Moniza Alvi in this week's TLS

Just a snippet of news in that I've another review in the TLS this week, following on from last week's 'In Brief' piece on Stephanie Norgate's Hidden River; this week's a more substantial review, covering both Moniza Alvi's Split World, Poems 1990-2005, and her latest PBS Choice collection, Europa. Do check it out if you can.

Review: Alan Gillis's Here Comes the Night

Alan Gillis’s third collection, Here Comes the Night, borrows its title from a song by the 1960s rock band Them: an upbeat, breezy pop tune that masks a lyrical tale of loneliness and unrequited love. It is a fitting anthem for a book of poems whose bounding rhythms, fizzy slang and runaway clauses waver between melancholy and contentment, typically when the poet loses himself amid the bustle and blur of modern city life. Formal yet freewheeling, mixing descriptive detail with breakneck pace, most of Gillis’s poems run to several pages: the opening piece, “Down Through Dark and Emptying Streets”, kicks off unpromisingly with its references to Google, Facebook and MySpace, but its cinematic sweep develops over twenty quatrains into an unnerving appraisal of the virtual world and memory’s corridors. As with Gillis’s last collection, Hawks and Doves, MacNeice often seems the presiding influence: from the “going here, going there, getting nowhere” of “Rush Hour”, where “traffic passes like money”, to the grievous excesses and grim characters of the title poem’s sprawling dreamscape; from the jump cuts of “Everyone a Stranger” with its odd mixture of the sinister and absurd, to the vision of Death as a loan shark in “The Debt Collector”, which views life through the lens of financial crisis.

Yet, while the thematic scope of certain poems justifies their length, others read as rambling bids for a significance they fail to deliver. “Looking Forward to Leave” convincingly adopts the voice of a female army cadet, skilfully segueing from the clarity of childhood to the confusions of war, but pieces such as “On Cloughey Beach”, though not without descriptive flair, lack both impetus and focus. Such misfires would be less frustrating if they came from a poet of less ample talents. What impresses most about Here Comes the Night is its capaciousness and inclusiveness. Lovers, police officers, gangsters; cyclists, revellers, soldiers and shelf-stackers: not many collections of verse nowadays are crowded with so many characters, while fewer still depict and inhabit them so fully, or so funnily. The book is too long by far: two protracted sonnet sequences pad it out to nearly 100 pages. But it also contains some highly memorable poems - not least the ambitious “On a Cold Evening in Edinburgh”, which bites and stings in the way Kafka recommended - leaving the lasting impression of a poet of invention and verve.



first published in the Times Literary Supplement

Maura Dooley's Life Under Water

Just a quick post to point anyone interested towards this week's TLS, March 20 2009 (No 5529), which includes my review of Maura Dooley's T.S. Eliot shortlisted Bloodaxe collection, Life Under Water.

New Poems by James Midgley

Following on from new poems by Charlotte Runcie, Andrew Bailey and Corinne Salisbury (see previous posts), the final featured poet on the Poetry Group for April 2008 is Mimesis editor James Midgley. His work has been previously published in various UK journals including Magma and The Rialto.

You can read four new poems of his here.

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14

As anyone with an interest in these things, an inbox crammed with newsletters and notices, and a growing lack of shelf space knows, there are plenty of literature magazines about, plenty of poetry mags among those, and plenty of indie poetry mags among those. When I first started – for my sins – reading contemporary poetry, I took out subscriptions to all sorts, and still do when the bank balance permits. But there really are loads of the things and, while some are certainly safer bets than others, it’s always a gamble as to whether you’ll find stuff to enjoy – be it poems, features or reviews – inside their pages. Will it really be worthwhile parting with your hard-earned dough in exchange for a new sub, even a renewal? Perhaps not, if the mag in question is anything like Pen Pusher who, upon recently folding, told their existing subscribers that their money was gone, and thus, effectively, to get lost and jog on. (Not forgetting the magnanimous invitation to freely “hate” them for it, “if you like”. A master class in how to undo years of hard work in a single stroke.)

But then Pen Pusher’s fate – however fantastically bad the editors’ handling of it – is only the latest in a long line. It can sometimes seem like all the best indie poetry mags have bit the dust. Flick through the acknowledgements pages of poetry collections from the late 80s and 90s and you find all sorts of curious names: The Wide Skirt, The Echo Room, joe soap’s canoe, Blade, Thumbscrew. Exciting, independent, underground and – in the latter’s case – fun-poking (if a little blinkered by its own meanness), these mags are now, sadly, all gone.

Then once in a while something turns up: online, in the post, by word of mouth. Another small mag, you think, which, as the best new poems continue to wing their way to premier league and championship types – Poetry Review, The Spectator, the TLS; Poetry London, Magma, New Welsh Review – will probably fall short. Cynical, maybe, but so often new publications lack real selling points: something unique to fill – that terrible phrase – a gap in the (already tiny) market. By that I don’t mean a half-baked editorial stance like Popshot’s, where ‘making poetry accessible’ amounts to little explanations at the bottom of each page (something you’d think a barely disguised insult to readers and contributors alike, were it not done so earnestly, and with such awful, naïve gusto). No, I mean something like Thumbscrew’s off-kilter tastes and raucous odds and ends; something like – though it's not what it once was – the unique little features and layout experiments of The North, who for a time printed new poems without authors’ names. (The thinking being that poems should stand on their own merits, not merely a poet’s track record).

