Seamus Heaney

There will be tributes from writers more accomplished and qualified for the job than I after the death of Seamus Heaney, the pre-eminent poet in the British Isles over the last few decades. On the other hand, one can hardly let the sad day go by without acknowledging it.
The position of Northern Ireland in poetry in our time was ostensibly achieved by a generation of poets that grew up after him and around him. If our major poets have recently been identified with provincial areas rather than the metropolis or Oxford and Cambridge, none has been as evident as the talent to come out of Ireland.
Seamus Heaney was perhaps best known for his early poems on archaeology, the icons of primitive violence found preserved in north European mud, and his version of Beowulf. However, for me his poetry was remarkable for the light and lightness of touch it displayed. There was a generosity of spirit and humanity that was expressed with a physical texture and music in his language that was his own, that no other could imitate or even try to.
Those qualities came directly from a personality who above all valued frienship, family and the Human Chain that gave the title of his last book of poems. It would go without saying that he leaves a considerable gap in contemporary poetry.

Lumsden's Women in Paintings

I'm pleased to find this poem is on the internet. It is very much a contender for my Best Poem of the Year. So far, at least. I can hardly see it not being on my own short list even if I have some other candidates and there's a whole book of Kleinzahler due in October.

http://edinburgh-review.com/extracts/poetry-women-in-paintings-roddy-lumsden/

And when I say 'Best', I mean how am I supposed to know what is the best. I mean I like it best, probably of anything else I've read this year.
And so, why do I like it so much.
To be frugally honest about it, I've seen a number of poems I have liked so far this year but not so many that make me think they are of classic status. It was ever thus. But it does mean that 'best' is best when not necessarily up against a very strong field. But I do like the poem the more I look at it and more than when I first saw it several weeks ago.
I like the understatement of its fine music. It hides its virtues a little bit, the more that they might satisfy on discovery. It rhymes but you might not know it; it has internal rhyme here and there that the reader is welcome to disregard. It is about other art, but not only about other art; it summarizes and yet is particular. In the space of 12 lines it makes me stop to admire several times and yet you must read on, thus you need to read it twice each time, once stopping to admire and once never doing so, with all those things understood. Or as many of them as I like to think I have found. I'm sure there are more. A good poem is always withholding more than one has found in it, one would like to think.
And it is a sort of bravura. Lines like,

                              a lilac twister
of a sunstreak, through which the bonneted girl
is ever about to step,

so that, yes, poetry in our day and age can still be simply lovely and not just clever.
I could go on but won't.
Another good thing about it is that Mr. Lumsden is clearly still at the height of his powers and I like seeing that in the poets that I regard as my favourites. It is poems like this that remind me why I still read it while I still read it.

Thomas Hardy - A Pair of Blue Eyes

Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (Oxford)

