Kathleen Jamie - The Overhaul

Kathleen Jamie, The Overhaul (Picador)

I started at the beginning which I don't always do with books of poems. In this case it was a good idea because it became apparent more readily than it otherwise might have done that the poems take us through a year like an almanac.  

Kathleen Jamie is possibly better at doing wintry chill than midsummer. We begin with wind on the coast, which is the environment of many of the poems, in January and move through further shoreline or rural settings, populated more by wildlife or weather than by people. And we are well aware that it is a Scottish coast for the use of Scots words as well as whole poems in dialect if we hadn't guessed already from the climate. And there a few words here that will come in useful at Scrabble if they are admissable south of the border.

It is not quite what I was expecting from Jamie as my inadequate knowledge of her work heretofore had led me to think of her as more directly political and with more 'attitude' but the blurb suggests these poems 'broaden her poetic range considerably' and so perhaps it doesn't continue her themes thus far because it is a 'midlife book of repair, restitution'. Either way, it is an excellent book, immediately and clearly accessible and sure to enhance her reputation whatever it has been based on up to now.

As well as the wind, pebbled beaches and wildlife, in which summer is recorded through flowers and birds, two poems in which the moon encroaches into her room are among the most memorable.,

the books, too, appeared inclined

to open and confess.

 

and the world of the poems is extended by a view through a telescope of Jupiter's moons.    

 

Hawk and Shadow is in a similar form to Thom Gunn's Tamer and Hawk and so can't help but suggest to me an intertextual relation. It is either consciously that or one of those examples of great minds thinking alike.

Being out of sorts

with my so-called soul,

part unhooked hawk,

part shadow on parole,

 

I played fast and loose.

 

And what we are usually left with is an idea of a shifting, temporary world that is at the same time rooted in those processes and so we might find them uneasy or displaced at times but the overall impression is of survival and, certainly as poetry, great satisfaction.

The best poem for me is the last one, Materials, where we are left with a superb description of gannets  that 'pluck such rubbish from the waves' to make a network of nests on the cliffs, 'colonies so raucous and thief-ridden', and then they leave the cliffs,

wearing naught but a shoddy, bird-knitted vest.

 

(the cliffs, not the birds)

and the episode refers Jamie back to ourselves,

 

...but a bit of bruck's

all we need to get us started, all we leave behind us when we're gone.

 

It is a sure-footed, admirable and entirely convincing book that I only regret not having read in time to include on my shortlist for last year's best. It would have prevented the walkover by Julia Copus and at least given us a race.

 

 

 

Night on the Town

Ночью по городу

he painted love, but he didn’t practice it.
                                     Virginia Haggard, My Life with Chagall

We would be angels joined above the night,
a pacific embrace, a longed-for swim
through all we ever thought we could have been.

The paint will tell you that, this other world
of shared imagining. But all there is to give
is given there. For the night air is cool

and poetry, I’m afraid, is unreal
and artists’ eyes take more than they give back,
returning less to you each time they look.

--

Virginia Haggard was Marc Chagall's second wife, after the muse, Bella. Jackie Wullschlager's biography quotes from her memoir.
The title here is what I am offered for the Russian for 'Night on the Town' by Google Translate and so it is not necessarily any more than a working title at the moment. I would probably try to get it rendered into English script but the listen facility suggests it sounds like 'Noscu por gorado'.
Any offers of help with any of that would be gratefully received.'

Bruhns and Kuhnau

Bruhns, German Cantatas, Cantus Colln/Konrad Junghanel (Musique d'Abord), Kuhnau, Sacred Music, The King's Consort/Robert King et al (Helios).   

                                                     These two discs, issued last year, bring to light a couple of lesser known names from the German baroque. The impression that one gets that Europe at the time was awash with sublime musical genius makes me think that it is the prevailing style that is attractive and that anybody with sufficient acumen to compose within its discipline will sound tremendous to us, by which I mean at least me. By the same token, anybody alive today infatuated with installation art must think that we are living in a golden age.

However, Nikolaus Bruhns (1665-1697) was not destined to be a lesser light given his reputation before his early demise.Having been a student of Buxtehude at Lubeck, C.P.E. Bach reported that his father 'loved and studied' Bruhns' work and used some of it as models for his own. There isn't much of it left to us but these cantatas are evidence enough that he belongs in that saintly group of composers that departed this life far too soon.

These pieces are set for a small group of instumentalists and four voices, beginning with a wonderful interwoven funeral piece, Die Zeit meines Abscheids ist vorhanden, which doesn't sound immediately as mournful as one might expect for a bewigged late C17th German funeral. It is gorgeously considered and intricate to a measured and entirely comprehensible degree of complexity. Much more funereal (and equally intended as such) is Ich liege und schlafe ganz mit Freiden, which my German as well as Google translate tells me means 'I lie down and sleep with peace'. The lute and alto in the second part surpass the interchange between soprano and strings in the first. And nobody is ever going to convince me that highly stylized compositions in any art form are necessarily less expressive than raw, unbridled emotion or that people from warmer countries are somehow better at it than those from more forbidding climates.

