The Leaping Year by Jeffrey Turner

New poems are like buses, for want of a better simile. I don't see any for months and then four recent booklets turn up at once.

The point of the Chestnut Press is not only the poetry. He carefully invites only poets that he wants to to provide poems for his editions on fine, hand-made paper in choice typefaces. I'm not even sure it's possible to buy them, such is the art for art's sake ethos of the project. Would that a few others were quite so devoted to their craft.

The Leaping Year consists of one 18-line poem and, of course, it's not going to be any old filler. It has to be worthy of the paper it's on so it's not one of those marginal poems that some collections include, lucky to make the cut in order to bulk it out and make the others look better.

It's not possible to read it quickly. Its meditative pulse won't let you. Its long lines vary in length, giving the impression of a formal discipline that is only actually in its adagio cadences. That is both more natural and more convincing than having to work at achieving a set metre, making the poet a slave to their chosen strictures. Not that the naturalness has necessarily come easily. I strongly suspect that Jeff Turner works hard at appearing so relaxed in print.

The music is subtle, like the rhyme on the first line ending's 'hare' and the 'unprepared' that comes soon after in line 2. The line of thought works its way from scepticism, through gentle disapprobation for 'those who should know better' - which is poets- and 'the folly of expectation' to the certainty of seasonal renewal, not unlike the R.S. Thomas masterpiece, Song at the Year's Turning. To its credit, the poem also in some ways brought to mind Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden by Julia Copus which rarely goes unmentioned here when there's reason to mention it.

It might seem profligate to go to such lengths to put one poem in print and anything sub-standard would immediately look absurd but our attention is duly focussed. We don't even have to decide which poem we like best. I am re-assured that there is still fine poetry being written. I might not know where to look for it but by now I'm lucky enough to know people who show it, or even give it, to me.  

Lunchtime Classics at the Menuhin Room, Sat, Sept 14

 

Home of the Gentry

Reading Turgenev was a book by William Trevor as well as still being a good idea. There is a line of prose writers that came before Trevor, including the Joyce of Dubliners and George Moore that make for a highly coherent reading list.

Home of the Gentry, or whichever of its many titles in translation, is as important as Rudin or Fathers and Sons, it seems to me, to Turgenev's depiction of the 'superfluous man', which we might uncharitably understand as 'layabout', as Mikhalevich lets Lavretsky know,

'You're not a sceptic, not disillusioned, not a Voltairean, you're a layabout, a vicious layabout, not a naive type. Naive layabouts lie on the stove and do nothing, because they don't know how to do anything; and they don't think, but you're a thinking man - and yet you lie around; you could do something and yet you do nothing; you lie with your full stomach sticking up in the air and say: This is how it must be, lying about like this, because no matter what people do, everything's nonsense, it's a lot of rubbish leading to nothing.'

So that's him told and it might make others among us feel a bit uneasy, too.

Lavretsky marries the chic, talented but possibly superficial Varvara with all her Parisian sophistication but she proves less than a perfect match. Returning home, he finds Liza who is a much better idea but, as so many such triangles prove, no lasting good comes of it all. Liza becomes a nun, Varvara carries on with her glamorous society life and Lavretsky is superfluous.

In the usual process of evaluating things, it is ultimately necessary to compare them with others which unavoidably leads us towards the unnecessary dreariness of league tables. I'm not going to rate Turgenev as Top 10 or any other such reductive statistical status, not least because there could easily be twenty novelists I'd like to put in a Top 10 but I'd say he's essential and anybody one rates alongside or above him needs to be very good indeed.

--

The arrival of that book delayed a big hiatus in which I trawl through writers wondering what should come next. It shouldn't be like that, though, I rely on things demanding to be read. Similarly, I can't like some people sit in front of a blank sheet of paper and produce a poem worth having. The poem has to insist on being written.