I like to try to review books as soon as I can after publication. Apologies that this appears 140 years after its first appearance in print.
Being given The Woodlanders or The Mayor of Casterbridge to read for homework at school in about 1975 must have been some kind of turning point for me, the sort of thing that happened on the road to Damascus for others in biblical times if not now. Homework was supposed to be some sort of drudgery and yet that was a pure pleasure. It reminds me of the remark I've seen since by Terry Eagleton that he is amazed to have been paid for reading literature all his life, as if he earned a living by sunbathing or self-abuse. But it has been a long time since I read a Hardy novel and so I took A Pair of Blue Eyes on holiday. It is an early effort but it is still a brilliantly done thing with many of the unlikely plot techniques of the later masterpieces but equally with any number of wonderful insights into human nature, like,
Beside him was a lady with skim-milky eyes and complexion, belonging to the 'interesting' class of women, where that class merges in the sickly, her greatest pleasure being apparently to enjoy nothing.
To think that Hardy foresaw Victoria Beckham 120 years before the fact.
Hardy's plots remind me of a G7 chord on the guitar, or any seventh chord, in which a note is added that moves us into the next chord. I believe it happens in songs like I Wanna Hold Your Hand by The Beatles. The determinism, almost fatalism, of Hardy's world view is helped along by the clearest of hints and the placing of small incidents that openly suggest what is going to happen next and yet you still need to read on to see it happen. Patrick Hamilton builds a similar sense of inevitability in his stories. Hardy was an architect and so one can see how he understood it. Hamilton liked golf, though. Surely only the very best golfers can play a round with quite such sureness about what will happen next.
Mrs. Jethway, the mother of the first victim of a love for Elfride Swancourt, haunts most of the book like an unexploded hand grenade. Social divisions are a terrible obstacle to 'love' but social mobility shifts those about almost as dangerously as the changing tides of a young girl's affections. One sees the action for the most part through Elfride's young and innocent blue eyes and so one is not too quick to blame her for the mounting pile of heartbreak victims but the bookish intellectual, Henry Knight, isn't quite as sophisticated as he might seem in this mess of unworldliness and so ultimately it is that prized virtue of innocence that one has to blame for so much hurt so expertly described.
The past is, as it was always going to be in Hardy, ready to spoil the future. A lost earring here and a premonition of a further precarious encounter a long way above a precipitous fall are other incidents positioned beautifully by Hardy's fastidiously planned story. We find ourselves where we were a few chapters before, but in a new situation, astonishingly often but brilliantly.  And when Stephen, the young architect, and Knight meet on their way back to try to reclaim Elfride in a classic piece of hopeless Hardy irony,
There followed that want of words which will always assert itself between nominal friends who find that they have ceased to be real ones,
and all that Hardy has so carefully compiled unravels in deepening sadness.
It is unfair to have embarked straightaway on another novel by a young, contemporary writer because it stands no chance in comparison with a so-called 'minor' novel of a genius like Hardy but one has to read something next. Grace McCleen's The Land of Decoration isn't much like her Professor of Poetry, but it is amusing in its way and not to be underestimated. I just wonder if it would have got a fairer reading if I hadn't moved straight into it after this book, a long overdue return to Hardy. It will be nowhere near as long before the next.
It was free to borrow from Portsmouth Central Library. Can you believe that. All I have to do is take it back.

Two Small Incidents This Week

Just in case there is nothing else to put here for a week or so, here are two pieces that probably could be called 'poems'. And, yes, they are poems. But possibly not quite the sort of poem I'd usually put my name to, if you see what I mean.

But they are reportage of detail from a small life. There might be a reviewer within these islands that would say so.

Two Small Incidents This Week 

1 

I’m looking at hats on a market stall.

The cheapest type of panama or fedora. 

Behind me I hear the sort of local wit

That keeps the stall holders so entertained. 

He’s asking what came first, the chicken

or the egg. And that it’s a good question. 

I look at one or two more hats.

They’re 7 quid and shouldn’t be put near naked flames. 

But then can’t help but turn round to explain

It was the egg, the egg came first. 

Dinosaurs laid eggs

Before there were chickens. 

But he says, yes, but there was life

On earth before dinosaurs 

And I say, yes, there was

But not chickens.

 

2 

I packed my bag for a week off

Throughout the week before, 

Adding each item as I thought of it.

Tablets, diary, camera. 

Oh, yes. Camera, and therefore

Some replacement batteries to put it in. 

I take two batteries out of the drawer,

The last two in the cardboard strip 

Then find that I have put the cardboard

Into my bag and am walking to the kitchen bin 

To throw the batteries away.

Why am I throwing these batteries away. 

Oh, I see. Perhaps I’ll put them in my bag

And throw the cardboard away instead.

The Avoidance of Bad Practice

Poetry and poetry critics have an ambivalent relationship with the idea of orthodoxy. While many readily dispense rules, guidelines, dictums, manifestos and agendas towards what they think poetry is or should be, no sooner are these in place than it becomes de rigeur to transgress them. The rules were apparently for others to studiously comply with while the real poet is the individual whose talent gives them the right to break them.

Reviewers allocate much of their time identifying how the poet under discussion establishes their own unique identity, their ‘voice’ and often how they create the striking effects in their poems. It is about 100 years since Pound advised that poetry should ‘make it new’ and textbooks devote themselves to explaining how it is desirable to shock and surprise, to see the world in a new way, remake cliché or set up an expectation only to subvert it. All of that is, on the face of it, fair enough but it isn’t long before that becomes a new orthodoxy.