Fourteen is one such magazine: a stylish but unfussy indie production that’s been steadily building its small reputation, bit by bit, over the past six years. I first came across it some four or five years ago, and found good stuff to enjoy in its charming, staple-bound pages, not least a neat little poem, “Girl Playing Sudoku on the Seven-Fifteen”, by Rob Mackenzie. I ordered the guy’s pamphlet. And on the strength of it and the other poems inside, subscribed to Fourteen. It wasn’t long before I wanted to see my own poems in there. All things that swiftly mark out a good indie poetry mag from the rest, how it keeps going and, of course, why there’s so few of them about.

Dedicated to poems of fourteen lines, Fourteen ranges from formal sonnets to looser experiments; from metaphysical, meditative stuff to light and funny pieces. The editors’ tastes seem broad but discriminating. Peppered with quirky, eerie drawings by Clare Johnson, the latest issue is an eclectic mix of consistently good writing: the twisting, how-serious-should-you-take-me tone of John Whitworth’s “The Fat Clock”; the frail elegance of Andrew Marstrand’s “Unseparate”; Kristian Wiese’s atmospheric “Poem” and its tumbling lines, to pick out just a few. But see for yourself. Go and buy an issue from their site. If you like it, subscribe. Maybe there is an especial lack of quality indie poetry mags these days, compared with the situation ten or so years ago – I don’t know. But what’s clear is that mags like Fourteen stand above most, warrant support, and deserve a wide readership.

Oxfam Poetry Night - Four Sheffield Poets

Oxfam Poetry Night @ Oxfam Bookshop (West St / Glossop Rd)

featuring four Sheffield poets:
Frances Leviston, Chris Jones, Helen Mort, and Ben Wilkinson

Wednesday 15th July, 6.30pm - 9pm

£2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD

Nothing and Everything: An Essay on ‘The Trace’ in Don Paterson’s ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’

Despite the title, it's not often that I overtly discuss Derrida and deconstructive thought on this blog, but as I've been working on a critical perspective of Patrick McGuinness' excellent poetry (particularly The Canals of Mars, a first collection which inexplicably missed the shortlist for the Forward Prize), I was pleasantly reminded of my undergraduate studies on poststructuralist thought and theory. So, forgive me if it's your idea of the epitome of tedium and/or you've heard it all before, but I've reproduced a short piece I wrote a while back below, exploring the notion of the trace and presence & absence in Don Paterson's textless poem, ' On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him'. Any thoughts welcome.

~

Nothing and Everything: ‘The Trace’ in Don Paterson’s ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master in the Kyushu Mountains and Not Finding Him’


As a deconstructive concept, the trace is necessarily related to what Derrida coins différance: the constant play of each element of language within a system referring to other elements; calling forth differences between concepts and deferring any meaning a concept might be assumed to possess. In relation to the trace, then, this takes the form of the differences between, and echo of, each spoken or written sign within every other sign. Consequently, any concrete meaning that a sign might naively be thought to capture is permanently deferred, since each signifier constantly calls forth further signifiers in bearing the traces of them. Nothing within the linguistic system, then, is ever merely present or absent, as the presence and absence of concepts and meaning play out their differences, or, as Derrida states, ‘there are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.’

In relation to Don Paterson’s poem, ‘On Going to Meet a Zen Master…’, the concept of the play between traces is particularly relevant. First, the textlessness of the main body of the poem turns the traditional prevalence of presence over absence on its head, as the poem seems to speak entirely from ‘the Other’: the traces of signs which would traditionally lie behind the present signs (within a text poem) seeming to hold the dominant voice. However, it is important to note that the poem does not completely invert this presence/absence hierarchy, nor could it: for one thing, the presence of a title causes the reader to construct the poem him/herself from the play and difference between the traces within it, and even if the poem were titleless, presence would emerge from its absence. Consider looking at a blank piece of paper, for example: its whiteness calls forth purity, perhaps the image of snow, or maybe absolute silence, but whatever you construe it to mean (and surely you must), some presence is borne out of its absence, and further traces come to bear on these; presence necessarily proliferating from absence. In occupying a presence, then, the ‘otherness’ of absence inevitably becomes the selfsame, and absence and presence are revealed to be necessarily tied-up in one another. This is the very essence of the trace at work.