And so I await the arrival of the Grove Beethoven, not least for its catalogue of opus numbers. He was a teenage hero before being eclipsed by Bach, and Handel, with Mozart, the first love, never going away. But, following that performance of the Ghost Trio, it has been a Beethoven revival summer and he's in there challenging Mozart and Handel and only likely to improve his credentials after the Yo Yo Ma, Emmanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos Prom on Saturday. The point being that such a trio performing the Archduke really should make any anorak attempt to make league tables look very silly. However, come December I'm sure I'll be sitting here trying to decide which from a highly competitive list qualifies as the Event of the Year.   

Eve Jackson and Sue Spiers

 Eve Jackson, Turning Bird; Sue Spiers, De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da 

I don't see a great deal of new poetry these days. I don't go looking for it. Perhaps I should. On the evidence of these two recent books, there's still worthwhile poetry to be had if you look in the right place or are directed to it.

Eve Jackson's Turning Bird is visual and full of birds. With her other recent book, Allotment, it suggests she makes books on a theme whereas others of us put together whatever we've done and themes may or may not emerge by themselves. Turning Bird is the collection I prefer with its sense of abundance not only in birdlife and nature but the way her language captures it, too.

In Orkney,

One swan irons the distant loch

slowly, slowly, like a mother

lost in thought.

There's a lot of technique packed into three short lines there. 

 

The title poem dispenses with the definite and indefinite object as far as it can which subliminally suggests the weird sisters and their recipe for a spell in Macbeth.  I returned to the lines,

This hand-me-down know-how genetic Braille

begins with an inbred map of trust

of how and where to unearth materials,

cache of contents that gradually build

into a cradle of unstoppable must: 

 

There's a lot to like in the book. Eve's garden, or her travels, are either blessed with more birds than mine are or she is much more alert to what's around her.

 

In De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da, Sue Spiers is more concentrated on ideas and social issues and in her way more adventurous but doesn't always do it with the same linguistic insights. She is auditory more than visual, alert to sound and silence as the epigraph to her first section here highlights. Silence and sound are less opposites than intimately related parts of each other, not least in the music cited as reference points.

In Wider When Standing,

Quiet is where we go to see ourselves,

a meditation on nothing, a negation of noise,

even if silence is recorded, the recorder

whirs, the orchestra inhales, exhales.

 

Sue doesn't flinch from much. For me, sometimes poems that are making social or political points do so at the expense of the 'poetry', though. It is not easy to have it both ways.

I don't always find it necessary to spread words across the page, abandoning traditional lineage and spacing but to finish, in A Life,

It's    the    space    you    make

 

and the space       

                                   you leave.

 

That is all of it, in all its spaced-out zen compactness and it works.

 

In this summer interim without local musicians to provide a staple diet, the local painters in their annual exhibition in the cathedral and these two poets from the area have contributed to filling what could have been a void with good work. It's been great to find how much else is going on. I'm not ungrateful.                            

Opus 1

It said here a few months ago that Ethel Smyth arrived fully formed with her op. 1 String Quintet. It's been the Beethoven Piano Trios on my turntable for much of the summer, the first of which are op. 1, no. 1 and no. 2. Written in 1793, that makes him 22 when he wrote them. He arrives in mature condition, too. However forbidding he might sometimes appear in portraits or his more strident music, the slow movements in all these trios are anything but and he effortlessly takes on Mozart's legacy throughout.

Mozart's own opus, or Kochel, 1 is a formal exercise for Piano Minuet and if it lacks some of the depth of the Smyth and the Beethoven we might bear in mind he wrote it when he was 5.

So, the question of opus 1 brings with it a few different 'types' of artist. Some know what they are doing from the beginning, or wait until they do before publishing anything- which is a good idea; others develop from a starting point and improve markedly, yet others - perhaps more in pop music or literature than 'classical' music - have a good idea but fail to follow it up with anything as convincing, either trying to repeat the trick with diminishing returns or not finding anything else to compare with their one brilliant idea.

I've seen it suggested that some very successful pop acts can stretch the success of a debut album into a second, the point being that the first contained all their best stuff and the second is the next best plus whatever they've written since. Oasis fell apart when the third album was only half any good and that's what they were ever after. Charles Shaar Murray was wheeled out by a tabloid newspaper to review Be Here Now, heralded as a major cultural event, but he was in the minority in believing the hype and, basically, got it wrong. 

