Tag: Poetry Review

A bit of a rave about Sam Willetts

On the train to the Poetry Review launch the other week  I looked through the magazine to remind myself of the poems which I’d enjoyed on first reading, or that I remembered (not always the same thing of course).

Consequently I found myself re-reading Claire Crowther, Sam Willetts and Jean Sprackland, checking their biographies in the back (why are these always so compelling? Or is it just me that finds them so? I know some mags are firmly of the ‘no biogs’ camp and it always makes me feel a bit cheated as I love to know a bit about the writers).

One of the evening’s readers at Keats House was in fact Sam Willetts, who read all three of his PR poems, two short and one long. I’ll own up now to a rather skittish habit I have of reading short poems before long ones. Superficial? In need of instant gratification? Miniscule attention span? I don’t know. But ‘Stone’ and ‘The Bemusement Arcade’ hooked me in enough to make me want to read the longer ‘Caravaggio’. It’s one of those poems you start reading and think that any minute you’re going to stop, but you keep reading. Like watching something horrific on TV, looking away, but not actually changing channel. It’s the story of an incident that took place when the writer was twelve. Not a pleasant story –  you almost want to wash your hands after reading it –  and yet it reeks of so much ‘impossible truth’, both for the boy at the time and later as an adult ‘Why will all this leave me so angry? What will I have lost?’

New Light for the Old Dark

After the reading I bought a copy of Willetts’ collection ‘New Light for the Old Dark’ (Cape) which was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize in 2010. So I’ve obviously come a little late to the party on this one. But there’s so much I really love about these poems: lively language that almost winks at you, cinematic effects (I mean that in a good way!), a strong sense of place and the ability to switch calmly to interior moments of great intensity.

Loved this:

Near night’s end on Dover Docks
the Channel meets the wall in white high fives (‘Home’)

And in ‘Trick’ , the ‘unexceptional mystery’ of the death of a parent is told with a mixture of detatchedness and tenderness, a sad litany of un-things (‘Dad’s untoothed mouth gawps’) and

His new state exposes the stark child of him
and un-sons me.

There’s a beautiful delicacy about so much of this writing. Even the triolet form is brought to bear with great effect on the tale of an apparent suicide:

She thought that she might breathe the river
breathe the river and never rise (‘Thames Triolet’)

Loved this too:

One police car slides by, and another
slow and self-announcing as a pair of swans.

(‘On Hanway Street with Persian Ali’)

Sorry this isn’t a proper review, just a snapshot. Perhaps I need to go on a ‘how to write a review’ course.

Proper reviews etc: Kate Kellaway  in the Guardian, Steven Knight in the Independent,  Susanna Rustin interview in the Guardian.

Poetry Review launch and the Keats & Marx trail

Last week I met up with poet friend Lynne to go to the Poetry Review launch at Keats House museum in Hampstead. I admit I’d not visited Keats House before (although I’ve been to the one in Rome), and I don’t think I’ve ever been to that part of Hampstead either. I grew up in South London and north of the river was (and still is in a way) a foreign country.

As soon as you get off the train at Hampstead Heath it feels like you’re in a rather well-heeled and gorgeous place. Must be something to do with the street name plates being white-on-black, like in Oxford.

Keats Grove
Wouldn’t you want to live here?

Keats House apparently used to be two dwellings made to look from the outside like one. Young John was separated from Fanny Brawne merely by a load-bearing wall.

Keats House

The Poetry Review Launch was a warm affair and very sociable, Lynne and I even got snapped by the paparazzi.

Robin & Lynne

I met some lovely people, including Shanta Acharya, London poet Tessa Lang and recent Pighog Pamphlet winner Kate White, but didn’t really do any schmoozing. I almost introduced myself to Maurice Riordan, but then what would I have said to him? I actually don’t have a great track record of this sort of thing. Plus I’d had two three glasses of wine by this point and we all know what happens when things get a bit lairy.

Highlight of the evening for me was hearing Sam Willetts read – more about him in a later blog post.

