New Poems

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I'm keeping a few things back as completely unpublished, not even here, just in case of emergency.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

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.

Tasmin Little

Tasmin Little, Naked Violin, Portsmouth Square Tower, June 24th

Post concert delirium might not be the best condition in which to sit and write a review but, there again, not many concerts induce such a thing at this level. This might be going to be the best review I've ever given anything.

The Square Tower is an historic little pile in Old Portsmouth that has been put to various naval and penitentiary uses in the past including a gunpowder store. I'm sure lesser reviewers might stumble on the observation that it might never have contained anything as potentially explosive as one lady and a 1708 Strad but you know I wouldn't do such a thing.

The concert space here held 100 seats and became candlelit with Tasmin possibly in the very frock pictured here on a small stage. A quick Telemann ditty led us into an explanation of the many difficult techniques demanded by Paul Patterson's Luslawice Variations, which included remarkable picking with the left hand while bowing with the right, harmonics played with the little finger placed lightly higher up the note played, bouncing the bow on the bridge, all that dead easy double-stopping and more. Spare and sometimes bleak in its Eastern European way, it was still a mesmering performance and a fine advert for difficult contemporary music and a huge exploration of the things a violin can be made to do.

In a change to the programme, Tasmin explained that a transcription of a guitar piece by Albeniz, Leyenda from the Asturias suite, had proved popular on her very recent tour of Australia and so she gave us its British premiere. Dark and passionate and very Spanish, again it was captivating in a way that you make sure you don't miss a moment. Music doesn't last very long at all when played and listened to with such intensity.

So we arrived at the Bach and one had to think the Old Master had it all to do. Familiarity might work against him after two extraordinary and powerful novelties. Tasmin explained how Bach is regarded as a mathematically perfect composer but the whole point is that this technical brilliance carries a great emotional charge, too. She is wholeheartedly committed to a 'musical' performance rather than a technical one and the solo violin perhaps lends itself more to a breaking of restraint than the orderly patternings of keyboard music. So, of course, her approach is ideal to find the flourish and extravagance available in the baroque sonatas and that is exactly what happened. One should never have doubted the cigar-chomping old maestro. As was once said by Michael Bywater in a Sunday newspaper column, he flatters us by being of the same species. It was spell-binding and spine-tingling and all those things.

But that was only the first half. Perhaps she'll leave us alone in the second half. Some more Bach preceded a generous and entertaining Question and Answer session. She's got four violins, was it, but the Strad is on loan from the Royal Academy; her new release of the Elgar is conveniently the recording she's most proud of and, probably much to the chagrin of the 13 year old daughter, a mother was told that at that age, Tasmin was doing four hours of practice a day. I bet the poor girl said, Thanks, Taz, thank you very much.

But the perhaps the most blinding thing of all was the Melodie from the Bartok Sonata. Slow, haunting and hypnotic if not a bit disturbing. This was no jolly romp through the Classic FM canon she was serving up here. It was, if one can say, an illuminating set of some genuinely dark and difficult music that Tasmin is surely most interested in as an artist and I think we were grateful for that. Her enthusiasm for her subject has always been impressive. It's strange to think she does it all for money. Paganini might have had the devil in him but she goes for some alarming effects with such panache and can still deliver it all with infectious charm and a genuinely delighted smile. For all the despair and waste land that the Bartok might evoke, the unscheduled Ysaye 'Ballade' Sonata ended the set with spectacular verve. The superlatives run dry because words (especially mine) don't capture music particularly well at the best of times and this was something else.

You must go and see Tasmin Little whatever she's doing whenever you can but you'll be the lucky one if the performance near you is this solo presentation.

You don't see many concerts as good as this in a year. You don't see many concerts as good as this in a lifetime.

The Tallis Scholars

The Tallis Scholars, Portsmouth Cathedral, June 23rd

The acoustics of Portsmouth Cathedral have been explored to great effect over the years by the flamboyant baroque music of the Kammerensemble Koln, the Ensemble Clement Jannequin featuring the counter-tenor of Dominique Visse, the Bach Cantatas series under David Stanicliffe and, more recently, James Bowman and Catherine Bott. The Tallis Scholars seemed an ideal match for them as part of this year's Portsmouth Festvities, and so it conclusively was proved.