It might not be entirely correct to make The Catcher in the Rye Salinger's op. 1 but it might as well be for all that his other work is read by any beyond his devotees. Such early success so readily achieved can be a burden and the apprenticeships served by the Beatles in Hamburg, Handel in Italy, Bach in Lubeck and perhaps T.S. Eliot with Ezra Pound look like sound investments.

But, however impressive it is to arrive with a mature opus 1, one can't remain at square one without it soon becoming 'samey'. One possible way of differentiating the genuine artist from the box office provider is the capacity to move on and do the next things equally well. Beethoven did that and I might have found a reason to put him above Handel who delivered awesome opera and oratorios and a grand style but some might say without having Beethoven's range and depth. Once we are at that level, though, fault finding starts to look a bit over fussy.

Arvo Part could be said to have had two, or maybe three, careers or phases moving with fashion, up to a point, until finding the music that he is now famous for. Shakespeare did not turn up with his best work first, whether we think that was Titus Andronicus or Henry VI, and that ought to be Quod Erat Demonstrandum. If Beethoven had his Mozart, Bach his Buxtehude, Handel his Corelli, where would Shakespeare have been without Kit Marlowe.

Nobody just turns up and does it. Everything comes from something else.

Fathers and Sons

"They are so swollen-headed, these young men of today! If you ask one of them, 'Which wine do you prefer, red or white?' I am in the habit of preferring red!' he will answer in a bass voice and with such a solemn expression on his face as though the whole of the universe were looking at him at that instant....",

says Paul Petrovich in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.

There will always be a 'generation gap', at least one, but we change sides, inevitably, given time. I well remember being even more pompous, foolish and pretensious than I am now but possibly being surrounded at a non-descript university by worse examples of ingenus who, on the basis of some so-so 'A' levels and having read nearly 35 books, regarded themselves as God's gift to future of intellectual culture.

My own most telling analysis of the schism between generations so precious to each coming one were the lines,

Hendrix lives and we're all aware

that Dad don't know and Mum don't care,

I'd like to go for a walk and find

that the woman I love is also blind.  

It was either that, or maybe another, that was self-consciously done in the spirit of All the Young Dudes, the anthem of such disaffection for those of us of that vintage but one is up against it if deciding to take on Bowie even on a song he was big enough to be able to give way.

Cat Stevens was also very good on the subject.

I'm not entirely convinced that Fathers and Sons is obviously Turgenev at his best. With 'nihilism' as the younger generation's agenda, they are an easier target than when it was, say, Rock Against Racism, CND or hunt saboteurs.

In the end, I compressed by various attempts at satire on 'campus Marxists' to a few lines in another poem,
           across the campus

where students are reciting 

scriptures taken from Ulyanov 

as jealous as Puritans 

and righteous as lounge bar spivs.

               (Escape Artist, for Rosemary)

and, in the words of Thomas O'Malley, the alley cat, I'm very proud of that, not necessarily for the lines themselves but for the fact that I finally dealt with the issue in a nonchalant way and didn't even give them a whole poem to themselves.

I'm still concerned, though, whether it should just say 'Lenin' or whether 'Ulyanov' brings with it any affectation that is meant to be attributed to them rather than me.

I'm sure it will be possible at some future time, depending on how long one has left, to look back at oneself as one is now and think, like Capt. Mainwaring, 'oh, no, no, no', and so it's a condition that, once acknowledged, one can't ever escape. But if that's the level of self-doubt, scepticism and reflection on the effects of time that Turgenev has prompted before I'm halfway through a re-read of his so-called masterpiece then perhaps it is a 'thought-provoking' masterpiece.

Rudin

 Further choices from upstairs have been highly satisfactory. It seems I've read some good books in my time if only I could remember them.

