Deconstructive Wasteland

Review: Reed, Schmidt, Joseph, Jess-Cooke, Pugh

2012-01-26T16:05:00.000Z

Jeremy Reed, West End Survival Kit, Waterloo, £10, ISBN 9781906742072
Michael Schmidt, Collected Poems, Smith/Doorstop, £18.95, ISBN 9781902382005
Jenny Joseph, Nothing like Love, Enitharmon, £9.99, ISBN 9781904634843
Carolyn Jess-Cooke, Inroads, Seren, £7.99, ISBN 9781854115119
Sheenagh Pugh, Later Selected Poems, Seren, £9.99, ISBN 9781854114976

Any poet worth their salt, as Michael Donaghy once noted, “tries to tell the truth by working truly.” Not by conforming to reified concepts of ‘fact’ or ‘actuality’, of course (but this is what actually happened!), but by being true to themselves, the reader, and the world they construct within a poem, however surreal or fantastical. The linguistic sense of a poem is a measure of this, ensuring that, rather than a private act, poems become a shared communication of recognisable truth, whether literal or imaginative. In short: you give a good poem a shove, and it always bounces back.

The poems in Jeremy Reed’s latest collection certainly depict a recognisable, albeit often futuristic world. But do they ring true? West End Survival Kit contains memorable images and the sort of off-kilter description that defined his early volumes, but also much purposeless repetition, lack of rhythmical invention and, unusually for a poet known for subversive attitudes, dichotomised gender stereotypes. The male subjects here may be anonymous, but they wear “charcoal pinstripe Sisley suit[s]”, “chill with GQ”, and drive sports cars which routinely appear, whether as objects, images or metaphors. Take trophy girlfriend “Sheila”, a “Chinese babe” who sports “a jacket sewn with loud logos // like a sticker-plastered racing car”. Reed’s intention may be a laudable criticism of a certain rich, fast-living, yet infantile segment of society (most of the poems feature brand-conscious, apathetic couples), but without wry humour or the inclusion of more sophisticated characters, such observations remain vague and wearyingly dystopian, however intriguing.

The problem remains in Reed’s over-productiveness. West End Survival Kit consists of over fifty poems, and appears two years after his last volume. There is much to provoke in its vibrant, disconcerting prophesying: “the clouds building / like a schema for World War 4”, or an ‘Interplanetary Executive’ whose “corporate logo’s a DNA strand”. But with few exceptions, these flashes of intensity pepper a collection that sounds the same note over and over; describing capitalist excess, boredom, and spiritual bankruptcy in tercet after tercet of growing fatigue. In the end, this book seems akin to the “canvas stash bag” at the centre of its title poem: curious in its gathering of familiar consumer detritus, but not enough to maintain the reader’s interest.

Unlike Reed, Michael Schmidt’s Collected Poems brings together four decades of work, yet only runs to some two hundred pages. This no doubt has to do with Schmidt’s activities as literary editor, publisher, critic and teacher; his founding of Carcanet Press and the journal PN Review, among other achievements, having earned him an OBE. But one suspects it is also due to deliberative writing methods. A poem such as ‘The Judas Fish’ exemplifies this: its blend of ornate description, everyday idiom, biblical allusion and telling imagery put to the service of a questing mind:

Looking out, indeed, there’s not much to see,

no diver, no near fish, nothing to possess,
though there is a strange possessiveness
in water, as in sunlight, determining the shadows.

Just as the eerie fish has “a Judas eye trained” on the poet, Schmidt’s work looks to uncover the elemental forces beneath surface facades, locating him within the Modernist tradition of Eliot, Pound and Yeats.

The central preoccupations of Schmidt’s poems are uncertainty, indecisiveness, and the mistakes that can follow. This is evident in rhythmical, incantatory forms (“If we swam out and never came back in, / Lapping against the deep end just the pulse / of water, is it water?”) but also dream-like, childhood reminisces: “I, to whom the knowledge had been given, // […] remember how a knot of pains / swelled my hand” (‘Wasps’ Nest’). No surprise that water – in its physical potential and metaphorical implications – often provides a manifestation of such themes: its movements mirroring the poet’s emotions; murky depths both appealing and threatening. But it is the book-length sequence at the heart of this Collected, The Love of Strangers, which is most memorable and original. As the narrator regresses from adulthood to childhood, we are given portraits, impressions, and memories of an eclectic mix of writers, artists, and loved ones; a sustained tribute to those who Schmidt holds dear, whether personally or artistically, and a work which only a poet-critic of such broad tastes and enthusiasms could have produced.

Jenny Joseph’s Nothing like Love is another collection with a wide compass. Her first since 2006’s Extreme of Things, it mixes early love lyrics with new work in what the blurb describes as an “entirely fresh combination”, which makes billing it a new book slightly odd. In any case, there seem to be two Josephs: one who is a writer of sprightly, elegant, but often clichéd lyric poems; the other who is an observant, imaginative chronicler of human experience. Several poems positioned recto-verso illustrate this: while ‘Great Sun’ exercises hackneyed imagery, ‘Here Lies Treasure: Here Be Monsters’ is a bracing reflection on love, desire and possession. Similarly, ‘Lady Love’s energetic rhythms disguise a poem of little depth, though ‘The Unlooked-For Season’ adopts plain description in pursuit of subtler effects. Nothing like Love is a mixed success, then, but this reader is not exactly its intended audience. Admirers of Joseph’s celebrated poem ‘Warning’ will, I suspect, find much to enjoy here.

Almost any poetry reader – indeed, any reader – would be pushed not to find something to enjoy in Sheenagh Pugh’s Later Selected Poems. The companion volume to her 1990 Selected Poems, it contains work from five collections published since, and is testament to the muscular, plainspoken style Pugh has developed, capable of addressing myriad subject matters in diverse manners. Life, love, death and all the usual suspects are here, of course – though typically revivified – but so too are censorship, fan fiction, HTML, cartoon characters, and renowned anthropologist Owen Beattie; even the extra in a film, seen “waving his farewells / to the extras on shore, / among whom, // with a rather distinctive hat, / by some continuity cock-up / he also stands.” Pugh’s poems are full of subtle details and double takes: mundanity may often be the order of our days, but if we pay close attention, surprise lurks just out of sight. It is this marrying of the world’s bustle and growing complexity with a miniaturist’s eye for detail that makes Pugh such an accomplished poet; as adept at longer, discursive pieces as following, say, the brief lives of “flakes of ash scudding seawards”: “the wind full / of waste paper, // brief wordless messages, / fluttering out unread.” Because, level-headedly, she speaks of and to our modern, manifold world, Pugh’s is a voice worth listening to.

So too with Carolyn Jess-Cooke, a young poet whose often contemporary subjects – YouTube, hidden-camera TV, jet lag, the fish counter at the local supermarket – are, in the best poems from her debut Inroads, made surprisingly profound through a mixture of woozy shifts in focus, startling imagery, and a freewheeling use of the vernacular. In such a lavishly varied and adventurous collection, it seems a shame to single out one poem in particular for praise. But I kept returning to opener ‘Accent’, where the local and global intermingle, yet “the picked-up place-music” of home lends shifting roots to cling to:

Home? Or everywhere? Like combing coral
or sand and snow globes, or a wave-shaped petal
from Sydney’s Manly Cove
my voice fossils places. The way sound chases
itself in tunnels and halls, the way senses
fold memory into five

is an accent’s suitcase aesthetic. Listen.

As this and the bulk of Inroads suggest, Jess-Cooke is a poet of both achievement and promise; whose future work will be worth looking out for, but who also deserves to be read and enjoyed now.

this piece was first published in Poetry Review

Review: John McCullough's The Frost Fairs

2012-01-09T09:11:00.003Z

John McCullough's debut collection introduces a writer acutely aware of poetry's transformative power, its ability to question assumptions and subtly shift perspective. His musical work offers up an array of voices – speaking statues, spoons in a drawer, men sent to bed for a year "trialling pills for weightless conditions" – sometimes playing for laughs, but always thoughtful and touching. It also adopts various styles: from the sensuous lyricism of "The Light of Venus", which views love through the lens of astrophysics, to the witty chit-chat of "The Long Mile", drawing on Thom Gunn's brilliant "Night Taxi" in its cab driver persona while veering into weirder territory. Gunn can often seem the presiding influence here: sharp yet compassionate, formal yet nimble, the poems glitter with slang and modern culture while maintaining an engaging seriousness. Energy and abundance aside, though, it is the dark, quietly attentive poems that impress most, like the fallen jackdaw in one poem, "its neck twisted as though broken / from straining to see the incredible."

first published in The Guardian, Saturday 13 August 2011

Home

2011-12-01T11:50:00.004Z

Home

Only there, the afternoons could suddenly pause…
Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Stafford Afternoons’

I try to imagine it differently, coming back to this town,
its streets the same except for shops unemptied,
a book store not bought out by Waterstones,

or the Ancient High House not leaning forwards,
its bulging Elizabethan plaster and timberwork.
But as the train shuttles down the West Coast mainline

and I shift my head to gaze into the gloaming outside –
a paperback of Acrimony on the table to pass the time;
the girl opposite eyeing it with suspicion or interest –

I’m woken by the town’s lit-up landmark; that castle
built from wood, then stone, then again and again
until it was left in the ruins that remain and its stock

of earthworks. The station’s empty in pools of orange
light. This, I think to myself, won’t be the last time
I wander bleary-eyed past the silence of the Bird in Hand,

a bunch of kids skittering their BMXs round McDonalds
or the small miracle of a bargain shop where, for years,
everything’s been ‘Going Going Going’

though, for a second there, I almost considered turning off
to Joxer Brady’s, even The Coach, but every time I just
drag my heels past, onto the waiting shadow of the night bus.

poem by Ben Wilkinson; first published in Poetry London (No.61, October 2008)

Review: Alan Buckley's Shiver

2011-11-08T00:15:00.006Z

Alan Buckley
SHIVER
21pp. tall-lighthouse. Paperback, £5.
978 1 904551 61 4

So here’s the thing: I actually got hold of a copy of Shiver, Alan Buckley’s debut pamphlet of poems, not so long after it deservedly grabbed the PBS Pamphlet Choice back in 2009. They say a week’s a short time in politics, and the same can go for poetry: so much stuff is published these days, half the time you can barely keep up, and that’s just with the kind of thing you enjoy, never mind the whole broad canvas. (Or at least I can’t anyway, and sincerely hope / suspect I’m not the only one). Marketing exacerbates this, of course: sure some of the best poetry comes from those imprints that are part of a much bigger commercial enterprise, but in the media fuss that can sometimes surround the big players’ literary stars (relatively speaking, like; this is poetry after all), you can often end up missing out on something very special put out by the smaller indies. As an occasional reviewer, this can be doubly frustrating: by the time you find out about / get around to properly reading this great little book that came out a year ago, the time has most likely passed when you could have defiantly sung its praises in a magazine or paper.

Which is pretty much what I want to do here with Buckley’s Shiver. Because really, for me, Buckley just gets what poetry is about, and puts it into practice again and again over the course of a short pamphlet with undeniable invention and prowess. Here’s a poet who knows that you have to beguile and entertain the reader before you can lay on the heavy stuff; that any form of address, perhaps especially poetry, has to make the reader or listener want to invest time and thought in what’s being said, rather than making the fatal mistake of simply expecting such attention. Take the opening poem here, “Flaming June”, a precise little sonnet that we could admire simply for its technical accomplishments. But these only earn their keep, as form and technique should, given that they’re put to the service of the poem’s minutely observed story: a narrow boat’s passage through a canal lock which manages to transform that fairly pedestrian happening into a Dante-like journey into another, altogether darker, realm. We can forgive Buckley his more flashy literary effects – the boat like a “semi-colon”, for instance - given the wonderful, otherworldly eeriness the poem invokes: “the feral river” that “charges the weir // then bursts back into view, dark and foaming”, or the anonymous man who “strolls past us, a limited god”. By the time he “spins the sluice wheels” and, as the poem closes, “gently, we descend”, Buckley has taken us into the quotidian and on into somewhere unnervingly unfamiliar, readying us for what’s to come.

There’s some real risk-taking and ambition in the poems that follow. Not “risk” as some might define it, in the sense of testing the reader’s patience to breaking point with indecipherable self-indulgence and syntactic glossolalia, but risk as in the risk of mundanity, of attempting to transform the everyday into something new and surprising, or the risk of attempting to write deftly on sometimes uncomfortable topics. “Anusol©”, as its rather unfortunate title suggests, attempts the latter with admirable tightrope-walking finesse, taking that particular medicinal cream and the broader idea of discomfort to interrogate our social mores with a welcome dash of subtle humour: “I saw the tube where I’d left it, perched on the edge / of the tub: that blunt, un-English name, the manufacturer – / Canadian – unaware of our sensitivities”. The poem launches into its unforgiving analysis:

Please understand:

we are born uncomfortable. We must apologise for these
bodies that block up our narrow streets, that brush
and bump in Underground trains. We have smoked them

brown as kippers, stuffed them with pig fat until they drip,
soaked them in cheap gin; and yet they persist, refuse
to go away. We wish they would show some decency […]

That distinctly Larkin-like first-person plural “we” speaks of a poet who is either naïve in their assumptions, arrogant in their assumed communal voice, or of one who is unafraid to communicate a collective feeling given the hard-thinking manifestly on show in their writing. Buckley is the latter. Sentimentalists and others might see this as a matter of opinion given their restrictive allegiance to the wholly subjective, but the way to work out which category any writer falls into here is the broad truth of the claims made, and which English reader can claim not to feel the truth of that link between our broader sense of “decency” and our often uncomfortable relationship with the carnal and corporeal? We like to think of the bodily, and by extension, physical intimacy, as something inherently private, something that inevitably takes place “behind closed doors”, but what Buckley reveals here is how such ingrained attitudes might come to short-circuit our relationship with the physical entirely; wanting to be left in a detached, most likely digital, world with “only our monkey-house minds / for company.”

Elsewhere, some of the poems in Shiver are a pleasure to read simply for their unshowy, natural and conversational lyricism; their subtle music a welcome change from some of the rolling linguistic firework displays other contemporary poets favour. The romantic trysts in “His knowledge of astronomy is limited”, for example, are beautifully yet unsentimentally described, worth quoting here at length:

Once, he imagined it like this:
a hillside, miles from the nearest
town, the ground hard and brisk
with frost; the night sky clear,
blue-black as the bottle of ink
on his desk. Two people
beneath a rough wool blanket,
hot from the reckless rush of sex;
the wood pulsing orange-red,
dying down towards charcoal,
eager sparks flicked out and up
into the cool, still air.

Delicate yet robust and rhythmically paced, with rhyme sparingly deployed to evocative effect and alliterative sound pockets that barely register until you read back, this is consummate writing. That Buckley, as already proven, is also a whip-smart, hard-thinking writer is enough to make his work worth reading. But, fairly, you might want other reasons, in which case you can look to other poems in Shiver – a pamphlet of only twenty that ends up feeling more substantial than some full collections – for evidence of an emotional integrity and frankness, as well as a gift for the choice metaphor to augment a poem’s arguments. Take “Your news”, which skirts deftly in and around the difficult matter of breast cancer, and somehow comes off: incorporating clever imagery (which I won’t spoil here) and, believe it, grim humour before jumping to particle physics via a half-recalled intimacy. It’s probably one of the lesser poems in the pamphlet for its necessary flatness and slightness, and yet still it invites, resonates, impresses, and connects wholly disparate things in a memorable way. So too with “Peaches”, a fruity little sonnet dripping with luscious vowel sounds, that somehow manages to survive the fecund ambiguity of its extended metaphor to leave us in a brief existential conundrum, borne solely of tinned fruit.

In short, Shiver is a pamphlet to savour. You might not quite shudder while reading it, but if it doesn’t jolt you or stop you in your tracks at least a few times, I’d probably check for a pulse. For here is a restless intelligence, alloyed to a keen eye and a precise yet capacious style that can’t help but take the everyday and find in it the unfamiliar and extraordinary. Real poetry, basically. Don’t expect to wait long for this poet to be snapped up by a major publisher, for what promises to be a very impressive debut collection.

(ix) 02:50: Newtyle

2011-10-28T10:25:00.005+01:00

Remember that poem right at the end of Don Paterson’s God’s Gift to Women (1997)? The last in the book’s muddled sequence of poems that take their titles from the defunct Dundee-Newtyle railway line, it comes a handful of blank pages – actual blank pages, just to be clear, not the blank-page poems Paterson has a proclivity for – after the notes, isn’t listed in the contents, and got up the noses of a fair few critics with its mid-parentheses, mid-sentence, ostentatious ending. Really, though, nothing can disguise its intrinsic revelatory weight and significance, how ever much the poet seems at pains to undermine any naïve, earnest hunt for intellectual or spiritual meaning: the white page of its printing likened to snow, which in turn becomes a deity’s “shredded evidence”, falling from the skies.

Well, for those who haven’t spotted this already, you might want to check the copyright page of Landing Light (2003), Paterson’s equally acclaimed follow-up volume (if one discounts the magnificent “spiritual portrait” of his Machado versions, The Eyes (1999).) Here, for those who, as “A Talking Book” puts it, “drag each sentence through their fine-toothed combs, / all set to prove the Great Beast lies at slumber / in the ISBN or the barcode number”, is the follow-up quatrain, just below that italicised bit about not lending, selling, copying, rebinding, or reading choice pages out to random passers-by like a grade-A nutter.

