Bill Cushing, The Beast Inside

 Bill Cushing, The Beast Inside (Southern Arizona Press)

The poetry diaspora is a loose, often unconnected thing. While the superstar names for the most part know each other to some extent, the local writing groups, magazines and communities might have only tenuous links with each other if any at all. How I came to have any contact from the south coast of England with Bill Cushing who lives near Los Angeles is an unlikely story that was not through poetry. It's a story that will have to wait for another time but meanwhile it's a great thing to be able to keep up with his work.

The Beast Inside gets off to a sure-footed start with At Mrs. Gannett's, a portrait of an old lady,

In a tidy house cluttered with kindness,
surrounded by her late husband’s bric-a-brac, 

and not long after in the first section is the comparable, At the Stationer's, with the proprietor's somewhat less sympathetic attitude to children. There might not be a prohibitive language divide between American poetry and English but there might be one of idiom and attitude and I'd be interested to know if American readers find a certain swagger in such poems or if the tone sounds perfectly natural to them. It's more clear cut in August Kleinzahler's work who is more obviously putting on a laconic show.

In three parts, this first part of the book is entitled The Reminiscent Self. With a Foreword and an Introduction, the book comes with its own explanations or interpretation which, while useful, could also seem a bit limiting as if there is a right answer to poetry. Some might prefer less help and be allowed to find their own themes and sub texts because poems have different effects on different readers, occasionally with contrasting readings or even mis-readings, which can make them all the more interesting.

Crescendo was another that made an immediate impression in the first section, a powerful artist's impression of Beethoven on his death bed. I'm sure there will be poems where a better appreciation comes later. The thought that some of the pieces are heavier on ideas than the music of their words persists and lines such as,

Every moment in time

we need to see the moment in time
in which we exist and are present

and contextualize it to where we exist
in the history and the moment as it relates

not only to the past but to the future. 

look more to me like an idea for a poem than 'poetry' itself but Bill's not in such bad company there because that's what I think about some passages in Eliot's Four Quartets, too.

The second section is The Formal Self and is a wide-ranging collection of pieces in thirteen different formal disciplines. A sestina would have been impressive but we are given a successful villanelle, a form which is much more difficult to write than it looks, coming together in its four line final stanza here,

Spirit has died; there’s no more drive,
and true liberty lost all allies.
Welcome to the collective hive
where being numb means being alive. 

It's tempting to read the poem as commentary on a specific time and place but it's not obvious one should do that and it is applicable to any number of them and looks forward to recurrent themes in the the final section. 

The specific word count of 42 words proves enough to make poems whereas I've never thought that 17 syllables had the capacity to get anywhere in English in a haiku but trust that it does in Japanese.

'Concrete' poetry meant a few different things in the 1960's. Bill's The State of Florida goes back further to at least George Herbert in making the lines into the shape of its subject, the significance of it being called the 'state of' and not just 'Florida' being the point.

“If you ain’t from Dixie,
   You ain’t shit,” raising
  the question: If I am from
   Dixie, does that make me
   shit?

That being just above halfway on the map and Tampa being on the left side immediately below it. Bill's never far from being socio-political and I take it that Florida, once thought glamorous, is in decline.

The Dream-State Self  is the third section that maybe the book develops towards. It's a survey of a culture become dystopian now organized by AI and algorithms where human life has become degraded. It's 'protest' poetry in a way but has more in common with Larkin's Going, Going that fears a new, uglier world replacing one that had more to like about it,

Shopping malls are
caricatures of our way of life;
what one learns in these places about
our true nature will keep anthropologists
in stitches for hours. 

(in Let’s All Get Down and Do the Lowest Common
Denominator)

and,

The world is mannequin-clown scary. 

(When “Yes” Isn’t Enough).

As the book demonstrates, Bill Cushing is a few different poets in one, or a versatile one ready to take on a range of approaches but one personality comes through. The polemical work is easy to sympathize with but not always as accomplished as the lyricist or humourist. In nearly 90 pages of poems there are highlights to take with us, most notably in The Reminiscent Self, in poems like RE:Joyce, a gentle love poem, more solid and figurative than abstract, that preserves one of the things that makes it all worthwhile,

giving me the ability
to ignore life’s pallor
and bathed me,
if only for that year,
with nothing less than joy.

The Heaney Letters, to finish

Probably more to be enjoyed as it went on, the names and events more familiar in the 1990's and thereabouts which increasingly looks like a minor Golden Age. It is, like such books often are, like a biography, like the one he turned down offers for more than once. He thought that the interviews in Stepping Stones adequately covered that ground and that he'd revealed enough. But, as with Larkin and anybody else who wants to defend their privacy, such intrusions are an inevitable corollary of celebrity although perhaps one that you don't see coming until it's too late.

But in 2010 he suffers a 'heavy depression'. Without wanting to diagnose the causes of that, one might wonder how it happened to such a naturally cheery, convivial man of such depth and balance. He'd had a stroke, he was 70, thoughts of mortality might have pressed more imminiently upon him and even the happiest of souls can discover a darker side. But I just wonder if, after such a life immersed in the 'word-hoard', complying with so many requests for appearances, contributions and lectures, the time spent on flights to all parts of the world and overseeing a whole academic industry of which he was the focal point - if he just began to question the worth of it all.

In so many of the letters he thanks people for their books and says generous things about how enriching they were but you can do so much, so apparently tirelessly and sincerely, and yet - perhaps one wonders what it amounts to.

It's the template for so many life stories - origins, the early successes, a sort of seamless transition into being the person they became known as, the superstar years (where applicable) but eventually the decline, the health issues and the looking back. The 'looking back' for Heaney being in his two last books of poems that refer to earlier ideas that made his name.

It's a big book and something of an undertaking, obviously essential to any Heaney scholar and of interest to many beyond them. Like any such thing it can be dipped into but I don't generally dip into books, I either read them or I don't. It is the broad sweep and the accumulating detail that gathers together the Heaney story and it's best read whole if at all..

He's not a Top 6 poet for me, probably not even Top 12. He possibly ought to be, given the 'poetry' and the music in it and all those things that make a poet great. So he could be in 'Best 12', certainly Best Handful of C20th in the Language but I don't feel he's my man. It's probably due to the Irishness, which is a fine flavour but not something I feel a part of.

It's the difference between 'favourite' and 'best' and also something to do with disposition. I am ill at ease sometimes, perhaps being shown up by the benevolence that makes him seem almost a candidate for beatification compared to the more guarded compromises some of us find it necessary to make in life and writing. I was once surprised by the results of an academic survey of coverage of the poets of the period in journals, magazines, etc. that put Heaney ahead of Hughes in such perceived 'importance', at no. 1. I'm sure that's how it should have been. Heaney had a lot of time for Hughes, to be sure, and owed an early debt to his example in poetry but he readily came clear of any such dependance and became much more.   

