Pauline Hawkesworth

Pauline Hawkesworth, Bracken Women in Lime Trees (Indigo Dreams Press)

The best-selling poet in Portsmouth this week was Pauline Hawkesworth. People are unusually willing to part with £7.50 for a poetry book if given the right sort of opportunity and a launch event at St. Francis Church was the ideal way of outselling all other poets, none of whom would have had enough books on shelves in bookshops to compete.
Pauline read from the book at either end of an hour which included readings by Maggie Sawkins, Denise Bennett, Brian Wells, Mick Perryment and a varied and entertaining support cast from Portsmouth Poetry Society. The performers and the impressive size of the audience showed the Portsmouth Poetry Scene to be in a fine and healthy condition.
The moon and stars recur in the poems in Pauline’s book, sometimes in relation to domestic situations. There is something mystical not far below the surface of everyday experiences but it is not defined here and the poems are too well-grounded and practical for Pauline to be described as a ‘mystic’ or dubious ‘dream-weaver’. The poems are perhaps ‘in search of mysticism’ and use a language that is not over-written but accurately descriptive and at times captivating without being showy.
Thus dogs are as likely to be constellations as pets, if not both. There is an instinctive relationship between our worldly presence and wider, universal references, and quite arrestingly, in midwinter, we are shown
the earth finger-tipping
along the edge of her realm.

Sedna, the newly discovered minor planet beyond Pluto, is

small, a wren
caught on camera
in the oceans of space.

And, after images of space, it is oceans that come most readily to mind in these poems,
If he inspects her heart,
he will see an ocean moving

or,
the sea’s rim turning into gigantic hands.

The descriptive power of Pauline’s language and her perceptions are the most memorable features of the collection although perhaps the best poem for me is When She Left the Room, which reveals a dark underside to an apparently happy relationship.
The poem provides something unexpected and almost sinister.
We are often told that poetry should do the unexpected but if it did so all the time, the unexpected would soon become expected and so it can’t really win. Experimentation and daring innovation can be of great interest but doing the simple things well is never going to go out of fashion. But one word in this book took me more by surprise and provided more to think about than all the rest when in Venus in the Night Sky, the universe is described as ‘crowded’.
Of course, we know that the universe is unimaginably empty. So perhaps it is simply that on a starry night it looks densely packed. But in the context of this book, full of domestic comforts, a few terrors and the broad sweep of evocative imagery, an enquiry into the possibility of mysticism, the universe might be crowded with things that aren’t really there.

Pop Music - All-Time Top 100

Pop music is pretty much all over for me, as far as I can tell. It ended on an all-time high with The Magnetic Fields concert in the Cadogan Hall last summer. It's unlikely I'm going to rush out to buy any more albums and it is three years now since I went to see The Feeling in Southsea and was the second oldest person there.

So, for perhaps the last time, I've compiled my Top 100. It isn't a lifetime retrospective, it is how it looks at the end of 40 years of being a pop-picker, on and off.

It's a hopeless project, making such a list. Once you get beyond the top 10 or 20, it becomes a bit arbitrary and the list would be different every time one did it. But having fiddled about with this list so far, it will do as it is- a playlist of classics and slightly lesser-known favourites. Artists like Public Image Limited, Chic, Led Zeppelin and Otis Redding will be thought unlucky not to get in and there is absolutely no way of explaining how one record makes it into the top 40 while another is down in the 90's. It has to be said that Gregory Isaacs is under-represented because his best records are numerous and consistently great and, like Motown and The Magnetic Fields, he could provide a Top 30 all of his own but he doesn't have stand-out tracks and that made it hard to get high individual places. He would be in the top three singers and songwriters and top 6 artists, though.

Stephin Merritt's transcendental little masterpiece as number one was a way of opting out of a choice between the next three in the list, who were the obvious candidates for the ultimate accolade. I've almost certainly forgotten something crucial and there might be songs I haven't heard that should be in but this is the best I could do...

