The Leaping Year by Jeffrey Turner

New poems are like buses, for want of a better simile. I don't see any for months and then four recent booklets turn up at once.

The point of the Chestnut Press is not only the poetry. He carefully invites only poets that he wants to to provide poems for his editions on fine, hand-made paper in choice typefaces. I'm not even sure it's possible to buy them, such is the art for art's sake ethos of the project. Would that a few others were quite so devoted to their craft.

The Leaping Year consists of one 18-line poem and, of course, it's not going to be any old filler. It has to be worthy of the paper it's on so it's not one of those marginal poems that some collections include, lucky to make the cut in order to bulk it out and make the others look better.

It's not possible to read it quickly. Its meditative pulse won't let you. Its long lines vary in length, giving the impression of a formal discipline that is only actually in its adagio cadences. That is both more natural and more convincing than having to work at achieving a set metre, making the poet a slave to their chosen strictures. Not that the naturalness has necessarily come easily. I strongly suspect that Jeff Turner works hard at appearing so relaxed in print.

The music is subtle, like the rhyme on the first line ending's 'hare' and the 'unprepared' that comes soon after in line 2. The line of thought works its way from scepticism, through gentle disapprobation for 'those who should know better' - which is poets- and 'the folly of expectation' to the certainty of seasonal renewal, not unlike the R.S. Thomas masterpiece, Song at the Year's Turning. To its credit, the poem also in some ways brought to mind Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden by Julia Copus which rarely goes unmentioned here when there's reason to mention it.

It might seem profligate to go to such lengths to put one poem in print and anything sub-standard would immediately look absurd but our attention is duly focussed. We don't even have to decide which poem we like best. I am re-assured that there is still fine poetry being written. I might not know where to look for it but by now I'm lucky enough to know people who show it, or even give it, to me.  

Lunchtime Classics at the Menuhin Room, Sat, Sept 14

 

Home of the Gentry

Reading Turgenev was a book by William Trevor as well as still being a good idea. There is a line of prose writers that came before Trevor, including the Joyce of Dubliners and George Moore that make for a highly coherent reading list.

Home of the Gentry, or whichever of its many titles in translation, is as important as Rudin or Fathers and Sons, it seems to me, to Turgenev's depiction of the 'superfluous man', which we might uncharitably understand as 'layabout', as Mikhalevich lets Lavretsky know,

'You're not a sceptic, not disillusioned, not a Voltairean, you're a layabout, a vicious layabout, not a naive type. Naive layabouts lie on the stove and do nothing, because they don't know how to do anything; and they don't think, but you're a thinking man - and yet you lie around; you could do something and yet you do nothing; you lie with your full stomach sticking up in the air and say: This is how it must be, lying about like this, because no matter what people do, everything's nonsense, it's a lot of rubbish leading to nothing.'

So that's him told and it might make others among us feel a bit uneasy, too.

Lavretsky marries the chic, talented but possibly superficial Varvara with all her Parisian sophistication but she proves less than a perfect match. Returning home, he finds Liza who is a much better idea but, as so many such triangles prove, no lasting good comes of it all. Liza becomes a nun, Varvara carries on with her glamorous society life and Lavretsky is superfluous.

In the usual process of evaluating things, it is ultimately necessary to compare them with others which unavoidably leads us towards the unnecessary dreariness of league tables. I'm not going to rate Turgenev as Top 10 or any other such reductive statistical status, not least because there could easily be twenty novelists I'd like to put in a Top 10 but I'd say he's essential and anybody one rates alongside or above him needs to be very good indeed.

--

The arrival of that book delayed a big hiatus in which I trawl through writers wondering what should come next. It shouldn't be like that, though, I rely on things demanding to be read. Similarly, I can't like some people sit in front of a blank sheet of paper and produce a poem worth having. The poem has to insist on being written.

And so I await the arrival of the Grove Beethoven, not least for its catalogue of opus numbers. He was a teenage hero before being eclipsed by Bach, and Handel, with Mozart, the first love, never going away. But, following that performance of the Ghost Trio, it has been a Beethoven revival summer and he's in there challenging Mozart and Handel and only likely to improve his credentials after the Yo Yo Ma, Emmanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos Prom on Saturday. The point being that such a trio performing the Archduke really should make any anorak attempt to make league tables look very silly. However, come December I'm sure I'll be sitting here trying to decide which from a highly competitive list qualifies as the Event of the Year.   

Eve Jackson and Sue Spiers

 Eve Jackson, Turning Bird; Sue Spiers, De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da 

I don't see a great deal of new poetry these days. I don't go looking for it. Perhaps I should. On the evidence of these two recent books, there's still worthwhile poetry to be had if you look in the right place or are directed to it.

