Ogogo (og)

I am grateful to my father, Phil, who pointed out this little masterpiece last week.

Football result

Dagenham and Redbridge 0 Notts County 3 (Davies, 44; Hughes, 47; Ogogo, og, 85)

Even better than when Parker scored from the spot and it said Parker (pen).

Poetry Live for Haiti

Poetry Live for Haiti, Westminster Central Hall, January 30, 2010

Poetry did its bit for a good cause as Carol Ann Duffy's imagination and position as the tribe's poet-in-chief brought out the great and good and some old troopers to raise a few bob to send to the stricken and needy.

The major surprise guest appearance was Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah. Mr. Brown made some fairly predictably laudible comments before resorting to default mode and made a political speech, for all the world as if he were at conference or was an embattled Prime Minister. His big announcement was that his government have bought up all the corrugated iron in this country and it is being sent to Haiti by ship. This is a noble and great gesture but not necessarily a vote winner among those of the electorate who make things out of corrugated iron. But he was generously received and he stayed to hear a fine Dannie Abse reading before being ushered off by Ms. Duffy. He has a country to run and needs to keep up with the Raith Rovers score.

At such an event there is bound to be some heartfelt expressions of humanity and some political points made but humanity and politics alone do not great poetry make. Some of these broadsides or specially and hastily written poems looked a bit de trop or too colossally obvious to need saying. At a performance like this, in a large auditorium, it is the 'performers' that become the highlights however fine some of the poets usually are on the page or in more intimate venues. Thus folk recorder-player John Sampson, Carribean old-timer John Agard and Daljit Nagra provided the most memorable performances while I won't be as impolite here as to mention those highly respected names whose poems were not really worthy of being put before such an audience.

For me, on a day useful to see and hear a number of poets one wouldn't have gone as far to see if advertised separately, Maura Dooley and Lachlan MacKinnon were revealed as candidates for further investigation. Owen Sheers is perhaps the one poet that parents would be pleased to have a daughter bring home and introduce to them, as he is very presentable indeed and a very competent poet in the making. Robert Minhinnick came as a big surprise, like a brooding bad boy who looks like he means business. Others with credentials included Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales; Christopher Reid, recent winner of the Costa prize and Roger McGough, whose Chinese-syled excursions supported by Andy Roberts on strummed instrument, followed by Brian Patten, reminded us that the 60's are still in living memory.

I would mention Jo Shapcott, Andrew Motion, Glyn Maxwell, Imtiaz Dharkar, Moniza Alvi, Robin Robertson, Collette Bryce, Elaine Feinstein, Ian Duhig and Grace Nichols, too, but fear this website doesn't carry long pieces very well and I would worry that I'd forgotten someone. All of them appeared for gratis, the hall and administration were given as acts of charity and the communal singing of the Scottish bard's Auld Lang Syne, following the laureate's atmospheric performance accompanied by the charismatic John Sampson, was a moving moment.

To think that all the usual self-promotion of the poetry circuit, the waffle and self-serving of reviews, the internecine 'poetry wars' and the essay writing in pursuit of daft degrees in universities could provide such a great coming together was quite humbling to see. A feelgood factor predicated on unthinkable disaster a long way away, no doubt, but we paid our money, turned up and took some memories away and so it is very hard to pick holes in it even if one wanted to.

Hats off and thanks to Carol Ann Duffy for being the prime mover in such an event, poetry's Live Aid, on a day when poetry for once had reason to feel good about itself. The benefit event will have been of benefit to many, both here and hopefully further across the world.

Bright Star

Bright Star (2009), dir. Jane Campion

A film review on this website. Whatever next.

It is the habit of film reviewers to remark upon the 'special effects', the tawdry and expensive cheap thrills that beset the blockbuster genre. But one can be sustained by mere rapturous photography alone when a film is such a banquet for our tired eyes as Jane Campion's account of John Keats and his most tragical dalliance with Fanny Brawne.

The film is Janeite(*) in decorum with the recurrent images redolent of Vermeer's painting as ladies doing stitching or poets reading are caught in the light that filters through windows.

