From the Heart

Tongues and Grooves, From the Heart, Square Tower, Old Portsmouth, Oct 1 

The long-established poetry series, Tongues & Grooves, nowadays mostly presents From the Heart where readers, whether poets or not, undertake to recite poems that are not their own from memory. I find it hard enough to read poems in front of an audience with the text right in front of me so it's unlikely I'd take on the challenge but one way for my good mate, Kev, to improve his status towards 'best mate', should he feel the need, was to choose one of my poems to learn. The very least I could do was turn up to support him.

Maybe about half of the performers get through without being prompted, which is impressive. Nobody attempted They flee from me by Thomas Wyatt but I'm sure that's what the words do under the pressure of performance. And it is the reader's performance rather than the poem one is appreciating. Shelley's not a huge favourite of mine but the recitation of Ozymandias was exemplary. Neither was the poem read by Cat Sawkins but she just about cleaned up in what became a family double when Maggie did Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow which I possibly could have done about fifty years ago but it's not a game that what can expect to improve at with age. Maggie's reading of The Rain Stick, from Seamus Heaney's brilliant book The Spirit Level, was usefully illustrated by the very thing and probably my favourite poem of the evening but it was strange to find oneself applauding a great reading of one's least favourite poet in English Literature - Kae Tempest- but that's how it works. Gareth Toms doing the nearby Armitage public poem, The Theatre of the Sea, revealed him as something of a showman.

It was impressive that a couple of those whose main job was to provide the interval barber shop choir extended their involvement by performing poems, too. And if Maggie is as thoughtfully gifted a presenter as she is a poet then in Janet Ayers she has an ideal co-host whose confidence and demeanour are always well-ahead of the potentially precarious situations of microphone malfunction, unremembered lines or anybody winning too many raffle prizes.

I had no idea what to expect. Poetry readings can, on occasions, be dire experiences. Anybody who fancies having a go at doing poetry 'live' could easily be a recipe for disaster. But many of them have done it before and there's more talent out there than one might think. Poetry isn't always the uplifting, therapeutic thing it is sometimes claimed to be. But at Tongues & Grooves, From the Heart took on all my doubts and cast them aside with the most gracious ease. Hugely enjoyable show in all its variety and good will.

 

 

 Kevin Rogers, once frontman of the Von Trap Family, finds himself performing Romanticism by David Green nearly fifty years later. That's progress for you.  

Jeffrey Turner - A House Called Paradise

 Jeffrey Turner, A House Called Paradise (Chestnut Press)

I am the privileged and grateful recipient of a copy of this limited edition produced 'for private distribution'. If it hadn't dawned on me years ago, when it should have, I'm beginning to grasp now that in the poetry world much depends on who you know. Now that I'm glad to benefit from sometimes knowing such people.

The Chestnut Press take special pleasure in producing these editions on fine paper, elegantly typeset and Jeff Turner is a poet they rightly regard as one whose poems are worthy of such presentation.

Flumen est Arar, Julius Caesar begins a passage in De Bello Gallico, before going on to explain that there is a river Arar that flows so incredibly slowly that it is impossible to tell with the naked eye in which direction it is flowing. Not all of that rote learning done to achieve 'O' level Latin fifty years ago was wasted. That line comes to mind now as almost appropriate to how Jeff's poetry works. It is luxuriantly slow-moving. It doesn't demand anything beyond patience but it certainly rewards close reading. It can't possibly have been poured out in a rush of inspiration. It must have been thought over, finessed and allowed to mature in a way that I'm sure those who enjoy fine wines or whisky would understand.

It is contingent, feeling as if it might be somehow formal or metrical but not being, exploring what might be only to find that the exploration was all there was, like,

                a track that stumbles on, uncertain

whether to find or lose itself. 

