Mending Wall

Several years ago now I took some pictures in Portsmouth's Kingston Cemetery, put one here with reference to Eliot's line, I had not thought death had undone so many, and undertook to continue with a series of such photographs that brought to mind famous poems.
It didn't come to anything until yesterday when I thought I'd apply a coat of wood preserver in the hopes of making the the garden fence last a while longer. It does at least look the better for it.
But while I was at it my neighbour came out and we exchanged a few cordial words which reminded me of Robert Frost,
Good fences make good neighbors.

Coming soon, some high windows. I have some in mind from where I'll be on Thursday.

Gary Desmond in Portsmouth

Lunchtime Live ! Gary Desmond, organ, Portsmouth Cathedral, Sept 21st.

The reason for taking time off in September is to avoid the height of summer and the possibility of a heatwave. But last year September ambushed me with an alarrming late hot spell so this year I delayed it to late September, when I really should be back at school, in the hope of side=stepping any repeat of that and to align with the choicest lunchtime concerts.
The sea was agitated as I took my late morning constitutional towards Old Portsmouth and rather more autumnal than the anticipated calm of summer in retreat before the onset of winter but it makes for lively company. And what better to welcome you to the cathedral than Gary Desmond, from Bath Abbey's, programme that begins with Buxtehude.
Three hundred and ten years since the maestro departed this life in favour of that Luheran heaven, he's still on the bill. The Praeludium in C (Bux WV 137) announces itself in grand gestures and tootles along in a jolly way in between. Thomas Arne's Gavotte was a more becoming jaunt, modest, sensible and attractive, and then Denis Bédard's Variations on the Old One Hundreth began big before the imperious congregational was wrapped up in a variety of disguises.
Frank Bridge's Adagio in E gradually crept up on one, achieving impressive grandeur before drifting off, apparently sated. Percy Grainger's Handel on the Strand, arranged by Peter King, used a subdued dampening effect in what I assume was the left hand in a lollipop that was followed by the highlight, the beguiling, consolatory And the peace may be exchanged  by Dan Locklair which my rudimentary research tells me was played at the funeral of Ronald Reagan. I bet nobody thought they'd miss him as much as we do now.
Alexandre Guilmant's Choral et Fugue from Sonata no. 5 was suitably hymnal and opened out into an entirely expected rousing and elaborate finish to send the Lunchtime Live faithful back out fortified into what had become gorgeous, doleful, street-emptying drizzle so that I could undertake some shopping in Southsea in peace.
Such days make retirement seem very inviting indeed but one must be cautious of the fact that not every day will be like that.

Door

In the Dick Francis thriller Flying Finish, the hero goes through all the usual trials and tribulations at the hands of hoodlums and gangsters before miraculously arriving intact with his star horse at Cheltenham in March for the Champion Hurdle. It's a gripping race, it's all action until, jumping the last upsides, they charge up the hill and are just beaten on the line, undermining expectations of a happy ending. And, it says, That's racing.
Well, it's poetry, too. In the equally glamorous world of local poetry, it's all to play for in Portsmouth Poetry Society's annual competition. This year the prescibed theme was 'Door'. It took me a couple of weeks to come up with anything to write. I thought I really ought to take part, to be sociable, but didn't want to put in anything too sub-standard. Eventually, once the idea came, the poem followed easily. I thought it stood a chance, bearing in mind that one doesn't know what the judge will like and the standard of the opposition is good.
But my runner was tight, fit to race, accessible and did the things that poems are usually expected to do.The judge did a marvellous job, her comments detailed, showing that she'd given everything due consideration and also said that in a close decision, my poem had been placed second.
So, what can you do. Congratulations to everybody on some fine poems. And small consolation that I don't have responsibility for the cup for the next twelve months.

Door

Time was I’d look behind a door

To investigate what was there

On the off-chance of adventure.

Intrepid, then, I didn’t care.

Later if I saw one ajar

I’d glance through the inviting gap

And weigh up what the chances were

Of opportunity, or trap.

But now I’m glad to leave it closed

For fear of what there is to find.

My attitude’s metamorphosed.

I’m not prepared to gamble blind.

