The Magnetic Fields - You Must be Out of Your Mind

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCAVTapPOm0

Some people's idea of the greatest pop concerts might be of a vast stadium with thousand upon thousand of fans waving flags and singing along, or of ageing long-haired guitar heroes (who might be necessarily a bit shorter-haired by now) making some immense racket through piled-up speakers and amps and the suspicion that class A drugs were involved.

O, no, not me. Stephin has a cup of tea in the first half, at least. And it's much more like a chamber concert. You Must be Out of Your Mind is almost a composite Merritt song, as if he isn't exactly stretching his talent any more. But it will do just fine. As long as our seats at The Barbican don't have other people's heads getting in the way as much as this.

My Cultural Life

I'm in The Observer today, the review section having begun a feature called My Cultural Life. One doesn't mind them editing it but it would be better if they didn't make it mean the opposite of what I'd said. The misunderstanding occurs when they think Danny Baker's show is a football phone-in, but never mind. You can't believe anything you read in the papers. What I sent in was this,

My Cultural Life

I keep Radio 5 on most of the time at home but have developed the quick reactions needed to switch over to Radio 3 when a football phone-in starts. Danny Baker is back to his glorious best on Saturday mornings while Radio 3 often succeeds if you don’t check what’s on and let it surprise you.
I’ve been reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson after hearing so much about it. After a slow start it has picked up very well and is starting to live up to its reputation. But I don’t read very much fiction these days. I’ve been looking at The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara to decide once and for all if his casual vernacular deserves to be treated as important poetry. I’m still not sure but it is a likeable book. On order is Identity Parade, a forthcoming anthology of British and Irish poets that have emerged since the mid-1990’s edited by Roddy Lumsden. Poets are looking younger these days, like policemen have been doing for a long time, and it will be interesting to see what they are up to.
Also on order is Thomas Ades’ CD, Violin Concerto & Tevot. Some reviews virtually demand you buy certain items although one needs to read between the lines a bit to decide if the reviewer is on your wavelength. CD’s suddenly seem so old-fashioned and I can’t remember when I last went into a shop for one but one-click buying is alarmingly easy to do. The Magnetic Fields’ Realism was another potent mixture of dark humour and gorgeous romanticism. It is unlikely that the achievement of 69 Love Songs will be repeated but they are my favourite pop act by a distance and we are looking forward to seeing them again, at the Barbican next month.

Flat Earth

Flat Earth

Aristotle knew the earth wasn’t flat.
Ships don’t drop off the edge but slide from view
as gradually as new stars appear
as one travels south. And, not only that,
the summer solstice sun cast no shadow
at Syene, though Alexandria

had shade at the same time. The earth is curved,
as Eratosthenes could demonstrate
and did. Who also knew Egypt was hot
before the invention of temperature,
Farenheit, Celsius or centigrade.
And here is further proof that it is not:

It had to be like that – for space and time
demand that they turn back on themselves,
thus neither earth or universe are flat
when you set off in search of wealth or fame,
so young, promiscuous and vain, or else
you wouldn’t meet yourself on the way back.

Thomas Ades

Ades, Tevot, Violin Concerto, Berlin Philharmonic/Rattle et al (EMI)

British music has been in good form in the last decade or two. John Tavener is now the old guard, his Protecting Veil a masterpiece and popular success; James Macmillan now middle-aged, whose Veni, Veni Emmanuel is a regular concert item and Seven Last Words from the Cross a sublime personal favourite of mine and so, how time flies, Thomas Ades (b.1971) is the big noise although it might seem that he's been around for some years, because he has.

Tevot is a big noise, too. The notes usefully explain that,

'Tevot' is a Hebrew word that connotes both musical bars and Biblical 'arks', Noah's miraculous vessel and the Ark of the Covenant. And Ades is quoted as saying that the earth is an ark carrying us through the chaos of space in safety.

I think I remember Lieutenant Pigeon using a similar metaphor to enlighten us on the conceptual complexity of Mouldy Old Dough. But, even so, one does wonder if Ades' meaning isn't alarmingly optimistic. After the obligatory soft and loud, one hears lush passages of strings and restful horns, trumpets more remote suggesting endless space but what I mainly hear is a film soundtrack to a story about a spaceship but nothing particularly profound.

