Romanticism, with notes

New from DGBooks and the swansong of the imprint having now used up the 10 free ISBN numbers issued in 1990.

Please don't order it from anywhere that it's listed. You can have one for the asking while stocks last.

Some notes on the poems-

Rainyday Woman takes its title from a horse that was winning races at the time, not from Bob Dylan. I had a poem I liked without a title and a poem that didn't work that had a good title so they were merged together.

Starý židovský Hřbitov, the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague eventually presented itself as idea when the theme of the 2020 Portsmouth Poery Society was 'pebbles'. I'm not very taken with the idea of writing on prescribed themes but that's the second time that the competition has given rise to a poem that would never have been written otherwise.

Situation and Lockdown Trains were both reactions to the lockdown situation. The first prompted by one of the many lines noted from Proust, which served as a fitting epigraph.

The title poem came during and after a visit to Netley Abbey and the cover photograph of early C19th graffiti. I sat in the grounds making some preliminary notes like a painter sketching a scene before organizing them later.

Canute at Bosham and Thomas Weelkes in Chichester are historical figures in their nearby settings. I usually sit by the stained glass window of Weelkes at Chichester Cathedral concerts which is also next to the Arundel Tomb made famous by Philip Larkin.

Hammershøi is based on this painting of which there is a print on my front room wall.

Ronnie came after reading a biography of Phil Spector and incorporates references from their songs.

Escape Artist was reworked extensively from a failed Rosemary Tonks pastiche that had been abandoned. Having been invited to contribute to the book, Inspired by Six Women who Shook the World, I was glad to be able to do a rare repair job.

Altair was for my great niece's time capsule for when she reaches 18. 

Nativity is vivid enough as a childhood memory but the reasons for writing it only last year, on 3/12, are not.

Success was initially suggested by somes lines in praise of Utrecht in The Upside-Down World by Benjamin Moser but may owe something to Larkin's Posterity. It sometimes only dawns on one that one has re-written a Larkin poem sometime after the fact.

Slightly Different Version, Rainy Morning Man and Imperfect, as suggested in the titles of the first two, are variations on Rainyday Woman in which the relationship with poetry is conflated with the non-committal relationship with a generic, or composite, girlfriend. I was encouraged when finding an echo of their attitude today in Murakami's The City and its Uncertain Walls,

I think the emotional and physical function needed in order to love - the kind of overarching impulse to give your whole self to another - had burned out in me long ago. 

Curtains, with its obvious double meaning, came from thinking about Nottingham in the 1960's, as did Nativity and Move Over Darling, from the previous booklet, and the plan to go back to those places next year.

It might read like a downbeat book read all at once, which it easily can be, and if such moods served Hardy and Larkin's poetry so well it can't be a bad thing but I hope it's not overly melancholic.

There is one typo, at least. There's an accent on 'cortège' in Curtains but not in Canute but one of them must be right. I'm making manuscript amendments to that as I go.