Love at the Bottom of the Sea

http://www.houseoftomorrow.com/calendar.php

I only just caught this in time. 25th April at the Royal Festival Hall.

It's become something to look out for on a two-year cycle now, though, The Magnetic Fields tour and album.

So, get in before its too late. It will be my third Magnetic Fields concert and, for a devoted admirer, it is an unmissable occasion.

Which did make me count up who else gets into the elite group of artists I've seen three times. It's an unlikely list with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra presumably heading it with I don't know how many Portsmouth Guildhall concerts. Andrew Motion would be next with 5, then Tasmin Little, Sean O'Brien, Tom Paulin and perhaps John Cooper-Clarke on 3. Elvis Costello, The Clash, Paul Muldoon, Natalie Clein, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, The Tallis Scholars and Rod Clements (once with Lindisfarne and once on his own) are definitely among those seen twice.

I think there might be people who have seen me three times but I'd be the first to acknowledge that it wasn't in order to see me that they had gone.

BSO - Sibelius and Dvorak

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Karill Karabits, Gautier Capucon (cello), Weber, Dvorak and Sibelius, Portsmouth Guildhall, Jan 27

I wouldn't be the first to be enthused about nationalism or even nationalism in music but one can't help but be enthused by impressive landscapes of sound and with a rising star Ukrainian conductor and a dashing young cellist from France, this evening's concert was internationalist and well-travelled rather than in any way brooding on the dark side of patriotism.

Weber's overture to Oberon has survived the opera it was written for and provided a lively, perhaps even capricious, waking up exercise before the real business got underway.

Karabits is not a flashy or demonstrative conductor, quite rightly doing his job in rehearsal and preparation rather than seeing the performance as his moment. The Dvorak Cello Concerto is a majestic piece of rousing passion and sonorous reflection. Inevitably describing both wide open American spaces as well as echoing pieces like the Slavonic Dances from back home in old Bohemia, it reaches a bigger climax at the end of its first movement than in the last, which moves through more lyrical and solitary passages before the final flourish. Gautier Capucon's best moments came with the more delicate and, I daresay, technical demands of quick fingering and deftness of touch but his cello made a fine sound through all its paces and the piece was a big success, the boy apparently enjoying it as much as the audience.

Sibelius 5 is a symphony I know as well as any but that still doesn't qualify me to comment in any semblance of a professional capacity. The last time I heard it was at the Proms the season before last when it was a little overshadowed by having to come after a sensational Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. It was better done here, judged on a couple of points but whether those are in some way due to the venues and where I was within them is hard to say. Closer to the action in Portsmouth than London, the broad sweep of Sibelius' masterpiece (and I mean one of his several) was more involving here. I did wonder if in the early passages it was sharp and a fraction more frenetic than is required but the brass, which is very important in the final movement, were exactly right as was the judgement of tempi there. The chill Scandinavian winds in the strings and the expanse of forest and cold, clear lakes was delivered authentically and convincingly. One can't fail to be moved by Sibelius and my contention that it is impossible not to like him has only been challenged once by someone who said, well, I know someone who doesn't like him. But there is always one and that's fine.

It's some time since I last went to see the BSO in their winter programme at Portsmouth Guildhall but it's not likely to be as long until the next time. They look like a young orchestra in good form -or, yes, it might just be me who is now older and mostly out of form. It's a shame that the days are gone when a contemporary piece was included in each concert. I remember James MacMillan, most magnificently, and Dominic Muldowney from the year when that charm offensive was tried. But there will always be a place for a good orchestra playing reliable standard repertoire and it is to be hoped that the Bournemouth Symphony, whose lorry's arrival into Portsmouth was witnessed and applauded by me from my office window this afternoon, will keep on bringing them here. They'd be missed if they ever didn't.

John Burnside - Black Cat Bone

John Burnside, Black Cat Bone (Cape Poetry)

It's still 2011 on this website. With this book winning both the Forward and T.S. Eliot Prizes I thought it ought to be looked at. I'm very glad I did. It is an excellent book and a not unworthy winner of the double.

In many ways one can bracket it with the Harsent and O'Brien collections of last year, as part of a middle-aged man syndrome of poetry haunted by loss or demons and darkness. But in the same way that Bach, Handel and, say, Telemann might sound very similar to the uninitiated, attentive listening can differentiate them. Here one might find more possibility or suggestion of redemption in Burnside than O'Brien's unreconciled sense of loss or Harsent's dark side.

