Dean Young

On Facebook the other day, Rob Mackenzie posted a link to this poem, which I like a lot. I bought Dean Young's New and Selected Poems on my iPad a couple of years back, and dip in and out of it a lot – I recommend it very highly.

Magma 65

Issue 65 of the always excellent Magma is out now - you can find further details here.

Reviews include Kathryn Gray on Ian Duhig, Andy Willoughby and Claire Askew; Ian McEwen on Martin Stannard, Matthew Caley and Barbara Cumbers; Rob A Mackenzie on Judy Brown, Lisa Matthews and Adam Crothers; and Pippa Little on Anne-Marie Fyfe, Martin Figura and Andrew Shields.

End of year lists

I'd like to beg forgiveness for a little bit of own-trumpet-blowing now, as Rob Mackenzie has selected The Elephant Tests as one of his favourite books of 2013, over at his excellent blog, Surroundings.

It's an intriguing list all-round. I'd agree with pretty much everything Rob says about the Luke Kennard and Ahren Warner collections. The latter, I know, seems to have divided opinions pretty sharply, but as Rob says, the sheer ambition and individuality at the very least mean that it forces you to have an opinion about it.

Andy Philip's collection is awaiting me at home, and I look forward to reading it over the holiday. He set himself a very high standard to maintain with his debut, The Ambulance Box, but the poems that I've read from the new book raise the bar even higher, if anything.

The Gillian Allnutt and Dai George books both sound right up my street, so I'll be looking to get hold of them soon, and the Robert Bly/Tomas Transtromer letters too.

Finally, Rob's own excellent second collection, The Good News, is available here, and deserves to be on more than a few end of year lists itself - it's a genuinely questioning, intellectually curious book, yet every bit as readable and playful as his debut.

All of which reminds me, I need to compile my own lists...

Poetry and pop

There's a good post here, on Rob Mackenzie's Surroundings blog, about whether there's any correlation between tastes in poetry and tastes in popular music, and indeed whether we should expect there to be.

I have to admit that I've no real idea what answer I'd give. I started out by thinking that there probably was a fairly close relationship in my particular case, but the more I thought about it, the more I struggled to relate different musical genres to the many tribes of contemporary poetry. I mean, what about country? What would that equate to?

I think it's certainly true, though, that poets of my generation and younger (and probably quite a bit older, too) can't get away from thinking about poetry's relationship to popular music. You hear talk of Second Album Syndrome in the poetry world (Simon Turner even refers to it in the title of his excellent second collection), and I think it's probably quite common to think of collections as albums, which presumably makes a poem in a magazine or anthology a single, and a pamphlet an EP.

Is that a bad thing? I don't think so, but I wonder if poetry could benefit from cross-pollination with other artforms in other ways, too. Reviewing is an area that springs immediately to mind, but I'd be interested to know more.

Poetry reviewing

It's not often I find my way over to Facebook these days, but I have been following an interesting discussion on Rob Mackenzie's wall this week, about the way that poetry is reviewed in this country.

It's a complex subject, and to a large extent I find myself agreeing with the thrust of Jon Stone's argument (why can't poetry be reviewed in the same way that, say, film and music are?), as well as feeling a good deal of sympathy for Rob's starting-point.

I suppose one of the angles that hasn't been explored fully is where the reviews are appearing. I've no idea what The Guardian (or any of the other broadsheets) pay their reviewers, but I'd assume they do, and that would inevitably create a different situation to that of reviewers writing for a small press mag for no financial reward. While it might on the one hand make it easier for the reviewer to be critical (not having to worry about offending a potentially large proportion of the magazine's subscribers), it might also work the other way - the paper would be reluctant to consistently be too lukewarm towards the books of a regular advertiser.