Their programme of Palestrina, Morales, Gibbons, Morley and Josquin des Prez might be varied to the educated and sophisticated ear but not necessarily to my more cloth-based devices. Nonetheless, it's difficult to see how any amount of education or expertise would make it sound any more heavenly or superb except that it would help differentiate between styles, personality and mood in this ancient music. While the Josquin Agnus Dei from Missa L'Arme Homme might be more gorgeously poignant and the Gibbons Hosanna more celebratory, the prevailing mood is that of a bright, unfolding eternity.

The subtle alto parts and continuo tenors sound fine and restrained in their places but it is, of course, the soaring top parts that carry the thrill and bravura of most of these pieces, most notably tonight as the light outside began to fade and the stage lights had more effect and it immediately became more intimate and evocative. This happened to be in the Morales Emendemus in melius immediately after the interval but whether that really was one level more glorious than the pieces in the first half or if it was a trick of the light is hard to say.

The best known piece, by us at least, was the Josquin, with which they ended with spectacular charm and poise rather than climactic drama. Apparently a simple composition based on a carillon leitmotif, it can't be quite as easy to achieve as it was made to sound, moving through its phases towards inevitable resolution. You can't hear it like that on any sort of hi-fidelity equipment, of course, and neither can such a choir be appreciated to such effect in the wider spaces of the Albert Hall at a greater distance from the action.

When sublimity is the object of the exercise, it's always going to be hard to exceed expectations but the Tallis Scholars, world renowned purveyors of any amount of such fare, didn't disappoint either, especially given the astute move of not beginning until 8pm to allow dusk to gather by the end. I'm not sure the cathedral would have shifted Evensong to allow them to start any earlier anyway.

But it was a treat for Portsmouth to have them here and if Tasmin Little delivers as much as she is expected to tomorrow night then the Portsmouth Festivities will have provided richly for its appreciative audience this year.

Just a Minute

I tell you what, the latest series of Just a Minute has taken the game into a new age. The games between Stephen Fry, Sue Perkins, Fi Glover and Paul Merton have been like a new superleague with no place for a hapless fall guy, previously a part taken by Kenneth Williams or Wendy Richards for comic effect and a lovable last place.

In olden days, the masterful tactician Clement Freud would pick off the points and start as a short-priced favourite every time he took part. One might expect Stephen to have it all his own way now but there are no easy games any more, with these contests veering towards a real game of erudition and quick thinking rather than slapstick histrionics which, of course, was only another word for the scientific study of the past.

Stephen is genuinely trying to win as if he thinks he ought to but against opposition of this standard, he doesn't have it his own way. They are all brilliant, with vocabulary and the ability to cover a wide range of subjects that is a tribute to the educational standards that served the generation they come from as well as their own wit and natural talent. And it hasn't lost any of its sense of fun in the process, it's just become more the game as it was originally conceived and is the better for it.

We've been told about 'dumbing down' in the media for a long time now, how things have been stupidized and how everyone makes verbs out of adjectives but it seems this old warhorse of a programme has been, erm, 'taken to the next level.'

And, while lauding Radio 4, which isn't always my default station of choice, the season of Terence Rattigan plays has been tremendous, too. He was a more serious, and better, dramatist than I had realized and I'm grateful that I was given the chance to chance upon them and find out for myself.

Lds & Gnlmn, I give you The BBC. Raise your glasses.

Tamar Yoseloff - The City with Horns

Tamar Yoseloff, The City with Horns (Salt)

The City with Horns is the title of the middle of three sections to Tamar Yoseloff's new book which is an involving account of the life of Jackson Pollock. We also see Rothko, Kerouac and Ginsberg among the maniac, generically-styled beats all having their wild times as well as Frank O'Hara, the nice, sensible one.Pollock is macho, atavistic and potentially dangerous. Yoseloff's achievement is to express him in such detached and yet vivid poems. In the aftermath of his turbulent life, his paintings are,

the way the galaxy might look to a man stranded

in space, before science and logic takes hold.

