Poem for a baby

A lot of poets say they don't want to be Poet Laureate but they don't mind having a go at the job when it suits them.
I don't mind having a go myself. My Diana poem was a proper poem and I meant it whereas the Will and Kate wedding one was perhaps less so.
Herewith one for the lad. The BBC were left discussing if the BBC had given too much coverage to a story which, I hear Private Eye calls Woman Has Baby. Well, it's not long ago that Manchester United's manager retired, and the amount of attention given to that was disproprtionate to a lot of people's interest in it. Where is football on our radar now with the tennis man, the cyclist, the athletes and the cricketers making Britain look like a sporting powerhouse.

For George Alexander Louis 

They kept him to themselves for four short hours

while press reports said nothing had happened

and nothing happened for a few hours more. 

So, what do they know who can only wait

outside expensive buildings, their hungry

cameras cocked, ready to shoot, like royals 

on holiday waiting for grouse. Babies

all look the same, he must have thought, as yet

unable to ascertain if adult

life was only going to be a lot of

mundane questions and the obvious answers

they are bound to get. And he might be right.

Sinead Morrissey - Parallax

Sinead Morrissey, Parallax (Carcanet)

You close one eye and put a finger from one hand up in front of your face. Then you put a finger from the other hand up behind it so that it is obscured by the nearer one. Then close your open eye and open the closed one and the further finger has moved into view. That is parallax and although I don't remember much from O level Physics, I do remember that.
We are talking about 'shift', how things look different from different angles, how things change in a new perspective and how, for example, things are no longer like they were when caught in a photograph. The word occurs in Sinead Morrissey's book of poems in a poem called Lighthouse,
                             it blinks and bats
the swingball of its beam, then stands to catch,
then hurls it out again beyond its parallax.

The poem moves between the very private world of a child's imagination and the big, wide world, as told by his mother. Like many of the poems here, it rewards closer reading, not all of it being available perhaps on first acquaintance. That is how I prefer poems to be, not easily seen off on one peremptory run through but neither so opaque that one never gets far enough with it. And so Sinead Morrissey made more appeal the longer I spent with her book.
I'm never convinced how much a collection needs a theme quite as specific as this and I wouldn't say that every poem here in necessarily a contributor to it but it is a way in and provides a way of interpreting the work if one feels the need of such a thing. As a general rule, I don't, but the thought wasn't completely wasted as I do like to wonder about the significance of a collection's title.
A Day's Blindness was the first to capture my attention. The onset of blindness presents some apparently paradoxical ideas, like,
He would have needed practice
at being blind to pretend to be sighted.

before we are taken back into memory.

These are tough poems, lyrical in an unsentimental way. I am patiently waiting for any new book by Caitriona O'Reilly in the hope that there is one is due one day but these poems remind me of hers in a way that is beyond the fact that they are from Ireland and by a woman and so have filled that gap temporarily. There is a similar austerity about them if these are a bit less haunted.

Shadows considers the poet's shadow cast on a railway station platform in the morning and how it stretches and would alter if she stood there all day. The meditation benefits from a series of luminous images brought forth by the possibilities,
I could be a dissident in a textbook in Soviet Russia
discovered after the print run
and painstakingly blackened out by each teacher,

and it could be the most arresting poem of them all as well as the most easily accessible.

A Lie is a faded photograph. I would have appreciated a short note at the back to shed more light on why F# minor is The Evil Key, but I will have to consult Johann Mattheson. Its sinister discomfiture makes it another outstanding poem. There turned out to be quite a few and there might be more by the time I have to decide which were my favourite poems and books of this year. Parallax and some of its contents seem to be heading for my short list as readily as it is already on some others.

Terry Eagleton - Across the Pond

Terry Eagleton, Across the Pond (Norton)