I’m not quite sure what I make of it, but despite its apparent sincerity and lyrical solemnity, it seems like Paterson is joshing here, specifically with the kind of person who he half-expects would a) notice this kind of thing in the first place & b) bother to link the two quatrains up and pore over ’em for a while (i.e. me), and what he/she might make of it all. I get the feeling that a part of Paterson reckons – and maybe on the whole, he’s not totally wide of the mark – that many a literary scholar lacks the requisite sense of humour when it comes to scrutinising poems to understand his point here, which is that, essentially, if you look hard enough into anything, you can in turn, if you like, see pretty much anything you want reflected back – maybe, say, your own straight-laced critical brilliance if you’re so inclined. But make no mistake, the poem suggests, you’re wasting your time, since such an approach does great poetry no service whatsoever. You might just as well apply your dazzling exegesis to the dullest of shopping lists and look forward to much the same result.

So the poem’s a bit of a joke, perhaps, but a joke that makes a serious point. Whether the forgivably naïve gusto and application of the serious undergrad, or the wasteful idiocy of brilliant minds who really should know better, looking for meaning as something already resident within any text, the poem suggests, is just plain wrong. The journey, the road, the natural process of reading for what the text might meaningfully generate, is where the interesting stuff happens; not at the oasis, a mirage of intrinsic transcendental meaning, where the tortuous, minutely scrutinised road meets its imaginary end.

This is, then, a defence of poetry as something which means – in that reified and wholly false sense – nothing at all, yet at the same time, far from meaning whatever you want it to mean, is charged with huge transformative power and an unrivalled sense of possibility. Though if you feel like asking why Paterson didn't just damn well say that, you might not be getting this.

Review: Siân Hughes's The Missing

2011-10-26T10:07:00.004+01:00

Siân Hughes’s The Missing is a short collection of, typically, short poems; a fact that belies this debut’s exactitude, hard-won emotional truths, and long road to completion. It is some thirteen years since Hughes’s vignette “Secret Lives”, appearing here in book form for the first time, first graced London’s tube trains as part of the Poems on the Underground project (and winner of a TLS competition), depicting a familiar suburban world of complex relationships with magical panache; where dressing gowns meet in the middle of the night to “head for a club they know / where the dress code is relaxed midweek, / and the music is strictly soul.” As much of The Missing demonstrates, Hughes has a real talent for capturing such fleeting, subtly significant incidents: a blend of delicate suggestion, invention and colourful wit characterizes her best poems, expressed in unobtrusive, idiomatic language. “The Girl Upstairs”, for example, treads the line between personal happiness and polite society’s expectations with conversational ease. Elsewhere, “The Stairs” provides a familiar snapshot of the difficulties of modern, often fragmented, young families, describing a party “where the children have taken the seats / in the living room”, and “no one consoles / the woman in a low-cut dress sitting outside the bathroom.”

Around midway through, however, the overall tone of the book changes: a shift from the playful, albeit tense feel of these earlier poems, to the brave and compelling pieces of the latter half. The focus here is parenting, particularly its many unforeseeable difficulties, with a number of poems addressing time spent in and out of hospital. These are as affecting and effective for their evocative, yet rarely merely decorative, description (“Fireworks on Ward 4C”), as for their arresting and deft use of speech patterns (in “Mengy Babies”, a distressed mother is found crying: “‘I kept phoning and telling them, something’s gone wrong.’”). But it is in a provocative elegy, “The Send-Off”, that Hughes’s writing seems most urgently committed. A haunting, touching address to the poet’s lost child, diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome before birth, it is difficult to examine the poem in typical critical terms: honest, and devoid of any agenda as it is. Along with many of the poems in The Missing, it memorably reveals the work of a writer capable of addressing emotionally difficult subjects with exceptional clarity and feeling.

first published in the Times Literary Supplement

Difficulty, Academia, and the Young

2011-10-26T07:53:00.003+01:00

V: I’ve been quite disappointed recently at how polarized the poetry world can be. When I’m in London speaking to young poets and people there, they like a range of poets — then I get back to Oxford, and talking to graduate students it can seem sometimes like the only poets taken seriously are Hill, Muldoon, Prynne — these are the serious poets.

CR: You can see why. There is a great difference between those poets, but they all have something in common — difficulty. If you’re a graduate student — this is professionalization again — you want to admire something that other people can’t read, where there is work for you. Those three poets represent an employment opportunity. They wouldn’t like Elizabeth Bishop because she is, relatively speaking, quite easy, although she isn’t really that easy — as you know. But there are so many local pleasures, and you persist. ‘Filling Station’ — how can anyone resist it? Well these people can. Because it’s witty, it’s lovely, and they understand it. It appears to offer them no opportunity … what critics want is a pommel horse they can pirouette around, which will continue to support them while they’re being brilliant themselves. Elizabeth Bishop — well, there’s no place for your brilliance, because the thing itself is brilliant. It’s made out of glass. It’s a piece of sculpture. Young people always like difficulty. You want to be outdistancing people. When I started doing a doctorate, it was on Coleridge’s philosophy — and the reason I did it was because I wanted to be able to say to people at a dinner party, ‘I think if you’d read Kant’s Critique der Reinen Vernunft, you’d know that … ’ I wanted to be able to silence people. It’s a terrible impulse. But of course in the end I couldn’t get through Kant, it was unintelligible. But that’s what I wanted to do — so I recognise this impulse in all these graduate students. I suffered through it myself once...

excerpt from Hard Raine: an interview
with Craig Raine by Vidyan Ravinthiran,
Horizon Review, September 2009

Making Writing Matter

2011-10-23T19:16:00.006+01:00

To those wondering how on earth Autumn has crept up so quickly despite having arrived late – September’s the cruellest; Eliot & Pound had it all wrong, man – I’m right there with you. 2011 looks to have sped on by, and it doesn’t seem a year ago that I was writing about Matter 10 – the decade anniversary issue of the mag published out of Sheffield Hallam University’s renowned MA Writing course – in this meagre corner of the internet. Yet here we are – or I am, at any rate – typing this up hot-on-the-heels (well, almost) of the launch of Matter 11, a rather funky, hot little pink number, as you’ll see from the above, that wouldn’t look out of place on a coffee table in some swanky hairdressers frequented by gaggles of rich-kid fashionistas.

Were it to find itself in that unfortunate situation, however, unlike the tedious fuckwittery that would odds-on make up the glossy pages of its idiotic neighbours, Matter’s pages are crammed with sharp, witty, gritty, honest, often edifying and, above all, entertaining writing of the highest order. An infuriatingly admirable combo of brains and looks. Something which the editors of Matter 11 have, in part, the guys and gals at Eleven Design to thank for, who not only supplied the striking boards and endpapers, but the fantastically spiky graphics and artwork that pepper its contents.

And what contents. I could point to the guest contributions, not least on the poetry side of things where there’s two new poems apiece from Colette Bryce and Paul Farley (“Brawn” in particular is the kind of fizzing lyric we’ve come to expect from the latter, yet are always surprised by: earthy yet dizzying, familiar yet eerie). But, as ever, the quality of the work here from MA students is easily just as striking. Listening to readers at last Wednesday night’s launch and following up their stuff on the page, I was particularly grabbed by Brigidin Crowther’s “Sylvia’s Wig”, a short story that mixes deadpan wit and fun-poking with an odd seriousness; the bite, quiet desperation, and unshowy wordplay of Matt Clegg’s sonnet “Raw Poem in Smooth Room”; and the almost Martian-like avian reimaginings of Suzannah Evans’ poem “Catalogue D’Oiseaux”.

All good reasons to get yourself a copy from the Blackwell’s on Hallam campus. The place has a top-notch modest poetry section, too, which being something of a rarity these days, is definitely worth a visit. Or, if you fancy listening to some of the contributors’ read in person over a glass of plonk or two, you can head to the London launch: 3rd November, 7pm, at the London Review Bookshop, so I'm told.

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

2011-10-20T12:18:00.005+01:00

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

Memorial

2011-10-07T12:30:00.004+01:00

In her sixth book of poetry, Memorial, Alice Oswald draws on her classical education and longstanding fascination with the oral tradition – tales told rather than written – to produce a mesmeric reworking of the world’s greatest war story: Homer’s Iliad. Yet where most critics have praised, and most translators have sought to capture, what Matthew Arnold called the poem’s “nobility”, Oswald’s version abandons its narrative – the wrath of Achilles – approaching instead what ancient critics called its “enargeia”, or “bright unbearable reality”. The result is a darkly atmospheric poem which flits between biographical laments for the many war-dead and soaring, dramatic similes; “an antiphonal account”, as Oswald states in her introduction, “of man in his world”. Throughout, the unflinching, plain realism of the former – “DIORES son of Amarinceus / Struck by a flying flint / Died in a puddle of his own guts / Slammed down into mud he lies” – is often as gripping as the elemental blaze of the latter – “Like the hawk of the hills the perfect killer / Easily outflies the clattering dove / She dips away but he follows he ripples / He hangs his black hooks over her” – blending the human and the workings of nature to remarkable, incantatory effect.

You can visit The Poetry Archive today to listen to Alice Oswald read from Memorial, an excerpt taken from the accompanying CD audiobook to the hardback publication. I'd recommend it.

The Salt Book of Younger Poets - now available

2011-09-29T11:41:00.000+01:00

THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS

edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough
Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99

The Salt Book of Younger Poets showcases a new generation of British poets born since the mid-80s. Many of these poets embrace new technologies such as blogs, social networking and webzines to meet, mentor, influence and publish their own work and others’. Some poets here were winners of the Foyle young poet awards when at school. Some have published pamphlets in series such as tall-lighthouse Pilot and Faber New Poets. All of them are working away on first collections. This is a chance to encounter the poets who will dominate UK poetry in years to come.

RRP £10.99; currently available to buy from from Amazon for £7.54.

Review: John Whale's Waterloo Teeth

2011-09-29T11:33:00.003+01:00

The opening poem in John Whale’s debut collection concerns a species of chameleon-like octopus: a flexible and capable creature, we are told, “at the invertebrate zenith”. With “three pumping hearts” and “no rigid form”, its appeal to Whale is clear enough: his poetic voice revels in its own adaptability, switching between scientific jargon, emotional verve, and subtler, insinuating tones. This allows for a smorgasbord of subjects, and lends Waterloo Teeth an intellectual range that is beyond most slim volumes: moving from the eerie yet touching quatrains of “Mary Toft”, who amusingly ruined the reputations of several eminent eighteenth-century physicians by fooling them into thinking she had given birth to rabbits, to the tumbling rhythms and blunt close of “Mimicries”, which catalogues birds imitating modern technological sounds.

Beneath the book’s surface variety, however, a handful of recurrent themes emerge. Whale is a professor of Romantic literature, so it is not surprising to find his work haunted by the presence of Wordsworth & Co, as well as the celebrities, politics and attitudes of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries more broadly. Titles such as “Lines on the Death of Mary Wollstonecraft” and “Brioche” jump out; a long poem, “Sugar”, harbours a Romantic sensibility in its associative reflections; and the grim title poem examines the mercenary practice, common to the age, of pulling sets of teeth from fallen soldiers. Even the lone apple core that garnishes the collection’s jacket stems from a vignette which reworks an entry from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal. But the book is not without cohesive focus, as each poem attempts to bridge the gap between our refined sensibilities – sentimentalized bite marks in an apple – and the blunt, clinical facts of our corporeal lives: “a jet of arterial blood” bursting from Jean-Paul Marat’s chest; Lady Hamilton’s recurring dream of “Freddy drenched in Flanders”.

That said, Whale’s protean interests can get the better of him. Cwm Idwal, a hanging valley in Snowdonia is surely a spectacular landscape and a natural wonder, but Whale’s paean to it lacks any real consequence. A shame, then, that his book’s latter half is padded out with these dull landscapes, when his more natural milieu is the drama and diversity of life as it was, and is, variously lived. For as much of Waterloo Teeth reveals, it is here that Whale excels; revivifying the “phantom life / which lies beneath our feet.”

first published in the Times Literary Supplement

An Artist of the Floating World

2011-08-03T11:48:00.003+01:00

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

The Forward Prizes 2011

2011-07-27T08:23:00.008+01:00

The Forward Prizes, now in their twentieth year, are usually the source of much discussion and contention in poetry circles; or at least, the shortlists are. Will the main prize, for best collection of the year, exclusively round up the usual heavyweight suspects, or will it count a couple of unexpected books from lesser-known poets in its ranks? Will it be a commercial press shoo-in, or feature collections put out by hardworking smaller presses? Will the categories of best first collection and best poem introduce 'the next big thing'?

Looking at this year's lists, anyone inclined to grumble about the usual main prize shortlist almost always consisting of established, white, predominantly male voices won't be acting unreasonably; in this year's shortlist of Burnside, Harsent, Hill, Longley, Nurkse & O'Brien, we even have one populated entirely by blokes. Sarah Crown raises some interesting points about that here; doubtless this year's judges (three women & two men) acted in good faith, looking for (and, from those I've read, I'd say finding) the best collections regardless of their author's gender, but that can't explain away the fact that in the twenty year history of the prize, only three women have won in the Best Collection category. After all, if year on year judges are guided solely by the criteria of what they view to be the best poetry, and given that as many, if not more, women as men write the stuff seriously, probability would suggest that we really shouldn't end up with a distorted long-term outcome like that. Should we?

Pleasantly, at least, the Best First Collection category has seen this year's judges (Andrew Motion as chair, joined by Fiona Sampson, poet and teacher Leonie Rushforth, author Lady Antonia Fraser and journalist Sameer Rahim) ending up with a shortlist that represents a more diverse bunch, with collections from publishers Carcanet, CB Editions, Picador, Bloodaxe & two from Seren. I haven't read all of these, and hadn't heard of Nancy Gaffield's Tokaido Road until I saw the shortlist, but from those I have, it seems like a strong and fairly diverse grouping. Both Rachael Boast's Sidereal and John Whale's Waterloo Teeth are excellent debuts; smart, assured, distinctive and memorable. If you were to buy just one book from the shortlist, I'd strongly recommend either, though Boast's in particular - a sampler poem can be found on the Guardian website.

As to the Best Single Poem category, only four shortlistees this year, and all established poets, so no promise of bringing a new talent to a wider audience as the 2004 prize did, going to what would become the title poem of Daljit Nagra's bestselling first volume, Look We Have Coming to Dover. But then it's only the absolute quality of the poem that does and should matter here, and Alan Jenkin's "Southern Rail (The Four Students)" is a masterful, moving, devastating and wholly incisive poem that fully deserves to take the prize I think.

The three shortlists are as follows - my money's on Geoffrey Hill, Ahren Warner, & Alan Jenkins - and the winners will be announced, as ever, at a ceremony in London on the eve of National Poetry Day in October.

The Forward Prize for Best Collection

£10,000 – sponsored by the Forward Arts Foundation

John Burnside, Black Cat Bone (Jonathan Cape)
David Harsent, Night (Faber & Faber)
Geoffrey Hill, Clavics (Enitharmon)
Michael Longley, A Hundred Doors (Jonathan Cape)
D Nurkse, Voices Over Water (CB Editions)
Sean O’Brien, November (Picador Poetry)

The Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection

£5,000 – sponsored by Felix Dennis and the Forward Arts Foundation

Rachael Boast, Sidereal (Picador Poetry)
Judy Brown, Loudness (Seren)
Nancy Gaffield, Tokaido Road (CB Editions)
Ahren Warner, Confer (Bloodaxe)
John Whale, Waterloo Teeth (Carcanet)
Nerys Williams, Sound Archive (Seren)

The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (in memory of Michael Donaghy)

£1,000 – sponsored by the Forward Arts Foundation

R. F. Langley, "To a Nightingale" (first published in London Review of Books)
Alan Jenkins, "Southern Rail (The Four Students)" (Poetry Review)
Sharon Olds "Song the Breasts Sing to the Late-in-Life Boyfriend" (Poetry London)
Jo Shapcott "Bees" (Poetry Review)

The New Political Poetry?

2011-07-13T18:02:00.009+01:00

The recent ruckus at the UK’s Poetry Society has so far seen plenty of finger-pointing, gun-jumping, side-taking (but which sides? and who’s on them?), as yet unsubstantiated rumours of some supposedly shady goings-on, high profile resignations, and a(nother) quite funny rehash of one particularly reiterable scene from epic war film Downfall. Business as usual in poetry-biz-land, then.

Something that’s also been bandied about is the idea that the Poetry Society would be better off doing away with Poetry Review. Of course, I would never suggest that many, indeed most of the more fervent supporters of this idea are of an ilk that reacts very, very badly to repeat rejection slips. But I will say that one of the main, if not the reason I continue to be a paid-up member of the Society is to get my quarterly subscription to what has always been a thoughtful, provocative, entertaining, infuriating, but above all engaging magazine.

Yeah right, Ben, you would say that – you’ve got a poem in the latest issue! Ah yes, so I have. Well, shoot me down. Tell me it’s exactly the same as every poem that Poetry Review has ever published; bourgeois, nice & safe, formal pillar of mediocrity that it is. Then send me a copy of a real magazine, with avant-garde stuff that boggles the mind in its self-reflexive boundary-pushing, i.e. its brave disregard for not only sense and musicality, but also for the reader, who’s fast giving up on trying to wrestle something, anything from the brave new spattered word-shrapnel. Amen.

Now the cutting edge trend-vaulters have gone (or as ever, are one step ahead on the road to nowhere, scrolling down to the comments box) and I’ve stopped madly addressing myself, let me tell you that, truly, there’s some great stuff in the latest PR. New poems from Jamie McKendrick, Philip Gross, Daljit Nagra, Adam Thorpe; fascinating political letters to Crane, Milton and Shelley from John Burnside, Gwyneth Lewis and Neil Rollinson; reviews of Duhig, Cope, McDonald and others, including a round-up of debutants. The series of poems by David Harsent for the World Wildlife Fund, commissioned to accompany photographs as part of the ecological campaign Fragile Beauty, are especially compelling in their subtle, dark, questing arguments, as is the Centrefold perspective on Harsent’s work to date by poet-critic Sean O’Brien. Well worth a read.