Either side of this central section are poems called City Winter and Indian Summer. The first contains the more successful poems, for me Invisible Nearby Sea taking the unpromising theme of sitting next to a fat bloke on a bus and making something quite special from it. Their proximity leads the two passengers to some imagined recognition of each other's background,

And he will sense that I carry

the stagnant air of shuttered rooms, stalled lifts,

the slow creep of complacency. But still

it rises from tarmac to find us, clings

to our skin: that saline longing

for somewhere else.

Blackwork is about embroidery that mourns a lost lover to charming sixteenth century effect and City Winter itself is a fine meditation with a satisfying sense of loss.

Perhaps in other places the observation is a little prosaic, the Mannequins on 7th Street or the seemingly mundane thoughts on Stamps that might or might not be recovered by a nice ending. The third section involves a fair amount of poetic fading, losing and escaping, the highlight being Jetty, which turns out to be considerably better than Peter Doig's painting once you've googled it but both capture the increasing dark, the reducing view, the turning in on oneself that both nighttime and ageing inevitably bring.

It's a considerable book, evocative and confidently made. It is urban poetry with various hints of glamour and degradation, in each sense of the word.

Katy Evans-Bush - Egg Printing Explained

Katy Evans-Bush, Egg Printing Explained (Salt)

Following up the debut, Me and the Dead, KEB's new book perhaps extends her range from the spectacular, expansive stories into a variety of further forms.

Thibault's Ribbon is representative of the book in the way that it brings together the exotic with the ordinary in an account of the poet Gerard de Nerval taking his pet lobster for a walk. And it is such synchromesh of everyday and extraordinary, expansive and economical, perhaps even passionate and ironic that makes one wonder if the Anglo-American style is a mixture of American panache and English restraint. But I wouldn't want to make any such claim.

The larger scale, broader poems here are most engaging in The Desiring of Practically Everything, a look back on some gauche adolescent attitudes, and Forth in July, in which time stands still at a moment of alarm in childhood. Both are memorable and successful poems but my preference is for the more formal and compact You're in Bedlam, which takes the idea that all previous conversations are recorded in the surroundings and walls of a room,

The noise is in the walls. We hear it daily,

recorded by the bricks we live among.

Our curtains hang on tuning rods. No, really.

You'll screech for ages when your song is sung,

and, The Night is Dark, a build up of neuroses and inner trauma in the small hours that at first I read in my dyslexic glance as 'You're made of what you're afraid of ', and I wish it still was but it's,

You've made what you're afraid of.

It's a poem I'd love to have written myself if I hadn't done a very similar thing once and praise doesn't come much higher than that.

But between these poems, and outside of them stylistically, are a pirate Prufrock pastiche, some post-concrete wordplay in On a Note by Louise Bourgeoise and Meditation on a Freudian's Lip. It seems like only last year that another Salt book ended on a quiet evocation of Hammershoi, and in fact it was. That exhibition must have been crawling with poets. And I might reach my limit with cerebral references at dear m magritte - 'it says it isn't / a pipe/ but it is.' Well, I thought the conceptual point was that it wasn't a pipe but a picture of a pipe but once I have to go to the next level and consider whether it is a pipe again or if it always was, I remember that I don't like short poems, think that three lines is never enough and move quickly on.

But with The Mermaid, What's Time, Conneticut Postcard and more, there's plenty to enjoy here, carrying forward the impetus of Me and the Dead impressively and divertingly.

Royal Ascot

One day I'll tip a real bookiebashing bonanza here but after the Derby saw the selection not quite get into it, the warning remains that flat racing is not an area of any expertise here. I wish I'd drawn attention to the Champions League Final coup ahead of the event but putting football punditry on here really would be lowering the tone.

Goldikova is a living legend and apparently generously priced at 13/8 to beat Canford Cliffs in Tuesday's opener. If she can get us off to a good start then the yankee will become a warm ticket in my pocket.

Hoof It is not an elegantly named horse but, at 7/1 in the Wokingham Handicap, is apparently potentially better than a handicapper and might be running in Group races by the end of the season.

Sole Power's win at Haydock was one race I have seen this season and was impressive enough. In the hope that it was not a peak but a stepping stone to higher things, we might include him in as he bids to add the King's Stand Stakes (6/1) as the sprinting division might not be in a vintage year.