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Six concerts in ten days and so, no, sadly I won't go to Petersfield on Saturday night to make it seven in twelve. Just temporarily I'm all across the football and Fulham and Forest are both on telly. Petersfield was do-able, and mightily rewarded, for the Shostakovich symphony but arriving back on the mean streets of Portsmouth late at night feels unconvivial and one mustn't live by music alone.

My role as music 'reviewer' is an unlikely one since my talent for music equates to that of talc on the hardness scale. I did it once for the school choral society's Messiah in the 1970's then maybe a few pop gigs but it wasn't until one or two at DGBooks got picked up by those whom they concerned that it developed into this industry. I'm very glad it has because it not only brings with it a sense of purpose but it's put me on speaking terms with many of the fine musicians in the local area.

The first part of the process is, of course, selecting which events to go to. Chichester and Portsmouth Cathedrals announce their three terms per year's programmes well in advance and mailing lists from the Menuhin Room and other performers drop in with their news while, at Music in Portsmouth, Simon O'Hea does great work in picking up all that is available with listings, previews, reviews and profiles of artists. One reason why nothing is ever reviewed negatively by me is that it's my fault if I chose the wrong thing, another is that there's no point in fault finding in the performances of genuinely committed musicians making sincere contributions to our quality of life but mainly there are rarely faults worth mentioning to be found. I go to celebrate more than critically evaluate, I don't know if I'm genuinely a 'reviewer' but maybe I am whereas I don't regard myself as a 'critic' when the word brings with it connotations of adverse criticism even if that's not what it means in this context.

Local choirs and concert series have graciously allocated free tickets in exchange for my write-ups but by now I prefer to pay my way, not only to support these worthy causes but so that I'm independent. I can do whatever I like at DGBooks because it's all mine but when it's going further it ought to be a 'proper job' but cathedral lunchtimes, Inspiratio Ensemble and others are for donations anyway and tremendous value as such.

Next, one habitually sits in roughly the same place in each venue. On the left and towards the front is my preference especially for piano recitals where one has a view of the keyboard so I play in the same position as Ryan Giggs did. Or, in fact, where I mostly did in the Gloucester Sunday League in the 1970's. On the attached photo of St. George's Chapel, Portsmouth Cathedral, that's me with the St. Cuthbert tonsure. 

I need to make notes or else I'd arrive home struggling to remember all the profound thoughts that occurred to me during the performance. I never throw away envelopes that arrive in the post. While waiting for the start I make headings for each piece, like Moz, Beet, Chop. I increasingly try to do this as unobtrusively as possible, not wanting to be a distraction to the person sat next to me who wants to be absorbed in the depths of the Adagio. I also increasingly try to write legibly to avoid not being able to decipher it afterwards. It concentrates the mind to be rifling through one's private thesaurus to find le mot juste or not the ones one has used too often before but Google with find you synonyms and has come in useful in what otherwise would be an adjective recycling exercise,

If possible, the theme and first paragraph can have been done in advance if a story presents itself on the basis of the programme but sometimes that has to be scrapped when that doesn't turn out to be the story. On anniversaries, a typical opening might be Grolsch would have been 250 this year, had he lived but there's only so many times one can get away with the same old jokes. Adjectives are more durable.

The account is usually a mention of each piece played, in order, but sometimes the headline news - like the recent Shostakovich symphony- elbows its way to the front. Generalized comment might imply the piece came and went while an attempt at more detailed analysis indicates it made a deeper impression but I'm not qualified to throw around terms like 'rubato', '6/8 time' or 'B flat minor' although I have nervously tried to smuggle in 'syncopation' and 'arpeggio'.

A story needs an ending and it's sometimes possible to refer back to the idea with which one began. Of course one likes to make an appreciative summing-up of the performance but one ought to avoid mere platitudes and for the most part it's the music I'm talking about more than the musician unless it's been a piece I know well. 

I'm home within an hour or so, do it straightaway and it can be at DGBooks within 2, usually more like 3, hours of the last note dying away and then, as long as it was in the area Music in Portsmouth picks it up and only then do I begin to worry if I've said Something Stupid like I loved them.

Now, though, it's time to re-charge the batteries and the 'word hoard', as Seamus Heaney called it. I worry that the language will get worn out but the trillions of combinations of words into sentences that are published every day are evidence that it is an infinite resource even if not all those sentences are worth reading. I have the same concern about chess that surely, eventually, every possible chess game with its 32 pieces on 64 squares will have been played but the internet is host to tens of thousands at any given time and, no, not all of them are worth watching.

But when something's good, it's very, very good and at least half a dozen performances in the last few years have left an indelible mark. They will always be remembered. It's not a matter of taste, of judgement or aesthetic value, one just knows.

Ivory Duo at Lunchtime Live!

 Ivory Duo, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 27

Always much looked-forward to on the Portsmouth Lunchtime Live schedule is the visit of the Ivory Duo, Natalie Tsaldarakis and Panayotis Archontides. On this occasion their programme readily divided itself into two halves, the first of great delicacy and the second more powerful.

Lola Perrin's Lettres d'amour dans le parc was a homage to Debussy, lingering faraway, possibly in the subconscious as if on the outer limits of our awareness. Then, with Ravel's anniversary making his music a more popular choice than ever, Ma mère l'Oye was a suite of miniatures based on nursery rhymes, its opening Pavane from Sleeping Beauty retaining much from the first piece. Panayotis brought forth the beast in the bass in Conversation of the Beauty and The Beast until Le jardin féerique, the Fairy Garden, was gentlest of all until a sparkling finish.

I'm not sure I'm aware of a composer quite like Busoni whose ravishing Romanticism fits so well with his sympathy for Bach. His Finnländische Volksweisen fuses vigorous folk melodies with a sense of baroque order, its highly-charged reverberations not restrained but enhanced by its respect for, and echoes of, the godfather of counterpoint. It developed into a vivacious vivace and a precocious presto.But more vigour was yet to come as Panayotis rattled through the top end of Danse Macabre in a tempestuous account with Natalie in the engine room. She didn't have quite so much time for it in this but elsewhere when she had a spare hand she helped herself to a bit of conducting practice and I wondered if she has in mind a further career on a podium. 

For the most part my family were cyclists more than musicians. My father rode on the front of a tandem, firstly with his brother behind as a teenager and later in life with my mother. The tandem was jocularly known in such circumstances as the 'marriage tester'. Such partners performing together on the one piano is an obvious parallel. In both cases, the test has been passed - most harmoniously.  

Max Pemberton in Chichester

 Max Pemberton, Chichester Cathedral, March 25

The piano is generally an instrument played with two hands, and one or two feet. Except for this week. Max Pemberton has a condition in his right hand that- hopefully temporarily- means he can only use the other one and so compiled a programme of pieces all 'for the left hand' without the most famous of them by Ravel.

I'm sure that a competent musician would have been able to tell by sound alone that only one hand was in use but it would have fooled me. In the first two pieces it was something of a distraction to see how it worked, the thumb often picking out the melodic line in Leopold Godowsky's Étude no. 13, as per the Chopin, over what I might risk calling arpeggios played by the fingers. Luise Adolpha Le Beau's Improvisation was then lyrical and not dissimilar.