Turning back to the poem as it stands, then, (textless but bearing its title), the potential play of differences and traces within it are seemingly infinite. What is the reader to make of the emptiness of the page? At first glance it may call forth the solitude of the narrator and surrounding mountains, or perhaps his silent contemplation at having not found the Zen Master. The pure silence conjured by the space where we expect the text to be, in turn, may even call to mind a pure Buddhist or Zen meditation. Furthermore, what are we to make of the narrator ‘Not Finding Him’? Initially, this would seem to be the narrator failing to locate the Zen Master in physical terms, but given that the search for him may be part of a spiritual or quasi-religious quest, the narrator may have been unable to ‘find him’ in a spiritually fulfilling sense; failing to comprehend the advice he perhaps sought from the Master. On a general level (returning to the idea of the poem speaking from ‘the Other’), the textlessness may also hint at the impossibility of writing a Western poem that could sufficiently deal with ‘the Otherness’ of the East. This is echoed in the traces of the written sign of the ‘Kyushu Mountains’ : initially signifying the physical concept of the mountains themselves, but simultaneously alluding to an area that is often considered to be the birthplace of Japanese civilisation. Indeed, ‘On Going’ itself seems to bear the trace of such a continual, and in this case futile, operation.

And these examples, it must be remembered, are just a handful of considerations. Any individual reader approaching this poem could potentially come to create an infinitely long poem from the traces which play out not only in its title, but also in the very absence of its text. In short, in containing nothing, Paterson’s poem contains everything. But all this is not to say that the concept of the trace allows for a text to mean whatever anyone might want it to mean. If anything, the inverse is true: in allowing ‘the Other’ within a text to speak, the critical analysis of the trace must listen to that which speaks before an act of reading begins; surely a difficult task. Nor is such a textless poem (as may seem the case) unique in this seemingly paradoxical potentiality. For in every single poem, in every piece of literature; in short, in every single instance of spoken or written discourse, différance and the play of traces are at work. Though I believe I have a firm understanding of the sentence I have previously constructed (and you may feel, as a reader, the same in your reading of it), it is nonetheless inherently unstable in its meaning and conceptuality, and as open to the constant fluctuations of meaning as those observed in Paterson’s poem. Everywhere, and as seen, in a seeming ‘nowhere’ or ‘nothingness’, there are only ever differences at play, and traces of traces proliferating ad infinitum.


Ben Wilkinson, 2006


For those interested in properly exploring deconstruction and its ramifications beyond my own half-baked thoughts, there are numerous texts worth looking at. Bennett and Royle's Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is a good introductory volume, and more specifically, Martin McQuillan Deconstruction: A Reader and Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction are both excellent. Where Derrida is concerned, the best of his ideas and his own most lucid explanation of deconstruction (which, given his propensity towards linguistic play, deception and deferral isn't always easy to follow) is contained within Of Grammatology. Paradoxically, it's perhaps best to approach the McQuillan or Culler before Derrida's work itself.

In Brief reviews: Nerys Williams' Sound Archive and Julian Turner's Planet-Struck

Sound Archive, by Nerys Williams (Seren, £8.99)

"How to sing the texture of hair / drying near fire on a winter's night?" asks the narrator of "Shopkeeper's Song", one of several playfully serious meditations in this curious collection. A former sound librarian, Nerys Williams brings precision, scrutiny and colourful synaesthesia to her terse, contemplative poems: "my favourite perfume was a room of laughter" states the poet in "Aurascope", while words are put under the knife in "An Anatomy of Arguments"; "edges so fine their chords fray into light". Surreal imagery abounds, heightening the poems' examinations of the blurring between reality and illusion, truth and deception: Dublin's "Dead Zoo" of stuffed animals becomes an unlikely metaphor for the forgotten "unreleased singles and demos" that John Peel once championed, now there's "nothing left but teenage kicks". Throughout, Williams curates this mixture of jokey vernacular and high seriousness with varied success. Unsurprisingly, there is also a frequent fascination with lists and catalogues: in "Marilyn's Auction House", the larger-than-life cultural icon is reduced to an itemisation of her surviving possessions. It all makes for an unusually distinctive debut although, in its peculiar blend of exactitude and obfuscation, Sound Archive has a slightly medicinal flavour.

first published in The Guardian, Saturday 16 July 2011



Planet-Struck, by Julian Turner (Anvil, £8.95)

The poems in Turner's third collection strike an eerie, haunting note: brimful of spooks, spirits and the seemingly mysterious movements of the elements. Reading them is often to sense a looming presence, glimpsed beyond the poems' shadowy edges. Alongside a measured musicality and lively language, a loose formality and anachronistic tone mark Turner's style. At best, this marries past and present with aplomb: several poems explore how knowledge brings its own fears through the terror of the possible. At worst, the poems overreach for effect. They are better when Turner finds a crossover between seemingly incompatible topics: the jetstream in one poem transformed into a deity of sorts, merging science with religion. But the triumph of Planet-Struck is the long poem "From The Arcades Project" which, in its refreshingly moral stance, addresses the warped ethics that money both engenders and disguises. Like much of this laudable collection, it digs deep beneath surface façades to find, as one poem has it, "all monsters that we nurture with our thought".

first published in The Guardian, Saturday 4 June 2011

Eyes Open

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Matter magazine & Armitage reading

Matter, the annual magazine showcasing work from the Sheffield Hallam MA Writing, is now approaching its ninth edition; beginning to take shape and due to be published in October '09.

As well as new poetry and fiction, it'll also contain guest contributions, including new poems from Maurice Riordan, Tim Turnbull and - recently confirmed - Julia Copus.

