Finally, here I am putting my head above the parapet. It’s been a lovely full summer. Not so much for the garden, which suffered from a too-early onset of dry weather, then the nail in the coffin of the hosepipe ban. We did get a modest harvest of cucumbers, courgettes and tomatoes, although quite a few plants failed. But plenty of fun stuff: a big family holiday, long in the planning, an extended visit from stepdaughter over from Australia that really energised me, then most recently a two week holiday a deux in Sicily. I’m a lucky woman in so many ways, I won’t bore you with the detail. Let’s just say I’m back and I have that good feeling that comes with the move into Autumn.
Readings
Eighteen hours after crawling into bed on Tuesday morning, after a day’s driving followed by a flight delay, I was at the Hurstpierpoint Festival taking part in a group poetry reading organised by poet friend Miriam Patrick. Miriam is a very talented poet who gives so much of her time to others. A number of the attendees on Tuesday were members of Miriam’s poetry reading group that she set up in the village. It was a good event – I think the room was full, and we all got a warm reception. Miriam read some engaging poems about work, with themes ranging from artist’s muse Lizzie Siddal to Aquinas’s angels dancing on a pinhead. Wendy Klein was also reading, from her pamphlet ‘Having Her Cake’. The collection tackles the subject of assisted dying, with reference to a close friend who made that choice in California, where the process is not illegal. I found it an intense and moving reading.
Meanwhile, forthcoming readings are just around the corner. Please come along if any of them are near you. (I’m also looking for more reading opps next year, so if there’s a poetry event near you that you think I could ask to read at, please let me know.)
I’ve been pondering why I’m so lacking in any impetus to write at the moment. After all, if the sun-drenched historic gorgeousness and energy of Sicily doesn’t inspire me, what the heck will? Actually, those fabulous mosaics at Villa Romana Casale of female bikini-clad athletes are pretty inspirational. But sometimes (usually, for me) it’s a small thing that pops out unexpectedly. Among the pile of publications and catalogues waiting for me to read when I got back was a copy of the new-look Times Literary Supplement, bigger and thicker than before and every two weeks rather than weekly. I had barely got into it when today the latest issue dropped though the letter box. A quick skim for poetry content revealed a poem by Jemma Borg called ‘Before & after the night’. (Apologies if this link takes you to a paywall.) As I read it, I felt little lights going off in my brain accompanied by the kind of ‘wish I’d written that’ feeling that can be inspirational but also saddening. Like Salieri in Amadeus, melting in the face of Mozart’s brilliance and at recognising that he himself will never be more than a reasonably good musician. Thankfully, Jemma’s poem had more of a positive than negative effect on me! So I’ve just ordered a copy of her collection Wilder and a already noodling through a few ideas.
Reviews
I’m not the greatest trumpet-blower as you know, but it would do a disservice to D A Prince and Mat Riches not to link to their wonderful reviews of The Mayday Diaries.Davina’s is on the London Grip website and Mat’s is here on Ink & Sweat & Tears. How lovely to have a book read so closely and with such insight. I’m very thankful for the time and effort both poets made. There’s another fillip for the book coming up later in the year, but more about that, er, later.
Subs windows
One job I have managed to get done this week has been the quarterly spreadsheet update of magazine submissions windows. It seems to be getting more complicated, with more journals stipulating more and more micro-guidelines, the rise of submissions fees (but also, the rise of payment for publication), also more publications making their subs windows even shorter and harder to predict. I’m wondering if the spreadsheet in its current format could be slimmed down and made more relevant. I know, I’ve talked about reviewing it before now. But I think a plan is starting to formulate.
You know how I’m a bit of a sucker for interesting poetry formats? Well, I’ve often wondered what The A3 Review was all about – a paean to the London to Portsmouth road, perhaps? Or a massive mag that won’t go through your letterbox? I bought a copy of issue #13 to find it’s neither of those. As the website says, it’s ‘a magazine that behaves like a map’ – it comes folded into A6 size, but opens out to reveal its contents.
In it I found poems by a number of international writers who I wasn’t familiar with, plus a pocket-sized Q & A with Roger Robinson (top tip: ‘read & write more, publish less’) and some quirky graphics. It was really interesting to see the poems spread out, so you get a visual sense of how they sit together as well as how they ‘talk’ to each other. Also in my package (sent from Spain where editor Sean Levin perhaps is based) was ‘Write About The House’, an innovative writing prompts booklet, or rather map, in the same A3 fold-out form. It’s a visual treat, as well as being packed with interesting prompts.