In poetry mags and webzines themselves, it's a bit different. The reviewer is often writing for no reward other than a free copy of the book (although some, such as Magma, certainly pay). From personal experience, that's fine - it's a chance to read more poetry than I could otherwise afford, and especially to take a chance on books that I'd otherwise have thought looked interesting but didn't feel like shelling out for. It does mean, though, that the reviewer is often predisposed to like what they're reading - you're unlikely to take the time and effort to read the book carefully, make notes, then write the review, if it's something you just don't like.

The same's true on blogs, and that's certainly unashamedly the case here at Polyolbion. I don't get the time or the money to read anything like all the poetry I'd like to, so I'm not going to waste precious time writing a negative blog review when I could be just getting on with finding something I do like. I don't get enough time to be positive about all the things I do like, for that matter, so a great many good books go unheralded.

Finally, someone in the discussion brought up the subject of what a review is actually for. I haven't ever, I don't think, bought a book of poetry purely on the strength of a review, but a good review (as in a well written one) is often enough to spark my interest in a book that might otherwise have passed me by - again, it might well encourage me to take a few chances.

So what is a good review? Well, as Rob originally suggested, I want to see some suggestion of weak points, as well as strengths (and I can't think of a single collection I own that doesn't have at least some negatives), and I want to see both highlighted with plenty of reference to the actual text. In that, at least, I suppose it's always going to be different to any print review of film or music, where examples can only be described.

Some recent reading

There's a good review of Claire Askew's chapbook The Mermaid and the Sailors over at Rob Mackenzie's blog. I've been meaning to write something about it myself, and will do eventually. In fact, reading Rob's excellent piece will give me the kick up the arse I need to start rolling out some reviews from next week, starting with David Morley's Enchantment.

Sphinx has the first reviews of Matthew Stewart's fine pamphlet Inventing Truth, and there are new reviews appearing there all the time, plus a great archive of past articles.

Meanwhile, I've been enjoying Ernesto Priego's The Present Day. I've just come across this review of it, which sounds pretty spot-on to me. It's a terrific book, and I've even had a go at reading some of the untranslated Spanish poems. I might need a bit more practice there, though.

Horizon Review 5

I've been out of circulation for the last 10 days or so, and returned to the usual backlog of emails, plus all sorts of interesting goings-on in the poetry world. I'll post more on some of those, such as the TS Eliot Prize Readings and Michelle McGrane's new book The Suitable Girl, later in the week, but for now, I'll just flag up the latest issue of Horizon Review.

I really do think it's going from strength to strength, so kudos to both former editor Jane Holland and new editor Katy Evans-Bush. There's a wealth of reviews. essays, interviews and stories in there, before you even get to the poetry from the likes of Julia Bird, Alison Brackenbury, David Briggs, Ian Duhig, Roz Goddard, Mark Granier, Helen Ivory, Ira Lightman, Rob A Mackenzie, Andrew Philip and Andrew Shields, to name just a few. I've got a piece in there too -  Zugunruhe - which appears in hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica.

Subscribe to HappenStance

I’ve said it before, and I am of course biased, but HappenStance is one of the UK’s most consistently interesting poetry presses. I’m in awe of quite how one-woman publishing team Helena Nelson manages to maintain such a high-quality and increasingly prolific output, but she does, and it shows no signs of stopping in 2010.

Among the chapbooks coming out are Jon Stone’s Scarecrows and one from Tim Love, plus a debut chapbook from Matthew Stewart is due next year. The back catalogue, of course, includes pamphlets from Alison Brackenbury, Mark Halliday, Ruth Pitter, Michael Mackmin, Andrew Philip, James Wood, Rob Mackenzie, Gill McEvoy, Tom Duddy, Frances Thompson, Marilyn Ricci, Patricia Ace and Eleanor Livingstone (plus many more, including yours truly), and a really fine full collection from DA Prince.

