tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47049462512564629382024-03-07T21:28:44.980-08:00Poetry Scotland ReviewsAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.comBlogger15125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-11686043586681077602013-08-29T01:06:00.000-07:002013-08-29T22:27:18.290-07:00Subject and syntax to fear and enjoy<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Helen Ivory, Waiting
for Bluebeard, Bloodaxe</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Ira Lightman, I,
Love, Poetry. Knives, Forks and Spoons Press</b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“I would like to
extend my thanks to everyone who has ever liked my poems,” writes
Helen Ivory in her acknowledgements. This is an eminently sane
remark for a sane, witty and slightly discomforting poet. If you are
both attracted and repelled by her subject matter, so you should be.
The first half of the book is about women and death, and women's
conspiracies with death, and the second half – dealing with
Bluebeard – is about, well,. Women's attraction and repulsion for
death.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Written concisely and
in short poems and stanzas (with the occasional equally short prose
poem), it is all about subject with Helen Ivory. The book can be read
as a horror story or as single poems which would often be hilarious
but for the creepy draught of skeletons,suspicions and omens. These
controlled and detailed poems, fearlessly dealing with human and
physical small sufferings.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Each poem shows a
mastery of nerve as layers of survival are unravelled. Matchboxes are
coffins too small for their content: skin comes off people ion
layers. Even the colours are sinister: lemon, grey-silver. Ordinary
things like “a decent cup of tea”or waiting for buses have us
looking over our shoulder in terror; the television walks out of the
house with Bluebeard. Vertebrae can be unbuttoned, jelly rabbits come
to life. Nothing is as it seems, and after a few of the poems nothing
seems able to be trusted, either.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Helen Ivory is also an
artist. There is something neo-Victorian in the kind of miniature
assemblages she produces, from photographs and objects. They are
fascinating and precise. Her poems are exact reflections of this
outlook. You can hardly get more Victorian than your female
ancestors' submission to Death, nor the Jekyll-and-Hyde, Jack the
Ripper type of Bluebeard whose wives disappear. We can all; imagine
how, but not as precisely and chillingly as Helen Ivory, whose
incongruous mixture of sadness and humour can freshen the dusty
corners of our muddled fears. I can see why she has been compared to
Stevie Smith in this respect, and there are time when her conciseness
brings Emily Dickinson to mind. Those are fine women masters, indeed
– and look at our language there – for who would dare call
Stevie and Emily mistresses?
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Another connection with
her art is the awareness of the human (or animal) body – often
expressed as parts. There's the little girl padding out the bra of
the ball gown, and even the “thinly sliced tongue sealed up in wax
paper” from the butchers. Indeed, in this way of anatomy, she links
people and animals – there's that flash of insight where she is
filing her nails “so they wouldn't catch on things. She wasn't,
after all, a beast.” She can even turn the earth and stars into
creatures. In <i>What the Stars Said, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">she
tells us the stars</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
heaved themselves under the bed</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and began to burn holes in the rug.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
What
does the author make of men in this book dedicated to women? She
makes Bluebeard a privileged man with a leather desk – the old
master-of-the house image, divorced from the women's life as they are
divorced from his. There a re constant suggestions of the werewolf.
Gender relations are so relatively equal nowadays, it is salutary to
be reminded of the ancient confederacies of women who, excluded,
exclude men.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Helen
Ivory's impact is all in the content, rather than the language
itself. Not a word is out of place. Language is used superbly to
obtain the effects she seeks.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">When
you look at the work of another poet/artist,</span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Ira Lightman in </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">I,
Love, Poetry, </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
also a book of predominantly short poems, you'll see a total contrast
in the use of language. Ivory entertains and instructs by what she's
saying. Ira Lightman's work is all in the language. It's about how
what you think or see is affected by the way in which you say it.
Full of grammatical hiccups, puzzles, tricks and puns, Lightman's
work defies translation (a great definer of poetry) and provides
collections, strings and blocks of words that dazzle and confound
with meanings that could not be got without these exact words. And
to take the meaning you have to absorb the words as the poet gives
them: you must be receptive to poetry. Take a simple example,
</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Restorant:</span></i></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
on our tablecloth
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the besuited drops /</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
leatherbound tomes
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
for madame, monsieur
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
to raise, consult</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
weigh with frown</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
on page five,
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
smile at fifty
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
as if that's
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
all the order
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
they can sustain</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It's a simple grammatical sentence describing the waiter as
“besuited” and the menu folders as”tomes” adding weight and
formality to the small incident of choosing from the menu, taking you
right there as they choose their numbered course, and “restoring”
sense (the pun).</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A few pages on, <i>As the petal splashes </i>also takes you to the
heart of a tiny incident, this time even less concerned with
intrusive complex syntax:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Chins down, the roses are</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
(stems blithe children) picked</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
into air, car, bath</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and (seabound river's) bed</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Yet these and other statements in the poems, the contracted, their
essence extracted, are precise. One needs to get the feel of such
nuggets from Lightman before embarking on larger pieces where the
language is seen to work the same way. <i>Snack on meaningful
evening</i> is a sonnet (well, fourteen lines) in four sentences.
Each convoluted sentence is packed with information on a summer
evening walk round Leicester. Not just any walk: this particular
walk: the nitty gritty of the sentence identify it overwhelmingly,
and fix it as unique. The first sentence runs:
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
in Leicester, hardworking deco New York</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
shops marketry fonts the fronts that</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
want money not serfdom from the super</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
economics under English June evening.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The sound crackles in all these poems. Sound is more primary than
syntax, though syntax is never lacking even when it has to be hunted
for. However I set out by giving examples of the more traditionally
well-behaved syntactically of these poems. Others, having gathered
their confidence on how to proceed, give a whole lot more ammunition
for any surviving fossils of the old schoolteacher mentality to
grumble about. Here's how <i>Air on A</i> starts:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It stood dum dum for groin dum dum</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
their ver-er-er-er-er-tices' tether,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
to peg there</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and be, dum dum</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the tie that fixedly dum dum dum dum</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
bound the crotch up dum dum dum dum with animal skin.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In this poem you can see how much Lightman is enjoying the sounds
and rhythms, so that it makes sense he is now regularly writing
songs. His writing is surprisingly sexy. This is poetry to enjoy
rather than understand. The vivacity and freshness of Ira Lightmans
poetry is a direct result of the verbal freedom to which he has laid
claim.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The invitation to enjoy rather than understand poetry has to be got
across to readers before we can regain a general readership for
poetry. There's a general belief out there (not discouraged by review
writing) that you always have to understand poetry. This is already
resulting in people only buying what poetry they are told to like,
and/or baby poetry.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So, Ira Lightman is a poet and artist who, a rebel with words and
sound, makes you listen and hear what you weren't expecting. He
offers invigorating and different poetry, putting words together in a
jolting, unnerving but highly enjoyable way and taking you to the
heart of language. By contrast Helen Ivory, equally poet and
artist, comes over as well behaved, sticking to simple form and
traditional syntax, while actually having unnerving (and secretly
enjoyable) things to say. Thus she tales you to the heart of her
subject.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Both these poets are highly contemporary in outlook and offer
important ways forward for the current poetry scene.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-66068765514481267022013-07-01T03:55:00.004-07:002013-07-01T03:55:59.330-07:00A view of Omnesia <div id="yiv414987075">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span dir="ltr"></span></span></div>
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<strong>Omnesia (remix) and Omnesia (alternative text) by W N Herbert. <br />Bloodaxe, £9.99 per volume.</strong></div>
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<strong><br /> </strong></div>
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<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1372672156759_5131">
Even as Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle, WN Herbert, known universally to poets as Bill Herbert, has been slightly out of the sourthern English picture until recently. "So far north" and given to writing in Scots (well represented in this book), and to provocative verbal play in his well known and generously written blogs, he hasnt been particularly noticed as a major writer in a larger field. I am glad to see this changing.</div>
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This pair of books is a publishing milestone. It's amazing how the severe recession, which is slowing and stopping publication of so many ordinary books, can bring out something completely unexpected, almost untoward and with capacity to take us forward. This is the second such book (if you can call it one book) that has really excited me this year.<br /><br />Omnesia is two apparently very simlar books, with identical prefaces and acknowledgements, identical back blurbs, of equal length, and both dedicated to the memory of the great Somalian poet Gaarrye. <var id="yiv414987075yui-ie-cursor"></var>It is an at first daunting galaxy, unless you are simply going to read the poems, without worrying about the arrangement. If you do just read the poems, you'll find the unusual phenomenon of a writer <em>really writing</em>, pushing his boundaries eveyrwhere. But you'll soon be hankering to follow the structure of these half-identical books.</div>