1. One April Day Stephin Merritt
2. Walk Away Renee The Four Tops
3. The Tracks of My Tears Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
4. Papa Was a Rodeo The Magnetic Fields
5. I Don’t Really Love You Anymore The Magnetic Fields
6. I Want You Back The Jackson Five
7. One Woman Al Green
8. Sunday Morning The Velvet Underground
9. This Old Heart of Mine The Isley Brothers
10. Get It On T. Rex
11. The Book of Love The Magnetic Fields
12. Dancing at Whitsun Tim Hart
13. I’m Still Waiting Diana Ross
14. Just My Imagination The Temptations
15. Bird Girl Antony & the Johnsons
16. God Only Knows The Beach Boys
17. All My Little Words The Magnetic Fields
18. Beast of Burden The Rolling Stones
19. I’m Still Waiting Bob Marley & the Wailers
20. She Elvis Costello
21. If I Was Your Girlfriend Prince
22. All the Umbrellas in London The Magnetic Fields
23. Massachuchetts The Bee Gees
24. Stop! in the Name of Love Diana Ross & the Supremes
25. Hot Love T. Rex
26. I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself Dusty Springfield
27. I’d Rather Go Blind Chicken Shack
28. A Chicken with His Head Cut Off The Magnetic Fields
29. The Carnival is Over The Seekers
30. Green Grow the Rushes R.E.M.
31. I Didn’t Know Al Green
32. How Can You Mend a Broken Heart Al Green
33. I Will Billy Fury
34. I’ll Never Find Another You The Seekers
35. Leaving New York R.E.M.
36. Rebel Rebel David Bowie
37. Tired of Being Alone Al Green
38. O, Babe What Would You Say Hurricane Smith
39. Come See About Me Diana Ross & the Supremes
40. Hush Darling Gregory Isaacs
41. Lady Eleanor Lindisfarne
42. Si Tu Dois Partir Fairport Convention
43. Let Off Sup’m Gregory Isaacs & Dennis Brown
44. It Will Never Be Over for Me Timi Yuro
45. Maggie May Rod Stewart
46. So. Central Rain R.E.M
47. This Woman’s Work Maxwell
48. I see you, You see me The Magic Numbers
49. Jeepster T. Rex
50. Just Like Honey Jesus & Mary Chain
51. You Got Me Jaibi
52. Refugees The Tears
53. Can’t Stand Me Now The Libertines
54. Metal Guru T. Rex
55. I’ll Be Your Mirror The Velvet Underground
56. Don’t Talk to Him Cliff Richard
57. Here, There and Everywhere The Beatles
58. I’m a Believer The Monkees
59. If I Don’t Have You Gregory Isaacs
60. The Changing of the Guard Bob Dylan
61. The Girl All the Bad Guys Want Bowling for Soup
62. Hey Ya Outkast
63. Girl The Beatles
64. Trash Suede
65. The Only One Roy Orbison
66. All the Young Dudes Mott the Hoople
67. Like Sister and Brother The Drifters
68. Drive-in Saturday David Bowie
69. I Can’t Make it Alone Dusty Springfield
70. Puff the Magic Dragon Gregory Isaacs
71. Wordy Rappinghood Tom Tom Club
72. Apollo 13 The Tears
73. Oliver’s Army Elvis Costello
74. 911 Wyclef Jean feat. Mary J. Blige
75. Do You Wanna Dance The Mamas & the Papas
76. Time for Heroes The Libertines
77. I Looked All Over Town The Magnetic Fields
78. A Case of You Joni Mitchell
79. Wild is the Wind David Bowie
80. White Man (in Hammersmith Palais) The Clash
81. Taste of Cindy The Jesus & Mary Chain
82. Baby I Love You The Ramones
83. My Friend the Sun Family
84. Carrickfergus Bryan Ferry
85. Sexuality Billy Bragg
86. Goodtime Girl Stone the Crows
87. What Becomes of the Brokenhearted Jimmy Ruffin
88. Push Matchbox 20
89. You Look So Fine Garbage
90. Jesus to a Child George Michael
91. Life on Mars? David Bowie
92. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow Carole King
93. Rave On Steeleye Span
94. Tumbling Dice The Rolling Stones
95. That’s How Heartaches are Made Baby Washington
96. Smooth Santana feat. Rob Thomas
97. Randy Scouse Git The Monkees
98. Losing My Religion R.E.M.
99. Mr. & Mrs. Untrue Candi Staton
100. The Great Beyond R.E.M.

Rare Masterpiece Found in Southsea Bookshop

I happened to be walking through Southsea today and went into a couple of secondhand bookshops.

In the second one, the Poetry and Literature was in a room at the back and all the usual dried up and hopeless copies of Shakespeare and Chaucer were there, mixed in with a few rarer names that were perhaps briefly fashionable. But once a book gets into a room like that, it is unlikely to ever get read again.
There were a number of pamphlets and booklets and I picked up one with a black cover that actually turned out to be by me. It was one of the first 'bad' batch of my booklet Re-reading Derrida on a Train (2000), with the badly photocopied pages. It didn't have a price on it but since it's out of print and I've only got one or two copies myself, it could actually be worth nearly a pound.
So, I walked home wondering who passed that swiftly on to the bookshop after I'd given it to them or if it was a review copy I'd sent out. There were probably no more than 30 or 40 copies printed but precious few were actually sold for money. But obviously not every copy was retained lovingly and referred to on a daily basis. As well as the title poem, it included such poems as The Skylight Blind, Kiss and Anaximander and Phil Simmons in PQR wrote at the time that I had 'a facility for spreading long, discursive sentences over short, well-constructed lines that might be descibed as Larkinesque' (thanks, mate).
There's a real bargain waiting to be discovered in Albert Road. Get there before someone else buys it.