For those interested in the editing and development of the magazine as it takes shape, the editors have also set up a Twitter page, giving occasional updates on the project. You can read it here.

I've been told that a website will shortly follow, and I'll no doubt post about the mag here again on the Wasteland sometime.

In a piece of loosely related news, Simon Armitage is reading in Sheffield on the 6th May, along with a short set from myself, Sheffield-based poet Chris Jones, and others, at a poetry event as part of a series to celebrate the completion of Jessop West, the new building which houses the Arts and Humanities departments of the University of Sheffield (pictured above). Tickets for the event are free - held at St George's Church, near Mappin St - but you need to register your interest here.

The Manchester Review

In certain quarters of the poetry world, there can be a certain snobbery surrounding publication online - one that maintains that print literary magazines are usually better than online journals. This argument is usually based on the idea that many (though certainly not all) established poets only send their work to print publications, and so the best quality work ends up being published in them, especially given the added incentive that the bigger players pay for poems: Poetry Review, The London Review of Books, the TLS and so on.

Though not entirely untrue, fortunately this is only part of the bigger picture, as a number of online poetry and literary magazines in the UK and further afield are growing in considerable authority. These include the likes of Salt Publishing's Horizon, edited by Jane Holland; Blackbox Manifold, edited by Adam Piette and Alex Houen at the University of Sheffield; the longstanding Jacket magazine, and those print journals which also publish much of the material from their issues online, most notably the American magazines AGNI and Poetry. A few UK print journals could learn a thing or two from the latter, and of the former UK online publications, work by Paul Muldoon, Michael Schmidt, George Szirtes, Fiona Sampson and Vona Groarke have featured in Horizon's and Blackbox Manifold's pages - some of the better poets writing in English today.

Another online magazine that's recently emerged in the UK is The Manchester Review, edited by the staff of Manchester University's creative writing course. The magazine published its second issue earlier this year, and has already featured new work from Sean O'Brien, Nick Laird and Conor O'Callaghan, among others. It looks like another strong addition to the best online publications around, and one which poets and novelists alike can publish their work in. Of particular interest to me were Nick Laird's poem 'Adeline' and Peter Armstrong's 'Breakfast at The Fisherman's Mission'. Check it out if you get chance.

By Way Of An Update

Adding to the woeful pattern that's been developing around here this is just a short post and mini-update, so for those of you who do stick around the Wasteland, my thanks and also apologies; I promise I'll post something meatier in the future.

Last weekend I went down to London, and had a very useful (and entirely painless*) editorial meeting with Roddy Lumsden, going through the poems that'll be included in my forthcoming tall-lighthouse pamphlet, The Sparks, to be published alongside Emily Berry's with a launch on November 14th - details on the TL website. I'm feeling slightly more confident about the whole thing, as the meet helped to re-shape certain poems into what - after rewriting - will hopefully be tighter, stronger pieces, and tidy up weaknesses in others that are closer to completion. It was also great to see Roddy perform his own work at the Betsey Trotwood in the evening, and meet other tall-lighthouse Pilot poets who also gave good readings, Retta Bowen in particular. For those interested, my reading 'set list' was as follows:

1. Sunday
2. Byroads
3. The Tesla Coil
4. Filter
5. Lights Out
6. Reflections
7. Hex

It was good to catch up with old friends in the capital, too, not least a school pal who happened to be down for the day before he travels to the States for a few months, who I met by total coincidence on the tube. Unfortunately however, this weekend promises to be less enjoyable, as I've an increasing pile of editing, writing and menial tasks on my to-do-list. Still, I'm enjoying getting properly stuck into Leontia Flynn and Zoe Skoulding's work for critical perspectives I'm writing of them, so it's not all bad...

In the meantime then, before I get around to writing something substantial here, I'll mention that my critical perspective of Faber poet Hugo Williams is now up, and my review of Stephanie Norgate's Forward Prize-shortlisted first collection, Hidden River, is in this week's TLS. Now I'm off to shop for socks and a new pair of trousers. At least it's sunny out...


*Which is to say no poems, or poets, were harmed in the process.

The Sunday Sessions

As many Wasteland readers will no doubt be aware, 'lost' recordings of Philip Larkin reading his work were recently rediscovered (they'd been lying on a shelf in a garage, apparently), and the poet's publisher, Faber, are putting the twenty-six poems out as an audio CD this January, an excellent late xmas present for any fan of the poet, undeniably one of Britain's greatest postwar writers.

As the Faber website states:

The Sunday Sessions were recorded by Philip Larkin in Hull in February 1980 - reportedly, each on a Sunday, after lunch with John Weeks, a sound engineer and colleague of the poet. The tapes contain work from Larkin’s first major collection, The North Ship, as well as poems from his best-known collections, The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows.

For now, you can enjoy the recording above, which features Larkin reading one of his most famous poems, 'An Arundel Tomb', in full, from The Whitsun Weddings.

Poetry London - Summer 2009

So I'm reliably informed that the latest issue of Poetry London has been launched, at the Ledbury festival no less, and though I haven't had chance to read a copy yet, it looks like an excellent issue.

