Salonen - Out of Nowhere

Salonen, Out of Nowhere, Leila Josefowicz (Deutsche Grammophon)

For at least the first four minutes of the Violin Concerto on this new disc of music by Esa-Pekka Salonen, one is ready to be thrilled by any amount of exhilarating violin skittering and shattering of itself over a dreamy, impressionistic, lightweight accompaniment exploring a brightly-lit palette of sounds.
The second movement is restrained and thoughtful and then the third more deranged. Listening to it more closely, I'm not regretting buying it now after three or four hearings than I was at first. There is no doubting Leila's immense energy and technical mastery or that of the piece that Salonen wrote for her to play. But it used to occur to me quite regularly when some of my contemporaries enthused about various rock music guitar heroes that just because you can play like that doesn't mean you have to and it's up to me to decide whether it gives me any pleasure to listen to it. This is difficult music and in places quite noisy. I'm sure it would be tremendous in the concert hall to see it being done but I don't necssarily get excited just because the music I'm listening to seems to expect me to be.
The final movement of the concerto works its way to a bursting climax that ends on a more morose note and, it would appear, is a statement of the composer's unresolved world view. I am grateful to him for it without sharing all of it. But I'm enjoying it more on fourth hearing than I did before. It is undoubtedly a fine piece by a major composer of my generation.  It's just that one can't be too careful reading newspaper reviews when the impression given by the reviewer is written from their point of view but you read their words from your own.
The 19.15 of Nyx is an orchestral piece definitely on a scale too big for me. I don't really buy this sort of thing apart from in the sense that I order it from Amazon in error. It's possibly things appearing in the night, bad dreams or anything like that but the more it imposes on us with its brass and dramatic intentions, the less I'm impressed.
You take your chances. It would be a dull world in which every record you bought outranked the previous one in one's list of all time favourites. I'm glad that I now know about Leila Josefowicz. 

The Forward Book of Poetry 2013

The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 (Forward)

Questions of Good, Better and Best would be the ultimate aim of literary criticism if it were possible to decide. Thirty-odd years ago at Lancaster, the Stylistics and Criticism course stopped at 'Interpretation' and refused to go anywhere near the next step of 'Evaluation'. It seemed at the time that the English Department were withholding some precious secret from the undergraduates but now I can see that they probably didn't know either. Sometimes it would be preferable to simply enjoy poems but it's difficult not be quietly wondering 'if it's any good', trapped forever in a nightmare of critical judgement.
After that, it's only a short step to making comparisons between poems, poets and, in the end, anthologies.
I can't help but put this book in a different division to the Salt Best of British book. I'm sure that is a heinous, wicked and elitist thing to do but I'll have to compound the felony by adding that this might be seen as a collection of poems by poets whereas the Salt selection is a book of creative writing course graduates.
There are, of course, good and less good in both books and every reader will take different things from two surveys of the year in poetry in these islands. But once they start awarding prizes or using the word 'best' in their titles, with whatever caveats, then the idea of putting some things ahead of others is embedded in the process and we are stuck with it.
Glyn Maxwell in expansive and nostalgic mood and Geoffrey Hill as love poet are two that immediately stand out here, with a less ambitious but equally striking poem, Open, by Kate Bingham also a ready hit for me. A couple I've seen and admired already, like Julia Copus and James Fenton and a litany of mostly easily recognizable names like Marilyn Hacker, Paul Durcan, Jane Yeh and Michael Longley make this a credible attempt at what might be something like the 'best' of what had been published in the year to July 2012. There's no attempt to show how admirably diverse the range of poems are, they've just issued prizes, a short list and some commendations.
Once I've settled on my own short list for the year and nominated my favourite poem and collection I might look forward to not deciding what was more worthy than what else for a while. I'm sure that is not the purpose for which poems get written. Well, I'm not completely sure in all cases, actually, but for the most part it would be better if they weren't.

