Recent Poetry Books - Kathryn Gray and Sue Hubbard

Kathryn Gray, Hollywood or Home; Sue Hubbard, God's Little Artist (both Seren) 

Not as much new poetry arrives here as it once did. Not much at all, really. There must be some worth having being published but maybe I'm not looking in the right places. I'm not looking very hard, it must be said. But, one thing leading to another, here's some I found. 

Kathryn Gray read Bournemouth at the Evening with Rosemary Tonks in Soho a couple of weeks ago, imagining meeting the recluse on the seafront. Any friend of Rosemary's is a friend of mine and Kathryn's poem is an evocative tribute, its slow rhythms not like Rosemary's world-weary, often bleary-eyed confessions but after conjuring Dover Beach becomes both intimate and infinite admitting that she is,

           afraid of my own mind.

'Exploring celebrity culture', as the back cover says the book does, wouldn't be a theme I'd expect to be taken with myself so the selection of celebrities comes with some pleasant surprises - the poets, at least - in Dorothy Parker, Roddy Lumsden and Michael Donaghy. One can tell by its reference points that this is one's sort of book.

The Portable Dorothy Parker works a bit like a loose sestina, each stanza using the words 'blood' and 'shot' and most using 'cabinet' and 'gun' but Kathryn's poems are smart casual more than formal, as disciplined as they feel like being rather than insisting on strict adherence to rhyme or metre. Dorothy Parker is, like its heroine, a less deceived tour de force,

                                            When I love someone, I love them more

than they want to be loved. If they weren't already dead they'd sleep with a gun.

There is a Rosemary-like dissatisfaction in these poems, often attended to with a Dorothy-like attitude. For all their knowing worldliness they are most often in search of lost innocence but once lost innocence is not something that can be regained.

The problem with Donald is like the problem with Donald. Trying to speak of the unspeakable is a hiding to nothing and yet one can hardly not say anything. The Trump poem reduces itself to simplistic statements, repeats itself, is chronically angry at its own pitiful limitations and makes empty claims for itself and as such gets somewhere near its subject but more depth could be achieved if its subject was a more engaging character, like Donald Duck, because Trump's complexities are only manifested in his one-dimensional hideousness so the poem is a creditable attempt at an impossible job. Poems from the pamphlet, Flowers, including the title poem about a singer called Brandon whose work has almost entirely passed me by, are included here and I'm surprised to find I have all the Kathryn Gray there is in print. I thought there'd be more but it's a good idea to publish fewer books and make sure they are good ones. 

I'm not quite such a Sue Hubbard completist. I think it's her first books I have but I lost track of her writing on art somewhere along the line.

God's Little Artist is a verse biography of Gwen John, not so long ago the subject of a major exhibition in Pallant House, Chichester. It's not an easy thing to do but four pages of prose biography by way of introduction provide the story and then the poems are as vignettes to follow.

In Attic, it is as visual as the series of gorgeuosly quiet, pale paintings of that room in Paris, a print of one of which is on the wall over to my left but on that one the window is closed, but at its best poetry is music if it's anything at all and these poems have a gentle music that complements the paintings as well as touch, smell and all the senses that accumulate to evoke the limited but powerful palette of them, too. Again, like all poems worth having, they are better appreciated on subsequent readings than on the first. The phrase 'subtle tonalities' used by Sue to describe the paintings applies equally to her poems. 

Perhaps the highlight of the whole book, though, entirely satisfying as it is, is the quote from Georges Simenon,

'Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness'.

Yes, I dare say gloriously happy people don't stop to brood on their lives in poems, music or painting but it is just as true to say that those things at their best can bring more than adequate consolation which is something the unconsidered life lacks.

Seren has never been less than a highly likeable imprint and these two books only enhance that idea.