Americans are open, honest and friendly in this 'Englishman's view of America' but stereotyping is to be avoided as a general rule because although stereotypes must have some foundation in fact or else they wouldn't have come about, they are by no means laws of nature and cannot be applied universally.
Prof. Eagleton starts with language in his consideration of how he finds the USA. He makes a long list of Americanisms that 'not all Americans know..are fairly distinctive to their own brand of English' but I'm afraid I hear weird, awesome, feel comfortable with, have a hard time and many others of his collection regularly. They have fed back into English English through young people and a similar vocabulary has arrived through consultants who dress up the bleakest common sense as if it were science to sell it to gullible organisations who think it will improve them. I'm afraid we are not as divided by the same language as we might like to be although pants, fags and bums are three things that we do need to be clear about.
America, for Eagleton, is up-front, confident, unironic and loud- to summarize him very crudely- whereas the British are self-effacing, understated and apologetic. He brings in the Irish to make it a three-cornered comparison sometimes. They are unsentimental. Guinness is no longer Irish and no Irishman ever said Begorrah unless it was for the benefit of a tourist.
But the defining quality of America from which all else follows is the pursuit of money. They don't have much history, tradition or class and they don't care about that but they do care about money. Eagleton regularly refers back to previous accounts of America, by de Tocqueville and Dickens, and finds them very sympathetic to his view or possibly only quotes them when they are. But in books like these he is not the sort of philosopher that Kant or Hegel are, constructing closely argued chapters to establish general epistemolgical or phenomenolgical truths. He does a bit of refuting, applies a bit of logic and then arrives at a conclusion or generalization that we aren't necessarily inclined to take too seriously in the way that observational stand-up comedians do. Eagleton's entertainments qualify him for a high place among the Sean Lock, Dara O'Brian, Shappi Khorsandi, Alexei Sayle contingent of humourists.
Miserable people rarely get murdered.
is one of his Quod Erat Demonstrandums that might not stand up to much statistical investigation and would have been unlikely to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason.
On the way to arriving at such wisdom, though, he is good at identifying the shortcomings, absurdities and moral vacuousness of the aristocracy, the royal family, capitalism and the inordinately wealthy as well as Americans but Michael Jackson seems to be particularly getting on his nerves at the moment.
It is a book that made me laugh every few pages which I thought it would and which is why I bought it. Eagleton is well-practiced at this line of reductio ad absurdam by now and he works like a gadget that can be pointed at a subject and he will deconstruct it for you in this playful, half-earnest, half-derisory manner. A life spent perfecting this common sense, slighly contrarian method has not gone to waste. He finishes with several pieces of advice for America and Americans, which do seem to be sincerely and not ironically meant, for example,
There should be compulsory courses for all college freshmen in how not to mean what you say.
Most of it almost goes without saying but was never so well expressed. The problem with any of it is that if they took him at his word, it wouldn't be America anymore.

Count Arthur Strong

It wasn't obvious why Just a Minute needed to have a run on television but it was given one. Of course, Little Britain began on radio, as did Alan Partridge, in On the Hour, which begat The Day Today, which begat Knowing Me, Knowing You before the begetting begot out of hand.
Some things belong on radio. Although I'm sure the BBC would love to have the pictures back to go with Test Match Special, they might find they don't have space for them any more or else we would lose any number of programmes about moving house or buying up other people's old tat at auction.
But the announcement that Count Arthur Strong was to go on the telly was immediately met with doubt and suspicion. It is script-based, works well on radio, and seeing it might not offer up much more. It might even reduce it.
After only two episodes, those doubts are confirmed for the most part. It looks as if the radio shows have been re-worked into a new scenario in which someone played by Rory Kinnear is researching a book about his father who knew the raconteur and pompous old ham in the olden days. Count Arthur is an update on the confused 60's comedy icon, Harry Worth, with added baroque malapropism and frustrated self-regard. The second episode took a long time to develop an unlikely set of meetings between Rory's character and someone in a shop until recreating a Victorian Jack the Ripper scene as he pursues him down a street shrouded in fog but whether the added visual facility justified the eventual effect was a moot point.
For someone who I last saw in the flesh, most tragically Shakespeherean, as it were, and who has since enhanced his actorliness and credentiality elsewhere, Rory looks a bit embarrassed in some laboured passages here where the same joke has been made better in other places and more economically, even in ordinary daily life not thought worthy of writing down, rehearsal and filming. There are still some fine moments of Count Arthur carried forward from the original conception of him but whether it is worth wading through an otherwise no more than workmanlike script to get to them is a judgement still very much in the balance.
There is still time for the TV version to work but it has somehow been devalued and the genius of it diluted in the process. It's a shame things can't be let be as what they are but need to be exploited until inevitably at some stage the impetus runs out and they stop being what they were..