Brian Wells - Opus 9

Brian Wells, Opus 9

Members of the Portsmouth Poetry Society joined together last Thursday at Trinity Methodist Church, Southsea, with family and friends of Brian Wells, who died earlier this year, aged 81.
The readings, music and tributes marked the launch of his book of poems, Opus 9, which had been produced in time for him to see just before he died. It was both a moving and fitting event to remember Brian who worked in visual arts as well as being a poet.
The book brings together a number of elements in his work,  his interest in challenging forms, war poetry, ancient lore and an awareness of tradition.
Time allows no time is one of a number of his cyclic poems here in which five haiku begin with the last line of the previous until the last line of the poem is also the first. Typically Brian in its insistence on stopping the moment but also in its observance of a complementary shape to do so within.
Unmoving but curious describes an encounter with a deer in woodland that 'swiftly disappeared',
its deer-shaped space leaving
a leafy hollow of silence 

Four poems on The Four Horsemen are grim encounters, accepting no comfort in the face of Death and his three unforgiving friends. Death Speaks begins,
Revere my sable panolpy
and rictus of my skull,
for I ride a tireless stallion
unsleeping through your night.

and there is no relief in the next four pages as Famine, Pestilence and War have their say, either.

The darkest moments are in this central section. While Autumn and a sense of endings are thematic to these last poems, it is elsewhere captured with a more relenting serenity although never without a suggestion of regret or loss. More than anything we have the expression of Brian's gentle humanity, his modest sensitivity and considered economy with words.
The feeling for tradition leads him, quite deliberately I think, to use some antiquated phrasing. Although clearly aware of and interested in modernist practice, he is more 'school of' an A.E. Housman or Ivor Gurney.
In an expertly edited book, Shattered Trees is a further statement of the horror of WW1 before ending on the perfect note with Old Winchester Hill, a love poem mainly to his wife, Sheila, but also to a favourite place. I can't think of another poet whose poems are so recognizably and sincerely their own. 

The Saturday Nap - Week Three

There are two things one can dwell on, looking through tomorrow's racing.

One is that Aiden O'Brien had a few options in the Racing Post Trophy at Doncaster but goes there single-handedly with Kingsbarns. The other is that Ruby Walsh rides at Chepstow when you might think the bigger prizes are at Aintree.

I backed Kingsbarns the other day and I'm not changing my mind on that. We have a similar top prospect opposed by some potentially very dangerous opponents under a different code in Wonderful Charm, Chepstow 3.40. It might not be your 'working man's price' but we are in safety first mode here, hoping to include this project in the generally successful run I'm having outside of it and so it is to be hoped that this horse is perhaps the main reason for Ruby to be going to Wales rather than Merseyside tomorrow.

BSO/Tasmin Little in Portsmouth

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Tasmin Little/Rubikis,
Brahms, Schubert, Stravinsky, Portsmouth Guildhall, October 26

The Portsmouth Guildhall accorded Tasmin Little and the BSO an ovation from the top end of their repertoire for a great evening of music featuring a welcome return for Tasmin Little.
The Brahms Violin Concerto was doing nicely enough thank you very much before Tasmin's cadenza in the slow movement grabbed one by the labels with some force and from then on seemed to be on a different level. Superb lightning fingerwork from Tasmin and a concerto that I think probably really does improve as it goes along certainly did tonight. It's always a pleasure and it had been worth it by half-time whatever the second half was going to do.
We were on safe ground with Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, poignant and shimmering with its touch of sturm und drang that forever makes one wonder what the third and fourth movements were going to do. It stops where Schubert left it, perhaps not quite as eerily as Bach's Art of Fugue in which he leaves us just as he is signing his name in the final theme, but nonetheless it is an unintentionally open ending. I mean the boy was only 31.
But the real bonus for me was the much less familiar Firebird by Igor Stravinsky (above), that I had certainly not gone specifically to hear.
By turns skittering and (perhaps) pellucid with harp and woodwind the verisimilitude of a bird, it made my neighbour in C11 jump out of that seat when we reached the identifiably Igor riot in a brief middle section. But then, the bird's dying embers are gorgeously described with a song on the cello, a plaintive repeated riff on the harp and the tuba over at the back inserting a mute that brought tears to one's eyes just to see it. The programmatic music comes to a wonderful climax to finish a monumental piece that was a revelation to me and a tremendous finale to another fine concert. Get there if you can to see them. They are an orchestra in top form.
I think I said that the last time I saw them.

