Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne and Paterson

The Fortnightly Review has this fascinating piece, by Peter Riley, on The Collected Letters of Charles Olson and J H Prynne, and Don Paterson's The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre. Now I've only really skimmed through it at lunchtime, and I'll have to give it much more detailed consideration at some stage, but it is good at least to be able to read such a thorough and thoughtful article on poetry, and TFR deserves credit for that.

POEM magazine

Poetry magazines come and go, and increasingly, some of the most interesting developments are happening online. Still, the launch of a major new journal for world poetry doesn't happen every day.

POEM, the first issue of which is on sale from January 24th, will be published by the Universities of Durham and Santiago de Compostela and Poetry Ireland, and has initial funding from a Canadian sponsor. That international flavour is there in the advisory board, too, which includes C K Williams, Don Paterson, Marjorie Perloff, Tomaz Salamun, Sean O'Brien, John Burnside, Stanley Moss, Linda Gregerson, Fady Joudah, Antonella Annedda and Yang Lian, and the magazine is edited by Fiona Sampson, former editor of Poetry Review.

The 128-page quarterly journal will cost £8.95 per issue or £30 for a four-issue subscription, and one nice little feature is that it's designed to slip into a pocket.

Established and emerging poets are invited to submit - the postal address is Wythgreen House, Coleshill, Swindon SN6 7PS, and the email address POEMmagazine@yahoo.co.uk

There's also more information at the POEM Magazine page on Facebook, and on Twitter @POEMmagazine

Catching up

Regular readers will know that a monotonous feature of this blog is an endless stream of promises to get round to finishing reading or reviewing certain books, and a parallel outpouring of apologies for failing to do so.

I actually got round to some serious reading over the last week or so, though, thanks to some travelling, so I'm going to start to clear the backlog (yeah, yeah, you're thinking, I've heard that before).

So, first up was Simon Armitage's Seeing Stars. Now, although there seems to have been something of a backlash against him in recent years, I've remained something of a fan of Armitage, although I think his work has been a lot patchier since somewhere around The Dead Sea Poems. Almost everyone I've talked to about this collection, though, has either loved or hated it, no doubt in large part because it consists mainly of prose poems/flash fictions/whatever you want to call them.

Well, I have no problem with the format, but I just don't think the execution is up to scratch. It's fun in parts, and always readable, but too often the strangeness seems a bit forced, and the end result is rather inconsequential, or predictable. I think Ben Wilkinson hits the nail pretty much on the head in this review that originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

I enjoyed Cliff Yates' Frank Freeman's Dancing School a lot more. There's a much less obvious, and thus unsettling, strangeness to his poetry. At first sight it can appear to transplant something of Geoff Hattersley's style from South Yorkshire to the Midlands, but it soon becomes clear that it's heading somewhere rather different. Yates gives seemingly plain language the smallest of tweaks to suddenly switch perspectives again and again. It's a book I'll be coming back to, and writing more about.

A bit of blog trawling produced this excellent piece on Alan Baker's Litterbug, about Don Paterson's book on Shakespeare's sonnets. Hard to find anything to disagree with there, or in the Alastair Fowler review linked to there, from the TLS.

Finally, I've just received Century of the Death of the Rose, by the Ecuadorean poet Jorge Carrera Andrade. There are parallel texts, of the Spanish originals, and the translations by Steven Ford Brown. On a recent trip to Ecuador, my guide, Juan Manuel Carrion, gave me a bird guide he'd written, in which he extensively quotes Carrera Andrade, and I liked what I read, so I ordered this book. Looking forward to getting stuck into it later.

Lists, lists, lists

Good piece by Todd Swift over at Eyewear, talking about the usual glut of year-end book lists. I tend to agree with a lot of what Todd's saying, although it is fair to point out once again that I'm always a bit underwhelmed by Don Paterson. I bought Rain the other day, along with John Burnside's The Hunt In The Forest, and although I will take time to digest and re-read them, I'd have to say I prefer the latter. As usual with Paterson, I find myself thinking "it's good, but is it really that good?"