How many shocks and surprises can one take before one becomes attuned to them, before the unexpected becomes predictable, before the shock of the newness becomes cursory and mundane. After a long hour of reading poetry, one would have become immune to such arcane fireworks. A novelty doesn’t remain so for very long and the idea of novelty has a similar limit to its uses. By all means, without stylistic innovation there would be no progress and no interest whatsoever in any new writing but poets whose whole manifesto is based on their perceived ground-breaking style are likely to be of brief interest to all but their immediate circle of supporters. Even something as clever as the ‘Martian’ poetry of the 1980’s began to seem old hat very quickly which is not to say it isn’t worth reading any more, only that nobody seemed to be writing like that by the mid 1990’s.

One simple maxim that does endure, though, is the avoidance of bad practice, that is - bad stylistic practice. The shifting element within that, of course, is what is regarded as bad practice from one decade, or less than that, to the next. But the poems I find I most admire, having read a few books in recent few years and made mention of them here, are those that do the fewest things wrong and yet still remain memorable.

There are a number of readily identifiable traits that recur in poetry that can make potentially good ones not quite so good- for example, too much alliteration, gestures that are too grand, straining for effect and modish affectation. In Donald Davie’s phrase, a poem is ‘a considered utterance’ and so is not really a poem at all unless self-consciously artificial. And so it is a sort of non-sequitur for a poem like Allen Ginsberg’s Howl to affect to be a spontaneous outpouring of an over-wrought sensibility when in fact he worked very hard on it to make it appear so.  But, each poem succeeds or fails on its own terms and is only successful when a reader has enjoyed it (even if the only reader that does so is its author), and so each to their own and Ginsberg’s admirers are welcome to him.

Philip Larkin’s method is a case in point in the avoidance of bad practice, having become a ‘plain style’ that eschewed such recently bygone aberrations as Eliot’s high intellectualism, Auden’s political engagement and Dylan Thomas’s wordy apocalyptic rhetoric. Larkin’s approach had a cleansing effect, for those inclined to follow it, but in turn he was immediately indicted by the next shift in fashion which saw him as genteel, workmanlike and unambitious.

The first thing any poem needs to do is ‘be any good’ but there is more than one way to skin a cat, as they say, and there is no need to have a set of rules, of do’s and don’ts, and no manifesto to indicate how that might be achieved. The ongoing dialectic between the establishment of new principles and their immediate rebuttal is as useful as fashion. Adherence to such agendas makes poems more easily dated. Personally, ‘making it new’, achieving an individual ‘voice’ and seeing the world in a new way are perfectly laudable things to have found one has done but one hasn’t automatically failed if those targets haven’t been achieved.   

Grace McCleen - The Professor of Poetry

Grace McCleen, The Professor of Poetry (Sceptre)

The Professor of Poetry is a hymn to Oxford, a city of books, light and stone; to academic life; a thesis on poetry in itself. It doesn't say it's Oxford but one would be surprised if it wasn't. Or perhaps, in the end, not quite a hymn but a critique.
The Professor of Poetry is Elizabeth Stone, distinguished and devoted to her work if unworldly at the same time. She is middle-aged when she becomes ill but needs to spend time in Oxford to work on some papers of T.S. Eliot's. Her tutor from her days as a brilliant student, Edward Hunt, is still teaching there, scruffy, smoking and sometimes swearing.
The story conceals more secrets than it ever answers- like Elizabeth's relationship with her mother, what really happened at the concert thirty years earlier when she felt sick and what the relationship between Elizabeth and Edward had ever been. Elizabeth is something of a case study of various dysfunctions, one of which is the interesting condition of apparently not liking music.
The early chapters move slowly and one wonders how Grace McCleen can keep up the descriptions of the world of books lit by early evening light for quite so long without anything happening but as the novel develops and quickens to its climax it gains power and becomes very moving in the way that the intellectual ideas in poetry can become emotional, going beyond words and meaning. And yet, academic work isn't sufficient and perhaps it ultimately fails when Elizabeth finally makes her way through crisis into something more 'real'.
Grace McCleen's writing is spectacularly good in places and goes subtly unnoticed in others which is always a sign of top quality. Surely there is a pastiche of Virginia Woolf in one part; it finds perfect pitch in its descriptions in others and finally is paced with all the panache of a Dick Francis thriller. An interest in poetry would help in reading this, her second novel, but it is a beautiful thing by any standards and will make a wonderful film, I'm sure.
If I enjoy any other novel half as much for the rest of the year, I'll be happy with that. Her first novel, The Land of Decoration, has been ordered and is on its way here right now, I hope.

