of everything we’d never want to do,
the pop records they dance to that they heard
on the radio in traffic jams, on
i-pods because they thought they wanted to
and thought that it might look good at the time.
They like it when the weather’s warm and spread

themselves in outdoor places making it
untidy and decide they are in love
with one of the rest of them, usually
someone who’s quite conveniently nearby.
I’m glad we are not like them and would die
rather than do such things for we are made
of finer stuff and deserve much better
than them. And that is why I love you so.

Not At All

2011-09-04T18:06:00.004+01:00

I am aware that the number of labels on this website marked 'Music' are gradually surging ahead of those marked 'Poems'. It wasn't intended to be like that but I don't write very many poems, let alone good ones, or ones that I necessarily think ought to be exhibited here, ostensibly advertising my presence to the world as, ahem, a 'poet', as absurd as that seems to me.
Nonetheless, 'Poems' need to make up some of the deficit.
My Japanese correspondant writes the most beautiful e-mails you'd ever want to receive.

Not at All

I am sorry for say such a foolish things.
Yuka Watanabe

Just after daybreak your e-mail arrived
from a summer afternoon in Japan.
You think your English is badly contrived,
Will I understand? Well, of course I can.
In fact, if anything, it says much more
for all the effort that you have put in,
more moving and more beautiful. Therefore,
your English writing doesn’t only pin

your meaning to the page but brings with it
a sense of Yuka from so far away.
And here am I, almost monoglot Brit,
who knows shogun, sake, kamikaze
but no more than that of your language. Please.
I couldn’t write to you in Japanese.

Proms Saturday Matinee 4 and Prom 65

2011-09-04T16:00:00.013+01:00

Proms Saturday Matinee 4, Natalie Clein, BBC Singers, Britten Sinfonia, Gubaidalina, Tavener, Tippett, Cadogan Hall/Tasmin Little Literary Passions, Royal College of Music/Prom 65 BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Marc Andre Hamelin, Elgar, Michael Berkeley, Rachmanninov, Kodaly, Royal Albert Hall

In yesterday's Times crossword, the clue for 5 down was 'Four or five men left in the concert venue (5,6,4)' and the answer was 'Royal Albert Hall', the four or five men being Roy, Al, (Al)bert and Hal plus an L for left.

How did they know. It's the sort of uncanny occurence that would make one believe in any and every superstition that there is until one reflects on how many times I've done crosswords on trains and they hadn't contained my destination among the answers and that every single other thing that happened during the day was not in the least coincidental. But I suppose they are just the endless mass of non-coincidences, the exceptions that prove the rule.

My first stop, though, was the Cadogan Hall to see Natalie Clein, the cello player in this dreadful, demonic duel for my musical affections with Tasmin Little. There isn't time to dwell on the pieces by Tippett because John Tavener's Popule Meus was a major attraction here, a 'lament on man's turning away from God', a battle between the dark, threatening timpani and the clear, serene light of the cello. Natalie put in a passionate performance, one couldn't help but compare the piece with the famous Protecting Veil and then a frail Tavener was brought from the audience to take a huge ovation from those, like me, who were absolutely thrilled to be in his mystical, humble presence.

Sofia Gubaidalina wasn't, unfortunately, present to hear her Canticle of the Sun, a longer piece with choir, a 'battery' of percussion and cello that was at least as unusual as this maverick, idiosyncratic composer would be expected to have written. At first, in a way, it made me think of the paintings of Miro, whose canvasses are often populated by an array of shapes and doodles, the 'teeming creation in which we are all a part of each other'. Based on a poem by Francis of Assisi, this interpretation might not have been quite as first envisaged by the author, fragmentary and using wine glasses filled with water to create notes by running a finger around their moistened rims. Natalie was expected to put down the cello and contribute to the percussion, too, and it was beginning to occur to me that this extraordinary composition was really old Sofia just getting them at it. But it built from there, with Natalie loosening the bottom string I think four times to produce even lower notes from the instrument in one passage, hitting the strings with a drum stick and ending on a remarkable riff which I think might be called glissando, running off the top of the fretboard on the top string to bow no more than two inches of string in notes that, eventually, I suppose, just disappeared off the scale into silence, a tremendous climax and a massive artistic success from such adventurous ideas and resources. This was wonderful and put Natalie right back where she belongs in the stratosphere of my affections- that she never left- because she could do the glamorous bit all day long if she wanted and get away with it but she didn't. She was consumed by the music and brought off what I assume to be a fairly challenging piece. Whether I could play the cello quite so well myself is hard to say. I've never tried.

One stop further along the District Line, I moved from Chelsea to Kensington and was able to include Tasmin's recording of the interval talk for Radio 3 on her literary passions which included Hamlet, Hesse and Hilaire Belloc whose surname the presenter (to hilarious effect) did a bit of Spoonerism with which meant a quick re-take of that line. Having nearly got myself lost in returning from the washroom, I might still be there now among the noises of students practicising their tuba scales in various rooms if my sense of direction hadn't miraculously returned. But I can bear witness to the fact that all the gorgeous sounds of concert music are born of some less demure noises made repeatedly and sometimes woefully in private.

We queued to be Prommers for Prom 65, standing with not the best view of the orchestra for the bargain price of five of our British sterling pounds. A bottle of beer costs nearly that much in there and doesn't last anywhere near as long. One doesn't want to moan too much about such a fine thing as the Proms but it has to be said that the price of a refreshing plastic glass of drink in there is outrageous. But at least nobody will be getting drunk on such a tariff.

It really felt like the Proms when it kicked off with Elgar, the Cockaigne Overture which, it turns out, came from the remains of an attempted symphony. You can stand there and think, here I am, listening to Elgar at the Proms. Let the inner cities burn and the hordes loot and pillage if they must but I am an Englishman and I'm here doing this.

