Signed by Dana Gioia

The collecting of signed poetry books never actually stopped but it hasn't continued at any sort of pace because I've got all the affordable poets I could want and Larkin, Eliot and Auden no longer come at sensible prices, notwithstanding having to re-mortgage the house to get Sylvia or Dylan Thomas whose legends make such things far beyond outlandish. I might have another look at Rosemary Tonks, though, because it is only money.

However, Dana Gioia was an absolute bargain at a price one might easily pay for an unsigned book. 

I'm half convinced that graphology is not cod science by the correlation between formal, common sense poets having nice, clean, legible handwriting and the 'freer', less disciplined poets being less legible. Such a thesis demands deeper analysis and there will be outliers like 'exceptions that prove the point' even if they would really undermine it.

Dana Gioia is so very neat and tidy, considerate and caring and finishes with just a bit of a flourish. There would appear to be a bit of a story and background to this dedication which makes it all the better. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
 

The Edward Thomas Study Centre

 Portsmouth and its surrounding area are well served for choirs, their concerts, lunchtime piano recitals and the like but it's not everybody who can live quite so close by places associated with two of their favourite dozen poets.

Having waited patiently for summer to pass, it's suddenly time to fit in some of those days out that haven't happened yet. Next week I must return to Warblington to visit Rosemary Tonks where she is buried but The Edward Thomas Study Centre in Petersfield is another of those little places one needs to know about that make a trip worthwhile.

It's not as big as you'd quite reasonably expect but there's not an inch of space wasted and it is immacualately presented. It's more library than museum but it won't be found wanting for much in Thomas and Thomas-related literature. For the asking, one can see books signed by Thomas but, as advised by Jeremy Mitchell there, don't ever be persuaded by a book of his poems signed by Thomas because they weren't published until after his death. Not that I'd stretch to the asking price for any such thing but, as with John Donne and Auden, the Signed Poetry Books feature here will have to be glad of a photograph and accept that no such signed book will ever grace my shelves.

There isn't much to see in most towns these days now that they've become generic versions of each other with their Gregg's, charity shops and supermarkets but Petersfield retains considerable charm with its famous, labyrynthine second-hand bookshop (which didn't have any Dostoyevsky) and kindly atmosphere almost redolent of Camberwick Green but maybe it only seems like that to one like me who is attuned to the mean streets of Portsmouth.

The very fact that there is an Edward Thomas Study Centre is something to be glad of. It couldn't be called a reading room but some of us who are devoted enough to books like looking at them for their own sake in the same way that trainspotters enjoy seeing locomotives without taking a ride on them.

If I'd known there was a visitors book I might have thought of something appropriate to write in it in advance but even when I've thought of lines to say in advance I sometimes forget them in the pressure of the moment and ad lib as best I can.

Some people left and some people came.

It might not look much but the genuine Edward Thomas cognoscenti should appreciate what it is meant to mean. I hardly felt worthy of signing so soon after wit, raconteur and all-round oddball talent, Gyles Brandreth, who had attended nearby, upmarket Bedales school. I'm very glad I finally made the effort and got there. The stated objective of societies like the Edward Thomas Fellowship is to,

Perpetuate the memory of Edward Thomas and foster interest in his life and works,

and, yes, of course it is but we wouldn't want it catching on too much, would we. It's not such a bad thing that it is our own little secret so that when you meet people like Jeremy and distract him from his work it seems like you've shared something special.   

Signed Poetry Books - Geoffrey Grigson

It isn't over til it's over and it'll never be over for me. The Signed Poetry Books collection more or less stalled where it had got to a few years ago but is always glad of worthwhile additions. Thus, this afternoon, I was grateful for a signed copy of Grigson at Eighty, edited by R.M. Healey (Rampant Lions Press, 1985), which will be an informative way into the poet with its contributions from such as Peter Scupham, Roy Fuller, Anthony Thwaite, David Gascoyne and John Lucas as well as a collector's item.

No collecting is ever completed and done with. The University of Ballinacoorish say they have the complete archive of the work of Finbarr McCoodle but do they have the note he left out for the milkman that said 'two pints please' on February 11th, 1951. No, they don't, and so Professor Anton Schwiez, his biographer in a minor Hungarian university, has not been given the opportunity to pontificate on whether he wanted milk, porter or whisky. We have to find ways of getting to sleep without knowing.

Signed Poetry Books is always open to offers. It might have gone nearly as far as it can but you never know. If you have anything signed by Eliot, Auden, Larkin, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Dylan Thomas, Derek Mahon, Roddy Lumsden or Rosemary Tonks, by all means post them to me.