The Toccata and Fugue by Jenő Takács was next very dissimilar, discomfiting and uneasy in its broken-down Bach way and Robert Saxton's Chacony continued in an edgy, unsettled mood that we could call 'sinister' to make use of our memory of distant Latin classes.

But having gone from C19th Romanticism to C20th Modernism, and become more accustomed to the novelty of left-hand only, the masterstroke was an arrangement by Brahms of Bach's Chaconne, BWV 1004, as also taken up by Busoni. This immense performance of such grand sanity transcended any consideration of how many hands were playing. You can't miss with a piece like that although, of course, the pianist needs all the technique and virtuosity in the quickening middle section and Max is clearly some talent to produce such a performance with, as it were, one hand tied behind his back.

I hadn't been entirely convinced I'd make the trip to Chichester today towards the end of what has been a heavy schedule of pleasure just recently- not that I'm complaining- but I'm very glad I did. You never can tell what is going to surprise you next. On Thursday in Portsmouth Cathedral we are due one piano with four hands. Suddenly it seems that two is an odd number of them to apply to a keyboard.

Portsmouth Baroque Choir in Fareham

 Portsmouth Baroque Choir, United Reformed Church, Fareham, March 22

Mention of the name Buxtehude will often elicit a response about 'the organ composer' but of the 29 discs of the extant complete works, only 4 of them are organ music. Thus, as part of its ongoing exploration of lesser-known repertoire, Portsmouth Baroque Choir had plenty to choose from along with pieces by Johann Kuhnau.

I have a programme from a concert by the Consort of Twelve that was in Bosham in October 1988. They have remained a stalwart presence in the area since 1982 but the only name that occurs on that programme and the one for this is Kate Goodchild so she deserves a special mention on a day when solo parts in the choir were widely distributed and it's going to be very unfair of me not to be able to namecheck them all.

Oboes took the part of trumpets in this non-period instrument performance, as in the opening Buxtehude, Ihr lieben Christen, and perhaps Frančeská Dante is noteworthy for playing one of those, cor anglais, recorder and singing at different times. In Dulce Jubilo, BuxWV52, benefitted from a warm tone in the choir without being quite, perhaps thankfully, the skipalong setting we might hear more often.

But while I'd finally found the ideal opportunity to wear my Buxtehude t-shirt by way of support, he was all but outshone by Kuhnau early doors and possibly went into the interval 0-1 down. Jennifer Kimber's cello strode out, laying a firm foundation in Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern which it was to do equally memorably in more than one piece, and any spotters of rare instruments would have been thrilled with Rachel Haggarty's dulcian. Chris Clark's arias involved some baroque tenor acrobatics before the lush chorale. 

Ich habe Lust abzuscheiden is a more shadowy thing, for those of us who prefer the half light to outright illumination, with further memorable cello chopping away in the alto aria.

Perhaps Portsmouth Baroque's greatest strength is its sopranos and in Gott, sei mir gnädig Ruth Sands and Lucy Bradley demonstrated two of the reasons why, filling an acoustic that might not have been designed with concert performance as a priority.

I'd been saving the oxymoron 'rich austerity' for use in relation to Buxtehude and not had much chance to use it until Jesu, mein freude which had such a Lutheran quality not least in Depart, you sad ghosts, the hymn-like chorus that Malcolm Keeler's notes very credibly suggest the young Bach might have heard on his extended away day to Lubeck.

Bach was even more present in the fuller flow and building of his arrangement of Kuhnau in Der Gerechte kömmt um with its pulsing woodwind.

Buxtehude is credited with his Magnificat on the same basis as some almost grudgingly allow Shakespeare his own plays - due to the lack of other plausible claimants - but since it sounds like him and carried forward features that we had heard the like of already, it is a safe enough attribution. The extended glorias passed around the assembled company to finish what was a gentle devotional evening for one still recovering from Shostakovich 10.

There is always fixture congestion in the concert schedules before Easter but Portsmouth Baroque took their share of the available audience. As ever, much credit goes to Malcolm Keeler as the mastermind of the enterprise but it is a shared experience and thanks also to those who also served but weren't mentioned by name on this occasion.

Petersfield Orchestra at Petersfield Festival Hall

 Petersfield Orchestra, Petersfield Festival Hall, March 20

Scholarship might never decipher all the meanings in the music of Dmitri Shostakovich. Maybe not everybody will agree but for me the debate's been over for a while about the greatest composer of the C20th, opaque ironies and false signals notwithstanding. I've been trying my best with the forbiddingly loud, large-scale, complicated symphonies recently and the chance to hear one in the flesh at Petersfield had to be worth that bit of extra mileage.

First, though, came the short, sharp shock of Liadov's Baba-Yaga, all drama and urgency although in the circumstances only a softening-up exercise for what was to come.

Ariel Lanyi and the orchestra then blasted into Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, its big beginning and then the big theme of its first movement. Ariel is highly expressive in Beethoven's grander gestures and even in the pacific moments we know he's only brewing up the next storm. Row 3, right in front of where the sound comes out of the piano, might not be the optimum position that a recording engineer would take his settings from but, on what was not a night for faint hearts, one was almost inside the sound. One of my imagination, the orchestra, Ariel or Beethoven was conjuring torrents of rain or maybe it was all four of them.

The Adagio is a sumptuous serenade giving Ariel a chance to be lyrical and were it not obvious that it moved into a new mood and theme, you might think it was a concerto of two movements because we are suddenly in the Rondo Allegro, ever moving with Beethoven's protracted way through the triumphant variations of what could almost be a tarantella. Precious few do heroics like he did and Ariel and the Petersfield Orchestra stood and delivered. Luckily he had an encore ready and even more luckily it was the peace and release of the lost reverie of Chopin's Nocturne in C#minor.

 

But the evening was still young. It's astonishing to think that in recent weeks Beethoven, that monster that overshadowed all that came after him, has not necessarily been the main feature of two brilliant concerts. It takes some doing to outdo him and over the whole oeuvre hardly anybody does but you get him playing away against a C20th Russian who fancies the fixture and you might just outpoint him.

The Shostakovich Symphony no. 10 begins with a 25-minute first movement of immense, searing power - woodwind, brass and all sections having their parts before the colossal work of the strings, led by the shock storm-troopers of the violins. I had no idea that the Petersfield Orchestra could make such a sound or take on this vast edifice of a work. I'm an enthusiastic, hopefully generous concert-goer and reviewer who doesn't go to find fault and so I use up words of praise readily without throwing them about like confetti but then there's this.

Robin Browning is somehow what Herbert Von Karajan should have been like if he hadn't been the most appalling narcissist- distinguished, charismatic, readily in charge of an orchestra who surely have the greatest respect for him and he's made all this possible.