Michael Berkeley was the second major living composer I saw on the day when he took a bow at the end of his Organ Concerto. To be as fair as possible to the piece, the trumpets spread up in the galleries were very effective at the beginning and end and the orchestra did some good work but, no, thank you, Michael. I meant it much more while I was applauding John Tav. Not impressed. If we want you back, we'll let you know but don't sit by the phone all day.

Of course, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Why not. In the early parts it seemed to be played in snatches by Marc Andre Hamelin but, there again, maybe that's how it's written. For me, the slower passages brought us the lush Rachmanninov that it would take a very strict disciple of other codes not be enamoured by and the piece improved as it went through its variations. And the highlight of Kodaly's Hary Janos Suite was undoubtedly the cimbalom of Ed Cervenka, reminding me of my much neglected Indian raga CD's of Shivkumar Sharma caressing the strings of his santoor with sticks.

It wasn't a Prom I'd picked for advance booking like the Handel opera or the Gubaidalina but it's a good value ticket for an evening out with a mate of now 40 years standing, and counting, who always provides the kindest and most considerate hospitality on my trips to London which is nothing less than saintly of him when you consider what a rough and ready guest I make. It was a weekend of sustained interest, wonderment and not a moment of doubt that this is how life should be and, just occasionally, is.

Many, many thanks to all those mentioned above for making it so.

View from the Boundary

2011-08-28T16:26:00.006+01:00

A man with one bookmaker's account might be understood to just enjoy a harmless weekend punt. One could probably lend him a fiver with every expectation of getting it back. But how do we regard someone with two accounts. A bit of a liability, perhaps, on his way to the loan shark's tawdry clutches and then the workhouse.

But I have opened a new account with Paddy Power in order to take advantage of their free bet to use that to back up my investment on Hollinghurst for the Booker Prize (4/1) with a similar gratis stab at the Forward Prize, which is one of the more exotic markets that the Irish firm offer prices on.

They have Geoffrey Hill at 13/8 fav with Sean O'Brien at 2/1, David Harsent at 4/1, then Longley 8/1, Burnside 10/1 and Nurske 12/1. This is roughly in line with their respective kudos and reputation, one would guess, but I'm not convinced it takes account of the specific volumes in competition for this year's prize.

While Hill is undoubtedly the doyen of High Church English poetry, and could win the prize on that reputation alone, it's not likely to be his best work but I'm not to know whether it is or not. In betting against favourites, you do so in the hope they are not quite on top form. However, although a long-time admirer of O'Brien and all his work, I do regard Harsent's book as 'better' this year. And this is in the knowledge that O'Brien's form figures in the Forward Prize read 111.

Michael Longley's reputation seems to remain a little way ahead of his achievement for me while the prize going to an outsider would make it just one of those events in which the roulette ball goes into 0 or 00. So, I'm with Harsent on this and can't help but notice that twenty pounds on two 4/1 shots multiplies up to five hundred. A monkey, in fact. The only way I've ever had a monkey before is by saving up for one. Perhaps Hollinghurst and Harsent will deliver me one over the winter.

Faber and Martin Amis would be the only ones who could know why a Selected Larkin (pictured) is required. I can't see the need for it myself but it's due out very shortly.

It will mean me going into a bookshop next month to check on the contents list and skip through Martin's introduction. I don't intend paying to have a copy for myself.

Faber's Selected Poems of Douglas Dunn 1964-1983 ends on page 262 whereas their Collected Larkin edition of 2003 has its last poem on page 198. It has always seemed to me that Larkin did the selecting of his poems before publishing, finishing or even writing them. His Collected Poems are also his Selected Poems. So the interest in Martin Amis's edition is only really in what he leaves out or what he says in his introductory essay. We know he admired the 'instantly unforgettable', 'mnemogenic' nature of Larkin's poems while taking a less sympathetic view of the unambitious, provincial nature of the man himself. We don't really need a new selection to read that point of view again but I will be seeing if I can find a High Street bookshop to sneak a look at whatever else he has found to say.

And, finally, from Robert Robinson's knowing and worldly-wise memoir, Skip all that,

(though Bill Gaskill, who wore an ear-ring and went to parties dressed as Nijinsky, had met Lady Redgrave in the vacation and after she'd said to her butler 'Butler, would you bring Mr. Gaskill a glass of fruit juice,' Bill had asked her if this was the correct way of addressing butlers, and she replied, 'certainly, if their name is Butler'.)

Matthew Hollis - Now All Roads Lead to France

2011-08-27T19:32:00.003+01:00

Matthew Hollis, Now All Roads Lead to France, The Last Years of Edward Thomas (Faber)

Sometimes you don't realize what you were missing until you've got it. Edward Thomas seemed fairly well served by commentaries and memoirs and so I wasn't really aware of the lack of a real biography. Eleanor Farjeon's book that covers the last four years, when looked at again, is really annotated letters from Thomas to her and there wasn't a biography by anybody that wasn't either friend or family.

Although, inevitably, Matthew Hollis's title tells us to expect the story of his last years, Thomas's early life is recounted in sufficient detail to make it a complete story. It is consummately well done, filling in with descriptions of other poets, the political situation that brings about the war and flashbacks to Thomas's family both seamlessly and right on time.

Although not advertised quite so clearly in the poems, Thomas was melancholic even beyond his contemporary in poetry, Hardy, and one of his greatest successors, Larkin. Dark moods and difficult relationships meant he rarely felt fulfilled or happy. His wife, Helen, would appear to have borne much of this in devout and long-suffering fashion. Thomas was by no means at home all the time and was not always an easy companion when he was. And she has first Eleanor Farjeon's and then the considerably more dangerous Edna Clarke Hall's rival charms to apparently contend with.