In Turgenev's Rudin, the central character's phrase-mongering and the profundity he is credited with are found to be superficial. I had earlier abandoned A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic after the introduction not being able to accuse it of that but having been reminded that however much I like those bits of Sartre, Derrida, Wittgenstein et al, philosophy soon loses me in its language games. For a paperback of its age, its in good condition as a result of how little I looked at it at university and since. As the bible of English Empiricism it is as close to common sense as phiolosophers get but one needs to know what 'analytical' means, what a proposition is and, as I did in a poem 25 years ago, 'I start to doubt what meaning means'. It's absurd that part of my degree was in Philosophy. It's absurd that empiricism should be so abstract. Everything is absurd and I retreated early doors to engage with literature instead. Not that I hold it against Freddie Ayer. I'm sure he and G.E. Moore are on the right side but in the same way as I admire the work of chess players like Jose Capablanca without understanding how they do what they do, I have to take most of that on trust.

Katherine Mansfield's Prelude, in Bliss and Other Stories, is slightly less opaque but still very subtle. The relationships between the mostly female characters are finely delineated as per their position in society counterpointed with their attitudes and personalities. Not much is apparently happening until a revelatory ending in which Beryl sees herself as 'playing a part', perhaps in a similar way to Gabriel Conroy finding himself revealed to himself at the end of The Dead.

I can almost feel an essay suggesting itself on the hollowness inside us as a central theme in literature ranging through Hamlet, the way Larkin's Arundel Tomb undermines its portentous final line, L'Etranger, any number of others and Rudin. 

 

When I first read La Chute by Camus decades ago, I missed the irony which is the main point and one could easily do the same with Rudin if one applied such simple-minded reading to it. He's erudite, charming, intellectual and at least to begin with and in the right circles, convincing. Except that he's clever but empty and, being ungenuine, can't build anything permanent. The ending, appended by Turgenev later, in which he is shot while posturing as a revolutionary, is perhaps almost as gratuitous as he is but we have been beguiled by him in the early chapters and feel robbed, if no longer all that sympathetic. I'm sure we also feel the wiser, though, and the rest of the Turgenev section upstairs are lined up invitingly along with a new addition ordered today. 

 

Never have the books stored up for so many years come in quite so useful. I just go and look around and pick one and am usually impressed. That is what they are there for.

Kitchen

Aware of two recent titles by Banana Yoshimoto, I wasn't convinced how much point there was in them. She hasn't got much in common with Dick Francis but once you've read one you've very much got the idea. So, I went back to the original, reputation-making Kitchen. Firstly in a very warm 'garden' and then indoors with the Beethoven Violin Concerto and Brahms 4 on the wireless.

She's somewhere in between therapy and literature, indulging in deep feelings of both loneliness and profound attachment,

The times of great happiness and great sorrow were too intense; it was impossible to reconcile them with the routine of daily life. 

And from this template of a 100-page novella come all the others. Mikage's back story is one of serial family bereavement. We are told of the early deaths of her parents and then grandparents by the end of the second page and then Eriko, the transgender mother/ex-father of her friend Yuichi, is killed, too. If that is a thoroughgoing way of establishing a young person's status as 'alone in the world' then the otherwise gratuitous trans issue is no less subtle in questioning gender roles. Eriko is awesomely beautiful even having had plastic surgery in the way that maybe similarly 'magic realist' Haruki Murakami has a character whose ears are so beautiful they stop traffic. But food is of crucial importance to these people, Mikage's penchant for kitchen's apparently being something to do with 1980's consumerism and cuisine being their associated aesthetic of choice. 

The story gathers pace in a sublime act of devotion, delivering a second helping of the best-ever katsudon - pork with egg over rice- to Yuichi in an episode reprised later in Dreaming of Kimchee. And after triangular jealousies, chaste soul-mate devotion, trauma, loss and outrageous levels of gorgeousness, it looks as if Mikage and Yuichi have a future.

I have chronically worried whether Banana Yoshimoto is 'any good' or a 'guilty pleasure' and, despite my asking, nobody's ever told me. She could easily be both without ever being quoted in the betting for the Nobel Prize for Literature as Murakami often is. I don't think Sebastian Faulks is, either. I don't feel guilty about the pleasure gained from the music of Cliff Richard that is rarely compared with that of Bob Dylan.

So that is the answer.