Chairman Mo and the Cultural Revolution

Sixteen years ago, was it really sixteen years, when I still claimed to be a football supporter of sorts, a rumour went round that Mohammed Al-Fayed was buying Fulham Football Club, recently revived as far as the third tier of the English football pyramid. Fulham had been down to the depths of the Football League and had once had only Torquay below them but Mickey Adams had turned around their fortunes from the darkest days of, yes, Ian Branfoot, and we were on our way back. Except from hereon in I will refer to Fulham as 'they' rather than 'we' because I never actually played for them. I thought it sounded like good news for the club but felt sorry for Mickey Adams when the radio sports bulletin announced he hadn't got on the coach to go to the midweek League Cup match at Wolverhampton. I predicted that it would 'all end in tears' but it didn't, or not for most people.
Kevin Keegan was immediately installed as someone who knew about football. Mr. Fayed's prediction that they would be in the Premier League the following season betrayed the fact that he didn't know very much. He went on to say later that Fulham would become the 'Manchester United of the South'. I think anybody who lived in Fulham or anywhere else who wanted to support Manchester United already did and probably didn't want Fulham to become anything of the sort. Keegan appointed Ray Wilkins as team manager and 11 games later they were still in exactly the same mid-table position as they were before and so sacked him, paid him off his contract and, if you want a job doing properly, did the job himself.
Ian Selley was the first signing. He promptly broke his leg and possibly never played again. I'm not researching any of this, it is off the top of my head, so don't quote me or sue me over any of it. And then, on an away game at Gillingham, a Fulham supporter was stabbed and, I think, died. This didn't seem to be a part of the plan.
The celebrity appointment of Keegan to glad-hand visitors and give the club a 'higher profile' had unforeseen consequences. He gave Mike Conroy, the centre forward he inherited, a pair of boots. Conroy said he didn't know whether to wear them or put them on the mantlepiece.
Keegan had said in an interview that he 'liked a challenge' and it seemed to me he could have found a better one at somewhere like Rochdale, without such financial backing, but soon enough he made things move in the right direction, making the significant signing of Chris Coleman. I saw third -tier Fulham in the cup at Southampton, in among the Saints faithful on a borrowed season ticket. I had to restrain some enthusiasm when Fulham went one-nil up inside ten minutes, and that was how it stayed until very near the end when I was the only one in the whole stand not on their feet celebrating the equalizer. But a 1-1 was a decent result for the work-in-progress Fulham.
My 40th birthday was the weekend of a home game against Bristol Rovers and so that was a part of a weekend of events to mark the occasion. It was not a pretty game but Geoff Horsfield, the hod-carrier centre forward, drilled in the winner of a 1-0 that made sure I had a birthday treat that I liked.
Keegan, of course, left for the England job, a move that I immediately announced was 'a bad move for Keegan, Fulham and England' and was proved right. By the time Paul Bracewell had been promoted from within but failed to get promotion from tier two to the top league and then Jean Tigana left, the press were keen to portray Fayed as somewhat trigger happy in dispensing with managers but Keegan had been his gift to the nation, Bracewell wasn't up to it and Tigana's contract was up, he had delivered his part of the deal and so he moved on.
The story was that Chris Coleman revealed himself as a natural leader of men towards the end of the French regime - of Saha, Malbranque and Legwinski- when Tigana hadn't shown up by 2.30 and so Coleman took charge and told the team to get changed. Apparently footballers who know they have a game to play at 3 o'clock need to be told to put their kit on at 2.30. Tigana put his hrad round the dressing room door at five to three and said, 'Good luck, lads' and Coleman was pretty much in charge from then on.
Although generally quoted among the bookies' favourites for relegation year on year, it was only like that once. With two games to go, with Roy Hodgson apparently having run out of time to save them, they were 2-0 down to Man City mid-afternoon, all but relegated, and I was drinking lager in a back garden in Ealing. My mate came back from indoors and said Fulham had won 3-2. Oh, yes, you'll have to do better than that, sir. But they had. Winning one-nil at Portsmouth to stay up was almost a formality after that and since then they have consistently finished very respectably in the Premiership.
I did even get an idea of what it might be like to be consumed by football as they battled from a late-July start, having qualified for the Europa Cup on the Sportsmanship ticket, through a group and various precarious positions in the knock out stages to the final.
Oh, so they are through again. Who would have thought it. Fulham v. Juventus. Then 3-1 down on the away leg and 0-1 down at home until a devil-may-care rally and a thunderous night at the Cottage, the greatest goal ever seen (by Simon Davies) and a fairly good one by Clint Dempsey and it said 'Fulham 4 Juventus 1' on the scoreboard and it was the semi-final next.
The final was a tragedy of lack of resources. With Zamora dodgy from the start, the ball just didn't stick up front any more and Fulham ended with a better team on the injury list than on the pitch until, within five minutes of taking the final to penalties, a shot deflected in off the inside of Hangeland's leg and that was that.
But the adventure was over either way. It had been an immense season and whether your team actually lift the cup or don't, I thought it was bound to be a deflating experience once it was all over. To travel is so often better than to arrive. Roy had done a wonderful job and Fulham had created some heroic moments. And, being a Fulham supporter, I honestly didn't think it mattered. Like I said, if we wanted to support Man United, we would but we quite clearly don't.
Fulham supplied England with another manager and so Mark Hughes benefitted from inheriting a good unit for one season until mistakenly thinking he was worthy of something better, got neither the Chelsea or Villa jobs and then waited a year before squandering the QPR millions and had to make room for Harry Redknapp to put the finishing touches to the noisy neighbours' relegation campaign.
In Martin Jol, Mr. Fayed has left Fulham with a workmanlike manager and, at least at one stage of last season, the most diverse collection of nationalities in any Premiershiop squad. And the new owner, whose moustache is only a mere echo of Chairman Mo's typically vaudevillean false one, seems to think that Fulham is a venture worthy of a portion of his own personal wealth. You wouldn't have thougt that when Jimmy Hill's campaign to save Fulham meant ostensibly forming a new club, Fulham FC (1987) Ltd.
And, so, thank you very much, Mr Fayed. You done good. 68 years old when you started and still a self-styled maverick at the age of 84. Not everybody would have done that. Any number of other league clubs have been promised a renaissance when in lowly league positions and that is still where a lot of them are now.
I'm afraid I can't find it in me to care as much as I used to. It's an entertainment for little lads and obsessives who failed to outgrow it, I suppose. The first time I saw Fulham was away at Mansfield in about 1969. It hadn't occured to me that they might lose, not with Les Barrett and Jimmy Conway, but they did and I cried once we got back to Nottingham. Nowadays I like to say it would make no difference to me if Fulham went out of business but it doesn't look like they will. They will have to do something really monumental to provide me with a better day of sport than yesterday's wins by Chris Froome on Mont Ventoux and England at Trent Bridge.
But, go on, Fulham, get to another cup final. Try me out. See if you can make me cry again. You'd have to win it, though, to do that.