That is both a theme and the way the theme is expressed and, as such, a paragon example of how poetry at its best can extend beyond the shackles of the language it needs to escape from. Before too long, this pathway and the house called Paradise that it leads to are both the poem and an extended metaphor for life itself and,

We must take them at their word

And take our chance that this is paradise:

 

One is even impressed with four judicious semi-colons in a 45-line poem. A couple more might have made Jeff look like a campaigner for the preservation of a threatened species of punctuation but they become necessary, if not quietly radiant, in such considered writing.

But, reading as closely as I have, I've gone back several times to find how the mice evoked in the final stanza can be called 'they' when such a pronoun must surely refer to some entity previously mentioned. I go back to those that 'we take at their word', who before that 'meant to stay' and before that were 'whoever built it' and either Jeff has performed some syntactical legerdemain, it's poetry taking a bit of a chance or the poem has been loosed from its moorings. But,

There is no more, they are saying.

No further on to find

Beyond the memory of what never was.

 

Which leaves us none the wiser, then, but with some sense of having been somewhere and seen something. I told you it was about 'life'.  

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, An Eightieth-Birthday tribute to Peter Didsbury, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley (Broken Sleep Books).

 Happy Birthday, Peter Didsbury. An expanded edition of his Scenes from a Long Sleep is published today and this festschrift, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley, is available for pre-order at Broken Sleep ahead of its imminent release date. It features poems by an impressively gathered cast of the great and good with such as Don Paterson, Ian Duhig, Carol Rumens, Rory Waterman, plenty more than that and some good wishes from Douglas Dunn. And me, actually. It's a bit like a non-league player finding themselves in the England squad for a friendly match. 

Peter Didsbury has long been a central figure in the story of how Hull became an unlikely-sounding epicentre of British poetry in recent decades, post-Larkin, post-Stevie Smith and a long time post-Andrew Marvell. If Larkin's provincial hideout in its university library began something there and attracted Andrew Motion, it is perhaps more properly Douglas Dunn who might be regarded as the godfather of its mafiosi although 'movement' might be a gentler term for what could be regarded as a more coherent grouping than The Movement ever was. 

It would surely be improper to submit the sort of poem one might place in the middle of a book to thicken it up, or for the editors to include such things, in a tribute to a respected writer and that hasn't happened. I must look further than I previously have into the work of Carol Rumens on the evidence of The Sense of Vision. If Paterson's Hedgehog appears to begin like Aesop, it becomes more like Einstein. If, as I sometimes suspect, we are not living in a Golden Age of British Poetry then the ongoing parade of talent now assembled here is evidence that it's not so bad after all. And there's little for poetry to fear from AI when O'Brien puts in a signature performance in The Lost Language of Trains that only he could have.

Didsbury is inimitable and I don't think anybody has dared to try. It would have been unwise. What has resulted is a profound tribute to one who has always done it his own way from a litany of admirers doing it theirs.   

 

Simon Armitage Library Tour, Portsmouth BookFest

 Simon Armitage Library Tour, Portsmouth BookFest, Menuhin Room, March 4

It appeared to fall nicely that Simon Armitage's 10-year tour of libraries coincided, when it reached the right part of the alphabet, with Portsmouth's BookFest. Having been a student of Geography here and visited a couple of times recently, he knew his way.

As diplomatically as I am able, I need to explain that poetry is a broad church, as is music, as is painting, and if one 'likes poetry' one doesn't necessarily like it all. 

The host from BookFest displayed an overwhelming enthusiasm that made up in hyperbole for everything it lacked in irony. If her build-ups and reactions to the support acts, Maggie Sawkins, Portsmouth’s own Laureate Sam Cox, and Majid Dhana, went unquestioned, her next level left Simon with little option but to pause at the microphone and say, 'no pressure, then'.

The Menuhin Room fitted in 100 and tickets were much sought after. They could have given away- for it was free - plenty more. I dare say the majority took Sam and Majid's exuberantly affirmative performances at face value and felt enabled, inspired and uplifted by their messages of hope and deeply sincere belief in good in the face of all the evidence. But their poems have only one layer and while rhythm and rhyme are essential elements of the music that can make 'poetry' something other than 'ordinary language', not necessarily when that's all it has. When my friend discreetly got up and went out to having a coughing fit - luckily we were near a door- I thought the same as when another friend had done so in Portsmouth Cathedral during a sub-standard performance but, no, they were genuine coughing fits on both occasions.