How cool is this? The A3 Press has over 20 of these themed writing maps and also produces chapbooks (chapmaps?) as well as the A3 Review. Excellent value for money too.
PS: I’ve been asked if I get free copies of stuff that I review or talk about on this blog. The short answer is no, unless it’s a contributor’s copy of a magazine or a book that I’ve blurbed. This includes my quarterly list of magazine submission windows. So any ‘endorsement’ is entirely just my own thoughts.
I’ve recently had sight of Abegail Morley’s new collection The Unmapped Woman. To read it is to be drawn into a mystery of dream-like sadness and the minutest, extraordinary detail of the processes around loss and grieving. ‘We all start in water’ begins the poem ‘Expected’, and whether that’s amniotic fluid, rockpools or ‘slippers of meltwater’, water seeps its way through the whole collection, as if it couldn’t be stopped. This is emotionally draining material conveyed with great skill and beauty.
The reader has a sense of being ‘on hold’ throughout – waiting is a recurrent theme: sometimes with anticipation, sometimes in desperation, finely balanced, a jangle of nerves, things just holding together.
‘ You’re waiting / for liberation, foetus shaping in liquid until you / come adrift on a crib-shaped island with the map / of life crumpled in the tiniest palm I can imagine’ (‘Imminent’)
‘I wait for melancholy to wake,/snared like a hack of crow/ at the back of my throat. / I wait to weight its grief at daybreak.’ (‘Not Being’).
I found this collection very moving and I think my favourite of Abegail’s books so far. You can order it here at Nine Arches Press. I believe there’s an online launch planned. What a shame that so many good poetry books are having to make do with virtual launches for now.
Epigraphs, we’re told, are risky – they have a habit of upstaging the poem that follows. But the quote from William Blake is an apt start to Peter Kenny’s Sin Cycle, a sequence of twenty-four poems recently published in Issue 29 of E.ratio, an online journal of Postmodern Poetry. There’s a Blake exhibition at Tate Britain at the moment: ‘radical and rebellious’ he’s called in the exhibition notes, and reading Sin Cycle there are moments when you feel you’re inside the madness of a Blake painting. I know Peter is also a writer of horror fiction, and it’s clear he enjoys a strong sense of the macabre.
The work bristles with energy and inventiveness. Right from the first stanza we’re jerked inside the narrator’s head:
… Then He came. Grinding my bed-wetter’s face into dandelions, wrecking their stalks, weeping their wart milk.
My skin was a surface he secured without slippage, till His prick burst the ghost clock of my head. …
(‘Original’)
We’re taken through a series of good and bad days, self-obsession and tortured thoughts. The world through this person’s eyes is full of squirming creatures, human and otherwise, destined for the slaughterhouse, the dustbin, ‘squelching late-night screenings’, or just dead, fossilised, taken, ‘yawning for air in their anxious hell.’ The narrator saves his harshest criticism for himself, who he sees behaving badly in some scenarios, and victimised in others. Catching the reflection of his face as he tortures a fish out of boredom ‘I hate myself, / loathing whatever thing is watching me.’ (‘Siamese Fighting Fish’). A game of pool is going well, and then: ‘He’s back, that version of me, / the choker who doesn’t deserve it. So I choke again’.
I found myself compelled onward through the sequence and really enjoyed the form – each poem just two stanzas of four lines each – there’s a loose narrative arc driving it and the sheer exuberance and creativity is wonderfully gripping. Not so much a romp as a yomp – there’s no missing the real anguish here, but it’s worked through with such wit and originality. Sin Cycle succeeds in being luscious, gruesome, poignant and hilarious somehow all at once. Peter happens to be a friend and I was fortunate to read versions of Sin Cycle when it was a work in progress. I was sure it would be snapped up by a UK small press, but it took a US publisher to appreciate it. But who knows, *whisper* we may yet see it in print.
En garde, I whisper, lunging onto the train, my elbows dexterous in their micro-aggressions. We’re all on the same line, and I re-read the same line, until a well-Wellingtoned woman
treads on the tail of my eye. She follows a red setter carving through cow parsley into an open field. He sprints, I sprint, into the priceless possibility of a place with no station and nothing to stab for.
I’ve got into a rhythm of reading a Canto of Dante’s Purgatory each night before falling asleep, sometimes I get through the chapter commentary & notes too, sometimes not. If I’m too tired to finish the Canto I have to start it again the next day. Purgatorio is a more complex read than Inferno. There are just as many references to people and politics of the time, requiring explanation, but it seems to me there’s more characterisation and symbolism to get one’s head around, not to mention the philosophical wondering it’s sent me on.