I may or may not need Dead-End Memories and The Premonition. Having been given the titles, the books almost seem to write themselves, as would Steward's Enquiry by Dick Francis or John Francome but at least one knows what to expect, one is unlikely to be disappointed and they are tremendous successful authors. In the meantime, with itchy fingers so intent on ordering something new for the library, it doesn't need any and is serving its purpose. If I disposed of books once read I'd have a spare room in which to put something else but I don't, for good reason.

An Olympic Summer

 If that's 23 degrees outside, I'm only glad it's not the 34 that was thought possible. Summer becomes a grind even when we are given some heat off for good behaviour. Later July and then August take away my usual round of concerts, brings out kids and noisy neighbours and is the time most associated with city centre riots. It is a long time since summer was the undisputed highlight of the year, celebrated in such songs as Sumer is ycumen in.

Being a curmudgeon, like being a pessimist, is a defence mechanism used by people who can be perfectly happy in other circumstances but not entirely so as things stand but it's only three or four weeks until such circumstances might yet prevail again.

Sport is supposed to be that thing that diverts us from real issues into makeshift glory. Good luck to The Hundred, the version of cricket invented by Professor Branestawm, its latest forlorn effort to sell itself to a mass audience except it's not quite cricket. This summer it has been a footnote to the incursions of football via the Euros and the festival of windsurfing, break dancing and wall climbing that is now the Olympic Games.

And, why not. Although the Olympics are really the running races, how do we know it shouldn't be knitting, bricklaying, flower arranging or competitive eating.

One way of seeing what television amounts to is to experience it with one dimension removed. While Top of the Pops could often be silly it could also be brilliant but watch it without the sound and it becomes clear it's a lot of posturing. Listen to a sitcom from another room and it amounts to regular bursts of canned laughter whether it's Dad's Army or The Green Green Grass. And sport, whether it's exciting or not, is a commentator employed for their capacity to transmit the routine sensation that somebody has won.

Somebody was bound to but I'm happiest when my horse has got over the last well clear and I've got it right again, bar the shouting.

There were some great running races in the Olympics. The fact that the Men's 100 metres was so close suggests it might have been drug-free. Flo Jo simply could not have been that much faster than the rest of her gender and species but gender is now a sinister issue where once Jarmila Kratochvilova had always been female and so was Caster Semenya as far as I understood it. We are not all made the same. All except two of us will not be Olympic Champion at any given games but now there are 72 genders and what I want to know is why I, alongside so many others, am a victim of the prejudice against my exact specification that denies us the glory of being Olympic Champion of Everything.

Like literature, sport depends on the 'suspension of disbelief' and allowing ourselves to be involved with it even though we know there's something not quite right about it, like the fact that Everton and Nottingham Forest survived relegation last season despite points deductions whereas Man City keep kicking 110 financial irregularity charges down the road almost as often as they equally effectively kick a ball.

Absurdities come into focus when one things about things too much, one could think, but it's too hot too often; sport is expecting us to pay up and be thrilled by a meaningless circus and we are forever shortchanged while expected to be grateful. But somewhere deep down in the curmudgeon or pessimist there remains the idealist who still nurtures the hope that everything is gonna be alright.

Kamala hasn't taken long to be running all over Trump in the polls; we eventually now have a competent Prime Minister with a good majority for a few years in the UK and, rather than have Beethoven's Archduke Trio set on replay on the record player, it's only a few weeks until Chichester and Portsmouth Cathedrals, the Menuhin Room and other local venues will be providing such things in the flesh again.

It ain't over til it's over. Keep Hope Alive.     

Isherwood

Goodbye To Berlin is what came off the shelves next. I'd read the other Isherwoods near it but never this which, I dare say, is his best-known and probably best book. I was already the better informed for reading the first page, it being where Thom Gunn took his To Isherwood Dying from. If MacNeice presaged war from England in his Autumn Journal, Isherwood is somewhat earlier in Germany doing the same.

Not much of it sounds made up even if Sally Bowles was really called Jean Ross. Making it semi-fictional would risk devaluing it but he says it's not 'purely autobiographical' in his preface and my edition classifies it as Fiction/Literature. Fiction and autobiography can intersect sometimes, though. In this case his cast of characters don't seem to need much additional help to be memorable. Isherwood's writing is as dapper as he always appears in pictures. Since I can't remember anything about the other books I have of his upstairs, I'd be better off re-reading them rather than buying others.