The countenance of Ben Wishaw is more comely than required to represent the poet but it is a truth universally acknowledged that anyone appearing in a film needs to be more handsome than those who do not. The more dastardly Mr. Brown, played by Paul Schneider, provides the angelic Keats with a heavily counterpointed opposite for dramatic and sometimes comic effect. Otherwise I believe the film to be accurate enough in its fidelity to truth and so, in this case, with sufficient reference to the texts, truth is indeed beauty and beauty is truth.

Sad, of course, and there is some inevitability in the dreadful ending but death was in life for these purveyors of poetic langour and life wasn't quite beauteous enough for them. So it may never be counted among the litany of most profound or admirable of the all too few films that I have seen but it was a fine and gorgeous thing to see and I can do more than commend it to you.

* I only once ever saw the word 'Janeite' in print, so I looked it up and found it meant 'pertaining to Jane Austen' but it isn't in either of the dictionaries I have here.

J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)

The death of J.D. Salinger made me think some kind of tribute or obituary was due but we will see.

Perhaps the most fitting tribute will be to say nothing.

The Magnetic Fields - Realism

The Magnetic Fields, Realism (Nonesuch)

http://www.houseoftomorrow.com/

Whereas the last Magnetic Fields album, Distortion, was homage to the Jesus & Mary Chain, like the time R.E.M. put down their mandolin and made Monster, this is advertised as the return to basics. The two albums were apparently conceived as a pair. This has the female figure on the cover where the other had the male.

However, if it was intended as a 'folk' album it might not convince the hard-core traditionalists. With You Must be Out of Your Mind we are immediately back onto the familiar ground of dark lyricism and engaging instrumental arrangements. The cello and banjo ensemble is a rare and lovely combination used to great effect on previous classics on 69 Love Songs and I. John Woo and Sam Davol are a wonderful pairing at the centre of these restrained songs- their gigs in London in 2008 being suggested as the quietest pop concerts in the history of the genre.

For the most part, this is a pretty album, lilting and drifting sometimes sleepily through the subconscious.

It is unlikely that the monumental high points of The Book of Love or Papa Was a Rodeo from 69 Love Songs are going to be reached on a regular basis again and they aren't here but Stephin Merritt retains his camp, quaint, mordant songwriting genius. The yearning, dreamy I Don't Know What to Say seems to be translating into A Groovy Kind of Love but delivers more of the lost romantic charm of his most beguiling moments.

Everything is One Big Christmas Tree is jovial camp, enhanced by a verse in German for added fun. But it is the elegance of the strumming, exotic soft percussion - the cuatro and sitar, no less- that make this an admirable record, hypnotic and contemplative much more than usual. One needs to be careful to listen because it might successfully steal past one unnoticed. It asks unassumingly to be heard rather than demands your attention in an almost self-effacing way. And there's a lot to be said for something like that. It wouldn't come as a big surprise if Stephin Merritt became a Buddhist, refining his unique sensibility out of existence.

Magnetic Fields Realism Sneak Preview

http://www.myspace.com/themagneticfields

Oh, of course, myspace. Why didn't I think of that earlier.

I'll be hoping that We Are Having a Hootenany isn't supposed to be a stand-out track on the new album but, then again, you don't give your best stuff away for nothing. Unless you're me.

But You Must Be Out of Your Mind is suitably as is to be expected,

You call it sunset,
now it's dawn.
You can't go round
just saying stuff
because it's pretty
and I no longer drink enough
to think you're witty.

That'll do fine. Same old, same old dark, heartbroken themes. But, when you have your masterpiece behind you, what more are you supposed to do.

Poets Live for Haiti

http://www.poetryliveforhaiti.org/

I'll hope to make the trip up to London for this on Saturday.

There are enough reliable names and old troopers in among the cast list to make it a worthwhile event, you never know if somebody else might prove to be better than you imagined and it's good to see poetry doing its bit for a cause.

The Magnetic Fields - Realism

The Observer were kinder about the new album than The Sunday Times.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jan/24/magnetic-fields-stephin-merritt-realism

I'll have my own, fuller account here just as soon as my copy arrives.