And, no, we are polite people, happy to give anyone a hearing and well aware that what we are hearing might be brilliant to others, that it might even be us that are wrong. But for me the sincerity was overdone, the righteousness was comic and the poems were not my sort of thing.

Maggie Sawkins, opening the second half, provided the improvement that I was confident she would. She has a more guarded attitude and can do wry humour. I look back at her poem, A Sort of Bargaining, her reading copy of which she gave me after just snatching a competition ahead of me many years ago and by now can think, yes, that's fair enough. She's any good, knows what she's about and thus uses language in subtler ways than bashing it about like a Tonka toy.

And then came Simon, a class act who has done such things so many times and is entirely at ease working an audience with his self-effacing stories. There was nothing at all to find fault with at all in the delivery of the other poets, only the fact they were trying too hard while not having any but the standard poetry reading devices to do it with. Simon doesn't look like he's trying very hard. Probably because he isn't because he doesn't have to. He's had audiences spellbound by his methods time and again. It's a sort of anti-showmanship but, exuding a calm confidence, it entirely works.

Simon's not on my list of especially favourite poets and poetry readings generally are low on my agenda. If one doesn't know the poems already then it's not easy to assimilate them on one first hearing although all four of them did well to read poems mostly not so demanding that one needed much more.

Apparently there's a 'poetry boom' in progress. I can remember several such before. It doesn't mean that Simon is going to be as recognizable a figure as Tennyson was in his time. I happened to see him from a bus, approaching the railway station in Portsmouth City Centre the next day and he wasn't being mobbed or signing autographs. He had quite rightly answered a Q with his A that none of the more popular art forms needed to worry about poetry.

He is tremendous at what he does, however realtively few have the slightest knowledge of, or interest in, what that is. By all means it's a dubious undertaking and not an obvious one to get rich by. There are football players that not even football supporters have ever heard of earning much more money than the most eminent poets that every poetry reader has heard of.

So be it. Everybody had a good time. Even me. 

Sean O'Brien, The Bonfire Party

Sean O'Brien, The Bonfire Party (Picador) 

 

There was a time it seemed to me that once beyond the age of 60, poets either ground to a halt or began repeating themselves. If it's a rule at all it's one of the type that need exceptions to prove it. Exceptions like Sean O'Brien who continues to deliver with rigour and energy.

Some might facetiously suggest that he was always repeating himself but he arrived all but fully-formed with The Frighteners in 1987 and not in much need of 'development' to become the mature version of himself, complete with an armoury of objective correlatives for the perceived declining condition of England.

It's less repetition than resonance as summer is either imminent or on its way out. Afternoons are long and drawn out in an onomatopoeic way. Much needs to be ratified, certificated or established by a higher authority, maybe one of the 'gods' mentioned, and we are still haunted by vestiges of WW2. Otherwise not even language is to be trusted. There are sinister implications in how,

                  the clocks conspired to agree

rather than were synchronized. And the discourse is liberally sprinkled with sometimes esoteric literary references, several of which need looking up.

Early on, Sleepers takes as its text a line from George Orwell about 'the deep, deep sleep of England' which is at least as pertinent now as it was in the 1930's,

                         This couldn't be the end

 

for something we had never thought to lose.

It is deceptively restful while dense with a feeling of detachment and unbelonging. Similarly, in High Summer,

This used to be England

and now it is nowhere. 

This long, somnolent afternoon has dragged on since Somebody Else, in Ghost Train, in 1995. 

Ryan: Rainy Season is more autumnal and somewhat less resigned, longing to 'put off politesse and do some smiting' to the gory extent of putting insect larvae into ears but still,

the world is only ever scenery, a tale,

a line that evokes more than its surface complacency suggests when 'unpacked'. The world, it would appear, is a landscape, or some fiction, we pass through - perhaps as tourists or day-trippers do- without being a part of it.