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The books may be opened by various keys, the best I think being the Pilgrim Street sequence that runs identically thorugh both books, concluding the various but corresponding sections. Pilgrim Street, as Tynesiders know, is an important street leading down to Newcastle Staion, from which pilgrimages around the world, and around the poetry world, have been made. This powerful seqeunce starts in a Spenserian/Keatsian/Byronic traditional romantic metre, which with its rhyme is maintained throughout. By the final poem however, the ancient Greek rhythms, decasyllables and hendecasyllables are winning through. Being variants of sylable patterns or dance steps they can merge into English formal metres, and just in case you were in doubt, the subsequent and last poem in <em>alternative text</em> makes a mention of Pindar.</div>
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<div>
Herbert can flit in and out of formalism from a great height. (It seems to me that is what the flying fish on the cover is doing.) Famously at home with the Scots "habbie", he can do anything with rhyme and meter, those oft neglected tools of the poet's art. </div>
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But what to say? Aha! Greece (strongly) and and the many places of Herbert's poetic globetrotting provide inspiration and surprises. Cheifly perhaps Somalia, where he collaborated with and translated for the famous Gaarrye, has added to the depth of his written work. I cannot think of another poet who has made so much real poetic capital out of state suported international shenanigans, and this is possibly the reason such an unprecedentedly substantial pair of volumes has appeared: almost 350 pages of new uncollected poetry, much written in the flush of what the poet has learnt from his travels. Look! It works! the establishment will say.</div>
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</div>
<div>
Political explanations aside, it is great to see work of this power being published properly. Poetry is full of disestablishment fire. Here for once is some establishment fire, greatly needed if we are to get non specialist readers on our side. <br /><br />The structure of the books, quite apart form the structure of individual poems, has taken poetry book making to a new level. This is not wordsmithing so much as textsmithing, and could revolutionise the concept of a book of poems if other poets acknowledge this feat and respond to it. </div>
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</div>
<div>
The two books are self- and inter-referent and you will find parallel (occasionally, in the last section, the same) poems in the equivalent position in the other book, give or take a page or two of slip to add to the challenge. This presentaion has the <em>jeu d'esprit</em> of Nabokov's Pale Fire, or B S Johnson's loose leaf novels, or Durrell's Alexandria Quartet perhaps, before that idea was so over-copied. These are techniques of fiction not often applied to poetry, where we are accustomed to the sequence, the long poem, and the collection (never a favourite concept of mine). Here we have a composition, and a refined one at that.</div>
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Without going into detail over the individual poems and sections (people will register for PhD's to do that), there you have it. All the same, we won't leave the subject without noting the thrust of the Pilgim Street sequence, from</div>
<div>
"My voice immersed </div>
<div>
itself in others' work like lakes"</div>
<div>
to<br />"this travelogue of an unravelling voice<br />which can't go home again."</div>
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It's not diificult in the nitty-gritty, but it's important, though often hidden/forgotten. And there's so much fun in the overflowing packages of the sections. There's room for a MacGonigall skit on "the Silver Bridie" (V&A Dundee if you didn't know), room for travels in Somaliland deserts with armed guards; all of it too real and divergent to start nipping with "cricitcism." Further I will not go.</div>
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Bibliographically the books are parallel, and you can only tell if there is a first one by the ISBN. If you want to buy just one, I suppose you'll have to choose between the epigraphs to the sections. <em>Remix</em> has Richard Burton, Heidegger, Gwyneth Lewis (To make the poem work in English, I had to change everything, the plot, characters and outcome, in order to give a sense of the original), Glen Gould (Something really does happen to people who go into the north) and others, while <em>alternative text</em> includes Borges, Lowry, Bruno Schulz, Rumi, and Gaarrye himself. </div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-44208195386004769802013-05-27T18:03:00.003-07:002013-05-27T18:03:45.045-07:00Cultured Llama
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Cultured Llama</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Strange Fruits, by
Maria C. McCarthy<br />A Radiation, by Bethany W. Pope</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Unauthorised Person,
by Philip Kane</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>The Strangest
Thankyou, by Richard Thomas</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Unexplored
Territory, edited by Maria C. McCarthy</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A
huge amount of energy has gone into launching these new publications
by the new press <b>Cultured Llama</b>, and it has obviously mostly
come from Maria C. McCarthy. To start publishing with six full books
demands courage, and there is little sign of inexperience in the
finished articles.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Strange Fruits,</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">
by the editor of the series, is in memory of a friend who died of
cancer with proceeds going to MacMillan Cancer Support via Word Aid.
The poet genuinely remembers her friend Karen McAndrew, with poems
about clothes and shopping, and the everyday life of a town including
dentists and hairdressers. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The title poem is about litter in the hedge of a new housing
development, alongside an old house with an orchard.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In
<i>Car on a Country Footpath </i><span style="font-style: normal;">there's
a similar theme: </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">a
bramble-clamped car</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">though
human placed, is not out of place.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">As
much a part of the landscape now as the lines of planted poplars.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">There
is quite a lot about Ireland in this book. The poems are personal in
a generous, friendly way and her interest in Irish women shows. This
is almost a poetry of social journalism. McCarthy is also a writer of
short fiction and the last piece in this book is a short prose
account of her last meetings with Karen McAndrew, describing their
joint shopping trips, and particularly their rendezvous in a
favourite café. This piece is beautifully written without a word out
of place and for that reason fits well in a poetry book.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">In
my view editors of poetry presses have every right to include their
own work in their lists. It shows their starting perspective as an
editor, for one thing. But one does sometimes notice ploys to make
this practice more acceptable, and in this case the collaboration
with the fund raising charity Word Aid and Macmillan Cancer Support,
gives Maria McCarthy an additional reason to place herself on this
list. Her work needs no apology and she needs no excuse.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><b>A
Radiance, by Bethany Pope</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;">,
is the début book of a very strong and powerful poet with a voice of
her own, searching valiantly for a style she is coming into. It's
going to say visceral on the back cover – yes it does. The poems
are both long and long-lined and the poet is totally unafraid.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The poet uses family events as her
subject. This heightens the drama and you are soon thinking </span><i>What
a family!</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> though you should be
thinking </span><i>What a writer!</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
because the American country life described, although foreign to us,
is no doubt not out of the ordinary where it happened. <br /> I am
looking for descriptions of mangrove swamps and alligators. There is
barely room for them among the family dramas but here they are:</span><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">we
lived by a river that fed mangroves,</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">where
the herons speared black snakes</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">and
infant alligators, and the city municipalities</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">in
the cheapest of wisdom, allowed sewer water </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">to
flood into streams...</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><br />I
swim through the currents, a knife in my teeth,</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">bone-handled.
It came from my great grandfather. I slaughtered</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">nothing
on these swims, save for</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">the
dragons which rose in my mind.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Further
on in this poem </span><i>(Selkies, the River's Daughter)</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
the poet stretches even further:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">observe
the moments I first loved light, in the glory </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">of
Zeus poured out on Danaë, made pregnant</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">by
light.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">56 pages like this add up to a far
outstanding first book. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Bethany
Pope also writes novels, and has recently left London for New York to
take up a publishing post. I hope her exciting new job won't take up too
much of her time, for this woman must write.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Unauthorised
Person</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;"> is a collection of
poems by artist and surrealist </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Philip
Kane</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;">, clearly an arty man
about town in Medway and Rochester, and brought onto this list as a
character, someone with something different in the line of verse to
contribute. Basically there are two sections in this book, first the
entertaining sequence of poems about Carole and Johnnie, who lurch
their way precariously through outer London chic while clinging
defiantly to their housing scheme background. It is in a dated,
spare, deadpan free verse and it is saved by being all too true. Here
are two snippets from their life:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Now
that operas are trendy</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Carole
would like to visit one</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">she
is trying to find</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">an
opera about motorbikes</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Johnnie
suspects</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">that
Carole is going broody<br />he worries that babies</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">would
end his musical career.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
second part of the book is a long ballad-like poem about some
big-hearted ruffian called Bill who goes out for a drink. Things get
much worse, and he eventually heads off from Rochester for London,
leaving the lights of the place behind him. This 14 page poem, </span><i>Among
High Waves, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">has four full page
drawings by Wynford Vaughan Thomas, and there are other illustrations
and photographs by the author spread through the book. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">On
the whole, this book shows evidence of its 27 years in the making (as
stated on the back cover), while the title itself contributes to the
impression that Kane is the mischief maker in the pack, not your
product of C W courses and what have you. He's Medway's
Mephistopheles!</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-style: normal;">Richard
Thomas' The Strangest Thankyou </span></b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">is
a simple book of collected up poems, many of which have had outings
in magazines, the old style format of a standard first collection.