For just £7.50 (in the UK, £12 elsewhere), you can subscribe to HappenStance for the year. For that, you get a chapbook of your choice and the latest instalment of The HappenStance Story, plus a discount on other books, and advance notice of and invitations to launches. You also get the satisfaction of supporting a great poetry publisher. Give it a try…

The Clockwork Gift, by Claire Crowther

Claire Crowther's poems and reviews have been published in a wide variety of UK and North American journals and anthologies, and her pamphlet Glass Harmonica appeared from Flarestack in 2003. Her first full collection, Stretch of Closures, appeared from Shearsman Press in 2007, and was shortlisted for the Jerwood/Aldeburgh Best First Collection prize in 2007. Her second collection, The Clockwork Gift, appeared in February of this year.

She was awarded a bursary by Kingston University to complete the book, and was also poet in residence during 2008 at Dorich House, Kingston on Thames, a museum dedicated to the life and work of sculptor Dora Gordine.

I interviewed her via e-mail about the The Clockwork Gift, and the results are below, along with a couple of poems from the book. I hope you enjoy them...

I write a lot on Polyolbion about pamphlet poetry, and I notice that you had a pamphlet, Glass Harmonica, published before your first collection. Is this a publication route you'd recommend to new poets?

The useful thing about publishing a shorter collection, for your first one, is that you can practice selecting and ordering a smaller number of poems. These are challenging tasks, I find. Get them wrong and some poems can be weakened. But nowadays pamphlet publishers often work through competitions – this must be good for a small press and I can see that it drives the standard up in some cases – but it could make it more difficult for a new voice to find a home. A prizewinning collection has to be strong from the off and I regret that there may be fewer of those personal relationships where a pamphlet publisher discovered a new voice and supported, even mentored, the poet to improve the collection. Charles Johnston at Flarestack performed just that role for me. I am deeply grateful.


There are a lot of ghosts in your new collection, The Clockwork Gift. Are they a necessary personification of memory?

Yes, that’s right, these are personified memory – rather than, say, relating particular memories. I am less interested in memory as anecdote than in memory as a social, political or emotional tool – ghosts are always interesting and they may summon up fear, which is the emotion I am most interested in. I am working on a new collection which has the working title of Afraid. The ghost of a grandmother in The Herebefore is a composite character meant to represent the lost women poets of previous generations rather than a picture of my own grandmother. But my grandmothers gave me lots of source material for poetry. I had an English and an Irish grandmother. When I was very young, my English granny gave me a book of Keats’ poetry which she had bound herself. I still treasure that. She also kept a stack of News of the World papers under the cushions on her settee and I was full of envy for this reading mountain – I had to climb it to sit down. Then I could look at the lurid photographs inside. I still remember one photo of a crowded farmhouse kitchen table – in the middle of which was a small round plate with a human heart on it. What shocked me most was a hand-drawn arrow pointing to the heart – not drawn by my granny but by the murderer whose case the paper was relating.


There’s also a lot of tension and internal debate in the collection about the role and value of books and literature. Do you see that creation of “unnaturally pressed sense” as ever more important in our internet-dominated culture?

Partly I am playing out my role as a writer of poems in such poems – always a source of tension (because what exactly is that role). And I do see the paradox of being addicted to compressing sense, as poets are, when expanding it is so fashionable. I’ve been given an electronic reader and it’s odd to hold 150 perfectly readable books somehow melded together inside a palmtop-sized device. Internet-led forms of writing such as email or updates have their own fascinating habits of compression. I have tried several times to write poems using those forms – but the poems don’t work very well yet! There’s no doubt they have given me other voices to use.


One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was the willingness (this was something I also liked about Andy Philip’s recent book) to create your own myths. Poets seem to have been scared of this for some years now - is it something you see making a comeback?

That’s an interesting question – I wonder if this is happening. Myth is so often invoked in poetry that I am surprised more poets haven’t had a go at doing their own. Of course, myth must be the repository of a society’s experience and it is a rather grand claim that I’m the voice for that in a myth I have made up. Yet can I be anything else? In the end, I decided the stories about ‘otherness’ and social damage that I wanted to tell were strengthened by creating a mythic figure (the thike).


