Big names don't get much bigger than this among living poets in English. And, as Nobel Laureate, Heaneys don't come cheap. This copy of Seeing Things was £20, which seemed very reasonable at the time.
Tuesday 30 June 2009
Signed Poetry Books - Sean O'Brien
This was the first of the signed O'Briens I have. If I remember rightly he signed it in Hull in 1997.
Some of my favourite lines in all poetry are on page 20, in Latinists, where the young O'Brien is struggling with his Latin,
When the stare you award me
Takes longer than Rome did
To flower and vanish, I notice
The bells are not working in heaven today.
Monday 22 June 2009
Portsmouth Festivities - Catherine Bott and James Bowman
Catherine Bott and James Bowman, Portsmouth Cathedral, Monday 22 June
You don't always get quite what you're expecting and it's not always a bad thing. James Bowman has long been one of my favourite singers on account of his recording of Couperin's heavenly Lecons de Tenebres and so I wasn't expecting to see him perform duets like O What Very Charming Weather. While this sort of parlour entertainment would have been familiar to our grandparents, it was an unusual mix for us. Having been given a free hand to perform whatever they would, Bott and Bowman presented an idiosyncratic pot pourri of Handel opera, Michael Tippett, English folk songs and Noel Coward among a varied selection. Bowman is apparently moving forward in his career from other worldly counter tenor to part-time comic turn.
Both singers began with unaccompanied solo pieces that showed off their extraordinary voices, leaving top notes resounding in the clerestory. Then they chose fittingly sea-related songs from The Tempest, Blow the Wind Southerly, Full Fathom Five as well as a duet from Julio Caesare, folk standards like All Things Are Quite Silent and moved on to mark midsummer with Gershwin's Summertime and some gaiety from Flanders and Swann.
Catherine Bott's soprano might have been marginally the more impressive overall but Bowman retains the capacity to astound with his remarkable tone and surge of power. The strength of his counter tenor voice is the more remarkable when contrasted with his more ordinary performances when required in the middle register.
Moving readily between elegiac moods and witty lightheartedness they made a lively if approximately matched couple as if on a date that had yet to prove it would lead to a permanent relationship. But it was a pleasure, an old fashioned English sort of treasure that fitted in a much wider range of songs than you would hear in almost any other show. For both novelty value and top quality voices, they are a rare combination.
Muldoon
This form, invented by Roddy Lumsden and advertised by him on the Poets on Fire forum, requires the title and line endings to use the same three, four or five consonant sounds. This has a 'fuzzy rhyme' effect as practiced by Paul Muldoon amongst others. So when Muldoon's name generated enough line endings he seemed an appropriately post-modern subject for such an exercise.
Muldoon
Some say he is but a bewitched old man
that words torment under an idle moon,
while others claim he is a verbal demon
-the paragon of what is all modern.
For he rhymes words like brazil with almond
and makes for himself such a wild name
that for me he can provide no model,
only this form with which I am laden.
Muldoon
Some say he is but a bewitched old man
that words torment under an idle moon,
while others claim he is a verbal demon
-the paragon of what is all modern.
For he rhymes words like brazil with almond
and makes for himself such a wild name
that for me he can provide no model,
only this form with which I am laden.
Saturday 20 June 2009
Portsmouth Festivities- Tasmin Little and the London Mozart Players
Tasmin Little and the London Mozart Players, Portsmouth Cathedral, Friday 19 June
Tasmin Little is so radiantly cheerful that there's never any doubt that she is enjoying the music as much if not more than anybody else. She is immediately engaged in everything that is going on, turning to conduct a few bars during the violin rests whenever she can.
She conducted the Overture to Marriage of Figaro before the pace slackened in Seigfried Idyll, as redolent of a passing English summer as any of those pieces specifically designed to evoke one. But it was when Tasmin brought out her own violin in The Lark Ascending, which is the genuine article, that the concert became something special. The cathedral acoustic displayed the clarity of Tasmin's playing superbly well and her quick fingerwork was made startling by the detail. It is a sumptuous and evocative piece whether it is quite one's favourite or not, and here it was given an exemplary rendition. The advantages of live performance over any recording become much clearer at times like this.