Meanwhile, Peony Moon is featuring mini-lists from a wide variety of poets. They make very interesting reading, and it's good to see Andrew Philip's wonderful The Ambulance Box and Clare Crowther's The Clockwork Gift cropping up with such regularity. I found it very difficult to narrow things down to three books, because I get the impression it's been a pretty strong year.

With that in mind, I'll be doing my usual round-up of favourite books some time after December 25th, but in the meantime, look out later this week for reviews of Simon Armitage and Tim Dee's anthology The Poetry Of Birds, and the similarly themed US anthology Bright Wings, edited by Billy Collins.

Current reading includes John James' Collected Poems, George Ttoouli's splendid Static Exile, and a selection from Francis Kilvert's diaries (I'd been looking for a cheap paperback of the latter for ages, and found one for £2 in Leicester on Friday).

Buy one, get one free!

Christmas is coming, and, err, I’m getting fat. With that in mind, and before doing anything silly like eating less or exercising more. I’m trying to create more room in my cramped house my rationalising my bookshelves.

A while ago, I bought some books at the closing down of a bargain bookstore. They’d always sold a lot of remaindered poetry from the likes of Faber, Cape, Picador and Bloodaxe, and there were quite a few volumes worth having, but you basically had to buy a box at a time, for a fiver. So I did. Trouble is, there were also quite a few books in there that I already had, and a few more that I didn’t really want.

So, until Christmas, anyone buying a copy of Troy Town through this website (£9, including postage and packing) can also have one of the collections absolutely free - I'd like to think they were going to a good, poetry-reading home. I’ll send you the full list of what’s available when you enquire, but some of the poets include Don Paterson, Neil Rollinson, Jean Sprackland and Ruth Padel.

Email me at the link shown on the right, or just post a comment below. Oh, and don't worry if it takes me a while to get back to you - I'm going to be all over the place for the next couple of weeks.

And I thought I'd been a bit hard on Don Paterson...

Issue 3 of Horizon Review is jam-packed with all sorts of goodies, and a fairly brief trawl through it at lunchtime was nothing like long enough to do it justice.

I put the poems themselves on hold for now, and the podcast on West Midlands poetry, and turned instead to the interviews. There's a really good piece on Hugo Williams, always a favourite of mine. I love what he says about line-breaks, especially that last line about the broken thermometer. Carrie Etter and Claire Crowther's piece is good too, as you might expect if you read the interviews with them both on these pages earlier this year.

And then there's Vidyan Ravinthiran's interview with Craig Raine. Among other things, he has some pretty harsh words to say about Don Paterson, words I'd struggle to agree with, despite my previously mentioned lukewarm response to most of Paterson's work. I think there's quite a bit of 'previous' between the two, though, and it's probably safe to assume that that's where all this coming from.

There's one thing Raine definitely gets wrong, though. No one decides to support Leicester City arbitrarily. Why on earth would you, on a whim, decide to subject yourself to a lifetime of gallant, underachieving mediocrity, punctuated by an all-too-brief golden era and not-so-occasional periods of grinding misery?

Not entirely surprising...

So, Don Paterson's collection Rain won this year's Forward Poetry Prize, as was widely predicted, while Emma Jones' The Striped World took Best First Collection, and Robin Robertson's At Roane Head Best Individual Poem.

I don't want to slag off individuals, and I'm not a believer in some great poetry conspiracy, but those choices do seem entirely predictable. Obviously any competition comes down, in the end, to the subjective views of the judges, but I think they could have shown a bit more imagination, with the shortlists as well as the eventual choices.

I have to admit Paterson leaves me rather cold. I've got all his collections up to this one (although some were bought from remaindered stock, or in charity shops), and although I can see how well crafted they are, they don't really excite me or move me much. Again, personal taste, but the same thing keeps happening as did with Elvis Costello after about 1981 - with each new release, I listen to the flood of critical praise, decide that this time it must be the real thing, go out and buy it, and end up rather disappointed.

Elsewhere, the BBC's poll to find the nation's favourite poet did spring a surprise, for me at least, although perhaps that says something about me. TS Eliot won - I suppose I expected someone more, I don't know, accessible. I've seen it suggested that Cats had something to do with his popularity, but anyway, I found it quite heartening that such a major poet is actually held in wide public esteem.