They are good poems. A lack of consecutiveness in the poems can seem
a problem today, when we are trying so hard to turn poetry into books
that will appeal to general readers. We have themes, sequences,
objectives. The best of one's pieces to date including those
published in good magazines, can only be a start. Add to this
the wide range of styles offered by this poet and the confusion
deepens. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Still,
Richard Thomas can produce a poem, and I liked many of the individual
poems. </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Cézanne
and his critics:</span></i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">and
I can hear Cézanne.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">rolling
in his grave with laughter,</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">yelling,</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">'That'll
show the bastards. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Or
in </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Life as a Poem</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
:</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Sometimes
writing poetry is hard, </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I
go to grab it but it's gone. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">There
is good control of language, there is facility and exactness, but the
shadow of the CW degree hangs over it, with some poems under
suspicion of being exercises and just too many wares laid out. There
is plenty of evidence that Richard Thomas can write, but I look for
more than evidence that someone can write in a book nowadays. I look
for structure. And this is why I prefer the term </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">book</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
to the term </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">collection</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-style: normal;">Unexplored
territory, </span></b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">an
anthology, contains poems which are included in the other books
above. It also contains fiction. It is a lively, enthusiastic and
personal presentation of writers with some connection to Cultured
Llama or known to the editor. It has a slight balance in favour of
women, and indeed everyone knows there are more good women poets
around who have not been picked up by any establishment presses,
than there are men. And the contributors are not all from London and
suburbs (I see Rosemary McLeish who was living in Glasgow not so long
ago though she may have moved on.) </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
book is well designed and produced and has a nice cover illustration. It ought to sell well around the Medway, in London and further afield.</span></span></div>
<div align="RIGHT" class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-67955510046158310952013-05-26T17:00:00.000-07:002013-05-26T17:06:10.963-07:00Squeaky Clean Presses<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Wonderland, by Fiona
Sinclair. Indigo Dreams</b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Everything I thought
I knew, by Jo Gibson. Calder Wood Press</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>The Year's Six
Seasons, by Colin Will. Calder Wood Press.</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Indigo
Dreams</b>, the poetry press run by Ronnie Goodyer is one of those
smaller presses that comes out squeaky clean and with flags flying as
against the vicissitudes and cutbacks affecting the higher profile
poetry presses. Ronnie has an impressive backlist and is still
introducing poets and printing second and in this case third
collections by very good poets who are never described as “emerging”
by the establishment, yet are able to develop their poetry and
readerships helped by such presses as this one.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Wonderland</b> is a catalogue of present day and largely urban
incidents with close observation transformed into confident and
sophisticated verse. All in an informal and eloquent post-beat style
(no villanelles, no pentameters, no end rhymes), the style is
cumulative and adds up to a very coherent book.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The blurb says Fiona Sinclair likes handbags, old movies and Fred
Astaire – subjects that instantly bring to mind Deborah
Tyler-Bennett, and there are touches of these subjects from the first
poem on, but the people here are more everyday, confronted in their
ordinary lives. In <i>Time Traveller </i><span style="font-style: normal;">:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The girl on the Underground is a sartorial time traveller</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
….</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
yet there are no Sid James remarks from the suited men.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>Fear
of Letter Boxes</i> will strike chords with anyone who has had
problems via the post ( and who hasn't?)
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Sundays, strikes and snow, she is a school kid</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
whose bully has been excluded fro a few days.”</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Among
these perceptive small subjects, there are poems about jumble sales,
lucky winnings on the horses, and also some very moving ones, such as
<i>Inherited Friend:</i></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">until her </span><i>I don't want to
be involved anymore</i></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">despite mother's boozy begging
calls</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
….</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and when she departed</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the little dog smelt foppily of Chanel No.5
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Then there's <i>The Decorators have left for good</i> which is both
feminist and touching:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
until at 50, she finds that her body has deducted every month</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
from the allocation of fecundity she thought infinite,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
so Roberta and Oliver will always be fiction.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Many excellent and interesting poems in here, and they do translate
an ordinary urban peopled world into a wonderland. Good title.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Another indefatigable small press, though not confined to poetry,
is <b>Calder Wood Press</b>. Colin Will, the publisher, takes an
interest in local poets. Jo Gibson, author of a new pamphlet<b>
Everything I Thought I Knew,</b> was a founder member of Dunbar
Writers Group and has had poems published in Scottish
magazines. The language of her poetry is classically English.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The poems here are full of relationships: I and you, giving relevant
detail without fully explaining the people. There are vignettes, as
here, in <i>Sitting</i> :</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
You in your chair where, head bowed,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
hair falls down while a waterfall</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
of words pitter-patter.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Me in my chair where, heavy-browed</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
frowns crumble while an ancient wall</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
of absurd resistance is un-wrought.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Many of the poems work by contrasts and similes, as in <i>Lost </i>:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
as if I'll find you between the words</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
as if failure is a 'full stop'</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
...</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
as if our hopefulness is a rope</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
our fate a cliff face</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Nothing is over-ambitious and everything works in these poems, and a
40 page pamphlet is a good way to present them.<br />
Calder Wood
Press allows strong participation by authors in the design of books.
In this case the cover illustration, being a collage of family
photos, seems to be the result of this participation, and to my mind,
it is rather a mismatch to the book. Although very likely inspired by
family, there is little explicitly about family in the text of the
book. If anything this implies a lack of a wish on the poet's part to
take poetry further afield.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Apart from this niggle, it's a nicely turned out pamphlet, well
produced internally.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
other new poetry item from Calder Wood Press is Colin Will's own
booklet <span style="font-style: normal;"><b>The Year's Six Seasons.
</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;">It is an extra to his
full books (from red Squirrel and diehard). </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">It has an an agenda. The poems are
local to his area, Dunbar, and it is intended for local sales. I'm
all in favour of this approach to publication, books designed for
readers. The poem are all vintage Colin Will, though all previously
unpublished. Knowing Colin as I do, I see personal stories in some of
them: the untitled </span><i>I thought the sea would be...</i><span style="font-style: normal;">refers
to his “retirement” move to Dunbar and his increasing busyness in
poetry, gardening, family and other interests.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
…
<span style="font-style: normal;">I thought the sea would be</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">a place to reflect,</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">and it is, but so much to do</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">leaves little time for quietness,</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">no space for silence.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">I thought the sea would be</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">different from the place
I left,</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">and it is, but hills and wood</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">are not too far for when I need
them,</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">and friends are close.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Although
not directly in Colin's usual style, this is a superb poem and my
favourite. Nearly all the poems rely on a scholarly kind of
description, as in this gardening poem, </span><i>Adam's Way</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Straggly stems of goatsbeard</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">push between the cultivated
flowers,</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">and self-sown foxgloves</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">erupt their surprising spires</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">in places that I didn't choose.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
… <span style="font-style: normal;">I pull out</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">only what I don't find interesting,</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">and welcome strangers</span></div>
<ul>
<li><div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Herb Robert poppies, melon,
toadflax –</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">not weeds, just bright-faced
flowers.</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
cover is a photograph of Dunbar, and the title recalls the poet's
earlier title </span><i>Seven Senses.</i></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-55633643445873555042013-05-26T14:55:00.002-07:002013-05-26T15:08:05.466-07:00Poet to Poet: New York, South Wales<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>The Holy Place</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
by John Dotson and Caroline Gill,</span> is published in Wales and
New York as part of the Poet to Poet project showcasing 2 poets in a
single volume, one American and one from UK. I guess they could
equally have done New York and Wales. There are five of these volumes
so far. There is no suggestion of the poets actually
collaborating, and one has to work hard to suss out the links between
these two particular poets.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Caroline Gill</b>'s
poems form the second half of the book. They are a first collection,
apparently all previously published in magazines etc. They are well
written in a rhythmic, substantial way, rhyme coming more often than
not, the language well handled and the subjects direct. There's a
sense of the sea and the outdoor world. It's all like a lovely long
outdoor walk.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I would like to
single out the way she uses Scottish vocabulary so effectively in a
poem called <i>The Ceilidh Place, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">which
gives a very strong impression of storytelling on Skye. The well
known Ceilidh Place is in Ullapool, on the north west coast opposite
Skye, but we can listen to the stories anywhere with lines like
these:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the crofter enters his neighbour's parlour,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
rests on the settle while divots smoulder:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
a plaintive skirl fills the room with stories.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Mainly it is the Welsh seaboard that holds central stage, but
there are also poems about Norfolk and Cornwall and one set in Rome.</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The final poem, </span><i>Velvet
Shadows in Venice</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, neatly
compares Ruskin's discussion with Canaletto's painting, a twist which
makes it something more than a mere ekphrastic poem:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
John Ruskin felt that Venice was a clasp</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
of gold to keep the sphere of earth intact:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
but Canaletto made his viewers gasp</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Complex but clear, Caroline Gill's writing is never wrongfooted.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">If the title from</span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>
John Dotson</b></span><span style="font-style: normal;">'s work, </span><i>The
Holy Place</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, applies to
Caroline's poems it must be in this sense of the love of being
outdoors. What do these two poets give to each other? On the face of
it, you might well ask if there is any reason not to divide this book
in half, which would be a pity as it is a very nice little book. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The aim appears to be to promote the poets to each other's poetry
community, a sort of cultural exchange perhaps. It may be wrong
to look for parallels between the two poets, yes one does so automatically, as when
two poets are placed together in a poetry reading.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
After all, they share the book title. Caroline's poems are
landscape and seascape poems rather than nature poems, and while she
says she is a Christian in her author's notes, there is no hint of
another world or of secondary meanings in any of her poems.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The poems here by Dotson are not previously published, which tends
to make them a sequence rather than a collection, though the poems
are variously dated, the earliest 1993 . The title poem is so minimal
I had to check it was not a epigraph. It goes:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the holy place</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
is secret</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
because it is</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
so close</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
His
other poems are also sparse, in a wholly American idiom. They appear
to be about “self”, something that doesn't worry Caroline Gill.