In the second half, Beethoven's Violin Concerto was inevitably more substantial than anything that had gone before. At once stately and with a storm in his heart, Beethoven is majestic and all encompassing. The drumbeat motif that begins the first movement recurred throughout while Tasmin used the cadenzas to express a dramatic range of emotions from doubt and darkness through to the playfulness of the second movement's well-known final theme. Her playing is confident, positive and compelling, she is a warm and friendly performer apparently playing for the sheer joy of it rather than with specific points to make.
The programme built towards a resounding climax, becoming more involving as it developed in compass and musicality so that no encore could have satisfactorily followed it and I, possibly for the first time, joined the several who gave it a standing ovation.
She conducted the Overture to Marriage of Figaro before the pace slackened in Seigfried Idyll, as redolent of a passing English summer as any of those pieces specifically designed to evoke one. But it was when Tasmin brought out her own violin in The Lark Ascending, which is the genuine article, that the concert became something special. The cathedral acoustic displayed the clarity of Tasmin's playing superbly well and her quick fingerwork was made startling by the detail. It is a sumptuous and evocative piece whether it is quite one's favourite or not, and here it was given an exemplary rendition. The advantages of live performance over any recording become much clearer at times like this.
In the second half, Beethoven's Violin Concerto was inevitably more substantial than anything that had gone before. At once stately and with a storm in his heart, Beethoven is majestic and all encompassing. The drumbeat motif that begins the first movement recurred throughout while Tasmin used the cadenzas to express a dramatic range of emotions from doubt and darkness through to the playfulness of the second movement's well-known final theme. Her playing is confident, positive and compelling, she is a warm and friendly performer apparently playing for the sheer joy of it rather than with specific points to make.
The programme built towards a resounding climax, becoming more involving as it developed in compass and musicality so that no encore could have satisfactorily followed it and I, possibly for the first time, joined the several who gave it a standing ovation.
Friday 12 June 2009
The Greatest English Poet of the Twentieth Century
The BBC Poetry Season offered a chance to re-evaluate things a little bit. The programme on Eliot made me realize just how long it's been since I actually read any of those classic poems, those huge icons of C20th English poetry. While looking at the considerable work of contemporary poets like Roddy Lumsden, Kathryn Simmonds, Carol Ann Duffy, Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage, one forgets to notice what a vast shadow a poet like Eliot still casts.
One is tempted to reinstate Eliot as the greatest C20th English poet immediately (whether by birth or use of the English language) after doubting if all that Modernism really caught on. Then one wonders how many great poems he wrote and I've always had my doubts about how great some of the poetry in The Four Quartets actually is. So are Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady and The Waste Land enough to base a whole iconic reputation on, with Ash Wednesday, The Hollow Men and Cats. Or does Auden's achievement, or Hardy's, amount to more.
I stared at the candidates and thought there might be a shortlist of five genuine contenders.
Hardy's enormous output is beautifully made, traditional and carries an immense emotional charge. One is almost weighed down by them, they become a bit repetitive and do roughly the same thing over and again. But he has the common touch, perhaps a bit mournfully but never less than honestly.
Yeats is a huge talent with at least two distinct periods after the Celtic twilight is replaced by a modernist aesthetic and in Byzantium he has become the fully-fledged artist after the beguiling sentimentalism of The Lake Isle of Innisfree. He must be on any shortlist and his influence on the powerful generations of Irish poets that followed him is immense. They all refer back to him incessantly.
With those poems listed above, Eliot can't be anything less than a major contender, even more so as the great critic who defined the taste and standard by which he was to be judged. Ezra Pound is the svengali behind the modernist movement, the 'kingmaker' who restyles Yeats and Eliot to his more radical way of thinking but his rarefied style is too far beyond the common reader for his own poetry to have sufficient appeal to make him greater than his acolytes.
Auden's early political commitment and greater humanity make second generation modernism more user friendly. His facility for making poems and side interest in light verse make him more attractive to general readers before he is thought by some to lose his way and become more rambling and prolix after moving to America, ostensibly to avoid the war. Auden was the candidate who I suspected might have taken Eliot's presumed title but he's not as universal a choice as one might expect. If he makes it look too easy, he is suspected of not extending himself. Greatness doesn't sit easily with complacency.
And Larkin did more recent poets a great service by cleaning up English poetry of all its difficulties and obfuscation. Some call it reactionary while others might say it is just common sense. A perfectionist techinician at his best, it will be claimed he was by definition a 'minor poet' but his reputation continues to rebuild itself as the considerations of political correctness are weighed off against an exemplary oeuvre of poetical correctness. Many have benefitted since from his example of clarity and ordinariness, his updating of Hardy's method.