And before I nip off to sort a nightcap, here’s a link to Dan Wyke’s blog, who kindly asked if he could feature my stab at translating Eugenio Montale’s “Il Balcone”. Needless to say I can’t speak Italian (back when I wrote the piece I worked from a mixture of literal translations and existing versions to first get a feel for the poem, before attempting to make my own), so I’m chuffed to have the poem praised by someone who can, and who’s also a talented poet in his own right. Check out his debut, Waiting for the Sky to Fall, to see what I mean.

The Swan

2011-05-31T09:52:00.004+01:00

The Swan

Just as Blake engraved his poems backwards,
out of necessity but also open-mindedness,

each illuminated word gleaming in relief
against its brightly burning backdrop,

something clicked into place
as we watched it hurtling upwards:

the desperate, beating wingspan
testament to what should or could or can

be achieved when all’s open, flung wide,
neck craned out and eyes on the prize

as, thrashing itself from the lake’s surface,
its flight was a realised extravagance –

as Blake, man of genius and boy of visions,
saw angels line the trees, beyond reach of metaphors.

poem by Ben Wilkinson; first published in The Sparks (tall-lighthouse, 2008)

Review: Colette Bryce's Self-Portrait in the Dark

2011-05-30T20:43:00.005+01:00

Often as it might be said of first collections, Colette Bryce’s The Heel of Bernadette (2000) was a debut of genuine and considerable promise: its taut, economic lines combining everyday vernacular with deftly crafted images and a winning, often unusual musicality, to produce, in its finer moments, poems that were both intellectually provocative and formally agile. It suggested that a more mature and potentially brilliant second collection might follow, but for all its qualities – the poems’ stylish lines, their verve and meticulous execution – its follow-up, The Full Indian Rope Trick (2004), offered little in the way of real surprises, tending to reiterate (with a few notable exceptions) the winsome effects of Bryce’s earlier work.

‘A Spider’, the opening vignette of Self-Portrait in the Dark, quickly and quietly suggests that this new book will be, in at least certain respects, different. A sketch that takes the act of ‘trapp[ing] a spider in a glass’ as symbolic of the narrator’s own circumstances, the tight lines and subtle music of earlier poems are still in evidence, but Bryce makes these resources work harder than previously: manipulating syntax and repetition to conjure a well-pitched tone and convincing atmosphere (‘a glass, / a fine-blown wineglass. / It shut around him, silently’), while pushing her rhyming panache to achieve surprising metaphorical links:

I meant to let him go
but still he taps against the glass
all Marcel Marceau
in the wall that is there but not there,
a circumstance I know.

The effect is an impressive one. Bryce has the knack of making her poems look effortless when a restless intelligence is carefully at work behind them. But it’s when this hard thinking is combined with the looser lines of lengthier poems that the results are most pleasingly unusual and memorable. In ‘The Residents’, for instance, stanzas of slant-rhymed couplets are adopted to describe an eerie, dust-ridden study where ‘mould is blossoming on the wall’; a ‘funk-hole’ which seems to embody the anxiety of literary influence (note the Yeatsian refrain at the end of each stanza) as well as the writer’s fear of failure, especially when its richly described, dilapidated state becomes a reimagining of the room as a crime scene, where

if asked, you could offer a team from forensics:
– various punched-out blister packs
– a fingerprint in a lip-gloss compact
– a half-smoked menthol cigarette
– a woollen scarf unravelling on a hook
– a mildewed draft of her second book
– a culture thriving in her unwashed cup
– a single plimsoll, size five, lace-up […]

An almost darkly comic meditation on the nature of both the literary life and the decidedly contemporary enterprise of the literary residency, the poem goes on to end with these curious and suggestive tangents (‘posit[ing] a case of human combustion / perhaps, or an extra-terrestrial abduction’) cutting suddenly short: ‘skip[ping] three years / to a bright young novelist opening the door; / the inaudible snap of a spider’s thread / as he takes the first steps into your head.’ It succeeds – as in the sudden closure of the final end-rhyme – when the tone is pitched between indifference and a sense of resignation and regret, interrogating the speed of twenty-first century life as it affects writers, readers and literature itself, but also the feeling that much of our world is increasingly disposable and that nothing, not even literature (‘Is this a crime scene? Is it a shrine?’) is ever quite sacred.

Another commendable feature of this new book is its well-judged humour. In the title poem, for example, the narrator’s talk of insomnia, smoking habits and ‘moving on’ from a difficult break-up is smartly juxtaposed with wryly amusing observations: ‘Here, I could easily go off / on a riff / on how cars, like pets, look a little like their owners / but I won’t ‘go there’, / as they say in America, / given it’s a clapped-out Nissan Micra…’ So too, with greater subtlety, in ‘The Poetry Bug’: ‘a moon-pale, lumpish creature’; and the two women in ‘Car Wash’, kissing ‘in a world where to do so / can still stop the traffic.’ Bryce’s wide thematic range is also striking, even if the results are not always successful: ghosts, empty cars, mobile phones, mysterious dwellings and vivid childhood memories recur throughout the collection in poems that are frequently shrouded by cigarette smoke or a strange half-light. A particular highlight is the intricate conceit of ‘Volcanoes’, where the human imagination and the workings of the earth begin to mirror and merge: ‘The mind in the cavern of the skull. / The skull the limits of the skies. / The core in the dark behind the eyes.’

There are reasons to suspect, however, that the renewed depth, wit and imaginative range of Self-Portrait in the Dark may go unmentioned, even unnoticed, by some critics and readers, and this is largely due to the combination of Bryce’s succinct and swift-moving poetic style with the difficulty of uncovering the sometimes elliptical significance of her work. Starting this review with two relatively close readings of Bryce’s poems was an attempt to offset this – the notion that fluent, musical and energetic contemporary poems yield their meanings quickly and cleanly without warranting a great deal of rereading or deliberation. For while there are poems in this book which seem a tad hurried and glib (‘The Knack’; ‘On Highgate Hill’), the majority see Bryce developing a muscular and graceful language capable of dealing with everything from the grander themes (the solitude of ‘Finisterre’; the failures of language in ‘Sin Música’) to the specifics of contemporary life (the junk inside a phone box in ‘Belfast Waking, 6 a.m.’; the detailed introspection of ‘Self-Portrait in a Broken Wing-Mirror’). Reading this book through for the first time is something of a mixed experience, but if the poems are given the time and thought they deserve, Self-Portrait in the Dark reveals itself to be a complex and often richly rewarding volume.

first published in Stand magazine

The Salt Book of Younger Poets

2011-04-21T10:02:00.006+01:00

THE SALT BOOK OF YOUNGER POETS

edited by Roddy Lumsden & Eloise Stonborough
Salt Publishing, October 2011. Paperback, £10.99

Available to pre-order from Amazon.

Review: Lorraine Mariner's Furniture

2011-04-19T22:45:00.002+01:00

The title poem of Lorraine Mariner’s debut volume tells the story of two young women in their twenties: one who has “acquired” a family, home and furniture, the other “who’d only ever known the fully-furnished, / the three white goods”. As both a metaphor for unrealised, misplaced aspirations and an emblem of modern life’s clutter, furniture in the broadest sense is ubiquitous in Mariner’s poems. Many specifically address such objects, intent on uncovering the social significance they embody, as in the complex staff-room politics of “Chair”, or the collapsed Ikea wardrobe of “There is nothing wrong with my sister”. Elsewhere, the cultural detritus of Littlewoods catalogues, CDs, predictive texts and London Lite newspapers grows irritatingly to litter the book with their almost programmatic contemporaneity, though frustration is usually offset by Mariner’s natural, charming and engagingly chatty free verse.

The best poems in Furniture tend to be the longest, affording Mariner room to unpick everyday subject matters in often surreal narratives. In its study of human infidelity, “Feathers” sustains an impressive (if unlikely) extended metaphor based on birding, while “My beast” brings children’s fairytale and adult reality into literal collision, the poet imagining her father’s “Volvo reversing into a beast’s carriage” while she “end[s] up at the castle as compensation”. “Assertiveness role play” treads a similar line between contemplative seriousness and wry comedy. “Thursday” is an accomplished and original perspective on terrorism, detailing in lengthy stream of consciousness the poet’s journey to work on the morning of the 2005 London bombings.

It is in the short, first-person lyrics which dominate the collection that the shortcomings of Mariner’s verse appear. Too many of her poems fail to develop their slight subject matters: in “Shop names”, a brief discussion of retail puns yields nothing beyond mild amusement; “My wedding” sacrifices a more provocative engagement with the personal implications of our digital era to throwaway, crowd-pleasing effects. At its best, Mariner’s work is sure-footed, energetic, and often strikes an original tone; at worst, it exhibits prosiness and chick-lit triviality. But the strongest poems – foremost among them the fully realised character study of “In my worst moments” – successfully combine a witty light touch with intelligent reflection.

first published in the Times Literary Supplement

Review: Mark Waldron's The Brand New Dark

2011-03-01T18:25:00.002Z

The late American comic Bill Hicks once infamously began a stand-up routine with the deadpan line “If you work in advertising or marketing, kill yourself now”. He may well have made an exception for someone like Mark Waldron, a poet who writes adverts for a living. His debut, The Brand New Dark, is far removed from the clichés and superficiality of modern commercialism; witty, subversive, often darkly comic poems which are full of unusual images and curious turns of phrase. But the world which Waldron deftly unpicks is also a bleakly decadent and harrowingly pertinent one, uncovering “The King … in his counting house / not counting out his money, but making some swanky / kind of love to his secretary”, while elsewhere, a man dressed in a Mickey Mouse suit at Disneyland becomes a chilling metaphor for our increasingly isolated and virtual lives.

The success of the book, however, stems from the way in which Waldron handles the sinister, noirish aspects of contemporary life; a darkness which frequently rears its head in the commercial branding satirized in the volume’s title. One might expect a fug of depression or moralizing to pervade poems on mass production, sex as commodity, and the drawbacks of technological advancement. But Waldron’s gift is to approach these subjects from novel, oblique angles, often with a tone that is more implicating than accusatory. And so in “The Sausage Factory”, the meat is figured as “wee circus elephants, / gripping the tail of the one that goes before, / marching uncertainly away from death”, while in a series of dramatized poems focusing on a fictionalised, attractive young woman, the narrator is candid about his sexualizing of her: “Oh Marcie, I’ve watched you come half to yourself, // … and, / Oh, say it! watched your body, / a scented buddy to yourself, your self’s pork dolly, / dreaming its own fuckable dream”.

Overall, there is much to admire about The Brand New Dark: only a few squib-like failures occur where the humour misfires, dotted about an otherwise wide selection of engaged and engaging poems addressing modern life in all of its complexity; like the manatees that close the book, “arranging and rearranging themselves / into what we might call stories”. It confirms Mark Waldron as an emerging talent to watch.

first published in the Times Literary Supplement

14

2011-03-01T14:25:00.011Z

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.

Fiere

2011-02-12T16:35:00.004Z

Just a quick note for those interested: my review of Fiere, Jackie Kay's new book of poems and her first with Picador, appears in today's Guardian Review. It's also on Guardian.co.uk. Brief pieces from previous supplements - on books by David Wheatley, Anna Woodford, Brian Turner, John Haynes, Penelope Shuttle, and Dan Wyke - are also in the poetry reviews archive, here.

Bearing

2011-02-12T16:27:00.003Z

Bearing

Watching him that spring-spilled-into-summer,
sat among Algar Seco’s jagged rocks,
steadfast with rod, tub of bait,

water, hunk of bread,
still and magisterial as a stork in its nest
settled above the walls of Silves,

I recovered what it was to wait –
content, not out of hope or faith
but for the catch that always comes;

a clutch of silver by dusk just as
us, stumbling onto the beach one night,
finding that added depth in each other’s eyes.

Ben Wilkinson

Review: Simon Armitage's Seeing Stars

2011-02-12T16:23:00.004Z

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

Lament

2010-11-16T00:00:00.002Z

Lament

Here now, it’s hard to believe this place –
yellowed wallpaper, towels hung over
every decent lager except the guest –
is where we first met and that blur

of brilliance – a world from this pint
and the torn fabric of a duff pool table –
meant the next week, the next fortnight,
were the closest things ever get to simple.

So if this is how I know us, want us –
the two who clicked on an understanding
of close as close to sparseness, bluntness –
then that’s why, aware or drifting,

I’ve come to sit in this selfsame chair,
selfsame spot; listening to the traffic
which you must be a part of, somewhere,
pitched as it is among frantic and Orphic

while one by one the pigeons flutter off;
draining the glass and closing my book
as the lights click on, someone coughs,
and the place is good as lost, however I look.

Ben Wilkinson

Seafood : Splinter

2010-11-15T23:51:00.003Z

Single from late 90s/00s alt-rock band Seafood's second album, When Do We Start Fighting.

The Mars Volta : L'Via L'Viaquez

2010-11-03T11:40:00.004Z

Seeing Stars

2010-11-03T11:27:00.003Z

Alongside a slightly lengthier piece on John Fuller's latest collection, Pebble and I, by William Wootten, the current week's TLS (29 October) contains my review of Simon Armitage's latest book, the PBS Choice (and so automatically T.S. Eliot prize-shortlisted) Seeing Stars. A new direction for his work, sure, but is it actually any good?

Matter Launch

2010-10-09T14:41:00.003+01:00

Matter magazine, published out of the MA Writing course at Sheffield Hallam University, is now in its tenth year and, to celebrate, this year's issue - just published - has a burnt gold cover. As ever, it's a stunning object to hold in hand and, like the best literature mags, combines quality production with excellent writing.

I've only dipped into the issue myself, having recently received a copy, but have already been struck by the guest contributions - from the likes of Daljit Nagra and Iain Sinclair - and the strength of writing from MA students included. (Jamie Coward's 'The Coxcomb' is a nifty little poem in particular; curious, amusing, subtly musical.) As in previous years, the issue points to Sheffield Hallam's ever-growing reputation as a place that nurtures some of the best new writers: Katharine Towers, Marina Lewycka, Tony Williams and Frances Leviston, to name but a few successful alumni.

Should you fancy getting hold of a copy of this year's issue, then, you'll find it on sale from the Matter website, as well as in Sheffield bookshops. And there's a couple of events tied in with it too, where contributors to the issue will read from their work and copies will be on sale. The first is the launch proper, at the Sheffield Hallam Blackwell's branch on Wednesday 13th October, from 7.15pm. Refreshments will be provided. There's also an event at the Riverside in Sheffield on the 21st October at 7pm. This will feature many of the same readers, but they'll be reading more of their work. I'm also told that the London launch is on 4th November at London Review Bookshop from 7pm.

You can find out more about these events, among other things, on the Matter website.

Katharine Towers: The Floating Man

2010-09-15T11:29:00.003+01:00

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 XX win the 2010 Mercury Prize

2010-09-08T11:41:00.005+01:00

South London-based band the XX have won this year’s Mercury Prize, and deservedly so. Their self-titled debut beat other shortlisted albums from Mumford and Sons, Biffy Clyro, Dizzee Rascal, Foals, and bookie’s favourite (?!) washed-up has-been Paul Weller – all, I think, would have made deserving winners with the obvious exception of the latter. But the XX are unusually and subtly original in a way none of these artists are: their moody, electronic, skeletal songs are unlike anything else going on in the British pop-music mainstream at the moment. Like all great bands, they manage to sound wholly contemporary while also retaining a timeless feel; atmospheric and haunting, their stuff isn’t showy but it sticks and, I think, will stand up for years to come. I fully recommend buying a copy of their album if you haven’t already. Along with Klaxons, PJ Harvey, Pulp and Elbow, I’d go so far as to say they are perhaps the most deserving winners in the Mercury Prize’s history. But before this becomes Superlative Central, best to let the music speak for itself… above is the video to their single ‘Islands’; a live version of which I posted here back in October '09. Enjoy.

Faber Firsts, Poetry Classics & Poet to Poet on special offer

2010-08-05T20:20:00.014+01:00

There's a lot to be said for brilliantly designed and stunningly produced books, second fiddle though these things are - and certainly should be - to brilliant, stunning writing. When the two are combined, though, the book lover really can't ask for much more. And so it is with these recent Faber Firsts reissues: beautiful, highly affordable hardbacks of classic contemporary collections, including Armitage's Kid, Cope's Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, Paterson's Nil Nil and Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings.

They seem a continuation of the beautiful Faber 80th Anniversary Poetry Classics, selected poems of various poets which include similarly stunning designs and not only make the perfect gift for the newcomer to British and Irish poetry, but are tempting to those of us who already own other, doubtlessly less stylish, selecteds of Yeats, Plath, Hughes, Auden, Betjeman and Eliot.

Good news, then, for those of us who live in or around Sheffield, as the Blackwell Bookshop on Mappin St (just off West St) has the poetry section bursting with these, and all on offer at 3 for the price of 2, alongside a healthy selection of titles from the Poet to Poet series, also 3 for 2, all of which contain an illuminating introduction and selection from a great poet's work by a contemporary (I especially recommend Michael Hofmann's John Berryman, Maurice Riordan's Hart Crane, and August Kleinzahler's Thom Gunn). As Tony Williams puts it: "I covet the books even though I already own other editions".