Thomas was a successful reviewer and a professional prose writer before meeting Robert Frost who was responsible for encouraging him to write poems. Hollis gives us a useful and comprehensive account of the Dymock Poets, the largely Georgian community that Frost was associated with. But the main significance of Thomas and his friendship with Frost was how they were both arriving at an idea of poetry that was between the haughty doctrine of Ezra Pound and the antiquated Georgian insistence on sentiment and traditional forms. It was speech rhythms and 'the sound of sense' that Frost was intent upon using and it was a very similar to what Thomas had been thinking and writing for some time, for example in relation to Robert Burns,

'It is as near to the music as nonsense could be, and yet it is perfect sense'.

Thomas's example, and when he begins to write poems he does so prolifically, has come to influence the next generations more than could have been imagined with Larkin, Andrew Motion and Glyn Maxwell to name only the few at the head of a long list of those openly acknowledging a debt to his understated, plain but lyrical style.

While Rupert Brooke is among the first to enlist for the war and one of the first of the poets to die, others follow but Thomas is uncertain. He is not nationalistic but also appreciates the necessity of defending the countryside he has such an understanding of.

Thomas's experience of the war was very different from that of the other soldier poets. Where Sassoon, Graves and others had rushed to enlist and then recoiled at the horror of their experience of the conflict. Thomas's war seemed to be running in reverse. ..the longer the war went on the more committed he appeared.

Hollis does well in not dwelling at all on the poignancy of Thomas's death, with his doubts about the war in the first place, his apparently lucky run of just missing shells and the end of the war being only so few days away. The books dispels some of the assumptions that might make Thomas such a popular figure. Not completely the saintly nature lover and sensitive soul of the poems and prose books, he was clearly difficult. And neither just someone who turned to poetry a few years before he was killed but a well-connected literary man from Oxford University. His legacy is perhaps now even more important than the poems he wrote but, in navigating a way between Pound and the Georgian anthologies, he remains central to English poetry in the twentieth century with an influence that is not abating yet.

Matthew Hollis has done a wonderful job in providing exactly the book that was required. Immaculately conceived with a well-judged balance of material from friends, family, the literary world and history, it is both sensibly and sympathetically written. The reader is left with nothing more they could have wished for from it.

Proms - Handel, Rinaldo

2011-08-26T01:43:00.005+01:00

Prom 55, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Handel, Rinaldo

Glyndebourne brought their Rinaldo to the Proms and I had made it my nap selection from this year's programme in order to realize a minor ambition of seeing a Handel opera without going bankrupt by seeing it at Covent Garden. While Nigel Kennedy's Bach sounded great and I was also vastly impressed by the Shostakovich Violin Concerto by Lisa Batiashvili broadcast, I still think I was on the winner here. There was, of course, the Tallis Scholars, too, but I'm afraid perfection isn't quite good enough any more.

It wasn't exactly as one might have expected, being billed as 'semi-staged'. It was thoroughly staged, acted and choreographed as well as costumed. The conflict was realized as a school playground bullying issue which, somewhat riskily for the blood pressure of some of the middle-aged and respectable audience, involved some of the naughtiest schoolgirls one's wildest dreams might leave you wondering where that had all come from once you'd woken up and found it hadn't actually happened. Rinaldo was Sonia Prina, looking somewhat like a fourth form Frankie Valli, but this production if not the opera as a whole was one where the main role was not the one named in the title. Brenda Rae was strikingly (in more ways than you'd think) impressive as the dominatrix schoolmistress, Armida. And she was ably supported by the wicked furies. Oh, yes, and there were some blokes dressed as schoolboys as well.

So, it was somewhat more than a literal exposition of this drama of Christians and Saracens and a very playful interpretation visually. Which is not to say that anything was sacrified in the integrity of the music, which would have still sounded as wonderful as ever on the radio except one looked across at Martin Handley in the Radio 3 commentary box and wondered how he was explaining what had just happened on stage to the listeners at home. But still, the best known aria, Almirena's Lascia ch'io pianga, beautifully done by Anett Frisch, had a packed Albert Hall rapt in attentive hush. Normally, that would have been the highlight but Act 2 ended with Brenda Rae prowling first the stage, then a few rows of very nervous audience with her cane clearly bursting with disciplinary needs, before selecting an unwilling Prommer who politely demurred, and then the orchestra while all the time the magnificent director Ottavio Dantone was filling with continuo of a particularly obbligato nature, until it was indicated he should cease. It was magnificent theatre.

How much of this burlesque was originally written in by Handel and his librettist, Giacomo Rossi, for the first performance 300 years ago might be a subject for further academic enquiry but you don't get this much genuinely well-done entertainment in the more popular arts and this would be a tremendous advert for opera if only it could reach those who assume it's just opera, i.e. interminable melodramatic singing.

There were superb scenes of school involving bicycles, satchels and playground football as well as as much good (I mean 'bad', of course) corporal punishment as you could - ahem- shake a stick at.

Dantone's direction was superb. Radio 3's own Chi Chi Nwanoku was on bass, William Towers turned up as a wonderfully coiffeured Magician, Luca Pisaroni was a bad Argante, which was good, but even without the staging, the great visual jokes, the very contemporary theme of blatant pornography and specialist rubberwear, Handel's music is, of course, sublime and sumptuous. It has been said that when sending out speculative messages into space for other life forms to understand who we are on this planet it would be showing off if we sent them recordings of Bach. If we had sent them Handel, they'd be here by now.

Top 6 - David Bowie

2011-08-21T19:47:00.004+01:00

So, David Bowie is thinking of retiring, on his next birthday when he will be 65. How very gentrified.

