View from the Boundary

Like a Mastermind question master, once I'd started a book, I always used to finish it. Nearly every time. Not in the case of My Childhood by Maxim Gorky that we were given to read at school and not, much later, when I abandoned Proust after about 1300 pages. But mostly I wasn't a quitter.
But I'm afraid I am now, increasingly. I packed in Martin Amis a few months ago as regular readers will remember, I didn't finish Edward Thomas's novel The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans a few years ago and the list is steadily getting longer. Sometimes they're simply no good, or too hard work or I realize that now it's up to me, it's just for my entertainment. There's no course to pass, nothing I really have to know. And so why labour with a book you're not enjoying.
I was really enjoying A.L. Kennedy's The Blue Book, an enterprising and almost ground-breaking fiction writer, especially one sunny Saturday afternoon when I spent a couple of hours with it in the garden. I had made half a page of notes on it towards a review that was going to say, I thought, what a great writer she is. But I came back from a weekend of high excitement somewhere, returned to it and found that I had, literally, lost the plot. I'm sorry, Alison, I think of myself as an admirer, but once that happens, it's too hard to carry on. Maybe next time.
But here are a couple of notes I made,
p. 86, ocean's great grey thought
an essay on contingency and need
p.156, eyes full of sea and want
streams of associative.....

But, if nothing else, I'll make a note to myself to stop using 'contingent' for a while. It's a tremendous word and it sounds great but ever since first coming across it in studying Sartre, I've been well aware that I don't really know what it means.

Elsewhere, as we approach the 'review of the year' season, I can name only one pop music record that came out this year. And it came out this week, I think. Cliff Richard and Freda Payne, Saving a Life. It's introduced here by that renowned musicologist and novelist, Alan Titchmarsh http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXuetVC1Qv8&feature=related&noredirect=1 .
It's so easy to pick fault with Cliff that I choose not to, and I do genuinely like this record. For sure, it will drive me insane the next time I hear a pop song in which the singer claims to be 'driven insane'. But I'm sure I've written lyrics like that more than once. Heaven knows what Cliff is wearing, my sister wouldn't risk her great reputation as shirt buyer to me with a chancey outfit like that. And Cliff, duetting on his latest album with legends like Freda, Candi Staton, The Temptations, Roberta Flack and Percy Sledge, risks being the second best voice on every track. But Candi Staton's a wonderful singer and you'd never turn her down. Previews of the album suggest it's more MOTR than the 'soul' of the title, though. The phrase 'return to form' needs to be outlawed, only suggesting that the artist in question has been terrible recently but this isn't one, it's just Cliff providing the only pop record I could actually name from 2011. But it's one I will remember.
But, returning to performance, if not to 'form', it was an enjoyable gig (did I really say 'gig') on National Poetry Day in Southsea last week. An audience of 17 with one or two more that came or went is not to be derided when one considers the readings in The Poetry Bookshop, related in the recent Edward Thomas biography, at which Rupert Brooke and W.B.Yeats read to small groups. But you'll have to catch me when you can. I'm not thinking of making a habit of it or trolling round the festival circuit. I'll leave that to Harsent, O'Brien and Muldoon, who I hope all turn up and give us the reading of their lives in Cheltenham on Friday. Professional poetry. It must be the hardest game in the world. Or not.

Sasha Dugdale - Red House

Sasha Dugdale, Red House (Carcanet)

I'm not going to hazard a guess at the significance or symbolism of the red house in the title of this collection. It is a series of seven poems in the book and quick internet research suggests it is taken from a painting of 1932 by Kazimir Malevich. In the poems, a variety of vulnerable or dispossessed humanity and animals come and go, there are lines of rare music, like the vowel sounds in,

And the nestlings peep and pip at intervals, heard in rooms throughout

By the day-sick and the unfit for work

and one is aware of elsewheres whether spiritual, emotional or of geographical belonging.

I like poets who can do different things equally well, like Thom Gunn's ability to move between strict metre, syllabics and free verse. If Red House is not easy poetry, it is worth the effort, whereas in the same book, a poem like Prince's, nostalgic for a bygone way of life with the closing of a landmark shop, could hardly be more straightforward and yet is no less satisfying.

In Out of Town, a poem redolent of the waste land of Sean O'Brien and David Harsent's books this year, a derelict world is haunted by spirits, or are we them already, 'where no-man's-land might be an honest place.'

Beauty comes out of dross and horror can lie beneath beauty. In Dawn Chorus,

How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smouldering coal

Their throats singed and swollen with song

In dissonance as befits the dark world

Where only travellers and the sleepless belong

There is plenty more to like and admire. Shepherds, 'Perhaps Akhmatova was right', as well as poems responding to Keats, Auden and others. It is warmer and less desolate than other books this year that have inhabited similar territory and one could have done with more of it. I had thought that my shortlists for this year's best collections and poems were just about settled but I am reminded that it is only October and it isn't over until this gifted lady has sung.