Alongside this I’ve had a number of poetry collections on the go recently. Perhaps I’m getting more reading done this month because I’m not drinking alcohol? I can’t really see the connection, but I’m struggling to notice any other benefits to Dry November except the feeling of smug satisfaction that I can do it, if I put my mind to it. I hope I’m not jinxing it by making that claim when there are twelve days to go. Anyway, I wish I could commune with my internal organs and ask them if they’re feeling detoxified or rejuvenated.
Getting to the point (I know! finally!), here’s a roundup…
I always make sure I settle down with a nice glass of wine cup of tea before delving into a new collection from Clare, because I know I’ll be reading it in one go. She manages to write with such punch, and yet it’s so elegantly understated. The second half of the book is the title sequence, charting a relationship from courtship to old age. Somehow Clare gets to the (sometimes heartbreaking) bottom of the subject with both grace and humour. The first section contains some beautiful, quite personal poems honouring family ties, love and loss. ‘In February’ is especially moving – ‘You’re introduced to angels […] look, they welcome you with song and wine/ as I would, darling. But I must stay behind.’
Another new release, from another poet friend (disclosure!) In reading many of these poems I feel I’m being invited into a very private space in which the poet mourns the loss of her husband and the subsequent journey that takes her into another loving relationship which also ends in that partner’s death. If that sounds morbid then it’s not – there is more celebration than sadness here, and the reader is left with a strong sense of love, gratitude and hope. Like Clare Best, Lynne has a connection with nature that permeates her explorations of human relationships. ‘Planted on either side of the garden / they slowly inch their way closer/until finally (a century or two later)/ the fir leans into its beloved palm.’ (‘Three Tree Poem’).
The book’s blurb tells us we’re in for ‘interweaving themes of personal and political conflict’ and indeed you’re straight into this from the first poem, the powerful ‘I do not believe in silence’, with its repeated ‘because..’ and the turn from ‘I do not believe..’ into the positive: ‘I believe in the heart and its beat / and its bleep and the dance of the trace / on the screen…’ This rhythmic quality is a kind of drumbeat that drives the whole collection. The subject matter is often raw – injustices, dementia, rape, miscarriage – but it also bursts with passion and pure love:
‘How love must, at all costs,
be answered. We have answered
and so have a million before us
and each of their names is a vow.
So now I can tell you, quite simply
you are the house I will live in’
(‘Vow’)
Something that surprised me was the number of dactyls, particularly from the poem ‘A withered brown flower takes on a new colour’ (title dactylic in itself) to the end of the book. There was something about putting these poems back-to-back that meant the metre became a stumbling block in my reading of them. Still a wow of a book though.
The main reason I ordered Head On was because Clare’s one of the tutors at Kim Moore’s Poetry Carousel that I’m going to next month. Similarly, I’ve ordered books by David Tait and Malika Booker, to get at least a feel for their work. So more on those collections in another post.
There’s nothing predictable or familiar in this collection. Just when you feel you’re getting your feet under the table suddenly the table is gone, and the ground beneath, and your feet too. Just two poems in we encounter ‘Transcript’, a testimony with gestures-as-stage-directions which is stranger than the sum of its parts – a characteristic we meet intermittently throughout the book. The poet’s feeling for moss is visited and revisited, from ‘Nomenclature’ (‘bird’s -claw beard-moss / oblique-mouthed beardless-moss’) which ends with the line ‘ah – our fresh fingertips’ through to the last poem ‘Listening to moss’ (‘I take a blindfold, lie down and listen/ to a half-globe of star-green star-moss’). I came away with a sense of yearning, of sadness for something almost grasped but not entirely, almost said but not exactly (‘Situation of Secrecy’, ‘Scatter my bright feathered heart’, ‘Plaint’). The title poem ‘Inland’ takes the reader on a meditation around a few repeated words (gulls, grief, words, speak, heart, ship, inland) coming together and knocking against each other slowly towards a conclusion ‘gulls and men / follow the white island of the heart / all inlaid in the heart / grief in the heart / in white / I find white in the heart / inlaid’. I particularly loved Kay’s poem titles – more often than not intriguing, inventive and quirky. I also warmed to the more surreal poems, maybe because I enjoyed the fun of decoding them (or just scratching my head), much as the poet ‘translates’ a ‘secret message on a long fence’ in ‘Afternoon out’, but it’s also the magical mystery that Kay creates, sometimes as delicate as gossamer – you almost don’t want to pick it up for fear of breaking the magic.