The opening poem, The Fair Chase, is full of absence and searching but at least feels an,

infinite kinship, laid down in the blood

against the sway

of accident and weather

It introduces some of the recurrent images in the collection- vellum, billhooks and ice, for examples. 'Vellum' in the first line here is an adjective, suggesting a richness that 'medieval' in On the Fairytale Ending also does, redolent of heraldry and pageantry in,

broken gold

and crimson in the medieval

beechwoods

The collection maintains a steady, measured rhythm and glorious texture throughout. It's not difficult to see how it appealed to two different sets of prize judges.

'Hooks and eyes' recur as a metaphor as tiny binding forces in a world knitted intricately together but with its griefs and breakage a part of it, too.

Loved and Lost is a surprisingly literal title to an outstanding poem among several that is otherwise more allusive, ending brilliantly,

till we admit

that love divulged is barely love at all:

only the slow decay of a second skin

concocted from the tinnitus of longing.

If poetry often takes much of its power from the ability to imply meaning from contradictory ideas, Burnside makes impressive work of sustaining and resilience from the fragility of being and the inevitability of loss.

Another disconcerting title, Oh No, Not My Baby, knowingly lifted from the Goffin and King standard pop song, has not the potency of such relatively cheap music but the loving and moving sincerity of something more profound done with disarming fluency.

Neoclassical might be where we think we are reading Sean O'Brien except that closer reading finds a somewhat gentler mood in it somewhere, just fractionally, in the accumulation of something like acceptance or not quite acquiescence but not resistance either.

This is a beautiful book, fully deserving of its awards and I have to urge you to read it as a paragon example of what is best about poetry at the moment. 2011 produced some very fine books of poems. I won't revise my choice of the Harsent as being my favourite but the selection would have been even more difficult to make if I had read this book in time. I don't know what 2012 has in store - I believe we are promised the Collected O'Brien which will be a useful career restrospective- but when I notice this year getting underway, I'll let you know.

Dawn Moon

Dawn Moon

Left over from the night,
you’d think,
a two-thirds moon
is sharp above
the morning air
and clearer
than the science
that explains
how it turns,
or doesn’t turn,
so that
the same face faces us,
the other always
turned away.

David Green (Books) Merchandising

I sometimes wonder if David Green (Books) ought to issue slightly more than it does just to prove the imprint is not dormant.

I wondered whether to produce a free leaflet of Greatest Hits, for which I picked 14 poems from the booklets but those who really want the poems should have them already and it might be a superfluous title.

So, then I passed a place in town that makes up t-shirts with logos on and I thought I might ask how much a yellow t-shirt with the Last of the Great Dancers title on the front might cost. I might get myself a couple of XL, which is what fits me these days.

So, let me know if you'd like one. Tell me what size between S and XXL you think you are and I'll see if they can do them for a tenner each, plus it will be p&p of a couple of quid unless I'm due to see you in the near future.

British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000

I remember a story from maybe the 1980's where Bob Dylan was trying to order a copy of every record that featured a version of one of his songs. I don't know how successful the project was, or how he would have known.

I ordered this book because I found that I was mentioned in it. British Poetry Magazines, 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of 'Little Magazines', compiled by David Miller and Richard Price. It is much more bibliography than history and, as I thought, my mention is a listing of Allusions magazine that I co-edited issue 1 of, at Lancaster University in 1979. So, not worth having for that alone but it should be interesting to look through.
However, it doesn't compare with such things as the issue of Navis magazine, a very glorious career highspot in which I was listed as a contributor on the same back cover as Thom Gunn was listed as a previous contributor. I don't mind being no more than a footnote.

This parody of John Dean's style will fulfil the remit of a forthcoming Portsmouth Poetry Society evening on Parodies,

On Being a Footnote

with apologies to John Dean

At last, I am a footnote
in the history of verse,
a role that suits me well
and I have no need to rehearse.

It’s not for me the glamour
of the life of a laureate.
A small, marginal mention
is the most that I will get.

There will not be a movement
attributed to Green
as my career went straight from
young upstart to has been.

The pursuit of all such glory
was sadly never my game
and so it’s only in a footnote
that you will find my name.

Blogs are dinosaurs

Or so says Todd Swift, signing off from Eyewear.
I'd give you the link but what's the point. He's given up.
But I thought I'd stick with it for the time being, not get a Twitter account and continue reading books rather than get a kindle. I'll still listen to the radio rather than podcasts.
I don't listen to many of my old LP's these days but there's a hardcore of vinyl fans who won't have it any other way.
There is nothing that looks as silly and dated as those who went with a transient trend. Ask Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
Carry on.

The Complete Larkin

Philip Larkin, ed. Archie Burnett, The Complete Poems (Faber)

Absolutely not.

I just caught Archie Burnett being interviewed on Radio 4's review programme talking about the job he's done on repackaging Larkin again. That is not a tautology, I'm afraid. I meant to say both 'repackaging' and 'again'.