Eve Jackson's Turning Bird is visual and full of birds. With her other recent book, Allotment, it suggests she makes books on a theme whereas others of us put together whatever we've done and themes may or may not emerge by themselves. Turning Bird is the collection I prefer with its sense of abundance not only in birdlife and nature but the way her language captures it, too.

In Orkney,

One swan irons the distant loch

slowly, slowly, like a mother

lost in thought.

There's a lot of technique packed into three short lines there. 

 

The title poem dispenses with the definite and indefinite object as far as it can which subliminally suggests the weird sisters and their recipe for a spell in Macbeth.  I returned to the lines,

This hand-me-down know-how genetic Braille

begins with an inbred map of trust

of how and where to unearth materials,

cache of contents that gradually build

into a cradle of unstoppable must: 

 

There's a lot to like in the book. Eve's garden, or her travels, are either blessed with more birds than mine are or she is much more alert to what's around her.

 

In De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da, Sue Spiers is more concentrated on ideas and social issues and in her way more adventurous but doesn't always do it with the same linguistic insights. She is auditory more than visual, alert to sound and silence as the epigraph to her first section here highlights. Silence and sound are less opposites than intimately related parts of each other, not least in the music cited as reference points.

In Wider When Standing,

Quiet is where we go to see ourselves,

a meditation on nothing, a negation of noise,

even if silence is recorded, the recorder

whirs, the orchestra inhales, exhales.

 

Sue doesn't flinch from much. For me, sometimes poems that are making social or political points do so at the expense of the 'poetry', though. It is not easy to have it both ways.

I don't always find it necessary to spread words across the page, abandoning traditional lineage and spacing but to finish, in A Life,

It's    the    space    you    make

 

and the space       

                                   you leave.

 

That is all of it, in all its spaced-out zen compactness and it works.

 

In this summer interim without local musicians to provide a staple diet, the local painters in their annual exhibition in the cathedral and these two poets from the area have contributed to filling what could have been a void with good work. It's been great to find how much else is going on. I'm not ungrateful.                            

Opus 1

It said here a few months ago that Ethel Smyth arrived fully formed with her op. 1 String Quintet. It's been the Beethoven Piano Trios on my turntable for much of the summer, the first of which are op. 1, no. 1 and no. 2. Written in 1793, that makes him 22 when he wrote them. He arrives in mature condition, too. However forbidding he might sometimes appear in portraits or his more strident music, the slow movements in all these trios are anything but and he effortlessly takes on Mozart's legacy throughout.

Mozart's own opus, or Kochel, 1 is a formal exercise for Piano Minuet and if it lacks some of the depth of the Smyth and the Beethoven we might bear in mind he wrote it when he was 5.

So, the question of opus 1 brings with it a few different 'types' of artist. Some know what they are doing from the beginning, or wait until they do before publishing anything- which is a good idea; others develop from a starting point and improve markedly, yet others - perhaps more in pop music or literature than 'classical' music - have a good idea but fail to follow it up with anything as convincing, either trying to repeat the trick with diminishing returns or not finding anything else to compare with their one brilliant idea.

I've seen it suggested that some very successful pop acts can stretch the success of a debut album into a second, the point being that the first contained all their best stuff and the second is the next best plus whatever they've written since. Oasis fell apart when the third album was only half any good and that's what they were ever after. Charles Shaar Murray was wheeled out by a tabloid newspaper to review Be Here Now, heralded as a major cultural event, but he was in the minority in believing the hype and, basically, got it wrong. 

It might not be entirely correct to make The Catcher in the Rye Salinger's op. 1 but it might as well be for all that his other work is read by any beyond his devotees. Such early success so readily achieved can be a burden and the apprenticeships served by the Beatles in Hamburg, Handel in Italy, Bach in Lubeck and perhaps T.S. Eliot with Ezra Pound look like sound investments.

But, however impressive it is to arrive with a mature opus 1, one can't remain at square one without it soon becoming 'samey'. One possible way of differentiating the genuine artist from the box office provider is the capacity to move on and do the next things equally well. Beethoven did that and I might have found a reason to put him above Handel who delivered awesome opera and oratorios and a grand style but some might say without having Beethoven's range and depth. Once we are at that level, though, fault finding starts to look a bit over fussy.

Arvo Part could be said to have had two, or maybe three, careers or phases moving with fashion, up to a point, until finding the music that he is now famous for. Shakespeare did not turn up with his best work first, whether we think that was Titus Andronicus or Henry VI, and that ought to be Quod Erat Demonstrandum. If Beethoven had his Mozart, Bach his Buxtehude, Handel his Corelli, where would Shakespeare have been without Kit Marlowe.

Nobody just turns up and does it. Everything comes from something else.

