New Poetry in Hammersmith

 New Poetry, Hammersmith Irish Cultural Centre, Oct 13

Four poets with some Irish in their family trees came together to read newly published work in the quiet of an auditorium away from the hectic process of the Friday evening outside. Poetry readings aren't my very favourite type of cultural event but they are already 100% better if I'm not taking part.

Paul O'Prey, who is the Dare-Gale Press, first introduced Patricia McCarthy, the outgoing editor of Agenda, whose new pamphlet, A Ghosting in Ukraine, encounters some artists who we might once have thought to be Russian but were properly Ukrainian. Anna Akhmatova, whose style Patricia described as 'unadorned', is a significant presence in her work but I'm always ready for anything Chagall-related, which we got.

In Four Seasons Gone she recognizes the outpouring of poems by many who have never written poems before in Ukraine during the war powerfully and it is to be hoped their resilience is rewarded.

Greg Leadbetter's Caliban imagines Shakespeare's 'primitive' creation going back to the island having been given his freedom by Prospero. Greg read three poems in what purported to be Shakespeare's English and followed them with their translations in modern pronunciation. That might not have been entirely necessary given that the first versions weren't really in a foreign language but what I took from them, however tangentially, was a music reminiscent of the Old English Wulf and Eadwacer, the gorgeous and forlorn masterpiece that remains mysterious and not quite explainable.

Paul doesn't publish his own books. His Mappa Mundi comes from the Melos Press, seeing the world in terms of those early map-makers who used more imagination than verified knowledge but maybe,

flat earth love is like you never find the edge,

in which I don't know where the line endings come because I only heard it but I'm more concerned with what the line evokes than getting it right, like those early cartographers now look to us to have been.

Sean O'Brien has done this before. He has a sort of stagecraft that disguises his art as something relaxed, confident to do it is in his own time with casual humour that is probably more rehearsed and thought-out than it looks. It always was with the old school professionals like Morecambe & Wise, Tommy Cooper and Ken Dodd. His Otherwise is discussed elsewhere here (below), where it might turn out I've got at least as much 'wrong' as I've got 'right' but, having been brought up on the Intentional Fallacy, it's up to me if I assume a 'black dog' refers to depression and not, quite literally but not so literarily, simply a dog that is black.

Paul's introduction to Sean identified him as 'gentle but ruthless' and these new poems are gentler than he's sometimes been in the past. After many years of coining phrases to try to capture the essential O'Brien with varying degrees of success, I've not condensed it into three words quite so concisely.

As poetry readings go, this was a good one and rated quite highly. It's only the second one I've been to since lockdown and I'm in no hurry to find the next. But you'd be lucky to get anybody of quite such quality turning up at your local open mic night. On the other hand, as Sean wryly observed, one generally prefers to hear that there are 'just two more' rather than seven more, especially when the bar is open and, I was reliably informed, the Guinness in the Irish Cultural Centre is competitively priced compared to what it is possible to pay elsewhere in that there London.