New poems from Paul Farley, Heather Phillipson, Jacob Polley, Christopher Horton, Sam Riviere and many more besides. I'm particularly looking forward to seeing two poems in the issue by Mary Jo Bang, whose work I intend to read more of.

The issue also includes poetry reviews by Todd Swift, Helen Mort, Jack Underwood and Katy Evans-Bush, and a vignette of a poem, 'Camouflage', by yours truly. A sample of the poems and features in the issue can be read online.

Review: Simon Armitage's Seeing Stars

Simon Armitage’s latest collection, Seeing Stars, is a curious departure from his previous work. The hallmark of his poetry to date – a combination of coined phrases, warped cliché and heady vernacular with an energising adherence to meter, rhyme and traditional forms – has not exactly disappeared, but has certainly dissipated. This new book is full of disorienting, freewheeling narratives that, despite giving the fleeting impression of verse in their arbitrary alignment, are more like prose imbued with poetic intensity; flash fiction of a sort. Of course, if Armitage wants to call these poems, then they’re poems. What matters is whether they succeed as such.

Seeing Stars opens with “The Christening”, a dramatic monologue in the voice of a sperm whale. Through a mixture of assured description and humour, it has its thought-provoking moments: “My song, available on audiocassette and / compact disc is a comfort to divorcees, astrologists and / those who have ‘pitched the quavering canvas tent of their / thoughts on the rim of the dark crater’.” But the digressions that drive the poem brim with ideas that feel unfocused and underdeveloped. As a feature of Armitage’s live performances, it is sure to have audiences entertained, but its throwaway inconsequentiality offers little worth revisiting on the page.

Other poems falter on similar grounds. Another capricious monologue, “The Last Panda”, features a creature that is part endangered species, part former Beatle Ringo Starr – a clever conceit, but one that again prompts a discursive collection of pseudo-philosophical thoughts. “Hop In, Dennis” tells the tall tale of the former Arsenal striker Dennis Bergkamp hitching a lift; “one of dozens of Dennises”, the poem’s narrator recounts, “to have found their way / into the passenger seat of my mid-range saloon.” Amusing though it is, this revelation fails to lend the poem much depth or purpose, and neither do its abruptly portentous last lines.

The poem suffers further in calling to mind “Hitcher”: a precise, rhythmically off-kilter piece that Armitage’s admirers will remember from his third collection, Book of Matches. That poem conjures a contemporary sense of despair in its clipped depiction of coolheaded violence; by comparison, “Hop In, Dennis” is casual, chatty and colourful, but lacks real intent, its flashes of brilliance stemming from Armitage’s inventive use of simile and metaphor. No other poet, after all, could describe a footballer changing in the backseat of a four-seater and make a success of it: “a contortion of red and white, like Santa Claus in a badger / trap.”

Seeing Stars is studded with these original, dazzling images. In “Collaborators”, a barber views a client’s bald head as “a mirrorball set / with a hundred glistening beads of sweat”; in “The Cuckoo”, a young man who discovers his family and friends are government agents, without a care for him, “felt like a gold tooth sent flying through the air in a fist fight”. But this imaginative flair fails to prevent many of the poems from feeling circuitous and overwritten. Those which do stand out are the shorter, less showy pieces: “The English Astronaut” is a superbly sardonic commentary on the national character; “Last Day on Planet Earth” provides a series of vivid snapshots from a nightmarish future.

Despite its shortcomings, however, Seeing Stars does feel like a necessary work. As James Lasdun remarked when reviewing a fifth book of poems, Cloudcuckooland, in the TLS: “Armitage seems to have emerged more or less fully formed with his first collection, Zoom” (November 7, 1997). Since then, he has spent two decades exploring and refining a wonderfully distinctive poetic voice – exhaustive, if not exhausting work. While the carefree excess and absurdism of Seeing Stars may not altogether come off, it does see Armitage letting off steam, and points towards a new phase.


first published in the Times Literary Supplement

Harsent, Paterson, Seidel

The September issue of Poetry magazine has just been launched.

It includes, among other things, a new sequence from David Harsent, and two poems from Don Paterson's new collection Rain, published by Faber tomorrow.

It also includes a meaty review of Frederick Seidel's Poems 1959-2009 (a poet whose Faber Selected I recently bought and am currently enjoying) by Poetry regular, Michael Hofmann.

Katharine Towers: The Floating Man

I've been looking forward to the appearance of Katharine Towers's first collection of poems for some time now, having come across her work in a pamphlet, Slow Time, a few years back; a striking little volume for its poems' economical and unshowy resonance. So it was a pleasant surprise to spot the title poem from her debut with Picador, The Floating Man, in the Guardian the other month, and to see her collection longlisted for the Guardian First Book award. Even more so, it was a pleasure to write at length on the collection for that publication; my review of The Floating Man, appearing as it did, in last Saturday's Guardian Review. For those interested, it's also available to read online. And after you've been suitably persuaded, you can order a copy of the book, a snip at 25% off the cover price.

The Nightmare

The Nightmare


Remember that long drive back from the Lakes,
all lightning-lit through rolling rain?
Some nights I dream us on that stretch again,
the road like a river with a line of silver
fish that seem to leap about its centre;
leading us to Newby, Lawkland, Cleatop.