Linden Huddlestone, Life and Work

Linden Huddlestone. Life and Work

Three more books arrived this week which represent a major leap forward in my Linden Huddlestone project. This followed the brainwave of searching abebooks using ‘Huddlestone’ as a keyword rather than author and adopting a policy of ordering on sight anything that mentioned our English teacher from 1970’s Gloucester.
The five volumes I now have conveniently represent stages of his life, which begins with the biographical note provided in Penguin New Writing 35 (1948),
LH was born in 1924, and educated at Mercers School and London University. During the war he served in the Royal Navy, first as an Air Mechanic (Electrical), then as Instructor Lieutenant attached to the Royal Marines. He is married, and works as a schoolmaster in a London grammar school. This is the first full length study he has had published.
It is known that his MA from London University on the poetry of Charles Williams was dated 1952, and a note found on the internet records that, probably around this time, he had a book on Williams in preparation. Although there is no trace of such a book being published thus far, he provided the bibliography for a similar book by John Heath-Stubbs.
However, the edition of The Film of Murder in the Cathedral by T.S.Eliot and George Hoellering is inscribed in Huddlestone’s immediately recognizable italic script with ‘Jean Olivia and Linden Huddlestone, May 1952’. That might have been a worthwhile find in itself. I had heard from another source that first editions of Auden inscribed by LCH had been seen in Hay-on-Wye bookshops. However, a priceless bonus with this book is a carbon copy typescript included of an essay entered into a competition for essays on the film, with the press advert for the competition neatly clipped to it. Moreover, pencilled in at the end of the essay, it says ‘2nd, 250 pounds’. A quick reference to a website that converts monetary amounts accounting for inflation says that this is the equivalent of 5000 pounds now, so it was a lucrative 3000 words.
The closing date for this competition was March 30, 1953 and Huddlestone’s address typed at the top of this essay is in Sheffield. He had mentioned when teaching us that he had taught Barry Hines, author of A Kestrel for a Knave, which was filmed as Kes.
The Winter 1964 edition of The Critical Survey includes a piece outlining the sixth form English curriculum at Sir Thomas Rich’s Grammar School, Gloucester, where LCH was by then Senior English master. It outlines roughly the same course of study that we were provided with in the mid 70’s, an enlightened programme designed to read around set books as well as prepare for A level exams, clearly instigated by one enthused by literature for its own sake, as well as passing exams and preparing Oxbridge entrance students in a General Arts discipline. He makes mention of the four English teachers, one of whom also supervised rugby, who we would confidently identify as W.G.F. Bradford, whose forthright opinions on literature seemed as gritty and full-blooded as his rugby mentoring. Mr. Bradford died during our first year sixth and Huddlestone’s memorable tribute in assembly was a reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Sometimes a Lantern. Bradford was a great admirer of Hopkins, but less so of Milton, which he thought was something you cleaned your teeth with.
However, perhaps the most prestigious appearance in print is Huddlestone’s essay in The Morality of Art, essays presented to G. Wilson Knight by his colleagues and friends (RKP, 1969). Alongside other contributors like L.C. Knights, Geoffrey Hill and Wole Soyinka, LCH gives us Notes on a Production of Wilson Knight’s Ideal Macbeth and the only illustrations in the book are two plates of the set designed by him for the production of Macbeth at Ecclesfield Grammar School, 1958.
The 1971 anthology of Cheltenham Poets edited by LCH contains two Huddlestone poems, the short lyric and the Arthurian extract detailed elsewhere on this website but, realistically, the work in it is no better than would be expected from a local poetry group.
After retirement, a friend of mine met Huddlestone when visiting Painswick House Rococo Gardens, where LCH was taking the price of admission from visitors. This would have been in the mid 1990’s.
He died in January 2001.