I don't see any other poets being serious candidates for this somewhat subjective title. Although many will have serious objections to this shortlist because of the omission of their personal favourites, so have I because Thom Gunn isn't on it. There is a difference between 'best' and 'favourite' which is sometimes difficult to identify. But there is also a further difference between 'best', favourite' and 'greatest'. You need to be very good, relevant, memorable and influential to be a candidate for 'greatest' and then more so than anybody else.
But my apparent disquiet that, by 2009, we still haven't decided who was the greatest English poet of the C20th is perhaps misplaced. Do we actually know for sure that Keats was the greatest poet of the C19th? Or was it Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelley or somebody else. It wasn't Shelley, was it. Was Pope the greatest poet of the Augustan period? Not my period, not for me to say. But what about the C17th? Donne is challenged by Shakespeare and Milton and suddenly Marvell starts to look out of his depth.
So perhaps it is far too early to decide. Maybe there isn't an answer. Taste and fashion will continue to change and perhaps one day everyone will love dear old Dylan Thomas again. It is possible that one shouldn't worry about it and one less thing to worry about must be a good thing.
One is tempted to reinstate Eliot as the greatest C20th English poet immediately (whether by birth or use of the English language) after doubting if all that Modernism really caught on. Then one wonders how many great poems he wrote and I've always had my doubts about how great some of the poetry in The Four Quartets actually is. So are Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady and The Waste Land enough to base a whole iconic reputation on, with Ash Wednesday, The Hollow Men and Cats. Or does Auden's achievement, or Hardy's, amount to more.
I stared at the candidates and thought there might be a shortlist of five genuine contenders.
Hardy's enormous output is beautifully made, traditional and carries an immense emotional charge. One is almost weighed down by them, they become a bit repetitive and do roughly the same thing over and again. But he has the common touch, perhaps a bit mournfully but never less than honestly.
Yeats is a huge talent with at least two distinct periods after the Celtic twilight is replaced by a modernist aesthetic and in Byzantium he has become the fully-fledged artist after the beguiling sentimentalism of The Lake Isle of Innisfree. He must be on any shortlist and his influence on the powerful generations of Irish poets that followed him is immense. They all refer back to him incessantly.
With those poems listed above, Eliot can't be anything less than a major contender, even more so as the great critic who defined the taste and standard by which he was to be judged. Ezra Pound is the svengali behind the modernist movement, the 'kingmaker' who restyles Yeats and Eliot to his more radical way of thinking but his rarefied style is too far beyond the common reader for his own poetry to have sufficient appeal to make him greater than his acolytes.
Auden's early political commitment and greater humanity make second generation modernism more user friendly. His facility for making poems and side interest in light verse make him more attractive to general readers before he is thought by some to lose his way and become more rambling and prolix after moving to America, ostensibly to avoid the war. Auden was the candidate who I suspected might have taken Eliot's presumed title but he's not as universal a choice as one might expect. If he makes it look too easy, he is suspected of not extending himself. Greatness doesn't sit easily with complacency.
And Larkin did more recent poets a great service by cleaning up English poetry of all its difficulties and obfuscation. Some call it reactionary while others might say it is just common sense. A perfectionist techinician at his best, it will be claimed he was by definition a 'minor poet' but his reputation continues to rebuild itself as the considerations of political correctness are weighed off against an exemplary oeuvre of poetical correctness. Many have benefitted since from his example of clarity and ordinariness, his updating of Hardy's method.
I don't see any other poets being serious candidates for this somewhat subjective title. Although many will have serious objections to this shortlist because of the omission of their personal favourites, so have I because Thom Gunn isn't on it. There is a difference between 'best' and 'favourite' which is sometimes difficult to identify. But there is also a further difference between 'best', favourite' and 'greatest'. You need to be very good, relevant, memorable and influential to be a candidate for 'greatest' and then more so than anybody else.
But my apparent disquiet that, by 2009, we still haven't decided who was the greatest English poet of the C20th is perhaps misplaced. Do we actually know for sure that Keats was the greatest poet of the C19th? Or was it Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelley or somebody else. It wasn't Shelley, was it. Was Pope the greatest poet of the Augustan period? Not my period, not for me to say. But what about the C17th? Donne is challenged by Shakespeare and Milton and suddenly Marvell starts to look out of his depth.