These times, though, the car shudders as if
someone about to collapse or vomit –
a thunderbolt, all cinematic flash,
throwing us forward through time
with the dashboard dials spinning;
making a DeLorean out of your Yaris.

The windscreen warps with scenery,
like some epic zoetrope at full tilt.
We watch the road narrow
into a dirt track, cars evaporate,
the trees shrivel into nothingness
while others burst up in their place.

Dumbstruck, we sit in its awful wake.
And I want to tell you that the world
we find is a glorious one,
some bucolic idyll bathed in light,
only I can’t. Stepping out into heat
and a sky like hell, a murder of crows

screeches in the field to the west;
the trees all diagrams of hurt and harm,
the dry earth barren in an eerie calm.
Walking, a vast silence for what
seems like hours. Then, when I turn to
say as much, you’re nowhere to be found.

By rights, that nightmare should end there.
Instead, on a kind of autopilot,
my dream-self carries on, hopelessly
trekking a dust trail. All to find nothing
aside that weird, familiar outline in the heat,
a shape on the horizon. It’s then that I wake.



poem by Ben Wilkinson; first published in Poetry Review (102:1, Spring 2012)

"Out in the bush is silence now: Savannah seas have islands now"

Jane Holland has an interesting short post on rhyme on her blog at the moment, and it got me thinking about rhyme being this really transformative element in a poem, something, as she puts it, 'which launches the poem off into space', and, when used to its fullest potential, can make a poem truly moving, provocative and memorable. And it also made me think about Mick Imlah's work, something I'm writing a piece on currently, and how for all of the wit, ingenuity and syntactical invention in his narrative poems and dramatic monologues, for all of the impressive scope and surprising shifts in the ambitious pieces in his new collection, the poem of his that always astounds me is the first one in his first book: 'Tusking' from Birthmarks.

It's a really incredible poem (a meditation on colonialism via an imagined elephant hunt) with so many layers to it and a beautifully executed rhyme scheme, the sort that you feel really lives up to the whole 'best words in the best order' idea, without a single one wasted. And I'm clearly not alone in my thoughts of this poem being great, as I read something by Bernard O'Donoghue a while back describing the poem as one which should be in the running for the best poem of the past twenty five years. If you haven't read it, it's worth picking up a second-hand copy of Birthmarks for it alone. To give you a taste, here's a couple of stanzas:

'But if, one night
As you stroll the verandah
Observing with wonder
The place of the white
Stars in the universe,
Brilliant, and clear,
Sipping your whisky
And pissed with fear

You happen to hear
Over the tinkle of Schubert
A sawing - a drilling -
The bellow and trump
Of a vast pain -
Pity the hulks!
Play it again!'

Oh, and after two blog posts in a row on Imlah, I'll be sure to post about something different next time, promise...

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Michael Hofmann - Changes

Changes

Birds singing in the rain, in the dawn chorus,
on power lines. Birds knocking on the lawn,
and poor mistaken worms answering them ...

They take no thought for the morrow, not like you
in your new job. - It paid for my flowers, now
already stricken in years. The stiff cornflowers

bleach, their blue rinse grows out. The marigolds
develop a stoop and go bald, orange clowns,
straw polls, their petals coming out in fistfuls ...

Hard to take you in your new professional pride -
a salary, place of work, colleagues, corporate spirit -
your new femme d'affaires haircut, hard as nails.

Say I must be repressive, afraid of castration,
loving the quest better than its fulfilment.
- What became of you, bright sparrow, featherhead?

poem by Michael Hofmann
republished with permission of the author
first published in The New Yorker
from Acrimony (Faber, 1986)



I've loved Hofmann's poetry since I first came across an old copy of what I still think his best collection, Acrimony, some years ago. Despite frequent comparisons to Robert Lowell, he strikes me as a remarkably original poet, something I tried to get at in this critical piece on his work. I'd agree with what A B Jackson once said on Rob Mackenzie's Surroundings too: that, simply and often brilliantly, with Hofmann's brand of 'plain style' poetry "you get a real sense of that definition of a poet as one who makes Good Choices, out of all the thousands of possible ones: [...] that knack of hitting the right nail."

'Changes', the poem published above, is from Acrimony, and is also included in Hofmann's Selected Poems, published by Faber last year and something I'd highly recommend to those not familiar with his work. In his review of the book on Tower Poetry, here's what poet-critic Simon Pomery had to say about the poem:

'Changes' is a portrait of a lady in the time of Thatcher, comparable to the fearless but hopeless Marlene of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls. It illustrates how the ideology of an age impacts upon the individual. Here is a tercet:

'Hard to take you in your new professional pride -
a salary, place of work, colleagues, corporate spirit -
your new femme d'affaires haircut, hard as nails.'