And, as in The Past, we might look back on the past without finding ourselves there either.

But there might have been a shift in the O'Brien diagnosis of our personal, and communal, malaise. There was a time it was political, inflicted on us by the machinations of how things are run and all the time shown to be our own fault. Now, though,

                                    time's

the evil in the heart of things,

and we are victims of something more metaphysical.

It all remains contingent, precarious and unwinnable. But not necessarily as bleak as it sounds. If Sean's poetic genealogy has Auden as a grandfather and maybe Peter Porter and Douglas Dunn as parents, Larkin is an uncle. Dark with implications though much might be - and the future surely looks darker than Larkin could be expected to have imagined, the sordid sheds, the old crowd in the window seat of the pub and the

gasp of rust

with which the back door of the garage opens are real things offering something more tangible than literature, like the engagement with Jules Maigret in Impasse, and in To Cythera, Juniper and Fingerpost towards the end of the book, the reader is left more transfigured than they had any reason to expect. 

 

Having been one of those who decided the result of last year's Forward Prize, it's unlikely any such committee will be required this year to move O'Brien's tally of them up to four.  

Pushkin

A few weeks ago I was wondering if The Woman in White had been the best book I'd never read. It wasn't, in the event, but Eugene Onegin could easily have been.

I avoided it for a few months, leaving it at the bottom of the pile, afraid of poetry in translation and the very idea of a novel written in sonnets. But things can benefit from low expectations.

Poetry in translation is a hard enough thing to do in the first place without having to reproduce a demanding rhyme scheme. However good Jules Laforgue is in French, it didn't happen for me in English. But whether it is Pushkin or the ingenious work of Stanley Mitchell, Eugene Onegin turns out to be a wonderful thing. If at first the rhyming seems a bit unnatural, well, insistent rhyme is unnatural and jars when it bosses the poem about but it can be useful when unobtrusive or impressive when it's done as well as it is here. The blurb says that the translation 'captures the cadences and lightness of the original poem' and it is that lightness in what is not going to be a 'light' story that comes across.

Not all canonical classics do it for me. I've tried a few times with Jane Austen but don't get it. But I'm gladder to have found Pushkin after all these years than I can say and he looks like being a project for further investigation in the new year. 

Horace, Poet on a Volcano

 Peter Stothard, Horace, Poet on a Volcano (Yale)

At school we were educated to understand that Roman civilisation was disciplined, efficient and much to be admired but perhaps we were then too inclined to believe its publicity and in thrall to our classical exemplars. Peter Stothard's life of Horace is part history, part biography and part literary criticism and the history part serves to emphasize, to those of us who haven't before seen it put together in such a way, that the power struggles in England later were in comparison little local difficulties compared to the carnage among the generation of leaders in Julius Caesar's time.

Horace socially climbed into events through a friendship with Maecenas, a sort of political advisor if not minister, and some considerable poetic talent. He was a supporter of Brutus and then Octavian, no soldier, no 'renaissance man' or athlete but a short, portly, blotchy man who lived 'in media res', preached about 'seizing the day' and enjoyed wine and himself.

Greek literature came before Roman and provided the models for it and the example of Antilochus provided Horace with his 'perfectionist' poetics in an age that admired formal discipline more than our laissez-faire culture now that raises no objection to 'free verse', an idea that would have made no sense and been an oxymoron to Horace.

I had imagined him a sort of Roman Dr. Johnson, full of humane wisdom and less deceived good sense and there's a bit of that to him but the Satires, the Odes and the Letters show him developing different approaches and providing his and subsequent languages with a number of set piece phrases, memorability being essential if your work is going to outlast bronze as he presciently said his would.

