Top 6 - Seamus Heaney

If anybody knows the whereabouts of a spare ticket for Seamus Heaney's reading in London on Sept 14, please get in touch and name your price. It just goes to show that you really shouldn't leave the internet alone for more than a couple of days or else you might miss something important.

I'd also be interested if anyone has ever seen a bad review of Heaney since there might never have been such a thing.

I had been leaving his Top 6 for a guest to do if anybody fancied the job but since now seems a good time to be celebrating him, I've spent a glorious sunlit couple of hours sitting under a whitewashed gable to do the job myself.

I had no need to check on A Brigid's Girdle, one of my favourite poems by anybody ever and as lovely as a piece of harp music.

Soon after it comes Sunlight, a memory of his mother that a friend of mine once said made him get up and do a jig around the room after reading it and he wasn't wrong.

The early Personal Helicon is more self-consciously literary in intent but made a statement of purpose that he lived up to ever since.

Re-reading the pile of books I have here brought to light a few lesser known pieces that I'd like to highlight hear rather than nominate the established anthology pieces. Servant Boy is one that made an early impression and retains a place among highlights but The Outlaw was a tremendous find, an account of taking a cow to be serviced by an unlicensed bull at another farm, the bull described as,

Unhurried as an old steam engine shunting.

and Victorian Guitar, a relic of a girl's lost life as herself before marriage seems to have stolen her individual identity as a musician allowed to express herself while her guitar has a continuing life in other hands.

Of course, there's more to it than that and I choose the more lyrical, sympathetic Heaney over his meditations on primitive violence and archaeology but it's a personal choice and allcomers are welcome to pick an entirely different six should the urge take them.

Top 6 - Roger McGough

In the 70's we used to wonder what the Rolling Stones would do when they got old and having waited those 40 years to find out we know that they would keep on doing exactly the same thing. The same could be said of Roger McGough, a teenage hero of mine in the mid-70's but whose whimsical hippiedom hasn't aged quite as well as other claims on my affections. Now comfy and cosy on Poetry Please, some young gunslingers now might not believe you if you told them he was once really cool and state of the art.

Thus, this selection is a little bit of a nostalgia trip, but there's plenty still to like among the witty wordplay and cuteness. If he was partly e.e.cummings and partly Allen Ginsberg then the influence of cummings was always likely to be more beneficial.

Roger's biography, Said and Done, is worth a read for its anecdotes of zany sixties life on the road, particularly the story of the late night stops at motorway service stations, the homebound poets concocting the most outlandish dishes from the self-service, like coffees with celery sticks in them or steak and kidney pie and custard (but don't quote me exactly on that). The bored cashier would just take one look, key in the items and say,'one pound, eleven and six, please'. That is misquoted because I don't have the book here but I can vouch for his generosity in contributing a poem to our magazine at University and, at the end of the reading we arranged, just handing me a pile of books to sell, telling me the price and then not checking my takings once the crowds had dispersed.

40-love is an obvious selection, using McGough's visual effects of word arrangement to full effect, making the eyes move across the page as if watching tennis.

after the merrymaking, love? will always stay in the memory for its line, 'sleep./ In the onrush of its lava.'

The poem he let us have for the much unlamented Allusions magazine was Poem for a Dead Poet and it wasn't just any old outtake he had lying around because it made it into the New Volume follow up to the hugely popular Mersey Sound anthology,

St. Francis, he was

of the words. Words?

Why, he could almost make 'em talk.

Thank you, sir. The cheque might still be in the post.

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But it's forlorn melancholy with the sad little joke that he did best, and still does.

In ofa sunday, it's

[i]... *

miss mass

and wonder

if mass

misses me

(*the typographical tricks on this occasion mine for editorial purposes);

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in kinetic poem no.2, at his most cummingsonian, it's

without love

i'm just a

has been away

too long in the tooth

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and although long poems are usually best avoided in this Top 6 feature, and so we haven't had Homer or Virgil yet, one probably can't avoid summer with monika, with such morose charm as 'your finger, sadly, has a familiar ring about it'.

He does rather lend himself to quotation because that is the whole point. Nobody apparently relished the job of 'poet' more and now that poets are more likely to be either po-faced creative writing tutors on university pay rolls or 'performance poets' few could have carried it off for quite so long.