Satire leaks through the use of plosives. There is a latent invective spit in those clipped p's, the world of fast tracks and grad schemes, of 'corporate' 'colleagues', is exposed as worthless, the invective articulated through cussing c's. The phrase 'corporate spirit' draws attention to the genius below the surface of the quotidian: its Latinate prefix, 'cor-', means heart, 'corporate spirit' is oxymoronic, and the heartlessness of the beloved's Thatcherite uniform is exposed for what it is: on the surface she looks 'hard as nails', but beneath it her heart has shrunk to nothing. Hofmann's final lyrical query 'What became of you/ bright sparrow, featherhead?', laments the road taken to the office, to profit for its own sake.

A good reading of the poem I'd say - 'Changes' is one of my favourite Hofmann poems exactly because it so well exemplifies his ability to address something personal, emotional and detailed while also making deft social commentary and wider observations about the age. It's something he also does effectively in the many poems about his father, and in poems detailing foreign travel (particularly in a third book, Corona, Corona).

I'll also link, before I have to get on with some work, to this excellent new poem, 'Cricket', published in a recent(ish) issue of Chicago's Poetry magazine. "Did I say it was raining, and the forecast was for more rain? // Riveting. A way, at best, for the English / to read their newspapers out of doors, and get vaguely shirty / or hot under the collar about something." Spot on.

Recent Issues

Well, here are a few recent issues of magazines that I thought I'd flag up, and no, not just because I've something of my own included in them, which in several cases I don't, but because I've subscriptions to many poetry mags and journals for the simple reason that, in many ways, they're the lifeblood and engine rooms of new writing and, on this slightly gloomy looking Wednesday morning, I'd like to encourage you, dear Wasteland reader, to consider subscribing to a new publication today.

First off, the latest issue of New Welsh Review dropped with a satisfying thud through my letterbox the other week, and aside being excellently produced (nothing superficial about enjoying the look and feel of a stylish book or magazine with high production values, and to be honest, NWR holds its own against most books, never mind journals), it also contains plenty of engaging new writing, including two new poems from Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, fiction from Nii Ayikwei Parkes, plus reviews of Philip Gross's T.S. Eliot prize-winning collection The Water Table, and a new collection of short stories inspired by the work of Jane Austen.

I'd also recommend the latest issue of The Rialto, celebrating 25 years of this major publication's appearances, and including - among new work from Carol Ann Duffy, Andrew Motion, Lorraine Mariner and Rachel Curzon - 'Look Out', the first part of a special feature on new poets under 35 edited by Nathan Hamilton, with poems from Andrew Jamison, Luke Kennard, Chris McCabe, Heather Phillipson, Keston Sutherland and Jack Underwood. Well worth a look.

The latest issue of Orbis, #150, is also packed with poems and reviews of recent books, and its usual 'Lines on Lines' section of candid reader comments on the previous issue. Where the poems in #150 are concerned, highlights for me came in the shape of Rupert Loydell's 'Paper Children', Eoghan Walls's 'Terminal One', and Todd Swift's 'The Port Daniel House'. Reviews include a round-up of recent pamphlets from the indefatigable Smith/Doorstop (the publishing house of the, now Sheffield-based, Poetry Business), including Sally Goldsmith's Singer, a short little book that packs an emotional yet unsentimental punch, and one which I'd recommend getting hold of.

Lastly, the latest issue of the Times Literary Supplement (No 5590, May 21 2010) contains the usual array of incisive, decisive, highly readable and thought-provoking literary reviews, not least a piece on Merrill Chleier's study of architecture and gender in American film, Skyscraper Cinema, and Michael Hofmann's translation of Gottfried Benn's poem, 'Englisches Café'. But I'd like to point you in particular towards the poetry reviews, not only because of pieces on new collections from Selima Hill and Antony Dunn, among others, but because there's a review of my own included of Sian Hughes's excellent debut, The Missing. It's a real shame that this book didn't come away with a prize or two, having been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and chosen as a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. As I say in the review, the collection is a short one of, often, short poems: something that perhaps belies its exactitude, hard-won emotional truths, and long road to completion. At any rate, it really is a great debut collection, and one which I've returned to on several occasions recently. So I'll end by saying that, as well as subscribing to a poetry magazine today, you should really push the boat out and go and order The Missing, which you can pick up from Salt's website, here. And if you need any more convincing, you should first read this powerful and emotive elegy, 'The Send-Off', which won Hughes the Arvon International Poetry Competition a few years back. Moving isn't the word.

Moon

A few weeks ago I went to see Moon, the excellent debut film from director Duncan Jones (once known as 'Zowie Bowie') - an impressively eerie, cerebral and often darkly funny piece of sci-fi cinema that details the life of a man alone on the lunar surface. I highly recommend it, and briefly entertained thoughts of writing a lengthier piece about it here, but then a friend of mine has recently set up a film review blog, and has done an excellent job of writing an intelligent and incisive piece on the film. So I needn't bother waffling on - instead, you can read the review here. What's more, it doesn't completely give the game away unlike many reviews I've read of Moon, which means if you do decide to go and see it, this review won't ruin your experience of it.

Elbow live with the BBC Concert Orchestra

A brilliant feature I spotted this morning on the BBC Radio 2 website: English alt-rock band Elbow perform the whole of their Mercury-prize winning album, The Seldom Seen Kid, augmented by the BBC Concert Orchestra (originally recorded and broadcast last Saturday).