Is this yet another take on religion? Dotson thinks that self is holy
and he is looking for it in his observations of the world, the stars,
the kitchen –</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
there are the mixing bowls</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
there the saucers</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and pain is only what</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
falls through the drainer</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
into thin air
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>Kitchen</i></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
when all of a sudden</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
you know what</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
you cannot know</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
is what</div>
you cannot<br />
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">doubt </span><i> </i>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>How do you look</i></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Dotson's longest poem here is <i>Trapezium</i> in which he reflects
on Ferlighetti's 'poet like an acrobat' – a well enough known poem
but I felt it should have been acknowledged. It's still in those
short, dry, spare and sometimes despondent lines:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and what was the truth</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
of that curse was</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
there was no curse</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So
I'm left reading a poet I wouldn't have found just now if I hadn't
read Caroline Gill, while Dotson's poetry circle will read Caroline
Gill whom they would not very likely have come across either. Perhaps
that's the point of it. Perhaps other groupings in the new series
work better, such as <i>Nightwatch</i> by Aeronwy Thomas and Maria
Mazziotti Gillan. (Poor Aeronwy, she's almost always referred to as
Aeronwy-Thomas-Dylan-Thomas'-daughter.)
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Or <i>First and Last Things</i> by JC Evans (no relation) and
Annabelle Mosley.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I'm puzzled. I like both poets' work, especially Caroline's but then
she is closer to me, what with our South Wales connections and indeed
the same university course, which totally irrelevantly was Classics
in Newcastle, in the same building where Bill Herbert now teaches
poetry and creative writing. Or is this totally irrelevant? A poet of
similar background, the same education, the same gender, as against a
guy from New York with a much different history? Maybe we all need to
move beyond our comfort zones.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-30645670134897479342013-03-08T02:50:00.000-08:002013-03-14T00:31:23.458-07:00Stewed Rhubarb<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1362737597316_5567">
Harry Giles. Visa Wedding. Stewed Rhubarb.</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1362737597316_5573">
Jenny Lindsay. The Eejit Pit. Stewed Rhubarb.</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1362737597316_5570">
Tracey S. Rosenberg. Lipstick is Always a Plus. Stewed Rhubarb.</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1362737597316_5571">
Katherine McMahon. Treasure in the History of Things. Stewed Rhubarb.</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1362737597316_5576">
R. McCrum. The Glassblower Dances. Stewed Rhubarb.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1362737597316_5577">
Hurray for Stewed Rhubarb. It is what the Edinburgh poetry scene has been needing. Far more natural for such ebullient writers to publish these fresh and unstuffy books in a world increasingly peopled with poets, than to wait humbly for an old-fashioned establishment to come along, publish them, fund them and praise them, yes and edit, shape and sanitise them. <br />
<br />
They have twigged they could wait forever, and they have got on with it. This is the sort of breakthrough poetry needs.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1362737597316_5578">
When people ask me what the difference is between performance poetry and page poetry, I am nowadays inclined to say it is age. Just as young people have been squeezed out of jobs amd housing by a greedy, short sighted and selfish senior population, so new writers now find themselves high and dry. Older and arguably duller writers have taken all the positions and are hanging onto their ascendancy grimly. University schools expect you to fork up to go on their creative writing programmes, from which wealthy graduates will continue to be the favourites for the tiny traditional extablishment sector. This situation, which has changed so much in a generation, is changing more and more, and what with the internet, youtube, and the ease of book production (with some savvy and a little money), new poets, encouraged by their peers in city groups, have begun to find ways of getting through.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
The best performance poetry and the best page poetry are the same animal. Page poetry can be more serious, reflective and yes, boring. Performance poetry can be nothing but a string of jokes. But get the balance right, and a good page poem can be performed to an audience that will not go to sleep, while a good performance poem will shine on any page.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
So here we are. Five smashing pamphlets, all beautiful and freshly designed. (Who's the main designer? It doesn't say, but it might be James T Harding.) These booklets have <i>oomph</i> as objects, you enjoy the handling of them before you get down to the poems. They are not many pages long, easy to read, light to handle, and cheap. They should sell well and race up the pamphlet stakes. And as these are all 2012 dates, I expect more in 2013.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
I believe they are all first books apart from that by <b>Jenny Lindsay.</b> Her experience of previous publication has undoubtedly helped her select these poems of confidence and substance. She can be expansive or minial, cheerful and funny, or less cheerful but still funny <i>(The Truth)</i></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
You left me for the world.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
What competition.<br />
I miss your socks.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
Jenny Linsdsay loves writing about people. She quoets Adrian Mitchell: 'Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores people', though in that poem, <i>Mirror</i>, she doesn't write about people. She does so in <i>Things you Leave Behind, I Promise I Will Not fall in Love With You</i>, and other poems, and she is very good at shining a wordy light on relationships. She is good at writing in Scots, but here does so only in the last wee poem, <i>The Eejit Pit,</i> which is also the title poem.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
Many of <b>Harry Giles'</b> poems depend on wit, as in the sermon about the problems love causes in the world. There is a subject theme of weddings and twosomes, as in <i>Vows: </i></div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
I will obey you whenever</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
it accords with my wishes</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
and further down the same poem, hitting hard for so many young couples:</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
for better for worse</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
in good times and in bad</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
whether we see the inevitable collapse of globalised late capitalism</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
or continue to live in a world characterised by the essential conflict </div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
between capital and labour...</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
and of course the title poems, which have a Scottish-American slant.</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
The two 'bookend' poems are in Scots. The last poem, <i>Brave</i>, turns into a formidable rant about the Scotland of youth in cities. There might be a slight reflection on Tom Leonard's 'unacknowledged thingummybobs' in this line, but it's a good line anyway:</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
Acaus<var id="yiv2144928358yui-ie-cursor"></var>e fur aw that wur aw Jock Tamson's etcetera, are we tho? Eh?</div>
<div class="yiv2144928358ms__id2734" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div class="yiv2144928358ms__id2734" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
Well, look out for Harry Giles.<br />
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Tracey S.