One of the book’s main themes is the role of grandmothers. Can you tell us a bit more about how you approached this? And was the poem Names as enjoyable to write as it is to read aloud?!

I loved writing Names! Of course I had about ten dozen other names than the ones I used and the fun was choosing which would work together as lines and stanzas. I read aloud all the possible combinations, as I do with all poems as they grow. I did a lot of research – three years’ worth – about aspects of grandmotherhood, medical, economic, historic, mythic, including having several new grandchildren of my own during this time. I collected many many grandmother poems by other poets and wrote a couple of academic papers on those poems. While all this was going on, I wrote a grandmother journal and the poems just cropped up as I went along.


Without making it explicit, there seemed to me to be a very strong environmental concern running through many of the poems, with lots of images of decay and transformation between the human and the rest of the natural world. Is this a strand you see yourself pursuing further?

Yes, without doubt. My partner is a solar energy scientist and his life is dedicated to experimenting with new forms of solar energy to help overcome some of the problems we face as an oil and nuclear using society. We talk continually about the issues that arise from his work and, though I rarely set out to write about those issues directly, they influence the political thinking that is behind every poem I write – as it has to be behind every poem written. The new collection is bringing in some aspects of this more directly than usual – though I need to be sure these new poems are working well before I publish them.


Finally, could you tell us a bit about your experience of Shearsman as a publisher? How do you go about putting together a collection?

Tony Frazer at Shearsman has been an excellent publisher and editor – efficient, visionary and full of energy. I was impressed with his list and so approached him about my first collection. I already knew the feel of the press from Shearsman’s journal which I had published work in. After his acceptance, I made many changes to the set of poems, amending poems, adding poems, subtracting poems – and he encouraged this without ever dominating the process. I feel I managed this process better with the second collection than the first – to me, it’s almost like constructing a long poem or poem series. There are aesthetic and semantic choices (and mistakes) to be made. I understand other publishers can be slower to respond to poets than Tony is and I’m very grateful that he did not keep me waiting for months or years for an initial acceptance. He is also very good at cover design and sourcing cover images. Both my covers are all his work. The only thing we have ever disagreed on is the title of the first collection – he didn’t like mine and I disliked the one he suggested. In the end, I came up with a long list of other titles – he decided his three favourites, I decided mine and the one overlapping title was it!

Key Stage
for Bessie, who suffered from dementia

In a shop
where keys are copied,
my daughter asks for her own.

The boy takes mine.
His overalls are oily from the machine.
We wait.

She reminds me: ‘You must carry it
always, it locks you out
as well as lets you in. If it sticks

to begin with, don’t panic.’
It wears smooth in time.
She has gone

out for years without me.
Now she will come home alone with my key,
enter my emptiness as an adult,

bar out the night
whose shine
is from dead stars,

and accept what she sees of me
through doors
she has opened.

Experience

The woman let off Death Row walked through a gorge
of chaotic limestone left by meltwater
and saw men everywhere.

They were climbing the steep and overhung sides.
Their feet flexed in thin shoes, toeing
crevice after crevice.

Their hands pried the split crag for brokenness.
They hung
and carefully worked out each nodule of rock

rejecting the frailty of this or that stone,
clicking in the knot
that would hold them from falling back to the passage.

She ignored arrows, made her own path
through tall-stalked, small-headed ferns and young ash,
past a feral goat, newish horns knuckling up,

across cinquefoil-buttered grass, near-invisible swellings
of bluebell seed, a memory of leaving home –
or maybe a promise.

The climbers weren’t enjoying the view.
They climbed for the sake of the stone. One stopped
in a patch of sun, refusing to carry on

trusting the handshake of rock and rope
though below each man another looked up
holding a thin string.

She was looking for innocence
like an older woman standing over her young husband
allowing an undoing of long hair.

First published in Poetry Wales

Finally, for an excellent review of The Clockwork Gift, go to Rob Mackenzie's blog Surroundings, or to hear Claire reading some of her poems, go along to Poetcasting.