Nunc est bibendum, the best known use of a gerund, 'now is the time to drink', might have become a general entreaty to enjoyment but was first used to celebrate the suicide of Cleopatra. Peter Stothard doesn't go to any lengths to make Horace any more likeable than I already thought he was from the poems. He certainly had an eye for an opportunity and the career he was clearly born for but one can still find sympathy for him in the letter in which he,

began to pour out his feelings about his own poetry as he never had before. He wrote about the precariousness of his place in society, the perils of seeking perfection when no one noticed or cared, the madness, alienation and despair that were necessary for the only art that mattered.

Many poets through the ages will have thought as much despite the celebrity some of them achieved at least in part through that tortured image, and perhaps some pop singers, the exaggerated embodiment of the 'poet' in the last 70 years, have exploited it further and so rather than the template of the sound-minded, equable writer, he might have been the prototype of the artist who took himself all too seriously and thus caused Baudelaire.

In a coda outlining the legacy Horace left to be picked up by two millennia of poets since, Stothard omits Marvell's explicit citation in his Horatian Ode, written to mark a public event which won't have been an oversight and so perhaps isn't Horatian enough but the general verdict is that Milton amongst others didn't do him any favours and that perhaps he is inimitable, and much better in the finely-crafted Latin. Stothard's summaries of the poems he finds significant are very useful but, time and again, he interprets the poems as opening with a shout, some thumping declaration, which is not the Horace I ever conceived of or what comes across in translation and so I'm left not all that much closer to him than I thought I was before but I do now have a synopsis of a seminal period of history that was as chaotic and dangerous as any one can think of. Not orderly. The 'order' only arrives once a proper poet puts it all into inventive, metrical lines.      

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.

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.

August Kleinzahler - A History of Western Music

 August Kleinzahler, A History of Western Music (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The old boy is still rockin', don't you worry, although we had this much evidence that he was from, as acknowledged, having had the chance to see most of these poems already in the LRB if not also in previous collections but here they are collected together. He's still downtown in clubs with jazzmen, with the Great American Songbook, with Sinatra, remembering his friend, Thom Gunn, in the style of Johnny Mercer but, not quite as one might expect, he opens in customary, well-advised fashion with just about the best piece that he has and it's about Whitney. 

He's not much if not laconic. It's an idiom that he has made his own, owing a debt to the casualness of Frank O'Hara but with more hyperbole such as, in the ending of Chapter 63, that first poem in the book, with reference to I Will Always Love You, 

                                     if they played that one,

it wouldn't just be you dying in aisle 5.

All the girls would be dropping there like it was sarin gas

pouring from the speakers up there hidden behind the lights.

 

Widely read in his subject, there's an authenticity that only someone devoted to it can bring to it from so many disparate genres, as in Chapter 72, the titles all being such out-of-sequence headings,

And the 'Pavane'...What was it Ravel himself said

after a too too adagio performance years later?

Something about that it was the princess, not

the 'Pavane', that was supposed to be dead.  

 

Chapter 1 (Mahler/Sinatra) must have been written a long time before Trump's excruciating, overly enamoured reference to Arnold Palmer in a recent bunch of spiel that he passed off as a 'speech' but Ava Gardner's reporting back on Sinatra is almost as unbecoming in what can drift sometimes into a prowling machismo although there is a vast difference between Kleinzahler's convincing cool cat attitude and the monstrous overbearing narcissism of Trump.

For the most part, though, these poems and August in general are much cleverer than that and he incorporates his learning discreetly into his art. The idea of synesthesia in Chapter 4 (The Monkey of Light), the desperation of the late night radio phone-in host fielding out of season calls from,

no one calling but the hard cases,

 

the same sad old bachelors  

in Chapter 12 and,

Almost a hiss

An old shellac LP of white noise

Playing in the distance 

in Chapter 5 (Hyper-Berceuse: 3 A.M.) like the sound radio telescopes pick up from the edge of the universe.

Born in 1949 and so 74 years old now, it's not often that poets set off in a new direction at an age like that and Kleinzahler hears the shipping in the fogs in the bay off San Francisco, there is the old longing and the appreciation of moments of outrageous beauty but there is still the exuberance. It's not easy to recapture the time when one first caught such things but one can continue to catch them. This wouldn't be his very best work but he certainly hasn't lost it, either. The music is more to him than some cliché about it being 'the soundtrack to our lives'. Mine is an essential part of me, too, but I'm not going to claim it as quite as essential to me as his is to him.