Blackbox Manifold and Ink, Sweat & Tears

2010-08-03T11:58:00.005+01:00

The fifth issue of literary ezine Blackbox Manifold has just been published, and well worth reading it is too; the usual mix of big names and new voices and poems of all styles, subjects and schools. And so you can read new work from George Szirtes, Sharon Olds, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Carolyn Hart and Susan Wicks, among others. I've a couple of poems included, too. There are also reviews by Vahni Capildeo, an exciting young poet in her own right (check out her stuff in Roddy Lumsden's recent generational anthology, Identity Parade), and by Adam Piette, co-founder and editor of the magazine.

Also worth checking out is the prose and poetry forum Ink, Sweat & Tears, which features a new poem, piece of prose writing or visual artwork almost every day. Recent highlights include Helen Mort's 'The Lovesick', which somehow manages to conjure genuine emotion from a Carry On scene, Helen Ivory's amusing account of her time at Latitude Festival, and Dan Wyke's atmospheric 'Saturday Night in St Ives'. Yesterday, my short version of Eugenio Montale's 'Il Balcone' also appeared there: an absolutely beautiful short poem in the original Italian I'm told. I at least hope I've captured its general feel. In any case, do drop in on the zine's site from time to time: there's sure to be plenty more fascinating stuff added in the future.

The Burning Perch

2010-07-13T09:37:00.004+01:00

A snappy - and hopefully accessible and informative - piece on Louis MacNeice's best and last collection, The Burning Perch, features in the second issue of YM, the Poetry Society's online magazine for new young readers and writers of poetry. Do take a look, and once you've been persuaded, you can pick up the excellent Collected Poems here.

Special Cases

2010-06-15T20:22:00.005+01:00

from Massive Attack's 2003 album, 100th Window.

Adam O'Riordan, In the Flesh

2010-06-06T14:30:00.001+01:00

This year looks like it’s shaping up to be an interesting one for new British poetry. There are several exciting debuts that have recently been released or are shortly forthcoming, not least Sam Willetts’s New Light for the Old Dark, which I mentioned here a couple of months back, Miriam Gamble’s The Squirrels are Dead, a first book of rhythmically taut poems that, if the stuff of hers I’ve spotted in magazines and elsewhere is anything to go by, will include lyrics and narratives from animal and curiously alien perspectives, and, of course, Dan Wyke’s long awaited debut with Waterloo, whose subtly suggestive poems address the domestic, familial and everyday with knowing insight.

One book I’m particularly looking forward to, though, is the first full collection from Adam O’Riordan. Titled In the Flesh and due to appear from Chatto & Windus this July, it follows on from a pamphlet, Queen of the Cotton Cities, published by tall-lighthouse in 2007 as one of the first in its acclaimed Pilot series, and winner of an Eric Gregory Award. A short volume of only sixteen poems, this pamphlet was the first introduction readers got to O’Riordan’s work, but it leaves a lasting impression: lyrical, thematically wide-ranging and Donaghy-like in its formal panache, the poems combine dazzling metaphor and simile with sudden shifts in perspective and detailed, provocative contemplation.

Having read an early proof, I’d certainly say that In the Flesh builds on this early promise, including many new longer poems and a sequence of sonnets, ‘Home’, which imagine episodes from the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, inspired by O’Riordan’s time as the Wordsworth Trust’s Poet-in-Residence at Dove Cottage. On the strength of the collection taken as a whole, I’m even inclined - for once - to agree with the publisher’s hype, which describes O’Riordan’s poems as “confident, seductive, and thrillingly assured […] seeking familiarity in a world of ‘false trails and disappearing acts’ […] in language both clear-eyed and sensuous”. Adding to that list of superlatives, I’d also call his stuff jaunty, vibrant, and satisfyingly disorienting: take vignette ‘NGC3949’, below, as an example of his ability to marry incongruous subjects in atmospheric and convincing conceits. And since it's often interesting to hear a writer's own thoughts about their work, as well as a bit of background, Adam answers a couple of questions below.

NGC3949

is a galaxy in Ursa Major whose formation mirrors, almost exactly, that of our own.

Back from the perforated dark and growing distance,
Hubble’s milky image brings us to ourselves.

The echo pitched up from the moss-wet well:
a lover’s shape, that indelible stain on the iris.

(Years down the line, you swear blind
the cut and sway of a dark form is her.

Neon dazzles the rain-slicked street
as you wave away the cab and push

back down through the crowd into the bar,
pilot charting the wrong star by candlelight,

leagues off course, the face, of course, is another’s.)
In this spiral galaxy the arms embrace the core.

Not her – or your idea of her – and never will be.
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is.

© Adam O'Riordan, reproduced by permission of the poet

BW: One of the first things readers will notice about In the Flesh is a strong sense of place threaded through the collection: Manchester, the Lake District, specific locations such as a college window in Cambridge or an escalator in Paris. Can you tell us a little about your background, upbringing, and what we might call your 'imaginative hinterland', and how you see these as contributing to your writing?

AOR: I was born in Didsbury in South Manchester.

My father’s family were from Scotland. His father was a third generation Irish immigrant and the third generation in public service, in his a case as a career naval officer. His mother from Fife, what you might call, haute-bourgeoisie. She was a descendant of Sir Michael Nairn, the linoleum manufacturer who took his father’s floor-cloth business and industrialized the process.

My mother’s family were a mix English, Scottish, and Irish. Her father’s family had come down from Aberdeen where they worked in the fisheries to work in the newly built Trafford Park, the world’s first planned industrial estate. Family legend has it they sailed down on board a fishing boat during the herring famine.

My father worked in Trade Union education, in fact he met my mother when they both at the same college. They were both active in the Labour party and for a period my mother ran the office of our local MP.

I was the first generation on my father’s side to go to a State school, but the fourth or fifth to go to Oxbridge.

I suppose these factors made me acutely aware of class and identity but also the fluidity of both. Leaving me feeling not particularly at home, or too uncomfortable, in any.

I remember my father telling me about an exercise called ‘Dig Where You Stand’ from a book of the same name by a Swedish historian Sven Lindqvist which encouraged workers to re-discover their history.

My poem ‘A Trade Union College’ from the ‘Vanishing Points’ sequence recalls a story my father told me about teaching a group of shop stewards as a young man and carrying out the exercise. Part way through he realized that the college they were in had once been a rather grand private house and was the place his mother was born. Though apparently they didn’t give him too hard a time about it.

The other poems in the sequence looks at similar themes – flux and change and forgetting of identity. The poem ‘A Wedding Letter’ takes a note written by the son of my last Gaelic speaking ancestor on the night of his daughter’s wedding in 1906. He describes in a wonderfully Edwardian way how she ‘would carry her hospitality to extravagance’ and ‘never spoke English with any satisfaction’.

It occurred to me in reading the letter that once it was lost or forgotten that the woman (my great great great grandmother) would vanish. It was that chilling sense of erasure coupled with the privilege of being perhaps one of the last to catch a glimpse of her in that description.

BW: That title, In the Flesh, captures well the blurrings between the sensual and the violent, the physically beautiful and the rawly animal, which much of your work centres on. Do you see this as an especially contemporary concern?

AOR: I think it’s always been there. Certainly in the lines and traditions I respect and have learned from: think of Yeats’s Leda and the Swan with that ‘’sudden blow / the great wings beating still’.

I always loved that line in Romeo and Juliet where Mercutio, in a lovely coupling of the two, describes Tybalt as ‘the very butcher of a silk button’.

I remember when I was in residence at The Wordsworth Trust showing my collection in progress to Pamela Woof, the president of the Trust and academic. She wrote a note to me talking about ‘the nearness of violence to beauty, of beauty to the vulnerable’ which I think captures it.

I struggled with the title for a long time. I wanted something that suggests not just the blurrings of sensual and violent you mention but also a sense of presence and absence and the familia. I think ‘In the Flesh’ ties it all together quite well.

Recent Issues

2010-05-26T07:53:00.004+01:00

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.

Drive-By Truckers

2010-05-05T10:04:00.004+01:00

Drive-By Truckers perform "Birthday Boy", taken from their new album The Big To-Do, on Jools Holland's Later.

Chris Morris's Four Lions

2010-05-02T13:22:00.010+01:00

There can be weeks when I find very little to engage on BBC2's The Review Show (formerly Newsnight Review, though the name change seems to have accompanied nothing more than the sickly new colour scheme of its redesigned set), so it was a pleasant surprise to see Chris Morris, Britain's foremost satirist and creator of series The Day Today (1994) and Brass Eye (1997), featured on the show this week, having finished his latest project, a darkly comic film about a bunch of hapless, amateur terrorists based in Sheffield.

I'd almost forgotten about the movie, having last read about Morris's current project when I stumbled across a letter, "The absurd world of Martin Amis", in the Guardian a few years back, in which Morris takes the bestselling author to task for "prowling the thickets of his research [into Islam and terrorism] like a demented flasher".

But as Morris's first film, and given his reputation for dealing with difficult topics (such as drugs, war, paedophilia, and AIDS) with biting satire, sharp observations and prickly wit, Four Lions promises to be impressive. In the meantime, I'm returning to DVDs and online clips from Morris's previous work, particularly the excellent The Day Today. For those who haven't seen it, here from the fifth episode of that series is Morris's rebarbative newsreader character at full tilt, deliberately sparking off a war after an unlikely peace accord in order to capitalise on the ensuing pandemonium with up-to-the-minute news coverage, invasive, sensationalist footage, and even (later in the episode) marketing a CD titled 'Our War', including pop songs inappropriately set to war footage.

Robin Vaughan-Williams: The Manager

2010-04-27T13:01:00.008+01:00

Managers, offices, the daily grind, rows of computer screens, crap coffee machines ... a fair number of contemporary poets have been swift to pen their thoughts on the typical working conditions of modern life, but a new pamphlet I recently received, The Manager, is, I think, a novel and original take on the 9-5 world that most of us inhabit. As its title suggests, it centres on the shifting persona of "the manager", in a sequence that moves from the serious to the irreverant and from the depressing to the uplifting with surprising ease. A few excerpts to pique your interest:

The manager has proverbs on the wall about being a good man
and he reads them at times of intense isolation

when his office has become a cell
and the laughter in the next room is a barrier

he has not the skill to clear.

(Manager #1: Mantra)

The manager burns, he burns
with the heat of an example
others will follow: a new kind of leader.

(Manager #5: Health & Safety Incident)

The manager's eyes are not his own.
He has seen more than one man can bear.
He has seen the high street of humanity,
the bargain hunters, shop lifters,
just looking, and disfigured returns -
receipt or no receipt, that's policy.

(Manager #8: The Manager's Eyes)

Doesn't he realise how vulnerable I am?
I'm a sensitive person.
'I'm a poet,' I say.
'You can't fire me,
I'll put you in a poem.'

'Not a very well known poet,' he says
and fires me anyway.

(Manager #10: Fired!)

Thought-provoking and entertaining, it's a pamphlet that's consistently effective and insightful but at the same time understated, and which doesn't take itself too seriously. Well worth getting a copy, available from HappenStance press at £4, which isn't much more than that extra pint down the pub on a Friday.

I Trust I Can Rely On Your Vote

2010-04-16T19:51:00.001+01:00

Radiohead performing the brilliant "Electioneering", shortly after the release of their album, OK Computer.

Our Disappearing World

2010-04-10T11:15:00.004+01:00

The latest issue of Poetry Review, Our Disappearing World (100:1, Spring 2010) has just been published, and features a broad array of interesting poems, features, and reviews: just received my copy the other day, so haven't had chance to enjoy it in full, but so far Alison Brackenbury's article on the work of John Clare, Jacqueline Gabbitas's round-up of recent pamphlets, and poems by Glyn Maxwell, John Stammers, James Midgley and Liz Berry have all caught and held my attention. In particular, Liz Berry's "In the Steam Room" is impressive: a minutely detailed, gorgeously sensual and descriptive poem that is also, in parts, that touch uncomfortable - great stuff. I'm particularly pleased, then, to see it included in a section of the magazine, "Now and Then", which takes its title from a poem of mine, also in issue, and also includes poems by Alex McRae, Tamar Yoseloff, Tom Gilliver, and Daniel Weissbort. The issue also features the winners of this year's National Poetry Competition: Helen Dunmore's "The Malarkey", Ian Pindar's "Mrs Beltinska In The Bath", and John Stammers's "Mr Punch in Soho".

I'll also add, before I embark on the immensely dull chore of general housework, that it was an unexpected pleasure, on the same day as receiving my copy of Poetry Review, to stumble across this very generous and attentive review of my pamphlet, The Sparks, at Tom Chivers's online literary review, Hand and Star. Always heartening and reassuring to know that someone has come away from reading your stuff with a real sense of what you - often dimly, in my case at least! - feel you're trying to achieve.

Iota

2010-03-30T11:24:00.004+01:00

News just in: the shortlist for the Iota International Poetry Competition 2010 has just been announced, judged this year by the talented - and typically stylishly turned-out - poet Tim Turnbull. And amongst some familiar names - Martyn Crucefix, Mick Wood, Matthew Caley and Christopher North - I'm chuffed to see a poem of my own shortlisted.

The full list of prizes, shortlisted poets and poems is below; the winners will be announced at an awards event at the University of Gloucestershire on April 19th.

1st Prize £2,000
2nd Prize £1,000
3rd Prize £500
10 Supplementary Prizes of £50

(in no particular order)

"Here is The News" by Carol Beadle

"A truck called 'Perseverence' ", by Martyn Crucefix

"Look Who's Shunting The Nuclear Train", by Mick Wood

"Playtime", by Maeve Henry

"Los Angeles", by Matthew Caley

"The embolism suffered by Edward's father (during a sudden cold
snap)", by Rosie Sheppard

"Doors", by Kevin Russell-Pavier

"In the Gardens of Titans", by Clint Frakes

"Everyone Matters", by Jamie Walsh

"Untitled", by Pat Cash

"Where the Bull Got In", by Kate Miller

"New Flat", by Ben Wilkinson

"Eurythmy Artiste with Toque", by Christopher North

[ends]

To The Lighthouse

2010-03-29T18:39:00.003+01:00

For those interested, my review of the last four poets to produce pamphlets as part of Tall-Lighthouse's Pilot series (published 18 younger poets over the course of three years) is up now at Stride magazine. Charlotte Runcie, Richard O'Brien, Ailbhe Darcy and Simon Pomery - all very different writers, and all names to look out for in the future, not only when their first full collections appear, but when the annual Society of Authors' Eric Gregory Awards are announced in the coming years, no doubt.

You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve

2010-03-11T22:11:00.004Z

For my money, one of the best pop songs of recent years. Brilliant.

New Light for the Old Dark

2010-02-10T17:03:00.006Z

Just a hunch, but since I came across the poetry of Sam Willetts in the latest Poetry magazine and elsewhere, I'm inclined to agree with Dan Wyke's prediction that Willetts' debut collection, New Light for the Old Dark, due from Jonathan Cape in April of this year, will certainly be shortlisted for and perhaps win a number of first collection awards, and no doubt be well-received on the whole. His mixture of poetic registers and the precise observations of his poems remind me a little of Michael Hofmann's work, but Willetts' stuff (and I'm only going on a handful of poems here, particularly 'Tourist' and the ambitiously-titled 'Digging') seems looser and more freewheeling; a jangling, stop-start lyrical music propels them along with satisfying originality. His subject matter is also distinctive: the crushing experience of heroin addiction and recovery informs 'Digging' in particular. I'll look forward to the book appearing later this year, as with Dan Wyke's own first collection, due from Waterloo, and debuts from Adam O'Riordan and Miriam Gamble, from Chatto and Bloodaxe respectively, all published in the summer.

The Lengthening Winter

2010-02-04T20:20:00.004Z

Happy to leave work today and find not only that the bastard ice has melted (thus rendering my hilly walk home a pleasurable one in which I can let my thoughts wander, as opposed to this morning, when I shuffled like some early-to-rise madman with my eyes glued to the treacherous pavements, only occasionally lifting my head to watch the bloke in front march then wobble then flail with desperation), but also, on arrival home, to find that this week's TLS had fallen onto my doormat, and includes two of my poetry reviews, on Carrie Etter's The Tethers, and Lorraine Mariner's Furniture. The issue (no. 5575; February 5 2010) also contains, among other things, two new poems from Simon Armitage, which like all of the recent poems of his which I've spotted here and there (Rialto, Poetry London, and in the excellent online poetry journal Blackbox Manifold), seem to be something of a departure from his characteristic style. Worth checking out.

Jen Hadfield and Greta Stoddart

2010-01-26T14:12:00.005Z

A quick pointer to those interested - on the Contemporary Writers site, you can now find critical perspectives on the poetry of two very different, but equally fascinating, writers: Jen Hadfield and Greta Stoddart. Hadfield's second collection, pictured above, won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2008; recently awarded to Philip Gross in 2009 for his collection The Water Table.

And to those on/off regular readers of this blog: apologies for the hopeless lack of posts of late. Life, as the man says, has a habit of getting in the way. Work and writing permitting, I should hopefully find time to make some more substantial posts in the not-too-distant future. Cheers for sticking around.

Poetry Books of 2009: Etter, Lumsden, Paterson, Read, Williams & Mackenzie

2009-12-08T20:22:00.017Z

Like many other poetry readers and writers, I was recently invited to submit my three favourite poetry collections of 2009 to Michelle McGrane's feature on her Peony Moon site (if you missed it, the first of eight installments is here). And like other readers and writers who also happen to blog from time to time, I thought I'd elaborate a little on these choices, while also offering a few other collections which would have been included on a longer list (of six, to be exact).