For me, he could have retired 35 years ago but for our particular generation he was then as important as The Beatles, The Stones or Elvis Presley before him. Much is made of his magpie or chameleon character, perhaps stealing from or adapting to fashion and then somehow making it look like his idea but I can't think of any musician that didn't take what had gone before and do something else with it.

Wild is the Wind is the first name on the team sheet for a Top 6, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbpMpRq6DV4&ob=av2n , sublimely made and passionate from the masterpiece Station to Station album.

Rebel Rebel was a kind of mission statement for all the contrivance of gender confusion.

Heroes, equally impressive and more sinister in the German version, was a colossal classic of uber mensch traum but it might be better if we didn't spread this critic vocabulary on too thickly or someone will think it's serious.

Life on Mars? was a god awful small affair but you don't expect zeitgeist kultur like that to get in the charts anymore ( d'oh, sorry).

Word on a Wing is the next off Station to Station, from which virtually any would do.

And, in the accustomed position of having one selection left but a dozen candidates, even though I thought I saw you in an ice-cream parlour, drinking milk shakes cold and long, I'll take Changes.

Robert Robinson

2011-08-13T11:36:00.004+01:00

Lines in Memory of Robert Robinson

So, Farewell, then, Robert Robinson,
Master of erudition and Call My Bluff.

The next word is PANELGAME.

Frank,

Imagine if you will, you are having dinner in an Arab country.
You need to mop up the last of your first course, which was a spicy soup.
Your host offers you some bread. It won’t be a slice of Mother’s Pride or Hovis,
It will be a homemade Pan-el-Game, pronounced pan-el-garmay.

Patrick

I, I, I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered about those windows sometimes built into the side wall of a pantry. They were used to keep an eye on the vegetable patch from the comfort of indoors to defend against turnip thieves. First introduced in France, they were known as Pane des Legumes, which became anglicized as Panelegume and then Panelgame.

Joanna Lumley.

It’s Panelgame. You bring together some writers of light, humourous entertainments with an actor and celebrity or two and play a parlour game of no particular significance to provide half an hour of television.

Would that it were, my dear, would that it were.

What I did on my holidays

2011-08-11T21:51:00.002+01:00

O, dear me. Is it August already and the internet's audience figures are dipping because some of my readers think I've gone missing. Well, I'm sorry but a rest is as good as a change, as nobody ever said.
Just imagine if ITV1 didn't broadcast for a week and a half. Wouldn't that be awful.
But, like any jobbing columnist, I can attempt to dress up sundry items from my little life to pass off as entertainment. It is only a crying shame that I'm not Giles Coren or his sister or Robert Crampton and receive five figure amounts into my bank account for such lazy jottings-down.
I've been on my holidays, you see. Not the sort of holiday that my nephew, Chris, is on, who is just about to arrive in Mongolia having driven there in a tiny motor car through places like Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and, perhaps most dangerously, England.
http://www.thewongwayround.co.uk/
With all fingers and toes crossed, it is starting to look as if they might make it but we don't count chickens here. But best of luck to the intrepidness of their adventure. I've been pick-pocketed in Prague and Budapest and then sort of lost the will for such wild exploration but I hope they are finding that lots of different sorts of foreigners can be really nice to you.
My spirit of going into the unknown is tested when I begin to worry about having my ticket checked on the train from Bath to Swindon if the connection from Portsmouth has been late and put me on a later train than my ticket explicitly stipulates. This is nerve-end stuff as I have no idea what I'd do if I was thrown off at Chippenham.
But once I've arrived, I can relax a little bit. Not being at work for a week is an amazing elixir of freedom and laxity but I can't explain why because any word here about the way my office is run might end in unspeakable investigations although one can take some meagre comfort in the fact that Stalin didn't die in vain.
As well as blessing various relations with my presence, I saw some of the most minor tourist attractions in the area on a couple of nice, gentle walks, like Faringdon Folly and Cirencester Amphitheatre.
I had in mind a couple of titles from my father's bookshelves that I might read, including a tribute to Stan Barstow in a look at A Kind of Loving but I settled on Stanley Middleton's early novel, Harris's Requiem, which, being from 1960, was somewhat more pointed and less genteel than his later books and it did prove most diverting.
The usual and expected controversies over the rules of Scrabble were encountered in both Fairford and Swindon, which is strange when one reflects that the rules are quite clear for everyone to read and understand. But having come from behind and nicked the result off my dad with JEERINGLY in Fairford, I did an exhibition round against my very sporting and kindly sister in Swindon last night, beginning with FAINTLY and, 84-0 up after one play then put in a personal best of 449. She said she thought I'd come home and put something about that on my website. I said I didn't think I would.
And, also, well played to those players of Rummikub who did well at that.

The full programme for the Cheltenham Literature Festival was published this week. I hope I'm not forcing myself on my family more often than they would like but I can't help but think that I really ought to be there for this, http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/find-events/literature/l305-david-harsent-sean-obrien-paul-muldoon and so I'll try to be.
David Harsent has come from a dark horse position to strong favourite to lift this website's award for best poetry collection of 2011; Muldoon, amongst many other glories attached to his name, was best poem according to me last year, and O'Brien is so habitually listed on every prize list that I'm thinking I'll have to leave him off one of mine this year. But Cheltenham is so lovely, I can hardly bear not to go and see such a dream line-up of clever, smartarse, curmudgeonly, middle-aged talent. They are everything I ever wanted to be. And I haven't come this far to give up now.