And Fame and Glory, without being the out and out stayer that one might prefer for the Gold Cup, could be the class act and not therefore need to be. at 15/8 today. At this stage, on the Sunday evening, it's entrancing to see how those prices multiply together but if I'm allowed four winners in a flat season, perhaps they could all happen in the same week.

Dodd and Muldoon

Dodd and Muldoon

Just as I’m wondering
if I’m not blundering
into another solipsistic
mistake all of my own,

I’m not sure if I find it odd
that crazy-haired Ken Dodd
looks not a little like, impressionistic-
ally, like Paul Muldoon.

Sequitur or non-sequitur

I don't know if it is due to any ostensible decline in educational standards over the last few decades but opportunities to feel superior and/or exasperated at the use of language or blurred thinking broadcast on the BBC come thicker and faster now than ever before and there simply isn't time to bemoan or celebrate them all as one joyously puts on one's pedantic cloak and inserts the tyrant's monocle to scrutinize them.
But this week in an interview a representative of the Olympic Games organizers- I'm sure it wasn't Lord Seb Coe, though- I heard someone explain that the reason there were so many people disappointed that they didn't get the tickets they applied for was because 'too many people had applied for the most popular events'.
Yes, but.... if they hadn't then surely those events wouldn't have been the most popular and some others would. And if everyone had applied for the Graeco-Roman Wrestling, the Cribbage and the Su Doku then it would have been the more remarkable that seats would be available on the day for the 100 metres final to see Usain Bolt inevitably take a few more fractions off his world record.
It's amazing how much people are prepared to pay to go to see these events. They should be grateful that the public are as willing as they are to pay it and be so pleased to do so at the same time. The least we can do is admire them for it rather than criticize them for applying with such dedication and in such numbers.

Quiz - Ten Novels

Just like last week's game with poets and poems, identify if you will ten novelists and, if you feel like it, the novels.

David Green's Books

My friend Alan's daughter got a new, better digital camera. I've thought of getting a digital camera a few times but always demurred, not really seeing the need of one in the same way as it turns out that I'm in a select category of highly respected celebrities- that is Paul Merton, Danny Baker and me- that don't have a mobile phone.

But Alan said Jessica didn't want this clapped out bit of yesteryear technology any more so, rather than clog his dustbin up with it, did I want it. Well, I'm a very fussy and select, high-class kind of bloke so I wasn't going to take it off his hands until he showed me how it worked. But Alan is a very good friend to have, he's one of the best I've got or ever had and we like each other very much and so he did and so, but he's my friend, not yours, so forget it. Needing something to take a photograph of, this is my best study of one of my bookshelves.

There's the Shakespeare biographies on the top shelf, some poetry criticism and essays, Ray Carver's stories, etc. If you like such pictures of other people's books as much as I do, then you'll be matching them up to your own.

Thanks, Alan. It looks like it might be good fun.

Derby Preview

Last year I received an e-mail to ask if I was alright, the feeling being that if I hadn't posted a Derby Preview then there must be something wrong. Well, I'm a jumping man, as it were, these days, and I'm not sure if I ever did do a Derby Preview but I was moved by the concern. And, to put all minds at rest, I'll try my little best to solve the Derby puzzle now.

The Queen's horse, Carlton House, is a very uneasy favourite tonight at 5/2. Whether that's anything to do with this week's foot injury worries is hard to say but this time last week he was not going to go off at any price longer than 13/8 so you can't back him with any confidence. I believe in the ultimate free market of the betting ring more than any other clue and you don't go in at 5/2 if you thought all the evidence suggested the horse might go off at 5/4. The royal wedding made royalists of more of us than would care to admit it and even though I was at the cricket that day, I was as bewitched by Pippa Middleton as any bloke who still has a pulse but betting on horse races ought to be more scientific than how nice the owner's grandson's wife's sister looks in a nice white frock. I'm sorry, but however often the Dante Stakes turns out to be the best Derby trial, and however much I have a quaint admiration for the Queen, I'm not being led by such queasy sentiment here.

The obvious alternative last week was Fabre's Pour Moi, when it shortened up from 7/1 to 4/1, which is out of the great sire Montjeu with, is it, Darshaan on the distaff side, and without reading any form at all it began to look like a second favourite's race. But now Blue Square will let you have 6/1 and they are never knowingly generous.