Portsmouth Poetry Society on National Poetry Day

National Poetry Day with Portsmouth Poetry Society in Southsea Library.

And ole red eyes is back, doo-be-doo-be-doo, putting in a performance that would surely be the definition of cool except, please could someone remind me in future not to write poems with the word 'extinguishing' in them, or, if I do, then don't try to read them in public. Never mind. I got over that fence at the third attempt.

Team photo. Back row, left to right, David Green, Pauline Hawkesworth, Denise Bennett. Front row, Cliff Yates, Doris Bealing, Margaret Banks.

Thanks to Dave Moxham for taking these pictures.

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape)

Tony Webster, the character through which Julian Barnes tells this story isn't really to blame and he's not really the 'unreliable narrator' of so much contemporary fiction either. Something that he has forgotten he ever said comes to be horribly prophetic and we share in his awkward state of not knowing until he finds out how the past has unravelled behind him.

Whereas in Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach the discomfiture comes early and gradually recedes into a wide angle ending in which the difficulties have diminished with time, in The Sense of an Ending it has been kept out of our sight until the gaucheness of the climax.

It is an elegant composition, compact but beautifully expressed. It gives the effect of being much longer than its novella length. It might seem a little unfair on Alan Hollinghurst whose equally well-written novel this year was spread over 500 pages and was dropped from the Booker Prize running at the longlist stage while Barnes is now red hot at 6/4 favourite but that's the way it goes. Perhaps Giles Coren, writing in The Times, will prove top Booker tipster again this year and be glad to be proved wrong that Barnes isn't too good to win it.

That his first girlfriend, Veronica, might not be the 'fruitcake' he took her for might not be Webster's fault but his experience as her ingenue suitor is profoundly observed with its assumptions, naivetes and ironic little episodes. After their relationship ends,

The next day, I took a milk jug she'd given me down to the Oxfam Shop. I hoped she'd see it in the window. But when I stopped to check, there was something else on show instead: a small coloured lithograph of Chislehurst I'd given her for Christmas.

Alongside the even shorter stories of Pulse earlier this year, Barnes provides evidence enough here to suggest he's at the top of his game and among the league leaders of current British fiction. This is a consummately well-made book that only needs to be longer in order to prolong the enjoyment of it.

The Best British Poetry 2011

The Best British Poetry 2011, edited by Roddy Lumsden (Salt)

You don't expect to find the most startling line of a poetry anthology in the introduction but here Roddy Lumsden advises us that,

around a quarter of the poets here are under 30, representing a coming generation that I believe to be the strongest ever in UK poetry

It's a lavish claim, not one that can be verified for a while yet and not one that all of us will necessarily be around long enough to see proven or otherwise. But, who can say. Maybe we are on the brink of the finest Golden Age that will outshine, say, the 1590's, 1820's or 1910's (and, please, add your own choice of generation in here, too).

This title has been welcomed as the overdue equivalent to a similar, long-established American one. Whether Britain needs everything that America has just because they have it is another thing one might wonder about. We got the credit crisis from them as well as gangsta rap. And, as Roddy readily anticipates, there are inevitable problems with proclaiming the 'best' and we shouldn't take that title too seriously. Whereas The Forward anthology picks out highlights from new books as well as magazines, this book is like an uber-magazine, not much more expensive that an issue of any one of them but selected from a wide range of them so someone like me who no longer has subscriptions to any can have a look at some recommended poems.

One never expects to like a very high percentage of poems in a magazine and so it's to this books credit that it contains a satisfactory quotient of things one is glad to have seen. While one can be confident that Ian Duhig and Sasha Dugdale are going to be worth having, I was pleasantly surprised by Deryn Rees-Jones and, a new name to me, Lizzi Thistlethwayte. Every poet has a biographical note that contains their own comments on their featured poem. These divide broadly equally, it seems, between those who appear to have had a very clear idea of exactly what their poem was going to do and those who only found out during its making or are perhaps not even quite sure yet.

For me the mystery goes on surrounding the industry darling, Ahren Warner, whose meta-narratives refer us through, here, a Baudelairean transaction within comparative linguistic approaches. It is clearly me that is the loser in having not the faintest idea of what it means or why it's so admired and my main regret is that I won't be anywhere in the vicinity when the time comes to register whether such poems take their place in the long and glorious history of poetry in English or are making their way sublimely into a cul-de-sac.

