Forthcoming Poetry Events in Portsmouth and Havant

There is also Pauline Hawkesworth's launch, of Life-Savers on All Sides, previously mentioned below, this Saturday, 7.30 pm at St. Francis Church, Northern Parade, Hilsea with a supporting cast of readers from Portsmouth Poetry Society.

Let there be less of it

Having been most disgruntled by Richard Ellman's biography of Yeats, I've had Brenda Maddox's George's Ghosts waiting to be looked at to see if she provides a more coherent account of the life rather than a detailed exegesis of all the supernatural baloney that he involved himself in.
It was a close run thing in the early pages and Yeats was nearly abandoned as a lost cause but I persevered long enough for the book to convince that it is a sane and useful document of the life, personality and relationships and it is most welcome.

With Buxtehude proving a hugely enjoyable companion, mostly in the choral works, as I come to the end of a firrst run through of the 29 disc set of Opera Omnia, the next stage is to retrace my way back through some highlights noted on the way and read more of the booklets and text to formulate a clearer idea of the oeuvre. It is a case of instinctively knowing what is right and not for one minute has it seemed like an overdue extravagance to blow most of last year's horse racing profit on such an investment.

It has also meant a period of restraiut in ordering books and records while I catch up with this backlog of essential reading and listening. January has been a record low point for acquisitions with only one disc arriving, af fortepiano and viola da gamba pieces by C.P.E. Bach, and I surprised myself by ordering the paperback of David Starkey's television series on Music and Monarchy, in which he has been gentle with us, informed and sensible in his telling of the composers who wrote and played for the British royals.

But a considerable list is accumulating of further requirements and, in preparation for next year's biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus, a collected Mew will be necessary; there's piano concertos by Leopold Kozeluch, which could be Mozart in disguise; I see that we are due some Simon Armitage poems in March, which is also when The Magnetic Fields' 50 Song Memoir reveals its rich cargo and that is without essentials such as volume three of Danny Baker's memoirs, Sean O'Brien's stories in Quartier Perdu and the very long awaited Clive Wilmer's selection of Thom Gunn. Luckily, the last few days have seen some horses doing the required business to pay for them.

But there are events to mention, too, for anyone in their vicinities. Feb 11th is Pauline Hawkesworth's book launch, with a supporting cast of readers from Portsmouth Poetry Society (see below), of which I'm delighted to be one; The Jess Davies Band have a date forthcoming in Southsea in March, where it's possible one or two songs in the set might be co-authored by me and, further ahead in July, and different again, my nephew goes straight into time-trialling at the deep end, with plans to ride the Welsh CA 12 Hour, which now incorporates the WTTA event that I used to ride in the 1990's, in the Monmouth area for which I will be glad to support and advise in the inevitable obliteration of the one family cycling record I ever held.

So, while there is plenty to be involved with, and I can report that Time After Time, my novel about club cycling in 1969, is 78% done in its first and only draft, and will be ready to be printed off, photographed and then put away in a drawer, there is likely to be less of this internet broadcasting. It's not good for me and it might be better for those who read it if I do less of it and appear no more than once a week or when there is something worth the saying.       

Pauline Hawkesworth, Life-Savers on All Sides

Pauline Hawkesworth, Life-Savers on All Sides (Indigo Dreams)

Pauline Hawkesworth’s new pamphlet arrives as a result of success in the Indigo Dreams pamphlet competition. Her work has appeared in many places over the years but there was a long gap between her first published collection, Dust and Dew (1969) and the more recent opportunities to have her poems together in one book.

If some poems aspire to the condition of music, Pauline is a visual poet, one of observation, and more like a painter. Her language never reaches, or needs to reach, for anything extravagant. She is never going to be undone by trying too hard or straining for effect.

In They Will Come, which does a great deal in its seven lines, puddles join together to become seas,

and the shapes 

of drowned fishermen

float to the surface.

In so few, economical lines we have moved from something mundane to a suddenly haunting image and the poems here are often worried by something troubling like local or domestic miniatures that are metaphors for the larger, precarious world.

Themes of swimming, running or flight recur as if they are a search for release from such anxiety. Sometimes it is resolved but not always and it is the search for release that is the point rather than any guaranteed, comforting resolution.

Trick of the Eye leads us out of one chilling possibility only to disconcert with a different doubt about what we think we are looking at; the language of Not Looking Where You Are Going breaks down and fragments as the snail in it does. The Night ‘groans as daylight/ rubbed it away’ and in Cutting Through, the wish is expressed to ‘muster all the sadness in the world’ to cure it with a song of healing.

It is healing that these poems would like to be able to offer but they are wise enough to know that is too much to ask. It has still been worth the effort.

Order from Indigo Dreams here

Pauline Hawkesworth book launch

A review of the book will appear here soon.                                                              