Photo credit- Murdo Macleod.

Writing Utensils in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

One can't help but notice the above-average occurence of references to writing implements in Seamus Heaney's new book, and noticing such things is how literary analysis can work and how theses come into being if you're not careful. Having noted a series of such linked features of a writer's work, all one has to do is note them down and explain what their significance is.
Having noted the nostalgic The Conway Stewart, perhaps a memory of his first fountain pen, its squelching, sucking repertoire of amusing noises and the feeling of style and maturity it confers, later in the book come Colum Cille Cecinit, Hermit Songs and 'Lick the pencil' in rapid succession.
The first is versions of three short 11th-12th century Gaelic pieces, the first reflecting on the cramp endured from the writing invested in the storing of wisdom; Hermit Songs relates memories of school and the stationery cupboard, again mixing the subject with the mere utensils of study,
...then Cuchulain

Entertained the embroidery women
By flinging needles in the air
So as they fell the point of one
Partnered with the eye of the next

...As in my dream a gross of nibs
Spills off the shelf, airlifts and links
Into a giddy gilt corona.

'Lick the pencil', another poem presumably in memory of his father, lists some habits that could be nicknames, most memorably a colouring pencil that marked the skin purple as the skin can letter become.
We might then remember that Heane's early 'manifesto poem, Digging, begins,

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests, snug as a gun,

and ends,

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests,
I'll dig with it.

Also, in that first book, Heaney names a poem about his investigation of the farm's earth and wells, his Personal Helicon. This consciously literary way of looking at the world was a part of Heaney's process right from the start, then, and the pen and writing implements more than the extended desk stationery fetishism and celebration of the paperclip to be found in Douglas Dunn's Dante's Drum-kit.
The writing and the world written about are merged by the pen and, on another level, too, with a consciousness of other past literary figures whose traditions he carries on. And, perhaps this awareness of old-fashioned writing paraphenalia, the ink-wells and variety of implements from fountain pen to pencil to crayon, is a way of identifying with the history of writing because he doesn't seem to mention any computer screen or keyboard.
But on the other hand, he's a writer, isn't he, so it's hardly surprising that he occasionally mentions the tool of his trade that he sees lying around every day. He just happens to have written a few poems with writing implements in.

Seamus Heaney - Human Chain

Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (Faber)

Over the years there has been a tendency in reviewers of Heaney to welcome each new volume as a 'return to form'. There was a similar habit in reviews of David Bowie albums after the 1970's but whereas many of us suspect that Bowie never really regained the greatness of his tremendous sequence of LP's up to, say, Heroes, I have never been able to identify where Heaney is supposed to have ever lost it. This is his twelfth volume of poems and they seem to be consistently fine to me.

There is a sort of blueprint trajectory to the career of many, but by no means all, poets, in which 'maturity' doesn't arrive until the age of 35-40 and then after 60 there is sometimes a decline or lapse into repeating themselves. Again, this isn't necessarily applicable to Heaney and the most noticeable sign of his senior status in these new poems is in the number of poems 'in memoriam' of friends or other artists.

The human chain theme of the book is comparable to Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats with both aware of a network of human relationships but whereas Heaney's is generational and often within the family, Gunn's was emotional, sexual and being torn apart by the AIDS epidemic. But both involve a rich sense of community and both are suffering loss.

Heaney is sure-footed and with a disarming facility, his rhythms natural and organically a part of his thought and we are all invited to be 'vulnerable to delight', his generosity of spirit is undimmed like a sort of good-natured optimism and belief in humanity. For once, I began the book at the beginning and immediately the first poems lead you in to his world rich in sympathy and alive to the nuances of experience that he seems to translate so easily into language.

We are always aware that he is enjoying language and the power of specific, sometimes unexpected, words - 'spatulate', 'snottery', 'flop-heavy'- and also his consciousness of the literary, aware of Dante, Virgil and his classical predecessors.