Josephine Corcoran’s first collection draws upon memories (real, imagined or reimagined) to examine issues of identity, class, family and love. From the grief of miscarriage to a relationship mapped onto a litany of medical interventions (‘In 24 years, we’ve lost count / of all the body parts we’ve seen’ – ‘Love in the time of hospital visits’) the autobiographical content has an quiet honesty. Josephine situates the reader through her use of time-specific references, figures of speech period detail, popular culture and current affairs – the ‘5 o’clock bus’ from school, headrests ‘dimpled from Brylcreemed heads’. Stephen Lawrence, food banks and drones rub along with references to margarine, economy ham and the Three Degrees. Movie scenes and film references proliferate, as do dreams. The poet demonstrates great versatility and range, from the polemic of poems such as “Police Say Sorry” to the quieter lyric pieces and a wonderful pantoum ‘Fallen asleep by a Christmas Tree on New Year’s Eve’. Another trope weaving its way throughout is telephones and phone calls, featuring often as signifiers for communication (or lack of), misunderstanding, cross purposes and the gulfs between different times, ages, cultures and beliefs. Poems have been carefully sequenced, cross-referencing each other neatly. It makes sense, but if anything, I would quite have liked fewer instances of poems obviously following on from the previous one, for example ‘Gavrilo’ following ‘History Lesson’ – to makes things a bit more oblique for the reader. A very small quibble. One of my favourite poems in the collection, ‘In town for a funeral, we drive past our old house and see it is for sale’ is also possibly the longest. It’s a seemingly-simple but complex poem that invites many re-readings, yet still has plenty of secrets to give up. I can imagine Josephine might be already writing more of these longer poems. Watch out for the next collection.
I was fortunate to hear Josephine reading at Swindon Poetry Festival recently. Here is ‘Exquisite Corpse’:
This is my wrap-up post for 2017 – I’ve enjoyed other people’s posts but have been increasingly wondering whether I’ve anything else to add or anything different to say. But that of course is one of the downsides of blogging/social media and the like – the angst of wondering if is one actually saying anything of any value to anyone, or just adding to the morass of mediocrity that was once quaintly called the ‘information superhighway’.
So while the marketer in me is demanding a ‘top ten’ this or ‘best of’ that, I’d just like to highlight a few things that have caught my attention lately, plus a bit of news and some general thank yous & thoughts.
Allison K Williams comes up with this thoughtful piece on the Brevity blog, urging writers to congratulate themselves on the last year’s achievements, and setting realistic goals for 2018.
It was fascinating to read this recent thread on Twitter, begun by poet Phillip B Williams who asks whether social media encourages too much ‘bigging up’ of our poet friends rather than engaging in meaningful critique of the work, a question which unsurprisingly gets a very lively response.
I do like the way that people are using Twitter more often for these kinds of extended debates – proof that plenty of us are actually still willing to engage rather than throw flames.
On a thoroughly positive note, writer Annette Gendler each year creates an ‘Artists’ and Writers’ Notebook’ (let’s not get started on where I’ve placed the apostrophes here!) I’ve already printed off a copy and will be using some quiet moments over the weekend to fill it in. I like the way it focuses your thinking by asking you to list your various projects, wishes, how you’re going to prioritise and tackle them, that sort of thing – but in ways that encourage specific, rather than general answers. If like me you feel you always have things on the go but can’t follow through on everything, it’s helpful for understanding what you can do, what needs more research … and that it’s OK to shelve things and come back to them. You can download the 15-page workbook for free if you sign up Annette’s monthly newsletter.
Some thank yous
I was very touched to have been listed once more in Matthew Stewart’s end of year poetry blog round-upon Rogue Strands, together with a good range of blogs both familiar to me and not so much. I commend the list to you. I do think ‘poetry blogging’ now covers a wide spectrum, from the academic and review-led to the practice/writing technique-focused and then the more diaristic or personal like mine. I always find it fascinating how different poets approach blogging.
A recent heart-stopping moment for me was to read Rishi Dastidar’s review of a poem of mine published in The Rialto in the autumn. I’ve never had anyone publicly critique a poem in such detail, and for it to be on the Rialto blog and see it promoted across Twitter was very exciting for someone like me on the lower echelons of the poet-o-sphere. Whenever I find myself envious of ‘big name’ poets I should remember this feeling. Because as long as one is flying well below the radar of the ‘serious’ poetry world, one can bask in friendly reviews (cf Phillip Williams’s point earlier). If you hit the big time the knives are well and truly out – and the reviews get tougher to handle, not to mention the general sense of ‘you can say what you like now she’s public property’. Look at how they went for Sarah Howe when she won the T S Eliot Prize. Being down here amongst the unknowns is definitely a safe place to be!