Green on Harrison

The current programme of the Portsmouth Poetry Society finishes next Weds, 17th July, 7.30, St. Mark's Church, Derby Road, Portsmouth, with an evening on Tony Harrison. And I have inherited the very pleasant job of introducing it.
I offer my few minutes on the subject below but will also make mention of a story to be found in Romana Huk's essay Tony Harrison and the Leeds Renaissance, which can be found in the Bloodaxe Critical Anthology edited by Neil Astley. As well as a strong contingent of poets in Leeds in the early 60's was the emerging comedian Barry Cryer and Harrison appeared in reviews there at the time. It says that Cryer wanted to take Tony on tour with him as the straight man as part of his show.
How different things could have been if Cryer and Harrison had become an item.

Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison is probably best known for his film poems. These have included The Blasphemer’s Banquet, which gathered together a number of banned writers at a dinner party for Salman Rushdie; Black Daisies for the Bride, about Alzheimer’s Disease; The Shadow of Hiroshima, about the atomic bomb; Prometheus, about coal miners, and most famously, v., about the desecration of the cemetery where his parents are buried.

v. was the subject of outraged headlines in 1985 in some newspapers on account of its insistent use of a particular word that Philip Larkin had also used from time to time but the condemnation served mainly to demonstrate that The Daily Mail, amongst others, is not the best place to go for commentary on contemporary poetry.

Born in 1937, Harrison emerged in the early 60’s at a time when a group of young poets were based around Leeds University, like Geoffrey Hill, Wole Soyinka, Ken Smith, Jon Silkin, John Heath-Stubbs and more. These were perceived as considerably more politically engaged and challenging poets than the more sedate ‘Movement’ poets of the 1950’s.

In the 1980’s I remember reading that Harrisonwas the only person to have ‘poet’ recorded as his occupation in his British passport but I suspect there are many more now. But another part of his work has been adapting Classical drama for the modern theatre. The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus is an adaptation of Sophocles, and there are versions of The Oreisteiaby Aeschylus, Moliere’s The Misanthropeand further classical French and ancient texts.

His poems have predominantly had this political edge, the School of Eloquence being a set of sonnets on the ownership of language and the class divide; he also writes of his parents’ lives as well as meditations such as Cypress and Cedarand A Kumquat for John Keats that make apposite contrasts between life’s various sweetness and bitterness.

In 2000, he published Laureate’s Block which contained the poems written after the death of Ted Hughes and before the appointment of Andrew Motion as Poet Laureate. He had been widely suggested as the rightful successor but having published a poem in celebration the ‘Abdication of King Charles III’, he then issued the Laureate’s Block poem, expressing his vexation at still being associated with the post.

In fact, his sympathies are more with one of his other great heroes, the Roundhead Puritan, John Milton.