Signed Poetry Books - James Kirkup

This post first appeared in 2009 but, having added the label, it has jumped forward to re-date itself as today. That's fine. I'm surprised, but glad, to see how many times the blogspot metrics say it's been viewed in the last 13 years.

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 James Kirkup made headline news in the late 70's with a controversial poem which was by no means one of his better efforts. But there was more to him than that and this volume is an example of some of his more circumspect, controlled and thoughtful work.

He was, among other things, a great exponent of the haiku in English but the haiku in English in one of those subjects that I have to restrain myself from expressing a strong opinion on.

One thing Kirkup does best, though, is sign a book. This exquisite example is the neatest signature I have on a book of poems and it refers us back to an age where such style was valued.

Signed Poetry Books - Dannie Abse

The Oxfam Bookshop on East Street, Chichester, is a fine example of the genre and it's hard to leave it empty-handed. Yesterday it was Dennis O'Driscoll's Stepping Stones, the interviews with Seamus Heaney - about which I'm sure there'll be more in due course - and this latest addition to the ongoing but now very slowly accumulating Signed Poetry Book collection.

Dr. Abse was a proper doctor, the sort that diagnose and treat ailments, rather than one who has written a thesis. I saw him, venerable at the age of 86, when he did the Status Quo job of opening the show for a Benefit for the Haiti Disaster in Westminster in 2010 organized by Ms. Duffy. He was the only poet of the many assembled to be given an audience by Prime Minister Gordon Brown who had made a speech undertaking to send Haiti all our spare corrugated iron before sliding away to contiune trying to shore up his ailing Premiership. Younger readers might think that's all that Prime Ministers ever do. It's all that the recent ones have had as a priority.

Ask the Bloody Horse is notable for its esoteric vocabulary, including animalcules, thoracoplasty, thesmothete, nyctalopia, katabolic and corybantic, some of which might require a medical dictionary rather than the full version of the OED. I doubt if my two volumes of Shorter will have them all. I don't personally find such lexis efficacious in pursuit of ultra-Parnassian expressivity but if those were the words he felt the need to use it's not for me to say he shouldn't have.

Signed Poetry Books- Timothy Steele

 In an astute move in the transfer market, I acquired 19 back copies of About Larkin, the magazine of the Philip Larkin Society, which happily don't seem to include either of the issues I was in, and the booklet, Beatitudes, limited, numbered and signed thus by Timothy Steele.

It's tempting to play graphology when collecting, entirely for their own sake, books signed by poets. In Timothy Steele's case the precision and clarity of the signature are exactly as one might expect from the poems. Thom Gunn's, who was equally adept at formality, is similarly circumspect and one would imagine J.V. Cunningham's to be more so, if anything.

I don't know what happened with Timothy Steele, of whose work there is a bibliography going up to 2018 but whose last collection of poems still appears to be Toward the Winter Solstice, 2006.

But, if only at a glacial pace, the signed poetry books can still be added to when the opportunity arises.

Signed Poetry Books - John Burnside

It's been some time since I added to the Signed Poetry Book collection. I have a goodly proportion of the poets I'd like to have so the process of gathering was always going to slow down. Eliot, Auden and Larkin might be attainable but I try to have an eye for a bargain. I might need to sell the house to acquire a signed Sylvia or Dylan and I'm not one to make collecting such an obsession that I become a suspect on Midsomer Murders when a Thomas Hardy manuscript with impeccable provenance is up for grabs.

It is possibly indicative of the perceived difference between Portsmouth and Chichester that you wouldn't expect such a happy find in Portsmouth. I don't know if the fine Oxfam shop in Chichester had noticed this was signed but it's not as if the signature adds much to the value of a book until it is at least by more of a household name, like Betjeman, maybe. It's no reflection on the quality of the writing, only on the demand for the signature of the author.

It was quite glorious for me, though, given this year's very rewarding skim across the top of the prolific Burnside output. It's 'early' Burnside and interesting to see him finding his way towards the mesmerising poet he was to be. You can see it there waiting to happen but, in 1994, there was plenty more to come. 

The genuine artist keeps improving or else they should soon stop. It's by no means obvious that John has reached his limit yet and so he's still one to follow. It's possible that I have and so I'm not but at least I realized as much and have so far done the decent thing.