So perhaps it is far too early to decide. Maybe there isn't an answer. Taste and fashion will continue to change and perhaps one day everyone will love dear old Dylan Thomas again. It is possible that one shouldn't worry about it and one less thing to worry about must be a good thing.
Thursday 11 June 2009
The Poetry of Colleen Hawkins
I first ‘met’ Colleen Hawkins a few years ago when she won the first of my Festive Fun quizzes posted on the forum of the Philip Larkin Society website. The e-mail correspondence that followed turned into a long distance literary friendship that we liked to compare to that between Larkin and Barbara Pym. We flattered ourselves, I dare say, but it did seem to involve a gratifying degree of mutual admiration.
Colleen’s insight and judgement as a reader and literary critic immediately impressed me and it wasn’t long before I was sending her poems for her comments and criticism. Her thoughts were always intelligent, accurate and never resorted to the sort of pointless flattery that friends are ever likely to tell you just in case they upset you. And, as such, they have been valuable ever since.
Eventually Colleen was brave enough to send me some poems of her own. I say ‘brave enough’ because even luminaries as luminous as Roddy Lumsden, for some reason, regard me as a ‘tough critic’. Whereas I am, of course, actually a pussycat.
Colleen is a direct, uncompromising, forthright poet who makes Carol Ann Duffy look like her predecessor, the fey watercolourist Andrew Motion in comparison. And I’m only slightly joking.
Her poems are informed by a range of literary references, wordplay and re-made cliché. At her own estimation she inhabits a ‘nettle labyrinth’ of ‘noli me tangere’ in the face of the vagaries and vicissitudes of preconceived ideas of romantic love. Which is not to say she isn’t capable of lyrical moments but her kinship with the sceptical, disbelieving aspects of Larkin is an obvious comparison to make.
It was our correspondence that led me to admire Rochester’s Upon Nothing as well as Patrick Hamilton’s novels and Julian McClaren Ross. She is a reader and writer profoundly ‘less deceived’ and our epistolary relationship has been my privilege to take part in.
Here is Colleen’s recent poem In Development Hell. It’s one of my favourites of hers.
In Development Hell
The future is all behind me now
Please throw this film into fast reverse,
Let parting become a new kind of birth.
The story grows frothy this way round:
Mistakes are unmade without relief,
Snatched suddenly away by unseen thieves
Demanding everything I have to give,
Grabbing armful after armful, unliving
Days and years I unwillingly chose to live.
Without discrimination, good, bad, worse,
Disappears, emptying once heaving shelves
No longer groaning under the weight of self.
Do not restart the projector at the living end,
Let my once beginning mark the start
Of where the titles will not happen to begin.
The studio has other projects set to direct,
All cheery violence and tastefully mounted sex,
So strand me nowhere, never, ungreenlit,
One more script idea that kicks around forever,
But will not ever quite make it.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=657456535&ref=profile
Colleen’s insight and judgement as a reader and literary critic immediately impressed me and it wasn’t long before I was sending her poems for her comments and criticism. Her thoughts were always intelligent, accurate and never resorted to the sort of pointless flattery that friends are ever likely to tell you just in case they upset you. And, as such, they have been valuable ever since.
Eventually Colleen was brave enough to send me some poems of her own. I say ‘brave enough’ because even luminaries as luminous as Roddy Lumsden, for some reason, regard me as a ‘tough critic’. Whereas I am, of course, actually a pussycat.
Colleen is a direct, uncompromising, forthright poet who makes Carol Ann Duffy look like her predecessor, the fey watercolourist Andrew Motion in comparison. And I’m only slightly joking.
Her poems are informed by a range of literary references, wordplay and re-made cliché. At her own estimation she inhabits a ‘nettle labyrinth’ of ‘noli me tangere’ in the face of the vagaries and vicissitudes of preconceived ideas of romantic love. Which is not to say she isn’t capable of lyrical moments but her kinship with the sceptical, disbelieving aspects of Larkin is an obvious comparison to make.
It was our correspondence that led me to admire Rochester’s Upon Nothing as well as Patrick Hamilton’s novels and Julian McClaren Ross. She is a reader and writer profoundly ‘less deceived’ and our epistolary relationship has been my privilege to take part in.
Here is Colleen’s recent poem In Development Hell. It’s one of my favourites of hers.