It has not been easy to find an illustrative stanza to quote that both shows Harrison’s passionate mode of expression and can be broadcast in our pre-watershed slot here, but these lines from Them & Uz are representative of much of his brilliant and polemical writing,

More is becoming less and less

On my trip to London last Friday, I spent the first hour or so in the Poetry Library. I like to take the opportunity to look through the magazines there when I can but now, with my subscriptions to poetry magazines at an all time low of none at all but with a concurrent need to make a shortlist of the best poems I have read in any given year, I felt a need to have a few titles to consider as it is now July and my notebook doesn't have many candidates on its shortlist in progress.
The first thing I noticed was that the Poetry Library's shelves of current magazines had some slightly out of date issues on them - 2011 in at least one case, I think- and that I couldn't see Poetry Review there.
The next thing was how quickly one starts skimming through poems, discarding them very early on a 'just not my sort of thing' basis as I'm sure I would if editing a magazine ever again or judging a pile of poems in a competition. It is to be hoped that those who do such jobs do it with more of a conscience than I would. And I'm sure they do.
I did find some poems I liked and I made a note of two of them but these were not world shattering discoveries. They were by poets that are long-standing favourites anyway. The David Green Books Awards will rightly become regarded, if regarded at all, as the least adventurous prizes in poetry. And why not.
Then, on Sunday, I let Radio 3 offer its stream of music enlighten, entertain or just close out the silence for me but this week didn't have much that I liked. So I began to wonder how, since I put poetry and music down as two of my main interests, I can be apparently so little interested in so much of it. I like horse racing but am almost exclusively interested in jump racing and then only certain sorts of races; I like cricket but these days don't really look for much beyond Chris Gayle, the Nottinghamshire result and England test matches and in football, I honestly couldn't name much more than half of any team Fulham are likely to field and it is just one perpetual grind of something I really can't convince myself to care about.
And, so, which of these things am I really interested in and should I really put them on my CV the next time I apply for a job. When one says one is interested in Poetry, does one mean that one can't wait to read the next poem whatever it might be. You lay yourself open to all kinds of compromising situations then. Anytime in the next week someone will hear you say it and they will offer you a sheaf of their poems and expect you to declare that you've never been quite so moved or seen metaphors of such dexterity. No, by my rough estimate, something like 50% of poetry is not of much interest, perhaps 20% is downright awful, which leaves 20% to be acceptable and out of the 10% that you really like, maybe only half of it is written by Julia Copus, David Harsent, Don Paterson or the sort of poets you really take part in the game to enjoy reading.
In the early hours of a sleepless night last night, I had changed to Radio 3's Through the Night because, no offence intended, I couldn't bear to listen to Radio 5 talk about Andy Murray any more. I heard a concert of the very little known Jose de Nebra (1702-1768), very much in the area of things I think of as 'music'. And what a great discovery that was. But I'd have soon been retuning the wireless yet again if I had stumbled on a night long exploration of Bruckner.
So, if and when we say we are interested in poetry, or music, is that what we mean. Or do we mean that there are just some special bits of it we like but that they are incredibly precious. I'd even be suspicious of anyone who claimed to like it all because surely then there is no discrimination going on (and discrimination can be a good thing if not an essential one in such circumstances) and certainly no notion that one is taking part in the process oneself and finding a personal sympathy with some things but not others.
And well-meaning relations who don't quite understand might waste money on buying you just what they think you want for Christmas.
Well, I know you like pop music and I sneaked a look at your records. I know this is very popular and you don't seem to have it and so I thought I'd get it for you.
Oh, that is lovely. Queen's Greatest Hits.
How could I possibly thank you for that.

View from the Boundary

Sometimes I'm thinking 'bout the weather then I realize I'm wasting my time. And it would seem that the poet never spoke a truer word.
It was reported on various news programmes a few weeks ago that meteorologists had convened to decide why they thought we were having such a series of cloudy, cool summers. The conclusion was that whatever the reason might be, it was going to continue for ten more years and that was alright by me. And then the next day was clear and sunny and it's been getting warmer ever since. So, so much for experts, and hard luck for me who now looks forward to September, those few glorious weeks that fade towards Autumn with a dash of refreshing cool in the air. For now it is a strategic game to walk in the shadows wherever possible and prevent your gin and tonic from warming up.

But, of course, there is good news. Prof. Eagleton has a new book out and it was ordered without any delay once I knew. Across The Pond promises an Englishman's view of the United States, although not perhaps the stereotypical bowler hatted Englishman on the cover. A droll, slightly contrarian and iconoclastic one with a background as the leading Marxist Literary Theorist who, one must anticipate, isn't likely to be a great admirer of the USA. It should be good fun.