On the day this book was due to be delivered Amazon.uk announced they couldn't source it. It's not due in the UK until next Spring, from Carcanet. But I can't wait that long for something from one of my last remaining, very favourite living poets and so had it from Amazon.com, it being published by FSG. There isn't time to wait that long. I want it now. And, as I knew he wouldn't, like an old raincoat, he didn't let me down. 

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.  

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.                            

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.

Michael Nott, Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life

 Michael Nott, Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life (Faber)

You wait for what seems like half your life for the book you most wanted to read to be first written and then published and by the time it is its subject has been deposed from his undisputed position as your favourite poet, specialist subject and maybe even, I might have once precariously thought, 'role model'.

The book turning up exactly on time, once it was due, was still a major event but its sub-title made me dubious and wary. 'Cool' means 'detached' but is also a vague term of vogue approval; 'queer' is a derogatory term reclaimed in an act of defiance by those radical and upfront enough to do so, which it would have been dangerous to do in the 1950's, 60's and later. Both epithets can reasonably be applied to Thom Gunn with all good intentions but putting them so prominently on the cover does him no favours. He was much more than that in his day and if by now he's been reduced to such a definition, his work is diminished by them. 

In PNReview, Volume 16 Number 2, November - December 1989, Donald Davie wrote that,

I have in the press - to use that portentous phrase - a book about British poetry since 1960. And as I put it together I was surprised by how insistently Thom Gunn shouldered to centre-stage.

And that's what he was, or looked like, then - a central figure encompassing long, historical perspectives in poetry as well as contemporary references; one who moved from highly discplined, metrical forms to 'freer' lines and one who set himself up as 'impersonal' in manner and removed from the 'confessional' excesses of some of his contemporaries although it is now increasingly difficult to say where any such boundary lay. To reduce him to cool and queer, as if he was a little bit Miles Davis and a little bit Walt Whitman but mostly poetry's Lou Reed isn't good enough. And the photograph on the front cover doesn't help much, either.

Few biographies resemble psychological case studies as much as this but few people spent quite so much time ostensibly analysing themselves, their relationships with others and the world. In a book advertised as being 'no holds barred', though, one still wasn't expecting to find that young Gunn shared his mother's bed after her second husband left and that Gunn was on the outskirts of being investigated regarding the assassination of JFK, via his friend Don Doody. Soon, though, these extraordinary details don't seem so extraordinary after so many chapters of drug excesses and compulsive promiscuity and, for such apparently streetwise geezers, his entourage do seem alarmingly prone to 'falling in love'. Michael Nott begins, though, with the suicide of Gunn's mother, to who he was so attached, which clearly had an enormous effect on him.

Gladly, though, Nott doesn't lose sight of the work that made Gunn famous, regularly tracing the real people and occasions into the poems. While Gunn was most insistent that he was not 'confessional' in the style of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, that's a matter of opinion. His pursuit of 'impersonality' in his poems was to be admired but it's more in the detached attitude of his language than any escape from self that he achieves because, in a very Gunn-like paradox, that attempt looks more and more like a New Age 'search for himself'. Whether consciously or not, Nott compiles a long litany of writers that Gunn takes as role models as if his thesis is that Gunn was a highly talented tabula rasa, like David Bowie became in pop music, who assimilated almost all he was from precursors - Shakespeare, Donne, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Camus, Sartre, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound. 

What he did try to achieve, in common with other 1950's poets, was the avoidance of 'bad principles' although not all of his reveiwers from My Sad Captains in 1961 onwards agreed that he was successful in that. He can be seen to become himself in a Damascene moment on a dusty road in France when all his reading, thinking and inwardness are illuminated by a sense of release which might be identified as where the adventure begins but time and again it becomes apparent that he was only at home in restlessness, that 'love' - for want of a better word- was a strategic enterprise and a hedonism that defied reasonable limits was his primary motivation. At an early stage it was remarked that,

"He laughs too loud, as if he's got something to prove...that was a bit too self-dramatizing..that isn't actually quite true to yourself."