Signed Poetry Books - Elizabeth Jennings

Not strictly speaking a Signed Poetry Book but we don't let small details get in the way. I bought a copy of the 1970 collection, Lucidities, with a signed letter 'inlaid'. That letter turns out to be a routine but very gracious reply to a fan letter. All poets will know that fanmail arrives by the vanload every day. First class postage in 1974 was three and a half new pence.
It is also a quite charming book, though not immediately obvious in retrospect how Elizabeth had really developed 'a new style' as she explains in the enclosed Poetry Book Society leaflet but it must have seemed like a departure for her at the time.
I look forward very much to the biography in September when we can intrude further into the life of this modest, if not quite unassuming poet, who already seems like somebody likeable but almost quaint from a bygone age, much to her credit.

Signed Poetry Books - Clive Wilmer

One of the best things about being a poet/academic must be that whatever level of stardom you operate at, you don't get recognized in the street as often as Elton John would.
But, not so fast, Prof. Wilmer, I know who you are
because it's you I've come to see, please could you sign this book I bought specially for the pourpose.

Thanks.

Signed Poetry Books - Helen Mort

I'm glad I took on the challenge of my poor librarianship to find this book to take to Cheltenham because it has some fine things in it that it was good to be reminded of
.
And now my copy is all the finer for being signed.

She done a good job hosting the Gunn session.

Kathryn Gray - Flowers

Kathryn Gray, Flowers (Rack Press)

There is a lot to like about this new pamphlet. I'm not a big admirer of the term 'pamphlet' but apparently that is what the industry calls publications like this and so I must stay with the protocol.
It is 'some poems', isn't it, never mind how many.

It is evidence that Kathryn Gray hasn't gone away. I'm sure I wasn't the only one looking forward to her second full-length book of poems but I had by now just about forgotten, it having been 2004 ( ! ) when her debut, The Never-Never, appeared. Oh, my giddy aunt.
But she is to be admired for having waited for some poems that she wanted to arrive rather than press on regardless with the 'difficult second album'. Many wouldn't.
It happily comes signed and numbered and thus adds to the Signed Poetry Books collection without the rigmarole of queueing after a reading and having to exchange a few words of polite conversation or being hailed by the poet as 'European Man of Mystery'.  It's been some time since the collection was added to.
It consists of nine poems over ten pages and so makes me feel better about my own frugal booklets.
The best poem in it, for me, is Bournemouth, with its reference to Rosemary Tonks which also makes me feel good about being one of the in-crowd that would know such a thing, as well as,
                           And my tears
will be nothing new, and the stars - 
our startlers - the stars impossibly accrue.

On first reading, I read 'sparklers', which may or may not be intended to echo inside but I'm stuck with that forever now.
It rhymes when it feels like it but doesn't feel as if it has to and achieves enough of a casual sublime to make the short list for my Best Poem of the Year.
And it also references Brandon Flowers, more explicitly, and I was equally pleased with myself that I had to look up which band he was in.
Within its handful of poems, there are various signposts suggesting which way Kathryn Gray's poetry might be moving, like perhaps towards something more allusive than before but, if we are going to allow ouirselves to anticipate a fuller volume one day, it need not be restricted to any specific definition of what her, or any other, poetry should be like.   

Denise Bennett - Parachute Silk

Denise Bennett, Parachute Silk (Overstep Books)

Parachute Silk was launched to great effect at the Square Tower, Old Portsmouth on Sunday evening with a reading by Denise and music from The Polite Mechanicals. Denise gave a moving and personal introduction to her poems and the music was a versatile and entertaining mixture of politics and humour enjoyed by many of the great and good of the local poetry community as well as me.
Wilfred Owen said that 'the poetry is in the pity' but if he hadn't then I'm sure Denise Bennett could have. The poems in this book fall into three broad categories- poems about the Foundling Hospital, on themes taken from Portsmouth Dockyard and those about her mother, Ada, who died last year aged 102. All of them depend on deep sympathy, and empathy, that informs a tenderness and humanity but that is built upon a brave, unflinching attitude that firstly chooses the right word and then explains with great clarity. It is never difficult poetry but it is often on difficult subjects. She isn't afraid to look directly and honestly into emotional trauma, undeflected by irony or shifting meanings, but the result is a powerful sense of compassion where there might not always be any prospect of redemption.
That doesn't mean there is no linguistic 'play' going on. In Hovercraft Accident,
the upturned hovercraft caught
in a wall of white water -
the breaking news.

And the delivery of the message of the loss of Ada's husband in the war is presented with immense understatement in a poem about how she would get things back to normal for his return except,
the telegram boy
leaned his bike against the gate.