It would be useful to find more poems by Huddlestone but, at present, his critical work looks to be his finer achievement. An Approach to Dylan Thomas in Penguin New Writing is a fine, well-organized and extensive study, usefully uncovering meaning and explaining symbols in Thomas’ often seductive but ‘opaque’ poetry. As he is elsewhere, Huddlestone is interested in the sound of poetry and the poet’s reading of it. He is particularly good on Biblical references and does much to make clear in Thomas that which sounds fine but is difficult. He uses the term ‘apocalyptic’ to describe it in an apparently non-pejorative way whereas since 1948 that might have become a more loaded and derogatory description of the sort of poetry that has since dropped out of fashion. Thomas in retrospect looks like his own worst enemy sometimes but Huddlestone’s summary is a considered and fair apology for an artist who benefits from sympathetic treatment at a time before other poets were going to redress the balance towards a plainer style.
Since one poet we were introduced to at school was the religious modernist, David Jones, one does wonder if the mystical and Biblical themes were of special interest to Huddlestone or if they were simply a vogue of the poetic zeitgeist then. He did introduce us to Ted Hughes’ Crow as a rewriting of the creation story, which of course it is. It’s a shame he never got around to reading Gunn’s The Sense of Movement with us but we did find material on the poem sequence Misanthropos when sorting out the English stock room and that isn’t very religious at all. And he did successfully identify the reference in Gunn’s poem At the Back of the North Wind for the teacher I studied some Gunn with.
The essay on Murder in the Cathedral is similarly thorough and attentive to detail. It is necessarily an essay on the film rather than the play or Eliot but again notices Church symbolism and architecture. It is by no means a eulogy to the film. Although he clearly enjoyed it, he was not going to let reservations go unremarked. The highlight of the essay for me is in a footnote,
I must also record somewhere that I can remember nothing at all of the score by Laszlo Lajtha, and that I am not quite sure whether this is to praise or blame it.
The characteristically dry Huddlestone humour is perfect here. Never knowingly any funnier than he needed to be but you can see an austere sense of fun suggesting itself as long as you know it is there.
The Macbeth essay is a more practical theatrical piece about staging the play, closing curtains, moving stage furniture about and the design itself rather than literary work. Huddlestone had written to Wilson Knight, being nearby at Leeds, as part of his preparation of the production. But the publication of his notes here alongside such fine work as an essay by L.C. Knights on Timon of Athens is a measure of its recognition and value.
It is going to be impossible to know if and when one has found all there is to find of Huddlestone’s published literary work. While the five volumes I now have are unlikely to be anything like a complete bibliography, and there were obviously more poems somewhere, whether they ever appeared in print or not, it’s not obvious when it’s going to be the right time to stop looking. And so, anybody who finds this item here and can add to it, please get in touch by e-mail.

Alan Bennett - The Habit of Art

Alan Bennett, The Habit of Art (Faber)

Alan Bennett doesn't only write about little old ladies in Harrogate nattering on about teashops or a biscuit under the settee. The two who excused themselves after the first five minutes of Derek Jarman's Edward II many years ago might not enjoy this much more.

The imaginary meeting between Auden and Britten discusses biography and the role of art and ageing but adds another layer by having their biographer with them, too. At first a bit disconcerting to read from the page, it becomes an elegiac piece, showing the subversive within the 'establishment' in the same way that An Englishman Abroad, A Question of Attribution, The Common Reader or The Laying On of Hands also do among other Bennett work.

Humphrey Carpenter's biographies have been extensively mined for details of the lives, Auden's slippers, repetitive observations and bossy nature; Britten's more reticent character but equally perilous sexual preferences. It is a short read and an example of how much longer it takes to a writer towrite something that the reader takes no time at all to read. I'll look forward to a production of it being near me soon.

In the end, as much as any other, its theme is loneliness and the edifice- the habit- of art that is erected in defence against it, its consolations and its inadequacy. It is, perhaps, Alan Bennett's Tempest, a summary somewhere near the end of his career that provides some final thoughts although it is to be hoped that Bennett doesn't break his staff and bury his books just yet.

Top 6 - W. H. Auden

Just reading Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art and so it might be a good time to feature Wystan here.