The second movement is short, nasty, dense and aggressive, it being the portrait of Stalin that Shostakovich was finally able to paint. And then he signs it with his DSCH motif in every timbre, texture, tincture and atmosphere available to him in the third movement. And after the disembodied early fragments of the fourth movement, the swirling militarism leads to a great signing off with the same. 

It's as if the sound of soldiers marching, or the dereliction they leave behind them is somewhere there in so much of Shostakovich, this nervous, studious, very bravest of creative artists. I try my best to apply the most stringent of criteria before appointing anyone to the highest echelons of such heroes but I ask no questions of him. He has nothing to prove.

 

That was a monumental performance of an enormous work. It was exhausting to listen to so the Good Lord only knows what it was like to play in. The Petersfield Orchestra were deeply impressive in all departments and I'm not surprised they were sold out weeks in advance.

I could, at long last, end on a darkly ironic note and recommend you sign up for their next gig which is Bruckner but add that I won't because Bruckner is much closer to my Bottom 10 Composers than my Top 10. However, I did stand for hours at the Proms to hear the Berliners do whichever one it was and came out less unimpressed than I'd anticipated so being able to sit down might improve him further.

But, no. The Petersfields, Robin, Shostakovich- and Beethoven and Ariel- absolutely delivered the goods beyond all expectation. If you'd told me there could still be days like this I'd have had my doubts but you'd have been right. 

Portsmouth Cathedral Choral Scholars at Lunchtime Live!

Portsmouth Cathedral Choral Scholars, Portsmouth Cathedral, March 20

Portsmouth Cathedral's Early Music Festival got off to a punctual start, 1.10pm being early enough. It's a vague term that invites scrutiny. We have 'Renaissance', 'Pre-Renaissance' and 'Baroque' which some might prefer but it's better we attend to the music and not the loose categories of it.

The five Choral Scholars began in an arrangement of Happy is the people that Theo Almond had had a hand in, a gentle introduction before their many and various talents were gradually revealed.

Their Lamentations of Jeremiah I by Tallis being next up meant that my highlight came up quickly, its exquisite exposition of sorrowful progress being one of the rich repertoire of music lamenting the C6thBC siege of Jerusalem - I think- with Kim Chin leading the engaging blend of voices as counter-tenor.

But there was plenty more to admire with Theo decorative over Kim's dainty pipe organ in a fragment of the Bach Magnificat and Jimmy Thomson, bass, in the flighty love poem, Come again by John Dowland, this time with harpsichord accompaniment.

But Kim plays the recorder, too, as he did most plaintively over a walking harpsichord continuo in the Larghetto from Handel's Sonata HWV 360 then it transpired that Jimmy Thomson played violin as well as being one of two fine basses with Noah Toogood and Theo sang the Agnus Dei from Bach's B minor Mass, filling the acoustic of another gratifyingly packed St. Thomas's Chapel with Kim back on organ.

Two pieces from Messiah demonstrated immaculate clarity from Joel Fernandez and authoritative 'great light' from Noah and if, by any chance, my notes fitted all the right names to the roles they took at one time or another then my performance rates as one of my better ones while not being quite as elegant to witness.

As a finale, Kim made his way to the big cathedral organ for the finale, Sweelinck's Fantasia Cromatica, SwWV 258 which puts layer on layer in an orderly procession until raising its banner high to finish.

These were 'gap year' students. We didn't have 'gap years' in my day, we were glad enough to get to university on a grant, but these scholars are clearly making excellent use of their time, busy busy as it sounds like they are. You wouldn't want to be otherwise. I wasn't. 

We only had to wait half an hour until a most entertaining and illuminating talk by Andrew Gant based on his book, The Making of Handel's Messiah, I had an hour or so over the road in The Dolphin, surely the most civilized pub in Portsmouth, and I was down to Portsmouth Harbour for the train to Petersfield and an evening to remember with their orchestra. I'm very glad there are still such days as these. 

Chichester Cathedral Choir & The Rose Consort of Viols in Chichester

 Chichester Cathedral Choir & The Rose Consort of Viols, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 18

Life was so much simpler in the time of Orlando Gibbons, was it not. I somewhat doubt it. The anonymous author of the text to The silver swan notices that,

more geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

Perhaps less changes than we think but Gibbons, whose music made up all of this programme given by Chichester Cathedral and the Rose Consort of Viols under Charles Harrison, crafted a world of peace and harmony away from worldly cares compared to the often atonal, angular sound of much contemporary music.

Two trebles led off If ye be risen again with Christ, immediately setting the mood quite gloriously and the audience were wise and circumspect by deferring their applause to the very end of proceedings which helped greatly with the solemnity of the occasion by not over-punctuating the sequence of short pieces.

In Dainty fine bird the Consort were what in modern parlance would be called a violin duet before all five of them joined in for Trust not too much fair youth. And thus the fine choral sound was interspersed with their restrained charm and immacualte musicianship throughout. Without the forensic evidence of shellac, vinyl, CD or download being available to Gibbons, I'm not sure we can be confident of knowing exactly how his music sounded to him but the findings of modern scholarship provide something I hope he would have approved of.

A memorable In nomine 2 a5 most affectingly sustained a top note while the embroidery was woven below by the lower strings which I understand is where the main line of music once was.

Great Lord of Lords brought in countertenors with choir and then the Consort gave Fair is the rose and two more sumptuous Fantasias.  Breaking into a more spirited ensemble in See, see the word is incarnate with more solo parts, the cathedral acoustic was put to good purpose although probably inevitably better for those early arrivers who snap up the first few rows because this in intimate music more than it is grandstanding Albert Hall Last Night material.

It was a great privilege to hear, and see, this special, unsensational performance which was, in another way, sensational. 

Famous

The Heaney Letters flow on by, either repetitively or with recurrent leitmotifs.

He became his own industry which is a mark of his enormous success and I daresay he wouldn't have had it any differently but such celebrity comes at a cost. Whereas by now 'celebrities' are celebrated for being celebrities and that will do, it was previously required that they were celebrated for something. Heaney spends so much of his time travelling the world that editor, Christopher Reid, remarks that he might have had special notepaper printed with EI 117, the flight out of Dublin, as his address. In receipt of 15 letters a day, it's not in his nature to become tetchy about it but reading this book revises one's picture of him away from rural Ulster, the culture of Irish legends or peat bogs to that of airports, commitments, engagements, trying to avoid commodification and ever belately keeping up with correspondance. He does it all with good grace as best he can but not all of us would envy the schedule of lectures, readings, the Oxford job, Harvard, the craic that he maintains a devotion to, the books to write, read and know about while still ostensibly needing the time for reflection required to produce his poems.

Perhaps in some way he did become the factory of the product that his own industry depended on. There have been some who found fault with what he did but surely there are always those who take exception to success. 

I won't hear of it although I might not have taken on quite so many projects myself.

I've never been entirely sure about the debt he owed to Ted Hughes. Hughes, born in 1930, is as much of Heaney's generation, born 1939, as he is of the one before. It's more usual for one's main role model to come from an age difference more like that of Hardy, whose poems began circa 1900, and Larkin, born in 1922, but there are no rules- as ever- about such things.