Carrie Etter's The Tethers was perhaps the easiest choice - I can't say too much about it as I'm reviewing the book elsewhere, but its poems are so elegant, precise, witty and intense it made for a reading experience unlike any other I've had this year. Full of allusion and yet entirely contemporary, by turns darkly serious and unusually funny - it's lyrical invention, range and ambition make obvious the collection was years in the making. Take the wonderful close to 'The Daughters of Prospero':

Placing white boat after boat onto a brook,

because she has learned beginner's origami,
because her fingers have amassed a score of cuts,

because some of the boats never looked seaworthy,
because a surprising number can glide like swans,

the girl sets her boats on a fatal course, and though
her head is bent, I can just see her eyes' fierce gleam.

I also chose Roddy Lumsden's Third Wish Wasted; somewhat of a departure from his earlier work, though the development evident in this book was hinted at in his previous collection, The Drowned Man, published in his New & Selected Poems. Its formal invention, wry humour and leaping from dazzling image to image are refreshingly energetic if sometimes dizzying, and the best poems - 'Against Complaint', 'Keepsakes', 'Stone Tape Theory' and 'The Beautiful' - are the business. Here are the final pitch-perfect lines of the latter:

They
drift unapproached, gazed never-selves,
blunt paragons of genetic industry. We

desire them but cannot want such order.
We stand, mouths open, and cannot help
stammering our secrets, nailed to water.

The other collection I picked was Don Paterson's Rain. A predictable choice, some might say, but give me a chance to explain first. I'm not so much a fan of the book as a whole - I think in terms of consistency it can't quite compete with God's Gift to Women, or even Landing Light - as I am for its containing what I think are some truly remarkable individual poems, borne of Paterson's Frostian lyric gift, melancholic humour and brilliant turn of phrase. 'Two Trees', for instance, is an elegant yet unadorned poem which slyly, almost frustratingly, undercuts its cumulative beauty in its terse final lines, while the sprawling 'Song for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze' is a liberated celebration of music and the internet, reflecting all of our geeky obsessions. I don't think it's too bold a thing to say that both will probably be remembered among the major poems written at the start of this century. For my money though, the title poem is still by far the best in the book, though I'm a sucker for this kind of soaring lyric poetry:

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one big thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame [...]

But while I'd recommend all three of these titles, there are a handful of others I'd also like to point towards. First is Sally Read's Broken Sleep, her second book since her impressive Bloodaxe debut, The Point of Splitting. I've only recently got stuck into this collection having bought it some months ago, but as with her debut, I've enjoyed what I've read given her ability to marry a gentle, closely observant lyric style with often difficult, even painful, subject matters. In the main sequence of poems which address pregnancy, birth and motherhood in often surprising ways, the title poem is particularly memorable; partly in dialogue with Plath's 'Morning Song':

The birds rise together as though

on an up-draught. I spread
your outstretched fingers
on the back of my hand as you
work away at one breast -

ears pulling in time, toes curling;
your whole body drinking -
and lost milk from my other breast
grows cold as rain on my nightdress.

Another book worth buying is Tony Williams' debut, The Corner of Arundel Lane and Charles Street. As the title suggests, Tony is a Sheffield-based poet, and it was grand to read at his collection's launch, having followed his poems' appearances in mags and journals over the years. There are plenty of reasons to read Williams' poems. First, his influences are as much European (and specifically German Romantic) as they are British, which makes his best work highly distinctive. His poems are also funny, and witty, though as W.N.Herbert notes in his endorsement, '[Williams] understands that wit, as much as it may delight the reader, is always melancholy'. 'The Matlock Elegies' perhaps best captures Williams' ability to combine insightful profundity, ennui and wicked humour to great effect:

O my beloved Matlock! Market town
with barely a market to speak of,
my county town, my botched Eden.
Old Matlock, Matlock Green, Matlock Bank,
loop of the hated supermarket road,
the old quarry where the valley's
truculent aggression pools as sediment,
the satellites of Tansley and Elton, Winster,
Lea and Holloway. Matlock Bath,
tawdry jewel, I curse you as a tourist honey-pot;
you shadow me even unto Death. You slink
like a line of warts through the gorgeous
rock of my deliverance. A part of me
wanders forever round your amusement arcades
in an off-white polyester shirt smelling of stale teenage sweat
and a blue school tie. Another is sick in the woods.

Last, but not least, I'll recommend Rob A Mackenzie's debut, The Opposite of Cabbage, a collection I reviewed for Magma 44, where I described his writing as 'switching between playful contemporary wit and dark humour, honest feeling and compassion, and an occasional, beguiling obscurantism driven by language's slipperiness and a distrust of simple explanations'. Bernadine Evaristo sums the collection up nicely by describing Mackenzie's poetry as 'kaleidoscopic' - varied, often unusual, frequently shifting register and changing tack, it's a mixed yet surprisingly consistent book of poems. But my favourite piece is still 'In the Last Few Seconds', which vividly paints the cinematics of a car crash:

You expect a a flashback, a potted bio
of divorce and automobile replacement -
how one breakage led to another - film noir
bleaching the blackness,

but instead stars blister across the sunroof.
Cracks appear. You wait for the tunnel sponged in
light from some new world. But the car splits water,
floats in its shadow.

All books worth getting hold of, then, and that's before I start on those poetry volumes which aren't single collections, including Michael Donaghy's essential Collected Poems, and the Byrne and Pollard edited Bloodaxe anthology of younger poets, Voice Recognition. Also difficult to believe that certain collections were published over a year ago, like Mark Waldron's excellent debut...

----------

In other "news", it's also just over a year since my first pamphlet of poems, The Sparks, was published by tall-lighthouse press - eleventh in their Pilot series, showcasing emerging British and Irish poets under 30.

As expected, it didn't exactly receive a raft of reviews, but then pamphlets never tend to get much coverage, and I've been fortunate enough to receive kind comments on it from various poets and readers, which has been encouraging.

Since publication it's also sold steadily, at readings and other events, and at the Sheffield Hallam University branch of Blackwell's, who took a chance on ordering it in, and have stocked in another handful each time it's sold out, for which I'm really grateful.

Thanks to this kind support, it won't be long before the first modest print run has sold - something which makes me personally chuffed, but mainly thankful that people have bought it alongside other tall-lighthouse titles, and so supported an excellent small press - home to up-and-coming writers including Adam O'Riordan, Emily Berry, Helen Mort, Aoife Mannix, and many more besides.

For those interested in getting hold of a copy of The Sparks who haven't yet, there are still a few copies available at the Blackwell's mentioned above, and you can also find it on the tall-lighthouse website, here. I'm not going to lie to you and say they'd make perfect Xmas gifts (there're no mentions of reindeer, tinsel, or turkey dinners contained within its pages, and snow only appears as a bit of wishful thinking), but I'd appreciate the support nonetheless.

I'm also reading a poem from the pamphlet on Asking a Shadow to Dance, a forthcoming DVD from Oxfam, along with readings from Daljit Nagra, Kayo Chingonyi, Lorraine Mariner and Heather Phillipson, among others - more on which in the near future.

The Temper Trap - Love Lost

2009-12-07T23:25:00.001Z

You might know them for their recent hit single 'Sweet Disposition', but Austrialian four-piece The Temper Trap's debut album Conditions is equally impressive, even if the band's influences aren't difficult to spot. Worth checking out this live performance of the first track from the album, 'Love Lost'.

Michael Hofmann - Changes

2009-11-10T13:43:00.004Z

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.

Verse Palace

2009-11-03T17:07:00.005Z

The questions and discussions surrounding why and how writers write can be as fascinating and thought-provoking as good writing itself, no? And this is particularly true of poetry, with all of its nuanced complexity and intoxicating musicality (but then I would say that, wouldn't I). Well the good news is that - my witterings aside for a moment - an excellent new online project has recently been launched, intended to offer a platform for poets to talk about an aspect of writing or reading poems which currently interests them.

It's called Verse Palace, and will feature a post a week solicited from poets, teachers and poetry readers of all opinions, interests and tastes. Some of the contributors already lined-up include David Wheatley, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Mary Jo Bang and Michael Hofmann. Well worth visiting the site over the coming months as it develops then, and getting involved in the discussions.

First up is Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson, with her thoughts on translation and free verse. Do check it out.

Sigur Rós - Untitled 1 (Vaka)

2009-11-01T23:01:00.002Z

A great performance of a beautiful song - somehow melancholic and uplifting in equal measure, I think.

Horizon Review

2009-10-12T22:27:00.005+01:00

So the third issue of Salt Publishing's online literary journal, Horizon Review, has just been published. Edited by Jane Holland, it's a fascinating, varied, sometimes even satisfyingly infuriating read, and builds on the strengths of its previous issues, proving it can easily compete with the best of the printed mags.

Issue 3 includes new poems by David Morley, Helen Ivory, Barbara Smith, Claire Crowther and Sam Riviere; reviews of many recent collections including Hugo Williams' West End Final, Carrie Etter's The Tethers, and a particularly excellent review of Don Paterson's Rain by John McCullough; and a series of interviews, the most interesting, contentious and quotable of these being Vidyan Ravinthiran in conversation with Craig Raine. In fact, I might well post a separate discussion of some of the stuff which Raine has to say here, finding as I did some bits eminently sensible, some disagreeably caustic, and some just downright antagonistic (not entirely a bad thing). I should also add that what he has to say is on occasion pretty funny, often illuminating, and... hell, just go and read it and I'll stop blathering on.

Also, for those interested (jumping from Don Paterson's aforementioned Forward Prize-winning Rain to Emma Jones's Best First Collection-winning The Striped World) in this week's issue of the Times Literary Supplement (October 16, No 5559) my reviews of both Jones's book and fellow Australian poet Kevin Hart's Young Rain will appear. Do check them out if you can.

The XX

2009-10-03T11:17:00.004+01:00

Ones to watch.

The Shape of the Dance

2009-09-13T17:34:00.000+01:00

Q: Where is poetry heading? Is poetry that homogeneous an activity?

MD: Substitute the word 'music' for 'poetry' in those two questions and you see the kind of assumptions made about poetry. Blues musicians on the South Side of Chicago, jazz pianists in London, fiddlers in West Clare, electro-acoustic composers in Rotterdam - we wouldn't dream of measuring them by the same standard, ranking them or telling them where we think 'music' is going. Poetry is not an homogeneous activity. And art has no direction. That is spatial illusion generated by early twentieth-century ideas about 'advancement' and 'progress'. If it's hard to see this now, it's because the illusion is augmented by the demands of consumerism. Our economy depends on the notion that things and ideas become obsolete and have to be replaced. Products of art and literature can be sold more effectively if they're marketed as 'new' so that newness acquires an all-pervasive fetish value [...]

interview excerpt from The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions,
a collection of prose by the late Michael Donaghy.

Forthcoming Readings

2009-09-07T07:59:00.003+01:00

Tall Reflections

Tuesday September 15th 2009 7.30pm

continuing the tall-lighthouse cambridge series

alan buckley & ben wilkinson

voluntary contributions - suggested £2

Visual Arts Centre, Christ's College, Cambridge

Coffee-House Poetry at the Troubadour

Old Brompton Road, London SW5

Monday 21st September, 8pm

pick of the crop with emma jones, greta stoddart, mike bartholomew-biggs, olivia cole, martha kapos, ben wilkinson, emily berry and siân hughes with music from singer/guitarist henry fajemirokun

A poetic cornucopia for autumn’s equinox featuring:

* Emma Jones (b. Sydney), first collection The Striped World (Faber, 2009), now Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence;

* Greta Stoddart, Salvation Jane (Anvil, 2008), lives East Devon, teaches for Poetry School and Bath Spa Univ;

* poet & mathematician Mike Bartholomew-Biggs (b. Essex), Tradesman’s Exit (Shoestring, 2009);

* journalist and Gregory-Award winner Olivia Cole, first collection Restricted View (Salt, 2009);

* American Martha Kapos, Poetry London’s Assistant Poetry Editor, second Enitharmon collection Supreme Being;

* Ben Wilkinson (b. Stafford), pamphlet The Sparks (Tall Lighthouse, 2008);

* Emily Berry (b. London, pamphlet Stingray Fevers, Tall Lighthouse, 2008) features in Voice Recognition (Bloodaxe);

* The Missing (Salt, 2009) by Arvon-winner Siân Hughes, is shortlisted for Forward and Guardian first-book awards

* plus music from singer/guitarist Henry Fajemirokun.

Harsent, Paterson, Seidel

2009-09-02T14:51:00.003+01:00

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.

Rosemary Tonks

2009-08-26T21:42:00.005+01:00

"My foremost preoccupation at the moment is the search for an idiom which is individual, contemporary and musical. And one that has sufficient authority to bear the full weight of whatever passion I would wish to lay upon it.

"Every poet who has been confined - at the mercy of form when he has come of age emotionally - and has found half the things he wants to say well out of his poem's range, knows the immensity of the task. And I am not speaking here of metrical skills, but of absolute freshness and authenticity in handling diction.

"What I write about must develop from my life and times. I am especially conscious of the great natural forces which bring modern life up to date. My concern here is with the exact emotional proportions - proportions as they are now current for me. Ideally, whatever is heightened should be justified both by art and by life; while the poet remains vulnerable to those moments when a poem suddenly makes its own terms - and with an overwhelming force that is self-justifying. For this reason certain poetic ideas have little validity when lifted out of context. I am consequently uneasy when discussing the logic of a poem with those whose intellectual equipment is purely mathematical. If you say that the English have a love of order which is puritanical, and the French a love of order which is imaginative, that does not make one more orderly than the other. The progress of feeling in a poem may be no less logical than the development of an argument.

"Telling the truth about feeling requires prodigious integrity. Most people can describe a chest of drawers, but a state of mind is more resistant. A hackneyed metaphor is the first sign of a compromise with intention; your reader damns you instantly, and though he may read on with his senses, you have lost his heart. Some poets do manage to converge on their inner life by generating emotion from an inspired visual imagery; in this instance the images exist in their own right, but may be thought to be in a weaker position as the raw material of the emotion, in preference to a larger existence as illustration of it."

Rosemary Tonks, writing in the PBS Bulletin in 1963,
in relation to her collection Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms

Faber New Poets

2009-08-26T16:31:00.006+01:00

At the start of this year a new Arts Council-funded initiative was announced - the prestigious poetry press Faber were to release a series of pamphlets by young poets, influenced by the continuing success of tall-lighthouse's Pilot series, edited by Roddy Lumsden.

Like the Pilot series, each poet receives editorial input and a pamphlet of their poems is published, but the Faber scheme also offers some financial help for the poets.

Now, the first pamphlets in the series are scheduled to be published in early October of this year. And the selected poets - Fiona Benson (pamphlet cover pictured above), Heather Phillipson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas and Jack Underwood - seem to represent a fair cross-section of the type of poetry emerging from this new generation of poets; unusual, edgy, contemporary and occasionally free-wheeling... hard to say anything substantial here without going into great detail (and even that would only be based on the handful of poems I've seen by these poets in magazines). Needless to say, they promise to make for interesting reading alongside the Pilot series, and will be worth checking out.

2010 will see the next four poets in the Faber series also published - Joe Dunthorne, Annie Katchinska, Sam Riviere and Tom Warner. Of these, I'll be especially interested to see Sam Riviere's pamphlet, particularly if it includes poems as strong as his second place winner in the 2008 Poetry London competition.

Where the Pilot scheme is concerned, talented young poets Charlotte Runcie and Richard O'Brien (both editors of the fine Pomegranate magazine) are also due launch their pamphlets in October, following on from the March launch of Amy Key's instead of stars and Sarah Howe's a certain chinese encyclopaedia. In related news, I'll also be reading at a tall-lighthouse event, "tall reflections", in Cambridge on the 15th September, along with Alan Buckley and invited guest readers. Do come along if you're able.

Moon

2009-08-16T10:38:00.004+01:00

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.

The Quality of Sprawl

2009-08-12T14:20:00.003+01:00

I've come across poems by Australian poet Les Murray here and there - in anthologies, online, and in magazines like a recent issue of Poetry London (Autumn '08, above) - but haven't yet bought a collection of his work. I'm thinking of ordering his Selected from Carcanet soon though, as I was reminded of what I admire in his work reading 'The Quality of Sprawl' in Shapcott and Sweeney's excellent Faber anthology, Emergency Kit, last night: the verbal dexterity, originality and often dark humour, though the unswerving certitude of some of his poems can get a bit irritating. Still, 'The Quality of Sprawl' is a fine piece, and one which uses the conversational, narrative style to great effect, I think.

It's one of his more well-known poems, but for those unfamiliar, you can read it here.

Rik Mayall's poetry reading

2009-08-04T09:17:00.003+01:00

A lesson in how not to give a poetry reading, by comic genius Rik Mayall.

Review: The Border Kingdom by D Nurkse

2009-07-27T18:31:00.003+01:00

In much the same way that D Nurkse’s seventh collection of poems, The Fall (2003), comprised of three sections of grouped poems, his ninth and latest book, The Border Kingdom, is divided into four sequences. The variety of the poems and the uneven length of the sequences, however, suggest that the book’s prevalent theme was not conceived from the outset. Poems, after all, have a useful tendency towards naturally grouping themselves together and forming a coherent whole; different poems extending into one another through recurrent images and themes, as a result of the poet’s preoccupations, interests and concerns. Where The Fall’s sections addressed childhood, married adulthood and illness in old age, then, charting the Blakean journey from innocence to experience and the consequent fraying of our thoughts, beliefs and singular identities, The Border Kingdom’s four groupings of poems approach states of limbo and ambiguity from an assortment of often unusual angles, spanning wars waged from the Biblical to the present and the fractures and fragments left behind, to the legacies of fathers and the complex heritages that they leave their children.