View from the Boundary

The BBC's arrangements for the Proms on telly are particularly satisfying this year with highlights of the week on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, and the week in review on Saturdays on BBC2. I was especially glad to see Mitsuko Uchida playing the Beethoven Concerto no. 4 on the i-player followed by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mariss Jansons doing the Symphonie Fantastique.
Not having been to as many concerts as usual this year, there are a couple of performances seen on television that are suggesting themselves as the best thing I've seen this year and Mitsuko goes in alongside Chic's set at Glastonbury as one of them. But I listened as closely as I could, even though I am no virtuoso on the piano myself, because I had read Richard Morrison's words in Saturday's Times,
Mitsuko Uchida made too many nervous slips for comfort

Do us a favour, mate. Is that the best you can find to say about it. It was a blinding, magical performance.
I ordered Mitsuko's box set of the Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos partly in sympathy with her and partly in protest against Richard Morrison, whose future conduct I will be monitoring, but mainly, of course, because they will be tremendous.

---

If the nation's economic well-being is measured by such indices as the FTSE and the inflation rate, my own state of mind depends much on my rating on FICS, the Free Internet Chess Server and the profit or loss situation between me and my bookmaker for the year in progress.
Everything is looking okay at the moment, thanks, with me trading at 1369 on FICS, ever in pursuit of the 1417 personal best set last year and in a best ever position v the Old Enemy in the gambling arena.
It gets harder to push on once one I go beyond 1350 on FICS because one wins fewer points for each victory the higher one goes. You have to take on better players and a loss against a lower rated player sets you back more. If one gets into the rarified heights of 1380-1400, it gets more nervous and one is less prepared to take chances. One tends to grind things out, be less imaginative and less sporting. And then after a couple of defeats, the latest surge to the top loses impetus and, before you know it, you're 1300 again. Or, I am, anyway.
When I was 1417 it put me in only the top 46% of the registered players and that is a contrived personal best way above my real worth, which gives me some indication of my chances of challenging Magnus Carlsen.
But surely even a disastrous Autumn can surely not lose me all of the profit I have taken off the turf accountants this year. Of course, there is a long way to go to get back a lifetime of losing but I've bought a new suit out of the proceeds so far.
Come back in October to follow the Saturday Naps here and see if we can't finesse this miraculous success against the odds.
--

The reason I bought a digital radio, and now have two, was so that I could instantly retreat to Radio 3 or 4 when Alan Green came on Radio 5. The incorrigible bombast is still under the impression that endless football opinions, and mainly his, are of great moment and I couldn't take it anymore.
Radio 5 was my staple diet with certain things to tune in to on 3 and 4 for but for the time being without Danny Baker or Peter Allen, Radio 5 is amassing a grand army of presenters that I can surely do without.
Gary Richardson's  Sportsweek has long been a reason to spend Sunday morning with Radio 3 with his grimly serious approach to sport as if he were Jeremy Paxman and sport was the News. Stephen Nolan in the weekend midnight slot seems to want to be Kilroy or Esther Rantzen with his lurid human interest stories, most of which aim at long pauses and desperately moving accounts of terminal illness, heartbreak or tabloid sensationalism. Ian Payne sounds like a junior presenter from University radio. And this morning I turned to Radio 4 for the Breakfast show because Chris Warburton is on 5 in place of Nicky Campbell. I can just about take Campbell's narcissism and smart arse asides because he is clever enough but Warburton was subliminally awful.
But when one finds quite so many of the company unpalatable, it might not be them, it might be you. And so it is probably me. I listen to Test Match Special as much for the conversation as for the cricket score.
I don't think Radio 5 is a natural home to me anymore. It will be a matter of much more channel hopping from now on.