As so often, anthologies are unsatisfactory in being able to allow so few examples of each individual's work- and here it is only one each. The composite impression of poetry in 2011 is unfulfilling and half a dozen poems by much fewer poets would make a better book, with more chance of appreciating the talents that are in it, although would not meet Roddy's purpose. Which is why I think roughly the same amount of money spent on Sasha Dugdale's collection was the better spent.

I'm well aware that it is entirely my fault that far too much of this book passes me by but at least I tried, fed money into the machine, and I keep on trying while realizing that for me the real thrills of poetry are elsewhere.

Patrick Hamilton - Twopence Coloured

Patrick Hamilton, Twopence Coloured (Faber Finds)

Patrick Hamilton was 24 when his third novel, Twopence Coloured, was published. After too long out of print, the Faber Finds series has given us the chance of comparing and contrasting with Hamilton's later, better known work.

The story follows the career of Jackie Mortimer, an actress of particularly good looks and some ambition, through a series of episodes that provide a vehicle for portraits and satires on the theatre in London and the provinces.

Theatre producers are seedy, middle-aged men with cigars, the acting profession is tawdry, threadbare and takes place in a twilight world behind the garish glamour of lights and curtains. Thus, one might think that Hamilton at this stage was a somewhat one-dimensional writer of character, his plot predictable and nothing is likely to surprise.

That isn't the case as the final chapters do take an unexpected turn and the ending is certainly not what I expected. Early Hamilton lacks the sinister, exploitative edge of the West Pier trilogy or Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky. While there are glimpses of the gin-stained heartlessness and cynical manipulation of his major books, which comes to the final disintegration of style and morality in Unknown Assailant, this is more straight-forward and relatively innocent account of London theatreland. In fact, one might be taken aback by what a sensible girl Jackie is and how little grief befalls her.

The world of matiness and stage doors is understood all too well by Hamilton's keen eye,

The plots of these melodramas....dealing as they did, exclusively and traditionally with infamously monocled scoundrels, pathetically credulous young women, oily-mannered (but black-hearted) solicitors, young men vaguely on His Majesty's Service (but with plenty of time for white flannels, father-defying, and yachting caps)....

and he is already brilliant at putting a character's sincere feelings in contrast to the superficial world they inhabit,

And it caused her to recall, in a sad mist, the very great beauty of their little time together. And it struck her that her spirit had been alive and poignant then, and that it was dead and beautiless now, and that this ornate chattering and idle gossiping around her, this foolish orchestra and foolish play, this tawdry, stuffy, smoke-ridden foyer- were irrelevant and very paltry phenomena to one whose spirit had once been alive.

Twopence Coloured is not an early curio of a writer who went on to become greater but one of his several books, worthy of attention in its own right, at a stage in the trajectory of his career when the balance in his world view had not yet tilted towards a crueller and meaner interpretation of human nature.

Top 6 - R.E.M.

The shortlist for Top 6 R.E.M. went to a dozen very quickly so it was never going to be an easy process.

One item that was never going to get left out is Losing My Religion, a long-standing classic and favourite that has only its familiarity to count against it. Apparently a hymn to some kind of existential angst, one is often not quite sure what Michael's writing about but one appreciates his oblique 'poetry' and takes the rest on trust.

One suggestion I received having solicited them was Find the River and since it was high on the shortlist, it goes in with its sense of longing and nostalgia. That is a recurrent theme, one soon finds if one didn't realize already, but the tour de force The Great Beyond, which seems to find Stipe on top form describing what it feels like to be on top form provides a great counterbalance to regret and doubt,
I'm pushing an elephant up the stairs
I'm tossing up punch lines that were never there
Over my shoulder a piano falls
Crashing to the ground

I'm breaking through
I'm bending spoons
I'm keeping flowers in full bloom
I'm looking for answers from the great beyond.

And then I have to add in Leaving New York, which was a very emotional piece on first hearing, on an otherwise lack lustre album, before I even realized it was about 9/11,
You might have laughed if I told you (it's pulling me apart)
You might have hidden a frown (change)
You might have succeeded in changing me (it's pulling me apart)
I might have been turned around (change)

It's easier to leave than to be left behind (it's pulling me apart)
Leaving was never my proud (change)
Leaving New York, never easy (it's pulling me apart)
I saw the light fading out
You find it in your heart, it's pulling me apart
You find it in your heart, change...

All of which leaves us already with only two selections left and a lenghty list to pick from. There's not going to be room for a novelty no. 6 here.

I've got to have So. Central Rain with its contained melancholy becoming a thundering cry of desperation and so it is a vast problem to be left with only one choice. There will be many whose precious personal favourite isn't mentioned here but those are the rules, you can only mention six.

I've very reluctantly admitted it's not this, it's not that, so it's between these. I'm going to go with The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite but it would be no problem to furnish another six without any need to start compromising.

Well done, R.E.M., and thanks for having been there for so long.