Rosenberg</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">'s pamphlet contains
more conventional poems than the others, more poems of a style one
might find in standard poetry books or magazines. This is probably
because a</span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
good number of these poems have been previously published. </span></span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">There's
</span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Couples</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
there's </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Canyon
Conversation</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">, and
there's the neatly observed </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Bookseller
Love, </span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">though
I'd like to put out an incidental plea to writers to abandon the
hoary cliche of dusty tomes. In this poem we have </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">soft
with</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">dust, second-hand
soot</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
and </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">a dusty coat.</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
Apart from this, I love the way the books come first:</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
they look at the book before they look at me.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">A
prevalent subject again is couples and dating, bringing this book
firmly into line with the Stewed Rhubarb ethos. There's a good line
in stories, well told, and a </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Because</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
poem. </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Time
Lord's Job Advertisement</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
swipes at the glamour lead in so many films, being delightfully
condescending and anti-feminist:</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
After the danger,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I can explain their importance,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and pat you on the shoulder if you cry again.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This is all good work from a determined writer.</div>
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
</div>
<div style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: times new roman, new york, times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal;">
<b>Katherine McMahon's</b> book contains personal poems, many about relationships, many unfeignedly lesbian. They are well crafted and a bit less expansive than some of the more obviously performance poetry in the other books. McMahon's poems are never comic, always particular to relationships, almost introspective. The one I liked most, <i>Labyrinth,</i> is about a relationship with a man, almsot certainly her father, as she hopes to communicate with him on different levels, drives home with him for Christmas, remembers the names of birds. When she tries to broach her itnerest in poetry he plays her an old vinyl record of John Cooper Clark. I liked that touch (if it didn't happen, it should have). McMahon explains in the final poem that the performance poetry scene enables her to communicate in a way she cannot otherwise experience. </div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
This booklet has the additional feature of CD fixed in the back cover, with the poems read with musical breaks, in the same order as they are printed . When CDs first started to be put into books this sounded like a great idea (and a cheap one for publishers) but I'm not sure that in these days of youtube and so many clips of poets reading on the internet, it is really necessary. A reader is going to enjoy these poems on the page, but it is not easy to imagine her sitting down to listen to a CD of the selection right through. It may be an idea that has come and gone, and perhaps CDs (with or without a word sheet) would be better sold separately for a different purpose from books.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Which brings us to Ms <b>R McCrum</b>, undoubtedly one of the forces behind this group. <i>The Glassblower Dances,</i> the title poem of three pages, comes at the end of the book.. In fact this book almost repays reading from back to front, like a magazine. McCrum's language is powerfully English. Her lines have splendid vowel sounds that are foreign to most writers in Scotland, and the book stands out for that sound in the language. Not only does she state her various cases and tell her stories in such well chosen words, but the sense that this is the perfect way to say something is never far off as you read her poems. This kind of English has sometimes been unpopular in Scotlnad because certain Scots poets emulated it and made it sound false, or they thought it was not suitably Scottish, or they just couldn't hear the vowel sounds at all. But these attitudes are dying out, thankfully, and in any case the diction and sounds suit this poet's work so excatly that no one could find fault with it.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
There's something else about these publications. This is not just a group of performance poets who have managed to publish pamhphlets rather wel;l. If you look at them carefully, you will see a new fashion of poetry coming out of them, a city-based fashion, open about relationships and difficulties, humorous, sardonic and straightforward. Unimpressed with the past, the establishment and the universities, it is almost a movement, a movement which is new but has an affinity with the American beats.</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
Edinburgh's young city poets have done very, very well to produce these pamphlets.<var id="yiv2144928358yui-ie-cursor"></var></div>
<div>
</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1362737597316_5581">
</div>
<div id="yui_3_7_2_1_1362737597316_5580">
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-83670026287500548262013-03-05T04:27:00.002-08:002013-05-26T15:07:19.599-07:00Poet to Poet: Palestine to Scotland<br />
Iyad Hayatleh and Tessa Ransford. A Rug of a Thousand Colours: Poems inspired by the Five Pillars of Islam by two contemporary Scottish writers each also translating the other. Luath Press.<br />
<br />
A Rug of a Thousand Colours is a brave and unusual book. Both these poets benefit by collaboration in terms of their writing work. The history of the two poets' association is also of some relevance. Since founding the Scottish Poetry Library in the early 1980s, Tessa Ransford has been a well known figure in Scotland. She spent her childhood in India, a point that is relevant to her strong sympathy for others whose lives have moved them around the world. Iyad Hayatleh came to Scotland from Palestine with his wife and children as a refugee, and first met Tessa Ransford back in those early days through PEN and its efforts to help writer refugees. In due course Iyad and family received permission to remain in Glagow and became British citizens. Iyad has contributed considerably to the poetry community in Glasgow, and has wirtten and published many poems, often with Tessa's translations, in Scotland, while he is active in Arabic on the internet.<br />
<br />
Tessa and Iyad have produced this interesting book as a result of that friendship.<br />
<br />
The core of the book is the title sequence, Five Pillars of Islam.<br />
<br />
With the Arabic language, most Scottish readers need to be fully guided by the translator. They do not have that option of a quick glance at the words opposite in a European language, that may make sense to them. So the translator's work is more important. Tessa's work has always displayed an interest in theological explorations, and explorations of ways of life and how they relate to belief. Ransford gives an assured and convincing version of this central poem. I would say it presents Mohammed as a god not unlike the Christian god, along with the writer's personal sense of struggle and loss, and a sense of dependence on the god among the difficulties of human life.<br />
<br />
Because I don't have Arabic, I have had to depend entirely on the translatin to understand Iyad's poems, though I have on occasion heard him reading poems very impressively in Arabic. I know the translations are reliable and good, because of the collaboration and because of the introduction in the book. However it occurs to me that here is one advantage of the internet over print. One can call up cheap and instant if faintly unreliable translations for any piece of work one is reading there.<br />
<br />
The Five Pillars sequence is interspersed with several poems by Tessa Ransford. Hayatleh's Salah (Prayer) discusses the chanting of the prayer in his baby's ear, this baby born in Glasgow:<br />
<br />
and an astonished midwive with open mouth gasps<br />
What on earth are they doing here?<br />
What is he mumbling in the baby's ear?<br />
<br />
is followed by Prayer Sequence by Tessa Ransford, which is both Christian and allusive: to Christianity: to Milton, to a childhood hymn (Now the day is over) , and shows, in contrast to the Islamic sequence, how the Christian will have more difficulty abdicating responsibility to the god.<br />
<br />
I have prayed in panic to the gods of chance<br />
let it not happen<br />
<br />
In Hajj (Pilgrimage) Hayatleh considers the myths of the history of Islam -- some coinciding with Old Testament stories -- and places himself among the refugees who most need mercy.<br />
<br />
Ransford's Pilgrimage uses a suitably different interpretation. She compares her own journey through life to that of Chacuer's Canterbury Pilgrims,<br />
<br />
not sure they want to get to know each other well<br />
but forced to get alogn the road together.<br />
<br />
This is a good, if accidental,, image of the world's religions coexisting.<br />
Throughout the book, Hayatleh's religion comes over as devout and precise, a net of myths and traditions to which he is completely attached. He even states that he had to consider, before agreeing to write these poems, whether from the point of view of his religion they conform to its rules of holiness.<br />
<br />
Ransford's religion is different. Perhaps it should be described as a kind of post-Christianity, tailored to her views and reading of wider texts and interpretations, and essentially personal. Hayatleh does not personalise his Islam, he is a follower, and represents an example of what politicians call the integration of different faiths in a country.<br />
<br />
Both poets present religion as a consolation and a refuge. When things are very difficult it is good to have such a conslation, no doubt, but it may be that this points to the essential difference between the outlook of religious people and of atheists. For the atheist there is nothing but the world and other poeple. For the atheist the world is less self-centred, other people on the journey matter just as much as oneself, one does not have the same sense of specialness (in God's eyes) as individuals. Not only does god not bring the bad things, he does not bring the good things either. We have to recover from our own ills and make our own good, and we cannot abnegate this responsibility.<br />
<br />
However by merely publishing these poems, our poets show they are willing to share with others their most truthful conclusions about the world, the people nearby not just being co-travellers or witnesses, but friends and poet friends. Religion has to justify almsgiving (an atheist would find that concept odd). Both these poets have been generous in giving of their own outlook to others.<br />
<br />
I had intended to review this book alongside another two-poet book Poet to Poet 5: The Holy Place,by John Dotson and Caroline Gill, but I have had so much to say about this book that I will post the reivew of the other book separately, although they make interesting parallels.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-31208723972645541222013-02-11T00:04:00.002-08:002013-02-11T00:06:39.964-08:00Gleaming Cutlery<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Geraldine Monk.
Pendle Witch-Words. Knives Forks And Spoons Press</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Paul Sutton Cabin
Fever. Knives Forks And Spoons Press </b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Stephen Nelson.
Lunar Poems for New Religions. Knives Forks And Spoons Press</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Nicky Mesch. A Cold
Woman. Knives Forks And Spoons Press</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Neat
and uniform books from this catchily-named press. There's clearly an
intention to get down to business: for example, no information on the
authors, although at least Geraldine Monk and Paul Sutton
have done the rounds, Geraldine with well acclaimed books, Paul
Sutton with pamphlets in his native Tyneside. The principal objective
in the case of all these authors is to deliver the texts, which have
contributions to make to the poetry scene. There's a sense of strong
content in all of them.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Geraldine
Monk</b>'s poetry about the Pendle witches of Lancaster is well
known. Her previous book <i>Interregnum</i> (Creation Books 1994) was
well researched, and while mainly concerned with the story of the
Pendle witches it also referred to the Quakers' founder George Fox,
to Gerald Manley Hopkins and the Birmingham Six. With the 400<sup>th</sup>
anniversary of these infamous events, and with <i>Interregnum</i> out
of print, in the context of better historical research and the
misiniformation generally offered by the tourist industry, Pendle
Witch-Words comes as a timely re-working of the witches' poems.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Monk
now gives words to the country characters caught up in the events.
These were ordinary lower-class victims of the hysterical reactions
of the time. Words being the essence of the accusations, these poems
are both sympathetic and informative. Not many poets could even
attempt this subject with any hope of success, but Geraldine Monk's
poems are fair, illuminating, and respectful and bring a sort of
peace to these dreadful events of history. Her unassuming poems in
such authentic voices are a major achievement.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Paul
Sutton</b> has been an active poet on Tyneside for a long time, and
well deserves for his poems to be available in book form. These poems
are collected from a number of booklets including some from the
Knives Forks and Spoons Press itself.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Described by Luke Kennard as “the antidote to the writing workshop”
Sutton is a poet of protest and performance, a justifiably aggressive
poet of social and sometimes poetry politics – as in <i>The Death
of the Poet,</i> where certain high-profile poetry characters are
summarily dealt with in a quick scuffle after which the poet is</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Dragged back,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
last seen in Bedford, a traveller's “camp”,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
then traded on between rival gangs.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In
the following poem, a long sequence really laying into the
'bourgeous' poetry of residencies etc, he counterpoints descriptions
of Amalfi with powerful satire on the system:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Morning like a slap. Circulate at breakfast, distribute copies,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Disappear.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My first poem is an utter joke.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In
another section:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Angrily he accepts a copy of my Amalfi poem, now translated into
Italian.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In
the title poem <i>Cabin Fever</i>, with its hints of a sort of poetry
busking life,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Do you see me from the top deck?</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I dread the language-school trash,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
shoplifting gangs</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
he
hits a splendid whammy at the too-bourgeois audience:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“Thanks.