If any jockey has inherited the controversial mantle of Lester Piggott, it is surely Kieren Fallon and then some. I don't remember Lester ever having to go to court to get his Derby ride but I'm sure he would have done if he had to in his less litigious days. He wants to ride Recital badly. Well, not quite. He wants to ride him well.

Unlike jump racing, where you want to evaluate how exposed horses have run over courses and distances, the big money flat is much more about breeding and here is another Montjeu progeny, one big clue, and Fallon is giving us another, rather less gracefully than when Steve Cauthen used to guide us very openly towards the pay out window on Henry Cecil horses in the 1980's. But, we take note of what we decide to deem significant. I'm the tipster in form having seen beyond any doubt that Barcelona were 3-1 better than Manchester United last week and I'm thus richer by exactly the amount I expected to be.

Recital wins the Derby tomorrow. Get on.

Unlikely Lookalike

On my old website I collected a set of vaguely similar-looking types which were me, Salman Rushdie, Shakespeare and Stanley Kubrick, to which we then added Mark Everett, the singer from eels.

It was no more than the merest bit of fun and a riff on the bald head and/or beard theme.

This week in the office, as happens, we began casting a film of our weird existence in there with actors taking our parts. Carole played by Judi Dench, etc. Leif wanted to be played by some glamorous young actress I'd never heard of but we don't need to go into that.

And then, eventually, Andrea cast Russell Brand in the role of me. Well, okay, then. I can see some connection in the scruff-pup image and wordy flights of fancy if you will but not quite so much the role of male tart and serial Lothario. Daniel said he'd never seen me look so pleased before. And it's a long time since I have been so I'm not surprised at that.

Quiz - Ten Poets

Identify, if you will, ten poets - and the ten poems, too, if you want to- from these fragments.

Send in the answers if you feel like it or tell me if they were too easy or too hard for you.

Martha's

Farewell, then, Martha's. Portsmouth's town centre pub closed its doors for the last time on Monday.

I hadn't been in it for a few years now but, heaven knows, it was a big part of my life at various times over the last 30 years.

Just around the corner from where I worked when first arriving here, it became a home from home, scene of some tremendous pool games and source of the occasional betting coup. We were the pool team for a while, or a big part of it. We were educated in the dark arts of dominos at the end of the bar by Cass Campbell and Kenny Jones, old boys who knew a thing or two that we could never quite fathom.

The most spectacular bet was when everybody was on Leysh in the Cambridgeshire at 33/1, but one Saturday night I announced that Sagace would win the Arc, which it did the next day at about 8/1.

I made my one and only appearance as a strippagram in there in 1986, was it. So it was no surprise that a few years later it had become a flagship gay bar, no doubt seeking to relive the beauty of that seminal evening.

After that I was lucky enough to be part of a regularly succesful team in the Sunday night quiz and it was a regular Friday night after work hangout.

'Gin and tonic, please.'

'Oooh, I make the best gin and tonics in Portsmouth.'

(I daresay you do, young man. I daresay you do.)

It was never less than flattering to catch the eye of a good-looking young boy in there. But I'm sorry. I wish I could have explained.

So, one's life closes down behind you as you pass through it. The last time I was in there was probably the Thursday lunchtime I beat Clifford 8-0 at pool and that was the last time we ever played pool at lunchtime. Once, having the place to ourselves, I realized we were at that moment, Portsmouth's leading gay attraction, knocking the reds and yellows around until one of us happened to be left on the black. Any hopeful homosexual turning up with with their Rough Guide would have taken one look at us and sniffed, 'Is that it? Portsmouth's not what it was.'

But time for us seems to be linear rather than circular so we're not likely to be back in there with Billy Ocean and Five Star on the video juke box, the great Ken and Jane Urquhart as our hosts, the sulky girls turning up because a Navy ship was back in; the camp young men with their little tins of vaseline or the dungareed girls swagging pints of lager are just as unlikely to be there again as the drag act or the dubiously stained green baize of that hallowed arena of tactical and technical mishap.

There would be a poem in it if I hadn't just used up all my best memories of it.

Thanks for the memories, Martha's. All our yesterdays are gone with your famous name.