‘Jericho’ opens the book’s first section, ‘The Age of Crusades’, in an intense, if elliptical, burst of imagery. Describing ‘a high window’ where ‘a white curtain knotted against itself / gives a glimpse of the lovers / as they were before the war’, this deceptively simplistic poem depicts the ‘undo[ing] of a mother-of-pearl snap / while a cat perched on the sill / looks down with burning eyes’. Despite Nurkse’s tendency towards the longer, often sequential poem, then, in many ways this short, sparsely rich account of intimacy in a city dominated by conflict sets the tone for the rest of the book: tender, humane and evocative whilst at the same time darkly political and historical, Nurkse’s poetic voice combines felt emotion and level-headed thinking to impressive effect. In ‘Albi’, for instance, another poem in the collection’s opening section, the narrator’s harrowing tale of his being ‘sealed up in a wall’ is related matter-of-factly in precise, conversational lines, but with an eerie feeling that is – as good poetry should be – difficult to describe; emotional and strangely spiritual, yet also markedly impersonal: ‘Then I was the wall itself, / everything the voices long for / and cannot have – the self, / the stone inside the stone’.

It is this captivating style that lends Nurkse’s poetry its sometimes startling originality. This is especially evident in ‘Ben Adan’, an arresting poem in which a seemingly innocent prisoner is instructed by his captor to dig his own grave. Here, it is less the haunting beauty of the poem’s imagery, despite its imaginativeness (‘At thigh-depth I found / a layer of black loam / and a tiny blue snail / that seemed to give off light’) than the disconcerting yet well-pitched tone of the narrator’s voice (‘perhaps in a moment / he will lift me up / and hold me trembling, more scared than I / and more relieved’) that gives the poem its poignancy and delicate weight. This allows the poem to interrogate the reader’s notions of power and captivity (in both a psychological and physical sense) in ways that a more straightforward engagement would fail to hit upon, and Nurkse’s work with human rights organisations have no doubt helped contribute to his producing such accomplished poetry on the matter.

In the book’s second sequence, ‘The Limbo of the Fathers’, there is a continuation of this type of (im)personal political poetry; finding poignancy and wide-reaching revelation in the nuanced specifics of individual lives, rather than looking for history’s lessons on a larger, grander scale. ‘In the Hold’, for example, is an affecting account of the poet’s father leaving Nazi Germany as a stowaway in ‘the stifling void’ of a boat, depicting how he ‘counts the coins in his sack, / the stitches in the gunny weave – / takes his pulse, then having / no more real things, he counts / the members of his family, the chimneys / of his village, all the days / of his life in the old country’. Similarly, the deft specificities of the poet’s memory in ‘Practice’ – recalling his throwing ‘a white Spaldeen / shaped exactly like a baseball […] / all morning at the fence post’ as an extended metaphor for our childhood ‘practicing’ at adulthood – makes for an enjoyable and gently nostalgic, if slightly inconsequential, poem; the poet ‘relieved of a great burden / to see [his] father so clearly, / shivering, gray, stammering to himself, // mincing a clove of garlic / until it was fine and plural / as the gesture itself’.

Unfortunately, The Border Kingdom’s third sequence, ‘The Limbo of the Children’, is less engaging than these earlier poems. This is perhaps odd as the section also contains a handful of the book’s best pieces. Among these is ‘Canaan’, a short lyric on the failures inherent to language which, though bringing little new to our postmodern understanding of drifting, unpredictable signifiers, finds, in both senses, fantastic images to evoke our relationship with the spoken and written word: ‘How the mind wound up the doves / and sent them volleying / over the shepherds’ low fences’. This delight and frustration with the failings of communication is also conjured effectively in ‘The Child’, in which the young narrator describes how ‘no one calls me you. / I am addressed in the third person / as if I were sideways to the world’. It is a shame, then, that these poems sparkle among a sequence which is otherwise littered with numerous narratives reflecting on nature and mountains in particular, which, though often richly descriptive and subtly musical, are too often full of inactive lists that do little more than to describe (albeit atmospheric) landscapes (‘Hitching to Mount Hebron’, for example, or ‘At High Falls’).

This aside, however, when Nurkse hits his stride such writing can begin to evoke the Hopkins of ‘No Worst, There Is None’, and even the Wordsworth of ‘The Prelude’, in its merging of the landscape with the poet’s state of mind. In 'The Border Range’, for instance, the narrator states how: ‘Sometimes we boasted / of the waterfall, the whirlwinds, / the downy soft-pinioned owl / drifting in daylight / with a hole in his voice, / the immense cliffs’, before concluding: ‘And that is all anyone knows / of those years of marriage, / labor, voluntary poverty: / those mountains were perfectly flat / and exist only as a little rip / where the map was folded once too often’. Through taut language and economic use of imagery, this poem succeeds in adopting our relationship with nature as a metaphor for our often difficult relationships with one another, an impressive feat which Nurkse pulls off with considerable skill.

It is satisfying to find, then, that the closing sequence of The Border Kingdom, ‘The Gods’, is the best of the collection; comprising of consistently engaged and engaging poems on the difficult subject of conflict in the contemporary world. The success of these poems often rests on their approaching subject matters from oblique angles: in ‘Late Summer’, for example, an unknown terror grips the narrator who ‘ha[s] to remind [him]self: / this is darkness’, while in ‘Liberation in Winter’, the threat of a bombing is described as ‘maybe just a faux pas between lovers // who lie naked, an inch apart, / in the stepwise shadows of the blind’. Similarly, the fallout of 9/11 is addressed with care and subtlety, imagining ‘children [drawing] the plane, / sticking out their tongues, pressing / hard with crayons, never looking up / as if they’d seen it all their lives’. Here, the towers in the child’s drawing become ‘a huge box’, ‘the fire – an orange flower: / God – a face with round eyes / watching from the margin’, and ‘the fireman in his smudged hat / running with outstretched arms / up a flight of endless steps / that veered suddenly off the page’.Just as the sequence, and collection, closes with the image of ‘round pools, / […] trembl[ing] as if a child swam there’, then, the thought-provoking child’s drawing in ‘After a Bombing’ most starkly suggests an idea that recurrently surfaces throughout this deeply philosophical, deceptively simplistic, and often rewardingly discomfiting collection: namely, that our habitual handle on the world is often staunchly limited, narrow, and thus frequently inadequate, and that greater understanding, even redemption, may often lie in a freer, fuzzier, and more openly imaginative approach to the world.

It is to Nurkse’s credit that he has written a book of poems which expresses this so unprescriptively and effectively, then, and that explores a great deal more besides in diction and syntax well-pitched between ordinary speech and poetic elegance; a collection which is much more, as the narrator of ‘Canaan’ states, than mere ‘signs on the blank page’.

This review originally featured on Eyewear.

Live Poetry in Sheffield

2009-07-23T16:07:00.005+01:00

With the shop’s back room packed and excellent readings from Helen Mort, Chris Jones and Frances Leviston, last week’s poetry event at the Oxfam bookshop on West Street, Sheffield was a modest success. It was a pleasant feeling to be promoting Sheffield poets while also making money for such a worthwhile cause – through a mixture of kind donations on the door and book sales, including Helen Mort’s new tall-lighthouse pamphlet, A Pint for the Ghost.

Her performance included a number of poems from this new collection - eerie and provocative pieces on the ghosts and pubs of Sheffield and Derbyshire, past and present - and a handful from her first, the shape of every box, including an atmospheric poem about Division Street, located only a stone’s throw from the venue. Unsurprisingly, copies of her new pamphlet were quickly snapped up after the reading.

Chris Jones also performed a wide selection of his published poetry to date, from affecting vignettes about his young son from his pamphlet Miniatures, to powerful poems on his time spent as writer-in-residence at a prison, as well as pieces on the themes of family, friends and home, from his first collection The Safe House.

The evening finished with a reading by Frances Leviston, who read a selection of thought-provoking and vivid poems mainly from her first collection, Public Dream, including the meditative ‘I Resolve to Live Chastely’ and ‘Scandinavia’, an unusual love poem entitled ‘Gliss’, and ‘The Fortune Teller’, an update to, and reworking of, Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Mind Reader’. We were also treated to a few new poems, including a short, suggestive lyric, ‘Two Owls’.

I also gave a shortish reading on the night, and since it seems to have become a bit of a feature on UK poetry blogs, here’s my ‘set list’:

1. Crux
2. Sunday
3. Filter
4. Home
5. The River Don
6. Familiar
7. Wednesday
8. Gesleham-on-Stour
9. Itch
10. Hex

Given the success of the night, I hope to help arrange something similar again with Oxfam – though perhaps in a bigger venue than the shop, as that back room can get quite stuffy at times. If I do, it’ll be posted up here closer to the time of course. For now, thanks again to everyone who read, and also to all who attended – a fun night.

Tonight: Oxfam Poetry - Four Sheffield Poets

2009-07-15T08:48:00.001+01:00

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

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

Tonight (Wednesday 15th July), 6.30pm - 9pm

£2.50 donation on the door and free poetry CD

The Mole

2009-07-15T08:33:00.006+01:00

Over at her blog, should you fancy a look, Carrie Etter has kindly featured a poem from The Sparks, as part of a (very) brief tour of blogs I thought I'd do to promote the pamphlet.

The poem is 'The Mole' (hence the photo above), and was first published in the Times Literary Supplement early last year.

Latitude 2009

2009-07-14T14:46:00.005+01:00

Well, it's that time of year again... When those festival goers with exceptional taste head out to the Suffolk countryside to enjoy three days of great music, poetry, literature, cabaret, film and comedy at the wonderful, indefatigable Latitude festival.

Sadly though, I won't be attending this year, and am particularly gutted as the line-up for the Poetry Arena looks at least as strong - if not stronger - than when I was reviewing and blogging on the festival last year and the year before. Tim Turnbull, Tim Wells, Jackie Kay, Simon Armitage, Kathyrn Simmonds, Helen Mort, Caroline Bird, Emily Berry, Andrew Motion, Paul Farley - Latitude attracts some serious poetic talent, and unsurprisingly the tent's audience often spills into the sunshine outside: Armitage was particularly popular on both the Poetry and Literary stages last year, and Daljit Nagra drew a big, midday crowd.

This year, there's also music from the likes of The Pet Shop Boys, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Regina Spektor, Patrick Wolf, Bat for Lashes, Editors, Gossip and Spiritualised, and comedy from Stephen K. Amos, Dave Gorman, Rufus Hound, Jo Brand, Lee Mack, Marcus Brigstocke and Ed Byrne.

As I say, I'm gutted I'm not going. Maybe next year...

Poetry London - Summer 2009

2009-07-14T14:26:00.005+01:00

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.

Mowing

2009-07-09T14:36:00.004+01:00

For months it sits unplugged,
collecting spider webs spun and undone,
while dust complicates sunlight

through the shed’s single window
at the broken egg of dawn. Or
nursing the dregs of blackness

that settle in its gut as you haul it
out onto the lawn, plug it in
or fill it, yank at its ripcord –

the sudden hum of blades
and the patch of mown green,
now glowing. It churns

like a stomach hungry for anything:
leaves, daisies, insects, dogshit;
the sheer weight of things

bulked to a cube inside of it.
Afterwards, the lines of the garden
shimmer like wood grain,

pious tree rings unravelled and planed
down to chair legs. Or the glint
of varnish as you empty the basket

into the brown bin:
the painted toy man of a toy set
or model village, still smiling.

poem by Ben Wilkinson
first published in Brittle Star, issue 17, summer 2007

The Bloody Apprentice

2009-07-08T19:10:00.004+01:00

A friend pointed me to this the other day, and quite funny it is too - footage of the BBC's popular reality show The Apprentice, painstakingly edited so as to make a monkey out of Sugar and its contestants (though they often do a fair job of that themselves). Contains some strong language though, so don't watch if you're easily offended.

And while we're on the subject of The Apprentice - does anyone actually know what job it is that the winner gets? Organising the stationery at Amstrad HQ? Or perhaps researching new areas for Sugar's businesses to expand into - as in Harry Hill's gag about 'Amsstairs' ("No, we don't sell 'amsters, we sell Amsstairs")? Any suggestions welcome.

Maurice Riordan

2009-07-07T09:01:00.003+01:00

Just a quick heads up to those interested - I notice that Faber poet Maurice Riordan's entry on the PoetCasting audio site is now online, including readings of his poems 'Fish', 'Silenus' and the excellent 'Southpaw'. Well worth checking out.

The recording was made on the same afternoon as my own, and along with another Sheffield poet, Chris Jones, whose readings are also now on the site - of the four poems featured, I'd recommend 'Work' in particular. Jones will also be reading at the Oxfam Poetry Night taking place at the Oxfam Bookshop on West St, Sheffield, alongside myself, Helen Mort and Frances Leviston.

Magma 44

2009-06-28T12:06:00.003+01:00

The latest issue of Magma (No. 44, Summer 2009) includes my reviews of Mark Doty's eighth book of poems, Theories and Apparitions, John Agard's Darwin-inspired Clever Backbone, and Rob A Mackenzie's debut collection, The Opposite of Cabbage.

The issue also contains new poems by Alan Buckley, Alison Brackenbury and Sheenagh Pugh, among many other features, including an interview with Jackie Kay (pictured on the issue's cover, above). Find out more here.

Lily Allen Shocks Glastonbury Crowds Dressed As Hyperactive Girl From Hit Children's TV Series Lazy Town

2009-06-28T11:46:00.006+01:00

Above (left): Lily Allen pictured with guitarist and bassist at this year's Glastonbury Festival
Above (right): Lazy Town star Stephanie sporting her trademark garish hair

Five Houses Down

2009-06-25T12:23:00.005+01:00

Praise be to The New Yorker, that most revered of American cultural magazines, and to Paul Muldoon, it's poetry editor, who recently appeared on The Colbert Report, reading his poem 'Tea' and indulging Colbert's gently mocking, wry brand of humour.

Why? Because I've just found a brilliant poem by Christian Wiman on the publication's website, which conjured that instant, wonderful sensation of lifting the top of my head clean off and smashing the frozen sea of daily routine, as Emily Dickinson and Kafka would have it. I seriously encourage you to read it.

And while you're there, take a look at Don Paterson's excellent poem 'Rain', the title piece from his new Faber collection due later this year. That's another which transports you somewhere else in its cinematic sweep - a welcome detour and distraction from whatever work deadlines are looming over you this afternoon. Humorous and seriously thought-provoking - you can't ask for much more than that.

Oxfam Poetry Night - Four Sheffield Poets

2009-06-23T16:10:00.007+01:00

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

Reviews: Jacob Polley & Colette Bryce

2009-06-06T11:58:00.004+01:00

For those interested, my review of Picador poet Jacob Polley's first novel will appear in this coming week's TLS (June 12 2009).

In the just-published issue of Stand, vol 9 (1), I'm informed that my review of Colette Bryce's third book of poems, Self-Portrait in the Dark, also appears.

Poetry Feature: Carrie Etter's The Tethers

2009-06-04T10:19:00.007+01:00

Blurb writers often describe debut poetry collections as "long-awaited", but I can honestly say that I've been looking forward to Carrie Etter's first collection for a good while, having enjoyed many of her poems in magazines, not least the TLS.

And now I happily find that Etter's first book, The Tethers, is to be published later this month by Seren. Having already attracted praise from the likes of Glyn Maxwell and Robert Crawford, it promises to be a highly distinctive and original collection of poems, partly given Etter's fertile imagination, but also her background as an American-born poet who has lived in the UK for many years, drawing on poetic traditions from both sides of the Atlantic.

I'm delighted, then, to feature The Tethers here on the Wasteland, and include a poem from its pages below. I hope the collection attracts the prize shortlistings it will no doubt deserve, and would encourage readers who enjoy witty, sophisticated and thought-provoking poetry to visit the Seren publishing website, Etter's own blog, and check out the collection on Amazon. Enjoy.

The Review

So at Starbuck’s you stood in line
behind The Review’s assistant managing editor?
A skinny cappuccino? Were you close enough
to detect her brand of shampoo?
There is no need to name The Review:
it is the one that, when mentioned, inclines all bystanders
toward its vocalization until they ascertain
the nature of the allusion and proceed accordingly.
If you are an author whose work appears in the current issue,
at least two well-scented women will brush your arm “inadvertently”
and one man will strive to prolong your stay in his presence
with a look of surpassing interest.
Publication in a past issue creates a circle
of brightened eyes, however nonchalant some try to act,
and a member of the opposite sex will ask
what you’re having and bring you another
whatever the volume in your present glass.
If The Review has never accepted your work
and you live in the same city as its offices,
once a month you will find yourself unaccountably
walking past the building’s reflective panels and steel yourself
to look only ahead until you reach the end of the street,
but alas! you glance in The Review’s direction to see
an image of yourself that seems disparagingly untrue.
Some neglected authors cannot stop thinking of The Review:
they can recount the highlights of senior editors’ résumés,
and a simple “Sorry” handwritten on the rejection slip
gives them days of delight, even though they suspect
a mere intern has so condescended. A mere intern!
No one at The Review is mere. The janitor may know
whose manuscript lingers on whose desk.
The Review’s aura has an impressive breadth.
Even I feel giddy from speaking so long of it.

poem by Carrie Etter
from The Tethers (Seren, 2009)
republished with permission of the author
first published in the Times Literary Supplement

A Pint for the Ghost

2009-06-03T14:40:00.002+01:00

photograph by Katie Utting

A fair few poetry readers who drop by these parts might already know of Helen Mort, a Sheffield-born, Cambridge-based poet who won a Gregory Award in 2007. Her first pamphlet of poems, the shape of every box, was published the same year, and I'd recommend getting hold of a copy if you can - it's a good read full of distinctive, musical, lyric poems that are accessible, candid and sometimes marked by deft, even dark, humour.