--

Further fallout from the Gunn biography leads me to think that his life and work represented the process by which liberal becomes libertarian. It was perhaps always implicit in both. Liberal involves a concern for others whereas the libertarian is primarily concerned with themselves. Gunn's early work was self-absorbed and his awakening, through Touch, to the presence of others, while overcoming his solipsism, is more exploitative than caring. 

The libertarian acknowledges as few limits on their own freedom as they possibly can and only really grants others release from them in order to enjoy them themselves. Nobody is against freedom but in Boris Johnsonian terms it is a panacea that brings inherent dangers with it. If everyone were allowed ultimate freedom, anarchy would ensue and nobody would benefit in the end.

Gunn's promiscuity and drug use were, for the most part, his own business and he successfully went beyond social barriers in pursuit of his hedonistic aims. If it did no harm to others then so be it but it's not heroic. It's not an example everyone could follow and even for him one suspects his fulfilment was artificial and he might have known as much. I will still accord him some heroic status for his poems, though, the best of which were as good as anybody's from his generation and the later C20th. As with Larkin, as with George Orwell and as with so many others, we need to separate out the writing from who wrote it, the dancer from the dance and not reject one because we don't necessarily like the other.

Doing Things I Always Wanted To

When one's life is effectively one big holiday it seems a bit excessive to undergo the trauma and hardship of travel to do it further afield. My days of airports, foreign currency, language and such things have long been over and memories of Topkapi Palace, St. Mark's Basilica and the Charles Bridge are reduced to vestigial snapshots of moments. However, seeing a coach holiday in the local paper while waiting for a takeaway, with an optional day trip to Durham, prompted a return to the lower end of the holidaymaking classes. I seem to have an affinity with Northumbria, this being the third 'holiday' as such I've undertaken there out of my last four. Since Japan is unthinkable, Durham Cathedral was about the only thing on my list of places to go I considered worthy of the undertaking.

As the difficulties of coach travel and l'enfer c'est les autres can now be treated with more irony than angst, it was actually worth it, revisiting Lindisfarne all too hurriedly after maybe 27 years, seeing a bit more of Newcastle and missing Hadrian's Wall for the sake of the University's Rosemary Tonks archive, as below, into the bargain. Holidays don't come much more bespoke than that and while doing such things on one's own might mark one out as a weirdo, having anybody else there would have made such self-indulgence not admissable and, anyway, I know a few perfectly good and normal people who readily pay the single person supplement.

The complexity of the vast network of coaches moving people from all parts of the country to so many others turned out to be an additional feature of great interest. My three coaches and 12 hour outbound journey would have been miraculous except for taking in the M6 and Stoke-on-Trent and the driver apparently getting lost whether the M1 was blocked up or not. Thus two three-hour rides with only a 20 minute break weren't the original plan. And then, on arrival, having to find one's key, with a form to fill in for imminent dinner's menu choices I was prodded on the shoulder and asked reasonably politely if I could not wear my hat on the coach as it spoiled someone's view, presumably of some small but crucial detail of M1 travel that one person had particularly wanted to see.

A series of such impossibly picky gripes from various fellow travellers whose worlds are presumably otherwise forever unblemished soon became a further ghastly entertainment, with their concomitant insight into human nature, as the days went by. Even the hotel manager found it necessary to relay a warning via the understandably eternally disgruntled coach driver that guests should not be helping themselves to a free lunch from the breakfast buffet. Comparing notes with my best friends of the week, they asked if I'd read all the rules and I conceded that I hadn't. They said you could be thrown out of the hotel for doing that but the penalties were easy-going enough to stop short of transportation to Tasmania.

My temporary best friends were two ladies from Redditch, among the few ostensibly younger than me available, and I was glad of them especially as they made the effort before departing on their coach on the last day to come and wave to me. What our staid, possibly Daily Mail-reading co-travellers made of our blowing kisses to each other made of it I don't know but, in my defence, the soundtrack of the first leg of my trip north had been John Lennon's Shaved Fish compliation and so the spirit of such hippy times was expected to be within the remit of the clientele.