I suspect we might not know what Bruhns looked like as a search for a picture of him finds me a portrait that I thought was Buxtehude and so I am wondering if that portrait is brought into service whenever a picture of a musician who was in the area at the time is required but perhaps that is a good thing. We have perhaps raised the personality of the artist to a previously unrequired importance. The discipline of the sonnet form made one Elizabethan sonnet-writer sometimes indistinguishable from the others and so it might be with German baroque composers. It might only be us that suppose that 'finding one's own voice' is preferable to excellence in composition or adherence to formal exigencies.

And while it will usually be the high line, the soprano or counter tenor, that takes my attention first or provide the most lasting impression, the tenors are given plenty of opportunity here in Paratum cor meum, not overly flamboyantly but with parts that take them on excursions until a final duet that one might say dances.

It would be an advantage to have a libretto with the disc but in fairness it was reasonably priced and one can't have everything. If one is interested enough one can e-mail someone who is good at German, which I have done, but I have no idea what the last cantata is about apart from that it was meant for Easter. And the words on the packaging suggest that the UK was only third on Harmonia Mundi's marketing team's list of target areas after Germany and France. And so perhaps, for once, David Cameron is right and we need to renegotiate our position in Europe. Marvellous disc, though.

The disc of Johann Kuhnau's Sacred Music does have the words with it. One is first struck by the difference in tone as, although there are only a few more musicians listed, it begins with the brass and a more spectacular gambit.

Kuhnau was another Lutheran who has spent most of his time dead 'in the footnotes' of Bach. I'm sure many of us would be glad to have been that good rather than spend the rest of eternity in a dark corner of the Poetry Library. But he was also a polymath with the law, several languages and being 'a theorist' among his other areas of expertise but more than any of those, I'd be most interested to find an English translation of his novel from 1700, Die musicalische Quacksalber (honestly, I couldn't make this up), a satire 'on what he considered to be the shallow and superficial trends in contemporary music'. It's a shame he didn't live long enough to hear The Saturdays. But just as soon as I've finished writing this, I'll be on the phone to Blue Square to see what odds I can have about my chances of finding a copy of that.

He took his music very seriously, which is an interesting point for the booklet to make. That doesn't mean it is limited by such seriousness, does it. Ken Dodd, among a number of other comedians, has taken great pains to think about his art but that doesn't mean that his act is to be taken seriously. Yes, missus, what a beautiful day it is but that is not quite the goofy Liverpudlian's ultimate point.

Deborah York puts in the required decorative if straight shift in the second cantata, Weicht ihr Sorgen aus dem Hertzen (Banish care from your hearts), and it is beautiful and I wouldn't complain if I only listened to such things for the rest of my life. But, having been told that 'seriousness' is uppermost in the composer's mind, I wish I hadn't been told that because it does start to sound rigid where Bruhns, within very similar constraints, was looser but lost nothing by it. I want to like Kuhnau as much as I immediately took to Bruhns but it isn't quite happening, given that the difference between such composers isn't much and surely nothing that my cloth ear could detect for itself. This music is, I'm sure, just as fine as Bruhns with all the little cadences and touches of the baroque that one buys it for, but I'm afraid that, having put these two together on one order, somebody was likely to finish second best and it is Kuhnau even if it might be that his apparently more difficult personality might have made him more interesting than the easier genius of Bruhns.

But I'm sure there is a lesson to be learned by Amazon in this. Both of these discs by lesser-known composers of the Deutsche baroque are exactly the sort of items that will persuade me to part with money and so, if they insist on sending me e-mails to say that I might like this or that, then they would do well to tell me about other things that are a bit like them. But recently, after I had made a very rare foray into buying pop music (the Kristina Train and Matchbox 20 albums- both excellent in parts), they thought they could encourage me to buy some more and, after recommending other albums by the same artists, the next thing on their list was the 10th Anniversary album of We Will Rock You. I don't think there is a CD that I would want to destroy any sooner than that one. They could have recommended almost any other CD in their whole catalogue and I'd have been more likely to buy it than that. Fuzzy matching and profiling by computer obviously still has some way to go before they can be considered to have a soul.

I'd like to think it would have made Johann Kuhnau laugh.   

                                                                                    

 

  

Green on Gunn

It is the dream ticket. It will make Miles Davis talking about John Coltrane look like Jim Davidson talking about Bernard Manning.