 

Continuum at Chichester

Continuum, Chichester Cathedrral, Sept 19th

Continuum, in an ever-changing programme of groupings, offered two rarely heard composers alongside Bach, Handel and Corelli in a generous lunchtime helping of sonatas.
Michel Blavet (1700-1768) was a new name to me with his delicate, airy flute music and then Sebastian Comberti impressed on the cello, with a particularly smooth cantabile Adagio in his Op. 1, No.1, by Stephen Paxton (1734-1787) which was available on CD and had to be snapped up.
The group returned to a three-piece for Corelli's La Follia for recorder, cello and harpsichord, Elizabeth Walker nimble and dextrous in her fingering on the unforgiving instrument and finishing with a flourish.
Bach's erudite meanderings in the French Suite no.4 were delivered by Michael Overbury with its all-too-brief pizzicato section gorgeous on the instrument.
Morven Brown then joined to make a four-piece for Handel's Sonata in G minor with some fine interplay between two flutes for which a front row seat was a great advantage.
Continuum maintain the high standards of Chichester's lunchtime concerts which are always a pleasure and worth the trip and now I am grateful for three other Stephen Paxton works for cello to take further. One is happy to still be learning something new every day.

Fretwork at the Wigmore

Fretwork, The Art of Fugue, Wigmore Hall, Sept 18th.

It's the place we like as much as the music. It's me who decides what the best option is on the dates available and if the Art of Fugue is not the most inviting thing Bach ever wrote, at least it's Bach. One instinctively knows that the Wigmore Hall is right, there's almost nowhere else one would rather be and they don't let you in if you don't know your Pergolesi from your Buxtehude.
Fretwork founder, Richard Boothby, has completed The Art of Fugue which Bach left apparently unfinished, maybe as an exercise for others to finish, maybe in a post-modern way before the fact but it does now seem unlikely that he had just re-introduced the B-A-C-H theme and then died. Richard's study only sees fit to add no more than two minutes.
One knows what one's in for from the start with four parts introducing themselves one after the other with the main theme that is going to become very familar during the next hour. It is an exercise but an epic and labyrynthine one - reggae would call it a version excursion - the variations not mixing it up the way that Brahms on a theme of Handel or Beethoven's Diabelli do. It is academic stuff but benefits greatly from the five-part viol ensemble arrangement compared to the organ disc that I don't always see through to the end. Fretwork's tone is a pleasure in itself and seeing it played adds considerably to merely hearing it. Contrapunctus IX comes eventually to liven it up after the rich melancholy of eight mostly decorous and leisurely movements as if J.S. came back to it from arranging some Vivaldi- but, no, that is not a serious scholarly suggestion.
But it is an intricately woven canvas to explore like a maze Goldberg variations or the high point of such extended exercises, The Well-Tempered Klavier. And thank you kindly, the Wigmore and the BBC, for the bargain it is to sit in such a seat, over to the side but well upfront and right behind Ian Skelly (deputising for the indisposed Sara Mohr-Pietsch) as he addresses the choicest of radio audiences, where it would cost twice as much to sit in the evening to listen to, say, Andras Schiff.
rather then the more expansive
We aren't going to forget what B-A-C-H sounds like in a hurry but I doubt if any performance of it would make it more profound, and palatable, than Fretwork and, as Ian's notes said as I read them over his shoulder, he guaranteed that you won't have heard that music (that last couple of minutes) before. As such, Richard Boothby is to Bach what Mike Yarwood was to Denis Healey, saying things he never said but saying them just like he would have done if he had. Whether that was a more historic moment than an Electric Warrior t-shirt being worn in the Wigmore Hall is a point that might remain moot for some time. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