I was going to start listing all the people who’ve helped and supported me and my writing this year, but it’s a killer of a task because there are so many I want to name and I’d be terrified of missing anyone off the list. I love you all and just hope you know who you are. I’m also as grateful as always to you (yes YOU) for reading, commenting and sharing my blog posts. Happy New Year – here’s to us all, and to a fulfilling, creative and happy 2018.
*I’m away next week, but I’ll be giving away that copy of ‘Coast to Coast to Coast’ the week after…
To be fair, I did have a seat for the first half, but with the sciatica playing up I was happy to stand for the second. Plus it meant a quick getaway at the end with poet friend Jan, and the last (viable) train home.
Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour (run by the indefatigable Anne-Marie Fyfe) is always worth the trip to London – I always feel I’m being introduced to interesting and often very fine poets who aren’t necessarily on my radar (for example, who don’t frequent social media and/or are not over-exposed at poetry readings and/or are not UK-based). It’s an intense reminder of the very wide poetry world out there.
On Monday, we heard eight poets, six of whom were new to me, and musical entertainment from Henry Fajemirokun.
Michael Scott (who I know from Swindon Poetry Festival) kicked things off, with a series of poems ostensibly addressed to a ‘little usherette’, but he told us were actually about all the big themes – love, loss, death, family and so forth. I was transfixed for most of the time by his ‘Attack of the 50ft Woman’ T-shirt (which did come into one of the poems). Also in the first half were Alistair Noon, Penny Boxall and Claire Dyer. I knew Penny’s name but don’t think I had heard her read before, and I found her engaging. Claire I met originally at an Interpreter’s House launch, and who I always enjoy hearing read, plus we’re also social media friends. I admire both her poetry and her calm delivery.
Penny Boxall, Claire Dyer, Alistair Noon
Poetry readings always seem to offer up a myriad ways in which I might put my foot it in. This time the only seat I could find happened to be at close quarters to a table with a plate of half-finished food. It appeared to have been pushed to the edge. I assumed the people at the table had finished with it. It smelt. This was a hot, crowded room, after all. So I picked up the plate and started to take it away to the bar, when someone at the table said ‘excuse me’ and asked for it back. Fair enough. But it never did get finished, or cleared away. But by the time the interval came, the air was ripe with the combined respiration of 70 or 80 people in a basement room, so maybe this is a moot point.
Second half, as seen from a different viewpoint – Ruth Sharman read poems about the slow and desperately sad demise of her father. She is incredibly well-spoken (a slightly old-fashioned phrase, I know) and delivered her work with great style. We also heard from Jon Stone (who I remember as co-editor of Fuselit with Kirsten Irving) who looks far younger than he could POSSIBLY be (now that’s the kind of compliment I would relish), Elaine Gaston (whose work I enjoyed so much I forgot to take a photo – and who had the confidence to finish when we were expecting and wanting more) and Nick Makoha to end, whose introductions were excellent but I liked so much of his poetry, although he suffered from one or two stumbles during the poems.
Henry Fajemirokun, Ruth Sharman, Jon Stone and Nick Mahoka
I came away with a distinct impression of which of the poets I would like to read more of, and also quite a few takeaway thoughts – on what to wear for a reading, on engaging with the audience, on improving my diction and vocal tone (I couldn’t help cringing again thinking about my recent performance at the Eyewear launch), on practising, practising, practising…
Jan kindly took the same train as me until we parted at Haywards Heath, and I continued in the company of a zillion Chelsea fans as far as Lewes, then onto a replacement bus to Eastbourne, and to my bed by 1am.
It had been an excellent day in many ways – before even the Troubadour night earlier the day I’d had a poem accepted by the excellent Prole magazine, been to the hospital for the dreaded tests and finally (after a week of worry) pronounced ALL CLEAR. For now, of course. Everything is for now. But no less the sweeter for it.
Katy Evans-Bush‘s TS Eliot shortlist workshop is fast becoming an institution. Now in its sixth year, it’s a fine precursor to the Prize readings which take place the following day, and the prize giving itself the day after that.
The format is straightforward – Katy reads the ten shortlisted books, chooses from them a number of poems to discuss, and invites poets along to the Poetry School in Lambeth for a day to mull them over. I’ve been to one of these workshops once before and had a wonderful time. This time I had to confess I hadn’t read any of the collections, but in a way that’s part of the excitement – to be introduced to them by someone like Katy. Not only does she offer her thoughts and insights into the works, and invite us all into the discussion, but she also brings to the table her formidable background as a writer, reader and and literary critic. Plus the odd bit of insider gossip, of course.