I did enjoy this, but, well, I just want to ask</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
what
language is it? I do like a raw yeasty tang of</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
vernacular,
and think that some rap is almost</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
poetry...”</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I've
been trying to think of the right term for Sutton's poetry, the
opposite of bourgeois, not working class, not lower class... This is
what people write when they are not grantsucking.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Stephen Nelson
</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">writes in Scots of varying
intensity, and in English. Some of his Scots is much the same as
conversational English tarted up with the odd </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">fae</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">wis</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">.
Some is in stronger Scots.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> It
is brave of any English publisher to publish poetry in Scots.
Actually it is very difficult to get it published in Scotland at the
moment. What with MacDiarmid and his followers having somewhat
receded into history and the demands on present day editors of
including Gaelic, Scots has been squeezed a good deal. Scots is very
complex and beset by dialect, so English publishers will probably
have to take Scots on trust from any poet who approaches them. One
wants to know what kind of Scots each poet writes. Nelson's is
central belt Scots, certainly, Glasgow and Edinburgh urban Scots, at
time very reminiscent of the late Sandie Craigie, the
Edinburgh/Glasgow performance poet:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> &
the wirld birls roon again</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> mixin
sea an sky an air</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> fur
aw time ir wan time...</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> This
is the longest of the four books. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Look
Up</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">, the main sequence,
to me reads like a story, rather than a narrative poem. Most
narrative poems are supported by a formal structure or metre that
gives them that difference of intention from a story. The
conversational tone here sets the scene for a long soliloquy about
everything and nothing, a perfectly suitable subject for a poem, as
told in a pub perhaps, or with one or two listeners in a kitchen,
while working through to end on the approved lines about love of
country and the Scottish coast.</span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Crescent</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
begins with almost blank pages and moves on to long narrow poems,
punctuated by prose poems which I like better. I'm not convinced
Nelson is a master of placing line breaks. He often has recourse to
patterns which do the job of line breaking, however the strength of
his writing shows up better in the prose pieces. This poet has plenty
to say, and his short lines don't entirely match his sense of
direction and conclusion. It is true we can write about worlds
without direction and conclusion (The Waste Land perhaps) but to
follow any philosophy of deconstruction seems a little at odds with
the sci-fi references of the title </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Lunar
Poems for New Religions </span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and the sections </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The Moon
from my Windowless Heart</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
and </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Crescent</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> There
are six prose poems in this section and to me they are the best
things in the book. Again they remind me of Sandie Craigie, and
that's a compliment. The end of the last of these prose poems
possibly sums up the whole book:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> ...a
comedy of in betweens or rebellion in a cup. How tired I am of
inarticulate drunks </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> waving banners of peace over fallen women! I've
pledged my allegiance to space travel </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> and flightless birds, less a
surrender of will than a submission to the inchoate.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Nicky Mesch</b><span style="font-weight: normal;">'s
</span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Cold Woman</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
is really an ice woman. A couple of minimalist poems about early
girlhood precede a substantial poem </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">On
the Lake</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">, which has a
distinct fable-like story to it,with plenty of detail of a
lake/island and a woodsman with dogs. Cold wild country, if it says
where it is I've missed it – could be Canada. Then comes </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Night of the Ball</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">, a
similarly styled six page poem, then </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Ma's
Tale</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">, then </span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Blood
Moon</span></i><span style="font-weight: normal;">, then an Epilogue
of six minimal lines </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;"> There are a lot of the elements of a novel
here. It's all seen through a very chill glass and includes the
maturing of the girl, sex, having babies, and various adventures and
misadventures, against a strong background of men, forests, dogs and
horses in a harsh, inhospitable world. It is very much a picture of
womanhood from a male point of view. And this may have some historical
value, against the contemporary background of gender experiences
merging into each other more and more. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-23076962319869714162013-02-07T16:07:00.001-08:002013-02-07T16:07:24.005-08:00A Poem and its Editors
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Kenneth Steven. A
Song Among the Stones. Polygon.</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This
unusual story in verse deals with the little known (in UK) Papars, an
early sect of Christian monks who sailed the northern seas around the
6<sup>th</sup> century. It is primarily about the sea and its moods,
its way of taking over the lives of primitive sailors and of the
sailors' need for landfall.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Clearly I intend to praise this work, because I liked it enough to
publish it in its entirety in Poetry Scotland (Issue 68, 2010). This
previous publication is acknowledged, along with its original
commissioning for BBC3.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Since it is basically the same work I saw and liked after first
seeing it in typescript, and it has now benefited from in-house
editing at Polygon, I am going to say a little about editing.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I don't usually edit the poems I select for Poetry Scotland. Poems
are expected to arrive complete from the hand of the poet. Though one
may see requirements, for competitions, that poems should be their
writer's unaided work, this would normally go without saying.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A poem that reaches a magazine editor in less than finished state
would not be acceptable, except that people cannot always see whether
their work is finished or not. So I do sometimes suggest alterations,
if there are obvious improvements and I know the poet concerned will
accept my suggestions constructively.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In the case of a confident and experienced writer like Kenneth
Steven, my job would be only to arrange the poem on the page. This
we did over a four-page single-sheet issue. Kenneth was sent a proof
and he probably made one or two tiny amendments as he saw the poem's
layout, and small queries may have arisen between us. I cannot
remember.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In many ways it was easier to see the structure of this poem spread
across the broadsheet pages than it is in this very attractive little
book, where page-turning separates parts of the poem from one
another, so that perhaps the readers will be at sea, along with the
monks of the story, until the conclusion is reached. And perhaps
that's appropriate.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Reading through the text of this book and pencilling the changes onto
a copy of my version was an exhilarating experience, because much,
much less than I was expecting to see, had been altered. This
confirmed my original feeling that Steven had produced a tight and
unified poem, worthy of publication as it stood.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In the 375 line poem, barely a dozen lines have been altered, mostly
in very minor ways, and another half dozen lines deleted or
abbreviated. The punctuation, utterly minimal, has not been changed
in substance or detail.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The revision has been done with a careful eye. Pearls of rain become
glistenings of rain, presumably because they weren't actual pearls,
and the writing of the whole piece is descriptive, exact and sparse.
The monk who stays solitary, on the rock, only needs to explain in
one statement:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I won't go with you. Tell them I stayed</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
that I went further north, to what</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I cannot know.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
His
earlier line,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I have no choice, I'm going on</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
is deleted.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Elsewhere,
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the woods splayed with yellow patches, thatched with birdsong,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
(a
line very typical of Kenneth Steven's nature poems) is reduced to</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the woods splayed with yellow patches,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
birdsong</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
–
no doubt suggested because the poem achieves its effect without such
extravagance of language in the detail.</div>
Apart from one or two changes of breaks in the lines, that's about
it.
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It is good to see it so little altered, so much the same poem,
because I appreciated the work very much when I published it. I did
not see it as an unfinished draft. I have seen a great deal more of
Kenneth Steven's work over the years, and I am glad this lovely poem
was essentially complete when it first came my way. Polygon's editors
have also passed their test: they have not gratuitously changed this
very capable poet's work. Indeed they have heard the song among the
stones as the poet relayed it to them and to myself and the reader.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The poem has approximately thirty page-length sections, some being
very small page lengths, even a couple of lines or one line in
places, and some being more substantial. It has been turned into a
full book, as justified by the strength of the text, by the addition
of white paper and blank pages that go well with the sense of a
voyage, being lost in the waves. Indeed it is the quality not the
length of a text that makes a book.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Full marks all round.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-45864636549122220552013-01-28T05:52:00.001-08:002013-01-28T05:52:48.481-08:00Unholyland
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Aidan Andrew Dun.
Unholyland. Hesperus Press </b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The title page says
<i>Unholyland: the Rambam.</i>
Hidden in the unlikely garb of a paperback with a black and red cover
reminiscent of a 1970's socialist group report, this is a whole book
in a sequence of modernist sonnets, a love story and a political
story of history and music and young people in the Gaza Strip. It is
a page-turner of a poem, a sustained narrative that stands up to the
best of its kind, which is not a British poem but <i>Eugene Onegin</i>.