Both the dockyard poems and those about the Foundling hospital are records of lives long forgotten but discovered in pieces of research. The opening poem, The Foundling Hospital, records how babies left there were identified by scraps of fabric which mothers, if and when able, could reclaim their offspring by matching their part of the fabric to the piece kept in the hospital records,
On leaving her son, one mother
cut his shirt clean in half,
wanted no mistake when retrieving him.
Another deposited one tiny sleeve.
Each left, clutching her grief. 

The title poem gains from its quiet control, about wedding dresses made from recycled parachutes,
sensuous as spindrift,

its language as delicate and careful as the luminously graceful story it tells.
But perhaps the most powerful poem is Some Days, an account of Ada's physical and mental disintegration. There is nothing sentimental about the frank, uncompromising account of how such a long life can come to its end. It is plainly recounted in poetry that hardly needs to strive for effect, and doesn't, because telling it as it is does the job better without such distractions.
The whole collection is utterly coherent, consistent and profoundly human. One might ask for some light relief, but that is implied and available in the memories evoked and any sudden outbreak of frivolity would be out of place in a volume that is sombre but quite delicately and sensitively so. It can only add to Denise's already well-established reputation, not only locally but far beyond.
My collection of Signed Poetry Books has not been added to much recently so I'm glad to have this one. It was happily one of those times when the author didn't have to ask who to sign it to.

Signed Poetry Books - Robert Wells

I recently entered the bidding for a signed Philip Larkin on e-Bay. Not expecting to win it but giving it a go for form's sake. I haven't yet tired of telling the tale that it went for £645.
But there was a Carcanet get together a while back and Mr. Turner who attended returned with a pleasant surprise for me in the shape of this signed Robert Wells which has some fine things in it and so that provided compensation at nowhere near the cost. No cost at all, in fact. So thank you very much to Robert for that.

Signed Poetry Books - Cliff Blake

One of the great advantages of being a part of a 'community' of poets is that you inevitably get back more than you put in. I generally think of poetry as a solitary activity rather than a social one but the benefits of turning up to the Portsmouth Poetry Society meetings over the last few years have been considerable.
I recently dished out copies of The Perfect Murder there and was delighted to get back in return Rhapsody, Rhyme and Rhythm by the great octagenarian rhymer, Cliff Blake, and so I got him to sign it so that he could be a part of my pantheon of signed poetry books.
It is a fine selection that begins with Cliff's outline of his 'modus operandi', not quite a manifesto but an explanation of his way of working. Some of it sounds exactly right to me, like,
Sometimes it appears to magically come from nowhere.

Not all of it does, though. And that is because Cliff isn't the same sort of poet as me. He says,
I consider a poem without rhyme as prose

but he qualifies that very acceptably by continuing,
although it may be associated with poetry by having the other attributes.

Perhaps we will talk about that next time, sir. The first meeting of PPS that I ever went to was in 1982 and the subject was 'What is Poetry?'
I don't know if I want to go through all that again or not. But thanks for the book, and a very articulate summary of how you do what you do. Welcome to my collection.

Signed Poetry Books - George Szirtes

I don't know why I had formed the impression that George Szirtes was a difficult poet. It certainly turns out not to be true on the evidence of this fine book and a warm and welcoming reading in Portsmouth.

Signed Poetry Books - Tim Liardet

The visit of the T.S. Eliot Prize tour to Portsmouth not only provided the city with a fine evening of poetry readings but enhanced the signed books collection, too.

Signed Poetry Books - Roy Fisher

Just arrived is Roy Fisher's The Long and the Short of It, which is signed.

Signed Poetry Books - P.J. Kavanagh

Acquisitions have been few and far between recently but a return to e-Bay found me a bargain Selected Poems by the admirable P.J. Kavanagh and so I relieved the vendor of it for not very much at all.
I had to check my own website to see if I had a signed Kavanagh or not because one's memory is starting to lose track. The next time I order a book that I already have won't be the first.
An interesting feature of this volume, though, is a typographical correction on page 71 in the same hand as the signature. I must include a reference to it in any talk I give to visitors to the collection. Admittedly I am not taking as many bookings as the Lindisfarne Gospels are getting for their trip to the North East but once word gets around I'll probably have to stay open late two nights a week.

Signed Poetry Books - Kate Bingham

This was a bonus.
Having been suitably impressed with the Kate Bingham poem in the Forward anthology, I ordered her two books of poems from Amazon New & Used.
And this one turned out to be signed.

Signed Poetry Books - Don Paterson

Don Paterson has been a target for my collection of signed poetry books for a little while now and so it was good to land this signature, along with his love, apparently, on a very successful raid on Cheltenham.