Poetry Workshop Radio 4

2011-07-31T19:58:00.003+01:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012wcln#synopsis

It might not hit the headlines with the same lurid intensity as some of the more graphic and gratuitous horror films have done in the past but Radio 4's new series, which seems to be occasional, and hidden away in the quiet 4.30 Sunday afternoon slot, Poetry Workshop, promises to provide shudders and shivers as harrowing as any of the more mainstream chillers.
Ruth Padel goes to a local poetry workshop and takes part in their discussion of each other's poems. It is one of the cruellest and most difficult things anyone can be put through. Not only for the poet, most of who think that their work is worthy of such scrutiny, but also for the other poets whose turn it isn't, who have to find kind words to say about the poem in question before guardedly and as politely as possible suggesting a minor improvement that might be made in order to transform the lines into a classic.
Cringe by cringe one listens to the poet adopt one of the default poetry reading settings- e.g. soft and caressing, carefully enunciated, deeply in thrall, etc.- and deliver lines they wouldn't dare use with friends and family but seem to think fellow poets will be impressed by. They have worked hard and they do think this is what poetry should be like and so you can hardly blame them but then the precious devices have to be picked over and considered until everyone's been done and they all go home with the happy glow of having been fulfilled.
It really can be quite horrific and for my part I'd rather my poems remained utterly without merit rather than be bandaged and re-made by others into something they thought they liked a bit better. If I like my own poem that is all I need. If anybody else likes it, that's fine but it can't make me feel any better if I don't.
In this first programme, Ruth went to Exeter. I've heard worse poems than all of them but none of them did much for me. It was mostly the usual agony of the process that distracted from any enjoyment. Until the last poem by Rachel McCarthy which sounded promising so I looked her up afterwards. She's only got her own Wikipedia entry, books published and an Arts show on the radio. It's not surprising she came across quite well. Her poem was a different class.
The programme has a gory allure and a grim fascination. It might even have the same effect as a horror film in making it impossible to sleep afterwards. One keeps thinking you heard someone say, 'I really liked the metaphor about the sycamore tree.' There's going to be another one in October. I hope I don't miss it.

Danny Baker Desert Island Discs

2011-07-31T12:05:00.000+01:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012wcl4

Worth a look.

Forget What Read

2011-07-31T11:17:00.002+01:00

Having noted a few weeks ago that I'd hardly read any books, I now realize that I can remember hardly any of those that I have read. Remind me, what happens at the end of Atonement; what are the names of the characters in Birdsong; what was the difference between A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle? But, most of all, remind me never to do Contemporary Fiction as a specialist subject on Mastermind.

I do remember quite well some of the books we read at school and wrote essays about and I do retain a general impression of what books were about and what certain writers are like. I can do you an impromptu lecture on The Woodlanders whenever you're ready and I'll outline some main points about Patrick Hamilton if required. But reading Revolutionary Road again after only a few years, it came almost as fresh off the page as when I'd first read it.

I'm always impressed by academics who seem to be able to talk about, and certainly know about, almost any writer you care to mention. Perhaps there's a special trick to that. But it's a minefield getting engaged in any discussion with them because it's only a matter of time before they take you off piste and I'm floundering like a complete illiterate.

There's nothing to be done about this, of course. It's not as if I actually need to remember any of this and nowadays I'll abandon a book at an early stage if I'm not enjoying it. It's for enjoyment, not self improvement, that I read books. Amateur in the real sense of 'for the love of it', not professional. It really doesn't matter but it does come as a bit of a scare when one wants to talk about a book you know you've read and you try to find it in your memory and there's nothing there. This Side of Paradise? Sure, let me see, now. No, I'm sorry, I can remember almost nothing about it.

There is a big advantage to this, which is I have quite a large collection of books that I can return to at any time and they'll be as good as new. That might come in useful, and occasionally has, when one knows there must be thousands of titles one ought to read but one simply doesn't know which of them to try.

Opera in the Park

2011-07-30T22:01:00.005+01:00

Opera in the Park, Victoria Park, Portsmouth, 30 July

When, next winter, the burghers of Portsmouth are complaining that the council haven't cleared their icy pavements for three weeks they will have to bear in mind that popular classics were provided for free in the park on a summer evening and that money can only be spent once.

Opera Interludes are available for corporate events to add a bit of class to companies who either see themselves as 'top end' or want others to think so. It would be uncharitable to point out that these singers are appearing in the park in Portsmouth at the height of the season and not in Covent Garden because they are making an honest bob and dishing out the Verdi and Bizet with some gusto, which is sometimes necessary when the train line runs right behind the stage and the Guild Hall bells chime the hour midway through an aria. I didn't think the train went past until Act 2 of La Traviata. A properly sumptuous One Fine Day benefits from the whole orchestral setting rather than piano accompaniment and the delicate textures of Voi Che Sapete are lost in this simplified, common denominator setting of picnics and bring-your-own cheap booze. But let's not be churlish and miss the point with snooty remarks when it was all put on for free and offered great tunes to the masses, just like ought to happen more often in any utopian civilisation. Baritone David Stephenson took the highest honours with the necessary power to impose himself on the situation, John Pierce did us a worthy Nessun Dorma and a particularly good Largo al Factotum by David had him in among the audience before timing his arrival back on stage to answer a call on his mobile phone with, 'Figaro...Figaro, Figaro, Figaro'. Well done.

Naomi Harvey and Charlotte Stephenson did such things as the Flower Duet before leading a miniature Last Night of the Proms with Rule Britannia, Jerusalem and Land of Hope and Glory. I realize that Jerusalem is probably the only one of these that one should join in with but by now I think the others must just be ironic while still providing a damned good opportunity to sing.

I was in two minds whether to go but it was a pleasant evening and with the favourites having won the two big races at Goodwood for me, thought I'd better make a day of it. Then I come home to find that two more winners at Lingfield had given me four out of five on the day and doubled my earnings so I could, if necessary, tolerate another day like today.