Anyway, I was so delighted with the place I persuaded my husband that we had to have a day out to Hampstead and Highgate the very next week. As luck would have it, we chose Tuesday and it POURED with rain. Here I am slightly less happy, in Highgate Cemetery.

Highgate Cemetery
I’m feeling a bit how he looks.

We took the guided tour of Highgate Cemetery West and learned about the Victorian fashion for draped vases, sleeping angels, Egyptian themed monuments and body snatching. There are 53,000 graves, mostly falling down as the undergrowth slowly reclaims it all. In the drizzle I can only liken it to being in a jungle, or perhaps Angkor Wat – but colder and quieter.

Angel memorial Highgate

HIghgate Cemetery West

HIghgate Cemetery West

People are still being buried at Highgate, but not as many as in its heyday (thirty a day wasn’t uncommon apparently.) One of its newest residents is Alexander Litvinenko, whose grave we were asked not to photograph.

I’d like to go back to the Cemetery on a drier day. Not sure if anyone offers writing workshops there but it fired up all sorts of weird ideas in me.

We decided not to walk up onto Hampstead Heath – another time! – but at least we visited Keats House properly and ended up playing Scrabble and drying off at The Wells (fab food by the way.)

Last but not least – did you know Hampstead has its very own Flatiron Building?

Flatiron buildings x 2
Separated at birth?

I mislaid my poetic mojo in a Ghent hostel

Poetry mags and books

Having been away for four days ‘helping’ with a college trip to Belgium (my husband was the tour leader – his A level students) I’m finding it hard to get back to poetry.

I suppose it’s partly because I’m having to catch up with work as well, and not having a proper night’s sleep the whole time we were away (teenagers don’t go to sleep before 2am, so nor can anyone else in a Youth Hostel where there are no carpets and the doors all slam).

Although they were (for the most part) very nice people, I just found the whole being-around-40-teenagers utterly exhausting and a tad depressing. Their energy saps mine, their zest for life deadens my creativity. I’m amazed at how so many writers are able to combine a teaching career with writing – and yet it’s such a common combination, whether it’s by choice or necessity.

OK, I realise I’m probably being over-dramatic here, after all I think a foreign trip is tiring even for the full time teachers, because you’re never off-duty, not for a moment.

Anyway, I think I now have an even higher respect for my husband and his colleagues for everything they bring and give to teaching. I just know I don’t have that kind of generosity in me!

But on a more positive note… lots to look forward to, not least of all some much-needed sunshine!

The answer to a creativity deadzone for me is to read, and read good stuff. I’ve still to explore the new Poetry Review and Magma which arrived a week or so ago, plus I’m reading Abegail Morley’s Snow Child and Ben Parker’s The Escape Artists, so I’ll be talking about those soon on the blog.

Poetry readings coming up: Hilda Sheehan has very kindly invited me to read at the Blue Gate Poets meeting on 8th August in Swindon, and I’m currently talking with the organisers of the Shoreham Wordfest about putting on a poetry night where I hope to be reading alongside some lovely poet friends. Then come October there are exciting plans for a reading with Abegail Morley and Emer Gillespie – will keep you posted.

Judith Cair’s ‘The Ship’s Eye’ and other new reading matter

Poetry Review & The Ships Eye

Judith Cair launched her debut pamphlet ‘The Ship’s Eye’ on Thursday evening in Brighton and the event was a sell-out, or rather a sell-over, as about a dozen people had to stand the whole evening. (Great for publisher/event organiser Pighog in a way. But I know from experience that packed events usually mean the next one is less than packed as people think ‘well if I’m not going to get a seat…’ especially as Pighog are now streaming their events live. Nice idea but if people choose to watch on the web then that’s £5 loss per person. Just sayin!!)