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

The news this week reported the findings of an enquiry by the opinion poll people into why they got the result of the last General Election wrong.
They didn't ask enough Conservative voters.
Well, I never. But surely that was the question rather than the answer. These days we are regularly offered empty platitudes as if they are wisdom and expected to be grateful that now we understand. But we don't. We are just told we understand.
I go to some lengths now to avoid hearing football pundits, or football itself, but still hear the explanation that such and such a team are not doing very well 'because they don't score enough goals'. Of course, scoring goals is the object of the game and so that much is obvious but the answer required would include the reasons why they don't score enough goals.
Some time ago I heard on the radio that some research done in a university had discovered that women like shopping but men like watching football. Whether this was a serious piece of work or satire was hard to tell but it didn't serve the purposes of demolishing stereotypes. And it wasn't even true.
But, why would anyone tell an opinion poll about their voting intentions anyway. Perhaps too many are flattered to be asked. But it's a secret ballot, we understand.  I have once declined the opportunity to answer a telephone opinion poll and once pointed out to a party representative outside a polling station that it was a secret ballot and I was disappointed that their party didn't respect British democracy.
There is nothing quite as satisfying as a free hit and a chance to occupy the moral high ground.
--
I'm delighted that The Times continues with its Latin crossword, my record number of answers filled in still being the six I achieved in the second one but I don't pursue it for very long because there is no chance I'll ever finish one. But today I did pursue the main crossword even if I got off to a slow start. It's fulfilling and rewarding to keep at it, if self satisfaction is a reward you enjoy, and today it was all in place well before the racing started, with no artificial aids.
Then all the horses ran and none of mine came first or anywhere near it until Duke Des Champs strolled into the distance ahead of his rivals in the last at Ascot and made the day a slightly profitable one.

What more can one ask of a Saturday.
--
2016 looks like being another good one for Portsmouth's thriving poetry community. The small but select gathering that discussed the poetry of Rosemary Tonks at PPS on Wednesday did a fine job but with pamphlets by Pauline Hawkesworth and Denise Bennett likely to be launched by readings later in the year, we should also be welcoming the reading for South magazine's Autumn issue to the city in October. There will be more news here, and on South's own website, when that is confirmed.
--
But, I was looking for something in Philip Larkin this week and, as ever, came across so many things that I wasn't looking for that were better than the thing I wanted.
I have expressed doubts a number of times about just how much of the mining of Larkin's writing he would have wanted to see in print, particularly in respect of The Complete Poems but also that there was no need of a Selected Larkin because he did the selecting before putting anything into print in the first place. And so it was good to find in Required Writing, in the interview with The Observer,

A bibliography of your work has just been published. What do you feel about being bibliographed?

On the whole, very flattered, as long as no-one thinks I thought all these things worth exhuming.

So, Quod Erat Demonstrandum. It might be a good idea for some pop svengali to decide what should be the next Taylor Swift single but for an artist of Larkin's stature, it was for them to decide what is published and not an editor.
Larkin's reputation has survived the accusations of misogyny, misanthropy and misearabilism that followed the publication of his letters and going back to these pieces that were available long before only emphasize what enormous common sense he had to say about poetry. I wouldn't have the same twelve poets that he did within arm's reach and neither would I endorse his view of Margaret Thatcher but he told it how it was about poetry and how it really still should be and we should be grateful for that.

Portsmouth Poetry Society Live in, well, Portsmouth, obviously

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that an evening with Portsmouth Poetry Society would be a marvellous thing but I think last night surpasssed any expectations that any of us had of it.
Everybody was great. Special thanks to Maggie Sawkins who appeared as a special guest and to all those who took part and helped put the show together. Here are some photos. I can't include everyone here. Thanks to Tom Bennett for the photographs.

Here are- Maggie Sawkins, Rosemary Penny, Helen Larham, Ros Griffiths, Denise Bennett, someone who doesn't look like the marathon bike rider he once was any more, John Dean, Diana McCormack and Pauline Hawkesworth.

Pauline Hawkesworth

Pauline Hawkesworth, Bracken Women in Lime Trees (Indigo Dreams Press)

The best-selling poet in Portsmouth this week was Pauline Hawkesworth. People are unusually willing to part with £7.50 for a poetry book if given the right sort of opportunity and a launch event at St. Francis Church was the ideal way of outselling all other poets, none of whom would have had enough books on shelves in bookshops to compete.
Pauline read from the book at either end of an hour which included readings by Maggie Sawkins, Denise Bennett, Brian Wells, Mick Perryment and a varied and entertaining support cast from Portsmouth Poetry Society. The performers and the impressive size of the audience showed the Portsmouth Poetry Scene to be in a fine and healthy condition.
The moon and stars recur in the poems in Pauline’s book, sometimes in relation to domestic situations. There is something mystical not far below the surface of everyday experiences but it is not defined here and the poems are too well-grounded and practical for Pauline to be described as a ‘mystic’ or dubious ‘dream-weaver’. The poems are perhaps ‘in search of mysticism’ and use a language that is not over-written but accurately descriptive and at times captivating without being showy.
Thus dogs are as likely to be constellations as pets, if not both. There is an instinctive relationship between our worldly presence and wider, universal references, and quite arrestingly, in midwinter, we are shown
the earth finger-tipping
along the edge of her realm.

Sedna, the newly discovered minor planet beyond Pluto, is

small, a wren
caught on camera
in the oceans of space.

And, after images of space, it is oceans that come most readily to mind in these poems,
If he inspects her heart,
he will see an ocean moving

or,
the sea’s rim turning into gigantic hands.

The descriptive power of Pauline’s language and her perceptions are the most memorable features of the collection although perhaps the best poem for me is When She Left the Room, which reveals a dark underside to an apparently happy relationship.
The poem provides something unexpected and almost sinister.
We are often told that poetry should do the unexpected but if it did so all the time, the unexpected would soon become expected and so it can’t really win. Experimentation and daring innovation can be of great interest but doing the simple things well is never going to go out of fashion. But one word in this book took me more by surprise and provided more to think about than all the rest when in Venus in the Night Sky, the universe is described as ‘crowded’.
Of course, we know that the universe is unimaginably empty. So perhaps it is simply that on a starry night it looks densely packed. But in the context of this book, full of domestic comforts, a few terrors and the broad sweep of evocative imagery, an enquiry into the possibility of mysticism, the universe might be crowded with things that aren’t really there.