Top 6 - Easy Listening

2011-07-28T21:30:00.004+01:00

Don‘t be concerned, it will not harm you.

Val Doonican, Elusive Butterfly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FF0m-580B4

Max Bygraves, Fings Aint Wot They Used To Be, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg-Ycc-yKqY

Rolf Harris, The Court of King Caractacus, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3s0joFeajk

John Coltrane, Blue Train, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1GrP6thz-k
Just my sense of humour, 10 minutes of your life there is no need to waste.

The New Seekers, You Won’t Find Another Fool like Me, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lnO-517rEU

Darts, It’s Raining, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NhoXPT5tXY
Still perfect after all those years.

Last Draft

2011-07-28T16:31:00.002+01:00

From the age of 50 onwards, as if following in the spirit of Larkin's The View, Green's poetry became increasingly morose and, although he kept on trying, it received even less critical acclaim than it had before.

-these lines taken from a future academic who resorted to me as his subject because all other poetry had been discussed to a standstill.

Last Draft

It’s no use. The past is now a spendthrift
friend, islands in a grey lagoon bereft
of such tricks as sorcery or witchcraft
or alchemy. It had promised a gift
of remembrance that, it said, you could lift
anything from, like that starburst festschrift
one very nearly wrote or Vermeer’s Delft
pictured after soft rain. But it was theft.

It never explained exactly how swift
it would be in making its move to shift
its ground and leave one derelict, adrift
upon a future that you were too daft
to see would leave you on a homespun raft
counting your good luck and whatever’s left.

Amy

2011-07-25T19:27:00.003+01:00

I'm really sorry. I wasn't a fan. It wasn't my fault, I just didn't know enough about her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfC6CCtZjxk&feature=related

Never mind the celebrity tributes. This is a fine thing.

Banana Yoshimoto - The Lake

2011-07-25T17:33:00.003+01:00

Banana Yoshimoto, The Lake (Melville House)

A long time ago now, one of the Sunday papers published a supplement on 'cult fiction' with pieces on all kinds of books that they thought fitted that epithet. Against each book were symbols representing Horror, Sex, Drugs, etc. to signify which of those categories it belonged to. Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen was one of the few, perhaps the only one, to be awarded all six, I think it was, of these badges and so, inevitably, I thought I'd better read it. It was a nice book, strangely comforting and discomfiting in a dreamy world of ordinary unworldliness. I followed it up with the short story volume, Lizard, which remained a favourite and since then I've kept up with Banana as best I can although it has to be noted that this new translation into English was first published in Japanese in 2005.

After a while I came to wonder if the characters, often traumatized or locked into themselves, who find some transcendently close relationship with another lost soul, weren't becoming a little bit formulaic and when I found myself sitting next to a specialist in Japanese literature at dinner in Oxford, I asked if Banana Yoshimoto was taken seriously as literature or was really 'chick-lit'. I got no straight answer until the lady turned round to find me talking about the football results with the person sitting on my other side.

'Ah. One minute you want to know if she is chick lit and now you're talking about football.' So I'm afraid I still don't know.

This new book breaks precious little new ground. Chihiro's mother has died and she is haunted by her memory. She lives opposite the quiet reclusive Nakajima, but their relationship develops from a growing correspondance in their nearby but solitary lives. Chihiro is an artist, working on a mural. Nakajima has a deep attraction for her although neither of them are eager to repeat their first sexual enconter together.

Nakajima's trauma turns out to be due to an episode in his life when he was kidnapped and brainwashed by a cult. In the meantime, their relationship is on some special, zen-like level that we are led to understand is beyond anything that most people have ever felt.

I felt as though we had been walking like this forever. at the edge of this lake. Through scenery so gorgeous it seemed like another world. 'I'm sure I'll walk like this with lots of other people', I thought, but I'll probably never feel like this again.

There are many, many such magical passages in this short novel, as there are in all of her other books. They are contrasted with the terrible darkness that such love provides salvation from. Although apparently beautifully and simply expressed, there is no telling in translation how this reads in Japanese. Very attractively, one must assume. But there does seem an ongoing solipsism in this theme when one feels some identification with it and recognition of it and then reflect that the specialness of Banana's characters' feelings takes no account that we might all have felt it, too, and they might not be as special as they think they are so perhaps they are less illuminated and touched by a special grace but somewhat vain.

The Lake is no more or less than Banana's previous efforts, all of which outline this dualism of agony and ecstasy, a gentle and optimistic feelgood motif of young devotion and deep humanity.

It is a few years since I read my last Banana book. In the meantime I might have grown out of their mystical psychology and lifestyle statements.

I met Banana one last time, by the lake. I could see that she was as beautiful and perhaps still as special as when we had first met many years before. I knew that she would love others and others would love her just as I had but as I watched her disappearing into times of my life that had now passed, I could only think that the good times that we had were over and I already loved others more than I now loved her.

Hollinghurst - The Stranger's Child

2011-07-18T20:38:00.003+01:00

Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child (Picador)

It is 1913, and handsome, effete young men are spending an endless English summer in the gardens of nice houses writing poetry, much of it to each other.

Stop me if you've heard it all before.

The idyll is brought to a shocking and abrupt halt by the war that didn't actually end all wars and many of these poets, athletes and charmers who were the cream of their generation are killed. Alan Hollinghurst's novel centres on Cecil Valance, not quite a first division war poet but one whose poem, Two Acres, becomes an anthology piece. And then the poem and the reputation of the poet are traced through the rest of the twentieth century.

By the end, Paul Bryant, has added a few more titles of controversial literary biography to the life of Valance that he began his career with.