But Mort also has a new pamphlet in the pipeline, and one which is rather unusually accompanied by a "one-woman poetry show": A Pint for the Ghost. This, as the show's curious blog states, "is set in a deserted pub after hours where strange characters come to introduce themselves. From the phantom miner at Hanging Flatt to the spirit in the hospital x-ray machine, the ghosts of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire saunter in for a drink with me. Join us at the bar when the show is finished later in 2009."

It promises to be an unmissable event, then, including music, poems and stories, and will be touring around the country from late 2009 through 2010, so worth looking out for if it's going to be at a venue near you (and by the sounds of things, it won't all be in the sorts of venues you might expect...).

In the meantime, do check out the A Pint for the Ghost blog, which features sample poems from the pamphlet and show, and posts on everything from the derelict pubs of modern London to Mort's favourite drinking haunts from across the country. Mine's a pint at The Devonshire Cat.

Just One Book - Salt Publishing

2009-05-20T18:41:00.003+01:00

As those of you who read other poetry & literary blogs and/or drop into UK poetry forums will know, the enterprising poetry publishers Salt have hit hard times. Partly due to discontinued grants from Arts Council England and the current economic downturn, this is particularly depressing as Salt have always been committed to building a poetry press eventually capable of sustaining itself, something it has worked towards by seeking out and publishing some of the most impressive new poets to emerge in the UK in recent years (Rob A Mackenzie, Julia Bird, Luke Kennard, Mark Waldron and Katy Evans-Bush, to name but a few) as well as more established writers including Jane Holland, Tim Dooley and Tobias Hill. It also has what promise to be strong first collections on the horizon from Abi Curtis, Tom Chivers and Tony Williams.

To help save Salt, then, please consider the following:

JUST ONE BOOK

1. Please buy just one book, right now. We don't mind from where, you can buy it from us or from Amazon, your local shop or megastore, online or offline. If you buy just one book now, you'll help to save Salt. Timing is absolutely everything here. We need cash now to stay afloat. If you love literature, help keep it alive. All it takes is just one book sale. Go to our online store and help us keep going.

2. Share this note on your profile. Tell your friends. If we can spread the word about our cash crisis, we can hopefully find more sales and save our literary publishing. Remember it's just one book, that's all it takes to save us. Please do it now.

With my best wishes to everyone
Chris
Director
Salt Publishing
http://www.saltpublishing.com

It would be a great loss to UK poetry if Salt were to fold. I've just ordered a copy of Tim Dooley's Keeping Time, and would urge anyone who reads and values contemporary poetry to buy a title or two from their list - I'd recommend Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage and Mark Waldron's The Brand New Dark, my reviews of which are forthcoming in Magma and the TLS respectively.

Reviews and The Sparks

2009-05-16T12:08:00.005+01:00

I was talking with the poet Conor O'Callaghan the other week about the dwindling number of poetry reviews published these days, particularly by the bigger publications and magazines. When his first full collection, The History of Rain, came out in 1993 with Ireland's Gallery Press, it apparently received around 25 reviews; I sincerely doubt many first books - even those published by the commercial presses - receive that kind of critical attention nowadays.

Unsurprisingly, poetry pamphlets and chapbooks (or short collections) receive even less attention from print magazines, with the notable and admirable exception of a few, particularly Poetry London and its autumn round-up of their 'top ten' (or so) pamphlets of the year. Increasingly then, much reviewing of poetry seems to take place online, in magazines like those I mentioned here recently, and on various widely-read literary blogs. And why not? Many of these blog writers are published poets and reviewers for print and online magazines themselves (myself included), so the blog is the perfect vehicle for reviewing books and pamphlets that print magazines don't have the room for.

One such writer is Tony Williams, a poet soon to have his first collection published by Salt, who also keeps a poetry blog featuring occasional reviews. And I was delighted to discover recently that he's written a generous and insightful review of my pamphlet The Sparks, the second to appear this year, on the back of Noel Williams' piece in arts magazine Now Then. Williams' review also takes in Matthew Clegg's sequence pamphlet Edgelands, published last year by Longbarrow Press. Worth checking out.

Critical Perspective on Mick Imlah

2009-05-14T17:41:00.005+01:00

Some months ago, shortly after the poet Mick Imlah sadly passed away and his excellent collection The Lost Leader won the Forward Prize, I mentioned that I had written a piece for a profile of his work due to appear on the Contemporary Writers website. A few Wasteland readers expressed an interest in reading this piece, and as unfortunately it won't now appear, I thought I'd include it here instead. I hope it gives a flavour of Imlah's work, of which I'm a big fan, and encourages those not familiar with both of his collections (the aforementioned Faber volume and his first book, Birthmarks, published in 1988) to search them out.

Mick Imlah: A Critical Perspective

Alongside Michael Hofmann’s Nights in the Iron Hotel, Mick Imlah’s Birthmarks (1988) is perhaps the most original debut poetry collection of the 1980s: witty, irreverent and often darkly comic, its poems tread a line between the stylistically prosaic and the syntactically inventive and, in many instances, reveal an impressively unique music. As Neil Corcoran noted when reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘unusually for a first volume of poems, Birthmarks sounds distinctly like itself’, and it is certainly true that the collection resists comparison to much contemporary, even modernist, verse: in many respects, Imlah’s influences are Victorian. This is evident in his Tennysonian mastery of rhyme, rhythm, assonance and alliteration, as in ‘Silver’ (‘in block or chain / [it] Will not sustain / The nameless slaves / Who row it through the waves // As long as the old, crude / Hallmark tattooed / On every chest / Proclaims them second-best’), but more specifically in poems such as ‘Tusking’, a deft exploration of colonialism that, in its African setting of an imagined elephant hunt, ironically recalls the imperialistic works of Kipling:

‘In Africa once
A herd of Harrow
Elephants strayed
Far from their bunks;
Leather, they laid
Their costly trunks
And ears of felt
Down on the Veldt.

All forgot
The creep of dusk;
A moonbeam stole
Along each tusk:
Snores and sighs.
Oh, foolish boys!
The English elephant
Never lies!’

As is characteristic of Imlah’s work, this wry and knowing humour rises through the registers (in this case, to a suggestive yet starkly vivid description of the dead creatures: ‘Out in the bush / Is silence now: / Savannah seas / Have islands now, / Smelly land-masses, / Bloody, cold, / Disfigured places / With fly-blown faces’), ending with a subtle commentary on post-colonial guilt: the ‘tinkle of ice [in whisky] and Schubert’ being played on an ivory-keyed grand piano, intoning: ‘Pity the hulks! / Play it again!’. As its title suggests, then, Birthmarks relishes in exploring the complex issues surrounding (and intertwining) our origins, identities and wider history, and does so with both ingenuity and sharp intelligence. In poems such as ‘I Have a Dream’ and ‘Cockney’, for instance, Imlah’s use of narrative and dramatic monologue (a form he frequently adopts, bringing to mind another Victorian poet, Robert Browning), serves to cunningly question received ideas on race and class respectively, but also to demonstrate his gift for demotic speech and an eye for the contemporary. In ‘Goldilocks’, a university lecturer finding a homeless Scottish man in his bed makes for a particularly well-drawn character:

‘Now I’m keen for us all to be just as much worse as we want,
In our own time and space – but not, after midnight, in my bed;
And to keep his inertia at bay, I went for the parasite,
Scuttling him off with a shout and the push of a boot

That reminded his ribs I suppose of a Maryhill barman’s,
Until I had driven him out of the door and his cough
Could be heard to deteriorate under a clock in the landing.
(Och, if he’d known I was Scottish! Then I’d have got it.)’

Elsewhere, Birthmarks’ characters are as diverse as an unhinged neo-Darwinian biologist (‘The Zoologist’s Bath’), an outraged tourist (‘Visiting St Anthony’), an unborn foetus (‘Abortion’), and in the brilliant ‘Lee Ho Fook’s’, the owner of a Chinese restaurant, saved by a builder from a ‘vat of boiling and thunderous tea’. There are also three sets of sequences in the collection which further demonstrate Imlah’s considerable ambition: ‘The Drinking Race’ is by turns a funny and grave look at alcohol, ‘Mountains’ adopts peaks from Snowdonia to the Himalayas as springboards to various existential musings, and ‘from The Counties of England’ takes brief, often droll snapshots of everywhere from Rutland’s ‘Uppingham streets / And the alleys of Oakham’ to the imagined ‘battle of Berkshire’, depicted in much the same manner as the Anglicised Biblical scenes in the paintings of Stanley Spencer. In ‘Oxfordshire’, the entirely believable but likely invented project of ‘Oxford Rebuilt’ (a supposed plan drawn up in 1943 to restore Oxford after forecasted German bombings – ‘Nuffield to Churchill: We’ve got the phoenix, now you deliver the ashes…’) also demonstrates one of Imlah’s recurring tendencies: simultaneously delighting and deceiving the reader, thus revealing the world – as good poetry should – to be the questionable, random and uncertain place it is.

Following a twenty year hiatus, Imlah’s second collection, The Lost Leader, appeared in 2008. Winner of the Forward Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year), it is one of the most wide-reaching, surprising and varied volumes of poetry to have been published in years: taking Scottish history from ‘the year dot’ to yesterday at a Dumfries bus depot as its starting point, it makes for an almost overwhelming, thoroughly incorporative tour de force. In part a response to Edwin Muir’s assertion that ‘no poet in Scotland now can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads, the people’s songs and the legends’, the collection features a Scottish cast ranging from William Wallace to Fergus of Galloway, Sir Walter Scott to the title poem’s ‘lost leader’, Bonnie Prince Charlie; revivifying Scotland’s history and folklore in often wildly imaginative ways. What makes The Lost Leader such a brilliant book, however, is that while Scotland may be Imlah’s stock material, the true subject matters of the poems reach much further. ‘Domestic’ discusses the traits and general character of the Scottish terrier, for instance, but does so to explore such ‘sagacity, nerve, and the wherewithal / to make the most of little’ more generally, while the fantastical ‘Mary Queen of Scots’ has a train by that name telling another, ‘Joan of ‘Arc’, ‘if they [the passengers] had to wander back in time, / […] what would smack them in the general face’ would be ‘a great big smell – / […] composed of gunpowder, incense as well, / […] you know the stuff / I mean, Joan; the “English” word was ‘faith’’; something which both binds and collides Scottish, English and European histories.

If the first half of The Lost Leader is both a riposte to Muir and an assertion of Imlah’s Scottish heritage (in half-mocking response to the late Angus Calder’s statement that ‘few people thought Mick Imlah […] was a ‘Scottish poet’’), then the second half is perhaps most memorable given its gentler, more sincere and sometimes sombre tone, as well as its more directly personal subject matter. This includes a thoughtful and moving elegy for Stephen Boyd, a perfectly-pitched love poem (‘Maren’), and an affecting piece addressed to the poet’s young daughter (‘Iona’). While heartfelt, however, these personal poems can still be oddly and gravely humorous, as in ‘Past Caring’, where the narrator emptying the flat of an alcoholic female friend states: ‘The gin! / No wonder you’re thin; / Hundreds of bottles of gin; / And feeding them singly into the ring / My arm grows weary from shifting the bottles of gin; / A numbing collection of lots of exactly the same thing.’ As evident in ‘Gordon Brown’ (where the poet recalls meeting not Britain’s ‘lost leader’ but the rugby player, nicknamed ‘The Ayrshire Bull’), there are also repeat references to sports and games throughout Imlah’s work, a much underused subject and device in contemporary poetry as illustrated by the clever vignette ‘London Scottish’, remembering the rugby teams sent to fight in 1914.

On the strength of only two collections, then, Imlah’s highly inventive, quick-witted and often surprisingly executed poems have made his one of the most significant voices in contemporary British poetry: the many approving and admiring appraisals of his work – from poets and critics as different as Andrew Motion, Frieda Hughes, Bernard O’Donoghue, Mark Ford and Stephen Knight – testament to his ample talents and evidently wide appeal. As Douglas Dunn has noted, ‘Imlah’s accomplishments [are often] characteristic of contemporary poetry at its best’, and as longstanding Poetry Editor of the Times Literary Supplement, a position he held from 1992-2008, it is hard to imagine a contemporary poet more suited to the role.

Imlah’s death in early 2009 – a year after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease – robbed the poetry world of one of its most incisive, original, and talented practitioners.

Ben Wilkinson, 2009
Originally written for the Contemporary Writers site, © British Council

The Manchester Review

2009-05-10T18:11:00.006+01:00

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.

Poetry Reading Tomorrow

2009-05-05T09:21:00.004+01:00

Poetry reading with Simon Armitage

featuring short readings from Chris Jones, Liz Cashdan, Matthew Clegg, and Ben Wilkinson

Wednesday 6 May, 6.30–8pm

St George's Church, St George's Terrace (off Broad Lane), Sheffield

Event soundbyte:

A poetry reading by Simon Armitage, one of the most popular and prominent poets of his generation. His nervy, slangy, chatty poems explore depths of language with vitality and a sharp vision of the North, its classes, dialects and living cultures.

There will be book stalls in St George's Church before and after the poetry readings. The guest authors will be available after the readings to sign books purchased at the event. Signed copies of books by Simon Armitage, Ciaran Carson and Carol Ann Duffy may also be ordered from Rhyme & Reason Booksellers who will provide a list of available titles on request (enquiries@rhyme-reason.co.uk).

Matter magazine & Armitage reading

2009-04-26T16:47:00.007+01:00

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 Sparks

2009-04-22T12:17:00.008+01:00

I'm chuffed that my first poetry pamphlet, The Sparks, is selling well thanks to the support of those who attended both the London launch of it alongside Emily Berry's excellent Stingray Fevers; the Sheffield launch with Matthew Clegg, Helen Mort and others; and those who've bought a copy through the tall-lighthouse website. The warm reception that myself and other Pilot poets received at this year's StAnza festival was also great; people chatting and buying copies of pamphlets in the series after the Pilot reading. Cheers.

If any readers of the Wasteland are yet to get a copy however, and are interested, I've some of my own which I'm more than happy to scribble in and send out, UK postage free (£4). Just drop me an email (on my profile page). They're also available from the tall-lighthouse website, along with new pamphlets in the Pilot series by Amy Key and Sarah Lowe, and the just-published Shiver, Alan Buckley's first pamphlet, awarded the Poetry Book Society's Pamphlet Choice for Spring 2009.

Battles and Bat for Lashes

2009-04-22T11:33:00.004+01:00

I sometimes think that there isn't much worth discovering where new music's concerned: the wave of schmindie, bland acoustic wielders and post-Britpop guitar music that remains so popular little more than dull variances on old sounds. But then I realise that it's usually because I'm not looking hard enough, and beyond the blander end of the most heavily advertised and marketed music released each year (which, admittedly, isn't all bad), there's still some great stuff being made.

Two bands I'd recommend at the moment are Bat for Lashes and Battles. I've mentioned the former here before, the work of singer-songwriter and visual artist, Natasha Khan, and whose first album, Fur and Gold, narrowly missed out on winning the 2007 Mercury Prize. That album was a glittering, brooding and dreamlike-voyage into the unknown; a slice of glittering and gorgeous art-rock that bears partial comparison to Bjork, Kate Bush, and to Khan's talented contemporary, Patrick Wolf. To my mind, her latest album, Two Suns, continues with similar soundscapes, but hangs together as a work in its own right, telling haunting tales of lost loves whilst, in certain parts, adopting an alter-ego to add another dimension to Khan's lyrics. I'd recommend giving it a listen, with single 'Daniel' and a few other tracks on her MySpace page, here.

Battles possess a different sound all together. There debut album Mirrored, released a few years back, is a 21st century prog-album in the best sense: a sprawling mixture of epic drums, solo-driven, spidery guitars, electronica and bizarre vocals which holds together surprisingly well, and manages, for the most part, to avoid sounding self-indulgent or pretentious. I first saw single 'Atlas' performed a year or so ago, on Jools Holland's Later..., and was halfway to dismissing them, but the song grows on you after a few listens and before long, you're hooked. Check it out here if you're interested. You don't have to be a Yes fan, honest.

New Poetry @ Poetry Matters

2009-04-07T16:20:00.006+01:00

Just wandered across to the Tower Poetry site (a poetry venture run by poet-critic Peter McDonald at Christ Church College, Oxford) to find that the latest issue of Poetry Matters is up. And it's good to see more poetry than prose there for a change - its reviews, though always engaging and worth reading, are something of a regular feature compared to new writing. But in this issue, no less than four poets grace its webpages, including Stephen Romer, Emily Middleton, and Paul Abbott, whose Flood I reviewed for PM last year. There're also a couple of my own new(ish) poems. If you're not about to head out and enjoy the good weather, then, do head across and have a read. There's also a review of Peter Porter's cheekily named Better Than God, by Vidyan Ravinthiran, which, at least for me, provided an interesting window on a well-established poet whom I'm criminally unfamiliar with.

Charlie Brooker's Newswipe

2009-04-07T10:04:00.006+01:00

A bit late catching up with this, but flicking through BBC iPlayer in a brief fit of boredom last week I noticed that Charlie Brooker is back on our screens with Newswipe - a series following on from the brilliant Screenwipe. Except instead of taking satirical and pessimistic swipes at the crap on TV, Newswipe takes a Day Today-esque look at - you guessed it - the news, or rather, the way news is covered by the likes of BBC, ITV and Channel 4 these days.

The clip above is from the first part of the first episode, and for those who like the look of it, the third installment is on BBC4 tomorrow (Wednesday) at 10.30pm.

Nick Laird wins Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize

2009-04-01T10:00:00.004+01:00

Good to see that Northern Irish poet and novelist Nick Laird has won the 2008 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his second collection of poems, On Purpose, published by Faber in 2007.