But Heaney explicitly acknowledges Hughes in birthday wishes in 1990,

the verifying and releasing power 'Lupercal' et al had on me in 1962. 

And you can't say fairer than that however many parallels one wants to find between the nature, the violence and the deep sense of history. One might say the language and music, too, but that might be where any such essay comparison needed to do a bit more work than outline the obvious. Hughes, some might suspect, seems to relish the vigour and alpha-male aspects of nature and appears to be lone, selfish and destructive whereas Heaney is communal and gentler.

There's an essay in it but it's not one I'd attempt. They are neither of them ironic enough but Heaney is the much better poet. He may well have found things in Hughes that he could develop towards his own purposes. You feel you're in good company with Heaney, in safe hands. You don't always think so with Ted.  

Sláinte, Seamus

The Heaney Letters is a volume too substantial for its flimsy design. It doesn't 'perch on the hand' like Craig Raine's 'caxtons'. It gets bent too easily and after one reading of its 820 pages it will look well-used.

Not to worry. He is good company, forever apologizing for his overdue replies despite the amount of time he clearly spent writing letters. Being so eminent and having so many friends has its downside but one does sometimes catch him being uncharacteristically uncharitable about one contemporary or another which only goes to show that even those who appear passing saintly are still human.

He uses any number of ways of signing off, but Sláinte- 'cheers', or 'health'- is a favourite not reserved for his fellow Irish because Ted Hughes gets wished as much. One envies his friends for having counted him as such and him for having counted Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky among the international superleague of his acquaintance. Reading the incessant planning of new titles, pieces in magazines and not so the much reading tours makes one want to be involved in such even if one has just issued a title. But, no, not the readings. Although I dare say he showed up and deported himself most affably at all such events they do seem to be a chore he could have done without.

For the most part we might not need such a catalogue of his travels and holidays, his peripatetic career and social evenings but from time to time there comes a literary idea. The most profound of those so far might be to David Thomson in Sept 1983 regarding Patrick Kavanagh's,

impossible but proper ambition for himself as a poet: to play a true note on a slack string. He meant, I think, that a true writer is always aware of any technical trickery he may practice, however justifiably, and that this rigging of his material will rob him of some of his pride in his work.

I wonder if the idea is a variation on Edward Thomas aspiring to 'a language not to be betrayed', or be betrayed by, or if the impossibility of it is like trying to tell the dancer from the dance.

I'd have thought that all poetry, all writing and all art involved 'technical trickery'. It is artificial, however 'natural' it might purport to be and, in Donald Davie's phrase, a 'considered utterance' and that for 'trickery' we could equally read 'art' and thus conclude that it's an impossible ambition because to achieve it would ipso facto disqualify the result from being 'poetry'. For Marianne Moore it's 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them' and although it's nice when it happens, it doesn't always 'come as naturally as the leaves to a tree' as Keats would have liked.

So, there we are, more names dropped and cited in as few sentences as possible. There is an essay to be done on the subject, I dare say, if only one I've outlined several times before as I yet again do here.

I don't think I could ever write properly about Heaney because, not being Irish, I'm not sure it's my business. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion found themselves firmly if politely reprimanded for claiming him as British and he insists on his Irishness to an extent that I can't be expected to be a part of, his generosity of spirit being not akin to the reservations of some of us more Larkin-esque English but that doesn't raise the sort of objections it seems to for High Church Protestant, A.N. Wilson, whose often admirable scholarliness doesn't extend to sympathy for Seamus.

Having discovered that there's such a thing as Seamus Heaney and the Great Poetry Hoax: A critical exposé of Faber and Faber’s verse-man by Kevin Kiely, I'm tempted to look at the case for the prosecution, conspiracy theory though it may appear. Perhaps one shouldn't have a house full of only books one agrees with. I've been waiting for a chance to read what Shakespeare was really like, according to Stanley Wells who clearly doesn't know, but don't want to spend much on it and certainly with no royalty accruing to Prof. Sir Stan.

I don't defend Larkin, Gunn, Auden or Donne to the very last word and Heaney isn't quite them, for me. I defend Elizabeth Bishop and Rosemary Tonks further on the basis of different infatuations and the gender difference might not be insignificant. It's not the Nobel Prize that convinces me about Heaney - heaven knows Henry Kissinger got one of those - it's mostly do do with his music.

I might have a look round upstairs for some more fiction to re-read, though. 700-odd pages of similar letters can eventually make one look forward to some first-hand literature.  

Chess Masters

 Anything and everything will get its turn at being a 'Reality' TV show if it waits long enough. There was the increasingly horrible Big Brother, 'business' in The Apprentice, then cookery, dancing, needlework, Traitors. It took a while for the brainstorming sessions to find chess but they will try anything once and see if it flies.

I didn't have high hopes of it but gave it a go. Sue Perkins is brought in as somebody vaguely 'highbrow', perhaps having won Maestro on which she was judged to have waved her arms most stylishly conducting an orchestra but I don't think Claudio Abbado lost any sleep over it. It also had David Howells- someone who genuinely can play- selling himself for the money on offer like Lang Lang surprisingly did in The Piano. Or perhaps they both did it through dedication to their art, for the legacy benefit of others.

 

It wasn't as bad as it might have been. The players all have to have epithet nicknames like Killer Queen and, as is customary, a 'back story' if at all possible. It's never allowed to appear dull for a moment. Even though Round 1 was only with 10 minutes each on the clock there was no way we'd be shown a game in real time. It was just an opening position, a crucial position and the end with players apparently engaging in friendly conversation during such a quick-play discipline. I've never played in such an atmosphere even with 90 minutes on the clock and Fischer and Spassky didn't in Rekjavik either. It was more about personality than positional analysis and yet one got an idea of what had happened, could take sides and it served as entertainment.

Six players started out in programme 1 and only one was eliminated. Another goes next week after which I think another six turn up to provide eight 1/4 finalists. Of this first batch of six I'm expecting the most successful of them to be female.

You won't learn any more about how to play chess watching this than watching Match of the Day would make you a better footballer. I can't see it gathering great audience figures beyond the likes of me and I'm not part of any obvious demographic that any marketer would aim at.

It would be interesting to know what ratings the participants have or could achieve at LiChess, officially with FIDE or anywhere else because I'm not convinced they're that good. Maybe I could have been a contender except I don't have a personality to sell.

Reality TV hasn't done poetry yet. I'd be even worse at that-

What is it you like about poetry? 

I never said I did like it.

And how often do you write poems?

Hardly ever.

 

But chess is on the telly for the first time since Kasparov-Short in 1993 as best as the telly can by now accommodate it. It's marginally a good thing but in the end it matters little whether it's chess, origami, composing an opera or making a scientific discovery that such shows are themed around. You get largely the same show whatever it is.