The Violin Concerto 'Concentric Paths', soloist Anthony Marwood with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, is more successful, the notes referring us to Ariel, shimmering and then darker. But jumpy outbursts of sound do not automatically make a piece dramatic. When one hears such interjections in every other contemporary concert on Radio 3, they become a default compositional device and not very shocking at all. There is no doubting Marwood's virtuoso playing, though, and it has periods of fine music and concentrated playing. The notes tell us that 'the exhausted soloist (is) reduced to noise making at the bottom of the violin's register' but, here, for once, if that is so, I'd prefer it to be more so and, if he's that exhausted, how come he has enough energy to give us the final movement of over 5 minutes.

Three Studies from Couperin give us some hope or expectation of some more satisfying baroque orderliness and the pastiche captures the necessary mood accurately but these pieces aren't the reason for the CD, and the little fillers at the end aren't supposed to be a disc's highlights. Nicely done but not essential when we could listen to Couperin himself whenever we choose.

Overture, Waltz and Finale from the opera Powder Her Face are sassy, showy and theatrical but by this time I'm wondering whether I care, I'm afraid.

So, with apologies. If sometimes, some items didn't disappoint just a little bit then it would be less of a thrill when other things give us that rare feeling that goes down your back and makes you feel more alive than what you thought you were.

This isn't it, for me, and if Thomas Ades is the leading light of his generation then I am grateful for the music that the composers of my own age and the generation before them provided. It might be asked why anybody would take the time to review something that they don't particularly like but also refuse to demolish. I think it's to show that there is an in-between area and that one just can't enthuse about everything. What would be the point of that.

Lachlan MacKinnon - Small Hours

Lachlan MacKinnon, Small Hours (Faber)

Wendy Cope has a well known poem about men being like buses. You wait ages for one then three turn up at once. Well, it would appear that the one she chose to get on was Lachlan MacKinnon because for those who didn't know, like I didn't until recently, they are now married.

Mackinnon is a fine, quiet and thoughtful poet. Much of this latest book is taken up with elegies for friends, and most of it, in fact, by The Book of Emma, an extended biographical work mostly in prose in memory of a friend, Emma Smith, who was a contemporary at Oxford. I'm not sure if that makes it a prose poem and would rather not know. Anybody who knows what a prose poem is probably has too much time on their hands. But like the poems, it is economically written, in short sentences but builds into both a fragmentary personal memoir, shifting in time, and a devoted tribute.

Emma wasn't a girlfriend as such but greatly admired in a way that perhaps goes beyond such a relationship. What MacKinnon can do, and does elsewhere, is suggest something beyond the words that the words are inadequate to say, which is hopefully what the very best poetry aspires to do but most poetry fails in.

A similar idea comes at the end of In Memory of Keith Darvill,

Oh, the silences

men keep between them

when what they are keeping back

is what would spoil in being said.

He moves easily between poems in rhyme and metre and free verse forms, as again is something that the finest modern poets are able to do so that neither option completely defines him although perhaps the free verse here is marginally preferable. So, having said that, we will forgive him A Suffolk Sketchbook which looks suspiciously as if it is written in haiku and thus, for a poet in English, usually punishable by a stint of community service.

Midlands meditates upon history in unregarded places and how they are now in a melancholy, Larkinesque view of England,

I thought of close skies

darkened to monochrome,

of rain teeming

in streets of little market-towns

that turned to manufacturing.

Small Hours, on the slightly dubious ground of looking like a poem about poetry, defines it more memorably than most in,

all you want is a few words

that will say how it was for us

at one a.m. on a Wednesday morning

so clearly that a thousand years may hear.

Canute is a fine poem, as is Edward Thomas. Two touchstones of modesty and humanity that serve any poet as fine models. MacKinnon is aware of the vastness beyond, the unsayable size of his philosophical concerns and it is interesting in The Book of Emma that he declares a religious faith while admitting that true atheism is 'as tough a faith as any'. And, elsewhere reflects,

But a western mind reels at the thought of a world in which the existence of God is not even a question because nothing exists and only nothing. Few atheists deny their own being.