In a change to the advertised programme of the Portsmouth Poetry Society, the evening on Thom Gunn will now be on Feb 6th and the American Poets are moved to May 1st in exchange. And, against the protocol by which whoever suggested the idea for the meeting thereby introduces it, Pauline very modestly said that 'she doesn't know anything about Thom Gunn' and so it was decided most democratically by me that I, who know loads of things about him, will be doing it.

You are invited to attend at 7.30 at St. Mark's Church, Derby Road, North End, Portsmouth, and bring Gunn poems to read and discuss. And I will bring a selection of iconic memorabilia from my collection to be enjoyed by all.   http://portsmouthpoetrysociety.moonfruit.com/#/about/4555663882

Reading Sean O'Brien in the Bath

Sean O'Brien, Collected Poems (Picador)

O'Brien at 60. It is one of those milestone occasions when an eminent figure undergoes the career retrospective. Much of what might be said has been noted along the way. We are familiar with the urban landscape of canals and railways, time stalled as the loss of identity or possibility of elsewhere are meditated upon, the apparent lack of opportunity for redemption and the imperative manner. It has increasingly been observed that there is something of Auden in the political warnings. And we have come to expect a facility with pentameter lines.

O'Brien himself acknowledges his debt to Douglas Dunn and in particular to Dunn's poem The River Through the City and that poem's influence runs through at least the first half of this collection. Not only the landscape but the atmosphere of darkness and threat, so much so that in A Donegal Golfer,

 

In my book even golf is sinister,

 

but, insistently and whatever the circumstances, the theme recurs and it is right from the start, on page 16,

 

The world is guilty of itself

 

that we are not ourselves or, if we are, it has been made our fault. The 'iron doors that bang shut in the sewers' in Dunn's poem echo for a long time afterwards in these.

During the period that O'Brien has been pre-eminent in specifically English poetry, the capital city of poetry in the UK has ostensibly been Belfast. Scotland has been in good form, too, with England itself somehow overshadowed. Those poets that have represented England have been noticeably from the regions and most obviously from the North, where O'Brien has been at home. But he has continued an English tradition that goes back through Larkin, Auden, Housman, Edward Thomas, Hardy, then to John Clare and Wordsworth and, one might say, to Piers Plowman. 

Where Ted Hughes had remarked that,

 

the very sound of metre calls up the ghosts of the past and it is difficult to sing one’s own tune against that choir.  

O’Brien is not convinced, or at least decided that rhythm suited his own purpose and was happy to identify with the long tradition associated with it. The continuity of his metre is to be admired for its virtuosity and enjoyed and, for the most part, is most effective without the adornment of rhyme. He makes a fine music but it is more often a sturdy Beethoven than decorative Corelli. 

The comparison with Auden doesn’t end with the call to political engagement. Auden’s facility in verse was much to be admired before Paul Muldoon’s poems took a quantum leap that made mere ‘facility’ look, well, almost facile. O’Brien has always had a similar line in light verse to that of the Wystan who enjoyed a Martini at 6 o’clock and the operas of Donizetti, except that Sean’s light verse can’t be taken too lightly since there can often be an iron hammer inside the apparently jovial velvet glove. And, actually, he doesn’t very often wear gloves. 

There are some identifiable common career trajectories among poets. An elite few hardly ever write a bad poem (Larkin, Derek Mahon); in some themes develop and even mutate to the opposite of where they began (Gunn); some reach a mature period and become recognizably themselves with their third collection; others find something to say or do and keep on saying it and doing it and eventually suffer from the law of diminishing returns. You are welcome to add as many of such profiles of your own as you wish. But Prof. O’Brien might belong with those whose third book, HMS Glasshouse, was where he became the finished article and, to show it wasn’t a fluke, followed up with Ghost Train, which for some of us was possibly the book to define not only him but the best of a generation. If there is a development in the themes, we might think that the provincial inertia described in the earlier books starts to look to a more international elsewhere in later work and perhaps there is more sympathy emerging in later poems although in the November poems this has been engendered by a succession of tributes to poets and friends in memoriam.

The assiduous reviewer will search out omissions in a book like this. Having not been selected for the Selected, I was disappointed to find the exuberant tour de force, Piers Powerbook’s Prologue, not collected in the Collected either. It’s a great pity in my view but there will be reasons for it. It can’t possibly be an oversight and one can't imagine the poet and his editor going to two falls and a submission over the issue.

But the definitive titles are, of course, all in evidence- Somebody Else, Thrillers and Cheese, Special Train, On the Piss and more recently the tremendous Elegy. Here are the 'mad Mass Observers observing ourselves', the place 'unencumbered by meaning' that is 'endlessly repeated' and 'almost as real as the Boat Race' and those who,

 

   find themselves seated in violent laughter

With like-minded womem - girls until looked at,

Whose heels keep on breaking, who cannot stop

Screeching or crying or finding themselves being hit

For misplaced and forgotten adventures

With other such mateys because it was Christmas

Or someone had won the St.Leger.