Racetrack Wiseguy - Cheltenham

It makes no difference what wisdom one brings to horse racing in a race like today's Champion Hurdle. Only a random result generator could have found the 1-2-3 there.

The warning signs had been there with Constitution Hill's dodgy jump last time out. The Mullins confidence in State Man looked well founded when he sailed past Brighterdaysahead but then he did an Annie Power. The Rich Ricci people were happy enough with the Mares Hurdle before all that happened but, as The Prof points out, what must they be thinking now and how on earth do we price up next year's renewal.

After possibly the most astonishing race I've ever seen it's hard to know how to continue but I got out of it without as much damage as others would have sustained and so, playing with what one wouldn't miss-

I'll have 15/8 The New Lion in the first tomorrow, on the strength of Harry Skelton's long-term belief. Ballyburn should be a penalty kick and we are due one now. Jonbon is no good thing but he usually finds a way to win. I'm not putting Stumptown in again because he's in a bet that hasn't gone down yet but I'll have Kalypso'chance in the dangerous, dark waters of the bumper on the basis of punditry in previews.

But three horses took it in turns to look like certs in the Champion Hurdle and none of them won it and that is what horse racing can be like. It's easy to think, yes, I knew all along when one's selection wins but, no- no you didn't. You can be careful and achieve a decent % strike rate and profit by making some more significant bets than others but the casualty rate among punters is high. Johnny Dineen, bookie turned professional gambler was interviewed on ITV and said that of the four odds-on favs, he'd only backed Majborough.

He had a 50-50 chance, since two of them won, and chose a wrong answer. It's potential problem was jumping and, like Constitution Hill and State Man, proved not to be good enough at it. It is jump racing. You might get away with it on the way to Cheltenham but it's not so easy once you're there.  

Romanticism, Reaction Received

 I've gone to the highly self-regarding lengths of copying across all reaction received regarding Romanticism to make a miniature Casebook edition for my own purposes. I can hardly publish the comments here without permissions from their authors but it's an interesting exercise.

Some commentators are accomplished poets or poetry readers and others not quite so much and it's very kind of them to provide either in-depth analysis or less detailed thoughts but they are generous. In many ways, those that find places for suggested improvements are of the most interest but I don't always agree. Mainly it's a great privilege to have been read in such detail.

I'm still very pleased with the book. I think those last three titles were the best I did and if it goes no further it's good to end in such form.

I have to hang on to a few copies in case the copyright libraries take up their option but there are still a few available for want of an address of a good home to send one to.

The Fall, Albert Camus

 The Heaney Letters can progress steadily during what is usually an Irish week at Cheltenham. Stewart Lee's books make their point time and again at bedtime providing a good example of why it's sometimes a good idea not to read all of a writer in one go. There are further weighty volumes on Shostakovich and Dorothy Parker in waiting before those projects are completed. Sometimes one has more on the go than seems right but on an average day at school one would be expected to take in Maths, Chemistry, Latin and French, say, all in one day so thank heavens there was the respite of English. In the meantime I read The Fall by Camus. It's only 100 pages and one realizes that one ought to be reading, or re-reading, literature itself and not only 'about' it.

The Fall has as its abiding image that of the suicide attempt overheard by its central character whose paragon assessment of himself is undone by his shame at not jumping in to rescue them. By extension we are thus aware of his fall from a state of grace and the agonies of self-doubt he sets out in his confessional monologue. His name is Clamence which, surely, like Mersault in L'Etranger, has echoes of significant meaning, clemency - with all available religious overtones.

While he's the opposite of Mersault who we imagine not having much to say for himself, Clamence is not one you'd ideally find yourself chosen by as the audience for his anxieties but they are similar in finding moral vacuums inside themselves. As in Engleby by Sebastian Faulks, many years ago, it was chilling to find quite so many resonances with oneself in Clamence's self-absorption,

it seemed to me that at the time I felt the need of love. Obscene, isn't it? In any case I experienced a secret suffering, a sort of privation that made me emptier and allowed me, partly forced to it, and partly just out of curiosity, to make a few commitments. Inasmuch as I needed to love and be loved., I thought I was in love. In other words, I acted the fool.

The 'fallen' human condition, being absurd, compromises us, being unable to regain the unfallen condition which might be why death is such a common motif in Camus. While in life he was full of political commitment and apparently approaching a kind of sainthood as such, in philosophy the idea of death provided an absolute if all too simplistic way out of solipsistic meaninglessness.

Novels don't need to be long to be masterpieces and The Fall is a succinct analysis of the conundrum of 'being human', Clamence being a bore on the subject of himself and yet, we might think, profound if bleak. 

In traditional terms it's not really a novel, it's more of an essay, deeply ironic with an unreliable narrator that we can't be expected to like but perhaps end up with more sympathy for than we thought we would have. I'm not saying it's better than The Plague or L'Etranger but I will say that if there's ever been a more artful fiction writer then unless it's James Joyce I don't think I've read them.

Gregory's Tambourine Man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwAP9Dy032c

No,  it's probably logically impossible to agree with John Peel's dictum that he was more interested in the music he hadn't heard than that that he had. We know what he means but you can't be, can you.

However, once in a while, another thing crosses from that which one hasn't heard to that which one has. Nobody would claim that Gregory's Tambourine Man was his best work but he could turn up and do a cover version at the drop of his hat and be trusted to make it sound like a Gregory song.

Now that I've found it I won't let it go.

Recklessly talented and glamorous

In the early stages of The Letters of Seamus Heaney, in 1970, he writes from Berkeley to Michael Longley and asks for a print of George Best to be forwarded to him. Editor Christopher Reed sees fit to note that Best was a 'recklessly talented and glamorous' footballer then at his peak. That is the most captivating phrase in the first 50 pages of the book.

That is not to say that Heaney is not good company. He is apparently made of bonhomie and goodwill as the rest of his life proved him to be but the early letters at least are only those of a good man at the outset of an illustrious career. Nothing at all to find fault with there but other poet's letters reveal more thoroughgoing idiosyncracies than the evidence for the poet's literary beatification.

Ted Hughes was full of horoscopes, superstition, money-making projects and tragedy; Thom Gunn was all promiscuity and dubious characters and three books of Larkin represented the compartmentalisation of his life into unworthy, immature attitudes shared with the likes of Kingsley Amis, some mawkish sentimentality to his mother and the excuses of a part-time lover to Monica. With Heaney we get a well-balanced grown-up, as one should have expected but no inner demons or perceived shortcomings look likely to be revealed which is good for Heaney but might come as a disappointment to some.

We will see, it's early days yet, but deep down we already know Heaney was short on shortcomings.

 

Jean-Samuel Bez & Gina Kruger in Chichester

 Jean-Samuel Bez  & Gina Kruger, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 4

Maurice Ravel would have been 150 if he'd lived until Friday. Jean-Samuel Bez and Gina Kruger are marking the occasion but not with the pacific Pavane or the incessant dance he wrote for Torvill and Dean. Les Deux Mélodies Hébraïques are sombre and haunting, Kaddish sorrowing with Gina the sparest of accompanists as it evokes the ancient religion. Still subdued in L'énigme éternelle until the long last violin note. Jean-Samuel is a versatile musician but he might not always cast a spell like that.