Having to share the once tranquil idyll of Lindisfarne with so many other day-tripping hordes would surely have made Cuthbert and Bede shudder but they were no more guilty than me and I dare say that 98% of the people one sees in Barcelona, Venice, Bourton-on-the-Water or even Las Vegas are tourists and doing what you're doing, too, and so such places can't ever be 'real' any more. My pilgrimage to the place my once favourite pop group was named after was an absurd parody of a pilgrimage.

Durham Cathedral met expectations. I can't remember very much of Canterbury; Wells is tremendous, as is Westminster Abbey. Gloucester, Salisbury, Winchester and my regular backyard in Chichester are all fine. And that's betting without Rome, Venice, Prague, Istanbul, Vienna and others. It's good, just for once, not to feel the need to make a league table. What I did come way with was more regard for Bede, the writer, than Cuthbert and all his devotions.

Alnwick Castle, The Angel of the North, Newcastle Cathedral, the Hotspur pub, the Baltic and Earl Grey on his vertiginous plinth were duly included but St. Michael's Church, Alnwick, outran its odds with a performance of much charm and genuine peace because I had it to myself and there's much to be said for that. I also found deep sympathy for Rosemary Tonks, as below. So, yes, it was worth it but, no, I don't think I'll be doing such a thing again because I can't at the moment think of anywhere else to go that could line up such a worthwhile few days.

The Rosemary Tonks Archive, Newcastle University

My intrepid journey into the North last week was the furthest I've been since I was last up that way not long into the current millenium. It was worthwhile to undergo the hardships of long-distance coach travel for the sake of seeing Durham Cathedral in the flesh, revisiting Lindisfarne and, quite brilliantly, being able to book myself in to Newcastle University Library's Special Collections and spend an afternoon communing with Rosemary Tonks via the archive they have of her there.

It is not to be undertaken lightly or without some sense of guilt. What Newcastle has is digitalized copies, to be viewed on a laptop, of her diaries, address book and notebooks from after she had renounced her work as a poet and novelist. The first indexed item one sees is a picture of the box they come in, on which it very clearly says,

All these notebooks are written in a certain way which is incomprehensible to the layman.

It is mere gibberish to the layman; for they cannot be understood. To the ordinary person the only conclusion is that the writer must be mad.

And she asks,

Please... I beg you to burn these notebooks

but they didn't. And so one is intruding where one hasn't been invited in looking at this private material and one feels bad about it, grasping at such excuses as one is only doing so because you love her. Why would anyone write down such things if they were not meant to be read. Larkin got lucky when his secretary burnt his journals before anybody else read them but perhaps Rosemary remained a writer for all that she had abjured her career as such but still felt the need to write things down for her own benefit, which might be where serious writing begins.

I only found two asides that made any reference to her published writing. I don't know if the Newcastle Archives are filed by subject area or any other but the content of the Rosemary archive doesn't really belong under Literature. She was not writing poems or novels by the time of these documents. At her own word, the best place for them might be under Psychiatry and then we involve ourselves, however improperly, in the life of a lady and her neuroses, obsessions, anxieties and moments of happiness, her comforts and joys, medications, appointments and mood swings.

Most movingly, in among her love for Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, her dismay at 'too much tennis on T.V. + that terrible Fiona Bruce in a long piece on paintings forgery', the waitress she doesn't like in the coffee shop and, over and over again, the ravens in whose croaking she finds comfort, the last entry in her diary, on 12/2/2014, is a delivery from Sainsbury's. Those won't have been her last words but they might have been the last words she wrote and compared to Goethe's Mehr Licht, or even Oscar's Either those curtains go or I do, they are the most ordinary words one could have from one who had once been such an extraordinary writer.

Before that, it is sometimes sleeplessness and the milky drinks she had faith in. She is totally convinced on a regular basis, as on 11/6/99, that,

Hooray !!

Married! To an absolutely darling man !