In Development Hell
The future is all behind me now
Please throw this film into fast reverse,
Let parting become a new kind of birth.
The story grows frothy this way round:
Mistakes are unmade without relief,
Snatched suddenly away by unseen thieves
Demanding everything I have to give,
Grabbing armful after armful, unliving
Days and years I unwillingly chose to live.
Without discrimination, good, bad, worse,
Disappears, emptying once heaving shelves
No longer groaning under the weight of self.
Do not restart the projector at the living end,
Let my once beginning mark the start
Of where the titles will not happen to begin.
The studio has other projects set to direct,
All cheery violence and tastefully mounted sex,
So strand me nowhere, never, ungreenlit,
One more script idea that kicks around forever,
But will not ever quite make it.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=657456535&ref=profile
Sunday 7 June 2009
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (Virago)
On her website, Sarah Waters nominates Rebecca as the book she would most like to have written and in this latest novel, she's almost there. Hundreds Hall and its troubled history are as much a character in this as Manderley is in Daphne du Maurier's classic.
The problem with ghost stories, or anything involving the supernatural, is that a sceptical or rational person knows that there is either a sensible explanation for everything or the author is just making it up. One litmus test I have with fiction is whether I notice that I am reading fiction or if I'm tempted to think at regular intervals that it is all made up and then I start contradicting the text by thinking, 'no they didn't' whenever the author tries to tell me that a character either did this or said that.
Sarah Waters is among the last fiction writers that should fail such a test. Her characters and places are superbly well realised, perhaps her descriptions of characters a bit too detailed at times to be forensically convincing, but when we are asked to consider the series of unfortunate events that happen in Hundreds Hall, we don't really want to believe in poltergeists or phantoms, as the narrator, Dr. Faraday doesn't either.
The sequence of horrors claims a greedy share of the family and one wonders why the young servant girl, Betty, sees it all through. The faded glory of Hundreds Hall becomes a desolate shell. The unhappy details of the past, as well as Roderick's war wound, grow and grow in their after effects to vast proportions. Much of it one can see coming but that is more of a tribute to Sarah Waters' gradually revealing writing than a criticism of any failure to shock. For a time, it does seem to shock and thrill but not quite as much as some of the early reviews suggested it would, and once the pattern is established and the nature and extent of the mystery apparently set, it is more a psychological drama than genuine spine-tingler.
I don't know what one has to do to tingle spines nowadays. The Little Stranger is an engaging and involving story. Very few 500 page novels will be read quite so quickly or avidly. It is another period piece, just post World War II, in which doctors smoke and worry about the coming of the National Health Service and pay more for a wedding ring, £15, than they did for their car. I'm not quite sure it lived up to the enormous expectations of being the new Sarah Waters but perhaps not much could have. That is the enviable problem one faces when one's reputation is so high, one would imagine. It will, of course, make a tremendous film.
Wednesday 3 June 2009
Crossword
Across
6. The sword a mad poet produced (6,6)
8. Swan Crosby made a sound poet (7)
9. A pose changed fabulous writer (5)
10. Marlowe or Raleigh editions initially what Oliver wanted (4)
12. Lad on island with beautiful boy in it (6)
14. Aware it sounds like a feature (5)
15. Given out in this suede cover? (6)
16. With the same new, pointless poise (4)
19. French author caught in huge net (5)
21. I hope Al went mad, went mad and drowned (7)
22. Let on apology is for study of the Stones and
rock in general (12)
Down
1. Worst bid at swim ? (3,5)
2. Artist in short smoke, Martian's first name (5)
3. All the world's a good man's period (5)
4 and 11. Jakobson's novel demise? (7,3)
5. Larkin didn't know what they were for (4)
6. american poet (1,1,8)
7. Dracula is such a novel ! (10)
11. see 4
12. Sounds alternatively inspired (3)
13. Farm's pig (8)
14. One was offered for a knave (7)
17. Beat poet? (5)
18. Disorder in the cha cha cha ostrich performs (5)
20. Not watered down in one attempt (4).
Monday 1 June 2009
My Favourite Poem - Mary Green
-b_rotated.jpg)
Having considered Masefield and things learnt at school, like Sea Fever and Cargoes, my mother has chosen If by Rudyard Kipling 'which has tremendous thoughts/ideals etc and takes a great deal of living up to'.
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm
http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm
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