The award - given alternately each year to a work of prose or verse - was judged by poets Jo Shapcott and Michael Longley, and Sam Leith, literary editor of the Daily Telegraph.

It puts Laird on a distinguished list of previous winners, including Seamus Heaney, Hugo Williams, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison, Don Paterson and Michael Hofmann.

Having enjoyed and reviewed the collection for the Winter 2007/08 edition of Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly, I recommend it to readers unfamiliar with Laird's work, as well as his first collection, To a Fault. Here's an excerpt from my review of On Purpose:

What is most impressive about On Purpose, however, is Laird’s charting of the loose and difficult territory of the existential crisis between our desire to control our lives and act with certainty and conviction, as set against the possibilities and inherent unpredictability of the world we actually encounter. As Don Paterson rightly urged in his T.S. Eliot lecture in 2003: ‘It’s important that poets remember that our first perception of the world is already a misinterpretation’ (though one, it must be noted, that is no less valuable than every other). Laird often succeeds within these poems, then, in exploring that which is – both personally and universally – so often beyond our grasp and understanding, be it in the narrator’s failure to describe a beautiful vista in ‘Use of Spies’, the attempt to break habits of a lifetime and escape blinkered perspectives in ‘Variation in Tactics’, or the dedicated hunter’s speculation and failing faith in some higher power in the sombre tones of ‘Hunting is a Holy Occupation’. Laird’s poetic voice has gained an added maturity and distinctiveness since his first collection, too; gone is the unconvincing ‘newladspeak’ that knocked the shine off some of his earlier work, honed into a style that allows for poems of greater brevity, rhythmical execution, and despite a deliberate variance in seriousness of tone, real feeling. Like Armitage, he is an impressive and distinctly male writer of love poems: the expression of masculine emotion and its awkwardness measured and balanced with an economy of sentiment, as in the narrator’s stating ‘Love, I’d turn for you clean-living, / relinquish drinking, fighting, singing’ in ‘The Present Writer’. And the more I read those poems of Laird’s that explore the rural and urban landscapes of Ireland, Britain, and beyond, the more I think it not an overstatement to compare his rich descriptive powers, during their finer moments, to Heaney’s. Take the following glittering stanzas from ‘On Leaving the Scene of an Accident’:

In the eastern suburbs deer appear.
Brushed by waist-high silver steppe grass
and the lighter strokes of barley stalks,

elegant as one might half-expect
the grazing self to be, except her grace
is one complicit in departure.

For those interested, the Guardian coverage is here.

Odds and Ends

2009-03-31T15:19:00.004+01:00

Still haven't found time to blog about my time at StAnza, Scotland's international poetry festival held in St Andrews, yet - though I intend to get round to it soon. In short, it was a great (long) weekend: particular highlights including readings from Bill Manhire, New Zealand's foremost contemporary poet; the excellent Simon Armitage; poetry centre stage with Robert Crawford and Kate Clanchy; and the launch of Roddy Lumsden's new collection, Third Wish Wasted. And I enjoyed taking part in the poetry breakfast on young poets, as well as the tall-lighthouse Pilot reading (alongside Abi Curtis, Adam O'Riordan, Jay Bernard and Emily Berry) and pamphlet signing, both of which proved popular.

Before I get to doing a proper write-up then, I thought I'd flag up a few forthcoming odds and ends: I've two new poems that'll appear in the next issue of Poetry Matters on the Tower Poetry site, and a short sequence that'll crop up in a future issue of Stand magazine. Also in the next two issues of Stand, I've a couple of reviews: first of Colette Bryce's Self-Portrait in the Dark; second of Glyn Maxwell's Hide Now. And I've completed a fair number of critical perspectives of poets for the British Council Contemporary Writers site which'll go live in due course, including Robert Crawford, David Constantine, Patrick McGuinness, Carol Rumens, Tom Paulin, and the late Mick Imlah.

Alongside forthcoming reviews for Magma and the TLS and working on new poems, then, I'm having a happily busy time of it - the only problem being that man flu has recently halted me from doing much at all productive; hunched as I am over the PC with a mug of tea and packets of honey and lemon Lockets. Even if you are misguided enough to do so, however, please don't extend your sympathies - many, not least my girlfriend, will amply attest to how utterly pathetic I am when afflicted with only the slightest of sniffles.

Maura Dooley's Life Under Water

2009-03-24T09:11:00.003Z

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.

Poetry Feature: Conor O'Callaghan

2009-03-08T12:27:00.011Z

Conor O’Callaghan, an Irish writer born in Newry in 1968, is one of those poets who critics may lazily – albeit quite rightly – describe as ‘one of the best of his generation’, though he actually seems to fall on the cusp of two generations. Or at least has fallen short, despite having appeared in seminal Irish anthologies, of major British anthologies and promotions – too young for the New Poetry and the PBS’s New Generation campaign; inexplicably missing from the Next Gen and falling short of the cut-off point of Roddy Lumsden’s forthcoming Identity Parade – as inadequate as these may ultimately be at fully checking the pulse, let alone establishing the hierarchy of the literature of a given period (history will do that), they still (usually quite rightly) cement reputations, develop readerships, and give a representative flavour of poetry at the time. This isn’t to badmouth these publications or promotions, but to note that given the inevitable parameters, some genuinely talented and worthy writers often get sidelined or miss out through nothing more than plain bad luck.

This aside, I hope I’m right in reckoning that O’Callaghan’s work will stand the test of time. I can only reach for the usual platitudes in urging you to hunt down copies of his three collections published by Gallery Press to date – The History of Rain (1993) and Seatown (1999), collected together in Seatown and Earlier Poems (2000); and the excellent Fiction, published in 2005 – showcasing the development of an exciting and original poetic voice sounding itself out in poems that are engaged and engaging, witty, smart and sharp, but above all, driven by an energetic music that is as capable of challenging and amusing as it is of moving the reader.

In his review of Seatown in the Times Literary Supplement, Stephen Knight pointed to James Fenton, Robert Frost and Philip Larkin as pronounced influences in O’Callaghan’s work, and for those who are fans of any of these major voices in post-war poetry, you won’t be disappointed by his poems. But at the same time, quite rightly, Knight states that ‘despite the presence of these pungent voices, O’Callaghan’s poetry is marvellously his own’. This is largely to do with the knowingness of the poems, which amounts to more than the winks, nudges, sarcasm and irony that crop up in much contemporary verse. Instead, particularly in Fiction, O’Callaghan’s poetry combines the suggestive, deliberative and symbolic capabilities of verse with the inventive, imaginative qualities most readily associated with fictional prose, often to startling effect. This includes the likes of ‘Out-takes’, exploring the sounds left behind from a recording session (‘leftovers from a cleaned up / final version’; suggesting our polished, distorted view of ourselves); ‘Reception’, where the poet remembers an event from his childhood which turns out to be a story he was told ‘over a glass of ropey Chianti’; ‘Hello’, a sequence of poems exploring the invention of that phrase for ‘the blower, / since some kind of formula / for an opening exchange / had to be agreed upon / to get the ball rolling’; and the excellent vignette ‘The Narrator’, who ‘during the break in chapter / gets up to stretch beneath a skylight’, a theme returned to in ‘The Present Writer’, who ‘gets a kick / inhabiting the third person, as if talking across himself / or forever clapping his own exit from the wings’.

In short, O’Callaghan stuff is the business and deserves a wide readership. And needless to say, his next collection will be well worth waiting for. In the meantime, though, do check out the three poems of his which appear in this month’s issue of Poetry magazine, and the comic ‘The Modern Pastoral Elegy’ in that magazine’s archive. And rather than my blathering on any further here, I’ll let the poetry speak for itself – below is ‘Coventry’, the sonnet that opens Fiction, first published in the TLS.

Coventry

On a night as clear and warm as tonight,
in 1941, a stray German squadron
with a war to win and a radar on the blink
mistook the quays of neutral Seatown
for the lights of greater Coventry.

On a night as clear and warm as tonight –
when she has gone into an almighty huff
and taken the chat over heaven-knows-what
(or something of nothing with a bit of fluff)
and my lot once again is the box-room futon,
the guest duvet –
I am inclined to think
perhaps the Luftwaffe after all were spot on,
and would give my eye-teeth for butterfly bombs
to fall into this silence I have been sent to.

poem by Conor O’Callaghan
republished with permission of the author
first published in the Times Literary Supplement, 20 October 2000
from Fiction (Gallery Press, 2005)

PoetCasting and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

2009-03-07T17:04:00.004Z

I've mentioned PoetCasting on the Wasteland before - an admirable and, I think, extremely valuable collection of audio recordings of established and emerging contemporary poets, professionally put together by the enterprising young poet Alex Pryce. Andrew Motion's Poetry Archive should watch its back.

Well - shameless self-promotion alert - having been featured on the site in a joint venture with literary magazine Pomegranate, showcasing young poets published in the magazine since its beginnings, I've my own feature on the site now, including recordings of four poems from the sparks.

It was great of Alex to come up and record this and, more generally, for her to run PoetCasting so professionally and diligently in the first place (on visiting Sheffield, she recounted how whenever her mother rings her up, she's invariably on a train heading someplace or other to make a recording). Unsurprisingly then, the poets featured on PoetCasting to date span the height and breadth of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and more are always being added. In fact, on the same day my recordings were done, Gregory Award-winning Sheffield writer Chris Jones and Faber poet Maurice Riordan were also recorded reading, both of which'll no doubt be added to the site soon.

Do take a look at the PoetCasting site then, and if you like the sound of what you find there, subscribe to their feed for regular updates.

Also, on a slight tangent, for those interested in the work of Welsh poet Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch, my critical perspective of her poetry is now up on the British Council's Contemporary Writers website.

Shadows

2009-03-04T18:53:00.003Z

The scene’s one of wandering back to a tent, through a field of thousands, flag posts and lamp-lit; the pitch hasn’t moved but their damned if they can find it, more having cropped up in makeshift walkways in-between. The sky’s the final shade from its fullest darkness, throwing clouds across itself like fishing boats, streamlined by currents. Campfire smoke drifts across the site, a half-cut mob of guys attempt to resurrect some fading chant, and a man is running in the inimitable manner of one desperately in need of the toilet. Morning darkens. Now one of the crew mutters something to himself, another sparks a roll-up with the same Zippo that was held to the wall of sound and fading whine conjured not an hour ago; a stack of Marshall amps and the wielding of a custom-built, sunburst Fender Strat… If there is a more direct way back it escapes them, left instead as they are circling in on the plot that, altered by darkness, will finally return to the mind as the changed yet half-familiar face of an old acquaintance might… In the meantime, there are only the torches of camps illuminating their puppetry of contents, and the names the imagination might give to the shadows of intimacy, argument and practicality that flicker so suddenly across them… Wings; The Last Dance; Snakes; A Parting Kiss; This is Something…

Mew: Am I Wry? No

2009-03-04T13:03:00.004Z

Was round a friend's place the other night, enjoying a few beers and some albums I haven't heard in a good while, when we ended up listening to Danish alt-rock indie band Mew's album, Frengers.

So many good songs on that record, I can't believe I haven't listened to it properly in so long. And such a refreshing, unusual sound - soaring but subtle vocals, beautiful guitar and electronic arrangements, and a pop sensibility that at the same time is totally atmospheric and cerebral - I can't recommend it enough. In fact, I've just checked their wiki page after typing that, and found that a review of the album described it as 'a work of quiet brilliance, aiming for the epic without straying into the bombastic, offering cerebral arrangements while keeping things accessible'. Spot on.

Above, then, is the promo video for 'Am I Wry? No', the opening track of the album, and as good an introduction to the record as any.

Raw Light, the Guardian, and death by junk food

2009-02-22T14:27:00.010Z

For those wanting an introduction to a selection of contemporary poets whose work you might've not come across before, you could do much worse than checking out Jane Holland's Raw Light blog, which is currently enjoying a 'Short Season of Other Poets'.

So far, poems from debut collections by Katy-Evans Bush, Matt Merritt, Angela France and Rob Mackenzie have been featured, a pretty eclectic selection in which you'll no doubt find something of interest. I hear that Claire Crowther, among others, is due to be featured before Raw Light resumes usual service, and at the moment, a poem from the sparks is also up there. Why not wander across, then, before you head out and enjoy a sunny Sunday afternoon?

Also worth a look this weekend for those who haven't spotted them already is Sean O'Brien's review of George Szirtes' New and Collected Poems in the Guardian and, though I'm a week or so late to flag this up, a thoughtful and interesting blog post by Adam O'Riordan on his time spent collecting together the late poet Michael Donaghy's critical prose work.

On a pretty repulsive and totally unrelated note, there's also this website that a friend sent me the link to earlier in the week. Apologies in advance. Though come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that cupcake used to be on the dessert menu at Fatty Arbuckles - and whatever happened to that franchise?

Elbow live with the BBC Concert Orchestra

2009-02-07T15:03:00.003Z

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'.

Poetry Feature: 'The Hush of the Very Good' by Todd Boss

2009-02-01T14:42:00.007Z

I first came across the American poet Todd Boss in Poetry magazine, where a number of his poems have appeared in recent years, and instantly enjoyed his demotic, witty and deftly musical style. I was chuffed, then, to receive his first collection Yellowrocket as a present recently, which at over a 100 pages is a lengthy and rewarding read. His poems - charting the recurrent themes of landscapes, language, kids, love and marriage with intelligence, subtlety, real feeling and humour - bring to mind the likes of Frost and Auden, but also bear comparison to more contemporary poets such as Armitage, Kleinzahler, and, at times, the late Michael Donaghy. He is definitely a poet worthy of your attention, and a friendly chap too, as he recently kindly granted me permission to reprint his poem 'The Hush of the Very Good' here on the Wasteland. If you enjoy it, I really encourage you to buy Yellowrocket - published by W.W. Norton you can find it here, and Boss's website with recordings of him reading his work is here.

The Hush of the Very Good

You can tell by how he lists
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxto let her
kiss him, that the getting, as he gets it,
is good.
xxxxxxxxxIt’s good in the sweetly salty,
deeply thirsty way that a sea-fogged
rain is good after a summer-long bout
of inland drought.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxAnd you know it
when you see it, don’t you? How it
drenches what’s dry, how the having
of it quenches.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxThere is a grassy inlet
where your ocean meets your land, a slip
that needs a certain kind of vessel,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxand
when that shapely skiff skims in at last,
trimmed bright, mast lightly flagging
left and right,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxthen the long, lush reeds
of your longing part, and soft against
the hull of that bent wood almost im-
perceptibly brushes a luscious hush
the heart heeds helplessly—
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxthe hush
of the very good.

poem by Todd Boss
from Yellowrocket (W.W. Norton, 2008)
first published in Poetry, February 2007

Young British Poets in The Manhattan Review

2009-01-22T17:01:00.007Z

An interesting, varied and substantial biannual publication, The Manhattan Review has long been featuring exciting work by leading American, British and international poets alike, from John Burnside to D Nurkse, Pascale Petit to Les Murray, Ruth Fainlight to David Constantine, George Szirtes to Penelope Shuttle, and of course the late, great Peter Redgrove, who remained a regular contributor until his passing.

But of special interest in the latest issue, as well as work by Tim Liardet, John Kinsella, Polish poet Julia Hartwig and a number of those listed above, is an important feature – something of a welcome, occasional aspect of the publication, taking stock of trends and developments in contemporary poetry across the globe – in this instance, ‘Seventeen Young British Poets’, edited and introduced by Todd Swift.

As a successful editor – having put together Poetry Nation and 101 Poets Against the War, both of which featured a broad, eclectic sweep of established and emerging poets, as well as the Life Lines: Poets for Oxfam recordings – Swift’s selection is a thoughtful one, and his understanding of British poetry as a partial outsider (a Canadian living in London, both British and North American influences are much in evidence in his own poetic sensibility and attitudes) makes his introduction and its justifications an intelligently written and largely convincing read. The seventeen poets featured, then, are a selection of those which both Swift and co-selector Philip Fried (longstanding editor of The Manhattan Review) suggest are currently most successfully drawing from, developing upon, and in rich conversation with the complex poetic ‘schools’ that precede them, most obviously the British lyric tradition (whose current talented practitioners, as Swift notes, include Sean O’Brien, Don Paterson, Roddy Lumsden, George Szirtes, and Hugo Williams) and the more modernist-influenced British avant-garde, whose linguistically interrogative approach is perhaps best exemplified in the work of J.H. Prynne.

Though bold and, as with all such predictions, less than certain, then, the central claim to the selection is not an unreasonable one: that ‘every one of these poets would likely be found on a list of the thirty most impressive, or original, new younger writers to start publishing in the 21st century’. So who are these poets? They range from the lyrically gifted Jacob Polley to the linguistically dextrous Daljit Nagra, and span from recent Eric Gregory Award winners and other emerging voices to those whose recent prize-winning books are slowly helping to reshape, develop and evolve British poetry today. Among them are the playfully inventive wit of Luke Kennard, the quirky and fresh lyricism of Emily Berry, and the markedly contemporary suburban tales of Kathryn Simmonds. They are seventeen poets at varying stages of their still collectively early development as writers, and this feature gives a taste of their early output with two new poems by each, something which, to The Manhattan Review’s great credit, few other magazines have the space or ambition for (also worth mentioning are its regularly featured lengthy essays on contemporary poetry, as in the current issue’s ‘Smuggled Under the Threshold of Listening: Encountering Alice Oswald’).

It’s well worth picking up a copy of the Fall/Winter 2008/9 edition, then, which can be ordered from the magazine’s website here, not only for the important and interesting Young British Poets feature itself, but to sample the poems, essays and translations of a publication worth subscribing to.