"Come along, my Rosemary,

Follow me, my own child..."

and that man is the Lord.

 

Newspaper reports of a poltergeist not far from where she lived in Bournemouth and destroyed her collection of ancient artefacts are understandably, in her circumstances, seen to be significant.

Her admirers might be tempted to cite Ophelia and say,

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown

but Rosemary's poems, novels and interviews from the 1960's and into the 70's had expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the world as she found it then so I'm reluctant to find fault with her for going in search of something better. It's not obvious that she found it but at least she disdained celebrity status and made for herself a way of life that made some strange sense to her.

I was glad to establish that we had the same birthday, as if astrology actually meant anything, to witness the ordinariness of the life she chose having once been the cover girl of a generation of English poets and to see that she, too, thought, as on 24/10/98, at the age of 70,

The difference between my happy normal self & the distressed wrestling person is UNBELIEVEABLE.

 

I'm not sure she'd have been the easiest of company at any time of her life because she must have been nothing if not demanding but the few hours spent with her daily notes made me grateful they weren't destroyed and, compared to the lives of such luminaries as Eliot, Yeats, Ezra, Dylan Thomas, Ted and Sylvia, Stevie Smith and others, I'm not sure how 'mad' she really was. 

Maybe in the end we either just like somebody else or we don't. And nobody in their right mind would undergo coach travel from Portsmouth to Newcastle and back to pry into a dead poet's private notes unless they cared.

Yes, the main point was Durham Cathedral, then revisting Lindisfarne and what proves to be the area I usually decide on when having a 'holiday' but any sort of experience can be given vaguely religious status if it means enough to us. We pay our money and we makes our choice. 

I'll meet with whichever friends want to see, or pay their respects at, Rosemary's grave at Warblington some time quite soon, very informally. 

Sean O'Brien, Juniper

Sean O'Brien, Juniper (Dare-Gale Press)

'Haberdashery' is a good word to have in a poem with its natural percussion and domestic associations but one might not get away with using it more than once. I thought Sean O'Brien had used it before but, with no concordance available, failed to find it in his previous work. It was used in an unconvincing Pastiche O'Brien on this website on 3/12/2009, though, and so art eventually imitates its own poor imitator and if its use in Amnesia, the poem here, is Sean's first then I saw it coming a long way off whether I knew what it really meant or not.

In Amnesia, the sundry goods are the subject of some of those now faded advertisements painted on end-of-terrace houses in,

Entire districts where the poor had fought and lost

for generations out of mind could not be found at all.  

We experience this leftover feeling in the city as 'the merely dead' and death or the dead are explicitly referred to in all but one of these thirteen poems and are at least implied in the other but alongside madness and rain and themes of such exclusion and lack of understanding, they are only really a sub-category of the over-riding theme of time.

In The Goodbye Look, 

    time's the evil in the heart of things, 

in which we have to live while it wears us out. It is always in language in verb tenses, it can't be gainsaid. Such was the idea in my own first ever poem in print but it's taken until now, and Sean's new poems, to realize that it is the overwhelming theme of all literature and life. If he has dealt in weather gods, river gods and other pagan gods at times, time is the genuine almighty.

A feature of the O'Brien technique is how he can let sentences extend and then extend further and in Peacetime one of them lasts for ten mostly 10, 12 or 14 syllable lines. That's plenty, one might think, but it demonstrates the point that while time is forever disappearing it can also drag as anyone who has gone from Portsmouth to Newcastle and back on a coach would understand.

The weight of time accumulates behind us and we call it history, or as much of its wars and brave attempts at making something of it as our amnesia allows to be preserved.

Juniper here is a small place near Hexham rather than a flavouring for gin. The title poem is in memoriam the artist Birtley Aris, a friend as Fingerposts, an even more recent poem recently heard on the TLS podcast, is for another. That had led me to anticipate a mellower, gentler, perhaps less combative O'Brien. Keats was writing Late Keats at the age of 25 but, for all we know, Sean might still be writing middle-period O'Brien in his early seventies but I suspect the discomfiting 'attitude' might not abate. Only time will tell.