In the meantime, the campaign to set a new personal best rating at the Free Internet Chess Server goes on. I need to go beyond 1417, which puts me about 46% of the way down the 20-odd thousand registerd players, at which point I'll spend a few weeks, I hope, enjoying a status that is far beyond my actual ability and play only unrated games. I keep reaching 1380 or so after a run of wins and then slip back. I know how Sisyphus felt. But it will happen one day. Maintaining a rating in the mid 1300's means that the graph of my progress over the last five years remains on the upgrade. Over 10 thousand games in 5 years. That is a bit unsettling but nowhere near as mind boggling as that it represents that many games that were all different and yet the vast majority were generated by the very limited range of my opening repertoire which is nearly always a Queen's Gambit with white and something Sicilian with black. Garry Kasparov did say there were more possible chess positions than there are grains of sand on the earth/stars in the universe, etc. That comes as some surprise with the finite resources of 64 squares and 32 pieces but multiplication is a wonderful thing.
Even three such certainties as Serena Williams winning Wimbledon, Chris Froome winning the Tour de France and England winning the Ashes series would have multiplied up to a very fair return on twenty-five quid. But Serena somehow managed to blow it.
The problem was that the treble was my way of not having to lay out too much to win the same amount on Froome at 4/6. Just put him with two other certs and it limits the risk. But, as Froome dominates the Tour as impressively as anybody has for many years, the bet has already gone down.

There's no such thing as a certainty. Oh, now they tell me.

Vermeer and Music

Vermeer and Music, The Art of Love and Leisure, National Gallery, until September 8

Regrets, I have a few. One of them was not going to the Netherlands some 15 years ago or more when the most Vermeers that are ever going to be in the same place at the same time in this lifetime didn't quite seem to justify a holiday in itself at the time. It's a  mistake that can never be rectified.
So, when only 5 of them were due in London this summer it became a highly likely day out even if getting into and back out of London these days is less and less of a pleasure. But 5 represents a fair proportion of an artist of who we only have, is it, 36, extant camnvasses.
The exhibition is augmented by a number of mid-C17th Dutch contemporaries as well as musical instruments and a few music texts to go with them.
The very first item, on your right as you go in, is an astonishing, tiny painting by Carel Fabritius, A View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller's Stall, 1652, 15.5 x 31.7 cm. Its strange perspective is perhaps accidental, though, as it was perhaps originally part of a 'perspective box' that would have made more sense of the panorama. It still, however, contains the recurrent theme of music as transient, the silence of the instruments only emphasizing how music inevitably passes.
For the most part, in other paintings, music is a social exercise, its harmony closely linked to love and courtship. Or so we are told. To me, it looked on several occasions as if the guileless young lady was concentrating on the music while her admirer's attention was at best divided between the music and plans for after the music had stopped.
Not so much for Vermeer himself, though, who had four pictures of young ladies playing music unattended while in The Music Lesson, a conveniently placed mirror shows the sideways glance on the girl's face and she's not daft. She knows exactly what's going on.
Among the instruments, a highlight is the octave virginal, a toy really, by Samuel Biderman II, of about 1620. Sadly not pictured in the catalogue, the bidding in words to describe it would begin with 'exquisite' and then shoot upwards. A luxury item for a leisured, well-off lady to pick out a little tune on, the painting she has to look at while she plays is a luxury all of its own and she could keep her sewing kit in it as well.
The Vermeers are in that last room with it, the star turn after the support acts have been on. We've had a fine Pieter de Hooch, two Jan Steen, two Brugghen but we've come to see Vermeer really. And immediately you go into the room, it seems as if they have been lit to better effect, like a rider in a bicycle race wearing a yellow jersey to show he is the overall leader, or David Beckham having yet another haircut to show he is the richest footballer. The word 'luminous' turns up again and again but it doesn't mean much until you see that effect. I scrutinized the lighting a couple of times from different angles to see if the Vermeers were getting an unfair share of attention but I'm sure they're not. It's in the painting.
While the literary text of the pictures might be all about harmony, invitations and composition, Vermeer's art is even more concerned with light. The very last room, as a sort of coda, explains recent research into Vermeer's technique and how he deliberately achieved it. Apparently it isn't just a matter of thinking that a bit of this lovely blue over here looks nice against that elegantly lit cream-coloured wall. Although that is a part of it. The catalogue explains something that you then realize you had known all along, how limited is the palette of colours that he uses. I might suggest that he possibly couldn't afford expensive paints in a wide range of colours but it is preferable to think that it was a conscious artistic decision and those were the tones he liked best. It is not as if the time, thought and effort expended on making such masterpieces suggests a cheapskate. Every inch of each canvas is apparently thought out, like every word in a great poem must be. It is not that some parts are slightly out of focus through lack of attention, it is to draw the eye to the real focus of the painting. And how, 350 years ago, one could get the folds of such a posh frock so right with just paint is hard to say, except Vermeer's contemporaries here were nowhere near as good at it and I don't think David Hockney does it much either.
And that is how, I suppose, the unbelievable genius is separated from the merely brilliant.