For those who know the album, the songs are played in tracklist order, but for those who don't and aren't particularly familiar with the band, I'd suggest checking out 'The Fix', performed with local Sheffield singer-songwriter Richard Hawley (around the 36min mark) and the anthemic 'Day Like This' (around the 47min mark).

An absolutely brilliant performance, it can be found here.

And as a sampler, since it won't let me embed the video of the whole performance, above is the recording of thumping single, 'Grounds for Divorce'.

An Artist of the Floating World

In his collection of essays Music at Night, Aldous Huxley famously remarked that "after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music". The idea is by no means a new one: where words fall short, music can often seem uniquely placed to articulate our subtlest moods, thoughts and emotions. Yet few can have explored this concept, or its wider complexities, with the delicacy and originality of thought that Katharine Towers achieves in this ambitious, powerful and memorable debut, longlisted for the Guardian first book award.

In their deft harnessing of the music intrinsic to language – that which fuels poetry's thrilling confusion of sense with sound – Towers's poems are akin to those moments of quiet clarity amid the bustle and blur of daily life. The book's opening poem, "Amber", is a terse vignette that sets the tone with an elegant metaphor: figured as a frail "thought" and, by extension, a stay against confusion, the resin's safeguarding qualities make it a talisman "to hold against the slipshod years".

The Floating Man contains many such "flies in amber". On "Camusdarach Beach", a seal raises its "orphan eyes" to two lovers, "sensing our lives on the turn", while in "Trust", a memory of the poet's young daughter swimming in the sea is conjured from the complex, maternal emotions with which it is tangled. Even half-forgotten words are made strangely tangible in "Found": "old stones we've wintered in the earth / to learn the darkness underneath".

Yet there is nothing showy about these poems. Succinct and unassuming, they rarely draw on the full orchestra of effects at the poet's disposal, instead favouring subtle, single notes. "The Dread", for example, is an unsentimental view of arctic terns, birds that "have no weight but heart-weight", "no thinking, but know the curve and swing / of the earth". Through gentle assonance, the poem develops a studied coolness, anticipating the sudden silence – known as the Dread – before the birds jointly take flight: "as if / someone quietly said: come, follow me." That calmness, the poem suggests, is almost a shadowy memory in the terns' collective mind; a moment's eerie stillness that jolts them again into restlessness. The poem succeeds in expressing this notion and its human resonance, while avoiding the naïve anthropomorphism that would undermine such observations. It's a neat trick which Towers pulls off elsewhere, most notably in "Haunts", a concise unpicking of the fragile divide between the natural and the human worlds:

We can walk into woods and find
we are suddenly mortal.
The air has kept still for seasons
and we've no cause to speak

or to question this adequate moment
of moths, earth, light restrained by trees.
Let us not think we hear our own feet
treading the soft ash of leaves.

Nature offers a brief reprieve from the human labyrinth; opportunity to escape a world where everything appears in the guise of its value or function. But even if we stop questioning such "adequate" moments in order to pursue a broader understanding, we soon return to centring the scene on ourselves, however ghostly a presence we might be. How can we help but hear, in the sly sibilance of that final line, "our own feet / treading the soft ash of leaves"?

The book's presiding spirit – "The Floating Man" of the title poem – offers an answer of sorts. Enacting a thought experiment devised by the Persian polymath Ibn-Sina, an attempt to prove the independence of the soul from the physical body, our narrator imagines himself suspended, isolated from all sensory experience, "for as long as it takes to forget the sweating desert / and the sifting streets of Hamadan." In doing so, he approaches a kind of objectivity, blurring the false distinctions we observe: "Shall I say I am a man or a thought, / or a man thinking about deserts and cities?"

This expansive attention to detail, the ability to look beyond one's own narrow perspective, enriches Towers's writing and her search for emotional truths. Some of these poems are sensitive as a cardiograph to the moments they chart: "She's there on a branch: don't startle her" warns the poet in "Nightbird". Similarly, while waiting to hear their "late evening / call to prayer" in "In the Oak Woods", the narrator is "quiet for fear the owls might startle / and fly from their rooms".

The best poems in The Floating Man, however, are those which express human relationships in terms of music and vice versa, augmenting our understanding of both. "The Art of Fugue" opens with the hopefulness inherent to the form: a contrapuntal composition of conversing "voices" which the poem imbues with human characteristics; "solemn instruments, which yawn / and clamber to their feet" and "suppose they feel the same". Yet this simplicity, "the clean white sail of a tune making everything good", isn't quite as it seems: the desire to bring things to a close, each instrument "using their own words", is never far away. In love as in music, harmony is unstable, fleeting, and often appears as artifice: by the end of "Counterpoint", the poem's warring couple settle for a truce; "you still banging away at the deep end, / me somewhere up in the gods, trying the high notes".

It's these intelligent and honest insights, always intent on offering a fresh outlook, that lend Towers's quiet poems their tenacity; testament to her inclination, as with "The Language Spider" in one poem, "to favour stealth / over the grand gesture".


first published in The Guardian, Saturday 11 September 2010

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