Reform Section 5

http://reformsection5.org.uk/

I'm not quite so much one for campaigns, petitions and the like as I might have been when once just a little bit cross without much cause to be when I was a teenager. I suppose it was seeing how naff student politics was that put me off it for so long.
But I was genuinely surprised to see how far we had allowed the particularly pious strain of 'correctness' to take us in Vicky Coren's piece in The Observer last Sunday when she highlighted the Reform Section 5 campaign. And so I'm back in it as far as this goes.
Blimey.

Don't you dare mention a ham sandwich in my hearing. As a vegetarian, it would seem I'm well within my rights to be offended enough to get you put away.
I'm not saying I would. Just don't push me too far. Is all.

I don't know if we can do much but please try to do anything you can.

Spot the Ball

One of the miseries involved in football in my childhood was how impossible it was to 'spot the ball' in these daft competitions.
And so, I've rather inexpertly scrubbed the ball off this photo from Portsmouth Ladies v Cardiff Ladies yesterday, which was a quite exciting 3-3 draw, and I invite you to send me a copy of this picture with an x where you think the ball is, assuming you are good enough at computers to do that, and the closest will win a very inappropriate prize. A poetry prize, I expect, because if I ever get Shelly Cox's autograph, I'll probably keep it myself.
I've become a bit of a supporter this season, although first deceived into thinking I was watching Premier League football when actually there is a Super League above it. But, never mind. I would have never known aboout Gemma Hillier, Charley Wilson or Shelly Cox otherwise.
Best of luck to them.

Alison Moore - The Lighthouse

Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)

Literary prizes are not a viable betting proposition. Second guessing a panel of judges is probably not something I'm going to do again but this year, after the fact, I certainly thought I should have backed my feeling that Hilary Mantel would win again. I was afraid of Will Self- who isn't- but can see now that him winning was not a realistic outcome. Alison Moore's debut novel was never likely to win either but I'm glad it was short-listed to bring it to my attention because I liked it a lot.
It is 'slight' but accomplished and beautifully made like a poem with its recurring images, themes and understated language.
Futh, the main character, goes on a walking holiday after the break-up of his marriage and both his childhood and marriage are recounted in flashbacks. There is also the life of the couple who run the inn in which he stays at the beginning and end of the walk.
He is an unprepossessing character, awkward and somehow secondary in his relationships with his father, his childhood friend Kenny, his wife, the hotel people and even Kenny's mother. He works in the less masculine world of perfumiers, which is not approved of by his over-bearing father, and smells, whether redolent of place and time or those of alcohol or smoking caught on the breath of others, are a central theme of the narrative. He has a habit of checking out emergency escape routes whenever staying in an unfamiliar room and his father bores his mother on the subject of lighthouses during their unhappy time together.
It is an unhappy book with all of the characters defined by their dissatisfactions, the tawdry or unredeeming sex they pursue or engage in and their obvious inability to escape such circumstances. Futh's walk significantly takes a wrong route, doesn't deliver much relief from the life he is leaving behind but the steady rhythm of the sentences draws us on towards a gripping climax as the ordinary and undramatic chapters sustain an undertow of vague threat until leaving us, expertly delivered, through lighthouse references, to a point of apparent no return.
Possibly not somehow big enough, despite Julian Barnes' win with an equally short book last year, to win such a prize but a very good novel and I'm pleased for its author, publisher and for myself as a reader that the shortlist surely brought it to a wider readership. 

BrandosHat

I miss him so much. I had to have a look at what he's up to.

It's the same old story, I'm afraid. He's still issuing prescriptive lists of what we all ought to be reading although they are olde worlde recommendations of completely predictable poets from a tired idea of challenging some perceived idea of orthodoxy. And you don't get much more orthodox than that.

It was ever thus. Men will be men and want to try on what they think are tough guys clothes, like the leather jackets that their heroes wear. But it doesn't look right on them somehow and they are the only ones who don't realize.

It's a wide church, poetry. Everybody can play. Those who try to look 'cool' are always the ones who don't.