With a timed ticket, one expects to have a reasonable look at the pictures. It was full enough without being oppressively so. One always considers others with a sort of art gallery etiquette while making sure you see all you want to see for your money and read all the notes, which are in the catalogue to take home anyway. But the performance of relevant music timed for 3pm had a roomful of audience sitting expectantly a good twenty minutes ahead of it and some of them had obviously been there longer. An understatedly agitated crowd gathered, looking into the room from beyond where it was taped off, thinking that they were missing something. I'm not sure if the National Gallery achieved much with such a venture or if it caused more collateral disappointment. After a few minutes of listening from a disadvantaged vantage point, I concluded that I wasn't missing quite as much as they thought they were but it seemed a bit bungled and less than impressive. But not a blot, really, on a wonderful exhibition where the music was never going to enhance the paint by much and we all know what John Dowland's music sounds like, which is what was on the CD they were selling..
Vermeer is radiant and calm and all the things that one wants from art if technique, wonder and a sense of something else beyond is what you like. It looks quiet and charming but there's always more to it than that. The volume need not go above 7 or 8 to hear plenty going on.

I have a very moderate record of seeing famous people in real life and not all of the names are worthy of the mention anyway but I did just turn round in time a few years ago to see Rowan Williams, when Archbishop of Canterbury, on the way into a Prom of the Monteverdi Vespers. What else could it have been.
And similarly here, knowing that he is a big fan of the modern-day Vermeer, Hammershoi, on my way into the exhibition I passed the globe-trotting Python, teller of Ripping Yarns, and all-round good egg, Mr. Michael Palin, who was on his way out, as it were.
If it's good enough for him, it was certainly good enough for me.

Lunchtime Music

Jun Sasaki and James Sherlock, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, July 5; Graham Davies, Portsmouth Cathedral, July 4.

Jun Sasaki played the second Bach Cello Suite in St. Martin-in-the Fields at lunchtime. These free concerts, with a donation suggested, are always well attended and especially tremendous value in the cool and calm of the church while Trafalgar Square gets busier and warmer outside. Born in 1989, one is immediately staggered at how young people are these days but his playing was thoughtful and of superb technique.
Bach's immense common sense is nowhere more evident than in the Cello Suites in which one is convinced that something is being explained with great authority but also the right amount of patience and understanding.
Jun's third movement here, the Courante sounded very quick to me - I'll have to check how Casals did it - but it was not to the detriment of any clarity or tone. These are primarily dances after all and the Gigue at the end went to the lower strings with some dexterity, too. The applause seemed to reflect a genuine appreciation of some fine musicianship.
James Sherlock joined on the Steinway to give Mendelssohn's Sonata no. 2, Op. 58. Mendelssohn always seems to me the forgotten man among the Premiership of composers, perhaps due to some perception of lightweight about what is more properly 'lightness of touch'. It's a perception I'm happy to keep on arguing against.
The first movement had piano and cello sharing and sharing alike in conversation and summery motifs; in the second the cello was played both pizzicato and in more extended, lyrical bowed themes. After the stately chorale of the Adagio that owed much to Mendelssohn's admiration of Bach, the final movement put in a sustained turn of foot to scamper away to the winning post with piano passages twinkling not unlike those of a Mozart concerto.
These are two young musicians whose futures are surely very bright.

Mendelssohn had opened yesterday's organ recital in Portsmouth Cathedral with Graham Davies visiting from Farnham. This sonata was an attractive, bright beginning to a programme that gladly had the master, Buxtehude's, Preludium in D as its centrepiece because I'm always grateful for as much Buxtehude as I can get.
Graham used several of the stops on the Portsmouth organ for muted, trumpet or full effect but I won't be in any hurry to revisit the music of Vierne and one was grateful that only three of the 24 Pieces in Style Libre were offered. I spent 10 minutes wondering why anyone had found it necessary to compose this music but I dare say the same will be thought by some of my next booklet of poems. But a lunchtime recital is very much the thing during a week off work, not only a fine use for a church in the daytime but excellent opportunities for musicians to play in them.