Cord power

The decline of the UK's corduroy industry is a major concern in these difficult economic times, but as you'll see from the photograph above, poets are fully alive to the threat and are already taking action. Rob Mackenzie (left), Andrew Philip (right) and myself were all sporting corduroy jackets at our recent reading at Word Power in Edinburgh - I can only imagine James Wood's was in the wash, forcing him to cut a more elegant figure instead.

Remember, by going out and buying just one piece of corduroy clothing now, you can help save an ancient and honorable British industry, and at the same time ensure that no poets will go naked this winter. And you really don't want to see that.

Thanks to Eddie Gibbons for the photo.

Northern (high)lights

Back to work today, after a wonderful weekend in Edinburgh. The reading at Word Power on Saturday, with James Wood, Rob Mackenzie and Andrew Philip, was an extremely enjoyable affair. As so often seems to happen, despite having made our choices wholly independently, the poems we read clustered round a couple of definite themes – an illustration of the poet as social barometer, as James suggested.

It was good to catch up with Helena Nelson, and to meet Eddie Gibbons and Colin Will there, the latter in full highland dress and unquestionably the most smartly dressed man I’ve ever seen at a reading, a consequence of him officiating at Kevin Cadwallender’s wedding the same day (apropos of nothing, Cadwallender is a fantastic surname, isn’t it?). It’s not like anyone else looked too shabby, either, but Colin raised the bar for the rest of us to try to follow. He's a fine bird poet, too, which always gets my vote.

Afterwards, Andy and Rob headed off to do two more readings, and James and I took a more leisurely tour of the city, taking in all manner of architectural and real ale delights, and talking poetry all the way. A huge amount of ground – both literal and literary – was covered, and great fun it was too.

On the way back home yesterday, it struck me that I’ve got umpteen unfinished blog posts that I really need to get cracking on this week. So, coming very soon, expect pieces on The Salt Companion To Lee Harwood and Not The Full Story: Six Interviews With Lee Harwood, an appreciation of the splendid ONE magazine (go and appreciate it yourself in the meantime, at great length), and much more. Claire Crowther and Siriol Troup’s new collections arrived at the weekend, so they’ll feature too, and there are a few other books I’ve been itching to write about. Oh, and there'll be a few thoughts on the poetry business itself, and on selling your collection, in the light of the outstanding success Andy and Rob have had (Andy is already on the third print run of The Ambulance Box - most 'name' poets would be more than a little proud of that).

Word Power!

Word Power, at 43-45 West Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, plays host to a free feast of poetry this Saturday lunchtime.

Starting at 12noon sharp, I'll be reading along with fellow HappenStancers James Wood, Andrew Philip and Rob Mackenzie.

Rob's chapbook, The Clown of Natural Sorrow, was published by HappenStance Press in 2005. His first collection, The Opposite of Cabbage, was published by Salt in March 2009.

Andrew has published two poetry pamphlets with HappenStance - Tonguefire and Andrew Philip: A Sampler. The Ambulance Box, his first full-length collection, was published in March by Salt.

James W Wood’s pamphlet, The Theory of Everything, was published by HappenStance in 2006, and Inextinguishable by Knucker Press in 2008.

More information is available by following the link, but all you really need to know is that all three are very fine poets (and if you've been reading here for any length of time, you'll know why). We'll all have books available to buy, of course, so drop in.

Just one book...

I've been away all week, and returned to the depressing news that Salt Publishing is going through a major financial crisis at the moment, sad when you consider what they've added to the UK (and international) poetry scene in recent years. You can read more about it here.

There is hope, though. They're still trading, for a start, so now's the time to support them (and other small presses, for that matter). Have a read of the message below from Salt supremo Chris Hamilton-Emery, and treat yourself to some summer reading. I've talked about a few Salt titles on here recently - Rob Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage, Andrew Philip's The Ambulance Box, Shaindel Beers' A Brief History of Time, Sian Hughes' The Missing, and the Salt Companion To Lee Harwood - any one of them would be as good a place as any to start.