Natalie Clein - Bloch/Bruch

Natalie Clein, Bloch, Bruch, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Ivan Volkov (Hyperion)

It is always interesting to see which music from presumably wide repertoires musicians choose to record. Natalie is staying in roughly the same late C19th/early C20th but moving from better known Romantic composers to what might be more personal choices, following a Kodaly set in 2010 with this pairing of two composers with explicitly Jewish cultural reference points.
Bloch's Schelomo, as could be said of all three of his pieces here, moves from a lonely searching mood to more passionate passages but it's  unsettled music. If the contrasting moods are in some way compensation for each other, it is not for me a satisfying passion and 'tension' seems to be the apposite word that stays with me from the booklet notes that give detail of where the original texts were taken from. Although in no way avant garde, at least to our battered C21st sensibility, this isn't easy music, its dramas concentrated into bursts and rapidly-shifting directions. Longer deliberations that might dwell on the haunting slower tempi would suit me better but that is not Bloch's or Natalie's purpose here.
The Bruch piece, Kol Nidrei, is formed of two parts- the first (it says here) based on a C16th German synagogue chant and the second on Psalm 137. From 1881, and thus significantly earlier than the Bloch, it is still a more coherent whole, lyrical and inevitably perhaps devotional, and for me more successful. Natalie's most popular recording so far is ever likely to be her Elgar concerto with its gorgeous selection of fillers on the programme, too, but the lesser known parts of the cello library need investigating, too, and she is doing us a service in bringing to our attention, by which I mean mine, these things that I had no idea of. I was aware of a second Bruch violin concerto but not much more beyond that and, as I think I've said somewhere else quite recently, it isn't right for any artist to be known for only one work.      

The Saturday Nap -Week Two

Two out of three is often said to be not bad but when the missing one in a treble was the one you had backed on its own and put up as the nap for all the world to see then I'm afraid it was no good at all last week.
Neither would it have done for all the faithful followers of this project to have tuned in on Saturday morning to find that a Friday nap had put us back level so it's no use to you to know that I'm alright, Jack, and retrived my money from the bookmakers as The New One went in at Cheltenham today.
Tomorrow's programme presents plenty of great racing, with Ascot staging Frankel's swansong, and we might as well take the opportunity of having a picture of him here while we can, as well as the jump racing season getting into top gear at Cheltenham.
At Ascot, if Excelebration sees Frankel in the boxes before his race, he will most likely assume he's just going to get another chance to study the superstar's back end going away from him but it will come as a relief and a surprise when he doesn't see him at the start because he's in a different race this time. Excelebration would be being talked of as a truly great miler had he not been unlucky enough to be the same age as Frankel and he'll surely take advantage of being allowed to swerve him but at 4/5, I can't be tipping odds-on shots here.
Havingotascoobydo in the Cheltenham 2.30 is tempting as a 7/1 winner would put this project well in the clear but we aren't supposed to be taking quite such chances as that. And I'm not full of confidence in the hurdle races, and so we go to Ascot on the flat for Sapphire, currently available at 100/30 for looking, with reasonable hopes and expectation, in the 2.55 mares race. She has won on soft and heavy ground at The Curragh, admittedly once at a Frankel price, and hasn't run too often this season. So I'm getting on now.

For a Birthday

Stick at it and you never know what you might achieve.  It is starting to look as if I'll make it to the age of 53 tomorrow on a birthday I share with Fulham's finest, the late Johnny Haynes, and one of Haiti's, Wyclef Jean.



For a Birthday
Thom Gunn

I have reached a time when words no longer help:
Instead of guiding me across the moors
Strong landmarks in the uncertain out-of-doors, 
Or like dependable friars on the Alp
Saving with wisdom and with brandy kegs,
They are gravel-stones, or tiny dogs which yelp
Biting my trousers, running round my legs.

Description and analysis degrade,
Limit, delay, slipped land from what has been;
And when we groan My Darling what we mean
Looked at more closely would too soon evade
The intellectual habit of our eyes;
And either the experience would fade
Or our approximations would be lies.

The snarling dogs are weight upon my haste,
Tons which I am detaching ounce by ounce.
All my agnostic irony I renounce
So I may climb to regions where I rest
In springs of speech, the dark before of truth:
The sweet moist wafer of your tongue I taste,
And find right meanings in your silent mouth.

O'Brien and Paterson at Cheltenham

 
Sean O'Brien and Don Paterson,
Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 12.