The Book of Emma will be worth returning to again and again. It makes the thought of prizes seem a little tawdry but if Small Hours doesn't feature on all the shortlists and take a generous share of this year's awards then something will have been seriously amiss.

From the archives - Diana

Now that there are some days that The Daily Express don't actually lead on a story about Diana, it might be time for some of the rest of us to publish something on the subject.

I took these photographs on the day, probably in 1990, but it says exactly when on the inscribed stone on the entrance, that she came and opened the extension to Portsmouth Cathedral. She was accompanied by David Stancliffe, who went on to be Bishop at Salisbury, but then was still putting on marvellous performances of Bach cantatas in Portsmouth.

I wasn't one so involved with Diana's death that I needed to buy Elton John's record by the handful but there didn't seem anything else to do on the day she was brought home but to watch it on telly.

Such luminaries as Ted Hughes, Maya Angelou and Carol Ann Duffy published poems in the Sunday papers, as well as, one supposes, any number of lesser known poets some of who might have been writing their first ever poem.

But it wasn't until an image stuck with me from the funeral that I joined in and I've since read that poems that refer to Icarus are often the first to be dismissed when judging poetry competitions. Well, I can live with that. This poem first appeared in the microscopically limited edition Line Drawings that I printed in 1997, that included poems about prominent 'celebrities', from Stephen Hawking to Gianni Versace and from Lisa Simpson to Banana Yoshimoto. The Diana poem appears in Re-read, Selected Poems, still available for a mere three and a half pounds (inc. p&p) or near offer.

But these are the words I made out of it.

Diana

There she goes. London's never been as quiet
as this -a vast but passive riot
has occupied it. One last summer day
is arrived to watch her taken away.

Perhaps I thought of Icarus but then
decided that no such comparison
was needed. Let her remain human if
she can before she is made into myth.

Horizon after horizon she goes through,
returning home, a life folding back into
itself, flowers raining in on the hearse
like a soft explosion in reverse.

6.9.97

Top 6 and Poetry Please Review - Tony Harrison

Poetry isn't well-served by radio. Ian McMillan's tiggerish enthusiasm on The Verb would be best saved for the under-fives and Roger McGough's Poetry Please is a comfort zone that will from time to time throw up an item of interest and one is grateful for small mercies. However, the poems are mostly read by actorly types that make many of the poems sound the same.

Although not all poets are great readers of their own poems it is preferable to hear them try. So in the current series, it is most laudible of them to be featuring a poet or two doing just that. And Tony Harrison is one of the finest at it, his rich dark tones remaining with you whenever you read his poems afterwards.

Today's was a better than average Poetry Please, with Roger offering his biographical note on Thom Gunn after a reading of the surfing poem From the Wave and then Harrison introducing his powerful Newcastle is Peru.

But usually, the companion programme in Radio 4's poetry slot, Adventures in Poetry, is capable of doing more in half an hour by telling the story behind just one poem.

But, while we are at it, the venerable old leftist bard is overdue his turn on Top 6.

His most recent books have perhaps not been his best and the couplets and heavy rhymes that refer back to his classical background have threatened to descend into the doggerel they previously transcended. I was surprised to see his last book the subject of a paper at the British and Irish Contemporary Poetry academic conference at Oxford in 2006 because the earlier work is surely more worthy of attention.

A Kumquat for John Keats and Cypress and Cedar are somehow companion pieces thematically contrasting sweetness and bitterness in finely made meditations.

The Birds of America, about the profligate use of wildlife in Audaubon's artistic methods, and Loving Memory, where he walks the Malvern Hills in search of the grave of Jenny Lind, the Swedish nightingale, are both from a set called Art & Extinction. The latter is selected partly on account of his brooding reading of it and partly for its great opening line, The fosses where Caractacus fought Rome.

Whereas I'll take The Icing Hand for its last line, along with all its others, that makes fine music as well as punctuating itself so very conscientiously, and first, ebbing, salts, then, flowing, floods this line.

And it wouldn't be right to pick six Harrison poems without including v, the film-poem made unnecessarily controversial by tabloid newspapers, or one in particular, that found it shocking for its perfectly legitimate use of four-letter words when it really should have been celebrated for everything else about it.