Fathers and Sons

"They are so swollen-headed, these young men of today! If you ask one of them, 'Which wine do you prefer, red or white?' I am in the habit of preferring red!' he will answer in a bass voice and with such a solemn expression on his face as though the whole of the universe were looking at him at that instant....",

says Paul Petrovich in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons.

There will always be a 'generation gap', at least one, but we change sides, inevitably, given time. I well remember being even more pompous, foolish and pretensious than I am now but possibly being surrounded at a non-descript university by worse examples of ingenus who, on the basis of some so-so 'A' levels and having read nearly 35 books, regarded themselves as God's gift to future of intellectual culture.

My own most telling analysis of the schism between generations so precious to each coming one were the lines,

Hendrix lives and we're all aware

that Dad don't know and Mum don't care,

I'd like to go for a walk and find

that the woman I love is also blind.  

It was either that, or maybe another, that was self-consciously done in the spirit of All the Young Dudes, the anthem of such disaffection for those of us of that vintage but one is up against it if deciding to take on Bowie even on a song he was big enough to be able to give way.

Cat Stevens was also very good on the subject.

I'm not entirely convinced that Fathers and Sons is obviously Turgenev at his best. With 'nihilism' as the younger generation's agenda, they are an easier target than when it was, say, Rock Against Racism, CND or hunt saboteurs.

In the end, I compressed by various attempts at satire on 'campus Marxists' to a few lines in another poem,
           across the campus

where students are reciting 

scriptures taken from Ulyanov 

as jealous as Puritans 

and righteous as lounge bar spivs.

               (Escape Artist, for Rosemary)

and, in the words of Thomas O'Malley, the alley cat, I'm very proud of that, not necessarily for the lines themselves but for the fact that I finally dealt with the issue in a nonchalant way and didn't even give them a whole poem to themselves.

I'm still concerned, though, whether it should just say 'Lenin' or whether 'Ulyanov' brings with it any affectation that is meant to be attributed to them rather than me.

I'm sure it will be possible at some future time, depending on how long one has left, to look back at oneself as one is now and think, like Capt. Mainwaring, 'oh, no, no, no', and so it's a condition that, once acknowledged, one can't ever escape. But if that's the level of self-doubt, scepticism and reflection on the effects of time that Turgenev has prompted before I'm halfway through a re-read of his so-called masterpiece then perhaps it is a 'thought-provoking' masterpiece.

Rudin

 Further choices from upstairs have been highly satisfactory. It seems I've read some good books in my time if only I could remember them.

In Turgenev's Rudin, the central character's phrase-mongering and the profundity he is credited with are found to be superficial. I had earlier abandoned A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic after the introduction not being able to accuse it of that but having been reminded that however much I like those bits of Sartre, Derrida, Wittgenstein et al, philosophy soon loses me in its language games. For a paperback of its age, its in good condition as a result of how little I looked at it at university and since. As the bible of English Empiricism it is as close to common sense as phiolosophers get but one needs to know what 'analytical' means, what a proposition is and, as I did in a poem 25 years ago, 'I start to doubt what meaning means'. It's absurd that part of my degree was in Philosophy. It's absurd that empiricism should be so abstract. Everything is absurd and I retreated early doors to engage with literature instead. Not that I hold it against Freddie Ayer. I'm sure he and G.E. Moore are on the right side but in the same way as I admire the work of chess players like Jose Capablanca without understanding how they do what they do, I have to take most of that on trust.

Katherine Mansfield's Prelude, in Bliss and Other Stories, is slightly less opaque but still very subtle. The relationships between the mostly female characters are finely delineated as per their position in society counterpointed with their attitudes and personalities. Not much is apparently happening until a revelatory ending in which Beryl sees herself as 'playing a part', perhaps in a similar way to Gabriel Conroy finding himself revealed to himself at the end of The Dead.

I can almost feel an essay suggesting itself on the hollowness inside us as a central theme in literature ranging through Hamlet, the way Larkin's Arundel Tomb undermines its portentous final line, L'Etranger, any number of others and Rudin. 

 

When I first read La Chute by Camus decades ago, I missed the irony which is the main point and one could easily do the same with Rudin if one applied such simple-minded reading to it. He's erudite, charming, intellectual and at least to begin with and in the right circles, convincing. Except that he's clever but empty and, being ungenuine, can't build anything permanent. The ending, appended by Turgenev later, in which he is shot while posturing as a revolutionary, is perhaps almost as gratuitous as he is but we have been beguiled by him in the early chapters and feel robbed, if no longer all that sympathetic. I'm sure we also feel the wiser, though, and the rest of the Turgenev section upstairs are lined up invitingly along with a new addition ordered today. 

 

Never have the books stored up for so many years come in quite so useful. I just go and look around and pick one and am usually impressed. That is what they are there for.