Having elsewhere here nominated Musee des Beaux Arts as my favourite poem, that is obviously a given. However well-known and widely quoted it becomes, and despite Tom Paulin being most derogatory about its 'complacency', I still love it and choose it above even the highest points of my other most admired poets. It might not be complacency exactly but a stoic acceptance and a wonderfully controlled meditation that makes its way between mundane and transcendant thoughts with the utmost confidence and savoir faire.

In the Collected, there are numerous candidates surrounding Musee, suggesting that the late thirties was when the artist was at the height of his powers. These are poems beyond critical category that are simply all they need to be, accessible but profound, beautifully-made and balanced. Not showing off Auden's virtuoso facility for its own sake but neither drifting towards the sentimental or overtly political, which he might at other times have done. Brussels in Winter isn't well-known enough; The Novelist, as well as everything else it does, agrees with what I've long thought, that their job is much harder than the mere poet's.

I don't want to include The Fall of Rome because for reasons I can't quite say, it's either seemed too easy or too generalized or something, but the more one looks at it the better it gets and one's subconscious objections become reasons for liking it.

It might be a received wisdom to accept the idea that Auden became rambling and meandering in his later poems but it could just be that he developed a discursive style, and one perhaps always ought to move on to new ways of doing it, if only for one's own sake, to stay interested in what one's doing. So, although there is always the didactic 'mother hen' in Auden explaining to us quite categorically what he has decided, I'll have The Common Life from About the House which is a comfortable book to read in one's slippers.

Which only leaves one more place and there are at least a dozen candidates to fill it. Having said we don't want to get too sentimental (like those other sickly valentines do) and there are a few Auden poems that have become so well-known one almost tires of them, it'll be The More Loving One because that's what he always was.

It might not look like the real Top 6 to posterity or to many Auden readers but in doing these little summaries, it has been the most difficult to pick, the most overwhelming choice and it is inevitably betting without the Collected Longer Poems.

Footnote. I knew that the facial skin condition was a rare medical syndrome but what I didn't know was that Racine also had it. Thanks to Alan Bennett for that.

Ted Hughes' Letters

Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (Faber)

It doesn't feel quite right reading 'letters', many of which were surely private and not intended for publication, but the book got such good reviews when it came out and Hughes was such a major figure that one feels one might have a look at something so prominently now in the public domain. Now in paperback, one can hardly help but compare them with Larkin's letters, and contrast the flippant, juvenile, larky Larkin with the deeply serious, iconic and iconoclastic Hughes. Except, of course, it's not quite so simple.

Christopher Reid explains in the introduction that the manuscripts aren't quite as immaculately spelt as one might have expected from someone who went to Cambridge University in 1951 to read English. He is idiosyncratic in consistently spelling certain words wrong, sometimes clearly when charging down a torrent of thoughts in some haste but also, one suspects, prefering his own versions. Reid's selections begin with teenage accounts of primordial nature around Heptonstall that set the Hughes world view of powerful and mysterious energies in place.

While at first the seriousness and focus of his ideas is as impressive as one had hoped, a number of themes and attiudes emerge and are sustained throughout the heavy 750 pages that one begins to suspect them and tire of them after a while. I had expected it to be a book to dip into but it is better than that and much of it was read from page to page, not skipping any detail until well into the second half. While obviously a companion volume to the biography (by Elaine Feinstein and a fine book), it becomes an autobiography in itself with Reid's useful notes to letters and brief introduction to each calendar year providing context.

Hughes was a poet set against the 'literary world's' fashions and established conventions and clearly didn't see his British contemporaries as any kind of stablemates. He feels more kinship with myths, ancient wisdom and what he sees as more engaged poetry, from further East mainly, than with the likes of Larkin and Donald Davie (who comes in for some particularly vitriolic denouncements). So it is interesting to see 'poetry wars' being engaged in at the very top level, and possibly even more so to find traces of a certain two-faced personality when poets who have been the subject of derogatory remarks to others are then sent polite and respectful letters later. Having assumed that Larkin had long been regarded as the inevitable 'establishment' choice for Poet Laureate after Betjeman, Hughes is surprised to be offered it and that Larkin hadn't been asked. Or so he thought.