Beginner's Guide to Fado

Beginner's Guide to Fado (Nascente)

One of Radio 3's highlights programmes from WOMAD a couple of weeks ago featured the latest star of fado, Carminho, and finally decided me that it was well overdue that I availed myself of some choice records of the genre. Mariza had suggested herself previously but not got me as far as the checkout. And that was much more my fault than it was hers.
Having found this 3 CD set at £5.99, I weighed the ostensible value against the ignominy of admitting to the status of 'beginner'. I only really want 'state of the art', I don't need my record collection to accuse me of 'beginner' status but it didn't take long for my parsimonious side to get the better of the inner snob. And once it arrived and I played it, I found that was exactly right. This is a tremendous bargain and a marvellous collection.
Many genres of music 'all sound the same' to the non-expert. Barber shop quartets, trad jazz, modern jazz, Renaissance polyphony, hip-hop. Whereas to a finely-tuned ear, like I fondly imagine mine to be, the difference between Bach and Handel, between Mozart and Haydn, the various degrees of reggae or glam rock are immediately obvious. I feared that fado might be like that- just so many very similar passionate despiring laments. It isn't like that at all. It would appear that fado covers as wide a range of music as reggae does, where nobody could possibly fail to tell the difference between U-Roy, Mutabaruka, Big Youth, Culture, Sugar Minott, Barry Biggs and Barbados by Typically Tropical.
The first disc here, Classic Fado, goes back to 1958 which one might find disappointing when the wikipedia entry on the subject says its roots go back to at least 1820 but if Amalia Rodrigues' Solidao was recorded in 58 then she does date back to 1939. But it is one of those moments when class just announces itself, at the start of track 13, that one instinctively knows that Maria da Fe was the essential singer of her period. It is a shame there is no lyric sheet to go with this album and my first efforts to find translations on the internet weren't successful but one can't have everything for £5.99 and one does get the general idea from the title and the performance. Fado means 'fate', and thus, often, loss, heartbreak and irretrievable damage. But one would like to know if the more upbeat pieces are on a different theme or just putting a brave face on it in the manner of something like I'm Doin Fine Now by New York City.
Fado Now sadly doesn't have Mariza or Carminho- again that would be too much to expect- but opens with exactly what one wanted from the album, immediately devastating resignation to luxuriate with, Amor Mais Perfeito by Joana Amendoeira, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EPUBsoTF4w. I'm sure glamour has many other manifestations but to express such fatalism with such panache is one of the finest and most uplifting things one can take from any music or literature. For all that the fado is about despair and hopelessness, it is remarkable how much better one can feel for listening to it.
In a collection from a different culture, one hears strange reminders of more familiar music often enough to suggest that jokes, magic tricks and football aren't the only things that don't need language to translate very well when, of course, poetry itself doesn't. R.E.M. did that chord change, or surely that is from a Dusty Springfield record. Ana Moura is probably the other name that has to be mentioned from this disc although there is not a bad track on any of the three. One striking thought is whether any current English singer could quite convince like this music does. Dusty was something out of the ordinary in the 1960's with her wonderful replication of Motown but whatever happened to Duffy when she dared to try to prove she could do a second album. And yet, although fado is still art, dependant on talent and performance, it seems entirely convincing.
Fado Fusion is numbered disc 2 but it acknowledges by its title that it looks to mix fado with other styles and so one could suggest it might have been put third, looking outwards. It was the disc I had the most doubts about at first. I just wanted fado, I don't want to know what Miles Davis would have done with it. I know that all art is fusion, that nobody can deliver anything worthwhile if they only repeat what went before. And so it doesn't matter if this is 'fado' or not- one stops caring- but might suspect that it is really Contemporary Portuguese Music.
Except, if it is, then perhaps I'll see you in Lisbon. If the other discs delivered not only what one wanted and more, then this is a massive bonus. The term 'R'n'B' has been used to designate wildly different popular music in British and American culture. Do Doctor Feelgood really belong in the same division as Rihanna. And so, whether this is fado, by any stretch of the imagination, begs the question.
There are gorgeous love songs, like Morrinha by Dany Silva, in fairly traditional style but the next track- by Lura- insists on reminding me of Portishead, the band rather than the town near Bristol; others make me wonder if night clubs might be a sort of paradise in Portugal that I'm sure they are not in Britain or Ibiza.
In an unlikely borrowing that I don't suppose really comes from The Clash, my favourite on this disc has to be the Lisbon City Rockers feat. Margarida Pinta, Estranha forma da vida. It's a haunting, late night masterpiece, says here from 2004. There is something of George Benson about the guitar. I'm sure I would have readily gone out and bought this record in 2004 if I had known about it.
I don't mind being treated like a beginner if it brings me a collection like this. What a tremendous set it is. If you have any interest at all in any of the above, this is the bargain buy of the year if not the decade.