The Violin Sonata of Mel Bonis begins with a discursive, Romantic Moderato. The rest of the tempo markings weren't always easy to agree with, the Lento not being all that slow and the form of the composition escaped me, the Presto was rich and warm but the Con Moto finale was convincingly spirited. It might have been a case of the music sounding better than it was but I'd have to try again to say I fully 'appreciated' it beyond its concatenation of musical ideas. There is, I think, an opportunity to try again in Portsmouth Cathedral on Thursday as this tour progresses.

Back with Ravel, the Violin Sonata no. 1 was spacious, en plein air and pastoral with both musicians relishing its descriptive qualities. One might have thought of a lark ascending to float on currents of summer updraft. It was quite captivating and especially useful to hear further aspects of Ravel, of which there are a few.

Most of the Chichester lunchtime programme is in place until July now so one can see which Tuesdays not to commit to anything else.

Helen Farish, The Penny Dropping

 Helen Farish, The Penny Dropping (Bloodaxe)

Helen Farish wrote the officially best poem I've seen of the C21st and, although it's a lot to expect that she might also write the second and third best, that is sufficient reason to buy her new book. Not the fact that it was on the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlist.

It is a 'verse-sequence', a term that gives me a sinking feeling even though there's nothing ostensibly wrong with it. I staunchly maintain that there's either a collection of poems or there's a long poem in sections and there's no need of the 'sequence' in between but it's a long cherished dogma that gets me nowhere, like the way that coffee and golf seem to make me irrationally cross. What The Penny Dropping most resembles is the Birthday Letters of Ted Hughes, and I might even suggest that a sequence would have such a generalized title, or like Duino Elegies, rather than take a poem's title for the collection although I can see that the theme of the whole book is the 'penny dropping' that the long-term relationship is profoundly over. 

So, whereas the much-loved Pastoral was a technical tour de force and these poems attempt no such artistry and one wonders at 54 pages of poems mourning one relationship, I'm not going to be easily convinced but it does what it does with an accumulating amount to like and even admire about it.

I'd be the first not to insist that poetry has to be metrical or rhyme but a corollary of that is that it must do something and Helen's poems often work on loose extended metaphors, like The Waste Land about a soft toy polar bear called Eliot that she gives away to a child and then misses in the same way as she misses the ex-partner.

They were well-travelled, Helen and the beloved, and so cities abroad give a feeling of displacement, whether exotic or alienating and the partnership has elements of domestic togetherness before the loss of estrangement. 

Triggers lists a number of occasions that might have brought the past to mind but it's a 'bog standard Tuesday' that the more compelling young stag comes into her garden and sleeps, then 'drifts off' herself before he vanishes. There is a parallel with being 'cheated on' and a more powerful trigger. Then, in The Shaman Says, it's some sort of compensation that,

I almost feel sorry for your wife

who only has you for the remainder

of this lifetime, this poky little corner

of the twenty-first century. 

That's not quite as generous as the tone of most of the book which does much to celebrate and memorialize what there was and objectifies the self-pity into something much more than the mawkish threnody it could easily have become. It's a tribute to the writing that we don't feel that's what it is. If Donne is praised for the ingenuity of his many seductive arguments, there's as much to be said for how many approaches to this form of bereavement are compiled here.

I'm not sure how hard it is by now to be judged one of the ten best poetry books of the year. We are no longer in a competitive golden age although there might be some circularity to the point that I don't think so so I'm not looking hard enough to find what might be going on. It's not easy to form an opinion of things you don't read but The Penny Dropping confirms that if you know where to look there are still good things to be found and that Helen Farish maintains her place in the diminishing list of poets whose books I gladly buy.

The Shostakovich Symphonies, Part 4

Enthusiasm, hopefully not quite bordering on obsession, can take one a long way into filling the days with some purpose. The Shostakovich project has gone as far as buying a couple more books, first up of which is Ian MacDonald's The New Shostakovich. First published in the 1990's and extensively updated since, it's not as 'new' now as it was then and although it seems some areas of Shostakovich Studies might never be fully resolved, I think it's much clearer now, with the help of this book, than it had been.

The integrity of Solomon Volkov's Testimony, the memoirs as told to him, has been upheld by some authorities who ought to know and few would now believe Shostakovich to have been a Soviet puppet in the light of the encoded meanings in so much of the work, not least the symphonies. There are passages we might never interpret satisfactorily but it's clear that in many works he was a dissident hiding in plain sight, sometimes providing 'socialist realist' work that was approved of, producing film music and being used as a Soviet figurehead but subversively hiding deeper meanings in his art. Quite how he survived the mass purges of intellectuals, writers and others suspected of being 'enemies of the people' is some kind of miracle and he didn't expect to.

Possibly even more than Solzhenitsyn's first hand reportage, Ian MacDonald gives a compelling account of Stalin's rule, not that he has any right to in which nobody was able to feel safe. He also does a fine job of analysis on the symphonies and other significant pieces which will be useful in further listening to them, if one can bear it.

 

Cardiff Symphonic Brass at Lunchtime Live!

Cardiff Symphonic Brass, Portsmouth Cathedral, Feb 27

While the staple diet of the lunchtime concert is chamber music there are other items on the menu from time to time. One does not live by piano alone and it made for something outside of the usual remit for me to see Matthew Thistlewood and the teenagers of Cardiff Symphonic Brass, it being about 50 years since I last saw a brass band.

It's not every day one hears a Bach cantata arranged for such an 11-piece ensemble and the Sinfonia from BWV18  immediately brought the brightness of the day outside into the big indoor space of the cathedral. The trombones did a fine job of what was written mainly for cello parts, one might think, and I was almost convinced that it worked.

Corelli's Concerto Grosso, op. 6, no.8, made even more of the resonant acoustic and was yet more persuasive with its blazing trumpets, mellow Adagio and fanfare finish. Corelli might not often make a deeper impression than Bach but today was his day and perhaps he was the overall highlight unless the Bach had served to get us attuned to such arrangements and Arcangelo thus benefitted.

The trumpets then rested but no such luxury was afforded for the lower brass whose Abendlied by Rheinberger was solemn with horn and trombones in profound-sounding, euphonious conversation. We had been led to expect a euphonium here last week but will take this week's, with tuba bonus, as fair compensation. These, and horns and obviously the glamorous trumpets usually upfront are outrageous instruments, reflecting all available light back in their immaculate shine but they come as a rare treat to me.

Stephen Roberts's Classic Snacks were three adventurous arrangements of popular classics but not quite as we know them. The ensemble impressively achieved a full brass band sound in Turkish Delight, which was recognizably Mozart's Rondo a la Turk but the Latin mood of A Taste of Tango hid Fur Elise under more of a disguise. Hungarian Goulash you'd recognize if you heard it without necessarily knowing it was no. 5 of the Brahms Hungarian Dances. It quickened into a lively cha cha cha.