Like the old cricket double act when Ian Botham and Allan Lamb toured with their show of debonair humour, or a pairing from further north than Radcliffe and Maconie, I could see O'Brien and Paterson being a ticket that would work tremendously well, perhaps reviving the Music Hall in a post-Variety world. Except that this was a double bill rather than a double act but the two humanely acerbic poets go together well with their idiosyncracies and their likeness.
With Don on first, darkly and sharply funny but with a world view that regards us human beings as no more than portions of gloop that have somehow become sentient (and that is my precis rather than his words), the robust and usually unconsoled Sean followed in seemingly almost mellow mood. That was until he read his Jubilee poem on 1985- Don had been given his own year by Ms. Duffy and you don't argue once you've been told- in which he fought a great rearguard action in establishing that the devil (in this case, Don) doesn't have all the angriest music but, invoking Auden, they must both know that 'poetry makes nothing happen'. In fact, one might say that 'what Paterson fails to realize is that poetry makes nothing happen' however unremitting he might think.
But there was more humour and laughter in this show than you might have thought, or in a lot of other shows. They are both dab hands at the pointed throwaway remark. I don't laugh out loud as much as admire. Don made a number of points that I take as truisms already- that the introductions to poems in a poetry reading are usually more interesting than the poems, and that he doesn't enjoy poetry readings much and he doesn't know any roofers or other tradesmen who go to watch others do the same job in their spare time. Sean for his part reports from a residential creative writing course. I could write poems about my day job but don't. If I did, I'd have more to complain about than lasagne.
Sean's Scottish accent, as he reads his Marmite poem, The Plain Truth of the Matter, has possibly improved since last year, in an area that he would accept himself that there was room for improvement. But at a reading ostensibly taking place to promote a recent Selected and a due Collected, both of these starry, starry names dwelt less on past glories but gave over much of their time to new work and so I can give advance notice that the next books from both of them are not going to disappoint. This world was never meant for two as implacable as them. In particular, Paterson's new sonnets see him in the form of a David Gower (just to bring back the cricket motif for the sake of it) at the height of his powers, making everything look very easy to do to those who can't do it at all.
Don finished with two of the best from Rain, including Rain. He should have been reading there the day before when nature would have provided an appropriate percussion on the roof of the marquee.
But it was a masterclass from two class masters, growing gradually older more gracefully than they might allow. The way that bleakness and good humour can mix so well reminded me of something Sean once wrote about poetry being like the mix of water in an estuary, the different tides combining to produce a new 'pull'. I don't know if that's quite what he said. If he didn't say it, then I just did and I'll have it.

Copus and Reid at Cheltenham

 
Julia Copus and Christopher Reid, Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 11.

I've been noticing in recent years how my favourite poets don't extend beyond an age limit of only a few years younger than me, say born 1965 or thereabouts. And inevitably, the list is getting older and gradually dwindling.
So I'm glad that Julia Copus can be added as an obvious star of her generation and that she was in Cheltenham, like just about everybody else with a new book to promote.
She is a fine reader of a poem. Not all poets are but it must be a great help when one's poems are such sure things on the page to deliver lucid readings to those who might not know the poems already. She began with the poems from the start of her book, just as I had been reading on the train and so it was good to hear them done properly in their authentic voice so soon after reminding myself how much I liked them.
We learnt some useful background, as well as that the 'mirror' poem is properly now called a 'specula' poem, the Latin for mirror. My suggestion that the form would come to be known as a 'Copus poem' has unfortunately already been suggested by the Poet Laureate so I'm badly placed in any claim to have coined that phrase.
Twenty minutes is a long enough slot in which to listen to many poets but all too short a time for others and I'll hope to be seeing Julia again, as it were.
Christopher Reid's new book, Nonsense, contains narrative poems including an account of a recently widowed academic's time at a conference on futility and 'nonsense'. It's hard to think where some writers get their ideas from, Prof. Reid having explained that his brief academic career was not happy. It's an easy target, an academic conference about nonsense, but his extract was accurate enough and genuinely entertaining, transposing into the minor key of A Scattering gently and sadly to finish. In a couple of lines, Reid sang the quotes from the French songs and, on that slim evidence, it might appear that he has a tenor voice that might offer him an alternative career if ever he wants to try one.
A poetry reading can be a dreadful thing- and I have been to a few that were- but with the right performers, compared to a full orchestra, all the rigmorale of a stadium rock concert or the long hours required to make a film, it can also prove that less certainly can be more and two poets simply reading from their books, at an unarguably good value entrance charge of nothing at all, it can be a wonderful thing, too.