 

and the ending of Thrillers and Cheese is one of several passages that could have come from John Cooper Clarke.

If you said that any of O’Brien’s world-view was nostalgic then you might do so at your own peril and I doubt if he is repentant about the 'strong' language that one only gets the full impact of with seeing the poems all together like this. But I‘m not sure that he thinks that poetry makes anything happen any more than I do or Auden did. So perhaps his main theme is an aftermath for the missed opportunities of Old Labour values, a post-1945 culture that by some miracle was almost brought into being but faltered in the face of larger, more inevitable forces. That is all beyond retrieval now but he provides a tough and sometimes strangely beautiful lament for it.   

For Better or Worse

I heard Roger Scruton on the radio last week saying that The Beatles were better than Led Zeppelin, not in his opinion but as an objective fact. He didn’t offer any evidence or argument in support of his contention although I’m sure he would have tried if given the chance.
I would normally take the opposite view to Prof. Scruton, even to the extent of altering my own view to avoid the match up if necessary. On this occasion, I daresay he was right. My opinion is probably the same as his except his didn’t appear to be an opinion.
Then I read in my Opera Handbook that the aria Stizzoso, mio stizzoso in Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona, is ‘irresistible’, another judgement that I concur with as I recently discovered it and found to be so for me. But I have my doubts if it is ‘irresistible’ to everyone. All of opera is readily resistible to many.
And so in a short space of time I found two authorities, somewhat self-appointed though they may be, apparently so secure in their aesthetic judgements as to make them objectively true. Taste or personal preference doesn’t come into it for them.
This would be of interest at all times when evaluation and comparison is the desired ultimate stage of criticism. Although it is perfectly satisfactory to enjoy a work on its own terms and conclude that is was worthwhile, it is often not long before we start comparing it with other similar things. However, it is of increased interest to me as I compile my Top 100 pop songs, trying to think as long and hard as possible about them to finally get it right, and the shortlist approaches number 80, and I’m well aware than none of my 100 would appear on many other people’s list and of the 7 billion people in the world it is unlikely that any of them would concur with more than half of them as Top 100 choices.
There is the premise that surely Donne is a finer poet than, say, Colley Cibber or Nahum Tate and so if we can make an obvious judgement like that then it is theoretically possible to ultimately decide if Larkin is better than Auden or Tennyson than Browning and eventually put everyone in their correct position.
Of course we know that this isn’t going to happen.
Sometimes it depends on context and on some occasions The Birdy Song is more appropriate than a symphony by Tchaikovsky although in most analyses, the Tchaikovsky is likely to be considered the finer piece of music. Seriousness would appear to be a positive quality in attributing greatness but already we are in danger of setting up rules that we are going to need to break because if Ulysses is to be given its usual high place among novels it won’t be long before someone points out that it is essentially a comic work. And so, although some of us at least would like to think that there is a hidden secret, too well hidden to know in the last analysis, about what is better than what else, perhaps we remain interested because we can’t know and our enquiry is never going to be answered. And it comes as a relief to me that I don’t have to adjust my relative opinion of The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in order to dissociate myself from Roger Scruton because I can refute his premise – or indeed his lack of premise- rather than reject his conclusion.

Pergolesi

Christmas delivered Pergolesi. Delivered him, that is, from my list of 'one-hit wonders' on account of his wonderful Stabat Mater, a long-time favourite, to the status of rapidly rising star.
Record Review on Radio 3 discussed the DVD of Il Prigionier Superbo which prompted the purchase of the CD, notwithstanding the slightly grudging praise that he was 'as good as fairly good standard Vivaldi', or some such judgement, which is obviously and meant to be, a good thing.
But the discs are a revelation, constantly rewarding, superbly recorded and, as the notes suggest, with the intermezzo La Serva Padrona providing just as many of the most memorable moments as the main opera.
The booklet also takes pains to dispel the legend of Pergolesi as the tragic figure that died at the age of 26 by pointing out that he enjoyed great patronage and opportunity in his short creative life but I can't see that in any way removing him from the list headed by Mozart and Schubert of those who heaven only knows what they might have produced given a fuller creative lifespan.
Born in 1710, he was thus 25 years younger than Bach and Handel but was dead well before either and thus far I'm putting him right there with those major baroque masters and Vivaldi. It was hardly his fault that he wasn't given time to produce quite so many reams of masterpieces. The most immediate aria from La Serva Padrona, Stizzoso, mio stizzoso, was reprised a few times on my record player straight after hearing it for the first time.
2013 has got off to a tremendous start. There is always room for a new hero in my firmament.