Kona Macphee - What Long Miles

Kona Macphee, What Long Miles (Bloodaxe)

I remember antdays, that one day of the year that a particular breed of flying ant is everywhere and the next day have gone. It happens about this time of year. I would ride through swarms of them in the Hampshire countryside. And I remember Antdays, Kona Macphee's poem, being in Magma - I think it was- last year. It is one of several memorable poems in this new collection. The insects are,

the offered-up, the flight-blessed, fertile supplicants
of chance, aloft on likelihood's indifference.

Some purist might object to the mere listing of adjectives as if having thought of so many descriptors the poet finds it unnecessary to form them into sentences but there can be too many rules and guidelines and this is a fine poem that captures exactly what it sets out to.

My life as a B movie is beautifully done, too, stringing together film cliches to offer an account of a life built on set-piece unlikeliness to cheap comic effect 'all heavily foreshadowed'. It is presumably about fiction as well as about life but it is best enjoyed for its knowing humour without too much fretting over meaning or intention.
As the blurb promises, the poems 'range wildly'. There is a recurrent theme of encounters with nothingness, the aridity of Dry country, the 'growing wrap of absences' in Singularity, the empty, bought gestures of Rentboy, and more but they are all in different contexts and try out a variety of poetic forms so that one feels that Kona Macphee is one of the least formulaic poets one is likely to find.
I nurture a personal prejudice against poems shorter than, say, eight lines and so the haiku, aphorisms and vignettes here are wasted on me even if the Three sketches of a mandible are well-observed and realized. But I thus have no complaints about the extended argument of Prodigal, which seems to envy the footloose and devil-may-care escapee but has learned that there is more to be lost than won,

Would you learn, at last ,that any heart
will shred to tatters when what hauls it on
is some crazed engine hulking in the dark
of what it can't unlearn and can't outrun

and we end with Paschal (for Muldoon) which seems to take issue with that poet's Hay and rather than celebrate the packed hay accordion of potential meaning, regrets the blank of unseen consequences of inaction,

this much we will not know.

(it might be a tautology to say 'from whence' here)

It's a highly likeable book and a pleasure to read, achieving just the right tone of joie de vivre with regret. And it has one of the best covers I've seen for a while. Never essential but it doesn't do any harm either.

Sometimes crossword compilers are the best poets

Look at this from today's Times crossword.

Song about break-up from dearest, reeling in the years (9)

It is YESTERDAY.

And that is a beautiful thing. Well done.

Scordatura

Scordatura

 

The room shifts in unsteady candlelight.

To love you would be impossible now.

Tomorrow is upon us and the cruel 

science of harmonics has been adjusted

to accommodate this sense of release.

How did he know, Heinrich Biber, that to 

retune the violin could drain the world

of light and pack it surreptitiously

into a passacaglia where grief 

and wonder are the same. How would you know

which one was which, which word meant what, because

to love you would be impossible now.