The trouble with so many modern composers is that they insist on being themselves.
A young Malcolm Sargent circa 1920.
Many of us would do well to remember that it's poetry/music/art that any potential audeience is interested in, not us and yet so many think they need to 'express themselves'. It has been encouraged in poetry for years now in the phrase 'finding one's voice'. As if yet another unique voice is going to be interesting.
The sameness of style among Elizabethan sonneteers did them no harm and it is, of course, a Romantic problem, more than 200 years old now, in which art became a vehicle for personal feelings. James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and, more lately, Thom Gunn were keen to be impersonal and one can but hope that their example, objectifying, standing outside of themselves, will reclaim more ground.
--
That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with innovation or idiosyncracy but it does often mean some respect for tradition. Many thanks to BBC 4, Sky Arts, Johnnie Walker and Dotun Adebayo for their Marc Bolan features this weekend. Absolutely rightly, Dotun's listeners on Up All Night made Get It On their choice, a casting vote giving the decision over 20th Century Boy. From Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and through Bob Dylan, Bolan knew his heritage and, in their turn, Oasis carried on purloining riffs.
There have been some moving moments over the last couple of days, the records still sounding astonishing whereas, as it has been pointed out, it's the music and tastes of some of those who descried his pop and glam that now sound dated.
--
Johnnie's first half hour of 70's records, with Roxy Music, Al Green, the Faces and Telegram Sam and Children of the Revolution reminded me what it's all about, amongst other things, rather than rating my well-being on two indices, those of the plus or minus balance on the horse racing year and my rating at Chess24.
Although still comfortably ahead on the racing, the plus is not what it was and I've slid abjectly from an unreal high of 1917 at chess and am now struggling to regain 1700.
But it really doesn't matter at all,
No, it really doesn't matter at all,
Life's a Gas.

 

Douglas Dunn - The Noise of a Fly

Douglas Dunn, The Noise of a Fly (Faber)

Dunn takes Donne as his text, a sermon in which he neglects God and his angels for the noise of a fly and sets the tone for some self-disparaging, eye for detail and honouring of literary forebears.
Sixteen years after his last collection of poems, Douglas Dunn is very recognizably the same poet and, if that much older, his cussedness and accompanying tenderness are undimmed.
Subsequent generations of poets have arrived but that's no reason for him to accommodate their poetry but he takes no offence at the young, only a sanguine complaint against himself. He is a second generation Movement poet, if something reluctant to concede that it ever had a first can have a second. He counts syllables diligently, mixes lyricism with irony, followed in Larkin's wake and is admirable in his observance of much of the 1950's aesthetic.
'Wondrous Strange' takes up the Donne idea of minutiae with,
Now it can almost be heard. But not quite
Almost. Still on the far side of nearly,

which echoes Larkin's 'almost instinct almost true'. And Thursday revisits Toads Revisited,
But I've a problem. It's called 'work ethic', so
I'll slog on with the daily, dreary toil.

Not that he thinks it's worthwhile. As 'the model of a modern academic', he's 'absoultely super at ennui'. If younger poets are prone, or even encouraged, to play up their talents, Dunn prefers to play down his own prodigious gift under a blanket of unforced modesty.
He is a fine visual poet with his 'runic birdprints tracked in frozen snow' and 'spring's predictable daffodils/Bugling yellow silences' and it is his garden that he takes most pleasure in these days, like Michael Longley celebrating home and place. But on later pages, his eyesight is a concern, having made a case for use of all the senses in poetry, in poems about Braille and a monocle.
In Self-Portraits he conflates those of Rembrandt into one of his own. It's a meditation on art and self and not the only poem in the book to read like a manifesto in places. But the longer poems have taken the energetic discursiveness of Dante's Drum-kit and started to ramble a little bit, as Auden is charged with doing in later life. Not in a dull way but not as sharply focussed as earlier poems were.
It was in Dunn that I first recognized the list, which now seems a way of avoiding convoluted syntax. A list of more than three items might offer a choice of things to rhyme on at line-endings if one juggles their order but after more than two or three instances it begins to look like a habit. It can suggest abundance or variety but if overdone it is less than fine poetry, as are a few of his prosaic phrases.
None of which detracts from the number of poems which belong among Dunn's finest. The Nothing-But seeks out the priceless truth from a choice of irritants,
To have kissed the lips of one who was dying
Is to have tasted silence, salt , and wilderness

and it is the 'wilderness' there, 'the desert where there is no lying' where he finds a transcendence equal to anything in his own poetry or that of his generation.
Moments such as that are more impressive coming from one who is so determinedly unimpressed, especially not impressed by himself, and worth more than a bookful of such thoughts from a poet forever striving for them. Dunn is unflinchingly honest and genuine and has no trace of bitterness, only the uplifting generosity of one who finds and celebrates wonder and beauty even if it seems sometimes against the odds. He has continued what seemed like an English tradition - from Hardy, through Edward Thomas, to Larkin - and done it in a devoutly, insistently Scottish way, never apparently too far from his dram and whisky is the rich, deeply-appreciated, characterful drink that his poetry has as its equivalent.