In five chronological sections, the book threads together a number of themes which might be the nostalgia for the lost pre-war England, a history of homosexuality developing from furtive opportunism to civil ceremonies, a satire or examination of the curious shark tank of the literary biography industry and all along it is a beautifully observed comedy of manners, as when Paul is reviewing books for the TLS and searching through newly-arrived titles for potentially 'gay' material,

Paul saw a promising mauve cover deep down, gay books keeping generally to that end of the spectrum, but when he dug it out it was a survey of historic thimbles, which wasn't quite gay enough.

Hollinghurst's writing is as ever disciplined and understated but flawless and such prose is almost worth reading for its own sake. It might seem at first to be missing a climax, a big revelation, but, if anything, the big bang is near the start and the rest of the book is its echo. As such, making any interpretation of the title, one only ties up a phrase in the Valance poem with a much later detail that Bryant's father was 'unknown'. But, with Hollinghurst's method being both comic and at times satirical, one wonders if there are any characters one likes here, and then in any of his previous books either. Although his understanding of them is deep, his characters can be shallow as in self-regarding, hedonistic or envious.

It's 'cool' in the detached, studied sense of the word, a masterpiece at what it does but pitched one or two notches below the drama of The Line of Beauty or our expectations of any book or adaptation these days. It doesn't work against it for me but an occasion such as the 'new Hollinghurst' needs to be appreciated as a masterclass of prose style, a slow burn and perhaps even something anachronistic to many people by now. I didn't think the Booker Prize committee would need to meet when this book is up for consideration but perhaps now they had better just drop into the same pub to make sure and give it the nod. There is unlikely to be a better written book or a better conceived one but they might just want to make sure it wasn't just that bit too self-conscious and discreet.

Ian Pindar - Emporium

2011-07-15T20:26:00.005+01:00

Ian Pindar, Emporium ( Carcanet)

Well, no, not really. My usually trustworthy eye for a good new poetry book might have left me down for once. It’s hardly for me to say that any book written at this level of erudition isn’t any good but I will have to accept that I wasn’t a part of its target audience even though I thought Ian’s prize-winning poem last year and his exemplary short biography of Joyce both suggested that his debut in ‘full-length’ poetry would be something I ought be buying.
I’m not ashamed to say if and when something is beyond me but if it seems to be orbiting beyond one’s remit, one shouldn’t be able to get the feeling that there are bits of it one simply doesn’t like and I’m afraid here I get a sense that when it isn’t trying too hard, then it is simply not my sort of thing. I hope it wins every prize that it qualifies for but unless I suddenly see the point, it isn’t going to make my shortlist.
There is one poem that demands attention- Chain Letter, a wonderful 'tour de force' that seems to take us through English language poetry from Langland to very recently (and thanks to the notes for showing some of us who didn’t know all the lines) in a wonderful, let’s say- for the sake of it- phantasmagoria of purloined fragments. Heaven only knows how well-read and clever you have to be to do that. It is a sensational thing but, somehow, disappointingly brilliant.
Disappointing when you have only just read The King’s Evil, an apparently not-ironic anti-Royalist poem that doesn’t seem to have realized that the monarchy might reign but doesn’t rule, that might appear to think that Prince Andrew is in charge and also seems to want to celebrate the democracy that in recent decades has given us Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the Coalition government successively shoring up the rich against the threat of the ever poor and taking us to war on behalf of another big fat country. Well, if that’s what Thomas Paine meant, it’s a shame he’s not here to defend himself. This poem can’t be as stupid as it seems to me because Ian Pindar is clearly several times cleverer and better read than me and so it must just be me missing the point - that has happened before- but I’m not sure I’d have written anything quite as gauche in the fourth form never mind 35 years later. I’m not particularly royalist but a better argument than this needs to be made if I’m going to be swayed from some admiration for the Queen and, say, Pippa Middleton. A colleague of mine went to a recent garden party at Buckingham Palace and met the Queen. My colleague is wheelchair-bound. When she met the Queen, and you always want to know what she said, Her Majesty said ‘I bet you can go quite fast in that.’ Brilliant.
We are told we have democracy already but unfortunately it’s run by gangsters, like the world always has been. What our country has that others seem to covet is a bit of class. I’m not saying we have. We invented Wayne Rooney and Jeremy Clarkson. All I’m saying is ‘be careful what you wish for’.
Armageddon is a nicely disturbed poem. Mrs Beltinska in the Bath is the prize winner I liked a lot. Birds, on a theme of totalitarianism, is a well-done piece. I could almost have liked this book as much as I thought was going to. Ian Pindar is beyond doubt a writer of immense talent and reading but I’m not going to say ‘depth’ because I suspect the politics and modernism on show here might be a bit shallow.
I could have spent seven quid on Amazon on something I liked better but it’s too late now.

From 'We cannot choose'

2011-07-10T11:12:00.003+01:00

This came to light this week. Almost certainly my first poetry apperance in print, in The Richian, school magazine, of 1975, so I was 15.

Obviously from a longer work, and quite possibly a 'sequence' ( ! ). It is to be hoped that I made some progress in the following 36 years.

John the Baptist

2011-07-07T19:26:00.002+01:00

Okay, then, hands up everyone who wants to see a new poem.

Well, hard luck, you're getting one anyway.

John the Baptist

Now I can see I never stood a chance.
From the moment I looked into his eyes
and they carried me like an avalanche,
I knew that it was him I’d idolize.
The water that I drenched him in ran off
him clear; he was already free of sin.
I saw that I could never do enough.
He would not follow me, I’d follow him.

My audience dispersed once they had heard
his charismatic speech; legerdemain
miracles that stilled their base discontent,
the frugal wonder in his every word.
And I do anything for him I can.
It is his word, not mine, I represent.