Signed Poetry Books - Don Paterson

Don Paterson has been a target for my collection of signed poetry books for a little while now and so it was good to land this signature, along with his love, apparently, on a very successful raid on Cheltenham.

Signed Poetry Books - Julia Copus

It's always good to be able to give out good news and Julia Copus was, of course, thrilled to know she is well-placed in my considerations about what will be my best collection of the year for 2012.
I'm sure it's not the money they want, which is a good job in this case. If poets were in it for the money, they'd be in something else. Which many of them are, too.

Signed Poetry Books - Christopher Reid

 
Although I come back from Cheltenham obviously slightly the poorer after this afternoon's second place for Boyfromnowhere, the signed poetry books collection has taken a leap forward and become richer with three acquisitions, the first of which is Prof. Reid's signature on A Scattering.

The Saturday Nap - Week One

Last year we held on to a small profit from this little venture, running from October to Boxing Day, picking our way through the weekend horse racing to build a bulwark against austerity.
I saw Boyfromnowhere comprehensively outstay his maiden rivals at Uttoxeter recently and although he has a Paul Nicholls-trained horse in opposition today on the day that the top stable usually gets into top gear for the season, I'll take the 6/4 available at the time of writing.

Wulf and Eadwacer

Where were we. O, yes, perhaps not intending to be quite as back-handed as it looked in complimenting the Best British Poetry 2012 anthology on sending me back a thousand years to Wulf and Eadwacer.
I've never been big on Old English, or even Chaucer, a mere 400 years later than this, except for always remembering Craig Raine's re-make of this poem in his book, Rich, that we were blessed with in 1984. Tremendous poem and by no means a translation.
I've been happy enough with that ever since until being driven to further investigation this week.

Don't take my word for it, but it would appear that the original poem was written between 960-990, collected in The Exeter Book, is certainly written from a female point of view and, some say, by a woman and for me has plenty of that mystery about it that makes a poem great. The difference is that in this case it is difficult to understand because the language it is written in is already difficult notwithstanding any other ambiguity of meaning. It is not because the agenda of the author demands that her meaning is difficult for us to interpret. Or, not necessarily.
Reducing it to absurdam, the lady is stuck on an island, in 'renig weder' (I think even I can translate that) with Eadwacer but she'd rather be with Wulf, who is away on another island.  There are a number of possibilities, all discussed in easily findable places on the interweb. Inevitably, of the several versions available in translation, Paul Muldoon's has to be the preferred option, although you might want to see two or three more to see how else it might be done.

http://poemsoutloud.net/audio/archive/muldoon_reads_wulf_and_eadwacer/

And there are readings in Old English on You Tube and elsewhere.

It is a wonderful poem, and all the better for its unintended mystery.

The Best British Poetry 2012

The Best British Poetry 2012, ed. Sasha Dugdale (Salt)

If we are going to trust anyone to pick the best poems of the last 12 months, then Sasha Dugdale with Roddy Lumsden helping suit me very well.
However it isn't long before the introduction is bogged down in discussion of 'gender balance'. What a shame.
It is true that there was an imbalance, of perhaps 97% to 3% in favour of the male, throughout the canonical history of English poetry until quite recently. But Sasha seems to want it both ways here, congratulating herself on not even knowing who wrote the poems and unaware of their gender while also marking the slight majority of females in her selection.
Along with her championing of 'non-English' voices, which here includes Romani and Shetlandic, this anthology is still as determinedly politically correct as last year's and we won't be making progress towards the falling away of these barriers while we insist on letting them rule our thinking. Yes, the Poet Laureate, the Director of the Poetry Sociey and the editors of several of the most highly-respected poertry magazines are all female. And that's fine. Let it be.
Having never regularly bought the equivalent Forward book of the year's verse, I might start next year. Although Salt's selection is useful and brings to light a number of poems one hasn't seen (well, nearly all of them), it's hard not to wonder how many of them would have made one's own selection if time had been allowed to spend days and days in the Poetry Library. Quite possibly none of these poems will make my own shortlist, a mere handful, for Best Poem 2012.
That is not to say that Gillian Clarke's Swans isn't an excellent piece; Rory Waterman will be a first collection to look out for next year; Jane Flett is an unqualified success here; Graham Mort and Greta Stoddart are both picked for fine poems about the dead.
The longer I persevered with the poems, the more of them gradually revealed more than I had first found in them but afer a while it becomes subject to the law of diminshing returns and one suspects that one has found as much as is there for you. What I am most grateful for is that Vahni Capildeo's Four Departures from 'Wulf and Eadwacer'  sent me back to the original when quite possibly a female poet wrote the Best Poem of one of the years between perhaps 960 and 990.