For all that he might have thought poetry could provide some ecsape from himself, it was a brave attempt that didn't work whereas Larkin's manifold ironies that accepted his lot for the most part did pace Gunn's respect for his technical excellence but derision of his lack of ambition. 

Given his lifestyle, Gunn might be counted as lucky to survive the AIDS epidemic of the 1980's. He lost many friends who were memorialized in his 1992 volume The Man with Night Sweats, the book that restored him to more generalized critical acclaim after the perceived difficulties of his 'middle period', and most of those tributes were metrical. While there are free verse and syllabic poems to admire, that is also where more of his less successful or lazier attempts are and metre is overall what he did best.

He did not go gentle into any good night but propelled himself headlong into his decline with as much commitment as he had embraced life in what retrospectively looks like a programme of self destruction but, having given up work, he was bored, may not have wanted to live and became increasingly difficult to live with. His death at the age of 74 was entirely foreseeable although the heroin found in his body had not been known to be part of his regular diet.

Books are more significant if they change our minds rather than merely confirming what we thought already. In one way it's a dull book, detailing repetitive episodes of compulsive behaviour but for the vast majority of us who have led more sheltered lives it offers a view of a sub-culture which we might not have known quite how thoroughgoing and established it was. It also makes it more difficult to argue against Gunn being understood as a 'gay poet' because first and foremost it makes clear that that is what he always was.

John Burnside - Ruin, Blossom

 John Burnside - Ruin, Blossom (Cape)

What I hadn't realized when finding out that John Burnside had died was that there had so recently been a further book of poems. Such a leavetaking seems almost too appropriate, his poems having long inhabited a region that isn't this world but can't believe in the mysticism his words evoke to think there is any other.

The words 'snow', stars' and 'shadow' recur regularly throughout Ruin, Blossom. Burnside would never have been anything quite so prescribed or prosaic as a mere 'symbolist' but those words insist on being noticed and so invite interpretation. In the first section, Apostasy, we have to take its title as a hint and a shift from the language and rituals of Christianity to the deeper, more natural Paganism might be an idea. The snow is often melting to reveal what was beneath it, as if the world was being divested of its lustrous covering to show what was beneath it. But that is far too superficial a reading to suffice as anything like the whole story.

Some poetry collections are so loosely themed that what the poems have in common is that they are those the poet has written since their last book whereas others, like this, ask to be read in relation to each other. One can make the 'shadows' into doubt and the 'stars' into eternity, fate or revelation but poetry worth its while benefits from not being having meaning pinned quite so firmly on it. It's possible that some poets might not be aware of how often certain words occur in their work and they are subconsciously revealed by their 'semantic fields' but it's unlikely that John Burnside and his editor didn't notice such topography.

The poem Apostasy begins,

At one time,

when there might have been a God,

before being illuminated by 'the sway of matter and a hint/ of distance',

in Bedlam Variations,

      all our gods have vanished from this house

and,

No one believes in heaven anymore

and we can take the hint that Burnside is celebrating something more vital and luminous,

things seen, as I am seen, and things unseen,

absolved of what I once mistook for rapture 

or,

      like forgiveness for the sin 

of being, but not being what was asked.

Those in Bedlam have a more acute insight into the unfathomable like the epigraph from Corinthians 2 where 'the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal'.

 

I'm often suspicious of poems that regard themselves as so 'free' that they can leave one word to a line or spread fragments of lines across the page. I'm not convinced it's much more than affectation but John Burnside has an innate music and seriousness that convinces above and beyond recondite typographical effects. Free verse can still be verse when generating authority enough not to divert attention to its formal niceties but it needs to be doing that first, not hoping that dispensing with ostensible form and metre somehow is its own justification.