The 'unfreshness' of his father's suits in a wardrobe is made attractive in one of the most moving poems, but the best is quite probably 'The door was open and the house was dark', another 'in memoriam' in which the silence and the absence spreads out from the house down the street and into the wider world. It is impressively understated in a book where not everything is quite so memorable and it might not be his best collection but I'm not sure I could say which is. A career without peaks and troughs contains fine poems from beginning to end and so doesn't so easily offer up a stand-out set but there's no suggestion yet that he is going through the motions as other great poets might sometimes do after 70. The previous book, District and Circle seemed to revisit his early chthontic (yes, chthontic !) concerns and this is inevitably also a look backwards in many ways but not in a way that suggests the repeating of the same themes. He is entirely comfortable in his own poetry and hardly likely to change much now.

Far too comfortable, though, it has to be said, is Faber's continuing house style in cover design. Their plain style seems to have dispensed with design almost completely as if their position as 'establishment' arbitors of taste and authority make such considerations beneath them and the mere thought of illustration or promotion something they have transcended. Publishers like Carcanet and Salt make much more of an effort and their books look the better for it. But the words inside speak for themselves and they appear to think that if they have Seamus Heaney, Don Paterson and suchlike on their list then they don't need to try any harder.

Bag-boggling

I was pleased to see Paul Muldoon (interviewed in The Times last Saturday) nominating The Flea as a favourite among Donne poems. It doesn't mean I'm right but it does seem a neglected classic and I'm not averse to having Prof. Muldoon on my side.

Whereas one who is rarely on the same side as me, it regretably always seems, is Steven Waling, the Manchester post-avantiste poet who reports himself 'unaccountably sad' on his blog at the death of Edwin Morgan, the senior Scots makar. I don't think it is 'unaccountable', though, I think it's because Edwin Morgan died.

Anyway, I thought regular readers might be interested in the Bag Boggling Championships, held in Swindon recently, a sport played only in my family which should soon be on its way to Olympic recognition.

The sport has a disarmingly simplicity and is open to all, remarkably on this occasion by everyone present at my sister's house last week.

As will be seen from the picture with my sister, Pam Chadwick, fielding a boggle, the aim is to hit or preferably knock over with a tennis ball a target placed in between the two players. Two points are scored for knocking the target over (technically known as a 'boggle'), and on this occasion the target used was a small log, and one point for hitting it (for which the correct term is a 'bag'). First to 10 points wins and so far no match has needed a tie-break so no rule has been invented to cover that eventuality yet.

After some warming up, I decided on a darts-type throwing action similar to John Lowe's classic style. But a first round match between Ron Chadwick and my mother, Mary, saw two underarmers in opposition which was an intriguing strategy appreciated by the cognoscenti within the game. With eight players taking part, it was a straight knock-out format with Chris Chadwick, recently returned from cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats, among the most fancied but an early casualty with the obvious excuse of lactic acid deficit.

Always played in the most sporting spirit, Pam reluctantly found herself in the final and, at 9-8, had a shot to take the title but missed. She wasn't likely to get a second chance at that and, yes, Ladies & Gentlemen, I won. What else did you think was going to happen except that it very nearly didn't.

Last year's champion, Nicky Stephens then turned up and a Champion of Champions match went 10-5 to me, too. First thing I've won since the Portsmouth heat of the Ottakar's Poetry Competition quite some years ago, thank you very much.

But, of course, it's not the winning, but the taking part that counts and a fine family occasion with the youngest competitor 18 years old and the oldest 73. It is a part of the traditional English summer season, with Henley, Ascot, Wimbledon and the Chelsea Flower Show, or, for me, The Swindon Literature Festival, Portsmouth Festivities, Arundel cricket, The Proms and sometimes The Globe.

The game's origins can be traced back to Nottingham circa 1980 perhaps , invented by my father, Phil, on the patio outside my grandparents back door, a more concrete version of the game with a brick as target rather than the more rustic grass and wood edition played this year. With professional sport so increasingly dispiriting and unwholesome, it could be just the game we need to re-establish Corinthian values and something that everyone can happily take part in.

Aubrey and Sickert in Oxford

John Aubrey (1626-97, pictured) was best known to me as the early biographer of Shakespeare as part of his Brief Lives. His dating of Shakespeare's up and off from Stratford to London is early and I for one would like him to be right on that as it would help our little Shakespeare biography project quite nicely, thank you. The Bodleian Library have an exhibition of Aubrey's books this summer, showing him to be an innovative biographer of his time, introducing significant anecdote and telling detail to both enlighten and, in retrospect at least, amuse.