The difference is that the plot of <i>Unholyland</i> has no
unkindness except from the political situation, the ongoing flack of
daily warfare.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Aidan Andrew Dun is
known as an extra-establishment (not disestablishment) poet of
considerable power. His previous long poem <i>Vale Royal,</i>
published some fifteen years ago, has been gaining credence and
followers ever since. That poem, in trenchant but enigmatic tercets
covering London and its poets, Keats, Blake, Chatterton etc,
published with an attached CD in the early days of CDs in books,
gave him enough reputation as poet and performer for us to hope for
great things of him. There have been some intermediate books, and now this one, <i>Unholyland.</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The poetry deals
with a gripping story. Despite its small print and its 156 pages
(twelve equal chapters of twenty-two sonnets each) I read it in a
day, though with a poem like this, you have never finished when you
have read it once. The background matter is highly difficult, with
its exposition of Jewish history and its criticism of the manner in
which Palestinian land was taken, the legacy of the revenge against
nazism. There's a delicate balance for young people in these
countries, where Tel Aviv has a youth culture of Palestinian Hiphop
music and rap. After a quiet introduction explaining that his own
grandmother ran a ballet company which she would not take to Israel,
and treating us to the moral tale of a monk who resolved a dispute
between a wedding party and a funeral procession on a bridge, Dun
wades into this difficult setting with a poetic narrative of calm
persuasiveness.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
His young hero Moss
or Moshe who disguises himself to attend a legendary hiphop session
in Palestine, and his friendships on the other side, with the
inevitable attraction to the young woman performer, form the crux of
the story, as the young friends drive about in cars to rendezvous,
and attend an extraordinary youth music rave in an an unidentified
but rather paradisical, Arabian-style underground location. The
scene's very realistic, very druggy. The dangers are real.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This unlikely
scenario is carried off by utter confidence. <i>Vale Royal</i> for
all its flamboyant achievement was a teeny bit showy. In <i>Unholyland</i>,
everything that needs saying – and a lot needs saying – is said
simply and with confidence.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The sonnets connect
a strict rhyme pattern which I believe is Pushkinian, with variable
speech rhythms in often narrow lines, bringing many rhymes very close
together and displaying an exceptional rhyming facility. Rhyming is
something our poets rarely practice, something held to be suitable
for comic or children's poems. Not since Byron have we had a really
pro display. We have one here. With well over two hundred sonnets to
choose from I can give you only fleeting examples. In one sonnet at
random we have ebony and ribbony, outstretched and sandwiched, car
and rapstar, and poison and passion. In another, porcelain and mane,
crash-landing and outstanding, welcome and foursome, immense and
quintessence. It's constant – and as simple as needed whenever. It
is the flexible, simple language, in which the speaker is forever
looking forward, that does it.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Additionally it is
very, very rare to have good rhyme with variable speech rhythms,
rhythms that are almost free verse. Jon Silkin was doing some work on
free verse and metrical verse: he'd have been interested in
<i>Unholyland</i>.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As opposed to the
difficulties of the subject, the narrative is handled directly, with
a wealth of detail enmeshed with the background, cultural references,
and at times skyhigh fun, until the young, Beatrice-like girl figure
meets the hero by pulling him from a burning car. She is a singer at
the huge event. Each of them presents a rap, embedded in the poem,
and at the end their romantic communion is interrupted by violent,
bloody warfare from the skies.<br /> <i>Unholyland</i> is a highly
satisfactory read, perhaps more so to people who read a lot of poetry
and can pick up the parallels and intentions in the art of the longer
poem. But it is also coherent in itself and does not assume
additional knowledge either of history or poetry. The Introduction is
well worth reading but will be skipped by many: the Notes at the end
are dispensable but provide additional information on the music, Goa,
the Rastafarians, and the various political and religious histories.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The poem abounds in
lines memorable in themselves. Balancing the felicitous narrative
ease comes a sense that the poem was difficult to write but has been
written successfully against the odds.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Politically the poem
is interesting because it also seems to give hope to a hopeless
political situation, by its very expression of that hopelessness, its
questioning of it, and by its insistence on facing up to history.
And if this is poetry that might make anything happen, this is not
because it isn't pure poetry, in the sense that it is poetry that
makes its own reality so that the world it is made from is actually
less real than the world of the poem.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Dun's seems to be the
only new poetry from Hesperus Press, which publishes translations and
reissues of standard poets such as Chaucer, Pushkin and Emily Bronte.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-71307104736238175362013-01-28T03:44:00.002-08:002013-01-28T03:44:24.032-08:00Publisher and poet
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Sheila Wakefield.
Limerance. Consett, Co. Durham: Talking Pen.</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It's no secret that
Sheila Wakefield worked in the motor trade before taking an M.A. in
Creative Writing at Northumberland University. Her teachers might
well have been aware she would write poems that worked – no
unexplained rattlings, no missing screws – but could they have
guessed that one day she might turn her pen on them? She does so in
<i>They</i></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
… they want us to
find our voice,</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
but then try to
silence it....</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
they take our
fees, our naivety,<br /> sensitivity, plagiarise our work...</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
have they
forgotten so quickly</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
when they were
just like us?</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Yet there is absolutely
no sense of hostility here. Sheila's work, like herself, is always up
front. With a simple contemporary style and a strong eye, she slams
home her points whatever her subject. <i>Next Door</i> begins with
what sounds like a grumble about neighbours:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
next door she
shouts a lot...</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
next door the
cockerels crow</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
every three
minutes...</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
but swiftly moves to
environmental problems:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
next door mammoth
machines create</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Northumberlandia...</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
next door the
opencast intrudes,</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
twenty-four/seven.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This is a book by an
incisive, practical poet of the free verse school. Not a rhyme in
sight. This is the poet who learned much from James Kirkup (who also
originated in North-East England), and the poet who has published
dozens of other poets in both North-East England and Scotland with
her Red Squirrel press.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The poems are direct
and outspoken, and sometimes not so much cynical as unillusioned. The
poet links to the community in <i>Twelve things I don't want to hear,
After Connie Bensley </i>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
(...You
would like me to 'just look' at a new car...) and <i>38 poems I never
wrote After Linda France.</i></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
As
well as the title poem, also a love poem, there are a couple of
forthright poems about sexual encounters, in both of which a car
features, one more incidentally than the other, and yet another poem
that can only be described as a love poem to a BMW. Or there
again...
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
His cool silver metal</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
cradles a heart of pure platinum, a chassis of steel...</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Child-like,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
a hint of bravado,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
nestling in his catalytic converter.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It is actually quite unusual for today's women poets to write about
their relationships with men.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Physically this is a
neat, cheerfully unassuming pamphlet: red cover, cream paper, not
cramped, and decorated with vaguely blown-up woodcuts. Published by
Talking Pen rather than Sheila Wakefield's own press, <i>Limerance</i>
is entirely readable, satisfying, deserved and dignified.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-75120693995629049422013-01-28T03:37:00.001-08:002013-01-28T03:37:42.285-08:00Friends and Translations
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Arne Rautenberg.
Snapdragon. Translated from the German by Ken Cockburn. </b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Lincoln: Caseroom </b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Gordon Jarvie. La
Baudunais et autre poemes de Bretangne. Traduit de l'anglais (Ecosse)
</b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>par Jean-Yves Le
Disez. Brest: Editions les Hauts-Fonds</b><br /><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There are advantages in
parallel text translations. Firstly, you know the work hasn't been
translated from the Penguin. Secondly, the reader can compare the
texts. A drawback is that you only get half a book. So quite a small
collection or sequence can be presented in the two languages between
the covers of a full book.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Arne Rautenberg and Ken Cockburn's
<i>Snapdragon</i> is one of the prettiest small books I have seen for
a while. Cover designer Jantze Tullett has come up with a repeat and
border pattern with related endpapers that truly welcome you into the
book. It's the work of two poets who have an affinity of writing
style. Sensitive, playful or serious, in Scotland you would say there was an Edwin Morgan influence.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>the bird-clock
sunrise 0.4.30</i> is a good example (Routenberg eschews caps) with a
list of exact timings of different birdsong and whimsical comments as
though by the birds, reminiscent of Richard Price's piece on birds –
another poet who uses similar styles to these. More serious and to
the reader more interesting is the series of double sonnets
describing the author's memories connected with World War II. It is
difficult not to wonder what Germans make of their nazi history. In
these poems the memories have become fragmentary and general. They
dare to be nastier in places:</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
playing football
with / skulls</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Everything fucked.