I see these pieces advertised as 'irreverent makeovers' but I can't imagine Mozart or Brahms being offended. Beethoven I'm not sure about. Liberties were taken there but all in well-intentioned spirit.

An encore continued in the same mood with Jan Koetsier's Grassauer Zwiefacher, Op.105 No.3, which added a further name to the list of composers I've ever heard of.

Young people doing such things don't tend to be show-offs. They deliver what they've been rehearsing and maybe are glad to get off after a job well done. It takes a while to gain the confidence of a Nigel Kennedy or suchlike and look as if you're enjoying doing it. I'm with them entirely but Cardiff Symphonic Brass can return home, via Salisbury tomorrow, with all our thanks for coming, something like a box office record for a Portsmouth Lunchtime Live! and all our best wishes for the future. 

The Complete Hardy 7 : Under the Greenwood Tree

Under the Greenwood Tree is the lightweight one, isn't it, being so fewer pages than the other, more intricately-designed novels. ostensibly happy and it's surely his answer to As You Like It, would you not say.

But if an artist so deep and complex as Shostakovich could provide Classic FM with such an interlude as The Gadfly then maybe Hardy could give his view of an irretrieveably doomed existence a day off.

And he surely does with his cast of rustic types observed with the sort of condescension that such talented, writerly sorts will always make comic material from those maybe not as gifted in the literary arts as they are but who, fictional though they may be, seem to be happier with their allotted status than Hardy's genius made him.

It wouldn't be a Hardy book if the girl married the man she should having seen off the attempts of the two less convincing candidates without us having doubts it was for the best. Whereas in other books, Tess, Bathsheba, Sue Brideshead and others are heroines, you never get the same feeling about Fancy Day who fancies herself far above any suitor and, maybe, why shouldn't she although women's rights might not have got as far as thinking as much by 1872 when a wife was apparently the equivalent of a buttonhole for a man, hoping to appear at least not to reduce his status and, if possible, enhance it.

We are not left with the happy ending we might think it is. We're not that daft. What makes  Under the Greenwood Tree so good is that it's done you with its story of the band being superseded in the church services, its community of yokels steeped in their long traditions, all that gorgeous Dorset countryside stuff that looked even for him, never mind us, like a lost paradise. It's not like that at all.

Dick Dewey can hardly be blamed for being infatuated with Fancy Day but Fancy Day only wants someone to be infatuated with her. 

Coming with perhaps more of Hardy's insightful observations of humam behaviour - because for the few few chapters not much happens apart from that- it is, almost from line to line, perfect company. It wouldn't be right to say it's not his best book because it isn't tragic enough. It's not his best book because it's not as 'big' as some of the others.  

Racetrack Wiseguy Cheltenham Preview

 If it was just sport and only about who won, I'd only really want Constitution Hill to put himself back into the unrateable category where he was before his illness. He looked like the horse of a lifetime, even to me whose lifetime included Arkle although with no memory of seeing him race in real time. I want him to win the Champion Hurdle by 10 lengths in second gear and not beat an under par-looking Lossiemouth only comfortably which was a performance that almost made it possible to give him a rating.

He's highly likely to regain the hurdle championship and odds of 4/6 look very fair, the reason being that the best of the opposition are likely to go to other races they might win rather than take him on. I don't think he really knows what a race is.

But 4/6 is no tip and it's ante-post and the absence of Sir Gino in the Arkle has already taken out a little ante-post treble of mine so there are other places to look on my favourite day of sport in the whole calendar, Tuesday at Cheltenham.

I didn't have anywhere near enough on Kopek des Bordes at 9/5 for the Supreme Novices after he won at Leopardstown and now he's 10/11. He looked sheer class that day and if Salvator Mundi is joint second fav, having jumped like an item of furniture when we saw him last, he's unlikely to be the saviour of the world. Kopek is confidently expected to get us off to a good start and set some trebles going.

And I've believed in Brighterdaysahead all the way through as Lossiemouth and State Man have reached their limits. I'd take Constitution Hill on with her if, for the sake of the sport, if it were my decision so if she goes to the Mares race, she's a very good thing on a day that lines up a very obvious treble - but take it easy there- as well as L'eau du Sud being an each-way steal in the Arkle.

(You don't get imaginative insight and big priced punts in a Wiseguy preview. You get a plan. That's what's 'wise' about it.)

Final Demand absolutely scooted in at Leopardstown but Harry Skelton has never made as much of any prospect as he has of The New Lion, pictured, and the Novices that begins Wednesday makes for a proper race in which, at the prices, I'll stay with the Skelton horse until it gets beat. I'm sure Ballyburn will feature in some speculative combinations now they've accepted it wants a distance like that of the 3m Novice Chase. As will the heroic Jonbon, who has entirely justified his enormous cost when not all expensive horses do and I suppose, if I were to dignify the Cross Country with a bet then 5/2 Stumptown must be good as he does win such races but why it is race 4 and not put on at the end so that those who don't care can get away early, I don't know.

Thursday could be a bit of a day off. I thought Il Est Francais ran the perfect Ryanair trial in the King George and he should be some sort of bet against the fav even if he could be an Alex Higgins of a horse, outrageously talented but given to finding ways of imploding. Teapuhoo came slightly later than I'd hoped to dominating the Stayers Hurdle division but it looks to be his while he wants it for now. While the loudmouth, composite good-time boys pack out Prestbury Park with their mad money-throwing at races with 6/1 favs, I'll check on how all my good things are compiling themselves, or not.

Mr. Henderson looks to have a chance of wresting the Triumph Hurdle from Mr. Mullins with the impressive Lulamba, so let's hope he does. I'm not especially patriotic but Mr. Henderson at least stands for something English, decent and worth having as the rest of the world gets nastier day by day.

I wonder if Joseph O'Brien has set aside Lark in the Mornin for a repeat festival win in the County Hurdle and I'll guess he might have if I'm still winning before, even at 1/2, you've almost got to have Galopin des Champs in the Gold Cup because it looks as inevitable as Hinault, Indurain or Lance Armstrong, later disqualified as he was, used to win the Tour de France. It wasn't very interesting but 50% interest on your money is ahead of inflation at the moment.

So, which of that litany of obvious big favourites are the three to make the treble.

I don't like losing money so I'm going Brighterdaysahead in the Mares Hurdle on Tues, Teapuhoo in the Stayers on Thurs and Galopin in the Gold Cup but that's the least imaginative treble one could have although your tenner could become £50.

As ever, mix them up in whatever way you choose. Three or four joined up ought to pay but one or two will get beat and if there were a guaranteed way of making it work the secret would be out by now.

It's an industry and, as such, it expects to support itself by making money out of its customers. I take a contrary view these days, having paid in plenty in decades long gone by.

In an unlikely alliance, I'll see it as Donald Trump sees everything - if there's nothing in it for me I'm not in the game.