Anyone in the Portsmouth area with an interest or the inclination will be welcome tomorrow evening (20th) for an evening devoted to Shakespeare's sonnets. It is a friendly, informal group without agendas and everyone has the opportunity to read something relevant (usually a poem) which can then be talked about. St. Mark's Church, Derby Road, North End, kick off 7.30 and we will be away at 9.30. My own contribution, being a self-appinted authority on the subject of Shakespeare's life, will be the piece on the dedication in the 1609 edition, that appears here a few weeks ago.
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Meanwhile, the short list for Best Novel of 2016 has got off to a much better start than its Poetry Collection equivalent. I am waiting for All That Man Is by David Szalay, to put alongside the Graham Swift and Julian Barnes that have already impressed and I'm aware that Ian McEwan and Sean O'Brien, to name but two, are due later in the year.
Before ordering the new Szalay, I tried Spring, published in 2011, not least because it has horse racing in it. It proved to be a good choice, very convincing not only in the horse racing parts but in the dysfunctional relationships, the theme of money and its fine writing, which occasionally threw up words that might have been trying too hard but it did plenty to make the new book one to look forward to. There was much to admire, like on a trip to the zoo,
Even the energeticaly pointed-out okapi - a strangely neglected creature, it looked like a misunderstanding in a medieval manuscript...
so don't talk to me about poetry being better and novels are 'prosaic'. Good novels do all that poems do, and more, whereas many poems do nothing like as much as a good novel. But I found myself thinking of the old point about how nobody ever does mundane things in films or books. In a lot of novels there is more sex than usually happens (or am I missing out), for example, presumably because it's interesting or significant. It certainly is in Spring, but it occured to me that not many people in books read books very often which might be odd because they're written by people who must have read a few. I know Jane Eyre reads a book but then she would but most books are not about people reading books.
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I pursued further music by Errollyn Wallen by buying the album, Errollyn. The opening track, Daedalus, brought to mind Kate Bush- it is an album of piano-based songs- but didn't always live up to its early promise, being a mixture of jazzy, dreamy but sometimes less than compelling pieces.
It might be best to see what more orchestral music there is from her wide-ranging output but I don't know how much more is readily available on CD.
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And, if anybody can explain ITV's Marcella to me, please write. Or, of course, don't. I realize that it's not Z Cars anymore and that darkness fills our lives with ever-deepening noir. I was lured in by the wonderful Anna Friel, almost like a victim in such a story of bleak obsession, and now I find I can't get out. It is an example, and I'm not sure it's a good one, of how future generations will look back on our television and wonder if life was really like that for us all. They might wonder why we relished so much bad. Or, by then, life might be like that for everyone and they'll find it quite ordinary.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