The TS Eliot Prize is probably the highest profile UK poetry prize and that’s not just because the winner gets £20,000. The annual prize readings are a popular draw. I was fortunate to be there at the South Bank last night. The result will be announced tonight – I won’t be at the award ceremony this year (no invitation!? Boo! – although that didn’t stop me going last year!)
Anyway, here’s a quick round-up of the books, a note or two from the workshop and what I thought of the readings. It’s in the order that they read last night. I can’t presume to review any of the collections, but I’ve included links to interesting reviews of each of them, should you want to find out more. Oh, and a few pics at the end.
Bernard O’Donoghue, The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber)
In an interesting mix of shortlisted poets, O’Donoghue represents the old guard, if you like – experienced, a Whitbread Prize winner, Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, writing the sort of assured, Heaney-esque lyric poetry one expects to see on the TSE shortlist. In the time-pressured vipers’ nest of the workshop room the few poems we looked at got short shrift, but to be fair it was near the end of the day and we needed cake.
Ruby Robinson, Every Little Sound (Liverpool University Press)
Born in 1985, Ruby Robinson is clearly this year’s newcomer wild card (but not to be dismissed -look what happened last year). It’s a slim collection of little more than 30 poems, in a very small format (pamphlet sized) and even smaller typeface. This book was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, so clearly is a standout. In our workshop, various aspects of the sample poems came under attack (errors in grammar, inexplicable line endings).. could envy have been getting the better of us? Surely not!
At the readings, Ruby stood her ground very successfully and if she was nervous she made a good job of keeping it under control.
A collection of mostly short poems, with a section devoted to the Bach Flower Remedies, in which Towers personifies each flower with the qualities it purports to cure. These were clever and entertaining, but workshoppers identified a tendency to sail dangerously close to whimsy.
Katharine came across as a little nervous in the reading. Much as I admire brevity when it comes to introductions, as a member of the audience I found myself feeling supremely uninvolved. It’s a tricky balance.
In the workshop, none of us knew anything much about J O Morgan, but Katy filled us in on his previous publications and helped us into Interference Pattern, which doesn’t follow any traditional path. There are no titles, and although there are section markers it’s not clear if the sections are meant to be read as individual pieces. There are some recurring threads but it’s not all narrative. ‘Voices jostling… like radio interference’ was how Katy described it. I was intrigued by the idea of it not being ‘one poem’ but then again clearly meant to be taken as a whole.
I travelled up to London with poet friend Charlotte Gann and by the time we arrived I’d been won over by her enthusiasm for J O Morgan. The reading he gave was mesmerising – all without a script, and with an intensity of presence that gripped me utterly. Slightly scary too – which probably helps if you want to keep people’s attention!
At the start of the second half of readings, host Ian McMillan announced that a few people had complained that they couldn’t hear people clearly enough – thank god it wasn’t just me then! And the second half sound was noticeably better.
Vahni Capildeo, Measures of Expatriation (Picador)
One of the big guns – this book has already won the Forward Prize for Best Poetry Collection, and it’s clearly a big read. It’s in seven sections and is packed with not just poetry but dense passages of prose. It deals with displacement, leaving, distance, language, identity and many of such topics that are absolutely of the moment. ‘Complex and multifaceted but readable’. One of the workshoppers said she was halfway through and although she thought she’d find it heavy going it absolutely wasn’t.
Last night Vahni was first to read after the break, as a few audience members finished their ice creams and beers. It could have been a challenge but she was confident reader, friendly and fun. My brain struggled however to connect to what she was reading, I felt I’d come to it too ‘cold’ to really get a handle on it. I often find that though, and I also felt it when we read sections of the book in the workshop – I’d rather have the space and clarity of reading it on my own off the page, with time to look up references I don’t understand, that kind of thing.
Is there anyone who doesn’t love Ian Duhig? He’s such a great combination – a man of the people who’s absolutely grounded in the real world, local communities and politically engaged, generous and humble, but also fiercely intelligent with a masterful grasp of history, the classics and poetry in all forms. AND FUNNY TOO. Yikes! That’s my impression anyway.
It took me a while to adjust to Duhig’s accent in his reading and I wanted him to take the poems more slowly, so we could savour and enjoy. By this point my neighbour was already suggesting that us Southerners were woefully unrepresented – come on, Sarf London! Don’t leave it to Kate Tempest!