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.

UK and International
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/index.php

USA
http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop-us/index.php


2. Share this note on your Facebook and MySpace 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

Review: The Opposite Of Cabbage, by Rob A Mackenzie

Salt, 2009, £12.99

I fullly intended to review this collection alongside Andrew Philip's The Ambulance Box. After all, they were published on the same day in March, and both poets came to notice the same way, with fine chapbooks from HappenStance in 2005.

Both are Edinburgh-based, too, and they’ve read and worked through their collections together, but that’s not to say that the results are notable for their similarities. Instead, one of the most enjoyable aspects of reading them one after the other was seeing how they’d arrived at very different takes on some of the same subjects. So, to do them both justice, I thought I'd post them in fairly rapid succession - expect to see a review of Philip's book later in the week.

I’ve read and enjoyed Mackenzie's pamphlet, The Clown Of Natural Sorrow, several times, read with him, and stayed in fairly close touch, and yet this book managed to surprise me again and again.

Not that there’s anything flashy, any “look at me” posturing, about the way he springs those surprises. Early in the book, the wonderfully atmospheric The Listeners starts with:

The thrill of the fair is not in the glamorous machinery
and its spin, or in the clamour of infants longing
to be heard, but in the hour when music stops
and lights blink out, when a man threads a dark path
among greyer darknesses of once-bright carousels,
and becomes, with them, a bearer of absence,
night’s counterpart, impossible to bring to focus.

It could almost be a manifesto. Mackenzie handles the “glamorous machinery” of poetry very well, in a number of technically deft pieces, and many of these pieces are highly musical, but he’s never in thrall to formal constraints. And, while he generally maintains a quietly ironic distance, observing modern life with wit and intelligence, he doesn’t bury feeling too deep. Ashbery is an acknowledged influence here, but you’d struggle to level the same accusation ­– of being all about surface glitter – at Mackenzie as sometimes gets aimed at the great New York poet.

In a poem such as the excellent Glory Box, he juxtapositions the intensely personal with the clutter, confusion and absurdity of the everyday, undercutting any danger of sentimentality while, paradoxically, heightening the emotion conveyed. There’s a back story here, and a definite trajectory for the collection as a whole, but he hits a good balance between poems that thrive in each other’s company and a rattling good read that can be dipped into just about anywhere.

Subject-wise, he’s generally interested in threading that dark path mentioned earlier, in being a “bearer of absence”, in suggesting (but never making explicit) what lies just out of reach of the light. And, as the final phrase of the stanza above suggests, his surprises usually work by subtly disorientating the reader.

Scotland, not surprisingly, figures as a subject on a number of occasions, and perhaps because the poet has spent long periods abroad (in Italy and South Korea), his view of his own country is a complex, multi-faceted one. In Scotlands, he talks about:

…each fibre waiting for
the sudden drop, for a patch of earth in which to root itself.

That suggests the position he arrives at elsewhere, that the changing face of the UK following devolution offers opportunities to create all manner of new communities, owing nothing to flag-waving or nationalism.

But that word “community” is probably a key one, because Mackenzie, a church minister, never loses sight of the threads that connect us, even when, as suggested earlier, they lie somewhere in the shadows.

Which is where we came in, really, because what is poetry about if not making connections, preferably surprising ones?

The Opposite Of Cabbage is available from Salt, here, or through Rob Mackenzie's (highly recommended) blog, Surroundings.

Highs and lows

On Wednesday, the gravel pits and reservoirs of central England seemed to be swarming with Black Terns, with the odd Little Tern thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, commitments of a cricketing nature meant I couldn't get out to look for any of them (one consolation is that our ground is playing host to a Cuckoo this year).