It is perhaps surprising how few of the letters selected by Reid cover the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Weevil and so it is going to be a disappointing book for those who might trawl it to satisfy prurient interests. It is obvious how much Hughes admired Plath as a poet and what a creative partnership they had for a time- she was arguably or potentially the better poet. Their time in America and working together was perhaps Hughes' happiest time. But from Sylvia's death onwards, he finds himself emerging from dark periods and hoping for more equanimity on repeated occasions. Although at least ostensibly blaming himself at times he is apparently unable to see that a possible common factor in the tragedies that beset him is him.

The dubious fascination with astrology and other such unscientific mysticism is given one of those chilling twists (for those more sceptical among us) when in 1956 he finds an indication of suicide in Sylvia's horoscope.

Longer letters, most notably rambling about shamanism and a letter on Measure for Measure (which seems to become the template for his Shakespeare book) are prolix and tedious and suggest that a limit on seriousness needs to be set. But if one might doubt the validity of some of his more far-fetched beliefs, his disparaging of the literary world and its conventions carries more weight when he explains how much he has been impressed with the children's poetry he has judged when involved with competitions and how much talent enters university to study English Literature compared to how few poets of worth come out of universities. His implication is that Eng Lit at university has destroyed the poets, one way or another. And he may have a point. I doubt if he'd have been very impressed with the trend in recent years to install poets onto Creative Writing programmes that make sure young aspiring poets all do it properly.

But it's not all grim. For someone who admires the natural world so much, he seems to take rather too much pleasure in killing large sections of it and one wonders if it is life he wants to celebrate, or death. But he goes further than I had ever done in finding parallels with Shakespeare's biography in King Lear; he fiercely defends the legacy of Sylvia Plath against perceived mis-representations by the likes of Alvarez; he tells a great story about being fitted out by Moss Bros on his way to the Palace to receive the Queen's Medal for Poetry and then he tries his best (though unsuccessfully) to persuade Thom Gunn to change his mind about declining the same award.

He doesn't have a bad word for Seamus Heaney and he can be supportive to the speculative sort of submissions from hopeful new poets looking for a few kind words. I don't know if his farming activities were ever profitable but it is striking how, despite being on the exam syllabus and selling books in amounts beyond the dreams of most poets, he was never far away from thinking up the next money-making edition or scheme. Given the size of the pile of boxes of laureate oloroso sherry he is photographed in front of, one would hope he didn't have to spend much on booze.

But the insights to the man made available by this big but only highly selective edition of his letters didn't make me like or admire him any more than I did already and I thought it would. I thought my horizons might be expanded by finding sympathy with a great and impressive man who hadn't previously been one of my topmost heroes in C20th poetry. I'm afraid he still isn't but the book did provide an engaging read for a week or two. It can be just as rewarding to disagree with someone most of the time than to find everything to one's taste. In many ways these letters are better than Larkin's but they were both primarily known as poets and it's far too late now for me to be unpersuaded of the opinion that Larkin was the finer poet.

Snow

I think Louis Macneice and Sean O'Brien have good snow poems, as I'm sure do many others.

But easily my favourite is Kleinzahler's Snow in North Jersey www.bayonnelibrary.org/Hot_Topics_Binder-14/page_1_Snow.pdf

It surely owes a little bit to Joyce's The Dead.

Top 6 - Derek Mahon

If Seamus Heaney hadn't been such a vast figure in British Poetry for the last thirty years then one might imagine that more attention might have fallen on the likes of Derek Mahon, who, at his best, has produced equally fine poems, doesn't seem to publish a bad one and is more prepared to make a politically-committed statement.

On the other hand, despite having his books since the Selected Poems published in 1990, all of my selections here come from that book whereas, when I get around to picking from Heaney, I expect there'll be much more recent poems highlighted.