The premise of Void Studies is Rimbaud’s idea of writing series of poems as ‘pure music’ with no discernible message being communicated. He never did it, so here’s Rachael Boast’s version. You have to let the poems ‘wash over you … like listening to Debussy’ was Katy’s explanation. Basically French symbolist poetry, but in English. The poems we looked at struck me as having lovely ethereal language & imagery. Mostly in couplets, short. My kind of poetry, one might think.
Boast has a strong voice, a real pleasure to listen too, although perhaps it was the nature of the poems that they did indeed start to wash over me, without leaving any strong impression.
Here’s John Field’s review of Void Studies, only one of the ten reviews he wrote on the shortlisted books which inexplicably never made it onto the TSE Foundation website, which is a great shame. John is a fine reviewer as evidenced on by his blog Poor Rude Lines, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to have linked to his reviews and help publicise them. Ah well.
Denise Riley, Say Something Back (Picador)
The ‘beating heart of the book’, said Katy, is the central sequence ‘A Part Song’ on the theme of a mother’s grieving for her dead son. We read the whole sequence round the room as part of the workshop and it was certainly moving. ‘A stupendous book’ was Katy’s pronouncement, and Riley was ‘a poet’s poet with a fine reputation.’ Katy pointed out that she’d come a long way, from being last published by Reality Street (‘Reality Street! Not even Shearsman!’) to Picador – a big leap, well deserved though. Indeed at the end of the day most people in the room felt this could be the winner.
The best word I can use to describe Denise Riley’s reading is ‘defiant’ – there was a strength of feeling in her delivery which was compelling, although I struggled with her chosen emphasis at times, and the long pauses between words. We didn’t get to hear ‘A part song’ which I was kind of hoping for.
Surely gets a prize for the most eye-catching cover, and in fact I absolutely LOVED all the Picador covers, and the size/shape of them. Full marks, Picador packaging peeps.
So here’s Jackself – a collection of poems about various Jacks of legend, phrase & fable, of childhood – Jack Sprat, Jack Frost, Jack O’Bedlam… Englishness and a sense of place (Polley’s place – the English/Scottish border country), themes of being trapped, a confrontational, unstable world. Katy says ‘You’re either with him or you’re not’.
In the workshop I was with him, I enjoyed the poems and the handling of the themes. Made me think a bit of Janet Sutherland’s Bone Monkey, or Ted Hughes’s Crow, although less dark than either of those (as far as I could tell from what I read).
Polley’s reading was the penultimate and having to go before Alice Oswald is also a pressure. I remember really enjoying his reading from The Havocs a few years ago. More self-assured now, but a little more mannered in his delivery. I still enjoyed the poems though.
I struggled to find a review of Jackself, but you might be luckier than me!
Alice Oswald, Falling Awake (Cape)
What can I say here? I loved the poems we read in the workshop, including ‘Swan’ which she then read last night. Falling Awake won the Costa prize already and Oswald is a previous winner of the TSE Prize. Her reading was magnificent, all recited from memory which I love but it wasn’t just that. She had such a presence. ‘Commanding presence’ is a cliche but it really was that.
And so to the result – only a few hours to go. My metaphorical money is still on Alice Oswald, although my fellow workshoppers came down in the Denise Riley camp. With Vahni Capildeo the other in the triumvirate of ‘likely to wins’. Or how about J O Morgan as a dark horse?
The books…in no specific orderMe & KEB at the end of the poetry book marathon
And on the way home, what should I pass than Pimlico Plumbers and their amazing Christmas decs – in the middle of January!
Hello!? It’s January 15th, people!
But London was as beautiful as ever at 5pm in January…
An interesting book came my way from Bloodaxe recently – a book of books, you might call it, or perhaps an anthology of collections. Home Front features four collections (each by a different poet, three of whom were unfamiliar to me) on the theme of war, specifically the experience of wives, lovers and mothers when their loved ones in the military are sent away to war.
Isabel Palmer‘s contribution is Atmospherics, which includes a number of the poems from her excellent Flarestack pamphlet Ground Signs which I read and enjoyed a while back. The poems here are grouped into three, the central section focusing on the period of time her son spent in Afghanistan, sandwiched between two ‘Home’ sections, before and after. As a result, Atmospherics expands on Ground Signs through the inclusion of not just more material but also more experimental forms, as in for example the lists and glossaries that make up the six-part ‘Symbols’ sequence at the start of the final section.