The season in Portsmouth resumes on September 12th. I think St. Martin's is perpetual and has been for 60 years. 

Green on Harrison

In a slight change to the programme of the Portsmouth Poetry Society, the last meeting before the August recess will now still be on Tony Harrison but it will be introduced by me.
I'm glad to be doing it as long as nobody thinks I've had more than my fair share of introducing subjects on the programme that is just ending. I promise to do fewer next year.
But, roll up, roll up. 7.30, Weds 17th July, St. Mark's Church, North End, Portsmouth.
I'll put the introduction on here then.

Thomas Wyatt, The Heart's Forest

Susan Bridgen, Thomas Wyatt, The Heart's Forest (Faber)

Life in Henry VIII's court was never going to be a pushover. Thomas Wyatt found himself in a delicate situation early on when not only favoured by the first Queen Katherine but also, aware that Henry saw Anne Boleyn as his second wife, had to decide whether to explain to the king that he had had intimate relations with the new prospect before he married her or to gamble on him not finding out afterwards. Either way, Wyatt's head could conceivably become separated from his body. In the event, he decided to make Henry aware of the situation before it could become any more complicated but Henry wouldn't have it. She was not that sort of girl to a despot if that is what a despot wanted to believe. After a pause, he said she was 'of untainted virtue', although he did have her executed for adultery a little while later.
Anne's sister, Mary's, romantic adventures, we are told,
                    were notorious, even in France
as if that is some special category of notoriety. But Susan Brigden's account of Wyatt never threatens to descend into a BBC costume drama of flesh and libido. It is a thoroughly engaging examination of the poet's role as courtier, ambassador, spy and bigshot in the treacherous, shifting politics and 'theology' of C16th Europe.
It is not done precisely chronolgically as an account of the life. Wyatt's childhood is mentioned briefly on page 70, after chapters that set us off in search of the elusive 'real Wyatt'. While he condemns the flattery and duplicity of the court, his position is increasingly and forever compromised by the need for expediency and questions of friendship when it is difficult to trust anybody else, especially if they are to be interrogated with a view to their own execution of for evidence to justify one's own.
Wyatt's great strengths are his charm and erudition and so he advances in his career, firstly in London and then even more dangerously as ambassador to Spain, representing the English king who is heading towards schism with Rome, among Catholic kings, Emperors and, of course, the Pope.
Meanwhile, his poetry is full of restlessness and insecurity, fleeting and evasive, but also inventively trying new forms while owing a great debt to Petrarch. He refers time and time again to an unnamed 'they', as in his most famous poem, They flee from me, and perhaps wisely we are never told exactly who they are but we are offered some informed guesses.
Susan Brigden is a historian and the detail of the political machinations is impressive at this distance but her literary exegesis is excellent, too.
The book builds to a gripping climax as Wyatt prepares his own Defence when finally out of favour and in the Tower and his days look numbered. He produces a brilliant document, full of all the devices of rhetoric and argument, finally pointing out that,
Should the jury be fearful of freeing him, this would be tantamount to denying that their king was a prince of mercy and justice.
Which, in the circumstances, are fine words from someone whose integrity is beyond reproach but what else can you do. In a book about Wyatt, we are inevitably somehow on Wyatt's side but there is the ever present sub-text that this was an upwardly mobile society man on the make who remained suspiciously conservative in religion while working for probably the greatest tyrant that ever ruled these islands,
'I think I shoulde have more adoe with a great sorte in Inglande to purge my selffe of suspecte of a Lutherane than of a Papyste.'
He is not brought to trial but, ironically in a story full of paradoxes, dies not long after, catching a fever while riding to Cornwall, back as a trusted emissary of Henry. He has spent a lot of time dashing long distances on horses in his short but eventful life and dies in a way that befits him, having been clever enough to escape the demise that saw off so many of his peers, like Thomas Cromwell, for instance, whose grisly end may or may not have come about while Wyatt preserved himself.
Part of his acquittal involved a bargain in which he took back his first wife, Elizabeth Brooke, who he had never forgiven, and that had sad repercussions for Bess Darrell, his genuine love, whose precarious position is presumably saved by the provision he makes for her in his will, like 'Montacute Priory in Somerset, with all its manors and lands.'
But Wyatt's legacy, beyond the immensely dodgy dealings and maneouverings of his life in domestic and international politics, was a 'new poetry', attributed to him and Surrey.
It is not a book to be undertaken lightly but it is immensely rewarding and highly readable, the retention of Tho. Viat's orygynale spellinges enhancing the period atmosphere if sometimes needing some deciphering nearly 600 years later. I'll miss it now I've finished it.