View from the Boundary

 
The best part of the year provided several spectacularly good days this time around, with that welcome cooler edge in the air perfectly paired with seemingly endless clarity.
It climaxes with the Cheltenham Literature Festival- for me this year a much anticipated menu of Copus, Reid, Paterson and O'Brien, then me setting a new personal best for what age I am, 53 if I make it, before Tasmin comes to Portsmouth Guildhall to play the Brahms concerto the day after we remember stalwart Portsmouth poet, Brian Wells, who died earlier this year, aged 81.
It's Maggie May time of year,
It's late September and I really should be back at school.
I was reminded on Radio 4 this evening that Ray Jackson, the good-looking one from Lindisfarne in a not too difficult heat, played the mandolin as a session man on Rod's masterpiece, got paid his wages for the day's work but was replaced by a miming Dancing Jack Peel on TOTP. A bit unfair, perhaps, but that's session work for you.
I think I knew that Ray played the mandolin on that but, in the same way that I'm no longer sure if I have certain books or if I have some particular music on CD, LP, cassette or at all, I'm not quite sure if I knew it or not.
I heard Rod interviewed once when he was some way down the road to overblown glam icon and the interviewer asked him about his songwriting and why he hadn't done more since he was a 'bit of a dab hand', and he was. He was one of the truly great voices in pop music, too, and I still forgive any suggestion that he took the safest option by shifting into the middle of the road. We have Danny Baker's word for it, and I think Nick Kent's, that he is the best bloke you could ever want to meet. Although possibly by now with the same proviso that David Mitchell jusified the royal family, 'albeit with a massive sense of entitlement'.
--
After such a special year of sport, the Sports Personality of the Year award (in which I must admit I don't actually understand the question), is going to be difficult. All except one of Bradley, Jessica, Mo, Andy Murray and my longshot suggestion, Nicola Adams, and a litany of others are going to be very unlucky to miss out when you consider that Greg Rusedski once won it, and Ryan Giggs was apparently once given it for still being available to play.
I don't know why there was so much fuss about the Ryder Cup. I mean, firstly, it's golf. But coming back from 10-6 down isn't so remarkable. I saw Fulham come back from 4-0 down at Fratton Park on 1/1/84. We know the Ryder Cup had to be altered from USA v. GB into USA v. Europe just to make a game of it and so now it's usually close. In fact, why not save a lot of messing about, and simply draw lots to select which player has to sink a 10 ft. putt and just decide it on that.
But my suggestion to solve the impossible job of evaluating all of this year's performances would be to make it ironic this year. A straight head to head of Kevin Pietersen v. John Terry.
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But I think I've found an answer to the vexing problem of early Sunday morning radio. It is a wasteland on Radio 5 as the breakfast slot can only warm up yesterday's football as if anybody who was interested didn't know already and then you get the unbearably serious Sportsweek, in which everything you know already is examined by Garry Richardson as if he is Jeremy Paxman and sport actually has colossal global implications, like whether Rio is in England or not. Radio 4 is okay with its broadcast of dreary singing of fine hymns and 4 Extra fills in with a reminder of how many comedy programmes from one's childhood were bad beyond belief, especially if as currently, one of them is The Clitheroe Kid.
Go straight to Radio 3. I've done it from time to time and never been disappointed but after last week, I know it's where one should be. It's a wonderful programme and although drifting in and out of sleep means you miss parts of it, listening to some of the superb things they play in that state of maybe 25% consciousness is a sublime luxury. It made me by a CD of Michael Tippett's music last week, on which I don't even mind that the 6.14 of the lament from Sellinger's Round is the only thing I want it for. I'm glad I know about it now because I didn't before.
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And my latest visit to the upstairs room in which the supposedly less essential of my books are kept found me coming back out again with The Go-Between. It's been tremendous.
I mentioned at work that I was re-reading it.
Someone said they had done it for O level. But they couldn't remember who wrote it.
I'm glad that the value of education isn't misunderstood or its purpose misplaced.