However, biography was only one of many polymathematical areas of study that Aubrey was involved in, in an age in which one could excel in a variety of disciplines without being suspected of dabbling. Aubrey was a 'scientist' before the word, an 'experimental philosopher' in fact, and interested in Astronomy, Mathematics, Earth Sciences and was ahead of his contemporaries in dating Stonehenge as pre-Roman.

However, the exhibition is of books and however in favour of books one is, looking at them in glass cases has a limited appeal. Much better to look at are paintings and the recently refurbished Ashmolean has some particularly fine ones, especially those by Walter Sickert. I've long been an admirer of his study of marriage gone past its crisis, Ennui, all modern desperation and quiet horror. But next to it is the even finer Brighton Pierrots, pictured. The bright splash of vaudevillean colour is backlit as the show struggles on, end of season, early evening, empty seats and only an echo of better days. What a tremendous painting. It made the trip to Oxford worth it on its own and any day would be worthwhile if one discovered such a thing, and any year in which one discovered 365 such things would be quite a year.

World Enough and Time

Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time, The Life of Andrew Marvell (Little, Brown)

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Even though much of the remaining documentary evidence of Shakespeare's life might suggest he was both parsimonious and litigious in his property dealings, most biographers insist on showing him as a sweet-natured, well-balanced paragon of charm. It is much more difficult for one writing Marvell's life to swerve the numerous reports of hot temper, scurrilous satire, 'haughty and insolent' manner and the rewriting of his own history because that is most of it but Nicholas Murray's highly readable book makes a fine attempt at achieving a fair and sensible balance.

By no means all of Marvell's life was literary and much of the detail here is taken from his years as M.P. for Hull and his ongoing pamphlet wars with Samuel Parker, Bishop of Oxford. He represents an odd but still faintly recognizable strain of English liberalism, a staunch defender of religious tolerance and yet deeply anti-Catholic, puritanical and sceptical of others in ethical questions but quite capable of quickly over-writing his support for Cromwell after the Restoration, referring to his 'usurped and irregular government'.

He landed a wonderful job in the Commonwealth in 1657, as assistant to Milton as Latin Secretary, translating, drafting and deputising for the blind senior man, but he was clever enough to see ahead with a survivor's instinct where his best opportunities lay and after Cromwell's death he shifted his ground quite radically but successfully.

In the best tradition, he was an amateur poet, and one is left to wonder how important his literary work would have seemed to him when he is now remembered almost exclusively for it even though his life is here rather more a slice through the politics of the English revolution. His poems seek after solitude while his life was spent in busy London at the centre of government. His use of gardens as a metaphor for art versus nature runs parallel to the juxtaposition of solitude and sophistication, the orderliness of his verses a further, cultivated irony on his celebration of innocence and the pastoral. As a writer, he is highly literary and stylised, with art always a consideration above sincerity.

His work involves sitting on any number of committees and he reports back to Hull, lobbying for a lighthouse at Spurn Head and apparently conscientious in his representative duties, which are admittedly more to the businessmen of Hull than to the people as a whole. But he becomes increasingly anti-Royal and critical of corruption in Parliament, too, as the glorious restoration went quickly to bad. His puritan conscience, or perhaps just his urge to express himself in his chosen forthright manner, led him to make many enemies and he might have worried for his own safety. Some of the more controversial pamphlets against popery were published anonymously and even though he died of a fever, theories about his possible murder were inevitable when the physician's remedies had the opposite of the intended effect.

But Nicholas Murray's Marvell is not without some redeeming features. Thanks to Parker, we see him drinking wine alone at home 'to refresh his spirits and exalt his Muse'; he enters a poetry competition for the newly completed Louvre but doesn't win; he might have turned down a lucrative position under the king on principle when rumoured to be living in relative poverty and he doesn't marry or leave any traceable emotional attachment to posterity. And it is to Murray's credit that this last factor isn't allowed to dominate his book.

There's much to admire in Marvell's difficult, self-contained, rigorous attitude and much to like about Murray's account of it, too.