While looking as if it is at least flirting with mysticism and 'the great beyond', Burnside's poetry was dealing with someting very real, something that led Carol Ann Duffy to suggest that poetry was 'the music of being human'. I was reluctant to give any credence to what sounded nice but didn't mean much but John Burnside might have provided her with what she meant, or me with a clue to what she meant, by it.

Recent Poetry Books - Kathryn Gray and Sue Hubbard

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

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

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

           afraid of my own mind.

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

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

                                            When I love someone, I love them more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Katy Evans-Bush, Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle

 Katy Evans-Bush, Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle (CB editions)

Politics and poetry don't mix well, or not for me they don't. Politics is a low art of devious half truths and manipulated appearances, slogans and undercooked promises - perhaps never more so than in recent years- whereas poetry, when it's any good, suggests more rather than less and remains of value beyond any sell-by date. Everything is political, I dare say, but not everything is art.

Katy Evans-Bush has come out at the other side of some crises a changed writer on the evidence of this new volume of poems. There always had been a compelling energy in her work and an expansive ability to make more of the language than its constituent parts, which is exactly what one wants, but the opening poem here, From lines by Kenneth Patchen #1, kicks off with a vitriol not seen before,
You think creativity is a different activity from everything else,

you clever, lifeless little coward, my little phony, you professional

partisan with no ideas; you think restlessness is energy. 

 

The poems' titles go from #1 as such to #51.  Kenneth Patchen was 'an important countercultural figure in the US. A defiantly working class poet whose life spanned the first and second world wars, the Depression and Vietnam'. All of #1 to #51 are poems 'prompted' by lines from his which is a remarkable achievement whatever one thinks of such a 'creative writing course' way of making poems. 

I don't buy, or buy into, anywhere near as much new poetry as I did, say, ten years ago because me and it have lost much of what connection we had and some of Joe Hill Makes His Way is symptomatic of why. Some of it is one-dimensional and that dimension is anger. Entirely justifiable anger but at times one-dimensional nonetheless and I'm already feeling that I'm one of those guilty as charged in #1 for being such things as,

You tired, sad, bedtime little phony, you namby-pamby,

fake reader, you’re terrified of caring! Worse, you’re terrified

of seeming to care.

I'm not. Honestly, I'm not. I recognize the sentiments immediately and it's everybody else, not me. It's as if two of my favourite poets, Rosemary Tonks with her virulent dismissal of social niceties and Sean O'Brien with his recurrent theme of us all being guilty of being ourselves had joined forces at their least forgiving and told us what they really thought.

But while these poems, and #1 more than most, have an element of one-off, live 'performance' about them they are more convincing than Kae Tempest's stagey outrage and we know that Derek Mahon had a point,

What middle-class twits we are

To imagine for one second

That our privileged ideals

Are divine wisdom, and the dim

Forms that kneel at noon

In the city not ourselves.  

(and it doesn't say 'twits' in all available versions).

 

Joe Hill Makes His Way wouldn't be a worthwhile book, and it wouldn't be Katy Evans-Bush, if it was only an orchestrated rant. It is of value as poetry as much as politics because she does things with the language.

#39 has,

all our philosophy's a piece

of ersatz Chippendale. 

and,

Art's not redemption. Art's just how we're tuned. 

That might be the most searing opportunity to see ourselves as we are, so satisfied with our Mozart, Vermeer, David Bowie and Philip Larkin and, yes, I am. Not to mention that, in #46,

                   We can't tell what's beautiful anymore.

 

This is writing that has come through a storm and found itself changed and changed utterly. We would mostly prefer not to know and be allowed to get away with it. I wouldn't take it from Piers Corbyn, GB News or the Democratic Unionist Party, for example, but this arrives powerfully in these pages which were a few too many to want to read at one sitting although maybe they should be read thus.

It's not mad. It is what it's really like but most of us are comfortable enough, aren't we, and we can be cross, indignant and incendiary as a part-time pastime when we are not enjoying a Zinfandel or Puccini because to know such things is to love them. And we do and we do and we do.