Maggi Hambling - George always

Reviewing an exhibition with only the catalogue isn't very satisfactory so perhaps this is really a book review. Although I do have an eye witness report from a visit to Liverpool which said this 'was not a patch on what we saw' at the Waves and Waterfalls exhibition in Piccadilly last year- to be fair, we did have the advantage of Maggi there that day as well as generous flowings of free champagne.

Whereas the waves and waterfalls were predominantly monochrome, these paintings of George Melly, Maggi's recently deceased close friend, are lurid and garish in their colour. Only in some of the more high-spirited laughter paintings has Maggi used quite such flamoyant colour before. And if at first it seemed a bit overstated and de trop one is soon thinking that understatement was never George Melly's way, and it isn't Maggi Hambling's either.

The paintings, as so often, are most memorable for the flourish and the relish of Hambling's art. She has painted her parents and her lover-muse, Henrietta Moraes from death and increasingly the borderline between life and death is blurred. The dead continue to live as presences in Maggi's memory and in the paintings while death is present in life, too.

The oil paintings here show Melly and the ghost of Melly in a series of lively poses- singing, dancing, drinking and smoking while the ink drawings are quieter studies of a crumpled figure reading, sleeping and also fishing. Melly's stomach is a recurring feature in many of the paintings, which used to arrive at the front door 'several minutes before the rest of him'. A waterfall triptych adds some of George's colour to the black and white waterfalls that were the highlight of last year's show; George inspects heaven is a regal composition of dark reds; George's ghost dancing, Last drink before Heaven, encountering a leaping fish and surrealist lecture all inevitably take the surrealism a bit further.

The problem with an appreciation of Hambling's work from a small book like this is that even the details don't compensate for the lack of an opportunity to get up close to the intensity of brushwork, the complex combinations of colours that form at a distance into the overall effect. Maggi Hambling's world ranges from the serious forces of nature to the huge laughter of vaudeville and camp and these paintings are from the robustly jovial part of her work. It is only in the drawings, in which Hambling's imagination is given a rest and her eye is concentrated on the life, that Melly becomes a vulnerable, frail figure, struggling to read.

It is to be hoped that increasing coverage of Maggi in the newspapers, whether over the controversial scallop shell on Aldeburgh seashore, over smoking and political correctness, or these paintings, isn't going to become a breakthrough from the art world into the category of general purpose personality and 'national treasure'. It would be best if she were allowed to continue her full-time commitment to her art which, even in these jocular paintings, is a serious business.

Shakespeare Lookalikes

There is a satisfying regularity to the news stories concerning new 'discoveries' about Shakespeare. Whether the issue is the authorship, his birthday or what he looked like, the Shakespeare industry is a dab hand at keeping itself in the news and the media themselves are surprisingly willing and complicit in publishing most of it whether it has any provenance or not.

The latest revelations promised us a picture of the real Shakespeare, 90% likely to be genuinely him and endorsed by Prof Stanley Wells, the doyen of Shakespearean Studies.

The problem is that the extant knowledge of what Shakespeare looked like neeeds to be discredited and thrown out before the latest likeness can be taken seriously because there is only the most superficial resemblance between the established image of him and this one.

It is generally accepted that the monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford and the engraving by Martin Droeshout on the first folio of the plays, published in 1623, were seen by the wife and theatrical colleagues of the poet and must thus have some authority. Unfortunately it has become the trend for any vaguely likely-looking lad of the times with a bit of a beard and a moustache to be roped in as the bard and made into sensational news stories.

In the event, it is becoming a similarly jokey little game as on my previous website when any middle-aged, balding creative type- Salman Rushdie, Stanley Kubrick, Shakespeare and then the singer from a band called Eels- was rounded up and said to look a bit like me.

Some of the problem for bardolaters (people like Prof. Wells who nurture idolatrous feelings for Shakespeare) is that the established images are not quite as attractive as they'd like. The Droeshout is a badly drawn cartoon and the Stratford monument shows a plump, jolly sort of face, neither of which are as lovely to contemplate as the lusher, more refined and gentle features of pictures like the Chandos portrait or this new attribution. But one of the great traditions of Shakespeare biography has been to not let the few pieces of genuine evidence that are available spoil the story as we'd prefer it to be.