Anyway, more importantly, Judith’s pamphlet … she had said she was nervous about reading but you wouldn’t know. Her strong, calm delivery was a joy, and the way she started with all her thank yous, meticulously naming everyone, was testimony to her generous nature and thoughtfulness. Judith is a super-supportive workshop member and writes wonderfully. I’ve not yet read the whole pamphlet through closely but already I have several favourites, such as the moving simplicity of Cineribus Veris Patris Mei Dedicatum – I was slightly put off by the title but my schoolgirl Latin tells me it means something like ‘dedicated to the true ashes of my father’ (apologies if this is wrong!) the pamphlet includes many classical references/themes and indeed 3 poems are Judtith’s translations of passages from Homer’s Odyssey. Definitely a pamphlet I will be going back to.

Also through the door in the last couple of days – the latest edition of Frogmore Papers, and the big fat package from the Poetry Society with Poetry Review, Poetry News and various other bits, including a fascinating little anthology of the Foyle Young Poets – tomorrow’s stars? – you can read the whole thing online here.

Speaking of Poetry Review – I was excited to see how well Brighton poets are represented in this edition – not only John McCullough and Maria Jastrzebska but also Marion Tracy. Maria and Marion are both members of the Mimi Khalvati workshopping group I joined last year here in Lewes, and Marion’s excellent first pamphlet Giant in the Doorway (HappenStance) was published last year.

Lots of lovely reading matter to get stuck into when I’m on holiday next week.

First poetry reading group – Ní Chuilleanáin, Feaver, Wilkinson

There’s nothing  quite like reading poetry to stimulate writing – something it took me many years to discover. So I was very pleased when Brighton Stanza member Miriam Patrick proposed a new monthly group devoted to reading poetry. Our first meeting was last night – we were a small but perfectly formed group!

The format is that we each bring multiple copies of a poem we’ve read and enjoyed, and we discuss. The focus is on contemporary work, although it’s fine to bring along something you really like even if was written a while ago.

For this session we looked at 3 poems  – Miriam introduced us to ‘The Second Voyage’ by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, from her “Selected Poems’. Ní Chuilleanáin is a well-respected Irish poet who I confess I’d not come across. (For me, that’s the beauty of the these sessions – there’s so much poetry out there I’m completely ignorant of.) There followed much discussion of the Odyssey and whether or not, if you base a poem on myth, it’s reasonable to assume the reader knows the original story. But even for those of us not entirely au fait with Odysseus’s Second Voyage, we agreed there was some stunning language (‘…fountains /  Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares, / The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle,’)

Then we read Ben Wilkinson‘s  ‘October (after Paul Verlaine)’ which was one of a pair I’d seen in the current Poetry Review and enjoyed. I’ve got a bit of a sonnet thing going at the moment and I liked the clash of registers in this poem, I know the ‘turn’ is supposed to bring a change, and although in this case it seemed a tad unsubtle, maybe that was the ironic intention, and ‘after Paul Verlaine’ was the clue:

Wouldn’t you wager it the truest season,
free of summer’s delusional passions?

and a few lines later, on the turn:

Of course those nutters and the pushovers
all go for spring and dawn

I admit I’d done a hasty search for Paul Verlaine and I wasn’t sure the info I had scraped from Wikipedia was reliable! We talked about what ‘after  XYZ’ meant when we saw it as a subtitle to a poem – in the style of? As a reaction to? An ‘homage’? Anyway, homework on French Symbolist poets to be done I think.

Jo’s chosen poem was ‘Ironing’ by Vicki Feaver. Jo was impressed by the way the poet was able to convey so much about the course of a life within the ironing metaphor, going from a kind of bitterness and anger at a life the narrator clearly wasn’t happy with (‘my iron flying over sheets and towels … the flex twisting and crinking until the sheath frayed, exposing wires like nerves.’), through an intermediate period (of change? of loss? of resignation?) to happiness and love (‘an airy shape with room to push / my arms, breasts, lungs, heart into.’)

We’re going to have to spend less time on each poem if the numbers go up, but that’s OK. I think the group will evolve naturally in whatever way we want it to, and like the workshopping group it will have a different dynamic from month to month depending on who comes along.

(PS: I do feel I lack the analytical skills to take a poem apart with any real insight –  possibly due to my lack of poetry training!  But that’s sort of what I’m hoping to try harder at over the course of time, and learn from listening to others and indeed by reading others’ reviews.)