Isabel Palmer is from a military family, whereas Bryony Doran is not. When her son joined the army it was a surprise to learn ‘…that I’d become part of the army, another dazed parent / eating plastic packed sandwiches thrown casually on tables’ (‘Joining up’). Bulletproof is Doran’s first collection, in which she charts her own feelings of helplessness and fear for her son while he serves in Afghanistan, from wondering what her pacifist father would have made of it (‘Wormwood Scrubs’) to dealing with enquiries from well-meaning friends and trying not to be panicked by every Afghanistan-related media story. The poet ponders aspects of her son’s personality and childhood episodes, observes others who are also touched by the war and seems to be trying to make sense of her son’s choices and motivations.
On his last day he says when he gets back
he’s putting in for his motorbike test.
He sees the look on my face and laughs,
asks why I’m scared of life. (‘Rest & Relaxation’)
We later learn that ‘more soldiers have died in motorbike accidents since coming back than have died in Afghanistan’ (footnote to ‘Avoiding Traffic Accidents’). Although the poet’s son returns safely, clearly the mother isn’t undamaged by the experience. There is an edge of bitterness to ‘Tips for Parents of Returning Soldiers’ that goes beyond the ‘wtf’ irony of some of the earlier ‘found’ poems based on army-issued instructions or advice. Despite some slightly (for me) heavy-handed moments, this collection was an intriguing read next to Palmer’s.
I’m sorry not to have discovered Jehanne Dubrow before now. Stateside, her collection in Home Front, is written from the perspective of the wife of a US naval officer who’s deployed to various postings overseas. It’s also an exploration of wives-left-behind with reference particularly to Penelope in the Odyssey. Both the officer and the wife at home have their own journeys, and of course there’s the one they take together. The reader fears for the relationship even from the opening poem ‘It means the moveable stays tied’ (‘Secure for Sea’) and even on a balmy seaside evening eating chocolate – ‘ we’re kids again’ – the mood darkens –
I would like to call it death, this thing that sticks
like marshmallows inside my mouth, gritty
with a thousand sharp particulates of sea. (‘Virginia Beach’)
Through all the collections in Home Front, fear of the loved one dying is naturally a common theme. It seems to inhabit so many of Dubrow’s poems: the irony of soldiers having to play dead in an exercise (‘Swim Test’), death in dreams (‘Sea Change’) and in the sheer waiting (‘Situational Awareness’). It permeates the eroticism of poems such as ‘Instructions for Other Penelopes’ and ‘Bowl, in the Shape of a Bristol Boat’. In ‘Against War Movies’ the list of famous war films builds black comedic effect till being brought up sharp at the end –
Each movie is a training exercise
a scenario for how my husband dies.
Dubrow favours form (there are many sonnets in the collection, and a three-stanza triolet – is there a name for that?) and I loved her clever use of rhyme. So many of the poems I wanted to read out loud to really enjoy the musicality and the many subtly layered effects. The work feels like a sophisticated examination of a relationship slowly dying under the strain of separation;
… I can’t say when I reached for you if we rustled like tissue paper, delicate
as shards, or if we slid our razored edges back and forth, until we split apart. (‘Moving’)
The final collection in the book is Elyse Fenton‘s Clamor, first published in the US in 2010 when it (intriguingly) won the Dylan Thomas Prize, despite not having published in the UK. We learn in the biog that Fenton is the wife of a US army medic posted to Iraq.
It’s fascinating to plunge right on into another poet’s world, another poet’s take on the now familiar theme. I couldn’t help but feel a bit strung out at this point. What new? What more? But in the words of the time-honoured cliche (itself a time-honoured cliche)… I wasn’t disappointed.
Fenton’s poems are both gutsy and delicate, alive with wordplay and creative leaps. The human body features frequently in all its messy physicality, whether describing life – ‘Radha, let us touch your face, / thaw our fingers on your kindled skull, / trace the kerf of your open mouth’ (‘For Radha, Two Days Old’) – ‘your mouth and its live wetness, your tongue / & its intimate knowledge of flesh’ (‘Love in Wartime 1’) or death – As if this were not the work of shrapnel – / not the body’s wet rending, flesh/ reduced to matter – (‘Notes on Atrocity (Baghdad Aid Station)’)
All the themes we’ve encountered before are here: dreams. Waiting. Fears of the unknown. Homecomings. Same, yet different. Here’s an extract from Fenton’s ‘Your Plane Arrives from Iraq’, heavy and elegiac in the face of what should be a joyful moment, which for some reason brought to my mind Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and its ‘each slow dusk the drawing down of blinds’ –
… And once more
the sky’s feathered jet-stream, and once
more, the dirge and caesura of rotors
and once more the slow Morse of the plane’s
body descending. And at the end
of the longest sentence I’ve ever known
your face in the window’s fogged aperture:
stranded noun, Rorschach of stars. Beautiful thing.
I’ve recently had sight of 