The Cobbe portrait, as it is known since it is owned by the Cobbe family, has been tested and conveniently dated at 1610. All the research into the history of the painting, its ownership and the concomitant possibilities fit marvellously into the usual pattern of convincing circumstantial evidence, the likes of which have been used to 'prove' that any of several other hands wrote the plays, for example. But on this occasion no amount of astute and brilliant academic work can overturn the more common sense evidence that this painting simply doesn't look like the bloke it is being claimed to be.

A. S. J. Tessimond

There probably isn't statistical evidence to support the idea that poets are more likely to be manic-depressive, hopeless romantics or lead unorthodox lives but, if there was, then A.S.J. Tessimond (1902-1962) would be a case study.

Being roughly of the Auden generation, he made a name for himself during his lifetime but the reputation has since slipped and he wouldn't now be among the first to come to mind when thinking of major C20th poets. However, it would only take a small shift in the tastes and fashions of the poetry world and he could make a comeback at any time.

Tessimond's poems have no sub-text, there is no game-playing textual games. What they intend to communicate is very much what the words express and they do so in formal, patterned lines that rarely venture into Modernist experiment. His appeal is in the humane, self-deprecating character and some finely-made lines. He writes about love and observes the social world around him with a sympathetic, sometimes satirical attitude.

Love is never quite satisfactory, it is a difficult business almost sure to end in disappointment and so it might be best to accept this from the beginning,

Reason says, 'Love a girl who does not love you? /Learn to forget her, learn to let her go !

but Tessimond's implicitly doomed view doesn't prevent his regular intoxication. It isn't surprising to find that among the anthologies that used his poems, Larkin's Oxford book found space for Jamaican Bus Ride in which the first image is of a 'gloomy and resigned' fowl in a basket.

Tessimond shares Larkin's capacity for hope of transcendence, though, and one can't read Portrait of a Romantic without suspecting it is a self-portrait,

He is haunted by the face behind the face. /He searches for lost frontiers and lost doors./He tries to climb the wall around the world.

More often, though, his view of the world is satirical, as in The Ad-Man, who is 'a trumpeter of nothingness, employed/ To keep our reason full and null and void.' In The British, which he might have called The English, 'We are a people easily made uneasy,/Especially wary of praise, of passion..' etc. And The Man in the Bowler Hat is, among other things, 'too busy with a living to live, / Too hurried and worried to see and smell and touch'.

Tessimond seems immediately familiar because his poems express such everyday concerns so lucidly and as such, he was a precursor to the Larkin-esque style of 1950's poets. Faber's issue of the Selected Poems in Not Love Perhaps should ensure that his poems aren't lost to posterity.

Roddy Lumsden - Third Wish Wasted

Roddy Lumsden, Third Wish Wasted (Bloodaxe)

It's getting late. We've already reached the point at which the once young gun, Roddy Lumsden, is publishing the book after his Selected Poems and making passing reference to middle age. The blurb on the back of this volume tells us that 'it is concerned with our wishes and desires', which is fair enough, except that it doesn't really matter what poetry is about, what it says or even what it means. Especially in the hands of a poet like Lumsden, it is more a matter of what it does and how it does it. In his opening poem, envious of The Young, he describes the carefree and effortless spirit of youth in lines that might be used in appreciation of his own exuberant style,
One cartwheel over the quicksand curve
of Tuesday to Tuesday and you're gone,
summering, a ship on the farthest wave.

In many of these poems the exuberance is not a mood described or captured like off-the-peg joie de vivre but a function of the thought and language itself to the extent that in Keepsakes he is doing a passable job of being Paul Muldoon. These are linguistic performances of great erudition, intelligence and rhythm not to be confused with that genre of live stand-up called 'performance poetry'.
It's easy to list half a dozen favourite poems from this book- The Story of Spice, How the Champion Sleeps, Contagious Light, Quietus, The Damned and Tandem, for instance- without being sure you haven't missed out better ones or, for that matter, thinking that this is even Roddy Lumsden's best collection, which it might not be.
Contemporary poetry usually gets itself a bad name and one can often see how it might happen when the public are offered the dodgy doggerrel of the 'slam', a perception of a sealed-in private academic world of self-regarding highbrows or controversial publicity about bad marriages, infidelity or right-wing sympathies that lurk behind the poems in the lives of famous poets. Roddy Lumsden, if he were well-known enough, would be in danger of giving poetry a good name, with his ready wit, likeable character and impressive technique. Luckily, the good news is less likely to get out.