Larkin is somehow accused of having published little and even being 'constipated' and the discussion wondered if he might have been surprised to find that his Complete Poems now run to 768 pages.

I expect he probably would, and mainly because he decided at a very early stage which of his poems were finished and warranted publication and that he didn't think that every little verse he put on a Christmas card was meant for the oeuvre, the supposed 'legacy', the 'work'.

That might have been one of the reasons, the quality control, that brought him such tributes as being regarded as the finest poet of his generation when, at a very early stage in his career, it did.

There is really no need to buy this book if you have Larkin's poems in any of their other iterations already. Why does one need an eighth, ninth or tenth edition of his best poems taking up shelf space when one has them so many times already. Burnett's arguments in justifying this unnecessary volume were specious at best and nothing that he said in praise of the poet justified it and there was certainly no need to make improper remarks about the work of Trevor Tolley, whose imaginings of which records might have formed Larkin's jazz collection might have gone a little bit too far already.

If academics can find nothing better to do then it must be time that there were fewer of them. This is very likely to be the best collection of poems published in 2012 but that is not the point.

Lips & Bananas Restored

My painting, Lips & Bananas, has now been restored with acrylic paint over the flaking yellow gouache bananas. Except acrylic paint seems to catch the light so it might need photographing in daylight.And it is now designated as Lips & Bananas, (2007, gouache, acrylic and permanent marker on canvas, restored 2012).

Natalie Clein

I think it's a review of Natalie's Kodaly CD on Amazon in which the release is praised for not trying to sell itself with pictures of the musician on the cover. It wouldn't need to, and although it might be said that her other records do feature her draped over the cello or looking nice, that's mainly because that's what she looks like and Julian Lloyd Webber doesn't.

And I'd like to establish from the start that I haven't bought all of Natalie's CD's for the pictures, either. I have discs of the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and I didn't buy them because he looks gorgeous.

I've seen her two times. The first was in Fairford Church a few years ago now when she filled the cosy acoustics with Bach Suites with an unforgettable tone. At another end of the spectrum, in the Cadogan Hall Prom this year, it was passsionate Tavener and idiosyncratic Gubaidalina. You can't choose between such ends of a scale but both were tremendous. And so, finding that her recording career so far began rather more ordinarily with Brahms, Schubert and Rachmanninov could have been slightly underwhelming.

The Brahms Schubert set from 2004 includes the Schubert sonata for arpeggione which my forensic instincts deduce must have been what she played in Fairford because it says here that it is the only surviving piece written for that instrument that was invented, came and went, in a decade or two, only having had time to entice Schubert to write any surviving music for it. Although the Brahms sonatas have their moments and provide eloquent discourse on their velvety way, it is the Schubert that charms the most.

The Romantic Cello looks at first sight like an alarmingly Classic FM marketing exercise but I'm sure the Chopin and Rachmanninov are given thorough seeing-to's, doing exactly what it says on the tin. So far, this is the disc I can find the least to like about but it's up against a couple of sensational recordings and it can be the case that those things that don't impress immediately reveal their secrets and power given further hearings and so I'm not dismissing it yet. It does cross one's mind that cello sonatas are not solo pieces but accompanied by piano and both Chopin and Rachmanninov are primarily regarded as piano composers and so I wonder if Natalie doesn't share the spotlight with the pianist, Charles Owen, rather more than the credits suggests.

I don't regard myself as much of an Elgar fan. With Purcell, Tallis, Byrd, even Handel if you will, and then William Boyce and any John Taveners or Taveners around, I couldn't promise the Worcester man a place in my Top 6 English composers, but the account of the Concerto from 2007 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Vernon Handley, who, as I have just checked, left us forever the following year, would be enough to convince anybody. Like the Bruch violin concerto, the piece has become one of those standards that familiarity can almost make you love and not notice both at the same time because it is taken for granted but this reading is sensual, beguiling and very wonderful indeed. Natalie says in her note it took her ten years before she felt she was ready to record it but then the moment came. And it was worth the wait. There is stacks of thought and feeling in it, both from Elgar, Natalie and presumably Handley, too. It's not very often I place an order on Amazon for a CD to be sent to someone else but I did it with this one.

Not only that, but the Salut d'Amour and Chanson de Matin are beautifully realized, too, and valued here as much more than fillers.