Instead, I got up absurdly early yesterday morning, but was foiled again by mist and fog that made seeing anything difficult. So, on the way home from work yesterday, I tried again, first calling in at some of my regular sites, then working my way along the Trent Valley.

No luck at Trent Valley Pits, although there were huge numbers of Swallows skimming the water, and it was the same story at Aston Gravel Pits, where you have to stand on a concrete block just outside the main entrance, ignore the traffic whizzing past on the A50 just behind you, and crane your neck to see as much of the pits as you can.

Crane your neck. It's playing on my mind, you see. Because when I got to my final stop, Willington Gravel Pits, I met two birders walking down the lane. When I asked them if there was much about, one replied: "Nah, nothing much. We must have just missed the Cranes."

Missed the Cranes!!!!! What Cranes? Well, apparently two had been seen at around 5pm, but it was now 7.30 and they were seemingly long gone.

At this point, I was in two minds as to whether to go home. It had got incredibly dark, and there was a fine, misty rain falling. Cold, too. May isn't supposed to be like this. It's supposed to be all balmy evenings, sitting round with a cold beer, perhaps after watching a lot of obliging migrants dropping into your local site.

I carried on anyway. On the main reserve, there were masses of Black-headed Gulls, a few Common Terns, the usual mixture of ducks, and a sprinkling of Lapwings, Redshanks and Oystercatchers, all looking to settle down to roost for the night, and bickering over the best spots. A little flock of 10 Dunlin flew round and round, just above the water, jinking this way and that at high speed, and occasionally looking to land on one of the gravel spits. They'd come in, lower their legs in anticipation of landing, then pull out at the last moment in reaction to the agitation of the gulls. Finally, they found a quieter spot over near the Redshanks, and that was that.

I walked over to the Canal Pit, and just as I reached it, the clouds cleared slightly, the rain stopped, and the light improved significantly. You're forced to view the birds at a fair old distance, though, so it was quite a challenge picking out anything on the muddy shores, even if the hirundines were a bit more obvious over the actual water.

After about 10 minutes scanning, though, I was able to find three Black-tailed Godwits feeding enthusiastically in one little bay, and nearby was a Wood Sandpiper. Both good local ticks, especially as I've kept missing the occasional godwits that drop in from time to time.

These are one of my favourite waders - very elegant, despite the fact that their long legs and very long bill really ought to make them look a little absurd. The name, if my memory of the Readers Digest Book Of Birds (a much underrated volume) serves me correctly, comes from the Anglo-Saxon 'god wiht', meaning good thing. Meaning good thing on a plate with some veg and gravy, specifically. In fact, they were considered a delicacy until quite recently, and they're still hunted in France, despite the fact that the Western European population is under considerable pressure.

As I was getting back to the car, four Black-tailed Godwits were flying overhead, probably a different group altogether, with their white wing bars showing up well in the fading light.

Later, at home, I was having a read of The Salt Companion To Lee Harwood. One of the essays (I can't remember whose) was talking about Harwood's interest in nature, and quoted him talking about the pleasure he gets from being able to name plants, birds and so on. On the face of it, that sounds like the rage for order that is usually blamed for the British male's passion for spotting and/or collecting things. But in Harwood's poetry, what also comes through, I think, is a constant desire to reassure one's self that the world really is as various, to use Louis MacNeice's phrase, as we hope it is.

Anyway, much more on Harwood very soon. And coming this weekend, reviews of Andrew Philip's The Ambulance Box and Rob Mackenzie's The Opposite Of Cabbage.

Ramblings

Things have been a little quiet here at Polyolbion recently, but it's the calm before the storm, because I've got a whole load of half-written pieces ready to finish and post up.

For starters, there's reviews of Rob A Mackenzie's The Opposite Of Cabbage and Andrew Philip's The Ambulance Box, both from Salt, and both very fine books indeed. I've read and re-read them several times, and keep going back to revise my original thoughts, but I'll get something completed over the bank holiday weekend.

