View from the Boundary

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

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

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

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

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