Which leaves us with the latest release of Kodaly on Hyperion. And, finally, something dark and dangerous. While placings in the Classic FM chart no doubt pay the bills and afford a nice new frock or two, it must be the genuine artistic purpose of the real musician to take on pieces like this half hour solo sonata of C20th Hungarian 'sturm und drang' . When German Romantics thought of the idea of such 'storm and stress' in the late C18th, it wasn't their fault but they had no idea what the C20th was going to be like. Was it Theodore Adorno who pronounced that 'no poetry could be written' after such things as the holocaust or the 'World' Wars. Well, wrong again, you silly old Marxist theorist. You didn't realize quite how hard and resilient we could be, even as early as 1915. And here, Natalie goes into that darkness, as Tasmin did with the Bartok last summer, and brings us shocking richness to show that we are not finished yet and have somehow come out on the other side, sadder no doubt, but intact. Much of the credit in this case goes to Zoltan Kodaly, of course, but it is to be hoped that Natalie will go on and record more of this part of the repertoire as well as the lyrical Romantic pieces.

And if it were possible to place an advance order for her recording of the Bach Suites, to put next to Pablo Casals and Paul Tortellier, then I would but Amazon don't have the facility to take orders for things that haven't been done yet.

Derek Mahon - Raw Material

Derek Mahon, Raw Material (Gallery Press)

Poetry in translation is an unsatisfactory business. Poetry only really exists in its original language and is immediately a different thing once translated. However, it would be insular and narrow-minded to only read poetry in languages that one was fluent enough to appreciate it in. I like to think that I can read Baudelaire in the original but I'm sure I'm missing out on quite a bit.

Derek Mahon's introductory note to this book distinguishes between the 'literal' approach of Ted Hughes, in which much is sacrificed to stay true to the words rather than reproducing the spirit of a piece, and Mahon's own approach, which is to provide his 'version'. I think both are flawed and the whole enterprise is too difficult to get right without learning the first language. And that is a big undertaking.

Not only that, but we get more of Mahon's alter ego poet, Gopal Singh, here- a poet of his own invention to make faux translations of, just in case translation wasn't a suspect enough process already. Mahon's not alone in having an imaginary friend like that. Last year I tried to find more poems by Liviu Campanu before discovering that he was invented by Patrick McGuinness and even I, for whatever reason, had a small number of poems in magazines some thirty years ago under the name Detroit Jackson. I don't want to talk about that.

But I'm glad to say that this is an enjoyable book in spite of all that with versions of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and others, but mainly for the series of poems, Sextus and Cynthia, from Propertius, a Roman writing to his girlfriend at one time passionately recalling a night spent together but also missing her, being suspected by her of more than he says he was guilty of and at times jealously warning against the attentions of others, like,

some dickhead adept at sexy talk.

It is in a word like 'dickhead' that a literal translation and Mahon's modern vernacular rendering can be seen to diverge. One day perhaps I'll get a volume of Propertius and check which word he used there. I'm not sure it was one we covered in 'O' level Latin.

View from the Boundary

Happy New Year.
I remember running in a race of several laps of the track at school once, it might only have been a 1500 metres, but the teacher said afterwards that he noticed my body language going into the last lap saying, 'oh, no, not again'. And that's very much how it felt going back into the office this morning. The midwinter break is often the longest break of the year for me these days and so the most accustomed I get to not having to deal with the dreary routine of it all, the same people still behaving in the same old ways, the same grinding processes to be gone through. But, there again, by some miracle, one is still employed. One never asked to be born but one has to be a bit philosophical and can't help but see the point of Larkin's almost grateful resignation to it in Toads Revisited.
There are still small joys to be had and even the often grim edifice of professional sport can yet provide them. The New Year racing recovered my Christmas losses before I made a clattering error that only went to prove that a fool and his money will eventually be parted but the gloriousness of Kauto Star makes such things very bearable. And the tedious complaints of Arsene Wenger only served to somehow augment a tremendous fight back by Fulham last night.
I don't know how long Geoffrey Hill has been under consideration for a knighthood but it's encouraging to note that as soon as this website features him, he gets it. I'm really not convinced about the honours list - what it means or how it matters- and it is those awards that contain the words 'British Empire' that need the most looking at. But if anybody can wear a knighthood with the necessary gravitas, it must be Sir Geoffrey.
However, it doesn't make the poems any better or the poet any greater. If anybody was thinking of nominating me, I wouldn't want to discourage them as I'd appreciate the opportunity to quietly turn it down. I wouldn't go through all the rigmarole that The Beatles went through, do the photo opportunity and then hand it back. I'd save Her Majesty's time and trouble and let someone else have it who might appreciate it. Jeremy Clarkson perhaps.
Okay, then. Let's go round again. There'll be the Swindon Literature Festival, the Portsmouth Festivities, the Proms, the Cheltenham Festivals of both Literature and horse racing and books and concerts that I'm sure will make 2012 memorable. But 2011 was tremendous. If 2012 is half as good, it will be fine.