Signed Poetry Books - Martin Mooney

2011-07-05T12:25:00.006+01:00

It was long overdue that the Signed Poetry Books collection welcomed new arrivals and so I was keen to make sure I got Martin Mooney at the Oxfam Bookshop in Marylebone last night. With apologies to his friend, Heather, I managed to end up with her pen, too.

It was a great evening with a varied international cast of poets genially introduced by Todd Swift but I'm going to give myself a day off and not actually review it here. Even I tire of contriving those considered sentences of judgement and evaluation sometimes. Instead, to preserve the occasion, here's the man himself caught in full flight.

Signed Poetry Books - Michael Symmons Roberts

2011-07-05T12:20:00.006+01:00

A bonus for the signed poetry books collection was finding that the Oxfam Shop had a copy of Michael Symmons Roberts' latest book on its shelves and the poet only a few yards away to append his signature.

Today at Arundel

2011-07-01T20:28:00.010+01:00

There were some old cricketers among the spectators at Arundel today.

In their interval exhibition they rolled back the years and showed that if you ever had it, you never completely lose it.

New Poems

2011-06-28T18:12:00.003+01:00

Just in case any returning readers keep coming back here in the hope of seeing new poems, I do apologize that there hasn't been anything but the most disrespectful doggerel here since March.
I never did count on any more than an average of four finished and satisfactory poems a year but when the Music tab is now top of the index here, it does draw attention to the fact that the website is shifting its focus.
But please be reassured that poems are still being struggled with and occasionally finished to some sort of satisfaction. I can't say whether my lack of excitement about them is because I've grown beyond that thrill or, more likely, if they are simply no more than workmanlike. I think, as in sport, there's not much point in taking part unless one is trying one's best and the hard work put into a poem is, as in Oscar's dictum, much more important than the idea that stimulated it.
I'm keeping a few things back as completely unpublished, not even here, just in case of emergency. You never know when you might need one. But there are titles like Passacaglia, Last Draft and John the Baptist to come in due course. In fact, there are nearly enough poems to go to the printer's with to make a new booklet but we won't be doing that for some time yet because there's a feeling it would have some perfectly able squad players in the team but not necessarily any big enough stars.
There is enough poetry being written without me adding to the kerfuffle. I did make sure I put enough postage on a submission to South magazine this time so we will see what they make of them. But whereas I once strolled into that as if I could have owned the place, you just can't tell. Their moveable feast of editors, when given the chance, declined to publish The Cathedrals of Liverpool before it became a prize-winning masterpiece elsewhere.
But increasingly, poetry is more enjoyable as a spectator sport than one to play oneself so I'll be off to see Martin Mooney in London next week.
And, to lift the details from Eyewear, http://toddswift.blogspot.com/

July 4 - Six Poets for Oxfam

Oxfam Books and Music Shop
91 Marylebone High Street, London W1
near Baker Street tube.
7-10 pm

Naomi Foyle - Naomi Foyle’s first collection, The Night Pavilion, was an Autumn 2008 Poetry Book Society Recommendation;
Martin Mooney – Northern Irish poet, latest collection The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (June 2011 by Lagan Press);
Claire Potter – Australian poet, debut collection Swallow from Five Islands Press;
Agnieszka Studzinska – debut collection Snow Calling from Salt;
Michael Symmons Roberts – Whitebread Prize-winning Cape poet;
Brian Turner – American war-poet, author of the famous poem “The Hurt Locker”;

Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

2011-06-27T19:51:00.003+01:00

Graham Swift, Wish You Were Here (Picador)

Graham Swift's Wish You Were Here relates the circumstances of the repatriation of a soldeir's body from Iraq. In Last Orders, a group of friends take the ashes of their mate to Margate; in Waterland, a body is found on the fens and there's a suicide, too.

There's a recurring theme among these, which is augmented in the latest book with the shooting of the family pet dog, Luke, when he was terminally ill and the slaughter of cattle in the B.S.E. epidemic.

And yet, with the soldier, Tom, being Jack's brother, 8 years younger and not seen for 13 years, not contacted for 12; the dysfunctional relationship they had with their moody father and Jack's wife, Ellie, not feeling that she is a part of the occasion of the return of the brother, it is the distance between people in these family and ceremonial situations that is really Swift's theme.

Jack's awkwardness as part of the proceedings constitutes a significant part of this separation from shared emotion as when he wrote a childhood postcard to Ellie saying, 'wish you were here', which he meant sincerely not realizing it was the standard cliche to write.

With Ellie at home on their Isle of Wight caravan park, Jack is aware of the distance between them,

It seemed to him that there was now a difference, a gap, between Ellie and him as plain as that strip of choppy sea he's crossed this morning.

He had felt as if his passport, carried for identification for the Army, might be required as he landed at Portsmouth from the island, which has become a home he is attached to just as much as the Devon farm that his family had owned for generations before.

As the journey to meet the body is mixed with flashbacks that build up this past life, we are asked to add to the catalogue of tragic deaths the suicide of his father by his own shotgun on the farm. As a portrait of the 'condition of England', even one as pessimistic and disenchanted as I began to wonder if this wasn't laying it on too heavily.

Rural economic decline, cattle disease and family dysfunction combine to sweep away characters with undue haste. Swift is a marvellous writer of a sentence, a great psychologist and describes his cast with great art but, please, as the motifs and symbols pile up in the text, so do the bodies just as rapidly in the plot.

The ghost of Tom haunts Jack in the second half of the book as it picks up in tempo and tilts towards madness and an ending you think surely isn't going to do what you think it's going to do and, then, well, I can hardly spoil it for you here.