Eloisa-Fleur Thom

Ciaconna, Eloisa-Fleur Thom (violin), Handel House Museum, Thurs 15th May 2014

With seating capacity of 28, the rehearsal room in Handel's House is about as intimate as a concert venue can be and ideal, if unusual, for solo and small ensemble recitals. I returned there after a few years' absence to take up the opportunity of hearing Biber's Passacaglia, not knowing how many chances I will ever get.
Eloisa-Fleur Thom began with it in this brief summary of the development of baroque solo violin, it is a majesterial piece, of course, and was delivered with nimble left hand fingering and great assurance. The Westhoff Suite no. 5, remarkable for its stylings in the opening Allemande, is something to be investigated immediately, with how ever many others there are of them, but the programme stepped up a notch or two for the Bach Partita no. 2, played (it seemed to me) with more verve and confidence suggesting either greater familiarity with the piece or possibly having to rise to the challenge of Bach. It built to the torrential Chaconne that is one of many places where Bach is shown to be nothing like a mere mathematical perfectionist but a vehicle for tremendous passion, leaving one blinding passage only to launch fluidly into the next. It can be exhilarating, should be and was and I for my part will always take the soloist against the world rather than the combined, shared responsibility of an orchestra.
I hope Eloisa-Fleur Thom has a great future and it is unlikely that she wouldn't have. And, as you can see, with so little competition from the rest of the audience for her attention, I was able to add her to my recent collection of signed programmes.
And then I found my way to Ealing and the best value accommodation in London. You take the wine but drink most of it yourself, are given the most considerate hospitality and leave with two complimentary books expertly chosen by your host with that special personal attention to detail, an autobiography by the posh spiv, racing correspondent, Julian Wilson, and a book of fine academic introductions to 50 Classical Authors.
It would be unreasonable to ask for more.   

Maggie, I think I got something to say to you

Congratulations to Portsmouth poet, Maggie Sawkins, on winning the Ted Hughes Award 2014 for her Zones of Avoidance, http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/tedhughes/

I'm glad to say that Portsmouth Poetry Society invited her to read as a friend at the reading we have planned for National Poetry Day, Oct 2nd, before this success and that she agreed. I only hope now that she will still be available and it is still on the originally agreed terms ( ! ).

So please put the date in your diary when PPS will be launching the new edition of Calliope, because now it is officially an even better event than it was going to be.

Well played, Portsmouth. You see, there really is something going on down here.

Jesus to a Child

She gave me so much. One thing that she gave me, probably not knowing how much it meant to me even then, was a disc of George Michael's Jesus to a Child. It was always a treasure.

Thanks for everything, Ingrid. You were a class act. You were tremendous.

Jesus To A Child

Kindness in your eyes
I guess you heard me cry
You smiled at me
Like Jesus to a child
I'm blessed I know
Heaven sent and heaven stole
You smiled at me like
Jesus to a child
And what have I learned
From all this pain
I thought I'd never feel the same
About anyone or anything again
But now I know

When you find a love
When you know that it exists
Then the lover that you miss
Will come to you on those cold, cold nights
When you've been loved
When you know it holds such bliss
Then the lover that you kissed
Will comfort you when there's no hope in sight

Sadness in my eyes
No one guessed, well no one tried
You smiled at me
Like Jesus to a child
Loveless and cold
With your last breath you saved my soul
You smiled at me
Like Jesus to a child
And what have I learned
From all these tears
I've waited for you all those years
Then just when it began
He took your love away
But I still say

[Repeat chorus]

So the words you could not say
I'll sing them for you
And the love we would have made
I'll make it for two
For every single memory
Has become a part of me

You will always be...my love

Well I've been loved
So I know just what love is
And the lover that I kissed is always by my side
Oh the lover I still miss...was Jesus to a child.

Cygnus

Cygnus 

i.m. I.K. 

One night I had explained to you the stars

of Cygnus the Swan, framed by a window

above where we lay. That’s Deneb, fifteen

hundred light years away.

 

And now I hear that you are gone further,

much further than that. Much further away

than where I thought you were now in London.

I am the more alone without you there.

Calliope, new poems from Portsmouth

It is intended that Portsmouth Poetry Society produce a booklet of new poems later this year. Work is underway to the extent that I have the first draft of the cover ready already and here it is.
A reading is planned on National Poetry Day, October 2nd, with PPS & Friends. More details later. I wouldn't want you to miss it.

Bank Holiday Special - Top 100 Poets

Top Favourite Poets of mine, quite obviously once you take a look.

They are the first 100 names I thought of and then the first 45 have been put in some sort of order and then the rest is in no particular order. I'm sure I have forgotten some quite important names but they can't be that important, or candidates for the Top 20 if I still hadn't thought of them once I'd put in Dante, who I have only read in the O'Brien version, for example. It started to become difficult. You don't know how hard it can be.
It just goes to show how futile list making can be but it was interesting for a while.

Thom Gunn

Philip Larkin

John Donne

W. H. Auden

William Shakespeare

Ovid

T.S. Eliot

Sylvia Plath

Sean O'Brien

Thomas Hardy

Seamus Heaney

Andrew Marvell

August Kleinzahler

Edward Thomas

Tony Harrison

John Keats

Fulke Greville

e.e. cummings

Thomas Wyatt

Geoffrey Chaucer

Paul Muldoon

Julia Copus

Elizabeth Bishop

Derek Mahon

Anon Wulf and Eadwacer

Ted Hughes

Horace

W.B. Yeats

Alfred Tennyson

Louis MacNeice

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Martin Mooney

David Harsent

Carol Ann Duffy

Andrew Motion

Alun Lewis

Roddy Lumsden

John Betjeman

Don Paterson

Catullus

Michael Daugherty

Douglas Dunn

Charles Baudelaire

Tibullus

John Burnside - Matthew Arnold Timothy Steele Wislawa Symborska Mina Loy Percy Shelley Adrienne Rich Glyn Maxwell Paul Durcan Christopher Marlowe Philip Sidney Richard Wilbur Kathleen Jamie Petrarch Dante Aligheri Craig Raine Stuart A. Paterson  Wilfred Owen Simon Armitage Colette Bryce John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester Juvenal James Fenton Michael Symmons Roberts Michael Donaghy Ian Duhig Robert Lowell Dylan Thomas R.S. Thomas A.E. Housman George Szirtes Ruth Padel John Cooper-Clarke Donald Davie Alexander Pope John Milton Ben Jonson Kathryn Simmonds Geoffrey Hill Marianne Moore William Wordsworth Francois Villon Ivor Gurney Stevie Smith Tom Paulin Sue Hubbard William Langland George Herbert Robert Frost Yevgeny Yevtushenko Wendy Cope Sinead Morrissey Weldon Kees Michael Longley Michael Drayton John Clare

From The Way We Live Now

The man's speculations had been so great and so wide that he did not really now what he owned, or what he owed.
Antyhony Trollope, 1875.