Then; /A spruced-up, spring-cleaned city.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
textbooks are
burning</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There are wordlist
poems and some one-words poems (with integral titles) which may not
be very suitable for translating. <i>twelve stitches</i> consists of
German compound words which cannot be one-worders in English even
with hyphens, but they do show the German poet's stylistic interests.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There are also quite
a number of exactly page length poems, of six or seven three line
stanzas rather sparse in line length. If I expected to find something
sickening in the war haiku and didn't, I found it here in a revolting
story of a workman who set fire to rabbits. The rest of this series
of poems also deal with tough characters in life. There is <i>Deathwish
Driver </i>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
if you are in
luck I drive by
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and <i>Stockman,</i>
who gets used to his awful smell.<br /><br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
You manage because
your own body</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
simply absorbs the
smell</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
ah! these people live
in different flats, they are subtitled <i>attic floor right, third
floor right</i>, etc. along with the garrulous idiot widow and the
working girl.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My advice to this
poet is, move house.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This is not a
translation of a particular book by Rautenburg but a selection by the
translator. <i>Snapdragon</i> is the translator's title.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The difference
between <i>Snapdragon</i> and <i>La Baudunais </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is
that in the latter the original poems are in English, or, as the
title page puts it, Scottish English. The parallel read is therefore
different. The French verses are the translation.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">It
is interesting to see the phrase “not waving but drowning” make
its way into the French. Of the eleven poems spanning twelve years of
visits to the same area, the farewell poem including this quotation
is easily the shortest. Of the rest, most are mid length, though one
is divided into sections with dates – much like a diary (the first
poem, </span><i>In Brittany</i><span style="font-style: normal;">),
and one is substantially longer </span><i>(The day we saw the
conger)</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. The poems build up to a
good understanding of the host countryside, and there is one poem,</span><i>
Lottery Winner? </i><span style="font-style: normal;">that is very
appealing on the rejection of too many riches, linking into an old
Breton prayer to connect the poem with the area. It is probably my
favourite:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
...I can't sleep in more than one bed</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
or sit in more than one chair</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
at a time...</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I remember the old Breton prayer...</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
...and day by day, a bowl of cider</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and a warm galette. Amen,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
amen to all of that.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
poems are a homage to the area. Even </span><i>Belle</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
a neighbour's dog who sits alone 'like Greyfriars Bobby' desperate
for a greeting from passers by, is part of the village, and the
conger belongs to the waters of Brittany. The last poem, </span><i>Night
Flight,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is wider in geographical
scope as they fly north from Spain into France, but from the plane
the poet is looking out for Brittany and Normandy. There's a real
sense of home. </span>
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
It is good that people who live there can read these poems in French,
thanks to Le Disez' lively and pleasing translations, and a publisher
in Brittany who has done poets and poems justice in an excellently
produced book. The French translations have been given the right hand
pages and strangely they are in a seriffed typeface while the
Scottish poems are done in sans serif which makes them look a little
plainer and the French slightly more decorative. But that doesn't
matter.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Both these books are the result of a productive relationship between
poet friends who are able to meet fairly easily across the linguistic
borders.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-73732569956273796612013-01-20T13:34:00.002-08:002013-01-20T13:34:52.379-08:00Sci Fi Poetry Liftoff
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /><b>Where Rockets
Burn Through: Contemporary science fiction poems from the UK. ed.
Russell Jones. Penned in the Margins £9.99. </b>
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A substantial trade
paperback of 208 pages making a strong bid to take poetry out to the
bigger Science Fiction audience. Unusually, both the Preface and
Essay are well worth reading. Russell Jones' introduction is properly
more practical and about the intention of the book.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In the preface,
Alasdair Gray defines both the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost as
science fiction – an original point indeed – and says we base
today's science fiction on today's scientific view of the world.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Steve Sneyd, the
doyen of Sic Fi poetry when it was a smaller clique comprising
himself, Edwin Morgan and friends, is an inspired choice for the
longish introductory essay, <i>Wormholing into Elsewhere.</i> Sneyd
really knows his stuff. He has been more accustomed to the small
press, sometimes the very small press, as he churned out leaflets and
booklets published from his home in Huddersfield, in a manner
reminiscent of Sheena Blackhall's activity in Aberdeen. Over the
decades it is a sure way of becoming known. Sneyd has read everything
relevant and pulls great fish out of the water. “Our new mythology
is science fiction,” he quotes from Henigan. He considers the
changing boundaries of Science Fiction, places it has already been,
unbeknownst to ordinary poets, places it might end up.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
With titling by Edwin
Morgan running through the book, Morgan and Sneyd lead a wide range
of contributors, all poets to professional standards, with a high
proportion of previously published poems, but in books or journals
that would probably not reach the SF readership.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The proportion of
women contributors to men is smaller than one usually sees in current
anthologies, though Pippa Goldschmidt, Kona Macphee, Claire Askew and
others hold their own. Another noticeable feature is the strong
Scottish contingent, which must reflect an editorial ear to the
northern ground. There are even some nice pieces in Scots (<i>Dr Wha</i>
and <i>Intae the Ooter</i>) from widely known novelist James
Robertson, welcome because Scots is rarely seen in publications aimed
at the whole UK.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Some of the poems
are substantial and very well researched – correct detail being
essential – e.g. the collaborative sequence <i>Lost Worlds</i> by
Jane McKie, Andrew C Ferguson and Andrew J Wilson.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
An important strand
in such a book is poems which link SF imagination and astronomical
research with more immediate human concerns or world political
problems. Pippa Goldschmidt's<i> From the Unofficial History of the
European Southern Observatory in Chile</i> does this very well.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Steve Sneyd's special
personal language in his poems is worth clocking if you have not come
across it before (perhaps you should have done). We have been happy
to print poems from him in Poetry Scotland several times.
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There are very many
witty poems here, e.g. Kirston Irving's <i>Supper</i> – where</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
a boat of lush
green paper on the plate
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
transposes to<br />
aboard: a flash of green peppering the palate</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
and so on.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
There is also good
lyrical poetry, but wit rides stronger in the collection as a whole.</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This book should be
appreciated by any SF reader whether previously familiar with poetry
or not (meaning usually not). Like Red Squirrel's successful <i>Split
Screen</i> it reaches out to further audiences. An achievement and a
milestone. We hope to see it prove poetry books can sell.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-85476989839717181282013-01-20T13:33:00.001-08:002013-01-20T13:33:09.301-08:00Eyewear Grows Up
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Dangerous Cake.
Elspeth Smith</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Eighteen poems.
Simon Jarvis.</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>both Eyewear
Publishing, London, 2012.</b></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Hardbacks
with strong coloured covers, very nicely bound, good sized, and quite
a lot of poetry in them, £12.99 each, these come a little above the
usual cost of new contemporary poetry. They are very welcome both
from a production point of view and by their widening of the London
poetry perspective. Most of the poems are previously published,
mainly in Canadian, American and North West England journals, which
helps a new publisher by backing up his choices.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Simon Jarvis' book carries longer, chunkier poems such as are not
always favoured by book publishers, so is far more substantial than
the title <i>Eighteen Poems</i> suggests. Two of the poems indeed
reach twelve pages without by any means dripping down the middle of
the page. They're not narrative either, but reflective or
philosophical, enjoying and filling their space with a width of
imagination and memory. Another substantial poem, <i>Persephone</i>,
is an essay in rhythm and meter and mostly in dactyls – it's
catching.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Elspeth Smith's poems in <i>Dangerous Cakes</i> are generally much
shorter. And what does the title mean? There are a number of domestic
subjects, with titles like <i>Parties, Tea</i> – ah yes it is the
final line in <i>Sweet Things</i>. The art of the ordinary, perhaps.
<br /> Elspeth Smith lives in Huddersfield, while Simon Jarvis is now
a professor of Poetry at Cambridge. I have one whimsical question.
Does this publisher oblige his authors to be photographed in specs?
These two seem to be wearing identical pairs.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Encouraging and adventurous publishing by Todd Swift of the Eyewear
website. More in the pipeline, I've heard.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4704946251256462938.post-38000665431814911042013-01-20T13:30:00.000-08:002013-01-20T13:30:52.552-08:00How Renga Happen
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>How Ripples Happen.
Larry Butler and Ratnadevi. Playspace Publications, 14 Garrioch
Drive, Glasgow G20 8RS, £5</b></div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
These
nijuuin and ather renga are beautifully written and very well
presented in a simple booklet, all of landscape/place in the west of
Scotland. They make you want to visit Cuil in Ardnamurchan,
Auchinrowan on Arran, and Culzean Castle, Ayr, far more effectively
than the tourists board can manage. But they also bring the visits to
you.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
My favourite is the shorter iisute renga, <i>back to back</i>, made
at Culzean Castle, a most extraordinary place on a cliff above sea,
with a spacious semi-formal garden behind.
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Even the difficulty of access is part of the picture:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
absorbed writing this</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
we miss the last bus – too dark</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
now to walk the road</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
resting back to back we wait</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
for a friend to take us home.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
other two renga are equally fine, both winter stops over Christmas to
New Year in successive years, quiet reflective times away from the
crowds. <i>more of the same</i> (at Cuil), and <i>how ripples happen</i>
(at Auchinrowan). Despite their similar wintry dates, in consecutive
years, they are clearly distinguished experiences one from the other.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
A
mini renga, <i>On the Way to Manchester,</i> on the Pennine Express,
is placed between these two winter poems, and noticeably engages more
with the world:</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
no Foot and Mouth here –</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
war with Afghanistan on the front page,</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
we move to a warmer compartment.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Designed
with a pleasing colour illustration by Ratnavdevi including winter
pine trees and Buddhas, this makes a very acceptable souvenir of any
of the locations, or a small present.</div>
<div class="western" style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15194694103069489211noreply@blogger.com0