I suppose I should collect my books and get on back to school
Or steal my daddy's cue and make a living out of playing pool. 

South 46

South 46

http://www.southpoetry.org/

South 46 arrives with at least its usual quota of highlights plus the discussion points and reviews necessarily succinct so that as many poems as possible can be included in its customary smart format.
Regular contributor D.A. Prince impresses most on this occasion with A-Z, a short but beautifully made poem that rewarded repeated readings with its careful music.
Carolyn King is the featured poet, introduced by Stewart Conn, with a generous selection of spirited poems.
Lisa Kelly's mirror poem, Hangover, provides not quite the immaculate mirror image of a Julia Copus example of the form but certainly a lesson in cause and effect while I also liked Dorothy Pope's Music in the Church among a number of other poems that were enjoyable on their own terms. 
The magazine is going through a balmy period of successful issues that may well continue. At six pounds (plus another pound by post), it might not seem good value but you don't get much for a fiver these days and although you get more for your money from PNR in terms of reviews and highbrow articles, the number of poems I am pleased to have read in an issue of either of them is usually about the same.

Kurtag/Ligeti

Kim Kashkashian, Kurtag/Ligeti, Music for viola (ECM)

One doesn't need to read the booklet with this CD to immediately identify Bartok as the influence, the spirit and the founder of C20th Hungarian music without who these pieces could never have been written.
Gyorgy Ligeti was surely the main inheritor of the tradition and in the light of Tasmin Little's assurance that his violin sonata is the most difficult thing in her repertoire, remains worthy of further study.
The added attraction of this state of the art recording, on top of the wonderful cover picture, is the esoteric appreciation of the more sonorous viola sound.
For a limited writer on music like me, each genre has a semantic field of words that can be of use in the attempt to describe it. It is a thankless task, of course, because any words are inadequate if one can simply listen to the music. But the thesaurus of relevant, viable words for this strain of modernism includes spare, austere, bleak, dark and, possibly, haunting. On this particular recording we can augment the list with virtuosic and just occasionally lyrical.
The Kurtag work is called Signs, Games and Messages, 19 short pieces so far, begun in 1989 and still 'in progress'. The longest is the first at 4 minutes 39 seconds and the shortest is 28 seconds. So we can also justifiably say 'fragmentary', too, which is the way of these things. Not inconclusive because they can be taken as a whole within which there are traces of distorted dance rhythms, glimpses of lyricism, demanding expectations of the soloist and, I'd say, an expression of resilience against the darkness. But we are probably not going to say this is like Boccherini or that is organized along obviously 'classical' lines.
Ligeti's Sonata is thus in comparison literally 'more of a piece'. It's not supposed to be easy but I think one might say, a bit like Mark Twain said that 'I'm told that Wagner's music is not as bad as it sounds'  that Ligeti isn't as difficult (to listen to) as it sounds. Even I realize that it must be difficult to play and Kim Kashkashian clearly knows her way around the viola.
I'm not going to be whistling any of the tunes from this disc on my way into work tomorrow. For one thing, I don't know if it has any tunes and, secondly, I can't whistle. And I'm not suggesting that I'll be playing this more often than I play Andreas Scholl's recording of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, which has been the disc at the top of my playlist over the last few months, with the Charpentier Lecons de Tenebres next. But once one has Tasmin's solo Bartok assimilated into one's musical wardrobe, then you might want something to wear with it and this might be a good candidate to be that thing.
I love things like this, somewhat hard to find and outside of the grim despair of what is offered as popular entertainment nowadays. It reminds me of when I was 13, listening to Sounds of the Seventies after 10 p.m. on Radio 1, in search of the least middle of the road music I could discover. This is my new equiivalent of that and without such things I'm not sure there would be any point in being interested in music at all.