Speaking of my fellow HappenStancers, I'll be reading with Rob, Andrew and James Wood at the Word Power bookshop in Edinburgh, at noon on June 20th, so come along if you can. Edinburgh's always a pleasure, but it'll be great to catch up with the others and talk poetry.

I've also been reading The Salt Companion To Lee Harwood, edited by Robert Sheppard, and Not The Full Story: Six Interviews With Lee Harwood, by Kelvin Corcoran. Harwood's a poet I enjoy a lot, and it's been fun looking deeper into his work with the help of these two books.

And finally, I spent last week on a working trip to the Algarve. The sun shone, and the birding was excellent. Flamingo, Glossy Ibis, Spectacled Warbler, Rock Bunting, Crested Tit, masses of Avocets, Black-winged Stilts, Kentish Plovers and Whimbrels (the latter not a bird I see often over here), loads of Little Terns, and a big fall of migrants at Cape St Vincent, including Golden Oriole, some very smart Pied Flycatchers, and absolutely masses of Spotted Flycatchers.

Oh, and there was a close-range Otter, and a very showy displaying Little Bustard, which I managed to digi-bin. I haven't downloaded and tidied up the pics yet, but I'll post them later. In the meantime, enjoy that gratuitous shot of two Bee-eaters (not mine), just because we saw loads and they're a glorious bird.

I almost forgot. I got home to find that some great rarities had turned up on my local birding patch, so I dashed around yesterday seeing a Pectoral Sandpiper at Cossington Meadows, and two Whiskered Terns at Willington Gravel Pits (there had been eight earlier in the day, but a Peregrine spooked them).

Paper round

Saturday's Guardian contained this review, by David Wheatley, of Michael Donaghy's Collected Poems, out now from Picador.

I enjoyed it a lot, although my knowledge of Donaghy is fairly restricted, to Shibboleth and then a handful of other poems in anthologies. It's a gap I really ought to fill, and there's no better way than with a Collected.

Elsewhere, Rob Mackenzie's The Opposite of Cabbage, which I've been enjoying immensely and which I'll review soon, was reviewed in The Times. Great to see a national paper picking up on a first collection like that, and I hope it gives Rob the sales boost he deserves.

Raw Light spotlight

Jane Holland has very kindly published The Memory Of Water, one of the poems from Troy Town, as part of her season of other poets at her Raw Light blog.

It has already featured fine poems from Katy Evans-Bush and Rob Mackenzie (whose book The Opposite Of Cabbage is just out), and I can't help being slightly envious of Katy that she managed to supply a poem of that quality that hadn't made it into her very fine book Me And The Dead!

There are plenty more poets to follow, too, so keep an eye on Raw Light...

Zbigniew Herbert

Following on from Rob Mackenzie's recent posts on him over at Surroundings, there was this piece on Zbigniew Herbert in Friday's Guardian. As I mentioned to Rob, I don't know nearly enough about his poetry, but I remember years ago enjoying one called The Monster Of Mr Cogito so much that I copied it out. The current resurgence of interest in him, and the literary controversy that has gone with it, has given me the nudge I needed to go and seek out more of his work.

New Sphinx

I got home late last night to find the new issue of Sphinx waiting for me. I made the mistake of dipping into it for what was supposed to be five minutes, and ended up reading Rob Mackenzie’s excellent piece on poetry blogging, a fine interview with poet, artist and Stride Magazine editor Rupert Loydell, and Tia Ballantine’s perceptive (and glowing) review of James Wood’s Inextinguishable. Who needs sleep?

There's plenty more still to read, and of course the website contains a wealth of reviews that complement the printed version. Sphinx editor Helena Nelson mentions that it is likely to go totally online in the near future. It’s a shame in some respects, but on the other hand it will give it the opportunity to maintain its high standards without running up huge bills. Stride itself serves as a good example of just how well an independent online mag can work.

Whatever the format, Sphinx remains an essential read for anyone interested in the poetry pamphlet world. Buy one now.