Courtyards in Delft is one of those poems you just want to imitate, for any part of it to seep into your own poems, to steal from, to be 'influenced by', to echo in ways that nobody will quite know where you got it from. Although it might look like yet another poem based on paintings, it's better than that. If any poet ever tried to edit out adjectives from poetry then they need to see how such well-chosen ones can do so much.

Always keen on a villanelle that genuinely works, I'm almost equally mad about The Dawn Chorus. It is a deep thing apparently summoned up from the sub-conscious but immaculately well constructed in verse, too.

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford is the anthology piece and understandably so, as good a political poem as there ever was. Afterlives similarly doesn't pull punches although it is enormously disappointing that we are described as 'middle class twits' in the edition I have rather than the word he originally used which was more vernacular but powerful because he's usually so erudite.

Old Roscoff is a tough, muscular description of place but it gets inside the history of the place and is far too sympathetic to be macho swagger. And In Carrowdore Churchyard is that thing I always like if and when done well enough, homage to the admired precursor, in this case Louis Macneice.

The later poems are by no means forgettable but they don't seem to have the same power as these pieces. He doesn't have the same equanimity as Heaney and might now be meditating more inwardly, in a more melancholy state of mind but he was masterful at the height of his powers and doesn't owe us anything.

Top 6 - John Keats

Whatever it is that Keats' poetry has to say, his world view is probably a bit dubious and 'Romantic' just doesn't seem very fashionable right now. However, poetry is perhaps not primarily valued for what it actually means as much as how it expresses it and Keats is the paragon example of much that we seem to expect of a 'poet'. His language is gorgeous and sublime and his life so short and productive he inevitably takes his place very high up in the pantheon.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer is wonderful, Ode on a Grecian Urn similarly beguiling. To Autumn is a lush celebration of language and 'When I Have Fears that I May Cease To Be' is perfectly made and exemplary. Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on Melancholy demonstrate the excesses that define Romantic poetry for us now but if the world is really unworthy of our more escapist aspirations, they've never been so dreamily rendered. A part of his legacy has been to leave us with this stereotype idea of a poet is but that is mainly because he did it all so well.

Bright Star is on at No. 6 Cinema, Portsmouth, at the end of the month and one can hardly wait to swoon along with it.

Linden Huddlestone update

My progress in tracing the literary work of Linden Huddlestone has admittedly been slow thus far. This has been due to needing to get into the Poetry Library to consult a rare text and not being in the vicinty of the Royal Festival Hall recently when the library's been open.

I had an ideal opportunity today on the way home from Craven Cottage. There I am, at my second FA Cup tie of the season. The Swindon supporters upset the natural calm of our riverside idyll with their noisy participation but went home knowing that they've no need to check the draw for Round 4. But, well played Swindon, anyway.

A very helpful assistant found Trevor Tolley's Poetry of the Forties for me because it wasn't where it should have been. The Huddlestone reference, as found originally by Google, is on page 96 where Tolley is dealing with Dylan Thomas. He writes,

As Linden Huddlestone pointed out many years ago, religious imagery is used in the early poetry 'in a highly unorthodox way'.

The footnote then refers us to L. Huddlestone, An Approach to Dylan Thomas in Penguin New Writing 35. Since Tolley's book was published by Manchester University Press in 1985, this item is 'many years' before that. But finding that will be the next stage of this painstaking investigation. Unless, of course, you have a copy to hand and let me know.

This is a pleasing development, finding Huddlestone writing on Dylan Thomas, after my first discoveries revealed his interest in Arthurian themes.

Linden Huddlestone was our English teacher in Gloucester in the 1970's and introduced us to, amongst other things, James Joyce and Ted Hughes. The contents of the English stockroom betrayed an interest in contemporary poetry with Gunn's The Sense of Movement, my copy of which properly belongs to the school by rights, and David Jones' modernist religious efforts. It would have been easier, in retrospect, to have simply asked him about his literary interests at the time rather than try to investigate them three decades later but it never occured to me then. To younger schoolboys he might have seemed a dry old stick but he had a sense of humour and obviously a genuine interest in literature that went beyond the set book curriculum.

My enquiries will continue but if you've found this item and can add anything, please get in touch.